journal 25: WOUNDED.2.27.7

Journal: Wounded



Completed: 2.27.7

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/world/middleeast/21iraq.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Rape Accusation Reinforces Fears in a Divided Iraq
A woman with her son in a hospital, after he was wounded in a car bombing Tuesday in southern Baghdad.

By MARC SANTORA
Published: February 21, 2007

BAGHDAD, Feb. 20 — The most wicked acts are spoken of openly and without reserve in Iraq. Torture, stabbings and bodies ripped to pieces in bombings are all part of the daily conversation.
Rape is different.
Rape is not mentioned by the victims, and rarely by the authorities. And when it is discussed publicly, as in several high-profile cases involving American soldiers and Iraqi women, it is usually left to the relatives of the victim to give the explicit details.
So when a 20-year-old Sunni woman from Baghdad appeared on the satellite television station Al Jazeera on Monday night with a horrific account of kidnapping and sexual assault at the hands of three officers in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Police, people across the country were stunned, some disbelieving, others horrified, but all riveted.
Almost immediately, Shiite leaders lined up to condemn the woman, calling her charges propaganda aimed at undermining the new security campaign. Sunni politicians offered the woman their support. Whatever the truth of the accusation, though, it played to sectarian fears on both sides.
For many Shiites, the charges appeared to be an attempt to smear them and attack the Shiite-led government; for Sunnis, the woman’s account only highlighted what they already believed to be true — that the Iraqi government cares little for justice and promotes a Shiite agenda.
Bitter exchanges between politicians of various sects were relayed to millions on television, interspersed with clips of the woman telling her story, her face veiled, just the tears in her eyes visible.
The Americans, who have advisers working with the Iraqi National Police, found themselves caught in the middle without answers. The woman said the Americans had rescued her from the officers and gave her medical treatment. The American-backed, Shiite-led government said the Americans would show the woman’s claims to be false.
The American military said only that it was investigating the charges.
That was also the first response of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who issued a statement soon after the woman appeared on television on Monday, promising a full investigation and the most severe punishment for anyone involved.
Only hours later, however, Mr. Maliki reversed himself. His office released a second statement after midnight, that one calling the woman a liar and a wanted criminal and going on to praise the officers involved.
“It has been shown after medical examinations that the woman had not been subjected to any sexual attack whatsoever, and that there are three outstanding arrest warrants against her issued by security agencies,” said the second statement. “After the allegations have been proven to be false, the prime minister has ordered that the officers accused be rewarded.”
The government did not elaborate on the statement or say why the prime minister had so quickly reversed himself. His office only said that “known parties” had been responsible for the allegations.
But in siding with the security forces, Mr. Maliki threatened to only heighten the tensions surrounding the already highly charged case. His government also released the woman’s name, which is not being published by The New York Times.
Sunni politicians rushed to her defense, accusing the government of revealing its true sectarian bias.
The case “should not be dealt with on a sectarian basis,” said Saleem Abdullah, a spokesman for the Tawafiq bloc of Sunni parties, which helped the woman come forward. “She is a sister for all Iraqis.”
He went on to say the government’s handling of the issue could undermine its credibility in directing the security crackdown.
With fears of violence pervasive throughout the country, many Iraqis stay inside their homes whenever they can. Satellite television is their connection to the outside world and, just as often, their own country. On the two most prominent channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, they would have heard the woman telling her story over and over.
If she made up the story, it was an elaborate piece of propaganda and the contradictory statements by the Iraqi government only added to its power.
The woman was lying on a bed as she was interviewed, a blue blanket pulled up nearly to her chin. She had a light pink scarf covering her hair and a black scarf covering her face.

