-------- activism
From: Jacksha1@aol.com
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:30:24 EST
I urge all of your organizations to start mailing your Senators as soon as possible. A push is now on to go all out for Nuclear Energy, and in the US Nuclear Power plants will be, essentially, unregulated. The Nuclear Navy land based power plants are now unregulated and they are becoming a disaster [see my web site http://www.mindspring.com/~kapl/index.html].
Congress has, furthermore, passed legislation that takes away the Constitutional rights of all NRC and DOE contractor employees, which includes Nuclear Reactor Operators and other nuclear plant workers [see 42 USC 5851]. The Ninth Circuit Court has ruled that the whistleblower protection laws [42 USC 5851] are not worth the paper they are written on. The Nuclear Industry supporters want it "business as usual" , just like refrigerators, cars, ovens, etc., despite the fact that we are dealing with the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.
John P. Shannon Nuclear Physicist/Nuclear Engineer
-------- britain
Anarchist Nicolas Walter Dies
Assoiciated Press
March 13, 2000 Filed at 10:41 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Obit-Walter.html http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS736GO680
LONDON (AP) -- Nicolas Walter, an internationally known anarchist, died of cancer on March 7 in the central England town of Milton Keynes, British newspapers reported Monday. He was 65.
Walter reached a worldwide audience in 1969 with the publication of his short booklet, ``About Anarchism.'' It was translated into dozens of languages including Japanese, Serbo-Croat, Greek, Chinese and Russian, The Independent newspaper said.
``In Britain, Walter late became known more as a humanist than an anarchist,'' The Independent wrote. ``But in the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia and the United States, he was an anarchist first and foremost.''
In the early 1960s, Walter was responsible for leaking secret British government reports about what the country would do in the event of a nuclear war, prompting large-scale protests.
Walter also wrote for British newspapers and journals and worked on radio and television programs. He kept up production of booklets throughout most of his career.
Walter developed testicular cancer in 1973, and high doses of radiation were blamed for increasingly harmful side-effects, eventually confining him to a wheelchair, The Independent said. When asked why he didn't try to sue Britain's state health service, Walter told the newspaper in 1994: ``Why should I? If I sued ... for negligence and won, it would mean there was less money for other people.''
Walter is survived by his second wife, Christine Morris, and two daughters.
-------- china
China agrees to take nuclear waste
Taipei Times 00-03-13
STAFF WRITER AND AGENCIES
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/15/202l-031500-idx.html
Taipower yesterday acknowledged it had signed a letter of intent with China to ship nuclear waste there, but denied this was the same as signing a memorandum of understanding which would allow the company to begin the transfer of waste to China.
A local Chinese-language newspaper reported that Taipower had signed the memorandum in Hong Kong two months ago with a Chinese nuclear company "affiliated with an official nuclear agency," the paper said.
Under the contract, China will dispose of 210,000 drums of nuclear waste currently stored on Orchid Island and three nuclear power plants around the island, the daily quoted New Party presidential candidate Lee Ao as saying.
Lee says he obtained the memorandum from Taipower but would not identify the source.
Tsai Mao-tsun (CHINESE1/2²Z§ø/CHINESE), the company's vice president in charge of nuclear energy, said: ``We've been negotiating for seven or eight years now, but no agreement of this sort has been signed yet.''
Taipower president Kuo Chun-hui (³¢"T´f) said that no memorandum was signed, but only a letter of intent and that it had been signed a long time ago. There has been no progress since that time, he said.
However, Kuo was unwilling to confirm or deny whether another letter of intent was signed two months ago, as reports were saying.
Taiwan has been hard-pressed to find storage for waste produced by its three nuclear power plants. It has sought to store the low-radiation waste overseas, but negotiations with North Korea and Russia have so far yielded no results.
Last year, the government in Taiwan faced strong opposition when it indicated it may build an undersea storage site near an outlying island group (CHINESE¯QËú/CHINESE) between Matsu and Kinmen islands. The uninhabited islet where the site was to be built is only 37km from a Chinese island.
Taiwan now stores more than 170,000 barrels of radioactive waste, including 97,000 at a facility on Orchid Island, where residents have forced the power company to halt further shipments.
The rest is stored at the three nuclear power plants where facilities are already over capacity.
Taipower signed an agreement with North Korea in 1997 to dispose of 60,000 drums of low-radiation nuclear waste, with a provision to increase the number to 200,000 barrels.
But the power company was forced to virtually scrap the accord after the Taiwanese government was reluctant to give Taipower the required go-ahead, following pressure from China, the US and South Korea.
The accord also met with strong protests from environmental protection groups, including Greenpeace, which maintained that poverty-stricken North Korea lacked the ability to handle nuclear waste safely.
Reports said the famine-stricken country would receive a one-time payment of US$1,300 from Taipower for each barrel of nuclear waste to be stored at an abandoned coal mine 90km north of Seoul.
Taipower is also negotiating with Russia and the Marshall Islands for disposal of the waste.
Taipower runs three nuclear power plants and is building a fourth.
Meanwhile, Taipower is studying the possibility of dumping the nuclear waste on Small Wuchiu, an islet in the Taiwan Strait off China's Fujian coast.
----
Beijing shadows voters in Taiwan
Washington Times
March 13, 2000
By Willis Witter THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/news4-031300.htm
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Television viewers are being deluged in the final week before Taiwan's hotly contested presidential election with a campaign ad designed to play on the fears of a Chinese military attack.
In it, presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party is seen hoarsely shouting, "Long live Taiwanese independence." In the next scene, Taiwanese civilians wave goodbye to their families and march off to war with China.
The ad, which follows a series of threats from China of military attack if Taiwan should seek independence, is financed not by friends of Beijing but by an anonymous supporter of the ruling Nationalist Party.
It bears out the view of analysts that the Chinese threats have become the most important issue in the election, even if it is not clear how voters will react.
"We talk about the threat of war all the time," said homemaker Chen Tsai-o, who like one-quarter of Taiwan's 15 million voters, remains undecided. "If I vote the wrong way, it could mean war."
In fact, the streets of this thriving city of 3 million may be a bit calmer than they were four years ago, when Taiwan became the first ethnic Chinese nation ever to democratically choose its own leader. That time, China fired ballistic missiles near both ends of the Taiwan Strait and the United States dispatched an aircraft carrier battle group as a sign of support for Taiwan.
This year, China is using words instead of missiles. And once again, the comfort of America's military blunts some of the fear.
"We are afraid of war, but we don't think this time China will attack us. No American [presidential] candidate would let that happen," said Ellie Yang, 30, a Taipei-based writer.
China began its campaign of intimidation last month with the release of a "white paper" in which, for the first time, Beijing threatened a military attack on Taiwan if it refused to open talks on reunification.
A barrage of similar warnings followed, alerting Taiwan's 22 million people to the danger of pursuing independence.
The man with the most to lose from the threats is Mr. Chen, who is locked in a three-way race that is so close that only the candidates and gamblers dare to call a winner.
The 48-year-old former mayor of Taipei is expending much of his energy trying to reassure nervous voters with pledges to be "a peacemaker, not a troublemaker."
He has disavowed his party's longtime goal of independence from Beijing and instead is offering to meet President Jiang Zemin and to vastly expand direct trade and communications with China. At present almost all trade and travel must be routed through Hong Kong or a third nation.
Mr. Chen's two rivals are far more wary about the theoretorical pitfalls associated with the "one-China" policy, a quagmire of nuances and ambiguities that is officially espoused but interpreted differently by both sides.
Vice President Lien Chan, 63, represents the Nationalists, who have ruled since fleeing to Taiwan in 1949 from the victorious Communist armies of Mao Tse-tung.
The third candidate, James Soong, 57, defected last year from the Nationalist Party to run as an independent candidate and is the most conciliatory toward China.
Mr. Lien and Mr. Chen yesterday kicked off the final week of the campaign with rallies that brought hundreds of thousands of banner-waving supporters onto the streets of the southern port city of Kaohsiung.
"This vote is not like the one four years ago. This time everyone is worried because if they choose the wrong candidate, . . . bad things will happen to the country," said outgoing President Lee Teng-hui at the rally for his vice president, Mr. Lien.
If Mr. Chen's Achilles' heel proves to be his past taunts at Beijing, his opponents are both haunted by reports of corruption in the Nationalist Party and, in Mr. Soong's case, outright embezzlement of party funds.
Despite the fear of war, most Taiwan voters cringe at the thought of being reunited with the Chinese mainland. They earn four times as much as their mainland compatriots on average but recoil at the thought of 1.2 billion Chinese seeking a share of Taiwan's wealth.
"If the people in one province on the mainland came over here, the island would sink," said Lai Chi-len, 24, a graduate student in electrical engineering who said he would probably vote for Mr. Chen because he felt safe from China.
Despite the periodic flare-ups with China, Taiwan investors have pumped more than $30 million into factories and other businesses on the mainland. That proves persuasive to voters who have a stake in what has been a profitable, if low-key, form of engagement.
"We can't survive without China," said Chang Hui-tong, 39, who frequently visits Shanghai to oversee a factory that makes leather belts. His partner is a South Korean investor.
Mr. Chang has not decided how he will vote. "A candidate will say something, and I find myself thinking maybe I should or shouldn't vote for him," he said.
A former tennis coach, Mr. Chang spoke in the basement of a Taipei town house that doubles as a clubroom for coaches of children's sports. Trophies and pennants from baseball league championships line the wall.
With a high school baseball game on television, Chung King-chung, 46, who teaches at a nearby elementary school and coaches its baseball team, said he plans to vote for Mr. Chen, the DPP candidate.
"The U.S. is the world police and also the leader of democratic countries. Beijing will not resort to force carelessly," he said.
---
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Washington Times March 13, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/letters-20000313.htm
Stop the unlimited, unreciprocated flow of Chinese goods into this country We pay our lawmakers quite handsomely to represent our interests in Congress. Yet, not one of them seems to know how much profit the oil producers are making at the wellhead or at the refineries at that stage of the process. Isn't that interesting?
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wants to raise interest rates again to slow our economy down. He is afraid that consumer demand for products will add greatly to our already huge trade deficit.
This country no longer produces the products that American consumers want. Our government, under the mantra of "free trade," has systematically exported our industry and our jobs. We open our markets while other countries close theirs to American goods.
How long can our economy survive this unilateral surrender to so-called free trade?
Here's something even more interesting. Go shopping and try to buy American-made goods. You want a television or a radio? Try to find one made in the United States. A pair of walking or tennis shoes? Try again. How about jeans, shirts or dresses? Try again. Clocks? Nope. . More and more of our cheap hand tools are coming from China - not our friends in Taiwan, but good-old, Clinton-aided, most-dangerous-enemy China. China is greatly expanding its military strength with American dollars and technology given to them by our president.
The last time (about 1990) oil and gas prices went up, and the Fed raised interest rates, as is happening now, we had a recession.
We exported jobs to Mexico, gave it money to save its miserable, drug-producing economy and guaranteed future loans, yet it won't increase oil production to help us out.
Ever heard of Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia? How much did the U.S. taxpayer pay to pull the Kuwaitis' bacon out of the fire? How much do we spend to protect Saudi Arabia? Neither of them is rushing to help their U.S. taxpayer benefactors, are they?
Ever heard of the World Trade Organization? That's the outfit that is going to police world trade, and prevent the kind of blackmail being perpetrated against the United States with this oil situation. Have you heard from it yet? Don't hold your breath waiting.
We need to lift the sanctions on Iraq, pull all of our troops out of the area, and stop selling the most sophisticated military equipment in the world to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
We need to stop the unlimited, unrestricted and unreciprocated flow of Chinese goods into this country. If they are to be our most formidable and dangerous future enemy, why are we funding their military buildup? Mr. Clinton says that, in five years, China will open its market to us. China is a poor country. What does America sell that the Chinese need, or can afford? We export mainly technology. How much of that can a poor Chinese worker buy? If we want to stem the trade deficit, we must return to producing consumer goods in this country again. It's that simple.
Trade unions, although once a necessity in the era of the sweatshop, have priced the American worker out of the job market. This needs to be addressed.
Remember, Chinese tools; Japanese cars, steel, cameras, televisions and stereos; Indonesian clothes and shoes; Indian brass; Argentine beef; French cookware; and British wool all add to our trade deficit. Those countries do not reciprocate and are not totally open as our markets are.
When are the American taxpayers going to wake up and demand results, not promises from our government? In five years, China might decide not to accept American goods and aim American-funded nuclear missiles at our citizens.
Pat Buchanan isn't advocating isolationism, but a fair market system and a world that must stop sponging off of American generosity and benevolence.
ROBERT L. DI STEFANO Abingdon, Md.
----------- imf / world bank
Limiting the Scope of the World Bank
By James D. Wolfensohn
Monday, March 13, 2000; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/13/015l-031300-idx.html
During the past few days a good deal of coverage has been focused on the Meltzer Commission Report on the International Financial Institutions, and what it might mean for the World Bank. Let me take this opportunity to lay out some real concerns that we at the bank have, and also to set the record straight.
We are, of course, pleased that the issue of poverty reduction should be headline news. We share the commission's concern that more must be done by all the players in the fight against poverty, and we applaud all who broach this difficult subject. We also welcome the commission's call for debt relief, and we hope that funding support from Congress will follow it. This is crucial.
We nevertheless believe that a number of the commission's proposals are based on a fundamental misreading of the development challenges we face today. Poor people in developing countries will be the losers if these proposals are implemented.
If the World Bank were to withdraw entirely from Asia and from Latin America; if it were to stop lending to countries with a per capita income above $4,000 a year, it would cut out the marginalized, the poorest, the excluded who live in these countries.
Private-sector investors will not fund the improvements in health, education and other essential public services that people need to pull themselves out of poverty. Moreover, if the World Bank were to stop lending for anti-corruption work, good governance, regulatory reform and institution building, it would cease to create the kind of enabling environment that can attract private funds to countries and areas that currently receive little. No other organization is doing this work on a global scale.
A critical strength of the World Bank is its ability to learn from developing countries in all regions of the world and to reflect those lessons in its policy advice and operations and in its global research programs. Under the commission's proposal to devolve country programs to regional development banks, our clients would be limited to countries in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the former Soviet Union. This would undermine the World Bank's global character at the very time that the demands of globalization are pointing in the opposite direction.
The loss of the bank's cross-regional perspective and the synergies it generates would hurt everyone--especially the poor of the developing world. But the burden would fall heaviest on the 2.2 billion people living on less than $2 per day in Asia and Latin America, since the bank would no longer be involved in country programs there. We would need to withdraw our support for maternal health in Bangladesh, AIDS programs in India, legal reform in Thailand, social security reform in Brazil, financial sector reform in Mexico and so on.
Reflecting other commission recommendations, we also would need to withdraw from important country programs in Europe, such as Poland, where we have supported the creation of market-friendly legal and regulatory frameworks and financial sector and health care reforms.
Nor do the commission's recommendations seem to be supported by sound analysis and careful use of statistics. The report states that 70 percent of the World Bank's non-concessional lending goes to 11 countries that have substantial access to capital markets, but it ignores the fact that these countries are home to more than 60 percent of the poor people in the developing world. The report's authors also fault the bank for neglecting its own insight that aid can be effective only in countries with good policies. But in 1997-99, the best-performing countries annually received almost five times more International Development Association resources per capita than poor performers.
We have changed, and we are changing. By the late 1990s, the financial sector and the social sectors--such as education and health--absorbed about a quarter each of total annual World Bank lending, up from around 5 percent each during the early 1980s. None of this is reflected in the commission's report. Nor is the fact that our operational performance has improved markedly over the past few years. Instead, the report bases much of its argument on a distorted use of statistics on bank effectiveness.
We welcome debate. But we need to test the commission's recommendations against the challenges that we face on the ground every day. Unfortunately, against this measure I believe that many of them significantly miss the mark.
The writer is president of the World Bank.
-----
EU backs German for IMF job
USA Today
03/13/00- Updated 04:27 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#imf
BERLIN - European Union finance ministers agreed Monday to back Germany's Horst Koehler for the top job at the International Monetary Fund, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres confirmed. Portugal currently holds the rotating presidency of the 15-nation EU and is expected to lobby for Koehler in Washington. The first EU candidate, also a German, was rejected by Washington as being unqualified. Guterres said that all EU nations support Koehler. A European customarily holds the managing director position at the IMF, while an American heads the World Bank.
---
Clinton to Support Koehler as I.M.F. Head
New York Times
March 13, 2000
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/13imf-clinton.html
WASHINGTON, March 13 -- President Clinton told Germany's leaders today that he would accept Horst Köhler as the new head of the International Monetary Fund, ending a heated diplomatic contest over who would lead the institution that battles global financial crises.
Mr. Clinton's apparently reluctant support means that Mr. Köhler, a former German finance official who is now president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, is assured of winning the post when the I.M.F.'s board meets later this week. But it leaves several wide rifts, both over the future direction of the much-criticized fund and the method by which its leaders are chosen.
In interviews this morning, before Mr. Clinton's announcement, senior Administration officials who had been less than enthusiastic about the selection of Mr. Köhler were beginning to tout his strengths as a key player in the unification of Germany.
