------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
RUSSIA
Grab for Money Could Arm Enemies of the U.S.
Main Figures in Submarine Inquiry
Submarine Victims' Families Gather
Greeneville's Skipper Is Known for Devotion to His Job
On Day of Sub's Accident,
Dispute on Russian Tests Divides Nuclear Experts
Everywhereabouts
Canada's angst -- fear of the future
North Korea may scrap nuclear accord
North Korea Asks for US Help With Electricity
Missile Defense, Part VI
Do You Know How We Got Here?
Chinese Official To Visit U.S.
Lobbyists Waitin' on the Levy
NATO's Robertson To Meet Officials
Missile-Defense Flaw
Worrywart Canadians fear the worst
Russian compliance with nuclear test ban stirs U.S. skepticism
Slicing the sub
Aircraft carrier named after President Reagan
Nevada
UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)
Calif. Municipalities Mull Power Business
Colorado
Lawsuit alleges mishandling at site
Waste mismanagement?
PADUCAH GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT
PORTSMOUTH GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT
OAK RIDGE GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT

MILITARY
China denies helping Iraqi military
For One Who Suffered, Kuwait Is the Land of Lost Content
We're Doing Battle Right and Left, Colombia Insists
Rebels Linked to Drug Trade by Arrests in Colombia
Death in Colombia
Everywhereabouts
Maine
Why Saddam Hussein Is Back Onstage
NASA Tries to Contact a Distant Spacecraft
A New Legal Weapon to Deter Rape
Global Look at Racism Hits Many Sore Points
Everywhereabouts
21 Die in Crash of Guard Plane in Georgia Rain
Military begins recovery efforts in plane crash

OTHER
LANL Squad Tracks Anthrax
Road to Disaster Is Paved With Oil
Why we should let wolves be
Everywhereabouts
Britain Livestock Disease Spreads
Gipper Meets 'Survivor' as G.E.'s Image Hardens
Animal Illness Suspected on Continent Prompts Ban
Foot-and-mouth cases found in British park
Arizona
Oil and Blasphemy
Police Learning Spanish as Latino Population Grows
D.C.
Everywhereabouts
Locating Devices Gain in Popularity but Raise Privacy Concerns
U.S. Thinks Agent Revealed Tunnel at Soviet Embassy
Spy may have revealed embassy tunnel
Weapon of Choice:
In Embassy Bombing Trial,
To Deter Terror,

ACTIVISTS
Activists say incinerator, not site, should close
Students work to fight hate
China to Release Dissident, Human Rights Group Says


-------- NUCLEAR

RUSSIA

March 2001
Uranium Enrichment Newsletter
Earth Island Institute
by Mary Byrd Davis,
http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_mar_01.htm

USEC-Tenex agreement

The Bush administration appears to have withdrawn approval for USEC to sign an agreement with Russia's Technsabexport in regard to the implementation of the US-Russian High-Enriched Uranium (HEU) agreement from 2002 to 2013. In reply to a request from the US House Energy and Commerce Committee for a review of the proposed agreement by the Enrichment Oversight Committee, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote to the committee that USEC's execution of the HEU agreement "requires careful oversight to ensure that the agreement achieves important US nonproliferation objectives, while at the same time being mindful of the stresses this may place upon the domestic industry. I believe that a review of recent decisions related to this agreement is warranted." She indicated that particular attention will be paid to the question of importing enriched uranium that does not contain military HEU. (www.nuke-energy.com/data/other/natl_security_usec.html)

The Russian Audit Chamber has checked for the first time on how the US-Russian HEU agreement is being implemented. The results of the check were discussed at a meeting of the Chamber's board, which decided to send reports on the results to the Russian Security Council and to both houses of the Russian parliament. (Itar-Tass, 2/6/01)

URANIUM MARKET

DOE's "Report to Congress on Maintenance of Viable Domestic Uranium, Conversion and Enrichment Industries," dated December 2000, recently came to public attention. The report was prepared in response to the FY 2001 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Conference Report, which asked the Clinton administration to evaluate and recommend options to support the domestic uranium industry. In the conclusion DOE recommends that the USEC Privatization Act be amended to avoid the requirement that DOE place on the market by April 2003 the remaining 9.8 million pounds of natural UF6 associated with Russia's 1995 and 1996 shipments of blended-down HEU; that consideration be given to prompt, limited assistance to the only US conversion company, ConverDyn; that DOE and the uranium industry cooperate to develop low-cost environmental restoration technology for uranium mines; and that DOE establish an Office of Nuclear Fuel Cycle Security. The report can be found at www.ne.doe.gov/fuels/rptcongress12_00.pdf

---

Grab for Money Could Arm Enemies of the U.S.

