------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Civilians could have distracted sub crew
LOCAL BUSINESS - DC
Swiss Find Scant Plutonium Traces in Balkans
Persian Gulf War Illness Compensation Act of 2001
Chance of another Indo-Pak. war: CIA
Nuclear Watchdog: Iraq Cooperated with Inspection
Future of NATO in question
Bush Seeks Missile Shield Dialogue with China
Europe's change of heart
German Sees Russia Bending on Missiles
Russia Chided for Missile Tech Info
Taiwan to Resume Building Nuclear Plant
Taiwan Restarts Nuclear Project
Taiwan Says Work on Plant Will Resume
Bush tours NATO, Navy units
Whistle-blower wins ruling vs. Ga. Power
RAD PROTECTION STANDARDS
A shot in the dark?
Russia: Germany Won't Mediate In Missile Debate With U.S.
Germany adopts key role in missile-defense dispute
Revenue generation makes waste-disposal industry a heavy hitter
Tooele residents support facility
Goshutes divided over N-storage

MILITARY
Russian warplanes in Japan airspace
Hikers found dead at bottom of ravine
Colombia Peace Talks Resume
Colombian Military Officers Convicted in Village Killings
For the Dutch, Ecstasy just the latest fad
Governor's Drug Efforts Show Fruit in Santa Fe
Powell: U.S Won't Toughen Sanctions
Inside Saddam's death lab
SKorean President To Meet Bush
Spacewalk 100: Astronauts finish lab work
Battle with bureaucrats
Help not on the way, yet
Accidents fuel military-training concern
Japanese Outrage Grows Over Hawaii Submarine Crash
Submarine Inquiry Focuses on Civilians
Copters Crash on Maneuvers Over Hawaii
Bush Details Plan to Focus Military on New Weaponry
Bush Vows Spending on Futuristic Weapons
Excerpts From Bush's Remarks on the Military
Bush to ease strain on reservists

OTHER
The World in Medicine
Chemical warfare has a long and terrifying history
Mad cow measures may destroy bullfights
Tunisia plants trees, builds homes to revitalize Sahara
EU proposes new mad-cow measures
Paving the Planet: Cars and Crops Competing for Land
Europe OKs new biotech food rules
Iran's parliament limits police
Defense Grills Terror Witness on bin Laden
Terror Trial Witness's Reliability Questioned
Poll: US Against Retaliatory Attack

ACTIVISTS
NEXT STOP FOR ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MARCH - HAWAII
National Day of Action to Stop Staples
Bonds Boycott February Update
Mother's Day 2001
Chiapas Indymedia Up and On-line NOW!
China to execute Islamic protester
China Tries Man for Web Site
Greenpeace Sails To Pacific Star Wars Test Site
Veterans for Peace

-
------ NUCLEAR

Civilians could have distracted sub crew

02/14/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-02-14-sub.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Navy officials Wednesday acknowledged the possibility that 15 civilians aboard the U.S. attack submarine that sank a Japanese fishing vessel could have distracted the crew, but said there is not yet any evidence of that. The officials also said that in seeking to determine how the accident happened, the Navy is considering an inquiry along criminal lines that could result in charges against the captain of the submarine or members of its crew. Nine Japanese from the fishing vessel are still missing and hopes for their rescue have faded since the collision Friday off Hawaii.

A decision on how to proceed with the investigation is being weighed by Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr., who as commander of Submarine Group Nine based at Bangor, Wash., is in charge of all ballistic missile submarines assigned to the Pacific Fleet.

He was dispatched to Hawaii shortly after the accident.

The captain of the submarine has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the investigation. Regardless of the format of Griffiths' investigation, his findings will be forwarded to the Navy chain of command for a decision on what, if any, charges to pursue against the sub's captain or crew members.

The Navy might choose to use a more formal approach to its inquiry because of the likelihood that civilian deaths may have resulted from the collision, officials said.

Although the nine Japanese are still listed as missing, Navy officials believe it is likely they were either trapped inside the ship or otherwise drowned.

The ship is lying at the bottom of the sea at a depth of 1,800 feet.

In addition to the Navy inquiry, the National Transportation Safety Board is doing its own investigation.

The Navy acknowledged Tuesday that two civilians were at key control stations of the USS Greeneville when it practiced an emergency surfacing maneuver and rammed the Ehime Maru, sinking it. Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun, a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman in Hawaii, wouldn't specify the stations or release the names of the civilians, who included businessmen.

Other Navy officials said Wednesday none of the civilians are nationally recognized names.

It is not unusual for the Navy to take civilians aboard for a demonstration ride on a submarine or surface ship.

One issue to be considered in the investigation is whether their presence in the control room or elsewhere on the submarine could have interfered with the crew's normal procedures, officials said.

The disclosure that two civilians were at control positions on the submarine drew sharp criticism from some Japanese. ''A civilian wouldn't know what to do,'' Ryoichi Miya, first mate of the Ehime Maru, said Tuesday.

''It's absolutely unforgivable if a civilian was operating it.''

A defense official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that one civilian was at the helm, where the vertical movement and direction of the submarine are controlled.

The source said there was no indication that person played a role in Friday's crash.

The Washington Post, citing a source it did not identify, said another civilian was at the ballast controls, where the surfacing maneuver would have begun.

The Greeneville was performing a drill in which it dove to about 400 feet and then made a rapid ascent, shooting out of the water.

This is done to practice an emergency ascent, although there was no actual emergency at the time.

The submarine commander usually ensures nothing is overhead before blowing the sub's ballast tanks, but the Greeneville somehow failed to detect the presence of the fishing vessel.

National Transportation Safety Board member John Hammerschmidt said late Tuesday that the submarine's primary periscope was functioning properly.

However, he said Navy officials had informed him there were no sonar recordings or video to show what crew members saw before the Greeneville surfaced.

He said investigators might be able to retrieve sonar data from computer hard drives.

Hammerschmidt said investigators also hadn't determined whether civilians' actions had any role in the crash. It isn't unusual for civilians to be allowed on Navy vessels; last year, 213 civilians took part in at-sea tours on Hawaii-based submarines, he said.

-------- business

LOCAL BUSINESS - DC

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1871-2001Feb13?language=printer

USEC of Bethesda, a processor of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, said it will reduce headquarters costs 20 percent -- eliminating 40 to 50 jobs -- for a total of $10 million in savings in fiscal 2002. The company also plans to cease enrichment operations at its Portsmouth, Ohio, gaseous-diffusion plant in June and consolidate enrichment operations at its Paducah, Ky., plant.


-------- depleted uranium

Swiss Find Scant Plutonium Traces in Balkans

February 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/science-health-pluton.html

ZURICH (Reuters) - A Swiss laboratory has found only minute traces of plutonium in NATO depleted uranium (DU) weapons used by NATO-led forces in the Balkans, Swiss radio reported on Wednesday.

``It is already clear that only extremely small -- if any -- traces of plutonium were found in the shells and shell fragments that were checked, and these in no way pose a potential health risk, according to scientists,'' the radio reported.

The possible danger of contamination from armor and other targets hit by cheap and highly-effective shells tipped with depleted uranium during the Gulf War -- and more recently in southern Serbia -- has caused an outcry in some Western states. Britain and the United have insisted the risks are minimal.

Swiss defense ministry spokesman Oswald Sigg told the radio: ``We will release the detailed findings of the Spiez (weapons lab) plutonium investigation this week, but we can already confirm the same trend that the German investigation found.''

He was referring to reports that Germany's GSF research lab had also found no traces of highly toxic plutonium in NATO ammunition used in the Balkans.

Last month Switzerland ordered the lab to check DU weapons samples from Kosovo for plutonium amid concern -- played down by defense experts -- that the munitions may have posed health risks to peacekeepers, aid workers and civilians in areas of the Balkans where NATO used them to blast Serb tanks.

The United Nations' Environmental Program (UNEP) sent a mission to Kosovo earlier this month as the storm broke in Europe over reports that foreign troops who served in the Balkans and the Gulf over the past decade may have been exposed to contaminated sites that could cause cancer.

The 14 experts collected 340 samples of soil, water and vegetation, conducted smear tests on buildings and destroyed Yugoslav army vehicles, and found remnants of DU ammunition at eight of the 11 sites they visited.

UNEP is working with the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer to try to determine exactly what risks soldiers and civilians run from DU weapons.

UNEP had asked the Spiez lab to check the samples for enriched uranium, and it found traces of uranium 236, created during processing in nuclear power plants.

But UNEP has said the traces were so small that the weapons containing it would have been no more dangerous than purely DU arms.

--------

HR 612----
Persian Gulf War Illness Compensation Act of 2001

Wed, 14 Feb 2001

This bill is an attempt to clarify two regulations that were not being fully implemented and to further define Undiagnosed Illnesses of the Gulf War Vets....and to force the VA to compensate the Gulf WAR VETERANS.

intoduced today FEB 14

107TH CONGRESS H. R. __612______ 1ST SESSION IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Mr. MANZULLO introduced the following bin; which was referred to the Committee on__________ ________________________________________

A BILL To amend title 38, United States Code, to clarify the stand- ards for compensation for Persian Gulf veterans suf- fering from certain undiagnosed illnesses, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the "Persian Gulf War Illness Compensation Act of 2001".

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Although the majority of veterans of the

Armed Forces who served in the Persian Gulf War returned from the Southwest Asia theater of operations to normal activities, many of those veterans have experienced a range of unexplained illnesses, including chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, loss of concentration, forgetfulness, headache, and rash.

(2) Those veterans were potentially exposed to a wide range of biological and chemical agents in eluding sand, smoke from oil-well fires, paints, solvents, insecticides, petroleum fuels and their com- bustion products, organophosphate nerve agents, pyridostigmine bromide, depleted uranium, anthrax and botulinum toroid vaccinations, and infectious diseases, in addition to other psychological and physiological stresses.

(3) Section 1117 of title 38, United States Code, enacted on November 2, 1994, by the Persian Gulf War Veterans' Benefits Act (title I of Public Law 103-446), provides for the payment of compensation to Persian Gulf veterans suffering from a chronic disability resulting from an undiagnosed illness (or combination of undiagnosed illnesses) that became manifest to a compensable degree within a period prescribed by regulation.

(4) The Secretary of Veterans Affairs prescribed regulations under section 1117 of title 38, United States Code, that interpreted that section so as to limit compensation to Persian Gulf veterans with illnesses that "cannot be attributed to any known clinical diagnosis".

(5) In a report dated September 7, 2000, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences indicated that it was not asked to determine whether an identifiable medical syndrome referred to as "Gulf War Syndrome" exists and suggested that the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, in developing a compensation program for Persian Gulf veterans, consider the health effects that may be associated with exposures to specific agents that were present in the Southwest Asia theater of operations during the Persian Gulf War.

sec. 3. COMPENSATION OF VETERANS OF PERSIAN GULF WAR WHO HAVE CERTAIN ILLNESSES.

(a) PRESUMPTION PERIOD FOR UNDIAGNOSED ILLNESSES PROGRAM.--Section 1117 of title 38, United States Code, is amended--

(1) in subsection (a)(2), by striking "within the presumptive period prescribed under subsection (b)" and inserting "before December 31, 2011, or such later date as the Secretary may prescribe by regulation"; and

(2) by striking subsection (b).

(b) UNDIAGNOSED ILLNESSES.--Such section, as amended by subsection (a); is further amended by inserting after subsection (a) the following new subsection (b):

"(b)(l) For purposes of this section, the term 'undiagnosed illness' means illness manifested by syrnptoms or signs the cause, etiology, or origin of which cannot be specifically and definitely identified, including poorly defined illnesses such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders, and multiple chemical sensitivity. The attribution of one or more of the symptoms to a disability that is not an undiagnosed illness shall not preclude other symptoms from being considered a manifestation of an undiagnosed illness.

"(2) For purposes of paragraph (1), signs or symptoms that may be a manifestation of an undiagnosed illness include the following:

"(A) Fatigue.
"(B) Unexplained rashes logical signs or symptoms.
"(C) Headache.
"(D) Muscle pain.
"(E) Joint pain.
"(F) Neurologic signs or symptoms.
"(G) Neuropsychological signs or symptoms.
"(H) Signs or symptoms involving the respiratory system (upper or lower).
"(I) Sleep disturbances.
"(J) Gastrointestinal signs or symptoms.
"(K) Cardiovascular signs or symptoms.
"(L) Abnormal weight loss.
"(M) Menstrual disorders.".

(c) PRESUMPTION OF SERVICE CONNECTION PROGRAM. ----Section 1118(a) of such title is amended by adding at the end the following new paragraph:

"(4) For purposes of this section, the term 'undiagnosed illness' has the meaning given that term in section 1117(b) of this title.".

(d) EFFECTIVE DATE.--(l) For purposes of section 5110(g) of title 38, United States Code--

(A) the amendments to section 1117 of title 38, United States Code, made by subsections (a), (b), and (c) shah take effect as of November 2, 1994; and

(B) the amendment to section 1118 of title 38, United States Code, made by subsection (d) shall take effect as of October 21, 1998.

(2) The second sentence of section 5110(g) of title 38, United States Code, shall not apply in the case of an award, or increased award, of compensation pursuant to the amendments made by this section if the date of application therefor is not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act.

-------- india / pakistan

Chance of another Indo-Pak. war: CIA

Friday, February 09, 2001
The Hindu
By Sridhar Krishnaswami
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/02/09/stories/03090003.htm

WASHINGTON, FEB. 8. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. George Tenet, has told a Congressional panel that he is worried about the proliferation and development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in South Asia and that there were ``good prospects'' for another round of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan.

``I told you I was worried about the proliferation and development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in South Asia. The competition predictable extends here as well, and there is no sign that the situation has improved. We still believe there is a good prospect for another round of nuclear tests. On the missile front, India decided to test another Agni missile last month, reflecting its determination to improve its nuclear weapons delivery capability. Pakistan may respond in kind'', Mr. Tenet said during the course of a hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee.

At a broader level on the issue of missile proliferation, the CIA chief argued that as worrying as the threat of the ICBM's may be to the U.S., the threat to American interests from short and medium range missiles was very much there. ``The proliferation of MRBMs (medium range ballistic missiles) driven largely, though not exclusively, by North Korean Nodong sales, is altering strategic balances in the Middle-East and Asia. These missiles include Iran's Shahab-3, Pakistan's Ghauri and Indian Agni-2'', Mr. Tenet said.

Mr. Tenet, an appointee of the Clinton administration who has been asked to stay on by the President, Mr. Bush, otherwise made a routine assessment of the South Asian situation reiterating that both India and Pakistan were willing to take risks over Kashmir even while taking note of the positive developments in the recent past. ``India has been trying to engage select militants and separatists, but militant groups have kept up their attacks through India's most recent ceasefire'', Mr. Tenet observed.

In a context that has a domestic interest, one of Mr. Tenet's major focus was on Osama Bin Laden, his network of terror and the implications of Islamic militancy not only for the U.S. but globally as well including the region of South Asia. ``Osama Bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat. His organisation is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation'', Mr. Tenet noted.

Referring to the expanding Islamic militancy in West Asia, Mr. Tenet argued that the terrorist threat to U.S. interests because of the country's relationship with Israel has increased. ``At the same time, Islamic militancy is expanding and the worldwide pool of potential recruits for terrorist networks is growing. In Central Asia, the Middle-East and South Asia, Islamic terrorist organisations are attracting new recruits, including under the banner of anti-Americanism'', the CIA chief observed.

After the open hearing, the Senate Intelligence Committee went into a closed session with the Director of the CIA where the Senators would have had the chance for more pointed questioning and exchange of views with Mr. Tenet.

In fact during the open session there was considerable interest on a broad range of countries including China and Russia.

At one point Mr. Tenet told law makers that the U.S. was ``watching and analysing'' carefully the actions of China especially in the context of the commitment of last November not to assist countries in the development of ballistic missiles. ``We are watching and analysing carefully for any sign that the Chinese entities may be acting against this commitment. We are worried, for example, that Pakistan's continued development of the two stage Shaheen-2 MRBM will require additional Chinese assistance'', Mr. Tenet told law makers on Wednesday.

-------- iraq

Nuclear Watchdog: Iraq Cooperated with Inspection

February 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-nu.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq, which refuses to let in U.N. weapons inspectors, has cooperated with the latest routine nuclear inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog agency said on Wednesday.

``Iraq provided the necessary cooperation for the inspection team to perform its activities effectively and efficiently,'' IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said in a letter to the Security Council.

The inspection itself, which took place last month, went well, ElBaradei said. His teams ``were able to verify the presence of the nuclear material subject to safeguards, which consists of low enriched, natural and depleted uranium,'' none of which is of weapons grade.

The IAEA inspection team had wrapped up its four-day mission in Iraq on Jan. 23 but gave no word at that time on the outcome of its first inspection in a year of the several tons of uranium it had put under seal more than two years earlier.

The material it inspected was located at the Tuweitha nuclear plant, 12 miles south of Baghdad. The IAEA put it under seal following the plant's destruction after the 1991 Gulf War.

The inspection by the agency, which monitors the peaceful use of nuclear power worldwide, was intended to guard against any diversion of the nuclear material to military programs.

It was unconnected to more intrusive IAEA inspections in Iraq conducted prior to 1998 under a Security Council resolution ordering Baghdad to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

U.N. weapons inspections have been barred since the last U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) team left Iraq in December 1998. It withdrew shortly before U.S. and British warplanes launched a four-day air campaign on grounds that Iraq was hindering the work of U.N. arms experts.

Baghdad has rejected a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for new arms inspections in return for an easing of the sanctions imposed after the Gulf War.

-------- missile defense

Future of NATO in question

Friday, February 09, 2001
The Hindu
By Batuk Gathani
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/02/09/stories/0309000g.htm

BRUSSELS, FEB. 8. The Munich visit of the U.S. DefenceSecretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, paves the way for a new Euro-American defence debate.

The European Union has reacted cautiously to the U.S. plans for a national missile defence system. The security conference held in Munich last weekend shows that it may take some time for the U.S. and Europe to agree on a new plan for security. Mr. Rumsfeld made it clear to the E.U. and NATO countries that the U.S. was determined to move ahead with the President, Mr. George Bush's controversial missile defence plan. In European and Asian capitals, this plan is considered as the first major American initiative to protect the U.S. armed forces not only in Europe but in regions like South Korea, in the Far East and in West Asia from missile attacks by the so-called rogue States - North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

The Munich conference on security policy was attended by Defence Ministers and also defence specialists. Russia and China have threatened to build more weapons if the U.S. goes ahead with its plan. Mr. Rumsfeld said the U.S. would not be dissuaded by existing non-proliferation treaties or European concerns about the missile defence programme. The Europeans have also expressed concern about the planned reduction of U.S. troops from the Balkan region. The Bush administration has said the U.S. needed to rethink its policy of troop deployment in NATO-led peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. But Mr. Rumsfeld reassured U.S. allies that the U.S. would not act ``unilaterally'' and would consult NATO on troop deployment in the Balkan region.

The proposed NMD system may take a decade or more to be implemented. A senior European official was quoted as saying that though the U.S. had belatedly taken note of the concern of its allies ``neither Europe nor Russia has any real leverage to stop the U.S.'' The Greek Defence Minister called the U.S. plan a one- sided decision and warned that if handled badly it could antagonise Russia and China. The German Foreign Minister, Mr. Joschka Fischer urged the U.S. not to endanger existing nuclear agreements with Russia and added that the size and importance of Russia must be considered while shaping European security.

The U.S. have also expressed reservations about the E.U.'s proposed launch of a 60,000 strong military force. This has highlighted the difference of defence perceptions between the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. feels that the creation of a European force may undermine the NATO alliance. Eleven of the E.U.'s 15-member States are also members of NATO but six other European NATO allies are not members of the E.U. Turkey, which is a founding member of the old NATO alliance, has objected to the creation of an independent European force as it will have no say in it not being a member of the E.U.

New York Times warned in an article: ``The incoming Bush administration risks making an early mistake if it rushes to build a national missile defence. A hasty move in this area could quickly deplete the goodwill generally accorded to new President by foreign leaders, especially those of Russia, China and Washington's main European allies...Mr. Bush should instead expand research and testing to determine what kind of defensive shield can best meet America's security needs against the future threat of nuclear missile attack from unpredictable nations like North Korea, Iraq and Iran.''

Over a decade ago, central Europe was the most militarised region in the world guarded by the Western NATO military in the west and the then Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact military alliance in the east. The debate at the height of the Cold War was who would attack first. All that is now history after the ignominious collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1989.

---

Bush Seeks Missile Shield Dialogue with China

Wednesday February 14
Yahoo News
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010214/pl/china_usa_dc_3.html

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - U.S. President George Bush wants to open a dialogue with China and Russia on a U.S. proposal to build an anti-ballistic missile shield to protect the United States from attack, a Canadian official said on Wednesday.

The message was passed on to Chinese President Jiang Zemin (news - web sites) by visiting Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in a meeting of the two leaders in Beijing Tuesday, the Canadian official told Reuters. Chretien was the first world leader to visit the new U.S. president after his inauguration in January.

``(Bush) recognizes that he has some communication and exchange to have with all the NATO (news - web sites) partners, and with the Russians and with the Chinese,'' the official quoted Chretien as saying in Shanghai.

Bush ``has agreed that he wants a lot of discussion to occur (on the missile umbrella). He has to convince the partners and they are not quite ready, the technology is not quite ready, but he thinks that he has a very good case.''

It was the first indication that the Bush administration would be willing to open a dialogue on the issue, which has been strongly opposed by Russia and China.

Both believe the U.S. plan to develop the ambitious shield against ballistic missiles would pose a threat to their own nuclear forces.

Another Canadian official had said Tuesday that Jiang had raised with Chretien China's fears that the plans for the shield would spark a costly arms race.

Steadfast Opposition

China has steadfastly opposed the National Missile Defense (news - web sites) (NMD) system, fearing that even a limited U.S. shield would neutralize its modest strategic arsenal.

Ahead of his inauguration as president in January, statements from Bush and key cabinet appointees endorsing NMD drew sharp demands from Beijing that Washington scrap the scheme.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is an ardent proponent of NMD, and author of an influential report on the missile threat from ``rogue states'' such as North Korea (news - web sites).

Japan has been studying a proposal with the United States for a Theater Missile Defense (TMD), a variant of the NMD aimed at shielding U.S. troops in Asia.

Tokyo was stunned in August 1998 when Pyongyang test fired a medium-range Taeopodong missile which flew over Japan before crashing in the Pacific Ocean.

Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji in January warned the United States against offering Taiwan protection under a TMD proposed to protect U.S. troops and allies in Asia.

---

Europe's change of heart

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
Helle Bering
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2001214182154.htm

It being defense week in the Bush White House, this column will take the liberty of revisiting a topic recently discussed here - national missile defense (NMD) - which provoked particularly interesting reactions from European diplomats and officials in Washington. The changed tone - and substance - in discussions over NMD could hardly have been greater. What seemed only like intimations of a change in the air last week have taken more definite shape.

The watershed event in the discussion of missile defense, of course, was the appearance of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the NATO defense minister's annual Wehrkunde meeting in Munich. It bears repeating what Mr. Rumsfeld said that was so remarkable. For one thing, he told the European allies that the Bush administration was committed to developing missile defense and would do so with or without their consent. However, he also emphasized that extensive consultations would take place and that the United States did not want this issue to create a split in the alliance. In fact, he said that American allies ought to be covered and extensively consulted.

The question is whether Mr. Rumsfeld by these bold moves have managed to cut this particular Gordian knot. While it appears so on first impressions, it is also clear that as we move to the next level of the debate, a whole new set of issues will have to be dealt with. Now, we know that missile defense is not a question of "if," but "when." Than comes the questions "how," and "at what price."

Most startling was the comment in Moscow this week by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, that despite Russia's vigorous objection to any system that violates the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, "In the end, the Russians are going to accept it." Now, judging by the remarks of Russian National Security Adviser Sergei Ivanov, who responded to Mr. Rumsfeld's speech with a series of paranoid rantings of his own, it hardly sounds that way. "It will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create the prerequisites for a new arms race," Mr. Ivanov said. Mr. Fischer, however, was cool as a cucumber. The Russian comments "are sometimes a bit harsh," he reflected. "But it all depends on the climate. The climate is good; there's a difference between statements and climate."

Meanwhile, at a German ambassador's breakfast this week, a high ranking German government official speaking on background, actually welcomed the approach of the new American administration, which is remarkable given that most Europeans displayed a distinct distrust, not to say disdain for candidate George W. Bush during the presidential campaign. "Rumsfeld coming to NATO in Munich after just two weeks in office sends a very important signal," he said. Asked whether the Clinton administration did not consult with the Europeans - which despite all their protestations they certainly skimped on - the official hedged, but said that "there is a difference. In the Clinton administration there was no decision to do so."

Conversations with representatives of other European countries reflected a similar sense of resignation, bordering on relief. "U.S. leadership is a good thing," said Olli-Pekka Jalonen, defense counsel at the embassy of Finland. "It is better to have someone who knows what he wants." According to Danish ambassador Ulrik A. Federspiel, who spoke to The Washington Times this week, "Rumsfeld's speech was sufficiently clear that the Americans will go ahead. That may have cleared the air."

Even a spokesman for the French embassy, Francois Delattre (whose President Jaques Chirac warned that missile defense was "an invitation to proliferation" at an Anglo-French summit last week) said that France "is not opposed, but has some doubts that it is the best possible answer to the threat we now have to face. Furthermore, "whatever our concerns, we think it is an American decision."

Obvious as this fact may seem, it is huge progress. Somehow threats of a split within the NATO alliance have evaporated, and talk is everywhere of extensive consultations within the alliance, particularly as far as threat assessment is concerned and beyond that, trade offs, costs and systems.

