9-11’s LINGERING TOXIC MENACE

"Redevelopment" at Ground Zero Hits New Yorkers With Double-Whammy

by Wynde Priddy

More than three years after the historic attacks that ushered in a new global conflict and changed the Manhattan skyline forever, local residents still say that concerns about the health impacts of the disaster for New Yorkers have never been meaningfully addressed. Now many fear that the redevelopment effort underway in the area of Ground Zero will raise still more environmental risks.

Unanswered Questions

When the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, the disaster constituted an environmental hazard of unprecedented scope. As the towers burned and then collapsed, over 10,000 personal computers, hundreds of copy machines, thousands of fluorescent lights, five million square feet of painted surfaces, seven million square feet of flooring, and 600,000 square feet of window glass were vaporized and released into the air. Along with these more expected materials present in this uncontrolled demolition, there were also millions of rounds of lead ammunition used in a Secret Service shooting range, and materials such as arsenic, mercury, and chromium which were housed in a U.S. Customs laboratory in the complex. Concrete, asbestos, jet-fuel, and many other unknowable hazardous materials were incinerated at temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit; hot enough to produce toxic gas and ultra-fine particulates, or air-born dust, easily breathable and highly unsafe for humans. Fires continued to burn at the site until Dec. 19. Dr. Michael Weiden, a medical officer for the New York Fire Department, called it "the largest single acute exposure to high-volume particulate matter in a modern urban environment."

Yet the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a statement on Sept. 16, 2001 that said: "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York’s Financial District." On Sept. 18, EPA administrator Christie Whitman declared to New Yorkers: "The air is safe to breathe." Public advocates are still asking why these seemingly premature determinations were made. And why were the first responders and Ground Zero recovery workers not informed of–much less adequately protected from–the hazards?

In the weeks following September 11, all EPA press releases were filtered through the White House. In a 2003 report entitled "EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse," the EPA’s own Office of Inspector General found: "It appeared that EPA’s best professional advice was overruled when relaying information to the public in the weeks immediately following the disaster. Politics, it appears, trumped science in the communication of risks to the public."

There have been numerous independent studies and tests that reveal the true nature of the dust that blanketed much of Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. One dust sample tested by the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project (NYELJP) showed five percent asbestos, towering above the EPA’s own 1 percent threshold for human risk. An indoor sample of WTC dust taken at 80 John Street five months after September 11 found levels of fibrous glass–a potent carcinogen–ranging from 10 to 15 percent. Meanwhile, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection told Downtown residents and business owners to just clean up the WTC dust with a wet rag–exposing thousands to life-threatening toxins.

EPA officials contend that they didn’t want to cause mass panic, and that their tests showed only "low levels of asbestos." Critics respond that the conditions around Ground Zero did, in fact, call for extreme caution if not panic, and that even "low levels" of asbestos are still dangerous. They also point to the EPA’s use of outdated testing methods that apparently underestimated the risks; testing methods that were not good enough for their own building at 290 Broadway, which was tested and cleaned using the most advanced methods. An asbestos-removal contractor was brought in to decontaminate the EPA offices, at the same time that local residents were being told to use wet rags.

In the years since the Twin Towers fell, there has been no comprehensive cleanup, no health care program for those who were affected, and no accurate federally-issued statement of the true risks that people living or working near Ground Zero were exposed to in the weeks and months following September 11, according to a new study by the Sierra Club, "Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero." In fact, many first responders are having trouble with their workman’s compensation, and even workers and residents with health insurance are experiencing trouble getting the kind of medical services they need.

Brooklyn stands out as the most neglected community impacted by the disaster. The notion that the East River protected Brooklyn from the massive air-born dust cloud released by the collapse of the towers is easily dismissed by anyone who saw aerial photos of that day. The wind blew a huge plume of WTC dust directly into Brooklyn–yet there were no clean-up services provided to residents of Brooklyn, and virtually no attention paid to the suffering of Brooklynites living with the long-term health effects.

The federally-funded clean-up program was insufficient and poorly implemented all around, critics charge. Cleaning of local residences finally got underway in September 2002–a full year after the contamination. Those outside the small zone of Lower Manhattan covered by the program continued to get the same instructions: clean up the WTC dust with a wet rag. Some could afford professional cleanup, but many couldn’t. And with the EPA downplaying the risks, thousands had unknowingly exposed themselves by cleaning up the dust themselves, even within the zone covered by the program. Chinatown residents, who live in overcrowded conditions and frequently lack facility with the English language, were hit particularly hard by this disaster of judgment. Small businesses also suffered by being excluded from the clean-up. Predictably, most insurance companies refused to pay for testing or clean-up.

Money for Contamination, Not for Clean-Up

Organizations like New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), 9/11 Environmental Action and NYELJP, with U.S. Representatives Carol Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, are advocating on behalf of the thousands who were exposed to WTC toxins. They are also demanding adequate safety measures to be taken in the redevelopment of Ground Zero and the impacted zone now being overseen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), an authority jointly created by the city and state of New York in 2002.

The LMDC has bought two buildings in the area from the Deutsche Bank–one several blocks away from Ground Zero at 4 Albany Street, and one directly across from Ground Zero at 130 Liberty Street which was severely damaged and highly contaminated by the toxic dust and debris. The 40-story building on Liberty Street is the most heavily damaged building to remain standing after September 11, and must be demolished to make way for Freedom Tower, the $11 billion skyscraper, memorial, and transit hub that is slated to stand on the WTC site by 2015.

Plans for this potentially dangerous demolition are being drawn up by the LMDC. Activists and community members are demanding that the EPA carefully oversee the demolition to ensure the safety of both the workers and the area residents. For now, the EPA is only acting as an advisor to the LMDC, which is developing deconstruction plans to submit for EPA approval. In January 2005, the EPA rejected one LMDC submission, saying the plan lacked sufficient protections.

Though the LMDC will continue to submit revised plans, activists continue to demand more direct oversight of the demolition. David Newman, an industrial hygienist with NYCOSH says, "The EPA is the only agency with the experience, expertise, and resources to ensure that such demolition operations are conducted in a manner that protects public health."

More than half of the $2.7 billion of the September 11 recovery money pledged by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has already been spent by the LMDC. While community groups demand that at least a chunk of the remaining $850 million be directed towards addressing health and environmental concerns, and building affordable housing. Meanwhile, the LMDC plans on asking for more money–for the ambitious redevelopment scheme centered around the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.

"The LMDC keeps going for more funds," says Joel Kupferman, senior attorney at NYELJP and environmental counsel to the Firefighters Union. But he’s not confident that the endowment will bring about a safer redevelopment. "They’d rather send out glossy press releases than test the air," he says, adding that the LMDC’s quasi-private nature has resulted in "a lack of accountability and no elections to worry about."

"I would expect a private landlord to act in a self-serving way," Kupferman concludes. "But the LMDC is publicly funded and we’re alarmed that they’re not meeting a higher standard."

RESOURCES:

"Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero," Sierra Club, August 2004

NYCOSH

NYELJP

9/11 Environmental Action

LMDC

For more on 9-11’s health impacts, see WW4 REPORT #50

For more on the Ground Zero redevelopment effort, see WW4 REPORT #88

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April. 10, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue Reading9-11’s LINGERING TOXIC MENACE 

JOHN NEGROPONTE & THE DEATH-SQUAD CONNECTION

Bush Nominates Terrorist for National Intelligence Director

by Frank Morales

"He will be a key figure in US counter-terror operations." —BBC News, Feb. 17, 2005

"I think he could have stopped all these assassinations and torture… We’re against this nomination. If he didn’t see human rights violations in Honduras, it’s possible he won’t see human rights violations anywhere in the world." —Leo Valladares Lanza, former head, Honduran Human Rights Commission, quoted in New York Times, March 29, 2005

On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte, 65, to be the United States’ first National Intelligence Director." According to various published reports, Negroponte will be the president’s "primary briefer" in the area of global and domestic intelligence and counter-terror operations, coordinating and overseeing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other agencies.

His upcoming Senate confirmation seems assured, and that is a scary prospect. Why? Because Negroponte has a long and bloody criminal history, dating back to the early 1960s, of overseeing the training and arming of death squads, schooled in the techniques of torture, "forced interrogation," assassination and, as we shall see, even genocide. He has been described as an "old-fashioned imperialist," active for nearly four decades in Vietnam, Central America, the Philippines, Mexico and most recently Iraq. He got his start back in the days of the CIA’s Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives."

According to Bush, the ultra-rightist Negroponte has a real grip on today’s "global intelligence needs." Indeed he does. Negroponte’s long career in the "foreign service" has equipped him well to fulfill the requirements of global and domestic counterinsurgency. So while newly-installed Attorney General Gonzales supplies the legal basis for torture (as he did as a Bush White House counsel), and recently-installed Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff acquiesces (as he did as a Justice Department pointman on the post-9-11 sweeps), Negroponte is now in a position to ratchet up the repression domestically, and further the dissolution of democracy at home.