She said she was taken from her house on Sunday morning by the National Police while her husband was out, something no one disputes. The officers, she said, were looking for weapons but when they arrived at the police garrison, they accused her of cooking for Sunni insurgents.
It was at the garrison that she says the first officer raped her, covering her mouth to muffle her screams. Others were in the room at the time.
“I begged one of them to get me out,” she said. “He said, ‘No, no. I will after you give me one thing.’ ” She asked what that was, and he told her he wanted to “get close to me.” She said she was led into a small room with a bed and a machine gun against the wall. Another officer came in and told the first man to leave. “Leave her to me,” the man said, according to her account.
“I swear on the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad, I am not that kind of woman,” she said she told the officer. He repeated her words scornfully and beat her with a black water hose, she said.
“If we want something, we will take; and things we don’t want, we will kill,” the woman said she was told.
She said that the attack was videotaped and that she was told she would be killed if she told anyone about it.
A nurse who said she treated the woman after the attack said that she saw signs of sexual and physical assault. The woman, according to the nurse, could identify one of her attackers because he was not wearing a mask, as were the others, and could identify a second attacker by a mark on his genitals.
The nurse would speak only on the condition of anonymity because she feared that Shiite militiamen would kill her for speaking out. The nurse said she was also wanted by the authorities, who believed the clinic she works at was used by insurgents.
She said the clinic was simply for Sunnis in the Amil neighborhood who were too afraid to the visit the Shiite-run hospital.
In Amil, which has been almost totally cleared of Sunnis, people were outraged, but not surprised. The woman’s charges seemed to confirm their worst fears that the security forces were little better than militias in uniform.
A spokeswoman for the American military here in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberle, confirmed that the woman had been detained by the Iraqi National Police on Sunday morning, but said that everything that happened after that was under investigation.
But a senior Iraqi official, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen as critical of the Americans, said that he had alerted the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, on the day the woman made her allegations, cautioning him that if the case was not handled delicately, it could further inflame sectarian passions.
A spokesman for Mr. Khalilzad could not be reached.
The sectarian tensions further complicated an already delicate topic in Iraqi society.
The most high-profile rape cases since the American invasion four years ago have involved charges against American soldiers. And even in those cases, it was left to the relatives to speak publicly. Iraqis said they could not remember the case of a rape victim going on television.
Sabah Salem, a professor at the Baghdad University College of Law, said that while men were occasionally charged with rape in Iraq and punished, many cases went unreported.
“Rape cases in Iraq are viewed as a shameful thing to any woman regardless of the fact that she is the victim,” he said in an interview.
The charges and countercharges occurred on yet another day of unrelenting violence in the capital, as two car bombs and a suicide bomber, in separate attacks, killed at least 17 people. One of the car bombs exploded in a neighborhood that was visited earlier in the day by Mr. Maliki, on a rare foray outside of the Green Zone.
North of Baghdad, a truck carrying chlorine exploded, killing nine people, The Associated Press reported. More than 150 others were made violently ill by the toxic fumes.
Damien Cave and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/washington/21loyalists.html

