------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
*Lockheed Aims at Ad - Hoc Euro Cooperation
*FEDERAL CONTRACTS
*Czechs Launch Temelin N - Plant As Austria Protests
*Czech Nuclear Plant Gets Clearance
*Pressure India for talks: Pak.
*Pakistan Worried by Indo - Russian Defense Deals
*North Korean's historic visit to U.S.
*Attempt To Recover Russian Sailors
*Nuclear Fallout: Mutant Wheat
*Investigations Demanded by Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free
*Idaho lab wins uranium filtration project
*Richardson wants probe of discrimination
*Pentagon Can't Find Deutch Disks
*Gore, Bush agree: Pentagon needs more money
*Protest targets Redstone for role in U.S. plans for weapons in space
*The light that kills
*The candidates
*Gore, Bush agree: Pentagon needs more money

MILITARY
*Fox wants multinational war on drugs
*Clinton Will Meet North Korean Aide
*STATESIDE NEWS . . . .
*Another delay for Discovery
*SHUTTLE LAUNCH DELAYED AGAIN
*U.S. feels pressure
*U.S. scrambles to keep Sudan off Security Council
*Turkish plane lands in Baghdad
*Politely, Lazio and Mrs. Clinton Debate U.N. and Supreme Court
*Big Navy deal boosts EDS shares
*Texas Guard Unit Home After 8 Months in Bosnia
*Don't shoot
*Our Foreign Role
*States

OTHER
*Cloning Used in an Effort to Preserve Rare Species
*Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
*Gore's No Environmentalist
*It's Not Oil vs. Beauty in the Arctic
*Hole In Ozone Layer Is Growing Larger
*Endangered Wilson Bridge
*Endangered Wildlife
*officials have stopped placing foster children near Superfund site
*Officer Accused in Rape of Car Passenger
*Hardware firewall runs on NSA technology
*Study reveals 'politicization' of intelligence
*Nazi Code Machine Poses a New Enigma for the British
*Geyer gets Alsop award
*. . . Avoiding a War
*After Counterterrorism Bill Fails, Nation's Preparedness Is Debated
*Terrorism on agenda for North Korean talks

ACTIVISTS
*Million Moon March

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

Lockheed Aims at Ad - Hoc Euro Cooperation

Reuters
October 09, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-lockhee.html

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp. intends to cooperate flexibly with European defense companies as opportunities arise, not by choosing a permanent partner or acquisition, the top U.S. weapons-maker said on Monday.

``We believe we can do business in the transatlantic market place with (multiple) partners,'' Scott Harris, Lockheed's vice president for plans and analysis, told Reuters in an interview.

With defense budgets tight and some governments urging a freer transatlantic arms market, analysts and investors have looked for signs of permanent ties or even mergers between U.S. and European aerospace companies.

But Harris discounted Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor by sales, taking such an approach.

Instead, Lockheed would look for opportunities in which it could form an ad-hoc partnership with a European company for a particular business opportunity.

The partner would have local presence while Lockheed had relevant technology, especially in the U.S.-dominated field of information warfare.

``We bring capability,'' he said.

``We have a flexible business model. The notion isvery flexible, adaptable.''

NO NEED FOR LOCAL SUBSIDIARIES

The ad-hoc approach seems to exclude an alternative model, which Lockheed Martin already pursues in Britain, in which it would build up its presence in continental Europe with local subsidiaries, perhaps acquisitions.

``We don't have to own anything in Europe,'' Harris said.

In Britain, Lockheed has a major subsidiary that undertakes complex systems-integration work for the British government, which appears to treat it as though it were a British company.

In one of the most extraordinary instances of transatlantic defense interdependence, the U.S.-owned company is even responsible for maintaining Britain's nuclear weapons stockpile.

British defense contractor BAE Systems Plc is committed to the local-subsidiary approach, with a big North American unit that the Pentagon is treating as a U.S. company.

BAE and France's Thomson-CSF have also gathered together a collection of aerospace businesses in various other countries.

A FREE MARKET IN WEAPONS

Defense industries are a highly nationalistic issue on both sides of the Atlantic, with most countries reluctant to import anything they can build locally.

Lockheed advocates a free transatlantic arms market and Harris said it might be possible to take an incremental approach to developing it.

``Our answer to that is 'Let's integrate this market by one product area at a time','' he said.

An example was Lockheed's C-130J, an upgraded version of its venerable Hercules transporter that Italy and Britain have bought.

But critics of U.S. defense procurement policy argue that European countries have a long history of buying U.S. equipment while the United States buys very little from Europe.

U.S. armed forces have occasionally bought British planes and aero-engines since World War II, but not much other European high-tech gear.

Harris said that, to some extent, governments could do little to prevent incremental development of a freer international arms market.

``What we think is happening is that the clear distinction between Europe versus America is breaking down,'' he said. ``It is partly because of industrial and technological factors.''

Countries might not want to import complete weapons systems, like combat aircraft, or even their major sub-systems, such as radar and engines.

But increasingly prime contractors had to assemble those systems from basic components made in many different countries.

``Part of it is beyond control because it is technologically driven,'' Harris said.

-------- business

FEDERAL CONTRACTS

By Jimmy Chuang States News Service
Monday, October 9, 2000 ; Page F15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35886-2000Oct8?language=printer

.... Swales Aerospace of Beltsville won a $45 million contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for space technology research and development services.

BAE Systems Applied Technologies Inc. of Rockville won a $41 million contract from the Navy for systems-integration support for the Trident I and Trident II fleet ballistic missile programs.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $22.5 million contract from the Air Force for investigating, modeling, analyzing, developing, testing and demonstrating radio frequency and photonic component and subsystem technologies for ground, air and space sensor applications.

ManTech Systems Engineering Corp. of Fairfax won a $21 million contract from the Navy for engineering support services for acoustic systems.

Charles Stark Draper of Cambridge, Md., won a $14 million contract from the Navy to develop a computer-based integrated engineering environment to support the replacement of existing technologies for the MK-6 guidance system, inertial component engineering to address specific features of current instruments and alternate technologies for accelerometer and gyro technology.

Veridian Engineering Inc. of Alexandria won an $11 million contract from the Navy for engineering services and software development and upgrades for the F-14A/B and F-14B aircraft.

... Harris Technical Services Corp. of Alexandria won a $10 million contract from the Air Force for fiscal 2001 site integration, communication systems and technical support.

Harkin Builders Inc. of Silver Spring won a $9 million contract from the Air Force for demolition services. .

R.R. Gregory Corp. of Waldorf, Md., won a $7 million contract from the Army to build a physical fitness center.

AT&T Corp. of Washington won a $6 million contract from the Navy for the government emergency telecommunications service.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $6 million contract from the Air Force for 16 Trigger Pulse Amplifier units applicable to the APY-1/2 surveillance radar on the E-3 aircraft.

COMSAT General Corp. of Bethesda won a $1 million contract from the Army for the maintenance of satellite communications system and data.

Atlantico Electric Inc. of Yorktown, Va., won a $1 million contract from the Navy for building repairs....

The contracts listed were awarded by the federal government to companies and other vendors in Virginia, Maryland and the District. To submit contract award notices, contact statesnewsservice@usa.net or 202-628-3100, ext. 224.

-------- czech republic

Czechs Launch Temelin N - Plant As Austria Protests

Reuters
Octoober 09, 2000 Filed at 3:05 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-nuclear.html

TEMELIN, Czech Republic (Reuters) - The Czech Republic Monday approved the launch of a nuclear power station near its border with Austria, intensifying a bitter row with Vienna which fears the plant is unsafe.

Thousands of Austrian environmentalists blocked the largest border crossing between the two countries in protest at the Soviet-designed facility.

The Czech Nuclear Safety Office (SUJB) gave the go-ahead for launch of the first reactor of the Temelin nuclear plant, some 31 miles from the Austrian border.

The plant, which has a Western control system, has soured Czech relations with its prosperous southern neighbor. Austria has even threatened to torpedo Czech efforts to join the European Union unless it gets the safety assurances it wants.

``The Temelin nuclear power plant has fulfilled all the requirements of Czech legislation for this phase of the activation process,'' Dana Drabova, chairwoman of the SUJB, told a news conference.

SUJB Deputy Chairman Karel Boehm added that the plant will conduct final checks ``and the launch will occur in about eight hours.'' The first nuclear chain reaction within the plant is not expected until some time Tuesday.

Plant director Frantisek Hezoucky told reporters that the reactor will be running at about 30 percent of capacity in two months and will be in full operation in five months. The plant's second block should be completed 15 months after the first block becomes operational.

The plant, owned by power producer CEZ(CEZPsp.PR), has sparked the fiercest diplomatic conflict with the Czech Republic's western neighbors since the end of Communism.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel wrote to Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman Sunday asking him to postpone Temelin's activation and reaffirming his warning that the issue could obstruct Prague's efforts to join the EU.

``If Temelin is put into operation, consequences can be expected for the membership negotiations...certainly from the Austrian perspective,'' Schuessel said.

The Czech government -- appealing to national sovereignty -- has vowed to push ahead with the launch of the 2,000 megawatt plant and Schuessel said Zeman had ignored all his previous letters on the subject.

He added that this ``refusal of dialogue was regrettable and not in accordance with European principles.''

A police spokesman said the border crossing at Wullowitz had been blocked by tractors and trucks. He said several thousand demonstrators were expected throughout the day, although the demonstration was illegal.

Last Friday, all 15 border crossings between Austria and the Czech Republic were completely blocked for 13 hours.

---

Czech Nuclear Plant Gets Clearance

Associated Press
October 09, 2000 Filed at 2:11 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Czech-Nuclear.html

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Workers took the first steps Monday to begin activating a controversial nuclear power plant 30 miles from the Austrian border.

The plant at the small village of Temelin has been a source of friction between the two countries, with some activists demanding a halt to the project. In a symbolic protest, hundreds of Austrians blocked two border crossings with the Czech Republic on Monday.

``We started with the first preparatory steps immediately after we got the permission,'' plant spokesman Milan Nebesar said Monday.

Vratislav Fajman, inspector of the State Office for Nuclear Safety, said permission to start activating the fuel rods came Monday afternoon.

The first fission reaction was expected in 20 to 30 hours, and energy from the plant's first 1,000-megawatt reactor will be available for commercial use in December.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel on Sunday asked his Czech counterpart, Milos Zeman, to stop the countdown until all security and safety questions are clarified.

Czech officials rejected such demands, arguing the plant meets all security criteria. ``There is no reason to stop Temelin,'' government spokesman Libor Roucek said.

Construction of the 2,000-megawatt, Russian-designed plant was started in 1980 and upgraded by technology provided by the American firm Westinghouse in the 1990s. It is owned by CEZ, the state energy utility company.

Czechs already operate one Soviet-designed, 1,760-megawatt plant built in the mid-1980s near Dukovany, 125 miles east of Prague.

-------- india / pakistan

Pressure India for talks: Pak.

The Hindu
Monday, October 09, 2000
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/10/09/stories/03090005.htm

ISLAMABAD, OCT. 8. Pakistan today asked the world community to ``exert pressure'' on New Delhi to hold talks with Islamabad to resolve the Kashmir issue as it said the prospects of Indo-Pakistan dialogue was ``very poor''.

``The world community should see how it could exert pressure on India for resumption of talks ... The talks should be purposeful to address the root case of tension,'' the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr. Abdul Sattar, told leading Japanese daily Nikkei.

``Prospects of the Indo-Pakistan talks are very poor,'' he said, accusing New Delhi of ``not responding to the call for resumption of stalled talks.''

Referring to the nuclear issue, Mr. Sattar said Pakistan would review its unilateral moratorium on further nuclear tests if ``another country'' conducted explosions. ``We will not be the first to resume tests,'' he said.

On the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin's recent visit to India during which the two countries embarked upon a strategic partnership in nuclear and defence fields and resolved to cooperate in combating international terrorism and religious extremism, Mr. Sattar said Pakistan had no problem about the bilateral ties of other countries as every country had the right to improve ties with other.

Asked about reports that Pakistan had tested long-range Shaheen-II missiles, Mr. Sattar said his country's missile development programme had been going on for a decade and that he had no information about any new tests.

He denied any support to Pakistan by North Korea and China in missile development, saying Islamabad's missile programme was indigenous.

On CTBT, he said the military regime was building a domestic consensus on the issue.

``Pending signatures on the treaty, Pakistan will observe its key obligation of no further tests,'' he added.

- PTI

---

Pakistan Worried by Indo - Russian Defense Deals

Reuters
October 09, 2000 Filed at 7:32 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-pakista.html

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan voiced worries on Monday over defense deals arch-rival India has made with Russia and said major powers should instead try to persuade New Delhi to settle its disputes with Islamabad.

``It is natural for us to feel concerned over the prospect of induction of massive quantities of new equipment and arms recently contracted for purchase from Russia which will be destabilising for the region,'' a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

But the spokesman, Riaz Mohammad Khan, whose comment was Pakistan's first on the contracts signed last week during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to India, said nuclear-capable Pakistan could deter any aggression.

He said Pakistan was pursuing ``a policy of restraint and avoidance of arms race, conventional or nuclear'' and again offered a no-war pact with India.

He said Pakistan's stance was in contrast with New Delhi, which made its ambitions evident by increasing its last defense budget 28 percent.

``This does not augur well for promoting a security environment of trust, peace, stability and confidence,'' he said.

``It is in the interest of the region that nothing is done to whet the Indian ambitions. Instead the major powers can play a positive role by persuading India to resolve disputes and differences and follow the path of dialogue and cooperation.''

Pakistan, a close ally of the United States during the Cold War but now denied U.S. weapons, extended an unusual warmth to a Russian official when Putin sent a special envoy, Sergie Yastrzhembsky, to Islamabad before going to India.

But any optimism generated in Islamabad by Yastrzhembsky's September 26-27 visit about the possibility of better relations with Moscow seemed dampened by defense deals between Cold War-era friends India and Russia.

Khan called Pakistan's defenses as ``impregnable'' and said ''the world knows we have the capability to deter any aggression against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan.''

Pakistan demonstrated its nuclear capability by testing its nuclear bombs in May 1998 in response to similar tests by India in a development that brought international condemnation and economic sanctions for both countries.

Russia and India last week forged a strategic partnership under which they agreed not to join any military political alliance, associations or armed conflict against each other and also signed four agreements, including for the purchase by India of T-90 S battle tanks and Sokhoi-30 MKI fighter jets, an a protocol on military technical cooperation.

U.S. weapons supplies have been the mainstay of Pakistan's military, but Washington banned weapon sales to Islamabad in 1990 because of its objections to Pakistan's nuclear program.

-------- korea

North Korean's historic visit to U.S.

CNN
October 9, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ASIANOW/east/10/08/north.korea.usa.reut/index.html

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- North Korea's second-most powerful official, Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, arrived in San Francisco on Sunday for a one-day stopover before heading to Washington where he will become the highest-ranking North Korean ever to visit the U.S. capital.

Former Defence Secretary William Perry, who is hosting Jo during his visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, met the vice marshal as he left his airplane.

Jo waved to photographers as he walked from his plane at the San Francisco airport, but did not talk with reporters.

While in the Bay Area, Jo is expected to visit telecommunications equipment maker Lucent Technology Inc. (LU.N) for meetings with the firm's executives.

Jo, a soldier with 50 years of service at one of the hot spots of East-West conflict, comes to Washington as the special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, son of the founder North Korea.

The visit, which marks the fall of another Cold War barrier, has been in the making for almost a year.

It shows how far North Korea and the United States, enemies in the 1950-1953 Korean War, have come in a gradual rapprochement driven largely by U.S. fears of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile technology and its military sales to governments that Washington dislikes.

It also comes in tandem with a thaw in relations between North and South Korea, which culminated in the June summit between Kim Jong-il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

The United States wants to talk to Jo about his country's weapons programmes, its status as a "state sponsor of terrorism" and how to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.

But Ambassador Wendy Sherman, coordinator of U.S. policy toward North Korea, tried last week to play down any expectations that the visit will lead to breakthroughs.

"The very fact of this visit is important and I believe historic. We are hopeful of course ... that we will make progress on issues as well. But I think that remains to be seen, because this is a long process," she told reporters.

The countries still have no diplomatic relations but have been talking about opening liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang as a first step toward exchanging ambassadors.

"These discussions are underway and we are hopeful that as we move forward in this process that we can begin to take additional steps that would move to normalise our relationship," Sherman said.

They took a minor step forward on terrorism last week when they issued a joint statement agreeing to exchange information and work toward removing North Korea from a U.S. list of seven countries deemed to be "state sponsors of terrorism."

But the North Koreans have not yet complied with a U.S. demand that they expel members of the extreme leftist Japanese Red Army who hijacked a Japanese airliner to North Korea in 1970.

"They know what they have to do. They've always known. They still know. And we'll see how quickly that can happen," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

The United States will especially want to find out more from Vice Marshal Jo about Kim Jong-il's proposal to give up ballistic missile programmes in return for foreign assistance with launching North Korean satellites.

Robert Manning, director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said a possible outcome would be a permanent freeze on the missile programmes, one step beyond the temporary suspension North Korea announced last year.

He envisioned a deal similar to the Agreed Framework of 1994, in which Pyongyang froze its nuclear programmes in return for financial help for fuel oil and new nuclear power plants.

As a former air force commander and the leader of military delegations to many countries through the 1990s, Jo is well placed to talk about Washington's proliferation fears.

He went to Russia in 1994, Cuba in 1994 and 1997, Pakistan in 1995, Syria in 1998 and China in May this year with Kim Jong-il, according to published reports.

But no U.S. official has ever met Jo and little is known about his personality. Published accounts say he is about 78 years old but an official biography provided by North Korea listed only his military and official appointments.

While in Washington, Jo will meet President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary William Cohen.

-------- russia

Attempt To Recover Russian Sailors

Associated Press
October 09, 2000 Filed at 11:16 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Norway-Russian-Submarine.html

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- Divers from Russia, Britain and Scandinavia left a western Norway port Monday on a grim mission to recover bodies of Russian sailors from the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk.

The divers sailed aboard the Regalia, a rig normally used by the offshore oil industry. The rig is expected to take 10 or 11 days to reach the site in the Barents Sea off northwestern Russia where the Kursk went down Aug. 12, killing all 118 people aboard.

Russia's Rubin military design bureau and the Norwegian subsidiary of the U.S.-based Halliburton oil services company are leading the recovery mission. Rubin has said it expects to bring up no more than about 50 bodies because of the extensive damage the submarine suffered.

