------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Beijing's spies gain access to secrets
Putin Proposes Deeper Nuclear Cuts
Statement of President Vladimir Putin
Thousands Call for Nuke - Free Taiwan

MILITARY
Billionaires Push National Drug Reform Debate
BUSH WILL CONCEDE TO GORE
Mexicans attack hundreds of federal police
Put women at the peace table
Beret policy ambushed by special forces reaction
U.S. Military Jets Hit Near Japan
Two U.S. military jets collide
A new Vietnam prepares to welcome Clinton

OTHER
Growing a Green Plant
Pivotal Discussions Aim for Resolution of Global Warming
Texas currently incarcerates 220,000 people
Court to Study Force Used by Police 1
Court to study forced used by police 2
Documents show CIA funded Chilean parties before 1973 coup
No Connections
Afghan War Link to Cole Bombing
Terrorism Puts Afghans On Defensive

ACTIVISTS
While Gore supporters are holding protests ...
Florida AIM calls on UN, OAS to monitor recounts, revote



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- china

Beijing's spies gain access to secrets

November 13, 2000
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-20001113231037.htm

Part one of three

In the early 1990s, the FBI came across evidence that amounted to a counterspy's worst nightmare: Classified reports showed communist China was running several "assets" - spies, in the vernacular - who operated clandestinely inside the U.S. government.

One spy, however, was different from the others. He didn't work for just any agency. He had burrowed deep inside the U.S. intelligence community, meaning that the People's Republic of China had access to vital secrets.

The information was revealed to FBI counterintelligence agents in highly sensitive communications intercepts between the Chinese Embassy in Washington and Chinese intelligence officers in Beijing. The intercepts suggested the agent was supplying the Chinese with classified defense information.

The spy's code name was "Ma" - Chinese for "horse."

A Chinese government official who defected to the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 also told U.S. intelligence that China had successfully developed five to 10 clandestine sources of information here.

The defector said these agents were known as "Dear Friends" of China. And one had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence data, known as Top Secret-Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI.

FBI counterintelligence agents' search for this Chinese "mole" led to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon's intelligence arm. A key suspect emerged: Ronald Montaperto.

At the time, Mr. Montaperto was a senior DIA analyst specializing in "estimates," or analyses, of matters related to China and East Asia.

His job required making official contacts with Chinese government and military officials. In Washington, that meant defense attaches posted to the Chinese Embassy.

Chinese defense attaches are officers who work for the military intelligence department of the People's Liberation Army's General Staff. One was PLA Maj. Gen. Yu Zhenghe, the air attache, who had developed a close relationship with Mr. Montaperto - close enough to be invited to his wedding in 1990.

Warnings by defectors

This hunt for a Chinese mole was rare for the FBI. Most of the other moles uncovered inside the U.S. government during the 1980s, in what became known as the "Decade of the Spy," were spies for the Soviet Union.

There was one exception: A Chinese intelligence officer who defected to the United States in 1985 identified a Chinese language specialist for the U.S. government as a spy.

The defector was Yu Qiangsheng, a senior intelligence officer in the Ministry of State Security. Mr. Yu had extensive access to information about Chinese intelligence operations and agents. It was Mr. Yu who first put a CIA counterspy on to Larry Wu-Tai Chin, the Chinese language specialist, who worked for the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The service publishes translations of foreign news publications and broadcasts.

Mr. Yu, who was resettled in the United States, remains under federal protection. He fears for his life because of Beijing agents.

Mr. Chin eventually was unmasked. He had burrowed within the CIA for about 30 years, passing valuable political intelligence to Beijing. He was a rare catch, but before he could be interrogated thoroughly for "damage assessment," he committed suicide in his jail cell.

After the bloody military crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, several other Chinese intelligence officers defected, determined to help the United States defeat the Communist government. Two had worked inside the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

The defectors' information helped to confirm and update what Mr. Yu had provided years earlier. They explained the care with which Chinese intelligence contacted and serviced its clandestine agents. For instance, intelligence officers never met their agents inside the United States because the FBI was considered too good at catching spies. It was safer to meet abroad, preferably in China.

These defectors had access to intelligence reports - sent from the embassy to Ministry of State Security headquarters in China - that revealed that Chinese intelligence had recruited several agents who were referred to as "Dear Friends." The Dear Friends were rewarded for valuable intelligence with paid trips to China, business opportunities there and prestige-building access to senior Chinese officials.

From their knowledge of the Chinese Embassy's intelligence cables, the defectors were able to tell U.S. intelligence debriefers about details China obtained from the Dear Friends. The U.S. counterspies were troubled that large amounts of extremely sensitive military intelligence was being provided to China.

Interrogating a suspect

Based on the defectors' testimony, the FBI began a major espionage probe. The bureau came up with a list of 12 suspects that fit the profile of the Dear Friend with access to U.S. military secrets.

During systematic "interviews" of each suspect, FBI agents met with Mr. Montaperto in late 1991 or early 1992. At the time, he was chief of DIA's estimates branch for China, a job he held from September 1989 until his departure in February 1992. He had joined DIA as an analyst in October 1981 and worked his way up.

Intelligence intercepts of Chinese government communications gathered by the National Security Agency and supplied to the FBI later revealed that one of the most important agents being run by Chinese intelligence was code-named Ma.

FBI agents eventually confronted Mr. Montaperto during what the bureau called "hostile interrogations" over the course of three meetings. They asked bluntly whether he had passed classified intelligence information to China's intelligence service.

No, Mr. Montaperto replied. He said any contacts with Chinese intelligence were authorized. He did conceded to the DIA that he knew Gen. Yu, the Chinese intelligence officer.

The FBI cleared Mr. Montaperto, though some counterintelligence officials still suspected he was Ma but couldn't prove it. The matter was put to rest conclusively, Mr. Montaperto said.

"I can honestly say they looked me in the eye and said, 'We don't think you're a spy,' " he said of the meetings with FBI agents.

But soon after the investigation, Mr. Montaperto left the DIA. In an interview with this reporter, he said the FBI probe had nothing to do with his departure. As for his friendship with Gen. Yu, he said: "One does not have friends with Chinese officials" - meaning his contacts were strictly professional.

"Did General Yu attend your wedding?" this reporter asked. "Yes," Mr. Montaperto said.

It was a relatively small wedding, he said, because it was his second marriage. He said he invited Gen. Yu and other Chinese officials because he thought it would be a good experience for them.

Hanging on the wall inside Mr. Montaperto's office was a large scroll of Chinese calligraphy. It contained the characters "horse dragon virtue," which when spoken in Mandarin sound like "Montaperto." A second set of characters on the scroll are Chinese for "war horse."

The scroll is signed by a Chinese intelligence officer, who, like Yu Zhenghe, was an attache at the Chinese Embassy in Washington when Mr. Montaperto received the scroll as a gift. Mr. Montaperto says a student in Shanghai gave it to him.

A panda hugger?

The FBI never found the clandestine spy known as Ma. The bureau did uncover several Dear Friends, but did not seek prosecution. The FBI was hamstrung by the limited details provided by the former Chinese intelligence officers, who had seen the cables but did not have hard copies.

One Chinese agent was a Chinese-American employee at a U.S. defense contractor in Northern Virginia. Although he was not prosecuted, his access to classified information was cut off.

Mr. Montaperto next went to work at the Pentagon's National Defense University at Fort McNair, a scenic base overlooking the Potomac River in Southwest Washington. He became a "social science analyst" with the university's Institute for National Strategic Studies, a think tank for security issues.

Mr. Montaperto's biography as posted on the university's Internet site contains only four sentences and makes no mention of his DIA experience. It states only that he is a China affairs specialist: "Currently he is defining strategies and policies for managing future U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region."

Because the FBI could not prove its suspicions, Mr. Montaperto was allowed to retain his top-secret security clearance. But he does not have the same access to intelligence information as he had at DIA.

Gen. Yu, meanwhile, remains one of China's most important intelligence officers. He works for Gen. Xiong Guangkai, the PLA's deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

According to one U.S. national security official, Gen. Xiong returned to the United States in 1996 during the Taiwan Strait crisis and tried to meet Mr. Montaperto. The crisis was prompted by test firings of Chinese missiles near Taiwan; the United States dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region.

Mr. Montaperto's primary job at the government's National Defense University is to oversee the China portion of an annual "Strategic Assessment," to speak on China policy around the world and to organize an occasional conference on China. His pronounced pro-China view plays down that nation's military capabilities, specifically its development of strategic and conventional forces.

But Mr. Montaperto says he is no "panda hugger," using the derogatory term China specialists at the Pentagon employ for soft-liners.

"For some people, I will always be considered a panda hugger," he added.

'Hide brightness'

When Congress ordered creation of a National Defense University clearinghouse for intelligence on the People's Liberation Army, Mr. Montaperto presented the plan to the Pentagon. It called for hiring 33 specialists, opening a large office in Southwest and spending $4.5 million a year.

At first the Pentagon rejected the plan because it appeared to promote military-to-military contacts with the PLA rather than provide useful information about the strategy and direction of the Chinese military.

The Clinton administration already had dramatically increased meetings and exchanges with Chinese military leaders, which the Chinese exploited to develop intelligence. Many in the Pentagon had had enough of that, and senior officials objected to Mr. Montaperto's appointment as director of the new center. But the university named him director anyway.

The importance of the center was highlighted when Mr. Clinton opposed the requirement to set it up.

By mandating the center and reports on China's military buildup, Congress assumes "an outcome that is far from foreordained - that China is bent on becoming a military threat to the United States," the president said in signing a $289 billion defense bill in October 1999. "I believe we should not make it more likely that China will choose this path by acting as if the decision has already been made."

Yet the president's policies and those of the soft-liners who refused to recognize the nature of the People's Republic of China had done more to increase the danger from China than any of the skeptics in Congress who believed more should be done to learn about the Communist regime's military intentions.

Mr. Montaperto's minimizing of the threat is at one with Chinese military policy, which involves deception - preventing the U.S. "hegemon" from recognizing China's emerging power until it is greater, at least regionally, than that of the United States.

The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said China must avoid provoking a conflict with the United States until China has the military, economic and political power to win.

In the words of Mr. Deng: "Hide brightness; nourish obscurity." Or as the official translation in Beijing put it, "Bide our time and build up our capabilities."

Friendly 'specialists'

Chinese military writings predict a "dangerous decade" - when that nation faces a strategic checkmate - between 2020 and 2030.

By 2020, the United States will not be able to ignore China's growing might. But China's military and strategic planners fear their country will not be powerful enough to take on the United States until 2030.

What China wanted was three more decades of Clinton-style "engagement," a policy that downplays Chinese military capabilities, encourages decreasing U.S. defense spending and gives China major technical and financial boosts.

Chinese officials view certain specialists in the United States as important outlets for Beijing's views. Many of these China specialists are current or former government officials.

Unlike the thousands of political scientists who specialize in European and Russian affairs, the China experts who specialize in international security and foreign affairs could fit in a large conference room. And most of them communicate via Internet discussion groups, a major target of influence exerted by the Chinese government.

Take "Chinasec." Every morning, a group of about 100 high-level U.S. policy-makers and intelligence officials receives e-mail postings as part of this Internet discussion group, whose innocuous-sounding name stands for "China security."

The informal electronic gathering includes some of the most important China policy-makers in the U.S. government, including the Pentagon's desk officer for China matters, Col. John Corbett. The group is decidedly pro-China and often criticizes news articles - in particular this reporter's work for The Washington Times - that explore Chinese weapons sales to rogue states or espionage against the United States.

For instance, when The Times reported on the critical views of China held by Condoleeza Rice, a key foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush, Chinasec swung into action. The e-mail network adopted the standard posture of the Clinton administration: spin. It dismissed the article as exaggerated and the work of a "nonexpert."

