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                         NUCLEAR POLICY
 
1 US: United Press International: Bad intel on Iraq led to war, says S
2 Guardian Unlimited: The claims and the reality
3 Guardian Unlimited: Spy chiefs 'withdrew' Saddam arms claim
4 Guardian Unlimited: CIA critical of British uranium claim
5 AU Townsville Bulletin: Downer rejects war report 
6 US: New York Times: Excerpts From Two Senators' Views About Prewar 
7 US: New York Times: Opinion > The Senate Report
8 US: New York Times Conclusions: Powell's 'Solid' C.I.A. Tips Were So
9 BBC: Q: The Butler intelligence inquiry 
10 BBC: CIA shoulders the blame 
11 BBC: Bush pledges intelligence reforms 
12 BBC: Long history of intelligence failures 
13 Sunday Herald: The real intelligence failure was Blair and Bushs - 
14 Sunday Herald: Whose Head Will The Butler Serve Up? - 
15 US: Wichita Eagle: Now focus turns to White House
16 US: Wichita Eagle EDITORIAL: FAILURE
17 US: OpEd.com: Senate "Report" White-Washes "Bad Intelligence" Story 
18 Scotsman.com: PM and spies at war over Iraq report
19 US: MSNBC - 'The Dots Never Existed'
20 Scotsman.com: Blair Must 'Shoulder Blame' for Intelligence Failings
21 US: Online NewsHour: Senate Releases Report Critical of CIA Prewar I
22 UK Independent: The most iconic city on the US West Coast
23 UK Independent: How Blair stood his ground as it fell away 
24 UK Independent: Defiant Blair faces censure from Butler over Iraq wa
25 AFP: IAEA could soon close dossier on Iran: senior Russian official
26 AFP: Price negotiations holding up launch of Bushehr - Russian offic
27 AFP: Iran says does not fear nuclear dossier being referred to UN
28 Guardian Unlimited: Rice Caps Asian Tour Focused on Nukes
29 AFP: "So much is possible" for NKorea in return for nuclear dismantl
30 Korea Herald: [EDITORIAL]Historical provocation   
31 Briton sues US giant over depleted uranium poisoning, could
32 [DU-WATCH] Britian sues US giant over 'uranium poison'
33 Washington Times: Inside the Ring - 
34 IAEA: IAEA Chief Eyes Middle East Free of Nuclear Weapons
 
                         NUCLEAR REACTORS
 
35 [DU-WATCH] Chernobyl: Kiddofspeed faked?
36 Globe and Mail: Nuclear's hidden costs   
37 Japan Times: Power failure halts Tepco reactor
38 US: SouthofBoston.com: Mediator joins Pilgrim's weekend summit
 
                          NUCLEAR SAFETY
 
39 BBC: 'Uranium poisoning' man sues
40 Scotsman.com: Worker Wins Legal Aid to Sue Firm over Du Contaminatio
41 ITAR-TASS: Russia and Germany to build facility to scrap decommissio
42 US: IAEA: Red Tides, Red Tape Cloud Life at Sea
 
                         NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE
 
43 [DU-WATCH] Yucca Flats knocked back - no early end to 30 year
44 US: Savannah River N-Waste Tanks Cracked, Rusted Or Leaked
45 Deseret news: Ruling on Yucca site delays waste delivery 
46 US: Rocky Mountain News: Canon City mill's quest for tainted soil st
47 US: DenverPost: Colo. rejects thorium waste
48 US: DenverPost: Colorado rejects radioactive waste from N.J.
49 US: Pasadena Star-News: Water plant on line by fall
50 The Australian: N-dump appeal to milk taxpayer 
51 The Australian: N-dump could cost Howard - Rann 
52 New York Times: Court Sets Back Federal Project on Atom Waste 
53 Las Vegas RJ: Opinions on Yucca Mountain vary in scientific communit
54 Las Vegas RJ: WEEK IN REVIEW: Yucca Mountain ruling half-full or hal
55 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: A lot more than 10,000 years 
56 Las Vegas RJ: JOHN L. SMITH: Yucca Mountain story offers Hollywood e
57 Las Vegas RJ: SCIENCE VERSUS POLITICS: Yucca ruling seen as bad for 
58 AFP: US court upholds Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, with toughe
59 Las Vegas RJ: Gibbons blames Tenet for intelligence errors 
60 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN DECISION: State claims court win 
61 Las Vegas RJ: U.S. COURT OF APPEALS RULINGS ON MAJOR CHARGES 
62 Las Vegas RJ: Project part of national platform 
63 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: ... but fight isn't over
64 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: State draws Yucca blood
65 Las Vegas SUN: Columnist Jeff German: Yucca ruling exposes Bush lies
66 RGJ: Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
67 RGJ: The dump’s dead, say Yucca foes
68 Sen: ENSIGN CELEBRATES YUCCA DECISION 
69 RGJ: Court decision makes Yucca moot issue in campaign, GOP says
70 Spectrum: How safe will nuclear waste really be? - Opinion -
71 US: The State: Nuclear waste tanks in poor condition
72 US: AP Wire Reports: S.C. Atomic Waste Tanks Damaged
73 US: Bradenton Herald: Officials to decide role in cleanup
74 Washington Times: Court upholds Nevada nuclear storage
75 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Yucca Mountain isn't so inevitable now
76 Congressman Jon Porter: Jon Porter Praises Today’s Yucca Decision
77 Nevada Appeal: Ruling halts Yucca Mountain plan
78 Nevada Appeal: Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain
79 Jim Gibbons: Decision is an Historic Victory for Nevada
80 Las Vegas SUN: Democratic Party platform includes anti-Yucca Mountai
81 US: courier post: GEMS landfill controversy far from resolved
82 AU ABC: Rann expects backdown on nuclear dump. 
83 US: Charleston.Net: Nuclear waste tank inspections raise worries 
 
                         NUCLEAR WEAPONS
 
 
                        US DEPT. OF ENERGY
 
84 [progchat_action] Classified Disks Missing From Los Alamos Lab
85 The Daily Camera: Public's role at Flats uncertain
86 New York Times: Los Alamos Missing Secret Data
87 ABQjournal: Classified Information Items Missing at LANL 
88 Washington Times: Los Alamos loses secret data
89 Tri-City Herald: GAO criticizes fast-track Hanford cleanup plan 
90 Lowcountry NOW: Old SRS tanks leak atomic waste
 
                          OTHER NUCLEAR
 
91 IAEA: The Scientists of Santiago
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                         FULL NEWS STORIES
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 1 United Press International: Bad intel on Iraq led to war, says Senate
 
By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor 
Published 7/9/2004 11:10 PM
	 		
WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- The Senate Friday published the 
unclassified version of its scathing report on the United States' 
flawed pre-war intelligence about Iraq, with lawmakers from both 
parties saying the U.S. confrontation with Saddam Hussein might 
have ended very differently if the country's leaders knew then 
what they know now.

 The report states that the central findings of the U.S. 
intelligence community, and in particular the CIA, that led to 
the 2003 military action against Iraq -- that Saddam's regime had 
biological and chemical weapons stockpiled and was trying to 
develop a nuclear bomb -- were inaccurate. 

The conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies "either overstated, 
or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence," according 
to the 521-page report.

 Intelligence analysts got on an "assumption train," said Sen. 
Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Select Committee on 
Intelligence, whose staff worked for a year to produce Friday's 
unanimously adopted report.

 "Assessments were built or were based on previous judgments 
without carrying forward the uncertainty of those judgments," he 
explained.

 The report also found that there was "a collective presumption" 
in the intelligence community -- shared globally by other spy 
agencies, the United Nations and many experts -- that Iraq "had 
an active and growing weapons of mass destruction program."

 This "groupthink" led analysts and their managers to play up 
ambiguous evidence that supported the thesis and play down 
anything that seemed to undermine it.

 The report states that officials did not adequately caveat or 
qualify their conclusions, given the paucity of hard information 
upon which most of them were based.

 Analysts have to make a clear distinction, said Roberts, 
"between what they know, what they don't know (and) what they 
think. ... As the report details, they did not do this." As a 
result, he said, policymakers -- in both the executive and the 
legislative branches -- remained in the dark about key 
uncertainties.

 Roberts said that these errors accounted for repeated statements 
that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction made by the 
administration and in particular the president. But he warned 
about the danger of those in glass houses throwing stones.

 President Bush "made very declarative statements," he said, but 
added, "We all did. Look at the statements that we've all made -- 
some of the people who are now being so terribly critical. We 
believed it. But the information was wrong."

 But Democrats took a different view, arguing both that the 
flawed intelligence did not vindicate the president and that the 
flaws were largely the ultimate fault of his administration, 
which had pressured analysts to come up with the conclusions they 
wanted.

 "Bad intelligence and bad policy are not mutually exclusive," 
said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "You can have both. And I happen to 
think that's what you had here."

 "It is no coincidence," stated Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Jay 
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., in an appendix offering additional views of 
committee Democrats, "that the analytical errors ... all broke in 
one direction."

 He said the analysis was produced "in a highly pressurized 
climate wherein senior administration officials were making the 
case for military action against Iraq through public and often 
definitive pronouncements."

 Nevertheless, Rockefeller told reporters Friday that there would 
have been no invasion of Iraq without the flawed intelligence.

 "We in Congress would not have authorized that war," he 
emphasized, "if we knew what we know now."

 Roberts said he did not know how the vote would have gone but 
that he would probably still have supported military action. He 
argued that the war would have simply taken a different form -- a 
humanitarian intervention of the type the United States had 
supported in Bosnia and Kosovo.

 "I think it would have been argued differently," he said. "I 
think perhaps that the battle plan would be different. ... But 
yes, I think I would have voted that way."

 The committee found one area in which the CIA's "judgments were 
reasonable, based on the available intelligence" according to 
Roberts -- the question of links between Saddam Hussein and 
al-Qaida.

 "The agency was also more careful to inform policymakers about 
uncertainties with their analysis," Roberts pointed out. 

Democrats were particularly scathing about the CIA's National 
Intelligence Assessment -- the document that set out the extent 
of U.S. knowledge about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, 
calling it "a rushed and sloppy product ... hastily cobbled 
together using stale, fragmentary and speculative intelligence 
reports and replete with factual errors and unsupported 
judgments."

 They also complained that it had to be requested by senators and 
was "forwarded to members of Congress mere days before votes 
would be taken to authorize the use of military force."

 Democrats also said they were frustrated by what was not in the 
report -- an examination of how policymakers had used the 
intelligence.

 "The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was -- in this 
senator's opinion -- ... exaggerated by Bush administration 
officials, was relegated to that second phase, as yet unbegun, of 
the committee investigation, along with other issues," said 
Rockefeller.

 Republicans said that the shortness of the legislative session 
remaining before November meant that the second phase would 
likely not be ready until after the election.

 Large portions of the report were redacted by the CIA, although 
Roberts said that the committee had made progress during six 
weeks of negotiations.

 Among the redactions are almost the entirety of two sections 
likely to be embarrassing to the CIA, according to the National 
Security Archive at George Washington University. The section 
following the conclusion that the CIA provided bad information to 
Secretary of State Colin Powell for his February 2003 United 
Nations address; and the discussion that follows the report's 
finding that the CIA's public presentation of Iraq intelligence 
in October 2002 misled the country by leaving out the caveats 
present in the classified versions.

 Roberts said the committee would continue to work to get more 
declassified. "We're not giving up," he said.

 --

 (Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)                
Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International
*****************************************************************
 2 Guardian Unlimited: The claims and the reality
 
Focus: the Butler report 
		
Sunday July 11, 2004 The Observer            
 		
45 minutes 

Claim:
 'Intelligence reports make clear that he sees the building up
of his WMD capability as vital to his strategic interests. His
military planning allows for WMD to be ready within 45 minutes
of an order to use them.' Government dossier on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction, 24 September, 2003. Tony Blair tells MPs
that Saddam Hussein 'has ... plans for the use of chemical and
biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes'. 

Reality:
 Sir Richard Dearlove, MI6 head, said the dossier should have
made clear the claim referred to battlefield weapons. A JIC
assessment before the war stated that the claim related to
munitions, not missiles. The claim came from the Iraqi National
Accord, which said it would take an average of 20 minutes to
deploy the weapons; the maximum time was 45 minutes. 

Mobile laboratories 

Claim:
 'We know that Iraq has at least seven mobile, biological agent
factories ... These are sophisticated facilities. For example,
they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can
produce enough dry, biological agent in a single month to kill
thousands upon thousands of people.' Remarks to the UN Security
Council by Colin Powell, 5 February, 2003 

Reality:
 Two lorry trailers loaded with laboratory equipment were found
in Iraq shortly after Saddam's regime fell. Coalition experts
concluded the equipment had been used for making hydrogen for
weather balloons. 

An Iraqi major, introduced to the Defence Intelligence Agency by
the Iraqi National Congress, supported claims before the war
that Iraq did have laboratories. But it became apparent that he
had been coached by the INC. 

Chemical and biological weapons 

Claim:
 JIC judged that Iraq had a 'usable' chemical and biological
weapons capability, which could be delivered by 'artillery,
missiles and possibly unmanned aerial vehicles'. 

In October 2002, the CIA said: 'If left unchecked, it [Baghdad]
probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.' 

Reality:
 The Iraq Survey Group scoured the country for a year. Its
interim report in October 2003 stated: 'Iraq did not have a
large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons programme
after 1991.' 

A JIC report, days before the invasion of Iraq last year,
indicated that if such weapons had once existed, they were now
in pieces. 
	
   Chronology  

Iraq timeline: Feb 1 2004 - present
Iraq timeline: July 16 1979 - Jan 31 2004

   Useful links  

Provisional authority: rebuilding Iraq
Iraqi-American chamber of commerce
cnn.com: David Kay's evidence to US Senate committee

[UP] 

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
 3 Guardian Unlimited: Spy chiefs 'withdrew' Saddam arms claim
 
  Special report: the Butler report

Gaby Hinsliff and Antony Barnett
Sunday July 11, 2004
 		
Tony Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a 'current and 
serious' threat to Britain is challenged by dramatic new 
allegations today that Britain's spy chiefs have retracted the 
intelligence on which it was based. 

The supposed proof that the Iraqi dictator was still trying, even 
in the run-up to war, to produce chemical and biological weapons 
became crucial to the Prime Minister's case for urgent military 
action rather than waiting for inspectors to finish their task. 

Yet, according to a senior intelligence source interviewed by 
BBC1's Panorama tonight, MI6 has since taken the rare step of 
withdrawing the intelligence assessment that underpinned the 
claim that Saddam had continued to produce WMD - an admission 
that it was fundamentally unreliable. 

The charge leaves Blair open to serious questions over why, if 
the nature of the proof had changed, he did not tell the public 
that the evidence of WMD was crumbling beneath him. 

It will increase speculation that he may be forced to disown 
chunks of the controversial September dossier on banned weapons 
when Lord Butler publishes his report this week on the handling 
of intelligence on Iraq. 

Yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, weighed 
into the debate, warning that Blair would be judged before God 
for his actions over Iraq and suggesting he would struggle with 
his conscience. Asked how Blair would account for himself, 
Williams answered: 'At the judgment seat.' For Christians, that 
is the point of entry either to heaven or to hell. 'When you 
acknowledge that you have taken a risk which has not paid off, 
which has cost, and that cost does not seem be justified, that's 
the punishment,' he added. 

The fresh blow comes with jitters sweeping Whitehall over the 
Butler report. Blairites fear that if it is genuinely damaging, 
it could provoke fresh attempts among Gordon Brown's supporters 
to force the Prime Minister to stand down. 

Tensions bubbled to the surface yesterday as it emerged that 
Blair seriously considered resigning during his most difficult 
period this year, the fortnight running up to June's local 
elections, when he came under repeated attack over the war. 

Friends dismissed suggestions that cabinet loyalists John Reid, 
Tessa Jowell, Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt had to beg him 
not to go. But it is clear he did ponder whether he had become a 
liability, prompting panic among allies who feared Brown would 
step into his shoes. 

'The idea that there was a concerted trek up Downing Street to 
persuade him to stay is basically wrong,' said one ally. 'But 
people like Charles and John see a lot of Tony. The newspapers 
were full of "Blair's going" stories. If they didn't take the 
opportunity to say "I hope you're not", it would be surprising.' 

Amid reports that it was Cherie Blair who actually persuaded her 
husband to stay on, another aide said decisions on the future 
were private ones made between the couple. 

Blair's confidence now appears restored, but it will be tested in 
the coming week. Butler is expected to make sweeping criticisms 
of the way the public case for war was handled - and Downing 
Street's failure to grasp the limitations of intelligence. 

Tonight's Panorama focuses on secret intelligence produced during 
the days before the dossier was published. This follows an 
anguished appeal from Downing Street for more convincing 
evidence. 

After the undisclosed material emerged, John Scarlett - chair of 
the Joint Intelligence Committee which oversaw the dossier 
process - hardened up the draft dossier's suggestion that Iraq 
'probably' had more recently produced stocks of banned weapons to 
the assertion that it 'has' continued to produce them. That 
allowed Blair to claim dramatically that evidence received only 
'in recent months' showed Saddam was still generating WMD. 

Yet the intelligence underpinning this claim was subsequently 
withdrawn by MI6, which decided it could not be relied upon, 
according to the senior intelligence source interviewed by 
Panorama. This raised serious questions over the quality of the 
work that went into the dossier, and how far it can now be 
trusted. 

Although it is not known exactly when MI6 changed its mind, the 
revelation will prompt calls for Blair to put the record straight 
publicly about what he knew, when. 

Downing Street yesterday refused to say whether Blair stood by 
his original claim that Iraq had been a 'current and serious 
threat', pending Butler's findings. While the Prime Minister 
confessed last week that WMD might not be found, he has continued 
to insist that Saddam was still a threat. 

When he submits his report on Wednesday, Butler is expected to 
conclude that there were serious errors in British intelligence 
gathering and assessment - mirroring those of the CIA identified 
by a US senate inquiry last week. 

Scarlett may be criticised for being drawn into the 'magic 
circle' of Downing Street intimates rather than remaining 
impartial. However, Blair will fight to keep the man he promoted 
to the post of head of MI6 once the war was over. 

There were signs last night that Lord Goldsmith, the 
Attorney-General, will also escape serious censure over his 
advice on the legality of the war, despite evidence passed to 
Butler suggesting he changed his mind as the invasion drew 
closer. 

Goldsmith wrote a note to Blair in the run-up to war warning that 
the invasion could be illegal without a second UN resolution 
authorising military force, The Observer can reveal, with 
Whitehall sources admitting the legal advice process was 'messy'. 

However, Downing Street is also expected to mount a robust 
defence of Goldsmith, arguing that government lawyers regularly 
rehearse both sides of the argument. 
	
 	
[UP] 

      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
 4 Guardian Unlimited: CIA critical of British uranium claim
                                	
[UP] 

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday July 10, 2004
The Guardian 		
 		
Most of the details about Britain's role in promoting bogus 
intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons were discreetly hidden 
under the censor's black marker pen in yesterday's Senate report. 

However, enough was left uncensored to show that the CIA thought 
very little of the work of its British counterparts when it came 
to Saddam's supposed attempts to buy uranium in Niger. 

The issue came up as the White House was preparing a landmark 
speech for the president in Cincinnati in October 2002, in which 
Mr Bush would say: "The regime has been caught attempting to 
purchase up to 500 tonnes of uranium oxide from Africa - an 
essential ingredient in the enrichment process." 

The CIA, aware that the claim was built largely on information 
passed to them by British intelligence, struggled to get the line 
removed. "We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this 
issue," one senior CIA official wrote in a memorandum to the 
national security council. The line was dropped from the speech. 

However, it reappeared in the president's State of the Union 
address the following January, causing consternation in CIA 
ranks. It may be that the White House felt obliged to back up the 
British claims. 

According to the senate report, one CIA analyst reported being 
told by a staff member at the national security council that to 
remove all reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa 
"would leave the British flapping in the wind". 

It comes as the Butler report is about to pronounce on Britain's 
use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Lord Butler is 
expected to single out the claim that Iraqi forces could deploy 
chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes - a claim even the 
CIA did not make. 

Unlike the Senate committee - which did not investigate claims 
about how the White House used or abused intelligence - Lord 
Butler's mandate included the way the British government did. 
	
 	
        Special report Iraq

Chronology Iraq timeline: Feb 1 2004 - present Iraq timeline: 
July 16 1979 - Jan 31 2004

Interactive guides Click-through graphics on Iraq

Key documents
Full text of speeches and documents

Audio reports
Audio reports on Iraq

More special reports
Politics and the war
Aid for Iraq
Iraq - the media war
The anti-war movement
28.01.2003: Guide to anti-war websites

Useful links
Provisional authority: rebuilding Iraq
Iraqi-American chamber of commerce
cnn.com: David Kay's evidence to US Senate committee

[UP] 

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
 5 AU Townsville Bulletin: Downer rejects war report 

11 July 2004                                                                                                                     

Source: Sunday Herald Sun                                                       

By Lincoln Wright

GOING to war in Iraq was still the right thing to do, Foreign 
Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday.

Mr Downer has dismissed the findings of a US Senate report that 
found there was little evidence Iraq had weapons of mass 
destruction. 

The report said the CIA had made claims that were overstated or 
not based on evidence. 

The report found no proof the Bush Administration had pressured 
the CIA to adopt a hard line on Saddam's weapons program, but 
that there were serious mistakes in an October 2002 CIA 
intelligence brief into Iraq's weapons plans. 

But Mr Downer maintained that Iraq did, in fact, have chemical 
and biological weapons programs, as well as illegal missiles. And 
he said the liberation of Iraq had made the world safer. 

"In the end, the right decision was made to overthrow Saddam 
Hussein's regime and eliminate that threat to human rights, 
neighbouring countries and the international community," he said. 

But the Opposition described the report as evidence of the worst 
intelligence failure in Australian history. 

Foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd called on Prime Minister 
John Howard to apologise. 

"If John Howard had any sense of self-respect today, he would 
apologise to the Australian people for taking them to war on the 
basis of a lie," Mr Rudd said. 

"John Howard claimed that Iraq possessed stockpiles of completed 
chemical and biological weapons. 

"He said we had to go to war to remove those weapons so they 
would not get into the hands of terrorists." 

The US Senate report found the CIA's assessment of Iraq's 
ballistic programs to be adequate. 

But it said most key judgments about Iraq's nuclear capacity, and 
its chemical and biological weapons programs, did not follow from 
the available intelligence. 

Mr Rudd said it was a mistake for Australia to rely on US 
intelligence without having enough analysts in Canberra checking 
their reports. 

Greens Senator Bob Brown said the report clearly showed the war 
was based on flimsy premises. 

"The weapons of mass destruction reason (for war) was a ruse," 
Senator Brown said. 
		 		 		 			 	 		 		 		 	 			
  privacy policy © The North Queensland Newspaper Company Pty
Ltd   
*****************************************************************
 6 New York Times: Excerpts From Two Senators' Views About Prewar 
Assessments of Iraq
 
Published: July 10, 2004

[W] ASHINGTON, July 9 — Excerpts from opening statements of 
Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence 
Committee, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, vice chairman of 
the committee, at a news conference on Friday, as recorded by 
Federal News Service Inc., and the text of the committee's 
report:

Comments by Senator Roberts 

A year ago, the Senate Committee on Intelligence made a 
commitment to the Congress and the American people that we should 
examine the quality and the quantity of intelligence that led to 
the war in Iraq. Now, the debate over many aspects of the United 
States liberation of Iraq will likely continue for decades, but 
one fact is now clear: before the war, the United States 
intelligence community told the president, as well as the 
Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of 
chemical and biological weapons, and if left unchecked, would 
probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade. Well, today we 
know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, 
they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the 
available intelligence. The report the committee is releasing 
today seeks to explain how that happened. 

And I want the American people to know — we both want the 
American people to know — that the committee's 12-month inquiry 
into the United States intelligence community's prewar 
assessments with regard to Iraq is without precedent in the 
history of the committee. The committee has looked behind the 
intelligence community's assessments to evaluate not only the 
quantity and quality of the intelligence upon which it has based 
those assessments, but also whether or not those assessments 
themselves were reasonable. 

The report contains a detailed and a meticulous recitation of the 
intelligence reporting and the evolution of the analyses. From 
the details, a report emerges that is very critical of the 
intelligence community's performance. This has not been a 
pleasant task, but it is based on fact. 

Now, while criticism is never easy to accept, I think 
professionals understand the need for self-examination. And let 
me emphasize, the men and women of the intelligence community are 
first and foremost true and dedicated professionals. 

Now this report is long and detailed. I encourage all of you to 
take the time to digest as much of it as you can. Obviously while 
it is too large for either one of us to summarize, I can point 
out some of the highlights. 

First of all, most of the key judgments in the October 2002 
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's W.M.D. programs were 
either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence 
reporting. Here are some examples of statements from the key 
judgments: 

Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program. 

Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. 

Iraq was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, a U.A.V., 
probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents. 

And all key aspects — research and development and production — 
of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are active and 
that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were 
before the gulf war. 

Now these are very emphatic statements. Simply put, they were not 
supported by the intelligence which the community supplied to the 
committee, and they should not have been included in the N.I.E. 

Second, in the committee's view, the intelligence community did 
not accurately or adequately explain the uncertainties behind the 
judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to 
policy makers, both in the executive branch and here on Capitol 
Hill. Intelligence analysts are charged with interpreting and 
assessing the intelligence reporting and with clearly conveying 
to policy makers the difference between what they know, what they 
don't know, what they think and then making sure that the policy 
makers understand that difference. As the report details, they 
did not do this with respect to the October 2002 N.I.E. 

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>>  
Third, the committee concluded that the intelligence community 
was suffering from what we call a collective groupthink, which 
led analysts and collectors and managers to presume that Iraq had 
active and growing W.M.D. programs. This groupthink caused the 
community to interpret ambiguous evidence, such as the 
procurement of dual-use technology, as conclusive evidence of the 
existence of W.M.D. programs.



While we did not specifically address it in our report, it is 
clear that this groupthink also extended to our allies and to the 
United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did 
believe that Saddam Hussein had active W.M.D. programs. This was 
a global intelligence failure.

Fourth, the committee concluded that in a few significant 
instances, the analysis in the N.I.E. suffered from what we call 
a layering effect.

Assessments were built or were based on previous judgments 
without carrying forward the uncertainty of those judgments. This 
is what we have termed the "intelligence assumption train."

Layering is a necessary tool for analysts. There's no question 
about that. However, if ongoing underlying questions and 
uncertainties are not incorporated into the subsequent 
intelligence products, then the subsequent assessment can be - 
unbeknownst to the policy maker, become increasingly inaccurate; 
in other words, the assumption train simply becomes longer.

Fifth, the committee concluded there was a failure by 
intelligence community managers to adequately encourage analysts 
to challenge their assumptions, to fully consider alternative 
arguments, to accurately characterize intelligence reporting, and 
to counsel analysts who had lost their objectivity.

Sixth, the committee concluded that there were significant 
shortcomings on almost every aspect of the intelligence 
community's human intelligence collection efforts against the 
Iraqi W.M.D. target. Most alarming, after 1998 and the exit of 
the United Nations inspectors, the C.I.A. had no human 
intelligence sources inside Iraq who were collecting against the 
W.M.D. target. In addition to this lack of good source reporting, 
the C.I.A. did not share its sensitive human intelligence 
reporting. Most if not all of these problems stem from a broken 
corporate culture and poor management, and cannot be solved by 
simply adding funding and also personnel.

Seventh, the committee concluded the C.I.A. abused its unique 
position in the intelligence community to the detriment of this 
nation's prewar analysis in regards to Iraq's W.M.D. programs. In 
a number of cases, the C.I.A. sequestered significant reportable 
intelligence and prevented information from being shared with all 
source analysts at other intelligence agencies. This problem also 
plagued the terrorism analysts as they examined Iraq's links to 
terrorists. But with respect to Saddam Hussein's regime and his 
link to terrorists, the committee did find that the C.I.A. 
judgments were reasonable, based on the available intelligence.

The agency was also more careful to inform policy makers about 
uncertainties with their analysis.

Finally, the committee found no evidence that the intelligence 
community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence 
on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result 
of politics or pressure. In the end, what the president and the 
Congress used to send the country to war was information that was 
provided by the intelligence community, and that information was 
flawed.

So the question now is, where do we go from here? As I have said 
before, this report cries out for reform. However, it is 
incumbent on the committee and the Congress to think responsibly 
and carefully about the most effective reforms. We must base 
whatever recommendations we ultimately make on the facts and 
considered judgment, not on expediency or media-generated 
momentum.

I intend, we intend for the committee to examine closely all 
proposals for change, keeping in mind that we should first do no 
harm, and avoid as best we can the law of unintended 
consequences. Congress should not legislate change merely for the 
sake of change. We should really direct our actions only against 
identifiable problems that lend themselves to legislative 
solutions. With these thoughts in mind, we intend to work with 
the executive branch, with our counterparts in the House of 
Representatives, and yes, with the people who are doing good work 
in the intelligence community, to construct an intelligence 
capability worthy of this great nation and the men and women who 
perform this difficult and often dangerous work. . . .

Comments by Senator Rockefeller 

There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war 
in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence 
failures in the history of the nation. The fact is that the 
administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad 
information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress would 
not have authorized that war - we would NOT have authorized that 
war - with 75 votes if we knew what we know now.



Leading up to Sept. 11, our government didn't connect the dots. 
In Iraq, we are even more culpable because the dots themselves 
never existed. Tragically, the intelligence failure set forth in 
this report will affect our national security for generations to 
come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world 
has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans 
in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, 
our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before.

We found the intelligence judgments regarding Iraq's weapons of 
mass destruction were not supported by the underlying 
intelligence. And here my words will parallel, in many respects, 
what Chairman Roberts has said. They were not supported by 
underlying intelligence. The judgments overstated what analysts 
knew and then failed to explain the uncertainty or uncertainties 
behind those judgments - in other words, the judgment with the 
caveats of "We generally feel this way, but there are those in 
the State Department, the Department of Energy, or whatever, who 
feel differently." Aluminum tubes was an example of that.

The report points out the intelligence community began with a 
presumption, as Chairman Roberts has said, that Iraq had the 
weapons, never questioned the assumption that Iraq had the 
weapons, and viewed virtually every bit of ambiguous information 
as supporting the fact that the weapons were there.

I just interrupt myself to point out that the head of Unscom, 
Rolf Ekeus, always had as a theory - and still does - that those 
so- called weapons of mass destruction, which we are still 
looking for, were in fact left over and simply a result of the 
10-year war with Iran, and that all of the rest of it was what 
United Nations inspectors and others and us tried to find.

Our human intelligence collection, as Pat Roberts has pointed 
out, was inadequate. Not only did we not have people on the 
ground in 1998 - after 1998, when the inspectors left; but we 
relied, when they had left, too much on the fragmentary reporting 
from years before, from the early 90's, from the post-Iran-Iraq 
war situation, and were never able to pin anything down.

Our report found that the intelligence community's judgments were 
right on Iraq's ties to terrorists, which is another way of 
saying that the administration's conclusions were wrong, and that 
is, of the relationship, the formal relationship, however you 
want to describe it, between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no evidence 
that existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in Al Qaeda's 
terrorist attacks, including 9/11, which, through the device of 
Mohammed Atta and others, the debate continues almost up until 
two months ago, at least on the part of the vice president

Our report underscores the need for reforming the intelligence 
community . . . we have to have people whose job it is to 
specifically challenge the assumptions that analysts have come up 
with; that is their work, to challenge the assumptions on whether 
it's W.M.D. or whether it's the National Intelligence Estimate; 
that there are those who are there who are contrarian analysts, 
so to speak, to try and pick apart and challenge what those 
assumptions might be.

Do I feel a sense of frustration together with Chairman Roberts 
that we have not been able to do that because of the weight of 
511 pages and the time that that required, which is almost total? 
Yes, I think we both feel that frustration.

But we've got to do it right. We can't just do it for the sake of 
doing it. But we've got to do it fast. 

This business that went on yesterday about threat levels and 
what's going to happen at conventions and other things, all of 
this simply is a way of saying time has run out. The 9/11 victims 
have a right to be frustrated, and their families have a right to 
be frustrated by the fact that we have not actually come up with 
and legislated, where we could, the reforms of intelligence. But 
we've not been able to do that because of the nature of this 
report and the investigation required of it, and the paucity of 
our staff, which has to be another intelligence reform, that the 
nature of the Intelligence Committee itself changes.



Now, the report does an excellent job of pointing out the 
intelligence community's shortcomings. I have to say, it is only 
an incomplete picture of what occurred during the national debate 
over the decision to invade Iraq.

The report we are releasing today is the first phase of the 
two-part committee investigation. Regrettably, whereas I consider 
reform incredibly important, I also consider the nature of the 
interaction, or the pressure, or the shaping of intelligence by 
endless numbers of public statements emanating from all levels 
high up in the administration, virtually saying that time has run 
out; you know: "mushroom cloud," "grave and growing," "imminent" 
by some, evidence supports the fact that they are developing 
their nuclear weapons program - all the rest of it. That whole 
aspect is being relegated to the second part of our report, and I 
regret that. I felt that we should and could have addressed all 
of these matters as a single matter, because under the rules of 
the committee, we can do that. But that was not possible. And so 
we moved forward, we moved forward and produced a very good piece 
of work.

The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was - in this 
senator's opinion, was exaggerated by the Bush administration 
officials, was relegated to that second phase, as yet unbegun, of 
the committee investigation, along with other issues.

We've done a little bit of work on the No. 3 guy in the Defense 
Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run 
intelligence past the intelligence community altogether; his 
relationship with the I.N.C. and Chalabi, who was very much in 
favor with the administration, wanting them to come on in; and 
was he running a private intelligence failure, which is not 
lawful.

As a result, the committee's report fails to fully explain the 
environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence 
community officials were asked to render judgments on matters 
relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush 
administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their 
conclusions publicly. It was clear to all of us in this room who 
were watching that and to many others that they had made up their 
mind that they were going to go to war. And I believe to this 
day, and I always have and I've said so publicly many times in 
regretting my vote, that there was a predetermination, even going 
back to 1998 and the letter to Bill Clinton, saying the time for 
diplomacy has ended and now is the time for military force - use 
of military force.

So the justification for the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq was: 1, 
that Iraq had stockpiled weapons, chemical and biological; 2, 
that they were actively pursuing a nuclear weapon; 3, that Iraq 
might use its alliances with terrorist organizations, including 
Al Qaeda, to use these weapons to strike at the United States. 
And in one part of our report, I believe we use the word even the 
use of this in the homeland, the United States.

The N.I.E. - I'm sorry.

The first two administration points, the case for invasion, the 
committee details, as Chairman Roberts has indicated, how these 
key pillars were not supported and should not have been there. 
The National Intelligence Estimate was given to us at our request 
- at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee - about 10 
days before the vote came.

It was done in three weeks. It was thrown together. It was based 
upon fragmentary intelligence, ancient intelligence. 

And then there was this enormous difference between the 
classified version, where all kinds of doubts and caveats were 
included, and then the white paper, which was the unclassified 
version, which all of a sudden, everything moved in one direction 
- towards they've got them, they're ready to use them and watch 
out. I don't think that was an accident.



Let me just finish by saying - again, an emphasis on this 
relentless public campaign prior to the war which repeatedly 
characterized the Iraqi weapons programs in more ominous and 
threatening terms than any intelligence would have allowed. In 
short, we went to war in Iraq based on false claims.

So in conclusion, during a critical time in our nation's history 
- 18-month period spanning the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 
2001, to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003 - the credibility 
of the intelligence community, which is the spear tip of all 
actions, and particularly under a doctrine of pre-emption, was 
significantly compromised.

Excerpts From the Report

OVERALL CONCLUSIONS:

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

1. Most of the major key judgments in the intelligence 
community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq's 
Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either 
overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence 
reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade 
craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.

2. The intelligence community did not accurately or adequately 
explain to policy makers the uncertainties behind the judgments 
in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

3. The intelligence community suffered from a collective 
presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass 
destruction program. This groupthink dynamic led intelligence 
community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret 
ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a W.M.D. program 
as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have 
active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs. This 
presumption was so strong that formalized I.C. mechanisms 
established to challenge assumptions and groupthink were not 
utilized.

4. In a few significant instances, the analysis in the National 
Intelligence Estimate suffers from a "layering" effect whereby 
assessments were built based on previous judgments without 
carrying forward the uncertainties of the underlying judgments.

5. In each instance where the committee found an analytic or 
collection failure, it resulted in part from a failure of 
intelligence community managers throughout their leadership 
chains to adequately supervise the work of their analysts and 
collectors. They did not encourage analysts to challenge their 
assumptions, fully consider alternative arguments, accurately 
characterize the intelligence reporting, or counsel analysts who 
lost their objectivity.

6. The committee found significant short-comings in almost every 
aspect of the intelligence community's human intelligence 
collection efforts against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction 
activities, in particular that the community had no sources 
collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 
1998. Most, if not all, of these problems stem from a broken 
corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by 
additional funding and personnel.

7. The Central Intelligence Agency, in several significant 
instances, abused its unique position in the intelligence 
community, particularly in terms of information sharing, to the 
detriment of the intelligence community's prewar analysis 
concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

OVERALL CONCLUSIONS: TERRORISM

8. Intelligence community analysts lack a consistent post-Sept. 
11 approach to analyzing and reporting on terrorist threats.

9. Source protection policies within the intelligence community 
direct or encourage reports officers to exclude relevant detail 
about the nature of their sources. As a result, analysts 
community-wide are unable to make fully informed judgments about 
the information they receive, relying instead on nonspecific 
source lines to reach their assessments. Moreover, relevant 
operational data is nearly always withheld from analysts, putting 
them at a further analytical disadvantage.

10. The intelligence community relies too heavily on foreign 
government services and third party reporting, thereby increasing 
the potential for manipulation of United States policy by foreign 
interests.

NIGER CONCLUSIONS

12. Until October 2002 when the intelligence community obtained 
the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium 
deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have 
been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence 
Agency reporting and other available intelligence.



16. The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence 
Estimate that "Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure 
uranium ore and yellowcake" overstated what the intelligence 
community knew about Iraq's possible procurement attempts.

19. Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted 
by a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyst 
about problems with them, analysts at both the Central 
Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency did not 
examine them carefully enough to see the obvious problems with 
the documents. Both agencies continued to publish assessments 
that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa. In addition, 
C.I.A. continued to approve the use of similar language in 
administration publications and speeches, including the State of 
the Union.

21. When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central 
Intelligence Agency analysts or officials told the National 
Security Council to remove the "16 words" or that there were 
concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger uranium 
reporting. A C.I.A. official's original testimony to the 
committee that he told an N.S.C. official to remove the words 
"Niger" and "500 tons" from the speech, is incorrect.

22. The director of central intelligence should have taken the 
time to read the State of the Union speech and fact check it 
himself. Had he done so, he would have been able to alert the 
National Security Council if he still had concerns about the use 
of the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting in a presidential speech.

25. The Niger reporting was never in any of the drafts of 
Secretary (Colin) Powell's United Nations speech and the 
committee has not uncovered any information that showed anyone 
tried to insert the information into the speech.

26. To date, the intelligence community has not published an 
assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not 
Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa as stated in the 
National Intelligence Estimate. Likewise, neither the Central 
Intelligence Agency nor the Defense Intelligence Agency, which 
both published assessments on possible Iraqi efforts to acquire 
uranium, have ever published assessments outside of their 
agencies which correct their previous positions.

NUCLEAR CONCLUSIONS

27. After reviewing all of the intelligence provided by the 
intelligence community and additional information requested by 
the committee, the committee believes that the judgment in the 
National Intelligence Estimate, that Iraq was reconstituting its 
nuclear program, was not supported by the intelligence. The 
committee agrees with the State Department's Bureau of 
Intelligence and Research alternative view that the available 
intelligence "does not add up to a compelling case for 
reconstitution."

28. The assessments in the National Intelligence Estimate 
regarding the timing of when Iraq had begun reconstituting its 
nuclear program are unclear and confusing.

29. Numerous intelligence reports provided to the committee 
showed that Iraq was trying to procure high-strength aluminum 
tubes. The committee believes that the information available to 
the intelligence community indicated that these tubes were 
intended to be used for an Iraqi conventional rocket program and 
not a nuclear program.

30. The Central Intelligence Agency's intelligence assessment on 
July 2, 2001, that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes "match 
those of a publicly available gas centrifuge design from the 
1950's, known as the Zippe centrifuge" is incorrect. Similar 
information was repeated by the C.I.A. in its assessments, 
including its input to the National Intelligence Estimate, and by 
the Defense Intelligence Agency over the next year and a half.


31. The intelligence community's position in the National 
Intelligence Estimate that the composition and dimensions of the 
aluminum tubes exceeded the requirements for nonnuclear 
applications, is incorrect.

32. The [material deleted] intelligence report on Saddam 
Hussein's personal interest in the aluminum tubes, if credible, 
did suggest that the tube procurement was a high priority, but it 
did not necessarily suggest that the high priority was Iraq's 
nuclear program.



33. The suggestion in the National Intelligence Estimate that 
Iraq was paying excessively high costs for the aluminum tubes is 
incorrect. In addition, 7075-T6 aluminum is not considerably more 
expensive than other more readily available materials for rockets 
as alleged in the N.I.E.

34. The National Ground Intelligence Center's analysis that the 
material composition of the tubes was unusual for rocket motor 
cases was incorrect, contradicted information the N.G.I.C. later 
provided to the committee, and represented a serious lapse for 
the agency with primary responsibility for conventional ground 
forces intelligence analysis.

37. Iraq's persistence in seeking numerous foreign sources for 
the aluminum tubes was not "inconsistent" with procurement 
practices as alleged in the National Intelligence Estimate. 
Furthermore, such persistence [material deleted] was more 
indicative of procurement for a conventional weapons program than 
a covert nuclear program.

38. The C.I.A. initial reporting on its aluminum tube spin tests 
was, at a minimum, misleading and, in some cases, incorrect. The 
fact that these tests were not coordinated with other 
intelligence community agencies is an example of continuing 
problems with information sharing within the intelligence 
community.

42. The director of central intelligence was not aware of the 
views of all intelligence agencies on the aluminum tubes prior to 
September 2002 and, as a result, could only have passed the 
Central Intelligence Agency's view along to the president until 
that time.

43. Intelligence provided to the committee did show that Iraq was 
trying to procure magnets, high-speed balancing machines and 
machine tools, but this intelligence did not suggest that the 
materials were intended to be used in a nuclear program.

44. The statement in the National Intelligence Estimate that "a 
large number of personnel for the new [magnet] production 
facility, worked in Iraq's pre-gulf war centrifuge program," was 
incorrect.

45. The statement in the National Intelligence Estimate that the 
Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission was "expanding the infrastructure 
- research laboratories, production facilities, and procurement 
networks - to produce nuclear weapons," is not supported by the 
intelligence provided to the committee.

46. The intelligence provided to the committee which showed that 
Iraq had kept its cadre of nuclear weapons personnel trained and 
in positions that could keep their skills intact for eventual use 
in a reconstituted nuclear program was compelling, but this 
intelligence did not show that there was a recent increase in 
activity that would have been indicative of recent or impending 
reconstitution of Iraq's nuclear program as was suggested in the 
National Intelligence Estimate.

47. Intelligence information provided to the committee did show 
that Saddam Hussein met with Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission 
personnel and that some security improvements were taking place, 
but none of the reporting indicated the I.A.E.C. was engaged in 
nuclear weapons related work.

BIOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS

48. The assessment in the October 2002 National Intelligence 
Estimate that, "[W]e judge that all key aspects - research & 
development, production, and weaponization - of Iraq's offensive 
biological weapons program are active and that most elements are 
larger and more advanced than they were before the gulf war" is 
not supported by the intelligence provided to the committee.

49. The statement in the key judgments of the October 2002 
National Intelligence Estimate that "Baghdad has biological 
weapons" overstated what was known about Iraq's biological 
weapons holdings. The N.I.E. did not explain the uncertainties 
underlying this statement.


50. The statement in the National Intelligence Estimate that 
"Baghdad has mobile transportable facilities for producing 
bacterial and toxin biological weapons agents," overstated what 
the intelligence reporting suggested about an Iraqi mobile 
biological weapons effort and did not accurately convey to 
readers the uncertainties behind the source reporting.



