------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Silex takes on Intel in silicon chip race
Change at the White House? Asians Are Uneasy
Czech N - plant operator says begins to raise output
Czech, Austrian PMs meet to ease nuclear dispute
Iraqi: We Got Bomb Info From U.S.
Six charged in Japanese nuclear accident
Clinton Trip to North Korea Depends on Missile Talks
U.S., North Korea Hold Missile Talks
U.S. resumes talks with North Korea
A Breakthrough in North Korea
Russia tests ballistic missile
International union to aid Ukraine on Chernobyl
Momentum Builds for Disarment Group
Prober: Lee's Ethnicity Wasn't Factor
The Secrecy Legacy
ENERGY: Nuclear waste on the loose

MILITARY
A strike against Plan Colombia
Crew capsule closes in on space station
FIRST LIVE-IN CREW MOVES INTO SPACE STATION
Issues: defense
Marine Corps warns of Camp Lejeune hazard
Investigators say government hiding papers on U.N. peace missions
The limits of U.S. intelligence

OTHER
France says sunken tanker leaking chemicals
Would Clinton ban release of the Pentagon Papers?
Australia govt seeks fast renewable energy deal
Inside Track-Fuel cell investment boom echoes Web heyday
DaimlerChrysler to test drive new fuel - cell vehicle
Deal protects stretch of Appalachian Trail
FDA releases list of recalled corn products
BOMBING SUSPECT STABS GUARD

ACTIVISTS
An interview with KAI LUMUMBA BARROW



-------- NUCLEAR

Silex takes on Intel in silicon chip race

Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 02/11/2000
By SUE LOWE
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/02/text/bizcom1.html

Sceptics of Australia's ability to produce hard core technology, take note. Sydney not only has a pure silicon producer, but one that aims to beat chip giant Intel at cranking 100 times the speed out of future processors.

ASX-listed Silex Systems, founded by an academic at NSW University, has spent 12 years developing a laser technology that is being used to develop an ultra pure form of silicon.

Rather than let someone else develop the material into usable product, Silex has now acquired worldwide patent rights to a Japanese semiconductor technology shown to produce processors that run 100 times faster than Intel's current fastest Pentium.

Silex's share price jumped 27c to $3.44 on the announcement. It gives the technology's developer, Dr Michael Goldsworthy, a stake that is worth $23.5 million.

Silex has to date used its laser-based technology to enrich uranium for the nuclear power industry, but earlier this year sold those rights to an American specialist in the area and hinted it was moving on to silicon and the $US150 billion semiconductor market.

"We were contacted by two different groups - one in Japan, one in the US - both needing the material we produce. But rather than just provide the raw material we took the opportunity to buy some of the rights to the application, which moves us from being a core technology into the user-side," said Silex managing director Dr Goldsworthy.

The deal just announced is with the Advanced Semiconductor Material Group at Tokyo's Keio University.

But discussions are also under way with the US group, aiming to consolidate the intellectual property and development efforts.

Intel's fastest commercial processor, the Pentium III runs at 1 gigahertz.

Intel is working on the Pentium IV "but it will only be a small increment faster. It's a real struggle to make even small advances with current technology," Dr Goldsworthy said.

The combination of Silex' pure silicon and the Japanese Silicon Isotope Superlattice technology promises to break that barrier and produce chips running to "potentially 100GHz or more in a relatively short space of time." Silex expects to demonstrate commercial production capability by the end of 2001 with a view to actual production in 2005.

Intel, IBM and other leading chip manufacturers are inevitably also working on the same problem, but Dr Goldsworthy claims efforts have moved to materials such as gallium arsenide.

"It's very awkward and it doesn't fit today's massive infrastructure for silicon," he said. "We know they're taking a watching brief on what we're doing."

-------- china

Change at the White House? Asians Are Uneasy

International Herald Tribune
Paris, Thursday, November 2, 2000
By Michael Richardson International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/THU/IN/aorient.html

SINGAPORE - The prospect of a change in the White House after eight years of Bill Clinton is causing unease in Asia.

China especially fears that Mr. Clinton's policy of strategic partnership with Beijing will be abandoned in favor of a strengthened alliance between the United States and Japan if the Republican George W. Bush wins the election.

On some of Asia's major geopolitical concerns - U.S. relations with China, Japan and Taiwan, and an American missile defense system that could protect U.S. troops and allies in the region - Mr. Bush and the Democratic contender, Vice President Al Gore, appear to be poles apart.

Mr. Gore and his foreign policy advisers have signaled that he would basically continue Mr. Clinton's policy of engagement with China while enhancing U.S. security commitments with Japan.

''Our long-term strategy must be to encourage China to become a strong, prosperous and open society,'' Mr. Gore said recently.

But Mr. Bush portrays China in a menacing light. Beijing, he said, ''has been investing its growing wealth in strategic nuclear weapons, new ballistic missiles, a blue-water navy and a long-range air force. It is an espionage threat to our country.''

China fears that as president, Mr. Bush would upset the delicate ties between the two countries that have only recently recovered from a major upset caused by the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade last year during the allied air strikes against Yugoslavia. Washington said the bombing was a mistake, an explanation Beijing has been reluctant to accept.

The weekly Beijing Review, published by China's cabinet, said recently that Mr. Bush viewed China as an adversary and was likely to deepen U.S. ties with both Taiwan and Japan, while pushing ahead with developing a missile shield that would cover them as well as U.S. territory.

Writing in the Review, Jiang Lingfei and Fu Tao, two researchers at China's National Defense University, said that Mr. Bush's position was ''based on the belief that China is the main rival'' of the United States.

They said that Mr. Bush favored closer ties with Taiwan at the expense of China and that such an approach would produce ''grave results'' by undermining Chinese sovereignty.

Beijing has warned repeatedly that any moves by the island toward independence could prompt a Chinese military takeover - something the United States is likely to oppose.

The prospect of renewed tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan and other issues alarms many officials in East Asia who regard relations between Washington and Beijing as a touchstone of stability in the region.

While being careful not to take sides by endorsing either Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore, Singapore's senior minister, Lee Kuan Yew, said at a dinner Friday that ''the key to peace and stability in Asia will depend on how the U.S., Japan and Europe engage China.''

Mr. Lee said the United States should ''play it long and play it cool'' with China, so that Beijing would be a contributor to regional and international stability, ''not a spoiler.''

In Taiwan, the Republicans have often been favored for their tougher anti-Communist stance. The Democrats have further hurt their standing with the governing party as a result of U.S. State Department restrictions that were placed on President Chen Shui-bian during a recent stopover in the United States, a high-ranking official in Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said.

''They did not even allow the Taiwan community to greet the delegation,'' said the official, who requested anonymity. ''These restrictions made many supporters of our party angry with the Clinton administration.''

In Malaysia, too, the Democrats - and Mr. Gore in particular - are seen as hostile by the government.

Mr. Gore is remembered for an appearance at a meeting of APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, in Kuala Lumpur two years ago. He said at a gathering of regional officials, including many Malaysian cabinet members, that he supported an anti-government movement led by Anwar Ibrahim, a former Malaysian deputy prime minister who was dismissed and charged with sodomy and abuse of power. Mr. Anwar is currently serving two prison terms totaling 15 years.

Mr. Gore added that the United States supported the ''brave people'' in Malaysia who were calling for reform.

''It's the most disgusting speech I've heard in my life,'' Rafidah Aziz, the trade and industry minister, said at the time.

Abdul Razak Abdullah Baginda, executive director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Center in Kuala Lumpur, said that some Malaysians would prefer to see Mr. Bush become president.

''There's a standard package that one expects with a Republican president,'' Mr. Razak said. ''Human rights, for instance, will probably not be a major determinant of Bush's policy.''

In pursuit of the labor and environmental vote in the United States, Mr. Gore has indicated that he will seek to build labor rights and environmental protection into future trade agreements - something that Asian nations strongly oppose.

In South Korea, officials publicly praised the recent ground-breaking visit to the North by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, saying that it would reinforce the improvement in South-North relations sought by President Kim Dae Jung.

But privately, some officials expressed concern that negotiations with the North could lose momentum, particularly if Mr. Clinton decided to visit Pyongyang after the presidential election but before he steps down in January.

Mr. Clinton decided earlier this year to leave a decision on whether to start construction of a missile defense system to the next president. Mr. Gore has said that he favors such a system in principle, but would limit it to protecting U.S. soil.

He also stressed the need to negotiate with other concerned countries, including China, to ensure that the system did not cause existing arms control accords to unravel.

Mr. Bush, reflecting a traditional Republican commitment to strong U.S. defense, wants a ''robust'' missile defense shield built that will protect both America and its allies.

-------- czech republic

Czech N - plant operator says begins to raise output

Planet Ark
CZECH REPUBLIC: November 2, 2000
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8774

PRAGUE - Czech power company CEZ said yesterday it had begun to raise output at its controversial Soviet-designed Temelin nuclear power plant less than 24 hours after receiving approval from the country's nuclear regulators.

CEZ, which owns the station, said in a statement that at 0415 GMT the 981 megawatt VVER 1000 reactor was working at level two, with output at 1.5 percent of capacity, up from 0.001 earlier in the morning.

"The whole process of raising electrical output at the block to 100 percent will take about four months," the statement quoted Temelin spokesman Milan Nebesar as saying.

Temelin stands just over 50 km (30 miles) from the border with nuclear-free Austria, touching off a major diplomatic row between Prague and Vienna, which says the plant is unsafe and has threatened to block the Czech Republic's negotiations to join the European Union.

Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman and Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel held talks into the early hours of Yesterday morning to break the impasse.

The two agreed to promote creation of pan-European nuclear safety standards, to hold further discussions on the safety of the plant, and to consider carrying out the environmental impact study which Austria demands.

