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

The Nuclear Graveyard Below

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, September 3, 2000
By LLOYD J. DUMAS
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20000903/t000082763.html

DALLAS, TEXAS--The sinking of the pride of the Russian submarine fleet, the Kursk, is not just another tragic loss of life at sea. It added two more nuclear reactors, and perhaps nuclear warheads, as well, to the more than half-dozen reactors and nearly 50 nuclear warheads already on the bottom of the sea. No one knows just how much ecological damage this nuclear graveyard is generating or when its latent threat to human life will become manifest.

Blaming the deteriorating condition of Russia's military forces for the Kursk tragedy obscures a key point. Similar accidents have happened before, under different conditions. When the U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarine Thresher sank with 129 men and two nuclear-armed SUBROC missiles aboard, it was 1963, and the Cold War was at its height. When a Yankee-class Russian submarine carrying 16 missiles, each armed with two nuclear warheads, sank 600 miles northeast of Bermuda in water three miles deep, it was 1986, in the heady, early days of glasnost and perestroika. Eight years later, Russian scientists told U.S. experts that the sub had broken up. The warheads and missiles, they said, were "badly damaged and scattered on the sea floor" and were surely leaking plutonium and uranium. In 1993, the Russians warned that plutonium from the nuclear submarine Komsomolets, which sank in the Norwegian Sea in 1989 with two nuclear torpedoes on board, was in danger of leaking and poisoning important fishing grounds.

All told, there are two U.S., one French and five Russian submarines in the underwater nuclear graveyard. But that is not the end of the story. The Kola Peninsula, off which the Kursk sank, has become a junkyard for 100 Soviet-era nuclear-powered subs that are rusting away with their nuclear reactors still on board. The 50,000 nuclear-fuel assemblies from the reactors are sitting in storage tanks, some of which are probably leaking, and in open-air bins on military bases and shipyards. At present rates, it will take decades to transport them to permanent storage.

The Kursk tragedy, in which 118 Russian sailors died, is the latest in a long line of nuclear military accidents. During the 45 years before the Kursk was built, there were at least 89 publicly reported military accidents involving nuclear weapons; 59 American, 25 Soviet/Russian, four French and one British. In addition to submarines, the accidents involved fighter planes, bombers, missiles, nuclear-waste storage facilities and surface ships. They occurred despite the best efforts of first-rate designers, careful manufacturers and well-trained crews. What lesson can be drawn from all this?

We live in an age dominated by the advance of technology. We have vastly more power to affect the physical world than we had even 60 years ago. Yet, humans are no less error-prone. The clash between our growing technological power and our enduring fallibility has laid us open to disaster on an unprecedented scale, by accident or design.

Despite the end of the Cold War, there are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons around the globe. U.S. nuclear forces remain on high alert. Two more nations, India and Pakistan, have joined the nuclear club within the past two years. Yet, nuclear weapons are not the only technology that threatens us.

Chemical and biological weapons, whether in the hands of hostile governments or terrorists, can kill large numbers of people. Then there are technologies designed for benign purposes but capable of doing enormous damage if things go dramatically wrong. Two of the worst accidents in the 20th century involved such technologies: the Chernobyl nuclear-power-plant meltdown on April 26, 1986, and the release of a cloud of toxic chemicals from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India on Dec. 3, 1984, which killed 2,000 people and injured 200,000 more.

There is no way to eliminate risk from the world, and we would be foolish to try. But there are less-risky technologies, more forgiving of human fallibility, that are either on the shelf or within reach. One of the most heavily subsidized energy technologies, nuclear power can be replaced by a variety of alternative energy sources, from solar and wind power to biomass conversion. If a concentrated and well-funded effort is necessary to lower cost and increase efficiency, it is a social investment worth making. For other dangerous technologies, a mix of technological and non-technological alternatives may be more effective.

In the mid-1990s, military figures like Gen. George Lee Butler, the commander in charge of all U.S. strategic nuclear weapons from 1991-94, and Gen. Charles A. Horner, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. They were joined in late 1996 by nearly 60 retired generals and admirals from the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain, who signed a statement at the United Nations endorsing the idea that nuclear weapons can and should be eliminated. They believe that conventional-weapons technologies are more than adequate for military needs today.

The nuclear reactors and weapons arsenal littering the bottom of the sea are out of our control. As with the Kursk, it is risky to try to retrieve them. That is not an acceptable state of affairs. We cannot blithely assume that all these weapons and reactors will remain stable indefinitely and do no harm. It's important that studies be done on the feasibility and desirability of retrieving them, and equally important that the results of these studies be made public and subjected to open criticism and debate. The Kursk is a good place to begin.

Cold War habits of thinking die hard. But there is no room in this situation for secrecy, arrogance or national pride. When we have found the best approach, whichever nations can most effectively contribute to implementing it must be mobilized in a timely and concerted joint effort. Surely, we have learned that much from the sinking of the Kursk.

In a larger sense, the Kursk is only the most recent reminder of our own imperfectability and the limitations of the technological devices we have developed. We must learn to take more seriously the boundaries created by our unavoidable fallibility, or we will surely do ourselves terrible damage some day.

-

Lloyd J. Dumas, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas, Dallas, Is the Author of "Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies."

---

Plutonium Pact With U.S. Signed, Russia Says

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, September 3, 2000
From Reuters
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20000903/t000082922.html
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=195302
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/09/03/national/PLUTONIUM03.htm

MOSCOW--Russia and the United States have formally signed an agreement to destroy 68 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, the Russian government said Saturday.

A government statement said Vice President Al Gore had signed the agreement Friday in Washington and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov had signed it Tuesday in Moscow

The deal was reached between Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and President Clinton during their June summit in Moscow.

The West has doubted the ability of post-Soviet Russia to properly control depots where weapons-grade plutonium is stored.

U.S. officials, alarmed by the nuclear ambitions of some "rogue states," have said it only takes 13 to 18 pounds of plutonium to make a powerful bomb.

The agreement says that the International Atomic Energy Agency will monitor and control "the activities of Russia and the United States connected with the destruction of weapons-grade plutonium," the Russian statement said.

Putin and Clinton are expected to meet on the sidelines of the U.N. Millennium Summit in New York this week.

The plutonium pact requires each country to render the weapons-grade plutonium into a form unusable for nuclear weapons and to pledge never to use it for that purpose again.

According to U.S. officials, the 34 tons of plutonium to be destroyed by each country represent about one-quarter of Russia's military plutonium stockpile and about one-third of that of the United States.

Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar stories about: United States - Foreign Relations - Russia, Plutonium, Weapons Demobilization. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to retrieve one.

---

Russia's Putin Arrives in Japan

Associated Press
September 03, 2000 Filed at 8:37 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Japan-Russia-Putin.html

TOKYO (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Japan on Sunday for talks on economic cooperation and a territorial dispute that Japan has said is a condition for signing a peace treaty.

Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori were to meet Monday and Tuesday in part to try to settle conflicting claims over the Russian-controlled Kuril Islands -- known in Japan as the Northern Territories.

The four islands off Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido were seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War II, and the dispute has prevented the countries from signing a peace treaty ever since.

Though Russia and Japan aim to sign a peace treaty by year's end, a statement by Putin earlier Sunday indicates that they are still far from resolution.

``Has someone really ever said that the government of the Russian Federation plans to give up the Kurils?'' Putin said before flying to Japan.

``We are conducting negotiations. We are talking about only a discussion of the issue as such, and no more than that,'' he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Territorial disputes aside, the Kremlin hopes that Putin's trip will give a boost to economic ties.

Russian and Japanese officials plan to sign a dozen agreements, including a program on developing trade and economic relations and a separate document on joint efforts to aid the economic development of the Kuril Islands.

Putin and Mori are also expected to sign agreements to address cooperation in the energy field, Japanese assistance in dismantling Russian nuclear arsenals and strengthening cooperation between the two nations' border guards.

It will be Putin's third meeting with Mori this year and his second visit to Japan as president. He attended the Group of Eight summit of world leaders in July.

-------- china

China's President Heads to U.S.

Associated Press
September 04, 2000 Filed at 2:02 p.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-China-US.html

BEIJING (AP) -- Emboldened by President Clinton's decision to delay deploying a national missile shield, Chinese President Jiang Zemin intends to keep pressuring Washington to scrap the defense system at a U.N. summit this week.

Clinton's announcement Friday that deploying a national missile defense should be left to the winner of November's presidential election came after China's most public diplomacy in decades: an 18-month campaign with Russia to rally world opinion against the weapons system Beijing and Moscow view as a security threat.

China's small community of arms control experts, which backed the campaign in rare agreement with the politically powerful and hard-line military, showed relief.

Jiang, who wants stable ties with the United States but cannot afford to look weak at home, left for New York on Monday in a better position for talks.

``The Clinton decision will put Jiang Zemin in a stronger position'' -- not only at the United Nations but in a one-on-one meeting with the U.S. president, said Yan Xuetong, an international security scholar at China's elite Tsinghua University.

During the three-day U.N. summit, which opens Wednesday, and a smaller but important Security Council gathering Thursday, Jiang will confer with Russian President Vladimir Putin and lobby other world leaders to oppose the U.S. defense plans.

He will also court U.S. business leaders, whose investment is crucial to keeping China's economy growing.

As on his previous trips to the United States, Jiang will be shadowed by groups protesting Chinese human rights abuses.

Followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement plan demonstrations of their yoga-like meditation exercises during Jiang's stay in New York to highlight China's suppression of the group.

But unlike his last U.N. summit five years ago when a crisis over Taiwan produced a frosty meeting with Clinton, Jiang will put on display a China more confident of its rising world stature and its ties with Washington.

Opposition to the U.S. national missile defense, or NMD, and a more limited version for East Asia illustrates that change.

Beijing fears that the anti-missile shields will render useless its growing arsenal of missiles and force China into a costly arms race.

The proposed East Asian system, if extended to Taiwan, would bolster the island against Chinese pressure to unify, China's most sacred foreign-policy goal.

``The apparent Chinese strategy is to whip up international opposition in an effort to get the United States to cancel its NMD,'' said Evan Medeiros, an arms control researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Arms control tops the agenda for the Clinton-Jiang meeting, their first in a year, Western diplomats in Beijing said.

Clinton will try again to persuade Jiang that the missile shields are not directed against China, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.

Clinton will also preview the upcoming U.S. Senate debate on China's entry to the World Trade Organization and hopes to persuade Jiang to renew a dialogue on human rights, the diplomats said.

Aside from the heat over missile shields, Jiang is expected to try to advance the businesslike relationship he and Clinton have tried to forge.

Even on missile defense, China knows its influence over Washington is limited and that the battle is not won. Clinton's decision merely delayed deployment, and his possible successors -- Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush -- are committed to some form of national missile defense.

``This was a political decision,'' said Yan, the Chinese scholar. ``No one can stop this project.''

-------- depleted uranium

Evidence Shows Many Gulf War Vets Have Uranium Poisoning

By Jonathon Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier,
UK Sunday Times,
September 3, 2000
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/09/03/stifgnnws02001.html

New evidence that Gulf war syndrome exists and was caused by radiation poisoning will be revealed today by a former American army colonel who was at the centre of his government's attempts to diagnose the illness.

Dr Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war.

The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation.

Durakovic, who is professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, Washington, and the former head of nuclear medicine at the US Army's veterans' affairs medical facility in Delaware, will tell the conference that he and his team of American and Canadian scientists have discovered life-threateningly high levels of DU in Gulf veterans 10 years after the desert war.

His findings, which have been verified by four independent experts, is embarrassing for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and American Defence Department, which have consistently refused to test Gulf war veterans for DU.

Durakovic will tell the European Association of Nuclear Medicine that tests on 17 veterans have shown DU in the urine and bones of 70% of them.

Depleted uranium does not occur naturally. It is the by-product of the industrial processing of waste from nuclear reactors and is better known as weapons-grade uranium. It is used to strengthen the tips of shells to ensure that they pierce armour.

Durakovic, who left America because he was told his life was in danger if he continued his research, has concluded that troops inhaled the tiny uranium particles after American and British forces fired more than 700,000 DU shells during the conflict.

The finding begins to explain for the first time why medical orderlies and mechanics are the principal victims of Gulf war syndrome.

British Army engineers who removed tanks hit by DU shells from the battlefield and medical personnel who cut off the clothes of Iraqi casualties in field hospitals have been disproportionately affected.

Once inside the body, DU causes a slow death from cancers, irreversible kidney damage or wastage from immune deficiency disorders.

In the UK, where more than 400 veterans are estimated to have died from "Gulf war syndrome", at least 50 of those victims came from Reme (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) units. Others, such as Ray Bristow, 42, of Hull, who was a theatre technician for 32 Field Hospital, are now wheelchair-bound.

Tests carried out by Durakovic on Bristow showed that, nine years after leaving the Gulf, he had more than 100 times the safe limit of DU in his body.

Durakovic said: "I doubt whether the MoD or Pentagon will have the audacity to challenge these results. I can't say this is the solitary cause of Gulf war syndrome, but we now have clear evidence that it is a leading factor in the majority of victims.

"I hope the US and UK governments finally realise that, by continuing to use this ammunition, they are effectively poisoning their own soldiers."

An MoD spokesman said it would study any new evidence: "Our aim is to get the best care for British veterans and our views are based on the best evidence around.

----

Iraqis Say Their Cancer Rate Is Up -- and Blame 'Depleted Uranium' Used by U.S. in Gulf War

Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday, September 3, 2000
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
http://www.sltrib.com/09032000/nation_w/18928.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Wearing a lace-fringed bonnet and a faint smile, Azhaar Kamel, 7, watched with wide eyes as American visitors entered a cancer ward at Saddam Pediatric Hospital.

She was a gentle child. She also was a symbol of an issue as troubling and elusive as any childhood fantasy or fear. Azhaar had leukemia. So did several of the other 19 cancer patients from various parts of Iraq.

Doctors, echoing their government, blamed nearly all of the cancers on a simple-sounding acronym: DU. But the "depleted uranium" debate is not simple. It involves about 320 tons of armor-piercing slugs that U.S. and British planes and tanks fired during the Gulf War.

The slugs were made from the low-level radioactive metal that remains when U-235 isotopes are removed from natural uranium to make enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors. Heavier than lead, depleted uranium self-ignites and gets sharper as it penetrates armor.

Much of it vaporizes, giving off fine particles that can be inhaled. Some fall onto the ground, sometimes where crops are later grown. Some cling to damaged equipment that soldiers and civilians later climb on. Winds carry some away.

Whether the particles -- which have low, alpha-ray radioactivity and are chemically toxic -- pose dangers is unresolved. Iraqis say the particles have caused a sharp rise in cancer rates and birth deformities, especially in Basra and other southern areas.

Iraqis have had more exposure to such particles than U.S. troops, but there are other factors: a population weakened by malnutrition, pollution from refineries and burning oil wells, and Iraq's use of poison gas against both Iran and rebels among its own people. The World Health Organization has not yet studied depleted uranium in Iraq.

Veterans groups in the United States are concerned because hundreds of U.S. soldiers may have had close exposure. Some think that could be one factor in the unusual illnesses many Gulf War veterans have reported.

Definitive studies of depleted uranium's long-term effects have not been done. A General Accounting Office report to Congress on March 29 said that two expert reviews of evidence, plus monitoring by Veterans Affairs of a few dozen highly exposed veterans, show that radiation from inhaled or ingested depleted uranium is an unlikely health hazard to U.S. troops.

That supported the Pentagon's position. But the report, which notes that veterans with DU shrapnel in their bodies have elevated uranium levels in their urine, also says more research is needed.

Opposition groups such as the Military Toxics Project cite conflicting evidence among both civilian and military studies. They point out elaborate protective procedures used to handle depleted uranium. And, noting that such weapons were used in Kosovo, they say the Pentagon is protecting its ability to use the weapons on future battlefields.

"I am looking for a way to follow up on this," said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who had asked the General Accounting Office for an analysis and is still bothered by some discrepancies in the report. "I'm not convinced that enough research has been done, and I do have a continuing sense that this depleted uranium was dangerous and may have caused health problems.

"To me, the response so far of the federal government really goes to the core of whether we treat our soldiers fairly. What I have noticed working with Agent Orange and other issues like this is, we sort of have a tendency to say to our military people, when they say they're not feeling well, to basically assume that it's not serious or that they're making it up.

"My view is we should assume that they're telling the truth and that they're right. After they've made this kind of sacrifice, that should be the kind of assumption we have."

Feingold added that a broader, intensive study by the National Academy of Sciences on the possible illnesses associated with Gulf War toxin exposures in general, including depleted uranium, is expected to be released soon.

---

Ex-U.S. Army Doctor Says Uranium Shells Harmed Vets

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3 4:33 PM ET updated 4:33 PM ET Sep 3
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/ts/france_syndrome_dc_2.html

PARIS (Reuters) - A former U.S. army doctor said on Sunday that many Gulf War veterans suffered from renal and other diseases as a result of inhaling particles of depleted uranium used in anti-tank shells.

``According to some estimates, 320 tons of depleted uranium were exploded during the (1991) Gulf War,'' doctor Asaf Durakovic told reporters after speaking before a conference of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine.

``Many of the patients (that I examined) suffered renal disease and failure, the clinical consequences of inhaled uranium,'' he said.

Durakovic said depleted uranium that coated shells to ease penetration of thick armor exploded into multiple particles, which ``became part of atmospheric dust'' after hitting targets.

``Because of the omnipresence of small sub-micron radioactive dust in the Persian Gulf, uranium that was liberated by impact (with tanks)...evaporated at temperatures higher than several thousand degrees centigrade,'' he said.

``Some of those particles were inhaled and stayed in the lungs...where they can cause cancer, and some entered into the bloodstream and affected kidneys and bones.''

Durakovic, who held the rank of colonel, is now with the department of Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University Medical School in Washington.

He told reporters that he had come under ``political pressure'' from U.S. authorities to halt his research shortly after the Gulf War, when the U.S. military first challenged the notion that a mysterious ``Gulf War syndrome'' affected many veterans.

Authorities are now conducting their own studies.

``I don't claim uranium contamination is the (main) cause of the Gulf War syndrome but the veterans show high levels of depleted uranium in their bodies and studies about this must be intensified,'' he said.

The British Sunday Times newspaper said Durakovic would tell the conference that ``tens of thousands'' of British and American soldiers were dying from radiation from depleted uranium shells. But he gave no such figure.

Some published medical studies have linked the Gulf War syndrome, with symptoms ranging from flu to chronic fatigue and asthma, to the multiple vaccines given soldiers during the war to counter possible Iraqi chemical weapons attacks.

--------

Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have Uranium Poisoning

by Jonathon Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Sunday Times (UK)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/090300-05.htm

NEW evidence that Gulf war syndrome exists and was caused by radiation poisoning will be revealed today by a former American army colonel who was at the centre of his government's attempts to diagnose the illness.

Dr Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war.

The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation.

Durakovic, who is professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, Washington, and the former head of nuclear medicine at the US Army's veterans' affairs medical facility in Delaware, will tell the conference that he and his team of American and Canadian scientists have discovered life-threateningly high levels of DU in Gulf veterans 10 years after the desert war.

His findings, which have been verified by four independent experts, is embarrassing for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and American Defence Department, which have consistently refused to test Gulf war veterans for DU.

Durakovic will tell the European Association of Nuclear Medicine that tests on 17 veterans have shown DU in the urine and bones of 70% of them.

Depleted uranium does not occur naturally. It is the by-product of the industrial processing of waste from nuclear reactors and is better known as weapons-grade uranium. It is used to strengthen the tips of shells to ensure that they pierce armour.

Durakovic, who left America because he was told his life was in danger if he continued his research, has concluded that troops inhaled the tiny uranium particles after American and British forces fired more than 700,000 DU shells during the conflict.

The finding begins to explain for the first time why medical orderlies and mechanics are the principal victims of Gulf war syndrome. British Army engineers who removed tanks hit by DU shells from the battlefield and medical personnel who cut off the clothes of Iraqi casualties in field hospitals have been disproportionately affected.

Once inside the body, DU causes a slow death from cancers, irreversible kidney damage or wastage from immune deficiency disorders.

In the UK, where more than 400 veterans are estimated to have died from "Gulf war syndrome", at least 50 of those victims came from Reme (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) units. Others, such as Ray Bristow, 42, of Hull, who was a theatre technician for 32 Field Hospital, are now wheelchair-bound.

Tests carried out by Durakovic on Bristow showed that, nine years after leaving the Gulf, he had more than 100 times the safe limit of DU in his body.

Durakovic said: "I doubt whether the MoD or Pentagon will have the audacity to challenge these results. I can't say this is the solitary cause of Gulf war syndrome, but we now have clear evidence that it is a leading factor in the majority of victims.

"I hope the US and UK governments finally realise that, by continuing to use this ammunition, they are effectively poisoning their own soldiers."

An MoD spokesman said it would study any new evidence: "Our aim is to get the best care for British veterans and our views are based on the best evidence around."

-------- iraq

We Must Break Out of the Failed 'Saddam Trap'

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Tuesday, September 5, 2000
Los Angeles Times
by Scott Ritter
http://www.latimes.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090500-106.htm

While the presidential candidates jockey to define their agendas, there is one issue on which both Al Gore and George W. Bush see eye to eye: Saddam Hussein must go.

While neither candidate has offered a precise plan on how to achieve this goal, it seems clear that regardless of who wins the White House, the next four years will see a continuation of America's decade-long fixation on the president of Iraq.

The problem of Iraq is complex and vexing. Over the past eight years, the Clinton administration was trapped in a Saddam-centric policy of regime removal, which dictated the containment of the Iraqi dictator through economic sanctions regardless of the reality of Iraq's disarmament obligation and the horrific humanitarian cost incurred by the people of Iraq. This policy has been an abject failure, a fact that has prompted much of the international community to start viewing Iraq and its leader more sympathetically. Whoever wins the election in November will face the daunting task of overcoming the Clinton legacy on Iraq: a hopelessly divided Security Council, an impasse on weapons inspections, a degenerating system of economic sanctions, the loss of American credibility and a resurgent Saddam Hussein.

Soon, weapons inspectors from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) will try to resume inspections of Iraqi weapons facilities. Such inspections were stopped 20 months ago, in the aftermath of Operation Desert Fox and the resultant collapse of UNMOVIC's predecessor organization, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). Iraq has rejected any cooperation with UNMOVIC as long as sanctions remain in place. The result is that, yet again, the Security Council will be confronted with a crisis regarding Iraq.

Three of the five permanent members of the Security Council--Russia, France and China--have made no secret of their sympathies toward Iraq and their opposition to America's Iraq policy. The rest of the world appears more inclined to trade with Iraq than continue a pointless and morally bankrupt policy of economic sanctions. The fact that both major presidential candidates couch their justification for the continuation of economic sanctions on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is still in power and not on any sound assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction only further distances their respective positions from the rest of the world.

In fairness, the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is no easy hurdle. Years of Iraqi obfuscation, lies and general lack of cooperation have made any unbiased assessment of its disarmament obligation virtually impossible. It is easy, given Iraq's uneven record, to accept analysis based on speculation, rumor and hyperbole. This is the course that many, including Richard Butler, the former executive chairman of UNSCOM, have taken. The message of Iraq as "the greatest threat," however overblown, is widely accepted in those corners prone to demonizing Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

The reality, however, is quite different. Rolf Ekeus, Butler's predecessor as the head of UNSCOM, acknowledged that by 1995, Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" and that "all that remained were questions." All of the major confrontations between UNSCOM and Iraq that took place between 1996 and 1998 concerned the search for documents and weapons components, not weapons or weapons production capability.

Iraq no longer possesses meaningful quantities of weapons of mass destruction or the means to produce such weapons. And yet Iraq continues to be punished by economic sanctions that have directly or indirectly led to the deaths of more than 1.2 million Iraqi civilians, primarily young children and the elderly. The justification for this tragedy lies not in Iraq's disarmament obligation, which has been largely fulfilled, but rather in the policy of regime removal pursued by the United States. This policy has failed, and yet it represents the cornerstone of the thinking on Iraq for both Gore and Bush.

The Saddam Trap has foiled America's Iraq policy for eight years, and unless both candidates are willing and able to break free of such Saddam-centric thinking and focus on the larger issue of Iraq, it will continue to ensnare America for the foreseeable future.

Scott Ritter Is a Former Weapons Inspector for Unscom and the Author of "Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem, Once and for All" (Simon & Schuster, 1999). E-mail: Wsritter@aol.com

-------- israel

Israel's Best Defense

New York Times
September 03, 2000

To the Editor:
Re "Clinton in Cairo," by William Safire (column, Aug. 28):

Mr. Safire correctly points to the likelihood that "in five years, Iran and Iraq are likely to have weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them." But rather than concluding that this deadly development makes the success of the peace process all the more critical, he argues the opposite: Territory, not peace, is the best defense.

While maintaining a decisive military advantage is imperative, Israel's best defense is to close the circle of peace on its borders. Israel now has peaceful borders and relations with Egypt and Jordan. Adding Syria, Lebanon and, most critically, the Palestinians to this alignment would diminish the likelihood of any Iraqi or Iranian attempts to launch an attack. It is the Palestinian issue that currently provides a false pretext for belligerency.

MICHAEL W. SONNENFELDT Chairman, Israel Policy Forum New York, Aug. 28, 2000

-------- japan

Coolant Leak at Tohoku Elec Nuclear Plant

Reuters
September 03, 2000 Filed at 10:49 p.m. ET
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-japan-n.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's fifth-biggest power utility, Tohoku Electric Power Co Inc, said on Monday about one liter (0.22 gallon) of coolant water had leaked from a pipe at one of its nuclear plants in the north of the country.

The pipe connected one of six machines that filter coolant water to remove impurities at the plant in the Miyagi district,

202 miles from Tokyo, a company spokesman said.

No radiation had escaped into the environment outside the 524-megawatt plant in Saturday's incident, he added.

The equipment was stopped immediately and remains closed while the cause is investigated, he said, adding the incident had not disrupted operation of the plant itself.

Japan has 51 commercial nuclear reactors which supply about a third of its electricity.

But a series of nuclear accidents in Japan including its worst incident in September last year which killed two uranium plant workers, has undermined public trust in the nation's nuclear policy.

Tohoku Electric shares ended Monday morning down 5 yen or 0.33 percent at 1,535 yen.

-------- russia

Putin warns of possible arms race with US

Australian Financial Review
Sun, 3 Sep 2000 19:00 AEDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-3sep2000-73.htm

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that differences remain between Russia and the United States over nuclear weapons, despite US President Bill Clinton's decision to put a controversial missile shield on hold.

Mr Putin says the decision has "been made exclusively in the interests of the United States."

Mr Putin has warned of Russian-US disagreements over the cornerstone 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which bans the deployment of national nuclear defence systems.

He says Mr Clinton's postponement of any decision on the national missile defence system "gives hope for a constructive dialogue."

Moscow has campaigned for months against the deployment of a missile defence shield, warning that such a move could spark a new arms race.

---

Russia's misgivings key to delay in missile defense

San Jose Mercury News
Sunday, September 3, 2000
New York Times
http://www7.mercurycenter.com/premium/world/docs/missile03.htm

Tuesday afternoon, visibly tired after an 11-hour flight from Cairo, Egypt, and still focused on the Middle East, President Clinton met at the White House with two of his closest advisers to hear Secretary of Defense William Cohen appeal one last time for making the bold decision to build a national missile defense.

Cohen, speaking matter-of-factly, conceded that technological hurdles remained and the Pentagon's schedule for completing a system by 2005 had become no more than a hope. ``Still,'' a senior defense official said, ``he felt we should proceed with construction,'' to give Clinton's successor a head start toward building a system.

Clinton left the meeting without declaring his intentions, but by then the outcome was a formality, administration officials now say. The foundation for the decision he announced Friday in a hastily arranged speech at Georgetown University had in fact been laid months before, several senior administration and Pentagon officials said.

Clinton's decision not to authorize even initial construction of a national missile ``shield'' had been shaped by events as far back as January, officials said, when the Russians first made it clear they would not negotiate changes in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

The administration's calculated plan for making a decision about a limited missile shield in the 2000 election year -- drafted in part as political defense of Vice President Al Gore in his campaign for the presidency -- had begun to unravel even before it got very far. And it did so because of events that were largely out of the administration's control.

The startling diplomatic opening of Kim Jong Il of North Korea, culminating in a summit meeting with his South Korean counterpart in June, gave support to missile-defense critics who said the threat of an attack by ``rogue'' nations had been overstated. And the spectacular failure of the Pentagon's test of its high-speed missile interceptor in July left insurmountable doubts about whether the technology was ready.

Most important, however, the administration could not predict domestic politics in Russia. The administration's plan rested on negotiating a deal with Moscow to allow construction of a limited missile shield without scrapping the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That treaty, signed by the United States and the former Soviet Union, and viewed by some as the cornerstone of Cold War arms control, sought to prevent nuclear war by forcing Washington and Moscow to remain equally vulnerable to the other's attack.

But any chance of a deal with Russia disintegrated along with the political fortunes of the man on whom this diplomatic strategy depended, Boris Yeltsin, who was viewed by American negotiators as more pliable than his successor as Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

``I believe that when Boris Yeltsin was president, there was a decent chance of getting the deal we wanted in the course of this year,'' a senior administration official said. ``When Putin came in, that changed. Putin is, among other things, the un-Boris.''

With each of these events, support within the administration for building a missile defense withered. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was so unenthusiastic she virtually dropped out of the internal debate, leaving the issue to her deputy, Strobe Talbott, administration officials said.

Opposition had so hardened at the White House and State Department that officials at the National Security Council were said to have expressed quiet relief when the test failed in July.

``It was a joke over here that they were burning incense at the NSC before the test, hoping it would fail,'' a senior Pentagon official said.

In the end, it was Cohen, the sole Republican in the president's Cabinet, who continued to advocate sticking to the timetable the administration had drafted, long after all of Clinton's other senior advisers had concluded that to do so would be a technological leap of faith and a diplomatic disaster.

Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had almost no role in the debate or the decision, showed little enthusiasm, Pentagon officials said, believing that protecting against shorter-range missiles capable of hitting American troops overseas was the more pressing concern. They were especially worried, these officials said, that an expensive missile defense would drain dollars from conventional forces.

In the hours after Clinton made his announcement Friday, Cohen did not appear in public to explain his views. He simply released a curt statement that, at least indirectly, made his zeal for pursuing missile defense clear. ``I have noted on many occasions that several emerging threats warrant the deployment of an effective missile-defense program as soon as it's technologically feasible,'' he said.

---

Admiral: Missile May Have Hit Sunken Russian Sub

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3 2:59 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/russia_submarine_dc_125.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian admiral offered on Sunday a new possible explanation for last month's sinking of the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, saying it might have been hit first by a missile fired by another vessel.

The Kursk plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea on August 12 and all 118 crew members died.

Vladimir Yegorov, commander of Russia's Baltic Fleet, said such a strike was one of several versions being considered by investigators, including a collision with another vessel or with a mine left over from World War Two.

Yegorov told state RTR television in an interview that no such strike had ever occurred in the Russian navy during exercises in which the Kursk was taking part in the Barents Sea. But an incident like it could have set off a detonation in one of the Kursk's own missiles.

``Even if it had been struck, it would have been clear that it was a torpedo from one of our own ships and it would had the effect of a mere mosquito bite on such a submarine, even less. During exercises, torpedo never carry charges,'' he said.

But a reaction by detonation could not be ruled out despite many safety systems.

``If a strike occurs, conditions are created for detonation. Detonation is possible,'' he said.

``The damage in the (submarine's) first section demonstrates that this version cannot be ruled out.''

Russia made a series of rescue efforts before Norwegian divers found that the vessel was full of water and the crew were pronounced dead eight days after the accident.

Western officials have strongly denied any suggestion the accident was caused by a collision with a foreign submarine and say the cause was probably an exploding faulty torpedo on board.

The Russian minister in charge of the investigation told the same program that an operation to recover the bodies of the victims would get under way between September 28 and 30 and take up to three weeks.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said a plan to raise the entire submarine, or at least the nuclear reactors powering it, could be undertaken within a year despite huge costs.

