------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
*Be Honest About Evil
*The Week That Was
*South Korea's Peacemaker
*If Koreas Unite, Will Asia Divide?
*Who Stole Russia?
*Area votes in Congress
*NATION HOW THEY VOTED
*Attack on Cole Exposes Our Vulnerability to Terrorism
*VOTES IN CONGRESS
*Idaho national lab spins off technology
*Clinton Case Cited In Perjury Ruling
*Tennessee Oak Ridge
*The Power of TV Images Paid for by Politicians
*New Mexico

MILITARY
*Ambitious Antidrug Plan for Colombia Is Faltering
*Oil Workers Kidnapped
*Crises Unnerve Global Optimists
*What Is the Matter With Mary Jane?
*Company for Rudolph
*'Huge' space station takes shape
*U.N. and NATO Move to Curb Kosovo Crime
*Security Council Elections
*New Patriot missile peforms 'superbly and perfectly' in test
*USS Cole: An Act of War
*Persian Gulf, U.S. Danger Zone
*Cole Sailors Reach Hospital in Germany
*Yemenis Insist Accident Caused USS Cole Blast
*USS Cole fatalities:

OTHER
*Coal Sludge Blankets Kentucky Countryside
*Sweet Fishing and a Gorgeous Gorge, if You Don't Mind All That Old Lead
*Energy Salvation? Not in the Arctic
*Flights of Falcons Protect Human Fliers
*States
*China Trade Reassurances
*Joining the Force
*Conneticut
*We're No. 1, and Paying for It
*Injured U.S. Sailors Head Home from Germany
*THE FAMILY Navy Mother Mourns, as Does a Navy Town
*Ex-Pentagon Planner Defends Sending U.S. Ships to Yemen
*Sailors Fight to Halt Flooding Aboard Damaged U.S.S. Cole
*Preventing Terrorism After the Cole Bombing
*LIBERTIES As the World Churns
*Iraq Reports Safe Ending to Hijacking of Saudi Jet
*Hijackers arrested; passengers freed

ACTIVISTS
*Million Family March set for Monday

-------- NUCLEAR

-------- korea

Be Honest About Evil

Washington Post
Sunday , October 15, 2000 ; Page B07
By Fred Hiatt
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7296-2000Oct14.html

Two separate events--the Clinton administration's romancing of North Korea and its refusal to forthrightly condemn Yasser Arafat--raise questions about the meaning of the term "honest broker." The United States sometimes has to engage with bad people in order to mediate conflicts and promote peace. But when that role leads the administration to avoid the truth, it's fair to ask whether something has gone awry.

Start with Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, whom Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will visit later this month in advance of a possible end-of-term summit in Pyongyang. Kim is believed to be personally responsible for a 1983 bombing that killed 21 people, including four members of South Korea's cabinet and two senior aides to South Korea's president. Kim is believed also to have personally given the orders for two North Korean agents to plant a bomb on a South Korean passenger jet in 1987, thereby murdering 115 people. He has not expressed remorse for any of these killings.

Without question, he is responsible for overseeing what is probably the most repressive regime in the world today--more brutally suffocating of personal freedom than Fidel Castro's, or Jiang Zemin's or maybe even Saddam Hussein's.

Clinton has insisted on accountability for Libya's alleged role in blowing up a civilian airliner. He has refused to talk with Slobodan Milosevic, isolated Cuba, barred leaders of Burma's repressive regime from Washington.

So why the red carpet last week for Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok? Why does the administration say so little about North Korea's appalling human rights record?

Burma "can't do anything to hurt us militarily," a senior administration official explained in an interview Friday. North Korea, by contrast, is believed to have developed nuclear technology and long-range missiles. North Korea is a threat.

There are obvious dangers to this policy of engagement with North Korea. One is that other nations, such as Burma, will learn that the best way to get American attention, food aid and a lifting of sanctions is to pose a military threat--that blackmail works. Another is that the United States will help prolong the rule of a dictator who essentially keeps his population of 22 million in one isolated concentration camp.

There are strong arguments in favor of U.S. policy, too. Maybe engagement will temper Kim Jong Il's repressiveness. Maybe it will lessen the risk of war. South Korea's democratically elected president, and the world's newest Nobel Peace laureate, Kim Dae Jung, favors engagement, and since South Korea is most at risk its views must carry weight.

So maybe it's right that Clinton wants to cap his presidency with a visit to a murderer. A great power's diplomacy can't always be consistent. But can it be right not to speak forthrightly about that regime? Can U.S. criticisms of human rights abuses in Iraq, or Belarus, or even China be taken seriously when it has so little to say about its newest pen pals in Pyongyang? Ronald Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union; he also called it what it was--an evil empire.

In Israel, as in South Korea, a democratically elected leader remains committed against all odds to peace and so deserves U.S. support in his pursuit of negotiations. But Ehud Barak is honest in that pursuit, and he asks for equivalent American honesty. "We know who initiated it"--the violence, that is--"and why," he told CNN. "And we believe that the Americans know it. We believe that certain other Western countries know it. And we expect the leadership of the world to be able to look at the eyes of our own public and tell the truth loud and clear."

For a leader who has taken and continues to take such risks for peace, that does not seem so much to ask. Yet the Clinton administration won't veto U.N. resolutions that are false and one-sided. The most a senior U.S. official can say is, "I think he [Arafat] has not gotten control over" the violence. "Finding a villain isn't part of the job," the official says. "Making too many personal judgments is not the way to move this forward."

Arafat and his aides have urged, celebrated and participated in the uprising. They have freed terrorists and stood by as holy sites are desecrated. "Not gotten control over" is simply not an accurate rendering. Yet it is put forward in the name of preserving U.S. usefulness--of remaining an "honest broker."

No one can argue with that goal. But a failure to speak the truth not only damages America's moral standing; in the long run, it will also damage its effectiveness as a mediator. A minimum requirement to be an honest broker is honesty.

---

The Week That Was

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000 ; Page B07
By Jim Hoagland
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7297-2000Oct14?language=printer

Foreign policy is created as an abstraction of words and ideas; life is lived in specifics. In the past extraordinary week the twain met: A flurry of global challenges for American power intersected with the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, where both men sought to accentuate the positive in their views of the world.

"What a week," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright breathed just before she rose at an official banquet to toast North Korea's Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok, the No. 2 man in a regime that Washington long treated as a band of lunatics.

And that was only Tuesday.

The world-upending sense of Marshal Jo's visit to the Oval Office in full military uniform earlier that day to meet President Clinton was nearly lost in the competing euphoria over the victory of democracy in Serbia and the despair of escalating Arab-Israeli slaughter. Lying in wait were the terrorist attack on a U.S. Navy destroyer in Yemen and a Nobel Peace Prize for the man largely responsible for Jo's visit to the White House, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

When Defense Secretary William Cohen took a giant step forward by enthusiastically welcoming European Union defense planning in a speech to NATO on Tuesday, it was a big tree falling silently in the policy forest of Washington's week that was. Nobody heard.

Time flees the Clinton administration, causing the president to speed up his already hectic pace. But Clinton and his aides need to show they have the wisdom to recognize when to slow down as well---when to avoid hurrying for legacy's sake.

The startling change in North Korean diplomacy symbolized by Jo's hastily arranged visit here was worth the welcome it received and the Nobel prize it triggered. A year of deft probing by Clinton special envoy William Perry and of trail-blazing peace initiatives by President Kim established that the Pyongyang regime of Kim Jong Il is rational and capable of following a sustained policy of opening to the world.

Those fundamental points had been in doubt. Kim Jong Il was initially viewed by U.S. policymakers as a flake, a cross between Caligula and Stalin. North Korea's testing of long-range missiles in 1998 triggered calls for an urgent start to a U.S. missile defense system to protect the nation against crazy rogue leaders.

The diplomatic outreach Pyongyang now practices may be part ruse, part blackmail, as skeptics suggest. But even that course would reflect rational behavior that can be dealt with through a combination of diplomacy and deterrence.

Albright's projected visit to Pyongyang should be useful as well as historic. But to add to that a presidential trip by Clinton, or to seek a comprehensive settlement with inexperienced North Korean negotiators in Clinton's final days, would be serious and egotistical overreaching. This embryonic detente must be pursued step by step, with all deliberate speed, and readied for Clinton's successor to manage to fruition.

The same is true in Serbia, where newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica is wary of an early high-level embrace from Washington. Albright is aware of lingering Serb resentment over her role in the Kosovo campaign and willing to let European leaders take the spotlight on Serbia's initial rehabilitation.

The rising death toll in the Middle East--which now includes U.S. military casualties--argues for similar superpower discipline. The prestige of Clinton's office should not be committed to an unpredictable Israeli-Palestinian summit of enraged combatants. To the extent diplomacy can help defuse this moment of continuing rage and madness, the task falls to Kofi Annan, a rare U.N. secretary general with credibility on both sides.

The focus of the U.S. role now must be on helping find an end to the violence and supporting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's bid for peace, as George W. Bush and Al Gore agreed in their debate Wednesday. Each endorsed Clinton's handling of the week's crises. Each appeared in command of foreign policy questions and ready to take the baton from Clinton's hand at the right moment.

The image of competency was of most benefit to Bush, who was mugged journalistically early in the campaign with a foreign policy pop quiz. This time he cleverly used general themes--the need for an all-powerful America to be "humble" in its dealing with the world, "judicious" in the use of its military--to attach those contemplative words to his own public image.

Gore was often on the defensive, biting into the poisoned apple of discussing the specifics of U.S. intervention in Somalia and Haiti and stretching far to link the Marshall Plan to nation building in the Third World.

Bush was the team manager, in command of the general and not sweating the details. Gore was the expert, content and condemned to live or die by the specifics he has mastered. Together, they might make a heck of a president.

---

South Korea's Peacemaker

New York Times
October 15, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/opinion/15SUN2.html

Two global flash points, the Middle East and the Balkans, have been in the spotlight in recent weeks for different reasons. Now comes a reminder from Oslo - in the form of a Nobel Peace Prize - of encouraging signs in another of the world's most enduring trouble spots. President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea has been awarded the prize for his efforts to secure peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula.

The 76-year-old Mr. Kim, improbably elected president in 1997, is a worthy recipient. As a dissident during the years of Seoul's military dictatorship, Mr. Kim struggled courageously for human rights and democracy before assuming the presidency. It is only fitting that one of the heroes of democracy's triumph in South Korea is striving to bring lasting peace to the entire peninsula.

The award came a day after the United States and North Korea pledged to "fundamentally improve" their relations. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced plans to visit President Kim Il Jong of North Korea in Pyongyang soon, and her visit may pave the way for a subsequent visit by the president. Mr. Clinton will embark on a historic trip to Vietnam in November, and a stop in North Korea would give an added flourish to Mr. Clinton's last months in office.

In its citation to Kim Dae Jung, the Nobel committee alluded to the contributions made by North Korea and other countries to advance reconciliation and possible reunification on the Korean peninsula. President Clinton deserves some of the credit. His administration has adroitly made overtures to North Korea's Communist regime while insisting that it give up efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

At home, President Kim's cultivation of Pyongyang has not always been popular. But this year it has paid impressive dividends. He held the first- ever summit with his North Korean counterpart in June. The two countries have since agreed to rebuild the rail link between them, arranged short family reunions for relatives separated for a half- century and marched together in the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympic Games.

The thaw could not have been possible, to be sure, without a dramatic attitudinal shift on the part of North Korea, which not long ago seemed intent on dragging the peninsula into another war. But serious issues remain to be resolved, such as Pyongyang's program to develop intercontinental missiles. Washington and Seoul must now ascertain whether the thaw is merely an opportunistic gambit by President Kim Il Jong to attract economic aid or a fundamental attempt to overcome the past.

---

THE WORLD If Koreas Unite, Will Asia Divide?

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15FREN.html

SEOUL, South Korea -- For nearly 50 years, American troops billeted along the most heavily fortified border in the world have helped stave off a surprise attack by North Korea and have kept the line separating it from the south frozen in place.

Now, after a short few months of stunning diplomacy that started with a presidential summit in June and was recognized with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize last week to President Kim Dae-Jung of South Korea, many Koreans have finally been able to imagine an end to their nation's division.

But as the prospect for national reconciliation and eventual reunification grows, anxiety is spreading throughout Northeast Asia, suddenly bringing into sharp focus a feature of the American military presence whose effects are far more sweeping than its assigned role of defending a medium-sized ally.

The region is home to many of the most explosive loose ends of the 20th century. And by policing the Korean DMZ for five decades, the United States did far more than keep the truce here. It served as a cork in the bottle, preventing historic rivalries and animosities among China, Japan, Korea and even Russia from spilling forth.

Under the American shield, Western Europe came together during this same period, both economically and politically, and ultimately witnessed the collapse of the threat from the rival bloc to the east.

But this region, home to the world's most populous nation, its second largest economy and several of the world's biggest and best equipped armies, has seen no such coalescence. What remains in place instead are many of the same antagonisms of old, together with incomparably greater means to act upon them.

American policy makers are plainly aware of this. President Clinton himself recently warned against any premature American withdrawal from Korea. But thoughts are already turning to the substantial downsizing that would inevitably follow any peace treaty between the Koreas. "Mission defines force structure," said the United States ambassador to South Korea, Stephen W. Bosworth, who said that American ground troops could be cut back in the future. "If we are no longer here to deter, we may need different things. Our military planners would work closely with our Korean hosts to decide what is necessary."

But Korea's Asian neighbors are clearly not waiting for an uncertain peace treaty between the divided halves of the peninsula to begin thinking and worrying about what comes after the Pax Americana.

Indeed, they may not have to. If the two Koreas are able to sustain any momentum in their current engagement, public opinion in South Korea since the summit meeting, together with generational changes, will steadily increase pressure on present and future governments to shrink America's presence. Last month, one newspaper poll said that 67.3 percent of Koreans already favored a gradual withdrawal of United States troops, while 10.7 percent wished them to leave immediately.

"Simply maintaining good atmospherics could be a real destabilizer," said Han S. Park, director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia. "South Korea cannot maintain the necessary level of military preparedness under these circumstances. National security advocates in the society will find themselves on the defensive."

While South Koreans who are old enough to remember the devastation of the Korean War, or to have grown up in its shadow, worry that the prospect of peace on their peninsula paradoxically carries with it a heightened risk of renewed disaster, Korea's neighbors are haunted by patterns set in a distant past.

Western Europe's rivals came together around common cultural foundations, capitalist economies and democracy. But China and Japan, despite having much in common, are as divided as ever. One is Communist, the other capitalist. One is wealthy and increasingly gray, the other's system young and relatively poor, but fast-rising. Each craves stability. But neither can countenance being eclipsed by the other.

And for China, which sees itself as the region's Greece and Rome, the humiliation under Japan's brutal colonial rule drives its bid for renewed - the Chinese would say rightful - pre-eminence.

When these two powers have locked horns in the past, it has often been over control of the Korean Peninsula. And many of the worst nightmares of their leaders today involve the peninsula once again.

For Japan, the bad dream is an expansion of Chinese power and influence in the peninsula, including the military use of ports like Pusan to intimidate it.

"The closer the Koreas grow together, the more the rationale for the American forces will change, and if there is rapid movement, it will have a major impact on Japan's security," said Terumasa Nakanishi, a professor of international politics at Kyoto University in Japan. "Koreans tend to be very complacent and overly optimistic about China, and that worries the Japanese.

"The nightmare that Japanese have is that the peninsula one day will fall under the strategic sway of China. We have a fear of seeing the Chinese naval colors being flown in Pusan one day. To American eyes this may seem rather far-fetched, but this comes from a deep-rooted historic and cultural experience of the three nations in northeast Asia."

China, meanwhile, harbors a real fear of Japanese rearmament and a resurgence of Japanese militarism. Such a turn of events could flow from further North Korean nuclear or missile weapons testing, or from a feeling in Japan of being left exposed once there are fewer American troops.

Having had hundreds of years of experience of foreign interventions, Korea, the quintessential medium power surrounded by far more powerful neighbors, knows the frightening regional scenarios by heart. "Historically when Japan gets stronger they simply cannot remain on their own island; they try to expand their power on the continent," said Chun In Young, a political scientist at Seoul National University. "But China will then say, `But this has been our traditional zone of influence.' Their worsening relations will inevitably have grave consequences here, and could prove to be the most persuasive reason for retaining an American presence."

But things are not quite that straightforward. Whether one considers allies, rivals or outright foes, the presence of American troops both grates and gratifies, often simultaneously. China, for example, has never officially favored the American deployment in South Korea, even though it has plainly profited from the resulting peace, to the point of establishing lucrative economic ties with South Korea. "If North Korea is no longer the threat, the Chinese will ask, why are the Americans still on the peninsula," said Mr. Park, of the University of Georgia. "Redefining the role under these circumstances is going to be a formidable task."

With few of these issues worked out, it is little wonder that none of the regional players appears to be in a hurry to address the question of the American troop presence as they watch events unfold between the Koreas. According to President Kim Dae Jung, even his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Il, told him that he wishes to see American troops remain.

"Frankly no one knows what the picture will look like in 10 or 15 years," said Mr. Nakanishi, the Japanese specialist in international affairs. "But the mainstay of order in this region is the American presence. And as Margaret Thatcher once said, you should not break down your old house until you have built a new one."

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Who Stole Russia?