Although Negroponte’s office will be in its own projected $200 million headquarters, Bush has said that Negroponte "will have access on a daily basis." Negroponte has actually had close presidential access for awhile. Not quite four years ago, on Sept. 18, 2001, as the embers were still smoking at Lower Manhattan’s Ground Zero, Negroponte was appointed U.S. Representative to the United Nations. His mission was to work the floor and backrooms in preparation for Colin Powell’s infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN making the case for war on Iraq–which even Powell now admits was based on falsehoods. Then in April 2004, with a counter-insurgency war in Iraq rapidly spreading, Bush nominated Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador to that occupied nation following the June 2004 hand-over of "sovereignty" to as-yet "undetermined Iraqi authorities."

RAP SHEET

Negroponte was born in London in 1939, the son of a Greek-American shipping magnate. A graduate of Yale University, raised on New York’s Park Avenue, he was a "career diplomat" between 1960 and 1997, serving in eight countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, as well as holding positions in the State Department and White House. From 1971 to 1973, Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger, having worked as a "political affairs officer" (read: CIA) at the US Embassy in Saigon starting as early as 1964. At that time, he shared a room with Richard Holbrooke, then an official for the Agency for International Development, later US ambassador to the UN under Clinton. Negroponte and Holbrooke both became members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the oldest and most prestigious of US foreign policy think-tanks. Following Vietnam, Negroponte went on to "serve" for a number of years as an "economics officer" working out of the US Embassy in Ecuador.

Negroponte was appointed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan to head up the US Embassy in Honduras, where he stayed quite busy through 1985. From 1987-1989, he was deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, reporting to Colin Powell. From 1989-1993, he was ambassador to Mexico. Following a stint as ambassador to the Philippines from 1993-1997, he "retired" from the diplomatic corps and took a well-paid position as vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill, the big publishing company.

In 1981 President Reagan authorized paramilitary operations against the leftist government of Nicaragua. As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in establishing that country as a base of operations for the CIA’s "Contra" guerilla army then attempting to destabilize Nicaragua, with a 450-square-kilometer stretch along the border virtually turned over to the US-backed Nicaraguan rebels. He was also instrumental in the reign of terror then being overseen in Honduras by security chief Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, his good friend. Between 1980 and 1984, US military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to facilitate the crushing of popular movements through a covert "low intensity" war.

Although the high-level planning, money and arms for this repression flowed from Washington, much of the on-the-ground logistics was run out of the Embassy in Tegucigalpa. So crammed was the tiny country with US military troops and bases at this time, that it was dubbed the "USS Honduras." The captain of this ship, Negroponte, was in charge of the US Embassy when–according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun–hundreds of Hondurans deemed "subversives" were kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret Honduran army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

BATTALION 316

In addition to internal repression in Honduras, Battalion 316 also participated in the CIA’s covert war against Nicaragua. Members of the Battalion were conscripted by the CIA for such sensitive missions as training the Contra terrorists and even mining Nicaragua’s harbors. Negroponte worked closely with Gen. Alvarez in overseeing the training Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, torture and kidnapping. Honduras was the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere at this time after neighboring El Salvador. Increasing numbers of both Honduran and Salvadoran soldiers were sent to the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas to receive training. In El Salvador, the death squads were headed up by Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a 1972 graduate of the School of the Americas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, one of his classmates at the US "torture academy," was a founder and commander of Battalion 316.

Through his support of Battalion 316, Negroponte is directly complicit in the murder of at least 184 Honduran civilians officially found to have been killed by the death squad by a 1994 Honduran truth commission. The unit used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept prisoners naked–and, when no longer useful, killed them brutally, and buried them in unmarked clandestine graves. Women were raped, often in front of their families.

Negroponte was likely involved in a number of other like paramilitary formations throughout Central America, as compliant and "stable" Honduras served as a base for U.S. operations throughout the region. Recently, the New York Times (March 8, 2005) reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) has reopened an investigation, "based on new forensic evidence," into the massacre of "hundreds of peasants" at El Mozote, El Salvador in 1981–when 800 unarmed men, women and children were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers "from a battalion trained and equipped by the United States." Reports of the massacre were published at the time in the New York Times and the Washington Post–reports that were "dismissed" by Negroponte and other "officials of the Reagan administration."

Covert operations in Central America were paid for in part through the sale of cocaine. "CIA officials," according to the New York Times (July 17, 1998), "involved in the Contra program gave relatively low priority to collecting information about the possible drug involvement of Contra rebels"–while of course giving high priority to covering it all up. Ambassador Negroponte acquiesced in shutting down the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for CIA-facilitated cocaine trans-shipments to the United States, with profits going to the Contras. According to a 1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative report, "elements of the Honduran military were involved in the protection of the drug traffickers."

In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training centers there for Central American forces, principally directed at improving the lethal effectiveness of the Salvadoran military–at a time when the Salvadoran army was carrying out massacres such as the one at El Mozote, and army-linked death squads ratcheted up a death toll of at least 800, according to El Salvador’s UN-backed Truth Commission. Much of the training in these "anti-subversive" techniques–i.e., kidnapping, torture and murder–was done at El Aguacate air base in eastern Honduras. Established in 1984, the base was also used as a secret detention and torture center. In August 2001, excavations at the base uncovered 185 corpses, including those of two U.S. citizens–church workers involved in aiding the Honduran peasant movement–thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

In 1994, when the Honduran Human Rights Commission documented the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents in the previous decade, it specifically accused John Negroponte of complicity in a number of human rights violations. The Baltimore Sun reporters found that in 1982 alone, during Negroponte’s first full year as ambassador, the Honduran press carried at least 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the military. The US Embassy, however, certified the country’s record on human rights in such glowing terms that aides to Negroponte joked that they were writing about Norway, not Honduras. Rick Chidester, a former aide to Negroponte, revealed to the Sun that his supervisors had ordered him to remove allegations of torture and executions from his draft of the 1982 human rights report.

Jack Binns, who served under president Jimmy Carter as the ambassador to Honduras prior to Negroponte, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Recently, he stated regarding Negroponte, "I think he was complicit in abuses, I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities." (NYT, March 29, 2005) In one early ’80s cable, Binns reported that Gen. Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives, on Argentina’s "dirty war" of the 1970s, which, in turn, had been modeled on the techniques of European fascism in the 1930s and 40s–perhaps after having received some pointers from certain elements who fled there with US support after World War II. Recall that Adolf Eichmann, overseer of the apparatus of Jewish extermination during the Nazi era, was captured in Bueno Aires in 1960.

In May 1982, Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after the death-squad assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero the previous year. Negroponte claimed that the Embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Jack Binns said that a group of Salvadorans–including the women Bordes had been looking for–were abducted on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran secret police. They were later thrown out of helicopters while still alive. The Sun’s investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of these crimes, but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensure that the Embassy’s annual human rights report did not contain the full story. According to a 1996 BBC report, Negroponte "knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives." According to the Baltimore Sun report, Negroponte "was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on."

NEGROPONTE’S REVISIONISM

When Bush announced Negroponte’s nomination as ambassador to the UN shortly after coming to office, the move was met with widespread protest. Questioned at the time about whether he had turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras, Negroponte rejected the suggestion. "I do not believe then [sic], nor do I believe now, that these abuses were part of a deliberate government policy. To this day, I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

Despite the protests, the Bush administration did not back down–and even went so far as to silence potential witnesses who might have shed some light on Negroponte’s criminal history. On March 25, 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his then upcoming Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deported Hondurans was none other than Gen. Luis Alonso Discua, the former commander of Battalion 3-16, then serving as Honduras’ deputy ambassador to the UN!

Upon learning of Negroponte’s 2001 UN nomination, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch commented that "he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed" and that "one would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights by this appointment." Answer: What human rights? When queried about these "serious atrocities," Negroponte told CNN, "to the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform…. Frankly, I think that some of the retrospective efforts to try and suggest that we were supportive of or condoned the actions of human rights violators is really revisionistic."

In 1987, during the administration of George HW Bush, Negroponte returned to the National Security Council (NSC) to work under Colin Powell as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within two years, he was back in Latin America; appointed as ambassador to Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and helped facilitate Mexico’s passage of the NAFTA treaty–as well as likely U.S. intelligence operations that anticipated a popular reaction to the treaty. Negroponte left Mexico just ahead of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.

APPOINTMENT TO THE UNITED NATIONS

Negroponte was sworn in as U.S. Representative to the United Nations on Sept. 18, 2001. By November 2002, he was strong-arming a resolution through the UN Security Council which called for the "disarming" of Iraq. Standing in front of the Security Council with CIA director George Tenet, Negroponte stated that "the Resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. One way or another…Iraq will be disarmed." The New York Times would later report (March 29, 2005) that "Mr. Negroponte pressed on foreign colleagues American intelligence on Iraqi weapons that turned out to be profoundly flawed. If he was miffed, Mr. Negroponte never spoke out."

Negroponte also delivered a warning to other less hawkish members of the Security Council, stating that, "if the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of a further Iraqi violation, this resolution does not constrain any member state from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq, or to enforce relevant UN resolutions and protect world peace and security." As Stephen Kinzer, writing in the New York Review of Books (September 2001), put it, "giving him this job is a way of telling the UN: ‘We hate you’."