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Los Angeles Times
By GARY MILHOLLIN
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20010304/t000019165.html

The Bush administration is conducting a top-to-bottom review of America's defenses to see whether they can handle, among other things, the growing threat from "rogue nations" (now called "states of concern"). At the same time, a Senate committee is pushing a bill that would make it easier for such nations to import the means to make nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and backed by high-tech firms hungry for markets, would severely restrict the president's ability to control the export of strategically sensitive American equipment.

Among the items that could wind up for sale are the high-precision electronic switches needed to detonate atomic bombs. As recently as 1998, Iraq tried to buy 120 of these devices (known as nuclear weapon "triggers") by claiming they were needed as "spare parts" for medical equipment. Under Enzi's bill, the sale of switches will probably be decontrolled.

The bill could also lift restrictions on the glass and carbon fibers needed to make missile nose cones and the "maraging" steel needed for centrifuges that process uranium to nuclear weapon grade. In the 1980s, our export laws thwarted attempts to smuggle U.S.-made carbon fibers to a Iraqi missile project, and to smuggle U.S.-made maraging steel to Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program.

These three items and scores of others have been controlled by the U.S. and its allies for two decades, specifically to combat the spread of mass-destruction weapons. But if Enzi gets his way, many of them may become available to foreign arms makers. Releasing these items for export would dismay our allies and destroy American credibility on arms control.

Under the Enzi bill, the secretary of Commerce would be required to decontrol any item that is available in "volume" in the country that produces it. Nuclear-weapon triggers, carbon fibers and maraging steel are all available in volume in the United States, but that doesn't mean they are readily available to countries trying to build the bomb. The evidence, in fact, points the other way. Western controls on high-tech goods during the Cold War left the Soviet Union in a technological abyss, where it is still languishing. The controls helped win the Cold War, even though the goods they restricted--essential to Western economic development--were available in great volume where produced.

The bill also requires the Commerce secretary to free for sale anything a "controlled" country like Pakistan is able to buy from "sources outside the United States." In fact, Pakistan is now importing missile components from China and North Korea. Under the Enzi bill, U.S. firms would be authorized to sell the same equipment, allowing Pakistan to do its missile shopping in the U.S.

This obviously raises a moral question: Should the United States sell anything another country does, just to make money? German firms have supplied turn-key poison gas plants to Libya and Iraq, China has essentially created Pakistan's A-bomb program and Russia is now outfitting Iran with ballistic missiles. Should the U.S. decry the fact that our companies missed these sales? Shouldn't America be proud that, when the Israelis found Scud missile parts in shattered buildings in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, the logos on the parts were German and not American? America should not let a grab for money by exporters bring America down to the level of the lowest common offender.

The Enzi bill also would make bureaucratic changes. It would take away the power of the experts in the Pentagon to determine what items should be controlled. Only the Commerce Department would have this power. The exporters obviously believe that the business-friendly folks at Commerce, whose main job is promoting trade, should not be pestered by people concerned with defending the country.

The White House should not put up with this. Current law gives President Bush broad authority to control any item he deems important to U.S. national security. He should keep things that way. Under the Enzi bill, he would have less power than his own Commerce secretary. If the secretary decided to free an item for sale--even one controlled by U.S.allies under an international agreement--the president could not overturn the decision without making burdensome findings within 30 days. And the bill forbids him to delegate the job to his staff. Can anyone imagine the president personally plowing through data on nuclear weapon triggers?

The bill's backers hope to sneak it through Congress before the administration gets organized. The White House should quash these efforts. As the U.S. tries to strengthen our defenses against potential enemies, it would be folly to weaken export controls, which are the best means of preventing such enemies from arming themselves.

Gary Milhollin Is Director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington.