Chinasec's on-line discussion group is secret, but not in the sense of that term denoted by the U.S. government classification. Most of Chinasec's participants hold high-level security clearances. At least 10 CIA officials are members.

Chinasec is part of an informal but powerful network of current and former officials, academics and other China experts who exert a major influence on U.S. policies toward China.

The litmus test

The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote that "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

The view of China presented by these pro-Beijing specialists is not manufactured by the Chinese Communist Politburo, but it serves the Politburo's strategy. The key theme of the propaganda directed abroad is simple: China is not a threat.

The theme is central to the Chinese Communist Party's overt and covert influence efforts. It is the litmus test for those experts that Beijing labels "Friends of China." And it was a constant refrain of the Clinton administration.

Despite the soft-line approach, a public opinion poll last year showed that Mr. Clinton's policy of engagement had not convinced the majority of the American people that China is a benign power.

The results of the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, published in September 1999, indicate that 60 percent to 80 percent consider China to be an "adversary," not a strategic partner.

-------- russia

Putin Proposes Deeper Nuclear Cuts

November 13, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-US-Nuclear-Cuts.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- In a bold new arms control gambit, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that Russia and the United States could make drastic cuts in their nuclear arsenals far beyond existing proposals.

Putin, who is pushing to downsize a huge and inefficient military that Russia can no longer afford, said the former Cold War opponents need not stop at the 1,500-warhead limit Russia has been advocating up until now. He did not propose any specific numbers.

``It's not the limit. We are ready to consider lower levels in the future,'' he said in a statement issued by the Kremlin. ``We don't see reasons which would hamper further deep cuts in strategic offensive weapons. There should be no pause in nuclear disarmament.''

Putin said the 1,500 level could be achieved by 2008, but only if the United States does not go ahead with a national missile defense system that Russia says would undermine nuclear deterrence.

After years of delay, Russia's parliament in April ratified the START II arms reduction treaty, which would roughly halve arsenals to about 3,500 warheads each. As soon as the treaty goes into effect, the sides have tentatively agreed to go ahead with a START III treaty that envisages further cuts, to 2,000 to 2,500 warheads.

Analysts say the United States has roughly 7,500 nuclear weapons, while Russia has between 6,000 and 7,000. START II has not taken effect because the Russian parliament added conditions not yet ratified by the U.S. Senate.

The cash-strapped Russian government is under intense pressure to cut military spending, which makes up one third of the federal budget even though Russia spends only about $5.1 billion on defense -- compared with annual U.S. defense spending of around $290 billion.

Last week, Putin approved a military reform plan that would cut the 3 million uniformed and civilian personnel in the overall military establishment by about 600,000, or about 20 percent.

Most experts believe that Russia wants deep nuclear cuts because it can't afford to keep up its forces even at START II levels and wants to preserve nuclear equality with the United States. Russia has only been able to build a handful of nuclear missiles in recent years, far too few to replace the hundreds of weapons approaching the end of their service lives.

``It's very important for Russia to persuade the United States to also cut its arsenals, to avoid a unilateral disarmament,'' said Dmitry Trenin, an analyst for the Carnegie Endowment.

Trenin said that Russia was likely to agree to some form of U.S. missile defense by agreeing to the changes in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic missile treaty which restricts such systems. That's because Russia fears it doesn't have the money to respond if the United States unilaterally backs out of the ABM treaty.

``Russia will have to choose between some kind of agreement with the United States and the absence of one, which would put Russia in a most desperate political and economic situation,'' Trenin said.

U.S. negotiators have pressed for ABM changes to allow a limited missile defense against attacks from so-called ``rogue states'' such as North Korea. Washington says its defense system would not be able to blunt a Russian attack.

Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, the chief of Russian Strategic Missile Forces, acknowledged Monday that Russia faced an uphill battle to preserve the ABM treaty. He hinted at a compromise, saying that the two countries could consider counting both defensive, as well as offensive weapons as part of their strategic arsenals.

``In that case, a country willing to increase one part, will have to cut another,'' he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Putin, however, spoke strongly against any changes in the ABM.

``They tell us that the situation in the world has considerably changed during the last three decades. ... The situation has indeed changed, but not to a degree allowing us to break the existing system of strategic stability by emasculating the ABM,'' Putin said.

He said recent attempts by the United States to negotiate with North Korea on limiting its missile program showed threats could be addressed by ``political and diplomatic means, without leaving the ABM treaty.''

--------

Statement of President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin

The Kremlin, Moscow,
November 13, 2000

At the juncture of two millennia the world has reached a crucial frontier in the matter of nuclear disarmament, the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ensuring of strategic stability. Over the recent period there have been indisputable achievements here: exceptionally responsible decisions were adopted by the participants of the NPT Review Conference, an informative dialogue on disarmament issues took place at the Millennium Summit in New York, and the First Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations endorsed a number of important resolutions. Russia also has made its contribution, having ratified the Treaty on the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START-2), the package of the New York 1997 understandings with respect to antimissile defense, and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In the international community there has taken shape a consensus that there should be no pause in nuclear disarmament, and that the disarmament process should be intensified. Radical progress in this direction is really called for.

Russia is ready for this.

We see no grounds that would hinder further deep reductions in strategic offensive arms. As is known, we have suggested to the U.S., including at the highest level, that the attainment of radically decreased levels of our countries' nuclear arsenals - down to 1,500 warheads for each country - should be set as an objective, which can quite feasibly be reached by the year 2008. But neither is this the limit - we are ready subsequently to consider even lower levels. We agree with the view being expressed in the United States that for the achievement of this agreement it will not be necessary to conduct protracted negotiations and to start it all from scratch - we have accumulated considerable experience, and there are juridical mechanisms under START-1 and START-2. We hope that the Senate of the United States will follow the example of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and complete the ratification of the START-2 Treaty and the ABM-related understandings. But the main thing now is for Russia and the U.S. to start without delay moving together or in parallel towards radically reduced ceilings on nuclear warheads.

That goal should be achieved in conditions of the preservation and strengthening of the 1972 ABM Treaty. We are told that the situation in the world has changed significantly in the past three decades as new missile threats have arisen which allegedly require corresponding changes in the ABM Treaty. The situation has indeed changed, but not to such an extent as to warrant breaking the existing system of strategic stability by emasculating the ABM Treaty. Measures to counteract the spread of missiles and missile technologies can be taken without going beyond the framework of the ABM Treaty and acting primarily by political and diplomatic methods. A vivid example is the intensive dialogue between the USA and the DPRK on the problems of missiles. Ways to improve the political and legal mechanisms of missile non-proliferation are being actively discussed in multilateral format, work is underway to develop a new code of conduct in this field and to create a Global System of Missile and Missile Technology Control.

For the countries which raise the question of a military-technical "safety net" we offer broad cooperation in the sphere of theater missile defense that fits into the ABM Treaty. The technological developments for that already exist. The Moscow Center on Missile Launch Data Exchange now being created by Russia and the US which must in future be open for all the interested countries could provide an element of such cooperation. We have already invited European and other representatives to join this work. I hope that the new US leadership will not object to the such use of the Center in the interests of strengthening regional and global stability.

Russia is ready, without a pause, to continue the dialogue with the US on the issues of the ABM over which we differ, a dialogue started more than a year ago. The obligation to consider all the issues affecting the ABM Treaty is contained in the Treaty itself. Accordingly, we are open to the continuation of such a discussion within the Permanent Advisory Commission, a negotiating forum which has been functioning successfully under the Treaty since 1973, and if necessary, agree on upgrading the level of representation of the parties in the Commission.

The implementation of a pragmatic and long-overdue program in the field of real nuclear disarmament proposed by Russia will make it possible to really strengthen strategic stability and international security on the threshold of the new 21st century.

-------- taiwan

Thousands Call for Nuke - Free Taiwan

November 12, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-Protest.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Tens of thousands of people rallied Sunday to support Taiwan's president, the focus of widening criticism for scrapping a partially completed nuclear power plant.

Protesters in the capital, Taipei, and the southern port city of Kaohsiung demonstrated for President Chen Shui-bian, whose decision last month to abandon the $5.4 billion project has prompted calls for his ouster.

Protesters waved purple and green banners that read ``No Nuclear Plant, Support Chen Shui-bian,'' and distributed pamphlets reminding the public of past nuclear disasters abroad. More than 100 policemen with riot shields cordoned off roads leading to the Presidential Palace.

Chen has faced intense criticism from opposition lawmakers who say that his bypassing of the legislature to scrap the plant was unconstitutional, and a coalition of opposition leaders met over the weekend to discuss details of Chen's ouster.

Anti-nuclear forces argue that Taiwan is incapable of storing nuclear waste, and the plant would threaten the environment, already damaged by decades of policies emphasizing industrial growth over all else.

Opposition lawmakers, however, say the plant in northern Taiwan is urgently needed for national security and to help fuel continued economic growth and ditching the plant would be a waste of taxpayer's money.

Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy. If China ever made good its threats and forced Taiwan to reunify after 51 years of estrangement, the most logical option would be to form a naval blockade and cut off Taiwan's oil supply, analysts have said.


-------- MILITARY

-------- drug war

Billionaires Push National Drug Reform Debate

Fox News
Thursday, November 9, 2000
http://www.foxnews.com/elections/110900/billionaires.sml

The trio of billionaires who funded the effort to relax drug laws in California has created a national profile for their state and local efforts.

University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, New York philanthropist George Soros and Ohio insurance executive Peter Lewis have pumped millions of dollars over the last four years into campaigns for state ballot initiatives that they say are part of a referendum on the drug war.

So far, their greatest success has been California's Proposition 36, which will send thousands of first- and second-time drug users to community treatment programs instead of jail. Additionally, Colorado and Nevada approved using marijuana for medical purposes, and Oregon and Utah restricted government seizures of drug offenders' property.

Other victories include medical marijuana laws in Alaska, Arizona, Maine and Washington.

"It shows that the war on drugs is slowly being strangled, and eventually the federal politicians are going to have to face up to their 20-year failure," Sperling said Wednesday.

Proponents of the billionaires' campaign say their efforts may target Middle America next.

"Michigan and Ohio are probably the places where you have the largest number of people affected, and you would send the loudest message," said Dave Fratello, campaign manager for the California initiative. "And they have the initiative process."

On Tuesday, Massachusetts and Alaska rejected sweeping drug initiatives, but proponents say America's view on the drug war is changing.

"Politics is perception, and the perception up to this point is that voters want tougher and tougher drug policies," said Bill Zimmerman, executive director of the Campaign for New Drug Policies. "The votes we saw (Tuesday) night represent a sea change in that perception."

But opponents fear that the billionaires' deep pockets will allow them to engineer more election successes than are warranted. "I think the initiative process is becoming dangerous," said Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation, which advocates a zero-tolerance approach to drugs. "The very wealthy who have the money to do it are buying public policy all over the country."

The drug war itself was not on the ballot in any state, Fay stressed.

"I don't think that the voters perceive that they're voting to end the drug war," she said. "They don't see the big picture."

Just two decades ago California — the nation's most populous state - led the country in jailing drug users. It still jails more drug offenders per capita than any other state.

But Proposition 36 will require treatment instead of incarceration for the estimated 36,000 California drug users convicted each year for using or possessing drugs for the first or second time.

The three philanthropists contributed between $6 million and $7 million toward changing the drug policies during the 1997-98 election cycle, said Ethan Nadelmann, Soros' drug policy adviser. They spent $1.2 million each on the California initiative.

----

BUSH WILL CONCEDE TO GORE

An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
Communiqué and Analysis from the Narco News Elections Service

Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 00:18:08 -0800
RadTimes # 101 November, 2000
PROJECTION at 10 p.m. ET, Sunday, November 12, 2000:

(Note to working journalists: Your news agencies will not allow you to run with this projection yet, but please file it for second review if and when the scenario presented here occurs.)

