-------- NUCLEAR (by country)

-------- australia

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Olympics Safe, Australian Officials Say

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000; Page A24
Associated Press
WORLD In Brief
Compiled by Virginia Hamill
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/209l-082700-idx.html

SYDNEY--Australian officials said yesterday the Sydney Olympics were safe from terrorist attack after a possible plot against the country's only nuclear reactor was exposed.

It was revealed Friday that New Zealand police last March stumbled across evidence of a possible plan to attack the reactor. The information was discovered during an operation in Auckland against a suspected organized crime ring with links to Muslim rebels in Afghanistan.

With the Games scheduled to start Sept. 15, officials were quick to say there was no direct evidence of a terrorist threat.

-------- india / pakistan

Little chance of a India-Pakistan summit

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
By Janaki Bahadur Kremmer
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-200082522748.htm

NEW DELHI - The leaders of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan travel to New York in early September but the chance of a summit to end the artillery and guerrilla fighting on their borders is small, despite U.S. encouragement.

However Indian-American businessmen are trying to arrange a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. They believe that as president, Mr. Bush would be more friendly to India's booming high-tech businesses than the Democrats.

Hopes for a meeting between Mr. Vajpayee and Pakistan's chief executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, are focused on the U.N. General Assembly opening from Sept. 6 to 8 in New York, which both will attend.

"The ball is in India's court," said national security analyst Naseem Zehra from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "Gen. Musharraf has repeated over and over again that he is ready to talk - any time, anywhere."

Many analysts in the region believe the United States is pushing for the two to meet in New York, but officials in Washington say that while they would welcome such a summit they are not playing a matchmaker role.

"We are not behind the scenes trying to instigate Vajpayee and Musharraf to meet in New York," said a senior State Department official yesterday.

"This is not something we could propose, even though we would support it. It must be at the initiative of the two parties themselves."

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted some positive signs in the troubled region, including a brief cease-fire in Kashmir between Indian troops and the largest Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgent group, Hizbul Mujahideen.

But he said a resumed Pakistan-India dialogue, at the summit or any lesser level, is only one of the "four R's" President Clinton called for during his visit to the two countries in March. The other three are: respecting the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, rejecting violence and mutual restraint.

The official also said that India's new prominence in U.S. eyes will be demonstrated when Mr. Vajpayee visits Washington after the U.N. meeting.

Mr. Vajpayee will be hosted at a luncheon by Vice President Al Gore on Sept. 15; by Mr. Clinton at an official dinner Sept. 17; and he will address a joint session of Congress.

The atmosphere for any sort of dialogue between India and Pakistan has been soured by recent violence and gunbattles in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, where more than 25,000 people have been killed in the last 11 years.

An Indian army spokesman said yesterday that Indian troops had killed 10 Pakistani soldiers and wounded several others while repulsing an attack. Pakistan said its troops had repulsed an unprovoked Indian attack across the truce line, and two of its soldiers had been killed and two were missing.

So far, India has refused to talk to Gen. Musharraf because it believes his government supports the violence in Kashmir.

"On the one hand, Pakistan says it is willing to participate in talks, on the other it continues to be deeply involved in violence, killings and cross-border terrorism," said Mr. Vajpayee on India's independence day Aug. 15. "The world knows who has sabotaged the peace efforts."

However, the prime minister kept alive the prospects of negotiations in the future, leading analysts to believe that there may be a chance of some sort of meeting in the United States.

But the future of Kashmir, the biggest issue between them, is too sensitive to be discussed right now, said foreign affairs analyst Amitabh Mattoo from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Other topics that might be brought up under prodding from the United States include the threat of atomic war since each country set off nuclear tests in 1998.

"Hypothetically speaking, they could discuss the prior notification of a missile test, improvement of communications at the highest levels of military operations and carry on consultations on nuclear doctrines," Mr. Mattoo said.

But Pakistan has repeatedly stated that no dialogue is possible if it does not include the subject of Kashmir, and Niaz Naik, a former senior Pakistani diplomat, said there is too large a gap in perceptions on the nuclear issue between the two countries to make any headway in one sitting.

As things stand, it's unlikely that the two leaders will even come within a few feet of each other.

Says Mr. Mattoo: "Indian diplomats are very skillful at avoidance - making sure that if a meeting is not to take place then Musharraf and Vajpayee will not even be walking through the corridors of the U.N. at the same time."

• Ben Barber contributed to this article in Washington.

-------- iraq

Iraqi missile plant discovered

Jerusalem Post
Sunday, August 27 2000 12:51 26 Av 5760
By Douglas Davis
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/08/27/News/News.11389.html

LONDON (August 27) -Germany's BND foreign intelligence service has located a secret Iraqi missile plant in an inaccessible area some 40 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, according to a report in the Hamburg daily Bild on Friday.

The facility, which bears the name "Al Mamoun," is far from main roads and is said to consist of several buildings, some underground, where about 250 engineers are currently working on Iraq's clandestine missile program.

According to Bild, the intelligence service "has now provided proof of what Western intelligence services have long suspected" - that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is still developing nonconventional weapons.

The paper reports that the plant, whose target coordinates for satellite reconnaissance are given as 33 degrees, 1 min, 10 secs north/44 degrees, 13 mins, 10 secs east, is currently producing a solid-fuel short-range missile of the Ababil-100 type.

While the missile has a range of just 150 kilometers, the significance of the discovery, according to the German intelligence service, demonstrates that "the Iraqi will and personnel for developing missiles still exist."

The paper said the intelligence service is convinced that Iraqi technicians are currently working on missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers and with chemical and biological capability.

This means they could strike at targets not only in Israel but also in central Europe, noted the paper, which quoted intelligence officials as saying there was "a very real danger that, rather sooner than later, Germany will also fall within range of these weapons."

The paper added that recent attempts by Baghdad to import missile parts, including navigation instruments, from the former Soviet Union and North Korea, have failed.

---

Cheney Suggests Little Change in U.S. Policy on Iraq

Yahoo News
Sunday August 27 3:15 PM ET updated 5:08 AM ET Aug 28
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000827/pl/iraq_usa_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney said on Sunday that military strikes would be the ``ultimate sanction'' if the Iraqi government tries to develop weapons of mass destruction.

But he declined to propose military strikes if Iraq merely refused to let U.N. arms inspectors back into the country.

``We have to watch carefully to see to it that he (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) doesn't get involved in trying to recreate this capability. And, of course, the ultimate sanction always is the possibility of having to use military force,'' he told the NBC program ``Meet the Press.''

``Whether or not there ought to be a military strike, I think, would depend on circumstances, and at this point I don't have enough information to say there should be,'' added Cheney, who served as U.S. secretary of defense during the 1991 Gulf War.

``In the meantime, I think we want to maintain our current posture vis-a-vis Iraq. We want to see to it that we keep the coalition in force, we maintain the sanctions that are currently on ... and hopefully there will be a change in the government in Iraq before too long,'' he said.

The United Nations is preparing a new arms inspection team for duty in Iraq, but a U.N. weapons spokesman said on Tuesday it was uncertain when it would be sent to Baghdad.

Iraq said on Wednesday it would not accept the new United Nations arms inspection team, which was established under a Security Council resolution last December.

It would replace UNSCOM, which left Iraq in 1998 after constant conflict with the Iraqi government over where it could go and who could take part in the inspections.

UNSCOM dated from the aftermath of the Gulf War and has a mandate to find and destroy Iraq's weapons programs.

The Clinton administration also has declined to endorse military action to try to force Iraq to accept inspections, a tactic that has failed with Baghdad in the past. But it, too, has threatened to attack if it finds evidence that Iraq is trying to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

``If Iraq wants to take this opportunity, then it can. If not, they will be stuck in the same situation they are in now,'' a State Department official said last week.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the main effect of Iraqi compliance with the new inspection system would be to give it access to dual-use goods -- goods that have both civilian and military applications.

``One of the ways for us to be able to issue a license for dual-use goods is to have inspectors go in and inspect their facilities. ... It's not our problem. It's up to them to take the opportunity but they shouldn't complain about the sanctions while not allowing inspectors in,'' he added.

Bush foreign policy advisers, however, have said that a Bush administration would give more support to opponents of Saddam, in the hope that they would overthrow him.

---

U.N. Readies Iraq Team

New York Times
August 27, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/082700this-week-review.html

President Saddam Hussein calls them spies, and doesn't want them back in Iraq. But the United Nations has more than 40 new arms inspectors trained and ready to go. To meet some Iraqi objections, the team is drawn from 20 countries, some of them -- like China, France, India, Russia and Sudan -- considered friendly to Iraq. Only 11 arms experts have been drawn from the United States and Britain. Hans Blix, the leader of the new inspection commission, says he is prepared to wait out the Iraqis, who can't hope to have a decade of sanctions lifted until they cooperate.

Barbara Crossette

-------- russia

Russian pride went down with the Kursk Sub was symbol of might

Spokane Spokesman Review
August 27, 2000
Barry Renfrew
Associated Press
http://www.spokane.net/news-story-body.asp?Date=082700&ID=s843849&cat=
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200008/27+kursk082700_news.html+20000827

MOSCOW _ With an honor guard in crisp blue uniforms standing at attention on the deck and its flags snapping in the breeze, the nuclear submarine Kursk glided quietly out to sea in late July, a symbol of Russian power and pride.

It was the last time anyone on land would see the nuclear-powered warship that the Russian navy boasted was unsinkable. The Kursk was named after the region in southern Russia where Soviet troops in 1943 turned the tide against Nazi Germany's army in the biggest tank battle in history. The Kursk -- a 500-foot-long underwater missile base with an elite crew -- was intended to turn the tide at sea if there was ever another world war.

President Vladimir Putin had big plans for the navy and the Kursk. The exercises that the Kursk sailed to join on Aug. 10 were hailed as a prelude for a major step in putting Moscow back on the world stage: the return of a Russian fleet to the Mediterranean in 2001 for the first time in a decade.

Then on Aug. 14 the navy announced that the Kursk had experienced a malfunction. The situation was not critical -- the submarine was in radio contact, air and power lines had been hooked up and arrangements were being made to bring the crew up, the navy said.

Evidence suggests the crewmen were already dead and almost every utterance by navy brass about saving the Kursk would turn out to be a lie.

Norwegian monitors reported detecting an explosion in the vicinity of the Kursk on Aug. 12, followed within minutes by a much larger blast that registered at 3.5 on seismic monitors, equivalent to a small earthquake.

The submarine was carrying a new type of torpedo with a liquid fuel system that some officers complained was unstable. The first blast must have convulsed the Kursk, knocking out control systems and pitching it into a sharp dive.

Crewmen would have been knocked sprawling as the submarine plunged out of control. Officers in the command center would have been shouting for reports, trying to determine what had happened although the whole crew already knew they were in serious trouble.

The second explosion was probably torpedoes and anti-submarine missiles detonating -- some officers estimate more than 10 tons.

The Kursk was built of immensely strong steel and ripped backward, breaking through the thinner walls of the crew compartments.

Anybody still alive was almost certainly stunned, probably deafened and unconscious as tons of water surged in, quickly filling the submarine.

Kursk crew honored

•The Hero of Russia order was awarded posthumously Saturday to Capt. Gennady Lyachin, the 117 other sailors were honored with the Order of Courage. The crew, with Lyachin saluting at far right, is shown leaving the Severomorsk naval base July 30 on the fatal voyage.

•Russia has begun a criminal investigation into allegations that the Kursk sank after a collision with a British or American sub. Memo: Norway, which monitored the explosion and played a key role in the rescue effort, reported no evidence of a collision.

---

Kursk Submariners' Deaths Probably Sudden and Swift,

Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday, August 27, 2000
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/08272000/nation_w/16772.htm

MOSCOW -- With an honor guard in crisp blue uniforms standing at attention on the deck, the nuclear submarine Kursk glided silently out to sea.

It was the last time anyone on land would see the nuclear-powered warship that the Russian navy boasted was unsinkable. As it headed into the Barents Sea for maneuvers, the Kursk's crew expected to be home in a few days.

The submarine was a 500-foot-long underwater missile base. Its sides bristled with 24 silos, each housing a cruise missile. But with the Cold War long over, the Kursk's nuclear warheads were locked up ashore.

On Aug. 14, a Monday, the navy announced that the Kursk had experienced a malfunction. The situation was not critical -- the submarine was in radio contact and arrangements were being made to bring the crew up, the navy said.

Mounting evidence suggests the crewmen were already dead and almost every utterance by top officials about saving the Kursk would turn out to be untrue.

The Kursk was rising to the surface, possibly preparing to fire a torpedo on Aug. 12 when disaster struck.

Norwegian monitors later reported detecting an explosion in the vicinity of the Kursk, followed within minutes by a much larger blast that registered at 3.5 on seismic monitors, equivalent to a small earthquake. All the signs suggest a problem in the torpedo compartment at the front of the Kursk.

The submarine was carrying a new type of torpedo with a liquid-fuel system that some officers complained was unstable, according to some reports. Or the young, inexperienced conscript sailors may have fumbled one of the torpedoes, the weapon jamming in a torpedo tube.

The first blast must have convulsed the Kursk, knocking out control systems and pitching it into a sharp dive toward the bottom 354 feet below the waves.

Crewmen would have been knocked sprawling as the submarine plunged out of control. Maybe there was time to hit the alarm system, but the whole crew already knew they were in serious trouble.

The first blast probably killed and injured some of the sailors.

Plunging down at mounting speed and with the decks slanting sharply forward, sailors would have been fighting to stay on their feet or in their seats as the Kursk plunged into the depths. They never regained control.

A second, catastrophic explosion ripped through the Kursk, probably as it slammed into the bottom. This blast was probably torpedoes and anti-submarine missiles detonating.

The hull was twisted like a wet towel being squeezed dry.

The Kursk was built of immensely strong steel to withstand the enormous pressures of diving hundreds of feet. The hull would have contained and intensified the explosion.

Most of the crew were within yards of the blast. Navy officers say that many were probably vaporized by the detonation.

Anybody still alive after the second explosion was almost certainly stunned, probably deafened and unconscious. Kursk's nuclear reactors appear to have shut down, plunging the submarine into darkness.

The explosions ripped at least one large hole in the hull. Tons of water surged in, quickly filling the submarine. Anyone who survived the explosions almost certainly drowned, the navy says.

---

Russian Navy Adrift in Ocean of Problems
Submarine disaster points up a financial crisis that stems from funding cuts.

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, August 27, 2000
By ROBYN DIXON, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates/lat_navy000827.htm

MOSCOW--In May, a group of officers from Russia's Northern Fleet participated in an exercise that they hoped never would be needed: a submarine rescue operation.

An old, decommissioned submarine was sunk on an even keel, and Russia's rescue submersibles went to work. Four attempts to dock with the submarine failed, but the official report on the exercise said that it had been a success.

The rescue operation for the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk this month was more demanding. The submarine was resting on the seabed at an angle, and the weather was bad. Like the exercise, the real rescue failed.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Russians are searching for answers on why the accident happened and why the rescue failed. Was negligence, poor maintenance or funding cuts the cause of the catastrophe? Did 118 crew members die because Russia's rescue equipment and training were inadequate, despite the navy's insistence that its expertise was equal to that of the West?

The navy's poverty has implications far beyond Russia's borders: Starved of funds for a decade, it has dozens of nuclear reactors in its back pocket, each one a potential mini-Chernobyl.

With no evidence as to what caused the Kursk accident, it's too early to say whether the financial crisis in the navy since the collapse of the Soviet Union was a factor. But President Vladimir V. Putin and Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev are convinced that it was, as are officers with the Northern Fleet.

The Kursk debacle has focused Putin's attention on the economic wreckage of the navy and what kind of fleet it can afford to maintain. At a time when even officers' families are going hungry, Putin's goal of reviving Russia's naval might seems distant, at best.

After the disaster, Putin promised extra money for the military and announced a 20% pay increase for the armed forces and the creation of sea rescue centers. He said Russia's submarine fleet might be cut from about 30 vessels to just 10 but that the crew of each would be properly supplied.

The navy's financial problems are dire.

The Baltic Fleet owed so much money to the Kaliningrad bread factory that the plant refused to supply any more bread last summer.

In one of the Northern Fleet's great indignities, one of its submarines was stripped of its missiles in 1995 and used to transport potatoes from the Kola Peninsula to Siberia.

Theft is common. On Jan. 13, four desperate sailors in Kamchatka, in eastern Russia, stole the radioactive fuel on their submarine to sell for some quick cash. They were caught and jailed.

Russian naval officers are paid $150 a month, and sailors receive $50 to $90--far less than the average Russian's monthly earnings of $350. Many of the navy's top people have left.

Size of Fleet Has Dropped in Decade

The navy's fleet has shrunk from its bloated numbers in the Soviet days. One thousand vessels were scrapped in the last decade because the navy's funding for maintenance and repairs was 10% of what it needed, according to a navy report published in December.

"There has been growing concern as to whether the navy's present decline has become irreversible," noted an analysis on the Russian navy in Jane's Sentinel, a security assessment journal. "Crews are increasingly losing their basic skills. Sea duty for submarines has been cut by a quarter since 1997, and for ships, by fully a third."

Russia's 11 Oscar-II class submarines have to rely on help from cities nationwide.

"The Kursk got its name because the city of Kursk was taking care of the submarine, supplying it with food, televisions, videos," said Igor Kudrik, an expert on the Russian navy from the Norwegian environmental group Bellona. "We are talking about the submarine, which is one of the most important vessels in the Russian navy. And a nonstate initiative is supporting it. It shows the state is unable to run the fleet."

To navy families, the shrinking of that branch of the military has only underscored how little clout the admirals had in the struggle for funding. Many naval vessels cannot put out to sea because they need repairs, and crews are often paid late.

"Our navy is very poor today," said Nadezhda Tylik, who lost her son Sergei, 24, on the Kursk. "The Russian navy has been destroyed by numerous reorganizations, all of which resulted in the shrinking of the force. The best people had to quit. The people who knew how to use the submarines and vessels, and who could teach their crews to find a way out of extreme situations, all left. I am amazed that submarines are still capable of leaving their ports at all."

Nikolai Konyashkin, 43, senior sublieutenant at the Kursk's base in Vidyayevo, near Murmansk, said an officer's life has become a "fight for survival. There's no gas in our town. There are no hot-water supplies, and we get paid $150 a month for handling nuclear weapons."

Vladimir Chaikin, also a senior sublieutenant at the Vidyayevo base, said officers' families sometimes go hungry.

"There have been times when I came home after a tour of duty and saw that my family didn't have anything to eat," he said. "My wife and I have to sit down every month and write down on a piece of paper how we're going to spend each kopeck. And we're officers. We're supposed to be the elite of the military."

He complained that the navy's limited funds were often misspent, despite numerous reorganizations to trim the fat.

"There are still all sorts of freeloaders in the navy. You find these headquarters, command groups and all sorts of bureaucratic structures that devour a lot of money but produce zero result," he said. "As for combat officers who actually do the job, our opportunities are severely restricted."

Crews Often Assembled from Several Vessels

Russian submarine crews, while in port, are understaffed by about 20%, and when they take to sea, crew members are reassigned from other vessels to fill the gaps. Among the Kursk victims, at least 12 officers were from another vessel, the Voronezh.

"It's the wrong thing to keep throwing people from one submarine to another and then back. But there's simply no other choice," Chaikin said. "Obviously, the practice creates tensions in the crew because a submarine crew should be a close-knit collective of people who think and act in exactly the same way."

Bellona's Kudrik argues that one possible cause of the disaster was the use of a new, cheaper type of torpedo using liquid fuel.

According to an article in the official military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on Aug. 17, the navy had opposed the new torpedoes because they were difficult to store and dangerous to handle.

Analysts say the navy's poverty compromised the rescue operation.

The first time a Russian submersible managed to approach the submarine hatch, it was ordered to pull away because it had old batteries that were about to expire after a couple of hours' work.

One revelation during the Kursk rescue was the fact that Russia had no deep-sea divers capable of helping. In the 1980s, Soviet divers were trained in France to reach depths of more than 300 feet, in order to work on the exploration of energy reserves in the Barents Sea.

One of the divers, Konstantin Argelade, said that high-tech diving equipment was bought overseas in the 1980s but that, in the early 1990s, it was dismantled and dispersed, and the divers lost the regular experience they needed to maintain their skills.

After the Kursk catastrophe, the navy faces a new problem: a collapse in morale not only among ordinary seamen but also among officers.

"I don't want to serve in a submarine anymore," Chaikin said. "But I'm not given the opportunity to get a transfer to the shore. It's becoming impossible for me to continue in the service because the conditions are so disgraceful. And I can't quit because I have a family to feed."

For Russia's top naval commanders, Putin had seemed to offer salvation. At last, here was a president who grasped the need to reassert Russia's naval might in order for the nation to reclaim its place as a real global power.

In January, navy commander Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov said Russia would retain and repair four nuclear-powered Kirov-class battle cruisers, including the Admiral Ushakov, which had been out of action for a decade. A public charity campaign was initiated to raise money for its repair.

In late July, Kuroyedov announced "World Ocean," a plan to rebuild the Russian navy over 15 to 20 years and provide a counterbalance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's naval power.

He also said the navy would return to its old Soviet playground in the Mediterranean--temporarily, at least. The plan was for a flotilla of vessels, including the navy's sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, the Kirov-class battle cruiser Peter the Great, and the navy's newest destroyer, the Admiral Chabanenko, to steam triumphantly into the Mediterranean late this year in a brash display of Russia's naval might.

'Blue-Water' Strategy Meant to Send Signal

Analysts said the aim was to send NATO a signal of Russia's intention to maintain a "blue-water" offensive naval strategy, which involves patrolling farther from one's own shores in an attempt to keep perceived or potential enemies as far away as possible.

The report on Russia's navy in Jane's Sentinel noted "a pattern of increasing Russian naval activity that has seen attack submarines operate in the Cold War stamping grounds of the Mediterranean and Eastern Pacific, carrying out simulated attacks on U.S. naval forces."

"According to senior U.S. intelligence analysts, the Russian navy is operating in a manner very similar to that of the Soviet fleet during the Cold War. Crucially, however, Russian naval strength has seriously declined, with only 20 first-class attack submarines in operating condition."

Just after NATO began its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year, the Northern Fleet readied the Kursk to go to the Mediterranean.

According to one Russian naval officer who served on the Kursk at the time, the vessel was in the Mediterranean from August to October. His name cannot be used because of the risk of serious repercussions against him.

The Kursk disaster has cast doubt on the navy's recent attempts to revive Russia as global naval power.

"It's obvious that our presence in the Mediterranean Sea will never ever be what it was before. Certainly we can make a voyage, but it's only to show everyone that we are capable of doing it," said Vladimir Urban, a naval specialist at the AVN military news agency.

Putin's comments after the Kursk tragedy have cast doubt not only on the plans for the Mediterranean exercise but on whether a "blue-water" strategy is right for Russia, given the state of its economy.

Russia's Defense Ministry budget for 2000 is $4.5 billion, compared to about $268 billion for the United States.

In an interview Thursday on the RTR state television network, Putin said the only way that Russia's navy can get out of its humiliating position is for the military to shrink.

"Our armed forces should match our needs on one hand and the possibilities of the state on the other," he said, adding that the military must be "compact, modern and well paid."

"We have been talking about military reform for how long? At least eight years and perhaps a whole 10 years, but there has been little change in this area," he said.

But for the families who lost loved ones on the Kursk, it's more important to reform the Soviet mentality of the admirals.

Vice Adm. Yuri Kvyatkovsky, quoted in the Vlast journal two days after the Kursk sank, said the reason that crew members hadn't evacuated the sub was because they understood the need to preserve state secrets from foreign spies.

"The main thing to take care of is the preservation of state secrets. There are lots of different devices and communications systems on the submarine which can be considered state secrets," he said. "It's crucial not to lose the submarine."

Later, when the entire crew was lost and officials were in desperate damage-control mode, Defense Minister Sergeyev took full responsibility--while insisting that the military made no fundamental errors in the failed rescue effort.

"The old mentality is pretty much alive," said Tylik, the grieving mother. "Our government finds it easier to keep its mouth shut, to hush up the problems rather than to do something about them." --- Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

---

A Submarine Disaster And a Country's Pride

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, August 27, 2000
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/08/27/ED40476.DTL

IMAGINE LOSING a sleek nuclear sub near the Farallon Islands. Then the Navy bungles the rescue while President Clinton dallies on a palm-tree vacation. Finally, when American sub experts are stymied, a team of Canadian divers pry open a hatch cover and find all hands dead.

Such a tale would touch off a burst of grief and anger -- and it has. In Russia, the loss of the Kursk, the country's most modern missile sub, and its crew of 118 is both a disastrous undersea accident and a humiliating national ordeal.

As never before, Russia resembles a stumbling, second-class power. Its leaders look ineffectual and arrogant, from the military to the Kremlin. A customary streak of authoritarianism is peeled back to show an angry society.

The sinking tests the thin fabric of an emerging Russia. A rusting economy, corruption, Chechnya, and now this -- the loss of a powerful symbol of national might and technology. The disaster turns especially bitter when the decrepit navy can't rescue its sailors.

The episode puts President Vladimir Putin on the spot. When the Kursk went down, he stayed in touch with navy authorities but remained on holiday. Nearly 10 days after the sinking, he finally flew to visit grieving families at the Arctic-edge sub base. He was roundly booed when he arrived.

A tough-minded politician might want to keep his distance from a no-win situation like the Kursk. But Putin, who flew in a MiG cockpit and handed out knives to Russian troops in Chechnya, normally projects a forceful role in Russia's chaotic politics. His hesitance could undercut his wide popularity prior to the sub disaster.

Cold War instincts die hard, especially for front-line warriors. The Russian navy spurned help from the West. Finally, long after it could do any good, the admirals allowed a Norwegian crew to try what no Russian could: open an escape hatch for a look inside.

Now the outsiders are invited to raise the vessel, loaded with missiles, munitions and two nuclear reactors. The humbling message is that Russian navy can't do the job itself, and the entire country took note.

Just as startling is the hostile questioning of authority. News media have raked the government's handling of the disaster. Lies and half-truths about oxygen lifelines and hull taps from trapped crewmen were exposed. The navy appeared more worried about protecting its reputation than its sailors, critics said. It's a far cry from the loyal treatment afforded the military in Soviet days.

The Kursk sinking has exposed the rough edges of Russia's transitional society. Public confidence, essential in moving the country forward, must be restored. Yet, so far, its leaders have done little to lift an air of despair.

---

Aftershocks of Sub Disaster

New York Times
August 27, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/082700this-week-review.html

The mea culpas began almost as soon as Norwegian divers pried open the hatch of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which went down in 350 feet of water during exercises in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, killing all 118 people on board. The commanders of the navy offered to resign, as did the defense minister, Igor D. Sergeyev, but Russia's commander in chief, Vladimir V. Putin, declined to accept the resignations.

Russian officials said they suspected that the Kursk was sunk after striking a submerged object of "large tonnage," like a foreign submarine, and they were busy scouring the seabed for evidence. But the main task facing Mr. Putin is quieting the political storm over the navy's ill-equipped and inept rescue operation.

Patrick E. Tyler

---

Prosecutors open Kursk probe

USA Today
08/27/00- Updated 08:56 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#towe

MOSCOW - Russian prosecutors have begun a criminal investigation into allegations that a nuclear submarine that crashed to the sea floor had collided with a vessel that later escaped, the Interfax news agency reported Saturday. Military prosecutors believe that vessel, which has not been found, violated safety rules and was directly responsible for the sinking of the Kursk, Interfax said, citing unidentified sources. All 118 sailors aboard were killed. Russian experts have not determined what caused two explosions aboard the Kursk, which sank Aug. 12 during exercises in the Barents Sea. Military officials claim the most likely scenario was that the Kursk collided with another vessel, most likely a foreign submarine. The cause of the disaster probably will not be known until experts study the shattered submarine more closely, if it can be raised. Russia is negotiating with Norwegian and Dutch companies to raise the Kursk.

---

The First Steps From Authoritarian to Civil Society

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, August 27, 2000
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000827/t000080330.html

WASHINGTON--It's hard to see how Russian President Vladimir V. Putin could have handled the Kursk submarine crisis any worse. Each move he made seemed to come out of the old Soviet playbook: Lie, cover up, then, when all else fails, blame the West.

But after a week of remaining on vacation, tooling around on his water scooter and refusing vital foreign assistance that might have helped avert the death of all 118 sailors aboard the submarine, Putin may have started to turn a corner. A torrent of criticism and outrage by Russian citizens and the media put him on the defensive and forced him to confront the crisis. In an age when citizens around the world want elected officials to feel their pain, he's learning you can't mirror the actions of an aloof czar or isolated dictator and that public relations increasingly matter almost as much as effective action. Late last week, Putin made his first attempts to reach out by holding a town meeting with relatives of the sailors who perished and calling for a national day of mourning.

The truth is that, however tragic, the submarine crisis may be a blessing in disguise for Russia. It has dramatically accelerated the country's evolution from a backward, authoritarian country into a civil society, where individual citizens' voices cannot be ignored. As globalization, the Internet and mass media take hold in Russia, the secretive structures that supported the Czars and then the Soviet empire are being undermined.

The big question has been where Putin stands. Elena Bonner, widow of Andre I. Sakharov, the human-rights advocate and Noble Peace Prize winner, has declared that Putin's presidency is "a new stage in the establishment of a modernized Stalinism." But many Western leaders, including President Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have hailed Putin as a democrat who can establish order in a chaotic country.

Who has it right? The submarine crisis may show which road Putin intends to travel down. While he has indeed suggested rolling back Russia's Westernization, it's all remained at the noise level. If Putin is bold enough and has enough power, he might reverse course and seize on the submarine crisis to push through real reforms.

Putin's dilemma over Westernization is not new. Ever since Peter the Great created St. Petersburg and, as he put it, "flung open the window to the West," Russia has agonized over whether or not to emulate the West. Slavophiles have argued that the Russian soul needs to be safeguarded against alien influences, while Westernizers have sought to modernize the country. But the Slavophiles have usually had the upper hand: The 18th-century writer Marquis de Custine noted, "In Russia, everything is turned into mystery," and, two centuries later, Winston Churchill famously explained that Russia was "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

But it was the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the precursor to the current submarine disaster, that put an end to the Soviet government's ability to lie to itself and its people. That nuclear accident became a textbook example of how not to deal with a crisis in an era when television and other technologies made it impossible to shield Russians from what was actually taking place. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev used the meltdown to try out his policy of "glasnost," or openness, and to turn to the West for help. But Chernobyl took the Soviet Union along with it.

The Kursk fiasco could prove as consequential. For one thing, it was the first event of this type to be covered essentially round the clock on Russian television. This intensive media coverage of a disaster--bread and butter for American cable television--is something quite new in Russia, and it fueled anger against the authorities. The military still doesn't seem to have a clue: "Why should a housewife know what is happening with the Kursk in the Barents Sea?" complained one Russian military official.

Given these obsolete attitudes, Putin himself may not be in the strongest position to carry out reforms--even if he wanted to. For Putin declared last year that Russia should never become a "second edition of, say, the United States or Great Britain . . . . For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly, which should be got rid of. Quite the contrary, they see it as a guarantor of order and the initiator and the main driving force of any change."

Whether Putin has the imagination and power to overcome such attitudes is highly questionable. One of his first acts as president was to step up the war in Chechnya--which, indeed, went over well with most Russians. He also attacked the business oligarchs, a necessary move, but his first target was a troubling one--the Media-Most broadcasting empire. This was condemned as an assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, just as these are struggling to be established in the formerly controlled society.

More recently, Putin reflexively defended the military establishment, making the empty declaration, "I will stand by the army. Together, we will revive the army, the navy and the country." Andrea Rutherford, an investment banker and influential analyst, says, "Ironically, Putin, despite his massive electoral win and apparent control of the Duma, is turning out to be a weak president. Because people believe that he has been unable to take control of the Kremlin, he has lost influence everywhere. The Duma, for example--which we expected to be absolutely compliant under the control of Unity--has already blocked or postponed key elements of Putin's tax-reform program. Perhaps even more worrying, there are indications that the bureaucracy has also lost confidence and is responding in its usual manner--by simply failing to execute instructions."