The roughly 80-member crew of the Regalia includes nine Russian and nine other divers from Britain and Scandinavia. It left an offshore oil base near Bergen, the main city on Norway's west coast, on Monday morning, Halliburton said.

Company spokesman Birger Haraldseid said the team will train together during the trip to the arctic. Only the Russian divers are planning to enter the Kursk, which lies under 330 feet of water.

The companies have not said how long the operation will take or how much it will cost.

Russian officials have not determined why the Kursk, one of the most modern vessels in the nation's fleet, sank during military training maneuvers. The Russian navy tried for days to reach the crew before asking for international help. A team of British and Norwegian divers reached the scene a week after the accident, only to determine that the submarine was full of water and the crew was dead.

-------- ukraine

SCIENCE - Nuclear Fallout: Mutant Wheat

Compiled from reports
by Rob Stein and Kathy Sawyer
Monday, October 9, 2000 ; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35933-2000Oct8?language=printer

It's been 14 years since the Chernobyl nuclear accident shocked the world and spewed radiation into the surrounding Ukrainian countryside. Scientists are still trying to assess the lingering effects of the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster.

Now, Olga Kovalchuk from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues have studied the effects of radiation around the crippled facility on wheat plants. They grew genetically identical plants in heavily contaminated soil near Chernobyl and in clean soil about 19 miles away and then analyzed the offspring of those plants.

Offspring grown in contaminated land had six times the number of genetic mutations, the researchers reported in the Oct. 5 issue of Nature. "Theoretically, this low-level exposure should not cause such a large increase in the mutation rate, suggesting that chronic exposure to ionizing radiation has effects that are as yet unknown," they wrote.

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

Investigations Demanded by Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free

Mon, 9 Oct 2000 18:54:50 -0700 (PDT)
For Immediate Release: October 2, 2000

Contact Erik Ringelberg (307) 732-2040

INCREASED RADIATION CONTAMINATION IN AFTERMATH OF WILDFIRES AT IDAHO NUCLEAR FACILITY; RESIDENTS CHARGE DOE WITH IGNORING FIRE WARNINGS AND DOWNPLAYING HEALTH RISKS - ASK ENERGY SECRETARY RICHARDSON TO INTERVENE

(Jackson, WY) - Major fires that raged in July at a U.S. Department of Energy nuclear facility in Idaho burned over radioactively contaminated ground. Contrary to initial claims by the Department of Energy (DOE), its own tests show a massive increase in radioactive air contamination in the immediate aftermath of the fires at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). In a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Jackson Hole, Wyoming residents, led by the group Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free (KYNF), charged INEEL officials with being ill-prepared to fight the fires and with intentionally misleading the public about the location of the fires and threats to public health from radiation released into the atmosphere . The community of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park are both 90 miles downwind of INEEL.

On July 28 and 29, the biggest wildfires in more than a decade raged at INEEL. More than 49,000 acres of the facility were burned. DOE originally claimed that, "The fire did not burn over any areas of know (sic) contamination." However, DOE's own follow up tests - the recently released results show radiation levels in the aftermath of the fire were up to 200-600% higher than normal. In addition, DOE documents discovered on the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality's web page clearly show that the fire overran a number of contaminated sites. Despite all this, DOE claims those radiation increases were not caused by radioactive contamination from INEEL and pose no added health risks.

KYNF asserted that DOE was not as prepared as it could and should have been to fight the blazes. INEEL ignored warnings by the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho that this summer would likely be a higher than normal hazard or severe season for fires. Yet, reasonable precautions, such as hiring additional firefighting personnel, contracting with private firefighting programs, or even aggressively fighting the initial ignitions and spot fires, were not taken.

"If DOE was as good at cleaning up its contamination as it is at covering up, and had heeded warnings in the spring of extreme fires, perhaps these fires wouldn't have further jeopardized the health of the thousands of people living downwind of INEEL," said KYNF executive director Erik Ringelberg. "Furthermore, DOE did not warn residents once the fires did strike contaminated grounds. Thus, people were not able to take precautionary measures like staying indoors, which reduces the risk of contamination by up to 50 percent, added Ringelberg.

DOE recently made false statements concerning similar wildfires that burned in June at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington. DOE's claims that the Hanford fires did not release radiation were also later proven false. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that plutonium was indeed released into the air from the Hanford fires. The Post-Intelligencer also reported that in the days during and after the fire, government officials reassured the public that they were safe from radiation exposure. These fires followed a prescribed burn earlier this season that quickly got out of control near the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

In a separate letter, KYNF requested that the DOE develop an independent oversight and monitoring program similar to that which is in place at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The LANL program for independent oversight was approved by federal court in a Consent Order. The Consent Order was the result of DOE's falsification of air monitoring records.

The response to Richardson should be directed to his personal (sec.) line (202) 586-6210 and his fax (202) 586-4403.

-------- idaho

Idaho lab wins uranium filtration project

Environmental News Network
Monday, October 9, 2000
By Jennifer Langston, Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2000/10/10092000/krt_filter_32366.asp

Argonne National Laboratory-West has been awarded a project that will keep scientists and technicians busy for the next seven to 12 years.

The Department of Energy has decided to use a treatment developed at the lab to separate uranium from fission products and sodium in spent nuclear fuel. The decision brings stability to the former hotbed of nuclear research, which has lost 20 percent of its employees in the last six years and has faced an uncertain future.

It's also the best way to treat the fuel and put it in a safer condition, said Paul Pugmire, director of public affairs for the lab. The fuel used in Idaho's EBR-II reactor was cooled with sodium, which can explode or ignite when exposed to air or water. Before the fuel can leave the state of Idaho and be put in an underground repository, it must be treated to separate and stabilize the sodium. "This action turns the corner for Argonne-West," Pugmire said. "It will provide programmatic stability for the next seven to 12 years. We're also pleased because it's the right thing to do." After years of letting people go through attrition or early retirement, the lab could actually see its employment rolls grow again, Pugmire said. There have been about 250 people working on the spent fuel technology.

Having a steady funding source that keeps people working may also help the laboratory hang on until more funding materializes to develop new generations of nuclear reactors, which might be sold in other countries.

"In order to be at the table for some of those programs, you have to have a core of facilities and people who are capable of doing that," he said. "You've got to keep them actively engaged in doing productive, valuable work." Argonne spent three years developing the electrometallurgical treatment process, which dissolves spent nuclear fuel in a vat of molten salt and uses an electric current to pull out uranium, which is melted into ingots.

The other waste products, such as plutonium, fission products and sodium are mixed with minerals and glass and turned into ceramic blocks. The remaining contaminated cladding is melted to produce a metallic high-level waste. The three-year demonstration project ended last fall. The program's future was in limbo while DOE considered whether or not to treat the rest of the fuel using Argonne's technology.

The agency also looked at melting and diluting the fuel, putting it in storage cans or using a process developed at Savannah River. It decided that the technology pioneered at Argonne was the best method.

The DOE delayed making a decision on how spent fuel from the Fermi power plant in Michigan will be handled. That fuel, which is also stored in Idaho, could be treated at Argonne if no other technologies emerge in the future.

-------- new mexico

Richardson wants probe of discrimination

USA Today
10/09/00- Updated 05:26 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsmon01.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Richardson-Racial-Profiling.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - Amid lingering resentment among Asian-Americans over the Wen Ho Lee case, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced safeguards Monday to guard against racial profiling within the department or among its private contractors.

Richardson said he would ''not tolerate even hints'' of racial profiling and ordered his inspector general to investigate whether any such activity has occurred.

''We have made progress addressing concerns of racial profiling, but more needs to be done,'' Richardson said.

Richardson said in an interview that he remains convinced that Lee, Taiwan-born former Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory scientist, was not singled out in an espionage investigation because of his Asian background.

Still, said Richardson, there are ''enough instances throughout the complex'' to raise suspicion that such discrimination may have occurred in other circumstances.

''I want to eliminate once and for all any future suspicions,'' he said, although not elaborating on specific cases. ''I will not tolerate even hints of racial profiling.''

In addition to the inspector general's probe, Richardson ordered revision of outside contracts to include guarantees against racial profiling; and he ruled that a contractor can be forced to pay for failing to deal with profiling.

Richardson acted against a backdrop of resentment among Asian-Americans about handling of the Lee case, an issue that could have political overtones just weeks before the presidential election.

''This case, perhaps more than any other cause we've seen, has really galvanized the (Asian-American) community, more than campaign finance reform, more than welfare reform,'' said Victor Hwang, an attorney for the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus.

Hwang, whose group has joined a lawsuit Lee filed against the government charging privacy infringement, said he views the additional actions by Richardson ''as a way to deflect an external investigation.''

Asian-Americans have joined into a growing political force especially in such key states as California. Many Asian-American activists have been outspoken critics of the Clinton administration's treatment of Lee, from singling him out early on as virtually the only target in a lengthy espionage investigation to confining him for nine months without opportunity for bail.

Last month Lee, 60, who was fired from his job at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in March 1999, was freed from jail after the government dropped all but one of 59 security violation charges. He was never charged with espionage, and no evidence surfaced that he provided secrets to anyone.

The Lee case ''has been resolved. We think the matter is closed,'' Hwang said. The broader issue remains of others who may have been or still are being singled out because of race, Hwang said in a telephone interview.

For three years prior to Lee's firing at Los Alamos, he was the primary focus of an FBI investigation into the alleged loss in the 1980s of one of the country's most sophisticated nuclear warheads.

Intelligence experts since have said if China obtained the information, it could have come from many sources.

Richardson and Attorney General Janet Reno have denied Lee was singled out because of his race or national origin. The former counterintelligence chief at Los Alamos, Robert Vrooman, has insisted that Lee was.

''Every time Lee's motive was discussed, I came down to his ethnicity,'' Vrooman reiterated at a Senate hearing last week.

---

Pentagon Can't Find Deutch Disks

Associated Press
October 09, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Deutch-Secrets.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon investigators have been unable to locate computer diskettes that ex-CIA Director John Deutch used to store a journal when working at the Defense Department, officials say. The journal contained classified information.

Deutch has declined to be interviewed about the whereabouts of the disks, created during his tenure as deputy defense secretary in the mid-1990s, officials said.

``There's no way to tell what their ultimate disposition might have been without talking to Dr. Deutch, and he has declined requests for our investigators to talk with him on this or other topics,'' Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

The investigation of the missing diskettes comes after CIA officials already concluded that Deutch improperly recorded government secrets in a private journal about his government experiences. He stored the journal on electronic storage cards during his tenure as head of the spy agency.

While the storage cards he used at CIA have been recovered, the Pentagon was unable to locate the diskettes Deutch created during his Defense Department days, when he began the journal, officials said Monday.

The Pentagon has been conducting a damage assessment to determine if his action jeopardized national security. The Justice Department also is investigating whether any criminal charges are warranted.

Deutch's lawyer on Monday declined comment, citing the investigations. Deutch cooperated with the CIA probe, and earlier this year apologized for sloppy handling of classified information.

At CIA's urging, Pentagon criminal investigators began their own inquiry in February into Deutch's handling of classified information when he was the No. 2 defense official from 1993 to 1995.

They concluded he began compiling the journal during his tenure at the Pentagon and stored it on diskettes.

``Dr. Deutch was known to transport these floppy disks in his shirt pocket,'' the investigators wrote in their report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The investigators also found Deutch began to experience technical problems with the disks at the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, prompting him to change to higher-capacity storage cards at CIA.

The electronic cards can store hundreds of times more information than a single floppy disk.

According to the final draft report, Pentagon investigators also found Deutch ``declined departmental requests that he allow security systems to be installed in his residence,'' where he sometimes worked on classified documents. His home computers were sometimes used to access the Internet.

The missing diskettes are likely to focus new attention on the government's ability to protect its most important secrets -- an issue that has received extensive scrutiny in the aftermath of the Wen Ho Lee case at the Energy Department nuclear weapons labs.

Lee was accused of downloading 10 computer tapes of nuclear weapons design secrets from the labs. Unable to locate seven tapes, the government charged Lee with 59 felonies and kept him in solitary confinement for nine months while trying to build a case against him. The government eventually reached a plea bargain in which Lee pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets. He also agreed to tell what he did with the information he admits to having downloaded onto tapes and unsecure computers.

The government has not charged Deutch with any wrongdoing.

The Pentagon investigators who probed Deutch raised concerns about lax Pentagon computer security.

They noted that some computers the ex-official used were donated to schools without the hard drives being destroyed. When investigators located the computers, they were able to recover significant Pentagon information.

None of the information was classified, but the investigators warned that such lax security could result in ``the improper release and use of classified or sensitive information.

``Current policy on what is required to dispose of these types of hard drives is not clear. We recommend that the department implement policy that requires the destruction of all computer hard drives, classified and unclassified, before the computer is disposed of outside the DOD,'' investigators wrote.

-------- us nuc politics

Gore, Bush agree: Pentagon needs more money

October 9, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200010922456.htm

Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush differ on the combat readiness of today's armed forces, but they do agree on one critically important issue: The Pentagon needs more money.

Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush both say they would increase the Pentagon's top line above this fiscal year's $309 billion budget.

They would boost pay beyond increases already enacted by Congress, build new housing and buy loads of new equipment. Both say the military needs to further transform itself from a Cold War force into lighter, more agile units able to respond quickly to overseas wars and disasters.

Mr. Bush refuses to specify the increase, saying the top number will be determined once he reviews strategy and forces.

Mr. Gore, in a recent speech to National Guardsman, spoke of devoting $100 billion of the projected federal surplus to new Pentagon spending. The figure is about in line with five-year increases proposed by President Clinton after the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him in 1998 their forces suffered a readiness problem.

Still, Democrat Gore and Republican Bush would lead the 1.4 million active force down decidedly different paths in terms of its culture, defense systems and overseas deployments.

Among the differences:

• Mr. Gore says one of his first acts as president would be to lift the military's ban on open homosexuals. At first, he said he would require candidates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support that policy before he would appoint them. He later backed off, saying he would expect the chiefs to carry out his order. One big stumbling block: The ban on open homosexuals is federal law, signed by Mr. Clinton in 1993, meaning Mr. Gore needs concurrence by both the House and the Senate.

Mr. Bush says he supports the current policy known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allows homosexuals to serve as long as they keep their sexuality private.

• Bush aides say he is inclined to change the disputed policy of mixing male and female recruits during basic training. The practice was condemned by a blue-ribbon Pentagon panel, but the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force balked at change. The Marine Corps trains the sexes separately in boot camp. Mr. Bush will examine separate training in the first weeks of training to give the young people time to acclimate to military life.

Unlike his position on homosexuals, Mr. Gore says he will leave the question of mixed-sex training up to the Joint Chiefs.

• Mr. Bush argues the military is over-stressed and over-deployed. One of his first acts would be to review all overseas deployments, especially in such open-ended missions as Bosnia and Kosovo, to see if U.S. allies can take over. Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard B. Cheney mentions Haiti as one peacekeeping mission he would never have asked American troops to undertake.

Mr. Gore has backed Mr. Clinton's decisions to send American troops on some 50 peacekeeping and war missions.

• The two candidates diverge sharply on building a missile defense against a limited attack of nuclear intercontinental missiles.

Mr. Bush would deploy the system in Alaska as soon as it proved itself in realistic test intercepts. He would also pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty if Russia refused to amend the agreement to allow for the anti-missile system.

Mr. Gore, however, says only that he supports developing the technology. He would stick with the ABM treaty - a stand missile defense advocates say means he would never deploy the system.

The candidates are leaving fundamental questions about force structure to reviews they would conduct once in office. Mr. Gore says his staff would quickly insert itself into the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The assessment of strategy and forces is due out next June.

Pentagon officials are looking at the 10 active-division Army, the 300-ship Navy and 13-fighter-wing Air Force. They will decide whether the units can still carry out the national military strategy of being capable of fighting two regional conflicts.

In speeches, Mr. Bush talks of skipping a generation in weapons development to give troops even more advanced systems now on the drawing board. He wants to allocate 20 percent of total procurement spending (now at $60 billion) for such research.

His advisers caution, however, that this does not mean he will cancel near-term weapons such as the F-22 Stealth fighter or multiservice joint strike fighter.

"It's got to be a balance between modernizing the current force and beginning to transform that force to the force of the future," said Steve Hadley, a Bush foreign policy adviser. "He has not gotten into the business of endorsing particular weapons systems."

Visit our Election 2000 page for daily election news and analysis

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

Protest targets Redstone for role in U.S. plans for weapons in space Demonstrations set today in 65 locations around the world

Alabama Live
October 09, 2000
By BRIAN LAWSON Times Business Writer
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/Oct2000/7-e29734.html

Protesters are gathering in 65 locations around the world today, from Azerbaijan to Huntsville, to express their opposition to a U.S. military presence in outer space.

The protests are being coordinated by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. There will be demonstrations and actions in Europe and Asia and at a number of U.S. military facilities, including Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

Demonstrators plan to gather outside Gate 9 at Redstone, off of Rideout Road, beginning at noon.

David Waters, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Birmingham, plans to take part in the demonstration here.

''Huntsville is one of the sites they are considering to build a space-based laser,'' Waters said. ''With nuclear weapons, you think about how much destruction can be done with them, even inadvertently, it makes you wonder about our leaders. They don't need to start building weapons in space.''

Waters said he doesn't expect a large turnout for the Huntsville protest, but regards the event as a first step toward kindling public awareness about the consequences of the military's plans.

The date for the protest was set several months ago, in anticipation of President Clinton's decision concerning deployment of a National Missile Defense system. It was timed to occur prior to the elections in November.

Clinton deferred the decision in September, opting to let the next president make the choice.

The NMD program has a significant economic impact on Huntsville. More than 1,300 people, spread among 13 defense contractors, work on the project, which is budgeted at $1.7 billion over the next three years.

Calls to officials at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville were not returned Friday.

There are a number of programs being considered for missile defense. The National Missile Defense system relies on nonnuclear, ground-based weapons to shoot down enemy missiles. The system's detectors are designed to be based in space.

''Star Wars'' is the popular description for a space-based missile defense system, which would use lasers or other weapons to shoot down ballistic missiles launched at the United States.

The Global Network protesters are deeply distrustful of plans for a ballistic missile defense system.

---

The light that kills

Alabama Live
October 09, 2000
KENT FAULK
News staff writer
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/Oct2000/5-e427583b.html

HUNTSVILLE - Small rockets and mortars hurled toward a platoon of soldiers are zapped out of the sky by a laser mounted on a truck.

As an enemy truck convoy heads toward the front line, a helicopter swoops down, points its laser turret at the trucks and blows out the tires.

