“Texecutions” draw international scorn
World sees Gov. Bush as cold-hearted killer

By Susan Lee Solar

A disabled woman in Denmark and a young couple in Canada build websites for Texas death row inmates. In Paris, hundreds rally for a black former athlete and crack addict from Wichita Falls awaiting execution; the Pope, the European Parliament, and French President Jacques Chirac all plead with an immovable George W. Bush to save a life. From France alone, Bush received 7,000 letters pleading for one death-row inmate’s life. The execution of Mexican nationals is a huge issue for our southern neighbor and NAFTA partner. Eighteen more Mexicans wait in various stages of Texas’ death penalty proceedings for their date with the needle.

International attention is focused on the latest flurry of executions in Texas, which were described as “barbarous” in the French press. Pope John Paul II has appealed to Governor Bush to spare the lives of several inmates who were nonetheless dispatched with a lethal mix of chemicals. Texas Department of Corrections officials responsible for executions have been very busy, and that activity has drawn many foreign visitors to Huntsville who come to mourn or document the planned deaths of people who are important to these individual visitors, or to their nations. Texas executions have replaced South Africa’s apartheid as a source of global moral outrage.

The roll call in the first three months of this year saw the execution of a woman in her 60s (Bettie Lou Beets), a man who was a juvenile when he committed murder, and at least one diagnosed mentally ill man (Larry Robison). Even more appalling to many ordinary French and Swiss citizens, continued from page 1 one man (Odell Barnes Jr., a 31-year old drug addict from Wichita Falls) appeared to be innocent of the crime for which he was strapped to a gurney on March 1 and injected with chemicals. Barnes’ attorney, Gary Taylor said the drugs “sucked the life out of him.”

Although none of the gurney’s victims drew worldwide attention comparable to that garnered by Karla Faye Tucker, these executions kept Huntsville, Texas, Governor Bush, and the Texas judicial system in the spotlight of criticism.

The Pope appealed to Bush to stay the executions of Robison, Beets, and Barnes, and to request that Bush’s appointees on the Board of Pardons and Paroles, consider and grant clemency to the condemned. The board ignored the pleas. They never meet in person to discuss appeals, but conduct business by phone or fax, thus generating the term “death by fax.” Except for Henry Lee Lucas, who could have been an embarrassment if executed because he was out of the state when the murder was committed here, Bush’s board has never recommended clemency. To date, Bush has presided over, and thus condoned, 127 executions.

This year began with a national moratorium conference in Huntsville at Sam Houston State University, on a weekend sandwiched between executions. On Friday night, January 21, paranoid schizophrenic Larry Robison was put to death, believing he was going to be beamed up to the mother ship. He was killed despite the pleas of the Pope, Larry’s agonized parents and attorneys, and angry articles and editorials from across the Atlantic, especially the British Isles.

Editorials, articles, and letters in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in France, also denounced the killing of great-grandmother Bettie Lou Beets, and news stories about her appeared in Argentina and Mexico. (Media visits to her were cruelly limited, according to her attorney Joel Margulies, and a Spanish journalist was denied an interview on spurious grounds.) In the United States, groups opposing family violence agitated on her behalf, and Bush’s office received 2,000 protesting phone calls and faxes on the day Beets was to be executed.

Nonetheless, as scheduled on February 24, Beets met her silent fate in the Walls Unit. The president of the European Parliament stated he was deeply angered that the governor of Texas didn’t grant a stay in response to the many pleas from throughout the world, and that these executions are more outrageous in a democracy when they occur during elections, implying they were driven by politics rather than justice. La Nación of Buenos Aires reported that Beets’ attorney described Bush as lacking compassion and her execution as an act of cowardice.

As the first of March neared, it seemed the entire nation of France, and pockets of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Australia were mobilized to prevent the execution of Barnes, who was convicted in 1991 of the murder of a black nurse. Thanks to European donors to his investigation, his new attorneys found strong scientific and testimonial evidence of his innocence and others’ guilt. Unfortunately it was never admitted by appellate courts because of new procedural laws, which almost eliminate the admission of new evidence after conviction. Desperate calls by his attorneys and others in the months preceding his death by poison had inspired little US media interest in the case, despite the issue of possibly innocent inmates on Texas death row being highlighted in the presidential debates.

A rally in Austin supporting Barnes, Gary Graham, and others was organized by University of Texas students. They gathered outside the governor’s mansion the weekend after Barnes was killed. Nearly 500 death-penalty protesters ringed the mansion, but the media again were absent; presumably they were with the governor campaigning in California.