Bush Friends, Loyal and Texan, Remain a Force
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: February 21, 2007
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — Israel Hernandez was a fresh-faced college graduate from the Texas border town of Eagle Pass in the summer of 1993 when he landed a job in Dallas as the personal aide to the part-owner of the Texas Rangers George W. Bush.
Together, they spent months driving the dusty back roads of the Lone Star State to promote the team, Mr. Hernandez behind the wheel of Mr. Bush’s Lincoln Town Car.
“He would speak to a rotary or chamber and say, ‘You need to come to the ballpark and we’ll make it Athens, Texas, Day. We’ll put you in your own special section; we can say ‘Welcome Athens, Texas,’ on the big screen; you can come to batting practice, ‘’ Mr. Hernandez recalled.
Today, after nearly 14 years in Mr. Bush’s employ, with a short break to get a master’s degree, Mr. Hernandez, 37, travels the world promoting free trade as an assistant secretary of commerce. From his sun-drenched corner office, with its sweeping view of the Washington Monument, he can sit at his desk and watch the presidential helicopter, Marine One, ferry around the man to whom he owes his career.
“In many ways,” Mr. Hernandez said of Mr. Bush, “I feel like I have grown up with him.”
He is not the only one. Six years into Mr. Bush’s presidency, the corps of loyal Texans who accompanied him to Washington from Austin remains a powerful force inside the administration, a steady source of comfort for an increasingly isolated president. No matter how grim the polls or dire the news in Iraq, they have stood by Mr. Bush — and been rewarded with plum jobs — as their lives have grown increasingly intertwined with one another’s and with his.
“We’ve gotten married, gotten remarried, had babies,” said Margaret Spellings, who was a single mother with two children when she followed Mr. Bush to Washington and has since been promoted from a domestic policy adviser to secretary of education. “I remember the Bush twins when they were just little squirts.”
To hear these people talk about the president is to meet a man many Americans have either forgotten or no longer recognize. Their George W. Bush is the compassionate conservative who helped soften the harsh image of the Republican Party, a man who chokes up at going-away parties, as he did last year for Andrew H. Card Jr., his departing chief of staff; a man unafraid of giving promotions to openly gay people, as he did with Mr. Hernandez, and who always remembers to ask how the family is.
“There’s a lot of devotion to George Bush the person,” said Clay Johnson, a prep school buddy of Mr. Bush who is now a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Like another Bush devotee, the first President Bush, these Texans are increasingly angry at criticism leveled at him. Karen Hughes, the communications adviser who famously went back to Texas when her teenage son grew homesick but has since returned as an under secretary of state, says she is tired of seeing Mr. Bush treated as a “caricature.”
Mr. Johnson says the most painful accusation is hearing Mr. Bush called a liar.
“I said, ‘How in the world can you be considered a liar by some?’ ” Mr. Johnson said, recounting a conversation with Mr. Bush. “I mean, there are bumper stickers about lying. It’s just incredible.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’ve just got to get used to it. Because that’s what we have here.’ ”
Every president has his kitchen cabinet, the intimate and informal circle of friends and advisers who typically wind up with high-placed jobs. John F. Kennedy installed his brother Robert at the Justice Department. Ronald Reagan brought Edwin Meese III and Michael K. Deaver from California. Jimmy Carter had the so-called Georgia Mafia: Jody Powell, Hamilton Jordan and Bert Lance.
But in a White House that prizes loyalty, the Texans stand out, in number, influence and discretion. Those who have left remain supportive even if they have been nudged out the door, as in the case of Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel.
“Loyalty and friendship” is one explanation, said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, who has spent 13 years — nearly his entire adult life — with Mr. Bush. Another explanation, Mr. Bartlett said, is the war in Iraq, which “lengthened a lot of people’s stay.”
Scholars say Mr. Bush has been more strategic than most presidents in sprinkling loyalists throughout the administration. Paul C. Light, an expert in public service at New York University, says it has created an “echo chamber” in which the president gets advice he wants to hear.
“It’s like these are George Bush’s political children that he’s raised from infancy,” Mr. Light said. “They’re incredibly loyal, and they’re also likely to tell him what he thinks, and that’s what we’ve seen as the big weakness in this administration.”
The Texans, not surprisingly, disagree; they say their closeness to Mr. Bush frees them to be candid.
Mr. Bartlett, 35, knows the president better than most. His job during Mr. Bush’s first campaign for Texas governor was to research the candidate’s background, and he is today a kind of walking presidential biographer, with details crammed into his brain of Mr. Bush’s triumphs but also his travails, including his National Guard Service and his arrest for drunken driving in 1976.
“I dealt with him directly at a very young age,” Mr. Bartlett said. “I don’t even think twice about telling him what I think.”
The Texas circle includes three cabinet officials — Ms. Spellings, the education secretary; Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and Alphonso R. Jackson, the secretary of housing and urban development — as well as some of the best-known names in Washington: Karl Rove, the chief political strategist, Mr. Bartlett and Ms. Hughes.
There are also lesser-knowns. Mr. Johnson, the deputy budget director, met Mr. Bush in 1961 at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., when they were two 15-year-olds far from home. Mr. Johnson later ran the governor’s personnel office in Austin; in Washington, he keeps a George Bush doll on his desk and is one of the few people in town to have had the Bushes at his home for dinner, motorcade, Secret Service and all.
Gordon D. Johndroe, once a $5-an-hour college intern in Austin, is today the chief spokesman for the National Security Council. Mr. Johndroe learned the art of dealing with reporters by literally sitting at the president’s knee on the floor of the eight-seat Bush campaign plane in 2000, monitoring the governor’s interviews.
“My job,” he said, “was, ‘Let us know if he makes any news. Let Karen know or call back to Dan Bartlett, who was in Austin.’ And I was able to do that because I had listened to him speak so much. I knew when he said something new.”
Among the benefits to being an old Texas friend of the president is access: the invitations to Camp David, to dinner and movies at the White House, to Mr. Bush’s annual July 4 birthday bash. Ms. Hughes remains a regular dinner companion, most recently at a small White House gathering for Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic.
Among the downsides is being ridiculed as a crony. Ms. Miers, who met Mr. Bush when she ran the Texas Bar Association, was excoriated by lawmakers who deemed her unqualified when Mr. Bush nominated her to the Supreme Court. Still, she calls her association with the president “one of the great blessings of my life.”
Mr. Hernandez, who is so close to the Bushes that he moved in with them in Dallas after his apartment was burglarized, has been the subject of news articles suggesting that the president dubbed him Altoids Boy, a reference to his duties dispensing Altoids mints to Mr. Bush during their Texas travels.
“I hate that,” Mr. Hernandez said. “He doesn’t call me Altoids Boy. He calls me Izzy.”
Two years ago, the online edition of The New Republic, a liberal magazine, singled out Mr. Hernandez as a member of the Bush “hackocracy.”
But sitting in his corner office the other day, recounting his travel this past year to Peru, China, Vietnam and Panama, Mr. Hernandez — who in his Department of Commerce job supervises 1,600 employees in 80 countries — had the final word.
Mr. Bush, he said, is simply giving him an opportunity to show what he can do.
“Everyone has their own journey, their own story,” he said. “I feel like I climbed this mountain with the president, and I’m getting a chance.”
Correction: February 22, 2007
An article yesterday about Texans in the Bush administration misspelled the surname of the United States attorney general, one of three cabinet members from Texas. He is Alberto R. Gonzales, not Gonzalez.
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http://texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2644
Update: Big Brother is Watching You II
by: annatopia
Mon Feb 19, 2007 at 12:15:08 PM CST

