NUCLEAR
Commanders Oppose U.S.-Russian Launch Notification
Moscow-Havana ties enduring, but not always smooth
Putin to Find Legacy of Russian Presence in Cuba
Britain, N. Korea Establish Ties
Britain, North Korea Open Diplomatic Ties
Rivals Cooperate on Chip Equipment
Pentagon Says China Tested Missile
China runs 2nd test of long-range missile
Missile Plan Won't Halt Iran Program
Britain, N. Korea establish diplomatic ties
Litton Awarded $338 Million Navy Contract
North Carolina
Power alert declared in Calif.
Landfill Tapes May Hold Secrets
Constellation Buys Stake in Nuclear Plant
Nuclear facility reports problem
Another contractor for Hanford
What next president faces abroad

MILITARY
Putin urges deeper economic ties with Cuba
New Test Lets Parents Check Johnny for Drug Use-Behind His Back
US "Outsourcing" Colombian War?
Nevada
11 indicted for E. Timor war crimes
EAST TIMOR: WAR CRIMES INDICTMENTS
Not worth saving
Baghdad's Troops Have Left Enclave, Iraq Kurds Say
IRAQ: `OIL FOR FOOD' EXTENDED
Korea negotiators meet on future relations
Burmese Junta May Be Ready to Release Top Opponent
Myanmar critics face torture risk
Pearl Harbor Historiography:
NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS
Endeavour Touches Down, Ending Space Station Construction Mission
U.S. Envoy Tackles Objections to Tribunal on War Crimes
U.N. Report Says Yugoslavia Needs More Aid
Marines Ground Osprey Fleet After Crash Kills Four
Osprey crash delays production decision
Marines ground Osprey fleet after fatal crash in North Carolina
Daschle blocks bill on military voting
States

OTHER
Thirteen Days
'A Practical Tool,' but Puzzling Too
Wind Generators Popping up in Wis.
Iowa
Outrage as a Neighborhood Learns That Its Water Is Contaminated
Bush (Jeb) at White House for Bill on Everglades
Bill may bring health to Everglades
Dredging the Hudson
Bush civility
Purchase Nearly Completes Land Acquisition for 2-State Park
States
Tiny particles in air increase deaths
World Bank head: Russia may get loan
U.S., Australia win beef appeal
Western Banks to Continue Lending Money to Turkey
Affidavits submitted in LAPD case
Fingerprinting to Go
Peru ex-spy chief hires lawyer
PERU: EX-SPY CHIEF HIRES SWISS LAWYER
U.S.-based sect member nabbed for spying
Fake Nike shirts glorify Bin Laden

ACTIVISTS
DBSO Conference December 30-31
Act now to protect endangered steller sea lions
THE WATCHERS Multinationals take aim at protesters
SLA fugitive trial may be delayed
CANADA: MONTREAL PROTEST
OUTSIDE THE COURT
Florida
Protesters wave signs of the times
Supreme pasture
Dems stage rallies around nation


-------- NUCLEAR

Former U.S. Military Commanders Oppose U.S.-Russian Launch Notification Agreement

Russia Today
Dec 12, 2000
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=229195

WASHINGTON -- (Agence France Presse) A group of retired U.S. military commanders protested Monday a proposed U.S.-Russian agreement on prior notification of ballistic missile launches, saying it would likely impede development of U.S. "space power."

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister were expected to sign the pre-launch notification memorandum of understanding later this week in Brussels, the group said.

There was no immediate comment from the State Department.

The proposed launch notification regime is part of a broader initiative to reduce the risk that a misunderstood launch could lead to an accidental nuclear exchange. The two countries also have been discussing setting up a joint missile launch early warning center in Moscow.

But in an open letter to President Bill Clinton, 19 former military commanders said prior notification of missile and space launches would run counter to ensuring unimpeded U.S. access to space.

"Operational security and counter-intelligence considerations, as well as 21st century military doctrines calling for routine and expeditious space launch capabilities, strongly argue against our assuming such obligations," they said.

Urging the administration to give force to a "space power policy," the former officers said the United States needed "the legal latitude to do so."

"Insofar as the new MOU (memorandum of understanding) would deny the United States such latitude, it is incompatible with our long-term national security and economic interests and should be treated accordingly," the letter said.

It also urged development of cheaper launch capabilities, arguing that U.S. ability to exploit space has been constrained by "our reliance upon enormously expensive, time-consuming and labor intensive launch systems and facilities." ((c) 2000 Agence France Presse)

---

Moscow-Havana ties enduring, but not always smooth
Putin to make historical Cuban visit this week

CNN
December 12, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/12/12/cuba.russia.history.reut/index.html

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- Ties between Russia and Cuba, often hailed as "eternal and unbreakable" over four decades, reflect an enduring but turbulent relationship which returns to the spotlight this week with President Vladimir Putin's visit.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/maps/cuba.havana.jpg

Relations were not always friendly, grabbed international attention with the 1962 Missile Crisis, came perilously close to total divorce at one point, and now are moving towards a cooler, more pragmatic understanding of mutual convenience.

Ever since the Soviet Union's early recognition of Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, the Moscow-Havana link has remained an object of world attention and almost permanent controversy.

The note of controversy was struck right from the first visit by a leading Soviet figure to revolutionary Cuba, that of Vice-President Anastas Mikoyan in February, 1960.

In an incident conveniently forgotten since by Cuba's state-controlled media, Catholic students carrying placards reading "Long Live Fidel! Down with Russian Imperialism!" tried to disrupt a wreath-laying ceremony by Mikoyan in Havana.

Police fired shots into the air to restore order.

The Mikoyan visit produced the first of what would be a series of Cuban-Russian sugar-for-oil deals and fueled growing fears in the United States that Castro was planning to turn Cuba into a communist Soviet satellite.

From then onwards, Soviet-Cuban links improved rapidly, just as fast as U.S.-Cuban ties deteriorated to the point where Washington cut diplomatic relations with Havana January 3, 1961.

Castro declared Cuba socialist soon afterwards and the Moscow-Havana marriage was consummated by military and trade accords that placed the island firmly in the Soviet camp.

But it was the 1962 October Missile Crisis that most firmly impressed the significance of the Soviet-Cuban alliance upon the consciousness of the United States and the world.

The deployment, with Castro's acquiescence, of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, brought the United States and Soviet Union, and the world, to the brink of a nuclear holocaust.

After a tense stand-off, last-minute agreement between U.S. President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev led to Moscow withdrawing the missiles from the Caribbean island.

But, ironically, the deal that avoided World War Three marked the first row in Havana's relationship with Moscow.

Castro was furious that he was not consulted by Khrushchev about the missile withdrawal, provoking a Cuban sense of "betrayal by Moscow" that was to recur in the decades to come.

But the Soviet-Cuban marriage survived this and blossomed into a full-blooded political, economic and military alliance.

Cuba joined the Soviet trading bloc Comecon in 1972 and later sent "internationalist" troops, equipped with Soviet arms and trained by Soviet military advisers, to combat "imperialist expansionism" in battlefields like Angola and Ethiopia.

Winds of change cloud Soviet-Cuban ties

But in the second half of the 1980s, winds of change in the Soviet Union, especially the reformist canons of "perestroika" and "glasnost" embraced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, blew new clouds onto the horizon of Soviet-Cuban relations.

Moscow, increasingly pragmatic in its relations with the United States and the West, had grown distinctly uneasy about Castro's passionate endorsement of, and active material support for, left-wing guerrilla movements in Central America.

The 30-year-old marriage came under immediate strain from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Castro, while not concealing his displeasure, was still declaring in 1990 that Cuba's relations with the Soviet Union were "born to be lasting and eternal". But disruption to Soviet supplies of oil and other products started to hit Cuba's economy.

Political confusion and uncertainty in the Soviet Union led Castro to proclaim "an independent, Cuban, socialist line".

In 1991, Gorbachev's surprise unilateral announcement that he would withdraw Soviet troops from Cuba hit Havana like a bombshell. Castro, recalling 1962, again cried betrayal.

Relations reached a low point in the mid-1990s, although the new Russian state sustained some sugar-for-oil trade with Cuba, as well as low-level military and technical cooperation.

Although the old passion seems gone for ever, recent years have seen attempts to revive past ties on a new, non- ideological footing, with greater emphasis on economic ties.

---

Putin to Find Legacy of Russian Presence in Cuba

Russia Today
Dec 12, 2000
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=229193

HAVANA -- (Reuters) When Russian President Vladimir Putin walks into Moscow's vast embassy in Havana later this week, the first thing he will see is a portrait of himself hanging on a green velvet case opposite the entrance.

He may not realize it, but behind the case is a large, marble bust of Vladimir Lenin -- too bulky, or in Cuba perhaps too politically sensitive, to cart away after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the dismantling of such symbols elsewhere.

Wherever he turns on Wednesday when he arrives in Havana for his first visit to Latin America, Putin will find much to remind him of the influential role the Soviet Union once played in Cuba during three decades of close ties cemented by a shared communist ideology.

But despite the Lada and Moskovich automobiles that dodge potholes on Havana's streets and the steady diet of Soviet culture Cubans were once fed, to many it is remarkable how quickly Russian influence has dissipated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

"Cubans and Russians are people with a culture and idiosyncrasy so different that a total fusion was impossible, and the influence ended up being minimal," said a Russian businessman who has lived in Cuba for 13 years, one of a small community of some 1,500, a fraction of the previous numbers.

RUSSIAN PRESENCE EBBS

Hundreds of people once filled the cavernous Russian Embassy in what one worker there called "the happy Soviet times." Now barely a dozen diplomats are stationed in the building. Its huge central tower is closed off, and footsteps echo eerily in the empty spaces.

Built near Havana's coastline during the 1980s, the Soviet-style embassy, which neighbors compare to a space ship or missile tower, has now become a virtual tourist attraction, a souvenir of the Cold War era.

It is not the only symbol of Soviet presence in Cuba in the decades after President Fidel Castro turned to Moscow for support in what became one of the Cold War's most notable alliances.

Putin will also be aware of the sophisticated electronic intelligence center that Moscow leases from Cuba.

From a road nearby, the Lourdes center, which has been a source of controversy between Washington and Moscow, looks like a mass of antennae, cables and electronic equipment in the middle of tropical vegetation and agricultural fields.

Despite its abandoned appearance, the Lourdes installation, built in the 1970s, still has great strategic importance for Russia and the world, said Moscow's ambassador to Cuba.

"It gives Russia a means of observing U.S. compliance in the agreements to limit and reduce strategic arms," Andrey Dmitriev told Reuters. "The United States has various centers like this around Russia. ... It also serves as a communication tool for our Latin American representations and for shipping."

Viewed by some in the United States as simply a spy station, Lourdes is reported to house dozens of Russian intelligence officers using satellites and other high-tech surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the United States.

Lourdes is one of the few major Cuban-Russian projects still functioning. Others -- like the Juragua nuclear plant, the Cienfuegos refinery and the Las Camariocas nickel plant -- remain half-built and in need of fresh investment.

SIGNS OF OLD INFLUENCE STILL VISIBLE

Beyond these Socialist-era constructions, however, there will be plenty else for Putin to see and hear of the old Soviet presence, before the withdrawal of the last troops in 1993.

In the streets of Havana, Ladas and Moskovichs imported from Moscow compete with old American cars brought into the country before Castro's 1959 revolution. Numerous machines, vans, and planes -- like the Antonovs and Tupoleves -- also recall the Soviet influence.

"Everything here came from the Soviet Union. They even used to joke that we bought snowplows from them!" recalled one Havana resident, remembering the era when two-thirds of the Caribbean island's trade was with the Soviet bloc.

