------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
U.S. says nuclear materials secured in Russia
Cauley & Geller, LLP Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against USEC, Inc.
Report says tritium confined to one area
Gore made flip-flop on nuclear power use

MILITARY
Colombian Rebels Urged to Resume Talks
DRCNet Issue #160,
Researchers Develop Way to ID Coke Origin
Ontario to Drug Test Welfare Recipients
Calif. Initiative Could Overwhelm State Treatment Programs
U.S., Yugoslavia to Resume Relations
U.S. needs more space-based spying
An Appeal to the 'Conscience of the International Community' on Sudan
Clinton arrives for Vietnam tour
Cole Attackers Were Afghan War Vets
Shelton: Peacekeeping Missions Unavoidable
Cole Bombers Identified as Veterans of Afghan War
A Higher IQ Before the Marines Land
An Army Contract Signals a Shift From Tanks to Light Armor

OTHER
Bush Aide Hints Police are Better Peacekeepers Than Military
New Jersey: Racial Profiling Documents to Be Released
Carnivore Can Read Everything

ACTIVISTS
After Monday's clash, protests look quiet



------- NUCLEAR

-------- russia

U.S. says nuclear materials secured in Russia

Excite News
Updated 4:22 PM ET November 17, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/r/001117/16/energy-nuclear

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy said Friday that 10 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials, enough to make 500 nuclear bombs, is now secured at a central storage facility in Siberia, as part of a joint U.S.-Russian program to prevent theft by terrorists.

"Today's announcement shows the continuing commitment of the U.S. and Russia to reduce the risk that terrorists or countries of proliferation concern might acquire nuclear materials for use in a weapon," said U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

The materials were moved from three separate storage locations to the central site at the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant in Siberia. That site contains comprehensive nuclear material and accounting systems.

The systems were put in place as part of the U.S.-Russian Material Protection, Control and Accounting (MPC&A) program, an effort designed by the two nations to protect hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium against theft.

MPC&A was launched in 1993 in partnership with Russia and the New Independent States to correct deficiencies in systems to secure nuclear materials.

The Energy Department said security upgrades were underway for 750 metric tons of the estimated 960 metric tons of nuclear materials requiring security.

The main point of the program, according to the agency, is to install modern physical security and material accounting systems; reduce risks by consolidating materials into fewer buildings; and converting highly enriched uranium into forms not usable in nuclear weapons.


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

-------- kentucky

Cauley & Geller, LLP Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against USEC, Inc.

Excite News
November 17, 2000
http://news.excite.com/news/bw/001117/fl-cauley-geller-law

BOCA RATON, Fla. (BUSINESS WIRE) - The Law Firm of Cauley & Geller, LLP announced today that it has filed a class action in the United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky on behalf of all individuals and institutional investors that purchased the common stock of USEC, Inc. ("USEC" or the "Company") (NYSE:USU) in or traceable to the Company's Initial Public Offering ("IPO") on July 23, 1998 and including all purchasers of the common stock from July 23, 1998 through December 2, 1999 (the "Class Period").

The complaint charges that the Company and certain of its officers and directors violated the federal securities laws by providing materially false and misleading information about the Company's business, and as a result of these false and misleading statements the Company's stock traded at artificially inflated prices during the class period. Specifically, the complaint alleges that statements made in connection with the IPO were materially false and misleading because they misrepresented and failed to disclose adverse material facts which were in existence at the time of the IPO, such as (1) the market for enriched uranium was in severe decline and as a result, placed the Company in a precarious position regarding previously entered into purchase contracts, and (2) the operation of the Gaseous Diffusion Plants was not economically viable and the Company was saddled with a money-losing contract that required it to buy Russian uranium at (what would soon be) above-market prices in a market where the primary customers for enriched uranium-nuclear power plants were reducing their purchases of uranium and were not required to pay more than market prices.

Cauley & Geller, LLP has substantial experience representing investors in securities fraud class action lawsuits such as this. The firm has offices in Florida, Arkansas and California, but represents shareholders from throughout the nation. If you have any questions about how you may be able to recover for your losses, or if you would like to consider serving as one of the lead plaintiffs in this lawsuit, you must meet certain requirements and take appropriate action by January 6, 2001. You are encouraged to call or e-mail the Firm or visit the Firm's website at www.classlawyer.com.

Contact: Cauley & Geller, LLP, Boca Raton Sue Null or Charlie Gastineau Toll Free: 1-888/551-9944 E-mail: info@classlawyer.com

-------- washington

Report says tritium confined to one area
The Energy Department offers few specifics on the contamination on the Hanford burial site

Oregon Live
Friday, November 17, 2000
From The Associated Press http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/news/oregonian/00/11/nw_61triti17.frame

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Ground water contaminated with radioactive tritium appears confined to an area on the edge of an old burial site for high-level waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the U.S. Department of Energy said Thursday.

Although the specific source of the tritium remains unknown, it is believed to be coming from the bottomless pipes and drums used to store waste in the 618-11 burial ground, 31/2 miles from the Columbia River in south-central Washington.

"There appears to be no imminent risk to the river," said John Morse, an Energy Department ground-water manager.

Thursday's report updates an ongoing investigation of the contamination. Energy Department representatives were unable to say how extensive the tritium contamination is, how fast it might be moving and when it might reach the river.

Ground water at Hanford can take five to 30 years to migrate to the river.

"We'd like some answers soon," said Mike Goldstein, remedial project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Energy Department was still unable to offer an explanation for why bottomless containers were used to store nuclear waste in the burial ground.

"We're dealing with what we have rather than speculate on what was done," said Beth Bilson, a Energy Department assistant manager for environmental restoration and waste management.

The burial ground is west of Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear power plant and about 10 miles from Richland.

The 8.6-acre site was used from 1962 to '67 to dispose of radioactive waste from fuel fabrication for Hanford reactors and research testing of plutonium and nuclear fuel.

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that poses a cancer risk when ingested. Hanford produced it to boost the explosive yield of nuclear warheads.

Samples taken from a well in January showed tritium levels of 8 million picocuries per liter of water, 400 times above the federal limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter for drinking water. Another sample taken in August showed a level of 7 million picocuries per liter.

The well also is in the path of a huge tritium plume stretching from the 200 Area in the central part of the 560-square-mile reservation to the Columbia River.

An October sample taken about 80 yards from the burial ground and what would be downstream of the ground-water flow showed a contamination level of 1.5 million picocuries per liter.

Another sample taken on the burial ground's northern edge showed 6,000 picocuries per liter, suggesting to investigators the contamination was confined to the area where the bottomless drums and pipes are buried.

The radioactivity of tritium decays by half every 12.3 years.

The 618-11 burial ground is scheduled for cleanup after 2010, but records for the area are incomplete, so technological limitations and worker safety issues prevent crews from simply going in and using a backhoe to dig up the containers now.

The next step is to determine what, if any, interim action is needed, Bilson said. The Energy Department is prepared to act immediately if necessary, said Wade Ballard, the department's manager for assistant planning and integration.

-------- us nuc politics

Gore made flip-flop on nuclear power use

November 17, 2000
By Patrice Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/business/default-200011172247.htm

Vice President Al Gore made a last-minute concession to environmentalists just before the election to oppose any increased use of nuclear power to comply with the global-warming treaty.

The change appears aimed not only at appeasing environmentalists, but bridging differences with European nations who oppose the use of nuclear power to comply with the treaty, which Mr. Gore was instrumental in drafting in Kyoto, Japan, three years ago.

Yet, by taking away one major option for American companies to meet the stiff emissions cuts required under the treaty, Senate aides say the move will only harden opposition to the treaty in the Senate, where ratification has long been in doubt.

Nuclear-power plants do not emit the gas that many scientists say is the chief cause of a recent warming of the earth's atmosphere: carbon dioxide. For that reason, the Clinton administration previously said that U.S. companies should be able to help Third World countries build nuclear-power plants as a way of complying with the treaty.

Environmentalists stridently oppose the U.S. position, however, and in states such as Oregon and Washington, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader tapped into that opposition to siphon away votes from Mr. Gore - prompting the Democratic candidate's apparent reversal on Nov. 3.

"I do not support any increased reliance on nuclear energy," Mr. Gore stated in a one-paragraph letter to Harvey Wasserman of the Nuclear Information and Resources Center. The letter states what he called his "long-held policy" on nuclear power.

"I have disagreed with those who would classify nuclear energy as clean or renewable" not only for purposes of the global-warming treaty, but as part of any federal legislation to restructure the electricity industry, he said.

The anti-nuclear environmental group is trumpeting Mr. Gore's letter as a change of heart. The administration's chief negotiator at The Hague, Netherlands, where details of the treaty are being finalized this week, appeared to confirm the change.

"We have long had concerns about nuclear energy. Those concerns relate to safety, waste disposal, nonproliferation, costs and public acceptance," said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David B. Sandalow.

Aides to Mr. Gore said he has no plans to attend the negotiations at The Hague that started this week and continue through Dec. 1.

But they did not rule out a last-minute appearance like the one he made in Kyoto that enabled negotiators to clinch agreement on the sweeping emissions-reductions requirements of the treaty.

The nuclear question is one of the top issues that must be resolved if The Hague negotiations are to succeed. The United States in the past has pushed for as much flexibility as possible to make it easier for companies in the United States to achieve the drastic one-third cut in emissions required by the treaty.

Another important measure at stake in the negotiations is the use of forests and other green spaces to comply with the treaty. The world's vast forests absorb much of the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and cars, and the U.S. is advocating reforestation as a way of complying with the treaty.

Under the administration's negotiating position, the United States could achieve half of the 600 million tons of carbon reductions it must achieve each year under the treaty simply by protecting its existing forests. Australia, Canada, Japan and many Latin American nations with large rain forests have aligned themselves with the United States.

The European Union, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and other major environmental groups are strongly opposed, however, arguing at The Hague this week that Americans are trying to get away with doing very little to curb their voracious appetite for cars and electricity. The U.S. uses about one quarter of the world's energy.

Environmentalists appear to be split over the issue, however. The Union of Concerned Scientists yesterday released a statement signed by 110 environmental researchers, including a Nobel Prize winner, saying forests should be counted as carbon "sinks" under the treaty.