Last month I wrote about a story I've been following: the case of domestic spying on major American data carriers. At the time, using information available online as well as several news sources, I put forth some speculation.
First, that innocent Americans' data is being swept up and stored thanks to the use of the "full pipe" data gathering technique. Second, that the government's Total Information Awareness Program - which was "killed" but never defunded - was being used to build domestic spying facilities around the country.
I caught PBS's NOW program last Friday by chance, and I'm glad I did. They have resources not available to this lowly blogger. What PBS discovered will chill your bones. Yes, data on innocent Americans is being intercepted and stored. Additionally, more whistleblowers have come forward to establish the existence of another secret spy room on AT&T's network, built post 9-11.
They key findings in PBS's report:
- The government is intercepting most emails sent domestically.- AT&T is collecting most emails and sharing them with the government, specifically the NSA (this is backed up by Klein's documents).- The NSA spy room at AT&T's San Francisco facility is only accessible to the NSA and AT&T employees cleared by the NSA- The NSA's interest seems to be in MAE WEST, *the* major hub of American and international internet traffic on the West Coast- The device installed in San Francisco is capable of intercepting 10 GIGBYTES of data per second. In layman's terms, that means it could go through all the information in all the books in the Library of Congress in 15 minutes.
AT&T declined to be interviewed for this PBS report.
The government claims that they are doing this for national security reasons, but if that is the case, then why are people who aren't committing terrorism-related crimes being caught up in this net? Another revelation from the PBS report concerns the case of Enzyte owner Steve Warshack. Warshack is currently under indictment for fraud and false advertising related to the Enzyte product. What's disturbing is that the government's case was built using old emails obtained without a warrant and sent by Warshack on Yahoo's email service. Warshack's lawyer is fighting the case based on an argument that emails are protected by the right to privacy contained in the 4th Amendment.
The government, on the other hand, treats emails "like a postcard". In the Warshack case, they argued that an ISP's employees have the ability to read your email, therefore email is not private, protected communications. As someone who's worked in the ISP industry for a decade now, let me say that is total crap. Yes, we do have the ability to read your email, but we do not do it. In fact, the very first security provision I was ever trained on as a support tech was that under no circumstances were we to read customer email. The most that we were allowed to view was the email headers, and only when we were troubleshooting an issue for the customer. I have worked with hundreds of people in this industry, and I assert with confidence that not one of them ever violated the privacy of our customers. We just don't do it. It's offensive that the government is using employees like me - who operate with very high ethical standards - to excuse their snooping into your private communications.
The Warshack case is still ongoing, but clearly there are some concerns here that tie into the domestic spying program. What does Warshacks's case have to do with national security? Why was the government able to obtain his old emails without a warrant?
The PBS report also mentions that Congress is considering a law mandating that email providers store all of your email indefinitely. I don't think it's going anywhere. There's no way that's going to happen without billions of dollars in federal subsidies, because the industry just doesn't have the capitol neccessary to make that kind of investment.
"We're not mining, or trolling, through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." - GWB, 5/11/2006
Also included in the PBS report was the revelation (earlier reported in Salon) that more AT&T whistleblowers have come forward. They've provided evidence that AT&T's St. Louis facility also had a secret NSA room installed after 9-11. This room is only accessible to the NSA (or employees cleared by NSA, much like the SanFran room) and employs biometric security. Bottom line is that AT&T is looking more and more complicit in the degradation of our civil liberties post 9-11.
Ryan Singel, a journalist who's spent a lot of time covering this story, answered a few questions for PSB. You can read the entire interview here, but here's the part that's relevant to the current case status:
NOW: What other cases are out there with respect to wiretapping?
Singel: There's been a large number of lawsuits that have been filed besides the EFF lawsuit against AT&T. There's been more than 50 lawsuits filed against the government directly and against other telecoms and ISPs. As a judicial process, what they've done is consolidated all of those lawsuits with a single judge, which is the judge in San Francisco who's been handling the AT&T case.
NOW: What other cases are out there with respect to wiretapping?
Singel: There's been a large number of lawsuits that have been filed besides the EFF lawsuit against AT&T. There's been more than 50 lawsuits filed against the government directly and against other telecoms and ISPs. As a judicial process, what they've done is consolidated all of those lawsuits with a single judge, which is the judge in San Francisco who's been handling the AT&T case.
NOW: Where do things stand with the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T?
Singel: Currently the decision is that the lawsuit can go on to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. A three judge panel has said they are going to hear that appeal. So that should happen in the coming months. But neither the government nor AT&T or EFF have filed with the court yet. In the meantime, the judge in San Francisco is trying to find ways to let the case go on. He seems to be very interested in having as much of the case go forward as he can. Currently he's trying to decide if that same ruling-that state secrets don't apply to the other suits against Verizon, Bell South, Sprint and MCI-whether those suits also can go forward despite the government's belief that they involve state secrets.
You can watch the entire NOW program online - I'd strongly advise doing so. I'd embed it, but GooTube is going down the drain and I refuse to use their "service" anymore. So, click this link and go watch the program. You'll be glad you did.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/20/AR2007022001566.html
Justice Dept. Statistics On Terrorism Faulted
Most Numbers Inaccurate, Audit Shows
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff WriterWednesday, February 21, 2007; Page A08