``First of all, there is the reactor. Our public opinion, and not just ecologists, is very concerned. In any case, we will get the reactor...the reactor is practically shut down and is now cooling,'' he said.

He said studies had shown little difference in cost between raising the entire submarine or simply the reactors.

``But it would be simpler to raise the reactor itself than to lift the entire vessel,'' he said.

Klebanov had earlier said the operation to recover the bodies would cost between $5 million and $7 million and involve a joint Russian-Norwegian team cutting holes in the side. He had earlier estimated the cost of lifting the entire submarine at about $100 million.

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Russia Hails U.S. Decision to Put NMD on Hold

Russia Today
Sep 3, 2000
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=195303

MOSCOW -- (Reuters) Russian President Vladimir Putin has welcomed a decision by U.S. President Bill Clinton to delay development of a national missile defense system, the Kremlin said in a statement received by Reuters on Saturday.

"U.S. President B. Clinton's decision not to take obligations to deploy the system of national anti-missile defense is seen in Russia as a well-thought and responsible step," the statement quoted Putin as saying.

"There is no doubt this step will lead to strengthening strategic stability and security in the whole world, and will strengthen the authority of the United States in the eyes of the international community," Putin said.

Clinton, speaking at Georgetown University on Friday, effectively left to his successor a decision on the system, which is vehemently opposed by both Russia and China, saying more time is needed for testing. Clinton leaves office in January.

Russia strongly opposes U.S. plans to deploy a national missile defense system (NMD) aimed at protecting the country from a possible threat posed by what it has dubbed "rogue states" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Russia says the NMD would breach the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which limits such systems and is seen in Moscow as a keystone for all subsequent nuclear disarmament deals.

Russia rejects U.S. proposals to amend the ABM treaty and has threatened to reconsider its obligations under other disarmament deals if Washington goes ahead with the system.

But earlier this year Putin said he understood U.S. concerns about potential new nuclear threats and proposed setting up an international non-strategic system to deal with them. Putin's proposals have so far failed to impress Washington.

RUSSIA PERSISTS IN OPPOSITION TO CHANGES IN ABM

Russian media, which commented on Clinton's statement with apparent relief, said that Putin's staunch opposition and the concern of NATO countries played an important role in prompting Washington to delay the decision on NMD.

"The turn of the events may be described as Russia's major foreign policy success," Kommersant daily newspaper wrote.

"Although Russia has neither power, nor resources to resume confrontation with the United States, Moscow has managed to persuade Western Europe that such a scenario was possible," it said referring to Moscow's threats.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement issued on Saturday that Russia persisted in its opposition to any changes in the ABM treaty, and would press ahead with its own initiative.

The ministry said ways of maintaining strategic stability would be high on the agenda of Putin's visit to Japan starting on Sunday, and of his talks with Clinton on the fringes of the UN Millennium Summit in New York next week.

In Washington, White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said on Friday he felt it was still possible to reach an agreement with Russia to amend the ABM treaty despite Russian opposition.

"I do not believe that we have yet exhausted the possibilities for reaching such an agreement," Berger said.

---

U.S. Energy Secretary Visits Russian Sub Base

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/ts/russia_nuclear_dc_1.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson praised the ``courage'' of Russian authorities on Sunday after visiting a once top secret submarine base at the close of a tour aimed at making nuclear supplies more secure.

Richardson was taken across a foggy bay to view rows of aging nuclear-powered submarines due to be dismantled in the port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on the remote Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's far east.

He was then shown six modern Oscar-class submarines similar to the Kursk, which sank with the loss of 118 lives last month in the Barents Sea off Russia's Arctic coast.

``Seeing what we saw, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, represents clear progress in our continuing evolving relationships,'' Richardson's spokesman Stu Nagurka, speaking from Anchorage in Alaska, quoted him as saying.

``It is clear that it has not been easy for the Russians to have opened up their most secret of sites for us to see. We respect their courage and know the world will be a safer place because of the steps they and we are taking.''

Richardson was the first ranking foreigner to visit the base, where Russia hopes to create a facility with U.S. help to dismantle submarine reactors and dispose of their fuel.

He spent five days touring sites to help safeguard nuclear materials against theft, praising a spirit of cooperation despite problems last year sparked by Russian opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Commissions Plants Near Vladivostok

Richardson commissioned two plants near the Pacific port of Vladivostok aimed at improving security for active and spent fuel from nuclear submarines. He visited the Avangard nuclear weapons plant in Sarov in the Volga region, part of which is to be turned into a factory producing kidney dialysis equipment.

His tour included a stop in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, which along with Ukraine and Belarus, gave up its nuclear arsenal after the 1991 collapse of Soviet rule.

A top Department of Energy official, Rose Gottemoeller, said the trip had gone a long way to reduce risks of post-Soviet proliferation of nuclear materials, sometimes by sailors trying to sell them to supplement meager earnings.

``There is very close cooperation between the Department of Energy and the Russian navy to secure sensitive nuclear materials,'' Gottemoeller, Deputy Under Secretary for Defense and Nuclear Non-Proliferation, said by telephone from Tokyo.

``There are some quite desperate situations out there and that's why we're so concerned about the overall security of nuclear fuel.

``It's not feasible for an individual to try to dismantle a reactor but we consider pulling out some fuel rods a feasible proliferation threat. If you sell a couple of fuel rods one can get some materials directly usable in nuclear weapons.''

Officials said the United States had allocated up to $7 million for the project in Sarov, with $30 million set aside for the two Vladivostok plants and financing of at least $100 million required to complete any facility in Petropavlovsk.

---

Putin Backs Clinton on Arms, Differences Remain

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/ts/arms_russia_dc_1.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday he hoped President Clinton had taken account of Russian objections in putting off development of a national missile defense, Russian news agencies reported.

Speaking to reporters on Russia's far eastern island of Sakhalin before beginning a visit to Japan, Putin also said he hoped for further dialogue with Washington to remove differences on U.S. plans to alter a landmark 1972 arms control treaty.

Putin said Clinton's decision to leave development of such a system to his successor ``was taken strictly in the interests of the United States.''

``I believe that this considered decision was taken after Clinton consulted his allies and hope that Russia's position was taken into account,'' Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

A Kremlin statement issued on Saturday quoted Putin as describing the announcement as a ``well-considered and responsible step.'' Putin said it would boost world security and enhance U.S. authority in the international community.

Russia has led opposition to U.S. plans to build a national missile defense (NMD) system, which Washington says is inspired by fears that ``rogue states'' like Iraq, Iran and North Korea could develop technology for missile strikes. China is also strongly opposed.

Some of Washington's West European allies have been unenthusiastic or expressed reservations about the program, expected to cost at least $60 billion. Two high-profile tests of the system failed to achieve their objectives.

Russia says the NMD would breach the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which limits such systems and is seen in Moscow as a keystone for all subsequent nuclear disarmament deals.

It rejects U.S. proposals to amend the ABM treaty and has threatened to reconsider its obligations under other disarmament deals if Washington goes ahead with the system.

Interfax said Putin acknowledged in his remarks on Sakhalin that differences remained over ABM. But he said Clinton's postponement ``will enable us to count on constructive dialogue with our American partners in the future.''

Earlier this year, Putin said he understood U.S. concerns about potential new nuclear threats and proposed setting up an international non-strategic system to deal with them. His proposals have so far failed to impress Washington.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday issues of international stability would be high on the agenda of Putin's Japan visit and his talks with Clinton on the fringes of U.N. Millennium Summit in New York next week.

White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said on Friday he felt it was still possible to reach an agreement with Russia to amend the ABM treaty.

---

Back in the U.S.S.R.

Washingon Post
Sunday, September 3, 2000; Page B07
By George F. Will
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-09/03/243l-090300-idx.html

As the tragedy of the Russian submarine Kursk unfolded, Vladimir Putin's government responded with mendacity, lying about many things and suggesting that some other nation's submarine had collided with the Kursk. Which is to say, the government behaved like what it is, a cabal run by a third-generation apparatchik. Putin, whose grandfather was in Lenin's and then Stalin's personal security details, and whose father was a Communist Party functionary, was a KGB careerist before converting--if you think as the Clinton-Gore administration evidently does--to democracy.

The nature of Putin's government is pertinent to America's presidential choice. Al Gore, much more than George W. Bush, adheres to the anachronistic idea that Russia must be treated as a great power--witness Gore's quest for Russia's permission for the United States to defend itself against ballistic missiles, and his passion to preserve the 28-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Gore should read in the National Interest quarterly Zbigniew Brzezinski's essay "Living With Russia," which argues that "there is no solid foundation" for Russia's claim to global status.

Russia's domestic conditions are "bordering on social catastrophe"--ruined agriculture, collapsing infrastructure and steady deindustrialization of the imploding economy. In 1999 direct foreign investment in China was $43 billion, in Poland $8 billion, in Russia $2 billion to $3 billion. Sixty percent of recent births are not fully healthy; 20 percent of first-graders are diagnosed with some mental retardation. Since 1990 male life expectancy has declined five years, to around 60.

Russia's demographic crisis--its population dropped from 151 million to 146 million in the 1990s--exacerbates its geographic crisis. To the east are 1.2 billion Chinese with an economy that is four times larger than Russia's and is lengthening its lead. To the west are 375 million Europeans with a surging economy 10 times the size of Russia's. To the south are nine Muslim states with combined populations of about 295 million Muslims (not counting Turkey's 65 million) seething about Russian brutality against Chechnya. By 2025 the population of the nine may be 450 million (plus Turkey's 85 million).

Nevertheless, Brzezinski's basis for "longer-term optimism"--very longer term--is that Russia's dilemmas are so dire that it has no realistic choice but to join a "Vancouver to Vladivostok" West. But for the foreseeable future, Russia's government justifies pessimism.

Unlike in the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe, there are, Brzezinski says, no former dissidents in Russia's government. It consists, "with no exception," of the sort of people--"former apparatchiki, criminalized oligarchs, and the KGB and military leadership"--who could be governing the Soviet Union if it still existed. Unlike Germany and Japan after losing a war, Russia after losing the Cold War was not occupied and reformed. And even though Putin's office has a portrait of westernizing Peter the Great, Russia's "renunciation of the Soviet past has been perfunctory"--the corpse of Lenin, founder of the gulag, is still honored in central Moscow.

Brzezinski contrasts Russia's stagnation today with Turkey's rapid modernization after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The slow decline of that inefficiently repressive empire allowed the development of a cadre of intellectuals and military officers--the Young Turks--eager to westernize. Turkey quickly adopted the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code and the German commercial code. Russia's progress, says Brzezinski, will be delayed until "Russia's past imperial and global status will have become a distant memory rather than an entitlement."

Putin's talk of a Russia "which commands respect" as "a great, powerful and mighty state" is delusional. Alexander Lebed, a former general and current politician (who, granted, has an ax to grind), claims there are fewer than 10,000 combat-ready troops. Last year the Associated Press reported that fuel is so scare that pilots average 25 hours flying a year, compared with the Western air forces' minimum of about 200 hours. The Los Angeles Times reports that Putin says the submarine fleet may be cut to 10 and that last summer "the Baltic Fleet owed so much money to the Kaliningrad bread factory that the plant refused to supply any more bread." An indicative indignity occurred in 1995 when a submarine was stripped of its missiles and used to transport potatoes to Siberia.

The submarine Kursk was named for the city that had been supplying it with food and other supplies. That city's name also is attached to the great 1943 battle--history's largest tank battle--that guaranteed the survival, for a while, of the Soviet regime. The Putin government's response to the Kursk submarine's tragedy demonstrates how long and arduous is the crawl up from communism.

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Deputy premier says sub must be raised

USA Today
09/03/00- Updated
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#host

MOSCOW - Raising the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk, a complicated and costly operation, is necessary because of radiation concerns, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Sunday. The submarine sank following a devastating explosion and the blast's damage raised concerns that there could be a leak of radioactive material from the ship's reactor. No increases in radiation in the area have been reported. The government has provided no details on how the lifting would take place, or on how the cash-strapped government can bear the burden a project estimated to cost up to $100 million.

-------- ukraine

The Silver Lining in Chernobyl's Cloud The loudest protest over the closing of the nuclear plant is coming from a most unlikely place: the people who work there. What's a little radiation when it puts food on the table?

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000903mag-chernobyl.html

There was a time when Leonid Aniskin was frightened of radiation. But that was before he went to work at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. He still remembers his first day on the job. It was in 1987, a little over a year after an explosion had ripped the roof off the plant's fourth reactor block. "The trees in the forest behind the station had all died," he recalls. "The pine needles had turned red and dropped off."

Soldiers were burying the radioactive tree trunks when he arrived for his first shift. Everywhere he looked there were men in masks and dark rubber suits, and orange bulldozers scraping away the contaminated soil.

The station's three undamaged reactors were all up and running by then, ordered back on line by Soviet central planners. While the world was still reeling from a disaster that spewed radiation over much of northern Europe and forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, the Kremlin was wrestling with a different issue: where to find workers willing to operate the stricken plant.

Aniskin was 27 at the time, a champion marathon runner and a newly graduated acoustical engineer. He and his wife, Marina, had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary and the birth of their son, Igor. Like most young couples, they were living in a crowded dormitory near the Kiev airport while waiting for a state apartment in a soulless high-rise. In those days, newlyweds faced years if not decades of communal showers and public toilets before they were assigned their own place.

There was a way, however, to bypass the waiting list. The Kremlin was building a new city 40 miles from Chernobyl -- just outside the depopulated Exclusion Zone -- a town unimaginably luxurious by Soviet standards. The nation's best builders had been harnessed for the showcase project, and construction crews from eight Soviet republics were working double-time to erect housing districts in the traditional styles of their lands.

Brand-new apartments were to be had in this "model city," which the Kremlin christened Slavutich after the Russian word for glory, and jobs that paid 10 times the average national wage. All Aniskin had to do to win this Faustian Soviet sweepstakes was sign up to work at Chernobyl.

"When Igor was born," he says, with the conviction of someone looking back on a difficult decision that came out right, "I decided to offer my family a chance at a better life."

It is a warm and breezy Saturday morning in Slavutich. Mothers push baby strollers in the central parade ground, and children play near the memorials to posthumous Heroes of Soviet Labor. In the Riga district, plant bosses tend their flower gardens, while the six-foot-wide Geiger counter over the pediatric wing of the nearby hospital flashes a reassuring 15.4 microroentgens -- about the same as in Denver -- if you stick within city limits, where the contaminated soil has been removed.

Leonid Aniskin has already run his daily 10 miles and is cooking breakfast for his family and me. The aroma of fish and fried potatoes fills the sunny second-story apartment and drifts into the living room, where Igor, now a tall and big-boned teenager, sits transfixed by a sumo wrestling match on ESPN's Eurosport. Aniskin brings out a pot of coffee and clamps his son in a good-natured headlock. "You don't want to become like them," he gibes in mock horror, pointing to the jiggling giants on the screen.

"Papa is a little crazy when it comes to exercise," announces Igor, who has his father's earnest face to go with short, spiky hair. Aniskin takes the rejoinder in stride. His thick hair may have grown silvery around the edges these past 13 years and he may have lost a step or two, but his sinewy 5-foot-9-inch frame can still carry him across the finish line of a marathon in a most respectable 2 hours and 40 minutes.

"Papa also loves fishing," declares Igor after his father disappears into the kitchen, "and we always go together after 'Friends."'

"Friends," dubbed into Russian, is Igor's favorite program. You can catch it only on cable television, an extraordinarily rare sight in the lands of the former Soviet Union. In Slavutich, cable is piped in free of charge to every household, courtesy of Chernobyl.

Igor likes living in Slavutich. He says there's a lot to do here. There is the music festival arranged by the plant (LaToya Jackson was a recent headliner), swimming and sailing in the Dnieper River, basketball and soccer. There are art classes and weightlifting facilities, judo and gymnastics clubs. There's even Little League, started last year by a United States Department of Energy consultant.

Nor does Igor lack playmates. Nine thousand of Slavutich's 26,000 residents are children under the age of 16, a result, town fathers proudly note, of the city's astonishing birthrate, the highest in post-Communist Ukraine. "People can afford to have children here," explains Marina Aniskin, as we settle down to breakfast. "We've had stability," she adds. "It's what sets Slavutich apart from the rest of the country."

Between them, the Aniskins bring home the equivalent of $450 a month, which doesn't sound like much until it's compared with an average wage in Ukraine of $38 a month. More important, Chernobyl pays on time and in cash. In the rest of the country, people often get their salaries in tires or sacks of sugar, or not at all.

"I don't think an outsider can appreciate to what degree Chernobyl has saved us," she says.

Marina Aniskin is an attractive woman in her mid-30's with a warm smile, soft round features and hair the color of Ukraine's famous wheat fields. She was born in Soviet Turkmenistan and raised in Odessa, where many of her friends and family still live -- though she is saddened that some refuse to visit her in Slavutich for fear of radiation.

It was Marina who first thought about moving the family to Slavutich. "I used to sit on my cot and dream about getting my own place," she recalls. "So when the opportunity came to get an apartment, we jumped at it. Everything was so new and clean. And the schools and playgrounds were so beautiful. I'd never seen anything like it."

Over the years, she and her husband, and the rest of this one-company town's residents, have all learned to live with radiation. The one thing they can't live without, though, is Chernobyl. And Chernobyl is closing.

In June of this year, the Ukrainian government -- which inherited the plant in 1991 and has kept it running to allay its own crippling energy crisis -- finally bowed to international pressure and agreed to take Chernobyl off-line by Dec. 15. Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, calls the shutdown a "gift to the Ukrainian people."

But no one around here sees it that way.

The train to Chernobyl leaves Slavutich's one-platform station at 7:30 each morning. It's a 40-minute commute, and passengers pass the time catnapping, playing cards or reading newspapers.

For the first half of the ride, the scenery is bucolic and serene, a tableau of collective farms, dairy herds and gently rolling pastures. The semblance of normalcy fades, however, once the train crosses into the Exclusion Zone. Double rows of barbed-wire fencing and yellow radiation signs announce its perimeter. A few minutes later, deep ditches appear, dug to prevent the cesium and strontium fallout that has leached into the marshy soil from draining into the nearby Dnieper River basin, where 36 million Ukrainians get their drinking water.

The abandoned settlements start soon after, weedy and overgrown, with peeling walls and moldy roofs decaying from neglect. The radiation level here jumps from 15 microroentgens per hour to 43, no longer safe for human habitation (25 to 30 is considered the limit).

Then two large red structures loom into view: shells of Chernobyl's incomplete fifth and sixth units, whose construction was halted after the 1986 meltdown. Next to the rusting hulks lies a sandy clearing, where the foundations for two more reactors were to have been poured. Soviet central planners had intended for Chernobyl to be the world's largest nuclear power station rather than its most infamous.

As the train nears the plant, the landscape turns industrial and gray. Thick power lines sag from high-voltage transformers, and steam pipes snake across concrete pedestals. Closer still, and Chernobyl's big black reactor blocks rise against the low, overcast sky. Passengers stifle yawns, collect their briefcases and make for the doors.

The train stops at a specially sealed platform with blue corrugated steel walls and translucent rubber flooring. The platform shades into a metallic gold corridor bisected by rows of phone-booth-size radiation detectors, which the plant's 5,940 workers pass through after changing clothes at the end of their shift.

The uniform at Chernobyl is a tasteful turquoise jumpsuit, black boots and a dosimeter that, like a pager, clips onto the waistband and is measured monthly to track each employee's accumulated exposure. Large Geiger counters are installed throughout the station. The one above the bronze bust of Lenin outside the main administrative offices, where Marina Aniskin works as a bookkeeper, reads 88 microroentgens.

Her husband has invited me to visit him on the job, and I have accepted with some trepidation. Aniskin works at the so-called sarcophagus, tending the steel and cement tomb that encases 216 tons of uranium and plutonium buried within the remains of the fourth reactor block. His is one of the most dangerous jobs at Chernobyl.

The sarcophagus stands at the far end of the plant, sharing a divider wall with the third reactor unit, which is still operating. The structure has the rough dimensions of a basketball arena, and its rust-daubed walls are battleship gray. The Geiger counter mounted 100 yards in front of the electrified fence that surrounds the sarcophagus flashes 1,430 microroentgens per hour.

Beyond this point, radiation at Chernobyl is measured in rem. There are a million microroentgens in one rem, and in some chambers inside the ruined reactor hall the radiation can reach two thousand rem per hour, four times the lethal dose.

I follow Aniskin down a stairway to a passage that leads under the fence into an underground locker room where radiation suits are issued. We strip down and step into protective gear: double layers of white cotton-weave pants and undershirts, high, astronaut-style boots, a jacket, gloves, a mask and a head covering reminiscent of a short-order cook's.

We ascend another stairway and emerge directly in front of the sarcophagus. Close up, its surface is a patchwork of cement and metal plating. Its walls are not plumb, straight or true, and several footwide gaps can be seen under the eaves. "There isn't a single rivet or weld holding it together," explains Aniskin. "The radiation was too high for builders to come near."

The entire structure, in fact, was assembled using remote-controlled cranes and giant military helicopters to drop metal beams, sand and concrete on the wrecked reactor. Those helicopters and cranes -- and 12,000 other cement trucks and earth-movers used to clean up the accident -- now sit in a machinery graveyard a few miles from the plant, still too radioactive to touch.

We enter the sarcophagus -- what was Chernobyl's fourth reactor -- through a narrow staircase near the old turbine hall. At every landing large trays full of water rest on disposable plastic floor mats, and we must step into these so as not to track radioactive dust. An estimated 30 tons of highly contaminated dust covers the rubble inside. Keeping this dust down is one of Aniskin's chief responsibilities.

The control room is dim; the lights and ceiling tiles have all been removed, as have most of the wiring, dials and knobs from the big instrumentation panel and crescent-shaped console in the center of the chamber. A translucent pink film covers everything, sparkling in the gloom. This is the glue that binds the deadly dust to the walls and ceilings.

On one panel someone has spray-painted 4/26/86, the date of the explosion, and just outside the control room, on what was once the observation deck, there is a brass plaque and a few plastic tulips to commemorate Valery Khodemchuk. Khodemchuk was the night-shift manager on duty at 1:23 a.m. when the core started overheating during an experiment he was conducting and the reactor's automatic shutdown system did not respond. Khodemchuk rushed to the observation deck just as the pressure inside the core reached a critical mass. He was vaporized.

A three-foot-thick concrete wall is all that now separates us from the remains of the reactor core, and this is as far as Aniskin says it's safe for me to go. He can see that I'm sweating badly and that it is not from the 100-degree heat inside the sarcophagus. "Come meet my boss," he says, guiding me down a corridor.

We step into the monitoring station, where his supervisor, Vitaly Borets, is tracking temperature and gamma and neutron activity. Borets, a thickset man in his 60's with a few silver teeth and a sliced-off pinky, is one of only 547 of Chernobyl's 6,000 original personnel who returned to the plant after the accident. He came back, he says, because he grew tired of being treated like a "leper" by outsiders. "When people heard I was an evacuee from Chernobyl, they wouldn't even shake my hand, like I was contagious."

Borets is angry about the impending shutdown, which he says is "stupid," and worries where it will leave people like him. "They told us that if we moved to Slavutich and worked at Chernobyl, we were patriots, we were rendering a great service to the motherland.

"Well, we came, we took our doses and now it's thank you very much and please leave. I have nowhere else to go," he complains. "And I'm fed up with being played like a human Ping-Pong ball."

Aniskin politely interrupts his boss, pointing to the clock on the wall. "We should go," he tells me. "You shouldn't stay too long."

"I can understand how he feels," Aniskin confides, as we retrace our steps toward the changing room. "The government promised to take care of us for the rest of our lives if we came to work here." Aniskin is one of the lucky few whose jobs will continue past the plant's closure: for at least five years, or until the completion of a new, $750million, internationally financed dome over the existing sarcophagus.

After I take a decontamination shower, my dosimeter is measured. During the 20 minutes I spent inside the fourth reactor block I was exposed to one-hundredth of a rem, or 10,000 microroentgens. "You'll live," declares the technician who hands me my readout. Just to be sure, I later ask Alexander Sich, a nuclear-safety expert and a contractor for the United States Department of Energy, for a second opinion. "It's about the same dose you'd get taking four round-trip trans-Atlantic flights," he assures me, explaining that radiation occurs naturally in high altitudes, which is why the measurements in Slavutich are similar to those in the Rocky Mountains. "The real danger for Chernobyl workers," he adds, "is long-term exposure."

Outside the sarcophagus, the sun is poking through the clouds, and workers are heading for their lunch break. There are four cozy commissaries at Chernobyl, and the food is free and served on tables decorated with quaint, red-checkered cloths. I am advised to save my leftovers for the six-foot-long catfish that live in the reactor cooling pond near the sarcophagus. The whiskered creatures weigh up to 300 pounds and can swallow a loaf of bread whole.

Wildlife is teeming in the depopulated zone around Chernobyl. In fact, the plant's director, Vitaly Tolstonogov, recently hit a moose with his car, and there are now wolves and wild boar roaming the 1,000-square-kilometer area sealed to human settlement. The anomaly has scientists stumped. "The mammals near the plant are getting doses that we know have to be lethal," says Michael H. Smith, a professor of genetics from the University of Georgia. "But the animals all appear healthy." Smith, however, warns that appearances can be deceiving.

There are approximately 200 people living in the zone, mostly elderly peasants who defied the government ban to return to their evacuated homesteads. One of these is Ivan Tumenok, a sturdy 70-year-old pensioner who grows his own vegetables and says he would be long dead had he stayed in the dreary housing project in Kiev where Soviet authorities resettled him in 1986.

Tumenok lives in a small, pale-blue clapboard hut surrounded by sunflowers on Proletariat Lane, not far from the old Jewish quarter of Chernobyl, the ancient village from which the plant took its name. "When the time comes," he says, "we will all die. My wife and I just chose to die here, in our home." Tumenok's wife passed away last year of cancer at the age of 60.

The one place that no one has returned to in the zone is Pripyat, Chernobyl's old housing development, which is sealed off and guarded by soldiers. Once, 50,000 people lived there, including a co-worker of Aniskin's, Sergei Pavlovsky, who agrees to accompany me on a visit to the abandoned town.

The door to his old ground-floor apartment on Lenin Prospekt stands wide open, and moss has spread over the threshold. Outside, a tree has pushed through the asphalt, and the overgrown courtyard looks like a set for "Planet of the Apes." Pavlovsky, 37, hasn't seen his old place in 14 years, since the evacuation order was given a full 36 hours after the accident, and he is visibly moved to be back in his childhood bedroom. "My sticker collection," he says sadly, wiping the dust off a dresser. On the floor lie his old Za Rulyom magazines, the Soviet version of Car and Driver, and a rock someone has thrown through the window. He picks up the stone and gently places it on the dresser. "Take a good look around," he says, his expression suddenly bitter. "This is the future of Slavutich."

The first thousand layoffs at Chernobyl will be posted in October. Already, says Anatoly Nosovsky, a former head of safety at the plant who now runs a United States-financed lab in Slavutich, senior scientists are starting to flee. "Some of our experts have moved to Iran," he says, flashing a mischievous grin, "and I'm sure others will follow."

Nosovsky is an affable man in his early 50's with an easy manner that belies his military background. Before moving to Slavutich from St. Petersburg, he designed the propulsion systems on the world's largest nuclear submarines, the aircraft-carrier-length Typhoons that carry 200 nuclear warheads apiece.

"I can understand," he argues, "why the West wants Chernobyl closed. But you have to see the situation from our point of view. We have an energy crisis and power blackouts, and no money to buy natural gas from Russia. People are going to freeze this winter.

"And then," he adds, gesturing toward the neat rows of whitewashed buildings that line Slavutich's Heroes of Chernobyl Street, "there's the most painful question of what to do with this place"

Virtually everyone in Slavutich, from the ambulance drivers and kindergarten teachers to the snow-removal crews and the surly waitress at the lone hotel, works for Chernobyl. And even those few who don't collect a paycheck from the power station are bracing for the worst. "I'll lose my job even though I don't work at the plant," predicts Lena Dimitrenko, a 25-year-old redhead from Belarus, who spends her days in a stifling kiosk in the Moscow district selling cigarettes, sticky candy bars and knockoff soft-drink brands. Business has already fallen off sharply, she says. "We used to sell imported goods, but now it's all cheap Ukrainian stuff. There's no money here anymore."

The economic crunch has already begun. Slavutich had no hot water this summer because the local heating plant is storing up fuel for the winter. Such stockpiling and outages are common throughout Ukraine, but this is the first time Slavutich has suffered them.

The endemic wage arrears that plague the rest of the former Soviet Union are also starting to make their painful presence felt here. "I haven't been paid in three months," grumbles Svetlana Popova, a 30-year-old mother of three who works in the cafeteria at the plant-owned Evropeiski Hotel, where most of Slavutich's 60-odd Westerners live. "The West is giving all this money for a new sarcophagus, but what about us? This was such a nice and peaceful place, and now look what's happening."

Slavutich is indeed changing. The influx of foreigners, which is expected to swell as construction of the new cover starts next year, has spawned the town's first prostitutes. They are called "screwdriver girls," after the drinks they sip while waiting for a lonely Belgian or French engineer. Crime, another unwelcome novelty, is also up, even as budget cuts have slashed the 120-strong police force by a third. "Our main worry," says Yuri Vasilievich, a senior sergeant, "is when the plant closes and unemployment puts everyone on the street."

Town fathers are equally glum. "Slavutich and Chernobyl are really one organism," says Vladimir Zhigalo, the deputy mayor. "If you kill one part of that organism, it's very hard for the other to survive." Zhigalo is trying to attract new employers to Slavutich by offering potential investors free land and tax holidays, but so far there have been precious few takers. "It's the downside of being associated with Chernobyl."

At Hospital No. 1, next to the new American-financed laboratory where Professor Smith and other American scientists are studying the genetic effects of radiation on mice, another of Chernobyl's legacies can be seen.

"Over the last few years we've had an increase in kidney and thyroid cancer," says Dr. Irina Frulova, a surgeon from St. Petersburg who has been tending Slavutich's sick since 1987. There has been, she adds, an across-the-board deterioration in the health of Slavutich's citizens this past year and a "dramatic" decline in birthrates. The reason, however, is to a great extent economic; Slavutich no longer receives the special foods, medications and equipment once subsidized by the plant. "It gets worse every day," Frulova sighs.

Frulova refers her most urgent cases, the instances of children's thyroid cancer, to the National Institute of Endocrinology in Kiev. There, 19-year-old Natasha Shugala is recovering after surgery. She is one of 1,354 young people from the Chernobyl region treated for thyroid cancer thus far, though Prof. Mykola Tronko, the institute's director, warns that this number is far from a final tally because the latent period for the disease is as much as 30 years.

Many of the so-called Chernobyl children are, in fact, already well into adulthood. In the recovery room next to Shugala's, blood drains from tubes protruding from the bandaged neck of a 27-year-old army officer. He was 13 when Chernobyl erupted, and, like Shugala, breathed in radioactive iodine isotopes released by the accident. The body naturally concentrates and stores iodine in the thyroid gland, and when irradiated, the toxic isotope causes a tumor-suppressing gene to malfunction, allowing cancerous growths to spread unchecked.

The frustration for doctors like Tronko is that no one knows how many victims there really are. Because Ukraine cannot afford to send out medical teams into all the contaminated regions, many cases go undiagnosed until it is too late. The army officer's cancer, for instance, has spread to his neck and mouth.

Shugala was more fortunate in that a mobile diagnostic ambulance donated by the Department of Energy passed through her village just north of the Exclusion Zone.

"She'll be O.K.," says Tronko, ruffling Shugala's strawberry blond hair. "We were able to get to her early. Please tell your readers that it was American money that saved this girl, and that we are grateful."

Igor Aniskin wants to be an engineer, like his father, Leonid. And he wants to work at a nuclear power station, like his father. He tells me this in confidence, as we flip through an encyclopedia of the physical world, his most prized possession after the Secret Service pin given to his dad by a member of Al Gore's security detail during the vice president's 1997 visit to Chernobyl.

