------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Putin Tells German Chancellor He'll Pay Soviet Debt
Germany confirms weapons warning
Caution urged over 'Balkans syndrome'
Munition valued for tank busting
Radiation risk known for years
Kosovo war irradiated villages: UN
NATO and European Nation to Hold Meetings on Depleted Uranium
WHO Doubts Depleted Uranium Gave Troops Leukemia
NATO and EU probe suspect shells following cancer alarm
RADIOACTIVITY FOUND AT BALKAN SITES
Russia Suggests UN, WHO Check 'Balkans Syndrome'
NATO, EU Move Depleted Uranium Dispute to Centre Stage
Analysis: Uranium row tests Nato
Israel denies depleted uranium use
MoD pressed to move on toxic shells Special report: Kosovo
The truth about depleted uranium
Germany Ignored DU Warning;
Report: Pakistan has developed new missile
Korea: Seoul Hopes for Continued Dialogue With the North
Why Russia Wants Waste
Russia denies nuclear missile move
Litigators Join TRW Suit
A New Destroyer May Force Choice on the Bush Team
USA Under Bush, bigger plans for missile defense
Organization aimed at nonproliferation 'gaps' in Russia
A Sheepish Hunt for Missing Fuel Rods
Fermi-2 set new site record for generation in December
In Defense Post, Infighter Known for Working the Means to His End
Bush Focuses on Military Amid Chavez Controversy
Foreign policy needs continuum, not shifts
DOE repository decision might be delayed 6 months

MILITARY
U.S. Embassy in Rome Reopens
Some Leery of Plan to Lift Ban on Arms in Africa Horn
Countercurrents
Death to drug traffickers
Ecuador Afraid as a Drug War Heads Its Way
A Drug Warrior Who Would Rather Treat Than Fight
Heroin, an Old Nemesis, Makes an Encore
BROOKLYN: TEENAGER DIES IN GUNFIRE
Conneticut
Space fission
NASA plans landing on an asteroid
Taiwan Is Likely to Ask the U.S. to Sell It 4 Destroyers
Conservatives prepare to contest global court
America on Trial?
Navy Inquiry on Cole Urges No Punishment of Captain or Crew
Official: No U.S. personnel to be disciplined
Cohen Tosses Cole Potato to Bush
General details Army shortfall
Back to the USS Cole
The USS Cole set-up
Veterans cross the Atlantic to retrieve a beloved ship
Bush gets cheers in the barracks

OTHER
Dr. Sadek Hilal, Pioneer in Detecting Brain Diseases, Dies at 70
When the G.O.P. Was Green
Nearing a Forest Legacy
Babbitt warns GOP on environment
States
Norton critics reject Watt comparison
RENTON: RACIAL PROFILING LEGISLATION
Anti-cop lawmaker might resign
U.S. Embassy in Rome Not Ready to Reopen
U.S. embassy in Rome reopens
U.S. REOPENS EMBASSY IN ROME

ACTIVISTS
Getting the Message From 'Eco-Terrorists'
New group logical step for Turner
Turner, Nunn Form New Foundation
Cranston's Noble Career
Pardons being weighed as Clinton term ends
ISRAELIS STAGE MASS RALLY AGAINST PEACE PLAN
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION to close the SOA


-------- NUCLEAR

Putin Tells German Chancellor He'll Pay Soviet Debt

Associated Press
January 8, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08RUSS.html

MOSCOW, Jan. 7 - The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, left Moscow tonight like a smiling creditor who got what he wanted from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who saw off his guest with an affirmative airport declaration: "We intend to pay and will pay the debts of the former Soviet Union." About $20 billion of the $48 billion in Soviet-era debt is held by Germany.

After a festive weekend of negotiation, religious services celebrating the Eastern Orthodox Christmas, motor touring and even sleigh riding through the snowy Russian countryside, the two leaders, and their wives, Doris and Lyudmila, parted company today in high spirits. But neither indicated that a solution had been found to Russia's imminent default on $1.5 billion in debt payments due in the first quarter of the year.

Mr. Putin seemed to be smiling tonight because Mr. Schröder said he and the Russian leader were still discussing ideas about how to convert part of that debt into investments in Russian industries, an idea that Mr. Putin favors. Negotiations are expected to be stepped up this month, both leaders said.

"No one in the world has an interest in placing Russia's economy in a situation where it will not be able to honor its international obligations," Mr. Putin said, explaining that 25 percent of Russian budget expenditures this year will go to debt and interest payments.

Mr. Schröder said nothing to disagree, and the tenor of parting remarks suggested that a compromise was possible along the lines of Russia's making a substantial payment this year as warranted by its strengthening economy, while some debt is rescheduled or converted into investments in Russian industries.

But Mr. Putin acknowledged the strong political pull on Mr. Schröder on the debt issue, saying, "At one point in our conversation, the chancellor told me that friendship is one thing, but duty is duty." Though Mr. Putin said nothing more about the context of the remark, it clearly signified the German position that stronger ties between Berlin and Moscow will not translate into debt forgiveness and that Mr. Schröder, as his government said in a statement this week, expects Russia to live up to its obligations.

The parting remarks by the two leaders did not touch on how each was looking to the incoming administration in Washington, or President- elect George W. Bush's proposal to build a national missile defense shield. Mr. Putin said, "It was very important for me to learn and hear, personally, from one of Europe's leaders, how Germany sees the development of relations between the European Union and Russia and between Russia and Germany."

Both leaders endorsed further medical studies into the possible health effects from NATO's use of depleted uranium ammunition during the 1999 offensive in the Balkans.

But Mr. Putin went further, criticizing NATO's intervention by saying, "The use of force in Yugoslavia, or anywhere in Europe in the 20th and the 21st centuries is absolutely unacceptable." Mr. Schroder just smiled and left for home.

-------- depleted uranium

Germany confirms weapons warning

CNN
January 8, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/01/08/nato.uranium/index.html

BERLIN, Germany -- NATO warned months ago about the potential dangers of depleted uranium ammunition, German officials have said.

The German Defence Ministry has confirmed that it received a warning in July 1999 of the risks from the ordnance, used by the United States during air campaigns across Yugoslavia for its armour-piercing qualities.

The renewed concerns over depleted uranium arose in December after Italy announced an investigation into 30 sick soldiers who served in the region. Twelve have cancer and five have died of leukaemia.

A team of Portuguese scientists is examining depleted uranium sites suspected of causing so-called "Balkan Syndrome" illness among troops.

After arriving on Saturday, the crew of four from the Department of Radioactivity Protection went immediately to the Klina area in western Kosovo with Portuguese peacekeepers who work in the region.

The German revelation was found in an internal defence ministry document by the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper.

In the document, dated July 16, 1999, NATO had warned soldiers and aid workers of a "possible toxic threat" and advised them to take "preventative measures."

The ministry has previously said it began health checks on soldiers who had come into possible contact with the depleted uranium ammunition that same month -- as U.N. peacekeeping forces were still entering Yugoslavia's Kosovo province after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.

The defence ministry said it immediately responded with orders for soldiers on how to behave in areas that were targeted with depleted uranium.

A chorus of European NATO member countries have voiced their concern about the potential dangers of the ammunition and a number have launched testing programmes.

On Sunday, Greece joined a number of countries including France and the Netherlands to have reported cases of leukaemia among their Balkans veterans.

The United States, the only nation to use depleted uranium weapons in the NATO missions, has denied there are any health risks from the ammunition.

German Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping also repeated the ministry's assertion that the ammunition poses no danger. He is to present a report to parliament on the issue this month.

"All the facts should be on the table -- but only facts," he told the Bild newspaper in an article published on Monday.

Schroeder and Putin voice concern

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, on a visit to Russia, said the questions were serious ones and would be investigated.

"It is in our interests to see any danger to our own soldiers and those of our partners to be ruled out," he said. "We want to have a clear picture first of what happened."

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, which had opposed the NATO bombing, on Sunday called the use of force in Yugoslavia "impermissible" and said investigations would have to determine "why such weapons were used and with what results."

Across Europe, the calls continued for a more thorough look into the possible effects.

"If it is shown that depleted uranium causes an increase in cancers, then we have got to look at alternative weapon systems and at precautions which could be taken to protect our troops, as well as at how we can clean up the areas where the shells were used," Bruce George, chairman of a British parliamentary defence committee, said.

Meanwhile, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme criticised NATO for not being more forthcoming about where it used the ammunition.

Klaus Toepfer told the Berliner Zeitung in an article to be published on Monday that the alliance had taken the stance "that investigation at these locations wasn't necessary anymore. That is very clearly not correct."

UNEP has visited 11 of 112 sites in Kosovo identified by NATO as having been targeted with ordnance containing depleted uranium, and found higher radiation levels in eight locations. Final results are expected in March.

Toepfer said similar investigations should be done in Bosnia and Serbia, and that it was NATO's responsibility to dispose of the ammunition.

In Greece, the scare has rekindled public opposition to NATO's intervention in the Balkans -- sentiment that spurred daily and sometimes violent street protests during the bombing.

Defence Minister Akis Tsochadzopoulos rejected calls to withdraw the country's 1,500 peacekeepers, saying on Sunday that "the soldiers did not go there on an excursion, they went to help bring stability to the region."

Greece's military is planning to screen up to 4,000 current and former peacekeepers and has confirmed that a sergeant who served in Bosnia has leukaemia.

Swiss authorities also said on Sunday they would screen 900 soldiers who served in the Balkans for signs of radiation poisoning.

Polish and Bulgarian officials said on Sunday that tests so far on troops serving in Kosovo had shown no negative effects from the ammunition.

---

Caution urged over 'Balkans syndrome'

CNN
January 8, 2001
By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/01/08/uranium.context/index.html

LONDON, England (CNN) -- It could be many years before scientists are able to say for sure whether shells tipped with depleted uranium really are to blame for so-called "Balkans syndrome."

What they do know is that NATO countries have so far reported 16 deaths and 57 illnesses among former Balkans military personnel -- with the weapons blamed by some for cases of leukaemia and other illnesses.

Latency periods for leukaemia average about five years, and other forms of cancer can gestate for 10 years or longer.

And some experts wonder how it is possible to separate out exposure to depleted uranium weapons from exposure to other toxic chemicals released in modern warfare.

In NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Serbian targets in Kosovo in 1999, U.S. jets fired some 31,000 rounds of depleted uranium ordnance.

About 10,000 rounds, or nine tonnes, were unleashed by Western jets against Yugoslav forces in the Bosnian campaign of 1994-95.

In the 1991 Gulf War, an estimated 300 tonnes of weapons using depleted uranium were fired.

Depleted uranium, a waste product derived by removing the isotope from its enriched counterpart, the highly radioactive uranium-235, is used on the tips of bullets, shells and missiles to enhance the weapon's ability to penetrate armour.

In solid form, experts say, depleted uranium munitions emit only trace amounts of radiation -- certainly not enough to pose a risk to humans.

But upon impact, an intense heat reaction pulverises the munitions into a toxic radioactive dust that is at the crux of a controversy over the weapons' long-term health ramifications.

Last week, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman said research conducted on U.S. service personnel after the Gulf War failed to produce evidence of a link between the use of the weapons and reports of ill health from former servicemen.

The department has also denied that the weapons posed a health risk to former Balkan peacekeepers.

Britain's defence ministry has echoed the U.S. position. At the same time, it has promised to investigate the case of a former army engineer who attributed the weapons to a range of health problems from hair loss and fatigue to severe bowel problems.

Nuclear experts are cautious about rushing to judgement based on what they consider patchy evidence.

"Our belief in Vienna is that a much more detailed study will have to be done than sending 14 people for 10 days to Kosovo," David Kyd, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in the Austrian capital, told CNN.com.

'Good faith'

He was referring to a fact-finding mission to the Serbian province in November by a team of investigators from the U.N. Environment Programme that included two officials from his agency.

In their preliminary report, issued last week, the team said it found slightly higher levels of radiation at eight of 11 sites culled from a NATO-provided list of 112 targets.

Those targets were hit by weapons containing depleted uranium in NATO's 1999 bombing campaign to repel Yugoslav forces from Kosovo.

Kyd says he believes the Americans and British acted in good faith when they first used depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf War. At the time, the military prized the weapons as a cheap and convenient substitute for metals such as titanium and tungsten.

"It had an overriding advantage that as it penetrated armour, it sharpened as it went through," Kyd said.

"So the military said this is a great munition. It was very appealing because it allowed you to scoot and shoot ... attack armour from a distance and not have to go head-to-head with an adversary. ... Perhaps now we are seeing the after-effects of that policy."

---

Munition valued for tank busting

The Age
Monday 8 January 2001
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/01/08/FFXN2Z7LNHC.html

LONDON
Depleted uranium is a radioactive heavy metal left over when the radioactive isotope uranium-235 is taken from naturally occurring uranium to fuel nuclear power stations and build nuclear bombs. This cheap and plentiful by-product is almost twice as dense as lead. It is valued for its ability to punch through armored vehicles.

A report by the US Army environmental policy institute said that depleted uranium had both chemical and radiological toxicity. It concluded that on the battlefield there were many hazards, against which the risk from depleted uranium was small.

The risk is greatest from ingesting depleted uranium or inhaling particles. It poses a great threat to the kidneys, where high concentrations can lead to organ failure. There is also a radiological hazard that can cause DNA damage and thus, in theory, lead to cancer.

The amount in the shells is about 200,000 times less than the radium in instrument dials of Soviet tanks used by Iraq and 30 million times less than the americium in smoke detectors. The links between cancer and depleted uranium were tenuous, said Michael Clark, of the National Radiological Protection Board. Cancer normally takes years to develop.

----

Radiation risk known for years

The Age
Monday 8 January 2001
By MICHAEL SMITH LONDON
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/01/08/FFXL2Z7LNHC.html

Britain's Ministry of Defence has admitted that it had known for 10 years that there were health risks from the depleted uranium ammunition used during the Gulf War and the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Politicians and representatives of soldiers around Europe called for investigations into what they claim to be links between use of the radioactive metal and illnesses, including leukaemia.

Despite a number of British soldiers who served in the Balkans appearing to have symptoms similar to those of the so-called Gulf War syndrome, the Defence Ministry said there was no cause for concern.

The admission that defence chiefs were aware of risks involved in the use of depleted uranium came after the Telegraph obtained a copy of regulations issued to German troops in Kosovo warning of a potential long-term hazard.

The document told soldiers not to approach any locations or equipment that had been hit with depleted uranium (DU) ammunition "except for life-saving purposes and/or measures indispensable to the mission accomplishment".

Ammunition or other contaminated material should not be touched. "It must be assumed that not only the interior but also the surrounding area of an armored vehicle destroyed by DU ammunition is contaminated," the document said.

"There is a potential health hazard in the form of DU exposure stemming from ammunition parts and destroyed DU-contaminated vehicles. Long-term hazards may also result from drinking water and soil contamination."

NATO and the European Union have launched separate investigations into the effects of depleted uranium amid concern over a number of suspicious deaths and illnesses among soldiers from France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Portugal after their return from the Balkans.

General Carlo Cabagiosu, the Italian commander of KFOR, the NATO-backed force that polices Kosovo, said at the weekend that it was still not known whether there was a link to depleted uranium.

"There has been a lot of scientific research to establish a direct link between this and soldiers with cancer," General Cabagiosu said. "But the statistics have to be examined to see if this has to be taken seriously."

The Ministry of Defence said it was waiting for the results of a United Nations Environment Program investigation in Kosovo and an independent study by the Royal Society.

"At present we see no cause for concern," a ministry spokesman said. "From everything we know about depleted uranium, we have no reason to believe there is any significant risk to UK personnel."

Asked about the German regulations, the spokesman said the ministry had issued similar instructions to British troops.

"That is just a sensible precaution," he said. "Our understanding of the levels of radioactivity is that they are so low that they pose only minimal risk to health."

However, the Berlin-based Tageszeitung said on Saturday an interim report by the UN environmental team showed higher levels of radioactivity than expected in areas where depleted uranium was used.

Tageszeitung said the team called for all 112 sites to be closed off after finding considerable concentrations of uranium dust in eight of 12 bomb craters studied.

---

Kosovo war irradiated villages: UN

The Age
Monday 8 January 2001
By MARLISE SIMONS PARIS
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/01/08/FFX47V7LNHC.html

Pekka Haavisto made some startling discoveries on a recent United Nations mission to Kosovo to assess the impact of uranium-tipped weapons used in NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

"We found some radiation in the middle of villages where children were playing," said Mr Haavisto, a former environment minister of Finland who headed the UN inquiry in Kosovo.

"We were surprised to find this a year and a half later. People had collected ammunition shards as souvenirs and there were cows grazing in contaminated areas, which means the contaminated dust can get into the milk."

The UN team's discovery of low-level radiation at eight of the 11 sites it sampled seems certain to spread the fury and panic across Europe about the wellbeing of soldiers sent to serve in the Balkans. More than a dozen of them have died of leukaemia.

Residents of Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro may also increasingly resent being kept unaware of the need to clean up the low-level uranium dispersed by American weapons detonated in Bosnia in 1995 and in Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo war.

Mr Haavisto said that even though the radiation was low-level, the debris should be removed. "We are recommending that until the clean-up starts, contaminated areas should be clearly marked and fenced off," he said. "The local people do not understand the material."

As well as the leukaemia deaths and cases being treated, uncounted numbers of soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans have complained about an array of symptoms - symptoms similar to those of Gulf War syndrome, registered after the 1991 war.

The 15-country European Union has ordered its own inquiry into the possible noxious effects of the uranium-tipped ammunition.

------

NATO and European Nation to Hold Meetings on Depleted Uranium

Associated Press
January 8, 2001 Filed at 2:25 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Depleted-Uranium.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- NATO and the European Union will examine the possible health risks of depleted uranium ammunition used in the Balkans, and the U.N. administrator in Kosovo made an ``urgent appeal'' Monday for help from the World Health Organization.

NATO's political committee and the EU's political and security committee scheduled talks for Tuesday. The use of depleted uranium has led to rising fears in Europe since Italy began investigating soldiers who have become ill since serving in the Balkans. Twelve have cancer and five have died of leukemia.

In France, four soldiers are being treated for leukemia. One Portuguese soldier has been diagnosed with cancer since returning from Kosovo. Several other European countries have begun screening soldiers who served in the Balkans, with many civilian aid agencies doing the same.

European officials cautioned that determining a link, if there is one, between any particular illness and depleted uranium -- a dense metal used against armored vehicles because of its penetrating power -- may take a long while.

``It's not easy to find a definitive conclusion to this problem, but the process will start tomorrow,'' said Sweden's Defense Minister Bjoern von Sydow, whose country holds the EU presidency.

The United States, the only country to use depleted uranium munitions during the 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 and in Bosnia during 1994 and 1995, insists the ammunition poses no significant health threat.

Radiation levels from depleted uranium are much lower than natural uranium, a U.S. Defense Department report said last month. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, quoted in the report, said: ``No human cancer of any type has ever been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium.''

Scientists remain divided on the issue, and worry about the risk from breathing dust from the exploded munitions. Yugoslav experts and officials claim the depleted uranium will remain in the soil, filtering into ground water and moving into the food chain.

The German Defense Ministry confirmed Sunday that in July 1999, NATO warned of possible dangers from depleted uranium ammunition in the Balkans and called for proper precautionary steps to be taken.

Many countries whose troops are serving in Kosovo have sent or are now sending medical teams to examine soldiers for ill effects. The outgoing U.N. administrator in Kosovo sought help gauging what effects, if any, the depleted uranium may be having on civilians.

Bernard Kouchner made an ``urgent appeal'' to the World Health Organzation to send public health experts to monitor the possible health risks, said U.N. spokeswoman Susan Manuel.

On Monday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called on NATO to release all available information on the use and effects of depleted uranium ammunition.

``We want frank information about where the ammunition was used and with what consequences,'' Schroeder said. He added, however, that he harbored a ``healthy skepticism'' that the ammunition caused the illnesses.

While depleted uranium fears spread, others advised caution.

Ljerka Obradovic, a hematologist in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, said the leukemia rate among the 500,000 residents of that section was the same as before the Bosnian war.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said that according to initial findings by WHO and the Kosovo Department of Health, ``there has been no increase of incidents of leukemia among adults over the last four years.''

WHO said Monday that soldiers and civilians exposed to depleted uranium in the Balkans probably did not receive large enough doses of radiation to cause leukemia. The U.N. health body agreed that radioactive dust from the exploded munitions could end up in the body, but said the amount would have been low.

Dr. Mike Repacholi, WHO's coordinator for occupational and environmental health, stressed that the organization's position was based on a review of existing research and could not say whether areas bombed by depleted uranium now are safe.

``If parents have children playing in contaminated areas, they should be careful about this. There are going to be radioactive fragments,'' Repacholi said.

A Serb health official said Monday that ethnic Albanian villagers were letting cattle graze on soil contaminated by depleted uranium, putting people at risk of consuming milk or meat that could become toxic.

Villagers in Bratoselce removed a fence sealing off contaminated land, said Miroslav Simic, a health official in Vranje, 180 miles southeast of Belgrade.

U.N. scientists who visited 11 of 112 Kosovo sites identified by NATO as having been targeted with ordnance containing depleted uranium found higher radiation levels at eight of them. The U.N. team intends to visit more sites in the spring.

``Once we have concluded the tests we will know precisely what environmental and health damage the uranium weapons posed, if any,'' Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

---

WHO Doubts Depleted Uranium Gave Troops Leukemia

Reuters
January 8, 2001 Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-balkans-who-d.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-leukemia.html

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization experts said on Monday they doubted that depleted uranium (DU) weapons used by NATO in the Balkans over the past decade had caused blood cancer among troops from alliance countries.

But they warned that children playing in former conflict areas where the weapons had exploded could be at risk and recommended that soldiers who had taken home DU shell parts as souvenirs should dispose of them promptly.

``Based on our studies, and the evidence we have, it is unlikely that soldiers in Kosovo ran a high risk of contracting leukemia from exposure to radiation from depleted uranium,'' WHO specialist Michael Repacholi told a news conference.

Presenting preliminary conclusions of a WHO study to be issued next month, the Australian doctor made clear his remarks also applied to troops who served in Bosnia under both the flag of the United Nations and NATO.

The news conference was called amid growing concern in countries of the Western alliance over reports that former soldiers and peacekeepers in both areas of ex-Yugoslavia were dying in increasing numbers of leukemia, a blood disease.

Although U.S. military chiefs and the NATO-led SFOR force in Bosnia said last week that DU weapons posed scant danger once they had been used, several alliance governments and European Commission President Romano Prodi have called for an inquiry.

NATO foreign ministers -- including those from Italy, Greece and Portugal who have voiced particular alarm -- are due to discuss the issue at a meeting in Brussels this week.

Shells tipped with depleted uranium, which increases their ability to penetrate armor, pulverize into dust on impact. They were used against Yugoslav army targets in Kosovo in 1999 and in Bosnia against Bosnian Serb targets in 1994-95.

The WHO's Repacholi, who is the U.N. agency's coordinator for occupational and environmental health, said a study carried out over the past year had shown that in a worst-case scenario exposure of troops was only half that in the uranium industry.

NO LEUKEMIA RISE AFTER CHERNOBYL

And the preliminary report said no radiation-related increases in leukemia had been established in miners or workers milling uranium metal to make nuclear fuel elements.

Repacholi also told the news conference that although

millions of people had been exposed to uranium dust after the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl in the then-Soviet Ukraine in 1986, no increase in the disease had been detected.

Generally, several years and normally between 10 and 15 were needed after exposure to ionizing radiation before leukemia could be clinically detected in the human body, he added.

Also speaking at the news conference, WHO policy adviser Daniel Tarantola said studies in Kosovo hospitals had so far shown no rise in average levels of leukemia among the largely- Albanian civilian population of the Serbian province.

But the preliminary report said that it did not have enough

information on the overall possible exposure of NATO military personnel in Kosovo to make definitive conclusions on the cancer risks they ran.

``Detailed surveys are needed to determine the numbers of soldiers exposed, the amount of DU used, how much exists on the surface, how much is buried in the ground....before better conclusions can be made,'' it declared.

``Breathing ultra-fine particles could lead to a theoretical risk of cancer,'' it added.

Tarantola said a U.N. task force was going to Iraq later this month to discuss official claims that thousands of Iraqi citizens had died of cancer and babies been born deformed following Western use of DU weapons in the 1991 Gulf War.

U.S. and other groups of veterans of that conflict say DU weapons are partly to blame for a wide range of health problems among thousands of who fought there. The Pentagon said last month that such a link was ``unlikely.''

---

NATO and EU probe suspect shells following cancer alarm

Yahoo News
Yahoo! Asia - News Monday, January 8 12:34 AM SGT
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headlines/010108/world/afp/NATO_and_EU_probe_suspect_shells_following_cancer_alarm.html

PARIS, Jan 7 (AFP) - Both NATO and the European Union were this week probing possible after effects of so-called depleted uranium munitions used in the Balkans, amid mounting alarm over reports of cancer among former personnel there.

NATO's top decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, will meet on Tuesday to discuss the crisis over the controversial weaponry, which is being more and more widely linked to subsequent cancer in veterans.

On the same day the European Union political and security committee will also discuss the "Balkan syndrome," as it is being called.

Seven Italian soldiers, five Belgians, two Dutch, two Spaniards, a Portuguese and a Czech have died from cancer since returning from tours of duty in Bonia or Kosovo where the US has fired depleted uranium (DU) shells.

Four French soldiers and four Belgians have also contracted leukemia.

EU Commission President Romano Prodi last week demanded the abolition of the tank-busting weapons if there was a risk of radioactive contamination.

The European Union was considering launching its own investigation into the use of the controversial hardware, a spokesman said.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson ordered a detailed investigation of potentially contaminated Bosnian sites following calls from Belgium, France, Italy and Portugal for further information on DU projectiles and their potential health hazard.

European ministers called Thursday for an urgent inquiry into NATO's use of the weapons and suspected health risks.

Meanwhile Greece has asked Sweden to take the lead in Europe to clarify dangers posed by DU ammunition. Sweden currently holds the rotating European Union presidency.

Greece's Defence Minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos asked Bjorn von Sydow, his Swedish counterpart, to broach the issue at the next EU defence ministers' session.

In Kosovo itself, health experts were examining effects of uranium dust on public health after the head of a UN scientific team repeated warnings that civilians and mine-clearers could be at risk.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said that it had found no evidence of an increased leukemia risk in the province nor that the disease could be linked to DU ordnance with which US jets peppered Yugoslav army targets during the Kosovo conflict.

But research continued after the head of a UN team which found depleted uranium at eight sites warned that landmine clearance could stir up toxic dust, and that children especially ran an increased radiation risk.

The team urged that the targetted sites be sealed off. But this had not yet happened, a spokesman for NATO-led peacekeepers confirmed Saturday.

Uranium is used in DU munitions to make bullets or missiles denser so that they can cut through armour. The material gives off relatively low levels of radiation, but can be dangerous if ingested, inhaled in dust or if it enters the body through cuts or wounds.