51. The Central Intelligence Agency withheld important 
information concerning both CURVE BALL's reliability and 
[material deleted] reporting from many intelligence community 
analysts with a need to know the information.

52. The Defense Human Intelligence Service, which had primary 
responsibility for handling the intelligence community's 
interaction with CURVE BALL's [material deleted] debriefers, 
demonstrated serious lapses in handling such an important source.

53. The statement in the key judgments of the National 
Intelligence Estimate that "chances are even that smallpox is 
part of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program" is not 
supported by the intelligence provided to the committee.

54. The assessments in the National Intelligence Estimate 
concerning Iraq's capability to produce and weaponize biological 
weapons agents are, for the most part, supported by the 
intelligence provided to the committee, but the N.I.E. did not 
explain that the research discussed could have been very limited 
in nature, been abandoned years ago, or represented legitimate 
activity.

55. The N.I.E. misrepresented the United Nations Special 
Commission's 1999 assessment concerning Iraq's biological 
research capability.

CHEMICAL CONCLUSIONS

58. The statement in the key judgments of the October 2002 Iraq 
Weapons of Mass Destruction National Intelligence Estimate that 
"Baghdad has . . . chemical weapons" overstated both what was 
known about Iraq's chemical weapons holdings and what 
intelligence analysts judged about Iraq's chemical weapons 
holdings.

59. The judgment in the October 2002 Iraq Weapons of Mass 
Destruction National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq was 
expanding its chemical industry primarily to support chemical 
weapons production overstated both what was known about expansion 
of Iraq's chemical industry and what intelligence analysts judged 
about expansion of Iraq's chemical industry.

60. It was not clearly explained in the National Intelligence 
Estimate that the basis for several of the intelligence 
community's assessments about Iraq's chemical weapons 
capabilities and activities were not based directly on 
intelligence reporting of those capabilities and activities, but 
were based on layers of analysis regarding [material deleted] 
intelligence reporting.

61. The intelligence community's assessment that "Saddam probably 
has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 
metric tons of chemical weapons agents - much of it added in the 
last year," was an analytical judgment and not based on 
intelligence reporting that indicated the existence of an Iraqi 
chemical weapons stockpile of this size.

62. The intelligence community's assessment that Iraq had 
experience in manufacturing chemical weapons bombs, artillery 
rockets and projectiles was reasonable based on intelligence 
derived from Iraqi declarations.

63. The National Intelligence Estimate assessment that "Baghdad 
has procured covertly the types and quantities of chemicals and 
equipment sufficient to allow limited chemical weapons production 
hidden within Iraq's legitimate chemical industry"was not 
substantiated by the intelligence provided to the Committee.

DELIVERY CONCLUSIONS

68. The intelligence community assessment in the key judgments 
section of the National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq was 
developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (U.A.V.) "probably intended 
to deliver biological warfare agents" overstated both what was 
known about the mission of Iraq's small U.A.V.'s and what 
intelligence analysts judged about the likely mission of Iraq's 
small U.A.V.s. The Air Force footnote which indicated that 
biological weapons delivery was a possible, though unlikely, 
mission more accurately reflected the body of intelligence 
reporting.

69. Other than the Air Force's dissenting footnote, the 
intelligence community failed to discuss possible conventional 
missions for Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.) which were 
clearly noted in the intelligence reporting and which most 
analysts believed were the U.A.V.'s primary missions.

72. Much of the information provided or cleared by the Central 
Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's speech 
was overstated, misleading or incorrect.



73. Some of the information supplied by the Central Intelligence 
Agency, but not used in Secretary Powell's speech, was incorrect. 
This information should never have been provided for use in a 
public speech.

74. The Central Intelligence Agency should have alerted Secretary 
Powell to the problems with the biological weapons-related 
sources cited in the speech concerning Iraq's alleged mobile 
biological weapons program.

75. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency should have alerted 
Secretary Powell to the fact that there was an analytical 
disagreement within the N.I.M.A. concerning the meaning of 
[material deleted] - activity observed at Iraq's Amiriyah Serum 
and Vaccine Institute in November 2002. Moreover, agencies like 
the N.I.M.A. should have mechanisms in place for evaluating such 
analytical disagreements.

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

COLLECTION CONCLUSIONS

77. The intelligence community relied too heavily on United 
Nations [material deleted] information about Iraq's programs and 
did not develop a sufficient unilateral collection effort 
targeting Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and related 
activities to supplement U.N.-collected information and to take 
its place upon the departure of the U.N. inspectors.

78. The intelligence community depended too heavily on defectors 
and foreign government services to obtain human intelligence 
information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction activities. 
Because the intelligence community did not have direct access to 
many of these sources, it was exceedingly difficult to determine 
source credibility.

79. The intelligence community waited too long after inspectors 
departed Iraq to increase collection against Iraq's weapons of 
mass destruction programs.

80. Even after the departure of United Nations inspectors, 
placement of human intelligence (HUMINT) agents and development 
of unilateral sources inside Iraq were not top priorities for the 
intelligence community.

81. The Central Intelligence Agency continues to excessively 
compartment sensitive human intelligence reporting and fails to 
share important information about HUMINT reporting and sources 
with intelligence community analysts who have a need to know.

82. [material deleted] The lack of in-country human intelligence 
collection assets contributed to this collection gap.

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

PRESSURE CONCLUSIONS

83. The committee did not find any evidence that administration 
officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to 
change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass 
destruction capabilities.

84. The committee found no evidence that the vice president's 
visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to 
pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure 
analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's 
weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to 
change their assessments.

IRAQI LINKS TO TERRORISM

90. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that Saddam 
Hussein was most likely to use his own intelligence service 
operatives to conduct attacks was reasonable, and turned out to 
be accurate.

91. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that Iraq had 
maintained ties to several secular Palestinian terrorist groups 
and with the Mujahedeen Khalq was supported by the intelligence. 
The C.I.A. was also reasonable in judging that Iraq appeared to 
have been reaching out to more effective terrorist groups, such 
as Hezbollah and Hamas, and might have intended to employ such 
surrogates in the event of war.

92. The Central Intelligence Agency's examination of contacts, 
training, safe haven and operational cooperation as indicators of 
a possible Iraq/Al Qaeda relationship was a reasonable and 
objective approach to the question.

93. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that 
there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and 
Al Qaeda throughout the 1990's, but that these contacts did not 
add up to an established formal relationship.



94. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably and objectively 
assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that the most problematic 
area of contact between Iraq and Al Qaeda were the reports of 
training in the use of nonconventional weapons, specifically 
chemical and biological weapons. [material deleted]

95. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on safe haven - 
that Al Qaeda or associated operatives were present in Baghdad 
and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control - was 
reasonable.

96. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that to date 
there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance in 
an Al Qaeda attack was reasonable and objective. No additional 
information has emerged to suggest otherwise.

97. The Central Intelligence Agency's judgment that Saddam 
Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with 
a global reach - Al Qaeda - to conduct terrorist attacks in the 
event of war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far 
to suggest that Saddam did try to employ Al Qaeda in conducting 
terrorist attacks.

98. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessments on Iraq's links 
to terrorism were widely disseminated, though an early version of 
a key C.I.A. assessment was disseminated only to a limited list 
of cabinet members and some subcabinet officials in the 
administration.

99. Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there 
was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts 
determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to Al Qaeda.

100. The Central Intelligence Agency did not have a focused human 
intelligence collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to 
terrorism until 2002. The C.I.A. had no [material deleted] 
sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on 
terrorism. The lack of an official [material deleted] United 
States presence in the country [material deleted] curtailed the 
intelligence community's HUMINT collection capabilities.

102. The committee found that none of the analysts or other 
people interviewed by the committee said that they were pressured 
to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism. 
After 9/11, however, analysts were under tremendous pressure to 
make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and 
to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11. As a 
result, the intelligence community's assessments were bold and 
assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links. For 
instance, the June 2002 Central Intelligence Agency assessment 
Iraq and Al Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship was, 
according to its Scope Note, "purposefully aggressive" in drawing 
connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda in an effort to inform 
policymakers of the potential that such a relationship existed. 
All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting 
on the September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism 
interviewed by the Committee agreed that while some changes were 
made to the paper as a result of the participation of two Office 
of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy staffers, their 
presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments.

104. None of the portrayals of the intelligence reporting 
included in Secretary Powell's speech differed in any significant 
way from earlier assessments published by the Central 
Intelligence Agency.

REGIONAL STABILITY

109. The Intelligence Community should have produced a National 
Intelligence Estimate-level assessment of the overall threat 
posed by Iraq in the region prior to the start of Operation Iraqi 
Freedom. Such a document would have outlined - in one place and 
in a systematic fashion - the complete range of factors 
comprising Iraq's threat to regional stability and security.

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S

HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD CONCLUSIONS

110. Between 1991 and 2003 analysis of Saddam Hussein's human 
rights record was limited in volume, but provided an accurate 
depiction of the scope of abuses under his regime. The limited 
body of analysis was reasonable, given the difficulty of 
intelligence collection inside Iraq and the demands on collection 
resources that were primarily targeted on other priorities. Those 
competing priorities included weapons of mass destruction, 
terrorism, regime stability and regional security. There was no 
indication that the intelligence community's analysis was shaped 
or manipulated in regards to analysis of human rights abuses.
*****************************************************************
 7 New York Times: Opinion > The Senate Report
 
Published: July 10, 2004

[I] n a season when candor and leadership are in short supply, 
the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar 
assessment of Iraqi weapons is a welcome demonstration of both. 
It is also disturbing, and not just because of what it says about 
the atrocious state of American intelligence. The report is a 
condemnation of how this administration has squandered the public 
trust it may sorely need for a real threat to national security.

 The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too 
narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence 
Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, 
the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books 
to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam 
Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing 
nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to 
terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat. 

These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications 
for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a 
true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence 
itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human 
sources was more than four years old. The committee said the 
analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had 
fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was 
hammered into a preconceived pattern. Their bosses did not 
intervene.

 The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating 
intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that 
there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam 
Hussein and Al Qaeda. It also said there was no evidence that 
Iraq had been complicit in any attack by Osama bin Laden, or that 
Saddam Hussein had ever tried to use Al Qaeda for an attack. 
Although the report said the C.I.A.'s conclusions had been 
"widely disseminated" in the government, Mr. Bush and Vice 
President Dick Cheney have repeatedly talked of an Iraq-Qaeda 
link.

 Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President 
Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify 
war. It left open the question of whether the analysts thought 
they were doing what Mr. Bush wanted. While the panel said it had 
found no analyst who reported being pressured to change a 
finding, its vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said 
there had been an "environment of intense pressure." But the 
issue was glossed over so the report could be adopted 
unanimously.

 The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the 
intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the 
bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure 
analysts to change their findings because the findings were 
determined before the work started. 

By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not 
to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had 
begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it 
wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald 
Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the 
goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to 
deliver.

 Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and 
the international community will see the committee report as 
another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. 
But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security 
threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical 
about the government's assessment of danger.

 There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, 
will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive 
military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a 
real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on 
intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet 
reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will 
have to believe that the president is acting against a real 
threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.

 This administration has not made it easier for people to have 
that confidence. Its continuing insistence on linking Iraq and Al 
Qaeda is not aimed at helping the public understand the situation 
in the Middle East, but at providing political cover for an 
increasingly unpopular invasion. 

Then there are the news conferences that administration officials 
hold periodically to warn us that we're about to be attacked. 
Everyone is aware of the danger out there, but there is no reason 
to go on television and repeat vague warnings that seem to be 
intended to frighten everyone, but are more likely to lull people 
into complacency by their familiarity and repetition. When Tom 
Ridge, the secretary of homeland defense, holds a news conference 
to warn the nation of dire peril and it winds up as fodder for 
comedy shows, there's something very wrong somewhere./>

 The Senate Intelligence Committee's report ought to be the first 
move back from the brink of destructive public cynicism. The next 
must come from the president, who could help restore confidence 
in the government's risk assessment by simply being frank about 
the errors his administration made and the lessons it learned. 
That would do more to prepare the country for the next crisis 
than a full season of scary press conferences by Mr. Ridge.

*****************************************************************
 8 New York Times Conclusions: Powell's 'Solid' C.I.A. Tips Were Soft, 
Committee Says
 
 By DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: July 11, 2004

[W] ASHINGTON, July 10 — The images of dysfunction were stark. 
The C.I.A. stubbornly refused to accept contradictory evidence, 
relied on dubious, sometimes discredited sources, clung 
protectively to its own conclusions and reigned over the 
country's intelligence operations with an almost haughty sense of 
infallibility — all this, even as it repeatedly failed to assess 
accurately crucial evidence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, the 
Senate Intelligence Committee reported Friday.

On the most significant issues the C.I.A. investigated, like 
whether Saddam Hussein had mobile biologicial-weapons 
laboratories, tried to buy special aluminum tubes for nuclear 
weapons or planned to develop drone aircraft to attack the United 
States, the agency's analysis proved wrong. Its flaws were 
exposed sometimes after what the report indicated was a cursory 
examination of the information or sources on which the 
conclusions were based.

 Among the most vivid examples was the issue of whether Iraq had 
mobile bioweapons labs, an issue that set off a debate in 
February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed 
the United Nations Security Council. One day before Mr. Powell's 
speech laying out the reasons to invade Iraq, a Defense 
Department analyst warned the agency against relying on some of 
the most significant informants, like an Iraqi defector code 
named Curveball, whom Mr. Powell planned to cite.

 "I went through the speech," an unidentified military 
intelligence officer, an expert in biological warfare, later told 
the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quoted him in its 
report, "and I thought, my gosh, we have got — I have got to go 
on record and make my concerns known."

 But the deputy chief of the agency's Iraqi Task Force, who said 
"we can hash this out in a quick meeting," rejected the worries 
as irrelevant. "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going 
to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and 
that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in 
whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the deputy 
chief wrote in an e-mail message obtained by the committee.

 The episode goes to the heart of flawed procedures that the 
committee concluded had seriously undermined the agency's broad 
prewar analysis of Iraq's unconventional weapons. The panel found 
that the agency was unwilling to consider information that 
contradicted its expectations, dismissed information from other 
agencies, and shielded its sources from anyone who might 
challenge their credibility.

 But the expert who read Mr. Powell's speech had reason to be 
concerned. He was the only American intelligence official before 
the war who had met Curveball, a crucial source of reports about 
a suspected Iraqi program to house mobile weapons labs in 
trailers. Information from Curveball and three other informants 
had given Mr. Powell one of the most provocative pieces of 
evidence in his far-reaching presentation at the United Nations.

 The biowar expert said he doubted Curveball's credibility. The 
one time they met, the informant had turned up with "a terrible 
hangover," enough to raise suspicions. Intelligence officials 
were not even sure of Curveball's true identity, he added.

 Mr. Powell heard none of these doubts during the several 
evenings he spent reviewing the evidence for his speech. In an 
interview last summer, Mr. Powell said he had demanded to see the 
backup material for each piece of evidence, and said he insisted 
on multiple sources for every assertion. He threw out some 
evidence, he said, that he found unconvincing.

 "There were a lot of cigars lit," Mr. Powell said last summer. 
"I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face."

 Yet now all four of the sources on whom Mr. Powell relied 
concerning the supposed mobile biolabs seem at best unreliable, 
and at worst fictional. Curveball has been discredited. Another 
source was deemed a "fabricator," which in intelligence circles 
is tantamount to a designation as untrustworthy. The third source 
said the information needed further checking. The fourth source 
could not corroborate Curveball's claims.


The intelligence committee concluded that the C.I.A.'s belief 
that Iraq would probably develop mobile biological weapons, in 
effect, blinded its analysts. In its report, the panel found: 
"The intelligence community's expectation that Iraq would move to 
mobile biological weapons production focused their attention on 
reporting that supported that contention and led them to 
disregard information that contradicted it."
        
"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid 
sources," Mr. Powell told the United Nations. "These are not 
assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based 
on solid intelligence."

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, when asked 
about the episode, told the committee the worries probably should 
have been brought before Mr. Powell.

The events surrounding the speech reflected broader problems 
involving the agency's protectiveness about its intelligence, the 
Senate committee concluded. "Not only does the C.I.A. not accept 
information readily from other agencies; it also does not always 
share its most prized intelligence with those who might 
contradict it," the report said.

The same problems undercut the agency's assessment of another 
intelligence finding: that Iraq was trying to buy aluminum tubes 
for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium for possible nuclear 
weapons. That finding was initially challenged by Energy 
Department experts, but the C.I.A. clung to its belief even after 
specialists from the Defense Department and the International 
Atomic Energy Agency also disagreed.

Similar issues arose in assessing whether Iraq was developing 
drone aircraft as weapons. The agency warned that Iraq was 
obtaining mapping software that could only be used inside the 
United States, a finding that led some analysts to conclude the 
aircraft might be used to attack American targets with chemical 
or biological agents.

But the agency withheld further information that led to an 
alternative conclusion: that the software was innocently acquired 
as part of a package intended for generic guidance of drones.

Over all, the committee concluded, the C.I.A. was too secretive 
for its own good. The report said, "Contentious debate about 
significant national security issues can go on at the analytic 
level for months, or years, without the director of central 
intelligence or senior policy makers being informed of any 
options other than those of C.I.A. analysts."
*****************************************************************
 9 BBC: Q: The Butler intelligence inquiry 
 
  Last Updated: Saturday, 10 July, 2004
 
A report into the intelligence which the British government had 
about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction is to be published on 
Wednesday 14 July. It has been written by a committee headed by 
the former head of the civil service Lord Butler. BBC News Online 
examines some of the issues: 

Why was the inquiry set up? 

The Foreign Secretary Jack Straw set up the inquiry on 4 February 
2004 following widespread public concern about the reliability of 
pre-war intelligence which claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass 
destruction. No such weapons have been found. 

The inquiry members are: Lord Butler; Sir John Chilcot, a former 
civil servant in Northern Ireland; Labour MP Ann Taylor; 
Conservative MP Michael Mates; and Field Marshal Lord Inge, 
formerly Chief of the Defence Staff. 

The committee met in private but had access to witnesses and 
documents. 

What were its terms of reference? 

It had three tasks. The first was to assess what intelligence is 
available about WMD and "countries of concern." This means not 
just Iraq but also countries like North Korea and Iran. The idea 
behind this was to see if problems encountered over Iraq might 
also occur elsewhere. 

The second - the one attracting the most interest - was to 
"investigate the accuracy of intelligence on Iraqi WMD up to 
March 2003." March 2003 is when the war started. The inquiry had 
to "examine any discrepancies" between the pre-war intelligence 
and what has been found (or not found) since. 

Thirdly, it had to make recommendations about the future handling 
of intelligence on WMD in "countries of concern." 

What questions need to be answered? 

The broad questions include: Were the sources for intelligence 
reliable and properly checked, did the government accept what it 
was being told too easily and why was it so forthright in its 
dossier on Iraq issued in September 2002. 

Specifically, people will want to know, among other things, on 
what basis the government claimed that Iraq had chemical and 
biological weapons and was aiming to develop a nuclear bomb, why 
it said that Saddam Hussein had weapons he could fire within 45 
minutes, why it said that Iraq had tried to get uranium from 
Niger in Africa and why it claimed that he had a number of Scud 
missiles. 

Is the inquiry likely to conclude there was failure of 
intelligence? 

This is the expectation because no weapons of mass destruction 
have been found. 

It will be interesting to compare its findings with that of the 
Senate Intelligence Committee in the United States, which has 
concluded that there was indeed a major failure of intelligence. 

On the other hand, the House of Commons Committee on Intelligence 
and Security in a report last September was generally supportive 
of the intelligence community and of the government's position, 
though it was critical of some important details. 

Two members of that committee, its chair Ann Taylor, a Labour MP, 
and the conservative MP Michael Mates, are on the Butler inquiry. 

Mr Mates revealed that the Butler report would deal with the 
theme that "intelligence does have its limitations." 

Will the inquiry name names? 

This remains to be seen. 

The names people will be looking for fall into two categories - 
politicians and intelligence officials and politicians. 

The roles of the Prime Minister Mr Blair, the Foreign Secretary 
Mr Straw and the defence Secretary Mr Hoon in accepting the 
intelligence are likely be examined. 

It has also been reported that the Attorney general, Lord 
Goldsmith, who issued a legal ruling approving the war, will be 
mentioned. 

The intelligence officials include John Scarlett, who was head of 
the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time (and has since been 
appointed head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6) and Sir 
Richard Dearlove, head of M16 at the time. 

Lord Butler himself has been criticised. Why? 

His critics say that as a former top civil servant he is too 
close to government and will not rock the boat. They point to his 
too ready acceptance in 1994 of former Tory MP Jonathan Aitken's 
word about his dealings with a Saudi businessman. In fact Mr 
Aitken had lied and was later sent to prison for perjury. 

His supporters say that his knowledge of government will help him 
make accurate assessments. 

What's the difference between the Butler and the Hutton 
inquiries? 

Lord Hutton dealt with the death of the government scientist Dr 
David Kelly, the BBC's role and the government's published 
dossier on Iraqi weapons. Lord Hutton deliberately did not get 
into the actual intelligence, only what use was made of it. The 
Butler inquiry is looking into the intelligence itself. 

Have the Americans set up a similar inquiry? 

On 6 February 2004, shortly after the Butler inquiry was 
announced, President Bush appointed a bipartisan panel to make a 
similar assessment of US intelligence and Iraq. It is headed by 
former Senator Chuck Robb, a Democrat and a former Appeal Court 
judge Laurence Silberman who served two Republican presidents. 

This commission is not due to report until next year, after the 
US presidential election. 

It is separate from the Senate Intelligence Committee which has 
published its own very critical findings. 





*****************************************************************
 10 BBC: CIA shoulders the blame 
 
  Last Updated: Friday, 9 July, 2004

By Gordon Corera BBC security correspondent in Washington   

[Republican Chairman Pat Roberts (left) and Democrat Vice 
Chairman Jay Rockefeller (right)]                                                                                                  

The Senate Intelligence Committee was as confident in its 
judgement of America's intelligence community as that community 
had been about the existence of Iraq's WMD. And their verdict was 
scathing. 

Both Democrat Jay Rockefeller and Republican Chairman Pat Roberts 
questioned whether the US Congress would have authorised the war 
with Iraq if it had known what it now knows about Iraq's weapons 
of mass destruction programme. 

So what went wrong? Firstly, according to the report, it is clear 
the CIA didn't have enough human sources inside Iraq. 

In fact, the committee revealed that after 1998, it had no 
sources inside the Iraqi WMD programme. 

Secondly, the information that did come through was poorly 
analysed. 

"The intelligence community was suffering from what we call a 
collective group think," said Senator Pat Roberts. "This group 
think caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence such 
as the procurement of dual use technology as conclusive evidence 
of the existence of WMD programmes." 

Finally, the committee concluded there was a failure of 
management - a failure to encourage analysts to challenge 
assumptions, to fully consider alternative arguments and to 
accurately characterise intelligence reporting. 

'Half the story' 

The verdict on the CIA was largely bi-partisan - the senior 
Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller was equally scathing of the 
agency. 

The committee's report fai to fully explain the environment of 
intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials 
were asked to render judgements Senator Jay Rockefeller         

But where the Democrats differed from Republicans was the degree 
to which the CIA should shoulder the blame by itself. 

"The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of 
intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials 
were asked to render judgements on matters relating to Iraq when 
the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already 
forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly," 
argued Senator Rockefeller. 

The committee's decision to look only within the CIA rather than 
at the politicians' use of intelligence came after a long battle 
between Democrats and Republicans. 

Democrats feel that this report tells only half the story and 
downplays the pressure that the CIA may have been under. 

The committee will eventually look at the subject but only in its 
phase two report, which is due to come out later in the year. 
Many Democrats believe that will be after the presidential 
election. 

The White House will hope that the CIA will become the scapegoat 
for the failure for intelligence in Iraq, deflecting attention 
away from its own role and closing the issue. 

However, Democrats will try to use the report to erode the Bush 
administration's credibility. 

The president's ratings have suffered in recent months, amid the 
ongoing problems in Iraq and the failure to find WMD. 

Vulnerable 

Defenders of the CIA argue that the committee was looking to 
attach blame without understanding the challenges involved in a 
case like Iraq. 

"There's reason certainly to have some criticism," Richard Kerr, 
the man who led the CIA's internal inquiry, told the BBC. 

"My question would be the degree to which they understand the 
process. Do they really understand how analysis is done, how 
collection is done, what the limitations are? And also the 
expectations are far greater than they should be," Mr Kerr said. 

He argues that in the absence of contrary information that was 
persuasive, it would have been very hard to come to the judgment 
that Iraq's WMD programmes had been discontinued. 

The report has left the CIA in a vulnerable position. 

In addition to its failure over Iraqi WMD, the inquiry into the 
September 11 attacks is due to report at the end of July which is 
likely to be highly critical of the agency, as well as the FBI 
and others. 

The agency is also currently without a permanent director as 
President George W Bush mulls over whether to appoint a successor 
to George Tenet, who held his leaving party the night before the 
report came out. 

The pressure is mounting for some kind of broad reform of the 
intelligence community, but in an election year, that will not be 
an easy task. 





*****************************************************************
 11 BBC: Bush pledges intelligence reforms 
 
  Last Updated: Saturday, 10 July, 2004
 
[Republican Chairman Pat Roberts (left) and Democrat Vice 
Chairman Jay Rockefeller (right) present the report] The report 
highlights multiple intelligence failures                                            
		
President George W Bush has promised to reform US intelligence 
services after they were criticised for the quality of their 
pre-war information on Iraq. 

However, he defended the US-led invasion, saying his 
administration, Congress and the United Nations all believed Iraq 
posed a threat. 

Mr Bush spoke after a report by US senators said the CIA had 
overstated the threat posed by Iraq. 

It said the US and its allies went to war based on "flawed" 
information. 

However, the Senate Intelligence Committee report, published on 
Friday, concluded that there was no evidence the Bush 
administration had tried to coerce or put pressure on officials 
to adapt their findings. 
	
SENATE REPORT: KEY POINTS                       
Assumptions about Iraq wrong, not supported by evidence   
Analysts failed to say when intelligence was uncertain         
Managers failed to question analysts' assumptions   
CIA had no human sources in Iraq since 1998    
CIA withheld intelligence from other agencies           

"I look forward to working with members of Congress to put out 
reforms that will work," Mr Bush told a campaign event in the 
state of Pennsylvania. 

Mr Bush also stressed that the world knew Saddam Hussein had been 
trying to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. 

"We haven't found the stockpiles, but we knew he could make 
them," Mr Bush said. 

'Group-think' 

The committee's chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, said 
most of the key judgements about Iraq's WMD programmes "were 
either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence 
reporting". 

The intelligence community suffered a "collective group-think", 
which led analysts to presume that Iraq had weapons of mass 
destruction (WMD) programmes and to interpret ambiguous evidence 
as conclusive, Senator Roberts said. 

We have fostered a de hatred of Americans in the Muslim world Jay 
Rockefeller Vice Chairman           

But the failings were not America's alone, he added. 

"It is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies, 
and to the United Nations, and several other nations as well, all 
of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein had active WMD 
programmes. This was a global intelligence failure." 

The report criticises CIA director George Tenet, who steps down 
on Sunday, for not personally checking President Bush's 2003 
State of the Union address. This contained the allegation - which 
first surfaced in a UK report and has since been discredited - 
that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger. 

It concludes there is no evidence that analysts came under 
pressure from the White House to deliver certain findings, 
although some Democrats on the committee disagree. 

Exaggerated case?

The issue of whether the Bush administration exaggerated the case 
for war in Iraq is being investigated separately in a report 
likely to be released after the presidential election on 2 
November. 

The Democrat vice-chairman of the committee, Senator Jay 
Rockefeller, stressed his party's regret that the whole matter 
had not been addressed in one inquiry. 

He said many members of Congress would not have authorised the 
war if they had known then what they knew now. 

"Tragically, the intelligence failure set forth in this report 
will affect our national security for generations to come," he 
said. 

"Our credibility is diminished, our standing in the world has 
never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in 
the Muslim world, and that will grow." 

Deputy CIA director John Laughlin said people should not conclude 
from the Senate report that there were huge failings within the 
agency. 

He told reporters: "It is wrong to exaggerate the flaws or leap 
to the judgment that our challenges with pre-war Iraq weapons 
intelligence are evidence of sweeping problems." 

The US report comes just five days before Lord Butler publishes 
the results of his inquiry into the quality of British 
intelligence on Iraq. 
*****************************************************************
 12 BBC: Long history of intelligence failures 
 
  Last Updated: Sunday, 11 July, 2004
 
By Paul Reynolds BBC News Online world affairs correspondent   

[Battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it capsizes in Pearl 
Harbor, Hawaii, 7 Dec, 1941]                           

Lack of intelligence left the US vulnerable to attack at Pearl 
Harbor                                                                

The intelligence failure over Iraq will take a prominent place in 
the history of notable intelligence breakdowns. 

These range, if you want to go back far enough, from the wooden 
horse in Troy to, in modern times, Stalin's refusal to believe 
that Germany would invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and the 
British belief that they would have warning of an Argentine 
invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. 

Intelligence also failed to warn against - let alone stop - the 
two sudden and daring strikes against the US, at Pearl Harbor in 
1941 and on 11 September 2001. 

Intelligence failures can be put into a number of categories: 

Overestimation 

This is characterised by a determination to overemphasise 
information, leading to a false conclusion. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has detailed how this happened 
over Iraq. 

But there is another example of this, which nearly led to 
disaster in the Cold War. 

It is known as Operation Ryan, an acronym for the Russian words 
raketno-yadernoye napadenie, meaning nuclear missile attack. 

Ryan was a KGB operation in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan 
was president. 

It was based on a fear that the US was going to launch a missile 
attack on the Soviet Union. 

KGB agents around the world were told to look out for unusual 
signs of military activity and, of course, found them or said 
they did. 

In their book, KGB: The Inside Story, Soviet defector Oleg 
Gordievsky and espionage writer Christopher Andrew give a 
hilarious account of how KGB agents looked out for lights on 
unusually late in places such as the British Foreign Office. 

Fortunately, the West had Gordievsky to warn it about this Soviet 
state of mind. 

Reassuring signals were put out and danger was averted. 

Underestimation 

This is the syndrome in which the intelligence services or the 
political leadership completely misread the enemy's intentions. 

[Joseph Stalin]                                 
Stalin ignored evidence of German intentions to invade                                                             

In 1941, Stalin was apparently convinced that Hitler would not 
invade the Soviet Union, despite strong military signs to the 
contrary and urgent warnings from Britain and the US. 

Churchill even passed on some intelligence - gained from the 
Ultra secret, the reading of the German Enigma codes - that 
Germany had deployed new armoured formations in southern Poland. 

There was also a Soviet spy in Switzerland who sent Moscow the 
date on which the invasion would start, 22 June. 

Stalin did not want to know. 

To this day, nobody really knows why. 

This category is closely linked to the next. 

Over-confidence 

Here, one side is so confident of its ability that it projects 
its reasoning onto the other side and believes that since it 
would not do something itself, nor will the other side. 

The classic case is the Yom Kippur war of October 1973. 

The Israelis had what was called the "concept" - Egypt could not 
win a war, so it would not start a war. 

In fact, Egypt had the more limited aim of establishing a 
bridgehead across the Suez Canal and converting this into a 
diplomatic victory. It did so. 

The Israeli commission of inquiry was highly critical of the 
"concept", and Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned. 

Complacency 

This happens when you know the enemy might do something, though 
you are not sure what or when, and yet you do nothing anyway. 

The British suffered from this over the Falkland Islands in 1982. 

	 		
[British Troops, Falkland Islands] Britain had to fight to regain 
the Falkland Islands                                                                 

The Argentine military junta had made it clear that it wanted to 
gain sovereignty. 

Yet even when negotiations stalled in early 1982, Britain did 
nothing to prevent an invasion. 

The British ambassador in Buenos Aires called it the Micawber 
policy after the Dickensian character who hoped that something 
would "turn up". 

What turned up was the invasion of the islands and a bloody 
little war. 

However, an inquiry by Lord Franks, a former diplomat, said the 
government was not to blame because the Argentines had acted 
unpredictably. 

Something similar happened when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 
1990. 

People thought he might do so, but hoped he would not and did 
nothing. 

On the whole, it is as well to fear the worst when a dictator 
makes threats and moves armies. 

Ignorance 

When there is virtually no intelligence, you are at the mercy of 
events. 

While it is the case that there were signs in 1941 of aggressive 
Japanese intentions towards the US, nobody in a senior position 
expected the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

It was carried out with skill and surprise. 

But ignorance should not lead to inaction. 

The US Congress issued a stinging report because no adequate 
steps were taken in Pearl Harbor itself to cover against an 
attack. 

Although the radar station picked up the approach of the Japanese 
aircraft, nobody could interpret the signs and there were no 
aircraft ready to repel them. 

Failure to join the dots 

This is the failure to make connections between bits of 
intelligence to make a coherent whole. 

It is more easily identified afterwards than at the time. 

One of the main charges against the CIA and FBI post-9/11 was 
that they failed to join up the dots beforehand - the presence in 
the US of known suspects, the unusual number of men from the 
Middle East taking flying courses, the known tactic of al Qaeda 
to use aircraft, etc. 

Finally, a word about that wooden horse. 

The key intelligence failure was that the Trojans ignored a 
warning. 

It came from Cassandra, the daughter of Troy's King Priam. 

Given the gift of prophecy, she had then angered the God Apollo, 
who ordained that her prophecies should never be believed.

So the Trojans rejected what they said was her "windy nonsense". 

A myth perhaps, but there is a lesson to be learned. 

The trouble is that lessons are not always learned, which is why 
the list of intelligence failures grows longer. 





*****************************************************************
 13 Sunday Herald: The real intelligence failure was Blair and Bushs - 

  What we think 
 
 IN the techno-speak jargon of Californias silicon valleys, group 
think is where everyone in a project speaks the same language, 
has the same understanding of what a project is about and how to 
achieve its goals. The terms meaning was strangely morphed last 
week when the Republican head of the Senate Intelligence 
Committee, Pat Roberts, said there had been a collective group 
think which had led intelligence analysts to presume Iraq had 
active and growing weapons of mass destruction programmes  when 
in fact there was none. 

The group think, he said, not only affected US intelligence but 
also extended to our allies and several other nations and had led 
to ambiguous evidence being regarded as conclusive . According to 
Roberts, this was a global intelligence failure. 

To use less technocratic, but nevertheless apposite, terminology 
we suggest the senators summary of his committees 500-page report 
is full of collective absurdity. Prior to the Iraq war, numerous 
foreign countries questioned almost all US assessments on Iraqs 
WMD. French intelligence experts at the DGSE (Direction Générale 
de la Sécurité Extérieure) came up with a widely different 
interpretation of what was inside Iraq; the DGSE also insisted 
that Saddams regime did not represent a nuclear threat and 
branded White House claims as phoney. Equally the Russians openly 
said they were not convinced by either the September 2002 dossier 
from Britain or by the October report from the CIA. President 
Vladimir Putin said: Fears are one thing, hard facts are another. 

After US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United
Nations in February 2003, France, Germany and Russia were among
the leading voices to say he had presented no evidence strong 
enough to support the US claim that Iraq was a threat. Having 
made clear their misgivings , these countries pushed the idea 
that the UN-authorised inspections taking place inside Iraq by 
weapons inspectors should be given more time. There was no global 
intelligence failure, unless Senator Roberts is so poorly 
informed or naive that he believes the word global refers only to 
the US and UK. 

The fall guys in the Senate report are the CIA. We knew this 
would be the case even before the report was published. The CIAs 
director, George Tenet, went before he was pushed. The report 
said the CIA evaluations on Iraqs WMD were either overstated or 
not supported by raw intelligence reporting. The result? That 
mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most 
devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of 
the nation. The vice-chairman of the committee, Senator Jay 
Rockefeller, said the Senate would not have authorised that war 
if we knew what we know now. Even George W Bush says he needs to 
know and wants to know how to make the agencies better. 

Another collective term is needed here: collective amnesia. These 
senators are saying they were unaware of the international 
reporting and investigating that questioned Bushs 
neo-conservative administration and its decision to take on Iraq 
immediately after September 11, 2001. Former UN weapons 
inspectors, such as Scott Ritter, made public their belief that 
WMD existing inside Iraq was not a black-and-white issue. Ritter 
is on record as saying that there was no evidence that Iraq had 
retained, post-1998, WMD capability and material. 

So is Bush really saying that the White House viewed all CIA 
assessments as 100% gold-edged truth? And how would the Senate 
committee know, without a doubt, if the Bush administration never 
tried to coerce or put pressure on officials to adapt their 
findings? This issue  whether or not Bush and his colleagues 
exaggerated the case for the Iraq war  is being investigated 
separately in a report conveniently timed to be published after 
Novembers presidential election . 

Abraham Lincoln said you couldnt fool all of the people all of 
the time, but Bush and a large section of the Senate Intelligence 
Committee clearly dont think such an exercise is that difficult.

Lord Butler will next week give us his take on this global 
intelligence failure. As a career civil servant of the old 
school, we can be fairly confident the noble lord will not resort 
to language such as  collective group think. But it is unlikely 
that his report will address the real issue: the political 
pressure on the intelligence services to justify a war Tony Blair 
and George Bush had already decided to wage. Until that 
information is dragged into the public arena, one worry remains: 
the prospect that it might be allowed to happen again. If Blair 
wants to use the army as a global police force he has to pay for 
it LAST week was dominated by the anguished sound of long-retired 
senior officers deprecating the fact that, unless there is a 
last-minute change of heart, historic regiments will face the axe 
under the governments latest Comprehensive Spending Review. 
Nothing wrong with that: infantry regiments are as much family 
concerns as fighting formations and one under threat is the Royal 
Scots, Britains oldest infantry regiment with a long and proud 
fighting tradition. Of course, it is sad that Pontius Pilates 
Bodyguard (its nickname) might disappear from the armys order of 
battle, along with another four or five regiments, but the fact 
is that the Royal Scots failed to meet their recruiting targets 
and are badly under-strength. 

Either the regimental hierarchy has not worked hard enough in an 
increasingly crowded market or it might be that young Scots are 
no longer willing to take the Queens shilling for a career which 
offers great challenges but also includes considerable dangers 
and disruption. It is also true that for all the sentimental talk 
about a regiments links to its community, the reality is that the 
traditional recruiting grounds appear to have dried up, perhaps 
forever.

But the defence cuts are not just about preserving time-honoured 
names. The navy and air force are also being forced to make 
savage cuts to equipment, much of which was introduced for cold 
war confrontation and is not much use in the kind of role which 
Tony Blair favours today. The Gulf war of 1991 showed alarming 
deficiencies in the ability of Britains armed forces to support 
themselves in the field . Successive defence reviews undertaken 
by the Conservative government failed to address the problem and 
in some areas, such as contracting out services to the private 
sector, caused an even bigger muddle. The present government has 
also made a number of stabs at the problem by promising that the 
three services should be realigned as a force for the good and 
given an expeditionary capability. The truth is that the defence 
budget has stagnated and the amount of money available bears 
little relation to the requirements of defence and foreign 
policy.

Yet all the while the armed forces have been on constant 
operational service. Since the first Gulf war they have served 
with distinction in Sierra Leone, East Timor, the Balkans and the 
Congo, usually restoring order and bringing relief to people torn 
apart by internecine wars. At the same time they gave aid to the 
civil powers during periods of flooding, in the recent 
foot-and-mouth epidemic and in the firefighters strike. 

Then came the war against terror, and the war in Iraq. This 
newspaper has been sceptical about the justification concocted by 
Bush and Blair for the invasion of Iraq, but that is not to argue 
against operations that would end tribal fighting or put a stop 
to ethnic cleansing. However, to carry out this task effectively 
the forces have to be given the tools for the job. They need 
equipment which is suited to the demands of interventionist and 
peace-keeping operations, they need the capability to get 
themselves quickly and effectively into potential trouble spots 
and, above all, they need sufficient personnel to do the tough 
but often unglamorous work of keeping the peace on the ground. 
Britains armed forces have built up an enviable reputation in the 
fields of conflict prevention and post- conflict reconstruction, 
yet find themselves overstretched and under-funded by a 
government which insists that these operations be undertaken.

This cannot continue without placing unacceptable strains on the 
armed forces. If the government wishes a task to be undertaken, 
it is up to it to ensure that there are sufficient numbers of 
trained personnel , provided with enough equipment of the right 
kind and a sizeable pool of replacements. The argument is not 
about saving historic cap badges; it is about realigning and 
re-equipping the forces so that they can meet the challenges of 
bringing stability to troubled areas around the world. 11 July 
2004 

  © newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 14 Sunday Herald: Whose Head Will The Butler Serve Up? - 

  Lord Butlers long-awaited report is about to reveal what went 
wrong with intelligence on Iraq. Necks are on the block. But are 
they necessarily the right ones? By Investigations Editor Neil 
Mackay 
 
 IF the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is anything to go by 
then the entire Cabinet and the whole upper echelon of British 
intelligence should be roasted on a spit by the Butler Inquiry, 
which is due to report on Wednesday.

Cook says that John Scarlett told him before the war in Iraq that 
Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction that 
could be fired over long distances at strategic cities. Scarlett 
is the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 
which wrote the infamous dossier laying out the governments case 
for war  and the man who is now to take over MI6  and Cooks 
recollection of his comments is in direct contradiction to the 
dossiers claim that Saddam could hit UK assets with WMD within 45 
minutes.

If Cook knew this, Scarlett must have told other senior 
government figures including Tony Blair and Scarletts mate 
Alastair Campbell, then Blairs director of communications. I 
still find it perplexing, says Cook, why Number 10 came to a 
different conclusion. 

The government had made up their mind that Saddam had weapons and 
must be a threat; they had made up their mind they were going to 
war. The intelligence agencies were then left in a position of 
having to find evidence to support a conclusion.

Lord Butlers inquiry into the use of intelligence in the run-up 
to the war in Iraq has also turned up proof that in March 2002 a 
meeting of government officials in Downing Street decided that 
available intelligence was not strong enough to support the case 
for war. Critics will seize on this as proof that the case for 
war was a political one.

But regardless of this evidence and Cooks damning recollections , 
this morning there appear to be just three men nervously 
fingering their collars and wondering if they will still be in 
the employ of Her Majestys government come Wednesday evening. One 
of them is indeed John Scarlett. The others are Sir Richard 
Dearlove, the outgoing head of MI6, and Lord Goldsmith, Labours 
attorney-general and the man who ruled that it would be perfectly 
legal to invade Iraq. Government lawyers and ministers had agreed 
that the war would not be legal without a second UN resolution. 

Goldsmith, Scarlett and Dearlove have all been sent preliminary 
letters from the Butler committee, a sure sign that castigation 
is to come. Goldsmith is the one most likely to escape a 
roasting, as Butlers remit does not extend to the legality of the 
war.

This weekend Tony Blair is holed up in Chequers plotting how to 
deal with the Butler fallout. The Prime Minister is expected to 
escape pretty much unscathed, although the effect of recent 
pressure on him can be measured by the interjection last month of 
four Cabinet ministers. John Reid, Tessa Jowell, Charles Clarke 
and Patricia Hewitt are reported to have been so worried that he 
was going to resign that they personally counselled him and urged 
him to stay on when he was said to be seriously reviewing his 
position.

 Michael Mates, one of the inquiry team, has said that the report 
will highlight the limitations of intelligence. And Peter Hain, 
the leader of the Commons, has already paved the way for the 
spies to take the brunt of the criticism, saying that MI6 did 
make mistakes from time to time. 

It is Scarletts coat that is on the shakiest peg. It was under 
his leadership that the JIC metamorphosed from an outfit designed 
to liaise between the intelligence community and politicians into 
the leading element among all the British intelligence agencies. 
Under New Labour it went from being a body filled with 
policy-wonks at the bottom of the intelligence pile to an 
organisation that made intelligence assessments, evaluated what 
analysts had to say and even produced the infamous government 
dossier on Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. The bottom line is 
that the JIC was elevated and politicised from 1997 onwards  and 
Scarlett allowed Number 10 to distort intelligence for political 
reasons, to the detriment of the United Kingdom.