"My parents," he says, hitching up close to my ear, "don't like the idea. They say I should do something else."

"You should just worry about your grades," reprimands Marina Aniskin good-naturedly, returning from the kitchen with a tray of cold meats. "And stop talking nonsense."

It is my last night in Slavutich, and the Aniskins have prepared a farewell feast. There is carp that Igor and Leonid caught with their new lure, a weighted fly made entirely with hair from a goat's chin; cucumbers and tomatoes from their dacha plot; cheese from the local market; and beet salad.

I know from my conversations with American and Ukrainian scientists that minute traces of radioactive cesium and strontium are almost certainly present in some, if not all, of the food grown in this region. That is just one reason why neurological, endocrinological, gastrointestinal and urinary illnesses are 15 times greater in the contaminated regions of Ukraine than in the general population.

About the only item on the dinner menu that can be judged with some degree of certainty as safe is the gallon jug of Horilka vodka that Marina's spirited 61-year-old mother has brought. It is only after several of her ebullient toasts that I work up the courage to ask Leonid Aniskin the question that has been troubling me since we visited the sarcophagus together: how much radiation has he received?

"Oh, I've lost count," he chuckles, deflecting my question with a pearly smile made all the whiter by his lifeguard's tan. "Besides," he says, laughing, "I've developed an immunity to radiation."

The silence that follows is broken by his wife. "Tell him," she says in a low, quiet voice.

Aniskin sips slowly from his shot glass. It is filled with cherry juice because he doesn't touch liquor, even ceremonially. A few years ago, he finally admits, one of his teeth fell out. At first he thought it was nothing, but then another fell out. And another, until he lost all but his three gold crowns.

He had dentures and bridgework done on the sly, so as not to alert the medical commission at Chernobyl that rules on whether workers should be pensioned off due to radiation sickness. "I was scared they would fire me," he confesses. Disability pay, when it is paid, which is usually months in arrears, is only about a fifth of the regular salary at Chernobyl, and Aniskin's job is highly coveted because it won't be phased out for at least the five years it takes to build a new sarcophagus.

"Don't look so sad," he says, reaching out to pat me on the shoulder. "It's really all right. I made my choice a long time ago."

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

DEATHS
John Simpson Physicist

Washington Post
Sunday, September 3, 2000; Page C06
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-09/03/161l-090300-idx.html

John Simpson, 83, a pioneer in the study of cosmic rays and a leader in the development of the atomic bomb who later promoted the peaceful use of nuclear power, died Aug. 31 at a hospital in Chicago after surgery for a heart ailment.

In 1943, he joined the University of Chicago and Enrico Fermi's team of researchers on the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to build the atomic bomb. After the bomb was used against Japan, Dr. Simpson helped organize a campaign for the peaceful use of nuclear power and also helped develop the McMahon Act of 1946, which mandated civilian control of atomic energy.

Dr. Simpson is credited with inventing the cosmic ray neutron intensity monitor, used in 1956 to collect the first evidence indicating the existence of the heliosphere, a region beyond the planets that is influenced by the sun's magnetic field. In 1965, he and his team built the first cosmic-ray detector to visit Mars, and also built detectors that were flown to Jupiter, Mercury and Saturn.

-------- new mexico

Judge Savors Low-Key Role in High-Stakes Secrets Case

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/090300nuclear-judge.html

ALBUQUERQUE, Sept. 1 -- This was a day of high legal drama, as a last-minute government maneuver thwarted defense efforts to free the former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee on bail and left the federal district judge hearing the case, James A. Parker, suddenly on the sidelines as the action leapt to an appeals court in Denver.

But if there was a lesson about Judge Parker in the episode, it was conveyed in his unemotional willingness to simply follow the letter of the law, even as the defense lawyers accused the prosecutor of effectively turning a hearing here into a diversion while he surreptitiously filed the appeal. Judge Parker simply noted that the appeals court's one-sentence order had taken the issue out of his hands, and left it at that.

Judge Parker, 63, a lanky, understated, Jimmy Stewart-like figure, is no judicial activist. In a lengthy interview this morning in his chambers, an "I Love Fishing" sign and framed family pictures on the shelf behind him, he described himself as a conservative Republican; indeed, he was appointed to the bench in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. He made it clear that he was quite comfortable making even unpopular decisions if he felt they were supported by a strict reading of the law.

And that is why, he added, he has not hesitated in issuing a string of bold decisions in Dr. Lee's national security case.

Among them were the decisions granting bail to the scientist and ordering the government to hand over thousands of pages of classified documents to see if they supported the defense's assertions that Dr. Lee was unfairly singled out for prosecution for mishandling nuclear weapons secrets because of his Chinese ancestry. Both struck harsh blows to the government.

"I don't think they were difficult decisions because they were perceived to be against the interests of the government," said Judge Parker, in a rich, throaty baritone that carries a twangy residue of his upbringing in Texas. "They were difficult because they were close, but the law seemed clear."

Expanding only slightly on his philosophy, he said later in the conversation, "My role is to follow the rules as established by the higher level courts."

Today was actually Judge Parker's first day as chief judge of the federal district of New Mexico. But if the courtroom blasts seemed to mark an inauspicious start, Judge Parker showed none of it. The two sides had had their day in court, and that seemed to satisfy the judge.

Laura Cordero, an assistant United States attorney in Washington and one of his first law clerks here, said that two of his more remarkable qualities were his insights into human behavior and his prairie-lawyer spirit in believing wholeheartedly in the importance of giving people their day in court, even if that means allowing lawyers to go on and on, as he has frequently in Dr. Lee's case.

"He's an unusually fair man," Ms. Cordero said. "He truly believes in giving everyone their day in court and letting them have their say. I know there were lots of times I would have cut off people long before he did."

Judge Parker gave a lengthy interview to a reporter here this morning, and then continued the conversation about topics like fly fishing -- particularly the relative merits of the five different kinds of trout to be found in a wild stretch of the Pine River -- and his belief in the need for more mediation in criminal trials as he offered a tour of the palatial, sun-drenched offices that he will soon be occupying.

Although it was a series of random accidents that landed the case of Dr. Lee in his court, Judge Parker expressed fascination with the issues involved, particularly the way scientists operate. He even paused for a moment to reflect on what he perceived to be the core values of the scientific mind.

"The pursuit of knowledge is paramount," he said. "Their lives are not like yours or mine. They're seeking pure scientific knowledge. I recognize that they need free expression with scientists anywhere in the world to do that."

Judge Parker grew up in Houston and received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Rice University, then went to the University of Texas law school. Although he does not seem to be a man given to spontaneous decisions, that was essentially what brought him to New Mexico.

He said that after law school he was interested in moving to Phoenix and had arranged some job interviews there. The airline had no direct flights, so he had to stop in Albuquerque. At the urging of a law professor, he used the time to literally walk in cold at some law firms. Things worked out.

He eventually spent several decades working for the largest law firm in New Mexico, Modrall, Sperling, Roehl, Harris & Sisk, and specialized in civil litigation, particularly medical and legal malpractice cases.

Since becoming a judge, he has handled a number of complex cases, but none in the area of national security or nuclear secrets. Among the more high-profile cases he has handled was one in which he effectively ordered the state to improve or shut down its systems for caring for the mentally disabled. Following his ruling, the state shut them and created community care centers instead. Other cases have involved the immensely complex laws surrounding the usage of water from the state's rivers.

The personal stamp he has brought to Dr. Lee's case has been his willingness to give all sides a chance to have their say. Twice he allowed what had been expected to be brief bail hearings to drag on for three days.

"A lot of the information being brought out in open court is for the use of the press rather than my use, but I recognize the national interest," he said.

-------- virginia

Radiation Shield Bricks Developed

Associated Press
September 03, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-EXP-Mars-Bars.html http://www.individual.com/frames/story.shtml?story=h0903134.000&level3=788&date=20000904

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) -- Ryan McGlothlin takes a sugar-like powder, stirs in a substance that resembles flour, pours the mix into a mold and bakes it.

The result is a small, shiny, black bar designed to shield against radiation. The powder is polyethylene and the ``flour'' is a gray topsoil.

McGlothlin, a chemistry major at the College of William and Mary, and chemistry department chairman Richard Kiefer are using those ingredients to develop a material to make bricks that would protect astronauts against radiation on Mars. They are working with aerospace researcher Sheila Thibeault at NASA Langley Research Center in nearby Hampton.

``What we're doing is the basic research, establishing that yes, you can do this,'' Kiefer said. The work also could have applications on Earth, such as use in shields around nuclear reactors, he said.

NASA hopes to put people on Mars within the next several decades. Because of the different orbits of Earth and Mars, the window of opportunity for travel between the two planets occurs only once every two years. That means that anyone traveling to Mars would have to stay there for a long time.

The prospect of an extended stay on Mars prompts a number of concerns, among them the health effects of galactic cosmic radiation, found nearly everywhere in space. The magnetic field surrounding the Earth deflects the radiation, but Mars does not have such a field.

Radiation can cause illness or even death, depending on the dosage and length of exposure. Therefore, astronauts will need a material they can use to build shelters and laboratories that also will shield against radiation.

The lighter the material is in terms of mass, the better its shielding properties, and research has shown that liquid hydrogen is the best possible shield, Kiefer said. ``But that's a little impractical to take to Mars,'' he said.

So the next best thing is a solid polymer, or chemical compound, that contains a lot of hydrogen. And polyethylene, a very cheap plastic from which plastic bags are made, has more hydrogen than other polymers, said McGlothlin, 21, of Lebanon, Va.

Loading lots of building material onto the space shuttle would create a heavy weight at launch. So the researchers are trying to figure out how much -- or little -- polyethylene is needed to create bricks by mixing it with a material that astronauts can find in abundance once they get to Mars: regolith, or topsoil.

``We're trying to find the most efficient way to get the least payload and the maximum payout,'' Kiefer said.

Obviously, Mars topsoil isn't easy to get on Earth. Chemical analysis of soil samples obtained by probes has shown that Mars topsoil is similar to that on the moon. But since that isn't plentiful on Earth either, the researchers are using regolith from a quarry in Minnesota that is similar to lunar soil.

Regolith contains very little hydrogen, so it would not shield very well against radiation without the addition of polyethylene, Kiefer said.

At a laboratory at NASA, McGlothlin experiments with mixing different concentrations of polyethylene and regolith to see what works best. He has created small ``Mars bars'' containing 10 percent, 15 percent and 20 percent polyethylene.

Once the polyethylene and regolith are thoroughly mixed, McGlothlin puts the mixture in a drying oven to remove moisture.

The mixture then is poured into a stainless steel mold that creates a small sample bar, such as 3 1/2 inches by three-quarters of an inch. The mold is heated for a half hour at 245 degrees Fahrenheit.

Back at William and Mary's chemistry labs, McGlothlin does thermal mechanical analyses on the samples to find out how the material reacts under extreme temperatures. The bricks also are tested to make sure they can withstand pressure, so bricks toward the bottom of a building would not crumble or crack.

The topsoil the researchers are using is gray, so bricks made from it are black. Bricks made from Martian topsoil would be a reddish color.

Kiefer said another student who since has graduated began testing Mars bricks using a different polymer a year ago. McGlothlin picked up the project this summer and will continue the research until he graduates next May.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Are There Any Nuclear Secrets Left to Steal?

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/090300nuclear-review.html

The abrupt turnaround in the public image of Dr. Wen Ho Lee from villain to victim, from atomic spy endangering the nation's security to computer nerd unfairly put behind bars for downloading harmless minutia, is raising new questions about what constitutes a nuclear secret these days. More than half a century after the making of the atom bomb, millions of former secrets have been either declassified or posted willy-nilly on Internet sites, even as the nuclear club has grown to at least eight members, with many more wanabees in the wings.

Combined with President Clinton's announcement on Friday that he would leave the decision on whether to pursue a national missile defense system to his successor -- a shield that China, Russia and the NATO allies have warned may set off another nuclear arms race -- Lee's case raises a troubling question: what's really secret anymore?

The surprising answer is, a lot. Some restricted data is deemed so sensitive that Washington is engaged in a quiet effort to raise classifications from secret to top secret for 65 nuclear topics, making whole libraries of sequestered data less likely to slip into foreign hands.

Though itself off limits, the list of high-risk topics, experts say, includes information that would let outsiders foil U.S. weapons, fire stolen arms, copy American bomb designs and manufacture nuclear weapons small enough to fit atop long-range missiles or into a terrorist's briefcase.

Even the stack of blueprints for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- an extremely crude device by today's standards -- is now proposed to be made top secret.

"We need to restore people's respect for classified information," said Dr. Albert Narath, a former director of the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M. The problem, he added, is that Washington has such a "long history of classifying too much stuff that people have lost respect."

The case of Lee, 60, a Taiwan-born naturalized citizen who was fired last year from the Los Alamos National Laboratory amid a spy inquiry, is a worrisome example of just how bewildering the nation's nuclear secrets policy has become.

After he was arrested in December, the government asserted that Lee was dangerous because the computer files he downloaded illegally to an unsecure computer were the "crown jewels" of the nuclear arsenal. Some of his portable computer tapes are missing, and the government argued that Lee, if freed on bail, might give secrets to China or other nations.

But his defense team later showed that the data Lee downloaded was classified as secret and confidential only after his dismissal from Los Alamos. And last month, a defense witness, John L. Richter, a former top nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos, testified that perhaps 99 percent of the downloaded information had already been made public and would not be that useful to a foreign country.

Asked if national security would be hurt if the missing tapes found their way into foreign hands, Richter replied, "I don't believe that it would have any deleterious effect at all."

On Aug. 24, after that testimony, a federal judge reversed himself and said Lee could be released on bail after eight months in jail, though on Friday prosecutors won an appeal that delayed a final decision.

Lee's guilt or innocence has yet to be determined. But Richter's assertion has fed the growing perception that many, if not all, nuclear secrets are out of the bag -- a view based partly on fact.

Decades of memoirs and histories, and the fact that scientists talk for a living, have unveiled most basic principles. It is well known, for instance, how the high heat of a small atomic explosion in a thermonuclear weapon ignites hydrogen fuel in a far more powerful blast.

In addition, the dribble of official declassifications during the Cold War later turned into a flood. Private experts who have tapped this gusher include Chuck Hansen, the author of "The Swords of Armageddon," a CD-ROM containing 2,503 pages and 345 diagrams that is a near-encyclopedia of what is known publicly about America's efforts to make nuclear arms.

In Washington in recent years, the push for greater openness has coexisted uneasily with an equally intense desire to raise a wall around the nation's remaining nuclear secrets. That tension began with Hazel O'Leary, who as head of the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1997 was the main keeper of the nation's atomic secrets. Her pursuit of openness was widely praised and condemned, but behind the scenes she also promoted a secrecy drive known as "Higher Fences."

"People think Hazel was declassifying promiscuously," said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington. "In fact, she was trying to bring order and logic to the classification process."

The rationale was that the bag of atomic secrets had grown so large that protection would be ensured only if the most serious topics were set aside for stringent safeguarding. So it was that, long before the Lee case made Washington hypersensitive about lax security, a push was underway to put key nuclear secrets under tighter lock.

In a 1994 report, the National Academy of Sciences blessed the general idea. In 1997, Narath of Sandia led a Energy Department panel that called for 137 topics to be raised from secret to top secret classification, which would increase protections and sharply cut access. But the Defense Department, which deploys the nuclear arms made and maintained by the Energy Department, balked, citing the added cost of building new storage facilities, computer networks and specialist cadres. Defense Department officials also expressed an unwillingness to shoulder the added costs of providing top secret clearances. The price of a federal investigation for a secret clearance is about $100, experts say, whereas a top secret clearance runs about $5,000.

Asked to ease the load, the Energy Department then winnowed the list of proposed top-secret topics to 65, officials said. Still, nothing happened. Recently, the deadlock ended after Congress shook things up. Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr., R-Va., chairman of the House Commerce Committee, asked Defense Secretary William S. Cohen in a Aug. 14 letter to explain why his agency had apparently failed to make "an adequate effort" to review the Energy Department's revised plan or boost security.

Last Monday, the two feuding agencies signed a agreement to make joint recommendations by Dec. 1, and perhaps to help end the false impression of a nuclear sieve created by the Lee case.

Will the new study end in another standoff between the bureaucracies? "I don't engage in dry holes," said Eugene E. Habiger, head of security at the Energy Department. "I engage in making things happen."

---

Russian Resistance Key in Decision to Delay Missile Shield

New York Times
September 03, 2000
by Steven Lee Myers, Eric Schmitt and Marc Lacey, and was written by Mr. Myers.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/090399missile-assess.html

On Tuesday afternoon, visibly tired after an 11-hour flight from Cairo and still focused on the Middle East, President Clinton met at the White House with two of his closest advisers to hear Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen appeal one last time for making the bold decision to build a national missile defense.

Mr. Cohen, speaking forthrightly and matter-of-factly, conceded that technological hurdles remained, and that the Pentagon's schedule for completing a system by 2005 had become no more than a hope. "Still," a senior defense official said, "he felt we should proceed with construction," to give Mr. Clinton's successor a head start toward building a system.

Mr. Clinton left the meeting without declaring his intentions, but by then the outcome was a formality, administration officials now say. The foundation for the decision he announced Friday in a hastily arranged speech at Georgetown University had in fact been laid months before, several senior administration and Pentagon officials said.

Mr. Clinton's decision not to authorize even initial construction of a national missile shield had been shaped by events as far back as January, these officials said, when the Russians first made it clear they would not negotiate changes in the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

The administration's calculated plan for making a decision about a limited missile shield in the election year 2000 -- drafted in part as political defense of Vice President Al Gore in his campaign for the presidency -- had begun to unravel even before it got very far. And it did so because of events that were largely out of the administration's control.

The startling diplomatic opening of Kim Jong Il of North Korea, culminating in a summit meeting with his South Korean counterpart in June, gave support to critics of missile defense that the threat of a rogue attack had been overstated. And the spectacular failure of the Pentagon's test of its high-speed missile interceptor in July left insurmountable doubts that the technology was ready.

Most important, however, the administration could not predict domestic politics in Russia. The administration's plan rested on negotiating a deal with Moscow to allow construction of a limited missile shield without scrapping the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. That treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union, and viewed by some as the cornerstone of cold war arms control, sought to prevent nuclear war by forcing Washington and Moscow to remain equally vulnerable to the other's attack.

But any chance of a deal with Russia disintegrated along with the political fortunes of the man on whom this diplomatic strategy depended, Boris N. Yeltsin, who was viewed by American negotiators as more pliable than his successor as Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

"I believe that when Boris Yeltsin was president, there was a decent chance of getting the deal we wanted in the course of this year," a senior administration official said. "When Putin came in, that changed. Putin is, among other things, the un-Boris."

With each of these events, support within the administration for building a missile defense withered. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was so unenthusiastic she virtually dropped out of the internal debate, leaving the issue to her deputy, Strobe Talbott, administration officials said. Opposition had so hardened at the White House and State Department that officials at the National Security Council were said to have expressed quiet relief when the test failed in July.

"It was a joke over here that they were burning incense at the N.S.C. before the test, hoping it would fail," a senior Pentagon official said.

In the end, it was Mr. Cohen, the sole Republican in the president's cabinet, who continued to advocate sticking to the timetable the administration had drafted -- long after all of Mr. Clinton's other senior advisers had concluded to do so would be a technological leap of faith and a diplomatic disaster.

Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had almost no role in the debate or the decision, showed little enthusiasm, Pentagon officials said, believing that protecting against shorter-range missiles capable of hitting American troops overseas was the more pressing concern. They were especially worried, these officials said, that an expensive missile defense would drain dollars from conventional forces.

Several administration officials said that Mr. Cohen's hold-out position created by far the most striking schism among Mr. Clinton's foreign policy advisers, who pride themselves on forging public unity and keeping disagreements to themselves. The "ABC team" -- the administration's alphabetical shorthand for Ms. Albright, Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser, and Mr. Cohen -- had previously never failed to reach consensus on a significant issue before submitting it to Mr. Clinton. The only other time one official could recall Mr. Cohen being overruled was when he argued against imposing sanctions on Myanmar in 1996.

"This has been one of the more divisive issues in the defense establishment, in the arms control community and in the administration," said a senior official who was immersed in the debates.

In the hours after Mr. Clinton made his announcement Friday , Mr. Cohen did not appear in public to explain his views. He simply released a curt statement that, at least indirectly, made his zeal for pursuing missile defense clear.

"I have noted on many occasions that several emerging threats warrant the deployment of an effective missile defense program as soon as technologically feasible," he said.

From the beginning, President Clinton's actions signaled that he was an unenthusiastic supporter of building a national missile defense. When he came into office in 1993, he scaled back what remnants were left of the research that Ronald Reagan had begun with his dream of a Star Wars defense against the threat of ballistic missiles.

By 1998, however, the debate over limited missile defenses intensified. A committee heavily weighted with Republicans and led by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense under President Gerald R. Ford, reported that the threat of ballistic missiles from countries like North Korea, Iran or Iraq was no longer a distant one.

A month later, as if to prove the point, North Korea fired a Taepo Dong missile, capped by a satellite, over Japan. The test was a failure, but the debris landed in the Pacific Ocean not far from Alaska.

It was clear early on that Mr. Cohen was going to be the administration's most ardent supporter of building a limited defensive shield to counter the emerging threat. In January 1999, when the administration announced it would spend $6.7 billion to develop and test a system, Mr. Cohen bluntly warned that the United States was prepared to unilaterally withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty if the Russians did not agree to amend it.

Officials at the State Department and the White House quickly disavowed his warning, but planning for the system went ahead. And the Pentagon devised a schedule for testing a missile interceptor that, guided by sophisticated radar stations on the ground and satellites in space, would crash into incoming ballistic missiles before they reached American soil.

In fact, Mr. Clinton's timetable on missile defense grew at least in part out of desires to protect Vice President Gore from Republican attacks that a Democratic White House was weak on defense, officials conceded. Republicans had hammered Mr. Clinton for not backing a missile shield, so the President adopted a middle course that would spend millions on tests while attempting to preserve the current arms control agreement.

By last fall, the administration agreed that Mr. Clinton would make a decision on whether to deploy the system this summer -- at the height of the presidential campaign -- based on four criteria: the system's cost, its technological feasibility, the missile threat and the impact on national security, particularly on arms control.

The last criteria was key, because President Clinton agreed with senior State Department officials and arms control advocates that the A.B.M. Treaty was a cornerstone of all arms control. Its prohibitions against a national missile defense allowed the United States and Russia to reduce offensive nuclear weapons without fear of losing their strategic deterrence.

Mr. Clinton made it clear that he would only approve a system if the administration could reach agreement with the Russians to amend the treaty, officials said. But any hope of that was dashed last New Year's Eve when President Yeltsin, who had shown considerable flexibility in dealings with the administration, announced he was stepping down and named Mr. Putin as his successor.

With the Americans proposing to build a missile defense that many Russians saw as a threat to their last claim to superpower status, Mr. Putin flexed his muscle and drew the line. "He was going to make sure the Russian people understood he wasn't going to roll over for stuff," one administration official said.

By last January, Mr. Putin's tougher stance was already clear. The State Department's chief arms-control negotiator, John D. Holum, presented his Russian counterparts with a detailed proposal for amending the treaty, while assuring them the system was so limited that Russia's nuclear arsenal could easily overwhelm it and obliterate the United States -- thus, in the logic of arms control, preserving strategic stability.

The Russians brushed the proposal aside, refusing even to call the talks "negotiations," referring to them merely as "discussions.". Mr. Holum, Mr. Talbott and other officials continued to hold "discussions" with the Russians through the spring.

The Russians never flatly ruled out the possibility of negotiating amendments -- "Putin never said nyet," the senior official recalled -- but after Mr. Putin was elected president in March, he began a diplomatic campaign against the American proposals, driving a deep wedge between the United States and its NATO allies.

By the time Mr. Clinton met with Mr. Putin in Moscow in June, American officials claimed they had made considerable progress in steps intended to enhance strategic cooperation and security, but the two leaders barely discussed national missile defense.

There was never any question that Mr. Clinton would actually move ahead unilaterally, as Mr. Cohen had suggested in 1999. "He didn't want to be the President that killed the A.B.M. treaty," one official said.

Instead, the White House asked the administration's lawyers to see if there was a way initial work on a defensive shield could begin -- starting with a sophisticated radar at Shemya Island in Alaska without technically violating the treaty.

The lawyers came up with three opinions, but even those proved divisive. On July 25, Mr. Cohen appeared before the Senate and said the lawyers had reached a consensus that workers could pour concrete and lay the rails that would support the radar itself. Such an interpretation would allow work to continue until 2002 before the United States would have to notify the Russians of its intent to withdraw from the treaty.

Mr. Cohen was simply voicing his support for the most liberal interpretation. There was no consensus, and senior officials at the State Department and the National Security Council complained that Mr. Cohen's position was overly aggressive and certain to inflame tensions with Russia and the allies.

All the while, the Pentagon and Mr. Cohen pushed ahead with a testing schedule that even some in the military considered overly compressed and highly risky. But the Pentagon's efforts, too, suffered setbacks.

After having a successful test in October 1999, proving that it was possible "to hit a bullet with a bullet," as Mr. Clinton said on Friday , another test in January failed. That put even more pressure on the test this past July 7, since the administration had said it would have to have two successful intercepts before it could approve the program.

On the night of the July 7, the interceptor lifted off a launch pad in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and streaked toward a dummy missile fired from California. But the interceptor's booster rocket failed to separate.

"After that test failed, it pretty much confirmed that the deployment would be kicked back," a senior defense official said. "We lost the momentum."

Even so, Mr. Cohen and a small circle of aides pressed ahead. They noted that while the test had failed, other parts of the system, including the ground-based radar, had worked.

By late July, however, Mr. Cohen was alone in making the case that the system was at least technologically feasible. At the White House and the State Department, officials had concluded that the system was nowhere near ready, and meetings to discuss the issue became increasingly tense. "We saw the glass as half full," one senior Pentagon official said, "and they kept saying it was half empty."

Mr. Cohen first delivered his recommendation to the president more than a week ago, before Mr. Clinton's trip to Nigeria, Tanzania and Egypt. Administration officials said he argued that contractors should begin work on the radar station in Shemya, Alaska, leaving open the possibility of completing a system at the earliest possible date should the next president -- either Mr. Gore or George W. Bush -- choose to do so.

At no time, officials said, did Mr. Cohen betray his loyalty to the Democratic president, whose aides value at least the appearance of interagency harmony. "I think Bill Cohen has been a total mensch about this at every stage," one senior official said, with the grace of a victor toward a vanquished foe.

By the time Mr. Cohen met at the White House on Tuesday with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Berger and the president's chief of staff, John Podesta, the President's mind was made up.

In the weeks before announcing his decision, Mr. Clinton had been reading a book by the historian Frances Fitzgerald, "Way Out There in the Blue," visitors to the Oval Office said. The book provides a sharp critique of the Reagan administration's advocacy of a Star Wars defense, chronicling the wrenching internal debates that went on in the 1980's among the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council.

Mr. Clinton told several aides that his administration's debate over one of the most significant issues in foreign affairs and defense policy of the time seemed orderly by contrast.

---

A Missile Defense Strategy That Will Have to Wait

New York Times
September 03, 2000
News of the Week in Review
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/090300thisweek-review.html

President Clinton left to his successor the decision on whether to deploy a national missile defense system. He said he would not do so himself because of test failures and diplomatic disputes. The president, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had decided not to act after two huge $100 million tests of the system failed to intercept incoming missiles.

Clinton said more time is also needed to find a diplomatic solution to what has been a growing confrontation between the United States and Russia and China, staunch opponents to a U.S. missile defense.

---

Woes Undermined Missile Defense Cause Clinton Weighed Test Failures, Development Delays in Addition to Diplomatic Costs

Washington Post
Sunday, September 3, 2000; Page A04
By Roberto Suro Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-09/03/119l-090300-idx.html

Just a few hours after he returned from a four-day, three-country trip to Africa on Tuesday, a jetlagged President Clinton informed some of his top advisers that he had decided against deploying a national missile defense system.

"Let me tell you how I see this," Clinton told Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Chief of Staff John D. Podesta. The president then rendered his verdict on one of the most complex and controversial national security issues he has faced. "He said he did not want to pay the big front-end costs if he was not sure this thing would work," a senior administration official recalled.

The up-front costs that concerned Clinton were diplomatic and stemmed from Russia's insistence that even the most preliminary work on constructing a missile shield would violate the 1973 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that, in response, Russia would halt cooperation on strategic issues, starting with arms control. His doubts about whether missile defense would work arose from the failure of two consecutive flight tests and from some carefully hedged Pentagon assessments suggesting, but not explicitly stating, that development of the system was far behind schedule.

Once he decided he knew enough to conclude that missile defense was a bad bargain, Clinton told his staff that he wanted to seize the moment and get the news out fast, administration officials said. Two working days later, the president announced the decision during a speech at Georgetown University.

The Friday morning speech, added to Clinton's schedule at the last possible moment, allowed him to dispose of the issue just days before the opening on Tuesday of the United Nations' Millennium Summit, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dignitaries were expected to denounce him over the missile defense program both from the podium and in private meetings. The timing also meant that Clinton's long-awaited decision could be announced before the final stages of the presidential race, when any negative reactions might prove more costly to Vice President Gore.

Only one final matter had to be settled after Clinton rendered his verdict.

Among all his advisers, Cohen, the lone Republican in the Cabinet, had pressed hardest for moving forward with missile defense; and at the meeting on Clinton's return from Africa, Cohen held firm. While the Pentagon worked to overcome the technological challenges, Cohen argued that it should also begin work on the most daunting logistical challenge--building a radar site on a remote Aleutian island--so at least that important aspect of deployment would remain on schedule, according to administration officials.

Clinton did not close the door on Cohen's views immediately, but he was already convinced of the merit of another approach promoted by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and her deputy, Strobe Talbott. They argued that the scheduling delays in the Pentagon program had a positive side because they opened a valuable window of opportunity to overcome Putin's objections and, thereby, also to ease concerns among European allies that missile defense would upset global strategic equations. Rather than take a provocative step, such as authorizing construction of the Aleutian radar site, they suggested that the added time should be used for new diplomatic initiatives. Clinton agreed.

The decision-making process that led up to Clinton's announcement took a sharp turn on July 8. Early that morning, the Pentagon conducted the third flight test of the missile defense system. In the first test, the interceptor had successfully smashed into a target warhead, but in the second test, in January, a minor plumbing problem had caused the test to fail instants before the intercept was to take place.

If the July test succeeded, the Pentagon wanted to press forward with an initial deployment of 20 interceptor missiles in Alaska by 2005. But the flight failed because of an incidental glitch, and valuable time and credibility were lost. The Pentagon had no conclusive proof that the system would work.

During a five-hour meeting on Aug. 5, the missile defense team reported to the Pentagon policymakers on the program's status. In addition to the troubled flight tests, development of the booster rocket was a year behind schedule, and top military officials had agreed to consider the recommendations of independent experts for extra tests to prove the system's ability to distinguish between decoys and real warheads.

"We were losing ground all over the place," said one participant.

The bottom line that emerged from the session was that the 2005 deployment date would probably slip, perhaps by a year or more, although it might still be possible to meet the goal with luck and an extraordinary effort.

In addition, a clear consensus developed that the White House should be advised to proceed with construction of the radar site on Shemya Island in the Aleutians. That has always been the most time-sensitive element of the project--the "long pole in the tent" in Pentagon parlance--because of the short construction season there. Because the radar could be used for a variety of purposes, it was suggested that the administration could claim the construction did not violate the ABM Treaty.

Cohen conveyed the Pentagon's findings in conversations with Berger as the missile defense team continued to work on a new timetable and on new cost estimates. On Aug. 11, the Pentagon's top weapons tester, Philip E. Coyle, circulated a memo concluding that the program's efforts thus far would not support a recommendation to the president to go forward with a 2005 target date and that important elements of the system were still unproven.

