***************************************************************** 02/01/04 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 12.26 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 US: Bush Sidesteps Probe on WMD 2 [du-list] Who is Hutton - Revealing history 3 Bush about-face on independent WMD inquiry 4 Guardian Unlimited: US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD 5 BBC: Within prison walls 6 US: Washington Post: Bush to Back Probe of Iraq Data, Officials Say 7 US: Guardian Unlimited: Now even Bush admits WMD 8 US: Washington Post: Failing Grade for Spies 9 Guardian Unlimited: WMD: How it went wrong 10 UK Independent: flounders 11 Mail & Guardian Online: Iraq a year later... 12 US: TIME.com: So Much For the WMD 13 US: Tampa Tribune: Yeah, It Was The Spooks Who Duped W! 14 Scotsman.com News: Opinion - The Question remains: Where are the WMD 15 Korea Herald: 'N.K. talks could open this month' 16 Korea Herald: [A Reader's View]Nonproliferation of misunderstanding 17 SF Chronicle: North Korea ready to end arms crisis, visitor says 18 KoreaTimes: 6-Way Talks Possible in Feburary 19 US: Washington Post: Why We Didn't Get the Picture 20 US: Washington Post: Echoes of McNamara and 'Nam 21 US: Asia Pacific News: Deputy US Secretary of State Richard Armitage 22 NYT: Pakistan Ousts Nuclear Scientist From Post 23 AFP: Prosecuting Pakistan's nuclear father may bring unwanted 24 BBC: Pakistan sacks 'father of bomb' 25 Washington Post: Pakistan Fires Top Nuclear Scientist 26 Washington Post: The Nuclear Noose Around Pakistan's Neck 27 Washington Post: A New Libya? 28 Daily Times: Legal action plan against erring scientists almost fina 29 Pakistan News: IAEA team arrives in Pakistan 30 GN Online: Nuke body reviews progress of probe 31 asahi.com EDITORIAL: Pressure for dialogue 32 Las Vegas SUN: Pakistan Removes Top Nuclear Scientist 33 Las Vegas SUN: Security Lapses Said to Hit Pakistan Lab 34 BBC NEWS | South Asia | Uncovering Pakistan's nuclear secrets NUCLEAR REACTORS 35 US: NRC: NRC to Conduct Restart Readiness Inspection at Davis-Besse; 36 US: News Journal: Nuclear complex is given deadline 37 Bellona: Norwegian radiation authorities issue lightning fast permit 38 US: thenews-messenger.com: NRC inspection team to visit D-B as part 39 US: Beacon Journal: NRC takes look at Davis-Besse 40 US: San Luis Obispo Tribune: Quake's effect on nuclear plant discuss 41 TheStar.com: It's wise to keep workers informed 42 US: Gloucester County Times: Nuke plant hit on safety 43 US: TimesDaily.com: TVA upgrade - Authority working to increase powe 44 US: JOURNAL NEWS: Entergy thermal cleanup cost in dispute 45 ITAR-TASS: Radioactive metal collectors detained near Chernobyl 46 US: toledoblade.com: NRC schedules meetings on Davis-Besse restart NUCLEAR SAFETY 47 Gulf War II Syndrome 48 [du-list] additional news from Afghanistan 49 US: [du-list] Paradise lost: Sailor's home in the Navy becomes a 50 Bellona: K-159 will not be raised from ocean floor this year 51 Las Vegas SUN: Study Probes Cancer Risk of X-Rays, Scans NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 52 US: NRC: NRC to Meet with NFS Officials February 5 53 US: Ithaca Journal: Cornell's waste plan scrutinized - 54 Indymedia/IMC Paris: German Castors to roll next week, protest tomor 55 US: kgw.com: Initiative to ban nuclear waste imports certified 56 asahi.com: EDITORIAL: Review nuclear fuel cycle NUCLEAR WEAPONS US DEPT. OF ENERGY 57 DOE safety standards covering more than 100,000 workers 58 Knox News: Toxic-waste burner may restart today 59 Tri-City Herald: Attorney general unclear on I-297 OTHER NUCLEAR 60 Google News Alert - nuclear 61 Google News Alert - nuclear 62 [du-list] DU in the news - 1st Feb. 04 63 [du-list] DU Info Bulletin no 88 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Bush Sidesteps Probe on WMD Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 12:48:03 -0600 (CST) Hi All, As expected, Bush is attempting to silence critics and avoid the truth of his actions. Here are three versions of stories on the call for an investigation on WMD. The more he equivocates the more he looks suspicious... My Best, David Grace ///////\\\\\\\ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040130/ts_nm/iraq_bush_dc&cid=564&ncid=1480 Top Stories - Reuters Bush Sidesteps Call for Outside Probe on Iraq WMD Jan 30, 2004 - 25 minutes ago By Caren Bohan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Friday sidestepped demands for outside review of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, but said it was important to know all the facts surrounding White House assertions Iraq's illicit weapons justified the U.S. decision to invade. "I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Bush told reporters at the White House. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain has broken party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent probe into how U.S. intelligence got it wrong given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction Bush insisted were in Iraq. "McCain is the guiding light on this," said a Republican insider who predicted that the Bush administration may shift its view and accept an investigation. "Clearly, this has been a bad hair week for the administration," the source said, while noting that a probe does carry plenty of risks for the administration in an election year. The source noted that it was pressure from McCain that helped to persuade the administration to accept an independent commission to study the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Meanwhile, the president gave no public sign yet he planned to yield to the demands for a probe, though he did not completely shut the door on the idea. Instead, Bush stuck to a position that the U.S. government will compare in an internal CIA probe the pre-war intelligence with what the weapons hunters have found. "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq," he said when asked whether he would support an independent probe. Condoleeza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, on Thursday acknowledged that there may have been some flaws in the intelligence. "I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground," she told CBS. Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said on Capitol Hill on Wednesday "we were almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that his search there found no evidence of biological or chemical arms. Kay and a number of leading Democrats on Capitol Hill have also called for an investigation, but Republicans say they fear an election-year political witchhunt. Bush said Kay had made clear in his congressional testimony that Saddam Hussein was a "growing danger" who had to be dealt with given the post-Sept. 11 world. "He was defiant, he ignored the request of the international community and this country led a coalition to remove him. We dealt with the danger," Bush said. But critics emphasize that was not the main justification given for the war, in which more than 500 U.S. troops have so far died. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California added her voice to those calling for a probe of the Iraq intelligence. "An independent investigation is the only way that we can uncover the truth," Feinstein said in a statement. +++++ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040130/ap_on_re_us/iraq_weapons_investigation_11 U.S. National - AP Bush Declines to Back Call for Intel Probe Fri Jan 30, 2004 By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent WASHINGTON - President Bush said Friday "I want to know the facts" about any intelligence failures concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged cache of forbidden weapons but he declined to endorse calls for an independent investigation. The issue of an independent commission has blossomed into an election-year problem for the president, with Democrats and Republicans alike supporting the idea. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay has concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, which Bush had cited as a rationale for going to war against Iraq. Bush said he wants to be able to compare the administration's prewar intelligence with what will be learned by inspectors who are now searching for weapons in Iraq. There is no deadline for those inspectors, the Iraq Survey Group, to complete their work. "One thing is for certain, one thing we do know ... that Saddam Hussein was a danger, he was growing danger," the president told reporters during a brief question and answer session after a meeting with economists. Parting company with many of his fellow Republicans, Sen. John McCain said Thursday he wants an independent commission to take a sweeping look at recent intelligence failures. Some of the Democratic candidates for president said they support an independent commission. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean criticized Vice President Dick Cheney, saying that he berated CIA operatives because he did not like their intelligence reports. "It seems to me that the vice president of the United States therefore influenced the very reports that the president then used to decide to go to war and to ask Congress for permission to go to war," Dean said during a campaign debate Thursday night. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his support for the Iraq war was based on years of intelligence briefings and evidence of Saddam Hussein's atrocities against his own people. He supports an independent commission "that will have credibility and that the American people will trust, about why there is this discrepancy about what we were told and what's actually been found there." Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said that whether Cheney berated CIA officials to shape the intelligence that he wanted is "a very legitimate question. ... There's an enormous question about the exaggeration by this administration." +++++ http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040130/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_intelligence_1 White House - AP Intelligence Probe Would Be Risky for Bush Jan 30, 2004 - 2 hours, 7 minutes ago By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent WASHINGTON - A full-blown investigation of Iraq intelligence failures would pose election-year risks for President Bush. No one could be certain where it would lead, who it would touch or what it would uncover. But resisting an investigation has hazards, too, because that would give Democratic presidential rivals an opening to keep the issue alive and question what the White House might be hiding. A bipartisan proposal for an independent investigation is blossoming into a prominent issue on the presidential campaign trail and on Capitol Hill. The issue moved to the fore when former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said he believed Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and Bush's decision to go to war was based on inaccurate intelligence. For now, the White House appears to be playing for time, hoping the furor will die down. Bush refused to endorse the idea of an independent investigative commission on Friday but insisted, "I want to know the facts." The administration needs more time to investigate, he said. With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, it's unlikely an independent commission would be created without the president's blessing. While Bush once raised dire warnings, he now seems to say Saddam's weapons were almost beside the point. "Saddam Hussein was a danger," Bush said. "The world is a better place and a more peaceful place and the Iraqi people are free" without him In terms of the weapons, Bush argues that the Iraq Survey Group once headed by Kay should pursue its investigation, as long as that takes. Whenever that investigation is complete, the administration will compare its findings with the pre-war evidence that Bush found conclusive - it led him to say that Saddam threatened the world with "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Of course, the investigation - and then the comparison - will take time and there is no guarantee it would be concluded before the election. "It's like a basketball game, and he's got the ball and there's a problem here and there and he's just going to play out the clock. And he may be able to do it," said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. The specter of world threats and danger is a key element of Bush's re-election campaign. His strongest suit against Democrats is his leadership of the war against terror, polls show, and the White House is eager to protect and enhance that reputation. "Presidents don't seem to like to admit mistakes and he can't attack the intelligence community, for heaven's sake," said presidential analyst Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. "He's still the commander in chief. ... And yet if he's doing his job he'd better knock some heads together in the intelligence community, or figure out at least what we should be doing that we didn't do before." Democratic presidential candidates already accuse Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of manipulating pre-war intelligence to make the case for invasion. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean says Cheney berated midlevel analysts at the CIA because their weapons' analyses weren't strong enough. Sen. John Kerry says there are "very legitimate questions about what the vice president of the United States was doing at the CIA." Dean and Kerry, along with their fellow presidential candidate, Sen. John Edwards, support creation of an independent commission. But it is not strictly a partisan issue: Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona supports the idea, too. Kay's recent comments have created another major headache for an administration already being investigated for the leak of an undercover CIA employe's name, and for mistakes that some say may have left the nation vulnerable to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The administration wants the Sept. 11 commission to wrap up its work and is resisting its request for a deadline extension. The leaks investigation is in the hands a federal grand jury, beyond the control of the White House. By their very nature, investigations have the potential to embarrass a White House - such as the Tower Commission's investigation into the U.S. sale of weapons to Iran and the diversion of proceeds to Contra rebels in the mid-1980s. Ronald Reagan gave the commission conflicting accounts of what happened and wound up looking befuddled, concluding that he simply did not remember. Beyond the obvious political risks, an intelligence investigation could put a heavier strain on ties between the White House and the CIA, particularly Director George Tenet. The White House blamed Tenet last year for the failure to stop Bush from saying in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for weapons. The administration seems happy to have that feud behind it. "I've got great confidence in our intelligence community," Bush said this week. "These are unbelievably hardworking, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America." ___ EDITOR'S NOTE - Terence Hunt has covered the White House since the Reagan administration. +++++++ As usual, if you would like to be removed from these mailers, please notify me. ****************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/ ***************************************************************** 2 [du-list] Who is Hutton - Revealing history Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:58:17 -0800 Who Is Hutton? - revealing history by Re-Sista! Re-Sista!, 28.01.2004 22:50 A history of Hutton's life, from Bloody Sunday cover up to Pinochet affair to Iraq war lies. So Who the Hell is Hutton? By Re-Sista! 28/1/04 Upon his resignation as BBC chairman Gavyn Davies commented on the irreconcilable contradictions between Hutton's "bald conclusions" and the balance of evidence presented to the actual Inquiry. Even BBC political editor Andrew Marr comments on Huttons underlying assumptions and background, making him more likely to believe and trust certain social groups: "again and again, he comes down on the side of politicians and officials." So who is Hutton, and what is in his background to come to these extraordinary conclusions? What has lead to the reports extraordinary absolution of Blair's war lies and attack on journalistic freedom? The 72 year old Baron Hutton of Bresagh, County of Down, North Ireland, is a classic representative of the British ruling establishment. A member of the Anglo-Irish elite, he was educated at Shewsbury all boys boarding school, and then Balliol, Oxford, before entering the exclusive club of the British Judiciary. Whilst British Judges are overwhelmingly conservative, upper class, white, male and biased, Hutton's background is even more compromised. His name will be familiar to residents of the Six counties of Ulster. During the bloody thrity years war Hutton was an instrument of British state repression, starting in the late 1960's as junior counsel to the Northern Ireland attorney general, and by 1988 rising to the top job of Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Hutton spent his career as Judge and Jury in the notorious northern Ireland kangaroo 'Diplock Courts'. These were special non-Jury courts, condemned by human rights advocates for their miscarriages of justice. He was hated for this role by the families of the many innocent catholics wrongly convicted here. Hutton distinguished himself after the Bloody Sunday massacre of civil rights protesters in 1972. He played a key role in the ensuing judicial cover-up called the Widgery Inquiry which absolved British troops of Murder. This miscarriage of justice is only now being investigated by the current Saville inquiry. Then in 1978 he represnted the British Government before the European Court of Human Rights, defending it against a ruling that it abused and maltreated detainees from the conflict. However, he will be remembered in the rest of the UK for his role in the 1999 Pinochet affair. Another senior Judge, Lord Hoffman had contributed to the decision to arrest and extradite the notorious former dicator of Chile and mass murderer General Pinochet during his visit to Britain. As a law lord, Hutton led the rightwing attack on Lord Hoffman, on the excuse that Hoffman's links to the human rights group amnesty international invalidated Pinochets arrest! Lord Hutton said "public confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken" if Lord Hoffman's ruling was not overturned. More recently, Hutton was also involved in the ruling that David Shayler, the former MI5 agent, could not argue he was acting in the public interest by revealing secrets. This history of intimate links with, and knowledge of Britains secret military intelligence operations meant he could be a trusted pair of hands when it came to the Kelly affair. ________________________________________________________________________ BT Yahoo! Broadband - Free modem offer, sign up online today and save £80 http://btyahoo.yahoo.co.uk To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 3 Bush about-face on independent WMD inquiry Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2004 21:45:34 -0600 (CST) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1136930,00.html Weapons inspector's doubts trigger investigation into intelligence failures The Guardian Monday February 2, 2004 David Teather in New York President George Bush has bowed to mounting pressure and agreed to order an independent investigation into why the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction appears to have been so flawed, according to reports last night. The commission of inquiry will also study intelligence gathered on al-Qaida and weapons proliferation, senior White House officials said. "The president wants a broad, bipartisan and independent review of our intelligence, particularly relating to weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation efforts," an official told Reuters. The decision represents a remarkable about face by Mr Bush's administration, which had, until now, resisted calls for an investigation until the completion of the search for weapons. A panel of "distinguished citizens who have served their country in the past" will lead the inquiry, modelled on the Warren commission, a 10-month investigation which re-examined the assassination of John F Kennedy. The White House has yet to set a time limit for the inquiry, the findings of which are likely to have a big impact on the presidential campaign. Members of Congress from both parties had been pressing for an independent inquiry. But the sense of urgency intensified last week when the former chief US weapons inspector, David Kay, said the stockpiles probably did not exist and offered the blunt public testimony that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's arms programmes. Yesterday's announcement was welcomed by senior Republicans. Senator Trent Lott, a key member of the Senate intelligence committee, told CNN: "I'm not a fan of commissions, generally speaking, but in this case, there's no question that there was an intelligence failure, in some form or another. What I want to know is, what happened? Why wasn't it more reli able, why wasn't it more accurate? And, more importantly, what are we going to do about it?" The decision by Mr Bush appeared to be an attempt to take control of what could become a dangerous sore on his re-election campaign if left to fester. Backing an inquiry deflects claims that the administration is evading difficult questions, and by getting involved in the creation of the panel, instead of leaving it to Congress, the White House could also have a say in the parameters of the investigation. Former weapons inspector David Albright said the government could use the commission to deflect blame for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. "The bottom line for them [the Bush administration] is to delay the day of reckoning about their use of the weapons of mass destruction information," Mr Albright said. "David Kay can blame the CIA and say 'Oh, I made all these comments based on what I heard from the intelligence community.' President Bush can't do that. He's the boss." The US media had also been drawing comparisons between Tony Blair's cooperation with the Hutton inquiry and what the New York Times called Mr Bush's "spin and evade" approach. DESPOTISM The White House has yet to close the book on finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it has been shifting its position and is no longer adamant they will be found. More emphasis has been put on the despotism of Saddam Hussein as a justification for his removal. At the end of last week Mr Bush offered his first admission that prewar intelligence might have been faulty when he said he wanted to "know the facts" about the gathering of information. Earlier, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, admitted that Washington had not found what it had expected in Iraq. "I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground," she said. Even last week, though, the White House was maintaining that any independent inquiry should be stayed until the completion of the work of the Iraq Survey Group, something that could take between six months and a year. The investigation could prove damaging for Mr Bush's election campaign if the results are published before voting on November 2, and if they implicate the administration. Democrats have argued that intelligence on the weapons programme in Iraq was exaggerated to justify the invasion. That view was recently given weight by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who claimed in a book that Mr Bush had decided to oust Saddam before the terrorist attacks of September 11. In his testimony before the Senate armed services committee, Mr Kay, who resigned 10 days ago, backed an outside inquiry. He said he thought the Bush administration had been misled by its intelligence sources, and warned yesterday that flawed intelligence on Iraq had weakened the case for a policy of pre-emption. "If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly cannot have a policy of pre-emption," Mr Kay said. Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, agreed. "America's credibility's at stake," he told CNN. "This isn't about politics any more." Others, though, have questioned the pressure from policymakers on intelligence agencies to support the case for war. Six separate panels, including the House of Representatives and Senate intelligence committees, are already working on investigations into the prewar intelligence. The Senate committee is scheduled to be the first to publish its findings, in March. ***************************************************************** 4 Guardian Unlimited: US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD [UP] Blair comes under pressure as Americans admit it was widely known that Saddam had no chemical arsenal Peter Beaumont, Gaby Hinsliff and Paul Harris Sunday February 1, 2004 The Observer Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt. Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The new revelation came as White House sources indicated that President George Bush was considering establishing an investigation into the intelligence, despite rejecting an inquiry the previous day. The disclosure that US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded so quickly that no major weapons or facilities would be found is certain to produce serious new embarrassment on both sides of the Atlantic. According to the time-line provided by the US sources, it would mean that Number 10 would have been aware of the US doubts that weapons would be found before the outbreak of the feud between Number 10 and Andrew Gilligan, and before the exposure of Dr David Kelly as Gilligan's source for his claims that the September dossier had been 'sexed up' to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. It would suggest too that some officials who defended the 24 September dossier in evidence before the Hutton inquiry did so in the knowledge that the pre-war intelligence was probably wrong. Indeed, comments from a senior Washington official first casting serious doubt on the existence of WMD were put to Downing Street by The Observer - and rejected - as early as 3 May. Among those interviewed by The Observer was a very senior US intelligence official serving during the war against Iraq with an intimate knowledge of the search for Iraq's WMD. 'We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, "where did we go wrong?",' he said last week. 'We had already made the judgment that something very wrong had happened [in May] and our confidence was shaken to its foundations.' The source, a career intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was also scathing about the massive scale of the failure of intelligence over Iraq both in the US and among its foreign allies - alleging that the intelligence community had effectively suppressed dissenting views and intelligence. The claim is confirmed by other sources, as well as figures like David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector with close contacts in both the world of weapons inspection and intelligence. 'It was known in May,' Albright said last week, 'that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public.' The new disclosure follows the claims last week by Dr David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, a hawk who believed Iraq retained prohibited weapons, that he now believed that the alleged stockpiles 'had never existed'. It also comes as the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have been hearing evidence on why no weapons have been found, prepare to publish their reports this month. Although it is expected that they will conclude that there was no political interference in the intelligence process, as some critics have alleged, the reports are expected to be damning about the quality of the intelligence that led to war. The revelation is likely to lead to increased pressure both in Britain and the United States for an inquiry into the intelligence marshalled in favour of war. In recent weeks Bush has come under concerted pressure over the issue, with Democratic presidential candidates accusing both him and Vice-President Dick Cheney of manipulating pre-war intelligence to make the case for invasion. White House sources said that President Bush is considering the formation of an independent panel to investigate pre-war intelligence on Iraq that he used to justify going to war. Aides are discussing it with congressional officials, sources familiar with the discussions said last night. Bush had rejected an independent investigation amid White House fears of a political witch-hunt by Democrats hoping to unseat him in elections this year, but began in recent days to reconsider the position. 'I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts,' Bush told reporters on Friday. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a range of options for such a panel was being explored and that an agreement was hoped for soon. The White House would not comment. Arizona Republican Senator John McCain broke party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent probe into how US intelligence got it wrong, given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction. Guardian Newspapers Limited ***************************************************************** 5 BBC: Within prison walls Last Updated: Friday, 30 January, 2004 By Olenka Frenkiel Reporter, This World Kwon Hyok is one of about 4,000 North Korean defectors living in Seoul, South Korea. [Map of North Korea] Locations of secret prison camps, or Gulag, are marked in black Most escaped because of hunger, fear, torture, imprisonment or a simple hatred of the regime. But Kwon Hyok is not one of those. In 1999 he was a North Korean intelligence agent stationed in Beijing when he was persuaded by the South Koreans to defect. Six years before, in 1993, Kwon Hyok says he was Head of Security at prison camp 22 in Haengyong, an isolated area near the border with Russia. Camp 22 is one of a network of prisons in North Korea modelled on the Soviet Gulag where hundreds of thousands of prisoners are held. Most of them have been charged with no crime. They are there because of the "Heredity Rule". Prisoners w like pigs or dogs. You could kill them without caring whether they lived or died Kwon Hyok "In North Korea, " Kwon Hyok explains, "political prisoners are those who say or do something against the dead President Kim Il-sung, or his son Kim Jong-il. But it also includes a wide network of next of kin. It's designed to root out the seeds of those classed as disloyal to North Korea." In prison, says Kwon Hyok, "there is a watchdog system in place between members of five different families. So if I were caught trying to escape, then my family and the four neighbouring families are shot to death out of collective responsibility." Torture, he says, was routine. "Prisoners were like pigs or dogs. You could kill them without caring whether they lived or died.." "For the first three years" he explained " you enjoy torturing people but then it wears off and someone else takes over. But most of the time you do it because you enjoy it." Human experimentation But Kwon Hyok had something else he wanted to tell. I had no sympa at all...I felt they deserved to die Kwon Hyok He says he witnessed chemical experiments being carried out on political prisoners in specially constructed gas chambers. "How did you feel when you saw the children die?", I asked. His answer shocked me. "I had no sympathy at all because I was taught to think that they were all enemies of our country and that all our country's problems were their fault. So I felt they deserved to die." Verification There have been many rumours of human experimentation on political prisoners in North Korea. But never has anyone offered documentary proof. Until now. In Seoul I met Kim Sang-hun, a distinguished human rights activist. He showed me documents given to him by someone else completely unrelated to Kwon Hyok. He told me the man had recently snatched them illicitly from Camp 22 before escaping. [Kim Sang Hun] Kim Sang Hun is convinced the documents are not forgeries They are headed Letter Of Transfer, marked Top Secret and dated February 2002 . They each bear the name of a male victim, his date and place of birth. The text reads: "The above person is transferred from Camp 22 for the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons." I took one of the documents to a Korean expert in London who examined it and confirmed that there was nothing to suggest it was not genuine. But I wanted to run a check of my own with Kwon Hyok. Without showing him the Letter of Transfer, I asked him very specifically, without prompting him in any way. "How were the victims selected when they went for human experimentation? Was there some bureaucracy, some paperwork?" "When we escorted them to the site we would receive a Letter of Transfer," he said. Sadly, as long as these reports continue from defectors, and as long as the North Korean government continues to deny all allegations of human rights abuse, while refusing to allow access to its prisons, such allegations cannot be dismissed or ignored. Access to Evil will be broadcast in the UK on Sunday, 1 February, 2004 at 2100 on BBC Two. ***************************************************************** 6 Washington Post: Bush to Back Probe of Iraq Data, Officials Say (washingtonpost.com) Reported Shift Comes Amid Pressure From Hill By Dana Milbank and Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page A01 President Bush has agreed to support an independent inquiry into the prewar intelligence that he used to assert that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, Republican and congressional sources said yesterday. The shift by the White House, which had previously maintained that any such inquiry should wait until a more exhaustive weapons search has been completed, came after pressure from lawmakers in both parties and from the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. There was no official confirmation from the White House yesterday, but sources in the government said Bush's announcement of support for an independent commission is imminent. Vice President Cheney has begun to call lawmakers on the intelligence committees, who have encouraged the administration to proceed with an inquiry. The White House has not settled on what type of independent review it would favor and has not backed any specific plan. Bush's shift in position represents an effort to get out in front of a potentially dangerous issue that threatens to cloud his reelection bid. An independent commission would not necessarily absolve Bush politically, congressional officials said, but it could quiet the current furor and delay calls for top-level resignations at the CIA and elsewhere until after the elections, diluting the potency of the issue for Democrats. David Kay, who resigned his post nine days ago, testified Wednesday that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's weapons programs. He said it was unlikely that stockpiles would be found in Iraq. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said yesterday that convening a blue-ribbon panel is important, because "we're in danger now of seeing the politicization of the whole intelligence issue." The panel, Roberts said, would have to be bipartisan and include only recognized experts whose recommendations could "leapfrog" over the current debate and quickly tackle the issue of how to fix intelligence deficiencies. "It would be helpful not only politically, but also for the nation," Roberts said. Sources said Bush intends to endorse a commission in the coming days while remaining publicly agnostic on the accuracy of the intelligence that the administration used to take the nation to war in Iraq. Though some in the White House favor a frank admission that the intelligence was wrong -- something lawmakers and inspectors have given -- Bush and his aides have so far concluded that would only increase the pressure on them. The details about the commission are not yet firm, including how much authority it would have to investigate not just the intelligence-gathering apparatus, but also how the administration used the intelligence it was given. By joining the effort to create the commission rather than allowing Congress to develop its framework on its own, Bush will likely have more leverage to keep the focus on the CIA and other intelligence agencies rather than on the White House. Democrats have asserted that Bush exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq to justify going war, a theory that was boosted by recent allegations from former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill that Bush had contemplated Hussein's ouster long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Politically, the decision to back an independent probe contains substantial risks for Bush. It means the White House will have to surrender some control over the timing of the investigation, raising the possibility that such a panel could release information about the intelligence failures before the Nov. 2 elections. But the pressure on Bush to accept an independent inquiry became intense after Kay, in testimony on Wednesday, said it is "important to acknowledge failure" and that his own view is that "it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it." Six separate panels -- the House and Senate intelligence committees, a CIA internal review team, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the newly refocused CIA-led Iraq Survey Group and an army team -- are already investigating the prewar intelligence process. Roberts' committee is likely to be the first to complete its work, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of March. According to congressional officials, it will also likely be the most hard-hitting, calling into question the competence not only of mid-level CIA analysts but also of the top CIA leadership, including Director George J. Tenet. Roberts and other congressional officials said they believe any independent panel should not begin its work at least until after the Senate report has been issued. "We are going to answer a lot of questions," he said. Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said even when his committee report is issued, which may not be until the end of the year, "I expect there will be yet another investigation, for years to come . . . and there should be." But Goss and Roberts said they believe partisan politics would make it impossible for the new commission to get any real work done before the elections. "Not this year," Goss said. "You couldn't get the members together, or even the rules set up. This is not easy, because nobody trusts anybody." A member of Congress said the administration can be expected to deal with the intelligence failure "by moving the boxes around" and giving more authority over intelligence matters to the Department of Homeland Security. Though they did not explicitly rule out an independent probe, Bush and his aides were dismissive of the notion last week even after the former chief weapons inspector, Kay, backed the idea. They said the Iraq Survey Group should first complete its search, a process that could take a year or more. Asked about an independent inquiry on Friday, Bush said: "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq." The administration has generally resisted probes of this nature. The White House long objected to an independent inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, ultimately relenting under congressional and public pressure. Bush insisted on tight control over the intelligence material to be viewed by the commission, causing a constant struggle with the panel and leading to a dispute last week over whether commission members would have access to their own notes. With the creation of the new commission, the White House will have two outside probes underway that could prove politically dangerous. The Justice Department has given semiautonomy to an inquiry into who in the administration leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, criticized the administration's assertion that Iraq had sought nuclear material in Africa. © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 7 Guardian Unlimited: Now even Bush admits WMD [UP] Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor Saturday January 31, 2004 George Bush finally conceded last night that there may be a problem over Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction when he said he wanted to know why there were discrepancies between pre-war intelligence and the negligible material investigators had found on the ground. He said he "wanted to know the facts" about any intelligence failures but he refused to endorse calls for an independent investigation. Mr Bush's comments are likely to add pressure on Tony Blair to comment on why Iraq's banned weapons have not been found. In the run-up to the war he said Saddam Hussein's WMD posed a "real and present danger to this country". The White House has said it is too soon to rule out finding weapons but it has also stopped predicting it will be vindicated. Mr Bush is fending off calls for a public inquiry in a debate which intensified yesterday after the president's national security adviser said Washington had not found what it had expected in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice said: "I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground." The British government is also facing renewed calls to explain the failure to find WMD, an issue Lord Hutton said was outside his terms of reference. Parliament's intelligence and security committee is preparing an investigation and will question Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6. It is also expected to question the prime minister. The committee meets in private but it showed it is willing to flex its muscle in a critical report last year on the government's weapons dossier. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said last night: "When Colin Powell [the US secretary of state] and now Condoleezza Rice express reservations about the likelihood of finding WMD, even No 10 Downing Street should pause and consider whether its continuing confidence is justified. "What is certain is that the scepticism of so many major players simply adds to the justified clamour for a wider investigation into the question of whether the British government took us to war on a flawed prospectus." Guardian Newspapers Limited ***************************************************************** 8 Washington Post: Failing Grade for Spies (washingtonpost.com) By Jim Hoagland Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B07 George W. Bush and Tony Blair are momentarily in the clear. But their intelligence services are left stuck in deep doo-doo, as a former CIA chief and ex-president named George H.W. Bush might well put it. Neither outcome is good for the seven Democrats seeking a chance to defeat Bush in November, or for the Tories who hoped finally to break Blair's political mastery on the rocks of an "intelligence hoax" in Iraq. Having to campaign against the ineffectiveness of your nation's spies -- rather than running against your political opponents' vile lies -- is no easy task. In credible, authoritative and at times painfully exacting testimony before a Senate committee last week, David Kay revived the Washington practice of making a sensational discovery out of a known but obscured truth: Saddam Hussein's police state was a very difficult and dangerous place for the U.S. and British intelligence services to try to uncover secrets, and they were usually unsuccessful in their attempts over two decades. What was new and most helpful was the clear description by Kay of the non-secrets about Iraq's disintegrating society that the agency apparently also missed. As the United States prepared to invade, the agency did not have human resources inside Iraq able to communicate the existing chaos, corruption and social decomposition that was to explode under the pressure of invasion. "The glue that holds people together in a relationship that allows cooperation was destroyed by Saddam Hussein, just as the infrastructure was destroyed," said Kay, the former weapons inspector employed by the CIA to head up the search for Iraq's still-missing chemical and biological weapons and military nuclear program. Kay correctly cast the huge intelligence failure in Iraq in historic terms: This was on a par with the agency's misreading of the strength of the Soviet Union's economy as it stumbled toward collapse. "What had looked like a 10-foot power turned out to be an economy that barely existed. . . . We are particularly bad about understanding societal trends" because intelligence agencies invest in satellites and other technological means and neglect "our human intelligence capability," Kay added bluntly. Kay's unequivocal denials that agency analysts had given in to political pressure or had the intelligence they supplied falsified or manipulated were echoed in London by Lord Brian Hutton in his report on the Blair government's handling of intelligence. These twin denials put a big dent in the overblown charges from congressional Democrats that Bush (and by implication Blair) perpetrated an "intelligence hoax" on their national legislatures and publics. The truth in Machiavellian terms is worse: Bush and Blair accepted and actually believed the flawed intelligence that their spy bosses and senior aides provided, and then inflated it in their public speeches. Credulity, not chicanery, would be the plea, your honor. The CIA's failure on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is only one strand, and a somewhat understandable one. Analysts are rewarded for gravitating toward worst-case scenarios. Predicting what could go right -- that U.S. forces would not need chemical protection suits in the desert, or that Saddam might have been fooled by his scientists, who were stealing money for nonexistent programs, as Kay speculates happened -- is an art that does not flourish in Langley or at the Pentagon. If yet another investigation of the CIA is needed, it must be broad and not limited to weapons of mass destruction. Why did the agency fail to predict before the war the deadly insurgency that American troops now face? That will lead to examination of the fruitless "decapitation" strategy the agency pursued in Iraq for 15 years, to the detriment of other, more promising approaches. But trying to conduct such an inquiry in the middle of a war and a presidential campaign is a shaky proposition. It is probably a task best left to an independent commission appointed after the November elections. The focus for Democrats should be on Bush's competence, not on the sinister but sketchy presentations of his motives that have formed the debate thus far. The most deft Democrat on this issue is Hillary Clinton, who has been forthright in describing Iraq as a justified war that has been subsequently mishandled at the White House and Pentagon. Making the CIA's performance the big issue is hardly a clean victory or escape for Bush. The doctrine of preemption is badly wounded as a national policy by this intelligence failure. And the president has yet to explain in a convincing way what he believed and when he believed it. ">hoaglandj@washpost.com © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 9 Guardian Unlimited: WMD: How it went wrong [UP] Focus: After Hutton Since David Kay's bombshell last week, intelligence experts are revealing the truth behind Saddam's threat to the West. Peter Beaumont and Gaby Hinsliff in London and Paul Harris in New York report Sunday February 1, 2004 A year ago it seemed so clear. Saddam Hussein's regime, said the politicians and the spies, posed a clear and present danger. It was described most comprehensively on 5 February, 2003, by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a presentation to the Security Council that laid out the threat in 29 sub-headings. Twelve months have passed, and now the same intelligence officials who produced the stories that scared the world to war are admitting that they got it very badly wrong. And not only do they admit that the intelligence was seriously flawed, they admit, too, that they have known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the first week of May, a month after Baghdad fell, a secret that has finally lurched into the open. In a series of interviews, senior former US intelligence officers, members of the weapons community and former senior US policy advisers have told The Observer that it was well known in intelligence and senior administration circles by the first week of May that it was extremely unlikely that any weapons would be found. It is a disclosure that undermines the continued assertions of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the months that followed - including President George Bush and Tony Blair - that weapons and weapons programmes would be, and had been, found. The allegations pose serious questions for Downing Street and the Prime Minister, raising the possibility that Blair and his officials began their feud with the BBC and Andrew Gilligan after it had become known that the intelligence used to justify Britain's involvement in the war was largely incorrect. 'We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, "where did we go wrong?",' a very senior US intelligence practitioner involved in assessing Iraq's WMD, told The Observer last week. The source, an intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was also scathing about the massive scale of the failure of intelligence over Iraq both in the US and among foreign allies - alleging that the intelligence community had effectively suppressed dissenting views and intelligence. The claims are supported by former members of the inspection community and former senior US policy officials who retain close contacts both in the world of intelligence and inspection. Among them is former UN nuclear inspector David Albright, now president of a Washington think-tank. 'It was known in May,' Albright said last week, 'that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public.' The claims that it was widely known in intelligence circles that there were no WMD to be found are confirmed by reports of a statement by an unnamed senior Washington official on 3 May, and raised with Downing Street on the same day, that US officials would be 'amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium'. The official added it was unlikely that large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons would be found either. According to the sources contacted by The Observer last week, the reason for the certainty among intelligence officials was based on the failure of tasked US military units to find any trace of WMD at any of the so-called 'sensitive sites' earmarked for inspection, most of which had been visited by late April. First interviews with senior Iraqi scientists were turning up the same result: the picture painted by the intelligence community of Iraq's WMD was wrong. The question is, why did the intelligence community get it so wrong? And why, crucially, did Bush and Blair press on for months with their insistence that the WMD existed, after it was clear that the intelligence was hugely flawed? Robert Einhorn, a former Assistant Secretary of State for non-proliferation under both Bush and Bill Clinton, whose focus was Iraq, believes that missing WMD represents a massive bureaucratic failure by the intelligence community. Einhorn believes that the most basic intelligence assumptions on Iraq were misguided. 'In retrospect it did not really make sense for Iraq to hold on to large stocks of WMD over a decade to obsolescing junk, when it could meet the letter of the law required by UN resolutions, have sanctions lifted, and covertly develop what you might call a just-in-time WMD capability. 'I am talking about missiles just below the nominal range permitted that could be upgraded quickly, and dual-use facilities that could quickly be turned into a capability for producing chemical and biological weapons. 'What is so remarkable is that it became very quickly apparent in the post-war interviews with scientists and other officials, that no one even admitted that even plans such as those existed. 'In our intelligence community there was simply not a lot of incentive to second-guess the casual assumptions of a decade about Iraq. No one was asked to offer alternative explanations for what they were seeing... to second-guess what had become conventional wisdom.' More serious, in the words of the senior US intelligence official, the intelligence community had forgotten how to do its job. 'We have forgotten how to ask questions. When I started out in intelligence 25 per cent of the work would be looking at the current intelligence and 75 per cent of the work would be analysing it. 'Now, at a time when we have more intelligence than we have ever had in history, we rely almost exclusively on current intelligence. People see stuff and they relate it to what they think they know. They do not ask the hard questions. He is particularly scathing about the handling of defectors by the US, intelligence that was shared with allies:'Was there ever a study done on this defector intelligence? Did anyone ever ask how good it was? Did anyone ever look deeper into the material? The answer is no.' Worst of all, he believes, intelligence officials failed in one of their most important tasks. They lost the nerve to tell bad news to politicians. 'There were dissenting views, analysts who were right. But the dissenters were pushed to the side.' It is a claim corroborated by former CIA anti-terrorism expert Larry Johnson. 'I know for certain that there were analysts in the Defence Intelligence Agency and the State Department and the CIA who took an alternative point of view. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately George Bush chose to ignore their cautions. Worst-case scenarios were being taken by policy makers who were picking and choosing intelligence,' he said. Despite the attempts by the politicians and the spies to blame each other, what emerges from the accounts collected by The Observer is that the culpability is on both sides: from cherry-picking politicians to intelligence practitioners unwilling to ask difficult questions that might undermine official policy. The comments are certain to increase pressure on both sides of the Atlantic for independent inquiries into how the intelligence turned out to be so wrong. Among those who have now joined calls for an inquiry is David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, whose resignation comments last week that he now believed the stockpiles of weapons 'did not exist' has created political crises in Washington and London. 'It is serious enough,' Kay told The Observer on Friday. 'I wish I believed that it could be done by normal procedures, but I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we are going to have to go outside for this. Closed orders and secret societies do not engage in internal reform.' The falling-out between the Iraq 'hardliners' and the 'dissenters' in the intelligence community is mirrored in the bitter recriminations in the weapons inspection community. And ironically it is Kay who is being blamed for encouraging the politicians in London and Washington. Albright is harsh in his criticism, claiming that Kay's initial insistence that weapons would be found had made him a 'laughing stock'. 'The reason that Kay has come clean is that he needed to restore his own credibility. Kay knew a train was coming down the track and jumped out of the way. That is what has caused such immense problems for the administration. He was their strongest terrier and he has turned against them.' A mark of how devastating Kay's declaration has been is evident in the rapid volte-face performed by Bush and his senior officials in recent days, if not by Blair who clings to the belief in the existence of Iraq's WMD. First to break ranks was Powell, whose presentation at the UN, with its misleading description of experiments on death-row prisoners, of biological armed missiles hidden in palm groves and Iraq's hidden industry of Armageddon, has undermined his credibility. By last week even Bush was rewriting the reasons for going to war, insisting on Wednesday: 'There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat to America and others. That's what we know.' While Bush is resisting calls for an inquiry into the intelligence failures, few doubt that damning reports by the House and Senate intelligence committees on the quality of the Iraq intelligence - due for publication this month - would be difficult to resist even in an election year. Blair, too, is likely to face increasing calls for an inquiry when he faces the parliamentary liaison committee this week. The quality of British intelligence will also come under the spotlight when Downing Street publishes its long-awaited response this week to criticisms from the Intelligence and Security Committee, which reported last autumn on the September dossier furore. The ISC concluded the dossier had not been 'sexed up', but criticised flaws in the JIC intelligence assessments on which the dossier was based for not making clear 'the uncertainties and gaps in the UK's knowledge' of Iraq's banned weapons. Downing Street will have to tackle its complaints that while there was 'convincing intelligence' of chemical and biological weapons, the JIC assessment did not 'precisely reflect' what agents had reported and the dossier should have made clear both that Saddam was no direct threat to mainland UK, and that it was not known for sure that he was still producing banned weapons. 'You know, a lot of people have been in denial on this,' the senior US intelligence source said. 'Some of them still are.' Observer special reports The Hutton Inquiry: Observer special Iraq: Observer special More from Guardian Unlimited The Hutton inquiry: breaking news and analysis Politics special: The Hutton inquiry MediaGuardian special: The Hutton inquiry More Hutton inquiry comment [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 ***************************************************************** 10 UK Independent: flounders By Andy McSmith and Raymond Whitaker 01 February 2004 Close associates of Tony Blair fear that the Prime Minister is on the point of being hung out to dry by President George Bush over the issue of whether Iraq held weapons of mass destruction when Britain and the US went to war last March. Under pressure from the Democrats and some prominent Republicans in an election year, Mr Bush is edging towards an admission that the intelligence used by the US and Britain to justify the war was faulty. White House sources said yesterday that he may yield to demands for an independent inquiry into the failure of intelligence on Iraq. One leading ally of the Prime Minister said: "There have been signs of a divergent strategy in Washington. This is a real problem for Blair." Having enlisted Britain's spies in making the case for war in the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's WMD, the Prime Minister is less able than Mr Bush to distance himself. The White House, unlike No 10, never staked its entire case for war on Iraq's alleged possession of WMD, and may seek to deflect blame on to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including MI6. The changing message from Washington comes as Downing Street advisers are still recovering from their astonishment at public reaction to last week's Hutton report into the suicide of the weapons expert David Kelly. Instead of seeing the report as proof that Mr Blair believed in the existence of Iraq's illegal weaponry when the took the country to war, the public - according to early opinion polls - thinks that the BBC has been unfairly traduced for trying to uncover the truth behind the decision to go to war. Last week he brushed aside calls to open an inquiry into the quality of British intelligence reports on Iraq's pre-war weaponry, which will increase when he is questioned by MPs this week. He has consistently ducked the issue of why no chemical or biological weapons have been found in post-war Iraq, insisting that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which has been vainly searching for them since last spring, must be given time to complete its work. This could take years, because inspectors have accumulated a vast quantity of documents, now waiting in a warehouse in Qatar to be translated and analysed. There is said to be enough paper to form a column 10 miles high. Until recently the hope in London and Washington was that the ISG would keep working until after the US presidential election and the general election likely to be called in the UK next year, allowing both leaders to seek re-election without having to answer awkward questions about whether they used faulty intelligence to justify the war. Fears that Washington might abandon Mr Blair's "wait and see" line have increased since Mr Bush himself implicitly acknowledged that the failure to turn up WMD was not what he had been led to expect from the intelligence reports he was shown prior to the war. The President has come under heavy pressure to hold an inquiry into the pre-war intelligence reports since David Kay, former head of the ISG, suggested that the weapons will never be found because they were never there. Dr Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "In my view, we were almost all wrong. I had numerous analysts apologising that the world they were finding was not the world they thought existed and that they had estimated." Mr Blair is also facing demands at home for a public inquiry, and is expected to be questioned on the subject when he appears before the Commons Liaison Committee on Tuesday. On the same day, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee is likely to decide to hold a series of public hearings into the origins of the war. This is the committee that questioned Dr Kelly in public two days before his suicide, and a decision to open another inquiry would be highly unwelcome in Downing Street. UK Independent Ltd. ***************************************************************** 11 Mail & Guardian Online: Iraq a year later... Monday, February 02, 2004, 3:47 A year ago it seemed so clear. Saddam Hussein's regime, said the politicians and the spies, posed a clear and present danger. It was described most comprehensively on 5 February, 2003, by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a presentation to the Security Council that laid out the threat in 29 sub-headings. Twelve months have passed, and now the same intelligence officials who produced the stories that scared the world to war are admitting that they got it very badly wrong. And not only do they admit that the intelligence was seriously flawed, they admit, too, that they have known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the first week of May, a month after Baghdad fell, a secret that has finally lurched into the open. In a series of interviews, senior former US intelligence officers, members of the weapons community and former senior US policy advisers have told The Observer that it was well known in intelligence and senior administration circles by the first week of May that it was extremely unlikely that any weapons would be found. It is a disclosure that undermines the continued assertions of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the months that followed -- including President George Bush and Tony Blair -- that weapons and weapons programmes would be, and had been, found. The allegations pose serious questions for Downing Street and the Prime Minister, raising the possibility that Blair and his officials began their feud with the BBC and Andrew Gilligan after it had become known that the intelligence used to justify Britain's involvement in the war was largely incorrect. 'We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, "where did we go wrong?",' a very senior US intelligence practitioner involved in assessing Iraq's WMD, told The Observer last week. The source, an intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was also scathing about the massive scale of the failure of intelligence over Iraq both in the US and among foreign allies -- alleging that the intelligence community had effectively suppressed dissenting views and intelligence. The claims are supported by former members of the inspection community and former senior US policy officials who retain close contacts both in the world of intelligence and inspection. Among them is former UN nuclear inspector David Albright, now president of a Washington think-tank. 'It was known in May,' Albright said last week, 'that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public.' The claims that it was widely known in intelligence circles that there were no WMD to be found are confirmed by reports of a statement by an unnamed senior Washington official on 3 May, and raised with Downing Street on the same day, that US officials would be 'amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium'. The official added it was unlikely that large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons would be found either. According to the sources contacted by The Observer last week, the reason for the certainty among intelligence officials was based on the failure of tasked US military units to find any trace of WMD at any of the so-called 'sensitive sites' earmarked for inspection, most of which had been visited by late April. First interviews with senior Iraqi scientists were turning up the same result: the picture painted by the intelligence community of Iraq's WMD was wrong. The question is, why did the intelligence community get it so wrong? And why, crucially, did Bush and Blair press on for months with their insistence that the WMD existed, after it was clear that the intelligence was hugely flawed? Robert Einhorn, a former Assistant Secretary of State for non-proliferation under both Bush and Bill Clinton, whose focus was Iraq, believes that missing WMD represents a massive bureaucratic failure by the intelligence community. Einhorn believes that the most basic intelligence assumptions on Iraq were misguided. 'In retrospect it did not really make sense for Iraq to hold on to large stocks of WMD over a decade to obsolescing junk, when it could meet the letter of the law required by UN resolutions, have sanctions lifted, and covertly develop what you might call a just-in-time WMD capability. 'I am talking about missiles just below the nominal range permitted that could be upgraded quickly, and dual-use facilities that could quickly be turned into a capability for producing chemical and biological weapons. 'What is so remarkable is that it became very quickly apparent in the post-war interviews with scientists and other officials, that no one even admitted that even plans such as those existed. 'In our intelligence community there was simply not a lot of incentive to second-guess the casual assumptions of a decade about Iraq. No one was asked to offer alternative explanations for what they were seeing ... to second-guess what had become conventional wisdom.' More serious, in the words of the senior US intelligence official, the intelligence community had forgotten how to do its job. 