When faced with contention over US intentions during the UN debate leading up to the war in Iraq, Negroponte turned to grandstanding. In March 2003, Negroponte walked out of the General Assembly after Iraq’s UN envoy, Mohammed Al-Douri, accused the U.S. of preparing a war of aggression. "Britain and the United States are about to start a real war of extermination" he said, "that will kill everything and destroy everything."

NEGROPONTE IN BAGHDAD

On April 20, 2004, Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq, stating that, "he has done a really good job of speaking for the United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and peace." Calling him "a man of enormous experience and skill" was all that our courageous Senators required in order to vote him in by 95-3 on May 6. He was sworn in on June 23.

Negroponte’s US Embassy in Baghdad, housed in a palace that once belonged to Saddam Hussein, was and remains the largest embassy in the world, with a "diplomatic staff" of over 3,000. Opting for the kind of diplomacy he’s most familiar with, he immediately "shifted more than a $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army," diverting the funds "from reconstruction projects" to military and intelligence projects associated with "what intelligence officials describe as the largest C.I.A. station in the world." (NYT , March 29, 2005)

On Jan. 2, 2004, the Washington Post stated that a "major challenge" facing the diplomatic mission "will be sorting out the terms of the US military presence, which is expected to exceed 100,000 troops even after the occupation ends…" An un-named U.S. "official" stated that "we have to determine what command American troops will be under: Will it be part of some kind of multinational force, under the United Nations, under NATO? Or will they be relatively independent in an agreement with the Iraqi government? These are huge questions to be answered in a very short amount of time." We can rest assured that John Negroponte, the enforcer, made the Iraqi government an offer they couldn’t refuse in favor of the "relatively independent" option.

Shortly after taking up the position, Negroponte was asked about eyewitness statements that in late June 2004, Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi had, in a gesture of steadfast loyalty, personally executed up to six suspected insurgents in front of his US military bodyguards. While Allawi denies the accusation, Negroponte did not. In an e-mail to the Sydney Morning Herald, July 2004, he stated that "if we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy’s press office is concerned, this case is closed."

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey wrote of Negroponte’s arrogant side-stepping. "Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte’s record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing… This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1,000 American foreign service officers, plus American advisers salted throughout Iraqi ministries, as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq. Of course, ‘the case is closed’."

By the first weeks of January 2005, Negroponte was said to be overseeing the formation of death squads in Iraq, prompting media reports about a "Salvador option." MSNBC reported on Jan. 8, 2005 that the Pentagon was "intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the US government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually, the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success, despite the deaths of innocent civilians…"

One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi death squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers–even across the border into Syria, carrying out assassinations or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.

Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, was quoted in a Jan. 8, 2005 Newsweek story on the "Salvador Option," warning that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqis do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source suggested that "new offensive operations" are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Threatening everyone in a village with torture and death, if the village is deemed a potential base insurgent operations can be a very effective technique, whether the perpetrators are the Nazi SS in occupied Czechoslovakia, the death squads in El Salvador, or whatever new force is invented in Iraq. This strategy of tactical terror aims to sever an insurgency from it’s potential base of support.

At least one pro-occupation death squad is already in operation. On Jan. 11, 2004, just days after the Pentagon plans regarding possible "new offensive operations" were revealed, a new militant group, "Saraya Iraqna," began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps–up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reported. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised.

CIA COUNTERINSURGENCY: PROJECT X

During Negroponte’s Honduran ambassadorship, he worked closely with Duane R. Clarridge, aka "Mr. Marone", a high-ranking CIA officer based in Honduras, who was, according to a recent New York Times report (March 29, 2005), "running the covert war against communism in Central America." According to Clarridge, "Negroponte was a big supporter of the agency’s covert action mission" there.

At the time, the CIA utilized it’s "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" to teach young Honduran soldiers and others the methodology of torture. Dated 1983, the manual, one in a series of recently "declassified" documents, addresses, among other subjects, "coercive interrogation" techniques utilized in "the torture situation," which is, according to the manual, "a contest between the subject and his tormentor."

The manual discusses inflicting pain or threatening pain, depriving prisoners of food and sleep, making them maintain rigid positions for long periods, stripping them naked, and keeping them blindfolded or in prolonged solitary confinement. Disseminated throughout Latin America during the early 1980s, the manual appears to have been compiled from training courses given to members of the Honduran military. The manual can be assumed to have been sanctioned by higher-ups, including Negroponte, given, for example, its statement that, "illegal detention always requires prior [headquarters] approval."

This secret manual was compiled from sections of an earlier 1963 training manual entitled, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation." This was a U.S. Military Intelligence field manual written as part of the Army’s Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program. According to the manual, "all coercive techniques of interrogation are designed to induce regression" to a state of abject submission. The tormentor’s "principal coercive techniques" are "arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility, hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression."

In a March 1992 internal "report of investigation," which was sent to then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, seven such interrogation manuals used for years by the Pentagon’s Southern Command throughout Latin America were said to contain "objectionable" and "prohibited material." Army investigators traced the origins of the instructions on use of beatings, false imprisonment, executions and truth serums back to a top-secret program run by the Army Foreign Intelligence unit in the 1960s code-named "Project X." Written by US Army counterinsurgency experts starting in 1965, the Joint Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program used Project X to train U.S. allies in Vietnam, Iran, Latin America, and elsewhere around the world.

The report to Cheney noted that the "offensive and objectionable material" in the Project X manuals "undermines US credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment." Cheney of course, immediately embarked on a course of "corrective action," namely, to "recall" and destroy as many of the manuals as possible, shredding the "embarrassing" history–though some copies have survived, or perhaps were meant to.

Meanwhile, a July 1991 U.S. Southern Command "confidential" document records a phone conversation with a Captain Victor Tise, who served in 1982 as a counterinsurgency instructor at the School of the Americas (SOA). In it, Tise relates the history of the "objectionable material" in the manuals and the training courses that he assembled for use at the School. According to Tise, in 1976, following a decade of SOA tutoring, use of the Project X material was suspended by Congress and the Carter administration "for fear the training would contribute to Human Rights violations in other countries." But the program was restored by the Reagan administration in 1982, shortly after Negroponte arrived in Honduras.

Tise described Project X as a "training package to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries." These "techniques" were undoubtedly derived from the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination campaign which liquidated 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives." The course materials Tise put together, including the manuals that became the subject of the investigations, were sent to Defense Department headquarters "for clearance" in 1982. They "came back approved" and "UNCHANGED," despite the fact that Tise sought to remove–or so he said–the "objectionable" parts. Subsequently, hundreds of the unaltered manuals, "objectionable material" and all, were disseminated for use throughout US-militarized Latin America over the next nine years. Negroponte’s role in this particular bit of "objectionable" history remains shrouded, and shredded.

It appears that by 1965, the US intelligence community had seen fit to formalize the hard-learned lessons of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam by commissioning the top-secret Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center & School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from "field experience" to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997. According to the Washington Post (March 6, 1997), the Project X materials even suggested that "militaries infiltrate and suppress even democratic political dissident movements and hunt down opponents in every segment of society in the name of fighting Communism…"

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to foreign U.S. "military assistance groups." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world, in effect, a textbook for global counterinsurgency and terror warfare.

In its 1992 review, the Pentagon also acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons taught at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents. But disclosure of the full story was blocked when Defense Secretary Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. Nearly simultaneously, President George HW Bush pardoned six Reagan-Bush administration figures of any wrongdoing in the Nicaragua operations. These included former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and Duane Clarridge, by then named as intellectual author of another sinister murder manual, "Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare." Produced by the CIA, this booklet openly instructed in the assassination of public officials, and was distributed to the Nicaraguan Contras.

That George W Bush’s war on terrorism is really a global war of terror directed against the entire world becomes inescapably clear with the appointment of a man linked to this grisly history to head the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. Perhaps there is still time to apply pressure on the Senate and halt this next step in the legitimization of torture and state terrorism–if the citizenry, human rights community, clergy and responsible voices in the media can join in a single cry: STOP NEGROPONTE!

DEDICATED TO ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO, BORN 1917, ASSASSINATED MARCH 25, 1980.

Adopted from an article in The Shadow, New York City, Spring 2005

http://www.shadow.autono.net/

RESOURCES:

Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch, John Negroponte

Media for Social Change dossier on Negroponte

"In From the Cold War", Terry Allen, In These Times

Religious Task Force on Central America & Mexico report on El Aguacate air base

National Security Archive, "Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past"

"The Hidden History of CIA Torture," Alfred W. McCoy

"Lost History: Project X, Drugs & Death Squads," Robert Parry

Peter Dale Scott on Project X in Southeast Asia

Virtual Truth Commission on US Army torture manuals

KUBARK, Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, July 1963

US Army Field Manual 30-31B
——————-

Adopted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, April. 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

Continue ReadingJOHN NEGROPONTE & THE DEATH-SQUAD CONNECTION 

COLOMBIA: ANTI-FTAA PROTESTS, INDIGENOUS UNDER ATTACK

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

FREE TRADE PACT PROTESTED

The seventh round of negotiations for a "free trade treaty" (TLC) between the US, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador began on Feb. 7 in the Colombian Caribbean port city of Cartagena. Opponents of the TLC held a nationwide day of protest in Colombia on Feb. 10. Thousands of workers, campesinos, indigenous people and students marched in Cartagena to protest the TLC. Police reported no incidents. The demonstrators were barred from approaching the convention center where the talks were taking place. At least 1,000 students and unionists marched in Bogota, surrounded by riot police. At least 400 demonstrators marched in Cali. A protest was also held in the city of Pereira.