If Putin is the strong leader he claims to be, he'll seize on the submarine tragedy to shake up the country. After a bungled start, he could turn the tables by retiring the gerontocrats in the military and shrinking their ranks. Considering the chaotic state the country's economic system and military are in, reform is long overdue.

But to consolidate power, Putin would have to perform an end run around the bureaucracy, whose incompetence has once again been exposed by the submarine disaster. Trying to cut Russia off from open debate is futile in an era when information can't be controlled by the state and leaders have to be responsive to public perceptions. As his overtures to the relatives of the dead sailors suggest, Putin may have begun to grasp that lesson.

Jacob Heilbrunn Has Written for Foreign Affairs and Is a Columnist for Suddeutsche Zeitung, a Leading German Newspaper

---

Military Probing Whether Russian Vessel Hit Sub

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000; Page A28
By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/167l-082700-idx.html

MOSCOW, Aug. 26-A criminal probe into the sinking of the submarine Kursk is focusing on the possibility that a Russian vessel collided with it and caused it to plunge to the bottom of the Barents Sea, press reports said today.

The Main Military Prosecutor's Office is investigating possible violations of an article in Russia's criminal code that punishes "the breach of security of railway, air or water transport . . . resulting in the death of two or more people through negligence." According to the Interfax news agency, the probe is focusing on persons "who supposedly were in control of an unidentified maritime object that collided with the Russian submarine."

Speculation that the Kursk was damaged in a collision with a Russian ship or submarine emerged briefly after the nuclear-powered attack vessel sank on Aug. 12. Since then, Russian naval officials and commercial shippers have dismissed the possibility. Instead, naval officials insisted that the culprit was either a British or U.S. submarine monitoring naval exercises in which the Kursk was participating off far northwestern Russia. London and Washington have said their submarines were nowhere near the Kursk. Reports of the new criminal probe, attributed to foreign law enforcement agencies, made no mention of foreign vessels.

The Kommersant Daily newspaper said that the use of the Russian criminal code precludes a foreign culprit. One other possibility--that the probe may center on the Kursk crew itself--created a stir. It is "spit on those who died and their relatives," lawyer Anatoly Kucherana said.

Investigators are also looking into the possibility that the Kursk hit a World War II-era mine, or that two Muslim civilian technicians on board sabotaged the vessel in protest of the war in Chechnya. On Friday, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev affirmed his belief that the Kursk struck a foreign sub.

It is rare that investigations into man-made Russian disasters reach a conclusion. However, few catastrophes have echoed across the nation like the sinking of the Kursk, in which all 118 crewmen died.

---

Death by Putin

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • August 25, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-2000825185734.htm

While Russian President Vladimir Putin vacationed in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, sailors trapped in a 14,000 ton sea tomb tried desperately to force open an escape hatch. As the Kremlin continued spinning lies about the accident, these sailors watched their comrades struggle for breath in the oxygen depleted submarine and steadily pass away. The SOS signals detected by sonar grew increasingly faint, but Russian bureaucrats continued refusing outside help for the rescue effort. Finally there was no sound at all in the depths of the Barents Sea.

It is no wonder that Mr. Putin's paranoid, prideful and callous bungling of the Kursk rescue has angered the Russians. Suddenly, the popular Russian president has fallen out of favor, but in many respects he wasn't deserving of it in the first place.

The Russians appear to have gotten exactly what they voted for. In the ongoing war with Chechnya, Mr. Putin has demonstrated a chilling disregard for human suffering and loss of life. Russians were outraged when this insensitivity was directed at their brethren at the bottom of the sea, but they shouldn't be overly surprised. This lack of humanitarian feeling is easily transferable.

And the Russians also knew that Mr. Putin was rather partial to cracking down on the media's freedoms before he was voted president. Mr. Putin had ordered the capture of Radio Free Europe reporter Andrei Babitsky before the March presidential election, in a transparent attempt to silence the only Russian reporter critical of the onslaught on the Chechens. So the Kremlin's lies concerning what caused the accident, when it occurred, how many people were onboard and whether there was radio communication with Moscow shouldn't shock the Russians or the rest of the world.

This tendency to manipulate the truth, in combination with Mr. Putin's often stated distrust of the outside world and zeal to recapture Russian glory, all conspired to add to the disaster. Mr. Putin clearly felt it was preferable to sacrifice those lives than to acknowledge his country's inability to launch a serious rescue attempt. It now appears Mr. Putin badly miscalculated.

The Kursk incident has glaringly highlighted Russia's technological and military inadequacies. A Norwegian team successfully opened the sub's escape hatch in just 36 hours, a feat the Russians were unable to complete in more than a week.

The Norwegians' quick work has surely fanned the grief of the victim's relatives: If only the team had been brought in sooner. Those relatives are questioning why the Kremlin allowed their loved ones to die one of the grimmest deaths imaginable - and all at a time of peace. Bleak as it may seem, the Kursk disaster came to its logical conclusion, given Mr. Putin's shortcomings. Alas, the Russians have hardly seen the last of them.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

Satellite imagery of Israel's nuclear complex

August 27, 2000

In mid-August, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) posted on its web site high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor. According to the FAS, the imagery, which was taken by the privately owned Ikonos satellite, suggests that the country has a smaller arsenal of nuclear weapons than previously thought.

By counting cooling towers at Dimona and comparing recently declassified U.S. spy satellite photos form the 1960s and 1970s to the Ikonos photos, analysts at FAS conclude that the reactor could have produced about 20 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium a year. This would be enough plutonium for about 200 nuclear weapons. Previously, analysts had speculated that Israel had as many as 400 weapons.

The release of the images follows the recent publication in Israel of Avner Cohen's book Israel and the Bomb. Israel, which is the only nuclear weapons state that refuses to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal, had initially sought to block publication of the book.

"The Bomb that Never Is" by Avner Cohen, May/June 2000 Bulletin

"Beyond the Pale," a review of Israel and the Bomb by Mike Moore, January/February 1999 Bulletin

"And Then There Was One" by Avner Cohen, September/October 1998 Bulletin

For more on the Ikonos satellite, see:

"Private Eye, Public View" by Michael Flynn, March/April 2000 Bulletin

----
-------- new mexico

Los Alamos's Nuclear Family Splinters

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000 ; A1
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26268-2000Aug25.html

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – The Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and one of the country's preeminent centers for research on nuclear physics and supercomputing, is suffering from low morale, losing scientists to the private sector and having difficulty recruiting top-flight replacements.

In what surely must be the worst year in its storied history, the lab has been hammered by back-to-back FBI investigations into security lapses, intense congressional scrutiny, punitive budget cuts, an exodus of government computer experts to high-paying software companies, and an act of God – a wildfire that shut down the lab for 12 days and forced the evacuation of surrounding towns.

If the lab remains under siege and cannot lift the spirits of its staff, administrators here and in Washington say, the United States may squander an asset that is as vital to national security as any military unit, weapon or secret.

"When you read all the things being written about this laboratory," said former director Siegfried S. Hecker, "anybody who has a choice has to think twice about coming to Los Alamos. I'm not sure we can recover quickly enough. A lot of damage has been done."

To be sure, extraordinary research is still going on at Los Alamos. The lab is building a 300,000-square-foot facility for the world's most powerful computer, capable of performing 30 trillion operations per second. Los Alamos, which designed 85 percent of the nation's nuclear weapons and is responsible for certifying that the aging stockpile of warheads is still safe and reliable, will use the big machine to run three-dimensional simulations of nuclear explosions.

But 14 top computer scientists, nearly half of the permanent staff at the Advanced Computing Laboratory, have quit this year. Most were lured away by higher salaries and stock options at dot-com firms in nearby Santa Fe. Replacing them has not been easy. When Los Alamos recruiters made their annual visit last fall to Stanford University, no one showed up to hear their pitch.

"People don't want to take lie detector tests, they don't want to come to a place that has already been beaten down. And Los Alamos has been beaten down," said Patrick S. McCormick, who heads a team working on computer visualizations of nuclear blasts and who fears his entire team could leave by the end of the year.

"Why am I still here? Good question," he said, acknowledging that he too has begun interviewing for private-sector jobs.

This month, Los Alamos director John C. Browne issued an open letter to the lab's staff commiserating that "we are going through a difficult time now, perhaps as difficult as any the lab has ever faced." Browne offered a "letter of encouragement and support to the laboratory" from its new overseer, Air Force Gen. John A. Gordon, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, set up by Congress to tighten security after last year's political furor over alleged Chinese nuclear espionage.

But anger; at Browne, at the FBI, at Washington in general; is simmering among the rank and file and has boiled over onto the lab's electronic bulletin board, the equivalent of a call-in radio show for Los Alamos's tech-savvy staff of 7,000, including 1,800 holders of doctoral degrees.

"It should be clear by now that the lab is in a major crisis with morale at a very low point," William S. Varnum, a physicist in the top-secret X Division, said in an open message in July. "Many people are considering leaving. Individual staff members are being harassed and threatened by management, the Energy Department, University of California, the FBI and Congress. Management is making no visible effort to support the employees. In government and business activities throughout the world, when this happens, the people at the top offer their resignations as a means of helping to resolve these crises. I think it is time for laboratory upper management to consider doing the same."

Karen Pao, a computer specialist, responded electronically: "If all top managers at the lab were to resign today, would security improve? Would Congress suddenly love us? Would FBI stop harassing us? Would people stop leaving?"

Other indicators of turmoil at Los Alamos, according to figures provided by senior administrators:

The number of postdoctoral fellows, a bellwether of the lab's health, has dropped 10 percent this year.

The rate of "first choice" candidates rejecting job offers at Los Alamos has jumped from 20 percent in 1996 to 44 percent so far this year.

After a steady increase in the hiring of Asian American scientists over the past eight years, Asian Americans all but stopped applying for jobs at the lab following the firing and arrest last year of scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of mishandling classified information.

Almost all of the senior weapons scientists with nuclear testing experience, an elite group of about two dozen people, are eligible to retire. Many are expected to depart Jan. 1, as soon as new retirement incentives offered by the University of California, which manages Los Alamos for the Energy Department, take effect.

It is hard to overstate the contribution to America's nuclear weapons program of Los Alamos, an isolated town 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe that sits atop the Pajarito Plateau on a series of finger mesas divided by dramatic, thousand-foot canyons.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the University of California at Berkeley physicist who ran the Manhattan Project, vacationed as a boy in this rugged desert terrain and picked Los Alamos as the place to build the atomic bomb with supersecrecy in mind. There was only one road off the high mesa during World War II, when babies born in "the town that never was" received certificates listing their birthplace as "P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe."

Today, the vast stands of ponderosa pine that ring the town are blackened, scorched by a forest fire that swept down from the hills in May. The inferno destroyed 400 homes and forced the evacuation of both Los Alamos (population 11,000) and its bedroom community of White Rock (population 7,000).

The lab itself, which occupies 2,200 buildings and sprawls across 43 square miles, was largely untouched by the fire. But just as it reopened, management was informed of the disappearance of two computer hard drives loaded with data on how to disarm U.S. and foreign nuclear weapons. Sixty FBI agents arrived to open the second major security investigation at Los Alamos in a very short time.

The first began three years ago as a probe into China's alleged theft of the designs of American nuclear warheads. Today, senior U.S. officials are increasingly doubtful that the designs were stolen from Los Alamos, if they were stolen at all. But in the course of the investigation, the FBI discovered that Lee, a Taiwanese American weapons scientist who had worked at Los Alamos for nearly 20 years, had improperly copied or "downloaded" a vast amount of nuclear data from the lab's classified computers to his unsecure office desktop and to portable tapes, some of which are missing.

Lee has not been charged with espionage because there is no evidence that he passed the information to anyone. But he was fired in March of last year, arrested in December, and held in solitary confinement at a Santa Fe jail for the past eight months. Last week, a federal judge reversed himself and approved Lee's release on $1 million bail pending trial in November, a development that his supporters hope is an indication the government's case is unraveling.

Lee certainly has sympathizers at Los Alamos. Some of his former colleagues believe that he was singled out for investigation because of his ethnicity, and that the case became part of a congressional "witch hunt" for Chinese spies. But many Los Alamos scientists also consider his unauthorized downloading a significant violation of security rules, are puzzled by his motives, and wonder what happened to the missing tapes.

"This is a place peopled by patriots," said Stephen M. Younger, the lab's associate director for nuclear weapons. "To have the lab pilloried in the press and in Congress is a tremendous blow to these people, who do take security very seriously. I don't know anyone who takes security more seriously than the people who design the stockpile, because they know better than anyone else what these weapons can do."

They also know that the worst case of nuclear espionage in U.S. history; involving two Los Alamos scientists, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall; a lab machinist named David Greenglass; and two couriers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; occurred here when security was at its zenith.

Since the end of the Cold War, all of the big national labs; Lawrence Livermore in California and Sandia in New Mexico, as well as Los Alamos; have been encouraged to look for commercial applications of their research and to gradually reduce their dependence on government funding. They have opened up to visitors from private companies and foreign countries.

In the wake of the Lee case, Congress and the Energy Department clamped down, imposing regular polygraphs for many scientists, a moratorium on visitors from sensitive countries, and a one-third reduction in the lab's $75 million discretionary research budget and its $35.4 million travel account, cuts that Browne, the lab director, calls "punitive." The department also is threatening to sever its contract with the University of California, which has run Los Alamos and other national labs for half a century. In terms of staff morale, however, the case of the missing hard drives may be even worse than the Lee investigation. The FBI has grilled all 26 members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, a group of scientists who have volunteered to respond to an accident or terrorist threat involving nuclear weapons.

Both hard drives turned up behind a photocopier inside the lab's secure X Division on June 16, a little more than two weeks after they were reported missing. But a grand jury investigation has only just begun as the FBI proceeds on the assumption that one or more NEST team members misplaced the drives and then, afraid of being punished for the security lapse, engaged in a cover-up and put them behind the copier.

If that's what happened, some Los Alamos scientists say they know why. "I don't think we should be surprised with the way this hard drive issue has played out," said Anthony E. Burris, who manages Los Alamos's nuclear intelligence unit. "The only example we've got is up in solitary confinement in a jail in Santa Fe in shackles."

One of those targeted by the FBI has told colleagues that his legal bills are running $6,000 a week; lab scientists and employees have responded by opening a legal defense fund for him and others who have been called before a grand jury.

While many of Lee's former colleagues remain troubled by his behavior, there is virtual unanimity in X Division that the case of the missing hard drives is different: A minor security infraction turned into a criminal case, just to appease Congress.

"There's a scandal – how this was treated as a political football," said Merri M. Wood, an X Division veteran. "That's the scandal. There's no evidence a crime was committed. Quite frankly, it's a witch hunt."

Wood and numerous others at Los Alamos argue that Washington's security crackdown is hurting Los Alamos's ability to do first-rate science and may, in the end, make the nation less secure. She cites the lab's so-called two-hour rule, which allowed scientists working on classified projects in the X Division to leave their computers running for up to two hours when they were not in their offices.

After the hard drives went missing, the Energy Department immediately revoked the rule. Because it takes X Division scientists as long as 20 minutes to shut down computers running complex programs, and because they must leave their offices to confer with colleagues about top-secret issues they are not allowed to discuss over the telephone, Wood said, the suspension of the two-hour rule effectively halted their work.

"I wouldn't say there isn't anything dumber they could do, but this was right up there," she said.

Jon C. Weisheit, X Division's director, worries that Los Alamos may lose so many of its best scientists that it will be unable to ensure that America's nuclear weapons are reliable without underground nuclear testing, which Congress suspended eight years ago. "It's my worst nightmare, simply because it is possible," Weisheit said.

Houston T. Hawkins, director of Los Alamos's nonproliferation and international security division, asks rhetorically: Which two agencies must work seamlessly together in the event of a terrorist incident involving nuclear weapons?

His answer is the FBI and Los Alamos's NEST team, now bitterly aligned against each other.

"You create these very high walls and make people take polygraphs, but what's missing in this equation?" Hawkins said. "It ultimately comes down to a question of trust, regardless of the height of the walls, because the people who create this information take it home with them in their heads."

---

Dark Cloud Hangs Over Los Alamos Besieged Atomic Lab Is Losing Staff, Spirit

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000; Page A01
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/154l-082700-idx.html

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.-The Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and one of the country's preeminent centers for research on nuclear physics and supercomputing, is suffering from low morale, losing scientists to the private sector and having difficulty recruiting top-flight replacements.

In what surely must be the worst year in its storied history, the lab has been hammered by back-to-back FBI investigations into security lapses, intense congressional scrutiny, punitive budget cuts, an exodus of government computer experts to high-paying software companies, and an act of God--a wildfire that shut down the lab for 12 days and forced the evacuation of surrounding towns.

If the lab remains under siege and cannot lift the spirits of its staff, administrators here and in Washington say, the United States may squander an asset that is as vital to national security as any military unit, weapon or secret.

"When you read all the things being written about this laboratory," said former director Siegfried S. Hecker, "anybody who has a choice has to think twice about coming to Los Alamos. I'm not sure we can recover quickly enough. A lot of damage has been done."

To be sure, extraordinary research is still going on at Los Alamos. The lab is building a 300,000-square-foot facility for the world's most powerful computer, capable of performing 30 trillion operations per second. Los Alamos, which designed 85 percent of the nation's nuclear weapons and is responsible for certifying that the aging stockpile of warheads is still safe and reliable, will use the big machine to run three-dimensional simulations of nuclear explosions.

But 14 top computer scientists, nearly half of the permanent staff at the Advanced Computing Laboratory, have quit this year. Most were lured away by higher salaries and stock options at dot-com firms in nearby Santa Fe. Replacing them has not been easy. When Los Alamos recruiters made their annual visit last fall to Stanford University, no one showed up to hear their pitch.

"People don't want to take lie detector tests, they don't want to come to a place that has already been beaten down. And Los Alamos has been beaten down," said Patrick S. McCormick, who heads a team working on computer visualizations of nuclear blasts and who fears his entire team could leave by the end of the year.

"Why am I still here? Good question," he said, acknowledging that he too has begun interviewing for private-sector jobs.

This month, Los Alamos director John C. Browne issued an open letter to the lab's staff commiserating that "we are going through a difficult time now, perhaps as difficult as any the lab has ever faced." Browne offered a "letter of encouragement and support to the laboratory" from its new overseer, Air Force Gen. John A. Gordon, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, set up by Congress to tighten security after last year's political furor over alleged Chinese nuclear espionage.

But anger--at Browne, at the FBI, at Washington in general--is simmering among the rank and file and has boiled over onto the lab's electronic bulletin board, the equivalent of a call-in radio show for Los Alamos's tech-savvy staff of 7,000, including 1,800 holders of doctoral degrees.

"It should be clear by now that the lab is in a major crisis with morale at a very low point," William S. Varnum, a physicist in the top-secret X Division, said in an open message in July. "Many people are considering leaving. Individual staff members are being harassed and threatened by management, the Energy Department, University of California, the FBI and Congress. Management is making no visible effort to support the employees. In government and business activities throughout the world, when this happens, the people at the top offer their resignations as a means of helping to resolve these crises. I think it is time for laboratory upper management to consider doing the same."

Karen Pao, a computer specialist, responded electronically: "If all top managers at the lab were to resign today, would security improve? Would Congress suddenly love us? Would FBI stop harassing us? Would people stop leaving?"

Other indicators of turmoil at Los Alamos, according to figures provided by senior administrators:

* The number of postdoctoral fellows, a bellwether of the lab's health, has dropped 10 percent this year.

* The rate of "first choice" candidates rejecting job offers at Los Alamos has jumped from 20 percent in 1996 to 44 percent so far this year.

* After a steady increase in the hiring of Asian American scientists over the past eight years, Asian Americans all but stopped applying for jobs at the lab following the firing and arrest last year of scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of mishandling classified information.

* Almost all of the senior weapons scientists with nuclear testing experience, an elite group of about two dozen people, are eligible to retire. Many are expected to depart Jan. 1, as soon as new retirement incentives offered by the University of California, which manages Los Alamos for the Energy Department, take effect.

It is hard to overstate the contribution to America's nuclear weapons program of Los Alamos, an isolated town 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe that sits atop the Pajarito Plateau on a series of finger mesas divided by dramatic, thousand-foot canyons.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the University of California at Berkeley physicist who ran the Manhattan Project, vacationed as a boy in this rugged desert terrain and picked Los Alamos as the place to build the atomic bomb with supersecrecy in mind. There was only one road off the high mesa during World War II, when babies born in "the town that never was" received certificates listing their birthplace as "P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe."

Today, the vast stands of ponderosa pine that ring the town are blackened, scorched by a forest fire that swept down from the hills in May. The inferno destroyed 400 homes and forced the evacuation of both Los Alamos (population 11,000) and its bedroom community of White Rock (population 7,000).

The lab itself, which occupies 2,200 buildings and sprawls across 43 square miles, was largely untouched by the fire. But just as it reopened, management was informed of the disappearance of two computer hard drives loaded with data on how to disarm U.S. and foreign nuclear weapons. Sixty FBI agents arrived to open the second major security investigation at Los Alamos in a very short time.

The first began three years ago as a probe into China's alleged theft of the designs of American nuclear warheads. Today, senior U.S. officials are increasingly doubtful that the designs were stolen from Los Alamos, if they were stolen at all. But in the course of the investigation, the FBI discovered that Lee, a Taiwanese American weapons scientist who had worked at Los Alamos for nearly 20 years, had improperly copied or "downloaded" a vast amount of nuclear data from the lab's classified computers to his unsecure office desktop and to portable tapes, some of which are missing.

Lee has not been charged with espionage because there is no evidence that he passed the information to anyone. But he was fired in March of last year, arrested in December, and held in solitary confinement at a Santa Fe jail for the past eight months. Last week, a federal judge reversed himself and approved Lee's release on $1 million bail pending trial in November, a development that his supporters hope is an indication the government's case is unraveling.

Lee certainly has sympathizers at Los Alamos. Some of his former colleagues believe that he was singled out for investigation because of his ethnicity, and that the case became part of a congressional "witch hunt" for Chinese spies. But many Los Alamos scientists also consider his unauthorized downloading a significant violation of security rules, are puzzled by his motives, and wonder what happened to the missing tapes.

"This is a place peopled by patriots," said Stephen M. Younger, the lab's associate director for nuclear weapons. "To have the lab pilloried in the press and in Congress is a tremendous blow to these people, who do take security very seriously. I don't know anyone who takes security more seriously than the people who design the stockpile, because they know better than anyone else what these weapons can do."

They also know that the worst case of nuclear espionage in U.S. history--involving two Los Alamos scientists, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall; a lab machinist named David Greenglass; and two couriers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg--occurred here when security was at its zenith.

Since the end of the Cold War, all of the big national labs--Lawrence Livermore in California and Sandia in New Mexico, as well as Los Alamos--have been encouraged to look for commercial applications of their research and to gradually reduce their dependence on government funding. They have opened up to visitors from private companies and foreign countries.

In the wake of the Lee case, Congress and the Energy Department clamped down, imposing regular polygraphs for many scientists, a moratorium on visitors from sensitive countries, and a one-third reduction in the lab's $75 million discretionary research budget and its $35.4 million travel account, cuts that Browne, the lab director, calls "punitive." The department also is threatening to sever its contract with the University of California, which has run Los Alamos and other national labs for half a century.

In terms of staff morale, however, the case of the missing hard drives may be even worse than the Lee investigation. The FBI has grilled all 26 members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, a group of scientists who have volunteered to respond to an accident or terrorist threat involving nuclear weapons.

Both hard drives turned up behind a photocopier inside the lab's secure X Division on June 16, a little more than two weeks after they were reported missing. But a grand jury investigation has only just begun as the FBI proceeds on the assumption that one or more NEST team members misplaced the drives and then, afraid of being punished for the security lapse, engaged in a cover-up and put them behind the copier.

If that's what happened, some Los Alamos scientists say they know why. "I don't think we should be surprised with the way this hard drive issue has played out," said Anthony E. Burris, who manages Los Alamos's nuclear intelligence unit. "The only example we've got is up in solitary confinement in a jail in Santa Fe in shackles."

One of those targeted by the FBI has told colleagues that his legal bills are running $6,000 a week; lab scientists and employees have responded by opening a legal defense fund for him and others who have been called before a grand jury.

While many of Lee's former colleagues remain troubled by his behavior, there is virtual unanimity in X Division that the case of the missing hard drives is different: A minor security infraction turned into a criminal case, just to appease Congress.

"There's a scandal--how this was treated as a political football," said Merri M. Wood, an X Division veteran. "That's the scandal. There's no evidence a crime was committed. Quite frankly, it's a witch hunt."

Wood and numerous others at Los Alamos argue that Washington's security crackdown is hurting Los Alamos's ability to do first-rate science and may, in the end, make the nation less secure. She cites the lab's so-called two-hour rule, which allowed scientists working on classified projects in the X Division to leave their computers running for up to two hours when they were not in their offices.

After the hard drives went missing, the Energy Department immediately revoked the rule. Because it takes X Division scientists as long as 20 minutes to shut down computers running complex programs, and because they must leave their offices to confer with colleagues about top-secret issues they are not allowed to discuss over the telephone, Wood said, the suspension of the two-hour rule effectively halted their work.

"I wouldn't say there isn't anything dumber they could do, but this was right up there," she said.

Jon C. Weisheit, X Division's director, worries that Los Alamos may lose so many of its best scientists that it will be unable to ensure that America's nuclear weapons are reliable without underground nuclear testing, which Congress suspended eight years ago. "It's my worst nightmare, simply because it is possible," Weisheit said.

Houston T. Hawkins, director of Los Alamos's nonproliferation and international security division, asks rhetorically: Which two agencies must work seamlessly together in the event of a terrorist incident involving nuclear weapons?

His answer is the FBI and Los Alamos's NEST team, now bitterly aligned against each other.

"You create these very high walls and make people take polygraphs, but what's missing in this equation?" Hawkins said. "It ultimately comes down to a question of trust, regardless of the height of the walls, because the people who create this information take it home with them in their heads."

---

Accused Weapons Scientist Is Freed on Bail

New York Times
August 27, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/082700this-week-review.html

In December, a federal judge was told that Wen Ho Lee posed such a threat to national security that if he leaked the nuclear weapons secrets he had allegedly taken from the Los Alamos National Laboratory it could tilt the global balance of power. Dr. Lee was held in solitary confinement without bail pending trial.

But now the balance of power has shifted in the courtroom. The judge reversed his decision after hearing new evidence, ruling that Dr. Lee could be freed to a form of home detention. The order was a sign that, after admissions by prosecutors that misleading testimony had been presented earlier, the government's case was suffering serious weaknesses.

James Sterngold

-------- washington

Declassified photos depict Hanford life
Pictures taken from 1943 to 1967 document work and play at the atomic works in Eastern Washington

The Oregonian
Sunday, August 27, 2000
By Linda Ashton of The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/news/oregonian/00/08/nw_11hanf27.frame

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Everything used to be secret at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Thousands of people worked side-by-side at the Manhattan Project site, never talking about what they were doing and, often, not knowing themselves.

Loose lips, after all, sank ships.

In 1943, scientists in the United States and Nazi Germany were racing to build an atomic bomb.

In the isolated desert of Eastern Washington, miles from the population centers of Seattle and Portland, the federal government and its contractors built the first large-scale reactor to make plutonium.

Most of the 50,000 workers on the site were not told what they were making until after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

But government photographers were taking pictures of the work, and now some of those pictures have been released to the public.

"They wanted a living story of Hanford," says Dave Briggs, manager of the national security analysis team for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "At the end of the war effort, it was supposed to be torn down and gone -- then the Cold War came along."

Some 90,000 negatives -- glimpses into an archive of the remarkable and the mundane -- detailed the once-classified life at Hanford from 1943 to 1967. It's a relatively small sampling of the 2 million photographs taken at Hanford since day one.

Some photos are available now for public viewing on the Hanford Web site. A photo disk of the images should be available by Oct. 1.

"They were classified because of the time period they were taken. Almost everything was classified just by definition," Briggs says.

Organizing the collection

Briggs and Rick Stutheit, a classification officer for the U.S. Department of Energy, are among the dozen modern-day film detectives reviewing boxes and boxes of negatives, stored in aging manila envelopes, and compiling the photographic library.

The project is part of the Energy Department's openness policy, and it also reduces costs of storing the material. Classified storage is very expensive.

"We, the people, paid for this effort. We, the people, ought to see what we got for the money," Briggs says.

The Hanford atomic works sprang out of the sagebrush in just a few months. The prospect of feeding, housing and entertaining 50,000 people in a place where there had been little more than a string of small farm towns and orchards was daunting.

The photographs reflect it all, from construction of the Plutonium Uranium Extraction plant for removing plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel to shots of people fishing, cooking and dancing.

There are pictures of band leader Kay Kyser, children learning to swim, Election Night 1944.

Some 50,000 negatives have been reviewed so far, and only about a dozen have remained classified -- those dealing with weapons information and unit costs, Stutheit says. Some photographs that might be culturally sensitive for Native Americans also are being held for tribal review.

Witness to history

Lee Edgar, 86, was among those bearing photographic witness to history at Hanford from 1947 to 1967. He shot traffic accidents, crime scenes, U.S. presidents and new buildings. He was sent to peer into tubes and crawl around in tanks used for making plutonium and storing the deadly wastes from the process.

Once, he recalls, he was lowered about 16 feet into a tank, with his arms raised above his head, to take pictures for signs of rust.

"When I went to come out, I couldn't come out," he says.

His lean frame had swelled -- not unlike a diver in need of decompression -- down in the tank, and he had to be yanked out with a harness and a crane.

"The camera went out first, of course," he says.

For Angela Townsend, a Pasco native and a national lab employee, scanning the photos has been an education.

"I was born in 1970. I didn't know what all of this was," she says. "Actually, this is better than our history classes we had in school."

-------- MILITARY (by country)

-------- britain

11 British Soldiers in Sierra Leone Are Seized in Area Held by Renegades

New York Times
August 26, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/leone-soldiers-ap.html

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, Aug. 26 -- Eleven British soldiers sent here as part of a force seeking to bring some order to war-ravaged Sierra Leone have been seized by one of the country's many rival factions, the British Ministry of Defense said today.

Britain sent 1,000 soldiers here after some 500 United Nations peacekeepers were taken hostage in May, when a peace accord for this West African nation collapsed and its civil war re-erupted. While the troops came ostensibly to evacuate foreigners and secure the airport, their presence has done much to quell the strife here.

When the British forces withdrew in mid-June they left behind soldiers to train Sierra Leone Army recruits. Britain has also donated arms and equipment and sent military advisers.

The commander of the British forces, Brig. Gordon Hughes, said contact was lost with the 11 soldiers on Friday around the towns of Masiaka and Forudugu, about 45 miles east of the capital, Freetown.

A radio message received from the group today indicated that they were being held against their will, a Ministry of Defense spokesman said later in London. "We believe they are all well," the spokesman said.

The British troops were stationed at Benguema, about 25 miles east of Freetown, where British instructors are training Sierra Leone Army recruits.

They were accompanied by a government soldier, who was acting as their guide and who is also believed to have been captured.

The troops disappeared in an area occupied by a small and ruthless renegade faction of fighters known as the West Side Boys, said a spokesman for the British force, Capt. John Price.

Until June, the West Side Boys were part of a fragile pro-government alliance fighting rebels of the Revolutionary United Front. But the faction fell out with the authorities after reportedly attacking other pro-government fighters and carrying out a spree of carjackings, robberies and rapes.

Since Sierra Leone's civil war began in 1991, the rebels have systematically killed and maimed tens of thousands of people in an attempt to gain control of the government and the country's lucrative diamond-mining regions.

They have abandoned three peace treaties, the latest signed July last year.

The United Nations hostages were eventually released and a successful and unusually bold rescue operation was mounted to free some 233 other United Nations troops surrounded in rebel territory.

Since then, a ragtag alliance of pro-government forces, backed by Britain, has slowly pushed the rebels away from the capital.