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000
Reviewed by Richard Lourie
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52312-2000Oct11.html

FAILED CRUSADE America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia By Stephen F. Cohen Norton. 160 pp. $21.95

GODFATHER OF THE KREMLIN Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia By Paul Klebnikov Harcourt. 400 pp. $28

SALE OF THE CENTURY Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism By Chrystia Freeland Crown Business. 389 pp. $27.50

Russia has been a land of calamity and survival ever since 1237, when the Golden Horde came clattering into Kiev. Now the "new" Russia may yet evolve into a modern state, occupied with technology and commerce, or the bitterness of its humiliations may cause it to redress grievance with grand ambitions on the world stage. When Robert Strauss retired as U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1992, he said that we had to decide what it was we wanted-a strong, friendly Russia or a strong, unfriendly Russia. No matter what, Russia would be strong.

There's a sense now of an opportunity squandered, by us and by them. Though these three books differ in perspective, evaluation and tone, they are at one in sharing that sense of folly, crime and blindness. Paul Klebnikov, senior editor at Forbes, and Chrystia Freeland, former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, both provide colorful, detailed accounts of the looting of Russia. But since that could not have occurred without the connivance of people in power, economic and political history here are almost one. These books show you how the two arenas meshed-cogs, grease and all. Stephen Cohen, a New York University professor and CBS news consultant, emphasizes the American side, misreads and misdeeds. He sees American journalists, academics and policy makers hypnotized by an idea that had nothing to do with reality. Russia was not making a transition to democratic capitalism; it was being plundered and plunged into a misery that is all too supportable by statistics-$2 billion in capital flight a month, 70 percent of the population living beneath the poverty line, Russians dying in their middle 50s. (A friend of mine, turning 59, joked: "I'm officially dead.")

Cohen is unambivalent in his belief that the "Clinton administration put America on the wrong side of history in post-Communist Russia." No devotee of understatement, Cohen calls the result the "worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, and its long-term consequences more perilous." But he is an excellent critic because he knows his own mind and has no fear of speaking it. "We can judge the failure by exact criteria," he writes. "After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the foremost goal of U.S. policy-makers should have been a Russia in full control of its enormous quantities of nuclear weapons and other devices of mass destruction, and therefore one that was prospering, politically stable, at peace, and cooperating with the United States on the most threatening international problems." Since Russia fails to meet any of those "exact criteria," American foreign policy can only be judged a shambles.

America foreign policy toward Russia failed from a combination of ahistorical hubris-now that they're free of communism, they'll want to become exactly like us-and willful blindness. Cohen uses the same 1998 quote from Vice President Gore twice: "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia." If, as Cohen contends, a country so degraded that it is even slipping out of modernity is a cause for optimism, what exact picture of the world does the Democratic candidate carry around in his head?

Most probably, "Who lost Russia?" will not be a campaign issue, for the good reason that no one's interested. But that could change if something were to go significantly awry in Russia, where lately submarines have been sinking and television towers bursting into flame. Here is Cohen, imagining history's indictment: "The U.S. government, enthusiastically supported by many journalists and scholars, actively encouraged a Yeltsin regime which enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable twentieth-century assets."

Klebnikov, who is more intent on describing that plunder, is also in perfect accord with Cohen: "The Clinton administration, in particular, while trumpeting the principles of democracy and the free market, repeatedly ignored evidence that the Yeltsin regime was a kleptocracy." Chrystia Freeland is a little more forgiving of human nature: "It took us a while to abandon the image of Boris Yeltsin on the tank as the defining icon of the New Russia. The collapse of the evil empire, the velvet revolution, and the end of history were such hopeful stories . . . they were hard to stop believing." But it wasn't gaudy Russian mafiosi, though they got press, who were the cause of the country's dire condition: "Russia has been looted all right, but the biggest crimes haven't been clandestine or violent or even, in the strict legal sense, crimes at all. Russia was robbed in broad daylight, by businessmen who broke no laws, assisted by the West's best friends in the Kremlin-the young reformers." Though she apportions blame differently, her version of events does nothing to alter the image of cheerful myopia at home and a greed in Russia so outsized that Gogol would have blanched.

The obvious question here is whether a new consensus has emerged with its own mantra and mindset, of exactly the type Cohen derides-or whether these three accounts match so closely because they describe something so huge and grossly obvious that no other rendition is possible. Unfortunately, it's the latter.

Though alike in so many ways, these three books are also quite different. Cohen's is basically an indictment of American foreign policy, its tone at times approaching jeremiad, an effect both heightened and dulled by the inclusion, with postscripts, of many of the author's journalistic pieces from the '90s. Inevitably, some points get hammered again and again-the Clinton administration was naive and arrogant in its "virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system." Not only were we failing to achieve what Cohen insists should have been our foreign policy aims, but we were too closely engaged in Russia's affairs, attempting to coerce the Russians with the "moral" and financial powers of the victor.

While comparing Yeltsin to Lincoln during the first Chechen War, Clinton also actively pursued a policy that could only be viewed from within Russia as aggressive, if not hostile. Accepting Poland, Hungary and the Czech republic into NATO, bombing Serbia, attempting to divert the transportation of Caspian Sea oil away from Russia-none of these could be seen as anything but encroachments. Our basic stance should in fact be the one advocated by the grand old man of Russian studies, George F. Kennan, whom Cohen quotes: "The ways by which peoples advance toward dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign interference can do less good."

What Cohen does advocate is something "akin to the American New Deal of the 1930s." In this scenario, the industrialized nations play FDR and invest $500 billion in Russia over a 10-year period. But Cohen doesn't answer the questions that follow hard upon this recommendation: How are such sums to be monitored in a land where theft is rife? Or will that control be exerted from within, by Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin who regards such power as his mandate from history?

Klebnikov's and Freeland's books will especially appeal to readers who enjoy closely documented financial transactions-alliances, structures, strategies and the art of the deal. Though they inevitably cover the same events and people (there are only seven oligarchs to go around), the two authors differ in tone and take. Freeland writes in a sprightly style, and though she occasionally slips into gratuitous vulgarity, she can be quite adroit at as summing a person up with three quick adjectives as in this sketch of Yeltsin: "crude, mercurial, and intuitive." In her numerous interviews she catches the reformers in the coils of their self-deception. One of them, Chubais, says of the oligarchs and others: "They are stealing absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop them. But let them steal and take their property. They will then become owners and decent administrators of this property."

But that's not what happened, as Klebnikov clearly demonstrates in his portrait of Boris Berezovsky, the former scientist who became probably the richest man in Russia, and whose "most destructive legacy was that, as a private individual, he hijacked the state. . . . He and other crony capitalists produced no benefit to Russia's consumers, industries, or treasury. No new wealth was created." The frequently made comparisons with Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Morgan simply don't wash-however rapacious they may have been, they built the nation's steel, oil, automotive and financial industries. Klebnikov sees an absolute blurring among crime, business and government in the Russia of the '90s. And the atmosphere of murk and murder around Berezovsky fully justifies Klebnikov's use of "Godfather" in his title. There is some evidence, though insufficient, that Berezovsky made efforts to have his chief rival killed. And Berezovsky himself was the target of an assassination attempt-a bomb was placed in his car; he was badly burned and his driver decapitated.

The sudden, astonishing collapse of the Soviet Union was humbling not only for Russia but for those who watch it by profession. No one saw it coming. And whatever lurch Russia makes next will also probably catch us by surprise. Will Rogers put it best: "Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it's true."

Richard Lourie, author of a recent novel, "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin," is writing a life of Andrei Sakharov.

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

Area votes in Congress

Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, October 15, 2000
ROLL CALL REPORT SYNDICATE
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/10/15/national/VOTE15.htm

WASHINGTON - Here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week.

Senate

2001 defense budget. Voting 90-3, the Senate approved the conference report on a bill (HR 4205) authorizing nearly $310 billion for defense programs in fiscal 2001, including a 3.7 percent military pay raise, a major expansion of health care and prescription-drug benefits for Medicare-eligible career veterans, special payments of up to $500 a month to keep the lowest-paid personnel off food stamps, and $2.1 billion to advance the National Missile Defense System.

The bill authorizes U.S. military involvement to fight illegal drug trafficking in Colombia but omits a House-passed cap on troop deployment. It provides special funding for workers who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and toxic substances, such as beryllium and silica, while building America's nuclear arsenal.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D., Del.), Frank R. Lautenberg (D., N.J.), William V. Roth Jr. (R., Del.), Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) and Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

Not voting: Robert G. Torricelli (D., N.J.).

---

NATION HOW THEY VOTED

Pioneer Planet
Published: Sunday, October 15, 2000
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/2/news/docs/027420.htm

WASHINGTON - Both chambers hope to complete work on fiscal 2001 budget bills by week's end and adjourn for the year.

Here's how area members of Congress were recorded on major roll call votes in the week ending Oct. 13

2001 DEFENSE BUDGET Voting 90 for and three against, the Senate on Oct. 12 approved the conference report on a bill (HR 4205) authorizing nearly $310 billion for defense programs in fiscal 2001, including a 3.7 percent military pay raise, a major expansion of health care and prescription drug benefits for Medicare-eligible career veterans (next issue), special payments of up to $500 a month to keep the lowest-paid personnel off of Food Stamps and $2.1 billion to advance the National Missile Defense System.

The bill authorizes U.S. military involvement to fight illegal drug trafficking in Colombia but omits a House-passed cap on troop deployment. It provides special funding for workers who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and toxic substances, such as beryllium and silica, while building America's nuclear arsenal. If Congress fails to develop a compensation plan by next July 31, workers with illnesses traced to nuclear weapons exposure will receive a lump sum payment of $150,000 plus medical care.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Minnesota Wellstone voted no. Grams did not vote.
Wisconsin Feingold voted no. Kohl voted yes.

---

Attack on Cole Exposes Our Vulnerability to Terrorism

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, October 15, 2000
By GARY ACKERMAN
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20001015/t000098212.html

The explosion that blew a 20-by-40-foot hole in the port side of the U.S. guided missile destroyer Cole, killing numerous seamen and threatening to sink the vessel, serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of U.S. forces overseas to covert attack. The Cole explosion brings up echoes of Beirut and Dharan, where U.S. service personnel were casualties of small groups of fanatics.

Since then, the U.S. government has expended a large amount of resources on increasing protection for its overseas facilities against sabotage and attacks by terrorists. The question is whether these efforts have proceeded efficiently and quickly enough to keep pace with the adaptability and motivation of those sub-national enemies of the United States willing to express their discontent by attacking symbols of U.S. power abroad. The fact that U.S. officials immediately attributed the explosion to terrorists and deployed the FBI to Yemen displays the Clinton administration's recognition of this vulnerability.

Such vulnerability could have wider ramifications than the tragic loss of American sailors. What if instead of the Cole, the attacked ship had been a nuclear-powered vessel? Although the chances of a nuclear explosion as the result of a bomb attack are negligible, severe damage to the reactor core and subsequent meltdown could conceivably emit dangerous levels of radiation. This would contaminate the surrounding environment and magnify the effects of an attack by inducing far-reaching psychological and political effects. How many countries, for instance, would feel comfortable knowing that U.S. ships frequenting their ports could become irradiators of their coastal areas?

The current conflagration in Israel has led to demonstrations throughout the region in the past week, including a rise in anti-U.S. sentiment within the Arab world. Reports question why the Cole was not using its own support boats in the Middle East port of a country with a reputation for violence. Shouldn't there have been increased alert levels among the U.S. military, especially deployments in the Persian Gulf region, to the possibility of terrorist attacks?

Obviously, even if such precautions were being taken at the time of the alleged attack, they proved insufficient. An attack by a suicide bomber is often impossible to prevent. But, in this case--dealing with an identifiable target in a tense political climate--surely there were added steps that could have been taken regarding the approach of a foreign vessel that might have prevented the tragic loss of American lives.

The incident raises questions about the integrity of current Department of Defense force-protection measures. While the Cole and other billion-dollar vessels like it may be able to thwart conventional military attacks using the most advanced sensor systems and countermeasures (the Cole possesses plenty of both), it would be shameful indeed for the U.S. Navy if its vessels proved vulnerable to an inflatable dinghy filled with explosives.

Gary Ackerman Is a Research Associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies

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

VOTES IN CONGRESS

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000 ; Page M23
By Roll Call Report Syndicate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10743-2000Oct15.html

The following is a report of how some major bills fared recently in Congress and how Southern Maryland's representative, Steny H. Hoyer (D-5th District), and Democratic Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes voted.

SENATE

2001 DEFENSE BUDGET

For-90/Against-3

The Senate on Thursday approved the conference report on a bill (HR 4205) authorizing nearly $310 billion for defense programs in fiscal 2001, including a 3.7 percent military pay raise, a major expansion of health care and prescription drug benefits for Medicare-eligible career veterans (next issue), special payments of up to $500 a month to keep the lowest-paid personnel off Food Stamps and $2.1 billion to advance the National Missile Defense System. The bill authorizes U.S. military involvement to fight illegal drug trafficking in Colombia but omits a House-passed cap on troop deployment. It provides special funding for workers who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and toxic substances, such as beryllium and silica, while building America's nuclear arsenal. If Congress fails to develop a compensation plan by July 31, workers with illnesses traced to nuclear weapons exposure will receive a lump sum payment of $150,000 plus medical care. A yes vote was to pass the bill.

MIKULSKI-YES SARBANES-YES

-------- idaho

Idaho national lab spins off technology
A 5-year-old program has transferred 29 inventions, many of them developed for market by in-state concerns

Oregon Live
Sunday, October 15, 2000
By ANNE MINARD of The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/news/oregonian/00/10/nw_11ineel15.frame

POCATELLO, Idaho -- Idaho's nuclear site once jealously guarded its inventors and scientists.

But since 1995, the spinoff technology program at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory has increased the transfer of technologies developed there to industry.

Dennis Cheney helped spur the spinoff program in 1995 after he had seen one in action at the University of Utah.

So far, the program has helped develop 29 spinoff technologies.

Cheney said the site encourages entrepreneurs to use the knowledge in local businesses, and the majority stay in eastern Idaho. But inevitably, some leave.

In the case of Cosner Industries in Carson City, Nev., scientists developed an oil-and-water separator, used at in Idaho in the early 1990s to separate and purify uranium.

"The inventors saw the opportunity to use it as an oil-water separator for environmental cleanup," Cheney said, adding that the creators have since moved to Nevada. He said it is one invention that is going places.

"This is going to make a big difference to our environment. Ships have these devices installed on them. Oil-rig water is being cleaned before it's put back into the ocean."

He said the oil-and-water separators will soon be sold to the U.S. Navy.

Solex Environmental Systems Inc., a Houston-based computer software company with an office in Idaho Falls, was a spinoff back in 1989, said spokesman Steve Zollinger. Solex has developed a robot useful for cleaning the insides of tanks contaminated with environmental toxins.

The Idaho Falls-based Gapowders worked with the laboratory to develop a better, stronger and cheaper magnet for use in electric motors and sensors.

The Collabware Corp., also in Idaho Falls, has adapted computer-assisted drawing software for use on the Internet so engineers throughout the world will be able to access and collaborate on the most current engineering and drawings.

"It's a very promising technology," Cheney said.

Another company is developing a spinoff technology called the tractrix valve, based on the tractrix curve. Named after a phenomenon in physics, valve boasts two surfaces in the curvature designed to wear evenly. It is being developed for use in the oil industry and in industrial chemical applications.

In many of the partnerships, the spinoff program helps get businesses started by lending them key pieces of equipment and sponsoring some of the research.

Zollinger and Cheney agreed that one of the best parts of the spinoff program is the long-range opportunity for collaboration among experts.

"These spinouts have access to former associates," Cheney said. "There's a support network that's been developed."

-------- new mexico

Clinton Case Cited In Perjury Ruling

Associated Press
October 15,. 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Perjury-Sentence.html

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) -- A federal judge who sentenced a convicted perjurer to one year in prison instead of the recommended five said he based his decision partly on the fact that President Clinton asked for leniency when facing perjury charges.

Chief U.S. District Judge James Parker told prosecutors it seemed ``terribly unfair'' that the Department of Justice was trying to ``pillorize'' Ruben Renteria Sr. when Clinton was asking for leniency, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

Clinton was found in contempt of court and fined $90,000 by a federal judge in Arkansas for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. A state court panel has recommended he be disbarred.

Renteria, 49, was acquitted of drug-conspiracy charges in the 1990s, but prosecutors later charged him with perjury after he denied signing a consent form that gave investigators permission to search his property.

He was convicted of perjury in 1996, but the 15-month sentence Parker imposed was thrown out on appeal.

In May 1999, Parker resentenced Renteria to five years in prison, but noted that the sentenced could be decreased. That led to a legal battle over sentencing criteria.

At an Oct. 4 hearing, defense attorney Joseph Gandert cited Clinton's requests for leniency made during his impeachment trial and during the ongoing case to disbar him.

Gandert also argued that the government was being severe on Renteria when it failed to prosecute FBI agent Robert Messemer, who admitted making ``inadvertent'' errors while testifying in the case of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. Parker was the judge in the Lee case.

Parker imposed the 15-month sentence again, saying Renteria had served the original sentence and that Clinton's pleadings were the ``icing on the cake.''

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathon Gerson told Parker it was ``an abuse of this court's discretion to rely in any way'' on the proceedings involving the president. The office is considering an appeal.

-------- tennessee

USA Today
10/15/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Tennessee

Oak Ridge - An administrative judge sided with a whistleblower who said the Department of Energy tried to reassign him to silence his complaints about a welder's 1997 death at a DOE plant. Judge Richard Vitaris recommended that the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board order DOE to give Joe Carson a job in Oak Ridge.