Thousands of Austrians have repeatedly blocked Czech border crossings in protests against the plant's activation last month. Temelin was built under a Soviet project but has been upgraded with a Western control system and fuel.

----

Czech, Austrian PMs meet to ease nuclear dispute

CZECH REPUBLIC: November 2, 2000
Story by Jan Lopatka
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8776

ZIDLOCHOVICE, Czech Republic - Czech and Austrian leaders met on Tuesday to discuss a dispute over a Czech nuclear power plant near the Austrian border, but failed to resolve their differences over the Temelin station's safety.

Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman and Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel however broke the ice in relations between the two central European neighbours and agreed to promote creation of pan-European nuclear safety standards.

The meeting, which ran into early Yesterday, took place just hours after Czech regulators gave the final go-ahead to raise output at Temelin's first VVER 1,000 reactor which has been running at low levels since mid-October.

On Monday, Austrian Vice-Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer had warned the Czech Republic that Vienna would thwart Prague's European Union ambitions as long as the Soviet-designed Temelin reactor remained active and no comprehensive security check was undertaken.

Fiercely anti-nuclear Austria's concerns about the plant were heightened by a Friday statement from the plant's owners CEZ that a pump failure had forced them to scale back operational tests.

Zeman and Schuessel agreed to hold further discussions on the safety of the plant, built just 50 km (30 miles) from the border of Austria, and to consider carrying out the environmental impact study which Austria demands.

"The Czech government has the same interest as the Austrian one, for Temelin to be safe," Zeman told a news conference after the meeting. "If it is not, we do not have an interest in operating it."

MEETING EASES TENSIONS

Schuessel said he had agreed with Zeman that the European Union's informal Atomic Question Group should draft a unified safety standard for European nuclear stations, which would also be binding for the Czechs, who hope to join the EU in 2003.

"I proposed that we raise the review of safety standards to the European level, and to have a mediator perhaps at the level of the Commission," said Schuessel. "I proposed this could be (EU Enlargement Commissioner) Guenter Verheugen."

However, Schuessel failed to force Zeman to stop the current operations at Temelin, pending further tests and the environmental impact study. CEZ plans to raise output to full capacity over the next few months.

The meeting at a chateau in southeastern Czech was the first top-level contact between the two countries since Schuessel's cabinet was sworn in.

It eased strains in the neighbouring countries' relations which had been raised by the Temelin issue and Czech's participation in sanctions against Austria earlier this year.

Schuessel and Zeman agreed to hold another meeting on the atomic dispute later this month in Austria.

Riess-Passer on Monday threatened that Austria would not sign the energy chapter needed for Czech entry to the EU unless new safety checks are made.

Schuessel told reporters that his cabinet was still bound by a parliamentary ruling not to close the energy chapter in Czech talks to join the EU until the Temelin worries are resolved.

Thousands of Austrians have repeatedly blocked Czech border crossings in protests against the plant's activation.

Dozens of mainly Austrian activists also held a peaceful demonstration outside the chateau where Zeman and Schessel met, waving banners demanding the station's closure. Temelin was built under a Soviet project but has been upgraded with a Western control system and fuel.

-------- iraq

Iraqi: We Got Bomb Info From U.S.


By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Saddams-Bombmaker.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former high-ranking official in Iraq's nuclear weapons program says he got American help in designing a bomb for Saddam Hussein: library copies of reports on the 1940s Manhattan Project.

``I found a nice gift from the U.S. Atomic Energy Project at the library -- the Manhattan Project report,'' Khidhir Hamza, a nuclear physicist who defected in 1994, said Thursday in a rare public appearance.

One of only three or four nuclear physicists in Iraq when the bomb project began in the 1970s, he says he found the reports at Iraq's atomic energy library ``in a corner with a pile of dust on them ..., sitting there telling me exactly what to do.''

The Manhattan Project was the crash U.S. government program in which scientists developed the atomic bomb and produced the two that were dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

In a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hamza did not say how the Iraqi library got the reports, which like much other information are readily available around the world now.

He has said previously, however, that Iraq had a program before the 1991 Persian Gulf War of searching open literature and getting close to people in the United States who had classified information. Specifically, Iraqi students in the United States combed university libraries for bomb-building information, and Iraqi agents and scientists collected data at American scientific conferences and elsewhere, he has said.

Hamza, who co-authored the just-released book ``Saddam's Bombmaker,'' said Iraqi scientists and engineers concealed their work from international inspectors by simply locking doors and leading inspectors past them.

``We understood what the inspector's limits were. He was not allowed to ask outside certain limits,'' Hamza told a conference on nuclear proliferation at the Carnegie think tank. ``So he would be taken to a set path, and he would be answered within the limits of what he was allowed to ask, and he would leave. And next door is where we would be working on whatever we were doing to enrich uranium or design a bomb.''

Hamza said he believes Iraq could build a nuclear weapon ``within months'' if it got fissionable material from Russia or on the black market. Without that, he said, it would need to rebuild destroyed factories to produce its own material, which would require two or three years.

After his defection, Hamza worked for a time at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, and as a consultant to the Energy Department.

The assessment of how long Iraq would need to reconstitute the nuclear weapons program destroyed by the Gulf War and the following U.N. inspections, comes from work he did with the institute.

-------- japan

Six charged in Japanese nuclear accident

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
News in Brief
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

Six former officials of a Japanese nuclear fuel reprocessing plant were charged yesterday with negligence in an uncontrolled reaction last year that killed two people, Kyodo News agency reported. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident. If convicted in connection with the Sept. 30, 1999, accident, the six former employees of JCO Co. face maximum penalties of five years in prison or a $4,630 fine.

-------- korea

Clinton Trip to North Korea Depends on Missile Talks

International Herald Tribune
Paris, Thursday, November 2, 2000
By Ellen Nakashima and Steven Mufson Washington Post Service
http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/THU/IN/kor.2.html

WASHINGTON - President Bill Clinton will not decide whether to visit North Korea until after talks between U.S. and North Korean officials that began Wednesday in Kuala Lumpur on the issue of the Communist country's missile program.

Mr. Clinton met Monday with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who reported on her visit to Pyongyang last week and told him that North Korea had indicated it was willing to give up its missile program in exchange for help launching communications satellites.

U.S. officials said they believed the proposal made by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, was ''serious,'' and one said that he even tried to answer technical questions during his meetings with Mrs. Albright. Nonetheless, a senior administration official said that Mr. Clinton would want to know ''the specifics'' before committing to a state visit.

Robert Einhorn, assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, is leading the U.S. team trying to nail down those specifics in Kuala Lumpur. At issue are which categories of missiles would be prohibited, what types of research would be barred, and what guarantees there would be against the export of missile parts and technology. The talks started Wednesday and are scheduled to last three days. ''Ultimately, the question comes down to what are they willing to give up,'' said the official, ''and what do they think they need as a substitute.''

North Korea, starved for revenue, has indicated that it would expect to be compensated for the loss of export earnings if it agreed to halt exports to countries such as Iran and Pakistan. But U.S. officials argue that North Korea's missile exports might bring in as little as $300 million. That could be offset by increased trade and tourism with South Korea, and reconciliation with Japan could result in reparations for World War II.

The administration has not decided exactly how much movement by North Korea would justify a presidential visit, the senior official said. ''Missiles is probably the most paramount issue that we face,'' he said. ''That will be a cornerstone of a judgment whether to go, and we don't know enough yet.'' Another issue is for Pyongyang to take steps to reduce tensions on the border between North and South Korea.

It is possible that a presidential visit could be made to mark significant progress, even if a formal agreement is not ready for signing, the senior official said. ''We haven't made that decision,'' he said. The trip also has a political dimension, since Mr. Clinton must weigh the risk of appearing to give in to missile blackmail against the opportunity to defuse a threat from a country whose border he once called ''the scariest place on earth.'' Mrs. Albright has been criticized since her return for turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in North Korea.

---

U.S., North Korea Hold Missile Talks

Washington Post
Thursday, November 2, 2000 ; Page A24
WORLD IN BRIEF Compiled by Virginia Hamill
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60913-2000Nov1.html

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia--U.S. and North Korean negotiators began talks yesterday aimed at winding down the communist state's missile program.

But with two more days of discussions to go, it was too early to assess the prospects for a breakthrough following the progress made during Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il last week.

"Throughout this week the talks will build on the serious discussion held last week between Secretary Albright and Chairman Kim," Robert Einhorn, assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, said in a statement before greeting North Korean negotiators at the U.S. Embassy in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

The two sides held a working lunch and at the end of the first day the North Korean delegation, led by Jang Chang Chon, director general for U.S. affairs at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, described the atmosphere as good.

"The meeting was really held in a good mood, but serious," said Jong Sun Il, a Foreign Ministry secretary general. None of the participants would describe the substance of the talks.

The outcome of the discussions could influence President Clinton's decision whether to visit North Korea, one of the United States' most implacable enemies, before he leaves office.

---

U.S. resumes talks with North Korea

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
News in Brief
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

U.S. and North Korean officials resumed talks yesterday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that Washington hopes will curb the communist country's missile program and improve global security. The talks may influence whether President Clinton makes a historic trip to North Korea.

--------

A Breakthrough in North Korea

By Harold Hongju Koh
Thursday , November 2, 2000 ; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60921-2000Nov1.html

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's recent visit to Pyongyang was a landmark step toward ending the half-century of estrangement and tension that has clouded America's relationship with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea since the Korean War.

This summer, North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Il signaled a new openness toward dialogue, holding a historic summit in Pyongyang with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. In October he invited Secretary Albright to be the highest-ranking American official ever to visit North Korea. The secretary accepted that invitation fully mindful of North Korea's dismal human rights record, which has been comprehensively detailed in the State Department's human rights and international religious freedom reports. Kim Dae Jung, a longtime advocate of democracy and human rights in his own country and worldwide, strongly encouraged the secretary to travel to Pyongyang.