---

Airmen trapped in glacier for 60 years

USA Today
08/27/00- Updated 07:22 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#hostages

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Britain's Royal Air Force paid tribute Sunday to four World War II airmen whose bodies were trapped inside an Icelandic glacier for nearly 60 years. The remains were retrieved last week during a three-day expedition to the wreckage of their plane, which crashed in May 1941. Among the most poignant offerings was a bouquet of six red roses sent from New Zealand by the pilot's childhood sweetheart, 83-year-old Nan Poole. The airmen's plane crashed in thick fog shortly after takeoff. The site was located two days later, but the spot was quickly lost in a blanket of snow and ice.

-------- china

China Puts 700,000 Troops on Alert in Sudan

NewsMax.com
Sunday, Aug. 27, 2000
NewsMax.com
http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/8/26/204458

In a stunning revelation, London's Sunday Telegraph is reporting in today's editions that China has as many as 700,000 troops in the Sudan and is preparing to enter that country's civil war.

According to the British paper, for the past three years China has been bringing Chinese nationals into the Sudan by cargo jets and boats.

Ostensibly, the Chinese were to serve as guards at oil fields and facilities controlled by the China National Petroleum Corporation.

The introduction of Chinese troops comes in the wake of the military success of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) headed by Col. Johnny Garang.

Garang's forces, largely Christian, have been battling Sudan's Islamic regime which controls the country's oil region in the Upper Nile.

SPLA troops are reported to be just 10 miles from these oil fields.

The Islamic regime has made an emergency request that China crush the SPLA forces and end the country 17-year-old civil war.

Oil production began in Sudan just last year, and since then arms have been flowing in from Libya, Qatar and China.

The Telegraph cites an internal document from the Sudanese military indicating that "as many as 700,000 Chinese security personnel were available for action."

Baroness Caroline Cox, the leading human rights activist for Christians in Sudan, criticized Western governments for their complacency and complicity.

She said: "If with foreign help the NIF regime crushes all opposition we will have entrenched in the heart of Africa a militant Islamist regime aimed at spreading terrorism throughout the continent. It's unbelievably serious for the future of democracy in Africa and could happen in the next few weeks."

British companies, and Canada's Talisman Energy, have joined the Chinese to help develop its oil production facilities and pipelines.

Human rights activists have criticized Western governments for backing the militant Islamic regime in Khartoum, one that has killed civilians to clear areas for oil production.

Christian groups have also publicized the regime's use of slavery.

China's involvement in the ongoing civil war may prove to be the most unusual twist, and may represent the largest movement of one army into another country that went completely undetected by other nations.

A Western aid worker in southern Sudan told the Telegraph, "Everyone knows what is going on. We've all seen the Chinese being brought in and can only pray about what's going to happen next."

The use of Chinese "workers" as a military force may raise serious concerns about the growing number of Chinese illegals detected in Central America and the Caribbean.

Chinese influence in Panama which controls the Panama Canal has already raised serious warning froms military experts, including Adm. Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

---

China Seizes Books with Dalai Lama

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
Photo By Steve James
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/china_book_dc_1.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - China seized thousands of books containing a photo of the Dalai Lama clutching President Clinton's hand, a U.S. publisher said on Monday, as the State Department dubbed Beijing's action ``disturbing.''

The publisher said the Chinese have also impounded copies of two other new books from Callaway Editions -- one an illustrated tome on Tibetan Buddhist art and another by a fashion photographer, which contained some mild nudity.

``Three books censored for three different reasons -- politics, religion and sex!'' the publisher's founder, Nicholas Callaway, told Reuters.

There was no immediate comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, but a spokesman told the New York Times Beijing maintained the right to ban production of printed material deemed politically sensitive. Beijing considers the exiled Dalai Lama a symbol of opposition to its control of Tibet.

Asked about the Chinese action, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said: ``If the report is true, then it is most disturbing. Seizure of books in order to impose religious or political control violates international human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed.''

He indicated Washington had not intervened directly with Chinese authorities over the issue. However, the company that sent the work to China for the American publisher said it had appealed to China's Commerce Ministry to release the books.

The action by customs officers at a southern Chinese bindery, where the books were being prepared for shipment, effectively blocked publication of ``The Clinton Years,'' a $40 book of pictures by former White House photographer Robert McNeely.

McNeely said in a telephone interview he hoped sufficient pressure would be brought to bear on the Chinese government that the problem would be kicked up to a higher level, senior Chinese officials will ``see how ridiculous this is'' and release the book.

``I find it just inconceivable that they'll stand by this decision,'' he said. ``But at this point they're still standing by it. The idea that this affects a book about the president of the United States will hopefully lift us past these petty bureaucrats.''

Also unlikely to appear in time for Callaway's fall catalog are ``Celestial Gallery,'' a two-foot tall book of Buddhist art which will retail for $125 per copy and ``Max,'' a $75 collection of work by fashion photographer Max Vadukul, which Callaway said included some ``very tame nude pictures.

``The irony is that while we are being censored, we are also planning a book by an American photographer which will celebrate the culture and landscape of China.''

``Further irony is that that book is being printed in Providence, Rhode Island,'' said Callaway.

He said 8,000 copies of the McNeely book, which contains photographs taken during McNeely's tenure from 1992-98 as official White House photographer, had been bound and shipped to the United States at the beginning of August.

But about three weeks ago, Chinese customs officials seized 16,000 copies that had been printed in Hong Kong and sent to nearby Shenzhen for binding.

The McNeely book contains a black-and-white photo of Clinton -- in Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites)'s office, not the Oval Office -- clasping hands with the Dalai Lama.

Callaway said he was in touch with Palace Press International, which acts as a broker between U.S. publishers and printers in Asia. Printers in Hong Kong and southern China have a reputation for high-quality work at low cost.

``We have had no news, but are monitoring the situation and hope to bring it to the attention of political, cultural and religious figures,'' said Callaway.

In San Francisco, Palace Press Director Gordon Goff said the company had never had any such problems in the past and even printed a complete book in China about the Dalai Lama, along with other books containing some artful nudes.

``We are flabbergasted, but in the long-term we believe the Chinese will come around. We like the Chinese and think this is ridiculous.''

Goff said his company had contacted the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing but had received no reply. He said he believed the seizure was part of a temporary crackdown by customs officials at the border between Hong Kong and China.

In the meantime, ``there are lots of alternatives,'' but printing books in Singapore or Thailand and air-shipping deliveries on short notice costs more, said Goff.

Efforts by Clinton to improve ties with Beijing have been hampered by U.S. concerns over human and civil rights. Washington this year moved toward a more open trading pact with China and military ties resumed after being frozen after last year's NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

But many Americans, including vocal members of Congress, resent China's restrictions on religion, its crackdown on political dissidents and continued tight grip on Tibet.

---

Chinese POWs kept in asylum for 35 years

USA Today
08/27/00- Updated 07:22 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#hostages

HONG KONG - Two Chinese prisoners of war have been found in an Indian mental asylum where they spent the past 35 years, a newspaper reported Sunday. Shih Liang and Yang Chen have been held at the Central Institute of Psychiatry in the east Indian state of Bihar since 1965 after being arrested on charges of espionage. India's Home Affairs Ministry said that it has no knowledge of the two prisoners, while the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said it will investigate the matter before responding. Yang, who is in his early 60s, used a walking stick to get around and did not respond to questions. Shih seemed to be in good health, and brightened up when offered a cigarette.

-------- colombia

Top Colombian Rebel Dies in 'Accident'

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/colombia_guerrillas_dc_1.html

BOGOTA (Reuters) - A senior Marxist rebel commander, believed responsible for a recent wave of attacks across central Colombia, has been killed in an accident, fellow insurgents said on Monday.

A communique issued by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) said commander Adan Izquierdo, head of one of the guerrilla force's seven main fighting divisions, died in an ''unfortunate accident'' but gave no further details.

The RCN television network, citing anonymous military intelligence sources, said Izquierdo had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his rifle.

Izquierdo was commander of the FARC's so-called Central Joint Command based in central Tolima province. The division had carried out a series of attacks on isolated police posts in central Colombia since June.

The FARC is Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel army with an estimated 17,000 combatants and control of up to 40 percent of the country.

-------- drug war

Reputed Head of Drug Ring Taken to U.S. After Arrest

New York Times
August 27, 2000
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/082700colombia-us-drugs.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 -- Wrapping up a huge international anti-drug operation, the United States has brought the reputed leader of an international cocaine smuggling ring to Florida to face federal charges, the United States Customs Service announced today.

Along with additional arrests by South American and European authorities, the apprehension of Iván de la Vega effectively brought to a close one of the broadest international anti-drug operations ever mounted, one that involved authorities from 12 nations, officials said today in Washington.

A freighter, one of several said to have been used in the global trafficking scheme, is also being confiscated, the officials said.

"This case demonstrates what can be achieved when nations of the world work together against a common enemy," Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in the statement.

The smuggling operation was based in Colombia and Venezuela, and Venezuelan officials arrested Mr. de la Vega, a Colombian citizen accused of leading the drug organization, on Aug. 16, as part of a series of raids that used about 200 anti-drug officers with an array of helicopters, airplanes and boats, the authorities said. A United States Navy ship stopped the Maltese-flagged ship, the Suerte I, off the coast of Grenada on Aug. 17 after Venezuelan authorities had intercepted smaller boatloads of cocaine headed to the Suerte I with cocaine on board. No cocaine was found in a search of the larger vessel.

Also arrested and sent to Florida for prosecution was Luis Antonio Navia, a Cuban national with United States residence status who was a fugitive wanted on prior federal drug charges.

Meanwhile, in Europe, authorities in Greece made eight arrests in connection with shipping firms that they said were linked to the operation. There were also two related arrests in Italy and another in France.

The American officials said that arrests and seizures effectively wrapped up a two-year, multinational crackdown that resulted in the seizure of nearly 25 tons of cocaine. That much cocaine would have a street value in Europe of roughly $1 billion if sold in individual doses, they said. The drug ring is thought to have transported as much as 68 tons of cocaine to Europe and the United States during the past three years.

---

Home-Grown Drug Business Booms in Vancouver

New York Times
August 27, 2000
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/082700canada-drugs.html

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- As Canada's health department looks this fall for a reliable supplier of almost one million marijuana cigarettes for clinical trials, some Canadians say they need to look no farther than "British Colombia," where relaxed attitudes about smoking marijuana have helped turn the province into a major North American producer for some of the drug's strongest strains.

While Mexicans can grow bales of the stuff on plantations, cold weather Canadians have genetically tweaked their indoor plants to reach potencies of 10 times the levels of the Woodstock-era grass, putting it on a par with prized Jamaican weed.

Now marijuana is estimated to be a $1 billion-a-year export here, right behind lumber and tourism as the leading business in British Columbia. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimate that there are about 9,000 "grow operations" in the Vancouver area. Across the bay from here, in the city of Nanaimo, the Mounties estimate that there are 1,000 residential grow operations, about one every two blocks.

"In my neighborhood, it's one house in 10," said Chris, a 40-year-old grower. "I walk around late at night, after work, and I can smell it, from the fans."

Increasingly, marijuana turns up in the oddest places. In May, a newspaper here reported that a man had been caught growing plants in a garage of a house he rented from the attorney general of the province.

On Aug. 12, two Canadian men wearing military uniforms were arrested in Blaine, Wash., after crossing the border in two Canadian military trucks. (The United States Customs Service says one truck was loaded with five duffel bags, containing a total of 240 pounds of marijuana.)

The concentration of marijuana growing stems from many factors. Judges, mirroring local public opinion, tend to give lenient punishments. An arrest for growing 500 plants, the average size of a bust here, often yields an $800 fine -- compared with a short prison sentence in California or a life sentence in Texas.

"I paid my partner's fine, $500, with money from the business -- it's a business," said Buck, an engaging 30-year-old in a polo shirt. He said he talked his way out of any charges when a policeman his age discovered his grow operation this year.

A study by the local newspaper, The Vancouver Sun, found that of 112 people convicted here of growing marijuana in the late 1990's, one quarter served no jail time and paid no fines, and that 58 percent paid fines of less than $1,800. Fewer than one in seven served any jail time.

With prices for "B.C. Bud" double on the American side of the border, marijuana is indeed lucrative in a province with some of North America's highest tax rates, stagnant economic growth, and high unemployment among young people.

Vancouver also offers the technical support a serious grower needs. With cultivators here approaching their indoor marijuana farming with the solemnity of Japanese bonsai gardeners, the number of stores specializing in hydroponic gardening equipment mushroomed in Vancouver during the 1990's, from 3 to 30. Growing plants without soil, in a mix of rock pellets and nutrient-rich water, requires an array of electric gadgets -- from 1,000-watt lamps to cooling systems to special systems that neutralize telltale odors before ventilation.

At one store, Jon's Plant Factory, the offerings do not seem geared to growing hydroponic tomatoes. In the electronic section, there is a $1,400 sophisticated pager, sort of an electronic plant sitter that can alert the long-distance gardener of system failures -- water pumps, air fans, fertilizer drips -- or even if an intruder has opened a window or a door.

Referring to complex growing systems, Chris, an experienced electrician and plumber, said during a store tour, "Some people will sell their feeding schedules for $6,000."

Cheaper technical support comes from Marc Emery, Canada's leading cannabis capitalist. Mr. Emery offers 350 varieties of marijuana seeds through his Web site and publishes Cannabis Culture, a magazine of gardening tips. This year, he started two Internet media productions, Pot Radio and Pot-TV Internetwork, a 24-hour online broadcast of marijuana news.

For marijuana broadcasters like Mr. Emery, the news from Canada this summer has been encouraging.

In separate rulings in late July, Ontario Court of Appeal judges ruled against employee drug testing and invalidated Canada's law against marijuana possession. In the latter case, Judge Marc Rosenberg suspended his ruling for a year to give Parliament time to rewrite the law. His ruling, however, immediately granted Terry Parker, a 44-year-old Toronto man, the right to smoke marijuana to control his epilepsy.

With Parliament scheduled to return in September, Canada's two national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, have editorialized in favor of decriminalizing marijuana for medical uses. Anne McLellan, Canada's justice minister and a member of Parliament for the governing Liberal Party, has said such decriminalization "is a legitimate question."

On that subject, Canadians, as usual, are cautiously looking at the United States.

"Outright legalization would cause serious trouble with the United States," The Globe and Mail editorialized after the Ontario decision. Calling for decriminalization, a path favored by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the newspaper concluded, "Therefore, Canada should follow its historical nature and take a middle path."

In a survey here in May for The Vancouver Sun, 56 percent of the people agreed that provincial courts should "ignore the Americans and hand out sentences we think are appropriate." A virtually identical percentage said that possession of marijuana should not be a criminal offense. With 61 seriously ill people authorized by Health Canada to smoke marijuana for medicinal purposes, the government plans to start clinical trials of marijuana next year.

When smugglers are cornered at the border, the smart ones sprint north. Even so, the border is lightly patrolled and few people are caught, compared with the intensely watched United States border with Mexico. In the federal fiscal year ending last September, United States Customs Service agents seized 50 times as much marijuana coming in from Mexico, 988,310 pounds, as they seized coming in from Canada, 19,753 pounds.

Some Americans hope that if Canada decriminalizes marijuana possession it would show the United States a different path, similar to Canada's strict gun control laws and its system of universal, government-administered health care.

This year, the Vancouver police have raided growing operations at twice the rate of last year. But they are careful to publicize their raids as efforts to break up vicious Asian gangs, to protect children from fires in houses with faulty wiring, or to break up smuggling rings where hockey bags stuffed with marijuana are traded for guns and hard drugs from the United States.

"We have houses burning down, we have explosions, we have organized crime in our neighborhoods," Sgt. Chuck Doucette, the Mountie spokesman here, said in an interview. Noting that anonymous tips about grow houses have flooded his office this year, he added, "We cannot keep up with the calls."

Still decriminalization for casual use seems to be a reality here in Vancouver.

Last May, hundreds of people gathered for a marijuana "smoke-in" on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, five blocks from the premier's office. The police ignored the event. In contrast, on the same day the police arrested 312 people for lighting up at a legalization rally in lower Manhattan.

-------- iran

Assassin in chief

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
Arnold Beichman
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-column-2000825181233.htm

New York City will have a rather interesting visitor next week. He is Mohsen Rezaii, former commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who on Oct. 21, 1991, said: "The day will come when, like Salman Rushdie, the Jews will not find a place to live anywhere in the world."

Mr. Rezaii is part of an Iranian delegation, headed by Sayad Mohammed Khatami, the country's puppet president, to a conference of the Interparliamentary Union to be held at the United Nations Aug. 30 through Sept. 1. The Clinton-Albright State Department has been selling Mr. Khatami as a "moderate" since his election on May 23, 1997. The real power in Iran is, of course, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In 1981 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, revolutionary founder of the Iranian theocracy, appointed Mr. Rezaii to his command post after he had organized the Guards Corps intelligence section. He was the Corps commander in chief for 16 years and is credited with a number of terrorist coups, including the following:

• The 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 243 Marines. Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger blamed the terrorist attack on "Iranians with sponsorship and knowledge and authority of the Syrian government." In a boastful and no doubt proud moment, Mr. Rezaii told an Iranian newspaper, Ressalat, (July 20, 1987): "Both the TNT and the ideology which in one blast sent to hell 400(sic) officers, NCOs, and soldiers at the Marine headquarters have been provided by Iran."

• The hostage taking in Lebanon is believed to have been entirely the work of Mr. Rezaii's Corps. A Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Qabas, wrote January 30, 1988: "Diplomatic sources in Beirut say that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander in Chief Mohsen Rezaii constantly travels to Beirut. He has become the ultimate authority in anything related to the Western hostages. These sources add that all 17 hostages in Lebanon are under the complete control of Rezaii and Hezbollah."

• During the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rezaii's Guards dispatched children to the war fronts to act as human minesweepers. The children were forced to run on suspected mine fields. How many children were killed or maimed is not known but Iranian dissidents in this country say the tactics resulted in the death of thousands of children and students.

• As commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mr. Rezaii called for the organization of an international Islamic army so as to prevent "the interference by superpowers in disputes among Muslim countries." To that end he formed the Qods (Jerusalem) Forces in 1989, whose main task was the planning and execution of terrorist attacks in Arab and Islamic countries.

• The National Council of Resistance, based on the Iran-Iraq border, charges that Mr. Rezaii is responsible for the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners.

With this kind of record, the question to be raised with the White House and the State Department is whether Mr. Rezaii should be allowed into this country even with a diplomatic passport and visa. This isn't quite your ordinary terrorist, as can be judged from Mr. Rezaii's declaration Oct. 21, 1991, in an Iranian newspaper, Kayhan:

"The Muslims' fury and hatred will burn the heart of Washington someday and America will be responsible for its repercussions." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might call Mr. Rezaii's words overheated rhetoric but this man shoots to kill.

The parliamentary conference is going to be followed by the U.N. Millennium Assembly which opens Sept. 5. Mr. Clinton, like many other heads of state, is expected to attend the session. Should the president of the United States be in the same United Nations chamber with Mr. Rezaii, Iran's assassin in chief, who boasts that he is responsible for the death of 243 U.S. Marines?

Perhaps even the ever-optimistic Mr. Clinton might want to alter his sunny view of Iran. To send someone like Mr. Rezaii with his bloody terrorist record to New York, United Nations or no United Nations, is spitting right in the eye of the Great Satan.

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a Washington Times columnist.

-------- ireland

In Northern Ireland, it is Protestant vs. Protestant

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
By Patrick Rucker
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-200082522434.htm

BELFAST - Guns are blazing again in the Shankill Road, but the fighting is no longer between Protestants and Catholics.

Two Protestant militias are feuding over pride, territory and a burgeoning drug trade, with much of the violence inspired by a convicted terrorist who was released from prison under the Good Friday peace accord.

In the third murder this week, two masked men identified with the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) broke into the home of 21-year-old Samuel Rocket on Wednesday night and gunned him down in front of his girlfriend and child.

Police thwarted what may have been a reprisal attack yesterday when they arrested six armed men near Shankill Road - a main street through the Protestant part of Belfast that this week is being patrolled by British troops for the first time in two years.

Major political and religious leaders are calling for mediation to end the fighting, described by Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson as "squalid, murderous, gang warfare."

But militia leaders on both sides are skeptical. John White, whose Ulster Democratic Party has links to the UFF, said the latest killings are "something we are going to see more of."

Billy Hutchinson, a politician close to the rival Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), was quoted yesterday saying, "There are those on both sides hellbent on continuing it until they feel they have drawn enough blood."

Much of the blame is being placed on UFF leader Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, a terror kingpin said by police sources to have seized control of the drug trade around Shankill Road after being released from prison in September under the Good Friday accord designed to end 25 years of sectarian warfare.

Tensions between the UFF and the UVF already had led to five deaths this year before the UVF murdered two men on Monday. The coffin of one of those men, Bobby Mahood, was carried through the Shankill area yesterday, followed by hundreds of Protestants.

The killings outside a betting shop followed weekend clashes in which 10 persons were hurt and a number of houses torched.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mandelson accused Adair of being involved in the "commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism" and had him arrested.

British troops, called into the area for the first time since the Good Friday pact brokered by U.S. mediator George Mitchell, have helped limit the unrest but were unable to prevent the latest killing Wednesday evening.

During their decades-long struggle against the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Protestant militias learned to control their own communities through a combination of extortion, assassination and racketeering. In the early 1990s, Adair led the UFF's most brutal murder gang, which was responsible for more than 70 killings. Adair distinguished himself with ruthlessness and daring, openly scouting Catholic neighborhoods for possible targets.

"He went into the lion's mouth to extract the teeth," said a source in the Royal Ulster Constabulary who has followed Adair's career. "Everything he told his people to do, Adair had once done himself."

Adair escaped numerous IRA assassination attempts and criminal prosecutions until he finally was sentenced to 16 years for directing terrorism in 1995.

"He is a cult figure with disciples," said the RUC source. "He has the power of life or death. If he told his henchmen to kill someone while he watched, they would do it. That is the kind of control he has."

Since Adair's release, his UFF gang has imposed its predominance in the Shankill Road area. UFF wall murals have mushroomed, and in several high-profile "shows of force," masked UFF gunmen brandished weapons or stopped traffic at makeshift roadblocks - all to the chagrin of the UVF.

Most worrying for security forces, Adair has built an alliance with the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) - whose past leader, Billy "King Rat" Wright, was shot dead in the Maze prison in 1998. Adair is trying to fill Wright's shoes, security sources fear, and create a new league of disaffected pro-British Loyalists to join his drug and terror franchise.

Mr. Mandelson said he hopes Adair's arrest will allow the warring factions to make peace, an unlikely outcome in the short term since both sides are still calling for vengeance.

-------- myanmar

Suu Kyi Stands Firm in Myanmar Roadside Protest

Yahoo News
Sunday August 27
By Aung Hla Tun
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000827/wl/myanmar_leadall_dc_12.html
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/209l-082700-idx.html

YANGON (Reuters) - Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi began a fifth cramped and uncomfortable day in her car south of Yangon on Monday in a roadside test of wills with Myanmar's military rulers.

The 55-year-old Nobel laureate and more than a dozen members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) were halted by police on Thursday as they headed south of the capital in two vehicles.

It was the first time Suu Kyi had tried to leave Yangon since another roadside stand-off in 1998 that ended after 13 days when deteriorating health and dehydration forced her to return home in an ambulance.

Myanmar's government says Suu Kyi is being prevented from traveling further for her own protection, due to threats of violence by ``armed separatist terrorist groups.'' It has asked her to go home but says she is free to remain in Dala.

``Until safety conditions improve, Daw Suu Kyi is visiting Dala township, a small but charming and scenic town about 10 minutes' boat ride from Yangon jetty,'' the government said in a statement at the weekend.

Journalists who tried to go to the scene of the stand-off were turned back by security authorities at the jetty.

The government insisted Suu Kyi was being provided with ample food and water, contrary to reports from some NLD members who said she was running short of supplies.

To support its assertion that Suu Kyi was being properly looked after, the government released five photographs of Suu Kyi's ``visit to Dala.''

One showed several men laden with plastic carrier bags walking along a path toward the parked cars, with the caption: ''Suu Kyi's travel companions coming back from shopping at nearby food stores in time for high-tea.''

Myanmar Hits Back At Critics

Another picture showed the group's two vehicles -- a saloon car and a pickup truck -- parked beside a dirt track. The caption pointed out houses in the background, noting that ''bathroom services are available there for free.''

Other photographs showed men washing at an outdoor water pump and bathing in a river. The government said the pictures showed NLD members taking ``an afternoon dip.''

Suu Kyi was not visible in any of the photographs.

World anger at the treatment of Suu Kyi has mounted, with the United States and European Union demanding that she be allowed to travel freely in her own country.

The government said critics had misunderstood the situation.

``Apparently there is some misunderstanding of the current situation in Myanmar, so we would like to clarify some basic points to those who are criticizing us irresponsibly,'' it said.

``Like any government in the world, the government of Myanmar has a fundamental obligation and responsibility to protect its citizens from acts of violence from terrorist organizations and unlawful armed groups.''

Diplomats in Yangon said they had not heard reports of armed insurgent groups active in the area of the stand-off.

The NLD won elections in May 1990 by a landslide but has never been allowed to govern.

Suu Kyi was under house arrest for six years until 1995 and her movements remain severely restricted.

(With additional reporting by Andrew Marshall in Bangkok)

-------- u.s.

Cheney Says Clinton Drives Military Into Decline

Yahoo News
Sunday August 27 2:01 PM ET updated 5:08 AM ET Aug 28
By Jonathan Wright
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000827/pl/campaign_military_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, adding fuel to the campaign dispute over U.S. military readiness, said on Sunday that the Clinton administration had driven the armed forces into decline.

``They've cut too far. They've cut too deep. They've also added commitments. A big part of the difficulty ... is the force is spread too thin,'' he told the NBC program ``Meet the Press.''

``What the Clinton-Gore administration has done is to shortchange the military, continue to impose significant burdens on them and not make the kinds of investments that need to be made. ... It does need to be fixed,'' he added.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush (news - web sites), the governor of Texas, made the state of the U.S. military a campaign issue at the Republican convention earlier this month when he said that two of the 10 U.S. army divisions were not ready for duty.

The Pentagon said the divisions briefly had not been ready last November but the problem had been fixed. Democrats have jumped on the case of the two divisions to suggest that Bush was stretching the truth and politicizing the military.

Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, told ``Meet the Press'' that both Bush and Cheney were ``flat wrong about the question of readiness.''

Retired Gen. George Joulwan, former supreme commander of NATO, told ``Fox News Sunday'' that the U.S. military has ''structural problems'' and needed to be reorganized.

But asked if Bush was wrong when he said that the military had been ``hollowed out'' during the seven years that President Clinton has been in office, Joulwan said: ``Yes.''

Cheney agreed that the U.S. military, with 1.4 million people in uniform and the most sophisticated weaponry available in the world, was better than any other country's.

But he added: ``The problem is it's in decline, and this administration has done very little to reverse that decline. They have, in fact, significantly expanded our commitments, even as they cut the size of the force.''

He said that 40 percent of the U.S. Army's helicopters are not combat-ready and that the average number of hours flown by aviation battalion commanders has fallen to 1,000 hours, half of what it was 10 years ago.

In the Air Force, about 65 percent of combat units are combat ready, down from 85 percent when Clinton took office in 1993, he added.

Recruiting Problems

``We've got recruiting problems. We've got retention problems. We're not able to keep pilots, for example,'' Cheney told another program, CBS's ``Face the Nation.''

Democrats have retorted that the cuts in the U.S. military began under Bush's father, President George Bush, in whose administration Cheney served as U.S. secretary of defense.

Cheney said President Bush was right to make limited cuts because of the end of the Cold War, but Clinton and Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites), the Democratic presidential candidate, had extended the cuts too far.

``We called for a 25 percent reduction in force structure. ... But they've gone far beyond that. They've taken the Army from 18 divisions down to 10. They've taken wings in the Air Force from 24 wings to 13 wings,'' he added.

But Kerry said: ``We have the best trained, most extraordinary military in the history of humankind.''

The military's problems with retaining personnel were a result of the strong economy, which makes the private sector more attractive, the Democratic senator added.

Rep. John Kasich (news - web sites), an Ohio Democrat who briefly ran for president, criticized what he said was a massive increase in the number of foreign deployments under Clinton, saying these amounted to 116, against 42 in the previous 11 years.

``Clinton has ... turned the United States military into the policemen of the world,'' he said.

``I'd like to see us target the use of American forces to where it is in our national interest and where there is an achievable objective. ... I think that's the biggest change that we need,'' he added.

---

Cheney: Gore Drops Ball on Military

New York Times
August 27, 2000 Filed at 3:09 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/p/AP-Cheney.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In recruiting, retention, morale and combat readiness, the U.S. military has serious problems that Vice President Al Gore either doesn't understand or has ``chosen not to tell the truth about,'' Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney said Sunday.

He admitted, however, that major cutbacks in the military began on his watch as the first post-Cold War defense secretary. And, in response to an irate letter from a Democratic senator, Cheney refused to back down from a campaign statement depicting the Army veteran Gore as being ''`AWOL' on Veterans' Issues.''

Cheney said he had not seen the statement and, until he does, cannot say whether it was appropriate to use the acronym that means ``absent without leave,'' a heinous military offense, to describe the Democratic presidential candidate. But, he said told ``Meet the Press'' host Tim Russert: ``I have not used that word. I don't think it's appropriate of you to attribute it to me.''

Cheney discussed military readiness on three Sunday talk shows.

``There is an enormous amount of evidence out there ... that the question in terms of readiness and morale, the problems with recruiting, problems with retention, that the military is in trouble today,'' he said on NBC.

On ABC's ``This Week,'' Cheney said: ``There are serious problems out there in respect to the overall quality of the force. There's no question that we've got a great military today, but it's headed in the wrong direction.''

Based on his discussions with military people, he said, ``either Al Gore doesn't know what's going on in the U.S. military, or he's chosen not to tell the truth about it.''

In response, Gore campaign spokesman Douglas Hattaway said the Republicans have lost all credibility on defense.

``Cheney already admitted that military downsizing began under the Bush-Quayle-Cheney administration,'' Hattaway said. ``So either Cheney doesn't know what he's talking about, or they can't get their story together on the military. I think it all shows that Bush is not ready to be commander in chief.''

George W. Bush, who heads the Republican presidential ticket, raised the issue of military preparedness last week in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Milwaukee. He said the next president will inherit a military in decline.

Cheney repeated the charge Sunday. ``I think if you match our forces today up against any others around the world, we've got the best force,'' he said on NBC. ``The problem is it's in decline, and this administration has done very little to reverse that decline.''

He was asked about the Democratic contention that President Clinton assumed command in 1993 of a military that already was being cut back, by President Bush's administration and his defense secretary, Cheney.

``When we came in in '89, we still had a Cold War,'' Cheney said. ``We had to be ready to fight an all-out global nuclear war that would begin with a few hours' notice. ... We had big forces then. Then we won the Cold War. We prevailed. The Soviet Union imploded and went away. ... All of us agreed that it was time to downsize the force.''

The problem now, he said, is ``they've continued to cut. They've cut too far. They've cut too deep.''

Such language came under fire Sunday from Democrats.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., criticized Bush for inaccurately telling the Republican National Convention that two U.S. Army divisions are unready for action. Levin said the units were on duty in Bosnia and Kosovo late last year.

``If anything will sap morale'' of troops, it's that kind of statement, he said on CNN.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who followed Cheney on NBC, said: ``Dick Cheney is flat wrong, and George Bush is flat wrong, about questions of preparedness.'' He blamed the booming civilian economy for problems with military recruiting and retention but said the Clinton administration is working to change that with pay increases and other personnel moves.

Kerry, who like Gore served in Vietnam, was exercised over the Bush-Cheney campaign's use of AWOL to describe Gore in its dissection of ``The Clinton-Gore Record on Veterans.'' Neither Republican served in Vietnam.