A desperate enemy launches a missile with a nuclear warhead toward the United States. Space-based sensors spot it and the missile is shot down within seconds by a laser mounted on an orbiting satellite.

Welcome to the battlefield of 2020.

Those scenarios have echoes of a science fiction movie, but the United States is spending billions of real tax dollars to develop combat lasers that can be mounted on trucks, helicopters, airplanes and satellites.

"We believe it does have a place on the battlefield of the future," said Dick Bradshaw, director of the directed energy office at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville.

Bradshaw's office oversees several laser projects, including the Tactical High Energy Laser, or THEL. That $250 million program is being developed with Israel and prime contractor TRW. It is designed to knock down short-range rockets, artillery and mortars for which troops have only seconds or minutes to respond.

THEL has gotten further along in development than any other U.S. combat laser. In tests this summer, it shot down at least two Katyusha rockets at a time. Katyushas are sometimes launched from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.

The THEL demonstrator is housed in tractor-trailer-sized containers, but could be shrunk and turned into a truly mobile system in four to seven years, said Tom Romesser, vice president and deputy general manager for laser programs in TRW's space and laser programs division.

Lasers - short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation - are devices that produce beams of intense light. Depending on its power, the laser beam can cut through the skin of missiles, rockets and mortars in about a second. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so lasers can react more quickly than other air defense weapons, experts say.

THEL's laser beam is created by a chemical reaction. But the Army's directed energy program is sponsoring work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California on an electrically powered solid-state laser, Bradshaw said. The laser could be put on a small truck.

Congress gave it $20 million in next year's budget, the most the 3-year-old program has gotten.

Research also is going on in military and private industry labs around the country to develop other combat lasers.

One is the Airborne Tactical Laser being developed by the Boeing Co. in California. It is to be put on an Army CH-47D Chinook helicopter or on a Navy MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

Very precise

Originally designed to shoot down low-flying cruise missiles, it's so precise it could cut radio antennas or blow out the tires on enemy trucks, Army and Boeing officials say.

Most of the money spent so far is for designing lasers to shoot down mediumand long-range missiles that could carry nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.

The Air Force and the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization are developing a Space Based Laser that can shoot down such a missile shortly after it's launched and still above enemy territory.

The Space Based Laser Integrated Flight Experiment is a $3 billion project to launch a satellite with a laser on it in 2012. The experimental laser is to be tested over the following three years against dummy ballistic missiles. The team of TRW, Boeing and Lockheed Martin has a contract to build it.

If the experiment is successful, the military envisions a constellation of 20 space-based lasers around 2020 that could provide an added layer for the proposed National Missile Defense system.

A $115 million system test facility will be built to assemble and test the satellite. Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville is one of three sites being considered for that facility.

"We are expecting a site selection decision by the end of December," said Lt. Col. Coe Woods, spokeswoman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

Critics of a space-based system worry about what it would do to world peace to put a military weapons in space.

"There's a concern about what the reaction of other countries might be," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One concern is that because the space-based lasers would be capable of shooting down Russia's missiles, it could halt any more arms-reduction talks with that country. Another is that if a space-based laser is developed, other countries might develop anti-satellite systems to knock it and other satellites out of orbit, she said.

"The U.S. has more to lose than anybody else does," she said, referring to the number of satellites the United States has in orbit.

Whether the United States decides to build the space-based lasers, the nation needs to continue developing the capability, others say. Russia and other countries are developing combat lasers, they say.

"If we wait until we absolutely have to build a technology, we can't do it overnight," Lt. Col. Woods said.

The space-based laser experiment will use a chemical laser similar to the airborne laser being developed by the Air Force to put on a Boeing 747 airplane. This laser - larger than the airborne tactical laser - also would be used to knock down ballistic missiles soon after they are launched.

It is scheduled for a major demonstration in 2003, and a fleet couldn't be ready until the end of the decade, said TRW's Romesser, whose company is also involved in that project.

Lasers won't replace missiles or other air defense weapons because they have limitations, such as the possible effect of weather on the laser beam, experts say.

"What we will see is laser systems emerging as a critical piece of the arsenal," Romesser said.

---

The candidates

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Monday, October 9, 2000
Political Almanac
POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF and NEWS SERVICES
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/national/alma09.shtml

George W. Bush: Holed up at his central Texas ranch to prepare for Wednesday's debate with Al Gore in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Al Gore: Headed to Sarasota, Fla., for his own debate prep sessions.

Dick Cheney: Spent yesterday at home in Wyoming but was headed to the Pacific Northwest today for appearances in Washington state and Oregon.

Joseph Lieberman: Raised $400,000 for the Democratic National Committee at a brunch at a private Washington home before pausing to observe Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

News of note

In a strategic shift, Bush will begin advertising aggressively in California, the nation's most vote-rich state and one that polls have indicated is solid Gore territory.

GOP and Bush campaign leaders said they believe California is winnable. But some political analysts and even some Republicans suspect Bush is seeking to force Gore to spend money in the state.

Starting tomorrow or Wednesday, the Republican National Committee will spend about $1 million a week exclusively in the Los Angeles area, where nearly half the state's voters live, GOP and campaign officials said Saturday.

The ads will air on network television through the final month of the campaign, party officials said.

The spots are the same ones airing in battleground states, and probably will focus on education and prescription-drug benefits. Campaign officials said they will air often enough so that the average viewer will see them 10 times a week -- a "saturation buy."

On foreign policy

Some differences between Gore and Bush on foreign affairs issues:

NATIONAL SECURITY

Gore: Supports a broadened definition of U.S. national security interests to include global environmental, health, humanitarian and other issues.

Bush: Calls for more limited foreign involvement, avoiding peacekeeping operations and other foreign deployments that do not directly protect U.S. interests.

YUGOSLAVIA

Gore: Stresses need to lift sanctions and offer help after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic while pursuing his indictment for war crimes.

Bush: Stresses need to keep Russia involved in ridding country of Milosevic as opposition takes over.

MISSILE DEFENSE

Gore: Supports development of technology for limited missile defense while seeking Russian agreement to amend the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Bush: Supports robust anti-missile shield, seeking Russia's agreement to amend ABM, but proceeding if necessary without such agreement.

NUCLEAR ARMS

Gore: Opposes unilateral nuclear arms cuts.

Bush: Supports U.S. cuts in nuclear arms even if Russia doesn't match them.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

Gore: Negotiated and supports Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse gases to reduce global warming.

Bush: Opposes ratification of Kyoto agreement.

IMMIGRATION

Gore: Change rules that favor admission of Cubans and Nicaraguans over others from the region so Central American asylum seekers overall, as well as Haitians, are on a more equitable footing.

Bush: Split Immigration and Naturalization Service into two services devoted to welcoming legal immigrants and cracking down harder on illegal ones.

TRADE

Gore: Negotiate more trade agreements, but attach environmental, labor and human rights standards to them. Favors increased cooperation and trade in this hemisphere.

Bush: Negotiate more trade agreements, giving priority to a free-trade agreement for the Western Hemisphere.

Today's trail

Bush, Texas.

Gore, Florida.

Cheney, Washington state and Oregon.

---

Gore, Bush agree: Pentagon needs more money

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-200010922456.htm

Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush differ on the combat readiness of today's armed forces, but they do agree on one critically important issue: The Pentagon needs more money.

Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush both say they would increase the Pentagon's top line above this fiscal year's $309 billion budget.

They would boost pay beyond increases already enacted by Congress, build new housing and buy loads of new equipment. Both say the military needs to further transform itself from a Cold War force into lighter, more agile units able to respond quickly to overseas wars and disasters.

Mr. Bush refuses to specify the increase, saying the top number will be determined once he reviews strategy and forces.

Mr. Gore, in a recent speech to National Guardsman, spoke of devoting $100 billion of the projected federal surplus to new Pentagon spending. The figure is about in line with five-year increases proposed by President Clinton after the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him in 1998 their forces suffered a readiness problem.

Still, Democrat Gore and Republican Bush would lead the 1.4 million active force down decidedly different paths in terms of its culture, defense systems and overseas deployments.

Among the differences:

• Mr. Gore says one of his first acts as president would be to lift the military's ban on open homosexuals. At first, he said he would require candidates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support that policy before he would appoint them. He later backed off, saying he would expect the chiefs to carry out his order. One big stumbling block: The ban on open homosexuals is federal law, signed by Mr. Clinton in 1993, meaning Mr. Gore needs concurrence by both the House and the Senate.

Mr. Bush says he supports the current policy known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allows homosexuals to serve as long as they keep their sexuality private.

• Bush aides say he is inclined to change the disputed policy of mixing male and female recruits during basic training. The practice was condemned by a blue-ribbon Pentagon panel, but the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force balked at change. The Marine Corps trains the sexes separately in boot camp. Mr. Bush will examine separate training in the first weeks of training to give the young people time to acclimate to military life.

Unlike his position on homosexuals, Mr. Gore says he will leave the question of mixed-sex training up to the Joint Chiefs.

• Mr. Bush argues the military is over-stressed and over-deployed. One of his first acts would be to review all overseas deployments, especially in such open-ended missions as Bosnia and Kosovo, to see if U.S. allies can take over. Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard B. Cheney mentions Haiti as one peacekeeping mission he would never have asked American troops to undertake.

Mr. Gore has backed Mr. Clinton's decisions to send American troops on some 50 peacekeeping and war missions.

• The two candidates diverge sharply on building a missile defense against a limited attack of nuclear intercontinental missiles.

Mr. Bush would deploy the system in Alaska as soon as it proved itself in realistic test intercepts. He would also pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty if Russia refused to amend the agreement to allow for the anti-missile system.

Mr. Gore, however, says only that he supports developing the technology. He would stick with the ABM treaty - a stand missile defense advocates say means he would never deploy the system.

The candidates are leaving fundamental questions about force structure to reviews they would conduct once in office. Mr. Gore says his staff would quickly insert itself into the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The assessment of strategy and forces is due out next June.

Pentagon officials are looking at the 10 active-division Army, the 300-ship Navy and 13-fighter-wing Air Force. They will decide whether the units can still carry out the national military strategy of being capable of fighting two regional conflicts.

In speeches, Mr. Bush talks of skipping a generation in weapons development to give troops even more advanced systems now on the drawing board. He wants to allocate 20 percent of total procurement spending (now at $60 billion) for such research.

His advisers caution, however, that this does not mean he will cancel near-term weapons such as the F-22 Stealth fighter or multiservice joint strike fighter.

"It's got to be a balance between modernizing the current force and beginning to transform that force to the force of the future," said Steve Hadley, a Bush foreign policy adviser. "He has not gotten into the business of endorsing particular weapons systems."

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

-------- drug war

Fox wants multinational war on drugs

USA Today
10/09/00- Updated 07:04 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#mide

BOGOTA, Colombia - President-elect Vicente Fox of Mexico says there must be a coordinated multinational war against drug trafficking. Mexico is a major route for cocaine entering the United States from Colombia. Fox said after meeting Sunday with Colombian President Andres Pastrana, ''We have to think of ways to coordinate.'' Wealthy and violent Mexican drug-trafficking cartels have corrupted branches of Mexico's government. With backing from the United States, the Colombian leader is launching a military offensive against drug producers and leftist rebels who protect cocaine-producing plantations.

-------- korea

Clinton Will Meet North Korean Aide

Associated Press
October 09, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-North-Korea.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The highest North Korean official to visit Washington in a half century of limited contacts plans a historic meeting with President Clinton on Tuesday, amid signs the State Department soon may remove the communist country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Clinton will hold a midmorning meeting with the first vice chairman of the country's National Defense Commission, Cho Myong Nok. He is described as the right-hand man to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

After a daylong visit to San Francisco, Cho was arriving here Monday night for meetings with Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen and members of Congress.

During his stay on the West Coast, Cho was hosted by former Defense Secretary William Perry, who stepped down recently as an adviser to Clinton on North Korea. Cho's visit reciprocates a Perry visit to Pyongyang in 1999.

In June, Clinton eased economic sanctions against North Korea but has been unable to take further steps because its terrorist-state status bars the country from receiving all but humanitarian aid.

The Clinton administration has been making a concerted effort to get North Korea on a peaceful path after long years in which Pyongyang was widely regarded as the greatest threat to peace in Asia.

Don Oberdorfer, a Korea expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said U.S. officials were ``amazed and pleased'' when the North Koreans offered to send Cho to Washington. The administration had been expecting a lower ranking official from the Foreign Ministry.

``The main concerns of the U.S. are regarding military and security issues. This guy is in a much better position to speak to those than a Foreign Ministry type,'' Oberdorfer said.

He described Cho as a top general who is outranked only by Kim Jong Il himself on the defense commission.

Clinton acknowledged last week that he strongly supports reconciliation and said he sees Cho's visit as a step toward achieving that goal.

He spoke shortly after the State Department made public a joint U.S.-North Korean communique in which Pyongyang said it opposes all forms of terrorism and believes that all U.N. member states must refrain from such activity.

The statement was based on a series of discussions between the two countries, the latest of which ended last week. Pyongyang has been on the list since the 1987 bombing of a South Korean passenger jet near Myanmar that killed all 115 people on board. Pyongyang has not been implicated in any major incidents since then.

U.S. officials have been advising the North Koreans during the discussions on what they must do to be removed from the terrorism list. One measure of the administration's eagerness for warmer ties is that, of the seven countries on the terrorism list, only North Korea has been getting advice on how to get off of it.

``I personally am very hopeful that, in the coming days, we will make some progress on this very critical and difficult issue,'' said Ambassador Wendy Sherman, Albright's top assistant for North Korea.

Conservative groups are wary about the North's intentions, noting that the country's military posture has remained essentially unchanged since the breakthrough summit in June between Kim the North Korean leader, and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Another U.S. concern has been North Korean missile exports to Iran and Syria. As Cho was preparing for his Washington visit, the London Sunday Telegraph reported that Libya has taken delivery of North Korean No-Dong surface-to-surface ballistic launchers and missiles, capable of hitting targets in Israel and NATO states in southern Europe.

The State Department had no comment Monday on the report.

-------

STATESIDE NEWS . . . .

THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
MONDAY OCTOBER 9, 2000
http://morrock.com

HIGH-RANKING NO. KOREAN IN U.S.: Vice Marshal Jo Myong-ronk of North Korea, the highest-ranking official from his country ever to schedule a visit to Washington, arrived in San Francisco on Monday en route to the U.S. capital. He planned a visit to Lucent Technology before heading off to Washington and a visit that underlines the major recent thaw in the 50-year-old diplomatic standoff between the two countries.

-------- space

Another delay for Discovery

USA Today
10/09/00- Updated 09:42 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsmon02.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Gusty wind forced NASA to call off Monday night's planned launch of space shuttle Discovery on a space station construction mission.

The flight was already four days late because of mechanical problems, which were resolved over the weekend. Spokesman Bruce Buckingham said high wind Monday morning disrupted preparations for fueling.

NASA will try again on Tuesday evening, though windy weather could still be a problem. Discovery was supposed to depart for the international space station last Thursday but was grounded by concerns over bolts on the external fuel tank. A sluggish valve in the shuttle's engine compartment also had to be replaced.

Shuttle managers wrapped up the bolt issue Sunday and declared Discovery safe to fly.

While reviewing film from Atlantis' launch last month, engineers noticed Wednesday that one of the bolts on the external fuel tank did not retract fully when the tank separated from the shuttle eight minutes into the flight as planned.

NASA immediately put together three teams to investigate the bolt malfunction and determine whether the problem might affect Discovery.

As of Sunday, after reviewing piles of film, engineers had identified about a half-dozen shuttle launches with similar bolt problems, said test director Steve Altemus. The malfunctioning bolts did not cause any of the fuel tanks to tilt or tumble when jettisoned, he said.

''That's good news,'' Altemus said.

The main concern last week was that a protruding bolt could put a spin on the 153-foot, rust-colored tank and cause the tank to slam into the space shuttle. Such a collision could be catastrophic.

NASA wants to launch Discovery as soon as possible in order for the space station to be inhabited early next month. The space station's first permanent crew cannot lift off until Discovery has visited the 240-mile-high outpost.

Discovery's seven astronauts will attach two new segments to the space station: a girderlike truss that holds motion-control gyroscopes and antennas, and a shuttle docking port. Four spacewalks are planned on four consecutive days.

It is NASA's first space station construction mission in two years.

---

THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
MONDAY OCTOBER 9, 2000
http://morrock.com

SHUTTLE LAUNCH DELAYED AGAIN: The launch of the space shuttle Discovery, originally set for last Friday but delayed because of mechanical problems, was postponed again on Monday because of the weather. NASA will try again Tuesday. The shuttle crew is due aboard the international space station to continue construction there.

-------- turkey

U.S. feels pressure

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison
News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-2000109213511.htm

The U.S. Embassy in Turkey is feeling diplomatic jitters over the Armenian genocide resolution in Congress.

After Turkey last week threatened to ban U.S. planes from using a Turkish air base to patrol Iraq if the measure passes, U.S. Ambassador Robert Pearson met with Turkish President Bulent Ecevit. Later Mr. Pearson made sure the Turkish media understood that President Clinton is strongly opposed to the resolution.

"We understand the sentiments of Turkey on this issue. We take all these things seriously," he told reporters Friday.

He said the Clinton administration "will continue to make every effort possible to convince the House not to move ahead with this issue."

The House International Relations Committee approved the resolution last week, and it could come before the full House this week.

Mr. Pearson called the U.S.-Turkish relationship "a strategic partnership - it is very important for us to continue it."

Turkey's parliament last week warned that it might refuse to renew an arrangement that allows U.S. warplanes to use a crucial base in southern Turkey to enforce a no-fly zone in northern Iraq.

Turkey objects to the resolution, which recognizes the killing of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 as genocide. The measure blames the old Ottoman Empire, not modern-day Turkey.

Armenians say Turkey deliberately tried to exterminate the Armenian population and killed up to 1.5 million. Turkey admits several hundred thousand Armenians were killed by Ottoman troops in an armed conflict and in a forced relocation of the civilian population.

Turkey claims the House resolution is politically motivated to help Republican congressmen with Armenian-American voters. The sponsors of the measure note it has bipartisan support and that they are trying to recognize a historical tragedy.

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

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

U.S. scrambles to keep Sudan off Security Council

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
By Betsy Pisik
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000109215639.htm

NEW YORK - The United States is trying to derail Africa's chosen candidate to represent the continent on the U.N. Security Council, saying Sudan's government has such a poor human rights record that its ambassador could not possibly take part in discussions about international peace and security.