In Medellin, students began their anti-TLC protest at the University of Antioquia, then moved out to the street, where three armored vehicles of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) police unit were waiting. As demonstrators clashed with police outside, and police sprayed the students with water cannons, an explosion injured 18 students in the university’s pharmaceutical chemistry department. According to university vice rector Martiniano Jaimes Contreras, the accident was caused by homemade explosives which the students were assembling to throw at police. Three of the injured students were in critical condition with burns over 80% of their bodies, said Jaimes. (AP, AFPO, Notimex, Feb. 10; El Universal, Caracas, Feb. 11)

The nearly 1,500 TLC negotiators meeting in Cartagena were meanwhile having their own problems: by the time the talks ended on Feb. 12, no agreement had been reached on any of the 23 areas being discussed. The biggest sticking points include agricultural policy–Andean farmers are concerned about being forced to compete against heavily subsidized US agribusiness–and intellectual property, since the Andean countries are concerned that the TLC will make it impossible for them to produce generic medicines. Other touchy issues are the mobile phone market and used clothing imports from the US. (AP, Feb. 10, 12; AFP, Feb. 13)

The lack of progress forced a new schedule for the remaining talks. The eighth round is still scheduled for March 14 in Washington to discuss investment, textiles, intellectual property, rules of origin, and revision of annexes on service measures. But during March, Washington will also host separate bilateral talks on agriculture: March 9-10 with Peru; March 16-17 with Ecuador; and March 21-22 with Colombia. The Andean TLC’s ninth round has been set to start April 18 in Lima, focused on pharmaceutical patents. (Article from Americaeconomica.com posted Feb. 13 on Colombia Indymedia; Prensa Latina, Feb. 12; AFP, Feb. 13)

On Feb. 10 in Peru, some 7,000 cotton growers protested the TLC with a 24-hour strike, including blockades on the Panamerican highway in Santa province, Ancash department (north of Lima) and marches in the cities of Ica and Chincha, in Ica department (south of Lima). The strike was called by the Association of Small-scale Agrarian Farmers. (La Republica, Lima, Feb. 11)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

MORE INDIGENOUS KILLED

On Feb. 3, members of the rightwing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) murdered two young Wayuu indigenous men, Jose Eduardo Boscan Epinayu and Manuel Salvador Lopez Fernandez, in the village of Santa Cruz, Maicao municipality, in the northern Colombian department of La Guajira. Boscan and Lopez were members of the indigenous leadership of the Epinayu clan, and like many members of the community, they made a living peddling gasoline. The bodies of the two were found in the village of La Esperanza near the Venezuelan border; the killers had put AUC insignia on the victims’ clothing in order to sow doubts about the authors of the crime. On Feb. 2, the day before the killing, three AUC members known by the names "Zacarias," "Genito" and "Samir" had entered the home of Francia Boscan, the traditional matriarch of the community and mother of Jose Eduardo Boscan, and had threatened her and her family.

The Communities of the Wayuu People in Civil Resistence, based in the indigenous territory of Media and Alta Guajira, charge that the paramilitaries use violence to exert control over the region and establish a monopoly on gasoline sales and other economic activity. Community members say they even informed President Alvaro Uribe Velez on his recent trip to La Guajira that paramilitary groups were controlling the flow of contraband gasoline from Venezuela. In a statement, the communities ask why the government is seeking funds from the international community to give to "demobilized" paramilitaries, when the paramilitary groups "have accumulated enormous fortunes" and have given up none of the land or properties they control. (Comunidades del Pueblo Wayuu en Resistencia Civil, Feb. 3; National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) Press Bulletin #15, Feb. 3)

The latest killings followed a Feb. 1 communique from the Communities of the Wayuu People in Civil Resistence which marked the first anniversary of the killing of Wayuu youths Roland Ever Fince and Alberto Ever Fince, shot to death on Feb. 1, 2004, by the AUC’s "Wayuu Counterinsurgency Bloc." The communities’ statement decried the impunity enjoyed by the killers, who followed up the double murder with a massacre in Bahia Portete in April. (Comunidades del Pueblo Wayuu en Resistencia Civil, Feb. 1)

In Cauca department, southern Colombia, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) murdered Nasa indigenous leader Ever Cunda on Jan. 29 at his home in the hamlet of El Cabildo, Miranda municipality. Cunda worked as a prosecutor for the La Cilia Miranda indigenous reserve, and in 2003 he served as president of El Cabildo’s Community Action Board. The FARC had recently threatened Cunda, accusing him of being an informer for the army and paramilitaries. The FARC have also threatened two other Nasa leaders, Unidad Paez coordinator Jairo Lasso and Ernesto Cunda, a council member of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN). (ONIC Press Bulletin #14, Jan. 31)

PARAMILITARY MASSACRE IN ANTIOQUIA

On Jan. 29, rightwing paramilitaries apparently murdered seven people in a rural area of San Carlos municipality in Antioquia department, Colombia. The victims were sisters Luz Adriana and Flor Maria Garcia Ramirez; Jose Eugenio Garcia Quintero and his daughters Omaira and Gisela, who were 16 and 15 years old, respectively; and Hector Eduardo Giraldo and Giovanni Gallego. The mother of the Garcia Ramirez sisters survived and made her way with two of her children to the neighboring municipality of San Luis, where she reported the massacre to army troops. The killers had apparently accused the victims of being rebel sympathizers. (Message posted on Colombia Indymedia, Feb. 1)

ARMY KILLS CAMPESINO IN CHOCO

On Jan. 29, campesino leader Pedro Murillo was shot to death by members of the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade in the village of Cano Seco, Jiguamiando municipality, Choco department. The soldiers accused Murillo of being a guerrilla; he was hit with three bullets as he tried to flee, and the soldiers shot him three more times after he was wounded and on the ground. Shortly afterwards, some 500 soldiers from the 17th Brigade entered the town and over the course of Jan. 29 and 30, threatened and mistreated numerous residents of the Afro-Colombian community, accusing them of being leftist guerrillas or guerrilla supporters. The soldiers also detained a local resident for five hours, beating and threatening him and harassing his wife–who was giving birth at that moment–and his children.

The Interreligious Justice and Peace Commission urges human rights supporters to contact Vice President Francisco Santos to demand that a verification team including national and international non-governmental organizations be sent to the area immediately, and that the government respond to community demands for an end to the sowing of oil palm within the Collective Territory of Curvarado and Jiguamiando. Santos can be reached at fax #571-566-2387 or fsantos@presidencia.gov.co. The Commission also recommends asking Attorney General Edgardo Maya Villazon (fax #571-342-9723, reygon@procuraduria.gov.co) to investigate abuses by the 17th Brigade, and asking National Defender of the People (ombudsperson) Volmar Antonio Ortiz Perez (fax #571-640-0491, info@defensoria.org.co) to send a protective presence to the zone. (Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Jan. 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 6

INDIGENOUS PROTESTS IN BOGOTA

On Jan. 20, more than 400 Embera Katio indigenous people from the Sinu and Verde rivers area of Cordoba department in northern Colombia marched with dozens of supporters in Bogota to press the government to resume talks over their demands. The Embera protesters had been camped out in Bogota since Dec. 20, demanding compliance with an April 2000 agreement on compensation for damages caused by the Urra hydroelectric dam. The government insists it won’t negotiate under pressure. Indigenous people from at least 11 different ethnic groups took part in the march, including a delegation of members of the Indigenous Guard of Cauca department, a civilian self-defense group armed only with traditional staffs.