The bottomline is that discussions must not become a bureaucratic nightmare, a labyrinth of commissions within commissions, a specialty of the European bureaucracy. If Europe wants threat assessment, we could ship a load of copies of the Rumsfeld Commission report on the missile threat to Brussels. Then there is the question of whether American acceptance of the European Security and Defense Initiative could be a trade off, or dramatic nuclear missile reduction to 1,500 as set out in START III negotiations with the Russians. As far as systems go, the European preference is clearly for theater missile defense, which can provide localized boost-phase interception, for areas like Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Korea - and does not violate the ABM treaty. This still would leave the mainland of the United States vulnerable though, and has to be combined with another system, probably space-based, to protect the United States. By all means let us have consultation and discussion. That does not mean, however, that we should allow the subject to be talked to death.

E-mail: hbering@washingtontimes.com.

Helle Bering is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Her column appears on Wednesdays.

--------

German Sees Russia Bending on Missiles

February 14, 2001
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14RUSS.html

MOSCOW, Feb. 13 - President Vladimir V. Putin and Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, discussed the proposed American missile defense at a Kremlin meeting today, ending two days of talks that Mr. Fischer said pointed to new Russian flexibility on the notion of a shield against rogue missiles.

Mr. Fischer and Russian officials denied that Germany was acting as an intermediary between Moscow and the new Bush administration, which has made clear its plan to develop the shield in the face of European qualms and fierce Russian opposition.

But Mr. Fischer will be in Washington next week. And after talks with many of the Kremlin's top foreign-policy leaders and the Communist leader of Parliament, each covering the missile-defense plan in depth, it was clear that he would be able to give the White House a detailed view of Russia's objections.

Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, met with Mr. Fischer on Monday and said Russia "will act at negotiations on questions pertaining to strategic offensive weapons and missile defense in a constructive way."

Mr. Fischer went a bit further. "In the end, I think Russia will accept negotiations" on the missile shield, he told reporters.

-------- russia

Russia Chided for Missile Tech Info

February 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Russia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld chastised Russia on Wednesday for contributing to the spread of missile technologies to nations hostile to the United States.

In his strongest comments about Russia since becoming Pentagon chief in January, Rumsfeld said Russia's opposition to Bush administration plans to erect a defense against ballistic missiles ``is not really serious.''

Rumsfeld said Moscow has nothing to fear from a U.S. missile shield, which would not be capable of defeating a large-scale missile attack of the kind that the Russian military is capable of launching. The U.S. defense system would be designed to stop only ``handfuls'' of missiles, he said.

The Russian government has said a U.S. national missile defense would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, lead to the unraveling of other arms control measures and disrupt the global balance of power. China, which has only about 20 long-range nuclear missiles, also objects.

``Let's be very honest about what Russia is doing,'' Rumsfeld said on PBS' ``NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.''

``Russia is an active proliferator. They are part of the problem. They are selling and assisting countries like Iran, North Korea and India and other countries with these technologies, which are threatening other people, including the United States, Western Europe and countries in the Middle East.

``Why they would be actively proliferating (missile technologies) and then complaining when the United States wants to defend itself against the fruit of those proliferation activities it seems to me is misplaced.''

Eventually, Rumsfeld predicted, the Russians will ``accommodate themselves'' to U.S. missile defenses. He also said he expects the European allies to warm to the idea of a U.S. missile shield.

-------- taiwan

Taiwan to Resume Building Nuclear Plant

Wednesday February 14
Yahoo News
By Alice Hung
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010214/wl/taiwan_dc_1.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's cabinet said on Wednesday it would immediately resume construction of a controversial nuclear power plant, ending a three-month political stand-off with the opposition-dominated legislature.

``To me this is a bitter decision and unavoidable responsibility,'' said Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (news - web sites), who made the widely expected announcement at a news conference after the Executive Yuan, or cabinet, approved the decision.

The US$5.5 billion, 2,700-megawatt nuclear power plant, Taiwan's fourth, was one-third complete when the cabinet decided to shelve it last October, to the anger of the main opposition Nationalist Party which initiated the project.

Although the cabinet's decision ended the political deadlock, the controversy over the plant is unlikely to end. Anti-nuclear residents in the area it is being built and members of the ruling party both expressed opposition to it.

Chang said the decision to resume construction was made for the sake of ``political stability and economic development'' and because his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was in a minority in parliament.

The DPP holds just 66 seats in the 220-member legislature.

``With the global economy slowing, we cannot afford to split because of a single item on the public agenda,'' Chang said.

A prolonged political stalemate would bring economic and social turbulence, he said.

The cabinet would restore the budget for the nuclear plant and resume construction ``with the highest safety standards,'' he said.

In a key concession, the cabinet agreed to drop its insistence that a new legislature, to be elected at the end of the year, decide whether to finish the plant located outside Taipei.

Protest Planned

DPP chairman Frank Hsieh said the cabinet's decision contradicted the party's anti-nuclear principle, but the government had no choice.

``The cabinet is forced to make this decision to prevent the entire government's operations from being paralyzed,'' Hsieh said.

Hsieh said his party would push for a referendum bill in order to let the public decide on the plant.

Residents of Kungliao, where the plant is located, were angry about the government's reversal.

``We are disgusted that politicians betray their conscience, lie to their voters, and abandon their principles,'' said Kungliao township chief Chao Kuo-tung.

The decision also faced strong opposition from anti-nuclear die-hards in the DPP.

The DPP's decision-making Central Standing Committee said it would back a big anti-nuclear protest march planned for February 24 and would encourage members to take part.

The stock market ended down 2.32 percent as investors cashed in profits after Tuesday's 3.09 percent rally fueled by signs of a political breakthrough.

The business community, fearing future power shortages, mostly favors building the power plant. But environmentalists say Taiwan lacks the ability to process nuclear waste and deal with accidents.

In January, Taiwan's top judges censured the prime minister for not consulting lawmakers on his decision to halt construction and said the cabinet must seek legislative approval.

Chang took office last October when his predecessor, a Nationalist Party stalwart, resigned after falling out with the president over the power station.

The Nationalists, ousted by Chen in presidential elections last March after five decades in power, had spearheaded a drive by a coalition of opposition legislators to sack Chen over the nuclear row. That drive lost steam due to public opposition.

``We hope this is the last time the people have to pay such a price,'' Nationalist chairman Lien Chan said, referring to the political deadlock.

--------

Taiwan Restarts Nuclear Project

February 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-Politics.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan's government ordered construction to begin again on the island's fourth nuclear plant Wednesday, sacrificing a key policy goal for political and economic stability.

Restarting the nuclear project was the first major defeat for President Chen Shui-bian's administration, which infuriated the powerful opposition by trying to cancel the plant three months ago without seeking lawmakers' approval.

Political feuding over the plant that ravaged investor confidence in the stock market officially came to an end when Premier Chang Chun-hsiung reinstated the $5.4 billion plant, the pet project of the previous government.

During a news conference, Chang -- Taiwan's No. 3 ranking leader -- said several times that restarting the plant was a ``painful decision.'' But he said, ``If we allow this standoff to continue, it will cause economic and social chaos.''

The announcement came a day after the government cut a deal with the opposition, capping days of tense negotiations. The agreement includes a pledge to work together on a nuclear energy bill, which the government hopes will phase out nuclear power.

Restarting the nuclear project, one-third complete, was an agonizing decision for the president because his Democratic Progressive Party has spent years campaigning to spike the project. The DPP argues the plant would be unsafe on the earthquake-prone island and that other energy sources would be cleaner and more practical.

But the recent battle over the plant was more about political power than nuclear energy. The opposition-controlled legislature argued that the minority government exceeded the limits on its power by unilaterally canceling the plant.

The opposition refused to cooperate with the president on other issues, causing gridlock that helped cause the stock market to lose 44 percent of its value last year.

The president was long reluctant to cave in because he needs the support of anti-nuclear factions in his party to battle the huge opposition, said Philip Yang, a political science professor at National Taiwan University.

--------

Taiwan Says Work on Plant Will Resume

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
News Services
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2501-2001Feb14?language=printer

TAIPEI, Taiwan, -- Taiwan's cabinet said today that it would immediately resume construction of a disputed nuclear power plant.

"To me this is a bitter decision and unavoidable responsibility," said Prime Minister Chang Chun-hsiung, who made the widely expected announcement at a news conference after the cabinet formally approved the decision.

The $5.5 billion, 2,700-megawatt nuclear power plant, Taiwan's fourth, was one-third complete when the cabinet unilaterally decided to shelve it last October.

Earlier, the government struck a deal with the powerful opposition to restart construction on the plant, ending a three-month feud that took a severe toll on the stock market and public confidence.

The agreement came after President Chen Shui-bian ceded to lawmakers' demands and retreated from his campaign promise to cancel the project, which was approved by the previous government.

Announcing that the opposition would accept the government's proposal with minor changes, the legislature's president, Wang Jin-pyng, said, "We have demonstrated our utmost goodwill. We did this so that the economy can quickly recover and people can feel at ease."

When the government canceled the project in October, the opposition-controlled legislature was furious that lawmakers were not asked to endorse the move.

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

Bush tours NATO, Navy units

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
By Joseph Curl
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001214224436.htm

NORFOLK NAVAL BASE - President Bush yesterday told sailors and NATO ambassadors that new national-security threats will drive the future of the U.S. military, but said "the best way to keep the peace is to redefine war on our terms."

On his second leg of a three-day tour of military bases to highlight his agenda to revamp the armed forces, Mr. Bush described "a new era" of danger to America and its allies.

"The grave threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons has not gone away with the Cold War. It has evolved into many separate threats, some of them harder to see and harder to answer. And the adversaries seeking these tools of terror are less predictable, more diverse."

The answer, Mr. Bush said, is to modernize the military to prepare it to "confront the threats that come on a missile . . . in a shipping container or in a suitcase."

Mr. Bush used a ceremony at the Allied Command Atlantic headquarters of NATO to announce he will request Congress add $2.6 billion to the Pentagon's research-and-development budget next year.

"We're witnessing a revolution in the technology of war, powers increasingly defined not by size, but by mobility and swiftness. . . . Safety is gained in stealth and forces projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons," Mr. Bush told hundreds of members NATO military personnel and their families.

Mr. Bush, who plans to deploy a high-tech "umbrella" defense against incoming ballistic missiles, pledged to work closely within the NATO alliance before building the system.

"In diplomacy and technology and missile defense, in fighting wars and, above all, in preventing wars, we must work as one," Mr. Bush said. "We did not prevail together in the Cold War only to go our separate ways, pursuing separate plans with separate technologies.

"NATO is the reason history records no World War Three, by preserving the stability of Europe and the trans-Atlantic community. NATO has kept the peace and the work goes on. The defenses we build must protect us all," he said.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush proposed sharing missile-defense technology with NATO and other allies, such as Israel.

But sweeping changes won't come swiftly.

"We must put strategy first, then spending," said Mr. Bush, who plans no major changes in spending until after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld completes a strategic review of the armed forces. "Our defense vision will drive our defense budget, not the other way around.

"Redesigning the strategic vision of the military is going to take some time," he told reporters onboard Air Force One. "But we must do it. There are going to be some tough choices to make, but that's why you get elected."

Washington-based diplomats from NATO nations, as well as Virginia Sens. John W. Warner and George F. Allen, traveled to Norfolk to attend the ceremony.

At the Allied Command Atlantic headquarters, Mr. Bush also watched a high-tech war game conducted jointly by the United States and its NATO allies directed from the command ship, the USS Mount Whitney, 50 miles off the Virginia coast.

In his short visit to this naval port city, Mr. Bush also visited the nearby U.S. Joint Forces Command, which assesses national security threats and recommends ways to outfit and configure the military to adapt to the changing strategic environment.

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

-------- georgia

Whistle-blower wins ruling vs. Ga. Power

February 14, 2001
Matthew C. Quinn
http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/wednesday/business _a3a88276636a319a0023.html

Georgia Power Co. has been ordered to reinstate and pay an estimated $5 million in back pay, damages and attorney fees to a nuclear plant executive fired in a 10-year-old whistle-blower case.

The utility said it will appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals a U.S. Labor Department administrative review board ruling that Marvin B. Hobby be reinstated with $250,000 in compensatory damages for "emotional distress, humiliation and loss of reputation'' plus back pay and other costs.

Hobby claimed Georgia Power fired him in 1990 because he questioned decisions on control of the utility's two nuclear power plants, contending they violated federal operating licenses.

Hobby's Washington attorney, Michael Kohn, on Tuesday estimated the final award at $3 million in back pay plus another $2 million in legal fees, costs and damages. The review board issued the ruling last Friday.

Kohn is associated with the National Whistleblower Center, a Washington-based activist group. He called the award the largest resulting from a series of U.S. environmental whistle-blower laws enacted during the 1970s. Hobby, 54, lives and is employed in metro Atlanta but was not available for comment Tuesday.

Kohn said the company is required to make full payment to Hobby within 30 days. But Georgia Power spokesman Todd Terrell said the company will ask the appeals court to suspend the order while the appeal is litigated. He also disputed Kohn's calculation of $5 million in damages but didn't put a value on the award. Parent Southern Co. and Georgia Power denied Hobby's accusations.

It's the latest turn in a legal saga that dates to 1990, when Hobby filed his original complaint with the Department of Labor.

Hobby alleged he was dismissed on Feb. 2, 1990, as general manager of Georgia Power's Nuclear Operations Contract Administration in retaliation for voicing concerns inside the company over transfer of control of the utility's two nuclear power plants to an unincorporated subsidiary of Southern Co. Hobby said the transfer violated Southern's Nuclear Regulatory Commission operating license.

A Labor Department administrative law judge initially ruled in Georgia Power's favor. But Robert Reich, then labor secretary, threw out the ruling in a 1995 decision that found the decision to fire Hobby "was based solely on retaliatory animus.''

In his decision, Reich said A.W. "Bill'' Dahlberg, then Georgia Power president and now Southern Co. chief executive, and another senior executive had denied knowing about Hobby's concerns. "I discredit their testimony,'' Reich said.

Reich remanded the decision to another administrative law judge, who in 1998 ordered Georgia Power to pay Hobby back pay and damages. That decision was upheld last week by the review board.

In 1997, Georgia Power reached an out-of-court settlement with another nuclear plant whistle-blower also represented by Kohn. Alan Mosbaugh had been dismissed in 1990 after alleging nuclear plant safety violations at Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle to the NRC and secretly taping high-level executives.

ON THE WEB: For more information about the Hobby case and the National Whistleblower Center: www.whistleblowers.org

-------- nevada

RAD PROTECTION STANDARDS

Feb. 14, 2001

Please Fax [preferably] or call Bush at: White House Fax: 202-456-2461 White House Phones:202-456-1111 & 202-456-1414

Contact: Lisa Gue (202) 454-5130
Kevin Kamps (202) 328-0002
Kalynda Tilges (702) 796-5662

Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy & Environment Program ph: (202) 454-5130; fax: (202) 547-7392 www.citizen.org/cmep

Strong Radiation Protection Standards Essential For Scientific Decision on Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Bush administration should develop strong radiation protection standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository to protect the public and the environment from the dangers of radiation, a dozen consumer and environmental groups said today. The national and Nevada-based groups, which actively oppose the Yucca Mountain repository proposal, were joined by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn and Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) in calling attention to the radiation protection standards used to evaluate site suitability.

Yucca Mountain, located near Las Vegas, Nev., is currently the only site under consideration for a potential dump for high-level radioactive waste generated by U.S. commercial reactors and weapons facilities. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to set radiation protection standards for the site. The agency released a proposed rule for comment in 1999. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy (DOE) commented in favor of weaker standards, and a final rule has not yet been issued. The standard now falls to the new administration to issue in final form.

We urge the Bush administration to support a standard that at a minimum ensures:

- exposure limits at least equivalent to the EPA's generic radioactive waste disposal standard, in terms of annual dose to the most vulnerable persons (e.g. fetuses, children, the elderly); - groundwater protection consistent with the Safe Drinking Water Act; - a regulatory timeframe that covers the entire period the material would be dangerously radioactive; and, - compliance at the boundary of the repository so as to not allow for a buffer zone.

While campaigning in Nevada last fall, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney promised to base a decision about the contentious Yucca Mountain proposal on sound science. The new administration has an early opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to this pledge by establishing a radiation protection rule that requires radioactive waste to be isolated from people and the environment. More lenient standards would threaten public health and promote a reliance on merely dilution -- rather than containment -- of nuclear waste to meet regulatory requirements. This would be a travesty of the scientific concept undergirding the proposal for a geologic repository, the groups said.

The DOE is expected later this year to recommend the Yucca Mountain site for development as a permanent repository for 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. A favorable recommendation is contingent on an assessment of whether a Yucca Mountain repository could meet EPA radiation protection standards.

Radiation standards are of critical importance for public health and environmental protection - quite literally a matter of life and death. Therefore, on behalf of their combined memberships across the country, the following organizations urge the Bush administration to live up to its campaign promises by establishing strong radiation protection standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository: Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), Public Citizen, Sierra Club, U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), Women's Action for New Directions (WAND), Women's Legislative Lobby (WiLL), Citizen Alert, Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth (HOME), Nevada Desert Experience, Nevada Nuclear Waste Taskforce, Toiyabe (Nevada Chapter) Sierra Club.

Bipartisan political leadership in Nevada shared the concerns of these groups.

"Last year, it required a presidential veto to stop efforts to strip away the role of the EPA in establishing radiation standards for Yucca Mountain, and I would hope the new administration will pledge to do the same if required," said Sen. Reid. "During her confirmation hearing I received an assurance from EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman that her agency would continue to set radiation standards for Yucca Mountain. The Bush administration must honor that commitment to protect the health and safety of Nevadans by requiring a stringent radiation standard, not one which is supported by the greedy nuclear power industry."

Nevada's governor, Guinn, has received promises from President Bush that radiation protection standards would not be lowered or transferred to another agency. The state continues to insist that Nevadans are entitled to the same level of radiation protection as other Americans and that standards for a Yucca Mountain repository cannot be more lenient than those governing the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

Added Sen. Ensign, "I welcome this call for the strongest possible radiation protection standards when it comes to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. I have every confidence this administration will follow through on promises made during the campaign, to let the Environmental Protection Agency set those standards. If sound science truly governs this process, then nuclear waste will not be dumped in Nevadans' backyard in the first place."

In conjunction with other groups in Nevada, Citizen Alert has prepared a detailed position paper on the proposed EPA radiation standards from a Nevada perspective, which will be ready for release within the next 10 days.

###

For more information about these groups and nuclear issues, view the following Web sites: Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA): www.ananuclear.org Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS): www.nirs.org Public Citizen: www.citizen.org/cmep Sierra Club: www.sierraclub.org/nuke U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG): www.uspirg.org Women's Action for New Directions (WAND), Women's Legislative Lobby (WiLL): www.wand.org Citizen Alert: www.citizenalert.org Nevada Desert Experience: nevadadesertexperience.org Toiyabe (Nevada Chapter) Sierra Club: www.sierraclub.org/chapters/nv

-------- us nuc politics

A shot in the dark?

February 14, 2001
Excite News
By Justin Greene
The Technician North Carolina State U.
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/010214/university-171

(U-WIRE) RALEIGH, N.C. -- In the early days of the new administration, President George W. Bush has stepped up to the plate with a new and controversial proposal for national missile defense (NMD). Bush's proposal, backed up by national security experts Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, calls for an extensive shield of missiles to defend the United States and its allies against nuclear coercion by what are considered to be rogue states: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Bush's plan differs from previous approaches in that the language used by him and his advisors explicitly includes the development of defenses for our allies, not just the 50 states.

While the more expansive aspect of the plan is new, the basic foundations of NMD have a long and intensely debated history. Beginning in the 1960s, the defense and intelligence communities began to seriously consider the idea of a missile defense shield. The idea was soon tabled; however, it became clear the cost and technology needed to defend the United States against 9,000 Soviet missiles was extremely preventative. In addition, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) gained steam as U.S. leaders decided the best defense for both America and the Soviet Union was to threaten each other with eminent nuclear holocaust if someone stepped out of line.

The NMD debate exploded again in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which was labeled "Star Wars" by opposing Senator Ted Kennedy, proposed the idea of satellite-based technology and armed conflict above the atmosphere. Once again, U.S. leaders chose to stick with the prevailing MAD philosophy.

All these factors changed enormously with the fall of the Soviet Union. The world was no longer saddled by gigantic superpowers engaged in an epic arms race. In place of the USSR was a defunct collaboration of struggling nations with a whole lot of firepower and no clear way to keep track of it all. Indeed, the United States was faced with developing a new slate of foreign policy and defense agendas aimed at combating rogue nations and idealistic terrorists instead of a Russian military juggernaut.

Unfortunately, many observers continue to weigh the merits of a NMD system based on the old U.S.-Soviet relations, with any change in mutual vulnerability being viewed as destabilizing. In 1995, senior Clinton appointee Jan Lodal held a news conference saying, "Nuclear deterrence worked throughout the Cold War; it continues to work now; it will work into the future. The exact same kinds of nuclear deterrence calculations that have always worked will continue to work." This assessment may certainly be true in a bi-lateral scenario between the United States and a China or Russia, but it completely ignores the basic rules of the MAD scenario when applied to potentially new nuclear powers such as North Korea or Iraq. In order for mutual vulnerability to be a deterrent, both countries must have informed decision makers, a high degree of rationality on both sides, a degree of familiarity, effective channels of communication, and leaders who are sensitive to cost and risk. None of these aspects is present in either case.

To add more fuel to the fire, in 1998 the independent Rumsfeld Report assessed the current nuclear situation as very dangerous and advised future U.S. leaders to either deploy a NMD system, substantially alter our current nuclear treaties, or both. Shortly after the report was issued, North Korea fired a three-stage rocket over Japanese airspace, serving to confirm the intelligence community's worst fears. The choice now seems clearer than ever before. While the system will be an investment in the tens of billions of dollars and will take time to develop, it is important for the United States to be firm in its advocacy of nuclear defense. Critics point to two failed interception tests as proof that the idea won't work, but any invention takes time to test and perfect.

President Bush has taken the right step in mandating NMD. At the same time, he has shown a keen awareness of international concerns by pursuing a system that helps our allies as well. At a time when murderous terrorists such as Osama bin-Laden are seeking out stores of uranium, America must look past the smoking embers of the Cold War and chart an efficient and cautious course through the minefields ahead.

---

Russia: Germany Won't Mediate In Missile Debate With U.S.

14 February 2001
Radio Free Europe
By Roland Eggleston
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/02/14022001105800.asp

Munich (RFE/RL) -- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer says Germany will do all it can to facilitate a dialogue between Russia and the United States over Washington's planned missile defense system.

But Fischer says Germany is not prepared to act as a mediator between the two.

Fischer made his comments after holding talks earlier this week in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia's national security council, Sergei Ivanov. Fischer said he would discuss Russia's position with U.S. officials when he visits Washington next week, but would not try to seek compromises.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov is expected to present Russia's objections to the missile defense system when he meets U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell later this month in Cairo (Feb 24).

Russia says it believes the proposed missile defense system would destroy the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which it says forms the cornerstone of arms control agreements. Russia argues that if America goes ahead with a plan to build a missile shield, it might spur other countries to take similar measures or to increase the numbers of their own missiles, thereby eroding nuclear deterrence. Fischer told German news media that it was in everyone's interests that the U.S. and Russia discuss their differences over the missile system in a climate of cooperation, not confrontation. He said his talks left him with the impression that Russia wants to avoid a political clash with the U.S.

"We were pleased the Russian parliament, the president, the foreign minister, and the security adviser assured us they would take a constructive attitude and possibly hold talks with the United States on a missile defense system."

Fischer has made clear several times he has some sympathy for Russia's concern about the planned missile defense system.

But while in Moscow he stressed that Germany was a loyal partner of the United States. He told reporters: "The United States is our most important ally."

Fischer's most intense talks about the missile defense system were with the head of the Russian national security council, Sergei Ivanov. German officials described them as a continuation of talks between Fischer and Ivanov at a security conference in Munich earlier this month.

In an address to that conference, Ivanov said deployment of the U.S. missile system would destroy international strategic stability and open the way for a new arms race, including an arms race in outer space.

Ivanov said that if Washington dropped its plans, Russia was ready for a joint program with the United States to make radical cuts in the number of offensive strategic weapons.

Fischer's talks in Moscow also covered the European Union's plans to offer membership to Central European and Baltic nations. In an address to Russian political scientists, Fischer said the accession of the Baltic states to the Union would confer EU citizenship on the Russians living in these countries. He said this could help improve ties with Moscow.

The German foreign minister also met members of the Memorial organization, which seeks to defend human rights in Chechnya. According to the German Foreign Ministry, Fischer told them that accurate reporting of human rights violations was an important part of the effort to bring peace to the region.

---

Germany adopts key role in missile-defense dispute

Feb. 14, 2001
San Jose Mercury News
New York Times
BY MICHAEL WINES
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/world/docs/germany14.htm

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin and Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, discussed the United States' proposed national missile defense at a Kremlin meeting Tuesday, ending two days of talks that Fischer said point to new Russian flexibility on the notion of a shield against rogue missiles.

Both Fischer and Russian officials denied that Germany was acting as an intermediary between Moscow and the new Bush administration, which has made clear its plan to develop the shield in the face of European qualms and fierce Russian opposition.

But Fischer will be in Washington next week. And after talks with many of the Kremlin's top foreign-policy leaders and the Communist leader of parliament, covering the missile-defense plan in depth, it was clear that he would be able to give the White House a detailed view of Russia's objections.

Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who met with Fischer on Monday, will hold his first meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Cairo, Egypt, on Feb. 24, the Kremlin said Tuesday. The missile-defense proposal is expected to be the centerpiece of those talks.

Ivanov said Monday that Russia ``will act at negotiations on questions pertaining to strategic offensive weapons and missile defense in a constructive way.'' He added, ``We are interested in expanding international cooperation in countering new threats and challenges.''

Fischer went a bit further. ``In the end, I think Russia will accept negotiations'' on the missile shield, he told reporters.

The United States insists that a limited missile defense is needed only to counter the growing threat of a surprise strike, with one or a handful of nuclear-tipped missiles, by a ``rogue'' state like North Korea or Iran.

Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has sought to allay European concerns about the program by offering to extend any shield to cover Europe. He has also said Washington will not move on its own without conducting extensive negotiations with both Europe and Russia.

But Russia and China say they fear that the defense is aimed squarely at their strategic nuclear forces. Conventional wisdom today says that the nuclear arms race is held in check because no nation can defend itself against a missile strike, and so no nation is willing to risk a counterstrike by launching its own attack.

-------- us nuc waste

Revenue generation makes waste-disposal industry a heavy hitter

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Deseret News
By Jerry D. Spangler and Donna Kemp
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,250011074,00.html

What's a five-letter word for garbage? Maybe "waste" or "trash?"

In Utah, the correct response is inevitably "money." In fact, the disposal of waste is a huge industry here. Collectively, these businesses generate hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate revenues, employ hundreds of workers and sweeten state and local coffers through millions in fees and taxes.

In fact, the Tooele County budget is largely dependent on waste industries.

In all, Utah is home to one hazardous waste landfill, two hazardous waste incinerators (one is currently shut down), two radioactive waste dumps, a chemical weapons incinerator, a massive commercial landfill that accepts some wastes deemed hazardous in other states but not in Utah, and a facility that burns municipal waste.

Each is regulated to some degree or another by the state Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Each, to one degree or another, is subject to fierce criticism from environmentalists who scrutinize every nuance of their disposal licenses, applications for changes in their permits, and violations issued by regulators. Now add to the brew the inescapable fact all operate in a highly charged political atmosphere and a volatile business climate where the market for waste is constantly changing.

"In this business, you change or you aren't in business anymore," said Charles Judd, president of Envirocare of Utah, a commercial low-level radioactive waste facility in Tooele County that generates about $100 million a year in revenue.

Changes in the market for the nastiest of human-caused wastes have already led to the demise of one hazardous waste incinerator (it operated only a few months before it was shut down for lack of waste to burn). And Safety-Kleen, owners of a hazardous waste landfill in Tooele County, recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Envirocare is also faced with declining revenues, forcing them to lay off workers.

The result is an industry that is struggling to stay alive. And Judd warns that companies that don't change are going to be out of business.

When Judd says "change" what he means is they must be allowed to accept different kinds of wastes above and beyond what was originally authorized.

Envirocare had planned to petition Utah lawmakers and the governor this legislative session for permission to accept radioactive wastes thousands of times hotter than they are currently licensed for now. Called Class B and C wastes, these materials are remnants from the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, as well as wastes from research labs and hospitals. Some of the shipments will be so lethal that if somebody got close enough, they could receive a fatal dose, noted Bill Sinclair, director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control.

But the company decided to wait, given that lawmakers are uncomfortable about addressing the issue before the public comment period has ended.

Without the permit, Judd said Envirocare will be in serious financial trouble as its current supply of waste - low-level radioactive soils called Class A wastes - runs out in the next few years.

Several years ago, Safety-Kleen had approached lawmakers about its plan to accept the same Class A radioactive wastes that constitute the bulk of Envirocare's business. But those attempts were blocked by Envirocare and Tooele County commissioners who argued there was not enough of the waste to sustain both the existing Envirocare facility and an expanded Safety-Kleen.

For more than a decade, Envirocare has deftly navigated the stormy political waters surrounding the commercial storage of mildly radioactive waste. But many lawmakers simply don't like the fact Utah has become a national dumping ground for radioactive and hazardous wastes, and they can't see allowing wastes that are even more toxic.

Envirocare and its owner, Khosrow B. Semnani, have responded by contributing generously to Utah political campaigns and political parties - Almost $100,000 over the past two years - winning friends on Capitol Hill.

Envirocare sees its two primary sources of waste -11e2 and Class A wastes that currently combine for 80 to 90 percent of their business - largely disappearing over the next several years.

It's not so much that supplies of waste have disappeared as it is government regulators are looking for less-costly ways of disposing of contaminated soils. Most federally funded cleanups now involve building storage cells on or near the contaminated site.

For example, the 10 million tons of uranium tailings at the Atlas mill near Moab is something that in years past could have been earmarked for disposal at Envirocare. But Atlas cleanup plans call for the tailings to be shipped to a site near the Moab airport where they will be buried.

Government regulators with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have also changed the rules on disposal of low-level radioactive wastes. Some materials once targeted for Envirocare are considered so benign they can now be discarded in public landfills. Other contaminated soils can be recycled for traces of uranium.

Despite objections by the state, the NRC is allowing International Uranium Corp., which operates a uranium processing mill near Blanding, to accept contaminated soils and mill tailings for recycling. The small traces of uranium being extracted cannot be justified given low market prices for uranium, but the company also gets paid cleanup fees for taking the materials.

State regulators argue that is nothing more than a sham for disposing of radioactive wastes without state oversight, and that taxpayers will be left with cleaning up a huge tailings pile once the company walks away from the Blanding mill. The company argues, and the NRC agrees, that recycling, whether subsidized with cleanup payments or not, makes good economic and environmental sense.

Ironically, the state's dispute with International Uranium has resulted in a strange alliance: Environmentalists often critical of the state's pro-industry posture toward waste disposal have been wholeheartedly supporting the state's position that radioactive wastes should be properly discarded in regulated facilities like Envirocare.

"It is painful (to admit), but yes, sites like Envirocare are needed to serve the public good by cleaning up these cultural nightmares sitting next to schools and airports," said J. Preston Truman, founder of Utah Downwinders and a frequent critic of Envirocare's business practices.

"Does it mean it all has to be shipped to Utah? I don't think so," he said. "The nation has to come to task with those already sacrificed on the nuclear altar, the Utahns and Nevadans and Idahoans who have already given their lives."

---

Tooele residents support facility
Community is at peace with plant that employs 700

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Deseret News
By Joe Bauman
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,250010923,00.html

STOCKTON, Tooele County - Near this small ranching community 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the first incinerator of its kind in United States is burning a toxic legacy of the Cold War - 13,616 tons of nerve gas and blister agent.

With numerous shutdowns and one acknowledged release of nerve agent into the atmosphere, the Tooele Chemical Disposal Facility (TOCDF) has been a lightning rod for criticism. But residents of nearby communities seem at peace with the plant, which employs about 700. More than half of the employees live in Tooele County.

The Army's $1 billion incinerator is based at Deseret Chemical Depot, a base that also houses rows of storage igloos for the thousands of rounds of chemical arms and storage tanks.

The incinerator began its task in August 1996. By mid-January, it had burned 4,917 tons of chemical agent, 36 percent of the stockpile. The only type of material destroyed so far is GB nerve agent (a k a sarin), with VX nerve agent and mustard agent yet to be burned.

The Tooele stockpile - thousands of munitions, including bombs, projectiles, land mines, spray tanks, rockets and one-ton storage containers loaded with nerve gas or blister agent - once amounted to 44 percent of the country's entire chemical armory.

TOCDF's work is scheduled for completion by 2004.

The campaign is given urgency by the fact that nearly every month, some of the aging munitions stored in protective igloos are discovered leaking, and must be specially double-packed until they are destroyed.

The fact that the incinerator is reducing that risk doesn't mean the picture is entirely rosy. The plant has a history of controversy, mistakes and breakdowns.

But the plant's neighbors have grown used to seeing alarm systems mounted on power poles and hearing the weekly test sirens. They are not worried.

Environmentalists insist the plant may not be safe. The types of incidents that concern them were demonstrated within the past year:

The most serious release happened the night of May 8-9, 2000, when the plant vented nerve gas to the outside air. The incinerator immediately shut down and remained closed for several months.

Only a minute amount of GB leaked from the stack, but none should have escaped. State, Army and federal officials investigated. All concluded that nobody was harmed.

The Centers for Disease Control recommended changes, most of them procedural. After improvements, the plant was back in full operation in September.

In November 2000, low levels of GB were detected on work clothes worn by employees. At worst, it was less than one-quarter of one time-weighted average. Under federal standards, 1 TWA is the level at which a worker can be exposed without harm for eight hours a day, five days a week, for 40 years.

Jason Groenewold, director of the anti-incinerator group Families Against Incinerator Risk, Salt Lake City, contends the plant is not operating as designed.

"The original design was based on draining nerve agent from the bombs and rockets, so that no more than a slight residual amount would go into the metal parts furnace or their deactivation furnace," he said. "However, due to the jelling of agent inside a significant portion of the weapons, the Army has now been incinerating nerve agent in a manner that was never intended."

Officials "really can't assure us that what is coming out of the smokestack is safe," he said.

Dave Jackson, the incinerator's site project manager, responded that the plant operates with alarms and sampling tubes. The Depot Area Air Monitoring System (DAAMS) tubes take samples from smokestack emissions.

"The DAAMS tubes . . . are analyzed with very sophisticated instrumentation," Jackson said. "Since those things are on there 24 hours a day, we know the performance of the system for agent destruction."

The system operates better than the required destruction efficiency, he said. That requirement is a strict one, nicknamed "six nines." The plant must destroy 99.9999 percent of the nerve agent.

"We exceed that tremendously," Jackson said.

The bottom line, according to Jackson, is that the plant is in full compliance with the state's permit, according to the state's interpretation. "This is a safe facility," he said, "and you cannot forgo the fact that we have made the neighbors that I have around me safer."

A quick telephone survey of the plant's neighbors found residents of nearby Rush Valley, Tooele County, support the plant.

"Oh, we're not dead yet. We're still kicking. Of course, I don't know if I've received any harmful effects from it," said Lyle Erickson, whose comments are the closest to a criticism voiced by anyone in this small community during the interviews.

Most of his reactions were like those of his neighbors, a positive feeling about the work the plant is doing to destroy toxic chemical arms. "But one thing I do know," he said. "I think they've eliminated about 50 percent of the hazardous waste in this valley, and that's a plus."

The plant has not stopped real estate values from rising, he said. "Nobody seems too concerned about the gas thing," he said.

Odell Russell, mayor of Rush Valley, lives about four or five miles from the incinerator. "I think I can speak for the community. . . . We have no concern about it. We think it's safe, and I think they're doing a good job."

---

Goshutes divided over N-storage

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Deseret News
By Jerry D. Spangler and Donna Kemp
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/sview/1,3329,250010939,00.html

To get to the 18,000-acre Goshute Indian Reservation, head west from Salt Lake City on I-80 past the slag piles of the Kennecott smelter, then past the turn-off to the Deseret Chemical Depot, where the nation's deadliest chemical and biological weapons are stockpiled prior to incineration.

Keep heading west toward the MagCorp smokestack in the distance. You can't miss it. It's the one spewing more air pollution into the atmosphere than any other plant in North America.

About 45 miles west of downtown Salt Lake, turn south just before you get to two hazardous waste incinerators, a hazardous waste dump and a radioactive waste facility. You get to the reservation about 25 miles later, or about 10 miles before the Dugway Proving Ground, home of some of the nastiest byproducts of military weapons testing.

These days, the reservation boundary is marked only by a nondescript sign, a cattle guard across the road and a billboard inviting travelers to stop at the Pony Express Store, a two-pump pullout with sparsely stocked shelves. It is the only business on the reservation.

About 25 people live in this sun-baked desert where the only sound is the occasional scream of a car engine as it races along the arrow-straight highway to some place else.

A treaty more than 130 years ago exiled a small band of Goshute Indians out of sight and out of mind in one of the harshest landscapes imaginable, a place so desolate it was appropriately named Skull Valley.

"Our homeland was the Tooele Valley, but the pioneers kept pushing us west," said 44-year-old Leon Bear, just elected to his second term as chairman of the 112-member band, most of whom live in towns far removed from the reservation. "They pushed and pushed."

The Goshutes are now pushing back, tweaking the nose of Gov. Mike Leavitt and Utah's political establishment by entering into a lease agreement to allow a consortium of nuclear power utilities to store up to 40,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in above-ground casks on tribal lands. Because the tribe has sovereignty over what happens on the reservation, the state has struggled mightily with how to stop the Goshutes from accepting the most lethal wastes known to man.

The proposal calls for temporary storage of the waste. But opponents believe once it's here, it'll stay.

Bear believes the wastes can and will be stored safely, and that the deal with Private Fuel Storage will spell economic prosperity on his impoverished reservation. The $3 billion to be spent building and operating the facility over the next 40 years will mean jobs for Goshutes, a handful of new homes, money for health services and a cultural center to help them preserve their disappearing heritage.

But the proposal has bitterly divided the tiny tribe.

Margene Bullcreek is leading a small group of "traditionalists" who do not want their ancestral homeland turned into a toxic waste dump.

"(Leon) is trying to convince himself that what he is doing is right," said the 54-year-old Bullcreek. "(But) this waste will destroy who we are."

The dispute is far more than a small Indian tribe going to war with a state bent on keeping the waste out. Rather, the lease agreement thrusts the Goshutes into the middle of a national debate over the nation's nuclear policy, which has failed for more than 50 years to come up with a plan to dispose of nuclear waste.

It seems the only ones who want the waste are the Skull Valley Goshutes, who say their reservation, already tucked between toxic waste dumps and incinerators, is not only a suitable site, but the only real option the tribe has for drumming up jobs.

The tribe has tried but failed to attract other businesses. A rocket test range that the Hercules Corporation used to test satellite launch rockets since 1975 now sits idle on the reservation, the company recently declining to renew its contract. In 1993, the tribe invested in a glass and aluminum recycling plant that went bankrupt.

Other prospects didn't pan out either.

Three years ago, Bear signed a lease with PFS, but he won't disclose the financial details. "Some things," he said, "are nobody's business."

National dilemma

What to do with nuclear waste has become a huge national problem, not just for the nation's nuclear power plants, which provide 20 percent of the country's power, but for the federal government that needs a place to dispose of waste from nuclear submarines, decommissioned nuclear missiles, nuclear testing laboratories (including two in Utah) and thousands of fuel assemblies from nuclear power plants in foreign countries.

In 1983, Congress passed legislation committing the government to have a permanent repository for the nuclear waste in place by Jan. 31, 1998. Now the government is saying a permanent facility will not be ready before 2010 at the earliest.

And no one inside the industry believes the government will meet that deadline, either.

Most agree a permanent nuclear waste facility will someday be built deep inside Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. Scientific tests on the suitability of the site continue, but actual construction is years away.

Government officials recognized years ago they would not meet the storage deadline passed by Congress. In the early 1990s, the Department of Energy invited communities and Indian tribes to apply for grants to study the possibility of temporarily accepting nuclear waste pending completion of a permanent site.

The Goshutes were among two Indian tribes that responded. They accepted two grants totaling $300,000 to conduct studies and visit nuclear power plants around the world.

"Initially, it bothered us that they seemed to be targeting Indian reservations," said Bear, who at the time was tribal secretary. "Then we went through the studies and decided it was feasible to store it, that it was safe."

A general meeting of tribal members passed a resolution supporting the idea.

In 1997, the tribal council, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a consortium of nuclear power companies signed a 40-year lease agreement for temporary storage of nuclear waste, emphasizing to a wary public that the Skull Valley facility is a stop-gap only until the federal government completes a permanent facility. Even at a cost of $3 billion, it is money well spent if it avoids the shutdown of 10 to 20 nuclear reactors, says Scott Northard, PFS project manager.

The Skull Valley facility would cover 820 acres, most of which would be covered by rows of some 4,000 stainless steel canisters, each 18 feet tall, enclosing spent nuclear fuel rods transported to the site by rail from nuclear power plants around the nation.

If all goes as planned and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants the Goshutes and PFS a license to store the wastes, construction could begin by 2002. Not only will Goshutes be given preference in the construction jobs, but they will have first crack at 43 full-time jobs at the site, Bear said.

It's just the kind of economic development, Bear said, that will draw tribal members - most now living in Grantsville, Tooele and Salt Lake City - back to the reservation. And the financial windfall, he said, will help create the infrastructure that will give them something more than jobs.

Tribal survival

For most of the past century, few Goshutes have actually lived in Skull Valley. Most drifted to white communities where they could find jobs and their children could be taught in public schools.

Bear grew up playing in the arsenic-contaminated dirt of Stockton, just south of Tooele.

He worked awhile as a security guard at the missile test facility before moving permanently to the reservation in 1980 with his wife, a Paiute, where they raised their two daughters. He doesn't speak the Goshute language.

In contrast, Bullcreek and her family have always lived on the reservation. Her brother, the late Bert Wash, was the tribal chairman before Leon Bear's father, Richard, replaced him. Fluent in the Goshute tongue, she calls herself a traditionalist.

She feels that the large utility corporations are invading their small tribe because they don't recognize their traditions. "You don't have to live in teepees to be a traditionalist," she said.

Bullcreek and her neighbor, Sammy Blackbear, have been leading the fight against the nuclear waste storage facility since Bear signed the lease with Private Fuel Storage in 1997. They organized a small opposition group called Ohnogo Gaudadeh Devia (Goshute for "mountain community"), mustering support from other Native American tribes, environmentalists and politicos.

Their attorney, Duncan Steadman, has filed a federal action to force the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reverse its approval of the lease agreement. State officials have openly supported the lawsuit and the Goshute opposition, using state funds to foster the legal challenge.

"I felt I had to be outspoken or lose everything that has been passed down from generations," Bullcreek said. "The stories that tell why we became the people we are and how we should consider our animal life, our air, things that are sacred to us."

Bullcreek has a powerful ally on her side. Gov. Mike Leavitt is confident the state can block the waste through a series of legal and regulatory challenges to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process.

Leavitt is also looking to Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, chairman of the House Resources Committee, to exert congressional muscle to thwart PFS. And he considers President George W. Bush a friend who could feasibly block the deal through executive order.

But Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is warning the governor that there is little that can be done in Washington to block the nuclear waste dump, and that powerful political forces are at work to make it happen. And make no mistake about it, he said: If nuclear waste comes to Utah, it will be permanent.

"The state needs to do some clever, creative thinking about how to stop this," Hatch said.

Leavitt insists he is. He plans to twist the arm of Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura to put the political stops on Minnesota-based PFS from shipping nuclear wastes from power plants there.

Closer to home, Leavitt is pushing the Utah Legislature to pass a law prohibiting Tooele County from providing electricity or water or other public services to the site. And he wants lawmakers to give him $1.6 million for a legal and public relations war on PFS.

And the war will be carried outside of Utah where accidents during rail transport of nuclear wastes could expose millions to the dangers of nuclear contamination.

Bear approaches the state's opposition with Zen-like indifference. Maybe the Goshutes win, maybe the state does. But if the proposal falls through, all is not lost.

"We're not dead in the water yet," he said. "We'll look for something else."

E-MAIL: spang@desnews.com ; donna@desnews.com


-------- MILITARY

Russian warplanes in Japan airspace

2/14/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=8pkr06va8gkoq

TOKYO (AP) - Russian military planes illegally entered Japan's airspace twice on Wednesday in the first such violations in six years, the defense agency said. Russian officials denied the claim. Japanese fighters scrambled toward the Russian warplanes after they were spotted on radar screens, but no encounter occurred, said Koichiro Oshima, a defense agency official. He said four Russian planes, including TU-22 bombers, were spotted at 11:59 a.m. in the Japanese airspace off Rebunto island at the tip of Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido. He said two TU-22 bombers were then spotted at 2:36 p.m. in the same area. Each time, the planes flew over Japanese air space for about three minutes, Oshima said. It was the first Russian violation of Japanese airspace since 1995, Oshima said.

-------- colombia

Hikers found dead at bottom of ravine

02/14/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-14-hikers.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - The bodies of nine hikers on an excursion near a national park in southwest Colombia were found at the bottom of a ravine, authorities said Wednesday. They had all been shot execution-style.

National police chief Gen. Ernesto Gilibert said it was too early to speculate on who killed the hikers near the Purace National Park, home to a majestic, snowcapped volcano. All of the victims - three women and six men - were Colombians.

It was not immediately clear when they had been killed. A report in El Tiempo newspaper said the group had last been seen on Feb. 4, when one of the hikers phoned home from an archaeological site near the park.

The bodies were discovered Tuesday, and authorities initially believed they had stumbled upon a massacre of peasants - almost a daily occurrence in a 37-year war that pits leftist guerrillas against the military and right-wing paramilitary groups.

Guerrilla fronts are active in the area in western Cauca state, police said, however officials were not pointing blame in any direction.

"It's extremely worrisome given that these were people dedicated to recreation, far removed from any kind of conflict," Gilibert said. "We have to clarify whether it was a misunderstanding or simply a homicide or a robbery."

Local media reports indicated the hike was organized by an ecological group and employees of health and recreation cooperative.

--------

Colombia Peace Talks Resume

February 14, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-Peace-Talks.html

LOS POZOS, Colombia (AP) -- Peace talks resumed Wednesday in this southern village following a daring, high-stakes summit between President Andres Pastrana and the country's top guerrilla leader.

Topping the agenda between the government and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were cease-fire proposals and a much-awaited exchange of ill prisoners.

Before flying into a large rebel-held territory that includes Los Pozos, a government peace envoy said he was optimistic about the talks.

``We hope both sides can discover the path which, little by little, will demonstrate their desire for peace,'' Sen. Juan Gabriel Uribe told reporters.

The negotiations were made possible by a dramatic, two-day summit here last week between Pastrana and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda. The president spent the night with minimal security in the guerrillas' main stronghold and managed to pull them back into negotiations they had suspended in November.

A 13-point agreement to reshape and expedite the talks avoided sending Colombia into ``a leap into the abyss'', rebel leader Alfonso Cano, a top aide to Marulanda, said in an interview published Wednesday in Bogota's El Espectador newspaper.

But Colombians were under few illusions that the new talks would produce quick results to end a 37-year war or reduce civilians' suffering.

Colombia's long conflict is being fueled by money guerrillas and paramilitary groups derive from ``taxing'' the drug trade, and a majority of Colombians question the FARC's sincerity. The government's willingness to make the sweeping political and economic reforms demanded by the Marxist rebels is also an open question.

Negotiations with a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army, are also having difficulty getting off the ground amid opposition by northern residents to holding the peace talks in their region.

Los Pozos is part of an area twice the size of New Jersey that Pastrana ceded two years ago to the FARC to entice them into the negotiations. Following the meeting with Marulanda, the president extended the zone through October.

Meanwhile Wednesday, in what was seen as a good-faith gesture, the FARC turned over to authorities 62 fighters between the ages of 13 and 16, and pledged to dismiss 500 more underage guerrillas in the months ahead. The FARC has been under pressure in Colombia and internationally to stop recruiting children.

--------

Colombian Military Officers Convicted in '97 Village Killings

February 14, 2001
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/world/14COLO.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Feb. 13 - An army general and a colonel were convicted late Monday for allowing right-wing paramilitary gunmen to kill dozens of villagers in 1997, the first such conviction of high-ranking military officers in a human rights case.

But human rights groups said today that the prison sentences handed down by the military tribunal - 40 months for the general and 30 months for the colonel - were too light, given the horrendous nature of the crime.

Retired Gen. Jaime Humberto Uscategui and Col. Hernán Orozco were convicted for having allowed gunmen from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia to enter the southern village of Mapiripán in July 1997 in search of suspected rebel sympathizers. Over six days, the men decapitated villagers and burned bodies, as calls for help from local officials went unheeded. Authorities have said at least 30 people died, though the exact number remains unknown.

Human rights groups say that Colombia's paramilitaries have historically had ties to the military, receiving logistical and, in some cases, tactical support in their attacks on villages. In the Mapiripán case, investigators believe that the military not only ignored warnings and cries for help from villagers, but may have also allowed paramilitaries to stop at a nearby army base en route to the village.

A military tribunal, in finding General Uscategui guilty of "omission," said he "didn't act, though he could have and should have."

General Uscategui, who was relieved of his duties last year, was commander of the Seventh Brigade in the southern province of Meta when the massacre took place. The tribunal said that Colonel Orozco, who commanded a local battalion, helped his superior officer cover up reports by a judge in Mapiripán of the continuing killings.

Speaking to reporters, General Uscategui denied his involvement, and said he would appeal the conviction. "I've been dishonored on the national and international level," he said. "I've been unjustly held prisoner for more than a year, and I know that the evidence is in my favor."

The convictions come as President Andrés Pastrana's administration has been trying to demonstrate that it is taking a tough line against the paramilitaries, who are thought responsible for most of the country's massacres.

At his meeting last week with the leader of Colombia's largest rebel group, Mr. Pastrana agreed to create a commission that would make recommendations on how to deal with paramilitaries. In November, the rebels had declared a unilateral freeze on peace talks until the government could show that it was taking a harder line against the groups.

Despite government pronouncements, many international and Colombian human rights organizations say not enough is being done to punish military officials with ties to the paramilitaries. Human rights groups were disheartened that General Uscategui was not convicted of homicide or other serious offenses.

"This works out to a little more than a month for each Colombian murdered in Mapiripán," said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch in Washington.

The paramilitaries have grown to 8,000 fighters from a few hundred in the early 1990's, according to military estimates. Although historically based in the north, in the last two or three years they have spread across the country, where they single out people they believe help the rebels.