-------- us nuc politics

The Power of TV Images Paid for by Politicians

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By JOSEPH HANANIA
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/arts/15HANA.html

BEVERLY HILLS -- IN 1948 Rosser Reeves - the advertising executive who would later create the "melts in your mouth, not in your hands" commercials for M&M's - approached the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, with the idea of advertising on the new medium of television. Dewey flatly turned him down. Television, Dewey said, was undignified.

If Dewey had been willing to dirty himself with television, perhaps he would have been spared the less-than-dignified spectacle of a gleefully victorious Harry S. Truman holding up the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." The power of televised political advertising has been proved repeatedly over the last half century, to the point that two out of every campaign dollars at all levels, or about $1 billion this year, is spent on TV ads. The growth of this new industry, and art form, is chronicled in "Madison Avenue Goes to Washington: The History of Presidential Campaign Advertising," a film being shown at the Museum of Television and Radio here and in New York through Nov. 12.

That history actually begins in 1952, when the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, shot 40 ads on a single trip to New York, said Tom Hollihan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California.

The "Eisenhower Answers America" series - produced by Rosser Reeves - included spots such as a voter complaining to Eisenhower about how little $25 had bought at a grocery store. "It was the candidate addressing the everyman voter with an everyman situation, and it was powerful," Mr. Hollihan said.

Eisenhower gained an almost immediate benefit, said David Bushman, curator of the museum's package of screenings. In 1948, each presidential candidate trekked up to 30,000 miles to shake half a million hands; Eisenhower's commercials were sent out to 19 million television sets across the country and sealed his victory, Mr. Bushman said. Eisenhower's Democratic opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson, refused to appear in television advertisements, saying they showed contempt for the American people and proclaiming, "This isn't Ivory Soap versus Palmolive."

Four years later, Stevenson had changed his mind. Running against Eisenhower again, he produced the first negative ad, accusing the incumbent of breaking promises to promote government "thrift" and "integrity." Eisenhower, campaigning on the slogan "I Like Ike," easily won re- election.

By 1960 television had become important enough for the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, to commission the first group whose sole mission was to create political ads. But Nixon's trust in television advertising was not complete; he kept it on the back burner while stumping in all 50 states.

Nixon's uneasiness with television in that campaign went beyond advertising, of course. His poor showing in the televised debates with John F. Kennedy came at a time when 9 out of 10 American homes had a television.

But Nixon's narrow loss in the election may have involved more than just his poor makeup during the debates. In a move little noted at the time, Jacqueline Kennedy cut American television's first Spanish-language ad, appealing to Hispanic voters to support her husband.

Up to this point televised political advertising had followed a traditional hard-sell approach. But in the 1964 presidential campaign more emotional appeals began to appear. President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a series of advertisements savaging his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater. One ad showed a saw cutting through a wooden model of the United States, slicing away the Eastern seaboard as the narrator told of how Goldwater had suggested floating the East Coast out to sea.

Even that paled next to a spot showing a young girl counting the petals of a daisy, the camera pulling in tight on the black of her eye as a male voice begins a count-down that ends with a nuclear bomb blast. "These are the stakes," Johnson says in a voice- over. "To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." The tag line: "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

BROADCAST just once, the advertisement nevertheless drove news coverage, putting Goldwater on the defensive for the rest of the campaign. This was no accident, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Everything You Think You Know About Politics - And Why You're Wrong" (Basic Books).

Ms. Jamieson said that a recently discovered memo showed that Johnson administration strategists had deliberately targeted the advertisement at journalists, effectively pushing the issue Johnson wanted to debate - was Goldwater likely to blow up the world? - front and center. This strategy, of targeting advertisements at the news media, has been a staple of campaigns ever since.

Apparently learning from his and Goldwater's gaffes, Nixon stayed away from reporters during the 1968 election and ran an image-laden campaign designed for television consumption. "The events staged for the campaign become the campaign itself," Mr. Bushman said. "For the first time, the staged event superseded reality."

That trend peaked in Ronald Reagan's 1984 "Morning In America" advertisements, which ignored the country's difficulties, instead resonating with rich images of a bride kissing her grandmother and a boat sailing across a harbor. "These were feel- good, not substantive ads, indistinguishable from product ads," Mr. Hollihan said. More than 30 years after his "Ivory soap vs. Palmolive" prediction, Stevenson's fears had become real.

One of the most notorious presidential campaign advertisements appeared in 1988, when supporters of the Republican candidate, George Bush, broadcast a photograph of Willie Horton, a menacing-looking black man who had been imprisoned for murder and rape and then released on a prison furlough program in Massachusetts initiated by Mr. Bush's opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, the state's governor. Playing on racial fears, the "revolving door" ad helped make 1988, in the opinion of many, the nadir of political TV advertising.

Largely in reaction, a greater scrutiny of political ads began with the 1992 campaign, as newspapers began to examine their truthfulness and balance. The resulting "ad watches," combined with voters' increased disgust with attack ads, has resulted in cleaner, more issue-oriented ads today, Ms. Jamieson said. When Gov. George W. Bush's campaign released a commercial earlier this year ridiculing Vice President Al Gore and referring to his fund-raising visit to a Buddhist temple, it was criticized by many officials in Mr. Bush's own party.

Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and the narrator of "Madison Avenue Goes to Washington," says that that attitude is even beginning to seep into Congressional races. At least two advertisements - one in New Jersey and one in Kentucky - were recently pulled after each attacked candidate showed television stations that the ads were inaccurate. "This has never happened before," Mr. Russert said. "It's fantastic."

For all of their impact, televised political advertisements may have reached the limits of their power. As new technologies allow viewers to remotely "zap" ads, and as voters are broken down into ever smaller demographic groupings, both the Internet and drive-time radio will grow as small but important parts of the mix, said Roderick Hart, a communications professor and elections expert at the University of Texas.

In the meantime, Ms. Jamieson is just happy that televised advertising has to some extent been cleaned up. "Before November, we ought to stop ourselves and give a cheer," she said. "The system works."

Joseph Hanania's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about the actress and television reporter Andrea Thompson.

-------- us nuc waste

USA Today
10/15/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

New Mexico

Carlsbad - Wendell Weart, who spent a quarter-century working to bring the USA's first federal nuclear waste dump to fruition, is retiring today to do consulting. Weart spent 41 years with Sandia National Laboratories, mostly working on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The repository, which opened in March 1999, buries plutonium-contaminated waste in salt beds.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Ambitious Antidrug Plan for Colombia Is Faltering

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15COLO.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - Three months since the United States approved a huge aid package for Colombia, the overarching $7.5 billion plan to stabilize that nation and thwart its guerrilla movements and drug traffickers is already showing signs of disarray, officials and experts say.

European nations have balked at providing donations to help Colombia address its social problems, Latin American leaders are voicing concerns about creeping United States militarism and the government of President Andrés Pastrana has been reluctant to promote the plan at home or to dedicate funds to it, American officials concede.

In a report to Congress this week, the General Accounting Office said "the Colombian government has not demonstrated it has the detailed plans, management structure and funding necessary" to meet the plan's goals, and international financial support from beyond the United States "has yet to materialize."

Mr. Pastrana announced the so- called Plan Colombia as an initiative of his government a year ago. But the skepticism it has met reflects a concern abroad that the plan was drafted by the United States as a way to ease its own drug crisis and not as a coherent strategy to lift Colombia from a quagmire involving two guerrilla insurgencies, right-wing death squads, a faltering economy and a crisis of confidence in government.

"They see it as something that was cooked up in Washington," said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a forum for leaders from the hemisphere. "If other countries saw this was moving in the direction of being more responsive to Colombian concerns, they would support it."

Mr. Pastrana set a goal of reducing the coca cultivation and distribution of Colombian narcotics by 50 percent over six years. Pledging $4 billion in Colombian funds to the effort, he asked for an additional $3.5 billion from the United States, Europe and multilateral lenders in order to advance Colombia's peace efforts, promote economic development and judicial reform and fight drug traffickers.

The Clinton administration in July approved $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia - including more than a dozen Black Hawk helicopters - to help the Colombian Army strike into southern territories under the control of drug traffickers and guerrillas.

American officials acknowledge the plan cannot succeed without international support for the "softer" programs to raise Colombians' living standards and provide alternatives to drug trafficking and war.

But European nations so far have failed to pledge funds at hoped-for levels. At a donor's conference in Madrid in July, Spain promised to contribute $100 million, and Norway pledged $20 million. The United Nations promised $131 million, and Japan and international lending institutions offered $70 million and $300 million in loans, respectively.

Europe, which is the second-largest consumer of Colombian narcotics, after the United States, is still considering its role and may announce additional funds at a followup to the Madrid conference on Oct. 24., diplomats said.

But one European envoy said the European Union has no intention of supporting Plan Colombia.

"The E.U. and member states are supporting the peace process in Colombia and not specifically the Plan Colombia, which is an American project," the envoy said.

Although the Clinton administration has portrayed Plan Colombia as Mr. Pastrana's work, much of it was drafted by American officials, according to people familiar with its preparation.

The plan emerged last year after Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House anti-narcotics coordinator - under pressure from Congressional Republicans - declared that Colombia was a foreign policy "emergency." He noted its steady increases in drug cultivation, the widening influence of rebels and its general potential to destabilize the region, given Colombia's position between the Panama Canal and Venezuela, the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States.

"We've been totally naďve in this process, in thinking that's going to shake loose some matching funds from the donor community," said a senior administration official. "From their perspective, this is our problem."

Mr. Pastrana, who took office on a pledge to bring peace to his country, has himself proven a lackluster champion of the plan, American officials say, and has only allocated $15 million to the project.

Analysts say Mr. Pastrana is torn between hopes that the American attention and largess could provide Colombia with a rare opportunity for foreign investment, on the one hand, and concerns, on the other, that deepening ties to the Pentagon could unleash greater violence in Colombia and possibly draw in its neighbors.

Members of Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, were suspected this week of kidnapping five American oil workers and five of their colleagues in neighboring Ecuadaor. The rebel group denied responsibility for the unusual cross- border operation, but Ecuadorean authorities said the guerrillas had carried it out in retaliation for Plan Colombia.

Colombia's most influential neighbors - Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela - last month voiced support for peace negotiations in Colombia, but pointedly refused to back the military aspect of the plan. Mr. Pastrana is now touring the region trying to broaden their endorsement.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has "reservations with respect to the military component of the Plan Colombia," said Toro Hardy, his ambassador in Washington. "It risks projecting Colombia's internal conflict into the neighboring countries."

Clinton administration officials counter that the risk of doing nothing is far greater.

"Colombia's historic neglect of the nation's outlying areas has allowed the problem to fester, and it has been exacerbated by an economic downturn of a magnitude Colombia has not seen for 70 years," said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.

Republican lawmakers who have vigorously pressed the administration to expand its military aid to Colombia say there are sufficient legal constraints on the American presence in that country - including on the size and nature of training programs - that there is little danger that American troops will get drawn into a decades-old civil war.

"Colombia does not want - and has never asked for - American blood to be shed on its battlefields," Representative Benjamin Gilman of New York, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said in a hearing on Colombia this week. "Let's not be fooled by that old `it's another Vietnam' canard."

But some critics voiced concerns that the United States is allying itself with an army that has a notorious human rights record.

Amnesty International warned that increased support for Colombian security forces would result in a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the country's conflict zones.

---

Oil Workers Kidnapped

New York Times
October 15, 2000
In Review: October 8-14
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15P2ST.html

Ten foreign oil workers, including five Americans, were kidnapped in Ecuador by gunmen thought to be Colombian guerrillas. But the fates of the captives, who were whisked into Colombia by hijacked helicopter, grew more uncertain after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, denied responsibility. American officials said privately that they believed a FARC unit had kidnapped the workers but that it might not have had permission from the group's high command. Clifford Krauss

---

Crises Unnerve Global Optimists

Associated Press
October 15, 2000 Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Wrestling-with-History.html

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War began melting away, the phrases du jour were ``new world order'' and ``the end of history.'' Humanity, the optimists suggested, had finally broken through the murk of centuries of religious and ideological warfare to reach the blue skies of liberal free-market democracy.

But alas, nothing is ever that simple, and the events of the last week are a forceful reminder that the new order isn't always orderly, and that history is still running amok.

Take last Thursday:

--Palestinians and Israelis, who only weeks ago seemed on the threshold of a final peace treaty, plunged into one of their worst spasms of violence when a mob beat at least two Israelis to death in the West Bank. Israeli helicopters fired missiles at Palestinian targets.

--Spooked by the Mideast violence, investors dumped stock on Wall Street, bringing the Dow Jones industrial average down by about 380 points. Oil prices, already tripled after a decade of low prices, shot up as much as 10 percent more after an apparent terrorist attack on a U.S. warship in Yemen.

--In a demonstration of how some conflicts easily spill over borders, 10 foreigners, including six Americans, were kidnapped in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador and flown by helicopter to neighboring Colombia by self-professed Colombian rebels. The kidnappers were said to be fighting a Colombian anti-drug trafficking initiative backed by $1.3 billion in U.S. aid.

There was other, more upbeat news:

--President Clinton lifted key trade and economic sanctions on Yugoslavia, rewarding it for casting out Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Less than a month ago, Yugoslavia's crisis looked intractable.

--Another historic moment loomed with the news that Clinton was contemplating a trip to North Korea. No American president has ever been to the rigidly communist republic. Now it is suddenly possible to imagine the reunification of North and South Korea, an event that would be for Asia what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Europe.

That's the big news. But the swiftly changing world is reflected just as strikingly in the minutiae of everyday life.

Picture this: At the Hauptwache in Frankfurt, Germany, a square that saw countless demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and '70s, a truck pulls up at a Foot Locker outlet in the summer of 2000 and disgorges cartons of sportswear. Foot Locker is American. The cartons are labeled Made in Vietnam.

Or this: On a park bench in Prague, a man's cell phone rings. It plays the melody of the Soviet national anthem. Call it yuppie post-communist chic, in a country that until a decade was under strict communist control.

Cell phones, Foot Locker ... It all comes under the rubric of globalization, another handy word to sum up a world transformed. But as the Middle East has shown in recent days, nothing should be taken for granted; all the carefully crafted diplomacy and choreographed handshakes for the cameras can unravel in an instant.

Conflicts have a sobering way of reverting to their roots just when they should be nearing their end. The problem is not the end of history. It often lies at the beginning of history.

Think of Sarajevo. An assassination on its streets lit the fuse of World War I. A Winter Olympics in 1984 gave it an aura of peaceful renaissance. Yet by century's end its name had become shorthand for the massacres and ethnic cleansing on western Europe's doorstep, and NATO warplanes were involved in a Balkan conflict whose root grievance dates back to 1389.

And who imagined that after traveling such a long journey toward each other, Palestinians and Israelis would relapse into bloodshed over a patch of inner Jerusalem that was holy centuries before Christ was crucified?

It was the end of communism's grip on Yugoslavia that unleashed the nationalist rivalries that ripped the country to pieces. The Korean rapprochement owes everything to communism's worldwide retreat that left North Korea virtually friendless.

The Arab-Israeli conflict not being purely a product of the Cold War, has outlived it. Still, Israelis and Arabs are freer to open their own channels of detente instead of marching in lockstep with distant superpower patrons. Israel has made peace with Egypt and Jordan, and Lebanon has been pacified.

That has left little else but Jerusalem and the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees to argue about. But these are the core issues. They are historical. They are the most painful.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Marcus Eliason is an AP correspondent who has worked in the Middle East, southern Africa, Europe and East Asia.

-------- drug war

THE NATION What Is the Matter With Mary Jane?

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15VERH.html

SEATTLE -- The medicinal use of marijuana has scored some smashing victories at the polls in recent years, winning approval by voters in seven states, and it's on the ballot in two this fall. But in Alaska, an important test is at hand for those who use images like "Trojan horse" and "camel's nose under the tent" to argue that medical marijuana's advocates are really out to clear the way for the legal recreational use of the drug.

Just two years after Alaska's voters backed a measure allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana for medical purposes, they are being asked whether the state should become the nation's first to legalize it, period. The measure is sweeping, allowing use by anyone 18 or older, giving amnesty for anyone ever convicted of growing or possessing marijuana, and even moving toward restitution for them.

Regardless of the outcome, the fact that legalization is being so openly discussed is clearly a step in some sort of direction. It's a backward one, of course, in the minds of drug opponents, and a forward one for those who feel that America's approach to what they call "soft drugs" is unduly harsh and lags behind the European tack.

The Netherlands has basically legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, and several countries, including Germany and France, have all but stopped enforcing laws against it. Switzerland's cabinet has proposed making it legal to smoke it.

And in Britain, the push to legalize marijuana has picked up surprising steam in recent days, owing in no small part to a backlash against a Conservative Party proposal to impose a "zero tolerance" measure for its possession as a platform plank. The Conservative leader, William Hague, was forced to back down on the policy last week after seven leaders in his party, in response to a survey, admitted to having smoked marijuana in their youth. Several leading newspapers and politicians of other parties have come forward to argue that marijuana should be legalized or decriminalized.

Whether the same movement is afoot in the United States is harder to determine. Aside from the Alaska measure, voters in Mendocino County in northern California will be asked on Nov. 7 whether to allow residents to grow marijuana for personal use. That citizen-sponsored initiative is expected to pass, though Mendocino, in the heart of an area where marijuana is widely described as the leading cash crop and use of the drug has long been tolerated, is hardly a bastion of mainstream opinion on the issue.