---

Main Figures in Submarine Inquiry

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Snapshots.html?searchpv=aponline

A court of inquiry, the Navy's highest form of administrative investigation, could result in court-martial recommendations for three USS Greeneville officers:

-- Cmdr. Scott Waddle. A 1981 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he is former executive officer of the USS San Francisco. He received a master's degree in national resource strategy from the National Defense University's Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

-- Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer. He is a 1986 graduate of the Naval Academy. His previous assignments include two other nuclear submarines, USS Nevada and USS Batfish. He is former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Nuclear Propulsion Examination Board.

-- Lt. j.g. Michael Coen. He was commissioned from the Navy ROTC at Florida State University. The Greeneville is his first assignment.

Three Navy admirals will make up the court of inquiry:

-- Vice Adm. John B. Nathman, commander of the Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and former commander of the seven-ship Nimitz Battle Group.

-- Rear Adm. Paul F. Sullivan, director of plans and policy at the U.S. Strategic Command, and former commander of the Navy's Trident submarine fleet based in Washington state.

-- Rear Adm. David M. Stone, commander of Cruiser/Destroyer Group FIVE and the Nimitz Battle Group, and former commander of the Standing Naval Force Mediterranean.

---

Submarine Victims' Families Gather

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Collision.html?pagewanted=all&searchpv=aponline

HONOLULU (AP) -- As the Navy prepared to convene a rare court of inquiry into the collision between a nuclear attack submarine and a Japanese fishing boat, the families of some of the nine men and boys lost at sea gathered Sunday to bid farewell to their loved ones.

Relatives of five of the victims cried and clasped leis as a native Hawaiian group offered traditional prayers and songs during an oceanside memorial. One mother sobbed, clutching a handkerchief, as a ukulele player strummed a melody written in remembrance of the missing.

Family members later sailed to the scene of the accident to scatter flowers across the waters.

Hirohisa Ishibashi, mayor of Uwajima, the boat's hometown, said when he first got word of the Feb. 9 accident, ``I wished so hard that it was a bad dream.''

``We really need to be told what happened in the submarine,'' he said. ``We have to do everything we can to prevent anything like this from happening again.''

On Monday, family members are expected to attend a formal investigative hearing by the Navy that seeks to explain why the USS Greeneville rammed the Ehime Maru while demonstrating an emergency surfacing maneuver for 16 civilian guests.

The ship, carrying 35 people, was on an expedition to teach teen-agers how to become commercial fishermen when the Greeneville plowed through its hull. Four high school students, two teachers and three crewmen never were found.

The hearing will examine the actions of the Greeneville's top officers: Cmdr. Scott Waddle, his second-in-command, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer, and the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Michael Coen.

Waddle's attorney, Charles Gittins, told ABC's ``This Week'' on Sunday that as the Greeneville's skipper, the commander is ``personally responsible for the accident.''

``I am sure that the evidence is going to show that there was a chain of mistakes and, quite possibly, Cmdr. Waddle did not see this vessel and that was one of the chain of mistakes that caused the accident,'' Gittins said. ``That doesn't mean that those people who made those honest mistakes should ultimately be prosecuted criminally.''

Three Navy admirals will preside over the court and recommend whether the officers should face disciplinary action ranging from a reprimand to court-martial. Their findings will be forwarded to Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, for final action. The admirals also could suggest changes to Navy policies on civilian participation in military operations.

A Japanese maritime official was named an adviser to the court but is not allowed to vote on any recommendations. The hearing was expected to last at least a week.

The court of inquiry, the Navy's highest form of administrative investigation, is ``how we get lessons learned,'' said Eugene Fidell, head of the National Institute of Military Justice in Washington, D.C.

``It's to have an exhaustive look at the matter, not only from the standpoint of potentially assigning responsibility but finding out what happened and making recommendations of a systemic nature so that it doesn't happen again,'' Fidell said.

All 16 civilians and an estimated 16 Navy personnel were crammed into the Greeneville's tight control room as the crew prepared to surface the submarine. One crewman, whose job is to track surface vessels, told federal investigators that he stopped manually plotting the position of the Ehime Maru less than an hour before the collision because the control room was too crowded.

Three civilians were at various controls during the maneuver itself, although the Navy maintains they were closely monitored and that their actions did not contribute to the accident.

The court of inquiry's presiding officers could subpoena the civilians to testify, although Navy officials said none had been issued prior to Monday's session. Affidavits could be requested instead.