The role of the JIC will be crucial to the Butler findings. David 
Kay, former head of the coalitions Iraq Survey Group, has 
criticised it for failing to adopt a zero estimate: instead of 
starting with a blank piece of paper on Iraqs weapons of mass 
destruction, it assumed from the start that Saddam had WMD and 
was working to build more. Intelligence that Iraqs WMD 
capabilities were diminished was ignored to such an extent that 
the JIC even said Saddam would use chemical weapons if Iraq was 
invaded. Michael Herman, a former senior GCHQ official who gave 
evidence to the Butler committee, described the assessment 
process as a disaster. 

Scarlett is now a liability for Blair. His recent elevation to 
MI6 chief is seen by many as a political thank you from the Prime 
Minister. Any criticism of him by Butler would render his new 
position untenable. If he goes, Blair is damaged for making a 
foolish, cronyistic appointment; if he stays, Blair will be 
accused of damaging the lead intelligence service by keeping a 
lame-duck friend in office.

Sir Richard Dearlove is also in line for a pasting. Under him MI6 
was giving the JIC out-of-date intelligence and information 
gathered from unreliable exiles linked to Ahmed Chalabis 
discredited Iraqi National Congress. MI6 effectively had no 
informers and agents within Iraq.

The JIC and MI6 both ignored intelligence assessments which 
pointed towards Saddam having little or no WMD, or towards Iraq 
not being a threat to the West. They also ignored intelligence 
from France and Russia  two countries that did have agents inside 
Iraq  saying Saddam posed a diminishing threat. 

Were it not for the US censors pen we would probably now know 
most of the damning evidence against British intelligence, as 
much of it was contained in the Senate Intelligence Committees 
report into pre-war intelligence on Iraq, published on Friday. It 
damned the CIA for overstating the threat from Saddam, but most 
of its references to UK intelligence matters were blacked out 
when it was published.

It is known, however, that even the CIA was critical of British 
intelligence. The agency was particularly disparaging of claims 
from British intelligence that Iraq was trying to buy uranium 
from Niger in Africa, cutting a passage from a keynote speech by 
George Bush in October 2002 which was to read: The regime has 
been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 tonnes of uranium 
oxide from Africa . One CIA official wrote a memo to the National 
Security Council (NSC) saying: We told Congress that the Brits 
exaggerated this issue.

The line was dropped from the speech, but what remained points 
significantly to the way British and American politicians were 
intent on sexing up what intelligence they could. The same speech 
saw Bush say: Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for 
the final proof  the smoking gun  that could come in the form of 
a mushroom cloud. Significantly, the Niger/uranium claim did 
return in Bushs State of the Union address in January 2003. One 
CIA analyst told a member of the NSC that to remove all reference 
would leave the Brits flapping in the wind. 

The Butler team visited the US to gather evidence and is thought 
to have been passed an early copy of the Senate Intelligence 
Committee report some time ago . That report criticised the group 
think that bought into the notion of Iraq possessing WMD without 
relying on proof , and the Butler inquiry will probably reach 
much the same conclusion. 

Lord Huttons much-condemned whitewash report in January gave an 
indicator of this when it said that Scarlett might have been 
subconsciously influenced into making the September 2002 dossier 
stronger than it should have been. Scarlett, after all, had 
agreed to requests from Alastair Campbell for the JIC to toughen 
up the language in the dossier. It is thought that Butler will 
criticise such abuse and politicisation of intelligence.

 The fact the British government backed the war before getting 
hard facts from MI6 meant intelligence officers had to go running 
around wildly trying to get information to support this position. 
As a result, Butler will say, the infamous 45-minute warning was 
based on vague information and should not have been presented as 
fact. The information came from a single source. Butler is likely 
to note that the claim had no caveat attached and also that Blair 
asserted in the foreword of the dossier that Iraqs continued 
production of WMD was established beyond doubt. On Tuesday, Blair 
told parliament: I have to accept that we have not found [WMD]; 
that we may not find them.

The Butler report might also pack a punch for Campbell, who told 
the Hutton inquiry that he was asked by Downing Street to bin 
work on a dossier into axis of evil states North Korea, Libya and 
Iran and to concentrate instead on Iraq. Lord Butler wrote to 
newspaper editors during his investigations, seemingly hunting 
for the hand of Campbell at work, asking whether you or your 
reporters were briefed by representatives of the government about 
the dossier  and whether you were guided to report particular 
aspects, such as the statement that some chemical and biological 
weapons were deployable by Iraq within 45 minutes. 

Blair is believed to have been told that the report will not 
contain a silver bullet which will lead to top-level government 
resignations. Part of Blairs strategy to offset any criticism 
will be the announcement tomorrow of a hefty hike in spending on 
the intelligence services.

Of course, there is also the chance that a lot of the leaks about 
how severe the Butler report will be could be coming from the 
government as part of a clever spin campaign. If the report turns 
out to be only mildly critical, the government will appear to 
have come out of the experience relatively unscathed.

It is little wonder that the vengeful ex- Cabinet minister Clare 
Short buys this conspiracy theory. There is lots of spin going 
on, she says. I dont think its coming from Butler. It looks like 
its coming from Number 10 .

It has also been rumoured that the report will point to Foreign 
Secretary Jack Straw over-ruling advice from Elizabeth 
Wilmshurst, who subsequently resigned as one of the Foreign 
Offices most senior legal advisors. Clare Short says:  Word went 
out that the attorney- general didnt think there was legal 
authority and the military wouldnt go to fight a war without it 
The rumour was that he [Straw] went shopping and found the only 
international lawyer who thought there was authority.

Many believe Blair should not escape his own roasting. Former JIC 
chair Dame Pauline Neville-Jones says the buck must stop with the 
Prime Minister and he should acknowledge his mistakes in the 
run-up to war. I dont think the political layer in any country 
can escape the consequences of systemic failure, she has said, 
adding that Blair is at least open to the accusation of 
incompetence. 

  © newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved   
*****************************************************************
 15 Wichita Eagle: Now focus turns to White House

| 07/10/2004 | 

BY ALAN BJERGA

 Eagle Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - The withering critique of Iraq-related intelligence 
failures released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee 
sparked a heated election-year debate over questions the report 
didn't answer. 

With a bipartisan consensus emerging that arguments for the Iraq 
war were built on bad intelligence, the debate pits Republicans 
who blame intelligence agencies for failing President Bush 
against Democrats who agree the intelligence agencies made 
serious mistakes but also want to know whether the Bush 
administration manipulated information to mislead America into 
war. 

The division will shape the politically sensitive "Phase Two" of 
the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence probe of Iraq 
intelligence, which looks at how the Bush administration used 
information to build its case for war. That phase probably will 
continue into next year despite calls for resolution before the 
November election. 

In its 511-page report, members of the Intelligence Committee 
unanimously agreed that U.S. intelligence agencies made serious 
mistakes regarding Iraq's prewar weapons capabilities and its 
threat to American security. 

Reports that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and 
biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons -- the Bush 
administration's main justification for the war -- were simply 
wrong, said committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan. 

"They were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the 
available intelligence." 

Committee Democrats supported the report's condemnations but 
expressed frustration with the report's scope, which almost 
exclusively criticized intelligence agencies while leaving Bush 
unscathed. 

Ranking Democratic Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller of West Virginia 
said limiting the report's findings to agency failures didn't 
adequately address questions surrounding the Bush 
administration's use of intelligence information when it made its 
case for war. 

Among the issues Rockefeller wants addressed in Phase Two: 

How intelligence on Iraq was used or misused by administration 
officials in public statements intended to build support for the 
war, especially repeated statements of operational links between 
Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network. U.S. intelligence 
officials have said that while there were contacts, there was no 
compelling evidence that Saddam and Islamic terrorists 
collaborated in any effort to kill Americans. 

The role the Pentagon played in intelligence-gathering, 
specifically the aggressive approach that Defense Undersecretary 
Douglas Feith took toward exploring ties between Iraq and 
al-Qaida. A Rockefeller addition to the report describes how 
Feith's office did its own analysis, bypassed the CIA and 
presented its findings directly to the White House. 

Prewar intelligence forecasts about postwar Iraq. 

The role played by Ahmad Chalabi, the now-discredited leader of 
the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile dissident group, in 
passing information to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick 
Cheney from defectors whose assertions haven't been supported by 
evidence. 

"After the analysts and the intelligence community produced an 
intelligence product, how is it then shaped or used or misused by 
the policy-makers?" Rockefeller asked. "Virtually everything that 
has to do with the administration has been relegated to Phase 
Two" of the committee's investigation. 

Roberts said that had been the plan since February, when he and 
Rockefeller agreed to expand the probe beyond its initial scope. 

The timeline isn't a matter of politics, he said. After taking 
more than a year to look at intelligence agencies, Roberts said, 
a new round of findings by November, which would require 
questioning hundreds of officials, isn't feasible. He assured 
Democrats that the probe was a priority and was proceeding as 
fast as it could. 

The next steps will be hearings to consider changing the 
structure of U.S. intelligence agencies, Roberts said. 

Last month an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll showed that 47 
percent of Americans thought the president misled them to make 
the case for war. 

Bush, traveling in Pennsylvania on Friday, called the Senate 
Intelligence document "a useful report," but said he hadn't read 
it. 

"I want to know how to make the agencies better, to make sure 
that we're better able to gather the information necessary to 
protect the American people," the president said. 

"Unless administration officials, from the president on down, had 
information not made available to the Senate Intelligence 
Committee, there was clearly an exaggeration of either an 
imminent or a grave and growing threat" to Americans, said 
Intelligence Committee member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.   

Kansas.com | 
*****************************************************************
 16 Wichita Eagle EDITORIAL: FAILURE

| 07/11/2004 | 

The United States went to war with Iraq based on falsehoods. 
That's the stark and intolerable conclusion of the report 
released Friday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence 
Committee, which found that central assumptions in the argument 
for war -- that Iraq had dangerous stockpiles of chemical and 
biological weapons, as well as a fast-developing nuclear 
capability -- were flat wrong. 

The report should lead to a wholesale shakeup of our intelligence 
services. 

It should also occasion some hard questions about the White House 
decision-making that led this country to war. 

This long-awaited bipartisan report, overseen by committee 
chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., focuses on CIA intelligence 
failures -- mistakes that, as Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-Virginia, 
said, "will affect our national security for generations to 
come." 

It's main finding: CIA analysts fell into "group think" that 
assumed too much and overplayed limited tidbits of information 
from second-hand sources. 

CIA chief George Tenet, whose resignation is effective today, 
should have been fired. 

What the Senate report doesn't address, as Democrats on the 
committee complain, is the extent to which the Bush team 
manipulated and exaggerated this faulty intelligence to justify 
its desire to go to war with Iraq. 

In fact, administration officials, most notably Vice President 
Dick Cheney, continue to stubbornly insist on discredited notions 
-- such as an operative link between al-Qaida and Iraq. 

It makes one wonder: Did they cherry-pick intelligence for 
certain conclusions or simply hear what they wanted to hear? 

Whatever mistakes the CIA made, they were compounded by another 
historic mistake: President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war, 
which commits this nation to attacking first when confronted by a 
potential threat. 

The problem is that this doctrine depends far too heavily on 
intelligence reports as the basis for action -- reports that are 
almost always inherently incomplete, fragmentary and tentative in 
their conclusions. 

Mr. Roberts and his colleagues have performed a vital national 
service in uncovering key flaws in our intelligence community, 
which serves as America's first line of defense in the war on 
terror. 

But the Bush team was not an innocent bystander in this national 
tragedy. This was also a gross failure of policy, and of 
executive judgment. 

For the board, Randy Scholfield   

*****************************************************************
 17 OpEd.com: Senate "Report" White-Washes "Bad Intelligence" Story for the
   White House; Former CIA Director Tenet Set Up as "Patsy" as
                   Media Ignore Real Culprits.
 

      OpEdNews.com Growing. Contribute

By Mike Hersh 

Katherine Pfleger Shrader of the Associated Press reports on the 
Senate Committee "Report" that White-Washes the "Bad 
Intelligence" Story for the White House. Her take? "Report: War 
Rationale Based on CIA Error." 

What error did the CIA make? Again from the AP: "In the 
unanimously approved report, senators concluded that the CIA kept 
key information from its own and other agencies' analysts; 
engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption 
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; and allowed President 
Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to make false 
statements." 

>From this, it seems the CIA schemed to trick Bush and Powell 
into lying 

to Americans and the world in order to scare us if not other 
nations into attacking Iraq. Is this true? Of course not. But 
before we debunk this facile cover story, let's consider the 
other key verdict, from the same AP story: "Following release of 
the 511-page review Friday, the panel's top Democrat, West 
Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said three-quarters of senators 
would not have voted to authorize the invasion if they had known 
how weak the intelligence was." 

See: "Report: War Rationale Based on CIA Error" by Katherine 
Pfleger Shrader, Associated Press, July 10, 2004: 

Bush, Cheney and others evaluated the "weak" and "bad" CIA 
intelligence, or supposedly from the CIA. Then, these two and 
others rushed to war. 

Didn't the Bush team seek a second opinion or even a third before 
claiming they knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Of 
course they did. 

They ignored warnings from the CIA and former Bush I Ambassador 
to Iraq Joe Wilson that "intelligence" claiming Iraq sought 
"yellow cake" 

uranium from Africa was wrong. Even Colin Powell and Condoleezza 
Rice concluded Iraq represented no threat to the USA. How is the 
CIA to blame for buffaloing a purportedly reluctant warrior Bush 
and the ostensibly peaceful Cheney into this rash and tragic 
mistake? 

Consider this report from Mother Jones: "The reports, virtually 
all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an 
apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush 
administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush 
national-security team, one day after President Bush took the 
oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was 
raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting -- 
and officials all the way down the line started to get the 
message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon 
hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the 
deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary 
of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become 
the vanguard for regime change in Iraq." The entire 
public-relations basis for Bush's rush to war came not from the 
CIA, but from a hand-picked flock of Neo-Con chicken hawks. 

See: "The Lie Factory" by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest in which 
"Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed 
how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a 
secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq [for] 
the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus 
intelligence and led the nation to war. 

Mother Jones magazine, January/February 2004 - <u><font size="2" 
color="#0000ff">http://www.mojones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_40 
5.html</font></u>

If the media were left-leaning, this information would get at 
least as much attention as Monica Lewinsky. It didn't and still 
hasn't. Not even on the day the Senate Intelligence Committee 
issued a white-washed "report" trying to blame the CIA for "bad 
intelligence." Unmentioned remains the "Office of Special Plans" 
established specifically to massage if not bypass CIA 
intelligence to concoct "support" for an Iraq War planned long 
before 9/11/01, and plotted in earnest while the WTC wreckage 
still smoldered. 

The Bush administration rushed into war killing nearly 1000 
Americans in uniform (and counting), wounding 1000s more, costing 
100s of $BILLIONS (again, and counting) on "bad intelligence." 
Not just according to the majority Republican Senate Committee. 
Also according to Bush's Secretary of State, the same 
once-trusted official designated to make the fabricated case to 
the UN and the world. This is one of the stories of the century. 
Yet all the networks - broadcast and cable news alike - ignore 
the real culprits. 

Why would a "liberal media" help the Bush team blame the CIA and 
not even mention the OSP? It's not like no one reported on the 
OSP. In addition to muck raking Mother Jones, Seymour Hersh (no 
relation) reported about this in-house White House "bad 
intelligence" factory in 

detail: 

"[A]ccording to former and present Bush Administration officials, 
their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the 
Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change 
of direction in the American intelligence community. These 
advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after 
September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews 
that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy 
toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence 
agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National 
Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. 

By last fall, the operation rivaled both the C.I.A. and the 
Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as 
President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's 
possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection 
with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. 
And although many people, within the Administration and outside 
it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity 
of much of that intelligence is now in question." 

Yes, self-proclaimed national security expert Richard Cheney and 
all the other top Bush officials relied on Ahmad Chalabi for 
"intelligence." The same convicted felon Chalabi (Jordanian law) 
currently suspected of spying against America for Iran. The Bush 
team welcomed this suspected spy into their inner circle and 
shared with him our most crucial and sensitive national security 
secrets. Not because he offered any real or even plausible 
information about Iraq. Just because he eagerly told the Bush 
team the lies they wanted to hear and needed to scare America 
into war. 

How is any of this the CIA's fault? How is this not the fault of 
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld? Even if the CIA reports 
were erroneous, the men and women entrusted with keeping us safe 
and making sound, essential decisions exacerbated any CIA errors, 
rushed into war based on this, assured us they knew exactly where 
the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were, and got 100s of our 
troops killed based on their errors. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, 
and Rumsfeld all kept lying. It all worked well while it was just 
Karl Rove public relations BS intended to help Republicans win 
seats in Congress. Until the attacks began and Americans started 
dying. Americans are still dying and top level Bush 
administration officials are still lying. Where is the 
accountability? 

It's no mystery how all this happened. Former Bush Treasury 
Secretary Paul O'Neill confirms the Bush administration planned 
to attack Iraq long before 9/11/01. Greg Palast uncovered 
evidence of detailed plans to seize and sell Iraqi assets to 
Washington insiders and Bush campaign contributors drafted mere 
weeks after Bush's tainted inauguration. 

All these plans were in the works, and Former Bush Anti-Terror 
Czar Richard Clarke testified under oath that Bush, Rumsfeld and 
others pressed him to blame Iraq and Saddam for the 9/11 attacks 
even though Clarke told them repeatedly al Qaeda was to blame. So 
Bush fired Clarke, made a half-hearted stab at Osama bin Laden 
with 11,000 troops in Afghanistan, and sent nearly 200,000 
American to kill and die in Iraq. 

This is especially damning: "According to the Pentagon adviser, 
Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what 
Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 
believed to be true - that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al 
Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, 
biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the 
region and, potentially, the United States." According to the 
Senate Committee, none of that was true. See: "SELECTIVE 
INTELLIGENCE" by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Donald Rumsfeld has his own 
special sources. Are they reliable? The New Yorker Magazine, 
2003-05-12, <u><font size="2" 
color="#0000ff">http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_f 
act</font></u>. 

Unfortunately the Senate chose to blame the CIA and ignore the 
Bush administration's and OSP's active role in this willful 
deception - at least until after the November 2 election. How 
convenient. Now reconsider the Senate "report" and the eager 
beaver media cover-up in lieu of real coverage. 

Bush and most of his top-level national security team are guilty 
of manufacturing lies about Iraqi nuclear and other weapons 
programs to frighten Americans into backing his war. Bush himself 
certified dishonest "intelligence" under oath in his presentation 
to the Congress. 

This remains largely unreported, left to small magazines and 
muckraking books. Not even Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11 
mentioned these facts, and of course they have never seen the 
light of a cathode ray tube. 

ABC, CBS, NBC and the "Clinton News Network" just blithely blame 
the CIA and sit back as Bush and Cheney question others' national 
security credentials. Anyone who considers the media "liberal" is 
raving. Bush is only in office now - getting away with his 
selection rather than election, and not impeached for high crimes 
before and after seizing office - because the corporate media 
ardently protect Bush and his corrupt, inept administration. All 
while the mass media prevent the public from knowing the truth. 

By Mike Hersh (c) 2004 ( MikeHersh@MikeHersh.com) 

Mike Hersh is a writer, lawyer and activist living in the 
Washington, DC area. He graduated from Cornell University and the 
Washington College of Law, founded two small businesses, and then 
became a full-time writer and activist. He is the webmaster of 
MikeHersh.com and several political online communities. Enter 
Your E-mail address to Receive OpEdNews Newsletter [Tell A 
Friend]       <b><font color="#0099ff">Contribute
     
*****************************************************************
 18 Scotsman.com: PM and spies at war over Iraq report
 
Sun 11 Jul 2004   			 			

  Two former Intelligence officers claim that officials pointed
out the dossier on Iraq's WMD was overstated but were overruled.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister announced a separate agency to
deal with WMD.

Picture: Johnny Green/ PA  

BRIAN BRADY 

OPEN warfare erupted between Tony Blair and the UKâ€™s 
intelligence community last night over who should shoulder the 
blame for inaccurate information on Weapons of Mass Destruction 
that helped lead Britain into war against Iraq. 

In a bid to deflect criticism over intelligence failings expected 
to be contained in this weekâ€™s Butler Report, the Prime 
Minister has ordered a massive overhaul of the way Britainâ€™s 
spies gather information on WMDs. 

A new spy centre dedicated to identifying and assessing the risk 
posed by illegally-held WMDs is to be set up in the UK in an 
attempt to ensure that the intelligence failings that preceded 
the Iraq war are never repeated. 

The Butler report is expected to be critical of the Prime 
Minister as well as the analysts who provided the "evidence", and 
Blair hopes the creation of a WMD nerve centre will absorb some 
of the flak. 

Blairâ€™s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, last night emerged as 
another possible target for criticism, over his instruction to 
redraft the September 2002 dossier on Saddamâ€™s arsenal, because 
he felt it suggested the Iraqi leader was only a threat if he was 
attacked first. 

But there are mounting indications that the intelligence 
community has no intention of taking the blame for overstating 
the threat posed by Saddam. 

Evidence from two former intelligence officers, to be broadcast 
in a BBC documentary tonight, suggests ministers were aware of 
the poor quality of intelligence from Iraq. 

Dr Brian Jones and John Morrison claim officials knew from the 
start that the government dossier overstated the threat from 
Saddam, but were overruled. They will also back up persistent 
claims that intelligence officers were pressurised to make their 
findings on Iraq suit the requirements of politicians. 

"In moving from what the dossier said Saddam had, which was a 
capability possibly, to asserting that Iraq presented a threat, 
then the Prime Minister was going way beyond anything any 
professional analyst would have agreed," Morrison, the former 
deputy chief of Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), told the 
BBCâ€™s Panorama programme. 

Opposition politicians and other intelligence officers also 
warned they would not allow the Prime Minister to dodge 
responsibility for any failings identified by Lord Butler and his 
five-strong inquiry panel. 

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint 
Intelligence Committee (JIC), insisted that "the buck must stop" 
with Blair if the final report, to be published on Wednesday, 
finds serious shortcomings. 

Blair is expected to meet any criticism from Butler with a vow to 
restructure the intelligence services and an insistence that his 
pronouncements on Saddamâ€™s destructive capabilities had been 
based squarely on the advice of his intelligence experts. 

A Downing Street spokesman hinted at the strategy last night, 
when he said: "He acted in good faith." 

But the commitment to shake up the UKâ€™s intelligence operation 
to keep a tighter rein on rogue states and organisations 
suspected of developing a WMD capability is a concession to MPs, 
who suggested the idea earlier this year. 

Blair has agreed plans for a new unit based on the Joint 
Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), set up following the Bali 
bombings in 2002 to improve the fight against international 
threats like Al-Qaeda by ensuring all counter terrorism 
intelligence is processed centrally. 

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) found that the 
centre had "significantly improved the UK intelligence 
communityâ€™s ability to warn of terrorist attacks". It also 
claimed the approach could provide a solution to the deficiencies 
in analysing information on WMD laid bare by the mistakes made 
over Saddam. 

A Downing Street insider last night told Scotland on Sunday the 
move had now been accepted as a "logical solution". 

Blair has already ploughed millions into a campaign to recruit 
more than 1,000 new agents to plug intelligence gaps on the 
ground around the world. But he will now direct even more into 
the new nerve centre, which will be ordered to gather 
intelligence on WMD proliferation and present a regular expert 
analysis of the raw data to ministers. 

The limitations of British intelligence on Iraqâ€™s WMD - and the 
political use to which they were put - are explored in 
tonightâ€™s Panorama. 

Jones, a retired DIS branch head, tells the programme that no one 
knew what chemical or biological agents had been produced since 
the first Gulf war and there was no certainty that agents had 
been stockpiled. 

Morrison also revealed that analysts came under political 
pressure in the wake of the 1998 Operation Desert Fox bombing 
campaign on Iraq. He said they felt pressure to agree that 
targets actively involved in the WMD production programme had 
been hit in the strikes, when they were not certain that was the 
case. 

Last night, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Tory foreign secretary, 
acknowledged there had been intelligence failures, but insisted 
the activities of politicians lay behind the problem with the 
case for war on Saddam. 

He told Scotland on Sunday: "The Prime Minister chose to use the 
intelligence agencies in a way that they have never been forced 
to act before. 

"He may want to get into a row with his own intelligence agencies 
and to order them to change the way they operate. But this is 
nothing to do with structures, it is about the political 
misjudgments made by Blair after he had put pressure on the 
agencies." 

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned that Blair would 
be judged before God for his actions, and suggested he would be 
condemned to struggle with his conscience. 

It also emerged last night that former BBC chairman Gavyn Davies 
has threatened to sue ex-Number 10 spin doctor Alastair Campbell. 

Davies, who was forced to quit in the wake of the Hutton inquiry 
into the death of government scientist David Kelly, was incensed 
by Campbellâ€™s claim that he had lied over the BBCâ€™s 
allegations that Number 10 had "sexed up" the Iraq dossier. 
Davies said lawyers had advised him he could sue Campbell for 
branding him a liar.              [ border=]             

        Delivery formats for "Scotsman.com News"        [more 
*****************************************************************
 19 MSNBC - 'The Dots Never Existed'

  A damning report on Iraq intelligence failures throws the 
administration a Curve Ball  
    
  Khue Bui for Newsweek  
    
  George Tenet: In August 2002, the CIA director got a briefing 
from a Pentagon team pushing evidence that Iraq might have been 
involved in the 9/11 attack  

  By Michael IsikoffInvestigative CorrespondentNewsweek

July 19 issue - The more he read, the more uneasy he became. In 
early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing 
touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case 
for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon 
intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was 
alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied 
heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, 
dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed 
chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi 
National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the 
German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile 
labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody 
inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the 
informantâ€”except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man 
was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled 
that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a 
"terrible hangover."

After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to 
speak up, according to a devastating report from the Senate 
intelligence committee, released last week, on intelligence 
failures leading up to the Iraq war. He wrote an urgent e-mail to 
a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about 
whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really 
rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. 
government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons 
program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind 
the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve 
Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably 
aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's 
talking about."

The saga of Curve Ball is just one of many wince-inducing moments 
to be found in the 500-page Senate report, which lays out how the 
U.S. intelligence community utterly failed to accurately assess 
the state of Saddam Hussein's programs for weapons of mass 
destructionâ€”and how White House and Pentagon officials, intent 
on taking the country to war, unquestioningly embraced the flawed 
conclusions. In startling detail, the bipartisan report concludes 
that the CIA and other agencies consistently "overstated" the 
evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and 
was actively reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. Hampered 
by a "group think" dynamic that caused them to view all Iraqi 
actions in the harshest possible light, the committee found, U.S. 
intelligence officials repeatedly embellished fragmentary and 
ambiguous pieces of evidence, making the danger posed by Iraq 
appear far more urgent than it actually was.

When U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq in the fall of 2002 and 
reported that they couldn't find any Iraqi weapons of mass 
destruction, for instance, the CIA dismissed the inspectors as 
gullible neophytes who were being tricked by deceitful Iraqi 
handlers. Similarly, when several Iraqi officials and scientists 
stepped forward to claim that Saddam had actually destroyed his 
WMD stockpiles and discontinued his programs (a claim that 
appears increasingly likely to have been the truth), they were 
branded as liarsâ€”while dubious sources like Curve Ball, whose 
stories were in step with the administration, were embraced.

Taken together, the facts in the report show that virtually every 
major claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion 
of Iraqâ€”from Saddam's growing nuclear program to his close ties 
with Al Qaedaâ€”was either wrong or exaggerated. The CIA was so 
convinced that Saddam was seeking to rebuild nuclear weapons that 
it "lost objectivity," the report concludes. The problem was 
compounded by the fact that the CIA did not have a single human 
spy inside Iraq after 1998 to report on what was really going on 
in Saddam's weapons program. Why not? The agency apparently 
didn't want to take the risk. "It's very hard to sustain ... it 
takes a rare officer who can go in ... and survive scrutiny for a 
long time," the agency told the panel, which cited the responses 
as evidence of the "risk averse" corporate culture of the CIA. 
"Leading up to September 11, our government didn't connect the 
dots," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on 
the committee. "In Iraq we are even more culpable, because the 
dots themselves never existed."

The report did offer the administration one consolation: the 
investigators said they found no overt evidence that 
intelligence-community officials were directly pressured to 
distort their findings. Seizing on that conclusion, White House 
aides tried to make the best of the damaging report, saying it 
proved that the president had been given bad information. 
"Listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. 
I thought so; the Congress thought so; the U.N. thought so," Bush 
told an audience last week. The president showed no signs of 
having had any second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion.

Other Republicans weren't so sure. Asked whether Congress would 
have authorized an invasion had it known two years ago what it 
knows now, Senate intelligence-committee chairman Pat Roberts, a 
loyal White House ally, said bluntly, "I don't know." He himself 
might have voted for a war more "like Bosnia and Kosovo"â€”a 
bombing campaign where no U.S. ground troops were put in harm's 
way.

Though the Republican-led committee officially concluded that 
nobody ordered intelligence analysts to tailor their findings, 
the question of whether political pressure influenced 
intelligence decisions leading up to the war has yet to be laid 
to rest. There were repeated clashes between committee Democrats 
and Republicans on the issue. Some Democrats on the committee 
complained that the report gives an incomplete and inaccurate 
picture of what really happened, since Republicans insisted on 
taking up the damaging topic of pressure in a second reportâ€”to 
be issued after the presidential election.

The report itself points to examples of possible political 
meddling, especially on the issue of whether Iraq had ties to Al 
Qaeda. Some U.S. intelligence analysts complained to the CIA 
ombudsman that "the constant questions and requests to reexamine 
the issue of Iraq's links to terrorism [were] unreasonable and 
took away from their valuable analytic time." When the CIA 
reached a measured and ambiguous view of the connectionâ€”"Iraq 
and Al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship" was the title of 
one June 2002 reportâ€”a team of Pentagon hard-liners under the 
direction of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith 
strongly challenged the agency's conclusions. An August 2002 
briefing that the Pentagon team gave to the then CIA Director 
George Tenet pushed evidence that Iraq might have been involved 
in the 9/11 attack. Their prime piece of evidence: alleged 
meetings in Prague between lead hijacker Muhammad Atta and an 
Iraqi intelligence agent. In fact, the committee found that the 
meetings likely never occurred. The Pentagon team brandished a 
photo of a supposed October 1999 meeting between Atta and the 
Iraqi agent that turned out to be bogus. The Qaeda terrorist was 
actually in Egypt visiting his family when the rendezvous 
supposedly took place. Tenet "didn't think much of" the briefing, 
he told committee investigators, so the Pentagon team took its 
case to Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief 
of staff, and Stephen Hadley, the deputy national-security 
adviser. There they found a much more receptive audience. Libby 
asked for follow-up, including "a chronology of Atta's travels."

The committee report may be just the beginning of the president's 
political troubles this month. Next up is the long-awaited 9-11 
Commission report, which is expected to be highly critical of 
administration agencies for failing to "connect the dots" that 
might have prevented the terror attacks. NEWSWEEK has learned 
that the commission has decided to release its findings next 
week, so they don't coincide with the Democratic Party convention 
in Boston at the end of the month. Commission officials say they 
don't want their work to get caught up in the politics of the 
presidential campaign. It was a nice thought, anyway.

With Tamara LipperÂ© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.


About MSNBC.com | Newsletters| Search | Help | News Tools | Jobs
Â© 2004 MSNBC.com
*****************************************************************
 20 Scotsman.com: Blair Must 'Shoulder Blame' for Intelligence Failings
 
Sat 10 Jul 2004   			 			

By James Lyons, Political Correspondent, PA News 

Tony Blair must shoulder the consequences for intelligence 
failings on Iraqâ€™s weapons of mass destruction, a ex-spy chief 
has said.
 
Western secret services were blamed for errors over Saddam 
Husseinâ€™s arsenal in a scathing US senate report.
 
But â€œsystematic failureâ€ within British agencies did not let 
the Prime Minister off the hook, said Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.
 
â€œThe buck stops there and I donâ€™t think that the political 
layer in any country can escape the consequences of a systemic 
failure,â€ she said last night.
 
The very future of the CIA was called into question by the 
devastating conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
 
Intelligence on Saddam Husseinâ€™s weapons of mass destruction 
was â€œflawedâ€ or overstated, the report concluded last night.
 
And British secret services were implicated in the â€œglobal 
intelligence failureâ€.
 
But there was no evidence of political pressure from President 
George Bushâ€™s administration or, by implication, allies in 
No10.
 
That will be seized on by the Prime Ministerâ€™s allies as he 
prepares for the findings of a similar British inquiry next week.
 
Mr Blair has already conceded that Iraqi WMD may well never be 
found ahead of Lord Butlerâ€™s report on Wednesday.
 
The Prime Minister insisted that it was wrong to suggest that did 
not mean Saddam posed a WMD threat.
 
However, Dame Pauline drew comparisons between Mr Blair and 
George Tenet, forced out of the CIA ahead of the damning US 
senate report.
 
Dame Pauline, who once headed the Joint Intelligence Committee 
bring together the UKâ€™s secret services, said: â€œThe head of 
the CIA is a politically appointed job.
 
â€œSo its the equivalent of the Minister going.â€
 
Speaking to BBC Worldâ€™s Hardtalk she refused to say whether Mr 
Blair should go if he was wrong.
 
But she said: â€œHe is making a distinction between what he 
genuinely believed and what turns out to be the case so he is at 
least open to the accusation of incompetence.â€
 
Dame Pauline went on to say: â€œI think there is a trust issue 
now and I think we already see this the trust issue.
 
â€œThatâ€™s one of the reasons why itâ€™s important, first of 
all, the Prime Minister does acknowledge he actually got it 
wrong.
 
â€œSecondly that confidence is restored in the intelligence 
services.â€
 
Mr Blairâ€™s appointment of John Scarlett as head of MI6 would 
not help that, Dame Pauline suggested.
 
Mr Scarlett faces criticism in the Butler report for overseeing 
the Iraq dossier as JIC chair.
 
Dame Pauline refused to rule out Mr Scarlett being forced to 
stand down, saying: â€œIâ€™m not going to pre-judge it.
 
â€œBut if your preoccupation is as it should be the clearing of 
the reputation of the MI6 and making sure that any of the reforms 
recommendations that are bound to come from that Committee you do 
have to ask the question whether somebody whose been deeply 
involved and possibly criticised in the findings of the Butler 
Report is regarded as a suitable person to head that up.â€
 
His credibility will be damaged by criticism from Lord Butler and 
that would have wider implications, Dame Pauline said.
 
â€œIt will be and it damages the Agency. National interest is 
concerned with the reputation of the Agency,â€ she added.
 
Mr Blairâ€™s allies will say the extent of the US criticism of 
intelligence failings strengthens his argument that he had no 
option but to back the invasion on the evidence available to him.
 
Intelligence analysts fell victim to â€œgroup thinkâ€ 
assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, the senators 
conclude.
 
US intelligence failures run so deep that money alone cannot put 
them right, their report stresses.
 
Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, 
said assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons 
and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were 
wrong.
 
â€œAs the report will show, they were also unreasonable and 
largely unsupported by the available intelligence,â€ he said.
 
â€œThis was a global intelligence failure.â€                     
 	 
*****************************************************************
 21 Online NewsHour: Senate Releases Report Critical of CIA Prewar Intelligence -- 

July 9, 2004
 
  [a NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript]   
  INTELLIGENCE FAILURES   
  
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report Friday
highly critical of the CIA and other intelligence agencies for
failures in their analysis of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
programs prior to the U.S.-led invasion last spring. Jim Lehrer
follows up with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), and its vice chairman,
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). 

[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: And now to the Chairman of the Senate 
Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and the 
Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia. I spoke 
to them from the Capitol a short time ago. 

Gentlemen, welcome. Senator Roberts, is it correct to say the 
United States went to war in Iraq on false premises and wrong 
information? 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: I don't know about the false premises across 
the board, but the information in regards to the intelligence on 
whether or not Iraq had the weapons of mass destruction, that 
certainly was not the case. And there were some very emphatic 
statements made in the national intelligence estimate of 2002. 
Senator Rockefeller and I both agree with outstanding work by our 
staff and a 516-page report that that simply was not the case. We 
had flawed intelligence. 

JIM LEHRER: Flawed intelligence and more, Senator Rockefeller, 
that caused us to go to war? 

[Sen. Jay Rockefeller] SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: We had flawed 
intelligence on enough, I think, to cause us not to go to war. 
And WMD, weapons of mass destruction, you know, the so-called 
nuclear threat/Niger thing, and the question of was there a link 
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein and the 
destruction and 9/11 and that tragedy, which has been discounted 
since by the intelligence community. It didn't... you know, Pat 
and I, when we go back to our respective states every weekend, we 
see men and women who are in the guards and reserves and the 
regular military and they're over there, or their spouses are 
over there, fighting, and dying and losing limbs, and I have to 
ask the question of: Are we better... are the Iraqis better off 
that we went in there, and are we better off? And in both cases I 
cannot answer yes. I think we went in under false pretenses. We 
did not have the reason to do it, and my judgment is the 
president wanted to do it. Was the war a foregone conclusion?   
  

JIM LEHRER: Senator Roberts, do you agree with that, that the 
president wanted to do it and that somehow this... the bad 
intelligence information or whatever it was just fed what he 
wanted to do anyhow? 

[Sen. Pat Roberts] SEN. PAT ROBERTS: I don't think the president 
is that disingenuous, and I don't think the president had a 
foregone conclusion in his mind. I think what the administration 
received, whether it be Colin Powell, Condi Rice, the president, 
whomever, basically what they said was very declarative, it was 
very positive, but they got that information from the 
intelligence community and the national intelligence estimate, 
and the intelligence estimate was wrong. So... and, you know, 
like Jay, I go back and I visit with the troops and I visit with 
the families, and we grieve with those who have paid the ultimate 
sacrifice. 

But, you know, I don't know about Iraq being better off or worse 
off. Now we're trying to achieve stability, and there is a 
central nervous system, Jihadist movement over there that's very, 
very difficult, but we do have a new government. And I could tell 
you one thing for sure, the 500,000 people that Saddam Hussein 
murdered, we can't ask them, but I think I know what the answer 
would be. 

[Jim Lehrer and Sen. Pat Roberts] JIM LEHRER: But, Senator 
Roberts, do you think your report today is going to make it more 
difficult, not only for and you Senator Rockefeller but for all 
members of the U.S. government who supported this war going in, 
to explain to the families, et cetera, as to why this loss... 
they suffered this loss in Iraq? 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: I think it's how you frame it. I think if you 
try to explain as best you can the intelligence assumption train 
that slowly developed ever since 1991, you can present some 
extenuating and mitigating circumstances as to why the 
intelligence community presumed that after the U.N. inspectors 
left that Saddam would reconstitute his weapons of mass 
destruction. They certainly had the capability, but the facts are 
that he did not do that. 

It's going to take some explaining, and more important, we are 
going to have to launch into a real period of reform, and to try 
to change things in regards to the group think that exists and 
the self denial that exists in the intelligence community, not 
only on behalf of the people who are doing the fighting and the 
men and women in uniform and on behalf of our national security, 
but on behalf of the solid and patriotic women within the 
intelligence communities who are also risking their lives. 
Problems with 'group think'   
  

[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: Senator Rockefeller, what's your 
analysis of how this "group think" that your report, and Senator 
Roberts just now repeated, got going? What was the group think 
and what was behind it? 

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I'm going to answer that, but I want to say 
something as to your question to Pat Roberts. That, if you had 
asked me that question, it would be simply the most painful 
question that you can ask me. When you go back and you face these 
men and women and their families who were over in the 130-degree 
temperature fighting, dying, two days ago 16 injured, five 
killed, it hasn't gotten better since Saddam Hussein was turned 
over to the Iraqis. Now we find there's 20,000 insurgents 
organized, rather than 5,000. And I... you can't look those good 
people in the eyes and say that their people are there doing the 
right kind of thing, because they're doing it at the request of 
their commander in chief, and they're good, but it is painful. It 
is very painful. If you could ask me the second question, I'd 
appreciate it. 

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. The group think, what was the group think that 
caused this flawed intelligence, and where did it come from? 

[Sen. Jay Rockefeller] SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I think it came from 
several reasons. One is that the Berlin Wall went down in 1989; 
then during the '90s that was also close to the end of the 
Iran-Iraq War. During the '90s you had this sort of absence of 
American presence except in the skies over Iraq. And people... 
there wasn't really any weapons of mass destruction to be found, 
but there were these constant barrage of messages coming from our 
national leaders saying that weapons of mass destruction are 
there, that the link between al-Qaida and... or Saddam Hussein 
and 9/11 is there, and that... that's a kind of a pressure. 

I mean, the pressure can be applied individually by one person to 
another, but it could also be applied psychologically by the 
environment in which you work and what you read and see on 
television every single day. And I think that pressure has had a 
substantial effect, and I think that's the pressure which caused 
the American people to support the president when he went to war, 
and then when they discovered that the reasons for going to war 
were not there, I think that's the reason for the drop. 

JIM LEHRER: In other words, nobody was saying, "Hey, wait a 
minute; there may not be weapons of mass destruction"? 

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: No, nobody was... that's not correct to 
say. I'm not going to do double negative on you. But what's 
lacking, and Pat Roberts and I would both agree on this, I think, 
in the intelligence community is what we call red teams, and that 
is people whose only job is to go to the analysts who are coming 
forward with conclusions, and to systematically challenge all of 
those analysts and what their conclusions are, or as they are on 
their way to making their conclusions. And that whole concept of 
red teams, contrarian analysis, has been missing, and hence group 
think.     

  

  

  

  

  

  
  Who was questioning the intelligence?   
  

[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: Senator Roberts, to follow up on that, 
when you look at this and you say "oh, my goodness, how did this 
happen?" This is what everybody's going to want to know after 
reading your report and hearing you and reading about your report 
in the next 24 hours, average Americans want to know, "hey, wait 
a minute, was there nobody in the U.S. government who didn't say, 
'hey, how could something this serious go this far and under an 
umbrella of group think without somebody raising some flags in a 
way that would have stopped it?'" 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, somebody did. As a matter of fact, in the 
Department of Energy and the Department of State and in other 
agencies, there were caveats. But remember the biggest single 
item that happened was 9/11, and the president did make very 
declarative and very assertive comments, but he did so thinking 
that -- from the intelligence community -- we had aluminum tubes 
that were going to be used as centrifuges. He had the situation 
where the intelligence community talked about unmanned aerial 
vehicles, about the mobile labs, but all of that information had 
caveats in it. And finally, the analysis of the product that 
finally came through said that this was true. So... 

JIM LEHRER: The caveats were not there, you're saying? 

[Sen. Pat Roberts] SEN. PAT ROBERTS: No, the caveats were there, 
but basically what we are finding out is that the CIA really 
compartmented a lot of that information, did not share it, or did 
not allow the other caveats to be considered in the final 
product. But remember now, Jim, this is after 9/11. This is after 
3,000 people lost their lives. And also you go back to '91 with 
the first war with Iraq and then the discovery that he had a 
better nuclear capability or more advanced nuclear capability 
than we really thought he had. Then you have all these 
inspections by the U.N. inspectors. Then after 1998, they leave. 

What would be your assumption, would he reconstitute his weapons 
of mass destruction given all of his speeches, all of his 
violations of the U.N. resolutions? Most people, I think, would 
say "yes, I think that's a pretty good bet." And then as they put 
that together and they layered more and more assumptions on top 
of one another into the group think, nobody said, "Let's blow the 
whistle." One other thing, this is not only the United States, 
it's also the Brits, it's also the Italians, it's also the 
Russians, it's also the French, it's also the U.N. This was a 
world community failure on the WMD. 

[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: What about Senator Rockefeller's point 
that his definition of pressure, not one-on-one pressure to 
change things, but there was just a kind of an assumption of 
pressure here that everybody believed this, as you say, everybody 
believed there were weapons of mass destruction, everybody 
believed all of this, and everybody knew that that's how the 
intelligence was supposed to turn out. Do you buy that? 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, I think that it is the job of the 
intelligence community, just as Jay has indicated, to use what we 
call red teams. You have people who simply offer, you know, 
contrary ideas and then, "say prove it." But then again... let me 
put it this way. If you're an analyst, and it was before 9/11, 
and there were ten dots to connect, you had to really connect 
eight or nine of them before you pushed the product to the policy 
maker to make a decision. After 9/11 everybody says, "oh, my 
gosh, we're too risk averse," you have the 9/11 commission saying 
we didn't connect the dots, we should have thought about this. 