During her two-day visit, the secretary raised with her hosts the full range of American concerns, emphasizing missile restraints and other security issues, while also discussing global issues and compliance with international norms on such matters as terrorism and human rights. Not only was the secretary the first American Cabinet official ever to raise the issue of human rights with the highest-ranking North Koreans, she also pursued directly with Kim Jong Il in-depth discussions of issues obviously critical to the reduction of tensions and expansion of freedom on the peninsula.

Critics have chided the secretary not for the substance of her trip but for the images of clinking champagne glasses with Kim Jong Il and attending a mass performance in honor of the founding of the 55th anniversary of the Korean Workers Party. But while publicly discussing the performance in Pyongyang, the secretary told the North Koreans and the world press, "I wasn't born yesterday, and I have been a student of communist affairs all my life, and so one knows perfectly well how these performances are put together. . . . I just can assure you that these glasses that I have on are not rose-colored."

In public statements, she told the North Koreans that the "American people care about humanitarian issues. We always have, and we always will." While toasting "to all Koreans, a future marked by prosperity, reconciliation and peace," she urged North Korea to participate in the international system and to observe global norms.

As we now pursue broader human rights discussions with North Korea, we must stay focused on substance. From Beijing to Bosnia, from East Timor to Kosovo, Madeleine Albright has spoken and acted for human rights and democracy more forcefully and consistently than any previous American secretary of state. She has pursued a global policy of principled, purposeful engagement on human rights issues, using diplomatic dialogue with authoritarian governments to press for greater freedom for oppressed peoples. Her trip to North Korea was an important breakthrough in fostering greater North Korean openness to the outside world.

As a Korean American, I have spent my whole life waiting for the day when North Korea would end its isolation and begin a process of rapprochement with South Korea and the United States. Opening dialogue--particularly on the issues of weapons of mass destruction and ending hostility--is obviously critical to advancing any human rights agenda in North Korea. If vigorous diplomacy brings closer the day that 23 million North Koreans can enjoy genuine freedom, then let us have more of it.

The writer is assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

-------- russia

Russia tests ballistic missile

Florida Today
November 2, 2000
http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/stories/2000b/110200b.htm

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's strategic missile forces successfully test-launched an RS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday from neighboring Kazakstan, officials said.

The 25-year-old missile hit its target at the Kura testing ground on the Kamchatka peninsula on Russia's Pacific coast, said Alexander Buchin, spokesman for the strategic missile forces.

The RS-18, known in the West as the SS-19 or Stiletto, can be equipped with up to six warheads.

The missile was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome, the launch pad used for Soviet and Russian missile and space launches for decades -- and for the launch of the first crew of the international space station on Tuesday. Russia leases Baikonur from Kazakstan, a former Soviet republic.

Russia is supposed to decommission its RS-18's under the START II nuclear arms reduction treaty. The U.S.-Russian treaty was ratified by the Russian parliament this spring after years of delay, but it has yet to take effect because of U.S. protests over conditions attached by Russian lawmakers.

-------- ukraine

International union to aid Ukraine on Chernobyl

UKRAINE: November 2, 2000
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8773

KIEV - An international trade union said yesterday it would launch a worldwide campaign for funds to help workers and local people dependent on Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power, which is due to close next month.

Fred Higgs, secretary-general of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions, told a news conference in Kiev that the union would help raise at least $135 million for a "social protection programme".

Earlier this year, Ukraine said its Chernobyl station - the site of the world's worst civil nuclear disaster in 1986 - would be closed on December 15.

Kiev has appealed to the international community to help finance the closure, including funds to complete building two replacement reactors in western Ukraine, to find new jobs for staff, pay for pensions and to keep local services running.

Over the past six years, Ukraine has been locked in talks with the West aimed at winning hundreds of millions of dollars in return for the closure of Chernobyl.

"The donor countries have only allocated funds to ensure the plant's safe decommissioning, while the personnel social protection programme has not been approved as the state budget lacks the funds to implement it," Higgs said.

Ukrainian and Western experts say the social protection plan for more than 5,000 Chernobyl workers and 24,200 inhabitants of the nearby satellite town of Slavutych could cost $135-400 million for the next eight years.

Experts estimate that the plant's closure and measures linked to it will cost a total of more than $2 billion.

Fourteen years after the Chernobyl tragedy, Ukraine still relies heavily on nuclear-generated electricity, which accounts for half of all power produced in the nation of 50 million.

-------- un

Momentum Builds for Disarment Group

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Disarmament.html

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A coalition of countries pressing for total nuclear disarmament has won votes from the United States and NATO countries for a resolution seeking to cut nuclear arsenals, a top U.N. official said Thursday.

The resolution of the New Agenda Coalition was adopted with 146 votes in favor at Wednesday's close of the annual session of the U.N. disarmament committee. Last year, it only received 90 ``yes'' votes.

Undersecretary-General for Disarmament, Jayantha Dhanapala, attributed the ``significant'' increase in this year's vote to the outcome of a U.N. conference in May reviewing progress on implementing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

That conference ended with a pledge by the five main nuclear powers -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- to make an ``unequivocal'' undertaking to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

``I think the fact that there was a consensus in the NPT helped the (New Agenda Coalition) countries to garner more support for their resolution this year,'' Dhanapala said, citing the positive votes by the United States, Britain and China and several NATO members.

Russia and France were among the eight countries that abstained from the vote, which now goes to the full General Assembly.

India and Pakistan, which conducted rival nuclear tests in 1998, and Israel, which is believed to have nuclear weapons capability, voted against the resolution. None joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The resolution of the New Agenda group, which includes South Africa, Brazil, Ireland, Egypt, New Zealand, Mexico and Sweden, was one of 49 adopted by the committee in its deliberations.

One resolution sponsored by Japan and Australia took the agreements reached at the May conference further by setting a date -- 2005 -- for the conclusion of negotiations for a treaty banning the production of fissile material, the key building block of nuclear weapons.

The United States, Israel and Micronesia voted against a resolution cosponsored by Russia, China and Belarus calling for the United States to refrain from deploying a national missile defense system.

The resolution welcomed President Clinton's decision to put off deployment, which would require changes to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, considered the cornerstone of arms control agreements.

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

-------- new mexico

Prober: Lee's Ethnicity Wasn't Factor

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 2, 2000 ; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58716-2000Nov1.html

The Energy Department investigator who singled out Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee for investigation of suspected Chinese espionage denied yesterday that Lee's ethnicity was a factor in that decision.

Daniel J. Bruno, speaking publicly for the first time, said he identified Lee for investigation by FBI agents five years ago because the Taiwanese American scientist's personnel record was full of "anomalies," including a telephone call to another scientist who was under suspicion of espionage and close contact with visiting Chinese scientists at Los Alamos.

Bruno, 56, agreed to discuss the case in an interview as Congress, the FBI and the Justice Department are reviewing Lee's prosecution and asking, among other questions, whether he was a victim of racial profiling or ethnic bias.

Although Lee was never charged with espionage, he was fired from his job in the high-security X Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in March 1999 and was held in jail for nine months while awaiting trial on charges of mishandling classified information. In September, the government dropped 58 of the 59 counts against him, and he was freed in return for pleading guilty to a single felony count.

Bruno, a 32-year counterintelligence veteran, said he was told by Notra Trulock III, then the Energy Department's director of intelligence, to conduct an "administrative inquiry" in the fall of 1995 into how China could have obtained classified information about the miniaturized W-88 warhead sometime between 1984 and 1988.

He began by pulling the travel records of 70 employees at Los Alamos and 49 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had access to W-88 secrets and had traveled to China during those years, Bruno said. Of those 119 employees, Bruno said, he identified Lee, his wife, Sylvia, who worked as a secretary at Los Alamos and hosted visiting Chinese delegations, and seven others as subjects for further investigation based on various "anomalies" in their files.

The list of nine subjects from Los Alamos and Livermore, Bruno said, consisted of six Caucasians and three Asian Americans.

Indeed, Bruno denied ever identifying Lee as "the most likely individual" to have leaked secrets to China about the miniaturized W-88 warhead, as FBI Director Louis J. Freeh alleged in recent congressional testimony.

"I upheld the principles of the United States. I did nothing untoward, nothing immoral and nothing illegal," Bruno said, insisting that his review merely singled out Lee for further scrutiny on the basis of circumstantial information. Bruno said he had no mandate--and no evidence--to suggest that Lee had committed espionage.

In his account of how the case against Lee began, Bruno said the FBI, at his request, initially assigned one of its best Chinese counterintelligence agents, Van Majors, to help him review travel records at Los Alamos in the winter of 1996.

But the FBI then pulled Majors off the case and reassigned him to other duties, Bruno said. The decision left Bruno reviewing travel records at Livermore by himself for weeks. "I thought it was pretty cavalier," Bruno said.

Bruno said he warned FBI officials at an initial briefing that he could look only at employees of the Energy Department. "I told them at the initial briefing that there are other places that would have had this particular information [about the W-88]--the Navy, the Department of Defense and possibly contractors," Bruno said.

As it turned out, the FBI broadened its investigation to include the Defense Department and contractors only last year, after outside reviews faulted the bureau for focusing exclusively on Lee as the source of the leaked W-88 information.

Bruno also defended Trulock, who has been publicly criticized for overzealousness, for his handling of the administrative inquiry. "Trulock did not steer me anywhere or tell me to go look at this person--no," Bruno said. "He just felt there was a very serious breach here_and let's just close the barn door."