But Washington's approval seemed driven more by a sense that Mr. Clinton could not turn down a second German candidate for the job, and one endorsed directly by Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. Two weeks ago Mr. Clinton rejected the selection of Caio Koch-Weser, and developing nations, led by Africa and the Middle East, attempted to break the tradition of placing a European in the post and nominated Stanley Fischer, the African-born No. 2 official in the Fund.
Mr. Clinton and Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, while praising Mr. Fischer, said they could not violate the 50-year-old, unwritten rule that allows Europe to fill the post, while the United States appoints the head of the World Bank.
The White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said this afternoon that Mr. Clinton had spoken to Mr. Schröder in the afternoon, and "the president told Chancellor Schröder that the United States was prepared to support Mr. Köhler as the new head of the IMF."
"The president and Schröder agreed that Mr. Köhler should come to Washington to meet with the IMF board, particularly with the developing countries," Mr. Lockhart said. "The president and Schröder also agreed that Kohler should retain the talented management team at the IMF."
Mr. Clinton's decision came only hours after all 15 nations of the European Union endorsed Mr. Köhler. With support from the United States, he will almost certainly become the new I.M.F. director, because the United States and Europe control a majority of the votes at the monetary fund.
Though administration officials said that Mr. Köhler is qualified for the job, he was no one's first choice. Germany's unusual decision to insist on installing one of its nationals in a key international post and its aggressive lobbying efforts left both European countries and the United States with an unattractive choice: Rally around Germany's second nominee or risk seriously alienating Europe's second-largest economy.
--- Washington Times
Daybook
March 13, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-03132000.htm
World trade seminar - 10 a.m. - International Law Institute holds a seminar, "World Trade Organization: Rights and Responsibilities." Location: ILI, 1615 New Hampshire Ave. NW. Contact: 202/483-3036
-------- india
A Likely Nuclear War
By Paul D. Taylor
Monday, March 13, 2000; Page A17
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/13/013l-031300-idx.html
President Clinton's visit to South Asia will do much good if it only serves to focus more attention on the deep-seated and dangerous antagonism between India and Pakistan. More Americans need to be aware that experts both within and outside the government believe existing safeguards are inadequate to keep events from escalating rapidly to a nuclear exchange on the Asian subcontinent.
Developments in South Asia last year reminded the world that the nuclear tests undertaken in 1998 by India and Pakistan had ominously increased the danger of nuclear conflict. Pakistani occupation of Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir precipitated the fourth sustained engagement between the countries' armed forces in the 50 years since independence. It also underscored the violent potential of incompatible claims in Kashmir by the two countries.
The October military coup d'etat in Pakistan raised questions about governance, stability and democratic pluralism in a country that has spent about half its political life since independence under military rule. Late in the year, the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by Pakistani militants introduced the specter of state-supported terrorism into the conflict. Together these events created the climate for the 28 percent increase in India's military budget that was recently announced.
Shortly after the nuclear tests in May 1998, the U.S. Naval War College undertook a series of simulations and "decision events" designed to examine the consequences of the tests. The project started from the premise that the tests had increased the possibility of weaponization, deployment and use of nuclear weapons in South Asia. The Decision Strategies Department organized a series of events that convened experts from the U.S. government, academia, foreign governments, business and private voluntary and nongovernmental organizations as well as military commands.
They were presented a scenario set in the year 2003. Some 200 experts examined the implications of a conflict in South Asia that escalates from civic unrest and terrorism to a significant exchange of tactical nuclear weapons.
Several conclusions emerged. A scenario of violence between India and Pakistan, escalating to the point of a significant nuclear exchange, is frighteningly plausible. Moreover, the international community's ability to deal with such a crisis would be limited. Any capacity to influence events in the early stages would only grow weaker as a conflict worsened.
If it developed into a nuclear exchange, the United States and others might wish to help ameliorate a disaster threatening millions of casualties, but to do so would require international coordination well beyond anything currently envisioned in contingency planning.
This is why the U.S. government should act now to create a standing "consequence management" force that could be deployed to alleviate a major disaster anywhere in the world by providing both expertise and material aid. Participants in the study concluded that because the human and economic costs of a nuclear war in South Asia would be so enormous, the United States and other countries should invest efforts and resources now to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan. The financial and political costs of an ounce of prevention would be modest compared with the costs of an unlimited conflict.
India has not welcomed outside help in resolving the dispute over Kashmir, which it considers a domestic problem. Such reservations have eventually been overcome in other trouble spots, however, such as the Middle East and Northern Ireland. But beyond that, it is worth noting that removing the causes of conflict would require a degree of engagement that is incompatible with the arms-length posture the United States has assumed with these two countries in its efforts to discourage others from imitating their nuclear initiatives.
Moreover, for the United States to employ its full influence in the cause of keeping nuclear weapons from being used between Pakistan and India, it will have to deal with the reality that, barring an unforeseen miracle, neither country is going to abandon its status as a de facto nuclear power.
The writer, a former Foreign Service officer, chairs the Asia-Pacific Studies Group at the Naval War College.
--------
India: No Messages Via Clinton
Associated Press
March 13, 2000 Filed at 4:50 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-India-Clinton.html
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India has no intention of asking President Clinton to mediate the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir when he visits next week, the foreign minister said in an interview Monday.
Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh acknowledged Clinton had played ``a positive role'' last July when he persuaded Pakistan to withdraw forces occupying mountain peaks in the Indian-ruled part of Kashmir. But India remains wary of third-party involvement in its disputes.
``We have to examine whether all such interventions are necessarily positive,'' he told The Associated Press. ``In South Asia we bring to this question a considerable degree of historical experience,'' referring to failed efforts to end Afghanistan's civil war.
``The United States does not come to this region with a clean slate,'' he said, adding that the chaos in Afghanistan could be traced in part to U.S. support for Islamic guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in its entirety and have fought two wars over the divided Himalayan territory. In recent months, attacks across Kashmir's border have risen sharply.
The dispute took on a new dimension when the rival nations engaged in underground tests of nuclear devices in 1998. Clinton, whose leaves Washington on Saturday, last week called the Kashmir cease-fire line the ``most dangerous place in the world right now.''
Washington imposed sanctions on both nations after the nuclear tests. Singh cautioned against expecting major policy announcements during Clinton's visit, such as the lifting of U.S. economic sanctions or progress on nonproliferation.
Reports in Indian newspapers have quoted intelligence reports as saying the probabilities were high of a major outbreak of fighting again this year. Singh said he disagreed with that assessment.
In Islamabad, Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said Pakistan hopes Clinton's visit will help reduce soaring tensions on the subcontinent. Pakistan has repeatedly sought involvement from the United Nations or other parties.
``We fear the present tensions could turn into a conflict in view of belligerent statements of Indian leaders,'' Sattar said. ``The international community should make some effort to reverse this trend.''
Sattar also rebuffed demands by the United States and India to rein in pro-Kashmir militant groups based in Pakistan, saying they were not violating any laws. India has accused Pakistan of helping the militants infiltrate Indian territory to launch strikes against civilian and military targets, but Pakistan denies giving the groups more than moral and diplomatic support.
Sattar also warned that on the issue of a quick return to democracy in Pakistan, where the army took power in a bloodless coup last October, ``we are not going to follow an American agenda.''
Singh, who spoke with The AP in his office in parliament while listening with one ear to a debate on closed-circuit television, also seemed to soften India's earlier position regarding talks with Pakistan.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has said that India will not resume talks until Pakistan vacates the one-third of Kashmir that it has administered since the first Indo-Pakistan war in 1947.
But Singh said that for the dialogue to resume, Pakistan must renounce violence, stop supporting ``cross-border terrorism'' or infiltration by pro-Kashmir militants, and cease hostile propaganda.
The Indian foreign minister also refrained from criticizing Clinton's decision to add Pakistan to the itinerary of the trip to India and Bangladesh that begins Saturday.
``There's a saying in Sanskrit,'' Singh said. ``Treat every guest like a god.''
On the Net: State Department's Bureau of South Asian Affairs: http://www.state.gov/www/regions/sa/index.html
----------- iran
http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/2000/3/13/8.text.1
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary (Aboard Air Force One)
For Immediate Release
March 13, 2000
TEXT OF A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT TO THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE
March 13, 2000
Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)
Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)) provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, prior to the anniversary date of its declara-tion, the President publishes in the Federal Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. In accordance with this provision, I have sent the enclosed notice, stating that the national emergency declared with respect to Iran on March 15, 1995, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706) is to continue in effect beyond March 15, 2000, to the Federal Register for publi-cation. This emergency is separate from that declared on November 14, 1979, in connection with the Iranian hostage crisis and therefore requires separate renewal of emergency authorities. The last notice of continuation was published in the Federal Register on March 12, 1999.
The factors that led me to declare a national emergency with respect to Iran on March 15, 1995, have not been resolved. The actions and policies of the Government of Iran, including support for international terrorism, its efforts to undermine the Middle East peace process, and its acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, continue to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.
Sincerely,
WILLIAM J. CLINTON
-------- iraq
Without benefit of issues? A.M. Rosenthal
Washington Times
March 13, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/comment1-031300.htm
Now that we know one of two men will lead America into the future, perhaps both would be good enough to talk to us about the most important dilemma facing the country, which all candidates slithered over or ignored during the primary season.
Dilemma:
The United States is now the most powerful nation in history economically and militarily. Therefore it faces more and different problems, dangers and opportunities than any other nation ever. But its government has not the faintest workable idea about what to do about most of them.
The candidates did deal with important matters, of course, like how little taxes we could pay, how we could get better-educated children in the cities with poorer teachers and rotting schools, and, endlessly, with the trickery and playacting necessary to run a campaign.
There was one brave, stirring moment - when Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, had the courage to tell both parties to shed themselves of intolerant never-elected leaders, and named Democratic and Republican specimens. For that the Republican right beat him to a political pulp, successfully avoiding being led by the hottest conservative possibility since Ronald Reagan.
But issues were not brought up that could involve lives and deaths around the world, American included. Such as: Would American policy be designed to help hostile dictatorships wither and die as the Soviet Union did? Or, in the hope that stuffing them with trade and other fruits of free capitalism would somehow reform them, were we simply heightening their ability to confront us in the future?
Did anybody hear any debate about what in heaven's name are we going to do about Saddam Hussein - preferably before he finishes the development of his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to smuggle into our country?
American and allied forces wiped him out in the Gulf war. Then they gave him 15 days to reveal his weapons of mass destruction, and, hilariously, believed he would.
A decade later this latter-day Lazurus has completely wiped out inspection. Countries we solemnly believed were our allies, or at least good chums, rally round him to try to lift the sanctions he imposed on his people by his battle against inspection.
If he ever allows some inspection, how will we be able to know what he did in the year and a half he has banned it? We won't - that is the answer of every inspection specialist worth the name.
If the primary candidates had any good ideas they hid them from Saddam and the American public.
Mind you, the American public did not seem to care a hoot, nor did most of the press, print and electronic.
Perhaps everybody was being tender toward the candidates. After all, none of them have been president yet, so let's not bother them with all that headachy foreign affairs stuff now. Sweet.
But they were applicants and wouldn't we all want to know how anybody running for the presidency would handle problems even bigger than attack ads?
I guess not. But it is hard for me to get my mind around the fact that once again we are strengthening dictatorships.
When I was young, we used to say the Japanese were very generous. We sold them torn-down elevated lines for scrap, at good prices, and they gave them back to us free, at Pearl Harbor.
We have not learned that when dictators - Japanese, German, Iraqi, Chinese - bare their teeth at us, they mean it.
We hear the United States plans to give Syria billions if it signs a treaty with Israel under which it would get back the Golan Heights. Seems to me the Syrian dictatorship should pay America for arranging it. How it seems to the four candidates, who knows?
Of course, we are sorry for the dictators' victims - but usually not sorry enough to do anything.
We did not hear from the four candidates still running last week what they thought, when in Sunday church, about Chinese Christians who have been arrested, beaten, tortured, for the crime of worshipping as they believed, and where, not as the Communist Party orders.
Maybe Beijing would ease up on their victims if the four had advocated trade restraints as penalties against Beijing for gross human rights violations. But they all now recoil at the very thought.
On we go. If we let the presidential campaign itself pass without hearing the detailed Bush plan for enforcing the human rights covenants China has signed, or the Gore scenario for eliminating Saddam's arsenal, we will betray tyranny's victims, and our own democratic duty to know.
A.M. Rosenthal is the former executive editor of the New York Times.
----------- ireland
IRELAND A LEADER IN EFFORTS TO ELIMINATE N-WEAPONS, AUSTRALIA LAGS
13/3/2000
AUSTRALIAN PEACE COMMITTEE/FRIENDS OF THE EARTH
foesyd4@pop.ihug.com.au,
Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:24:01 +1000
Friends of the Earth and the Australian Peace Committee are urging that the question of nuclear weapons policy and the coming review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) are on the agenda for talks today between the Australian and Irish Prime Ministers.
According to Irene Gale AM of the Australian Peace Committee and John Hallam of Friends of the Earth, "Ireland has along with New Zealand and Sweden, a very distinguished role in efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Ireland was a founding member of the New Agenda Coalition, which brought a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly last year that passed by a massive majority, urging that the nuclear weapons states abide by their obligations under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and that nuclear weapons be taken off alert status. That resolution was based on the recommendations of Australias own Canberra Commission. Australia to its shame, abstained from voting on it."
"Ireland will we are sure, like New Zealand, be amongst the nations that will make a real attempt to produce genuine progress on the fulfillment of the obligations of the nuclear weapon states under Article VI of the NPT."
"The Australian Senate last Thursday passed a resolution that called on the Australian government and other countries to implement the Canberra Commission and pressure the nuclear weapons states to abide by their treaty obligations to eliminate their nuclear arsenals."
"Ireland, along with New Zealand, has shown true leadership in global efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Australia has since the signing of the CTBT, beat a steady retreat from what was once also a leadership role.
Implementation of the Canberra Commission recommendations has been left to nations such as Ireland, New Zealand and Sweden. If the coming NPT Review conference is to have any hope of a positive outcome at all, Mr. Howard should be discussing with Mr. Ahearn the way in which we might cooperate on the floor of the UN over the NPT in April/May in implementing the Canberra Commission recommendations and force the weapons states to abide by their obligations to rid the world of nuclear weapons." John Hallam, 02-9517-3903, h02-9810-2598 Irene Gale AM, 08-8364-2291
------- japan
Japan town says no to nuclear waste facilities
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=5977
TOKYO, March 13, 2000 (Reuters) - A small Japanese town passed a resolution on Monday banning the construction of nuclear waste storage facilities there, the latest sign of growing grass-roots opposition to nuclear power after a string of accidents.
The town council of Yaku in Kagoshima prefecture, 980 km (610 miles) southwest of Tokyo, unanimously adopted a resolution opposing any plans to build a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.
Although there are no official plans to build a plant in the area, a local power plant had been rumoured to be interested in doing so. In the first ever move of its kind, the council also planned to adopt later this month an ordinance barring the entry of radioactive materials into the town, Kyodo news agency said.
The council's move comes amid growing public criticism of Japan's nuclear energy policy following a series of accidents in recent years. The country saw its worst-ever nuclear accident last September when a mishap at a uranium processing plant killed one worker and exposed more than 100 people to radiation.
Nuclear energy covers about one-third of the resource-poor nation's electricity demand.
Trade Minister Takashi Fukaya said on Friday that the central government would begin a sweeping review of its energy policy, a move that is likely to lead to cuts in plans to build as many as 20 new nuclear reactors by 2010.
Fukaya said it might be difficult to achieve the current nuclear expansion target given changing circumstances facing the energy industry.
03:38 03-13-00
-------- korea
N. Korea Diplomats Get Gregarious
Associated Press
March 13, 2000 Filed at 3:09 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Koreas-Diplomatic-Campaign.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- After years of virtual hibernation, North Korean diplomats are turning gregarious. They just visited Canada for the first time, they're talking to counterparts in New York and they're preparing to play host to envoys from Britain.
These days, rival South Korea is also seeking the world's ear: its foreign minister, Lee Joung-binn, was in Washington on Monday for talks with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Even though the two Koreas remain locked in an armed standoff, their parallel diplomatic campaigns ally them in the same pursuit: Communist North Korea appears eager to engage the world it has simultaneously spurned and relied on for decades, and Seoul is anxious to help.
A striking symbol of Pyongyang's policy shift could come in April if a visit by a top North Korean official to Washington goes ahead as planned.
Last week, U.S. and North Korean envoys opened talks in New York to discuss the trip. One possible candidate to lead the delegation is Kang Sok Ju, North Korea's first deputy foreign minister.
North Korea could be acting out of desperation as much as a desire for reconciliation if it dispatches Kang to a nation it has long regarded as the crucible of imperialist evil.
Years of famine brought on by drought, floods and economic mismanagement forced the totalitarian state to appeal for food donations from international donors, including the United States. Aid workers say the situation remains precarious.
North Korea's missile and nuclear programs and human rights record would likely be on the agenda in Washington. Also, North Korea wants the United States to remove it from a U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorist activities.