Washington has failed to allay growing European concern over the use of DU munitions. The Pentagon has said no adverse effects had been found in US personnel who handled the ammunition and rejected calls for a moratorium on the use of DU shells, still being used by US peacekeepers in Kosovo.

In Britain the defence ministry admitted that depleted uranium-tipped shells had been used on firing ranges in Britain. But it insisted it had no reason to believe that the shells posed any significant risk.

The announcement came as British defence officials were to be questioned by a parliamentary committee over fears that soldiers in the Balkans may have contracted cancer from the ammunition.

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Mon, 08 Jan 2001 15:53:10 -0800
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

RADIOACTIVITY FOUND AT BALKAN SITES: Eight of 11 sites in the Balkans, visited by U.N. inspection teams, tested positive for above normal radioactivity. The tests were ordered as residents and peacekeeping troops expressed concerns about health risks caused by NATO's use of depleted uranium in ammunition used during the Kosovo action.

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Russia Suggests UN, WHO Check 'Balkans Syndrome'

Reuters
January 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-balkans-russia.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) should help check claims that NATO weapons using depleted uranium have caused illness among peacekeepers.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov raised the uranium issue--dubbed ``Balkans syndrome''--over suspicions the radioactive material has caused cancer among peacekeepers. He spoke after meeting the new head of the UN administration for Kosovo, Hans Haekkerup.

``The main thing is to have independent, objective checks at the level of experts of the United Nations and other specialist bodies, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organisation,'' Ivanov told reporters.

He said such checks should determine the ``real level of risk'' from the depleted uranium. Russia has some 3,000 peacekeepers in Kosovo and around 1,000 in Bosnia.

He said Russia was worried about the health of its servicemen but reiterated official statements of last week that Moscow had so far found no evidence its troops were ill due to uranium.

NATO has come under increasing pressure from several European governments over the claims about depleted uranium.

Italy and France have also called for NATO to examine the claims and Portugal has begun testing 10,000 military and civilian personnel who have served in the Balkans.

Ivanov met Haekkerup as the Dane prepares to take over from Frenchman Bernard Kouchner on January 15 as head of the transitional post-war UN administration in Kosovo.

He said the discussions were a chance for Russia to express some of its concerns about the way Kosovo was being run but pledged Moscow's continued support for the mission.

``We are very much interested in the success of this mission. It will determine not only the settlement of the situation in Kosovo itself but also the stabilisation of the Balkans in general,'' Ivanov had said at the start of the talks.

Russia has several times expressed worries that international troops are not doing enough to clamp down on violence by what it calls Albanian extremists against the 75,000-strong Serb minority in the breakaway Yugoslav province.

Russia also criticised the UN administration after it held municipal elections in October boycotted by the local Serbs.

Russia has traditionally supported Yugoslavia, although Moscow last year helped smooth the transition to power of President Vojislav Kostunica in his stand-off with authoritarian predecessor Slobodan Milosevic.

---

NATO, EU Move Depleted Uranium Dispute to Centre Stage

Reuters
January 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-health-.html?pagewanted=all

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Controversy over NATO's use in the Balkans of tank-busting shells tipped with depleted uranium moved firmly onto the political agenda Monday, although health experts doubted any link to blood cancer among soldiers.

NATO and the European Union will hold separate meetings this week amid growing concern that radioactive depleted uranium may have caused dozens of cases of leukemia among peacekeepers.

While several EU states backed calls for NATO to come clean on where, when and how much depleted uranium (DU) ammunition was used, the alliance insisted there was no risk of contamination.

Mark Laity, special adviser to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, told Reuters Television there was no scientific evidence to prove that the specially hardened munitions designed to pierce tanks were linked to leukemia, a blood cancer.

``In general terms, the current state of medical opinion is that depleted uranium is not a risk. You just have to take precautions under certain circumstances. But the radiation risks are very low indeed.

``That's why it's depleted uranium. It's got less radiation than normal uranium which is in your backyard. You're breathing it now. It's in the air we breathe.''

That view was supported by World Health Organization experts who doubted DU weapons had caused leukemia among troops.

But the Geneva-based WHO warned that children playing in former conflict areas where the weapons exploded could be at risk and recommended that soldiers who had taken home DU shell parts as souvenirs should dispose of them promptly.

``Based on our studies and the evidence we have, it is unlikely that soldiers in Kosovo ran a high risk of contracting leukemia from exposure to radiation from depleted uranium,'' WHO specialist Michael Repacholi told a news conference.

CALLS FOR NATO DETAILS

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined calls for NATO to investigate the claims that Western troops in the Balkans fell ill through exposure to the depleted uranium which is used in missiles, shells and bullets to increase armor penetration.

``We want a complete examination of where these munitions have been used and with what consequences,'' Schroeder told reporters in Hanover. ``Of course we also want to know if there are connections between cases of illness and the use of these weapons.''

It also emerged that NATO warned its member states 18 months ago of a ``possible toxic threat'' from radioactive weaponry, widely blamed for the ``Balkans Syndrome'' that has allegedly caused deaths and cancers among peacekeepers.

The German Defense Ministry confirmed reports that NATO issued warnings in July 1999 recommending countries take their own ``preventative measures.''

The controversy erupted after six Italian soldiers died of leukemia after serving in the Balkans.

It echoes claims that Western use of DU weapons in the 1991 Gulf War caused thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths from cancer and the birth of deformed babies.

The Pentagon has said it is unlikely there is a link between the use of DU weapons in the Gulf and veterans' claims they caused a wide range of health problems among the military.

U.S. attack jets fired 31,000 rounds of DU ammunition against Serb targets during NATO's 1999 campaign to drive the Yugoslav army out of Kosovo. Some 10,000 rounds were also fired in neighboring Bosnia in 1994-5.

SCOTTISH WATERS LITTERED WITH DU SHELLS

In Britain, the environmental group Friends of the Earth and a Scottish parliamentarian demanded a clean-up of waters around Scotland after the Defense Ministry admitted it fired over 6,000 DU shells into the Solway Firth in training in the past decade.

NATO political advisers will discuss the DU row Tuesday and the North Atlantic Council -- the alliance's permanent ambassadors -- meets on the issue in Brussels Wednesday. NATO medical experts meet next Monday.

Swedish Defense Minister Bjoern von Sydow said the EU's new Political and Security Committee (COPS) would also discuss the controversy Tuesday, but he warned against any quick fixes.

EU foreign ministers were also expected to add the issue to the agenda for their monthly meeting in Brussels on January 22.

NATIONS STEP UP MILITARY HEALTH CHECKS

Germany's Defense Ministry said it would review all leukemia cases in the military to see if there was a higher rate in those soldiers who had served in the Balkans.

Finland, Greece and Norway all stepped up health checks and radiation controls for their troops, and Switzerland said it would re-examine the death of an officer who served in Bosnia in 1998.

Three Portuguese ministers will visit Kosovo to see whether soldiers are at risk from so-called ``Balkans Syndrome,'' following the death from brain disease of one Portuguese soldier who served in Kosovo and news that another has leukemia.

Croatian Premier Ivica Racan vowed to press NATO to clarify whether alliance aircraft dumped depleted uranium bombs in the Adriatic Sea as they returned from Kosovo to bases in Italy.

-------

Analysis: Uranium row tests Nato

BBC News
Monday, 8 January, 2001, 14:24 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1106000/1106290.stm

A Portuguese soldier measures radiation in the Kosovo town of Klina By Defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus

The row over the use of depleted uranium munitions threatens to open up a significant rift within the Atlantic Alliance.

A number of countries claim that some of their peace-keepers serving in either Kosovo or Bosnia have died because of conditions prompted by exposure to depleted uranium, used in Nato munitions in the Balkans.

The Italian and German governments appear eager to ban the use of the munitions altogether - certainly until they can be proved safe.

Nato must try to reconcile the very strong concerns of some of its member governments with the equally strong assertion by some of its major military players - notably Britain and the United States - that depleted uranium rounds pose no significant health hazards and that any hazards that do exist are far outweighed by the rounds' usefulness as a tank-killer.

Nato's own role in all of this is hard to determine.

It must act on behalf of all of its member governments and it is likely that it will try to be a sort of clearing house for the exchange of information on depleted uranium and its possible risks.

Britain and the United States are likely to resist strongly any attempt for these weapons to be withdrawn from service as demanded by the Italian and German governments.

There may also be some attempt to coordinate the various screening programmes that different countries are establishing for Balkans veterans.

Other scientific studies are already under way, but there are going to be no rapid answers.

Some careful crisis mangement is needed to avoid this issue exacerbating tensions between the United States and at least some of its European allies.

---

Israel denies depleted uranium use

BBC News
Monday, 8 January, 2001, 17:39 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/newsid_1106000/1106531.stm

Some Palestinians believe depleted uranium is being used against them By environment correspondent Alex Kirby

As debate intensifies in Europe over the risks of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, Israel has insisted that it is not using them.

It has rejected an allegation by a Palestinian minister that its forces are firing them in the current wave of violence.

Israel is known to possess DU munitions, and a reluctance to use them now could indicate an awareness of the risks involved.

And even some critics say it would gain nothing from resorting to DU weapons.

A Ramallah newspaper, al-Hayat al-Jadidah, accused the Israelis on 19 December of using DU.

It said the Palestinian Interior Minister, Dr Yusuf Abu-Safieh, had "confirmed that the occupation authorities have started using radioactive uranium ammunition to suppress the intifada".

The minister said the Palestinian President, Yasser Arafat, was assembling a committee "to examine the situation".

Earlier denial

But the Israeli Embassy in London told BBC News Online the report was completely without foundation, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were not using DU.

It did not say why the IDF were not using DU munitions, nor whether they might do so in the future.

Last November the independent Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) asked the IDF about reports that Israeli helicopters had been using DU ammunition throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

An IDF spokesman said no such ammunition had been used.

The same month a US group, the International Action Center (IAC), called for an inquiry into what it said was Israel's use of DU weapons.

Confiscated

IAC members say they picked up shell casings and metal fragments around Nablus and Ramallah which they believe contained DU.

But the debris was confiscated from them as they were leaving Israel, so they were unable to test it for radioactivity.

More than 350 people have been killed in the last three months in the violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Most of those who died have been Palestinians.

Depleted uranium is a heavy substance, 1.7 times as dense as lead, and used in armour-piercing munitions.

Many veterans of the Gulf War believe it is implicated in a range of medical problems they are suffering from, known collectively as Gulf War Syndrome.

And members of the armed forces of several European countries who served in Bosnia and Kosovo now say they believe DU may have made them ill.

Because of its ability to punch through armour, DU is prized as a highly effective anti-tank weapon.

In its natural state, it is only mildly radioactive. On impact with a solid object it turns into a burning vapour.

Risks 'negligible'

The US Defense Department and the UK Ministry of Defence accept that the resulting dust can be dangerous, and say troops entering vehicles hit by DU weapons need to take precautions.

But they say the dust soon ceases to be a significant problem, and is unlikely to move far from the site of the explosion, though independent authors have found it can be blown many miles.

The US and UK military authorities say any risk from DU comes from its toxicity as a heavy metal, and that its radioactivity is negligible.

---

MoD pressed to move on toxic shells Special report: Kosovo

The Guardian
Monday January 8, 2001
Richard Norton-Taylor
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Kosovo/
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,419204,00.html

The Ministry of Defence was coming under increasing pressure last night to screen British troops who served in the Balkans and the Gulf war for signs of contamination by depleted uranium used in anti-tank weapons.

With Nato officials preparing to face up to growing concern across Europe about the weapons linked to a spate of leukaemia cases among Balkans veterans, Britain and the US, the only two countries to use the shells, are increasingly isolated in their defence.

Switzerland yesterday joined France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, and Finland in setting up screening programmes for soldiers who have served in the Balkans.

Official assurances and the lack of hard evidence have failed to dampen public concern among veterans - echoed by the European commission and the UN - about the safety of the weapons. Senior officials will meet in Nato headquarters in Brussels tomorrow to consider how to respond to pressure on governments faced with evidence linking DU shells with cancer. The EU has announced an inquiry into the health risks of the shells.

The Ministry of Defence insisted that ranges in Eskmeals, Cumbria, and the Solway Firth in Scotland, where DU shells were used, were monitored by the health and safety executive. It could not comment on reports they had also been fired at the army's ranges at Lulworth, Dorset.

Though the ministry acknowledges that toxic dust from the shells is harmful if inhaled or ingested in large quantities, a spokesman said it did not believe the shells posed "any significant health risk".

The MoD has asked for an independent study by the Royal Society, which is to report in the spring. However, it has no plans to screen veterans, the spokesman said.

The ministry's stand has not been helped by its failure to warn troops before the Gulf war of the risks of DU in shells used by US AI0 "tankbusters" and British Chieftain tanks.

The Labour MP Paul Flynn yesterday showed the Guardian a letter he received in 1993 from Jeremy Hanley, then a Foreign Office minister, who explained that the omission was due "to the urgency attached to bringing into service such a critical capability which at the start of the crisis was still under development".

Mr Flynn, who was also told in 1993 that DU shells had been used in West Freugh, Scotland, and Foulness in Essex, criticised the MoD for contaminating large areas with radioactive dust - what he called "an unknown hazard with unknown remedies".

Terry Gooding, a Gulf war veteran, described the MoD's refusal to screen for DU contamination as "disgusting". He has a war pension for what the MoD describes as "unspecified and ill-defined" illnesses.

American A10 aircraft fired more than 30,000 rounds of DU shells in Kosovo and more than 10,000 in Bosnia, mainly around Sarajevo.

The Commons defence committee is to meet on Wednesday to decide whether to summon ministers to explain the government's policy. "If it is shown that depleted uranium causes an increase in cancers, then we have got to look at alternative weapon systems and at precautions which could be taken to protect our troops, as well as at how we can clean up the areas where the shells were used," said Bruce George, the committee chairman.

He said no repeat should be permitted of the MoD foot-dragging over Gulf war syndrome in the 1990s, which saw ex-servicemen battling for years to convince ministers that their illness was real.

--------

The truth about depleted uranium
Robert Fisk: Bosnians investigating a growth in cancers can get no information from Nato. This is not a scandal. It is an outrage'

The Independent
8 January 2001
http://www.independent.co.uk/argument/Commentators/2001-01/fisk080101.shtml

Just fourteen months ago, on a bleak, frosty afternoon, I stopped my car beside an old Ottoman bridge in southern Kosovo. It was here, scarcely half a year earlier, that Nato jets had bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees, ripping scores of them to pieces in the surrounding fields. Their jets, I knew, had been firing depleted uranium rounds. And now, on the very spot east of Djakovica where a bomb had torn apart an entire refugee family in a tractor, five Italian Kfor soldiers had built a little checkpoint. Indeed, their armoured vehicle was actually standing on part of the crater in the road.

I tried to warn them that I thought the crater might be contaminated. I told them about depleted uranium and the cancers that had blossomed among the children of Iraq who had - or whose parents had - been close to DU explosions. One of the young soldiers laughed at me. He'd heard the stories, he said. But Nato had assured its troops that there was no danger from depleted uranium. I begged to differ. "Don't worry about us," the soldier replied.

They should have known better. Only a few weeks earlier, a team of UN scientists - sent to Kosovo under the set of UN resolutions that brought Kfor into the province - had demanded to know from Nato the location of DU bombings in Kosovo. Nato refused to tell them. Nor was I surprised. From the very start of the alliance bombing campaign against Serbia, Nato had lied about depleted uranium. Just as the American and British governments still lie about its effects in southern Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. US and British tanks had fired hundreds of rounds - thousands in the case of the Americans - at Iraqi vehicles, using shells whose depleted uranium punches through heavy armour and then releases an irradiated aerosol spray.

In the aftermath of that war, I revisited the old battlefields around the Iraqi city of Basra. Each time, I came across terrifying new cancers among those who lived there. Babies were being born with no arms or no noses or no eyes. Children were bleeding internally or suddenly developing grotesque tumours. UN sanctions, needless to say, were delaying medicines from reaching these poor wretches. Then I found Iraqi soldiers who seemed to be dying of the same "Gulf War syndrome" that was already being identified among thousands of US and British troops.

At the time, The Independent was alone in publicising this sinister new weapon and its apparent effects. Government ministers laughed the reports off. One replied to Independent readers who drew the Ministry of Defence's attention to my articles that, despite my investigations, he had seen no "epidemiological data" proving them true. And of course there was none. Because the World Health Organisation, invited by Iraq to start research into the cancers, was dissuaded from doing so even though it had sent an initial team to Baghdad to start work. And because a group of Royal Society scientists told by the British authorities to investigate the effects of DU declined to visit Iraq.

Documents that proved the contrary were dismissed as "anecdotal". A US military report detailing the health risks of DU and urging suppression of this information was dutifully ignored. When two years ago I wrote about a British government report detailing the extraordinary lengths to which the authorities went at DU shell test-firing ranges in the UK - the shells are fired into a tunnel in Cumbria and the resulting dust sealed into concrete containers which are buried - I know for a fact that the first reaction from one civil servant was to ask whether I might be prosecuted for revealing this.

One ex-serviceman, sick since the Gulf War, actually had his house raided by the British police in an attempt to track down "secret" documents. More honourable policemen might have searched for papers that proved DU's dangers - and which might form the basis of manslaughter charges against senior officers. But of course the police were trying to find the source of the leak, not the source of dying men's cancers.

During the Kosovo war, I travelled from Belgrade to Brussels to ask about Nato's use of depleted uranium. Luftwaffe General Jerz informed me that it was "harmless" and was found in trees, earth and mountains. It was a lie. Only uranium - not the depleted variety that comes from nuclear waste - is found in the earth. James Shea, Nato's spokesman, quoted a Rand Corporation report that supposedly proved DU was not harmful, knowing full well - since Mr Shea is a careful reader and not a stupid man - that the Rand report deals with dust in uranium mines, not the irradiated spray from DU weapons.

And so it went on. Back in Kosovo, I was told privately by British officers that the Americans had used so much DU in the war against Serbia that they had no idea how many locations were contaminated. When I tracked down the survivors of the Albanian refugee convoy, one of them was suffering kidney pains. Despite a promise by Shea that the attack would be fully investigated, not a single Nato officer had bothered to talk to a survivor. Nor have they since. A year ago, I noted in The Independent that foreign secretary Robin Cook had admitted in the House of Commons that Nato was refusing to give DU locations to the UN. "Why?" I asked in the paper. "Why cannot we be told where these rounds were fired?"

During the war, defence correspondents - the BBC's Mark Laity prominent among them - bought the Nato line that DU was harmless. Laity was still peddling the same nonsense at an Edinburgh Festival journalists' conference some months later. Laity - who is now, of course, an official spokesman for Nato - was last week reduced to saying that "the overwhelming consensus of medical information" is that health risks from DU are "very low". But the growing consensus of medical information is quite the opposite. Which is why a British report to the UK embassy in Kuwait referred to the "sensitivity" of DU because of its health risks.

And still the Americans and the British try to fool us. The Americans are now brazenly announcing that their troops in Kosovo have suffered no resultant leukemias - failing to mention that most of their soldiers are cooped up in a massive base (Fort Bondsteel) near the Macedonian border where no DU rounds were fired by Nato. Needless to say, there was also no mention of the tens of thousands of US troops - women as well as men - who believe they were contaminated by DU in the Gulf.

So it goes on. British veterans are dying of unexplained cancers from the Gulf. So are US veterans. Nato troops from Bosnia and now Kosovo - especially Italians - are dying from unexplained cancers. So are the children in the Basra hospitals, along with their parents and uncles and aunts. Cancers have now been found among Iraqi refugees in Iran who were caught in Allied fire on the roads north of Kuwait. Bosnian authorities investigating an increase in cancers can get no information from Nato. This is not a scandal. It is an outrage.

Had we but known. On those very same Iraqi roads, I too prowled through the contaminated wreckage of Iraqi armour in 1991. And - I recall with growing unease - back in Kosovo in 1999, only a day after the original attack, I collected pieces of the air-fired rounds that hit the Albanian refugee convoy. Their computer codes proved Nato had bombed the convoy - not the Serbs, as Nato tried to claim. I also remember that I carried those bits of munition back to Belgrade - in my pocket. There are times, I must admit, when I would like to believe Nato's lies.

---

Germany Ignored DU Warning; Italian Enlistments Drop As Fear Spreads

Mon, 8 Jan 2001
The Times (London)
BY ROGER BOYES, RICHARD OWEN AND MICHAEL EVANS

THE Berlin Government ignored warnings of potential health risks associated with American depleted uranium shells during the Balkans offensive. Rudolf Scharping, the Defence Minister, was urged in a letter from Admiral Elmar Schmähling to prevent German troops coming into contact with the shells or vehicles hit by them. The letter was sent on June 14, 1999, after the 78-day Nato air campaign in Kosovo and Serbia. No protective measures were taken as a result.

Internal German Defence Ministry correspondence shows that the issue did not disappear. Peter Wichert, a junior Defence Minister, passed on Nato guidance that there was "a possible toxic danger" in the war zone. But the same memo concluded: "Nato currently has no plans for decontamination."

In Italy, there are indications that fears of a link between leukaemia affecting troops who served in Bosnia and Kosovo and the use of depleted uranium shells in both operations is having a serious impact on recruiting. General Franco Angioni, a retired commander, said that the scare over depleted uranium was giving potential recruits "pause for thought".

Italy is in the process of changing from a conscripted army to a professional force. "We should have 50,000 professional recruits being processed at this stage, but in fact we only have 20,000," he told Il Messaggero.

Eight Italian soldiers have died from leukaemia or cancerous tumours after serving in the Balkans. A German Red Cross nurse has also died.

In Greece, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, the Defence Minister, said he would not rule out withdrawing the 1,600 Greek soldiers from Kosovo if a link was found between leukaemia and the use of depleted uranium weapons, although he pledged his Government would not act unilaterally.

Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, called on Nato yesterday to release all available information on the use of depleted uranium. He made clear that he opposed using such weapons.

The World Health Organisation said yesterday that it doubted that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans in the Balkans over the past decade had caused blood cancer among Nato troops.

"Based on our studies it is unlikely that soldiers in Kosovo ran a high risk of contracting leukaemia from exposure to radiation from depleted uranium," Michael Repacholi, an expert from the organisation, said. However, he said that children playing in former conflict areas where the weapons had exploded could be at risk.

A Serbian health official said yesterday that tests carried out on 500 civilians in southern Serbia, where American depleted uranium shells had exploded, had uncovered no linked illnesses.

In Britain, the Ministry of Defence said that the Army and the Royal Navy held stocks of depleted uranium weapons. The Army had a stock of depleted uranium shells for use by Challenger tanks, and the Navy's Type 42 destroyers and one aircraft carrier were equipped with the Phalanx Gatling gun, which fired depleted uranium shells.

The Royal Society is studying the possible health risks posed by depleted uranium weapons. In a statement yesterday, Professor Brian Heap, vice-president of the society, said the study had not been commissioned by the Ministry of Defence. He added: "We wish to emphasise that the study was initiated independently. It will be carrying out its estimates of exposure, doses and health effects during and after the use of depleted uranium munitions."

Professor Brian Spratt, who is carrying out the study, said that it was right to take the issue seriously. He told Channel 4: "We do have to be careful because depleted uranium is mildy radioactive and it's chemically poisonous."

Igor Ivanov, the Russian Foreign Minister, said an independent inquiry into Nato's use of depleted uranium shells should be conducted by the UN, WHO and International Atomic Energy Agency.

-------- india / pakistan

Report: Pakistan has developed new missile

World Tribune
Monday, January 8, 2001
MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE
http://www.worldtribune.com/tout-7.html

NEW DEHLI - Pakistan is reported to have developed a new missile that can be tipped withh a nuclear warhead.

The Press Trust of India, in a report from Islamabad, said Pakistan has developed a missile called Haider-1, set for a test launch in March. The New Dehli-based agency said that at a speed of 16.6 kilometers per second the missile is faster than most in the region and can reach many Indian cities within three minutes of launch.

The Haider is also said to be more accurate than the Shahin missile tested last year. That missile has a range of 2,500 kilometers and is believed based on Chinese technology.

Pakistani sources told the Indian agency that the Haider-1 was developed independently by Pakistani experts.

In the Indian city of Hyderabad, a short-range missile went awry during a test on Thursday and exploded in the compound of Bharat Dynamics. The complex contains Indian missile projects such as Akash, Prithvi and Trishul.

-------- korea

Korea: Seoul Hopes for Continued Dialogue With the North

International Herald Tribune
Monday, January 8, 2001
David Ignatius International Herald Tribune
The Washington Post.
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=6581

SINGAPORE Above the stairway to the office of President Kim Dae Jung in the Blue House, South Korea's presidential mansion, is a large tapestry depicting the Korean Peninsula. Like the Korea in the imagination of many of the president's compatriots, it has no border dividing North and South.

Mr. Kim realizes that his homeland, carved in half by the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II, probably won't be reunited in his lifetime. That process will take another 20 to 30 years, he said in an interview in Seoul on Friday. But he worries that his rapprochement with North Korea, symbolized by the dramatic visit last June to Pyongyang that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, may be undone because of misjudgments by the new administration of George W. Bush.

He said he plans to visit Washington soon to urge Mr. Bush to maintain support for his "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North. And he hinted at the message he will deliver: Don't change course; support continued dialogue; don't push the North's leader, Kim Jong Il, back into a corner.

Korea presents what may be the Bush administration's trickiest foreign policy problem outside the Middle East. It is a region where the new administration has especially hawkish views and its rhetoric conflicts directly with the peace policies of a close ally. Because 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, it is one of the few places on earth where U.S. missteps could lead to a real war.

The Clinton administration achieved some important gains, helping Kim Dae Jung draw the isolated neo-Stalinists of North Korea into a process of dialogue and change. Indeed, Bill Clinton had hoped to cap his presidency by visiting Pyongyang himself to sign an accord limiting North Korean missile development, but he ran out of time.

When the Bush administration looks at North Korea, it sees red - a rogue nation that is a living demonstration of the need for a missile defense system to protect the United States (and, in theory, South Korea) from attack. A senior South Korean diplomat worries that in the mind of Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld, North Korea has become a "poster child" for missile defense. He fears that the new administration will create "a missile arms race in our region and a return to an 'us-them' mentality."

President Kim chose his words carefully in the interview, and he specifically refused to answer a question about the Bush administration's enthusiasm for missile defense. He said he would wait to hear what administration officials had to say on the subject when he visited Washington, perhaps as soon as March.

While he noted that there are different voices in the new administration, he said he expects that Mr. Bush will support his policy of engagement with the North. He said he wants the United States, too, to continue engaging Pyongyang through the tripartite U.S.-Japanese South Korean approach that the Clinton administration backed.

He said he wants Washington to understand that the North really has changed, not because its Communist leaders wanted change but because change was forced on them by the need to survive economically. He said the most important sign of that change is Kim Jong Il's acceptance of the proposition that U.S. military forces should remain in South Korea to foster security and balance in the region.