So say that the analysts has four dots and he starts to push the 
product, you could be wrong. So consequently everybody was 
leaning forward and I hope to heck that there is pressure by 
repeated questioning. As it turns out, in the WMD section there 
was not any repeated questioning, or what some people call 
pressure. In the other section in regards to links to terrorism, 
there was repeated questioning and it was a better document.     

        A failure of a system or individuals?   
        

[Jim Lehrer and Sen. Jay Rockefeller] JIM LEHRER: Senator 
Rockefeller, looking at all of this, everything that you know 
about this, everything that's in the report and everything you 
know outside this, is this a failure of a system or is this a 
failure of a bunch of individuals who just did their jobs poorly? 

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: This is a failure of a system, and that's 
an extremely important question. It is not fair to simply dump 
all of this on the Central Intelligence Agency. The Central 
Intelligence Agency does not make the decision, and George Tenet 
does not make the decision to go to war. That decision is made at 
the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. 

I think if there was a system that we were caught short, by the 
end of the Cold War we were wandering around trying to find WMD 
-- in Iraq, when there wasn't any to be found, David Kay kept 
coming back and saying he found any yet, but he was going to, 
then... and he never did, and they're still looking. They're 
going through 3 million documents as we're talking, and they're 
not going to find any. So we went to war under false pretenses, 
and I think that is a very serious subject for Americans to think 
about for our future. 

JIM LEHRER: Senator Rockefeller, do you believe that if the 
president had known then what he knows now, he would have still 
taken us to war? 

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I can't answer that question. I just ask -- 
the question I ask is, why isn't he, and maybe he is, why isn't 
he as angry about his decision, so to speak his vote on this, as 
I am about mine? 

JIM LEHRER: You regret your vote? 

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: Oh, I said that months and months ago. 

JIM LEHRER: Senator Roberts do you regret your vote in favor of 
the war? 

[Sen. Pat Roberts] SEN. PAT ROBERTS: I think there were four 
reasons as to why we took the military action: one obviously was 
the WMD and whether or not it really threatened our national 
security. Second one was the links to terrorism. We have found 
that there is some evidence of a safe haven we have found 
evidence of contacts. We really haven't found any operational 
planning, so I'm not saying school is still out, but at least 
there's some consideration. But there is also the regional 
stability factor. He did have 150, what, I guess kilometer 
missiles that could reach Israel. And then there's the human 
rights situation. 

Let's go back a little bit in the Clinton administration and look 
at the Khartoum chemical plant, whoops, it was the wrong plant, 
and then the situation with the USS Cole where we did have 
intelligence that should have, really should have gone to the 
ship's captain and said don't go into the port of Aden... then 
have you the embassy bombings in regards to Africa, and I could 
go on and go on and go on, where the intelligence community 
basically didn't come up with the right information. 

Now all of a sudden, we lean forward and more especially after 
9/11, and we have what I have called this assumption train, and 
we kept adding cars to it. So you can see how this happened. 

But let me say something about the president. I think he more 
than anything, more than anyone else should be disturbed by this 
and knows the value of intelligence in such far reaching 
decisions and important decisions as to bring to the country to a 
war footing and launch any military action. 

[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: But are you personally disturbed as a 
United States senator for having voted for this war based on what 
you were told about weapons of mass destruction -- 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, of course, I am terribly disturbed by the 
flaws in intelligence, and that's why both Senator Rockefeller 
and I have as a priority goal not only the phase two part of the 
investigation but also a priority on reform and change that 
should be made. And we are going to have experts throughout the 
community testify before the Intelligence Committee. We're going 
to do it in a careful and a very deliberate way. But, Jim, right 
now we're under threat in terms of a possible homeland attack. So 
these flaws have to be corrected. 

JIM LEHRER: Phase two is looking at the use of this intelligence 
by the administration? 

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, basically, it's the prewar intelligence 
on post war Iraq. What were we saying on what the condition would 
be right now, and everybody knows that post war Iraq is sort of 
an oxymoron -- there is a war, a big-time war -- also the use of 
intelligence. And also what effect on the intelligence product 
did the Department of Defense have with Assistant Secretary Fife 
and the Iraqi National Congress? 

JIM LEHRER: So, Senator, in a few seconds then, Senator 
Rockefeller this thing is a long way from being done, this is 
only stage one of what you and your committee are going to do and 
look at, correct? 

[Sen. Jay Rockefeller] SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I certainly hope 
that's correct. And the chairman has assured me that's correct. 
We have two things that we have to do and we have to do them on a 
parallel tract and we have to do them as fast as we can. One is 
we have to come up with reforms that can be legislated within the 
intelligence system to make it better. And secondly, we have to 
do what the rules of the committee cause us to do, but we just 
never were able to do it, and that is not just look at prewar 
intelligence with respect to Iraq, but also the use of, how was 
that intelligence put to use, what -- did the policy-makers make 
decisions based on that intelligence, which is where I come into 
my trouble with why we went to war. 

JIM LEHRER: And that's -- 

[Sen. Pat Roberts and Sen. Jay Rockefeller] SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Let 
me add something, Jim, on that news factor we're including 
members of Congress, some of the biggest critics of the president 
and the administration made just as assertive and declarative and 
aggressive statements. We knew about the NIE, we had the vote to 
go to war. People should have read the NIE. We should be just as 
upset as the president, and those in the administration should be 
in regards to intelligence. 

JIM LEHRER: Okay, gentlemen, thank you both very much.     

Copyright © 2004 MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights
*****************************************************************
 22 UK Independent: The most iconic city on the US West Coast


'A global intelligence failure': report damns pretext for war
 
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
 
10 July 2004

Claims made by President George Bush and others that Saddam 
Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was seeking 
to develop a nuclear arsenal were based on flawed and faulty 
intelligence, a scathing Congressional report confirmed 
yesterday. But the report utterly failed to address the issue of 
whether the administration had manipulated intelligence for its 
own political ends. 

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee was highly 
critical of George Tenet, the outgoing head of the CIA, who 
leaves office tomorrow. It said he provided skewed advice to 
politicians and repeatedly failed to include dissenting views 
from other intelligence agencies, such as those controlled by the 
State Department and the Pentagon. It also blamed Mr Tenet for 
not personally vetting President Bush's 2003 State of the Union 
address, which contained the erroneous claim that Iraq was 
seeking to purchase uranium in Africa. 

Yet critics of the administration will argue that the report - 
established with a narrow investigative remit - unfairly 
scapegoats Mr Tenet. The committee is only due to report on the 
administration's role in the intelligence failures after the 
November election. 

Yesterday Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice-chairman 
of the committee, said that while the report concluded there was 
no pressure placed on analysts by the administration to make 
certain judgements about Iraq, he and other Democrats on the 
committee disagreed with that conclusion. He said pressure was 
created by a "cascade of statements" about Iraq's weapons 
capabilities and the regime's alleged links with al-Qa'ida. 

He said the Senate would not have voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to 
approve the war in Iraq if it had known how deeply flawed the 
intelligence was. He said there was real frustration among 
Democrats on the committee that it had not addressed the question 
of how intelligence was "shaped or used or misused by the 
policy-makers". 

"The administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used 
bad information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress 
would not have authorised that war ... if we knew what we know 
now," he said at a press conference following the report's 
publication. "Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in 
this report will affect our national security for generations to 
come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world 
has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans 
in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, 
our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before." 

Republicans, who have the majority on the committee, have ensured 
that suggestions that the administration manipulated intelligence 
do not appear anywhere in the report's 500-plus pages. Rather the 
report chose to blame what it termed "group-think assumptions" 
Iraq had weapons that it did not. It said there were a number of 
factors for this. Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of 
the committee, told reporters there had been a "global 
intelligence failure". 

"This group-think dynamic led intelligence community analysts, 
collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as 
conclusively indicative of a WMD programme as well as ignore or 
minimise evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding 
weapons of mass destruction programmes," the report concluded. It 
said such assumptions also led analysts to inflate snippets of 
questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had 
chemical and biological weapons. 

By way of example, the report highlighted the highly 
controversial case of two lorries discovered in Iraq that were 
claimed by some to be mobile weapons laboratories. The discovery 
of these trucks - later found to be used for weather balloons - 
led analysts to conclude that Iraq was actively making chemical 
weapons, the report said. It also said analysts put great store 
by the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named 
"Curve Ball". American agents did not have direct access to Curve 
Ball or his debriefers, but his information was expanded into the 
conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological 
weapons programme. 

Reports from other defectors - some provided by the Iraqi 
National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi - were also relied 
on too heavily, it said. 

This was because US intelligence had no sources collecting 
information about Saddam's weapons programme since 1998 when UN 
weapons inspectors were pulled out of Iraq. 

Mr Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the committee's report 
essentially "agrees with what we have said, which is we need to 
take steps to continue strengthening and reforming our 
intelligence capabilities so we are prepared to meet the new 
threats that we face in this day and age". 

The report appears to be greatly at odds with the views of 
several former intelligence analysts who believe that 
intelligence was "cherry picked" and skewed to make the case for 
war and that caveats inserted by analysts about the lack of solid 
intelligence about Saddam's capabilities were ignored for 
political reasons. Much of this skewed intelligence was gathered 
by a specially formed team within the Pentagon and the former 
analysts believe that putting the blame on the regular 
intelligence community amounted to a "whitewash". 

Greg Thielmann, a former analyst with the State Department's 
Intelligence Bureau, said intelligence provided by his 
organisation was routinely ignored by the administration because 
it did not fit with its preconceived ideas about what weapons 
Saddam possessed. "I call it faith-based intelligence gathering," 
Mr Thielmann previously told The Independent about the way facts 
were collated. "Analysts want to maintain relationships. Tenet 
spoke to the President six days a week [for his daily 
intelligence briefing]. If he went and said, 'Mr President, you 
have misrepresented what my analysts said', how long would he 
keep going to the White House?" 

Mr Tenet is not leaving the CIA without putting up something of a 
fight for his reputation. On Thursday he gave a farewell speech 
in which he said: "In the end the American people will weigh and 
assess our record where intelligence has done well and where we 
have fallen short." In February - perhaps aware of the growing 
pressure on him to resign - Mr Tenet denied that analysts had 
ever said Iraq represented "an imminent threat". In a strident 
defence of his agency, he said that analysts had various opinions 
about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear 
weapons programmes and that these were clearly spelled out in a 
report handed to the White House in October 2002. That report, 
the National Intelligence Estimate, included 40 caveats and 
dissents from various analysts. 

"We concluded that in some ... categories Iraq had weapons, and 
that in others, where it did not have them, it was trying to 
develop them," he said. 

THE MAIN POINTS 

• CIA fell victim to "group-think" assumptions 

• CIA director George Tenet is criticised for providing skewed 
intelligence and ignoring dissident views. Also blamed for not 
reviewing 2003 State of the Union address 

• Intelligence community relied too heavily on reports from Iraqi 
exiles and defectors 

• Intelligence community has "broken corporate culture and poor 
management". Extra cash would not help             


UK Independent Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 23 UK Independent: How Blair stood his ground as it fell away 
beneath him
   
He will survive Butler, but can he ever regain our trust?
 
The more he justifies his decision to go to war, the less the 
public trusts him. Braced for criticism from an inquiry he has 
every reason to dread, the Prime Minister, for all the clamour, 
has little to fear - even from his rivals and enemies
 
By Raymond Whitaker and Andy McSmith
 
11 July 2004

It has become a commonplace of British politics: Tony Blair has a 
problem of trust. 

The more the Prime Minister justifies his decision to go to war 
in Iraq, the less the public seems to believe him. His 
explanations have veered from the certainty that Saddam Hussein 
had weapons of mass destruction which posed a "current and 
serious" threat to Britain - which is what he said when 
presenting the September 2002 Iraq dossier to Parliament - to the 
assertion that even if the intelligence was wrong, it was right 
to invade Iraq to rid the world of an evil despot. 

But whatever he says, the public doesn't buy it. Mr Blair's 
attempts to draw a line and move on to domestic subjects with 
which he is more comfortable, such as health and education, have 
been constantly frustrated. He has sought to deal with the trust 
problem by saying that he respects the motives of critics such as 
Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, who disagree with his 
decision to go to war - but he insists that they should do the 
same for him. That is a long way short of the apology that many 
are demanding. 

Nor does the coming week offer any respite. The Senate 
intelligence committee in the US has just issued a damning report 
on the failings of the CIA in Iraq which in passing accuses other 
intelligence agencies, including Britain's, of similar errors. On 
Wednesday, Lord Butler, appointed by the Prime Minister to 
examine the same issues, will report on the findings of his 
committee. While the Senate committee, for party political 
reasons, did not explore the dealings between the intelligence 
agencies and the politicians, the Butler committee, according to 
all the reports, will do just that. 

And next weekend sees the anniversary of the death of Dr David 
Kelly, whose suicide brought a dimension of human tragedy to what 
might otherwise have been an arid dispute over biology and 
missile ranges. Certainly Mr Blair will not want to be reminded 
of last summer, when doubts over the Government's WMD case were 
suddenly turned into the subject of pub and dinner party 
conversation, first by the titanic row between Downing Street and 
the BBC, then by Dr Kelly's disappearance and death, and finally 
by the Hutton inquiry 

Through August and September, the inner workings of government 
were laid bare by evidence to the inquiry, with notes and memos 
which would normally remain secret for 30 years being made public 
within weeks of their creation. The picture revealed was not 
flattering to the BBC, the intelligence services, Downing Street 
or the Prime Minister himself. 

By January, when Lord Hutton completely exonerated Mr Blair of 
any wrongdoing in connection with Dr Kelly, the two men at the 
top of the BBC had stepped down, as had their principal 
antagonist at No 10, Alastair Campbell. Also gone was Andrew 
Gilligan, the BBC reporter who had used Dr Kelly as his source. 
But did this get the Prime Minister off the hook? Not at all. 

The fuss over whether the Hutton report was a whitewash might 
eventually have died down, At almost the same moment, however, 
the whole WMD issue belatedly erupted in the US. The American 
public had been largely impervious to the controversy in Britain, 
but when the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, announced 
that he had found no weapons stockpiles and told the Senate, "It 
turns out we were all wrong", notice was suddenly taken. 

In an election year, President George Bush had to react. He set 
up an inquiry into the intelligence on which the US and Britain 
had gone to war, and Mr Blair - not for the first time - was 
forced to follow suit. All arguments that Hutton had settled the 
issue were abandoned. The inquiry the Prime Minister never wanted 
will present its findings in three days' time. 

Even if Lord Butler presides over a whitewash as comprehensive as 
Lord Hutton's, however - and the former cabinet secretary is said 
to be determined to avoid such a perception - it will make 
curiously little difference to Mr Blair's position. There is a 
disjuncture between what might be called street politics and life 
in Westminster; public distrust on Iraq does not translate into 
obstruction in the Cabinet or the civil service, and the 
political class is as preoccupied with the two by-elections to be 
held on Thursday as they are with Lord Butler's findings on 
Wednesday. 

Lord Butler can hardly avoid concluding that Tony Blair took the 
country into war with Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence. 
He is also expected to criticise the procedures by which 
decisions are reached in Downing Street - yet despite all the 
buzz about Tony Blair's future, nobody of real influence in 
Westminster wants or expects his job to be on the line. 

The Cabinet Blairistas do not want him damaged, and are running a 
very visible operation to shore him up. Tessa Jowell, John Reid 
and Charles Clarke will be on the airwaves today, all hammering 
out the same message that the Prime Minister is fighting fit and 
here to stay. Although the Tories gain to some extent from a fall 
in Tony Blair's personal standing, Iraq is not a good issue for 
them either, because they supported the war. 

Even Gordon Brown and his circle, who would be the first to 
collect the prize if Mr Blair vacated Downing Street, do not want 
a political crisis to erupt this week. They know that if he 
thinks he is being driven into a corner, it is likely to 
reinforce the Prime Minister's determination to tough it out. One 
figure close to Mr Brown said: "We want him to get through 
Butler, get through the by-elections and everything else so that 
he can go on holiday and think about what he wants to do." 

"Getting through" Butler will depend on what the report says. 
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former head of the Joint 
Intelligence Committee, says the buck must stop with Mr Blair 
himself, and implies that the author of the WMD dossier and 
former head of the JIC, John Scarlett, appointed head of MI6 by 
the Prime Minister, might have to stand down if that is what is 
needed to "restore confidence" in the intelligence services. 

Few others have gone so far, however. The Prime Minister hopes 
that the response to Butler can be restricted to administrative 
changes in the intelligence agencies and the civil service, along 
with some kind of expression of contrition along the lines of: "I 
am sorry the intelligence was wrong, but the decision to go to 
war was still right." 

His dilemma is that while this might satisfy the Westminster 
village, it will not regain him public trust. That would require, 
if not an admission that it was wrong to go to war, at least a 
promise that Britain will never go to war again on such flimsy 
grounds. But among the political class this would be tantamount 
to standing down and handing over to Mr Brown. Whatever the hopes 
in the Brown camp that he will be contemplating this during his 
summer holiday, it remains the least likely scenario. 

Which brings us back to the problem of trust. In this respect Mr 
Blair is exactly where he was a year ago. And ever since he put 
his fate in the hands of President Bush, his influence over the 
Iraq issue has been compromised. 

Leading article, page 24; John Rentoul, page 24 

BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT 

Gavyn Davies, 53, resigned as chairman of the BBC after criticism 
of the corporation in Lord Hutton's report on the death of Dr 
David Kelly. 

When Mr Davies took up the post in 2001, there were concerns that 
his New Labour links might jeopardise his independence. But he 
stood shoulder to shoulder with the director-general, Greg Dyke, 
in defending the BBC. 

"I have been brought up to believe that the referee's decision is 
final," he said on his departure in January. This week, however, 
Mr Davies said he found Lord Hutton's findings "inexplicable", 
and accused the Government of conducting a witch-hunt. 

Before the Hutton inquiry, John Scarlett was as anonymous as a 
spy ought to be, aside from tales of derring-do as MI6 chief in 
Moscow in the early 1990s. 

Mr Scarlett's involvement in the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's 
WMD brought him into the public eye like no other chairman of the 
Joint Intelligence Committee. 

Despite Lord Hutton's finding that he might "subconsciously" have 
been influenced by Downing Street in his writing of the dossier, 
Tony Blair appointed him head of MI6. He takes over this month, 
but critics question whether he should keep the job if he is 
criticised by Butler. 

After a torrid appearance at the Royal Courts of Justice in 
London, Andrew Gilligan was roundly censured in the Hutton 
report, which found no evidence that the dossier on Iraq had been 
"sexed up". 

Mr Gilligan left the BBC and for a time it appeared his career 
might falter. A post at The Spectator as well as a contract for 
the Evening Standard have confounded those who hoped he would 
never work in the media again. 

Although reluctant to write on the Kelly affair since his 
departure from the BBC, he is expected to return to the fray when 
the Butler report comes out. Plans for a book are still in the 
pipeline, but a return to broadcasting is unlikely. 

Last autumn, Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence, was 
favourite to become the main political casualty of the Hutton 
inquiry. What appeared to finish him off was evidence from his 
political adviser, Richard Taylor, about a meeting with Mr Hoon 
before Dr Kelly's death, in which they had discussed what to do 
if the scientist's name was leaked to the press. This seemed to 
contradict Mr Hoon's denial that he played any part in making Dr 
Kelly's name public. 

But Lord Hutton concluded he was not untruthful. Mr Hoon may well 
move jobs in a reshuffle this month, but at this distance it will 
not be seen to be a result of the Kelly affair. 

A year ago, Alastair Campbell was the second most powerful man in 
the country, at a time when, more than ever, information is 
power. 

As No 10's director of communications and strategy, his authority 
derived from his closeness to Mr Blair. Now he has resumed the 
career of public performer he abandoned 10 years ago. His Evening 
with Alastair Campbell shows draw good audiences; he writes on 
sport for The Times; and he has become a TV interviewer on 
Channel 5, with a guest line-up that includes Bill Clinton. His 
future is assured by the eye-watering value of his 
as-yet-unpublished diaries. 

Amid the millions of words about the David Kelly affair, the 
near-total silence of his widow, Janice, has been remarkable. 

Mrs Kelly, 59, has declined all requests for interviews, in spite 
of offers estimated at up to £750,000. Her one public revelation 
was to tell the Hutton inquiry that her husband had felt "let 
down" by the Government. She also wrote in the newsletter of her 
local history society of the "nightmare" she and her family had 
been through. She is understood to have recently moved out of the 
house that the couple shared in the village of Southmoor, 
Oxfordshire, but remains living quietly nearby.                    


UK Independent Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 24 UK Independent: Defiant Blair faces censure from Butler over Iraq war
 
By Andy McSmith, Francis Elliorr and Raymond Whitaker
 
11 July 2004

Tony Blair defiantly dismissed all talk of resignation yesterday
amid growing signs that his political management in the run-up
to the Iraq war is to be censured in this week's report by Lord
Butler. 

The former cabinet secretary told colleagues he believes the
Prime Minister failed to take sufficient responsibility in the
months before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent on Sunday
has learnt. Lord Butler is understood to have withheld the key
conclusions of his report from Downing Street to limit its
ability to manipulate media coverage. 

The political tension has increased with reports emerging that
MI6 has now retracted the the key intelligence behind Tony
Blair's claim that Iraq posed a "current and serious" threat ­
the justification for war. 

A senior intelligence source is said to have told BBC1's
Panorama programme that the evidence of Saddam Hussein's
chemical and biological weapons was fundamentally unreliable. 

This evening's Panorama also hears from Dr Brian Jones, a
retired official with the Defence Intelligence Service who says
that he "couldn't relate" to Mr Blair's evidence to the Hutton
inquiry. 

John Morrison, former Deputy Chief of DIS, says he could "almost
hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall" when Mr
Blair told Parliament that the threat from Iraq was "serious and
current". 

The Prime Minister's cabinet allies are out in force this
weekend, trying to crush any suggestion that he is on the point
of quitting. According to today's Mail on Sunday, Mr Blair even
ordered his civil servants to draw up a framework document
setting out how he would handle his resignation. 

It is now known that at least six cabinet ministers recently
approached the Prime Minister on an individual basis, appealing
to him not to step down. Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for
Education, told the IoS he had a face-to-face conversation with
Mr Blair after MPs returned from the Easter break. He said he
had intended to appeal to Mr Blair not to quit, but realised
"within 20 seconds" that he was determined to carry on. 

He added: "There was a lot of speculation whizzing around at the
time. I thought the speculation was bollocks but I decided I
would go to Tony, because I very much wanted him to stay. I
would never normally say that, but there was a rather frenetic
atmosphere and you never quite know how people react to those
situations. I wondered if there was any uncertainty in his mind
about where he stood, but actually it was immediately clear that
the conversation was redundant." 

Four other cabinet ministers ­ John Reid, Tessa Jowell, Peter
Hain and Lord Falconer ­ have approached Mr Blair to urge him to
stay on. Patricia Hewitt, another of Mr Blair's cabinet allies,
has written asking him to continue. 

Mrs Jowell told BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday: "I don't think Tony
Blair has at any time indicated that he is on the brink of
resigning. He is the most successful Prime Minister of modern
times." 

A Downing Street spokesman pointed out that when questioned last
month about whether he intended to carry on through the next
election, Mr Blair had said: "I am absolutely up for it."
However, there is another hurdle for the Prime Minister, with
two key by-elections on Thursday in normally safe Labour seats. 

Lord Butler's report is expected to be less fierce than last
week's US Senate findings into the CIA's judgements about Iraq's
weapons ­ which did not, however, extend to 

criticising George Bush, or the White House. Lord Butler is also
likely to avoid criticising Mr Blair by name, or to make any
mention of his former director of communications, Alastair
Campbell, but will conclude that Downing Street "dodged" its
responsibility to ensure that intelligence was properly
evaluated and used. 

Among the evidence he has found is the minutes of a meeting in
Downing Street in March 2002, which decided that the available
intelligence did not justify war. Seven months later, Mr Blair
told the Commons that the threat from Iraq's weaponry was
"serious and current". 

John Scarlett, the incoming head of MI6, and the man he
replaces, Sir Richard Dearlove, both face censure, according to
reports. Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, is also likely to
be criticised. 

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the person most likely to inherit the
crown should Mr Blair resign, had his head down as he put the
finishing touches to his comprehensive spending review announced
in the Commons tomorrow. 	           


UK Independent Ltd.
*****************************************************************
 25 AFP: IAEA could soon close dossier on Iran: senior Russian official

WAR.WIRE

MOSCOW (AFP) Jul 09, 2004

 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could close its 
dossier on Iran's nuclear program within months, the head of 
Russia's federal atomic energy agency said Friday.

"There is a chance that Iran's dossier could be closed during 
IAEA's autumn session," Alexander Rumyantsev told reporters in 
Moscow.

"Iran has opened up and has been cooperating with the agency," he 
said.

Russia has been pressing Iran to continue to cooperate with 
inspectors from the United Nation's nuclear watchdog agency, 
which has been investigating the Islamic state since February 
2003 for allegedly hiding a secret weapons program.

In June the IAEA criticized Tehran for being less than 
forthcoming over its activities.

Russia has faced a barrage of criticism over its construction of 
Iran's first nuclear power station at Bushehr, especially from 
the United States and Israel that say Iran can use fuel for the 
reactor for a covert weapons program.

Moscow and Tehran have for months been negotiating a contract for 
the return of the plant's spent fuel. Russia has said it will not 
deliver fuel to Bushehr until the contract is signed.

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 26 AFP: Price negotiations holding up launch of Bushehr - Russian official

WAR.WIRE

MOSCOW (AFP) Jul 09, 2004

 Negotiations over price and logistics are holding up the launch 
of Iran's first nuclear power plant at Bushehr that Russia is 
contructing despite international protest, Moscow's top nuclear 
official said Friday.

Alexander Rumyantsev said the 1,000 megawatt plant is now 
expected to go online in 2006.

Russia says it will not begin delivering fuel to the plant until 
Moscow and Tehran sign a contract for the return of spent fuel 
back to Russia.

"The principles of the contract have been decided at all levels," 
Rumyantsev said.

But the two sides are still negotiating over the price that 
Teheran will pay for Russia to store that spent fuel and the 
logistics of how it will be transported back, Rumyantsev said.

The talks over the contract have dragged on for years, prompting 
speculation that Moscow was yielding to pressure from the United 
States, which says the Islamic state could use fuel from the 
plant for a covert nuclear weapons program.

Spent fuel is highly radioactive and in some cases can be 
recycled for weapons use.

On a visit to Moscow in late June, Mohammed ElBaradei, the chief 
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), gave a thumbs 
up to Bushehr's construction that he said was "no longer at the 
center of international concern."

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 27 AFP: Iran says does not fear nuclear dossier being referred to UN

WAR.WIRE

TEHRAN (AFP) Jul 11, 2004

 Iran, facing allegations it is secretly trying to build an 
atomic bomb, dismissed Sunday calls by its archfoes for the 
dossier on its nuclear activities to be sent to the UN Security 
Council.

"Iran is not afraid of threats regarding the possible referral of 
its nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council," said foreign 
ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.

"We are not worried about such threats, although we are trying to 
sort out the problem through the IAEA and its board of 
governors," he told a press conference, referring to the 
International Atomic Energy Agency.

The United States and Israel, which both accuse Iran of seeking 
to make an atomic bomb, want the case sent to the Security 
Council -- which could impose sanctions on the Islamic republic.

But IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei said during a visit last week 
to Israel -- widely believed to be the only nuclear power in the 
Middle East -- that such a referral would only complicate 
matters.

"Considering Iran's transparency and cooperation, there would be 
no reason to send our dossier to the Security Council," Asefi 
said.

Asefi also confirmed that Iran, which says its nuclear ambitions 
are limited to producing electricity, had taken the "political 
decision" to resume the manufacture and assembly of centrifuges 
but said that unspecified technical issues had yet to be 
resolved.

Last month, Iran announced it would go back on its commitment to 
Europe's so-called "Big Three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- 
to suspend production of centrifuges, which can be used to make 
bomb-grade uranium.

The move followed an IAEA resolution deploring Iran for its "lack 
of cooperation" with the international community over its nuclear 
actvities.

Asefi, however, said the manufacture of the centrifuges, which 
can also be used for peaceful purposes, will take place under 
IAEA control.

Iranian leaders have also said they do not intend to start the 
process of enriching uranium to make it useable in weapons.

  WAR.WIRE
  
*****************************************************************
 28 Guardian Unlimited: Rice Caps Asian Tour Focused on Nukes
 
From the Associated Press        

[UP] 

Saturday July 10, 2004 3:16 AM

AP Photo SEL109 

By HANS GREIMEL 

Associated Press Writer 

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - U.S. National Security Adviser 
Condoleezza Rice said Friday that North Korea could reap 
``surprise'' rewards if it dismantles its atomic weapons program, 
as she capped an Asian tour focused on easing the nuclear 
standoff. 

In Seoul after stops in Japan and China, Rice also thanked South 
Korea for sticking to its planned troop dispatch to Iraq despite 
the beheading of a South Korean hostage on June 22. 

Speaking with South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, Rice 
said ``North Korea will be surprised to see how much will be 
possible'' if the communist nation agrees to abandon it nuclear 
ambitions, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. 

``So much is possible if North Korea just does that,'' she said. 
She cited the example of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who 
agreed to give up his nuclear weapons program, which helped pave 
the way for last month's resumption of diplomatic ties between 
Tripoli and Washington. 

Last year, Peacefully resolving the 21-month nuclear dispute with 
North Korea was also a top item in Rice's talks with officials in 
Beijing and Tokyo, two other partners in the six-nation talks 
aimed at persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear programs. 

Beijing has arranged three rounds of talks among the two Koreas, 
the United States, China, Japan and Russia on the matter. 

During last month's talks, Washington offered the North aid and a 
security guarantee in exchange for dismantling its atomic weapons 
program. 

The dispute with Pyongyang erupted in 2002 when Washington said 
North Korea admitted running a secret nuclear program in 
violation of a 1994 deal under which it received energy aid. 

While in Seoul, Rice also gave President Roh Moo-hyun a letter 
from President Bush emphasizing his commitment to good relations 
with Seoul. 

Rice later met Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and praised Seoul's 
commitment to sending 3,000 troops to the northern Iraqi town of 
Irbil beginning next month. 

The mission, which will also include some 600 South Korean 
soldiers already in Iraq, will make Seoul the biggest partner in 
the coalition after the United States and Britain. 

Rice applauded what she called ``the great strength that the 
Republic of Korea has demonstrated in supporting the effort in 
Iraq to stabilize the country.'' 

Sending the South Korean troops is considered an important 
gesture toward Seoul's most important ally. The government 
pledged to follow through despite last month's beheading of Kim 
Sun-il by militants after the government rejected their demand to 
scrap its deployment. 

The hostage killing dented public support for the dispatch. On 
Friday, a handful of demonstrators rallied outside government 
buildings in Seoul, some holding signs with a defaced photo of 
Rice with the words ``War Criminal.'' 
  
      Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
*****************************************************************
 29 AFP: "So much is possible" for NKorea in return for nuclear dismantlement
: Rice

WAR.WIRE

SEOUL (AFP) Jul 09, 2004

 US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said Friday North 
Korea would be surprised at "how much will be possible" if the 
Stalinist state abandons its nuclear ambitions, South Korean 
officials said.

The remarks came when Rice met with South Korean Foreign Minister 
Ban Ki-Moon in Seoul on the final leg of her Asian tour which 
also brought her to Japan and China, they said.

"North Korea will be surprised to see how much will be possible 
(if it abandons its nuclear programs)," Rice told Ban, according 
to official Kim Eun-Seok, who attended the 30-minute meeting.

"So much is possible if North Korea just does that."

Rice expressed hope that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il will 
follow the footsteps of his counterpart of Libya, a former US 
enemy which has normalized ties with Washington after giving up 
its nuclear ambitions.

"I wish Kim Jong-Il would talk to (Libyan leader Moamar) 
Kadhafi," Rice was quoted by Kim Eun-Seok as saying.

A nuclear stand-off erupted in October 2002 when the United 
States said North Korea acknowledged it was developing nuclear 
weapons, violating a 1994 international agreement.

The third round of six-way nuclear crisis talks in Beijing last 
month ended without a breakthrough, although the United States, 
the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia agreed to meet again by 
the end of September.

Pyongyang has proposed freezing its nuclear program and pledged 
to stop building, testing and transferring nuclear weapons, but 
insisted Washington's rewards for concessions were the only way 
to resolve the impasse.

The United Sates offered at the latest negotiations economic and 
diplomatic rewards if North Korea shut down and sealed its 
nuclear weapons facilities in three months.

North Korea has demanded energy aid and a security guarantee from 
the United States. Pyongyang also wants Washington to lift 
sanctions on North Korea and remove the Stalinist regime from the 
US list of states sponsoring terrorism.

While meeting with Ban, Rice also thanked South Korea for sending 
troops to Iraq at the US' request, officials said.

Earlier in the day, Rice met with South Korean President Roh 
Moo-Hyun and conveyed US President George W. Bush's letter to the 
South Korean leader.

"President Bush wanted me to visit Seoul and reaffirm the 
importance the United States attaches to its relations with the 
Republic of Korea," Rice was quoted as saying in the pool report.

The letter is expected to contain Bush's thanks for Seoul's 
decision to deploy more than 3,000 troops to Iraq, an aide to Roh 
was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

A group of some 60 activists rallied on a road leading to the 
presidential Blue House, chanting slogans denouncing the US-led 
war on Iraq as Rice was meeting with Roh.

Rice also met with her South Korean counterpart, Kwon Jin-Ho, to 
discuss Washington's plan to realign its troops stationed 
overseas, officials said.

Washington has offered to reduce its 37,500 US troops in South 
Korea by one third under a global redeployment plan.

The US military presence has served as key deterrence against 
North Korea since the 1950-1953 Korean War, and the planned 
reduction has prompted security concerns among South Koreans.

Rice headed back home after a meeting with Ban late Friday, said 
US embassy spokesman Jason Rebholz in Seoul.

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 30 Korea Herald: [EDITORIAL]Historical provocation   
        
In their coverage of the latest inscription of Goguryeo monuments 
in China and North Korea on the World Heritage List, the Chinese 
news media, including the state news agency Xinhua, have been 
unequivocal in describing the ancient Korean kingdom as a state 
founded by an ethnic minority group in northeastern China. The 
Korean government must be far more articulate in protesting and 
requesting that Beijing give up its historical aggression, given 
that these media largely speak for their government.

 In its dispatches from the southern Chinese city Suzhou, where 
the World Heritage Committee recently held its annual conference, 
Xinhua reported that "the WHC unanimously agreed to inscribe the 
capital cities and tombs of the ancient Goguryeo kingdom of China 
into the World Heritage List." It said that "Goguryeo, which once 
expanded its territory to the Korean Peninsula, played a very 
important role in the development of history in the northeast 
Asian region and represented an important part of Chinese 
culture."

 This is a preposterous distortion of historical facts and a 
blatant infringement on early Korean history, as well as on past 
relations between the two neighbors. No less incredulous, the 
Chinese foreign ministry recently deleted Goguryeo from a 
description of ancient Korean kingdoms on its Internet homepage. 

China is seemingly stepping up its scheme to claim a crucial 
portion of early Korean history. Not only our government, but the 
state-funded Goguryeo Research Foundation is also urged to speed 
up its activities to organize joint academic conferences with 
China and North Korea and to produce English-language 
publications on the history of Goguryeo for distribution to 
international academic communities and government agencies.

 Both Seoul and Pyongyang may find it awkward to counter China's 
strategy to undermine Korean historical sovereignty now, 
considering its role in mediating a solution to the ongoing 
nuclear dispute. Yet, China should realize that its historical 
provocation cannot stand the test of justice in the long run. 

2004.07.12
 
*****************************************************************
 31 Briton sues US giant over depleted uranium poisoning, could
 
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 09:02:33 -0500 (CDT)

 
The Observer | UK News | Briton sues US giant over 'uranium poison'
Landmark court case could establish critical link for Gulf war veterans

Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer

A former British defence worker has won legal aid to sue the giant US
military corporation Honeywell over claims that he was poisoned by depleted
uranium while working at its Somerset factory.
The case is likely to have far-reaching implications for Gulf war veterans,
aerospace workers and civilians living in former war zones.
Richard 'Nibby' David, 49, suffers from serious respiratory problems, kidney
defects and finds it extremely painful to move his limbs. Medical tests have
revealed mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes which he alleges
has been caused by depleted uranium poisoning (DU), a radioactive waste
product from the nuclear power industry that is used for shells because it
can smash through tank armour.
Millions of tonnes of DU shells have been fired by US and British forces in
Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also been used as ballast in aircraft
and counterweights on helicopter blades. While it is believed to be
relatively harmless lying in the soil, a growing body of scientists believe
that when its fine dust is inhaled it can cause a range of cancers, kidney
damage and birth defects.
It has been alleged that DU used in the 1991 Gulf war was responsible for
abnormally high levels of childhood leukaemia and birth defects in Iraq.
France, Spain and Italy claim soldiers who served in Bosnia and Kosovo,
where Nato used DU shells, have contracted cancers. It is also believed to
be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which has left thousand of
veterans with mysterious health problems.
While the defence and nuclear industries have played down the danger of DU,
David's case is the first time that the arguments will be heard before a
court. Should he win, the verdict will send shockwaves through the military
establishment as it could pave the way for huge compensation claims against
the armed forces. He also believes that dozens of his fellow workers at the
Honeywell site in Yeovil have also suffered. A number of his closest
colleagues have died or contracted liver cancers.
Although the Legal Aid Board does not back personal injury claims, it
decided that David's case was in the 'wider public interest'. The decision
was a major victory after an eight-year struggle for justice after ill
health forced him to give up his job in 1995 as a component fitter for
Normalair Garrett, the Yeovil firm now owned by Honeywell, which makes parts
for most of the world's fighter planes and bombers.
After being struck down by a disorder that left him paralysed with pain and
unable to breathe properly, David began looking for clues as to the cause.
The breakthrough came in September 1995 while watching a news bulletin on
Gulf war syndrome on which he saw how a UK army major struggled to get out
of her car.
'I was in unbearable pain and unable to move. I thought I was going to die,'
he said. 'But when I saw this woman major trying to move and saw the intense
pain in her eyes I immediately knew she was suffering like me.'
David had never been in the armed forces or the Middle East, but was
convinced there was a link between his illness and those suffered by former
Gulf troops. But it was not until February 1999 that the possibility that DU
was the cause came when he heard a talk by US scientist Dr Asaf Durakovic, a
former military doctor and nuclear medicine expert. Durakovic suggested that
the debilitating, in some cases fatal, illnesses suffered by Gulf veterans
were not necessarily caused by a cocktail of vaccines, as some claimed, but
by DU poisoning.
Durakovic decided to test the urine samples of 15 UK Gulf veterans and
agreed to include David's. Six months later, the results showed that he had
one of the highest levels of uranium contamination out of all the samples.
'It was unbelievable,' said David. 'I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
On one hand it gave an answer to why I was suffering, but also the knowledge
I would never recover. Above all I was confused. How could I have been
contaminated in England?'
The answer was not long in coming. DU is a man-made material and experts
told him that the most likely route of his contamination was his workplace.
David decided to sue Honeywell Aerospace, but without being able to pay for
lawyers it was impossible to collect evidence. But now he has been awarded
legal aid he hopes to be represented by barrister Michael Mansfield QC and
intends to call a stream of world experts to back his claim.
One is Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry and chief
scientific adviser to the Gulf Veterans' Association.
'This case will be highly significant not only for soldiers but for many
others. We know of cases where firemen have had to deal with fires caused by
burning DU at factories and prison officers have also been contaminated by
inhaling fumes. I am in no doubt that inhaling DU has the potential to cause
a great deal of damage.'
Honeywell has declined to comment on details of the case, but will claim it
never used DU at Yeovil. However, it is known that another aerospace group,
Westland, which shared the Somerset site, has admitted using DU from 1966
until 1982 as counterweights for helicopter blades. David also claims
Honeywell used special heavy metal alloys for making components which he
*****************************************************************
 32 [DU-WATCH] Britian sues US giant over 'uranium poison'
 
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 15:32:47 -0500 (CDT)

 
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1258632,00.html

Briton sues US giant over 'uranium poison' 

Landmark court case could establish critical link for
Gulf war veterans 

Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer 

A former British defence worker has won legal aid to
sue the giant US military corporation Honeywell over
claims that he was poisoned by depleted uranium while
working at its Somerset factory. 
The case is likely to have far-reaching implications
for Gulf war veterans, aerospace workers and civilians
living in former war zones. 

Richard 'Nibby' David, 49, suffers from serious
respiratory problems, kidney defects and finds it
extremely painful to move his limbs. Medical tests
have revealed mutations to his DNA and damage to his
chromosomes which he alleges has been caused by
depleted uranium poisoning (DU), a radioactive waste
product from the nuclear power industry that is used
for shells because it can smash through tank armour. 

Millions of tonnes of DU shells have been fired by US
and British forces in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. It
has also been used as ballast in aircraft and
counterweights on helicopter blades. While it is
believed to be relatively harmless lying in the soil,
a growing body of scientists believe that when its
fine dust is inhaled it can cause a range of cancers,
kidney damage and birth defects. 

It has been alleged that DU used in the 1991 Gulf war
was responsible for abnormally high levels of
childhood leukaemia and birth defects in Iraq. France,
Spain and Italy claim soldiers who served in Bosnia
and Kosovo, where Nato used DU shells, have contracted
cancers. It is also believed to be a possible cause of
Gulf war syndrome, which has left thousand of veterans
with mysterious health problems. 

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The UK&apos;s Largest Conservation Charity
The National Trust, renovating and restoring one of
the...

nationaltrust.org.uk
 While the defence and nuclear industries have played
down the danger of DU, David's case is the first time
that the arguments will be heard before a court.
Should he win, the verdict will send shockwaves
through the military establishment as it could pave
the way for huge compensation claims against the armed
forces. He also believes that dozens of his fellow
workers at the Honeywell site in Yeovil have also
suffered. A number of his closest colleagues have died
or contracted liver cancers. 

Although the Legal Aid Board does not back personal
injury claims, it decided that David's case was in the
'wider public interest'. The decision was a major
victory after an eight-year struggle for justice after
ill health forced him to give up his job in 1995 as a
component fitter for Normalair Garrett, the Yeovil
firm now owned by Honeywell, which makes parts for
most of the world's fighter planes and bombers. 

After being struck down by a disorder that left him
paralysed with pain and unable to breathe properly,
David began looking for clues as to the cause. The
breakthrough came in September 1995 while watching a
news bulletin on Gulf war syndrome on which he saw how
a UK army major struggled to get out of her car. 

'I was in unbearable pain and unable to move. I
thought I was going to die,' he said. 'But when I saw
this woman major trying to move and saw the intense
pain in her eyes I immediately knew she was suffering
like me.' 

David had never been in the armed forces or the Middle
East, but was convinced there was a link between his
illness and those suffered by former Gulf troops. But
it was not until February 1999 that the possibility
that DU was the cause came when he heard a talk by US
scientist Dr Asaf Durakovic, a former military doctor
and nuclear medicine expert. Durakovic suggested that
the debilitating, in some cases fatal, illnesses
suffered by Gulf veterans were not necessarily caused
by a cocktail of vaccines, as some claimed, but by DU
poisoning. 

Durakovic decided to test the urine samples of 15 UK
Gulf veterans and agreed to include David's. Six
months later, the results showed that he had one of
the highest levels of uranium contamination out of all
the samples. 

'It was unbelievable,' said David. 'I didn't know
whether to laugh or cry. On one hand it gave an answer
to why I was suffering, but also the knowledge I would
never recover. Above all I was confused. How could I
have been contaminated in England?' 

The answer was not long in coming. DU is a man-made
material and experts told him that the most likely
route of his contamination was his workplace. David
decided to sue Honeywell Aerospace, but without being
able to pay for lawyers it was impossible to collect
evidence. But now he has been awarded legal aid he
hopes to be represented by barrister Michael Mansfield
QC and intends to call a stream of world experts to
back his claim. 