Pyongyang was put on the list because of involvement in the midair bombing of a South Korean airliner near Burma, now Myanmar, in 1987. All 115 people on board the Korean Air plane died.
The Washington meeting would be a vindication of the so-called ``sunshine'' policy of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who has tried to woo the recalcitrant North with sports, business and cultural contacts.
Kim is under domestic pressure to show results from his gradualist policy, which critics say has failed to win concessions and has instead funded North Korea's military machine. Opposition leaders have seized on the issue ahead of parliamentary elections on April 13.
North Korea also has a home audience to please. While its diplomats talk behind closed doors to American negotiators, its official media pumps out diatribes denigrating the United States as ``brigandish,'' ``impudent,'' ``sinister'' and ``criminal.''
Pyongyang still refuses to talk, at least publicly, to the government in Seoul, which it rejects as illegitimate. In a speech last week in Berlin, South Korea's Kim delivered another appeal for direct talks and offered more economic help to the North.
Although the strength of U.S.-South Korean ties is evident in the 37,000 American soldiers stationed on the Korean peninsula, there is concern that North Korea is trying to drive a wedge in the alliance by talking only to the United States.
``We hope that they don't have that illusion of any possibility of isolating our country,'' said S.J. Yoon, a presidential spokesman in Seoul.
Stripped of allies by the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, North Korea is pursuing ties. Normalization talks with Japan, which has decided to resume food aid to the North, are expected to start next month.
Four Foreign Ministry officials visited Canada earlier this month, and several British diplomats are expected to visit Pyongyang in April or May. Canada and Britain have donated aid to North Korea but neither has immediate plans to establish official diplomatic ties.
North Korea is also stepping up overtures to its chief ally, China, perhaps to ease any concern in Beijing about its new contacts with the West. In a highly unusual move, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il visited the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang a week ago.
China's decision in 1992 to formally recognize South Korea, now a major trading partner, strained relations with the North. But Beijing's own concerns about U.S. and Japanese sway in the region may have encouraged it to improve ties with Pyongyang in the past year.
--------pakistan
FAS Briefing on Pakistan's Nuclear and Missle Facilities
US Newswire
13 Mar 17:34
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0313-140.html
Pakistan's Nuclear and Missile Facilities Revealed at Federation of American Scientists News Briefing To: National and Assignment desks, Daybook Editor Contact: John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, 202-675-1023; Web site: http://www.fas.org
News Advisory:
When: Wednesday, 9 a.m. March 15
Where: National Press Club, Lisagor Room
What: New satellite images of Pakistan's nuclear and missile facilities provide fresh insight into the nuclear dangers on the subcontinent. The high resolution images, acquired by the Federation of American Scientists from the Space Imaging IKONOS satellite, show details of Pakistan's weapons facilities previously known only to the secret intelligence world. The public release of these images on the eve of President Clinton's trip to India and Pakistan highlights the urgency of new initiatives to address the risk of nuclear escalation between these countries.
The Federation's Public Eye project is acquiring imagery of nuclear and missile facilities around the world. In February it released imagery of the North Korean missile test facility, and imagery of additional facilities will be released in coming weeks.
The imagery covers two of Pakistan's most important special weapons facilities, the plutonium production reactor at Khushab, and the nearby medium range missile base at Sargodha. Plutonium from the Khushab reactor would probably be used in light-weight nuclear warheads for the M-11 missiles at Sargodha, which Pakistan acquired from China in the early 1990s. The new satellite imagery indicates that construction of the Khushab reactor is essentially complete, and that Pakistan has built a dozen garages for mobile missile launchers and associated vehicles at Sargodha.
"Pakistan has laid the groundwork for a force of dozens of nuclear tipped missiles capable of striking Indian cities and military bases. But Pakistan is in danger of having most of its nuclear eggs in one basket, which would be a tempting target for a pre-emptive Indian attack in a time of crisis," according to John Pike, who directs the Federation's Public Eye project. "The United States needs to work with India and Pakistan to reduce this temptation for launching disarming attacks. With Pakistan and India apparently moving ahead with deploying nuclear forces, the danger of such attacks will grow. In the past, American policy focused on preventing these countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the future, American policy need a new focus on initiatives to reduce the risk that these weapons will be used."
A more detailed analysis of these facilities, including highlights of the satellite imagery, is available on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists at http://www.fas.org News media wishing to reproduce this copyrighted imagery for publication or broadcast should contact Mark Brender at SpaceImaging at 703-558-0309 or Amy Opperman at 303-254-2078 to make the necessary licensing arrangements.
------ The Federation of American Scientists is engaged in analysis and advocacy on science, technology and public policy concerning global security. A privately-funded non-profit policy organization whose Board of Sponsors includes more than 55 American Nobel Laureates, FAS was founded as the Federation of Atomic Scientists in 1945 by members of the Manhattan Project who produced the first atomic bomb.
-0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 03/13 17:34
-------- russia
Siberian sellout: N-dump proposed
Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 13/03/2000
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0003/13/text/world07.html
http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/MON/FIN/nuke.2.html
Washington: The Russian atomic energy ministry has drafted a proposal to earn $A33 billion over the next 10 years by importing 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from Asian and European countries for storage and eventual reprocessing in Siberia.
According to confidential ministry documents obtained by environmental activists, the plan is aimed at cashing in on a world-wide shortage of secure storage sites for spent nuclear fuel. But environmental groups argue Russia risks being turned into a nuclear dumping ground for richer countries. The United States opposes the idea because it would add to the already huge Russian stockpiles of plutonium, a key ingredient in building a nuclear bomb.
While the Russian atomic energy ministry, known as Minatom, has made no secret of its desire to earn precious hard currency from the storage of other countries' nuclear waste, the draft documents provide new details about the Russian recycling proposals, which are more extensive than previously understood in the West.
A Minatom spokesman confirmed the target figure of $A33 billion for the storage and reprocessing plan, but described it as a very rough estimate of maximum possible revenues. The estimate is based on the predicted emergence of a huge market for spent nuclear fuel storage, because of unsatisfied demand from countries like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, and Switzerland.
Plutonium, a fissile material used for making atomic bombs, is one of several by-products of the reprocessing cycle.
In contrast to the US, which does not produce plutonium for civilian purposes, Russia has long advocated a "closed" nuclear cycle in which plutonium can be separated from spent nuclear fuel and then used to power civilian reactors.
The Washington Post
---
Russia Could Become World's Nuclear Waste Repository
By Cat Lazaroff
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/mar2000/2000L-03-13-07.html
WASHINGTON, DC, March 13, 2000 (ENS) - The U.S. Department of Energy and Russia's Ministry for Atomic Energy have signed an agreement to develop and test advanced technologies to remediate high level nuclear waste in both counties.
Nuclear waste storage area at Zhelezhnogorsk (Two photos courtesy DOE)
The announcement Friday came amid revelations by international environmental groups that the Russian ministry plans to earn billions of dollars by importing and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from Asian and European countries.
The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to fund a new Tank Retrieval and Closure Demonstration Center at the Mining and Chemical Combine, a production facility in Zheleznogorsk, Russia. The center will serve as an international site where advanced equipment and technologies for remediation of high level radioactive waste tanks can be tested, before being qualified for use in cleanup of both the Russian and U.S. complexes.
The same site, Greenpeace International has uncovered, has been targeted for the storage of up to 30,000 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel imported from non-Russian countries including Germany, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Spain and Taiwan.
Minatom's import plan could send 30,000 tonnes of nuclear wastes to this storage facility
Last week, Greenpeace International released confidential documents from the Russian Ministry for Atomic Energy (Minatom) showing plans to import up to 20,000 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from foreign countries. The fuel would be imported not only for intermediate storage, as had been previously proposed, but also for final disposal and even plutonium reprocessing.
The document, dated 1999, calculates an income for these services of $US 21 billion and is signed by First Deputy Minister Valentin Ivanov. Greenpeace describes this plan as "an extremely dangerous and cynical deal to generate billions of dollars which will only add to the enormous environmental problems that already exist in Russia, as well as increasing security risks and nuclear proliferation."
The spent nuclear fuel would be sent to Russia by truck, train and river barge. Plutonium reprocessing could begin as early as 2020, after a new reprocessing plant is completed in Ozersk.
The Minatom plan could not be implemented without significant changes in Russia's environmental laws, which now prohibit the import of nuclear fuels into Russia except from a few former Soviet Union states. But Russia has been spending less and less on environmental protection, and the government could be willing to change the rules for such a potentially lucrative proposition.
The half-completed reprocessing facility at Zhelezhnogorsk (Three photos courtesy Bellona Foundation)
Last month, U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced that the U.S. and Russia are near an agreement to halt reprocessing of civilian nuclear fuel, including plutonium, in Russia. Both countries have been working toward an agreement to limit or ban reprocessing as part of nuclear weapons non-proliferation efforts.
The confidential report revealing Minatom's import and reprocessing plan was obtained and translated by Greenpeace International's Tobias Muenchmeyer. The countries listed as potential clients all have problems with where to store spent nuclear fuel.
"It is a problem of their own creation, and it is for their government and citizens to seek to solve the problem of nuclear waste that presents a hazard to the environment for tens of thousands of years to come," said Greenpeace. "As there is no current solution, they should move as early as possible to a phase out of nuclear power, and to opt for national, monitored, above-ground dry storage," the group recommends.
The Greenpeace report and the translated Russian documents are available at: http://www.greenpeace.org/~nuclear/waste/russianwaste.html
Meanwhile, the DOE plans to spend $1.5 million to "assist Zheleznogorsk in their efforts to become a world provider of technology for cleaning and remediating high level radioactive waste storage tanks, a $24 billion industry in the U.S. and Russia," the DOE says.
The "Severnyy" Repository, about 20 kilometers north of Zheleznogorsk, is also targeted for storage of imported nuclear wastes
The partnership will be funded through the DOE's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, a project to secure weapons of mass destruction expertise in Russia and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.
The project seeks to enhance U.S. national security and nonproliferation objectives by engaging scientists, engineers and technicians from former weapons of mass destruction and weapons related institutes, redirecting their activities in coooperatively developed, commercially viable non-weapons related projects.
"This is an exciting collaboration offering the potential to reduce future cleanup costs at U.S. and Russian facilities by billions of dollars," said Rose Gottemoeller, acting deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the DOE. "In addition this activity puts Russia's top scientists to work in their homeland, helping to prevent brain drain, a major U.S. priority."
The contract, which was signed Tuesday between the DOE's Sandia National Laboratories and Russia's Mining and Chemical Combine names Sandia as overall project manager in Zheleznogorsk. The laboratories' personnel will test Russia's tank remediation technology and coordinate this technology with international standards.
The project also advances the DOE's Nuclear Cities Initiative by assisting Russia as it downsizes and commercializes its weapons complex. The Nuclear Cities Initiative is a DOE project that helps the Russian government provide civilian employment to weapons scientists in the 10 closed Russian nuclear cities, making it possible for them to remain in their homeland and work on civilian and commercial projects as facilities in Russia's weapons complex are downsized or eliminated.
-------
Daybook
Washington Times
March 13, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-03132000.htm
Energy Department meeting - 9 a.m. - Energy Department holds the first meeting of the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board Task Force on Russia to review the Energy Department's nonproliferation and nuclear-safety programs in Russia. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson participates. Location: Energy Department, Room 8E-089, 1000 Independence Ave. SW. Contact: 202/586-5806.
---
RUSSIA IMPORTING NUCLEAR WASTE FOR FINAL DISPOSAL AND REPROCESSING
Official documents reveal plans for dumping and plutonium reprocessing
http://www.greenpeace.org/~nuclear/waste/russianwaste.html
Berlin, March 9th, 2000
Greenpeace has obtained a confidential document which provides background details on plans of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy to import up to 20,000 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from foreign countries not only for intermediate storage - as had been proposed, but also for final disposal and even plutonium reprocessing in Russia.
The document calculates an income for these services of $US 21 billion. The document, dated 1999, is signed by First Deputy Minister Valentin Ivanov. The document envisages the import of up to 20,500 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to get revenues of US$ 21 billion. Greenpeace described this as an extremely dangerous and cynical deal to generate billions of dollars which will only add to the enormous environmental problems that already exist in Russia, as well as increasing security risks and nuclear proliferation.
The countries listed as being potential clients, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Spain, Taiwan all indeed have a spent fuel problem. It is a problem of their own creation, and it is for their government and citizens to seek to solve the problem of nuclear waste that presents a hazard to the environment for tens of thousands of years to come. As there is no current solution, they should move as early as possible to a phase out of nuclear power, and to opt for national, monitored, above-ground dry storage.
MINISTRY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FOR ATOMIC ENERGY TECHNICAL-ECONOMIC BASIS FOR THE LAW OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION "On the proposed amendment to article 50 of the Law of the RSFSR "On environmental protection" Download the full document
http://www.greenpeace.org/%7Enuclear/waste/russianwaste.pdf
Greenpeace critique of Minatom nuclear law change and nuclear proliferation trust (NPT) proposal Download the full document
http://www.greenpeace.org/%7Enuclear/waste/russianwastegp.pdf
Read the 11th March story in Berliner Zeitung (German)
http://www.greenpeace.org/%7Enuclear/waste/russianwastegp.pdf
Download pdf here
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
------
Putin's Ascent Worries Activists
New York Times
By The Associated Press
March 13, 2000 Filed at 1:21 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Russian-Liberties.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Soon after Vladimir Putin was named acting president, some human rights activists huddled together in a smoky Moscow office to consider what the ex-KGB agent's striking ascent would mean for Russia.
Their verdict: ``Nothing good,'' according to Sasha Daniel, who works for the human rights group Memorial and whose parents were famous Soviet-era dissidents.
With Putin almost certain to win March 26 presidential elections, human rights activists fear he will roll back liberties they fought for in the communist era. Putin has already cranked up pressure on outspoken journalists, strengthened the secret services, and waged a war in Chechnya that rights groups staunchly oppose.
But few activists predict a full-fledged revival of Soviet-style political persecutions, strict censorship and closed borders. So far, all they've seen are a few worrying signs. Even Putin, they hope, understands that Russia has tasted too much freedom in the past decade to allow that.
Still, the dissidents are among the few to cast doubt on Putin's policies.
Ordinary Russians appear unconcerned by the two things that most worry human rights defenders in Russia and the West: Putin's 15 years with the Soviet-era KGB -- which killed, imprisoned and persecuted millions -- and his role in waging Moscow's war in Chechnya, which has killed thousands, mostly civilians.
In fact, Putin's strict stance on Chechnya has been a key source of his popularity for many Russians, who are fed up with the kidnapping and other crime that has festered in and around the breakaway republic in recent years.
Putin's rigid demeanor and law-and-order refrain also appeal to Russians frustrated by years of corrupt, capricious leadership under Boris Yeltsin. And Putin's secret police past is not a mark of shame in Russia, which has not confronted its totalitarian past the way many Eastern European nations have.
``Putin hasn't denounced his past or that of the KGB. He even speaks of it proudly, embraces it,'' said Yuri Samodurov, director of the Sakharov Foundation, which honors Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. ``We are very much on guard.''
Yet he noted that some dissidents who resisted Soviet rule now support Putin.
``They, like all of us, need to believe in something. Dissidents have had little to believe in Russia recently,'' Samodurov said. ``Everything will depend on which freedoms people are willing to surrender, and which freedoms they are willing to defend.''
Samodurov was among several people who wrote a recent appeal to Western governments to ostracize Putin for his rights record.
``Under the present government, our country can expect, in the foreseeable future, shattering upheavals that could impact surrounding countries as well. And we appeal to the governments and public of the West to re-examine their attitude toward the Kremlin leadership, to cease conniving in its barbaric actions, its dismantlement of democracy and suppression of human rights,'' the statement read.
Putin has dismissed suggestions that he would seek unlimited powers or create a ``super-KGB,'' and he has pledged to respect individual rights.
``I am deeply convinced there will be no development, no future at all in the country if we suppress civil rights and freedom of the press,'' Putin said recently.
Yet signs of creeping state control have been increasing in recent years, since before Putin rose to the Kremlin throne.
After the Soviet Union's demise, Russia's secret police underwent a wave of cutbacks and reforms. But many of those have since been reversed. Yeltsin's last three prime ministers all had intelligence backgrounds.
Putin has increased state surveillance of Internet activity, starting when he was head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB's main successor, before being named prime minister last summer.
The Russian military has rigorously restricted journalists' access to the Chechnya war. And police recently tried to send a Moscow reporter who has written about corruption to a mental hospital. In the Soviet era, dissidents were routinely confined to asylums.
Alexander Nikitin, who was pursued by the FSB for four years after he exposed unsafe storage of nuclear waste by the Russian navy, said Putin is bad news for environmental activists and crusaders for court reform.
``My friends and colleagues and I discuss all the time the future for us and for Russia, regarding human rights, with the appearance of this new president,'' Nikitin said. ``We have little optimism.''
Nikitin was acquitted of treason charges in December. The case enraged environmental and human rights groups worldwide. Putin headed the FSB during much of the investigation, but commented on it publicly only once -- to say Nikitin was guilty.