Gittins said that when Waddle checked the periscope for other ships before surfacing, the Ehime Maru probably was traveling bow-on to the submarine. That may mean the white fishing vessel was obscured by haze and whitecaps. Waddle had raised the sub to a higher periscope depth and changed the magnification before looking, his lawyer said.

``He did the procedures that are required to do a proper periscope search. Unfortunately, he didn't see the target,'' Gittins said.

Among those expected to testify during the court of inquiry: Capt. Robert Brandhuber, the chief of staff of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force who accompanied the civilians aboard the Greeneville; the fire control technician who said he was distracted by the visitors; Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths, who led the Navy's investigation into the accident; and Hisao Onishi, captain of the Ehime Maru.

The three officers also are likely to be called to testify, although they could invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Attorneys for Waddle and Coen have requested the officers be granted testimonial immunity, which would prevent the military from using anything they say to seek future charges. They still could face prosecution, however, based upon the testimony of others.

Lawyers for Pfeifer and Coen did not return calls Sunday for comment.

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Greeneville's Skipper Is Known for Devotion to His Job and Crew

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04WADD.html?pagewanted=all

PEARL HARBOR NAVAL STATION, Hawaii, Feb. 28 - For Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, the skipper of the submarine Greeneville, there is no better job in the world than commanding a submarine.

"This is the pinnacle of my career," he said in an interview for a coming television special on Pearl Harbor. "This is without question the best job an officer in the Navy can have."

But that was before Commander Waddle's nuclear-powered submarine Greeneville slammed into the hull of a Japanese fishing trawler on Feb. 9, sinking it within minutes and leaving nine Japanese students and crew members dead. Commander Waddle, 41, was relieved of his command the next day.

He has disconnected the phone at his home and has been forced to sever contact with his crew. Now, he spends his time preparing for a Navy investigation known as a court of inquiry that begins on Monday into why the accident occurred and whether he should be held responsible.

Friends and colleagues who have spoken with him say he is traumatized. "When I saw Scott, I asked, `Is there anything I can do?'" said a Navy officer who has known him for years. "I got the sense he was consumed by the court of inquiry. He seemed numb." His friends have set up a fund for his legal defense.

Active-duty and retired submariners and Commander Waddle's friends portray him as a self-effacing Navy officer who is active in the Rotary Club and the Boy Scouts and whose idea of a good time is sitting on the lawn of his semi-attached house on the base, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar and looking out over the Pearl Harbor channel.

In an evaluation in August recommending his "immediate promotion" to captain, Capt. David McCall, his squadron commander, called Commander Waddle "an outstanding mentor" and "inspirational leader" who is "performing flawlessly as commanding officer," according to Commander Waddle's personnel records.

Commander Waddle worked hard to build the reputation of his submarine by creating a special, family- like environment that produced one of the highest retention rates in the Pacific submarine fleet, Navy officials said. Unlike many captains, he gave civilian visitors photographs of the Greeneville along with personal handwritten notes. "The chemistry on a submarine is not always good, but people-wise, they were one of my top ships," said one Navy counselor on the base.

Commander Waddle is described as supportive of the families of the crew members of other submarines when they are out to sea. "He's always checking in on the wives, telling them, `I know your husband's away, so you let me know if anything breaks down or if you need another father to fill in for the kids' activities," said one Navy wife. "If another ship is departing, he's always there with leis."

He is also said to be devoted to his wife of 16 years, Jill, and their teenage daughter, Ashley. "In a world where officers put the boat first and family second, with him, it's a tie," said the wife of a retired Navy captain. Commander Waddle declined to be interviewed for this article.

Commander Waddle's style of humor has reverberated throughout the submarine community on Pearl Harbor. John Peters, 65, a retired submarine commander, recalled his first encounter with Commander Waddle when they were both waiting in line at a popular Japanese restaurant. Commander Waddle, to show respect for his elder, "prostrated himself on the ground and then kissed my Naval Academy ring like you'd kiss the ring of the Pope," Mr. Peters said.

At the annual submarine Birthday Ball in 1999, in which all the submarines compete to have the best centerpiece, the Greeneville's display consisted of a toilet commode with a lid that mechanically lifted and a periscope that popped up and turned around, while a recorded voice said, "We're closer than you think." The display won first prize.