In the following days, Cohen told the top military staff at the Pentagon that he felt confident he knew enough to make a recommendation to the president and that he would develop his talking points on his own, Pentagon officials said.

"Basically, the message was 'He's got the ball now and he's going to run with it,' " said a senior official.

Cohen delivered his advice to the president before Clinton left for Africa on Aug. 26, administration officials said. Although the deployment date would slip, Cohen urged what came to be known as the "limited green light" option, going forward immediately with construction of the Aleutian radar site but acknowledging that the next president would have to make the final decision on the fate of the program.

By then, however, the technical problems of missile defense and the almost certain delay in deployment loomed large in White House thinking, administration officials said. If the system could not be deployed until 2006 at the earliest, Clinton felt there was no reason to move ahead now with steps, such as building the radar site, that would have major diplomatic repercussions, the officials said.

At the meeting with Cohen, Berger and Podesta on his return from Africa, Clinton presented a few major conclusions that became the outline for his Georgetown speech, an administration official said. Clinton worried that the threat of a missile attack on the United States was real and growing and that the threat of massive retaliation might not deter an unstable or misguided opponent in the future. But for now, missile defense was so uncertain that it did not justify the diplomatic costs.

Even as the president made a brief visit to Colombia on Wednesday, aides began working on his speech. On Thursday, Clinton stated definitively that he would not start construction on the radar site, and a final draft was completed by midday. The president, however, did not have a venue for delivering the speech.

Arrangements with Georgetown were not nailed down until Thursday afternoon, and that evening hundreds of hastily printed fliers appeared around the campus announcing the president's visit the next morning. Georgetown students and a few top officials were the only people in Washington who knew the president was about to give a major address on the Friday before Labor Day weekend.

That morning, the top military officials involved in missile defense learned from news bulletins that the president was about to announce the fate of their program.

Staff writers Ellen Nakashima and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.


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

Putin Arrives in Japan, Hopeful on Ties

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
By Gareth Jones
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/japan_russia_dc_3.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Japan on a three-day official visit on Sunday and said he was optimistic about improving the long-troubled relations between the two former Cold War enemies.

``In our assessment, Russian-Japanese relations are at their highest level of development since the end of World War Two,'' Putin told reporters after his arrival at Tokyo's Haneda airport.

``We value this fact very highly and plan to develop our relations further,'' said Putin, who is anxious to build on a rapprochement initiated by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin and to tap Japanese investment for Russia's fragile economy.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori gave Putin and his wife Lyudmila a red carpet welcome with a full military guard of honor.

``We intend to have an open dialogue on all aspects of our relationship in the next few days,'' Mori told reporters.

Mori, who met Putin only last month at the annual summit of the Group of Eight Nations on Japan's southern island of Okinawa, also alluded to Putin's love of judo and noted that the Kremlin leader's program in Tokyo included several cultural events.

Putin, a 47-year-old former KGB spy, praised Mori as a reliable negotiating partner.

``I have a very friendly, business-like relationship with Prime Minister Mori,'' said Putin.

Peace Treaty Proving Elusive

Russia and Japan are struggling to conclude a peace treaty by the end of this year that would formally end World War Two hostilities.

However, the two sides remain far apart on the ownership of four tiny islands held by Moscow since 1945 but still claimed by Tokyo as its Northern Territories. Russia fears a nationalist backlash if it returns what it calls the Southern Kuriles.

On Sunday, Putin said Russia and Japan would move forward on the basis of previous agreements, which have committed them to seek a solution to the islands' dispute on the basis of respect for the national interests of each side.

But in comments made earlier on Sunday on Russia's Far East island of Sakhalin, Putin played down the chances of any deal.

``Did someone actually say that the Russian government is intending to give up the Kurile islands?

``We are conducting talks. We say the problem exists, but there is no question of turning over the Kuriles. At issue here is a discussion of the problem, which we recognize as such. That is true,'' he said.

Russia's commercial television NTV speculated this was a bid to crush suggestions that a deal was being hatched to put the islands under joint jurisdiction and eventually turn them over to Japan in return for investment totaling more than $150 billion.

NTV quoted an item which appeared on the Russian media Web site gazeta.ru which said the Kremlin's ``pragmatic'' wing had won out and that Putin was prepared to turn over the islands.

Russian Focus On Economy

Moscow has signaled that it wants to focus the discussions in Tokyo on economic relations with Japan, including the possibility of joint development of the disputed islands.

Bilateral trade between Russia and Japan currently stands at a measly $5 billion a year. Trade between Japan and China is $60 billion.

The Kremlin would prefer to conclude a broader peace, friendship and cooperation pact which would effectively defer any resolution of the islands' dispute until a later date. Tokyo is wary about any interim accords.

Putin and Mori are expected to sign some 15 documents covering a range of issues from energy to the environment.

The two leaders are due to begin their official talks on Monday morning.

-------- china

China Protests U.S. Rights Suit Against a Leader

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090300china-tiananmen.html

China is demanding that American officials dismiss a federal civil lawsuit charging a high-ranking official with human rights abuses stemming from the 1989 military crackdown that killed hundreds of student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan by five participants in the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The suit was brought against Li Peng, the country's prime minister at the time and now the chairman of the National People's Congress.

Chinese officials blamed the United States government for not properly protecting Mr. Li from having a court summons served to him while he was in New York for a United Nations conference of members of parliaments. A process server handed the summons to a State Department employee guarding Mr. Li. Although the department later said it could not accept such papers, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Li could be served through his guards.

"What happened in New York concerning the serving of the court papers is a political farce, put together by a small number of anti-China elements," Zhang Yuanyuan, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a telephone interview on Friday night.

The civil suit was filed by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal group that specializes in human rights cases. It is the first time that such a legal action has been taken against a Chinese official.

The Chinese government is "expressing strong opposition, strong displeasure and dissatisfaction with the incident, and launching a strong protest," Mr. Zhang said. He added that the charges were "absolutely absurd and unacceptable."

State Department officials could not be reached yesterday for comment.

The lawsuit accuses Mr. Li of being responsible for "crimes against humanity," including summary execution, arbitrary detention and torture.

The plaintiffs, who live in the United States, are four former student dissidents and one man, Zhang Liming, whose sister was shot dead by army troops that overran Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Among the former students is Wang Dan, who was released from a Chinese prison in 1998 and exiled to the United States.

The legal basis for the lawsuit comes from two American statutes that allow human rights victims anywhere in the world to file for claims in this country's courts. Mr. Li has more than two weeks to answer the court order. He flew back to China on Friday.

-------- colombia

'Plan Colombia': A Policy Recalling Vietnam, Nicaragua

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Kansas City Star
by Rhonda Chriss Lokeman
http://www.kcstar.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-103.htm

Holding up a map of Southeast Asia, the government of Panama last week sent U.S. officials the diplomatic equivalent of "Hell, no, we won't go." Any way you looked at the map, signposts pointed to a quagmire in the southern hemisphere.

In nearby Colombia, President Clinton and a bipartisan entourage of 35 U.S. officials were not amused by this rebuff. They had wanted to use the Central American nation as a staging area to fight Marxist-backed narcotics-trafficking in Colombia.

There they were in Cartagena -- all set for lights, camera and action -- when Panama pulled the plug. Right behind Panama was Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, said such intervention, albeit at Colombia's behest, "could lead us to a Vietnamization of the whole Amazon region."

Not at all, said Clinton. "This is not Vietnam," he insisted, "nor is it Yankee imperialism." Republicans and Democrats in his entourage agreed.

As the politicians once more scrutinize the definition of "is," here's what to expect now that the Washingtonians are safely back in their brownstones thousands of miles from Bogota.

Americans, through Plan Colombia and congressional approval of a $1.3 billion aid package, have just entered Colombia's 40-year-old civil war and have done so with no exit in sight. (See Vietnam.)

That strategic oversight combines with a bizarre anti-human-rights arrangement that undermines whatever good intentions are behind the war on narco-trafficking. Blood will be on Democratic and Republican hands long after the Clinton administration expires.

Panamanians can see what's coming. And Panama's president has a good memory.

Not only does the Colombian initiative evoke the Vietnam quagmire, but a military escalation in the region would, as Panamanians insist, represent regressive, rather than progressive, policy. Nations bordering Colombia want diplomacy and dialogue to end the civil war, not just the drug war.

In Colombia it's difficult to tell guerrillas from drug traffickers because sometimes they inhabit the same body. Sometimes the drug lords use civilians as shields, the way the Vietcong did. It's pure folly to trust the Colombian military, recipient of 60 helicopters from Uncle Sam, to not target civilians given its record thus far.

At the same time the Central American region moves toward further democratization, this buildup in foreign aid and materiel -- virtually certain to be followed by more advisers and possibly deployments -- tilts things in the wrong direction. This is Vietnam and Nicaragua all rolled into one.

In Reagan's presidency, when $1 million daily went to El Salvador and Thomas Pickering was U.S. ambassador there, it was a Republican administration and a Democratic Congress. Now there's a Democratic president and Republican Congress. And Pickering, promoted to under secretary of state, oversees U.S. policy supportive of Colombian President Andres Pastrana's $7.5 billion Plan Colombia.

In Reagan's day, U.S. funds went to fight leftist guerrillas in Nicaragua. Under Clinton, money goes to fight Marxist-backed coca-growers in Colombia. It took the diplomacy of the Contadora nations, not just military might, to get peace in Central America. It may take such an alliance, not the prescribed foreign military aid, to bring peace to Colombia.

But where there's drugs and money, there's the potential for wrong. In the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, some Americans took part in drugs-for-arms-for-hostages schemes. Here's what has happened already with Colombia.

In July, a federal judge sentenced Col. James Hiett, former commander of the U.S. military's anti-drug operation in Colombia, to five months in prison for trying to launder $25,000 in cash from his wife's heroin and cocaine operation. The U.S. Embassy in Bogota was used as a point of transfer.

Also consider: The U.S. aid package, including helicopters and military "advisers," comes just as Republicans have blamed Clinton for stretching military commitments too far. Yet, GOP support for Plan Colombia stretches things further over time.

But that's OK because, as House Speaker Dennis Hastert said, it's necessary. The Illinois Republican said last week in Colombia, "For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we can't afford to let this fail."

Here's how else Congress will spin this venture: The Colombian aid package is a supplement to a military construction bill that would, conceivably, improve conditions for U.S. troops domestically.

Supporters of Plan Colombia insist this won't be a U.S. military operation but that story won't hold up for long. Colombian rebels vowed to oppose "U.S. aggression." The Miami Herald last week reported that U.S. Brig. Gen. Keith Martin of the Southern Command will oversee the military aspects of the Colombian package.

This won't be a tidy operation by a longshot.

---

The President Of Hypocrites: Clinton's Intervention in Colombia's Drugs War Won't Help The Chaotic Country And It Could Backfire On The US

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Independent / UK
by Joan Smith
http://www.independent.co.uk/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-107.htm

I suppose there are bigger hypocrites than Bill Clinton, but their names escape me for the moment. The US President made a flying visit to Colombia last week, after assuring the population in a video broadcast that the US has no military objective in their country. I'm sorry? Wasn't he about to hand over $1.3bn - some £900m - in mostly military aid to Colombia's President Andres Pastrana? Well, yes, but you would barely know it from Mr Clinton's trademark blend of personal anecdote and stomach-churning sentimentality. He insisted he was merely providing assist- ance in a campaign against drugs led by the Colombian government, before going on to salute ordinary people who are marching for peace, for justice, for the quiet miracle of a normal life.

The compliment was not whole-heartedly returned. Bomb-making equipment was found in Cartagena, the Caribbean port where Mr Clinton spent precisely eight hours, well away from the capital, Bogota, and the southern provinces which the government has ceded to drug traffickers and left-wing guerrillas. Even so, Mr Clinton's brief presence required protection from no fewer than 5,000 soldiers and police, 350 US Secret Service agents, helicopter gunships and several navy patrol boats. Six people, including three children, died in guerrilla attacks apparently prompted by the visit, and eight soldiers were injured. Protesters marched in Bogota, signalling that Mr Clinton's assurance that he wanted to make life better for people had not been universally believed. With very good reason. The Colombian military, whose involvement with paramilitary death squads is admitted even by its own government, is about to receive 60 helicopters and training for two special army battalions. At present, they do not have enough helicopter pilots or hangars, but their job will be to protect police as they attempt to destroy coca plantations. This is not a task for which Colombians have shown much aptitude; in the decade since fumigation of coca crops began, according to one recent calculation, annual production has risen by more than 750 per cent.

Since there is no meaningful distinction between members of drugs cartels and the two main guerrilla groups, the US military is taking sides in a long-running civil war which is set to become, Mr Clinton's harshest critics say, another Vietnam. The comparison is fuelled by the fact that the chief architect of Plan Colombia, as it is called, is the US's drugs tsar Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose own record in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War has come under hostile scrutiny. (In March 1991, General McCaffrey ordered an attack on retreating Iraqi soldiers which turned, in his words, into "one of the most astounding scenes of destruction I have ever participated in". Eye-witnesses have questioned whether the Iraqis began shooting first, as McCaffrey claimed.)

* Another close parallel is the Reagan administration's military aid to the government of El Salvador and the opposition Contras in Nicaragua. Mr Clinton may be a Democrat but, like Mr Reagan, he has invoked national security in waiving human-rights conditions attached to military aid by Congress - an admission that the war on drugs is more important than anything else, including murder. According to Human Rights Watch, there is "detailed, compelling and abundant evidence" of the Colombian army's connections with paramilitary death squads; half of its 18 brigades have been linked to these groups, including those operating in areas which are about to get US assistance.

Mr Clinton visited a law centre in Cartagena last week and posed in a silly hat for photographers before scuttling back to Washington. The US intervention leaves ordinary Colombians, who face a human-rights crisis of "alarming proportions" according to Amnesty International, acutely vulnerable in a civil war which is almost certainly about to intensify. The Colombian military is as incompetent as it is brutal; two weeks ago, an army patrol mistook a party of schoolchildren for rebels, opened fire and killed six. Mr Clinton has not said what the US government will do if its military advisers are attacked in rebel-controlled areas. But the spectre of US involvement in a protracted jungle war in South America is belatedly setting off alarm bells in Washington.

Why should Mr Clinton take any notice? This most shameless of US presidents will be out of office in four months, leaving someone else to sort out the mess. Opinion polls have suggested that the electorate is worried about drugs, and that the Democrats are seen as soft on the issue. Mr Clinton is doing Al Gore a favour, at no political cost to himself, while also delighting US arms manufacturers with substantial orders, not least the companies whose helicopters will be part of the aid package. You do not have to be a cynic to guess, correctly, that they also happen to be important donors of funds to the Democratic Party.

* In effect, Colombia has become the setting for an exercise which is really about US domestic politics, in which the anxieties of voters and the interests of arms manufacturers happen neatly to coincide. The war on drugs is unwinnable - as President Pastrana remarked in a candid interview last week - as long as there is a continuing demand in wealthy nations such as the US. Mr Clinton mouthed a few platitudes about this in his broadcast, but the truth is that the victims at home are largely expendable: young black men who kill each other in drug-related shootings or end up serving long sentences. One in 20 black men over 18 is in jail in the US, the vast majority for crimes involving drugs.

The question of why the US is so determined to prosecute a drugs "war" it has demonstrably failed to win, at such cost in human suffering, is something I do not have space to address here. But it is clear that Mr Clinton is stepping up US military involvement in another country's civil war, one which has lasted for 36 years without either side nearing victory. Can this be the same President who flew to Guatemala only last year to apologise for US interference in that country's very similar conflict, thereby contributing to the deaths of 200,000 people? Politicians are notorious for memory lapses, but this one is spectacular even by Mr Clinton's Olympic standards.

Yet the British Government supports this insane adventure, as do its EU partners. It remains to be seen whether they will feel so happy about Plan Colombia now that Mr Clinton has released the Colombian military from its obligation to clean up human-rights abuses. This weekend, Lotte Leicht, Brussels director of Human Rights Watch, is writing to EU foreign ministers asking them to suspend European aid in the light of Mr Clinton's decision. I know Robin Cook is touchy about ethical dimensions and all that, but this is one occasion when he really does have a case to answer.

---

Clinton Leaps Into Colombia Quagmire by Jim Schultz

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Sunday, September 3, 2000
San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurycenter.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-105.htm

PRESIDENT CLINTON went to Colombia on Wednesday to build support for his new war effort there. In July Congress approved $1.3 billion for Clinton's ``Plan Colombia,'' a massive U.S. leap into the big muddy of anti-drug and anti-guerrilla warfare in the hemisphere's longest-running civil war. As the presidential campaign at home focuses on whose tax cut -- Al Gore's or George W. Bush's -- is the better deal, few are watching Clinton's lame-duck launch into a new Latin American quagmire with its haunting echoes of quagmires past.

The goal of Clinton's aid package is to bring an end to Colombia's longstanding cocaine trade to the United States. However, that aid will land right in the middle of Colombia's bloody 40-year-old civil war, in which both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries tap into the drug trade for financing and support. The bulk of the aid package goes to the Colombian military -- 60 helicopters, training for a new anti-narcotics army brigade and other support for a massive incursion into southern Colombia's coca-growing region.

When Congress agreed to Clinton's aid request, it also recognized the human rights abuses committed by Colombian military and paramilitary units. Democrats and Republicans joined together to place important human rights conditions on that aid. They mandated that Colombia's president issue a written decree that soldiers who commit gross violations of human rights would be tried and punished in civilian court, that the country's armed forces cooperate in the investigation of human rights abuses, that any soldier involved in human rights abuses be immediately suspended and that the Colombian government prosecute leaders of paramilitary groups, the source of the majority of human rights abuses.

Congress' message was clear -- no action on human rights, no money.

How many of these conditions has the Colombian government met? ``Not a single one,'' reported Human Rights Watch last month.

Sidesteps Congress

Nevertheless, two weeks ago, in preparation for his Colombia visit, Clinton announced that he knew better. Better than the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and better than human rights workers on the ground in Colombia. Clinton used his executive authority to waive all those human rights requirements and put that $1.3 billion in the pipeline to Colombia's war zones.

Black Hawk and Huey-2 helicopters. Cash for machine guns and bullets. A billion-plus dollars buys a lot of killing.

Why did Clinton waive the protections imposed by Congress? ``Since the legislation is fairly recent, it's understandable the Colombian government has not had sufficient time to meet all the conditions,'' explained Clinton spokesman P.J. Crowley.

Chilling echoes of 20 years ago and the United States' first steps into the Central American quagmire of the 1980s. In 1981, during his final week in office, President Carter fretted over a new guerrilla offensive in El Salvador. U.S. aid to El Salvador's military had been suspended because of the record of horrendous human rights abuses committed by the Salvadoran military and paramilitary groups, among them the murder and rape of four U.S. churchwomen and the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Six days before leaving the White House, Carter used his emergency powers to send a package of aid to El Salvador's military. Soon after, President Reagan would boost that aid by massive amounts, always reminding his Democratic critics that it was Carter, not he, who began the policy. Over the next 10 years, more than 70,000 Salvadorans would die, and one of six would become refugees.

Now, using his executive powers to sidestep Congress, Clinton justifies his action by saying the Colombian government just needs more time to take action on human rights. ``We do think there is a good-faith effort under way in Colombia,'' said the State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. More echoes from the 1980s.

``Good-faith efforts,'' the same words Reagan's people used to describe El Salvador's human rights record when he certified their generals as appropriate recipients for U.S. aid. ``Good faith efforts'' such as the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, where an elite army unit trained by U.S. advisers killed up to 926, more than half of them under the age of 14.

Here's a taste of Clinton's new Colombian version of ``good-faith effort'' -- an eyewitness account of murders carried out in February in the town of San José de Apartado, passed on to me by a young American who was there and watched as gunmen did their work:

``They split into four groups: One went into a billiard bar and ordered the men inside to lie on the floor and not look at them. When Edgar Mario Urrego did not obey, and reportedly said that he recognized some of the gunmen as soldiers, they shot him dead. Another group went to the Pentecostal church, where they forced José Ubaldo Quintero out of the building and shot him several times in the head, killing him instantly. Lus Ciro Aristizabal and Alonso Jiménez were forced out of their homes and shot dead. Albeiro Montoya was killed in the town square.''

Murder in a Pentecostal church. ``Good-faith effort''?

The war we funded in El Salvador was a war against ``communists.'' The one we are getting ready to fund now in Colombia is a war against ``drug dealers.''

No doubt, the United State's anti-drug effort in Colombia is paved with good intentions. The roads into quagmires always are. But the violence our money buys will likely have little effect on the drug trade and far too often be directed at the innocent.

San José de Apartado was a self-declared ``peace community,'' which pledged neutrality in the civil war, asking only to be left to live. No such luck. The people killed that day weren't drug dealers, or guerrillas. And townspeople identified those who did the killing as soldiers, just like the ones to whom Clinton will now send U.S. helicopters, guns and cash. How short our memories.

In Colombia today, in the face of war, there are powerful movements for peace and brave peacemakers. It is a tragedy for Colombia, and the United States, that President Clinton did not listen to them. They know that the guerrillas are not the only ones with their hands in the drug trade; right-wing paramilitaries linked to the army also participate.

`Could escalate the war'

The peacemakers also know that the path to peace is not made easier by a $1.3 billion transfusion for war. Says Ana Teresa Bernal, coordinator of a national network of grass-roots peace efforts, ``Those of us in Colombia who are convinced of the need for international assistance for peace believe there is an extremely high risk that Plan Colombia, the current U.S. aid package, could escalate the war.''

I was in El Salvador in May, eight years after that country's civil war ended. The conflict stopped only when international pressure forced the government into peace through negotiation and only after public opinion in the United States made it clear that the easy flow of heavy aid would not continue much longer. Time and again during my visit people told me that social conditions and poverty were worse than before the war.

What did all that U.S. assistance buy, other than a decade of killing, torture and suffering? Why do we think it will buy anything different in Colombia?

Soon Clinton will be retired and writing his memoirs. If Gore succeeds him, he will be locked into his former boss's Colombian adventure. If Bush sits in the Oval Office and hawkish advisers push him to continue or even increase aid, he will be able to shake a finger at critics and remind us: ``I did not start this, Bill Clinton did,'' just as Reagan cited Carter.

As the American political season focuses on issues closer to home, there are echoes in the air. Echoes of human rights being set aside, of ``good-faith efforts'' with blood on them, and of a lame-duck president funding yet another violent clash in a faraway country. A battle in which the real victims will be innocents.

Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center (www.democracyctr.org), lives and writes in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The center provides training and support to citizen democracy projects in the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. Shultz wrote this article for Perspective.

---

Alliance With a Predator

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, September 3, 2000
By WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE, KENNETH E. SHARPE
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000903/t000082761.html

WASHINGTON--President Bill Clinton's trip to Colombia on Wednesday put a presidential imprimatur on Washington's deepening commitment to the guerrilla war there. But all the pomp and circumstance of a presidential visit cannot conceal the weakness at the core of this budding alliance: The Colombian armed forces, to which the U.S. has tied its fortunes, are badly--perhaps fatally--flawed.

Clinton has been forced to admit as much. Despite the Colombian government's failure to meet basic human-rights conditions imposed by Congress, he exercised a national-security waiver allowing the administration to send nearly a billion dollars in new military aid.

The Colombian military has a notorious history of abusing human rights and collaborating with right-wing paramilitary death squads during its four decades of armed conflict with Marxist guerrillas. Under pressure from national and international human-rights groups, the military's direct involvement in abuses has declined in recent years, but politically motivated murders by its paramiltary allies are on the rise. By leaving the dirtiest work in this war to the paramilitaries, the regular army can claim a cleaner human-rights record as it seeks more military aid from Washington. The recent massacre of dozens of peasants in the village of El Salado illustrates the modus operandi. Hundreds of heavily armed paramilitaries occupied the village and held a kangaroo court, summarily executing peasants they suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. The carnage went on for two days while the Colombian armed forces not only refused to intervene but also blocked access to the village by outsiders.

The Colombian armed forces' record of brutality and impunity moved Congress to impose strict human-rights conditions on military assistance to Colombia, which constitutes 75% of the $1.3 billion drug-war aid package. Short of a presidential waiver, the law requires the secretary of state to certify that the Colombian government is vigorously investigating and prosecuting human-rights violations by military personnel and paramilitary leaders, and acting affirmatively to sever the military's ties with the paramilitary groups before aid can be sent.

Similar conditions were imposed on military aid to El Salvador in 1981, for exactly the same reasons, but President Ronald Reagan routinely ignored them, certifying human-rights progress even when there was none. The charade of certification on El Salvador went on for two years until Reagan vetoed a renewal of the certification law. During those 24 months, Washington sent El Salvador $418 million in security assistance while the armed forces and their death-squad allies murdered 10,000 noncombatant civilians.

Although the Colombia aid law includes tough human-rights conditions, drug-war enthusiasts in Congress managed to insert an escape-hatch provision allowing the president to waive the conditions on "national security" grounds if Colombia does not meet them, thus circumventing certification without flouting the letter of the law. That's precisely what Clinton did Aug. 22, one week before his trip to Colombia. Conceding that only one of the six human-rights conditions had been met (military personnel accused of human-rights abuses will be tried in civilian rather than military courts), the president waived the others, tacitly admitting that Colombia's military does not meet even the most minimal human-rights requirements.

Congress did not insert the human-rights conditions into the law to embarrass the president, though he apparently was embarrassed about waiving them: He signed the waiver late at night, thereby missing the regular news cycle. Congress insisted on the conditions because a military unwilling to comply with them is an unworthy ally for the United States. To finance an escalation of Colombia's combat capability despite its depredations is to be complicit in the increased carnage that is apt to follow. No presidential waiver can absolve Washington of that moral burden.

Reagan certified Potemkin progress in El Salvador because fighting communism in Central America was more important to him than human rights. Clinton waived the human-rights requirements in Colombia because fighting drugs in the Andes is more important to him than human rights. Both presidents make the mistake of thinking that U.S. security interests and human-rights concerns are in conflict.

Protecting human rights is a prerequisite for the successful defense of U.S. long-term interests in Colombia. The United States cannot build stable democratic allies out of regimes that have predatory military institutions at their core. Granted, Colombia today is more democratic than El Salvador was in 1981, and its armed forces are more professional. But a military that routinely kills civilians with impunity and makes common cause with paramilitary terrorists is more a threat to democracy than a pillar of it.

The human-rights conditions imposed by Congress give the Clinton administration a potent policy instrument to force the Colombian military to clean up its act, but circumventing the conditions by granting a waiver has sent exactly the wrong signal. The Colombian armed forces and their paramilitary partners, like their Salvadoran brethren before them, are bound to conclude that Washington's concern for human rights is nothing but window dressing to sell the policy domestically. A rash of deadly paramilitary attacks in the days following Clinton's waiver shows that the death squads are undeterred by U.S. protestations of support for human rights. They are watching what we do, not what we say.

Financed by drug traffickers and protected by the military, the paramilitary right is at least as serious a threat to Colombian democracy and U.S. interests as are the leftist guerrillas. Yet, Washington's military aid package ignores the paramilitaries, focusing instead on expanding the war into guerrilla strongholds.

In a speech broadcast to the people of Colombia on the eve of his visit, Clinton affirmed Washington's support for the peace negotiations currently underway between the government and the guerrillas. "We do not believe your conflict has a military solution," he declared. "We support the peace process." But the peace process will remain stalled as long as the Colombian and U.S. governments turn a blind eye toward paramilitary terrorism. The guerrillas will never agree to lay down their arms and participate in electoral politics so long as rightist death squads roam free, killing anyone they suspect of leftist sympathies.

Thus, the success of U.S. policy depends fundamentally on fulfilling the human-rights conditions enumerated by Congress, not waiving them. Within the next few weeks and every six months thereafter, the secretary of state must report to Congress on what progress Colombia has made toward meeting these conditions. That will be a good opportunity for Congress and the American people to assess whether or not the White House is willing to back up its rhetorical commitment to human rights with actions. If Colombia's progress is no better than it has been so far, the president should rescind his waiver and halt the distribution of military aid.

William M. Leogrande Is Professor of Government at American University. Kenneth E. Sharpe Is Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. They Coauthored "Two Wars or One? Drugs, Guerrillas, and Colombia's New Violencia," in the Fall Issue of World Policy Journal

---

Colombian Rebel Attack Leaves Seven Police Dead

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/colombia_violence_dc_1.html

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Seven policemen died in a leftist rebel attack with homemade mortars and dynamite on a small town in northeastern Colombia, police said Sunday.

Four police officers posted in the village of Tomarrazon in Guajira province died when rebels dynamited the small police station late Saturday, according to Gen. Tobias Duran Quintanilla, operations director of the National Police.

``Later a police patrol clashed (with the rebels) and there three members of the police were killed,'' Duran Quintanilla told Radionet radio.

The body of one rebel fighter was discovered near the town, he said.

He added that rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) also destroyed the telephone company offices, leaving the area without phone service.

The rebel attack came after army troops repelled a FARC assault on a communications complex in western Colombia Friday and Saturday.

Eight soldiers and at least 12 rebels died in the battle. Another seven soldiers were killed when an AC-47 aircraft that had provided air support to the ground troops slammed into a mountain early Saturday. Officials discarded the possibility that the FARC shot the plane down.

The rebel offensive follows President Clinton's one-day visit to Colombia Wednesday. Washington has pledged a $1.3 billion aid package in mostly military assistance to support Colombia's fight against drugs.

The FARC, which authorities say partly finances its three-decade-old uprising with proceeds from protecting the drug trade, has warned that the US aid would lead to an escalation of the Colombia's internal conflict.

---

Curbing Drug Trade: A Proven Approach

New York Times
09/03/00
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l03dru.html

To the Editor:

Re "Colombia Says Key to Drug Fight Is for U.S. to Tame Demand Here" (front page, Aug. 30):

Colombia's president, Andrés Pastrana, is nearly right when he calls international drug trafficking the "most lucrative business in the world." Actually, the world arms trade is larger, but both are intertwined in the spread of drug addiction and AIDS through terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Efforts to reduce demand are essential to curtail drug use, but money is the big driver in the global drug trade.

America's forfeiture laws are an effective way to curtail the arms and drug trades. These should be globalized to stabilize the political and economic system in Colombia, making the rule of law stronger and building a source of strength for the Colombian people.

Achieving this would take political will and United States membership in the International Criminal Court.

RONALD B. BRINN Great Neck, N.Y., Aug. 30, 2000 The writer is a nongovernmental representative at the United Nations.

---

35 killed in rebel surge after Clinton visit

USA Today
09/03/00- Updated 09:05 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#host

BOGOTA, Colombia - A surge of rebel violence left 35 people dead over the weekend following President Clinton's visit to Colombia, including seven police officers slain by guerrillas - some of whom were disguised as police. Clinton was there to deliver a $1.3 billion anti-narcotics aid package. But critics have said the aid, including helicopters and troop training, is skewed toward the Colombian military, leaving police forces increasingly vulnerable. On Sunday, the Colombian navy intercepted a speedboat off its Pacific coast on Sunday and seized three tons of cocaine.

-------- cuba

US 'Commits Child Abuse' In Cuba

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Tuesday, September 5, 2000
Miami Herald
by Anthony F. Kirkpatrick, MD
http://www.herald.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090500-102.htm

Dr. Daniel Greenwald, a plastic surgeon, and I have just received U.S. government approval to fly medications from Tampa to Cuba.

We are the first to be granted such permission.

I am certain the American people would be voicing their opinions loudly if only they were better informed about the U.S. blockade on food and medicine to Cuba.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government has corrupted the entire process of informing us and Congress about the Cuban embargo, as evidenced by the blatant lies coming from its ``official'' guardian of worldwide human rights. Each year the State Department is mandated by Congress to prepare a 1,000-page report on human-rights violations in every country on this planet except, of course, one -- the United States.

POLICY IS SINISTER

When the U.S. government is questioned about the consequences of its embargo, the responses have been troubling. For example, on May 12, 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responding to a question from Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes stated that it is ``worth it'' to kill some 500,000 innocent children to eliminate a political opponent.