They said it would help to protect endangered rain forests from the logging and clear-cutting that are the biggest threats facing the Amazon in Brazil and Orinoco basin in Venezuela. Those dense forests are sometimes called "the lungs of the planet" because they absorb so much carbon.

Peter Frumhoff of the scientists' union, a specialist on the role that forests play in trapping carbon emissions, said the treaty should be used to preserve and enlarge forests if only because a quarter of the carbon build-up in the atmosphere each year is caused by burning and deforestation, mostly of rain forests.

"Since forests are 25 percent of the problem, they ought to be a major part of the solution," he said, though he added that the rules should be stricter than the "business as usual" forestry practices being advocated by the United States.

Europeans and environmentalists also took a hard stand at The Hague this week against a U.S. proposal to allow countries like the United States to buy "credits" for emissions reductions from countries like Russia, which already is well below its emissions target because of a collapsed economy.

"So far, I haven't seen anyone move their position by one centimeter," Raul Estrada, Argentina's environmental representative, told reporters at the negotiations.

Another major sticking point is the demand for compensation from Third World countries that produce oil and would be hit hard by the major reductions in energy use mandated by the treaty.

Saudi Arabia, one of the richest oil-producing producers, claims that it would lose $25 billion a year as a result of the treaty, and it wants reparations. "There will be no outcome if our concerns are not adequately addressed," Mohammed Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation, said at the conference.

Visit our Election 2000 page for daily election news and analysis


-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Colombian Rebels Urged to Resume Talks

Reuters
Friday , November 17, 2000
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37097-2000Nov16.html

BOGOTA, Colombia, Nov. 16 -- President Andres Pastrana, seeking to pull Colombia's peace process back from the brink of collapse, urged leftist rebels today to restart negotiations they broke off in an angry protest against his government.

"What we're hoping is that the FARC will return to the negotiating table," said Pastrana, referring to Latin America's largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

"What the Colombian people are hoping for are gestures and acts of peace from the FARC," added Pastrana, who spoke in an interview with the U.S.-based Spanish-language television network Telemundo.

Excerpts from the interview were made available by Pastrana's press office.

Pastrana, whose peace efforts have been the centerpiece of his administration, offered bold concessions to bring the 17,000-strong FARC into formal negotiations nearly two years ago.

But the talks stalled in their earliest stages, and the rebel group, which political analysts say is stronger and more recalcitrant than ever, plunged the government into crisis Tuesday by saying it was indefinitely suspending peace talks.

Blaming Pastrana, the FARC said he had failed to make good on promises to halt "terrorism" by right-wing paramilitary groups and was opening the way for a Vietnam-style, U.S. military intervention in Colombia.

Even before Tuesday, the powerful insurgency said that Pastrana's Plan Colombia anti-drug initiative would likely derail efforts to settle an increasingly brutal conflict that has taken 35,000 lives since 1990. Under the plan, which is backed by a package of $1.3 billion in mostly military aid from the United States, state security forces are preparing a major offensive against illicit drug crops and long-standing FARC strongholds in southern Colombia.

Pastrana has declared a Switzerland-sized area of Colombia's southern jungle and savanna off-limits to security forces since November 1998, to create a safe haven where rebel commanders would feel at ease as they engaged in protracted discussions about myriad problems underlying Colombia's war.

But the security forces and some of Pastrana's cabinet ministers have accused the FARC of making a mockery of the peace process by using the 16,000-square-mile enclave as a staging ground for the smuggling of drugs and arms, and for hit-and-run attacks across the country.

Pastrana, who has been widely criticized as weak and naive, has a self-imposed Dec. 7 deadline to decide whether to extend the land-for-peace deal. If he chooses to reassert government authority over the demilitarized zone by dispatching troops to oust deeply entrenched FARC fighters, it would likely sound the death knell for his peace efforts.

Underscoring the seriousness of that decision, and of possible bipartisan efforts to get negotiations with the FARC back on track, government officials announced late today that Pastrana was postponing a planned official visit later this month to Germany, Norway and Sweden.

-------- drug war

DRCNet Issue #160,
11/17/00
http://www.drcnet.org/drcreg.html

Articles of a purely educational nature in The Week Online appear courtesy of the DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.

1. Interview: Federal Judge Denounces Drug War

Judge Scott O. Wright, a Senior Federal Circuit Court Judge for the Western District of Missouri, this week joined the ranks of drug war critics on the federal bench. Wright stands alongside luminaries like Jack Weinstein, Robert Sweet and John Kane in utilizing his standing on the bench as a bully pulpit to call for drug policy change.

Last Sunday, Wright accepted an invitation to give the keynote speech at the Kansas City Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee's human relations awards banquet.

He took that opportunity to hurl thunderbolts at the nation's drug policies, telling a receptive audience that the war on drugs "is destroying our inner city communities," and denouncing mandatory minimum sentencing, asset forfeiture abuses, and the "annihilation" of Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures.

Wright, a Nebraska native, served as a Marine Corps aviator during World War II before obtaining a law degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1950. His legal career alternated between private practice and stints as a prosecuting attorney. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and served as chief judge from 1985 to 1990. He assumed senior judge status in 1991.

The Week Online interviewed Judge Wright on Wednesday. Here are excerpts from that interview:

WOL: What inspired you to speak out on drug policy?

Judge Wright: I sit on the bench and see that the overwhelming majority of the people I sentence are minorities. In all of these cases, it's a black or a Mexican or a Latino these drug agents nail. I can't believe there aren't any white people carrying drugs. When they nail these people, I have to think they're engaged in racial profiling. It's the same damn thing with the Highway Patrol. In every case where defendants were stopped on the highways, they've been minorities.

This has been grinding around in my head for a long time, so when I was invited to make a speech, I just unloaded. I've talked about this for some time, but who cares what a federal judge says? And my wife is tired of hearing about it, so I thought this was a chance to say publicly these things I've been concerned about for a long time.

WOL: In your speech last Sunday, you went out of your way to criticize mandatory minimum sentences. What's wrong with them?

Judge Wright: Don't get me wrong, it's not that these people may not deserve some time in jail, but these mandatory minimums are just draconian. I hate drugs and I recognize that drugs are a real problem, but these people are nonviolent criminals.

These sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums leave all the power in the hands of the US Attorneys. They are the only ones who can file for a downward departure [a sentence below the mandatory minimum], and they do so only when someone is cooperating. That's not all bad, because lesser offenders can help nail someone up the ladder. But if someone has no information with which to bargain, the US Attorneys won't file the departure and the judge is stuck with the mandatory minimums. It is worst in the cases of these drug mules. They may not have any previous convictions and they may not even know what or how much they're carrying, but they get hammered by the mandatory minimums while the guys who are supplying them get off scot-free.

WOL: Have you attempted to sentence defendants to terms you thought were just but were beneath the mandatory minimum?

Judge Wright: Oh, yes, I've done that. Then the US Attorneys appeal, and the Court of Appeals reverses me. That's the law, but in a lot of these cases, the law is an ass.

WOL: Have you ever succeeded in getting around the mandatory minimums?

Judge Wright: Rarely. There was one case where a guy was operating a crack house, a big operation. When the police went in with a warrant, there were two guys outside selling rocks. They were addicts, just selling enough to keep themselves supplied. The crack house owner cooperated and got a downward departure from the US Attorney. He got 18 months. The two guys outside, however, the US Attorneys charged them with conspiracy and made them liable for all the drugs in the house, with mandatory minimum 10-year sentences. I said, "I'm not going to do that." I only found them liable for the drugs they had on them.

WOL: And what happened on appeal?

Judge Wright: The US Attorneys did not appeal. The case was so inequitable that even they didn't want to fight me on it.

WOL: What would you recommend in terms of reforming drug policy?

Judge Wright: Look, we've been at this for years and we're not getting anywhere. We're just putting a bunch of people in jail, while drugs are just as plentiful as ever. Again, let me say I think drugs are bad and it is sad to see these people hooked on drugs. But we can do better.

First, spend more money on treatment. I think we could get some of these people off drugs. If we spent for treatment what we spend to put people in jail, there could be some successes.

Second, we need to emphasize drug education. We need to start drug education at an early age. We need to work with children and parents so they realize the dangers. But it is the parents who are most important. Many don't seem to realize their kids are using, and that's a damned sad commentary on these parents.

WOL: Some European countries have adopted decriminalization or legalization models where, for instance, heroin addicts can have access to a legitimate supply. Would you favor something like that?

Judge Wright: I'm not saying that. When you're talking about legalization, maybe you're going a little too far. The problem is, nobody can talk about this. In the campaign, neither candidate mentioned drugs at all. They're afraid to mention it. Politicians are afraid to say the policy is wrong; they're afraid their opponents will label them "soft on drugs."

There is something of a shift, though. Look at California, where they just passed that sentencing reform initiative. It will put people into treatment instead of prison. That's a good sign, a very good sign.

WOL: Very few judges, federal or otherwise, have spoken out on this issue. Do you have any sense that your position has support among other judges?

Judge Wright: A lot of federal judges are really upset about the mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines, but they are reluctant to speak out. They ought to speak out. I talk to my fellow judges here, we have conversations over lunch, for example, and these things come up. There isn't a judge on this court who doesn't think mandatory minimums create very serious problems.

WOL: In your speech, you also bemoaned the erosion of the Fourth Amendment as a result of the war on drugs and mentioned the Supreme Court's "cascading exceptions" to Fourth Amendment protections, among them "allowing police helicopters to peer into windows, highway troopers to search passengers in cars whose drivers seem suspicious, and, most notoriously, state agents to smash down doors without warning or evidence of crime."

Judge Wright: Absolutely. The Fourth Amendment is in trouble. You have Highway Patrolmen stopping people and they always use the excuse that the guy had a driving infraction, he crossed the center line or something, and you know that's a damned fraud.

WOL: Are you suggesting that these officers are lying to the court?

Judge Wright: Yeah, I'm suggesting that they're not completely telling the truth.

WOL: You also addressed asset forfeiture in your speech. What are your reservations about asset forfeiture?

Judge Wright: Judges here have been really upset about asset forfeiture abuses for some time, but there was no movement until the Kansas City Star did their series on forfeiture (http://www.kcstar.com/projects/drugforfeit/). That series made it clear that what police are doing may not be illegal, but it sure is unethical. Here in Missouri, if local or state police seize money it is supposed to go to the school system. The police would get around it by turning the seizures over to the federal government, which in turn would kick most of it back to the police here. The police got the money, not the schools.