One is Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal
chemistry and chief scientific adviser to the Gulf
Veterans' Association. 

'This case will be highly significant not only for
soldiers but for many others. We know of cases where
firemen have had to deal with fires caused by burning
DU at factories and prison officers have also been
contaminated by inhaling fumes. I am in no doubt that
inhaling DU has the potential to cause a great deal of
damage.' 

Honeywell has declined to comment on details of the
case, but will claim it never used DU at Yeovil.
However, it is known that another aerospace group,
Westland, which shared the Somerset site, has admitted
using DU from 1966 until 1982 as counterweights for
helicopter blades. David also claims Honeywell used
special heavy metal alloys for making components which
he believes may have contained DU. 

	
		
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 33 Washington Times: Inside the Ring - 

July 09, 2004 

By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough 

Enraged Pentagon 

The Defense Department is circulating a "talking points" memo
expressing outrage at Mexican authorities for disrupting the 
honor-guard funeral of a Mexican Marine killed in Iraq June 21. 

"The disruption of the funeral of USMC Lance Corporal Juan 
Lopez was a deplorable incident," the memo says. "The Department 
of Defense extends its deepest sympathy to the Lopez family for 
this added tribulation in their hour of loss. 

"An initial response by government of Mexico officials has 
unfortunately failed to satisfy our deep concern over what 
occurred. ... The Department of Defense is still awaiting 
clarification from the secretariat of National Defense regarding 
the incident." 

On Wednesday, the Mexican government issued what some in the 
Pentagon considered a halfhearted apology. 

Its soldiers disrupted Cpl. Lopez's funeral, in his hometown 
of San Luis de la Paz, on the grounds that two Marines in the 
honor guard carried rifles in violation of Mexican law. 

The rifles were nonfunctioning for ceremonial duties. And 
besides, the Marine Corps says, it worked out arrangements 
beforehand with the Mexican government. 

"All due legal requirements and formalities were 
scrupulously observed, a fact communicated to Mexican 
authorities well in advance of the funeral service," the 
Pentagon memo says. 

Schmidt's defenders 

You would not know it by the Air Force's harsh reprimand 
this week of Maj. Harry Schmidt, but the Air National Guard F-16 
pilot has a lot of defenders in the service. 

Some came forward in court hearings to defend Maj. Schmidt, 
who mistakenly bombed a training range in Afghanistan. He 
mistook ground fire for anti-aircraft shots. His bomb killed 
four Canadian soldiers. 

One of those who came forward is Col. David C. Nichols, an 
F-16 pilot who commanded the pilot's air group when the accident 
occurred on April 17, 2002. 

In a written declaration, Col. Nichols said higher-ups never 
informed the group that there would be training that night. 

"After April 17, 2002, when I learned of the activities that 
had been conducted at Tarnak Farms, I was astonished that my 
mission planners had not been informed that live fire exercises 
were being conducted by friendly forces," Col. Nichols stated. 
"[It] was a major breach of good and safe fire control 
measures." 

The colonel also said the required night-vision goggles made 
ground fire appear to be coming up at the airplane. 

The officer said he investigated the incident, interviewing 
pilots and listening to radio communications. His conclusions: 
"I found no departures from flight discipline on the part of 
Maj. Schmidt. His actions were well within the rules of 
engagement. 

"Punishing a pilot because his judgment, though reasonable 
when it was made, later is determined to be grossly incorrect 
and injurious, in my opinion will have a disastrous and adverse 
effect on aircrew morale." 

The Air Force did just that. Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson found 
Maj. Schmidt guilty of dereliction of duty, imposing a reprimand 
and a fine. 

Burrowing nuke 

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is defending his 
department's work on a new earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, 
which is under fire from anti-nuclear activists and their 
supporters in Congress. 

Mr. Abraham said during a meeting with reporters and editors 
of The Washington Times that he is "frustrated" by Congress' 
reluctance to fund a study of the new warhead. 

The warhead, which must be able to burrow some 100 feet 
before setting off a nuclear blast, is needed because of the 
growing danger that rogue states and terrorists will build 
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons inside deep, hardened 
underground bunkers out of the reach of conventional bombs. 

"We know that there are people who like to build deep 
underground facilities that conceivably could be used against 
either the United States and others. And that is a growing, 
21st-century threat," he said. 

"Amazingly, a lot of people in Congress want to keep 
fighting the Cold War," he said. "They want to maintain the 
large weapons systems of the 20th century and not consider 
threats of the 21st." 

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator has been studied for the 
past two years, with funding cut in half last year by critics in 
Congress. 

The Energy Department is seeking $27.5 million for fiscal 
2005 and a House appropriations panel cut all money for the 
program in an Energy funding bill. Energy officials hope the 
Senate will keep the money for the warhead in its version. 

Anson Franklin, a spokesman for Energy's National Nuclear 
Security Administration, said Los Alamos National Laboratory is 
working on a modified version of the B-61 nuclear warhead for 
the burrowing nuke, while the Lawrence Livermore National 
Laboratory is examining a modification of the B-83 warhead for 
its penetrator. 

Journalist zone 

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz caught flak from the 
journalism hierarchy last month for saying reporters in Iraq are 
"afraid" to go out in the country and see what is really going 
on. 

Turns out a Time magazine reporter in Iraq also says 
reporters don't go out much. 

"Well, most of the other journalists don't leave their 
hotels or remain in fortified compounds," Michael Ware said this 
week on CNN's "Newsnight" with Aaron Brown. Mr. Ware was 
explaining how he has been able to make contacts with members of 
Abu Musab Zarqawi's ruthless terror group. 

"Or any attempt they've made to develop contacts in Fallujah 
or other  these other insurgent hot spots in the past, they've 
simply let go," Mr. Ware said. "This is required hard, 
unrelenting, gumshoe journalism, just getting out there and 
doing the basics. Most people just aren't doing that." 

Moore's loyalties 

Left-wing gadfly Michael Moore brags that he has had a 
camera team in Iraq interviewing rank-and-file soldiers. He 
asserts he is a friend of the basic infantryman. 

Those soldiers should know that Mr. Moore looks on the 
people killing them not as terrorists, but as freedom fighters. 
In other words, Mr. Moore views you as the oppressors, not 
Saddam Hussein's collection of fedayeen henchmen and internal 
security thugs. 

Mr. Moore wrote this in April: 

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 
'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'the enemy.' They are the 
revolution, the Minutemen and their numbers will grow  and they 
will win." 

By the way, after Osama bin Laden's terrorists flew planes 
into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing thousands, Mr. 
Moore, who has become the darling of the Democratic Party, wrote 
that America had it coming. 

"We, the United States of America, are culpable in 
committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had 
better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have 
been active participants," he said on his Web site. 

• Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. 
Mr. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at 
bgertz@washingtontimes.com. Mr. Scarborough can be reached at 
202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com. 

site contents copyright © 2004 News World Communications, 
*****************************************************************
 34 IAEA: IAEA Chief Eyes Middle East Free of Nuclear Weapons
 
Staff Report
 9 July 2004 [M. ElBaradei &amp; A. Sharon] 
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon. (Credit: Jerusalem Post) 
  + Story Resources 
  + News Story
  + General Conference Resolution [pdf] 
  + Director General Essay 
  + Leonard Davis Institute
  + Israel Atomic Energy Commission
  + IAEA &NPT Coverage 

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei ended his official visit
to Israel this week, striking a positive note for efforts toward
a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. He held talks
with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other members of
the Israeli Cabinet as part of a three day visit to Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem, 6-8 July 2004. 

"The prime minister affirmed to me that Israeli policy continues
to be that in the context of peace in the Middle East, Israel
will be looking forward to the establishment of a
nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East," Dr. ElBaradei
said at a press conference in Jerusalem. "It´s not a new policy,
but affirming that policy at the level of prime minister I think
is quite a welcome development." 

During his visit, Dr. ElBaradei also discussed bilateral
cooperation with officials of the Israel Atomic Energy
Commission and gave a lecture at the Leonard Davis Institute for
International Relations of the Hebrew University in Jersusalem. 

The visit is part of on-going efforts by Dr. ElBaradei to
promote a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. It follows a call
by the IAEA General Conference of Member States for countries in
the Middle East to open their nuclear facilities to full IAEA
inspection and establish a nuclear-weapons-free-zone. Copyright
2003-2004, International Atomic Energy Agency, P.O. Box 100,
Wagramer Strasse 5, A-1400 Vienna, Austria 
Telephone (+431) 2600-0; Facsimilie (+431) 2600-7; E-mail:
Official.Mail@iaea.org
Disclaimer 
*****************************************************************
 35 [DU-WATCH] Chernobyl: Kiddofspeed faked?
 
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 23:05:04 -0500 (CDT)

 
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chernobyl6jul06.story

THE WORLD
Account of Chernobyl Trip Takes Web Surfers for a Ride

By Mary Mycio, Special to The Times

PRIPYAT, Ukraine  Kate Brown began thinking about visiting this high-rise
ghost town in the mid-1990s, when she was researching a book about the
region before it was evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Then she saw a website about a young woman's lone motorcycle rides through
Chernobyl's exclusion zone. The site, http://www.kiddofspeed.com , attracted
tens of millions of viewers and became the most-visited site on
Angelfire.com, a Web page hosting service.

"I was intrigued," said Brown, an assistant professor of history at the
University of Maryland-Baltimore. She spoke while strolling along the
vegetation-choked sidewalks and cracked roadways of Pripyat, about a mile
from the nuclear power plant where the 1986 accident took place.

"Elena," whom several Internet sources identified as Lena Filatova of Kiev,
has been described as "fearless," "heroic" and "seriously whacked" in the
virtual chatter the website generated.

When asked by e-mail why the story of a raven-haired beauty roaring through
a radioactive wasteland attracted so much attention, cyberpunk author and
futurist Bruce Sterling responded: "It's a post-apocalyptic adventure story.
Very 'Mad Max.' "

And it is, evidently, equally fictional.

"That story is not true! She did not ride a motorcycle alone in the zone!
She came with her husband and a friend on a regular tour," insisted Rimma
Kyselytsia, who was the group's official guide. She identified the woman in
the images on the website as Filatova and has the documents to show that
Filatova's tour was organized by a Kiev travel agency and that her party
traveled in a car provided by Chernobylinterinform, the agency that ushers
all visitors to the exclusion zone.

The visit took place March 16, about two weeks after the website appeared.
Since then, the curious have made their way to Chernobyl inquiring about
Elena's adventure  among them two Norwegian biology teachers who arrived on
bicycle hoping to retrace the journey. A guard turned them away.

"Whoever put this together was never actually here," said Kyselytsia,
leafing through a printout of the images on the website. Although it has
been updated several times, the site's original contents survive in
duplicates elsewhere on the Internet, and on the computers of people who
downloaded them.

The updated site does not appear to contain any authentic images of "Elena"
or a motorcycle in any Chernobyl location. Four pictures on the updated site
can be traced to a Ukrainian coffee table book published in 2000, some are
aerial shots, and many are anachronisms. One photo is of chemical showers
that have not existed for years. In another, the tall ventilation stack of
the ruined reactor looms above some saplings. But those trees have since
grown so high that only the tip of the stack is visible today.

After the March 16 trip, the website was updated with new pictures,
including one of a motorcycle near a sign that reads "Chernobyl district" in
Ukrainian. But that sign is several miles south of the barbed-wire fence and
checkpoints surrounding the exclusion zone, which stretches almost 19 miles
in all directions from the disaster site.

According to Kyselytsia and Mykola Slobodianiuk, who drove the group that
day, Filatova's husband, Igor Filatov, told them that he had ridden his
motorcycle to the Chernobyl checkpoint but was refused entry.

"The idea is absurd," Slobodianiuk said. "I have worked in the zone since
1986, and I have never seen anyone on a motorcycle."

Closed motor vehicles are the rule in the zone, where radiation levels are
thousands of times normal in places. A moving vehicle stays ahead of the
dust it raises. When it stops, it is enveloped in its own  often
radioactive  wake.

After bumping for hours over the zone's crumbled, potholed and, in many
places, barely existent roads, it is difficult to believe that anyone could
ride a motorcycle on them.

The updated website depicts the lone rider in various zone locations, often
with a motorcycle helmet in a bag slung across her shoulders.

"When I asked about the helmet, she just said her husband had some ideas,"
Kyselytsia recalled as she led Brown and a reporter into the Pripyat
high-rise that the group had visited. "He took most of the pictures. He also
staged some of them."

Kyselytsia pointed out the mailbox that the website claimed contained a
hunting and fishing publication. It was empty, and Kyselytsia maintains that
it was empty when she and the Filatovs entered the building.

"This one left me blinking," science fiction writer Neil Gaiman posted on
his website after reading that "Elena's" story was not entirely true. "Not
so much because it was a fraud, as why anyone would bother to create such a
fraud."

Neither Lena nor Igor Filatov were available for comment. A woman who
answered the door at their apartment said they had left town and could not
be reached.

The Internet "Elena," however, is unapologetic. "I just wanted to show
people Chernobyl," she wrote in an author's note after doubts about the
story began to surface. "I did this for free, for no fame and I did this
with love for my country."

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 36 Globe and Mail: Nuclear's hidden costs   
  
By REG LANG

 Saturday, July 10, 2004 - Page A16 

Aurora, Ont. -- Re Nuclear Reactors Will Supply Ontario's Power, 
Province Says (July 8): Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan's 
announcement is silent on the disposal of nuclear waste. If the 
full costs were factored in, would nuclear power still be the 
least-cost alternative? Not likely. 

The nuclear-waste issue has been deliberately obscured ever since 
the first commercial reactors came on-line more than 30 years 
ago. Today, about 1.7 million highly radioactive fuel bundles are 
in temporary storage with 85,000 added each year. What to do 
about them? An initial concept for deep burial in the Precambrian 
Shield was submitted in 1981. 

Twenty-three years later, the Nuclear Waste Management 
Organization is still studying the problem. This process goes on 
and on with no indication of how or where such management will 
transpire, who will pay the cost (guess?) or who will suffer the 
impacts. 

Nonetheless, nuclear power is touted as clean, cheap and 
reliable. Coal-fired plants produce harmful air pollution; 
nuclear plants produce hazardous waste that will be dangerous for 
centuries. The former is abandoned, the latter embraced. 

All means of energy generation have costs, but none is so 
shrouded in secrecy, or so high-risk, as nuclear. At the very 
least, the Ontario government should come clean and tell us the 
whole truth.   

*****************************************************************
 37 Japan Times: Power failure halts Tepco reactor

  Saturday, July 10, 2004   


 NIIGATA (Kyodo) One of the reactors at Tokyo Electric Power 
Co.'s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station in Niigata 
Prefecture automatically shut down Friday after the generator 
providing electricity to the reactor failed, Tepco said.

 Tepco said there is no risk of radioactive leakage or other 
environmental damage due to the 3:11 a.m. shutdown of the plant's 
No. 1 reactor, a 1.1 million-kw boiling-water reactor put into 
operation in 1985.

 Electricity from the generator leaked into the soil, which is
normally an insulator, triggering a system to protect and halt
the generator, according to the utility.

 The Japan Times: July 10, 2004
(C) All rights reserved 


*****************************************************************
 38 SouthofBoston.com: Mediator joins Pilgrim's weekend summit
 
MPG Newspapers 9 Long Pond Rd. Plymouth, MA 02360 (508) 746-5555 

By Gregg Gethard MPG Newspapers

PLYMOUTH (July 10) - A federal mediator will join the negotiating 
table with Entergy over the weekend, according to the president 
of the Utility Workers Union of America local. The union has set 
a Tuesday deadline to sign a new contract with Entergy, the 
owners of Pilgrim Station, or go out on strike.

The current contract expires Tuesday, July 13. A spokesman for 
Entergy said he expects the negotiations to continue until then.

The union has thrown a new bargaining chip on the negotiation 
table. The union has asked the federal government to close the 
plant if it does go on strike. Through a Washington D.C.-based 
attorney, the union filed a petition Friday, July 9 asking the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to shut the plant in case of 
a labor walkout.

Union officials said Wednesday the plant should close in case of 
labor action due to safety concerns.

Entergy has said they plan to keep the plant open, using a 
combination of workers from other sites and management. A Pilgrim 
Station employee also said, on the condition of anonymity, some 
employees plan on crossing the picket line and will continue to 
work.

"This proposed workforce-by-committee will not possess either the 
experience or plant-specific knowledge needed to operate Pilgrim 
safely, or in compliance with the Plant's operating license," 
Local 369 president Gary Sullivan said.

A spokesman for the NRC said the agency had not yet received the 
union's petition early Friday. When it receives the filing, the 
NRC will review the petition at a hearing and will make a 
determination of its merits. The NRC could make a decision on the 
union's petition by Tuesday.

However, the NRC has never closed a plant due to a work stoppage.

Last month, area anti-nuclear watchdog groups petitioned the NRC 
to close the plant, fearing Pilgrim could become the target of 
terrorist attacks due to the Democratic National Convention. The 
NRC turned down their request.

The union's main protest stems from what they say are reduced 
numbers of employees at the plant, which has resulted in a 
workforce required to do too much work.

Last year, Entergy offered more than 600 of its employees in its 
nuclear division a severance package. Union members say 88 
Pilgrim Station employees accepted the deal, worth one week's 
salary for every year of service at the plant or a lump sum of 
$30,000.

Healthcare costs have also been a bone of contention amongst 
union workers who voted last month to walk out if a new contract 
was not met.

Entergy's nuclear division, comprised of 10 plants located across 
the country, earned $68.8 million in the first quarter of 2004, 
up from $36.7 million in the same time period in 2003.

Entergy attributed the earnings increase to a boost in wattage 
generated at its nuclear plants. At Pilgrim Station, 
reconfiguration of equipment and the installation of a new 
turbine enabled the plant to increase output by 20MW, the 
equivalent of powering 20,000 more homes.

During the same period, Entergy's overall earnings fell by 48 
percent, down to more than $207 million. Entergy's primary 
business comes by providing power to customers in Louisiana, 
Mississippi, Arkansas and parts of Texas. Entergy also is a major 
partner in an energy trading group, but announced it plans on 
selling its stake in that business. 

| MPG Newspapers, 9 Long Pond Rd., Plymouth, MA 02360 Telephone: 
(508) 746-5555
y
*****************************************************************
 39 BBC: 'Uranium poisoning' man sues
 
  Last Updated: Sunday, 11 July, 2004
 
[Tank]                                  
DU is used in armour-piercing shells                    
			   		
A former worker at US aerospace firm Honeywell is to sue over 
claims he was contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) at its 
Somerset factory. 

Richard David, 49, from Seaton, Devon, says he suffers breathing 
problems, kidney defects and pain in his limbs. 

The case, thought to be the first of its kind, could help other 
aerospace workers and Gulf war veterans. 

Mr David has won legal aid for his fight, but the firm says DU 
was never used at the Yeovil plant. 

Mr David worked fitting components for fighter planes and bombers 
at the Yeovil factory, formerly Normalair-Garrett, between 1985 
and 1995. 

DEPLETED URANIUM                        

DU is nuclear fuel that ha been "depleted" of most of its 
radiation        

High-density material is used as the tip of armour-piercing 
shells    

The residue has a half-life of 4.5 billion years          

He said medical tests had revealed mutations to his DNA and 
damage to his chromosomes. 

DU is believed to be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which 
has allegedly left many veterans with health problems. The 
radioactive waste product was used in coalition anti-tank weapons 
in both Gulf wars. 

Many scientists now believe that when DU is inhaled as a fine 
dust it can cause a range of illnesses including cancer, birth 
defects and kidney damage. 

Mr David, who gave up his job due to ill health in 1995, said the 
decision to grant him legal aid was a victory. 

He said: "It is brilliant to get this funding as I can barely 
afford to live, let alone take my case to court." 

Mr David said he would be represented by barrister Michael 
Mansfield QC at a High Court hearing in October. 

A spokeswoman for Honeywell said the company never used DU at 
Yeovil. 

She declined to make any further comment. 





*****************************************************************
 40 Scotsman.com: Worker Wins Legal Aid to Sue Firm over Du Contamination
 
Sun 11 Jul 2004   			 			

By Sarah Cade, PA News 

A former British defence worker has won legal aid to sue the US 
aerospace manufacturer Honeywell over claims he was contaminated 
by depleted uranium at a factory.
 
Richard David, 49, from Seaton, Devon, suffers from respiratory 
problems, kidney defects and finds it painful to move his limbs.
 
He claims he was affected by depleted uranium (DU) when he worked 
as a component fitter at Honeywellâ€™s factory in Yeovil, 
Somerset, between 1985 and 1995.
 
Mr David, also known as Nibby, said medical tests had revealed 
mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes. He believes 
his illness was caused by exposure to the radioactive waste 
product DU.
 
The Yeovil factory, which is now owned by Honeywell Aerospace, 
was previously owned by Normalair Garrett.
 
Mr David worked fitting components for fighter planes and 
bombers. He has never served in the armed forces or worked in the 
Middle East.
 
A growing body of scientists now believe that when DU is inhaled 
as a fine dust it can cause a range of illnesses including 
cancer, birth defects and kidney damage.
 
DU is believed to be a possible cause of Gulf war syndrome, which 
has allegedly left many veterans with health problems. The 
radioactive waste product was used in coalition anti-tank weapons 
in both Gulf wars.
 
The case, which is thought to be the first of its kind, could 
have far reaching implications for many Gulf war veterans, 
aerospace workers and civilians in former war zones.
 
Mr David, who is married, viewed the decision to grant him legal 
aid as a â€œvictoryâ€, after being forced to give up his job due 
to ill health in 1995.
 
He said: â€œIt is brilliant to get this funding as I can barely 
afford to live let alone take my case to court.â€ 

Mr David said he would be represented by barrister Michael 
Mansfield QC at a High Court hearing in October.
 
A spokeswoman for Honeywell said the company never used DU at 
Yeovil. She declined to make any further comment.                 

&copy;2004 Scotsman.com 
*****************************************************************
 41 ITAR-TASS: Russia and Germany to build facility to scrap decommissioned
Russian nuclear submarines
 	 	 	 
ITAR-TASS News Agency of Russia]     

10.07.2004, 04.45
 
BERLIN, July 10 (Itar-Tass) - Russia and Germany have been
successfully implementing their join project to scrap
decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines. 

The German Ministry of Economics said on Friday that the
foundation would be laid in the Saida Bay, Barents Sea, for a
storage facility capable of holding about 120 reactors from
nuclear submarines. 

According to the ministry, the facility covering an area of 5.5
hectares will be used to interim storage of reactors for 70
years. 

The construction of the facility, for which Germany will
contribute about 300 million euros, is expected to be completed
at the end of 2007. But the first reactors can be stored there
already this autumn when the first segment of the facility will
be commissioned.     [ border=]   

© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved. You undertake not to copy,
*****************************************************************
 42 IAEA: Red Tides, Red Tape Cloud Life at Sea
 
Staff Report
 9 July 2004 [Mussel] 
Shellfish filter and absorb the toxic algae, which if eaten by
humans, can be deadly. See photo gallery 
  + Featured Story: Chile's Toxic Tides 	 
  + Back to main story » 	 
  + Part 1: Chile Casts Off Toxic Tides 	
  + Part 2: The Fishermen of Chiloé 	
  + Part 3: The Scientists of Santiago 
  + Part 4: The Algae´s Toxic Brews 

Mario Luis, Russie Luengo and millions of fishermen in Chile and
other coastal countries are facing cloudy futures. Their nemesis
is "red tides" - scary code words for harmful algae the sea
tides bring that can poison shellfish and other seafood, taking
it off the market until deemed to be safe. 

Sometimes the scares of contaminated seafood prove to be real,
many times they do not. How food safety authorities tell the
difference is becoming a big issue internationally, with "red
tape" high on the list of concerns in fishing communities the
world over. A long and complicated bureaucratic road has held up
a new test to certify that shellfish exposed to red tides are
safe to sell and eat. 

The test relies on a nuclear-based scientific technique, called
RBA for short, that more quickly and precisely measures levels
of "red tide" chemicals shellfish might contain. Fishing and
health authorities in Chile, the Philippines and elsewhere are
seeing RBA as a key tool, and the IAEA is working with partner
countries and organizations to help them learn and apply it.
Their goal? To get RBA approved as the international "gold
standard" for testing and certifying the safety of shellfish and
other seafood from red tide waters. 

As things stand now, RBA´s approval is lugging along, but still
stuck in sand, with decisions looming some years down the road.
Meantime, fishing communities worry about the scares and reality
of the next red tide outbreak, and the inevitable losses it
brings. 

Today the paperwork fight to get RBA approved faster is
intensifying. Fishing is big business for coastal countries, and
how the story of red tide and red tape turns out is of growing
social and economic importance, especially in the developing
world where fishermen and women like Mario and Russie make their
living from the seas. 

Stories featured here describe how the challenges of red tide
and red tape are being met - and how the IAEA is working with
partners to help the world's fishing communities benefit from
the tools of nuclear science and technology to build a better
future. 

» Chile Casts Off Toxic Tides, in a series of reports, the
IAEA´s Kirstie Hansen explores the effects of red tide and the
road of red tape, highlighting how Chile´s fishing communities
have joined the battle. 

» Getting to the Bottom of Algal Blooms: Nuclear Methods Target
Toxins, in a report from the Philippines, IAEA´s David Kinley
takes a close-up look at action being taken in the village of
Bolinao. Copyright 2003-2004, International Atomic Energy
Agency, P.O. Box 100, Wagramer Strasse 5, A-1400 Vienna, Austria 
Telephone (+431) 2600-0; Facsimilie (+431) 2600-7; E-mail:
Official.Mail@iaea.org
Disclaimer 
*****************************************************************
 43 [DU-WATCH] Yucca Flats knocked back - no early end to 30 year
 
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 15:04:09 -0500 (CDT)

 
Hi

A battle won for those of us opposed to radioactive remnants of war; the NYT
article below makes clear that new reactors are likely to be put on hold as
a result of this setback.  I was never much impressed with the plan to bury
waste in an area as geologically complex as the Great Basin.  It has to go
somewhere - continental shield seems more suitable to me - - nearest to
Nevada is in Canada.  Any takers?

The most amazin thing to me, but, is how flamin precious they are about "the
public", 10,000 or 300 000 years down the calender.  And how Iraqis in
circumstances of higher than 60X background just now are off the radar.

Oh yeah, I know, "They " aren't all the same people, but the inconsistency
might be evident to one Gov't representative, say at the US Court of Appeals
in DC - - -   were they to adjudicate somehow on a question of exposure
levels proposed for Yucca Flats compared to those present and tolerated at
battle sites in Baghdad  - or have they been quietly swept up (rather than
under the carpet)?

Meanwhile, an in-principle decrease in the DU supply.

Cheers,
Robert

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/national/10YUCC.html

  Court Sets Back Federal Project on Atom Waste Site's Safety
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: July 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, July 9 - The government's 17-year effort to bury nuclear waste
at Yucca Mountain in Nevada suffered a major setback on Friday as the United
States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the
government's standards for protecting the public from radiation leaks at the
repository, which extend 10,000 years, were too short, though it did not
specify an appropriate period.

The Energy Department has spent about $9 billion on the repository, which
would dispose of waste from civilian reactors and would give the government
a place to store radioactive material left over from nuclear weapons
production. The repository is also crucial to the nuclear power industry's
hopes for new reactor construction after a 30-year drought. Failure to open
Yucca Mountain would probably leave highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in
about 68 locations around the country, where civilian power reactors have
operated.

The case had been brought by the State of Nevada and environmental groups,
which oppose the repository.

In its 100-page decision, the three-judge panel rejected other arguments
against the Yucca Mountain repository, including contentions that it was
unconstitutional for Congress to force the project on an unwilling state.
The appeals court said decisions by Congress and the Bush administration to
single out Nevada were not subject to judicial appeal.

An appeal of the decision is possible, but both sides said the argument was
more likely to move to Congress

In its ruling on Friday, the appeals court did not say how long the
government should plan for protecting the public from leaks, but it cited a
National Academy of Sciences report that said it was possible to predict the
flow of leaks from a repository for up to a million years. The court ruled
that a 1992 federal law that committed the country to burying the waste
required the government to follow the advice of the National Academy.

But according to the government, Yucca Mountain cannot meet the radiation
standard indefinitely. Documents prepared to help Yucca Mountain qualify
under a 10,000-year standard show that by about 270,000 years after the
waste is buried, an individual just outside the repository's fence would be
subject to a radiation dose 60 times higher than the allowable limit. The
academy had recommended setting a standard that covered the period when the
radiation leaks were predicted to be the highest, in about 300,000 years.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said his department would work with the
Environmental Protection Agency and Congress "to determine appropriate
steps" in light of the ruling. When the Energy Department loses a case in
court, it often seeks to have Congress overturn the decision by amending the
law. And the court even suggested that Congress could change the law to
mandate a 10,000-year standard.

A lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Geoffrey Fettus, said
that it might now be impossible for the Energy Department to argue that
Yucca could function acceptably for hundreds of thousands of years. "They
will have to contradict things they've already said in their earlier dose
assessments," Mr. Fettus said.

The council, one of the plaintiffs, favors burying the waste. But Mr. Fettus
said it remained to be seen whether it could be scientifically shown that
Yucca was an appropriate site.

Congress picked Yucca as the lead candidate for the repository in a law
passed in 1987. There is no back-up plan, because the same law bars
consideration of any other site. In the absence of a national repository,
the default solution is that as reactors around the country will build giant
steel-and-concrete casks for storage. More than a dozen reactor complexes
have done so already and many more are planned. The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission plans a public information session on July 15 at Indian Point,
near New York City, for example, on the construction of casks there.

Download Today's New York Times to Your Desktop.
 Continued
1 | 2 | Next>>

RELATED ARTICLES

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(Page 2 of 2)

The estimates of how long Yucca can exist without radiation leaks are based
on several factors, including how long the metal containers holding the
waste would stay intact, and how fast radioactive materials would be carried
through the soil by underground water flows. A decision to measure the
repository against a 300,000-year rule, or a million-year rule, would switch
the focus to characteristics of the rock, experts said.

Michael A. Bauser, associate general counsel of the Nuclear Energy
Institute, the trade group of reactor operators, called the court's decision
a victory for his side because it "validated the overall process that led to
the recommendation and selection of Yucca Mountain."

Mr. Bauser said the industry and the government could ask for a rehearing,
ask the Supreme Court to take the case, or seek help in Congress. Making
predictions beyond 10,000 years was harder, he said. "Uncertainties clearly
increase with greater periods of time," he said.

Mr. Bauser's group had argued that the government's rules were too
restrictive. The Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum permissible
radiation dose for people outside the boundary of the Yucca project, and set
a second standard for the maximum dose that they could receive through
contamination of well water. The industry said that there was no basis for a
separate water standard, but the court disagreed.

Over the long term, rainwater percolating through the mountain and then
flowing underground to wells is the most likely way that the public would be
exposed. Because nuclear waste breaks down over time, eventually becoming
harmless, predicting doses requires calculating the rate at which different
radioactive materials will decay and how fast each would flow through the
dirt.

Nuclear materials are measured according to their "half life," or the time
it takes for half the radiation to die away. Half lives for the isotopes
reaching Yucca vary from decades to millions of years, time periods that the
judges called "beyond human comprehension."

The decision also gave Nevada the right to challenge the Environmental
Impact Statement done by the Energy Department. Nevada wants to argue that
the department gave insufficient attention to one of the alternatives,
leaving the waste where it is, mostly in the spent fuel pools of nuclear
reactors or in concrete casks nearby. Nevada also wants to challenge
government estimates of the environmental impact of transporting the waste.

At the very least, the decision makes it even less likely that the Energy
Department can stick to its schedule of 2010 to begin accepting waste at the
site, on the edge of the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas, where the
department and its predecessor agencies tested nuclear bombs for decades.
The department was planning to file an application for a license later this
year, with another agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is
supposed to make a licensing decision using standards set by the E.P.A. The
commission expected to begin hearings next spring, but the E.P.A. has been
told to rewrite the rule.

The E.P.A. said when it set the 10,000 year standard that this was
consistent with rules on other kinds of hazardous materials. It also said
that anything longer would bring in factors that were hard to account for,
like climate change that would make the Nevada desert much wetter.

But with the demise of the 10,000-year standard, a lawyer for Nevada, Joseph
Egan, said, "As a practical matter, that means the licensing proceeding is
completely on hold."

Even before Friday's decision, the 2010 date was regarded by people in the
nuclear industry as highly suspect, because of the unprecedented nature of
the legal proceedings that would be required before the commission could
grant a license.

The $9 billion already spent by the Energy Department on the project has
mostly been collected from nuclear utilities, which signed contracts to pay
for waste disposal and the department faces lawsuits that may seek hundreds
of millions of dollars in damages for the failure to keep its end of the
deal.

Joseph Davis, a spokesman for the department, said that program managers
would evaluate the impact of the decision on the schedule. Nuclear power
plant operators have avoided any short-term problem by installing
steel-and-concrete casks to hold the waste, a solution likely to last for
decades at least. The military waste that has been solidified in preparation
for burial at Yucca is also stored in a form that would be suitable for
decades as well.

RELATED ARTICLES

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 44 Savannah River N-Waste Tanks Cracked, Rusted Or Leaked
 
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 12:41:07 -0400

 



http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Waste-Tanks.html
Reports: S.C. Atomic Waste Tanks Damaged
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 10, 2004


Filed at 4:39 p.m. ET

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Fifteen tanks holding
deadly atomic waste at a nuclear weapons complex
along the Savannah River have cracked, rusted or
leaked, according to federal inspection reports.

Some of the cracks date to the 1950s, when the
steel tanks first went into use at the Savannah
River Site. But inspection reports say some leaks
have been found in the past three years.

     Advertisement


In 2001, 92 gallons of radioactive waste leaked
through a 40-year-old tank into a containment
area. Six leak sites were found on the
750,000-gallon, 24-foot high steel tank.

Secondary containment systems have kept
radioactive poisons from getting into groundwater.
But a containment system failed in 1960, and the
waste leaked into the ground, the reports said.

The 300-square-mile federal weapons complex has 51
steel tanks holding 37 million gallons of waste,
including uranium, cesium and plutonium.

Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs the
site for the U.S. Department of Energy, says some
tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of the water table,
raising concerns. But Dean Campbell, a spokesman
for Westinghouse, says the government does not
know of any tanks that currently are leaking.

``They obviously are getting older and will not
last forever,'' said Charles Hansen, an assistant
waste disposition manager with the U.S. Department
of Energy. ``This is highly radioactive, and there
is a concern to get that waste out as soon as
possible. There's always some potential for
inadvertent leakage into the environment.''

The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it
to empty most of the waste from tanks and fill
them with a grout intended to reduce the threat
remaining material can pose to groundwater.

But critics of the DOE plan say the tanks' poor
condition shows the need to empty the containers
completely.




*****************************************************************
 45 Deseret news: Ruling on Yucca site delays waste delivery 

[deseretnews.com] 

Saturday, July 10, 2004 

Utah activists fear material coming to Utah in meantime 

By Leigh Dethman Deseret Morning News 

Nuclear waste appears to be on its way to 
Nevada, but thanks to portions of a federal appeals court 
ruling, it won't get there anytime soon. 

It could be coming here in the meantime, say Utah 
activists who worry that the waste will be stored in Tooele 
County while regulations for the Nevada site are hammered out. 

Nevada's Yucca Valley site has been approved by a U.S. 
appeals court, but questions about how long into the future the 
facility must provide protection for people against radiation 
leaks could delay the reality for a long time. 

Utah activists fear the nuclear industry will bring its 
waste to Utah while lawyers and the Environmental Protection 
Agency argue over what regulations should govern Nevada's Yucca 
Mountain waste site. 

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for 
the District of Columbia on Friday upheld the government's 
decision to single out Yucca Mountain as the site of a nuclear 
waste dump but ruled that the federal plan does not go far 
enough to protect people from potential radiation beyond 10,000 
years into the future. 

To comply with the court's ruling, the EPA must battle 
through appeals, permits, lawsuits and a lot of political red 
tape to put the court-ordered regulations in place. 

The nuclear industry won't wait that long to find a place 
to stash their waste, said Jason Groenewold of Healthy 
Environment Alliance of Utah. 

"If the decision is upheld as announced today, then Utah 
is definitely going to be a prime target for the nuclear 
industry," Groenewold said. 

The court's objection to the current radiation standard 
raised new questions as to whether the Yucca Mountain project 
will ever get off the ground. 

Currently, the EPA requires that the government protect 
the public from radiation leaks for 10,000 years. Friday, the 
court threw out that standard, and ordered that protection 
extend beyond 10,000 years. 

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham assured reporters that 
he is confident the radiation exposure standard can be resolved 
and that the project will move forward. 

Groenewold and other activists aren't quite as 
optimistic. He said the demise of Yucca Mountain could bring 
high-level nuclear waste to Utah. 

"The nuclear industry is going to redouble its efforts to 
dump the waste in Tooele County's Skull Valley," Groenewold 
said. "They are going to look for all potential available 
options, and this is one of the few they have available now." 

Skull Valley has long been proposed as a temporary 
nuclear waste facility until the Yucca Mountain waste site is 
completed. The Goshute Indians have negotiated with nuclear 
power companies to store 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods 
on their Skull Valley reservation. 

Former Gov. Mike Leavitt and his successor, Gov. Olene 
Walker, have been adamantly opposed to a high-level 
nuclear-waste facility, includ- ing the proposed temporary 
storage site in Tooele County on Goshute tribal lands. 

"We have always been against the idea that Skull Valley 
was going to in some way be a temporary waste site pending 
taking high-level nuclear waste to Yucca or anywhere else," said 
Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of 
Environmental Quality. 

Steve Erickson of the Citizens Education Project said he 
wasn't so sure that Friday's decision would speed up the 
development of a nuclear waste facility in Utah. He said, 
however, that Utah will endure more political pressure by the 
nuclear industry, and "that's worrisome." 

But on the bright side, nuclear waste will not be 
traveling soon on Utah's railroads and highways on the way to 
Yucca Mountain, Erickson said. 

Project planners say the government can safely bury 
77,000 tons of nuclear waste in canisters at Yucca Mountain. The 
waste consists of defense waste and used reactor fuel building 
up at commercial power plants. 

Congress approved the Yucca Mountain site in 2002 under 
very restrictive rules. Site planners are seeking a license from 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and hope to have the facility 
completed and open for business by 2010. 

The court also rejected Nevada's claims that it was 
unconstitutional to single out the state for a national nuclear 
waste site. 

It also refused to review how the Bush administration 
chose the site, although Nevada argued the process was illegal. 

E-mail: ldethman@desnews.com 

© 2004 Deseret News Publishing Company 
*****************************************************************
 46 Rocky Mountain News: Canon City mill's quest for tainted soil stalls

By Sakari Alighandhi, Rocky Mountain News

July 10, 2004

The state health department on Friday denied a Cañon City uranium 
mill's request to receive its first shipment of 24,000 cubic 
yards of radioactive soil from a Superfund site in New Jersey. 

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said 
Cotter Corp. hadn't shown it could safely handle the material. 

 The department also said Cotter will need the space to impound 
its own contaminated material when the mill closes. 

"We're disappointed, but not surprised," said Cotter's attorney, 
John Watson. 

"The state continues to manufacture red herrings to somehow 
rationalize denying us permission to accept this . . . material," 
Watson said. 

Cotter is seeking permission to accept a total of 400,000 cubic 
yards of soil from the Maywood Chemical Superfund site. The waste 
is contaminated with thorium, which was used to make lantern 
mantles. 

Howard Roitman, director of environmental programs for the health 
department, said Friday's decision does not mean the entire 
shipment will be rejected. 

The Cotter mill is a 90-acre storage facility that, according to 
Watson, the health department determined about a year and a half 
ago had enough capacity to hold the soil from Maywood. 

A 2003 state law gave the health department more say over the 
mill south of Cañon City. Cotter applied for a permit to operate 
the mill for an additional five years under that law. 

The Cotter mill began operating in 1958, two miles south of Cañon 
City, which now has 30,000 residents. 

The prospect of bringing contaminated waste to the site concerns 
some of the town's residents. 

"The history of Cañon is mining anyway," said Mayor William 
Jackson. "The mill was licensed as a uranium mill. It should 
remain and not be a dump site for Superfunds." 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 
*****************************************************************
 47 DenverPost: Colo. rejects thorium waste

Published: Sunday, July 11, 2004                                                
	
Radioactive dirt shipment denied

By Joey Bunch Denver Post Staff Writer
 			
 The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on 
Friday denied permission to allow the initial shipments of an 
estimated 470,000 tons of radioactive waste from New Jersey to 
Colorado. 

The agency turned down Lakewood-based Cotter Corp's request to 
dispose of thorium- laced dirt at its uranium mill 2 miles south 
of Cañon City. The dirt would come from a federal Superfund 
cleanup site in Maywood, N.J. 

The company will appeal the decision either to a state hearing 
officer or to state court, said the company's lawyer, John 
Watson. 

The health department denied the request on grounds that the 
company had not proved that it could ensure "safe and compliant 
handling" of the dirt. 

Howard Roitman, the health department's director of environmental 
programs, said it also was unclear whether the mill had enough 
space in its disposal ponds to handle the waste from New Jersey 
as well as its own waste. 

Watson said that the department had agreed the ponds had enough 
capacity and that operational questions had been satisfied. 

"They have now manufactured bogus, red-herring reasons for this 
denial," Watson said. 

The impoundments were built to store the radioactive waste of 
milling uranium from 1958 to 1979. The ongoing cleanup at the 
mill must preserve room for Cotter's contaminated building rubble 
and soils. 

Opponents of the Fremont County mill have bottled up Cotter's 
plan for more than two years. They said they were pleased with 
Friday's decision but dismayed that Cotter will fight on. 

"I hate to see our hard-earned tax dollars fighting this horrible 
idea that Cotter and (parent company) General Atomics has to put 
a radioactive waste facility so near a population," said Sharyn 
Cunningham, co-chairwoman of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic 
Waste, which formed in 2002 to fight Cotter's proposal. 

Cotter faces another deal-killer as well: The health department 
still has not renewed the company's five-year operating license, 
which includes processing the contaminated soil. 

The health department has a Dec. 15 deadline to make a draft of 
the license available for public comment. 

The mill has been on the national Superfund list of highly 
contaminated sites since 1984 because its formerly unlined 
holding ponds leached into groundwater. Staff writer Joey Bunch 
can be reached at 303-820-1240 or jbunch@denverpost.com.                                
 		   			 		   	 	
--> All contents Copyright 2004 The Denver Post or other 
*****************************************************************
 48 DenverPost: Colorado rejects radioactive waste from N.J.

Article Published: Sunday, July 11, 2004                                                
	
By Joey Bunch Denver Post Staff Writer

 The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on 
Friday denied permission to allow the initial shipments of an 
estimated 470,000 tons of radioactive waste from New Jersey to 
Colorado. 

The agency turned down Lakewood-based Cotter Corp's request to 
dispose of thorium-laced dirt at its uranium mill 2 miles south 
of Cañon City. The dirt would come from a federal Superfund 
cleanup site in Maywood, N.J. 

The company will appeal the decision either to a state hearing 
officer or to state court, said the company's lawyer, John 
Watson. 

The health department denied the request on grounds that the 
company had not proved that it could ensure "safe and compliant 
handling" of the dirt. 

Howard Roitman, the health department's director of environmental 
programs, said it also was unclear whether the mill had enough 
space in its disposal ponds to handle the waste from New Jersey 
as well as its own waste. 

Watson said that the department had agreed the ponds had enough 
capacity and that operational questions had been satisfied. 

"They have now manufactured bogus, red-herring reasons for this 
denial," Watson said. 

The impoundments were built to store the radioactive waste of 
milling uranium from 1958 to 1979. The ongoing cleanup at the 
mill must preserve room for Cotter's contaminated building rubble 
and soils. 

Opponents of the Fremont County mill have bottled up Cotter's 
plan for more than two years. They were pleased with Friday's 
decision but dismayed that Cotter will fight on. 

"I hate to see our hard-earned tax dollars fighting this horrible 
idea that Cotter and (parent company) General Atomics has to put 
a radioactive waste facility so near a population," said Sharyn 
Cunningham, co-chairwoman of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic 
Waste, which formed in 2002 to fight Cotter's proposal. 