Bruno said Lee's personnel file indicated that he had passed a polygraph examination about his 1982 call to a Taiwanese American scientist at Livermore under investigation for espionage. But Bruno said he still considered the call an "anomaly" that merited further scrutiny.

In his analysis, Bruno noted that Lee and his wife had traveled to China in 1986 and 1988 and that Lee was warmly received at Los Alamos in 1994 by Hu Side, a Chinese nuclear weapons expert, whom Lee had never reported meeting in China. Lee finally conceded in late 1998 that he had met secretly with Hu during a trip to China.

Sylvia Lee stood out, Bruno said, because of notations in her personnel file indicating that her unofficial duties hosting Chinese delegations were interfering with her work as a secretary.

"She was the hostess with the mostest for the Chinese visitors," Bruno said, explaining that her involvement struck him not necessarily as suspicious, but as odd and worth looking into.

Asked what impact Lee's ethnicity had on his analysis, Bruno replied: "None."

-------- us nuc politics

The Secrecy Legacy

November 2, 2000
ESSAY
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/02/opinion/02SAFI.html

WASHINGTON - President Clinton has until Saturday to sign or veto a stealth attack on American freedom. On his desk is a bill to prosecute any government whistle-blower who dares make public any corruption or abuses of power any official stamps "classified."

This assault on free speech under the phony cover of national security was conceived by a criticism-averse C.I.A., embraced by resentful bureaucrats at Janet Reno's Justice Department and rammed through by Congressional intelligence chairmen Richard Shelby and Porter Goss without public hearings or a recorded vote.

We already have anti-espionage laws on the books to prosecute anyone who willfully reveals national security secrets to aid a foreign power. But now, to cover up past blunders and egregious lapses in using those laws to protect real secrets, bureaucrats want to treat as a criminal anybody who publicly discusses anything that nervous officials consider "confidential."

Can this be happening in America? Are we about to adopt the sort of "Official Secrets Act" that lets British officials decide what news is suitable for the public? Is Congress handing the next president the weapon that so many dictatorships use to stifle dissent and hide misdeeds?

If this law threatening whistle-blowers with jail had been in effect, no Pentagon Papers would have been published; no pressure would have been applied to investigate intelligence fiascoes in Iran or security lapses at Los Alamos. No heat would have forced Justice to look into illegal Asian campaign contributions and their influence on arms transfers.

Disclosure of personal interest: This affects every journalist, as well as every person in government fearful of getting fired or reprimanded for going to higher-ups with unwelcome news about embarrassing mistakes or outright wrongdoing.

I remember reporting decades ago that electronic surveillance showed Billy Carter, Jimmy's brother, talking to the Libyan embassy about a contract; the president then stopped him. Under this new Jail-the-Leakers Act, my Times office would be wiretapped and the guy who tipped me to the petty corruption would spend three years in the slammer - with me in the next cell for contempt in refusing to testify. (Let's face it; there are people in the Clinton White House who lick their lips at that prospect. But the shoe may soon be on the other political foot. Does Clinton want to give George Bush the power to make Clinton the last president to be investigated?)

In the face of this sellout to the protectors of posteriors, legislators of both parties have belatedly spoken out. Henry Hyde, whose Judiciary Committee was neatly bypassed, says this "would grant the administration a blank check to criminalize any leaking they do not like." Georgia's Representative Bob Barr, a former C.I.A. man, calls it "an official secrets act that would silence whistle-blowers in a way that has never come before this body." Democrats John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi agree.

Shelby (my hero on privacy) justifies his villainy on plumbing by arguing "journalists are protected" and "the bill says `properly classified.' "

Wrong on both counts. Journalists would be followed, tapped and coerced in court to reveal sources, chilling the flow of information to the taxpaying public. And who would decide what's "properly" stamped secret? The same government officials who routinely overclassify today.

What if I were to write that I'm told that George Tenet, the diplomatically naïve director of what will now be known as the C.Y.A., was taken in by Yasir Arafat's security operatives in the West Bank? And that he personally passed on a wholly misleading assessment of Palestinian intentions to President Clinton?

Any cable traffic showing Tenet's analytical misjudgment would be "properly classified," of course. Would the shut-mah-mouth intelligence committees protect my source from newly empowered prosecutors?

Let's see where the candidates stand. Al Gore's spokesman tells me "the bill raises serious and troubling questions." That says he fully understands the question he is ducking.

George Bush's spokesman says "we must do a better job of protecting national security secrets" but "we have not weighed in on that specific bill." That suggests lightweightedness on civil liberty.

They'll leave this systematic squelching of criticism to Clinton, probably hoping he signs this un- American abomination and slams the White House door after him.

-------- us nuc waste

ENERGY: Nuclear waste on the loose

Christian Science Monitor
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2000
By Alexander Colhoun
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/11/02/fp14s4-csm.shtml

Department of Energy estimates for the total amount of nonretrievable radioactive waste in the United States may be off by as much as 10 percent, according to data released by the department in May. This revision may force the agency to develop a national policy for the first time to deal with this type of radioactive material.

Most of the waste is located at sites in Idaho and Nevada, where it was dumped years ago, in cardboard boxes and steel drums. According to Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who has needled the Department of Energy for three years to review its data, the agency's original position was based on two premises: that the amount of nonretrievable waste was not large and that if radiation leaked, it would not travel far.

"Both premises are wrong," Dr. Makhijani says. "That's why, after three years of pressure, the DOE has agreed to convene a National Academy of Science panel to review its policy." Makhijani hopes the agency works quickly. His data suggest plutonium from one site has already migrated dangerously close to the Snake River plain aquifer, Idaho's primary water table.

Fuel for the fire

Rising levels of CO2 could lead to more fires in the deserts of Western North America. Stanley Smith of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and colleagues reported last week that increased CO2 can, in the long term, change the balance of grasses in desert areas. This may accelerate the fire cycle, reduce biodiversity, and alter ecosystems, they say.

-- Compiled from news wires


-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

A strike against Plan Colombia
Guerrillas blockade food, supplies in a coca-growing region to protest anti-narcotics initiative.

Christian Science Monitor
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2000
By Howard LaFranchi Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/11/02/fp6s1-csm.shtml

PUERTO ASIS, COLOMBIA - For five days, Omar Ramos, his wife, and their five children have been sitting on a concrete curb outside the airport of this Colombian jungle town, waiting for a military helicopter to take them away from the frontier that for four years was their home.

"There's no food for the kids, there's no transportation, no gas or lights, and there's no work for me," says Mr. Ramos. "Why would we stay? How could we stay?"

The Ramoses are among 335,000 residents of the southern-border, coca-growing department of Putumayo who, for more than a month, have endured an "armed strike" called by the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC), the country's largest insurgent group.

Aimed at blocking the supply of food and other goods to the isolated department, the transport strike is the guerrilla group's first salvo against the government's ambitious new offensive, Plan Colombia.

To the government, Plan Colombia is a way to rid Putumayo and other departments of a thriving coca industry - and help bring peace to areas where guerrilla organizations and right-wing paramilitary groups have challenged the government's authority. President Andrés Pastrana insists that Plan Colombia, announced last year by the government, will offer social progress and a stabilizing institutional presence to areas that have lacked both for decades.

But to the FARC, Plan Colombia is a declaration of war.

Some $1.3 billion of the $7.5 billion plan comes from the United States - with nearly $1 billion of the US aid earmarked to train and equip Colombian anti-narcotics personnel.

For four decades Marxist guerrillas have been fighting Colombia's government, for much of that time in marginalized rural areas. While other insurgencies in Latin America died out with the cold war, Colombia's only intensified as the guerrilla groups built up income as associates of Colombia's cocaine traffickers.

Paramilitary groups entered the fray over the past decade, first as security forces for rural landowners, but increasingly as an independent militia with its own agenda, at times linked to the armed forces.

The FARC is protesting the buildup of right-wing paramilitaries in Putumayo and insists that alleged Army support of the paramilitaries must end.

Some analysts say the continued heavy fighting between the FARC and paramilitaries in Putumayo is part of a war for the right to protect and profit from the region's cultivation of coca leaves, used to make cocaine.

While the FARC, paramilitaries, and the government grapple over the future of Putumayo, local residents say they are coming up the losers. "The guerrillas, the paras, they fight, but those who suffer for it are the poor," says Ramos.

The FARC have burned cars and buses that defied the strike order. Electric lines have been cut and gasoline supplies reduced to a trickle. Food is increasingly scarce, prices skyrocketing.

Just across the silty Putumayo River from Puerto Asis, FARC soldiers openly man a river port checkpoint. They interrupt their pool game and flirtations with local girls to bar local residents from carrying produce across to hungry Puerto Asis.

"The people understand why we are doing this," says one FARC officer, who declines to give his name. "They are with us in opposition to Plan Colombia and the paras, so they are willing to put up with the hardship of the strike."

"Putumayo has been abandoned for 20 years, so people have gotten used to surviving by avoiding taking any side," says Oscar Montero, a young truck driver idled by the strike.

Puerto Asis store owners, however, took a stand Tuesday by closing their shops in protest against the slow arrival of government help.

Mr. Montero says most people wouldn't oppose the Army "taking care of things" - meaning ending the FARC strike by force - but he adds, "The government won't let the soldiers do it." Noting that the government will return to peace negotiations with the FARC later this month, he adds, "We're being sacrificed for the peace talks."

That's a view shared by the mayor of Puerto Asis, Manuel Alzate.

"We're victims here. As a mayor I can't do anything about the guerrillas and the paras, so while the government decides what to do about the peace process, we have to sit here like this."

Government officials say they are working overtime on addressing the emergency - and are not sacrificing anyone to the FARC.

"I recognize this is a crisis, but we're getting it under control," says Humberto de la Calle Lombana, Colombia's interior minister. Regular electric power is about to be reestablished, dwindling chemicals for the Puerto Asis drinking water system will be replenished, and the Army is continuing its airlift of food and supplies, he says.