Now, however, if the police want to give the money to the feds, they have to get a state court order, and state judges aren't going to go for that. This whole thing makes the police and Highway Patrol look bad because the money was supposed to go for schools and they were keeping it for themselves.

The big problem with asset forfeiture and with the war on drugs in general is that there's so much money involved it makes law enforcement dishonest and unethical.

WOL: What sort of reaction have you had to your speech?

Judge Wright: Very favorable. The only chilly reception was from the US Attorney. You know, when I first came on the bench here, there were 14 Assistant US Attorneys. Now there are 48 of them, and they're prosecuting drug cases. At least 80% of the cases I hear are drug cases. I'm so sick and tired of trying drug cases.

WOL: Are you willing to speak out again on this issue?

Judge Wright: The general public needs to be informed about this. I will speak anywhere, anytime. Anything I can do to help.

If you could read the politicians' minds, they know that what they're doing is not productive, but they're afraid their opponents will savage them as "soft on crime." The Clinton administration was afraid to do anything because the Republicans owned this issue. Maybe the Republicans will have to be the ones to undo this mess.

5. Britain: Labour on Drugs, Wobbly and Confused

DRCNet last reported on changing attitudes toward cannabis use and the resulting reverberations for British politics in late October (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/157.html#britain). Since then, Britain's cannabis controversy continues to tie the Labour government of Tony Blair in knots.

In the wake of a rash of "I smoked it" confessions by Conservative Party leaders and even some members of the Blair cabinet, Blair issued an edict ordering his cabinet to no longer discuss past cannabis use. But Dr. Mo Mowlam, Cabinet Office Minister and head of government drug policy, had already joined the ranks of the confessors.

Mowlam made waves again last week when, in a break with longstanding Labour cannabis policy that could signal a softening of the Blair hard line, she told BBC's On the Record TV program that the Labour Party could consider relaxing the laws on recreational use of cannabis if the scientific evidence showed it was not harmful or addictive.

In the interview, she said that the Blair government did not condone cannabis use, but that she did not consider it a "gateway" drug. Instead, she told BBC, it could be that "drug pushers persuaded cannabis users to try heroin."

Later, in an appearance on BBC radio, Mowlam added that the cabinet was now reconsidering its posture toward cannabis in light of recent shifts in public opinion.

"What is going on is not just a cabinet discussion," she said, "what is going on is what we want to see, which is a more open discussion of the impact of cannabis."

"But," she hastened to add, "our position on cannabis has not changed."

Mowlam's comments came just days after Ian McCartney, a Cabinet Office colleague whose son died of a heroin overdose, attacked the government's "just say no" policy as a failure and called for a "new realism" on drug policy.

But stiff opposition to drug policy reform remains, as evidenced by the savaging undergone by drug tsar Keith Hellawell in some quarters of the media, after he had the temerity to challenge the gateway theory that cannabis leads to hard drug use.

"I have never subscribed to the view that if you take cannabis you end up taking heroin," he told an interviewer. "There's no research I know of that proves the link."

The tabloid Daily Mail promptly lined up a host of "experts" to denounce Hellawell, headlining its critical op-ed piece, "What is the Point of This Man? Employed as Drug Tsar, He Says Cannabis Does Not Lead to Harder Drugs."

Within two days of that slash and burn attack, Hellawell recanted. He is now once more convinced that "cannabis is a gateway drug," he told reporters on November 8th.

Lost in the hubbub over gateway drugs and possible legalization were Mowlam's remarks indicating that the Labour government is preparing to move forward on medical marijuana. She told the BBC News that action could come soon, depending on the results of scientific trials.

"I hope that by the end of next year those scientific results will be out and then we can make a clear evaluation in relation to medicinal use," she said.

When asked if this meant the Blair government might back legalization for medical use by the end of next year, Mowlam gave a qualified affirmative answer. "Yes, but legalize it in the form of cannabinoids which is a kind of derivative so people don't have to smoke it."

If cannabis policy is giving the Blair government fits, Labourites can take some solace in the fact that it is also breeding nasty conflicts among the Tory opposition.

Last week, James Bercow, a Tory home affairs junior spokesman, attacked his boss' policy on drugs. Conservative shadow cabinet member Anne Widdicome, had ignited the current cannabis furor in early October when she called for mandatory fines and criminal records for cannabis consumers.

In an interview with the New Statesman magazine, Bercow said that Widdicome's plan for "a vast clampdown" on cannabis was unrealistic.

"The idea that the police should raid every home in the land looking for dope-smokers is transparently absurd," argued Bercow, who is a member of the socially liberal Portillo faction within the Conservative Party.

"Personal use has been effectively decriminalized... In this country we police by consent," he continued. "The police are not interested in launching an all out war on soft drugs. As far as I can see, alcohol and violence are closely related. It is not at all clear to me that cannabis and violence are."

Finally, readers of last week's Sunday Times were titillated by news that the paper had found traces of cocaine in parliament lavatories, prompting one Labour Member of Parliament, Paul Flynn, who has advocated the legalization of cannabis, to make the following remarks linking the discovery to the gateway drug controversy.

"Cocaine has become the social drug. But those addicted should be treated as patients, not as criminals," he told the Times. "At least the myth has been destroyed that if people start out on a soft drug, they end up on heroin. That they end up on the Tory front bench is not an enviable fate, but it is not quite as bad as lying in a gutter with a needle sticking out of you."

6. Sweden: Small Cracks Emerge in Drug War Consensus in Europe's Bastion of Reaction

While Sweden's hard-line stance on drugs, the toughest in Western Europe, will remain the law of the land in the foreseeable future, events in the last few weeks suggest that change may be looming just beyond the horizon.

In the 1990s, while most of Europe was moving toward harm reduction and decriminalization strategies toward drug use, Sweden went in the opposite direction. In 1988, Sweden criminalized not just the possession but also the use of drugs. Five years later, it increased the maximum sentence for being high to six months in prison and empowered police to force suspected drug users to submit to blood and urine tests in order to arrest them for consumption of drugs.

Now, a new report from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention has called that policy's tactics and effectiveness into question. As reported in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the council found that arrests for minor drug offenses had increased 70% from 1991 to 1997, that the number of drug tests of suspected users had more than doubled, but that youth drug use continued to rise.

"On the basis of the information that is available regarding the development of illegal drug use there are no clear-cut signs that the criminalization of drug use and the more stringent laws have had any deterrent effect," the report stated.

Criminologist Henrik Tham, a longtime critic of Swedish drug policies, told the Nyheter, "The statistics show that our tough legislation has not had any effect, even though the police are inspecting body fluids in their search for illegal drugs."

Critics may have an ally in the new Justice Minister, 38-year-old Thomas Bodstrom, who was appointed in mid-October. Two years ago, Bodstrom penned a critique of Swedish drug laws in the policy journal Liberal Debatt in which he described the criminalization of drug use as "completely meaningless" and criticized his predecessor, Laila Freivalds, for engaging in a "boring" debate with opposition drug warriors over whose policy was toughest.

In an October 15th interview with the newspaper Expressen, Bodstrom also detailed his own hash-smoking history. He smoked hash "many times" in his teenage years, "at parties and things like that," he said.

Bodstrom took pains to point out that he did not have a criminal record because of hash-smoking and, when asked whether he should have been imprisoned, he responded, "No, I could not have been because it was not illegal."

But this potential ally was backtracking within days as he faced mounting pressure from supporters of the status quo. Choosing his words carefully, he told the Nyheter, "What I was addressing in the Liberal Debatt article is the oversimplifying and caricaturizing that the Moderates [conservative opposition party] stand for with their belief that punishment is all that is necessary to fight crime. And that is absolutely not the case."

Bodstrom also parsed his earlier remarks about "meaningless criminalization," telling the Nyheter that he now supported criminalization.

"Yes, it is important. But we should not rest with that. It is rather meaningless to have only criminalization. The authorities must work preventatively and follow up punishment with care. Punishment alone means drug users are excluded from society," he said.

Where Bodstrom will end up on drug policy remains to be seen, but he is now in the hot seat.

Meanwhile, latent tensions over drug policy found expression in a teapot tempest over the kind of police presence required to control an MTV festival at Stockholm's suburban Globe theater scheduled for Thursday evening. According to reports in the newspaper Aftonbladet, local police authorities graciously declined offers from the country's "Rave Commission" drug squad and the Stockholm drug task force to help police the event. The festival features a number of global pop music stars and is expected to draw thousands of fans from across Europe.

"Thank you for your interest, but we don't see any need for your services," local police commanders wrote in their reply to the eager narcs.

"The risk for drugs is not bigger during the MTV festival than for other concerts," police commander Bruno Jarlestad told Aftonbladet. "Why should I presume that the world's elite artists are a bunch of junkies?"

Such an attitude did not sit well with either the drug squads or their civilian cheerleaders. Drug police accused local commanders of trying to avoid drug scandals and said they had 20 officers "ready to march."

Still, responded Jarlestad, "The Globe is within our jurisdiction. We have people who know the arena and can uphold law and order. There is no need for drug squads from the city to go there and show off and look for people under the influence of drugs."

Anti-drug crusaders such as Malou Lindholm, who has exported her brand of wisdom to drug squabbles as far away as Australia, and Torgny Peterson, the head of European Cities Against Drugs, are up in arms.

Peterson went so far as to send an open letter to the Stockholm police commission reminding authorities that police "are obligated to enforce existing narcotics legislation."

Peterson accused local police commanders of "arrogance but also an extensive ignorance about the presence of drugs in this type of event."

Peterson and his allies, however, got no succor from the police commission. Chairwoman Kristina Axen Olin told Aftonbladet that no special police presence is in place during concerts at the Globe.

"Therefore, it's not unusual if the local police department has made the judgment that extra help is needed," she said. "All policemen are trained to handle drug issues."

By Wednesday, however, local police commanders reversed course in the face of the criticism, allowing the drug squads to be present during the festival.

Local police spokesman Jarlestad remained unconvinced that the narcs were needed. "The Rave Commission wants to come and we might need to bring in the marine police if it rains a lot. Then in case of a hostage drama I guess we'll have to bring in the national crisis team and some negotiators as well," he sneered to Aftonbladet.