When Putin meets Cubans, he will find numerous people with names like Boris, Vladimir, Aliuska, Niurka and even Lenin. He could even discuss his nation's literature and cinema in Russian with many of them if he wants to.

Not only did thousands of Cubans study in the Soviet Union -- and vice-versa as Soviet citizens came to Cuba as technicians and soldiers -- but those Cubans who remained at home were fed a steady diet of Soviet culture.

Despite the 30 years of close ties, however, many people have been surprised at the rapid ebb of Russian influence over the past decade.

Although nostalgic for the relative economic abundance of the Soviet era, most Cubans confess they feel more affinity for American than Russian culture now.

"There's nothing left," said one Havana housewife. "We don't dance like the Russians. We don't eat like the Russians. We don't even drink vodka."

---

Britain, N. Korea Establish Ties

Associated Press
December 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-North-Korea.html

LONDON (AP) -- Edging further out of its international isolation, North Korea on Tuesday added Britain to the growing list of countries with which it has diplomatic relations.

The decision marks the first time Britain has had diplomatic ties with the communist Democratic People's Republic of Korea since its creation 50 years ago.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said his government had been persuaded by Pyongyang's growing rapprochement with South Korea and its decision to end missile launches.

``We believe that dialogue and negotiation are the best ways of securing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula,'' Cook said.

Welcoming the decision, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it ``will not only improve relations between the two countries, but also play a positive role in building peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation.''

Britain announced in October that it was ready to follow Canada, Italy and Australia, which have established diplomatic links with North Korea this year.

After five days of talks, the British and North Korean governments said in a statement Tuesday they would appoint ambassadors ``as soon as each side has made the necessary arrangements to open a resident mission'' in London and Pyongyang.

Until ambassadors are in place, Britain and North Korea will appoint non-resident charge d'affaires, to be stationed in the South Korean capital Seoul and in Geneva or Stockholm, the statement said.

Cook cited recent ``significant progress'' in the dialogue between the two Koreas, particularly the landmark June summit between their leaders, Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae-jung.

Cook also welcomed the dialogue between the United States and North Korea, and North Korea's ``confirmation of its moratorium on missile launches.''

At the June summit, the two Korean leaders reached a broad agreement to end decades of animosity and work together for reconciliation and eventual reunification.

The Koreas have since stopped propaganda broadcasts, exchanged high-level envoys and started reconnecting a cross-border railway.

---

Britain, North Korea Open Diplomatic Ties

Reuters
December 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain.html

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain opened diplomatic relations with North Korea Tuesday for the first time since the hard-line communist state was created more than 50 years ago.

The Foreign Office said engagement not estrangement was the best policy toward the Stalinist country of 22 million people, until recently branded the pariah of the West for its isolationism and aggressive nuclear proliferation policies.

``This allows us to engage with North Korea on issues of human rights and those related to non-proliferation,'' a Foreign Office spokesman said after a memorandum of understanding between the two governments was signed in London.

Britain follows Italy, Australia and Canada in establishing official links with Pyongyang, and its decision came after consulting Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Washington is edging toward engagement after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip to Pyongyang in October, but it has yet to abandon an ambitious program to protect itself and allies from ``rogue'' nuclear missiles including from North Korea.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook made particular reference to the United States in his statement:

``I have welcomed the continuation of dialogue between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, in particular the DPRK's confirmation of its moratorium on missile launches.''

North Korea sent shudders through the region when it test-fired a Taepodong missile in August 1998. The third stage of the missile fell in the sea beyond Japan.

NORTH KOREAN LEADER NEEDS CASH, BUT CAUTIOUS

North Korea's ``great leader'' Kim Jong-il brought his impoverished country out of its Cold War shell this summer with a landmark summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Seoul welcomed Britain's move, which reinforces its policy toward the unpredictable northern neighbor -- to draw it out of isolation while preventing a collapse of the military regime.

``South Korea hopes that it (Tuesday's signing) will contribute toward the relaxation of tension and improve the conditions for peace and security on the Korean peninsular,'' said Choi Sung-hong, South Korea's ambassador in London.

Political analysts said the establishment of diplomatic ties was a good thing for stability on the peninsula, strategically placed between Russia, Japan and China.

But they warned that the situation remained volatile.

The United States, which has 37,000 troops posted in South Korea, is technically still at war with the North following the 1950-53 Korean War. The border between the two Koreas is the most heavily guarded in the world.

And while Kim Jong-il may be keen to forge ties with rich countries to open up aid for his cash-starved and economically backward country, he remains cautious.

``This is still a very suspicious and independent-minded country which is wary and prickly of the outside world,'' said one London-based expert.

Britain said its decision to open ties with Pyongyang were political rather than economic, with little prospect of major trade flows opening between the two states in the near future.

---

Rivals Cooperate on Chip Equipment

New York Times
December 12, 2000
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/technology/12CHIP.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8 - A decade ago, when a Japanese company sought to acquire a Silicon Valley operation making crucial equipment for semiconductor manufacturing, the prospect was treated in this country as a threat to national security. Chip industry executives and politicians feared that the sale would touch off a chain of events ending an era of American technological supremacy.

Now those fears have all but vanished. And a growing number of industry executives say the most important lesson is not the threat of overseas competition, but the value of international cooperation.

The reason is a practical one: it will require almost $1 billion to develop the essential technology for the next generation of chip-making equipment. And with fears of Japanese domination having abated, the United States government is underwriting less and less of the underlying research. So chip makers say continuing advances are now beyond the grasp of Americans alone.

Indeed, an alliance of American, Dutch and German chip makers is expected to reach a milestone in April when they switch on a futuristic chip-making machine able to etch circuit lines no more than several hundred atoms across. It is a commercial engineering challenge - and an international collaboration - on a scale rare if not unequaled in any other industry.

``The semiconductor industry has been unique in pursuing this form of global cooperation,'' said Ulrich Schumacher, president and chief executive of the German participant, Infineon Technologiescoei. ``It's because our costs are brutally high.''

The privately financed cooperative effort is being conducted in national laboratories better known for their work on the American nuclear arsenal. It harnesses optical technologies involving highly reflective mirrors and high-powered laser light sources borrowed from research done as part of a missile-defense program known as Star Wars.

If the researchers succeed, the resulting chip-fabrication plants - which themselves will cost $1 billion to $2 billion apiece - will be able to produce chips for myriad applications that will be 100 times as fast as those in use today, with 100 times the storage capacity.

While the burden of developing chip technologies has brought a trend toward global cooperation, it has also led to the emergence of new players in the race to build state-of-the-art computer chips. In the last decade, the semiconductor industry has expanded significantly with aggressive new chip makers emerging in Taiwan, Korea and Europe.

The globalization of the industry is accelerating partly part because other regions are adopting gadgets like cell phones and wireless digital devices at a faster rate than the United States is. But the role of American chip makers in sharing and transferring technology has also been a factor. I.B.M., for example, rather than bear the cost of research and development on memory chips by itself, entered into a venture with Infineon, and the partnership was instrumental in helping make Infineon a world leader in memory technology.

And though the result has indeed been a dilution of American leadership in the chip industry, there has been almost no evidence of the anxiety that shaped a national debate on industrial policy in the United States a decade ago.

``There was a concern in Washington that this had to be a U.S.-only technology, and we've been working hard to explain to them that this has to be an international technology,'' said Charles W. Gwyn, program director of the American-European consortium working on the next generation of chip making gear. In 1999 global sales of the semiconductor equipment industry were $28.6 billion and worldwide chip sales reached $149 billion. Growth rates for chip production and chip-equipment purchases in Europe, Korea and Taiwan indicate that those regions are rapidly gaining on Japan and the United States, particularly in the most advanced memory chips - widely used in the most popular consumer products, from desktop PC's to digital music players - and in state-of-the- art factories.

Today three European chip makers - Infineon, ST Microelectronics and Royal Philips - are among the world's 10 leading chip makers. Meanwhile, a decade after the Japanese had come to dominate the memory-chip industry and were threatening to overtake the United States in microprocessors, they are now being outpaced, in part because they have tried to go it alone rather than cooperate in research and development, Mr. Schumacher said.

``They thought it was about controlling the technology,'' he said.

The shift toward collaboration can be seen most clearly here in the Bay Area, where the privately financed international effort to design the next generation of chip-making gear is under way at three national laboratories, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley and Sandia California.

Infineon of Germany, cobiASM Lithographycoei of the Netherlands and three American chip makers - Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Motorola - are underwriting the initiative, which involves an exotic new technology known as extreme ultraviolet lithography, or E.U.V.. The research is considered crucial to continuing advances in the semiconductor industry beyond 2004, when current technology is expected to reach its limits in etching ever-smaller circuits on silicon.

When Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the silicon chip, set out four decades ago to build one of the first chip- making machines, he drove to a photographic supply house in search of an inexpensive, used camera lens for his new machine.

In contrast, the new machines, called steppers, are custom-made devices of the highest order. They are based on a laser-generated light source at wavelengths far shorter than those used today. And they require engineering feats, like the ability to create a machine that can send light through a vacuum - and one that moves fast but produces no vibration.

The consortium researchers acknowledge that they still have thorny technical problems to solve. And I.B.M. and Lucent Technologies are pursuing an alternative direction, using ultrashort-wavelength X-rays to etch the circuits, instead of light.

But the Semiconductor Industry Association points to E.U.V. as the more promising technology, and the confidence of the California-based researchers has been growing in recent months. Their approach is expected to lead to a prototype machine by April. If all goes well, such machines will be producing chips commercially within five years.

The company that figures to bring the technology to market is, in fact, the Silicon Valley Group, the outfit that caused a furor when it was coveted by Nikon of Japan a decade ago. At the time it was the lithographic division of Perkin Elmer; I.B.M. ultimately stepped in to ensure that it stayed in American hands. But after further changes in ownership, it was recently sold to ASM.

At the same time, Japan is independently pursuing the E.U.V. technology in a government-financed consortium. Whichever team arrives there first, it appears likely that for the first time there will not be an independent American-owned maker of the most advanced chip-making machines.

Today the new landscape is being hailed by many in the computer industry as a major step toward a borderless world in which economic and technical interdependence are the hallmark of a global economy.

But some American officials remain concerned that while government-financed consortiums in Japan and Europe are continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new technology, United States government money for research in semiconductor making is dwindling.

In the early 90's, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was spending more than $300 million a year to develop new semiconductor capabilities, in part to ensure that the Pentagon would not have to turn to foreign suppliers for its own needs. With such concerns fading, that outlay is now $55 million a year, and is to be phased out by 2005.

``The United States programs in basic research are a lot smaller than the Japanese or European efforts,'' said Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, the leading American maker of chips. ``But people here are riding high and so there just isn't a great deal of concern right now.''

There is another, more fundamental reason there has been no political outcry about the new globalization of the chip field, according to many industry executives.

The rapid internationalization of the industry has made it possible for large and small American companies to take advantage of the low and subsidized cost of capital in countries like Taiwan and South Korea.

-------- china

Pentagon Says China Tested Missile

Associated Press
December 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China-Missile.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- China conducted a test flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile last month while Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on an official visit to Beijing, officials said Tuesday.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said China tested a DF-31 missile over its territory on Nov. 4. He would not reveal details such as how far the missile flew. The test was first reported in Tuesday's editions of The Washington Times.

``The test was pretty much as expected in terms of timing and in terms of results,'' Bacon said. There was no indication that Shelton was advised of the firing by Chinese officials.

The Times also reported that China is preparing another missile test in a few weeks.

Bacon said the Clinton administration is not alarmed by China's effort to modernize its long-range ballistic missile force.

``You can read about the DF-31 in a number of public reports that are put out by the Central Intelligence Agency, by the Defense Department and other agencies. So we are watching it,'' he said.