-------- drug war

For the Dutch, Ecstasy just the latest fad

02/14/2001
USA Today
By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-14-ecstasy.htm

AMSTERDAM - Jaro Renout is looking for drugs.
A bouncer at the dance club Milky Way, Renout nightly frisks patrons and pulls plenty of drugs from their pockets, including Ecstasy, the feel-good pill that's the rage in Europe and the USA. And then he gets out the club's enforcement device: a jar of water. Dumping pills into water ruins them, which serves other purposes: It keeps away dealers who might annoy customers, and it proves the bouncers don't confiscate drugs for themselves.

It also, of course, makes it pointless to call police. But calling police is not the Dutch way.

While the United States considers Ecstasy a scourge, it's just the latest fad here. While America rushes to toughen penalties and police sweep through rave clubs, the Dutch government sees a health issue. America offers jail, while Amsterdam offers Ecstasy revelers chemical tests to make sure their pills are free of dangerous impurities.

But the next few years will tell whether the Dutch can maintain that permissive approach. The Ministry of Justice is struggling to control illegal manufacturing and smuggling operations that have made the nation the world's leading Ecstasy supplier.

In 1999, the last full year for which data are available, Dutch authorities carried out 150 major operations, closed 36 Ecstasy labs and seized 3.6 million pills. Figures for 2000 and 2001 are expected to climb, and seizures represent only a fraction of the Ecstasy trade.

"The unremitting efforts to tackle Ecstasy production and trafficking will be sustained," said the Ministry of Justice in a statement announcing a budget increase for 2001.

"The Dutch are extremely aggressive," says Dean Boyd, a spokesman on drug interdiction for the U.S. Customs Service. Dutch authorities have cooperated closely with the Customs Service, he says, but the huge profits make it hard to stop the traffickers.

A pill costs only a few cents to make and often sells for $25 or more. And demand is growing, especially in the USA. In the year ended Sept. 30, U.S. Customs seized 9.3 million pills, up from 400,000 in 1997. About 80% of the Ecstasy imported to the USA comes from or through the Netherlands.

Ecstasy is a synthetic stimulant and hallucinogen widely popular at "raves," parties where people dance all night to techno and club music. Also known by teens as "E," "X" and the "love drug," it causes feelings of euphoria.

A U.S. government report shows use of Ecstasy among eighth-graders increased to 3.1% in 2000 from 1.7% in 1999. Among 10th-graders, use rose to 5.4% from 4.4%. And among 12th-graders, Ecstasy use rose to 8.2% from 5.6%.

While not considered addictive like other "hard" drugs such as cocaine or heroin, Ecstasy use is a habit of many young people and can be dangerous. Side effects include severe dehydration. Medical studies have shown that heavy use can cause brain damage.

In the Netherlands, although Ecstasy sales are illegal, the permissive policy means that individuals take the risk.

Former U.S. drug chief Barry McCaffrey, who made an official visit to Amsterdam in 1998, called the policy an "unmitigated disaster." So-called "coffee shops" feature menus of marijuana products and other herbal concoctions. "Dutch tolerance of drug use has created a climate that drug manufacturers and traffickers have seized upon," McCaffrey said. President Bush has not yet appointed a new drug "czar," but the new administration is expected to take a similar stance.

Holland is unyielding. "The policy on coffee shops will remain unchanged," the Ministry of Justice says.

Rien Maas, police chief in Oosterhout, a town south of Amsterdam, says the policy is not a panacea. Despite the availability of treatment, there are about 70,000 hard drug addicts in Holland and there's still drug-related violence, especially between rival smugglers.

Still, he supports tolerance as the most practical approach, especially compared to U.S. laws with mandatory minimum sentences. "It is impossible" to have enough police to eliminate drug dealing and use ."

To crack down on dealers, Holland is looking to regulate sales of pill-making machines and block import of the chemical ingredients for Ecstasy. It also is working with neighbors to better track illegal drugs, since border controls have disappeared largely with the advent of the European Union.

While most of Europe has strict anti-drug policies similar to those in the USA, a few are moving toward the Dutch approach. The governments in neighboring Belgium and Switzerland have tentatively approved measures to decriminalize marijuana this year. Portugal and Luxembourg are considering similar action.

At Amsterdam's clubs, patrons say the Dutch policy works and the impact of the crackdowns is not entirely positive. Ecstasy pills are more frequently spiked with unwanted amphetamines and other substitutes, they say. "When I came here for the first time, pills were a lot better," says Anke Bertems, 25, a sociology student at the University of Amsterdam. "Police began to interfere a lot more with it, so the quality went down.

Officials say a wide variety of substances have been mixed into the pills. Sometimes other stimulants are included, which can be dangerous especially if the use of the pills is combined with alcohol or other drugs.

Bertems says her friends are careful about their drug use. And because drugs are legally tolerated, she says they don't take drugs to rebel or show off, only to feel good. "We're not judging each other," she says.

Nearby, at the club Paradiso, in an old church, powerful bass speakers rumble and dancers shake where pews once stood. Marijuana smoke scents the air. Though many are high, this is not a drug party. Almost everyone is dancing.

Clubgoers who don't take drugs say they are comfortable dancing alongside those who do. "I can see what it does to people, and I don't want it," says Bo van Brommel, 20. But she says making drugs illegal is wrong. "We've got a lot of education about it and you just make your own choice."

She also says Holland's liberal policies don't create an underworld of drug criminals, and as a result "Amsterdam, it's quite safe," she says. The murder rate in Holland is a fourth of that in the USA.

Tineke Edink, 22, says she's never tried drugs. She works one day a week at a drug-treatment facility and she knows the downside. "But I have friends who use drugs. They can handle it. They are not addicts at all," she says. "Because it's legal here, I think more people use it like my friends without problems. When things are illegal, for some people, it is more exciting."

Even in the clubs, the Dutch say that tolerance is not the same as "anything goes." The society expects people to be responsible, they say. Renski Bronk, 22, who works at the van Gogh museum, disapproves of Americans there who show up for work stoned.

"They can't use it in America, so they are using it here" to excess, she says

---

Governor's Drug Efforts Show Fruit in Santa Fe

February 14, 2001
New York Times
Statehouse Journal
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14DRUG.html?pagewanted=all

SANTA FE, N.M., Feb. 13 - When he first proposed radical changes to his state's drug laws almost 18 months ago, Gov. Gary E. Johnson of New Mexico was viewed by many New Mexicans as something of an oddity.

Here was this otherwise conservative Republican borrowing a hefty page from the left-wing playbook, urging that possession laws be liberalized, that drug users get rehabilitation rather than prison terms, that pharmacies be allowed to provide syringes to addicts.

Now, after his relentless campaign to treat drug abuse as a public health issue rather than as a criminal justice matter, Mr. Johnson stands a chance to see his vision fulfilled.

Eight bills that reflect his positions on drug policy are making their way through the New Mexico Legislature. California, New York and dozens of other states have passed some of the same ideas into law, and others have taken effect through ballot proposals.

But experts on drug policy say no other state in recent years has considered so many legislative changes at once, putting New Mexico at the forefront of a policy shift that many state politicians once considered outrageous, even dangerous.

"None of these measures, by itself, is radical," said Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center, a leading national organization for overhauling drug policy. "But as a package, they are a leap forward."

Mr. Johnson, who has made drug- law changes a hallmark of his second and final four-year term, said he was ecstatic about the effects of his efforts. "A year ago, I wouldn't have dreamed this drug package would have generated so much support," he said in an interview in his office here, citing public response that he said was running 20-to-1 in favor. "I don't think it is out of bounds to believe that all eight pieces have a chance to pass."

His approach to solving drug problems, he said, reflects a traditional cost-benefit analysis that any fiscal conservative would take. At the same time it represents a major break from the usual mode of attack in the nation's so-called war on drugs, which has directed the power of law enforcement against suppliers and users alike.

In arguing that those efforts have produced only limited success, Mr. Johnson has become one of the nation's highest elected officials to advocate alternative means to reduce drug abuse and spare taxpayers the enormous costs of prosecuting low- level drug offenders and filling prisons with them.

Last May, Mr. Johnson appointed a panel of prominent officials that included a federal judge in Colorado to evaluate New Mexico's drug policies and recommend changes. Their report was the basis for the proposed legislation.

No other states have embraced such a comprehensive approach, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has said the Bush administration will pursue a strict approach to drug crimes without indicating much willingness to consider the many changes Mr. Johnson is pushing.

That has not dampened Mr. Johnson's enthusiasm. "I've talked to Bush twice about this," the governor said proudly. "So far, he hasn't dismissed me."

Here in the Legislature, the climate for a new direction appears warmer. The lobbyists representing the governor - one to work Republican lawmakers, another for Democrats - predicted that as many as five, perhaps six of the measures were likely to pass before the session ended next month.

The lobbyists - Mickey Barnett, a senior Republican Party official, and Toney Anaya, a former Democratic governor - said two bills were virtually certain to pass.

One, known as the Medical Marijuana Law, would exempt from prosecution anyone who uses "a reasonable supply" of marijuana to ease the pain of certain illnesses. Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed similar measures, and about 15 other states are considering the idea.

The other safe bet is a bill that would require that an offender be convicted before any assets could be confiscated, a measure similar to one passed by Congress last year and by Oregon and Utah through ballot initiatives.

Three more measures, the lobbyists said, have a good chance to pass. They include a bill that would protect pharmacists from criminal prosecution for selling clean syringes to drug users, a law in about 40 other states. Another would follow many other states in adding money for drug treatment, prevention and education programs to be used as local officials deem appropriate. The measure would nearly double, to $24 million, the money available, and officials estimate that as many as 33,000 people would be helped, an increase of more than 25 percent.

A third bill, which has gained little traction elsewhere, would provide immunity from prosecution for anyone who administered prescription drugs known as "opioid antagonists" to reverse the effects of a heroin or opium overdose.

The lobbyists said the remaining measures would be the hardest to sell.

One would resemble new laws in California, New York and other states to provide treatment rather than incarceration for first- and second-time offenders involved with small amounts of drugs. Another would decriminalize possession of one ounce of marijuana, as 10 other states have.

A third would allow judges to deviate from sentencing guidelines. A handful of other states, including New York, are considering such a measure.

Mr. Johnson's efforts have raised his profile considerably - but not so much, he said with a laugh, that President Bush might consider appointing him as the nation's drug czar.

"Not me," Mr. Johnson said, conceding that his positions might frighten as many people as they impress. "On this issue, I am radioactive."

-------- iraq

Powell: U.S Won't Toughen Sanctions

February 14, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-Powell.html

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- In a more conciliatory tone toward Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday the United States will not seek tougher U.N. sanctions but insisted that Baghdad eliminate its weapons of mass destruction.

Powell, who met with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for more than an hour, said the United States wants Iraq to allow U.N. inspectors to return to verify the destruction of its banned weapons -- as demanded by U.N. resolutions -- and then ``move on beyond this.''

Powell's visit comes just ahead of Feb. 26-27 talks between Annan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf on ending the stalemate over U.N. sanctions and weapons inspections.

``I hope that the Iraqi representative comes with new information that will show their willingness and desire to comply with the U.N. resolutions and become a progressive member of the world community again,'' he said.

The Bush administration has criticized the Clinton administration for being too soft on Iraq and not doing enough to bring about the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Bush and his top officials have have signaled a tougher line toward Baghdad and talked about reenergizing sanctions.

But the tougher line was not evident in Powell's comments Wednesday.

``We obviously are bound by U.N. resolutions and we're not trying to modify those,'' Powell said. ``What they have to do is get rid of the weapons of mass destruction that we know they have been developing and have had over the years.''

``The initiative should be in Baghdad for them to do what is required and what is right,'' Powell said.

Iraq wants to end the sanctions imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and it has strong backing from Arab nations, France, Russia and China. But it has refused to allow the return of U.N. inspectors, who pulled out ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes in December 1998.

After meeting Annan, Powell went to the U.S. Mission across the street from U.N. headquarters to meet ambassadors from the four other major powers on the Security Council -- Russia, China, Britain and France.

``We're all clear that we have the same objective on Iraq which is to see the resolutions implemented,'' Britain's U.N. Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said after the meeting, ``but we have different views on how to get there.''

Powell stressed that the Bush administration is now reviewing its Mideast and Iraq policies. The secretary of state is expected to make his first major trip to the Middle East later this month for a first-hand assessment.

Greenstock said once the policy is determined, the council would like quick action on Iraq.

Elsewhere in the Mideast, Powell called the latest clashes between Israel and the Palestinians ``very, very troubling'' and urged everybody ``to control their passions and not keep moving in the direction that gets us on an escalating scale of violence that does nothing but see people's lives destroyed.''

He also called for all countries in the region and international donors to provide economic assistance to the Palestinians.

Annan said he believes the U.N.-U.S. relationship ``is on a very good footing.'' U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said there are negotiations with the White House for Annan to meet Bush later this month.

--------

Inside Saddam's death lab

February 14, 1999
London Times
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/02/14/stirevnws01001.html?

A FEW kilometres south of Baghdad, in a looping bend of the Tigris, there is a low-lying tongue of land covered in reeds and rubble. The remains of ochre-brick buildings have crumbled into the scrub. It is a desolate and impenetrable spot.

The people of Iraq have suffered unprecedented hardship because of what their president, Saddam Hussein, did in this place and is determined to go on doing at other locations hidden around his benighted country.

The loop of land girded by the Tigris is called Salman Pak, and it was the secret headquarters of Saddam's biological warfare programme. It was bombed eight years ago in the Gulf war, but Saddam would not give up the work started there. It was turned over by United Nations inspectors after the war, but he would still not give up. Years of stringent economic sanctions have not forced him to come clean about the full extent of its weapons programme. Even now Saddam is defiant.

It is because of his unbending desire to keep his weapons of mass destruction that Britain and America have been bombing Iraq again this winter. After trying to root out the weapons for the past eight years, the UN inspectors have been kicked out by Iraq (for good, it says) and the world seems at a loss as to what to do next. Some are inclined to blame the inspectors for the predicament.

I was a senior adviser to the leader of the inspectors for four years, and I believe that even getting them back into Iraq with full powers would offer no hope of forcing Saddam to give in.

Are the inspectors to blame? Before answering, it is helpful to know the inside story of one of the greatest detective investigations of all time. Speaking as a former diplomat, I have had my views of the world indelibly altered by taking part in this investigation into a cynical and ruthless opponent. Many of my cosy ideals about international law and the efficacy of diplomacy were shattered in the face of uncompromising evil.

AN AIRCRAFT flies overhead and drops bombs, or a missile explodes. A chemical called VX is released into the air. You inhale it or it settles on your skin. The effect is dramatic and terminal.

VX blocks the transmission of nerve impulses. It shuts down the body's vital organs in seconds. Your heart stops beating. The intercostal muscles around your rib cage stop contracting so you can no longer breathe. Within minutes you are dead. This is chemical warfare.

Imagine another aircraft going over at low altitude. It is leaking something from tanks under its wings, but it does not seem to be in trouble and it is too high to be crop-dusting. You do not know it, but you are under attack.

The next day you notice that several of your friends are under the weather. It hits you two days later. You feel a slight fever and your chest feels tight. You think you have a bout of pneumonia. Over the course of the week many others are complaining of weariness and chest pains. As time goes on, you all have difficulty breathing and develop high fevers. Your skin turns a bluish-purplish colour, your neck swells and you cannot stop sweating.

You are dying of inhalation of anthrax spores - wool-sorter's disease. Your bloodstream has been taken over by billions of tiny, rod-shaped bacillus anthracis bacteria. They are only five or ten thousandths of a millimetre long, but there are so many that your blood has become a poisoned, blackish sludge. A day or so later you die. This is biological warfare.

Now take another scenario. You are at home with your family. Bombs burst. You get everyone into the basement - out of harm's way, you think. But the bombs have released viruses that cause haemorrhagic fever. You cannot see them; they are too small - only 100 nanometres (ten millionths of a centimetre) long.

Adults have a set of defences against this pernicious virus. But over the next few days you watch your six-year-old daughter going through agony. This begins after you think the danger has passed. She develops a sudden high temperature and her face flushes. This lasts two to seven days. She also develops convulsions and starts bleeding internally.

After a few more days her fever drops. This is not the good sign you think it is. Her circulatory system is failing; the virus has damaged her blood vessels so badly that they are leaking. She has nosebleeds, bleeding gums and gastrointestinal haemorrhaging. Red blotches appear under her skin as the blood vessels rupture. She dies that day. This is biological warfare with a twist - a bomb designed to kill only children. Nobody would conceive of developing such weapons, would they? Saddam did.

His regime made both chemical and biological weapons prior to the Gulf war, including missile warheads. It had used chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurdish villagers of Halabjah in northern Iraq. Its Scud missiles could hit Tehran and Riyadh. It was working hard on a new missile that could hit Moscow, Athens, Naples and Karachi. It had plans for a missile with a 3,000-kilometre range, sufficient to hit London, Paris, Stockholm, Delhi, Nairobi and western parts of China. Most scary of all, it was in the early technical design phase of developing a space re-entry vehicle to drop a warhead anywhere in the world.

Despite the destructive power of nuclear weapons, world powers still regard the use of them in extremis as justifiable; no such justification is made for biological weapons. They are regarded by the world community as evil and were the first class of weapons of mass destruction to be banned globally by the 1972 biological weapons convention. Iraq signed that treaty, but did not ratify it - meaning that it was bound morally but not legally.

Before the Gulf war, the Americans were so worried about biological weapons that they led the Iraqis to believe that the use of them would be met with a nuclear response. During a meeting in Baghdad in 1995 I heard Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, confirm this. According to his version, James Baker, the American secretary of state, had told him face to face that "if Iraq uses non-conventional weapons, the US will respond massively and overwhelmingly in a manner from which it would take Iraq centuries to recover".

Tariq Aziz commented: "We are not stupid. We knew what that meant. It meant a nuclear response."

When the war ended, the ceasefire resolution adopted by the UN security council banned Iraq from having nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres (roughly the shortest distance between the Iraqi and Israeli borders). It had to surrender these weapons for destruction; sanctions would be imposed until it complied. America forced Iraq to accept these terms by threatening to resume hostilities.

A UN special commission (Unscom) was to be responsible for rooting out all the banned weapons systems. Its first chairman was Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish disarmament specialist with a shock of white hair. He was a master of "Swinglish", which he would lapse into whenever he did not want to answer a question or come to an agreement on an issue. With Swinglish, he could leave you with the impression that you had received an answer but that it was your fault that you did not understand it. One of my New York banking friends once commented: "I saw your boss on the news last night. I don't know what he said, but I believed him."

Ekeus started his new job in April 1991 with an empty office and no phone, no budget and no people. On the upside, he was bound by no rules and no precedents. A group of expert commissioners - diplomats, scientists, academics and military officers - formed around him.

They were briefed by American intelligence analysts. Johan Molander, special adviser to Ekeus, remembers: "These guys with their dark glasses and briefcases handcuffed to their wrists come into the room. And they start lecturing the commissioners on Iraq's programmes like they were little children who could not really understand nuclear and chemical weapons. And they show their grainy photographs that had clearly been so degraded that you could hardly make out anything. Well, being treated like that did not go down well with some of the experts. It was like being told, 'We know best, do as we say'."

In its post-ceasefire "disclosure" to the UN, Iraq denied that it had biological or nuclear weapons programmes. An immediate series of Unscom inspections began. Professor Bryan Barrass, a retired specialist on protection against chemical weapons, was the UK's representative on Unscom. He had, many years ago, invented the Cam - the Chemical Agent Monitor - the first "real-time" sensor of battlefield chemical attacks. He suggested a fellow Briton, David Kelly, should lead the first "no-notice" biological weapons inspection. They had worked together at the chemical and biological defence establishment at Porton Down on Salisbury Plain, from where Kelly was involved in biological weapons inspections at Russian factories and laboratories as part of a secret Russo-Anglo-American arrangement following the demise of the Soviet Union.

Nobody had ever carried out absolutely no-notice UN biological weapons inspections in a country that was hostile to the idea of being inspected. But everything about Kelly speaks of attention to detail. He stands erect, sports a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and looks out sternly from behind rather large glasses. His normal dress consists of sharply pressed trousers and shirt, tie and jacket. He speaks with a clear, clipped accent. To assist him, Kelly had an international team of 28. They included microbiologists, medical or biotechnology experts, munitions and safety experts, special forces and intelligence types.

The first nuclear, chemical and missile inspections, which were fairly straightforward, inventory-taking inspections as opposed to no-notice inspections, had been announced in advance. By contrast, Kelly wanted his no-notice inspection to be as much of a surprise as possible so that the Iraqis had no time to prepare. Somehow, this did not filter through to the office of Derek Boothby, Unscom's deputy director of operations, a former Royal Navy officer who was responsible for relations with the news media. He announced seven days in advance that Kelly would lead a biological weapons inspection team into Iraq.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was perhaps the first element in a series of events that, had they been avoided, could well have meant that Iraq's biological weapons programme might have been uncovered in that hot summer of 1991.

Biological warfare is old. In medieval Europe, someone besieging a town had the bright idea of hurling the clothes of cholera victims over the walls to infect the townsfolk inside. Nowadays, there are many potential biological agents. The problem is not how to make them in large quantities. It is how to deliver them. Missiles, rockets, bombs, artillery shells, mortars and grenades are pretty ineffective. They either rely on an explosion to spread the biological agent, destroying most of it, or they deliver it all in one spot. The solution is to create an aerosol contaminated with the biological agent, which is sprayed from the air over the target.

To help track down the accoutrements of this type of warfare, Kelly took to Baghdad a questionnaire for Iraq to fill out on "dual-use" items that it claimed were for legitimate purposes but which could be used to make biological weapons.

He was helped in this by Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat seconded to Unscom who knew how to elicit important information from the Iraqis without their realising. Smidovich is a bear of a man but remarkably astute and adaptive. Like me, he had been a delegate to the conference on disarmament in Geneva. Indeed, he had been my principal opponent in negotiations on a chemical weapons ban.

Kelly's biological inspection was planned to last two weeks. Events did not quite work out like that. On his arrival in early August 1991, he found the Iraqis had changed their tune. Brigadier Hossam Amin, the Iraqi spokesman, admitted that Iraq had conducted "biological research activities for military purposes" - at Salman Pak.

Next morning, the Unscom inspectors drove with their Iraqi minders down to the low-lying peninsula. They found a forensic or chemical and biological area; an electronics research and manufacturing site; and an electronics production and storage area. In addition, there was a guesthouse area and an anti-terrorist training centre.

A fairly nondescript woman in her mid-thirties, Dr Rihab Taha al-Azawi, was presented as the sole driving force of the biological programme. She had a broad forehead, wide-set eyes and bouffant, dark shoulder-length hair. Her clothing - usually a jacket over a blouse and knee-length skirts - was frumpy.

Taha had a PhD in toxicology from the University of East Anglia, and the western press would later dub her "Dr Germ"; but from the outset Kelly doubted that she was the real driving force behind the biological weapons programme. She had limited experience, no military background and did not come across as someone who could drive an entirely new programme through bureaucratic red tape. While working women are a feature of modern Iraqi life, it was doubtful that a woman would be given such a responsible position.

Forceful is not an adjective that comes to mind. Taha vacillated between nervous wariness and prickly defensiveness. Under pressure, she was equally capable of bursting into tears as of launching into an angry shouting match. She later turned out to be the wife of General Amer Rasheed al-Ubeidi, a roguish British-educated senior figure in the politico-military establishment.

The buildings at Salman Pak had been largely destroyed by the coalition's precision bombing during the Gulf war. But a good deal of equipment had also been removed recently, some buildings had been torn down and a new layer of earth had been laid down on some parts of the site to cover up evidence. All this activity had taken place in the seven days between Boothby's announcement of the impending inspection and the team's arrival at the site.

Nevertheless, some useful evidence was found, including animal cages - some for primates. Taha admitted that experiments had been conducted on animals and acknowledged that this would have involved an aerosolisation chamber - which "could not be found" until the Iraqis led members of the team two kilometres down the road and showed them its remains. It had been crushed, apparently to destroy the evidence. A purpose-built stand-alone cold store was also found near the forensic science biology building. It was ideal for storing bulk quantities of biological warfare agents and heightened Kelly's suspicions that bulk production of biological weapons had either taken place or was planned.

When members of the team came across a large radioactive cobalt source, a severe health hazard, Kelly was furious - and Dr Ahmed Murtada, the director of the Technical Research Centre, which had set up Salman Pak, bore the brunt of his anger. Murtada ended up implicitly agreeing that there had been an offensive biological weapons programme. He said Taha reported directly to Hussein Kamal Hassan, Saddam's cousin, who in 1991 was minister of defence and responsible for the ruthless suppression of the popular uprisings in southern Iraq and Kurdistan. (He later defected and was murdered on his return.)

Taha initially insisted that Iraq's entire stock of biological warfare agents had already been destroyed. But she later handed over a collection of bacterial seed stocks, including anthrax, botulinum, gangrene, tetanus and tularensis. She wanted Kelly to confirm that this was the end of the Iraqi military biological programme. He declined; there was ample scope for Iraq to have retained other seed stocks.

Kelly intended to carry on from Salman Pak to other suspected biological sites, including a place called the "al Hakam warehouse", previously unknown to western intelligence, which had been unearthed by Smidovich's dual-use questionnaire. It appeared to contain a number of fermenters, a feature of biological warfare programmes.

Larger issues were afoot, however. While Kelly was chasing biological evidence, the UN and Iraq were at the brink of war again over a nuclear weapons inspection. Kelly had to call a halt. By the time the mysterious al Hakam was eventually inspected, it had been cleaned up and the door to understanding the full extent of Iraq's biological weapons programme had been slammed shut.