In a letter to Bush and Cheney, dated Saturday, Kerry wrote:

``In light of your service, Governor Bush, in the National Guard, and your service, Mr. Secretary, in the Defense Department, I know that you should be particularly sensitive to the full connotation of the word AWOL when applied to a veteran who volunteered for duty in Vietnam.''

---

Marines Suspend Flights of Three Aircraft Types

Yahoo News
Sunday August 27
By Charles Aldinger
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000827/ts/military_aircraft_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Marine Corps announced on Sunday it had halted flights of three different types of aircraft, including its vaunted new MV-22 tilt-rotor troop helicopters, for safety inspections due to unrelated problems in each type.

The Corps said in a release that flights of all of its 11 current MV-22s, which take off and land like a helicopter but fly like a regular aircraft, had been suspended along with operations of its AH-1W ``Cobra'' attack helicopters and big CH-53 transport helicopters.

The extremely-unusual precautionary halt to flights by three different aircraft types was ordered late on Friday, the Marine Corps said.

Big money is at stake in the future of the MV-22, made jointly by Boeing Co. and the Bell Helicopter unit of Textron Inc. An initial full-scale production decision is currently planned for later this year and the Marine Corps plans to eventually buy 360 of MV-22s at a cost of about $44 million each.

Cobras are made by Bell Textron and CH-53s by the Sikorsky aircraft division of United Technologies Corp.

The Marine Corps said flights of the MV-22 were suspended after one of the 11, which completed operational trials in July, made a precautionary landing on Thursday at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

The aircraft's back-up systems ``worked flawlessly and the pilot landed safely,'' the Corps said, but a subsequent maintenance inspection revealed that a coupling on the MV-22's interconnect drive shaft failed. The coupling was repaired, and the aircraft later returned to Marine Corps Air Station in New River, North Carolina, where it was based.

``Engineers will examine the other 10 MV-22s to ensure the failure was isolated,'' the announcement said.

The decision to suspend operations of all 165 CH-53s, built to carry troops and heavy cargo, was based on preliminary findings of the crash of a Navy MH-53E mine-sweeping helicopter off the coast of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Aug. 10, the release said. It did not provide details of those findings.

Officials suspended AH-1W Cobra flight operations after it was discovered last week that some older rotor blades on the choppers might be susceptible to cracking.

Each of the corps' 198 Cobras will undergo a one-time inspection to identify and replace, if necessary, the suspect blades before they are returned to flight status.

The MV-22 Osprey completed operational evaluation in July and is awaiting the go-ahead to proceed to full-rate production. It is planned to replace the corps' aging fleet of C-46 and CH-53D model helicopters.

In April, an MV-22 crashed in Arizona during a night operation, killing all 19 Marines on board. The corps said after a subsequent investigation that ``human factors'', including the pilot's extremely rapid rate of descent, and not mechanical or design problems caused that crash.

Even as the three flights suspensions were announced, the corps continued efforts to inspect and test all of its F402-RR-408A/B engines for the AV-8B Harrier jet before returning the aircraft to flying status.

Since July 11, about 30 of the corps' aircraft powered by the engines have been returned to flying status. A number of engines are still due to undergo vibration-scan testing and, if necessary, to be repaired before being returned to service.

---

Marines ground Osprey aircraft

USA Today
08/27/00- Updated 05:40 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncssun03.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Marine Corps announced Sunday the temporary grounding of all 11 of its MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, the hybrid airplane-helicopter that has been under increased scrutiny since one crashed during a training exercise in April, killing all 19 Marines aboard.

The decision to suspend Osprey flight operations was made late Friday by the Naval Aviation Systems Command, which also ordered the Marines to temporarily ground its fleet of CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopters and AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters, spokesman Lt. David Nevers said.

Nevers said the most significant of the three actions was the grounding of the workhorse CH-53E Super Stallions, because it is likely to take longer to get them back in the air than either the Ospreys or the Cobras.

Nonetheless, the Osprey's problem is likely to draw the most public attention, in part because of recollections of the April crash - the worst Marine helicopter loss in more than a decade - and in part because some members of Congress have criticized the Osprey program as too expensive and technically flawed.

The Osprey takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like an airplane. It is built by Boeing Co. and Bell Helicopter Textron.

The Osprey fleet was taken out of operation for about two months after the April crash in Arizona. Investigators determined the crash was caused by mistakes made by the pilot and co-pilot, not a mechanical problem.

The Ospreys resumed flying in June.

Last Thursday, an Osprey made a precautionary landing at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and a subsequent maintenance inspection revealed that a coupling on the aircraft's drive shaft had failed. The coupling was repaired and the Osprey returned to its home base at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C.

''In the interests of safety, they will check the other aircraft's couplings'' before returning them to flight, Nevers said. He said he could not estimate how long they would be out of operation.

The Marines are counting on the Osprey to eventually replace the corps' Vietnam-era CH-46 helicopters as the primary means of transporting troops into combat from ships offshore. The Marines plan to buy 360 Ospreys, and the Air Force plans to buy 50 for its special operations forces.

The Defense Department has not yet made a final decision to enter full-rate production of the Osprey.

The decision to ground three types of Marine Corps aircraft, albeit for unrelated reasons, puts an unusually large portion of the Marine aviation fleet out of operation. In July, 106 of the Marines' AV-8B Harrier fighter jets were grounded because of an engine bearing problem. Thirty of the Harriers have since returned to flight, but that leaves the majority of the fighters still grounded.

The decision to ground all 165 of the Marines' CH-53E Super Stallions was based on findings from the investigation into the Aug. 10 crash of a Navy MH-53E mine-sweeping helicopter off the coast of Corpus Cristi, Texas, in which four people were killed. Nevers said investigators found a bearing problem, but he was not sure of the exact nature of the problem.

Eight Super Stallions currently are on overseas deployment with Marine Expeditionary Units, Nevers said.

The corps' 198 AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters were grounded after it was discovered this week that some older rotor blades may be susceptible to cracking. Each Cobra will undergo a one-time inspection to identify and replace, if necessary, the suspect blades, Nevers said. Eight are currently deployed abroad.

The Cobras are likely to undergo ''a relatively quick fix,'' Never said, and return to normal operations.

---

A LOOK AT . . . The Readiness Debate
IS IT JUST CAMPAIGN RHETORIC, or is George W. Bush right to say that the next president will inherit a U.S. military in decline? These experts shed light on the candidates' contentions.; High Marks Now, Trouble Ahead

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000; Page B03
By Michael O'Hanlon
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/236l-082700-idx.html

What kind of shape is our military in today? Is it suffering from "long neglect," as Texas Gov. George W. Bush asserted last Monday in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention? Has the Clinton-Gore administration overused and underfunded the armed forces during the past eight years, leaving two Army divisions simply unready for combat, as Bush stated at the Republican National Convention? Or, as Vice President Gore and his running mate claimed in rebuttal, is the U.S. military in outstanding condition?

Political campaigns are not noted for sticking to the facts, but in this particular dispute, the Democrats' claims are (mostly) right. Today's military, while somewhat strained and overworked, remains strong and competent enough to handle the kinds of missions contemplated by current Pentagon plans. And, as Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out, Bush was plainly wrong when he said in his speech that two Army divisions are unready for duty.

But there is more to the issue than most of the campaign rhetoric would suggest, and a well-informed debate about difficult strategic issues--such as the purpose and practicality of a national missile defense--would serve the country well.

Although there are dozens of ways to assess the readiness of our armed forces, they can be grouped into four main categories. The Clinton-Gore administration deserves a high grade in two categories, a mediocre grade in one and an "incomplete" for the last.

Readiness of Individual Units: Grade, A-. By the most literal and urgent measure of readiness--the immediate ability to carry out their assigned tasks--most U.S. forces are in good shape, even if they have fallen off somewhat from the early 1990s.

Consider first the men and women of the military. Personnel are more experienced and better educated than ever. Anyone who doubts the abilities of U.S. troops need only review their outstanding performance in last year's Kosovo war, ongoing peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and the no-fly zone operations over Iraq. Even in the ill-fated Somalia mission of 1993, troops performed ably; it was the Clinton administration and top military officials who mishandled the mission.

As for available weaponry, although most U.S. military equipment is not in quite as good shape as it was a decade ago, it is comparable to the condition of weaponry during the Reagan era. The armed forces generally measure equipment readiness in terms of "mission capable rates"--the percentage of weapons that are immediately usable for major combat tasks, and not awaiting repair or otherwise out of commission. Although actual rates vary greatly from one weapon to another, "mission capable" rates were typically about 75 percent in the 1980s and 85 percent in the early '90s; they are generally back around 75 percent today. Historically, that is pretty good.

Altogether, the quality of people, equipment and training has given us a military in very fine shape. In addition, it has produced a very good safety record: Accident rates per person during training and deployments are lower than they have ever been, according to Pentagon data.

Ability to Execute War Plans: Grade, A-. What about readiness in a broader sense--the overall capacity of the U.S. military to carry out likely wartime missions?

Since the time of the Bush administration, the Pentagon has considered simultaneous all-out wars against two medium-sized powers, most likely Iraq and North Korea, to be its most demanding plausible combat scenario. The Clinton-Gore administration cut the size of the military about 15 percent beyond what the Bush administration had planned, which presumably has weakened the ability of the armed forces to execute this rather demanding and perhaps unrealistic two-front operation.

But it must be pointed out that the threats have gotten smaller, too. Iraq and North Korea have each suffered 10 years of economic and military stagnation. Iraq remains under sanctions, and is not even half as strong militarily as it was in 1990. In addition, South Korea, our ally on the peninsula, has continued to improve its already-strong military.

For their part, the U.S. armed forces may be smaller, but they have partly compensated by becoming more proficient at rapid deployment. They also have purchased new weapons--some of which were used in the 1999 war against Serbia--that give them more punch per person.

The U.S. military might encounter problems if it had to fight two Desert Storms at once, as official war plans nominally require. But the odds are small that it would have to do so. Even if two wars occurred at roughly the same time, it's unlikely they would each require the half-million troops who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Sustaining Readiness in the Coming Decade: Grade, B/B-. Although things look good today, there are cracks in the U.S. military that, if allowed to worsen, could change the basic readiness picture within a few years. Some were almost unavoidable, given the new demands of the post-Cold War world, and some are being fixed today. But troubles remain.

Morale is not very high these days. Troops feel overworked, and the services are having trouble attracting and holding on to people. Recent pay raises and efforts to make overseas deployments more predictable have improved some of these trends this year. But the situation remains worrisome, and requires further steps to reduce the strain on people (such as increasing the numbers of specialized units that are frequently deployed).

Remedies are also needed on the hardware front. Much of the equipment bought during the Reagan era is starting to wear out. Combat jets, for example, will soon average 15 years in age--and it is generally thought prudent to retire them after about 20 years of service. So while near-term equipment readiness is good, a new administration will need to act fast to keep it that way in 2005 and 2010. Modest spending increases may be necessary.

Preparing for Future Threats: Grade, Incomplete. The Clinton-Gore administration has worked hard to prevent new threats from developing around the world. It has taken numerous steps to reduce our vulnerability to terrorism; aided Russia in securing its dilapidated and oversized nuclear weapons complex so "loose nukes" do not fall into the wrong hands; weaned North Korea away from its nuclear weapons program; and improved protection for U.S. troops against possible enemy use of chemical or biological weapons.

But the administration has not done enough in other areas. For example, it has not attempted to stand U.S. and Russian nuclear forces down from their states of "hair-trigger" and dangerous alert; has made only limited progress in helping Russia restore economic and political stability; and has cut funding for military science and technology research that could be of general benefit in addressing future threats (cuts that Bush, to his credit, wants to reverse).

And on one of this year's hottest political issues--a national missile defense--it has not found a workable technology or a credible diplomatic strategy for deployment. Gore would do well to break with President Clinton, who is still clinging to a relatively unpromising missile defense technology and a rushed schedule that makes neither diplomatic nor strategic sense. That approach has won few supporters and many critics around the world.

On these longer-term issues, there are no clear answers, but plenty of room for debate. Bush should give up his overheated and mistaken rhetoric about a hollow U.S. military, and focus on these critical matters for future American security and long-term readiness. The country would be better served if he does.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author with Ivo Daalder of "Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo" (Brookings).

---

Diplomatic Files Found Off Bahrain

Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2000; Page A24
WORLD In Brief Compiled
by Virginia Hamill
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/209l-082700-idx.html

MANAMA, Bahrain--U.S. Navy divers have retrieved the diplomatic pouches carried by a U.S. courier who was killed in Wednesday's Gulf Air crash.

The divers began searching for the "diplomatic cargo" at dawn Friday and found it in the shallow waters off Bahrain Friday afternoon, said Cmdr. Jeff Gradeck, spokesman for the Navy's 5th Fleet, which is based in the island country just east of Saudi Arabia.

The courier, Seth Foti, 31, of Browntown, Va., was the only American aboard Gulf Air Flight 72 when it crashed into the Persian Gulf on Wednesday evening.

The U.S. Embassy in Bahrain held a private memorial service for Foti.

---

Kennedy, CIA papers released

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/national/nobyline-2000825222236.htm

BOSTON (AP) - Thousands of secret CIA missives and other previously classified materials, many documenting the internal foreign policy debate in the Kennedy administration, have been made public for the first time.

Among the documents are memos between President John F. Kennedy and former National Security Council Adviser McGeorge Bundy, cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Laos to the State Department during the early days of the Vietnam War and efforts at political subversion in Cuba.

Hundreds of historians are expected to scrutinize the 4,500 pages made public Wednesday at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

"The puzzle of the Kennedy administration is almost complete, but there are definitely holes," said Maura Porter, an archivist at the library.

The materials, which span Mr. Kennedy's years in office from 1960 to 1963, should help give a clearer picture of the administration's foreign policy decisions, said David Coleman, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

But the historian, who been eagerly anticipating the release of the documents, cautioned against expecting any stunning revelations.

Mr. Coleman is working on a project to transcribe tapes Mr. Kennedy secretly recorded in the White House. CIA-related documents are especially valuable because they have been the most difficult to obtain, he said.

The files also include documents concerning the United States' relations with the Dominican Republic, West Germany, India and the Soviet Union.

Despite the so-called "white papers" - in-depth analyses of countries or individuals - the more interesting information is generally contained in the memos, Miss Porter said.

"To hold a document handwritten by President Kennedy, it makes history come alive," she said.

One document, a November 1963 message from the CIA to the White House's "International Situation Room," offers a breathless account of an assault on the presidential palace in Vietnam: "Officer who lives adjacent palace area reports all his windows blown out and small arms fire from all directions on palace."

Others seem less weighty.

A once-classified memo from October 1963 regarding the activities of former Vietnamese first lady Madame Nhu reads: "The press, digging deep for sidebar stories as Madame Nhu kept to her hotel room, noted that New York specialty stores appeared to be trying to touch off a Southeast Asian style motif with Oriental scenes and fashion advertising featuring her coiffure and almond eyes."

The release of the material is the result, in part, of an executive order by President Clinton mandating that all documents 25 years and older containing national security classified information be reviewed for declassification.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

A Tale of Two Fisheries As New Englanders overfish their way to ruin, Australians have profited by becoming conservationists.

New York Times
August 27, 2000
By JOHN TIERNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000827mag-fisheries.html

John Sorlien, a lean, sunburned fisherman in rubber overalls, was loading his boat along the wharf at Point Judith, R.I., not far from the spot where the "Tuna Capital of the World" sign stood three decades ago. Back then, you could harpoon giant bluefins right outside the harbor. Today, you would have a hard time finding one within 20 miles. Since the early 1970's, the tuna have declined -- along with cod, swordfish, halibut and so many other species in the ruined fisheries of the Northeast. Sorlien, like the other fishermen in this harbor just west of Newport, is surviving thanks to New England's great cash crop, lobsters, but he wonders how much longer they'll be around. "Right now, my only incentive is to go out and kill as many fish as I can," Sorlien said. "I have no incentive to conserve the fishery, because any fish I leave is just going to be picked by the next guy."

Like the men who wiped out the buffaloes on the Great Plains in the 19th century, Sorlien is a hunter-gatherer who has become too lethal for his range. He is what's known in the business as a highliner -- a fisherman who comes back with big hauls -- but every season the competition gets tougher. When he got started 16 years ago, at the age of 22, he used a small boat and set traps within three miles of shore. These days, he doesn't even bother looking in those waters, which fishermen now refer to as "on the beach." He has graduated to a 42-foot boat and often goes 70 miles out to sea for lobsters, which can mean leaving the dock at midnight and not returning until 10 the following night. Each year, he has had to go farther and haul more traps just to stay even.

Solien was starting the season on this May morning by loading hundreds of the traps onto his boat, the Cindy Diane. The four-foot-long steel cages, each baited with a dangling skate fish, would spend the next eight months at sea. Sorlien would be tending 800 of them in all. On a typical day, he would haul 300, sometimes 400, up from the ocean floor to remove lobsters and insert fresh bait. As he stacked one 40-pound trap after another on deck, it was easy to see why he and so many other lobstermen have back problems. "My chiropractor says he can always tell when it's lobster season," Sorlien said.

The chiropractor is treating the consequence of what fishery scientists call "effort creep." Over the years, as Sorlien got a bigger boat and gradually doubled the number of his traps in the water, other lobstermen were doing the same. It was an arms race with no winners and some definite losers: the lobsters. Their life expectancy plummeted. "Lobsters used to live for 50 or 75 years," recalled Robert Smith, who has been lobstering at Point Judith since 1948. "When I started, it was not unusual to get a 30-pound lobster. It's been 20 years since I got one that was even 20 pounds." Last year, the biggest one he caught was four pounds, and that was an anomaly. Most lobsters don't even make it to two pounds. Biologists estimate that 90 percent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal minimum size at about age 6.

"If you translate that to the human population," Sorlien said, "it means that our industry is relying almost entirely on a bunch of 13-year-olds to keep us going. That doesn't seem too healthy. If we get some kind of environmental disruption that interferes with reproduction one year, we'll end up with nothing to catch for a whole season. We just go from year to year not knowing what to expect. I don't have a clue what kind of year this will be for me. It's like we're backing up to the edge of a cliff blindfolded, and we don't know if we're 50 feet away or have two wheels over the edge."

The obvious remedy would be to restrict the amount of fishing going on, as lobstermen have traditionally done in some communities. They have created informal local groups -- called harbor gangs by anthropologists -- in which they divvy up the nearby seabed, determining who can fish where, how long the season will be and how many traps each man can use.

The harbor gangs are built around the management principles of Tony Soprano. If a fishing trawler drags a net through their waters, destroying their traps, the lobstermen may dump an old car onto the seabed, which will rip the trawler's net the next time it's dragged. If an outside lobsterman intrudes, he might find a threatening note inside a bottle in one of his lobster traps or attached to the buoy above the traps. He might find that someone has removed his lobsters and left the traps conspicuously open or maybe applied a chain saw to the steel cages. More commonly, the intruder will find that the rope from the buoy has been cut, leaving the traps lost on the seabed. If he doesn't take the hint, his boat might be burned or sunk. Last summer, the Coast Guard barely rescued a lobster boat in Rockport, Me., that was going down. The owner, Robert Crowe, a newcomer to those fishing grounds, said someone had gone on board at night and destroyed the boat's battery, smashed the windows and beaten the engine with a hammer. "It's a lobster war," he explained.

The gang tactics yield both biological and economic benefits, as James M. Acheson reported in his 1988 book, "The Lobster Gangs of Maine." Acheson, an anthropologist at the University of Maine, found that the lobstermen who most avidly defended their turf were able to make more money with less effort because the lobsters in their waters were larger and more plentiful. But the tactics generally work only in waters close to the gang's home. The open ocean is harder to defend. One small patch 20 miles offshore has been divvied up by a few lobstermen from Point Judith, but that's an exceptional case. It took several years and several thousand broken traps for the lobstermen and trawler captains to negotiate who got to fish where and when. And their arrangement is respected by outsiders mainly because one of the lobstermen has an especially fearsome reputation for protecting his turf.

Most stretches of open ocean are governed by state and federal governments, which is why the fish are in so much trouble. Tuna do not vote. Lobsters do not make campaign contributions. There may be future benefits from limiting this year's catch, but politicians don't want the fishing industry to suffer while they're up for re-election. Even when fish populations start to decline, officials are reluctant to impose strict limits. Instead, they have often tried to help struggling fishermen with subsidies, which merely encourage more overfishing. The Canadian and American governments devastated one of the world's most productive fisheries, the Georges Banks off the coast of New England, by helping to pay for bigger boats. Now, even as scientists urge limits on lobstering, state and federal governments continue to offer tax breaks and other incentives to the lobstermen at Point Judith. John Sorlien was docked at a wharf financed by the taxpayers of Rhode Island. "It's not a sane system," Sorlien said. "We work with the government to break fisheries, and then we ask the government to subsidize us when the fish disappear."

As he got ready to take his traps to sea, he was listening to a plan for saving the fisheries. Sorlien, the president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen's Association, was being lobbied by one of his members, Richard Allen. It was gentle lobbying -- New England lobstermen have not lost their classic laconic style -- but there was no mistaking Allen's dedication to his cause. At 54, he has been lobstering for nearly 30 years and preaching reform for a decade. He expounded as Sorlien hosed the deck of the stinking juice from the lobster bait. "Dick is the messiah," Sorlien said with a smile. "His ideas have gotten him in a lot of trouble. Most of the guys don't agree with him. For a while, I didn't want to accept his ideas. But now I'm starting to think he's found the way."

Allen first found the way in the academic literature of fishery management, and then he saw it in operation. He journeyed to a port in Australia and returned with stories of a place with thriving lobsters, plenty of fat tuna, lots of prosperous fishermen -- and no Soprano strong-arm tactics. It sounded like the maritime version of the Happy Hunting Grounds.

On the way into Port Lincoln, a little fishing town on a remote peninsula of Australia's southern coast, you pass an elaborate 20-foot-high black gate adorned with a gold crown. Below the crown is a sign in gold script: "Mansion de Braslov." The mansion is a red brick pile perched on the hillside, with a pink balustrade overlooking the water and a grand staircase attended by statues of two nymphs. It is the house that tuna built.

Locals call it the "Dynasty" house, as opposed to the "Dallas" house up the hill, which was built by another tuna oligarch who is said to have spent $50,000 just to get the plans for the mansion that appeared on the show. Nearby is a pink stucco house with 127,000 square feet. One fisherman with a stable of racehorses made news recently by spending $200,000 at an auction for an antique racing trophy. Another bought a mammoth yacht that had once belonged to Alan Bond, the financier.

Fishing has been very good to Port Lincoln. The fishermen have gleaming $600,000 boats in a pristine private marina flanked by new white stucco town houses. Compared with the decaying public wharfs in Point Judith, Port Lincoln feels like Palm Beach. The town's 13,000 inhabitants are said to include the highest number of millionaires per capita in the southern hemisphere. That, at least, is a factoid you keep hearing there. No one seems to know exactly where it comes from (there is no Southern Hemisphere Millionaire Census Bureau), but as the locals say, "You wouldn't be far wrong."

These millionaires are generally not the sort profiled by Robin Leach. Except for a half-dozen or so in mansions, they live in nice ranch houses. They are men like Daryl Spencer, who dropped out of school at 15 to work as a house painter. One morning, a friend asked him to fill in as a deckhand on a lobster boat. He kept working on the boats for four years and saved up $10,000 for the down payment on a house.

"I told my captain I needed a day off to go look at houses," Spencer recalled, "and he told me I should buy a boat instead. I said I couldn't afford a boat. He said: 'How about half a boat? I'll be your partner.' I wasn't sure -- in those days lobstering wasn't a sought-after job. But my wife and I decided to hold off on the house."

Today, they have a house on a hilltop with a sweeping view of the harbor. They also own a thoroughbred racehorse. Lobstering turned out to be an excellent job thanks to a system of quotas that was pioneered in Australia and New Zealand. It is basically a version of the New England harbor gangs, run by the lobstermen under government supervision. The government started it in the 1960's by setting a limit on the total number of traps used by the fleet in Port Lincoln. Licenses for those traps were assigned to the working fishermen, and from then on, any newcomer who wanted to set a trap in those waters had to buy a license from someone already in the business. It's like New York's taxicab system, which has a fixed number of taxi licenses or "medallions": a newcomer who wants to own a cab must buy a medallion from someone who is retiring.

When Spencer got his own boat in 1984, he bought his first trap licenses for $2,000 apiece in Australian dollars. Nowadays, they would sell for $35,000, which means that Spencer's are worth a total of $2.1 million, or about $1.2 million in American dollars. He has done well by doing good: his licenses have become more valuable because the lobstermen are conservationists. They pay for scientists to monitor the fishery, and they have imposed strict harvesting limits that allow the lobsters to grow into sizable adults. The Australians are not any more altruistic than the Rhode Islanders -- they too have mortgages to pay -- and in the old days they used to howl when anyone suggested reducing their catch. But they began taking the long view as soon as they saw the rising price of their licenses for their lobster pots, as they call the traps. Like any property owner, they began thinking about resale value. "Why hurt the fishery?" Spencer said. "It's my retirement fund. No one's going to pay me $35,000 a pot if there are no lobsters left. If I rape and pillage the fishery now, in 10 years my licenses won't be worth anything."

Besides building up nest eggs, Port Lincoln's lobstermen have made their own jobs easier. In the old free-for-all days, lobstermen used to work every day of the seven-month season, including Christmas and Easter. "I once spent 10 days at sea with a dislocated hip," Spencer recalled. "I wasn't about to lose two days' income coming back to the doctor when my boat wasn't full." Now, he would go to the doctor and use up a couple of the off-days that each lobsterman is required to take during the season. While Rhode Island lobstermen are sometimes on the water 240 days per year, the Australians are not allowed to work more than 187 days of their 211-day season. And their days are a lot easier on the back, as a young lobsterman, Hubert Hurrell, demonstrated one March morning in his appropriately named boat, Fine Time.

Hurrell and I left the dock at 7:30 a.m. and sped out to his traps in barely an hour, cruising at 22 knots in his 60-foot boat. It was faster than Sorlien's and had twice as much room on deck and below. The wheelhouse and staterooms had the space and amenities you expect to find on yachts, not lobster boats. There was a television and VCR, a video-game player and a wraparound console with six screens showing data from computers, instruments and satellites. "We could virtually shut the window and fish just by looking at these," Hurrell said, pointing to the color images of the ocean floor and the locations of his traps.

He shook his head and winced when he heard about the 800 traps tended by the typical lobsterman in Rhode Island. In Port Lincoln, the lobstermen have limited themselves to 60 traps each. Hurrell had a larger boat than Sorlien not because he needed the space but because he could afford the luxury. It took Hurrell and his deckhand just an hour to raise their 60 traps and to extract an assortment of lobsters, including some hefty long-lived ones. After a leisurely lunch, they dropped the traps back into the water and were back on shore by 3. It was not quite an eight-hour day, and Hurrell was satisfied with the financial results. "No worries, mate," he said, which was not a bad summary of the prevailing view among the scientists who study the lobsters.

"Fishing may be the only economic activity in which you can make more money by doing less work," said Rick McGarvey, a biologist who monitors the fishery for the South Australian government. "By fishing less, the fishermen leave more lobsters out there to produce more eggs, which will make it easier for them to catch lobsters in the future. It's a win-win for the fish and the fishermen. The lobsters are thriving and the fishermen are spending more time at home with their families."

The system also makes McGarvey's job easier because he is spared the controversies that American scientists endure when they try to protect a fishery. In New England, a proposed conservation measure typically inspires a decade of battling that leads, at best, to an ineffectual compromise. In South Australia, the lobstermen act quickly to prevent overfishing, sometimes imposing stricter limits than the ones suggested by scientists. "We don't have to fight with the lobstermen," McGarvey said. "The old philosophy of fishery scientists was, 'We're philosopher kings and the fishermen are children who don't know what's good for themselves or the fish, so we have to impose regulations.' Now we just tell them what our research shows about the fishery, and they do a great job of regulating themselves."

Other researchers have documented similar success stories around the world, including many from traditional societies that have used property rights to protect the environment. In the South Pacific, where coral reefs have been destroyed by fishermen using dynamite and cyanide, the best-preserved reefs are the ones controlled by local villagers and closed off to outsiders. Japanese fishing villages have long prevented overfishing in local waters by using versions of harbor gangs. Louisiana's privately leased oyster beds are much healthier than the public ones in Mississippi. These results have won over most academic experts on fisheries. Last year, Australian-style quotas were endorsed in a report to Congress by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

Property rights enable fishermen to avoid what ecologists call the tragedy of the commons: the destruction of a common resource because it is open to all. Just as the closely tended herds of cattle thrived on the same plains where the buffaloes perished, fish stand a better chance of surviving if they belong to someone instead of everyone.

The lobstermen of Port Lincoln have managed to work out only a primitive system of property rights -- they each own a percentage of the traps used, not a patch of the ocean -- and they are dealing with just one relatively immobile species in coastal waters. What about all the fish that migrate vast distances in the open ocean? How could you turn them into private property? It is not a simple proposition, but the lure of profits is inspiring innovation. Already, for instance, there are property owners in Port Lincoln tending herds of wild tuna.

It was feeding time for the tuna, and Brian Cuddeford was chugging out of the Port Lincoln harbor with eight tons of frozen herrings and anchovies stacked on the deck. The herrings were from England; the anchovies, from California. These tuna were accustomed to imported delicacies. "It's like room service for the fish, with the full white-glove treatment," Cuddeford said. "They're getting fed twice a day. In the wild, they were probably eating once a week."

The tuna fishermen of Port Lincoln used to go out to sea with empty decks and catch as many tuna as they wanted. They returned with a boatload of dead fish and dumped them into unrefrigerated trucks bound for a canning factory. The fishermen collected about $600 per ton. Today, the tuna ranchers make more than that for a single fish. "You're getting more dollar for your product, so you don't have to catch as many," Cuddeford said. "You don't have to be so greedy."

The ranchers still fish for their tuna in the wild, but with restrictions. Because tuna were decimated by the old open system, in the 1980's the government imposed limits on the annual catch. Now each fisherman owns what is called an individual transferable quota -- the right to catch a certain percentage of the yearly haul. These quotas, which can be bought or sold like stock shares, are not cheap, so fishermen have changed their strategy. No longer able to slaughter fish at will, they have looked for ways to make the most of each fish. The result has been the world's premier tuna ranches.

When the tuna are first caught in a net far out at sea, they are shepherded by the thousands into floating pens. The pens are slowly towed to Port Lincoln in an enormous tuna drive that lasts about two weeks. Once the pens are anchored in a bay near Port Lincoln, it is the ranch hands' job to produce a fish good enough to become sashimi in Tokyo. "It's just like a feeding lot to fatten up cattle," Cuddeford said as he pulled up one of the pens, which consisted of a closed net dangling more than 40 feet below the surface. The net was attached to what looked like a huge inner tube, a floating ring of rubber about 200 feet in circumference. Cuddeford tossed in the frozen blocks of herrings and anchovies. As the blocks began melting, you could see the flashes of blue fins below the surface as the tuna snapped up their meals.

"We're giving them herring to get the oil content up in the meat," Cuddeford explained. "A bit more oil changes the color. The Japanese are fussy. They eat with their eyes." The tuna would be fed for several months as the ranchers monitored their weight and watched the price of tuna on the Tokyo market. At a propitious time, divers would jump into the pen and guide the fish -- gently, because any bruise would mean a lower price -- on to a boat, which would whisk them to shore and on to an airplane for Tokyo. The 2,200 tuna in this pen were worth more than $2 million. At night, armed guards patrolled the waters for larcenous humans and hungry seals.

Such ranching isn't practical yet for most species of fish -- the tuna pens are economical only because bluefins are worth so much -- but marine scientists are studying other ways to homestead the oceans. They have identified genetic markers and various features on fish that could serve as the equivalent of cattle brands. They can tell, for instance, exactly where a salmon spawned by examining its scales for the unique chemical signature of the stream where it was born. They have experimented with new kinds of underwater pens that use sound waves to mark their borders. Surveillance satellites can monitor who is fishing and what they are catching anywhere on the planet, which should soon make it technologically feasible for a quota system to be enforced throughout the world.