Sudan received the endorsement of the Organization of African Unity in July, and its election to the Security Council was all but certain.

But in recent weeks, the tiny island of Mauritius - about 500 miles east of the continent and a bit larger than Oahu in Hawaii - has made clear that it also is seeking the council seat, and has powerful support from Washington.

The entire U.N. membership is to select the five new council members tomorrow in one of the rare secret ballots on the General Assembly calendar. Each region elects one or two candidates to represent the region on the council for a two-year term beginning in January.

A State Department official acknowledged that the United States backs Mauritius, but bristled at the widespread notion that Washington is putting Mauritius up to block Sudan.

"Mauritius put in its nomination in March, before the [OAU] meeting," she said. "So it would be erroneous to say that they were put up by the United States."

Still, the State Department official left no doubt that Washington would prefer to see almost any African nation take the place of Sudan on the council.

"Sudan is not a suitable candidate to represent Africa for a number of reasons," she declared, saying the African country bordering the Red Sea has been under Security Council sanctions and has a "terrible" human rights record.

"So in light of that, it's difficult to envision how Sudan would be a credible interlocutor for Africa," she said, whatever the Organization of African Unity thinks.

Some African leaders - most volubly the Ugandans - may agree with the State Department, but they also say that position smacks of a colonialism they cannot tolerate.

As one North African diplomat wryly commented last week: "Three words: Boutros Boutros-Ghali." He was referring to the Egyptian diplomat who served as the previous U.N. secretary-general and was blocked by the United States from a second term despite Africa's continued support.

The council imposed an air embargo against Sudan in 1996 for its suspected role in an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia the year before. The OAU, the Arab Group and several others have petitioned the council to lift the sanctions.

Sudan was also the target of U.S. cruise missiles in August 1998, following the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. After destroying the Al Shifa Pharmaceuticals Industries factory in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, Washington said it believed the site was producing components of chemical weapons and had financial links to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, though neither claim has been conclusively substantiated.

Just three weeks ago, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa reaffirmed Cairo's support for Khartoum's council candidacy, declaring: "There is an African and an Arab decision in Sudan's favor concerning this issue."

Sudanese Ambassador Elfatih Erwa is livid over what he sees as American interference in African affairs. He notes that Sudan has "the legitimate African endorsement" and disparages Mauritius' candidacy as a "distortion" of the regional selection.

Mr. Erwa also notes - correctly - that nothing in the U.N. Charter prohibits a nation from taking its turn at the Security Council's horseshoe table because of council sanctions.

"When you talk about international peace and security, everyone knows you're not talking about internal problems, you're talking about invading other countries," Mr. Erwa said.

The spat over the African seat has eclipsed the usual handicapping that accompanies annual Security Council elections.

This year, Singapore is unopposed to take over the Asian seat as Malaysia ends its turn, and Colombia will replace Argentina.

Italy, Ireland and Norway are competing in relative gentility for the "Western Europe and other" seat that includes such far-flung democracies as the United States, Australia and, nominally, Israel. The Netherlands and Canada are ending their two-year stints on the council.

In recent weeks, the socializing has heated up, with Norway throwing a lavish dinner hosted by King Harald and Irish diplomats wining and dining the developing world to explain Ireland's history as a former colony of Britain.

But it is the African contest that has turned the election into a cliffhanger. It is Namibia's seat that is up for grabs, while Mali will keep the other African seat until December 2002.

"This really isn't good for Mauritius," said one African ambassador who said his government had instructed him to vote for the endorsed candidate. "They aren't going to win, and in fact, it will surely cost them. No African [country] should be seen as a tool of the United States or the Europeans."

Which is exactly how the island is starting to appear.

Many U.N. officials and observers, who see the annual Security Council elections as something like intramural sports, say Mauritius isn't supposed to win. Its role, they explain, is to put up enough of a fight so that a third nation will be able to emerge as a consensus choice.

There are precedents for a compromise - sort of.

In 1995, Libya won the vote to represent Africa in the council, but after prolonged agitation from the United States and others, Tripoli allowed Egypt to serve its term.

The Sudanese say no compromise is in the works.

"Why should we do that?" asked Mr. Erwa. "We are expecting to win."

---

Turkish plane lands in Baghdad

USA Today
10/09/00
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#mide

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Turkey on Monday became the ninth country to send a token humanitarian flight to Baghdad, the latest in what has become an almost daily show of support for Iraq. The flight came three weeks after France and Russia first challenged 10 years of U.N. sanctions on Iraq, flying planes to Baghdad without authorization from the U.N. sanctions committee. The Turkish aircraft carried four doctors and medical and humanitarian supplies. In the past few weeks, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Algeria all have sent flights to Iraq, each with U.N. approval.

---

Politely, Lazio and Mrs. Clinton Debate U.N. and Supreme Court

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/politics/09SENA.html

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rick A. Lazio condemned the United States yesterday for abstaining on a United Nations resolution censuring Israel for the violence in the Middle East. It was a rare moment of agreement in a debate during which Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Lazio argued over whether New York would be helped or hurt by having a Republican in the Senate next year.

Mrs. Clinton's disavowal of the abstention marked one of her strongest breaks with any policy embraced by President Clinton during her 15- month campaign for the Senate, and it came about 10 hours after Mr. Lazio issued a statement condemning the United States for failing to veto the United Nations Security Council resolution Saturday evening.

A senior administration official said of Mrs. Clinton's statement on the United Nations resolution: "She is a candidate for office and will take her own positions on what should be done."

The positions taken by Mr. Lazio and Mrs. Clinton underlined the importance of Jewish voters in this contest for Senate, and suggested the extent to which the turmoil in the Middle East could form a part of the backdrop in the closing weeks of this contest for Senate.

The exchanges came in a 60- minute debate during which the first lady and Representative Lazio sketched out different views on issues varying from public financing of political campaigns, to restrictions on abortions, to the tax on gasoline, to whom they would like to see on the Supreme Court, to whether public money should be used to build a new stadium on Manhattan's West Side. (Mrs. Clinton said no, and Mr. Lazio said yes.)

Their encounter, broadcast statewide from the WCBS-TV studio in Manhattan, was markedly different in tone from their meeting in Buffalo last month. The two candidates were firm but resolutely polite yesterday, and each was more relaxed in the second of what is likely to be three debates.

Mr. Lazio, who was criticized by Republicans for being belligerent and overly aggressive in their first debate, particularly when he strode over to Mrs. Clinton's lectern, said on CNN after yesterday's encounter that he "chained myself to the podium" this time, a turn of phrase that accurately captured his overall demeanor. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton persistently questioned Mr. Lazio's political views and credentials, at times seeming to be trying to goad him into reprising the debate performance that even aides to Mr. Lazio, a Suffolk County Republican, now say hurt his standing, particularly among women.

From a television perspective - which is, from the candidates' point of view, the most important perspective from which to judge how a debate is being perceived - perhaps the most notable moment came as the two candidates argued over each other's campaign financing practices. Mrs. Clinton asserted that Mr. Lazio had broken a pact between them on controlling spending by accepting $1.8 million worth of television advertisements by the Republican National Committee. She tried to turn an argument he had used against her back on him, asserting that Mr. Lazio's actions showed him to be untrustworthy.

"Last month, Mr. Lazio said that this was an issue of trust and character," Mrs. Clinton said evenly. "He was right. And if New Yorkers can't trust him to keep his word for 10 days, how can they trust him for six years on issues like Social Security, Medicare, prescription drugs and education?"

A few moments later, Mr. Lazio responded to her statement by evoking the questions that have shadowed her fund-raising practices: "Mrs. Clinton, please, no lectures from Motel 1600 on campaign finance reform." The camera showed Mrs. Clinton staring grimly at Mr. Lazio's reference to campaign contributors' being invited to spend the night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The debate began at 10:30 a.m., rather than at night, which is when debates are more customarily held. It also ended seven hours before the start of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar. Aides to both candidates said they thought it would be less noticed, and thus have less impact, than the last debate in Buffalo, and neither side seemed particularly unhappy about that.

Repeatedly during the debate, Mr. Lazio and Mrs. Clinton returned to what both campaigns have said would be one of their closing themes over the next month; whether New York would be helped or hurt by sending a Republican to the Senate to join Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat.

Mr. Lazio argued that New York needed a Republican in the Senate to ensure that it had a voice in the majority, assuming Republicans maintain control after November. "I have been in the minority and the majority, and let me tell you, I know that in the majority - it's the people in the majority who craft the bills, who write the language, who are in the position to actually get the job done," he said. He pointed to Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, both of whom were sitting in the audience, as evidence that Republicans are good for New York.

But Mrs. Clinton, responding to questions from a panel of four reporters and the moderator, Marcia Kramer of WCBS-TV, sought to turn that argument against Mr. Lazio. "The Senate is dominated by people who don't necessarily agree with how we need to do things here in New York," Mrs. Clinton said.

"I don't think I could defend Jesse Helms and Trent Lott and the people that Mr. Lazio will have to vote for," she said at another point. "His first vote will be for continuing Trent Lott's majority leadership, unless what I think will happen and that is the Democrats take over."

On Israel, both Mr. Lazio and Mrs. Clinton were in agreement in deploring the United States' abstention at the United Nations on Saturday evening, producing the unlikely image of Mrs. Clinton assailing her husband's foreign policy, though she never mentioned him by name.

"I believe that it was a wrong move not to have vetoed it, that it was inaccurate and one-sided," Mrs. Clinton said in response to a question by Gregg Birnbaum of The New York Post. "It did not address the violence that I believe is fomented by Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. It did not address what Israel has tried to do, such as showing good faith by pulling out of Lebanon and the fact that there's violence on that border."

Mrs. Clinton had also issued a statement Saturday night after the United Nations resolution, denouncing the Security Council's response to the violence in the Mideast as shameful and its condemnation of Israel as one-sided.

Mr. Lazio noted that he had put out a statement immediately after the vote expressing "my strong disappointment" with the United States for not vetoing it.

"For several generations, and for several administrations from both parties, we have had unequivocal support for the state of Israel," Mr. Lazio said. "This sends all the wrong messages about whether or not we stand firmly behind our democratic ally in the Middle East. They need to know that we stand behind them, stand by their side."

Mr. Lazio also said that he would not "support a call for a Palestinian state," drawing a clear if unstated comparison with the position of Mrs. Clinton. And both candidates disputed the suggestion by Arab leaders that blame for the violence lay with Ariel Sharon, the Likud opposition leader, who had led a visit to a contested holy site in Jerusalem that helped provoke Palestinian anger.

"I think that every Palestinian, every Israeli, every Jew from the world is really entitled to have access to Temple Mount," Mr. Lazio said.

But they spent most of the time drawing distinctions on domestic issues. Mrs. Clinton said she supported public financing for political campaigns. Mr. Lazio said he would oppose that. "I don't think that we should have welfare for politicians," she said.

Mr. Lazio presented himself as a supporter of abortion rights, criticized Mrs. Clinton for supporting a form of abortion that opponents call partial-birth abortion, and faulted her for being endorsed by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. "My opponent opposes a ban on partial-birth abortions," he said. "She is supported by Naral, that is so extreme on this issue that it wants to kick the Vatican out of the U.N."

Naral does want the Vatican's role weakened at the U.N. And Mrs. Clinton disputed his characterization of her views. "My opponent is just wrong," she said. "I have said many times that I can support a ban on late-term abortions, including partial-birth abortions, so long as the health and life of the mother is protected."

When Mr. Lazio was asked who among the current Supreme Court justices best reflected the kind of nominee he would vote for on the court, he named Sandra Day O'Connor. "No litmus tests," he said, laying out his criteria. "Let's make sure we get somebody who has a healthy respect for precedent, who's got the ability to make good decisions, and who's got, hopefully, a good experience of being on the bench."

Mrs. Clinton did not name a sitting justice, but argued that the future of the Supreme Court "hangs in the balance in this election."

"If we take Governor Bush at his word," she said, "his two favorite justices are Scalia and Thomas, both of whom are committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, ending a woman's right to choose. I could not go along with that."

Mr. Lazio reiterated his opposition to the tax on gasoline, which Mrs. Clinton supports.

At another point, Mr. Lazio criticized the health care proposal Mrs. Clinton had advocated in 1992 and 1994. "Let me just say that Mrs. Clinton's plan in 1993 would have been an unmitigated disaster for New York," he said. "No New Yorker would ever have written a bill that would have led to 75,000 jobs' being destroyed, health care rationing and the destruction of many of our teaching hospitals, which are an incredible asset for New York."

Mrs. Clinton referred to that time as a "learning experience," but said she was committed to achieving "quality, affordable health insurance for every American," if at a slower pace.

Perhaps the moment that best captured how the tone of this debate differed from the last one came when Ms. Kramer asked Mrs. Clinton, whose daughter, Chelsea, was sitting in the audience, why she had not left President Clinton after their marital difficulties.

"The choices that I've made in my life are right for me," Mrs. Clinton responded. "I can't talk about anybody else's choice. I can only say that mine are rooted in my religious faith, in my strong sense of family, and in what I believe is right and important."

In Buffalo, when Tim Russert had asked Mrs. Clinton a question about her defense of President Clinton when he was accused of having an affair, Mr. Lazio had followed up by attacking the first lady for her answer. This time, when the camera turned to him, Mr. Lazio had a different response. "Well, I think this was Mrs. Clinton's choice and I respect whatever choice that she makes," he said.

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

Big Navy deal boosts EDS shares

CNET
October 9, 2000, 9:10 a.m. PT
By Melanie Austria Farmer Staff Writer, CNET News.com
mailto:melanief@cnet.com
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-3142831.html

Shares of Electronic Data Systems jumped nearly 15 percent Monday after the services giant landed a multiyear government outsourcing contract considered the largest in history with a hefty $6.9 billion price tag.

Shortly after the morning bell, EDS, whose shares have fallen 39 percent this year, got a much-needed boost. The company's shares advanced $6.06 to $46.69, rising further above their 52-week low of $38.37.

The U.S. Navy on Friday announced EDS as the sole contractor of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, or NMCI, project. The government outsourcing contract calls for EDS and its team, which includes WorldCom and Raytheon, to provide the computers, phones, fax machines and anything else related to providing faster voice, video and data communications.

Other bidders in what analysts have called a landmark outsourcing deal included professional services heavyweights Computer Sciences (CSC) and IBM Global Services, as well as defense contractor General Dynamics.

CSC, which was favored by several analysts as a leading contender, took the hardest hit among the group on news of its defeat. Shares of CSC dropped $8.31, or nearly 11 percent, to $68.75 a share. IBM and General Dynamics also fell on the news. IBM shares slipped $1.13 to $114.88, and General Dynamics inched 50 cents lower to $59.94.

Merrill Lynch analyst Stephen McClellan upped his stock rating on EDS to "buy" from "accumulate" and increased his 12-month price target to $56 from $40.63 a share.

In research notes McClellan said it was a "major surprise" that EDS won the deal and that the contract will help boost the company's revenue going into 2001. McClellan had earlier pointed to CSC as a top choice because of the company's strong record with federal contracts.

"Revenues have been lackluster" for EDS, McClellan said. "Investors have awaited evidence of a return to healthier growth. This huge NMCI contract represents a big leapfrog in terms of somewhat more robust revenue prospects ahead."

EDS executives during a conference call earlier Monday said the Navy win is a "huge victory" for the company and will help boost incremental revenues annually beginning in the second half of 2001, when the demands of the contract are expected to accelerate.

The deal also will help position EDS at the center of more government outsourcing contracts for years to come, said chief executive Dick Brown.

In research notes, Salomon Smith Barney analyst Patrick Burton said he expects the Navy project will give EDS about $100 million in revenue each quarter. Still, he added that it will most likely take six to nine months for EDS to gain steady revenue streams from the contract.

Burton reiterated his "buy" rating on EDS' stock and maintained a $75 per share price target.

The NMCI project will entail the development and maintenance of a government intranet that will link about 100 existing networks worldwide, tying together some 360,000 Navy and Marine personnel by giving them access to a common intranet and multiple databases.

In addition to partners Raytheon and WorldCom, subcontractors include Cisco Systems, Wamnet, Dell Computer and Microsoft.

EDS said it intends to subcontract 40 percent of the project to small and minority-owned businesses, which exceeds the Navy's requirements of 35 percent.

---

Texas Guard Unit Home After 8 Months in Bosnia

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/national/09GUAR.html

CAMP MABRY, Tex., Oct. 7 - In the end, the soldiers of the 49th Armored Division of the Texas National Guard came home from Bosnia without using the ammunition they took there.

In nearly eight months overseeing American peacekeepers in Bosnia, they never fired a shot, either intentionally against enemies of peace in that tense land or accidentally when clearing their weapons as a safety measure when entering buildings on their base near Tuzla.

That they never engaged in combat is a measure of the stability taking root in Bosnia. That they never slipped up on firearms safety is in some ways just as important a measure of the military discipline that some have long felt is lacking in the citizen-soldiers of the National Guard.

"Not everybody in the National Guard is as screwed up as they thought we were," Specialist Frank T. Hinnant 3d of Bellville, Tex., said in an interview in Bosnia just before returning home.

On Thursday, in a traditional rite that included a Russian military band playing "The Yellow Rose of Texas," the division relinquished its command of the American NATO sector in Bosnia, rolling up its battle flag and turning over the operation to the regular Army's 3d Infantry Division.

Today, the last of some 650 men and women of the 49th returned to the division's headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin, tearfully reuniting with their families eight months to the day after President Clinton called them away to active duty.

The 49th completed its mission having erased at least some of the doubts about the National Guard's role in military operations. But its experience also raised questions about how often the Pentagon can turn to soldiers who normally spend no more than a weekend a month and two weeks each summer in uniform.

The 49th's commanders oversaw the safest spell in Bosnia since American troops began arriving five years ago in December, with no deaths or major accidents, officials said, even though active and reserve troops under its command flew 14,000 hours in the air and covered 1.25 million miles on the ground. Maj. Gen. Robert L. Halverson, the 49th's commander, said his worst safety problem was sports injuries.

The soldiers kept a lid on the lingering tensions that divide Bosnia's Serbs, Muslims and Croats, despite several especially volatile events, including a grenade attack on a house near Zvornik, where American special forces were staying, and a commemoration by thousands of women whose husbands and sons died in the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995.

More than 8,000 refugees returned to their homes in the American sector during the 49th's command. The 49th succeeded in pressing Bosnia's two armies, one Serb and the other Muslim and Croat, to cooperate for the first time on reconstruction projects, including bridges in Celic, Besici and Mackovac.

