***************************************************************** 10/06/02 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 10.257 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** NUCLEAR POLICY 1 Iraq oil - Russia, France, U$ horsetrade 2 Japan: Admit N-accidents can occur, then prepare to deal with NUCLEAR REACTORS 3 Repairs on Ukrainian nuclear power station postponed 4 Ukrainian company wins contract to equip nuclear plants in India NUCLEAR SAFETY 5 Japan: Ministry creates N-safety tipoff system 6 NATO Soldiers from Europe to Sue USA NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 7 US: AU: ROXBY MINE TO TREBLE IN SIZE 8 Sellafield Must Close to Avoid Chernobyl-Style Accident - SDLP 9 US: Opponents Call Stand by LDS Church Key to Utah's Future as N-Was 10 US: 'Offended' Radiation Control Board Comes Out Against Anti-Waste 11 Sellafield: Britain's nuclear plant steps up security 12 US: Utah: A tribe divided 13 US: Utah: N-foes split into 3 factions 14 US: Leavitt rejects paying tribe to block N-waste NUCLEAR WEAPONS 15 K2R4 Nuclear Plant Opposition Leader Murdered in Kiev 16 [southnews] Protesters storm military base in Belgium 17 [southnews] Italians protest US-led action against Iraq 18 US: Mational Lawyers Guild & civil didobedience agaimnt war 19 [southnews] Israel: US Iraq attack likely in November 20 US: Indymedia reports 11,500 march against war in Portland 21 Operation Endless Deployment 22 US: U$ POLL -- BUSH SHOULD WAIT ON IRA 23 Indian firms arming Iraq 24 US: Bush: Saddam Could Inflict 'Horror' 25 US: Bush Has New Rationale for Iraq Move 26 US: Why war? And why now? 27 Brewing in Brazil (WT) 28 Nuclear protesters storm Belgian air force base, 1,100 arrested 29 Explore options before waging war 30 US: Daschle Clings to Hope for War Powers Compromise 31 A Baghdad Diary 32 The spoils of war By Helen Caldicott US DEPT. OF ENERGY 33 Rocky Flats' 903 Pad to be cleaned to strict new levels OTHER NUCLEAR 34 America Knows Best Who Should Rule Germany ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 Iraq oil - Russia, France, U$ horsetrade Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 00:40:15 -0500 (CDT) http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,805530,00.html The Observer (London) Sunday October 6, 2002 Ed Vulliamy in New York, Paul Webster in Paris, and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy Manoeuvres shaped by horsetrading between America, Russia and France over control of untapped oilfields Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer investigation. The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad, which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America installs a successor to Saddam. A Russian official at the United Nations in New York told the Observer last week that the $7 billion in Soviet-era debt was not the main 'economic interest' in Iraq about which the Kremlin is voicing its concerns. The main fear was a post-Saddam government would not honour extraction contracts Moscow has signed with Iraq. Russian business has long-standing interests in Iraq. Lukoil, the biggest oil company in Russia, signed a $20bn contract in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oilfield. Such a deal could evaporate along with the Saddam regime, together with a more recent contract with Russian giant Zarubezhneft, which was granted a potential $90bn concession to develop the bin Umar oilfield. The total value of Saddam's foreign contract awards could reach $1.1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2001. The Russian official said his government believed the US had brokered a deal with the coalition of Iraqi opposition forces it backs whereby support against Saddam is conditional on their declaring - on taking power - all oil contracts conceded under his rule to be null and void. 'The concern of my government,' said the official, 'is that the concessions agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing contracts... Yes, if you could say it that way - an oil grab by Washington'. A government insider in Paris told The Observer that France also feared suffering economically from US oil ambitions at the end of a war. But the dilemma for Paris is more complex. Despite President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany agreeing last week to oppose changing the rules governing weapons inspectors, France may back military action. Government sources say they fear - existing concessions aside - France could be cut out of the spoils if it did not support the war and show a significant military presence. If it comes to war, France is determined to be allotted a more prestigious role in the fighting than in the 1991 Gulf war, when its main role was to occupy lightly defended ground. Negotiations have been going on between the state-owned TotalFinaElf company and the US about redistribution of oil regions between the world's major companies. Washington's predatory interest in Iraqi oil is clear, whatever its political protestations about its motives for war. The US National Energy Policy Report of 2001 - known as the 'Cheney Report' after its author Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly one of America's richest and most powerful oil industry magnates - demanded a priority on easing US access to Persian Gulf supplies. Doubts about Saudi Arabia - even before 11 September, and even more so in its wake - led US strategists to seek a backup supply in the region. America needs 20 million barrels of crude a day, and analysts have singled out the country that could meet up to half that requirement: Iraq. The current high price of oil is dragging the US economy further into recession. US control of the Iraqi reserves, perhaps the biggest unmapped reservoir in the world, would break Saudi Arabia's hold on the oil-pricing cartel Opec, and dictate prices for the next century. This could spell disaster for Russian oil giants, keen to expand their sales to the West. Russia has sought to prolong negotiations, official statements going between opposition to any new UN resolution and possible support for military action against an Iraqi regime proven to be developing weapons of mass destruction. While France is thought likely to support US military action, and China will probably fall in line because of its admission to the World Trade Organisation, Putin is left holding the wild cards. Russia recognises potential benefits of reaching a deal with the US: Saddam's regime is difficult to work with. Lukoil's billion-dollar concessions are frozen and profitless to Moscow and Baghdad under UN sanctions, leading to fears that Saddam might have declared the agreement null and void out of spite. Iraqi diplomats say Zarubezhneft won its $90bn contract only after Baghdad took it away from TotalFinaElf because of French support for sanctions. Russia stands to profit if intervention in the Gulf triggers a hike in Middle East oil prices, as its firms are lobbying to sell millions of barrels a day to the US, at two-thirds of the current market price. Moscow's trust of Washington may be slipping after what a Russian UN official calls 'broken promises' that followed negotiations over Moscow's support for the Afghan campaign. Russia turned a blind eye to US troops in central Asia, on the tacit condition that US-Russian trade restrictions would be lifted. But they are still there, and other benefits expected after 11 September have also not materialised. 'They've been making this point very strongly,' a senior Bush administration official conceded to the Washington Post , 'that this can't be an all-give-and-no-get relationship... They do have a point that the growing relationship has got to be reciprocal.' ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** ***************************************************************** 2 Japan: Admit N-accidents can occur, then prepare to deal with them [Daily Yomiuri On-Line] Fumitaka Shibata The late Futaro Yamada (1922-2001) captivated readers with his ninja novels and adventure stories. Recently, some of his diaries covering World War II and the postwar period have been brought out by three publishers. Chikuma collected and published "Senchu-ha Mushikera Nikki" (Diaries of a War-Generation Nobody), covering 1942-44. Kodansha published Yamada's diary writings in the immediate postwar period under the title "Senchu-ha Fusen Nikki" (Diaries of a Man Turning His Back on War). Finally, this summer, Shogakukan, Inc. released "Senchu-ha Yakeato Nikki" (Diaries of a War-Generation Man amid the Ruins) more than half a century after Yamada wrote the entries. He was a young student of medicine, and his diaries expertly evoke the reality of his life in Tokyo, far from kith and kin. The diaries describe the rampant skepticism during the war over the truth of military announcements of the "fruits of battle"--which in fact were often exercises in exaggeration and outright lies. They portray a public with access to surprisingly accurate information through word of mouth. People knew Japanese soldiers were dying in large numbers at hard-fought fronts. They kept up with politics, and knew about imminent changes of Cabinet. They also knew about Hiroshima, even though the military tried everything it could to keep news of the atomic bombing from leaking. As a medical student, Yamada's training in the natural sciences drew him to conclude quite objectively that Japan was losing the war "primarily because it has failed to win the battle over science." On Aug. 14, 1945, a day before Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces, Yamada laments--or rather, slams--an education system that was unscientific, irrational and failed to respect individuality. Such evils, Yamada writes, had turned the Japanese people into "an army of acorns." An earlier entry, dated Sept. 5, 1944, is especially poignant. "Now a bunch of so-called scientists are crawling out of the woodwork. These quacks have the nerve to proclaim that nutrition problems will vanish if we cut sugar from our diet. An unforgivable attitude. "There is no question that sugar is essential to the human body. Why don't they say the truth--that we need sugar but people should try to make do with less because in Japan these days you just can't find it?" Scientists have since proved that sugar is vital to proper brain function. Although the brain is little more than 2 percent of our body weight, it consumes 80 percent of our total sugar intake and 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe. When the brain is tired, it demands sugar--and that explains our craving for sweet things when we're run down. The entry continues: "Health without sugar? Any self-respecting scientist with even an ounce of conscience would never say such rubbish. This is tantamount to the prostitution of learning." Which makes you wonder how things are today. There have been recent revelations that Tokyo Electric Power Co. doctored the safety data of its nuclear power plants for years. TEPCO's transgressions are not an isolated case, as the harsh glare of public debate is shining on the nuclear power industry's deep-rooted propensity to whitewash reactor safety records. Similar cover-ups have been exposed at other utilities' plants, including those of Chubu Electric Power Co. and Tohoku Electric Power Co. Public distrust of the nuclear power industry is at an all-time low. Reports indicate that TEPCO first fudged reactor data around 1986, the year of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Kiev. A rash of serious nuclear accidents occurred in Japan in the years to follow, including a liquid sodium leak in a cooling system at the fast-breeder reactor Monju in 1995, a fire and explosion in 1997 at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant and a criticality accident at a private-sector uranium processing company in 1999. After any given accident, the officials in charge would, without fail, pledge to do "our utmost to regain public confidence" in the nuclear power industry. But now we see that data were routinely altered and records of reactor damage swept under the carpet, giving the lie to all those so-called pledges. Scientists and technicians know there is no such thing as "absolute safety" when it comes to nuclear energy. Anyone who says different is neither scientist nor technician. In particular, it is next to impossible to guarantee absolute safety when building a nuclear power plant, as some project teams have done to obtain approval from local residents. Now, though, we hear that scientists and nuclear energy technicians overseeing the construction of nuclear power facilities have suffered attacks of conscience. If this is so, it is awkward for them. Those who create the myth of safety are extremely badly placed to dispel that myth, and in the end become its slaves. The nation's nuclear power industry, for instance, is still struggling to start the kind of safety-enhancement work on nuclear facilities that has already been carried out in the United States and Europe. This is because the myth works against them. For example, officials suggest making safety improvements; the public asks why these are needed at all if the facilities are--as they have been assured--absolutely safe. Indeed, evacuation drills involving communities living near nuclear facilities were conducted only after a string of serious nuclear accidents. Perhaps we should follow the lead of the French nuclear industry, which has formulated a "safety culture." No other country depends more on nuclear power to supply its energy needs. France's safety culture can be defined as the pragmatic view that the possibility of a nuclear accident cannot be eliminated, and that therefore authorities must be prepared to deal with any eventuality. The country has a surveillance center staffed with experts who monitor the entire grid of nuclear reactors around the clock. In the event of an accident, they swing into action immediately to coordinate the emergency response and contain the damage. A similar setup has been suggested in Japan, but industry players themselves opposed this move, apparently because it would mean acknowledging the inherent possibility of nuclear accidents. Now is the time for all concerned to admit the simple fact that there can be no absolute safety where large-scale technological programs are concerned. This is just the starting point. The industry must then commit itself to fuller information disclosure, as well as promote nuclear safety education and put emergency procedures in place to deal with a nuclear accident. The change must come from the industry first. Only when they are honest and realistic about the hazards of nuclear power will we, the ordinary citizens, begin to refrain from making blind emotional responses against nuclear power plants. Those in charge of the safety of nuclear power plants must have faith that the public is more than simply Yamada's "army of acorns." Shibata is a deputy editor of The Yomiuri Shimbun's Science News Department. Copyright 2002 The Yomiuri Shimbun ***************************************************************** 3 Repairs on Ukrainian nuclear power station postponed | About Hoover's UK October 5, 2002 2:43pm Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhya Region, 5 October: Planned repairs on reactor No 3 at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which were due to begin last night, have been postponed till the end of October. The reactor will be deactivated on 27 October, when reactor No 5 is due to be restarted after planned repairs, the plant's information centre told ITAR-TASS today. The plant accounts for 24.5 per cent of all the electrical power generated by Ukraine's power stations since the beginning of the year, and more than half of the electricity generated by nuclear power plants. In September, the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant generated 3,184m kWh, which is more than a quarter of all the electrical power generated in Ukraine. Source: ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in English 1626 gmt 5 Oct 02 /© BBC Monitoring ***************************************************************** 4 Ukrainian company wins contract to equip nuclear plants in India | About Hoover's UK October 5, 2002 12:43pm New Delhi, 5 October: Ukraine's biggest manufacturer of electricity generation equipment has contracted to supply equipment for four generating units at nuclear power plants in India. Turboatom, a company based in Kharkiv, was selected as the equipment supplier for the Kaiga and Rajastan plants via a round of bidding. The 70m-dollar contract was signed during a current state visit by Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to India, sources close to the talks on the deal have told Interfax. Other Kharkiv enterprises are involved in the 30-month deal as well. Turboatom, in which the state holds a 75.22-per-cent stake, obtained a net income of 247.2m hryvnyas last year, which is 63 per cent more than the year before, and had a net profit of 61.89m hryvnyas in 2001 or 90 per cent more than in 2000. It has planned a 12-per-cent annual output increase for this year... Generating Unit 3 at the Kaiga plant is going in operation in March 2007, Unit 4 in September that year. Generating Units 5 and 6 at the Rajastan plant will go in operation in August 2007 and February 2008 respectively. Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in English 1447 gmt 5 Oct 02 /© BBC Monitoring ***************************************************************** 5 Japan: Ministry creates N-safety tipoff system Daily Yomiuri On-Line Yomiuri Shimbun The Education, Science and Technology Ministry has taken measures to ensure that attention is paid to whistle-blowers who expose illegal acts committed at research reactors and other nuclear facilities under its control, including universities and corporations, ministry officials said. Under the system, an internal investigation team led by a councillor-level nuclear safety supervisor, is responsible for dealing with internal tipoffs on nuclear safety at facilities under the ministry's jurisdiction. The ministry plans to set up a third-party committee to oversee the investigations. The committee will likely comprise about seven nuclear safety experts and lawyers by the end of the month, the officials said. However, the ministry's move comes two years after the enactment of a law aimed at encouraging whistle-blowing. The system was launched following a Tokyo Electric Power Co. scandal over falsified documents on nuclear facility check-ups, which came to light based on internal tipoffs. In dealing with the scandal, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry (METI)'s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was criticized over its failure to smoothly conduct the investigations. But observers also pointed out that the Education, Science and Technology Ministry failed to establish a system to handle internal tipoffs despite the fact that a revised law on regulating nuclear reactors and other related facilities, which was aimed to promote internal tipoffs, took effect more than two years ago. The new system was formally launched on Sept. 27. A METI committee to examine investigations conducted by the agency released an interim report on the same day. The Education, Science and Technology Ministry then compiled a provisional guideline for operating a system to deal with internal reports on nuclear safety. The ministry oversees about 40 nuclear facilities operated by 17 businesses nationwide. Although the revised law was put into force in July 2000, no internal tipoffs have been reported. Copyright 2002 The Yomiuri Shimbun ***************************************************************** 6 NATO Soldiers from Europe to Sue USA Pravda.RU ¹ Oct, 04 2002 NATO soldiers from Europe suffering from cancer are going to open a court case next week against US firms, which did not warn them that the equipment they were handling was dangerously radioactive. This case is not about Depleted Uranium, but radar systems, fabricated by Raytheon Company, General Electric Corporation, ITT-Gilfillan Inc, and Lucent Technologies. Lawyers Reiner Geulen and Remo Klinger, representing 450 soldiers who were exposed to radiation between 1958 and 1994 when handling this equipment, are to present their case on Tuesday. The case is based around the fact that the soldiers were not warned that the radar tubes were not adequately protected against radiation. The victims are seeking an elevated sum in financial compensation. Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru Copyright ©1999 by "Pravda.RU [http://www.pravda.ru/] ". When ***************************************************************** 7 AU: ROXBY MINE TO TREBLE IN SIZE The Advertiser: 06 October 2002 THE size of the Olympic Dam mine in the state's Far North will treble under the biggest investment proposal in South Australian history. Thousands of jobs will be created at the WMC-owned copper and uranium mine, near Roxby Downs, 520km north of Adelaide, under an estimated $5 billion expansion. If the proposal is approved, Olympic Dam will become the largest copper and uranium mine in the world, producing 600,000 tonnes of copper and 10,000 tonnes of uranium a year. The State Government today will announce formation of a task force, led by the Office of Economic Development, to co-ordinate government input into planning the proposal. Premier Mike Rann said it was the start of a long, complex process. "This is a huge opportunity for South Australia and will have a massive impact on our economy both in the construction phase and the long-term royalties stream and also with regional economic development," Mr Rann said. "I want this investment to happen – and I intend doing all I can to help it to happen." Olympic Dam currently employs 1200 people and supports the township of Roxby Downs with a population of 4000. Test drilling on a 1.5km x 1.75km tract of land next to the mine – and believed to contain a massive ore deposit – will begin in January as part of a feasibility study. A manufacturing facility will be established in Port Augusta to pre-assemble engineering equipment. The study will take more than a year to complete, after which WMC will decide whether to proceed with the next phase of its ambitious plan. Issues to be considered include the supply of water and electricity, the impact on the environment and whether there is a market for the huge haul of minerals. A gas-fired power station would need to be built, with WMC exploring options to pump gas from either the Timor Gap – north-west of Darwin – or south-eastern Australia. WMC has a four-year electricity contract and is the state's biggest user of power, utilising about 10 per cent. The taskforce's formation follows a meeting Mr Rann and WMC chief executive Hugh Morgan held earlier this year. The taskforce, comprising representatives from all government agencies, will be charged with assessing the economic, environmental, technical, social and infrastructure impact of the expansion. Office of Economic Development chief executive Dr Roger Sexton has conferred with senior WMC management at Olympic Dam to plan the first stages of the study. Mr Morgan said he welcomed the Government's support in establishing a forum to help progress the planned expansion. "It is very pleasing that the Government recognised what an important economic opportunity the Olympic Dam expansion will be for South Australia," Mr Morgan said. Existing legislation governing the mine may need minor amendments, with the Government expecting bi-partisan support from the Opposition. Olympic Dam is the site of the eighth-largest known deposit of copper in the world and the largest known deposit of uranium. With the completion of a recent $1.94 billion expansion, the mine now annually produces 200,000 tonnes of copper, 4500 tonnes of uranium, 113,000 ounces of gold and 913,000 ounces of silver. WMC has invested $3 billion at Olympic Dam and is now spending more than $400 million on projects that include: STAGE-three optimisation to increase copper production capacity to 235,000 tonnes a year, to be finished by the end of this year at a cost of $80 million. REBUILDING the solvent-extraction plant damaged by fire in October, 2001. This project is due for completion by next March at a cost of about $200 million. RE-LINING of the copper smelter and associated maintenance projects – $120 million. ***************************************************************** 8 Sellafield Must Close to Avoid Chernobyl-Style Accident - SDLP Leader Scotsman.com /By Dan McGinn, Ireland Political Editor, PA News/ Sellafield nuclear processing plant must be shut down now to prevent a future Chernobyl-style disaster, one of the joint leaders of the Northern Ireland Executive demanded today. Nationalist SDLP leader Mark Durkan said during a visit to the Rainbow Warrior as it docked in Belfast that the plant put people living in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic at risk. During a visit to the Greenpeace ship which docked near the city?s Odyssey arena, the Deputy First Minister of the Stormont power-sharing government said: ?The SDLP believes that it is high time that the British Government shut Sellafield down and for good. ?Sellafield poses a threat to everybody living in Ireland ? north and south. ?If there was an accident at the plant the whole of our island would be contaminated ? damaging livelihoods and destroying lives. ?We have seen the devastation that the nuclear accident at Chernobyl caused. Even today young children are suffering terribly because of that disaster 18 years ago.? Mr Durkan?s call for the closure of Sellafield follows hard on a plea last month for more measured debate on nuclear power by an Ulster Unionist cabinet colleague at Stormont. Environment Minister Dermot Nesbitt angered environmentalists and nationalist politicians by saying that too often the debate was dominated by emotion and not scientific fact. Recalling a visit to Sellafield in June, Mr Nesbitt told a Dublin conference on Sellafield: ?I also took the opportunity to visit the Pacific Sandpiper ship at Barrow-in-Furness. ?This ship is used to transport spent nuclear fuel from overseas to Sellafield. ?I saw and heard much. I am now better informed. My impressions of Sellafield were of a site well run and well managed, by thoroughly professional and dedicated staff.? Greenpeace and environmental campaigners protested vigorously when the ship containing plutonium rejected by Japan offloaded its cargo onto a train at Barrow-in-Furness bound for Sellafield?s mixed oxide (MOX) plant. Mr Nesbitt was also lambasted for saying at the conference that because of climate change there may be a ?need to consider further the option of nuclear power?. Environmentalists in July also criticised British Environment Minister Margaret Beckett for continuing to support the plant after she indicated that the Government hoped to cut radioactive emissions from the site. Mrs Beckett vowed that by 2020 discharges would meet the levels set by European countries under the Ospar (Oslo-Paris) Radioactive Discharges Strategy. Mr Durkan?s intervention in the nuclear debate places him alongside Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern?s Government and the Norwegians in demanding the closure of Sellafield. The SDLP leader, who is a member of Greenpeace, said today the British Government must not keep open the possibility of another Chernobyl-style incident happening. The Foyle MLA insisted: ?To protect ourselves and future generations Sellafield must close down. ?But far from closing Sellafield down, the British Government is massively expanding its operations. Ships laden with nuclear waste are coming from the four corners of the Earth to its new MOX nuclear reprocessing plant. ?It is just not on to have the world?s most hazardous waste being shipped right onto Ireland?s doorstep. ?As a long standing member of Greenpeace, I am calling on the British Government to shut Sellafield now.? ©2002 scotsman.com | contact ***************************************************************** 9 Opponents Call Stand by LDS Church Key to Utah's Future as N-Waste Site The Salt Lake Tribune -- Sunday, October 6, 2002 [PHOTO] Nuclear waste opponent Maryann Webster's work "Mutant Garden Diptych" shows Adam and Eve surrounded by animals that are sickly or altered, and atomic bombs being dropped. (Steve Griffin/The Salt Lake Tribune) BY JUDY FAHYS Maryann Webster stands out in Utah's quiet majority. She openly opposes warehousing tons of nuclear-plant waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation just 50 miles from her Salt Lake City home. A Mormon, Webster has petitioned her church leaders to oppose the project. She has chided federal regulators about the government's history of bungling nuclear programs. And she uses images of environmental catastrophe in her art to tell why. "If people thought about it, they would be firm in their resolve to prevent Utah from becoming the world's largest nuclear dumping ground," says Webster, a painter and ceramic artist. That Utahns object to the waste is obvious: Polls show nearly three of every four residents share Webster's objections to the Skull Valley project, a joint venture of the Skull Valley tribe and a group of out-of-state utilities called Private Fuel Storage (PFS). What is unclear is why the majority isn't speaking out. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Utah's opinion pacesetter, has remained silent. At the same time, state leaders have focused on legal and regulatory battles rather than grass-roots organizing. Interest groups struggle to energize citizens worn down by workaday chores, family demands and church obligations. Environmental groups do what they can, but it's tough when they are relegated to Utah's political margins. "A great deal of the public, either they are not concerned or they are not moved to act," says PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin. Meanwhile, Utah is poised to become home to the first new, nuclear construction approved in the nation since 1978. By Dec. 5, the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board expects to recommend whether the storage facility should be licensed. The board's legal and technical advice will help the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission make a final decision. With the NRC's OK, a $3.1 billion waste-parking pad would be licensed for up to 40 years to hold all the waste U.S. commercial reactors have produced so far, up to 44,000 tons. From the standpoint of federal regulators, the time for Utahns to weigh in passed long ago. "I have no indication there will be any more public input," said Sue Gagner, spokeswoman for the NRC. "That is not part of the process." Gov. Mike Leavitt has led the fight against high-level nuclear waste since his election in 1992. Results are mixed. "This is the hardest kind of guerrilla politics," says the moderate Republican. "We are dealing in many respects with raw political power." The combatants include: * Skull Valley Goshute leaders, who want to turn reservation land into an economic opportunity for the band's 121 members. While Leavitt regards the proposal as a health and safety risk, project proponents, including Tribal Chairman Leon Bear, describe the undisclosed millions of dollars the tribe would get as the Goshutes' best chance for financial survival. * The nuclear industry, which needs to unload spent fuel that its reactors have generated over four decades. While neighbors clamor to get the waste moved, utilities are pushing to relicense the plants for more decades. PFS member companies alone operate 33 reactors that serve 32 million customers. * The federal government, which promised to take over the waste nearly six years ago. The permanent disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev., will not open until at least 2010. Congress and the Bush administration want the problem solved soon. Federal regulators at the NRC are under pressure to help satisfy energy demands with nuclear power, which provides more than 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Leavitt's offensive covers several fronts, and the fight has cost Utah taxpayers $2.6 million so far -- or about one-third the sum PFS has paid to NRC in license fees alone. The money has underwrit- ten, among other things, costs of a federal lawsuit and the experts for the regulatory hearings. It also has covered legal expenses for dissident Goshutes who oppose the project but lack resources to fight it. Lawmakers have helped. They passed a package of laws intended to block the facility, but a federal court largely struck down Utah's case last month. The state is appealing. Leavitt personally has described Utah's concerns to White House officials. The governor or his representatives also have conveyed the state's objections to the U.S. secretaries of Defense, Interior and Energy. At the Pentagon, at least, the message apparently got through, based on accounts of a meeting last spring with Defense Secretary Donald Rums- feld. When told the lethally radioactive waste would be on a flight path for the Utah Test and Training Range, the U.S. military's largest pilot-training and missile-testing reserve, he wondered: "Who would be stupid enough to do that?" 'Ongoing Fight': Utah's five representatives in Congress also have pitched in. Rep. Jim Hansen, for instance, is pushing a bill that would outlaw the waste facility by designating surrounding federal lands as wilderness. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, acted, too. They secured promises that, as long as Yucca Mountain proceeds in a timely manner, the Energy Department and six of eight PFS member utilities will not pursue the Goshute facility. The state also has fought the Goshute-PFS proposal before federal regulators. Lawyers from the Utah Attorney General's Office were able to persuade regulators to conduct in-depth review of nearly a dozen legal and technical issues raised by the project. Leavitt insists it will be impossible to declare a winner in the waste-project dispute until the project is killed or casks of spent power-plant fuel roll into Skull Valley. He insists: "It's an ongoing fight." But one, evidently, few Utahns want to jump into. Public concern about high-level waste has none of the political energy of a Utah gun-rights rally. Few concerned citizens turn out for marches, rallies and public hearings. And the gatherings lack the outraged tone common at similar events related to Yucca Mountain or nuclear facilities elsewhere. One vivid example was a news conference Leavitt's no-nuke coalition had in April that was intended as a show of force during local meetings of the federal licensing board. Organizers told the media to expect 14,000 at the rally, but the only people who showed were about a dozen featured speakers. Not a single resident opponent showed up. "I was somewhat surprised at the lack of public participation," recalls Leavitt, who was obviously disappointed when he arrived. Steve Erickson, a longtime Utah activist, blames the public apathy on Leavitt's "Lone RanÂger-style" leadership. arrived. Political bigwigs and Utah business insiders dominate the Nuclear Opposition (or NO!) Coalition, Leavitt's official anti-nuke campaign. NO! has no Web site or phone contact number for ordinary citizens who might want to get involved. Environmental Role: Says Erickson: "I gave it wide berth because I figured out a long time ago it was the 'maybe' coalition." His Downwinders group is one of a handful of environmental organizations listed as a coalition member. So, too, is the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club, Families Against Incinerator Risk, and Citizens Against Radioactive Waste. But the environmental groups have largely played an outsider role, reflecting, perhaps, the weak influence environmentalism has in Utah politics. In New Mexico, environmental groups led the campaign against the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, says Chuck McCutcheon, author of a new book about the fight, Nuclear Reactions: The Politics of Opening a Radioactive Waste Site. Nuclear Reactions: The Politics of Opening a Radioactive Waste Site. "Maybe it's because there just isn't a tradition of activism there," he suggests, contrasting Utah's political conservatism with the green bent of Taos and Santa Fe. Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, calls citizens and public interest groups "extremely important" in the war against nuclear waste. In the campaign against Yucca Mountain, environmentalists have been able to enlist people from all walks of life by capitalizing on deep, public fears about all things nuclear, he says. Other observers wonder whether Utah's fight ever had a chance to gain public support absent backing from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Last week, spokesman Dale Bills confirmed the hands-off position of LDS leaders. "Nothing has changed on the issue," says Bills. "The church has taken no position on the nuclear waste project." The Salt Lake Temple, perhaps the most sacred site for Mormons, is less than one mile from one of the proposed waste-shipping routes. Claire Geddes of Utah Legislative Watch, one of the state's most successful grass-roots organizers, says that motivating the Utah public on an issue requires no less than church support. "A lot of people take their political cues from the church," she says, citing as examples the church's efforts to derail the MX missile in Utah and to kill the Equal Rights Amendment. "A lot of people will not speak out until they are told to." Kaylinda Tilges, a grass-roots organizer against nuclear waste in both Utah and Nevada, predicts that opposition from LDS leaders would change everything. "It would be all over," she says. The federal "government would be looking at another way to deal with its garbage." Veterans of the nuclear-waste fight see something worrisome about Utah's tepid response to the PFS-Goshute proposal: Concerned citizens may soon live alongside the world's largest stockpile of high-level nuclear waste without having challenged claims it will not harm health and safety. Risks Not Understood: PFS has said repeatedly that federal regulators will not give the storage site a license unless it proves safe. But anti-nuclear activist Lisa Gue doubts the public, outside of Utah as well as inside it, fully grasps what she believes are the risks. She has organized protests, dashed off news releases and lobbied Congress on the issue. "What is needed now is a broader critique of how these decisions are being made," says Gue, who works for Ralph Nadar's good-government group, Public Citizen. That view is echoed by Len Ackland, author of Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. The book offers a sobering look at the Cold War sentiments that allowed U.S. nuclear programs to operate with little public oversight, suffer repeated radioactive mishaps and render the place a vast hazard zone, leaving taxpayers to bear the risks and the cleanup costs of the old bomb-making site. Ackland says opposition plays a crucial civic role for endeavors as complicated and controversial as the Goshute project. "If that discussion does not take place," he says, "it allows the administration, corporations and the other people in power to act in an unaccountable way. "That violates the fundamental precepts of a democracy," says Ackland. "And that's very disturbing." Webster hopes her church will come around to understand its important public role with the high-level waste project. She talks to her neighbors about it. She presses church officials. She uses ceramic forms and provocative painted canvasses for her lament on what humans have done to their environment. A good example is her "Mutant Garden," side-by-side paintings that show Eve holding up the poison fruit for Adam. The landscape behind the unwitting couple is peppered with bad omens, sickly animals, atom-bomb mushroom clouds and a pollution-spewing nuclear plant. Instead of holy light, a spooky glow pervades the unworldly scene. "I don't think," she says, "the LDS Church wants the center of Mormonism to be known as the world's largest nuclear waste dump." fahys@sltrib.com © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 10 'Offended' Radiation Control Board Comes Out Against Anti-Waste Initiative Sunday, October 6, 2002 BY JUDY FAHYS THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE Utah's radiation oversight panel has take an official position opposing Initiative 1, after proponents of the measure to ban high-level nuclear waste shunned participating in a board forum. "Having the Radiation Control Board review our initiative would be the same as having Enron pass judgment on corporate accountability legislation," said initiative proponent Frank Pignanelli, a leader of Utahns for Radioactive Waste Control. "We're here because of their lack of ability to regulate," Pignanelli added in an interview following Friday's board meeting. "How could we expect a fair hearing from them?" The proponents' refusal irritated the radiation panel. Board members complained that initiative supporters had made unfair and unfounded allegations against them, as well as the Division of Radiation Control. Then, board members began listing their objections to the proposed Radioactive Waste Restrictions Act. In a yet-to-be-drafted position paper, they plan to outline legal and technical issues with the initiative, but board members admitted they were having a hard time controlling their emotions. "If I was to say I was offended, that would be a gross understatement," said board chairman Stephen T. Nelson. "I was greatly offended." Three of the 11 board members voted against the position paper. Such super-charged reactions might have been expected, given the nature of Initiative 1. The initiative, which will be on Nov. 5 ballots statewide, is backed by a coalition of environmentalists, the Utah Education Association and advocates for the homeless. It is opposed by many lawmakers, business associations and Envirocare of Utah, a Tooele County radioactive waste landfill owner that says the measure will force it out of business. Initiative 1 would outlaw higher level radioactive waste than that already permitted in the state. It also would hike taxes on permitted waste and channel the revenue into school and homelessness-relief programs. The measure also would affect the state regulatory program, including members of the radiation-control board and radiation-division employees. For instance, it would bar anyone who serves on the board from working for a regulated business -- as a lobbyist or employee -- for three years after leaving their regulatory position. The prohibition also would apply to other state employees regulating the industry. The provision is aimed at stopping what critics see as conflicts of interest inherent in the board's makeup. Currently, the radiation board, whose members serve part time, has a seat designated for a representative of the waste industry. That seat was once filled by Khosrow Semnani, the owner of Envirocare, who was implicated in a corruption scandal that involved Larry Anderson, the former director of the radiation-control division. Anderson is serving a federal jail sentence in connection with the scandal. The board also has a seat designated for the Department of Environmental Quality director. Former director Ken Alkema now works as Envirocare's regulatory affairs liaison. Envirocare has underwritten the campaign against Initiative 1, led by Utahns Against Unfair Taxes. That group's director, Hugh Matheson, called the initiative "a step backward." The position paper "will help because it shows [voters] the people entrusted with regulating radiation in Utah believe it will weaken their ability to regulate," he said. However, Salt Lake City pediatrician Louis Borgenicht chided the board for deciding the initiative did not pertain to health and safety matters they are supposed to regulate: "To me, it stresses even more the need to pass the initiative." Initiative proponents described in a two-page letter their reasons for not appearing before the board. "We have been willing to explain our positions, even to hostile audiences, but we will not lend credibility to any public decisions the Radiation Control Board may make on this matter by having us make an appearance," the letter concludes. "In fact, we strongly suggest the Radiation Control Board and the Department of Environmental Quality stay out of this debate, or they may risk having their motives for any position challenged in light of past conduct." fahys@sltrib.com © Copyright 2002, The Salt Lake Tribune All material found on ***************************************************************** 11 Sellafield: Britain's nuclear plant steps up security Saturday, 05-Oct-2002 10:11AM Story from AFP / Ingrid Bazinet Copyright 2002 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) SELLAFIELD, UNITED KINGDOM, 26-SEP-2002: Sellafield nuclear plant in North England on Sept. 26, 2002. The 3,8 square kilometer site on the Cumbrian coast produces nuclear fuel for electricity as well as storing nuclear waste from several countries around the world. [Photo by Odd Andersen, copyright 2002 by AFP and ClariNet] SELLAFIELD, England, Oct 5 (AFP) - Despite a stepped-up security since the September 11 attacks, Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant has failed to convince environmentalists that it is safe from a terrorist assault. Their unease has been heightened by the opening last December of a controversial nuclear reprocessing plant for mixed plutonium and uranium oxide (MOX). The arrival from Japan last month of a shipload of MOX at the plant in northwest England led to a significant protest led by Greenpeace. Government-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), which runs part of the plant and employs around 10,000 staff at the site, insists all is being done to provide the greatest possible safety. "We are working on safety cases," says Barry Nelson, operating director at Sellafield. "We have now a firefighter airport-style station with two new red trucks in addition to those that already existed." Traffic to and from the site has been slowed by the construction of concrete pillars which cars must now circumnavigate. Jack Allen, director of Sellafield's MOX plant, says he is allowed to escort only five people around the site at any one time compared to ten before the September 11 attacks on the United States. "I have to check every single one of their moves," he tells AFP. Three thousand people were killed when hijacked planes were steered into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington. Sellafield was already a no-fly zone prior to September 11 and had contact with a nearby government air base with the ability to scramble military jets within two minutes of any danger signal. Environmentalists won't be happy, however, until the site is shut down. "You have hundreds of waste tanks which are so full and in a dangerous condition," claims Janine Allis-Smith of CORA (Cumbrian Opposed to Radioactive Environment). Sellafield lies in the county of Cumbria. "Twenty-two of them each contain more radioactivity than was released in Chernobyl," she adds. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people have died since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the UN estimates that nearly six million people continue to live in contaminated areas. Ukraine closed down the fourth and last reactor of the Chernobyl power plant in December 2000. "Everything is jammed up together in a small perimeter and it's quite vulnerable," Shaun Burnie, head of Greenpeace's anti-nuclear wing, says of Sellafield. "It's potentially a huge bomb," he adds. The plant lies across from the Irish sea -- a cause of much concern for Ireland's government and the country as a whole. Having failed for years to have the site closed, Dublin called on London in January to guarantee the site's safety. Dublin was reacting to a report by the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland which said BNFL should make available "any evidence it can as to the capability of these tanks to withstand a major terrorist attack." http://www.ptd.net ***************************************************************** 12 Utah: A tribe divided [deseretnews.com] Sunday, October 6, 2002 Goshutes fight over N-waste and feel abandoned by state By Donna Kemp Spangler Deseret News staff writer SKULL VALLEY, Tooele County — A Goshute tribal member is bemoaning what he calls bad faith on the part of Gov. Mike Leavitt. ['Image'] Sammy Blackbear says that Gov. Mike Leavitt has reneged on a promise to help pay for the Goshute opposition's legal case against storing nuclear waste. [''] Michael Brandy, Deseret News Sammy Blackbear is a leader of dissident band members fighting tribal leadership to stop nuclear waste from going to tribal lands. As such, he's a natural ally of Leavitt, who is fighting the same battle against storing nuclear waste here. But he says Leavitt has broken his promises. That leaves a faction of the fractured nuclear waste opposition destitute of means to keep up its fight in federal courtrooms. "The state reneged on a deal," said Blackbear, referring to a promise by the state to appropriate money for the Goshute opposition's legal case. To date, Blackbear's legal team has received $214,000 to help pay a bill that is estimated at more than $1 million over four years. Leavitt said that although he supports Blackbear's cause, he feels it's not appropriate for the state to continue to fund a lawsuit that's really a dispute with the tribal government. "Do I agree with Sammy's position? I do," the governor told the Deseret News Thursday. "I try to be supportive of our allies when it's appropriate, but Sammy's lawsuit is not one of them." Leavitt mounted his own legal campaign against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which approved the lease between a consortium of nuclear power utilities and the Goshute tribal leadership to temporarily store spent fuel rods on tribal land while awaiting a permanent site at Yucca Mountain, Nev. But the federal courts have already ruled the state, which fears the nuclear waste could be permanent, did not have standing, leaving the dissident Goshutes to fight the battle on their own. That battle is being waged by environmental attorneys Duncan Steadman and Samuel Shepley, who have been driven to the brink of poverty by the all-consuming case. Steadman is now dying of pancreatic cancer (a third attorney in the case died two years ago in an auto accident). ['Image'] Margene Bullcreek heads a Goshute faction that is fighting plans to store nuclear waste on the reservation but has split with Sammy Blackbear. [''] Laura Seitz, Deseret News Blackbear dismisses rumors that Shepley would be forced to drop the case. "I am not worried about Sam leaving. He's committed," Blackbear said. He wishes he could say the same about the state. He watches the state's public relations machine with dismay. "It's PR crap," he said. "What they have been doing is using our work effort for their own fame. We are not in it for the glory. We are doing what we feel is right." Blackbear has resorted to begging for donations from Eastern environmental groups and other Indian tribes who abhor the thought of nuclear waste on tribal lands. There is a certain sense of irony, he said, that people in states that produce nuclear waste are stepping forward, but not in Utah where up to 40,000 tons of highly toxic nuclear waste would be stored in above-ground canisters. Not all of the dissident Goshutes share Blackbear's opinion. "Sammy has never trusted the state," said Margene Bullcreek, who has split from Blackbear and hired Brigham Young University law professor Larry EchoHawk and his son, Mark, to represent her concerns. To date, the