North Korea must go further and agree to give up its nuclear and missile threats, President Kim said. South Korean officials are worried that if the Bush administration simply denounces North Korea, and pushes ahead with an aggressive missile defense program, Kim Jong Il will retreat into isolation. In that case the only leverage available to the desperately poor North Korean regime would be military force. With thousands of North Korean artillery tubes pointed at Seoul (and at U.S. troops), defending against a long-range missile attack may be the least of America's worries.

The peninsula poses a classic test of the basic conundrum of foreign policy: Is security best achieved by a "soft" policy of negotiation with a potential adversary or a "hard" policy of building weapons to blunt that adversary's power? The right security policy is usually some combination of the two. But in its enthusiasm for building weapons, the Bush administration could subvert the process of negotiation that is already under way.

-------- russia

Why Russia Wants Waste

Russia Today
Jan 8, 2001
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=246957

MOSCOW -- (The Moscow Times) Last month the State Duma voted overwhelmingly to approve a government-backed law that will amend current legislation and allow Russia to import highly radioactive waste from foreign countries.

While this was not the final reading of the bill, its eventual approval seems virtually inevitable.

This result seems strange at first glance since all polls show that the Russian public is unequivocally opposed to such imports. Last fall environmental activists collected more than 2.5 million signatures calling for a national referendum on the issue. But the Central Elections Commission rejected this petition on a technicality, and now Duma deputies have shown no difficulty voting against the clearly expressed will of their constituencies.

Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has predicted Russia will earn up to $20 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by importing foreign waste. Adamov and other officials have stressed that spent nuclear fuel is not "waste," but a valuable commodity. After reprocessing, they maintain, plutonium and uranium may be extracted and recycled. They also try to make the idea more palatable by saying that proceeds from these imports will be used to clean up existing contaminated zones.

It is certainly true that many areas of the country are radioactively contaminated: The worst zone is in the Urals, in the region around Chelyabinsk. However, there are simply no effective means of "cleaning" large-scale radioactive contamination.

When relatively small radioactive spills occur, the contaminated earth is put into steel barrels and buried somewhere. Hard surfaces are washed with water and detergent. These methods are obviously not practical when hundreds of square kilometers are contaminated. After the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, there were initial attempts to wash down roads and buildings with detergent, but they were soon abandoned and everything was just left to decompose naturally.

The claim that imported waste will be "reprocessed" is also a sham. After all, Russia does not have enough capacity to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel that it produces itself. More importantly, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel does not make economic sense. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States have been dismantling their nuclear arsenals and many Western countries have been scaling back their civilian nuclear power programs. As a result, the world is awash with cheap uranium and there is simply no realistic market for recycled plutonium.

So why, then, do the Duma and the Kremlin support such a dangerous and doubtful plan? It can hardly be for the money. After all, last year Russia had a trade surplus of about $50 billion. A few hundred million in revenues from importing waste simply won't make much of a difference.

The explanation for the extraordinary unanimity of the political elite on the waste imports issue is the typical one: defense considerations. In April 1999, the Security Council (President Vladimir Putin was the secretary of the Security Council at that time) ordered the Nuclear Power Ministry to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including so-called "penetrators." These weapons are designed to burrow down tens of meters underground before exploding. The Security Council also ordered the development of a new generation of very low-yield tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons.

Immediately after Putin announced the Security Council decision, Adamov began to clamor for foreign nuclear waste and a bill was introduced in the Duma. In May 1999, Adamov told a conference: "They told us to accelerate military nuclear programs, but said we should do that using our own sources of revenue." In effect that meant the only way Russia can develop a new generation of weapons is if the West is willing to pay for it by dumping its nuclear waste here.

The gist of the Adamov plan - to make the West pay for a new generation of nukes that may be eventually used against it - has clearly captured the imagination of the Russian elite. During the Duma debate last month, leading Communist deputy and former Politburo member Anatoly Lukyanov said that anyone opposing the nuclear waste bill must be an "American agent."

In fact, the U.S. government has already endorsed Russia's initiative to import nuclear waste. But true Russian patriots will not be fooled by such tricks. Foreign radioactive waste will soon be on its way in.

---

Russia denies nuclear missile move

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Sun, 7 Jan 2001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-7jan2001-35.htm

Russia has denied reports that it has moved tactical nuclear missiles to its Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad.

President Vladimir Putin has described the allegations as "absurd".

The Washington Times published a report on Wednesday quoting US intelligence services as saying Russia had moved short-range nuclear weapons into the enclave last June.

A Pentagon official said the move raised questions about Moscow's commitment to pledges it had made on arms control.

Poland claims Russia maintains excessive military forces in the enclave, and says any deployment of nuclear arms there would be a serious cause for concern.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says the US administration intends raising the issue with Russia.

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

Litigators Join TRW Suit

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/politics/08WHIS.html

Two prominent litigators are joining an engineer in a suit that accuses a defense contractor of lying to the government about antimissile research.

Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at the military contractor, TRW, sued the company four years ago under the false-claims act. She said in her suit that TRW had falsified tests. The company denies the accusation.

On Friday, two powerful litigators announced that they would join Dr. Schwartz's lawyer, David W. Affeld of Los Angeles, in pressing the suit. The added firepower was made public in an amended complaint filed in the federal court.

The first is the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York group, and the other is Guy T. Saperstein, head of the law firm of Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller in Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Schwartz's accusation is being studied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for possible criminal implications, and by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

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A New Destroyer May Force Choice on the Bush Team

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/politics/08SHIP.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - They call it the DD-21 destroyer: an electric- powered stealth ship designed to attack enemies hundreds of miles inland from any of the world's oceans as well as fight at sea.

It will carry more Tomahawk cruise missiles and bigger guns than any destroyer in existence, yet will need fewer than a third as many sailors and cost less to operate, say its advocates, who include the secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, and leading members of Congress.

"It's like going from sail to steam," asserts Kendell Pease, a vice president of General Dynamics and a former rear admiral. General Dynamics will release its first public diagrams of the DD-21 at a Navy conference this week.

Yet for all the hoopla over it, the DD-21 faces a gantlet of obstacles emblematic of the broader problems that the armed services and the administration of President-elect George W. Bush will confront as they struggle to balance modernizing the military with paying for the upkeep of the aging equipment they have now.

During the campaign, Mr. Bush hammered home the need to rebuild the services, calling for an acquisition program that would "propel America generations ahead in military technology." To its advocates, DD-21 fits that goal, and Mr. Bush is on record as promoting an earlier version of the DD-21 known as the arsenal ship. But Mr. Bush also never explained how he would pay for such leap-ahead technology, and therein lies the rub.

Like the other services, the Navy is struggling just to pay for mundane things like fuel, spare parts and paint. And long before it can expect to sail its first DD-21, in 2010, the Navy says it must replace aging planes and rusting ships that are scheduled for retirement in the coming decade.

The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the Pentagon budget will have to grow by as much as $70 billion a year to maintain weapons systems while moving ahead with new ones like the DD-21. Some senior Pentagon officials say the shortfall is well over $100 billion a year. Yet Mr. Bush has called for increasing military spending by just $4.5 billion a year over the next decade.

That means that Mr. Bush's choice for secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, will almost surely have to cancel or postpone major programs in development, defense analysts say. High on that list of potential victims are the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the most expensive jet fighter in history, costing as much as $180 million each; the Marine Corps's V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, at as much as $80 million each; and the DD-21, at $750 million each.

Important decisions on the F-22, a stealth fighter for air-to-air combat, could be made as soon as this week, when a Pentagon panel is scheduled to decide whether to allow the plane to go into production.

Though an outright cancellation of the program seems unlikely, a chorus of F-22 critics in and outside the Pentagon is calling for a postponement or cutbacks in the program, which has been plagued by production delays and cost overruns. Advisers to Mr. Bush have also said they plan to review all of the Pentagon's fighter plane programs this spring.

The Marine Corps's V-22 Osprey is also in some peril, having suffered two fatal crashes last year. The departing secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, has called for an independent review of the program, which was almost canceled 11 years ago by Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense then and has returned to Washington as the vice president-elect.

But the DD-21 is arguably the most endangered of the big-ticket programs because it is the furthest from being developed. While actual V-22's and F-22's are already flying, the DD-21, with its radar-deflecting hull and futuristic electric propulsion system, exists mainly on drawing boards at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, owned by General Dynamics, and Ingalls Shipbuilding's yards in Pascagoula, Miss., owned by Litton Industries. The two shipbuilders are heading competing consortiums seeking to design the ship.

Under current Navy plans, a contract for the program would be issued this spring, calling for the first DD-21 keel to be laid in 2005 and the first completed ship to enter the fleet in 2010. The Navy wants to build 32 vessels to replace its Spruance-class destroyers.

The long lead time will give the destroyer's critics time to postpone or kill the program. And they are many.

There are academics who argue that the Navy should build a fleet of small, inexpensive "street fighter" ships capable of operating close to shore in mine-infested waters and fending off attacks from low-tech enemies, like the terrorists who nearly sank the destroyer Cole in Yemen last October.

Others contend that the Navy could save money by shelving the DD-21 and simply refitting four Trident nuclear submarines, scheduled for retirement, with Tomahawk missiles instead.

And critics of Pentagon spending raise questions about the need for a new class of powerful destroyers when the United States faces no superpower rival on the high seas. That money might be better spent on diplomacy than weapons, some contend.

"It feels to me like the Navy is still feeling around for a mission when they really don't have an enemy to face," said Eugene Carroll, a retired rear admiral who is vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a nonprofit Pentagon watchdog group.

The DD-21 even faces quiet resistance within the Navy from commanders of carriers and submarines, who would rather see some of the $600 million budgeted for research and development on the DD- 21 in the coming year allocated to their programs instead.

But what the program has going for it is the support of two important Republicans: Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, where half of the DD- 21's would be built, and Senator John W. Warner of Virginia. With Mr. Bush's inauguration, Mr. Lott will become majority leader and Mr. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

There is also wide agreement that the Navy must remake itself to meet the new, if less clear, challenges of the post-Soviet era. And many military experts say that mission must focus not on the blue seas but on the "green waters" closer to shore.

"In the wake of the end of the cold war, we recognized that the big naval battles on the open sea are not likely," said Mr. Danzig, who will leave his post as Navy secretary this month. "The more relevant issue is to be able to project firepower from the sea to the shore. DD-21 would be the first destroyer designed specifically to perform that mission."

The DD-21 would serve that mission in several ways, its defenders say. First, it would be stealthier. Propelled by electric engines, it would be quieter than existing ships. It would also have a narrower inverted-V hull designed to avoid detection by radar or sonar.

Second, it would carry far more firepower than existing destroyers, hauling at least 120 cruise missiles and 1,500 5-foot-long "bullets" for its two 33-foot-long guns. Those guns would be able to hit targets 100 miles inland, four times as far as guns on most destroyers. And with its more efficient electric propulsion system, it would be able to stay at sea longer without refueling.

The Navy also wants the ship designed to operate with a crew of just 95, instead of the 325 sailors aboard existing destroyers. The sharp reduction would be made possible by several innovations: electric drive would mean fewer moving parts and less maintenance; rust-resistant paint would require less scraping and repainting; meals prepared in advance would end the need for squads of potato-peelers and soup- stirrers.

With its lower fuel costs and smaller crew, each DD-21 would save the Navy $30 million a year, Mr. Danzig contends. The smaller crew would also help the Navy with its recruiting problems. So would the fact that the ship, with smaller engines and larger hull, would give sailors more spacious living quarters, with six-bed "staterooms" rather than cramped, 40-bed bunk rooms.

But all that sounds too good to be true, critics of the program contend. More important, Mr. Danzig, a leading champion of the program, will soon be out of office, making the ship even more vulnerable, some Navy officials say.

Mr. Danzig insists the program will be sustained. If testing proves that the ship can do what it is designed to do, "It will be quite apparent that this is just a good idea," he said.

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USA Under Bush, bigger plans for missile defense

Christian Science Monitor
MONDAY, JANUARY 8, 2001
By Justin Brown (brownj@csps.com) Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

President-elect George W. Bush's plans for a "robust" national missile defense (NMD) are likely to dwarf current models and may grow into a space-based system, according to experts familiar with the views of the incoming administration.

Although it is still early in the game, and Mr. Bush's national-security team has yet to publicly outline how it would build a comprehensive missile shield, several "add ons" are being discussed in GOP circles - ranging from simple expansions to radical changes in design that include sea- and space-based interceptors.

If followed through, any of the Republican plans would go beyond the limited system being developed by the Clinton administration, which initially calls for one interceptor site in Alaska and 100 missiles to shoot down enemy warheads.

Even the current proposal has been controversial - because of technological challenges and objections raised by Russia and China, which maintain it would violate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

The Bush administration would raise missile defense to an entirely new level. Their thinking is that, if they build it, they might as well try to make it foolproof.

"We need a system that is more robust than what the Clinton administration has designed," says Dave Smith, a top GOP missile-defense expert who served on the 1998 panel, headed by secretary of Defense nominee Donald Rumsfeld, that assessed enemy missile threats. That panel determined that North Korea and Iran were closer than previously thought to developing long-range missiles that could hit US soil, and subsequently set off today's sense of urgency to deploy a shield.

"If you want to be more robust, you have to go to sea or to space or to both," Mr. Smith says. "The system needs to be global, it needs to be layered, and it needs to have an evolutionary approach."

Accordingly, a new version of missile defense could look something like former President George Bush's plan for Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS), which involved satellite-based interceptors. That plan grew under the helm of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Both Vice President-elect Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld are considered strong advocates of NMD. The most likely update to GPALS would be adding sea-based interceptors, thus allowing the US to attack enemy missiles at all stages, and to protect all points on the globe, including allies and American troops stationed abroad.

Also, the US should make it clear that its defense would constantly evolve, so it could counter new technologies. By doing that, "you serve notice to any potential challengers that there's always going to be something on the drawing boards," Smith says. "You stay ahead of the threat."

Although Bush certainly couldn't make all of these add-ons even in two terms, he could put a long-term outline in the spending and research pipelines, which would be hard to stop in the future, analysts say.

Another leading missile-defense proponent, Daniel Goure of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, suggests that the new administration take a more moderate approach, at least for now. Mr. Goure would build three interceptor sites instead of one, so US territory - particularly the East Coast - would be better protected. Current plans focus on an attack against the West Coast from Asia and, critics say, neglect the possibility of an East Coast attack from the Middle East.

Also, Goure would boost spending and refine the pace of development, focusing more on test results and global events than on estimates of when potential enemies will have long-range strike capabilities.

So far, two of three tests have resulted in misses, and some critics have blamed that on a rushed schedule.

Regardless of the approach the Bush administration takes, the GOP seems determined to make the ABM Treaty a thing of the past. Baker Spring, an adviser to congressional Republicans, says the treaty is invalid and that the Senate will never ratify any agreements that prop it up. "It's a nonstarter," he says.

Republicans argue that the treaty was designed for an adversarial cold-war relationship between the US and Soviet Union. A new era in which Moscow and Washington are friendly, some say, requires a new strategic backbone, based on fewer offensive and more defensive weapons.

"Russia itself is no longer our enemy," Bush said during the campaign. "The cold-war logic that led to the creation of massive stockpiles on both sides is now outdated. Our mutual security need no longer depend on a nuclear balance of terror."

Democrats, however, argue that abandoning the ABM Treaty and building a massive missile defense will sour Washington's already tenuous relationship with Moscow - not to mention China, a country at the crossroads between friend and foe.

Furthermore, some say, diplomacy can be the best kind of missile defense. In recent months, the US has improved relations with North Korea, once considered to be the top missile threat. Pyongyang has apparently frozen its nuclear program and may be close to doing the same with missiles, Clinton administration officials say.

"It's a question of whether we want to maintain a deterrent relationship or [improve ties]," says Barry Blechman, a former member of the Rumsfeld commission.

Despite concerns about missile defense - whether because of cost, feasibility, or strategic implications - the program has momentum. Its potential of shielding America from missiles is hard for any politician to oppose. And because of that, the only limiting factor on Bush and his missile-defense plans may be the length of his tenure in office.

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Turner, Nunn set up organization aimed at filling in nonproliferation 'gaps' in Russia

Washington
Nuclear News Flashes
8 Jan 2001

Ted Turner and Sam Nunn Monday unveiled the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an organization that will try, among other things, to fill in the "gaps" of government programs designed to reduce the threat posed by Russia's collapsing nuclear infrastructure. Turner, the former chairman of CNN, said he will provide NTI with a minimum of $50-million a year for five years. Nunn, a former U.S. senator from Georgia will, in addition to serving as co-chairman with Turner, be NTI's CEO. Charles Curtis, the former DOE deputy secretary, will be NTI president and chief operating officer.

At a press conference today, Nunn said that NTI, in addition to awarding grants for studies and for assistance to international non-governmental organizations, will interact with the private-sector looking for new venture capital to help supplement government programs. Among other things, Nunn mentioned assistance for blending down more Russian weapons high-enriched uranium and expanding plutonium disposition efforts. NTI's board includes Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.); Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, and Andrei Kokoshin, a former first deputy minister of defense in Russia.

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

-------- connecticut

A Sheepish Hunt for Missing Fuel Rods

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/nyregion/08NUKE.html?pagewanted=all

WATERFORD, Conn., - If they could enlist the public in their high-pressure search, officials at the huge Millstone nuclear power plant here would be forced to post a sign saying something like this: "Lost: two spent nuclear fuel rods, 12 feet long and slender as a pinkie finger. Last seen in April 1980. Highly radioactive. May have been mistakenly shipped to South Carolina or Washington. Reward."

It may sound like a scene from "The Simpsons," but Millstone's predicament is quite real and, federal regulators say, unprecedented in the nation's highly regulated atomic energy industry. While there is virtually no risk to the public - wherever they are, the rods are almost certainly stored safely, officials say - their misplacement has both alarmed people who live near Millstone and highly embarrassed the plant's operators.

The episode is the latest black eye for Millstone, which is about to be sold and has been trying to rebuild its reputation after garnering one of the worst safety records of any nuclear power plant in the country. In in the mid-1990's, all three of the reactors at Millstone were closed for safety violations; units 2 and 3 have since reopened. Officials decided it was not cost effective to reopen Millstone 1. And in 1999, the nuclear subsidiary of Northeast Utilities, which owns Millstone, pleaded guilty to 23 federal felonies and was fined a record $10 million.

Rather than fear, the general reaction on all sides has been a mixture of frustration, dark humor, disgust and disbelief. "It seems unbelievable to me, with all the experts you have over there, how you could lose something like this," a grandmother and retired correction officer, Billie Staub, told plant officials at a public hearing in Waterford Town Hall on Thursday night. Another person asked if they realized they were the "laughingstock" of the industry.

Chagrined Millstone managers seemed to realize this only too well. At the hearing, they offered two theories, that the rods were still somewhere in the plant's spent fuel pool or that they had mistakenly been shipped to an out-of-state disposal center. "We're not at all pleased that it happened," said the decommissioning officer for Millstone 1, Frank Rothen. "The feeling is that's the only two places it could be."

While a mistaken shipment of spent fuel would constitute a violation of federal regulations, neither scenario would present any danger to the public, regulatory officials said. Still, the explanations were met with anger and derision from local residents who have long been suspicious of Millstone because of its checkered past. "Maybe they're in the town dump," one heckler at the meeting called out. "Or on the Little League field."

For conspiracy theorists, the disappearance of two highly radioactive fuel rods offers a chance for breathless speculation. Reconstituted fuel rods could, theoretically, be used to make plutonium. Perhaps the rods were stolen by international terrorists. Or domestic militia members. Or maybe it was a political plot, an effort to discredit Northeast Utilities just as it is preparing to sell Millstone to Dominion Resources, a Virginia energy company. But even some of Millstone's staunchest opponents concede that there is virtually no way the rods could have left the plant in anything but a properly protected shipping cask without setting off numerous alarms. "Superman, maybe," said Pete Reynolds, a former Millstone employee who worked on the refueling floor and said he was fired in 1994 after reporting safety violations. "These are not made out of kryptonite. He's the only one I know of that could have walked away with it."

Mr. Reynolds added, "Anybody with any common sense that knows anything at all about nuclear power, they are just laughing."

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, however, did not seem amused. "Obviously we are concerned that they are not able to trace where these rods are," said Diane Screnci, an agency spokeswoman. "We are maintaining close contact to stay up on the status of this investigation."

Officials discovered that the two rods were missing in November during a routine inventory conducted as part of the effort to decommission the plant's original reactor, Millstone 1, permanently. Millstone documents last account for the rods in April 1980, listing their location in a container in the plant's spent fuel pool. But as of September 1980, plant records no longer accounted for them.

Last month, officials carried out an initial search of the pool, more than 900 square feet of borated water, 40 feet deep, where old fuel rods and other radioactive garbage and debris are kept. The pool contains nearly 2,900 bundles of rods called fuel assemblies. But they found no sign of the two missing rods.

One reason they are difficult to locate is that they were not part of a bundle that rods are usually kept in.

The General Electric Company, which manufactured the rods, had removed them from the bundle in 1972 to make some repairs. In the process, one was damaged and the other could not be refitted into the bundle. Instead, they were stored in a container and put into the spent fuel pool, said Peter Hyde, a Millstone spokesman.

A team of experts from G.E.'s nuclear division are now in Waterford to assist Millstone with a more thorough search of the spent fuel pool. Millstone officials, who stressed that whatever mistake that was made occurred two decades ago, said they are also searching through hundreds of thousands of pages of old records to figure out what happened.

If the rods are not in the pool, one possibility is that they were mistaken for long tubelike radioactivity monitors that plant employees use and often dispose of in the spent fuel pool. Discarded monitors are often cut up and shipped off with other radioactive garbage to low-level waste centers. The radioactive waste is wrapped in a liner and shipped in a special cask, both of which are made with lead and concrete. At the dump sites, the waste is buried in accordance with federal regulations.

On the streets of Waterford and neighboring Niantic, those who knew about the missing rods seemed more disappointed than scared. "The fact that there was an error is ridiculous," said Deborah Cohen, a tile artist, standing outside a local supermarket. "This shouldn't happen in a nuclear power plant ever."

At the public hearing, Ellen Lazerow asked if Millstone officials "behind closed doors" had ever looked at each other, uttered an expletive and wondered, "What's the worst-case scenario?" Larry Temple, the general manager of Millstone 1, pondered the question for a couple of seconds before replying, "I would have to say, yes."

-------- michigan

Fermi-2 set new site record for generation in December

Washington
Nuclear News Flashes
8 Jan 2001

Detroit Edison's Fermi-2 set a monthly site generation record in December 2000 with a net output of 838,522 megawatt-hours (MWH), the utility said today. The previous record was set last March at 832,007 MWH, said Guy Cerullo, a company spokesman. The most important factor leading to the record was the installation of a high-pressure turbine during a refueling outage last spring, he said, noting that the new turbine boosted output by 20 MW.

-------- us nuc politics

In Defense Post, Infighter Known for Working the Means to His End

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/politics/08RUMS.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Bush choice for secretary of defense, will come to the job with a history of having filled it once before, a history marked by sharp disputes with a forceful secretary of state. So one of the most tantalizing questions about the new national security team is whether Mr. Rumsfeld will collide again, this time with the four-star general who is the Bush choice for secretary of state, Gen. Colin L. Powell.

On contentious issues like national missile defense, the approach of General Powell, who has to sell the concept around the world, may clash with that of the more hawkish Mr. Rumsfeld, whose chief worry will be to make the system work. And if history is any guide, Mr. Rumsfeld is a master at outmaneuvering his political foes. In the Ford administration, he won out over Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and deprived President Gerald R. Ford of what would have been his only significant foreign policy success.

On Jan. 21, 1976, Mr. Kissinger was in Moscow in a final effort to coax an agreement from the Soviets on the landmark SALT II arms control treaty. But Secretary Rumsfeld, backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was having second thoughts. Without Mr. Kissinger's knowledge, the National Security Council was convened, and by the time the two-hour meeting was over, the Pentagon had withdrawn its support.

"Surreal," was the way the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft described the meeting in a cable to Mr. Kissinger. Mr. Scowcroft added that the president "was angrier than I have ever seen him. He ranted about the total inconsistency with previous defense positions."

Mr. Kissinger was left to face the Soviets with no instructions. SALT II was dead for the rest of the Ford administration. Mr. Rumsfeld, who was traveling at the time, had stage- managed the outcome without even having attended the National Security Council meeting. The collapse of the treaty to limit strategic arms was both the most clever and forceful power play by Mr. Rumsfeld in his tenure as secretary of defense in the final 14 months of the Ford administration.

Now, as President-elect George W. Bush's choice for secretary of defense a quarter-century later, Mr. Rumsfeld is positioned to move into 3E880 in the Pentagon, the same suite of offices in the outermost elite ring where he worked so long ago.

A review of Mr. Rumsfeld's record as secretary of defense the first time around and interviews with his former colleagues paint a portrait of a highly organized, highly political personality and master bureaucrat who pushed hard for increased military spending, advocated a militant hard line against the Soviets and was quick to give his unvarnished opinion to the president.

"Rumsfeld afforded me a close-up look at a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly," Mr. Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.

"Ruthless within the rules," wrote Robert T. Hartmann, a White House counselor in the Ford administration.

Asked whether Mr. Rumsfeld was likely to clash with the new secretary of state the way he did 25 years ago, Frank C. Carlucci, a secretary of defense and national security adviser in the Reagan administration, said no. The difference, Mr. Carlucci said, was General Powell. "Colin has brilliant people skills," he said.

Even though Mr. Rumsfeld held the top defense job once before and has headed governmental commissions, the Bush transition team reviewed his record for potential problems before he was chosen. As well, the Senate Armed Services Committee presented him with 23 pages of questions it wanted answered before his confirmation hearing begins on Thursday, transition aides said.

Pentagon in Turmoil

The Pentagon that Donald Rumsfeld inherited in November 1975 was in turmoil. The Vietnam War had just ended and the all-volunteer force was in its infancy. Troop morale was low, and drug scandals and racial tensions plagued military bases at home and abroad. His predecessor, James R. Schlesinger, had been fired by President Ford, in part for his clashes with Mr. Kissinger and other national security officials, and his deteriorating relations with Congress.

The country was still reeling from Watergate and struggling to recover from a severe economic recession. A combative Democratic-controlled Congress sought to slash the military's budget, while President Ford faced a tough election, challenged by Jimmy Carter on the left and Ronald Reagan on the right.

Although Mr. Rumsfeld, a former Eagle Scout and college wrestler, had been a naval aviator and United States ambassador to NATO, at 43 he knew almost nothing about the Pentagon. "He wasn't steeped in defense issues," said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a senior State Department official in the Ford administration. "But his managerial skills and personality led Ford to think he'd make a good - and supportive - secretary of defense, and maybe an anchor to windward given the looming Reagan candidacy."