Minister de la Calle says Plan Colombia is the strongest proof that the government has no intention of abandoning Putumayo. The government is working to develop a new economy not based on coca, he adds.

But farmworker Ramos, who says he worked in Putumayo's coca fields, doesn't want to hear about "one more government project that never reaches the people."

He adds, however, "If they really got something going in the place of the coca, I'd come back. The only thing that matters to me is that there's work."

For further information:

Plan Colombia-United States Institute of Peace Library
http://www.usip.org/library/pa/colombia/adddoc/plan_colombia_101999.html

Clinton's 'Plan Colombia': Disturbing Questions Concerning The Real US Agenda Irish Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views/082300-106.htm

Amnesty International's Position On Plan Colombia
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/2000/colombia07072000.html

Plan Colombia: A Closer Look Colombia Report
http://www.colombiareport.org/plancolombia.html

The United States and Colombia Department of State
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/wha/colombia/

-------- space

Crew capsule closes in on space station

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
News in Brief
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

A capsule carrying American astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station closed in for a 240-mile-high linkup today. The docking was scheduled for 4:24 a.m. Shepherd and his crew will live on the space station until February.

--------

David Morrock <davidm@morrock.com
Morrock News, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2000
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
http://morrock.com

FIRST LIVE-IN CREW MOVES INTO SPACE STATION: The two Russians and the American who will be the first longterm inhabitants of the International Space Station arrived at the orbiting structure Thursday and began moving in. After docking, they entered the $60 billion station and posed for pictures that showed them floating inside. They're scheduled to stay for 118 days, during which time they'll do a lot of fixing-up -- for one thing, they need to get life-support systems running so they'll have a steady supply of oxygen and cooked food.

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

Issues: defense

EDITORIAL • November 2, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2000112193551.htm

To hear Al Gore and Joe Lieberman tell it, it was the Clinton-Gore administration that turned around the plunging defense budget it had inherited from President George Bush and Defense Secretary Richard Cheney.

There is a grain of truth in this argument, but only a grain. In fact, inflation-adjusted defense spending did begin to decline in 1990. However, what began during Mr. Cheney's tenure at the Pentagon as, in his words, "a reduction of 25 percent in force structure" in response to the end of the Cold War soon evolved into an accelerated evisceration of the U.S. military during the Clinton-Gore regime. Only after the Republican Congress forced the administration to increase defense spending in 1999 and again in 2000 did the trend reverse.

The Clinton-Gore administration has treated the defense budget as a cash cow for financing domestic discretionary spending and imprudently sliced U.S. military forces well beyond the 25 percent goal. The number of divisions in the U.S. Army, for example, has declined from 18 to 10. Army Gen. John Keane recently explained the dilemma: "The fourfold increase in the number of deployments, coupled with a 300,000-soldier reduction, is causing officers to have to do more with less." Not surprisingly, Army captains are fleeing the service in crisis-level droves. Also, as Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times reported yesterday, the number of senior Army officers, including colonels and lieutenant colonels, who have declined to assume commands has skyrocketed in the past five years.

The Army isn't the only service to have been decimated. The number of wings in the Air Force has fallen from a Cold War peak of 26 to 13. Gen. Michael Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, recently told Congress the service's typical aircraft was on average 22 years old. Meanwhile, a 1999 General Accounting Office report revealed that 25 percent of the remaining fighters were not mission-capable.

The U.S. Navy hasn't fared any better. The number of ships in the Navy has decreased from 579 under President Reagan to 316 this year. One reason the USS Cole was compelled to refuel in the Yemeni harbor was because the Navy does not have enough tankers. As a result, the lives of American sailors were placed in jeopardy in a port city that is a known haven for Middle East terrorists. Aircraft carrier battle groups have plunged from 15 to 11, and 20 percent of carrier-deployed F-14s are being cannibalized for spare parts.

Altogether, defense spending as a percentage of GDP has dropped from 4.8 percent in 1992 to 3 percent in 2000, the lowest level since the year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The 2001 Clinton-Gore budget projected defense spending to fall to 2.7 by 2005.

The deterioration has been so profound that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report in September concluding that the defense budget now needs to increase by $50 billion per year in order for the Pentagon to meet its commitments. In particular, thanks to the Clinton-Gore administration's starving the weapons-procurement account, the CBO report estimated procurement should be $90 billion per year, not the $53 billion spent in 2000.

The Clinton-Gore administration has violated its obligation to maintain the nation's defense posture. It has lived off the military build-up of the Reagan years, leaving its successor administration far bigger problems than a responsible commander in chief would. Given Mr. Gore's record, evidenced by the fact that he has been a big part of a very big problem, who can possibly believe he is the man to solve it?

---

Marine Corps warns of Camp Lejeune hazard

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
News in Brief
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

The Marine Corps is trying to notify the parents of an estimated 10,000 children born at Camp Lejeune, N.C., between 1968 and 1985 that they may have consumed water contaminated with compounds that have been linked to birth defects and childhood cancers such as leukemia. The substances, believed to have come from a dry-cleaning business, were found in 1982 in water systems that supplied houses on Camp Lejeune. For information, call 800-639-4270.

--------

Investigators say government hiding papers on U.N. peace missions

CNN
November 2, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/11/02/peace.keeping.study.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Clinton administration is withholding information from investigators on how the United States decided to get involved in four of the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping operations, the General Accounting Office says.

"This is clearly inappropriate and unacceptable," said Henry L. Hinton Jr., assistant comptroller of the GAO, Congress' investigative arm.

Investigators say the lack of cooperation by the State Department, Defense Department and National Security Council since March is holding up a probe into whether the administration followed guidelines on approving U.S. support for peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Congo and East Timor.

The House International Relations Committee asked for the study to see if the administration follows its own 1994 guidelines for considering things such as the cost of the mission and number of troops involved, whether it meets the objective and if there is a deadline or exit strategy.

Peacekeeping missions have been an issue in Congress, where some lawmakers fear the United States is getting involved in too many and providing too large a share of their costs.

They also have become an issue in the U.S. presidential election with Republican candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush advocating a diminished U.S. peacekeeping role in Europe and Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore countering that such a position demonstrates a "lack of judgment and a complete misunderstanding of history."

In pursuing its investigation of the four missions, the GAO said Wednesday that unless investigators get the information they need for their probe within a week it will issue a rarely used "formal demand letter" to the three government entities, roughly the agency's equivalent to a legal subpoena.

Investigators say the State Department and NSC have failed to hand over some documents related to the investigation and handed over others that were so heavily edited they "provided little useful information," Hinton said in a letter Wednesday to the House International Relations Committee.

"One 20-page unclassified document had a note on its cover page that ... it could be shared with U.S. allies and the United Nations, yet the remainder of the document was completely redacted, its pages completely blacked out," he said.

The GAO says the Pentagon waited to see how the State Department was going to handle GAO access to records and didn't agree to begin searching for its own until mid-September -- six months after the probe began in March.

Pentagon officials say they plan to have the search done by Nov. 6 but don't know when GAO can have access to the records.

"We're doing the best we can," said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. George Rhynedance. "We're a large organization and we're trying to do a comprehensive search."

The Clinton administration said it has offered to give the GAO a private briefing on the matter but doesn't want to release the documents because of the fear such an action would discourage others from offering frank advice.

Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, R-New York, who chairs the House International Relations Committee, introduced a resolution in the House expressing "concern at the administration's lack of cooperation."

The United Nations is currently involved in 15 peacekeeping operations involving nearly 38,000 civilian and military staff. The United States has pressed the United Nations to keep a zero-growth budget for the past several years as part of its demand for a reformed and streamlined organization.

But the United States has also been at the forefront of demands for an enlarged and more efficient peacekeeping department to cope with the new peacekeeping challenges in, among other places, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone.

---

The limits of U.S. intelligence

Nando Times
November 2, 2000 12:05 a.m. EST
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL:
Scripps Howard News Service
http://www.nandotimes.com/opinions/story/body/0%2C1096%2C500275082-500429924-502712628-0%2C00.html

(http://www.nandotimes.com) - The terrorist bombing of the USS Cole on Oct. 12 did more than damage one of America's warships and kill 17 American sailors; it shattered some myths about the nature and limits of U.S. intelligence. When Congress and the Pentagon go about the needed business of trying to make sure such attacks don't happen again, they need to understand what spies and satellites can and cannot do.

In the aftermath of the bombing, congressional investigators were told that intelligence agencies repeatedly picked up indications of a possible terrorist attack in the Persian Gulf, but that the warnings were not always relayed to military commanders in the area. All this suggests an appalling breakdown of communications. Or does it? Such a breakdown may have occurred. But it's far from certain.

U.S. intelligence analysts do not suffer from an absence of information. In fact, one of their burdens is information. They are sometimes buried in facts. The communications revolution has made the tidal wave of data even more overpowering and confusing. You don't have to be a CIA spy to understand this.

What's important is evaluating information and passing it along to the right people so it can be used. It's also important not to build bureaucratic barriers that suffocate innovation and cause delays. All this is not easy. It requires, among other things, sophisticated judgment.

Intelligence agencies can be reasonably faulted if they ignored what they knew or should have known were reliable indications of terrorism. But they can't be blamed if the indications were ambiguous, or if they were contradicted by other facts.

There is some reason for concern here; a Pentagon specialist has resigned because his supervisors refused to pass along what he thought was clear evidence of a terrorist attack. The specialist was not a lower-ranking analyst, but a high-ranking official.

Congress and the military have a legitimate role in helping to get to the bottom of the Cole disaster and punishing anyone in the U.S. chain of command who can be found guilty of dereliction of duty by sitting on information that might have saved lives. But they also have an obligation not to seek scapegoats or to make facile judgments.