ANALYSIS:

Although The Narco News Bulletin does not endorse candidates, and certainly would never support either of the hypocritical drug warriors Al Gore or George W. Bush, we have extensively covered election fraud matters in Mexico and the Dominican Republic this year.

As we look upon the recount controversies underway in the Narco-State of Florida, our analysts are now prepared to make a projection:

George W. Bush will concede this election to Al Gore very shortly, perhaps within a week.

The factors weighed in the NarcoNewsroom are the following:

1. Today's revelation by Authentic Journalists Robert W. Neill, Jr. and Preston Peet that found Florida Governor Jeb Bush's signature on a blatant act of absentee ballot fraud.

2. Tomorrow's Times of London report that the FBI is already in Florida investigating a massive case of voter fraud targeted at "black and Jewish" voters in the Bush controlled state.

Both articles are attached for your review.

Narco News, due to technical problems, has not posted our projection yet on our web site. However, this communiqué and analysis may be distributed or reprinted by others.

What does this story have to do with the narco?

Florida is a state swimming in drug money. Indeed, 99% of all dollar bills in Florida are found to have traces of cocaine. More importantly, the sheer amount of money that moves through Florida far surpasses the amount of money generated legally within its economy.

Florida is the bridge to the Latin American oligarchies from the Colombian paramilitaries to the former Cuban upper caste to the super-rich from Venezuela who are now trying to overthrow elected president Hugo Chávez. These networks and the US intelligence and other agencies that permeate them are steeped in narco-money, as a review of US federal court documents in the Miami district quickly reveals.

Narco News sources say that these networks pumped major money into the political campaign in Florida and investigators are already following the narco-money trail.

The US election system, standing naked before all América, has suffered severe image problems in recent days. But at the point that the narco-connection to the election process becomes known, the crisis will explode far beyond anything that has yet happened.

Both political parties, Democrat and Republican, have actively recruited narco-money for this campaign. See Michael C. Ruppert's May 2000 report:

<http://www.narconews.com/USDominican1.html>

Both parties thus have a vital interest in making certain that the current crisis does not escalate to reveal what Mexican columnist Carlos Ramírez wrote this morning: "That the myth of Democracy in the United States... is a myth."

Although both major US parties, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in the drug war and the narco-money trail, the weight of these facts, for simple geography, falls more heavily on the incumbent Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of the GOP candidate.

Look for George W. Bush to concede, perhaps by the end of the week, with the most graceful "the system still works" speech you ever heard. Both parties have an interest in making sure the narco-money scandal does not explode, and the Bush family's advantage in the election -- having a member as governor of Florida -- now converts to its major disadvantage.

Already documented to have signed an act of absentee ballot fraud, Jeb Bush faces investigation, subpoena and possible federal indictment by the Democrat-controlled Justice Department.

Narco News, with its experience watching how these kinds of crises are fixed behind the scenes in the nations of Latin America, makes an educated projection that a similar fix is already underway in the United States.

You heard it here first;

Narco News Projects Al Gore as the Illegitimate 43rd President of the United States

We furthermore challenge the US Government to clean up its own house before repeating its historic and arrogant finger-pointing at Latin America. Washington has no standing to tell the people of the rest of América how to run their democracies.

And to the US Media, wrong in its election night projections on Florida, we suggest the adoption of more accurate methods of projecting the winner. More important than exit polls in this era is that pillar of Authentic Journalism long forgotten by the commercially driven media: historic memory.

Al Giordano Narco News Elections Service The Narco News Bulletin <http://www.narconews.com/> <narconews@hotmail.com>

Attachments 1 and 2:

<http://www.egroups.com/files/WebSiteDaily/florida/campaignmaterials.htm> WebSiteDaily Internet Resources & News

Campaign Materials Apparently Encouraged Republicans To Vote By Mail Using Absentee Ballots

by Robert W. Neill, Jr. WebSiteDaily Editor & Publisher Sunday, November 12, 2000

Journalist Preston Peet columnist for NewYorkWaste also contributed to this report.

TALLAHASSEE (WebSiteDaily) - Campaign materials marked as being paid for the Republican Party Of Florida with a sig promoted the convenience of voting by mail and used a slogan of "Vote By Mail It's as easy as 1-2-3!". A removable form was attached to the flyers which could be signed and mailed or delivered to the county elections office to request an absentee ballot.

The materials were apparently distributed to an unknown number of Florida voters and did not require voters to give any reason for requesting an absentee ballot nor did it require voters to provide information required to properly confirm their identity. The office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris specifically lists the requirements needed to obtain an absentee ballot which includes"...last four digits of your Social Security Number, your name, residence address, date of birth, and voter identification number" and it further states "your request for an absentee ballot may be denied if you do not provide the required information".

Some Florida counties limit absentee voting to residents who are unable to vote because of specific and legitimate reasons and require voters requesting absentee ballots to cite the reason when they sign a request for an absentee ballot. The office of Secretary Harris further instructs voters on the official state web site to contact their county elections office "to ask about an absentee ballot as soon as you know that you will be unable to go to the polls on Election Day".

The form distributed under the name of Gov. Jeb Bush and identified as being paid for by the Republican Party Of Florida provided an option box which could be checked which would allow the county elections office to mail the absentee ballot to an address other than the address of the registered voter.

Absentee ballots apparently have a recent history of being used for voter fraud in Florida elections. A 1998 report on voter fraud after an investigation by the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement identified a wide variety of types of voter fraud that have been historically used in Florida.

The reports stated "it appears that the elderly voter or elderly witness to another's absentee ballot are often targeted for use in fraud schemes, perhaps because some of these voters may be easily manipulated or influenced by those in whom they have previously placed their trust." The 1998 law enforcement investigative report also indicated that "the absentee ballot is the "tool of choice" for those who are engaging in election fraud" and provided a review of past voter fraud cases from Dade, Volusia, Hardee, Dixie, Baker, and Lafayette counties.

Florida Voter Fraud Issues Florida Department Of Law Enforcement <http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/publications/voter_fraud.asp>

Secretary of State Katherine Harris Division Of Elections Voting Information <http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/voting_info.shtml>

Alachua County Florida Elections Office Requirement For Absentee Voting <http://www.co.alachua.fl.us/~supvelec/absvote.html>

-- Cannot attend the polls without another's help. -- May not be in the precinct where he/she lives when the polls are open -- Is an election worker who works outside the precinct where he/she lives -- Religious beliefs do not allow to attend the polls on this election day -- Moved to another Florida county when the books were closed for this election. -- This voter can only vote on national offices and statewide offices and issues. -- Moved to another state and cannot vote in the general election because of the laws of that state. -- This voter can only vote for President and Vice-President. -- Cannot attend the polls on election day and votes in the office of the county Supervisor of Elections.

St. Johns County, Florida Absentee Ballot Request Form <http://www.co.st-johns.fl.us/Const-Officers/Soe/images/ABS_BALLOT2.pdf>

Copy Of Republican Campaign Materials Encouraging "Vote By Mail" <http://www.egroups.com/files/WebSiteDaily/florida/Jebbush.gif> <http://www.egroups.com/files/WebSiteDaily/florida/Jebbush.tif>

-------- mexico

Mexicans attack hundreds of federal police

USA Today 11/12/00
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nwssun11.htm

LOS CHORROS, Mexico (AP) - Villagers in the restive Chiapas state clashed with 200 police who were preparing to arrest alleged members of a paramilitary group sought in a massacre.

Witnesses said residents of Los Chorros attacked the police with rocks and sticks after they entered the small Chiapas village. The officers fled and there were no arrests.

A news release from the federal attorney general's office said residents also shot at police as they fled. Two officers and three Indian residents suffered minor injuries in the melee, authorities said.

The police, agents of an anti-paramilitary unit of the attorney general's office, marched into town before dawn in an effort to capture 21 paramilitary members wanted in the 1997 massacre of 45 Indians in nearby Acteal.

''Our community felt attacked and offended,'' said a woman in Los Chorros who would not give her name. ''Here in this community there are no paramilitaries.''

Despite a cease-fire that followed a 1994 rebellion in Chiapas by leftist Zapatista rebels, who demanded more rights for the region's impoverished Indians, scores of people have been killed in clashes between rebels and armed pro-government paramilitary squads.

Forty-five indigenous members of a pro-government paramilitary group are serving 35 years in prison for the massacre.

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

Put women at the peace table

Christian Science Monitor
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2000
By H.E. Sheikh Hasina
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/11/13/fp9s2-csm.shtml

DHAKA, BANGLADESH - The United Nations Security Council made history last month by calling for the inclusion of more women in peacemaking negotiations and peacekeeping forces worldwide, and within the UN peace-building system.

It's about time, given the violent setbacks in the Middle East peace process and the clear lack of progress in the dialogue for peace in other conflict areas.

Bangladesh was instrumental in pioneering the first statement by the Security Council on women's efforts for peace during its presidency of the council this year. The Oct. 31 resolution endorses the idea of finally bringing the missing half of the world's population to the tables where peace is sought. It calls on Secretary-General Kofi Annan to use women as chief envoys in pursuing peace talks and heading peace missions.

Women from war-torn countries told members of the Security Council: Bring more women into the talks, into global peacekeeping and reconstruction, and into your own operations, and you will see those results for which the world yearns.

The argument is compelling.

In Northern Ireland, women's groups spent a decade building the trust between Protestants and Roman Catholics that was the foundation for the ultimate agreements. In Latin America, mothers, wives, and sisters dared to question the military juntas about "disappeared" relatives.

In Bosnia, women cross ethnic lines to rebuild working coalitions in Parliament.

In Sudan and in the Middle East, women from both sides of the conflict have long warned of excluding any sector from the peace process, and they have proposed new avenues that merit exploration, if only negotiators will listen.

Yet, despite their effectiveness on the ground, women are largely absent from high-level peace negotiations.

Only two of the 126 delegates to the Arusha peace talks in Burundi are women, although women are seeking peace within their communities there.

Only two women serve on the 15-member National Council of Timorese Resistance in East Timor, although women sparked that resistance.

And only five women are in leadership positions in the enormous UN mission in Kosovo, although women have forged the way for most of the groups that cross ethnic barriers daily to rebuild their communities.

The Security Council resolution will offer a new method and procedure - and an attitude, if you will, that would implement much of the UN rhetoric to include women in peace efforts.

Under it, more women - including indigenous women - would be named as special representatives to conflict regions, as cease-fire and peace negotiators, and as advisers in reconstruction and evaluation.

Women's rights to equal treatment, and involvement in peace-finding and peacekeeping would be spelled out in every UN document and monitored in every report.

UN staff would be trained everywhere to notice women's lives and women's roles - and women's groups in every conflict region would be consulted in peace processes.

Inclusion of women in peace processes could also further peace efforts in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Central Africa, and other regions where violence continues to take too many lives.

The bottom line would be a new approach to seeking and preserving peace, one that brings the neglected energies of half the world's population to bear on the problem that the other half has not quite succeeded in solving.

Let the women help, the Security Council is saying. What have we got to lose?

H.E. Sheikh Hasina is prime minister of Bangladesh.

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

Beret policy ambushed by special forces reaction

November 13, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-20001113224752.htm

Army documents show service leaders methodically planned how to sell the idea of issuing berets to all soldiers but failed to anticipate the ongoing firestorm of protest from special operations warriors.

The Army predicted soldiers would accept the change "in stride." In reality, commandos have barraged the Army and unit leaders with complaints.

The internal documents reveal a plan to "establish" stories in USA Today and other newspapers on the correctness of discarding a folding green cap in favor of black berets at a cost of $12 million.

Special operations and airborne - the only soldiers currently authorized to wear berets - are up in arms. They are exchanging scores of e-mails criticizing Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, who announced last month that the new beret policy will start on June 14, the Army's birthday.