And polls on legalization are a bit tricky to read, too. Generally, if Americans are asked whether they wish to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, they say no - depending on exactly how the question is worded, the majorities range from just above 50 percent to much higher. But, notes Allen F. St. Pierre, executive director of the Norml Foundation (Norml stands for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), the same question, asked differently, can yield dramatically different results.

"If you say, should an adult who gets arrested with a small amount of marijuana face any jail time, the number who say `no' goes way up," he said. His group supports the Alaska initiative, though he says its creators may have gotten a bit carried away with the restitution component. "It has a little bit of a radical tinge to it that isn't associated with Norml," he explained.

In Alaska, supporters are out in force. Willie Nelson has taped a radio ad. "The vast majority of these millions of marijuana smokers are good citizens who work hard, raise families and contribute to their communities," he says. "They are not part of the crime problem and they don't deserve to be treated like criminals."

Drug critics worry that the Alaska campaign, gauzed in a certain amount of humor, could catch on. "It would not surprise me if there are a lot of people in Alaska right now saying, `Look, I can have a joint, and I can handle it, so this is O.K.,' " said Dr. Herbert D. Kleber, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and medical director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. "We simply do not have the same historical connection with marijuana that we do with alcohol. And anything that legalizes it for adults is basically going to make it more available for kids."

In surveys, he said, roughly 50 percent of high school seniors say they have used alcohol in the last 30 days, while 24 percent have used marijuana - a figure he said would rise if marijuana were legally available to adults.

Marijuana, he argued, is a particularly insidious drug for adolescents, because it interferes with memory, decreases energy and stunts development of some "psychosocial skills," a key task during the teenage years.

Those are all arguments that proponents of the Alaska measure, not surprisingly, reject. In a pamphlet distributed by a group called Free Hemp in Alaska, alcohol seems far worse than marijuana. A marijuana-smoking group is "more likely to talk of politics, art, music and comparable topics as the children play nearby," it argues. "Adults intoxicated by marijuana still behave like grownups. They enjoy the youngsters and can help care for the babies."

And, it adds, "men using marijuana are more respectful, thoughtful, charitable and less foolhardy than when drunk."

For now, most of the debate is framed as medical. Surveys suggest that in Colorado and Nevada, measures allowing medicinal use will pass Nov. 7. (Nevada approved it with 59 percent of the vote in 1998; adding it to the state constitution requires a second yes vote.) Like measures have passed in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Alaska, Maine and the District of Columbia, though they have gone into effect in the face of federal drug laws. (None addresses the even more complex issue of selling marijuana.)

Medical marijuana advocates say the drug is enormously helpful to chemotherapy patients, and many insist, in the words of Dan Geary, a leader of the Nevada movement, that "this is a public-health issue completely unrelated to the war on drugs."

Other proponents say the two issues are indeed linked. Ironically, opponents like Dr. Kleber, at Columbia, agree that the two issues are separate, but say there is perhaps less of a reason to put medical marijuana to a vote than legalization. "They really are two totally different issues," he said. "One is in many ways a political issue, but the other is a scientific issue. Marijuana for medicinal purposes should not be decided by referendum. Would you have had a referendum on penicillin for pneumonia? You don't decide these things by popular vote. You decide them by the science."

-------- north pole

Company for Rudolph

New York Times
October 15, 2000
In Review: October 8-14
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15P2ST.html

The airspace over the North Pole, once avidly scanned for incoming missiles, could soon see thousands of flights by commercial jets. The demand for the polar shortcut between places like Chicago and Hong Kong is more than adequate to pay for the air traffic control investments that would be needed, according to a joint Canadian-Russian study. As many as 8,000 flights a year might use the shortcut by 2004, according to proponents. Matthew L. Wald

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'Huge' space station takes shape

USA Today
10/15/00- Updated 07:47 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndssun01.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL (AP) - With a shout of ''Yahoo!'' two spacewalking astronauts floated outside Sunday and promptly wired up the International Space Station's newest addition.

''This is too cool,'' Bill McArthur radioed down. His reaction to the space station towering out of space shuttle Discovery's cargo bay: ''It's huge.''

McArthur and his spacewalking partner, Leroy Chiao, hooked up power and data cables between the new aluminum framework and the space station's Unity module. The framework, a girderlike component called the ''Z1 Truss,'' was installed on the station Saturday.

McArthur performed the work while strapped to the end of Discovery's 50-foot robot arm.

''I was wondering what it was going to be like being out on the end of the arm, not being able to see the shuttle,'' he said. ''It's a strange feeling. My toes are curling right up.''

The spacewalkers also had to move two truss antennas during the 61/2-hour spacewalk, the first of four planned for this ambitious space station construction mission. The more powerful dish antenna was to be placed on the end of a 12-foot boom.

Besides antennas, the 15-square truss holds four motion-control gyroscopes. It will serve as the base for a solar panel that will be installed in December by the next shuttle visitors.

The spacewalk was barely under way when Chiao discovered that the tool belt on his white, bulky suit was stuck. ''I'll do what I can,'' he said. ''Let's keep going.'' An hour later, his tool belt was working again.

To NASA's disappointment, little of the spacewalking work was seen down on Earth.

An unusual antenna failure aboard Discovery has prevented the crew of seven from beaming down live, continuous video since last Thursday. The astronauts have had to use a slower shuttle antenna to relay staggered snapshots and occasional snippets of video.

Astronauts have never attempted four spacewalks before on a space station mission. The most spacewalks conducted on a single shuttle flight is five; that was for critical Hubble Space Telescope repairs.

During the next six years, astronauts and cosmonauts will have to perform nearly 160 spacewalks to assemble the international space station, an awesome challenge even by NASA standards.

By comparison, only 51 spacewalks have been conducted in almost 20 years of space shuttle flight - including Sunday's.

Shuttle astronauts Jeff Wisoff and Michael Lopez-Alegria will perform spacewalks on Monday and Wednesday. Monday's outing will include the installation of another space station segment, a docking port for future shuttle visits.

Chiao and McArthur will go back out Tuesday for Spacewalk No. 3. Chiao performed two spacewalks on his last shuttle flight, in 1996. This is McArthur's first spacewalk.

The spacewalking work must be completed before the station's first permanent crew can move in early next month.

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

U.N. and NATO Move to Curb Kosovo Crime

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15KOSO.html

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Oct. 14 - In what NATO commanders and United Nations officials declared was their first blow against organized crime here, international police officers and British marines raided 13 homes, bars and brothels before dawn today, arresting 25 people.

While the police declined to identify those arrested, they admitted that the raids were on properties owned by the Geci clan, a family of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who are said to have turned to crime.

Trafficking in drugs and prostitutes and other forms of crime are said to have flourished in Kosovo since NATO ended its bombing campaign last year. The United Nations police force and an international judiciary have been understaffed and accused of working too slowly to control crime since Serbian security forces withdrew in June 1999 under an agreement with NATO.

Although dozens of members of Kosovo's dwindling Serbian minority have been killed in the 15 months since NATO and the United Nations took control, one of the best known killings still unsolved by the police here was of Rexhep Luci, an ethnic Albanian who was director of city planning in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. Another unsolved killing was of a journalist, Shefet Popova. Three of the arrests today were said by the police to be linked to those murders, but no details were given.

Mr. Luci was regarded as an honest official who had taken a stand against dangerous illegal buildings. Pristina is in the middle of a construction boom because thousands of refugees and 450 charitable and military organizations have moved in.

Last week security forces arrested Sabit Geci, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander who is now said by international officials to run crime operations. He is being detained under the United Nations legal code on charges of threatening someone in a brothel he owns.

Gordon McRae, operations director for the United Nations police force, said 30 police officers and 290 Royal Marines raided 13 addresses simultaneously at 6 a.m. today.

Sections of Pristina were cordoned off throughout the day as bands of heavily armed marines clomped down streets, chasing leads to other addresses. The raiders found 15 guns and $50,000 in cash, the police said.

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Security Council Elections

New York Times
October 15, 2000
In Review: October 8-14
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15P2ST.html

It's election time at the United Nations, too. An unusually intense fight for five rotating seats on the Security Council went into four rounds of secret ballots in the General Assembly before Mauritius, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, was able to beat back a bid by Sudan - with a little help from friends in Washington. Among the Europeans, Ireland won handily but Norway, the eventual winner, and Italy had to battle it out for the second vacant seat. Colombia and Singapore won the Latin American and Asian seats uncontested. The new members' two-year terms will begin Jan. 1, 2001. Barbara Crossette

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

New Patriot missile peforms 'superbly and perfectly' in test

Bergen Record
Sunday, October 15, 2000
The Associated Press
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/miss15200010159.htm

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and the Army successfully tested the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missile Saturday.

The Pac-3 missile intercepted and destroyed a target missile, launched from Fort Wingate in northwestern New Mexico. A Pac-2 missile tested at the same time only damaged its target missile, a spokesman said.

"[Pac-3] worked superbly and perfectly, and it was a good test of the advanced Patriot missile," White Sands Missile Range spokesman Larry Furrow said.

Furrow said the success had been confirmed by high-altitude photographs.

The Pac-3, which Army officials said had previously completed seven flight tests, uses kinetic energy rather than an explosive warhead to destroy targets. It is designed to defend against tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and enemy aircraft.

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USS Cole: An Act of War

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000 ; Page B07
By John Lehman
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7299-2000Oct14.html

From media reports it appears that the skipper of USS Cole did all in his power to protect his ship and crew, and his leadership apparently saved lives. President Clinton described the attack on Cole as an act of cowardice and of terrorism. It was of course neither. It was a well-planned act of war by obviously brave and disciplined warriors almost certainly supported by one or other enemy states who view America and Israel as mortal enemies. The truth is inconvenient to the "peace process," and will be put in the memory hole, just as it was after Syria killed 241 American Marines in Beirut. We will instead blame it on Osama bin Laden or some mythical person. Other than President Clinton's traditional lobbing of a few cruise missiles, we can be certain that there will be no retaliation.

Another inconvenient fact sure to be stuffed down the memory hole is the obscene failure of intelligence. Obviously our vast centralized intelligence bureaucracy did not warn the skipper of Cole of the severe danger. But of course, no one could be surprised by intelligence failure. In 14 years of government service in three administrations I observed many historic crises, and in every one the consolidated product of the intelligence bureaucracy either failed to provide warning, as in Kuwait, or was grossly wrong in its assessment, as in the Yom Kippur War. Every national security adviser and every tactical commander from Elliott Abrams to Norman Schwartzkopf has deplored this scandal, but nothing is ever done. Cole is the latest victim of a $30 billion jobs program that takes the most wondrous products of space and electronic technology and turns them into useless mush.

If Cole had been warned, the ship would have avoided this notorious port. If for some reason and armed with warning, they were needed in harm's way tried-and-true measures can be taken to protect stationary ships. We kept many ships off Beirut for years without a successful attack, although there were several attempts.

But why was this single ship sent to Aden at the height of an anti-American crisis, in a nation notorious for harboring terrorists sponsored by Iraq and other rogue states? As Nimitz famously signaled to Halsey, "The world wonders."

While state departments in every administration want to treat naval ships like so many cost-free chess men, in recent years the profligate willy-nilly deployments have been running all of the services into tatters. During the Reagan years of Cold War activism, the Navy was deployed to crisis areas beyond ordinary deployments an average of 5 1/2 times per year, which fully stretched a Navy of nearly 600 ships. Over the same time span in the Clinton years, the Navy deployed out of the routine 12 1/4 times per year with a fleet that has been slashed to only 318 ships. This has not only destroyed morale, retention and family life, but it also has exposed a less-ready, thinned-out fleet to many more hazardous duty stations.

As the Navy learned at Okinawa, where 35 ships were sunk by kamikazes, it is impossible to protect completely against suicide attacks. The only defense is good intelligence and the will to retaliate against the source. The American government has neither.

The writer was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration.

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Persian Gulf, U.S. Danger Zone

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000 ; Page A01
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10189-2000Oct14.html

For 10 years, the mission that brought the USS Cole to a Yemeni port has enjoyed an unusual distinction: It has proven to be one of the most dangerous for U.S. troops, and yet it has been virtually immune from the criticism that has surrounded other overseas deployments.

Navy ships are always in or near the Persian Gulf, usually in the form of a carrier battle group of about 10 major warships, plus support craft. Dozens of Air Force fighters fly almost daily over northern and southern Iraq, taking off from bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey to patrol two "no-fly" zones and occasionally drop bombs.

The Army keeps hundreds of armored vehicles, artillery pieces and attack helicopters at Camp Doha, a 500-acre facility in Kuwait, and has thousands of troops exercising there almost continuously. A second brigade's worth of Army equipment has been stored in Qatar, and a third is kept afloat aboard ships in the Indian Ocean.

Overall, the United States usually maintains about 20,000 military personnel in the region, at a cost of at least $1.5 billion a year.

The policy of stationing thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen across the Middle East has its origins in the Persian Gulf War, almost exactly a decade ago. Since then it has grown into an open-ended commitment, largely unexamined in public. Scrutiny may grow in the aftermath of the bombing of the destroyer Cole, which claimed the lives of 17 sailors on Thursday. Members of Congress have called for a thorough investigation of the apparent terrorist attack, including whether security precautions were adequate and why the Navy sent the ship to refuel in Aden on its way to the Persian Gulf.

"I suspect that most Americans have no sense of the number of personnel we have in the Gulf region, or that they regularly engage hostile targets," said David Segal, a specialist in military affairs at the University of Maryland.

Unlike other missions during the Clinton administration, such as interventions in Haiti and the Balkans, the deployment in the Middle East appears to enjoy broad support within the U.S. military. "It is essential to regional stability. . . . Without it, a vacuum would be created--and no one would like who filled it," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Carol Mutter.

"So long as our economy remains grounded in petroleum-based energy, we are going to be there for the foreseeable future," added Air Force Col. Charles Dunlap. "To me, U.S. interests in the Gulf in a very real way are about whether or not a grandmother freezes to death in Boston some winter, whether fuel costs drive another family farm out of business, or if a working-class family can afford to send a kid to college."

This large and long-term presence is a sharp contrast to just 15 years ago, when the U.S. military operated infrequently in the Mideast, and then only in small numbers. Moreover, the Mideast over the last decade has been far more dangerous for American personnel than other places where the United States maintains troops, such as Korea, Japan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Several radical Islamic groups have said their primary mission is to drive U.S. forces out of the region.

In discussing the Cole attack in his weekly radio address yesterday, President Clinton referred to the ever-present threat, saying, "This tragic loss should remind us all that even when America is not at war, the men and women of our military risk their lives every day in places where comforts are few and dangers are many."

Since the Army went into Bosnia in 1995, only one American soldier has died violently there, from touching a land mine. None has been killed by hostile fire in Kosovo. By contrast, since the Gulf War ended in February 1991, 56 American troops or related personnel have died violently in the Mideast, including the casualties on the Cole:

* In April 1994, two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Iraq by U.S. Air Force jets, killing all 26 people aboard, including 15 American service members.

* In November 1995, a car bomb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed five American contractors involved in training Saudi security forces.

* Seven months later, a truck bomb exploded outside a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 service members.

Over the same period, the United States has launched at least six major offensive operations:

* In January 1993, 100 U.S., British and French aircraft bombed Iraqi radar and surface-to-air missile sites.

* Less than a week later, U.S. warships fired 46 Tomahawk cruise missiles into a nuclear fabrication site just outside Baghdad.

* In June 1993, U.S. ships fired 24 Tomahawks into Iraq's intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a plot to assassinate President George Bush.

* In September 1996, after Iraq attacked Kurds in northern Iraq, U.S. forces fired 27 cruise missiles against Iraqi military targets.

* In August 1998, in retaliation for the terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, U.S. warships in the Red and Arabian seas fired missiles at targets in Sudan and Afghanistan.

* In December 1998's "Operation Desert Fox," the military dropped more than 600 bombs and launched more than 400 cruise missiles at Iraq in 70 hours of strikes.

After Desert Fox, Iraq began firing antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles at American warplanes enforcing the no-fly zones. Throughout most of 1999, the no-fly zones effectively became small wars, with U.S. planes dropping bombs that Iraq claims have killed hundreds of civilians. The latest strike occurred Tuesday afternoon, even as the Cole was steaming down the Red Sea toward Yemen, when U.S. jets launched missiles at what the Central Command described as "a surface-to-air missile support facility in southern Iraq."

At first, the U.S. military was strained by the continuing operations in the Gulf region. They were harder on the Air Force than on the Navy and Marine Corps, which already were built around six-month deployments. The Navy's adjustments were fairly bureaucratic, such as establishing a new "Fifth Fleet" for the Gulf with a headquarters in Bahrain in 1995.

But Air Force pilots, who tired of life in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and complained that patrolling the no-fly zones was boring, began quitting in favor of lucrative jobs with commercial airlines. In response, the Air Force gave up its policy of simply grabbing available forces willy-nilly and restructured its combat units into 10 "Air Expeditionary Forces" that have clear deployment schedules.

This new structure does not make the missions any more interesting, but it at least has given Air Force personnel some predictability in their lives. A pilot can know, for example, that he will be at his home base for the next year but on tap to go to the Mideast in 18 months.

"As the Gulf presence has become more routine and predictable, it has become more manageable," noted Gordon Adams, a former national security expert at the Office of Management and Budget who now advises the Gore campaign on defense issues.

Watching the Pentagon struggle with open-ended deployments, some academic defense experts have argued that the U.S. military should embrace its new role as the world's "imperial constabulary force." The requirement to maintain a large, continuous presence in the Gulf and to execute other nonwar missions, such as peacekeeping in the Balkans, is forcing the military "to rethink its purpose," said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University who has become a leading advocate of the "imperial military" view.