-------- OTHER

France says sunken tanker leaking chemicals

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
News in Brief
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

Highly toxic chemicals have leaked from an Italian tanker that sank off France's Atlantic coast, French officials said yesterday. The Ievoli Sun tanker sank northwest of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, on Tuesday. The extent of the leak was unclear.

-------

Would Clinton ban release of the Pentagon Papers?
The whistle-blower who helped end the Vietnam War discusses the greatest threat ever to free speech and a free press

Salon.com
Nov. 2, 2000
By Daniel Ellsberg
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/11/02/ellsberg/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=665

This week President Clinton considers whether to approve or veto a bill that would make it illegal to make unauthorized disclosures of classified government documents. If this law had existed in 1969 when I faced the question of giving the Pentagon Papers to Congress, I would have violated it. I would have provided the papers knowing that it was a clear violation of this law, and that I would spend time in prison.

As a contractor to the government at the Rand Corp., I had in my authorized possession 7,000 pages of a study that later became known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a top-secret history of U.S. decision making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. The war was still going on, and the same patterns of deception of Congress, deception of the public, violation of treaties and reckless disregard for the national interest and the lives of Americans by the Nixon White House that were documented in the study persisted. Thirty thousand American lives had already been lost, and millions more Vietnamese had died. I was trying to minimize the number of names that would ultimately be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, so I gave the report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Subsequently, that committee requested and was refused official access to the study by the Defense Department -- four different times. Was I authorized to give it to the committee? No. Every page was stamped "Top Secret -- Sensitive." And no executive branch official would authorize provision of the study to Congress, even on a top-secret basis, although it was available to me at the private, nonprofit Rand Corp.

I was the first person in this country ever tried for revealing secrets to the American public, unless you count Nathan Hale, a very distinguished predecessor. I was brought to trial under existing laws that had never before been applied to disclosures to the press or public. Though I was not charged with espionage, I was charged under paragraphs in the Espionage Act, and was charged with theft and conspiracy. None of those charges had ever been applied to leaks before, and I faced 115 years in prison. But I was prepared to spend that amount of time in lockup for what I felt was an obvious reason: A war's worth of lives was at stake. My own freedom was a lesser consideration.

I have never regretted my decision. By the time my trial was dismissed in May 1973 for governmental misconduct against me, Richard Nixon had contributed over 20,000 more names to the future war memorial. It might have been many more.

Prior to the anti-leak provision that is part of the Intelligence Authorization Act just passed by Congress, there had never been a law that made it a criminal act to put out information to the public that your superiors or your department in the government had not authorized you to release. Though England and many other countries have "official secrets" acts, until now the United States has not. And for a good reason that very few Americans are aware of: We have the glory of living in a country that has a First Amendment built on the belief that the people are sovereign, that government information belongs to them and that sovereignty can't be exercised or government officials held accountable for their actions without people's having access to all kinds of government information, including that which those officials would prefer that you not have. You can't hold them accountable without being able to get information about their errors or their lies or their crimes or their reckless behavior -- which they would do anything to keep secret and would never authorize you to have if they could withhold it.

The reason there have been only two prosecutions for whistle-blowing in this country -- of which mine was the first in 1971 (the second was that of Samuel Loring Morison, who was convicted for leaking a reconnaissance photo of a Russian aircraft carrier in 1985 in an effort to show that our government was ignoring a Soviet aircraft carrier buildup) -- is not that the government has been unable to find out who publicized particular information. It's that the Justice Department in successive administrations has understood that it didn't have a law to prosecute with. Laws did exist that the Justice Department could interpret as applying to what I did or to other leaks, but the department always knew that it risked the likelihood that those laws would be found unconstitutional if it ever tried to apply them.

Most people who have leaked government information were under the mistaken impression that there was such a law. And that false belief, combined with all the career disincentives to putting out information your bosses don't want you to put out, has kept people's mouths shut, even when they knew that crimes were being committed or the public was being misled. Potential whistle-blowers feared losing their security clearance, their job, their access, their self-importance, their whole identity.

Attorney General Janet Reno says she'll limit the new law to documents and things that are properly classified. But by the standards that existed when I released the Pentagon Papers and that exist now, nearly every page of the papers was properly classified. There were very few pages that would not have been routinely and, on reflection, carefully determined to be classified. These were Joint Chiefs of Staff plans, estimates, presidential memos -- the kind of stuff that's always regarded as the most sensitive material. But I felt that Congress needed that information, that in the absence of it 30,000 Americans had been lied to death and many more deaths lay ahead.

Moreover, once the material was made available for public scrutiny, not one line of the thousands of pages was ever convincingly demonstrated to have damaged national security or cost an American life once it was released. That's a good indication of what percentage of the billions of pages currently locked up in safes truly deserves protection from public discourse: probably less than 1 percent of it.

Unauthorized disclosure is essential to the working of a republic, to its very existence. A leader who has the power to decide entirely on pain of prison what information the public can know about what the state or leader has done or intends to do is not the president of a republic: He is a king, a monarch. He has the ability to take this country into wars on his own decision, telling the Congress and the public only exactly what is needed, true or false, to get them behind him and move into war. That is the property of kings that our Founding Fathers were precisely trying to avoid when they gave the power of war and peace exclusively to Congress and when they wrote the First Amendment.

James Madison, the author of that amendment, wrote: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. Popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy -- or perhaps both."

I hope and expect that the Supreme Court will find this law unconstitutional. Certainly, by all past interpretations of the First Amendment, such a law is clearly unconstitutional, and that's why no Congress has ever gotten to the point of passing it before, even though several administrations have asked for it.

How did this Congress come to pass the measure? My best guess is that a Republican Congress wanted to admonish the Clinton administration for allegedly being lax about security at Los Alamos, N.M., and elsewhere. But Clinton shouldn't be let off the hook here. For the president to have allowed this legislation to get so far (with the approval of his Justice Department) -- legislation he must now decide whether to sign -- represents an unconscionable breach of his responsibilities as president of a democratic republic. It also serves as a terrible black mark for Reno, who, in her support of the bill, shows that she lacks an understanding of the basic requirements of a democracy.

If the bill is approved by Clinton, I hope that other people will violate the law under the same circumstances that I did. It took the unusual circumstance of the Vietnam War to bring me to that point. Those precise circumstances won't arise very often, I hope, but what will arise are other situations where many lives are at stake, like the radiation effects of past government nuclear testing and production that we found out about through unauthorized leaks. Or the foreign lives at stake in our support of covert actions abroad, during dictatorial regimes like that of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet or the death squads that ravaged El Salvador and Guatemala. Or the Iran-Contra affair, with its illegal funding of terrorists in Nicaragua and of arms sales to Iran.

There are already too few people willing to give up their careers as did Richard Nuccio, who was stripped of his security clearance and had to leave his position at the State Department after telling then Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., the name of a Guatemalan torturer on the CIA's payroll. For that, his career was ended by, of all people, former CIA director John Deutch, who, ironically, is now under investigation himself. But Nuccio doesn't regret what he did. Of course, he did the right thing and should not have been punished in his career for that. But if you add to that, under this law, the likelihood of actually going to jail, there will be fewer Nuccios and fewer whistle-blowers at a time when we need them as much as, if not more than, ever.

The administration claims that the law against unauthorized disclosure will not be used against the media, but that's a transparent and dangerous deception.

Why aren't newsmen called before grand juries routinely to identify the sources of the leaks they publish every day of the week? People may say it's because of our extreme regard for the First Amendment, but that's ridiculous. If Congress were so scrupulous about the First Amendment, it wouldn't have passed this law.

If Clinton approves this bill, for the first time the government will be able to say that a crime has been committed when a leak has occurred and, therefore, if you have information about who committed that crime, you must tell the grand jury and the country who the person is, on pain of jail for contempt if you refuse. Congress and the White House can say that they have no intention of doing that with newsmen, but the promise could not be more worthless. Newsmen will be called in front of grand juries and asked who gave them information. Many will refuse to say and will go to jail -- a respectable and worthy act of civil disobedience. But after a number of newsmen have languished in jail on contempt charges, the willingness by newsmen to accept a classified document or information will drop very sharply. As a result, we will know even less than we do now about our government's plans and decision-making processes. The cost? More wars like Vietnam.

Clinton should and must veto this bill. He must demonstrate his awareness that the bill is unconstitutional, that the First Amendment is worth protecting and that he understands what it means to be the president of a republic.

I bet very few of the members of Congress who voted in support of this bill understood the implications of what they were doing -- that they were essentially repealing our First Amendment in the name of so-called national security. In fact, nothing could be more dangerous to our national security than learning only what the government authorizes us to learn. (Besides, the disclosure of the most dangerous classified information -- espionage, disclosures of nuclear weapons design, cryptological processes or names of intelligence agents -- is already covered by suitably narrow criminal laws.)

Both Democratic and Republican presidents would like to be able to put whistle-blowers in jail, whether the information they disclose is classified or not. With this law, they'll get their wish. If it were retroactive, it could be called the "We'll get you this time, Ellsberg" law.

If Clinton does not veto this dangerous bill, one of his last acts in office will be to nullify the First Amendment, the very foundation of the American form of government. He will violate his oath of office to uphold the Constitution in a way incomparably more serious than anything with which he was charged in the impeachment proceedings.

If Clinton now thinks I should have gone to prison for releasing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, he can sign this bill in good conscience. If he doesn't think so, he should veto it.

About the writer Daniel Ellsberg is a former State Department and Defense Department official who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He is currently writing his memoirs.

-------- alternative energy

Australia govt seeks fast renewable energy deal

AUSTRALIA: November 2, 2000
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8775

MELBOURNE - Australian Environment Minister Robert Hill said yesterday the government wanted to resolve a deadlock over renewable energy legislation before a mid-November international meeting on greenhouse gas emissions.