Army Rangers particularly are upset because their distinctive black berets will now be standard issue for everyone from clerk to infantryman.

But the Army briefings prepared before Gen. Shinseki's announcement did not foresee the firestorm.

"High level assessment say Rangers will take decision in stride and choose to switch to 'Darby Ranger' beret or maintain the black beret," say the documents, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

Opposition to universal berets became so intense that one commander at Fort Bragg, N.C., ordered soldiers to stop using official e-mail addresses to vent their anger and to stop talking to the press.

Lt. Col. Russ Oaks, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said that despite the opposition, the service still plans to adopt the new cap policy.

Asked if the Army was aware of the unhappiness, he said, "I think you can concede there's some discussion along those lines."

Col. Oaks said Gen. Shinseki has explained to troops he wants the beret to symbolize a more agile, lethal Army force now in the planning stages.

"The beret has a history in the U.S. Army, and the units that have traditionally worn the beret have been the adaptable flexible units and [it] epitomizes everything we see the objective force to be," he said.

The documents show the Army instantly began selling the beret policy once Gen. Shinseki made the announcement. "Establish article with Army Times and national publications (e.g. USA Today)," the briefing says. "Hire marketing firm to ensure professional dramatic results and deliver message to potential recruits."

The briefing papers say Rangers will have the option of keeping the black beret or switching to the historic 'Darby Rangers' cap worn in World War II.

Wayne Lawley, president of the Special Forces Association, a group of 7,000 current and former Army Green Berets, wrote to Gen. Shinseki on Oct. 29 asking him to delay the wearing date.

"Since announcement of the beret decision on black Tuesday, 17 October 2000, our message traffic [unanimously opposed to the change] has increased tenfold," Mr. Lawley wrote.

"The Army-wide beret decision may appear to be icily logical to some; however, we view the decision as disrespectful to our brothers in battle, the Rangers and to Special Forces soldiers," he said. "The green beret, sanctified by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, is treated as sacred in our ranks. It is given as a reward for excellence in training and accomplishment in battle. The beret is coveted by many and worn proudly by only a few. On behalf of the Special Forces soldier and his heritage, we respectfully request that you belay this decision."

Army Special Forces wear the green beret; Rangers, the black; and airborne troops, the maroon.

The universal black beret will replace the battle dress uniform cap.

The documents show the Army began studying the new beret in June and Gen. Shinseki approved it three months later.

"They knew about this for months before they ever announced it," said Jimmy Dean, Special Forces association secretary. "It's going to hurt the Army before they know it." To try to keep each category of beret distinctive, the Army is creating patches, or "flashes," signifying different branches.

The documents show a variety of different flashes from which to choose. Army personnel at the Pentagon would have their own insignia, using the Army colors of black and gold.

Other flash options "are adopted from our national emblem based on the crest on the colors of the 1st Regiment, United States Army circa 1790s."

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U.S. Military Jets Hit Near Japan

November 13, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Japan-US-Military-Collision.html

TOKYO (AP) -- U.S. and Japanese planes and ships scoured waters off northern Japan for a missing pilot Monday after two U.S. military jets collided during a training mission. The second pilot was rescued.

The F-16Cs stationed on Misawa U.S. Air Base in northern Japan collided about 410 miles north of Tokyo early Monday, the Japanese Coast Guard said.

Both pilots apparently ejected from their planes and one of them was rescued by the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, said force spokesman Toshimi Okimoto. There were no other people aboard.

The rescued pilot, Col. Michael J. Lepper, was in good condition, the U.S. military said in a statement. His hometown was not immediately available. The name of the missing pilot was not released.

The jets were on a joint U.S.-Japan training mission, the statement said.

The mayor of Misawa, Shigeyoshi Suzuki, on Monday questioned the safety of the flight training and demanded reassurance from the U.S. military of the safety of future flights, said Misawa official Takenori Todate. He accused the U.S. military of not providing full details of the collision.

Misawa houses 5,400 U.S. service people and is used by 3,300 members of Japan's air defense forces.

Japan-U.S. relations have been strained in the past over the American military presence, especially on the southernmost island of Okinawa, where more than half of the troops are stationed. Japanese are worried not only about aircraft accidents but also about noise from the jets and possible crime by servicemen.

U.S. military officials at Misawa were not available for comment late Monday.

--------

Two U.S. military jets collide

USA Today 11/13/00- Updated 10:06 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwsmon07.htm

TOKYO (AP) - U.S. and Japanese planes and ships scoured waters off northern Japan for a missing pilot Monday after two U.S. military jets collided during a training mission. The second pilot was rescued.

The F-16Cs stationed on Misawa U.S. Air Base in northern Japan collided about 410 miles north of Tokyo early Monday, the Japanese Coast Guard said.

Both pilots apparently ejected from their planes and one of them was rescued by the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force, said force spokesman Toshimi Okimoto. There were no other people aboard.

The rescued pilot, Col. Michael J. Lepper, was in good condition, the U.S. military said in a statement. His hometown was not immediately available. The name of the missing pilot was not released.

The jets were on a joint U.S.-Japan training mission, the statement said.

The mayor of Misawa, Shigeyoshi Suzuki, on Monday questioned the safety of the flight training and demanded reassurance from the U.S. military of the safety of future flights, said Misawa official Takenori Todate. He accused the U.S. military of not providing full details of the collision.

Misawa houses 5,400 U.S. service people and is used by 3,300 members of Japan's air defense forces.

Japan-U.S. relations have been strained in the past over the American military presence, especially on the southernmost island of Okinawa, where more than half of the troops are stationed. Japanese are worried not only about aircraft accidents but also about noise from the jets and possible crime by servicemen.

U.S. military officials at Misawa were not available for comment late Monday.

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A new Vietnam prepares to welcome Clinton

November 13, 2000
By David Jones
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2000111322722.htm

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - It was Halloween in the roof bar at the Caravelle Hotel and a Filipino band called SOX belted out rock standards and recent hits by Michael Jackson, Oasis and Sister Sledge.

The ceiling was hung with cutouts of bats, gauzy shrouds and a coffin over the bar, and the barmaids looked suitably spooky in thick black-and-white makeup. The patrons, a mix of expatriates and Vietnamese nouveau riche, were into the spirit with costumes and masks, and they danced late into the night.

Halloween in Vietnam? No tricks and no treats but Vietnam, after a decade of uneven economic and social reforms, is no longer just a communist land of hate-America slogans, of rice tillers and elderly women in cone-shaped hats. The women are still here, but they have to step quickly to avoid being run down by legions of smartly dressed young people on motorbikes who swarm 10 abreast though the streets of Ho Chi Minh City - formerly Saigon - on their way to work in gleaming new office towers.

In the countryside, where 80 percent of the population still lives, electric power lines and television antennas sprout from tin and bamboo shacks. And along coastal Route 1, bulldozers and cranes are building concrete bridges just yards from where farmers wade knee deep through the paddies behind their water buffaloes.

No question, this is still a one-party state where secret police watch anyone who dares criticize the government, where journalists are monitored and where the band at the Caravelle had to audition for government censors before being allowed to play.

But the limits on nonpolitical activity are disappearing, and the government and people seem united in a drive to achieve, through hard work and increasingly free markets, the kind of prosperity enjoyed by their Southeast Asian neighbors.

Clinton visit a big event

When President Clinton this week becomes the first sitting American president to visit Vietnam since the war, he will be met with open arms by a government that is seeking U.S. friendship -and economic assistance - by former South Vietnamese soldiers thrilled that the Americans are coming back, and by foreign investors who hope the trip will jump-start a faltering economy.

Mr. Clinton is delaying his departure for Asia by one day due to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's duties as New York senator-elect, a White House official said yesterday.

Mr. Clinton will leave today for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on Wednesday and Thursday in Brunei, said spokesman P.J. Crowley. Mrs. Clinton will join her husband Thursday for the Vietnam visit.

U.S. officials avoid the word "reconciliation" to describe the purpose of the visit, saying rather that it is meant to symbolically cap a 5-year-old process of diplomatic and economic "normalization" and to open the door to a new era of closer relations.

But for many Americans, Mr. Clinton's trip will raise the question: Is it finally time, 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War, to put aside hard feelings and look at Vietnam as just another country?

Those Americans who have spent time in Vietnam in recent years, whether as businessmen, returned refugees or as war veterans doing charitable work, generally agree with C.E. Moore, a civilian anthropologist who has spent most of the past decade searching for remains of the 1,992 U.S. soldiers still listed as missing in action in Vietnam.

"Sure, why not?" he said. "The war is over. It's time to move on. The process of normalization started with President Bush."

For the Vietnamese, reconciliation has already happened. In the north and south alike, they display a warmth toward Americans that is missing in their attitudes toward Russians or Chinese.

That warmth was evident during a visit last week to the Trieu Le Primary School in Quang Tri Province. The school, with 430 students ages 6 to 11, was built in 1995 with contributions from American war veterans in fulfillment of a dream of Lewis B. Puller Jr., whose 1994 suicide was related to grievous war wounds he received nearby.

A reporter and photographer from The Washington Times who visited the school were mobbed by dozens of adoring, laughing children, whose delight at having visitors from America could not be mistaken.

U.S. Army Sgt. First Class John Kelley, in Quang Tri Province last week on his 15th mission seeking the remains of Americans still missing from the Vietnam War, recounted a similar experience while riding a rented bicycle near Hue.

"We came across a Catholic school run by Vietnamese nuns and stopped to have a look around," he said.

"They took us into a classroom and the kids gathered around us and sang to us. They turned it into something like a ceremony. It was pretty good, pretty good."

Letting go of the past

There are, no doubt, people who still nurse hostility over the war. But from the postwar generation of ambitious young Vietnamese who make up more than half the population, to the wounded veterans passing their last days in an ill-equipped hospital outside the capital of Hanoi, a common refrain is heard.

"The past is the past, and the future is the most important thing for our people," said one of some 40 students packed shoulder-to-shoulder on old wooden benches in a hot and airless classroom at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi.

More surprising was to hear the same thing from Nguyen Van Tong, 74, the war-deafened former commander of North Vietnamese forces in the Mekong Delta and now vice president of the Vietnam War Veterans Association of Ho Chi Minh City.

"Fighting against the American Army I think was inevitable," said the white-haired officer, who wore a Ho Chi Minh pin on his well-pressed shirt. "But I think now we should forget the past. I want to put the past aside."

There is a mantra-like quality to the answer, as though everyone is repeating a party line voiced frequently by the government. But foreigners with long experience in Vietnam say its Buddhist culture and its 1,000-year history of invasions from China have bred a willingness to forgive and forget.

"Every time they would defeat invaders from China, they would follow up almost immediately by sending a delegation to the Chinese emperor bearing gifts, almost apologizing for defeating them," said Chuck Searcy, for six years the director in Vietnam of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

The most tangible evidence of the government's eagerness for better relations with the United States is the high level of cooperation in the search for the remains of American MIAs.

"They have cooperated in a way that I doubt the American government would do if the positions were reversed," said Mr. Searcy, who will soon take up new duties as country director of the Washington-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

"They recognized that when the United States said we will base the pace of normalization on the cooperation we receive on the MIAs, that this was the best way for them to improve relations."

Helping U.S. MIA teams

That cooperation was also affirmed by members of Sgt. Kelley's MIA team, who look on their job as sort of a sacred honor.

Team leader Capt. James Becker said his wife put the mission in perspective for him when she reminded him of the death of their 3-month-old daughter two years ago.

"At least we got to hold her when she died. These families never even got a coffin back. If I can do anything to help these families have the same feeling I had, I will do it," he said.

If shared grief has helped bring the Vietnamese and Americans together - the United States is now helping Vietnam to look for some of its own 300,000 MIAs - reconciliation among the Vietnamese has been more difficult.