The State Department knowingly has made false and misleading statements to Congress and the public about the Cuban embargo to obfuscate its role in violating the most basic of universally recognized human rights.

The U.S. sanctions policy is sinister to its core. I've witnessed children vomiting several times a day, because the U.S. embargo blocks drugs required to treat the side effects of cancer chemotherapy. I have seen a child die of cancer because the embargo had blocked him from receiving a drug called pegaspargase, which is manufactured only in the United States.

The U.S. embargo on medical supplies is not the only evil inflicted on Cubans. The United States contributed to massive suffering in Cuba with its embargo on food through the implementation of the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act. This legislation was unambiguously calculated by the United States to hurt people in Cuba. The American Public Health Association testified against the bill warning of ``widespread famines.''

Five months after the passage, a food shortage contributed to the worst epidemic of neurological disease this century. More than 50,000 of the 11 million inhabitants of Cuba suffered from optic neuropathy, deafness, loss of sensation and pain in the extremities and a spinal disorder that impairs walking and bladder control. This was identical to the syndrome found among American POWs facing starvation in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II. The World Health Organization praised the Cuban government for its aggressive mass distribution of vitamins to curb the outbreak.

A WHO official who investigated the epidemic reported: ``Cuba has invested more in health services than almost any other country, and it has a higher health profile than the United States.'' He said that a humanitarian catastrophe was averted only because the Cuban government maintained a high level of budgetary support for primary and preventive health care to all its people.

The U.S. government counters that the embargo should be maintained because of human-rights violations in Cuba. Claims of massive abuse of human-rights are dishonest. A recent report by the prestigious international organization Human Rights Watch condemns U.S. exaggerations.

Rabid anti-Castroites need to find another excuse for maintaining the embargo. Logic tells us that the longer the United States maintains an embargo on the basic necessities of life, the more the world will rally to Castro's side, providing a crutch for any failures by his government.

Now is the time to push U.S. lawmakers for the truth about the medical embargo against Cuba.

Anthony F. Kirkpatrick, MD, Ph.D., is a physician at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He wrote this article for The Tampa Tribune.

-------- drug war

A Sacred Coca Leaf, Violent Traffickers And US Politics

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Sunday Herald (Scotland)
by Michael McCaughan
http://www.sundayherald.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-106.htm

The dried coca leaf, a sacred South American plant used by locals for several thousand years, was first processed into cocaine in a German laboratory in 1860.

The therapeutic drug quickly caught on and by early 1885 an urgent telegram reached US diplomatic posts demanding "full information to assure quality Peruvian coca for growing demand in the United States".

The Peruvian government, anxious to please a powerful trade partner, convened a conference of the best medical and scientific minds to ponder the sudden interest in the ancient plant. Within five years Peru had become the world's largest supplier of raw coca, exporting one million kilos a year.

In 1901 the US imported 863,252 kilos of coca, making it the leading consumer, producer and promoter of cocaine, a drug used as a medical anaesthetic and in the treatment of alcoholism, depression and fatigue.

Early US advertising praised cocaine's ability to restore lost energy, cure hay fever and act as a calmative "in those nervous conditions peculiar to females".

The chief international drug traffickers in those days were botanists at Kew Gardens, who oversaw the distribution of coca plants around the world, permitting the drug to grow as far away as Japan.

The passion for coca remedies turned to prohibition in 1907 when US Congress passed the Smith Anti-Cocaine Law, requiring sellers to label coca products with the word "poison", leading to an understandable decline in sales. The first world war saw an upsurge in cocaine supply to the front lines, with one outraged Times editorialist describing the threat of cocaine to soldiers as "more deadly than bullets".

The international cocaine trade re-emerged in Colombia in the 1970s, courtesy of a mafia which cut its teeth on contraband whiskey, marijuana and luxury goods. The first generation of modern traffickers was symbolised by Colombia's rich, violent and flamboyant Pablo Escobar.

Escobar amassed a billion-dollar fortune, living the good life, hanging out with politicians and popstars until US pressure forced a sustained manhunt which ended in a hail of bullets on a rooftop in Medell'n in 1993.

The drug traffickers learned their lesson, forming dozens of smaller syndicates, skilled in satellite communications, more elusive than their flashy pre decessors.

The relationship between drug traffickers and top government officials is no secret in Colombia, as traffickers have invested billions of dollars in legitimate businesses, blurring the lines between criminal activity and private enterprise.

President Ernesto Samper (who held power from 1994-1998), received $6 million in drug funds for his presidential election campaign, allowing the drug cartels to further penetrate Colombian society.

The relationship between the Colombian army and the drug traffickers has been healthy, as both groups despise the left-wing guerrilla groups fighting the state since 1964.

Right-wing paramilitaries were funded by wealthy land owners and industrialists, trained by Israeli mercenaries and given logistical help from the Colombian army, eager to aid potential allies in the war against subversion. The paramilitaries now number about 10,000 soldiers, a murder machine specialising in the massacre of civilians. There were 402 such massacres last year alone.

The imminent escalation of the armed conflict and the indiscriminate fumigation of drug producing areas (using EN-4, an Agent- Orange-like compound used in biological warfare) may precipitate a massive human exodus which would spill into neighbouring countries, already straining under the impact of a prolonged economic crisis.

Increased US interest in Colombia's internal conflict dates from January 1998 when a Washington Post article cited US State Department officials who acknowledged that left-wing rebels could seize power within five years. Critics of the US aid package also claim that increased US involvement in the region is aimed at securing stable regimes which would approve trade accords fav ourable to US interests.

The US has already negotiated a hemispheric trade bloc (ALCA) stretching from Alaska to Panama, but aspires to incorporating South America by the year 2005.

The war against cocaine is far more complex than it at first appears, pitting US political and economic hegemony against the region's reformist governments.

But, if the going gets tough Colombian traffickers will shift production to safer areas in coming months, continuing one of the most profitable businesses in the world, while the peasant farmers prepare for war, displacement and death, the traditional lot of Latin America's luckless majority.

---

Spanish Police Search 'Cocaine Ship,' Crew Freed

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
By William Schomberg
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/drugs_spain_dc_4.html

MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish police kept searching on Sunday for five tons of cocaine they believe is hidden on board a freighter seized on the high seas.

But most of the ship's crew were released after three days of searching failed to turn up any drugs.

About 80 police were sifting through the official cargo of steel coils and tar for what was thought to be one of Europe's biggest hauls of illicit drugs.

The 120-meter Privilege was stopped Thursday and boarded 200 nautical miles southwest of the Canary Islands -- far out in the Atlantic Ocean -- as part of an international crackdown on the South American drug trade.

An official in the port city of Las Palmas, on the island of Grand Canary, said 18 Philippine members of the ship's crew of 20 were released after a 72-hour limit for their detention without evidence.

The boat's Panamanian captain and his Mexican deputy were still being held, the official said.

The ship, flying a Sao Tome and Principe flag, was believed to be heading for Italy from Venezuela when it was boarded on Thursday by police shinning down rope ladders from helicopters with support from Spain's armed forces.

Drugs May Have Been Dumped

State radio said shipbuilding experts had been called in to advise on possible secret compartments in the freighter's structure. But investigators also believed the drugs might have been dumped at sea before Thursday's raid, the radio said.

``We're not ruling out any possibility,'' said a government spokeswoman in Las Palmas earlier Sunday. ``It's starting to look a bit strange that nothing has been found up to now.''

She said the search was complicated, given the size of the ship and the volume of its declared cargo. The vessel was moored in a navy dock at Las Palmas amid tight security.

The head of Spain's anti-drug program said Saturday the Privilege was believed to be carrying five tons of cocaine and the search could last three more days.

Five tons of cocaine would represent the second biggest drug haul in Spain, which has become an entry point into Europe for South American cocaine as well as hashish from North Africa.

The raid was part of ``Operation Orinoco,'' a multinational crackdown on cocaine smuggling by police in Venezuela, Colombia, United States, Italy, Panama, France, Greece and Spain.

Police in Venezuela seized about ten tons of cocaine in three drug busts in late August in the mangrove swamps and jungle of the Orinoco River basin as part of the operation.

The drugs were worth an estimated $800 million on the streets of Europe, officials said at the time.

Venezuela has become a major smuggling route for cocaine from Colombia, the world's biggest producer of the drug.

Last year, Spanish police and coastguards seized 7.6 tons of cocaine on a ship approaching the Canary Islands from Panama, and a further 5.2 tons were later found on the mainland in what was called Europe's biggest ever drug bust at the time.

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Making a Dent in the Demand for Illegal Drugs

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/090300antidrug-review.html

When Andres Pastrana, the president of Colombia, said last week that the key to winning the war against drugs was taming demand in the United States, he ruffled some American feathers.

Part of the problem was timing: President Clinton was about to hand him a check for $1.3 billion in aid to train and outfit a new Colombian anti-drug brigade. But Pastrana's words also rankled some people because they took no account of the myriad demand-reduction programs that are already in place in the United States.

Officials in the office of Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug czar, have a landslide of little-noted statistics that show domestic demand for drugs has plunged. Use of cocaine, both crack and powder, has decreased by 70 percent in the last 15 years, said Bob Weiner, a spokesman for McCaffrey. Consumption of all drugs by youths aged 12 to 17 went down 21 percent from 1997 to 1999, Weiner said. And while drug use went up among people 18 to 25, it was still far below what it had been 20 years ago, he said.

"We obviously have to do a better job of making certain that Latin American nations, for one, understand that we have a strong demand-reduction program in place and that it's working and successful," Weiner said. The programs range from a national campaign to put anti-drug commercials into movie theaters to having federal agents talk in classrooms and office parks about the dangers of drugs.

These efforts are mirrored by a network of local programs around the country. Many were modeled after those pioneered by the Brooklyn district attorney's office. That office, which spends a good deal of time making cases against dope dealers and crack addicts, has in the last decade also focused on getting drug felons into treatment programs, as well as educating the young about the perils of illegal drugs.

"It was very clear that the problems Brooklyn was having when I took over this office could not be addressed by law enforcement alone and needed something other than a traditional approach," the district attorney, Charles Hynes, said last week from San Francisco, where he was speaking at a conference on drug treatment programs. "And if drugs were the operative reason for the crime increase, then something had to be done about demand."

The centerpiece of his efforts is a program called D-TAP, or Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison, which was the first of its kind in the nation when it was introduced in 1990, the first year of Hynes' tenure. Under the program, people convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes may choose between going into treatment or going to jail.

"The DA said I'm going to take this population that would otherwise end up in prison and divert them into treatment," said Anne Swern, a deputy district attorney who runs D-TAP. "If they fail the program, they go to jail. But what we've found is that D-TAP can deal with these people with risks to the public that are low and benefits that are very high both financially and recidivism-wise."

Swern said about 50 percent of the people sent to prison in Brooklyn for drug crimes since the program started were re-arrested after three years, while only 23 percent of those who had entered D-TAP were back before a judge over the same period.

The program has saved millions of dollars in taxpayer money, too, Swern estimated. She said it cost $69,500 a year to house an inmate with a drug habit on Riker's Island, the city's largest jail. And it cost $82,000 a year, she said, to hold a criminal in New York City before his trial and then imprison him in an upstate cell. But to treat a convict for drug abuse, even in New York state -- which has the highest such costs, she said -- takes between $18,000 and $21,000 a year.

Hynes also requires every prosecutor in his office to spend at least two days each month talking to students in more than 300 schools in Brooklyn about the consequences of using drugs. This initiative, called Legal Lives, teaches children that there is a price to pay for snorting cocaine or smoking pot by having them act out situations they are certain to encounter on the street.

In one script, "Pot Luck," three youths are hanging out in the schoolyard after class, and one pulls out a joint. They light up. Then the cops arrive, and everyone is arrested. "We stop the action there and ask the kids questions," said Mary Hughes, who runs the program. "Why was Bob arrested? Why was Ernie arrested? Did the police have a right to arrest them? Why? What choices did everybody make?"

So as it turns out, crime-busters, from Hynes' office to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, are, in fact, in agreement with Pastrana.

"Everybody knows the DEA as the guys who throw people in jail," said Jack Hook, who runs the agency's demand-reduction section. "But the bottom line is that to solve the drug problem in this country means education, prevention and treating those who are already addicted."

-------- india/pakistan

The Plan for Pakistan

New York Times
September 03, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l03pak.html

To the Editor:

Re "Military Misrule in Pakistan" (editorial, Aug. 28): Gen. Pervez Musharraf's plan for restructuring the Pakistani government seeks to create local, self-administered municipalities, shifting away from the failed structure of a large, centralized bureaucracy to put power into the hands of the people. It reserves a minimum of a third of the seats in councils at all levels for women.

Your editorial defends "the country's top politicians" by claiming that General Musharraf has excluded them from the formation of the program, but that ignores the fact that these politicians are the root of Pakistan's problems. General Musharraf's attempt to collect billions of rupees in unpaid taxes has been stalled by these government officials. Their concerns do not include providing education, health care and proper sanitation. Rather, they are intent on personal aggrandizement.

ARIF RAFIQ Greenvale, N.Y., Aug. 28, 2000

-------- iraq

Dear Saddam

Washington Post
Sunday, September 3, 2000
By Jim Hoagland
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-09/03/225l-090300-idx.html

Hi ya, big boy. Yeah, you, Saddam. The Mother of All Dictators. Okay, okay, the All Mighty and Munificent One, then. Still touchy after all these years, I see. Yeah, it's been a while. You've been busy rebuilding missile factories and other secret toys for your version of a good time. Here, we've been distracted with a nascent election campaign in which both sides have been praying that you would stay out of sight.

They never learn, do they, O Blessed Hope of Iraq? They underestimate your need to stay in the spotlight. So you're back, making threatening noises. And they still don't get how you've honed that trademark touchiness you unleash so quickly as one of your most important political weapons.

You use it to attract useful idiots from abroad to plead for an end to international infringement on Iraq's "sovereignty." And you use it to intimidate other governments and the United Nations into tiptoeing around your deadly toys, so as not to set off your nasty side.

World-class tactics, pal. They help you big time now in wriggling away from U.N. sanctions. Why am I not surprised? Maybe because I have seen your skills firsthand. During our 1975 interview in your palace in Baghdad, for example. When one of your minions called to say you were upset with the article that followed, I thought I knew why: those references to you as a teenage gunman and the violence and intimidation you used to rule Iraq. All true, I said.

Nah, not that stuff, your diplomat shot back. It's the diamond cuff links. How could I have mentioned the obvious pride of the Greatest Arab Socialist in History in such worldly goods? This would not help your image, and what did not help your image was dangerous in Iraq.

Recent reports say that you and your clan still live luxuriously and that your army thrives while Iraqi children die from hunger and neglect. But somehow today the diamond cuff links part of the picture gets too little attention: Your line that sanctions, rather than your bloody rule and defiance of the United Nations, are the root cause of Iraq's troubles is propagated widely by people who should know better. They portray you as the victim.

But there I go again. You clearly are doing something right, from your standpoint. Look at the debate at the United Nations last week over a mind-numbing nuance: Should Hans Blix, the chairman of the new team of arms inspectors, announce that his group was ready to return to Iraq, as he planned? Or should he say the arms experts "could plan and commence" preliminary tasks to prepare for future inspections, once they are approved by Iraq?

Now stop laughing, Saddam. And don't gloat because Blix chose the second option after Washington and Moscow told him they didn't want an announcement that would "create a climate of confrontation at an inappropriate time." That's a Security Council diplomat talking to The Washington Post's Colum Lynch.

We know why Moscow wants to avoid any hint of confrontation. President Vladimir Putin is avidly working to get sanctions off and business with Iraq resumed, no matter how many hidden atomic, chemical or biological weapon facilities you've been building. Washington's motivation is more complex but no less craven.

Diplomatic confrontation would call attention to the fact that there have been no inspections for weapons of mass destruction since you unilaterally ended them in December 1998. Al Gore does not want that dredged up now. Not even Bush-Cheney-Powell seem eager to have U.S. televiewers or newspaper readers reminded that you survive, and plot.

But the Clintonites are considering rushing Patriot missiles to Israel just in case you act up. They are probably looking the wrong way again. All you have to do is cut back on oil exports and you would throw world markets into chaos. Is that a smile I see forming beneath the world's most notorious moustache?

And that would enable you to keep the focus off the fact your ban on inspections will outlast Clinton's second term. You keep the focus on the sanctions, not on your defiance. You hide in plain sight the fact that you could end tomorrow the cruel deprivation that afflicts Iraq's children by simply living up to the obligations you undertook to the United Nations and to the administration of George W. Bush's father to get an end to the Gulf War.

"Europeans feel we cannot go on starving innocent children with these sanctions," a leading German politician said on a recent Washington visit. I asked him if it made any difference that it was Baghdad's just-repeated refusal of inspections that kept the sanctions in place. "No, people just see the children," he responded.

You turned 63 this spring, O Crafty Survivor of All Survivors. But you haven't lost a step in the flimflam and intimidation game, Saddam. You are one of a kind. Or so I pray.

---

U.S. jets bomb Iraqi defense sites

USA Today
09/03/00- Updated 09:05 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#host

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. - U.S. jets bombed air defense sites in southern Iraq on Saturday after allied planes came under missile attack. All the planes returned safely from the strike, and the military is assessing the damage. There was no immediate word fromIraqi officials about any damage or casualties. The last air strike against Iraqi air defense sites was Wednesday. Iraq claimed the strike hit a village, injuring three people. The United States and Britain have been enforcing no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq since 1991. Iraq regards the zones violations of its territorial sovereignty and has been challenging the patrols since 1998. The zones were set up ostensibly to protect Shiite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north from attacks by Iraq's army.

--

USA Today
09/03/00

Alaska

Fairbanks - About a half-dozen F-16s from Eielson Air Force Base will leave for Turkey today to fly combat search-and-rescue missions in the Middle East. The fighter planes will join forces supporting the no-fly zone mission in northern Iraq, Air Force officials said. The Eielson fighters will be deployed in the Mideast for about three months.

-------- myanmar

Annan Voices 'Deep Concern' Over

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
Suu Kyi Treatment
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/myanmar_un_dc_1.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan again expressed on Sunday his ``deep concern'' over events in Myanmar a day after the government moved against opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her pro-democracy party.

``The secretary-general reiterates his deep concern at the reports of the recent actions affecting Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD), who have been involuntarily returned to Yangon on 2 September,'' a U.N. statement said. ``Reports concerning further infringement of the freedom of movement and the freedom of political expression are particularly disturbing.''

The statement issued in Annan's name emphasized ``the need to respect the human rights'' of the opposition leaders and ``the necessity for national reconciliation.''

Annan ``urges the two sides to engage, as soon as possible, in a substantive political dialogue,'' as called for by the U.N. General Assembly and the Commission of Human Rights, the statement said.

Sources close to the National League for Democracy said in Yangon on Saturday that members of the security forces had spent several hours in party headquarters.

At about the same time, a large police contingent picked up Suu Kyi, her driver and 14 colleagues from an encampment outside the capital where they had been since being stopped nine days earlier on a trip to visit supporters.

There were unconfirmed reports that several party leaders had been placed under house arrest. Myanmar officials declined to comment or confirm the whereabouts of league leaders.

The party won Myanmar's last election in 1990 by an overwhelming vote but has never been allowed to govern.

A 1998 roadside standoff between Suu Kyi and Myanmar's military leaders lasted 13 days, until worsening health and dehydration forced the Nobel Peace Prize winner to return home.

The United States, Britain and the European Union all condemned the new crackdown on Saturday.

---

Myanmar Crackdown Draws International Wrath

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/wl/myanmar_leadall_dc_24.html

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A crackdown by Myanmar's ruling military on the pro-democracy opposition party of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has provoked strong international condemnation.

On Saturday the Myanmar junta forced Suu Kyi to return to Yangon, ending a nine-day roadside confrontation with her just outside the capital. She had left Yangon on August 24 to try to visit supporters.

The United States expressed outrage at the treatment of Suu Kyi and her colleagues in the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). It said it had reports that the party's executive committee members were under house arrest. ''The United States is outraged and strongly condemns the Burmese authorities' treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party members and the violations of their fundamental human rights,'' U.S. Secretary of States Madeleine Albright said in a statement.

She said reports were that military intelligence agents had taken away files after spending hours on Saturday at NLD headquarters.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook condemned the crackdown, saying it showed the weakness of the Yangon regime.

``We are very concerned... We need to know she's safe, is well. What's happened to her is a scandal,'' Cook said in the French town of Evian on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union (EU) foreign ministers on Saturday.

The 15-member EU earlier issued a statement expressing concern at the forced return to the capital of Suu Kyi.

On Sunday, security was beefed up in front of the NLD headquarters and home of Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders, who were thought to be under house arrest.

Thailand's daily The Nation said in an editorial on Sunday that despite an end of the roadside confrontation, the stand-off between the Myanmar junta and the rest of the world would continue.

``The most efficient way to deal with Burma is to have the West, ASEAN, China, Japan and Australia working together to bring pressure to bear on the regime in an organized manner,'' the daily said.

``Without such a concerted approach, the political oppression in Burma will never end.''

---

Burmese Democracy Leader Forced Home; Standoff Ends

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090300burma-democracy.html

BANGKOK, Thailand, Sept. 2 -- In a sudden midnight raid, nearly 200 riot police surrounded the car where Myanmar's pro-democracy leader had been stranded by the roadside for a week and forced her and her companions to return home, one of her aides said today.

A Western diplomat said security forces then sealed off the political headquarters of the leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and apparently searched it and removed documents.

The forceful action brought to an abrupt end an attempt by Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 55, to publicize the restrictions on her political movement by attempting to drive from the capital of the former Burma to meet with her supporters in another town.

Her two-car convoy, in which she was accompanied by 14 supporters, was halted -- as similar forays have been in the past -- creating a standoff in the small town of Dala, just south of the capital, Yangon.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi refused to leave her car and set up camp by the side of the road. Her party, the National League for Democracy, issued a statement saying she would hold out "until she reaches her destination and accomplishes her party organizational duties."

Her aide, U Tin Oo, told reporters that he assumed she had been returned to her home. But his interview with local reporters was cut short before he could say much more.

"Around midnight, nearly 200 riot police raided the place where we were staying and forcibly took Aung San Suu Kyi and all of us," said Mr. Tin Oo, who is her chief deputy as party leader.

Party officials could not be reached by telephone today.

Though Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi failed, as expected, to meet with her supporters, her attempt succeeded in reviving international attention to the suppression of her political rights. It drew statements of concern from several nations as well as from the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Myanmar's military leaders accused her of a political stunt in advance of a session this month of the United Nations General Assembly and a meeting in December at which the main European and Southeast Asian political groupings are expected to discuss their relations with Myanmar.

Both the European Union and the most liberal member of the Asian grouping, Thailand, issued statements criticizing the government's actions.

In a statement today, the Myanmar government maintained its somewhat mocking tone toward the standoff, which it has portrayed as a pleasant outing in the countryside.

Under the headline, "Dala Incident Ends Happily," it said: "Daw Suu Kyi, her travel companions and all their attendants arrived home safe and sound this morning after their eight days of stay in Dala town."

Noting that her party had complained of the conditions in the swampy and mosquito-ridden area, the statement said: "The government acknowledged their complaints and on Sept. 2 at 1:30 a.m., Daw Suu Kyi and her travel companions were escorted back to their respective residences in Yangon in a motorcade facilitated by the government for their safe and convenient return."

The standoff was the latest confrontation between Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta that took power in 1988 after suppressing a nationwide pro-democracy uprising.

She was placed under house arrest the next year, but her party overwhelmingly won a parliamentary election in 1990, only to see the government set aside the results and remain in power. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

She was released from house arrest in 1995, but her activities since then have remained severely curtailed, and she has not been permitted to travel outside the capital, formerly known as Rangoon.

On Wednesday, Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, called on the government to try to resolve the long-running political stalemate through negotiations.

"The secretary general believes that the latest situation underlines the necessity for national reconciliation and urges the two sides to engage, as soon as possible, in a substantive political dialogue," said Mr. Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard.

But in a series of statements, Myanmar's leaders maintained their hard line against her.

On Friday, Foreign Minister U Win Aun portrayed Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's action in sinister terms, saying she hoped to draw an aggressive response from her foreign supporters.

"What she would like to see is the government to arrest her, thinking her arrest could create anarchy in the country, and eventually expecting foreign intervention," he said.

-------- space

Safety issues loom for NASA

USA Today
09/03/00- Updated 03:25 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm
PHOTO: The space shuttle Atlantis sits on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. (Michael R. Brown, AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Safety is the main concern as NASA gets set to boost its space shuttle flight rate in order to furnish and finish a space station that's more than two years behind schedule. In response to recent warnings about its dwindling workforce, NASA and its prime shuttle contractor, United Space Alliance, have hired a few hundred more people, including experienced veterans. The space agency also is modernizing the shuttle to make it safer. With Friday's launch of Atlantis, NASA plans a total of five shuttle flights this year, eight flights in 2001 and just about every year thereafter. ''We're starting to embark on a set of activities that is probably as complex as anything that we've ever done in the space business, including landing on the moon,'' shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore says.

-------- u.n.

Globalization Tops Agenda for World Leaders at U.N. Summit

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/090300un-summit.html

The stormy battle over globalization that brought protests to the streets of Seattle and Washington moves this week to the heart of the world's only truly global organization, the United Nations.

An extraordinary, three-day summit meeting of more than 150 world leaders called to thrash out problems of poverty and peace is turning instead into a debate about the future of the organization, as well as the world, at a time when national boundaries have become nearly as irrelevant to economic and political tides as they are to infectious diseases or popular music.

The summit meeting, which will begin Wednesday and end Friday, is the pivotal event in a two-week, traffic-stopping extravaganza for New York that began last week with a conference of world religious leaders, an assembly of scores of speakers from nearly all the world's elected parliaments and a meeting of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations from every continent.

A dozen or more other events are planned for the fringes this week, including a "dialogue of civilizations" featuring President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, a "state of the world forum" of government and private sector leaders, numerous street protests and a 10-hour teach-in against a greater role for global business in world affairs.

The United Nations is a more diversified organization than those that have been the focus of recent protests -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

So it is still seen as a hope for solving problems of globalization, rather than as a source of them, and it is not expected to be subjected to the same heated demonstrations that caused so much havoc in Washington and Seattle. Still, the debate over globalization will be intense.

At the United Nations, globalization means many things to many people. It is not simply the greater movement of goods, jobs and capital across borders, but also includes equally important cultural, environmental and political components.

For some countries, most in the industrial world, globalization is an opportunity to expand international standards in law, social development and human rights. For others, many of them developing countries, it holds out the worrying prospect of a United Nations aligning itself ever more closely with new power centers: the big corporations, high technology gurus and cultural icons of the industrialized world.

But unlike other summit meetings, the one here will give the fears and frustrations of the world's smallest and weakest nations equal time alongside the powerful, whose governments and -- increasingly -- corporations are feared for the influence they seem to be gaining inside the organization.

President Clinton, who will give the opening address and stay for three days, will be followed to the podium by the president of Equatorial Guinea. Russia's president will be followed by the leader of the Maldives, who likes to remind others that the big worry for his tiny nation of atolls is that globalization could mean disappearing completely -- if the warming of the world's climate is not halted.

"Globalization is seen by some as a force for social change, that it will help to close the gap between the rich and the poor, the industrialized north and the developing south," said Theo-Ben Gurirab, the foreign minister of Namibia and the General Assembly president for the last year.

"But it also is being seen as a destructive force because it is being driven by the very people, the colonial powers, who launched a global campaign of imperial control of peoples and resources in what we call now the third world. Can we trust them?"

Secretary General Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian with an American education who straddles two worlds, is at the center of the debate.

"Globalization is really defining our era," he said in an interview, explaining why he forged alliances with multinational corporations to improve labor and environmental standards as well as to bridge cyberspace gaps between the industrial and developing worlds.

He also warns political leaders that they have to govern well and learn to take advantage of international opportunities or their fragile economies are doomed. He argues that when citizens of any country are abused, the rulers can no longer tell others to stay out of their affairs.

"It's not that the secretary general is changing things too fast," Mr. Annan said, ranging over topics of relevance to the United Nations as varied as genetically modified foods or intellectual property rights. "The world around us is changing, and we change with it or we will be left behind. We have to adapt to the realities outside."

Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said the organization cannot ignore economic changes at a time when government aid has shrunk and international organizations have to look for new sources of money.

"At the end of the day," he said, "everybody has to acknowledge that the primary source of finance for development is going to come out of the private portion of the global and national economy."

Within the United Nations system, some officials are concerned that overtures to giant corporations and multinational industries from the top of the organization will set the stage for problems at lower levels. There are rules of engagement for working with governments, one official said, but there are no guidelines for working with businesses or independent advocacy groups.

Powerful corporations, encouraged by an open door in the secretary general's office, have the means to introduce corrupt arrangements or to pay for special favors among lower-ranking officials, including the handing over of insider information like unpublished research findings, some United Nations employees fear. Such acts would be easier to conceal than overt pressure from governments, which is a constant problem in the organization.

Mr. Annan's "global compact" -- a program intended to enhance cooperation between the United Nations and private corporations on things like labor standards and the environment -- has drawn the strongest criticism from American groups opposed to globalization, among them the Transnational Resource and Action Center in San Francisco.

Its director, Joshua Karliner, said the image of the secretary general standing beside the top executives of companies with bad reputations in the developing world sent the wrong message about the United Nations, and could make it a target of protest.

Mr. Karliner's organization is part of the International Forum on Globalization, which is sponsoring the 10-hour teach-in at Town Hall in Manhattan, beginning at 1 p.m on Tuesday.

Debi Barker, deputy director of the forum, said in an interview that the teach-in follows similar events in Seattle and Washington, where the targets were the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. "The U.N., unlike the W.T.O., the World Bank and the I.M.F., was really created to be a space to promote peace, human rights, the environment, social justice, livelihoods and democracy," she said. "This is a worthy institution and these are worthy goals.

"We are concerned that things such as the global compact, encroaching its way into the U.N., means that the U.N. is being usurped a bit by corporations and by people who are driving this globalization agenda. We would encourage the U.N. to take the high road; keep to its mandate; separate itself from corporations and deal instead with citizens."

Carol Bellamy, the executive director of Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, said that in the confrontation over globalization there has been an unfortunate tendency to adopt extreme views about business and that these get in the way of exploring new ways of cooperating with the private sector.

Ms. Bellamy, a former American Peace Corps director and New York City politician, has been wrestling recently with critics who want the Children's Fund to break ties with international corporations contributing to the organization. "The world demands a more sophisticated response today," she said.

"An outright rejection of globalization is a head-in-the-sand approach," she said in an interview, adding that the goals of international aid organizations may often coincide, at least in part, with those of business.

"The business community needs peace to see economic growth," she said. "They need kids to be educated to be consumers and workers. The rule of law, good governance, is important for creating an environment that will probably also be good for investment."

Mr. Malloch Brown of the United Nations Development Program says the debate about globalization in richer countries clouds the fact that a significant number of political leaders and nongovernmental organizations in developing nations are not opposed to a more interdependent world economy. They just want to be part of it, and they want it to be more sensitive to the needs of those least able to compete.

Mr. Annan, responding to frustration about the pace and effects of globalization in the developing world, said he had asked the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to work on ways to assist smaller nations in analyzing and simplifying complex economic and trade agreements so that they can benefit.

"It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity," Mr. Annan told the international conference of nongovernmental organizations last week. "But that does not mean we should accept a law that allows only heavyweights to survive. On the contrary, we must make globalization an engine that lifts people out of hardship and misery, not a force that holds them down."

The United Nations expects all the world's major powers to be represented at the summit meeting, and will make an effort to limit their formal speeches to five minutes each, with unlimited time for more informal talking later.

In addition to President Clinton, President Jiang Zemin of China will attend, as will President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

Leaders of most African nations, including Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, will speak. President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia is coming, as are Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat. Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, is also planning to come.