But there are, of course, a few political problems in persuading hunter-gatherers to become homesteaders. The biggest is how to divide up the range. Do you allocate the quotas and licenses equally among all working fishermen or according to how many fish each has been catching? Do you calculate each one's catch by considering the past year or the past 10 years? Do locals get first dibs on fishing rights? During Australia's debate over these questions, lobstermen were suing the government and slugging each other in pubs. Two decades later, some of their wives still aren't speaking at the grocery store.

Those disputes were relatively simple compared with the ones in America, where the fishing industry is older and larger. In the mid-1990's, the federal government successfully introduced Australia-style quotas in a few fisheries. But then Alaska's politicians got worried that fishermen from Seattle would end up with most of the quotas in their waters, so in 1996 they persuaded Congress to declare a national moratorium on any new quotas. The moratorium could end soon, which gives hope to Richard Allen, the Rhode Island lobsterman who has been preaching the Port Lincoln gospel. But he has no illusions about the political difficulties of setting up a quota system. Over the past decade, he figures he has spent 5,000 hours serving on advisory commissions and meeting with lobstermen, politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists.

"Most people start with the feeling that the ocean should be open to anyone who wants to fish," Allen said. "They complain that it's unfair to lock anyone out of the fishery. My answer is that with the current system, we already have fisheries that we're all locked out of. I can't go out and fish for halibut or swordfish -- there aren't any left. I would rather have a healthy fish stock and the option to buy access to it." Allen has been gradually winning converts on the wharfs in Point Judith, but it hasn't been easy.

"We're our own worst enemy," Sorlien said. "We're like the cattlemen in the range wars who shot at each other because they were claiming the right to the same property. Somewhere along the line, they figured out it made more sense to divide up the land and set up a system of property rights. That's the rational solution for us, but we can't bring ourselves to go through the pain of allocating each person a share. We're so far away from being South Australia."

Quotas have been gaining support among conservationists, notably at the Environmental Defense Fund, but they still face strong opposition from Greenpeace and other critics who fear that corporations will take over public waters. Once property rights are established, the same economic forces working against family farms could induce local fishermen to sell out to companies with big boats. While economists appreciate the increased efficiency of the bigger boats -- less labor, fuel and capital expended per fish -- others worry about the lost jobs and the impact on fishing towns. But it is possible to set up a quota system and still protect small-time operators, as the lobstermen in Port Lincoln did by putting a limit on the number of trap licenses that any one person can own.

As a result, there are still plenty of independent lobstermen in Port Lincoln; they just make more money doing easier work. Allen was

explaining this to Sorlien and his deckhand, James West, as they stacked lobster traps that morning in May. They looked incredulous when Allen described the huge new boats in Port Lincoln being used to haul just 60 traps.

"Sixty traps?" West said. "Man, I'd be happy if we could get by with 200." He listened approvingly to Allen's description of the Australian system, but he didn't like the part about newcomers having to buy their way into the fishery. West, who had been working as a deckhand for 11 years, was hoping soon to get his own boat. "I don't want the door shut on me," he said. "I've put a lot of time into this business. That's not fair."

Allen said that there would be special help for young people in West's position, but he conceded that there would be an expense. "You'd have to pay some money up front," he said. "But think of all the costs you'd avoid by using fewer traps. You'd be burning less fuel and using less bait. Think of what you'd be buying into -- a business with a future."

The deckhand was starting to come around. "Well, I like that idea," West said. "I don't want to buy a boat and hear that in 10 years it'll be worthless because you won't be able to make a dime lobstering."

The captain was still thinking about all the traps he wouldn't have to stack. "Imagine that -- just 60 traps," Sorlien said. He had been working for six hours, since 5:30 a.m., and the workday wasn't even half over. "You'd be done for the day now. You could be home counting your money, and you wouldn't have to worry about where the next lobster was coming from."

---

In Quest for Pristine Shore, Md. Must Surmount Mining Venture--and Some Lawmakers' Resistance

Washington Post
Monday, August 28, 2000; Page B01
By Monte Reel Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/28/111l-082800-idx.html

On paper, the plan outlined by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources last April seemed relatively simple, something that might unfold without a wrinkle.

The state and federal governments, with the help of nonprofit land trusts, would buy 5,500 acres in western Charles County, creating the largest stretch of publicly owned, undeveloped shoreline along the tidal Potomac River. It would be a refuge for wildlife, a showcase of botanical diversity, a fossil hunter's treasure trove, a maze of hiking trails and canoe routes, a rare point of public access to the river. It would, the state says, be "the gem of Maryland's statewide greenway system."

But outlining the proposal on paper was just the first step of what is turning out to be a long and complicated journey.

While state and federal legislators earlier this year set aside $6 million for the possible purchase of the land, a sand and gravel mining company had already signed a contract to buy about 1,400 acres, for an undisclosed amount, in the middle of the targeted area from Potomac Electric Power Co. The remaining 4,000-plus acres belong to two individual owners, one of whom hasn't yet been approached about selling.

Meanwhile, some western Charles County officials have criticized the very idea of land preservation, arguing that the area needs more industry, not open space.

"When you diagram all the pieces involved, it seems like an incredibly Byzantine process," said Michael Nelson, assistant secretary for DNR, which last year worked out a deal to preserve 58,000 acres scattered across five counties on the Eastern Shore. "But in Maryland, it works. It's arduous, but it works."

The 5,500 acres stretch along almost 10 miles of shoreline, most banked by cliffs and a thick tree line that's backed by a deep forest. It's split into four parcels: The two in the middle, owned by Pepco and the John Wilson family, respectively, are bookended on the north and south by parcels owned by the Milton E. Canter family. The Pepco property is known as Douglas Point; the other properties are named for their owners.

The tracts adjoin Purse State Park. If the deal were to go through, only a small patch of shoreline with scattered residences near Douglas Point would break up the public land.

"You can create a huge assemblage of land by purchasing just those four properties," said Debi L. Osborne, who as local director of the Trust for Public Land has led negotiations to buy the Wilson property. "It's the contiguity of these properties that makes them so important and gives them such strong potential."

It's that perceived potential--ecological, cultural and recreational--that keeps the preservation plans evolving.

Densely wooded Douglas Point lies about an hour's drive south of the District. The mosquitoes are oversized and slow--easy prey for the palms of the three men who on a recent afternoon leaned against their trucks on the side of the road.

One of the men was from Pepco, which has owned Douglas Point since the early 1970s, when the utility planned to build a nuclear power plant there. The other two were from Maryland Rock Industries Inc., which wants to put a strip mining operation on the property. A pickup truck approached the men, and the driver lowered his window to deliver his verdict:

"You're the bad guys."

It was the absolute certainty in the driver's voice that bothered Parran Bean, area manager for Maryland Rock. As the company's most visible local representative, Bean has conveniently filled the role of Public Enemy Number One for those fighting the mine.

Maryland Rock plans to clear 552 acres over a 20-year period, digging as deep as 60 feet for sand and gravel. The deposits would be loaded onto a conveyor system that would stretch 575 feet over the river to a barge loading station.

When Bean and others from Maryland Rock have described these plans at county hearings, the army of opponents in the audience often cringes, envisioning the calm forest transmogrified into a rattling eyesore.

"The peace and tranquillity will be gone, from sunup to sundown," said Paul Stecher, whose family owns a house adjacent to Douglas Point.

It's not that Bean doesn't see anything beautiful when he walks under a canopy of trees toward the river--he does, and he says most of it won't be harmed by the mining. But he doesn't see anything here that's quite as spectacularly unique and breathtaking as he's heard the property described.

Repeatedly, the mining opponents have paraphrased a release from DNR that described the land as "remarkably unchanged from the land that was first observed by early European settlers over 300 years ago."

But Bean rarely hears it mentioned that most of the land had been farmed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or that much of it had been clear-cut for timber as recently as the 1960s.

If Maryland Rock mines the land, the company says, it would refill the holes when finished and plant grasses to help restore the area. Eventually, the mined land would be naturally reforested, as it was after it was logged and farmed, Bean said. The opponents say it would take decades for it to fully recover, if it ever could.

All 5,500 acres sit on the Nanjemoy peninsula, the dominant land mass of western Charles County that includes the town of Indian Head. When that town lost its only grocery store in 1999, those seeking more development in the area came to view the loss as symbolic of a strangled local economy.

"I remember when we were the center of activity in Charles County," said state Del. Samuel C. Linton (D), of Nanjemoy. "Now, the western part of Charles County can't afford a service station or an adequate grocery store. Nanjemoy covers more area than Washington, D.C., and we're suffering for industry."

A few years ago, Chapman's Landing--a proposed 4,500-home development near Indian Head--was heralded by some local officials as a turning point, something that could pump dollars into the area and help support local businesses. But the state squelched that promise of economic revival in 1998 when it bought the 2,225-acre property as a preservation area.

Since that deal, land preservation is not a popular concept with everyone in western Charles County, particularly Linton.

"The state is the worst shepherd of property of anyone I've ever seen," said Linton. "I'd give it to anyone before I'd give it to the state. The most sought-after land in Charles County is waterfront. If the state takes it, it's never going to be available."

Linton says he remembers when most of the shoreline was developed. Large swaths were bought by private individuals at low prices after World War II, and many of those properties have remained undeveloped because of stricter environmental laws and economic stagnation, he said.

"Western Charles County is [undeveloped] because it's been neglected," he said. "Now, people come in and say, 'Look at this pristine area!' "

Two post-war purchases were made by the Canter family. The parcels total about 3,650 acres, the majority of the land targeted for conservation. The property is managed by Jacqueline D. Urow, a member of the Canter family.

Urow has not been approached by any governmental agencies about the preservation plans, and she said she hadn't intended on selling all of the property. She said there are no plans to develop her land.

State and federal officials said they need to hammer out more specifics before they can begin serious negotiations. Gayle Gordon, BLM's director for its 31-state eastern region, said that her agency, the state and Charles County expect to sign an agreement in coming weeks outlining how all the land would be managed.

Osborne, at the Trust for Public Land, said her office recently finalized a deal to secure the 466-acre Wilson property. The owner is committed to sell if the trust moves ahead with the deal.

The Wilson property includes Mallows Bay, which historians believe harbors the largest ship graveyard in North America. About 130 ships, most part of a fleet of steamships built during World War I, lie partially submerged, a carpet of vegetation covering the exposed surfaces.

Charles County has already expressed interest in maintaining the Wilson property and establishing a point of public boat access to the river. Other preliminary discussions have revolved around creating a kiosk overlooking Mallows Bay or an interpretive kayak and canoe trail that would allow the public to learn more about the ship graveyard.

The way the county, state and federal officials see it, such projects could encourage eco-tourism, providing a valuable economic boost for western Charles County.

"As in all cases, we have to develop a plan that's going to actually involve all of the people with an interest in the property," Nelson said. "I'm confident in the partnership [with the federal government and Charles County]. I've got to be optimistic."

---

Chemist claims fuel additive cuts pollution, boosts mileage

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
By August Gribbin THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000825223719.htm

A former American University chemist yesterday reported that he and a Virginia entrepreneur had created a safe, pollution-reducing and mileage-boosting replacement for harmful gasoline additives.

In a well-received paper presented at the annual American Chemical Society meeting that ended here yesterday, Paul Waters explained he had created a polymer additive for gasoline called polyisobutylene.

He said that controlled company tests using more than 50 different automobiles show the new agent reduces harmful auto emissions by 70 percent while increasing engine power 10 percent and gas mileage at least 20 percent.

The additive is being tested by officials in California, Maryland and Wisconsin, and also in China, Japan and Ireland.

"We've introduced the first antiknock [or combustion-enhancing] agent that is not a poison or environmental disaster," Mr. Waters said in an interview.

"What Professor Waters has, on the face of it, is a quite remarkable discovery," said Graham Swift, a Philadelphia-based polymer scientist and industrial consultant.

He adds, "I heard Professor Waters' presentation and conferred with respected colleagues. The consensus is that his science is good. He doesn't leave much room for doubt - a very good scientific discovery."

Put most simply, Mr. Waters' discovery is a method of changing the physical properties of gasoline rather than simply adding oxygen to it as all other additives do.

Introducing as little as two ounces of the polyisobutylene to a tank of gas forces slower-burning gasoline molecules to move closer to the faster-burning ones. That allows the fuel to burn more evenly at reduced temperatures. When that happens, fewer unwanted emissions are produced.

The altered gasoline reportedly cannot harm engines and can be used universally - in lawn mowers and in big trucks' diesels, too.

Mr. Waters is an emeritus professor at American University. For years, he has been collaborating with General Technology Applications, a small, 22-year-old Gainesville, Va., company that was formed to commercialize the military's technological innovations.

Company president Jerry Trippe said Mr. Waters "stumbled" on the technology for producing the additive while he and company specialists were trying to modify jet fuels so they wouldn't explode in crashes.

Both Mr. Trippe and Mr. Waters are convinced their discovery can bring an end to the long and increasingly intense search for a new way to reduce smog-producing and dangerous hydrocarbon emissions from internal-combustion engines.

Since 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency has required the use of gasolines reformulated with pollution-reducing additives in at least 17 states reporting severe smog. That includes most of the Northeast.

But in the last couple of years, the quest for a better additive has gained crucial importance because the most common additive, MTBE (or methyl tertiary butyl ether) has been found to contaminate ground water and to create serious health risks.

A National Academy of Sciences study also found last year that MTBE and its common substitute ethanol do little to reduce smog and are likely to worsen pollution. California and five other states thus have banned the additive and Maine no longer requires its use.

Mr. Trippe said there is no question that polyisobutylene can fill the gap left by MTBE. "The trick is for a little company to arrange and pay for all the testing needed to convince the petroleum industry," he said. "Ours is an unusual approach. The experts aren't used to confronting the problem the way we have."

Mr. Waters is less diplomatic.

"It's difficult when you have something brand new because the regulators tend not to understand any technology that wasn't invented by some German before 1900," he said.

-------- imf / world bank

Debt referendum planned in Brazil

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
World Scene • Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/world/worldscene-2000825234635.htm

BRASILIA, Brazil - The powerful Catholic Church in Brazil, critical of deep social inequalities, challenged the government yesterday on its large debt bills and support for an International Monetary Fund austerity.

Brazil's National Bishops' Council - which groups Roman Catholic leaders in the world's largest Catholic country - is organizing a nationwide plebiscite on debt payments next month to focus attention on meager spending for the poor.

At a news conference council members said they hope the plebiscite will change attitudes in the huge nation in which 50 percent of the 165 million population lives in poverty.

If the finance minister and the president think differently, let them convince the population to say 'yes' to the IMF deal, to the payment of external debts without an audit of the payments and the bleeding of the country's wealth to enrich speculators," said a statement handed out by the council at the news conference.

-------- politics

[I include this because so rarely does the media publish the actual words of people they're immortalizing. This has to do with war and peace in the middle east. Nuclear weapons are an implement of war, which so often is a result of missed communication.]

FARRAKHAN IN HIS OWN WORDS Lieberman: A test for White America

[SARN] What Farrakhan ACTUALLY Said
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 23:12:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: John C Lindsay <jclind1@sac.uky.edu>
http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/DeanofStudents/Dialogues/ http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/AWARE http://www.igc.org/projectsarn/ http://www.gospelgrandma.com

What did Minister Louis Farrakhan really say about Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joseph Lieberman? And why is the white-owned media intentionally misrepresenting his very clear words on the candidacy of the first Jewish candidate for that office?

The following unedited text is excerpted from a one-hour press conference that Minister Louis Farrakhan had Aug. 11 with journalists from white-owned mainstream media and the Black press in Los Angeles during a Million Family March promotional tour stop in the city.

Question by journalist from the L.A. Focus newspaper: My question is: Senator Lieberman was selected as America's first Jewish vice president candidate. Do you feel that that choice was a good choice, and what are your thoughts on a Jewish candidate being selected as the vice president? And do you think Black America is ready for a Jewish vice president?

Minister Farrakhan: See, that ends the press conference (Min. Farrakhan, audience laughter). That's the question that everybody wanted to know. After I answer that question, I guess the press conference is over. (Laughter continues.) When one is chosen to be vice president, really the top consideration should be, should the evil accident of time or something unfortunate happen to the President of the United States, that the Vice President, in his experience and wisdom, should be able to step in and run the country. Most everyone believes that Senator Lieberman has those kinds of qualities. That he could step in should anything happen and run the country well.

Black America would always be ready to receive a Jewish vice president because it has never been a problem for Black people what a person's faith is if that person is qualified. I must say, though, the choice of Senator Lieberman is a great test for the United States of America. Not so much for the Blacks. But it is a test for America. The question should be, is white America ready to have a Jewish vice president who is a heartbeat away from being the President of the United States of America. (Applause, light laughter, cheers).

If America answers that question well, and by well I mean that anti-Semitism would not raise its ugly head, if America answers that question well, then America has indeed matured. I think Rev. Jackson said, I'm not sure. I think it was Rev. Jackson (who said) it shows the maturity of the Democratic Party to chose a member of the Jewish faith to be the vice president. That choice now must be accepted by the American people. Blacks are not a problem. Never have been. Now, if you want to know if Louis Farrakhan is going to be a problem (light laughter), see, those of you who think that I am anti-Semitic, you are so mistaken.

If this man (Lieberman) is qualified, if this man would be fair and just, and as a Muslim, now I have concerns. As a Black person I have concerns. Maybe he will help us to be more comfortable, because he was against affirmative action. A lot of Black people see the public school system as having failed the American people and they are in favor of vouchers. He was not.

I agree with Senator Lieberman when he takes on Hollywood and the filth that is being poured on the American people in the name of the First Amendment. I agree with Mr. Bush who is pro-life, but I think that when John F. Kennedy became the nominee of the Democratic Party, I think he was the first Catholic and people had concerns as to whether he would be more loyal to an edict or something coming from the Vatican than he would to the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Kennedy passed that test. Unfortunately, he was assassinated.

Mr. Lieberman, as an orthodox Jew, is also a citizen, dual citizenship, with Israel. And the state of Israel is not synonymous with the United States. And the test that he would probably have to pass is would he be more faithful to the Constitution of the United States than to the ties that any Jewish person would have to the state of Israel. That's very real. Other people, fearing that they will be called anti-Semitic, may not raise such a point.

I am not anti-Semitic, but I raise that point. And I'll go one step further, and that is this, that I think it was Senator Lieberman who said that the cornerstone of America's foreign policy is the security of Israel. Now, that to me is significant because as a Muslim now, I'm speaking as a Muslim, any Arab or Muslim state that does not agree with the existence of Israel because of land being taken from the Palestinians to carve out that state, and if they seem to be a threat to Israel, then America's foreign policy would lean toward ostracizing or vilifying or maligning those Muslim states. Libya for one. Iran two. Syria three. Arab nations that won't come in and play ball--four. Iraq. Sudan. So that bothers me because I visited all of these countries and I know that they would like a better relationship with America, and I would hope that if Mr. Gore and Mr. Lieberman become the president and vice-president of this great nation, that a just and fair policy would come from the Government of the United States toward Muslim states who may have some disagreement with Israel.

And I think that's fair for me as a Muslim to be concerned. So, if I were Jewish, and I saw a presidential hopeful, I would want to know what their position is on Israel. As a Black man and as a Muslim, I want to know what will your position be with the Muslim states. What will your position be with Syria and the Golan Heights. What is your position with the peace process? How do you feel about Iran? Iraq? Libya? Sudan? These are called rogue states because America has the power to name people and make the name that they call you stick. These are not rogues. They are people that really have a point of view that is never heard in the Congress before the Congress arrogantly calls them rogues. We have never invited them to the Congress to defend themselves.

That kind of thing has to stop and that's why we can't leave it in the hands of Mr. Lieberman or Mr. Gore or Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney. It's got to be now in the hands of the people of the United States of America. (Applause)

-------- spying

CIA withholds its Chile files

Obstruction: With the same tenacity used to destabilize Chile's democratic institutions in the early 1970s, the CIA has sought to undermine the credibility of the Chile Declassification Project.

By Peter Kornbluh, August 27, 2000 Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/editorial/printversion.cgi?storyid=1150420212057&breadcrumb1=Opinion

Peter Kornbluh directs the Chile Documentation Project at the Public Interest Research Center, the National Security Archive in Washington. He is author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability."

"Ibelieve you have the right to know what happened back then, and how it happened," President Clinton stated last fall on his policy to declassify documents on U.S. involvement with the Pinochet regime in Chile.

The CIA, however, disagrees.

In a clear attack on the principle of openness and accountability, CIA Director George J. Tenet has decided that the Agency - not the president - determines what American citizens should know about the history of their government's conduct abroad.

At the behest of his covert warriors in the Directorate of Operations, Tenet is refusing to declassify hundreds of records from the early and mid-1970s on CIA covert intervention to destabilize the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and support the violent consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship.

If the White House does not take steps to overrule his position, the credibility of the administration's human rights policy abroad, and the rights of Americans to evaluate what was done in their name - but without their knowledge - will be severely compromised.

Since early last year, the Clinton administration has been conducting a groundbreaking special "Chile Declassification Project." Bowing to international pressure to take a stand on former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's arrest in London in February 1999, the Clinton White House ordered all agencies to "retrieve and review for declassification documents that shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism and other acts of political violence in Chile," before and during the Pinochet regime.

To date, more than 7,500 formerly secret records have been declassified - most of them from the State Department. Under the admirable direction of Secretary Madeleine K. Albright, the department has cleaned its archives of hundreds of important documents on what the U.S. knew about Pinochet's atrocities, including the death and disappearance of three U.S. citizens in Chile and the Sept. 21, 1976, act of international terrorism in Washington that took the lives of Ronni Moffitt and former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier.

The CIA is a different story.

The Agency has the most to offer to the Chile Declassification Project - but also the most to hide. While some CIA reporting on Pinochet's atrocities has been declassified, to date not a single document on the Agency's own involvement in promoting political violence to undermine democracy and to help bring a violent dictatorship to power has been released.

Indeed, with the same tenacity used to destabilize Chile's democratic institutions in the early 1970s, the CIA has sought to undermine the credibility of the declassification project.

When the guidance for gathering and reviewing documents was being drafted in early 1999, Agency officials insisted on inserting language which it claimed would exempt any search of covert-operations files.

When White House officials overruled that argument, the CIA asserted that documents on its covert role in political violence in Chile, and its support for Pinochet's secret police forces, were "nonresponsive" to the president's directive.

When the National Security Council rejected that argument, the CIA blocked the release of approximately 800 covert-action documents found in the Nixon and Ford presidential libraries and submitted by the National Archives for declassification.

My organization, the National Security Archive, is a leading advocate for the public's "right-to-know" on foreign policy issues. Last fall, the archive led a campaign to end the CIA's obstruction of the Chile Declassification Project, which forced Tenet to reconsider.

The CIA sent "written assurances" to the White House that such documents would be gathered, reviewed and released. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield told the press that "the CIA recognizes its obligation to release documents on covert actions in Chile. By the time this process is completed, the documents ... will be released."

To their credit, CIA analysts did compile hundreds of records covering the whole history of U.S. clandestine involvement in Chile, from 1962 through 1975 - which includes the first two years of the Pinochet regime. These documents were reviewed and redacted - information on sources and methods was blacked out to safeguard national security - and readied for final release on Sept. 14.

But, in a coup against the democratic concept of freedom of information, high officials at the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's covert-action division, have intervened to block public access to even censored records on U.S. operations in Chile. The official justification: "in their aggregate," as Tenet wrote earlier this month to Congress, "these materials present a pattern of activity that had the effect of revealing intelligence methods that have been employed worldwide."

As it has so many times in the past, the CIA is trying to protect a fictional secret. The aggregate "pattern of activity" - the multiple methods of undermining democracy and supporting dictatorship in Chile - has, in fact, already been officially revealed; it was published 25 years ago in two comprehensive Senate Committee reports based on the very documents the agency now claims must remain secret.

The special Senate Committee, chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, recorded the bribery, kidnapping, propaganda operations, clandestine funding of politicians, newspapers, journalists and businessmen, as well as the liaisons with the Chilean military before, during and after the coup. The level of detail got down to the dollar amounts the CIA spent on financing El Mercurio, Chile's leading newspaper ($1.6 million) to the caliber of weapons passed to assets in an attempt to foment a military coup.

Covert action, Sen. Church concluded after his long inquiry, was a "semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies - whatever is deemed useful in bending another country to our will."

To be sure, the CIA's operational files on Chile are, in essence, the 'Pentagon Papers' of a major covert war. Their release is certain to stir a substantive reaction among Chileans over the degree of Washington's covert influence in altering the history of their nation. Similarly, the documents will renew a debate in the United States over the propriety of that "pattern of activity" the CIA seems so desperate to conceal.

But that is the purpose of being free to study the historical record - to learn the lessons of the past and provide for informed decisions about the future.

The CIA must not be allowed to arbitrarily hold this history hostage. At home, it is a danger to the democratic principle of an informed electorate to permit the Directorate of Operations to designate itself the chief archivist of the United States and determine what the public can know - and what it can't - about government conduct, and misconduct, more than 25 years ago.

Abroad, it will undermine the credibility of U.S. leadership on human rights, and our diplomatic efforts to help countries like Chile address and resolve the horrors of the past and move on to stronger democratic futures.

With the State Department pushing to obtain a thorough accounting of the murders and disappearances of three U.S. citizens and the act of terrorism in Washington, the CIA's continuing coverup of accountability can only weaken our diplomatic efforts to press the Chileans to acknowledge the truth and pursue those responsible.

Chile's civilian authorities deserve ample credit for recently taking bold and courageous steps to confront a painful past by moving Gen. Augusto Pinochet toward a historic trial on human rights abuses.

It is a far less courageous, but no less necessary step for the Clinton White House to assert civilian control over the keepers of the secrets and order the CIA - in the name of democracy abroad and at home - to acknowledge and disclose the record of Washington's contribution to Chile's tragedy.

Originally published on Aug 27 2000

----

Prosecution May Be Urged in C.I.A. Case

New York Times
August 27, 2000
By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/082700cia-deutch.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 -- A special prosecutor investigating John M. Deutch, the former director of central intelligence, has told law enforcement officials that he is wrapping up his inquiry and expects to recommend that Mr. Deutch be prosecuted on charges of mishandling classified information, government officials said today.

The prosecutor, Paul E. Coffey, has not yet made any recommendations to Attorney General Janet Reno, the officials said. But Mr. Coffey, who was brought out of retirement for the Deutch matter, has told others in the Justice Department that he is inclined to conclude that Mr. Deutch be charged with storing government secrets on his home computer, a security violation.

Ms. Reno initially declined to prosecute Mr. Deutch, who had acknowledged a breach of security and apologized. But she ordered a new inquiry in February after a report from the C.I.A. inspector general questioned how the agency's leadership had handled the matter. In addition, the issue of how Mr. Deutch's case was dealt with drew criticism from Congress and elsewhere for its sharp contrast with the Wen Ho Lee case.

Dr. Lee, a former scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is being prosecuted on charges of illegally transferring and copying secret nuclear data from the laboratory, an offense some Justice Department critics have argued is similar to what Mr. Deutch may have done.

The government officials spoke after Bloomberg News Service first reported on the matter on Friday.

Mr. Deutch was director of central intelligence from May 1995 until resigning in December 1996. As he was leaving, a C.I.A. computer security official found that he had stored information at his home, including details of covert operations.

The agency's security office began an investigation into whether he had mishandled classified material but that inquiry soon bogged down.

The Justice Department was not notified that he might have broken any laws until more than a year after the breach was discovered. In 1998, a C.I.A. employee told the inspector general's office that the initial investigation had been improperly handled.

The inspector general then opened his own inquiry and notified the Department of Justice.

Six senior agency officials have been disciplined for their roles in the initial investigation of Mr. Deutch.

---

Russia refuses bail for spy suspect

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
World Scene • Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/world/worldscene-2000825234635.htm

MOSCOW - A Pennsylvania businessman accused of spying and held in a top-security Russian jail was refused bail yesterday, despite his lawyer's arguments that he may have cancer and needs specialized medical help.

Edmond Pope, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, was arrested in April on charges of purchasing secret design information about a high-tech torpedo for tens of thousands of dollars. His lawyer said yesterday he is accused of buying the plans from a Russian science professor.

The lawyer, Pavel Astakhov, said Mr. Pope denied trying to purchase documents containing secret information.

-------- terrorism

FBI in Romania

Washington Times
August 25, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.

U.S. Ambassador to Romania James Rosapepe yesterday praised Romania as a partner in fighting crime, as he attended the opening of an FBI office in the capital, Bucharest.

"Romania proves once again to be a key partner in efforts by European countries and the United States in tackling organized and cross-border crimes," he said.

Two FBI agents will assist Romanian authorities in fighting organized crime and terrorism.

To contact James Morrison, call 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail morris@twtmail.com

-------- activists

Americans Experience Life in Iraq

Associated Press
August 27, 2000 Filed at 4:15 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Iraq-Americans.html

BASRA, Iraq (AP) -- A horde of small children rushed to greet five American activists Sunday as the activists went to clean a primary school in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of this southern Iraqi city.

``We love American children,'' sang the barefoot children.

After six weeks in Basra, the activists from the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, which opposes U.N. sanctions against Iraq, have become household names.

The Americans came to Basra in mid-July intent on experiencing firsthand the discomforts of a country that has been under siege from sanctions for a decade. They chose the low-income al-Jumhouriya neighborhood, where nearly 200,000 residents live on meager food rations and deal with regular power cuts and sewage problems.

The activists are Kathy Kelly of Chicago; Lisa Gizzi of St. Paul, Minn.; Mark McGuire of Winona, Minn. and Tom Jackson and Lauren Cannon, both of Dover, N.H.

A sixth member, Ken Hannaford-Ricardi of Worcester, Mass., was unable to tolerate life in al-Jumhouriya, a labyrinth of mostly one-story crumbling brick houses bisected by open sewage and dotted with dumps of uncollected garbage. He stayed for only two weeks.

Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, bore the brunt of Iraq's 1980-1988 war with Iran and then the 1991 Gulf War. The wars devastated its infrastructure, and the sanctions imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait have made rehabilitation almost impossible.

U.S. missiles slammed al-Jumhouriya on Jan. 25, 1999, killing 11 people, injuring 59 and demolishing dozens of houses. U.S. officials have said it was likely that U.S. jets targeting Iraqi air defense installations as part of a southern no-fly zone misfired.

The U.S. activists have become a familiar sight in al-Jumhouriya. Like the Iraqi families they are staying with, they sleep on the roof at night to escape excessive heat during power cuts that last up to 14 hours, bathe by dumping bowls of water over their heads and use fans to cool their faces and drive off insects.

In the morning, they meet for their Arabic class. Kelly, Cannon and Gizzi have picked up enough colloquial Arabic to communicate with the locals.

Because two of them have already contracted diarrhea, the Americans now drink bottled water -- their only luxury.

Many families come to the Americans for help, but there is little Kelly and her group can do. Umm Mohammed wants medicine to alleviate her arthritis. University students visit them for books, newspapers or magazines. Such items are banned by the sanctions.

``I have only seen a few old books in this neighborhood,'' Cannon said.

After they end their mission in early September, the activists plan to stage a demonstration outside the White House and auction hundreds of fans on the Internet to highlight the plight of the Iraqis. They also plan to give fans free of charge to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the U.S. presidential candidates and State Department employees who staff the Iraq desk.

For Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the activists will take a mat sewn by teen-age girls made of small plastic bags. They are the same bags in which rationed powdered milk is distributed.

``The propaganda in the United States tells the American people that there is only one person (President Saddam Hussein) who lives here,'' Kelly said. ``The Americans do not know that here in Iraq are 22 million people deprived of education, employment, clean water, power supply and other essential services.''

Voices has led more than 30 delegations of U.S. citizens to Iraq to see the effects of the sanctions. Their tours include visits to pediatric wards of dying children and inoperative water treatment plants.

Bad water has created an epidemic of dysentery and infectious diseases, resulting in thousands of child deaths. UNICEF says the number of infant and child deaths in Iraq has doubled in the decade since the sanctions began.