In the macho world of the military, Mr. Rumsfeld quickly fit in, boasting that he could do 25 one-handed pushups and treating the squash court like a battlefield. "He wasn't a very good squash player but he played it with great gusto and determination," recalled Morton I. Abramowitz, the former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the time. "He doesn't like to lose."

Mr. Rumsfeld started an aggressive campaign to increase the Pentagon budget. Within two months, he had used his ties with Mr. Ford and the White House budget office to increase the military's proposed budget for 1977 by several billion dollars. He backed cruise missiles (a staple in today's military arsenal), a major shipbuilding program for the Navy and the B-1 bomber to replace the aging B-52's.

In making his case for more defense spending, Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the stark, cold war terms of strength and weakness. "You can be provocative by being belligerent," he said in a television interview in February 1976. "You could also be provocative by being too weak and thereby enticing others into adventures they would otherwise avoid."

As William G. Hyland, a deputy national security adviser in the Ford administration, wrote in his memoirs, "the more Rumsfeld took hold, the more he turned hard right."

As a former congressman, Mr. Rumsfeld recognized the need to build public support for his proposals. In an unusual effort to mount bipartisan backing for more military spending, he persuaded Mr. Ford to hold a series of late afternoon coffees at the White House with members of Congress, labor and religious leaders and women's groups.

"The purpose of the coffees was to rally people to pull up their pants and make sure that the Russians did not become No. 1," said Kenneth L. Adelman, a special assistant to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Rumsfeld also sought to portray himself as an able steward of the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy. He announced with a flourish the elimination of chauffeured sedans for 34 top civilian and military officials, for example.

All the while, the coming presidential election seemed to be uppermost on his mind. "He'd say, `How are we going to help Ford get re-elected?' " Mr. Hyland recalled. "Not in the formal N.S.C. meetings, but plenty of times, he'd say, `We've got an election, guys.' " Often mentioned in that era as a man with presidential ambitions or at least a possible running mate for Mr. Ford in 1976, Mr. Rumsfeld was never afraid to tell the president what to do.

Halloween Massacre

For example, Mr. Rumsfeld, as White House chief of staff, was chief consigliere to Mr. Ford in 1975 when he announced his huge administrative shakeup that came to be known as the Halloween Massacre. The shakeup included the firing of Mr. Schlesinger as secretary of defense and of William Colby as director of central intelligence, moved the elder George Bush out of the political arena by putting him in Mr. Colby's job and propelled Mr. Rumsfeld to the top slot at the Pentagon.

"In your press conference tonight, Mr. President, try to act presidential," Mr. Rumsfeld advised Mr. Ford, according to Mr. Hartmann's memoirs. "Don't go into long explanations of why you did this or that. Whenever you can, answer the question yes or no. Be decisive, in command. Be crisp and concise. Don't let them nickel and dime you to death."

Mr. Rumsfeld was a close ally of his generals, but he did not shy away from taking them on. One of he most brutal confrontations came in mid- 1976, when the Army was close to awarding a final contract to build the new M-1 battle tank. The secretary and his top aides spotted what they believed was a serious flaw: the American tank was equipped with a 105-millimeter gun; but British and German tanks had 120-millimeter guns. As a former NATO ambassador, Mr. Rumsfeld had expressed concern about the mismatched weapons that would be fielded by Western allies against the Soviets in a war in Europe. He ordered the tank contract delayed and dispatched Norman R. Augustine, then under secretary of the Army, to negotiate a deal with the allies to build a tank that could accommodate either gun.

The Army brass and their backers on Capitol Hill, whose districts included the tank-building factories, howled in protest. But Mr. Rumsfeld dug in, lobbied Congress hard, and prevailed. In many ways, the tank contract was a model of the kind of acquisition change that aimed to fix one of the military's most glaring procurement problems by putting a heavy burden of responsibility on the contractors. "Don backed me to the hilt at a time when it would have been very easy to saw us off," Mr. Augustine said.

A Hard Lesson

In his years in government and business, Mr. Rumsfeld has compiled a list of aphorisms he calls "Rumsfeld's Rules." At the Pentagon, one of his guiding adages was, "The secretary of defense is not a supergeneral or admiral," the rulebook says. "His task is to exercise civilian control over the department for the commander in chief and the country."

Gen. George S. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Mr. Rumsfeld's tour, learned that lesson the hard way on Oct. 18, 1976. A crusty four-star Air Force man, General Brown had riled his civilian bosses when he gave an interview suggesting that Israel, a staunch ally of Washington, was "a burden" militarily to the United States. The general also said that Britain and its military forces were "a pathetic sight" and suggested that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was building such a vast military because he had "visions of the Persian empire."

Mr. Rumsfeld did not fire General Brown, but he did something that was nearly as bad: He put the nation's top military officer through an extraordinary exercise. He forced the general at a news conference to read a statement - which his civilian bosses helped to write - clarifying his remarks. "The absence of a reprimand should not be taken as an endorsement of inelegant phraseology," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters.

As for Mr. Rumsfeld's management style, aides described it as simultaneously disciplined and manically exuberant. Mr. Adelman recalled being deluged with what came to be known as "snowflakes" from Mr. Rumsfeld - a flurry of questions, problems or assignments jotted down on white notepaper - that Mr. Rumsfeld dictated to his secretary and had delivered to his aides.

Meetings started on time, had a point, and ended with crisp decisions and assignments. "What Rumsfeld brought to the table was stability," said Thomas C. Reed, secretary of the Air Force at the time. "He was not a great intellectual blazing new trails."

Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld's star protégé in the Ford administration, saw him through a slightly different lens. "He's not the type to pat you on the back," Mr. Cheney told a reporter in 1975. "His reward is to dump three more things on you."

---

Bush Focuses on Military Amid Chavez Controversy

Associated Press
January 8, 2001 Filed at 6:11 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Bush.html?pagewanted=all

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- President-elect George W. Bush, who made strengthening the armed forces a central campaign theme, suggested on Monday that deploying a national missile defense system will require ``a lot of give and take.'' He sounded a note of caution on removing U.S. troops from the Balkans.

Bush pressed his commitment for a military pay raise, sticking with a campaign stance.

In a meeting with a bipartisan group of 14 lawmakers active on military issues, Bush promised to work with Democrats to find ``common ground ... to fulfill our obligations to make the world more peaceful.''

The two-hour session in an Austin hotel ballroom was praised both by the president-elect and his guests as an important get-acquainted gesture.

``We've made history here as we sit around this table,'' said Sen. John Warner, R-Va. ``This is the first time a president-elect has sat down with us ahead of the inauguration to hear our views.''

Warner, a former Navy secretary, is the immediate past chairman of the Armed Services Committee and will be chairman again after Jan. 20, when Bush takes office. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the temporary chairman, called the session a step toward actually adopting ``policies which will have bipartisan support.''

During the session, Bush expressed an understanding of the complexity of some issues like a national missile defense and U.S. peacekeepers in Kosovo and Bosnia, participants said afterward.

``I think he's less committed to very specific major shifts in policy than he might have sounded during the campaign,'' Levin said. ``He's a little more cautious.''

On the issue of withdrawing troops from the Balkans, Bush suggested it was ``more of a stated goal'' than something he would want to do unilaterally, Levin said.

During the campaign, comments by Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in which they argued for a troop withdrawal from the Balkans and demanded a more prominent peacekeeping role for allies alarmed Europeans.

Bush indicated ``he's not going to cut and run,'' said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

``There'll be no surprises. But in looking at our commitments around the world, we're certainly going to have to look at how much we have in Europe tied up in the Balkans in peacekeeping missions and what that takes from our readiness in other areas,'' she said.

Even though his audience was made up of both Democrats and Republicans, there was little likelihood of political clashes. Nearly all the members he met with have strongly supported military programs in the past.

Still, Sen. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, did get in a gentle dig. ``I was impressed with his flexibility. And I hope we can save him from his tax cut,'' Murtha said, referring to Bush's proposed $1.3 trillion, 10-year tax cut opposed by most Democrats.

During the campaign, Bush pressed for a roughly 7 percent across-the-board increase in military pay above increases approved by Congress over the past two years.

Warner predicted that Bush's pay-raise proposal would draw wide bipartisan support.

On the issue of a system to protect the United States against ballistic missile attack, Bush generally reiterated his support for a system more extensive than the one contemplated by the Clinton administration.

While saying, ``It's our obligation to do everything we can to protect America and our allies from the real threats of the 21st century,'' Bush also acknowledged that the missile defense proposal was ``a sensitive subject'' for some lawmakers.

``I understand that. It's a sensitive subject for leaders of different countries around the world,'' Bush said.

``The missile defense subject and the budgetary matters are all matters that require a lot of discussion and a lot of give and take and a lot of listening,'' Bush said.

Critics of a missile defense system viewed the remarks as an indication that Bush would not blindly follow recommendations of his defense secretary designate, Donald Rumsfeld, one of the nation's most outspoken advocates of moving ahead aggressively with such a system.

Russia and China are strongly opposed to a U.S. missile defense, an outgrowth of the missile defense system originally proposed in the 1980s by President Reagan and derided by critics as ``Star Wars.'' Moscow views it as an abrogation of the landmark 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

European allies are also skeptical about such a program, suggesting it could lead to a new arms buildup on the part of Russia and China.

``I think he (Bush) indicated he recognized some of the complexity of the issue, particularly our allies having problems with it and some of the proliferation negatives,'' Levin said. ``I think he recognizes there's an argument at least on that side.''

Joining Bush were Rice and Vice President-elect Cheney. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an active and senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former GOP rival of Bush, was not among those invited, Bush aides said.

---

Foreign policy needs continuum, not shifts

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 02:23 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/ncguest1.htm

Unlike presidential terms, foreign-policy issues don't come in tidy four-year time blocks, notes Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as the Clinton era ends. In excerpts from a wide-ranging discussion last week with USA TODAY's editorial board, Albright, the highest-ranking woman in U.S. government history, outlines a few of the challenges facing her successors. Her remarks were edited for space and clarity.

Q. How would you describe Russian President Vladimir Putin?

A. I often am asked whether I think he's a democrat, and you just have to read his biography to know he's not. But I think he's very much a pragmatist and somebody who very much wants to make sure that Russia works. To the extent that democracy and market principles help him to do that, those principles may work for him. If you look at some of the things he has done - Russia has a balanced budget; certainly the oil market is helping the country acquire a lot of cash - that is helping him do a lot of things.

He brought a certain sense of order to the place. Many Russians have become disoriented in their daily lives; especially for the older people, it has become very hard. There's just the sense that the safety net disappeared, and he's bringing a lot of that back. He is reviving a sense of Russian patriotism. The question is whether it's order with a small o or a capital O.

Q. What are the warning signs?

For me, what he's doing with the media (to suppress critical views) is unacceptable; that is of great concern to us. I wrote about the role of the press in political change. It was very important in Czechoslovakia in '68 and Poland in '81, and it's very important in Russia now. So I think it's important to watch that.

The fact that he can't figure out what to do with Chechnya, short of a military solution, (is of concern). And the Russians are very worried about the kinds of things we are doing in Central Asia, where all we have been doing is trying to support independent countries. So I'm concerned about that. He is something that Russia has wanted, but he has to be watched very carefully.

Q. What advice about Russia do you have for the next administration?

A. In both countries, there's still a mind-set about who the enemy was. There are plenty of people in the United States who would like to see Russia as the major enemy. There are clearly people like that in Russia. ... The thing that I would warn the next administration about is that we can't just get into that, that they're the enemy. It's too complicated. There are too many issues that we cooperate on.

Q. What accomplishments during your tenure particularly please you?

A. One regional achievement I take special pride in is what's happening in the Balkans. When President Bush left, he made a point of saying that he wanted to see a Europe that was whole and free. The Bush administration took a major step in that direction with the reunification of Germany, obviously a huge step. The Balkans was left in a state of complete disarray. As a result of a concerted administration policy, we have changed the Balkans. The story is not finished. But to have democratic elections throughout the Balkans has been quite remarkable, and that missing piece of a Europe whole and free now is in place. The challenge now is to keep it down.

Q. What about what used to be called rogue states, what you call "states of concern"?

A. Serbia is no longer a rogue state. That is a huge accomplishment. In North Korea, there are possibilities I hope the next administration will build on. That is a very big deal that needs to be explored.

Q. And Iraq?

A. We were left with Saddam Hussein, and we are giving him back. (Secretary of State nominee) Colin Powell says he is going to strengthen the sanctions regime. I told him, "I hope you can." The hardest thing to do has been to keep that alliance together, and we have managed, for the longest time, to keep the sanctions regime in place. While there clearly are problems, and the inspectors need to get back in, the bottom line is that Saddam Hussein is still in his box. And if (the new administration) can tighten the sanctions, I wish them all the best, because that's what needs to happen.

Q. Iran?

A. Iran is one of the more complex ones because there are so many kinds of mixed messages out of Iran. Clearly we are concerned about it acquiring technology for weapons of mass destruction and whatever threat it may pose within the region. But at the same time, (Iranian President Mohammad) Khatami has represented a very interesting shift. We have been dancing around each other, sending messages via speeches and interviews .

Q. Can you give us an example of a country in disintegration that has shown promise?

A. Haiti. Some people forget what it was when we got it: thousands of refugees, boat people streaming into this country and young people having their faces chopped off with machetes. Horrible things going on. Haiti has a long way to go. But (Haitian President Jean-Bertrand) Aristide, having been re-elected now, has made some promises.

Q. Your thoughts on Fidel Castro?

A. I keep on being asked what I'm sorry about, and one thing that I really am sorry about is that I wasn't present for the change of government in Cuba. It will come, and the Cuban people deserve something better. While the other post-communist countries have clearly gone through some very difficult periods, they're a lot better off than (the Cubans). Everything that I've tried to do and the president has tried to do is give some space to the Cuban people so they have some elbow room. I hope those problems are pursued.

Q. Are you bothered that you will forever be linked to Elian Gonzalez?

A. I think you all know me well enough by now and my anti-communist credentials. But I think that little boy belonged with his father, and we had to follow the rule of law . But I've never seen an issue more divisive in the American public. Whenever I give a speech and I say, "One more question," the one more question is always on Cuba - and quite a different question in Florida than in California. It's a very divisive issue.

Q. Your advice on China?

A. You can't decide you're not going to deal with a country such as China. Our engagement with the Chinese has shown that we believe that they need to be part of the system. I think PNTR (Permanent Normal Trade Relations) was good not only for economic reasons, but also because it basically opens China up. There's no way they can stop the computer and the Internet. It's very important to also state exactly what we think about their human rights. I have done that at every opportunity, and so has the president. And it's very important to get them to pursue a dialogue on the Taiwan issue. I think that is the most challenging issue out there for them. A lot depends on how the economy develops in the next year and how they participate in the World Trade Organization and how they are brought into the system.

Q. And Asia more generally?

A. Asia is hugely dynamic, and one of the things the president did by changing our relationship with India is put a whole new issue into play. There's a Chinese-Indian competition, and our having a more forward leaning, robust relationship with India is very important. In Asia, things could go in any number of directions. The reason I think the North Korean initiative is so important is that it could change the whole thing.

Now the most important thing is for the U.S. to maintain a presence in Asia, but it's a very dynamic situation - India, China, Korean peninsula, Indonesia, Japan, much more so than other places in the world.

Q. Do you see China becoming an aggressor anywhere beyond its borders in the near future?

A. I, personally, don't. But it depends on what you mean by aggressor. If you mean that the Chinese physically cross a frontier, I do not see that. I see them as a regional power, and they want to exert that power in certain ways.

For the most part, they are trying to deal with their internal issues. They are concerned about separatism. Their main problem is internal, and they view Taiwan as an internal problem. They clearly want to be respected as a major power, and they are very protective of their permanent position on the United Nations Security Council. They want to have a major influence and want to see how India develops.

Q. Other challenges?

There are huge challenges out there. How not to create enemies; it would be a huge mistake to re-create Russia as an enemy, to make China into the new evil empire. And there's the challenge, obviously, of how to deal with a Europe that is a partner and to try to deal with huge humanitarian problems that don't come in four-year blocks.

All of this requires a continuum in American foreign policy, and not shifts. We picked up a lot of issues from the Bush administration and dealt with a lot of them in a positive way, and the (incoming administration) is going to have to pick up some issues from us. I'm very proud about how continuum works in the United States.

-------- us nuc waste

DOE repository decision might be delayed 6 months

8 Jan 2001
Washington (NuclearFuel)--

A DOE decision on whether Yucca Mountain, Nev. could be used to safely dispose of radioactive waste could be delayed by six months or more if the incoming Bush administration decides it wants a full total system performance assessment (TSPA) done on a cooler repository design. DOE has not made any announcement of the potential delay; however, NuclearFuel reported today that several sources maintain that such a delay is a distinct possibility.

According to one source, a delay in DOE's site decision could translate into a day-for-day delay in repository operations. Currently, DOE is to decide in July whether to recommend Yucca Mountain as a disposal site for utility spent fuel and defense high-level nuclear waste. Repository operations are slated for 2010.

The TSPA is a complicated mixture of computer models and submodels that, based on site data fed into it, is used to calculate what radioactive doses would be emitted from a repository and when those doses would occur. So far only the so-called "hot repository" reference design has been run through the TSPA. That design would keep the temperatures of waste packages moved into the underground facility above the boiling point of water in an effort to prolong the life of the waste packages by evaporating moisture. The DOE waste program, however, only recently began considering an alternative design for a cooler repository even though an independent technical review board has been urging it to do so since 1992.

This latest schedule complication follows Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's decision last month to delay release of a key document that feeds into the site decision. Richardson put the report on hold until DOE's Inspector General investigates allegations that the scientific study of Yucca Mountain has been was biased toward siting a disposal facility there.--Elaine Hiruo, Washington (ehiru@mh.com)


-------- MILITARY

U.S. Embassy in Rome Reopens

Reuters
January 8, 2001 Filed at 12:15 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/usa-italy-embassy.html

ROME, Jan 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy in Rome reopened its doors to the public on Monday after a three-day security shutdown but the ambassador said the mission would remain ``vigilant against terrorism.''

The embassy on Rome's central Via Veneto, the cafe-lined street made famous in Federico Fellini's classic 1960 film ``La Dolce Vita,'' reopened at 9:00 a.m. (0800 GMT), almost exactly three days after staff were sent home, most without explanation.

Ambassador Thomas Foglietta said in a statement issued after the reopening that the ``security posture at the U.S. embassy is much improved.''

But he said the embassy ``will continue to be vigilant against terrorism'' and would continue to work closely with Italian authorities on improving security.

Foglietta said the safety of Italian and U.S. staff had to remain of paramount concern after the bombings of the U.S. missions in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans, and injured thousands.

The Rome embassy shut down two days after jury selection started in New York for the trial of four men charged with conspiring with Saudi exile Osama bin Laden to bomb the two embassies in East Africa.

Foglietta said he had made the decision to close the mission abruptly and defended it as ``the appropriate action.''

Embassy staff were told to leave on Friday after what a U.S. source called a ``very specific threat.'' ``There was an indication of a potential terrorist attack,'' a U.S. official said.

In an apparent response to media criticism that Italian authorities learned late of the decision, Foglietta said: ``we of course informed our Italian colleagues in a timely fashion.''

The perimeter of the walled embassy complex remained cordoned off by crowd control barriers and security checks were reinforced. A bus stop close to the walls was moved and a side road was closed to traffic.

SECURITY TIGHTENED AT CONSULATES, BASES

The security alert was also increased at consulates in Naples, Florence and Milan, and at Italian bases that host U.S. military.

U.S. military have facilities at the sprawling air force base at Aviano in northern Italy, which was the springboard for many of the NATO attacks on former Yugoslavia in 1999.

The U.S. military also have facilities in Sigonella in Sicily, La Maddalena in Sardinia, Capodichino Airport at Naples, and elsewhere.

NATO has facilities in Verona and the alliance's southern command, known as AFSOUTH, is based in a Naples suburb.

The security level at AFSOUTH on Monday was at ``Charlie'' -- two steps higher than normal security, according to sources.

The State Department has warned U.S. citizens living or travelling abroad to keep a low profile, be wary of mail and packages and not leave cars unattended.

The warning was a five-month extension of a caution issued in October when a U.S. Navy ship was bombed in the port of Aden in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.

Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini spoke by telephone with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Sunday about the embassy's closure, a foreign ministry source said.

Foglietta told the Rome daily la Repubblica in an interview on Monday he believed the alert was sparked by a phone call made to the embassy on Thursday.

In that interview, Foglietta was not specific about the security threat. ``I have heard of all the hypotheses that have been made on Osama bin Laden and all the other groups. I can't say anything more.''

-------- arms sales

Some Leery of Plan to Lift Ban on Arms in Africa Horn

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08HORN.html

UNITED NATIONS, - Misgivings are mounting, even among some American officials here, over United States efforts to lift an arms embargo against Ethiopia and Eritrea while the two African countries are still putting in place a fresh peace accord ending a border war that killed tens of thousands of combatants.

Secretary General Kofi Annan and some officials at the United States Mission to the United Nations, have expressed doubts about a draft resolution introduced in the 15-member Security Council shortly before the new year that aims to end the arms embargo, Western diplomats said.

In particular, strong objections have been raised by Canada and the Netherlands, which have peacekeepers in Eritrea and Ethiopia as part of some 4,200 United Nations forces who are supposed to oversee the peace accord signed by the two Horn of Africa countries on Dec. 12.

"It would be better to focus on confidence-building measures at this stage and give the peacekeeping troops a chance to get set up and to establish relationships with people on both sides," said the Canadian ambassador, Paul Heinbecker.

"We appreciate the progress the two sides made but think it would be good to give that agreement some time to mature," he said. "The two governments presumably have other priorities they could be spending their money on."

The arms embargo is scheduled to expire in May, a year after it was imposed, and several countries want the ban to stay in place at least until then. It will stay in place unless the Council votes to extend it or until Mr. Annan reports that "a peaceful definitive settlement of the conflict" between Eritrea and Ethiopia has been reached. Most Council members argue that Mr. Annan has not yet issued such a report.

But Western diplomats said this weekend that the former national security adviser Anthony Lake and Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, who brokered the peace accord, apparently promised Ethiopia that the arms embargo would be lifted once the peace accord was signed.

Ethiopia and and Eritrea continue to trade accusations daily over details of the accord.

Under the agreement, Ethiopia is to pull back to positions it held before the war broke out, and Eritrea is to withdraw to 15 miles from Ethiopian positions. But the two nations are still arguing over which areas were under whose administration before the war broke out.

The accord also calls for an independent commission to demarcate the 600-mile border, while other commissions are to address compensation for war damages, an exchange of prisoners and the return of people displaced from their homes. The work of the border commission is expected to last three years.

Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in World War I-style trench warfare during the conflict, and tens of thousands of others were taken prisoner or uprooted.

-------- drug war

Countercurrents

MORROCK NEWS SERVICE
January 8, 2001
http://morrock.com/counter.htm

Jim Skoog has sailed the Pacific Ocean aboard yachts, fished commercial, built boats, written articles and a book about blue-water cruising, invested in real estate, pursued home occupations -- anything to escape the workaday commute.

As a community activist, he has raised a ruckus in the press, taken on City Hall, and helped bring about the only High Court tested countywide ban of personal watercraft in the US.

Jim and his wife, Penny, have lived in New Zealand and Australia, and more recently in a log cabin on the scenic shores of San Juan Island, Wash. They are now domiciled in Florida on a motor home.

Their next plan: to follow the seasons and the "red roads" on an open-ended journey all over North America.

Jim Skoog's `Definitions for the Downtrodden' and other past issues of "Countercurrents"

-----

Death to drug traffickers

By JIM SKOOG TMNS Columnist
January 8, 2001
http://morrock.com/counter2.htm

This news service reported that drug use in America was down 50 percent in the last 20 years, according to Clinton sources (lead story, Jan. 4th). That's not good enough by half -- even if we trusted the figures -- because 50 percent of a national tragedy remains a national tragedy. Moreover, NBC News reported only yesterday that heroin use had risen to epidemic proportions.

However you cut it, our abysmal failure to eradicate illegal drugs continues to inflict untold misery and death upon Americans (14 million of us used illegal drugs last year). Sadly, the U.S. Government has comforted the drug trade by enacting half-measures that ensure the continuance of human suffering on the scale of the Holocaust.

I have a niece who is an addict. Like so many, she's doomed to the streets and ignominy. Through her experience I learned rehab is no cure-all -- often it's ineffectual, temporary, or rejected. Moreover, jailing addicts serves no purpose. To cure this scourge, we must cut off the supply altogether -- a gram of prevention being worth a kilogram of cure.

Stamping out drugs on America's streets is doable, although it would take a real leadership and a real deterrent. There'd be no need for military assistance a la Colombia, either; and no need for trade embargoes. The offending countries could produce and ship all the drugs they wanted, too. We would not even cut off foreign aid to them. There'd be just one hitch:

Without exception, all persons caught in the possession of over two ounces of an illegal substance within a U.S. jurisdiction would be tried for trafficking. Upon conviction, traffickers could appeal on points of law and evidence, but not the sentence -- prompt, mandatory lethal injection. At last, those responsible for so much death and wretchedness, not to mention huge expenditures of public resources, would meet justice.

This simple remedy would dry up bulk shipments to, and within, the country overnight. Attempting to smuggle or transport quantities in excess of two ounces, let alone hundreds of kilos, would be tantamount to playing Russian roulette. Couriers, aircraft pilots, cabin crew, deckhands, truck drivers, ships' captains, street dealers -- anyone aiding with aforethought the movement of over two ounces of an illegal drug -- would get the chop.

Here at home, drug-related burglaries and violence would drop off markedly, and there'd be few new addicts. Finally, instead of chasing our tails, we'd have truly won the war. Finally, we could salvage what we could of the human wreckage brought about by as diabolical a crime against humanity as the Nazi death camps -- and we could move forward to a new era of hope.

Death to drug traffickers -- they deserve no less.

---

Ecuador Afraid as a Drug War Heads Its Way

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08ECUA.html?pagewanted=all

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador, Jan. 3 - Every country bordering Colombia fears that as the conflict there worsens and United States involvement grows, violence and coca cultivation will spill across the frontier into their territory. But in this dingy Amazon border town, that dreaded scenario has already become a reality.

Hardly a day goes by now without right-wing paramilitary fighters and leftist guerrillas, ostensibly here on leave, killing each other on the streets or in bars.

Refugees fleeing the intensifying combat in southern Colombia are also showing up and, as if in anticipation of the Washington-backed anti-drug offensive the Colombian government is to begin soon, affluent Colombians with no ties to this area are suddenly buying up land and stocking up on chemicals used to process cocaine.

Of all of Colombia's neighbors, Ecuador is perhaps the most vulnerable, least prepared and worst equipped to deal with such developments.

Five presidents in five years are the best indication of the political instability in this Andean nation of 12.5 million, whose situation is further complicated by dire poverty, the highest inflation in the Western Hemisphere and a military better known for meddling in politics than valor in combat.