The weekend before Barnes’ death, a similar crowd rallied in Paris, trying to get the attention of the US media and of Bush, who had already been contacted by the European Parliament and visited by the French cultural minister about the case. Chirac pled with Bush’s father via telephone for more than an hour on Odell’s behalf.

One French university student attended both rallies. Houriya Berthes, with her mother Colette and fellow student Fabrice Guillot, had organized a group for Barnes’ defense. The group raised more than $80,000 to hire a chemist, crime scene experts, and a videographer needed to prove and communicate his innocence. Three of the organizers came to Huntsville on the execution date they had worked for years to halt. Heartsick afterwards, Berthes vowed never to return to Texas. A French university canceled orders for 100 Dell computers as a posthumous protest.

Closer to home, while scattered pockets of Amnesty International members protest in Central and South America, there is less noticeable involvement or interest in the issue, unless a local is involved. A search of websites for newspapers from the region revealed significant coverage of Karla Faye Tucker’s execution but little for anyone else (12 articles in one Argentine paper, but only two for Bettie Lou Beets, and nothing for Barnes or Robison). Several Hondurans are on US death rows. One is in Texas, and draws coverage in his native country. Similarly the Mexican media heavily covered the 1998 execution of a national here. Mexico officially protested to the US State Department over Texas’ violation of internationally-recognized rights in that case, and was issued an apology by the feds, who apparently put no pressure on Texas to change. (Mexico ended the death penalty in 1926, following the earlier examples of Colombia and Venezuela.) Now 18 Mexican nationals sit on Texas’ death row. As their appeals run out, we can expect the Mexican media to remind us again and again of our crimes against humanity, killings that no civilized society would ever permit.

Susan Lee Solar (solarmuse@igc.org) is an Austin-based freelance writer.

Two Iraqi civilians killed in US air raid

Baghdad, Iraq, May 29— Two civilians were killed in a US-led air strike on “civilian installations” in northern Iraq on Monday, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

“The US and British aggressors committed a new crime against our people by bombing civilian installations and services, killing two peaceful civilians,” the spokesman said, quoted by the official news agency INA.

He said warplanes entered Iraq from Turkey and carried out 18 sorties over the northern provinces of Dahuk, Arbil and Niniveh. The location of the deadly strike was not disclosed.

The US military said earlier that its fighter jets bombed northern Iraq after coming under Iraqi fire during patrols over the no-fly zone in the region.

The aircraft “dropped ordnance on elements of the Iraqi integrated air defense system” after Iraqi forces fired artillery from sites near Bashiqah, the Stuttgart-based US European Command said.

All the planes returned safely to base in Incirlik in southern Turkey, it added.

Some 40 British and US planes are based at Incirlik to patrol the northern no-fly zone imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War to protect the region’s Kurdish population.

A similar exclusion zone was also set up over southern Iraq to protect the Shiite Muslim population there and is patrolled by US and British aircraft based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Iraq does not recognize the zones, which are not authorized by any specific UN resolution, and has regularly fired on aircraft patrolling them since joint US-British air raids began on Baghdad in December 1998.

The United States says the planes only target military objectives in self-defense, but the Iraqis say civilians and civilian installations are frequently hit.

In addition to continuous bombing, the US and UN maintain sanctions against Iraq, which have caused 1.5 million civilian deaths.

Source: Agence France Press

“Forgotten” nuclear weapons factory poisons Iowa town

By Dennis J. Carroll

Middletown, Iowa, May 29— The assignment in an environmental issues class at Southeastern Community College seemed innocuous: Write a letter to a local official about the environment.

So Bob Anderson, 60 years old, wrote to US Senator Tom Harkin. In seven paragraphs, Anderson told about his experiences as a security guard at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant from 1968 to 1973, and suggested that exposure to radioactive materials may have given him and others cancer.

The letter, and the off-and-on inquiry it triggered, ultimately unleashed a stream of startling disclosures in recent months from federal officials and former plant workers who broke decades of silence to talk about the plant.

Radioactive uranium clouds routinely floated above the military compound, while workers, often unprotected by safety gear, probably came into contact with plutonium and other radioactive and hazardous materials. A few weeks ago, a groundwater well test at the plant showed radiation far above the levels considered safe for drinking.

The inquiry also found a huge institutional memory loss at the US Department of Energy, which had forgotten that the plant was once the nation’s only producer of nuclear weapons, and had completely lost track of plant records.

At the peak of production, almost 10,000 workers toiled around the clock at the 19,000-acre plant, making everything from bullets to atomic bombs. Almost anyone who lived in southeastern Iowa for any length of time, it seemed, either worked at the plant or knows some continued from page 1 one who did.