Most of the Justice Department's major statistics on terrorism cases are highly inaccurate, and federal prosecutors routinely count cases involving drug trafficking, marriage fraud and other unrelated crimes as part of anti-terrorism efforts, according to an audit released yesterday.
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that only two of the 26 sets of important statistics on domestic counterterrorism efforts compiled by Justice and the FBI from 2001 to 2005 were accurate, according to a 140-page report. The numbers were both inflated and understated, depending on the data cited and which part of the Justice Department was doing the counting, the report said.
The biggest problems were in numbers compiled by the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, which counted hundreds of terrorism cases that did not qualify for the designation because they involved minor crimes with no connection to terrorist activity, the report said.
In short, the report concluded, "The collection and reporting of terrorism-related statistics within the department is decentralized and haphazard."
The Justice Department said in a statement that it has already made most of the improvements suggested by Fine's office and that the U.S. attorneys' office would rename its "anti-terrorism" category to remove the implication that every case involves terrorism.
The analysis is the latest to find serious faults with the Justice Department's terrorism statistics, some of which have been featured prominently in statements by President Bush or the attorney general as evidence of the terrorist threat and the department's successful efforts to combat it.
The data are used to justify expenditures and explain to Congress and to the public how the Justice Department is using its resources to protect the country against terrorist attacks, officials said.
"Congress, department managers and the public need accurate statistics in order to fully assess the department's anti-terrorism efforts," Fine said in a statement.
A 2005 Washington Post analysis of terrorism cases tallied by the Justice Department's Criminal Division showed that most defendants were charged with minor crimes unrelated to terrorism.
Fine's office examined similar data as part of its analysis but, unlike The Post, it accepted at face value any claims of a terrorism link by the government. Under those conditions, the report said, the Criminal Division actually understated the number of cases that would qualify as related to terrorism.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said "the notion that the Justice Department inflated its statistics is false and flatly contradicted by the [inspector general's] report itself, which found that the Criminal Division either accurately stated or understated the department's terrorism statistics in nearly all categories."
Fine's report was careful to stress that the inaccuracies did not appear to have been intentional but instead were the result of shoddy recordkeeping, disagreements over definitions and other problems.
Much of the report's criticisms centered on the U.S. attorneys' office at Justice headquarters, which compiles statistics from 93 federal prosecutors nationwide and in U.S. territories. The office dramatically over- or understated the number of terrorism-related cases during a four-year period, due in large part to the way officials defined "anti-terrorism" cases, the report said.
A prime example was a massive operation to crack down on security problems at airports, which yielded dozens of arrests for immigration charges and other crimes but none related to terrorism. Even so, Fine's report said, all of the cases were counted as anti-terrorism efforts.
The only two sets of accurate statistics were compiled by the FBI, which nonetheless provided inaccurate data in eight other categories, the report said.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-pantex21feb21,0,731620,full.story