"Victory comes in inches, not in miles," said Lt. Col. James Brown, the owner of a well-drilling company in Tyler, Tex., who commanded the civil-affairs unit overseeing reconstruction efforts.

For the National Guard, however, this was not a victory measured in inches. The 49th's deployment culminated a trend in which the Pentagon has relied more heavily than ever on the Guard and Reserves for missions like the one in Bosnia. And its successes have already had an effect on the Army; in particular, clearing the way for officials to consider expanding the Guard's role still further.

The 49th's soldiers and other Guard units made up less than a quarter of the 4,300 American troops in Bosnia. Next year, when the 29th Infantry Division from Virginia takes command, three-quarters of the troops will be from the National Guard and Reserves - and not just primarily in the headquarters, but also in operational units, including 300 more members of the 49th from the Rio Grande Valley.

"The success of the 49th makes people who weren't comfortable much more comfortable in shouldering that kind of burden," said Brig. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the commander of the 29th, with troops from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were people saying, `Uh, I don't know.' There's less reluctance now."

The 49th's successes, however, have come at a price, for the Army and for the soldiers.

Since the 49th, like other Guard units, has to make do with older, often outdated equipment, the Army had to equip its soldiers with the newest radio system just so they could communicate with the active forces under their command.

Other Guard and Reserve soldiers received the newest M-16 rifles only when they left for Bosnia.

Then there is training. Although the law allows the president to activate Reserve units for only 270 days, the 49th's officers and soldiers spent at least 108 days training for the mission before they mobilized in February.

Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff, who flew to Bosnia to attend the change of command, called the 49th's deployment "a tremendous step forward for the Army," which has long had internecine rivalries with the Guard. At the same time, however, General Shinseki questioned how deeply the Army could tap into the 350,000 soldiers of the Guard.

General Shinseki has already limited future Guard deployments overseas to six months, shorter than the 49th's tour. He ordered General Halverson to review the training the 49th went through to see whether it could be compressed, shortening the time Guard soldiers are forced to be away from their jobs and families before and during deployments.

"I think in peacetime there is a limit to how often and how deeply we can go to the Reserve component," General Shinseki said en route to Bosnia. "I know this is not an open- ended deal."

For the 49th's soldiers, the deployment was an affirmation of the Guard's latent abilities.

"If we're going to be relevant in the national military strategy," Lt. Col. Larry D. Rutherford, the operations commander, said as he packed his duffel bags to leave Bosnia, "we felt like we needed to give something."

Col. Thomas A. Roman, who commanded the information operations cell, said that for him, that was a local television network his troops established, along with five programs about the peacekeeping efforts - a sort of Bosnian "On the Road With Charles Kuralt," as he put it.

For Capt. Geoffrey C. Ryan, a seventh-grade science teacher in Weslaco, it was putting into place a new system for monitoring the removal of land mines, which resulted in 85 square miles of land being cleared, nearly as much as in the previous three years.

When the deployment began, many of the 49th's soldiers said they encountered subtle and not so subtle doubts from the active-duty troops, most of them from one of the Army's elite combat units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. There were condescending comments and occasional efforts by the 3rd's officers to bypass the 49th's commanders, they said.

Sgt. Maj. Charles H. Cromwell, who served in the 49th's engineering battalion, did not feel he had much to prove. He wears a combat patch on his right sleeve, signifying his tour in Vietnam 30 years ago. That experience - and the performance of the troops in Bosnia - overcame many of the doubts, he said.

For the 49th, the challenge now is returning to their civilian lives. In Washington, officials express concern that the increasing deployments could hurt the Guard's ability to recruit and retain soldiers. So far, the Texas National Guard has not suffered an exodus, but General Halverson said the division's commanders would monitor the impact of the Bosnia deployment carefully.

For the soldiers of the 49th, there has already been an impact. Several have lost their jobs, despite a federal law prohibiting retribution against Guard or Reserve troops called to duty. A few marriages have crumbled.

Specialist Hinnant lost his job and his wife. Before he left, his employer, a contractor in Bellville, told him he would not have his position as a welder back. When he returned for leave in August, his wife, Tina, asked for a divorce after 10 years of marriage.

Still in Bosnia, he settled on a simple solution to his problems: "Stay here," he said. He and 32 others from the 49th chose to extend their service on active duty for an additional six months.

The rest flew to Fort Hood on Thursday. Today, after a last round of paperwork, three buses carried the last of them to the 49th's headquarters here at Camp Mabry. General Halverson mustered the troops one last time, with their families beside them, and praised what they had accomplished. Then his executive officer, Capt. Christopher C. Ryan, barked one final order: "Dismissed!"

---

Don't shoot

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
Inside the Beltway John McCaslin
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman was one of many witnesses on hand when a strange airplane landed at Washington's most popular museum.

The Pioneer Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - only 14 feet long with a wingspan of 17 feet - has found a new home in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, joining a collection of airplanes and spacecraft documenting the history of aviation.

Apart from Americans, those who really might like to see the aircraft up close is the group of Iraqi soldiers who during Operation Desert Storm incredibly waved white flags and surrendered to the sound of the UAV's engine high above them.

To the amazement of U.S. military officials many miles away, the surrender was caught on videotape through the aircraft's "eye in the sky" surveillance camera.

The unmanned plane, powered by a mere 26-horsepower rear-mounted engine, also flew successful missions over Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

---

Our Foreign Role

New York Times
October 09, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/opinion/L09GOR.html

To the Editor:

Vice President Al Gore is right to say that American troops can and should be used in appropriate circumstances to help stabilize war-torn societies - including, I might add, to facilitate the voluntary repatriation of refugees (news article, Oct. 5). Many military leaders I have spoken with - citing Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo - accept that such missions are part of the new reality.

But the United States need not undertake such endeavors alone. Efforts are under way in the United Nations, the European Union, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to make peace operations more effective. Steps might include the deployment of civilian police and of teams of civilian experts to build judicial systems and, in some cases, to actually undertake civil administration.

ARTHUR C. HELTON New York, Oct. 5, 2000
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

---

USA Today
10/09/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arizona

Tucson - The name of ex-Navy medic Roger Braden is etched into the stone of Pima County's new Korean War Memorial and a statewide memorial in Phoenix. It's an honor Braden doesn't want He isn't dead. Memorial officials can't fix the mistake without destroying the polished stone.

Georgia

Fort Benning - A memorial was dedicated to war dogs and their handlers, part of the National Infantry Museum. About 30,000 dogs served during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

New Jersey

Manchester - Traces of an explosive found in a batch of scrap metal may have caused the explosion that killed a worker at a magnesium-processing plant Sept. 29. State police said investigators found a nitrate-based explosive on metal that Reade Manufacturing had bought from the Navy.

-------- OTHER

-------- cloning

Cloning Used in an Effort to Preserve Rare Species

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By ANDREW POLLACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/science/09CLON.html

In what could represent a new way to save endangered species, scientists at a Massachusetts biotechnology company said yesterday that they had cloned an endangered Asian gaur and implanted the resulting embryo into a cow in Iowa. The baby gaur, an oxlike creature that is native to India and Southeast Asia, is expected to be born next month.

If the birth of the gaur is successful, it would represent the first cloning of an endangered species and the first cloned animal to use another species as a surrogate mother. Scientists say the technique could not only help preserve endangered species but also even revive species that have already become extinct.

Indeed, the company, Advanced Cell Technology, of Worcester, Mass., said yesterday that it had received permission from the government of Spain to clone the already extinct bucardo mountain goat, using cells collected from the last goat before she died earlier this year. The company is also looking at cloning giant pandas using black bears as surrogate mothers and frozen cells from Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, pandas at the National Zoo in Washington that have already died.

But the technique, which seems right out of "Jurassic Park," is raising ethical questions. Some conservationists fear that cloning would detract from other, less costly efforts at preserving habitat. And some say it is still not known whether an animal raised by a mother of a different species will be able to thrive in the wild.

"It's more like an amusement park version of the species rather than the wild species," said Kent Redford, director of biodiversity analysis and coordination at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. "We want to preserve a whole lot more than the genetic material," he added, saying species should be preserved in their natural environments. "That can't be reproduced in some Frankenstein lab."

Robert P. Lanza, vice president for medical and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology, said cloning would help reverse damage to wildlife habitat by people. He urged zoos and wildlife officials to begin collecting and freezing tissue samples of endangered species. "For a few dollars of electricity you can preserve the genes of all the pandas in China," he said.

He also said cloning was not likely to work on species that had been extinct for a long time because it would be difficult or impossible to find intact DNA. "You're certainly not going to be seeing dinosaurs in your backyard any time soon," he said.

To create the gaur, scientists took a skin cell from a recently deceased gaur and fused it with a cow's egg from which the chromosomes, containing the cow's genetic material, had been removed. The DNA of the gaur commandeered the egg, which grew into a gaur embryo. The embryo was implanted in the womb of a cow serving as a surrogate mother. The baby, which will be named Noah, should be an exact genetic copy of the gaur from which the skin cell was obtained. The procedure was reported yesterday in The Washington Post.

Previously, many scientists thought such cross-species cloning would be impossible because the DNA of the cloned animal would not be able to interact properly with the rest of the egg cell.

The technique failed many more times than it succeeded. The scientists created several hundred embryos, but only 81 grew to the stage where they could be implanted. Some 42 were implanted in 32 cows, but only eight cows became pregnant. The fetuses were extracted from two cows for examination, and five cows suffered spontaneous abortions, leaving only one cow that is still pregnant.

Based on the examination of the fetuses, Dr. Lanza said, the gaurs seemed to be normal, not crosses between cows and gaurs.

Dr. Lanza said cows were used as egg donors and surrogate mothers because there are so few gaurs left that it would be unethical to round up wild female gaurs and subject them to the treatments needed to extract eggs and implant embryos. And for creatures that are already extinct, he said, there would be no choice but to use other species as egg donors and surrogate mothers.

There have been cases of animals of one species being born to surrogate mothers of another species, such as a house cat giving birth to an African wildcat. But in these cases the implanted embryos were not the result of cloning.

Advanced Cell Technology, which is trying to use cloning for medicine and agriculture, has set up a nonprofit foundation to carry on species preservation work, since it is not expected to turn into a big business. The work, assisted by various university scientists, is described in a paper in the current issue of the journal Cloning and in an article in the November issue of Scientific American.

-------- environment

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
Exxon Still Hasn't Paid Valdez Victims

San Francisco Bay Guardian
Published on Monday, October 9, 2000 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
by Ralph Nader
mailto:beverley@essential.org
http://www.sfbg.com/nader/122.html

After the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster, Exxon was found guilty by an Alaska jury and ordered to pay about $5 billion in punitive damages - this was about one year's profit for the oil giant. Eleven years later, Exxon still has not paid a dime of the punitive damage award. Even the Rand Institute for Civil Justice, funded in part by insurance companies, recently noted the importance of such penalties, "Punitive damages are designed to punish a defendant for grossly inappropriate action and, in so doing, to deter further such actions by signaling that their consequences can be severe."

In a March 25, 1999 letter to Exxon CEO Lee R. Raymond, the National Association of Attorneys General said, "Each year Exxon delays payment of its obligation it earns an estimated $400 million from the difference between the statutory interest rate on judgments of 6 percent and the company's internal rate of return of about 14 percent."

For the 40,000 human victims of the oil spill and for environmentalists everywhere, this civil fine was modest for a corporate wrong that resulted in a massive spill of 11 million gallons of oil over Alaska's waters and more than 1300 miles of shoreline.

The spill was extremely hard on the Alaska Natives on Prince William Sound and the long Alaska coast. Their subsistence and cultural lives that had existed for millennia were severely disrupted. The lives of commercial fishermen and of their communities were rocked. Eleven years later one can kick over rocks on the shore of Prince William Sound and find Exxon crude oil. Much of the clean-up was superficial. Exxon's negligence is almost matched by its shameless use of dilatory legal tactics.

When the Supreme Court decision recently was announced, many observers of corporate misdeeds were surprised that the fine was still unpaid. On the 10th anniversary of the spill, Exxon mounted a campaign with some supportive scientists to convince the world that all damage had been contained, and the Sound had returned to its pristine state. Mendacity often abounds when big oil companies talk about their oil spills. More than 200,000 birds and 2,000 sea otters died after the spill. Many scientists, including Dr. Ricki Ott, believe the damage to bird species, fish, and sea mammals is permanent. Some bird and salmon species essential to the region and its inhabitants are said to be "recovering," while others, like the common loon, cormorant, harbor seal and harlequin duck are faring less well.

Moreover, the chairman of the federal-state oil spill commission, Walt Parker, decried the failure of oil companies and the state and federal government to implement recommendations of the spill commission designed to prevent new disasters. Despite the recent denial of an appeal by Exxon to the U.S. Supreme Court, Exxon company spokesman Tom Cirigliano said, "This is just one of several issues that needs to be resolved by the courts. It leaves our case very strong."

Exxon engaged in a legal war of attrition, while thousands of Alaskans and others suffered. Exxon media flaks and other corporate "spin masters" often call litigation "frivolous" when they are defendants. What is truly frivolous is Exxon's legal foot-dragging in this case.

Federal and state government officials could have encouraged Exxon to pay the punitive fine when the oil giant wanted to merge with Mobil. No such pressure emerged from Alaska state officials, the Alaska Congressional delegation, or the Clinton administration. Adding insult to injury, Alaska's governor Tony Knowles worked hard to pass a tort "deform" bill that made sure that big punitive damage awards for future spills would have to meet even higher standards of proof than the ones applied by the federal court in the Exxon case. As the head of the oil support firm, appointed by Governor Knowles's citizens task force, remarked to the head of an oil and gas lobbying group, "We don't want any more Exxon Valdez Jury Awards."

The tobacco, pharmaceuticals, auto, oil, chemical, and health care industries, along with their insurers, have fought to limit people's rights to sue and to further limit their own liability for the damages they cause innocent victims. The civil justice system provides our society with its moral and ethical fiber.

When the rights of injured consumers are vindicated in court, our society benefits in countless ways: by compensating injured victims and shattered families for unspeakable losses (and saving taxpayers from having to assist them); by preventing future injuries by removing dangerous products and practices from the marketplace and spurring safety innovation; by educating the public to unnecessary and unacceptable risks associated with some products and services through disclosure of facts discovered during trial; and by providing authoritative judicial forums for the ethical growth of law where the responsibility of perpetrators of trauma and disease can be established.

In the Public Interest publishes each Monday on sfbg.com.
Read Michael Moore's endorsement of Nader.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/07192000.html

---

Gore's No Environmentalist

The Oregonian
Monday, October 9, 2000
by Michael Donnelly and Jeffrey St. Clair

The last week of September, in a demonstration of just how desperate the Oregon Gore Campaign is as the tight race between Ivy League scions winds up, Oregonians were treated to a shrill, condescending visit by Gore's longtime environmental flak, Katie McGinty. Appearing in Portland and Eugene, McGinty, and a covey of captive, foundation-paid "Environmentalists for Gore," spent hours reduced to inflating fears of George W. Bush, virtually ignoring or greenwashing the foul Clinton/Gore record on the environment and other issues.

A string of grassroots environmental activists spoke up for full protection of our tenuously surviving Ancient Forests and for a Gore Campaign position, one way or the other, on breaching Snake River dams for the sake of salmon.

Many decried the fact that one-out-of-six old growth trees that still existed when Clinton and Gore came to office are now stumps -- trees that were off limits to the chainsaws under Bush, Sr. Said trees were cut only after the politically motivated, ecologically unsound Clinton Forest Plan was duly endorsed by the same foundation "greens" who now wish us to scare us into believing that a Bush, Jr., victory will "spell the end for Oregon's forest ecosystems."

In Eugene, McGinty shouted that George W. Bush would appoint justices "like Scalia and Thomas" who would "seek to undermine Roe v Wade," ignoring that Senator Al Gore voted FOR Justice Scalia and that his running mate Joe Leiberman sponsored Justice Thomas. Gore, who claims "I've always supported a woman's right to choose," actually holds an 84 per cent positive rating from National Right to Life due to his many Congressional votes against choice.

Equally out of touch on the forests, a frustrated, unintentionally telling McGinty stated, "We don't understand. The Heritage Forests folks told us that our Roadless Initiative was acceptable enough for Northwest environmentalists both ecologically AND POLITICALLY" (emphasis added).

Talk about self-serving, full circle nonsense. The captive foundation-paid greens went to the stage-managed 1993 Forest Summit and colluded in the resumption of old growth logging. Now, we have the derivative Heritage Forests Campaign, a do-nothing, foundation front group designed to turn out the Democrat vote, regardless of any content. The ephemeral Roadless Initiative has yet to save one tree, one acre. It is a mere promise of MAYBE not building roads in existing roadless areas of over 5000 acres. The carpetbaggers running Heritage Forests say this is "acceptable" to Northwesterners, yet the unimplemented initiative EXEMPTS the NW forests and it really provides little in the way of protection anywhere. Clinton, himself, has said it would lower the overall cutting of public forests, "by less than 2 percent."

Here's a top ten list of what real grass roots environmentalists of the NW and elsewhere want from Gore, if they are to give their vote, sans nose-holding, if at all:

-- Use executive powers to designate all remaining undammed rivers in Oregon/Washington/Idaho as Wild and Scenic;

-- Place a moratorium on federal land exchanges, including the current proposed Steens Mountain swap whereby ranchers will get ten acres of public land for every one acre they trade;

-- Halt US government support of the Makah whale hunt;

-- End subsidies for nuclear power;

-- End commercial logging on federal lands -- a corporate welfare practice that provides less that 3% of total wood fiber cut nationally yet costs the Treasury over $1 billion per year;

-- Veto the Sen. Wyden-sponsored "County Payments Bill" which continues the counties dependence on the federal dole -- i.e. stump money;

-- Breach snake river dams -- an issue Gore won't even take a public stand on;

-- Update spotted owl and marbled murrelet as endangered species, acknowledging that the spotted owls are declining faster under the Clinton plan (some 8% per year) than they were BEFORE Al Gore "end(ed) the standoff" over their fate;

-- Place a moratorium on Endangered Species Act-side-stepping Habitat Conservation Plans (HCP), favorite Gore tactics which have sprouted up like new Starbucks in Clintontime;

-- Place a moratorium on offshore oil drilling AND rescind the Gore-sponsored transfer of the National Petroleum Reserve to Occidental Oil, a move that will greatly enhance Gore's over $500,000 in Oxy stock.