'We have forgotten how to ask questions. When I started out in intelligence 25 per cent of the work would be looking at the current intelligence and 75% of the work would be analysing it. 'Now, at a time when we have more intelligence than we have ever had in history, we rely almost exclusively on current intelligence. People see stuff and they relate it to what they think they know. They do not ask the hard questions. He is particularly scathing about the handling of defectors by the US, intelligence that was shared with allies:'Was there ever a study done on this defector intelligence? Did anyone ever ask how good it was? Did anyone ever look deeper into the material? The answer is no.' Worst of all, he believes, intelligence officials failed in one of their most important tasks. They lost the nerve to tell bad news to politicians. 'There were dissenting views, analysts who were right. But the dissenters were pushed to the side.' It is a claim corroborated by former CIA anti-terrorism expert Larry Johnson. 'I know for certain that there were analysts in the Defence Intelligence Agency and the State Department and the CIA who took an alternative point of view. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately George Bush chose to ignore their cautions. Worst-case scenarios were being taken by policy makers who were picking and choosing intelligence,' he said. Despite the attempts by the politicians and the spies to blame each other, what emerges from the accounts collected by The Observer is that the culpability is on both sides: from cherry-picking politicians to intelligence practitioners unwilling to ask difficult questions that might undermine official policy. The comments are certain to increase pressure on both sides of the Atlantic for independent inquiries into how the intelligence turned out to be so wrong. Among those who have now joined calls for an inquiry is David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, whose resignation comments last week that he now believed the stockpiles of weapons 'did not exist' has created political crises in Washington and London. 'It is serious enough,' Kay said on Friday. 'I wish I believed that it could be done by normal procedures, but I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we are going to have to go outside for this. Closed orders and secret societies do not engage in internal reform.' The falling-out between the Iraq 'hardliners' and the 'dissenters' in the intelligence community is mirrored in the bitter recriminations in the weapons inspection community. And ironically it is Kay who is being blamed for encouraging the politicians in London and Washington. Albright is harsh in his criticism, claiming that Kay's initial insistence that weapons would be found had made him a 'laughing stock'. 'The reason that Kay has come clean is that he needed to restore his own credibility. Kay knew a train was coming down the track and jumped out of the way. That is what has caused such immense problems for the administration. He was their strongest terrier and he has turned against them.' A mark of how devastating Kay's declaration has been is evident in the rapid volte-face performed by Bush and his senior officials in recent days, if not by Blair who clings to the belief in the existence of Iraq's WMD. First to break ranks was Powell, whose presentation at the UN, with its misleading description of experiments on death-row prisoners, of biological armed missiles hidden in palm groves and Iraq's hidden industry of Armageddon, has undermined his credibility. By last week even Bush was rewriting the reasons for going to war, insisting on Wednesday: 'There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat to America and others. That's what we know.' While Bush is resisting calls for an inquiry into the intelligence failures, few doubt that damning reports by the House and Senate intelligence committees on the quality of the Iraq intelligence -- due for publication this month -- would be difficult to resist even in an election year. Blair, too, is likely to face increasing calls for an inquiry when he faces the parliamentary liaison committee this week. The quality of British intelligence will also come under the spotlight when Downing Street publishes its long-awaited response this week to criticisms from the Intelligence and Security Committee, which reported last autumn on the September dossier furore. The ISC concluded the dossier had not been 'sexed up', but criticised flaws in the JIC intelligence assessments on which the dossier was based for not making clear 'the uncertainties and gaps in the UK's knowledge' of Iraq's banned weapons. Downing Street will have to tackle its complaints that while there was 'convincing intelligence' of chemical and biological weapons, the JIC assessment did not 'precisely reflect' what agents had reported and the dossier should have made clear both that Saddam was no direct threat to mainland UK, and that it was not known for sure that he was still producing banned weapons. 'You know, a lot of people have been in denial on this,' the senior US intelligence source said. 'Some of them still are.' - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 ***************************************************************** 12 TIME.com: So Much For the WMD -- Feb. 09, 2004 /*red style for Getting The Most Out of What You Got Cameras, DVRs and more So Much For the WMD America's top weapons sleuth says the intelligence on Iraq's arms was all wrong. TIME reports on how the CIA blew it By MICHAEL DUFFY | WASHINGTON CIA chief George Tenet was certain David Kay was the best bloodhound to set loose in Iraq last summer to sniff for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet reasoned that if anyone could find the stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological arms on which the Bush Administration had predicated its unprecedented, pre-emptive attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, it was Kay. The Texan had spent 20 years as an international weapons inspector, with several tours in Iraq. Hard-nosed and fiercely independent, Kay, 63, had a vast network of friends at the Pentagon and the CIA—and among Iraqis in Baghdad. A political conservative, he sent the Bush campaign a check for $200 not long after Bush began his quest for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1999, and he supported a tough line on Saddam. When Tenet tapped Kay as the "ideal person" to lead a 1,400-strong WMD search party last June, Kay sounded neither daunted nor doubtful. "I'm confident," he told NBC, "that we will reach the goal of understanding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, including where weapons are, where weapons may have been moved and the exact status of that program at the time the war commenced." Ideal is about the last word anyone on Team Bush is using to describe what Kay is saying now. After his Iraq Survey Group spent seven months visiting hundreds of sites, interviewing thousands of Iraqis and sifting through millions of documents, Kay announced last week that it had uncovered no WMD in Iraq and was "highly unlikely" to turn up any in the future. In two separate turns before Senate committees, Kay politely shredded some of the Administration's most resilient—and repeated—claims of Saddam's vaunted weapons programs, fingered flawed analysis at the CIA and only halfheartedly encouraged his colleagues to keep looking for the mystery arms. "Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong," said Kay. "It is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there." Kay's findings were far more sweeping than the Administration had anticipated—and had several unsettling effects. They raised new doubts about the Administration's conduct in the weeks leading up to a war that cost hundreds of American lives and billions of dollars and alienated many allies. They sparked a new round of finger pointing between the CIA and the White House about who ginned up the weapons that apparently never existed—and why. They put new pressure on Tenet, who has survived in his post longer than many might have imagined and may no longer be able to write his own exit lines. And they revived plans, long abandoned, of a badly needed reform of the nation's numerous, mysterious, overlapping and often quarrelsome intelligence agencies. Bush had shelved the idea of a massive, one-time overhaul after 9/11, lest the undertaking distract the nation's spooks from their job of protecting the country from further calamity. But if the resulting work has not been effective, as Kay's findings suggest, there's little reason to put off a fix much longer. Kay is not the only CIA employee to unload on the agency. Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who just completed an internal review of the Iraq intelligence at Tenet's request, told TIME, "We may have relied too heavily on our prior knowledge and were not as careful as we should [have been]." Kerr spent six months looking at the secret U.S. intelligence on Saddam's WMD, including the crown jewels presented every morning to Bush and his top advisers—the President's daily brief. Kerr said one problem may have been that the CIA tried to distill complex matters too simply in the top-secret brief, with the result that its claims about Saddam's arsenal were not always adequately conditioned and caveated. "You're trying to make an argument—you often are caught up in that," he said. Looking at the Iraq intelligence in general, "you can find places where they're fairly careful and cautious," Kerr told TIME, "and other times where they carried the argument probably farther than they had evidence for ... There can clearly be some improvements." Tenet may hope Kerr's internal review will take some of the steam out of an even more scathing review, expected this week, by the Senate Intelligence Committee. That panel, controlled by Republicans, has worked for weeks on its own 300-page confidential draft report on the prewar WMD intelligence. Knowledgeable sources tell TIME that the Senate report will probably tag the agency for failing to conduct a zero-based assessment of Saddam's arsenal—that is, a brand-new study with no underlying assumptions about his weapons. Such a review was performed in 1991 before the first Gulf War, but not this time around. The product of 175 interviews by staff members on the panel, the Senate committee report is expected to take particular aim at Tenet, sources said, for giving lawmakers his personal assurance in closed-door hearings that WMD stocks would be found in Iraq. "He was telling the senior people in the Administration," said one source, "that the weapons were absolutely there, that they were certain the stuff was there." Tenet, as a result, "is locked in. He has nowhere to go." A senior intelligence official said Tenet will be perfectly comfortable telling the Senate committee that the Iraq Survey Group is still at work and that it is premature to come to any conclusions about WMD in Iraq. From the Feb. 09, 2004 issue of TIME magazine Page 1 of 2 1 | 2 Next > > ***************************************************************** 13 Tampa Tribune: Yeah, It Was The Spooks Who Duped W! [Daniel Ruth] DANIEL RUTH Published: Feb 1, 2004 So much for the buck stopping with the president of the United States. Why there hasn't been this much action hiding behind the first desk since Monica Lewinsky last delivered a pizza. Gracious, if former weapons inspector David Kay were any more disingenuous, he'd be the perfect candidate for ``The Bachelor.'' It certainly wasn't a good week for George W. Bush, as Kay stepped down from the search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction having spent $900 million and not even coming up with so much as a whoopee cushion to validate the White House's vanity war against Iraq. But then in an attempt to provide some political cover to Bush, Kay asserted the president of the United States himself may well have been duped into believing Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons by an overzealous intelligence community eager to go to war. Towel Snappers This was hardly uplifting news. After all, when you've been burdened your entire political career with a reputation for being less engaged than Sonny von Bulow, the last thing you need is someone like David Kay suggesting the president was little more than a Three Card Monte mark at the mercy of the spook community. Of course, the alternative was hardly any better. How would it look for the president to argue he wasn't duped, but instead participated in misleading the American people by using phony data to justify a war, which up to now has taken the lives of more than 500 U.S. military personnel? This was a no-brainer (sorry, bad word choice perhaps) for the West Wing towel snappers surrounding the president. This called for a Parallel Universe Red Alert! White House press shill, Scott McClellan, who makes a deer caught in the headlights look like the Lion King, was sent out to insist that even though the nation's chief weapons inspector (and his successor Charles Duelfer) are steadfastly confident Iraq had fewer lethal hardware than the Dalai Lama, the president and his gaggle of paranoid political appointees still believed otherwise. Nuclear Gibberish Indeed , McClellan, speaking for the president of Zircon 5, adamantly maintained the administration was still confident - despite Kay, Duelfer and the Secretary of State Colin Powell's statements to the contrary - that Iraq possessed vast stores of weapons of mass destruction. In an attempt to obfuscate the circumstances surrounding Bush's apparent AWOL from reality when it came to the invasion of a foreign country, the deaths of thousands of its citizens, the estrangement from the world community and the loss of American life, the White House has seized upon whether anyone in the administration ever made the precise claim that Hussein posed an ``imminent threat.'' But that is parsing on a scale that makes Bill Clinton look like Mr. Rogers. In the end, it depends on what your definition of bold- faced chutzpah White House hooey is. The overriding predicate for going to war with Iraq began and ended on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. It was the mantra blathered by every senior member of the Bush administration on the Sunday talk shows, in speeches, including the State of Union address (remember the Niger nuclear gibberish) and before the United Nations. And now these Heritage Foundation frat boys want you to believe that for all their patronizing hubris they were led astray by CIA career paper pushers? How comforting it must be for the families of the U.S. service personnel who have died in Iraq to know their loved ones gave their lives because the president and his top advisers were led like lemmings into war. What does this mean? The buck passing stops at Langley? Columnist Daniel Ruth can be reached at (813) 259-7599. TBO.com IS Tampa Bay Online 2004, Media General Inc. All rights reserved ***************************************************************** 14 Scotsman.com News: Opinion - The Question remains: Where are the WMD? Sun 1 Feb 2004 Ian Mather AS LORD Hutton’s judgment unfolded on television screens throughout the fortress-like headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, relief rippled through the building. Among senior managers, there had been real fear that heads would roll if Hutton concluded that MI6 had sold its soul and become the tool of a government desperate to bolster the case for war - with departures not just from "Babylon-on-Thames", as the ostentatious riverside building in central London is known, but also at the GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham. But, luckily for all who were intimately involved in key sections of the Iraq dossier published by the government last September, Hutton decided to confine himself to the narrowest definition of his remit. He steered well clear of the broader question of whether the government’s grounds for war against Iraq were based on faulty intelligence. On the explosive charge that the intelligence service had agreed to the inclusion of the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could be fired within 45 minutes, knowing it to be unconfirmed, Hutton was silent. The worst he could bring himself to say was that security chiefs might have been "subconsciously influenced" by Tony Blair’s desire to boost the case against Saddam. Yet the fundamental question about the quality of the intelligence that took Britain to war will not go away. The logic is brutal: with the discovery of WMD now extremely unlikely, if the government did not wilfully twist the facts then it must have been the intelligence that was wrong. Everything points to an intelligence failure on a massive global scale. The best-equipped, best-funded intelligence services in the world, including those of Britain, Germany, Israel, Russia, China, Australia and even France, were all convinced that Saddam Hussein was aggressively pursuing WMD programmes while giving United Nations weapons inspectors the runaround. "There was a consensus among the US government, a consensus among the UN inspectors, a consensus of American experts outside the US government. There was a consensus in the entire international community," says Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution in Washington, and a former CIA analyst. "I can’t think of anyone who did not believe that the Iraqis had a weapons of mass destruction programme. There was simply no-one." In the US it is being billed as the biggest debacle in intelligence since Pearl Harbour. In Washington last week the wave of doubt swept into the White House itself, where national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared to admit the intelligence may have been flawed. "I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground," she told a television interviewer. She added: "That’s not surprising in a country that was as closed and secretive as Iraq - a country that was doing everything that it could to deceive the United Nations, to deceive the world." But a far blunter verdict had already been delivered by David Kay, former head of the Iraq survey group, which is still searching for WMD in Iraq. Kay, a firm supporter of the war, told the Senate armed services committee he had been unable to find substantive evidence that Saddam Hussein had possessed WMD or had an active weapons development programme. "It turns out that we were all wrong probably, in my judgment, and that’s most disturbing," he said. Kay, who resigned from the ISG, added: "I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense, and that it is highly unlikely there were large stockpiles of deployed militarised chemical and biological weapons there." Kay also accused the Bush administration of backing away from its commitment to find WMD. He said it had cut back the 1,400-member Iraq survey group’s resources and switched manpower to the battle against insurgents. This is not good news for the British government, which is doggedly sticking to the line that as long as the ISG is searching there is still a chance of finding WMD, and which is resisting demands for a full independent inquiry into the role of the intelligence service until the hunt is completed - probably this summer. The hope may be that by then the public will have tired of the controversy, but the reality is that the inquest has already begun - and MI6 is in for an uncomfortable time. The House of Commons intelligence and security committee is preparing to launch a new investigation into the quality of the information that made the case for war. The head of MI6, the shadowy Sir Richard Dearlove, is expected to appear before it, though hearings will be in secret. They will concentrate on at least two pieces of intelligence supplied by MI6 that now look highly dubious. Documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger for its nuclear programme have proved to be forgeries. George W Bush used the allegation in his State of the Union speech in 2003, and the White House later acknowledged that it had been misled - but the Foreign Office continues to maintain that the allegation is true. The claim that Saddam could operate WMD within 45 minutes, which came from MI6, also now appears to be in tatters, even if one accepts the more limited assertion that this only applied to battlefield weapons. Last week, the head of the Washington-based Iraqi exile group, which passed that information to MI6, admitted it had been raw intelligence from a single source and second-hand - and insisted it had been up to the intelligence services to verify it. Nick Theros, who headed the Iraqi National Accord, said the Iraqi brigadier who provided the information had not himself seen the "chemical weapons crates" upon which his 45-minute claim was based. All he knew was that his unit had taken delivery of crates which appeared to contain short-range weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades, that were supposed to be fired from civilian Jeeps as a last-ditch defence by Saddam loyalists wearing gas masks. Sir Richard has ordered his agents to go back to informants following the revelation to the Hutton inquiry that the 45-minute warning did not relate to long-range missiles capable of hitting British military bases in Cyprus, as was implied in the September dossier. But he will still have to explain how MI6 allowed a single-sourced, second-hand piece of information not only to be included in the dossier but also to be given such prominence that it was included in Blair’s foreword to the document. It is worth remembering that, after all, that is precisely the accusation that was levelled against BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan - that he used an unconfirmed, single-source to make the claim that the government "probably" knew the 45 minute allegation was wrong. There will be awkward questions, too, about the evidence heard by Hutton that the Ministry of Defence failed to relay to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) the reservations of some senior intelligence officers about the content of the dossier. According to Sir Paul Lever, former head of the JIC, intelligence agencies have already begun looking again at the intelligence from signals, human sources and photographs to try to find out how they got it wrong. He said: "It all looks rather iffy. Most observers would have expected that by now missiles would have been found, or some chemical weapons or maybe a few labs." In the US an inquiry is underway by the Senate intelligence committee, and the CIA is also conducting its own intelligence review. A number of retired intelligence officers have delivered a review to CIA director George Tenet on the performance of the CIA and other agencies. But both investigations are in private and, despite insisting "I want to know the facts", Bush is resisting calls for a full public inquiry. Rolf Ekeus, former head of the UN special commission in charge of dismantling Saddam’s WMD after the first Gulf War, added to the pressure yesterday by saying there was now a "golden opportunity" to look again at that intelligence. Already three principal reasons for the intelligence debacle are beginning to emerge. First, according to Kenneth Pollack, a key factor was the withdrawal of UN inspectors from Iraq in 1998, when the US and Britain threatened air strikes because the Iraqis were failing to grant unconditional access to suspect sites. "When the inspectors were gone we no longer had the ability to vet information from defectors, from satellites, from other indirect sources of information," Pollack wrote last week. Second, with no inspectors on the ground in Iraq, the intelligence services began to rely more and more heavily on those defectors. There was no way to check their stories, but a lot of information from defectors before the withdrawal of the UN inspectors had turned out to be right. When Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and cousin defected in 1995, he provided so much information that the UN inspectors were able to catch the Iraqis red-handed developing Scud missile production facilities and a complete biological production facility, as well as making illegal purchases abroad. So when, in the late 1990s, another wave of key defectors arrived in the West, bringing accounts of Iraqi WMD programmes, there was a predisposition to believe them, even though some of the defectors were simply telling western intelligence what it wanted to hear in order to improve their chances of getting asylum, or for payment. The third reason why the intelligence services got it wrong was that Iraqi society under Saddam’s regime was almost impossible to penetrate. People were terrified to talk because the secret police were everywhere. One in every four or five people was reporting to the government. Any Iraqi spotted talking to a foreigner was immediately taken in for questioning, and foreigners themselves were followed and hassled. All communications were tapped. Pollack says: "The idea that an Iraqi government official or a scientist would meet with someone connected to the Americans was unheard of. As a result there was very little human intelligence coming out of Iraq." Yet according to Pollack, Saddam had become convinced that the only way to achieve his primary aim of having international sanctions lifted was to put the WMD programmes on indefinite hold. He scaled the programmes back to the minimum consistent with his long-term aim of reconstituting them some time in the future. He did not declare this policy openly because he wanted Iraq’s traditional enemy, Iran, and his internal enemies, the Kurds, to believe he still had a chemical weapons capability. In Britain it is already clear that whatever the final verdict on their performance, the intelligence services from now on will strongly resist the idea of any dossiers for public consumption based on intelligence. Air Marshal Sir John Walker, a former chief of defence intelligence and former deputy chairman of the JIC, said: "It is the first time in my experience that we have tried to use the JIC as an organisation in a public relations exercise with the government, and it doesn’t look as though it has been a great success." He added: "We went to war on the basis that WMD capable of being used within 45 minutes were a threat to UK interests - and they weren’t there. One of the advantages of Hutton being over with is that the big issue now is why did we go to war, and did we have an intelligence failure that took us to war?" Over at Babylon-on-Thames, the relief may be premature. ***************************************************************** 15 Korea Herald: 'N.K. talks could open this month' (shj@heraldm.com) By Seo Hyun-jin 2004.02.02 A fresh round of multilateral talks on North Korea's nuclear threat could open as early as this month, the chief U.S. delegate to the talks said in Seoul yesterday, echoing South Korean diplomats' recent predictions. Government officials and experts agree, however, that Pyongyang holds the key to reconvening the six-way talks as it still tries to get more concessions from Washington before sitting at the negotiation table. Still, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said he was "mildly optimistic" about the prospects for a second set of the nuclear talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. We "may be able to have another round of six-party talks before very long. Perhaps even this month of February," Kelly told reporters upon arriving at Incheon International Airport. Kelly had a luncheon meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck, South Korea's head negotiator for the six-way talks, to prepare the resumption of the talks after the five-month suspension. He will meet Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun before flying to Tokyo today. The participants have stepped up their diplomacy to restart the nuclear talks, the first round of which ended inconclusively in Beijing in August. Observers have said the end of February is a highly probable time for the talks, considering national events in some of the concerned countries. North Korea will be busy until Feb. 16, the birthday of its leader Kim Jong-il. China will have to focus on the National People's Congress in March. "South Korea, the United States and Japan believe the talks should open as soon as possible and North Korea should not attach conditions in rejoining the talks," a Foreign Ministry official said. Washington believes the timing of the new round of talks hinges on Pyongyang. "We have been working to prepare for another round of talks at an early date, but the decision on when those will be held, at this point, seems to lie in Pyongyang," said U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher during his daily news briefing Friday. "Therefore, it's not possible for us to predict when or the likelihood of any given moment," he said. ***************************************************************** 16 Korea Herald: [A Reader's View]Nonproliferation of misunderstanding By Song Young-wan 2004.02.02 I was perturbed to read the article entitled "Independent vs. isolated diplomacy" written by Katsuhisa Furukawa, which appeared in the Jan. 26 edition of The Korea Herald. As the Korean representative who participated in the Asian Senior-level Talks on Non-Proliferation held in Tokyo in November 2003, which Mr. Furukawa referred to in his article, I wish to correct the fallacies he wrote created and explain briefly Korea's policy toward the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It seems that Furukawa was given incorrect information on the November meeting from some participants and he himself does not appear on the list of participants at the meeting. He wrote, "To the surprise of many participants, a senior diplomat of the Republic of Korea, who participated in this meeting for the first time as an observer, strenuously opposed the draft." In fact, the ASTOP meeting last year organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan was the first one and all of the representatives from Korea, the U.S., Australia and ASEAN countries were full participants: none of us was an observer. It was particularly dismaying to read his argument that, "This is just one of many examples that indicate widening gaps between the ROK and other Asian countries in the area of nonproliferation." Furukawa implied that the Republic of Korea was lagging behind other Asian countries in the field of nonproliferation, which is truly false. The Republic of Korea is fully committed to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It has joined as a Contracting Party all of the existing export control regimes: the Missile Technology Control Regime in 2001, the Australia Group in 1997, the Wassenaar Arrangement in 1996 and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 1995. Moreover, from the start of 2003, Korea upgraded its export control system to curb the proliferation of WMD and missile technology by introducing the "catch-all" system into its legal framework, and is implementing it accordingly. In fact, there are only three countries in Asia, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Australia, which are members of all of the export control regimes and have internalized the "catch-all" system in their legal framework. It is therefore quite clear that the Republic of Korea, along with Japan and Australia, is playing a leading role in countering the proliferation of WMD and missile technology in Asia and worldwide. Against this backdrop, Korea has been chairing the Nuclear Suppliers Group since its plenary meeting held in Busan in May last year and will also assume the chairmanship of the Missile Technology Control Regime in October this year. Recently, there has often been mention of a dichotomy in our foreign policy in the form of "independence vs. alliance." Few of my colleagues at the Foreign Ministry would agree with such a contrast, since we believe that diplomacy is an art comprising delicate and complex interactions between people and among nations. In this vein, it was really distressing to read Furukawa's argument that, "When ROK President Roh Moo-hyun asserts the importance of an 'independent foreign policy,' he seems to mean independence from the U.S. - but simultaneously, an increasing dependence on North Korea and China, especially when it comes to issues of proliferation." The proliferation of WMD is a very serious matter which threatens international peace and security and the world community should take resolute steps to check it. The Republic of Korea knows much better than to lag behind in countering the proliferation of WMD and has, in fact, been making unswerving efforts to strengthen the multilateral nonproliferation regimes. Song Young-wan is a deputy director-general at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. - Ed. ***************************************************************** 17 SF Chronicle: North Korea ready to end arms crisis, visitor says Stanford professor believes regime fears being isolated Saturday, January 31, 2004 A Stanford professor who visited North Korea earlier this month said Friday that a high-ranking official of the Pyongyang regime had told an American delegation that the North was seeking to negotiate the eventual dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program. In an interview, John Lewis, a China expert at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, quoted North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kim Gye Gwan, as saying, ''It is everyone's goal to have complete dismantlement of our nuclear weapons program, and that is also our goal.'' Lewis said the comment had been made during a four-day visit to the North that started Jan. 6. "They clearly understand that if they pursue the nuclear option, they will be cut off from the rest of the world, and they do not want that," he said. Lewis led an unofficial U.S. delegation that included Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory; Jack Pritchard, a former State Department official who was in charge of negotiating with North Korea until his resignation last year; and two Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides. The group visited the Nuclear Scientific Research Center in Yongbyon, the North's main nuclear complex. They were shown a 1.5-inch tall, cone-shaped, heavy metal substance the North Korean officials claimed was weapons-grade plutonium, Lewis said. Hecker, however, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that he didn't see any proof the North had the capability of converting plutonium into bomb material. Lewis said North Korean Foreign Ministry officials denied the country had a program to produce highly enriched uranium, which can also power nuclear weapons. That remains a point of contention. The current crisis was touched off in October 2002 when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly was apparently told by the North during a visit to Pyongyang that the Stalinist nation had a uranium enrichment project. The two sides disagree on exactly what was said that day. The United States reacted by halting oil shipments to North Korea, which in turn expelled U.N. inspectors and restarted its nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. The North has said in the past that it will suspend its nuclear weapons program if Washington grants North Korea's demand for a nonaggression treaty, removes it from the U.S. list of terrorism-tolerating nations and resumes fuel aid. After much wrangling, the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia did tackle the issue in Beijing last August, but they achieved no progress. A second round of multilateral talks has yet to materialize, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Friday in Beijing that "the decision on the dates is in Pyongyang ... so you'll have to ask the North Koreans." T.J. Pempel, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies, said Lewis' account confirmed his notion that North Korea was "basically trying to send up smoke signals that they are not trying to be confrontational. " "I think they're trying to toss out feelers and see what gets bought," Pempel said. "In the long run, the North has no interest in ongoing confrontation." Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., called the North's decision to allow the delegation's visit and the display of the purported weapons-grade plutonium an "exercise in brinksmanship." Referring to Hecker's testimony that the North was still at an early stage of weapons development, Noland added, "This did not work out the way that the North Koreans wanted." E-mail Matthew Yi at . [graphical line] Page A - 10 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ ***************************************************************** 18 KoreaTimes: 6-Way Talks Possible in Feburary : FM Hankooki.com > Korea Times By Shim Jae-yun Staff Reporter Foreign Affairs-Trade Minister Ban Ki-moon on Sunday forecast that the six-way talks on the standoff over the North Korean nuclear program will be held sometime in February. ``It is very possible that the six-party talks will place in February given North Korea made positive comments to that effect in January,'' Ban said during an interview with Yonhap New Agency on his way to home after attending a regional forum in the Philippines. After indicating that the Seoul government has held ongoing consultations with relevant countries, Ban also said that time is running out, and there has been growing need to bring the North to the dialogue table at the earliest date possible. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly also said he believes the second round of nuclear talks will be possible within February. Telling reporters upon his arrival at Incheon International Airport, Kelly said, ``We may be able to have another round of six-way talks before very long. Perhaps even February.'' Kelly, who is here to consult with Seoul officials on the nuclear issue, said he is ``mildly optimistic'' of the prospect for the new talks because all the nations involved are working closely on the matter. He plans to meet with Ban and Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun today before leaving for Tokyo. North Korea last month said it would stop nuclear activities as a first step once the United States lifts its economic embargo against it, resumes oil shipment and removes it from the list of terror-sponsoring nations. But the U.S. has demanded the reclusive nation abolish its nuclear program in a verifiable and irreversible manner as a precondition for any U.S. concessions. Ban also backed the U.S. stance by saying, ``It is not proper for the North to come up with a series of requests as a precondition for its abandonment of the nuclear weapons development program.'' He called on Pyongyang to dismantle all of its nuclear activities, including its highly enriched uranium program, completely, verifiably and irreversibly. Ban said the Foreign Affairs-Trade Ministry is giving careful consideration to setting up a task force team that will be exclusively in charge of the North Korean nuclear crisis. 02-01-2004 15:29 ***************************************************************** 19 Washington Post: Why We Didn't Get the Picture (washingtonpost.com) We Collected A Little, and Assumed a Lot By Bruce Berkowitz Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B01 Last week David Kay went to Capitol Hill to explain to lawmakers what he had found in Iraq. Until last month, Kay, a widely respected proliferation expert, headed the Iraqi Survey Group, the team assigned after the war to find Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons -- and assess how well U.S. intelligence understood the threat. "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment," Kay said at the hearing. "And that is most disturbing." Disturbing is right. What happened? U.S. intelligence analysts have been taking a lot of criticism lately, but I believe that, when all the investigations are completed, we will discover that this wasn't an intelligence analysis failure. It was mainly an intelligence collection failure, combined with a misunderstanding all around about how intelligence really works. Our biggest problem in assessing the Iraqi weapons programs was simply that we lacked reliable, independent sources of information about threats that are increasingly difficult to see. The equipment for making chemical and biological weapons is nearly identical to that for making pesticides and beer, and the really essential components are the knowledge inside the weapons makers' heads. What's more, we have yet to figure out how to penetrate closed societies such as Iraq. All the other problems followed from this basic lack of data. It now appears that after 1998 Iraq did indeed have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs -- but they were in a "standby" mode, with Saddam waiting for the day United Nations sanctions would break down. The programs were mainly on paper or in the heads of technicians, and apparently did not amount to much. But when combined with our inability to crack Iraqi secrecy, these hibernating programs and Iraq's past behavior gave the impression of a much bigger and more successful clandestine effort. When U.S. intelligence spotted an illegal sale, hidden transaction or remnant of a program that had been shelved, our analysts concluded -- correctly -- that Iraq still planned to develop the weapons. The satellite imagery and telephone intercepts that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented at the United Nations in February 2003 were real. We just didn't know the complete meaning of all these things. It did not help matters that U.S. intelligence had underestimated Iraq's nuclear programs in the early 1980s and '90s. Analysts -- lacking hard information -- concluded the worst. Indeed, nearly everyone was taken in -- officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, our British allies, and even French and U.N. officials. Almost no one denied that the Iraqis were hiding something. The question was always what to do about it, and when. The ultimate irony was that Saddam Hussein -- who might have put all questions to rest -- was so intent on maintaining his power at home and his stature abroad that he could never let inspectors discover for themselves that his weapons programs had been shelved. He is now paying the price for what appears to have been a colossal bluff. If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Recall the infamous "missile gap" of the 1960 presidential election. After the Soviet Union surprised the West in 1957 by testing the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, U.S. intelligence predicted the Soviets would build them by the hundreds. Nikita Khrushchev boasted that Soviet factories were turning out missiles "like sausages," and we had little information from inside the Soviet Union to prove otherwise. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence analysts were still smarting from having underestimated the pace not only of the Soviet missile program, but also of its nuclear weapons program a few years earlier -- just as today's analysts were haunted by having missed Iraq's programs for weapons of mass destruction prior to the Persian Gulf War. The first-generation Soviet missiles, as it turned out, were lousy weapons, and the Soviet Union never built many. But no one knew this until after the United States had committed to building thousands of its own missiles as a deterrent. The recipe was the same in 1960 and 2003: Take a record of previously underestimating the enemy, combine with a secretive regime and a mercurial, bluffing strongman, mix in inadequate information and -- voilà -- you have a lot of chagrined officials and a huge bill. This problem will likely get worse. Not only is it hard to detect chemical and biological facilities, even nuclear weapons programs today have a small "footprint." Where the Manhattan Project required the equivalent of small cities, more recent programs, such as the one South Africa ran in the 1980s and Pakistan built in the 1990s, require only a few large buildings. Much of the North Korean program appears to be hidden in caves, and until recently we knew little of the Iranian and Libyan programs -- which ran for decades. That's why we need to focus even harder on improving collection and on understanding the true limits of our information at any given moment. Even the best analyst can't make intelligence out of whole cloth. But the most important lesson to draw from this episode is appreciating how intelligence really fits into the making of U.S. foreign policy. CONTINUED 1 2 Next > Print This Article © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 20 Washington Post: Echoes of McNamara and 'Nam (washingtonpost.com) By Ellen Goodman Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A21 BOSTON -- There was a moment in "The Fog of War" when I thought this sober film on the life and times of Robert McNamara should be required viewing for those who believe that even a good war is free of moral dilemmas. Remembering the firebombing of Tokyo, the death of 100,000 civilians in one night in World War II, McNamara asks: Would we have been tried as war criminals if we'd lost? There was another moment when I thought the film should be viewed as well by those who believe that American vulnerability began on Sept. 11, 2001. Remembering the Cuban missile crisis, the old Cold Warrior says: "At the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war." But by the time the film ran through the aging whiz kid's schoolbook -- "Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara" -- I was convinced that it should be seen most of all by those who are too young to remember when the Vietnam War was called McNamara's War. No, I am not someone who believes that Iraq is another Vietnam. Every war -- if I may mangle Tolstoy -- is unhappy in its own way. But you can't hear McNamara alternately justifying and apologizing for his role as secretary of defense, running his tongue across the painful tooth of his involvement again and again, without hearing echoes. "What makes us omniscient?" asks the man once described as an IBM machine with legs. "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasons." Reexamine our reasons? In the mid-1960s, McNamara remembers, we escalated the war in Vietnam on wrong information, on mistaken and misinterpreted reports of torpedo attacks. In 2003 we launched a preemptive war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the ready. Wrong again. Today the fog of this war is also lifting. In his exit interview, David Kay, the weapons inspector, talked openly to reporters about the grave errors of our prewar intelligence. As he led the failed search for weapons of mass destruction, Kay said, analysts came up to him "almost in tears . . . apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they did." But no one, he laments, ever stood up and said let's examine the basis for our conclusions. President Bush remains anything but apologetic. In his State of the Union address, he switched the subject from weapons of mass destruction to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." He's switched the justification for this war and its casualties to the insistence that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. He is trying to write the history our grandchildren will read. McNamara and Bush, Vietnam and Iraq, sent me searching back to the words of my friend the late James Thomson, curator of the Nieman program when I was a young journalism fellow at Harvard. Jim was a golden boy, the son of missionaries to China, who left the government and then spoke out against the Vietnam War. His powerful autopsy of the war -- "How Could Vietnam Happen?" -- was published in 1968, just weeks after McNamara's resignation in disagreement with President Johnson. Vietnam, he wrote, was the result of wishful thinking, overselling, the neutralizing of dissent within government and the idea that the war was a fundamental test of national will. He concluded: "To put it bluntly: At the heart of the Vietnam calamity is a group of able, dedicated men who have been regularly and repeatedly wrong -- and whose standing with their contemporaries, and more important, with history, depends, as they see it, on being proven right. These are not men who can be asked to extricate themselves from error." Do I hear Iraq? When McNamara left the Pentagon and Thomson wrote this autopsy, we were only halfway through the Vietnam War. We were seven years and nearly 31,000 more deaths from the end. How will that chilling fact echo? Through the primary season, Democrats have debated how we got into Iraq: Was it misinformation or disinformation? In the general election, it is likely to refocus on who can find an end without leaving a greater disaster in its wake. I think of the question Thomson described in his 1968 piece. Once, Henry Stimson, secretary of war for William Taft, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, was asked: How can we bring peace to the world? Stimson answered: "You begin by bringing to Washington a small handful of able men who believe that the achievement of peace is possible. You work them to the bone until they no longer believe that it is possible. And then you throw them out -- and bring in a new bunch who believe that it is possible." ">ellengoodman@globe.com © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 21 Asia Pacific News: Deputy US Secretary of State Richard Armitage Channelnewsasia.com Posted: 31 January 2004 0729 hrs KEDO holds board meeting on suspension of N Korea nuclear project NEW YORK : The international consortium in charge of a frozen project to build two nuclear power plants for North Korea, held an executive board meeting, with no end in sight to a nuclear showdown between Washington and Pyongyang. The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) judged last year that Pyongyang had failed to meet necessary conditions to continue the multi-billion dollar project which arose from a 1994 anti-nuclear deal between Washington and Pyongyang. The United States considers the deal, known as the Agreed Framework, ruptured after accusing Pyongyang in 2002 of launching a prohibited program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. "KEDO Executive Board members -- the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the European Union -- held useful discussions today," the State Department said in a statement issued in Washington. Discussions centered on issues relating to implementation of the suspension of the light water reactor project in North Korea, the statement said. "As we have made clear, we see no future for the light water reactor project." The suspension comes amid intensified diplomatic efforts to convene a new round of multilateral talks to resolve the nuclear crisis following initial six-country talks in Beijing in August. KEDO suspended the project for one year, a compromise between and US calls for a complete cancellation and a more lenient South Korean position. The future of the project will be assessed and decided before the one-year suspension expires on December 1. Despite the suspension, preservation and maintenance work to continue will continue on the site where the project was to have produced two light water reactors, not deemed suitable for the production of weapons grade material. Construction work began in 1998 and is only one-third finished, although completion of the project was scheduled for 2003, according to the North Koreans. Experts say it would take at least five more years to finish the complex. - AFP Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 22 NYT: Pakistan Ousts Nuclear Scientist From Post Associated Press Abdul Qadeer Khan, founder of Pakistan's nuclear program. By DAVID ROHDE Published: February 1, 2004 [I] SLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 31 — The Pakistani government on Saturday removed Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, from his post as a special adviser to the country's prime minister. The step, and other measures, suggested that the government was laying the groundwork for exposing wrongdoing by Dr. Khan, a man revered as a national hero in Pakistan. Dr. Khan, three scientists and three low-level army officers are the focus of an investigation into the possible sharing of Pakistani nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and other countries in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, has said that "some individuals" appear to have sold nuclear technology for personal profit. General Musharraf, who seized power in a coup, has been under competing pressures from the United States, secular and Islamist political rivals and Pakistan's powerful army. He must somehow strike a balance between being tough enough in the investigation to satisfy American concerns and not being seen as an American lackey, or betraying the army, his base of support. Officials outlined a series of steps that suggested an airing of evidence would occur, but it was not clear whether Dr. Khan or low-level scientists and army officers would be prosecuted. General Musharraf will make a televised address to the nation "shortly after" a series of national holidays that end on Thursday, a senior official said. An already extensive security presence around Dr. Khan's home has been "enhanced," the official added, but he has not been arrested. The removal of Dr. Khan from his post came after the National Command Authority, the senior military and civilian leaders who oversee Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, was briefed on the investigation's progress. The authority issued a statement saying it "condemns and distances itself in categorical terms from individual acts of indiscretion in the past." Pakistani officials have said that bank accounts believed to belong to Dr. Khan and nuclear smugglers from Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa and Sri Lanka have been found in Dubai and other Persian Gulf cities. Analysts are divided on the meaning of General Musharraf's action. Ayesha Siddiqa, a security analyst in Islamabad, said the army feared that if Dr. Khan was arrested he would identify senior military officials who approved the transfers. The military-led government has thus far taken the position that any sales of technology were an unsanctioned act, perhaps by Dr. Khan and a handful of close aides and low-level military officials. "A. Q. Khan will lead to more names," Ms. Siddiqa said in a telephone interview. "That is what they are weighing." But Rasul Baksh Rais, a professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, said the Saturday actions were a signal that Dr. Khan had committed a serious offense. Mr. Rais said he expected the government to move against Dr. Khan, if clear evidence against him existed. "It suggests that there is something serious against him," Dr. Rais said. "That Dr. Khan is no longer in the same esteem and respect of the government of Pakistan and he has done something really serious against the interests of Pakistan." Pakistan began its investigation in November, when Iranian officials told the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency that black marketeers who aided Iran's nuclear program had ties to Pakistan. In early January, Libya told Pakistan that nuclear smugglers it had used also had ties to Pakistan. Dr. Khan's troubles began in 2001. General Musharraf forced him to retire from his post as head of Khan Research Laboratories, the country's main nuclear weapons facility, which was named for him. American officials have said they pressed General Musharraf to remove Dr. Khan, whom they have long suspected of sharing nuclear technology with other countries. Dr. Khan was appointed special adviser to the prime minister for strategic programs in 2001, a term used to describe the country's nuclear program. A government statement issued Saturday said Dr. Khan had been removed from the post in order to "facilitate" the investigation into the sharing of nuclear technology in a "free and objective manner." Since his retirement from the nuclear program, Dr. Khan, a larger- than-life figure who is a fierce nationalist, has brought out deep divisions in Pakistan. His enemies, including a rival faction of nuclear scientists, dismiss him as a megalomaniac who exaggerated his role in constructing Pakistan's nuclear bomb and accuse him of corruption. Dr. Khan's supporters say he achieved an astounding feat, successfully enriching uranium and eluding an American effort to block the Pakistani nuclear program. In a rare interview recorded in late December and aired in full on Jan. 23 by the private Pakistani television channel Geo, Dr. Khan denied sharing technology with Iran. He said international news organizations were maligning him because the weapons he built thwarted India's plan to "destroy Pakistan." "What I did, I made all of their policies go to waste," he said. "A single person destroyed all of their intended planning for the next 25 years." He then laughed and said: "Who made the atom bomb? I made it. Who made the missiles? I made them for you." On Saturday, the president's chief spokesmen continued to assert that the inquiry was making progress. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan Khan, the military's chief spokesman, said the investigation had "narrowed down to a few people." Asked if Dr. Khan was one of the remaining suspects, he replied "he is certainly among them." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home| ***************************************************************** 23 AFP: Prosecuting Pakistan's nuclear father may bring unwanted scrutiny: analysts ISLAMABAD (AFP) Feb 01, 2004 The sacking of Pakistan's nuclear pioneer Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan from a government position signals his possible trial over his alleged role in the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran and Libya, analysts say. But prosecuting the 66-year-old metallurgist, who played a key role in making Pakistan a nuclear power and is seen as a hero, would be a risky undertaking and could expose the nuclear program to damaging scrutiny, they said. "The real challenge for the government would be the Pandora's box that such an action would open," Riffat Hussain, head of the Strategic Studies Department at Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University, told AFP. "Pushed to the wall A.Q. Khan can spill the beans, which can complicate matters -- especially Islamabad's claims that technology leakage was done without official sanction," Hussain said. According to government officials Khan has become a primary suspect in a two-month inquiry by Pakistani investigators into nuclear proliferation. The investigation was initiated after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) alerted Pakistan to the suspected role of some individuals in clandestine sales of nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya. But already, radical Islamic parties and professional groups have protested against what they call a "US-prompted campaign" against the father of the Islamic world's first nuclear bomb. "The possibility of him being charged now exists," acknowledged political analyst Mohammad Afzal Niazi, but he added: "It will be a traumatic experience for the country because A.Q. Khan was the symbol of the nuclear programme." Immediately after his sacking authorities beefed up security around Khan's home. Military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said this was done because the government "is definitely concerned about his security." Khan's contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme was the procurement of a blueprint for uranium centrifuges, which transform uranium into weapons-grade fuel for nuclear fissile material. He was charged with stealing it from The Netherlands while working for Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium Urenco, and bringing it back to Pakistan in 1976. On his return he joined the uranium enrichment plant and the project is credited with ultimately leading to Pakistan's first nuclear test explosion in May 1998. In 1983 he was sentenced in absentia to four year imprisonment by an Amsterdam court for attempted espionage, although the sentence was later overturned on an appeal. Khan has been questioned regularly since this most recent investigation started but he has not been detained during the probe -- unlike about a dozen other scientists and officials. Five nuclear scientists have been exonerated by investigators while six other individuals, including three officials, are still being interrogated with the probe said to be on the verge of completion. "I do not think it serves anyone's interest to call for punitive action against him," Hussain said. "Whatever has happened cannot be undone. The important thing is to institute legal and institutional barriers against this kind of behaviour in the future," he said. "The A.Q. Khan episode offers the government an opportunity to clean up whatever mess it manages to discover." But former head of Punjab university's political science department, Dr Hasan Askari, said it appeared that nuclear leakages did take place in the past and the government was "justified" in doing what it was. "If the government of Pakistan can take action against A.Q. Khan, it is really determined to plug all leakages and is serious about security and safety of the nuclear arsenal of the country" Askari said. WAR.WIRE ***************************************************************** 24 BBC: Pakistan sacks 'father of bomb' Last Updated: Saturday, 31 January, 2004 [Abdul Qadeer Khan (archive image from 1998)] Mr Khan is revered by many in his country The founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme has been removed from his post as a government adviser. Abdul Qadeer Khan was sacked after the Nuclear Command Council reviewed a probe into the alleged illegal sale of nuclear technology to Iran and Libya. The decision confirms speculation that he was a prime suspect in the inquiry, says the BBC's Zaffar Abbas. Mr Khan has held the post of scientific adviser since retiring as head of the country's top nuclear facility in 2001. The inquiry began two months ago after the UN gave Pakistan information it had gathered about Iran and Libya's nuclear programmes. More than 15 people from the country's premier nuclear enrichment facility, Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), have been questioned so far and five scientists and officials are still in the custody of the authorities. [Launch of missile at Kahuta Research Laboratories] Khan's Kahuta plant is Pakistan's main nuclear weapons laboratory Our Islamabad correspondent says that allegations about illegal sales in the Pakistani press make the country's future as a responsible nuclear power look vulnerable. The family of Dr Khan, a man who has always had financial and bureaucratic support from the military, says the scientist - now in effect under house arrest in the capital - is being made a scapegoat. In question are alleged payments of hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists and officials in return for the possible transfer of nuclear know-how and even hardware. Prime suspect Mr Khan's fall from grace has been dramatic. The man who until recently was regarded as the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb was dismissed from his post by a simple notification. He was appointed to the largely ceremonial post after he retired as the head of KRL. An official spokesman said Mr Khan had been relieved of his responsibilities to allow a fair investigation into the nuclear proliferation scandal. The spokesman said that, on the basis of the investigation, legal action will be taken against those found involved in selling nuclear know-how to a third country. ***************************************************************** 25 Washington Post: Pakistan Fires Top Nuclear Scientist (washingtonpost.com) By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page A01 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 31 -- Pakistan's most prominent nuclear weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was fired from his government job Saturday after investigators concluded that he made millions of dollars from the sale of nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya, officials said. The wealth that Khan accumulated during 30 years as a government servant, on a salary estimated now at $2,000 per month, is part of evidence that officials say led Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, to conclude that he had no choice but to take action against Khan, the flamboyant, European-trained metallurgist who is widely regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Khan, 67, counts among his assets four houses in Islamabad, a palatial lakeside retreat in the nearby village of Bani Gala, ownership shares in two restaurants and a hotel in Timbuktu, Mali, that he named for his wife, who is of Dutch ancestry, according to Pakistani investigators. The decision to dismiss Khan from his post as a science adviser to the prime minister came at a meeting Saturday morning of the National Command Authority, which is made up of senior military and civilian officials and is chaired by Musharraf. But Musharraf postponed a decision on whether to pursue criminal charges against Khan, who investigators say routed blueprints and other technical assistance to Iran and Libya by means of a nuclear black market in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai and -- in the case of Iran -- through a program to promote non-military nuclear technology. At least one other nuclear scientist, Mohammed Farooq, is accused of helping Khan in the scheme. Khan has been ordered to remain at home as investigators complete their work, officials said. Farooq, whose family maintains his innocence, is among five other current or former lab officials still being held at undisclosed locations. Musharraf is under heavy domestic pressure to go easy on Khan, who is considered a national hero for his pivotal role in developing the uranium-enrichment technology that allowed the country to achieve nuclear parity with arch rival India. At the same time, Musharraf is eager to remain on good terms with the United States and to demonstrate Pakistan's commitment to curbing the spread of nuclear weapons technology, in part by showing that he takes the allegations against Khan and other scientists seriously. Pakistan launched its investigation in November after the International Atomic Energy Agency turned up evidence that some of its scientists had helped Iran and Libya design centrifuges used to make enriched uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. Among those present at Saturday's meeting was Lt. Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, who presented the case against Khan at the meeting and said firing him would "would go a long way in establishing" Pakistan's "credibility with the IAEA," according to a participant. The same official quoted Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali as telling the group, "We must tell the world that Pakistan at no cost would allow irresponsible scientists to run its nuclear program." 