----------- scotland
JP Finds Peace Activists Not Guilty
Crown Case Bungled
From: TP2000 tp2000@gn.apc.org
TRIDENT PLOUGHSHARES
Press Briefing 13th March 2000
In Helensburgh District Court today JP Tony Stirling found two peace activists not guilty on three charges after the Crown had failed to present sufficient evidence.
Marilyn Croser (24), a student from Glasgow, and Helen Harris (27), an adult education tutor from Bristol, had been charged with three offences relating to their participation in a Trident Ploughshares disarmament action at Faslane naval base in August last year. There were two charges of criminal damage (cutting the base's perimeter fence) and one of breaching the military bye-laws. In regard to the criminal damage charges the police witnesses were unable to show any clarity about which fences were being referred to. In the case of the bye-law charge the witnesses were unable to show that the women were on MOD land without proper authority. There was also confusion about identity.
Although JP Stirling did not permit the accused to develop issues of international law in cross examining the Crown witnesses there was one interesting exchange with a Strathclyde PC from the Gorbals Division. He had come to the scene after being informed by a member of the public that someone was cutting the base's fence. In cross- examination Helen Harris asked him whether he would similarly investigate if told by a protester that international law was being breached by the activities behind the fence. He readily acknowledged that he would.
The accused did not take the witness stand but just gave a statement in summing up, on the grounds that they were weary of the continued refusal of the District Court to consider arguments based on international law. The Crown evidence had been patchy and sloppy but the real issue was not what fence had been cut where but the criminal activity going on inside the base. It was shameful that in spite of the judgment of Margaret Gimblett in acquitting the Trident Three at Greenock the District Court did not take account of the illegality of Trident.
In delivering his verdict JP Stirling said that his court did not have the discretion to argue the rights and wrongs of international law. The "appeal" of the Trident Three case had not yet been heard by the High Court and the relevant ruling was still that of the High Court in rejecting the appeal of activist Helen John. Yet the prosecution had not provided sufficient evidence to substantiate the charges and he therefore found the accused not guilty.
At this point Helen Harris interjected: " I wish you had a better reason than that for finding us not guilty." Stirling replied: " Be thankful for small mercies."
Later Helen Harris said: "The JP's position is illogical. If the District Court is not competent to deal with international law he should refuse to try our case. The whole episode was a hollow farce. One ray of light was the Gorbals PC who promised to investigate international crime. He will have a big mail bag soon!"
A Trident Ploughshares spokesperson said: "JP Stirling is all over the place in legal terms. International law applies at any level of justice, even the most parochial. He also has no right to block the cross-questioning of Crown witnesses on matters of international law without giving the accused the chance to show the relevance. Had Helen and Marilyn been convicted this case would have ample grounds for appeal."
Contacts: David Mackenzie 01324 880744 (07775711054) Jane Tallents 01436 679194 Trident Ploughshares website: http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/ Scottish CND website (Especially useful on Trident): http://www.cndscot.dial.pipex.com
ENDS
Trident Ploughshares 2000, 42-46 Bethel Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1NR, UK
tel + 44 (0) 1324 880744 fax + 44 (0) 1436 677529 http://www.gn.apc.org/tp2000/
Email : tp2000@gn.apc.org
Nuclear weapons are immoral, dangerous, polluting, a terrible waste of resources and were found to be generally illegal by the International Court of Justice on 8th July 1996.
----------- spain
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:04:43 -0800
From: "Dan Fahey" mtpdu@dclink.com To: du-list@eGroups.com
TITLE: Leukemia, lymphomas, and myeloma mortality in the vicinity of nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel facilities in Spain.
AUTHORS: Lopez-Abente G; Aragones N; Pollan M; Ruiz M; Gandarillas A
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Cancer Epidemiology Unit of the National Center for Epidemiology, Carlos III Institute of Health, Madrid, Spain.
glabente@isciii.es.
SOURCE: Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 1999 Oct;8(10):925-34
CITATION IDS: PMID: 10548323 UI: 20014359
ABSTRACT: Mortality due to hematological tumors in towns near Spain's seven nuclear power plants and five nuclear fuel facilities during the period 1975-1993 was ascertained. The study was based on 610 leukemia-, 198 lymphoma-, and 122 myeloma-induced deaths in 489 towns situated within a 30-km radius of such installations. As control areas, we used 477 towns lying within a 50- to 100-km radius of each installation, matched by population size and a series of sociodemographic characteristics (income level, proportion of active population engaged in farming, proportion of unemployed, percentage of illiteracy, and province). Relative risk (RR) for each area and the trends in risk with increasing proximity to an installation were analyzed using log-linear models. None of the nuclear power plants registered an excess risk of leukemia- induced mortality in any of the surrounding areas. Excess risk of leukemia mortality was, however, observed in the vicinity of the uranium-processing facilities in Andujar [RR, 1.30; 95% confidence interval, 1.03-1.64] and Ciudad Rodrigo (RR, 1.68; 95% confidence interval, 0.92-3.08). Excess risk of multiplemyeloma mortality was found in the area surrounding the Zorita nuclear power plant. Statistical testing revealed that, with the single exception of multiple myeloma, none of the tumors studied showed evidence of a rise in risk with proximity to an installation. No study area yielded evidence of a raised risk of leukemia mortality among persons under the age of 25 years. More specific studies are called for in areas near installations that have been fully operational for longer periods. In this connection, stress should be laid on the importance of using dosimetric information in all future studies.
MAIN MESH HEADINGS: Leukemia, Radiation-Induced/*mortality Lymphoma/*mortality Multiple Myeloma/*mortality Neoplasms, Radiation-Induced/*mortality *Nuclear Reactors *Power Plants ADDITIONAL MESH HEADINGS: Adolescence Adult Aged Child Child, Preschool Cohort Studies Cross-Sectional Studies Female Follow-Up Studies Human Incidence Infant Male Middle Age Retrospective Studies Risk Spain/epidemiology Support, Non-U.S. Gov't 1999/11 1999/05 08:00 PUBLICATION TYPES: JOURNAL ARTICLE LANGUAGES: Eng
-------- taiwan
Taiwan Stock Market Is Shaken by Election Fears
New York Times
March 13, 2000
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/13cnd-taiwan.html
HONG KONG, March 13 -- Fears that Taiwan's governing Nationalist Party might lose next Saturday's closely-fought presidential election surged through the Taipei stock market today, causing its largest single-day point loss in history and the largest percentage decline in a decade.
Taipei's main stock index plummeted 617 points, or 6.6 percent, in a panicky session driven almost entirely by politics. Analysts said investors were worried that a victory by the Democratic Progressive Party candidate, Chen Shui-bian, would inflame relations between Taiwan and China.
Beijing has sharply criticized Mr. Chen for advocating independence for Taiwan, which it views as a renegade province. Mr. Chen's party formally favors an independent Taiwan, though he has pledged not to declare that if elected.
The three main candidates to succeed President Lee Teng-hui -- Mr. Chen, Vice President Lien Chan of the Nationalist Party, and James Soong, an independent -- are running neck and neck in the most competitive race in Taiwan's history. But Mr. Chen seems to be gaining momentum at the expense of Mr. Lien.
Taiwan law bans the publication of opinion polls in the final two weeks of the campaign, which means statistical analysis has been replaced by anecdotal evidence, hunches and pure speculation.
Mr. Chen received endorsements over the weekend from three influential corporate leaders and one of Taiwan's most eminent academics, Lee Yuan-tseh. Mr. Lee, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, offered to resign as president of a top research institute to serve as an adviser to Mr. Chen.
Mr. Chen also drew an estimated 400,000 people to a rally in Kaohsiung, a southern port city that is a stronghold of the Democratic Progressive Party. The rally, the largest and most raucous of the campaign so far, impressed political oddsmakers with its organization and fervor.
"If Chen Shui-bian wins the election, there is likely to be a period of volatility because of the uncertainty about Taiwan's policies toward China," said Dong Tao, a regional analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. "There would also be uncertainty about how to deal with the Nationalist Party."
In an interview in Taipei last week, Mr. Chen complained that the Nationalist Party was playing the "China terror card," warning that a Chen victory would wreak havoc on the stock market and the economy. Today, Mr. Chen and several market analysts said they believed that the Nationalists had ordered government-related funds to sell their shares to deepen the market decline.
"It is heartbreaking and regrettable to see the Nationalists ignoring the interests of civilians and stock investors," Mr. Chen said at a rally near Taipei.
The Nationalists denied that they had orchestrated the sell-off. And they asserted that legislators from the Democratic Progressive Party had held up the approval of a $16.3 billion "stabilization fund," which the government could have used to protect the market from just this kind of politically-driven panic.
The effect of a gyrating stock market on the vote is unpredictable, though analysts believe that instability generally helps the Nationalist Party, because the party represents the status quo.
"The party is taking a risk here," said one market analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Instead of pushing up the market to please voters, they're saying, 'If you don't vote for us, this is the danger."'
Whatever Mr. Chen's concrete support, there is no question that he is generating more attention in the closing days than either of his rivals. The endorsements from Lee Yuan-tseh and the business executives are important because they lend weight to a candidate whose support is seen as coming mostly from younger voters and native Taiwanese, like Mr. Chen himself.
The three executives -- Stan Shih of Acer Computer, Chang Rong-far of Evergreen Group, and Hsu Wen-lung of Chi Mei Industry -- are also Taiwanese, as opposed to born in mainland China. But collectively, they represent the industrial elite.
They also have close ties to Lee Teng-hui, whom analysts say has tepid feelings for his vice president, Mr. Lien. Though Mr. Lee insists he supports Mr. Lien and campaigned for him over the weekend, rumors swept the market today that the president was about to abandon his deputy for Mr. Chen.
The Nationalist Party has lost supporters not only to Mr. Chen but also to Mr. Soong, who was himself a party heavyweight. One of the senior officials who defected, Chen Pi, said in an interview that he could not support Mr. Lien because "his style is to do little or nothing."
"People in Taiwan long for reform," said Mr. Chen, a former provincial police chief of Taiwan. "But Mr. Lien hasn't satisfied the expectations of the people."
Political analysts said there would be more twists and turns before March 18. And they cautioned that despite the mood today, the Nationalist Party would have an unrivaled ability to mobilize voters on election day.
-------- us nuc weapons
Shalikashvili Boosts Test Ban Pact
Associated Press
March 13, 2000 Filed at 12:19 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Test-Ban-Treaty.html
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS736I60G0
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former U.S. military chief John Shalikashvili said today he would try to allay the concerns of opponents of the worldwide ban on nuclear weapons tests in a drive to gain approval of the treaty.
``We know the feelings are very deeply held,'' Shalikashvili said at a news conference designed to drum up support for the treaty that won the support of only 48 senators, 19 short of the required 67, last October.
The former Army general, appointed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in January to lobby Senate foes, said he would consider all options short of those that would require renegotiating terms of the accord.
``It's important that the world understand we are trying to bridge differences,'' Shalikashvili said.
Rejection of the treaty was a major foreign policy setback for President Clinton and his administration. Opponents argued safeguards against cheating by other countries were inadequate and that the United States had to continue testing to keep its nuclear arsenal up to date.
Albright said passage was a foreign policy priority and that the treaty was ``too important to abandon.''
The administration has conceded, however, it could not gain approval this year, its last. The drive is geared to next year, when Clinton will have left office.
``This is not about politics or the legacy of a particular administration,'' Shalikashvili said.
George W. Bush, the likely Republican presidential candidate, has said he would oppose the treaty while supporting a continuing U.S. voluntary ban on nuclear weapons tests. Ratification would force the United States to conduct foreign policy ``with one arm tied behind its back,'' Bush has said.
Vice President Al Gore, the likely Democratic candidate, called the vote against ratification ``breathtakingly irresponsible.'' He is certain to support Senate approval if he wins.
Shalikashvili was one of a number of U.S. military chiefs whose support for the treaty was cited by the Clinton administration in its bid for ratification.
He and Albright said they hoped that with more time to consider the issues the treaty might be approved. ``It's too early to tell,'' Shalikashvili said.
---
WHERE THEY STAND
Two views of security, as seen in 'star wars'
Their stances on US antimissile plan show differences between Bush, Gore on defense.
Christian Science Monitor
USA
Justin Brown Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/03/13/fp2s1-csm.shtml
WASHINGTON
One of the most important military decisions in years awaits America's next president: whether the Pentagon should push forward with a national missile defense.
His decision, perhaps more than any other defense issue, will dictate the new president's stances toward foreign policy, national security, and arms control.
Both Texas Gov. George W. Bush (R) and Vice President Al Gore (D), their parties' likely nominees, see advantages in building a missile-defense system to protect the United States from attack by a rogue nation. Their differences seem to be a matter of degree, with Mr. Gore adopting a go-slow approach and Mr. Bush saying he'd proceed with not one, but two, missile-defense systems "at the earliest possible date."
The implications of building a national missile defense (NMD), the descendent of the Reagan-era "star wars," are significant. To deploy the system, the US would have to drastically amend, or even scrap, the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, considered a cornerstone in modern arms control.
Other differences in defense policy divide the two likely presidential candidates. They disagree, for example, over how big a boost to give military spending and how quick the US should be to intervene in conflicts abroad.
Yet their positions on NMD may speak loudest about how each sees America's role in the world and its stature vis-à-vis other nations.
That Bush-Gore difference
Gore approaches missile defense the same way President Clinton has - with a degree of caution and a desire to gain international approval before moving forward, his aides say.
Mr. Clinton, in fact, can make a decision this summer on whether to commit to such missile defenses, a technology so challenging that it is akin to trying to hit one speeding bullet with another. But given recent questions about technological feasibility and Russia's reluctance to revise the ABM treaty, it appears increasingly likely that he will leave the decision to the next administration.
"I think a consensus is being formed that a decision is farther off than [this summer]," says an administration official.
Bush, on the other hand, has indicated he wants to go ahead with two kinds of missile-defense systems - one for the entire US and another "theater" missile defense that can protect troops or allies abroad.
He has implied he would do so even if Russia continues its opposition to rewriting the ABM treaty, which was designed to prevent national missile defenses.
"If Russia refuses the changes we propose, we will give prompt notice, under the provisions of the treaty, that we can no longer be a party to it," Bush said in a Sept. 23, 1999, speech outlining his defense platform.
World caution
Breaking the ABM treaty and building a US missile defense could have a strong impact on the rest of the world. China would likely react by building more long-range missiles, analysts say, so that it would have the ability to overwhelm the system and maintain its deterrence against the US.
America's European allies also object to a missile defense because they believe the US and Europe should share the same level of vulnerability. The Europeans are worried, too, that they could become a proxy target of North Korea, Iran, or another rogue nation.
Many Republicans, however, argue that the 1972 treaty is outdated - and signed by a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. Also, they say, the risk of attack by a rogue state has never been greater - and the technology to make long-range missiles, possibly with nuclear warheads, has never been more accessible.
The Democrats are in a particularly difficult position. While many do not want to invest heavily in an untested technology that will upset China and Russia, it is hard for them to turn away from such a tantalizing possibility. Gore is considered a strong supporter of arms-control agreements like the ABM treaty. He has also worked closely on relations with Russia.
"Democrats are scared on this issue," says Patrick Cronin, a national-security specialist at the US Institute for Peace in Washington. "They want to kick it down the road."
The two candidates disagree on other defense issues, but less pointedly. Both support higher defense spending. But Bush favors a bigger budget than the $278 billion Clinton requested this year.
Bush has also said he does not want America involved in as many open-ended peacekeeping missions as it now is. Pentagon officials say operations like Bosnia and Kosovo have overextended the military and hurt troop preparedness. "I will order an immediate review of our overseas deployments - in dozens of countries," Bush said.
Gore, however, would be more likely to order an intervention or peacekeeping mission in the name of humanitarian suffering, one of his aides says.
No matter what his election-year positions, the next commander in chief will face one overriding military reality: a major Pentagon budget deficit. With several new and expensive weapons systems in the works, including the F-22 fighter jet, the Pentagon deficit could be as much as $20 billion in coming years.
And, says Peter Huessy, a senior associate at the National Defense University Foundation, it would be foolish to try to hide from the inevitable. "If we modernize faster, it will be cheaper in the long run," he says.
Before bookmarking this page in your browser, click here.
The URL for this page is: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/03/13/fp2s1-csm.shtml
For further information:
Project Vote Smart: Defense Issues
http://www.vote-smart.org/issues/DEFENSE/?checking=
Defense Issues: Presidential
http://www.issues2000.org/Defense.htm
Candidates' views Issues2000
http://www.issues2000.org/Defense.htm
National Security/Defense NCPA
http://www.ncpa.org/pi/congress/cong9.html
Online NewsHour Election 2000
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/election2000
Politics2000 Salon
http://www.salon.com/politics2000/index.html
Politics.com
http://www.politics.com/
C-SPAN: Road to the White House
http://www.c-span.org/guide/executive/rwh/
Daily Political Briefing Political Insider
http://politicalinsider.com/briefing.htm
Politics
http://www.IntellectualCapital.com/department/department50.asp
Please Note: The Monitor does not endorse the sites behind these links. We offer them for your additional research.