Years later, Tariq Aziz told Ekeus that at the end of the Gulf war, Iraq had been petrified that America might resume the conflict or that Iran might take advantage of Iraq's weakened military position. For these reasons Iraq had decided not to surrender its weapons programmes to Unscom. Once the Iraqi leadership realised that these fears were unfounded, he said, it was too late to come clean, and so it unilaterally and clandestinely destroyed its banned weapons and all evidence of the programmes under which they were built.

On the face of it this is a plausible explanation, but it is belied by the evidence. Consider what happened to the first no-notice nuclear inspection led by David Kay, a veteran official of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Early on the morning of June 28, 1991, he arrived at a military transport depot near Baghdad. American intelligence believed items from the nuclear weapons programme were there. While his inspectors watched the exits - and one climbed a water tower with a view over the site - Kay demanded entry. He was still arguing to be let in when his colleague radioed from the water tower: Iraqis were loading bomb-making equipment onto trucks inside the site, and were about to move out under armed guard.

When the trucks rolled out of the camp, a group of inspectors drove off in pursuit but stopped when shots were fired over them. Rick Lally, an American, gave chase in another vehicle, taking photographs. The Iraqis forced him off the road and tried to bully him, at gunpoint, into surrendering the camera. Kay watched in amazement as Lally refused, arguing it was not a camera but a new type of binoculars. Lally confided later that he had brought the new and very expensive camera to Iraq against the wishes of his wife. He had promised not to lose it.

His photographs were analysed in Vienna, New York, Washington and elsewhere. Nobody could identify the equipment on the trucks until a retired veteran of the Manhattan project diagnosed them as calutrons, equipment for isolating weapons-grade uranium. The security council was outraged and preparations were stepped up for an airstrike. Under this pressure, Iraq admitted a full-scale programme to enrich uranium. It denied this was military; but more inspection work revealed that Iraq was working in an obviously single-minded way on building a bomb under the guise of a civil nuclear energy programme.

The horror with which this news was greeted in the security council cannot be overstated. Iraq became the first country to be banned from any civil nuclear activity and the first to be forced to accept aerial surveillance of its entire territory at any time. Yet a further eight years of intensive Unscom activity has still not broken Saddam. The initial horror has been largely forgotten. His determination to hang on to his weapons is ignored. There is a weariness with the long haul.

Unscom has achieved a great deal, destroying large quantities of weapons that Saddam tried to hide. But it cannot, through inspections, change Saddam's ambitions or his willingness to let the Iraqi people suffer while he tries to outlast the UN's will to go on.

The ceasefire strategy has failed. With Unscom now kicked out, a de facto policy of containment seems to be in operation, backed by occasional bombing sorties. But without monitoring or no-notice inspections, there is nothing to stop Saddam rebuilding a biological weapons arsenal in weeks, and a chemical weapons arsenal in months.

Four years ago the former head of Iraqi military intelligence, General Wafiq al-Samarrai, told me: "Saddam relies on weapons. His theory is war. He cannot survive without war."

It is time to recognise that his ruthless ambition is the fundamental problem and the only solution is to remove the regime. This need not imply American or British ground troops entering Iraq. Airstrikes on Saddam's terror apparatus should be used to persuade those who keep him in power that their own best interests now require his removal. Air power can also help opposition forces by taking out any heavy armour deployed against them.

Will it work? There are no guarantees. But it is better than the other options, all of which will end up with a rearmed Saddam bent on bullying his neighbours and wreaking revenge. Machiavelli had it right: "Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot." Saddam sees generosity as a sign of weakness. That leaves destruction.

Tim Trevan 1999
Adapted from Saddam's Secrets by Tim Trevan to be published by HarperCollins on March 15 at £8.99. Copies can be ordered for £7.99 from The Sunday Times bookshop on 0990-329 454

Diplomat with a difference

Tim Trevan joined the Foreign Office in 1990 as a chemical and biological warfare specialist. After learning Arabic and serving in Yemen, he spent two years negotiating a global ban on chemical weapons. From 1992 to 1995, he was special advisor to the executive chairman of Unscom in Iraq.

-------- korea

SKorean President To Meet Bush

February 14, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-SKorea-US-Summit.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korean President Kim Dae-jung will meet President Bush in Washington next month for talks focusing on North Korea, Kim's office announced Thursday.

The March 7 meeting will be the first between the two leaders' first since Bush took office. About 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea against a possible North Korean invasion.

``The two leaders will have wide-ranging discussions on their countries' joint policy toward North Korea and ways of strengthening traditional alliance,'' presidential spokesman Park Joon-young said.

He said ``various measures will be discussed to help a permanent peace take root on the Korean peninsula.''

South Korean Foreign Minister Lee Joung-binn visited Washington this month to lay the foundation for the Bush-Kim meeting.

Lee said he was confident that the Bush administration would support South Korea's policy of reconciliation with North Korea's communist regime.

But concern persists in South Korea that Kim Dae-jung's ``sunshine'' policy with North Korea may face difficulty. South Korean officials and experts note that Republicans have traditionally been tough on North Korea.

U.S. and South Korean officials say that future U.S.-North Korea relations depend largely on whether the communist country would be willing to address U.S. concerns about its long-range missile development.

U.S.-North Korea relations reached their peak in October when former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited North Korea and held talks with leader Kim Jong Il.

South Korean officials say that a successful Bush-Kim meeting will create a good climate for a planned visit to Seoul by the North Korean leader.

The two Korean leaders met in the North's capital, Pyongyang, in June for the first time and agreed to work together for conciliation and national unification.

-------- space

Spacewalk 100: Astronauts finish lab work

02/14/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL - Two astronauts ventured outside Wednesday on America's 100th spacewalk, wrapping up work on the international space station's new science laboratory and taking turns playing dead. The space shuttle Atlantis spacewalkers, Thomas Jones and Robert Curbeam Jr., conducted NASA's "dead-guy test," an emergency drill for dragging an incapacitated astronaut to safety.

It was their third and final spacewalk of the mission, and the 100th time that Americans walked in space. Gemini astronaut Edward White II made NASA's first spacewalk in 1965. His excursion lasted 21 minutes. Wednesday's outing was 5.50 hours long.

Before going back inside, Jones and Curbeam paid tribute to White - who died in a launch pad fire in 1967 - and all the other Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and shuttle astronauts who performed spacewalks over the decades. Moonwalks are included in the tally.

"And here we are now," Jones said. "We think in the years to come in the very near future, we'll see not only the construction of the space station completed, but spacewalkers will take their place not only in low-Earth orbit, but back on the moon and back on the asteroids and perhaps even to Mars."

Jones and Curbeam hooked up a spare radio antenna on the space station, unlatched a radiator, checked a leaky fluid line and photographed loose pins on the base of the station's giant solar wings.

The mood lightened toward the end of the spacewalk, as the astronauts took turns hauling each other into the outer vestibule of the shuttle.

Curbeam was the first to be rescued. His goal was to be as motionless as possible. But he was free to keep on talking with his partner.

"Just got to watch that antenna there," Jones said as he hauled Curbeam toward the hatch of the space shuttle, their suits cinched together by waist tethers.

It took the 5-foot-8, 163-pound Jones several minutes to stuff the 6-foot, 210-pound Curbeam into the shuttle airlock.

"You're in!" Jones finally exclaimed.

"Tom, you get a much-deserved rest," shuttle pilot Mark Polansky said from inside.

Jones rescued Curbeam a second time using a different method in which the tether was used as an arm strap. Then it was Jones' turn to play dead.

NASA estimates that nearly 150 more spacewalks will be needed before space station construction is completed in 2006. Wednesday's outing was the 16th devoted to station assembly.

Atlantis undocks from the space station on Friday and returns to Earth on Sunday.

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

Battle with bureaucrats

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
Tony Blankley
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-200121417914.htm

The most sustained test of leadership for the Bush administration is likely to be played out at the Department of Defense. While the tax cut fight will be like the Battle of Stalingrad - fought door to door and hand to hand - one way or the other it will be resolved by the fall. Social Security and Medicare reforms are also formidable challenges, but they too will be decided on up or down votes sometime in the next 18 to 36 months. President Bush's education and faith-based initiatives are almost lay down hands; he will get about 80 percent of his original proposals in those fields.

But developing and implementing plans for a 21st-century military is a project that will require not only bold visions and hard choices, but just as importantly it will demand sustained battle with the Department of Defense bureaucracy and the deeply vested interests in Congress, the defense contractors and the legions of think tank theorists. What makes this challenge so distinctive is that it must be fought not only against the natural opponents of a strong military, but also against many of its natural advocates who may prefer the status quo to sharp - even radical - change. In Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush may have the ideal man to lead this great struggle.

He is off to a good start. Last week Mr. Rumsfeld stood firm in the decision to not immediately seek extra dollars to correct the admitted shortages that exist in the military. This sent a key signal to the military brass and bureaucrats that while the Bush administration intends to strengthen the military, it intends real reform - not merely throwing dollars at problems.

The dollars will come, but first Mr. Rumsfeld has to grab the bureaucracy by the neck to make sure it understands that the old ways are going to have to change. He also announced that he was going to rely on Andy Marshall for his reform designer. Mr. Marshall is the 79 year old eminence grise of military strategy - a Pentagon figure who has argued for years on the need to shift the military into an information age, post Cold War, non-Eurocentric fighting machine. This should not be a surprise to close observers of Mr. Bush's military comments. His speech to The Citadel military academy in September of 1999 was deeply informed by Mr. Marshall's theories.

When the time comes, these radical views - which entail canceling or fazing out major weapon systems such as the F-22 fighter, the JSF fighter, the DD21 navy destroyer and perhaps even aircraft carriers and heavy battle tanks - will get major press coverage and major fights by the defenders of these weapons. Less talked about, but at least as important will be Mr. Rumsfeld's fight to reduce radically the dollars spent in support, rather than war-fighting, activities. But it is the amount of dollars saved in non-war fighting support expenses that will determine how much can be spent on whatever 21st-first century weapon systems are finally selected.

In 1975, the last time Mr. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, 40 percent of Department of Defense money was spent on war-fighting and 60 percent was spent on everything else. Today, only 20 percent (or $62 billion per annum) of the Pentagon budget is spent on war-fighting resources, while fully 80 percent (or $248 billion per annum) is spent on support. If that ratio cannot be improved, even a $100 -billion dollar, five-year increase in defense spending would only increase war-fighting dollars by about $5 billion per annum. The same increase to fighting activities could be realized if we merely reduced the 80 percent figure to 78 percent.

There is no silver bullet to reducing overhead costs - it requires sustained, careful, intelligent administration and out-sourcing. But it can be done. Today, the British, who have been forced to watch every penny for years, currently maintain the 40-60 percent ratio that we had a quarter-century ago. That is why they spend only one-tenth as much as we do on defense, but they have one-fifth as much fighting capability. The Pentagon is still stuck in the essentially cradle to grave military run support system for our military personnel that was created after World War I. It doesn't work very well. The Pentagon today pays more for housing, food, health care, transportation and most other non-military goods and services than those same items cost in the private sector. Every dollar wasted in these inefficient, government-run, essentially non-military services, is a dollar not available for war-fighting. And in a war, the more resources we can provide our fighting men, the more of those fine men will come home safe and healthy.

If Mr. Rumsfeld can bring the bureaucracy around, there will be vastly fewer painful decisions to make about weapon systems. Then he, Andy Marshall and the many others both at the Department of Defense and in Congress will be able to make their reform decisions based on our military needs, not our budget restrictions. Sustained bureaucratic reform will make strategic reform financially possible.

E-mail: tonyblankley@erols.com

Tony Blankley is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column appears on Wednesdays.

---

Help not on the way, yet

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2001214182930.htm

When Messrs. Bush and Cheney pledged during the 2000 campaign that "help is on the way" to the U.S. military, they did not indicate that much of it might not begin arriving until Oct. 1, 2002. Nevertheless, that was the signal the Bush-Cheney administration sent the armed forces last week.

Despite evidence confirming a serious shortage of spare parts, inadequate training opportunities and unacceptable readiness levels, the administration announced that it would not support a supplemental defense appropriation in the near future to augment a fiscal 2001 defense budget totaling $296 billion. (As Mr. Cheney pointed out throughout the 2000 campaign, that defense spending level represented less than 3 percent of total economic output, or the lowest level of defense spending since the year before Pearl Harbor.)

Moreover, the Bush-Cheney administration also announced that it would soon be sending Congress the $310 billion defense budget for fiscal 2002, which begins Oct. 1, that was prepared last month by the outgoing Clinton administration. To be sure, the $310 billion defense budget for 2002 represents a $15 billion increase for that year relative to what Mr. Clinton proposed last February to spend in 2002. However, considering the tendency of defense inflation to outpace consumer inflation, the $14 billion increase in 2002 over 2001 barely, if at all, compensates for rising prices. Indeed, unless it is ratcheted up, inflation-adjusted defense spending may well decline next year. And real increases may not occur until fiscal 2003, which begins Oct. 1, 2002. Judged by the standards so clearly outlined by Messrs. Bush and Cheney during last year's campaign, this is simply unacceptable.

Until it completes a comprehensive strategic review that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is now conducting, the administration argues that many of its spending decisions will have to be put on hold. "Good appropriations will only occur if there is a strategic vision," Mr. Bush told Republican legislators at a Republican retreat earlier this month. While that is undoubtedly true for decisions involving major new weapons systems, it is not true for training, maintenance and spare parts, areas where there is a desperate need for immediate funding increases. Indeed, on the day the administration announced it would not soon be seeking a supplemental appropriation for 2001, Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times reported that the U.S. Army is literally running out of bullets for the 9mm Beretta pistol, the standard issue for many officers and certain enlisted ratings. Meanwhile, inventories of cruise missiles for both the Navy and Air Force need to be rebuilt after they were severely depleted during the Kosovo campaign.

Mr. Bush would do well to signal that significant spending increases can be expected for the next fiscal year, once the strategic review is completed. That would require submitting a revised defense budget during the summer. In the meantime, the administration should address the current spending shortfalls by announcing its support for a supplemental appropriation for the current fiscal year. The "help" that was promised to be "on the way" needs to arrive sooner rather than later.

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Accidents fuel military-training concern

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
By Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001214224154.htm

Two military calamities in the Pacific are raising new questions about the readiness of America's armed forces.

Investigators have just begun trying to determine what caused the attack submarine Greeneville to collide with a Japanese fishing vessel on Friday off the Hawaii coast and why two Army UH-60 Black Hawks crashed Monday during nighttime training on the island of Oahu.

But the back-to-back fatal accidents have some military analysts concerned that a lack of flying or training hours could be a factor.

Jack Spencer, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said "it's really hard to make any judgments on these sorts of things this close after they occur."

But he added, "One thing is for sure that training has been underfunded for a number of years now and the result of inadequate training is going to be more accidents. We often think of it leading to more bloodshed in warfare, but we see how inadequate training can certainly lead to accidents in everyday operations."

Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, became so alarmed by a rash of Navy surface ship accidents he ordered a one-day safety "stand down" in September.

Statistics show that the Navy experienced an increase in the rate of "Class A" accidents in 2000. A Class A accident is defined as one causing one or more fatalities and/or at least $1 million in damage.

The Navy's rate of 12.87 accidents per 100,000 sailors in the early 1990s dipped to 11.66 in the late 1990s before climbing to 12.59 last year.

Lt. Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a Navy spokeswoman at the Pentagon, said "we don't have any indication" any surface ship accidents stemmed from overdeployments or lack of training.

"The purpose of the stand down was to take a look at seamanship and navigation and focus on leadership and equipment handling," she said. "On any given day, more than half the 315 ships we have are under way and performing magnificently."

The armed forces, with its 1.37 million personnel and kept busy by a decade of wars and peacekeeping, began reporting combat readiness shortfalls in 1998. They complained of a lack of fuel and spare parts, which adversely affects the daily availability of aircraft and flying hours for aviators.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff has asked Congress to approve $7 billion in immediate emergency aid, some of which would cover training contracts and flying hours. But President Bush is refusing to commit to any new defense funding this year, at least until he sees the early results of studies he ordered into altering the force for future threats.

Some recent accidents and deployment glitches have been directly linked to readiness woes:

• A Navy inspector general investigation of carrier aviation said more than half of the laser-guided bombs missed their targets in Kosovo in 1999. The IG said pilots lacked target-imaging systems used to learn how to drop munitions from F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets.

• The Army faced embarrassing delays in readying a task force of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters for war in Kosovo. Two Apaches crashed while training over Albania's mountainous terrain. Commanders blamed the problem-plagued deployment on a lack of training hours for aviators and too few experienced pilots.

• An Army investigation into the relatively few Airborne troops who mistreated Kosovar civilians found that the soldiers were not properly trained in peacekeeping duties before being deployed.

• Two Air Force HH-60 Pavehawk rescue helicopters collided in flight and crashed in 1998, killing 12 airmen. CNN reported investigators blamed the tragedy on pilot error, but also discovered the squadron was overworked and harried from frequent overseas deployments. "We found that this unit was very stressed out," an investigator told CNN. "We found that this unit was deploying all the time. We found this unit did not have adequate time to do proper training."

Said Heritage's Mr. Spencer "You're going to have situations where people are not as prepared as they should be. Whenever you're dealing with weapons of warfare, the outcome can be deadly."

The accident on Oahu occurred at night as the 25th Infantry Division, nicknamed "Tropical Lightning," was conducting an air assault exercise in which the Black Hawks picked up soldiers at one spot and deposited them at another.

A division spokesman said he did not know the aviation brigade's flying-hour history. That subject, he said, would be part of the crash investigation. A Pentagon spokesman said there had been no cutbacks in the 25th Infantry's flying hours.

Six soldiers were killed in the accident and 11 were injured.

In 1996, two Black Hawks collided at Fort Campbell, Ky., killing six soldiers. The Army blamed the collision on poor air-crew coordination.

Three years later, a Black Hawk crashed at the same base, killing seven.

Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been prodding Mr. Bush to submit an emergency supplemental funding measure this year to pay readiness bills now. He said he spoke to the president privately yesterday and concluded "I'm confident that message is getting through."

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Japanese Outrage Grows Over Hawaii Submarine Crash

February 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-submari.html

HONOLULU (Reuters) - Japanese outrage grew on Wednesday after a disclosure by U.S. Navy officials that two civilians were at the controls of a nuclear-powered submarine when it hit a Japanese fishing vessel during a surfacing drill near Hawaii last Friday, leaving nine people lost at sea and presumed dead.

Ryooichi Miya, one of the crash survivors and the trawler's navigator, said that the revelation, made days after the USS Greeneville tore into the Ehime Maru, sinking the vessel 9 miles offshore, came too late and was ``absolutely unforgivable.''

Miya was one of several survivors who pleaded at a press conference on Tuesday night that officials continue the hunt for their missing shipmates.

``I want the people that are lost at sea found as soon as possible. That would relieve me considerably. Right now I am really upset.'' he said.

The survivors said there was a loud screeching sound like metal rubbing on metal when the submarine crashed into the fishing vessel. Almost immediately, the ship lost power and the sea began pouring in through a huge hold in the hull, said deck hand Shukuo Nakamura.

``Everyone was in a panic,'' Nakamura said. ``Everyone go up, someone was shouting, go up because the waves are coming. And then a big wave rushed against us and I was thrown into the water.''

Searches of crash site continued Wednesday both in the air and under the water and a robot sub was to go and photograph the wreck and determine if there were bodies on board.

Meanwhile, officials from Washington to Pearl Harbor admitted the affair has strained U.S. relations with one of its most important allies.

President Bush and other U.S. officials have sought to assure the Japanese that the event is being taken very seriously and Navy officials said on Wednesday that they were considering launching a criminal inquiry into the actions of the captain and crew during the crash.

But the Navy has also declined so far to release the names of the civilians on board the submarine for an ``orientation tour'' when the accident occurred.

A senior Naval official who did not want to be identified told the Los Angeles Times the civilians were sitting at two of three key positions in the control room when the surfacing procedure took place.

The official said one visitor sat at the helmsman's seat, and was told to hold the steering wheel steady so that the submarine's rudder and bow plane, which control forward and sideways motion, would not move. The official added that a second civilian was at the ballast controls which regulate up-and-down motion and was told to push buttons that expel water from the submarine's ballast tanks, causing it to rise to the surface.

Navy Cmdr. Bruce Cole, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said on Tuesday that a civilian seated at the controls would not have affected the course of the submarine once the decision had been made to send it to the surface in what submariners call a ``main emergency ballast blow.''

The Navy said it routinely allows guests to ride along on its sophisticated submarines in order to demonstrate the skill of its sailors. Cole said it is not unusual for guests to sit at work stations that control steering and diving, but always under constant supervision by a crew member.

A Navy official also acknowledged on Wednesday the possibility that the civilians aboard the Greeneville -- including two who were at control room positions when the sub rose rapidly to the surface -- could have distracted the crew.

``I'm sure that will be looked into. But we don't have any evidence of that whatsoever,'' the official said.

----------

Submarine Inquiry Focuses on Civilians

February 14, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Collision.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The admiral investigating the U.S. submarine collision with a Japanese fishing boat is considering a line of inquiry that could lead to criminal charges against the sub's captain or members of his crew, Navy officials said Wednesday.

The officials also said they cannot rule out the possibility that civilians aboard the USS Greeneville, including two at control positions, were a distraction to the crew and contributed to the sinking of the fishing vessel off the coast of Hawaii. Nine people aboard that boat, including four high school students, are missing and feared dead.

The Navy officials said no evidence of such a distraction has turned up yet, but investigators will examine the possibility.

In seeking to determine how the accident happened, the Navy is considering an inquiry that could result in charges against the nuclear-powered submarine's captain or members of his crew, according to the officials, who discussed the matter on condition they not be identified.

A decision on how to direct the investigation is being weighed by Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr., who as commander of Submarine Group Nine based at Bangor, Wash., is in charge of ballistic missile submarines assigned to the Pacific Fleet. He was dispatched to Hawaii shortly after the accident.

The captain of the submarine, Cmdr. Scott Waddle, of Austin, Texas, has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the investigation. The Greeneville is an attack submarine and does not carry nuclear missiles.

The Navy might choose a more-formal-than-usual approach to its inquiry because of the likelihood that civilian deaths resulted from the collision, officials said. Nine Japanese are still listed as missing, but Navy officials believe it is likely they were either trapped inside the ship or otherwise drowned.

The ship is lying on the seabed at a depth of 1,800 feet.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in an interview on PBS' ``NewsHour With Jim Lehrer'' that it is ``a very normal thing'' for civilians to be aboard Navy ships and submarines at sea. Asked if there was any indication they interfered with the crew he said, ``None whatsoever.''

``What they were doing is something that will be a subject of the investigation,'' he said.

Rumsfeld added: ``It's not unusual when an aircraft carrier or submarine is steaming that they take distinguished visitors out who have been helpful to the Navy.'' Later he said, ``It's a reward for work people have done to help the Navy, or the Navy League, things like that.''

The Navy League of the United States is a private, civilian organization based in Washington that helps promote the Navy's interests.

In Honolulu, 15 of 17 surviving crew members remaining in Hawaii boarded a plane headed for Tokyo, surrounded by security guards. Akira Kagajou, injured in the accident, boarded a separate flight for Osaka. Nine teen-agers, students at Uwajima Fisheries High School, sponsor of the boat's two-month training cruise, arrived home in Japan on Tuesday.

Only the captain, Hisao Onishi, remains in Hawaii, with relatives of the missing nine and the high school's principal. It was unclear whether officials investigating the accident, who already spoke with Onishi, asked him to stay.

Regardless of the format of Griffiths' investigation, his findings will be forwarded to the Navy chain of command for a decision on what, if any, charges to pursue against the sub's captain or crew members.

In addition to the Navy inquiry, the National Transportation Safety Board is doing its own investigation because civilian maritime traffic was involved.

One issue to be considered is whether the presence of civilians in the control room or elsewhere on the submarine could have interfered with the crew's normal procedures, officials said.

The Navy often takes civilians -- civic and business leaders, politicians, journalists and others -- aboard ships and submarines for orientation rides meant to demonstrate the Navy's capabilities. This normally would not interfere with operations, although conditions aboard a submarine are more crowded than aboard a surface ship.

It was not until Tuesday, four days after the accident, that the Navy disclosed that two civilians were seated at control positions on the sub at the time it soared to the surface, in a drill meant to simulate an emergency ascent, and rammed into the fishing boat.

On Wednesday, the Navy maintained its refusal to disclose the identities of the civilians, said to number 15 or 16, citing their right to privacy. It has said they are civic and business officials and asked the Navy not to reveal their names.

The disclosure that civilians were at two control positions on the submarine drew sharp criticism from some Japanese.

``A civilian wouldn't know what to do,'' Ryoichi Miya, first mate of the Ehime Maru, the boat the submarine hit, said Tuesday. ``It's absolutely unforgivable if a civilian was operating it.''

A defense official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that a civilian was at the helm, where the vertical movement and direction of the submarine are controlled. The source said there was no indication that person played a role in Friday's crash.

The Washington Post, citing a source it did not identify, said another civilian was at the ballast controls, where the surfacing maneuver would have begun.

The Greeneville was performing a drill in which it dived to about 400 feet and then made a rapid ascent, shooting out of the water. This is done to practice an emergency ascent, although there was no actual emergency at the time.

It is the responsibility of the submarine commander to ensure nothing is overhead before blowing the sub's ballast tanks. The Greeneville somehow failed to detect the presence of the fishing vessel.