---

World's Religious Leaders in NY Without Dalai Lama

Yahoo News
Sunday August 27 5:27 PM ET updated 6:56 AM ET Aug 28
By Daniel Bases
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000827/wl/un_peacesummit_dc_1.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Religious and spiritual leaders from around the world arrived on Sunday for the Millennium World Peace Summit, where they will pray and discuss over four days how to help solve conflicts and achieve peace.

But conspicuously absent among the 1000 religious and spiritual leaders from more than 15 major faith traditions will be the Dalai Lama, the well-known exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists and winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.

Organizers have declared Aug. 28 as the ``Day of Prayer for World Peace.''

The United Nations is playing host to some of the Summit's events, working in coordination with the organizers, a consortium of non-governmental interfaith groups.

``We all know that China strongly objects to his holiness's participation especially in the framework of the United Nations,'' Bawa Jain, Secretary General of the Millennium World Peace Summit said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

The Dalai Lama's office has said that apparent pressure from the Chinese Government on the U.N. caused him to be excluded from the summit taking place Aug 28-31.

``Their position from the beginning is that he is not a religious leader, that he is a political leader and we have to work within the framework of the (U.N's) political structure,'' Jain added.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said the U.N. ``is really a house for the member states and their sensitivities matter. This is an issue that the organizers of the meeting have known all along.''

The Chinese government is sending a delegation made up of individuals representing the faiths of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism.

In a statement released last week, Jain wrote: ``The intention of the summit is rather collectively to disavow the terrible misuse of religion for political purposes, to eschew the use of violence and war 'in the name of religion.'''

``For China to send a delegation is a major breakthrough. ... Maybe there is hope, maybe spirituality is really penetrating,'' Jain said in the interview.

The Dalai Lama declined a belated invitation to the summit's closing ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, the summit's headquarters.

According to Jain, the Dalai Lama is sending a high-level delegation to the summit, including Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche, head of the Drikung Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, who will address the summit participants at the U.N.'s General Assembly on Aug. 29 on the subject of forgiveness and reconciliation.

China, which annexed Tibet in 1951 and has drawn wide recriminations for its human rights abuses in the region, refuses to acknowledge the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile during a bloody 1959 uprising.

`One of the fundamental commitments of the religious leaders coming is how can we harness our energies and work and support and strengthen the United Nations system. We want to build an interfaith ally to the United Nations and its quest for peace,'' Jain said.

Included among the expected attendees are Francis Cardinal Arinze who will represent the Vatican; Samdech Preah Maha Gosananda, the Buddhist Nobel Prize nominee; Abdullah Salaih Al-Obaida, Secretary General of the Muslim World League; Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel; and Dr. Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia.

A major portion of the summit's funding is coming from the U.N. Foundation/Better World fund, created by Ted Turner, the Vice Chairman of Time Warner Inc., and founder of Cable News Network. Turner is serving as Honorary Chair of the Summit.

The summit organizers will hold open dialogues at the U.N. covering subjects such as ``The Role of Religion in Conflict Transformation'', and ``Toward Forgiveness & Reconciliation.''

At the Waldorf, closed-door sessions will place together attendees of different faiths, many from areas that have experienced armed conflicts between them.

Religious leaders from dozens of countries and regions, including the Balkans, Central Asia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Indonesia, Israel, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Syria, and the Sudan, are expected to open dialogues.

According to the summit organizers, 83 percent of the world's population believe in some formal religious or spiritual belief system.

Recognizing the vast number of different faiths from around the world, organizers set out criteria for identifying the ''major'' religious institutions.

Among them were their ``historical importance; the number of adherents; geography and reach; and antiquity: a general guideline is that the religion or faith should be more than 100 years old and its charismatic founder or leader is no longer present in body.''

---

Activists Say Disney Record on Dalmatians Spotty

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Sarah Tippit
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/re/leisure_dalmatians_dc_2.html

BURBANK, Calif. (Reuters) - A dog may be man's best friend but a corporation may be the worst thing that ever happened to a dog, animal activists charged Monday as they ripped into the Walt Disney Co. for endangering Dalmatians.

The activists said Disney (NYSE:DIS - news), with its upcoming sequel movie ``102 Dalmatians,'' was promoting unhealthy stereotypes of the zippy, black-and-white canines -- making them seem warm and cuddly when in fact they are high strung and unpredictable. As a result, kennels overbreed them and owners abandon and abuse them when they don't live up to their image, they said.

``Disney is making a fortune off these dogs but they don't bear any responsibility for the overbreeding and ... abuse they suffer later on when they're no longer cute little puppies and owners dump them into the animal shelters,'' said Ann Herrington, one of a handful of animal rights activists who held a press conference at the gates of Walt Disney Studios Monday to raise awareness of the plight of the pups.

A Disney spokesman had no immediate comment on the charge but on Friday, the company said it was teaming up with the Dalmatian Club of America to promote pet adoption and selection awareness in conjunction with the release of the film ``102 Dalmatians'' in November.

The activists said Disney stands to make millions selling black-and-white spotted paraphernalia to coincide with the Thanksgiving release of the sequel to ``101 Dalmatians,'' a 1996 live-action remake of the 1960s animated classic of the same name.

The Disney empire had licensed more than 17,000 items of merchandise that tied into ``101 Dalmatians,'' including porcelain eggs, boxer shorts, bedsheets, soap and diamond-studded pens, the activists said. They said that Disney is sure to have more such products out in time for the sequel.

At the same time ``puppy mills'', as commercial dog-breeding operations are called, stand to make money by churning out thousands of cute little dogs for the holidays. But in real life, Dalmatians grow up to become less-than-ideal pets for children and first-time dog owners.

They can grow to weigh more than 80 pounds, are highly strung, and can be unpredictable with children, strangers and other dogs. In addition, up to 26 percent of Dalmatians are deaf and the dogs are prone to other congenital defects, which mean they can require special diets and medical care.

As a result, within a few months of their purchase many Dalmatians end up abandoned in shelters where at least 90 percent are euthanized.

Last year more than 10,000 showed up in Los Angeles County shelters, said Teri Austin of the Los Angeles-based Amanda Foundation while wearing a black suit covered in dog hair to demonstrate to reporters how badly Dalmatians shed.

The number of abandoned Dalmatians increased more than 100 percent since before the 1996 Disney film was released, she said. Another glut of poorly bred and abused dogs is expected following the Disney sequel, she said.

``These dogs are a wonderful breed but they're not for everyone,'' Austin said.

Richard Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, said in Friday's statement that publicity surrounding the movie's release would include efforts to educate the public on pet adoptions.

``One of the main themes of this sequel involves animal shelters and promotes responsible pet ownership,'' he said.

--------

OneList subscribers:

NucNews - Please circulate -- help educate! - http://prop1.org

1. Toxic rocket tests
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

2. Coverup of Oak Ridge Iodine-131 Effects
From: easlavin@aol.com

-------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 05:29:52 +0100
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

Toxic rocket tests

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/00/37/news-collins.shtml

The URL above is for an article called "Russians, Rockets and the Santa Ana River: A closed weapons plant may be leaking hazardous chemicals into the Santa Ana River." The article quotes the director of Physicians for Social Responsibility as saying "It's Rocketdyne East." In the Sunday, August 20, 2000 Oakland Tribune on page News-4 there was this small item about the Rocketdyne site:

AROUND THE STATE Simi Valley

Toxic rocket tests: A former Department of Energy research site east of Simi Valley will never be completely clean of hazardous waste, a National Academy of Sciences report said.

The 90-acre Energy Technology Engineering Center was used for rocket testing and nuclear research from the 1950s to the 1980s, and it may be linked to numerous cancer cases in the surrounding residential areas.

The site is nestled in the Santa Susana Mountains on the Los Angeles/Ventura county border 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

The former DOE site is on the 2,700-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory owned by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Boeing.

--------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:15:13 EDT
From: easlavin@aol.com

Coverup of Oak Ridge Iodine-131 Effects

Impact of radioactive iodine worse than stated August 27, 2000 Knoxville News-Sentinel By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel Oak Ridge bureau

OAK RIDGE -- One of the most important conclusions of the Oak Ridge Health Studies Project, completed early this year, was that radioactive iodine releases in the 1940s and '50s increased the likelihood of thyroid cancer in the region.

The report estimated there could be as many as 150 "excess" cancer cases in the population living within 125 miles of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Yet, Dr. Owen Hoffman, chief architect of those findings, said the final report of the state-run study omitted or altered some details of his work and underplayed the significance of the iodine problem.

The environmental scientist also said new evidence indicates the discharges of iodine-131 from ORNL were higher than previously estimated, maybe even three times as much.

Hoffman said it's unclear how new calculations on the discharges might alter the overall health conclusions, but said, "Both sides of the equation need to be revisited."

His views, however, haven't drawn much support.

Hoffman said efforts to correct the existing record and push for new information have been ignored, and he suggested there may be a motive for sweeping the problem under the rug.

"I believe that the state of Tennessee is under pressure politically to downplay negative news about exposures to contaminants in the Oak Ridge region," he said.

State officials and others associated with the health studies scoffed at that quote, refuted many of Hoffman's criticisms and, in turn, suggested the Oak Ridge scientist might have an ulterior motive for promoting additional investigations. "It certainly would be an economic boon to him if additional studies were approved," said Dr. William Moore, director of communicable and environmental disease services in the Tennessee Department of Health.

The fallout from the seven-year health study seems to be almost as nasty as some of pollutants that were studied.

"Owen has had more than ample opportunity to express his views, to present them to that expert panel," Moore said, referring to the study's steering panel that included a number of scientists and health officials.

Hoffman said he's driven not by money but a desire to get the truth to people who may have been harmed by radioactive releases. He said he offered to redo aspects of the radiation dose reconstruction for free, just to improve the quality of the data.

The health impact of ORNL's nuclear discharges may be greater than thought and ought to be looked at again, he said. At the least, he said, people should be alerted to the concerns.

In addition to causing a regional increase in thyroid cancer, the Oak Ridge releases -- combined with radioactive fallout from the A-bomb tests at Nevada Test Site during the same time frame -- may have put some individuals at greater risk for noncancerous thyroid diseases, particularly hyperactive thyroid conditions, Hoffman said.

The issue of radiation-induced "auto-immune thyroiditis" has gained new attention of specialists in recent months, he said, noting discussions at a June workshop hosted by the Centers for the Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute.

He said it's important for East Tennesseans to be aware of this information because the noncancer diseases are not reportable and abnormal rates wouldn't show up on any state registry. He also noted some thyroid conditions that are treatable with medicine may not be diagnosed properly unless there's a greater awareness of the environmental factors at work.

The Oak Ridge Health Studies Project, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, was begun in 1991 to evaluate the significance of historic pollution from the government's Oak Ridge facilities.

The steering panel and its chief contractor, ChemRisk, screened a long list of pollutants before focusing on materials of greatest concern, which included toxic mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and radioactive materials, including iodine-131.

The dose reconstruction for I-131 was designated Task 1 on the Oak Ridge project, and that involved a review of releases from ORNL between September 1944 and October 1956.

The atmospheric releases of radioactive iodine occurred as the Oak Ridge laboratory chemically processed fuel slugs from the Graphite Reactor to extract barium-140. The barium isotope produced lanthanum-140, which was urgently needed at the time for use in nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the so-called "RaLa" (short for radioactive lanthanum) work at ORNL had top priority during the early Cold War period.

ChemRisk did most of the health studies research, including interviews with former workers at ORNL to document how much radioactive iodine was released during the 1940s and '50s. Hoffman's company, SENES Oak Ridge, was the subcontractor that assessed the data and used mathematical models to determine the potential for health impacts.

The 92-page final report released by the health project's steering panel devoted considerable space and attention to the iodine releases at ORNL, including top billing in the summary of risks from Oak Ridge pollution. A section in the report detailed the findings and outlined the cancer risks for different individuals, based on where they lived in proximity to ORNL and their habits.

Those most at risk included girls exposed at an early age and those who drank goat's milk or nonprocessed cow's milk from nearby farms.

Hoffman was unhappy, however, that some information in the final task report was not included in the steering panel's report, including a discussion of elevated thyroid cancer rates in counties surrounding ORNL.

He said a review of the state's disease registry identified increases of thyroid cancer in Loudon, Knox, Roane and Anderson counties that appeared to be consistent with predicted doses from ORNL's nuclear discharges.

Paul Voilleque, a health physicist and risk analyst who chaired the steering panel, said there was considerable discussion among panel members about that issue. He said it was determined the number of thyroid cancers in those counties was not statistically significant or different from the rest of Tennessee when other factors were considered, such as the differences in rates between blacks and whites.

Hoffman objected.

"'Statistically insignificant' is a vocabulary sometimes used by bureaucrats to create the impression there was no impact," he said. "We could not say that (increase in thyroid cancers) was due to the exposures, but it's interesting that it was consistent with our findings."

He sent a long memo to Voilleque in late March with a list of his complaints, including "important results" left out of the final report by the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel.

Among his complaints: "There is no referral to the detailed estimates of thyroid dose, excess relative risk and excess lifetime risk of thyroid cancer, including the probability of causation for those with current thyroid cancer and benign nodules. The fact that detailed estimates are provided in the appendices of the final Task 1 report for 41 different locations downwind of X-10 (another name for ORNL) as a function of 4 different diets, different ages at time of exposure and differences in gender should have at least been included in the overall summary of the final ORHASP report."

Hoffman said he was not even invited to the public meeting at the American Museum of Science & Energy when the health report was released, and he criticized the exhibit posters for not addressing important health impacts.

Lipford, the project director, said he thought Hoffman was out of town at the time of the report's release.

Lipford and Voilleque said other people, including some members of the steering panel, also noted problems with the museum exhibit, which was later updated to include more details on thyroid disease linked to ORNL's radioactive discharges.

They also said some of Hoffman's concerns will be addressed in a final electronic version of the health studies report that will be posted later on the Internet.

Regarding some issues, however, there simply is a disagreement, Lipford said.

Hoffman said there was personal animosity toward him even while work was under way on the health report, and he cited a number of actions he considered to be retaliation, including delayed payments that almost forced his company, SENES, to go out of business.

Lipford acknowledged there were some "frank discussions" about budget matters, but he said he was surprised to hear reports of animosity.

"If that his belief, it's certainly his belief and he's entitled to it," he said.

The state official called the research by Hoffman and his SENES staff "a splendid piece of work" and said they were easy to work with.

One issue almost from the beginning of the study was how to get an accurate estimate on the iodine releases during the RaLa project at ORNL. There were serious questions about the adequacy of existing records, and there were obvious problems trying to assess conditions 40 years ago, including the effectiveness of filters during the early nuclear era.

Hoffman challenged the data put together by ChemRisk on more than one occasion during the exercise. Since the report was completed, he has suggested there may be more problems related to the estimates on iodine releases.

In his memo to Voilleque, Hoffman wrote: "In actuality, our overall estimates of the excess cases of thyroid cancer may be low due to potential underestimation of the release of the total amount of I-131 from X-10 ...."

Hoffman said the effectiveness of the caustic scrubbers, which acted as filters at the Oak Ridge processing facilities, was overrated.

"The estimates used to produce the results in our November 1998 final report (on Task 1) are now known to be unrealistic, especially during times when the scrubber was operated with water (instead of sodium hydroxide)," he wrote to Voilleque.

Hoffman said these concerns were noted in memos sent to the state, ChemRisk and the project steering panel in 1999 before the panel's final report was completed. He said he never received a reply.

Voilleque said the scrubber issue was discussed at length at several meetings by members of the steering panel. "I think there was a variety of opinions."

The panel chairman said there were not any efforts to contact Hoffman and SENES about the final report because their contract work had already been concluded.

"It was pretty clear there wasn't going to be any input from them unless somebody put more money in the pot," Voilleque said. "I believe some people had the feeling they were being held up for more money, and there was a general disinclination to pursue further refinements."

Asked if he was comfortable with the estimates on the releases of radioactive iodine at ORNL, Voilleque said: "I think we used the best information we had at the time the calculations were made ... but, you know, we don't have the option of going back and redoing Task One from the beginning. It's conceivable that somebody may want to do that.

"The report may not have been perfect, but at some point you have to stop," he said.

Voilleque said he couldn't understand suggestions that the study might have been influenced by pressure to minimize Oak Ridge problems.

"I think the panel would have told DOE to go fly a kite if we had felt they were trying to manipulate what we put in our report," he said.

Moore said no one at the state, to his knowledge, ever received any pressure from anyone. "Owen can say whatever he wants to say," the state official said. "I don't know what his agenda is."

Voilleque said others in the community felt that the health project may have overstated the effects of pollution. "There certainly are people in Oak Ridge who are glad our study is over with," he said.

Frank Munger can be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net.

--------------------------------------------------------------

DOEWatch List ----A Magnum-Opus Project
Subscribe online: http://www.onelist.com
DOEWatch page: http://members.aol.com/doewatch

1. Impact of radioactive iodine worse than stated
From: magnu96196@aol.com

2. Chem and Rad oxidant effect--->mtDNA and thyroid, heart, and other diseases
From: magnu96196@aol.com

3. Critics decry 'revolving door' at DOE
From: magnu96196@aol.com

4. Dark Cloud Hangs Over Los Alamos Besieged Atomic Lab Is Losing Staff, Spirit
From: magnu96196@aol.com

5. Report Minimizes Risks of Radiation
From: magnu96196@aol.com

6. Radiation Damage in DNA: a new look
From: Raymond Shadis <shadis@ime.net>

7. Special prosecutor may charge ex-CIA chief Deutch
From: magnu96196@aol.com

8. Erasing the Cold War from Rocky Flats
From: magnu96196@aol.com

9. Arvada to back Rocky Flats refuge
From: magnu96196@aol.com

10. Declassified photos give a new look at old Hanford
From: magnu96196@aol.com

11. Letter: GOP promises to put nuke waste in Nevada
From: magnu96196@aol.com

12. Police to make arrests over Tokaimura nuclear accident
From: magnu96196@aol.com

13. [OTP] SOMETHING TO PONDER - COMMON DENOMINATOR (?)
From: df7332@aol.com

14. Arvada to back Rocky Flats refuge
From: "Paula Elofson-Gardine, Exec. Dir." <pelofson1@home.com>

-----------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 06:39:35 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Impact of radioactive iodine worse than stated

By Frank Munger, News-Sentinel Oak Ridge bureau
August 27, 2000
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/14056.shtml

OAK RIDGE -- One of the most important conclusions of the Oak Ridge Health Studies Project, completed early this year, was that radioactive iodine releases in the 1940s and '50s increased the likelihood of thyroid cancer in the region.

The report estimated there could be as many as 150 "excess" cancer cases in the population living within 125 miles of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Yet, Dr. Owen Hoffman, chief architect of those findings, said the final report of the state-run study omitted or altered some details of his work and underplayed the significance of the iodine problem.

The environmental scientist also said new evidence indicates the discharges of iodine-131 from ORNL were higher than previously estimated, maybe even three times as much.

Hoffman said it's unclear how new calculations on the discharges might alter the overall health conclusions, but said, "Both sides of the equation need to be revisited."

His views, however, haven't drawn much support.

Hoffman said efforts to correct the existing record and push for new information have been ignored, and he suggested there may be a motive for sweeping the problem under the rug.

"I believe that the state of Tennessee is under pressure politically to downplay negative news about exposures to contaminants in the Oak Ridge region," he said.

State officials and others associated with the health studies scoffed at that quote, refuted many of Hoffman's criticisms and, in turn, suggested the Oak Ridge scientist might have an ulterior motive for promoting additional investigations. "It certainly would be an economic boon to him if additional studies were approved," said Dr. William Moore, director of communicable and environmental disease services in the Tennessee Department of Health.

The fallout from the seven-year health study seems to be almost as nasty as some of pollutants that were studied.

"Owen has had more than ample opportunity to express his views, to present them to that expert panel," Moore said, referring to the study's steering panel that included a number of scientists and health officials.

Hoffman said he's driven not by money but a desire to get the truth to people who may have been harmed by radioactive releases. He said he offered to redo aspects of the radiation dose reconstruction for free, just to improve the quality of the data.

The health impact of ORNL's nuclear discharges may be greater than thought and ought to be looked at again, he said. At the least, he said, people should be alerted to the concerns.

In addition to causing a regional increase in thyroid cancer, the Oak Ridge releases -- combined with radioactive fallout from the A-bomb tests at Nevada Test Site during the same time frame -- may have put some individuals at greater risk for noncancerous thyroid diseases, particularly hyperactive thyroid conditions, Hoffman said.

The issue of radiation-induced "auto-immune thyroiditis" has gained new attention of specialists in recent months, he said, noting discussions at a June workshop hosted by the Centers for the Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute.

He said it's important for East Tennesseans to be aware of this information because the noncancer diseases are not reportable and abnormal rates wouldn't show up on any state registry. He also noted some thyroid conditions that are treatable with medicine may not be diagnosed properly unless there's a greater awareness of the environmental factors at work.

The Oak Ridge Health Studies Project, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, was begun in 1991 to evaluate the significance of historic pollution from the government's Oak Ridge facilities.

The steering panel and its chief contractor, ChemRisk, screened a long list of pollutants before focusing on materials of greatest concern, which included toxic mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and radioactive materials, including iodine-131.

The dose reconstruction for I-131 was designated Task 1 on the Oak Ridge project, and that involved a review of releases from ORNL between September 1944 and October 1956.

The atmospheric releases of radioactive iodine occurred as the Oak Ridge laboratory chemically processed fuel slugs from the Graphite Reactor to extract barium-140. The barium isotope produced lanthanum-140, which was urgently needed at the time for use in nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the so-called "RaLa" (short for radioactive lanthanum) work at ORNL had top priority during the early Cold War period.

ChemRisk did most of the health studies research, including interviews with former workers at ORNL to document how much radioactive iodine was released during the 1940s and '50s. Hoffman's company, SENES Oak Ridge, was the subcontractor that assessed the data and used mathematical models to determine the potential for health impacts.

The 92-page final report released by the health project's steering panel devoted considerable space and attention to the iodine releases at ORNL, including top billing in the summary of risks from Oak Ridge pollution. A section in the report detailed the findings and outlined the cancer risks for different individuals, based on where they lived in proximity to ORNL and their habits.

Those most at risk included girls exposed at an early age and those who drank goat's milk or nonprocessed cow's milk from nearby farms.

Hoffman was unhappy, however, that some information in the final task report was not included in the steering panel's report, including a discussion of elevated thyroid cancer rates in counties surrounding ORNL.

He said a review of the state's disease registry identified increases of thyroid cancer in Loudon, Knox, Roane and Anderson counties that appeared to be consistent with predicted doses from ORNL's nuclear discharges.

Paul Voilleque, a health physicist and risk analyst who chaired the steering panel, said there was considerable discussion among panel members about that issue. He said it was determined the number of thyroid cancers in those counties was not statistically significant or different from the rest of Tennessee when other factors were considered, such as the differences in rates between blacks and whites.

Hoffman objected.

"'Statistically insignificant' is a vocabulary sometimes used by bureaucrats to create the impression there was no impact," he said. "We could not say that (increase in thyroid cancers) was due to the exposures, but it's interesting that it was consistent with our findings."

He sent a long memo to Voilleque in late March with a list of his complaints, including "important results" left out of the final report by the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel.

Among his complaints: "There is no referral to the detailed estimates of thyroid dose, excess relative risk and excess lifetime risk of thyroid cancer, including the probability of causation for those with current thyroid cancer and benign nodules. The fact that detailed estimates are provided in the appendices of the final Task 1 report for 41 different locations downwind of X-10 (another name for ORNL) as a function of 4 different diets, different ages at time of exposure and differences in gender should have at least been included in the overall summary of the final ORHASP report."

Hoffman said he was not even invited to the public meeting at the American Museum of Science & Energy when the health report was released, and he criticized the exhibit posters for not addressing important health impacts.

Lipford, the project director, said he thought Hoffman was out of town at the time of the report's release.

Lipford and Voilleque said other people, including some members of the steering panel, also noted problems with the museum exhibit, which was later updated to include more details on thyroid disease linked to ORNL's radioactive discharges.

They also said some of Hoffman's concerns will be addressed in a final electronic version of the health studies report that will be posted later on the Internet.

Regarding some issues, however, there simply is a disagreement, Lipford said.

Hoffman said there was personal animosity toward him even while work was under way on the health report, and he cited a number of actions he considered to be retaliation, including delayed payments that almost forced his company, SENES, to go out of business.

Lipford acknowledged there were some "frank discussions" about budget matters, but he said he was surprised to hear reports of animosity.

"If that his belief, it's certainly his belief and he's entitled to it," he said.

The state official called the research by Hoffman and his SENES staff "a splendid piece of work" and said they were easy to work with.

One issue almost from the beginning of the study was how to get an accurate estimate on the iodine releases during the RaLa project at ORNL. There were serious questions about the adequacy of existing records, and there were obvious problems trying to assess conditions 40 years ago, including the effectiveness of filters during the early nuclear era.

Hoffman challenged the data put together by ChemRisk on more than one occasion during the exercise. Since the report was completed, he has suggested there may be more problems related to the estimates on iodine releases.

In his memo to Voilleque, Hoffman wrote: "In actuality, our overall estimates of the excess cases of thyroid cancer may be low due to potential underestimation of the release of the total amount of I-131 from X-10 ...."

Hoffman said the effectiveness of the caustic scrubbers, which acted as filters at the Oak Ridge processing facilities, was overrated.

"The estimates used to produce the results in our November 1998 final report (on Task 1) are now known to be unrealistic, especially during times when the scrubber was operated with water (instead of sodium hydroxide)," he wrote to Voilleque.

Hoffman said these concerns were noted in memos sent to the state, ChemRisk and the project steering panel in 1999 before the panel's final report was completed. He said he never received a reply.

Voilleque said the scrubber issue was discussed at length at several meetings by members of the steering panel. "I think there was a variety of opinions."

The panel chairman said there were not any efforts to contact Hoffman and SENES about the final report because their contract work had already been concluded.

"It was pretty clear there wasn't going to be any input from them unless somebody put more money in the pot," Voilleque said. "I believe some people had the feeling they were being held up for more money, and there was a general disinclination to pursue further refinements."

Asked if he was comfortable with the estimates on the releases of radioactive iodine at ORNL, Voilleque said: "I think we used the best information we had at the time the calculations were made ... but, you know, we don't have the option of going back and redoing Task One from the beginning. It's conceivable that somebody may want to do that.

"The report may not have been perfect, but at some point you have to stop," he said.

Voilleque said he couldn't understand suggestions that the study might have been influenced by pressure to minimize Oak Ridge problems.

"I think the panel would have told DOE to go fly a kite if we had felt they were trying to manipulate what we put in our report," he said.

Moore said no one at the state, to his knowledge, ever received any pressure from anyone. "Owen can say whatever he wants to say," the state official said. "I don't know what his agenda is."

Voilleque said others in the community felt that the health project may have overstated the effects of pollution. "There certainly are people in Oak Ridge who are glad our study is over with," he said.

Frank Munger can be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net.

=======

Comments:

ChemRisk is one of those companies that tends to help the polluter, as it appears on their web pages. They appear to low ball the I-131 emissions for ORHASP and totally lose the emission of HF from the gas diffusion plants operations, the most damaging release from OR.

There is very likely underestimation of the I-131 health effects from the dose reconstruction process and its gross errors. The ORHASP summary report also don't list the high rates of thyroid disease found here by the state in the summary. That data is left tucked away deep in the Task One text. That type of disease footprint is one that can be associated to OR emissions and the effect on regional health. This is something the plants managers and DOE would like to loose and its something that was found by ORNL in the mid 80's, and kept hushed up. There are hints of how constant the UF-6 releases were in some of the worker testimonies about the yellow dust all over the buildings, even in lunch rooms. Many accounts of white fog. HF can escape from certain operations without the loss of UF-6 or uranium. HF is a volatile and extremely cumulative poison that results in rat poison forming in the bones. Its symptoms match those seen in many of the sick workers; neurological, bone, joint, lung, heart, and thyroid problems all match HF.

ORHASP was flawed from the beginning with the omission of the HF emissions and fluoride toxic effects from K-25 and Y-12. HF and fluorides also damage the thyroid------------and this effect needs to be added directly to the I-131 effects.

ORHASP did do some work on uranium emissions from K-25, which would involved the process gas UF-6 emissions. This dose estimate was also done by ChemRIsk using a totally error prone process that grossly underestimated the K-25 plants HF emissions, or even its UF-6 emissions. ORHASP refuses to do a mass balance determination of UF-6 or fluoride losses from the plants operations. The plant ran at positive pressures and lost UF-6 all the time. Even storage cylinders allowed HF to evaporate from holes. Plant tear down cut open all the plant and allowed trapped UF-6 deposits to convert to HF and emit this to the air for workers and communities to inhale or take up in the food chain.

Fluorides act just like I-131 in pathways for the environment, and shows up in milk, bone meal, and produce. The diseases like are discussed in Paducah's community studies also fall well into those caused by fluorides toxic effects. The calcinosis is a fluoride toxic effect as it affects the parathyroid and kidney. Even sp abortion is connected as fluorides tend to biocontrate in the reproductive tracts and damage cell DNA. These same health problems appear in and around OR, and are much worse than those of Paducah. OR has failed to do a look like this Paducah study, because of the huge denials over the magnitude of the problems here.

Many persons are pleased to see ORHASP end, because ORHASP failed to get the real job done---------and took too many years and lots of money to do something that missed the mark------a process that omitted the most serious of the health risks from OR. ORHASP failed miserably and aided DOE in dodging the bullet..

ORHASP, if anything, was an argumentative time delay process that detracts from the magnitude of the health harm done by OR operations.

While the impact of the I-131 releases were worse than stated in ORHASP, the impacts of the HF emissions make little the damage done by the I-131 toxic effects and the fluorides effects continue to this day.

-----------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 07:34:48 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Chem and Rad oxidant effect--->mtDNA and thyroid, heart, and other diseases

Hello DOEWatch folks,

As we close in on the toxic emissions and health effects from DOE and even industry, the role of the mtDNA becomes most important. This cell energy mechanism was only discovered in the mid-80's, and today its vulnerabilty to retained chemicals in the body is very important.

The mtDNA is a major component in the disease process, because the mtDNA is very vulnerable to chemical oxidant damage. mtDNA effects are very dominate around gas diffusion plants chemical emission, and it also plays a role in radiation induced oxidation damage.

It is a component in the thyroid damages from I-131 radiation induced oxidant generation, and its a component from oxidative fluoine compounds seeking the thyroid gland.

mtDNA damage effects get into heart damage, as this muscle uses a lot of energy and pulls the oxidative materials into this zone at higher rates.

mtDNA damage is connected to various neurological diseases.

mtDNA damage can even happen to immune system cells due to bioconcentration effects of macrophages of toxins into the lymph system, where these cells energies are powered down------------resulting in numerous immune dysfunction diseases----and increased oxidant effects from virus, bacteria, and fungus.

mtDNA damage is now being used to sense cancer cells not being regulated.

This dominate disease mechanism was found at ORNL in the mid-80's in connection with the HF losses from K-25. Oak Ridge management has known of this damage effect since the mid-80's and suppressed the information and the HF emissions. The mitochondrial effects were discovered in the mid-80's. It is a major component in industrial diseases produced from toxic emission.

[Ref: Freedom from Disease by Hari Sharma, MD 1993 ISBN- 1-895958-00-8] and the following:

=============

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations in papillary thyroid carcinoma and differential mtDNA sequence variants in cases with malignant versus benign thyroid tumors.