A 69-year-old pedicab driver in Ho Chi Minh City, whose wide grin exposes his last three yellowed teeth, said he would talk to a reporter about his postwar experiences, but not here.

"Security is everywhere. Come in my cyclo, I will drive you for half an hour, three dollars," he said.

The man, who asked that his name not be used, served as a lieutenant in the 1st Division of the South Vietnamese army. When the war ended in 1975, he spent five years in a re-education camp -longer than most veterans - and two additional years growing rice in a special economic zone.

When he returned to the city in 1982, he was denied a job with any state-owned company and turned to cyclo driving.

The security people no longer follow him and life has improved in recent years, he said. With the growth of tourism, which will draw more than 2 million visitors this year, he earns about $100 a month - more than three times the national average - and sends half of that home to his wife in the countryside.

"Everything is OK. . . . I have no problems any more," he said. But he still sleeps in his pedicab on the street and insisted that a reporter put his notebook away before he pedaled the cyclo back to a riverfront hotel.

Human rights improving

The U.S. State Department's 1999 report on human rights in Vietnam said there is a special investigative agency run by the Ministry of Public Security that keeps watch on dissidents and a system of household registration and block wardens to monitor the population.

But the report said the system has become less pervasive in recent years and other longtime residents agree.

One former boat refugee who returned six years ago to work with a large American firm said such returnees - known as Viet Kieu -were watched closely in 1993 and 1994, but it hardly ever happens any more.

It is mainly a matter of manpower as more and more people come back.

Another former South Vietnamese serviceman, working now as an unlicensed free-lance tour guide, said: "Many who fought on opposite sides have learned to live together, especially since so many families had members on both sides. The Viet Cong also loved the land, loved their country."

The guide, a former navy lieutenant who now earns $5 to $20 a day, said South Vietnamese veterans are not allowed to have clubs or organizations but they do help one another financially and get together to drink and talk among themselves.

Asked how he felt about this week's visit by Mr. Clinton - a one-time opponent of U.S. support for South Vietnam - the guide said he was delighted.

"For a long time America forgot us. We were the leftover people, the leftovers of the war. . . . [President] Clinton has normalized relations and day by day the economic relationship is growing," he said.

Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien last week called for more U.S. aid to deal with the consequences of the Vietnam War.

"Vietnam is still suffering very serious consequences from the war - that's why Vietnam's needs are so large and we need bigger and speedier U.S. assistance," Mr. Nien said in an official interview obtained by the Agence France-Presse news service.

Mr. Nien acknowledged that Washington had started several humanitarian projects in Vietnam since the establishment of diplomatic relations five years ago, particularly in the field of flood relief.

He said U.S. and Vietnamese scientists were also working toward joint research into the U.S. wartime chemical defoliant Agent Orange, but he said that Vietnam still needed a bigger U.S. contribution to supplement its own efforts and those of other donors.

Southern vets find jobs

Some southern veterans have begun finding jobs in the government or with state enterprises, and even more are finding opportunities in the rapidly growing private sector, which is becoming significant after a decade of economic reform.

Dang Le Nguyen Vu, director and founder of a private chain of coffee houses with more than 200 outlets around the country, laughed and pointed across his office to his close aide, Le Non, when asked whether he would hire someone who had fought for the South.

"I had a difficult time for a couple of years after the war," said Mr. Non, who served in the South Vietnamese navy. "It was harder for certain troops to find employment, but it became less and less so, and now the discrimination has disappeared."

Still, those who fought for the South are systematically denied any special veterans' benefits and pre-1975 cemeteries for Southern war dead have been allowed to become overgrown with weeds.

Even in the northern provinces, the war cemeteries and monuments that mark every town seem a bit forlorn, overgrown with grass and peeling paint, as attention is lavished instead on the construction of roads, new schools and tourist hotels intended to spur economic growth.

The instruments of a repressive state remain in place. Outside organizations estimate there are from 40 to 150 political prisoners in the jails, and foreign journalists cannot leave Hanoi without permission or have bureaus outside the capital. Several photographs that were taken to accompany this article were confiscated by authorities.

Yet foreign newspapers are widely available. Westerners have been recruited to teach political subjects at the leading university, and citizens are encouraged to plug into the global information network via the Internet.

A paternalistic government The government seems more paternalistic than oppressive, ruling like a stern but loving father who is convinced he knows what is best for his children.

Nguyen Van Trung, 21, has lived all his life in a decrepit squatter shack atop the crumbling wall of the 200-year-old citadel at Hue, along with his 77-year-old grandmother, his parents and an indeterminate number of children, chickens and dogs.

The government has never charged the family rent for the use of the land, he said. It does provide running water and electricity at the standard rates, and a small television is on inside the darkened hovel.

They will be expelled soon so that the citadel can be restored to its former glory as a tourist attraction, he said, but not until the government has built new housing for the estimated 14,000 people who live on the ruins.

No one can say their problems are the government's fault, said Mr. Trung, who has given up his work at a restaurant to care for his sick father. "The government cannot help everyone. You have to work. It's up to me."

Like Mr. Trung, most Vietnamese find the best way to enjoy and improve their lives is simply not to think about politics, particularly notions such as freedom and democracy.

"It is hard to talk to people here about politics," said one midlevel government employee. "Personally I am interested because I studied politics in school, but if I try to talk about it with my friends at night, sometimes they get angry with me."

With market reforms rapidly creating new economic opportunities, especially for the young, most Vietnamese seem to have accepted a tacit compact with the government in which they enjoy broad freedom to do as they please as long as they stay out of politics.

"Most people look pretty happy. Look at their faces in the street," said a Viet Kieu businessman who asked that his name not be used. "All they care about today is to make money, to support their families."

Opening the economy

As in China, the Communist Party is attempting to open its economy to market forces without losing political control, an especially delicate balancing act in what it understands is an information-driven world economy.

The leadership hopes to emulate India as a global source of computer engineers and programmers, recently announcing plans to train 25,000 programmers and software specialists by 2005.

That is a tall order, given that computers are available in only 30 percent of secondary schools and most students are learning programming skills on a theoretical basis. But foreign businessmen enthuse about the work habits and learning capacity of the Vietnamese, and young people are embracing the challenge.

When the privately owned Blue Sky Computer Superstore offered introductory tours of the Internet at the National University in Hanoi recently, students quickly filled up all available slots for the free 40-minute sessions.

Blue Sky marketing executive Duong Viet Tu, who aspires to be like Bill Gates in the future, said the students showed the most interest in sites dealing with fashion, sports and to a lesser extent news. A walk around the room showed computers opened to MSN, MTV, Yahoo and Vassar College, as well as several Vietnamese-language sites.

Diplomats say the only Web sites that have been blocked by the government are those put up by dissident overseas Vietnamese, mostly in the United States. But Mr. Tu said the government should do more to open the economy and encourage Internet use.

The economy is opening up in other ways as leaders absorb the lesson learned when Vietnam went overnight from a rice importer to the world's second-largest exporter simply by allowing rice farmers to keep and sell their own crops.

Playing the stock marke

An embryonic stock market has opened in Ho Chi Minh City, so far with just four state-owned companies listed and trading three days a week. But local newspapers report with enthusiasm on the daily volume and the relative merits of the companies.

The number of listings is expected to rise soon, given government plans to restructure 2,622 small or money-losing state-owned enterprises over the next five years. Most will be equitized, meaning shares will be sold to the public, while others will be sold, leased or contracted out to private companies.

Businessmen say restrictions on foreign-owned companies are also being loosened day by day, albeit through five-year plans and lugubriously titled directives like that with the title of Government Decree No. 9/2000/NQ-CP. Two major American firms were recently permitted to buy out their Vietnamese joint-venture partners.

"For Vietnamese-owned companies, there are not many restrictions left," said Don Lam, a returned refugee who says he was born in a wartime trench and now is director of management consulting services in Vietnam for Price Waterhouse Coopers.

"If a local company wants to open up, you just have to register your name and address. You don't even have to wait for a response," he said.

Still, the leadership is divided between hard-liners in the Communist Party, who would like to slow the pace of change, and reform-minded technocrats in the government, who enjoy the backing of Prime Minister Pham Van Khai.

Infighting between the factions has held up some reforms, contributing to a precipitous drop in foreign direct investment, from $8.3 billion in 1996 to less than $2 billion last year, and a slowing of economic growth from the blistering double-digit pace of the early 1990s to about 6 percent this year.

Indicative was the difficulty Vietnamese leaders had in deciding whether to sign a far-reaching new trade agreement with the United States. They finally signed in July, approving it too late to be ratified in the United States before the new Congress is seated next year.

If and when the pact is finally enacted, Western businessmen hope to cash in on a market of 78 million people that increasingly has the purchasing power and an appetite for motorbikes, cosmetics and stylish clothes.

An appetite for motorbikes

According to the government's General Department of Statistics, Vietnam will import some 1.4 million motorbikes this year, a statistic that is evident on jammed city streets where stoplights are rare and pedestrians cross the street by stepping in front of oncoming traffic.

"The trade pact represents a huge leap for Vietnam," said Tom Siebert, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. "It is such a sweeping agreement . . . that it stands to improve things substantially."

Among the areas targeted are intellectual property, customs valuation and smuggling.

Corporate lawyer Sesto Vecchi, who came to Vietnam with the U.S. Navy in the mid-1960s and stayed on as a civilian all through the war, predicted the trade agreement would not only alter the economic picture but have profound social implications as well.

"The party's control has changed a lot in the last 10 years, and I think it is going to continue changing. A lot of things are going to be put in motion that [the Communist Party] cannot control. Information technology will take on a life of its own," he said.

Mr. Siebert attributed the downturn in foreign investment to the economic collapse across Asia in 1997, noting that most of the investment in Vietnam comes from Taiwan, Singapore and Korea.

"When things got tough for them, they went home," he said.

Despite the downturn in what was already one of the world's poorest countries, major effort is being put into infrastructure. Telephones work well, new schools are under construction and electricity is available to most citizens.

The government this month signed a $6.3 million contract with Cuba for assistance on a new highway following the old Ho Chi Minh Trail through the western mountains, and is working with its neighbors and $25 million from the Asian Development Bank to improve the main east-west route from the port at Da Nang through Laos to Bangkok.

A young country

With a staggering 55 percent of the population aged under 25, those young people hold the key not only to Vietnam's economic future but to its political destiny as well.

Many still are searching - in the classroom, on the Internet and in their minds - for an appropriate model for Vietnam's future.

"Economically, we would like to see our country develop like the United States or Japan," said Duong Quynh Hoa, 22, a student at the university. "Socially we would like to see it develop like Switzerland or Sweden."

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Growing a Green Plant
In his most expensive gamble to date, Bill Ford is spending $2 billion to build a better car factory

MSNBC
11/13/00
By Keith Naughton NEWSWEEK
http://www.msnbc.com/news/485487.asp

Nov. 13 issue - In its day, Henry Ford's River Rouge manufacturing complex was a showcase of the Industrial Revolution. Huge freighters bearing freshly mined iron ore docked at one end of the mile-long warren of foundries and factories, while on the other end, as if by some industrial magic, shiny black Model A automobiles rolled off the assembly line every 49 seconds.

In a few years a wildflower meadow will grow in the place where a factory once spit out millions of Fords.

AT ITS PEAK IN the 1930s, more than 100,000 workers labored at "the Rouge," and everyone from American presidents to school kids flocked to Dearborn, Mich., to marvel at Ford's vast creation. Today, however, the 83-year-old Rouge is a rusting relic of a bygone age and an environmental wasteland, its grounds covered with contaminated soil. And while workers still toil there to build Ford Mustangs, their surroundings are bleak and, at times, even dangerous. Last year an aging electrical powerhouse at the complex exploded, killing six workers.