Earlier the same day, a group of Nasa (Paez) leaders from the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), led by the Indigenous Guard and accompanied by other indigenous leaders, held a ceremony in Bogota’s Plaza de Bolivar to honor Colombia’s Constitutional Court for its rulings favoring indigenous rights. Inside the court building, Constitutional Court president Jaime Araujo Renteria accepted the Indigenous Guard’s flag, given to him as a symbol of support. (ONIC, Jan. 18, 20 via Colombia Indymedia; El Pais, CaliJan. 21)

The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) organized the Jan. 20 march to support the Embera Katio protesters and also to denounce the murders of at least seven indigenous people since Jan. 6. Also on Jan. 20, the Colombia office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) issued a statement condemning the "bloody beginning of the new year" for Colombia’s indigenous communities and urging the Colombian government "to take effective measures to protect indigenous people." (EP, Jan. 21; AFP, Jan. 20)

The UN office specifically condemned the Jan. 18 murders of Wiwa community leader Angel Loperena Montero and his brother Dario Loperena in the town of San Juan del Cesar, La Guajira department. (EP, Jan. 21) Loperena was the general treasurer of the Wiwa Yugumaiun Bukuanarua Tayrona organization, based in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, which straddle the border of Cesar, La Guajira and Magdalena departments in northern Colombia. His brother was a teacher in the community. (ONIC, Jan. 19)

Authorities believe the murders were carried out by rightwing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) under the command of AUC leader "Jorge 40"; the UN office urged AUC "to make a public statement about the killings, to require its members to fully comply with humanitarian norms that demand absolute respect for the civilian population, and to fully observe the declared ceasefire." (EP, Jan. 21)

"This year began very badly for us," ONIC president Luis Evelis Andrade Casama told AFP, "and we predict that the violations of indigenous people’s rights by illegal armed groups and, on some occasions, by government forces, will continue to rise." (AFP, Jan. 20)

On Jan. 6, indigenous leader Saul Marquez Tovar disappeared in Leticia, Amazonas department; his body was found the next day across the border in Brazil (see below). On Jan. 17, four members of an indigenous family from Bolivar municipality in the south of Cauca department were found shot to death. The victims were Hermes Cordoba Samboni, vice president of the Communal Action Board of the Las Cruces neighborhood of the San Juan indigenous community, and his family members John Fredy Samboni, Edgar Samboni and Cesar Samboni. The four went fishing on Jan. 11 and never returned; two of their bodies were found in a rural area of Bolivar municipality, and the other two were found in San Pablo municipality in neighboring Narino department. All had been shot in the head, and two of them appeared to have been tied up before being killed. (Colprensa, Jan. 19 via Colombia Indymedia)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 23

AMAZON INDIGENOUS LEADER KILLED

Saul Marquez Tovar, an indigenous Uitoto leader from Colombia’s Amazonas department and president of the Zonal Indigenous Association of Arica, disappeared on Jan. 6 in the Colombian city of Leticia, which is the capital of Amazonas department and borders on Peru and Brazil. On Jan. 7 Marquez’s body was found in the Brazilian town of Tabatinga; his tongue had been removed, his teeth and fingernails were pulled out and he had five bullet wounds. Marquez had gone to Leticia to carry out financial transactions on behalf of his community. (ONIC, Jan. 12)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 16

GUERILLA ATTACKS ESCALATE

On Feb. 8 or 9, rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) attacked a patrol unit of the Boltigeros Battalion, part of the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade, killing 19 of the unit’s 28 soldiers and wounding at least five others. The attack took place in the area of Porrozo, on the border between the municipalities of Chigorodo and Mutata, in the Uraba region of Antioquia department. In a Feb. 9 communique, the FARC’s Jose Maria Cordoba bloc reported that it also killed nine soldiers and wounded an undetermined number of others in a Feb. 7 attack on the Bombona Battalion in the hamlet of La Sombra in Anori municipality, in eastern Antioquia. The FARC said no rebels were killed in the Porrozo attack, but two died in the Anori attack. Colombian government sources said 11 rebels were killed in the Porrozo clash. (Communique from FARC-EP Estado Mayor Bloque Jose Maria Cordoba, Feb. 29; El Tiempo, Bogota, Feb. 11)

On Feb. 11, the Bogota daily El Tiempo also reported that four soldiers and 18 alleged rebels were killed in combat in Vistahermosa municipality, in the southern department of Meta; a noncommissioned officer and six rebels were killed and five soldiers wounded in Urrao municipality, western Antioquia; and the FARC burned 10 vehicles on a highway in southern Narino department. (ET, Feb. 11) The latest attack came only a week after the FARC killed 14 marines in a surprise attack on Feb. 1 at the Iscuande naval base in Narino (see below). The wave of rebel attacks has led to much public and press speculation about the success of President Alvaro Uribe Velez’s "Patriot Plan" military offensive against the FARC. [AFP 2/12/05]

On Feb. 10, following the army’s humiliating defeat in Porrozo, Gen. Hector Jaime Fandino Rincon was dismissed as commander of the 17th Brigade and replaced by Gen. Luis Alfonso Zapata Uribe, head of the Military Forces Operations Directorate in Bogota. Fandino will remain in the army while the incident is investigated. (ET, Feb. 11) Fandino and Zapata studied together at the US Army School of the Americas, graduating from the same "small unit infantry tactics C-7" course in February 1976, while they were second lieutenants. (SOA Graduates List) The 17th Brigade, based in Carepa–just north of Chigorodo–was recently accused of brutalizing an Afro-Colombian community in Jiguamiando municipality, in neighboring Choco department. (See above)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

Early on Feb. 1, some 200 members of the FARC launched a surprise attack on a Colombian navy base in the southern department of Narino, killing 14 marines, including the lieutenant who commanded the unit, and wounding 25 others, most of them seriously. The rebels used assault rifles and homemade mortars fashioned from cooking gas canisters in their attack on the Iscuande naval base, located on the Iscuande river near where it empties into the Pacific, in Iscuande municipality. The attack lasted four hours; the rebels retreated when artilleried helicopters and planes of the Colombian Air Force arrived. A Navy communique said the attack was carried out by the FARC’s 29th Front.

Most of the dead and wounded were participants in the government’s "campesino soldier" program, whose members do permanent military service in the areas where they live. Colombian Navy commander Adm. Mauricio Soto said at a Bogota press conference that government forces–consisting of 60 marines and 40 police agents stationed in the town–"repelled this attack, prevented the taking of Iscuande municipality…"

While the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez has launched a major offensive against rebel forces, especially in southern Colombia, a recent study by the Security and Democracy Foundation, headed by analyst Alfredo Rangel, showed that the FARC launched 900 attacks on government troops in the first two years of Uribe’s administration, compared to 907 over the previous four years. The previous president, Andres Pastrana Arango, pursued a policy of peace negotiations with the FARC. (Miami Herald, Feb. 2; AP, Feb. 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 6

BUSH REQUESTS MORE AID

On Feb. 7, US president George W. Bush sent the US Congress his fiscal year 2006 budget request, including $550 in "anti-drug" money for Colombia, of which more than $393 million is direct aid to the Colombian military and police forces. The total amount is about $10 million less than in fiscal year 2005, a State Department official said. The US has spent over $3 billion on mostly military aid for "Plan Colombia" since 2000, but that program is due to expire at the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30. The State Department official, who requested anonymity, dismissed the idea that some of the coming year’s military aid could be shifted to social programs: "The intent is indeed to change the focus as the military phase achieves success. We are achieving success, but we’re not there yet." The new Colombia aid proposal comes as part of a $735 million request for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative in fiscal 2006, $4 million more than 2005. Unlike Plan Colombia, the Andean Counterdrug Initiative has no expiration date. (Miami Herald, Feb. 8)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 13

VENEZUELA: KIDNAPPING CONFLICT RESOLVED?

Tens of thousands of supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias marched in Caracas on Jan. 23 to protest the violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty by neighboring Colombia. The march came in response to the Colombian government’s Jan. 12 admission that it paid bounty hunters to kidnap FARC representative Rodrigo Granda Escobar in Caracas on Dec. 13. The marchers also carried banners reading "Bush: Venezuela Is Not Iraq!" Speaking on Jan. 23, Chavez accused the US government of being behind the Granda incident: "This provocation came from Washington, it is the latest attempt by the imperialists…to ruin our relations with Colombia," he said. The US had offered its "100% support" for Colombia’s actions. Anti-Chavez forces tried to organize a march the same day, Jan. 23, but only managed to draw a few dozen people. (Reuters, AFP, BBC, Jan. 24)

The Granda incident sparked a freeze in trade and diplomatic relations between Colombia and Venezuela. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez announced on Jan. 29 that the conflict had been resolved; in a tour of the border department of Arauca, Uribe sent his greetings to Chavez and the Venezuelan people, and thanked the countries which intervened to negotiate a solution. Those countries reportedly included Brazil, Peru, Spain, Mexico and most notably Cuba, whose president Fidel Castro Ruz apparently played a key role. Speaking on Jan. 30 from Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he was attending the World Social Forum, Chavez said the crisis with Colombia was not yet resolved and that its resolution would depend on the results of a meeting planned between Uribe and him in Caracas on Feb. 3. (AP, AFP, DPA, Jan. 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 30

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, March 7, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: ANTI-FTAA PROTESTS, INDIGENOUS UNDER ATTACK 

BOLIVIA: PRESIDENT RESIGNS AMID GROWING UNREST

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

EDITOR’S NOTE: As we go to press March 7, Bolivia’s President Carlos Mesa has handed in his resignation to the country’s congress, citing ongoing anti-government protests. Mesa was caught between leftist protesters demanding greater state control over oil and gas companies and a free-market-oriented separatist movement in Santa Cruz department, where much of the oil and gas reserves are located. Left opposition lawmaker Evo Morales had announced a nationwide road blockade unless congress passes legislation increasing taxes on foreign oil companies from 15 to 50% of their sales. Mesa refused to support this, saying “the international community rejects such a law.” In February, he had reshuffled his cabinet and deployed the military to maintain control of oil and gas fields. But protests continued, and Mesa, submitting his resignation, said, “I can’t continue to govern under these circumstances.” Congress could vote to keep Mr. Mesa in office, but if his request to step down is accepted, the leader of the Senate, Hormando Vaca Diez, will take power. (UK Guardian, VOA, UPI, March 7)—WW4 REPORT

MESA BACKS DOWN ON AUTONOMY

On Jan. 28, bowing to demands for regional autonomy from the powerful civic committee of Santa Cruz department, Bolivian president Carlos Mesa Gisbert agreed to let the country’s nine departments seek greater autonomy and elect their own governors. Mesa’s Supreme Decree 27988, signed Jan. 28, sets elections for governors in all departments for June 12 to finish out the current 2002-2007 terms. Until now, the governors have always been chosen by the president. Mesa also agreed to allow departments to hold referendums on autonomy, starting with a referendum in Santa Cruz in June.