state has contributed $108,742 to Bullcreek's opposition case. That is money that is spent on environmental justice issues, explained Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. "We have made it clear we could not cover those intertribal disputes," she added. State leaders say they are committed to stopping nuclear waste from entering the state, having spent about $3.4 million over the past four years to fight the plan. But if it were not for the legal efforts of the dissident tribal members, nuclear waste might now be rolling toward Utah, Blackbear said. "The reason why there is no nuclear waste here today is because of our efforts, not because of the state of Utah's," he added. Blackbear, a 38-year-old single father of three, is also frustrated at the Utah congressional delegation, which he says dismissed him with a healthy dose of condescension. "Their arrogance," he said. "They said, 'You give us information and we'll tell you what you can do with it.' It was insulting. This is crap." In 1997, Tribal Chairman Leon Bear signed a lease with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power utilities wanting to store waste on tribal lands for up to 40 years in the $3.1 billion facility. The BIA later approved the lease. That lease has never been made public, but it has led to allegations within the tribe that Bear supporters reaped financial windfalls while waste opponents were shut out. Blackbear points to one statement made by Bear that PFS is paying the tribe more than $1 million a year. "I have received $7.81," Blackbear said. And he is not kidding. "As long as I get paid something, I can't go to court and say I haven't been paid." In 1999, Blackbear and 17 other dissidents in the tribe, which numbers 67 adult members, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the secretary of the interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, alleging corruption, bribery and other wrongdoing in connection with the lease. A federal judge in Salt Lake City recently dismissed the case on legal technicalities but urged Blackbear to re-file it to include claims not in the original lawsuit. "There is no basis for the allegations," Bear responded. "I don't know why they go through this whole process in court" when they have no chance of winning. Blackbear said there is proof, boxes of it. "As long as the BIA keeps getting us on technicalities, the judges won't hear the merit of the case," he said. Bear also asserts that Blackbear's attorneys are not sticking with the case out of the goodness of their hearts. "They are getting paid," he said. Shepley laughs at that, saying he is practically destitute because the Goshute case has eaten up all their time and resources — thousands of hours worth. "I have started living on our savings," said Shepley, who works from his home in Payson. "Right now we are about ready to go under." In the tightly knit Goshute community, the nuclear waste issue has divided the tribe. Most tribal members are related. Blackbear and Bear are actually cousins, "but we are not close," Blackbear observed. "Family or not, when you see somebody doing the wrong thing it doesn't make it hard to chose which side you are on," Blackbear said. E-mail: donna@desnews.com [donna@desnews.com] © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 13 Utah: N-foes split into 3 factions [deseretnews.com] Sunday, October 6, 2002 By Donna Kemp Spangler Deseret News staff writer A tried and true war strategy is "divide and conquer." And some opponents of storing nuclear waste on Goshute tribal lands in Tooele County fear that is what is happening to them. Opponents of nuclear waste in Skull Valley have divided themselves, unintentionally, into at least three legal camps: The state of Utah, which is not sharing its financial resources; dissident Goshutes led by Sammy Blackbear, who are financially strapped; and dissident Goshutes led by Margene Bullcreek, who has hired former Idaho Attorney General Larry EchoHawk and his son. And none of the opponents seems to be getting along with the others, resulting in a diluted effort that is going nowhere. "There is a lot of mistrust," said Bullcreek. "The waste already has destroyed our tribe." This division among the opposition would seem to benefit Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power utilities, in its plan to place nuclear spent rods on tribal lands. But it really makes no difference, supporters say. "I don't think it helps," said Sue Martin, spokeswoman for PFS. "It just seems like each camp has its own concerns and strategy for fighting the project." It was Bullcreek who initiated a lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1994, hiring environmental attorneys Duncan Steadman and Samuel Shepley. She and other dissident Goshutes later removed themselves from the lawsuit, leaving Blackbear and his family to fight it on their own. Meanwhile, the state hired Monte Stewart, a Brigham Young University law professor who immediately clashed with Blackbear's legal team over tribal sovereignty issues related to several bills passed by the Legislature — bills that were recently declared unconstitutional by the federal courts. Bullcreek felt her lawyers were ineffective and split from Blackbear, forming a third opposition front. Bullcreek then hired the EchoHawks, using state money and contributions to help pay her legal bill. Mark EchoHawk said they have been working with Bullcreek and others, representing their concerns before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is reviewing the license application to store 40,000 tons of nuclear waste on tribal lands. The EchoHawks also have represented Bullcreek and other dissident Goshutes before the Interior Board of Indian Appeals in a dispute over the conditional approval of the license signed by Tribal Chairman Leon Bear in 1997. "Our goal in representing Margene and other members of the band has been primarily to defeat the nuclear-waste facility and at the same time arrange for comparable economic development alternatives," EchoHawk said. "I have a lot of confidence in the EchoHawks," Bullcreek said. "They know Indian law." The EchoHawks also are trying to resolve internal tribal conflicts. "We don't have strong leadership," Bullcreek said. "We are very unstable right now." Part of the problem is nobody really knows who is in charge, she added. BIA has decided to recognize Leon Bear as the tribal chairman despite the fact that in August 2002 he was ousted in a recall vote and the council replaced him by Marlinda Moon, Sammy Blackbear and Miranda Walsh. "The BIA has not recognized the voice of the people," Bullcreek said. Bullcreek, who calls herself a "traditionalist," wants to return to a more traditional tribal council. Several years ago, she formed Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia Awareness, which means timber setting community, a name early Goshutes called their community when they settled in Skull Valley. She aims to restore peace on the reservation by forcing the BIA to do its job in uniting the tribe and protect its sovereignty. "We need to restructure," she said. "And we can't do it without BIA's help." E-mail: donna@desnews.com [donna@desnews.com] © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 14 Leavitt rejects paying tribe to block N-waste [deseretnews.com] Sunday, October 6, 2002 But he's willing to help Goshutes in other ways By Bob Bernick Jr. and Donna Kemp Spangler Deseret News staff writers Gov. Mike Leavitt says he won't "buy off" the Goshute Indians with a large cash payment from the state to keep high-level nuclear reactor waste off their west desert reservation. Leavitt said last week he has had meetings with various public and private citizens where the suggestion has been made that the state compensate the Goshutes in return for not turning their land into a lucrative nuclear storage site. "But it is not appropriate. I've always said no," the governor said. Leon Bear, chairman of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, chuckles at the suggestion of a payoff. "I don't know if they could afford it," Bear said. "They don't like hearing the 'b' word," referring to the billions of dollars the waste storage could bring to the small Skull Valley band of the tribe. Leavitt said he has no plans for the state to benefit from the $3.1 billion proposal by Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of Eastern nuclear power plant owners who are working with the Goshute tribe to locate a short-term, above-ground storage facility in Utah's west desert. Spent fuel rods would be stored there until an underground, permanent facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is finished, although Utah officials worry that once the dangerous rods are on Goshute land, they would never leave. The state recently lost a federal lawsuit over various Utah laws passed in 2001 to hinder or block the repository. That case now goes to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. And Leavitt said if the state loses there, it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's bad public policy to just give the Indian tribe $1 million or $2 million to stop its lease with PFS, said Leavitt, if for no other reason than there are other tribes and reservations in Utah who, at some point, would also have to be bought off. There may even be private land that could also be used for such a facility, and the state can't be in the business of buying off anyone who tries to accommodate PFS, the governor said. Leavitt, at September's monthly news conference at KUED, rebuffed any back-door plans to put nuclear waste on private lands in Utah. "It was simply something that was created by a media report and spiraled out of control," he said. "Frankly, it is naive and hypocritical. We don't want nuclear waste here," he said. "There's no proposal (nicknamed Plan B). This is a flurry of nothing," he added. In a newspaper interview, Leavitt said, "It is not proper to just give (the Goshutes) money. That is what PFS is doing — the tribe is really selling its sovereignty to that company." The state giving them money is no different, Leavitt said. "There are absolutely other tribes in the state that may want this," if the state were to buy off the Goshutes, he added. "We are fighting this repository on seven or eight fronts. We're fighting in Congress to block access" to the lands by making surrounding lands wilderness. "We're fighting within the Bush administration" to deny PFS various permits, said Leavitt, who spent an hour with President Bush last Friday morning in the White House. Leavitt said he did not discuss the Goshute matter with the president. "But I've made our feelings known to everyone else in the administration, including the vice president and secretary of the interior." (Leavitt said he and Bush, who he got to know well when the latter was governor of Texas, talked about Iraq and terrorist threats. Bush named Leavitt to a special homeland security task force, which meets regularly in Washington, D.C.) While Leavitt is not willing to give the Goshutes money, he said he will do just about anything else to help the tribe, which numbers less than 70 adult members. "We will guarantee, pay for, college scholarships to any tribal member who wants to go. We'll guarantee them a job in their (education) field. They have to hold the job, but we'll get them one. I've talked to a number of business leaders (in Utah) about this," Leavitt said. "We'll help them with transportation" to and from school and work. Several years ago, in a package of bills aimed at harming PFS's ability to operate the repository, some lawmakers suggested that $2 million be put aside for specific economic development on the Goshute reservation. "I did not support that," said Leavitt, adding that he questioned whether that could work — or if it would look like some kind of state buy-off. He said he's willing to work with tribal leaders in other ways to help their members, recognizing that the tribe has few opportunities for self-improvement on its west desert land. Bear said the state has proposed to the tribe leasing lands for a landfill to dump the Wasatch Front's garbage. "That was not a very good proposal," Bear said. "We don't want to turn our reservation into a garbage dump." E-mail: [bbjr@desnews.com] ; [donna@desnews.com] © 2002 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 15 K2R4 Nuclear Plant Opposition Leader Murdered in Kiev Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2002 08:36:34 -0700 http://nonukes.narod.ru/Public_Control.htm K2R4 Nuclear Plant Opposition Leader Murdered in Kiev October 3, 2002 KIEV, Ukraine - A month ago a civic group filed a lawsuit against the Ukrainian government to stop construction of two nuclear power plants at Rivne and Khmelnytskyi, calling the projects illegal. On Tuesday its vice-Chairman was gunned down in Kiev. An unidentified man shot and killed Ruslan Syniavskyi, 44, late Monday at the entrance of his apartment building in downtown Kiev, the Interior Ministry's department in the capital said. Police didn't provide other details. The Interfax news agency said that the assailant shot several times in an attempt to rob Syniavsky. "It's very doubtful that an ordinary thief carries a gun," said Oleh Sadanets, a representative of Syniavskyi's Public Control organization. "We consider that this (killing) was linked to his activity in the organization... four shots cannot be a simple accident." Syniavksy was the vice-Chairman of Public Control, a non- governmental, environmental organization. The group is suing the Ukrainian government in a Kiev district court demanding a halt to the plants' construction. The group claims that the State Nuclear Regulatory Committee broke the law by not conducting adequate public hearings before providing a license to the state nuclear company Energoatom to construct the new power stations. A judge agreed in August to hear Public Control's case after the same court denied a lawsuit by six representatives of an environmental group against Energoatom, claiming completion of the nuclear plants posed an ecological threat to the country. Alexei Tolkachov, a law student who is the chairperson of the Kiev-based Public Committee for State Security - a take-off of the Soviet-era KGB, or Committee for State Security - led the unsuccessful lawsuit. Ukrainian law requires the court to order construction to stop pending review of the group's petition and a decision. Court officials would not confirm whether a stop order has been issued, and Energoatom has denied that it had received any court order to stop construction resulting from the lawsuit. Soviet-designed reactors are currently operating at Rivne and Khmelnytskyi and the disputed new reactors are about 85% complete. Ukraine negotiated to build the new reactors to compensate for the electricity lost when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was closed in 2000. Currently, Ukraine operates four nuclear power plants with 13 reactors, nine of which are now working. The reactors are frequently shut down for malfunctions or scheduled repairs. K2R4 Loan Hurdles On 13 December 2000 the European Commission approved a Euratom loan of US$585 million for the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne plant expansions, subject to the confirmation by the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) of the effectiveness of their 7 December 2000 decision on a US$215 million loan for the same project. As all conditions were fulfilled, the EBRD and the Commission decision was ready to be confirmed and the loans were to be granted in early December 2001. But on 28 November 2001, some days before signing the contracts with the EBRD and European Commission, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh requested additional discussions on certain loan conditions that Ukraine considered unachievable, and consequently refused to sign the EBRD loan contract. At the request of Ukraine, a joint Working Group (WG) was established to explore solutions that would address the issues of their concern and render the project acceptable. The WG met biweekly until early February 2002 to discuss project cost, the Project Financing Plan, electricity tariffs, the Decommissioning Fund and nuclear liabilities and insurance. Substantial work remains to be done before a solution is fully defined. One of the conditions which the EBRD required is an immediate hike in electricity rates, which would have meant a 30% rise in consumer rates. The issue of increasing electricity rates played an important role in the move on 28 November 2001 not to sign the contract. To agree to such an increase at that moment was impossible in the run-up to national elections scheduled for March 2002. According to Prime Minister Kinakh, the negotiations in the WG had led to agreement on reduction of the project costs and on mitigation of the bank's requirement for increasing electricity rates. The required hike in electricity rates could be smaller if the total project costs could be lowered. Assuming the project is satisfactorily adjusted at technical level by the WG, it will have to be re-approved by all parties, a process that will require full political support. In any case, a decision is not expected until after the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of March. Currently, due to parliamentary disagreements and presidential scandals it is expected that agreements will not be announced until much later this fall. Sources: Associated Press, and the online magazine Korrespondent, and CEE Bankwatch For more information, contact NIRS WISE Ukraine at akul@svitonline.com or see our website at http://nonukes.narod.ru ***************************************************************** 16 [southnews] Protesters storm military base in Belgium Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 23:04:23 -0500 (CDT) Plan to Sell a Home? http://us.click.yahoo.com/J2SnNA/y.lEAA/MVfIAA/7gSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ---------- Protesters storm military base AAP BRUSSELS|: Sunday October 6, 8:05 AM More than 1,000 anti-nuclear protesters were arrested after trying to storm a Belgian air force base believed to hold US nuclear warheads. Police said 1,100 demonstrators were arrested for trying to get into the heavily guarded base near the town of Peer, 90km north-east of Brussels, protesting against the use of nuclear weapons. The action was part of an annual protest against the use of the weapons, which activists claim have been stored on the base since the Cold War. The ecological group Mother Earth, one of the protest organisers, said they believed about 10 B-61 nuclear bombs were deployed at the base. "We as citizens have the right to protest against our government and on a base which holds illegal nuclear weapons," the group said in a statement. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: southnews-unsubscribe@egroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 17 [southnews] Italians protest US-led action against Iraq Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 23:04:36 -0500 (CDT) Home Selling? Try Us! http://us.click.yahoo.com/QrPZMC/iTmEAA/MVfIAA/7gSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ---------- Italians out in force to protest US-led action against Iraq http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s694236.htm Sunday, October 6, 2002. Posted: 07:19:38 (AEDT) Thousands of Italians flocked to peace rallies across the country on Saturday to protest against a possible US military strike on Iraq. Anti-war groups said demonstrators in 100 cities from the financial hub of Milan to the tip of the Italian boot participated in the protests. Thousands of people streamed through the historic centres of Milan, Florence, Bologna, Catania and Bergamo in the morning and many thousands more took to the streets of Rome in the evening. "This protest gives a clear message without any doubt that we are against this war and against wars in general," said Luca Corradini, a student leader. In Rome, a group of women handcuffed together headed a massive march to the capital's historic Piazza Venezia. Union leaders, left-wing politicians and anti-globalisation groups led protests in Sicily and Naples, other marchers burned flags and monks rang church bells in Florence to show their support for the demonstrators. It was not immediately clear how many people turned out for the protests. US President George W Bush is lobbying for a tougher United Nations resolution against Iraq, saying President Saddam Hussein should be removed because he is trying to build an arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Iraq denies the charges and recently agreed to let UN arms inspectors into Iraq to search for illegal weapons. Unlike Germany and France, the Italian government has been supportive of Mr Bush. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently told Parliament that Rome had a duty to support US diplomatic and military efforts to disarm Iraq and said he would not flinch from conflict if that were the only way to disarm Baghdad. But many Italians oppose the idea of conflict. "The interests of Bush are not to bring about peace or stabilise an unstable situation. Bush's interests are military and economic," student leader Ambra Zeni said. The US embassy in Rome issued what it calls a "warden message", warning American citizens to avoid large crowds on Saturday due to the protests for fear they could turn "unruly". The demonstrations were for the most part peaceful, although a group of protesters briefly occupied the British consulate in Venice to protest London's support for Mr Bush. In Rome, a group of some 60 women held a sit-in at the US embassy, where they were outnumbered three-to-one by police. 1,000 arrested in Belgium Belgian police on foot and horseback came out in force on Saturday to arrest more than half the protesters at an air force base where nuclear bombs are allegedly stockpiled. Police in riot gear arrested 1,117 out of an estimated 1,700 people taking part in the peaceful "Bombspotting" protest at the base near the town of Kleine Brogel near the Dutch border, a police spokesman said. A few politicians were also handcuffed during the annual protest against the alleged stockpiling of 10 US B-61 nuclear bombs at the base. Police released the protesters shortly afterwards. Belgium's government has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of the bombs at the base. ) ABC 2002 | [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: southnews-unsubscribe@egroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 18 Mational Lawyers Guild & civil didobedience agaimnt war Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 00:05:52 -0500 (CDT) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 3, 2002. NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD SUPPORTS ACTS OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN PROTESTING PREEMPTIVE STRIKE AGAINST IRAQ Will Provide Legal Support and Materials Regarding Necessity Defense The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns George Bush's proposed preemptive strike and escalation of the ongoing war against Iraq as violating the Constitution of the United States and the United Nations Charter. The Guild will seek to provide legal support for individuals and groups practicing non-violent civil disobedience regarding the "necessity" defense, which is conduct that an actor believes to be necessary to avoid harm to himself or to another. Such behavior may be justifiable, provided that the harm sought to be avoided by such conduct is greater than the harm which the law defining the offense seeks to prevent. "The Guild commits its legal resources to support those who engage in acts of civil disobedience against such unauthorized military action," says Guild President Bruce Nestor. The Guild is preparing a legal brief and supporting materials related to the necessity defense and military action against Iraq, and will distribute those materials nationally. Immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a relatively small group of individuals in the United States government--primarily President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his Deputy Paul Wolfowitz--began to develop pretexts for intensified military attacks against Iraq. No credible evidence connects Iraq to the crimes of September 11. One year later, these officials formally promulgated a doctrine under which the United States will "act preemptively," without the legally required authorization of the United Nations and the international community, or any legitimate claim of self-defense or defense of others, to bomb and invade Iraq. (National Security Strategy, Section V). Ongoing unilateral military attacks by the US against Iraq, consisting of bombing raids in the "no fly zones," are not authorized by any resolution of the UN Security Council. These bombing raids, as well as any escalated attacks, violate Article 1, Section 4 and Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter and other provisions of international law, which as ratified treaties are also part of the "supreme Law of the Land." (Constitution of the United States, Article VI Section 2). The forthcoming air attacks and invasion of Iraq will kill innocent civilians, threaten international peace and security, undermine the rule of law, and create a backlash against the people of the United States. Under well-accepted general principles of criminal law applicable in every US jurisdiction, otherwise technically illegal acts may be justified by the necessity of preventing a greater wrong or danger--a form of self-defense or defense of others. In this case there is ample legal necessity and justification for non-violent resistance to these illegal and immensely destructive, murderous actions by the top officials of the US government. NLG President Bruce Nestor says that "The basic question raised by continuing and intensifying US aggression against Iraq is moral: whether US government officials are authorized to decide that the 'price is worth it,' for millions of people whose lives will be shaped--and in many cases destroyed--by the criminal actions of a handful of US leaders who hold themselves above the law." The fundamental principles of international law and democracy empower individuals to make this moral decision for themselves, regardless of the contrary actions of their leaders. US government officials forfeit legitimacy and the power to enforce laws against non-violent trespass and "disorder" when they pursue policies that result in war crimes. Non-violent civil disobedience in opposition to the US government's illegal preemptive wars is justified by the necessity of self-defense and defense of others. The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the then-racially segregated American Bar Association. Currently, the NLG has nearly 5,000 members nationally--lawyers, legal workers, law students and jailhouse lawyers--committed to using the law as a vehicle for positive social change. CONTACT: Bruce D. Nestor, phone 612.659.9019, bdnestor@visi.com Heidi Boghosian, phone 212.679.5100, ext. 11, director@nlg.org *************************************************************************** Susan Gordon, Director Alliance for Nuclear Accountability www.ananuclear.org 1914 N 34th, Suite #407, Seattle, WA 98103 ph 206-547-3175 fax 206-547-7158 ANA is a national alliance of organizations working to address issues of nuclear weapons production and waste clean-up. ============== ALSO ================= Subj: [snow] The UN Charter and the Use of Force Against Iraq Date: 10/4/02 9:22:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time From: susangordon@earthlink.net FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: OCTOBER 3, 2002 CONTACT: John Burroughs, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy (212 )818-1861 Jacqueline Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation (510) 839-5877 LAWYERS TELL SENATE: USE OF FORCE AGAINST IRAQ WITHOUT NEW SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION IS UNLAWFUL; URGE CONGRESS TO UPHOLD U.N. CHARTER In a 4-page memo sent to key Senators and Representatives, international law specialists have told Congress that under the United Nations Charter the use of force by the United States against Iraq would be unlawful under present circumstances. The legal memo begins: "The United Nations Charter is a treaty of the United States, and as such forms part of the 'supreme law of the land' under the Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2. The UN Charter is the highest treaty in the world, superseding states' conflicting obligations under any other international agreement. (Art. 103, UN Charter)." The memo concludes: "Under the UN Charter, there are only two circumstances in which the use of force is permissible: in collective or individual self-defense against an actual or imminent armed attack; and when the Security Council has directed or authorized use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security. Neither of those circumstances now exist. Absent one of them, U.S. use of force against Iraq is unlawful." According to John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy in New York City, "The implication for resolutions now being considered by Congress is that, as a matter of law, no resolution should be adopted which authorizes the United States to use force against Iraq in the absence of a new Security Council resolution clearly and specifically authorizing such use. Of course, even if there is a Security Council resolution at some point which authorizes use of force, it still remains a question for Congress to decide whether the use of force against Iraq is wise, moral, or otherwise advisable." Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, California added, "Adherence to the UN Charter is not optional. It's the law. The Bush Administration's unilateral headlong rush to war threatens not only unprecedented regional instability and potentially catastrophic loss of life, it threatens to do away with the existing international order." The United Nations Charter and the Use of Force Against Iraq, was issued by the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy, Western States Legal Foundation, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Professor Jules Lobel of the University of Pittsburgh Law School. The Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and Western States Legal Foundation are the U.S. affiliates of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms. Copies of the memo are available upon request or on-line at www.lcnp.org/global/iraqstatement3.htm or www.wslfweb.org/docs/Iraqstatemt.htm. # # # A formatted version of this press release is available on-line at www.wslfweb.org/docs/iraqpr.pdf -- ************************************** Susan Gordon, Director Alliance for Nuclear Accountability www.ananuclear.org 1914 N 34th, Suite #407, Seattle, WA 98103 ph 206-547-3175 fax 206-547-7158 ANA is a national alliance of organizations working to address issues of nuclear weapons production and waste clean-up. ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** ***************************************************************** 19 [southnews] Israel: US Iraq attack likely in November Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 01:48:01 -0500 (CDT) Home Selling? Try Us! http://us.click.yahoo.com/QrPZMC/iTmEAA/MVfIAA/7gSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ---------- Ben-Eliezer: U.S. attack on Iraq to begin by end of November By Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz Saturday, October 05, 2002 http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=215910&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0 Speaking at a meeting of Labor Party ministers on Thursday, Defense Minister and Party Chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer estimated that a U.S. military attack against Iraq would begin at the end of November. Sources close to Ben-Eliezer said that the defense ministry's initial assessment was that an assault on Iraq would commence in the middle of December. They said that the defense minister's remarks Thursday were based on new information received by the intelligence establishment. An Israeli security delegation arrived in Washington Thursday to consult with U.S. officials ahead of a possible war in Iraq. The Israeli team - comprised of Defense Ministry Director General Amos Yaron, his deputy Kuti Mor, and IDF Plans and Policy Directorate head Major General Giora Eiland - will meet with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and other top U.S. officials. The delegation's invitation to Washington is a sign that the Bush administration has decided to move to a new stage in its contacts with Israel, following the end of the siege on the Muqata compound in Ramallah at the start of the week. Quiet discussions on the preparations for a war with Iraq have been conducted for a few months, but the Bush administration has decided to "raise their profile." PM meets with U.S. ambassador Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met early Thursday morning with U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer. It was Sharon's first such meeting since the army's withdrawal from the Yasser Arafat's Muqata in Ramallah. The discussion focused on the water dispute with Lebanon prompted by the construction of the pumping station at the Wazzani river, a tributary to Israel's Hatzbani river. Israel wants the Bush administration to step up pressure on Syria and Lebanon, to avoid them diverting water from a mojor source of Israel's water supply. Sharon updated Kurtzer on the construction progress at the pumping station. Bouyed, Bush seeks to push reforms The Bush administration - buoyed by its success in persuading Israel to call off the siege on Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat's compound - is now calling on Arab states to play a role in the resuscitation of PA reforms. Officials in Washington believe that the strengthening of Arafat's status as a result of the Muqata siege is a transient phenomenon. The IDF withdrawal from the Ramallah compound created a three week "window of opportunity" for the resumption of PA reforms, prior to the presentation of a new cabinet to the Palestinian legislative council. The U.S. wants Egypt, Syria and Jordan to lobby for the appointment of a Palestinian Prime Minister. In addition, the U.S. administration has asked Israel to accelerate the transfer of tax revenues to PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad. The Bush administration wants to set a clear timetable for the transfer of monies owed to the PA and is prepared to send auditors to Israel to monitor the PA's use of the money. Fayyad will arrive in Washington next week, and receive VIP treatment. He will meet with National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Alongside preparations for an attack on Iraq and efforts to encourage internal PA reform, State Department and White House officials are also pondering ways to resume negotiations between the PA and Israel. In mid-October State Department envoy William Burns will arrive in the region to discuss possibilities to restart talks. The U.S. and its partners in the international "quartet" (Russia, the European Union and the United Nations) envision a three step process leading to resumed negotiations. In the first stage, lasting to mid 2003, the Palestinians are to implement security reforms, while the IDF is to roll back to positions it held before the intifada erupted two years ago. Secondly in 2003, a Palestinian state is to be established with temporary borders. The U.S. has promised Israel that it will not commit to positions on borders or the status of Jewish settlements during this provisional state stage. And thirdly, final status accord talks are to resume in 2004 between Israel and the Palestinians. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: southnews-unsubscribe@egroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ***************************************************************** 20 Indymedia reports 11,500 march against war in Portland Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 00:56:17 -0500 (CDT) http://portland.indymedia.org/ NOT IN OUR NAME 5 Oct 2002 11,500 gather in Portland Oregon to demand NO WAR IN IRAQ 11,500 Portlanders gathered downtown today as part of the nationwide NOT IN OUR NAME campaign to demand No War in Iraq. Cloudy grey skies were offset by a multitude of colorful signs and banners, loud drums and chants, and an energetic spirit. The crowd assembled in the South Park blocks for speeches and music and then marched through downtown to Terry Schrunk Plaza, in front of the Federal Building, for more of the same. A comrade and I ran out ahead of the march and picked a corner to count from. We were there for over forty minutes while people passed by in a seemingly endless stream. This is where we came up with the number 11,500. Word on the street is that AP was saying 4,400 and Jim Redden from the Portland Tribune was saying 5,000 or 6,000 (after activists talked him up from 4,500). Did either of these lazy corporate reporters stake out an intersection and patiently watch the whole time? I doubt it. At this particular intersection the drivers in front (all female) were excited about the march and we gave them "Attack Iraq? NO!" stickers. They waved them and cheered to everyone as they went by. When it became clear that the march was going to take awhile, one of them got out of her car and sat on the hood. At one point, an angry driver (male) tried to turn out into the street where people were marching. I got in front of his truck and boy, was he ornery about it. "We've got a permit," I told him. "You've gotta wait." After about 15 minutes two bike cops came up. The lady cop told me I couldn't do what I was doing and I told her I was stopping this guy from doing something that would be unsafe to the people in the streets. She agreed but said it wasn't up to me to do that. She said she would handle it from there. What ended up happening was that he had to back up around the corner where he came from, and then the cops made all the cars on that sidestreet back up and go another way. The two female driver supporters both stayed though, and kept cheering. It was great. I'm not really in favor of permits -- it is just our right to be in the streets, but it was useful in this situation, I admit. Otherwise I suppose I would've had to have gotten a ticket for obstructing traffic. There's so much to say and show about this beautiful day in Portland and I am hoping some other reports will pop up on the newswire soon because I want to see what else happened. One more quick story, though: When the rally in the Plaza was winding down, a brave young man (16, according to someone who knew him) climbed up on the peak above the door of City Hall with a "NO WAR" sign. A crowd gathered to cheer him on and threw a pair of goggles up there in case the police decided to pepper-spray him out. After about 15 minutes he came down into the welcoming arms of the throng, which then surrounded him to keep him from being arrested or cited. This same crowd turned into about 50 and we took the streets. We marched down Fourth, up another street (Stark?) to Broadway, and back to the Park Blocks and back into downtown. 50 isn't many people but it's enough to take a street. There was no police harrassment of this action, though several to many drivers were upset. One of them nudged into me with his car when a couple of us were blocking an intersection, and then nudged me again harder. Three or four other marchers came over immediately and the situation de-escalated. I snapped a photo of his license plate, which I will post later. I didn't see the end of this march, so hopefully someone else will post how it ended. I hope no one got arrested or cited. All in all, it was a beautiful day in Portland. Seeing so many people hit the streets to say NO to WAR was inspiring. I had tears in my eyes for a big chunk of time, I was so pleasantly overwhelmed by the number of faces. Hopefully, this turn-out in Portland today can help inspire NOT IN OUR NAME actions coming up in other cities in the next couple days! ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** ***************************************************************** 21 Operation Endless Deployment Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 21:16:28 -0700 Published in the October 21, 2002 issue of The Nation Operation Endless Deployment by William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan & Michelle Ciarrocca The Bush Administration's march toward war in Iraq is dangerous in its own right, and should be opposed as such. But the preparations for "Gulf War II" are also part of a larger plan to promote the most significant expansion of US global military presence since the end of the cold war. The Pentagon is determined to maintain access to the rapidly growing network of military facilities it has built or refurbished in the Caucasus, South Asia and the Persian Gulf for decades to come, long after George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein have passed from the global stage. In the fall of 1999, in his first major campaign speech on foreign policy, Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for sending US troops off on "aimless and endless deployments" that allegedly detracted from their core mission of fighting and winning wars. Bush was primarily referring to US peacekeeping missions in places like Kosovo, but he gave the impression that he was planning to reduce the overall US military presence overseas as well. Three years later, Bush's pledge to seek a more streamlined US global military presence has been cast aside under the guise of fighting "terrorists and tyrants" of Washington's choosing. Since September 2001 US forces have built, upgraded or expanded military facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan; authorized extended training missions or open-ended troop deployments in Djibouti, the Philippines and the former Soviet republic of Georgia; negotiated access to airfields in Kazakhstan; and engaged in major military exercises, involving thousands of US personnel, in Jordan, Kuwait and India. Thousands of tons of military equipment have been added to stockpiles already pre-positioned in Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf states, including Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. And discussions are still under way with Yemen about increasing American access to facilities there and establishing an intelligence-gathering installation aimed at monitoring activities in Sudan and Somalia. These forward bases, many of which have been arranged through secretive, ad hoc arrangements, currently house an estimated 60,000 US military personnel. This includes 20,000-25,000 troops in the Persian Gulf, poised to serve as the opening wave of a US invasion of Iraq. Funds for training and military aid, which are often used to grease the wheels of US access to overseas military facilities, have been increased substantially since the start of the Administration's war on terrorism. The budget request for training foreign military personnel is up by 27 percent in the fiscal-year 2003 budget, while funding for the government's largest military aid program, Foreign Military Financing, is slated to top $4 billion. The bulk of this additional funding is going to countries like Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India, which had previously been under restrictions on what they could receive from the United States because of records of systematic human rights abuses, antidemocratic practices or development of nuclear weapons. Now these same nations are viewed as indispensable allies in the Administration's war on terrorism. The new global buildup represents not so much a return to the cold war, when the United States had many more troops stationed overseas than it does today, but rather an elaboration of a new, more flexible infrastructure for intervening in--or initiating--"hot wars" from the Middle East to the Caucasus to East Asia. Military analyst William Arkin has noted that in the first four months after the September 11 attacks, thirteen military tent cities were hastily assembled to shelter US personnel in nine different countries. Many of the sites include "expeditionary airfields" that were built or upgraded on short notice to facilitate their use by US combat and transport planes. Despite protestations to the contrary by Pentagon officials, there are questions about how many of the new US forward bases will in fact be temporary. The US Central Command has long been seeking alternatives to Saudi Arabia to use as springboards for future interventions in the Persian Gulf, as well as access to facilities in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been purposely vague about the length of the US stay at any of the new facilities, Air Force Col. Billy Montgomery, who headed a team that expanded an air base in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for use by US and allied forces in Afghanistan, told the Washington Post, "I think it's fair to say there will be a long-term presence here well beyond the end of hostilities." In a mid-August briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, suggested that the length of the US military presence in Afghanistan could end up rivaling the fifty-year US presence in South Korea. And if the Bush Administration is not dissuaded from moving full-speed ahead with its plans to invade Iraq, several independent military experts have suggested that an occupying force of 75,000-100,000 troops may be needed to stabilize that country, giving rise to the need for additional formal or informal bases to house US troops. Growing US Military Presence Since 9/11/01 Qatar: With 600 war planners from the US Central Command scheduled to arrive in November for an "exercise" that could turn into a long-term deployment, it is widely believed that Qatar will serve as the principal base for coordinating US intervention in Iraq. The Pentagon began pouring additional personnel and funding into Qatar's Al Udeid air base in November 2001 in hopes of using it as an alternative to Saudi bases in the event of military action against Iraq. The facility now has a command center with satellite links that will enable it to coordinate thousands of airstrikes daily. The base, which has one of the longest runways in the Middle East, is currently home to roughly 3,000 US personnel and fifty aircraft, including fighters, bombers and reconnaissance and refueling aircraft. There are also 600 US personnel stationed at an air logistics base in Qatar--referred to by Army officials as "Camp Snoopy"--at which C-5 and C-17 cargo planes routinely come and go, bringing supplies for US forces in Afghanistan and the Gulf. Qatar and Kuwait (see below) are also host to more than three dozen 60,000-square-foot warehouses that contain hundreds of US military vehicles, ranging from M-1 tanks and armored personnel carriers to 155-millimeter howitzers. Jordan: Despite public pronouncements by Jordanian officials that their nation will not serve as a launching pad for a US attack on Iraq, US-Jordanian military cooperation has been increasing. During August, 2,200 personnel of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit were in Jordan for "Operation Infinite Moonlight," which several analysts believe was used as a cover to pre-position additional US military equipment in the Persian Gulf in preparation for war with Iraq. Recent press reports indicate that US forces also have regular access to Jordanian air bases at Ruwayshid and Wadi-al Murbah, both of which are close to the Iraqi border. Kuwait: Camp Doha is home to 5,000 US Army personnel, plus thousands more that come for regular military exercises in Kuwait. Counting troops in-country for extended exercises and air crews involved in flying F-16 and F-15 aircraft on surveillance missions over southern Iraq, there are now estimated to be more than 9,000 US military personnel in Kuwait. As of the first week of September, 2,000 US troops were en route to Kuwait for "Operation Desert Spring," an exercise slated to last several months. More than sixty military vehicles are being shipped to Kuwait as part of the exercise, apparently in an effort to bulk up the US arsenal there in anticipation of a war against Iraq. Saudi Arabia: As a tacit side agreement to the controversial 1981 sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia, US contractors built an unparalleled network of air, naval and communications bases in Saudi Arabia that served as the main base of operations for US forces in the Gulf War. The most important of these facilities is the Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh, which has served as the coordinating center for air operations over Iraq and Afghanistan. After initially stating that Saudi bases could not be used for a US strike against Iraq, Saudi officials have now stated that the facilities will be available, provided that the intervention is sanctioned by the UN Security Council. There are currently more than 6,000 US Air Force and Army personnel in Saudi Arabia. Oman: The United States is upgrading an airfield at Musnana for use as an air base that will house everything from fighter aircraft to B-52 bombers. According to GlobalSecurity.org, the United States has used three other bases in Oman to launch airstrikes against Afghanistan. A base at Masirah hosts US P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft and AC-130 gunships. Oman is also a major pre-positioning site for the US Air Force, with enough equipment and fuel stored to support three bases and 26,000 support personnel. Bahrain: The US Fifth Fleet, which coordinates all US combat ships in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean areas, has its headquarters at Manama, Bahrain. Twenty miles south of Manama, Shaikh Isa Air Base hosts US bomber and fighter aircraft, and is expected to serve as the home for a US Air Force expeditionary wing of forty-two aircraft in the near future. Total US personnel in Bahrain number 4,000 or more, most of them in the Navy or Marines. United Arab Emirates: The United States has no ongoing military presence in the UAE, but the government allows US reconnaissance and refueling aircraft to use its air bases, and there is some US equipment pre-positioned there for use in contingencies like the Bush Administration's planned intervention in Iraq. Diego Garcia: In August the Pentagon awarded a contract to a Norfolk, Virginia, shipping company to operate eight large "roll-on, roll-off" cargo ships in and around the US base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. B-52s based there are likely to come into play in any air war against Iraq; the island may also serve as a stopover point and distribution center for US personnel and equipment headed to the Gulf. Yemen: The Pentagon is exploring the possibility of building a signals intelligence base on the Yemeni island of Socotra that would be used to conduct surveillance on Somalia and the Horn of Africa. This past June, a US team arrived in Yemen to begin installation of a computerized surveillance system designed to link the capital of Sanaa with data flowing from major seas, airports and border crossings. Djibouti: In mid-September it was revealed that 800 US personnel, most of them Special Operations forces, have been deployed in the East African nation of Djibouti, poised for deployment in Yemen, Somalia or Sudan in pursuit of alleged Al Qaeda operatives. The Special Forces deployment is backed up by the stationing nearby of the Belleau Wood, an amphibious assault ship with helicopters and Harrier jump jets that can be used to transport US personnel in Djibouti