NEWS

IRAQ WAR ON TRIAL AGAIN - THIS TIME IN THE HIGH COURT.
Early next year a landmark court case is to be heard in Bristol. The hearing, which will take place over a week, will allow the UK High Court to confirm that the Iraq war broke international law. The court will be presented with the cases of five people who, a few days before the war, cut their way into Fairford Air Force base. Phil Pritchard, Toby Olditch and Josh Richards tried to reach and disarm the B-52 bombers which were stationed there waiting to attack Iraq. Paul Milling and Margaret Jones disabled trucks used for carrying bombs, and tankers for fuelling the planes. All five are charged with conspiracy and/or criminal damage. All are offering a 'lawful excuse' defence - that they aimed to prevent the crime of the Iraq war. Which is why, in an unprecedented move, the question of whether the war was in fact illegal has to be considered at High Court level, before their trials can go ahead.
There are peace vigils and other events to support the peace enablers, and to encourage the people who have been given the right to try them to make a fair, balanced, and legally correct decision. For more information:http://www.fairfordpeacewatch.com/IraqWaronTrial.html Bristol-Stop-The-War also has timetables, maps and updates. To receive their fortnightly newsletter send a blank email to:
bristol-stop-the-war-coalition-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

OXFORDSHIRE FARMING STUDY REVEALS THE HUMAN FACE OF THE FARMING CRISIS
A newly published analysis of Oxfordshire farming shows the structural changes in the food and agricultural sector over the last forty years. The analysis draws on interviews with Oxfordshire farmers and the personal consequences for them of the current farming crisis.

The analysis is published with an audio presentation from five of the ten farmers interviewed to form workshop materials. The materials are available from the project website at www.agricultured.org <http://www.agricultured.org/> or the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

The Corporate Watch briefing, commissioned by the AgriCultured Project, shows: a declining farm workforce and the loss of small and family farmers, reduced farming incomes, greater globalisation of agriculture, increasing corporate influence, supermarket exploitation of farmers and - surprise - a concentration of corporate power.
While the personal experience of farmers is retold in the farmers interviews, the research puts that into a broader regional and national context.

Contact: Kathryn Tulip 01865 793 910 or Andrew Wood 01865 203 015

FORENSIC 3 - THE FINAL INSULT
Can you imagine a privatised police force? The horror! Well, imagine no more. It's started. Following an independent review of the Forensic Science Service (FSS) it was decided that crime should pay. It should pay shareholders and it should pay executive top-brass.

'The emergence of a fully open and competitive market has been constrained by what the private sector sees as the entrenched monopoly of the FSS', said a recent government report. And so, not wanting to insult the sacred private sector, it was concluded that the FSS would change its status from a trading fund to a public-private partnership.

As usual, David Blunkett made sure his decision was made available for a full and frank discussion. 'I learned the news from a local radio station,' says the MP for Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle. 'The Home Secretary made his announcement on 17th July, which was, coincidentally, the day that Parliament went into recess leaving a void before the subject could be properly debated in the House.'

Somewhat understandably, when MPs finally got to debate the subject on November 5th, a lot of pertinent points were made.

'The measures are the thin end of the wedge. We have heard, 'Don't worry, it will only go so far,' before, but things soon spread. Who knows—will the proud Lancashire constabulary be walking around with 'Group 4' on their sleeves?' said Hoyle, sounding eerily prescient.

'When I asked the leading executives in the FSS whether any comparable country had suggested privatising its forensic science service, Dr. Werrett told me that not even the Bush Administration were prepared to go that far. Indeed, they were not even prepared to privatise DNA testing,' said Hemsworth MP, Jon Trickett. 'Nowhere in the world has the forensic science service been separated from the criminal justice service. Even New Zealand and Australia, which have occasionally had fairly reckless right-wing Governments, have not done that.'

So why now? The government has already backtracked on its claim that it wants to stop the FSS monopolising the market. Apparently the question of why different companies with different shareholders would want to share information couldn't properly be answered.

'The reason the government gave for the privatisation is that an investment of some £30m needs to be made,' says Max Sparhan from Prospect, the union representing the FSS employees. 'The thing is that £30m really isn't a lot in the context of government spending.'

As Hoyle, who has 240 of the FSS's 2,603 employees in his constituency, points out: 'Last year the FSS had a turnover of £140 million and returned a profit of more than £10 million. From that £10 million profit, £5 million was invested in new computers and £5 million went into the Treasury coffers. It is important to stress that. The money is circulated: the Treasury put money into the police force, which puts it into the FSS, and any profits return to the Treasury. The money is circulated, rather than greedy shareholders taking it out of the system.'

Which companies will put in a bid for the FSS has not yet been announced. The Evening Standard suggested that LGC/3i, as Europe's largest privately-owned forensic services group, will have a go. LGC was quietly put up for sale in August with L&G Ventures and the Bank of Ireland buying it up in September in a deal worth up to £80 million.

Max Sparhan, who deals with the FSS's union members, disagrees. 'I wouldn't have thought LGC would have the capacity because they're quite a small company,' he says. 'The only thing we know is that two companies expressed an interest - L&G ventures and HG Capital. The FSS Management didn't deny it.'

If venture capitalists don't really seem the right sort to take on a public service then that's probably because they're not. 'We believe the service should be driven by public interest rather than private,' says Sparhan. 'If venture capitalists were to take control then you could assume that they'd stay for three to five years, make a tidy profit, then pull out. What happens then?' Indeed.

And so to the real question. Why privatise the FSS in spite of all the evidence pointing down the stupid path? Could it be that selling off the service would be a step toward reducing the gaping hole in the public sector borrowing requirement - which just happens to be the year before the election? Hmm.