"If Colombia is going to be another Vietnam, as everyone keeps saying, then Ecuador is going to become the Cambodia of this war," Máximo Abad Jaramillo, the mayor here, warned. "We are not ready for this war, we don't want to be a part of it, but we are being dragged into the conflict against our will."

In December alone, the local police say, 20 people were killed here, 15 of them in clashes among Colombians and 5 who died when a bomb exploded in an attack on an oil pipeline that runs from Lago Agrio to the Pacific and is the main source of Ecuador's export earnings.

In the most spectacular of the slayings, a Colombian paramilitary trooper was shot dead in front of police headquarters by two men on a motorcycle.

Almost since its founding, Lago Agrio has been a service center for the oil industry, whose employees have flocked to the bars, discothèques, pool halls, karaoke parlors, cabarets and brothels that have proliferated here.

But those are now filled not with roustabouts but with wary young men whose Colombian accents, lean bodies, close-cropped hair and expensive military-style boots suggest that they are fighters on furlough.

Lago Agrio, whose name means sour lake in Spanish, also boasts an unusual number of medical clinics and doctors' and dentists' offices for a town with only 25,000 residents. Combatants from both sides are often brought here from Colombia for treatment, along with coca plantation workers who have been made ill by the noxious chemicals used to process their crop into cocaine.

In an effort to minimize conflicts between guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and paramilitary fighters, some of the brothels and various other establishments catering to guerrillas are marked with the image of Che Guevara superimposed on a red star.

But residents say conditions have deteriorated sharply as a result of Plan Colombia, the anti-drug campaign devised by Colombia and the United States.

"With all the violence, threats and even kidnappings, our situation has become really grave in the past four or five months," said Amparo de Córdova, president of Fuerzas Vivas, a coalition of neighborhood and professional groups here. "The Colombians have always brought their quarrels over here with them, but now their violence is political and subversive, and our authorities seem powerless to stop it."

Taking advantage of the growing tensions, Colombians from outside the border zone are buying up ranches and farms in the area from Ecuadoreans who fear the worst and are eager to leave.

In some instances the outsiders offer to pay above the market value for properties, but in other cases, recently displaced landowners say, they have not hesitated to threaten violence to gain control of especially desirable pieces of property.

"I just hope to God that they aren't planning on growing coca on those farms as a substitute for the plantations that are going to be fumigated over on the other side," said Fernando Lucas, president of the local chamber of commerce. "Because the moment that happens, we are going to have a real disaster on our hands here."

Ecuadorean officials say they have uncovered and destroyed several small cocaine processing labs in the Amazon region in recent months. Local peasants have crossed the border in recent years to work in the cocaine business, drawn by salaries that are up to five times the minimum wage paid here, and are now returning with the drug know-how they have acquired in Colombia.

The United States authorized $1.3 billion in emergency aid last year to strengthen Colombia's ability to fight drug trafficking.

Anticipating some spillover from Colombia to Ecuador, the United States has designated $40 million for expenditure here in the next two years, mostly for "social infrastructure" projects, according to the American Embassy in Quito. Ecuador's foreign minister, Heinz Moeller, recently visited Washington to plead for an aid package that could total $300 million.

Unlike Venezuela and Brazil, the Ecuadorean government has closely aligned itself with the anti-drug offensive through such measures as setting up an American drug surveillance base in the coastal city of Manta, which FARC leaders have said they consider "a declaration of war."

But Ecuador's own security forces appear eager to avoid conflict and largely unable to defend themselves.

"You go to the army, and they tell you they don't have the manpower, the vehicles or even the gasoline" to prevent Colombian incursions across the border," a civic leader here complained. "You go to the police, and they show you their guns and tell you that they don't even have bullets. We have been left unprotected here."

Nor is the Ecuadorean or American government providing help in dealing with a growing refugee problem. As of Dec. 31, nearly 2,100 Colombians had fled the fighting just across the border and registered with the Roman Catholic Church in Lago Agrio, which is aiding the evacuees in conjunction with a newly opened office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.

"We've been averaging about 100 people a week since September," said the Rev. Edgar Pinos, the church's refugee coordinator here, "but we are worried, because we expect the anti-drug campaign to start in earnest this month. In the event of a massive flow, we are going to need more help with food and lodging, because our capacity is limited."

To complicate things further, several of the mayors along the border, including the one in Lago Agrio, are leftists who, if not openly supporting the FARC, are sympathetic to its program.

"We cannot argue that any group or person has a right to kill," Mr. Abad said. "But the struggle for equality and the defense of justice is a good thing."

Just before Christmas, President Gustavo Noboa, who took office a year ago after a military coup, said he might be forced to declare a state of emergency in the border region if attacks on the oil pipeline and other installations continued.

Under the Ecuadorean Constitution, that would allow him to replace the civilian governors of border provinces with military officers, as has been suggested, and suspend some civil liberties.

"God forbid that terrorism comes to Ecuador," Mr. Noboa warned at a news conference in Quito. "I want to advise you that I am not going to allow the nation to lose its calm and peace. If I have to declare a state of emergency and apply the national security laws, I will."

But Mr. Abad warned that such an action "would only add fuel to the fire in this vulnerable zone."

The recent surge in the fighting has devastated the economy in this market town. Unable to obtain basic supplies from their usual sources because of skirmishes and roadblocks that have interrupted normal trade routes, the residents of Putumayo Province in Colombia have turned in desperation to merchants here, who are unable to meet the increased demand.

As a result, the price of rice and other staples like sugar, cooking oil, salt and beans has skyrocketed and there have also been runs on gasoline and pharmaceuticals. "A 100-pound bag of rice that sold for $16 in August was fetching as much as $38 by December," Mrs. de Córdova complained.

At the same time, sales of the products that Colombians have traditionally bought here in normal times have plummeted and credit has dried up. Mr. Lucas, who owns a company that distributes detergents and cosmetics, estimates that his sales have fallen as much as 70 percent in recent months and fears that things are going to become even more unsettled.

"For the Colombians this part of Ecuador has always been useful as a rest stop, as a place to treat their sick and wounded, to spend a weekend or to resupply themselves," Mr. Lucas said. "We can only hope that they do not want to turn this into another combat zone and make us targets, because we are not the ones who created this problem. All we want is an end to the bloodshed."

---

A Drug Warrior Who Would Rather Treat Than Fight

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/politics/08LIVE.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON -- REFLECTING upon nearly five years as the Clinton administration's top drug policy official, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey looks back even farther, to 31 years in the Army, where he became its most highly decorated general after fighting in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

"I doubt that I've ever seen in combat the misery such as I've encountered through watching what drug abuse does to people," said General McCaffrey, who is preparing to step down as the White House director of national drug control policy.

"They're doing things which they know to be morally and physically repulsive," he said. "They're ashamed of themselves. They're fearful, they're sick, they're driven."

And they are fellow Americans, added General McCaffrey, a professional warrior who refuses to accept the metaphor of a war on drugs. Beginning with his Senate confirmation hearings in early 1996, the retired four-star general has likened America's drug problem to a cancer that must be treated.

In an interview, he said that treatment for addiction and mental illness should be covered by the same health insurance that recognizes physical illnesses. General McCaffrey was instrumental in persuading President Clinton to extend such parity in health coverage to nine million federal employees.

The general does not fit the stereotype of a drug czar, whose authority primarily consists of facilitating the antidrug policies of a range of federal departments and agencies.

He called it "silly" for federal law to impose harsher penalties for selling or possessing crack cocaine than for powder cocaine because they are two forms of the same drug.

He criticized predetermined prison sentences for drug felons, like those set under New York's Rockefeller-era drug laws. "I am unalterably opposed to the system of mandatory minimums," he said. "I think we need to give this authority back to the judges."

And most nonviolent addicts behind bars, he said, belong in treatment centers, not in prison, where they learn to become better criminals.

The solution to drug abuse and its social consequences, he said, is "to engage in a more coherent, rational way the chronically addicted as we encounter them in our communities." And, he added, "we find them in the criminal justice system, in the health care system and the welfare system."

"At that point, it seems to me," he continued, "if you want to save taxpayer dollars, and you want to reduce violence in your communities, if you want to accomplish all of these larger social goals, you have to draw them into effective drug treatment."

General McCaffrey conceded that appropriating money to treat every addict had been a hard sell, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

"That's the argument that has to be made to state legislatures," he said. "Then we've got to tell the health insurance industry: `Look, you're going to pay for it one way or another. You can pay for it in the emergency room, you can pay for it with a lot less dollars in drug treatment centers. You can wait till they're H.I.V.-infected and then pay a quarter of a million dollars to deal with AIDS as a medical condition.' "

But he acknowledged that drug abuse elicited more revulsion than sympathy from the majority of Americans.

"They look at this and they're frightened and disgusted by it, and they want to walk away from it," General McCaffrey said. "And we're saying, `You can't walk away from it, you've got to rationally deal with it.' "

Since General McCaffrey took office, federal financing has increased by 55 percent for prevention programs and by 34 percent for treatment programs. "It's been hard lifting, but we've made the arguments that resulted in $2.78 billion in federal money going into drug treatment," he said.

The bulk of the government's drug-fighting budget, which jumped to $19.2 billion in the current fiscal year from $13.5 billion in 1996, is still spent on drug interdiction and law enforcement. Treating addicts does not mean legalizing drugs, General McCaffrey said, "and it doesn't mean condoning the dysfunctional behavior that emanates from chronic drug abuse."

General McCaffrey said he took pride in having overseen a $185 million advertising campaign to dissuade adolescents from experimenting with drugs, which he said helped account for a 21 percent decline in drug use by teenagers in the last two years.

THE son of an Army lieutenant general, Barry McCaffrey, 57, grew up on Army bases before attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and then going to West Point. He has been invited to teach national security issues at West Point starting later this month. He and his wife, Jill, who live in Virginia, have one son, an Army major, and two daughters, an intensive care nurse and a secondary school teacher.

Even as he leaves the White House, General McCaffrey continues to challenge the perception of a lost war on drugs, which he said was fueled by "a very deliberate, well-thought-out strategy by drug legalization forces" seeking public acceptance of drug use.

"You can convince people that it's a war and it's lost and rational people ought to move on," he said. "When you talk about it in a theoretical fashion, lots of educated, thoughtful people will accept that.

"But when you're confronted with drug abuse in your community and your family and your business, that kind of logic evaporates."

---

Heroin, an Old Nemesis, Makes an Encore

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By EVELYN NIEVES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/national/09HERO.html?pagewanted=all

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8 - At 5 a.m. in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin area, the drug addicts are just about the only ones out.

A young woman with matted blond hair stumbles down the street with her eyes closed; a man in a red spandex dress and silver pumps nods out against the door of a single-room- occupancy hotel; small clusters of hollow-eyed men and women hover on corners. It is no wonder the police call this strip of the Tenderloin the heroin corridor. Everyone on the street looks either high or hung over.

Later in the day, Matt Dodman, a blond, angelic-looking 26-year-old, is sitting in a cafe in another, hipper neighborhood, the Mission. A heroin user for three years, he avoids the Tenderloin drug scene. "I'm not part of a hard- core drug clique," he said, taking a sip of mineral water. But down the block, a dozen of his friends and acquaintances - all heroin addicts in their teens and 20's, and all disheveled and homeless, as he is - sit on the sidewalk outside a community center and wait to be tested for hepatitis C. More than half will test positive, as do the larger population of San Francisco heroin users who have been taking the drug at least five years.

Heroin was supposed to be over, yesterday's drug. But almost 20 years after AIDS made injecting it deadlier than it had ever been, it is as common in some neighborhoods here as Starbucks. A draw for drug experimenters since the heyday of Haight-Ashbury, the city remains a place where "old" heroin addicts - those who have been using the narcotic for 20 or 25 years - feed their habit. But more and more young people as well are using it.

And not just here. Hospitals and treatment centers in other large cities, especially in the West, are seeing record numbers of heroin cases. Chicago officials attribute a surge in life- threatening cases of asthma to increased use of heroin among the young. And while H.I.V. and AIDS are down among users, needles used to inject heroin are responsible for an increase in hepatitis C, which can cause liver failure. In fact, hepatitis C is growing across the United States and in Vancouver, British Columbia, a major trafficking point for a drug pipeline that extends from Canada to California.

The estimated number of heroin users in the United States has risen to 980,000 from 600,000 at the beginning of the 1990's, while cocaine use has decreased 70 percent, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The agency attributes the resurgence in heroin use to new forms of the drug, smokable and snortable alike; to a prevailing myth among the young that heroin is safer when not injected; and to the "heroin chic" look of models in the early 90's.

Washington State, Oregon and California have the highest incidence of heroin abuse in the West. Elsewhere, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts and Delaware also have big problems with it, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. H. Westley Clark, the agency's director, says its household surveys show that from 1996 to 1998, an estimated 471,000 people used heroin for the first time, with a quarter of the new users under 18 and 47 percent age 18 to 25.

Heroin is not only cheaper than it once was, "it's cleaner, purer," said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration and now directs the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "And too many young people think they can snort it and they won't get hooked." Eventually, Mr. Califano added, they do get hooked, and turn to needles to achieve a more potent high.

"The next drug czar, in the Bush administration, is going to have to deal with heroin in a big way," he said.

Public health experts see the big increase in heroin use as further evidence that the nation's 20-year-old war on drugs, with its emphasis on punishment rather than addict treatment, needs a new approach.

Here in San Francisco, heroin users, like homeless people (many are both), are part of the landscape. The city draws young people with troubled backgrounds from all over the country, even as it tries coping with inveterate users who have lived on the streets for years.

The new people, like Matt Dodman, from Michigan, arrive with no money and no plans. Often they end up in loose-knit communities of homeless drug users, scorned by the rest of the city and consumed with a need to get their fixes. People cross the street to avoid them. "They look at us like dogs," Mr. Dodman said.

To support his habit, which costs him $20 to $30 a day, Mr. Dodman steals. Or he "boosts" - steals an item from a store, then returns it for cash. He has panhandled, but says he does not "have the patience for it."

Dr. David E. Smith, founder and president of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, drug treatment centers here, has described the city's young addict population as people looking for "geographical cheer" - hope that life is going to be better in San Francisco than it was in Des Moines, say. Instead, they become alienated. The same is true of neighborhoods that attract young transients in Seattle and Portland. Officials in both cities consider heroin use at epidemic levels. In 1999, Portland had the nation's highest rate of death from heroin overdose.

"You look back into the early 90's, and the heroin deaths are one to two dozen per year, and then in 1999 it was 111," said Gary Oxman, director of the Multnomah County Health Department in Portland. The department expects the final number for last year to drop to the low to middle 70's, he said, in part because of aggressive education programs.

San Francisco has stepped up efforts in recent years to divert drug users to treatment. Such programs are making the city a model for California now that a statewide voter initiative, to take effect on July 1, makes first-time drug offenders eligible for treatment rather than jail. But more people keep coming to San Francisco than the city can help.

Matt Dodman was one of several addicts, young and old alike, who said in interviews on the streets that they could not find a program that would accept them. Another was R. J., who said he had been using heroin for 40 of his 49 years and could not find a space in the city's detoxification centers.

R. J., who would identify himself only by his initials, saying he wanted to spare his four children, is a walking sign of what heroin can cost. He has overdosed five times. He has been stabbed and raped while selling himself to support his habit. He has done time behind bars, almost nine years in all. And his inner forearms have so many needle tracks that they look striped.

By selling his body, R. J. earns enough money to pay for his heroin, if nothing else. "When I see young people, I tell them, `Don't end up like me,' " he said. "I tell them, `Look at me.' "

Gloria Clay, like R. J. a Tenderloin regular, is a little luckier. At 35, she is in a detoxification program and says she is on her way to kicking a heroin habit she picked up two years ago, after being addicted to crack.

Her scars keep her motivated. While on drugs, she was kicked by her drug-addicted boyfriend, a beating that cost her an eye and permanently damaged her spine.

Although infected sores in heroin addicts are the leading cause of admissions at San Francisco General Hospital, and while San Francisco consistently ranks among the worst metropolitan areas for emergency-room visits related to heroin, health officials here are more worried about the drug's long-term effects.

Experts compare heroin users to smokers, in that risk accumulates over time. Many people infected with the hepatitis C virus, for example, do not exhibit symptoms for many years, said Dr. Andrew Moss, professor in residence of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco. But, Dr. Moss said, a segment of those afflicted will develop liver disease, cancer or cirrhosis, and hepatitis C is very infectious.

In San Francisco, where young users as well as old overdose routinely, the young are very difficult to reach, because their problems transcend drug use, Dr. Moss said. "They're America's damaged children," he said.

Matt Dodman is not worried. He is sure he will not overdose, and certain he will remain free of disease. Why? "Because," he said, "I know so."


-----

New York Times
January 8, 2001
Metro Briefing
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/nyregion/08MBRF.html?pagewanted=all

NEW YORK
BROOKLYN: TEENAGER DIES IN GUNFIRE A teenager was killed and a man was critically injured early yesterday when they were shot in what the police believe was a drug-related dispute. The teenager, identified as Deshawn Alleyne, 17, was pronounced dead shortly before 2 a.m. He had been shot once in the back, the police said. The second man, who is in his 20's but whose name was not immediately released, was in critical condition at Kings County Hospital Center. The shootings occurred inside an abandoned building at 151 Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the police said. Elissa Gootman (NYT)

---

USA Today
01/01/08
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Conneticut
Groton - A statewide boom in Ecstasy sales is prompting plans for crackdowns on the drug. Police in Groton and Glastonbury recently broke up Ecstasy rings that employees allegedly were operating out of pizza parlors. Though the cases were not connected, authorities say they show how the drug has extended beyond the downtown clubs and into the suburbs.

-------- space

Space fission

New Scientist
8 January 2001
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999302

A rocket powered by thin films of nuclear material could get to Mars in two weeks, say scientists

A rocket powered by thin films of nuclear material could get to Mars in as little as two weeks, according to scientists in Israel. With conventional engines, the journey would last almost a year, they say.

Standard rockets work by giving a spacecraft a big kick, says Chris Welch, at Kingston University in London: "You essentially give it a big kick to get it going and then let it coast, until giving it another kick to send it onto orbit."

Welch says nuclear thrusters are less powerful, but can be used for longer periods. This makes the spacecraft build up speed and ultimately travel far more quickly. Ion thrusters are currently in use but are less powerful than the proposed nuclear thrusters.

The new engine, proposed by Yigal Ronen and Eugene Shwageraus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, uses films of a radioactive material called americium which are less than a micron thick.

Critical mass

Unlike other radioactive materials, such as plutonium and uranium, very small amounts of americium produce chain reactions. These reactions pump out large amounts of energetic ions or fission products.

Ronen calculates that if the americium is shaped into a thin film, the energetic ions produced by the nuclear chain reactions will be ejected out of the film.

If these high-energy particles were channelled with a magnetic field, they could be used to power a spacecraft, he says. "We are now far enough advanced to interest international space programmes in taking a closer look at americium-based space vehicles."

Welch says: "You'd have to take this a long way before you could use it for something practical. But it's worthy of further investigation and if it turned out to work, that would be wonderful."

More at: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A (vol 455 p 442)

Correspondence about this story should be directed to latestnews@newscientist.com

1207 GMT, 8 January 2001
Ian Sample
From New Scientist magazine, 08 January 2001.

---

NASA plans landing on an asteroid

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 09:35 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/ndsmon07.htm

Scientists remotely steering an automobile-sized spacecraft say they will end its unparalleled year-long mission with an unprecedented finale: an attempted landing on the surface of an asteroid. The NEAR-Shoemaker probe has been orbiting the asteroid EROS since Valentine's Day and is running out of fuel. There have been no attempts to set down on an asteroid before, and researchers put the chances for success at less than 1% in the February 12 ''controlled descent.''

''This wasn't in the original plan, but it's been in my mind for a longtime,'' said Robert Farquhar, mission chief at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD., where scientists are directing the asteroid mission for NASA. They also built the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, named for the late astronomer Gene Shoemaker.

''We're out of time, out of money and out of fuel,'' Farquhar said. ''This is the first time anyone has tried to land anything on a small body. It would be a nice way to end it.''

At the end of its $224 million mission, engineers will fire the spacecraft's thrusters, hoping for a skidding stop on the asteroid's hard surface. On its way down, it will send back clear images of the unprecedented landing.

The 1,775-pound spacecraft will be traveling about 1 yard a second when it touches down.

''That's about jogging speed, but if you hit a brick wall when you're jogging it hurts,'' Farquhar said. ''It's risky, but the mission is ending anyway. We'll get a lot of bonus science.''

Eros is a peanut-shaped rocky body that is 21 miles long and 8 miles wide, about twice the size of Manhattan. It is 8 miles thick.

It tumbles through the solar system, flipping toe over heel every five hours. It orbits the Sun along an eccentric path that brings it as close as 12 million miles to Earth. It now is 150 million miles away, beyond Mars.

NEAR-Shoemaker was launched in 1996 from Cape Canaveral. After propulsion problems, it rendezvoused with Eros on February 14, 2000, about one year late.

For 11 months it has been orbiting Eros between 30 miles to 200 miles from the surface. On October 26, it swooped as low as 3 miles. In mid-December, researchers fired its thrusters for 90 seconds and lowered it to 22 miles above the asteroid for final low-orbit observations.

The spacecraft carries instruments to analyze the asteroid's chemical components and magnetic field and an array of cameras to map its surface.

At the end of its $224 million mission, engineers will fire the spacecraft's thrusters in hopes of bringing it to a skidding stop on the asteroid's hard surface. On its way down, it will send back clear images of the attempted landing.

-------- taiwan

Taiwan Is Likely to Ask the U.S. to Sell It 4 Destroyers

Associated Press
January 8, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08TAIW.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/1/8/81251.shtml

SHANGHAI, Jan. 7 - Taiwan has signaled that it may ask the Bush administration to sell it four Kidd-class guided-missile destroyers to counter China's recently purchased Russian-made destroyers, the second of which is now steaming toward the Taiwan Strait.

The request, likely to be made before the United States and Taiwan hold annual talks on arms sales in April, would present George W. Bush with his first major challenge in managing the delicate balance of relations between China and Taiwan.

Under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the United States is obligated to help Taiwan maintain its defenses. Mr. Bush has indicated in the past that he will be more aggressive in fulfilling that obligation than was the Clinton administration, which declined to sell Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to Taiwan last year.

The Kidd-class destroyers carry more modest weapons and radar systems than the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, but the ships would nonetheless be the largest and most powerful in Taiwan's navy.

In Washington, Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the Bush presidential transition committee, said today, "The president-elect believes it is important for the United States to speak with one voice in foreign policy, and until Jan. 20, that voice is the Clinton administration."

China is certain to object to any such sale, which would be the most significant weapons transfer by the United States to Taiwan since Mr. Bush's father sold the island 150 advanced F-16 fighter aircraft in 1992.

That sale, which China said breached a 1982 joint communiqué not to increase the quantity or quality of arms sold to Taiwan, angered Beijing and cost some American companies business that went to European competitors instead.

Tensions between China and Taiwan increased after the election of Chen Shui-bian as Taiwan's president last year. In the past he had advocated declaring outright independence from China, which considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory.

He has since softened his stance, saying Taiwan would declare independence only if attacked. But Beijing has threatened to use force to bring the island under mainland control if Taiwan's government fails to show good faith in negotiating unification in a timely fashion.

Taiwan tried easing tensions last week by allowing direct travel and trade between the mainland and two heavily fortified outlying islands just off China's coast.

Beijing wants direct links with the main island of Taiwan itself, but Taiwan fears that its economy might grow too dependent on China.

China hinted on Saturday that it might soften its demand that Mr. Chen explicitly accept the "one China" principle before negotiating such direct links. That would require Mr. Chen to acknowledge Taiwan as an inseparable part of China, which he has so far refused to do.

In an article published by China Daily, the country's official English-language newspaper, a government official said Mr. Chen's government could negotiate direct links without making such a statement if the links themselves "operated as the domestic matters of one country instead of as state-to-state affairs."

But Taiwan is not letting down its guard.

Mr. Chen said in August that the island should begin considering new purchases of fighter aircraft to counter the advanced Russian-made jets that China is expected to receive this year.

And on Friday, the commander in chief of Taiwan's navy, Adm. Lee Chieh, was quoted by Taiwan's Central News Agency as saying that the Pentagon had recommended that Taiwan acquire the Kidd-class destroyers to replace the island's World War II-era Gearing-class destroyers.

The four Kidd-class destroyers, costing a total of about $600 million, would give Taiwan's navy a chance to train for an eventual purchase of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which cost 10 times as much, the admiral was quoted as saying.

President Clinton deferred deciding on Taiwan's request for the Arleigh Burke destroyers last April, in part because of Beijing's strong opposition to such a sale.

The Arleigh Burke ships are equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles and Aegis radar systems, which are capable of tracking more than 100 targets simultaneously. Weapons experts say the Aegis system could someday be adapted for use in the kind of theater missile defense whose development China vehemently opposes.

The Kidd-class destroyers, each more than double the size of Taiwan's largest current warship, could provide a platform for simultaneously conducting anti-air, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, according to Jane's Defense Weekly.

Admiral Lee was quoted as saying that such weapons systems would boost the island's ability to counter China's Russian-made Sovremenny- class destroyers and Kilo-class submarines.

The second of the Sovremenny- class destroyers, armed with supersonic Sunburn anti-ship missiles that can carry nuclear warheads, is expected to pass through the Taiwan Strait this month en route to the mainland.

The Sovremenny destroyers are part of a mainland arms procurement program intended to enable China to threaten Taiwan across the 100-mile-wide strait, something it can do today only with ballistic missiles.

Besides the destroyers, China is believed to have purchased dozens of Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft from Russia and is talking about buying an airborne command and control plane with an advanced early-warning radar system.

The purchases do not yet add up to a significant threat, say military analysts who also note that hardware alone does not equal military might. Both Taiwan and China will need years of training before they can field their advanced weaponry with any confidence.

But the Pentagon warned in a report last year that if Washington did not help Taiwan upgrade its weapon systems, China's procurement program could tip the balance of power in Beijing's favor after 2005.

Asked today whether the Pentagon had received an official request from Taiwan to buy the Kidd-class destroyers, Kenneth W. Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, said that by mutual agreement, neither the United States nor Taiwan comments on arms sale requests. If the Pentagon approves such a request, it notifies Congress, which can block the sale.

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

Conservatives prepare to contest global court

Washington Times
January 8, 2001
By Betsy Pisik THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200118215917.htm

NEW YORK - U.S. conservatives are organizing an assault on the U.N.-sponsored war crimes tribunal, saying President Clinton's surprise New Year's Eve signature on the treaty must be swiftly and surely erased.

"It is vital that we take deliberate and unequivocal action," said a spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Spokesman Marc Thiessen said several options would be open to George W. Bush following his presidential inauguration later this month.

"The new president can simply unsign the treaty. Or he can inform the United Nations that he is repudiating the signature. Or he can subject it to the [U.S.] Senate for ratification with a recommendation for rejection," he said.

"We can work with the president to develop the range of options," he added, declining to say whether these discussions had taken place.