Swedish drug war zealots can also rest easier knowing that Swedish Customs has brought in the drug dogs at Arlanda airport to ensure that visiting fans and musicians are coming in clean.

As of press time, DRCNet had no reports of drug-addled music fans rampaging through Sweden before, during, or after the festival.

7. Newsbrief: California Governor Finally Appoints Drug Czar in Wake of Prop. 36

After waiting nearly two years, and only days after voters approved a sweeping drug sentencing reform initiative, California Governor Gray Davis has appointed Kathryn Jett as his first director of the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.

In that capacity, Jett will oversee the implementation of Proposition 36.

Jett, 47, will leave her current position as director of the California Attorney General's Crime and Prevention Center, where she oversaw programs such as those providing local law enforcement agencies with training materials for Neighborhood Watch programs. While at the center, Jett also served on a committee of the California Peace Officers' Association, a group that lobbied hard against Prop. 36.

Jett also serves as chair of the executive committee of the Crime Prevention Coalition of America, a law enforcement-heavy organization whose primary claim to fame is its support of the "McGruff the Crime Dog" campaign, with its "Take A Bite Out Of Crime" slogan.

Jett will have a formidable task ahead of her in implementing Prop. 36, especially if she attempts to undercut the successful initiative. The new law's supporters are already pressuring Governor Davis to immediately release the first $60 million of $120 million authorized by the initiative to begin implementation of its mandate to divert some 36,000 drug offenders from jail or prison to drug treatment.

8. Needle Exchange and AIDS: Health Emergency 2001 Report, Infectious Disease Society Endorsement, Global Epidemic

The Dogwood Center's "Health Emergency 2001" report provides a revealing look at, and important data about, the impact of injection-related HIV/AIDS and laws barring provision of sterile syringes on the African American and Latino communities in the United States. Among Health Emergency's findings and recommendations:

10,000 African Americans, and 4,500 Latinos, are infected with HIV through needle sharing each year. African American injection drug users are five times as likely as white injection drug users to contract AIDS. Latino injection drug users are at least 1.5 times as likely as white injection drug users to contract AIDS. AIDS was the second leading cause of death among African Americans aged 25 to 44, and the fourth leading cause of death among Latinos aged 25 to 44, in 1998. Half of these cases, in each group, were due to needle sharing by injection drug users. To stem the epidemic of injection-related AIDS, it is necessary to improve drug education, expand drug treatment, permit possession of sterile syringes, permit pharmacies to sell syringes without prescription, and permit and fund needle exchange programs.

The full Health Emergency 2001 report includes a foreword by former US Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and can be found online at http://www.dogwoodcenter.org or requested in print from the Dogwood Center, P.O. Box 187, Princeton, NJ 08542, fax: (609) 252-1464, or e-mail: dday99@aol.com.

INFECTIOUS DISEASE SOCIETY ENDORSEMENT

The latest bulletin from the Infectious Disease Society of America (http://www.idsociety.org) reports that IDSA has adopted a statement in support of needle exchange programs. IDSA's statement supports efforts to:

Increase intravenous drug users' access to clean injection equipment; Reform and decriminalize syringe possession and paraphernalia laws; Legalize over-the-counter syringe access; and Establish/increase federal and other funding for needle exchange programs.

IDSA calls for all these activities to be coupled with increased access to drug treatment.

GLOBAL EPIDEMIC

Meanwhile, injection-related HIV and hepatitis continues to emerge as devastating global epidemics. According to Agence France Presse (11/3 -- http://www.afp.com), the World Bank reports that injection drug use is fueling an AIDS epidemic in southeast Asia. All south Asian countries except Cambodia have rising rates of drug use, and HIV rates among injection drug users are increasing in a number of countries as well, including Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma. Bangkok, Thailand's HIV rate among injection drug users has risen from two percent 10 years ago to more than 40 percent today.

In Vietnam, according to Reuters (11/7), 140,000 to 165,000 people will have HIV by year's end. Injection drug use is among the major factors driving the growing problem.

Pakistan, according to the Washington Post (11/12), has approximately 1.5 million heroin addicts. While HIV has not yet hit the injecting population in force, nearly 90 percent of participants in a study by the Nai Zindagi (New Life) needle exchange center were diagnosed with the hepatitis C virus.

9. Criminal Defense Lawyers Demand End to Drug War

(courtesy NORML Foundation, http://www.norml.org)

Washington, DC: The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' (NACDL) board of directors unanimously approved a resolution on November 4th calling for the end of the war on drugs.

In its resolution, NACDL, the nation's largest specialty bar association representing the interests of criminal defense lawyers, stated that drug use should be considered a health problem, and that the government should "repeal all laws criminalizing the possession, use and delivery of controlled substances." The resolution also calls for a regulated and taxable system for selling controlled substances with a portion of the revenues going towards drug treatment clinics, drug education and research.

"As a nation, we've stood by and watched this 'war on drugs' lock up a whole generation of young African-Americans," said Fred Leatherman, the NACDL board member who drafted the resolution. "All the evidence says it's a sham and a failure. And everybody else who makes money from it thinks we should escalate the war. We do not agree."

"Both of our presidential candidates committed 'youthful indiscretions' in their day," said NACDL president Edward Mallet. "Would they, or we, be better off if they had been sent to prison like so many blacks and Latinos are these days?"

10. The Reformer's Calendar

(Please submit listings of events related to drug policy and related areas to calendar@drcnet.org.)

November 16-19, San Francisco, CA, "Committing to Conscience: Building a Unified Strategy to End the Death Penalty," largest annual gathering of Death Penalty opponents. Call Death Penalty Focus at (888) 2-ABOLISH or visit http://www.ncadp.org/ctc.html for further information.

November 19, Richmond, VA, 4:20pm, Anti-Drug War Benefit, supporting DRCNet, organized by Virginians Against Drug Violence. Admission $3, at the Cary Street Cafe, 2631 W. Cary St. Scheduled performers include Publik Animalz, Neptune, Parkland Charlie and Mark Fitzgerald. 21-or-over for admission, outdoor facilities for those under 21.

December 2, New Haven, CT, 9:30am-6:30pm, First Conference on Drug Policy and the Prison Overcrowding Crisis in Connecticut. At Yale University, Lindsley Chittenden room 101, 203, 204 and 205, open to the public. For further information, contact Luke Bronin at luke.bronin@yale.edu or Adam Hurter at (860) 285-8831 or ahurter@wesleyan.edu.

January 13, 2001, St. Petersburg, FL, Families Against Mandatory Minimums Regional Workshop, location to be determined. Call (202) 822-6700 for information or to register.

March 9-11, 2001, New York, NY, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex. Northeast regional conference, following on the large national gathering in 1998, to focus on the impacts of the prison industrial complex in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and bWashington, DC. Visit http://www.criticalresistance.org for further information, or call (212) 561-0912 or e-mail critresisteast@aol.com.

April 1-5, 2001, New Delhi, India, 12th International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm. Sponsored by the International Harm Reduction Coalition, for information visit http://ihrc-india2001.org on the web, e-mail showtime@vsnl.com, call 91-11-6237417-18, fax 91-11-6217493 or write to Showtime Events Pvt. Ltd., S-567, Greater Kailash - II, New Delhi 110 048, India.

April 19-21, Washington, DC, 2001 NORML Conference. Call (202) 293-8340 for information. Registration and other information to be made available soon at http://www.norml.org.

April 25-28, Minneapolis, MN, North American Syringe Exchange Convention. Sponsored by the North American Syringe Exchange Network, for further information call (253) 272-4857, e-mail nasen@seanet.com or visit http://www.nasen.org on the web. At the Marriott City Center Hotel, 30 South Seventh Street.

11. Editorial: A Message to the President-Elect

David Borden, Executive Director, borden@drcnet.org

Dear Mr. President-Soon-To-Be:

A week and a half after the election, I don't know who you are. At least I don't know for sure. But there is something I do know about you. Not to a judicial certainty, perhaps, depending on whom you turn out to be. But I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would agree with me.

I know you've used illegal drugs.

You've either admitted it, or you've refused to deny it, having been willing to admit to other similar things. Indeed, you might never openly admit it, or admit to how often it actually happened. But I know it's true; and let's face it, I know that you know that I know it's true. Even if you won't say so out loud.

You've talked about "youthful irresponsibility" and growing up and overcoming the mistakes of your past. You've pleaded privacy. You've declared that your behavior of a quarter century or more ago has no relevance to your suitability for the office of President of the United States today.

And you have a valid point. It would be unfortunate, perhaps disastrous, were every past user of any illegal drug to be disqualified from positions of responsibility. I'm willing to grant you the privacy argument, and I'm more than willing to forgive you for "youthful indiscretions." Certainly, the public at large has the right to make such determinations too. You have ample subsequent history, in public office or private life, on which to judge your suitability for the nation's highest office. Based on that history, I decided not to vote for you. But that's only one individual's personal choice.

There's one sticking point, though, that I can't quite get past. It's your drug policies. Under your tenure as Texas Governor or federal Vice President, incarcerations have nearly doubled. You've presided over, sometimes encouraged, mandatory minimum sentences, sending countless nonviolent offenders to prison for much, sometimes most or all of their lives. None of them had the social, medical or legal resources that enabled you to be certain you would never suffer serious consequences for your actions.

You've gone so far as to incarcerate medical marijuana patients, or to allow them to be incarcerated under your authority. And you seem to support stripping students convicted of drug offenses of the educational financial aid that you would never have needed, but which they do.

So I agree that your "youthful indiscretions" aren't all that important. But whether your policies toward today's youth reflect a similar tolerance, or at least forgiveness, for their indiscretions, is very important, and has defining implications for your leadership and character.

Two million Americans languish behind bars, nearly half a million of for nonviolent drug offenses. Yet you ran an entire campaign without discussing this issue more than minimally. I think I know why. But I hope you don't think you'll be able to get away with that for four more years, let alone eight. Because you should know that you won't.

If you like what you see here and want to get these bulletins by e-mail, please fill out our quick signup form at http://www.drcnet.org/signup.html.

---

Researchers Develop Way to ID Coke Origin

jointogether.org
11/17/00
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/default.jtml?O=265120

U.S. researchers have developed an accurate method of tracing cocaine back to its country of origin, Reuters reported Nov. 15.

"Science is catching up," said James Ehleringer of the University of Utah. "We can tell who is pushing what."