---
PUBLIC LIVES
The Magic Blue Blazer vs. an Oily Patch of Bad Luck
New York Times
March 13, 2000
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/00/03/13/news/washpol/lives-richardson.html
WASHINGTON -- The lucky blue blazer is at home in the closet. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson last wore the raggedy 15-year-old Brooks Brothers jacket when he was jetting across the Middle East last month, trying to convince Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that the dramatic jump in oil prices was threatening the world economy.
The blazer became his sartorial trademark early in the Clinton administration -- when he was a diplomatic troubleshooter while a member of Congress, freeing American hostages from Iraq to North Korea to Sudan -- and later as American ambassador to the United Nations.
Last month, he said, the jacket proved its value once more; the Saudis and the Kuwaitis said they would examine their production levels, interpreted as a commitment to reopen the spigot for oil, if only slightly.
"Does it work? Sure, it works," Mr. Richardson said as his limousine sped across town on Friday afternoon, carrying him to a television studio for yet another interview to explain the administration's plans to drive down crude oil prices that have tripled over the last year. "I wear it for all my need-to-be-lucky events."
Whatever the magical powers of his wardrobe, it is difficult to think of Mr. Richardson as lucky these days.
An hour earlier, he had been in the Oval Office with President Clinton, hashing out the next move in the mess over oil prices; a report released by the Energy Department this month said gasoline prices should hit an average of $1.75 a gallon this summer because of production cuts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In some states, gasoline is expected to top $2 a gallon.
"It's not my fault, but I should try to fix it," he said. "A year ago, oil inventories were high. Nobody expected this. The states didn't expect it. Consumers didn't expect it. Even traders didn't expect it. I think everybody should have been better prepared."
Mr. Richardson inherited lots of bad news when he left the United Nations to take over the Energy Department 19 months ago.
First came the reports of security lapses dating back years in the department's nuclear weapons laboratories and the accusation that Chinese spies had obtained designs for this nation's most sophisticated nuclear warheads.
Then there was the department's admission, after decades of denials, that government workers making nuclear weapons had been exposed to radiation and cancer-causing chemicals that probably led them to an early grave.
And now, the explosion in oil prices has American drivers fuming at the pump.
The run-up in gasoline prices comes at a politically awkward time for Mr. Richardson, who knows he risks becoming the government's fall guy for expensive oil just as he was reported to be under consideration as a running mate for Vice President Al Gore.
Mr. Richardson, 52, a collegial, slap-on-the-back politician, has long been seen as an obvious candidate for the No. 2 slot.
He is the only Hispanic in the the Cabinet, a former Democratic House leader from New Mexico with appeal to the Latino voters who are being heavily recruited by both parties in the presidential race. Born in Pasadena, Calif., he grew up in Mexico City, where his mother was born. His father, a Bostonian, worked as an executive at Citibank in Mexico for several years.
When he was a boy he was an excellent pitcher, good enough to be drafted by the Kansas City A's after high school. Instead, he went to Tufts University outside Boston, where he earned a master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Few of Mr. Richardson's rivals could have failed to notice him beaming behind Mr. Gore's confetti-caked shoulder last week as the vice president gave his victory speech after sweeping the Super Tuesday primaries.
Mr. Richardson said he had nothing to do with his conspicuous placement on the podium in Nashville. "I was behind him because that's where the Gore advance people put me. There was a piece of tape that said Richardson. I didn't elbow some little old lady to get there. Somebody put me there. I was flattered."
While Mr. Richardson campaigned for the vice president in Iowa, New Hampshire and California, often before Hispanic audiences, he insisted he has no designs on the Democratic ticket.
"We haven't talked about the vice presidency, and I'm not campaigning for it," he said. "I want to discourage speculation by answering questions like this, because it appears that I'm overeager. I just think the vice president should have a full, open search."
Certainly Mr. Richardson has begun to look more like a national candidate. After five months on the protein-heavy Atkins diet ("It works, but I'm starting to get sick of it") and a daily workout with a personal trainer, he has dropped 30 pounds, bringing his weight down to 210 pounds.
Apart from the lucky blazer, his rumpled wardrobe has been discarded; he now favors tailored suits and Hermes ties. His unruly mass of black hair has been styled back. "I've cleaned up my act," he said.
He rejected the charge of overambition, which dates to his daring -- and usually successful -- hostage-rescue missions when he was an otherwise little-known member of the House.
He made headlines around the world in 1995, when he traveled to Iraq and persuaded Saddam Hussein to free two American engineers jailed there. George Stephanopoulos, the former White House aide, used to call Mr. Richardson "a diplomatic Red Adair," alluding to the famed oil-well firefighter.
Said Mr. Richardson: "I'm as ambitious as anybody else in this town, but am I excessively ambitious? No. If I don't continue in public life, I'll be very happy."
And he admitted that he might soon find himself out of a government job. He acknowledged that his chances of winning the nod as Mr. Gore's vice presidential nominee could evaporate if gas prices continued to soar.
"I realize that gasoline prices at $2 a gallon in August or September is not good," he said. "But my main responsibility is to try to fix the problem and be a good energy secretary. If it becomes a burden, so be it."
-------- us nuc waste
More waste shipped to New Mexico 28 Rocky Flats drums sent to WIPP site
Denver Rocky Mountain News
March 13, 2000
Associated Press
http://insidedenver.com/news/0313wipp6.shtml
Another shipment of 28 drums of transuranic waste has been sent from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Golden to the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, officials said.
The shipment was the 24th from Rocky Flats to WIPP since waste disposal operations began in March 1999 at the site, near Carlsbad.
The shipments had been halted temporarily in November to focus on implementing requirements of the WIPP Hazardous Waste Facility Permit, which was issued by the New Mexico Environment Department late last year.
The shipment that left Rocky Flats on Friday and arrived in New Mexico on Saturday was the first that was subject to the permit, issued under the New Mexico Hazardous Waste Act, officials said.
"By resuming transuranic waste shipments, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to clean up and close Rocky Flats, and make good on our obligations to the state of Colorado," said Ines Triay, manager of DOE's Carlsbad Area office, which runs the WIPP program.
"Further, it shows the American people that we are making real progress toward cleaning up the Cold War's legacy of nuclear weapons production -- and providing for safe, permanent disposal of transuranic waste," Triay said.
All 45 shipments to the facility to date have been purely radioactive waste regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Mixed wastes, which also will include hazardous materials, are scheduled to be shipped this year.
Of WIPP's incoming shipments so far, 24 have been from Rocky Flats, which produced plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs, 17 have come from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and four from the Energy Department's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Idaho Falls, officials said.
Ultimately, Rocky Flats will send about 2,000 shipments of transuranic waste to WIPP. The 705-mile trip Friday and Saturday took about 18 hours, including the time required for drivers to stop and inspect the truck every 100 miles or two hours, officials said.
Transuranic waste consists of clothing, tools, rags, debris, residues and other disposable items contaminated with radioactive elements, mostly plutonium.
WIPP is in an ancient, stable salt formation more than 2,000 feet underground.
---
USA Today
03/13/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm
Colorado
Golden - Another shipment of 28 drums of transuranic waste has been sent from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant to the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., official said. The shipment was the 24th from Rocky Flats to WIPP since waste disposal operations began on March 26, 1999. Ultimately, Rocky Flats will send about 2,000 shipments of waste to WIPP.
-------- us nuc facilities
------- california
Tokai fallout detection in Southern California
From: "NOEL HANSEN" - hansenna@songs.sce.com
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:59:11 -0800
SUBJECT: Tokai fallout detection in Southern California
We at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (San Clemente CA) have noted that the gross beta activity from our environmental particulate air samples is elevated for the collection period ending October 26, 1999. The values average 6.4e-2 pci/m3. This week has the highest average and the highest single gross beta reading since June 1986 when we were seeing fallout from Chernobyl. The lag time from the Tokaimura accident (~ 3 weeks) is consistent with the fallout lag time from the Chinese weapons tests in the early 80's and from the Chernobyl accident. Has another member seen elevated radiological enviornmental monitoring data from this time frame?
hansenna@songs.sce.com Noel Hansen (949) 368-8123
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html
----------- nevada
Thoroughbred Subcritical Alert
From: Charles F Hilfenhaus chilfenhaus@juno.com
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 23:47:37 EST
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
The US Department of Energy conducted a "good" mandatory dry run for the subcritical nuclear test Thoroughbred this afternoon (3-13-00). There is a great likelihood that this test will be conducted within the next three days. Signals have also been monitored for the test Oboe 4
----
USA Today
03/13/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm
Nevada
Las Vegas - A second check of a groundwater sample that last week showed high radiation levels in a monitoring well south of the Nevada Test Site indicates the first sample was in error and the water is safe. The original sample taken by Nye County scientists had indicated that radioactivity in the well's water was 25 times higher than allowed.
----- us militar
In Focus: Colombia in Crisis
Volume 5, Number 5
March 13, 2000
Written by Carlos Salinas
Editors: Tom Barry (IRC) and Martha Honey (IPS)
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol5/v5n05col.html Key Points
Violence and warfare in Colombia are often blamed on the drug trade, but the roots run much deeper. The overwhelming majority of victims are noncombatant civilians. Since 1987, more than 35,000 noncombatant civilians have been murdered or have "disappeared." Despite rich natural resources, Colombia's wealth is unevenly distributed, with some sectors of the population in deep misery.
Colombia, an oil exporter and leading producer of coffee, is rich in resources and has a moderate population density. But it is also plagued by violence, leads the world in the production of cocaine entering the U.S., and is an important source of heroin. Although violence is often blamed on Colombia's large-scale drug trade, dating from the mid-1970s, politically motivated killings predate this considerably. Nor is violence the result of competition over scarce resources. Instead, violence stems from desperate conditions and a political culture that has no tolerance for dissent.
Colombia has been ruled for decades by two political parties, Liberal and Conservative, whose struggles have led to civil wars and regional conflicts. During their last conflict, La Violencia (from 1948 to 1953), 145,000 people were killed. For years following, the two parties collaborated in a power sharing arrangement that excluded other political views. However, the hegemony enjoyed by these two parties exacerbated Colombia's inequitable distribution of wealth: the bottom third of the population now has an income share of less than 10% while the top third has an income share of close to 70%. With an economic crisis including a 20% unemployment rate in 1999, drug trafficking and political struggle are attractive options. A fierce counterinsurgency war, stemming from La Violencia, pits the Colombian state forces and their paramilitary allies against two major guerrilla forces, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Despite demobilization of other groups, hope for the transition of guerrillas into unarmed parties has been undermined by the killings of more than 2,500 members of the Patriotic Union party, created in 1985 out of supporters of FARC and other left-wing political groups.
One thousand combat-related deaths were reported in 1999, with FARC increasing its attacks in recent years. However, the brunt of the killings-3,000 in 1999-is borne by the civilian population. The Colombian military seeks to reduce the guerrillas' countryside support. In practice, this strategy entails indiscriminate and illegal killings of civilians by the armed forces and by paramilitary groups that operate in heavily militarized areas and coordinate their operations with the Army.
Since 1987 more than 35,000 noncombatant civilians have been murdered or made to "disappear," mostly by the security forces and their paramilitary allies. In recent years, the proportion of abuses directly attributable to the armed forces has declined, while abuses by their paramilitary allies have escalated dramatically. These abuses have resulted in massive internal displacement and refugee flows into Panama and Venezuela. Guerrilla forces have also contributed to internal displacement. More than 1.5 million people were displaced over the past fifteen years, with possibly 300,000 in 1999.
In addition to those living in areas of guerrilla activity, victims include perceived or actual government opponents: human rights defenders, lawyers, judges, peasant activists, trade unionists, teachers, and students. For their part, the guerrillas target those suspected of collaborating with the armed forces or the paramilitaries, and they fund their insurgency by taking hundreds of hostages for ransom-about 600 in 1999.
In urban areas, guerrilla-linked militias and police-linked death squads target political activists and those labeled socially undesirable. Drug traffickers have also targeted those who oppose their operations. With their wealth, drug traffickers have become large landowners and have come into direct conflict with guerrillas and peasants. Thus, these drug traffickers have collaborated with the armed forces in creating and financing paramilitary death squads.
Shortly before taking office in 1998, Colombian President Andres Pastrana met with Manuel Marulanda, the head of FARC and initiated the latest round of peace attempts. Prior to that, the ELN convened Colombian civil society representatives in Germany. As a gesture to FARC, the government removed its troops from more than 16,000 square miles in south-central Colombia. Substantive talks between the government and FARC started, following a brief cease fire at the end of 1999. A similar effort seems to be under way with the ELN.
In 1999, the Pastrana Administration unveiled its multidimensional proposal "Plan Colombia," contingent upon the provision of aid from the U.S. and European countries. With the conflict intensifying even as peace talks proceed, the Clinton Administration responded in January 2000 with an aid package heavily weighted toward security assistance.
Problems With Current U.S. Policy
Key Problems
U.S. policy is contradictory. On the one hand, it presses for human rights action; on the other, it bolsters those implicated in violations. U.S. military aid is ostensibly for counternarcotics operations but will more than likely support counterinsurgency and result in violations. The narcoguerrilla thesis was a necessary argument for supporting aid to the Colombian Army when the U.S. Congress wanted nothing to do with counterinsurgency.
President Clinton declared in his 2000 State of the Union address that his Colombia aid package was to help Colombia "win this fight." Yet what "this fight" is all about is not so clear. According to the State Department's Congressional Presentation Document for Foreign Operations FY2000, "the fight against drugs remains the principal U.S. national interest in Colombia." Yet for the Colombian Army, the principal fight is against leftist guerrillas. In recent years, the misleading but politically expedient term, "narcoguerrilla" has been coined to merge these two fights.
The current counterdrug program continues the history of U.S. support for Colombia's security forces. At least since the 1960s, the U.S. has supported Colombia's counterinsurgency operations in the name of fighting communism, offering training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and the Special Warfare Center, in-country training through advisers and Special Operations Forces, and International Military Education and Training (see In Focus: Military Training for Latin America). In addition, the U.S. has supplied Colombia's security forces with arms, munitions, and equipment.
Since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and then-President Bush declared drug trafficking a national security threat, Colombia has been the number one recipient of U.S. military aid in the Americas, ostensibly for counterdrug operations. Until recently, the Colombian Army did not deny that its priority was fighting guerrillas, not drug traffickers.
In 1994 and 1995, the U.S. Congress required a certification from the State Department that U.S. aid was "primarily" for counterdrug operations and not counterinsurgency. At this time, aid to the Colombian Army through the Foreign Operations Appropriations channel was effectively frozen. Congress then began directing the bulk of U.S. aid to the Colombian National Police's Directorate of Anti-Narcotics Operations (DANTI), leading to bitter feuds between Congress and the Administration. Although DANTI's human rights record is devoid of recent credible reports of violations, the human rights community has cautioned that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
In 1996 the U.S. Congress passed and the Administration embraced the Leahy Law prohibiting many forms of U.S. aid from going to security force units implicated in human rights violations. U.S. government documents obtained in 1996 proved that the U.S. had indeed given aid to Colombian Army units implicated in such violations, contradicting Administration officials who had assured Congress to the contrary in 1994. Although the Leahy Law blocked some aid, in 1998 it also provided justification for releasing aid to the Colombian Army that had been frozen since 1994, since the administration determined that there were no credible reports linking recipient Colombian Army units to violations.
To address U.S. concerns about Colombia's military's focus on counterinsurgency rather than counternarcotics operations, the Colombian military created a special counternarcotics battalion in 1999. Trained by the U.S. Special Operations Forces, this unit is ostensibly dedicated to supporting counternarcotics operations.
Since the 1980s, Administration officials have promoted the concept of the narcoguerrilla, in part to allay congressional concern about involvement in another counterinsurgency conflict. Colombian army officials have also advanced the concept that drug traffickers and guerrillas are the same. But this is essentially a false argument. Drug traffickers and guerrillas have separate identities and goals. (See In Focus: Colombia's Role in International Drug Trafficking.)
Drug traffickers and guerrillas often operate in the same regions and have some converging interests. Many guerrilla fronts tax and help protect drug cultivation, just as they do any business in areas they control. Yet the Army's allies, paramilitary leaders, are identified as narcotraffickers in their own right, and even Washington contends that former President Samper received financial support from narcotraffickers. Moreover, in January 2000, the wife of the U.S. military group commander in Bogotá pleaded guilty to heroin trafficking. The reality is that drug traffickers work with anyone willing to advance their interests.
U.S. officials describe their policy of escalation as supporting Plan Colombia, embracing the peace process and the development option, as well as the counternarcotics imperative. However U.S.-supported counternarcotics operations have resulted in the defoliation of large tracts of forest and farmland with chemical agents and the indiscriminate spraying of fields, livestock, and people.
President Clinton's January 2000 proposal consists of an additional package of $1.3 billion for the Andean region, in large part for the Colombian security forces. This package will be divided into two parts: an emergency supplemental appropriation request being considered by Congress in March 2000 and the foreign operations appropriation for FY2001.