Many in Washington are demanding that the incoming Bush administration "unsign" the treaty, which legal scholars say would be an unprecedented repudiation of an international agreement.

Conservative lawmakers also are examining changes in domestic law that could nullify Mr. Clinton's accession to the 1998 agreement creating the war crimes tribunal.

Specifically, they are mulling the revival of a bill that expressly forbids any U.S. agency or program from cooperating with the treaty organization in any way.

"If a mistake were made, a president would have the ability to correct it. This is the same thing," said John Bolton, a State Department official in the 1989-93 Bush administration and now a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute.

He demanded the incoming administration "march up to New York with a bottle of Wite-Out."

President Clinton quietly dispatched a State Department official through the snow to the United Nations on New Year's Eve to sign the statute creating the International Criminal Court, or ICC - a permanent tribunal that will hear charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The treaty is unusual because its creators claim "universal jurisdiction," meaning that its laws apply to all nations, even those that are not a party to it.

Mr. Clinton signed with reservations, noting that the court did not provide adequate protections for U.S. service members who might be subject to politically motivated prosecutions.

Despite this, he said, by signing before a year-end deadline, American negotiators could continue to shape the court's infrastructure. He said his successor should wait before sending the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Conservatives, many of whom oppose the court on philosophical as well as procedural grounds, are infuriated by what they see as an attempt to tie the hands of the incoming administration.

Many want Mr. Bush to promptly send the treaty to the Senate for almost certain rejection, effectively killing the matter unless a future president decides to reconsider it.

The incoming administration has not said publicly how it plans to deal with the issue.

"This is a flawed treaty," said Juleanna Glover Weiss, spokeswoman for the Bush transition team in Washington. "We believe there are problems with [the ICC statute] and it's something we would revisit before sending it to the Senate for ratification."

Donald H. Rumsfield, nominated as defense secretary, has endorsed a bill that would prevent any U.S. cooperation with the court, including the sharing of evidence, apprehension of suspects or financial support.

Mr. Helms, who co-authored the American Service Members Protection Act with House Whip Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, vowed last week "to make reversing this decision, and protecting American fighting men and women from the jurisdiction of this international kangaroo court, one of my highest priorities in the new Congress."

The service members bill would bar cooperation between Washington and the Netherlands-based tribunal, as well as cut off U.S. military aid to allies who ratify the ICC. An exception is made to permit continued U.S. cooperation with its NATO allies, all of whom have signed the treaty. Israel, which had publicly opposed the treaty, also signed it Dec. 31.

The bill is supported by former secretaries of state from the Bush, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Nixon administrations and appears to have broad support in Congress.

Legal analysts are less certain about the notion of "unsigning" the treaty.

"No one has ever tried to unsign a treaty, that I know of," said Palitha Kohona, chief of the U.N. treaty section. "I guess a nation could just let it stand and not do anything. That is why treaties are signed prior to ratification. If there is a change of heart, they do not ratify. . . .

"A signature doesn't require a state to do anything in a positive sense," added Mr. Kohona, whose division administers 524 multilateral conventions. "At the same time, it does obligate a state not to do anything that undermines the treaty."

Mr. Kohona said it would be up to the treaty signatories to decide whether passage of the Service Members Protection Act amounted to an undermining of the treaty. He said they might choose to ignore it as normal domestic politics in a government well known for tolerating divergent political opinions.

But some analysts - including human rights advocates who helped draft the treaty language -say the bill does contravene the aims of the treaty.

Mr. Bolton argued that Congress "is perfectly free to pass any statute it wants to." But, he said, by "unsigning" the treaty the new administration could remove any ambiguity on that point.

---

America on Trial?

New York Times
January 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/opinion/L08COU.html

To the Editor:

Contrary to "A Step Toward International Justice" (editorial, Jan. 3), the proposed international criminal court is a recipe for mischief, with the United States as the chief victim. For half the world, we are the Great Satan. Nothing would please our adversaries more than the ability to detain any American soldier on humanitarian duty or any sailor on shore leave and hold him on political charges. What American would be safe from detention, even if the court eventually ruled in his favor?

The "safeguards to prevent frivolous prosecutions" are laughable. We give up national sovereignty at our peril. True, we would like to be able to go after bad people, but is that worth opening a Pandora's box?

EDWARD J. PRENNER Forest Hills, Queens, Jan. 3, 2001

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

Navy Inquiry on Cole Urges No Punishment of Captain or Crew

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08COLE.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - Navy commanders overseeing an investigation of the suicide attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in October have recommended that neither the ship's captain nor crew members be punished, even though they failed to follow certain security guidelines, officials said today.

The recommendation raises the question whether any American commanders will ultimately be held responsible for the Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors, wounded 39 others and very nearly sank one of the world's most powerful warships.

The recommendation was made first by the naval commander in the Persian Gulf and endorsed by the commander of the entire Atlantic Fleet. It overturned the initial findings of an investigative officer who had concluded that the effects of the attack might have been mitigated if the Cole's captain had adhered to security measures, the officials said.

In reviewing those findings, however, the commanders argued that the Cole's captain, Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold, made defensible decisions to revise some of those measures and to skip others. They concluded that none of the required measures would, even in hindsight, have stopped two suicide bombers from steering a skiff packed with explosives to the side of the Cole and detonating it, the officials said.

The Cole, for instance, did not have an Arabic speaker aboard when it pulled into the Yemeni port of Aden to refuel on the morning of Oct. 12, as required by security guidelines issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.

Commander Lippold also decided against having officers stand watch on the bridge, assigning them instead to the quarterdeck. Nor did he order the crew to prepare fire hoses that could have been used to repel attackers, the officials said. Since the crew believed that the skiff was part of a flotilla of harbor boats instead of a hostile boat, such precautions would not have made a difference, the officials said.

"You've got to weigh the performance of the crew against the outcome," a senior officer said today. "And had they done everything, it would not have changed the outcome."

The Navy's investigation focused narrowly on actions aboard the Cole itself, but its basic conclusion, first reported in The Sun of Baltimore on Saturday, will focus greater attention on the decisions by commanders in the United States Central Command that resulted in the Cole's stopping to refuel, at only a moderate level of alert, in a country known as a haven for terrorists.

Senior officials said last week that Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen planned to order a new review of accountability beyond the Cole. He decided to do so after a broader investigation by two retired commanders found significant shortcomings in security throughout the region. That investigation - led by Adm. Harold W. Gehman of the Navy and Gen. William W. Crouch of the Army - did not set out to assign blame for the Cole attack.

Some Navy officials have questioned whether the Cole was left vulnerable when it arrived at Aden. Even if there had not been a specific warning of a terrorist attack, there had been general warnings, and Yemen was considered insecure enough that the American Embassy there was closed as a security precaution on the day the Cole stopped to refuel.

"We didn't have the kind of information that could have positioned him to deal with the threat," one Navy officer said, referring to Commander Lippold.

The new review being ordered by Mr. Cohen could assign responsibility to senior commanders in the gulf region, but while the services each have systems in place for establishing accountability, there is no clear mechanism for reviewing the actions of regional commanders.

Traditionally, the Navy has been vigorous in holding a ship's captain responsible for anything that happens on board.

The Cole's failure to follow basic guidelines for protecting the ship from attack - in the view of the senior admirals reviewing the investigation - did not reflect lapses in judgment or a general laxity toward security, the officials said. Instead, they concluded that Commander Lippold made deliberate revisions that were reasonable and defensible, the officials said.

The initial inquiry, led by a captain in the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, found that the crew had failed to carry out nearly half of 62 security steps outlined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to protect ships from terrorist attacks.

Many of those, such as providing sailors standing watch with night- vision goggles, were deemed irrelevant, but the investigating officer concluded that roughly 10 others constituted critical lapses, including the positioning of the officer on watch on the quarterdeck and not the bridge, the officials said.

The investigator's conclusions, completed last month, were overruled first by the naval commander in the gulf, Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore, and then by the commander of the Atlantic Fleet, Adm. Robert J. Natter. The commanders concluded that the investigator's conclusions took security guidelines too literally and did not account for the captain's discretion.

One senior official said that while the Cole's crew may not have done everything by the book, its performance fell within an "expected range" of performance, in the commanders' view, and thus did not warrant punishment.

On Friday, Admiral Natter forwarded his recommendations to Adm. Vern Clark, who as chief of naval operations, is the service's senior officer. Admiral Clark could reverse the findings yet again, but the officials indicated that he is not expected to do so.

"If you have a small boat carrying out a suicide attack," one official said today, "there's not a lot you can do to stop it."

---

Official: No U.S. personnel to be disciplined

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 07:44 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-01-08-cole.htm

ADEN, Yemen (AP) - A key suspect in the attack on the USS Cole told authorities in his confession that he believes the suicide bombers acted on the orders of Osama bin Laden, Yemeni sources close to the investigation said Monday.

The suspect's comments provide another in a series of circumstantial links between the Saudi exile and the deadly attack on the U.S. warship.

The sources did not identify the man, but described him as one of the three chief suspects in custody. He and up to seven others are expected to be tried, perhaps as early as this month, in the Oct. 12 bombing of the American destroyer that killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded 39 during a refueling stop in Aden.

Yemen's prime minister has said authorities have identified one of the bombers and were close to identifying the second.

Meanwhile, a senior U.S. defense official said Monday that the Navy's highest ranking officer, Adm. Vern Clark, has decided to let stand a determination made last week that neither the captain nor the crew of the USS Cole should be disciplined for failing to follow all prescribed security precautions before the attack.

Clark was expected to submit his written endorsement soon, said the defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Navy planned to announce this week the result of its investigation of the Cole bombing, which sought to determine the circumstances of the attack and what preventive measures the crew had taken.

Authorities have yet to establish a firm connection between the attack and bin Laden, but U.S. law enforcement officials have said several threads link the suspects held in Yemen to the bin Laden organization. Bin Laden, who is living in Afghanistan, has virtually declared war on what he sees as the anti-Islamic United States, and U.S. officials consider him their No. 1 terrorism suspect.

The jailed Yemeni man's brother was described as a prominent Arab Afghan, as Islamic fighters who helped push Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in the 1980s are known. The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the suspect confessed that he helped his brother run one of two safe houses where visiting fellow Arab Afghans would meet.

Authorities were searching for the brother, the officials said.

The brother's safe house, they said, was in Sa'da province, near the Saudi border, and the other safe house is in Saudi Arabia, though the sources did not say where. The two brothers' home is elsewhere in Sa'da, they said.

The suspect in custody told authorities that an unidentified Syrian man supervises bin Laden's activities in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The Syrian, he told police, is among 12 to 20 Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Syrians and other Arabs who are close to bin Laden and live with him in Afghanistan.

According to the sources, the suspect said all the Afghan Arabs who came to his brother's safe house worked for the Syrian. The two alleged suicide bombers were among a group that the suspect told investigators visited the safe house before the attack on the Cole, the sources said. It was not clear when the visit took place, and the identities of the two bombers have not been released.

The suspect said that the Afghan Arabs who came through his safe house were all either preparing attacks or hiding out from authorities, so it was natural for him to assume the two who authorities believe were the suicide bombers were planning something. He told authorities he had not known what the target would be, sources said.

Bin Laden, who is of Yemeni descent, recruited Arabs in Yemen to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and is believed to draw on them and other Arab Afghans to support a global militant Islamic terror network.

According to the sources, the suspect also provided details about bin Laden's network. They described his confession as saying that:

If a member of the inner circle drops out of sight, an attack is being planned or carried out. Even within the group, nobody is allowed to ask questions about where the missing man has gone.

Only the most trusted of bin Laden's associates are allowed to train in using C-4, the plastic explosive used in the Cole bombing.

It was unclear whether the suspect had signed the confession. Prosecutors in Aden and police ministry officials refused comment on what the sources said.

On Saturday, 10 to 15 American and Yemeni investigators visited locations allegedly used by the bombers, photographing the area where the two allegedly put their explosives-laden boat into the harbor, a local fisherman said. About half of them were Americans.

---

Cohen Tosses Cole Potato to Bush

NewsMax
Monday, January 08, 2001
http://www.newsmax.com/cgi-bin/printer_friendly.pl

Defense Secretary William Cohen is leaving to his successor how far up the chain of command blame should be placed for the USS Cole bombing.

According to the Associated Press:

A second, and more-stringent, review now being set up by Cohen will end up in the lap of President-elect George W. Bush's designated defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he is set to take over after Cohen and the rest of the administration of President Clinton depart Jan. 20.

The New York Times reports that Cohen is creating the mechanism for this inquiry to decide whether high-ranking military commanders in the Persian Gulf should be punished for the Oct. 12 terrorist attack that killed 17 American sailors as the destroyer lay refueling in a harbor in Yemen.

The Times said this new review is to be headed by Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

To explore what security lessons could be learned from the Cole incident, Cohen had earlier established a special commission headed by a retired Navy admiral and a retired Army general.

But that report, due to be made public shortly, did not assess accountability.

What Cohen wants now is an investigation to determine whether responsibility for allowing the attack rests with the destroyer's skipper, Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold, and officers under his command on the ship, who may face disciplinary action, or extends even higher up the line.

---

General details Army shortfall

Washington Times
January 8, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200118222947.htm

The four-star general who oversees Army training has sent a candid assessment to the Pentagon of how personnel and equipment shortfalls are hampering the development of hundreds of thousands of soldiers each year.

Gen. John N. Abrams, chief of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), says helicopter pilots lack adequate flight hours, training centers lack sufficient staff, and facilities are plagued by leaky pipes. He said that more than a quarter of power, water and sewage systems are in "failed or failing condition."

"Training modernization is broken across the force and will not keep pace with force modernization," the general wrote in a memo to Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff. "The problem gets progressively worse over the [next five years]."

The memo was drafted this summer after school commanders reported their individual readiness problems to TRADOC. The Washington Times recently obtained a draft copy. A TRADOC spokesman declined to comment except to say the memo was eventually sent to the Pentagon.

Located at Fort Monroe, Va., TRADOC is a major Army command. It oversees training and education in such critical fields as basic recruit training, infantry, artillery, intelligence collection, communications and aviation. The command's 67,000 staff members annually train about 350,000 military personnel and civilians on a $3.2 billion budget.

Gen. Abrams summed up his message with this statement:

"Although the command is achieving its primary mission, it is important to note that this is made possible at the expense of our other core mission areas. Of significance is the fact that we do not have the dollars or manpower to determine and develop functional user mission requirements. . . . Unless funding increases across the board, TRADOC will fall further behind in these key development areas which underpin the future Army."

Army officials say TRADOC's woes stem in part from money being shifted from statewide training to operational combat units. TRADOC is not alone in complaining of readiness cutbacks. Active Army divisions, principally those stateside, complain of missing personnel and a lack of spare parts.

Harvey Perritt, a TRADOC spokesman, declined to discuss the memo's specifics. But he said the command is short 26 percent of its assigned personnel strength.

"General Shinseki got the report," said Lt. Col. Lew Boone, the general's spokesman. "Our policy is we don't talk about the in-house stuff."

Gen. Abrams, a Vietnam combat veteran and a former infantry division commander, painted a particularly dire picture of the state of buildings and sanitary systems throughout TRADOC.

"Erosion of mission support resources impairs our ability to develop highly trained soldiers and officers," he wrote. "We are barely meeting our basic short-term needs. Approximately 72 percent of our base utilities (power, water and sewage) require repair with 28 percent of these systems in failed or failing condition."

The general said that without $875 million in added money, "there is simply no way to fund both the required training load as well as full infrastructure maintenance and repair within the current resourcing available."

He wrote of one instructional facility at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan., that is so dilapidated it needs to be torn down and replaced. The current building "is failing with exterior curtain walls rusted through, water pipes flooding five or six times a year and weekly electrical brownouts," the memo said.

On personnel shortages, Gen. Abrams said the gap has forced TRADOC to put relatively inexperienced captains in the "vast majority" of instructor and doctrine development billets. To make matters worse, there are not sufficient captains.

"This critical manpower shortage in our 'workhorse' grade very seriously impacts our ability to conduct quality training and severely limits our capability to do doctrine, training and combat development work for the Army," his memo stated. "Personnel availability is unsatisfactory."

The memo said the aviation training center at Fort Rucker, Ala., is suffering through a shortage of available helicopters because of groundings over safety concerns.

It said, "The Aviation Center . . . has had a continuous problem with safety of flight restrictions, which has resulted in a degradation of aviation training. . . . These [restrictions] are making it extremely challenging to complete the fiscal year 2000 training load. Failing to meet the training load will impact aviation readiness Armywide."

President-elect George W. Bush pledged during the campaign to make fixing such readiness shortfalls a major priority of his presidency. He scheduled a military summit today at his Texas ranch, inviting senior members of Congress involved in making defense policy and appropriating the Pentagon's $309 billion budget.

The Washington Times reported in August that TRADOC was suffering staff and equipment shortages that hinder critical training. The Times quoted readiness reports sent to Gen. Abrams by commanders of various schools and training centers. The sensitive Army reports show that of 20 schools for such critically important skills as field artillery, infantry and aviation, 12 dipped to a C-4 readiness rating, the military's lowest.

Some of the lowest-ranked training sites include the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker; the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; and the Army Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Okla.

---

Back to the USS Cole

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • January 8, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-20011818455.htm

Petty Officer John Washak was told not to point his M-60 machine gun at another small boat approaching the USS Cole after the first boat had blown a hole in the side of the destroyer. "With blood still on my face," he told The Washington Post, he was commanded: "That's the rules of engagement - no shooting unless we're shot at," by a senior chief petty officer. Now both the Pentagon and the Navy are coming out with reports that show there were significant breaches in security in the region. The U.S. military needs rules of engagement that match security threats, rather than invite them.

According to the Navy investigation though, the Cole's security guards were prevented from firing warning shots to approaching boats because of orders from the Navy's 5th Fleet based in Bahrain. The reason? There were diplomatic concerns over what would happen if U.S. sailors fired any shots in an Arab port. There is something wrong when diplomatic handcuffs prevent the military from defending itself. Even so, the Navy commission found that the captain and crew had not followed existing security procedures the morning of the bombing, which could lead to punishment for the ship's captain, Commander Kirk S. Lippold. The Navy, however, doesn't believe any of these errors alone could have prevented the attack.

The Pentagon report, to be made public this week, highlights areas that could prevent such attacks in the future. In the Cole's case, the Pentagon commission reported, there was a communication breakdown between Mideast embassies and the region's U.S. military headquarters. The Cole did not even know that the U.S. embassy in Yemen was closed down at the time due to concerns about mob violence, The New York Times reported.

The Pentagon report proposed the military focus on predicting and preventing terrorist attacks and protecting military ships, troops and aircraft while en route. It also suggested increased support for intelligence gathering from human sources.

With a new Bush administration placing military support and preparedness as a top priority, there will be high expectations that the armed forces will be allowed to act in the U.S. security interest in the face of terrorist threats in the future. The rules of engagement in the case of the USS Cole reflect a level of trust in those who have proven themselves untrustworthy: Yemen was known to be a haven for terrorists, yet the Navy was stopping there in an effort to strengthen relations with the renegade state. Future rules of engagement in the region should reflect the reality of relations which may require - at the very least - heightened security in the form of firing an unwelcome warning shot or two. It may not seem politically correct, but then what is politically appropriate when you are faced with terrorists?

---

The USS Cole set-up

Washington Times
January 8, 2001
Adm. James Ace Lyons
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-20011818158.htm

An objective review of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack on the USS Cole would clearly highlight the fact that the Cole had fallen into a predictable pattern of operations. This conclusion is based upon the following facts as we now know them from the press and other accounts.

In January 1999, threat levels for Aden had been changed from medium to high and remain so to date. Therefore, "high threat" levels became business as usual overtime.

Approximately 25 fueling stops have been made by U.S. Navy ships to the port of Aden over the past two years. The pattern of their brief fuel stops had been well-established prior to the Cole's arrival.

Rules of engagement in effect were questionable, i.e. "Don't Shoot Until Shot At," a terrorist formula for success.

During the first few port visits, harbor security craft, with armed Yemeni forces, were utilized to patrol around the U.S. Navy ship. After the first two visits were successfully completed, the requirement for harbor security craft was canceled.

Twelve days' advance notice of the Cole's brief fuel stop was required by the government of Yemen. Information on the refueling was then passed, by the government and/or the U.S. Embassy, to the oil refinery and port authorities, as well as the ship chandler providing supplies and other items.

Terrorists had ample opportunity to rehearse the attack. We now know that a previous attack was attempted on USS The Sullivans prior to the attack on the Cole. That attempt was aborted because the small inflatable boat being utilized began to sink due to the excess weight of the explosives it was carrying.

The Yemeni government does not exercise the type of control over the port of Aden that should give anyone comfort. Compounding this is the fact that the host nation is responsible for port security. After the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing disaster, I formed an elite group of former SEAL Team Six professionals. They were called the Red Cell and were to act and think like terrorists to identify our glaring security weaknesses, which were many, and to recommend corrective action.

One of the first exercises conducted with the Red Cell in 1984 was exactly the scenario that was conducted by the terrorists against the Cole. We found out with the Red Cell, barring any human intelligence capability, that the only way to defeat such an attack was to utilize harbor security craft with highly-trained, armed personnel on board. Armed personnel aboard the target ship were clearly inadequate for a variety of reasons.

This terrorist operation was well-planned, rehearsed and probably known to a number of local Aden port authorities including, possibly, the harbor pilot that brought the Cole into port. At this point, it remains unclear who were the real sponsors of this attack. We had no clear indications of orders being given to the terrorist cell such as we did with the Beirut barracks bombing, in which we knew the orders came directly from the foreign ministry in Tehran to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. The U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, was previously head of the State Department's counter-terrorist division and as such should have been sensitive to the limited central government control over the port of Aden.

While the current Israeli-Palestine flare-up apparently was not a factor in the terrorist attack on the Cole, representations should have been made to the Yemeni government to increase the port security measures in effect in Aden for the Cole's visit. As noted, the host nation has the responsibility for port security. Of course, for that matter, one has to ask what action did the U.S. Central Command, or the commander, U.S. Fifth Fleet, take with regard to enhancing port security for the Cole's fuel stop in Aden? Based on current press reports, it appears no increased security measures were requested by any of the above players and the Cole's brief fuel stop was looked upon as "business as usual." Ergo, USS Cole, her officers and crew, were "set-up" through no fault of their own.

Three courses of action are clear from the terrorists' attack. First, I believe we need to re-establish the Red Cell. Second, we need to give clearer direction with regard to the rules of engagement for our commanding officers, then have the guts to back them up. Third, we should not be deterred by the threat of terrorism from future port visits to Aden or anywhere else in the world where our flag must be shown.

Adm. James Ace Lyons is the former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

--------

Veterans cross the Atlantic to retrieve a beloved ship
For them, it's a risk worth taking.

Philadelphia Inquirer
Monday, January 8, 2001
By Richard Lezin Jones INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
rjones@phillynews.com
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/01/08/front_page/LST08.htm

SHREVEPORT, La. - Like so many who would later fight alongside him and die alongside him, Joe Vondran was more boy than man when he first saw the ships that carried him to war half a century ago.

"I went down the shipyard," said Vondran, a South Philadelphia native who is now 81 but can still reach back through the decades to conjure up that day. ". . . To my surprise, they were all women. I said, 'Geez, I sure hope these girls know what they're doing.' They did. They made some good ships."

Those good ships were the LST - or Landing Ship, Tank - a hardworking, flat-bottomed, flat-bed vessel originally built to land tanks and troops on distant shores during World War II.

And while the boys of the LSTs became men who became warriors, their faithful ketches have been all but forgotten, lost to decommissions and lent to foreign navies, an ignominious end to a vessel that Winston Churchill once said was the linchpin to Allied success in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

But now some of the same men who were safely shepherded by the LST are returning the favor. This week, 29 veterans - average age 72 - of World War II, Vietnam and Korea are expected to conclude a perilous, two-month transatlantic voyage to bring one of those LSTs back home.

On Wednesday, the sailors - all old LST boys, including a couple of Vondran's buddies - are expected to make port in Mobile, Ala., where they hope the ship that they've been piloting, LST-325, can be turned into a museum and national monument to this lost, working-class fleet.

Despite having no funding except the money from their own bank accounts, and nothing more than some sea training that was good enough to win them a world war, the men of the 325 are expected to complete a 4,350-mile journey full of nostalgia and its share of danger.

The journey began Nov. 14 from Crete, when the veterans took custody of the LST-325 from the Greek government, which had borrowed the ship from the U.S. Navy in 1964. After an inspection, U.S. Coast Guard officials tried to dissuade the veterans from making the trip, questioning the seaworthiness of the 58-year-old vessel and citing the cold, bitter weather on the Atlantic in December.

But the sailors, members of the United States LST Association, wanted the ship returned in time for the group's annual meeting in Mobile this week and could hardly afford the estimated $600,000 it would have cost to have the ship towed from Greece to Alabama's gulf coast.

So, over vigorous protests from the Coast Guard, the sailors sailed on, using fuel donated by British Petroleum and Phillips 66.

"Yakkety, yakkety, yak," said Mike Gunjak, an LST vet and president of the Ohio-based USLST Association, as he recalled the warnings. "Me, with my big mouth, I said, 'To hell with the Coast Guard. Let's do it.' "

Gunjak did not make the trip, but 29 of his group's 9,000 members paid $2,000 each to cover meals and expenses in bringing the 325 home.

The crew has been in contact with other LST Association members by radio and satellite phone, and Gunjak's group has posted daily updates on the crew's progress on its Web site (www.uslst.org).

The journey is nearly over after about a decade and a half of planning. In the mid-1980s, the LST group first sought to take custody of the vessel, which at 328 feet is about as long as eight SEPTA buses lined up end to end.

In 1999, Congress passed a measure that essentially gave the group permission to take custody of the ship, which was used in the invasions of Sicily, Italy and Normandy. After a year of planning, the group finally did so in November.

"This has been a long time coming," Gunjak said.

And because of some initial hiccups, it was feared the journey home might take even longer. After leaving Greece, the 325 stopped in Gibraltar on Nov. 30 to make repairs. One shipmate became seriously ill during the trek to Gibraltar and died shortly after returning to the United States, which renewed some Coast Guard concerns about the health and age of the crew.

Nevertheless, the ship set sail again on Dec. 12, moving at a top speed of about 10 m.p.h. After a brief stop in the Bahamas on Jan. 4. to take on such essentials as lube oil and beer, the crew is on schedule for the Wednesday arrival in Mobile.

"I was thinking about this trip, but I didn't [go] and I'm kicking myself now," Vondran said, when asked about the ship's expected arrival. "These guys will go down in history."

Still, Vondran said he was proud to have played a role in a different history book. The Navy veteran, who lives in Drexel Hill, hails from 17th and Pollock Streets - in the old St. Richard's Parish in South Philadelphia. He was 23 years old when he left a desk job paying him $135 a week - "that was money in those days," he said - and volunteered to serve in the Navy back in 1943.