-- Place a moratorium on oil exploration/leasing in the Nat. Petroleum Reserve-Alaska;

The creation of Foundation-funded, Democrat-sycophant "green" groups may have worked in the past, but it's now "fool me twice, shame on me" time. Without a record worthy of standing on, Gore now relies on fear inflation solely. A message that, "Bush will be worse" just doesn't hold up given the real record of Al Gore. He really will do and say anything to get elected.

Michael Donnelly of Salem was active in the Opal Creek campaign and Jeffrey St. Clair of Oregon City is the author of "Al Gore: A User's Manual."

---

It's Not Oil vs. Beauty in the Arctic

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By FRANK H. MURKOWSKI
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/opinion/09MURK.html

WASHINGTON - Clinging to a position that would prevent America from developing some of the most promising of its domestic energy resources, Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman have repeatedly stated their opposition to oil exploration in a tiny sliver of the Arctic Coastal Plain. They say it would yield only a six-month supply of oil, and only at the cost of the destruction of a pristine wilderness. In suggesting that we must choose between Arctic oil and environmental protection, they are presenting a false choice.

What is at stake here, according to the latest estimates of the United States Geological Survey, is 16 billion barrels of oil - an amount sufficient to replace all of our imports from Saudi Arabia for the next 30 years. And it can be extracted and moved to consumers in the "lower 48" states without harming the wildlife that inhabits the coastal plain at various times of the year. More than 25 years of experience at nearby Prudhoe Bay, a region that has supplied America with roughly 25 percent of its domestic oil production since the late 1970's, have shown that energy production and environmental protection can coexist.

At the time Prudhoe Bay was discovered, some claimed that oil development would devastate the central Arctic caribou herd. Today that herd is more than triple the size it was then. Nesting populations of migratory birds in the area are also on the rise. It is clear that we now have the technology that can both develop the oil and protect the environment.

The 19 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is roughly the size of South Carolina. In 1980, Congress declared 8 million acres of the refuge as strictly protected wilderness and an additional 9.5 million as refuge lands off limits to energy exploration. Mindful of the fact that the remaining 1.5 million acres of coastal plain was North America's best and last hope of a giant oil discovery, Congress designated the coastal plain as a special study area that could be opened to oil and gas leasing.

In the intervening years, a federal environmental impact study has shown that exploration of the coastal plain could occur during the winter, when animals are not present and no habitat would be disturbed, to determine if any recoverable oil is even present. If a large oil field were found, the oil could be developed using directional drilling technology, which requires very little use of land at the surface. It would disturb only 2,000 acres or less of the flat, treeless tundra that makes up the coastal plain.

In other words, we can determine if the oil is there with no environmental impact at all, and if a very large field were found, we could develop it with minimal environmental impact. The sad fact is, at present, we aren't even allowed to look.

America will remain dependent on oil for the foreseeable future, and increasingly, our dependency is on foreign oil. During the Clinton-Gore years, our oil imports have soared 17 percent while domestic production has decreased 14 percent. We now rely on foreign suppliers for 58 percent of our crude oil, and that reliance carries several risks.

As we import more oil on foreign tankers, which lack the safety features required of American ships, the risk of oil spills increases. Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks. Moreover, our growing dependence on foreign oil, including oil from Iraq, is inconsistent with our foreign policy objectives. And we endanger our economy as we rely increasingly on a cartel for an essential resource.

Mr. Gore and Mr. Lieberman heralded the recent release of oil from our existing Strategic Petroleum Reserve as instrumental in easing prices and building inventories of heating oil. But they oppose looking for the oil field that many geologists think may be under Alaska's coastal plain - a huge field that could have a meaningful and sustained effect on consumer prices. We are flirting with danger by refusing even to see what may lie under the coastal plain.

Frank H. Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, is chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

---

Hole In Ozone Layer Is Growing Larger

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/continuous/10CND-OZON.html

The hole that opens in the ozone layer over Antarctica each southern spring formed earlier and grew bigger this year than at any time since satellites have been monitoring the polar atmosphere, scientists have reported.

The finding renewed suspicions among atmospheric scientists that global warming could be indirectly abetting the chemical reactions that destroy ozone, but many still say the growth of the hole could also be the result of natural, albeit unusual, variations in Antarctic weather and other conditions.

In early September, several weeks before it normally reaches its peak, the hole expanded to a record 17.1 million square miles, an expanse larger than North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By comparison, in 1981, according to the atmospheric agency, it covered just 900,000 square miles.

Since its peak in September, the hole, which changes shape day by day as it is molded by globe-spanning winds, has extended several times over the southern tip of South America, as it has in a few years over the last decade.

With this year's record following records in 1996 and 1998, some atmospheric scientists are beginning to express surprise at the persistence of the phenomenon, which is caused largely by reactions between ozone and a group of synthetic chemicals that have been banned and whose concentrations are starting to decline in the air.

"I've been very much expecting to see a turnaround, a leveling off," said Dr. Michael H. Proffitt, the senior scientific officer at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, which issues a series of bulletins each fall tracking the progress of the ozone hole.

The hole is closely watched because the stratosphere's diaphanous layer of ozone - molecules consisting of three oxygen atoms - absorbs ultraviolet rays, which could contribute to skin cancers and cataracts and threaten agriculture and ecosystems if they reached the surface.

The annual ozone hole is the legacy of decades of emissions of a group of synthetic chemicals, mainly chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, that destroy ozone in the presence of sunlight. The chemicals were once popular in aerosol sprays, plastic foams, refrigerants and firefighting equipment, but have nearly all been phased out under voluntary moves by industry and the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

In the early 1970's, when scientists first reported that CFC's could destroy ozone, some theorized that the effect would be most discernible in the highest reaches of the atmosphere over the tropics, partly because of the abundance of sunlight.

But in 1985 British scientists found the huge loss of ozone each spring and summer over the South Pole.

"That was the surprise of the century," Dr. Proffitt said.

Subsequent research determined that the effect is focused mainly high over Antarctica, and to a smaller degree the North Pole, because ozone destruction is most vigorous when extremely frigid temperatures create clouds of ice particles in the stratosphere, generally 9 to 12 miles above the surface, that intensify the chemical reaction.

The putative link with global warming, Dr. Proffitt and other scientists say, comes because it is thought that a buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping industrial gases, while warming the lower atmosphere, actually acts in the opposite way in the stratosphere, causing it to radiate more heat to space and grow colder than it would otherwise be.

Another cause of stratospheric cooling is simply the loss of ozone itself. Without ozone, this layer of the atmosphere does not absorb the energy arriving from the sun as ultraviolet radiation, making the thin air even cooler.

The more cold high air, the more ice clouds, Dr. Proffitt said. More ice clouds mean CFC's and other ozone-destroying chemicals can more efficiently do their work.

Over the last five years, Dr. Proffitt said, measurements of stratospheric temperatures in October over Antarctica have shown an unusually large area cold enough to form ozone-destroying clouds. In the latest ozone bulletin, issued last week, Dr. Proffitt noted that the average expanse of extremely cold stratospheric air from 1995 to 2000 has been double that seen in any other five-year period.

Even so, he said, it is too soon to say definitively that a general global warming trend is responsible for this high-altitude cold snap, and the resulting growth in the ozone hole.

Other atmospheric scientists agree that, for several decades to come, the ozone hole will probably exhibit a lot of variability, and possibly more growth, before the global ban on CFC's and other ozone-destroying chemicals finally reduces concentrations enough to see the layer repair itself at the poles.

Through this span, unpredictable variations in polar weather will probably have more influence on the condition of the ozone layer than anything else, said Dr. Michael J. Kurylo, the manager of upper atmosphere research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"What we get in any one season is going to be driven by meteorological circumstances from year to year," he said.

For residents of Punta Arenas, Chile, and Ushuaia, Argentina, ports that sporadically have been visited by the edge of the ozone hole, there is little to worry about one way or the other, said Dr. Paul A. Newman, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In September and October, the peak months for the ozone hole, the sun is too low in the sky to pose much of a sunburn or cancer threat, he said.

"When the hole passed over Punta Arenas this time, it was 35 degrees that day," Dr. Newman said. "Nobody was really out there getting a suntan."

---

Endangered Wilson Bridge

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • October 9, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-2000109181554.htm

The shortnose sturgeon is probably no one's idea of a monster. Except for some fishermen and biologists, few persons have probably even seen it. But it may turn out to be one of the most frightening animals local officials, commuters and truckers have ever heard of: As an endangered species, the sturgeon might yet endanger the construction of a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

On Wednesday an environmental watchdog group announced it would file suit against the federal government for violating the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in connection with bridge construction work. That project harms both eagles and sturgeon and their habitat, says the National Wilderness Institute (NWI), and even government agencies must be accountable for it. "There is one set of rules," Rob Gordon of NWI told this newspaper's Audrey Hudson, "and it applies to rulers as well."

The organization is less interested in stopping construction work, it says, than in highlighting the special treatment that politically powerful, government-backed interests receive when it comes to complying with the act. The federal government itself acknowledges that the Wilson Bridge project is likely to force eagles to abandon a nearby nest, causing the deaths of up to two chicks. Notwithstanding the fact that the eagles are listed as endangered species, government officials have signed off on the project. Meanwhile, that same federal government is blocking the effort of an elderly Fairfax County man named John Taylor to build a one-story house for his wife, who is afflicted with Parkinson's disease, because it would somehow threaten an eagle nesting 90 feet away. Why the rough treatment for Mr. Taylor, whose property is 7 miles downstream from the Wilson Bridge, and not for the feds?

The handling of the shortnose sturgeon is also problematic for the government. Listed as endangered as early as 1967, the sturgeon inhabits East Coast rivers like the Potomac, albeit in dwindling numbers. Commercial fishermen caught one in the Potomac downstream from the bridge as recently as 1998 as part of a government survey program. Biologists believe the most likely spawning grounds in the Potomac for the sturgeon are at Little Falls, some 13 miles upstream from the bridge. So both commuters and sturgeon have to navigate the Wilson Bridge.

The government acknowledges how important the Potomac sturgeon population is. A 1998 government recovery plan notes: "The loss of a single shortnose sturgeon population segment may risk the permanent loss of unique genetic information that is critical to the survival and recovery of the species." But federal agencies think they can blow up the six-lane bridge without harming the sturgeon below, in part because the work includes plans to dig up all the clam beds nearby that might have attracted sturgeon to remain in the area. That might seem like a sensible solution to the problem, except that the ESA as interpreted by the courts does not permit someone to starve an animal out of its habitat.

The government also proposes to use special underwater barriers to protect sturgeon from the blasts, "although the cost, level of effort, and time required would preclude extensive use" of the barriers. Sorry, "cost" has never been an excuse when it comes to protection of endangered animals. At least it's not when the government applies the rules to someone else.

Exactly how the suit will affect the bridge isn't clear as yet. No one, least of all NWI, denies the bridge has to be replaced. Legislation exempting the project from ESA requirements might solve the problem, but it might be hard to justify to individuals and businesses who have labored under the act up to now. If it's necessary to exempt the bridge, then provide exemptions for all.

---

Endangered Wildlife

New York Times
October 09, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/opinion/L09WIL.html

To the Editor:

Re "Move to Save Wildlife Snags Spending Bill" (front page, Oct. 3):

I am pleased to see you shed light on one of the insidious anti-environmental riders on the energy and water appropriations bill. It would prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from complying with the Endangered Species Act on the Missouri River. This blatant attempt to circumvent an important environmental law must be stopped.

This bill must not become a vehicle for species' extinction. President Clinton should veto this spending bill and all others with anti-environmental riders. The Senate should represent the millions of Americans who care about protecting endangered species by voting to uphold the president's veto.

TIERNAN SITTENFELD Conservation Advocate, U.S. Public Interest Research Group Washington, Oct. 3, 2000

---

USA Today
10/09/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arkansas

Stamps - State officials have stopped placing foster children in homes near a former aluminum plant that is now a Superfund site. Authorities initially said that living near the site is safe but later suspended foster child placements to await conclusive evidence.

Louisiana

Shreveport - The duck pond at East Kings Highway Park is cordoned off while authorities decide what killed 25 to 30 waterfowl. The state is checking for disease, pesticide poisoning and other pollution.

New Mexico

Albuquerque - Senior religious leaders in New Mexico have pledged to combat global warming. The conference of churches statement said climate change is an urgent issue.

South Carolina

Charleston - Red and gray foxes are harder to find in the wild because of the popularity of fox hunting. Trappers capture foxes to stock 60 pens for hunts around the state.

Utah

Salt Lake City - State wildlife officials scrambled to try to stop poachers on the opening weekend of the rifle elk hunt. Wildlife officer Paul Davis said hunters armed with cell phones kept the state's poaching hotline busy on Saturday. More hunters reported poaching on opening day than all of last year.

Wyoming

Gillette - Phillips Petroleum is proposing two reservoirs to handle the groundwater to be discharged by thousands of coal-bed methane wells. One would be between Buffalo and Gillette; the other, north of Glenrock.

-------- police

Officer Accused in Rape of Car Passenger

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/nyregion/09COP.html

Nassau County police officer was arraigned yesterday on charges that he raped and sodomized a 30-year-old woman after pulling over the car she was a passenger in in North Woodmere on Saturday.

The officer, Jay Seifert, 30, was on patrol around 4:45 a.m. Saturday when he stopped a car with two women in it on Peninsula Boulevard, the county police said in a statement.

Officer Seifert asked the passenger to get out of the car and follow him to a nearby park, then sexually assaulted her, said Herbert Faust, the county's chief of detectives. Chief Faust said the driver witnessed the assault from her car.

The women drove to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, where doctors determined that she had been raped, Chief Faust said.

Officer Seifert, who worked at the Fourth Precinct in Hewlett, was arrested Saturday night and charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy and official misconduct, the police said. He was suspended without pay pending an internal-affairs investigation, the police said.

Officer Seifert joined the Nassau County police in June after nine years as a New York City officer. The New York department's public information office said yesterday that it could not provide information about him because it did not have access to his records on a Sunday.

-------- spying

Hardware firewall runs on NSA technology

EE Times
10/09/00
By Craig Matsumoto EE Times
mailto:cmatsumo@cmp.com
http://www.eetimes.com
http://www.electronicstimes.com/story/OEG20001009S0056

SAN MATEO, Calif. - A relationship with the National Security Agency has netted Marconi Communications the technology to produce a firewall that is said to run at OC-12 speeds (622 Mbits/second) and to be undetectable to potential intruders. The technology, licensed from the NSA and sold back to the agency in product form, is part of a longstanding relationship between government agencies and Fore Systems Inc., which Marconi (Pittsburgh) acquired last year.

Marconi showed the SA-400 at the Networld + Interop show in Atlanta last month. Unlike typical firewalls, which reside in software on a workstation, the SA-400 is a standalone appliance that sits on the incoming line and passes traffic through at wire speed, eliminating the telltale delay and routing of a workstation firewall.

In part, the box achieves that speed because it can handle asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) traffic natively.

"Most firewalls are done at the IP [Internet Protocol] layer and higher, because most people's security policy is at the IP layer," said Matthew Jones, program manager for enterprise ATM at Marconi. The SA-400 operates by inspecting the IP header and payload inside the ATM cell, without having to extract the IP information explicitly.

Jones likened the process to a glass bottle: "You can read the label and know what's in it without having to taste it," he said. "It's a pretty neat technology, to actually figure out the IP layer without going up there."

The SA-400 takes in traffic through two queues able to process two ATM cells apiece, then uses information at the ATM layer to determine how a particular frame has been encapsulated. From there, it searches for specific bits of IP-layer information - source address, destination address, TCP port and UDP port - implementing policies programmed onto FPGAs inside the box.

These shortcuts let the SA-400 hit higher speeds than conventional firewalls, Jones said. "Even with the most sophisticated and high-performance workstations out there, running a firewall, you're lucky to get DS-3 [45-Mbit/s] rates," he said.

Plugging the hole

Reading ATM also lets the SA-400 process voice-over-IP packets. With a software firewall, there isn't time to route voice signals through the workstation, so a path is created that bypasses the firewall entirely - essentially creating a hole in the firewall. Because the SA-400 can operate at wire speed, it averts that problem, Jones said.

Hardware-based firewalls didn't become common earlier because silicon hadn't caught up, Jones said, noting that FPGAs only now are large enough to handle the processing of IP data streams. In addition, line rates have now gotten high enough (many corporations now have high-speed access lines to the Internet) so that the delays of software-based firewalls are becoming a hassle, he said.

The SA-400 was developed at the NSA's Laboratory of Technology and Science. But the agency wanted to be able to buy the product commercially, to keep the price down, Jones said. So, the NSA licensed the technology to Marconi and acted as consultant in the development of the SA-400, which Marconi now sells back to the agency.

"Part of their charter is to make the technology commercially available for use internally," Jones said. "The economics of scale for federal production just aren't there. We can mass-produce the item and drive costs down."

The relationship stems from Fore Systems' origins as a government contractor. In fact, Fore was created through a Navy grant and has since remained close to the Pentagon and the intelligence community.

Marconi holds unconditional licenses to the NSA's patents on the traffic-inspection methods used in the SA-400. The company is "kicking around" ideas for using that technology in other products, including such possibilities as a firewall integrated into an ATM switch or a device to sort and prioritize IP-level information in much the same way as Multi-Protocol Label Switching does, Jones said.

The SA-400 is priced at $15,000 for an OC-3 (155-Mbit/s) version, or $25,000 for OC-12.

------------

Study reveals 'politicization' of intelligence

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000109215126.htm

A group of CIA covert-action officials vigorously opposed Reagan administration efforts to supply Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Afghan rebels, fearing it would trigger World War III by exposing direct U.S. support, according to a CIA-sponsored study.

The officials in the CIA Directorate of Operations, the espionage and covert-action branch, also tried unsuccessfully to block transfers of Stingers to the rebels for political reasons. They wanted to keep the Pentagon from "meddling" in CIA covert action, according to the report produced by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Details of once-secret CIA opposition - which included misleading interagency decision makers -were disclosed for the first time in the Harvard study. They provide a rare glimpse of "politicization" of intelligence activities within the CIA during the Reagan administration.

The CIA's opposition to the provision of the state-of-the-art missiles, which have been credited with helping the rebels defeat the Red Army, contrasts with public statements by the agency after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989. Then, the agency boasted of its covert action as one of its most successful paramilitary programs.

CIA claimed success as own

In February 1989, some 200 CIA officers involved in the Afghan operations held a party at the agency's McLean, Va., headquarters to toast the Soviet troop withdrawal. CIA Director William Webster stated three months later that the CIA Afghan Task Force of about 100 people "conducted one of the most successful covert operations in the country's history." He made no reference to agency opposition to sending Stingers.