The emergency supplemental appropriation consists of $954 million, including $512 million for training and equipping two additional counternarcotics battalions and for 30 Blackhawk and 33 Huey helicopters, as well as for assistance for those "who will be displaced during this push into southern Colombia." It also contains $238 million for drug trafficking interdiction, airplane and airfield upgrades, and provisions of intelligence to regional police and military. Another $68 million is earmarked for the Colombian National Police. In addition to these emergency funds, $318 million will be proposes as part of the Administration's FY 2001 appropriation request, complementing an already-programmed amount of $300 million (in FY 2000 and FY 2001).
Toward a New Foreign Policy
Key Recommendations
U.S. should fully support Colombia's peace process and evaluate any proposal in terms of its effect on the process, discarding those that will jeopardize it. End-use monitoring of security assistance and human rights vetting and monitoring need to be fully staffed and resourced. Washington should eliminate any policy proposals that contradict human rights protection and could negatively impact the local population.
Support the peace process Although no one is arguing that the peace process is proceeding smoothly, most observers in Colombia agree that it is moving forward and deserves strong support. To escalate U.S. military involvement even as the parties engage in negotiations is a contradiction. Washington should increase its public support for the process, ensuring that adequate resources are made available.
Continue implementation of the Leahy Law U.S. security assistance should continue to be closely scrutinized to ensure that no units of the Colombian security forces-armed forces, intelligence units, and police forces-implicated in violations receive any U.S. aid. Instead, Washington should assist Colombian efforts to prosecute those responsible for violations. Appropriate resources should be made available to ensure the best human rights vetting and end-use monitoring possible. Furthermore, Washington should publicly disclose the security force units slated to receive U.S. aid (including units being considered) to ensure full public discussion.
Dismantle paramilitary groups Washington should press for effective steps to dismantle paramilitary groups, such as suspending any active-duty officer charged by the Colombian Attorney General's office with paramilitary collaboration or human rights violations; executing the Attorney General's detention orders of paramilitary members; prosecuting in civilian courts any officers charged with paramilitary involvement or human rights violations; and fully implementing the often-announced but still not in force (since 1989) Bloque de Busquedad, designed to find and detain paramilitary members.
Reevaluate 'source country' antinarcotics strategy As long as cocaine commands high prices on the world market and alternative economic opportunities and infrastructure are limited, peasants are going to grow coca and are going to participate in this lucrative trade. The U.S. government should work closely with the Colombian government and local authorities to ensure that alternative development programs and infrastructure investment reach and serve the local communities. Aerial spraying in Colombia needs to cease, pending a public evaluation of the environmental, economic, and human impacts. In addition, Washington needs to open a broad, public, and rational discussion-devoid of finger pointing and political labeling-to evaluate the merits of other forms of dealing with the drug problem. This discussion should fully explore the public health dimensions of the drug problem.
Promote and support the rule of law Even if the conflict in Colombia were to end overnight, human rights problems would not disappear. There is a real dimension of human rights problems that is not related to the war, such as so-called social cleansing killings that target (among others) street children. Resources should be made available to strengthen the Colombian judiciary and to protect its members from attack, both in its field investigations and in its day-to-day operations. Any intelligence personnel implicated in violations should be turned over to Colombian civilian authorities for prosecution.
Support civil society Human rights defenders and other sectors of civil society striving to support the peace process, human rights, and the rule of law should be defended. U.S. assistance should support efforts by the Colombian state to implement agreements to protect civil society groups at risk of attack. Specifically, Washington should ask for periodic and public progress reports on the implementation of the Colombian government's commitment to investigate attacks against human rights defenders, to install security infrastructure for groups at risk, and to prosecute those implicated in such attacks.
Eliminate proposals contradictory to human rights The fact that the Administration's proposal acknowledges that its "push into southern Colombia" will create more displaced populations is a clear sign that the Clinton proposal has a fatal flaw. All programs should be evaluated in light of their impact on the local population. Those proposals deemed harmful should be discarded. Clear, periodic, and public reporting requirements involving concrete details should be added, and more resources should be made available for end-use monitoring and human rights compliance. Clear conditions need to be added to ensure that the Colombian government adheres to its international human rights obligations. And no new counternarcotics battalion should be created until the first battalion's operations can be fully and publicly evaluated.
Carlos Salinas is Amnesty International USA's Advocacy Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper goes well beyond Amnesty's mandate.
Sources for More Information
Organizations
Amnesty International USA Colombian Coordinator c/o AIUSA Washington Office 304 Pennsylvania Ave. SE Washington, DC 20003-1130 Contact: Paul Paz y Miño Voice: (510) 986-0885 Email: ppaz@igc.org Website: http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/colombia/
Colombia Desk Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau Department of State 2201 C St. NW Washington, DC 20520 Voice: (202) 647-3338 Fax: (202) 647-2628
Colombia Human Rights Committee Box 3130 Washington, DC 20010 Voice: (202) 232-8148 Fax: (202) 462-4724 Email: colhrc@igc.org
Colombia Program International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Bureau Department of State 2201 C St. NW, Room 7334 Washington, DC 20520 Voice: (202) 647-8727 Fax: (202) 647-8269 Website: http://www.state.gov/www/global/narcotics_law/fs_colombia.html
Human Rights Watch 1630 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20009 Voice: (202) 612-4321 Fax: (202) 612-4333 Email: hrwdc@hrw.org Website: http://www.hrw.org/
US/Colombia Coordinating Office 1630 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 200 Washington, DC 20009 Voice: (202) 232-8090 Fax: (202) 232-8092 Email: agiffen@igc.org Website: http://www.igc.org/colhrnet/
Washington Office on Latin America 1630 Connecticut Ave. NW, 2nd Floor Washington, DC 20009 Voice: (202)-797-2171 Fax: (202) 797-2172 Email: wola@wola.org Website: http://www.wola.org/
Websites
Colombia - information on society and politics (From Colombia; in Spanish) Website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jzuluaga/colombia.html
------
[Some thingsds never change]
INSIDER'S GUIDE
The Guns of The Anacostia
Sunday, March 12, 2000; Page F01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/12/076l-031200-idx.html
For District residents of the mid-nineteenth century, the most prominent source of unwanted noise was not the traffic on the Beltway or the stream of low-flying aircraft landing at National Airport. Such noisemakers would have been pleasant diversions compared with the Navy's experimental battery, whose cannons shook the walls of Capitol Hill homes and lobbed 32-pound shells toward the houses and farms on the eastern bank of the Anacostia River.
The Navy established the battery to systematically test new weapons. In 1844 it had been embarrassed by the catastrophic failure of a new gun in a public demonstration for then-President John Tyler. The gun, called the "Peacemaker," was installed on the USS Princeton, the Navy's first steam-powered frigate.
On the fateful day, the Princeton took Tyler and his party down the Potomac on a cruise to Mount Vernon. When passing Alexandria on the homeward journey, the captain ordered the Peacemaker fired in a salute. Instead the gun exploded, killing eight, including Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer; Secretary of State Abel Upshu; and the father of Tyler's fiancee.
The resulting congressional investigation exonerated the Navy but left its officers shaken and concerned about weapons development--concerned enough to establish the experimental battery in a low building at the center of the Washington Navy Yard.
It is here, in what is now a parking lot, that visitors can find a piece of that booming past in a display of historic naval guns, including a replacement for the ill-fated Peacemaker, forever silent.
In the 19th century, the battery was not only loud, it was dangerous. On Nov. 13, 1849, a new gun exploded, damaging part of the battery and killing a member of the gunnery crew. To warn both those in the Navy Yard and on the Anacostia River that the battery was active, the commander, John Dahlgren, would raise a signal ball on the roof of the battery.
To reduce operating costs, Dahlgren paid Anacostia residents to recover cannonballs. These workers would strap boards to their feet so that they could walk across the river flats (now covered by the eastern end of the Sousa Bridge) and dig the shot out of the mud. In return for this difficult and dangerous labor, they were paid one-fourth the cost of new shot.
At the start of the Civil War, Dahlgren became commander of the Navy Yard, replacing an officer who had joined the Confederate Navy. He moved into the commander's house (which still stands) just behind the battery, and on its porches regularly conferred with President Abraham Lincoln.
Dahlgren returned to a sea command in 1861, but the experimental battery was heavily used throughout the war. It remained in operation through 1891, when the Navy moved ordnance testing to a new facility far down the Potomac, named for John Dahlgren. And a bit of quiet was restored to the neighborhoods of Washington's east side.
--David Alan Grier, Washington
---
WHERE THE MONEY REALLY GOES
From: Winston Weeks - wweeks@mail.aros.net
Nowhere is the media's censorship of silence more costly to American taxpayers than its failure to report the gross financial misdoings of the Defense Department. There are, of course, exceptions; some good reporters stay on the case. But while the "financial stability" of Medicare or Social Security is discussed ad infinitum, the misappropriation and bad accounting of Pentagon monies get not a fraction of the attention it deserves.
For example, a recent DOD Inspector General's report, even though circulated by Associated Press, quickly disappeared into the media's memory hole despite revelations that Pentagon made some $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in order to make them add up. $2.3 of this sum failed to have receipts to back up the expenditures and $500 billion involved corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.
According to the Inspector General, "these entries were processed to force financial data to agree with various data sources, to correct errors and to add new data." In the dry, understated language of such reports, the IG said "DOD did not fully comply with laws and regulations that had a direct and material affect [sic] on its ability to determine financial statement amounts."
In plain English, the financial accounting of the Pentagon is out of control to a degree that overwhelms every other case of government waste or illegality that one can cite. If Pentagon budgeteers overspend in a certain category they "fast track" the sum to another category or, if necessary, lose the expenditures entirely. Every worthy domestic program in the country is held hostage to such incompetent, improper or illegal practices. The first step towards changing this situation, though, is for the media to report it.
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
-------- us spying
C.I.A. Director's Role in Deutch Case Is Disputed By JAMES RISEN
New York Times
March 13, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/cia-deutch.html
Related Article
Senate Subpoenas Former C.I.A. Lawyer (March 2, 2000)
WASHINGTON -- George J. Tenet, the director of the CIA, has defended his part in the agency's investigation of his predecessor, John Deutch, by arguing that he played a largely passive role in the matter.
But former officials of the CIA who were involved in the case have offered statements that contradict Tenet's version, arguing that Tenet was more fully informed about Deutch's security breach than he has publicly acknowledged.
In their depictions of how the case was handled, the former officials suggested that Tenet, who was Deutch's deputy and then succeeded him, had the information and the means to ensure that an effective investigation of Deutch was conducted, but at important points failed to do so.
The conflicting statements show how much finger-pointing has occurred among officials involved in the investigation since the agency's handling of the case came under question.
The differing accounts come from two former officials who have been criticized for their actions in the case: Nora Slatkin, the former executive director of the CIA, and Frederick Hitz, the former inspector general.
Although Tenet's role has not received much attention, because it appeared that he had not been kept fully informed about the handling of the investigation by other CIA officials, statements by Slatkin and Hitz have presented a conflicting picture. Slatkin has given her version of events to the agency's inspector general, and Hitz elaborated in an interview.
Their differences are significant because, after questions were raised about how the case was handled, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the Justice Department would review the case to determine whether a criminal investigation should be reopened.
The case began as Deutch was leaving office in December 1996, when the agency's security specialists discovered that he had improperly kept classified material on unsecure computers in his home, including information about some of the government's most sensitive covert operations.
But Tenet did not take action for more than a year after the discovery. During that time, the CIA did not formally notify the Justice Department that Deutch might have broken the law, and, in 1997, officials allowed the agency's internal investigation to languish, the CIA's inspector general later found.
The investigation of the Deutch security breach was only revived in 1998 after the CIA's inspector general was told by a CIA official that the investigation had not been handled properly.
On March 19, 1998, the CIA's inspector general finally notified the Justice Department that Deutch might have broken the law.
In April 1999, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Deutch. In August, after the inspector general's report had been completed, Tenet suspended Deutch's security clearances.
L. Britt Snider, who became the CIA's inspector general in 1998, concluded in his 1999 report that Tenet "should have involved himself more forcefully to ensure a proper resolution of this matter."
Tenet has accepted the criticism, explaining that he was distracted by his protracted struggle for Senate confirmation and other matters. But he has also suggested that he was not kept adequately informed by other CIA officials.
He has said, for instance, that no one told him that the CIA's internal security office had finished its work in summer 1997 and that it was time for him to act.
But Slatkin has contradicted Tenet's assertion that he was never told that the investigation had been completed.
Slatkin has testified that in summer 1997, she reviewed the security office's final report and "personally handed it to Tenet," according to the inspector general's report.
Tenet subsequently told the inspector general that he did "not remember ever seeing (the security office) report, nor does he recall any details of the report," the inspector general's report said. "He said it is possible that someone told him about the report, or showed it to him."
Slatkin and Tenet also provided conflicting statements about their actions early in the case.
Slatkin told the inspector general that she notified Tenet about the discovery of classified material on Deutch's computers almost immediately after the material was discovered on Dec. 17, 1996. She added that there were "multiple discussions with Tenet over time," about the way the case was proceeding. She said that "everything had his concurrence."
She also said that she had told Tenet early on that she did not feel comfortable handling the case, because of her close professional relationship with Deutch, whom she had worked with for years.
Slatkin told the inspector general that she had explained to Tenet that handling an investigation of Deutch "was too sensitive for her, and Tenet had the responsibility for making the decisions relating to the Deutch incident."
She said that she was concerned that others at the CIA would perceive that she and Michael O'Neil, then the agency's general counsel, were too close to Deutch and should recuse themselves. But she told the inspector general that Tenet still "gave her responsibility for coordinating this matter."
Tenet disputed Slatkin's statements. He told the inspector general that Slatkin and O'Neil, who had previously been Deutch's chief of staff, wanted to handle the investigation. He said he believed that "Slatkin and O'Neil did not want to place Tenet in the position of adjudicating a matter involving Deutch," the inspector general's report stated.
Bill Harlow, a CIA spokesman, said that Tenet stands by his testimony in the face of the conflicting statements by Slatkin.. Tenet's version is "supported by other peoples' recollections," Harlow added. And whatever her concerns, Slatkin did quickly assume a lead role in the investigation, he noted.
Separately, Frederick Hitz, the former inspector general of the CIA, said in an interview that in fall 1997, he met with Tenet and Snider, then a special assistant to Tenet, about the Deutch case.
Hitz said he told Tenet and Snider that the inspector general's office was taking an interest in the case. Hitz said he was, in effect, putting Tenet on notice that the inspector general's office was monitoring the progress of the case.
But Tenet did not respond by moving to revive the case, Hitz said. In 1998, Hitz launched an investigation into the Deutch case, just before he was succeeded by Snider.
Tenet and Snider say that a meeting with Hitz did not occur in fall 1997, Harlow said. While Hitz met frequently with Tenet in that time, Snider has checked the files of the inspector general's office for Hitz's memos about those meetings, and they do not indicate that the case was raised by Hitz, Harlow said.
To be sure, Slatkin and Hitz, like Tenet, were criticized in the inspector general's 1999 report. Slatkin, with O'Neil, was cited for taking actions that "had the effect of delaying a prompt and thorough investigation." Hitz, meanwhile, was cited for failing to "ensure the timely and definitive resolution" of the case.
---
Redemption at the C.I.A.
New York Times
March 13, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/13mo2.html
The Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war entanglements in Guatemala are like a malignant tumor that cannot be eradicated. In 1995 the agency seemed to deal belatedly but decisively with its misdeeds. John Deutch, the C.I.A. director, dismissed two senior officers and disciplined several others for mishandling relations with the Guatemalan military and failing to keep Congress adequately informed about operations in the Central American nation. But now all seems forgiven, as the agency prepares to award a distinguished career medal to the highest-ranking official who was fired.
The C.I.A. contends that the award to Terry Ward, who was once chief of covert operations in Latin America, is intended to honor his achievements over a long career and should not be read as a nullification of Mr. Deutch's action. Agency officials note that even as he sacked Mr. Ward, Mr. Deutch said his decision did not preclude recognition of Mr. Ward's previous service. But the unmistakable message of the award is that George Tenet, Mr. Deutch's successor, does not think Mr. Ward's behavior was all that reprehensible.
The Guatemala matter was not a minor mistake. It involved a breach of the most basic covenant that must govern the operations of an intelligence agency in a democracy. Mr. Ward failed to insure that Congress, as required by law, was kept fully and currently informed about the abusive conduct of Guatemalan officers who were on the agency payroll. This included allegations that one of the men had condoned the murder of an American innkeeper in Guatemala and the killing of a Guatemalan guerrilla married to an American lawyer.
Mr. Tenet, who has worked for the White House and the Senate and served as Mr. Deutch's deputy, is wise in the ways of Washington. Surely he knows that an award like this tells agency employees that the boss is repudiating the decision of Mr. Deutch and is more interested in befriending the C.I.A.'s operations division than in insisting on the highest standards of conduct. It is no secret that Mr. Ward's dismissal outraged many members of the espionage service.
Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but the rehabilitation of Mr. Ward comes just as Mr. Deutch's stature has been diminished by new disclosures that he mishandled classified information when he ran the C.I.A, and that some of his top aides, including Mr. Tenet, may have tried to shield him from investigation after he left the agency. In the spy business, accounts tend to get settled eventually, though often in opaque ways.
If Mr. Tenet did not want to create the impression that the agency was absolving Mr. Ward, he could have quietly overruled the decision of his operations chief, James Pavitt, to grant the award. At the least, when the award is presented later this month, Mr. Tenet or Mr. Pavitt should say that in honoring Mr. Ward, the C.I.A. is not excusing or belittling his transgressions.
-------- genetics
Technologist Gives His Peers a Dark Warning
New York Times
March 13, 2000
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/03/biztech/articles/13joy.html
In unlikely prophet is voicing a plea for reason and restraint in the increasingly chaotic stampede toward the technological future.
Breaking ranks with the customarily optimistic and self-congratulatory high-technology industry, Bill Joy, the chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has issued an impassioned critique of uncontrolled progress in digital, biological and material sciences. He has challenged scientists and engineers to rethink their ethical standards and step back from advances that might ultimately threaten the human species.
In a 20,000-word essay in the April issue of Wired magazine, which goes on sale Monday, Joy, a computer industry pioneer and one of the nation's leading technical authorities, writes that although the world has survived any number of potentially devastating technologies developed in the 20th century, several new branches of research pose threats of technological devastation at the hands of a small group or even an individual.
"The 21st century technologies -- genetics, nanotechnology and robotics -- are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses," he writes in the article, titled, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
"Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups," he writes. "They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them."
Such warnings about unbridled progress are not new, but until now they have typically come from social critics or scientists outside the mainstream.
In contrast, Joy is a leading computer researcher who developed an early version of the Unix operating system while a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. He helped found Sun Microsystems and more recently has been involved in the development of powerful software technologies like the Java programming language and Jini, a system for linking hundreds of thousands of appliances and other devices by way of the Internet. He also served as co-chairman of a presidential commission on the future of information technology.
Indeed, Joy also wrote a more generally optimistic cover article titled "Digital Wonders" for the March 6 issue of Fortune magazine. In a telephone interview, he said the Fortune piece was focused on short-term issues in the computer industry, while the Wired article addresses long-term forces that will be more difficult to control.
He lives in Aspen, Colo., where he moved in 1989 from Silicon Valley to set up a small laboratory that explores new technologies for Sun, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.
Joy's critique is striking because computer industry technologists, almost without exception, take a more sanguine view of the social consequences of advances. They typically argue that any negative effects will be far outweighed by the positive effect of new technologies.
Nathan Myhrvold, a physicist who is on leave from his job as the chief technology officer at Microsoft Corp., said in an e-mail interview, "People have made apocalyptic predictions about technology constantly for as long as there has been technology. I think it is because change frightens them. What is more, the most common form these dire predictions take is 'this next generation of stuff -- wow! that is really different and really scary.'"
But the new technologies will be more difficult to control in the future, Joy argues, because most are being driven by the commercial sector, not by the military, which in the past has controlled many potentially dangerous technologies.
Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who founded Thinking Machines Inc., an early supercomputer company, said of Joy: "Bill is pretty unusual. There are very few technologists who step back and try to look at the whole picture. Most who do tend toward optimism."
Joy argues that advances are now on the horizon in each of the three areas he addresses. In the field of robotics, he warns of a generation of superintelligent machines that could compete with their human creators for resources. Such possibilities have recently been addressed by other technologist-authors, including Ray Kurzweil ("The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence"), Hans Moravec ("Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind") and George Dyson ("Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence").
In genetics, Joy worries that the widening availability of knowledge about powerful genetic engineering will lead to a "white plague" -- a human-designed disease that can kill selectively.
In nanotechnology, he describes the increasing possibility of an accidental or intentional release of a submicroscopic self-replicating mechanism that could cause widespread destruction.
Such a calamity was first suggested by Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel "Cat's Cradle," a substance called ice-nine sets off a thermal chain reaction that leads to the freezing of the oceans.
"A lot of people have looked at all of this as science fiction, and as a result they haven't taken it seriously," Joy said.
At the heart of his warning, he writes, is an attribute that has not been true of destructive technologies until now but is a part of all of the most compelling 21st-century technologies: the ability to self-replicate.
"While replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance," he writes, "uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world."
Joy insists he is not a Luddite, and yet he also argues that the issues raised by the convicted bomber Theodore Kaczynski have not been adequately addressed by the nation's technologists.
"Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane," he writes. "But simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning."
Joy suggests parallels between the ethical dilemma faced by nuclear physicists in the invention and the use of the atomic and hydrogen bombs and similar challenges facing technologists today.
"We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the resulting arms race," he writes. "We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation are troubling."
He argues that today's scientists must find a path that was not taken by physicists during World War II: "I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility -- not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences."
"The only realistic alternative I see," he writes in Wired, "is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge."
He cited the precedent of the decision by the U.S. government to abandon the development of biological weapons.
Verification in the case of genetics, robotics and nanotechnology, however, will require that scientists adopt strict codes of ethics, he writes.
In the telephone interview last week, Joy said he doubted that the development of advances could be reined in in the commercial world, and he criticized scientists as being largely silent on the inherently destructive potential of rapidly evolving technologies.
Asked if he thought a technological species could expect to survive the ever-accelerating evolution of its market-driven technologies, Joy said: "The answer is 'yes, but not without additional care.' I think it's possible -- but it's not a given. Survival won't come for free."
---
New Technologies Imperil Humanity - Scientist
Reuters
March 13, 2000 Filed at 4:52 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-threat.html
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The co-founder of one of Silicon Valley's top technology companies believes scientific advances may be ushering humanity into a nightmare world where supersmart machines force mankind into extinction.
In a heartfelt appeal published in the April issue of Wired magazine, Sun Microsystems Inc. chief scientist Bill Joy urges technologists to reconsider the ethics of the drive toward constant scientific innovation.
``We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes,'' Joy writes. ``The last chance to assert control -- the fail-safe point -- is rapidly approaching.''
Joy's article comes as a rare cry of caution in an industry that thrives on relentless and often unplanned advances and is now riding the boom of a ``new economy'' expansion attributed to technological progress.
The warning is all the more disturbing because of the author's own impressive tech credentials. A leading computer researcher who developed an early version of the Unix operating system, Joy has more recently pioneered the development of software technologies like Java and was co-chairman of a presidential commission on the future of information technology.
Joy's fears focus on three areas of technology undergoing incredibly rapid change.
THINKING, BREEDING ROBOTS
The first, robotics, involves the development of ''thinking'' computers that within a matter of three short decades could be as much as a million times more powerful than those currently available. Joy sees this as setting the groundwork for a ``robot species'' of intelligent robots that create evolved copies of themselves.
The second, genetics, deals with scientific breakthroughs in manipulating the very structure of biological life. While Joy says this has led to benefits such as pest-resistant crops, it also has set the stage for new, man-made plagues that could literally wipe out the natural world.
The third, nanotechnology, involves the creation of objects on an atom-by-atom basis, which before long could be harnessed to create smart machines that are microscopically small.
All three of these technologies share one characteristic absent in earlier dangerous human inventions such as the atomic bomb: They could easily replicate themselves, creating a cascade effect that could sweep through the physical word in much the same way that a computer virus spreads through the cyberworld.
``It is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil,'' Joy writes. ``An evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to nation states on to surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.''
KACZYNSKI'S IDEAS
Joy says his new, darker vision of the potential threat to humanity posed by technology -- one he notes is shared in part by convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski -- has led him to reconsider his own contributions to the field.
``I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer place,'' Joy writes. ``If I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come.''
Joy does hold out some hope, saying humanity's effort to control the threat of nuclear and biological weapons was evidence of the strength of the species' self-preservation instinct.
But he urges a wider dialogue on the implications of new technological advances and specifically asks that they be incorporated into the program at the annual Pugwash Conferences, which began in 1957 as a forum for scientists to discuss the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
``The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which the process can take on a life of its own,'' Joy says.
``We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking upfront if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.''
------- other us protests
PETA says 'drink beer, not milk' to prevent cruelty to cows
Washington Times
March 13, 2000
By Ellen Sorokin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/metro/news5-031300.htm
Animal rights activists are urging college students this week to guzzle beer to save cows from the "cruelty" of being milked.
But the "drink beer, not milk" effort by the Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is losing its fizz - and friends.
Officials with Mothers Against Drunk Driving have asked PETA to pull the campaign for fear it will encourage underage drinking.
The group's "Got Beer?" nationwide campus campaign was timed to take advantage of the ubiquitous green-beer St. Patrick's Day celebrations this Friday.
"We're very concerned and appalled with it for the simple fact that underage drinking is the No. 1 drug problem among American youths," said Teresa Hardt, a spokeswoman for MADD, whose mission includes the prevention of underage drinking.
But local animal rights activists such as Alexandria, Va.-based Actions for Animals Network said PETA's campaign was devised simply to catch people's attention and get them to think about milk.
"Milk is not a health food, and it is the reason for tremendous animal suffering," said Mary Zoeter, president of Actions for Animals Network.
"But I don't think groups like MADD need to worry about college students being corrupted by this campaign. I don't think PETA is out to do that. It simply wants to get people's attention. And it already has," Mrs. Zoeter said.
It's not the first time PETA has come up with a controversial campaign to promote animal rights. Several months ago, the group hung posters in bus shelters that said "Fur Bites," and featured a naked black man, his face contorted in rage, imprisoned in a zoolike cage. The man is German model and actor Mola, who is an animal rights supporter.
"We do campaigns that grab people's attention," said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's vegetarian campaign coordinator. "Like the 'Fur Bites' posters, they're catchy and attractive. You notice them, and that's what we're trying to do."
The "Drink Beer" campaign comes at a time when increased attention is being focused on binge drinking on campuses, where the majority of students are under the legal drinking age of 21.
"If PETA's misguided purpose is to denounce the dairy industry, they certainly aren't advancing the ball by advocating alcohol consumption by college students," said David Botkins, spokesman for State Attorney General Mark L. Earley, who led a statewide Task Force on Drinking by College Students in 1998, one year after five undergraduates at Virginia schools died after ingesting too much alcohol.
Mr. Earley also toured colleges to encourage personal responsibility and solutions about the problem of drinking on campus.
"They'll be lucky if they don't get sued for plagiarizing the 'Got Milk' slogan," Mr. Botkins said.
Mr. Friedrich said PETA will proceed with the campaign and that it does not promote underage or drunken driving.
"College students are savvy," Mr. Friedrich said. "Nobody's going to put beer on their Cheerios or get drunk and drive as a result of our campaign."
PETA is using beer in its anti-milk campaign as a way to get attention, he said, but the campaign makes it clear that juice, water, soda and soy milk are preferable alternatives to beer.
PETA contends that milk does not do a body good because it is full of fat and cholesterol, while beer contains neither. PETA's main beef, however, is with what it says is the cruel treatment of cows and their calves on factory farms - that a cow is not necessarily fulfilled by filling a milk pail.
"Dairy cows are warehoused like so many inanimate objects, kept pregnant by artificial insemination to keep milk production high and slaughtered when they are spent after three or four years," Mr. Friedrich said.
Female calves face the same fate, while male calves are slaughtered for veal, he said.
"That's why there is a hunk of veal in every glass of milk," Mr. Friedrich said. "If you drink milk, you are supporting a product that is horrible for human health, catastrophic for the environment and a living nightmare for the animals involved."
Farmers, however, are skeptical of the argument. What would be a nightmare is if the cow isn't milked at all, said Joe Plesniak, a farmer in Prospect, Pa.
A former dairy farmer, Mr. Plesniak said a cow with an udder full of milk starts to bawl and rocks from side to side if she is not milked.
"To think milking a cow is cruel is ridiculous," Mr. Plesniak said. "The cow was made to produce milk and to be milked. It's a relief for the cow to be milked. It's cruel if you don't milk the cow. Then it suffers."
This article is based in part on wire service reports.
---
Two Dozen Protest Near Clintons' Home
New York Times
March 13, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/031300sen-ny-dem.html
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y., March 12 -- The police kept two dozen demonstrators from Brooklyn and Queens out of sight of the Clintons' new home here today.
It was the first demonstration at the house since Hillary Rodham Clinton moved in two months ago.
The demonstrators were from groups including Kach and Kahane Chai, Michael Guzofsky, an organizer, said. Both groups are on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.
There were no arrests.
The protesters complained that in supporting the current peace process, Mrs. Clinton was demanding that Israel "give away its rightful territory," and that she was against freeing Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
They chanted "Israel yes, Hillary no," and a woman in a Clinton mask kissed a man in a Yasir Arafat mask.
Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said, "We are certainly not going to be lectured to by a member of a terrorist organization who opposes the Middle East peace process."
"The real question," he said, "is why someone like this is supporting Rudy Giuliani for Senate?"
Mrs. Clinton was in Washington during the protest, Mr. Wolfson said
----- hotspots
---- argentina
Latin Nations Pay Price of Reform
Argentina Targets a Decade of Graft
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 13, 2000; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/13/105l-031300-idx.html
BUENOS AIRES-They were the last days of El Dorado, and Victor Alderete knew it.
Alderete, the stout, balding director of the National Pensioners Health Care Agency, issued orders to destroy or cart off truckloads of incriminating documents. Fernando de la Rua, Argentina's crusading new president who rose to power on an oath to clean up government, would soon move into the Presidential Palace, and Alderete feared that a raid on his notoriously fraudulent agency was only a matter of time.
He was right. The raid came in December, and it turned out the agency had been bilked of hundreds of millions of dollars. Alderete had tried, but failed, to cover his tracks. "There was too much dirt and too little time," said one investigator involved in de la Rua's takeover of the agency. "Not even bombing the building would have helped."
In the weeks since then, Argentine investigators have become involved in one of the biggest anti-corruption probes in Latin American history. Alderete and other directors had misappropriated a fortune, they said, and the agency's 4 million poor and elderly clients had paid the price. As Alderete snatched up new properties, such as a $1 million ranch in Uruguay, his agency was so broke it could not cover basic benefits for clients such as medicine and visits to the doctor.
But in the wave of corruption that hit Argentina during former president Carlos Menem's flashy decade of free-market reforms, Alderete--a close friend of Menem's--was only one of many civil servants who feasted on the spoils of new power and fast money.
Maria Julia Alsogaray, the former head of the environment agency who posed in a fur and little else on a magazine cover while in office, is under investigation for skimming millions off the top of privatization deals and giving a multimillion-dollar contract for triple the going rate to a man believed to be her lover. And then there was Mario de Marco Naon. A lowly sub-secretary who started his government post in 1991 with a Fiat and a humble apartment, de Marco approved bloated government contracts to companies he owned, then went on a buying spree of lavish properties and luxury cars. He even threw himself a wedding in Alaska, passing out gold nugget mementos to his 150 guests.
"In Argentina, public money simply became the spoils of war in the 1990s," said Cecilia Felgueras, a close aide of de la Rua and now in charge of rebuilding Alderete's agency with the help of a team from the United Nations. "We're talking about so much money--hundreds of millions from just this one agency. And we're only just beginning."
Hopes for Reform
The emerging picture of fraud and cronyism during Menem's 1989-99 administration--when the president was a big-money icon with his affection for champagne and Ferraris--concerns mainly Argentina. But it also underscores the scope of corruption across Latin America during a decade of widely applauded free-market and democratic reforms.
The 1990s started with enormous hopes that, with its reforms, Latin America would overcome the corruption that has been a hallmark of dictatorships and a barrier to economic equality since the 16th-century Spanish conquest. All countries except Fidel Castro's Cuba had evolved into some measure of democracy. And free-market reforms took root from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, giving rise to new hopes for spreading prosperity.
But rather than curbing corruption, experts say, the reforms allowed graft to persist or even expand as dishonest civilian politicians and their associates tapped into the massive new wealth created by privatization, foreign borrowing and soaring public spending.
The scale of the problem in Latin America has been compared by some analysts to that of the big grab in Russia after the fall of communism. And especially in countries such as Argentina--one of the world's largest debtor countries, struggling with unemployment and burgeoning poverty in the wake of free-market reform--corruption is cited as among the leading reasons why the reforms have failed to bring a better life to millions of workers.
"Corruption has prevented true free-market capitalism from taking hold in Argentina," Ricardo Gil Lavedra, the justice and human rights minister, said in an interview.
"Corruption has impeded development and increased poverty, since money has been shamelessly wasted and never reached projects for the benefit of the people who need help the most," he continued. "It has artificially increased interest rates by driving us further into debt. . . . At the same time, people who benefited from corruption are almost always those who already had money in the first place. . . . It has, without a doubt, perpetuated the cycle of the unequal society that we had set out to change."
As a result, many Latin Americans have begun to lose faith in the power of democracy--as well as free-market reforms--to make their lives better. A recent study by the MORI research firm in Santiago, Chile, showed that the people of only two countries in Latin America--Uruguay and Costa Rica, which also rank among the least corrupt in the region--give democracy an approval rating of more than 50 percent.