NTSB member John Hammerschmidt said late Tuesday the submarine's primary periscope was functioning properly. However, he said Navy officials had informed him there were no sonar recordings or video to show what crew members saw before the Greeneville surfaced. He said investigators might be able to retrieve sonar data from computer hard drives.

Hammerschmidt said investigators also hadn't determined whether civilians' actions had any role in the crash.

---------

Copters Crash on Maneuvers Over Hawaii; 6 Are Killed

February 14, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/national/14COPT.html

HONOLULU, Feb. 13 - Two Army Black Hawk helicopters crashed in a remote area late Monday while on a nighttime exercise, killing 6 soldiers on one aircraft and injuring 11 others.

The aircraft "somehow came in contact" with each other, but it was still unclear whether they collided, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley of the Navy said today at the Pentagon.

Both pilots were wearing night- vision goggles, Admiral Quigley said, and light rain was falling.

The helicopters, carrying a total of 17 people, crashed about 200 yards apart, said Capt. Stephen Johnson, whose fire company came from the nearby Sunset Beach station.

Admiral Quigley said he had received conflicting reports and was not certain how the two UH60 helicopters touched. They were taking part in an exercise over Kahuku on the island of Oahu, said Maj. Nancy Makowski, a spokeswoman for the 25th Infantry Division.

"I heard a big thud," said Perry Dane, who lives on Kamehameha Highway about a mile from the crash site. "It sounded like thunder. It shook, too, like a big rattle."

The accident came three days after a surfacing Navy submarine struck a Japanese fishing trawler off Oahu and sank it. Nine men and boys aboard the trawler are missing; 26 other people were rescued.

The site of the helicopter crash is a military area accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles, said Mandy Shiraki, district chief of the city ambulance services.

The Black Hawks were among 30 aircraft ferrying nearly 1,000 soldiers from Wheeler Army Airfield to a base at Kahuku, part of a two-week Army exercise that began on Feb. 5.

All the dead were aboard one helicopter. Four of the injured were listed in stable condition today at Tripler Army Medical Center. The other seven were treated and released.

The victims were identified as Maj. Robert L. Olson of Minnesota; Chief Warrant Officer George P. Perry and Chief Warrant Officer Gregory I. Montgomery, both of California; Sgt. Thomas E. Barber of Champlin, Minn.; Specialist Bob D. MacDonald of Alta Loma, Calif.; and Specialist Rafael Olvera-Rodriguez of El Paso.

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Bush Details Plan to Focus Military on New Weaponry

February 14, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14BUSH.html?pagewanted=all

NORFOLK, Va., Feb. 13 - President Bush said today that he planned to break with Pentagon orthodoxy and create "a new architecture for the defense of America and our allies," investing in new technologies and weapons systems rather than making "marginal improvements" for systems in which America's arms industry has invested billions of dollars.

In the second of his speeches on national security this week, Mr. Bush appeared to take sides in a long- brewing debate in the defense establishment over whether to invest in entirely new technologies and weapons systems, even if that means neglecting older and outdated systems for years until the next generation of arms is available. His strategy is also bound to set off a scramble within American industry - especially among a new group of software companies and others who have not traditionally served as defense contractors - for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in new Pentagon contracts.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Bush can execute the kind of sweeping changes he suggested today; many presidents, including Mr. Bush's father, ran up against the Pentagon bureaucracy, entrenched members of Congress and local interests that make it all but impossible to kill a weapons system that is already in production. (When he served as defense secretary, Vice President Dick Cheney tried and failed to kill the accident-prone V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey.)

"We do not know yet the exact shape of our future military," Mr. Bush said, "but we know the direction we must begin to travel. On land, our heavy forces will be lighter. Our light forces will be more lethal. All will be easier to deploy and to sustain. In the air, we'll be able to strike across the world with pinpoint accuracy, using both aircraft and unmanned systems."

Over the course of his administration, today's speech is likely to become the measure of Mr. Bush's success in altering not only the Pentagon, but its strategy and its structure.

But the president also stressed today that he was unwilling to spend much on his new plans until Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who sat beside him during his speech to Navy personnel here, completes a comprehensive review of American strategy and the structure of military forces.

Mr. Bush offered no specifics today, apart from saying he had given Mr. Rumsfeld "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo." The president said he would provide only $2.6 billion in next year's budget in additional funds for research and development. That represents an increase of only about 6 percent over existing levels - an increase that Republicans in Congress have said is far too low.

Mr. Bush himself acknowledged that his proposal was hardly the kind of money needed to rethink an entire arsenal, but said, "Before we make our full investment, we must know our exact priorities."

"We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment, a task we have neglected for too long," Mr. Bush said here at the headquarters of NATO's Atlantic command. "But we will do this judiciously and selectively. Our goal is to move beyond marginal improvements to harness new technologies that will support a new strategy."

Though Mr. Bush never used the phrase today, the movement he endorsed is known within the defense establishment as the "revolution in military affairs." It takes many forms, but focuses on the development of new weapons, often designed to attack not only enemy states, but small groups of terrorists who, like Osama bin Laden, can pose a major threat to the United States and its allies.

Most of the new weapons involve the use of sensing satellites that are linked to long-range, pilotless missiles or drones, and highly sophisticated reconnaissance systems. While the proposals and technologies vary, the aim is to obliterate targets from afar, and with little risk to American military personnel.

Reacting to intense criticism from Europe about his plans to deploy a national missile defense system, Mr. Bush also offered reassurances today without backtracking from his determination to build the system.

"We will cooperate in the work of peace," he said. "We will consult early and candidly with our NATO allies. We will expect them to return the same. In diplomacy, in technology, in missile defense, in fighting wars and, above all, in preventing wars, we must work as one."

At the conclusion of his speech, Mr. Bush added, "God bless NATO."

But Mr. Bush's speech today is not likely to calm the fears of allies. In Europe, Mr. Bush is an unknown entity: he has visited only once as an adult (Italy, where his daughter was studying), knows none of the NATO leaders personally (though Prime Minister Tony Blair comes for a visit later this month), and his campaign declarations about pulling American troops out of the Balkans set off a diplomatic uproar, forcing Mr. Bush to say he would do nothing precipitate.

Many of the ambassadors of NATO nations came here today to hear Mr. Bush's speech, but what they heard did not venture far from the markers Mr. Bush laid out in his campaign.

Indeed, some of his words were drawn directly from a campaign speech he gave at The Citadel, the military academy in South Carolina. The difference is that today the ideas moved from campaign positions to the official stamp of policy directives from the commander in chief.

At moments in today's speech, Mr. Bush echoed a theme that President Bill Clinton often returned to in talking about new threats to the United States: the fear of a biological or nuclear attack, perhaps delivered in a small container to an American city, by terrorists rather than a hostile state.

"With advanced technology, we must confront the threats that come on a missile," he said. "With shared intelligence and enforcement, we must confront the threats that come in a shipping container or in a suitcase."

Yet, nothing in the national missile defense plan that Mr. Bush made a centerpiece of his campaign addresses weapons that might enter American territory that way. Nor did Mr. Bush suggest new approaches to those threats today, other than working closely with allies.

"We did not prevail together in the cold war only to go our separate ways, pursuing separate plans with separate technologies," he said.

The burden of translating Mr. Bush's lofty goal of technological revolution will fall to Mr. Rumsfeld, who also served as defense secretary a quarter century ago - when the microprocessor was new technology and when the Pentagon was considered a developer of new technology, rather than a consumer of advanced technology that originated in commercial products.

In the next few days, Mr. Rumsfeld is expected to receive three directives from the White House to carry out the vision described by Mr. Bush today, ordering thorough reviews of troop deployments, American military strategy 11 years after the end of the cold war, and the time frame in which new technologies can be converted into new weapons.

Indeed, the challenge to the Bush administration, many of whose top national security officials were veterans of the cold war, is to demonstrate that they are able and eager to embrace a very different defense structure to deal with a very different age.

But there are technological and political hurdles to Mr. Bush's plans, as well as opposition from many within the armed services that, for example, are heavily vested in piloted fighters and heavy bombers and resist calls to move to drone vehicles. And much of the new weaponry Mr. Bush envisions remains experimental; in some cases, it has yet to be designed.

"There are very few technologies ready to be mass-produced and deployed that could transform the force today," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively on the Pentagon's budget.

Moreover, to make it all affordable, something must give - and there Mr. Rumsfeld will run into an entrenched bureaucracy, well-paid lobbyists, corporate behemoths that are terrified about losing lucrative contracts, and members of Congress who can imagine no worse form of torture than voting to kill a weapons system made in their district or state.

Some defense analysts have argued that many of the new weapons programs now being developed - from the Army's new mobile artillery system to the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet, from the Navy's DD-21 destroyer to the Joint Strike Fighter - represent relatively marginal advances from previous generations of weapons. But each has a corporate and political constituency, and each will be difficult to stop.

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Bush Vows Spending on Futuristic Weapons

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Washington Post
By Mike Allen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1469-2001Feb13?language=printer

NORFOLK, Feb. 13 -- President Bush pledged new spending today for unmanned weapons and other futuristic military technology that he expects will quickly overshadow the tanks, aircraft carriers and other heavy weapons that once defined a nation's might.

Bush also suggested that his administration may cancel some major weapons systems to pay for his plans. "There are going to be some tough choices to make, but that's why you get elected," he said aboard Air Force One.

In a speech earlier to NATO ambassadors and cheering sailors, Bush promised to transform the tradition-conscious military to deal with 21st century threats and to focus on building new weapons instead of fixing old ones.

"We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment, a task we have neglected for too long," Bush said here at the naval hub of the East Coast. "But we will do this judiciously and selectively. Our goal is to move beyond marginal improvements to harness new technologies that will support a new strategy."

Bush's comments were the broadest clues he has given to the direction of the months-long review he has ordered of the military's mission and makeup, an undertaking that has sent waves of uncertainty from the brass down through the enlisted ranks.

He made it clear that both higher defense spending and cuts in some entrenched programs are coming, but only after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has finished the review. Bush said he has given Rumsfeld "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo as we design a new architecture for the defense of America and our allies."

"We must put strategy first, then spending," the president said, his breath visible in the chill morning air. "Our defense vision will drive our defense budget, not the other way around."

Bush said the budget he submits to Congress Feb. 28 will make "only a start" on his ambitious plans for the Defense Department. He will announce a "full investment" later, he said.

The president announced Monday at Fort Stewart, Ga., that his budget for the next fiscal year will include $5.7 billion for military pay raises and bonuses as well as improvements to military housing and health care.

Today, Bush added, "My 2002 budget will also include $2.6 billion as a down payment on the research and development effort that lies ahead." That is part of a commitment he made in a September 1999 speech at the Citadel in South Carolina, where he promised to "commit an additional $20 billion to defense R&D" by 2006.

Bush's remarks today appeared to be aimed at allaying criticism from some lawmakers in both parties that, after campaigning on a pledge to bolster the military, he is not seeking an immediate increase in defense spending through a supplemental budget request.

The president spoke after watching a battle simulation that used three-dimensional radar images to show every ship, missile and aircraft from the East Coast to Europe. He stood before three floor-to-ceiling screens, watching a teleconference from the USS Mount Whitney, a command and control ship about 40 miles off Virginia Beach.

Bush said he wants the armed forces to focus on "the dangers of a new era," including terrorism and biological weapons, whether mounted on missiles or transported in suitcases.

"Eleven years after the Cold War, we are in a time of transition and testing, when it will be decided what dangers draw near or pass away, what tragedies are invited or averted," he said. "We must use this time well. We must seize this moment."

On the second of three days of visiting military installations, Bush landed at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and then spoke at the nearby headquarters of the Allied Command Atlantic, one of the two major military commands of the 19-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Amid his generally laudatory comments about the alliance's role in keeping the peace, Bush alluded to the opposition of many American allies to his plan to build a missile defense shield.

"I'm here today with a message for America's allies," Bush said. "We will cooperate in the work of peace. We will consult early and candidly with our NATO allies. We will expect them to return the same."

"In diplomacy, in technology, in missile defense, in fighting wars and, above all, in preventing wars, we must work as one," he continued. "The dangers ahead confront us all. The defenses we build must protect us all."

Bush has promised that unlike the Clinton administration's missile defense plan, his missile shield would cover America's allies, not just the 50 states. The president went on to describe the changes required by "a revolution in the technology of war -- powers increasingly defined not by size, but by mobility and swiftness."

"On land, our heavy forces will be lighter, our light forces will be more lethal," Bush said. "In the air, we will be able to strike across the world with pinpoint accuracy, using both aircraft and unmanned systems."

The Navy of the future will use new information technology, and the United States will develop ways to protect its satellites in space, Bush said. "All of this requires great effort and new spending," he said.

In words of warning followed by reassurance, Bush invoked the observation of Vice President Cheney, a former secretary of defense, that the military is like a ship that cannot be turned around in a moment.

"Change will not come easy for America's military and for our allies," Bush said. "But we must know our direction and make our turn."

---------

Excerpts From Bush's Remarks on the Military

February 14, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14BTEX.html

Following are excerpts from remarks yesterday by President Bush at the Joint Forces Command headquarters in Norfolk, Va., as recorded by Federal News Service Inc.:

Eleven years after the end of the cold war, we are in a time of transition and testing, when it will be decided what dangers draw near or pass away, what tragedies are invited or averted. We must use this time well; we must seize this moment.

First, we must prepare our nations against the dangers of a new era. The grave threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons has not gone away with the cold war, it has evolved into many separate threats, some of them harder to see and harder to answer, and the adversaries seeking these tools of terror are less predictable, more diverse.

With advanced technology, we must confront the threats that come on a missile.

With shared intelligence and enforcement, we must confront the threats that come in a shipping container or in a suitcase. We have no higher priority than the defense of our people against terrorist attack.

To succeed, America knows we must work with our allies. We did not prevail together in the cold war only to go our separate ways, pursuing separate plans with separate technologies. The dangers ahead confront us all. The defenses we build must protect us all.

And, secondly, as you know first-hand, we must extend our peace by advancing our technology. We are witnessing a revolution in the technology war. Power is increasingly defined not by size, but by mobility and swiftness. Advantage increasingly comes from information, such as the three-dimensional images of simulated battle that I have just seen. Safety is gained in stealth and forces projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons.

The best way to keep the peace is to redefine war on our terms. At my request, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has begun a comprehensive review of the United States military, the state of our strategy, the structure of our forces, the priorities of our budget. I have given him a broad mandate to challenge the status quo as we design a new architecture for the defense of America and our allies. We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment, a task we have neglected for too long, but we will do this judiciously and selectively. Our goal is to move beyond marginal improvements to harness new technologies that will support a new strategy.

We do not know yet the exact shape of our future military, but we know the direction we must begin to travel. On land, our heavy forces will be lighter. Our light forces will be more lethal. All will be easier to deploy and to sustain.

In the air, we'll be able to strike across the world with pinpoint accuracy, using both aircraft and unmanned systems.

On the oceans, we'll connect information and weapons in new ways, maximizing our ability to project power over land. In space, we'll protect our network of satellites, essential to the flow of our commerce and the defense of our common interests.

All of this will require great effort and new spending. The first budget I will send to Congress makes only a start. Before we make our full investment, we must know our exact priorities, and we will not know our priorities until the defense review is finished. That report will mark the beginning of a new defense agenda and a new strategic vision and will be the basis for allocating our defense resources.

As I announced yesterday, my 2002 defense budget will increase spending on the people of our military immediately with better pay, better housing and better --

This need is urgent, and it's obvious. You give the best, and we owe you the best in return. . . .

My 2002 budget will also include $2.6 billion as a down payment on the research and development effort that lies ahead. Yet in our broader effort, we must put strategy first, then spending. Our defense vision will drive our defense budget, not the other way around. Vice President Cheney often points out that the military itself is like a ship that cannot be turned around in a moment. It has a dynamic and momentum all its own.

--------

Bush to ease strain on reservists

2/14/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=8pkr06va8gkoq

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - President Bush promised military reservists and members of the National Guard on Wednesday he will ease the strain that "overdeployment" has imposed on them, renewing a pledge to use U.S. troops overseas only reluctantly. At the same time, he signaled that the reservists and guard members role in confronting domestic terrorism will expand. "As threats to America change, your role will continue to change," Bush said in a speech to some 1,500 reservists, guardsmen and their families.

Earlier, Bush told a gathering of two-dozen reservists, guardsmen and their employers, "We understand that overdeployment affects not only those on active duty but those in the guard and reserves." Tapping such units also puts a toll on marriages, he said. The new commander in chief said he intended to "clarify the mission."

He heard from several reservists and their employers who said growing reliance on the guard and reserves is taking a toll as active-duty forces have shrunk.


-------- OTHER

-------- biological weapons

The World in Medicine
Biowarfare Warning

February 14, 2001
Joan Stephenson, PhD
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v285n6/ffull/jwm10001-3.html

Australian scientists who inadvertently created a deadly mouse virus issued a warning last month that the global Biological Weapons Convention should be strengthened to reflect concern that their approach could be employed to modify human viruses for use as biological weapons.

The lethal mouse virus was the unintended creation of investigators at the Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for the Biological Control of Pest Animals, Canberra. The researchers, who were attempting to create a contraceptive vaccine to be used for pest control, used mousepox virus as a vector to introduce genes for mouse egg proteins into mice for the purpose of stimulating antiegg antibodies to curb fertility. (The types of mice used in the study are normally resistant to mousepox infection.)

However, when the researchers introduced another elementa gene for interleukin 4 (IL-4)to the mousepox vector to help boost antibody production, they made a surprising discovery: instead of having the desired effect, the modified mousepox virus suppressed the animals' cell-mediated immunity and killed all the mice within 9 days. The gene alteration also made vaccines that normally protect mice against mousepox less effective.

Although mousepox does not affect humans, the discovery raises concern that analogous modifications to such human viruses as smallpox could create deadly human pathogens against which current vaccines are ineffective. The CRC study is reported in the February issue of the Journal of Virology.

-------- chemical weapons

Chemical warfare has a long and terrifying history

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Deseret News
By Joe Bauman
http://deseretnews.com/dn/staff/card/1,1228,8,00.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,250011075,00.html

Chemical warfare has a long history, probably starting with the first stone-age warrior who smeared the juice of poisonous berries on his spearhead.

One of the earliest recorded examples of chemical warfare dates to about 429 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War. Thebes was besieging the city Plataea and unable to penetrate the town's defenses.

As Thucydides reported in "History of the Peloponnesian War" (translated by Richard Crawley in 1910), the Thebans "determined to try to effects of fire and see whether they could not, with the help of a wind, burn the town. . . . (they) lighted the wood by setting fire to it with sulphur and pitch.

"The consequence was a fire greater than anyone had ever yet seen produced by human agency. . . . A great part of the town became entirely inaccessible, and had a wind blown upon it, in accordance with the hopes of the enemy, nothing could have saved them."

But a thunderstorm intervened, putting out the choking fumes.

Sulfur also was a component to the chemical weapon known to the Eastern Roman empire as "Greek Fire." A mixture that also included naphtha and quicklime, the Byzantines shot it from bronze tubes mounted on their warships. They destroyed two Arab fleets with it in 678 and 717-18.

During World War I, 1914-18, both sides used poison gas, notably chlorine. One estimate is that 100,000 were killed and 900,000 injured by the blinding, choking fumes. Often soldiers were killed immediately by the drifting clouds of green-gray gas, but many died of pneumonia weeks after they were attacked because their lungs were damaged.

The combatants also used mustard agent, which burns skin and and lung tissue, and breaks the body's white blood cells and lymph tissues.

Italians gassed barefoot Ethiopian soldiers in the 1930s. Gas was used in the Iraq-Iran War. In 1987-88, Saddam Hussein's troops reportedly used poison gas on Kurds in Iraq.

When World War II began, President Franklin Roosevelt announced this country would not be the first to use poison gas, but would respond in kind if American troops were attacked. In a war that featured saturation bombing, incendiary bombing, terror rocket attacks and the atomic bomb, poison gas was not used.

Although neither side actually fired chemical weapons in World War II, Germans killed tens of thousands of concentration camp victims with Zyklon-B. Reportedly, Japanese also killed 3,000 prisoners of war in Zyklon-B experiments. In one of the strangest tragedies of World War II, scores of Americans were killed by this country's own chemical weapons.

On Dec. 2,1943, German bombers attacked American ships in the harbor at Bari, Italy. As summarized on an Internet site maintained by professor John H. Lienhard of the University of Houston, the bombers sank 16 ships, partially destroyed four others and set off two major explosions. Fires burned while rescuers pulled hundreds of sailors from the harbor.

"At first, many of the survivors seemed to be all right, though a few mentioned the odd smell of garlic," Lienhard wrote.

"Soon they began showing symptoms - stinging eyes, skin lesions, a variety of internal problems. Four survivors died later the first day, nine the next. By the end of a month 83 men, out of the 617 who'd made it to the hospital, had died."

One of the ships had carried 100 tons of mustard gas, which the Army later said was carried as a deterrent, according to Lienhard.

The United States built up an enormous stockpile of nerve and blister agent in the years after World War I. These deadly weapons were collected at nine Army bases including Tooele Army Depot in Utah's western desert.

About 44 percent of these deadly chemical weapons were collected at Tooele Army Depot. The arms storage area later was renamed Deseret Chemical Depot.

By the middle 1990s, munitions and chemical agent stored at Deseret Chemical Depot amounted to 13,616 tons of VX and GB nerve agent, mustard and Lewisite (made by mixing mustard agent with arsenic).

All are deadly. VX is so toxic that a minute drop of it on the skin can kill.

The chemicals were in steel containers holding about one ton of GB, and in battlefield weapons - spray tanks to be mounted on airplanes; projectiles; cartridges; land mines; rockets. Of 30,000 rockets at the Tooele base, at least 1,000 leaked. When leakers are discovered, to contain the vapors they are placed in special devices called "overpacks."

In 1985, Congress passed Public Law 99-145, which requires the destruction of all chemical arms. In 1993, this country signed the Chemical Weapons Convention; the Senate ratified the treaty in 1997. This international treaty commits signatory countries to the safe destruction of their chemical arms by 2007.

The Army decided the safest method was to destroy the material where it was stored, rather than move it to some central location and get rid of it there.

A prototype incinerator was built at Johnston Atoll. It began to burn chemical arms in 1990.

The Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System ended its task on Nov. 29. It had safely destroyed 412,732 rockets, projectiles, bombs, mortars, ton containers and land mines containing chemical agent, according to the plant's project manager, Gary McCloskey.

Johnston Island's weapons held 2,031 tons of chemical agent, less than 15 percent of the amount originally stored in Tooele County.

Utah's Deseret Chemical Depot near Stockton, Tooele County, is the location of storage igloos holding those thousands of chemical weapons. It is also the site of the first such incinerator built in North America.

After years of public hearings, environmental assessments and hearings, the $1 billion plant - its formal name is the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility - began destroying chemical weapons on Aug. 22, 1996.

Lewisite will not be burned because arsenic is a deadly element, which cannot be destroyed by incineration. Utah's lewisite will be eliminated by chemical neutralization. Special processing facilities are to be built for it at the Chemical Agent Munitions Disposal System at Deseret Chemical Depot.

The Tooele incinerator has been a continuous source of controversy. Yet it is getting the job done. If no unforeseen circumstances interfere, the incinerator should complete its work by early 2004.

-------- environment

Mad cow measures may destroy bullfights

02/14/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-14-bullfight.htm

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Tough European measures against mad cow disease are threatening to bring an end to one of Spain's oldest traditions: small town festivals featuring bullfights.

"The regulations could be catastrophic," said Jaime Sebastian de Erice, spokesman for the Union of Fighting Bull Breeders. "Up to 80% of the bullfighting festivals in Spain will not be able take on the costs of the new measures."

New European Union rules state that cattle over 30 months old must be tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as mad cow disease, before they are slaughtered for human consumption. Otherwise they must be destroyed, usually by incineration.

But these measures collide head-on with the centuries-old tradition in Spain of selling carcasses of fighting bulls killed in the ring directly to butchers. Steaks, stew, tails, ears and testicles from the slain animals are popular fare in restaurants and meat markets after each fight.

According to Sebastian de Erice, about 40,000 bulls are slaughtered annually in an estimated 17,000 bullfight festivals, an industry that generates $4.5 billion a year. He said 14,000 of the festivals are small-town affairs run on a shoestring.

Maximino Perez, organizer of the four-day Valdemorillo town festival this month outside Madrid, said the mad cow scare has been an "economic disaster."

"I lost 6 million pesetas ($34,000), or some 20% of the festival budget, just abiding by the mad cow regulations," he said.

Perez, who organizes about 50 such festivals a year, said he's not likely to see the season through unless authorities change the regulations or subsidize the festivals.

For the moment, Sebastian de Erice said, neither the central nor regional governments have offered any help.

Sebastian de Erice said the top-category bullfights in major towns and cities are not likely to be affected by the measures since their budgets can absorb the extra costs more easily.

Perez said he lost about $340 for each of the 52 bulls he used at Valdemorillo and spent about as much incinerating each animal.

He said some bulls and calves used in small-town festivals escape the regulations because they are less than 2 years old. The average age of bulls used in the larger festivals is 3 or more.

Some festivals this year have had veterinary facilities available to test the dead bulls. On testing negative, they were slaughtered and the meat sold to butchers, Sebastian de Erice said.

Breeders fear that if one of their bulls tests positive after a fight, it could lead to the mandatory slaughter of every cow and bull on the ranch where the bull was raised.

A fighting bull from a prestigious breeder can cost up to $17,000 - 30 times the price of some cows - and a ranch can have up to 40 such bulls, plus some 200 cows.

No cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy - a brain-wasting illness with a crossover, incurably fatal human equivalent - have been reported among Spain's fighting bulls, although 23 cases among cows have surfaced since November.