The meeting in the Netherlands will discuss details of implementing the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Australia has committed to limit its emissions to 108 percent of 1990 levels by 2010, a target seen by some countries as overly generous.

"Now as we continue our negotiations and try and settle the detail of Kyoto in a way that is fair to Austalia, it helps in those negotiations if we can show as background that we are doing our fair share at home," Hill told reporters.

The government's bill requiring power retailers to buy an extra two percent, representing 9,500 gigawatt hours, of electricity from renewable sources by 2010 is a key part of its efforts to meet its Kyoto target.

But the Australian Democrats have threatened to block the legislation, due to start taking effect from January, as it would allow burning of waste wood from native forests as one of the permitted renewable energy fuel sources.

"In principle we think they are wrong, but on the other hand it is only three percent of the bill, in effect, so there is room for discussion and we will keep talking," Hill said after addressing a sustainable energy conference.

"We are short of the votes at the moment and that is very disappointing because it is the most significant push for the renewable energy industry in Australia's history."

The government has estimated that the bill will attract A$2 billion investment in the renewable energy industry.

"With those investments it brings down costs and renewable energies become more competitive in terms of price, and that is our great challenge," Hill said.

Australia is heavily dependent on high-emission coal-fired generation and the stationary energy sector accounts for almost 57 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions.

Hill told the conference the extra two percent power target would take the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources in Austalia to 13 percent.

"The additional amount of electricity generated by this measure equates to the annual residential electricity consumption of a city of around four million people," he said.

----

Inside Track-Fuel cell investment boom echoes Web heyday

UK: November 2, 2000
Story by Andrew Callus
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8771

LONDON - Global warming was blamed for northern Europe's storms and floods this week and a growing section of the investment community is not arguing.

Environmental issues and associated technology breakthroughs have created an alternative energy investment sector already worth over $20 billion, according to Bruce Jenkyn-Jones of Impax Capital Corp, an Environmental Technology (ET) fund.

Some $17 billion of this is in listed fuel cell firms, which have enjoyed share price growth of 125-1000 percent over the past 12 months.

"Fuel cells are leading alternative energy and environmental technology as a whole into the mainstream investment arena and this means cheaper capital for the sector," Jenkyn-Jones told an IQPC Fuel Cells Week conference in London two weeks ago.

Fuel cells use hydrogen as a fuel to create an electric current between electrodes, producing power with far less pollution than traditional burning of fossil fuel.

Though they remain costly to make and face some daunting technological development barriers, their potential is causing a big stir among investors.

Companies like Proton Energy Systems are already producing commercially viable hydrogen converters and fuel cell energy stores for back up power and premium electricity users.

These are customers who need to be especially sure of uninterrupted power supplies, and do not mind paying for it.

Domestic power plants and other more everyday static applications will probably come next - with a bit of nudging from tough international targets on global greenhouse gas emissions.

But the automotive sector is where the investors expect a real bonanza.

CALIFORNIA BOOST

Fuel cell market leader Ballard Power Systems has a raft of development deals with major motor manufacturers, and it reckons fuel cells vehicles (FCVs) are destined to become a $180 billion industry.

The FCV cause received a major boost early in October, when California stuck to its target for 10 percent of zero and low emissions vehicles to be sold in the state by 2003, rejecting pleas from auto producers for a delay.

"More cars are sold in California than in many developed countries and this (ruling) is now a really key driving factor," says Joan Ogden, Research Scientist at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies.

Some 40 million vehicles are registered in California. Industry estimates say 10 percent of 2003 sales would amount to around 20,000 vehicles.

Ogden says public buses and other fleet vehicles will be the first to be made in commercially viable quantities, given that the lack of a hydrogen refuelling infrastructure is less of a barrier for them.

"Centrally refuelled fleet markets are large enough to buy down the cost of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in a decade of mass production," she said.

According to Jeffrey Ng, European Automotive and Industrial Specialist at Citibank in London, the fuel cells industry has seen $6-8 billion of corporate investment sunk into it so far, along with $4-5 billion from "pure play" fuel cell listings, and a further $2 billion in unlisted companies.

This looks low compared with more than $10 billion pumped into Internet hopefuls in first quarter 2000 boom alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers data.

MORE FUNDS IN THE MARKET

But the balance is starting to tip.

Hydrogenics , a Canadian maker of fuel cells for use in harsh environments, came to market on Friday last week.

Four or five others are preparing IPOs now, including Europe's first fuel cell IPO ZeTek Power. Another six to eight will probably go in the next six to nine months, and there are an unmeasurable number of smaller groups with only a dozen or so employees at present.

All of these are looking for investors, but it does not look as if they will have much trouble finding them.

A step change in investor interest in fuel cells and other ET stocks was sparked by a blaze of publicity around the fizzing IPO of Plug Power in November 1999.

That ardour apparently was undampened by Plug's spectacular fall from grace this year when the group, which targets a market for residential fuel cell power plants, had to rein back breakeven forecasts.

Jenkyn-Jones's Impax has $35 million under management. Merrill Lynch said last week its 200 million pound ($290 million) New Energy Technology Fund for listed and unlisted companies launched at the end of August was already oversubscribed.

And earlier in October, new economy energy backer Nth Power Technologies Inc, whose first venture capital vehicle fund was worth $63 million, closed a second at $120 million saying it could easily have raised twice as much.

FUEL CELL BUBBLE?

So will there be, as with the Internet boom, good money thrown after some terrible investments?

"Definitely." says Citibank's Ng.

"There's going to have to be a pretty long and fairly painful education process for a while."

Retail investors thinking of taking a punt on fuel cell stocks might stop and wonder where they would be if they had bought Plug Power at $150 a share in March.

The stock now trades at around $25, still a fair premium on its $10 float price, but one set of badly burned shareholders has brought a class action lawsuit against it for making "materially false and misleading statements" about its supply contract position.

"With fairly small free floats and small institutional hold positions the volatility is set to remain," says Ng.

"Some companies are now probably going to be tempted to go to market a bit too early, and remember that with fuel cells we are talking about substantive commercialisation still three, four or five years away...."

----

DaimlerChrysler to test drive new fuel - cell vehicle

USA: November 2, 2000
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8772

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - German-American auto maker DaimlerChrysler AG said yesterday it will begin a series of test drives for a new fuel cell vehicle later this month.

The new generation New Electric Car (NECAR), based on the Mercedes Benz A-Class model, was built for the fuel-cell alliance known as the "California Fuel Cell Partnership."

Fuel cell vehicles provide an environmentally friendly alternative to regular combustion engine vehicles because they generate electrical power from hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen. The company said these vehicles are more efficient and emit lower levels of air and noise pollution.

DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., and Volkswagen AG, along with the California Energy Commission, are all members of the alliance, which was established in April 1999.

Over the next three years, the NECAR will cover up to 25,000 miles on the California roads under normal operation conditions.

"We have now overcome the major technological obstacles facing the development of the fuel cell drive system," Ferdinand Panik, head of DaimlerChrysler's fuel cell project group, said in a statement.

"The task at hand is now to reduce the costs of the drive system even further and to pave the way for rapid introduction of these automobiles by 2004, for instance, by establishing a fuel infrastructure."

DaimlerChrysler said it intends to introduce the first fuel cell buses in 2002 and the first fuel cell cars in 2004.

Shares of DaimlerChrysler were up $2.08 at $47.98 in afternoon trading Yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange, below its year-high of $78.69 and above its year-low of $42.40.

-------- environment

Deal protects stretch of Appalachian Trail

Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, November 2, 2000
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/11/02/national/BITS02.htm

Three miles described as the largest unprotected segment of the Appalachian Trail would be preserved under an agreement announced yesterday between the Interior Department and the Saddleback ski area near Rangley, Maine. The pact keeps Saddleback Mountain's entire southeast side undeveloped and creates a buffer zone of at least 100 feet between the trail and the ski area. The resort will receive $4 million for about 1,500 acres and a scenic easement protecting an additional 320 acres.

Ballast water poses threat, researchers say

Hordes of microorganisms, including viruses and other potentially harmful germs, sail into U.S. ports every year in the ballast water that keeps ships stable, a study says. It suggests that microorganisms may pose a greater danger than bigger, known invaders in ballast water, such as mussels. The research, published in today's journal Nature, is likely to intensify the push for more restrictions on dumping ballast water near the shore. Researchers studied the ballast water of 15 seagoing ships and found that each gallon carried an average of 31 billion suspected viruses and 3.5 billion bacteria, including some disease-causing strains of cholera.

-------- genetics

FDA releases list of recalled corn products

USA Today
11/02/00- Updated 02:58 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/life/health/general/lhgen113.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Food and Drug Administration has released a list of 300 recalled products made with unapproved biotech corn. They include tortillas, taco shells and snack chips sold through national supermarket chains and restaurants.

Mission Foods Co. on Oct. 13 recalled all its products made with yellow corn after the genetically engineered corn was found in taco shells sold through Safeway stores. The corn, known as StarLink, is not approved for human consumption because of questions about its potential to cause allergic reactions.

The FDA's list includes tortillas and chips sold through Applebees and Wendy's restaurants, and taco shells carrying private labels of a number of supermarket chains, including Safeway, Food Lion, Kroger, IGA and Albertson's.

Officials with Mission Foods say they are having sales representatives check on compliance with the recall.

The products were made with StarLink grown last year and mixed in with other corn that was sold to millers. Federal officials are concerned that some of this year's crop also may get into the food supply because they have been unable to trace about 1.2 million bushels, or 1.5% of the total StarLink harvest, that have been shipped from farms.