J.J. Yeh1,2,3, K.L. Lunetta2, P.L.M. Dahia1,2, C. Eng1.
1) Human Cancer Genetics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH;
2) Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA;
3) Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA.

http://www.faseb.org/genetics/ashg99/f51.htm</A>

MtDNA defects have been implicated in several degenerative diseases and aging. Studies of tumors with large accumulations of mitochondria, i.e. oncocytic tumors, have led to hypotheses that defects in oxidative phosphorylation may result in a compensatory increase in mitochondrial replication and/or gene expression. Mutation analysis of mtDNA in thyroid neoplasia, one of the most common sites of oncocytic tumors, has been limited. Due to practical technical limitations, there has yet to be a study that systematically analyzes the coding regions of the mt genome in sporadic adult human thyroid tumors, comparing different thyroid pathologies and population controls. Using the recently developed technique of two-dimensional gene scanning, we have successfully examined 22 cases of thyroid tumors, 5 cases of non-neoplastic thyroid pathology, 30 population controls, 9 fetal thyroid tissues and 9 fetal tissues of non-thyroid origin, either kidney or liver. We have identified 3 different somatic mutations (23%) among 13 sporadic papillary thyroid carcinomas. Among all samples, we found a total of 136 variants representing 51 distinct sequence variations. Between 1 and 6 variants were noted per pathologic sample. Cases with thyroid pathology appeared to have more variants per sample compared to normal controls (2.6 vs 1.4, P=0.05, Kruskall-Wallis). Interestingly, carcinomas (N = 16) and adenomas (N = 6) differed significantly only in their distributions of neutral coding variants (p = 0.02). In fact, there was a greater than five-fold difference in the mean number of neutral coding variants that were identified in the adenomas (0.167) versus carcinomas (0.875). Only 1 of 6 (17%) adenoma samples had a neutral variant in a coding region, compared to 10 of 16 (63%) in the carcinoma samples. These findings suggest first, that somatic mtDNA mutations are involved in thyroid tumorigenesis and second, that the accumulation of certain non-somatic variants may be related to tumor progression in the thyroid.

===========

Mitochondrial DNA Deletions in Cardiomyopathy

V. Ruppert, B. Maisch
http://www.un i -marburg.de/herzzentrum/1099ruppert.htm

Dept. of Internal Medicine and Cardiology, Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany

Structural changes in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of a number of diseases. Several features of mitochondrial DNA may be related to its frequent association with disease. The mutation rate of mtDNA is about 10 times higher than of nuclear DNA. Because of having neither protective histones nor an effective repair system. Further on, the mtDNA is exposed to oxygen free radicals generated by oxidative phosphorylation. In addition, mtDNA has no introns, so that a random mutation will usually strike a coding sequence. In this study we report on deletions in the mtDNA of patients with DCM and post mortem control samples. For that DNA was extracted from left ventricular tissue and nearly the whole mtDNA was amplified using the long PCR technique. For quantitative analysis of the PCR-products with mtDNA deletions the fragments were scanned by a laser scanner.

With the method of long PCR we could detect wild-type and deleted mtDNA in one reaction. A total of 14 different deletions ranging from 3.3 kb to 12.6 kb could be detected. The highest rate of deleted to wild-type mtDNA was 12% in one control and 9% in a patient with DCM.

The number of mitochondrial deletions increase with age in the control group. Additional deletions appear sooner in cardiomyopathic hearts than in control hearts. With regard to the low quantity of the deleted mtDNA and the cumulative nature of these deletions by ageing, we conclude that they have contributory pathogenic effect on the development of dilated cardiomyopathy but may not be primary or initiating cause of DCM. The deletions may rather be a sign of increasing stress to the heart promoting consecutively the damage of mtDNA.

====

Abstracts: Distribution of G5460A mutant mtDNA in parkinsonian brain

N.M. Schnopp, S. Kösel, R. Egensperger, P. Mehraein and M.B. Graeber
http://www.hum-molgen.de/documents/abstracts/0054.html</A>

Molecular Neuropathology Laboratory and Reference Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders, Institute of Neuropathology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Thalkirchner Str. 36, 80337 Munich, Germany

2nd Workshop Neurogenetics in Germany, Munich, October 19-21, 1995

Several studies indicate that mitochondrial DNA mutations play a role in the etiology of complex disorders such as Parkinson disease (PD) and Alzheimer disease (AD), as well as in normal aging. In the case of PD, a point mutation at nucleotide 5460 affecting the ND2 subunit of NADH dehydrogenase (EC 1.6.99.3; complex I of the respiratory chain) was found to be more common in PD brains compared with normal and AD controls (Kösel et al., submitted). We have now studied the distribution of mutated and wild-type mtDNA in a large number of different anatomical regions in PD brains with very high and very low ratios of the different mtDNA species, respectively. DNA was extracted from formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded archival brain tissue, amplified by PCR, and digested using the restriction enzyme Hph I. The proportion of mutated mtDNA was determined by quantitative laser densitometry. Comparing up to 16 different tissue areas, we found varying degrees of mtDNA heteroplasmy in different brain regions. For instance, in one brain it appeared that hindbrain regions such as cerebellum and the nuclei of the cranial nerves carried significantly lower amounts (88%) of G5460A mutated DNA than the nuclei of the basal ganglia. Relative levels of mtDNA heteroplasmy were 96% and 94% in caudatum and putamen, respectively. Apart from their possible relevance for PD pathogenesis our results could provide new insights into brain development. Additional cases are currently being studied to determine the exact relationship between the degree of mtDNA heteroplasmy in specific neuronal populations and the histological as well as biochemical changes accompanying dopaminergic cell death in PD.

Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Gerhard Hess-Programm).

======

Blood, Urine Test May Detect Cancer
Biopsy-Free Method May Be Only a Few Years Away

By Daniel J. DeNoon WebMD Medical News
http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1728.55776</A>

March 16, 2000 (Atlanta) -- Forget scalpels and needles: A new test to detect cancer would require only a few drops of blood or perhaps urine. The test, still in the early stages of development, would be based on unexpected new findings published in the March 17 issue of the journal Science.

Studies already are planned to see whether the test accurately predicts cancer. If it does, they could be available to physicians very soon. "We are enthusiastic," study author David Sidransky, MD, tells WebMD.

Because a cell's genetic machinery goes haywire when it becomes cancerous, most researchers trying to unlock the secrets of cancer are looking at the very center of the tumor cell -- the nucleus -- where the cell's genetic material is found. Sidransky's team at Johns Hopkins University looked somewhere else: at the mysterious energy-producing particles within the cell, known as mitochondria.

Previous studies have shown that certain particles in the mitochondria of tumor cells have been altered or mutated. Sidransky's team found that tumor cells release these altered particles, called mtDNA, and release them in large amounts in bladder, head/neck, and lung tumors. The mtDNA could be detected in the blood or urine indicating bladder, head/neck, or lung cancer.

The most accurate way to test for cancer would be for people to have their mtDNA analyzed while they are still healthy, at age 40 or 45. Routine, annual tests then could quickly detect mtDNA.

"The test would probably work for any [cancer], possibly even lymphomas," says Sidransky, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "But the biggest problems -- breast, lung, colon, prostate cancer -- those are the ones we hope this test might be useful for."

A mitochondria expert Michael D. Brown, PhD, tells WebMD that the mtDNA test still has a major hurdle to overcome: It not only must detect mtDNA associated with cancer, but it must be able to show that when it does detect mtDNA mutations it means the patient has cancer and not some other problem. But Brown, a researcher in the Emory University Center for Molecular Medicine, says that the technology needed to create an mtDNA test already is available.

"If it were shown [the mtDNA tests] were specific to cancer and consistently found it, and [showed] which types of cancer and at which stage, the test would be very useful," Brown says.

Sidransky says, "It should take 6-12 months to get the technology [of the test] done, then we'll be doing definitive studies [in patients]. Once you get the technology going, maybe in two or three years you can get [the test] into the general population."

Vital Information:

Researchers think they may be able to develop tests for cancer that would require only a few drops of blood or possibly urine. In a study looking at tumor cells, researchers found large amounts of genetic mutations in the mitochondria, or energy-producing particles of the cell. The technology needed to create a test for mtDNA already exists, so if the technique really works, it could be available within a few years.

-----------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:08:57 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Critics decry 'revolving door' at DOE
They say moves to private sector hurt credibility

August 27, 2000
The Courier-Journal
By JAMES MALONE
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2000/0008/27/000827hodg.html

PADUCAH, Ky. -- Before he quit last fall as the Department of Energy's site manager at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Jimmie Hodges had arranged to work for a consulting firm that was bidding on a contract paid for with Energy Department money.

Hodges resigned his government job Oct. 1, 1999, but he was already described as a key employee of ELR Consultants in the contract proposal the company submitted on Sept. 10.

In December, the company, based in Oak Ridge, Tenn., got a $200,000 contract from the Paducah Area Community Reuse Organization, a group that has received $8.4 million in taxpayer money to find jobs for laid-off workers and new uses for the uranium plant.

Hodges had been a member of the Paducah reuse organization board when ELR made its proposal for the contract to find ways to reuse 9,700 tons of radioactive nickel stored at the plant.

Several attempts to reach Hodges for comment were unsuccessful. But Energy Department lawyers at Oak Ridge told Hodges in a letter after he quit that it was legal for him to work for the consulting firm, according to organization board minutes.

Nevertheless, the sequence of events illustrates DOE relationships that blur from the public to the private sector.

CRITICS ARE outraged over a revolving door that has seen many Energy Department officials resign to go to work for contractors, bidders or consultants. They say it compromises DOE's ability to hold its thousands of contractors accountable.

"The whole revolving-door thing undermines the integrity of DOE's credibility and its management," said Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of energy who is now an Energy Department critic.

"It's really a very serious problem," said Arjun Mahkijani, a nuclear critic and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington. "Not only are individuals going to work for contractors," he said, but many "have their eye on doing that" while still working for DOE.

"I think they cannot provide truly sound advice and make sound decisions that benefit the taxpayers and cleanup if they are eyeing jobs with contractors, because their pocketbook has been in conflict with their intellect."

Among the Energy Department officials who have gone to work for contractors are two former top managers at its Oak Ridge offices, Joe LaGrone and Jim Hall.

LaGrone was hired by British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a company that won a DOE contract to recycle metal at Oak Ridge, and Hall went to work for Westinghouse, which was bidding on a DOE contract at the time.

Steve Wyatt, an Energy Department spokesman, said both men complied with the law and avoided becoming involved in matters that would have posed a conflict. Moreover, Wyatt said that because of the highly specialized and technical nature of nuclear work, the services of departing employees are in demand by contractors.

HODGES HAD firmed up his job with ELR Consultants before leaving his position as the Energy Department's Paducah site manager. At the time, Hodges did not publicly disclose his plans but said his departure was not related to controversy about DOE's slow cleanup at the Paducah plant.

In a Sept. 10 proposal to the Paducah reuse organization, ELR had listed Hodges as one of three "Key Personnel" who would work on the contract, according to an Oct. 1 letter from a lawyer representing ELR.

ELR was the only bidder on the contract, though the organization says it asked for bids from more than 50 groups. The Oct. 1 letter from attorney Wallace Conaway indicated that the company was confident it would land the job. "ELR is pleased to have an opportunity to perform this work," the letter said.

The lawyer described Hodges as an "anticipated future ELR employee" and said ELR intended to make him a "deputy program manager" who would report to Bill E. Lindsey, a former executive with two of the companies operating the Paducah plant.

Lindsey "will determine the extent and interface Mr. Hodges can have with the -PACRO organization and Department of Energy," Conaway wrote. "No assignments will be made (for Hodges) that are in violation" of federal conflict-of-interest laws.

THOSE RULES generally bar Energy Department officials involved with awarding contracts in excess of $10 million from working for a contract recipient for a year. The law also says that a federal employee seeking outside employment "is considered to have a financial interest" in the prospective employer.

The law, according to DOE's written response to questions from The Courier-Journal, "precludes a federal employee from participating personally and substantially in any particular matter that would affect the financial interests of any person from whom the employee is seeking a job. To avoid violating the statute, the employee must not involve himself with matters that relate to the company with whom he is seeking a job."

Hodges' new job was announced at the Oct. 20 meeting of the Paducah reuse organization board. "Jimmie Hodges has joined the consultant firm ELR that we are in negotiations with for a contract," according to minutes of the meeting.

The minutes show that the board then appointed a "technical committee" to negotiate with ELR that included several people with whom Hodges had worked closely.

They included Myrna Redfield, who was subordinate to Hodges in the DOE site office; Dale Jackson, who succeeded Hodges as interim site manager; and Jimmy Massey, then the Paducah manager of DOE cleanup contractor Lockheed Martin, who worked closely with Hodges for years.

Also on the committee was Larry Jackson, an executive from the United States Enrichment Corp., the private company that leases and operates the plant, which enriches uranium for nuclear power plant fuel.

HENRY HODGES, an official of a state-funded regional planning agency that provides staff to the Paducah reuse organization (and no relation to Jimmie Hodges), defended the appointments.

"We are talking about things that are so technical that we must make use of the technical and expert advice we have available to us on the PACRO (board) regardless of the special interests in the room," he told the board. "It is our responsibility to acknowledge those special interests and to work together in the best interests of PACRO."

Board members were not unanimous in their comfort with the arrangement.

John Driskill, a board member who is a security guard at the plant, said he disagreed with Hodges taking the job with a contractor the reuse organization was about to hire.

"I'm not saying Jimmie has done anything wrong, but the appearance of it looks bad," Driskell said recently.

ELR's contract began Jan. 1, 2000. The company's scope of work calls for it to develop numerous policies and protocols and offer consulting advice on how to realize a profit from reusing nickel at the plant.

Jimmie Hodges has been attending Paducah reuse organization meetings in his job with ELR. At a Feb. 28 meeting of the organization's board, Hodges "again told of his restrictions in dealing directly with DOE," according to the minutes.

He then stated that ELR will be working with Jackson, then the Energy Department's interim site manager at Paducah, and "it is important to have DOE's blessing and support as we move forward."

Records show that the Paducah reuse organization has signed two contracts with ELR. The firm was originally hired in 1998 to help Paducah get a $1 billion laser process to enrich uranium, a project that was later abandoned.

The scope of ELR's first $61,512 contract then changed to help the reuse organization identify environmental problems and inventory and develop a strategy to privatize plant assets.

-------------

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:12:57 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Dark Cloud Hangs Over Los Alamos Besieged Atomic Lab Is Losing Staff, Spirit
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post
August 27, 2000
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-08/27/154l-082700-idx.html

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.-The Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and one of the country's preeminent centers for research on nuclear physics and supercomputing, is suffering from low morale, losing scientists to the private sector and having difficulty recruiting top-flight replacements.

In what surely must be the worst year in its storied history, the lab has been hammered by back-to-back FBI investigations into security lapses, intense congressional scrutiny, punitive budget cuts, an exodus of government computer experts to high-paying software companies, and an act of God--a wildfire that shut down the lab for 12 days and forced the evacuation of surrounding towns.

If the lab remains under siege and cannot lift the spirits of its staff, administrators here and in Washington say, the United States may squander an asset that is as vital to national security as any military unit, weapon or secret.

"When you read all the things being written about this laboratory," said former director Siegfried S. Hecker, "anybody who has a choice has to think twice about coming to Los Alamos. I'm not sure we can recover quickly enough. A lot of damage has been done."

To be sure, extraordinary research is still going on at Los Alamos. The lab is building a 300,000-square-foot facility for the world's most powerful computer, capable of performing 30 trillion operations per second. Los Alamos, which designed 85 percent of the nation's nuclear weapons and is responsible for certifying that the aging stockpile of warheads is still safe and reliable, will use the big machine to run three-dimensional simulations of nuclear explosions.

But 14 top computer scientists, nearly half of the permanent staff at the Advanced Computing Laboratory, have quit this year. Most were lured away by higher salaries and stock options at dot-com firms in nearby Santa Fe. Replacing them has not been easy. When Los Alamos recruiters made their annual visit last fall to Stanford University, no one showed up to hear their pitch.

"People don't want to take lie detector tests, they don't want to come to a place that has already been beaten down. And Los Alamos has been beaten down," said Patrick S. McCormick, who heads a team working on computer visualizations of nuclear blasts and who fears his entire team could leave by the end of the year.

"Why am I still here? Good question," he said, acknowledging that he too has begun interviewing for private-sector jobs.

This month, Los Alamos director John C. Browne issued an open letter to the lab's staff commiserating that "we are going through a difficult time now, perhaps as difficult as any the lab has ever faced." Browne offered a "letter of encouragement and support to the laboratory" from its new overseer, Air Force Gen. John A. Gordon, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, set up by Congress to tighten security after last year's political furor over alleged Chinese nuclear espionage.

But anger--at Browne, at the FBI, at Washington in general--is simmering among the rank and file and has boiled over onto the lab's electronic bulletin board, the equivalent of a call-in radio show for Los Alamos's tech-savvy staff of 7,000, including 1,800 holders of doctoral degrees.

"It should be clear by now that the lab is in a major crisis with morale at a very low point," William S. Varnum, a physicist in the top-secret X Division, said in an open message in July. "Many people are considering leaving. Individual staff members are being harassed and threatened by management, the Energy Department, University of California, the FBI and Congress. Management is making no visible effort to support the employees. In government and business activities throughout the world, when this happens, the people at the top offer their resignations as a means of helping to resolve these crises. I think it is time for laboratory upper management to consider doing the same."

Karen Pao, a computer specialist, responded electronically: "If all top managers at the lab were to resign today, would security improve? Would Congress suddenly love us? Would FBI stop harassing us? Would people stop leaving?"

Other indicators of turmoil at Los Alamos, according to figures provided by senior administrators:

* The number of postdoctoral fellows, a bellwether of the lab's health, has dropped 10 percent this year.

* The rate of "first choice" candidates rejecting job offers at Los Alamos has jumped from 20 percent in 1996 to 44 percent so far this year.

* After a steady increase in the hiring of Asian American scientists over the past eight years, Asian Americans all but stopped applying for jobs at the lab following the firing and arrest last year of scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of mishandling classified information.

* Almost all of the senior weapons scientists with nuclear testing experience, an elite group of about two dozen people, are eligible to retire. Many are expected to depart Jan. 1, as soon as new retirement incentives offered by the University of California, which manages Los Alamos for the Energy Department, take effect.

It is hard to overstate the contribution to America's nuclear weapons program of Los Alamos, an isolated town 20 miles northwest of Santa Fe that sits atop the Pajarito Plateau on a series of finger mesas divided by dramatic, thousand-foot canyons.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the University of California at Berkeley physicist who ran the Manhattan Project, vacationed as a boy in this rugged desert terrain and picked Los Alamos as the place to build the atomic bomb with supersecrecy in mind. There was only one road off the high mesa during World War II, when babies born in "the town that never was" received certificates listing their birthplace as "P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe."

Today, the vast stands of ponderosa pine that ring the town are blackened, scorched by a forest fire that swept down from the hills in May. The inferno destroyed 400 homes and forced the evacuation of both Los Alamos (population 11,000) and its bedroom community of White Rock (population 7,000).

The lab itself, which occupies 2,200 buildings and sprawls across 43 square miles, was largely untouched by the fire. But just as it reopened, management was informed of the disappearance of two computer hard drives loaded with data on how to disarm U.S. and foreign nuclear weapons. Sixty FBI agents arrived to open the second major security investigation at Los Alamos in a very short time.

The first began three years ago as a probe into China's alleged theft of the designs of American nuclear warheads. Today, senior U.S. officials are increasingly doubtful that the designs were stolen from Los Alamos, if they were stolen at all. But in the course of the investigation, the FBI discovered that Lee, a Taiwanese American weapons scientist who had worked at Los Alamos for nearly 20 years, had improperly copied or "downloaded" a vast amount of nuclear data from the lab's classified computers to his unsecure office desktop and to portable tapes, some of which are missing.

Lee has not been charged with espionage because there is no evidence that he passed the information to anyone. But he was fired in March of last year, arrested in December, and held in solitary confinement at a Santa Fe jail for the past eight months. Last week, a federal judge reversed himself and approved Lee's release on $1 million bail pending trial in November, a development that his supporters hope is an indication the government's case is unraveling.

Lee certainly has sympathizers at Los Alamos. Some of his former colleagues believe that he was singled out for investigation because of his ethnicity, and that the case became part of a congressional "witch hunt" for Chinese spies. But many Los Alamos scientists also consider his unauthorized downloading a significant violation of security rules, are puzzled by his motives, and wonder what happened to the missing tapes.

"This is a place peopled by patriots," said Stephen M. Younger, the lab's associate director for nuclear weapons. "To have the lab pilloried in the press and in Congress is a tremendous blow to these people, who do take security very seriously. I don't know anyone who takes security more seriously than the people who design the stockpile, because they know better than anyone else what these weapons can do."

They also know that the worst case of nuclear espionage in U.S. history--involving two Los Alamos scientists, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall; a lab machinist named David Greenglass; and two couriers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg--occurred here when security was at its zenith.

Since the end of the Cold War, all of the big national labs--Lawrence Livermore in California and Sandia in New Mexico, as well as Los Alamos--have been encouraged to look for commercial applications of their research and to gradually reduce their dependence on government funding. They have opened up to visitors from private companies and foreign countries.

In the wake of the Lee case, Congress and the Energy Department clamped down, imposing regular polygraphs for many scientists, a moratorium on visitors from sensitive countries, and a one-third reduction in the lab's $75 million discretionary research budget and its $35.4 million travel account, cuts that Browne, the lab director, calls "punitive." The department also is threatening to sever its contract with the University of California, which has run Los Alamos and other national labs for half a century.

In terms of staff morale, however, the case of the missing hard drives may be even worse than the Lee investigation. The FBI has grilled all 26 members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, a group of scientists who have volunteered to respond to an accident or terrorist threat involving nuclear weapons.

Both hard drives turned up behind a photocopier inside the lab's secure X Division on June 16, a little more than two weeks after they were reported missing. But a grand jury investigation has only just begun as the FBI proceeds on the assumption that one or more NEST team members misplaced the drives and then, afraid of being punished for the security lapse, engaged in a cover-up and put them behind the copier.

If that's what happened, some Los Alamos scientists say they know why. "I don't think we should be surprised with the way this hard drive issue has played out," said Anthony E. Burris, who manages Los Alamos's nuclear intelligence unit. "The only example we've got is up in solitary confinement in a jail in Santa Fe in shackles."

One of those targeted by the FBI has told colleagues that his legal bills are running $6,000 a week; lab scientists and employees have responded by opening a legal defense fund for him and others who have been called before a grand jury.

While many of Lee's former colleagues remain troubled by his behavior, there is virtual unanimity in X Division that the case of the missing hard drives is different: A minor security infraction turned into a criminal case, just to appease Congress.

"There's a scandal--how this was treated as a political football," said Merri M. Wood, an X Division veteran. "That's the scandal. There's no evidence a crime was committed. Quite frankly, it's a witch hunt."

Wood and numerous others at Los Alamos argue that Washington's security crackdown is hurting Los Alamos's ability to do first-rate science and may, in the end, make the nation less secure. She cites the lab's so-called two-hour rule, which allowed scientists working on classified projects in the X Division to leave their computers running for up to two hours when they were not in their offices.

After the hard drives went missing, the Energy Department immediately revoked the rule. Because it takes X Division scientists as long as 20 minutes to shut down computers running complex programs, and because they must leave their offices to confer with colleagues about top-secret issues they are not allowed to discuss over the telephone, Wood said, the suspension of the two-hour rule effectively halted their work.

"I wouldn't say there isn't anything dumber they could do, but this was right up there," she said.

Jon C. Weisheit, X Division's director, worries that Los Alamos may lose so many of its best scientists that it will be unable to ensure that America's nuclear weapons are reliable without underground nuclear testing, which Congress suspended eight years ago. "It's my worst nightmare, simply because it is possible," Weisheit said.

Houston T. Hawkins, director of Los Alamos's nonproliferation and international security division, asks rhetorically: Which two agencies must work seamlessly together in the event of a terrorist incident involving nuclear weapons?

His answer is the FBI and Los Alamos's NEST team, now bitterly aligned against each other.

"You create these very high walls and make people take polygraphs, but what's missing in this equation?" Hawkins said. "It ultimately comes down to a question of trust, regardless of the height of the walls, because the people who create this information take it home with them in their heads."

---------

Message: 5
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:38:54 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Report Minimizes Risks of Radiation

August 26, 2000
By John Fleck Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/109391scitech08-26-00.htm

If you worry about the danger of radiation, you should probably be more afraid of a coal-fired power plant than one using nuclear energy, according to Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh.

But both fears are probably misplaced, Cohen said in talks this week in Albuquerque, because the risk of cancer from low-level radiation is vastly overestimated today.

Risk estimates based on data from uranium miners and Japanese atomic bomb survivors, both of whom suffered high radiation doses, overstate the risk from low radiation doses, Cohen said in talks to University of New Mexico physicists.

A new report from the General Accounting Office supports his position, saying the evidence does not support the claim that low doses of radiation are dangerous.

Much of the fear today, Cohen told a Friday afternoon audience, is based on the sort of high-risk, low-probability accident scenarios that are easy to conjure up, but unlikely to happen.

"I can kill almost everybody in the world with any technology," he said.

The problem for scientists, he said, is to come up with realistic risk assessments to allow decisions to be made between competing choices for our energy generation.

And Cohen takes issue with the nuclear risk assessments now in vogue.

Current standards are rooted in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Soon after the war, researchers began tracking atomic bomb survivors, all of whom received high doses of radiation.

Studies in the years since show clear evidence of cancer, allowing epidemiologists to estimate the cancer risk of high-dose radiation.

Similar studies of uranium miners, exposed to high doses of a radioactive gas called radon, also show high cancer rates, Cohen said.

The question: Do low doses of radiation have a similar but smaller effect, or is there a level below which radiation poses no danger?

All living things are bathed in low doses of radiation - from radiation banging into Earth from outer space, natural radon seeping out of our soil, even from potassium in the bananas we eat.

Without clear evidence one way or the other about the risk of that low-level radiation, U.S. government regulators have taken the cautious approach and assumed there is an effect.

They use the large-dose effects to estimate the small-dose effect.

A dose of 1 percent received by Hiroshima survivors, for example, is assumed to cause one-hundredth the cancer rate.

That has led to strict standards on radiation emissions.

But when Cohen set out to see if he could find evidence for that low-dose effect, he failed.

He and his colleagues looked at lung cancer mortality rates in 1,729 U.S. counties. If there was a connection between low-dose radiation and cancer, they expected to find higher lung cancer rates in places with more naturally occurring radon.

But as radon went up, the cancer rate went down.

Other studies have found the opposite. So to try to settle the argument, the U.S. General Accounting Office surveyed 82 separate studies looking at the issue.

While a minority showed "slightly elevated cancer risk" from low-dose radiation, the GAO found, the studies taken as a whole suggest "that low-level radiation effects are either very small, or nonexistent."

As a result, U.S. low-dose radiation safety standards "lack a conclusively verified scientific basis," said the GAO report, commissioned by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

But even if you assume low doses are dangerous, nuclear power appears to be safer than the alternatives, Cohen argued Friday.

Radon emissions from coal-burning are far more significant than the long-term risks from leaking nuclear waste, he argued.

Coal mining kills 100 miners a year, he said, making it far more dangerous than uranium mining.

And even the alternative of energy conservation has its risks. Better sealing of your home to prevent heat loss has the consequence of trapping more radon inside, he said.

And do not forget, he added with a smile, the risks associated with putting solar panels on your home. "Then," he said, "you can talk about falling off of your roof."

==========

Comments:

A young healthy person does have good resistance to radiation, however, that is not the only case. It is deceptive to mix external radiation evidence with internalized contamination effects that can vastly expose some tissues to free radical damages. It is also deceptive not to discuss the damages to the immune mechnism as the reason for cancers to occur and persist.

Things like exposures to radon put alpha radiation inside the body, and an entire decay chain of radiation, ending in a toxic metal called lead.

There are strong differences in external gamma radiations and those of internalized contaminates that emit radiation. Natural bioconcentrations of these contaminates often occurs.

Natural accumulation of many toxic materials occur in the body and contribute to the aging process and the lessening of immune function. Exposing a 100 year old person with extensive free radical damage accumulation from chem and radiation often makes a much different outcome than a 20 year old.

Cohen's methods are not well done. Nuke plants leak noble gases and ozone, which damage human health. Nuke repositories cook off ozone and other chemical toxics from the surrounding materials that can get airborne.

We humans are currently highly affected by our environment and it does set the aging and diseases-----from the effect on the mtDNA generally. Which means each new toxic material of significance that comes along can produce either lesser life span or earlier disease effects. Many of the significant toxics these days are man contributed. And even coal fired emissions cause problems with fluoride, toxic metals, and internalized isotopes.

-----------

Message: 6
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:42:56 -0400
From: Raymond Shadis <shadis@ime.net>

Radiation Damage in DNA: a new look

New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution
POST OFFICE BOX 545, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT o5302

STAFF ADVISORY The following story appeared in Newsday [Long Island, NY] and was distributed nationally through Newsday syndication.

August 27, 2000 The Damage in DNA Brookhaven lab finds a way to pinpoint radiation's effects on structure by Earl Lane Washington Bureau/NEWSDAY

SCIENTISTS LONG have known that ionizing radiation, such as X-rays or gamma rays, can cause potentially serious breaks in the DNA molecules that carry the genetic instructions for each cell.

Widely separated nicks or breaks in a single strand of the DNA helix generally are repaired by the body's natural defense mechanisms. But when the damage is clustered, such as closely spaced breaks in both strands of DNA's double-helical staircase, the consequences can be much more serious.

If not repaired, double-strand breaks, as they are called, can trigger the death of the host cell or turn it cancerous. And some scientists have argued that double-strand breaks are but part of the story since they do not seem to account for all of radiation's observed lethality and cancer-causing effects in cells. The problem has been finding ways to reliably assess other types of radiation-induced damage clusters in DNA that also may have consequences. Now, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a technique to identify and measure other kinds of damage clusters. The damage sites can include lesions in close proximity to each other, including single-strand breaks or missing or oxidized bases. Bases are the chemical subunits that link the two complementary strands of a DNA molecule. Damaged or missing bases can cause spontaneous mutations that lead to cancer.

The new method has allowed the Brookhaven team to locate and count the complex damage sites on DNA molecules. Surprisingly, the researchers have found that double-strand breaks may account for only about 20 percent of the sites. The other types of radiation-induced damage clusters-while little studied over the years-seem to account for most of the sites.

"It's clear that double-strand breaks are not the whole story," said Betsy Sutherland, a biochemist who leads the Brookhaven research effort. She is assisted by Paula Bennett, a biology associate at the lab.

The new assay method could help researchers sort out some of the most vexing questions in radiation biology, Sutherland said, including whether the body can efficiently repair other types of cluster damage in a cell's DNA in addition to double-strand breaks. The technique also may shed light on how radiation-induced damage mimics or differs from the normal wear and tear on DNA from sunlight and other harmful agents.

New insights on radiation damage at the molecular level also should help scientists to better assess the proper doses in radiation therapy to kill cancer cells and to better weigh the risks of ionizing radiation for nuclear workers or astronauts exposed to cosmic rays on long spaceflights. The Brookhaven researchers first bombard a sample of human DNA with radiation. Then they use special enzymes (supplied by collaborators Jacques Laval and Olga Sidorkina in France) that cut DNA strands at the sites of specific kinds of damage, such as a missing base.

If an enzyme cuts both strands of the DNA in question quite close together, Sutherland said, it indicates damage in close proximity on the two strands of the DNA molecule. The snipped fragments can be made to migrate through a gel that separates them by length. The researchers can count the relative frequency of isolated vs. clustered DNA damage as well as the identity of the damage sites. In theory, the damage clusters could result from multiple radiation "hits," each producing one lesion in the DNA. But the early experimental results at Brookhaven suggest that each damage cluster results from a single radiation track. That means that damage clusters are formed by low as well as high doses of radiation, the researchers report.

Despite decades of study since the dawn of the Atomic Age, scientists still have much to learn about the effects of radiation on the body. "Many labs have looked at double-strand breaks," Sutherland said. "Some of them are repaired very rapidly, others more slowly. It's not clear at this point exactly what makes a double-strand break repairable or not so repairable." Nor is it clear whether cells can efficiently repair other types of cluster damage.