Breeders say that Spain's fighting bulls traditionally graze in pastures, rather than eat now-banned feeds made from ground-up animal remains - the practice blamed for the original outbreak of mad cow in Britain in the 1980s.

---

Tunisia plants trees, builds homes to revitalize Sahara

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
By Andrew Borowiec
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001214215529.htm

REJIM MAATOUG, Tunisia -Where the Sahara spreads its desolate sands, the Tunisian government is creating a greenbelt to stop the world's largest desert from advancing north.

"It is not only Tunisia, but the entire planet that is threatened," said Col. Ahmed Meftah. "The desert's advance must be stopped, and here you see the beginning of a transformed Sahara."

He pointed to long lines of recently planted palm trees now producing 20,000 tons of dates a year. "And this," he added, scrabbling three potatoes from the ground, "is more proof of what can be done."

The oasis of Rejim Maatoug is the front line established by what the Tunisians call "the development army," comprised of draftees who volunteer for nine months of desert duty.

"While other armies spend money on expensive weapons, we are fighting the desert," said Col. Meftah, a Tunisian graduate of St. Cyr, the French military academy, and one of two advanced engineering schools.

He has been in the desert for nine years, supervising a program that includes exploration for new water sources, planting date palms and settling Bedouins in villages equipped with schools, health clinics, piped drinking water and electricity.

Rejim Maatoug is now in the third stage of development, which involves the planting of fruit trees and market gardens.

Behind the trim, dapper Tunisian officer lies a cluster of four villages of small, single-story houses, where the nomads of the Ghrib tribe have settled. The tribe has been wandering through the desert for centuries and members now are being transformed into farmers.

Some 1,500 families have taken root here and at several nearby oases, and 87 families are waiting for the army to build more housing units, each consisting of two small rooms, a kitchen, a basic toilet and a courtyard - in traditional Tunisian style.

Ali Behadj, a civilian expert assisting the army, says the project, including a palm grove planted 13 years ago, covers an area of 5,000 acres - nearly 8 square miles - of which 2,700 acres have been declared completed. The project is irrigated from underground sources by 528 gallons of water per second, he explained.

He and other civilians in the region call this the Tunisian army's first victory in the battle against the desert.

This is the time of year when the sun over the Sahara is clement. The days are pleasantly warm, and nights can be freezing. To the west, where the sun sets in a giant red ball that seems to sink into the sand, lies Algeria, separated from Tunisia by white markers every few miles.

The settling of the nomads also serves Tunisia's political aim of keeping its population "vaccinated" against Islamic fundamentalism, some of whose adherents are fighting a war of terrorism in Algeria. By putting the wandering Bedouins into permanent settlements, the desert can be better supervised and protected from intruders.

There have been several attempts by Islamic guerrillas from Algeria to attack Tunisian border posts to capture weapons.

The palm groves, vegetable gardens and the villages are protected by "sand barriers" - sturdy fences made of palm branches. The threat of sandstorms is permanent, blowing grit northward often as far as the coast of southern Italy more than a thousand miles away.

That is why Italy finances about one fourth of the $30 million earmarked for the initial phase of the Tunisian project to keep the desert at bay. Tunisia and the European Union pay the rest. The cost has been considerably reduced by using the army as a labor force.

For example, said Col. Meftah, a housing unit built by the army costs $6,000 - just half what commercial builders charged.

The settled nomads are assisted financially during the first four years of their new life. Later on, they pay the government rent of $7 a month.

Above all, nomad children, who until recently had escaped Tunisia's compulsory education law, are now in schools. And besides paid medical personnel in each of its four villages, Rejim Maatoug has a doctor.

Some settled nomads have succeeded in planting vegetable patches in their courtyards. Others use them to keep sheep and goats. Most of the men of Rejim Maatoug work in palm groves and the market gardens.

Camels, each branded by its owner, meander in herds throughout the nearby desert, ignoring the white frontier markers.

"Here a camel means wealth," said Said Khtiwish, who drives tourists along desert tracks.

"An average camel costs 800 dinars ($580). We use them for travel, transport, meat and skin. Some of the nomads have 30 or even more camels. They rarely stray far from settlements or camps."

Building the greenbelt in the desert is based on three simple phases: the discovery of water sources, followed by the construction of roads and irrigation systems; planting date palms; and finally, creating permanent settlements.

After initial reluctance, thousands of nomads accepted resettlement, but many more prefer to still roam the desert, oblivious to the stability and convenience of settled life.

Teams of army engineers continue searching for water. "Before settling the nomads, we first have to assure their survival," said Col. Meftah.

And after a pause he added: "The desert can be exotic and beautiful, but in reality it means famine, unemployment, ignorance and misery."

At nightfall, electric lights begin to go on in the houses of Rejim Maatoug. Several families already have acquired television sets.

In the gathering darkness, the palm trees look like silent sentinels against the stubborn desert. From the minaret of the mosque the voice of the muezzin reminds the residents that "there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.

---

EU proposes new mad-cow measures

February 14, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001214213325.htm

STRASBOURG, France - The EU Commission proposed new measures yesterday to counter the mad-cow disease crisis, urging a move away from so-called industrial farms, where animals are packed into crowded warehouses and fed mass-produced feed.

EU Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler called for increased support for organic agriculture and said certain subsidies should be available only to herds that contain 90 head of cattle or less.

The mad-cow crisis "demonstrates the need for a return to farming methods that are more in tune with the environment," Mr. Fischler said.

Feed containing bone meal and other animal byproducts has been blamed for spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease.

--------

Paving the Planet: Cars and Crops Competing for Land

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Environmental News Network
Worldwatch Institute
http://www.enn.com/direct/display-release.asp?id=3413

WASHINGTON, DC - As the new century begins, the competition between cars and crops for cropland is intensifying. Until now, the paving of cropland has occurred largely in industrial countries, home to four fifths of the world's 520 million automobiles. But now, more and more farmland is being sacrificed in developing countries with hungry populations, calling into question the future role of the car.

Millions of hectares of cropland in the industrial world have been paved over for roads and parking lots. Each U.S. car, for example, requires on average 0.18 acres of paved land for roads and parking space. For every five cars added to the U.S. fleet, an area the size of a football field is covered with asphalt. The United States, with its 214 million motor vehicles, has paved 3.9 million miles of roads, enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157 times. Roads and parking lots cover an estimated 61,000 square miles in the United States, an expanse approaching the 21 million hectares that U.S. farmers planted in wheat last year. In the United States, there are three vehicles for every four people.

In Western Europe and Japan, there is typically one for every two people.

In developing countries, automobile fleets are still small, cropland is in short supply--and the paving is just getting underway. But, more and more of the 11 million cars added annually to the world's vehicle fleet are found in the developing world.

This means that the war between cars and crops is being waged over wheat fields and rice paddies in countries where hunger is common. The outcome of this conflict in populous China and India will affect food security everywhere. If China were to achieve the Japanese automobile ownership rate of one car for every two people, it would have a fleet of 640 million, compared with 13 million today. Assuming 0.02 hectares of paved land per vehicle in China, as in Europe and Japan, such a fleet would require paving nearly 13 million hectares of land, most of which would likely be cropland. This figure is over half of China's 23 million hectares of rice land.

India has more than 1 billion people and 8 million motor vehicles. Its fast-growing villages and cities are already encroaching on its cropland. A country projected to add 515 million more people by 2050 cannot afford to cover valuable cropland with asphalt.

There is not enough land in China, India, and other densely populated countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Mexico to support automobile-centered transportation systems and to feed their people.

The time has come to reassess the future of the automobile and to design transportation systems that provide mobility for entire populations without threatening food security.

For the complete article, see http://www.worldwatch.org/chairman/issue/010214.html

For more information, contact: Reah Janise Kauffman Director of International Publications Worldwatch Institute 202-452-1999 x 514 rjkauffman@worldwatch.org Web site: http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/indexia.html

-------- genetics

Europe OKs new biotech food rules

2/14/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=8pkr06va8gkoq

STRASBOURG, France (AP) - The European Parliament approved rules on the marketing and production of genetically modified food that may end the EU's 3-year-old moratorium on the licensing of new biotech products as early as next year. The assembly voted 338-to-52, with 85 abstentions, on Wednesday to endorse what the bill's author, British socialist David Bowe, called "the toughest GMO legislation in the world." The new rules - which still require the endorsement of the 15 EU governments - include stricter labeling and monitoring of genetically altered foods, feeds, seeds and pharmaceutical products. They include phasing out over eight years implanting antibiotics in plant genes, a practice that could cause allergic reaction in consumers. They also set up a public registry where consumers can trace genetically modified foods.

The rules approved by the European Parliament must still be endorsed by the EU governments and parliaments, which may take 18 months. Meanwhile, officials said, the moratorium on the licensing of new biotech crops remains in place.

Mad cow threatens bullfighting

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Tough European measures against mad cow disease are threatening to bring an end to one of Spain's oldest traditions: small town festivals featuring bullfights. "The regulations could be catastrophic," said Jaime Sebastian de Erice, spokesman for the Union of Fighting Bull Breeders. "Up to 80% of the bullfighting festivals in Spain will not be able take on the costs of the new measures."

New European Union rules state that cattle over 30 months old must be tested for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as mad cow disease, before they are slaughtered for human consumption. Otherwise they must be destroyed, usually by incineration.

But these measures collide head-on with the centuries-old tradition in Spain of selling carcasses of fighting bulls killed in the ring directly to butchers. Steaks, stew, tails, ears and testicles from the slain animals are popular fare in restaurants and meat markets after each fight. According to Sebastian de Erice, about 40,000 bulls are slaughtered annually in an estimated 17,000 bullfight festivals, an industry that generates $4.5 billion a year.

-------- police

Iran's parliament limits police

2/14/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=8pkr06va8gkoq

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's reformist-dominated parliament approved a bill Wednesday banning police from universities and seminaries, a lawmaker said, a measure which follows a deadly police raid on a Tehran University dormitory in 1999. The July 1999 raid sparked an outcry that led to the biggest protests in Iran since the Islamic Revolution 20 years earlier. One student was killed and 20 others injured when security forces and Islamic vigilantes stormed the university, where students had been demonstrating over the closure of a reformist newspaper. Reformist legislators promised voters after the raid that they would find a way to keep police off the campuses.

The bill requires military forces and police to get approval from university heads and the interior minister before entering a compound - even in emergency situations, said lawmaker Elyas Hazrati. To become law, the bill must be approved by the hard-line Guardian Council, which decides whether legislation conforms with the constitution and Islam. The council has rejected most bills that support reform.

-------- terrorism

Defense Grills Terror Witness on bin Laden

February 14, 2001
New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/world/14TERR.html?pagewanted=all

A former close aide to the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden testified yesterday under cross-examination in the embassy bombings trial that he worked proudly for Mr. bin Laden in his war against the United States, but later acknowledged telling American agents that Mr. bin Laden "misinterprets certain portions of the Koran to justify violent action."

The witness, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, made his statements under questioning by three defense lawyers in Federal District Court in Manhattan who seemed to want to show that their clients were mere foot soldiers who went to military training camps in Afghanistan with moral aims and were duped into a misguided jihad.

"When people higher up told you what to do at the camp, you would do it, right?" asked David Stern, a lawyer for Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, one of the two defendants who could face the death penalty if convicted.

"Yes," Mr. Al-Fadl replied.

In his testimony, Mr. Al-Fadl also shed new light on the internal deliberations of Mr. bin Laden's group, called Al Qaeda, over potential bombing targets.

In 1994, for example, Mr. Al-Fadl said, some high-ranking members of Mr. bin Laden's group proposed blowing up the American Embassy in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, but the idea was rejected.

"I don't know why," Mr. Al-Fadl said.

Defense lawyers also placed in the record the cost to the government of protecting and housing Mr. Al-Fadl since he began to cooperate with the Americans, about $945,000.

But throughout the cross-examination, the defense seemed to concentrate on having Mr. Al-Fadl depict Mr. bin Laden's group as rigidly hierarchical, with Mr. bin Laden at the top and surrounded by Islamic scholars who used the Koran to influence young and inexperienced Muslims who were caught up in the 1980's in the Ameri can-supported war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In calling Mr. Al-Fadl to the witness stand last week as the first government witness, prosecutors offered a history of what they have called Mr. bin Laden's global terrorism conspiracy, and laid the groundwork for tying that conspiracy to the 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded thousands.

Carl J. Herman, a lawyer for Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, who is charged with helping to prepare the Nairobi attack, elicited testimony about the worldwide call to Muslims to travel to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union, which Mr. Al-Fadl agreed drew Muslims who did not all have strong backgrounds in Islam.

In the camps, Mr. Al-Fadl acknowledged, they received military and religious training. Mr. Herman appeared in part to want to link the two to suggest that Muslims who answered the call saw it as a religious appeal and were more apt to follow leaders who could point to support from Islamic scholars.

Along similar lines, Mr. Herman elicited testimony that Mr. Al-Fadl had gone on missions for Al Qaeda without being told the reason, like when he was told to move from Sudan to Kenya, and upon his arrival, was instructed to move to Pakistan.

Mr. Herman also cited earlier statements by Mr. Al-Fadl to the F.B.I. that the jihad activities of Al Qaeda were built in the shape of a pyramid, "so that if one level of activity is discovered, the discovery is contained to that level in the organization."

Mr. Herman asked, "So if we think of Al Qaeda as a pyramid, the people at the top knew everything that was happening in the organization, is that correct?"

"Correct," Mr. Al-Fadl replied.

But, Mr. Herman said, "for security purposes, some activities that Al Qaeda engaged in were not told to everybody on the pyramid."

"You're right," Mr. Al-Fadl said, adding, "But sometimes they talk."

Mr. Herman's strategy seemed consistent with the opening statement by another of Mr. Odeh's lawyers last week, when he portrayed their client as a soldier and a religious man who obeyed orders but only to the extent that he believed that they were "Islamically correct." Mr. Odeh faces life in prison if he is convicted in a terrorism conspiracy.

David P. Baugh, who represents Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, the other defendant who could face the death penalty if convicted in connection with the Nairobi bombing, asked Mr. Al-Fadl to explain the obligations he was under after swearing allegiance to Mr. bin Laden's group.

"You agreed to follow whatever orders you were given by Al Qaeda, am I correct?" Mr. Baugh asked.

"Correct," Mr. Al-Fadl said.

Mr. Baugh continued, "You would set off bombs and kill many people, if asked?"

"Correct."

"And you also agreed that, if necessary, you would die?"

"Correct."

Mr. Baugh asked whether he was prepared to kill innocents, if necessary.

Mr. Al-Fadl said yes.

During most of his questioning, Mr. Baugh adopted a folksy tone with Mr. Al-Fadl, asking him not to be offended by the lawyer's lack of knowledge about the teachings of Islam. "I'm a Baptist from Virginia, and this is all new to me," Mr. Baugh said. He added later, "In Islam, you all believe in Adam and Eve, don't you?"

But Mr. Baugh shifted tone, asking, "Would you prefer to consider yourself an informant, a snitch, a turncoat, what? What do you prefer to use?"

Mr. Al-Fadl, who had some trouble understanding the question at first, responded without defensiveness, "Yes, I give them information, you're right."

The third lawyer, Mr. Stern, who represents Mr. Mohamed, accused in the Tanzanian bombing, asked Mr. Al-Fadl whether, after learning about a plan to bomb the embassy in Riyadh, he ever said, "I will not get involved in the bombing of embassies."

"No, I didn't say that," Mr. Al- Fadl said.

"Did you say, `Let's not bomb embassies, innocent people could be killed'?"

"No, I didn't say that."

"You just went about your business right?" Mr. Stern said.

Mr. Al-Fadl said yes.

"To support Al Qaeda and whatever wars they wanted to fight, right?" Mr. Stern asked.

"Yes."

At another point, Mr. Stern asked whether Mr. Al-Fadl was "proud to be helping Al Qaeda the way you best could."

Mr. Al-Fadl said yes.

Mr. Stern also cited Mr. Al-Fadl's plea bargain with the government in which he would receive a prison sentence of no more than 15 years.

Mr. Stern, in an apparent attempt to show an inequity between Mr. Mohamed's potential death sentence and Mr. Al-Fadl's possible 15-year sentence, added, "Do you expect to be alive at the end of it?"

Mr. Al-Fadl replied, "It's all in God's hands."

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Terror Trial Witness's Reliability Questioned

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Washington Post
By Vernon Loeb
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A646-2001Feb13?language=printer

NEW YORK, Feb. 13 -- Defense attorneys representing four alleged terrorist associates of Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden today questioned the reliability and motivation of the government's opening witness, noting that he has already cost federal authorities $945,000 in subsidies since agreeing to testify five years ago.

Jamal Ahmed Fadl, 38, an observant Muslim and Sudanese militant, took the witness stand in federal court here last week for two days of riveting testimony, describing how he had tried to acquire chemical weapons and uranium for an atomic bomb as part of a conspiracy by bin Laden's global network.

But in three hours of cross-examination today, defense attorneys prompted Fadl to concede that he would have had no qualms about using chemical weapons in the name of an Islamic holy war and that he now hopes to avoid going to jail by cooperating with the prosecution.

David Baugh, one of the defense attorneys, asked Fadl whether he preferred to be called "an informant, snitch [or] turncoat." Baugh also told the 12-member federal jury that Fadl has cost the government $794,200 since entering the federal witness protection program in 1999, plus $151,000 in FBI subsidies since 1997. The money has covered housing, medical, moving, travel, education, food, clothing and other expenses, according to government documents.

David Stern, another defense attorney, asked Fadl whether he had threatened to quit bin Laden's organization, known as al Qaeda or "the Base," after participating in a shopping trip for chemical weapons in Sudan in the early 1990s.

"No, I didn't say that," said Fadl, who went on to acknowledge that he knew the weapons were intended to kill innocent people.

When Fadl said prosecutors had promised him a sentence of no more than 15 years for pleading guilty to crimes as an al Qaeda member, Stern pursued the point.

"Your hope is that you'll get even less than 15 years?" Stern asked. "You hope you will never go to jail at all?"

"I hope that," Fadl replied in heavily accented English.

The four defendants are among 21 men who have been indicted for an alleged conspiracy by al Qaeda to kill American soldiers and civilians around the globe. Thirteen of the defendants, including bin Laden, are fugitives.

Three of the four defendants on trial -- Mohamed Rashed Daoud Owhali, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed -- are charged with participating in two nearly simultaneous truck bomb attacks that destroyed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 8, 1998, killing 224 people and wounding nearly 4,600 others. Both Owhali and Mohamed face a possible death sentence.

The fourth defendant, Wadih Hage, a tire store manager from Texas who once served in Sudan as bin Laden's personal secretary, is charged with participating in various al Qaeda conspiracies and lying to federal grand juries.

While the defense attorneys -- all court-appointed -- questioned the terms of Fadl's plea agreement with the government, they also spent much of their cross-examination probing the Islamic faith of Fadl and his former associates in al Qaeda.

Baugh, who represents Owhali, explained later in an interview that he was trying to show the jury that the case involves people who sincerely believe they have a duty to repel non-Muslim invaders from their homelands.

During cross-examination, Baugh asked Fadl whether he had heard al Qaeda's leaders preach that the United States had killed 1 million Iraqis, more than half of whom were children under 5 years of age, with economic sanctions since the end of the Persian Gulf War.

"Yes, they talk about that," Fadl said.

At the start of Fadl's testimony today, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald seemed intent on beating defense attorneys to the punch by revealing some unflattering information. While finishing his direct examination, Fitzgerald elicited the disclosure that Fadl had admitted stealing more than $100,000 from bin Laden -- his reason for breaking with al Qaeda and becoming an informant -- only at the very end of his initial two-week debriefing by the U.S. government.

But defense attorneys never tried to use the theft to impeach Fadl's credibility, focusing instead on al Qaeda's religious fervor and the sprawling nature of the organization.

Both Stern, who represents Mohamed, and Carl J. Herman, who represents Odeh, pursued a line of questioning that appeared to be aimed at showing that rank-and-file al Qaeda members often did not have a clear idea about what bin Laden and other leaders were planning.

The defense attorneys also spent considerable time questioning Fadl about a potent Islamic force that first attracted him and thousands of other Muslim men in the 1980s and led directly to al Qaeda's creation -- a 10-year crusade, aided by the CIA, to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.

Fadl said that, in 1994, al Qaeda members "discussed" but ultimately rejected a proposal by militant Egyptians to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

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Poll: US Against Retaliatory Attack

February 14, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-National-Security-AP-Poll.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American public usually rallies behind the government after military strikes retaliating for terrorism, but the picture is a bit different when they are asked about such an action beforehand.

More than half of Americans said they oppose launching retaliatory attacks against countries proven to have direct links to terrorist acts, says an Associated Press poll. Men were about evenly split on the question, women opposed by almost 2-to-1.

The United States launched missile attacks against sites in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 after two U.S. embassies in East Africa were attacked, and polls indicated the public backed the action by more than 4-to-1. Four men charged in the deadly bombings of the U.S. embassies are now on trial in New York.

An AP poll taken Feb. 7 through Feb. 11 suggests people are a bit more hesitant about a retaliatory strike that could take place in the future.

``I'm really against launching an attack,'' said Della Coe, a 55-year-old Republican from the Dallas area. ``A terrorist act is more the act of a smaller group. The ones who suffer when we retaliate are generally not the ones who carried out the terrorism, but children and family members.''

After the October attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, many politicians called for a response. GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney called for ``swift retaliation'' if the attackers could be identified. Presidential candidate George W. Bush said there should be ``consequences.''

Republicans were evenly split on the question of retaliation in the poll conducted for the AP by ICR of Media, Pa.

Democrats opposed retaliatory attacks by almost 2-to-1 and just over half of independents opposed launching an attack, while a third favored such an action.

Other findings in the poll:

--Almost three-fourths in the poll said they have at least some confidence in President Bush on the issue of national security.

--Americans by a 2-1 margin backed bringing U.S. troops home from Bosnia.

--More supported a proposed missile defense system than opposed it, by 48 percent to 38 percent. When asked whether they favored development of a system if it broke an existing treaty, backing for the plan dropped to three in 10 and opposition increased.

The poll of 1,015 adults has an error margin of 3 percentage points.

After facing questions during the campaign about his abilities to handle national security, Bush has won at least some confidence from a solid majority.

``I have a lot of confidence in him,'' said Kelly Sovine, a 29-year-old mother of two from Indian Mills, W. Va. ``He's appointed very good people under him. He's doing a good job.''

Bush chose Colin Powell, the popular former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War, to be secretary of state, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a 68-year-old veteran of Republican administrations going back to the Nixon era, to reclaim his old job of defense secretary. Cheney, who headed the Defense Department during the Gulf War, is vice president.

A third said they have a lot of confidence in Bush on national security, and men were far more likely than women to feel that way, by 42 percent to 26 percent. Three-fourths of Republicans and a fourth of independents said they had a lot of confidence in Bush on that issue.

The public still has questions about some proposals by the Bush administration, including the suggested $60 billion that the missile defense system could cost.

``I'm not real sure I'm for the missile defense system,'' said Robert Williams, a 54-year-old foreman of a water company from Hartly, Del. ``Things in the world are a bit calmer, the Cold War is over. ... To spend all the bucks on the missile defense system is not appropriate.''

The administration's plans to build the system have raised concerns overseas, notably in Russia. A national missile defense is outlawed by a 1972 U.S.-Soviet treaty, which is based on the theory that being exposed to deadly retaliation deters an aggressor from launching an attack.

The administration wants the treaty, reached at the height of the Cold War, changed.

-------- activists

NEXT STOP FOR ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MARCH - HAWAII

February 7, 2001, Wednesday
Inter Press Service
By Gumisai Mutume

Non-governmental organizations are mobilizing for their next stand against the forces of globalization, this time taking on the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which holds its annual meetings in Hawaii in May.

The protests will focus the spotlight on the little-known financial institution, which has been meeting annually behind closed doors over the last 35 years, making decisions that have affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Asia and the Pacific.

They will also focus attention on a territory that was once an independent kingdom, but which is now controlled by the United States as one of 50 states. In Hawaii, minorities continue to fight for their rights.

"Our attempt is not to shut down the ADB meetings," says Cha Smith of KAHEA, a Hawaiian environmental and cultural alliance. "We know where we live, this is not the U.S. -- technically it is -- but we are an occupied colony."

"We want to draw parallels with what the ADB does in Asia to what is going on here, the people have been displaced off their land, sometimes to make way for golf courses."

The ADB is a multilateral sister of the World Bank and it holds its annual board meetings in Honolulu, Hawaii from May 9-11. NGO parallel activities begin May 5.

Like the World Bank, the ADB has been faulted for pushing neoliberal macro-economic policies through structural adjustment programs and huge infrastructure projects such as roads and dams that have displaced people and harmed the environment.

Anti-debt movements also point out that more than 10 percent of the $800 billion in external debt owed by Asia Pacific nations is owed to the ADB. Since it came into operation in 1966 it has poured $ 112 billion into the region.

The ADB Watch -- a broad coalition of groups working for economic justice in Hawaii -- has put out an international alert to progressive movements across the world to "join in and create non-violent activities and events challenging globalization and the ADB's record of imposing destructive and oppressive policies and projects on communities throughout Asia and the Pacific."

ADB Watch, which is made up of non-governmental organizations in Hawaii, students, human rights activists and unions, hopes the proposed activities will "keep the pressure on" financial institutions "that perpetuate economic terrorism."

ADB Watch hopes to educate the public on specific ways that the ADB and globalization increases the gulf between the rich and poor and to unravel the "corporate myth" of Hawaii as a paradise.