The Department of Energy and the University of Iowa have begun a survey of health problems among the plant’s nuclear workers, and the department recently began testing workers for possible exposure to beryllium, a toxic metal used in constructing nuclear weapons.

Harkin said he never knew the plant produced nuclear weapons. When he received Anderson’s letter in the fall of 1997, he asked the Energy Department about it and was told that the plant never produced nuclear weapons. So he sent Anderson a letter thanking him for his interest, and let the matter drop.

But last August, after a Harkin aide touring the plant learned of its nuclear-weapons history, the senator’s office contacted Anderson and asked for more information. In the meantime, Harkin stepped up his questioning of the Energy Department and the US Army. But finding answers was difficult because workers’ health had never been monitored, as it was at designated nuclear arms plants.

On top of that, the records of plant operations and working conditions were in cardboard boxes scattered among Energy Department facilities and archives across the country. Many of the records turned up in boxes at the Pantex nuclear weapons facility near Amarillo, Texas, where Middletown’s nuclear operations were moved in the mid-1970s.

Finally, Energy Department officials confirmed for Harkin and themselves that the Atomic Energy Commission did indeed make nuclear weapons in Middletown from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. In fact, from 1949 to 1951, the facility was the nation’s only nuclear weapons assembly plant.

“When I learned the extent of IAAP’s role in creating the US nuclear arsenal, I was astonished to learn that some key federal officials knew little or nothing of its history,” Harkin told the Hawk Eye, a daily newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. “In other words, the IAAP’s nuclear history fell between some big bureaucratic cracks,” Harkin said.

“Senator Harkin was correct when he said that the plant fell through the cracks,’’ said Earl Whiteman, an official at the Energy Department’s office in Albuquerque. “Many people outside of [southeast Iowa] forgot about the important work that was done there.”

Anderson said he and the guards he supervised often boarded train cars loaded with metal barrels of radioactive materials. He said that at the time, he wasn’t sure just exactly what was in the drums that he walked among and touched. “I just knew that it must be pretty important ... to have people with machine guns guarding a railroad car,” Anderson said.

Fifteen years after Anderson left the plant, doctors diagnosed his non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that they suspected was caused by exposure to radiation.

Several of his friends, who had also worked at the plant, had died of similar diseases, Anderson told Harkin.

“We always prided ourselves on following everything by the rules,’’ Anderson said of his work on the nuclear production line. “Little did I know that we didn’t have a rule book. We were writing it as we went along.’’

Anderson’s account and the subsequent disclosures have prompted dozens of other workers or their relatives to come forward with stories of health problems and unsafe conditions.

“Is there anything the government is going to do to find out what’s going on with these people?’’ asked Terri Bailey, whose parents worked at the plant. She said her stepfather has throat cancer and her mother suffers from brain aneurysms.

“She carried live powder,’’ Bailey said of her mother’s work in the plant. “If she dropped it, she’d blow up.’’

For decades, workers, sworn to secrecy about what they did at the plant, had been reluctant -- even fearful -- about coming forward with their stories.

Vaughn Moore, a former guard at the plant, painted a dark picture of conditions at the plant.

“Talking about your work was strictly taboo. Back in them days, they would tell you, ‘Run your mouth and you’re going to Leavenworth Penitentiary,’” said Moore.

“They had 15 FBI agents stationed in this town,’’ he said. “All they did was run around in bars listening, grocery stores listening. They knew what clubs you belonged to, they knew where you ate, they knew where you went fishing.

“They knew all about you,’’ Moore said. “They knew more about you than you knew about yourself.’’

Harkin has been pushing the Defense Department to lift its secrecy about the plant so workers will feel free to tell their stories. Even now, the Army refuses either to confirm or deny that nuclear weapons were assembled there.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in January traveled to the area to talk to former workers, calling them Cold War heroes. He promised to conduct a radiological review of the nuclear arms production line at the plant and to explore ways of compensating former workers for their health problems.

Last month, Richardson announced a nearly $500 million proposal to compensate the nation’s nuclear weapons workers for their medical expenses and lost wages. It will not be easy to attribute health problems to nuclear arms production specifically. The plant is already part of a $110 million Superfund cleanup supervised by the Environmental Protection Agency. The cleanup generally does not involve former Atomic Energy Commission areas of the plant, and is focused on restoring soil and groundwater contaminated by decades of producing conventional weapons and improper disposal and burning of hazardous wastes.

But Energy Department officials have said that if workers can show they were exposed to certain hazardous materials, they will be given the benefit of the doubt in determining compensation.

As for his reaction to all that has happened since his letter to Harkin, Anderson said: “All of my life [as a policeman or security guard] has been one of observation and reporting if something is wrong, and basically that’s what I wanted to do.’’