While the military may find this rethinking disagreeable, it is unavoidable, contends Bacevich, a retired Army colonel. "This issue, not the phony readiness issue, is what the presidential candidates should be addressing," he said.

But some inside the military worry that adapting to new roles could distract the military and lead to disaster if a major adversary emerges in a decade or two. They point out that the last military to take on an imperial constabulary mission was the 19th-century British Army, which fought Queen Victoria's small wars in places such as Sudan and Afghanistan. Most of the time its operations were largely ignored by British society.

But it was woefully unprepared when World War I erupted and brought a new sort of high-intensity, industrialized combat to the European continent. Partly because British generals failed to adapt to this new form of warfare, they led a generation of youth to slaughter.

---

Cole Sailors Reach Hospital in Germany

Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2000 ; Page A23
By T.R. Reid Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10113-2000Oct14.html

LANDSTUHL, Germany, Oct. 14 -- Dazed, shell-shocked and desperate for news about their battered ship and missing shipmates, 39 wounded sailors from the destroyer USS Cole arrived at the big U.S. military hospital complex here today for treatment of their physical and emotional wounds.

The sailors suffered a variety of injuries Thursday when an explosion blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the hull of their ship while it was docked in Yemen on the tip of the Arabian peninsula. Doctors said none had life-threatening injuries, and all were reported in stable condition 12 hours after their arrival. Hospital officials said the injured sailors were much more concerned about the 17 shipmates who died in the blast than they were about their own injuries.

"One sailor told me that he was just sitting in the mess [hall], and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a pool of blood on the deck and his best buddy was dead," related Army Col. David McLean, a chaplain here who talked to many of the wounded today.

The wounded, most limping or borne on stretchers, arrived aboard two Air Force C-9 Nightingale flying ambulances. "They had that glassy look you get when you are just totally exhausted, and they had their various traumas on top of that," said Army Col. Elder Granger, commander of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

Striding the corridors of his busy hospital in a white physician's lab coat over fatigues and combat boots, Granger said, "They needed medical attention, but they needed emotional therapy as well. Just the fact that they were back among Americans, with American food and American newspapers around, made a big difference."

Thirty-four of the injured are in good enough shape to head home Sunday, doctors decided. They are scheduled to fly to Portsmouth, Va., where they will be examined again at Portsmouth Naval Hospital before being allowed to go home. Since the Cole's home port is Norfolk, most of the crew members live nearby.

The more seriously hurt will stay here a few more days or weeks, Granger said. One sailor has a punctured lung; another suffered burns on her face and hands; three others have compound fractures that will require major surgery.

The remains of five sailors were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware this afternoon. The flag-draped coffins were carried off an Air Force C-17 transport aircraft by pallbearers one by one, according to a Navy spokesman. As they passed through by an honor cordon, a band played the Navy Hymn. Navy officials said they were not certain when the rest of the bodies would be returned.

In Germany, the injured crew members--34 men and five women--did not want to talk to the news media, military officials said. "Some of their shipmates haven't been found," said a Navy spokesman, Lt. Doug Gabos. "These people don't want to talk about the disaster while their buddies' remains are still on the ship."

Hospital officials also said that the wounded sailors wanted to defer any public discussion of what happened until they can talk to investigators. The Navy and the FBI are in the Yemeni port of Aden trying to determine what happened. The Navy says the ship was attacked by two men on an apparent suicide mission who carried a large bomb in a small boat they drove up alongside the Cole's hull.

Any sailor would be distraught about such an attack on his or her ship while it sat peacefully at anchor. But the shock might be particularly bad for crew members of the Cole because it is a member of the new Arleigh Burke class of guided missile destroyers, named for one of the 20th century's most famous fighting admirals.

Because of their aggressive mission, the Cole and other Burke-class ships have a special double hull configuration to absorb attacks. Without that, naval officials said, the death toll might have been much higher.

Staff writer Roberto Suro in Washington contributed to this report.

---

Yemenis Insist Accident Caused USS Cole Blast

Washington Post
Sunday , October 15, 2000
By Howard Schneider and Roberto Suro Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8364-2000Oct14.html

ADEN, Yemen, Oct. 14 - Yemeni political and military officials are continuing to insist that an on-board accident caused the explosion that killed as many as 17 servicemen aboard the USS Cole, an attitude that could hinder American efforts to interview Yemeni nationals who might have knowledge about what American officials consider a suicide bomb attack.

Investigation efforts intensified today with the arrival of a 40-person emergency team assembled from the FBI, defense and state departments, adding to the corps of criminal investigators and military and diplomatic personnel already brought in from Washington, U.S. embassies throughout the region, and from the Fifth Fleet naval base in Bahrain.

Divers have begun scouring the bottom of Aden's crescent-shaped port, while aid continued to be given to the crew.

U.S. naval officials here announced that an additional six crewmen of the Cole have been evacuated to Germany to treat post-traumatic stress symptoms.

As the American team continued its forensic probe, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Salih toured the port where the explosion occurred, accompanied by several of his military personnel, and also met with U.S. Ambassador Barbara K. Bodine.

In a late evening news broadcast Friday, the local naval commander insisted that the hole in the side of the Cole was too big to be caused by the type of incident U.S. officials describe - a small harbor craft, pulling next to the destroyer, laden with explosives. He also insisted that U.S. technology was so sophisticated that electronic sensors would have warned the crew of the dangerous load approaching.

Brig. Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, commander of the Aden naval base, insists the incident "was not carried out by someone outside, and likely was the result of a technical malfunction inside the warship."

Meanwhile, Salih, while pledging full cooperation with the American probe, referred to it in reported remarks as a "technical" matter only.

American officials have already concluded that the explosion came from outside the destroyer, and worry that local attempts to downplay the likelihood of terrorism could impede their need to interview Yemenis, particularly those on duty at the port when the explosion occurred.

Those who carried out the attack would have at least needed advance knowledge of the Cole's arrival for its four-hour refueling stop, and probably also information about the mooring procedures U.S. vessels have used in the 15 months they have relied on the Aden port for refueling.

The situation has raised concerns similar to those encountered when terrorists bombed an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 servicemen. Saudi officials limited the ability of U.S. personnel to conduct their own inquiry, and in the years since the U.S. has frequently complained about access to information about the probe which the Saudis conducted.

The 505-foot, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer came to this port on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula for what was supposed to be a brief refueling stop while heading to the Persian Gulf to join the international fleet that polices United Nations sanctions against Iraq. Shortly after noon local time Thursday, a massive bomb exploded aboard a harbor workboat that had pretended to help the Cole moor at a refueling facility and then pulled alongside the warship.

In Washington, the first salvos were fired in what promises to be a vociferous debate over the wisdom of sending a Navy ship into a port known to harbor terrorists. As the State Department and the Pentagon pointed the finger at each other, congressional leaders called for a thorough investigation.

At the Pentagon, senior military officials said that specific threat assessments - compiled from reports by the State Department as well as military and civilian intelligence agencies - are conducted in advance of any port visit by a naval vessel in the Mideast. Aden was considered inherently dangerous enough that visits were limited to brief refueling stops. But U.S. warships had made 12 prior visits over the past 15 months without incident, and intelligence reports did not warn of any specific terrorist threat against the Cole, officials said.

"It is very clear to me that this was a very deliberate attack," Adm. Vernon Clark, chief of naval operations, told CBS News. "This kind of attack could not have been conducted without a great deal of planning and knowledge about what our movements were going to be and when the ship was going to arrive - all of the pieces that would make it possible for an attacker to come into proximity of the ship like they did."

The investigation initially will focus on searching the wreckage of the ship for any forensic evidence that could help identify the type and origins of the explosive that hit the Cole.

Navy divers examined the hull of the ship yesterday. While the overall structure appeared sound, they discovered that the hole ripped by the explosion was nearly twice the size originally estimated. With extensive damage now apparent below the waterline, the explosion is estimated to have torn open a hole 40 feet high by 40 feet wide in armored steel hull plates a half-inch thick.

Investigators will also work to identify the two men who were seen aboard the harbor workboat and who died in what appears to have been a suicide attack, officials in Washington said. The bombers appear to have infiltrated the harbor operations here, both to gain precise knowledge of when the Cole would arrive for a visit due to last only four hours and to gain access to the workboat that carried the bomb.

Bacon said Yemen's government has provided "very significant" assistance thus far to medical and security efforts as well as the opening phases of the FBI investigation.

Officials monitoring the investigation in Washington said they are hopeful but not optimistic that the Yemeni authorities will provide access to the workings of the harbor offices here. The State Department reported earlier this year that Yemen is "a safe haven for terrorist groups" because of "lax and inefficient enforcement of security procedures."

"It is not exactly in their self-interest to help us prove that their port facility was penetrated by terrorists," said a U.S. official.

With its deep waters, high surrounding hills and a strategic location between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, Aden has been an important port for 3,000 years. But from 1970 to 1990 Yemen was divided, and Aden was the capital of a Marxist-oriented state often in conflict with its neighbors, including the more pro-Western republic that controlled the northern part of the country. Investment started to flow back into the harbor only after Yemen's merger in 1990.

Near the spot where the Cole is docked, the lights of a new cargo facility glisten, representing an investment Yemen hoped would allow it to compete with Dubai for shipping between the Indian Ocean and the West. Fears about security, raised by the attack on the Cole, could derail that effort.

The port has been closed by the Yemeni government, barred to journalists and, according to U.S. officials, cleared of any ships near the American destroyer. A special anti-terrorism security force of U.S. Marines arrived to protect the Cole and patrolled its decks while Yemeni government boats ensured that no other vessels approached the destroyer.

In addition, two other Navy ves - the USS Hawes, a guided missile frigate, and the USS Donald Cook, a guided missile destroyer of the same class as the Cole - arrived in Aden yesterday to provide reinforcements for the Cole's crew as salvage work proceeds.

Beyond the effort to clear away twisted metal in damaged areas of the ship, ensuring that the Cole suffers no more damage requires a constant effort. With a major engine compartment flooded, sailors must constantly check and reinforce bulkheads and hatches that are suffering unusual strains, Navy officials said.

Sailors from the Cole have been offered an opportunity to ferry over to the other U.S. ships for food and rest, but a senior Navy official said that despite the dire conditions on the damaged ship, its crew is reluctant to leave it even for a few hours.

With the injured under medical care, the first of the dead began the journey home, landing at Germany's Ramstein Air Base in a light rain. An Air Force honor guard was on hand to place the flag-draped caskets into hearses as a phalanx of sailors in dress blues stood by.

A memorial service for the bombing victims is tentatively planned for Wednesday at the Norfolk Naval Station. President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen are expected to attend. Until the bodies of the 10 missing crew members are found, the Pentagon will not declare them dead.

However, when asked if the casualty toll had reached 17, Cohen said yesterday, "because of the nature of the blast and the severity of the damage done, that is the assumption we are operating under."

The bombing is the most deadly attack directed against U.S. military personnel since a 1996 attack against an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19. Two years ago, simultaneous explosions ripped through the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 12 Americans and hundreds of East Africans.

Schneider reported from Aden, Suro from Washington.

---

USS Cole fatalities:

USA Today
10/15/00- Updated 11:11 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsfri02.htm

Hull Maintenance Technician Third Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter, Mechanicsville, Va.
Electronics Technician First Class Richard Costelow, Morrisville, Pa.
Mess Management Specialist Seaman Lakeina Monique Francis, Woodleaf, N.C.
Information Systems Technician Seaman Timothy Lee Gauna, Rice, Texas
Signalman Seaman Recruit Cheron Ouis Gunn, Rex, Ga.
Seaman James Rodrick McDaniels, Norfolk, Va.
Engineman Second Class Mark Ian Nieto, Fond Du Lac, Wis.
Electronics Warfare Technician Third Class Ronald Scott Owens, Vero Beach, Fla.
Engineman Fireman Joshua Langdon Parlett, Churchville, Md.
Seaman Recruit Lakiba Nicole Palmer, San Diego, Calif.
Fireman Apprentice Patrick Howard Roy, Cornwall on Hudson, N.Y.
Electronics Warfare Technician Second Class Kevin Shawn Rux, Portland, N.D.
Mess Management Specialist Third Class Ronchester Mananga Santiago, Kingsville, Texas
Operations Specialist Second Class Timothy Lamont Saunders, Ringold, Va.
Fireman Gary Graham Swenchonis, Jr., Rockport, Texas
Ensign Andrew Triplett, Macon, Miss.
Seaman Apprentice Craig Bryan Wibberley, Williamsport, Md.

In addition, at least 39 sailors were injured.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Coal Sludge Blankets Kentucky Countryside

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/national/15SLUD.html

INEZ, Ky., Oct. 14 - A gooey mixture of coal particles and water that leaked from a plant near here has been swallowing driveways, bridges and lawns in the countryside for the last four days.

Since Wednesday morning, work crews from the Martin County Coal Corporation have been trying to clean up the molasseslike waste material - 200 million gallons of it - that leaked from the company's coal preparation plant.

Moving about 10 miles a day, the sludge has continued to ooze along two mountain streams toward the Big Sandy River, which traces the border with West Virginia north of Inez.

Janice Maynard has been trapped in her home by the sludge.

"In order to get to civilization, we have to walk through woods, down through a field and through a swampy area," said Ms. Maynard, who has a broken ankle. "I can't make that walk."

The Kentucky Department of Surface Mining issued four citations on Friday to the company for engaging in an unsafe practice by allowing the material to escape from its plant outside Inez, about 140 miles east of Lexington.

State and federal environmental agencies do not know how long it will take or how much it will cost to remove the huge glob of coal sediment, which is several miles long and up to 70 yards wide.

"We're still trying to determine how best to attack the problem," said Heather Frederick, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet.

No one has been injured by the leak, but authorities said fish and other wildlife have been killed. The state mining agency has ordered the company to replenish all fish and other aquatic life in the creeks.

Crews from Martin County Coal and its parent company, the A.T. Massey Coal Company, have been building rock dams to try to slow the flow of the material, said Bill Marcum, a company spokesman. Vacuum trucks, excavators and a dredging machine are being used.

"We're spending whatever we have to spend," Mr. Marcum said.

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Sweet Fishing and a Gorgeous Gorge, if You Don't Mind All That Old Lead

New York Times
October 15, 2000
ITHACA JOURNAL
By KIRK JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/nyregion/15JOUR.html

ITHACA, N.Y., Oct. 12 - Longfellow pictured an arrow shot into the air as the perfect metaphor for life's mysteries and the unknowable implications of our actions. But here, he might have pictured lead - millions upon millions of tiny lead shotgun pellets, each about one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, all fired into the air over the course of 100 years of manufacturing and testing firearms at a place called the Ithaca Gun Company.

The factory is gone now, boarded up since the mid-1980's. But the lead birdshot that its employees blasted out into the world over the decades is still, in a strange way, in motion. Much of the shot ended up - perhaps through gravity, erosion or deliberate dumping - in a beautiful city- owned gorge adjacent to the factory, where tourists and residents come to admire the 150-foot waterfall at Fall Creek and to fish and picnic, and where generations of students from nearby Ithaca High School have climbed in search of escape from their teachers and responsibilities.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, which tested the soil last month, is considering adding Fall Creek Gorge to the national Superfund Priority List, which could lead to emergency removal of the topsoil. The city, which acquired the land earlier this year from Cornell University for $1, has come under fire from some residents who say the property was inadequately investigated. The State Department of Health posted signs several weeks ago warning visitors to wipe their feet and wash their hands after leaving the gorge because of the health hazards of lead exposure, and to be particularly cautious about bringing children into an area that until very recently was considered one of the city's jewels.

The result is a jarring juxtaposition of history, nature and a very odd kind of industrial waste. Fall Creek Gorge, a deep pocket of sheer rock and water where herons pause on the rocks to fish, may be one of the most severely lead-contaminated public spaces in the region, E.P.A. officials say. In some places, tests have found lead concentrations of 215,000 parts per million, more than 500 times above the the level at which state and federal agencies would normally take remedial action.

"It's a paradox - we normally associate pollution with industrial settings," said Walter L. T. Hang, a local resident whose investigation of the site and letters to federal officials prompted the recent testing. "This is the most beautiful area I've ever seen with huge pollution problems."

Ithaca Gun, founded in the 1880's and now based in King Ferry, N.Y., was an icon in the hunting and shooting world. The company's famous "featherlight" shotguns were renowned for the fine decorative work - typically waterfowl or hunting dogs - etched by craftsmen onto each gun's breach. The rodeo star Annie Oakley favored Ithaca guns for her trick-shooting exploits. All the metal parts were machined to exact specifications, even as other firearms companies embraced the less costly, less precise system of metal stamping. And every gun was test- fired four times before sale, from a rooftop firing range, or in the factory's basement if the weather was foul.

Over the years, the company also became a symbol of the city of Ithaca. Wooden gunstocks with knots or other imperfections were donated to the high school, where, for half a century or more, students in wood shop made these pieces into lamps.

Inside the gorge, residue from the company's gun range gradually became part of the landscape as well. On the trails that lead up a steep slope to the fenced-in factory, where the chain-link is bowed out from people sliding under to trespass among the old buildings, some places are gray with granular lead and corroded brass.

And still the people continue to come, drawn by the falls.

Max Root, a college student, was unpacking his fly-fishing rod on one recent morning, heading past the warning signs.