"Hawaii is occupied by the U.S. military, colonized politically and economically and we face serious pollution problems," notes ADB Watch in a document calling for support from progressive movements.

"The rights of the Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiians) are under serious and increasing attack by the U.S. and state governments - - and now by organized right-wingers such as the Campaign for a Colorblind America, a conservative, racist, anti-affirmative action organization."

The annual meetings of the ADB had originally been scheduled for Seattle, but that city burst out in protests at the end of 1999 when thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators targeted the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting.

With that in mind, ADB officials opted for what is generally perceived as a tourist mecca -- Hawaii. Hawaii had incidentally campaigned to host the 1999 WTO meetings.

"ADB officials privately concede that they picked Honolulu because it is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by large military bases which should keep away protesters such as the 5,000 beneficiaries of their projects who appeared at their last annual meeting in Thailand," says Stephanie Fried of Environmental Defence Hawaii.

At its annual meetings last year, the ADB attracted thousands of protestors including networks of Thai farmers protesting against water user fees imposed by the bank. They demanded a halt to all ADB financing in Thailand charging that ADB loans benefited "imperialist super powers and multinational corporations."

The ADB has also been faulted for massive dam projects. Some of its largest dam and infrastructure programs stretch across six countries -- Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and the Yunnan Province of the People's Republic of China -- in the Greater Mekong sub-region.

ADB studies have identified some 50 potential dam projects on the Mekong River and its tributaries. The Mekong is the world's 10th longest river, running for 4,000 kilometers.

Under pressure from activists and communities, the Korangi Wastewater Management Project in Pakistan, which was listed by the ADB in 1996, had to be cancelled.

In Thailand, the Samut Prakarn Wastewater Management Project, which the ADB says is intended to improve environmental quality and public health, is raising concerns among activists for flawed design, its social and environmental impact and alleged corruption surrounding it.

The project is halfway through. The ADB is providing $ 230 million of the $690 million required. But affected communities say it will harm marine life, the main source of food for the 40,000 people living in the area. They have demanded that it too be cancelled.

Only recently has the ADB and Norwegian and Swedish power utilities involved in the 210 megawatt Nam Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project, completed in 1998, acknowledged that the project has had serious impacts on villagers such as declines in fish catches and flooding.

The ADB has also conceded that villages living in and around the project area in central Lao PDR, deserve compensation for their losses. As with the World Bank, the ADB says its overarching objective is to reduce poverty.

"Poverty is not immutable," Tadao Chino, ADB president told the Asia and Pacific Forum on Poverty taking place in Mandaluyong City, Philippines this week. "Public policy and action can and must eliminate poverty. This is what development is all about. This is what we, all together, are all about."

"Growing dissatisfaction with inequality threatens social and political cohesion, and casts doubts on the morality of economic reform, liberalization, and globalization."

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National Day of Action to Stop Staples, March 28, 2001
Tell Staples to Stop Destroying Forests Now!!

Fri, 9 Feb 2001

Can you envision a world where recycled and tree free paper was the norm? Can you imagine a time when you didn't have to search and dig to find a supplier of paper products that didn't come from our native forests?

That vision won't become reality until Staple's and the office supply industry stop selling clearcut forests as paper products to be used once and thrown away!

Less than 4% of our old growth forests in this country remain, 1/3 of our US national forests are being pulped for paper, and more than 1/2 of the paper in the US comes from Southern forests, the region containing the greatest biodiversity in the continental U.S. Yet Staples is refusing to stop selling products coming from old growth, US public lands, and Clear cut forest in the Southeast. Staples is also refusing to sell all recycled and tree free products, and is thus driving the destruction of our world's forests.

Join ForestEthics, the Dogwood Alliance, Free the Planet, the National Forest Protection Alliance, SEAC, Rainforest Action Network, American Lands, Earth First Groups, Rainforest Relief, STARC, Heartwood, Boston Global Action Network, and many others on March 28,01 for the Day of Action to Stop Staples!

On March 28, tell a Staple's near you that selling paper from native forests is no longer acceptable! They must immediately stop selling products from old growth fiber and US public lands, immediately eliminate all products that are made from 100% virgin fiber, and switch to all recycled and tree free products.

Plan a demonstration at your nearest Staple's store (you can find it using the store locator at www.staples.com). Hold a street theater, carry signs, make some noise! Take a manager on a field trip to a nearby forest. Deliver letters from the community. Call CEO Tom Stemberg. Jam his fax machine. Meet with the regional manager. Host a "clearcut forests tour" through the paper aisle of Staple's. Get out, get creative and raise your voice for the forests!

To get an action pack, postcards, to let us know the cool action you have planned, or for more information, contact: Around the US: ForestEthics formerly the Coastal Rainforest Coalition, Liz Butler liz@coastalrainforest.org, 202-319-2404 202.285.6758 In the Southeast---Dogwood Alliance, info@dogwoodalliance, 828.698.1998 Students can call Free the Planet michelle@freetheplanet.org, 202.547.3656 Also check out the website www.forestethics.org To sign up for a listserv that will keep you up to date on the campaign send an email to endangered-forests-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Liz Butler-National Organizer ForestEthics formerly Coastal Rainforest Coalition 202-319-2404 work, 202-285-6758 cell liz@coastalrainforest.org will change to liz@forestethics.org 509-471-6884 fax PO Box 21597 Washington, DC 20009-1597

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Bonds Boycott February Update

Fri, 09 Feb 2001
WORLD BANK BONDS BOYCOTT CAMPUS UPDATE FEBRUARY 2001

The World Bank Bonds Boycott has spread from the townships of South Africa to the highlands of Bolivia to the campuses of North America. The campaign is a tool that students are using to further democratize their campuses, which are increasingly controlled by corporations. For campuses that have made major strides in joining sweatshop verification agencies or kicking Sodexho Marriott off of campus, the WBBB is a simple but extremely powerful campaign to keep the campus activated and deepen activist understanding of globalization and the international financial institutions, and their role in maintaining global injustice. Also, your administration can be easily convinced to endorse the WBBB, because it presents no financial or administrative sacrifice for the university once the resolution is signed.

The World Bank and IMF are having their spring meetings in Washington, DC this April 29-30, just one week after the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. While the major mobilization this April will focus on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), we don't want the World Bank to think that we have forgotten about their unwillingness to cancel debts, or their devastating structural adjustment programs. By passing many more WBBB resolutions before April, campus activists and others can send a clear ultimatum to the Bank that the challenge is not only in the streets, but indeed from communities and campuses all across the country that are directly confronting the Bank's financial and public image base. The challenge comes from a power base that the Bank's overpaid economists and vaults of gold reserves can't control the power of the people! Eighty universities are pressing forward at some stage of the campaign, and below you can read briefly about some of the notable efforts. Professors are joining the WBBB struggle by signing-on to an endorsement letter, which has gathered a diverse array signatures from all over the world. [see http://www.worldbankboycott.org] Please circulate this letter to professors that may want to signal their support.

The WBBB is just one part of a worldwide revolution of popular empowerment in the face of global apartheid and inequality. In October, 220 grassroots activists from sixteen countries at a conference called "People of the Americas Confronting Neoliberalism" endorsed the WBBB, emphasizing that the institutions of debt and structural adjustment oppress workers', peasants', and indigenous rights. Last December in Senegal, the anti-debt, international Jubilee South Network called on activists in the North and South to press forward with the boycott; while calling on their national leaders to repudiate the illegitimate debt; and the international financial institutions to cancel all debt, end SAPs, and repay to the South its ecological and human debt. Most recently, January's World Social Forum in Brazil brought together activists working for global justice to strategize on the way forward.

The Bonds Boycott is advanced by a decentralized, global network that encourages student activists to challenge the power and policies of the World Bank by using the tool most readily at their disposal: universities and their money (whose endowments alone are worth over $128 billion in the US!). By getting our academic institutions to not buy World Bank bonds in the future, students reclaim power in their corporate universities, threaten the Bank's finance and public image, and create political space for human-centered economic development in other countries. By April 2001, the one-year anniversary of the campaign, we hope to have at least 10 more institutions on board. Now is the time to act to keep up the pressure on the Bank!

Contact the campaign information headquarters at 202-299-0020 or tnt@econjustice.net for stickers, BRAND NEW posters and organizing materials!

Todd N. Tucker Campus Outreach Coordinator World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign Center for Economic Justice

Read about some efforts below, and send in your updates, or post them to the listserve! (bank-boycott-students@yahoogroups.com)

Columbia University New York City

Columbia is in the somewhat unique position of having an advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing, created in February 2000 by the Board of Trustees following pressure from Columbia student groups. The Committee had two public hearings in the fall, where supportive student groups, professors and alumni, heavily represented the Boycott resolution. After much deliberation, the Committee shelved the proposal until the spring, citing ambivalence about the World Bank's mission and record. Despite the temporary delay from the investment committee at CU, it is good news that the World Bank, often a seemingly distant, incomprehensible among Americans, is becoming politicized campus and is the topic of debate.

For more information, contact Michele Hardesty at mlh44@columbia.edu.

Cornell University New York

Students have had teach-ins, petition-drives, actions, as well as meetings with the administration regarding the campaign. While the administration asserts that the university should not send "political messages" with its investments, the fact that Cornell has signed on to the Worker Rights Consortium reveals a contradiction in the administration's position -- as well as a clear point of leverage! The administration also argues that faculty are better situated to assess the Bank's practices. While activists must contend with the close relationship that exists between certain Cornell departments and the World Bank, they are currently in consultation with well known progressive faculty about endorsing the campaign and pressuring the university. Although the campaign is just getting underway at Cornell, the reception among students and the community has been great. In addition to the university, Ithaca activists have also identified the NY State and Local Retirement System as a major investor in WB bonds. The current state comptroller (whose office oversees the retirement system) is about to enter the election for NY's governorship, so this promises to be an important opportunity to raise awareness about the campaign across the state.

For more information, contact Kelly Dietz at kld18@cornell.edu.

George Washington University DC

Activists here are at Ground Zero in terms of the fight against the World Bank. GWU and the WB physically penetrate into one anothers' property, and members of the GW Action Coalition (GWAC) did some research on their university's property holdings, and found that some IMF properties are on a long-term lease from the university. Furthermore, activists are preparing materials on the MINERVA program, a joint World Bank-GWU-Brazilian government program designed to indoctrinate Brazilian bureaucrats through internships at the World Bank and study at GWU. Many World Bank staffers have served as part-time "scab workers" given the university's freeze on new faculty hires and "problems" with an increasingly militant Graduate Teaching Assistant's union (all of this in a time of over 20% expansion in enrollment). Students are sending a WBBB letter to the school president and sympathetic professors have signed the WBBB academic letter. But, needless to say, the campaign has encountered opposition. But members of the GWAC plan to follow up their research with action on the campaign in the spring.

For more information, contact Roli Khare at roli00@hotmail.com.

Maryland Institute of College and Art Baltimore

The MICA president has agreed to work with activists on writing up a resolution that would ban MICA from purchasing World Bank bonds, mutual funds that encompass World Bank bonds, and investing in major corporations that hold World Bank bonds! The administration is concerned about finding investments that are positive since it is eliminating some potential investments in this way. Activists plan to connect with a Socially Responsible Investment firm to propose some good investments.

For more information, contact Danielle Frank at phillyisburning@hotmail.com.

University of Florida Gainesville

Activists are investigating the WB's connections with U-Florida through something called the PURC, which advises utilities worldwide on how to privatize (the WB has given them $4 million over the years). They have also led, in the last month, a mobilization against the World Bank and the PURC on their campus. This is giving impetus to the WBBB.

University of Witwatersrand South Africa

Students here are linking up with the Anti-Privatization Forum and township activists to educate on the World Bank's local impacts, and how a Bond Boycott will help fight back. Among the local privatizations include the entirety of the city's utilities!

For more information, contact Patrick Bond at pbond@wn.apc.org.

Wheaton College Massachusetts

Several students active in African Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and the Progressive Alliance have developed posters and educational materials to educate peers and have sent signed petitions to the President and treasurer of the College.

For more information, contact Obinna Nwadike at onwadike@wheatonma.edu.

York University Toronto

Nearly the entire York political science department has endorsed the WBBB, and several graduate students are advancing the cause through on-campus debate and diffusion of information.

Todd N. Tucker Campus Outreach Coordinator World Bank Bonds Boycott Center for Economic Justice 1830 Connecticut Ave., NW Washington, DC 20009 202-299-0020 tnt@econjustice.net www.worldbankboycott.org

---

Mother's Day 2001
An Invitation to Support Western Shoshone Sovereignty and Stewardship:

Tue, 13 Feb 2001
Shundahai Network
<shundahai@shundahai.org>

I'm inviting you all to come down to the Nevada Test Site for Mother's Day and have your voices heard, we all have concerns for the younger generation; so they can continue their life. The people are the backbone of the government. We should be dictating to the leaders instead of the government dictating to us how they are going to shorten our life.

So let's unite ourselves together and save something for the future. Come for sure for Mother's Day and stay as long as you can and we will all be together. That way, we'll have a cleaner life and enjoy our life for the younger generations. Let's talk together. So come and bring your stuff; your bedroll, your food and the water you survive on. As a person, I really appreciate you people.

Corbin Harney,

Western Shoshone Spiritual Leader, Executive Director, Shundahai Network

We are contacting you to ask for your support for the 2001 Mother's Day Gathering that will take place May 11th -14th at the Nevada Test Site. If you want to lend your name this year, please contact us immediately. We are especially looking for active co-sponsors and supporters to co-host this year's gathering alongside the Western Shoshone National Council, Shundahai Network, Seeds of Peace, Nevada Desert Experience, and PooHaBah.

± Co-sponsor ($500 or equivalent in donations)

± Supporter (donations of any kind)

± Endorser (lend name only)

These are some other things you can do now:

Å Publicize this event in your literature or local calendars.

Å Organize a carload, van load, or busload to come and participate.

Å If you can't come, organize a solidarity event.

Å Make banners to bring or send.

Å Link your website to www.shundahai.org

This year's Mother's Day Gathering will "Celebrate Life & Sovereignty" as we unite and organize to stop nuclear contamination. The Nuclear Industry continues to poison all life on this planet, and continues to site its waste and processing facilities near people of color and impoverished communities. By uniting ourselves together we aim to stop this blatant environmental injustice. All over the world there are people dying from radiation contamination that is a direct result from business' and government's' disregard for our safety and lives. People need to come together to discuss and take action against these atrocities. The purpose of this gathering is to:

Support Environmental Justice on Western Shoshone Lands

Support, Host, & Welcome WSNC Spirit Run/Walk that will circle the test site

Protect Sacred Yucca Mountain from becoming a nuclear waste dump

Occupy & Pray for the land

Learn from Speakers & Trainers; Participate in Organizing Workshops

Take Action to STOP Nuclear Testing, Weapons, Waste, & Power

We are glad to announce that the Western Shoshone National Council will be conducting it's 2nd Annual Spirit Run/Walk to the Mother's Day Gathering. The walk will begin in Warm Springs, NV on May 7th and will circle the Test Site. Johnnie L. Bobb is the main organizer of this walk. If you would like to lend your support to this important event, you can contact Johnnie Bobb directly: HC 61 BOX 6250, AUSTIN, NV 89310 PHONE 775-964-2210

Gathering Schedule

May 11 (Friday)
Gathering Begins, Nonviolence trainings.

May 12 (Saturday)
Western Shoshone Spirit Walk arrives. Celebration of Life - Speakers from our communities, Workshops

May 13 (Sunday)
Sunrise Ceremony & Occupation, Mother's Day Brunch, Women's & Men's Councils

May 14(Monday)
Day of Action at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site

Be prepared for desert camping, hot days and cool nights. Bring plenty of drinking water, snacks and friends. Meals and local potable water will be provided, donations gladly accepted to help cover costs.

We thank you for taking the time to read this message. We hope that you will be able to support the Western Shoshone Nation in their work for environmental justice, and will attend the gathering. We look forward to hearing frm you soon!

SHUNDAHAI

SHUNDAHAI NETWORK
"Peace and Harmony with all Creation"
Po Box 6360,
Pahrump, NV 89041
Phone:(775) 537-6088
Email: shundahai@shundahai.org http://www.shundahai.org

Shundahai Network is proud to be part of: US Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Abolition 2000: A Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons People of Color/Disenfranchised Communities Environmental Health Network and the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

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Chiapas Indymedia Up and On-line NOW!

Wed, 14 Feb 2001
"Mexico Solidarity Network"
<jas@mexicosolidarity.org>

Did you know the newest branch of Indymedia-"Indymedia-Chiapas"-- is now on-line and ready for action? Click to http://chiapas.indymedia.org to check out this new addition to the Indymedia family. Activists throughout Chiapas are collaborating to make this site what you'd expect from Indymedia: photos, video, and articles expressing the perspectives of real people telling their truths. Articles avoid the dogma (and tone!) of the corporate media.

This site has been set up to address two major upcoming events:

· The Zapatista march from Chiapas to Mexico City (Feb. 25-March 11) · The civil society response to the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Cancun (Feb. 24- Feb. 27)

These events are too important, too historic to allow the corporate mass-media manipulators to get the last word. Follow Indymedia-Chiapas for honest, human, bi-lingual, up-to-the-minute coverage of the Zapatista march from indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Michoacan to the Zocalo of Mexico City. You'll find the same type of coverage for the anti-WEF protests in Cancun, where all of President Fox' cabinet will try to sell off Mexico's natural resources, working people and indigenous dignity to the highest corporate bidder.

Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Borne of the inspiring Nov. 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.

This message comes to you courtesy of the Mexico Solidarity Network.

This notice is to inform you that the newest branch of Indymedia-"Indymedia-Chiapas" is now on-line and ready for action. Click to chiapas.indymedia.org to check out this new addition to the Indymedia family. Activists from Chiapas are collaborating to make this site what you'd expect from indymedia: photos, video, and articles that avoid the dogma of mass corporate media and have real people telling their truths.

This site has been set up to address two major upcoming events:

· The Zapatista march from Chiapas to Mexico City (Feb. 25-March 11) · The civil society response to the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Cancun (Feb. 24- Feb. 27)

These events are too important to allow the corporate media manipulators to get the last word. Follow Indymedia-Chiapas for honest, human, up-to-the-minute coverage of the Zapatista march and the anti-WEF protests in Cancun, where all of President Fox' cabinet will try to sell off Mexico's natural resources, working people and indigenous dignity to the highest corporate bidder.

Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Borne out off the inspiring Nov. 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.

This message comes to you courtesy of the Mexico Solidarity Network.

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China to execute Islamic protester

2/14/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=8pkr06va8gkoq

BEIJING (AP) - A Muslim activist was sentenced to death in China's restive northwest for setting up a group that wants to establish Islamic rule, a court official said Wednesday. Arkhan Abulla was sentenced by the People's Intermediate Court in Korla, a city in the Xinjiang region, said a court official, who would not say when sentencing took place.

China has struggled for years to crush simmering separatist sentiment in its far northwest, where Uighurs - Turkic Muslims who are the region's largest ethnic group - have long resisted Chinese rule.

Since the mid-1990s, militant Uighurs have waged a campaign of bombings and assassinations against Chinese and suspected collaborators.

Human rights groups say two activists were executed in January on charges of trying to overthrow Chinese rule.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has been fed by an influx of Chinese settlers and a belief that migrants have benefited disproportionately from the region's economic development.

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China Tries Man for Web Site

Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Associated Press
WORLD
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1951-2001Feb13?language=printer

BEIJING -- A Chinese entrepreneur, whose Web site contained articles commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, was put on trial yesterday on subversion charges.

Huang Qi is the first person known to have been prosecuted for publishing political materials on a Web site. His trial, which ended at midday, comes as the government is attempting to tighten control over the Internet.

Huang's trial in the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court in western China was closed to the public. No verdict or sentence was to be announced until the court's findings were reported to "higher-ups," a court official said.

Huang is accused of "inciting the overthrow of state power." Human rights groups say that refers to government claims that his site mentioned the independence movement in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong.

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Greenpeace Sails To Pacific Star Wars Test Site

Wed, 14 Feb 2001

The international anti-nuclear and environmental organisation Greenpeace announced today that the SV Rainbow Warrior, has set sail from Auckland, New Zealand for the Pacific Star Wars test site to protest at the next scheduled test of the system and to call on US President George W. Bush to scrap the program.

The SV Rainbow Warrior is sailing to the US Army Missile Testing Range at Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands where the launch site is located for the so called "kill vehicle" - a missile intended to intercept a simulated enemy missile fired from the Vandenberg US Air Force Base in California. The next test of the Star Wars system is scheduled for sometime between March and June. The SV Rainbow Warrior will arrive in the Marshall Islands mid-March. Two of the three previous tests have failed and questions have been raised over the one that the US military claims did succeed.

The decision to send the Rainbow Warrior to the Star Wars test site comes at a critical point in deciding the future of the Star Wars system. Lead by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an urgent review of the program is underway and is expected to report to the President in late March. It also comes at a time when the Bush administration is engaged in a diplomatic offensive to persuade European allies to accept US Star Wars plans. Their most recent attempt was at a security conference in Munich two weeks ago where the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, warned that "missile defence must not come at the expense of arms control". Other US allies have also expressed major concern such as the French President, Jacques Chirac, who recently warned that US Star Wars plans could not "fail to relaunch the arms race in the world".

"Star Wars will not protect the American people or its allies. In fact it will destroy all current and future nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. The only beneficiaries of Star Wars will be the defence contractors," said Greenpeace Disarmament Campaigner, William Peden.

"Just as Greenpeace campaigned against nuclear testing in the Pacific, Greenpeace is campaigning against the testing of the Star Wars system; a system which threatens to ignite a new nuclear arms race and greatly increase the risk of nuclear war," Peden continued.

When the SV Rainbow Warrior arrives in the Marshall Islands Greenpeace is seeking meetings with Marshallese leaders; the Kwajalein Missile Range commander and to hold open days to discuss with the people of the Marshall Islands the Greenpeace campaign to stop the Star Wars program and the threat it poses to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.

"We are sailing the Rainbow Warrior to the heart of the Star Wars testing program to call for the immediate cessation of US Star Wars plans because of the real and present threat they pose to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons, something that Greenpeace has worked to achieve since it began thirty years ago," continued Peden.

"The Rainbow Warrior has a long history in our campaign to stop nuclear testing and achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. Its predecessor was blown up by the French in July 1985 as it was preparing to sail to the French nuclear testing nuclear test site in the Pacific." noted Peden.

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Veterans for Peace

Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001
"Laka Foundation" <laka@antenna.nl>

GULF WAR VET, SUFFERING FROM SEVERE GULF WAR SYNDROME, TO JOIN OTHER US VETERANS GOING TO IRAQ TO REBUILD WATER- TREATMENT FACILITIES

Candy Lovett, a female Gulf War Veteran who has testified before both the US Senate, and the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness; will join a dozen members of Veterans for Peace, Inc. in entering Iraq in the early Spring to protest the US- led economic sanctions. She, along with veterans of World War II and Viet Nam, among others, will go to Iraq to help rebuild water treatment facilities that have been rendered inoperable by the ongoing embargo. The group will depart March 12, enter Iraq on March 16, and will return to the US on March 27th and 28th.

Ms. Lovett, confined to either crutches or a wheelchair, is 100 percent medically disabled due to mycoplasma/ fermentes, an immune disorder, and degenerative arthritis -- all related to Gulf War Syndrome. During the Gulf War, Ms. Lovett and another soldier were assigned to burying scores of Iraqis killed in one of the "highways of death" where US planes torched the ground hoping to intercept Iraqis retreating from Kuwait. The one pair of protective gloves given to her for this traumatic detail evaporated within hours, and she had to complete the rest of the 2- day detail with her bare hands. It is still unknown if this caused her illness.

In one of two, front- page articles that have appeared in regional Florida newspapers prior to this release, Ms. Lovett, now a devout Christian, spoke of having to pry the bodies of babies away from the bodies of their mothers. "I hope that by meeting the Iraqi civilians, I can learn to see them as human beings, not just targets."

Veterans for Peace, Inc. (VFP), a non- profit educational and humanitarian organization founded in 1985, is proud to continue The Iraq Water Project, an endeavor begun last year that has achieved astounding international recognition and success. Among the 11 members of VFP going this time (17 went in October), 5 are women. The Iraq Water Project is a partnership with Life for Relief and Development, another nonprofit organization. Life for Relief and Development is the only relief organization to have dual permission from both the Iraqi government and the US Treasury Department, to do relief work in Iraq.

Waterborne diseases account for most of the child fatalities caused by sanctions (at least 4,000 per month under the age of 5 years old). Under The Iraq Water Project, Veterans for Peace, Inc. will restore watercleansing capabilities and provide 10 years of maintenance to four water- treatment facilities located in a suburb of Basrah (a major city in the southeast) called Abul Khaseeb. This area has been ravaged by 2 wars, sanctions, and ongoing bombings. Furthermore, it has been virtually poisoned by the aftereffects of depleted uranium weapons and ammunition use. The population in the region that will be serviced by The Iraq Water Project totals between 65,000- 70,000 people.

Veterans for Peace, Inc. is based in Washington, DC, holds 81 chapters nationwide, and has over a dozen international affiliations. It is an accredited NGO (Non- Governmental Organization) with the United Nations through the UN's Department of Public Information.

Contact (in New York City): Michael John Carley (646) 242- 4003 - cell United Nations NGO Representative (and Iraq Water Project Director) Veterans for Peace, Inc. United Nations Affairs

NGO Representative (646) 242- 4003 fax: (718) 622- 6227 Michael John Carley 429 Sterling Place #4R Brooklyn, NY 11238 mjcarley@ aol. com

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