Santa Cruz governor Carlos Hugo Molina resigned on Jan. 27, and an assembly of 200 legislators, council members and indigenous delegates gathered in the city of Santa Cruz, the departmental capital, on Jan. 28. In response to Mesa’s concessions, the assembly stopped short of defying the government with an autonomy declaration, instead approving the creation of a “provisional autonomous assembly” charged with directing the autonomy process and negotiating with the government. Mesa praised the assembly, calling it legal and consitutional. Santa Cruz residents held a victory rally on Jan. 28, and by the evening of Jan. 29, protesters had ended occupations at seven of the eight public buildings in Santa Cruz which they had taken over to demand autonomy. (A group of 53 university students were still holding the governor’s office.)

As part of the Jan. 28 agreement with the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, Mesa also ordered a tiny reduction in the price of diesel fuel, from 3.74 to 3.72 bolivianos per liter (3.72 bolivianos is about $0.46). Workers in Santa Cruz said they would stage new protests if Mesa didn’t completely scrap the fuel price hike he decreed on Dec. 30. (Los Tiempos de Cochabamba, NYT, Miami Herald, Jan. 29; La Jornada, Mexico, Jan. 30)

In the rest of Bolivia, and even among many Santa Cruz residents, feelings about the Santa Cruz “victory” were mixed. On Jan. 28, at least 100 indigenous people from the Altiplano came to Santa Cruz to block a main road there in protest against the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. The protesters said they support autonomy, but only through a constitutional assembly. Civic Committee members confronted the indigenous protesters and a clash ensued; several people were arrested. Marches were also held Jan. 28 in La Paz, Oruro and Potosi to protest the Santa Cruz Civic Committee’s autonomy pressures. (Los Tiempos, Jan. 29)

Also on Jan. 28, the Assembly of the Guarani People (APG) issued a 12-point public statement demanding the creation of a 10th department, called El Chaco. The indigenous Guaranies want to form the new autonomous department out of five provinces: Cordillera (now in Santa Cruz department), Hernando Siles and Luis Calvo (now in Chuquisaca department) and Gran Chaco and O’Connor (now in Tarija department). APG president Nelly Romero said the Guaranies can’t allow the regional oligarchy to continue speaking in their name and profiting from their oil-rich territory. (Los Tiempos, Jan. 29)

Evo Morales, cocalero leader and legislative deputy for the Movement to Socialism (MAS), criticized Mesa “for having ceded much to the Bolivian oligarchy organized in the Santa Cruz Civic Committee.” Morales said the calling of an election for departmental governors “violates the Constitution and resolves the issue of autonomy outside of what will be the Constitutional Assembly,” currently planned for the second half of 2005. Morales said campesinos and cocaleros would demonstrate against the new decree. (La Jornada, Jan. 30)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 30

PROTESTS CONTINUE IN LA PAZ

On Jan. 17, at least 10,000 people demonstrated in La Paz to demand the cancellation of an electricity contract with the Spanish company Electropaz. Following up on their victory in ousting a private water company from La Paz and neighboring El Alto, the protesters were also demanding state control of hydrocarbons resources, and that ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada face trial for the death of protesters in October 2003. Also on Jan. 17, campesino coca producers blocked roads in the Los Yungas region of La Paz department to protest the government’s coca eradication policies. (La Jornada, Jan. 18)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 23

EX-MINERS BLOCK ROADS

On Feb. 23, some 500 former miners from around Bolivia set up a roadblock in Caracollo and began a march to La Paz to demand the return of their payments into a government housing fund and to protest the fund’s recent payout to a construction company. The liquidator of the defunct National Social Housing Fund (Fonvis), Javier Elias Ayoroa, distributed $2 million to the construction company Cascarena after President Carlos Mesa issued a decree during the week of Feb. 14 releasing nearly $4.8 million. The retired miners are demanding the immediate return of their investments in the fund, which they paid into for over 22 years without ever receiving a land plot or a home, according to miners’ leader Serafin Chambi. The ex-miners are also demanding the removal of the Fonvis liquidator, Ayoroa, whom they accuse of corruption. (El Diario, La Paz, Feb. 24)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, March 6

LAND CLASH IN COCHABAMBA

On Feb. 20, Bolivian police and local area residents attacked a group of 180 families, members of the Landless Movement (MST), who had established a squatter encampment in the zone of El Frutillar, near Tunari park. MST member Luis Quinaya was badly beaten in the confrontation and died on Feb. 21; his health had apparently been previously weakened by weather conditions at the encampment. Carlos Maldonado, local director of natural resources and environment, admitted there was a confrontation, but said the only two people injured in the clash were area residents, not squatters. MST leaders Johnny Tapurata and Hilda Viscarra said the residents who confronted the squatters pretend to be environmentalists interested in reforesting the area, but are actually trying to sell plots of land there. (Los Tiempos de Cochabamba, Feb. 23)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 27

INDIGENOUS LEGAL OFFICE RAIDED IN AMAZON

On Jan. 5, some 30 people led by Arturo Vidal Tobias of the Agroforest Association of Riberalta (ASAGRI) forcibly entered the offices of the Center of Legal Studies and Social Research (CEJIS) in Riberalta, Beni department, which supports indigenous communities in the northern Amazon region of Bolivia. The assailants threatened the CEJIS staff with death, looted and destroyed office equipment and burned documents concerning land disputes. As they left, they told a CEJIS staff member that he must leave Riberalta within 48 hours, and if they saw him there after that they would set him on fire. The same day, deputy mayor Lucio Mendez Camargo of Vaca Diez province urged CEJIS to close its offices until Jan. 13, when a national government commission was to arrive to supposedly resolve a land conflict between the Miraflores indigenous community and the Yarari-Tirina brothers, who are fighting eviction from the territory owned by Miraflores. On Jan. 8, ASAGRI circulated a public statement signed by Arturo Vidal, justifying the raid against CEJIS and accusing organizations which support the Amazon indigenous communities of “pitting them against their campesino and indigenous brothers.” (Centro de Estudios Juridicos e Investigacion Social, Jan. 6, via Equipo Nizkor)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 23

EX-PREZ CHARGED WITH GENOCIDE

On Feb. 21, the Bolivian attorney general’s office formally charged ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada with genocide. Sanchez de Lozada and his cabinet are facing trial for responsibility in the October 2003 killing of at least 60 people, carried out by military and police forces seeking to crush a popular rebellion against his government in the cities of El Alto and La Paz. Prosecutor Pedro Gareca brought the formal charges against Sanchez de Lozada in the city of Sucre. Also accused of genocide are Sanchez de Lozada’s defense minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, and interior minister, Yerko Kukoc. Another 13 of Sanchez de Lozada’s cabinet ministers are charged with “complicity.” The rebellion forced Sanchez de Lozada to resign on Oct. 17, 2003, and flee to the US, where he remains. (AFP, Feb. 21))

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Feb. 27

See also WW4 REPORT #93

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, March. 7, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue ReadingBOLIVIA: PRESIDENT RESIGNS AMID GROWING UNREST 

ISLAM KARIMOV: UZBEKISTAN DICTATOR, U.S. ALLY

by Eric Stoner

"He may be a son of a bitch," a U.S. president is said to have commented
about one brutal dictator or another, "but he’s our son of a bitch." The
fact that on the worldwide web the line is attributed to no fewer than five
presidents, from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, speaks volumes about
20th-century U.S. foreign policy.

Over the last decade, a new dictator, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, has
taken the "our son of a bitch" place. U.S. support for this Central Asian
tyrant exposes the degree of hypocrisy in a foreign policy that claims
democracy, freedom and human rights as its core values. It also invites
serious backlash against the United States in the future–and is leading to
immense suffering for the Uzbek people now.

In the heart of Central Asia, due west of the oil- and natural gas-rich
Caspian Sea and directly north of Afghanistan, the former Soviet republic
of Uzbekistan has gained significant strategic importance to the United
States in recent years. It is a land with a long and rich history, home to
several ancient cities that were once important stops on the famous Silk
Road connecting Europe and Asia. Islam has flourished there since its
introduction to the country in the seventh century. Now, nearly 90% of
Uzbekistan’s 26 million citizens are Muslim. And with such a large
population–almost 50% of Central Asia’s total–Uzbekistan has become the
region’s major power.

The new nation’s recent history has been turbulent. As in many struggling
countries, a wealth of natural resources has not translated into prosperity
for the majority of the population. In fact, Uzbekistan is one of the
poorest of the former Soviet republics, with nearly 80% of the population
living in poverty, according to Andrew Stroehlien of the International
Crisis Group. Uzbekistan can also claim to have the most repressive regime
of the former Soviet Union, with the possible exception of Turkmenistan.