"It's kind of disturbing to think we've been exposed to it for years," he said. But the allure was strong, too, Mr. Root said. Under the thundering falls, the fishing - for brown trout, rainbows and landlocked salmon - has been "very sweet" lately, he said, though he added that he would not think of eating anything that came from these waters now. For him, it is strictly catch and release.

Ithaca city leaders and officials at the State Department of Environmental Conservation said they knew about the lead in Fall Creek Gorge long before Mr. Hang made a federal case out of it by getting the E. P. A. involved. The gorge was accepted into the state's industrial brownfields cleanup program in late 1998, according to Thomas Suozzo, an environmental engineer at the state agency's Division of Environmental Remediation. Under the brownfields program, the city would have been required to pay 25 percent of the cleanup costs and the state would pay the rest. The gorge would become a city park.

But Mr. Hang, the president of an Ithaca-based company called Toxics Targeting, which does environmental database analysis, said he got a call in July from a resident who said the contamination was worse than people realized. Mr. Hang filed Freedom of Information requests about previous testing and sent his material to the E.P.A., which in turn contacted the State Department of Environmental Conservation.

That exchange, Mr. Suozzo said, set a new plan in motion. If the cleanup were taken over by the E.P.A., the federal government would pay the costs, then seek reimbursement from the responsible parties, who would be identified at a later date. The city would be off the hook for its 25 percent contribution, too. So the state sent a formal letter requesting E.P.A. involvement. The federal testing crews came and the warning signs went up.

Mr. Hang says he worries that the federal cleanup will be superficial, taking only the most visible layers of lead and leaving contaminants beneath that might still work their way to the surface through erosion.

The on-scene coordinator for the E.P.A., Jeff Bechtel, who said the agency would issue its cleanup decision within the next few weeks, added that he thought the main issue would be the unique setting - trying to make a place that looks pristine into one that actually is.

"How do you remove it without disturbing the natural beauty?" he said. "That's the trick."

---

Energy Salvation? Not in the Arctic

New York Times
October 15, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/opinion/L15ARC.html

To the Editor:

Re "It's Not Oil vs. Beauty in the Arctic" (Op-Ed, Oct. 9): Senator Frank H. Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, argues that oil production and environmental protection can coexist. But the real question is whether oil consumption and environmental protection can coexist.

If increased emissions of greenhouse gases disrupt the climate system, and the evidence is strong that they do, it seems foolhardy to continue our oil dependence through the old explore-and-produce paradigm.

Sustainable economic vitality, strengthened national security and long-term environmental benefits will not be found at the bottom of the oil well, but in the creation and distribution of diverse, efficient and renewable energy technologies.

DAVID NARUM Arcata, Calif., Oct. 9, 2000

•To the Editor:

Senator Frank H. Murkowski (Op- Ed, Oct. 9) is right that America's dependence on foreign oil has reached a perilous level, but he doesn't mention that this is largely the result of 12 years of failure by the Republican Congress to enhance the fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles and to close the loophole that has allowed the large increase in production of sport utility vehicles.

Not once does Mr. Murkowski mention conservation or alternative fuels. For example, the United States is beginning a process to commit huge continental reserves of natural gas to the production of electricity. This mistaken energy policy should be intercepted by a concerned Congress. Natural gas should be used for heating and for vehicular fuel.

THOMAS H. ALDEN Bellingham, Wash., Oct. 9, 2000

The writer is professor emeritus of metallurgical engineering at the University of British Columbia.

To the Editor:

Re "It's Not Oil vs. Beauty in the Arctic" (Op-Ed, Oct. 9): During the oil crisis in the 1970's, Americans were told that we needed to invest heavily in renewable sources of energy, like power from the sun, wind and tides, and that we must conserve energy and stop building and buying gas guzzlers. What happened to the requirements of cars with better mileage? What happened to the exploration of noncarbon power?

Gov. George W. Bush speaks of oil and coal as if we had never faced this problem before. Vice President Al Gore acknowledges the need for new energy sources. But neither candidate has the courage to engage either the auto industry or the carbon-based power industry, which will not seriously invest in alternatives as long as it has reserves of carbon fuel.

ABRAHAM P. ORDOVER Atlanta, Oct. 9, 2000

•To the Editor:

Senator Frank H. Murkowski (Op- Ed, Oct. 9) fails to recognize that the real choice in deciding whether to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil is between short-term profits for big oil companies or a lasting legacy of rare and incomparable wilderness for future generations.

In this treeless expanse, any intrusion will destroy the wilderness, described in statute as an "area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man." Slightly raising fuel-efficiency standards would save far more oil than the Arctic refuge might produce.

None of the predictions about the amount of oil that may underlie the Arctic refuge even come into play unless there is oil there. The odds of any economically recoverable oil being in the refuge are slim: less than one in five.

SUSAN ALEXANDER V.P., Environmental Communications Public Media Center San Francisco, Oct. 10, 2000

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FOLLOWING UP Flights of Falcons Protect Human Fliers

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By JOSEPH P. FRIED
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/nyregion/15FOLL.html

It's still big birds versus little birds at Kennedy International Airport.

The big birds, of course, are the metallic monsters weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds that carry wingless members of the ecosystem on their migrations around the globe. The little birds are the flesh-and-feather fliers weighing as little as a pound that nest next to the airport, in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens.

It would seem to be no contest should a jetliner or even a smaller plane collide with a gull or a goose. While the bird is surely a goner, however, the plane can also suffer, even fatally. Birds sucked into an engine can cause it to stall and the plane to crash, as has sometimes happened around the world.

At Kennedy, where the bird threat is among the country's worst, close calls are remembered. In 1975, an engine choked with gulls caused a departing DC-10 to catch fire, but there were only minor injuries among the nearly 150 people on board. In 1995, an arriving Concorde caught fire after its engines sucked in geese, but none of the 79 people aboard were hurt.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Kennedy's operator, has long been in a shoo-and-shoot war against the birds. Early tactics, such as firing propane-gas cannons to frighten them with loud noise, did not help much. In 1991, the authority began using marksmen to shoot down gulls, among the leaders on the bad-bird list because of their prevalence.

Advocates for animals were enraged, but an average of 10,000 gulls a year were shot through 1996, when the authority added a method to reduce the shootings: falconry. Bird wings are swung in the air on long cords, inciting the falcons to swoop after the lures.

"The theory is birds can see them in a hunting mode and are frightened away," said Laura Francoeur, a wildlife biologist with the authority.

Peter Yerkes, an authority spokesman, said that all the efforts had helped cut contacts between birds and planes from 315 in 1989 to 133 last year, and that falconry had helped reduce the number of birds shot from nearly 15,000 in 1991 to 3,400 last year.

Manhattan Auto Racing Can Be Stop and Go

Some New Yorkers found the idea outlandish and disliked the sponsor. Others saw a boon to the city's economy. In 1992, the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins gave the go-ahead for a Marlboro Grand Prix of New York, in which Lower Manhattan's streets would become a temporary auto racing track.

Professional drivers would zoom up to 165 miles an hour within concrete barriers, as they had on streets in some other major cities and still do in Houston and Long Beach, Calif. New York officials envisioned $56 million being spent at hotels, restaurants and stores by visitors to the spectacle.

Then it disappeared like exhaust. The promoters canceled, citing higher costs than expected.

The idea, however, is not out of gas. The City Sports Commission has received another such proposal from another promoter, Ralph E. Preite, a Manhattan lawyer and the president of New York Motorsports.

"It's very preliminary," Mr. Preite said on Friday, adding that he would seek financing if chances of city approval seemed good. "We prefer Manhattan, but it could be any borough."

The sports agency's commissioner, Kenneth J. Podziba, said it was too early to discuss the proposal because "it hasn't left the infancy stage."

---

USA Today
10/15/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arizona

Phoenix - A $750,000 contribution from Congress brings conservationists closer to buying and preserving the Dry Lake volcanic caldera and wetland in northern Arizona. Almost half the $3.5 million for buying the 247-acre crater near Flagstaff has been raised through private pledges and the federal contribution OK's Wednesday by President Clinton.

Hawaii

Honolulu - The Environmental Protection Agency awarded $763,000 to the state to clean watershed areas. The EPA said the state met requirements for the control of pollutants not from a single identifiable source, such as oily runoff from streets. Hawaii will use the money to help reduce the amount of toxins flowing into streams and coastal waters.

Oregon

Portland - Three environmental groups have called on the state to ban logging on watersheds around critical habitat in 500,000 acres of forest in northwest Oregon. They want to preserve land around deep pools where salmon take refuge. The environmentalists say logging cuts back on the formation of those pools, endangering already fragile salmon populations.

Wyoming

Cody - Eight environmental groups are claiming victory over a decision by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to withdraw three oil and gas leases in grizzly habitat. The leases on the Shoshone National Forest were the focus of a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service and BLM. The suit contends the leases weren't analyzed for their impact on the bears and other wildlife.

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

China Trade Reassurances

New York Times
October 15, 2000
In Review: October 8-14
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15P2ST.html

Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, got what she and President Clinton sought in Beijing. Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji offered reassurances that China would open its markets as promised in its bid to join the World Trade Organization. But one of Mr. Clinton's top foreign policy goals - integrating China into the world economy - will be tested later this month in Geneva, when the stalled negotiations on China's entry to the W.T.O. resume. Joseph Kahn

-------- police

Joining the Force

New York Times
October 15, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/opinion/L15COP.html

To the Editor:

"How to Recruit Police Officers" (editorial, Oct. 9) blames the New York City Police Department for a shortage of candidates. But traditionally, young people were attracted to police work by friends, relatives and others who showed them that it is an honorable profession. But with morale so low, few veterans now urge young people to join.

One problem is the depersonalization, caused partly by a philosophy that says statistics tell the whole story and individual officers are fungible. After the Knapp Commission on corruption in the 1970's, there was an effort to humanize the job, with "ethical awareness" workshops and "venting" sessions. Our common enemies were crime and cynicism. Now everything is based on statistics.

With about 41,000 officers, most of us feel as if we are working for a conglomerate, but without the appropriate pay.

New York police have sharply reduced serious crime, but instead of celebrating success, most officers feel as if they are on a treadmill with only two goals: retirement and pension.

MICHAEL J. GORMAN Whitestone, Queens, Oct. 9, 2000

The writer is a New York City police lieutenant and a lawyer.

•To the Editor:

An Oct. 9 editorial discusses New York City's difficulties in attracting prospective police officers. You do not, however, mention the abysmally low salary offered to these candidates. An officer, we must remember, is asked to put his life on the line.

This deficiency causes the Police Department to function, in effect, as a training ground from which neighboring forces, with higher salaries and better working conditions, can draw officers.

THOMAS P. COYNE Long Island City, Queens Oct. 11, 2000

---

USA Today
10/15/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Conneticut

Hartford - Republican Gov. Rowland and Democratic Senate and House leaders urged voters to support a Nov. 7 referendum to abolish the state's sheriff system, describing the office as antiquated. Legislators in recent years have considered how to reform the sheriff system, which has been embroiled in allegations of corruption and the arrests of sheriffs and deputies.

-------- terrorism

We're No. 1, and Paying for It

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By RONALD STEEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/opinion/15STEE.html

WASHINGTON - It was an eerie coincidence. On Wednesday night, Al Gore and George W. Bush debated foreign policy for some 40 minutes. The next day, the tense confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians erupted into virtual open warfare, and in Yemen, the American Navy destroyer Cole was bombed in a terrorist attack that took the lives of 17 sailors.

In retrospect, the debate last week didn't come close to touching on the real repercussions of an interventionist foreign policy. It's not that such a policy is wrong. But the terrorist attack on Thursday does demonstrate that in foreign policy, as in domestic policy, there is no free lunch; every policy exacts a price.

Terrorist attacks are not capricious, nor are they even irrational. They have happened with regularity over the years. In 1998, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed and 224 people were killed. In 1996, a truck bomb exploded outside an American military compound in Saudi Arabia, killing and injuring more than 500 people. In 1993, the World Trade Center in Manhattan was bombed by foreign terrorists.

All these acts were directly related to the active role the United States plays in the world, and they were intended to punish and change that role.

Neither George Bush nor Al Gore wants to change that role in any kind of real way - but they, and we as a country, have failed to address its repercussions. Instead, in this presidential campaign, we have focused on essentially rhetorical differences.

In the debate, Mr. Gore presented himself as a committed liberal interventionist in the Woodrow Wilson tradition. He defended the American intervention in Bosnia on humanitarian grounds, and also went on to argue that "genocide or ethnic cleansing . . . can bring into play a fundamental American strategic interest, because I think it's based on our values."

Indeed, the promotion of American values throughout the world seemed to be the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The United States should "have a sense of mission in the world" and use its "values" and its strength to "project the power for good that American can represent," he proclaimed.

Nonetheless, he defended the administration's decision not to intervene in the Rwanda genocide, in which an estimated 600,000 people were murdered. He did so on the grounds that our "national security interest" was not involved.

This explanation hardy differed from that of Mr. Bush, who also opposed humanitarian intervention in Rwanda and supported the intervention in Bosnia (because of our interests in NATO). Although he opposed sending troops to Haiti to promote democracy, he supported interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf.

"We can't be all things to all people in the world," Mr. Bush declared, nor should we "walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you."

For all their supposed differences, Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush agree more than they disagree. They both believe in a powerful military, in strong alliances held together by America's armed forces, direct economic and political intervention where it serves American interests and the active discouragement of any potential rival power.

Mr. Bush may have spoken gently during the debate about the virtues of displaying "humility." But what he meant was the humility of the strong, not of the weak. Moreover, both men labored to portray their vision of American foreign policy as good not only for the United States but for the world.

The attack in Yemen serves as a reality check. It reminds us that the very "values" in which we take pride can be viewed by others as hypocritical or corrupt or even evil. And it reminds us that our power to project our values can been seen as a mortal threat to the values of others, however objectionable we may regard those values.

Those we describe as terrorists do not see themselves in such terms. They are, in their own eyes, what Ronald Reagan once called the Nicaraguan contras: "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."

Even among our friends, admiration for our values is not unbounded. The attack on a McDonald's store in France by a disgruntled citizen was widely applauded there as an act of cultural resistance. For most of the world, America is the 800-pound gorilla that they must appease as they lie down with it uneasily every night.

It can hardly be otherwise. If the United States is to play a powerful role in the world - and both candidates, along with virtually all Americans, want this - it must do things that will annoy and even infuriate others.

This is true no matter what we do. It is particularly true if the United States more actively pursues what Mr. Gore has referred to as the policy of "forward engagement" - of "addressing problems early in their development before they become crises."

This is another way of describing an activist, interventionist foreign policy of the sort that a great imperial power pursues to protect its interests and nip opposition in the bud.

But such policies exact a price. One of them is involvement in wars and crises over issues that we hardly understand; another is being subjected to the feverish contempt of those who scorn what we are and hate us for what we do.

This is the way the world works, and it does little good, except perhaps for our self-esteem, to proclaim, as Mr. Gore did in the debate that, "this nation is now looked on by peoples on every other continent and the peoples from every part of this earth as a kind of model for what the future could be."

Nor can we realistically be a "humble nation," in Mr. Bush's phrase, in anything but rhetoric if we expect to retain our full power and influence. The suicide bombers in Yemen help remind us that virtue is not its own reward.

Great powers may be admired or emulated, but they are rarely loved. Both George Bush and Al Gore know this, even though they think that voters' tender sensibilities may be offended to hear it. But we and they have to recognize our nation as the great imperial power it has become.

And as Edmund Burke observed during the high tide of British power and influence, "A great empire and little minds go ill together."

Ronald Steel teaches international relations at the University of Southern California and is the author of "Temptations of a Superpower" and "In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy."

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Injured U.S. Sailors Head Home from Germany

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15WIRE-SAIL.html

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany -- Thirty-three U.S. sailors injured in an attack on their ship in Yemen headed home Sunday after treatment by military doctors in Germany, but six shipmates who were more seriously hurt stayed behind.

Wearing donated track suits against the misty morning chill, the sailors gave thumbs-up signs as they boarded the gray C-141 plane taking them to a Norfolk, Va., air base. Most were well enough to clamber up the rear ramp, but several were taken aboard on stretchers, including one brought by ambulance to the waiting plane.

All were eager to rejoin loved ones after Thursday's apparent suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, that left 17 shipmates dead. The injured were evacuated Saturday to the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

"The sailors are in good spirits," said Capt. Richard Thornell, flight commander for the medical evacuation unit handling the trip home. "They are more rested and anxious to get home and see their families."

Some waved to waiting reporters as they left the Landstuhl hospital, set among peaceful fir forests in a western corner of Germany. Asked how they felt, one shouted: "Great!" Were they happy to be going home? "Absolutely!"

Shortly after 1:30 p.m., their plane roared into the sky from Ramstein for the estimated nine-hour flight home. Three nurses accompanied the injured on board.

Most of the injured suffered cuts and bruises, broken bones or eye injuries. Others limped as they got off buses that brought them from the hospital to the air base. A female officer -- the only officer among the injured -- had one arm in a cast; another sailor wore an eye patch.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Johann Gokool of Miami was transported by ambulance after undergoing major foot surgery until early morning.

Many of the injured sailors also suffered emotional shock, according to doctors and chaplains who talked to them at Landstuhl.

Hospital officials said earlier that 34 sailors were cleared to return home Sunday, but doctors later decided one of those couldn't travel yet. Among the seriously injured was one sailor with a punctured lung, another with burns and several with complicated bone fractures.

"They're a little bit more sick and need stabilization," Thornell said.

The United States says 17 sailors were killed and 39 injured in the attack on the USS Cole during a refueling stop.