'Public Disgrace' Khan has a history of strained relations with Musharraf, who in 2001 forced his retirement as director of the Khan Research Laboratories, the uranium-enrichment plant that Khan founded nearly three decades ago following his return to Pakistan from the Netherlands. His current job amounted to little more than a sinecure. "I swat flies and read newspapers," an associate recalled him saying about his duties several years ago. Still, as recently as Friday, even some of Musharraf's senior advisers were urging the president to avoid any action that smacked of "public disgrace," as one cabinet minister put it in an interview. CONTINUED 1 2 3 Next > Print This Article © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 26 Washington Post: The Nuclear Noose Around Pakistan's Neck (washingtonpost.com) By Pervez Hoodbhoy Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B04 Thirty years ago, fearful of India's newly acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan set out on its own quest to become a nuclear weapons state. Lacking a strong technological base, it secretly searched the world's industrialized countries for what was needed. Few could have imagined then that the move from buyer to seller of the world's deadliest technology would be so swift. But spectacular revelations beginning late last year by Iran, and later Libya, have forced Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to launch an investigation of Pakistani involvement in secret transfers of vital nuclear weapons information and equipment to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Musharraf has conceded the existence of "an underworld of people" in Pakistan who, out of "personal greed," could have sold nuclear secrets. The figure at the center of the crisis is Dr. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's most celebrated bomb maker and a national hero, who was fired on Saturday from his job as science adviser to Pakistan's prime minister. In his heyday, Khan was accustomed to adulation and worship. His procurement, by whatever means, of secret centrifuge designs from a Dutch consortium in the mid-1970s was critical to Pakistan's successful nuclearization. With unlimited government resources at his disposal, and free of auditing restrictions, Khan, a metallurgist who is often wrongly referred to as a nuclear scientist, managed to purchase restricted items, which companies in Europe and the United States were willing to sell for the right price, no questions asked. In the process, Khan became a wealthy man. Today, he and several close associates find that the laws of powerful nations cannot be spurned as easily as those of the state they have claimed to defend. Forced by the international community (read: the United States), Pakistan has put Khan and his cohorts on notice. Inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed centrifuges and traces of highly enriched uranium, and Iran pinpointed Pakistan as the source. A British expert who recently accompanied agency inspectors into Iran identified Iranian centrifuges as being identical to the Dutch design that Khan secretly obtained. And yet it is unlikely that Khan will be convicted in a Pakistani court, because that would involve a head-on collision with the country's religious parties and with a public that has been led to believe that Khan's development of the bomb guaranteed Pakistan's security. While the IAEA and U.S. intelligence may claim credit for having discovered the fountain of nuclear proliferation, Khan widely and openly advertised his wares over the past decade. Every year -- including 2003, when the proliferation controversy was already hot -- Islamabad was festooned with colorful banners advertising international workshops on "Vibrations In Rapidly Rotating Machinery" and "Advanced Materials," sponsored by the Dr. A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories (also known as the Kahuta Laboratories), Pakistan's key uranium enrichment facility. Over the years, Khan and his collaborators also published a number of papers on issues regarding the technical means for enabling centrifuge rotors to spin at supersonic speeds without disintegrating, which is essential for making bomb-grade uranium. They could scarcely have been more blatant. But to make absolutely certain, Kahuta issued glossy brochures that were aimed at classified organizations but were easily obtained on the Kahuta Web site. But Khan's nuclear bravado was of little concern to any of Pakistan's governments, civil or military. Indeed, since May 1998, when the country conducted several underground nuclear tests, Pakistan has flaunted its nuclear status in a manner wholly different from the world's other nuclear-armed countries. Nuclear nationalism was the order of the day as governments vigorously promoted the bomb as the symbol of Pakistan's high scientific achievement, national determination and self-respect, and as the harbinger of a new Muslim era. Publicly funded nuclear shrines still litter the country. One, a fiberglass model of the nuclear-blasted Chaghai mountain, stands at the entrance to Islamabad, bathed at night in a garish, orange light. Pakistan's political parties, secular and Islamic, rushed to claim ownership after the nuclear tests; elites and the masses all saw in the bomb a sign that Pakistan could succeed at something. With great pomp and ceremony, the bomb makers were turned into national heroes. With international outrage over its proliferation growing, the bomb threatens to become a noose around Pakistan's neck. For Musharraf's government, Khan's mega-ton ego and his escapades over the past decade and a half are now a nightmare. Even as the Iranian revelation catapulted Pakistan to the forefront of the world's attention, Khan threw down the gauntlet last month by declaring in a television interview: "Who made the atom bomb? I made it. Who made the missiles? I made them for you." Responding to calls by the Islamic parties to defend the bomb makers, thousands have taken to the streets of Pakistani cities in the past week to protest investigations into the activities of Khan and others. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, has called for Khan's exoneration even if he "has made millions of dollars, because he has saved Pakistan." The investigation is likely to raise more issues than it settles. While Musharraf has said that "There is no such evidence that any government personality or military personality was involved," this attempt to ascribe all wrongdoing to a few greedy individual scientists will find few takers. Nor should it. Since its inception, Pakistan's nuclear program has been squarely under army supervision. A multi-tiered security system was headed by a lieutenant general (now, two) with all nuclear installations and personnel kept under the tightest possible surveillance. Diplomatic immunity was insufficient to prevent a physical roughing up of the French ambassador to Pakistan some years ago when he journeyed to a point several miles from the enrichment facility. Kahuta was considered sensitive to the point that Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, claims that even while in office she could not receive clearance to visit the labs. In such an extreme security environment, it would be amazing to miss the travel abroad of senior scientists, engineers and administrators, their meetings with foreign nationals, and the transport and transfer of classified technical documents and components, if not whole centrifuges. While individual gain may have been part of the motivation, the substantial cause lies elsewhere. From the inception of the bomb program, Pakistan's establishment has sought to turn its nuclear ambitions and success into larger gains. For one, it wanted (and gained) the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over by claiming to provide a Muslim success story. (That this involved replicating a 60-year-old technology for mass destruction is a sad commentary on the state of the Muslim world.) For another, it enabled Pakistan to enjoy considerable financial and political benefits from oil-rich Arab countries. Among others, Libya reportedly bankrolled Pakistan and may even have supplied raw uranium. After Pakistan's nuclear tests six years ago, the Saudi government gave an unannounced gift of $4 billion worth of oil spread over five years to tide Pakistan over during its difficulties caused by international sanctions. The transfers to North Korea are more prosaic. Having developed the bomb, Pakistan needed missiles to deliver them. North Korea was willing to supply them, for a price. Like the Dutch centrifuges, all Kahuta had to do was put them together and stick a star and crescent on them. These deals and transfers of technology apparently took place from about 1987 until 1995. Musharraf is reported to have given Secretary of State Colin L. Powell his "four hundred percent assurance" that no such interchange is taking place now. This may be enough for now, given Musharraf's solid support for U.S. moves against al Qaeda. Whether moved by money or faith, Pakistan's bomb makers, like the bomb itself, have seriously compromised the country's international standing and security. Two years ago, it was scientists from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission who, in a fit of Islamic solidarity, went to Afghanistan and met with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. It is hard to believe they were the only ones so inclined. Pakistan will have to put its nuclear house in order. Anything less than strict and complete accountability, regardless of rank or reputation, will leave the door open for those who may wish to try their luck, or in whom the fire of faith burns brighter. My country's loose nukes underscore a global danger that may already be out of control. Nuclear secrets will keep leaking as long as the bomb has value as a currency of power and prestige. Humanity's best chance of survival lies in creating taboos against nuclear weapons, much as those that already exist for chemical and biological weapons, and to work rapidly toward their global elimination. To do away with the bomb, bomb technology and the menace of their proliferation will require the United States, as the world's only superpower, to take the lead by reducing its own nuclear arsenal, as well as dealing with all proliferators, including its ally Israel, at the same level. Author's e-mail: hoodbhoy@isb.pol.com.pk Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 27 Washington Post: A New Libya? (washingtonpost.com) Perhaps. But the U.S. response to reform must be linked to more Libyan progress. By Tom Lantos Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A21 In December 1988, agents of the Libyan government committed a horrendous crime: taking 270 lives with the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was the deadliest of numerous acts of terrorism committed by the Libyan regime in the 1980s. Now Libya's ruler, Moammar Gaddafi, says his country is ready to reform -- no more terrorism, no more weapons of mass destruction. Should we believe him? The United States has just taken possession of equipment and documents from Libya's nuclear weapons and missile programs as part of the country's agreement to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction, but can we expect this kind of follow-through to continue? I just returned from Libya, where I met at length with Gaddafi and senior members of his government. Gaddafi told me I was the first official representative of the U.S. government with whom he has met since the departure of the last U.S. ambassador decades ago. While camels and goats grazed outside, we sat in his vast but sparsely appointed tent, pitched symbolically near the untouched remains of the Gaddafi house that the United States had bombed in 1986 in response to the bombing of the La Belle discotheque. Gaddafi told me that he wants to improve relations with the United States, and to reveal and destroy all of Libya's weapons of mass destruction and related programs. Senior officials in his government confirmed Libya's bold policy decision as well, and American non-proliferation experts on the ground assisting the Libyans with removing and destroying their WMD capacity are impressed with the progress that has been achieved in just a few weeks. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed just days ago that information provided by Libya in the past few weeks will help uncover international arms smuggling networks that aided Libya and many other rogue nations. Meanwhile, the State Department tells Congress that Libya no longer is involved in terrorism. Why have Gaddafi and the Libyan government made this sudden about-face? Based on my meetings, Gaddafi has decided that Libyan security can be better assured by a positive relationship with the United States and the West than through a risky and expensive policy of developing weapons of mass destruction. Libya's leaders also acknowledged that their nation is facing growing economic difficulties that can only be resolved by an end to sanctions, a redirection of resources into development and Libya's close integration into the world economy. The issue now facing the United States is whether we can disregard the outrageous track record of the Libyan regime for the past 31/2 decades. Libya is responsible for many deaths resulting from acts of terrorism over the years and for much regional instability. So while we must welcome signs that Gaddafi may be altering his behavior, we must also remain alert to the possibility that what we are witnessing is not true reform. We can "trust, but verify," but we must be skeptical, and relentless in verifying. While we should respond quickly to Libya's dramatic and historic decision, the U.S. response must be measured and directly linked to continued Libyan progress. In light of the verifiable initiation of WMD dismantling, the United States should immediately lift the ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Libya, and move quickly to establish an American diplomatic presence there. But removal of Libya from the terrorist list, elimination of U.S. sanctions, and full normalization of relations with the country should be considered only after Libya has verifiably completed the dismantling of its WMD program and agreed to long-term monitoring procedures. A public apology by the Libyans for the Pan Am 103 bombing and a significant improvement in the human rights situation in Libya would help pave the way for these steps. The gains from the Libyan example are potentially enormous. Terrorists will have one less refuge in the world. The Middle East will be made less volatile by the defusing of Libya's WMD threat. Rogue states will be encouraged to abandon terror and to shed WMD, as they see that by doing so, they can enhance their security and normalize ties with the United States. The Muslim world will better understand that we are engaged in a war on terror, not a war on Islamic states. Countries and corporations selling WMD equipment and materials to rogue states will be intimidated by the fear of exposure and punishment. And the United States will have demonstrated that historic changes for the better can be wrought by peaceful means, always America's preferred option whenever possible. Libya still has much to accomplish before we can remove it from the terrorist list or fully lift economic sanctions. But if Libya does its part completely and verifiably, we must treat this as a new chapter in U.S.-Libyan relations. There is too much at stake to do otherwise. When the U.S. flag flies over our embassy in Tripoli once more, we will have demonstrated yet again our commitment to a more peaceful and stable world. Rep. Lantos (D-Calif.) is the ranking member of his party on the House International Relations Committee. He is also founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. © 2004 The Washington Post Company ***************************************************************** 28 Daily Times: Legal action plan against erring scientists almost final Monday, February 02, 2004 By Maqbool Ahmed KARACHI: Pakistani authorities overseeing affairs relating to nuclear proliferation have almost decided the legal plan of action against scientists found involved in the transfer of information and technology, official sources told Daily Times here on Saturday. Sources said there was no option under consideration for invoking international laws in the legal plan, as Pakistan was not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Besides, sources said intense debriefings lasting over a month had made those taking care of the whole affair believe that the matter pertained more to selling national secrets than proliferating nuclear technology. Sources predicted the final outcome of the inquiry by Sunday evening, adding the government had been advised by its legal advisors to try those involved for selling national secrets under the Official Secrets Act 1923 and for breaching their job contracts. However, the decision about the forum of the trial was yet to be contemplated, they added. They said the government had been suggested to try those found involved under sub-sections 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 of Section 2 and Sections 4 and 5 of the Official Secrets Act keeping in view their intensity and nature of involvement. Sources said the maximum punishment for all those sections was 14 years imprisonment and varying amounts of fines. Sources said Section 5 of the Act could be employed against those who were, by their position, in control of secret documents including designs, physical sketches, models or fully assembled articles. Section 4 of the Act could be used for those who were in contact with the black market or foreign agents. Finally, different sub-sections of Section 2 of the Act were for those involved in communicating parts of documents, parts of any articles or fully assembled articles itself. Those found involved in the transfer of information inadvertently might be tried for breaching their job contracts, sources added. Daily Times - All Rights Reserved Site developed and hosted by WorldCALL Internet Solutions ***************************************************************** 29 Pakistan News: IAEA team arrives in Pakistan PakTribune.Com Saturday January 31, 2004 (1704 PST) ISLAMABAD, February 01 (Online): A 3-member team of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has arrived here Saturday after their visit to Libya and Iran in connection with ongoing debriefing process on the alleged involvement of nuclear scientists in proliferation of nuclear weapons to both of these countries. The team exchanged information with the investigation team engaged in debriefing of nuclear scientists and other officials of Khan Research Laboratories. Well placed sources informed Online that IAEA team has got information on the transfer or sale of nuclear technology to these countries during its recently concluded visit. The team has just arrived in Pakistan and its visit is being kept secret. When contacted by the Online, the responsible army authorities refused to confirm or deny the reports regarding visit of the team and its engagement in Pakistan. End. Posted by DR KHALID MAHMOOD SHOUQ, Pakistan Pakistan News Service © PakTribune.com Pvt Ltd 2003-2004 ***************************************************************** 30 GN Online: Nuke body reviews progress of probe Dubai:Sunday, February 01, 2004 Islamabad |By Shahid Hussain, Correspondent | 01-02-2004 The government yesterday sacked Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, architect of Pakistan's nuclear programme, as its special adviser on strategic assets to "facilitate" a current probe into suspected transfer of nuclear know-how by individuals to Iran and Libya. The dismissal of Khan, who has been questioned by investigators in the two-month inquiry into possible nuclear leaks, came after a "special session" of the National Command Authority (NCA) that controls the nuclear and missile programmes. The NCA, set up by Musharraf four months after he took over in a military coup in October 1999, controls the entire nuclear establishment and army and air force strategic command. The move to sack Khan followed a spate of leaks in the press about alleged involvement of the scientist in sale of nuclear technology indicated a tightening of the noose, raising the possibility of prosecution of the man who is considered a national hero for helping Pakistan become a nuclear power. Authorities immediately tightened security around the home of Khan, who lives in Islamabad's poshest sector at the foot of the scenic Margalla hills. "We have enhanced security arrangements," military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said. "The government is definitely concerned about his security," Sultan said, when asked why the security had been increased. President Pervez Musharraf chaired the NCA meeting, the first since the probe was launched after the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency informed Islamabad of suspected involvement of individuals in Pakistan in nuclear proliferation. Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, ministers for foreign affairs, interior, defence and finance, chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, chiefs of navy and air force, Vice Chief of Army Staff, and head of uranium enrich facility, Khan Research Laboratories (KRL.), attended the meeting. "Dr A. Q. Khan, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Strategic Programme with the status of a federal minister has ceased to hold the office," a government announcement said. "The decision has been taken in the background of the investigations into alleged acts of nuclear proliferation by a few individuals and to facilitate investigations in a free and objective manner," it said. The NCA reviewed the progress of the ongoing investigation into allegations of nuclear proliferation against some Pakistani scientists. It was given an update on the findings of the debriefing by Director General of Strategic Plans Division, a press statement by the military's Inter-Services Public Relations department said. The meeting was informed that the probe had been "nearly concluded" and appropriate action would be taken against those found guilty. The NCA, set up by Musharraf after he took power four years ago in a military coup, reiterated Pakistan's "strong commitment" to international agreements on non-proliferation and vowed that the country would never share nuclear technology, in whatever form, with any other country. The statement said Pakistan's nuclear capability was solely for deterrence of aggression. "Pakistan took its international obligations with the utmost seriousness and in this regard, the government condemns and distances itself in categorical terms from individual acts of indiscretion in the past." The top body of civilian and military leaders "in the strongest terms" dispelled fears that Pakistan would ever compromise on its nuclear capability. "Far from rollback or freeze, Pakistan would continue to undertake qualitative and, if necessary, quantitative upgrades with the objective of consolidating the national deterrence in line with its minimum deterrence needs. "The nation should rest assured that the nuclear capability, which enjoys national consensus across the political spectrum, is in safe and professional hands and should not be subjected to political expediency," the NCA said. The statement emphasised that no incident of proliferation had taken place since the establishment of the nuclear Command and Control system in February 2000 and that "there was no chance of such acts taking place in the future." FALLEN HERO Khan played key role in nuclear capability • Abdul Qadeer Khan played key role in developing Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability, which culminated in successful tests in May 1998 shortly after tests by India. • In April 2001 he was relieved from the helm of KRL founded by him in 1976 and appointed special science and technology adviser to President Musharraf. • Khan, born at Bhopal in India in 1935, migrated to Pakistan in 1952, following the partition of the sub-continent five years earlier. He graduated from the University of Karachi before moving to Europe for further studies in West Germany and Belgium. In the 1970s, he took a job at a uranium enrichment plant run by the British-Dutch-German consortium Urenco. • In 1976, Dr Khan returned home to head the nation's nuclear programme under the patronage of then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He went on to work on the successful test-firings of the nuclear-capable Ghauri I and II missiles. • In 1983, he was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison by an Amsterdam court for attempted espionage, although the sentence was later overturned on an appeal. • "I am proud of my work for my country. It has given Pakistanis a sense of pride, security and has been a great scientific achievement," the 66-year-old scientist said recently. ***************************************************************** 31 asahi.com EDITORIAL: Pressure for dialogue Sanctions bill is a way to prod Pyongyang into talks. Proposed revisions to the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law will allow the government to impose economic sanctions against North Korea, for example, by suspending trade or remittances. The bill has already passed the Lower House and is expected to be approved by the Upper House in early February. Negotiations between Tokyo and Pyongyang over abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents have made no progress. There is increasing public frustration and discontent over the way the five returnees have been separated from their family members in North Korea. Nor is a solution in sight to the North's nuclear development program. The fact that the bill-submitted by members of ruling and opposition blocs rather than by the government-was approved with the support of all political parties except the Japanese Communist Party reflects the people's growing desire to find a breakthrough to the impasse. The government's policy toward North Korea has centered on ``dialogue and pressure.'' In view of the North's attitude toward Japan in recent years, it is highly unlikely the North will agree to dialogue unless Tokyo continues to exert pressure. Japan had the means to facilitate dialogue, for example, through economic cooperation-which was agreed on by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korea leader Kim Jong Il at their historic summit meeting in 2002-but Tokyo had hardly any way of turning up the heat on the North. The bill allowing economic sanctions to be imposed will be meaningful if it can be used as leverage in negotiations with the North. Remittances from Japan to the North are estimated to reach at least 4 billion yen annually. Japan is North Korea's most important trading partner after China and South Korea. If the flow of money and goods from Japan is stanched, it would hit the North hard. At the end of last year, when Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers started earnest preparations to revise the law, a senior North Korean official met with one of them in Beijing and offered a way for the relatives of the five returnees to come to Japan. Pyongyang apparently wanted to thwart the new legislation. Just before passage of the bill by the Lower House, the state-run Korean Central News Agency denounced it as a move to aggravate regional military tensions. The North appears to take the bill seriously. And yet, passage of the bill does not mean sanctions should be imposed immediately. What is essential in resolving the crisis over the North's nuclear development program, and also the abduction issue, is to continue concerted action among the parties involved in six-nation talks, in tandem with other members of the international community. If Japan alone adopts strong-arm tactics, other countries will be in disarray over North Korea, making a solution to outstanding problems even more difficult. In fact, the Japanese government, which is intent on finding a solution through diplomatic negotiations, is still cautious about imposing sanctions. A worrisome fact is that discussions on the bill at the Lower House's fiscal and financial policy committee lasted only one hour. The problem of North Korea is not so small that it can be handled by ritualistic discussion. If the committee was in haste because of mounting public opinion, then it actually failed to meet the people's expectations. LDP members are also considering submitting another bill to ban port calls by North Korea ships such as the Man Gyong Bong-92. But diplomacy doesn't work that way. The idea that more pressure is better isn't always the way forward. Nor should it be forgotten that the latest revision of the foreign exchange law is a means to be used as leverage to bring about dialogue. The government should first be doing its utmost to make specific achievements in the abduction issue. --The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 30(IHT/Asahi: January 31,2004) (01/31) ***************************************************************** 32 Las Vegas SUN: Pakistan Removes Top Nuclear Scientist January 31, 2004 By SADAQAT JAN ASSOCIATED PRESS ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - The founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was removed Saturday from his position as a government adviser amid an investigation into allegations of nuclear proliferation, officials said. Two government officials said on condition of anonymity that Khan was dismissed as a scientific adviser to the prime minister, a post he had held since retiring as head of the country's top nuclear facility in 2001. Khan had emerged as a key suspect in an investigation into charges that Pakistani scientists sold nuclear weapons technology. The probe was launched in November following information provided by Iran to the U.N. nuclear watchdog. It wasn't immediately clear if further legal action would be taken against Khan or any others accused in the investigation. The government was expected to make an announcement later Saturday about the investigation. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf was chairing a meeting Saturday of Pakistan's National Command Authority, which controls the country's nuclear assets. Six scientists and security officials from the nuclear facility - the Khan Research Laboratories, named after Khan - are being held in the probe over allegations of nuclear transfers to Iran and Libya. Khan was not arrested, but acquaintances said he has been restricted to the capital, Islamabad. Analysts have said a decision to punish top scientists, particularly Khan - long revered as the architect of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent against rival India, who gave the Islamic world its first atomic bomb - would be a tough one for Musharraf and would likely trigger an angry reaction from nationalists. Officials have said that Khan and a top aide, Mohammed Farooq, have failed to account for money in personal bank accounts. Farooq is among the six scientists in custody. Khan and Farooq have told investigators they didn't supply any technology to Iran and Libya, and Khan has maintained he did nothing to damage the interests of Pakistan, officials said. Earlier Saturday, officials had said loose controls at Khan's laboratory allowed a small number of its employees to profit from the nuclear black market. Those findings were to be reviewed by Musharraf at the Saturday meeting. Pakistan's government says it never sanctioned transfers of nuclear technology to other countries and will act against anyone guilty of doing so. The government has publicly acknowledged "one or two people" acted for personal gain. -- ***************************************************************** 33 Las Vegas SUN: Security Lapses Said to Hit Pakistan Lab January 31, 2004 By MUNIR AHMAD ASSOCIATED PRESS ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Loose controls at Pakistan's top nuclear facility allowed a small number of its employees to profit on the black market, intelligence and government officials said Saturday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators have submitted these findings in a report to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who is to chair a meeting later Saturday of Pakistan's National Command Authority - which controls the country's nuclear assets. The authority was to discuss how to prevent a repeat of the security lapses at the nuclear lab, a government official said, adding there is no evidence of any proliferation since Musharraf took power in October 1999 in a bloodless coup. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan wouldn't say whether the meeting would take a decision on actions against accused scientists. The government has promised throughout the week that the two-month probe into alleged transfers of nuclear technology to Iran and Libya would soon be complete. The founder of the nuclear program, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, and top aide Dr. Mohammed Farooq are among the key suspects. Officials have said the two scientists have failed to account for money in personal bank accounts. In all, six scientists and security officials from the country's top nuclear facility - the Khan Research Laboratories, named after Khan - are being held. Khan isn't in custody, but acquaintances say he's been restricted to the capital Islamabad. Any decision to punish top scientists, particularly Khan - long revered as the architect of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent against rival India - would be a tough one for Musharraf and would likely trigger an angry reaction from nationalists. Officials told The Associated Press on Friday that "loose checks and controls" at the nuclear lab led to the transfer of nuclear technology from Pakistan. "It is almost clear that a small number of people attached with Pakistan's nuclear program worked for international black market dealers in 1980s for personal gains," said a government official. These dealers supplied Iran and Libya, the official said, but he would not give details on the alleged involvement of Pakistanis. Khan and Farooq have told investigators they didn't supply any technology to Iran and Libya, and Khan has maintained he did nothing to damage the interests of Pakistan, officials said. Pakistan's government says it never sanctioned transfer of nuclear technology to other countries and will act against anyone guilty of doing so. The government has publicly acknowledged "one or two people" acted for personal gain. Pakistan began its investigation in late November after admissions made by Iran about its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, that indicated a Pakistan connection. Allegations also have surfaced that Pakistani technology spread to Libya and North Korea. -- ***************************************************************** 34 BBC NEWS | South Asia | Uncovering Pakistan's nuclear secrets Last Updated: Friday, 30 January, 2004, 13:14 GMT [ src=] [ By Zaffar Abbas BBC Islamabad correspondent An investigation into the possible involvement of some of Pakistan's best known scientists in the illegal sale of nuclear technology has sent shockwaves across the country. [Pakistan Hatf missiles] There is widespread interest in Pakistan's nuclear know-how Leaks in the local media talk about alleged payments of hundreds of millions of dollars to a few scientists and officials in return for the possible transfer of nuclear know-how, and even hardware, to countries like Iran and Libya. Families and supporters of the detained scientists say it's a government-sponsored media trial to defame people who, until a few months ago, were regarded as national heroes. But as details of the high-level probe start to come out, making Pakistan's future as a responsible nuclear-power state look vulnerable, some people believe the "revelations" have been nothing short of an atomic disaster. But is Pakistan heading for meltdown over the affair? The investigation centres round Dr AQ Khan, often described as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. Some 30 years ago he set up Pakistan's first uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta after what many believed was clandestinely acquiring nuclear know-how from the West. Scientists in the dock Until now, any comments on that or on the wealth and property he amassed over the years, or the millions he spent to project his image, were regarded as "unpatriotic". But in recent weeks things have changed drastically. Now Dr Khan is confined to his home in Islamabad and a security sleuth stationed outside is not there to protect him, but to restrict his free movement. Officials say he has already been questioned about his role in unauthorised proliferation and his activities are still under investigation. The family of Dr Khan, a man who has always had financial and bureaucratic support from the military, says he is being made a scapegoat. Some of his closest associates at the Khan Research Laboratories (named after him) at Kahuta are undergoing intense questioning about their direct or indirect involvement in the clandestine proliferation operation. They include former director general Mohammed Farooq, chief nuclear engineer Dr Nazir Ahmed, as well as a number of former army officials, who were responsible for the security of the nuclear establishment. A few, like prominent scientist Yasin Chouhan, have been sent back home but officials say their names have still not been cleared. Startling revelations The investigation began when, under pressure from the international community, Iran agreed to provide details about its nuclear enrichment ambitions. A public trial of any of these scientists... may open up a Pandora's box about Pakistan's covert activities in the past Now it appears it contained information about Iran's acquisition of nuclear technology from an illegal world nuclear market with the help of some Pakistani scientists. As Libya, too, announced the dismantling of its nuclear weapons programme, investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) discovered a Pakistani connection. Pakistani officials say when the IAEA shared this information with Islamabad, and asked for answers, it became a real challenge for the government to uncover the truth. Islamabad had maintained, and it continues to do so, that it has never been involved in proliferation. In order to clear its name, it sent investigators to Tehran and Tripoli, and held intense discussions with the IAEA in Vienna, leading to the high-level investigation. Leaks The entire probe is being carried out in extreme secrecy by the country's premier intelligence agency, ISI, and little is known about any clandestine activity that may have taken place in the country's nuclear establishment in the late 1980s and early 90s. Officially Pakistan maintains that ever since its nuclear tests in 1998, there have been several security measures to prevent proliferation. According to a spokesman, the investigations have narrowed down to a few scientists and officials, and that there's a possibility that in the past some people may have indulged in proliferation out of greed. But conscious of a possible public backlash, the authorities have been making selective leaks in the media to create a favourable environment before officially revealing the involvement of any leading scientists in proliferation. These reports suggest that it all started when, faced with international restrictions, Pakistan itself was using available nuclear know-how and technology in the international illegal market for its own covert nuclear programme. Offshore accounts During this period, some people are said to have been tempted into siphoning off knowledge and material to countries like Iran and Libya. But many people formerly associated with the country's nuclear establishment say that if proliferation involved the transfer of centrifuges or other hardware, it would not have been possible without the involvement of either the government or some top officials. Some have even pointed accusing fingers at a former military chief, General Aslam Beg, who has since then denied any involvement. It's a tricky situation for President Pervez Musharraf and his government. They want to clear Pakistan's name, but perhaps cannot afford a public trial of any of these scientists as it may open up a Pandora's box about Pakistan's covert activities in the past. Many people here fear that once Pakistan admits to the involvement some of its top scientists in proliferation, it may bring in more international pressure to ask Islamabad to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open up its facilities to international safeguards. Officials say no such thing is on the cards. But they, too, are hoping that the safety rings around Pakistan's nuclear programme, including the government's political will, may prevent a complete meltdown. ***************************************************************** 35 NRC: NRC to Conduct Restart Readiness Inspection at Davis-Besse; Meetings Scheduled for February 12 in Oak Harbor, Ohio News Release - Region III - 2004-00 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region III No. III-04-006 January 30, 2004 CONTACT: Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663 Viktoria Mitlyng (630) 829-9662 E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov Restart Readiness Assessment Team Inspection on Monday, February 2, at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. The agency has also scheduled two public meetings with FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company officials on February 12. The first will discuss the preliminary results of two inspections  the Restart Readiness Inspection and the ongoing followup Management and Human Performance Inspection which began January 12. In the second meeting, the NRC Davis-Besse Oversight Panel will discuss the possible restart of the plant with FirstEnergy officials. The Davis-Besse plant, located near Oak Harbor, Ohio, has been shut down since February 2002 to repair a damaged reactor vessel head and make other safety improvements. The followup restart readiness inspection will evaluate the performance of the plant staff and equipment to determine if the plant is ready to resume operation. In addition, the inspectors will assess the effectiveness of corrective actions taken by FirstEnergy as a result of issues identified by NRC inspectors during a previous restart readiness inspection in December. The inspection team includes experienced NRC inspectors from across the country, all of whom were part of the team that identified the performance and operational issues in the December inspection. Rick Skokowski, NRC senior resident inspector at the Byron Nuclear Power Station in Illinois, is the team leader. Both meetings will be at the Camp Perry Clubhouse, 1000 Lawrence Road, Bldg. 600, on Highway 2 west of Port Clinton. A picture identification is required to enter Camp Perry; the guards will provide visitors with directions to the meeting site. The public is invited to observe the business portion of each meeting and will have an opportunity to make comments and ask questions of the NRC staff before the meetings are adjourned. The two meetings will be: + 2 p.m. - Meeting to discuss the preliminary findings of the followup Restart Readiness Inspection and the followup Management and Human Performance Inspection, which has been evaluating the actions taken by the utility to improve the "safety culture" at Davis-Besse. This second inspection began January 12. + 6 p.m. - Meeting between the NRC Davis-Besse Oversight Panel and FirstEnergy officials to discuss the basis for the utilitys request for authorization to restart reactor operations. There will be no decision on possible restart during the 6 p.m. meeting. In evaluating FirstEnergys request for restart, the NRCs Davis-Besse Oversight Panel will review the information presented by the company, along with the results of NRC inspections over the past two years. The panel will submit its recommendation to James Caldwell, Regional Administrator for NRC Region III. Mr. Caldwell will make a decision on the possible restart after conferring with other senior NRC officials. The decision will be based on the agencys assessment of the ability of FirstEnergy to start up and operate the plant safely. Extensive information on the NRCs regulatory activities at Davis-Besse is available on the agencys web site: http://www.nrc.gov - select Davis-Besse from the key topics menu. Last revised Friday, January 30, 2004 ***************************************************************** 36 News Journal: Nuclear complex is given deadline www.delawareonline.com Salem/Hope Creek must reform 'safety culture' By JEFF MONTGOMERY Staff reporter 01/31/2004 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given owners of the Salem/Hope Creek nuclear complex 30 days to submit a plan to reform the company's "safety culture," including its willingness to listen to worker warnings and dissent. Commission regional administrator Hubert J. Miller issued the order in a Jan. 28 letter to Public Service Enterprise Group chairman E. James Ferland. The company's three plants, which can generate more than 3,000 megawatts of electricity, are on the Delaware River in Lower Alloways Creek Township, N.J., opposite Augustine Beach. Although the plants are in New Jersey, more Delaware residents live within the 10-mile-radius zone that federal officials consider at greatest risk in nuclear emergencies. "Sending the letter is not common, but we wanted to surface our concerns at an early stage," said Diane Screnci, spokeswoman for the NRC's regional office in King of Prussia. The letter from the NRC's Miller said, "If left unresolved, negative outfall from events relayed to us can create an unacceptable, chilled environment for raising issues and making appropriate operational decisions." Ferland said in a prepared statement Friday that PSEG will comply with the federal request, and said the commission had acknowledged improvements already made by the company. "The NRC's letter addresses workplace environment issues that we have been fully aware of for a period of time," Ferland said. He said a reorganization of the utility's nuclear group last year addressed many of the issues. Federal officials cited interviews with workers and results of a special review triggered by recent problems at the plant, including equipment breakdowns and a leak of radioactive tritium from a spent-fuel storage area. The leak contaminated shallow groundwater under one of the twin Salem units. David Lochbaum, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the NRC's action reflects serious concerns about Salem/Hope Creek, the nation's second-largest nuclear generating center. "They're trying to intervene sooner to correct them, before the safety margins get severely eroded," said Lochbaum, a former nuclear engineer who monitors industry safety for the nonprofit environmental group. Norm Cohen, who directs Unplug Salem, a group opposed to nuclear power, said the NRC's actions point to a serious problem. "Just the very fact that the NRC sent this kind of letter to the CEO as opposed to one of the people at Salem shows that they're concerned," Cohen said. "It's just a shame that the NRC has to work within its bureaucratic boundaries. By giving PSEG a month to produce an action plan, they're putting South Jersey at risk." Reach Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com. US air force has conducted bombing in different parts of Afghanistan. They relied on A-10s and AC-130 and apache helicopters as well as jet fighters. A-10 and AC-130 among others use DU munitions. Despite their bombing the US has lost 9 soldiers in Paktika province on 28 January 2004. Meanwhile, in Barmat area southeastern Afghanistan, 3 US Special Forces lost their lives in the battle and three Taliban fighters were also killed. These losses were in addition to the 8 US soldiers killed in the blast in Ghazni two days ago. Incidentally, negotiation between Afghan resistance and US forces failed last, saturday, to secure the release of 40 US MIAs that were captured last year. Miraki To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 49 [du-list] Paradise lost: Sailor's home in the Navy becomes a Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:58:27 -0800 Hello All: Before Depleted Uranium and Contaminated Bases came: "Atomic Veterans" The DOD is pathological in it's contempt for life, even for it's own... URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-82141sy0sep15.story ) Paradise lost: Sailor's home in the Navy becomes a radioactive battlefield by R.W. Rogers Daily Press, September 15 2002 With eyes closed, Jim Lyerly recounts landing at Hickam Field, Hawaii, in January 1955 as if retelling a dream. He breathes deeply and names the island smells - orchids, pineapple and sugar cane all swirled by sea wind. The young man from east Rockingham, N.C., with an eighth-grade education had just been dropped into the lap of paradise - and he knew it. Lyerly enjoyed the Navy, but Hawaii made him love it. He decided on the spot that the service would be his life, the sea his path, foreign ports his playground. He'd stay Navy until forced out. Then he'd retire to the islands surrounded by his children and grandchildren. He'd die a Navy man with sea-salt on his lips. But when Lyerly opens his eyes, paradise is not on the horizon. He lives in a single room in his daughter's house on a dead-end street in Denbigh. Cans of fat-free baked beans crowd a low table next to a stack of unopened medical bills. A white plastic bag keeps his urine from leaking through his diaper and into his linens. A Shar-Pei named Rocki sniffs distractedly in a cage next to his bed. Biographies of admirals and generals lie nearby. Red-white-and-blue ribbons hang from his window. A souvenir-sized U.S. flag with a plastic base sits on a shelf next to packs of adult diapers. A black-and-white photograph of Lyerly holding his infant son, now dead, sits propped against a box. In the photo a surgical scar - the first of many - crawls down the man's flat stomach. Loss, pain and fear surge in Lyerly's throat and escape in a long wail. His head jerks up as if slapped, and his chin juts out. His face twists and his Southern drawl goes thick. "They've taken everything from me. They lied, and they've continued to lie all through the years," he says. "They've taken everything from me. The government wants me dead because I'm an embarrassment to them. Then they can forget about me for good, like they've tried to forget me all these years." Lyerly's an "Atomic Veteran." One of an estimated 220,000 American troops who tested nuclear weapons in Nevada or the Pacific or served at ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War II. Their names and numbers are now largely lost due to poor recordkeeping by the military. Lyerly earned his status as an Atomic Vet at the Pacific Proving Ground, where from 1946 to 1958, men tested nuclear weapons more powerful than 7,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The top-secret tests - Crossroads, Sandstone, Greenhouse, Ivy, Castle, Hardtack I and Redwing -hold little current interest. But in their day, they were considered crucial to the security - if not the survival - of the United States and the free world. America's superpower status today was built upon them. Lyerly and his fellow Cold War warriors were expected to play their parts in unlocking the potential of The Bomb. Then they were expected to forget those roles for the good of the country. Their secrets might've died with them if not for the radiation that burst like pollen from the flowery blasts. In the decades following the nuclear testing, the number of Atomic Vets complaining of rare cancers, multiple tumors and illnesses in their children and grandchildren grew. When Lyerly entered the Navy in October 1954, the term "Atomic Vets" hadn't been coined, and the thought that something odorless, tasteless and invisible could destroy strong young men was unfathomable to everyone except those at the very highest reaches of the military and government. Certainly Lyerly didn't believe such a thing and couldn't for years - even after he nearly bled to death, his wife miscarried and his children and grandchildren were born prematurely or with severe and mysterious health problems. Now the silence is over. The Atomic Vets are talking. Many are convinced that military and government officials have led a decades-long disinformation campaign about the radiation dangers Atomic Vets were exposed to and are now waiting for them to die before issuing an apology for past sins and turning the page. So, like a dying tribe trying to preserve its history, Atomic Vets are collecting their stories while pushing for recognition and compensation. Time is not on their side. Even younger Atomic Vets are in their 60s and many, like Lyerly, are in poor health. Complications from prostate surgery earlier this year, and other health problems, have withered him from a lean 155 pounds in 1999 to a shaky 133 pounds today. Headaches blur his vision and he's in constant pain, except when he's on medication, which prompts sharp mood swings. He doesn't walk so much as shuffle, bent at the waist. With his crewcut, black watch cap and brown pea jacket, Lyerly, who turned 67 on April 28, looks like a thrift-store sailor on a Flying Dutchman and often feels just as damned. "I think this is the last time that I'll be able to tell my story," Lyerly says. "I just want my story told true." "USED US LIKE GUINEA PIGS" "I joined the Navy just as fast as I could when I turned 18," Lyerly says. "My father wouldn't sign me up when I was 17, so I had to wait." After the snow and wind of boot camp at Great Lakes, Ill., a 19-year-old Lyerly took a long flight and landed on Sunday morning, Jan. 2, 1955, at Hickam Field, Hawaii. Assigned to the USS Walton, a World War II-era destroyer escort based at Pearl Harbor, Seaman Recruit Lyerly was one of 215 crewmen. He worked in the laundry, cut hair and ran the ship's store. The long hours didn't bother Lyerly. Back in North Carolina he ran three newspaper routes by age 5 and worked in a cotton mill after quitting school at 14. In the Navy he finally found a life he wanted instead of one he didn't. And like millions of young men before and after him, Lyerly embraced the military as his ticket to a better life. Lyerly thrived under military discipline and for the first time succeeded. Walton logs kept at the National Archives in Maryland document his steady march up the ranks. His success made him dream big, of one day commanding a destroyer escort like the Walton and of retiring an admiral. It wasn't impossible. Others had done it, and Lyerly believed he could, too. He'd show those who'd teased him for being too poor to own shoes. With a promising career ahead of him, Seaman Lyerly left Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1956 for what he thought was Korea. Instead, the Walton stopped in Sasebo, Japan, before steaming to what was described by the ship's captain as "special operations." Lyerly, the crew of the Walton and 11,000 others were going to the Central Pacific and Operation Redwing. Consisting of Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands, the Pacific Proving Ground was the United States' premier nuclear testing site for the biggest and newest weapons in the arsenal. Smaller atomic weapons were tested in Nevada. The Proving Ground was a bustling place. Redwing would be the sixth nuclear test series since 1946 to rip through the pristine lagoons and contaminate vast areas of ocean at this remote site. Nearly 100,000 troops had already made their way to the beautiful atolls during 17 previous detonations, or "shots." One shot involved a hydrogen bomb that blew a canyon into the sea floor deeper than the Empire State Building is tall and large enough to hold several Pentagon-sized buildings, according to the Department of Energy. Redwing alone would test 17 nuclear weapons. It followed the disastrous Operation Castle in 1954, which produced hundreds of radiation injuries and contaminated the Marshall Islands with uranium and plutonium fallout. Wanting to avoid another Castle, Redwing's weapons were tested at reduced capacity to curb fallout, according to documents from the Federation of American Scientists, a think tank that studies defense issues. But even under that restriction, nuclear weapons equaling nearly 21 million tons of TNT were detonated at the Pacific Proving Ground between May 4 and July 22, 1956. The government and the military counted on Redwing yielding a wealth of information as the United States faced the Soviet Union during some of the most frightening days of the Cold War. In 1956, nuclear war seemed possible if not likely. So learning how to win one was crucial. That meant developing powerful and diverse nuclear weapons as well as learning how men and equipment could best fight on the radioactive battlefield. While a key Redwing test involved flying manned aircraft through nuclear clouds - including some planes from Langley Air Force Base - nuclear weapons testing was clearly the main goal of Redwing. Technical strides had greatly reduced the size and the weight of these weapons while increasing their punch. After a two-year testing hiatus at the proving grounds, weapons makers and the military were eager to see what their new designs could do. Each of Redwing's shots was named for an American Indian tribe and ranged in power from a modest 0.19 kiloton device that weighed just 96 pounds to a massive 5 megaton one that weighed 15,735 pounds. By comparison, the "Little Boy" nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, measured 15 kilotons and weighed 8,900 pounds. The "Fat Man" that flattened Nagasaki three days later measured 21 kilotons and weighed 10,300 pounds. A one-kiloton weapon equals a thousand tons of TNT, while a one-megaton device equals a million tons. To amass the most scientific information possible, the devices were detonated in various settings, including inside a water tank, from a tower, on a barge and airborne. There were other differences as well. While some shots emitted relatively little radioactive fallout, others were dirty and emitted a great deal of radiation, according to documents from the Federation of American Scientists. Besides gaining technical information, the military also wanted another piece of information and was willing to move troops ever closer to ground zero to get it. "Injury criteria established by tests on dummies and animals should be validated by human tests to insure reliability," read a Sept. 6, 1955, Department of the Army memo titled "Amendment to Proposed Project Regarding Blast Injury Evaluation." "All the volunteers," the memo continued, "concurred in the recommendation that this program be continued and that the participants be closer to ground zero in the future." The reference is to nuclear tests that took place at Camp Desert Rock, Nevada, in the early 1950s. This time, however, there would be a crucial difference. "It is realized that the lateness of this proposal and other problems may make it impossible to include a volunteer program in Operation Redwing. However, since inherent dangers will necessitate a gradual approach to the threshold of intolerability of effects, it is probable that a program extending over several tests will ensue." In other words, service men were "volunteers" whether they knew it or not. The letter that outlines de facto human radiation experiments runs counter to the "Nuremberg Code" issued in 1953 by Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson that barred experimenting on service members without informing them of the risks involved or getting their written consent. While the authors of the Redwing memo might have thought it a good idea to move service members closer to ground zero, officials from the Atomic Energy Commission, which ran the nuclear weapons program in those years, had concerns. Neither Lyerly nor other Redwing veterans say they volunteered for nuclear test duties. Nor, they say, were they informed of radiation dangers - or issued protective equipment other than dark glasses. They do, however, vividly recall being ordered to watch spectacular detonations. "We were told that we did not have a thing in the world to fear from the testing," Lyerly says. "But looking back, they used us like guinea pigs." "Used like guinea pigs," is a refrain often repeated by Atomic Vets. It might be worse than that. "THOSE CLAMS WERE RADIOACTIVE" Planners had intended that everyone taking part in Redwing wear radiation badges - one to measure daily exposure and another to measure cumulative exposure. In fact, Redwing was supposed to be the first nuclear test series in which radiation exposure for every participant was recorded. But, for a variety of reasons, that never happened according to federal documents and Redwing veterans. Lyerly recalls seldom getting a radiation badge. When he did, he said, the results were ominous. "You would put them over your heart," Lyerly said. "And I remember one time I got one and within what seemed like seconds after the blast, it turned green and then went black. I remember looking down on the badge and watching it turn." After the explosions, "They would come with a Geiger counter," Lyerly said, "and tell us what we had to do. I remember that one time we had to scrub down three times. I was washing clothes in water that was contaminated and taking showers in it, too." Walter Lewis, Lyerly's shipmate, tells a story that hints at just how radioactive the waters were that the Walton was sailing through. Lewis posted his recollections on an Atomic Veterans' History Project Web site in October 1999. Lewis said he never heard much about the level of radiation in the water until the day of the monster clams. "One day me and a couple of others were diving on the coral reefs of Japtan Island, and we found some huge clams. We decided that we could talk the cook into fixing some clam chowder. "So we collected a couple of them - they weighed 50 pounds each - and brought them back to the Walton. One of the biologists onboard saw us bring it aboard and he asked us to let him check it with a Geiger counter. "He did," Lewis wrote, "and those clams were so radioactive that they probably glowed in the dark! No clam chowder that day! "I believe that the level of radioactivity in the areas we sampled was far greater than anyone ever thought." Lewis didn't know how right he was. Some sailors spoke up about their radiation exposure. But not Lyerly. "You didn't do a lot of complaining," Lyerly said. "I had one idea in my mind - the Navy was my home." Rick Rogers can be reached at 247-4629 or by e-mail at rrogers@dailypress.com. Copyright © 2004, Daily Press PLEASE SEE ALSO: URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/media/thumbnails/blurb/2002-09/4595333.jpg ) FALLOUT: An Atomic Veteran's story Atomic testing gave the United States military superiority. Photo Gallery. URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-av_sungal.photogallery ) Jim Lyerly believes it also robbed him of his health, Navy career and the chance to give his children and grandchildren a better life. VIDEO: Interviews with Lylerly... by Brett England/Daily Press (RealMedia clips) URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/dp-av_video156.realvideo ) Recalling the atomic tests: 56k | DSL URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/dp-av_vet256.realvideo ) Discussing his family's health problems: 56k | DSL THE SERIES URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-82141sy0sep15.story ) TODAY: Young Jim Lyerly enlists in the Navy and finds paradise - until the Navy makes him a nuclear guinea pig. URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-38344sy0sep16.story ) Monday: Atomic testing gives Lyerly a surreal experience, followed by unbearable sickness. URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-82643sy0sep17.story ) Tuesday: Lyerly, his wife and children struggle through years of illness and pain, wondering when this legacy will end and why it began. URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-68793sy0sep18.story ) Wednesday: Lyerly's wife, Jerry, has endured 45 years of suffering, wondering and worrying. She tells her story. DEVELOPMENTS URL: ( http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/dp-atomicoct28.story ) Oct. 28, 2002: Veterans Administration again rejects Lylerly's claim Radiation Terms Ionizing Radiation: Radiation with enough energy to cause atoms to lose electrons and become ions. Alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma rays, are examples of ionizing radiation. Ultraviolet, infrared and visible light are examples of non-ionizing radiation. In this series, the radiation emitted by nuclear explosions is simply referred to as radiation. Gamma Rays: An example of electromagnetic radiation, they can cause injury even at great distances if shielding materials such as lead or steel aren't used. Most if not all radiation badges worn during nuclear testing measured gamma rays. Alpha Particle: Cannot penetrate the body, but can be hazardous if ingested. The risk from indoor radon is due to inhaled alpha particles that irradiate the lungs. Alpha particle monitoring was not done for rank-and-file troops. Fallout: Radioactive particles that fall to earth following a nuclear blast. Fallout can return to earth in a few hours relatively close to where it originated or stay suspended for months or years and spread across the globe. Service members describe fallout as feeling gritty like sand, which it probably was. Uniforms were often washed shortly after nuclear blasts to remove fallout. Rad: (Radiation Absorbed Dose) The rad is a unit for measuring the absorbed dose of radiation in any material. It is defined for any material and it applies to all types of radiation. It does not take into account the potential effects that different types of radiation have on the human body. Rem: (Roentgen Equivalent Man) The standard method for measuring the amount of radiation energy absorbed in a body is known as dose. The unit used to measure dose in a person is the rem. The rem is the unit used for equating radiation absorption with biological damage. The rem is a measure of the relative harm or risk caused by a given dose of radiation. * Taken from the Health Physics Society Web site, Defense Nuclear Agency material and Jefferson Lab. URL: ( http://www.hps.org/ ) Your Gateway to Radiation Safety The Health Physics Society is a nonprofit scientific professional organization whose mission is to promote the practice of radiation safety. Since its formation in 1956, the Society has grown to approximately 6,000 scientists, physicians, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals representing academia, industry, government, national laboratories, the Department of Defense, and other organizations. To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 50 Bellona: K-159 will not be raised from ocean floor this year Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov is not sure that raising of the K-159 submarine, which sank this year in the Barents Sea, is possible this year, RIA Novosti-North West reported from St Petersburg January 27th. 2004-01-30 16:53 "I am afraid this year we will not be entirely technically prepared for this," Kuroyedov told reporters. “The submarine will be definitely raised in any case” he stressed. But, so far, no decision has been taken on the exact time of lifting it, the admiral said. "We shall raise it when we are ready," he added. The retired K-159 sank on August 30 last year, as it was towed to a dockyard for dismantling. Only one of its ten crewmen was saved. In the earlier statements Kuroyedov promised to raise the submarine by autumn 2004. The salvage operation was originally to take