According to Ehleringer, cocaine and other drugs have a distinct chemical makeup. By looking at a drug's environmental signatures, scientists can tell where the drug came from, decide if a country is in compliance with drug regulations, and determine whether the drugs originated in the country where they were seized.

"We've identified a fingerprint but we can't explain how we get the fingerprint, only that the fingerprint seems to be reliable," said Ehleringer. He said that soil composition, humidity and the length of the dry season make up the fingerprint. "All these things are contributing to specific isotopes and basically what you have is a fingerprint plot, and the combination of environment and soil appear to be unique for a location," Ehleringer explained.

The technique gives drug-enforcement officials a powerful new weapon in fighting drug trafficking. Officials will be able to reconstruct trade routes, determine if two drug samples have a common origin, and identity new cocaine-producing regions as they develop.

Ehleringer's research is published in the science journal Nature.

http://www.nature.com/nature/

---

Ontario to Drug Test Welfare Recipients

jointogether.org
11/17/2000
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/default.jtml?O=265118

Ontario, Canada, plans to start requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug testing before giving them welfare checks, the Canadian Press reported Nov. 14.

http://www.canoe.com:80/CNEWSPolitics0011/14_ontario-cp.html

Ontario is the first province in Canada to enforce a drug-testing provision on welfare benefits. Under the plan, individuals who test positive for illicit drugs and refuse treatment would be ineligible for welfare assistance.

Opponents of the proposal said the mandatory drug-testing requirement is a violation of human rights and harmful to children and single mothers. "Half of the people on welfare are children, and they're going to be impacted by this legislation because the government wants to kick more people off welfare. It's wrong," said Andrea Calver of the Ontario Coalition for Social Justice.

But Social Services Minister John Baird said the proposal is intended to help people addicted to drugs, rather than punish them. "Our government is not prepared to simply turn its back and write anyone off," Baird said. "It's tough to get a job and hold a job if you're addicted to drugs."

Before being implemented, the proposal must go through a six-week consultation process, during which the province will meet with municipalities and legal experts.

---

Calif. Initiative Could Overwhelm State Treatment Programs

jointogether.org
11/17/00
http://www.jointogether.org/sa/default.jtml?O=265119

California officials said that transferring drug arrestees from jail to treatment programs under the voter-approved Proposition 36 could overwhelm the state's already strained addiction-treatment programs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Nov. 13.

http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/13/MN114264.DTL

As a result of Proposition 36, tens of thousands of drug offenders in the criminal-justice system could be transferred into treatment programs. California's drug-treatment programs currently serve 70,000 people a year, but 5,000 are waiting for admission to programs in any given month.

When Proposition 36 goes into effect July 1, it is expected to generate an additional 36,000 new treatment clients a year.

Prior to the measure's implementation, officials said the state needs to resolve several issues, including what exactly needs to be done and what funding is available. Proposition 36 provides only $60 million for treatment for the remainder of the 2000-2001 fiscal year. State officials say that an additional $330 million annually would be required to serve the new treatment clients.

"We've got people looking at it now," said state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco). "There will be a need for additional funding in order to implement Prop. 36. And there is going to have to be some legislation passed to clean it up so that it can go into effect. We are going to try to put together a task force to sit down and take a look at it and figure out exactly what needs to be done."

An analysis of California's drug treatment programs conducted last year found that the existing network of service providers in the state is already overwhelmed.

This week, members of the executive committee of the Community Alcohol and Drug Program Administrators Association of California are meeting to formulate a strategy for putting Proposition 36's provisions in place. "There is a lot of concern about how to make this work," said Bill Demers, the association's president. "We are going to make it work. But it is going to be a challenge."

-------- kosovo/yugo

U.S., Yugoslavia to Resume Relations

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2000
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35844-2000Nov16.html

The United States and Yugoslavia yesterday continued their brisk march toward normal relations, as officials in both countries said they would reopen embassies in each other's capitals within a matter of days.

In Belgrade, the government of President Vojislav Kostunica announced that it was ready to restore diplomatic ties with the United States, Germany, France and Britain. Kostunica's predecessor, Slobodan Milosevic, severed relations with the four NATO powers in March 1999, at the start of NATO's air war against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis.

The announcement was welcomed in Washington. Officials here said they expect a formal exchange of letters between Kostunica and President Clinton confirming the restoration of ties as early as today.

Kostunica has been reluctant to embrace the United States too quickly, given its dominant role in the NATO air war. But the Clinton administration has been eager to promote the international rehabilitation of Yugoslavia after the democratic revolution that toppled Milosevic in September.

The administration already has joined European allies in partially lifting economic sanctions--including an oil embargo and a flight ban--against Yugoslavia. It also plans to provide Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, with $100 million in short-term aid.

Yesterday, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the administration might lift a ban on travel to the United States by some officials who served in Milosevic's government.

U.S. officials haven't entirely forgotten the past. As a matter of law, the U.S. aid cannot be provided after March 31 without a "presidential certification" that Kostunica's government is cooperating with a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which has indicted Milosevic.

Kostunica has said his government will not hand Milosevic over to the tribunal but might put him on trial in Yugoslavia.

A senior official involved in Balkans policy said that cooperation with the tribunal would be defined in terms of "transferring indicted persons [to The Hague] or assisting in their apprehension," although he added, "We'll have to talk through what that means."

The official noted that Kostunica has given assurances that his government will permit the tribunal to open an office in Belgrade and will not hinder its investigators.

Another senior official said that Kostunica will be judged on whether he cooperates with the implementation of the Dayton peace accords in neighboring Bosnia. "What we're saying now is, 'Isn't this a wonderful change?' " the official said. "But in the second phase, then we'll really be looking to treat him like we treat other regional leaders, with the same kind of expectations--to make what we do more and more conditional."

For now, the emphasis of the United States and its allies is on carrots rather than sticks. On Nov. 1, after eight years in diplomatic purgatory, Yugoslavia was admitted into the United Nations. Last week, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe followed suit.

So far, the West's forgiving approach seems to be paying dividends in Belgrade, where the restoration of diplomatic ties between Yugoslavia and its erstwhile foes was announced by Prime Minister Zoran Zizic.

"This is an important moment for all of us," he said. "At this moment when we have decided to restore diplomatic relations with the dominant states of the modern world, it is unnecessary to analyze past events which led to the rupture of diplomatic relations with these countries."

Kostunica, a legal scholar and Serbian nationalist, was a sharp critic of the NATO air war; he made a point of refusing American pro-democracy assistance during his campaign. But the administration has courted him assiduously.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who once lived in Belgrade, sent a note of congratulations mentioning her lifelong experience with Serbs. James C. O'Brien, the administration's top Balkans envoy, laid the groundwork for yesterday's announcement during a visit to Belgrade this week.

The American diplomatic mission, headed by William Montgomery, occupies the fifth floor of the Belgrade Hyatt Hotel. That's because the embassy was gutted by angry Serbian crowds and will not be habitable for months.

-------- space

U.S. needs more space-based spying

USA Today
11/16/00
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsthu08.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States may eventually become ''deaf and blind'' to terrorist threats unless it devotes more resources to developing new technologies for spying from space, says a congressionally chartered group.

The 11-member National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Organization, which reviewed the federal agency in charge of space-based spying, concluded that requirements for intelligence from satellites have grown so rapidly that the agency responsible for building and operating satellites - the National Reconnaissance Organization - is being stretched too thin.

''Users of the intelligence provided by the NRO's satellites have long competed for priority,'' the report said. ''But now, the number of these customers has expanded dramatically...In the absence of additional resources, the NRO is being stretched thin trying to meet all its customers' essential requirements.''

The report was posted on the commission's Internet web site Wednesday.

The commission was created by Congress in the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2000 and is headed by Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who until recently was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The NRO, which was created in the 1950s, but whose very existence was a secret until 1992, is an agency of the Defense Department and is staffed by employees of the department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The commission concluded that the NRO's ''clarity of mission'' and sense of urgency have dissipated since the end of the Cold War, and that the president and secretary of defense need to give more policy direction.

''Without bold and sustained leadership, the United States could find itself 'deaf and blind' and increasingly vulnerable to any of the potentially devastating threats it may face in the next 10 to 20 years,'' the report said.

The commission recommended establishing a new office, under the direction of the NRO director, to allow the government to make greater technological advances in space reconnaissance. It suggested calling it the Office of Space Reconnaissance.

''The new office would attack the most difficult intelligence problems by providing advanced technology that will lead to frequent, assured, global access to protect U.S. national security interests,'' the report said.

The commissioners also concluded that the NRO's move toward public openness in the 1990s has backfired.

''Widespread knowledge of the NRO's existence and public speculation on how NRO satellites are used has aided terrorists and other potential adversaries in developing techniques of denial and deception to thwart U.S. intelligence efforts,'' it said, without providing any details or examples.

-------- sudan

An Appeal to the 'Conscience of the International Community' on Sudan

By Nora Boustany
Friday , November 17, 2000 ; Page A38
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37104-2000Nov16.html

The Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a genocide alert for Sudan on Wednesday and launched an exhibit of photographs and findings on the suffering in the southern part of the Horn of Africa country and in refugee camps farther north.

This is the first time the museum has presented a display about a situation outside of Europe. As Sudan is realizing its oil wealth and beginning to tap its oil fields, people in the south of the country are being displaced by bombing campaigns and continued fighting between various tribal and ethnic factions, armed in part by the government. The country has endured 17 years of civil war.

"What we want to do is move this up the ladder of priorities for Americans and stir the conscience of the international community," said William Lowrey, who helped develop the exhibit, called "Genocide Warning: Sudan."

A panel of Sudan specialists spelled out the practices and dangers threatening the civilian population. In addition to Lowrey, who worked with the Presbyterian Mission for Sudan from 1991 to 1998, the group included Jemera Rone, since 1985 the counsel for Human Rights Watch; Roger Winter, the executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees; and Lomole Simeon Mwonga, chancellor for the Episcopalian Diocese of Khartoum.

Rone, who has been a researcher on Sudan since 1993, said much of the southern part of Sudan is now viewed as "an oil concession." She said Malaysian, Chinese and Canadian oil companies are involved in the effort to drill for oil. One block of land has already been cleared and the government is moving its way south, she said, using the revenue from oil to boost its defense spending, which in turn is contributing to more military pressure on the population.