On Saturday, a military transport flew the bodies of five sailors killed in the attack back to the United States from Ramstein, a way station en route from the Middle East.

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THE FAMILY Navy Mother Mourns, as Does a Navy Town

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15NAVY.html

NORFOLK, Va., Oct. 14 - Two levels of grief were at work today in this quintessential Navy town. In one, elected officials and Navy families gathered at a waterfront park for the long-planned dedication of a new statue, "The Homecoming," which by a somber coincidence with the tragedy of the destroyer Cole, depicts a joyous sailor safely reuniting with his family after a tour of foreign duty.

Across town, Diane McDaniels was suffering a far more visceral grief, grappling with the Navy's latest alert about a different sort of homecoming - the return of the body of her son, James, who perished in the explosion that struck the Cole on Thursday.

"They said he could be home today or tomorrow," the mother said, pacing her apartment on Chesapeake Avenue, alternately fighting tears, then cherishing sudden memories that came upon her of "Little Mac," her son.

"Oh, all the girls loved him," said the mother, suddenly beaming at a vital image of him going about the Norview neighborhood with his friends. "They liked his sweetness. And, oh my, those dimples he had."

Seaman McDaniels shipped out Aug. 8, confiding to his family that, five months into a four-year hitch, he could already tell that the Navy was not the career for him. "When I heard the TV news about the terrorist bombing, I just knew he was dead, Mrs. McDaniels said. "I said it. I said, 'He's gone. My boy is gone.' "

The mother spoke surrounded by a family clutch of two daughters and five grandchildren who have been left with one unexpected but comforting postscript to the short life of James McDaniels, 19: Before he left, he conceived a child with his high school sweetheart, Novella Wiggins.

The first videotaped ultra- sound pictures of his future son, to be born in March, were on the way to the Cole when the explosion ended the sailor's life. "He never saw his son," Mrs. McDaniels said, adding that he had sent animated e-mail messages about the coming birth and his plans to be a dedicated family man.

"We got too many men named James in this family," said the mother. "And we like to make up names in my race, you know, so he suggested Daisaan, or maybe Daisaan Jesse James," she said, smiling once more. "Or he said he'd just call him 'Ace.' "

The two young people were planning to get married at Seaman McDaniels's next homecoming, Mrs. McDaniels said. "But then the two Navy officers came here to tell me he was gone, and I collapsed." she said. "Novella ran screaming down the street."

At the statue dedication, Mayor Paul Fraim welcomed a crowd of several hundred people. White-haired veterans and young Navy families were bathed in sunshine at the Hampton Roads harbor front.

"Not all homecomings are happy," the mayor said of the casualties aboard the Cole. "We still live in a dangerous world."

A sailor's homecoming has long been a cherished ritual in the Navy, Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia said at the statue dedication. He recalled his own first Norfolk homecoming 42 years ago as a marine safely back from combat. "A moment of joy and celebration and happiness," he said.

But he slowly added, "The homecoming is not guaranteed." He said that for all its obvious joy, the statue presented a worthy undertone, too, in honoring "the memory of all those who didn't get their last homecoming."

Mrs. McDaniels said she would need help with the homecoming of her son. "I can't imagine burying him, putting him in the ground," she said. "It will be devastating all over again. My heart is just hurting."

In the crowd by the Homecoming statue, 81-year-old Buck Weaver said he had to come by in sympathy for Seaman McDaniels and the Cole crew because he was a Navy veteran who survived the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. He was scrambling for his life inside the battleship Maryland when the bombs burst 59 years ago just as, he said, he knew the crew aboard the Cole must have scrambled for their lives.

"Those sailors below deck, they never knew what happened, which is for the best, really," Mr. Weaver emphasized, speaking from his memory of war.

The old sailor snapped a salute at the unveiling of the statue's happy family tableau by the edge of the sea. Then a young Navy family was chosen to come forward. Hospital Corpsman James R. Enderle of Chicago and his wife, Cindy, embraced on cue, in tune with the statue, while their two sons, Jeffery, 6, and Lorenzo, 4, hugged their legs.

"Yeah!" Mr. Weaver had to shout at this, struck by a particular memory. "At Pearl Harbor, I was just getting ready to go ashore on liberty. I was 20 years old, a handsome devil, looking for a woman," he said with grand self-jest and a smile at a sailor's life.

Mrs. McDaniels said her son's homecoming would end with prayers for his peaceful repose in a church cemetery. "I want to be able to visit his grave," she said.

Of the pending birth of Daisaan or Ace or perhaps another James McDaniels, the mother said she would be looking for dimples, adding, "There's going to be some sadness when we first look at him."

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Ex-Pentagon Planner Defends Sending U.S. Ships to Yemen

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - The architect of the plan to send United States Navy ships into the port of Aden as part of the larger goal of improving relations with Yemen defended his decision today, saying he was trying to prevent Yemen from becoming a "rats' nest" of terrorist groups.

"It's important to not have in the gulf region places like Afghanistan that become rats' nests of terrorists and extremists," said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the plan's creator and recently retired Pentagon regional commander for the Middle East. "We were helping Yemen help itself, and everyone in the region was interested in having us help them change."

In a reversal of the common view of American diplomats that the United States military is too cautious overseas, General Zinni said several planned ship visits had been vetoed by the American ambassador to Yemen, Barbara K. Bodine, who worried about the threat of terrorists.

The decision to refuel Navy ships in Aden harbor has been questioned by some counterterrorism experts since the explosion on Thursday that killed 17 sailors on the destroyer Cole. The refueling stops, done in the port's waters and not at the docks, were meant to help revive the economic fortunes of the once-bustling port and give the government the imprimatur of respectability that comes with regular American visits, the general said.

The constant presence of several terrorist groups associated with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and others active against Egypt and Israel prompted the Pentagon to approve Yemen's request to help create its own coast guard to control traffic on the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

General Zinni said he had also sent American special forces to Yemen to train the local military in counterterrorism tactics and the use of weapons. And senior officers and noncommissioned officers from Yemen are studying at military colleges in the United States.

"Our big concern was terrorists' ability to move in and out of Yemen," he said. "We wanted to make sure the Yemen military knew what they were doing and knew to contact us if they had a situation."

Now the Pentagon is reviewing security in Yemen to determine whether it should continue those refueling visits and who was responsible for the breach of security that led to the attack. The State Department has rejected suggestions by some Pentagon officials since the explosion that the American Embassy in Yemen was responsible for the ship's security in port.

"The responsibility for operational decisions, such as refueling and security, for all U.S. ships in this region rests with the commander in chief of Central Command," Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said on Friday.

General Zinni agreed, and said that the Navy had conducted the negotiations with the port authority at Aden for the refueling services and that he was responsible for the initial assessment that it was safe to return to Yemen after that country had suffered more than a decade of civil war and strife.

Yemen's strategic position on the tip of the oil-rich Arabian peninsula was the prime motivation for the general's recommendation, despite Yemen's refusal to join the allies in the Persian Gulf war against Iraq in 1991 and the constant presence of terrorist groups in its hinterlands.

But the general said he believed that Yemen was making progress at controlling those groups and would eventually evict them, and he wants the United States to continue developing its relations with Yemen.

"We've had bombings in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and I didn't hear anyone say it was because we were engaged in those countries," he said. "What I hope is we stay in Yemen."

---

Sailors Fight to Halt Flooding Aboard Damaged U.S.S. Cole

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15CND-YEMIN.html

ADEN, Yemen, Oct. 15 - An investigation into the explosion that hobbled the destroyer Cole, killing 17 American sailors and wounding more than 30 others, was put into abeyance today after a bulkhead collapsed, forcing the remaining crew to undertake emergency repairs to keep the damaged warship afloat.

The bulkhead caved in Saturday night after pumping in an adjacent compartment reduced the level of flooded water to the point where unequal pressure between compartments caused the collapse.

Sailors used a two-way fire hose brought from the mainland to pump the water out, stabilizing the destroyer sufficiently to forestall the possibility of its sinking..

"The crew is tired but they are in very good spirits," Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, the Navy officer commanding the support effort, said at a news conference. The sailors were being rotated out to several support ships for a rest, he said, while sailors from those ships boarded the Cole to stand watch.

The latest setback indicated that the destroyer is not seaworthy enough to be towed to another port for repairs. There is now discussing of bringing in a floating drydock to contain the ship once it can be moved to deeper water

Late today, Navy divers managed to enter the damaged hull and penetrate the collapsed compartment where the bodies of 10 missing sailors are thought to be trapped.

Yemen's president Ali Abdullah Saleh acknowledged today that the explosion on Friday was an act of terrorism, alluding to information apparently gathered by his own government.

The American ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Boudine, who said she had met "a couple of times" with Mr. Saleh since the disaster, told reporters today that the United States was very pleased with Yemen's response.

A team of F.B.I. agents, Navy investigators and other antiterrorist experts arrived Saturday in Aden to hasten the inquiry. Federal investigators looking into what Washington has called a terrorist act said that an analysis had indicated that the attackers used at least 440 pounds of high explosives, and that the hole caused by the blast at the Cole's waterline was about 80 feet wide and perhaps half as deep, far larger than initial reports suggested.

The investigation into the attack on one of the Navy's most sophisticated warships was bolstered with the arrival of a 40-member squad from the federal emergency support team, a Washington-based unit that draws experts from different government agencies. They joined a score of other investigators who flew in earlier from bases in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East, including the headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf.

The team is expected to grow to more than 100, including personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency and defense intelligence agencies.

The investigation is focusing on the theory that a team of suicide bombers, possibly belonging to an Islamic terrorist group, attacked the destroyer using the cover of a mooring operation in Aden harbor to dash in among a flotilla of support vessels.

Witnesses have described two men in a motorized rubber dinghy racing to the port side of the Navy ship and standing erect at the moment that the blast occurred.

If confirmed as the work of terrorists, the attack would be one of the most deadly incidents in years, and the worst against Americans in the Middle East since a truck-bombing of a military barracks in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American servicemen and wounded hundreds in June 1996.

In the first account by a witness of the scene aboard the Cole, a senior American diplomat who visited the ship on Friday described the situation 24 hours after the blast as "horrific," with surviving sailors struggling with shock at the loss of their crewmates and trying to keep the ship afloat despite widespread flooding below decks and severe structural damage throughout the ship, even on the upper decks well above the site of the blast.

Although investigators continued to say they have no firm leads on the identity or motive of the attackers, the American official told reporters that the Yemeni authorities had detained an unknown number of people in Aden for questioning, apparently including dock workers and some of the crewmen aboard other small vessels that were helping to service the Cole at the time of the blast.

The official described seeing steel doors and hatches buckled off their hinges, and parts of the ship's superstructure twisted by the force of the explosion.

"The damage seemed to extend throughout the ship," the official said at an onshore briefing that was held on condition that the official not be identified. The official said crewmen, while showing signs of grieving over lost shipmates, were working round the clock.

"They're very focused on saving the ship, but in their faces you can see that they just lost 17 of their friends, and there are elements of shell shock as well," the official said.

The official added: "These are professionals. They are observing a personal loss, but their first responsibility is toward the ship."

A interfaith memorial service for the dead sailors was held aboard the ship this morning, attended by all crew members not assigned to emergency duties.

The official offered no new details of the explosion, other than saying that the small vessel believed to have set off the blast was "some sort of Yemeni boat that approached the ship when it as already at anchor" and that "it was not suspicious to the point where anybody took any notice of it."

Navy officials have said the ship and crew were at the second highest degree of alert observed in the Fifth Fleet, stationed in Persian Gulf, with crew members assigned to watch boats approaching the Cole through binoculars and others with weapons keeping watch.

The official, who was among those responsible for monitoring the safety of the refueling stops made by United States warships here since the stopovers were approved in late 1998, said the explosion that killed the sailors "may not necessarily have been a lapse in security." The official added, "Unfortunately, you sometimes learn lessons in the most tragic ways, and there will definitely be lessons learned from this."

Although the official did not elaborate, the suggestion that there had been no breach of security appeared to indicate that investigators believe that the attackers may have infiltrated the onshore Yemeni organizations responsible for assisting in refueling and re-supplying the ship. One account circulating here has been that the Cole's crew believed the rubber dinghy that apparently carried the explosives to be one of the boats assigned to the help the United States ship moor, refuel and remove garbage and other waste.

As the destroyer sat listing in Aden's inner harbor today, under blazing 100-degree heat, the Pentagon announced new measures suggesting that it remained concerned about conditions aboard the ship, and possibly about further terrorist attacks.

The announcement said the Fifth Fleet had ordered two other ships, the frigate Hawes and the destroyer Donald Cook, to join the Cole in Aden as soon as possible "so the crews of the new ships can help do some of the work that's required to keep the ship afloat and to deal with the damage to the hull," said Kenneth H. Bacon, a Pentagon spokesmen.

Throughout the night and into the day Yemeni patrol boats could be seen in the harbor, and a British frigate, the Marlborough, remained moored alongside the Cole in what British and American officials said was a move by the Royal Navy to assist the American destroyer and the surviving members of its 293-member crew.

Reporters' requests to visit the Cole continued to be deferred. The Navy said it wanted no distractions from the investigation, which included diving operations below the Cole's waterline and down to the harbor floor to determine the extent of the damage to the ship and to search for the remains, if any, of the 10 sailors listed as dead but still missing.

The bodies of five of the seven crew members who were found after the blast have been flown aboard a military plane to Dover, Del., after being transferred first from Aden to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Today, 39 wounded shipmates from the Cole flew from the United States Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. on their way back to their home base in Norfolk, Va. Six more seriously injured sailors remained hospitalized in Germany.

On Saturday, the Navy announced that in addition to the 33 crew members originally listed as wounded, six of those evacuated on Friday to Landstuhl were suffering from what Lt. Terrence Dudley, a Navy spokesman, described as "post-traumatic stress."

Many of the crew members remaining aboard the Cole have been sleeping under awnings stretched across the upper decks after the blast filled many of the vessel's compartments and its engine room with water, rendering the ship's engines unusable and stripping the vessel of air-conditioning. Large shipments of bottled water flown from Bahrain, as well as emergency food supplies, were shuttled out to the ship by tenders.

There seemed little doubt that the billion-dollar warship was severely damaged. Lieutenant Dudley said that much of the recovery crew's effort had gone into pumping water out of flooded compartments, and to investigating ways of patching the hole caused by the blast, part of which was below the waterline.

That would enable sailors to get the ship to dockside, in Aden or elsewhere, where more extensive repairs could be made that would allow the Cole to be towed back to its home port of Norfolk, Va.

Officials in Washington said on Friday that they had no firm leads on which group might have carried out the attack. American officials in Aden stressed the thoroughness of the investigation here. The team that arrived this weekend from Washington will remain in Aden "as long as it takes," Lieutenant Dudley said.

Navy spokesmen say all their evidence shows that the blast, which they say occurred at 9:30 a.m. local time on Thursday (2:30 a.m. Eastern time), happened when the unidentified rubber boat maneuvered between other support vessels assisting the Cole with mooring, refueling and garbage removal operations, and raced to the Cole's port side.

Despite Mr. Saleh's initial suggestion that the blast was an accident, he has been at pains to promise that Yemen will cooperate with the investigation and "hunt down" the perpetrators if terrorist involvement is proved. American officials here say he has abided by that promise, offering all the help requested, and waiving Yemeni laws and regulations to allow large numbers of American military and intelligence officials to operate with few restrictions.

The cooperation has extended to allowing a 40-man Marine antiterrorist squad deployed from Bahrain to patrol inside a government-owned harborside hotel where most of the American team members are staying, wearing desert-style camouflage uniforms and carrying automatic rifles. The marines also act as bodyguards for investigators shuttling to the harborside.

President Saleh has issued statements harshly condemning Israel for its attacks on Palestinians in the last two weeks and directed government officials to help organize public demonstrations that have featured denunciations of Jews and Americans, including one in Aden on Tuesday that drew 50,000 people.

---

THE NATION Preventing Terrorism After the Cole Bombing

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/weekinreview/15SCHM.html

WASHINGTON -- Yemen is a failed state on the mend just around the corner from Somalia, in a truly wild neighborhood. It has been a haven for international terrorists and radical Islamic groups and there is little evidence that the government has any control over them.

Given these facts, some critics are already blaming policy makers for placing United States forces in such a dangerous place - and by extension, in all such places.

Using a refueling stop to build stronger ties with a volatile and struggling Arab nation not only backfired, such critics say, it shouldn't have been tried.

"It's not worth the risk," said Richard N. Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution who served on the National Security Council under President George Bush. "Yemen has a bad record, and it's still a place where the government is unable or unwilling to take certain steps against certain terrorist groups. We must become more selective and more wary of who we do normal operations with."

Others at least as numerous insist that the United States must not let terrorists dictate how and where it projects its presence on the globe. And to be sure, the United States is staying put in the Middle East.

"We have very large interests in the region that aren't just important, they are vital," said Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman who headed the House International Relations Committee.

Mr. Hamilton's list of interests is a long one: unfettered access to affordable oil; protecting Israel's security; limiting the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to launch them; checking the influence of Islamic fundamentalists; advancing economic development in the region.

"It would be an absolute victory for terrorists, if they're behind this attack, if we pulled back and stopped doing our job in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world, and we're not going to give them that victory," said the Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth H. Bacon.

Indeed, say critics of withdrawal, wouldn't abandoning the field in places like Yemen just leave them open to getting worse? Everyone points to Somalia as the example to avoid. But it wasn't the worst case by any means. Consider, for example, the experts in the Reagan administration who put American troops in a barracks at the airport in Lebanon in 1983.