Cotter faces another deal-killer as well: The health department 
still has not renewed the company's five-year operating license, 
which includes processing the contaminated soil. 

The health department has a Dec. 15 deadline to make a draft of 
the license available for public comment. 

The mill has been on the national Superfund list of highly 
contaminated sites since 1984, because its formerly unlined 
holding ponds leached into groundwater. Staff writer Joey Bunch 
can be reached at 303-820-1240 or jbunch@denverpost.com.                                
 		   			 		   	 	
 All contents Copyright 2004 The Denver Post or other copyright
*****************************************************************
 49 Pasadena Star-News: Water plant on line by fall

Article Published: Friday, July 09, 2004 - 10:54:22
 		   	 	
By Gary Scott, Staff Writer

PASADENA -- A treatment plant to clean the toxic chemical 
perchlorate from Pasadena's groundwater should be up and running 
by fall, according to NASA and city officials.

 The announcement comes after NASA abandoned plans to pump 
contaminated groundwater out of the Monk Hill basin and pipe it 
to a treatment facility being constructed at the Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory, which is owned by the space agency.

 Steve Slaten the well-heads a cheaper and more efficient 
solution.

 "Also, it helps control the plume," said Brad Boman t pumping 
water out of the ground, the more control we have on the 
groundwater plume."

 Perchlorate, a salt used in solid rocket fuel, flares and 
automobile air bags, impairs thyroid function at certain levels. 
Rocket testing at JPL in the 1950s is believed responsible for 
most of the contamination in this area. 

Pasadena Water and Power has had to shut down nine wells because 
of perchlorate contamination. Two have since reopened after 
levels fell below state standards and two others will remain 
closed.

 The treatment plant will target the four wells that draw water 
from the Monk Hill basin, which runs under the Hahamongna 
Watershed Park and JPL. An ion-exchange filtration system will be 
used to remove perchlorate from the water.

 Six vessels, each about 12-feet tall and 12-feet in diameter, 
will be installed, likely near the Windsor Reservoir. The vessels 
have the capacity to filter about 7,000 gallons of water per 
minute.

 A separate treatment facility will remove volatile organic 
chemical contaminants, making the water safe to drink, Boman 
said.

 A smaller plant is being constructed for the Lincoln Avenue 
Water District and should be completed by next month.

 Bob Hayward ts to see a significant savings since Lincoln 
imports all of its water from the Metropolitan Water District.

 A third treatment plant will be built on the JPL grounds to 
siphon off and clean the most polluted water. The system will use 
microbes to eat the perchlorate.

 Tests have found perchlorate levels as high as 13,000 parts per 
billion in the basin, more than 3,000 times higher than the state 
guidelines of 6 ppb.

 The water around the Pasadena and Lincoln wells is not as high, 
but Slaten said the ion exchange system will clean the water to 
below 4 ppb.

 NASA will fully fund the cleanup, Slaten added, though he had 
not figure on the total cost.

 Researchers, health experts and environmentalists continue to 
debate the level at which perchlorate constitutes a danger.

 In March, the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard 
Assessment set the threshold at 6 parts per billion.

 The Natural Resources Defense Counsel said the threshold must be 
lowered to protect pregnant women and babies from harm.

 According to Boman, one part per billion is equal to a cup and a 
third in a Rose Bowl full of water.

 -- Gary Scott can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4458, or by 
e-mail at gary.scott@sgvn.com.

Copyright © 2004 Pasadena Star News
*****************************************************************
 50 The Australian: N-dump appeal to milk taxpayer 

[July 12, 2004]

By Samantha Maiden and Rebecca DiGirolamo

TAXPAYERS face a multi-million-dollar legal bill if the Howard 
Government agrees today to mount a High Court challenge to ensure 
that a new radioactive waste dump is built South Australia.

As cabinet meets to consider whether to search for a new 
radioactive waste dump site or appeal against a Federal Court 
ruling that the commonwealth has misused urgency provisions to 
secure the remote site, government sources have confirmed that 
the current legal costs of $60,000 could blow out to "millions of 
dollars". 

Despite fears that the controversial dump could damage the 
Liberal Party's chances of retaining up to three key marginal 
seats in Adelaide, Finance Minister Nick Minchin has also hit out 
at opponents of the dump in his home state of South Australia, 
insisting it is still the safest site in the nation. 

"All I can do is express my disgust with the political cynicism 
and opportunism of the Rann Labor Government in frustrating the 
overwhelming national interest in establishing a national 
repository in the safest place in Australia," he told The 
Australian yesterday. 

"Scientists have told us that is in the central north of South 
Australia. Cabinet will explore all options in light of the Rann 
Government's decision." 

Last year, John Howard accused South Australians of a 
"pathetically parochial argument" in trying to stop the nuclear 
waste dump, but he appeared to soften his view last week when 
campaigning in marginal seats in Adelaide. 

Pledging to consider voter concerns over the 12-year, $5million 
search for a dump site, the Prime Minister said cabinet would 
discuss legal options "in a sensible, measured, reasonable way". 

Any High Court challenge risks a drawn-out legal battle with the 
Rann Government and would provide a political weapon to federal 
Opposition Leader Mark Latham, who has pledged not to build a 
dump in South Australia. 

The federal Government has until next Thursday to appeal against 
last month's Federal Court decision, which ruled that the Howard 
Government had unlawfully acquired land for the dump on Arcoona 
Station, near Woomera. 

Liberal MP Trish Worth, whose seat of Adelaide is one of three 
marginals under threat, said she was ready to face whatever 
cabinet decided. 

"I'm used to facing the music and I'm a strong believer in doing 
what's right for the nation, and we must have a resolution to 
this," she said. 

Science Minister Peter McGauran declined to comment yesterday, 
but has made it clear he wants the dump built on Arcoona Station 
"one way or another". 

Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear spokesman David Noonan 
said internal ALP polling had shown that the dump was the second 
greatest issue of concern for swinging voters in the seat of 
Adelaide. 
		 			 			
  privacy            © The Australian   
*****************************************************************
 51 The Australian: N-dump could cost Howard - Rann 

[July 12, 2004]

SOUTH Australians would punish the Federal Government at the next 
election if it pushed ahead with plans to build a nuclear waste 
dump in the state, Premier Mike Rann said today.

Federal Cabinet is today expected to discuss how to respond to a 
Federal Court ruling, which struck down the acquisition of land 
for a nuclear waste repository at Woomera in SA's far north.

 Cabinet could decide to appeal the decision in the High Court, 
but Mr Rann said it should abandon the plan to build the 
repository in SA.

 "Unless it is resolved now, then I can give this very firm 
message that South Australians will use it as an opportunity to 
record a no vote to a nuclear waste dump at the coming election," 
he said on ABC radio.

 "I think that the prime minister knows that more than 80 per 
cent of South Australians are opposed to us having this inflicted 
on us." 

Mr Rann said the Federal Government had held a review into the 
decision to build the repository before the last election, then 
decided to proceed with the plan after the election had been 
held.

 "What they clearly wanted to do was to try and having everything 
wrapped up," he said.

 "But by us fighting it in the courts and winning, now I think if 
they try and do another delaying tactic then South Australians 
will see through it totally." 
		 			 	 	   		 		
  privacy            © The Australian   
*****************************************************************
 52 New York Times: Court Sets Back Federal Project on Atom Waste 
Site's Safety
 
Photo: Main Street, Goldfield, Nevada, circa 1904.
       
 By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: July 9, 2004

ASHINGTON, July 9 - The government's 17-year effort to bury 
nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada suffered a significant 
setback today when a federal appeals court said that the rules on 
radiation leaks could not be limited to the site's first 10,000 
years, as the Environmental Protection Agency had decided.
        
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ruling in a 
case brought by the State of Nevada and environmental groups, did 
not say what the planning period should be, but it quoted a 
National Academy of Sciences report that said a million years was 
possible. A 1992 law that committed the country to burying the 
waste required the government to follow the advice of the 
National Academy, the court ruled.

The government has predicted that Yucca Mountain, which is 100 
miles northwest of Las Vegas, could contain nearly all the 
radioactivity for the first 100,000 years, but it has also said 
that by about 300,000 years, the dose to people at the site's 
boundary would be many times higher than the legal maximum.

A lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Geoffrey 
Fettus, said that for the Energy Department to argue now that 
Yucca would function acceptably for hundreds of thousands of 
years, "they will have to contradict things they've already said 
in their earlier dose assessments."

His group, one of the plaintiffs in the case, favors burying the 
waste, but Mr. Fettus said that it remained to be seen whether 
Yucca could be scientifically demonstrated to be appropriate.

"We want a repository based on science, not on political weakness 
in the late 1980's, which is what happened here," he said. 
Congress picked Yucca as the lead candidate for burying 
radioactive waste in 1987.

The dose estimates are based on several factors, including how 
long the metal containers holding the waste would stay intact and 
how radioactive materials would be carried through the soil by 
underground water flows.

In a 100-page decision, the three-judge panel rejected other 
arguments made against Yucca by Nevada and the environmentalists, 
including that it was unconstitutional for Congress to force a 
project like Yucca on an unwilling state.

But the decision gave Nevada the right to challenge the site's 
environmental impact statement done by the Energy Department. 
Nevada wants to argue that the Energy Department gave 
insufficient attention to an alternative, leaving the waste where 
it is, mostly in the spent fuel pools of nuclear reactors, or in 
concrete casks nearby.

Michael A. Bauser, the associate general counsel of the Nuclear 
Energy Institute, the trade association of reactor operators, 
said the decision was a victory for his side because it 
"validated the overall process that led to the recommendation and 
selection of Yucca Mountain." He acknowledged, though, that 
making predictions beyond 10,000 years was harder. "Uncertainties 
clearly increase with greater periods of time," he said.

Mr. Bauser said that he did not know what the next steps would 
be, but that they could include asking for a rehearing, asking 
the Supreme Court to take the case or going to Congress to ask 
for a change in the law.

The Nuclear Energy Institute had argued in the case that the 
Environmental Protection Agency rules were too restrictive. The 
E.P.A. rules set a maximum permissible radiation dose for people 
outside the boundary of the Yucca project and set a second 
standard for the maximum dose through contamination of well 
water. The industry said there was no basis for a separate water 
standard, but the court disagreed.

Over the long term, rainwater percolating through the mountain 
and then flowing underground to wells is the most likely way that 
the public would be exposed. Because nuclear waste breaks down 
over time, eventually becoming harmless, predicting doses 
requires calculating the rate at which different radioactive 
materials will decay and how fast each would flow through the 
soil, based on its chemical and physical characteristics.

Nuclear materials are measured according to their half-life, or 
the time it takes for half the radiation to die away. Half-lives 
for the isotopes reaching Yucca vary from decades to millions of 
years, periods that the judges called "beyond human 
comprehension."

At the very least, the decision makes it even less likely that 
the Energy Department can begin accepting waste at the site, on 
the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where the Energy Department and 
predecessor agencies tested nuclear bombs for decades. The 
department was planning to file an application for a license 
later this year with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is 
supposed to make a licensing decision using standards set by the 
E.P.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expected to begin 
hearings next spring, but a major element of the rules has now 
been thrown out.

A lawyer for Nevada, Joseph Egan, said, "As a practical matter, 
that means the licensing proceeding is completely on hold."

The Energy Department did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Even before today's decision, the 2010 target date for opening 
the site was regarded by people in the nuclear industry as highly 
suspect, because of the unprecedented nature of the legal 
proceedings that would be required before the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission could grant a license.

The Energy Department has spent about $8 billion on the Yucca 
project, most of it collected from nuclear utilities, who signed 
contracts to pay for waste disposal at the rate of one tenth of a 
cent per kilowatt-hour generated at their reactors. The 
department faces damage suits that will run at least into the 
hundreds of millions of dollars for its failure to keep its end 
of the deal, accepting waste beginning in 1998.



*****************************************************************
 53 Las Vegas RJ: Opinions on Yucca Mountain vary in scientific community 
 
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 

By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
 

Citizen Alert Executive Director Peggy Maze Johnson laughs
Friday at her Las Vegas office, elated about an appeals court
ruling that she said is a major setback to the government's
plans to store nuclear waste in Nevada.
Photo by Jeff Scheid.



Workers at Yucca Mountain begin their day at a tunnel entrance
in May 2000. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., threw
the future of the planned nuclear waste repository into doubt
Friday by demanding that the federal government devise a new
plan to protect the public against radiation releases beyond the
next 10,000 years.
Photo by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



Click image for enlargement.



Click image for enlargement.



Click image for enlargement.
 
   






Scientists familiar with the Yucca Mountain Project offered
differing opinions Friday on the now-uncertain future of the
decades-long, multibillion-dollar effort to dispose of
high-level nuclear waste. 
A federal appeals court determined Friday that an Environmental
Protection Agency standard for the repository, which required
that it safely contain radioactivity for at least 10,000 years,
was inadequate.
 
 One scientist said any attempt to complete the repository
should be dropped and the Department of Energy should start
looking for another site to dispose of the nation's 77,000 tons
of spent fuel and highly radioactive waste.
 
 Another said the EPA must either appeal the ruling or establish
another safety standard for containing the waste.
 
 A third scientist said the 10,000-year protection period,
adopted in 2001, might be adequate. However, the EPA, based on
the ruling, probably needs to do a better job of explaining why
it selected 10,000 years instead of 200,000 years or more, when
people would be most at risk from radioactive releases.
 
 "What it means is that the site should be removed from
consideration because DOE's own calculations show it can't meet
a reasonable safety standard," said geologist Steve Frishman, a
full-time consultant for the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency.
 
 Friday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals District of
Columbia Circuit said the EPA failed to follow a 1995
recommendation by National Academy of Sciences, which held that
the safety standard should include the periods of greatest
radioactive risk and not necessarily be limited to 10,000 years.
 
 "The geology of Yucca Mountain is not conducive to isolate
waste. This is what we've been saying for years," he said.
 
 Frishman said if Yucca Mountain's geology could isolate the
waste without relying on metal alloy containers to last for
40,000 years, "then the compliance period wouldn't matter
because the waste would be isolated."
 
 "But in this case, Yucca Mountain's vulnerability is shown by
the fact that the highest risks occur after that 10,000-year
period. ... This doesn't prove there is anything fundamentally
wrong with geologic disposal. It shows there's something wrong
with Yucca Mountain," he said.
 
 Kevin Crowley, a geologist who directs the National Academies'
Board on Radioactive Waste Management, noted that the court
didn't throw out the whole standard, but instead vacated one
part of it.
 
 "The most significant part of that, in my opinion, is the court
didn't necessarily say you couldn't have a 10,000-year standard
but said, 'We didn't like the way you (EPA) arrived at the
10,000-year standard," said Crowley.
 
 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must determine the repository
can safely contain radioactivity to license its construction. If
the EPA pursues a new safety standard, the Energy Department's
plans to submit a license application to the NRC in December
could be pushed back years.
 
 Said Crowley: "Over the long term, you can't have a license for
Yucca Mountain if you don't have a standard. I don't think this
means Yucca Mountain is dead or you need another site." 
Congress asked the National Research Council to develop a
technical basis for Yucca Mountain radiation standards in 1992.
Three years later, a 15-member committee recommended the EPA
base the standards on calculated risks of people dying from
exposure to radioactive contaminants that might escape the
planned repository rather than setting limits on the amount of
radioactive materials that could escape.
 
 In June 2001, the EPA finalized a 15-millirem annual dose limit
to protect people from releases from the mountain. A separate
standard, 4 millirems, was set for groundwater used for crops
and livestock.
 
 The 15-millirem standard applies to people who might live as
close as 11 miles from the repository site. In comparison, a
chest X-ray can result in up to a 10-millirem dose.
 
 People are exposed to about 360 millirems of so-called
background radiation each year from natural sources and fallout,
according to the EPA. The 15-millirem dose is considered
separate from annual exposure to background radiation.
 
 John Millett, an EPA spokesman in Washington, D.C., had no
immediate comment Friday on the ruling other than to say, "We're
going to review it and determine what next steps to take as soon
as possible."
 
 In recommending that the compliance period cover the time when
the greatest risk from exposure occurs, the National Academies
committee noted that it is possible to estimate how effectively
the repository could contain waste for up to 1 million years.
 
 But in a 1999 letter about the issue to the EPA, Lake Barrett,
who was the Energy Department's acting radioactive waste
management chief, said that a significantly longer period than
10,000 years for assessing compliance would be unprecedented and
unworkable.
 
 Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only
site the Energy Department has studied extensively for the
long-term storage of spent fuel assemblies from the nation's
commercial nuclear power reactors. So far, $8 billion has been
spent on the project, and plans have called for spending an
additional $50 billion to license and construct a repository and
haul the waste there in the coming decades.
 
 Energy Department scientists have not spent a lot of time
calculating how waste containers would corrode beyond 10,000
years and how that corrosion would affect potential releases of
radioactivity, said Per Peterson, chairman of the Nuclear
Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
 He said if future generations of Nevadans are living in a world
where they are not sampling groundwater for safety "what does
that imply? In some ways we may be providing a rather high
standard of protection." 
"Clearly it's an important ruling," Peterson said. "On the
matter of the policy associated with whether or not 10,000 years
compliance is adequate, I think the 10,000-year protection is
adequate compared to most of the things we do." 

Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 54 Las Vegas RJ: WEEK IN REVIEW: Yucca Mountain ruling half-full or half-empty 
 
Sunday, July 11, 2004

Both sides declared victory Friday when a federal appeals court
shot down Nevada's states' rights argument against the Yucca
Mountain nuclear waste dump, but also said a 10,000-year safety
standard backed by the Environmental Protection Agency did not
go far enough.
 
 "We think we put a stake through the heart of this project,"
said Joe Egan, an attorney for Nevada.
 
 Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham countered, "I am pleased with
today's decisions handed down by the court."
 
 The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed
the state's arguments that it was unconstitutional to foist the
nation's nuclear waste on Nevada.
 
 The judges also paid no heed to Nevada's argument that the
selection process was illegal.
 
 But dump opponents hailed another part of the ruling that said
the EPA's proposed radiation exposure limits weren't good
enough. They said the ruling would derail the project while the
government pursues appeals.
 
 The dump had been scheduled to open in 2010 about 100 miles
northwest of Las Vegas.
 
 "We're very excited about this decision because it reaffirms
what we've said all along, that politics drove this process,"
said state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas.
 
 More simply, Peggy Maze Johnson, president of Citizen Alert,
said she yelled, "We won," when she heard the decision.
 
 "The decision today said start from zero and send it back and
start all over," she said.

MONDAY
New downtown
home for police
 
 A new police substation at Bonanza Road and Ninth Street
features updated technology for the 100 officers who patrol the
downtown area.
 
 The new building replaced one at Fourth Street and Lewis Avenue.

TUESDAY
Nye County keeps brothels in business
 
 The world's oldest profession will stay in the open in Nye
County after local officials narrowly decided not to send them
down a road that could put them out of business. 
Because of some naughty billboards, some county commissioners
had considered letting the people vote to shut the brothels
down. But the brothels promised to act nice, so commissioners
voted Tuesday 3-2 to let them stay.

WEDNESDAY
Augustine may lose
state controller job
 
 State Controller Kathy Augustine will admit she willfully
violated state ethics laws, and she could be impeached because
of it, Attorney General Brian Sandoval said Wednesday.
 
 A source told the Review-Journal that a complaint against
Augustine alleges she required on-the-clock staffers to work on
her election campaign.
 
 Augustine, the state's chief fiscal officer, failed to show up
for work the next day amid speculation that she might resign
soon.

THURSDAY
Nader files to get on Nevada ballot
 
 That thorn in the side of Democrats, Ralph Nader, activist,
left-winger and spoiler in the 2000 presidential race,
officially filed 11,348 signatures with the secretary of state's
office Thursday nominating him as an independent presidential
candidate.
 
 Nader, who the Dems say took enough votes from Al Gore in 2000
to push Bush into the Oval Office, is polling at around 2
percent nationally. 

FRIDAY
Three initiatives come up short
 
 Three initiative petitions don't have enough valid signatures
to make the November ballot, in part because of a decision
Friday by the attorney general nullifying thousands of
signatures, sources said Friday.
 
 The official numbers won't be released until Monday, but a
source close to the situation told the Review-Journal on Friday
that the initiatives to legalize an ounce of marijuana and throw
out frivolous lawsuits were short on signatures.
 
 Secretary of State Dean Heller said one that would raise the
minimum wage by $1 an hour failed, as well.

COMPILED BY RICHARD LAKE

c READ THE FULL STORIES ONLINE AT www.reviewjournal.com/wir
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 55 Las Vegas RJ: EDITORIAL: A lot more than 10,000 years 
 
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 

But will court ruling kill Yucca Mountain, or just send DOE back
to the computers? 


Reactions in Nevada were markedly different from those elsewhere
Friday, after a federal appeals court ruled the U.S. government
must prove the public would be safe from Yucca Mountain
radiation leaks for a lot longer than 10,000 years.
 
 The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia said that contrary to the interpretation of
the EPA, a 1995 National Academy of Sciences report found "no
scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual
risk standard to 10,000 years." So, the government must prove
the dump would be safe for a lot longer than that, the court
ruled.
 
 How much longer?
 
 "Radioactive waste and its harmful consequences persist for
time spans seemingly beyond human comprehension," the court
noted. "For example, iodine-129, one of the radionuclides
expected to be buried at Yucca Mountain, has a half-life of
seventeen million years. ... Neptunium-237, also expected to be
deposited in Yucca Mountain, has a half-life of over two million
years."
 
 If the court means the federal government has to prove Yucca
Mountain won't leak for millions of years, one would think that
means, "Put a fork in it; it's done." And the generally jubilant
reaction in Nevada took that tone. 
But in some quarters the ruling was viewed differently, based on
the fact that the 10,000-year standard was the only part of
Nevada's challenge to Yucca Mountain that the panel embraced.
 
 So: will the rejection of the radiation safety standard kill
the waste dump, being planned for a volcanic ridge 90 miles
northwest of Las Vegas?
 
 The great risk, of course, is that cynical federal bureaucrats
will merely take this as an order to go back to their
word-processing programs, carefully inserting "safe for millions
and millions of years" every place they formerly claimed the
Yucca Mountain hole-in-the ground would be "safe for 10,000
years."
 
 In doing so, they would hope that the federal judges can be
counted on to throw up their hands, saying, "We're not
scientists. What do we know? If the government experts now
contend this thing will be safe for millions of years, so be it."
 
 Unfortunately, federal judges have been known to behave just
this way in the Yucca Mountain matter -- in the face of
considerable scientific malarkey -- more than once.
 
 The big problem in trying to apply any "scientific" standard to
the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump has always been that
the Department of Energy -- driven by its desire to please all
those big utility companies sitting on ponds full of spent fuel
rods, as well as a Congress that decades ago told those power
companies, "Don't worry; we'll take care of it" -- tends to
defines "science" as "whatever fancy talk will justify
continuing to build this thing." 
What real science tells us, of course, is that the radioactivity
that was supposed to take a century to reach the groundwater in
Hanford, Wash., in fact took less than a decade. A foot-thick
steel reactor vessel cap in Ohio that was presumed to be
impervious to dripping dilute boric acid for centuries was in
fact eaten away to little more than rust-colored dust in only a
few years.
 
 In the face of these kinds of revelations, federal officials
have gradually shifted from arguing the rocks of Yucca Mountain
will provide the main safeguard for the waste (mostly spent
reactor fuel from commercial power plants), to a current
mathematical formula that says the waste cannisters themselves
will provide 99.7 percent of the dump's safety factor -- Yucca
Mountain's geology a mere 0.008 percent.
 
 In which case -- why bother burying it?
 
 As to the notion that a single site will be safer against
terrorism: The government says 46,000 tons of spent fuel rods
are now stored at 131 sites. But since most of the nuclear
plants will continue to operate, waste levels at those sites
will never fall below 42,000 tons, even when Yucca Mountain
reaches its 77,000-ton capacity.
 
 So why accept the risk of all that cross-country shipping, if
the nation will never be rid of all those spread-out,
"terror-vulnerable" sites?
 
 In a world where real science -- and concern for the safety of
future generations -- outweighed mere political convenience,
what Friday's appellate court ruling should mean is, "You had to
bend like a contortionist to contend underground storage would
be safe for 10,000 years, and now the court is talking about
millions of years? Stop digging; let's think about a way to
guard this stuff where it sits while we re-examine recycling
technologies."
 
 Retrievable above-ground storage -- somewhere -- would make
more sense. Such a plan would make the waste easier to monitor
(and, eventually, recycle) while minimizing heat build-up and
danger from earthquakes.
 
 But should Nevadans assume that kind of common sense will
prevail?
 
 It comes down to your opinion of the federal government.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 56 Las Vegas RJ: JOHN L. SMITH: Yucca Mountain story offers Hollywood ending for
underdog Nevada 
 
Sunday, July 11, 2004
 
I'm thinking of writing a story. 

It's about a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere way out
in Nevada. 

The story begins a quarter century ago with a plan to create the
hole. Officially, the hole would be used as a place to store
radioactive waste collected from around the country. In reality,
the hole was a metaphor for the blind power and limitless greed
of the men who became wealthy beyond our dreams but in the
process created a waste so deadly it was capable of killing our
children's children thousands of years into the future. Those
powerful men decided to make billions first and fret the
consequences later. 

When the future arrives, they use their vast political contacts
to force the hole upon politically puny Nevada, a state which
possesses an outlaw reputation, initially has only three
representatives in Congress, and hasn't enough juice to light a
20-watt bulb. 

The state is targeted from the outset. Conventional wisdom,
which is seldom wise, makes the hole's destiny a foregone
conclusion. In short, it's all over but the shouting, the
digging, and the paperwork. 

The people of Nevada don't want the hole, but their voices are
drowned out by the sound of digging. Not just the physical kind,
but the political kind as well. 

In an effort to soothe the fears of the citizens, expensive
advertising campaigns are produced to wear them down. Lobbyists
are hired to soften up politicians. 

Those digging the hole invite skeptics, the curious, and the
media to visit it, don hard hats, and decide for themselves
whether it's safe. Forget for a moment that common citizens, and
especially reporters, aren't competent judges of such scientific
questions. Remember, this isn't about science. 

Just when Nevadans had all but given up hope, a twist ending:
Federal judges sitting 3,000 miles from the hole hear that the
science of the project is flawed, and agree. For the first time
in a quarter century, science trumps politics. The court ruling
promises the project will be delayed for many years, so many in
fact that work on the hole will cease. 

It is Bobby Thomson's home run, Michael Jordan's jump shot, and
Rocky Balboa's comeback all rolled into one. Nevada, the
underdog's underdog, the flyweight among sumo wrestlers,
prevails. 

The hole only looks empty. 

In reality, it is crowded with many things. 

First, there's money. Through the years, the government spends
billions of dollars studying the hole, preparing to dig it. This
money comes from taxpayers and electric power consumers.
Billions that could have been frittered away on poor children,
ailing veterans, health care for the elderly, or even wider
interstates, are poured into the hole. 

Then, there's the paperwork. By the government's own count, it
has created 5.6 million pages of documents about the hole, far
more than has been written about the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe
and Elvis combined. Those pages also flow into the hole. 

It remains far from filled. There's still enough room in the
hole for a sitting president, who conned Nevadans into believing
he was sincere when he promised that science, and not politics,
would rule the process. Those who had followed the story
believed that politics would always rule the process. 

He would be joined by some members of his party, including a
former Nevada governor, who were only too eager to sell out for
shekels in the name of the "inevitability" of the project. 

In the end, billions are spent. Political careers rise and fall.
Columnists make fools of themselves misreading the landscape. 

The hole in the ground goes down as one of the greatest
boondoggles in the history of a nation whose politicians pride
themselves on their fiscal foolishness. 

As the credits roll in the movie version, the project is silent.
Tumbleweeds roll past the hole. A curious coyote sniffs at the
entrance, cocks his head at the incomprehensible waste, and
trots off into a golden Nevada sunset. 

Yes, I'm thinking of writing a story about a hole in the ground
in the middle of nowhere way out in Nevada. 

But who would believe it? 

John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and
Sunday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 57 Las Vegas RJ: SCIENCE VERSUS POLITICS: Yucca ruling seen as bad for Bush 
 
Sunday, July 11, 2004

Parties agree decision will affect presidential election in
battleground state By ERIN NEFF
REVIEW-JOURNAL
 
John Ensign
Republican senator admits Democrats have gained traction on
Yucca Mountain

Harry Reid
Democratic senator says ruling on Yucca science is "a real blow
to George Bush"

Richard Perkins
Democratic Assembly speaker warns "this fight's not over"

Shelley Berkley
House Democrat has received assurances from vice presidential
candidate

Dina Titus
State Senate minority leader says GOP efforts to couch Yucca as
a bipartisan issue will fail

Friday's federal court decision on Yucca Mountain reignited the
state's most fiery political issue with both Republicans and
Democrats agreeing on one thing: It will affect the presidential
election in this key battleground state.
 
 Democrats and Republicans alike cheered the ruling, which said
that the radiation standard established by the government for
the nuclear waste repository could not meet legal requirements
to protect public health and safety. 
But that's where the unity ended.
 
 Democrats immediately heralded the ruling as a blow to
President Bush. The decision essentially says that, up until
now, science had been trumped by politics, they asserted.
 
 Even Republican U.S. Sen. John Ensign admitted Democrats have
gained traction with the Yucca Mountain issue since Bush
recommended the site and the Republican-controlled Congress in
2002 approved it. 
"I think Yucca has hurt the president's campaign," Ensign said.
"It's the only reason Nevada is even close."
 
 Republicans in the state were carefully trying to balance their
Battle Born pride in the decision with the reality that crowing
too much could be perceived as hurting Bush's efforts.
 
 But some said they were hoping Nevada would prevail on a
stronger argument, not a technical one.
 
 "This is obviously not the decision we were hoping for," began
a joint statement from state GOP Chairwoman Earlene Forsythe and
Clark County GOP Chairman Brian Scroggins.
 
 In an interview, Scroggins said the state lost its biggest
fight, the legal challenge over states' rights, and thus, "it's
a disappointing ruling."
 
 "It is expected that Democrats will continue to make this a
partisan issue," the joint statement read.
 
 Democrats pulled no punches.
 
 "I think that this is a real blow to George Bush," U.S. Sen.
Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. "George Bush tried to tell the people
of Nevada that he would follow good science. Now this decision
comes down and says it's just not good science, not good for the
environment.
 
 "I think it makes George Bush look like he deceived the state,"
Reid said.
 
 In 2000, when Bush was a candidate, he issued a statement while
campaigning in Northern Nevada. The statement promised that, as
president, he would base any decision on the siting of a
national repository on "sound science, not politics."
 
 Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said
the ruling by a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit panel supports the steps the administration has
taken.
 
 "(The court) affirmed the actions taken by this administration
and the Congress to develop the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada as
the nation's first long-term geologic repository for nuclear
waste," Schmitt said. "The administration decision was based on
20 years and $4 billion in scientific study."
 
 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and running mate
John Edwards released a statement saying the court "confirms
what John Kerry has been saying all along and what everyone in
Nevada knows -- that the Bush administration has turned its back
on sound science in its rush to build the Yucca Mountain
repository."
 
 During a campaign trip to Nevada in May, Kerry promised that if
he is elected, Yucca Mountain will not be a repository.
 
 "We need a new administration because if this comes up again we
can't have the same people who hurt us before making the
decision," said Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas.
 
 Titus said Republican efforts to couch Yucca Mountain in terms
of a bipartisan issue fail. She pointed to the inclusion of a
state GOP platform plank that calls for negotiating for benefits
for federally-owned public lands, a plank that covers Yucca
Mountain, although not by name. 
"You can't pretend to be opposed to something and then, with a
wink-wink, sneak something into the party platform to negotiate
for benefits and also endorse the president," Titus said.
 
 Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., recently told the Review-Journal's
editorial board that if the president has trouble in Nevada, it
can be blamed on Yucca Mountain.
 
 Republican consultant Sig Rogich, a friend of President Bush's
father, has called the platform plank "idiocy."
 
 But Democrats say they don't think the president is in trouble
in Nevada solely because of Yucca Mountain.
 
 "The economy in Nevada is better than in the rest of the
nation, but we lead the nation in uninsured," Reid said after
citing problems with education, veterans issues and health care.
"I think that Yucca Mountain makes the race one that should be
easier for Kerry to win. I don't think Yucca Mountain makes
Nevada a close state, I think it means Nevada will go for Kerry."
 
 Scroggins said the selection of Edwards as Kerry's running mate
weakens the Democrats' argument.
 
 Edwards took two votes on Yucca Mountain, one for and one
against it, leading some to question how the Kerry campaign
would live up to the candidate's May promise to the state.
 
 Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she received Edwards'
assurance that there is "no sunlight" between his position and
Kerry's anymore.
 
 "Contrast John Edwards' position now with Dick Cheney and his
secret meetings with nuclear energy leaders and the position
that we need to expand nuclear production which will produce
more waste," Berkley said. "There's no contest between the two."
 
 Scroggins said he believes that if the president agrees with
him on 90 percent of the issues, Bush still represents him well.
 
 "The Kerry-Edwards ticket is too liberal for Nevada," Scroggins
said. "The Protection of Marriage Act passed two times with
almost 70 percent."
 
 Scroggins was referring to the ballot question that banned gay
marriage in the state's constitution.
 
 Berkley said she believes voters will view the Yucca issue as
another example of "a blatant lie" from the administration. She
pointed to Medicare reform that she said isn't working and the
underfunding of the No Child Left Behind Act as two examples.
 
 If the Department of Energy appeals the decision to the U.S.
Supreme Court, or if Congress is asked to create a different
radiation standard, Democrats argue they need a change in the
White House to keep Friday's court victory in the state's favor.
 
 "John Kerry and John Edwards are going to be the key factor
this coming election to make sure Yucca Mountain doesn't stay in
Nevada," said Clark County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates,
who chairs the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus.
 
 "This fight's not over," added Assembly Speaker Richard
Perkins, D-Henderson. "We won, but this doesn't mean the project
is dead."
 
 Rep. Jon Porter, a Republican freshman in a competitive
re-election campaign against Democrat Tom Gallagher, strayed the
furthest among his GOP colleagues in celebrating the court
victory.
 
 "We know the Department of Energy bent the rules to find the
site suitable," Porter said. "Today, it is clear that sound
science and common sense have prevailed over political
expediency."
 
 Gallagher said that when he was CEO of Park Place
Entertainment, the company donated $100,000 to help finance the
state's legal and lobbying campaign against Yucca Mountain.
 
 "I am optimistic this court has landed a serious blow against
Yucca," Gallagher said. "I will fight every day to make sure
Yucca proponents never recover from that blow."

Review-Journal writer Henry Brean contributed to this report.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 58 AFP: US court upholds Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, with tougher
protection

WAR.WIRE

WASHINGTON (AFP) Jul 09, 2004

 A US appeals court Friday upheld a federal plan to create the 
only permanent US nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, 
Nevada, but said tougher radiation protection standards must be 
enacted.

The federal appeals court dismissed a challenge from the state of 
Nevada, local communities, the nuclear energy industry and 
environmental groups seeking to scuttle the plan.

But in a partial victory for opponents, the court also overturned 
a plan by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to 
protect the public from radiation for 10,000 years, saying the 
government must protect against radiation leaks for a longer 
period, following recommendations of the National Academy of 
Sciences.

Environmentalists and Nevada leaders cheered the partial victory, 
saying it could kill the Yucca Mountain project.

"On one of the most crucial issues in the Yucca case, the court 
has sent EPA back to the drawing board to write a radiation 
protection standard that safeguards public health," said Geoff 
Fettus, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council who 
argued the case for the environmental groups.

"When dealing with a project of the magnitude of a nuclear waste 
repository, the law requires that EPA do it right rather than 
rush it through."

Under the best case, the nuclear storage site will not go into 
use until at least 2010. A workable waste storage site is deemed 
essential if nuclear power is to expand in the United States.

The Yucca Mountain waste repository is designed to house up to 
70,000 tonnes of radioactive waste deep underground.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was "pleased" with the 
ruling on the site selection.

As for the ruling on radiation standards, he said, his agency 
"will be working with the EPA and Congress to determine 
appropriate steps to address this issue."

The court ruled that the decision by the Department of Energy and 
the president leading to the selection of the Yucca Mountain site 
is "unreviewable."

But the court cited a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report 
saying there was "no scientific basis for limiting the time 
period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years or any 
other value."

"It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy's 
recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that 
accommodated the agency's policy concerns," the justices wrote. 
"But that is not what EPA did. Instead, it unabashedly rejected 
NAS's findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically 
different standard, one that the academy had expressly rejected."

  WAR.WIRE
*****************************************************************
 59 Las Vegas RJ: Gibbons blames Tenet for intelligence errors 
 
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 

By TONY BATT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
 

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., who hopes to become
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday's
blistering Senate report on the CIA confirms the need for change
in the way federal agencies gather intelligence.
 
 "This report reaffirms what many in Congress have been saying
for a long time: that our intelligence agencies took a holiday
in the mid-'90s and we are paying the price for that today,"
Gibbons said.
 
 The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee is particularly
critical of departing CIA director George Tenet.
 
 "Sometimes, the buck stops at the top," Gibbons said.
"Sometimes, you have to lay the blame at the feet of the people
responsible. In this case, it was George Tenet."
 
 The current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep.
Porter Goss, R-Fla., is considered one of the leading candidates
to replace Tenet, who leaves office Sunday.
 
 In December, Gibbons sent a letter to House Speaker Dennis
Hastert, R-Ill., asking to be named intelligence committee
chairman when a new Congress begins in January 2005. 
But if President Bush moves quickly to name Goss as the new CIA
director, Hastert could appoint Gibbons chairman of the
intelligence committee this year.
 
 "That decision is completely up to the speaker," Gibbons said.
"I could certainly accommodate that request if he asks me."
 
 Gibbons is fourth in seniority on the committee behind Goss,
and Reps. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., and Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y.
Bereuter is not seeking re-election in November and Boehlert is
chairman of the House Science Committee.
 
 Reps. Ray Lahood, R-Ill., and Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., also
have been mentioned as possible successors to Goss.
 
 If Gibbons is named chairman, he would be eligible to serve at
least a six-year term and possibly more if he receives a waiver
from the House speaker.
 
 Asked if he would be willing to pass up a chance to run for
governor of Nevada in 2006 to become intelligence committee
chairman, Gibbons declined to speculate.
 
 "I'm not going to cross that bridge until I come to it," he
said.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 60 Las Vegas RJ: YUCCA MOUNTAIN DECISION: State claims court win 
 
Saturday, July 10, 2004

EPA's standard for 10,000 yearsof safe storage ruled inadequate

By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
 
Miners work earlier this year inside a tunnel at Yucca Mountain.
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the decision to single
out Nevada for a nuclear dump but ruled that the federal plan
does not go far enough to protect people from potential
radiation.
Photo by John Gurzinski.



Evertt Rogers walks past a display Friday at the Yucca Mountain
Science Center that poses a question central to an appellate
court ruling against a planned nuclear waste repository.
Although Energy Department scientists had been planning to build
the repository to contain radiation for at least 10,000 years, a
panel of judges ruled Friday that they have to do better.
Photo by John Locher.



Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., speaks Friday at the Lloyd George U.S.
Courthouse in Las Vegas about an appeals court ruling on safety
standards for the Yucca Mountain Project.
Photo by John Locher.
 
   






WASHINGTON -- After defeat upon defeat in the fight to stop the
nation's most lethal nuclear waste from being buried in Nevada,
state leaders said Friday that a decisive blow at last had been
dealt to the Yucca Mountain Project.
 
 State officials were jubilant after a panel of federal judges
threw out a key health and safety standard in the federal
government's plans to build a repository 100 miles northwest of
Las Vegas.
 
 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
invalidated a requirement that the repository be able to contain
radioactive materials safely for at least 10,000 years,
suggesting the period should be longer by possibly hundreds of
thousands of years.
 
 "For those who say Yucca Mountain is coming, throw in the towel
-- the fight is not over," said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., at a
news conference in the lobby of the Lloyd George U.S.
Courthouse. "I think today's court ruling is a significant
victory for the state of Nevada."
 
 The ruling could derail the Yucca project for an indefinite
period while federal agencies seek relief from Congress, pursue
new rounds of legal appeals --possibly to the Supreme Court --
or rework their rules to the liking of the court.
 
 A 100-page opinion, long awaited since judges heard technical
arguments in January, dissected about a dozen points that the
state of Nevada, environmental groups and the Nuclear Energy
Institute had made in a half-dozen lawsuits. Attorneys said the
state prevailed on points of varying significance, including key
arguments against the health standards implemented by the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
 
 Yet the state lost several of its major claims, including a
novel argument that the government had violated the U.S.
Constitution by designating Nevada for nuclear waste burial over
the state's objections. The mixed ruling allowed backers of the
project also to claim victory.
 
 "This is a very broad and sweeping win for the Yucca Mountain
Program and is exactly what most observers expected, having
observed the court arguments," said former Nevada Gov. Bob List,
a paid consultant to the Nuclear Energy Institute. "While it is
clear that the EPA will be required to revise its regulations,
and that the modeling for project compliance will be adjusted
accordingly, I do not expect significant delay to occur."
 
 Attorney General Brian Sandoval said he believes the ruling
spells the end of the Yucca Mountain Project, the repository the
state has resisted for 17 years at a cost of $3 million in
mounting its broad legal challenge. 
"In my heart I believe that," Sandoval said. "The Energy
Department and the EPA now have to meet higher standards, and
Yucca just can't accomplish that."
 
 After learning of the ruling, Peggy Maze Johnson, executive
director of the statewide environmental group Citizen Alert,
immediately began telephoning donors asking for money to expand
her group's campaign against nuclear waste disposal in the
state. Citizen Alert is a party to the winning lawsuit.
 
 Maze Johnson was meeting with inspectors from the NRC when she
got word of the decision.
 
 "I just yelled, 'We won,' " she said. "The decision today said
start from zero and send it back."
 
 Reaction from officials in three agencies involved with the
Yucca project -- the EPA, the NRC and the Department of Energy
-- was more muted.
 
 Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham issued a statement saying the
decision validated all the Energy Department's work leading up
to the 2002 designation of Yucca Mountain as a repository site.
 
 "I am pleased with today's decisions handed down by the court,"
he said. "The court dismissed all challenges to the site
selection of Yucca Mountain."
 
 But according to Sandoval, Nevada's victory was on a key point,
one "fundamental to the basis for site selection, licensing,
groundwater and other issues." 
The decision was the deepest blow to a suddenly reeling
repository effort, which already had been buffeted by a series
of recent setbacks. 
The Yucca project faces deep 2005 budget cuts that DOE officials
said could force as many as 1,700 layoffs in the coming months.
Additionally, the department's handling of a licensing database
has come under criticism, leading to appointment of a hearing
panel to resolve the dispute. 
Managers in the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management also have acknowledged that they are eyeing the
presidential race, in which Democrat John Kerry has vowed to
terminate the Yucca project and put them out of jobs if he is
elected.
 
 "Yucca Mountain is not over; everyone has to understand that,"
said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "But the state has been getting
some tremendously important breaks. This is news for all those
naysayers who said we should give up and negotiate.
 
 "This is a wound to a giant. It's a severe wound, but wounds
heal."
 
 The federal judges -- Harry T. Edwards, David S. Tatel and
Karen LeCraft Henderson -- issued a clear assessment that the
Bush administration rejected "sound science" in advancing the
repository, said Joe Egan, the state's lead nuclear waste lawyer.
 
 The judges invalidated an EPA standard requiring that the
Energy Department prove the Yucca repository could shield the
public from escaping radioactive elements from decaying nuclear
waste for 10,000 years. In setting the 10,000-year standard, the
EPA arbitrarily disregarded the recommendations of a National
Academy of Sciences panel that had been ordered by Congress, the
judges said.
 
 The scientists said the radiation protections should be
extended beyond 10,000 years to points when the greatest risk of
radiation exposures might occur. That could be anywhere between
several hundred thousand years to a million years, they said.
 
 The EPA "unabashedly rejected NAS's findings," the judges said
in their opinion.
 
 The ruling raised questions of how long it would take for EPA
to form new regulations and for the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to incorporate them into its licensing guidelines.
Also, could DOE meet a different standard?
 