``I don't think it's fair to say that this building or this government is worried about what they see in China, but clearly we watch any country that is developing its military, modernizing its military.''

---

China runs 2nd test of long-range missile

Washington Times
December 12, 2000
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-20001212222836.htm

China conducted the second flight test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile last month and is preparing for the third test in the next few weeks, a sign Beijing is accelerating its long-range missile program, The Washington Times has learned.

The flight test of the DF-31 missile was carried out in early November during the visit to China by Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Pentagon officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"This test and plans for the next one show they are moving ahead with their road-mobile long-range missile program," said one Pentagon official familiar with reports of the test.

Defense analysts said the timing of the test during the four-star general's trip appeared to be a deliberate political signal to the United States.

The test took place during a three-day visit to China by Gen. Shelton from Nov. 3 to 5. The general observed live-fire Chinese military drills near the southern city of Nanjing.

During the visit, Chinese military officials repeated Beijing's vehement opposition to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

A Taiwanese military delegation is scheduled to arrive in Washington in the next several days to present the Taipei government's annual arms purchase requests to the Pentagon.

The missile test so close to the U.S. presidential Election Day also was viewed by analysts as a signal to the next U.S. president of China's opposition to U.S. missile defense deployment.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has said he favors deployment of a missile-defense shield to knock out long-range missiles. Vice President Al Gore has criticized Mr. Bush's missile-defense plans and has not indicated clearly his position on deployment. President Clinton rejected deploying a missile-defense system earlier this year.

White House spokesman P.J. Crowley declined to comment on the details of the missile test, citing its policy on intelligence information.

However, Mr. Crowley sought to play down the threat posed by the DF-31. "The fact that the Chinese have a new missile, the DF-31, under development is well known," he said. "They have publicly indicated for some time an intention to modernize their strategic forces."

The CIA has said that the DF-31 and a longer-range version, the DF-41, will be the first Chinese missiles to incorporate U.S. nuclear weapons design information obtained through espionage, namely smaller warheads.

The new missiles also are expected to incorporate U.S. missile technology obtained illegally from the United States through commercial space cooperation, according to intelligence officials.

Unlike the last DF-31 test in August 1999, the November test was not made public by the Chinese government. It was disclosed to The Times by defense officials.

The flight test was carried out from the Wuzhai Missile and Space Center, some 250 miles north of Beijing. The flight path of the test ICBM could not be learned. The last test, however, was conducted within Chinese territory and involved several decoy warheads -an indication of China's intention to increase the DF-31's capability to defeat missile defenses.

Officials said U.S. intelligence reports indicated the missile test was successful.

China in recent months has increased its threatening rhetoric against the United States. A Chinese government white paper issued in October described the United States as a global menace bent on "gunboat" power politics. It called the situation in the Taiwan Strait "grim."

In February, the official military newspaper Liberation Army Daily warned in a blunt commentary that Beijing would resort to "long distance" missile strikes on the United States during a regional conflict over Taiwan.

"This is another warning shot in the political campaign China has sponsored over the past two years against deployment of a U.S. national missile defense," Michael Pillsbury, a former Reagan administration defense specialist on China, said of the latest missile test.

Mr. Pillsbury, in his recent book of translations of Chinese military writings, stated that China's strategy is to use its small but growing nuclear forces to threaten the United States with nuclear attack as a way to prevent U.S. military defense of Taiwan in any conflict with China.

The CIA reported last year that China's current long-range missile force includes 13 missiles targeted on the United States.

Richard Fisher, a China military specialist with the Jamestown Foundation, also said the latest DF-31 test is part of a propaganda campaign aimed at influencing U.S. policy-makers against deploying a missile defense.

"China is making maximum military-political use of its new nuclear missile capability," Mr. Fisher said. "The tests themselves are being used to target American decision makers as well as to target Taiwan's leadership to signal both that China's new missiles are intended to deter American support for Taiwan."

In 1996, China used short-range missile test firings north and south of Taiwan in an attempt to influence elections on the island. The United States responded by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region in a major show of force.

Mr. Fisher predicts that the new DF-31 will become operational "in the very near future."

The Chinese will begin garrison deployment of the DF-31 in the period between 2005 and 2010, said Mr. Fisher, who recently returned from a visit to China.

"The tragedy of the Clinton years is that America has no missile-defense capability to counter China's anti-Taiwan missile capability," Mr. Fisher said.

Chinese military officials have stated in private and through the official press that Beijing is willing to use nuclear weapons against the United States to deter the U.S. military from backing Taiwan in a conflict.

The test, according to defense officials, highlights China's strategic nuclear military buildup, a modernization program that has been played down publicly by the Clinton administration to avoid upsetting the pro-China engagement policy.

The truck-mobile DF-31 was first tested on the ground in 1995 and again in 1998, when ejection tests were carried out - firing the missile out of its launch tube.

After the first flight test, which took place Aug. 1, 1999, the Chinese government announced it had conducted a test launch of "a new type of long-range, ground-to-ground missile within its territory."

-------- iran

Missile Plan Won't Halt Iran Program

Associated Press
December 12, 2000 Filed at 2:45 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Iran.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran, a major recipient of missile technology from North Korea and China, will be only marginally affected if Pyongyang and Beijing follow through on their stated intention to halt exports of missile materials, a top State Department official said Tuesday.

Richard Roth, the No. 2 official in the department's Middle East bureau, said Iran has been relying mostly on Russian cooperation for its missile development.

Roth was one of a number of Iran experts who spoke at a panel discussion sponsored by the Middle East Policy Council, a private research group.

Geoffrey Kemp, a senior aide on Middle East policy in the Reagan administration, said he believes it is a foregone conclusion that Iran will acquire long-range missiles.

``We're going to have to live with them,'' Kemp said.

Last month, China promised to cease exporting nuclear materials, a move welcomed by the Clinton administration. North Korea has indicated interest in pursuing a similar path, and administration officials are hopeful a final agreement can be reached.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discussed the issue in October with North Korean chairman Kim Jong Il during a visit to Pyongyang.

Iran has tested the Shahab 3 missile, which has a range of 810 miles and is capable of striking Israel or U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Iran is now working on longer range versions of the Shahab.

Roth said that if China and North Korea decrease or eliminate missile technology exports, ``it may slow down some aspects of the Iranian missile program but the continuation toward achievement of Shahab 3, 4 and 5 is still very much on track thanks to the Russians.''

The United States has repeatedly accused Russian scientific institutes of selling missile technology and training to Iran.

Kemp said he would not rule out the possibility of China reversing itself on the missile export issue, particularly if it enters into a conflict with the United States over Taiwan.

``U.S.-China relations are going to be red button issue for the coming administration, and China has growing interests and energy needs from the Middle East,'' Kemp said. ``So this is a sleeper issue that we should bear in mind for the future.''

-------- korea

Britain, N. Korea establish diplomatic ties

USA Today
12/12/00- Updated 08:54 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwstue07.htm

LONDON (AP) - Britain and North Korea agreed Tuesday to establish diplomatic relations - recognition, Britain said, of Pyongyang's warming relationship with South Korea and its decision to suspend missile launches.

The decision marks the first time Britain has had diplomatic ties with the communist Democratic People's Republic of Korea since its creation 50 years ago.

In a sign of its improving relations with the outside world, North Korea has this year already established diplomatic links with Canada, Italy and Austria.

Britain said in October that it was ready to follow suit, and Tuesday's announcement came after five days of talks in London between government officials.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the decision ''was taken in recognition of the significant progress'' in the dialogue between the two Koreas, particularly a landmark June summit between their leaders, Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae-jung.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry welcomed Tuesday's decision, saying it ''will not only improve relations between the two countries, but also play a positive role in building peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation.''

Cook also praised ongoing communication between the United States and North Korea, as well as the communist country's moratorium on missile launches.

''We believe that dialogue and negotiation are the best ways of securing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula,'' Cook said.

In a joint statement, the two governments said they would appoint ambassadors after arranging for permanent mission offices in London and Pyongyang.

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

Litton Awarded $338 Million Navy Contract

Reuters
December 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-litton-.html

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. (Reuters) - Litton Industries Inc. (LIT.N) on Tuesday said the U.S. Navy has awarded it a $338.2 million contract to build a guided missile destroyer.

The contract to build the ship, a ``DDG 51'' Class Aegis destroyer, was awarded last Friday, Litton said.

Litton has been awarded contracts to build 24 Aegis destroyers, of which 13 ships have been delivered, the company said.

The Navy plans a total of 57 ships in the DDG 51 program, which extends into 2006. Of that total, 51 have been procured to date, Litton said.

Aegis ships are designed to provide primary protection for the Navy's battle forces, and are equipped with weapons and helicopter support facilities, the company said.

---

USA Today
12/12/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

North Carolina

Raleigh - The Navy will name a new attack submarine the USS North Carolina. Navy Secretary Richard Danzig said the fourth Virginia-class attack submarine is due to join the fleet in 2007. It will become the fourth ship in Navy history named for North Carolina. The last was the World War II battleship, now a floating museum in Wilmington.

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

-------- california

Power alert declared in Calif.

Infobeat
Tuesday, December 12, 2000
By JENNIFER COLEMAN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=405301764
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-West-Coast-Power.html

FOLSOM, Calif. (AP) - Cold weather in the Northwest again caused electricity shortages in Northern California on Monday, but the power crunch in the southern part of the state eased slightly after a nuclear reactor was put back in service.

Cold weather in other states means less electricity for California, which buys some of its power from out-of-state utilities. As a result, California grid operators declared a power alert Monday during peak hours.

Ed Riley, director of power grid operations at the California Independent System Operator, said the shortfall, which resulted in a Stage 2 alert, could mean large commercial customers like Intel Corp. would be asked to cut back on electricity use.

Southern California had enough resources Monday, Riley said.

There was no indication that California was in danger of a Stage 3 alert, when reserves dip so low that the state can impose hourlong, rolling blackouts affecting thousands of homes and businesses.

Utilities in Oregon and Washington have asked commercial users to conserve power but stopped short of declaring an alert.

``Our system is stretched thin and supplies are tight, but we don't anticipate any lights being cut off,'' said John Harrison, spokesman for the Northwest Power Planning Council, which represents Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

The California crunch was eased by the speedy repair of one of the two reactors at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo. The plant generates power for 2 million homes.

The power shortage also was helped by the 10-month closing of the Kaiser Aluminum Corp. smelting plant in Mead, Wash. The company decided to sell its unused power for $52 million.

``The power we had been using was worth far more on the open market than it was in making aluminum,'' Kaiser spokesman Scott Lamb said.

Electricity deregulation, the cold and the shutdown of some power plants for maintenance have been blamed for the crisis.

The overall problem _ demand that is consistently greater than supply _ isn't going away anytime soon, said Jim Detmers, ISO managing director of operations.

He said there has been no been significant power-plant construction recently, and power managers like the ISO are paying high rates to buy electricity when reserves drop. On Thursday, the ISO paid $81 million to keep electricity flowing; it usually pays about $5 million a day.

California approved a phased-in deregulation of the electricity market in 1996 in an effort to lower prices for consumers through competition, but so far it has led to higher prices.

-------- new mexico

Landfill Tapes May Hold Secrets

Washington Post
Tuesday, December 12, 2000 ; Page A02
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56620-2000Dec11?language=printer

The FBI's crime laboratory is examining more than 10 computer tapes recovered from a New Mexico landfill, and a government official said yesterday that, judging by their "outside appearance," they could be the classified cassettes that former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee claims to have thrown into the trash.