After the killing of 241 American servicemen by a Shiite Muslim driving a suicide truck bomb in October 1983, American resolve was badly shaken and there was a furious domestic debate over whether the United State should have brought in troops in the first place, or whether it should have done so in a different way.

The alternative, which came to pass when the American troops left, was Syrian control, for which everyone in the region is still paying the price.

The thing the Saudis, Egyptians and others in the region remember most about the marines in Beirut was not their arrival, but their departure. In Arab eyes, the marines simply cut and ran from Lebanon when the Syrians and their Lebanese allies made the cost of staying too high.

Both sides of the leave-or-stay debate, however, ignore a simple point: that there are common-sense rules of engagement for doing business in dodgy places that could reduce the risks of operating in them.

First of all, the diplomatic and military services should invest heavily in intelligence, preferably the kind using real eyes and ears, which can infiltrate terrorist groups and snitch.

"We're constantly reading the tea leaves very carefully," said one four-star officer with experience in the Middle East. "You continually assess the intelligence, bounce those observations off others and gauge the host nation's level of security cooperation. These things don't stay on a flat line, they ebb and flow."

Second, avoid stationing forces where they can become targets of opportunity and resentment. After the 1996 bombing of a housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 airmen were killed, American troops in Dhahran were moved out of urban compounds into more defensible desert bases.

Third, when traveling around the region, go well armed and avoid falling into predictable patterns that are vulnerable to preplanned attack.

Fourth, to the extent possible, limit dependence on host-nation support for security, supplies and other services that would allow terrorists to carry out an inside job, as the bombing of the destroyer Cole seems to have been.

Fifth, work closely with the host country's intelligence and police forces to limit vulnerabilities.

These are pretty straightforward operating principles, but they may be ignored, ether because of overconfidence in American armed might (forgetting that the whole point of terrorism is to puncture that very image), or because American forces overseas often want to be seen as benevolent and helpful.

"It's very, very complicated," said Adm. Stanley R. Arthur, who commanded allied naval forces in the 1991 Persian gulf war. "The basic nature of Americans is that we're much more comfortable reaching out than being in a bunker mentality."

In Lebanon, the United States trusted all factions to accept that it would be an even-handed guardian of order. In Yemen, it trusted the port authority not to be infiltrated by Islamic kamikazes, a doubtful proposition at best. "They executed the plan as it was specified," Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations said of the American commanders' security precautions.

Today, it is clear that the plan was inadequate. What happened in Yemen is a reminder that the world abounds in dangerous places, that American forces are vulnerable whenever they venture into them and that they must take precautions equal to that knowledge.

---

LIBERTIES As the World Churns

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/opinion/15DOWD.html

We were sleepwalking toward the election, not loving our choices, but not really too worried, with the country on palmy automatic pilot. Suddenly, three weeks out from a new president, the Middle East blows up and the markets tank.

With talk about war and terrorism and retaliatory bombing, and heartbreaking pictures of mangled American sailors and mutilated Israeli soldiers, with F.B.I. agents investigating in Yemen, the election seems more consequential and the issues more complicated than merely which side will offer better drug insurance for older Americans.

Going from cruise control to cruise missiles, we face the eerie specter of a St. Louis town hall meeting on Tuesday with Al Gore and George W. Bush debating in the midst of chaos.

The roiling globe provides a different prism to view not only the nominees, but their running mates. Reporters doing man-in-the-street interviews began getting a few questions wondering if Joseph Lieberman would have the proper distance on Israeli issues. Awkward campaigner Dick Cheney all at once found himself on terra firma, urging "swift retaliation" against those who attacked the U.S.S. Cole.

It is easy to imagine the Bush inner circle, always reliving the glory days of Desert Storm, swinging into action on the strategy of another Middle East war. You know Poppy is peppering his son with e-mails like "Talk to Condi. Get with Wolfowitz. Very tricky. Water's edge. Nation with one voice."

If W., who has been winging it on foreign affairs, had given a shakier debate performance Wednesday, the race might be over. With the scary backdrop of the Middle East, Al Gore could have jumped ahead as he grimly told Americans he had to leave Iowa's pumpkin-strewn campaign stages to join "the principals" of the National Security Council in the situation room.

But in Winston-Salem, W. was like Peter Pan. You knew there were wires holding him up as he flew Around the World With 80 Coaches. (He had finally figured out what was going on in East Timor.) But the Bush team did a pretty good job of hiding those wires for an hour and a half.

And W. ended up with bonus points from the first debate when it turned out that his suggestions that the Russians be called on to help push out Slobodan Milosevic - which Mr. Gore haughtily dismissed - turned out to be what the Clinton administration was already doing.

Al Gore, by contrast, had such a bad second debate that his foreign affairs I.Q. is not giving him the edge it should as the world turns dark.

The vice president was in a straitjacket the whole debate, forcing himself to look humble because he had looked too arrogant in the first debate. But the humble act was self-defeating.

Gore was reacting to Gore, like the sheriff in "Blazing Saddles" who holds a gun to his own head and takes himself hostage. W. seemed almost like a bemused spectator at the vice president's split-personality psychodrama. And since Mr. Gore was afraid to show his smarts and his contempt for W., the pair came across as a couple of regular guys running for student body president.

You knew what the transparent Mr. Gore was thinking, of course, when he was forcing himself to give that self-effacing little smile: I know I'm smarter. I'm just not allowed to say so.

The scene conjured up that hilarious "Saturday Night Live" sketch from 1988, with Jon Lovitz playing Michael Dukakis and Dana Carvey doing his papa Bush.

BUSH: "So, in summary . . . stay the course . . . thousand points of light . . . thousand points of light . . . stay the course.

MODERATOR: Governor Dukakis? Rebuttal?

DUKAKIS: I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.

Mr. Gore's confidants always worried that his biggest problem would be that he does not know who he really is, and there was a danger he would turn the race into a personality crisis.

The vice president thought his main hurdle was getting out of Bill Clinton's shadow and showing he was his own man. But the more he shows himself, the less people seem to like him. If only he had put himself in that lockbox right after the L.A. convention.

Now we will see whether W.'s foreign affairs tutorial has staying power. And whether Mr. Gore can put aside his own identity crisis and deal with the world's.

---

Iraq Reports Safe Ending to Hijacking of Saudi Jet

New York Times
October 15, 2000
By SUSAN SACHS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/world/15HIJA.html

CAIRO, Oct. 14 - At least two men, apparently armed with explosives, hijacked a Saudi Arabian passenger jet enroute to London today and forced it to land in Baghdad, where after three hours Iraqi officials announced that they had succeeded in negotiating the freedom of all those on board.

The 90 passengers and 15 crew members, including one American traveler and 40 British citizens, were in good health and were taken by bus from the airport to Baghdad hotels, according to Iraqi officials.

The Saudi Arabian Airlines' manager at Heathrow airport in London, Philip Griffin, was quoted as telling Agence France-Presse that the passengers would be flown out of Baghdad and arrive in Britain on Sunday evening. A state television announcer in Baghdad said they would be extended "Arab hospitality." Neither Saudi Arabia nor Britain maintain diplomatic relations with Iraq.

The hijackers, who reportedly threatened to blow up the plane on the tarmac, were taken into custody. "The hijackers were arrested and there will be investigations," said Tahir Jaleel al-Habous, an official of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

The demands made by the hijackers, said to be Saudi nationals, were not made public by the Baghdad authorities. Initially, officials in Baghdad said four men had commandeered the plane, but after securing the release of the passengers they revised the number to two.

At various points during the standoff at Saddam International Airport, Iraqi officials said the men were upset over what they called unreported human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, that they chose Iraq as their destination because it rejects "American hegemony" in the region, and that they wanted "political asylum" in Iraq.

After the standoff, an Iraqi Ministry of Interior official said the men had also warned that if they did not get what they wanted, another plane would be hijacked in coming days.

Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 115 originated in the Saudi port city of Jidda.

It was not clear whether the hijacking was related to the recent weeks of deadly conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. The violence, which has claimed almost 100 lives, most of them Palestinian, has spurred rage and huge demonstrations against Israel and the United States in most Arab states.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil-producer, is a close ally of the United States and the presence of American troops in the kingdom has been denounced by religious conservatives and by the accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile who has made the expulsion of American troops his main demand.

However, the Saudi government has also strongly condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians in the last three weeks, with Saudi leaders urging all Muslims to donate money and other aid to the Palestinians.

Iraq has been more forceful, calling even today for attacks on Americans and American interests around the world and proclaiming that Iraqis were prepared to go on suicide terror missions against Israel.

The Saddam International Airport in Baghdad reopened only two months ago after being shuttered for 10 years by the United Nations embargo on Iraq. Since Aug. 18, more than 20 planes from Egypt, Syria and Turkey have landed, reportedly carrying permitted shipments of food and medicine.

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, however, are frigid. The gulf kingdom was the base for the allied assault on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait and it has remained a bastion of opposition to ending Iraqi isolation.

Iraqi hostility also has not abated.

Soon after the hijacked plane landed in Baghdad, an official of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said on state television that the hijackershad demanded direct negotiations with Saudi authorities. The Iraqi official said the demand was refused because the delay in getting a Saudi to Baghdad would cause unnecessary stress for the plane's passengers.

Civil aviation officials in Cairo first reported the hijacking at about 2:55 p.m. (8:55 a.m. Eastern time), when the plane was in Egyptian airspace 70 miles southeast of Cyprus.

In a radio transmission from the Saudi airliner monitored by officials in Israel and then broadcast over radio and television in the region, the pilot is heard asking the control tower at Larnaca, Cyprus, to notify Syrian airport officials that the plane was on its way. "The hijacker is saying that he has TNT on board and he might blow the aircraft, and we have passengers from all kinds of nationalities," the pilot said in an even voice. "Do you read?"

A short time later, according to another transmission monitored on the ground, the pilot was heard telling air traffic controllers that he needed permission to fly over Syrian air space, but that the hijacker was demanding to go to Baghdad.

---

Hijackers arrested; passengers freed

USA Today
10/15/00- Updated 06:06 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwssat03.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Hijackers who commandeered a Saudi jetliner and took it to Baghdad were arrested late Saturday, Iraqi state television reported, ending a daylong ordeal for more than 100 people on board.

The Boeing 777 was on its way from Saudi Arabia to London when it was seized over the Mediterranean Sea and forced to fly around the Mideast for several hours before landing.

State television and airport officials said that the 71/2-hour crisis ended at 11:20 p.m. local time after high-ranking government officials negotiated with the two hijackers, who then surrendered peacefully.

The 103 passengers and crew members were reported safe. Officials said they were spending the night at a Baghdad hotel and were expected to leave Iraq Sunday.

No other details were immediately available on how the hijacking ended.

The two hijackers were later allowed to speak briefly with reporters. They praised Iraqi authorities and criticized their own government.

''We carried out the operation because we believe in the principles of justice and equality,'' one said. The other said the Saudi people were against the presence of U.S. troops in their territory.

The hijackers, who refused to give their names, said they haven't asked for political asylum, countering an earlier report.

Earlier, Al-Jazeera satellite television showed the passengers descending a ramp from the plane.

''We are very grateful to the government of Iraq,'' said a middle-aged man identifying himself only as a Pakistani.

Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based station that broadcasts to the Middle East, also showed a few women, children and several other men descending the ramp surrounded by plainclothes security agents.

Speaking before the release, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official, Taher Haboush, said the hijackers had said they seized the plane because they were upset over an investigation into the Saudi human rights situation that was too favorable to the government.

The hijackers also said they ordered the plane to fly to Baghdad because Iraq rejects ''U.S. hegemony,'' Haboush said.

It wasn't immediately clear if the hijackers were armed or what other means they used to seize control of the aircraft. A hijacker had at one point threatened to blow up the plane unless it was allowed to fly to Baghdad, Saudi officials said on condition of anonymity.

Word of the hijacking first emerged in Cairo, Egypt. Egyptian civil aviation officials said the pilot radioed them at 3:55 p.m. local time to say the plane had been commandeered and the hijackers were insisting that it fly to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

But the plane was denied permission to land as it neared that airport, air traffic controllers on the island of Cyprus said.

The hijackers then asked to fly through Syrian airspace to Iraq, the Cypriots said. Syria initially refused but later allowed the plane to pass, Damascus air traffic controllers said, and the plane flew on to Baghdad.

Damascus airport officials speaking on condition of anonymity had said the plane landed in Damascus, but they later backed off of that statement, saying it was erroneous. The official Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the plane never landed in Damascus, but flew over Syria to Iraq.

After the plane landed in Baghdad, airport security was tight with guards turning away journalists. Ambulances, buses, a fire engine and a fuel tanker went into the airport as reporters watched.

Saudi Arabia and Iraq have had no relations since Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. But the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information issued a statement saying ''the safety and security of the Saudi plane's passengers concerns us as if they were Iraqi citizens. Therefore, we reassure the families of the passengers that the Iraqi authorities will take of their relatives' safety and comfort to the maximum extent.''

Saudi Arabian Airlines officials in Jiddah said the plane had 90 passengers and 15 crew, led by an Ethiopian captain. The passenger figure included the two hijackers.

The airline officials said the passengers were 40 Britons, 15 Saudis, 15 Pakistanis, four Yemenis, four South Africans, two Kenyans, and one each from France, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Oman, the Palestinian territories, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

Baghdad's Saddam airport was reopened on Aug. 17, having been shut during the 1991 Gulf War. Regular flights to Baghdad are banned by the U.N. sanctions imposed since the invasion of Kuwait, but a series of planes have landed at Saddam airport in the past three weeks as France, Russia and a dozen Arab states sent delegations and humanitarian aid to Iraq.

Saturday's attack was the second hijacking in the Gulf in a month.

On Sept. 14, an Iraqi man hijacked a Qatar Airways plane at knifepoint and ordered it flown to Saudi Arabia. The 144 passengers and the crew escaped unharmed when the man surrendered to Saudi authorities at the city of Hael.

-------- activists

Million Family March set for Monday

USA Today
10/15/00- Updated 08:04 PM ET
By Jessie Halladay, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/million/mfm8.htm

WASHINGTON - Five years ago, the Nation of Islam motivated hundreds of thousands of people to gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March.

Now, organizers of the 1995 rally say it's time for those men who participated to return to the nation's capital with their wives and children for the Million Family March.

"There are real issues that affect the quality of family life in America that, quite frankly, haven't gotten national attention," says Benjamin Muhammad, a Nation of Islam minister and organizer of the Million Family March.

The family march, set for Monday, hopes to focus national debates around issues that most concern families, Muhammad says. Some of those issues include Social Security, domestic violence, education and health care.

March organizers say at least 10,000 buses and several airplanes have been chartered throughout the USA to bring people to the march. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan plans to address the crowd as part of a day-long schedule of speakers that will include several members of Congress and national and state religious leaders from several faiths.

There are even reports that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, will be there to bless 10,000 new couples in a sacred marriage ceremony.

"I really do doubt he'll be there," says the Rev. Levy Daugherty, vice president of the Family Federation for World Peace, one of Moon's organizations. "This is really Mr. Farrakhan's thing."

But Unification Church members will be riding chartered planes and buses to attend the march along with Nation of Islam members, Daugherty says, because Moon asked members to join the march.

"Rev. Moon saw this as the right thing to do," Daugherty says. "He's crazy about family."

Betty Muhammad of Las Vegas plans on making the trip with her husband, Fred, and five of her 10 grandchildren. Fred Muhammad attended the Million Man March in 1995.

"In America, we have lost the value of family," Betty Muhammad says. Though the trip from Las Vegas on a chartered bus will be a long one, Betty Muhammad says it will be worth it to show her grandchildren "values they will remember for the rest of their lives."

Some criticized the original Million Man March for being too specifically targeted to black males. And while many involved say that was not the case then, organizers say this family march will reflect more diversity. Daugherty says Moon insisted on religious, cultural and racial diversity before getting his members involved.

"There's room under this tent for everyone," Rep. Earl Hilliard, D-Ala., says. "This march will be one more of unity and coming together than the last march." Hilliard is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has worked to garner support for the march.

Not everyone buys the Nation of Islam's claim of greater inclusion. Farrakhan has a history of making statements viewed as biased against Jews, whites and gays.

"Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have a long history of promoting racism and anti-Semitism," says Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee. "A rally convened for any purpose is terribly troubling."

Though Farrakhan has toned down his public statements about other races, Stern says his history speaks for itself and people should not ignore that. March organizers say the event will be inclusive and also will include stronger follow-up.

"We're building a coalition that we intend to keep together after the march so that the thrust of that momentum will be felt not only in Washington but in every state capital," Benjamin Muhammad says. "It's a very serious moment for those seeking political office."

Muhammad is the former Benjamin Chavis, who was ousted as executive director of the NAACP because of his management of the organization's finances and handling of a former aide's sexual discrimination complaint. He says he hopes the energy generated at the march from the various speeches will motivate people to get out and vote Nov. 7.

Whether or not a presidential candidate will be endorsed at the march hinges on whether Texas Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Gore embraces the agenda the Nation of Islam has laid out. So far, Muhammad says, no endorsements are planned.

The agenda, a 200-page document prepared by march leaders, calls for a shift in thinking about the family to include issues of morality in public policy, political empowerment for citizens, quality-of-life issues and economic transformation.

Connie Reese of Glenn Dale, Md., plans on going to the march with her three daughters. She says attending will emphasize the importance of family to lawmakers.

And with the gathering so close to Election Day, Reese says, "it will probably encourage more people, blacks especially, to come out and vote.

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)