Safety alarms raised at nuclear weapons plant
Federal investigators are looking into deteriorating conditions at the Pantex plant in Texas. Energy Department officials say there's no danger.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff WriterFebruary 21, 2007

AMARILLO, TEXAS — Electrical failures have shut down the plant. The roof has leaked. Decrepit machinery dates back more than 40 years. Safety lapses led inspectors to levy fines twice within two years. And employees, under deadline pressure, complain they are often worked past the point of exhaustion.If this factory were producing medical devices or refining gasoline, the conditions would be serious enough. But this is where they work on nuclear bombs.Pantex is the Energy Department's main nuclear weapons factory, a linchpin of the nation's defense for half a century. The nation no longer makes nuclear weapons, so the plant's chief roles are servicing them or dismantling them to meet the terms of disarmament pacts.On a 25-square-mile swath of the Texas Panhandle, a series of massive white concrete domes mark the places where live nuclear weapons are opened up. The rituals and procedures inside those cells are supposed to be as strict as in any operating room, part of a safety culture that reduces any chance of an accidental nuclear explosion to one in 100 million.But lately, outside experts are questioning whether safety margins are eroding. Federal investigators are trying to assess the overall safety of the plant, which employs 3,300 people, amid troubling safety snafus and what employees call an atmosphere of intimidation.Energy Department officials acknowledge that the plant has fallen behind schedule on reliability testing of weapons. Long delays have occurred in decommissioning thousands of surplus warheads. They also concede the plant has maintenance problems and has violated safety procedures. But they insist there is virtually no danger of a conventional or nuclear explosion."Pantex is safe, no doubt," said Marty Schoenbauer, the acting chief of the Energy Department's nuclear weapons program.Safety has improved in recent years, he said, thanks to better procedures. But outside experts, union officials and watchdog groups say the opposite is true — that safety has regressed since 2000 as the most knowledgeable senior safety experts of the Cold War era retire and the plant's condition deteriorates. Energy Department Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman is investigating safety conditions at Pantex."You can't run a plant on glittering platitudes and generalities and call that a safety program," said Bob Alvarez, a former deputy assistant secretary of Energy and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. "A nuclear detonation accident is a low probability, but it is not incredible."

The backdrop to problems at Pantex is a growing concern that the Energy Department has mismanaged the nuclear weapons program. Last year, the Defense Department bluntly said that it had lost confidence in the Energy Department, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has acknowledged."We have constraints," Bodman said in an interview, conceding the department hasn't met all of its commitments to the Pentagon. Last month, he fired the head of the nuclear weapons administration.Conditions at Pantex began deteriorating at the end of the Cold War in 1989, when federal managers started starving the plant of funds. Billions of dollars were instead funneled into nuclear weapons laboratories, giving scientists new supercomputer centers, powerful lasers and physics instruments.By about 2000, the leaks in Pantex's roof were so bad that workers had to cover bombs with plastic when it rained. In summer 2004, a power overload tripped transformers, causing a plant-wide blackout. Last July, another electrical failure occurred when rats gnawed through wiring, according to weekly safety reports. And in August, a storm swept over the plant that left standing puddles in nuclear production areas.Although such conditions don't necessarily lead to accidents, the Energy Department has levied fines totaling nearly $234,000 against the contractor that operates Pantex, BWX Technologies Inc., for safety violations. In one case, involving the disassembly of a missile warhead, technicians improperly used red vinyl tape to secure a crack in the high explosives surrounding the plutonium sphere of the hydrogen bomb. The use of the tape itself was not faulted, but technicians misread engineering instructions and caused an even bigger crack.Federal safety inspectors found that the flawed operation "increased the opportunities for dropping all or part of the explosive during handling and hence increased the potential for a violent reaction," a finding that ran against assurances such a detonation was virtually impossible.In the second case, technicians were extracting an assembly of high explosives and plutonium from the casing of a different missile warhead for servicing. Using a jackscrew to apply several thousand pounds of force to the explosives, technicians exceeded the allowable loads and over a three-day period violated strict safety protocols.Dan Swaim, BWX Technologies president at Pantex, acknowledged that both incidents broke safety rules and were unacceptable, but he said there was no risk of a disaster."No nuclear yield was possible," Swaim said, asserting the company maintains huge safety margins that preclude any potential for a conventional or nuclear explosion. "As a guy who works here every day, I want it to be darn safe."The problems at Pantex came to light last fall after Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog group, wrote two letters to Bodman complaining about safety. The group has cited a lengthy report in 2000 by former Energy Department safety expert Frank Rowsome, who said that a detonation caused by lightning strikes, solvent fires or other incidents at Pantex was more probable than the Energy Department was admitting.In an interview, Rowsome, who retired in 2004, said he did not want to alarm the public, but he believed Energy Department officials were so "overly confident" and "complacent" about safety that they were not alert to deteriorating safety conditions.Where some see problems, others see progress. Last month, Pantex finally began overhauling the B83, a nuclear bomb designed to drop from a plane, after an 18-month delay triggered when scientists discovered potentially dangerous static electricity in work cells. Schoenbauer said the delay showed how far the Energy Department would go to protect safety. Critics say it shows that hidden safety problems can still exist.Meanwhile, Pantex also has fallen behind schedule in performing crucial surveillance tests required by laboratory scientists to certify the reliability of the bombs, Schoenbauer acknowledged. "That backlog has not affected the lab's ability to certify weapons," he said.