Now Henry Ford's great-grandson is initiating his own industrial revolution. But the one waged by William Clay Ford Jr., the company's current chairman, is not built on smokestacks and grit. The self-proclaimed "environmental industrialist"-who likes to fly-fish and admits Ford's sport utility vehicles need to clean up their act-intends a flower-power overhaul at the Rouge. In his biggest move since taking the wheel of the family firm two years ago, Ford, 43, persuaded his board last month to spend $2 billion to tear down the old assembly plant and transform the Rouge into a garden of industry, where hummingbirds will commingle with factory workers.

In a few years a wildflower meadow will grow in the place where a factory once spit out millions of Fords. And by 2003 a new environmentally friendly assembly plant will rise nearby, complete with a "living roof" blanketed with sedum, a succulent ground cover that flowers in the spring. Ivy will creep up the exterior walls of the plant, while inside, workers will be awash in light streaming through expansive skylights. The plant will be a model of flexibility, capable of building nine varieties of cars and trucks simultaneously on one assembly line. Some of the plant's computers will be powered by fuel cells, a clean source of electricity, while the paint shop throws off one third less air pollution. Much of the backbreaking work in today's dark, four-level plant will be replaced by computerized workstations in an airy, one-story layout, with mezzanines and overhead walkways to improve safety by reducing pedestrian traffic on the factory floor. And when the lunch whistle blows, workers can dine on a rooftop patio among songbirds and other wildlife Ford expects to return to the now barren site. Ford's grand vision, which he says could take two decades to be fully realized, is for the postindustrial Rouge to become the world's new green model for manufacturing. "I would like the Rouge again to be the most copied and studied industrial complex in the world," he told NEWSWEEK. "My great-grandfather would have thought this was fantastic."

But not everyone is wild about Ford's flowers. Just as many doubted Henry Ford could build a car for the "great multitudes," the pragmatists of the 21st century find Bill Ford's fanciful notions farfetched. Sure, it's nice to grow a pretty roof, says the Sierra Club's Dan Becker, but that doesn't square with what Ford intends to roll down the assembly line. The new Rouge will start out producing pickup trucks, which belch more pollution and guzzle more gasoline than regular passenger cars. "Greening up a Ford plant to produce a pickup truck is like producing an environmentally friendly factory to make cigarettes," says Becker, who nonetheless praised Ford's promise in July to improve the gas mileage of its SUVs by 25 percent. Tougher criticism may come from Wall Street, which sometimes worries that Ford's leanings will lead his company down the garden path. Told of Ford's plan to erect an assembly plant with a living roof, Morgan Stanley auto analyst Steve Girsky paused and said: "That sounds different. What's the return on investment?"

Ford officials acknowledge their scheme for the Rouge is 10 percent more costly than erecting a traditional steel-slab structure. But the payoff comes down the road, Ford argues, in the form of more motivated, productive workers and an industrial site that requires no expensive environmental cleanups. Indeed, the living roof will suck up two inches of rainwater and let it evaporate naturally, rather than allowing it to spill onto oily parking lots and stream those toxins into the river. (Even the parking lots will be made of an ecofriendly porous pavement that absorbs water and channels it into grassy ditches among patches of mulberry bushes.) "If [Wall Street] just sees the green roof going on and the botanical gardens going in, they'll think we've lost our collective minds," says Ford. "But this isn't just an environmental issue. It's about humanizing the place for people who work there." And by employing "lean manufacturing" techniques at the plant, where no movement of parts or people is wasted, inventory costs will be slashed and productivity will improve, Ford says. Even the foliage on the walls and roof will cut the utility bill by acting as a blanket to keep the factory cool in summer and warm in winter.

The Rouge was the first auto factory Bill Ford ever visited. At 8 years old he asked his father to show him how cars were made, and William Clay Ford Sr. took him to the mighty Rouge. "I was awestruck that what started off as a bunch of parts ended up as a car," recalls Ford. Now Bill Ford faces an even more daunting task. He has to prove that he can make a factory roof green and Ford's bottom line black.

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Pivotal Discussions Aim for Resolution of Global Warming

November 13, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/13/science/13CLIM.html

After four years of tortuous negotiations, a treaty aimed at curtailing global warming faces its greatest obstacles yet in the next two weeks as officials from around the world meet in the Netherlands to tussle over the fine print.

The pivotal talks, which begin today in The Hague, come on the heels of new scientific reports with the strongest evidence so far that people, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels, have contributed substantially to a warming trend that could disrupt weather patterns, ecosystems and agriculture around the world.

The treaty, called the Kyoto Protocol, requires industrialized nations to reduce releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere.

It has been signed by representatives of more than 100 countries, including the United States, but cannot take effect until a substantial number of the industrial nations ratify it.

So far, none have done so. Most important would be the approval of the United States, far and away the world's largest producer of heat- trapping gases, and without whose participation, specialists say, the effort is bound to falter.

Even if the details can be worked out over the next two weeks, the presidential election may have further clouded the accord's future.

Gov. George W. Bush has questioned the science pointing to a warming trend caused by human activity, and he opposes the treaty, which bears the imprint of the Clinton administration - and particularly of Vice President Al Gore, who flew to the pivotal session in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 to prod feuding delegates into agreement on key points.

Mr. Bush has said, however, that he would support a requirement of some reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

If Mr. Gore wins, some treaty experts say that in a few years he might be able to build sufficient support in the Senate to approve the treaty, but it would be an uphill fight, requiring the consent of 67 of 100 members of the Senate, which with the current election is close to evenly divided.

In other countries, negotiators say, there is a great enough sense of urgency to give the sessions at The Hague a chance of success.

Pressure for action in Europe to reduce fuel use has intensified partly because of recent spikes in already high fuel prices and a string of devastating floods and storms that have been cited as a taste of what may lie ahead if the world's climate is disrupted. Other countries are feeling pressure, too, if indirectly.

"It's the bottom of the ninth, and the bases are truly loaded," said John W. Ashe, a negotiator and ambassador to the United Nations from Antigua and Barbuda, a Caribbean country of 67,000. Island nations, which are vulnerable should the melting glaciers raise sea levels, have been some of the most passionate proponents of the treaty. "It's time for countries to step up to the plate."

If enacted, the treaty would commit industrialized nations over the next 8 to 12 years to reduce their emissions by at least 5 percent below the levels of 1990, the year chosen as the benchmark.

Developing countries, including giants like China and India, would pledge to seek emissions limits in the future, but would not be legally bound to do so. These countries emit far less greenhouse pollution than industrial nations now, but are expected to surpass many of them within two decades. Many American senators say this lets the developing nations off the hook.

Even as negotiations over the treaty have dragged on, emission levels of many of the world's big producers of greenhouse gases have continued to rise, particularly as economies have grown. This in turn has increased the pressure on negotiators for cheap solutions that are the least politically risky.

The United States, for instance, is producing nearly 22 percent more warming emissions now than in 1990, while under the treaty it would be required to reduce those gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

In fact, energy experts say, of the 34 industrial nations involved, only Germany and Britain have a good chance of meeting their emissions targets, and they are likely to do so because of policies that are being pursued in any case. Britain, for instance, is closing obsolete coal mines, and Germany is dismantling the grime-belching factories left behind during Communist rule in the east.

As a result, private environmental groups say there are many efforts under way to increase loopholes in the proposed treaty.

"They are trying to renegotiate the meaning of the numbers, making it easier to meet the targets," said Alden Meyer, director of government relations for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private environmental group in Washington. "The result could be we'll have a treaty, but the atmosphere would still be suffering."

As it stands, even the current treaty is seen by many climate experts and ecologists as baby steps toward addressing the effects of a century in which fuels were burned with abandon. And much remains to be done before it can take effect.

The United States disagrees sharply with other countries on central points of the accord - like how to penalize nations that fail to reach targets and whether to give credit for shifts away from coal and oil that involve alternatives like nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams or new systems that burn a dirty fuel, coal, with fewer emissions.

The United States, which potentially stands to face the greatest economic cost from cutting emissions, is one of several countries that think nothing should be rejected out of hand. It, for instance, along with Australia and other countries with lots of open space, prefers allowing more credits for efforts to sop up carbon dioxide by planting trees, while more crowded European countries want to limit this option.

Such disagreements and the politics surrounding the conference, many participants in the negotiations say, are helping to make the forthcoming sessions in The Hague a make-or-break effort.

The thousands of delegates and observers gathering in the Netherlands represent agendas as varied as the geography, economies and cultures of the countries from which they come.

There are Washington lobbyists representing oil-producing kingdoms who have succeeded for years in slowing the treaty with challenges aimed in part at compensating their clients once the world begins to wean itself away from petroleum.

There are European lawyers representing low-lying island nations and those of other poor countries seeking a range of payments to help fend off rising seas and to absorb other effects of climate change.

There are environmental campaigners who plan to build a dike of sandbags around the conference hall to illustrate the threat of future flooding.

And in the middle of all this are more than 160 national delegations, many of which have formed negotiating blocs.

The list of differences over differences and details is enough to dizzy the most seasoned negotiator, participants said.

The 15 nations of the European Union, pressed by an influential Green movement, are insisting on strict limits on how much credit a country can gain by investing in emissions-cutting projects abroad. Their goal is to have most cuts occur on home soil, through increased energy efficiency or by replacing old coal-fired power plants with clean- energy sources like windmills.

In contrast, the United States seeks to be able to spend money on emissions reductions wherever they can be done most cheaply, and to harness market forces through a global trading system for carbon dioxide similar to an American system for reducing sulfur pollution that causes acid rain.

Another key dispute is over how much forests can be used to gain credits for absorbing carbon dioxide. Environmental groups and the Europeans oppose large-scale use of this tactic, saying that planting trees where others have been cut down results in no net carbon reduction and that preserving one forest may simply prompt the cutting of another forest somewhere else.

Also, critics say, forests are not a secure repository because the carbon dioxide can easily be freed up d by fires, assault from pests or as climate shifts occur.

The United States, in turn, has criticized the European position on penalties for failure to meet targets. Europe proposes a simple cash payment for each ton of carbon dioxide missed.

But American negotiators, and some environmental campaigners, say this would allow nations simply to buy their way out of legal obligations. "Some rivers in Europe have schemes where you pay to pollute," said Fred Krupp, the executive director of Environmental Defense, a private group. "On this point," he said, "they are for ripping the teeth out of" the treaty.

The United States has proposed penalties in the form of larger subsequent cuts in greenhouse gases - essentially payment with interest. But critics say that this would simply put off the emissions reductions.

To take effect, the protocol must be ratified by any combination of industrialized countries with combined 1990 greenhouse emissions of 55 percent of the industrial world's total. This could happen without the United States, which accounted for 36 percent of total emissions in 1990.

The European Union, with 24.2 percent of emissions, has said that it might seek an alliance with Russia, at 17.4 percent, and Japan (8.5 percent), and so reach the threshold for the treaty to go into force. Still, many participants say, the effort is bound to falter if the world's largest source of greenhouse pollutants does not sign on.

For now, at least, the leader of the American negotiating team, Frank E. Loy, under secretary of state for global affairs, said he is committed to seeking changes in The Hague that produce real cuts in greenhouse gases that are affordable and fair, and thus acceptable to the Senate.

In an interview last week, Mr. Loy said that the strengthening scientific evidence behind the greenhouse effect will help build support for the treaty in Congress, as will recent decisions by companies like Ford, Shell, Polaroid and DuPont to press ahead with cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to create new pollution-free technologies.

"With the increasing clarity of the science and increasing participation of the business community," he said, "it gets clearer and clearer that no administration is going to be able to ignore this issue."

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Texas currently incarcerates 220,000 people -- the second-highest number after California
The Prison Paradox While America puts more and more young blacks and Hispanics in jail, the neighborhoods they leave behind grow even more unstable. Inside the tangled culture of the Prison Generation-and what can be done to try to reclaim lost lives

MSNBC
11/13/00
By Ellis Cose NEWSWEEK
http://www.msnbc.com/news/485480.asp

Nov. 13 issue - Growing up, she never much thought of the law, but of late she has thought of little else.