He shipped out on his LST, No. 932, soon after enlisting and spent a month at sea, winding down through the Panama Canal into the South Pacific, where he did most of his service.

"We went from the canal zone all the way to the Chinese wall," he said.

"I crossed the equator 12 times. Once, we rode out a typhoon on Okinawa for three days - 90-foot waves, hundred-mile-an-hour winds. And your LST is on top of the wave and then the wave disappears."

"It was tough," said the old motor machinist mate, second class. "But I'd do again. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Richard Lezin Jones' e-mail address is rjones@phillynews.com

---

Bush gets cheers in the barracks

USA Today
01/08/00
By Andrea Stone USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20010108/2970863s.htm

WASHINGTON -- For eight years, many in the military have felt discomfort when saluting their commander in chief. They regard President Clinton as a draft dodger whose moral authority has been lacking on everything from his push to let gays serve openly in the military to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Now, these Clinton critics are privately giving a 21-gun salute to their next boss, George W. Bush.

As a candidate, Bush promised to restore morale and modernize the armed forces, which military officers say are stretched thin after deep cutbacks and several peacekeeping missions.

As president-elect, Bush, a neophyte in military affairs, has surrounded himself with old Pentagon hands, including Vice President-elect Cheney, a former Defense secretary, and Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last month, Bush named Donald Rumsfeld to return for a second stint as Defense secretary. Rumsfeld served in the post in the 1970s.

Today, Bush and his defense team meet in Austin, Texas, with members of Congress to discuss improving readiness and morale.

Despite the high expectations military personnel have for his presidency, Bush might find he can't deliver the ambitious agenda he has promised them. His plans to build an expensive missile-defense shield, modernize weapons and reduce missions overseas are threatened by steep costs, opposition from other nations and a Congress that might balk at his wish list.

Even so, military people will feel good about a Bush presidency, says former Marine Corps commandant Charles Krulak, one of dozens of retired senior officers who endorsed Bush during the campaign. ''Here at least is a man who is coming in with a baseline plan, who sees the military as one of the elements of national power and not the element of national power.''

Military people are pleased that Bush has made weapons modernization a central goal, and they cheer his campaign vow to review all ''open-ended'' overseas missions with an eye to scaling back or ending some.

By contrast, Al Gore seldom talked about defense in his stump speech. But when he did, the vice president made it clear that he not only agreed with Clinton's strategy but also might be open to new humanitarian missions.

''One of the biggest points in Bush's favor is that he's not Gore,'' says Ken Allard, a retired Army intelligence officer.

That view is supported by a survey conducted in 1999 by a consortium of North Carolina universities. It found that Republicans outnumber Democrats 8-to-1 among officers and that military leaders in the last 25 years have ''largely abandoned political neutrality,'' which used to be a hallmark of the armed forces.

A separate survey of 12,000 service members released a year ago by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found ''profound stress'' among troops. When asked whether their unit had high morale, only 26% agreed.

''If there is such a thing as living on borrowed time, the armed forces of the United States are doing that,'' former Defense secretary James Schlesinger said at a recent Heritage Foundation forum. Other former and current Pentagon officials say the current annual military budget of $305 billion needs to increase by as much as $100 billion a year to maintain current operations and replace aging Reagan-era aircraft, ships and equipment. Pentagon critics, however, say such huge sums are unnecessary in the post-Cold War era.

One of the biggest controversies will be over the proposed national missile-defense system. By nominating Rumsfeld, who led a commission that warned of growing missile threats from North Korea and Iraq, Bush has underscored his determination to develop a missile shield.

Bush's ambitious goal of basing interceptors in space and on land and sea would dwarf in scope and cost the $60 billion land-only system envisioned by Clinton. Yet during the campaign, Bush proposed increasing spending by only $5 billion a year for nine years. ''That's 'decimal dust,' as they like to say over at the Pentagon,'' says James Lindsay, a Brookings Institution analyst. ''When you campaign, you live in the world of the free lunch. When you govern, you live in the world of the trade-off.''

Bush's promises to cut taxes by $1.6 trillion over 10 years, create Social Security private investment accounts and boost spending for education could make it tough to expand the Pentagon budget.

Bush might try to make room for his new initiatives by cutting other Pentagon programs, such as killing the Abrams tank as part of his plan to make forces lighter and more lethal. But canceling expensive weapons programs ''could cause a donnybrook with both the military and Capitol Hill,'' Lindsay says.

Bush caused a minor stir during the campaign when his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said U.S. troops should withdraw from Bosnia and Kosovo and leave peacekeeping there to the Europeans. That alarmed allies, who said such a move could divide NATO.

The Bush campaign quickly backed down, sending assurances that there would be no unilateral withdrawals from the Balkans.

But Bush has not retreated from his promise to halt ''vague, aimless and endless deployments'' overseas. Military analysts say he will have his work cut out for him. The Army, for instance, recently announced unit rotations for Bosnia and Kosovo through May 2005.

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Dr. Sadek Hilal, Pioneer in Detecting Brain Diseases, Dies at 70

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By WOLFGANG SAXON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/national/08HILA.html

Dr. Sadek K. Hilal, a Columbia University radiologist who helped advance the science of imaging technology, died Dec. 24 at his home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. He was 70.

Dr. Hilal suffered a stroke, his family said.

From 1979 until he took emeritus status four years ago, he directed Columbia's division of radiology and was a professor of radiology and neurological surgery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. At his death he was president of the International Society of Neuroradiology, a position he held since 1998.

Dr. Hilal was known for refining the technology to treat cerebral vascular disease, and he was a pioneer in developing a treatment for tumors deep in the brain.

In 1983, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, he unveiled a fourth- generation nuclear magnetic resonance scanner, which diagnosed strokes and other disorders by pinpointing dead or dying tissues well inside the body.

"Never before," he said at the introduction, "have we been able to look inside the human body with such detail and clarity."

He wrote about 240 papers and eight books. He held patents on three of his scientific innovations in tomography and imaging technology.

Sadek Kamil Hilal was born in Cairo and received his medical degree at the University of Cairo in 1955. He arrived in this country two years later and earned a doctorate in radiology at the University of Minnesota in 1962.

Even his thesis, "The Measurement of Blood Flow by Radiologic Technique," became one of the most frequently cited references in the field, according to the journal Radiology. Columbia recruited him in 1963 as an assistant professor and assisting attending radiologist.

Dr. Hilal's reputation soon grew with his introduction of a microdensitometer, which gauged the density of the cerebral arteries and allowed doctors to measure the blood flow in the brain.

He is survived by his wife of 36 years, Cynthia Tutundgy Hilal; three sons, Dr. Peter, Paul and Philip, all of Manhattan; a daughter, Dr. Diane Hilal Campo of Ridgewood, N.J.; and three granddaughters.

Among Dr. Hilal's notable patients was Edward I. Koch, who was mayor of New York when he underwent a magnetic resonance imaging scan, or M.R.I., in 1987. Dr. Hilal found what he described as a "tiny, trivial stroke."

Mr. Koch later discussed his experience at some length in a 1987 column in Newsday called "My Ordeal."

"The doctor in charge of the machine, who has in fact perfected it and must be a genius, is Dr. Sadek Hilal," Mr. Koch wrote. "I was helped out of the chair by Dr. Hilal, and he said to me: `Eddie, don't worry. You will be O.K.' I knew that I would be and I knew I was in special hands."

-------- environment

When the G.O.P. Was Green

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By WILLIAM CRONON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/opinion/08CRON.html

MADISON, Wis. - The past week has seen stark reminders of just how much the Democratic and Republican parties differ on environmental policy.

As President-elect George W. Bush nominated cabinet secretaries committed to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and promoting development on public lands, President Clinton issued an order last Friday putting nearly one-third of national forest land off limits to road building and logging and preserving millions of acres in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.

What is odd about this stark contrast is that no one seems surprised by it. Yet Republican hostility to environmental protection is quite a recent development. Indeed, until the 1980's, Republicans could claim with considerable justification that their party's environmental record was no less distinguished than that of the Democrats.

After all, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the greatest Republican presidents, launched conservation as a national political movement. Roosevelt set aside the first national monuments and wildlife refuges. In 1906, Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, which has enabled Mr. Clinton to protect wild lands as national monuments (and which Republican congressmen would like to radically weaken for that reason). Among the places Teddy Roosevelt protected by the Antiquities Act was no less a national treasure than the Grand Canyon.

Roosevelt was by no means the only Republican president eager to protect America's lands and resources. Although this is not the way we remember him, Herbert Hoover was a dedicated conservationist. And we should not forget that Dwight Eisenhower set aside lands on the North Slope of Alaska, protecting one of the last great caribou herds on earth. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a Republican creation, which makes the Republican eagerness to drill it all the more distressing.

Perhaps the most surprising Republican environmental legacy is that left by Richard Nixon. Nixon's personal commitment to conservation was not especially strong, and his policies can be mainly ascribed to his intense competition with two Democratic presidential contenders in the Senate - Henry Jackson and Edmund Muskie - who were both strongly pro-environment.

Nonetheless, many of the laws that have defined modern American environmental policy - the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the National Environmental Policy Act, even the Endangered Species Act - were signed by Nixon with strong bipartisan support. And we owe the existence of the Environmental Protection Agency to Nixon's genuine enthusiasm for government reorganization.

History's lesson is that for most of the 20th century, conservation enjoyed the support of both parties. Although they often approached the issue in different ways and with different emphases, Democrats and Republicans agreed that conserving natural resources, reducing pollution and preserving wild lands were clearly in the national interest. Strange as it may seem today, the parties even competed over which was more committed to environmental protection.

The great sea change in Republican policies toward the environment did not come until the election of Ronald Reagan. By 1980, conservatives in the party had begun their attack on big government as way to reduce the scope of federal power.

Environmental protection during the 1960's and 1970's had become associated with federal regulation - in no small measure because of bipartisan legislation passed during the Nixon years. And so environmental protection was demonized as a symbol of government usurpation of liberty and property, especially among those in the West who had long chafed at federal ownership of western land.

Although opposition to environmental protection seemed to make good sense as part of the conservative assault on government regulations, this stance has been a political loser for the Republican party. Few features of Republican politics have provoked more backlash, or lost more potential votes, than the party's anti-environmental stance. James Watt and Anne Burford were disasters for the first Reagan administration. And Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" came to grief in good measure because most Americans continue to believe that protecting the environment is a good thing.

There are two distinct Republican traditions regarding environmental protection. The more recent one is that people should be able to do pretty much what they please with natural resources and wild lands without government interference. Although this tradition plays well in certain western states - which opposed even Teddy Roosevelt's policies - anti-environmentalism does not represent the broad center of American popular opinion.

It is in fact the second, older, Republican tradition that is more in tune with public sentiment. Even conservatives who favor limited state power understand that government has an appropriate role to play in domains that the private sector does not handle well on its own. One of these is national defense. Another is conservation. Honoring our heritage by preserving public lands, remembering the deep spiritual ties to the land that led the United States to be the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks - what actions could more conservative than these?

George W. Bush has the opportunity to reinvigorate the Republican legacy of conservation. His party's support for environmental protection would surely be good for the environment - and good politics for the Republicans as well.

William Cronon is an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

---

Nearing a Forest Legacy

New York Times
January 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/opinion/08MON1.html

President Clinton is moving briskly in his final weeks to add to his already admirable record as an environmentalist. On Friday came what may be his biggest conservation achievement, an order putting nearly one-third of the nation's forest land permanently off limits to road-building and logging.

The plan has provoked angry criticism from the timber, oil and gas interests and their reliable allies in Congress and the Western statehouses - the same people who have challenged most of Mr. Clinton's wilderness initiatives over the last eight years. These interests have regularly been on the losing end, and for all their bluster, they must still navigate a formidable coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans on this and every other environmental issue. But because these same interests will soon have a friend in the White House, the environmentalists must gird for prolonged battle.

Under Mr. Clinton's plan, which was revealed in broad outline in November, 58.5 million acres of the national forests would be protected from new road-building and commercial logging - including 9.3 million acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, much prized by environmentalists for its old- growth trees. The big difference between the earlier plan and the final version concerns the Tongass, which is also coveted by loggers.

The original plan would have shut down new road-building in all other national forests in two months, but would have allowed new roads to be built in the Tongass until 2004. Alaska's Congressional delegation argued that a delay was needed to give southeast Alaska's economy time to adjust to lower levels of logging. Environmentalists argued that delay would encourage furious road-building and compromise the biological integrity of the forest. On this crucial point, Mr. Clinton sided with the environmentalists.

The plan cannot become law for 60 days. This gives its opponents a window of opportunity. President-elect George W. Bush has complained that the new rules were devised without adequate consultation with the American people. This will be a hard case to make in Congress and the courts. The administration appears to have gone strictly by the book, holding a year of public hearings and taking 1.5 million written comments. Opponents will also argue that the rule will cripple the timber, oil and gas companies. That will be an even harder case to make. The designated roadless areas contain less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the nation's timber, and a tinier fraction of its oil and gas reserves.

The forest plan could have implications for another important conservation decision - also involving Alaska - confronting the president. That is whether to issue a last-minute order declaring the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a national monument. Mr. Bush has said that he wants to open the plain to oil drilling. Environmentalists argue that by giving the area monument status, Mr. Clinton would also be giving it an extra layer of protection.

But some senior officials are unconvinced that monument designation is necessary or tactically sound. For one thing, it would not enhance the legal protection the refuge already has. Under a 1980 law, drilling cannot occur in the refuge without explicit Congressional approval. But just as Congress can choose to open the refuge to drilling, so too can it overturn a monument designation.

Moreover, even though there is substantial opposition to drilling in the refuge among moderate Republicans, a last-minute designation could persuade Republican leaders to insist on party discipline to rebuke an outgoing president for a perceived attempt to tie the hands of an incoming president. No less a friend of the refuge than Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who once said that drilling in the refuge would be as grave an insult to nature as building hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, worries that monument designation at this stage could invite a backlash against other vital elements of Mr. Clinton's conservation strategy - including the new forest plan.

This page opposed drilling in the refuge when Mr. Bush's father proposed it in 1989. It would destroy a pristine area that nurtures a breathtaking variety of wildlife while yielding only six months' worth of economically recoverable oil. But for tactical reasons, Mr. Clinton may be justified in not pushing for monument status, however attractive as a matter of principle. In any case, Americans are simply not going to endorse a plan that spoils the refuge to obtain a trivial amount of oil.

---

Babbitt warns GOP on environment

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 07:48 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-01-08-babbit.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Overturning environmental protections imposed by the Clinton administration would cost Republicans a lot of public support, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt told The Associated Press as opponents made plans to reverse his initiatives.

President-elect Bush has criticized actions by President Clinton that restrict timber cutting, oil drilling and mining on federal land, and some Western Republicans are urging him to reverse several of those decisions.

''I think that attempts to undo the gains of the last eight years are going to be very costly, because there's an enormous amount of public support,'' Babbitt said in an interview shortly before leaving the job he has held for eight years. Rep. Jim Hansen, the Utah Republican who now chairs the House Resources Committee, wrote Bush an eight-page letter last month outlining ways to reverse several Clinton environmental regulations. Gale Norton, Bush's choice to replace Babbitt, once worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has sued Babbitt repeatedly to try to do the same.

Babbitt declined to criticize Norton, but did denounce an idea Norton and Hansen have supported: compensating property owners when environmental regulations stop them from developing their land.

''The radical property rights crowd are anarchists at heart, and I don't believe the American people will buy into that,'' Babbitt said in the interview last week.

Hansen and other Republicans have blocked many Clinton administration environmental initiatives, such as raising grazing fees and royalties for minerals dug from federal land. Babbitt said he is proud that the administration, through regulations, has accomplished many of the goals blocked by Congress, something that enraged Republicans.

''Here we are, having achieved 80% of what was sought in legislation, by administrative rule,'' said Babbitt, who has been Interior secretary since the start of the Clinton administration.

Most galling to Western Republicans has been Clinton's use of the 1906 Antiquities Act to create and expand national monuments, further restricting development on federal land. On Babbitt's recommendation, Clinton has created or expanded 13 national monuments, most of them in the West.

Clinton's creation of monuments also prodded Congress into adding protection to federal tracts in Colorado, Oregon, California and Arizona in the past two years.

Babbitt on Monday recommended new monuments in Arizona and New Mexico. Last month, he suggested five new or expanded monuments in Montana, California and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Four of the already created monuments are in Arizona, where Babbitt grew up and served as governor from 1978 to 1987. That blunted criticism that the actions were taken by Washington bureaucrats unfamiliar with the areas, Babbitt said.

''I know every inch of land and every third person in Arizona,'' Babbitt boasted.

After he leaves office Jan. 20, Babbitt plans to write a book and continue to speak out on environmental issues. He said he plans to ''spend a lot of time fighting'' Bush's proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and natural gas drilling.

Although some have urged Babbitt to head a conservation group or take a university job, he said he would not do so. He said he also would not become a lobbyist, but might affiliate with a law firm. Another political run is out of the question, he said.

''I will be spending a lot of time writing and speaking, but I am not seeking institutional affiliation,'' Babbitt said. ''I will be a private citizen. I am not for hire.''

---------

USA Today
01/01/08
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maine

Warren - State environmental officials are threatening to sue a company that planned to build a rifle range using bales of polyester waste. The state says Steamship Navigation violated its license after finding erosion problems and a fire hazard at the site. The company says it's trying to resolve the state's concerns.

South Carolina

Hilton Head Island - Conservation groups are calling on landowners to keep development from overrunning Beaufort County. Property values have risen, making it difficult for nonprofit groups to purchase land, the Beaufort County Open Land Trust said. Landowners are being asked to declare their properties conservation easements. The country has about 150,000 undeveloped acres.

---

Norton critics reject Watt comparison

Washington Times
January 8, 2001
By Valerie Richardson
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200118222715.htm

DENVER - When asked to describe Gale A. Norton, President-elect George W. Bush's nominee for interior secretary, Coloradans who have worked with her over the past decade tend to use words like "intelligent," "fair," "pleasant" and "amiable."

And those are her critics. "We can talk to Gale Norton, that's true," acknowledged Tina Arapkiles, the Sierra Club's southwest regional representative in Boulder. "She's a very intelligent person, so the dialogue would be there. . . . She was always willing to discuss things with us."

So when the national Sierra Club denounced her last week as "James Watt in a skirt," vowing to fight her nomination to the bitter end, even Coloradans on the other side of the political fence squirmed at the comparison with President Reagan's first interior secretary. "It's not fair to say she's the same as James Watt. She's not," said Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli, who led the Colorado Democratic Party in 1984.

As the state's first female attorney general, a post she held from 1991 to 1999, Mrs. Norton earned a reputation as a fair-minded administrator who wasn't afraid to go after polluters, he said.

"She managed the attorney general's office without regard to political differences," Mr. Ciruli said. "There were Democrats there [when she took office] and she didn't fire them. She was tough on businesses that Republicans might normally favor, like the insurance industry, and on the Rocky Flats cleanup."

If her foes were made uncomfortable by attempts to tar her with the Watt label, her supporters were flabbergasted.

"It's very entertaining to see those kinds of attacks on her because they're attacking one of the best friends the environment ever had in Colorado," said Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank in Golden on whose board of trustees Mrs. Norton serves.

"It shows the hard-core environmental lobby doesn't know what it's talking about," he said.

Mr. Caldara argued that Mrs. Norton had used her office to pursue environmental violators in high-profile cases such as the cleanup efforts at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Rocky Flats and the Summitville mine.

"These are issues that as attorney general she could have easily avoided, but she stepped up and worked for Colorado," he said. "Few people have the skill Gale does to bring people together and find common ground."

So far, her reputation for cooperation hasn't scored her many points with liberal environmental groups. Colorado Public Interest Research Group (CoPIRG) is debating whether to oppose her nomination. "We're not impressed with her environmental enforcement record," said field director Robin Hubbard.

Still, even CoPIRG isn't willing to repeat the Watt smear. "People who have worked with her say she's amiable and bright, but has an extreme anti-environmental philosophy," said Miss Hubbard. "She's pleasant, but it's not productive working with her."

Mrs. Norton has declined to comment before her nomination hearing, said her spokeswoman, Jeanie Mamo. She did point out, however, that Mrs. Norton and Mr. Watt never worked at the department together: Mrs. Norton served as associate solicitor from 1985 to 1987 under Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, who took over after Mr. Watt resigned in 1983.

Her association with Mr. Watt dates back to 1978, when he hired her as a staff lawyer at the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation. She was fresh out of law school, and it was her first job.

"She's somewhat surprised by all this, considering it happened 20 years ago," Miss Mamo said.

More relevant than her association with Mr. Watt is Mrs. Norton's stance on oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), say some environmentalists. Mrs. Norton favors oil exploration in parts of the refuge, as does Mr. Bush, a position strongly opposed by many environmental groups.

For some, fighting Mrs. Norton's nomination is a way of bringing national attention to the issue. "Perhaps it's to let her know that drilling in the ANWR is not a good idea, and that this is a very serious issue," said Miss Arapkiles of the Sierra Club.

Despite the uproar over her nomination among green groups, predictions are that she will win Senate approval. "I do not anticipate any serious problems with her confirmation," Sen. Frank H. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, said in a statement last week. "President-elect Bush has made a great choice, and I am confident the Senate will concur."

Mr. Ciruli agreed. "I'd be surprised if she's not able to answer the questions and cite the examples from her real record that will undermine this obviously very simple-minded assault saying she's a clone of Watt," he said.

-------- police

New York Times
January 8, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/nyregion/08MBRF.html?pagewanted=all

RENTON: RACIAL PROFILING LEGISLATION State lawmakers investigating racial profiling are preparing legislation to ensure that police officers who violate a driver's civil rights face state criminal charges. Senate Judiciary Committee members will draft that legislation and continue with plans for public hearings on racial profiling and state police reforms. Committee members are working with Michael Chertoff, a former United States attorney, on the proposals. (AP)

---

Anti-cop lawmaker might resign

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 04:29 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nlead.htm

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - A freshman state lawmaker who stunned his constituents by revealing his support for the killing of police officers said Monday that he would resign under certain conditions.

Republican Tom Alciere, 41, said he would step down if 11 lawmakers agree to sponsor his bills and get them as far as a vote by the full New Hampshire House.

However, he reserved the right to run in the special election that would be needed to fill his Nashua seat.

''Should I do so, the voters then will have an opportunity to confirm what they said last November - in which case I shall return - or to retract what they said, in which case I can move on to bigger and better things and the media will have to find something newsworthy on which to report,'' Alciere said at a news conference.

He gave no reason for his decision. Legislative leaders were not impressed.

''Gosh, that's making a deal with the devil,'' said House Democratic Leader Peter Burling. A spokeswoman for Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, also a Democrat, said Alciere misled voters and should resign.

Alciere's bills propose drug legalization, barring involuntary commitments to mental institutions and the replacement of public schools with online learning. House spokeswoman Susan Wood said it may be too late to switch sponsors.

Alciere did not express his anti-police views during the campaign, which he won by 55 votes. Late last month, a newspaper connected him with hundreds of anti-police messages on Internet discussion groups.

''There is nothing wrong with slaughtering a cop. Just throw the carcass into the Dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Cops are nothing but vicious, brutal thugs anyway,'' said one message that Alciere acknowledged writing.

He has said his anger stems from reading and watching television about police misconduct, and his belief that many of the laws the police enforce are unjust. ''I was doing it to have fun,'' he said last week. ''It's fun to get them going, to post things just to ruffle people's feathers.''

During his campaign, he promised simply to oppose any bills that infringe on freedom. State GOP Chairman Steve Duprey later called on Alciere to renounce his views or resign, but the lawmaker stood his ground. The married father of one who inspects circuit boards at a factory denied misleading anyone, saying no one asked about his views.

-------- terrorism

U.S. Embassy in Rome Not Ready to Reopen

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/world/08ITAL.html

ROME, Jan. 7 - The American embassy will remain closed Monday morning after a security threat that prompted the embassy to close abruptly on Friday.

"We will meet tomorrow to evaluate the situation and determine whether to open Monday afternoon or sometime later in the week," Robert J. Callahan, an embassy spokesman, said tonight.

The embassy, which employs a staff of 300 Americans and Italians, has requested more protection from the Italian government after American officials received on Friday what Mr. Callahan described as "credible information of a specific threat." American officials in Rome and Washington have not divulged the nature of the threat but officials in Washington have said that American intelligence was recently told of a threat made by Islamic terrorists against American interests here and those of at least one other country.

Italian newspapers and television reported that the United States had reports that a three-person team of Algerian terrorists with links to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile believed to be responsible for financing a network of Islamic terrorists, was planning a suicide bomb attack on the embassy. Italian security officials did not confirm those reports.

When asked to respond to the Italian reports, P. J. Crowley, the White House spokesman on security matters, said today in Washington that he could not comment on the specific nature of the threats.

Italian authorities suspect that some Muslim groups operating on Italian soil may be providing logistical support to Islamic networks with ties to Mr. bin Laden, but there have been no recent arrests indicating a direct link.

American military posts in Italy have been on heightened alert for terrorist attacks since mid-December. Following intelligence reports of a threat to American interests last month, the aircraft carrier Truman canceled a stop in Naples.

---

U.S. embassy in Rome reopens

USA Today
01/08/01- Updated 04:36 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwssun02.htm

ROME (AP) - The U.S. Embassy in Rome reopened on Monday, three days after it was abruptly closed for a terrorist threat.

''After a review of our security posture, the U.S. Embassy in Rome has decided to open to the public,'' a statement said.

On Friday, the embassy sent its employees home without warning due to what U.S. officials only described as a security concern. They refused to discuss the nature of the threat, but Italian news reports said that a team of three Algerians, including a suicide bomber, planned to attack the embassy on Friday.

The reports linked the attackers to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire widely blamed for financing a network of Islamic terrorists. Bin Laden is blamed for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people, and for the suicide bombing of an American warship in Yemen in October, when 17 sailors lost their lives.

American intelligence had suggested before Christmas that bin Laden was planning to hit U.S. targets worldwide at the beginning of the year.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome employs 300 people and is in the heart of the city, on the famous Via Veneto.

It was the first security closure in a decade at the embassy, which shut its doors in 1991 at the outset of the Gulf War, as did many other U.S. embassies worldwide.

Over the weekend, security was also stepped up at U.S. consulates and at U.S. and NATO military bases across Italy.

---

Morrock News, Monday, Jan. 8, 2001
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

U.S. REOPENS EMBASSY IN ROME: After a three-day shutdown of the U.S. embassy in Rome, sparked by reports that three Algerians were planned a suicide bombing, the U.S. reopened the embassy on Monday, while keeping the embassy on heightened security. Security was also ratcheted up at U.S. consulates in Florence, Naples and Milan and at U.S. military facilities on Italian bases.