"Scott's an outgoing, modern submariner, an exuberant type," said Capt. Gerald Howfolt, executive director of the Bowfin Submarine Museum in Honolulu. "Some people are glass-half-empty kind of guys. Scott is a glass-half-full kind of guy."

Commander Waddle was said to have an affinity for the Japanese people. The son of a retired Air Force pilot, he was born in Misawa, Japan. "I learned the Japanese language first and I respect the Japanese people," the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper in Tokyo quoted Commander Waddle as saying when he personally apologized on Tuesday for the accident to Yoshio Mochizuki, a vice foreign minister visiting from Tokyo.

Mr. Mochizuki told Japanese reporters that "tears fell" from Commander Waddle's eyes as he handed over sealed letters of apology.

Commander Waddle spent much of his childhood living on Air Force bases, and in high school in Naples, Italy, was elected class president, played football and learned basic Italian. At the United States Naval Academy, he was a cheerleader, and graduated in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

After several years of technical training, he was sent as a staff watch officer with the submarine group stationed off the coast of Naples. There, he rode his bicycle to work and practiced Italian with his landlord and shopkeepers, although his friends were largely other American military officers, friends said.

A Navy colleague and friend from those days recalled that Commander Waddle had "some growing pains in the job."

"He was a newlywed and wasn't concentrating," the friend said. "He has an outgoing personality, and he didn't filter himself to be politically correct with the boss. There was never a formal reprimand, but he'd be the first to say he could have done better."

But then Commander Waddle became the chief engineer for the submarine Kentucky, in which he had responsibility for checking every piece of mechanical, electrical and electronic equipment on the ship - from the toilets to the nuclear reactor plant. "It's one of the hardest jobs on a sub, and you have to do it right," the friend said. "And he did it right. His strength is definitely engineering."

After serving on a board that tests the safety of nuclear reactors on submarines and then as the executive officer of the submarine San Francisco, Commander Waddle earned a master's degree from the National Defense University Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington. In 1999, he was given command of the Greeneville.

Certainly, Commander Waddle knows the importance of safety before surfacing. "Driving on the freeway, it's just like knowing who's around you, who's in front, behind, left, to right," he said in his television interview. "And we do so, but in a third dimension, because we have to change in a vertical motion."

He also said that sonar tracking before surfacing was critical "to determine which contacts on the surface are in close proximity and present the greatest danger and threat to the ship."

Commander Waddle is three months away from having 20 years' service in the Navy, when he will be eligible for retirement. Some of his friends are convinced that even if the investigation absolves him of any wrongdoing, his Navy career is over.

"If I were in his shoes right now, I'd be looking for three things," said one Navy officer. "How can I get out with benefits for 20 years of service to my country, how can I be exonerated and how can I avoid going to jail."

In submarine culture, the captain is responsible for whatever occurs on his ship. "There's a saying that the ship reflects the captain," said Cmdr. Dennis J. Murphy, the skipper of the submarine Tucson who was in the same class as Commander Waddle at the Naval Academy. "It's like being mayor of a small town. You have the ultimate authority over everything that happens."

---

On Day of Sub's Accident,
Tour Was Its Only Mission

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS with JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04GREE.html?pagewanted=all

HONOLULU, March 3 - Only days before the sinking of a Japanese trawler off Pearl Harbor, the captain of the submarine Greeneville canceled a longer training exercise as unnecessary. But he still took his submarine out on Feb. 9, the day of the accident, solely to accommodate the Navy's efforts to promote itself, officials here acknowledged.

Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle used his discretion as the Greeneville's captain to cancel the long-scheduled exercise, but his superiors in the Navy's Pacific Fleet had seen it as a chance to give a disparate group of 16 civilians a once-in-a-lifetime ride aboard a nuclear-powered submarine and were loath to let them down.

"They had made a commitment to these folks," one officer said of the civilians, some of whom had traveled from across the country.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and a preliminary inquiry by a Navy commander have found that the presence of the civilians, including two who occupied control positions when the Greeneville surfaced abruptly, proved a distraction to the crew. Whether that contributed to the collision with the Japanese vessel will be among the determinations made by a formal court of inquiry convening here on Monday, officials here said.