Officials said it will take several days to begin to reconstruct what is on the tapes, many of which are crushed. But the FBI has temporarily halted its two-week search of the Los Alamos County Landfill, and Energy Department experts have been put on alert to analyze whether the tapes hold the nuclear weapons data that Lee downloaded from the computer system at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1993 to 1997.

If the tapes excavated from a mountain of garbage prove to have been made by Lee, the discovery would help to back up the Taiwanese American scientist's assertion that he tossed approximately 17 tapes into a trash receptacle at Los Alamos in January 1999. It also would help reassure investigators that the tapes did not end up in the hands of a foreign country.

But government officials cautioned that it may be impossible to determine from the physical evidence whether all of the tapes ended up in the landfill--or whether anybody other than Lee ever handled them.

"Among the tapes there could be one or more [that Lee] might have thrown away," said one official familiar with the investigation. "But we don't know if they are all of them."

The official added that, by the same token, if the tapes found in the landfill do not turn out to have been made by Lee, "that doesn't say he didn't destroy the ones he had."

Still, the apparent discovery of the missing tapes was a dramatic turn in the long and controversial case.

Lee, 60, has been under steady FBI investigation since 1996, when he was targeted as a possible source of secret data about the newest U.S. nuclear warhead, the W-88, which had been obtained by China, possibly through espionage.

Although the espionage case against Lee essentially collapsed and he was never charged with spying, he was fired from his job at Los Alamos for security violations in March 1999. Investigators then searched his office and home, where they found evidence that he had downloaded the equivalent of more than 400,000 pages of nuclear weapons design data and computer simulation programs to his office computer and to portable tapes.

As a result, the FBI opened a new investigation, which led to Lee's arrest in December 1999. Charged with 59 counts of mishandling classified information and violating the Atomic Energy Act, he was held in solitary confinement and threatened with life in prison.

Part of the evidence against Lee was that he appeared to have gone to great lengths to hide his downloading by erasing data and repeatedly attempting to enter the top-secret X Division at Los Alamos after his security clearance was revoked.

Lee, through his lawyers, steadfastly maintained that he had never given the tapes to anyone and had destroyed them, though he long declined to say exactly how. His supporters, including Asian American groups, said he had been singled out because of his ethnicity. Government experts disagreed over the importance of the information he had downloaded, and his lawyers proved that the lead FBI agent on the case had given faulty testimony.

Ultimately, Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony count and was sentenced in September to the nine months he had already served. The federal trial judge apologized to him and excoriated other branches of government for his harsh treatment.

As part of Lee's plea bargain, he pledged to tell investigators why he made the tapes and exactly what he did with them. Until now, however, government officials have been skeptical of his claim that he made the tapes as protection against computer failures and later just threw them away.

FBI officials in Washington yesterday refused to confirm that any tapes have been discovered. Bill Elwell, a spokesman for the FBI field office in Albuquerque, said its grueling, dawn-to-dusk search of the 50-acre landfill with handrakes was halted Friday because agents were tired and needed a rest. He declined to confirm that any tapes had been found.

Lee's plea agreement allows the FBI to question him for up to 10 full days. Two days of questioning remain. Afterward, the FBI can request that he take a polygraph exam to try to determine whether he has told the truth.

-------- new york

Constellation Buys Stake in Nuclear Plant

Reuters
December 12, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-utilities-ni.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Power company Constellation Energy Group Inc. (CEG.N) on Tuesday said it would buy a majority stake in two nuclear power plants of the Nine Mile Point facility in Scriba, N.Y., for $815 million in cash.

Maryland-based Constellation said it will buy 100 percent of Unit 1 and 82 percent of Unit 2, and will own 1,550 megawatts of Nine Mile Point's 1,757 megawatts of total generating capacity.

In a separate statement, Niagara Mohawk Holdings Inc. (NMK.N) said Constellation would buy the share of the Nine Point plants for $1.04 billion, which includes $815 million in cash and payments, $134 million in interest, and $88 million in decommission savings.

Niagara Mohawk said it will sell its ownership of the Nine Mile Point 1 and 2 nuclear plants, and that New York State Electric & Gas Corp. Rochester Gas and Electric Corp., and Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. agreed to sell their ownership stakes of the Unit 2 nuclear plant to Constellation Nuclear.

Constellation said the purchase would add immediately to earnings, and contribute about 20 cents per share to its merchant energy business earnings in 2002. The sale is expected to close in mid-2001.

-------- ohio

Nuclear facility reports problem
Radioactive water leak forces FirstEnergy plant to shut reactor near Ohio

Akron Beacon Journal
Tuesday, December 12, 2000,
BY JIM MACKINNON Beacon Journal business writer
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/docs/027110.htm

SHIPPINGPORT, PA.: Highly radioactive water leaked inside a coolant system at a FirstEnergy nuclear power plant in this city just across the Ohio border, forcing the shutdown of one of the plant's two reactors and prompting a low-level emergency yesterday.

Authorities said the water at the Beaver Valley Power Station Unit 2 was contained within the building and there was no indication of a threat to public health or safety.

Water from the reactor core spilled onto the floor of the containment building at the rate of 10 to 20 gallons per minute, possibly for hours, through a small drainage pipeline, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The containment building's walls are at least 4 feet thick and made of steel-reinforced concrete, he said.

While a total amount of leaked water was not available, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said it had been collected and stored within the facility.

``It's highly radioactive,'' he said, but added he could not provide a measurement of the radioactivity. The water, by design, comes in contact with the plant's uranium fuel, he said.

Reports from the plant, which is about five miles east of East Liverpool, Ohio, indicated there had not been a radioactive release from the building, said David Smith, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

The emergency was declared at the plant's No. 2 reactor unit at 5:36 a.m. The leak was called an ``unusual event,'' the least serious of four classifications of power plant emergencies. The unusual event ended at 2:05 p.m., a FirstEnergy spokesman said.

Other types of unusual events include such things as a nuclear plant's telephone system breaking down or a trash fire, said FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider. ``It deals with a very minor event.''

That's not necessarily so, said a spokeswoman for the environmental group Earth Day Coalition in Cleveland.

``It's a very serious event even if it's the lowest level,'' said Chris Trepal. ``This is not just a little something. . . . I'm really glad nothing escaped from the plant.''

Despite their designation as unusual events, the incidents aren't all that unusual, said Sheehan. There are probably several dozen unusual events annually at the nation's 103 nuclear power plants, he said.

No workers were exposed to the leak at the Beaver Valley plant, according to FirstEnergy and the NRC.

Workers in protective suits went into the building to check the leak but were unable to reach the valve, Sheehan said. The only way to stop the leak was to shut down the reactor, he said.

``Everything we've seen, they've handled things appropriately,'' he said. ``We think they've handled things well.'' The leak was coming from a 2-inch-diameter line used to drain water from the reactor's coolant system, said Sheehan and Schneider.

The amount of water that leaked did not appear to jeopardize the nuclear fuel, said Paul Gunter, spokesman for the anti-nuclear group Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. That would have required a rupture of 500 gallons a minute, he said.

Even so, Gunter said the Beaver Valley incident is the ``type of event that exposes the chink in the armor of nuclear power.''

Beaver Valley Unit 2 had just undergone a routine 32-day-long refueling process that ended on Oct. 25.

Schneider said he did not know if the leak was related to the refueling effort. The leaking line is used only during maintenance periods, such as refueling, to drain water from the reactor, he said.

Beaver Valley Unit 2, which first went online in 1987, produces about 820 megawatts of electricity. It will remain off-line until the problem is fixed, Schneider said. He could not provide an estimate of how long that could be. The plant was shut down for nine months in 1998 for a federal review of plant operations there, he said.

``The plant this year has been running very well,'' he said.

Beaver Valley Unit 1 was unaffected and remained operating at 100 percent power, Schneider said.

The other three classifications of nuclear plant emergencies are an alert, a site-area emergency and a general emergency. Only one general emergency has ever been declared at a U.S. nuclear plant, after the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg.

Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com

-------- washington

Another contractor for Hanford

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Tuesday, December 12, 2000
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/hanf122.shtml

RICHLAND -- A new contracting team has been selected to design and build a radioactive-waste glassification plant at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the U.S. Department of Energy said yesterday.

The $4 billion, 10-year contract was awarded to Bechtel-Washington in the project to convert at least 10 percent of the deadly waste stored in 177 underground tanks into glass logs for long-term storage.

The tank waste -- 54 million gallons of it -- is considered Hanford's most serious cleanup problem. The highly radioactive material, left over from the production of plutonium during World War II and the Cold War, is stored in aging steel-and-concrete tanks.

Sixty-seven of the tanks have leaked more than 1 million gallons of waste into the ground, threatening the Columbia River, which borders the 560-square-mile reservation in south-central Washington.

"This is a major step toward meeting our commitment to the people of the state of Washington to treat waste now stored in underground tanks at Hanford," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said.

The contract was awarded a month ahead of a Jan. 15 deadline, set to keep the project on schedule after BNFL Inc. was fired in May when the company's estimated costs for the plant more than doubled, from $6.9 billion to $15.2 billion.

As planned now, construction on the glassification plant is to begin in July 2002, with waste processing to begin in 2007.

Bechtel, based in San Francisco, is teaming up with Washington Group International of Aiken, S.C., on the project. Washington Group includes the former companies of Westinghouse Government and Environmental Services, Morrison Knudsen and Raytheon Engineers and Construction.

-------- us nuc politics

What next president faces abroad

Christian Science Monitor
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2000
By Patrick M. Cronin and Audrey Kurth Cronin
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/12/12/fp9s1-csm.shtml

WASHINGTON - Our nation is filled with acrid partisan politics, turning in upon itself, at just the moment when international stability may depend on United States leadership.

The first reason for genuine concern is that, historically, political transitions have been opportune moments for regional troublemakers and local spoilers to sow mischief. Power abhors a vacuum. Both through design and accident, challenges will fall on the world's preponderant power in 2001.

Bill Clinton's first year in the White House, 1993, proved a colossal challenge in the realm of international affairs:

• Early in the year, officials uncovered an Iraqi intelligence service plot to kill former President Bush in a car-bomb attack during his visit to Kuwait. The administration fired 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles in retaliation.

• On March 12, North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Two months later it launched a medium-range Nodong missile off Japan, ushering in a rising crisis on the peninsula.

• In May, the US humanitarian relief operation in Somalia gave way to an ill-conceived United Nations mission. The US became drawn into a deadly firefight in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, leading to the withdrawal of US and eventually UN forces.

• In the summer, Bosnian Serbs began the strangulation of Sarajevo, the televised shots of which placed ever-greater public pressure on the US and Europe to act and which later led to the US and NATO intervention.

This was only the first year. The Clinton administration continued to pay for its early inattentiveness and inexperience. For instance, the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996 - which led the US to dispatch two aircraft-carrier battle groups in response to Chinese military exercises and missile tests off Taiwan - could have been averted with stronger, more assiduous diplomacy on the part of the US in 1994 and 1995. This is precisely the kind of unintended consequence the nation may face two or three years hence if we are not prepared to assume a leadership position in global affairs in the coming transition months.

The Clinton administration, which came to office with a clear electoral victory, eventually recovered from these setbacks. A Bush or Gore administration may not only have a questionable mandate, but it may also have a difficult time getting a coherent foreign and national-security policy team confirmed and into position.

This is possibly even more dangerous because, as severe as the multiple challenges of 1993 were, 2001 could be worse:

• Saddam Hussein has been contained and deterred but not defeated. He is undoubtedly looking for the way finally to bust out of US-led sanctions, especially with a deteriorating Arab-Israeli peace process and at a time when the US is distracted at home.