AN ATTRACTIVE, well-coifed woman of 44 given to conservative suits and sweeping statements, Toylean Johnson has immersed herself in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure the way some people bury themselves in the Bible. Johnson, however, is not a lawyer; she's a hardworking single mom who has watched one male relative after another carted off to jail. Her brother is serving hard time in Louisiana. Readell, her oldest son, 25, is doing a 17-year hitch in Texas. A youth she took in when his own mother was imprisoned is serving a four-year term. Only through luck and Johnson's perseverance have her two youngest sons, 23 and 18-arrested but not yet locked down for the long haul-escaped the fate of so many of their peers. Johnson, a senior support specialist at a Houston medical center, estimates her legal fees and other prison-related costs in the neighborhood of $50,000 and rising. Her dilapidated home with its paint-starved paneling only hints at how difficult this period has been. She has taken out a second mortgage, drained her savings and cashed out her retirement. She has acquaintances whom prison has left similarly strapped. "I personally know of at least 40 or 50 kids... who are either locked up, who've been in prison and are back on the street or on paper [parole]," she says. "All of my kids' friends have been arrested at one point, place or time for something or little of nothing."

At a time when the country enjoys record prosperity, when even many of those once on welfare are working, this is the America the good times have left behind...

Her calm tone cannot hide her bitterness. And her perspective is the dominant one in Sunnyside, a rundown area south of downtown Houston filled with weeds, ramshackle homes, churches-and the unmistakable scent of neglect. It is a place, like so many in urban America, within spitting distance of and yet isolated from the mainstream middle class; a place where dreams of affluence compete with the reality of poverty and where the police seem as likely to harass as to help. At a time when the country enjoys record prosperity, when even many of those once on welfare are working, this is the America the good times have left behind: neighborhoods where prison time can seem as inevitable as the rain, and only the lucky ones escape the storm. "Before you know it, you're caught in the system," says Johnson, "and you don't get a second chance."

Never before have so many Americans-roughly 14 million-faced the likelihood of imprisonment at some point in their lives. Some 2 million are currently behind bars. Due to sentencing reforms and stiffened criminal penalties (especially for drug abuse), more people than ever are serving longer terms. In Texas the total inmate population has grown nearly 500 percent in less than a quarter of a century. Upwards of 220,000 people are incarcerated there. Only the much larger state of California (with 240,000 prisoners) has more residents locked down than the Lone Star State. And though California's total prison population dipped slightly for the first time in decades this year, it seems poised to resume its upward climb. Fearful of the emergence of young so-called super-predators, Californians this March passed an initiative targeting underage offenders. As a result, in the next five years the state will send an estimated 5,600 youths to adult prisons who normally would have gone to the Youth Authority or county jails.

The general trend extends far beyond California and Texas. America's rate of imprisonment is the highest on the planet, since we recently passed Russia, our only real rival, according to an analysis last month by Washington's nonprofit Sentencing Project. We have become, to put it bluntly, a nation of jailers. And for that we are literally paying a steep price. Between 1985 and 1996, total expenditures on state-prison activities more than doubled, going from just under $13 billion to over $27 billion. We are also paying in less apparent ways, in the currency of lost human connections, including those between parent and child. Two percent of America's children must now visit prison to see Mom or Dad.

No one is seriously suggesting that America throw open the jailhouse door. Victims have a right to justice. And any society must protect itself from those who would rob, rape and otherwise violate the innocent; so prison will always have a place in a civilized world. But what happens when incarceration is so widely used that it becomes a powerful cultural force in itself? When it shapes millions of Americans' lives, and affects the outlook (and stability) of entire communities? One need look no farther than Sunnyside to get some sense of what that means.

Santino, Toylean Johnson's 23-year-old son, was first picked up in 1996, on an aggravated-robbery charge. The case (rooted, Santino claims, in mistaken identity) was eventually dropped, but not before Santino lost his security-guard job after spending two months in jail. In his next run-in with the law, Santino was charged with assaulting and intimidating a witness. It took Toylean three weeks to raise the money to pay his $30,000 bond. This case also went no-where. But by then Toylean had exhausted all her financial reserves. Meanwhile, Santino was fired yet again. "I've adapted to the possibility I could get jacked up in the legal system at any time," says Santino. "That's the way I live."

"Growing up in other neighborhoods, you probably are used to taking a vacation for a week or two with your family. But right here our vacation is when you get locked up." - GERARDO LOPEZ former member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang

That fatalistic attitude is not at all peculiar to Santino-or to Texas. "Growing up in other neighborhoods, you probably are used to taking a vacation for a week or two with your family. But right here our vacation is when you get locked up," says Gerardo Lopez, a 22-year-old former member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang of Los Angeles who now works with Homies Unidos, a group that counsels young men from the streets. "Law enforcement wants there to be an endless stream of kids going back and forth to prison. They don't want us to get along. That would be an end to the overtime for them," says Hector, founder and director of No Guns, a gang-outreach program in Los Angeles.

No doubt the vast majority of police and prosecutors are committed to fairness and evenhanded justice. But the deeply held sense that the forces of the law are arrayed against them has led many young men-and, increasingly, young women-to adopt a certain blase bravado about committing crimes and doing time. Robert Naranjo, a counselor for No Guns who spent much of his youth in trouble with the law, recalls, "Prison was no big deal for me or for my neighborhood. My cousins were all incarcerated... My aunt took pride in my cousin coming out of Tehachapi [state prison]. He came out built."

In some neighborhoods, prison has become such a part of the routine that going in can be an opportunity for reconnecting with friends. A onetime drug dealer from Maryland recalls his panic upon conviction. Having heard horror stories about young men abused inside, he fretted over how he would fend off attacks. Once behind bars, he discovered that the population consisted largely of buddies from the 'hood. Instead of something to fear, prison "was like a big camp," he says.

For Shawna McNeil, a 27-year-old former crack user, incarceration was a break from a troubled life. She went to prison in Pennsylvania after setting fire to a building because the landlord had put her out. She now recalls her time behind bars as "the best two years of my life; three hots and a cot. I didn't have a care in the world." She did miss her three children, she concedes, but she refused to let them visit: "I didn't want them to see me being dragged out of the visiting room."

After release, McNeil found her way to CBC Career Institute, a Philadelphia program that prepares people for entry-level jobs. Most of its students are not ex-offenders; they are more likely to be welfare recipients trying to make the transition to the work world. Yet even for those students who don't have records, prison seems an all-but-unavoidable presence.

One recent evening, sociologist Elijah Anderson visited a CBC class and asked whether any students knew people in jail. Practically every hand went up. "Every other guy on the block has been to jail," said one young woman. And women get involved with such men at their peril. "They don't want you to succeed," one participant explained.

Anderson worries about prison culture and its values contaminating entire communities, making it difficult for even the best-intentioned parents to protect their children. Dina Rose, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has an even broader set of concerns. In high-crime communities that are socially isolated and racially segregated, she fears that locking up ever more people may be so damaging to neighborhood social cohesion that it destabilizes the very areas it is supposed to make safe.

Rose has done her most extensive fieldwork in Tallahassee, Fla. With colleagues Todd Clear, Kristen Scully and Judith Ryder, she has focused on some of the city's most crime-ridden areas, including Frenchtown, a onetime community of black "freedmen" that dates back to the 1840s.

"I don't think you're going to find anybody in the neighborhood who doesn't have a relative who's in prison or been in prison." - KENNETH BARBER Frenchtown native

Long caught in an economic free fall, Frenchtown has lost its once funky charm. The blocklong stretch of Macomb Street where Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and other big names made music into the wee hours of the morning is today an empty, grass-covered lot. The neighborhood's young professionals are long gone, their place taken, in large measure, by convicted felons. Some longtime residents reckon that about 5 percent of the community's combined population goes in and out of prison on a revolving-door basis. That estimate is borne out by gender ratios: in one Frenchtown area identified by Rose and Clear, males made up barely 43 percent of the area's 1,579 residents-a statistic attesting to the high rate of imprisonment among the neighborhood's young men. "I don't think you're going to find anybody in the neighborhood who doesn't have a relative who's in prison or been in prison," says Kenneth Barber, a Frenchtown native who served four years on a 1972 heroin-dealing conviction. "If most of the men in the community are incarcerated, you leave women to be community leaders and raise the families when it should be the other way around."

In parts of Frenchtown, Rose and her colleagues theorize, incarceration has reached a tipping point-that dangerous locus at which new arrests no longer reduce crime but drive the crime rate up. The reason, they conjecture, is that arresting huge numbers of people so disrupts the social network that community ties crumble and therefore can no longer keep crime in check. Rose&Co. estimate the mathematical tipping point in the areas they have studied to be in the vicinity of 1 to 1.5 percent. That is to say, up to the point where 1 percent or more of a community's residents are imprisoned per year, locking people up seems to drive the crime rate down. But once that point is reached, the crime rate goes in the opposite direction.

Speculative and preliminary though their conclusions are (and the researchers stress that they do not know precisely where the tipping point is), Rose and her colleagues find the implications troubling for a society that tends to believe tough policies alone can win the war on crime. Some people in Frenchtown share the researchers' sense of unease. If parents go to prison, "the children will follow," warns G. V. Lewis, a 49-year-old Baptist minister who works with the Florida State Commission on Human Relations. The implications of parental imprisonment stretch far beyond Frenchtown. In 1999 nearly 1.5 million children had at least one parent in state or federal prison (up from less than 1 million in 1991).

And if the high incarceration numbers aren't troubling enough, there is the painfully manifest racial component of the current prison buildup. The figures are so skewed that they even taint the good racial news, such as statistics showing black unemployment at historically low levels. If so many black men were not in jail, the unemployment numbers would be much higher, argues George Cave, an economist associated with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Once the figures are adjusted for incarceration, there has been "no enduring recovery in the employment of young black high-school dropouts," note Princeton sociologist Bruce Western and his colleague Becky Pettit of the University of Washington.

Statistics only hint at the sense of futility felt by many black and Latino men who see prison as their special preserve, who believe the predominant police function is neither to serve nor protect but to put them in cages. Santino Johnson likens the atmosphere on the street to that on the television show "Wild Kingdom," with the cops in the "king of the jungle" role and poor black men as the prey: "When the lion comes on the scene, all the antelopes run, and then it's whatever the lion wants to pick."

Police prejudice or tactics certainly cannot be blamed for all the legal troubles faced by young minority men. There is also the fact that blacks and Latinos disproportionately live in communities where desirable options seem few and where voices summoning them to their own destruction are all too plentiful. Jesse, 31, who grew up in the Midtown area of Los Angeles, found those voices irresistible. Although he was raised in a two-parent, deeply religious household, he fell in with a gang as a teenager and ended up serving time in both state and federal prisons for selling drugs.

But even when such neighborhood dynamics are taken into account, many recent studies bolster the suspicion that there is a pervasive, fundamental and race-based inequity in the system. An analysis earlier this year by the Justice Policy Institute found that white youths in the Los Angeles area were much more likely than nonwhites to be treated leniently by the criminal-justice system. Another study, by a coalition of juvenile-justice research and advocacy groups, found that nationally, in every category of offense, minority youths were more likely than whites to be waived from juvenile to adult court. Blacks also make up the vast majority (nearly two thirds) of those sent to state prison for drug offenses, though white drug users out-number them by more than five to one, according to Human Rights Watch. "You can talk all you want about individual behavior," says Los Angeles civil-rights attorney Connie Rice. "But we incarcerate poor kids for things that middle-class kids get counseling for." One reason is that middle-class kids have greater access to competent lawyers.