into battle in neighboring nations. Turkey: Turkey's Incirlik air base, which has served as the launching ground for US airstrikes and surveillance missions over northern Iraq for more than a decade, is home to an estimated four dozen US surveillance and strike aircraft (the exact number is classified). The Pentagon hopes to use Incirlik as a major staging ground in its planned air war against Iraq, and has been courting Ankara with major arms sales, including transfers of Seahawk antisubmarine helicopters, two fully outfitted combat frigates and a pledge to cancel a substantial portion of Turkey's multibillion-dollar military debt to the United States. Georgia: As part of a two-year, $64 million "train and equip" mission, US Special Forces will be deployed to Georgia to train a 2,000-person antiterrorist force designed to patrol the Pankisi Gorge, an alleged refuge for Chechen rebels and Al Qaeda fighters. Barracks and other facilities for the US trainers will be built in cooperation with the Kellogg Brown & Root division of Halliburton industries. Afghanistan: The two main US bases in Afghanistan are at Bagram, where the headquarters for US military operations in the country is based, along with roughly 5,000 US personnel; and in Kandahar, where 3,000-4,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division are based, along with a detention facility for Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. Pakistan: Pursuant to an agreement struck with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last December, US forces have taken over an air base at Jacobabad, in southwestern Pakistan, and are building air-conditioned barracks and a higher security wall. American forces will also continue to use airfields at Pasni and Dalbandin for the foreseeable future, as part of what one Pakistani source predicts will become a "semipermanent presence" of US forces in Pakistan. Uzbekistan: Roughly 1,500 US troops are stationed at Khanabad, a former Soviet facility that is the largest air base in Central Asia. The US Air Force is scouting sites to set up a more permanent facility in Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan: The Manas air base, also known as the Peter J. Ganci base in honor of a New York City fireman who died in the World Trade Center rescue effort, is home to 2,000 troops--1,000 American and 1,000 from coalition partners Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and Spain. American officials claim that the base will be closed after the war in Afghanistan is over, but sources familiar with the extensive infrastructure that has been built, including a central power plant, a hospital and two industrial-size kitchens, expect US forces to be stationed there for years to come. Kazakhstan: This past July the United States and Kazakhstan signed an agreement to allow US military aircraft to make emergency landings--for a fee--at Kazakhstan's largest civilian airport, in Almaty. In addition, the Bush Administration has requested $5 million in military aid in the fiscal-year 2003 budget to refurbish an air base in order to establish "a US-interoperable base along the oil-rich Caspian." Tajikistan: After the September 11 attacks, Tajikistan was one of the first Central Asian states to offer the Pentagon access to bases, overflight rights and the use of its territory by US military personnel. Bases at Khujand, Kulyab and Kurgan-Tyube are available to US forces as needed, but unlike the larger bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, they have yet to become a major focus of activity. Philippines: More than 1,300 US troops were involved in "counterterrorism training" in the Philippines from February through July of this year, assisting local military forces in their efforts to wipe out the remnants of the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla movement, which Philippine security officials claim forged ties with Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. In parallel to the training mission, US military aid to the Philippines was increased tenfold, from $1.9 million to $19 million. A cadre of 100 US military personnel remained in the Philippines after the larger contingent withdrew in July. The Pentagon plans several other major training missions in the Philippines in the next year. Sources: Center for Defense Information; GlobalSecurity.org; David Isenberg, "By Infinite Moonlight, US Readies for War," Asia Times, August 29, 2002; US Defense Department; and numerous news stories from the Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New Orleans Times-Picayune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and William Arkin's "Dot.mil" column in the Washington Post Online. William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University, is co-author, with Michelle Ciarrocca, of the institute's report Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense, 1994-2000. Frida Berrigan is the deputy director of the arms-trade project at the New School University's World Policy Institute. Michelle Ciarrocca is the senior research associate of the arms-trade project at the New School University's World Policy Institute. Copyright © 2002 The Nation ### EmailShare This Article With Your Friends FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. ***************************************************************** 22 U$ POLL -- BUSH SHOULD WAIT ON IRA Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 21:36:40 -0500 (CDT) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2068844,00.html POLL: BUSH SHOULD WAIT ON IRAQ Monday October 7, 2002 2:20 AM WASHINGTON (AP) - A solid majority of Americans believe President Bush should give U.N. weapons inspectors time to act and should wait for support from allies before invading Iraq, a new poll says. The CBS-New York Times poll out Sunday also found a large and growing number of people want Bush to get congressional approval before going to war, with many saying Congress has not asked enough questions about Bush's policy toward Iraq. The poll comes as Bush prepares to address questions about potential war in a prime time speech Monday evening. Congress is preparing to vote on authorizing force in Iraq later this week, and Bush hopes to persuade Americans - as well as skeptical world leaders - that now is the time to confront Saddam Hussein. The poll suggests Americans want him to move slowly. By a 2-to-1 margin, they said they would prefer to see U.N. weapons inspectors have more time to do their work before military action is taken. A majority, 56 percent, said that one country should not be able to attack another country unless it is attacked first. When people were asked the same question specifically about the United States, they were evenly split. Two-thirds said they approve of military action to remove Saddam Hussein as leader of Iraq, but a large majority - 70 percent - want the Bush administration to get approval from Congress. Sixty-five percent think it would be better to wait for allies before acting against Iraq. And 51 percent think that Congress is not asking enough questions about Iraq policy, while one in five said it is asking too many. Last month, 44 percent said Congress was not asking enough questions. The poll of 668 adults was taken Thursday through Saturday and has an error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Among the poll's other findings: -Despite concerns about the possible war, seven in 10 would prefer to hear political candidates talk about the economy over war with Iraq. -More than one-third think the economy will get worse if the United States attacks Iraq, and half think military action against Iraq would increase the risk of terrorist attacks. -Six in 10 said a war with Iraq is likely to lead to a wider war involving other countries in the Middle East. -More than half, 57 percent, said they would base their vote for a candidate on economic policy before foreign policy. -Four in 10, 41 percent, said they approve of President Bush's handling of the economy, while 46 percent disapproved. His overall job approval was at 63 percent. -More than half said they consider the economy fairly bad, 42 percent, or very bad, 14 percent. Almost two-thirds said Bush should be spending more time on the economy, while a third said he's spending as much time as he can. ====================== *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the original source. *** ***************************************************************** 23 Indian firms arming Iraq The Frontier Post */ / Updated on 10/6/2002 6:06:31 AM/ * *F.P. Report* ISLAMABAD: Iraq can deploy weapons of mass destruction in one hour due to missile infrastructure produced with the illicit help of Indian companies. * Leading Indian daily Times of India has reported that Britain had alleged that Iraq was able to deploy some of its deadliest weapons of mass destruction within one hour as it possess missile infrastructure produced with the illicit help of Indian companies. Giving details, it reports that the British claim of Indian involvement were contained in 55 page dossier controversially and uniquely published by Tony Blair on the basis of what he called unprecedented and secret intelligence information. The document, which only obliquely blames Africa for supplying uranium to Saddam?s secret nuclear weapons programme, pinpoints India as part of the supply chain for banned propellant chemicals destined for ballistic missiles. One of these, ammonium per chlorate, according the dossier, was ? illicitly? provided by an Indian company, NEC Engineers Private Limited, which has extensive links in Iraq, particularly to its al-Mamoun missile production plant and Fullujah 2 chlorine plant. Analysts added that in an intriguing insight, the dossier appeared to indicate that much of this had been known to New Delhi for some time. © Copyright 2001 The Frontier Post ***************************************************************** 24 Bush: Saddam Could Inflict 'Horror' Las Vegas SUN: October 05, 2002 By SCOTT LINDLAW ASSOCIATED PRESS KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine- President Bush warned in his weekly radio address Saturday of the "massive and sudden horror" that Iraq could inflict if not disarmed, sharpening his case against Saddam Hussein in advance of a major speech Monday. Bush was working this weekend on a fifth draft of the address to be delivered in Cincinnati, putting the finishing touches on what will likely be a nationally televised address at 8 p.m. EDT. The president and his aides were working on the speech from the Bush family home here. Bush is trying to build public support for a congressional resolution demanding that Saddam disarm or face U.S.-led military action. He won agreement last week with a bipartisan group of House leaders and the Senate is expected to give him war-making authority, too, though many Democrats are still skeptical. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said he believes the House resolution gives Bush too much latitude to wage war "The resolution adopted by the leaders ... simply provides the use-of-force resolution and makes reference to 16 U.N. articles" that Saddam is accused of ignoring, Daschle said. "Well, one of those articles is, simply, a return of Kuwaiti prisoners. Well, do we want to use use-of-force in a pre-emptive strike to return Kuwaiti prisoners? I don't think so," the senator said in a CNN interview broadcast Saturday. He also said he was concerned about the implications of striking another nation pre-emptively, whether there is enough evidence that Iraq poses an imminent threat and the difficulties of rebuilding Iraq after a military attack. Bush, using his second straight radio address to discuss Iraq, said he wants to avoid war but Saddam may force the issue. "We hope that Iraq complies with the world's demands," he said. "If, however, the Iraqi regime persists in its defiance, the use of force may become unavoidable. Delay, indecision, and inaction are not options for America, because they could lead to massive and sudden horror." Bush was careful to balance his aggressive language with a passage calling war a last resort. "The United States does not desire military conflict, because we know the awful nature of war," he said. "Our country values life, and we will never seek war unless it is essential to security and justice." Yet, Bush reached for new rhetorical heights to denounce Saddam, paralleling the furious words his father used before going to war with Iraq in 1991. At a fund-raiser in Boston on Friday, Bush called Saddam a "cold-blooded" killer, a phrase he repeatedly has used to denounce the terrorists linked to the 9-11 attacks on the United States. In a statement that seemed designed to rally the American people to support war, Bush said "for the sake of our freedom, for the sake of peace, if the United Nations won't make the decision, if Saddam Hussein continues to lie and deceive, the United States will lead a coalition to disarm this man before he harms America." Secretary of State Colin Powell, meanwhile, forged an agreement Friday with the chief U.N. weapons inspector to defer searching for illicit arms in Iraq until tough new rules are imposed. Powell acknowledged it might take a long time to persuade the Security Council to adopt a resolution proposed by the United States. But, he told reporters in Washington, "I'm confident we'll find a way to resolve the differences that exist." Chief among them is refusal of France and Russia to threaten Iraq with war if it refuses to disarm. Powell said the warning was essential and must be adopted. The chief U.N. inspector, Hans Blix, registered his support. Blix has already arranged with Iraq to resume inspections in about two weeks. But after meeting with Powell and other senior administration officials, he said: "It would be awkward for us to go in and then find there was a new resolution." Powell, who had been trying to put the brakes on the return of the inspection teams until they were promised unfettered access to all sites, welcomed Blix's comments. "If the inspectors are going to go back in, they have to go back in without any restrictions on what they can do," Powell said. A new report by U.S. intelligence agencies backed the administration's contention that Iraq had significant caches of dangerous weapons despite numerous international searches. The agencies said Iraq has biological and chemical weapons and some long-range missiles, but probably no nuclear weapons. "If left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," the unclassified report concluded. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 25 Bush Has New Rationale for Iraq Move Las Vegas SUN Today: October 06, 2002 at 6:35:20 PDT By RON FOURNIER ASSOCIATED PRESS MANCHESTER, N.H.