-------- terrorism

Thursday, Nov. 2, 2000
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
http://morrock.com

BOMBING SUSPECT STABS GUARD: A man being held in a Manhattan federal jail in connection with the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings stabbed a guard in the eye, wounding him critically, federal officials said Thursday. The alleged assailant is to go on trial in two months for the attacks that killed 220 people in Tanzania and Kenya.

<a name="activists"></a>
-------- activists

BLACK COMEBACK: An interview with KAI LUMUMBA BARROW

Thu, 02 Nov 2000 10:40:43 -0500
FREE RADICAL: chronicle of the new unrest
by L.A. KAUFFMAN
www.free-radical.org

What if there was a revolution and nobody noticed?

OK, "revolution" is too grand a term, but the event in question is undeniably historic: the creation, in the United States, of a direct-action-based alliance across racial lines, between the predominantly white movement against corporate globalization and the predominantly people of color movement against criminal injustice.

You won't read about it in the mainstream media, but then, they didn't see Seattle coming either. More troubling is how little discussion there seems to be in radical and progressive circles about this nascent alliance: its necessity, potential, and pitfalls.

Kai Lumumba Barrow has been a major figure behind the recent resurgence of direct action within movements of color. She works fulltime as an organizer for SLAM!, the Student Liberation Action Movement, based in the City University of New York, especially Manhattan's Hunter College. Since the mid-Nineties, SLAM! has been a pioneering activist force on the East Coast, mobilizing working-class students of color in a series of savvy and daring campaigns for educational access, economic justice, and other issues.

This past summer, SLAM! brought the largely white New York City Direct Action Network (NYC-DAN) and other groups together to plan a joint action against the Republican Party Convention in Phildadelphia, focused on questions of criminal injustice. The process was a bumpy one -- in particular, there was resistance within NYC-DAN to what some felt was a turn away from the group's focus on corporate globalization, resistance that many activists of color viewed as racist -- but the coalition held, and holds to this day.

In this frank and wide-ranging interview, Kai Lumumba Barrow places this development within a broad historical context, focusing particularly on the troubled state of the black liberation movement over the last 25 years and its current revitalization. She sheds light both on why African-American radicals moved away from direct-action protest beginning in the mid 1960s, and why she and other activists of color are experimenting with it anew today.

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Kai Lumumba Barrow: I was raised by a black nationalist family, so I came to activist struggles early. It's difficult for me to say when I waspoliticized, because it seems like it's always been there. But I guess> probably '68, the Democratic Convention, stands out for me.

I was born and raised in Chicago. My parents were involved in various organizations and we lived in a co-op building where a lot of Panthers and Yippies and so forth came and stayed during the Convention. I was about 10, and I remember feeling close to some of the folks who were staying in our house before the Convention began. You know, you're a kid, and you're the homeowner's kid, so you get a special kind of attention. People were nice to me, and I felt they were my friends.

So when Daley turned his pigs on the people, and the people came back to the house, bleeding and beat up, I felt personally hurt. I felt like, they did this to my friends.

After that I read Malcolm X, and I wanted a revolution. That's it, I thought, we're going to do this. In high school, I was a knucklehead: conscious, but not active. But I went to college thinking, this is where the revolution is going to happen. I went to a historically black university in Atlanta, and I was really taken aback: It was the Carter years, and Reagan was beginning to show his ugly head, and there was no movement.

COINTELPRO had done a serious job on the Panther Party and then also the Black Liberation Army. There was underground stuff happening but it was way, way submerged. There wasn't any real movement specifically in black communities any more. And I was on this campus with the bourgeoisie, the black bourgeoisie, and I was really freaked out. Like, what is going on? (laughter)

But then I got active around anti-apartheid work, building student organizations on campus, and doing a lot of work at that time around Assata Shakur and Joanne Little and other political prisoners.

I also became a member of the Republic of New Africa, whose full name was the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. It focused on establishing a nation for black people in five states in the South. Doing a lot of institution-building, in that sense. We started a school, a Saturday school, did a lot of political prisoner work, and a lot of political education work. Training and that sort of thing.

I stayed with that in different capacities for several years. I went back to Chicago and started doing a lot of police brutality work there, still doing prisoner support work, and ended up here in New York in the early 90s, still staying with the same issues, around police brutality and prison work.

LAK: In the U.S., the tactics and techniques of direct action were really pioneered by the black freedom movement of the Fifties and Sixties, but by the early Seventies, those tactics are rarely seen in movements of color, especially in black movements. How did that come to be?

KLB: There was a major shift in the political expression of the black liberation movement in the mid-Sixties. I have recollections of looking at the civil rights movement, Dr. King, and the dogs and that sort of thing, and I have recollections of my family saying, Why are they allowing themselves to be beaten and attacked by these pigs, by these racist pigs? Why are they not fighting back?

So there were two predominant tendencies regarding which way forward for our people. It's reductionist to say it, but it was primarily Malcolm X versus Dr. King, and you choose your camp. And I tended to be in the Malcolm X camp - still do, frankly.

The Black Panther Party, as the heirs of Malcolm X, said we're not going to just stand by idly, we're going to utilize self-defense in order to get our movement forward. And at that time the Party did engage in a lot of direct action, from taking over the state capitol in California - that was a direct action - to various activities that were going on in communities around the country.

Now, though, the black liberation movement is at a really crucial stage in its development. We've seen a lot of our leadership and a lot of our comrades killed and imprisoned and driven crazy, exiled, because we stood up against oppression. And at this point there seems to be a reassessing of which way we should we go. We've engaged in a critique around the standard leadership model, the hierarchical leadership model; we've done a critique around the party model; we've done a critique around every possible model that we know exists, and at this point we're in the process of re-building.

So as a people, within different movements, we've been stunned to some degree for a really long time. Since the early to mid Seventies. I think the experiment with armed struggle models, underground models, hit us really hard. The Party as a large movement kind of stopped at that point. There have been smatterings of different things that have occurred since then, but I don't think we've really been able to capture the imagination of our communities in any broad way since that period.

So we've been kind of in this stalemate, and I think what's happening is that we're starting to look back to, well, the Fifties. (laughter) This> dawned on me maybe about a year or so ago, and I was really pissed. I was like, damn it, we're going backwards. (laughter)

So we're starting to reassess the utilization of direct action and civil disobedience, but we're coming at it, I think, more militantly than in the Fifties. We've seen it as a way to engage more of our community. Primarily what we've been doing since the Seventies is rallies and permitted protests and those sort of things, that have been more or less non-confrontational. I think we're starting to say, wait a minute. We've been using a multitude of non-confrontational tactics, and I think at this point some of us are starting to escalate some of the tactics that we're utilizing, understanding that we're also the most victimized by the state for participating in those tactics.

We took the position in the past that nonviolent civil disobedience placed us in a very passive position, so we started engaging in armed struggle or at least self-defense. We didn't have enough experience with that perhaps, or we didn't have enough support for that, and we were beat. We were beat pretty badly.

We're trying to come back from that, get it together and figure out how we're going to move forward. Taking the best of both self-defense and militancy while still being accountable to our communities.

LAK: What were your feelings about Seattle when it happened?

KLB: Why the hell am I in New York at a SLAM! meeting? I had planned to go - I was so mad!

For all the obvious reasons, I thought it was great. I was really disappointed by the coverage - I don't know if there were more people of color in Seattle than the none I saw in the media.

The morning after, my partner and I were on the train, reading the paper. And we were smiling and high fiving each other. I lived at the time in Bed Stuy, so the train was filled with black folks - and everybody was smiling.(laughter) I had some good conversations with a couple of folks on the train, about how this is necessary, and it's about time, and this reminds me of the old days. People were overwhelmingly supportive. Nobody said, "Oh, they shouldn't have thrown the rock at the Starbucks." (laughter)

But, in terms of their weaknesses, Seattle, D.C. - even Philly and L.A. - these mass convergences require a week's worth of time in order to participate, dollars in order to travel, support. If a whole group of people go somewhere for a week, there's a whole lot of work that's not getting done, and who's going to do it? Whether that's taking care of the children, or working 9 to 5. It's very difficult for people of color, even young people of color, young working-class people of color, to participate in mass convergences.

I thought Seattle was a great experiment, and it was great that labor came out. But there was clearly a class distinction between the people who organized and participated in Seattle versus where I come from. Access to cell phones? Please, we're just getting walkie-talkies. The utilization of technology, organizing on the Internet: What's that phrase, the digital divide? It's there. Make no mistake about it, it's there.

So the organizing and the building for that action clearly indicated that an intelligentsia, a bourgeois class, had organized it. They had the equipment, they had the contacts. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's really important to acknowledge that.

So to some degree, I thought it was great to see it, and I felt really heartened that people were in the streets. I also felt disconnected, and I felt envious - player hate. (laughter) I felt like, you know, why don't we have the resources to do this kind of work?

If we look at the Vietnam War protests, we see how those protests - because of a capacity to utilize the system, and money, and resources - tended to overtake and coopt the black liberation movement, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement and the Puerto Rican movement. I'm worried that this network of people doing direct action around corporate globalism is going to do the same thing to emerging movements around criminal injustice. These are issues where people of color are saying no, this is genocide, and we're building a movement. I worry about globalization issues knocking that out of the box.

That's why I think the predominantly white anti-globalization movement has got to engage in a domestic anaylsis of corporate globalization and what effect it has on disenfranchised communities of color. The movement against corporate globalization has to engage in an ongoing analysis about race and imperialism, and how they play out in the United States, or else it will completely undermine our work and continue to propel a racist and classist system.

That's why I wanted to really look at how we could unite with the Direct Action Network, or build a parallel alliance or network of people of color that were focused on issues that affect people of color, and unite the two major issues - corporate globalization and criminal injustice - as a place that we can spring from.

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