• North Korea's Kim Jong Il launched a diplomatic campaign this year, capped by a North-South summit meeting in June. But he has not yet agreed to any reductions in military threat. The next US administration will have to be prepared to deal with a more angry North Korean regime with a penchant for brinksmanship.

• Osama bin Laden, the reputed mastermind behind the twin embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 and possibly the suicide attack on USS Cole in October, may have every reason to take this opportunity to escalate his terror campaign.

• While Somalia may be enjoying its first elected president in a decade, the rest of Africa is consumed by some 17 intrastate conflicts. The failing UN missions in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo threaten not only to prolong suffering in West and Central Africa, but also to undermine the viability of future UN peacekeeping operations.

• In Bosnia, five years after Dayton, questions abound about the political will to retain a critical military presence given the absence of political and economic progress on the ground.

Meanwhile, the US in 2001 cannot count on the support of other major powers, such as China and Russia.

Even its allies in Europe and East Asia are wobbly on some tough issues. Building new coalitions of the willing is a time-consuming, 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year vocation, and a distracted America may not be sufficiently vigilant.

Even those pundits who predict a smooth presidential transition seldom speak of international security.

It is not our purpose to predict gloom and doom; this is less a forecast than a warning. There are higher stakes at risk than our Florida fiasco.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle should settle on a New Year's resolution that US domestic politics stop at the water's edge.

The key to overcoming partisan rancor will be the new president, who must set a tone of bipartisanship in the first 100 days.

The world is too dangerous for us to do otherwise.

Dr. Patrick M. Cronin is director of research and studies at the United States Institute of Peace. Dr. Audrey Kurth Cronin is writing on political violence and terrorism as a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.

-------- MILITARY

Putin urges deeper economic ties with Cuba

Nando Times
December 12, 2000 10:02 a.m. EST
The Associated Press
http://www.nandotimes.com/global/story/body/0%2C1025%2C500289244-500458022-503022773-0%2C00.html

MOSCOW (http://www.nandotimes.com) - Russia should move quickly to revive economic ties with Cuba or risk losing out to companies from other countries that already are moving onto the island, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired Tuesday.

Putin spoke to Russian and Cuban media ahead of his planned visit Wednesday to the former Soviet ally, the first by a Russian leader since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Russia should use its good relations with Cuba as a bridge to revive contacts with other Latin American nations, Putin said.

Putin emphasized that Russia has no ideological agenda in the region this time around and instead wants practical deals that will benefit Russian business.

"Unfortunately for us, in the years when our economic contacts collapsed, many important aspects of our mutual activity were squandered, and the position of Russian enterprises were taken by foreign competitors," Putin said on the ORT television channel.

Russian trade with Cuba now totals about $1 billion per year, Putin said, according to the Interfax news agency. This is well down from about $3.6 billion in 1991.

"Cuba plays a very important role in Latin America, and we hope very much for Cuba's active role in solving a whole number of international problems, in which we have to look for allies," Putin said, according to Interfax.

For the Soviet Union, Cuba - only 90 miles from the U.S. coast - was a strategic outpost and ideological ally worth subsidizing. About 20 percent of Cuba's gross national product is estimated to have come from Soviet subsidies.

Meanwhile, Putin said in the interview he hopes for positive relations with the new U.S. presidential administration regardless of who wins the disputed election.

"We expect that the new U.S. administration, whoever heads it, will use all the positive things achieved in Russian-U.S. relations in recent years, including those in the international security spheres," Putin said, according to Interfax.

Putin is scheduled to fly to Canada after visiting Cuba. He will cross U.S. airspace but is not scheduled to make a stopover, the presidential press service said Tuesday.

-------- drug war

New Test Lets Parents Check Johnny for Drug Use-Behind His Back
Mother's Little Helper

Village Voice
Published November 8 - 14, 2000
by Brendan I. Koerner
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0045/koerner.shtml

We'll never know who pawned that copy of Angela's Ashes at a New York bookstore, whether the person was male or female, minor or adult. But with one swipe of a new drug test across the paperback cover, we learned something infinitely more private: the previous owner likely endured the McCourt clan's Limerick woes with the aid of Marijuana.

Drug Detector, which offers America's first over-the-counter tests for marijuana and cocaine residue, requires nary a strand of hair, drop of saliva, or jar of pee. Sold by American Bio Medica of Kinderhook, New York, the product promises to make drug testing a nonconfrontational pastime. Instead of begging a child to submit to an invasive sample-based test, parents can now covertly slip into their son's or daughter's room and instantly discover whether microscopic specks of herb or blow dot the desk, drawers, or pillowcases.

"We feel the value of the service that is provided to consumers, especially parents, outweighs the privacy issue in most cases."

"Teenagers don't tell their parents when they're using drugs," says Stan Cipkowski, the company's founder and CEO. "And most parents don't have the kind of relationship with their kid-or the balls-to simply go up to the kid and say, 'Here, pee in this cup. I'm going to test you right now.'"

Since 1996, American Bio Medica's flagship product has been Rapid Drug Screen, a kind of dipstick urinalysis test popular with emergency rooms and drug-free workplace programs. But since it relies on human biological material, Rapid Drug Screen faces a lengthy FDA review before it can be marketed to retail customers.

Fortunately for the company, a firm called Mistral Security, a specialist in explosives detection, had created a drug-residue test for which it had little use. American Bio Medica licensed the invention, which needed no federal approval, and began packaging it for drugstores and online shoppers. Kits have been available at www.americanbiomedica.com since June, and Cipkowski predicts that Drug Detector will begin appearing in major-chain pharmacies by the beginning of next year.

A Drug Detector pack contains 10 matchbook-sized papers and a small, chemical-filled aerosol canister. Simply wipe the suspect surface with a collection paper, spray it, and wait for a color change. A positive result for marijuana is indicated by the rapid appearance of reddish brown dots; for the cocaine version, blue spots suggest that minute traces of nose candy are in evidence. At $34.95, or about $3.50 per test, Drug Detector is far cheaper than such laboratory staples as urinalysis ($10 to $12) or hair analysis ($60). The company also plans to sell an "industrial" version of the kit, containing papers and sprays for methamphetamines and opiates.

Despite the low price, American Bio Medica claims that Drug Detector is as reliable as any law-enforcement diagnostic device-somewhere in the neighborhood of 98 percent accurate. False positives can occur when uncontrolled substances such as nutmeg or henna are present, but the company claims such instances are rare.

In nonscientific field tests conducted by the Voice, the product was, indeed, able to detect the presence of Mary Jane residue on the freshly polished desk of one habitual blunt smoker, while giving an appropriately clean bill of health to the elevator doors at 10 Rockefeller Plaza. A copy of the Allman Brothers' eponymous 1973 album, recently purchased at a street fair, surprisingly tested negative for marijuana residue. At least one naughty patron of Chelsea hot spot Serena apparently used the men's room sink to powder his nose; the loo at nearby cop hangout Peter McManus was pristine.

American Bio Medica is quick to point out that should a child's backpack, jacket, or computer keyboard test positive, the result should not be considered absolute proof of narcotics use. "You can determine at least if there have been illegal drugs in his immediate area," says Brittany Johnson, the company's national sales manager. "That doesn't mean this person has used drugs, just that they have been exposed. A voluntary follow-up with a Rapid Drug Screen allows you to determine if he's using."

Civil libertarians, predictably, bristle at the concept of behind-the-back checkups. Louise Roback, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union's Capital Region chapter, vehemently objects to the test's inability to differentiate between contact and use. "If you're going to use that for a basis to terminate someone," she told the Albany Times Union in June, "it's a basis for concern."

Though its Web site pitches Drug Detector for use in the workplace, the company emphasizes that the primary market is not businesses but parents. "We feel the value of the service that is provided to consumers, especially parents, outweighs the privacy issue in most cases," says Johnson. "Keep in mind that the parents who are going to use this product aren't trying to hurt their child or take away their rights. They are trying to gather the right information so they can open a dialogue with that child and get them the help they need so they can live to see adulthood." To that end, each Drug Detector kit includes a questions-and-answers brochure that provides contact information for Phoenix House and the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, as well as the aphorism "Remember, you are not a bad parent."

Rave habituιs have also expressed reservations, bombarding the company's Web site with negative feedback. "Their opinion is that we're bleep bleeps, bleep bleeps," says Melissa Decker, investor relations manager. "They say, Why are we bothering a society that we don't even know about just so we can feel comfortable at night and we can go home to our nice houses and our nice dogs? Why don't we bother the crackheads on the corner that are shooting kids?" The company's response: "We thank them for their comments."

Cipkowski acknowledges that misuse is possible, perhaps by "some supervisor who has a vendetta against an employee, or some parent who is overly paranoid." But he maintains that Drug Detector's lifesaving potential far outweighs any ethical sticking points. More importantly, with an estimated 15,000 teens trying drugs for the first time each day, a financial bonanza awaits. "We're here to make money for our shareholders, number one," says Cipkowski. "The fact that we're selling a product that we think is going to help in a parent-child relationship, that's number two."

Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com

------

US "Outsourcing" Colombian War?

RadTimes # 130 December, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
Weekly News Update on the Americas,

The St. Petersburg Times of Florida reported on Dec. 2 that the Clinton administration has hired a high-level group of former US military personnel as "consultants," who keep in close contact with Pentagon officials while advising Colombians on efforts to improve the Colombian army, and how new laws could make the Colombian military more professional and effective, as well as helping to revamp Colombia's National Police. The consultants work for Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), an Alexandria, Virginia-based company run mostly by retired US military officers. Critics say the practice, known as outsourcing, is intended to bypass congressional oversight and provide political cover to the White House if something goes wrong. MPRI has done other work for Washington around the world, including in the Balkans.

MPRI is now working full time in Colombia under a $6 millioncontract. The arrangement was approved by the US Congress. The company has dispatched 14 employees to Bogota under the direction of a retired army major general. Specifically, MPRI is working with the Colombian armed forces and National Police in the areas of planning; operations, including psychological operations; training; logistics; intelligence; and personnel management.

"It's very handy to have an outfit not part of the US armed forces, obviously," said former US ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette. "If somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it's not a member of the armed forces. Nobody wants to see American military men killed." MPRI and the Pentagon both denied requests by the St. Petersburg Times to review the MPRI contract, which is renewable each year.

---

USA Today
12/12/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Nevada

Carson City - The USA's toughest marijuana laws would be softened under a proposal by a panel appointed and chaired by Chief Justice Bob Rose. The Nevada Supreme Court's Judicial Assessment Commission recommended treatment instead of prison for drug users and a citation for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Possession of any amount of pot and being under the influence of any drug are felonies in Nevada.

-------- east timor

11 indicted for E. Timor war crimes

Infobeat
Tuesday, December 12, 2000
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=405302865

DILI, East Timor (AP) - The U.N. administration in East Timor indicted an Indonesian army officer and 10 other suspects on Monday for war crimes in a series of killings around the time of last year's independence referendum.

Chief prosecutor Mohamed Othman said 10 militiamen and an Indonesian special forces officer, identified as Lt. Sayful Anwar, are the first suspects to be charged with crimes against humanity in the province.

They are accused in the murders of five clergymen, two church workers, an Indonesian journalist and a teen-ager in the eastern district of Los Palos, Othman said.

Anwar, the first Indonesian army officer to be indicted for war crimes, is a member of Kopassus, a special forces brigade that human rights groups have accused of numerous abuses in East Timor.

Militias organized and commanded by the Indonesian army laid waste to much of East Timor after its people voted to end Indonesian rule on Aug. 30, 1999. Hundreds were killed and about 250,000 fled the region.

The violence came to a halt after international peacekeepers _ who now number 9,000 _ arrived in September 1999. The United Nations is administering East Timor during its transition to full independence, expected in early 2002.