The new lab technique, described in recent articles in the journal Biochemistry and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should help scientists sort out such questions. Sutherland said the Department of Energy, which funds Brookhaven, wants to know if the damage clusters her group has been studying are identifiably different from the sorts of damage from events that are a part of normal life. For example, simply breathing oxygen can produce chemical complexes in cells called free radicals, which can damage bases on DNA. Sutherland theorizes that such radicals may produce isolated bits of DNA damage compared to the closely spaced damage clusters typical of ionizing radiation. Such radiation can create showers of secondary particles that can wreak localized havoc on the DNA, she said.

There has been a long-standing and contentious debate on the health effects of low-level radiation. Epidemiologists have had a tough time trying to tease out the possible impact in large populations exposed to low amounts of radiation over time. Researchers would like more information on the events that low doses of radiation might trigger at the molecular level. Accordingly, the Brookhaven team is looking to increase the sensitivity of its technique.

In the current studies, DNA samples were irradiated with roughly the equivalent of 100 rems of radiation (A rem is a standard measure of radiation exposure. The occupational exposure limit for nuclear workers in the United States is 5 rems per year. The annual background radiation from natural sources is about 1/3 of a rem.) At the radiation level used, the researchers determined there were about 2.4 double-strand breaks, about 3.6 clusters of missing bases and about 6.6 clusters containing oxidized bases per million DNA bases studied.

While the numbers seem small, if the flaws-particularly when clustered-are not repaired or poorly repaired, it may spell trouble. Sutherland said the team eventually would like to irradiate DNA samples with lower-level doses more akin to those we receive during certain medical diagnostic procedures or from natural background sources such as cosmic rays and radioactive minerals.

"The effects of most types of complex DNA damage in cells and how they are repaired are completely unknown," Sutherland said. "The only way to find out about them is to make careful measurements, and we have a way to do that now."

Raymond Shadis - Post Office Box 76, Edgecomb, Maine 04556 (207) 882 7801 shadis@ime.net

----------

Message: 7
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:42:51 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Special prosecutor may charge ex-CIA chief Deutch

27 August 2000
By Neil A. Lewis
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/000827nCIA-DEUTCH-NYT.html

WASHINGTON - A special prosecutor investigating John M. Deutch, the former director of central intelligence, has told law enforcement officials he expects to recommend that Deutch be prosecuted on charges of mishandling classified information, government officials said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Paul E. Coffey, has not yet made any recommendations to Attorney General Janet Reno, the officials said. But Coffey, who was brought out of retirement for the Deutch matter, has told others in the Justice Department he thinks Deutch should be charged with storing government secrets on his home computer, a security violation.

Reno initially declined to prosecute Deutch, who had apologized. But she ordered a new inquiry in February after a report from the CIA inspector general questioned how the agency's leadership had handled the matter. In addition, the issue of how Deutch's case was dealt with drew criticism from Congress and elsewhere for its sharp contrast with the Wen Ho Lee case.

Lee, a former scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is being prosecuted on charges of illegally transferring and copying secret nuclear data from the laboratory, an offense some Justice Department critics have argued is similar to what Deutch may have done.

Deutch was director of central intelligence from May 1995 until he resigned in December 1996. As he was leaving, a CIA computer security official found that he had stored information at his home, including details of covert operations. The agency's security office began an investigation but that inquiry soon bogged down.

In 1998, a CIA employee told the inspector general's office that the initial investigation had been improperly handled. The inspector general opened his own inquiry and notified the Department of Justice.

------------

Message: 8
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:46:15 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Erasing the Cold War from Rocky Flats

By Katy Human Camera Staff Writer
http://www.bouldernews.com/news/local/27aflat.html

Winds are feisty around Rocky Flats, once a nuclear weapons factory and now a Superfund cleanup site.

The winds occasionally blast west, north or south. Mostly, though, they rush out of the mountains onto the plains, sweeping dust eastward.

Walnut and Woman Creeks also cut east through the site.

Bini Abbott, 68, a farmer and horse-lover, lives downwind and downwater of Rocky Flats on the western shore of Standley Lake. Jefferson County once tried to buy her out for open space, but Abbott refused. She loves the prairie, the bald eagles that nest nearby, the water.

She has mixed feelings about Rocky Flats, though. Abbott does like the way the site, surrounded by a protected buffer zone, has kept townhouses from gobbling up the prairie near her home. But she sometimes thinks about the accidents that could happen in the cleanup and demolition of the site's contaminated buildings and soils.

"I worry that in their zeal to clean up, if the wind picks up and there's dust, that they'll keep on working. ..." Abbott said.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which owns Rocky Flats, has promised to get the site cleaned up and shut down - which may mean opened up for hiking and biking - by 2006. The plan is arguably the most ambitious ever devised by the Department of Energy.

"We think it is doable," said Ellen Livingston, senior policy advisor for environmental affairs to U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. But Livingston recognized that the agency is dealing with a "very, very tough goal."

As the DOE proceeds with its cleanup work, other federal and state officials are rethinking the cleanup standards. Raising the bar for water and soil even a little could increase cleanup costs by millions of dollars and extend the timeline by years.

Managers with Kaiser-Hill, the company hired to do the bulk of the cleanup work, have pinned a low likelihood on meeting the 2006 deadline: just a 20 percent chance.

The problems are in unknowns.

After a fire in 1969, workers tossed contaminated material into basements and cemented it in place. No one knows how "hot" the stuff is, so it's difficult to figure out how to clean it up.

No one knows what sort of contamination lies underneath buildings that have yet to come down.

No one knows exactly how people in the future will use the 6,000 acres of land that constitute Rocky Flats. Future use is key for cleanup: If people use the site just as open space, it may not have to be as clean as if someone works in a building there every day.

Dozens of such unknowns add up to a snarled mess for cleanup managers and other people who care about Rocky Flats' future. Though officials say they are optimistic, some former workers and activists are not, and they worry that the rush to finish cleanup could compromise safety.

"They can't do it," Jim Kelly, an Arvada resident and former steelworker at Rocky Flats, said in an interview earlier this summer. "They can't do it and be honest with people."

For nearly four decades and under three contractors - Dow Chemical, Rockwell International and then EG&G - Rocky Flats workers manufactured the triggers for nuclear bombs. The triggers themselves were small bombs, fashioned of radioactive plutonium and toxic beryllium. The work began in 1952, galvanized by the Cold War.

Rocky Flats workers also recycled triggers from retired warheads and produced weapons-grade plutonium from old residues. The work involved plutonium, uranium, beryllium, solvents and dozens of other toxic chemicals.

There were spills and fires, explosions and ventilation-system failures.

During production years, environmental standards were far more lax than they are today, and they were ignored at times. Workers buried radioactive waste underground in drums that leaked. Liquids that were poured into holes on the prairie seeped into the groundwater below.

Kaiser-Hill, which never had a hand in weapons production, is now cleaning up the mess left behind. The company has spent $3 billion since 1995, said spokeswoman Jennifer Thompson. In a new contract, Kaiser-Hill promised the government it will do most of the remaining cleanup work for $4.4 billion.

But the new work contract doesn't include everything required by the official Rocky Flats cleanup agreement, negotiated between the Energy Department and its regulators, the state of Colorado and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Even if Kaiser-Hill completes all contracted work, there will still be a major problem on the site: Surface water flowing through the Flats will not meet the current drinking-water standards detailed in the cleanup agreement.

"It's a brazen omission," said Tim Rehder, Rocky Flats manager for the EPA.

When hard rains fall at Rocky Flats, especially after a long dry spell, water flowing through creeks and channels on the site often violates the drinking-water standard. Kaiser-Hill workers have looked for "hot spots" of radiation that could be causing the problem but have found none.

For the moment that's fine: On-site water doesn't have to meet the standard until the cleanup is done. But at the end of cleanup, a person who drinks on-site water, showers in it and cooks with it should have no significant increase in cancer risk, according to the official Rocky Flats cleanup agreememt.

According to the cleanup contract, however, Kaiser-Hill officials need only to clean the site well enough so that on-site water meets an "open space" standard.

The difference is enormous: The open space standard would probably be about 140 picocuries of radiation per liter, said Dave Shelton, vice president for environmental systems for Kaiser-Hill. That's nearly 1,000 times more contamination than allowed under the current drinking-water standard of 0.15 picocuries per liter.

Energy Department and Kaiser-Hill staff members insist there was no other way to write the contract, because no one could calculate a cost for cleanup to the tighter standard.

"If the number were 0.15 on site, we didn't really know how that was going to be done," Shelton said. Diffuse, low-level soil contamination may be the culprit, Legare said, and the DOE and Kaiser-Hill don't want to bulldoze the entire site, including high-quality tallgrass prairie.

DOE's Joe Legare, assistant manager of environment and infrastructure at Rocky Flats, hinted that his agency may petition its regulators to modify the Rocky Flats cleanup agreement, since meeting the 0.15 surface water standard on site has proven so difficult.

But the site's regulators said the Energy Department will have to work hard to convince them that the standard must be made more lenient.

"It may be technically impossible to meet the (current) standard everywhere, but the burden of proof is on them," said Steve Gunderson, the Rocky Flats manager at the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. "I am convinced they can meet the standard at most places."

If the standard doesn't change, the DOE will either hire Kaiser-Hill to do more cleanup work or find another contractor to do it, Legare said, but the work might not be done by 2006.

Jean Woodis said she has never worried about the water flowing across Rocky Flats and off site.

Woodis and her husband John have lived east of Rocky Flats, at the corner of 96th and Alkire streets in Jefferson County, since 1948. They once raised milking cows and now run cattle and grow hay.

Woman Creek, which flows through Rocky Flats, once ran down near her house.

"My kids played in it, my cows drank water in it," Woodis said. "I had the water tested, and they milked my cows to test them for every kind of thing." The researchers found no contamination, she said.

"I have no problem with Rocky Flats, and I never have," Woodis said. She said she feels strongly about the future use of the site, however. Development is the bete noire of many people who have lived for a long time in the rural area east of Rocky Flats and have watched townhouses creep across the prairie.

Protecting Rocky Flats as open space would keep at least one chunk of land undeveloped.

"I'd like for them to leave it alone in its entirety," Woodis said. "Maybe they put a great big tall chain link fence around the nucleus (the industrial center of the site), but leave the rest alone."

Arvada Mayor Ken Fellman, however, is skeptical about the open-space proposal.

The cleanup level at a Superfund site is dictated by its expected future use. If the Energy Department were to let people build homes on Rocky Flats and work there, it would have to be cleaner than if development were prohibited and only non-motorized recreation allowed.

So Fellman and others say they fear that if the site is designated open space - as many have proposed - it will not be cleaned up enough.

Fellman insists Arvada has no development plans for Rocky Flats land, though the city has asked for that in the past.

"The No. 1 goal we have first and foremost is that we need to ensure that we get the highest reasonable level of cleanup on that site," he said.

U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and U.S. Rep. Mark Udall Udall , D-Boulder, are both developing bills that would protect Rocky Flats as open space. Fellman has suggested that the two legislators write into their bills "language that makes us comfortable that the land-use designation will not hinder cleanup."

Energy Department policy advisor Livingston said she's not sure that can be done.

"We have committed, as a matter of policy in the DOE, to meet our regulatory requirements," she said. Though citizens and local municipalities can request that the government clean up more thoroughly, those requests will be assessed relative to cleanup needs at other Energy Department sites.

Those needs are undeniably serious. At the DOE's Hanford site in eastern Washington, for example, a plume of radioactive water is slowly moving underground toward the Columbia River.

At the moment, the Energy Department is obligated to make sure water leaving the site is safe and also that soil left behind is clean enough that someone who runs there every day doesn't have a seriously elevated cancer risk.

But activists and local leaders were astonished when the government announced its cleanup level in 1996: The agency would only clean up soils contaminated with more than 651 picocuries of plutonium per gram of soil. On average, untainted Colorado soils register at 0.04 picocuries per gram, so cleanup workers would be allowed to leave behind soils more than 10,000 times "hotter" than native soils.

Citizens clamored loudly, and the federal agency eventually handed them $500,000 to redo its calculations. The Rocky Flats Soil Action Level Oversight Panel hired John Till of South Carolina's Risk Assessment Corp. to do the work.

Last year, the panel came out with a strong recommendation: To protect the health of future residents, soils should be cleaned to 35 picocuries per gram.

Rocky Flats neighbor Abbott said she'd love to see the site adopt that standard.

"Their previous standard was so ridiculous compared to any other site," she said. "I'd rather err on the side of caution."

The EPA, state health department and DOE are currently studying the panel recommendation and should decide by next year whether the current number, 651, is safe.

"They'll have to clean up more than that," said the state's Gunderson. "I'm confident."

If he's right, it will cost more to clean up the site, and it will take longer.

Kaiser-Hill managers calculated what it would take to clean up the 903 Pad, one of the site's most highly contaminated areas, given different cleanup standards.

As contracted currently, the 903 Pad project would cost $35 million and require soil removal from 5.4 acres, said John Corsi, spokesman for Kaiser-Hill.

If cleanup level drops from 651 to 115 picocuries per gram, it would cost almost $48 million for soil removal from 19 acres. And if the level drops all the way to 35 picocuries/gram, the project would cost $75 million and require excavation of 50 acres of soil.

Paul Golan, deputy manager of Rocky Flats for DOE, said that regardless of such unknowns, Rocky Flats can be cleaned up entirely by 2006. "We honestly believe that," he said. "It is going to be extremely difficult and there's a lot we need to learn to get it done by then."

Rocky Flats managers agreed to pursue the 2006 cleanup deadline primarily because of funding issues, he said.

Just five years ago, officials predicted the site wouldn't be cleaned until 2060, at tremendous cost to taxpayers.

"DOE kept upping the prices and timelines, and Congress finally said we need to stop this," Golan said. Legislators guaranteed the site a steady budget through 2006, assuming it would only need a small budget for monitoring after that.

Kaiser-Hill President Bob Card said that although his company calculates only a 20 percent chance of meeting the 2006 goal, the likelihood is getting better by the month, as cleanup projects are completed.

"We intend to do it," he said.

But former Flats worker Jim Kelly doesn't think it's possible.

Kelly, now 67, worked at Rocky Flats for 44 years and said the place disillusioned him. In the past, U.S. Energy Department managers flat out lied about accidents at the site, and Kelly's not convinced anyone knows the extent of real contamination there.

"I'm the guy that blew the whistle on the trenches and the drums that were buried," Kelly said. "There's still stuff buried, there's still contamination, and when they begin to disturb it, it's going to show its ugly head again."

Take building 771, he said.

"We had thousands of high intensity liquid spills there. Sometimes you'd see gallons and gallons of solvents on the floor. That stuff didn't disappear. It went somewhere. It didn't all get wiped up," Kelly said. "I really believe if they ever get underneath 771, it's going to be a hellhole. It's going to be a disaster."

Contact Katy Human at (303) 473-1364 or humank@thedailycamera.com.

------------

Message: 9
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:49:20 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Arvada to back Rocky Flats refuge

By Stacie Oulton
Denver Post Staff Writer
Aug. 27, 2000
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0827m.htm

The winds of change could finally be coming to Arvada.

The council is expected to pass a resolution Monday expressing "strong support" for a federal effort to turn Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapons plant, into a national wildlife refuge.

It's an action that surprised some members of the coalition of governments assembled to hash out the future use of Rocky Flats and oversee its cleanup.

Still, the move is seen as a major step forward in ensuring that the plant becomes a significant part of a "crown jewel" of open space in the northwest metro area.

"It's incredibly positive," said David Abelson, executive director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, which involves the seven county and city governments surrounding the plant. "Seven local governments moving in the same direction is key to sound policy-making because you are really working as a force."

Abelson called it a "milestone," because a year ago the seven governments had scattered views on the idea of open space, first introduced by Rep. Mark Udall, D-Boulder. Udall and Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Loveland, now have agreed to introduce a joint bill to make Rocky Flats a wildlife refuge. That bill might be introduced in Congress as early as next week. If it succeeds, the refuge's 6,400 acres would complement open space already purchased by Jeffer son and Boulder counties and the cities of Boulder and Arvada, creating an oasis of more than 11,000 acres of undeveloped land.

"We're very pleased," said Sean Conway, Allard's spokesman. "The importance of having a unified effort can't be underestimated" in getting the legislation through Congress.

Arvada had voted against the idea of open space there, and expressed strong concern about it becoming a national wildlife refuge. The city was the sole opponent of the plan and had a lobbyist involved in the issue, which raised the concern that Arvada could become a roadblock to the bill's passage.

But the city's stance will change if the council votes to approve the resolution recommended by Mayor Ken Fellman and Councilwoman Lorraine Anderson.

Five of the seven council members reached said they supported the resolution.

Fellman said the change stems from what he sees as stronger language in the bill, ensuring that the refuge designation won't create an opportunity for the federal government to do a "dirty" cleanup of the plant's radioactive and chemical pollution.

"We see the bill as addressing most of our concerns, and that makes us comfortable," Fellman said.

But, the mayor said, Allard made it clear that the wildlife refuge was the city's only option.

Arvada officials had argued that designating the plant as open space or a refuge now would permit a lower level of clean because there would be less human contact with the land. Coalition members and others disputed the idea that future land use would dictate the cleanup.

The city wanted the plant cleaned up to a level that would permit industrial use.

In addition, a history of the city wanting ownership of a part of Rocky Flats and wanting the option for other kinds of reuse prompted heavy criticism from its opponents.

"Definitely we were interpreting Arvada's interest (as wanting) to leave the door open for development if not in fact pushing development," Westminster City Manager Bill Christopher said. "I would interpret their support (for the joint bill) to be just the opposite. This is very encouraging."

-------------

Message: 10
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:53:47 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Declassified photos give a new look at old Hanford

August 27, 2000
by Linda Ashton
The Associated Press
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/hanf27_20000827.html

RICHLAND - Everything used to be secret at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Thousands of people worked side-by-side at the Manhattan Project site, never talking about what they were doing and, often, not knowing themselves.

Loose lips, after all, sank ships.

In 1943, scientists in the United States and Nazi Germany were racing to build an atomic bomb.

In the isolated desert of Eastern Washington, miles from the population centers of Seattle and Portland, the federal government and its contractors built the first large-scale reactor to make plutonium.

Most of the 50,000 workers on the site were not told what they were making until after the first bombs were dropped on Japan.

But government photographers were taking pictures of the work, and now some of those pictures have been released to the public.

"They wanted a living story of Hanford," said Dave Briggs, manager of the national-security analysis team for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "At the end of the war effort, it was supposed to be torn down and gone - then the Cold War came along."

Some 90,000 negatives - glimpses into an archive of the remarkable and the mundane - detailed the once-classified life at Hanford from 1943 to 1967. It's a relatively small sampling of the 2 million photographs taken at Hanford since Day One.

Some photos are available now on the Hanford Web site: www.hanford.gov/doe/culres/photos/. A photo disk of the images should be available by Oct. 1.

"They were classified because of the time period they were taken. Almost everything was classified just by definition," Briggs said.

Briggs and Rick Stutheit, a classification officer for the U.S. Department of Energy, are among the dozen modern-day film detectives reviewing boxes and boxes of negatives, stored in aging manila envelopes, and compiling the photographic library.

The project is part of the Energy Department's openness policy, and it reduces costs of storing the material; classified storage is very expensive.

The Hanford atomic works sprang out of the sagebrush in just a few months. The prospect of feeding, housing and entertaining 50,000 people in a place where there had been little more than a string of small farm towns and orchards was daunting.

The photographs reflect it all, from construction of the Plutonium Uranium Extraction plant to shots of people in the universal pastimes of fishing, cooking, dancing.

There are pictures of bandleader Kay Kyser, children learning to swim, Election Night 1944.

About 50,000 negatives have been reviewed so far, and only about a dozen have remained classified - those dealing with weapons information and unit costs, Stutheit says. Photographs that might be culturally sensitive for American Indians also are being held for tribal review.

Lee Edgar, 86, was among those bearing photographic witness to history at Hanford from 1947 to 1967. He shot traffic accidents, crime scenes, U.S. presidents and new buildings.

Once, he recalls, he was lowered 15 or 16 feet into a tank, with his arms raised above his head, to take pictures for signs of rust.

"When I went to come out, I couldn't come out," he said.

His lean frame had swelled - not unlike a diver in need of decompression - down in the tank, and he had to be yanked out with a harness and a crane.

His wife, Betty, 79, knew better than to ask what he did on the job.

"I never talked to her about anything," Edgar said.

Hanford photographers worked with Graflex Speed Graphics, using 101mm or 127mm lenses, and typically producing 4-inch-by-5-inch negatives. All film was black-and-white and no roll film was used until the 1950s, according to Daniel Ostergaard, another former Hanford photographer.

Hasselblads, high-end medium-format cameras producing 2 1/4-inch-by-2 1/4-inch negatives, were used in the late 1960s, and color transparency film was first used about 1960.

The pictures have been helpful as the Energy Department and its contractors work to clean up the radioactive legacy of 40 years of plutonium production, providing minute details about the construction of leaking storage tanks, for example.

The negatives are being scanned, indexed and cleaned for public display, improving the quality of some images dramatically.

For Angela Townsend, a Pasco native and a national-lab employee, scanning the photos has been an education. "I was born in 1970. I didn't know what all of this was," she said. "Actually, this is better than our history classes we had in school."

-------------

Message: 11
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 12:57:25 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

GOP promises to put nuke waste in Nevada

August 27, 2000 3:26 AM
http://www.tahoe.com/appeal/stories.8.27.00/VIEWS/ltrr27Aug1777.html

To the editor:

In a letter to the editor on Aug. 23, Donald Cunningham of Carson City writes that he can think of no better place than Nevada to house our nation's supply of nuclear garbage. This same view is shared by Republican leaders in Congress who have been relentless in their efforts to guarantee that Yucca Mountain becomes the permanent home to high-level nuclear waste.

Fortunately for the majority of Nevadans, who unlike Cunningham are opposed to nuclear waste storage, Vice President Al Gore has pledged his support in turning back Republican-led efforts in Congress to water down key health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain.

In a letter to U.S. Senator Harry Reid sent Aug. 17, Gore clearly stated that as president he would veto any legislation which would restrict the role of the EPA in determining acceptable radiation levels and other guidelines for the proposed nuclear waste dump 90 miles from Las Vegas.

It is important to remember that only President Clinton's veto prevented nuclear waste legislation from becoming law earlier this year, and Republican leaders in both the House and Senate have pledged they will be back to try again in 2001. These same leaders have also said that if a Republican is elected to the White House, there will be an interim nuclear waste dump at the Nevada Test Site. This would mean shipments of nuclear waste speeding to Nevada in as little as six months.

Unlike Gore, Gov. George W. Bush has failed to clarify his position on GOP efforts in Congress to accelerate the timetable for dumping nuclear waste in Nevada. During the GOP Convention in Philadelphia, Bush was silent on the need for tough standards to prevent nuclear contamination at the site, and he offered no new assurances to Nevada Republicans that he would side with them on this issue if elected to the White House.

Bush's reluctance to take a tough stance would come as no surprise in light of the fact that the GOP's 2000 platform contains language criticizing the Clinton-Gore administration for blocking efforts to dump nuke waste in Nevada. Proponents of Yucca Mountain know that tough radiation standards could ultimately disqualify the site and they view Bush as willing to accept legislation that would relax requirements for opening the dump.

Yucca Mountain is a threat to Nevada's families, to the environment and to our economy. We should know where the next president of our nation stands on the issue of nuclear waste and the role of the EPA in protecting the public and our water supplies from deadly radiation.

The people of Nevada need a president like Al Gore who will stand with them against the powerful nuclear industry, not a president like George W. Bush who will stand by and watch as the Silver State is turned into the nation's nuclear graveyard. The choice is clear, only Al Gore has given Nevada families his word that as President of the United States he will fight for what is right on this decisive issue.

RORY REID
Chairman, Nevada State Democratic Party

----------------

Message: 12
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 15:00:56 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Police to make arrests over Tokaimura nuclear accident

Aug. 25 2000
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/cgi-bin/kws.concisestory?id=20000825806

MITO, Japan, Police plan to arrest about three employees of JCO Co., operators of a uranium-processing facility in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, over a fatal nuclear chain reaction last September that killed two JCO workers and exposed hundreds of people to radiation, police sources said Thursday.

The employees will be arrested sometime next month on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, the sources said.

========

Comments:

The same thing needs to happen to the management of OR in regard to allowing the plants to poison the region with fluorides and then trying to hide the issue.

-------------

Message: 13
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 16:31:03 EDT
From: df7332@aol.com

[OTP] SOMETHING TO PONDER - COMMON DENOMINATOR (?)

To All:

* Maybe I've spent too much time at the keyboard, but is there a common denominator here? (Not including "WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF WITH AMERICA?")

* Consider the fact that the information below was culled from various *unrelated* sources.

* Please understand that I'm not pushing religion here, just noticing what seems to be some *interelated* material.

=================

BACKGROUND (This was printed in our local Metro News and caught my eye.):

WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF WITH AMERICA?

One of the most widely read books of all time is "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Written in 1788 by Edward Gibbon, it sets forth five basic reasons why that great civilization withered and died.

They were:

1) The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for human society.

2) Higher and higher taxes; the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace.

3) The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal more immoral.

4) The building of great armaments when the real enemy was within - the decay of individual responsibility.

5) The decay of religion; faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide the people.

The oft heard warning that "history repeats itself" has an ominous meaning for America.

-Quiet Hour Echoes

NOTE (By Don): [The Quiet Hour is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. As you browse through the many pages that highlight this ministry, we pray that God may touch your heart to allow you to see what this ministry is all about and how you can participate in its efforts.]

=================

COMMENT #1: Ran across this web site while searching for something else. (can't remember what I was searching for at the time.) Please take a moment to explore the site.

ILLUMINATI NEWS: <http://mercury.spaceports.com/~persewen/illum_index1001.htm>

EXCERPTS (Quoted by Illuminati News *only for reference.*):

"No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a Luciferian Initiation."

David Spangler, Director of Planetary Initiative, United Nations

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism and religious dogmas ... We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with vested interests in controlling us. The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives ... for charting the changes of human behavior."

Brock Chisholm, DIRECTOR, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

============

COMMENT #2: Ran across these web sites while searching fluorine, fluorides, etc.

Mind control?

Introduction to Fluoridation <http://www.enteract.com/~mgfree/Medical/Fluorine/FluorineApathy.html>

The Chemical Manipulation of Human Consciousness <http://www.cco.net/~trufax/menu/chem.html>

=================

COMMENT #3: This was posted to the <soc.veterans> newsgroup and relates to GATT, NAFTA, WTO. (Copied verbatim, without corrections. Note that in this posting there is a religious slant, also.)

Subject: A concern For tomorrows Vets From: subforgod@aol.com (Subforgod) Newsgroups: soc.veterans Date: 22 Aug 2000 22:56:57 GMT

Tomorrows Veteran will be from Police actions sponsered by The UN

The first of september this Year The UN is holding what is called the miliniel assembly to concider adopting an upgrade to thier charter. This Charter will increase thier power to enforce UN Dictates across national boarders. because our country has some of the best trained people ...We will more than likely be tasked to be world Policeman....as result many of our people will be involved in wars that do not fit our National interest.

. In a NutShell The UN is consolidating its Power as a World Governing Body and will be working in consort with the WTO and The World criminal court....We will become thier Policeman.

For Those Who would like to explore where Globalism and NAFTA is taking us here is a number of Links Most of Which are From The Proponents of Globalism

Save these to a document file and Bookmark these links ..because they will comre usefull as the Election Year moves on...Feel Free to pass them on ... ________________________________

World government Links:
http://www.i-p-o.org/global-democracy.htm
http://www.gci.ch/GreenCrossFamily/gorby/gorby.html
http://www.globalgreen.org/home.html
http://www.charter99.org/
http://www.cgg.ch/
http://www.millenniumpeacesummit.com
http://www.cgg.ch/links.htm
http://www.worldgov.org/
http://acgc.org/
http://www.upf.org/index.html
http://www.worldgov.org/MPAN/Default.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/~hyphenate/oneworld.html
http://www.globalpolicy.org/
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2598/
http://www.weforum.org/
http://www.vvm.com/~ctomlin/a87.htm
http://www.igc.org/icc/
http://www.worldgovernment.org/index2.html
http://www.worldgovernment.org/links.html
http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/am98/jdw-sp/am98-en.htm
http://www.thenation.com/issue/981019/1019GREI.HTM
http://www.epinet.org/
http://www.prospect.org/archives/40/40kuttnf.html
http://www.oneworld.org/partners/partners_list/ptlista_d.html
http://www.ombwatch.org/www/ombw/regs/wto.html
http://www.sovereignty.net/doddquote.htm
http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/globalization/
http://www.pcii.net/~udarrell/newworldorderglobaleconomics.html
http://www.pcii.net/~udarrell/globaleconomicpolicy.html
http://www.pcii.net/~udarrell/republicanscutgovt.html
http://www.theamericancause.org/pjb-97-0922.html
http://www.ourchurch.com/member/h/heavensgate/
http://www2.mo-net.com/~nixit/sect1cn.html
http://members.aol.com/jmlr1839/page/index.htm
http://www.myfreeoffice.com/ben/GLOBALGOV.html
http://www.weyrich.com/book_reviews/global_taxes.html
http://ps.ucdavis.edu/classes/ire001/int/worldgov.htm
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/glotax/
http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/dec/wr2keng.htm
http://usatoday.com/news/index/kosovo/koso1052.htm
http://www.lobbyforcyprus.org/nato.htm
http://www.sg/flavour/bulletin/bb-gov06.html
http://www.newswatchmagazine.org/nov99/index.shtml
http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/sep99/cbe921c.htm
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/09/F.RU.990922125438.html
http://www.transnational.org/features/AnnanstrongerUN.html
http://www.ips.org/icc/tv160601.htm
http://www.broomfieldnews.com/news/worldnation/21akofi.html
http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbins/legacy/sovereignty.htm
http://cda.net/stories/1999/Sep/21/S637371.asp
http://www.eclac.cl/english/news/Pressrelease/millennium2.htm
http://www.muenster.org/frieden/Down-with-the-Right-to-intervene%21.html

NAFTA LINKS

Lying with statistics
http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/tt/faculty/dcharbon/forum/usa.htm

Nafta secretariat
http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/index.htm

Globalcontact Nafta Register
http://www.nafta.net/global/

Notes on NAFTA:Masters of mankind
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/politics/chomnafta.html

North American Free Trade Agreement
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Bulletins/nafta.html

Nafta : are we better off because of it? by Nick Campolo
http://www.execpc.com/~squall1/nafta/nafta.html

Nafta Table of contents
http://sailor.gutenberg.org/etext93/naftchap.txt

Nafta 1995 annual report
http://www.ustr.gov/reports/tpa/1996/regional_2.html

certifying International Workers Rights-A practical Alternative
http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/levinson.html

A UAW Action Program Reforming Americas Trade Policy
http://uaw.org/workernews/1997CAP/CAP_booklet/05.html

The WTO and GLOBALONEY
http://www.populist.com/99.12.hightower.globaloney.html

Global Trade Watch -NAFTA
http://www.citizen.org/pctrade/nafta/naftapg.html

Nafta -Monitor
http://www.stile.lut.ac.uk/~gyedb/STILE/t0002097.html

Mexico Nafta Resources-LANIC
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/Mexico/nafta/

Teamsters - Nafta section
http://www.teamster.org/nafta_section.html

Nafta Fax Facts
http://www.naftalawsuit.org/naftafacts.html

Steel workers NAFTA Lawsuit Home Page
http://www.uswa.org/news/nafta.html

Nafta Satistics and Charts http://www.earlham.edu/~pols/17Fall97/nafta/statistics.htm

Matt Ch 24 :23-24 Then if any man shall say unto you,Lo,Here is Chirst,or ther is Christ;Believe it not.For there shall arise False christs&prophets &shall shew great signs and wonders;insomuch that,if it were possible,they shall decieve the very elect.

CONCLUSION (by Don):
The "dumbing down" of America is apparently going *very* smoothly. Too bad we can't all come back in about 150 years (maybe less) and see the results of the Great World Order Government.

On second thought, maybe we wouldn't want to.
out'a here, Don