ustxtxb_obs_1981_04_17_50_00025-00000_000.pdf

ASLB and the intervenors each would prefer that the other subpoena him. Sinkin says Swayze has been through enough abuse that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with these proceedings, and the intervenors are reluctant to call a witness who doesn’t want to be on the stand. Beeth says Swayze doesn’t have anything to tell. According to HL&P’s nuclear information man, Swayze just “popped off and got a lot of media attention,” but then when HL&P attorneys took his deposition, he “took back -everything but his name.” Sinkin says he was present during the taking of Swayze’s deposition and Beeth’s characterization of it is quite untrue. Beeth and HL&P attorneys claim that the intervenors don’t have a case, and at each turn in the conference they questioned whether intervenors were really parties in the proceedings. As intervenors, Sinkin and Buchprn, representing their groups, are very much the underdogs with their lack of legal and technical expertise. But as one reporter whispered during one of Sinkin’s legal arabesques, “Lanny is pretty good for a first-year law student.” There are a few advantages accruing to the underdog. Realizing this, Beeth approached a group of reporters and objected to the “assumption of ignominy on our part and assumption of goodness on their part.” He contended that these assumptions “need to be reviewed.” The intervenors would probably be glad to trade in their underdog status for enough money to prepare and present their case. “We are sitting here at three tables,” Sinkin said at the conference, “but we are not equal either in resources or powers.” If Sinkin can prepare his case while studying for his exams, if Buchorn remains a party in the case after her deadline passes for revealing her sources, and if both intervenors can maintain their endurance, this will be an interesting hearing that possibily could upset all the precedents in the granting of licenses to operate nuclear facilities. `We’re Shooting Azimuths Off Those Peaks’ commands” \(there are no unified commands in the Middle East or the Persian forces to conduct combat operations.” Under these fiats, USREDCOM deployed, April 3 through April 7, 22,000 men and women, regular, reserve and National Guard, Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force, but mostly Army, in far West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The exercise was code-named Border Star ’81 and the opposing forces Fort Bliss and Fort Hood armored cavalry units as invader, the Fort Polk, Louisiana-based Fifth Infantry Division support elements drawn from Marine, Navy, National Guard and reserve units were positioned for what the military calls a “meeting engagement” and in what USREDCOM’S press handouts called the use of “joint forces in a desert environment.” “The war games,” as the military called them, emphasized “joint air defense operations, air space management, electronic warfare, suppression of enemy air defense capabilities, and joint airground operations involving infantry, armor, and mechanized forces supported by tactical fighters.” [INTERVAL: The Associated Press, April 4, from Washington: “Secretary of State Alexander Haig hoped during his trip to the Middle East to rally pivotal nations behind an Administration strategy to block Soviet aggression in the region, U.S. officials say. One challenge for Haig will be to reassure those nations that an expanded U.S. military presence in the region doesn’t pose a threat to them. Saudi Arabia is said to be concerned on that point. Before he left, Haig met with President Reagan at George Washington University Hospital. . . . Haig told reporters afterward they ‘discussed the objectives of this trip and I received the President’s personal guidance on a number of things.’ “1 There are a number of desert areas in the world where military actions are in progress now or may occur within the next decade: Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, the central and western Sahara \(Libya and ceivably even South Africa’s Kalahari. For all but the Kalahari, this desert is nearly enough a dead ringer. This desert and the others named even share approximate latitudes: the deserts of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf lie mostly within 20 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude. This desert maneuver area, roughly the southern half of the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico, has for its southern boundary the state line here between Texas and New Mexico which is also the 32nd parallel. And its abuelo, its grandfather desert, extends southward as the Chihuahuan Desert roughly .to 20 degrees north latitude in Old Mexico. And all of these deserts share immediately-local weather phenomena: field operations on the first day of Border Star, April 3, the day Haig arrived in Egypt, were ordered to stand down because of violent sand storms, storms so local that the best of weather forecasters cannot foretell them. “I was sitting here yesterday,” said the buck colonel on April 4, “and all of a sudden everything went black. I , looked up at the window and there were three or four inches of sand up against the glass.” “Just like the one that blew up last year when the hostage rescue mission staged in the Iranian desert?” the Observer asked, as if to ourselves. This desert, like those in the Persian Gulf region, is high desert 4,000 to 5,000 feet ringed by mountains peak ing up to more than 8,000 feet. This one, about 30 miles wide and 200 miles long, is bounded on the west by the Franklin, the Organ, the San Andres and the Os curo ranges. To the east rise the Hueco and the Sacramento and northeastward the Jicarilla chain. Trinity Site, where in 1945 the explosion of the first atom bomb turned desert gyp and alkali into shards of green glass, lies only a few miles north of here, just west of the Oscuro. There is perhaps’ no grimmer country, no malpais harsher anywhere in temperate North America. Its flat is-no more flat than the flat of any other desert. The surface is duned hummocks rising from man-high to 10 or 12 feet and there is vegetation: olive-green creosote bush, greasewood, stunted mesquite, agave, broad-leafed yucca and ocotillo, the latter’s branches covered in green fur, as though pelted rather than leafed, and looking in dusk or dark or through the smoke generated to cover armored and troop movement, like armed infantrymen. Paul Horgan, the Pulitizer Prize winning chronicler of this country and its peoples, put a description of this desert into the mouth of a horse soldier of the 1870s: “How d’ya like this territory?” the lieutenant asked. “I wouldn’t shit ya, sir,” said the trooper, “it’s just outdoors of hell.” [INTERVAL: The Associated Press, April 5, from Washington: “Senate Republican Whip Ted Stevens said that President Reagan’s proposal to sell F-15 jetfighter equipment to Saudi Arabia ‘could be in real trouble’ in the Senate. Nearly 100 House members registered opposition to the sale on grounds the equipment would increase the Arab threat to Israel and that the Saudis are giving nothing in return. Stevens said that also is why the sale is in -trouble in the Senate. ‘There must be THE TEXAS OBSERVER 25