 Egan said the judges, in another part of their decision, also
confirmed that Nevada would be allowed to contest a broad range
of environmental and administrative issues during Yucca
licensing, if the program makes it that far.
 
 However, Angelina Howard, executive vice president of the
Nuclear Energy Institute, contended that the program setback was
relatively minor.
 
 "We think the agencies can accommodate that, and it shouldn't
affect the schedule," Howard said, choosing to emphasize other
segments of the ruling in which the government prevailed.
 
 Abraham spokesman Joe Davis said DOE attorneys could not
determine immediately how the court's ruling would affect the
Yucca project. The department has a December target to submit a
repository license application to the NRC, with hopes of opening
a Yucca facility in 2010.
 
 "Obviously, you can't get a license for Yucca Mountain without
a standard, and now you don't have a standard because the court
has vacated it," said Kevin Crowley, director of the Board of
Radioactive Waste Management, a division of the National Academy
of Sciences. 
A DOE official who asked not to be identified said the court
"has set forth some avenues of opportunity for us, and we're
looking at those. You could appeal, the EPA could set another
standard, or you could go to Congress. "
 
 The judges suggested that EPA might ask Congress to intervene
and pass legislation giving agencies permission to maintain the
standard. 
Reid, who has blocked other initiatives to speed up nuclear
waste burial in Nevada, said chances are slim that such a Yucca
Mountain bill would pass.
 
 "I dare them to do it," he said. "Let's see them try."
 
 Staffers for Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the chairman of the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, were reviewing
the opinion, according to spokeswoman Marnie Funk.
 
 "This will be a topic of considerable discussion in the next
few weeks, but it's a little early now to give a response," Funk
said. 
Yucca Mountain is expected to be discussed at a hearing Domenici
scheduled for Tuesday to highlight the nuclear energy industry,
Funk said. 
Although applauding the ruling, Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said he
feared what the nuclear industry and the Energy Department might
do next.
 
 "I don't trust Washington," Porter said. "We are dealing with
550-plus politicians and politics and the industry and the
Department of Energy. I am sorry, but I don't trust."

Review-Journal writers Henry Brean and Erin Neff contributed to
this report.
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 61 Las Vegas RJ: U.S. COURT OF APPEALS RULINGS ON MAJOR CHARGES 
 
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 
Here are the major charges contained in Yucca Mountain lawsuits
filed by Nevada and environmental groups and how U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on them Friday:

c DENIED
• Charge: EPA "gerrymandered" a radiation control area to
maximize the chances the repository could comply with health
rules

• Court ruling: "Record evidence supports EPA ... seems
reasonable to us."

c DENIED
• Charge: EPA "gerrymandered" a radiation control area to
maximize the chances the repository could comply with health
rules.

• Comment: "Record evidence supports EPA ... seems reasonable to
us."

c AGREED
• Charge: EPA setting 10,000-year compliance for radiation
protections is "arbitrary and capricious."

• Comment: EPA "unabashedly rejected" scientists'
recommendations for longer protective standard.

c AGREED 
• Charge: NRC "breached its duty" to protect health and safety
by limiting repository performance standards to 10,000 years.

• Comment: "We ... direct NRC to reconsider the period on
remand."

c DENIED
• Charge: NRC in violation of federal nuclear waste law by not
requiring Yucca Mountain geology to be the "primary" means of
isolating radioactive materials. 

• Comment: Law "contains no language indicating the NRC is to
assign a rating to any single barrier."

c DENIED
• Charge: Energy secretary failed to complete site
characterization before recommendation; DOE site suitability
criteria, president's recommendation and final environmental
impact statement all illegal.

• Comment: Enactment of repository selection law in July 2002
"rendered moot Nevada's challenges."

c DENIED
• Charge: Yucca Mountain selection unconstitutional.

• Comment: "Property clause clearly provides an adequate source
of constitutional authority."
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 62 Las Vegas RJ: Project part of national platform 
 
Sunday, July 11, 2004
 

Democratic plank calls repository plans in Nevada unsafe 
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 


Democrats took a strong position Saturday against a planned
Southern Nevada nuclear waste repository, approving a plank in
the national platform that says the Yucca Mountain project is
unsafe. 
During a meeting in Hollywood, Fla., the party's platform
committee approved the plank proposed by member Rep. Shelley
Berkley, D-Nev. 
"It sends a very strong message that the Democratic Party is
solidly behind the state of Nevada in its fight against Yucca
Mountain," Berkley said in a telephone interview. "It draws a
line in the sand and a distinction between the two parties'
positions when it comes to the safety of Nevada families." 
Yucca Mountain has become a key election-year issue in Nevada,
with Democrats pushing Kerry's longtime opposition and citing
President Bush's approval of the plan. 
The platform, which will be presented to delegates later this
month at the national convention in Boston, includes party
principles on social and economic issues and closely resembles
Sen. John Kerry's campaign agenda. 
Kerry voted against the federal government's plan in 2002 and
has said "Yucca Mountain will not be a repository" if he wins in
November. 
"It will take a Democratic president to stop this process dead
in its tracks, and John Kerry has already promised to do that,"
Berkley said. 
The plank reads: "We will protect Nevada and its communities
from the high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain which
has not been proven to be safe by sound science."
 
 
Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal
*****************************************************************
 63 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: ... but fight isn't over

July 09, 2004 

LAS VEGAS SUN

 WEEKEND EDITION

 July 10 - 11, 2004

 Attorney General Brian Sandoval, after Friday's federal appeals
court ruling on the government's plan to build a nuclear waste
dump in Nevada, went as far as to say that "Yucca Mountain is
dead." While we believe that this should be the end of the line
for the project after the favorable court decision, we're not as
optimistic that this project has been deep-sixed. We're still
concerned that President Bush and a Republican-controlled
Congress could undo the court's decision by passing a law that
would set more lax safety standards for the Environmental
Protection Agency to meet. In addition, the court's decision
will be appealed, and there is no way to predict how this
Supreme Court might rule.

 The federal appeals court's ruling is a major reason why
Nevadans should think very carefully about handing Bush this
state's electoral votes in November. Democratic presidential
nominee John Kerry has promised to put an end to the Yucca
Mountain project. Bush has already shown us his colors by
promising one thing during the 2000 campaign -- using "sound
science" to determine the project's fate -- and doing another
after he was elected when, in 2002, he persuaded Congress to
approve the dump. Any Nevadan, concerned about their health and
safety and that of generations to come must be keenly aware that
this may be our last, best chance to stop Yucca Mountain in its
tracks. 
 
*****************************************************************
 64 Las Vegas SUN: Editorial: State draws Yucca blood

July 09, 2004 
 

LAS VEGAS SUN

 WEEKEND EDITION

 July 10 - 11, 2004

 The news often hasn't been upbeat for Nevadans in the more than
two decades that the state has sought to fend off the federal
government's efforts to bury high-level nuclear waste here. But
on Friday the state of Nevada scored a major victory in federal
court. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia rejected some of the state's arguments against building
a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, the court importantly
sided with the state and environmental groups in finding that a
critical radiation standard for the planned dump was incorrectly
established and that this flaw must be corrected. The decision
has the potential to turn the tide in the state's uphill battle
against Yucca.

 The court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, in
setting safety regulations for the proposed dump, didn't follow
a crucial recommendation made by the National Academy of
Sciences. The federal Energy Policy Act mandates that the EPA
must set its safety standards for Yucca Mountain "based upon and
consistent" with the recommendations of the Academy. While the
EPA said that 10,000 years was a long enough period of time to
safely contain the dump's radiation so it couldn't harm the
public, the Academy said it wasn't. The Academy said that it
would be longer than 10,000 years before the nuclear waste was
at its peak radiation. The environmental group National
Resources Defense Council estimates that peak might not occur
for another 300,000 years.

 It was good to see the federal appeals court rebuke an agency
for not doing its job regarding Yucca Mountain, especially since
President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress have been more
than happy to please the nuclear power industry, which has
fought like mad to get the dump in Nevada approved. "It would
have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy's recommendations
into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the
agency's policy concerns," the court wrote. "But that is not
what the EPA did. Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS's (the
National Academy of Sciences') findings, and then went on to
promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the
Academy had expressly rejected."

 Even if the EPA goes back and rewrites the regulation to
satisfy the Academy, it's still impossible to imagine that the
Energy Department could then come up with a dump design that
would meet such a high standard. A new plan would certainly
require billions of more dollars, a scenario that could doom the
dump financially.

 It's been obvious all along that Yucca Mountain is an unsafe
location to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. It
hasn't been easy, however, getting others to heed Nevada's
concerns, especially for those states that have nuclear power
plants and want to get rid of their waste at any cost. And while
the battle is far from over, for now at least we can take
considerable comfort in this important court decision. 
 
*****************************************************************
 65 Las Vegas SUN: Columnist Jeff German: Yucca ruling exposes Bush lies 
 
Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and 
Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at german@lasvegassun.comor (702) 
259-4067.

 WEEKEND EDITION

 July 10 - 11, 2004

 If ever there was proof that "sound science" did not play a
role in the selection of Yucca Mountain, it was handed to Nevada
on a silver platter last week by a federal appeals court in
Washington.

 The court found that the Environmental Protection Agency
deliberately rejected the advice of the scientific community and
adopted standards for the high-level nuclear waste dump that
weren't safe for Nevadans.

 President Bush used those standards when he recommended Yucca
Mountain to Congress in 2002, which means there is no way in the
world that his decision was based on "sound science," as he
promised on the campaign trail here in 2000.

 The court's ruling is proof that the president out-and-out lied
to us. And it is proof that his nuclear waste policy, which is
beholden to the powerful nuclear industry, is rotten to the core.

 The heart of the court's opinion is that the EPA unlawfully
ignored the research of the National Academy of Sciences when it
decided that the radioactive waste only had to be safely stored
inside the nearby mountain for 10,000 years. The academy
recommended that the safety standard be set for a far longer
period, hundreds of thousands of years.

 Unless it appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and prevails, the
Bush administration now has two options. It can order the EPA to
begin the long and tedious process of formulating tougher safety
standards it knows Yucca Mountain probably can't meet. Or, with
the help of big energy money, it can try to convince Congress to
snub the appeals court and change the law to allow the weaker,
unsafe EPA standards.

 Neither option can be politically appealing to the
administration.

 And do you think the president is looking forward to meeting
the voters of Nevada in the coming weeks having been exposed as
a liar? Do you think he wants to keep hearing that his
Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has pledged to kill the
dump he's forcing upon us?

 I don't think so.

 The one person smiling more than the top Nevada officials who
fought hard to earn this legal victory is Kerry, who knows the
court decision has improved his chances of winning the state's
five electoral votes.

 "It makes Kerry look better every day," said Sen. Harry Reid,
Nevada's Democratic patriarch, who called the court decision a
"serious wound" to Yucca Mountain.

 Nevadans have an incentive to vote for a president who would
use any means available to him to stop the dump -- even vetoing
congressional legislation aimed at lessening its safety
standards.

 The ultimate irony here is that what happens in Nevada, a key
battleground state, could easily determine the outcome of the
presidential race. That means Bush's flawed and mean-spirited
Yucca Mountain policy could end up leading to his political
demise.

 On Friday the Kerry campaign was quick to capitalize on the
appeals court ruling.

 "The court decision," the campaign said, "confirms what John
Kerry has been saying all along and what everyone in Nevada
knows -- that the Bush administration has turned its back on
sound science in its rush to build the Yucca Mountain
repository."

 About the same time, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham issued a
statement from Washington furthering the Yucca Mountain lie.

 "Our scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain Project is sound,"
Abraham said. "The project will protect the public health and
safety."

 The contrasting words illustrated once more the clear choice
Nevada voters have in the race for president this November.

 We can vote for the candidate who is working to put the
deadliest substance known to man in our backyard. Or we can vote
for the candidate who is vowing to kill the project. 


 
*****************************************************************
 66 RGJ: Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
 
Sunday | Jul 11, 2004

Reno Gazette-Journal] 
 			     			     			     		 		
ASSOCIATED PRESS 7/9/2004 11:09 am       

Nevada officials declared victory Friday in their fight to stop 
the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, saying they don't think 
the Energy Department can meet a stricter standard to protect the 
public against radiation releases.

"The people of Nevada should throw up their arms and cheer at 
this court ruling," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., referring 
to a federal court decision requiring the Energy Department to 
contain radiation for longer than 10,000 years at the Yucca 
Mountain site.

Friday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of 
Columbia rejected Nevada's main arguments against the 
constitutionality of forcing one state to take all the nation's 
nuclear waste.

But justices did uphold arguments that Environmental Protection 
Agency radiation standards for the site were inadequate and would 
have to be strengthened.

Berkley said that by tossing out the EPA radiation standard, the 
court has said "the Bush Administration's plan for Yucca Mountain 
will not protect the health and safety of Nevada residents."

In a statement, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham noted the court 
dismissed the state's challenges to the selection of the site, 90 
miles northwest of Las Vegas, and said the department will work 
with the EPA and Congress to address the ruling on the radiation 
standard.

"Our scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain project is sound," 
Abraham said. "The project will protect the public health and 
safety."

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said it was unclear whether 
the ruling would delay plans to begin the process of applying for 
a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate the 
dump. The department had planned to open the repository in 2010.

Joe Egan, a lawyer who argued the state's case, said the Energy 
Department will not be able to meet a National Academy of 
Sciences recommendation that the site be made safe for 350,000 
years and will not be able to get a license.

"We think we put a stake through the heart of this project," Egan 
said.

Sen. John Kerry's campaign issued a statement praising the 
decision and criticizing President Bush for allowing the project 
to move forward. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee 
and Massachusetts senator voted against the project in 2002.

 

"The Court's decision confirms what John Kerry has been saying 
all along and what everyone in Nevada knows - that the Bush 
Administration has turned its back on sound science in its rush 
to build the Yucca Mountain repository," said Sean Smith, a Kerry 
spokesman in Nevada.

The Bush campaign referenced exhaustive studies proving Yucca 
Mountain is "scientifically and technically suitable for 
development."

"John Kerry is politicizing this issue in an effort to distract 
Nevadans from his troubling record on strengthening the economy, 
lowering health care costs, and protecting our homeland," said 
Tracey Schmitt, a Bush campaign spokeswoman.

But Nevada's congressional leaders hailed the ruling as a "major 
victory," and citizens' groups were elated.

"I love it. It means they have to go back to square one and do 
all this refiguring," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director 
of Citizen Alert, an anti-nuclear group in Nevada.

"Their whole house of cards is balanced against the fact that 
they only have to comply for 10,000 years," said Judy Treichel, 
head of the Nuclear Waste Task Force and a longtime Yucca 
Mountain opponent. "We said that's ridiculous because the stuff 
will probably get out before, but certainly after that time and 
contaminate Nevada."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the ruling was a "significant blow 
to the Department of Energy and the Yucca Mountain project, and I 
believe enough to effectively kill the project."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was similarly optimistic, saying the 
decision gives Nevada a "crucial legal tool to defeat the Yucca 
Mountain project once and for all."

Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican whose veto of Yucca Mountain was 
overridden by Congress in 2002, said he interpreted the court 
decision to mean there can be no movement toward licensing in the 
near future.

"You can't do much more without a license," he said.

The governor said the Energy Department could go to Congress for 
a change in the law or to seek an EPA rule change, adding that 
either would take time.

Bob Loux, director of the state nuclear projects office and the 
state's top administrator against the nuclear dump, said it took 
nine years for the Environmental Protection Agency to set the 
radiation standard that the court rejected.

"What's going to happen next. I don't know," Loux said. 	

     
© Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Newspaper. Use of this
*****************************************************************
 67 RGJ: The dump’s dead, say Yucca foes
 
[JANUARY 2002: A group of Japanese scientists examine a fault 
that had been discovered in the wall of one of the exploratory 
tunnels carved out of the interior of Yucca Mountain. - Marilyn 
Newton/RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL]                                

RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
7/9/2004 11:11 pm 	

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Friday threw out most of 
Nevada’s legal arguments to stop Yucca Mountain but handed the 
Silver State one victory that could delay or possibly derail 
building the nuclear waste repository.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington said the government had 
to make sure Nevadans would be protected from radiation for more 
than 10,000 years, which was the standard set for Yucca Mountain.

Energy Department officials called it a technical point that 
could be remedied, but Nevada officials said it would halt the 
waste dump.

“The project’s over. It’s effectively dead,” said Bob Loux, who 
heads the state’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, which opposes 
Yucca Mountain. “In our view, we’re planning the party.”

The court rejected all but one of Nevada’s arguments, including 
its challenge of the process for designating Yucca Mountain as 
the nation’s nuclear waste dump and its challenge of the 
constitutionality of the federal government taking Nevada’s 
rights to the land.

But the court said the government’s 10,000-year safety standard 
for radiation needs to be reviewed.

The 10,000-year standard is a crucial issue for determining 
whether to build the waste dump at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles 
northwest of Las Vegas. But it remains unclear how the court’s 
decision will affect the project.

The department was reviewing the decision to determine whether it 
would slow down the project, said Joe Davis, a Department of 
Energy spokesman. The Energy Department must file its application 
to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December to stay on 
schedule to start storing nuclear waste from power plants and 
government facilities by 2010.

“DOE will be working with the EPA and Congress to determine 
appropriate steps to address this issue,” Energy Secretary 
Spencer Abraham said in a statement.

Congress wrote a law saying the Environmental Protection Agency 
was to develop a radiation standard that would prevent humans 
from being harmed based on recommendations by the National 
Academies of Science (NAS). The NAS said the peak exposure of 
radiation to humans would be hundreds of thousands of years, and 
the nuclear waste repository should be designed to last that 
long.

But the EPA set the standard at 10,000 years, which would be 
easier for Yucca Mountain to meet.

The appeals court ruled that the EPA standard was inconsistent 
with the NAS findings, but did not state what the standard should 
be.

Joe Egan, an attorney representing Nevada, said EPA will have set 
a standard far beyond 10,000 years, which Yucca Mountain cannot 
meet.

“All the performance runs of the repository show that after 
10,000 years, it starts to leak (radiation) like a sieve,” Egan 
said. “The radiation doses would vastly exceed the EPA’s rule.”

“It’s the ballgame, in our view,” he said.

Not so, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry 
trade group representing utility companies.

Congress could pass a law ordering the 10,000-year standard or 
the government could ask for a rehearing on that one point, said 
Mike Bauser, associate general counsel for group. Or the EPA 
could rewrite its rule to solve the problem, he said.

“(Nevada) lost everything except the potential issue of period of 
compliance,” Bauser said. “The program, site-selection process 
and other elements of the program that were challenged all remain 
intact.”


+ + + 

Nevada officials cheered Friday’s federal appeals court decision 
on Yucca Mountain:

“The court’s ruling is a significant blow to the Department of 
Energy and the Yucca Mountain project and I believe enough to 
effectively kill the project,” — Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“Today’s court ruling provides Nevada a crucial legal tool to 
defeat the Yucca Mountain project once and for all,” — Sen. John 
Ensign, R-Nev.

 “It’s a great day for Nevada and a great day for those of us who 
have stood by our convictions. I’ve said in all of my speeches 
that we filed in four or five different areas and we only really 
needed to win in one of them.” —- Gov. Kenny Guinn

 “Nevada has been united in its fight. This decision, in part, 
said there are significant risks to the safety of Nevadans, and I 
think, the entire country.” — Former Nevada Attorney General 
Frankie Sue Del Papa    

Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett Co. Inc.Newspaper. Use 
*****************************************************************
 68 Sen: ENSIGN CELEBRATES YUCCA DECISION 

Sergeant at Arms SAA 2 2 2004-02-02T20:15:00Z
  
July 9, 2004 
  
Statement by Senator Ensign regarding today’s decision by the 
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that sided with the state of Nevada 
in its fight to stop Yucca Mountain from becoming the nation’s 
nuclear dumping ground: 

“Today’s court ruling provides Nevada a crucial legal tool to 
defeat the Yucca Mountain project once and for all. Our state’s 
legal team should be congratulated for this victory against all 
those forces that would like to turn Nevada into the country’s 
nuclear dumping ground. Our united effort, in which Nevadans of 
all political affiliations joined, is the reason for this victory 
and our celebration today.”
 
  
--Senator John Ensign 
  
*****************************************************************
 69 RGJ: Court decision makes Yucca moot issue in campaign, GOP says
 
Sunday | Jul 11, 2004

RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
7/10/2004 07:24 pm 	

The federal court’s rejection of the government’s safety 
standards for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump has made the 
project a moot issue in this year’s presidential campaign, Nevada 
Republicans say.

But Democrats, who never miss an opportunity to hammer on 
President Bush for approving the site, said the decision makes it 
even more crucial to elect a candidate committed to stopping the 
project.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington on Friday handed the 
federal government a setback when it ruled the Environmental 
Protection Agency acted illegally when it limited the standards 
for protecting the public from radiation to 10,000 years. The 
court reaffirmed a federal law that requires the EPA to follow 
guidelines set by the National Academy of Science, which say the 
public must be protected for at least 300,000 years.

Nevada officials said the decision spells the end of the project 
since it could take years to fix the environmental standard.

But the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to seeing the 
project through and have several avenues left to pursue, 
including appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, 
asking Congress to change the law or ordering the EPA to rewrite 
the standard.

That means Nevadans should vote for a presidential candidate who 
would stop the appeals process before it resulted in 77,000 tons 
of the nation’s most radioactive waste coming to the state, said 
Chris Wicker, chairman of the Washoe County Democratic Party.

“If John Kerry is elected, it means the death of the project,” 
Wicker said.

Kerry has said he opposes nuclear waste being sent to Yucca 
Mountain.

Gov. Kenny Guinn, who is co-chairman of Bush’s re-election 
campaign in Nevada, said there’s not much the president can do 
now, no matter who is elected.

“He doesn’t take any action,” Guinn said. “His people go back to 
the drawing board. It’s somebody else’s issue now. Candidate 
Kerry is saying he would stop it, but I don’t know how he could 
stop it. Now we have the court say it is not sound science. I 
don’t know what either can do at this point.” 

Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the site of the nation’s nuclear 
waste dump in 2002, after his secretary of energy, Spencer 
Abraham, recommended it. Bush’s decision came after his 2000 
campaign pledge not to approve the site unless it was “deemed 
scientifically safe.”

Guinn has said he and the president have “agreed to disagree” on 
the Yucca Mountain issue. Guinn and state Attorney General Brian 
Sandoval have led the latest fight on Yucca Mountain, despite 
heading the president’s re-election campaign in Nevada.

“The court’s decision confirms what John Kerry has been saying 
all along and what everyone in Nevada knows -- that the Bush 
administration has turned its back on sound science in its rush 
to build the Yucca Mountain repository,” said Sean Smith, Kerry’s 
Nevada spokesman. “A Kerry-Edwards administration will protect 
Nevada and its communities from the high-level nuclear waste 
dump.”

The Bush-Cheney campaign countered that Bush based his decision 
on “20 years and $4 billion in scientific study.”

“While Democrats and the John Kerry campaign continue to play 
politics with this issue, our campaign will continue to focus on 
the clear choice between President Bush’s steady leadership and 
John Kerry’s baseless rhetoric,” said Tracey Schmitt, a Bush 
campaign spokeswoman. 

Bush’s Democratic opponents said the court’s decision further 
bolstered their claim that Bush lied when he promised to base his 
Yucca Mountain decision on sound science, rather than politics. 

At the heart of the ruling is a scientific standard that governs 
how long the nuclear waste would be safe buried deep inside the 
volcanic ridge, 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

“This is a president that used flawed judgment and he applied 
that flawed judgment to Yucca Mountain,” said Mark Benoit, 
spokesman for America Coming Together, a political nonprofit 
group committed to defeating Bush. “It’s like George Bush handed 
us this club and said, ‘hit me over the head with this.’ ”

Nearly all of ACT’s campaign rhetoric in Nevada focuses on Yucca 
Mountain.

Beyond presidential politics, Yucca Mountain could become an 
issue during the next state legislative session, set to begin 
Feb. 7.

Last year, the Legislature funded Guinn’s request for $3 million 
to fight Yucca Mountain. Most of that money, as well as donations 
from private interests and local governments, has been spent in 
the legal challenge.

About $1 million remains in the fund, said Bob Loux, director of 
the state’s nuclear projects agency.

The state will need continued funding to fight the federal 
government as it pursues a license for the project and if it 
appeals the court decision.

Assemblyman Bernie Anderson, D-Sparks, and Sen. Randolph 
Townsend, R-Reno, said Friday that they believe the Legislature 
will remain committed to fight Yucca Mountain.

“I don’t see how we could back away from supporting the attorney 
general,” Anderson said.

But Assembly Minority Leader Lynn Hettrick has said he toured the 
site, believes it’s safe and thinks the state should begin 
negotiating for benefits from the project. Hettrick could not be 
reached for comment Friday.

“As soon as Mr. Hettrick goes back to Washington and comes back 
with some offer, maybe someone will listen to him,” Townsend 
said. “To the best of my knowledge, the federal government hasn’t 
put anything on the table.”

John Hadder, Northern Nevada director of Citizen Alert, an 
anti-Yucca Mountain group, said the federal court’s decision 
underlines why it is important for the state not to begin 
negotiations.

“If we had, we Nevada would not be in the position to forward 
these lawsuits,” he said.       

 		© Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Newspaper. Use of this
*****************************************************************
 70 Spectrum: How safe will nuclear waste really be? - Opinion -
                   
      thespectrum.com
 
    Sunday, July 11, 2004   

  IN OUR VIEW 

It was no surprise Friday when a federal appeals court rejected 
Nevada's arguments against building a nuclear waste site at Yucca 
Mountain. 

The decision leaves in place the Bush administration's plan to 
store 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, mostly from spent 
reactor fuel from the nation's commercial power plants, at the 
Nevada facility. 

What is surprising, however, is the fact that in the same ruling, 
the court ordered the government to develop a plan to protect the 
public against radiation releases beyond the 10,000 years it has 
already promised. 

The question is are we sure that the Department of Energy plans 
will, indeed, protect the public from radiation exposure for the 
next 10,000 years? Is there sufficient science to be able to 
prove such a statement at this point? Would 20,000 years be 
enough? 

This radioactive material is something that the National Academy 
of Sciences has told us can be dangerous for up to 300,000 years. 

Las Vegas, one of the most rapidly growing cities in the country, 
is only 90 miles away from the Yucca Mountain facility. An 
innocent Southern Utah population that was unconscionably 
drenched with nuclear fallout during the detonations at the 
Nevada Test Site sits just a little farther downwind. According 
to a report from the Centers for Disease Control, as many as 
15,000 people nationwide were killed by fallout from the Nevada 
Test Site. 

What disasters -- manmade or natural -- can this storage site 
handle? How can we truly know what kinds of weapons or other 
dangers will be in place 10,000 years from now? Worst of all, if 
something goes wrong at Yucca Mountain, will this corner of the 
planet even be habitable 10,000 years from now? 

Excuse us for being suspicious, but we've been down this road 
before. 

That's why we strongly support our neighboring state and 
encourage our state and local leaders to join in the fight 
against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issuing a license for 
the Yucca Mountain facility. 



Originally published Sunday, July 11, 2004
 
*****************************************************************
 71 The State: Nuclear waste tanks in poor condition

 
 07/10/2
 
15 of 51 containers at Savannah River Site have problems,
reports show

 By SAMMY FRETWELL

 Staff Writer


More than one-fourth of the Savannah River Sites high-level 
atomic waste tanks have cracked, rusted or leaked since the 1950s 
and 1960s, federal inspection reports show. 

U.S. officials have been unable to agree with environmentalists 
on how to stop future threats from the tanks. But neither side 
disputes the potential hazard these tanks present to the 
environment near Aiken. 

Exposure to high-level waste can kill a person instantly. Some 
radioactive waste can linger in the environment for hundreds of 
thousands of years. 

Recent federal inspection reports note hundreds of leak sites, 
or cracks, in 15 of the 51 aging steel tanks. In some cases, the 
cracks date to the 1950s; in others, leak sites have been found 
only in the past three years, according to the most recent tank 
inspection report. 

To date, secondary containment systems from most tanks have kept 
radioactive poisons from reaching groundwater beneath the 
300-square-mile federal weapons complex. 

The government also does not know of any tanks that currently are 
leaking, said Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse 
Savannah River Co., which runs SRS for the U.S. Department of 
Energy. 

Still, a containment system failed in one case, when radioactive 
waste leaked into the ground. And federal officials say the 
tanks condition is a concern. A number of tanks are within 8 to 
10 feet of the water table, according to Westinghouse. 

They obviously are getting older and will not last forever, 
said Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with 
the U.S. Department of Energy. 

This is highly radioactive, and there is a concern to get that 
waste out as soon as possible. Theres always some potential for 
inadvertent leakage into the environment. 

One of the most recent problems occurred in 2001, when 92 gallons 
of radioactive waste leaked through a 40-year-old tank and into a 
containment area, according to the governments latest tank 
inspection report. 

After finding the waste, inspectors located six leak sites on the 
750,000-gallon, 24-foot high steel tank. The leak was stopped 
before it reached groundwater. 

All told, the tanks at SRS contain about 37 million gallons of 
liquids, salts and highly contaminated sludge. The containers are 
more than 24 feet long and can hold 750,000 to 1.3 million 
gallons of liquid high-level waste. 

Waste pumped into them came from the creation of materials for 
nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The tanks contain an 
assortment of radioactive waste, including uranium, cesium and 
plutonium. 

Today, many tanks are less than half full, but environmentalists 
say the remaining radioactivity is among the highest at federal 
nuclear weapons facilities. DOE officials say some of the tanks 
at SRS have less radioactivity than others. 

These tanks are not designed for long-term storage, as you can 
obviously tell, said Geoff Fettus, a lawyer with the Natural 
Resources Defense Council, which sued to stop the DOEs cleanup 
plan in favor of its own. 

Most of the tank problems center on age and the way they were 
constructed, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and its 
chief contractor, Westinghouse. 

The 1950s- and 60s-era tanks were not treated to handle stress 
as well as more recently installed tanks, the DOE and 
Westinghouse say. Carbon steel used at the time also is not as 
sturdy as that used later. Most of the tank cracks occur along 
weld seams, where stress builds up from the waste inside. 

In 1960, tens of gallons of high-level liquid waste trickled into 
the ground at SRS after one tank cracked. The liquid flowed for 
about six hours and escaped a secondary containment pan, Campbell 
said. 

Campbell said the tank had since been emptied of most of its 
contents, although a layer of waste remained on the bottom. 

Other problems found in the latest Westinghouse tank inspection 
report include: 

• More than a foot of dried waste in a containment area outside a 
1-million gallon tank installed in 1957. Inspections have found 
33 leak sites, but federal officials estimate the tank contains 
50 cracks. 

• Nearly one foot of dried waste in a containment area outside of 
a 750,000 gallon tank installed in 1955. The leak may have 
occurred the same year the tank was installed. DOE hasnt 
determined the source of the leaked waste. 

• Eighteen leak sites have been found on one tank, including two 
discovered in 2000 and one through-wall crack in 2002. Two cracks 
have been found near the tanks bottom. 

• Five gallons of waste were discovered leaking from a 
45-year-old tank in 2001. Inspections found 15 leak sites never 
before detected. 

In an attempt to attack the problem, energy department officials 
seek permission from Congress to empty most of the waste from the 
tanks, then fill the containers with grout to neutralize atomic 
refuse the agency says it cannot remove. 

Agency officials say that will speed the tank cleanup before a 
serious accident occurs. Officials say the concrete-like grout 
will make the gooey waste less likely to move in groundwater. Of 
the 51 tanks at SRS, two have been formally closed in the manner 
the DOE proposes for the remainder of the tanks. 

Critics of the DOE plan, including former President Jimmy Carter, 
say the tanks poor condition shows the need to empty the 
containers completely. They do not think concrete will neutralize 
the remaining waste in the tanks. 

Waste removed from the tanks likely would wind up at the Yucca 
Mountain national disposal site in Nevada, if it opens. 

So far, Congress has supported the DOEs plan, but the issue 
likely will not be resolved for at least another month. 

Reach Fretwell at (803) 771-8537 or .   




TheStateOnline
*****************************************************************
 72 AP Wire Reports: S.C. Atomic Waste Tanks Damaged

 | 07/10/2004 | 

Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Fifteen tanks holding deadly atomic waste at a 
nuclear weapons complex along the Savannah River have cracked, 
rusted or leaked, according to federal inspection reports. 

Some of the cracks date to the 1950s, when the steel tanks first 
went into use at the Savannah River Site. But inspection reports 
say some leaks have been found in the past three years. 

In 2001, 92 gallons of radioactive waste leaked through a 
40-year-old tank into a containment area. Six leak sites were 
found on the 750,000-gallon, 24-foot high steel tank. 

Secondary containment systems have kept radioactive poisons from 
getting into groundwater. But a containment system failed in 
1960, and the waste leaked into the ground, the reports said. 

The 300-square-mile federal weapons complex has 51 steel tanks 
holding 37 million gallons of waste, including uranium, cesium 
and plutonium. 

Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs the site for the U.S. 
Department of Energy, says some tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of 
the water table, raising concerns. But Dean Campbell, a spokesman 
for Westinghouse, says the government does not know of any tanks 
that currently are leaking. 

"They obviously are getting older and will not last forever," 
said Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with 
the U.S. Department of Energy. "This is highly radioactive, and 
there is a concern to get that waste out as soon as possible. 
There's always some potential for inadvertent leakage into the 
environment." 

The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most of 
the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to 
reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater. 

But critics of the DOE plan say the tanks' poor condition shows 
the need to empty the containers completely.   

MyrtleBeachOnline.com 
*****************************************************************
 73 Bradenton Herald: Officials to decide role in cleanup

| 07/11/2004 | 


TALLEVAST CONTAMINATION

KEVIN O'HORAN

 Herald Staff Writer

A meeting Tuesday in the nation's capital may shape the future of 
cleanup activity in Tallevast, the local community beset by 
contamination linked to the former American Beryllium Co. plant. 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leaders plan to lay out for 
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., whether federal regulators need to 
take an active role in assuring toxic solvents are cleaned from 
the area's groundwater. 

"Hopefully, they'll commit to, if not getting involved in, at 
least monitoring the project," said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman in 
Nelson's Washington, D.C., office. 

That project has been a storm of controversy since November, when 
residents near the 1600 Tallevast Road plant learned they had 
been kept in the dark for nearly four years about solvents leaked 
from the site. 

So far, only the plant has been fingered as a source of 
contamination; officials with Lockheed Martin Corp. have 
acknowledged finding - and accepted responsibility for - 
contamination at the site. Lockheed crews had stumbled across the 
contamination in January 2000 as they prepared the property for 
an eventual sale to Wire Pro Inc., a New Jersey-based firm. 

The company notified Manatee County regulators and Florida's 
Department of Environmental Protection. But DEP officials, with 
oversight authority for such sites, deemed the release as no 
threat to residents and kept the finding in-house. 

That changed in late May and early June when further testing, 
prompted by community members who had grown suspicious of 
activity on and around the plant, found poisonous solvents in a 
slew of wells throughout Tallevast. 

DEP and Lockheed sent out alerts and passed out bottled water, 
and eventually shut down the wells and hooked the homes into the 
county's piped-in water supply. 

Residents remained suspicious and bitter, though, pointing to 
DEP's choice four years earlier not to notify them of the 
potential danger. The mounting angst and anger prompted U.S. Rep. 
Katherine Harris, R-Fla., and Nelson to seek EPA action. 

Nelson visited the community June 18, noting during a tour of 
Tallevast and a question-and-answer session with residents that 
there was "no excuse" they hadn't been notified sooner by the 
state, county or company - or all. 

The first-term senator also took the opportunity then to note he 
already had briefly discussed the site - and others like it in 
Florida - with EPA leaders, and asked for their help. 

Agency officials have been and remain tight-lipped over what 
role, if any, they might take in Tallevast. And their meeting 
with Nelson will be behind closed doors; the better to discuss 
issues freely, Gulley said. 

Whatever comes from the meeting, Lockheed and DEP leaders insist 
they'll embrace it. 

"We would certainly welcome any involvement that the U.S. EPA 
would wish to undertake," said Merritt Mitchell, a spokeswoman 
with DEP's Tampa office. 

Welcomed or not, the shape of that involvement is likely to gel 
Tuesday. 

"They're going to come down and they're going to tell Bill what 
they know about the site," Gulley said of EPA officials. "And 
Bill will share with them the concerns he heard while he was 
there in Tallevast. Then we'll go from there." 

Kevin O'Horan, environmental reporter, can be reached at 
745-7037, or at .   

Bradenton.com 

*****************************************************************
 74 Washington Times: Court upholds Nevada nuclear storage
 
Nation/Politics - July 10, 2004
			
A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a congressional mandate 
to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but ordered 
the federal government to expand radiation protection plans 
beyond 10,000 years. 
 
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of 
Columbia holds the project hostage until the plans are redrawn, 
but there were no signs the state plans to appeal. 
 
 
More than 100 interim nuclear storage sites exist throughout 39 
states and more than 160 million people reside within 75 miles. 
 
Energy Department Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was pleased 
with the decision and that the project will protect public health 
and safety. 
 
"While the court did not question the scientific validity of the 
Environmental Protection Agency's standards, it did vacate one 
aspect of the standard, the 10,000-year compliance period," Mr. 
Abraham said. "Therefore, DOE will be working with the EPA and 
Congress to determine appropriate steps to address this issue." 
 
Greg Bortolin, spokesman for Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn of 
Nevada, called the court's decision "encouraging." 
 
"Nevada's argument was based on sound science, and it is 
heartening to know that the court basically agreed with the state 
of Nevada," Mr. Bortolin said. "All along, what the governor was 
doing was looking out for the safety and welfare of the citizens 
of Nevada." 
 
Congress mandated in 2002 that the nation's radioactive waste 
from power plants and spent reactor fuel be stored at the Yucca 
Mountain site despite objections from Nevada state and federal 
officials. The site is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. 
 
The court's decision upheld the congressional act and dismissed 
other challenges as without merit. 
 
"Having the capacity to outlast human civilization as we know it 
and the potential to devastate public health and the environment, 
nuclear waste has vexed scientists, Congress and regulatory 
agencies for the last half-century," the court wrote. 
 
"After rejecting disposal options ranging from burying nuclear 
waste in polar ice caps to rocketing it to the sun, the 
scientific consensus has settled on deep geologic burial as the 
safest way to isolate this toxic material in perpetuity," the 
court said. 
 
It also ruled that actions by President Bush and the Energy 
Department leading to the selection of the Yucca Mountain site 
are unreviewable. 
 
However, the court ruled that the 10,000-year compliance period 
proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency is a violation of 
the Energy Policy Act in that it is not consistent with findings 
by the National Academy of Sciences. 
 
The court said the waste to be stored at Yucca Mountain has a 
half-life of 17 million years and that radioactive waste and its 
harmful consequences persist for time spans beyond human 
comprehension. 
 
"They can go forward, but they can't get the license without the 
EPA regulation getting changed," Mr. Bortolin said. "I concede it 
doesn't kill the project, but past experience shows that changing 
an EPA regulation can sometimes take several years." 
 
About 20 percent of the nation's electricity comes from nuclear 
power, and it is estimated that by 2005 the United States will 
have accumulated more than 100,000 metric tons of radioactive 
waste. 
 

 
*****************************************************************
 75 Nevada Appeal - Opinion: Yucca Mountain isn't so inevitable now
 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 
July 11, 2004     				 				
                         

Nevada Appeal editorial board
 						
 Could this really be the end of the Yucca Mountain 
nuclear-storage project? Nevada officials certainly sounded like 
it on Friday as they reacted to an appeals court ruling that 
rejected the Environmental Protection Agency's standard of 
protection for 10,000 years.

Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval said Yucca Mountain had 
been "stopped in its tracks."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he believed the ruling was "enough 
to effectively kill the project."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., also said it "provides Nevada a crucial 
legal tool to defeat the Yucca Mountain project once and for 
all."

But the money and the political forces arrayed against Nevada are 
vast, and we'll take a slightly more guarded view of the court's 
ruling. 

As long as there is no viable alternative developed for storage 
of the nation's highly-level radioactive waste, not to mention 
the $6 billion already spent on the Southern Nevada hole in the 
ground, it will be difficult to believe the plan won't be pursued 
in some form.

Still, Nevadans who oppose the Yucca Mountain project can 
celebrate a major victory. The court's finding buttresses their 
argument that standards were being compromised against the 
research of "sound science."

It's an even bigger blow to the forces in the state who lately 
have been counseling "negotiation" as a means of gaining some 
kind of financial windfall for Nevadans for a federal dump site 
they deemed inevitable.

If nothing else, the EPA will have to go back to the drawing 
board to set radiation standards. That likely will take years. 
We'd much rather the Department of Energy take a bigger step back 
and reconsider the whole concept of moving 77,000 tons of 
radioactive waste across the country to the Nevada desert so it 
can be buried in casks.

A real alternative - one that doesn't needlessly expose millions 
of people or threaten the water supply of the country's 
fastest-growing city - is ultimately the only course that will 
ensure the Yucca Mountain idea is dead forever.

All contents © Copyright 2004 nevadaappeal.com
Nevada Appeal - 580 Mallory Way - Carson City, NV 89701                         
*****************************************************************
 76 Congressman Jon Porter: Jon Porter Praises Today’s Yucca Decision

July 9, 2004       

  Press Release   
      
  
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE JON PORTER PRAISES TODAY’S YUCCA DECISION 
U.S. Court of Appeals rules favorably for Nevada
       
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Representative Jon Porter (R-NV) 
praised the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia 
Circuit’s ruling from the January 14 hearing on the proposed 
nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain: 
  
“Today’s decision is a big win for Nevada.  The decision is 
ultimately a huge setback for the Department of Energy and the 
Yucca Mountain Project.  The court ruled that the EPA did not 
follow the law when developing radiation standards.  While I 
fully expect the federal government to appeal this ruling, 
today’s decision will clearly delay the project and possibly end 
it. 
  
“The Yucca Mountain project has been of intense personal interest 
to me and all Nevadans.  I have been personally involved in the 
fight to stop Yucca for 20 years.  The Yucca Project has been 
supported by both Republicans and Democrats, and I will continue 
to fight against this project and will not rest until the storage 
of nuclear waste is no longer an option and the doors of Yucca 
Mountain are closed shut forever. 
  
“We know the Department of Energy bent the rules to find the site 
suitable.  Today, it is clear that sound science and common sense 
have prevailed over political expediency. 
  
I join with Nevada’s delegation in celebrating this victory.  I 
want to congratulate our Attorney General Brian Sandoval and our 
world-class legal team, headed up by Mr. Joseph Egan.  We could 
not ask for a more competent and capable group of men and women 
than the one comprised by the State of Nevada.” 
      
*****************************************************************
 77 Nevada Appeal: Ruling halts Yucca Mountain plan

Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
   																				 										
July 10, 2004
 								   								   									[Print Friendly]  Print [Email]
 Nevada officials praised an appeal court decision Friday on 
Yucca Mountain, proclaiming it a victory that should kill the 
project.

"Simply put, Yucca is stopped in its tracks because the court 
recognizes that the project isn't rooted in sound science," said 
Attorney General Brian Sandoval, echoing President Bush's words 
when he promised in 2000 to base his decision on the 
nuclear-waste dump on "sound science."

While Gov. Kenny Guinn didn't go that far, he said the ruling was 
a setback that would at least delay the project for years.

The Washington, D.C.-based court rejected most of Nevada's 
arguments, including a challenge to the constitutionality of 
Congress' resolution ordering construction of the 
radioactive-waste repository in the remote Nevada desert.

The court supported only one point in Nevada's challenge: that 
the Environmental Protection Agency ignored a law requiring it 
build a dump site that meets the National Academy of Science 
findings. The academy says the waste must be isolated for at 
least 300,000 years - the length of time it will remain dangerous 
to life on earth.

EPA's regulation requires the Department of Energy prove the dump 
will keep the waste isolated only for 10,000 years.

"It unabashedly rejected NAS's findings and went on to promulgate 
a dramatically different standard, one that the academy had 
expressly rejected," the court ruled.

The court ordered EPA to revise its standards to match the NAS 
findings, a process that could take several years, or return to 
Congress and get permission to ignore them, a prospect that 
observers called unlikely.