MISSING BILLIONS SUDDENLY TURN UP - BUT NOT IN IRAQ
Billions of dollars of oil money from Iraq, which were transferred to the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), had apparently disappeared into a 'financial black hole'; according to a report issued by Christian Aid in October. Out of the $5 billion dollars collected (from pre and post war oil revenues and invested assets) the humanitarian agency worked out that only around $1 billion dollars could be accounted for.

But, after the publication of the report, voila! The four billion dollars which Christian Aid pinpointed as being unaccounted for have now miraculously turned up. Most of it is apparently sitting in the Federal Reserve Bank in the States. While, equally astonishingly, a set of accounts have suddenly appeared on the CPA's website. Approximately $1 billion is listed, having been spent on, for example 'Wheat Purchases' ($125,400,000.00 ) and 'Electricity Infrastructure' ($6,687,800.35). There is no mention of, say, how much wheat has been bought, or what has been done with it, or which companies have benefitted from the payments. As Christian Aid point out, a personal bank statement has more and clearer information in it.

Tony Blair has repeatedly stated there should be transparency in the handling of oil revenues.

www.cpa-iraq.org
http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/indepth/310iraqoil/index.htm

UPDATE - VERY GENERAL ATOMIC
Issue 14 of the Corporate Watch newsletter reported on serious allegations that Shell (or a subsidiary) operated an unregistered nuclear reactor in a secret facility on the outskirts of Reading, Berkshire. Chris Grimshaw continues to investigate the tricky history of Shell’s nuclear interests.

Officially, Shell’s flirtation with nuclear power was a short-lived affair that ran for ten years from 1973 to 1982. During this time Shell took a 50% stake in Gulf’s subsidiary, General Atomic, through its American subsidiary, Scallop Nuclear. It sold its stake back to Gulf in 1982, apparently horrified by outrageous costs and very little return on the investments.

General Atomic was founded in 1955, in order to develop peaceful applications of nuclear power. Some sources indicate that GA was founded as a division of General Dynamics and some that it was founded as an independent company later incorporated into General Dynamics as the General Atomic Division. In 1967 General Dynamics sold the division to Gulf Oil who renamed it Gulf General Atomic and its name was again changed to General Atomic Co in 1973 when Shell took a stake in the company. Shell pulled out of the project in 1982 and Gulf renamed the company GA Technologies Inc. Then Chevron snapped up Gulf in 1984 and spun off GA in 1986, selling it to a holding company owned by Texan businessmen Neal and Linden Blue who promptly renamed it General Atomics, the name it trades under today.

From its inception General Atomics prospered from taking generously subsidised governmental projects, from designing nuclear powered spacecraft (the ill-fated Orion Project) to participating in experimental reactor research. These days, it has diversified into many high technology areas. Whilst it continues to research and build nuclear reactors, mostly of its TRIGA (Training Research Isotopes General Atomic) design, it is probably best known for building the US military’s Predator unmanned drone aircraft.

The TRIGA reactor has been a major success for GA. With around seventy of the research reactors having been constructed in 24 countries it is the most popular design of research reactor in the world, including Iran's first nuclear reactor, constructed during the infamous regime of the Shah of Iran.

The only GA project in the UK that we know about from publicly available sources is a TRIGA built for ICI at its Billingham plant. Very little information is available about this project, however. Exhaustive press searching using the Lexis Nexis news database reveals no mention of this reactor before its decommissioning in 1988. It was activated in 1971.

During the 1970s, when Shell is alleged to have had a reactor at a site near Reading, GA’s hot project was the development of a high temperature gas cooled reactor (HTGR). It was billed as the safest reactor ever designed, a 'walk away' reactor that would not melt down like most designs. Although GA had orders to construct up to ten commercial HTGRs, only two were actually built: a small experimental facility at Peach Bottom for the Philadelphia Electric Company and a larger reactor at Fort St Vrain. Both were dogged by technical problems and shut down early.

Key features of the HTGR were its graphite core, helium coolant, and its small size. Graphite’s extraordinary heat capacity meant that in the event of a failure in the reactor’s cooling system meltdown would not occur for many hours rather than the matter of minutes in which most reactors would melt down. GA publicity made the bizarre boast that reactor operators could go out for a sandwich and think things over in the event of catastrophic failure of an HTGR. The small size and graphite core tally with our account of the reactor allegedly seen at the Shell facility in Berkshire.

And there may be more to Shell's nuclear programme than GA. Journalist John Dyer, author of the website www.nuclearcrimes.com, says that Shell's nuclear activities were far more extensive than the ten year investment in GA. Dyer alleges that Shell's Thornton Research Centre in Cheshire was a key site in Britain's 1940s atomic bomb programme and that extensive nuclear experimentation was carried out there until at least the 1970s. He also claims to have extensive evidence of a reactor or testing cell at Thornton being illegally decommissioned and dumped in 1971. This evidence he assembled over years of research and exhaustive interviews with the workers who undertook the demolition of the reactor/testing cell. Certainly Shell's book, A Century of Oil, refers to experiments with irradiation of special oils at its Thornton site and Shell has admitted to the existence of a 'Cobalt-60 labyrinth' there. Inexplicably, Mr Dyer refused to comment on the case to Corporate Watch.

Shell PR officer, Justin Everard, promised to research Shell's past nuclear concerns and pass on information to Corporate Watch. Two months after making this promise he left Shell for a new job at the Food Standards Agency. At the time of writing however his successor has also failed to produce any information on the subject...

CORPORATE WATCH would be interested to hear from anyone with additional knowledge of the Shell/GA programmes. Contact: Chris Grimshaw at 16B Cherwell Street, Oxford OX4 1BG.