-------- activists

Getting the Message From 'Eco-Terrorists'

New York Times
January 8, 2001
By DAN BARRY and AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/nyregion/08ECCO.html?pagewanted=all

MOUNT SINAI, N.Y., Jan. 5 - The arson committed at the upscale subdivision being built on old farmland here, just off Route 25A in eastern Long Island, will never serve as a sophisticated model for the crime. The fires that torched three nearly completed houses were all ignited by birthday candles that had been attached to the handles of plastic jugs filled with gasoline.

And the messages spray-painted on another house in the subdivision that snowy, Dec. 30 morning did not seem particularly auspicious either: "ELF" "Stop Urban Sprawl." "If You Build It We Will Burn It." And, finally, "Burn the Rich."

But if the ELF acronym is mostly unfamiliar on the East Coast, it has long been a reference point in the Pacific Northwest for illegal and extreme environmental activism that law enforcement officials call eco-terrorism. It stands for Earth Liberation Front, a movement structured so loosely that trying to get a handle on it is like trying to grab a fistful of water.

For several years the people who claim allegiance to the group ELF and its partner in activism, the Animal Liberation Front, have taken responsibility for an underground campaign of destruction and fire against those they see as the earth's enemies: lumber and construction industries, mink and fox farmers, bioengineering companies and laboratories that do tests on animals. For ELF and ALF, they all represent base capitalism.

With a lanky vegan in Portland, Ore., acting as its publicist - although he says he merely shares the information forwarded to him through means he declines to reveal - the group boasts of what it considers to be nonviolent destruction, and provides a running cost estimate of the damage wrought, now at nearly $37 million. That total includes the $80,000 in damage done in Mount Sinai, and some big-ticket destruction as well, including the $12 million arson at a new ski resort in Vail, Colo., in 1998, and the $1 million arson at a lumber company's office in Monmouth, Ore., in 1999.

Although ELF has taken credit for acts of destruction elsewhere in the country, from the burning of a luxury home on the lip of a national forest in Indiana to the sabotage of a highway construction site in Louisiana, it has largely been associated with the West. But the Mount Sinai fires, along with several smaller fires last month and the uprooting of a cornfield at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last summer, have brought its message and notoriety to the quickly vanishing farmlands of Long Island and to the media market of New York.

The day after the Mount Sinai fires, ELF issued a news release that included a local angle. It said the arson, for which it took full responsibility, was partly done to show support for Andrew Stepanian, an animal-rights activist from the affluent Long Island community of Lloyd Neck. Mr. Stepanian was recently convicted of throwing a brick through the display windows of a fur store in Huntington.

This morning, just before he was sentenced to 90 days in jail in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, Mr. Stepanian and about two dozen supporters stood outside the courtroom and expressed admiration for the ideology of ELF They repeated the group's slogans and railed against "urban sprawl," but none admitted to being an "elf," as ELF members like to refer to themselves.

"I think what they did is a wonderful thing," said Mr. Stepanian, 22. But, he added, "we have no idea who they are."

Neither, it seems, do the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Forest Service or any of the other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that have tried for several years to stop the movement and arrest the masterminds - that is, if there are masterminds.

"Absolutely, there's frustration," said Kevin Favreau, the F.B.I.'s domestic-terrorism supervisor in Portland, which comes as close as anyplace to being the base of the amorphous group. "But people always said the F.B.I. wouldn't infiltrate the Mafia, and we did. They said we wouldn't infiltrate the K.G.B., and we did. Is it harder than your average criminal group? Yes, it is. It's not a group you can put your fingers on."

Then again, he added, "Maybe law enforcement will start getting lucky."

But Craig Rosebraugh, the publicist in Portland, said he doubted that would happen. "There's no central leadership where they can go and knock off the top guy and it will be defunct," he said. "It operates on an ideology."

He described the movement as a series of cells across the country with no chain of command and no membership roll, a structure that supporters liken to that of the French Resistance and the African National Congress. There is only a shared philosophy, he said, in taking aim at "anyone who is destroying the environment for the sake of profit."

Because he is the spokesman for ELF, Mr. Rosebraugh's pale, bespectacled face is the only one attached to the movement, even though he says he is a supporter but not a member. As a result, federal officials have raided his home, seized his computer and placed him before a grand jury investigating ELF and ALF activities. Simply put, they want to know the identities of those who keep him abreast of what ELF is doing, and the means by which they do so.

Mr. Rosebraugh, 28, has refused to cooperate with the authorities, while at the same time cultivating an air of mystery about himself and the movement. When asked how he receives the information he disseminates, he said, "I never disclose the type of communication." And when asked whether a reporter could talk to active members, he said: "The people don't want to be known to the public. They want to stay free to continue doing the action."

The movement known as the Earth Liberation Front began at a gathering of members belonging to Earth First, an environmental group, in England in the early 1990's. Some people "thought that the movement didn't go far enough, that it didn't take radical or strong enough actions," said Jim Flynn, who works for the Earth First Journal. So they began ELF, which for a while did little more than encourage people to celebrate Halloween by vandalizing bulldozers and mining equipment.

By 1997, ELF had established a presence in the United States, and formed an alliance with the Animal Liberation Front. In November of that year, with Mr. Rosebraugh as its conduit, the alliance announced that it had freed 600 wild horses and burros from a corral in Burns, Ore., and then had torched an adjacent building.

But the movement's arson attack in Vail, in October 1998, earned it the full attention of the country - and of the F.B.I. A series of early-morning fires destroyed several buildings of a ski-lift operation, causing more than $12 million in damage in what remains the country's most costly act of eco-terrorism. Mr. Rosebraugh said at the time that the development was encroaching on a habitat for lynx, adding of the arson, "As long as it doesn't harm human lives, we approve."

They claimed responsibility, and law enforcement agencies generally agreed, for a series of other actions: In Hermansville, Mich., holes were cut in the fence of a mink ranch, freeing about 5,000 mink. In Monmouth, Ore., offices of the Boise Cascade Corporation lumber company were destroyed. In Lansing, Mich., the genetic engineering research offices at Michigan State University were trashed and burned. In Niwot, Colo., a fire was set to a $2.4 million home under construction.

For all the emphasis that Mr. Rosebraugh gives to the loose, cell-like structure of ELF, there is a band of investigators who suspect that the movement has a small cohesive unit.

"From the activity that we've observed here, it appears that the core group of ELF is very small," said Bill Wasley, the director of law enforcement for the United States Forest Service, which is investigating the extensive vandalism done to its biotechnology research station in Rhinelander, Wis., last year. "They will attract local folks for specific activities and then go away. But it's very difficult to identify the total identity of the group."

Ron Arnold, the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a nonprofit agency in Bellevue, Wash., said that after researching ELF, he believes it operates as a "nomadic action group." For example, he said, a car with a couple of ELF members might leave Spokane, Wash., and drive across the country, stopping to drop off and pick up sympathizers along the way.

"You'll see these little crimes, bing-bing-bing, like ripples in a pond," he said. "This is a pattern we've seen time and again."

Teresa Platt, the director of the Fur Commission USA, which represents the interests of mink and fox farmers, generally agreed. "I don't think it's a large group; I think it's very mobile," she said. "The pattern is that it will quiet down in New York, and you will forget, and you will lose your political momentum. If they kept it up, your city wouldn't stand for it. But they move on."

Mr. Favreau, of the F.B.I. office in Portland, said the government's concern went beyond the damage done to buildings; it has to do with the dynamics of extremist organizations and the types of people they may attract. For example, he said, in 1999 some animal rights extremists, though not linked to the ALF, mailed razor-rigged letters, designed to cut fingers, to fur industry officials and scientists conducting experiments with animals.

"You start out with a large group that believes the same thing, and then it gets smaller and smaller and smaller," he said. "Ultimately, the type of thing we're trying to avoid is the lone guy who takes it to the furthest extreme."

But Mr. Rosebraugh maintained that ELF remains committed to nonviolence. "In the history of ELF, both in the United States and abroad, there have been no injuries to human life," he said. "The people take precautions so that no one gets hurt and their actions speak for themselves."

In fact, in a news release that immediately followed the fires here in Mount Sinai, the arsonists said they had made sure that no one was in the houses at the time the fires were set, and had even moved a propane tank out of the way. After apologizing for disrupting the firefighters' sleep, they added, "We encourage all citizens to donate generous contributions this year to your local volunteer firefighters."

Those sentiments did little to ease the mind of an assistant fire chief. "What if a fireman fell through the floor?" he asked. "There are just a multitude of ways that someone can get hurt like this."

The firefighter insisted on anonymity out of concern for his safety, explaining, "I don't know who these people are and how radical they are."

---

New group logical step for Turner

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Don Melvin - Staff
Monday, January 8, 2001
http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/monday/news_a39506032233b13c00f8.html

When Ted Turner announces this morning he is creating yet another nonprofit organization --- this one to fight nuclear proliferation around the world --- there may be a tendency by some observers to talk about Turner's unpredictability.

Oh, that wacky Ted. What will he think of next?

But with regard to the public issues closest to his heart, Turner has been nothing if not utterly predictable. For years, the favorite causes of this lifelong outdoorsman, rancher and former championship yachtsman have been environmental protection, population control and reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, power and waste.

Turner, the Atlanta billionaire who founded CNN, and former Sen. Sam Nunn will announce today in Washington the formation of an organization dedicated to reducing nuclear dangers worldwide.

Turner and Nunn will be the organization's co-chairmen, and Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will be the chief executive officer. Turner will supply the money --- at least $50 million a year for five years.

Turner's charitable giving attracted worldwide attention in 1997, when he announced he was donating $1 billion over 10 years to United Nations projects. Today's announcement seems likely to draw similar attention to Turner's concern over nuclear dangers.

But neither his charitable giving nor his nuclear worries are new. Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, who is president of the U.N. Foundation that disburses Turner's $1 billion gift, said Turner has been talking about nuclear dangers for nearly 20 years.

Given that commitment, it would be ridiculous to suggest Turner is trying to buy a reputation or acquire nobility, Wirth said. "The persistent driving forces are the idealism and the vision," he said.

Maura Donlan, a spokeswoman for Turner, agreed.

"I definitely don't think that Ted cares what people think," Donlan said. "He genuinely cares about these issues. And he thinks about them all the time."

Turner's giving stretches back at least to 1984, when he donated a billboard to promote an art exhibit by 350 Fulton County public school students.

He has launched several nonprofit ventures since. Among the more prominent are:

The Turner Foundation, which gives millions of dollars to domestic environmental causes, with some funds focused in states where Turner owns property.

The Turner Endangered Species Fund, which is dedicated, its Web site says, to "ensuring biodiversity by preserving the existence of imperiled species and their habitats" --- primarily on land Turner owns.

The U.N. Foundation, which aims to grant $100 million a year for 10 years to U.N. projects, primarily in population control, health and the environment.

And now the new organization, whose name will presumably be unveiled today, which will receive at least $250 million of Turner's wealth.

It is difficult to say whether any single moment awakened Turner to the potential danger of nuclear arms. Turner has known former President Jimmy Carter since Carter's days as Georgia's governor, and Carter sometimes vacations on Turner's ranches.

"They've had any number of conversations over the years about their mutual interest in human development projects," said Carrie Harmon, a spokeswoman for the former president. It would not be a stretch, Harmon said, to conclude that Carter has had an influence on Turner's thinking.

But it is known that Turner also was present at a seminar in January 1984 when Adm. Bobby Inman, the former deputy director of the CIA, talked about nuclear dangers.

The problem with unmanned American satellites, Inman said, is they can mistake flames from a ruptured Soviet gas pipeline for those of a launched nuclear missile. Inman drew gasps from the crowd when he added, without elaboration, "There is a past instance of that."

That year, Turner decided to have Superstation TBS air three specials dealing with nuclear proliferation, including "Threads," a graphic portrayal of the aftermath of nuclear war.

"Ted feels very strongly about the issue," Superstation TBS president Robert Wussler said at the time.

In 1985, Turner formed the Better World Society to make documentaries on issues such as U.S.-Soviet relations, the environment and nuclear proliferation.

"We were like his SWAT team to find creative ways to make those issues come alive for a mass audience," said Rachel Lyon, who was the senior producer there and is now director of media arts at Reinhardt College in Cherokee County.

"When it came to nuclear proliferation and nuclear arms, I think he saw a lot of things ahead of time," Lyon said. "Here we were in the midst of the largest military buildup in the history of the world in peacetime. . . . And Ted was really concerned that this is not just going to stay in the hands of stable superpowers."

Lyon said Turner was deeply informed and very hands-on --- something Wirth, at the U.N. Foundation, said remains true today.

"He's not a hand over the check and see you later kind of guy," Lyon said. Turner screened the rough cut of all 30 or so films the society produced, she said.

The Better World Society disbanded in 1990, in part, Lyon said, because films on those topics had become less rare.

In 1986, Turner launched another venture that cost him millions --- the Goodwill Games. Turner was concerned because the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

"I thought if I could do anything to bring the sides back together on the athletic fields, it (would) lessen the chance of war," he said at the time.

If the past is any guide, Turner will actively involve himself in the affairs of his newest organization, trying to make sure his donation is more than just a grand gesture, that it actually makes a difference.

Can a private organization help to reduce nuclear dangers?

"Absolutely," said Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "Without a doubt. . . . If it's applied properly, I think it could make a tremendous difference in this field."

The money could be used to inform people that nuclear dangers did not end with the Cold War, Schwartz said, or to encourage nuclear industries in Russia to manufacture other products.

"The way I look at it is the nuclear weapons issue trumps them all," he said. "I mean, what's the point of saving the spotted owl . . . if nuclear weapons or radioactive materials are used, as the bumper stickers used to say, to ruin your whole day?"

By all accounts, Ted Turner has wondered the same thing for quite a long time.

TED TURNER ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS

We've been here millions of years, 10 million years, human existence, that we've slowly evolved, that our parents worked to make us better and better and send us to better schools and get better airplanes and communications. All the things that we've done, our books, our art, our literature. And what have we done with our opportunity? Get ready to blow ourselves up. And not just ourselves. What about the elephants? --- July 1986, at the Goodwill Games in Moscow

Leave the atom alone. Don't split the atoms. They're dangerous little mothers. --- June 1996, explaining to Harvard graduates why he opposes nuclear power

Here's the class of '99, and y'all are just starting out. Wouldn't it be terrible to have nuclear war in the next week or two and mess up (your) career before they have gotten started? --- May 1999 to the graduating class at the University of Georgia

We have, I don't know, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that are still pointed at each other in the world today. And they say they're safe! But they can't get the Concorde to take off out of Paris without burning up. . . . All of us together can't get a Russian submarine that's sunk in only 300 feet of water, can't get the people to the surface, and yet they say all these nuclear missiles are safe. Don't believe it. I mean, they're not safe at all. The only safe thing is to get rid of 'em! Get rid of 'em now! Right on! --- August 2000 at a U.N. summit

---

Turner, Nunn Form New Foundation

Associated Press
January 8, 2001 Filed at 4:49 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Turner-Nunn-Nuclear.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- CNN founder Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn announced details Monday of a new foundation devoted to reducing the chance of a nuclear attack.

``The threat that we face from nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction is real. It is even more urgent now since it seems to have fallen off most people's radar screens during the last 10 years since the Cold War ended,'' Turner said at a news conference.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, chaired by Turner and Nunn, is designed to raise public awareness about nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and to encourage cooperation between nations on the issue.

Both Turner and Nunn were optimistic about the prospect of working with the incoming Bush administration.

``Reducing the risk posed by weapons of mass destruction is not the agenda of one political party or the other,'' Nunn said. ``I know that this is a deeply held desire by leaders of vision of every political stripe and philosophy.''

Turner, a vice chairman of AOL-Time Warner, will give the foundation $50 million each year for the next five years.

Nunn, a Georgia Democrat and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who retired from the Senate in 1997, said the threat of nuclear warfare weighs heavily despite great progress in the dismantling of thousands of nuclear weapons.

``The world today is more dangerous, in a sense, because various foreign nations, including Russia, face dire economic conditions that force severe cutbacks in that government's maintenance of its nuclear infrastructure, including in its warning, surveillance and control system,'' he said.

Nuclear workers, whether scientists or soldiers, often go months between paychecks in Russia, which still has a formidable nuclear arsenal.

``The cumulative affect of this deterioration in Russia has greatly increased the risk of a nuclear accident, or a dangerous and deadly miscalculation, or the prospects that a nuclear worker will compromise nuclear materials or sell know-how across borders to a terrorist group out of economic desperation,'' Nunn said.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., agreed. A member of the foundation's board of trustees, Lugar said he was surveying nuclear weapons sites in Russia last month when the government passed its $48 billion budget. It contained $7 billion for defense, he compared with the U.S. defense budget of $280 billion.

``There is very little money for security, for destruction, for fulfillment of treaties that have been entered into,'' Lugar said.

Nunn said the West must consider the effect of Russia's deep fears about NATO expansion.

``The Russians feel conventionally weak. They feel that they have to rely more on tactical nuclear weapons. That is a very dangerous situation,'' Nunn said. ``I think we ought to do everything we can to help them get some security confidence on the conventional side so that they do not go back to the posture that we were in during the Cold War.''

Turner said he supports elimination of nuclear weapons, but the organization's objective will be less far-reaching, with education a key goal.

---

Cranston's Noble Career

New York Times
January 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/opinion/L08CRA.html

To the Editor:

Re "Alan Cranston, Former U.S. Senator, Is Dead at 86" (obituary, Jan. 1): Certainly, Senator Cranston's role as one of the "Keating Five" was part of his public life. But this was an aberration in an otherwise exemplary career.

Senator Cranston was an able and dedicated public servant. He was a liberal's liberal who never wavered in support of people-oriented goals. He was also a fighter for causes that I hold dear, including equal rights for all people, improving the environment, full employment and world peace. In retirement, he founded the Global Security Institute, which works to abolish nuclear weapons.

Alan Cranston skillfully represented California in the Senate for 24 years. His one lapse of judgment should not obscure his many accomplishments.

HOWARD M. METZENBAUM Pompano Beach, Fla., Jan. 5, 2001

The writer was United States senator from Ohio in 1974 and from 1977 to 1994.

---

Pardons being weighed as Clinton term ends

Washington Times
January 8, 2001
By Jerry Seper
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200118222330.htm

President Clinton, with 12 more days in office, is considering additional pardons, prompting some FBI agents and other law enforcement authorities to renew their opposition to any clemency order for Leonard Peltier, convicted of murdering two agents in 1975.

Mr. Clinton, who pardoned 59 persons Dec. 22, including former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, a one-time Washington powerhouse who pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud in a corruption scandal, is reviewing clemency requests pending in the White House Counsel's Office.

"I would not expect anything until towards the end," White House spokesman Jake Siewert said Friday. "He's asked to review some more. Counsel's office is looking at them, and I think they'll probably present a package to him at some point."

John Sennett, president of the FBI Agent's Association, said he hoped Mr. Clinton would consider the facts in the Peltier case before making any decision.

"We can only hope the president has been impressed at what a bitter disappointment this would be," he said. "We still have faith that he understands the significance of law enforcement officers making the ultimate sacrifice."

Mr. Clinton's 59 pardons last month went mainly to people convicted on drug crimes, tax-evasion and fraud charges, including a longtime Arkansas friend, Archie Schaffer III, a Tyson Foods Inc. executive who was implicated in the probe of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.

He did not address such high-profile cases as Peltier; former junk-bond king Michael Milken; Susan McDougal, a partner of Mr. Clinton's in the Whitewater real estate venture; and Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy convicted of espionage in 1985.

The FBI has vigorously opposed Peltier's release, along with that of Pollard. The Justice Department's criminal division and the CIA also have announced their opposition to Pollard's release, and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright told Mr. Clinton there is no compelling reason to release the convicted spy.

Last month, hundreds of FBI agents staged an unprecedented, somber protest outside the White House, calling on Mr. Clinton to deny clemency for Peltier. About 500 former and current agents, other law enforcement officials, FBI workers and friends silently marched two-by-two around the White House to deliver a petition of 9,500 signatures opposing Peltier's clemency request.

They said the American Indian Movement leader "executed two FBI agents lying on the ground" who posed no threat to him and, as a result, he was not deserving of a pardon. Some of the marchers wore blue ribbons or badges bearing the names of the two agents and "1975." Three agents at the front of the march held a banner that read: "Never forget."

Mr. Clinton promised during a Nov. 8 radio interview to consider both sides of the Peltier case.

Peltier, eligible for parole in 2009, is serving two consecutive life terms at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., for the murders of Agents Jack R. Coler, 28, and Ronald A. Williams, 27. He was sentenced June 2, 1977, in Fargo, N.D., two years after the killings at South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, near Wounded Knee.

The killings occurred June 26, 1975, after Peltier's vehicle was stopped by the agents, who were looking for a suspect in a kidnapping and assault. According to court records, Peltier fled the vehicle with two other men and began shooting at the agents with semiautomatic rifles. Agents Coler and Williams were immediately wounded.

Crime-scene experts said the agents fired five shots before being hit, compared with 125 bullet holes in their car. Prosecutors said Peltier and two others fired three shots at pointblank range, hitting Agent Williams in the face as he knelt and Agent Coler, who was unconscious, twice in the head.

The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee has the support of the Hollywood community, including several big donors to the Democratic Party. The clemency effort is being led by such celebrities as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Robin Williams and Robert Redford.

The committee, which contends the FBI withheld evidence and coerced witnesses, has said it received positive reaction from both Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore concerning a possible pardon. The committee has sent petitions with more than 500,000 names to the White House in support of the convicted murderer.

---

Morrock News, Monday, Jan. 8, 2001
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

ISRAELIS STAGE MASS RALLY AGAINST PEACE PLAN: A massive crowd of Israelis took to the streets in Jerusalem on Monday, demonstrating against President Clinton's proposed peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israelis, estimated at 100,000 strong, waved flags and signs with slogans such as "The Temple Mount is Ours" and "Jerusalem is David's city, not Arafat's," opposing transfer of any control of Jerusalem sites to Palestinians. . . . Palestinian negotiators, meanwhile, had also rejected Clinton's proposals, saying they merely echoed Israeli demands.

--------

Fri, 8 Dec 2000
"SOA Watch" <soawatch@knight-hub.com>

January 17 - INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION to close the SOA

"Economic oppression and military repression are flip sides of the same globalization coin. The economic rape of the poor that accompanies globalization could not stand without the repressive military apparatus that brutalizes people who rise up to resist. Those who oppose the globalization of greed and those who work to end US training of repressive foreign armies are joined in one effort" - A16/SOA Watch Affinity Group Cluster

Call to Action - please forward widely: CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS! JANUARY 17TH 2001 "INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION"

On January 17th, people all over the world will hold vigils, demonstrations and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to voice their opposition to the "School of Assassins." This date marks the day that the SOA will be re-named "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation."

The U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), located at Ft. Benning, Georgia, is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers. The SOA was established in Panama in 1946 - supposedly to promote stability in the region. But it's reputation for churning out despots soon earned it the nickname, "Esquela de Golpes" or "School of Coups."

In 1984, the SOA was kicked out of Panama under terms of the Panama Canal Treaty, and a major Panamanian Newspaper dubbed it "The School of Assassins." The name was well-earned and well-documented. SOA trained soldiers have left a trail of blood and suffering in every country where they have returned.

During its 54 year history, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American troops, and continues each year to train hundreds of soldiers in combat skills such as commando tactics, military intelligence, and psychological operations. In 1996, a White House report revealed the existence of training manuals used at the SOA that advocated torture, execution, and blackmail.

SOA-trained troops have used these skills to make war against their own people, with disastrous consequences. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into refuge by those trained at the "School of Assassins."

In response to growing criticism, the Pentagon has mounted a smoke and mirrors PR campaign to keep the SOA open. Minor changes in the curriculum of the School -- which even SOA supporters have called cosmetic -- and the upcoming name change are part of this campaign.

Rebecca Johnson is organizing a dawn to dusk vigil at the gate of Fort Benning for the entire month of January. A creative nonviolent civil disobedience action is being planned in January to coincide with the re-opening of the school. All are invited to join in for the entire month or any part of it. Limited housing will be available in Columbus. If you'd like more information about this, please contact Rebecca at (508) 289-7813 or rebecca.johnson@oberlin.edu.

SOA Watch is calling on local groups and individuals to take action on January 17th. Organize educational events, vigils, demonstrations and direct actions at federal buildings, Army bases and other appropriate locations. If we join our strengths 'the powers that be' cannot for good and working together towards a future with dignity for all people. Organize and Educate!

If we unite our voices and our strength, the powers that be will not be able to stop us from shutting down this "School of Assassins" once and for all. Let us continue to work together towards a future of Justice and Peace for all people.

Key Resource for organizing against the SOA: "Solidarity in Action" - The key to the tremendous power and the success of the organizing work against the SOA is the tireless activism of thousands of individuals and groups. This detailed manual provides you with essential information to start a local SOA Watch office and offers help for effective actions, media and legislative outreach. $13 (students $10) Order from: SOAWatch/NE ~ 6367 Overbrook Ave ~ Philadelphia PA 19151

Please contact us with information about actions being organized in your region so that we can include this in our media-blitz (phone: 202.234.3440, Email: soawatch@knight-hub.com)

For more information check www.soaw.org To subscribe to the SOA Watch Email list, send a blank Email to: SOAWatch-subscribe@topica.com

www.soaw.org
www.atlanta.indymedia.org

SOA trains the military 'muscle' to beat down the opposition to the FTAA

The 'Free Trade Area of the Americas' (FTAA) is the planned expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout the Americas. It is targeted to take effect in 2005. The next FTAA summit is planned for April 2001 in Quebec, Canada. The main goal of the United States is to secure economic and political hegemony over the Western Hemisphere through the FTAA. Economic Experts from Latin America warn that the FTAA will sharpen social inequalities and benefit multinational corporations at the cost of workers, peasants, communities and the environment. The SOA is playing a crucial part in this project. Soldiers at the SOA are trained to protect the interests of U.S. corporations and maintain the economic status quo for the few rich and powerful in the U.S. and their cohorts in Latin America. In official SOA publications "economic development along free market principles" are identified as "primary foreign policy goals of the U.S." in Latin America. The SOA strategy is "to prepare military and police forces to respond to current threats to the achievement of those goals". For example in Mexico; hours after NAFTA went into effect, Indigenous communities rose up to say "No!" The Mexican military moved in immediately with troops, helicopters, and artillery. At least 18 high level officers who were involved in the civilian-targeted warfare are graduates of the SOA. In Colombia, recent reports from Human Rights groups and the U.S. State Department link SOA trained soldiers to various massacres of hundreds of peasants and the assassinations of Labor leaders and striking workers. Last year the Bolivian government sold the public water system to a private corporation and the water rates immediately doubled and at times tripled. As thousands peacefully took the streets, Bolivian President and former military dictator, SOA graduate Hugo Banzer sent out the forces to attack the civilians.

SOA - In the tradition of the Conquistadors The graphic of a Columbus galleon - consequently chosen as the SOA's official symbol and undeclared mission statement; providing the repressive military backing for the exploitation of Latin America.

Hendrik Voss School of the Americas Watch

check out: www.soaw.org & www.atlanta.indymedia.org

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