"It was Congress that required EPA to rely on NAS's expert 
scientific judgment and, given the serious risks nuclear waste 
disposal poses for the health and welfare of the American people, 
it is up to Congress - not EPA and not this court - to authorize 
departures from the prevailing statutory scheme," the court said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham had a very different take 
on the ruling, saying he was pleased.

"The court rejected the state of Nevada's challenge to the 
constitutionality of the resolution approving Yucca Mountain and 
dismissed the state's petition attacking the actions of the 
administration that led to the passage of that resolution by 
Congress," he said.

He added that the Energy Department will address the radiation 
standard rejected by the court and move forward with the project, 
which would send 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from sites 
around the country to a massive repository buried inside Yucca 
Mountain, which is located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas

Sandoval and Guinn said they don't think DOE can fix the problem 
because it would require throwing out the safety rules.

"This is a critical issue," said Guinn. "It's the safety of the 
people of this country that counts."

"If they can't get this approval, then they can't get licensing, 
and if they can't get a license you don't have a project."

Sandoval said even the former head of the Yucca project, Lake 
Barrett, testified at one point DOE could not meet the tough NAS 
requirement. Sandoval said he doesn't think DOE will ever be able 
to prove Yucca Mountain safe for 300,000 years.

The repository was scheduled to open in 2010, but it first must 
obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The three judges who made Friday's decision, a panel of the 
Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, were Harry 
Edwards, Karen Henderson and David Tatel.

Bush's promise to make his decision on "sound science" has become 
an issue in this year's presidential campaign, with Democrats 
charging he lied to the people of Nevada and approved the project 
almost as soon as it arrived on his desk.

Republicans raised the issue themselves when the party broke with 
their governor and congressional delegation this year and 
included a platform plank calling for the state to accept that 
the dump is inevitable and to seek compensation from the federal 
government for taking it.

Contact Geoff Dornan at or 687-8750.

All contents © Copyright 2004 nevadaappeal.com
Nevada Appeal - 580 Mallory Way - Carson City, NV 89701                         
*****************************************************************
 78 Nevada Appeal: Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
               
July 11, 2004     				 				
 					     				 			
KEN RITTER
 									 									July 10, 2004
 LAS VEGAS - Nevada officials declared victory Friday in their 
fight to stop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, saying they 
don't think the Energy Department can meet a stricter standard to 
protect the public against radiation releases.

"The people of Nevada should throw up their arms and cheer at 
this court ruling," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., referring 
to a federal court decision requiring the Energy Department to 
contain radiation for longer than 10,000 years at the Yucca 
Mountain site.

Friday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of 
Columbia rejected Nevada's main arguments against the 
constitutionality of forcing one state to take all the nation's 
nuclear waste.

But justices did uphold arguments that Environmental Protection 
Agency radiation standards for the site were inadequate and would 
have to be strengthened.

Berkley said that by tossing out the EPA radiation standard, the 
court has said "the Bush Administration's plan for Yucca Mountain 
will not protect the health and safety of Nevada residents."

In a statement, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham noted the court 
dismissed the state's challenges to the selection of the site, 90 
miles northwest of Las Vegas, and said the department will work 
with the EPA and Congress to address the ruling on the radiation 
standard.

"Our scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain project is sound," 
Abraham said. "The project will protect the public health and 
safety."

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said it was unclear whether 
the ruling would delay plans to begin the process of applying for 
a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate the 
dump. The department had planned to open the repository in 2010.

Joe Egan, a lawyer who argued the state's case, said the Energy 
Department will not be able to meet a National Academy of 
Sciences recommendation that the site be made safe for 350,000 
years and will not be able to get a license.

"We think we put a stake through the heart of this project," Egan 
said.

Sen. John Kerry's campaign issued a statement praising the 
decision and criticizing President Bush for allowing the project 
to move forward. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee 
and Massachusetts senator voted against the project in 2002.

"The Court's decision confirms what John Kerry has been saying 
all along and what everyone in Nevada knows - that the Bush 
Administration has turned its back on sound science in its rush 
to build the Yucca Mountain repository," said Sean Smith, a Kerry 
spokesman in Nevada.

The Bush campaign referenced exhaustive studies proving Yucca 
Mountain is "scientifically and technically suitable for 
development."

"John Kerry is politicizing this issue in an effort to distract 
Nevadans from his troubling record on strengthening the economy, 
lowering health care costs, and protecting our homeland," said 
Tracey Schmitt, a Bush campaign spokeswoman.

But Nevada's congressional leaders hailed the ruling as a "major 
victory," and citizens' groups were elated.

"I love it. It means they have to go back to square one and do 
all this refiguring," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director 
of Citizen Alert, an anti-nuclear group in Nevada.

"Their whole house of cards is balanced against the fact that 
they only have to comply for 10,000 years," said Judy Treichel, 
head of the Nuclear Waste Task Force and a longtime Yucca 
Mountain opponent. "We said that's ridiculous because the stuff 
will probably get out before, but certainly after that time and 
contaminate Nevada."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the ruling was a "significant blow 
to the Department of Energy and the Yucca Mountain project, and I 
believe enough to effectively kill the project."

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was similarly optimistic, saying the 
decision gives Nevada a "crucial legal tool to defeat the Yucca 
Mountain project once and for all."

Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican whose veto of Yucca Mountain was 
overridden by Congress in 2002, said he interpreted the court 
decision to mean there can be no movement toward licensing in the 
near future.

"You can't do much more without a license," he said.

The governor said the Energy Department could go to Congress for 
a change in the law or to seek an EPA rule change, adding that 
either would take time.

 						 						
All contents © Copyright 2004 nevadaappeal.com Nevada Appeal - 
580 Mallory Way - Carson City, NV 89701                         
yy
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 79 Jim Gibbons: Decision is an Historic Victory for Nevada
 
   Gibbons Statement on Federal Appeals Court Ruling on Yucca 
Mountain

7/9/2004

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) released the 
following statement regarding the federal appeals court ruling in 
favor of the State of Nevada which rejected the EPA safety 
standard currently being used for Yucca Mountain. The court 
ordered the federal government to develop a plan to protect the 
public against radiation releases beyond the proposed 10,000 
years. 

Today’s decision is an historic victory for Nevada. I have always 
said that only before an unbiased court would Nevada receive a 
fair forum on Yucca Mountain. Today’s ruling reiterates what many 
Nevadans have said all along– that the science behind the Yucca 
Mountain project was unsafe and unsound. 

“I applaud the diligent work and commitment of the state’s 
attorneys and our Attorney General, Brian Sandoval. Today’s court 
decision deals a major blow to the Yucca Mountain project and is 
good news for the people of Nevada. 

“The court found that the EPA must abide by the law and rely upon 
the expert scientific findings of the National Academy of 
Sciences (NAS). In fact, the EPA’s inadequate and arbitrary 
safety standard completely disregarded the recommendations of the 
NAS that had called for a standard of compliance for hundreds of 
thousands of years, instead of only 10,000. 

“As a result of the court’s decision, the EPA must now promulgate 
a new safety standard that can show compliance well beyond 10,000 
years. That will be a high standard to meet, and one that I doubt 
the DOE could realistically meet. Ultimately, today’s ruling 
creates a monumental obstacle and uncertain delay in the 
licensing process for Yucca Mountain.” 

For more information, contact: Amy Spanbauer Press Secretary 
Congressman Jim Gibbons Phone: 202-225-6155 FAX: 202-225-5679 
URL: 
*****************************************************************
 80 Las Vegas SUN: Democratic Party platform includes anti-Yucca Mountain plank
 
 By CHRISTINA ALMEIDA
 ASSOCIATED PRESS 

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Democrats took a strong position Saturday
against a planned southern Nevada nuclear waste repository,
approving a plank in the national platform that says the Yucca
Mountain project is unsafe. 

During a meeting in Hollywood, Fla., the party's platform
committee approved the plank proposed by member Rep. Shelley
Berkley, D-Nev. 

"It sends a very strong message that the Democratic Party is
solidly behind the state of Nevada in its fight against Yucca
Mountain," Berkley said in a telephone interview. "It draws a
line in the sand and a distinction between the two parties'
positions when it comes to the safety of Nevada families." 

The platform, which will be presented to delegates later this
month at the national convention in Boston, includes party
principles on social and economic issues and closely resembles
Sen. John Kerry's campaign agenda. 

Kerry, the presumptive presidential nominee, voted against the
federal government's plan in 2002 and has said "Yucca Mountain
will not be a repository" if he wins in November. 

"It will take a Democratic president to stop this process dead
in its tracks, and John Kerry has already promised to do that,"
Berkley said. 

Yucca Mountain has become a key election-year issue in Nevada,
with Democrats pushing Kerry's longtime opposition and citing
President Bush's approval of the plan. 

Republicans have been somewhat divided. During their state
convention, several rural county delegates called for a plank
urging negotiations for federal dollars and other benefits in
exchange for accepting the dump - an unpopular idea among the
state's top Republican leaders. 

The Democratic position was somewhat clouded with Kerry's
selection of Sen. John Edwards as his running mate. Edwards had
voted for the Yucca Mountain project in 2002. 

But Edwards has assured state party leaders that he backs
Kerry's opposition to the plan - something Republicans say is
indicative of the political complexities of the issue. 

"The Democrats hardly agree on this issue as evidenced by the
last vote when 15 senators and 102 members of Congress voted for
this project, including Sen. Edwards," said Yier Shi, spokesman
for the Republican National Committee. "The president has always
said that the decision on Yucca Mountain would be based on sound
science, and we have invested 20 years researching this topic." 

The plank reads: "We will protect Nevada and its communities
from the high level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain which
has not been proven to be safe by sound science." 

In announcing the plank, Berkley cited Friday's appellate court
decision saying radiation standards for the site were inadequate
and would have to be strengthened. But the decision by the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was not a complete
victory for Nevada. The court upheld the government's decision
to single out the state as the designated site. 

Officials with the Energy Department expressed confidence Friday
the radiation issue would be resolved and the plan would move
forward. 

-- 


 
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 81 courier post: GEMS landfill controversy far from resolved
 
www.courierpostonline.com

    
[South Jersey] 

 Sunday, July 11, 2004
 Central combatants in case wait patiently for federal judge's
ruling

 By LAWRENCE HAJNA Courier-Post Staff GLOUCESTER TWP. 

Remember the GEMS landfill controversy? It was only the most 
contentious environmental issue to hit Camden County in years.

 The furor over the proposed discharge of tainted groundwater 
from the landfill to county sewer mains has subsided.

 But the issue is far from resolved.

 The many combatants in the case - the county freeholders, the 
Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, the state and 
federal governments, environmental activists, and a trust paying 
for the landfill's cleanup - have been waiting patiently for the 
better part of the year for a federal judge to issue critical 
rulings.

 The decisions will effectively determine whether the GEMS Phase 
II Trust, representing former users of the sprawling Superfund 
site on Erial Road, must build a more elaborate treatment plant 
to deal with groundwater contaminated with radium and uranium in 
addition to conventional landfill contaminants.

 Arguments heard

 U.S. District Court Judge Jerome B. Simandle heard oral 
arguments Jan. 29 on a state motion seeking to force the trust to 
replace a small pretreatment plant at the site with a more 
sophisticated facility.

 Three weeks later, the county filed suit to force the trust to 
build the full-scale plant should Simandle reject the state's 
request. It was a safety-valve of sorts.

Nearly six months later, Simandle has yet to rule on either case. 
He declined comment through a law clerk last week.

 Cindy Rau-Hatton, a township resident who is fighting the 
sewer-discharge plan, worries this could be the lull before the 
storm. She fears the judge will rule in favor of the trust, which 
argues the sewer discharge is safe and cost-effective.

 "You just don't know where it's going, but six months does seem 
like a long time," she said. "People have not forgotten about 
this. They are still very concerned."

 Opponents contend that sending the water through sewer mains 
that travel through the heart of the county - Gloucester 
Township, Runnemede, Bellmawr, Gloucester City and Camden - could 
pose a health risk to county residents. GEMS, which stands for 
Gloucester Environmental Management Services, was a municipal 
dump that closed around 1980 and is on the federal Superfund 
cleanup list.

 Sharon Finlayson, a key opponent of the discharge plan, is 
perplexed that Simandle is taking so long, given the fact that 
the issue generated intense public and political interest. The 
past two years have been marked by public meetings jammed with 
irate citizens and passage of a state law that attempts to bar 
the discharge.

 "It seems very mysterious that there has been no ruling," said 
Finlayson, chairwoman of the New Jersey Environmental Federation. 
"In my heart of hearts, I hope the judge is taking a very serious 
look and will say there's no reason not to do a better treatment 
(at the landfill)."

 Ironically, tainted water continues to flow from the ground 
under GEMS into Holly Run, a stream adjacent to the landfill that 
flows into Big Timber Creek and, eventually, the Delaware River.

 This situation, Rau-Hatton argues, does no one any good. "We 
don't like to see this. The (full-scale) plant could have been 
built already," she said.

 Different take

 The EPA doesn't like the situation either, but has a different 
spin. The agency filed a brief last month in support of a trust 
motion that asks Simandle to throw out the county's suit.

 "If the county is allowed to proceed in this case . . . it will 
undoubtedly interfere with the EPA's interest in the 
implementation of the long-delayed remedy at this site," the 
brief states.

 "That would allow an imminent and substantial endangerment to 
continue, affecting public health, welfare and the environment," 
the brief further states, adding the trust has no authority to 
change the cleanup plan under the federal Superfund law anyway.

 The EPA argues it once considered full-scale treatment but 
rejected it as unnecessary. A pilot run of the pretreatment plant 
in 2002 found that uranium and radium levels were consistently 
below drinking water standards, the brief adds. Fears raised

 Simandle initially approved and later affirmed the 
sewer-discharge plan. But the state Department of Environmental 
Protection threw a curve at him late last year.

 The DEP raised fears that the radionuclides in the water do not 
result from naturally occurring minerals, as the trust and EPA 
assert, but may come from dumping of radioactive wastes at the 
landfill.

 During January's motion hearing, the DEP argued "hot spots" 
could arise in the future. The existing pretreatment plant might 
not be able to adequately remove the radionuclides before the 
water is discharged into county sewer mains, the department 
argued.

 The trust's lead attorney, Gary Lesneski, however, countered 
that the DEP bowed "to certain political factions that have 
created an aura of hysteria" about the sewer discharge. Lesneski 
did not return a call last week.

 Publicly at least, DEP Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell is not 
reading too much into the current lull.

 "I think there's an extensive record and a number of complex 
technical issues," he said. "This judge has shown himself to be 
very astute and thoughtful about the technical issues. I think 
that suggests to me that he's taking the time to render the 
decision with great care." 

Reach Lawrence Hajna at (856) 486-2466 or 
lhajna@courierpostonline.com

*****************************************************************
 82 AU ABC: Rann expects backdown on nuclear dump. 

12/07/2004. ABC News Online 

="Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online"> 

South Australian Premier Mike Rann believes federal Cabinet will 
decide today to back down on a proposal for a radioactive waste 
dump in South Australia. 

During his Adelaide visit last week, Prime Minister John Howard 
indicated his Cabinet would review the case after continuing 
public opposition and a court ruling against the compulsory 
acquisition of the land. 

The Government held a similar review prior to the 2001 election 
but postponed its decision until after it won government. 

Mr Rann says if that tactic is used again, South Australians 
will vote accordingly at the next election. 

"The Prime Minister knows that more than 80 per cent of South 
Australians are opposed to having this inflicted on us, which is 
essentially waste from the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor being 
brought across our borders, through our communities and along 
our roads," he said. 

© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 
*****************************************************************
 83 Charleston.Net: Nuclear waste tank inspections raise worries 

07/11/04
 
Some tanks at Savannah River Site deteriorating, some have leaked 

Associated Press 

COLUMBIA--Federal inspection reports show that 15 of 51 tanks 
holding deadly nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site are 
cracked or rusty or have leaked.

 Recent federal inspection reports note hundreds of "leak sites," 
or cracks in the steel tanks that have been used since the 1950s 
and 1960s as the plant helped make nuclear weapons. SRS tanks 
contain about 37 million gallons of liquids, salts and highly 
contaminated sludge.

 The tanks contain radioactive waste, including uranium, cesium 
and plutonium. Environmentalists say the remaining radioactivity 
is among the highest at federal nuclear weapons facilities.

 While some cracks date to the 1950s, the most recent inspection 
report says some leak sites have been found in the past three 
years at the 300-square-mile federal weapons complex on the 
Savannah River.

 In 2001, one of the most recent problems involved 92 gallons of 
radioactive waste leaking from a 40-year-old tank into a 
containment area, the government's latest tank inspection report 
says. Inspectors found six leak sites on the 750,000-gallon, 
24-foot-high steel tank.

 Secondary containment systems for most tanks kept the 
radioactive poisons from getting into groundwater beneath the 
sprawling site. But a containment system failed in one case, when 
radioactive waste leaked into the ground.

 Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs SRS for the U.S. 
Department of Energy, says some tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of 
the water table, raising concerns.

 Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse, says the government 
does not know of any tanks that currently are leaking.

 "They obviously are getting older and will not last forever," 
said Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with 
the Energy Department. "This is highly radioactive, and there is 
a concern to get that waste out as soon as possible. There's 
always some potential for inadvertent leakage into the 
environment." 

"These tanks are not designed for long-term storage, as you can 
obviously tell," said Geoff Fettus, a Natural Resources Defense 
Council lawyer. The council sued to stop the Energy Department's 
cleanup plan in favor of its own.

 The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most 
of the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to 
reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater.

 Agency officials say that will speed the tank cleanup before a 
serious accident occurs.

	   Copyright © 2004, The Post and Courier, All Rights Reserved.
 		Comments about our site, write:  
webmaster@postandcourier.com		 	   





*****************************************************************
 84 [progchat_action] Classified Disks Missing From Los Alamos Lab
 
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 00:42:31 -0500 (CDT)

 
Classified Disks Missing From Los Alamos Lab

    Two similar incidents have been reported since December at the
    nuclear facility. This time officials call the loss 'very serious.'

By Rebecca Trounson
July 10, 2004

The director of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Friday that the 
nuclear weapons research lab had lost track of two computer disks 
containing classified information, the third such incident in eight months.

Los Alamos officials, who said after each of the previous incidents -- 
in May and December -- that the missing materials posed no threat to 
national security, made no such statement Friday, instead describing the 
loss as "very serious."

Kevin Roark, a spokesman for the New Mexico lab, said he could not 
comment on the nature of the materials, except to say they were 
"classified removable electronic media," the lab's term for CDs and 
floppy disks.

The previous two incidents might have involved faulty bookkeeping for 
outdated disks that were listed as missing but might actually have been 
destroyed. Roark said this incident involved data necessary for current 
research.

"These items were not slated for destruction. These items were needed, 
and when they went to look for them, they weren't there," he said.

Director Peter Nanos said in a statement that the loss, discovered 
Wednesday, had "once again ... brought disrepute to Los Alamos." He 
ordered operations in the affected section of the lab halted while a 
search for the missing items was conducted.

The announcement of the missing disks marks yet another security breach 
-- and another embarrassment -- for the University of California, which 
manages Los Alamos for the federal government.

Earlier allegations of fraud, security lapses and mismanagement at the 
lab prompted the Energy Department to announce last year that it would 
require UC, for the first time, to compete for the contract to run Los 
Alamos. Congress later ordered that other national lab contracts, 
including one for a second UC-run facility, Lawrence Livermore in 
California, be put up for bid.

UC officials said the university had not decided whether to compete. The 
Los Alamos contract expires in September 2005, and the Livermore 
agreement about two years later.

A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which 
oversees the weapons facilities for the Energy Department, described the 
lab's failure to keep track of classified disks as "intolerable."

"We are deeply disturbed that employees at Los Alamos ... appear to 
demonstrate a cavalier attitude fulfilling their obligation to protect 
national security materials," spokesman Bryan Wilkes said.

Wilkes said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, as part of an initiative 
to increase security at nuclear weapons labs, had recently outlined a 
plan to eliminate all disks and disk drives from desktop computers used 
for classified weapons research.

Danielle Brian, who heads a watchdog group often critical of the lab's 
management, said her organization had been calling for such action for 
several years. The Energy Department now "needs to demand that the lab 
do it immediately," said Brian, executive director of the Project on 
Government Oversight.

Roark said the lab discovered that the disks were missing from the 
weapons physics directorate, where scientists conduct research related 
to nuclear weapons, computer science and other areas. The discovery was 
made as researchers prepared for a set of experiments, the nature of 
which he said he could not disclose.

After an immediate search did not turn up the disks, Nanos ordered a 
wider search and a partial "stand down" in the weapons physics area, 
Roark said. The lab has restricted the access of some employees, 
requiring them to enter the area under escort. The affected employees 
are those who had access to the missing items, he said.

Nanos said in the statement that those involved could lose their jobs.

"Once again, the failure of individuals to follow prescribed standards 
and protocols has brought disrepute to Los Alamos," he said. "As 
director of this national security laboratory, I want everyone to 
understand: If you can't keep track of classified materials, you can't 
work here."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

-- 
to the source:
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-labs10jul10.story

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"'No, no!' said the Queen.
*****************************************************************
 85 The Daily Camera: Public's role at Flats uncertain

Existing groups would not be funded under measure

By Todd Neff, Camera Staff Writer
July 11, 2004

A Senate appropriations bill passed last month includes money for 
a single local group to oversee Rocky Flats, raising questions 
about the public's role in the former nuclear weapons plant after 
cleanup is completed in 2006. 

The 2005 Defense Appropriations Bill, currently awaiting 
reconciliation with a House defense-appropriations bill, only 
includes money for a single "local stakeholder organization." Its 
language appears to favor something similar to the Rocky Flats 
Coalition of Local Governments, which was created in 1999 and 
includes officials from the city of Boulder, Boulder County, 
Superior, Jefferson County, Broomfield, Arvada and Westminster. 

 The 11-year-old Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board, which 
includes plant employees and representatives from local 
governments as well as environmental, businesses, academic and 
health-care interests, would go unfunded. 

Two Citizens Advisory Board members, including board chair Victor 
Holm, think their organization can safely go away after closure. 
But they are worried the public won't have an adequate voice. 

"We're really focused on some way to include all the stakeholders 
at Rocky Flats," said Mike Maus, a Citizens Advisory Board 
member. "However that takes shape, it's more than elected 
officials." 

The problem, Holm said, is in the bill's wording, which states 
that the local post-closure oversight group be made up of 
"elected officials of local governments." 

Holm said the solution could be as simple as changing the 
language to allow local governments to choose citizen delegates 
in addition to their own representatives. He said he doesn't 
think a separate citizens board will be needed. 

LeRoy Moore of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center served 
on the Citizens Advisory Board for 10 years until last year. He 
said local oversight should include diverse groups. 

"In general, local government people have their hands so full on 
such a wide range of issues, they should certainly be a part of 
the continuing oversight, but they should not be there alone," he 
said. 

Money for both boards, which have paid staff, has been tight. 
Holm said the Citizens Advisory Board receives $175,000, down 
from $400,000 in past years. 

David Abelson, executive director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of 
Local Governments, said his organization has had to compete for 
Department of Energy money as well, and has supplemented it with 
local money and grants. But unlike the Citizens Advisory Board, 
which appears to be covered into 2006, the 2005 Defense 
Appropriations Bill eliminates the Coalition of Local 
Governments' budget entirely. 

At the same time, the bill offers up $250,000 for the "new" 
oversight group with a similar makeup. 

Abelson said the current bill's wording didn't preclude deep 
public participation, and that his organization was "exploring 
the idea of how to involve non-elected officials in the 
post-closure organization." 

"We've made that commitment," he said. "The question is not 
should there be public participation, the question is how you 
best facilitate that." 

The Senate bill sets aside $250,000 to oversee the 1,000 acres of 
the site the Department of Energy will retain after 2006. 

The rest of the 6,300-acre property will be turned over to the 
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to become the Rocky Flats National 
Wildlife Refuge. 

Contact Camera Staff Writer Todd Neff at (303) 473-1327 or 
nefft@dailycamera.com.  

      Copyright 2004, The Daily Camera and the E.W. Scripps
*****************************************************************
 86 New York Times: Los Alamos Missing Secret Data
 
 By KENNETH CHANG

Published: July 10, 2004

[T] wo computer-data storage devices containing classified 
research information are missing from the nuclear weapons 
laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., officials there said yesterday.

"It's a very serious situation," said Kevin Roark, a spokesman 
for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Mr. Roark would not specify the type of storage devices missing; 
they could be floppy disks, hard disks, memory cards or some 
other kind of removable storage mechanism. He also declined to 
specify what was on the missing devices or which part of the 
laboratory they disappeared from, except to say that it was part 
of Los Alamos's weapons physics division.

The laboratory discovered the loss Wednesday during an inventory 
taken to prepare for an experiment.

This is the third instance in which classified data have gone 
missing from Los Alamos in the last year, but the announcement 
this time was more dire in tone. In a statement, G. Peter Nanos, 
the laboratory's director, said the current situation "must be 
dealt with swiftly and decisively." He said that the laboratory 
was investigating and that "I intend to fully exercise my 
authority as director to hold those involved fully accountable, 
up to and including termination of employment, if appropriate."

In the meantime, laboratory employees who had access to the 
missing devices will be allowed to continue duties in their work 
areas, though only under escort. That new restriction affects 
fewer than 20 people, Mr. Roark said.

In the most recent earlier incident, in May, laboratory officials 
said that the missing devices did not contain nuclear weapons 
information and that they believed there was no actual loss of 
material. 

"It was items slated for destruction,'' Mr. Roark said yesterday. 
But, he said, the missing devices this time contained data 
related to current experiments and had not been listed for 
destruction.

*****************************************************************
 87 ABQjournal: Classified Information Items Missing at LANL 

Albuquerque, New Mexico 

July 9, 2004 

The Associated Press 

LOS ALAMOS — Two items containing classified 
information are missing from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a 
lab spokesman said Friday. 

The items — so-called "Classified Removable Electronic 
Media" — were discovered missing from the Weapons Physics 
Directorate during an inventory check Wednesday, lab spokesman 
Kevin Roark said. 

While Roark refused to say if the items contained 
information that could jeopardize national security if in the 
wrong hands, he said the CREM items could include products like 
compact flash disks, CDs and floppy disks. 

A search was under way Friday, and lab Director Peter Nanos 
said he would order a full inquiry into what happened. 

"In order to operate effectively, this apparent lack of 
attention to CREM issues must be dealt with swiftly and 
decisively," Nanos said. 

This is the second such incident in recent months. Material 
also classified as CREM was reported missing in May. That data 
had been set to be destroyed before it went missing, Roark said 
at the time. 

Roark acknowledged Friday that this situation is different 
because the items were to be used for an upcoming experiment and 
are in fact missing. He added that Nanos' tone is also different 
this time. 

"What's different in this case is the director is saying 
this won't stand," Roark said. "If you can't keep track of 
classified material, then you can't work at Los Alamos anymore. 
The director is serious." 

U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said he was incensed by this 
latest security failure at the northern New Mexico lab. 

"That this is occurring in the current atmosphere of 
heightened security awareness is intolerable. . . . At this 
point, the lab needs to ramp up their plans to move all this 
classified information to secure servers," Udall said. "We also 
need a full investigation to get to the bottom of what went 
wrong here." 

Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security 
Administration officials have been notified of the latest 
incident. 

In recent years, the lab taken steps to reduce CREM 
inventory, reevaluate its procedures and retrain personnel. 

Nanos said the new policies and procedures address many 
security concerns. "However, once again, the failure of 
individuals to follow prescribed standards and protocols has 
brought disrepute to Los Alamos," he said. 

Pete Stockton with the Project on Government Oversight in 
Washington D.C., said it's time for the Department of Energy to 
take a more active role in the investigation. 

"We really believe that (Energy Secretary Spencer) Abraham 
should send a team out there and see what's going on," Stockton 
said in a telephone interview. 

The University of California has run Los Alamos since the 
lab was created as the headquarters of the Manhattan Project — 

the secret effort to create the first atomic bomb — in 
1943. 

The contract is up for bids after management failures in 
recent years, including the firing of two investigators who 
raised allegations of mismanagement, abuse of lab purchasing and 
financial malfeasance. 

Copyright Albuquerque Journal 
*****************************************************************
 88 Washington Times: Los Alamos loses secret data
 
                 Nation/Politics - July 11, 2004
			
The nuclear weapons research lab at Los Alamos, N.M., lost track 
of two data-storage computer disks, marking the third time 
classified materials have disappeared from there during the past 
year. 
 
Items described as "classified removable electronic media" were 
discovered missing from the Weapons Physics Directorate during a 
special inventory check Wednesday, Kevin Roark, a spokesman at 
the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Friday. He refused to 
say yesterday whether the missing items could jeopardize national 
security, the Associated Press reported. 
 
 
The lab was created in the 1940s as the headquarters of the 
Manhattan Project to secretly develop the first atomic bomb. 
 
A posting on the lab's Web site also did not detail the specific 
nature of the missing materials, although Mr. Roark said they may 
be such items as compact discs or floppy disks. 
 
After prior incidents in May and December, lab officials said 
there was no national security threat. However, they said on 
their Web site only that an "extensive search is currently 
continuing" for the most recently missing material. 
 
The University of California runs Los Alamos for the National 
Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of 
Energy. The lab also works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and 
Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. 
 
After the incident in May, the Energy Department said it was 
sending a team to the lab to investigate. Los Alamos staff said 
the department was notified of the latest disappearance and that 
entry into the lab was "suspended" for personnel with access to 
the missing items. 
 
"Our ability to safeguard classified materials rests first and 
foremost with the individual staff members who handle, maintain 
and use these items," said lab Director G. Peter Nanos. 
 
"In all cases, they have been given special confidence and trust 
that requires meticulous attention to detail, strict adherence to 
all relevant standards and procedures and, most importantly, an 
attitude that drives zero tolerance for error," he said. 
 
The previous incidents prompted a round of accusations of fraud 
at the lab, although whether foul play may have been involved was 
not clear. 
 
Mr. Nanos said Los Alamos has been working to reduce its 
inventory of classified removable electronic media, retool 
processes and retrain staff to address security concerns. 
 
"While we have seen progress," he said, "the failure of 
individuals to follow prescribed standards and protocols has 
brought disrepute to Los Alamos." 
 

 
*****************************************************************
 89 Tri-City Herald: GAO criticizes fast-track Hanford cleanup plan 

This story was published Saturday, July 10th, 2004 

By Annette Cary Herald staff writer 

The Department of Energy's accelerated cleanup plan to treat 
waste in underground tanks at Hanford would save significantly 
less money than estimated, may not be ready on time and may 
result in expensive facilities not fully capable of treating the 
wastes, according to the General Accounting Office. 

A report released Friday to Congress criticized DOE's fast-track 
approach to building the vitrification plant at Hanford. The 
plant is intended to turn tank wastes into glass logs for 
permanent disposal. 

"For projects of Hanford's complexity, this approach is not 
compatible with controlling costs and schedules," the GAO report 
concluded. 

Construction on the $5.7 billion vitrification plant project, 
which DOE has called the largest, most complex environmental 
cleanup project in the United States, was legally required to 
begin by July 2001. Under pressure to meet that deadline, DOE set 
its contract price for the project at the end of 2000 with the 
design less than 15 percent complete. 

Construction is under way even as design and technology 
development work continue. 

The GAO said that lack of planning has led to problems ranging 
from construction delays to increased operating expenses later. 

DOE also has failed to adequately plan for a lawsuit that could 
lead to the federal agency needing to send much more of its 
treated tank wastes to an underground repository, likely Yucca 
Mountain in Nevada. The suit could lead to more than $19 billion 
in additional costs for delays and changes to the program, the 
report said. 

The vitrification plant was planned to treat 55 million gallons 
of radioactive and hazardous wastes now stored in 177 underground 
tanks. The waste, enough to cover a football field more than 150 
feet deep, is left from the World War II and Cold War production 
of plutonium at Hanford for nuclear weapons. 

The initial plan would not have completed waste treatment until 
2046, well past the regulatory deadline of 2028. 

But through an accelerated cleanup plan, DOE said it could reduce 
the time needed to treat the waste by 20 years and reduce the 
project's total cost of $56 billion by $20 billion. 

However, the cost of building the plant increased $1.4 billion to 
the present estimate of $5.7 billion. 

But the GAO report found that the estimated $20 billion cost 
savings over the life of the plant was overstated. It concluded 
the savings likely would be closer to $12 billion. 

The construction project already is facing delays, the report 
said. For example, building interior walls has outpaced designs, 
leading to delays in finishing the walls and the need to reassign 
workers to other tasks. 

Because construction time has been extended by 16 months, DOE has 
shortened the time for testing the plant's complex treatment 
processes by nearly the same amount of time. 

As a result, DOE plans to test treatment of only two of four 
types of waste, the GAO said. 

"This commissioning approach could overlook significant problems 
until after the plant becomes fully operational," according to 
technical experts consulted by GAO. 

DOE and its contractor, Bechtel National, also have fallen behind 
schedule on resolving technical problems, GAO said. 

Difficulties in proving that mixers in certain tanks in the 
proposed plant will be able to prevent the buildup of flammable 
gases have delayed the testing schedule by more than four months 
and increased costs by more than $15 million, the report said. 

Modifications to the design for improved mixers are expected to 
require an additional $70 million and take about 16 months to 
complete, according to the report. 

The GAO also is skeptical about DOE's aggressive schedule to 
treat some waste in a process outside the vitrification plant now 
under construction. 

The vitrification plant would separate waste into high-activity 
and low-activity waste streams. Up to 60 percent of the 
low-activity waste would be turned into glass through an 
alternate technology, bulk vitrification. 

Because DOE is depending on bulk vitrification for so much of the 
waste, "any problems in developing this treatment capability will 
likely extend the duration of the waste treatment project and 
increase its overall cost," according to the GAO. 

Money could have been saved on the process of separating the 
wastes if more planning had been done on operating the plant 
before construction started, the report found. 

DOE planned to use a resin for the separation process that's 
available from only one supplier. Although it began looking at a 
wider variety of resins this year, testing alternatives could 
delay the planned start of the separation operation. As a result, 
operation costs could increase by at least $50 million a year, 
the report said. 

"DOE's slowness in pursuing an alternative resin stemmed from its 
focus on achieving the near-term goal of having an operating 
plant by 2011," the GAO concluded. 

One of the largest uncertainties surrounding the vitrification 
project stems from a lawsuit now on appeal that could require DOE 
to dispose of a majority of its tank wastes at Yucca Mountain. 
The suit has called into question whether DOE can segment some of 
the tank waste for different treatment and disposal, according to 
the GAO. 

"DOE has not adequately defined or communicated the potential 
effects of a legal challenge to its overall plan for minimizing 
how much high-level waste is disposed of in an underground 
repository," the GAO concluded. "Unless effectively managed, an 
adverse legal outcome could increase project costs by tens of 
billions of dollars." 

If the suit is resolved in DOE's favor, the delays could cost 
$350 million. Losing the suit could cost more than $19 billion at 
Hanford and $100 billion across the entire DOE nuclear complex, 
according to the report. 

The GAO is recommending DOE avoid fast-track approaches on 
complex projects. It also is asking DOE to provide Congress a 
plan for treating and disposing of waste if DOE loses the current 
lawsuit. 

DOE is concerned that preparing a revised plan for Congress is 
premature while the matter is still being decided in the courts 
because of the time and cost involved, wrote Jessie Roberson, 
assistant secretary for environmental management in a letter to 
GAO. However, giving Congress a better sense of the magnitude of 
changes that would be needed is appropriate, Roberson wrote. 

© 2004 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press &Other Wire Services

*****************************************************************
 90 Lowcountry NOW: Old SRS tanks leak atomic waste
                
07/11/04
 
www.lowcountrynow.com

Staff and wire reports 

Federal inspection reports show that 15 of 51 tanks holding 
deadly atomic waste at the Savannah River Site are cracked, rusty 
or have leaked.

 Recent federal inspection reports note hundreds of "leak sites," 
or cracks in the steel tanks that have been used since the 1950s 
and 1960s as the site helped make nuclear weapons.

 The SRS borders the Savannah River, and Beaufort and Jasper 
counties are located downstream from the plant. The river 
supplies most of the drinking water to customers of the 
Beaufort-Jasper Water &Sewer Authority, with an intake about 100 
miles from the SRS.

 Dean Moss, the authority's general manager, said Saturday 
evening that routine testing assures that the drinking water is 
safe, but "of course I'm concerned" to hear of the report about 
atomic waste leakage at the SRS.

 In a cooperative program with the water authority, the city of 
Savannah draws daily water samples at the river and U.S. 301 for 
safety testing. The sample site is "about 90 hours to 100 hours 
ahead of our intakes, so we have a couple days warning if there's 
going to be any kind of problem," Moss said.

 The SRS was built in rural South Carolina southeast of Augusta 
during the Cold War to produce tritium, a radioactive form of 
hydrogen used to boost the power of atomic weapons.

 On the drinking water front, a scare occurred in 1991, when the 
radioactive isotope at the SRS leaked into the river at high 
amounts considered potentially dangerous. Pumping from the river 
was halted for 10 days until it was deemed safe again. Moss said 
that was the first and only time for a shutdown due to SRS 
contamination concerns.

 In recent years, "We've seen, essentially, levels of tritium in 
the river coming down over time, not up," Moss said Saturday,

 "But, having said that, this is not good news and we have been 
and we continue to be concerned about the management of waste on 
the Savannah River Site," he said.

 "Customers should feel confident in our commitment to protect 
them from any potential problem in the river," he said, "and we 
will begin inquiries about this on Monday"

 SRS tanks contain about 37 million gallons of liquids, salts and 
highly contaminated sludge. The tanks contain radioactive waste, 
including uranium, cesium and plutonium. 

Environmentalists say the remaining radioactivity is among the 
highest at federal nuclear weapons facilities. 

While some cracks date to the 1950s, the most recent inspection 
report says some leak sites have been found in the past three 
years at the 300-square-mile federal weapons complex on the 
Savannah River. 

In 2001, one of the most recent problems involved 92 gallons of 
radioactive waste leaking through a 40-year-old tank into a 
containment area, the government's latest tank inspection report 
says. Inspectors found six leak sites on the 750,000-gallon, 
24-foot high steel tank. Secondary containment systems for most 
tanks kept the radioactive poisons from getting into groundwater 
beneath the sprawling site. 

But a containment system failed in one case, when radioactive 
waste leaked into the ground. Westinghouse Savannah River Co., 
which runs SRS for the U.S. Department of Energy, says some tanks 
are within 8 to 10 feet of the water table, raising concerns. 

Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse, says the government 
also does not know of any tanks that currently are leaking. 

"They obviously are getting older and will not last forever," 
said Charles Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with 
the U.S. Department of Energy. "This is highly radioactive, and 
there is a concern to get that waste out as soon as possible. 
There's always some potential for inadvertent leakage into the 
environment." 

"These tanks are not designed for long-term storage, as you can 
obviously tell," said Geoff Fettus, a Natural Resources Defense 
Council lawyer. 

The council sued to stop the Energy Department's cleanup plan in 
favor of its own. 

The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most of 
the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to 
reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater. 

Agency officials say that will speed the tank cleanup before a 
serious accident occurs. 

Copyright 2004 Carolina Morning News. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
 91 IAEA: The Scientists of Santiago
 
The Scientists of Santiago
 
Staff Report
 9 July 2004 [Dr. Benjamín Suárez-Isla] 
Dr. Benjamín Suárez-Isla, Director of Laboratory of Marine
Toxins, University of Chile. (Photo credit: K. Hansen / IAEA)
See photo gallery 
  + Featured Story: Chile's Toxic Tides 
  + Back to main story » 	 
  + Part 1: Chile Casts Off Toxic Tides 	
  + Part 2: The Fishermen of Chiloé 	
  + Part 3: The Scientists of Santiago 
  + Part 4: The Algae´s Toxic Brews 

Dr. Benjamín Suárez-Isla, Director of Laboratory of Marine
Toxins, University of Chile, has been researching the Harmful
Algal Bloom (HAB) phenomena for 15 odd years. With assistance
from the IAEA and Chilean Government, he recently set up a
marine toxin laboratory on the remote Island of Chiloé. At the
lab, technicians are taught how to use the Receptor-Binding
Assay (RBA) to quickly warn of a toxic algae outbreak in Chile's
prime fishing region. 

How the RBA Monitoring Tool Works 

The RBA is not a new science. The nuclear technique is widely
used in medicine for example, to measure hormone levels. The
technique also is not the only one scientists are targeting as
an alternative to the mouse bioassay for monitoring HAB toxins. 

Dr. Suárez-Isla explains the RBA procedure works by mixing a
shellfish sample with a "marker" - a radiolabelled saxitoxin,
which is basically a radioactive version of the same family of
poisons found in the shellfish. When the mixture is exposed to a
small amount of rat brain, if the sample is poisonous, the
radioactive toxin and poison compete with each other to bind to
nerve cells receptors in the brain. The radioactive toxin will
be displaced or "bumped off" its receptor by any poison present
in the shellfish, and its total radioactivity reduced. By
measuring amounts of radioactivity left in the sample,
scientists can pinpoint exactly how low or high toxic
concentrations in marine food or seawater samples are. 

"It is far more sensitive than the standard mouse assay," Dr.
Suárez-Isla says. "Health authorities err on the side of caution
when it comes to closing coastal areas - which infuriates the
producers," he said. The one thing seafood producers and
authorities agree on is that a faster, more precise, detection
tool like the RBA is needed. 

"On the Monday before the outbreak in Chiloé, the toxicity level
shown was zero, but by the following Monday it was well above
safe limits. The RBA would have given authorities much earlier
warning of the pending outbreak and better information on which
to act," Dr. Suárez-Isla said. 

"Businesses are at risks, lives are a risk. Any technique that
could decrease the response time and warn when waters are safe,
or unsafe, is relevant", says Mr. Juan Perez, a local Mayor in
the Chiloé region. 

The IAEA provided the marine toxins lab in Chiloé with the
equipment technicians need to observe the seas using the RBA.
The information now gives them a more precise map of waters that
are safe and those might become, or are, contaminated.
FONDEF-Conicyt grants from the Chillian Government awarded to
Dr. Suárez-Isla and the University of Chile also helped to
establish the laboratory, which will serve as a reference centre
to share information with other end-user laboratories. Daily
observations made at the lab will be recorded on a website that
allows fishermen, health authorities and others to track waters
for signs of toxic algae. 

The more humane monitoring method is also welcomed. Health
regulator Dr. Ramon Andrade points to a quarter-filled garbage
bin of dead mice. He says each week about 1000 live mice are
currently used to monitor Chiloé´s waters for HAB. Some
countries have banned imports on products tested on live
animals. It makes for a complex export system when the live
mouse assay is the essential certification need to export
seafood. 

The IAEA is spearheading efforts to change the "gold star"
export standard from the mouse assay to the RBA. To this end the
Agency has invested over $2 million in regional projects,
facilitated international collaboration between regulatory
authorities and national institutes using the RBA, and
identified the necessary steps to undertake the certification. 

The road of red tape has been long, and, for a time, sidetracked
by events. In late 2002, work towards certification hit a snag,
when fears linked to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in
America, placed saxitoxin near the top of a list of chemical
warfare agents the US was tracking. The only commercial company
that produced the radiolabelled saxitoxin (needed for the RBA)
stopped manufacturing it. 

The IAEA led successful efforts to restart production of
radiolabelled saxitoxin and get it off the chemical hit list.
The steps led to a gold mine of sorts. For the next three years,
the needed chemical will be supplied free of charge to the IAEA
by the United States Food and Drug Administration for
distribution to countries learning to apply the RBA technique.
"It is very generous when you consider the commercial cost is
upwards of $40 million," Dr. Kerry Burns, Head of Chemistry Unit
at the IAEA Seibersdorf Laboratories, said. 

The certification process starts this year, with predictions
that RBA will become the export standard a bit more optimistic.
The forecast is about two to five years if things go smoothly. 

Next: The Algae´s Toxic Brews » Copyright 2003-2004,
International Atomic Energy Agency, P.O. Box 100, Wagramer
Strasse 5, A-1400 Vienna, Austria 
Telephone (+431) 2600-0; Facsimilie (+431) 2600-7; E-mail: 
Disclaimer 
    
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