Nine of the accused militiamen are in detention in East Timor while the whereabouts of the tenth man are unknown, Othman said. He said the United Nations would demand that Indonesian authorities extradite Anwar.

U.N. investigators are in Jakarta trying to question 22 witnesses, including senior police and military commanders, about last year's events. The officers have so far refused to cooperate.

In Jakarta, Indonesian military spokesman Brig. Gen. Suhartono Suratman declined to comment on the indictments, saying lawyers would represent the military's interests in the case.

Also Monday, a car carrying two senior members of East Timor's administration was attacked in Jakarta as the officials left Indonesia's parliament building.

About 30 protesters, some of them pro-Indonesia East Timorese refugees, surrounded the vehicle before punching and kicking it. No one was injured and police quickly dispersed the crowd.

---

New York Times
December 12, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/world/12BRIE.html

ASIA
EAST TIMOR: WAR CRIMES INDICTMENTS The East Timorese filed their first case against an Indonesian Army officer for crimes against humanity. A new prosecutor general for the territory indicted the former deputy commander of special forces in the town of Los Palos, Lt. Sayful Anwar, and 10 others on 13 counts of murder, torture and forced deportation of East Timorese in August 1999. They are accused in the murders of five clergymen, two church workers, an Indonesian journalist and a teenager. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

-------- indonesia

Not worth saving

Washington Times
December 12, 2000
Arnold Beichman
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2000121219329.htm

Is Indonesia, which the World Bank lists as the most crooked state on earth, worth saving?

That's not as arrogant a question as it sounds. If you were to ask the peoples of Acheh, Borneo, Celebes, the Malukus, Irian Jaya or East Timor, some of the big Pacific islands of this archipelago state, their answer, probably unanimous, would be a thunderous "no." Indonesia is not worth saving.

The question of U.S. policy towards Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world - 210 million - will be one of the most immediately pressing on the new Bush administration. Clandestine meetings in Washington hotels by State Department officials with anti-Jakarta rebel leaders is not policy - not when some 5,000 Achenese, most of them civilians, have been killed.

From its beginnings in 1949 as a misbegotten state, thanks to the defeated Dutch colonial regime which ignored, except for the Javanese, the nationalist strivings of other island peoples, Indonesia has suffered from corrupt leaders who treated the rich resources of the 17,000 islands as their family property.

For it should be remembered that there never was a country called Indonesia. The name is a fiction. In colonial days it was called the Dutch East Indies. The various islands had no political relation to each other and certainly not to Java. In fact most of these non-Javenese people were fearful of what they called "Javanese imperialism." They never wanted to become, when Dutch rule ended, part of a Javanese empire.

"Indonesia was nothing but a geographic expression until the Dutch found it more efficient to unite the islands of the Indies under a single administration." The author of that finding was then-Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger. What he wrote in 1963 ("Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy") is just as true today. Since the Dutch administration headquarters were in the city of Batavia on Java, the Javanese took over the island empire and renamed Batavia as Jakarta. They installed Sukarno (Javanese rarely use first names) as president and then organized larceny and looting on an enormous scale which continued under Suharto, Sukarno's unelected successor. There is a new president since Suharto's ouster in 1998. He is Adburrahman Wahid, 59, who has promised an end to larceny as well as a plebiscite for the Achenese. Promises, promises.

By international law, Indonesia is a state but it will never be a nation-state, one with a national identity to which all its citizens subscribe. There is no common language, no common culture and no will to live together. Widespread inter-ethnic violence will be the country's fate in coming decades.

Target No. 1 for the Indonesian Army is Acheh, an enclave in northern Sumatra, rich in natural gas and other resources. There an armed struggle for independence, GAM (Gerakan Acheh Merdeka or Acheh Freedom Movement) was declared some three decades ago under the leadership of Hasan di Tiro, a direct descendant of Achenese royalty. In 1990 the Suharto government launched a campaign to crush GAM. The anti-Acheh operation continued without success for eight years until Suharto's overthrow. The war against Acheh was then resumed under President Wahid.

Human rights organizations have documented 7,727 cases of human rights violations in Acheh between 1990-98. From January 1999 to February 2000 the coalition documented nine cases of "massacre" in which 132 civilians were killed and 472 wounded, 304 arbitrary detentions, 318 extra-judicial executions, and 138 disappearances.

In February 1999, the Indonesian army started deliberately displacing inhabitants from some parts of Acheh. From June to August 1999 there were 250,000 to 300,000 internally displaced persons in Acheh.

However, in the following two months, despite the relative reduction in armed conflict, the numbers of the displaced rose rapidly again into the thousands. In one camp there were 4,110 refugees, including 712 infants, 818 children less than 5 years old, 52 pregnant women and 112 women who were still nursing infants.

Despite all these casualties, the Achenese, whom Dutch colonialism couldn't conquer, are not going to surrender. And the overriding question still remains: Is Indonesia worth saving?

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a Washington Times columnist.

-------- iraq

Baghdad's Troops Have Left Enclave, Iraq Kurds Say

Reuters
December 12, 2000 Filed at 4:22 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-ku.html

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Iraqi troops have withdrawn from positions they took in the Western-patrolled Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq, an Iraqi Kurdish faction told Reuters on Tuesday.

An Ankara-based spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls an area bordering Turkey in the enclave, said two Iraqi battalions had left positions they took near the town of Ba'idrah, about 40 miles south of Dohuk.

``We haven't seen any other troop movements,'' he said. ``We are expecting things to return to normal.''

A party official in London told Reuters that Baghdad had negotiated for and secured the release of some 150 Iraqi troops the KDP had taken hostage during their approach to the town, which began on Saturday.

``An Iraqi unit of about 150 soldiers was sent to the north of the town, apparently to cut the road to Dohuk and set up checkpoints. They were surrounded and surrendered. At the request of the Iraqi government, they were handed back on Sunday,'' he said.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the two Iraqi battalions initially took positions on ridges north of Ba'idrah but did not enter the town itself.

The KDP, which already had about 150 militiamen in the town, mobilized 5,000 reservists as a precaution, he added.

``No shots were fired, there was no direct engagement between forces, and the Iraqi troops have withdrawn from the hills around the town to a plain ... essentially south of the town,'' the spokesman added.

The United States has threatened to act militarily against Iraq if Iraqi forces move against the Kurds, but Bacon suggested that the Iraqi move did not justify a response.

NOT ``THREATENING OR SERIOUS''

``It was, from the best we can tell, a movement of some troops and then a return toward original positions. So this does not appear to be a threatening or serious incident at this stage,'' Bacon said.

The Pentagon spokesman, quoting Kurdish sources, said the troop movement might be the result of some ``political jockeying between a Kurdish religious faction or tribal faction on the one hand and the Iraqis on the other''. He did not elaborate.

The Iraqi Embassy in Ankara said it could neither confirm nor deny the report.

Turkey sharply curtails the movement of journalists in and out of northern Iraq, where it maintains a military presence and conducts offensives against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), making independent verification difficult.

The KDP and a rival Iraqi Kurdish faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, wrested much of northern Iraq from Baghdad's control after the 1991 Gulf War that followed its invasion of Kuwait.

U.S. and British planes based in Turkey maintain a no-fly zone over the region, which Washington has attempted to unite in opposition to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Squabbling between the two factions over customs revenue and proceeds from a lucrative sanctions-busting trade in Iraqi diesel fuel that the KDP controls from its territory has hamstrung the provincial government established after the Gulf War.

Fighting between the factions, which has killed several thousand people since the end of the war, peaked in 1996, when Iraqi-backed KDP fighters overran PUK positions, prompting U.S. missile strikes on military targets in southern Iraq.

Despite a U.S.-brokered peace deal between the factions in 1998, there has been little movement toward the power-sharing and elections it envisioned.

---

New York Times
December 12, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/world/12BRIE.html

MIDDLE EAST
IRAQ: `OIL FOR FOOD' EXTENDED Iraq accepted the terms of a new six-month extension of the "oil for food" program under which the government of President Saddam Hussein can sell unlimited quantities of oil to pay for civilian goods. But it then again demanded that oil buyers would have to pay a surcharge on each barrel, which the United Nations has ruled illegal. The new contract adds electrical and housing supplies to the list of goods Iraq can import without permission and gives the Iraqis access to $525 million for repairs to oil industry installations. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

-------- korea

Korea negotiators meet on future relations

USA Today
12/12/00- Updated 07:44 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwstue08.htm

SEOUL, South Korea - High-level government negotiators from South and North Korea met Tuesday to set the tone for future relations between the two former Cold War adversaries. In the North's capital of Pyongyang, Unification Minister Park Jae-kyu of South Korea told counterpart Chon Gum Jin that there was a perception in his country that North Korea was not improving relations as quickly as promised.

''If you want to argue on that, I will remind you that the North has made more sacrifices,'' Chon responded without elaborating, according to pool reports from South Korean journalists.

Both sides will enter full-dress negotiations on Wednesday. Previous talks were held alternately in the two Korean capitals, Seoul and Pyongyang.

This week's talks, the fourth since September, will review progress made so far and discuss cooperation in 2001, Park said.

South Korean officials said their major concern is helping reunite more separated family members on the two sides.

Since the June summit of their leaders, the Koreas have staged two temporary reunions involving the families of 200 people from each side. Both have agreed to hold at least one more reunion, but no date has been set.

South Korea wants a permanent meeting place along the border for millions of family members separated by the border. North Korea has proposed an isolated tourist site in its territory.

South Korean officials also will try to set the date for a promised return visit to Seoul by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung traveled to North Korea for the June summit.

The South Korean president received the Nobel Peace Prize for his pro-democracy activities and reconciliation with North Korea, one of the world's few remaining communist countries.

After receiving the award in Norway on Sunday, Kim Dae-jung said he expects Kim Jong Il to visit Seoul in the spring.

The South Korean unification minister said a new agreement expected during Kim Jong Il's visit would aim to ease military tension between the Koreas, who share the world's most heavily armed border. The 1950-53 Korean War ended without a permanent peace treaty.

At the June summit, the two Korean leaders reached a broad agreement to put decades of animosity behind them and work together for reconciliation and eventual reunification.

The Koreas have since exchanged high-level envoys, held family reunions, started reconnecting a cross-border railway, and stopped propaganda broadcasts.

Also Tuesday, Britain and North Korea agreed to establish diplomatic relations - recognition, Britain said, of Pyongyang's warming relationship with South Korea and its decision to suspend missile launches.

The decision marks the first time Britain has had diplomatic ties with North Korea.

The North already this year has established diplomatic links with Canada, Italy and Austria.

-------- myanmar

Burmese Junta May Be Ready to Release Top Opponent

New York Times
December 12, 2000
By BLAINE HARDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/world/12BURM.html

The military dictatorship in Myanmar signaled yesterday that it might soon release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the country's democratic opposition and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who has been under house arrest since September.

The junta that rules Myanmar, formerly Burma, has been bombarded in recent weeks by criticism from the United Nations, human rights groups and Thailand. It has been accused of torturing political opponents, using forced labor and condoning an illegal drug industry that is spreading addiction across Southeast Asia.

Amnesty International will release a report today that charges the Burmese government with using torture as an "institution" of state repression. The report says torture is used routinely "as a means of instilling fear in anyone critical of the military government."

In what may be an attempt to defang these critics, Burmese officials attending a meeting in Vientiane, Laos, told European Union officials that they would allow a four- member European delegation to visit Myanmar next month.

Its members would be free to talk to opposition leaders, including Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who is likely to be released from house arrest before the visit, said Charles Josselin, a French official who attended the meeting.