President Islam Karimov, who rules with the proverbial iron fist, first
came to power as leader of the Communist Party in Uzbekistan in 1989, right
before the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time, he was adamantly opposed
to independence; CNN reported that in 1991 he said, "If we remain part of
the Soviet Union, our rivers will flow with milk. If we don’t, our rivers
will flow with the blood of our people."

Despite his efforts to keep the country tied to the collapsing Soviet
empire, Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991 and promptly held elections.
Karimov maintained power with 88% of the vote in an election that was
criticized heavily by foreign observers. He managed to extend his rule
through 2000 via an apparently fraudulent plebiscite in 1995. He won
another seven-year term in a 2000 election that, according to Human Rights
Watch, even U.S. officials admitted was "neither free nor fair and offered
Uzbekistan’s voters no true choice."

If democracy has not fared well in Uzbekistan since its independence,
neither have human rights. Throughout the 1990s, both the international
human rights community and the U.S. State Department were reporting on the
bleak situation in Uzbekistan. The annual State Department "Report on Human
Rights Practices" in 1997 found the police and security forces "used
torture, harassment, and illegal searches and arbitrarily detained or
arrested opposition activists on false charges… The Government severely
limits freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of expression is
constrained by an atmosphere of repression that makes it difficult to
criticize the Government publicly."

U.S. Rewards Abuse

So how did the United States, the self-proclaimed global protector of
democracy and human rights, react to those conditions?

By giving the heavy-handed dictator in Uzbekistan a firm pat on the back.
Detailed data compiled by the Center for Defense Information reveal that
the United States began giving the country military assistance through the
International Military Education and Training program starting in 1995, and
grants to buy U.S. equipment with Foreign Military Financing funds
beginning in 1997. The U.S also participated in the first joint training
exercise of the multinational Central Asian Battalion–called CENTRAZBAT–in
1997. According to Kenley Butler of the Center for Nonproliferation
Studies, for this operation-which was to be the first in a series of joint
exercises-500 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division did a
parachute drop from Air Force C-17 transport aircraft to train forces from
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and several other countries in the
region.

Why would the United States aid such a tyrant militarily, especially on the
heels of such a damning report from the State Department? For the same
reason members of the Taliban were treated like royalty during a 1997 visit
to the United States: other interests-especially business interests-often
trump the stated ideals of U.S. foreign policy; in this case, the U.S.
desire for access to regional energy resources took precedence. As Michael
Klare pointed out in his recent book Resource Wars, surveys at the time had
just discovered "vast reserves of oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea
region." He documents how numerous U.S. officials–up to President Bill
Clinton–began talking openly about the strategic importance of these
resources and their intimate relationship to U.S. "energy security."

"CENTRAZBAT 97," Klare notes, "must be viewed against this backdrop.
Having identified the Caspian’s energy supplies as a security interest of
the United States, the White House was now demonstrating–in the most
conspicuous manner possible–that the United States possessed both the will
and the capacity to defend that interest with military force if necessary."

Relations "Flourish"

While military ties with Uzbekistan were initiated during these years and
aid began to flow, it remained relatively limited. This was all to change
following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the rush to war, the United
States was in need of a great deal of international cooperation, and
Karimov sat in the perfect strategic position. Uzbekistan provided critical
support for the attack on Afghanistan by allowing U.S. forces to use Uzbek
airspace and the Karshi-Khanabad base, located only about 90 miles north of
the Afghan border.

After Karimov’s cooperation with the invasion, any pretense that human
rights were a priority of U.S. policy toward Uzbekistan was quickly
abandoned, and relations "flourished" (according to the State Department’s
2004 "Background Note" on the country). U.S. aid to Uzbekistan almost
quadrupled over the next year-from $85 million in 2001 to nearly $300
million in 2002. The Uzbek dictator was even honored with an invitation to
the White House; in March 2002, during their 45-minute meeting, Karimov and
President Bush signed a declaration on the strategic partnership between
their two countries. The horrifying stories of repression and abuse that
continued to emanate from Uzbekistan apparently had no affect on this
budding friendship.

Karimov seemed to take the administration’s warmth as a sign that he could
do no wrong in its eyes, and-like many other heads of state-began using the
new "war on terror" as a cover to silence his political opponents. In the
name of fighting Islamic fundamentalism-namely the outlawed nonviolent Hizb
ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) and the militant Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, or IMU, which has claimed several lives in armed attacks-his
government imprisoned an estimated 7,000 people. According to a 319-page
report released last March by Human Rights Watch, independent Muslims
accused of being fundamentalists have been "arrested, tried in grossly
unfair proceedings, and receive sentences of up to twenty years in prison.
Those targeted for arrest include people whom the state deems as ‘too
pious,’ including those who pray at home or wear a beard-which is a sign of
piety."

The Economist reported in March 2004 that after a 2002 visit to Uzbekistan,
Theo van Boven, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, called torture
there "institutionalized, systematic and rampant." In one particularly
grotesque example, according to the UK Guardian of Feb. 13, 2004, a
forensic report commissioned by the British Embassy revealed that one
Muzafar Avazov died in an Uzbek prison in August 2002 after being
"immersed" in boiling water. Avazov’s mother was sentenced to six years
hard labor in a top-security prison after she complained to authorities
about her son’s death and "incriminating leaflets" were conveniently found
in her apartment.

This evidently constituted significant improvement to Washington, as the
State Department continued every six months to certify U.S. aid to
Uzbekistan, which was conditioned on "substantial and continuing progress"
in addressing human rights. The effect of this aid was predictable. As
Hakimjon Noredinov, a 68-year-old human rights activist whose son was
nearly beaten to death by the security service, told The Guardian May 26,
2003: "Because of the U.S. help, Karimov is getting richer and stronger."

In the last couple of years, U.S. aid to Karimov has slowed significantly.
This summer, for the first time, the United States decided to withhold $18
million in military and economic aid because of Uzbekistan’s lack of
progress. Interestingly though, it was not a lack of progress in human
rights that led Secretary of State Colin Powell to decertify Uzbekistan,
but rather the, "lack of progress on democratic reform and restrictions put
on U.S. assistance partners on the ground." In a press statement announcing
the secretary’s decision, the State Department was quick to emphasize that
the country remains, "an important partner in the war on terror," and that
the decision to cut aid by no means meant that "our desire for continued
cooperation with Uzbekistan has changed."

But in fact the administration is not merely unconcerned about torture and
human rights–in Uzbekistan or anywhere else for that matter. As the Sunday
Times of London revealed Nov. 14, 2004, U.S. officials have actually found
torture useful for their own purposes. The Times’ Stephen Grey obtained
evidence that agents of the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA have leased
a Gulfstream 5 jet to take suspected terrorists-reportedly bound, gagged
and sedated-to prisons in countries that are notorious for torture,
including at least seven trips to Uzbekistan.

Boiling Point

This U.S. policy and the brutality of Karimov’s regime have led to the
inevitable. As a report released last March by the International Crisis
Group stated: "Evidence suggests that Islamic radicalism is still on the
rise in Uzbekistan, and shifting from dissatisfaction with President
Karimov to wider dissatisfaction with the West’s support for his regime."
This past Nov. 1, in the town of Kokand, between 5,000 and 10,000
people took to the streets in protest against new government restrictions
on the market traders-the largest demonstration against Karimov’s
government in a decade. According to Galima Bukharbaeva of the Institute
for War and Peace Reporting, the demonstrators were actually protesting
more than just the new restrictions: they also "called on officials to rein
in the police, often criticized for excessively repressive behavior, and to
‘free Muslims from jail.’" Bukharbaeva adds: "Political analysts say public
discontent with government policies and the general economic situation in
Uzbekistan is close to boiling point, creating the potential for protests
on a wider scale, and further violence."

So the United States will have to choose. Will it side with the dictator or
the people? Will this country stick by Karimov until the bitter end, as it
did, for example, with the Shah of Iran? Or will it turn on Karimov and
invade his country once he outlives his usefulness or ceases to follow the
U.S. line, as successive U.S. administrations did with
Manuel Noriega in Panama or Saddam Hussein in Iraq?

Or will we choose yet another path? We could, for instance, live up to our
ideals and play a more constructive role, as the U.S. finally did in
Serbia. There Washington provided some $25 million for Otpor, the
nonviolent student-led movement, and other groups that ousted Slobodan
Milosevic in the fall of 2000. It was one time when the U.S. government
assisted in bringing down a dictator and giving new hope to a people who
for too long had lived under the dark cloud of repression. But given the
strategic stakes in Uzbekistan and the bellicose stance of the Bush
administration, it will probably take significant pressure from the U.S.
public to push their government to pursue such a course.

—

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of the Nonviolent
Activist, the magazine of the War Resisters League, New York City:
http://www.warresisters.org/nva.htm

RESOURCES:

Center for Defense Information page on U.S. military aid to Uzbekistan:
http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=1623

U.S. State Department Background Note on Uzbekistan:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2924.htm

The Economist on torture in Uzbekistan:
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2551988

The Guardian on torture:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html

and on forced labor:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1146979,00.html

The Sunday Times on "torture flights":
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1357699,00.html

See also WW4 REPORT #97

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, March. 7, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue ReadingISLAM KARIMOV: UZBEKISTAN DICTATOR, U.S. ALLY 

NUCLEAR AGENDA 2005

Bush Charts New Generation of Warheads

by Chesley Hicks

Despite the Cold War’s conclusion 15 years ago, the United States’ being
party to several anti-nuclear proliferation treaties, and President Bush’s
strident commands for the cessation of all nuclear weapons programs in the
Middle East and Asia, the current administration is promoting domestic
nuclear programs that could initiate another arms race.