- President Bush warned that Saddam Hussein could strike without notice and inflict "massive and sudden horror" on America, offering a new rationale for pre-emptive military action against Iraq. In the run-up to key congressional votes on war-making authority, Bush on Saturday promised in the clearest terms yet to rebuild Iraq after a war. He also said the Iraqi president has a "horrible history" of attacking his enemies first. "We cannot ignore history. We must not ignore reality. We must do everything we can to disarm this man before he hurts one single American," Bush told hundreds of cheering police and National Guardsmen. A leading Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, strongly challenged the "strike first" policy as Bush toured this politically important state. The president's remarks reflect subtle changes the White House is making in its case against Saddam as Bush prepares to address the nation Monday night from Cincinnati. Advisers say the address - now in its fifth draft - seeks to synthesize the case against Saddam, the reasons war may be necessary and why the threat is imminent. Bush and his advisers were tinkering with the speech during a weekend stay at his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine. He made a quick visit to New Hampshire to address soldiers and police officers, then headline a $500,000 fund-raiser for GOP Senate candidate John Sununu. The congressman's father was White House chief of staff for Bush's father. In a state whose motto is "live free or die," GOP donors jumped to their feet when Bush said of Saddam, "For the sake of peace, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of our future and our children's future, we will disarm him." Bush won agreement last week with a bipartisan group of House leaders for a resolution allowing him to use force against Iraq. Senate Democrat are more skeptical, though a resolution is expected to pass as early as this week. "Pre-emptive strikes are something we have to take very, very seriously and carefully," Daschle, D-S.D., said Saturday on CNN. "Number one, what kind of a standard does it set for the rest of the world? If it's OK for us, is it OK for India? How about Russia? How about Israel?" Daschle said the House resolution gave Bush too much latitude to wage war. He questioned whether there is enough evidence that Iraq poses an imminent threat and said Bush has failed to explain how Iraq would be rebuilt after war. "How long will we be there? What will it entail, on the part of the United States? How much will it cost? Who will be involved?" Daschle asked. Bush's struggle to pass a tough U.N. resolution on Iraq was underscored Saturday when Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq should not be delayed. Bush wants the mission postponed while he presses for a new U.N. mandate. "The message to Russia is this is about peace, this is about how to preserve peace, by removing the greatest threat to peace," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, offering a new rhetorical twist likely to be appear in Bush's Monday address to counter critics who say the president is too hungry for war. In a preview of that speech, Bush tried in Manchester to address the issues raised by Daschle and other skeptics. On the question of launching pre-emptive action, Bush laid out his usual case against Saddam: The Iraqi leader produces weapons of mass destruction, consorts with terrorists, oppresses his own people and condones abuses against the wives and daughters of his political opponents. But then he added a new rationale, suggesting Saddam might strike first if not disarmed. "The regime is guilty of beginning two wars. It has a horrible history of striking without warning," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Delay, indecision, and inaction are not options for America, because they could lead to massive and sudden horror." While other administration officials have talked about efforts to bring democracy and stability to a post-Saddam Iraq, Bush has had little to say about his post-war intentions. "Should force be required to bring Saddam to account, the United States will work with other nations to help the Iraqi people rebuild and form a just government," Bush said. Aides said it was his most firm commitment yet, though it came with no details. Bush said a congressional resolution would help persuade skeptical world leaders to back a tough new U.N. resolution on Iraq. "I urge Americans to call their members of Congress to make sure your voice is heard," Bush said. On a separate issue, Bush chastised Senate Democrats for demanding collective bargaining rights for workers in the proposed Homeland Security Department. Bush said inflexible union protections would "prohibit us from doing the job of protecting the American people." Firing back, Daschle accused Republicans of "trying to bust the unions" and wanting to return to the days when presidents "could pick their political hacks and put them in government positions." At the fund-raiser, Bush tried to help Sununu retain his lead over Senate rival Jeanne Shaheen, the state's Democratic governor. With taxes a gathering issue in state races here, Bush defended his tax cuts. "For the sake of economic vitality in this state, you will need a United States senator who will join me in making the tax cut permanent," Bush told GOP donors. All contents copyright 2002 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 26 Why war? And why now? U.S. News: (10/14/02) [usnews.com] ***************************************************************** 33 Rocky Flats' 903 Pad to be cleaned to strict new levels The Daily Camera: State/west Radiation Standards and Measurements Exposure danger difficult to quantify Down to the dirt By Katy Human, Camera Staff Writer October 6, 2002 Look west from the infamous 903 Pad at Rocky Flats, where radioactive liquids spilled during the site's nuclear-weapons-making years, and tall mountains loom over the horizon. Look east, and prairie flows for a mile to the Indiana Street boundary of the federal site. Below the blanket of asphalt underfoot: the most contaminated dirt known at Rocky Flats, soil that in spots contains 5,000 times more radiation than deemed safe. "It's the foremost concern of everybody, because it's there in the surface soil and it's in a vulnerable condition," said LeRoy Moore, an activist with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center who has been working on Rocky Flats issues for decades. "It's not far from where people live." Next month, Rocky Flats workers will begin prying up the 903 Pad and scooping out the contaminated soil below. The project will be the first on the site to be guided by a controversial, proposed new cleanup plan. The plan, scheduled for public release and comment sometime this month, is widely considered the most important ingredient in the complicated recipe of Rocky Flats cleanup. It will dictate how much contamination managers can leave behind, and how safe the site will be for people who hike or birdwatch there. Rocky Flats will become a wildlife refuge when cleanup ends. "They're really talking now about changing what the site's going to look like at closure," said David Abelson, director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, another watchdog group. For six years, soil cleanup at Rocky Flats has been dictated by the magic number of 651 picocuries per gram, a measure of radiation. Now, managers of the site and their regulators are proposing a much stricter cleanup standard: 50 picocuries per gram for surface soils. But the problem for some is that the change comes at a cost: To keep the site's cleanup budget from exploding, site managers propose to leave more underground contamination behind. For Tim Rehder, Rocky Flats manager for the Environmental Protection Agency, and other officials involved in regulating work at the site, the new plan represents a huge accomplishment. "It resolves, to a large extent, the controversy we've had over the cleanup levels," Rehder said. When his agency and others announced in 1996 a soil cleanup standard of 651 pCi/g, people who lived in communities near Rocky Flats were furious. That sort of cleanup would have been significantly more lenient than those at other nuclear cleanup sites around the world. One-tenth that figure is still too lenient for Moore, who said he also worries deeply about contamination left underground. The stricter surface standard, a result of years of negotiation and an influential independent study, is a "major victory for the people," Moore said. "But it's not good enough." Trouble in the wind From a gap in the mountains west of Rocky Flats, winds blow so fiercely down and across the prairie that the National Wind Technology Center situated itself just north of the site. Experimental wind turbines spin power from air just a mile or so from some of Rocky Flats' most contaminated buildings. It's that wind that helped create the fiasco of the 903 Pad. Between 1958 and 1967, when Rocky Flats workers were furiously making radioactive pits for the nation's nuclear weapons, they generated tens of thousands of gallons of plutonium- and uranium-laced waste oil. Workers incinerated some of the oil, but they poured most of it into 55-gallon drums and lined those up on a field at the edge of the main industrial section of the site. Jim Kelly, 69 and a radiation control worker at Rocky Flats for 35 years until 1991, said he remembers the time well. "They were putting the drums out there to get them out of the way," Kelly said. "They didn't want to use any extra space in the buildings." Kelly said he thought it was a bad idea to leave the steel containers exposed and outdoors, where any accident could expose the public downwind. "They don't know what all was in those drums, they weren't keeping records then," he said. Managers dismissed his safety concerns as ridiculous, Kelly said, but documents show that by the mid-1960s, many of the 5,000-plus drums were leaking badly into the soil below. "We got a rabbit coming out of there," Kelly said, "and that rabbit was too hot to count." His story is corroborated in a 1998 study of the 903 Pad by the Radiological Assessments Corporation, which refers to radioactive rabbits. The real problems with the area, though, happened when workers began removing the corroded barrels in 1967 and 1968. Wind and rain sent plutonium-contaminated dirt and dust downstream and downwind of the site, and then road graders moved in, to smooth the soil and prepare it for an asphalt safety cover. In the spring of 1969, wind sent a 10-foot-high cloud of dust half a mile beyond the site's perimeter security fence, the Radiological Assessments Corporation report noted. The 903 Pad sent more radiation into Denver-area residents' back yards than any other accidents on the site — including two historic fires that charred parts of buildings and sent plumes of radiation-filled smoke into the air, other reports concluded. Even so, it wasn't enough to seriously endanger public health, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1997, that agency declared that the contaminated soil east of the site boundary was so diluted and low-risk, Rocky Flats would not have to clean it up. Focused on the surface On a clear day, from high spots at Rocky Flats, a person can look northeast into Superior and Broomfield, east into Westminster and southeast through Arvada to the skyscrapers of Denver. When federal officials built the nuclear weapons plant in 1951, about 610,000 people lived in the Denver metropolitan area. Today, more than 2.2 million people do. Government officials from most of those cities and counties gather monthly as the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, to advise site officials on their concerns and preferences when cleanup decisions come up. Most members of the group have signed a letter supporting the general idea of the new soil cleanup plan. "Basically, it's a tradeoff, an agreement ... to do more extensive surface decontamination, and in return, an acknowledgment that some of the subsurface contamination is extremely immobile," said Rehder, who speaks regularly to the coalition. "Subsurface contamination" includes the dirt below buildings which could have been tainted by basement spills, and seven miles of glass, clay, metal and plastic pipes that snake below ground between buildings. Some of those carried radioactive, plutonium-laden liquids, and some leaked. The new plan insists workers remove all pipes less than three feet from the surface, said Joe Legare, a manager with the U.S. Department of Energy, which owns Rocky Flats. He and other officials declined to discuss what the new plan will say for deeper contamination. Although it's possible to imagine scenarios in which hot spots of underground radioactivity could be lifted to the surface — by a burrowing prairie dog, for example — underground contamination generally is far less dangerous to a hiker or refuge worker than surface contamination, said David Ableson, executive director of the local government coalition. For plutonium to affect a person's health, it must be inhaled or ingested. Given a limited cleanup budget, then, it makes sense to focus on a better surface cleanup, he said. Ableson and some of his colleagues said they worry some about the details of the new plan, which they haven't yet seen, but he called his group "realistic." "These are elected officials used to dealing with real budgets," he said. They know just how difficult it could be to squeeze more money from the federal government, which has set already aside roughly $650 million per year through 2006 for Rocky Flats cleanup. "We've got a fixed amount of money, whether people like it or not," Abelson said. But activist Moore rejects the money argument. "I call it a fiscal trap," he said. "We are trapped by their money numbers and refusal to entertain the question of calculating what it would cost to get a better cleanup." When he has asked officials to simply run the numbers — how much more would someone need to ask from Congress to get all the pipes removed, for example — he's been scoffed at, he said. "A halfway cleanup, that's what we're going to end up with," said Moore, clearly frustrated. "Money leftover is the primary driver of cleanup levels, not safety." That's not true, insists Legare. Even when the surface cleanup figure was 651 picocuries per gram, more than 10 times higher than that proposed today, officials deemed the level safe for a hiker or wildlife refuge worker, he said. "We can't go back to Congress and ask for more money if we can have a safe and compliant cleanup." Moore says he is not convinced and says he will never go for a walk at Rocky Flats, although he is a hiker. "I don't think it's a good idea for people to visit a plutonium-contaminated site," he said. The cleanup plan Late last month, workers in cherrypickers erected two white plastic tents over the 903 Pad, each one about one-third the size of a football field. Underneath, they can scoop up asphalt and contaminated soils without worrying about wind. The plan is to pluck up asphalt, gravel and dirt with front end loaders and excavators, pack the material into Dumpster-like boxes and truck it to a site in Utah for disposal as low-level waste, said Lane Butler, a manager with Kaiser-Hill Co., the firm coordinating Rocky Flats cleanup. Everyone in the tents must breathe supplied air and wear several layers of body protection, he said. Partly, that's because radioactive dust may drift into the air, despite several types of precautions, Butler explained, but it's also because the tents will trap machinery exhaust, and carbon monoxide will build up. He called the work technically unchallenging. And even though the 903 Pad sent more radioactivity offsite than any other site incident, the pad is far from the most dangerous place on site. The Energy Department's Legare said site managers measure risk in terms of presence of dangerous materials, such as plutonium and uranium, and worst-case scenarios, such as a tornado or a huge fire. Some rooms in old Rocky Flats buildings, the so-called "infinity rooms," are so contaminated that old-style radiation monitors recorded levels at "infinity." "When you compare absolute risk, something happening to 903 versus something happening to a building, 903 is not even on the scale," Legare said Longtime worker Kelly agreed wholeheartedly. "Having worked in (building) 771 for 20 years, when I hear somebody talking about knocking a wall down there, that scares the hell out of me," he said. But Kelly said he still worries about environmental contamination, he said, and he's not at all happy with the tradeoff — better surface cleanup for less underground work — site regulators are now proposing. "My position is there should be no tradeoff," he said. "I still think they should be made to bring it down to zero. It was zero when they found it." Contact Katy Human at (303) 473-1364 or humank@dailycamera.com. http://web.dailycamera.com ***************************************************************** 34 America Knows Best Who Should Rule Germany Pravda.RU ¹ Oct, 05 2002 “It would be better for the chancellor to resign.” The White House is dissatisfied with Germany very much, and the Pentagon is even more so. And this dissatisfaction is because of the German chancellor’s strict opinion concerning the US-led campaign against Iraq. Schroeder mentioned several times already that Germany will not participate in this war, even if the UN approves it. The statement made by German Minister of Justice Herta Daubler-Gmelin when she compared George W. Bush with Hitler only added fuel to the fire. During the past several days, German diplomats have made every possible effort to reduce the tension in relations with America, which arose after the above mentioned statements. The scandal seemed practically hushed up when Pentagon senior adviser Richard Perle arrived in Berlin. He was the aide to the US defense secretary under Ronald Reagan. As soon as he arrived in Berlin, he immediately announced that Gerhard Schroeder should resign. Perle doesn’t care at all that Germans elected the chancellor in accordance with their domestic interests. However, the American official strongly believes that if the chancellor doesn’t support US policy concerning Iraq, he should resign. Germany’s Handelsblat quotes Perle: “It would be better for the chancellor to resign.” Perle says that Schroeder’s anti-war election campaign strongly undermined the relations between Germany and America, and in a burst of revelation, he explained to the German people how much the chancellor’s pertinacity will cost the country. Is Germany still wishing to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council? It should forget about it for a long time, Perle says. According to him, it is because of the chancellor that the problem can be considered once again only by the next generation of Germans. Germany has been deprived of any authority to influence the Iraqi problem because of Schroeder’s “astonishing isolationism," Perle says. He adds that nobody made Schroeder do anything concerning Iraq, the USA especially. However, the chancellor, Perle says, “preferred to stay with his old friend for the sake of several votes at the elections.” Many observers say that relations between Berlin and Washington are on the lowest level ever registered since the end of WWII. They also admit that Perle’s statements proved to be the most harsh within the whole period of preparation for the war in Iraq. At first, US officials dared to speak only about Hussein’s resignation only. But, as we know, appetite grows while eating. Sergey Borisov PRAVDA.Ru Translated by Maria Gousseva Copyright ©1999 by " [http://www.pravda.ru/] ". When reproducing ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************