Early this month, the government released six other prominent opposition leaders. They were detained, along with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, when she tried to travel outside Yangon, the capital, on Sept. 21 to meet with other members of her party. The government has all but banned the party, the National League for Democracy, in recent months, locking up nearly all of its leaders in the capital and around the country.

President Clinton last week awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American civilian honor, to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Since her party won the national election held in 1990, which the generals in power ignored, she has spent most of the last decade confined to her house in Yangon, formerly Rangoon.

At the meeting in Laos, Foreign Minister Win Aung of Myanmar reportedly did not mention Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi by name. But he led European Union officials attending a meeting with foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to believe that she and two other opposition leaders would be released soon, Mr. Josselin told reporters.

"It's hard to imagine that a lifting of the restrictions would not happen before the visit," Mr. Josselin said.

The government of Myanmar has been singled out in the last month for an exceptionally scathing round of condemnation from the United Nations General Assembly, international trade unions, human rights groups and military leaders in Thailand.

The General Assembly last week accused the government of condoning the use of rape, torture, mass arrests, forced labor and summary executions to suppress dissent.

The International Labor Organization, an agency associated with the United Nations, recommended that member nations consider sanctions against Myanmar for its continued use of forced labor. In support, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, with members in 148 countries, announced that it would demand the withdrawal of foreign investors who aided or abetted forced labor in the country.

The chief of Thailand's armed forces said he planned to use a visit to Myanmar this week to warn the government that the widespread production of heroin and amphetamines there was a threat to regional stability, as well as a cause of drug addiction in Southeast Asia.

Of all the criticism in recent weeks, the most detailed is Amnesty International's report, "Myanmar: The Institution of Torture." It says political prisoners, believed to number about 1,700, are routinely tortured.

Drawing on interviews with former political prisoners who escaped from Myanmar this year, Ms. Guest said Amnesty had established that the junta consistently used the same torture techniques during interrogations. They include near-suffocation, electric shocks to various parts of the body and the "iron road," a technique that involves rolling an iron bar up and down the shins of a prisoner until the skin peels off.

"At least 43 political prisoners have died in custody since the military's violent suppression of the democracy movement in 1988, although the true number is believed to be much higher," the report said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross last year was granted access to Myanmar's prison system. Conditions have reportedly improved since then. But the Amnesty report said Red Cross officials still did not have access to detention centers, where torture during interrogation most commonly took place.

---

Myanmar critics face torture risk

USA Today
12/12/00- Updated 10:01 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwstue10.htm

VIENTIANE, Laos (AP) - Torture has become institutionalized in Myanmar as a means of instilling fear in critics of the military government, Amnesty International said in a report released Tuesday.

The report from the London-based human rights group said an estimated 1,700 political prisoners in Myanmar are at high risk of torture and beatings. ''Torture and ill-treatment of political prisoners and ethnic minorities in Myanmar are commonplace,'' Amnesty said.

The report came as two days of meetings ended in Laos between top officials from the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The meeting was dominated by discussion of the human rights situation in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

The two groups had not met in three years - a delay caused by differences over Myanmar.

On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Win Aung ruled out reconciliation talks with pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party unless it starts supporting the country's military junta.

But Win Aung also said that an EU team would be allowed to visit Myanmar in January and meet with Suu Kyi, the 1990 Nobel peace laureate. She has been under virtual house arrest for the past two months.

He said she would be released at ''an appropriate time.'' He refused to elaborate on whether she will be freed before the European visit.

Myanmar's military rulers face widespread criticism from the West for refusing to hand over power to Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, which won elections in Myanmar in 1990.

''If they want genuine dialogue they should abandon their confrontational approach and their ... threatening words,'' Win Aung said of Suu Kyi's party.

According to the Amnesty report, the army in Myanmar uses torture as part of counterinsurgency activities, as do guards in many of the country's 43 prisons and police and military intelligence interrogators.

Techniques used on political detainees include rolling an iron bar repeatedly up and down the shins until the skin peels off, near-suffocation and electric shocks applied to various parts of the body, the report said.

Win Aung denied the report and questioned its sources.

''As far as I know, there are no rampant human rights violations,'' he said. ''We are Buddhists. As Buddhists we have not just tolerance, we have love and kindness.''

The regime in Myanmar, known as the State Peace and Development Council, took power in 1988 after crushing a popular uprising against military rule that began in 1962. With thousands arrested for opposition activities in the past 12 years, the use of torture has increased, Amnesty said.

-------- propaganda wars

Pearl Harbor Historiography: A Lesson in Academic Housecleaning

by Gary North,
Lew Rockwell.com
December 12, 2000
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north26.html

Robert Stinnett closes his excellent summary article on Pearl Harbor historiography with these words: "Though the Freedom of Information Act freed the foreknowledge documents from the secretive vaults to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage industry continues to cover up America's foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor." Cottage industry, indeed! This cottage industry is the entire professional guild of salaried historians.

Pearl Harbor's Establishment historiography remains as secure in its tenured cocoon as it was when I began college in 1959. American history textbooks are as free from the truth about Roosevelt's deliberate provocation of Japan, and his advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, as they were in 1943. Mr. Stinnett does not have a Ph.D., nor is he employed as a history instructor. He was therefore in a position to tell the truth. This was equally true of journalist George Morgenstern, whose 1947 book on Pearl Harbor was the first to put the story together in one detailed volume. The historical guild paid no attention to Morgenstern. We shall see if it pays attention to Stinnett. I strongly doubt that the reception will be either favorable or widespread.

A week ago, I sent a letter to a group of my subscribers. It provided background on the issues raised by Mr. Stinnett. I made this point, in the context of how intellectual guilds operate. They adopt a three-phase position on a controversial new idea.

1. The story isn't true.
2. The story is true, but so what?
3. We always knew it was true.

I then illustrated this with the historiography of Pearl Harbor. Here is what I wrote.

--

Consider the conservatives' account of Roosevelt's advance warning of the Japanese attack in late 1941. When George Morgenstern wrote Pearl Harbor: The Story of a Secret War, only right-wing Devin-Adair would publish it (1947). The book was ridiculed by academic historians as being a pack of unsubstantiated opinions written by a mere journalist - and a Chicago Tribune journalist at that. When the premier liberal historian, Charles A. Beard, said much the same thing the next year in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (Yale University Press), he was dismissed by his colleagues as senile, and he permanently lost his reputation. When the premier American diplomatic historian, Charles C. Tansill, said it again in 1952 in his Back Door to War (Regnery), he, too, was shoved down the liberals' memory hole.

Today, the revisionist account of Pearl Harbor is more widely accepted, and is gaining ground fast. Another journalist, Robert B. Stinnett, recently found the "smoking gun" - an 8-page 1940 memo by a lieutenant commander in the navy on how to get Japan to attack us, a memo that Roosevelt adopted, point by point. His book is titled, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 1999). Stinnett served under a young George Bush during World War II. His book is the capstone to his career.

The liberals are now moving to stage 2: "The story is true, but so what?" Stinnett's book argues that Roosevelt basically did the right thing in luring the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. This attack overcame America's anti-interventionists, who had 88% of the people behind them in 1940. Pearl Harbor got us into the War in Europe.

It didn't, of course. Hitler's suicidal declaration of war on the United States on the following Thursday is what got us into the European war.

It will be a long time before liberal historians get to stage 3: "We always knew it was true." They will not admit how they smeared the reputations of first-rate historians who told the truth early, and then for the next fifty years used their power over graduate schools and professional academic journals to screen out the truth. The issue was power, and liberals respect it and use it.

--

What happened to Beard sent a warning to any aspiring young grad student who might have been tempted to follow in Beard's revisionist path. Beard was at the end of a long and distinguished career. He was the only scholar ever to be elected as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. But his academic achievements gained him no mercy when he broke ranks on Pearl Harbor. James J. Martin, the premier revisionist historian after Harry Elmer Barnes died in 1968, in 1981 provided an account of what happened.

Beard not only infuriated the influential supporters of Roosevelt by his insistence that the continuous deception by the President in making his steady moves toward war while endlessly talking about his peacefulness (few were allowed to forget his pre-election promise in 1940 never to send Americans off to a war outside U.S. borders) was in essentials, as Leighton described it, "completely to undermine constitutional government and set the stage for a Caesar" (Beard's famed peroration on pp. 582-584 of his Epilogue to President Roosevelt is required reading in this context.) He had opened up another sore while writing his book with a famed article in the Saturday Evening Post for October 4, 1947, "Who's to Write the History of the War?," in which he revealed that the Rockefeller Foundation, working with its alter ego, the Council on Foreign Relations, had provided $139,000 for the latter to spend in underwriting an official-line history of how the war had come about, in an effort to defeat at the start the same kind of "debunking" historical campaign which had immediately followed the end of World War I. Beard complained of inaccessibility of various documents, which he was sure would be fully available to anyone doing an Establishment version of the wartime past, convinced that these would be sat on as 'classified' for a generation or more. . . .

So it was understandable that the following February, two months before the publication of President Roosevelt, when the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Beard their gold medal for the best historical work published in the preceding decade, that his erstwhile liberal admirers would reach the end of their tolerance. The highlight of their protest was the resignation in rage from the Institute by one of its most influential members, Lewis Mumford, accompanied by abuse of Beard so extreme that it led to a memorable chiding to Mumford from Harry Elmer Barnes in a 11/2 column letter to the editors of the Chicago Tribune, published 11 February 1948. But the attack on Beard had barely begun. With the publication of President Roosevelt two months later, in April, the denunciation of Beard became a veritable industry, and the most eminent of the Roosevelt academic defenders were recruited to contribute to the character assassination. Probably the most outrageous was that of Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison, Roosevelt's handpicked choice to write a history of American naval operations in World War II, and even elevated to the rank of Admiral in recognition of his labors. But the outline of the total campaign aimed at Beard is substantial, extensively documented in the later editions of Barnes's booklet The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout (especially 6th thru. 9th).

Beard died in 1949. His book on Roosevelt was allowed - a mild word, given the circumstances - to go out of print almost immediately, and it was never reprinted. Maybe the Web will resurrect it. I hope so.

The final product of the Council on Foreign Relations' investment of $139,000 in 1946 - a lot of money in 1946 - was the standard Establishment history of the coming of the war, written by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation: The World Crisis of 1937-1940 and American Foreign Policy (1952). It was still the standard account two decades later. Its perspective remains dominant on campus today. Langer was a professor of history at Harvard. So was Gleason - medieval history - until he moved to Washington after Pearl Harbor, to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. He later became the official historian of the State Department. Establishment enough for you? (The other standard book was Herbert Feis's Road to Pearl Harbor (1950). He had served as the State Department's Advisor for International Economic Affairs.) Yes, the victors always write the history books, but when the historians are actually policy-setting participants in the war, the words "court history" take on new meaning. I read Admiral Kimmel's Story (Regnery, 1955) in 1958. That same year, I read anti-Roosevelt journalist John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth (Devin-Adair, 1948). At age 16, I became a World War II revisionist.

In 1963, I had a conversation with Thomas Thalken, who later became the librarian of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. We were then both employed by a short-lived think tank, the Center for American Studies. He was its librarian. I was a summer intern, fresh out of college. He had earned a master's degree in history under Tansill a decade earlier. He told me that Tansill had advised him not to earn a Ph.D. in history. Tansill had said that anyone who taught the truth about America's entry into World War II would see his career end before it even began. Thalken took his advice.

This is why there are no tenured World War II revisionists who write in this still-taboo and well-policed field. The guild screened them out, beginning in the early 1950's. Beard and Tansill by 1960 were remembered only for their non-WWII revisionist writings. Barnes was forgotten. Martin - in my view, the most accomplished American revisionist historian - never became known on campus. Anthony Kubek spent his career on the academic fringes. What the guild did to Barnes, Beard, Tansill at the end of their careers, and to Martin at the beginning of his, posted a warning sign: Dead End.