Toylean Johnson recounts the story of Gerald, a teenager whose mother was in prison on a drug rap. Feeling sorry for the boy, Toylean's son brought him home and Toylean didn't have the heart to turn him away. Eventually Gerald was charged in a shooting. Witnesses claimed he was nowhere near the scene at the time, but he accepted a plea bargain for a four-year term. Why? "He didn't have the money to defend the case," says Johnson.

Readell (who was recently transferred to Colorado City Prison in El Paso) is currently appealing a drug-case conviction. An admitted drug abuser, Readell got caught up in a drug sting operation because, as he tells it, he was innocently hanging out with the wrong people. Those people were in league with a crooked cop in the business of ripping off drug dealers. When the cop got busted, so did the friends and Readell. In his initial statement, the dirty cop claimed he didn't even know Readell. But when the cop pleaded guilty, his story changed. Jurors were so troubled by inconsistencies that they could not reach a verdict. On the second go-round, after deliberating for 20 minutes, a jury of 11 whites and one black convicted Readell, having heard from a string of police officers and an alleged accomplice-a five-time felon.

But even if one assumes that people like Readell are fully guilty of the crimes for which they have been convicted, does incarceration of such nonviolent criminals serve much of a purpose? As a society, our answer has been something of a collective shrug. We have no choice but to lock them up, we have said in effect, especially if we believe that they are beyond redemption.

INDEED, IN 1974 SOCIOLOGIST Robert Martinson authored a hugely influential essay that effectively endorsed that view. "What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform," published in The Public Interest, essentially concluded that nothing works, that the very idea of rehabilitation was a sham. Martinson's article was so influential because, among other things, it reflected the spirit of the time-a frustration with coddling wrongdoers, an anger at the spiraling crime rate. The same spirit spawned New York's so-called Rockefeller laws, harsh measures that gave hard time to those involved with drugs. That early salvo in the nation's war on drugs set the stage for much of the legislation that was to come. Martinson's gloomy analysis provided much of the intellectual rationale. By 1979 Martinson had changed his mind, but the hard-line movement that his early ideas informed had taken on a life of its own.

The targets of that movement-America's criminal class-did not vanish behind bars never to be seen again. More than 585,000 inmates will be released this year, up from 424,000 in 1990, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. And some of them are better for the experience. Deforest Simmons, a former drug abuser who has spent 13 of his 48 years in various Florida prisons, credits time behind bars with turning his life around. Out of prison for more than a year and drug-free for six, Simmons, now a freelance home-improvement consultant, says prison "was a basis for me to change. I was able to reacquire... discipline during my time in prison." But for every ex-inmate who talks of prison as a valuable turning point, there are a hundred others who see it as a way station to a ruined life. As Chito, a former Los Angeles gangbanger, observes, "Going in and out of jail... makes you hate yourself. It makes you bitter."

What happens as those embittered souls return to society? And can we somehow stop from adding millions to their ranks? Such questions were conspicuously neglected by the major-party presidential candidates this year, but they cannot be ignored forever. Motivated by apprehension, logic, compassion and love, Americans across the political landscape are searching for answers. Some are even trying to resurrect the idea of rehabilitation.

After studying programs at prisons in five different states, Ann Chih Lin, a political scientist and University of Michigan professor, has concluded that rehabilitation can work. In a new book Lin suggests that effective programs require the support of both prisoners and staff. And they don't simply teach job skills, but also assist in reintegrating individuals into a society that has become foreign. That might call for planning, years in advance, for inmates' eventual release-and putting them in touch with institutions and people on the outside who expect them to do something other than steal or smoke crack once they get out.

A host of transition programs already exist outside prison walls. They tend to be run by social workers, religious groups, prisoner advocates and, in some cases, ex-cons themselves. Bodega de la Familia, a nonprofit organization on New York's Lower East Side, works not just with ex-offenders but with their families. Bodega's leaders are convinced that the entire family of an ex-offender needs help-and that close relatives can provide an anchor that a solitary parole officer cannot.

Other programs attempt to intervene before prison (or death) has claimed another young life. In 1998, in a violence-plagued Chicago West Side community where gang violence is pervasive and incarceration is routine, the Chicago Boys and Girls Club and Mount Sinai Hospital jointly launched Within Our Reach. Dr. Leslie Zun had grown weary of seeing victims of violence (generally gang-related) carried into his hospital. So he collaborated with Boys and Girls Club consultant Jodi Rosen to take advantage of those young patients at a particularly vulnerable moment in their lives-at the point when they were literally lying on their backs, recovering from their wounds, and (he hoped) ready to re-examine their lives. While still in the hospital, willing participants undergo a lengthy interview and evaluation process. A caseworker aggressively tracks them for several months and tries to engage them in productive activities, such as job training, while helping to steel them against the voices in the street summoning them to their own destruction.

EVEN PROSECUTORS AND judges are grappling with ways to turn things around. In June the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals proposed help rather than prison for thousands of nonviolent drug addicts. If the proposal works as planned, low-level offenders will get rigorous inpatient drug treatment. If they stay clean, they can avoid incarceration. "It's a shame they have to come to us for intervention. But we've got them. And we know we can help them," said Judge Judith Kaye.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., the Kings County District Attorney's Office, in collaboration with a wide array of social-service providers and law-enforcement agencies, has launched a prison-reclamation effort of its own. The initiative, quarterbacked by Deputy District Attorney Patricia Gatling, arose from concern that crime was rising in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods even though it was down overall. The D.A.'s office concluded that two factors were responsible: gang activity and the re-entry of thousands of ex-cons. "These were individuals who had no access [to resources]... coming from communities that were not stable, going back to those same communities," observes Gatling. ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together) tries to connect ex-cons with help for drug addiction, job counseling, "whatever it takes," says Gatling, to bring some stability to their lives. And for convicted gang members, who would otherwise be serving sentences of 40 years to life, it offers a precious second chance to get on track. Though the program started small (with 17 gang members and roughly 300 ex-offenders), Gatling has ambitious plans for expansion. "I have 3,000 people returning to Brooklyn every year," she says. "I've got to get in gear." She sees the program eventually touching most of those 3,000 lives, as well as reaching inside prison walls-beginning the process of reintegration before the felon is released. "This will break the cycle of recidivism," says Gatling, who points out it might also save the state money. (It can cost up to $71,000 a year to house an inmate in New York's Rikers Island.) It also, in Gatling's view, recognizes a simple reality: "You can't incarcerate your way out of the crime problem."

Canada came to that realization early. In the 1980s the Correctional Service of Canada redefined its mandate. It now defines its job not primarily as punishing people but as safely reintegrating of-fenders back into the community as law-abiding citizens. Under its philosophy of reintegration, Canada's recidivism rate has dropped to less than half of what it was two decades ago. "If we became harsher... we actually think that it would prevent us from dealing with the factors that lead to more offenses later on," says Ole Ingstrup, Canada's commissioner of corrections, who instead advocates what he calls "the restorative model."

Canada's style, of course, is not ours. We believe in making people pay for their crimes, in protecting the weak from the vicious. We believe in justice. And we believe in simple truths. So much so that we might find it hard to accept this complex possibility: that our strivings to protect society may have weakened it. At the very least, our policies have arguably hurt certain communities. But they may also be doing deeper damage, for they fuel the notion that we can afford to throw human beings away. And they discourage us from asking whether it is morally or economically justifiable to invest so much in locking lost souls down and so little in salvaging them. In fact, a strategy of human reclamation may be the only thing that makes sense in the long run, not only for those fated to spend time locked down, but for the communities to which they seem destined to return-communities that now are doubly damned: to suffer when wrongdoers are taken away and yet again when they come back.

With Vern E. Smith, Ana Figueroa, Victoria Scanlan Stefanakos and Joseph Contreras

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Court to Study Force Used by Police

New York Times
November 13, 2000 Filed at 7:14 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scotus-Excessive-Force.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court entered the debate over police brutality Monday, agreeing to clarify when officers can be held legally responsible for using excessive force while making an arrest.

The Clinton administration says a lower court ruling means police officers ``in many cases, may use no force at all'' in arresting someone. The justices agreed to hear the government's bid to throw out an animal-rights activist's lawsuit against an officer who arrested him during a 1994 speech by Vice President Al Gore.

``This case boils down to whether it's going to be a judge or jury who decides whether police used excessive force,'' said attorney J. Kirk Boyd, representing activist Elliot Katz, who was arrested when he unfurled a banner during Gore's speech on a military post.

The justices' decision, expected next year, is likely to be of great importance to police forces nationwide.

High-profile allegations of abuse have been made in recent years against police departments in cities including New York City and Los Angeles. This month, Los Angeles officials agreed to make changes aimed at eliminating brutality and other abuses and to accept an independent monitor of the city's police department.

The court said it will review rulings that would allow a jury to hear Katz's lawsuit against military police officer Donald Saucier.

Saucier, an Army private, was serving as a military policeman at a Sept. 24, 1994, ceremony at the Presidio military post in San Francisco to celebrate the facility's imminent conversion from an Army base to a national recreation area.

Katz, a 60-year-old veterinarian and president of the group In Defense of Animals, had a seat near the speakers' stage. As Gore spoke, Katz unfurled a 4 foot-by-3 foot banner that said ``Please Keep Animal Torture Out of Our National Parks.''

Katz contends in his civil suit that Saucier and another MP grabbed him and escorted him to a military van and ``violently threw'' him inside. He was not hurt, and he later was released without being charged with violating any law or regulation.

A federal trial judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided a jury should hear Katz' argument that Saucier violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizures. They said Saucier was not entitled to ``qualified immunity'' from being sued.

The appeals court said the test for deciding whether such claims can go to trial is whether the force used during an arrest was reasonable, the same test that a jury later would use in deciding the case on its merits.

Justice Department lawyers said the appeals court ``has effectively held that, in cases like this, officers are prohibited from using any force at all to make an arrest.''

The government lawyers said qualified immunity is intended to protect officers from being sued unless they are ``plainly incompetent'' or knowingly violate the law. Courts generally should defer to the ``split-second decisions'' by officers on the street, Justice Department lawyers said.

Boyd, the lawyer representing Katz, said such questions should be decided by a jury, not by a judge who is asked to dismiss a case before trial.

``There will always be brutality issues,'' Boyd said. ``The question is, who's going to decide in a free society whether police have abused their power.''

The Supreme Court last year agreed to resolve the issue in a similar case, but the case was settled out of court.

The case granted review Monday is Saucier v. Katz, 99-1977.

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Court to study forced used by police

USA Today
11/13/00
http://usatoday.com/news/court/nsco1426.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to clarify when police officers can be held legally responsible for using excessive force while arresting someone.

The court's decision, expected sometime in 2001, is likely to be of great importance to police forces nationwide.

Granting a Clinton administration appeal, the justices said they will consider whether to throw out a civil-rights lawsuit against a military police officer accused of using excessive force to arrest a demonstrator during a speech by Vice President Al Gore.

The court said it will review rulings that would allow animal-rights activist Elliot Katz's lawsuit against Donald Saucier to reach a jury.

Saucier, an Army private, was serving as an MP at a Sept. 24, 1994, ceremony at the Presidio military post in San Francisco to celebrate the facility's conversion from an Army base to a national park.

Katz, a 60-year-old veterinarian and president of the group In Defense of Animals, had arrived at the event early and obtained a seat close to the speakers' stage.

As Gore was speaking, Katz removed a 4-foot by 3-foot banner from his jacket and unfurled it so Gore and others on the stage could see it. The banner read,

''Please Keep Animal Torture Out of Our National Parks.''

According to Katz's lawsuit, Saucier and another MP grabbed him and escorted him to a military van and ''violently threw'' him inside. He was not hurt.

Katz was taken to a military police station and briefly detained. He was released without being charged with violating any law or regulation.

A federal trial judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to dismiss Katz's lawsuit b