But Ralph Levine, who once ran the Energy Department's nuclear weapons surveillance testing, wrote a letter in 2005 asserting the backlog would allow defects in nuclear weapons to go undetected for years. As a result, he said, Energy officials removed him as manager of the program, and he retired last year.John Duncan, who until four years ago headed surveillance testing at Pantex for Sandia National Laboratory, agreed that testing problems at Pantex are undermining confidence in the stockpile. Even today, the certifications of nuclear weapons are being made with less certainty than scientists should have, Duncan and Levine said."I knew we were in trouble when I started attending meetings in Washington and was told to work better, faster, cheaper," said Duncan. "They started sending people to the plant with little weapons experience."The Energy Department confirmed Friday it planned to reduce the number of annual surveillance tests, saying the plan was better suited to an aging bomb stockpile. But Duncan said this would further erode the reliability of the weapons.A senior federal manager at Energy Department headquarters, speaking without attribution because the interview was not authorized, endorses those concerns."The delays in testing and lack of resources are so significant," he acknowledged. "The real question is when the laboratories can no longer certify the reliability of the stockpile."The workload at Pantex is likely to grow even more onerous in coming years.Under the Moscow Treaty, the U.S. needs to get rid of about 4,000 surplus nuclear warheads. At current rates, that could take Pantex until 2050, said Harvard University nuclear weapons expert Matthew Bunn. Though there is no firm deadline, that pace is unacceptable to arms control experts, Bunn said.The Bush administration has ordered the plant to increase dismantlements by 50% this year.Another task looming for Pantex is modernizing the W76 missile warhead used on the Trident submarine. Hundreds of W76 warheads will have to be disassembled and rebuilt with new parts. Swaim said the W76 program would begin on schedule this year.Pantex — named for the panhandle of Texas — has a largely blue-collar culture. The people who actually touch the weapons are known as "production technicians." They earn about $24 per hour. Engineers average $84,000 per year.Though the jobs are sought after in Amarillo, an anonymous letter surfaced in November alleging that the plant was in serious disrepair, BWX Technologies management was letting safety slip and employees were forced to work more than 80 hours a week in some cases.The stress of working with nuclear weapons has been exacerbated by an abusive management, said Henry Bagwell, the former chief of the Metals Trade Council, the principal union at the plant. "They treat people badly," said Bagwell, who left last year after 24 years at the plant.Bagwell said that when he attempted to raise a health and safety problem involving toxic beryllium dust in 2003, he was demoted from X-ray technician to janitor."It sent a message," Bagwell said. "It was a public humiliation. Safety seriously took a back seat."Swaim takes sharp exception to allegations that the roof leaks, labor relations are strained or that severe amounts of overtime are being forced on workers. After the letter surfaced, Swaim said an audit showed overtime averaged just 15% over the normal 40-hour work week, though some individuals racked up more."I told my guys no more than 72 hours a week," he said.*
ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com

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