Shadowing the United Nations summit meeting will be the fifth annual State of the World Forum, a private gathering at the New York Hilton of more than 500 prominent figures in finance, labor, science and government. Speakers include Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet president; Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa; Gen. Colin L. Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the financier and philanthropist George Soros, and John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

When the summit meeting ends, there will be commitments to some very ambitious goals, part of an action plan advertised on billboards around New York. World leaders will pledge to halve the number of the world's people who live on less than $1 a day. There are more than a billion of them. Almost an equal number -- many of the same people -- do not have access to clean water.

Their number should also be halved by 2015. By that year, leaders will pledge to have given all children a full primary school education. To show determination in the battle against H.I.V. and AIDS, the leaders will be asked to halt and reverse the spread of the disease by 2015.

---

Two to Preside Over General Assembly

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/090300un-summit-box.html

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 1 -- Unable to decide whether this year's or last year's General Assembly president should be in the chair for a summit meeting of member nations this week, United Nations members took the diplomatic way out. Both will preside.

Namibia held the presidency of the 54th General Assembly, which ends with the special summit meeting session. Finland will be president of the 55th General Assembly. For the past year, Namibia has been represented in the Assembly president's chair by Theo-Ben Gurirab, the country's foreign minister. But for the special summit meeting, President Sam Nujoma will be here.

He will share duties with President Tarja Halonen of Finland. Ms. Halonen, who was elected president of Finland in February, is a trade union lawyer and has been a member of Parliament since 1979. From 1995 until this year, she served as Finland's foreign minister.

Mr. Nujoma, the founder of the South West Africa People's Organization, led his country to independence from South Africa with the help of the United Nations in 1989, and became Namibia's first president in 1990.

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

U.S. Military Sucked Into Political War of Words

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
By David Storey
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000903/pl/campaign_military_dc_2.html
http://www.foxnews.com/elections/090300/military_readiness.sml

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tune into the Republican campaign for the U.S. presidency and you could walk away believing the U.S. Army is on its knees, that much of the Air Force is grounded and a rusting Navy has hardly a ship at sea.

Listen to the Democrats, who have been in power under President Clinton for eight years, and the picture is a rosy one, with the U.S. force towering over the globe, armed to the teeth with the latest war wizardry and ready to rumble. The state of the military has emerged unexpectedly as a major Republican campaign theme for the Nov. 7 election, in which the party's candidate, Gov. George W. Bush (news - web sites) of Texas, is in a close race with Democratic Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites).

``The next president will inherit a military in decline,'' Bush declared. The U.S. military is ``the strongest and the best in the entire world,'' said Gore.

Obscured by the political rhetoric of Bush's blaring attacks and Gore's defensive praise independent analysts say there are real and serious issues, both for short-term military preparedness and long-term strategy.

For many analysts, who see little interest in the issue among voters, and for those outside the United States, the debate may be puzzling.

U.S. forces, which strutted their stuff in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and, most recently, as the overwhelming element in the NATO force that hammered the Serbs over Kosovo without losing a single pilot, have a dominance unmatched in history.

U.S. military expenditure, at close to $300 billion annually, is higher than the total of the next 10 countries, including Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain.

Kosovo threw a spotlight on a growing technological gap between U.S. forces and their allies, many of whose defense budgets, unlike Washington's, are actually declining.

Most Powerful Force On Earth

No one, even Bush's hawkish running mate, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, would argue with Gore's statement that the U.S. force, backed up with more than 7,000 nuclear warheads, is the most powerful on earth.

But Bush and Cheney, seeking political capital in the neck-and-neck race for the White House, portray a military that, in Cheney's words, has been ``overextended, taken for granted and neglected,'' that is no longer ready for combat.

Tearing into the Clinton record, Cheney declared in a speech in Atlanta Wednesday that the average plane was 20 years old, that there was a shortage of non-commissioned Army and Navy officers, training was inadequate and equipment lacking.

By failing to adequately fund the forces and by dispatching them on dozens of dubious missions around the world, Bush said the forces had been left ``low on pay, parts and morale.''

The issue was given a new twist by Clinton's announcement Friday that he was putting off for his successor a decision on whether to deploy a national missile defense system, which prompted further Bush accusations of weakness on defense.

Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon dismissed the accusations. ''Morale is high, and the best sign of that is that retention is going up and the recruiting problem that we faced last year has largely been repaired,'' he said.

Independent analysts say some problems were caused by lower budgets in the Clinton years, but they say Bush exaggerates the ills and in the last year pay raises, budget hikes and other measures have improved the situation.

A quarterly Pentagon report Thursday on the ``readiness'' of U.S. forces said they would be able to fulfil their mission of fighting two medium-sized wars almost simultaneously, although it might take longer than hoped.

Bush's Father Started Cuts

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) says that, in fact, total expenditure under Clinton was almost the same as that envisaged under the long-term budget produced by Bush's father, George Bush, the year he left the presidency in 1993.

It was Bush senior and Cheney, then his defense secretary, who instigated the steep post-Cold War military spending cuts -- the so-called peace dividend.

But military leaders joined Republicans in Congress last year in complaining that the cuts, which saw the total U.S. force fall by 40 percent in the past decade, were squeezing their ability to carry out their mission.

``The Army is busier than I have ever seen it in my 34 years of service. There continues to be a mismatch in what we are asked to do and the resources we have to do it with,'' Army commander Gen. Eric Shinseki told a Senate panel in October.

Even taking into account the fact that the military leaders are constantly pressing for higher budgets, the strains were becoming evident to all.

Clinton says they were addressed this year by a 3.7 percent pay raise and other budget hikes and has let it be known he proposes further rises in the military budget in coming years.

Analysts say the next administration must move beyond the highly politicized debate over military spending and near-term readiness and begin addressing more fundamental questions.

``Is the U.S. military ``ready'' for the right kinds of missions and challenges?'' a CSBA report asked Thursday. That debate is too subtle for the hustings, but will surely be engaged under a new president.

Whether Bush or Gore becomes commander in chief, the new president will need to further transform the leviathan constructed to battle the Soviet Union into a more agile force for new challenges ranging from peacekeeping to countering terrorism.

---

Major General J. Milnor Roberts to Host Loch's Rodney Boone On Radio America's 'Front and Center' National Radio Program

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3
Press Release
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000903/dc_loch_ha.html

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 3, 2000--Major General J. Milnor Roberts is scheduled to host Rodney Boone, CEO/President of Loch Harris, Inc. (OTC:BB LOCH) on the national radio program, ``Front And Center'' Sunday, September 3 from 7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. EDT.

Roberts is the Secretary/Treasurer of High Frontier (launched by President Reagan as Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as ``Star Wars''). He is also Legislative Director of the Space Transportation Association, President of the National Historical Intelligence Museum, and Chairman of the Eisenhower Society. Throughout his extensive military career, he has received numerous awards for distinguished service.

Boone will discuss the ELF (an acronym for Eliminate Landmines Forever), Loch's x-ray based prototype designed to detect and identify landmines and unexploded ordnance at a forward-looking range of two meters. Boone will also discuss future plans and events regarding ELF.

``Front and Center'' is the only national radio program that addresses the concerns of the US Military. The show features weekly tributes to military heroes from Valley Forge to Desert Storm; a ``High Tech Watch'' - updates on the latest R&D developments; must know information on benefits and other issues of importance to veterans and military families; as well as interviews with Service Chiefs, Members of Congress, etc. ``Front & Center'' is heard around the country as well as on Armed Forces Radio International.

For stations broadcasting the show in your area, or to listen online visit http://www.radioamerica.org/program/frontandcenter.htm

For further information contact: Chuck Bagley, Investor Communications Group, Phone (770) 391-7273; Fax (770) 351-0700; Or Dwain Marshall, Loch Harris, Inc., Phone (512) 328-7808; Fax (512) 341-7721; Or visit our Web site at http://www.lochharris.com.

Radio America is a division of The American Studies Center. Radio America's mission is to produce and syndicate quality radio programs reflecting a ``commitment to traditional American values, limited government and the free market.''

Programs are broadcast via three satellites and over 400 affiliates carry our programs. In addition, the network's programs are now available through the Internet via RealAudio. Radio America programs generally reflect the network's adherance to traditional American values, limited government and the free market. News and talk features predominate on weekdays, while weekends offer a varied menu of special programs ranging from home finance to sports; from medical advice to politics.

Radio America 1030 15th St., NW, Suite 700 Washington, D.C. 20005 Phone: 202-408-0944 Fax: 202-408-1087 Source--``Front & Center'' Radio Show

Contact:

Investor Communications Group Chuck Bagley (770) 391-7273 or Loch Harris, Inc. Dwain Marshall (512) 328-7808 http://www.lochharris.com

---

USA Today
09/03/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Kentucky

Fort Knox - A U.S. Army Reserve intelligence officer who sought sanctuary in Israel amid allegations he deserted his post has been formally charged and jailed. Police found Army Reserve Lt. Col. Jeremiah Mattysse last week in a youth hostel. Mattysse, who trained reservists in San Antonio, failed to return from vacation on Aug. 8.


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Lawyers for Ecuador Indians See U.S. Judge Linked to Texaco

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/090300ecuador-texaco.html

A federal judge who for four years has been considering whether to hear a lawsuit filed against Texaco by Ecuadorean Indians who say the oil company polluted their lands attended an expenses-paid seminar on environmental issues held by a foundation receiving regular donations from the company, according to federal judicial and tax documents obtained by the Indians' lawyers. A former chief executive of Texaco spoke at the conference.

The lawyers, saying there was the appearance of a conflict of interest, filed a motion on Friday with the judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, requesting that he recuse himself and turn the case over to someone else.

Clerks for Judge Rakoff said his office could not comment on the motion.

Chris Gidez, a spokesman for Texaco, said the company would not comment other than to say, "This is a matter for the court to consider." He reiterated Texaco's stance that any lawsuit over pollution in Ecuador should be heard in Ecuadorean courts.

This is a position that Judge Rakoff took three years ago when he dismissed the case as having no basis in American courts. That dismissal was overruled by a federal appeals court, which sent the case back to Judge Rakoff in October 1998. It has been before him since then with no new move to either dismiss it or take it to trial.

John C. Bonifaz, one of the Indians' lawyers, said the potential conflict for Judge Rakoff lay not just in Texaco's financial support for the organization that played host to the seminar, but also in those who spoke.

At the six-day event, held at a Montana ranch in September 1998, one of the lecturers was Alfred C. DeCrane Jr., the retired chairman and chief executive officer of Texaco, who ran the company for part of the time it operated in Ecuador. From 1964 to 1990, Texaco helped Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, develop oil fields in the Amazon River basin.

In the motion filed on Friday, the plaintiffs' lawyers said Judge Rakoff, once he took up the case again, should have told them that he had attended the seminar with the former Texaco executive.

Mr. DeCrane's Montana lecture focused on an environmental cleanup at a Texaco refinery in Texas, not on the Amazon, according to representatives of the group running the seminar, the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment.

But Mr. Bonifaz said there would have been ample opportunity for Judge Rakoff and Mr. DeCrane to have informal discussions at the dinners, hikes, fishing trips and other activities offered to participants, all of whom were federal judges.

Telephone calls on Friday to the home and office of Mr. DeCrane, who is now a consultant, were not returned.

The lawsuit against Texaco was filed in 1993 on behalf of thousands of Indians and settlers in northern Ecuador, after a team of scientists and doctors found extensive pollution of waters and land around the oil fields developed in part by Texaco.

The suit contends that Texaco failed to use cleanup methods adopted by many other oil companies, and so was partly responsible for the pollution and any subsequent health problems or environmental damage. It demands, among other things, that the company create a medical fund to help affected Indian tribes and other residents of the area and that it begin a comprehensive cleanup.

Texaco officials said the company had already paid $40 million to Ecuador to help clean up pollution.

---

Discarded Hindu God Does Not Bless India's Waters

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By BARRY BEARAK
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090300india-ganesh-pollution.html

BOMBAY, Sept. 1 -- The Hindu god Ganesh -- bestower of happiness and eliminator of sorrow -- is a hard man to miss in a crowd. He has four arms and the head of an elephant. His pot belly is Sumo-sized. He fully indulges his fondness for gold jewelry.

Surely, there was no missing him today, at the start of Bombay's annual Ganesh Festival. Tens of thousands of brightly painted statues of the long-trunked deity were carried through the streets, then put in honored places in private homes or elaborate outdoor shrines. Most of these plaster-of-Paris idols are small, less than knee-high, but some stand a stunning 20 feet or more.

The festival is a 10-day celebration, with as much partying as prayer, but this year more than the monsoon will try to rain on any parades. Nothing against Ganesh himself, but environmentalists do not like the way the event traditionally ends, with the icons disposed of in a ceremonial immersion, "returned to nature" by leaving them to disintegrate in lakes, creeks and the conveniently located Arabian Sea.

"Within 24 hours you get massive fish deaths from the toxins in the paint," said Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary Asia, an environmental magazine published here. "The sentiment is pure but the reality is polluted. All that plaster forms an impermeable layer on the water's bottom so that organisms can't breathe."

The biggest share of the used Ganeshes is immersed along Chowpatty Beach. It is a gargantuan and joyous spectacle, with 500,000 people passing through, many of them wading into the water, gods in hand.

But a day later, at low tide, the beach looks like a hideous battlefield. Beheaded and dismembered Ganeshes lie marooned in the shallows.

Scavengers and city workers pick up what they can. "Frankly, it's a very sad sight," said Kedar Gore, the education officer of the World Wide Fund for Nature -- India. The group has issued an "urgent appeal" against immersion.

"Serious damage is being done to the sea floor," Mr. Gore said sternly.

So far, these entreaties have been so much incense in the wind, a disregarded blasphemy, something akin to asking Americans to quit chopping down evergreens at Christmas time. Immersion is considered an important rite, a reverent way to dispose of the inanimate statue after Ganesh's spirit has moved on.

The environmentalists admit they have a tough, and perhaps impossible, cause to sell. Besides, Bombay's problems with pollution go far beyond remnant Ganeshes.

This is India's financial center, with 12 to 14 million people packed so tightly they are almost fastened. Magnificent high-rises tower above some of the world's biggest slums. There is enough traffic to turn a crosstown drive into a two-hour trip. Factories feed the sea a buffet of nickel, cadmium, sulfur and untreated human waste. Chowpatty Beach, on its best days, is rife with garbage.

The sculptor Vijay R. Khatu, a man with a paunch to match even Ganesh's, makes a point of these failings. He is Bombay's best-known idol maker -- and, when asked, he said the opponents of immersion can go jump in the lake.

"The Ganesh Festival comes once a year," he said. "Every day, the factories dump chemicals in the sea and the big ships leave their diesel."

Mr. Khatu specializes in the bigger statues. They are not terribly expensive, at least for the rich. A 22-foot idol costs about $2,000, he said. Materials are cheap, mostly plaster, wood, mud, coconut hair and spray paint.

Each year, the Ganeshes seem to grow taller. Political parties and neighborhood associations want a god bigger than the next guy's.

Bombay's notorious mobsters also like to show off. The dons commission huge statues, attempting to win the people's good will. Smalltime goons use the Ganesh Festival for extortion, extracting "donations" from shopkeepers.

"Things have taken an unacceptable turn," complained G.R. Khairnar, one of the city's top administrators. "The religious part of the festival is getting lost."

Actually, the Ganesh Festival -- as celebrated in Bombay and the state of Maharashtra -- is rooted more in politics than religion. It began in 1897 at the instigation of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the freedom movement against the British. Large political gatherings had been banned, but religious festivals were exempted. Ganesh was used by Mr. Tilak as a loophole.

During the early festivals, religious skits were full of double meanings as the freedom fighters tried to stir people into action. Political uses of the celebration continue even now, with Ganesh often portrayed as favoring one party's ideology over another.

For those uses, as something of a running mate, the elephantine god is a fine pick. He is extremely popular -- especially in India's south and west -- very often a Hindu's first choice from the pantheon of deities. While Ganesh is thought to be wise and strong, there also seems something benign in the look of his macabre body, even if he does ride around atop a rat.

There are various myths about how Ganesh came to look half-human, half-pachyderm. One has him guarding an entrance as his mother, Parvati, bathed. As the god Shiva approached, the boy blocked his way, and the stronger deity cut him in two at the neck. To later pacify the grieving -- and decidedly angry -- Parvati, Shiva replaced the missing head with another from the first animal he found, an elephant.

Another story -- this one especially popular with parents -- has Ganesh's mother and father staging a race between him and his brother. The distance: three laps around the world. Ganesh's sibling, the better athlete, speedily began. But Ganesh, the wiser, simply circled his parents, telling them irresistibly that they were his world and he needed to go no farther.

Pramilla Nyalpelly finds that tale aptly Ganeshian. "He has perfect wisdom," she said, standing before the idol that her husband, Krishna, had brought home. Incense burned in the fading afternoon light. The statue was happily adorned with flowers and surrounded by offerings of bananas, sweets and coins. "Ganesh gives me everything without my asking. He knows what is in my heart and in my head."

Krishna Nyalpelly's extended family -- two dozen people -- convenes to celebrate the festival together. An art director in an ad agency, he creates a different shrine each year. This time, Ganesh is surrounded by paper lily pads and butterflies.

There was a cheerful look to the idol's face, but the Nyalpellys insisted that in a few days the same Ganesh will start to frown. "He won't want to leave our home because he'll feel he has become part of the family," said Mrs. Nyalpelly.

But however much he might wish otherwise, Ganesh must depart, she said. That is the teaching. "Everything about life leads to leaving. Every life comes with a death. Joy and sorrow are two sides to the same coin."

In 10 days, the family will carry their Ganesh on a three-hour walk to Chowpatty Beach. There they will place him in the water, leaving him to disintegrate, one with the sea.

---

The Hudson, After Years of Cleanup, Is Luring Swimmers Back in the Water

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-swim.html

So much sewage floated in the Hudson River in the 1950's that Shabazz Jackson and his friends made up their own version of the breast stroke when they swam along the shore in Beacon, N.Y. They would jump in feet first, then flail their arms to push the stinking mess away from their faces.

"We all swam in the Hudson," said Mr. Jackson, 50, an environmental engineer who still lives in Beacon. "It was an open sewer, but it was still the mighty river. You'd just swim with your head out of the water and push the debris away with your arms."

Today, Mr. Jackson still jumps into the river, but he is more likely to bump into other swimmers than into raw sewage.

After nearly 30 years of cleanup efforts, the Hudson River has rebounded from a dumping ground for human and industrial waste to one of the state's leading recreational sites. Now there is even officially sanctioned swimming in its waters, from organized races around Manhattan to a handful of public beaches in Westchester and Ulster Counties.

This Labor Day weekend, with the unofficial end of summer, hundreds of swimmers stroked their way into the Hudson River for the first time. And if New York State officials have their way, even more will have the opportunity to do so over the next few years. The Department of Environmental Conservation and the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation want to create a string of state-operated beaches along its shores from the northern tip of Manhattan to Columbia County, just south of Albany.

"I think it's clean and safe for swimming," said Deborah Knaust, 35, a Saugerties resident who took her two young daughters to the beach at Ulster Landing Park on a recent sweltering afternoon. "We're normal people. We don't have seven toes, we don't have a third eye, and we've been swimming in the Hudson our whole lives."

Like Mrs. Knaust, other parents watched unalarmed while their dripping-wet children wiped the river from their eyes and mouths. Several boys splashed their arms in the brownish water, no more than two or three feet deep in places, and pelted one another with clumps of sea grass. They yelled in excitement when a power boat barreling down the middle of the Hudson pushed the waves higher.

"That was so cool; it's like being in the ocean without the jellyfish," said Jack Jervis, 13, a Kingston resident who was at the beach with his aunt and two cousins. "Hey wait for me," he yelled before joining them again in the river.

Still, the Hudson is not for everyone. Daniel L. Thomason, 28, a financial consultant from Manhattan who was visiting friends, steadfastly refused to leave his beach chair. "I would need a lot more convincing, let's put it that way," said Mr. Thomason, ignoring the beckoning wave of one friend. "The Hudson may be cleaner now, but it smells and looks nasty. I wouldn't even let my dog swim in there."

While the very notion can still wrinkle noses, people have been dipping into the Hudson as long as anyone can remember. Open-bottom barges anchored in the Hudson and East Rivers, known as "floating swimming pools," were used by city dwellers for bathing at the turn of the century. And swimming areas once dotted the river's banks, including Cole's Grove, a dock and pavilions at the Catskills home of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painters.

There were health risks in earlier years, of course, from exposure to the raw sewage, garbage and chemicals routinely dumped into the river by industries along its shores. But the 1972 Clean Water Act, which required that sewage be treated before being released in the river, as well as later pollution controls, cleaned up the river and made much of it fit for swimming.

Even those who shunned the Hudson in the bad days have plunged right in. Gov. George E. Pataki dives into the river a half-dozen times a year from a sailboat that he keeps in Verplanck. "When I was a kid, you wouldn't even stick your toe in the Hudson River," Mr. Pataki said in a telephone interview. "It was so polluted your parents and everybody made it plain that you risked life and limb by setting foot in there."

Local families have been swimming at Croton Point Park, Westchester's only public beach on the Hudson, since it reopened in 1996. Maria Tamaoka, 44, who owns a quilt store in Croton-on-Hudson, said that swimming in the river was much cheaper than joining the outdoor pool at her family's athletic club. Her daughter Anna, 12, had her last two birthday parties at the beach.

"We just love it here," said Mrs. Tamaoka while gazing at the white sails of boats bobbing out in the river. "Just hearing the waves is relaxing. And we're only two minutes away. Why drive an hour-and-a-half somewhere else?"

Then she added a caveat. "But I don't think you should write all these advantages; we don't want everyone coming to our beach."

The rectangular swimming area, cordoned off by blue-and-white buoys, was only about five feet at its deepest. And while the water looked more clear than cloudy, it had a greenish tint, and swimmers could barely see the sandy bottom. Goose feathers, cigarette butts and a plastic soda bottle floated on the surface.

"It's kind of dirty but it's better than the beach where I live," said Steven Valentin, 20, a Bronx college student who was swimming in the river for the first time. "I would do it again, but it does need to be cleaner."

Would he become a regular here? "To tell you the truth, I'd rather go in the pool," he said.

--

'Earth in the Balance,' Gore's Call to Arms

New York Times
September 03, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/090300wh-gore-book.html

Following are excerpts from "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit," by Vice President Al Gore:

Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment -- whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment?

Global warming is a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 percent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the patterns of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level.

The world is once again at a critical juncture. We are invading ourselves and attacking the ecological system of which we are a part. As a result, we now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. The time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization.

---

AL GORE'S JOURNEY
Writing and Healing Career in the Balance, Gore Focused His Energy on a Book

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By MELINDA HENNEBERGER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/090300wh-gore.html

One of Al Gore's Senate colleagues was worried about his late-night comings and goings.

"Son, you need to get home to your family," the senator, Howell Heflin of Alabama, told Mr. Gore repeatedly back in 1990 and 1991. Mr. Heflin lived in the same Capitol Hill apartment building where Mr. Gore's parents kept a place after they moved back to Tennessee, and regularly spotted him getting into his car at 2:30 or 3 in the morning.

"He kept mighty late hours," Mr. Heflin, who is now retired, said in an interview. "Maybe I'd be up for some reason and I'd look out the window and see him depart."

He need not have concerned himself, though. This particular midlife crisis was being worked out through work -- lots of it -- and the pied-à-terre was where he holed up to get it done.

Mr. Gore had embarrassed himself by running for president before he was ready, in 1988. He shuttered that campaign, his first losing effort, just as he was turning 40. Not quite a year later, he watched a car hit his 6-year-old son. His therapy, his catharsis, his way of making sense of all he had been through, was a writing project that became the book "Earth in the Balance," an environmental call to arms.

"I began to take stock, but didn't really know how to do it," Mr. Gore said, self-critically, in a recent interview. "It was obvious to me I had a lot of growing to do, yet I channeled my feeling into the global environmental crisis and addressing it."

He returned to an earlier vision of himself, as a writer -- a role he seems to see as superior to that of a politician. And in his writing, he atoned for what he saw as his sins as a candidate. "The harder truth," he wrote in the book, "is that I simply lacked the strength to keep on talking about the environmental crisis constantly, whether it was being reported in the press or not."

He had certainly not regretted turning 40 -- finally, he thought, after years playing down his youth in races against older men. "I was delighted," he said recently, then mocked his delight. "I thought 40 was laden with gravitas."

Yet at midlife, nothing was going as planned. The campaign had left him heavily in debt and unsure how much it had hurt his prospects.

Even his wife was mad at him. They were getting into it pretty regularly in front of staff, usually over his crammed schedule. Though he had tried to preserve some semblance of family life by bringing his children on the road, that had not worked out, either.

After his son's accident, in April of 1989, he blamed himself, and not only because he had been holding Albert's hand before the boy broke free and ran into traffic. "He was thinking about how much time had he really taken with his son," said Chip Forrester, a Senate aide. "And if he had died, how much he would have regretted."

In a darkened car in rural Tennessee a few months later, Mr. Gore tried to describe the scene to Mr. Forrester, who recounted the conversation in an interview. "I looked down and his hand was slipping out of my hand," Mr. Gore said.

"Why was it doing that? Then he was sliding through traffic and everything was slow motion."

The boy made it across two lanes before he was struck by a '77 Chevy and thrown 20 feet. "I couldn't get to him fast enough," Mr. Gore told his aide. "I turned his head and he was alive, but we didn't know."

"I had him" and let go, he said, almost whispering. "I had him."

The child had half of his spleen removed to stop internal bleeding, and spent nearly a month in the hospital and weeks after that in a full body cast. As he began to recover, Mr. Gore felt that he himself was getting a second shot at life.

If the result was not an all-new Al Gore -- and it wasn't -- at this time in the life of a newly chastened Mr. Gore, he did learn to do things differently. He put his four children's soccer games and school plays on the schedule, in ink. And traded his dozen-a-day Diet Cokes for club soda with cranberry juice. He made changes large and small, much like George W. Bush, who stopped drinking and got serious after 40.

Mr. Gore was still a workhorse, though, still someone who would want to explore the public policy implications of his personal crisis. So instead of sticking close to home, he stepped up his travels to environmental hot spots, including Antarctica and the Amazon, to inspect the damage himself.

And rather than cut back his hours, he took on the second demanding job of writing a book.

The astonishing thing Mr. Gore did with his second shot, though, was to write the sort of book that could do serious damage to a sitting senator with aspirations. Knowing he would run for president again some day, Mr. Gore produced a work certain to be used against him -- iconoclastic, personal and full of fat targets for ridicule. In terms certain to be lampooned, he connected the dots between family dysfunction and man's collective callousness toward nature.

In "Earth in the Balance," Mr. Gore also revealed himself in baldly unflattering ways, harshly judging his own failings as a man and a politician. "I began to doubt my own political judgment" in the 1988 campaign, he wrote, "so I began to ask the pollsters and professional politicians what they thought I ought to talk about. As a result, for much of the campaign I discussed what everybody else discussed, which too often was a familiar list of what the insiders agree are 'the issues.' "

Friends remember asking one another: Was he trying to blow up his career? He sounded the alarm about global warming, then an obscure issue. He swore off "finger-to-the-wind" politics. And as if to ensure that, he recommended the retirement of the internal combustion engine.

"I believe deeply that true change is possible," he wrote, "only when it begins inside the person who is advocating it. Mahatma Gandhi said it well: 'We must be the change we wish to see in the world.' "

Then, barely back from his book tour, Mr. Gore hooked up with Bill Clinton -- who as governor of Arkansas was not exactly known as an ardent environmentalist. And he took a post that requires whoever holds it to be the opposite of independent, brave and out there.

'Is He Serious?'

When John Sterling, then editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, heard in June 1990 that Senator Al Gore wanted to write a book on the global environment, he was skeptical.

"I wasn't interested in some kind of campaign book," Mr. Sterling recalled telling Mr. Gore's agent, Mort Janklow. "I don't do those books. I thought, 'Are we talking a ghostwriter? Is he serious?' "

Still, he traveled to Washington, thinking he might get half an hour, tops, with the would-be writer, probably in tandem with some aide who would have to walk Mr. Gore through the material.

Instead, "we spent three hours all alone, and he spoke with genuine passion and an amazing breadth of knowledge," Mr. Sterling said. "I came back thinking, 'By God, a politician writing a serious book about a controversial subject.' He had 80 percent of the book in his head."

Mr. Gore hired a researcher and a clerical assistant, and worked closely with Mr. Sterling to impose a cogent structure on, in the editor's words, the "287 things he knew he wanted to say."

Mr. Gore also wanted a little editorial hand-holding. "I have my own issues I want to work through here," he told Mr. Sterling. "How much Al Gore should there be" in the book? "How personal should it be?"

But he did write it himself.

And while he worked on the book, he was unusually prolific in other ways: he helped organize the National Religious Partnership for the Environment -- faith-based groups mobilizing to protect nature. He came up with Family Reunion, an annual symposium on problems facing families, which is still held every summer in Nashville.

He was also uncharacteristically bold as a lawmaker during this period. A month after his son's accident, he had introduced a bill financing a $1.7 billion program to expand what was then called the information superhighway -- and yes, he did contribute to the development of the Internet. The bill supported research and development for fiber optics and required the Pentagon to upgrade the computer network that was the Internet's forerunner. And it financed research crucial to expanding the Internet beyond military uses. Mr. Gore spent three years pushing it before President George Bush signed it into law in 1991.

In the thick of his writing project, in January 1991, he cast a vote that seemed sure to end whatever might be left of his career after his book came out. He voted with Republicans -- and only nine other Senate Democrats (including Joseph I. Lieberman, now his running mate) -- in favor of the Persian Gulf war, infuriating party leaders. The Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, refused to speak to Mr. Gore for months, and made it difficult for him to speak on the Senate floor.

"He was a traitor, someone who had abandoned the Democrats," said a former Gore aide, Steve Owens. It is ironic that people later accused Mr. Gore of trying to position himself to run as a moderate in 1992, Mr. Owens said. "Because if Al Gore ever cast a nonpolitical vote, that was it."

'Now What Do We Talk About?'

Mr. Gore also began do-it-yourself psychotherapy. And though he can still say, as he has, "I was never on a couch," he took that work seriously, too.

One of the first meetings Mr. Gore had after his son's accident was with a Knoxville psychotherapist, Lance Laurence, and five of his colleagues, who wanted him to support a bill increasing Medicare coverage for the treatment of mental illness.

In the very first minute of the meeting, though, Mr. Gore said he already favored the bill. "It was, 'O.K., now what do we talk about?' " Dr. Laurence recalled.

The therapists could hardly have been more surprised by the two-hour discussion of intimacy and identity that followed.

"He was very psychological-minded," Dr. Laurence said. "There was a click, and we were all able to talk about things that were important, about meaning versus disconnectedness and the pathology of narcissism." Mr. Gore knew a lot about Robert Bly's book "Iron John," which discusses the damage that distant fathers do their sons.

And as Mr. Gore talked, Dr. Laurence thought that this "wasn't some theoretical experience with no personal resonance. He was trying to make sense of this for himself and had an emotional appreciation of those issues because he'd been there."

That night began what one of Mr. Gore's friends called his "psychotherapy by correspondence course." He read books recommended by Dr. Laurence, devoured Carl Jung, listened to personal development tapes in his car and, according to aides, regularly talked to Dr. Laurence on his car phone about what he was reading.

Why not do therapy the old-fashioned way? Mr. Gore and his wife, Tipper, often talk about the need to destigmatize it; would seeking counseling have been so shameful?

"We had family counseling" at the hospital after his son's accident, Mr. Gore said, "and we talked about that, but I never really considered doing therapy for myself. I didn't think I needed it, though I would encourage anyone who does to get it." Then he added, "Well, Tipper helped me."

Friends thought Mr. Gore shunned counseling less because he feared exposure than because he is the do-it-yourself type and doesn't take help that easily -- as he has repeatedly shown in the current campaign.

How much his wife was able to help him at that moment is unclear. She has said that their son's accident triggered a clinical depression, which was treated with medication and therapy. And though she has not said exactly when that was, one friend said that the accident, which she also witnessed, "sent her into a complete tailspin."