Figures supplied by the Sudanese government to the International Monetary Fund confirm that Khartoum's recent oil wealth has allowed it to boost its defense outlays. Sudan's military budget was $166 million in 1998, $242 million in 1999 and is projected to reach $327 million this year, according to government figures provided to the IMF. In July of this year, 250 bombs were dropped on civilian areas, according to U.N. reports and tallies by relief agencies.

Mwonga warned that "entire communities are being erased and the international community is being quiet. If the international community does not move in, those people will be erased and it will be too late."

Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan E. Rice is currently on her way to southern Sudan, according to various sources in the nongovernmental organization community, accompanied by her special adviser on the Sudan, John Prendergast. The State Department remained mum on her whereabouts yesterday, since she would be entering southern Sudan without the knowledge of the Sudanese government.

Embassies on the Move

The majestic mansion of 55 rooms that is the residence of the ambassador of Spain on 16th Street will be abandoned next spring for a newer residence on Foxhall Road designed by award-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo.

The old white stone residence with high ceilings, wide receiving halls and a ballroom was built in the mid 1920s by Mrs. John B. Henderson, who offered it to the U.S. government as the official residence for the vice president. Congress refused to allocate funds for that purpose, claiming the house was too opulent even for a vice president, according to Ambassador Javier Ruperez. In 1928, the government of Spain stepped in and acquired the property, using it as a residence, and the back extension of the mansion on 15th Street as chancery. Spanish and Moorish touches were added, such as a courtyard and water fountain surrounded by white columns. Tiles were brought in from Seville and Valencia and wrought-iron doors and grilles from Toledo.

Immediately facing the entrance is a circular painting of the coat of arms of King Charles III, which belonged to the Spanish Legation in Philadelphia in 1798. It was the emblem used by the first diplomatic mission sent by the King of Spain to the United States. This mission was headed by Don Diego Gardoqui, who became a personal friend of George Washington, according to Florentine Sotomayor, the information counselor at the embassy. There are paintings from the Prado Museum by 18th-century artists and a wall-size tapestry from the same period woven for the Royal Palace in Madrid.

Eventually, that section of town became less well frequented and the chancery moved out from 15th Street to a building on Pennsylvania Avenue that featured marble floors and columns, although the old residence was maintained. Recently however, shoot-outs and standoffs between drug dealers in the back alleys of the area led the Mexican and Italian embassies to vacate. The Mexicans still have a consular office on 16th Street.

Ambassador Ruperez conceded that the beautiful building should be kept as a cultural center and said he hoped to collaborate with his Mexican counterpart or even with other embassies to maintain the residence as a joint cultural center in the future.

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

Clinton arrives for Vietnam tour

November 17, 2000
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-20001117215846.htm

HANOI - President Clinton opened a historic visit today to Vietnam, the country he sought to avoid as an anti-war protester, becoming the first U.S. president to visit the Southeast Asian nation in 30 years.

He was welcomed with a red-carpet ceremony near the mausoleum of the legendary Ho Chi Minh, architect of the communist victory over U.S.-backed forces in the war that ended 25 years ago.

Crowds of curious onlookers, some of them waving, stood three and four deep on the streets as Mr. Clinton's motorcade headed for the French-built presidential palace on Ba Dinh Square. The palace is a stone's throw from the gray stone building where Vietnamese line up each day to pay respects to the late leader they know as "Uncle Ho."

A military band played the national anthems of the United States and Vietnam as Mr. Clinton and President Tran Duc Luong stood under a canopied platform in the warm morning sun. An honor guard of military troops stood at attention.

On a visit stirring painful memories back home of America's long and most unpopular war, Mr. Clinton promised "to build a different future" with its former enemy.

"This only happens once in a thousand years," said homemaker Tran Thi Lan, 50.

Mr. Clinton flew to Vietnam from Brunei, where he convinced 21 Pacific Rim leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum to embrace a U.S.-backed proposal for a new round of global free-trade talks under the World Trade Organization beginning next year.

Mr. Clinton's own past opposing the war and avoiding the draft hang over the trip.

But U.S. officials have tried to keep the focus of the journey firmly on the future. They insist the primary purpose of the trip is to demonstrate that the communist-ruled Southeast Asian nation "is not just a war, it's a country."

"One has to realize that Vietnam is a nation in transition," said U.S. Ambassador Douglas "Pete" Peterson, who served as an Air Force pilot in Vietnam and spent six years in a POW camp.

"It's transitioning in economics, making major changes politically, culturally, and generationally," he said.

The president's agenda will be a mix of backward- and forward-looking events. Tomorrow, he visits a site where a joint Vietnamese-U.S. task force is searching for the remains of some of the 1,500 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for from the war, and he will address groups attempting to disarm land mines left over from the conflict.

But he will also give a nationally televised address to students at Hanoi National University today and on Sunday will talk in Ho Chi Minh City - the former Saigon - with Vietnamese and American business groups seeking to expand joint commercial ventures in the country.

White House officials said today's speech will note the two countries' joint past, but would be addressed to the challenges facing Vietnam's rising generation of leaders.

With U.S. veterans groups and the 1.3 million-strong American-Vietnamese community watching closely, Mr. Clinton will not offer any expressions of regret for the U.S. role in the war that left more than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese dead, U.S. officials insisted.

"To be honest with you, I don't think an apology is nearly as important as a constructive engagement," Mr. Peterson said.

The ambassador said the president also plans to press his Vietnamese hosts privately on human rights and religious freedoms, and will encourage them to build on the economic liberalization incorporated in the bilateral trade deal the two countries concluded this summer.

For Vietnam, the trip has been seen less as an emotional closure to the war and much more in practical terms of what the United States can offer a still-poor nation. Public preparations for the trip have been markedly low-key.

Once seen as the next East Asian tiger, Vietnam's economy has cooled in recent years as foreign investor frustration has risen over corruption and the slow pace of government reforms. Vietnam's relative isolation helped it weather the continent's 1997-98 financial crisis, but Vietnam has also lagged as other East Asian nations rebounded strongly in 1999.

The ruling Vietnamese Communist Party remains divided over the direction and pace of economic reforms and finds itself under increasing pressure to deliver material prosperity. Some 60 percent of the population was born after the war that concluded in 1975.

"The war is in the past, and for most, Vietnamese ideological purity is irrelevant," said Frederick Z. Brown, associate director of the Southeast Asia studies program at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.

"The legitimacy of the Vietnamese Communist Party rests squarely on its ability to provide a better life for its people," he said.

First lady and Sen.-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Hanoi yesterday to greet enthusiastic crowds while daughter Chelsea has been traveling with her father on what could be the last major international trip of his presidency.

Richard M. Nixon was the last U.S. president to visit the country, coming to South Vietnam in 1969 at the height of U.S. involvement in the war.

Mr. Clinton's Vietnam trip comes after his success Wednesday and yesterday in convincing the Pacific Rim APEC-member nations in Brunei to call for new WTO free-trade talks next year.

National economic adviser Gene Sperling said trade ministers meeting before the APEC summit had failed to reach agreement. Japan and a number of Southeast Asian countries joined the United States and Australia in pushing the discussion.

The final communique reflected divisions over the benefits of broad-based, market-opening and trade-liberalization efforts.

"We are convinced that the movement toward global integration holds the greatest opportunity to deliver higher living standards and social well-being for our communities," the statement said.

But the leaders immediately added: "We understand that in all our economies there are people who have yet to gain the benefits of economic growth, especially in rural and provincial communities."

----

Cole Attackers Were Afghan War Vets

Fox News
Friday, November 17, 2000
Associated Press

The two men who were carried out the suicide bombing of the USS Cole last month have been identified as veterans of the U.S.-backed guerrilla war to drive Soviet forces from Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported Friday. The newspaper quoted Yemen Prime Minister Abdul-Karim al-Iryani as saying in an interview that one of the men who steered the small boat of plastic explosives into the ship was a Yemeni born in the eastern province of Hadramaut.

He would not discuss other details learned in the investigation of attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors Oct. 12 as the ship refueled in a port in Yemen. But he told the newspaper that authorities have solid leads to the identity of the second man, also thought to have been a native of Yemen.

Al-Iryani said the identity of the first man was established by false identification discovered in one of the rented houses around Aden, where the attack was planned. The name on the ID forms, which included a boating license, was false, but the photo was genuine.

The prime minister also told the Post that Yemeni investigators have learned a lot from relatives of the man.

"The picture inside the country should be very clear very soon. The question is outside. Who was involved outside the country?" he said.

Investigators have focused on Muslim extremists angered by the U.S. military presence in the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia.

U.S. investigators have said the attack bears the earmarks of followers of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire and Afghanistan veteran who officials say ordered the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The prime minister said Yemeni investigators have not linked the Aden bombing to bin Laden, who has Yemeni citizenship by his father's birth in the Hadramaut region. But al-Iryani said a wider conspiracy seems obvious to Yemeni officials, who believe the Cole attack displayed technological savvy unknown in their country.

--------

Shelton: Peacekeeping Missions Unavoidable

Associated Press
Friday, November 17, 2000
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37147-2000Nov16.html

The top U.S. military officer said yesterday it would be naive for the next president to believe he could stop using the military for peacekeeping and other noncombat missions overseas.

Commenting on the national security challenges likely to face the United States over the coming 10 years, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton said the world's lone superpower must continue to prepare its military for a wide range of missions--from training abroad and joining in peacekeeping duties to fighting major wars.

"It is naive to think that the military will become involved in only those areas that affect our vital national interests," Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech to a conference on U.S. priorities for a 21st century security strategy.

"The strategic environment will most certainly cause us to deploy forces to achieve limited military objectives," he said. "As a global power, I submit that we cannot retreat from one activity to do another exclusively."

Shelton's comments touched on an area in which the two major presidential candidates, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Gore, have expressed sharp differences.

Although Bush does not oppose all U.S. involvement in peacekeeping, he and his advisers have said prolonged operations make it more difficult for the armed forces to prepare for major wars.

Bush's top aides have said he believes the combat capability of the U.S. Army, which has been on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia for five years and in Kosovo for more than one year, has deteriorated as a result. They have derided those peacekeeping missions as "nation-building" efforts.