The report quotes CIA officer Thomas Twetten, the Near East operations chief from 1983 to 1986, as working against political appointees in the Reagan administration who favored the Stinger transfers. Mr. Twetten described them as "strange people developing strange ideas."

"There was a concern [during the Reagan years] between what I call sensible bureaucrats, having been one of them, and the rabid right," Mr. Twetten said, referring to Reagan administration policy-makers. Mr. Twetten later was promoted to the highest position in the operations directorate.

The report, "Politics of a Covert Action: The U.S., the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile," is a 64-page analysis of the political infighting over the Stinger decision. Covert action is secret overseas military or political action; if asked, the U.S. government denies involvement.

The missiles were sent in 1986 after a successful lobbying effort led by two anti-communist Pentagon policy-makers who helped build near-unanimous support within the government for the project.

Small group opposed plan

Only a small group of anti-Reagan CIA officials in charge of the covert action program within the CIA's Operations Directorate opposed it.

The weapon allowed the mujahideen (Islamic "holy warriors") to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships, and the Russian military debacle has been credited with hastening the demise of the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.

Hundreds of Stingers were sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and after the war another covert operation was set up to buy back missiles from those in the region who had them. There is no evidence that any of the weapons ended up in the hands of Islamic terrorists, although fears persist among U.S. officials that they will.

In the case of Afghanistan, the report said, CIA support for the mujahideen began six months before the Soviet intervention of Dec. 24, 1979, when the Russians sent troops to back one faction in the divided communist government. Within a few years, the U.S. government was supplying $250 million annually in arms to the rebels.

However, the operation was limited at first by the CIA's use of less-effective weapons that could not be traced to the United States. The CIA's goal was to make life "difficult" for Soviet forces, but not to help the Islamic rebels win, the report said.

Mujahideen were losing war

However, the mujahideen began losing the guerrilla war in 1984 with Moscow's introduction of Spetsnaz commandos and armored Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships. The commandos and gunships were able to attack hidden rebel bases in remote and inaccessible parts of Afghanistan.

CIA-supplied Soviet-made SA-7 and British Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles were "impotent" against the helicopters, the report said.

Within the Reagan administration, Fred Ickle, undersecretary of defense for policy, and his deputy, Michael Pillsbury, established an internal effort to provide the 5-mile-range Stinger missiles to the Islamic warriors.

"The Directorate of Operations (DO) of the CIA, which ran the Afghan operation, disagreed vehemently" with the plan to send advanced missiles, the report said.

Midlevel DO officers, including Mr. Twetten and another officer, William Piekney, the station chief in Pakistan, opposed sending Stingers because the missiles would expose the CIA's hand.

These officials also feared the Stingers in Afghanistan "would risk provoking retaliation from the Soviet against host country Pakistan - and such an attack could plausibly escalate into World War III," the report said.

The CIA also feared that sending Stingers "would expose a small well-run operation to meddling from the Department of Defense."

Internal rivalry a factor

"Covert actions are the most hallowed of all CIA undertakings, clandestine beyond secret," the report said. "Allow the Stinger and DoD would stand at the door. Covert would be overt and the operation destroyed," the report said of the CIA officials' argument.

Not all CIA officials opposed the effort. Clare George, chief of the CIA Operations Directorate at the time, and his deputy worked quietly with Mr. Pillsbury, the deputy undersecretary of defense, to garner support for the missile decision against those opposing it, the report said.

John McMahon, the CIA deputy director, also opposed the missile plan out of institutional loyalty, as did CIA Director William Casey. Both eventually changed their views and supported giving Stingers to the mujahideen.

"Leading the charge to stop the Stinger idea dead in its tracks was the Directorate of Operations at the CIA," the report said, noting that the agency was afraid it would lose "plausible deniability" if U.S. arms were used.

Mr. McMahon and the DO officials thought the arms were not allowed under an agreement with Pakistan to keep U.S. weapons out of the region. Mr. Piekney said Pakistani government sensitivities were "the predominant overriding concern" in not wanting to send Stingers.

Goal was: Topple Soviets

Mr. Ickle and Mr. Pillsbury pushed the decision to send the missiles through a reluctant government bureaucracy. They did so as part of the "the Reagan Doctrine" that was aimed at toppling the Soviet Union, the report said.

The doctrine included U.S. military modernization, economic pressure on Moscow and "covert actions to split client governments from Moscow," the report said.

Helping the rebels with the missiles was needed because intelligence reports from 1985 showed Moscow planned to sharply escalate its attacks on the Islamic warriors under its new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the report said.

According to Mr. Pillsbury, the Afghanistan covert action fit within the anti-Soviet strategy of the Reagan administration. "Blocking that escalation would provide an opportunity to raise the costs sharply to Moscow of its empire, even as it was stretched thin in Poland, in its hard currency, and in Africa and along Chinese borders," Mr. Pillsbury stated.

Intelligence information also indicated the Soviet leadership was divided on how to deal with the costly Afghan war and U.S. officials saw increasing aid to the rebels as a way to deepen the political fissure.

The plan to send Stingers was helped by a directive signed by President Reagan in March 1985 on "Expanded U.S. Aid to Afghan Guerrillas" that called for challenging the Soviets with "all available means."

Directive's secret annex

A secret annex to the directive endorsed "direct attacks on Soviet military officers in order to demoralize them," the report said. It also called for providing the Afghan rebels with satellite intelligence photographs and communications equipment.

Mr. Ickle also had suggested using U.S. C-130 transports to make direct supply runs to the rebels, but that too was opposed by the cautious CIA, the report said.

Mr. Piekney is quoted in the report as saying the new Afghan policy was designed to help the rebels "kill as many Russians as they could."

The report states that the anti-Stinger CIA officials lied about requests from Pakistan's president, Zia ul-Haq, asking for the missiles for the Pakistan military and the Afghan rebels. Mr. Twetten, in particular, told one interagency meeting that Mr. Zia did not want them, a statement that was contradicted by several other participants in the debate.

Mr. Ickle stated that the CIA provided "contrary reporting" on the issue.

Mr. Pillsbury is quoted as saying that the midlevel CIA officers "were openly defying President Reagan's signed directives and most likely belonged to the opposition political party."

According to Mr. Pillsbury: "These officers acted in a near-mutiny by exploiting their monopoly on access to [Pakistani intelligence] and Zia about the sensitive Afghan program to deny information to their own [director of central intelligence], and to [Department of Defense] and the [National Security Council]."

Pakistan wanted missile

Another CIA official working at the White House who was close to the program, Vincent Cannistraro, is quoted in the report as saying the CIA's station chief in Pakistan withheld a request from Mr. Zia for the Stingers as "the CIA was not anxious to bring it up because they were opposed to it."

According to the report, Mr. Zia told visiting U.S. officials in Pakistan that he wanted the Stingers for the Pakistani military and that they would assist the rebels.

The first missiles were sent to Pakistan in July 1985 and after an internal debate described in the report as a "battle royal," the Afghan rebels began shooting down Soviet helicopters in 1986.

The Joint Chiefs also opposed sending the Stingers because they feared the weapons' technology would be compromised to Moscow if some were lost in Afghanistan. However, a Soviet intelligence defector, Sergei Bokhan, had revealed that Moscow obtained Stinger blueprints in 1984.

The Soviets announced the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan in December 1987 under the Geneva agreement. The last troops pulled out in February 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall that began the unraveling of the Soviet Union.

---

Nazi Code Machine Poses a New Enigma for the British

New York Times
October 09, 2000
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/world/09BRIT.html

LONDON, Oct. 8 - A captured German machine that helped the British to crack the Nazi Enigma code in one of the turning points of World War II has been missing from its case in a Buckinghamshire museum for six months, and getting it back has turned into something of a riddle itself.

It was stolen in the spring from a glass display cabinet in the museum, in the Bletchley Park estate that was the clandestine wartime office of the remarkable team of crossword puzzle experts, linguists, chess masters, mathematicians and refugee intellectuals the British assembled to read encrypted enemy communications.

The Enigma machine, which looks like an oversized typewriter, was used by German military intelligence for top secret communications between members of the the Nazi high command. Enigma used a series of electrical rotors to scramble messages in an astronomical number of ways. To further confound the Allies, each day the German operators would alter the wiring on their transmitters and receivers.

The capture of Enigma technology by the Royal Navy from a disabled Nazi submarine in May 1941 enabled the Bletchley Park counterintelligence people finally to decipher the code that Berlin had thought uncrackable.

Their accomplishment has been credited for Allied successes in destroying much of the Italian Navy, mounting a defense against U-boat attacks on Allied convoys and decimating the supply shipments for Rommel's North African campaign. The code breakers believed that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years, and General Eisenhower gave them credit for saving thousands of lives.

The existence of the Bletchley Park 10,000-member spy unit, known as Station X, was never disclosed during the war, prompting Churchill to call the members "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled."

The only details of the April 1 theft that the police will disclose are that at least four people were involved and that they seemed to have inside knowledge of both Bletchley Park and the Enigma machine. Hoping that it might be a prank rather than a professional burglary, Christine Large, director of the Bletchley Park Trust, said, "If it's some young twits who've just run off with it who realize it was a silly thing to do, we're not going to be heavy-handed with them."

Officers took the traditional steps, fingerprinting hundreds of museum visitors, questioning staff in detail and conducting extensive searches of the grounds. No clues emerged.

Then last month, baffled detectives found themselves pressed into code-breaking service when an awkwardly composed ransom letter arrived, written on a wartime typewriter and using a sign-off word they could find in no English dictionary.

The police took the letter and subsequent ones, apparently from the same mysterious author, seriously because the writer included a photo of the identification plate of the machine, reading G312. The mysterious word has turned out to be a coded authentication. The letters were mailed from the West Midlands, West London and Milton Keynes, a town close to Bletchley Park.

The first letter read in part: "I have been asked by the current owner of the Enigma machine, who purchased it in good faith (in good faith being the operative word) to say and tell you now today, the unwitting person having no ultimate desire of depraving [sic] your august self or anyone the pleasure to see it again."

The letter writer asked for £25,000 ($36,000) and threatened to destroy the machine unless the money was paid by midnight last Friday. The museum has raised the entire sum from an anonymous benefactor and publicly says it is prepared to meet the terms to get the device back.

"Clearly the machine was stolen, but we don't believe it was stolen by the people who are in possession of it now," Ms. Large said. "There are a lot of things suggesting that we have got someone here who bought it in good faith and would like to get out of the heat and return the machine to us, but obviously doesn't want to be out of pocket at the same time."

She appealed to the letter writer to get in touch, but the midnight deadline passed with no word. At 4:30 a.m. Saturday, however, she received a telephone contact, and later that day she said she was still confident that the machine would be returned once the ransom was paid.

"We had a deal, but there was a fear that the machine might be destroyed if the police did not give certain assurances," she told the BBC. "Those assurances have been made now, and they have gone some way to being accepted." One of the demands that may be causing difficulty is an advance promise of immunity from prosecution.

Bletchley Park is familiar to many Britons since many newspaper and magazine articles and books have recounted the role played by the motley gang of decoders, celebrating a dramatic episode in what for the British is an unforgettable time of national heroism and triumph.

It is, in effect, the second time this year that the British have been robbed of cherished evidence of their wartime Enigma exploit. The thriller movie "U-571" was based on the capture of the Nazi cipher device, but the filmmakers stripped the captors of their British identities. The naval heroes in the Hollywood version are Americans.

---

Geyer gets Alsop award

Washington Times
October 9, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison
News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-2000109213511.htm

Georgie Anne Geyer, a syndicated columnist widely known in diplomatic circles at home and abroad, has received an annual media award from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

Miss Geyer was presented with the Stewart Alsop award at a dinner Friday night. The association selected her for her "outstanding foreign-policy" reporting and commentary in her column, which is carried in The Washington Times.

She is also the author of seven books on foreign affairs. Her books "show a superb ability to rationally distill complex issues with clear-eyed fairness," the association said.

The award is named for Mr. Alsop, who served in the Office of Strategic Service, the forerunner of the CIA, in World War II and later wrote a widely respected newspaper column.

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

-------- terrorism

. . . Avoiding a War

By Robert Satloff
Monday , October 9, 2000 ; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35932-2000Oct8?language=printer

After eight years of Herculean effort to build Arab-Israeli peace, President Clinton faces the cruel irony that the level of violence in the Middle East may be higher when he leaves office than when he entered it. The region not only faces the prospect of the collapse of the peace process but may be on the verge of wider conflict and perhaps even war.

The situation is critical. Israel faces a three-front crisis--with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; with Arab citizens inside Israel proper; and, following Hezbollah's cross-border raid and kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers, a state-to-state confrontation with Syria and Lebanon, the radical Islamic group's patron and host, respectively.

Israel's likely response is the establishment of a "national emergency government" joining Labor's Ehud Barak and Likud's Ariel Sharon. But that's not all. In recent days, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority has reached common ground with its Islamic opposition, Hamas, such that dozens of convicted Hamas operatives have been released from Palestinian Authority jails, and Hamas leaders have been accorded extensive air time on Palestinian television to call for jihad. Combined with the efforts now underway in Iran to coordinate action among Hamas, Hezbollah and the smaller but even more extreme Islamic Jihad, the potential for a return to the mass terrorism of the mid-1990s is chillingly real.

Then there is the dimension no one wants to talk about: Iraq. Last week, Saddam Hussein told a Baghdad audience that if the Arabs gave him a parcel of land bordering Israel from which to operate, he would "eradicate Zionism." With no arms inspections in Iraq in more than two years, can we be confident that the last man to fire ballistic missiles against Israel might not today have the capability to do even worse?

Even on the political front, the situation is worse than it seems. In Jordan, the new, young monarch, King Abdullah, has been forced to order anti-riot troops to fire tear gas against thousands of Palestinian protesters; how long he can remain supportive of his six-year-old peace treaty against this rising tide is unknown. And in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has begun to organize the first Arab League summit in a decade, a meeting whose bellicosity is sure to set back years of quiet efforts to build diplomatic and commercial ties between Israel and a dozen Arab states.

The death of the peace process and the descent to war are not foreordained. But it will require a resolute White House, willing to talk tough, and act tougher, to prevent further conflict and resurrect the principle that diplomacy is the sole route to resolving disputes.

So far, however, the administration has been neither resolute nor tough. Its decision on Saturday to acquiesce in the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution that first condemns Israeli actions and then supports an inquiry to find out what happened was bad policy. It could not but whet Yasser Arafat's appetite for further clashes as a means to achieve diplomatic gains and, in the process, hurt Israel's deterrent posture. That it happened on the day that Palestinians destroyed a Jewish holy site in Nablus and that Hezbollah brazenly flouted the five-month-old U.N. Security Council regime along the Lebanon-Israel border makes it shameful, too.

But there still may be time to put the brakes on the worsening situation. On the Palestinian front, the president needs to elicit a clear, public and unqualified commitment from Arafat to end violence and to use the considerable Palestinian security forces at his disposal to prevent its recurrence. Arafat must know that his relationship with the United States, perhaps his most important political ally, is at risk. To make the point, the White House should announce that it no longer opposes legislation now before the Senate threatening sanctions against the Palestinians, including a cutoff of economic aid, in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence. Arafat would get the message.

On the Lebanese-Syrian front, the president needs to join with Israel in holding Syria ultimately responsible for the captured soldiers and by offering public support to whatever moves Israel chooses to gain their release.

To address the continuing problem of Hezbollah terrorism, the United States should demand that Syria disarm the Hezbollah militia and that the Lebanese armed forces deploy in strength along the international border with Israel. These demands should be affirmed in a speedy U.N. Security Council resolution. Until it is fully implemented, the United States should suspend aid to Beirut, oppose international reconstruction efforts for southern Lebanon and announce a review of antiterrorist sanctions against Damascus with an eye toward their enhancement.

On the wider Arab front, the president needs to remind Egypt's Mubarak and other leaders such as Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that their interests are served through calm, not tension. As the Saudis' main protector and the Egyptians' leading donor, Washington has some means to convince them that a heads-of-state summit is a bad idea worth postponing.

And toward Iraq, the administration needs to be clear: The threat or use of weapons of mass destruction against Israel, Kuwait or anyone else would trigger a regime-ending response.

None of this addresses more fundamental problems, such as putting the Oslo Humpty Dumpty back together again or removing the Saddam bogeyman from the region's political calculus, once and for all. But it may help prevent the one October Surprise nobody expected--a Middle East at war.

The writer is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

----

After Counterterrorism Bill Fails, Nation's Preparedness Is Debated

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 9, 2000 ; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35898-2000Oct8?language=printer

With fire chiefs and other local government officials complaining about the federal government's fragmented approach to counterterrorism, Rep. Tillie Fowler (R-Fla.) shepherded legislation through the House in July designed to end their confusion.

It passed without a single negative vote despite opposition by the Clinton administration, leading her to believe help was near.

But Fowler's bill creating a high-level White House coordinating council failed last week in the Senate after administration officials lobbied against it, leaving her locked in debate with the administration's counterterrorism chief over the nation's real ability to respond in the event of a terrorist attack.

"It is truly appalling and disappointing that there has been a lack of cooperation in the administration--and over in the Senate--on this," Fowler said last week. "The National Security Council has had two years and hasn't done the job. The Justice Department hasn't done theirs. And I just think that's sad. We've got lives of Americans at stake, and who knows where an attack will take place?"

Richard A. Clarke, who oversees $11 billion in counterterrorist programs as the National Security Council's coordinator of counterterrorism and computer security, agreed that efforts are fragmented. An interagency coordinating office within the FBI--the National Domestic Preparedness Office--he acknowledged, is "badly broken."

But Clarke insists the country is far better prepared to respond to a terrorist attack than it was two years ago. And a new office for interagency coordination, he said, should not reside in the White House, as Fowler proposed.

Clarke said the federal government has trained and equipped 57,000 emergency response personnel in 69 cities over the past two years--close to half of the 157 cities scheduled for training to respond to attacks using biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Clarke said the government has created eight stockpiles "secreted around the country" of medicines and antidotes to chemical attacks.

"There is a massive amount of work that has been done which [Fowler] ignores," Clarke said, adding that he is awaiting a plan from Attorney General Janet Reno and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for reconstituting a domestic preparedness coordinating office.

Fowler's bill would have created the President's Council on Domestic Terrorism Preparedness, made up of Cabinet members and run by an executive chairman confirmed by the Senate. The council would have been required to draft an annual preparedness strategy and document assessing "the risk of terrorist attacks against transportation facilities, personnel and passengers."