In November 2004, anti-proliferation advocates felt a jolt of optimism when
the Republican-majority congress hamstrung the Bush administration’s
proposals for the institution and expansion of four controversial nuclear
programs. However, during its recent February 2005 federal budget request,
the administration revived efforts to fund the programs.

During the 2004 session, Congress eliminated funding for two programs:
research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), or "bunker
buster," a nuclear bomb that can tunnel deep beneath the earth’s surface,
and "advance concepts" research that would seek to design a new generation
of nuclear weapons. Similarly, funding was severely curtailed for the
development of a new "Modern Pit Facility." A pit facility is a factory
that produces the fissile cores–the plutonium detonators–for nuclear
weapons. Presently, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
produces small numbers of these plutonium pits, but the National Nuclear
Security Administration (NNSA) seeks to a build a larger, advanced factory
(at a still undisclosed location) that will produce them in greater numbers
and with new designs.

With bipartisan support, Representative David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), Chairman
of the House Energy Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water
Development, spearheaded the 2004 opposition, emphasizing that the
country’s current security issues do not call for more nuclear warheads,
and that the government’s mandate should be to reduce the absurdly
redundant nuclear stockpile rather than add to it.

Congress also requested a revision of the nuclear "Stockpile Plan," which
describes the size and structure of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Congress’ message was that new money will not be allocated to nuclear
programs that do not articulate definitive goals–which is how many of the
Bush Administration’s nuclear pursuits have been characterized.

Hobson redirected $9 million the administration had requested for the
advanced concepts research toward studies to instead improve the
reliability and lifespan of existing warheads. Calling it research for a
"reliable replacement warhead," the initiative acknowledges nuclear
advocates’ contention that the country’s aging arsenal needs fixing, but
underscores Hobson’s hope to ultimately reduce the arsenal, albeit with
fewer but better weapons.

Which is where matters get murky. In the president’s budget released the
first week in February 2005, the Energy Department sought–reportedly at
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s behest–$4 million to continue the
"bunker-buster" study. If the DOE request passes, presumably Pentagon
appropriations will follow for the second phase of the project. Ostensibly,
the project meets Hobson’s "reliable replacement" plan, as the new study
seeks to put an already existing warhead, now in the B-83 nuclear gravity
bomb, into a new delivery system-one that is capable of deeply penetrating
the earth’s surface. Critics are now asking how this plan differs in any
meaningful way from either the bunker buster or the advanced concepts
programs shot down by congress last November.

All of which further begs the question: If a new bomb is developed, won’t
it need to be tested? Though the U.S. signed the Comprehensive Nuclear
Test-Ban Treaty in 1996, replacing field explosions with computer-simulated
tests based on data collected from decades of nuclear detonations, in the
ensuing years Congress has refused to ratify the treaty, effectively
preventing it from going into force. While the U.S. hasn’t conducted a full
nuclear explosion since 1992, in recent years the NNSA has conducted a
series of "subcritical" tests at the Nevada Test Site, which stop short of
a full detonation-but which use real plutonium pits, and which critics call
a threat to the languishing Test-Ban Treaty. The White House has recently
sought approval from Congress to shorten the amount of preparation time
legally required between completion of a new nuclear weapon and the
field-testing of that weapon in an underground explosion–which, despite
official denials, seems to indicate an intention to resume full testing.

So far Congress has contained the most aggressive of these ambitions. But
while Hobson has been quoted as praising the cooperative institution of the
reliable replacement warhead plan, Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department
seems to have found a way to twist that plan into serving its own nuclear
goals. The often inscrutable bureaucracy that surrounds the Defense
Department and federal budget allocation in general could very well allow
it to succeed.

"The reality is that the federal budget is a huge morass," says Stephen
Young, senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The
Congressional budget requests we’re discussing are in the millions, the
overall nuclear Stockpile Stewardship program’s budget is 6.3 billion." He
added that the outcome of this year’s budget request "depends on how
closely the issues are tracked."

Young and countless others contend that the administration would most
benefit the country’s security by heeding its own message to de-escalate
nuclear proliferation. The number of deployed and imminently deployable
nuclear weapons in the US arsenal could destroy the entire planet. Experts
maintain that any further refurbishing is unnecessary and critically
misguided. Young describes the warhead number as "preposterous," and says,
compounding the problem, "Russia currently maintains a large arsenal
because of the US’s recent unwillingness to decrease its own arsenal."

Already, Russia, China, North Korea, and India have shown that they are
closely following US nuclear developments and adjusting their postures
accordingly. Which means proliferation continues, as it seems wherever one
looks, the US still has both hands in the nuclear cookie jar.

The Natural Resources Defense Council revealed in February that the U.S.
currently has hundreds of warheads deployed across Europe. The NRDC’s
report states: "U.S. nuclear arsenal in Europe is larger than the entire
nuclear weapons stockpile of any nation except Russia. The United States is
the only country that deploys such weapons outside its own boundaries…[even
though] weapons based in the United States can cover all of the potential
targets covered by the bombs in Europe." The report, which describes the
deployment as "clinging to the Cold War," notes ironically: "Nearly all of
the countries that once were potential targets for the weapons are now
members of NATO."

Also according to the report: "All the weapons are gravity bombs of the
B61-3, -4, and -10 types. Germany remains the most heavily nuclearized
country with three nuclear bases (two of which are fully operational), and
may store as many as 150 bombs… Royal Air Force (RAF) Lakenheath [in the
UK] stores 110 weapons, a considerable number in this region given the
demise of the Soviet Union. Italy and Turkey each host 90 bombs, while 20
bombs are stored in Belgium and in the Netherlands… The current force level
is two-three times greater than the estimates made by non-governmental
analysts during the second half of the 1990s. Those estimates were based on
private and public statements by a number of government sources and
assumptions about the weapon storage capacity at each base… The 480 bombs
deployed in Europe represent more than 80 percent of all the active B61
tactical bombs in the U.S. stockpile. No other U.S. nuclear weapons are
forward deployed (other than warheads on ballistic missile submarines)…
Approximately 300 of the 480 bombs are assigned for delivery by U.S. F-15E
and F-16C/D aircraft…deployed in Europe or rotating through the U.S.
bases. The remaining 180 bombs are earmarked for delivery by the air forces
of five NATO countries, including Belgian, Dutch, and Turkish F-16s and
German and Italian PA-200 Tornado aircraft."

The Bush administration has also expressed a disturbing interest in
weaponizing space. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by more than 90
countries including the US, bans weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from
being put into orbit and stipulates that: "The exploration and use of outer
space…shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all
countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific
development, and shall be the province of all mankind…[and] shall be guided
by the principle of co-operation and mutual assistance…"

The UN General Assembly has passed resolutions each year for the past 22
years establishing the continued peaceful use of space and the prevention
of an arms race in space. Though most of the UN resolutions have passed
unanimously, the US and Isreal have recently abstained from the vote, and
the Bush administration has revealed intentions to exploit areas not
explicitly covered in the various international space-protection
agreements. For instance, though the 1967 treaty bans putting WMD into
orbit, it does not specifically proscribe the transit of a WMD through
space. Currently, the US is developing reentry vehicles designed to deliver
a variety of weapons, including nuclear warheads, via an interceptor in
space that would in turn redirect the vehicle toward an earthbound target,
with greater precision than traditional launch and delivery systems.
Lockheed-Martin is leading this development effort. Alongside plans to put
non-nuclear defense mechanisms into orbit (despite treaty language
discouraging it), including anti-satellite weapons and the scientifically
dubious anti-ballistic missile interceptors, the Bush administration is
sending the message that it intends to dominate and control space.

Proposals are surfacing for new commercial uranium enrichment plants,
including a $1.3 billion facility in Eunice, New Mexico, be built by
Louisiana Energy Services, a partnership of several U.S. utilities and
Urenco, the UK-based global nuclear fuels corporation. Though allegedly
intended for the generation of power, the development of such facilities
could undercut an agreement made with Russia to turn tons of stockpiled
weapons-grade uranium and plutonium into power-plant fuel. As Bush
discourages the development of similar facilities in the Middle East, it’s
difficult to explain why the excess tonnage of unused plutonium and uranium
stored in thousands of US and Russian warheads would not be exhausted
before creating new reserves.

While the nuclear debate in Congress rages anew, the next review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), meets in New York in May. The events of spring 2005 could presage whether the climate for the next few years will more resemble the promise of a nuclear-free future or a return to Cold War paranoia.

—

RESOURCES:

NRDC report on U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe:
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/euro/contents.asp

SpaceRef.com on new space-based nuclear targeting systems:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=11693

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, March. 7, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://ww4report.com

Continue ReadingNUCLEAR AGENDA 2005