Disgusted people in some countries in the region have resorted to democratically elected but authoritarian rulers who appeal to voters with promises of zero tolerance of corruption and, often, of a slowdown in economic reform. A case in point is Venezuela's popular president, Hugo Chavez, a former coup leader and left-wing firebrand whose radical, anti-corruption platform has reshaped the government with a new constitution and a new legislative assembly.
"We have been destroyed by these supposedly [democratic] politicians," Maria Arrarte, a 38-year-old waitress and Chavez supporter, said at a rally in front of the presidential palace in Caracas last year.
In the past 10 years, civilian presidents in Venezuela and Brazil have been removed from office for corruption involving diverted money or personal enrichment. In Ecuador, rocked by a brief military coup in January that ended with Vice President Gustavo Noboa elevated to the presidency, corruption has had a hand in the removal or arrest of four sitting or former presidents in the past four years.
Mexico, which started the 1990s as a symbol of U.S.-blessed reform under Carlos Salinas de Gortari, has finished the decade as a very different symbol. Salinas's brother, Raul, sits in jail accused of murder and corruption--some of it connected to privatization--and the former president has gone into exile in Dublin.
"In Guatemala, they are redoing the privatization of the telephone company that was completed just six months ago, because the sale was tainted by corruption," said George R. Vickers, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America. "In El Salvador, the privatization of their banks ended up with then-President [Alfredo] Cristiani winning ownership of the largest bank."
Some Latin Americans have suggested that the Clinton administration and foreign lenders, while speaking out against corruption, in practice have avoided sanctioning dirty governments as long as the leaders voiced support for Washington's free-market economic gospel.
In 1998, for instance, Argentina was ranked as one of the world's most corrupt countries by Transparency International, an international nonprofit watchdog organization, and a bevy of Menem's closest ministers had resigned after corruption scandals. But Washington made Argentina its closest ally in Latin America, even awarding it the special designation of a "non-NATO" ally, reserved for the United States' closest friends.
"The United States clearly made the political decision that supporting Argentina's economic reforms was more important than having a tough position on what was extraordinarily obvious and widespread corruption during the [Menem] administration," said Carlos March, area director for Poder Ciudadano, a Buenos Aires-based watchdog group associated with Transparency International.
U.S. officials counter that Menem's free-market reforms, in the long run, will create a more open system of government by putting poorly run public-sector companies into the hands of private industry. But analysts argue that, just as in Russia, it has not happened so far.
"The point is that unlike what U.S. policymakers believed, free-market reforms alone have not curbed corruption, and in some cases, they've opened new avenues to make it worse," Vickers said.
Another consequence is dangerous levels of indebtedness, contracted partly to help replenish pilfered public coffers. In 1999, for instance, Argentina, a country of 36 million, was the largest recipient of loans from the World Bank, receiving $3.1 billion, compared with $1.9 billion for Russia, with a population of 147 million.
Myrna Alexander, the World Bank director for South America's Southern Cone, said the bank has investigated "a few possible irregularities" in loans to Argentina last year, but so far has turned up only two cases of apparent fraud, one of which potentially includes one or more government officials. She refused to give specifics, saying the case is under legal review. She added that the World Bank strictly monitors loans.
"But we are not naive," she added. "We know that in developing countries, just like developed countries, people are human beings and things happen."
Change in Argentina
For the most part, anti-corruption efforts have met with little or no success. In Paraguay, the country's leading anti-corruption official, Daniel Fretes Ventre, is under investigation for inexplicably becoming the owner of valuable properties during his four years in office. In Nicaragua, Agustin Jarquin Anaya, the country's chief anti-corruption officer, was thrown in jail in November, charged with fraud after he began to blow the whistle on government corruption.
Argentina perhaps will be the exception. Long-held suspicions of government fraud are being confirmed through new investigations backed by its austere president, de la Rua. And rather than being viewed as a political attack on Menem, de la Rua's effort is winning praise as a legitimate attempt to investigate and curb corruption.
At the heart of the campaign is a largely independent Anti-Corruption Office, with a team of investigators, economists and sociologists mapping out new legislation to increase openness.
"I don't agree with the position that corruption is somehow a cultural problem in Latin America. Corruption is not something in our blood," said Roberto de Michele, director of the office's transparency project. "What it is, however, is a societal problem created by weak and unstable political institutions. We are now embarking on a plan to change that in Argentina. But let's not fool ourselves, this is going to take time. And its success is going to depend . . . on the ability of our judicial system to handle some extremely tough cases."
Inside a maze of dimly lit corridors at the health care agency formerly headed by Alderete, evidence of his scorched-earth attempt to eliminate evidence is immediately clear. In an agency with a $2.4 billion annual budget, desks are largely clear of paper and the piles of files in corners characteristic of public offices in Latin America are mostly absent.
Humberto Lopez, 72, a retired municipal clerk from the rural province of Corrientes, was one of the agency's victims. For Lopez, the corruption meant he could not afford to get an eye infection checked. For his cousin, a cancer patient, it meant dipping into savings to see an oncologist.
"Why?" Lopez raged as his lips trembled, "because these shameless people were robbing us retired people. . . . Government officials? Please! They're nothing more than street thugs!"
With each day, new revelations emerge. On a recent afternoon, Lopez and two other men from the rural province 400 miles north of Buenos Aires walked into a branch of the Justice Ministry's anti-corruption office located inside the pensioners' agency. He extended a long and bony hand to investigators, studying them with distrust.
After hearing a brief explanation that a cleanup is underway, Lopez who helps lead a watchdog group for the aged in his province, warmed up. Things became particularly tough in his poverty-stricken home region last year, he said, when the agency ran so short of funds that it stopped paying for medical services. Pharmacies and many doctors refused to accept the agency's coverage for several months.
"You don't know how we suffered," he said. "Do you know what it's like to reach this age and have to beg for medical attention after working your whole life and paying your dues? We deserve better than to be manhandled by a bunch of corrupt scoundrels."
Lopez did not come without proof. He slapped on the table a packet of photocopied canceled checks obtained from a friendly bank clerk in his home province. Investigators marvel over the amateur sleuthing shown by the retirees. The documents indicated that even as the health care provider hired by the agency to serve retirees was refusing to make payments to doctors and pharmacies, it was depositing thousands of dollars in the personal bank account of an agency director.
Investigators also have found deals with companies that either do not exist or never provided listed services. They have unearthed contracts such as one with a nursing home co-owned by a friend of Menem's. The facility, investigators said, was receiving almost twice the average payment per patient as other contractors, despite the fact that five audits had found conditions there so unsanitary that halls, rooms and floors were smeared with patients' feces.
Besides investigations, a new government openness project is forcing officials--including de la Rua--to make their financial records available to the public on the Internet. Another Web site has been created to post information on government contracts and potential bidders, data formerly kept secret in many agencies.
De la Rua also has purged more than 1,000 agents from the the Argentine intelligence service, viewed by many as a hotbed of extortion artists. To prevent large-scale contraband trafficking, he has dispatched more than 1,000 troops to Argentina's notorious "triple frontier" with Paraguay and Brazil. In three months, they have seized more contraband than in the last four years combined.
Additionally, de la Rua is trying to sell Menem's presidential jet, Tango 01, the lavishly upholstered symbol of excess during Argentina's fast '90s. De la Rua is taking commercial flights on state visits abroad, and his vice president, Carlos Alvarez, hails taxis or takes the subway after declining the traditional service of a car and driver.
"The issue is not merely corruption, but also government waste and extravagance," de la Rua told reporters recently. "To me, extravagance is just another form of corruption."
Latin Corruption
Argentina has become one of the more corrupt countries in Latin America, and many Argentines express their dissatisfaction with democracy and market reforms.
Transparency International ranked countries according to the degree to which they are perceived to be free of corruption. The assessment is based on surveys of business people, risk analysts and the public in 1999.
RANKING OF SELECTED COUNTRIES
00.0 Most corrupt
10.0 Cleanest
94. Honduras 1.8
90. Paraguay
82. Ecuador
80. Bolivia
75. Venezuela
72. Colombia
71. Argentina 3.0
70. Nicaragua
68. Guatemala
58. Mexico
50. Jamaica
49. El Salvador
45. Brazil
41. Uruguay
40. Peru
32. Costa Rica
19. Chile
18. United States
3. Sweden
3. New Zealand
2. Finland
1. Denmark 10.0
MORI public opinion poll:
Percentage of respondents who said they were "very satisfied" or "fairly satisfied" with the way democracy works in their nation.
SOURCES: Transparency International; MORI research, Santiago, Chile
---- colombia
Real Aid to Colombia
Monday, March 13, 2000; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/13/011l-031300-idx.html
My recent church-sponsored travel in Colombia leads me to ask who is listening to the religious and humanitarian workers who struggle on behalf of 2 million displaced people?
Have U.S. trained military personnel and U.S. supplied military hardware brought Colombia any closer to peace? Have rampant human rights abuses been curbed? Has Colombia's paper democracy been strengthened? Has Colombia's hopelessly corrupt justice system been reformed?
Debate on the Colombian $1.6 billion aid package fails to ask who wins and who loses [news story, March 10]. Winners appear to be U.S. military contractors, the U.S. economy and Colombian military interests. Losers are the more than 10,000 newly displaced Colombians, adding to the 2 million already displaced in that war-torn country.
Only significant humanitarian and economic aid, combined with reduction of U.S. demand for drugs, will bring some hope of peace to Colombia. Further military assistance likely will prolong the country's 40-year civil war and involve the United States in another doomed Vietnam-style conflict.
CHARLES L. WILDMAN
Senior Pastor
Rock Spring Congregational
United Church of Christ
Arlington
-----
DeWine seeks to have money for drug interdiction in bill
Sen. Mike Dewine, a leader in the Senate in anti-drug efforts in the Carribean, is pushing to have money for Colombian drug fighting included in an emergency spending bill moving through Congress.
"At this moment, Colombia is in a state of crisis,'' said DeWine, R-Ohio. "But the people of Colombia do not suffer this crisis alone. Our nation struggles with them. And tragically, it is our nation's drug consumption that is subsidizing the deterioration of the oldest democracy in Latin America.
"As Colombia continues to deteriorate and succumb to drug-fueled violence and instability, it affects our own U.S. national security interests.
Colombia supplies 80 percent of the U.S. demand for cocaine and 50 percent of the demand for heroin.
"Without a strong Colombia, narco-traffickers will flourish, an abundant and steady flow of illicit drugs will head for the United States, one of our largest export markets in the Western Hemisphere will continue to falter, and a neighboring democratic government will further erode,'' DeWine said.
He is among the main sponsors of a $1.6 billion plan over three years to boost drug interdiction in the region as well as develop alternative crops.
The White House is also urging money for the anti-drug operations in Colombia, and the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday earmarked $1.7 billion for it.
Caption: Graphic
--------
U.S. Officials Cite Trend in Colombia Lack of Air Support Hindering Drug War
By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 13, 2000; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/13/103l-031300-idx.html
A key element of the drug war in Colombia is faltering because U.S. surveillance flights over major cocaine-producing regions have declined by two-thirds over the past year, according to administration officials.
The near disappearance of U.S. radar planes from Andean skies severely erodes the ability of U.S. forces to spot smugglers flying low over the jungle and direct intercept missions by South American warplanes.
In Peru those intercepts proved highly successful, helping drive down Peruvian coca production by two-thirds between 1995 and 1999, according to Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
For want of such simple equipment as fire trucks and navigational beacons, the interdiction effort has barely gotten underway over an area of southwestern Colombia, which took up the slack from Peru. Colombia doubled its coca production during the same 1995-99 period to an estimated 520 tons last year (twice U.S. annual consumption). That burgeoning cocaine trade finances an anti-government insurgency.
Moreover, in Peru drug traffickers are resurgent because of the decline in surveillance and interdiction, U.S. and Latin American officials said.
That decline is the result of diplomatic setbacks, friction between Congress and the Clinton administration, Pentagon infighting and the competing demands of other military operations, the officials said.
Restoring aerial surveillance is "absolutely critical" to U.S. anti-drug initiatives in South America, Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom), recently told Congress. "I am in urgent need of help on the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance side," Wilhelm said.
Wilhelm said he had reduced SouthCom to the lowest readiness status for those functions, meaning that it could not be expected to carry out its assigned missions.
The $1.6 billion package of counter-narcotics aid for Colombia working its way though Congress includes only minor provisions to boost surveillance flights and does nothing to deliver what Wilhelm says he needs most: E-3 AWACS, the Air Force's largest and most sophisticated radar plane. "Those are the long-reach, long-look airplanes that we need to do the job in the deep source zone," Wilhelm said.
The nation's 30 AWACS are in such heavy demand elsewhere that none are permanently assigned to SouthCom and temporary tours have become increasingly rare since the air campaign in Kosovo last spring.
"We are just way too stretched out between the Balkans, Iraq and North Korea to commit these assets to drug interdiction in South America," said a senior Air Force official.
Concerned that the Pentagon underestimates the importance of the drug war, McCaffrey wrote Defense Secretary William S. Cohen last month warning that weakened capabilities in Latin America could jeopardize the Colombia effort. The retired army general asked for a commitment to rebuild surveillance capacities, according to senior officials.
While declining to discuss the letter, McCaffrey said in an interview that "our ability to get into the Andean ridge has dwindled to about zero." The White House drug official said he had made it known throughout the administration that "I think we have to get going on this, and if we don't, we face a potential disaster within three or four years."
Surveillance flights are essential "because we can't go in there and fight this ourselves. The best thing we can give these countries is good intelligence about the source zones so they can get in there and do it themselves, but since last May, that has not been possible," a senior administration official said.
Last May, U.S. military forces and law enforcement agencies abandoned Howard Air Base in Panama and lost the use of the long runways and first-class maintenance and supply facilities that for decades had supported U.S. air operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Recognizing its importance to counter-narcotic efforts, the Panamanian government initially indicated a willingness to let Howard continue operating after other U.S. installations were closed when the United States ceded control of the Panama Canal. But early last year, the Panamanians unexpectedly insisted that U.S. forces leave Howard.
More than 2,000 flights a year had been taking off from Howard on drug-related missions, including surveillance flights that allowed Peruvian authorities to target coca fields for eradication and to intercept airplanes carrying cocaine from production labs to embarkation points for shipment to the United States.
Just as the United States planned to shift the surveillance strategy from Peru to Colombia, it found itself obliged to seek a replacement for Howard. Concluding that no single facility could do the job, Southern Command and the State Department tried to fill the gap by borrowing space at several airfields.
In recent months, Customs Service radar planes and Air National Guard F-16s have flown out of airports on Curacao and Aruba, two islands in the southern Antilles, to track smugglers crossing the Caribbean in boats or airplanes.
Surveillance of the cocaine-producing regions in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia was to be based out of a military airfield in Manta, Ecuador--a Pacific port roughly midway between the coca-growing regions in Colombia and Peru.
"From Manta and only from Manta can we reach down and cover the deep southern portion of the source zone," said Wilhelm, promoting the Colombia aid package on Capitol Hill.
But the airfield, which had been a training base for Ecuadorian military helicopter pilots, lacked even basic maintenance, storage, safety and navigational facilities and the runway was in disrepair and too short for big jets such as AWACS.
Republican leaders in Congress last year refused to authorize funding for initial improvements at Manta, arguing that the Clinton administration had mishandled the negotiations for Howard and failed to secure a long-term agreement with Ecuador for use of Manta.
SouthCom found funds to make patchwork repairs on the Manta runway after a short-term pact was reached last April and it opened last summer. But only one airplane at a time has been able to use Manta because it lacked a fire truck and other safety equipment. The surveillance aircraft, all small, short-range models, operate only in daylight because Manta lacks basic navigational aids.
"The narcos are smart enough to fly at night and so we have not been able to accomplish much on that front," said an administration official.
A long-term agreement was reached with Ecuador at the end of last year, and the Air Force is due to have the safety and navigation equipment in place by the middle of next month, nearly a year after they were first requested.
Addressing the reluctance to make even a minor investment in Manta, a senior Air Force official said, "Look, we get asked to do everything, and when this one came through the door and we had to do it with our own money, there was a feeling of 'Hey, why shouldn't the Navy or somebody else take care of it?' "
The Colombian counter-narcotics package before Congress includes a request to spend $38 million in fiscal 2001 on reinforcing and lengthening the runways at Manta so they can handle AWACS and the tankers that allow them to fly long missions. Even if the work is completed, the aircraft may not be available.
"At this point the entire fleet of AWACS is committed to missions where Americans are in harm's way or where there is a high threat of conflict, and so if any planes go to Manta on a regular basis, someone is going to have to decide whether it is Iraq or Korea or someplace else that has to give them up," the senior Air Force official said.
In the meantime, McCaffrey, Wilhelm and others are worried about new threats in Colombia and the erosion of gains in Peru. For more than a year, the Peruvian government has been complaining that the lack of U.S. surveillance has crippled its air interdiction program, according to senior officials. As a result, the Peruvians say, the powerful deterrent effect of the "you fly, you die" campaign has worn off and cocaine traffickers are back in the air.