The council also would have been required to review the budgets of all 40 departments and agencies responsible for responding to terrorist attacks.

Fowler said she asked one of Clarke's assistants earlier this year why the Clinton administration hadn't produced an annual plan for domestic preparedness and was assured, she said, that, " 'We'll do one this weekend.' "

Clarke said the Justice Department has created a five-year counterterrorist strategy, which represents "the most detailed articulation of policy and the most detailed articulation of programmatics that I know of in any area."

The Defense Department chose 120 cities for training based strictly on population size, according to information provided by Fowler's staff, but left 12 states without any training.

During a counterterrorist training exercise earlier this year in Colorado, Fowler's staff said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention delivered pharmaceuticals to a local airport on schedule, but the drugs proved useless, because no one was told they were coming or what to do with them once they arrived.

Commenting on Fowler's bill, the General Accounting Office said a White House council would address the problem of fragmentation but also would duplicate efforts of the FBI's interagency coordinating unit. Now, the GAO said, counterterrorist programs "remain fragmented because key interagency management functions are conducted by different departments and agencies."

----

Terrorism on agenda for North Korean talks

USA Today
10/09/00
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsmon03.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Clinton will hold an historic meeting on Tuesday with a senior North Korean official amid signs that the State Department may soon remove the country from its list of those designated as sponsors of international terrorism.

Clinton will hold a midmorning meeting with the first vice chairman of North Korea's National Defense Commission, Cho Myong Nok, the highest ranking official Pyongyang has sent to Washington.

After a daylong visit to San Francisco, Cho was due to arrive here Monday night for meetings with Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen.

During his stay on the West Coast, Cho was hosted by former Defense Secretary William Perry, who stepped down recently as an adviser to Clinton on North Korea. Cho's visit reciprocates a Perry visit to Pyongyang in 1999.

In June, Clinton eased economic sanctions against North Korea but has been unable to take further steps because its terrorist-state status bars the country from receiving all but humanitarian aid.

The Clinton administration has been making a concerted effort to get North Korea on a peaceful path after long years in which Pyongyang was widely regarded as the greatest threat to peace in Asia.

Clinton acknowledged last week that he strongly supports reconciliation and said he sees Cho's visit as a step toward achieving that goal.

He spoke shortly after the State Department made public a joint U.S.-North Korean communique in which Pyongyang said it opposes all forms of terrorism and believes that all U.N. member states must refrain from such activity.

The statement was based on a series of discussions between the two countries, the latest of which ended last week. Pyongyang has been on the list since the 1987 bombing of a South Korean passenger jet near Myanmar that killed all 115 people on board. Pyongyang has not been implicated in any major incidents since then.

U.S. officials have been advising the North Koreans during the discussions on what they must do to be removed from the terrorism list. One measure of the administration's eagerness for warmer ties is that, of the seven countries on the terrorism list, only North Korea has been getting advice on how to get off of it.

''I personally am very hopeful that, in the coming days, we will make some progress on this very critical and difficult issue,'' said Ambassador Wendy Sherman, Albright's top assistant for North Korea.

Conservative groups are wary about the North's intentions, noting that the country's military posture has remained essentially unchanged since the breakthrough summit in June between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Another U.S. concern has been North Korean missile exports to Iran and Syria. As Cho was preparing for his Washington visit, the London Sunday Telegraph reported that Libya has taken delivery of North Korean No-Dong surface-to-surface ballistic launchers and missiles, capable of hitting targets in Israel and NATO states in southern Europe.

The State Department had no comment Monday on the report.

-------- activists

Million Moon March
Rev. Sun Myung Moon is the surprise backer of Louis Farrakhan's big event in Washington next weekend -- and it may be his biggest remarriage shindig ever.

Salon.com
Oct. 9, 2000
By Frederick Clarkson
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/10/09/march/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=665

Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Minister Louis Farrakhan are trying to pull off what may be the oddest alliance in recent American history.

The two aging demagogues -- one the leader of the Unification Church and the other the African-American head of the Nation of Islam -- are collaborating on the sequel to Farrakhan's wildly successful Million Man March -- the Million Family March, scheduled for Oct. 16 in Washington.

The march's pièce de résistance will be a spectacular ceremony in which Farrakhan will renew the vows of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of married couples -- modeled after the mass marriage ceremonies led by Moon for the past 30 years.

"This reflects the ways Rev. Moon has influenced Minister Farrakhan," explained Rev. Phil Schanker, an official of Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU).

Schanker says that Moon's role in the Million Family March is the fruit of a three-year personal relationship that began when Farrakhan helped officiate at one of Moon's marriage ceremonies at Washington's RFK Stadium in 1997. Though Moon may not address the march himself for what Schanker describes as "security reasons," internal FFWPU memos posted on a church Web site state that Moon, who turned 80 in February, decided to back the event after learning from his aides "of Minister Farrakhan's personal desire to ask him to bless all the families at the MFM."

The alliance took some scholars and experts of the religious groups by surprise. Martha Lee, the Canadian author of "The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement" found it "curious ... that the two of them are trying to become respectable by allying with each other." But Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., was quick to point out similarities between the leaders: "They are both completely authoritarian, theocratic, male-dominated and homophobic."

As Moon and Farrakhan edge toward the ends of their respective scandal-prone careers, they are increasingly mindful of their legacies. Both have sought to move beyond their controversial reputations to achieve mainstream legitimacy.

Each group has a checkered history that it would rather people forget. While the Million Man March proved to be dramatic and inspiring for many African-American men, it was also notable for its controversy and divisiveness. Many objected to the exclusion of women. The headline-grabbing anti-Jewish and anti-white demagoguery that has marked the history of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its leaders, including Farrakhan, drove others away. NOI security team, the Fruit of Islam, has had a thuggish history that Farrakhan has sought to put behind the organization.

Farrakhan, 67, who has suffered from prostate cancer, emerged from his illness earlier this year with new messages of reconciliation. While Farrakhan watchers are divided about the sincerity of his change of heart, the new messages of inclusiveness are evident in Farrakhan's approach to the march. He has invited people of all ethnicities, races and religions -- even Jews -- to march "under their own banners" at the Million Family March.

But only weeks before the march, a sex scandal centered around march coordinator Minister Benjamin F. Muhammad, threatened to overshadow the event. In an investigative story titled "The Shame of Mosque No. 7," the Village Voice questioned whether march coordinator Muhammad "is fit to lead" in light of a $140 million civil suit recently filed against him. The suit alleges that Muhammad sexually harassed and assaulted an NOI volunteer secretary when he served as Farrakhan's lone representative in New York. "Until recently," wrote reporter Peter Noel, "the sordid details of his three-year stint at the 127th Street mosque remained hidden behind Farrakhan's new family values crusade." Muhammad denies the allegations.

The charges are noteworthy in part because Muhammad, previously known as Rev. Ben Chavis, was fired as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1994 amid revelations that he had diverted at least $250,000 of the organization's funds to quietly settle charges of sex-discrimination against him. Farrakhan subsequently hired Chavis to direct the Million Man March. Chavis changed his name to Muhammad when he converted from Christianity to Islam. In 1997, Farrakhan appointed him head of the New York mosque once led by Malcolm X.

So far there has been little national news about the march except the entertainment-industry hype about the backing of black entertainment moguls and the booking of top popular and hip-hop acts who will perform at the rally. Entertainers already signed on to perform include Macy Gray, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, Run-DMC and Kelly Price. PSAs to promote the march by Dead Prez and Snoop Dogg are running on radio stations around the country. The Congressional Black Caucus, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Bar Association, among others, have also endorsed the march.

Farrakhan's efforts at entering the mainstream not withstanding, he sounded like a leader of the Christian right at a Sept. 11 press conference in Chicago to promote the Million Family March. He blamed a "moral and spiritual decline" on society's supposed "extreme position in the separation of church and state," and compared America to "ancient Rome, which fell due to corruption from within."

But it's the appearance of Moon's organization that looms largest over the event. Moon, the self-proclaimed Messiah, is a multinational businessman, media mogul and a convicted felon. His career of controversy and deep political involvement has usually involved the international far-right. The Moon empire publishes and subsidizes the conservative and famously unprofitable Washington Times, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in its business of producing a pro-Messiah alternative to the Washington Post. (Moon's media company also purchased the venerable but financially vulnerable United Press International wire service earlier this year; prompting the immediate resignation of veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas.)

The Moon organization and its numerous subsidiaries came to prominence over the years for, among other activities, funneling aid to the Nicaraguan contras after the U.S. Congress cut off funding in 1984 and staging mediagenic rallies in state capitols and at the Statue of Liberty to whip up popular support for the war against Iraq.

Moon has advocated "an automatic theocracy to rule the world" and often denounced American constitutional democracy, individualism and feminism. "You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan" he insisted in a 1995 sermon.

Snapshots of the evolution of the Farrakhan/Moon relationship can be found in the online official newspapers of the two religious organizations they represent, the Final Call and the Unification News. According to one pre-march report in the Final Call, Farrakhan thanked Moon as he rallied MFM supporters in a plush ballroom of the Manhattan Center -- a Moon-controlled entertainment venue in New York. Similarly, Unification News frequently notes the presence of NOI leaders and delegations at a wide range of Moon-sponsored events. NOI leaders and activists are also frequently mentioned in accounts of the activities of the Moon-sponsored Pure Love Alliance, which promotes sexual abstinence and abstinence education.

In 1998, a Final Call writer published a story in Unification News detailing a pivotal moment in the pas de deux. Under the headline "Friendship in Korea: Min. Farrakhan meets with Rev. Moon" -- an article recounting how a Farrakhan-led delegation had visited Moon's religious, business and industrial facilities in South Korea on the last leg of a "World Friendship Tour." Farrakhan praised Moon to the heavens, and suggested "that some union with the Nation of Islam and Rev. Sun Myung Moon" might be productive.

In addition to the mass nuptials, Moon plans to host a high-profile, three-day conference of international leaders that will overlap with the march. "This is truly a moment that comes only once in history," one FFWPU memo declared. The conclave will "bring together all the heads of Religions and Denominations and top political leaders, (i.e. presidents, kings, ambassadors and U.S. leaders) that True Parents have educated over the last 30 years. They will be asked to sit in a prestigious World VIP area of the MFM at the base of our nation's capitol building displaying absolute unity for world peace."

Although he declined to name any confirmed participants, Schanker said that "hundreds of former presidents, prime ministers and university presidents" will participate.

Improbable and grandiose as such rhetoric may seem, Moon has often managed to attract A-list celebrities and politicians to his events.

At one 1996 conference in Washington, Moon garnered such conservative stars as former presidents George Bush and Gerald Ford, TV preacher Robert Schuller and Christian right leaders Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer. Comedian Bill Cosby provided entertainment, but later angrily said that he had been duped, and would not have agreed to appear had he known it was a Moon-sponsored event. Moon's 80th birthday celebration in February was no less star-studded. Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, former President of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda and former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle all turned out for the Washington event.

Moon's invitations are attractive in part because they often come with cash. The former President Bush (sometimes accompanied by former first lady Barbara Bush) spoke at a series of Moon-sponsored events in Japan, Argentina and the U.S. after he left the White House. Estimates of how much the couple received for these appearances run between $1 million and $10 million. Former Reagan Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp earned $52,000 from Moon-affiliated groups in the year before becoming Bob Dole's GOP running mate in 1996.

In 1998, investigative reporter Robert Parry revealed how a Moon subsidiary organization funneled $3.5 million into a nonprofit organization in Virginia, in a scheme intended to ease a major financial crisis at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Falwell has been ubiquitous at Moon-sponsored events since at least the early 1980s when he led a chorus of complaints that Moon was "persecuted" rather than prosecuted on criminal charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with his federal tax fraud case. (Moon was convicted and spent 13 months in federal prison.)

Since his release, Moon's people have sought to burnish the church's image. FFWPU's Schanker says that the Unification Church has now "matured" and does not engage in deceptive practices. If any occurred, he asserted, they were in the 1970s and were not authorized.

"They are trying to mainstream, and don't want to be viewed as controversial," says Steven Hassan, a former Moonist leader, anti-cult activist and author of "Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves." Hassan says, however, that a scandal has been rocking the church and caused some longtime members to leave and others to think about it. In her tell-all book, "In the Shadow of the Moons," Moon's ex-daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, alleges she was abused by Moon's son and heir-apparent Hyo Jin Moon. Hong describes her former husband as a cocaine addict who engaged in frequent extramarital sex and drank heavily while watching pornographic videos. He also apparently financed a lavish lifestyle with cash smuggled into the U.S. from abroad.

According to the court records of Hong's divorce from Moon, in 1994 alone church members delivered $1 million in cash to Hyo Jin who ran the church-controlled Manhattan Center in New York. Hong also describes the elder Moon as a philanderer who likes to gamble in Las Vegas casinos.

All the high-level shoulder rubbing not withstanding, some believe Moon's involvement with the Million Family March contradicts the event's stated goal of strengthening the traditional family.

"Bizarre," said Pricilla Coates, president of the Leo J. Ryan Foundation in Bridgeport, Conn., when asked what she thought of Moon's involvement. Coates blasted what she considers to be the Unification Church's record of deceptive recruiting and indoctrination tactics that separate people from their biological or adoptive families. "Moon has had no respect for families that I've dealt with," she said. "They are not allowed to see their children. The True Family means that the family that you grew up with is nothing," she concluded. "It's only the True Family that matters."

The "True Parents" -- Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han -- are also known as "True Father" and "True Mother." The church itself is the "True Family." "Blessed Wives" are women who have been married in Moon's mass weddings or "Blessings." Unificationist "Blessed Couples" are usually strangers, interracial, international and often do not speak the same language.

Meanwhile, others note that the family values themes of the Million Family March mask the conservative gender roles advocated by both groups. Women in the Nation of Islam have traditionally played a subservient role and, says Lee, the author, Farrakhan is likely reaching out to them as a response to the criticism he received for alienating women from the 1995 Million Man March. He is also seeking to widen his appeal.

But even if Farrakhan seems to be extending an olive branch, Moon's view of women, and hence of family life, is at odds with all but perhaps the most conservative religious traditions. "[I]f you desire to receive the seed of life," he declared in a 1995 sermon, "you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent."

A call for such obedience (Schanker calls it "vertical leadership") was on display when Moon decided to go all out in support of the march. Hundreds of "Blessed Wives" were in airports en route to a seminar in South Korea when they were suddenly re-called to work on the march. Rev. Chang Shik Yang, and Rev. Michael Jenkins of the FFWPU sought to assuage the women's "confusion" about the "new direction" -- which they described as "almost unbearable" -- so much so that "they cried out to heaven in anguish." "Please rest assured," the men concluded, "that this direction is official. This is the will of heaven as directed by our 'True Parents.'"

The women were also directed to donate their $1,000 seminar fees to the Family Federation. All other families were to put up $300, and were told they should expect to cough up more for the church's regional offices.

But those women might be disappointed by the Million Family March's ambitious agenda of public policy goals. Organizers write that the march "offers an unprecedented opportunity to transform the social, political, economic and spiritual landscape of America;" and that the agenda "was drafted broad enough to be inclusive of the mutual political interests of Black, Hispanic, Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, Arab and White Americans;" and that they hope that a new political coalition will emerge, to push for "progressive public policy" at all levels of government.

Examination of the Unification Church's role in the detailed "National Agenda" posted on the Million Family March Web site exposes further anomalies. The agenda is a paradoxical hybrid of progressive domestic and foreign policy interests and conservative positions on sexuality issues that mirror those of the religious right. For example, the National Agenda advocates such progressive notions as affirmative action, Native American sovereignty, affordable housing and universal healthcare for children. But the section titled the "Divine Institution of Marriage" invokes conservative interpretations of the Koran and the Bible. Gay and lesbian civil unions and civil rights, reproductive healthcare and abortion are ignored throughout the document, even in connection with discussion of HIV and AIDS. But there is little mention of women at all outside of the section on family, which seems to primarily reflect the views and input of the Nation of Island and the Unification Church -- the only sources cited in the chapter notes.

What's more, there is significant internal dissent over Farrakhan's views and the march agenda. One Moon political operative, Dan Fefferman, wrote to his colleagues that Moon knows that many of them have "problems with Farrakhan," for example, over the NOI's call for "a ban on interracial marriage and their support for a separate nation for American blacks," and NOI's denial of the existence of the Sudanese slave trade. Fefferman also writes, "There are certainly policies in the march's agenda ... which most of us do not support."

Fefferman wrote that church leaders have stated "our support for the march is limited to central themes such as the God-centered family, interracial harmony, interreligous unity and moral revival." Fefferman's concerns are probably radically understated since the Moon organization has played an active and prominent role on the far right of American politics since the Kennedy administration.

Schanker was unable to explain his claim that the march is not political even though it is bringing a stated public policy agenda to Washington two weeks before a national election. He insisted that the three march themes are "atonement, reconciliation and responsibility," even after it was pointed out to him that the MFM Web site says that the themes are "family, morality and public policy."

Finally, even Farrakhan had difficulty explaining the role of the Moon organization to his black nationalist colleagues on the National Organizing Committee on Sept. 21: "I don't want us to get bent out of shape because folk of another race desire to help," he declared. "I say to the Muslims that are present that I am grateful for the help of the Family Federation for World Peace under Rev. and Mrs. Moon ... The Honorable Elijah Muhammad [Farrakhan's predecessor as head of NOI] told us that people would come from the East, that they would teach us everything we need to know in order to be the people that God meant for us to be."

While the Moon organization certainly shares some of Farrakhan's views, Clarence Lusane, an assistant professor at American University in Washington and author of several books on African-American politics, thinks they have been particularly useful in furthering the appearance of Farrakhan's new inclusiveness. He says that while presence of Asian and white Americans from the tiny Unification Church at pre-march rallies has helped, there is actually less racial and religious diversity than meets the eye.

Lusane sees Farrakhan's collaboration with Moon as a "one-to-one convergence of interests" in which both gain an image of broader support and influence than actually exists. The alliance benefits Moon in this regard because, says Lusane, a close relationship with NOI "allows Moon to pretend that he has a base that is broader than it is in the African-American community."

While Farrakhan and Moon may be indulging in a kind of apocalyptic grandiosity that only aging prophets and messiahs are capable of, both also have a record of staging large-scale events, and maintaining disciplined, arguably totalitarian organizations to carry them out. But can they attract the kind and number of people that will make this an historic event on the scale that they envision?

salon.com | Oct. 9, 2000

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About the writer

Frederick Clarkson has reported on the religious right for 15 years. He is the author of "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy" (Common Courage Press, 1997).

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