I went on to earn a Ph.D. in American history, but I never did teach in my field. Neither did Bruce Bartlett, who wrote The Pearl Harbor Cover-Up (Arlington House, 1978). (Our paths crossed briefly in 1976: we were both on Congressman Ron Paul's Washington staff.) Bartlett did not earn a Ph.D. Instead, as a supply-sider on Jack Kemp's Congressional staff, he wrote his way into economic policy-making.

This is typical of the handful of WWII revisionists in the post-Tansill era. Most of them never made it onto a campus, and of the few who did, they did not teach WWII revisionism. The WWII revisionist books of 1947-55 were out of print by 1960. They remain out of print.

In 1966, an aged Barnes wrote a brief introduction to an article that appeared in a small-circulation journal published by libertarian pioneer Robert Lefevre, Rampart Journal. At the end of his introduction, Barnes wrote: "We should be able to look foreword to something more honest and dependable in the quarter of a century between now and the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor." Nice dream; no fulfillment. World War II revisionism remains a fringe movement of non-certified, non-subsidized historians.

Conclusion

In 1958, the only book critical of Franklin Roosevelt's domestic policies and his foreign policies was Flynn's book. In 1958, it was out of print. In the Year of Our Lord, 2000, it remains the only book critical of Roosevelt's domestic and foreign policies.

We haven't come a long way, baby.

Things are beginning to change for the better. The Web has begun to chip away at every academic guild's monopoly. What is taught in college classrooms no longer has the same authority that it possessed in 1960. But until the subsidizing of higher education by the state ends, and until the state-licensed accreditation oligopoly ends or is overcome by new, "price-competitive technologies," it will remain an uphill battle for Pearl Harbor revisionists in academia.

December 12, 2000

Gary North is the author of a ten-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible. The latest volume is Sacrifice and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Acts. The series can be downloaded free of charge at www.freebooks.com.

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NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

DayTips' Strange News: 12/12/00
Tue, 12 Dec 2000 04:38:31 -0800
info@daytips.com http://www.daytips.com

NASA called up Pioneer 6 recently and wished it a happy 35th birthday. The space agency -- which had been out of touch with the outdated, sun-orbiting satellite for three years -- decided to contact its oldest space vehicle to commemorate the anniversary of its Dec. 16, 1965, launch. Using the 17-meter radio telescope at the Goldstone Deep Space Network communications complex north of Barstow, Calif., the scientists -- some of whom had joined the project nearly at the start -- were jubilant to hear from the 150-pound, 3-foot-by-3-foot spacecraft last Friday evening. "It was a nice surprise. The orbit was still very stable. The signal was still strong. We were overjoyed," Lawrence Lasher, Pioneer's project manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told UPI. Pioneer 6 was one in a series of spacecraft. The first four tried for the moon but failed, the next got within 37,000 miles of the lunar surface and became the first to orbit and observe the sun. Pioneers 6, 7, 8 and 9 continued the work -- forming a network of solar weather stations orbiting the sun. The best known of the series, Pioneer 10, was sent on a mission to Jupiter and beyond in 1972.

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Endeavour Touches Down, Ending Space Station Construction Mission

Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, December 12, 2000
From Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001212/t000118720.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.--Space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of five returned to Earth in triumph Monday, ending NASA's most difficult space station construction mission yet.

Throughout the afternoon, Mission Control had worried that clouds or rain might delay Endeavour's homecoming at Kennedy Space Center. But the weather cooperated, and the shuttle touched down shortly after sunset, right on time.

The international space station Alpha and its gleaming new solar wings soared over Florida four minutes before Endeavour's touchdown, clearly visible from Cape Canaveral as it streaked through the dark sky.

During their week at the space station, Endeavour commander Brent Jett Jr. and his crew installed the world's largest and most powerful solar wings. Three spacewalks were required to attach the $600-million wings, hook up all the cables and then tighten the right wing, which was too slack.

The astronauts also spent one day inside Alpha, helping commander Bill Shepherd and his two Russian crew mates with computer problems and cargo transfers.

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U.S. Envoy Tackles Objections to Tribunal on War Crimes

New York Times
December 12, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/world/12TRIB.html

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 11 - When the Clinton administration's special envoy on war crimes wrapped up his last negotiating session on the formation of an International Criminal Court last week, he left on the table a new proposal intended to assuage fears of Americans opposed to the court.

The envoy, David Scheffer, has been negotiating for five years to bridge a widening gap between Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a supporter of the court, and the Pentagon and Congressional Republican leaders who either reject the court on principle or want guarantees that no American will ever be tried by it.

The court would be the first permanent international tribunal set up to try individuals on charges of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity. Opponents fear that with United States power a large target anywhere, Americans on duty abroad would be vulnerable to frivolous or ideologically motivated prosecutions.

Mr. Scheffer said in an interview he believed that the safeguards against such cases already existed, because the court reserves the rights of nations to conduct their own trials of military personnel accused of crimes abroad, as the United States does in courts-martial. But for good measure, the American delegation proposed on Thursday two tests of admissibility before a citizen of any country could be surrendered for trial.

Mr. Scheffer called his proposal, to be discussed further in February, an "insurance policy" that should calm fears by doubling a procedure already in the treaty, which was adopted in June 1998 in Rome. More than 100 nations have signed and 25 have ratified the treaty. The United States has done neither, as President Clinton deferred to the Pentagon and Congress.

"This proposal is important," Mr. Scheffer said of the American plan, "because it will provide assurances to contributors to international peace and security, contributors to international peacekeeping operations, that if any of their personnel are charged with crimes, that the court will undertake a rigorous review of the admissibility of the case before any individual is in fact surrendered to the court. We're simply saying at this moment of surrender, check that admissibility box again."

Many nations support the idea, which would not require a revision of the court's statute.

Mr. Scheffer, who has worked on codifying the crimes to be dealt with by the court, as well as in drawing up ad hoc criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia and Sierra Leone, said he hoped that a new administration in Washington would preserve his office when his term ends next month.

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U.N. Report Says Yugoslavia Needs More Aid

New York Times
December 12, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/world/12YUGO.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, Dec. 11 - A United Nations report has warned of a $460 million shortfall in aid for Yugoslavia and stressed the need for urgent international action to help the Balkan country after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic.

Yugoslavia needs that amount of aid in coming months on top of assistance that has already been committed for crucial areas, according to the report, which was prepared for a meeting of international donors in Brussels on Tuesday.

The report, put together by the Belgrade mission of the United Nations' office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, detailed the financing gaps in six sectors including energy, food, health and education.

The head of the agency's office in Belgrade said he expected donors at the Brussels meeting to announce important amounts of aid, narrowing the deficit.

"We are expecting significant announcements for contributions," Paul Hebert of the office said. "We are very optimistic."

The Yugoslav deputy prime minister, Miroljub Labus, who will head his delegation, said aid was required to cover the population's basic needs during the winter. "Pledges so far cover the period until January," he told reporters. "We must negotiate aid for several more months."

The United Nations report said the dramatic political changes in Yugoslavia, in which President Milosevic was forced by a popular uprising to accept defeat in the September elections, and the country's fragile economic and social conditions called for a prompt international response.

"The quality and capacity of public services have been undermined during the past decade by economic decline, lack of reform and investment, economic sanctions and the conflicts which accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia," it said.

Western nations have rushed to show support for Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica.

The European Union is in the process of distributing a $177 million emergency package to help Yugoslavia cope with the winter cold. Several countries have also pledged aid, including the United States.

The United Nations report estimated donor contributions for coming months in the six areas at a total of $240 million so far. It said that amount would not be enough to meet all needs and estimated that $262 million was required until the end of March in the energy sector alone.

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Marines Ground Osprey Fleet After Crash Kills Four

New York Times
December 12, 2000
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/12/national/12CND-OSPREY.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 -- The Marine Corps announced today that it had grounded its fleet of V-22 Ospreys, hours after one of the innovative but problem-prone aircraft plunged from the sky during a night training mission over North Carolina and crashed in a fireball, killing all four marines on board.

Just seven months after an Osprey crashed near Tucson, Ariz., killing 19 marines, the accident on Monday raised new questions about the safety of the experimental aircraft, which takes off and hovers like a helicopter but cruises like an airplane.

The crash came just one week before the Navy was expected to approve full production of the Osprey, a decision that would have made it extremely difficult to cancel the $40 billion program. Now, the Marine Corps has asked the Navy to postpone that decision until a full crash investigation is completed sometime next year.

Now almost 30 years old, the Osprey program has become emblematic of the type of costly, high-tech Pentagon weapons system that seems almost too big to die. Eleven years ago, the Bush Administration, led by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, tried to cancel the Osprey, calling it too expensive.

But the exotically designed craft, whose wing-mounted rotors can tilt upward or forward, has been kept alive by its dogged patrons in Congress and the Marine Corps, who see it as integral to their plans to move more Marines faster and farther than any helicopter can. But the years of delay in moving to full production have meant that the cost of each Osprey has tripled.

Though Marine Corps officials acknowledged today that Monday's crash spelled trouble for the program, they did not budge from their optimistic appraisals of the Osprey as a safe aircraft that should be put into full production next year.

"I will still tell you that, having flown this aircraft and having been around the aircraft a lot of times, I don't think that there is anything else out there that rates with it," Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, the Marine Corps deputy commandant for Aviation, said at a Pentagon briefing today.

Marine Corps officials said a crash investigation team was still searching the forests of coastal North Carolina for the flight data recorder that might provide clues to the cause of the crash. Though past Osprey accidents have been blamed on pilot error and not design problems, the two pilots aboard the aircraft that crashed Monday were considered the best and most experienced V-22 pilots in the Marine Corps. They were identified as Lt. Col. Keith M. Sweaney, 42, of Richmond, and Maj. Michael L. Murphy, 38, of Blauvelt, N.Y.

Also killed were Staff Sgt. Avely W. Runnels, 25, of Morven, Ga., and Sgt. Jason A. Buyck, 24, of Sodus, N.Y.

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Osprey crash delays production decision

USA Today
12/12/00- Updated 06:05 PM ET
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncstue03.htm

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday called off a decision scheduled for next week on whether to approve full-scale production of the V-22 Osprey after a tilt-rotor aircraft crashed on a night training mission in Jacksonville, N.C., Monday night, killing four Marines.

The accident brought to 30 the number of Marines killed in the Osprey program. And it prompted the latest setback for an already troubled program that in more than a decade has also survived opposition from Pentagon officials - including former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney - who wanted to cancel it because it was too expensive and experimental and, most recently, a slap from the Pentagon's top testing official who found the aircraft ''operationally unsuitable.''

Monday's accident was the second fatal mishap this year involving the hybrid aircraft, which cruises like an airplane and takes off and lands like a helicopter. In April, 19 Marines were killed in Arizona when an Osprey crashed during a training flight. Investigators blamed ''human factors'' for the crash, including a too-rapid rate of descent.

As it did after that crash, the Marines grounded its eight remaining limited-production Ospreys until more is known about the cause of Monday's accident. Officials have retrieved the aircraft's flight data recorder.

Officials said the V-22 was three minutes away from landing at the Marine Air Station at New River after completing a night instrument and landing practice mission near the base when the pilot issued a ''mayday'' distress call at 7:27 p.m. That was the last air traffic controllers heard before the aircraft went down flat on its bottom in a heavily wooded area about five miles north of Jacksonville.

''The rotors got real loud, and it disappeared behind a tree,'' said Mark Calnan, who lives nearby. ''There was an orange flash, a great big one. Then I heard a pop. It crackled like thunder.''

Rescue workers used b