Asked about Bush's view on this, Shelton at first said he would not respond to either presidential candidate's comments, then said he does not see peacekeeping as an "all or nothing" proposition.

"I do draw a line between what I would call nation-building and what I would call sustaining a safe and secure environment," he said, referring to the stated objective of peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Shelton noted that much remains to be done in the Balkans to restore civilian institutions.

"Soldiers, per se, do not do that," he said. "We can provide a safe and secure environment, but we don't do the law enforcement, we don't do the court systems, we don't get commerce going again. . . . That is, in my definition, what you're doing when you get into nation-building."

Speaking after Shelton at the same conference, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's chief adviser on national security matters, said the Clinton administration was right to have intervened in Kosovo to stop Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing. But she cautioned against keeping the U.S. military there too long.

"We as a country have got to take a hard look at the resources we are providing and the missions we are taking on" in Kosovo and elsewhere, she said. "That is not to say the missions need to be ended."

-------

Cole Bombers Identified as Veterans of Afghan War

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 17, 2000
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35748-2000Nov16.html

ADEN, Yemen, Nov. 16 -- The two men who steered a small boat laden with plastic explosives into the USS Cole on Oct. 12 have been identified as veterans of the U.S.-backed guerrilla war to drive Soviet forces from Afghanistan, according to Prime Minister Abdel-Karim Ali Iryani.

One of the two who carried out the attack, which killed 17 U.S. sailors as the Cole refueled in this port, has been identified as a Yemeni born in the eastern province of Hadramaut, Iryani said. He declined to provide further details. But in an interview Wednesday in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, he revealed that authorities have solid leads to the identity of the second bomber, who is also believed to be a native of Yemen.

Iryani said the identity of the first bomber was established by false identification discovered in one of the rented houses around Aden from which the plotters prepared the attack. The name on the ID forms, which included a boating license, was false, but the photo was genuine. And as investigators worked the document trail, which included phone records from the safe houses, the photo was recognized, he said.

The prime minister said he could not elaborate, but noted that Yemeni investigators, who still have dozens of people in custody for questioning, have learned a great deal from relatives of the identified bomber, who lived in the Aden area, as well as from a person "who I think was involved," Iryani said.

"The picture inside the country should be very clear very soon. The question is outside. Who was involved outside the country?"

The description of the bombers as Arab veterans of the 1980s Afghan conflict came as no surprise to investigators. Since the beginning, they have focused on Muslim extremists angered by the U.S. military presence in the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials have said the attack on the Cole bears the earmarks of followers of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire--and Afghanistan veteran--who U.S. officials say ordered the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The prime minister said Yemeni investigators have not linked the Aden bombing to bin Laden, who has Yemeni citizenship by dint of his father's birth in the Hadramaut region. But Iryani said a wider conspiracy seems obvious to Yemeni officials, who believe the Cole attack displayed technological savvy unknown in their country.

A "shaped charge," the bomb was military-style C-4 plastic explosive encased in a metal housing fashioned to maximize the impact on the destroyer, which narrowly stayed afloat with a 40-by-40-foot hole at its waterline. The sophistication suggested the work of an explosives expert such as the one U.S. prosecutors say was dispatched to Nairobi to prepare the truck bomb that two other men drove to the U.S. Embassy on Aug. 7, 1998; when it exploded, the bomb killed more than 200 and injured 5,000.

The expert in that attack, a native of the Comoros Islands who has used a number of aliases but has been identified as Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, remains at large.

Yemeni authorities have been told that at least one explosives expert was brought into Aden after a January attempt against another U.S. warship ended in embarrassment. In that failed effort, at least one of the men who perished in the Cole attack launched a skiff into the Aden harbor planning to bomb a U.S. vessel refueling there. But the craft began to sink under the weight of the explosives.

-------

A Higher IQ Before the Marines Land

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2000
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37111-2000Nov16.html

Shortly before he became the Marine Corps' new director of intelligence four months ago, Col. Michael E. Ennis bluntly opined that the nation's $30 billion intelligence community was failing its own military commanders.

He called it a "crisis of credibility" and wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette that the best intelligence in the world was worthless if commanders couldn't get what they needed on time--and, in Ennis's opinion, they clearly were not.

Now ensconced at Marine Corps' headquarters in Arlington and selected for promotion to brigadier general, Ennis, 50, is leading the new wave of the digital revolution. He wants his analysts to produce comprehensive computerized reports on everything from missile systems in the Middle East to contagious diseases in Africa--before the Marines are deployed.

The problem confronting Marine intelligence--and the entire intelligence community--is too much digital information and too little time to sort through it.

"To be honest with you, Marines go into places that most people aren't interested in," Ennis said in a recent interview. "I want to take the baseline infrastructure data and preposition it now, in peacetime, so that we don't have to scramble for it in contingency."

To make a point about the increasing importance of intelligence in the information age, Gen. James L. Jones, the Marine Corps' commandant, announced in April that he was separating intelligence from command, control, communications and computers with the appointment of Ennis, elevating the intelligence director's job to flag rank for the first time.

Ennis began his career in 1972 as an infantry lieutenant and soon became a foreign area officer as part of a special Pentagon program that trains rising stars in the language, culture and history of various global hot spots. Ennis's specialty was the Soviet Union.

As soon as he finished the program, he was given his first official intelligence assignment in 1980 as assistant intelligence chief at the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade in Okinawa.

Why train an officer in Russian and send him to Okinawa? "Because every Marine has got to go to Okinawa to pay his penance, and my turn was up," Ennis said.

But in 1981, Ennis found himself at the Pentagon waiting for the phone to ring--literally--as a presidential interpreter on the Moscow hot line. After three years, Ennis spent three years in Potsdam, East Germany; a year back in Washington as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and two years as assistant naval attache in Russia.

Most recently, Ennis headed the Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor. The job gave him intelligence responsibility for 52 percent of the Earth's surface and fully exposed him to the digital deluge of information.

He remembers telling his analysts to research a particular country topic on Intelink, the intelligence community's top secret Web-like intranet. "We spent 696 man hours and found 756 different locations on Intelink where there was information on this subject," Ennis said. "In a crisis situation, when we have to do a noncombatant evacuation with an embassy going down, who has 696 hours to find this basic kind of data?"

Tying all 13 of the nation's intelligence agencies together on one classified, searchable network, Intelink was an innovation that's now becoming a victim of its own success, Ennis said.

"Intelink is the Library of Congress for intelligence products," he explained. "The problem is, all the books are on the floor because nobody created the card catalogue to go with it."

To deal with that problem, Ennis is creating the electronic equivalent with new databases that will sort themselves into files that Marine commanders can use.

The key, Ennis said, is digitally tagging data by various parameters, so a search about airports in East Timor, for example, would produce data about airports in East Timor, not hundreds of intelligence reports that just happen to contain the words "airport" and "East Timor."

"There is so much information out there for the operators that they have a difficult time making decisions," Ennis said. "They want to get information more quickly, they want it in [the right] format. We need to pay attention to that in the intelligence community. Because it's not necessarily a question of bigger, better and more. What I'm arguing is, I think we'd be a lot better off if we provided better access to what we already have."

Players
Col. Michael E. Ennis
Title: Director, Marine Corps intelligence.
Age: 50

Education: Bachelor's degree in French and international relations, Concordia College; master's in government and national security studies, Georgetown University; continuing studies, University of Paris (Sorbonne).

Family: Married, two children.

Previous jobs: Foreign area officer; naval attache, commander, Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific.

Pastimes: In-line skating, scuba diving.

---------

An Army Contract Signals a Shift From Tanks to Light Armor

November 17, 2000
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/17/national/17TANK.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - In a move that represents an important shift in Army strategy, the Defense Department today announced a multibillion-dollar contract for the purchase of light armored vehicles that will increasingly replace tanks on the battlefield.

The Army contract, which could be worth up to $4 billion, was awarded to General Dynamics Land Systems of Sterling Heights, Mich., a unit of the General Dynamics Corporation.

Pentagon officials said the purchase of wheeled vehicles, which will be far easier to transport and maneuver than tanks, will allow the Army to respond quickly to small conflicts and peacekeeping missions where tanks are not appropriate.

The decision follows an often-heated debate within the Army over the future of tanks and other large armored vehicles originally designed for use in the cold war. Tank commanders in the Army had argued that it was wrong to move away from buying tanks, given the protection of heavy armor plating and firepower they offer to soldiers.

"This is one of the big steps toward the transformation of the Army into the 21st century," said Lt. Gen. Paul J. Kern, a specialist in Army acquisition and logistics. "This is our first major acquisition of a wheeled vehicle for combat operations."

Pentagon officials said the vehicles could weigh no more than 19 tons, allowing them to be easily moved aboard standard C-130 military planes. Details of the contract are expected to released tomorrow.

The Army's M-1A2 Abrams tank weighs almost 70 tons, which prevents easy or quick transport, often frustrating the Pentagon in planning smaller military and humanitarian operations like those in recent years in Somalia and the Balkans.

General Kern said in an interview that the new vehicles would "clearly provide less protection than an Abrams tank, but we're not giving up on those; we'll still have tanks."

The new vehicles will come in a variety of configurations, including mortar carrier, anti-tank guided missile vehicle, medical evacuation vehicle and a reconnaissance vehicle for the detection of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

The Army said in a statement that all of the vehicles were to be delivered before September 2008. The statement did not say how many would be built.


-------- OTHER

-------- police

Bush Aide Hints Police are Better Peacekeepers Than Military

November 17, 2000
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/17/world/17RICE.html

ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 16 - Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to Gov. George W. Bush, said today that it might be necessary to set up international police forces to perform peacekeeping roles that are now the responsibility of soldiers.

In a speech at a conference sponsored by the Army, Ms. Rice also expressed interest in Russia's recent suggestion that Moscow is ready to amend to a treaty banning missile defenses if both the United States and Russia agree to deeper cuts in offensive nuclear weapons.

Ms. Rice, who spoke today as a private citizen but is likely to be national security adviser should Mr. Bush become president, declined to discuss what the governor was doing to prepare for his possible transition to power.

She has come under fire from the Clinton administration and NATO allies for saying last month that if elected, Mr. Bush was prepared to end American participation in peacekeeping in the Balkans.

At first, her remarks today on international police forces seemed to have been meant to address concerns of those who fear that a Bush administration would be unwilling to share the costs and risks of peacekeeping. But later she explained that her comments were merely her attempt to identify a problem.