Yet Mr. Gore did re-examine his life, and in his reading was particularly taken with "The Drama of the Gifted Child," by Alice Miller, a book he handed out to friends and drew on in his own writing. The book speaks to the high-achieving children of narcissistic parents, who can lose track of their own desires while striving to please.

Mr. Gore has never spoken other than respectfully of his own self-made, intensely ambitious mother and father. But in his book, he wrote this: "A developing child in a dysfunctional family searches his parent's face for signals that he is whole and all is right with the world; when he finds no such approval, he begins to feel that something is wrong inside. And because he doubts his worth and authenticity, he begins controlling his inner experience -- smothering spontaneity, masking emotion, diverting creativity into robotic routine."

A Strain on the Family

As Mr. Gore was writing those words, he was struggling to stay true to his promise to spend more time with his own children.

"There had been a real strain on the family," said Mr. Owens, who worked for Mr. Gore in both the House and the Senate.

And Mr. Gore's relationship with his wife remained tense for some time after their son's accident. His staff saw a relationship that seemed passionate -- they witnessed some major smooches, too -- and very real, but with real fights to show for it.

One night, months after the accident, Tipper Gore was with her husband in Tennessee, where she was to appear with him at a fund-raiser for his 1990 senatorial race. In the car on the way there, she asked him to brief her on the event. Who would be there?

"It's just the typical fund-raiser," he told her, according to the aide who drove that night. "We've done this a million times."

"Well, you say that," she answered. "But then I get there and it's different and then I can't live up to your expectations. I'm here and the least you can do. . . ."

"You do fine," he told her, as the aide remembers it. "You're making a mountain out of a molehill."

The fight went on like that until Mr. Gore finally threw a sheaf of briefing papers at his wife, who was behind him in the back seat. "Here, read this," he told her. Then Mr. Gore put his seat back in a reclining position and almost instantly went to sleep.

"That made her even madder," said the aide, who stole a glance in the rear-view mirror and saw her reading and fuming.

In a recent interview, Mrs. Gore said in a general discussion of family life that she and her husband believe "even fighting is communication," and have no desire to be portrayed as the kind of no-muss, no-fuss, picture-perfect couple that does not exist in nature. "At times it needs to go into the Jiffy Lube," she said of their relationship.

This was one of those times. And things did change. "Tipper had a lot more influence on the schedule and they started going on dates," Mr. Forrester said, though "some of the staff resented it."

Even in the thick of his presidential campaign, the Gores still go on dates; they took in "The Perfect Storm" one recent Sunday night. And Mr. Gore takes enormous pride in having been to all but one of his son's high school football games last year. Friends recall that Mr. Gore's own father never attended one of his.

As he was working on becoming a more present husband and father, Mr. Gore became aware that he had not always been the world's most sensitive boss. As a result, he brought in a management consultant to hear his staff members' frustrations, and even took them on retreat in West Virginia. He tried harder to listen to their concerns, they said, and let them put their children's soccer games on the schedule, too.

In one of his debates with Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, during the primary season, the candidates were asked what mistake in life they had learned the most from, and Mr. Gore said this: "Early in my career in public service, I fell prey to what a lot of people who get into the work force and get excited about their work do. And they get drawn into it so much that they don't balance their lives."

When Mr. Gore again had the chance to speak, he circled back to the question. "Every time you are in a situation with a friend or a small group where you are unkind unnecessarily, that is a mistake and there is no excuse for it, whether it's stress or whatever," he said. "And as you get older and mature, if things go well you learn from those mistakes and stop doing that."

A Difficult Decision

He was finishing the first draft of "Earth in the Balance," and it was time to choose: was he running for president in 1992, or wasn't he?

He hadn't changed so much that he wasn't tempted. He wanted to run, no question. But his family needed him. Not only that, but he had said publicly that his family needed him, that he was trying to be around more.

As one friend said, he had said it so often that to have run would not only have broken the spirit of his promise to his family, it would also have made that broken promise obvious to all the world.

His old Tennessee friend Steve Armistead said, "His quiet answer to me was, 'Bush's ratings are so high with Desert Storm, it's not in my interest to get in this.' "

He told his editor, Mr. Sterling, that he wanted to finish the book, which was far too long and needed major revisions. "It became clear that he could not finish the book and run for president," Mr. Sterling said.

As in his decision to go to Vietnam, a number of factors came into play. He spent a family vacation on a houseboat on a lake in Tennessee in August 1991, mulling his final decision. Then he announced that he would not run, though he seemed grumpy about it, aides said.

"I can't speak to whether I seemed thrilled," he said recently, bristling a little. "But I knew it was right because it was a very hard decision," he added, echoing the lesson, drilled into him as a prep-school student at St. Albans and mentioned in his recent convention speech, about taking the "hard right over the easy wrong."

For whatever combination of reasons, Mr. Gore chose his family and his book. And in the spring of 1992, Al Gore the author became the kind of hit Al Gore the candidate never was.

At a small book party at his high school friend Reed Hundt's house, Mr. Gore could hardly contain himself. "He stood on my stairs and said, "I hope you like it, because this book is me,' " Mr. Hundt remembered. " 'I hope you know it's really me.' "

The book was eventually translated into more than 20 languages and sold more than half a million copies. It was a best seller for eight weeks even before Bill Clinton chose to put Mr. Gore on the ticket.

Mr. Clinton did not know Mr. Gore well at the time, and chose him at least in part because of "Earth in the Balance." Rahm Emanuel, then Mr. Clinton's senior adviser, remembered that at the first meeting to discuss the vice-presidential short list, he saw the book on Mr. Clinton's night stand.

"He had been up until all hours of the morning reading that," Mr. Emanuel said. "When we got to Gore's name he praised the book, and was very taken with it. I always believed it was Gore's writing and thoughtfulness that caught his attention."

But why, after working so hard on his environmental manifesto and political declaration of independence, did Mr. Gore accept Mr. Clinton's invitation?

In a recent interview in his car, Mr. Gore described it as something of a sacrifice.

"I was quite ambivalent," he said. "But it's not just about me and how I want to spend my time and contribute while enjoying my life. I was feeling very content, even joyful. I was enjoying what I was doing."

Two friends said Mr. Gore told them much the same thing at the time. Someone close to Mr. Clinton who participated in the selection process remembered it this way: "He was not disinterested, but he didn't drop and do 50, either," the confidant said, referring to the way Mr. Gore began training right after deciding to make his first run for Congress. "He wasn't doing what other people were doing, which was position themselves. He did not campaign for it."

After thinking it over, Mr. Gore said, "I thought it mattered a lot to the cause that I wrote about whether we had four or eight years of moving in the right direction and laying the groundwork to a solution for global warming, compared to another four years of neglect" under Republicans. "I really felt we were headed for trouble, and I thought that between Bush and Clinton, Clinton would do better."

Not a ringing endorsement of Mr. Clinton as an environmentalist, though probably an accurate one.

Later in the same conversation, though, Mr. Gore challenged the premise that Mr. Clinton had not made the environment a priority in Arkansas. "It was not an awful record," he said. "It was mixed, certainly mixed, and gave me cause for concern."

He said he had made clear to Mr. Clinton before accepting the job that he expected their administration to take the issue seriously. In fact, he said, when Warren Christopher, who was in charge of the search for a running mate, asked him how he would respond if Mr. Clinton offered him a spot on the ticket, he said that before answering, he wanted to have a serious discussion with Mr. Clinton about the environment.

It was not a quid pro quo, he made clear, and he signaled that if all went well he certainly would join the ticket. But, he said, "I wanted to make it the topic." And when Mr. Clinton did call to offer him the job, Mr. Gore said, "He began by saying, 'I'd like to talk to you about the environment.' "

In the first of their weekly lunches Mr. Gore showed his new boss some charts on global warming, he said, adding that a good 90 percent of their lunches at least touched on the environment.

Mr. Gore often touts the Clinton administration's work in strengthening clean air regulations, forcing companies to disclose the toxins they use and protecting huge new tracts of land in the West. But some environmentalists have expressed disappointment over the consequences of the Nafta treaty and say the administration should have more aggressively forced industry to curtail greenhouse gases.

In the current campaign, the vice president has at least sporadically tried to make an issue of the environment, though again, this focus has not received extensive coverage. And he has not backed off anything he said in "Earth in the Balance," which was reissued this spring.

Asked about possible regrets, he quickly said oh, yes, and spoke of a number of writerly, rather than political, qualms. Lots of good stuff got cut, he said.

But has he been as faithful to the part of his book that promised an end to "finger-to-the-wind" politics? Again, he was quick to say yes. Told that that was not the consensus, he showed his frustration.

"I don't know exactly what they would cite other than Elián," he said. His position that the case of the young Cuban refugee Elián González should have been handled in family court was widely seen as a sop to Florida's Cuban population. "And that happens to be inaccurate because when I took that position I knew it was hurting me, even in Florida. And absent that issue, I don't know of another one where there's a claim I understand."

Maybe it's the new clothes, the new headquarters, the new proposals? For the first time in more than a dozen long interviews, Mr. Gore looked as if he might scream. "That's a myth!" he cried, leaning forward, very close to his interviewer in the car. "Tipper and Karenna," his oldest daughter, "took me to a store and said we're sick of these dark suits. What's the big deal?"

But then, asked how he would know if he had sold out, Mr. Gore not only simmered down but almost laughed. "I don't know," he said, "because I haven't."

To walk the line between idealism and compromise that is politics, he said, "you find the limits of the possible and you push."

"Look," he said, "if you're going to climb a mountain, you need to do a number of things to get ready -- plan the route, identify the base camp, get the supplies and, hopefully, some luck.

"This is a mountain," he added, referring to his environmental goals but also to his presidential campaign. "And I've been planning to climb this mountain for a pretty good while."

---

Judging Pepco's Deeds

Washington Post
Sunday, September 3, 2000; Page M02
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-09/03/087l-090300-idx.html

The recent controversy concerning the strip mining of Douglas Point has made several things clear to me. If Pepco is green, they are the dark green of the dollar. Their commitment to the protection of the environment is as murky as the oil-laden waters of the Patuxent and as enthusiastic as their pitiful initial attempts to clean up their oil spill.

As their outdated coal-burning plant at Chalk Point belches smog from one end and prodigious amounts of hazardous fly ash from the other, their CEO receives awards for environmental sensitivity.

Perhaps their commitment to the environment is equaled by their commitment to the community they serve. A few months ago, residents of Nanjemoy learned that Pepco had entered into a contract to sell the 1,300-acre Douglas Point property, obtained by Pepco in the early 1970s for a failed attempt to establish a nuclear power plant. Recently, a Pepco spokesperson, Steve Arabia, revealed that the contract had been signed more than two years ago. Pepco never made public their interest in selling this land nor their intent to sell it to be strip mined. This is in spite of a clearly expressed interest in the property by Trust for Public Land, the Conservation Fund and the Nature Conservancy. Ignorance of the value of Douglas Point cannot be an excuse--the historical, archaeological, environmental and cultural significance of Douglas Point is well documented through extensive study that began in the 1970s. Their claim that laws and governmental oversight will protect these resources is pathetic. The process of strip mining Douglas Point will clear over 600 acres, gouge a hole up to 60 feet deep extending into the water table and extract 30 million to 40 million tons of sand and gravel. The mining company stands to make millions annually, Pepco stands to make millions and Charles County stands to lose precious natural and cultural resources and gain a huge hole in the ground. We as citizens, as patrons of Pepco should not stand by as another environmental disaster unfolds.

Pepco, the waters are clearing and we begin to see to the heart of the matter. As customers and stockholders, the impact of our outrage has yet to be felt. Pepco, live up to your brave words or be quiet so more reliable voices may lead. Companies, as individuals, are judged by their deeds, not brave but hollow words.

Michael Ziebell
Nanjemoy

---

USA Today
09/03/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Indiana

Gary - The parent company of two mobile home parks in northern Porter County will pay $765,000 for sending sewage into a stream that flows into Lake Michigan. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says Manufactured Home Communities of Maryland and several of its affiliates have agreed to pay the fine for violating the Clean Water Act several years ago.

New York

Syracuse - State officials are investigating an environmental firm after finding a barrel of a highly explosive chemical in a warehouse less than two miles from where 87,000 visitors were attending the New York State Fair. The chemical picric acid, a relative of TNT, was stabilized and removed from the Environmental Products & Services warehouse by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Tennessee

Memphis - A federal jury has acquitted three employees of a barge company of pollution and conspiracy charges. The men, who worked for Choctaw Transportation Co., were accused of dumping shredded tires in the Mississippi River at the company's terminal near Dyersburg in 1997.

---

Gore's Policies Resulted in Loss of 200 Potential Jobs in Flint Select Steel Example of Where Clinton-Gore Could Have Helped Provide Jobs, But Didn't

Yahoo News
Sunday September 3, 5:17 pm Eastern Time
Press Release
Republican National Committee Victory 2000
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000903/flint_gore.html

FLINT, Mich., Sept. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The following press release was issued by Republican National Committee Victory 2000:

Today, as Al Gore makes a campaign stop in Flint, there are sure to be many in the community who have not forgotten about the 200 high paying manufacturing jobs their city lost due to Clinton-Gore policies.

``While we have labored to put Michigan families back to work, the reckless and ill- defined policies of the Clinton-Gore administration have impeded our efforts,'' said Michigan Governor John Engler.

Despite Al Gore's claimed support of working families, his record proves different in Flint, Michigan. Just two years ago, Select Steel proposed to build a new $175 million steel mill in Flint. The mill would have created over 200 high-paying manufacturing jobs for working families in the Flint area. Unfortunately, Clinton-Gore's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed major roadblocks in the company's way, ultimately forcing it to build elsewhere. The EPA later admitted there was no basis for its action.

Even the local Democrat Congressman, James Barcia, decried the Clinton-Gore Administration's policies. ``Whenever the EPA has a chance to stop development in Michigan, they take it,'' said Barcia (``EPA inquiry may kill Flint steel mill,'' Detroit News, August 26, 1998).

SOURCE: Republican National Committee Victory 2000

-------- police

EU plans armed police force for world hot spots

September 3 2000
Stephen Grey, Sunday Times (UK)
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/09/03/stifgneur01006.html

A PARAMILITARY police force is being established by the European Union to intervene in conflict areas across the world to protect the community's political and economic interests.

Brussels has drawn up plans for a 5,000-strong armed police capability able to carry out "preventative and repressive" actions in support of global peacekeeping missions. Critics say it is a deliberate challenge to the United Nations.

The new body, which may be given the name European Security and Intelligence Force (Esif), would work alongside a 60,000-strong EU defence force that is also being set up.

The security force - likened to France's gendarmerie or the Royal Ulster Constabulary and made up of policemen from Britain and other EU members - would be intended primarily for use in trouble spots such as Kosovo. Although it is not clear when recruitment to the force will begin, it is expected to be fully operational by 2003.

Critics fear, however, that its units, armed with light machineguns and trained to operate alongside EU ground troops, may eventually be used to suppress disorder within member states. No restrictions on its sphere of operations have been placed in the regulations so far agreed by EU governments, and detailed "rules of engagement" have not yet been drawn up.

"This is an appalling development," said Timothy Kirkhope, the former Home Office minister and now Conservative chief whip in the European parliament. "Al-though they say this police force would be used only in places like Kosovo, once the structure is in place there is an implied threat to deploy it anywhere, including on home soil."

Tony Bunyon, the director of Statewatch, a civil liberties group which monitors the EU's security policy, said the creation of the force was part of a broader drive by the EU to enhance its powers: "The European Union is working hard to become a player alongside the United States in policing the world."

It was of particular concern, Bunyan added, that details of the new structure would be kept secret, under regulations quietly agreed by EU governments during the summer that end the right of public access to information about both military and civilian crisis management.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the need for an international policing ability had been revealed in Kosovo when British troops found themselves engaged in police work to "restore and maintain law and order".

"There is no attempt at all to reduce the role of the United Nations," he said. There was also "no question" of the force being used within the EU.

The new police units, like the EU's defence arm, will be under the control of a political and security committee, composed of ambassadors from each EU country.

Effective operational command, however, will be in the hands of Javier Solana, the Spanish former secretary-general of Nato who is now secretary-general of the council of ministers.

A spokesman for Solana said last week that the police units would be modelled on such paramilitary forces as Spain's guardia civil, the Italian carabinieri, and the French gendarmerie.

There were already more than 3,000 policemen from EU countries deployed abroad, in the Balkans, Guatemala and East Timor, making the target of 5,000

a modest one. The big change was to organise things collectively, the spokesman said.

"We cannot tell where a crisis may occur and EU assistance is requested, so there is no geographic limitation being placed at all."

Experts believe deploying a police force of 5,000 would require more than 15,000 men committed and trained for service with the EU.

The impetus for the creation of the force has been the perception of Britain, France and Germany that the UN failed to act effectively in preventing bloodshed in the Balkans. But the present plan is considerably more ambitious, calling on the EU to intervene on the world stage either in co-operation with or instead of the UN.

----

As Turnpike Shooting Case Stalls, Time May Favor the Troopers

New York Times
September 03, 2000
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/nj-trooper.html

TRENTON, Sept. 2 -- Two years after two New Jersey state troopers opened fire on three unarmed men on the New Jersey Turnpike, turning racial profiling into a national issue, the criminal case against the troopers is fraying and a series of closed-door decisions by prosecutors and the trial judge during the next several weeks will determine whether the most serious charge, attempted murder, is dropped.

The resolution to this complex legal issue is being decided in a highly charged political environment, with the troopers' supporters insisting that the officers are being persecuted for an honest mistake, and civil rights leaders casting the case as the ultimate test of the state's resolve to apply discipline in cases of police misconduct.

The troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna, were indicted last year on charges of attempted murder for firing 11 shots into a van they had stopped on the turnpike. Three of the van's four occupants, who were all young black or Hispanic men from New York City, were wounded. The police maintained that they fired in self-defense after the driver backed up and struck Trooper Hogan.

In recent months, two truck drivers who witnessed the shooting have come forward and given statements that the troopers' lawyers say bolster the self-defense claim.

This week, prosecutors were granted a two-month delay to reassess the evidence and, according to three lawyers involved in the case, consider dropping the attempted murder charge against each trooper.

Since the shooting, which occurred on April 23, 1998, near southbound Exit 7A in Cranbury, allegations of widespread discrimination by some of the state's 2,800 troopers have led to political protests and several investigations. Some of the racial profiling claims have been substantiated, and the New Jersey attorney general agreed to take steps intended to prevent racial profiling by the state police and allow a federal judge to monitor their conduct.

As a result of the investigation into the van shooting, Troopers Hogan and Kenna were also charged with falsely reporting the race of some other drivers they had pulled over during earlier traffic stops, to conceal the fact that they singled out black and Hispanic drivers. These charges are not affected by the new testimony, according to the troopers' lawyers.

Prosecutors have not yet turned over the statements by the new witnesses to defense lawyers, and have declined to discuss how the testimony affects their strategy. Nonetheless, the delay, and the possibility that prosecutors may alter the charges against the troopers, has brought heated reaction from across the political spectrum. Leaders of the State Troopers Fraternal Association released a statement this week saying they were heartened that Judge Andrew J. Smithson of Superior Court was considering a motion to drop the charges. He will announce his ruling by Oct. 31.

"The S.T.F.A. hopes that Judge Smithson and the attorneys can come to an expeditious conclusion to this case so that Troopers Hogan and Kenna can be allowed to get on with their lives," the union president, Ed Lennon, said.

Civil rights leaders, meanwhile, say that prosecutors have already weakened their

own credibility with many black and Hispanic residents in New Jersey by allowing the case to drag on for almost two years. The Rev. Reginald T. Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey, said that it would be irresponsible for prosecutors to throw out charges without a hearing in open court.

"If these two mysterious witnesses had surfaced, two years after the shooting, and made statements which were damaging to the police, would they be treated the same way?" Mr. Jackson asked. "I think they should be brought in to testify, to be cross-examined, and let the public assess their credibility as well. If there's evidence that the officers are innocent, no one wants to see them found guilty.

But if the prosecutor and the judge just drop the charges, there's going to be a whole lot of furor. People will not believe that justice has been done."

The shooting occurred as Keshon Moore, who lived in the Bronx, was driving a rented van to a basketball camp in North Carolina. Troopers Hogan and Kenna later told investigators that they stopped the van because it was speeding.

The troopers said they opened fire because they feared for their lives after Mr. Moore shifted into reverse and the van backed toward them, knocking Trooper Hogan to the ground. Three of the men inside were wounded.

But the troopers' versions of the shooting were contradicted by a civilian witness, occupants of the van, and each other.

Trooper Kenna said he heard Trooper Hogan yell for help after being knocked down, but Trooper Hogan told investigators he never shouted. The civilian witness, a dentist who had been bicycling across a nearby overpass, told investigators that Trooper Hogan shot at the van as it rolled across the roadway, away from him and Trooper Kenna.

One of the wounded men, Danny Reyes, told investigators that Trooper Kenna fired as Mr. Reyes's hands were raised and he was begging the troopers not to shoot. Mr. Reyes said the last shot, which struck near his spine, hit him after the van had backed up and passed the troopers, crossed the road and was headed into the ditch.

After a 16-month investigation -- during which the authorities closed down a six-mile stretch of the turnpike to reenact the incident -- a forensics expert testified that at the time of the shooting, the van was moving at only about 4 m.p.h., far slower than the troopers had described.

The grand jury returned the indictments last September and since then, defense lawyers have tried to rebut the prosecution's case by pointing out that just after the shooting, Mr. Moore's Mr. Moore told investigators that he was to blame for the incident because his foot had slipped onto the gas pedal, causing the car to back up toward the officers.

But Mr. Moore's lawyer, Peter Neufeld, said several months ago that his client uttered those words only because he felt "survivor's guilt" and that he did not make a similar statement before the grand jury.

The truckers' statements are significant because they apparently told investigators that the troopers shot only as the van rolled toward them, and ceased firing once it reached the roadway and rolled into the ditch.

Trooper Hogan's lawyer, Robert Galantucci, said those statements mesh with testimony that a ballistics expert made to the grand jury, stating that the trajectory of the bullets proved that no shots were fired as the van rolled down into the ditch.

"The only time they fired is when they can articulate a reason for jeopardy," Mr. Galantucci said in an interview this week.

But other people involved in the case question the truckers' motives and the accuracy of their statements. The first trucker offered his story to the police only after he was stopped for speeding this March and sought leniency, according to lawyers on both sides. Investigators said his credibility was further eroded because he claimed that just after the van shooting he stopped his truck and spoke to the driver of a car that was also hit by Mr. Moore's van. But police say the driver, Eric Jusino, has told investigators he did not speak to any civilian.

Investigators, though, say they consider, the second driver's story more credible, although that driver also kept silent for 23 months after the shooting. He said he did so because he was afraid his statements might weaken the troopers' legal case.

Mr. Kenna's lawyer, Jack Arsenault, said that despite the witnesses' delay in coming forward, their statements are compelling and clearly support the troopers' claims of self-defense.

But Mr. Jackson and other New Jersey civil rights leaders fear that the state may place too much weight on the truckers' statements and use them to end the embarrassing media spectacle that the Turnpike case has become.

The legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Lenora Lapidus, said that despite the state's admission that some officers routinely discriminated against blacks, women and Hispanics, the attorney general's office is still fighting a class action suit filed by drivers who contend that they are victims of racial profiling.

"It is abundantly clear that practice of racial profiling has been going on for years around the state and they are still continuing to deny it," Ms. Lapidus said.

Trooper Hogan's lawyer, Mr. Galantucci, said he did not dispute evidence that many troopers engaged in discrimination for years, but he argued that it would be a grave injustice to punish the two troopers for the failings of the entire force.

"There was clearly an institutional problem," Mr. Galantucci said. "But it's not something that was created by Hogan or Kenna."

-------- terrorism

A New Trial for American

New York Times
September 03, 2000
News of the Week in Review
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/090300thisweek-review.html

After an election marred by charges of voter fraud, President Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru no doubt needs all the friends he can get. That could well explain Peru's decision to grant a new trial to Lori Berenson, the New Yorker who in 1996 was tried in secret before masked judges and sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism. The case has been a thorn ever since in relations between Washington and Lima, but human rights officials remained wary, fearing that a new trial would be no fairer than the first. -- Hubert B. Herring

---

Bus stop bomb kills three in Lahore

USA Today
09/03/00- Updated 09:05 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#host

LAHORE, Pakistan - A bomb exploded at a crowded bus stop Sunday, killing at last three people and critically injuring 10 others. Police say the blast was triggered by a homemade remote-control bomb, which destroyed a bus and the bus stop's waiting area while shattering glass in nearby buildings. A 1-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl were injured critically, while several other people had minor injuries. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the explosion, which was the third in the city this year.

-------- genetically modified food

Genetically Altered Foods: We Are Being Exposed To One Of The Largest Uncontrolled Experiments In History

Common Dreams NewsCenter
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Chicago Tribune
by Martha R. Herbert
http://chicagotribune.com/index.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-102.htm

BOSTON - Today the vast majority of foods in supermarkets contain genetically modified substances whose effects on our health are unknown.

As a medical doctor, I can assure you that no one in the medical profession would attempt to perform experiments on human subjects without their consent. Such conduct is illegal and unethical. Yet manufacturers of genetically altered foods are exposing us to one of the largest uncontrolled experiments in modern history.

In less than five years these companies have flooded the marketplace with thousands of untested and unlabeled products containing foreign genetic material. These genetically modified foods pose several very real dangers because they have been engineered to create novel proteins that retard spoilage, produce their own pesticides against insects, or allow plants to tolerate larger and larger doses of weed killers.

Despite claims that these food products are based on "sound science," in truth, neither manufacturers nor the government has studied the effects of these genetically altered organisms or their new proteins on people--especially babies, the elderly, and the sick.

Can these products be toxic? Can they cause immune system problems? Can they damage an infant's developing nervous system? We need answers to these questions, and until then genetically altered ingredients should be removed from the food we eat.

As a pediatric neurologist, I especially worry about the safety of modified foods when it comes to children. We know that the human immune system, for example, is not fully developed in infants. Consequently, pediatricians have long been concerned about early introduction of new proteins into the immature gut and developing body of small children.

Infants with colic are often switched to soy formula. Yet we have no information on how they might be affected by drinking genetically engineered soy, even though this product may be their sole or major source of nutrition for months. Because these foods are unlabeled, most parents feed their babies genetically altered formula whether they want to or not.

Even proteins that are normally part of the human diet may, when introduced too early, lead to auto-immune and hypersensitivity or "allergic" reactions later.

Some studies suggest that the epidemic increase in asthma (it has doubled since 1980) may have links to early dietary exposures. The behavior problems of many children with autism and attention disorders get worse when they are exposed to certain foods.

Yet as more unlabeled and untested genetically engineered foods enter the market, there is no one monitoring how the millions of people with immune system vulnerability are reacting to them and the novel proteins and fragments of viruses they can contain. In fact, without labeling, there is no possible way to track such health effects. This is not sound science, and it is not sound public health.

The biotech industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say there is no reason to test genetically modified foods, because they are no different from the products of old-fashioned plant breeding.

Never mind that chicken genes are being put in apples and genes from fish are being used in strawberries. Yet because of the way genes are inserted into unrelated organisms, they have the potential to disrupt other areas of essential genetic information.

We have no idea what these effects may be, or what form the disruptions may take. We don't know because no one has studied these questions in depth, and biotech corporations are not required to conduct thorough health analyses as a precondition for putting genetically engineered products on the market.

Finally, there is the question of antibiotic-resistance genes.

Biotech corporations put these genes into genetically modified foods as "markers" to see if the alien genetic material has successfully penetrated the cell's defense system. If the sample resists an antibiotic, the gene has invaded the new organism.

Manufacturers use this technique purely for convenience, cavalierly ignoring the potential health risks from breeding more virulent antibiotic-resistance germs.

Scientists know that in nature antibiotic resistance genes can pass from one organism to another. If such genes take up residence in our bodies, many of the currently available drugs such as ampicillin, an often-used antibiotic, could become useless.

Before we produce and market untested genetically altered foods, we need to conduct a complete, thorough, long-term, and independent evaluation of all of these novel organisms. And we need to label foods containing altered genes. As pediatricians often advise parents, "better safe than sorry."


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5 National Missile Defense Not Ready For Prime Time
U.S. Newswire
1 Sep 13:25

NUCLEAR EXPERTS SUPPORT PRESIDENT'S DECISION NOT TO DEPLOY To: National Desk Contact: Daryl Kimball, 202-546-0795 ext. 136 or Stephen Young, 202-546-0795 ext. 102 both of Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 /U.S. Newswire/--The largest coalition of non-governmental nuclear arms control organizations praised President Clinton's decision not to deploy or initiate action to begin construction on a limited national missile defense system.

"President Clinton has come to the common sense conclusion that national missile defense is not ready for prime time. With his decision not to deploy or begin construction of the Pentagon's costly and ineffective anti-missile scheme, the President has made the prudent and wise choice for American and global security," said Daryl Kimball, director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers.

"This program is a lemon. The NMD program's incessant technical failures and schedule delays have made it clear to the President that it is foolhardy to commit to a costly and controversial weapons project that does not work," said Stephen Young, deputy director of the coalition. Recent system test failures have shown that the $60 billion anti-missile scheme cannot reliably intercept even a few warheads or discriminate against decoys. This week, Pentagon officials have also said that the missile test failures and increasing program delays have made it unlikely that the system can be put in place by the arbitrary 2005 target date.

"The president has realized that a decision to deploy or even initiate construction of a key anti-missile radar in Alaska would be seen as a unilateral decision to pursue deployment and would needlessly provoke immediate adverse consequences in our relations with Russia, China and our NATO allies--who oppose deployment -- and undermine prospects for further nuclear arms reductions," said Young.

"Some politicians erroneously believe there are better, cheaper and faster national missile defense technologies. No matter who is elected or which national missile defense scheme might be proposed, the American people deserve to know whether any such system will work and whether it increases--or decreases--overall security before committing us to such a risky course of action," cautioned Kimball.

The Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers is a non-partisan alliance of 17 of the nation's leading non-proliferation organizations working for a practical, step-by-step program to reduce the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. For more information, see the coalition's on-line briefing book: Pushing the Limits: the Decision on National Missile Defense.

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6 D.C.-based disarmament group raps plutonium- recycling deal -
September 2, 2000
CNN.com -

Plutonium can be used either in weapons or for power generation

A leading independent U.S. disarmament group on Saturday criticized an agreement by the United States and Russia to recycle plutonium from nuclear weapons as fuel for electricity.

The Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute said burying used plutonium would be a better option.

U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore signed the agreement, which has already been counter-signed by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kazyanov.

The agreement was first announced during President Bill Clinton's Moscow summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on June 4.

Under the deal, each nation will provide 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium for peaceful purposes. U.S. officials say the entire project will cost nearly $6 billion.

But the Nuclear Control Institute said the agreement failed to provide a means of verifying plutonium would be used in Russian reactors.

It said it would have been quicker and cheaper to bury the plutonium in secure dumps and that reprocessing served only to revive a plutonium industry that was already in decline.

Reprocessing to take 20 years

A statement issued from Gore's office said: "This accomplishment advances the critical task of reducing stockpiles of excess weapons plutonium and contributes to key U.S. arms control and non-proliferation objectives."

Factories will be required to process the plutonium into usable nuclear fuel, costing Russia $2 billion and the U.S. $3 billion, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. has been urging the international community, including G7 members, to help fund Russia's bill for a reprocessing operation which will take 20 years.

The statement added that plutonium disposal will commence in 2007 to this report.

-------

OneList subscriber submissions:

NucNews - Please circulate -- help educate! - http://prop1.org

1. U.S., Russia sign plutonium deal
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

2. Tests Show Gulf War Victims have Uranium Poisoning -Sundsy Times
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

3. Environment News Service AmeriScan October 1, 1999
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

4. Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have DU Poisoning
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

----------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

U.S., Russia sign plutonium deal
Weapons-grade material to be disposed of in both countries

San Francisco Examiner
Saturday, September 2, 2000:
Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The United States and Russia have signed an agreement to begin disposing of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium each, enough for thousands of nuclear weapons.