place in August and September 2004. Publisher: , President: Information: , Technical contact: Telephone: +47 23 23 46 00 Telefax: +47 22 38 38 62 * P.O.Box 2141 Grunerlokka, 0505 Oslo, Norway ***************************************************************** 51 Las Vegas SUN: Study Probes Cancer Risk of X-Rays, Scans January 30, 2004 By BETH GARDINER ASSOCIATED PRESS LONDON (AP) - The risk of cancer from common X-rays and increasingly popular CT scans ranges from less than 1 percent to about 3 percent, according to a new study. The small risk posed by X-ray radiation is well-known, but the study by researchers from Oxford University and Cancer Research U.K. makes the most careful effort to date to estimate it precisely, the scientists said. CT scans, also known as CAT scans, are computer-enhanced X-rays that can provide a better view of all parts of the body. But they emit significantly more radiation than a standard X-ray. In the United States, doctors have urged caution about unnecessarily using the scans on children. Children are more sensitive to radiation and exposure is cumulative. The new research indicates the cancer risk - ranging from 0.6 percent to 3.2 percent - varies depending on the frequency of X-rays and scans in 15 countries surveyed. Experts not involved in the study wrote in the journal The Lancet, which published the findings, that the benefits of X-rays and CT scans far outweigh the risk. Of the 15 countries surveyed, the cancer risk believed linked to X-rays was lowest in Britain, where they are used least frequently. They estimated that 0.6 percent of the cumulative British cancer risk for those under 75 years old came from X-ray exposure, accounting for about 700 of the nation's 124,000 annual cancer diagnoses. The American figure nearly doubled a 1981 estimate that about 0.5 percent of U.S. cancer cases were linked to X-rays. The new 0.9 percent estimate translates into 5,695 cases per year, the researchers said The highest risk was in Japan, where X-rays are done much more frequently and accounted for 3.2 percent of cancer risk, or 7,587 cases per year, wrote the researchers, Amy Berrington de Gonzalez of Cancer Research U.K. and Sarah Darby of Oxford. Dr. Peter Herzog and Dr. Christina Rieger, of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, noted in a separate Lancet piece that the researchers did not assess the benefits of X-rays and CT scans. "Benefits include the earlier detection of cancers ... and the possibility of early treatment, which probably allows more cure of cancers than radiological exposure is able to cause," they wrote. Herzog and Rieger were not involved in the study. In all the other countries for which Berrington de Gonzalez and Darby analyzed data, they estimated that X-rays accounted for less than 2 percent of the cancer risk - 0.9 percent in Sweden, 1.3 percent in Australia, 1.1 percent in Canada and the Czech Republic, 1.8 percent in Croatia, 0.7 percent in Finland, 1.5 percent in Germany, 0.7 percent in Kuwait and the Netherlands, 1.2 percent in Norway, 0.6 percent in Poland, and 1.0 percent in Switzerland. Dr. Adrian Dixon, radiology professor at Cambridge University, said the estimates were not surprising and the risk posed by X-rays was relatively small compared to the overall chance of getting cancer. "I don't think (people) should be worried at all," he said. "You shouldn't be having an X-ray unless the benefits are greater than the harm and that's why we vet every request fairly carefully." All the rates cover only cancer diagnoses in people under age 75, since data for cancer incidence among those over 75 was unavailable in all 15 countries, the researchers said. They based their estimates on the incidence of cancer in each country, the national rates of X-ray and CT scan use between 1991 and 1996, the most recent years for which data were available, and mathematical models of the links between radiation exposure and cancer. They said that while their model may have overstated the risk, they believed they had not significantly understated it. While any individual's risk of developing cancer because of an X-ray was tiny, the widespread use of X-rays and CT scans means the risks translate into a significant number of cases, the researchers said. They said reducing the radiation dose delivered by each X-ray or CT scan and cutting the frequency of use could lessen cancer risks. Herzog and Rieger, the outside commentators, noted that development of lower-radiation scanning equipment had already reduced the risk and was likely to continue to do so. They agreed with the researchers that doctors should avoid unnecessary X-rays and CT scans. ***************************************************************** 52 NRC: NRC to Meet with NFS Officials February 5 News Release - Region II - 2004-00 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION Office of Public Affairs, Region II No. II-04-004 January 30, 2004 CONTACT: Ken Clark (404) 562-4416 Roger D. Hannah (404) 562-4417 E-mail: opa2@nrc.gov officials of Nuclear Fuel Services discuss the companys performance since it last met with the NRC in October. The company is also expected to discuss the results of its efforts to improve both safety and regulatory compliance at its facility. The Blended Low-Enriched Uranium (BLEU) Preparation Facility planned for the NFS site will not be discussed since the NRC has received a formal request for a hearing on that project. The meeting will begin at 8 a.m. at the NFS Training Center in Erwin on Jackson Love Highway near Exit 15 on Interstate 181. Members of the public are invited to observe the meeting and will have an opportunity to ask questions of the NRC staff before the meeting is over. Last revised Friday, January 30, 2004 ***************************************************************** 53 Ithaca Journal: Cornell's waste plan scrutinized - ithacajournal.com Local News - Saturday, January 31, 2004 Chemical option replaces incineration of material By ROGER DuPUIS II Journal Staff [Photo] BILL WARREN/Journal Staff Walter Hang, front right, of Toxics Targeting, asks a question about plans for a new animal remains waste management facility at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine during a public information meeting Wednesday at the the Tompkins County Public Library. [Photo] A bottle of hydrolysate. [Photo] Bone fragments from the process ITHACA -- Paul Jennette took a plastic bottle of caramel-colored liquid and raised it to about shoulder height Wednesday night during a public meeting at the Tompkins County Public Library. "The end is definitely within our grasp," he said, squeezing the bottle gently. Jennette is a biosafety engineer for the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. The end to which he referred is the construction of a $5 million waste management system that would allow the college to retire its incinerator and start disposing of animal remains by reducing carcasses to bone matter and fluid through chemical digestion, rather than by burning them. Cornell's 1985-built incinerator handles 750,000 pounds of pathological waste (including 5,000 pounds of contaminated animal bedding) and 150,000 pounds of regulated medical waste per year, Jennette said, in addition to a small number of pet cremations. Animals come to the incinerator from Cornell's agricultural operations, from its veterinary hospital, and also through its necropsy lab, which studies pathogens in dead animals for the state Department of Agriculture. Keeping the aging incinerator in working order is growing increasingly expensive and difficult, Jennette said. Stringent government emissions standards have required the staff to make modifications to the incinerator, while neighborhood groups -- such as the Cornell-Community Waste Management Advisory Committee -- have, since the 1990s, pressed for the college to find an alternative to burning. The tan liquid in Jennette's bottle -- called hydrolysate -- is a sample of what remains after the digestion process is complete. He also showed the audience samples of the other key byproduct: chalky-white fragments of digested animal bones. Veterinary college officials view the new process as a modern, environmentally-friendly and ultimately less costly replacement for incineration and the emissions that waft out into the air. The medical waste and bedding would be steam sterilized, shredded and sent to a landfill after the incinerator is removed. Some worry that Cornell's plan to send liquid hydrolysate to the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Plant -- which discharges treated water into Cayuga Lake --could be detrimental not just to the health of the lake, but to thousands of people for whom Cayuga provides drinking water. Walter Hang, an Ithaca businessman whose company, Toxics Targeting, identifies and charts toxic sites, has municipalities --among his many clients -- concerned about their drinking water supplies. Hang has, for many years, pushed for government agencies to effectively address high phosphorous problems in Cayuga Lake, which add to growth of algal blooms. He fears the new process would not only add phosphorous to the lake, but could also introduce prions. These highly durable strings of proteins are believed by some scientists to cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies -- the family of incurable, brain-wasting diseases that includes bovine transmissible spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease, and the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, that affects humans. "Does it totally inactivate the prions 100 percent of the time?" Hang asked. Proponents of the technology, including other agencies which already use it, expressed confidence in what's known as alkaline hydrolysis. The process Cornell is looking to buy an alkaline hydrolysis tissue digestion system from Indianapolis-based Waste Reduction by Waste Reduction Inc., also called WR2. According to Jennette and WR2, the process begins by placing animal carcasses onto a basket inside the digestor, an insulated, stainless steel pressure vessel that resembles a large pressure cooker. After the machine's cover is closed, water and alkali is added in proportion to the weight of waste material in the basket. The vessel is then pressure-sealed. Steam is pumped into an outer jacket, and the inside temperature reaches 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Subjected to heat, high pressure and high pH levels, organic matter dissolves into hydrolysate, a sterile liquid that's typically brown or purple hued and has a pungent, soap-like smell. The only solids left behind are sterile calcium fragments from bones and teeth, cellulose material such as grass inside an animal's stomach and plastics, such as ear tags. The process takes at least three hours. After the fluid is drained from the tank, bone material is flushed with hot and cold water to clean it of hydrolysate before it's removed from the basket. The remaining material is soft enough to be easily crushed into powder. Cornell's plan is to send bone matter from the process to a landfill. There are several options for disposal of hydrolysate. Cornell's proposal calls for trucking the fluid to the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment plant. There, it will be subject to an anaerobic treatment process, which generates methane gas that is used to provide fuel for generators that power and heat the plant's buildings. On a daily basis, Cornell would contribute an estimated 2,000 gallons of fluid to the treatment plant, Jennette said. The plant typically handles about 6 million gallons of sewage per day, said Jose Lozano, director of laboratories at the facility. Treated wastewater from the plant is discharged into Cayuga Lake. Lozano noted that recent and continuing programs have dramatically lowered the phosphorus going into the lake, and said Cornell's effluent would constitute only about 3 pounds, or 2 percent of the phosphorus going into Cayuga from the treatment plant each day. The hydrolysate would add about three tons of solids per day to the plant's sludge output. The company According to WR2 President Joe Wilson, the process was developed in 1992 by Gordon Kaye and Peter Weber, professors at the Albany Medical College. n cut from hereTheir aim was improving disposal methods for tissue from medical and pharmaceutical waste generated at the college, some of which was classed as low-level radioactive waste. Their first, small digestor was in regular operation by 1993 and is still in use. The pair, working with financial backing from Rochester-based lawyer David Lovenheim, founded a company to market the technology on a wider basis. Wilson was vice president of solid waste management for STERIS, a large, Ohio-based maker of sterilizing equipment, when he saw Kaye present a paper on the new technology. "I became enamored with the thought that you could create a system to destroy carcasses and cadavers that wasn't an incinerator," Wilson said. When he realized that officials at STERIS weren't interested in investing in the technology, Wilson joined the Kaye-Weber endeavor, in 1998. To date, WR2 has sold numerous small digestors, Wilson said. Large digestors -- those that can process 1,500 or more pounds of material per cycle -- are in use at five U.S. locations, including Colorado State University in Fort Collins and the University of Florida's College of Veterinary Medicine in Gainesville. Six more North American orders are on hand, he added. Internationally, large units are being used in Japan and Signapore, while the company has an office in Scotland that is prepared to start filling European orders pending government approval of regulations over the process. The prion question In responding to questions about prion destruction from Hang and other concerned citizens, Cornell's Jennette cited Scottish research performed several years ago. Researchers, led by David M. Taylor of the Edinburgh-based Institute for Animal Health, sought to put the process through a difficult test in which a hole was drilled into sheep heads, and a virulent strain of scrapie -- a TSE family disease -- was placed in the holes. The heads were sealed in a plastic bag and then put through the reduction process for various lengths of time ranging from three to six hours. Hydrolysate from the process was injected into lab mice. None of the mice treated with hydrolysate from the six hour process developed wasting disease, although some of those treated with fluid from the shorter cycles did get the disease. Taylor, who is noted for his experience in studying wasting diseases, left IAH in 2000. The Journal attempted to contact Taylor for this article, but was unable to locate him before press time. Jennette said that based on Taylor's research, the probability of a human actually contracting a wasting disease through exposure to hydrolysate is almost negligible: To run the risk of contracting the disease, a person would have to drink 1.2 billion gallons of pure, untreated effluent resulting from the digestion of an infected animal. Hang, as noted, is not comfortable with the odds. "Cornell is now in the laudatory position of trying to get out of the incinerator business," Hang said. "But they're hanging their hats on a limited amount of data that offers very limited comfort." His concerns were shared by Ithaca resident Fay Gougakis. "No matter how much you treat it, I'm not convinced it should go into the lake," Gougakis said at Wednesday's public meeting. "People who are drinking out of that lake are going to be outraged." Colorado's case What Cornell is talking about in theory, Colorado State University has learned in practice. Like Cornell, CSU is home to extensive animal science facilities, including a veterinary hospital. Since October 2001, CSU has been using a 2,000-pound capacity WR2 digestor to dispose of its animal waste. Lab Director Barb Powers said CSU turned to the digestor after the rendering plant that formerly handled its waste went out of business. "We basically had to get (the digestor)," Powers said. "We're in the middle of Fort Collins and couldn't have an incinerator." Until a few weeks ago, CSU sent effluent from the digestor into the Fort Collins sewer system, where it was processed by the municipal wastewater treatment plant serving that city of about 125,000 people. In 2002, CSU processed 832,000 pounds of material, including carcasses of deer and elk infected with chronic wasting disease, one of the family of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases that includes mad cow disease. "It was a major concern in Fort Collins," Powers said. "And this is one of the most effective methods of getting rid of the prions" that cause the disease. To ensure that the prions were deactivated, Powers said CSU's policy was to treat infected carcasses for six hours, which has been shown in European studies to completely destroy prions. "We'll always do it for at least six hours if we have any suspicion," she said. Dave Meyer, technical services superintendent for the City of Fort Collins Utility Department, said treatment plant officials saw no dangers posed by processing CSU's hydrolysate. "There just isn't any documented evidence that this is a public health hazard," said Meyer, adding that he has attended U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seminars on the topic. CSU stopped putting its hydrolysate into the sewers not because of any health issues, but because CSU wanted to find a way to avoid the city's heavy surcharge on processing the material. While CSU's 400-gallon daily discharge was only a small fraction of the roughly 12 million gallons of sewage treated daily, a large amount of energy was needed to process the highly concentrated material, Meyer said. CSU has developed a process to solidify the hydrolysate on site, and the material is then sent away to a landfill. Meyer declined to elaborate on that process, saying CSU is seeking to patent it. The only environmental issue Powers pointed to was the odor generated by the hydrolysate. While it's generally not powerful enough to be smelled in the surrounding neighborhoods, she said the solution's odors can be quite strong in the reduction room and other places where it is handled. To deal with that, CSU has installed a deodorizing system. "Any time that stuff is open to the air, it stinks," she said. Next steps The plan has been the subject to a number of state-mandated studies. What could be the last of these, a supplemental environmental impact statement, is subject to a public commentary period through Feb. 9. That study can be viewed at the Tompkins County Public Library, Ithaca Town Hall and Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine libraries. But that's not the last opportunity for the public to have its say. Jennette said the there also will be public comment periods on Cornell's construction and operation permits. Designs for the system and renovations to the incineration building, where it will operate, are set to be finished by May. If all approvals are granted, the system could be put in operation in late 2005, with renovations to the building complete by 2006. --- Contact: rdupuis@ithaca.gannett.com Originally published Saturday, January 31, 2004 ***************************************************************** 54 Indymedia/IMC Paris: German Castors to roll next week, protest tomorrow | ACCUEIL | PUBLIER | AGENDA | LOGIN | German activists report that 11 Castor caskets of spent nuclear fuel from several power stations are to be railed to La Hague in France and Sellafield in England next week. Aktionsbuendnis CASTOR-Widerstand Neckarwestheim says two Castor caskets will go to both countries from the nuke at Neckarwestheim, about 45 km north of Stuttgart, the first transport this year. The others would come from the north. Krümmel, Stade and Unterweser nukes are mentioned, but the activist group http://x1000hamburg.derule Krümmel out. The Neckarwestheim group expect trucking out on Tuesday, 3 Feb. On 4 Feb the train is to take the French route via the border crossing of Lauterbourg, west of Karlsruhe. The border crossing is planned for 2 p.m. Today, Saturday, 12 members of Greenpeace demonstrated in the early hours against the last planned nuclear transport to Sellafield. Police said it was a peaceful protest that ended at 8 am. Nuclear opponents from the region have announced another demonstration for tomorrow, Sunday Feb 1. They plan to erect a "Wailing Wall" outside the Neckarwestheim nuke to protest the intention to build an "interim storage" in its grounds for about 160 Castor caskets. anti-akw.neckarwestheim@s.netic.de Info-tel 07141 / 903363 * fax / 923991 http://neckarwestheim.antiatom.de ***************************************************************** 55 kgw.com: Initiative to ban nuclear waste imports certified News for Oregon and SW Washington | AP Wire 01/31/2004 Associated Press The Washington secretary of state has certified an initiative that seeks to block the federal government from sending more radioactive waste to the Hanford nuclear reservation until all of the existing waste is cleaned up. Secretary of State Sam Reed certified the initiative Thursday, which means the Legislature must now enact it or send it to the November ballot. Leaders in the Legislature have said it's unlikely lawmakers will approve the measure. The equivalent of about 75,000 55-gallon barrels of radioactive waste are buried at Hanford. The material can take thousands of years or more to decay to safe levels. The state and federal governments recently agreed on a long-term schedule for cleaning up the waste. In the meantime, the federal government started shipping radioactive and hazardous waste from other sites to Hanford for packaging before sending the material to a New Mexico plant for disposal. Hanford currently accepts and disposes of lower-level waste from other nuclear plants around the country. Initiative 297 would halt nuclear waste shipments from other states to Hanford until existing waste at the site is cleaned up. It would do so by preventing the state from approving permits for new waste facilities. The measure has been endorsed by environmental groups, the state Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters. Critics question the constitutionality of the measure and argue such a policy could make it difficult to ship Hanford's existing wastes to other states, such as Nevada and New Mexico, for proper burial. Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest and sponsor of the initiative, has made no effort to convince the Legislature to simply enact the measure. He said he would look forward to the impact it would have on this year's campaigns. "We want to see the strongest possible message," Pollet said. "What would be stronger than a unanimous Legislature would be a strong public vote in November." Some in the Tri-Cities area near Hanford believe the measure would actually hamper cleanup efforts. "The only hope is to try to fight the initiative head on," said state Rep. Jerome Delvin, R-Richland. "Who has the resources to put up that kind of education program? I don't know. The burden falls on the Tri-Cities." Sen. Pat Hale, R-Kennewick, submitted a letter earlier this week to Attorney General Christine Gregoire asking that she clarify a list of questions about whether sections of the measure are legal, whether the initiative violates the U.S. Constitution, and general questions about whether it would speed or delay cleanup efforts. If Gregoire were to issue a critical opinion, that could be used as a basis to bring the initiative to the Senate floor and stage a rare "No" vote, Hale said. "That would certainly send a loud statement to voters," she said. Pollet said he's certain the initiative would withstand any legal challenge. Gov. Gary Locke, who doesn't have a formal role in the process, said this week he hasn't yet studied the initiative but planned to soon. This text is invisible on the page, but this text is affected by the invisible item's flow. This text is invisible on the page, but this text is affected by the invisible item's flow. © Belo Interactive Inc. ***************************************************************** 56 asahi.com: EDITORIAL: Review nuclear fuel cycle Japan's energy policy has drifted far from reality. The Atomic Energy Commission of Japan is the country's highest policy-making body regarding nuclear power policy. Four of its five commissioners, including the chairman, have recently changed. The new members face the test of whether they can produce a shift in Japan's nuclear energy policies, which are at a crossroads. The commission is indeed facing a test of its own reason for existence. Japan's nuclear energy policies continue to veer further and further from reality. The government's long-term energy supply/demand outlook report has always come out with excessively high figures for nuclear power generation. Because the government's energy planning is based on these bloated figures, the country's energy policies as a whole have been warped. The current plan is to ``build nine to 12 more nuclear reactors by 2010.'' But this is simply not possible. It was just last December that the construction plan for a nuclear power plant in Suzu, Ishikawa Prefecture, was cancelled. It was a joint project involving three regional utilities, Kansai Electric Power Co., Chubu Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. Also in December, Tohoku Electric Power Co.'s plan for a nuclear plant in Maki, Niigata Prefecture, was scrapped. Construction of new plants is becoming increasingly difficult. This is due not only to opposition to nuclear power plants, but also to business concerns, such as a slowdown in electricity demand. As deregulation of the electricity industry rapidly progresses along with technological improvements in energy resources such as fuel cells, the huge investments necessary for nuclear power plants are becoming extremely risky. Because nuclear power generation produces no carbon dioxide, it helps curb global warming. But persisting in unrealistic construction plans for new plants may hamper the development of other policies to combat global warming, or to diversify energy resources. What is necessary is to recognize the existing realities of today, and bring the scope and content of Japan's nuclear energy policies to a level that most people in the country can accept. The review of the nuclear fuel cycle policy is one of the most pressing issues. The current cycle plan to ``reprocess all the spent nuclear fuel, extract plutonium, and use that plutonium in fast-breeder reactors'' is based on policies created roughly 40 years ago. But there is no prospect whatsoever for fast-breeder reactors to ever be actually utilized. The plutonium-thermal project has been put forward as a means to fill in the gap until the fast-breeder reactors arrive, but even the ``pluthermal'' project is having difficulty getting off the ground, due to resident opposition, high costs and other factors. The Atomic Energy Commission will hold hearings to solicit opinions from various sectors on the nuclear fuel cycle policies and other nuclear energy issues. We urge the commission to coordinate the interests of the electricity companies with those of the local communities and seek a path that the entire society can agree upon. One reason for the fixed nature of the government's nuclear power policies is the way the energy plans are constructed. The long-term energy supply/demand outlook report is created by the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy, a committee that reports to the minister of economy, trade and industry. This advisory panel also determines the levels of nuclear power generation. The commission takes note of the advisory committee's report, and puts together the long-term plan for nuclear energy. It is a double-feature show with nobody certain who is in the lead; drastic policy shifts are difficult as a result, and stopgap measures are the only changes that get included. But this year, the government's energy supply/demand outlook is up for revision, and changes to the long-term plan will get under way. It offers a good opportunity to overcome any bureaucratic sectionalism, grasp the entire picture and move on to create a pragmatic nuclear energy policy. To that end, the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission both need to change. Otherwise, we need to consider the creation of a new forum to discuss a comprehensive energy policy. --The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 24(IHT/Asahi: January 31,2004) (01/31) ***************************************************************** 57 DOE safety standards covering more than 100,000 workers Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:58:13 -0800 Hi! Here is a better accountability By NANCY ZUCKERBROD Associated Press Writer that was forwarded to me by the California alliance. The local Tri-City Herald often change, delete, or distoret the wording of other reporters. Gai dccole@hotmail.com,robbie99352@juno.com,eagleyes@bentonrea.com,smith33oop@peoplepc.com,babysweetpea@peoplepc.com,vcolley@earthlink.net,gizmo@brtc.net,mikemc@drizzle.com,rogerh@energy-net.org, rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com, threeletterranch@hotmail.com ============================================================ From: Inga Olson Date: 2004/01/29 Thu PM 09:06:43 GMT To: Fred allingham , calderx@pacbell.net, ctmp@dcn.org, egolson@scvwd.dist.ca.us, gmgiova@ispwest.com, goglesbee@charter.net, Barbara Gonsalves , joyceannbrooks@cs.com, dan mckeel , Mary Moshar , oglesbee@charter.net, olsoning@yahoo.com, paulfreres@yahoo.com, triesq@aol.com, tswift@mindsync.com, sharon woods Subject: DOE safety standards covering more than 100,000 workers weakened Dear Sick Worker & Family Member support group members and friends: This move to weaken DOE safety regulations covering more than 100,000 workers is discouraging. We already know the harmful results of inadequate regulations, monitoring, and oversite by the DOE. Tri-Valley CAREs representatives meet with John Conway, who is mentioned in the article below, every year when we go to Washington, DC. He is definitely not a worker advocate, but he seems to publish the results of his board reviews without political manipulation. Inga Olson Tri-Valley CAREs Nuke Facilities Safety Rules Are Targeted By NANCY ZUCKERBROD Associated Press Writer The Bush administration is moving to replace government safety standards at federal nuclear facilities with requirements written by contractors after Congress directed it to start fining the contractors for violations. Long-established government minimum standards at the more than two dozen nuclear weapons plants and research labs around the nation would become unenforceable guidelines under the Energy Department proposal. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., an author of the 2002 legislation ordering the fines, accused the administration this week of distorting Congress' intent with a plan that "will likely decrease worker protection." John Conway, chairman of an advisory board overseeing safety at the Energy Department, said the proposal would weaken safety standards covering more than 100,000 workers at the facilities. "The way it's written, I don't like it at all," said Conway, head of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Energy Department officials said they have not made a final decision on the proposal and emphasized that the government would retain the authority to approve or reject the contractor-written safety requirements. "The department believes the proposed rule seeks to fully protect our workers," Assistant Secretary Beverly Cook said. The proposal was outlined in a draft regulation put out by the department last month. Cook described it as part of a continuing effort to get contractors to focus on hazards specific to their sites rather than on dangers that don't exist everywhere. The Energy Department can now fine contractors who expose workers to hazardous levels of radiation, but it has no authority to levy fines for failing to protect workers from other industrial dangers, such as exposure to toxic chemicals. The proposed rule would change that, allowing the department to assess fines against contractors who violate what would be contractor-written safety plans dealing with industrial hazards. "The decision making will be largely in the hands of contractors to decide what protections are appropriate," said Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio. "It's the fox guarding the hen house." The government often gives contractors financial incentives to complete projects ahead of schedule, and tough safety standards could slow contractors down, said Leon Owens, a worker and past president of the local union at the government's uranium plant in Paducah, Ky. "I don't feel that a contractor would be as inclined to develop rules that would go the extra length to provide adequate protection for workers," Owens said. Some of the basic standards the Energy Department generally requires contractors to meet mirror Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations at private industrial sites, including commercial nuclear power plants. While some contractors say they like the new rules, at least one is on record as opposing them. UT-Battelle, which operates the government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., said it would prefer one set of rules, based on OSHA guidelines, for all contractors. ***************************************************************** 58 Knox News: Toxic-waste burner may restart today By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com January 31, 2004 OAK RIDGE - The government's toxic-waste incinerator may resume operations as early as today. It has been shut down since Sept. 29 for maintenance and repairs. The incinerator has been in "hot standby" mode for the past couple of weeks while officials did final checks before the restart of waste operations. The Oak Ridge facility is the only incinerator in the United States licensed to burn both radioactive and hazardous wastes, including those containing difficult-to-treat polychlorinated biphenyls. Dennis Hill, a spokesman for Bechtel Jacobs Co., said Friday the restart is partly dependent on when a new part arrives. If waste-burning activities don't resume today, the restart will probably take place on Tuesday, he said. Bechtel Jacobs is the U.S. Department of Energy's environmental manager in Oak Ridge. Shaw Environment &Infrastructure operates the incinerator under a subcontract to Bechtel Jacobs. Besides repairs and normally scheduled maintenance activities, workers used the four-month outage to repackage waste and prepare for upcoming burns, Hill said. About 172,000 pounds of solid waste has been placed into burnable boxes and is currently available for incineration, he said. A DOE official earlier said the agency hopes to burn about 1 million pounds of waste this year. DOE wants to maximize operations at the Oak Ridge incinerator during the next couple of years before shutting it down permanently in late 2006. The facility is burning waste from federal nuclear sites around the country. The incinerator operates at temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It reportedly is capable of destroying more than 99 percent of PCBs and other hazardous elements in waste. DOE and its contractors have been re-evaluating systems during the past few months to make sure the Oak Ridge facility meets new emissions guidelines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The rules place tighter limits on the release of cadmium, lead and other metals. Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329. 2004, Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. ***************************************************************** 59 Tri-City Herald: Attorney general unclear on I-297 This story was published Sunday, February 1st, 2004 By Chris Mulick Herald Olympia bureau OLYMPIA -- The state Attorney General's Office doesn't know how it will address a series of questions it has been asked to answer about the legal standing of a Hanford cleanup initiative certified Thursday. Sen. Pat Hale, R-Kennewick, submitted a list of seven questions Tuesday about whether Initiative 297 conflicts with the U.S. Constitution, a series of federal laws and the Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact that governs Hanford cleanup. But it's not entirely clear what the attorney general's role is. Unlike Tim Eyman's high-profile tax-limiting initiatives to the people, I-297 is an initiative to the Legislature. Lawmakers are given the choice of enacting it or putting it on the November ballot. The measure, which would attempt to halt nuclear waste shipments from other states to Hanford until existing wastes are cleaned up, is only the 28th initiative to the Legislature to be certified in the state's history. And it could prove to be one of the more legally complex. "We're trying to figure out how to handle this," said Jim Pharris, the opinions editor for the Attorney General's Office. "This doesn't come up very often." Generally, the office does not assess the constitutionality of initiatives because it is tasked with defending them in court, should there be a legal challenge. But it does assist lawmakers as they write bills to help them steer clear of any legal pitfalls. An initiative to the Legislature could fall under both categories, Pharris said. State law also grants the Legislature the ability to draft an alternate plan to send to the ballot with I-297, and such legal advice could be valuable as it is being written. Amid a host of legal questions, Hale also asked a few subjective ones, including whether the initiative would speed or slow cleanup, and whether it is wise to impact the Tri-Party Agreement. "Generally, we won't get into policy questions or judgment questions," Pharris said. It's unclear when answers, if any, will be provided and whether they would come in the form of a formal attorney general's opinion, he said. If the Legislature decides to draft an alternate version it would have plenty of leeway. So long as lawmakers don't stray from the subject, they could propose to do just about anything, including change the intent of the initiative. "There's basically no limit," said Jeff Even, an assistant attorney general. If an alternate were submitted to the ballot along with the original version, voters would be asked two questions. The first would be whether they support one or none of the measures. All would be allowed to answer the second question, asking voters to choose a preference between the two options. But lawmakers may be hesitant to draft an alternate version even if they agree they don't like I-297. It likely would be so short "the environmentalists would shoot it down in a heartbeat," Hale said. While making the rounds in Olympia, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told reporters that the Legislature should do more to educate itself about the cleanup issue, a subject it rarely has to address. "I would hope the Legislature will take some time to have some hearings and have everyone understand it," she said. "I don't think any of us understand the legal impacts." She and others are concerned the policy could make it difficult to ship existing Hanford waste to other states for proper burial. "We have to work with all the other states," Murray said. "It's always a concern if we start pitting other states against each other." © 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services ***************************************************************** 60 Google News Alert - nuclear Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 20:43:03 -0800 (PST) ISLAMIC parties demand end to probe of nuclear scientists Deepika ... political Pakistani leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed has threatened to disclose the army's ''secrets and acts of corruption'' unless the interrogation of top nuclear ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.deepikaglobal.com/ENG4_sub.asp%3Fccode%3DENG4%26newscode%3D39590 CONGRESS stalls Bush plan for nuclear weapons San Francisco Chronicle A surprise delay this week in the Bush administration's planning for a factory to produce plutonium cores for nuclear warheads -- and a blistering letter from ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/chronicle/archive/2004/01/31/MNG1H4M91M1.DTL HOPES Rise of New Talks over Nuclear Stand-off The Scotsman A US State Department envoy said today that a fresh round of talks on North Korea’s nuclear stand-off could open as early as this month. ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm%3Fid%3D2477560 Q&A : Nuclear Watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei Newsweek ... 9 issue - The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meant to be the watchdog of the nuclear world, has been shouldered aside by the Bush administration in ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4120339/ PAKISTAN Ousts Nuclear Scientist From Post New York Times 31 The Pakistani government on Saturday removed Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, from his post as a special adviser to the ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/international/asia/01STAN.html%3Fex%3D1076216400%26amp%3Ben%3D0b6e3eb15fa5d6bc%26amp%3Bei%3D5062%26amp%3Bpartner%3DGOOGLE TOP Pak nuclear scientist sacked Calcutta Telegraph 31: Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the “father of the country’s nuclear bomb” was today removed from his post as adviser to the government on nuclear affairs ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040201/asp/foreign/story_2848148.asp NUCLEAR plants criticized Cherry Hill Courier Post Federal regulators have asked the operator of the Salem nuclear power complex here to address "work environment" concerns they believe could lead to safety ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.courierpostonline.com/news/southjersey/m013104b.htm EXPERTS slam moves to fast-track nuclear dump The Australian GLOBAL nuclear experts have criticised the Howard Government's application to build a radioactive waste dump for failing to meet world's best practice, calling ... 'FATHER of Pakistan's Nuclear Bomb' sacked Deepika Islamabad, Jan 31 (UNI) 'Father of Pakistan's Nuclear Bomb' Abdul Qadeer Khan was today sacked from the post of Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister to ... RUSSIANS plan large nuclear exercise Toronto Star MOSCOW—Russia's nuclear forces reportedly are preparing their largest manoeuvres in two decades, an exercise involving test-firing of missiles and flights by ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer%3Fpagename%3Dthestar/Layout/Article_Type1%26c%3DArticle%26cid%3D1075504209875%26call_pageid%3D968332188854%26col%3D968350060724 This daily-once News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Remove this News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts/remove?s=682e52ddd0720101&hl=en Create another News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en Try Google News: http://news.google.com/ ***************************************************************** 61 Google News Alert - nuclear Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 12:23:17 -0800 (PST) A nuclear weapons `Wal-Mart' Chicago Tribune (subscription) For those who track nuclear weapons across the globe, developments over the last weeks have heads spinning like the special centrifuges that enrich uranium for ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0402010028feb01,1,7965233.story%3Fcoll%3Dchi-techtopheds-hed OP-ED: Political fall out of nuclear controversy —Dr Hasan- ... Daily Times Pakistan is confronted with a controversy related to its nuclear programme. It pertains to the information received from the Geneva ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp%3Fpage%3Dstory_2-2-2004_pg3_2 CARBON dioxide leak shuts down nuclear power plant Green Bay Press Gazette CARLTON — The Kewaunee Nuclear Plant declared a low-level emergency after detecting a carbon dioxide leak in the fire-suppression system. ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_14473109.shtml THE Pretence is Over | Pak Link with Nuclear Black Market Times of India I was attending an international conference on nuclear proliferation organised by Prince Sadruddin Agha Khan as a prelude to the third NPT review conference. ... PAK Not To Give Up Its Nuclear Capability: Rashid Pakistan News Service ... UK: Feb 01 (PNS) - Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has categorically said Pakistan will neither give up its nuclear ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.paknews.com/main.php%3Fid%3D6%26date1%3D2004-02-01 US envoy hopes for next NKorea nuclear talks this month SpaceDaily US envoy James Kelly said Sunday he was optimistic about holding a new round of talks this month on ending the North Korean nuclear crisis. ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040201072715.2l9rubdr.html US Official : ‘ Resumption of Nuclear Talks Lies in ... Chosun Ilbo As diplomacy continues to stage a fresh round of six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear intentions, the US State Department is striking an optimistic note ... See all stories on this topic: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf8&client=google&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200402/200402010001.html LIBYAN Nuclear Equipment Arrives in US Pakistan News Service 27 (Xinhuanet) -- An American C-17 transport plane carrying components and materials of Libya's nuclear weapons and missiles arrived in Tennessee, in the ... This daily-once News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Remove this News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts/remove?s=682e52ddd0720101&hl=en Create another News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en Try Google News: http://news.google.com/ ***************************************************************** 62 [du-list] DU in the news - 1st Feb. 04 Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:58:22 -0800 DELIBERATE Undercounting of "Coalition" Fatalities CounterPunch ... Some soldiers may not appear in any statistic yet, but many are near areas where Depleted Uranium munitions [aka, DU ammo] were used -­ this even occurred in ... <http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij01312004.html> CLUSTER Bombs: War Crimes of the Bush Administration, by Paul ... UN Observer ... Regarding the use of cluster bombs, among other war crimes--the use of depleted uranium, "the wanton destruction of cities and towns," collective reprisals ... <http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=1397&blz=1> To unsubscribe from this groups send a message to du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type unsubscribe and send. Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT 4287b.jpg 42914.jpg ---------- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/du-list/ * * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: * du-list-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com * * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. Attachment Converted: 4287b.jpg: 00000001,433f8995,00000000,00000000 Attachment Converted: 42914.jpg: 00000001,433f8996,00000000,00000000 ***************************************************************** 63 [du-list] DU Info Bulletin no 88 Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:58:25 -0800 DU INFO BULLETIN NO 88 Book Review 1) Terry Walker’s: The Mother of all Battles Veteran’s News 2) War Illness Blow for Gulf Veterans 3) For Whom The Death Tolls 4) Zapped Veteran Fights On 5) Gulf War Syndrome Action Demanded DU News 6) Bombs and Brains Don't Mix 7) US Military Wreaks Worldwide Environmental Havoc 8) Anti-War Group Stage Protest At Arms Depot 9) Networking for Environmental Justice" 10) Uranium in Your Koolaide 11)Cluster Bombs: War Crimes of the Bush Administration Events 12) Depleted Uranium Anti-Tank Shells: Toxic Contaminant or Smart Technology? Book Review 1)'The Mother of all Battles' ISBN: 1-904166105 By Terry Walker The first book on Gulf War Syndrome from the UK. You can buy it from http://www.design-publications.co.uk/ at £9.99 plus £2.50pp Write- up Mother of All Battles" by Terry Walker It was the worst and most environmentally toxic war of the 20th century. Following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein promised the “Mother of all Battles”; few in the West believed him. Yet, for ordinary Iraqis the conflict was catastrophic. As Iraq was repeatedly subjected to heavy bombardment from the air, coalition ground forces faced a significantly diminished Iraqi army and Republican Guard. Some offered minor or token resistance, but most surrendered with dignity. It took the allied forces less than two months to eject the Iraqi military from Kuwait but for many British veterans the consequences of the Gulf War lasted much longer. Considerable numbers of formerly healthy men and women have fallen ill since this period yet the government officially denied any link between vaccines to protect against Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the subsequent catalogue of illnesses and disabilities. But the numbers of former soldiers afflicted with illnesses continued to rise and the machinery of a government cover-up was set in motion. Terry Walker was one of these victims and this is his story. Veteran News 2) WAR ILLNESS BLOW FOR GULF VETERANS DAVID BYERS 12:00 - 23 January 2004 A North Staffordshire support group has voiced its disappointment after the Government rejected calls for a debate into Gulf War Syndrome. Gulf War Syndrome UK Support Group chairman Justin Harvey said: "I'm disappointed and I think it will disappoint a lot of veterans and their families." Mr Harvey - who served as a trooper in an armoured regiment reconnaissance unit during the Gulf War - added: "I think a debate is the only way we will get to the bottom of what has happened. If the government has nothing to hide it should allow a public inquiry to take place." Addressing the House of Lords yesterday, Labour's Lord Morris of Manchester asked for a Government response to a coroner's ruling that a Territorial Army reservist died from health problems he developed during the 1991 Gulf War. But Lord Bach said: "We are not convinced a public inquiry would help. "The possibility that we may look again at this matter has not been ruled out, but in the present circumstances, it is only through the programme of research initiated by this Government, that we are ever likely to be able to establish the causes of Gulf veterans' illnesses." http://www.thesentinel.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=67725&command=displayContent&sourceNode=67252&contentPK=8602409> 3) FOR Whom The Death Tolls Deliberate Undercounting of “Coalition” Fatalities by Paul de Rooij There is evidence of a concerted effort afoot to obfuscate the number of casualties in the recent crop of US-led wars. May 1st was the day the president Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared the end to the war and the start of the occupation of Iraq. [1] Since then many casualty numbers have been publicized, most of them disingenuous fudges of the real death toll. There are many reasons why the casualty toll is understated, which we dissect in this brief essay. The Bush regime is doing its best to hide the human cost of its recent wars. Publicity of the soldiers’ deaths is bad during an election year, and would be bad for the continued justification for the American occupation of Iraq. If they are intent on hiding the casualty figures, then it behooves us to uncover and amplify them. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/DeRooij0124.htm 4) Zapped Veteran Fights On By PAUL WOOD © 2004 THE NEWS-GAZETTE Published Online January 25, 2004 RURAL THOMASBORO ­ Doug Rokke has a stack of Army commendations as big as a suitcase. But he's not winning much love now from the military, speaking out all over the world on the dangers of depleted uranium. The uranium, with most of the highly radioactive material taken out to be used in reactors, is heavy and hot-burning, and shells made from it have been used by tank crews in both Gulf Wars and Somalia to penetrate thick steel. The health physicist, who retired this fall from the Army reserves as a major, says the nation has a debt to its warriors who became ill in the Gulf Wars, as well as to the Kuwaitis and Iraqis who still have dangerous weapons in their homeland. Rokke said 320 tons of uranium remain on the ground. "My 30-plus-year military career has been dedicated to ensuring our nation's sons and daughters have optimal military education and training, they receive the medical care and applicable pensions that they earned during service our nation, they are given safe and effective equipment, and that environmental contamination caused by military operations is cleaned up," Rokke, 54, said last week. He also has health concerns as close to home as it gets. "I'm zapped," he says. The way to test for uranium fragments in the body is through urine tests. http://www.news-gazette.com/story.cfm?Number=15330> 5) Gulf War Syndrome Action Demanded A call for action for those suffering from so-called Gulf War Syndrome is due to be made in the House of Lords. Lord Morris of Manchester will demand the government responds to a coroner's ruling that an ex-soldier's death was linked to his service in the 1991 war. The Labour peer will make the plea on Thursday, following the verdict on the death of Army reservist Major Ian Hill in 2001, after a decade of ill health. Last November's coroner's decision, was the first of its kind in the UK. Major Hill, 54, a retired Army officer with 20 years' experience as a field nurse, volunteered for service because of a shortage of medically-trained personnel. 'Inquiry promise' His health deteriorated throughout the 1990s and he died in March 2001, after founding the National Gulf War Veterans' and Families' Association. Cheshire coroner Nicholas Rheinberg ruled at the Warrington inquest that he had died from natural causes "to which service in the 1991 Gulf campaign contributed". Lord Morris said Major Hill's widow, Carole, told him that before becoming prime minister, Tony Blair had promised her dying husband that if Labour won power he would ensure that these veterans got a full public inquiry. "These are matters which I shall be raising in the House of Lords," said Lord Morris. "Scores of Gulf War veterans have been taken ill and have died prematurely. "This inquest ruling is something which the Ministry of Defence must respond to." Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/England/Manchester/3418479.stm DU NEWS 6) Bombs and Brains Don't Mix How Military Exercises Caused Devastating Neurological Damage to Civilians January 31, 2004 (Montreal) - A famed ”Mad Cow Disease” researcher has now turned his attention to other diseases of the brain, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Disease, and has found what he thinks is a ”smoking gun” on the small South Pacific island of Guam. The island was occupied by the Japanese during WWII and was eventually liberated by US forces after heavy fighting. Guam today has very high rates of various neurodegenerative diseases. And these two facts are not at all independent of one another, as many people maintain, claims Mark Purdey, columnist for the investigative online magazine RedFlagsDaily. Purdey makes the case that the environmental contamination caused by the aerial bombing off the coast of Guam and other events related to the US military presence there in the decades following the US liberation, are the real cause of the high rates of brain maladies afflicting the inhabitants. And Purdey is not the only one who feels this way. During a BBC documentary entitled “Poisons in Paradise” one resident of the Island recalls the WWII fighting and states “There was something in the bomb that was polluting the water. The children at that time were bathing in it and drinking it.” The environment in certain areas of Guam is heavily polluted with toxins, including radioactive ones, such as strontium, barium, cesium, according to Purdey. This is due to radioactive decontamination performed routinely on military ships off the coast. Regarding his opinions on sensitive and controversial subjects, Purdey certainly pulls no punches. About weapons of mass destruction, he states: ”The only difference between the positions of the developed vis-a-vis the undeveloped nations regarding their handling of weapons of mass destruction, is that the less sophisticated ‘rogue’ states have not yet developed a sufficiently watertight infrastructure of secrecy and mass media spin to keep their various acts of human and ecological barbarism under wraps.” The complete article can be found at http://www.redflagsweekly.com/conferences/mad_cow/2004_jan13.html 7) US Military Wreaks Worldwide Environmental Havoc by Heather Wokusch January 24, 2004 http://antiwar.com/orig/wokusch.php?articleid=1761 While some German politicians are worried about the closing of US military bases in their regions, others fear nasty surprises will surface after the Americans depart. The United States has consistently valued military power more than the environment - but at what price? Some in the White House argue that US national interests transcend greenie niceties, and this certainly was the case with Bush's 3-day stay at Buckingham Palace last year. US security forces trashed the Royal Gardens, historic statues and even the palace itself in an effort to provide the best environment for the president. The Queen's ensuing outrage didn't seem to bother Washington: if US self-protection mandates despoiling a patch of land far away, then so be it. The issue of US military bases overseas arouses similar conflicts. According to Gary Vest, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, "There is not a [US] military base in the world that doesn't have some soil or ground water contamination. That is just a given." 8) Anti-War Group Stage Protest At Arms Depot A Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster could happen in Warwickshire, according to anti-war campaigners. 21 January 2004 Leamington UK Courier http://www.leamingtonspatoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=691&ArticleID=727125 They staged a demonstration outside the DM Kineton arms depot on Saturday, protesting against the storage of weapons containing depleted uranium - which they say could lead to widespread radioactive contamination if there was a serious accident or terrorist attack. Long Itchington resident Richard Williams was part of the 15-strong group, who called themselves the Warwickshire Weapons Inspectors. He said: "We succeeded in getting our message across, but we didn't have any joy in our attempts to get into the base itself. "We want people to be aware of what is really going on here. These weapons could cause a major contamination of this densely-populated region if there was an accident. This could lead to mass evacuation, and the sealing-off of a large area of the Midlands for decades, even centuries - as has happened in Chernobyl. 9) "Networking for Environmental Justice" Stephanie Ariganello staff writer Arden Hills Bulletin 1-14-2003 Concern over possible depleted uranium leaks and remediation clean up drew residential crowds to discussions regarding the former Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant in Arden Hills. On Monday, Jan. 5, a national representative for the Environmental Protection Agency headed a presentation regarding depleted uranium on former TCAAP land. On Jan. 6 the TCAAP Restoration Advisory Board held a regular meeting to discuss the pending five-year environmental review conducted through the United States Army. Depleted uranium was used in the production of certain munitions in what was known as Building 502 on TCAAP property. Alliant Techsystems Inc., a child company to Honeywell, was the manufacturer of the DU shells and penetrators from the 1970s until the late 80s or early 90s. Alliant’s largest customer is the U.S. Department of Defense. DU is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process for nuclear fuel and weapons-grade uranium production. It is considered waste material and under strict storage requirements because of its radioactive nature. The first meeting served as a forum for informing residents on the basics of the production and clean up efforts. According to some attendees, questions still remain unanswered. Most of the frustration surrounding the issue seems to come from the “compartmentalizing” of the government agencies. The EPA, though involved in the remediation on some level and enforcer of standards, defers to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on sites involving substances like depleted uranium. DU resurfaced during the RAB meeting the following evening, as many questioned its role in the five-year environmental assessment. One man in the audience stood to ask if the DU had been removed completely www.miltoxproj.org 10) Uranium in Your Koolaide Ewa Jasiewicz, Occupation Watch Occupied Basra DU - What is it? Depleted Uranium is a highly toxic heavy metal derived from nuclear bomb and fuel waste. It's heavy weight and pyrophoric qualities cause it to burn-melt like a blowtorch through steel when a DU coated/loaded penetrator, self-sharpening by nature, strikes a hard target. It's mainly used to incinerate battle tanks, and on contact pulverizes into breathable aerosol-like dust that can travel 26 miles and remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years. Despite the name "Depleted" Uranium, DU has 60% the radioactivity of natural uranium, which is pure uranium, and all uranium whether "natural", "depleted" or "enriched" is a chemical and radiological toxic substance emitting alpha, beta and gamma particles, all of which have a destructive effect on the cellular make-up of the human body, ie they attack the human body at the most essential, primary and vital levels. Imagine the effect of DU weapons on tanks and compare it to that of the after-drift and settlement into water systems, soil, vegetation, and the animal/human body. The energy of a single alpha particle, never mind the gamma, the heaviest penetrating rays known to science - is more than the amount required to damage important macromolecules (the glue that holds us together) such as DNA, RNA, enzymes and proteins. It does this by breaking molecular bonds and chemical reactions, which alter or destroy the shape, organization and function of these essential life sustaining molecules. DU particles have the capacity to penetrate, corrode, crack and break down the building bricks of human life within the body, through generating cancer. It can kill, slowly and undetectably at first, with the effects of DU invisible for the first 4 years of exposure. According to Dr Durakovic, a former US army colonel and current professor of medicine, in the course of one year, 1 milligram of uranium emits 390 million alpha particles, 780 million beta particles and associated gamma rays. This is over one billion high-energy, ionizing, radioactive particles and rays which can produce extensive biological damage biological warfare fought out across the inner terrains of the human body: attacking the ovaries, lungs, lymph nodes, kidneys, breast, blood, bones, brain, stomach and fetuses. There are over 1000 different cancer types known to medical science. Cancer means mutated cells. The body's immune system kicks in to combat the cancerous cells and in doing so begins to attack the whole body. White blood cells do the fighting. They're designed to attack any foreign cells, or any foreign object entering the body, be it viruses, mutated cells or even organs such as mismatched transplanted kidneys. As cancer spreads through the body, the immune system strategy is to try to defeat it. Cancer cells divide rapidly, overtake other cells and can spread faster than the immune system can react. Death envelops when cancerous cells reach a critical mass in the body, attacking and multiplying through mutating every cell around them. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/01/25/1998471 11) Cluster Bombs: War Crimes of the Bush Administration, by Paul Rockwell 2004-01-30 | The formal war in Iraq has ended, and most of the big guns have fallen silent. Yet the death toll continues to rise, not merely because of the brutality of occupation and the resistance, but because of one of the most heinous, unpredictable weapons of modern war-the cluster bomb. All over Iraq, unexploded cluster bombs, originally dropped by U.S. troops in populated areas, are still killing and maiming civilians, farm animals, wildlife-any living thing that touches them by accident. Under Article 85 of the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to launch "an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or injury to civilians." Under the Hague Conventions, Article 22 and 23, "The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited," and "It is especially forbidden to kill treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army." A cluster bomb is a 14-foot weapon that weighs about 1,000 pounds. When it explodes it sprays hundreds of smaller bomblets over an area the size of two or three football fields. The bomblets are bright yellow and look like beer cans. And because they look like playthings, thousands of children have been killed by dormant bomblets in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. Each bomblet sprays flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter inch of steel. The failure rate, the unexploded rate, is very high, often around 15 to 20 percent. When bomblets fail to detonate on the first round, they become land mines that explode on simple touch at any time. Human Rights Watch reports that 1600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians have been killed, many more injured, by explosive duds following the Persian Gulf war. Under the Geneva Conventions, cluster bombs are criminal weapons because it is impossible to use them in significant numbers without indiscriminate effects. In the war in Bosnia in 1995, Major General Michael Ryan recognized the inherent danger to civilians and, out of respect for the laws of war, prohibited the use of cluster bombs in the European theatre. According to Air Force reports, "The problem was that the fragmentation pattern was too large to sufficiently limit collateral damage and there was also the further problem of potential unexploded ordinance." http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=1397&blz=1 EVENTS 12) MIT's Program on Human Rights & Justice, in Cambridge Massachusetts presents Depleted Uranium Anti-Tank Shells: Toxic Contaminant or Smart Technology? Saturday March 6, 2004 Building 34, Room 101 1:00-5:00 p.m. Alexandra Miller, Radiologist, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute Ken Czerwinski, former MIT Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering Jan Snihs, Researcher, Swedish Radiation Protection Institute; scientific leader, UN Environmental Programme, Kosovo Michael Kilpatrick, Deputy Director, Deployment Health Support, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dan Fahey, Policy analyst, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; former US veteran, Persian Gulf, 1991 Jim Walsh, Executive Director, Managing the Atom Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University Several of these folks will be apologists. I want to be there nonetheless! Anyone have pictures of sick vets to share? 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