"There may be new roles for international forces of a different type when civil conflict is well beneath the place that combat forces are needed, where police functions are needed," she said, speaking from notes. "We need to think hard about the development of forces that are appropriate to police functions. It is simply not the case that combat forces made over into police forces always is the best answer. It may very much be necessary to think about new kinds of forces for those functions."

Asked in a later telephone interview whether she was advocating multinational police forces in which the United States and its allies would have a role, Ms. Rice was vague, saying: "I wasn't designating who would be part of it. I'm not saying the United States should field these forces, or the allies. I'm not proposing any solution. I wanted to identify a gap in capability, not to suggest that I have a particular answer."

Ms. Rice also acknowledged the difficulties of substituting police officers for soldiers in peacekeeping operations, saying that those who have tried to do it in the Balkans "are having a hard time."

Some in the audience today, most of whom were military officers, said they found her remarks troubling.

"I nearly jumped out of my chair," said one senior Air Force officer who works on peacekeeping missions. "What is the internal structure of such forces? Where is the command and control? What happens the first time these police find themselves in a firefight and they're undergunned?"

With American soldiers still in Bosnia and Kosovo, the American military has become concerned that its troops are increasingly called upon to carry out police functions, which many are not trained for. And many countries have often been reluctant to send their police officers on risky missions.

In a speech earlier at the same conference, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military's role in peacekeeping and other noncombat missions. He added that the United States must continue to prepare the military for a wide range of missions - from peacekeeping to fighting major wars - saying, "It is naïve to think that the military will become involved in only those areas that affect our vital national interests."

---

DRCNet

Issue #160, 11/17/00
The Week Online with DRCNet
http://www.drcnet.org/drcreg.html

2. New Jersey: Racial Profiling Documents to Be Released

New Jersey Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. announced last week that on November 28th his office will finally make public as many as 80,000 pages of state police records dealing with racial profiling.

The chairman of the New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee, William L. Gormley, had demanded that the records be released. After resisting Gormley's demand for months, Attorney General Farmer announced in September that he would comply.

Gormley had imposed a November 10th deadline for the records' release, but Farmer told the Associated Press on that date that the number of records was larger than expected and his workers kept finding previously undiscovered files, thus necessitating the delay.

Racial profiling refers to selecting drivers by race or ethnicity to be targeted for minor traffic infractions and then searched for drug violations. Racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike had been the subject of national network television broadcasts as early as 1989. Years of complaints about the practice flared into white-hot controversy in April 1998, after two New Jersey state troopers fired on a van carrying four black and Latino men on the New Jersey Turnpike. Three were injured.

The documents could hold more potentially damaging revelations for state police and elected officials, who for years repeatedly denied that they engaged in such tactics, but were then forced to publicly admit that they were wrong.

In April 1999, then Attorney General Peter Verniero admitted that racial profiling was "real, not imagined," and that black and Latino drivers did indeed face discriminatory police attention.

But that was only one of many black-letter days for New Jersey law enforcement officials. A few months earlier, in February 1999, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was forced to fire Police Superintendent Carl A. Williams after he told a newspaper interviewer that minority groups were linked to drug trafficking.

And only days after Verniero's admission, New Jersey law enforcement suffered the indignity of a federal Justice Department investigation of the state police on civil rights grounds. After months of negotiations between the state and the Justice Department, New Jersey was forced to accept a consent decree requiring the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure that the state complies with an agreement to end racial profiling.

The documents could further clarify the roles of various state officials, including Gov. Christy Whitman, in fending off earlier attempts to investigate and halt racial profiling by state troopers along the New Jersey Turnpike.

The New York Times last month examined some 11,000 of the documents already released as part of a lawsuit filed against the state police. The Times' investigation found that as early as 1996, New Jersey law enforcement and elected officials were aware that racial profiling was an ongoing problem, but that instead of rectifying the situation, state police commanders engaged in a defensive strategy of denials.

Of particular interest will be any documents showing what then Attorney General Verniero (since appointed to the state Supreme Court) and Gov. Whitman knew about racial profiling by the state police and when they knew it.

Verniero, in testimony before the New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee, said his concerns about racial profiling did not "crystallize" until after the 1998 shooting. But records perused by the Times indicate that senior members of Verniero's staff were involved in 1996 efforts to uncover racial profiling.

And, according to a police summary of a 1997 meeting, Verniero and then state police commander Colonel Carl Williams, in an effort to avoid "unpleasant surprises," decided to limit data provided to the Justice Department to two state police stations already under fire for racial profiling.

"Decision reached to restrict production of data to Moorestown and Cranbury stations," wrote the state police sergeant who took notes on the January 10, 1997 meeting.

Gov. Whitman has claimed that she had no evidence of racial profiling until early 1999, and the records released so far do not include any memorandums to or from either Whitman or Verniero. Such documents could be among those to be released later this month, but lawyers for the state have claimed that thousands of documents are exempt from disclosure. Whether memos between Whitman and Verniero are included will not be known until the document release is reviewed.

---

Carnivore Can Read Everything

Wired
11:45 a.m. Nov. 17, 2000 PST
Associated Press
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40256,00.html?tw=wn20001118

WASHINGTON -- The FBI's controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service, far more than FBI officials have said it does, according to a Bureau documents and a recent FBI test.

An FBI official involved with the test stressed Friday that although Carnivore has the ability to grab a large quantity of e-mails and Web communications, current law and specific court orders restrict its use.

Nevertheless, privacy experts said they are worried about the breadth of Carnivore's capability and questioned why the FBI even conducted such a test in June if it intends to use the tool only for narrow purposes.

"That really contradicts the explanation that the FBI has provided as to the purpose of the system and how it works," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We've been led to believe that the purpose of Carnivore is to filter and pinpoint the particular communications that the FBI is authorized to obtain. If that's true, then why are they testing the system's ability to store and archive everything?"

Sobel's group recently obtained the FBI documents that provide the test results, as part of litigation it brought under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the lab report, FBI officials said Carnivore "could reliably capture and archive all unfiltered traffic to the internal hard drive" and could save the information on removable high-capacity disks as well.

Marcus Thomas, head of the FBI's cybertechnology section, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the test was only done to check Carnivore's "breaking point." He said the tool would not be used to capture broad swaths of Internet communications in a real-world situation.

Thomas was one of the FBI agents who approved the lab report.

"Certainly, in operation, you could set the filters up to do nothing," Thomas said. "But our procedures are very detailed, we'll only do what we're allowed to in a court order."

The difference of opinion is the latest in what has become a debate between Carnivore's capabilities and its actual use.

While law enforcement officials have admitted that Carnivore can capture much more than e-mail, including Internet chats and Web browsing, FBI officials insist it is only used to copy e-mails to a criminal suspect or from a criminal suspect in accordance with a court order.

Opponents say the "black box" nature of the system keeps the public from knowing what it can really do, and its installation at an Internet provider may cause network problems.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center started receiving batches of Carnivore-related material in October, after a court ordered the FBI to release the information.

EPIC representatives said they have received about 550 pages so far, and expect to get only about 30 percent of the 3,000 documents related to Carnivore. Most of the released documents have large portions blacked out.

FBI officials say Carnivore has been used in about 25 cases, most of them involving national security.

Congress considered several measures this year to rein in Carnivore, but none survived. Lawmakers have said that they may consider measures again next year.

An independent review of Carnivore was ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno. That report is due to be received by the Justice Department on Friday, Justice spokeswoman Chris Watney said.

Watney said the report is expected to be released to the public early next week, after it is edited to eliminate references to Carnivore's internal blueprints and other sensitive material.


-------- activists

After Monday's clash, protests look quiet

August 17, 2000
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200081521491.htm

LOS ANGELES - About two dozen protesters yesterday launched a feeble attempt to block the entrance to the California Federal Bank Building, while animal rights activists opposed to the fur trade demonstrated in front of clothing stores.

Police arrested about 45 protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. But compared with Monday night's street fights between demonstrators and policemen, yesterday was relatively quiet.

Los Angeles Police Department officers strolled through a morning rally for local bus drivers in MacArthur Park with little fanfare, although they continued to surround the march that followed, riot gear at the ready.

Helicopters still whirred over downtown, and sirens were heard often.

The arrest total for Monday's clashes was 19, including one charge of assault with a deadly weapon.

The demonstrations, which seem to blur at some points as participants carry signs for different issues regardless of the focus of the protest, cover myriad issues, from globalization to police brutality to the environment.

Protesters yesterday discussed their encounters with the law and took some mental notes: Rubber bullets hurt, pepper spray stings and these 2,000 police assigned to the dozens of protest groups will be aggressive.

"This really gives us an idea of what we are in for," said Tyson Robichaud, 22, one of the hundreds of demonstrators who help run a makeshift co-op about two miles from the Staples Center, where the convention is being held.

"There's kind of a progression of intensity now, but it's not directly related to that police action. But we now know what to plan for."

Jason Berkman sat yesterday morning on the floor of the co-op and prepared medical supplies for another day. His supplies included vinegar to soothe the sting of gas and bandages to cover the welts and cuts caused by pepper spray paint balls and rubber bullets.

"We're still working on peaceful, nonviolent protests," said Mr. Berkman, who lives in Pasadena. The Monday melee was caused by a handful of agitators, he said.

"Which can happen, and throwing objects at the police is unacceptable," he said. "But it is still unacceptable for police to fire pepper spray at people from close range. It's a dispersal tool, not a weapon."

Monday's fighting outside the Staples Center began around 9 p.m. following a 40-minute free concert by left-wing rock band Rage Against the Machine.

Police attempted to disperse the crowd of about 7,000 before delegates and the media began leaving the center.

When the crowd failed to react in what police felt was a timely manner, officers began charging the crowd on horseback and in battalion lines.

Plastic water bottles and chunks of concrete were hurled at the officers during the ensuing scuffles.

Hundreds of protesters and one police officer were injured, none seriously.

LAPD Cmdr. David Kadish said his officers were reacting to a situation that was started by several obstinate people.

"Some will view it as we waited too long.

Some will view it as we moved in too quickly," he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California yesterday condemned the police for what the group called "incredibly poor judgment" and "gross violations of individuals' civil rights."

Today, a group protesting the justice system will march on LAPD headquarters.

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