Friday, Vice President Al Gore signed at his residence here, and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov signed in Moscow. The arms control agreement was reached in Moscow in June by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimar Putin.

It demonstrates a joint commitment to reduce nuclear dangers despite occasional blips in relations between the two countries.

However, Paul Leventhal, president of the nonprofit Nuclear Control Insitute, said the agreement did not deal with very important problems associated with the processing of plutonium for nuclear reactor fuel.

He said there remained no agreement on who would be held responsible if another severe Chernobyl-like accident occurred in Russia. And he said it was a mistake to let Russia use plutonium as fuel rather than dispose of it as waste.

New facilities will be built beginning in 2007 to convert some of the plutonium into fuel. The rest will be buried.

The process will be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Congress has approved providing Russia with $200 million to help carry out its side of the agreement.

Disposing of the plutonium will cost an estimated $5.75 billion: $4 billion in the United States and $1.75 billion in Russia. Other countries will be asked to contribute.

The Russian plutonium is to be converted for use in civilian nuclear power reactors. Some of the U.S. material will be used for reactors, and the rest will be buried.

------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

Tests Show Gulf War Victims have Uranium Poisoning -

Dr Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war........ "I doubt whether the MoD or Pentagon will have the audacity to challenge these results, Durakovic said.

fyi-janet

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TESTS SHOW GULF WAR VICTIMS HAVE URANIUM POISONING

Sunday Times (UK)
September 3 2000
By Jonathon Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier

New evidence that Gulf war syndrome exists and was caused by radiation poisoning will be revealed today by a former American army colonel who was at the centre of his government's attempts to diagnose the illness. Dr Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war.

The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation.

Durakovic, who is professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, Washington, and the former head of nuclear medicine at the US Army's veterans' affairs medical facility in Delaware, will tell the conference that he and his team of American and Canadian scientists have discovered life-threateningly high levels of DU in Gulf veterans 10 years after the desert war.

His findings, which have been verified by four independent experts, is embarrassing for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and American Defence Department, which have consistently refused to test Gulf war veterans for DU.

Durakovic will tell the European Association of Nuclear Medicine that tests on 17 veterans have shown DU in the urine and bones of 70% of them.

Depleted uranium does not occur naturally. It is the by-product of the industrial processing of waste from nuclear reactors and is better known as weapons-grade uranium. It is used to strengthen the tips of shells to ensure that they pierce armour.

Durakovic, who left America because he was told his life was in danger if he continued his research, has concluded that troops inhaled the tiny uranium particles after American and British forces fired more than 700,000 DU shells during the conflict.

The finding begins to explain for the first time why medical orderlies and mechanics are the principal victims of Gulf war syndrome. British Army engineers who removed tanks hit by DU shells from the battlefield and medical personnel who cut off the clothes of Iraqi casualties in field hospitals have been disproportionately affected.

Once inside the body, DU causes a slow death from cancers, irreversible kidney damage or wastage from immune deficiency disorders.

In the UK, where more than 400 veterans are estimated to have died from "Gulf war syndrome", at least 50 of those victims came from Reme (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) units. Others, such as Ray Bristow, 42, of Hull, who was a theatre technician for 32 Field Hospital, are now wheelchair-bound.

Tests carried out by Durakovic on Bristow showed that, nine years after leaving the Gulf, he had more than 100 times the safe limit of DU in his body.

Durakovic said: "I doubt whether the MoD or Pentagon will have the audacity to challenge these results. I can't say this is the solitary cause of Gulf war syndrome, but we now have clear evidence that it is a leading factor in the majority of victims.

"I hope the US and UK governments finally realise that, by continuing to use this ammunition, they are effectively poisoning their own soldiers."

An MoD spokesman said it would study any new evidence: "Our aim is to get the best care for British veterans and our views are based on the best evidence around."

------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000
From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>

UNDERGROUND EXPLOSION TESTS PLUTONIUM STOCKPILE

Environment News Service AmeriScan
October 1, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/oct99/1999L-10-01-09.html

NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada, (ENS) - The Department of Energy (DOE) set off an underground explosion Thursday as part of ongoing tests of the nation's nuclear stockpile. The test, known as Oboe 1, took place at 2:56 pm Pacific Time in a chamber some 906 feet beneath the surface of the DOE's Nevada Test Site. The DOE performs these experiments, in which plutonium of various ages is shocked by high explosives, to help determine whether the nuclear material in U.S. weapons is stable and still effective. "There's not much point having a nuclear stock pile of weapons that wouldn't work if, God forbid, you needed to use them," said Derek Scammell, a DOE spokesman. Thursday's test and the dozen or so planned before the end of the year 2000 will use new plutonium and plutonium that is up to 40 years old to determine whether older plutonium reacts differently. Oboe 1 is the seventh such experiment conducted since 1997, but differs from the previous six because it took place in a sealed steel vessel. Prior experiments were held in experimental alcoves excavated for the purpose, which then had to be sealed to prevent the escape of radiation. Oboe 1 also took place in an alcove, but the alcove was protected by the vessel, and can be reused for future experiments, cutting costs by about 50 percent. The tests also help ensure that stored nuclear weapons have "no chance of going into a chain reaction and detonating," Scammell says.

-------------

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have DU Poisoning

"The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation"
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/090300-05.htm

http://www.eanm-paris2000.com/Eng/index_en.htm
European Association of Nuclear Medicine Annual Congress

-----------------------------------------------------


DOEWatch List ----A Magnum-Opus Project
Subscribe online: http://www.onelist.com
DOEWatch page: http://members.aol.com/doewatch

1. Evidence for the role of environmental agents in the initiation or progression

From: magnu96196@aol.com

------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Evidence for the role of environmental agents in the initiation or progression of autoimmune conditions.

Environ Health Perspect
1999 Oct 107 Suppl 5:667-72
Powell JJ, Van de Water J, Gershwin ME

Division of RHeumatology/Allergy and Clinical Immunology, University of Califronia at Davis School of Medicine, 95616, USA.

The concordance of autoimmune disease among identical twins is virtually always less than 50% and often in the 25-40% range. This observation, as well as epidemic clustering of some autoimmune diseases following xenobiotic exposure, reinforces the thesis that autoimmune disease is secondary to both genetic and environmental factors. Because nonliving agents do not have genomes, disease characteristics involving nonliving xenobiotics are primarily secondary to host phenotype and function. In addition, because of individual genetic susceptibilities based not only on major histocompatibility complex differences but also on differences in toxin metabolism, lifestyles, and exposure rates, individuals will react differently to the same chemicals. With these comments in mind it is important to note that there have been associations of a number of xenobiotics with human autoimmune disease, including mercury, iodine, vinyl chloride, canavanine, organic solvents, silica, l-tryptophan, particulates, ultraviolet radiation, and ozone. In addition, there is discussion in the literature that raises the possibility that xenobiotics may also exacerbate an existing autoimmune disease. In this article we discuss these issues and, in particular, the evidence for the role of environmental agents in the initiation or progression of autoimmune conditions. With the worldwide deterioration of the environment, this is a particularly important subject for human health.

Publication Types: Review Review, tutorial

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NUCLEAR POWER CONTENTS

1 Alice's Restaurant and the Proposed Storage of Nuclear Fuel in

2 Coolant leaks from nuclear plant

3 Hansen Bill Takes Shot At N-Waste

4 6 ACCUSED OF TRYING TO STEAL METAL FROM CHERNOBYL AREA

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NUCLEAR POWER ARTICLES

1 Alice's Restaurant and the Proposed Storage of Nuclear Fuel in Skull Valley

The Salt Lake Tribune--
SUNDAY, September 3, 2000
BY DAVID A. HEDDERLY-SMITH

In the 1960s song "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree" and movie "Alice's Restaurant," folk-singing hippie Arlo Guthrie taught us a lesson that the nuclear regulatory powers-that-be should be taking to heed.

The story of both the song and movie commenced with a Thanksgiving dinner in a counter-culture church in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. (Remember, " . . . Alice doesn't live in the restaurant. She lives in the church near the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband, Ray, and Fasha the dog.") On Thanksgiving morning, 1965, Arlo and a friend helped clean out some garbage from the church in anticipation of the dinner, loaded it in his red VW microbus, and took off for the local dump.

But the dump was closed for the long weekend, and Arlo needed to find a place to unload the trash before dinner. While returning to the church along some back road, he passed a ravine with a heap of somebody else's garbage in it. Arlo reasoned that " . . . one big pile is better than two little ones . . .," and added his load to the existing mound, " . . . rather than bring that one up, we decided to throw ours down."

Regretfully for Arlo, an envelope with his name and address on it got mixed in with the trash, and the next morning he received a call from Officer Obie. His initial response was, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage," but after about 45 minutes on the phone, Obie "arrived at the truth of the matter." Arlo and his friend were subsequently thrown in jail, taken before the local magistrate, convicted of littering, fined $50, and made to clean up the whole mess (which had grown considerably since Arlo and friend had made their deposit). All this eventually worked out fine for Arlo as his littering conviction later made him morally unfit to be inducted into the Army and sent off to fight in Vietnam, at least according to the song and movie.

The several dozen nuclear power plants in our country are in a dilemma not dissimilar to the one Arlo faced when he found the gate to the dump locked that Thanksgiving morning of 1965. Their "dump" is the proposed Yucca Mountain high- level nuclear waste permanent repository in Nevada. But that facility has been under study for a decade or two. The studies continue, and it may not be available for another decade or so, if the repository is ever approved. Meanwhile still highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel continues to build up at the plants.

No doubt in the past few years the managers of the nuclear plants have gotten together --undoubtedly in some proverbial "smoke-filled room"--to discuss their predicament. It's just a matter of time until they're going to have too much spent fuel to store at their plants, and they know it. And it looks like the Yucca Mountain facility may not get open in time, if ever. So some bright nuclear administrator apparently came up with a solution, "You know what we gotta do? We gotta find us some ravine on some back road where nobody will notice a pile of garbage!"

And they've found one! I've never seen the Goshute Indian Reservation lands in the Skull Valley in the West Desert, but I'll bet they're not the most picturesque lands in Utah. They're certainly "out of the way." And isn't that where the Army decided to bury all those sheep that the Air Force killed with the Army's nerve gas back in the '60s? Is somebody using Arlo's logic that ". . . one big pile is better than two little ones" ? I fear such is exactly the case.

This one's a no brainer. No one really knows what will happen to the spent nuclear fuel after it is unloaded in Utah--my guess is that it will sort of get forgotten. Certainly the pressure on the nuclear energy folks to approve and complete the Yucca Mountain facility will be relieved. And once the nuclear industry has found a place to unload their most hazardous waste, it won't take them long to figure out where they can put the next- most-dangerous batch of stuff.

We don't know how well the canisters in which the fuel is encased will hold up over the next decades or centuries, but we do know that the spent fuel will be hazardous for another 10,000 years or so. My guess is the canisters won't last even 50 or 100 years, being constantly bombarded from the inside with radiation. And then Utah will find itself in the not-too-distant future facing another dark program like the Dugway nerve-gas incineration project. We'll be kind of like Arlo, having to clean up everybody else's garbage.

Personally, I'm something of an advocate of nuclear power. I'm a scientist (a geologist/ geochemist), and I think that time may very well show us that the utilization of nuclear energy is far more benign to our planet than our current unrestrained use of fossil fuels. I think there's a good chance that the "greenhouse effect" proponents are on the right track and that we are steadily altering our upper atmosphere with increased carbon dioxide, potentially effecting a long-term warming of our planet. (We'll know for sure in another 20 or 30 years, if not sooner.) And I believe that high- level nuclear wastes probably can be safely buried deep within the Earth--maybe even at Yucca Mountain. We absolutely need to solve these problems regarding disposal of these nuclear wastes.

But lining up canisters of spent nuclear fuel en echelon on 40 acres of the Skull Valley some 70 miles southwest (and upwind!) of Salt Lake City certainly isn't the solution. It wasn't right in the 1960s for Arlo to dump his trash in that ravine, just because the dump was closed for the holiday weekend, and it isn't right today for our nuclear power industry to dump their high- level waste on the Goshute Reservation in Utah, just because the Yucca Mountain facility isn't ready for it.

And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board both ought to be smart enough to figure that out. __

David A. Hedderly-Smith is a 52-year-old consulting geologist living in Park City. He holds a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Utah.

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2 Coolant leaks from nuclear plant
THE JAPAN TIMES
Sunday, September 3, 2000

SENDAI (Kyodo) Tohoku Electric Power Co. on Saturday reported a leak of coolant water from a nuclear power plant between the towns of Onagawa and Oshika, Miyagi Prefecture.

It said plant workers discovered a pool of water on the floor near a coolant water filtering device in the building that houses the turbine for the Onagawa plant's No. 1 reactor at around 10:45 a.m.

A subsequent inspection showed that water was leaking from the vicinity of a valve on a pipe on one of six filters. About 1 liter of water had leaked out, but no radiation was found to have escaped from the plant, the power firm said.

The water registered radiation levels of roughly 5,000 becquerels, far short of the 3.7 million becquerels which would require notification to authorities, according to Tohoku Power.

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3 Hansen Bill Takes Shot At N-Waste

The Salt Lake Tribune
SUNDAY, September 3, 2000
BY PAUL ROLLY

Utah Rep. Jim Hansen has prepared a bill he will introduce in the U.S. House of Representatives that state officials hope will stifle once and for all plans to store nuclear waste materials on the Goshute Reservation in western Utah.

Hansen and Gov. Mike Leavitt have worked closely on the bill, which would prohibit the storage of nuclear waste on ranges used for training and testing by Air Force jets, The Salt Lake Tribune has learned.

Jets from Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah regularly run test and training flights over the vast and barren western Utah desert. The Goshute Reservation is in the area of the test range, so if the bill becomes federal law, the storage of nuclear materials would be banned there. Hansen will argue that the vibrations caused by F-16 jets roaring overhead could jiggle the nuclear waste storage containers and possibly damage them.

Just last May, Leavitt sounded as if he had just about given up hope of preventing some 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel rods from being stored on the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Reservation, about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City in Tooele County.

A consortium of eight out-of-state utilities is seeking a federal license to store the nuclear waste at Skull Valley. The spent fuel, now being stored in about 20 nuclear power plants in California, the Midwest and East, is highly radioactive. It is lethal or carcinogenic to anyone directly exposed to it and does not decompose for about 10,000 years.

Leavitt has been battling the proposed transfer of the waste to western Utah since his first year in office in 1993, when Goshutes first expressed interest in storing on their land spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. At that time, he called it an "over-my-dead-body issue."

But the courts have ruled the Goshute Reservation is sovereign land and Utah officials have no authority to dictate what is stored there. Leavitt tried another tactic by purchasing for the state the county road leading to Skull Valley and imposing limitations on the use of that road.

The consortium, known as Private Fuel Storage (PFS) got around that obstacle by proposing to transport the spent nuclear fuel by rail. PFS has continued to move forward and now has a license application being considered by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Consortium officials say the nuclear waste storage facility could be open as early as 2003.

The latest blow to the governor's attempt to stop the project occurred in May when the Tooele County Commission signed a contract giving PFS permission to operate in the area. The county would receive between $90 million and $300 million over the next 40 years, depending on how much waste is moved to the reservation.

A few days after the PFS agreement with Tooele, the governor admitted during his monthly televised news conference on KUED that he was running out of ideas.

"We are doing all we can to resist it," Leavitt said during that May news conference. "It's not inconceivable we won't succeed, but it's worthy of our efforts to prevent it." Later, Leavitt conceded: "We are slowly running out of ways to object" to the project.

Leavitt plans to announce the proposed federal bill with Hansen on Monday at 2:30 p.m. in Clearfield, which is in Utah's 1st Congressional District that Hansen has represented for 20 years.



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4 6 ACCUSED OF TRYING TO STEAL METAL FROM CHERNOBYL AREA
Chicago Tribune Traditional Version - Nation/World
SEPTEMBER 03, 2000

KIEV, UKRAINE Ukrainian police have detained six citizens of Belarus on suspicion of trying to steal radioactive metal from the Chernobyl zone, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, officials said.

The six were detained while driving a truck loaded with 1.1 tons of non-ferrous metals, the Interior Ministry said Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.

They were apprehended near the village of Benivka, within the 19- mile-radius "exclusion zone" around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the report said. It did not specify when they were detained, and the ministry's press service did not give details.

All settlements in the zone were evacuated after the April 1986 explosion and fire at Chernobyl, which contaminated large areas in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus and spread a radioactive cloud over Europe.

Thieves have long emptied the zone of most valuables. Some poor Ukrainians gather mushrooms and berries there, hoping to sell them to unsuspecting customers.

Aluminum, copper and non-ferrous metals are targeted by scavengers across the former Soviet Union. They sometimes sell the metal to private companies.

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NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS

1 Did Experimental Torpedo Sink Russian Sub?

2 TESTS SHOW GULF WAR VICTIMS HAVE URANIUM POISONING

3 The Nuclear Graveyard Below

4 Iraqis Say Their Cancer Rate Is Up--and Blame 'Depleted Uranium'

5 National Missle Defense Not Ready For Prime Time

6 D.C.-based disarmament group raps plutonium- recycling deal -

-----------

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES

1 Did Experimental Torpedo Sink Russian Sub?
Fox News
Dan Philbin at the Pentagon,
Paul Wagenseil, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
Saturday, September 2, 2000

Theories that the explosion of a faulty experimental torpedo caused the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk reportedly were confirmed by acoustic spy tapes gathered by U.S. military intelligence, although U.S. officials deny the tapes' existence.

May 2000: The Russian nuclear sub Kursk is shown docked at a Russian Navy base in Vidyayevo.

In Russia, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, chairman of the commission investigating the Aug. 12 disaster - when the submarine sank after shattering explosions - rejected reports that the Kursk was testing a new type of torpedo that some officers considered unstable.

Russian officials maintain that the Kursk collided with a large object such as a foreign submarine or a World War II mine, but they have also raised the possibility that a torpedo inside the submarine misfired.

"There were no new torpedoes on the submarine," Klebanov said after a commission meeting in St. Petersburg. He said the type of torpedoes aboard had been in service for 20 years, although he added they had been fitted with a new model of battery.

U.S. REPORTS CLAIM EVIDENCE GATHERED BY SPYING SUB

Tuesday's report, published in the New York Times, said that the USS Memphis, a U.S. Navy attack submarine monitoring the Kursk's naval exercises in the Barents Sea, had "sonar tapes and other recordings" that confirmed the predominant American theory.

"According to the American theory," the Times wrote, "a rocket-propelled torpedo being loaded or launched as part of an exercise misfired, its engines or its fuel exploding."

The article reported that the tapes are being examined at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Md., also the hometown of the National Security Agency; although the Navy will not confirm the report.

The Pentagon has been loath to comment on any of these reports as well.

"I believe that's a city in Tennessee," a Pentagon official responded when asked about the Times article that said the USS Memphis was "one of two American submarines that were spying on the largest Russian naval exercise in years."

The Pentagon routinely does not publicly discuss the operating locations or the missions of U.S. submarines. Nor do they publicly discuss what they know about the operating locations or missions of foreign submarine forces, as this could reveal the sources and methods used to gather that information.

In fact, most nations are extremely secretive about information regarding their submarine forces. Some experts allege that this secrecy may have contributed to the failed efforts by Russia to respond effectively to the Kursk disaster, which could also lend support to the theory that the Russian Navy was experimenting with new weapons technology.

EXPERIMENTAL TORPEDO MAY HAVE MISFIRED

While the Pentagon refuses to confirm any reports, the Times cited anonymous U.S. officials as theorizing that the Kursk was testing a revolutionary type of rocket-propelled torpedo which misfired, either its fuel or its engine exploding in or near the submarine.

The Times article also quoted a Russian government investigator in Vladivostok as saying that the Kursk was testing an experimental weapons system.

The U.S. and Russian sources cited by the Times did not elaborate further, but Internet reports during the crisis circulated rumors that the Russian submarine was test-firing a "supercavitation" torpedo.

A recent article in the British journal New Scientist reported that the Russian navy was indeed working on such technology, which would involve launching a torpedo underwater from a catapult at speeds of at least 120 miles an hour.

At such high speed, water would deflect from the torpedo's specialized blunt bow, creating a "supercavity", a large bubble of air that would enclose the torpedo as long as it maintained its speed.

Once the supercavity formed, the torpedo's rocket engine would ignite and it would be capable of traveling at hundreds of miles per hour underwater.

Projectiles traveling at such high speeds underwater could understandably revolutionize submarine warfare, and New Scientist also reported that American researchers had broken the underwater sound barrier using supercavitating bullets traveling at 3,000 miles per hour.

While theories that the Russian Navy was experimenting with such supercavitation torpedoes in the Barents Sea are speculation, it is one of few hypotheses that account for the need to have a rocket- propulsion system attached to a torpedo.


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2 TESTS SHOW GULF WAR VICTIMS HAVE URANIUM POISONING

The Sunday Times: World:
September 3 2000
JONATHON CARR-BROWN AND MARTIN MEISSONNIER

NEW evidence that Gulf war syndrome exists and was caused by radiation poisoning will be revealed today by a former American army colonel who was at the centre of his government's attempts to diagnose the illness.

Dr Asaf Durakovic will tell a conference of eminent nuclear scientists in Paris that "tens of thousands" of British and American soldiers are dying from radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired during the Gulf war.

The findings will undermine the British and American governments' claims that Gulf war syndrome does not exist and intensify pressure from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic for compensation.

Durakovic, who is professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, Washington, and the former head of nuclear medicine at the US Army's veterans' affairs medical facility in Delaware, will tell the conference that he and his team of American and Canadian scientists have discovered life-threateningly high levels of DU in Gulf veterans 10 years after the desert war.

His findings, which have been verified by four independent experts, is embarrassing for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and American Defence Department, which have consistently refused to test Gulf war veterans for DU.

Durakovic will tell the European Association of Nuclear Medicine that tests on 17 veterans have shown DU in the urine and bones of 70% of them.

Depleted uranium does not occur naturally. It is the by-product of the industrial processing of waste from nuclear reactors and is better known as weapons-grade uranium. It is used to strengthen the tips of shells to ensure that they pierce armour.

Durakovic, who left America because he was told his life was in danger if he continued his research, has concluded that troops inhaled the tiny uranium particles after American and British forces fired more than 700,000 DU shells during the conflict.

The finding begins to explain for the first time why medical orderlies and mechanics are the principal victims of Gulf war syndrome.

British Army engineers who removed tanks hit by DU shells from the battlefield and medical personnel who cut off the clothes of Iraqi casualties in field hospitals have been disproportionately affected.

Once inside the body, DU causes a slow death from cancers, irreversible kidney damage or wastage from immune deficiency disorders.

In the UK, where more than 400 veterans are estimated to have died from "Gulf war syndrome", at least 50 of those victims came from Reme (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) units. Others, such as Ray Bristow, 42, of Hull, who was a theatre technician for 32 Field Hospital, are now wheelchair-bound.

Tests carried out by Durakovic on Bristow showed that, nine years after leaving the Gulf, he had more than 100 times the safe limit of DU in his body.

Durakovic said: "I doubt whether the MoD or Pentagon will have the audacity to challenge these results. I can't say this is the solitary cause of Gulf war syndrome, but we now have clear evidence that it is a leading factor in the majority of victims.

"I hope the US and UK governments finally realise that, by continuing to use this ammunition, they are effectively poisoning their own soldiers."

An MoD spokesman said it would study any new evidence: "Our aim is to get the best care for British veterans and our views are based on the best evidence around."

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3 The Nuclear Graveyard Below

Opinion
Sunday, September 3, 2000
Los Angeles Times
By LLOYD J. DUMAS

DALLAS, TEXAS--The sinking of the pride of the Russian submarine fleet, the Kursk, is not just another tragic loss of life at sea. It added two more nuclear reactors, and perhaps nuclear warheads, as well, to the more than half-dozen reactors and nearly 50 nuclear warheads already on the bottom of the sea. No one knows just how much ecological damage this nuclear graveyard is generating or when its latent threat to human life will become manifest.

Blaming the deteriorating condition of Russia's military forces for the Kursk tragedy obscures a key point. Similar accidents have happened before, under different conditions. When the U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarine Thresher sank with 129 men and two nuclear-armed SUBROC missiles aboard, it was 1963, and the Cold War was at its height. When a Yankee-class Russian submarine carrying 16 missiles, each armed with two nuclear warheads, sank 600 miles northeast of Bermuda in water three miles deep, it was 1986, in the heady, early days of glasnost and perestroika. Eight years later, Russian scientists told U.S. experts that the sub had broken up. The warheads and missiles, they said, were "badly damaged and scattered on the sea floor" and were surely leaking plutonium and uranium. In 1993, the Russians warned that plutonium from the nuclear submarine Komsomolets, which sank in the Norwegian Sea in 1989 with two nuclear torpedoes on board, was in danger of leaking and poisoning important fishing grounds.

All told, there are two U.S., one French and five Russian submarines in the underwater nuclear graveyard. But that is not the end of the story. The Kola Peninsula, off which the Kursk sank, has become a junkyard for 100 Soviet-era nuclear- powered subs that are rusting away with their nuclear reactors still on board. The 50,000 nuclear-fuel assemblies from the reactors are sitting in storage tanks, some of which are probably leaking, and in open-air bins on military bases and shipyards. At present rates, it will take decades to transport them to permanent storage.

The Kursk tragedy, in which 118 Russian sailors died, is the latest in a long line of nuclear military accidents. During the 45 years before the Kursk was built, there were at least 89 publicly reported military accidents involving nuclear weapons; 59 American, 25 Soviet/Russian, four French and one British. In addition to submarines, the accidents involved fighter planes, bombers, missiles, nuclear-waste storage facilities and surface ships. They occurred despite the best efforts of first-rate designers, careful manufacturers and well-trained crews. What lesson can be drawn from all this?

We live in an age dominated by the advance of technology. We have vastly more power to affect the physical world than we had even 60 years ago. Yet, humans are no less error-prone. The clash between our growing technological power and our enduring fallibility has laid us open to disaster on an unprecedented scale, by accident or design.

Despite the end of the Cold War, there are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons around the globe. U.S. nuclear forces remain on high alert. Two more nations, India and Pakistan, have joined the nuclear club within the past two years. Yet, nuclear weapons are not the only technology that threatens us.

Chemical and biological weapons, whether in the hands of hostile governments or terrorists, can kill large numbers of people. Then there are technologies designed for benign purposes but capable of doing enormous damage if things go dramatically wrong. Two of the worst accidents in the 20th century involved such technologies: the Chernobyl nuclear-power-plant meltdown on April 26, 1986, and the release of a cloud of toxic chemicals from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India on Dec. 3, 1984, which killed 2,000 people and injured 200,000 more.

There is no way to eliminate risk from the world, and we would be foolish to try. But there are less-risky technologies, more forgiving of human fallibility, that are either on the shelf or within reach. One of the most heavily subsidized energy technologies, nuclear power can be replaced by a variety of alternative energy sources, from solar and wind power to biomass conversion. If a concentrated and well-funded effort is necessary to lower cost and increase efficiency, it is a social investment worth making. For other dangerous technologies, a mix of technological and non-technological alternatives may be more effective.

In the mid-1990s, military figures like Gen. George Lee Butler, the commander in charge of all U.S. strategic nuclear weapons from 1991-94, and Gen. Charles A. Horner, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. They were joined in late 1996 by nearly 60 retired generals and admirals from the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain, who signed a statement at the United Nations endorsing the idea that nuclear weapons can and should be eliminated. They believe that conventional-weapons technologies are more than adequate for military needs today.

The nuclear reactors and weapons arsenal littering the bottom of the sea are out of our control. As with the Kursk, it is risky to try to retrieve them. That is not an acceptable state of affairs. We cannot blithely assume that all these weapons and reactors will remain stable indefinitely and do no harm. It's important that studies be done on the feasibility and desirability of retrieving them, and equally important that the results of these studies be made public and subjected to open criticism and debate. The Kursk is a good place to begin.

Cold War habits of thinking die hard. But there is no room in this situation for secrecy, arrogance or national pride. When we have found the best approach, whichever nations can most effectively contribute to implementing it must be mobilized in a timely and concerted joint effort. Surely, we have learned that much from the sinking of the Kursk.

In a larger sense, the Kursk is only the most recent reminder of our own imperfectability and the limitations of the technological devices we have developed. We must learn to take more seriously the boundaries created by our unavoidable fallibility, or we will surely do ourselves terrible damage some day. * - - -

Lloyd J. Dumas, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas, Dallas, Is the Author of "Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies."

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4 Iraqis Say Their Cancer Rate Is Up--and Blame 'Depleted Uranium' Used by U.S. in Gulf War

SUNDAY, September 3, 2000
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
Rick Wood

A young girl suffering from leukemia is one of 20 people in the cancer ward at Saddam Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. Iraqis claim a surge in cancer rates.

BAGHDAD, Iraq--Wearing a lace-fringed bonnet and a faint smile, Azhaar Kamel, 7, watched with wide eyes as American visitors entered a cancer ward at Saddam Pediatric Hospital.

She was a gentle child. She also was a symbol of an issue as troubling and elusive as any childhood fantasy or fear. Azhaar had leukemia. So did several of the other 19 cancer patients from various parts of Iraq.

Doctors, echoing their government, blamed nearly all of the cancers on a simple-sounding acronym: DU. But the " depleted uranium" debate is not simple. It involves about 320 tons of armor-piercing slugs that U.S. and British planes and tanks fired during the Gulf War.

The slugs were made from the low-level radioactive metal that remains when U-235 isotopes are removed from natural uranium to make enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors. Heavier than lead, depleted uranium self-ignites and gets sharper as it penetrates armor.

Much of it vaporizes, giving off fine particles that can be inhaled. Some fall onto the ground, sometimes where crops are later grown. Some cling to damaged equipment that soldiers and civilians later climb on. Winds carry some away.

Whether the particles--which have low, alpha- ray radioactivity and are chemically toxic--pose dangers is unresolved. Iraqis say the particles have caused a sharp rise in cancer rates and birth deformities, especially in Basra and other southern areas.

Iraqis have had more exposure to such particles than U.S. troops, but there are other factors: a population weakened by malnutrition, pollution from refineries and burning oil wells, and Iraq's use of poison gas against both Iran and rebels among its own people. The World Health Organization has not yet studied depleted uranium in Iraq.

Veterans groups in the United States are concerned because hundreds of U.S. soldiers may have had close exposure. Some think that could be one factor in the unusual illnesses many Gulf War veterans have reported.

Definitive studies of depleted uranium's long- term effects have not been done. A General Accounting Office report to Congress on March 29 said that two expert reviews of evidence, plus monitoring by Veterans Affairs of a few dozen highly exposed veterans, show that radiation from inhaled or ingested depleted uranium is an unlikely health hazard to U.S. troops.

That supported the Pentagon's position.

But the report, which notes that veterans with DU shrapnel in their bodies have elevated uranium levels in their urine, also says more research is needed.

Opposition groups such as the Military Toxics Project cite conflicting evidence among both civilian and military studies. They point out elaborate protective procedures used to handle depleted uranium. And, noting that such weapons were used in Kosovo, they say the Pentagon is protecting its ability to use the weapons on future battlefields.

"I am looking for a way to follow up on this," said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who had asked the General Accounting Office for an analysis and is still bothered by some discrepancies in the report. "I'm not convinced that enough research has been done, and I do have a continuing sense that this depleted uranium was dangerous and may have caused health problems.

"To me, the response so far of the federal government really goes to the core of whether we treat our soldiers fairly. What I have noticed working with Agent Orange and other issues like this is, we sort of have a tendency to say to our military people, when they say they're not feeling well, to basically assume that it's not serious or that they're making it up.

"My view is we should assume that they're telling the truth and that they're right. After they've made this kind of sacrifice, that should be the kind of assumption we have."

Feingold added that a broader, intensive study by the National Academy of Sciences on the possible illnesses associated with Gulf War toxin exposures in general, including depleted uranium, is expected to be released soon.