What is clear is that were it not for the civilians, the Greeneville would not have left its berth at the Pearl Harbor Naval Station in the first place, the officials here say.

"There was no other reason to be out there," one person briefed on the preliminary naval inquiry said.

When the court tries to determine why the Greeneville struck and sank the trawler, the Ehime Maru, leaving nine people missing and presumed dead, including four high school students, the investigation will focus on more than the actions of Commander Waddle and his crew that day.

It will also focus on the Navy's extensive efforts to build public support by taking civilians, known in naval parlance as DV's, for distinguished visitors, aboard the world's premier warships and strutting their stuff. The practice has been growing, especially in the submarine fleet.

In his instructions to the admirals who will run the court, the Navy's Pacific commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, called for a thorough investigation of the visitors program and what effects, if any, it had on the operation of the Greeneville the day it collided with the Ehime Maru. "Provide your candid assessment and conclusions regarding the execution of this program on 9 Feb. 2001," Admiral Fargo wrote, according to an official here, "as well as any recommendations the court may have for improving the policies and practices" related to the program.

Among the witnesses expected to testify before the court are Rear Adm. Albert H. Konetzni Jr., the commander of the Pacific submarine fleet, who has been an enthusiastic public supporter of nuclear- powered attack submarines at a time when the Navy has lobbied to increase their numbers. Another expected witness is Capt. Robert L. Brandhuber, the admiral's chief of staff, who escorted the civilians aboard the Greeneville the day it struck the Ehime Maru.

The presence of civilians aboard the Greeneville - and the suspicion that the submarine's operations were little more than a public-relations demonstration - have deepened the anger over the deaths, especially in Japan, where news accounts have referred to the Greeneville's mission as a joy ride.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who said earlier that there was no evidence that the presence of civilians contributed to the accident, has ordered the Navy and the other armed services to prohibit civilians from operating any military equipment until a review of the guidelines for "community relations programs" is completed.

He stopped short of ordering a broader review, however. And despite the Ehime Maru's sinking and the questions swirling around it, the Navy has defended its distinguished visitors program - and continued to play host to civilians aboard its ships - contending that it remains one of the most effective ways for the service to burnish its image.

The practice extends to all the services, which routinely invite visitors well-known and unknown to tour bases and, in rarer cases, ride along in ships, aircraft and helicopters.

The Army encourages base commanders to hold open houses, letting civilians ride in tanks, operate communications gear and even fire weapons. Army guidelines warn that allowing civilians to throw grenades or participate in bayonet training would be "improper," but beyond that simply urge commanders to "use discretion."

The latest rage in Army public relations is the tandem parachute jump, in which a visitor is strapped to a paratrooper instructor at Fort Bragg, N.C. The Army has allowed roughly 100 of these in each of the last two years and included such notable figures as Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Ann Curry of the NBC program "Today."

Many visitors are what the services call "influencers," including journalists, teachers, lawmakers and others who are more likely to spread the word about their experiences. And many are celebrities. The singer Ricky Martin flew with an Air Force jump team before this year's Super Bowl, while the actor Bruce Willis flew in an F-16 a few years ago. The actor Harrison Ford flew in a Marine F-18.

"It's for people who have visibility, people whose opinion will be heard, or people who have an impact on their local communities," said Lt. Col. David Lamp, an Air Force spokesman. (There have been at least two fatal crashes of Air Force planes with civilian visitors aboard. The worst was in 1981, when an EC- 135 crashed during a training mission, killing 4 civilians and 17 crew members. A crew member's wife was in the pilot seat, but investigators found she had nothing to do with the accident, Colonel Lamp said.)

The Greeneville's civilians included a Massachusetts sportswriter, a Honolulu couple who were supporters of the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial Association and travelers from Texas and other states, some of them well-heeled investors in oil and gas or other businesses.

While all branches of the Armed Services have broad guidelines - the Navy requires children to be at least 8 and forbids couples to bunk together on overnight cruises - the rules have been left intentionally vague, giving local commanders wide discretion on which civilians can participate, when and how often.

"There are no standardized rules," Cmdr. Greg J. Smith, a Navy spokesman, said. "Commanders are told certain things they can't do, but anything else is the commanding officer's decision as to what is appropriate."

Here in Honolulu, commanders were handed wide latitude and used it. Admiral Konetzni, the commander of the Pacific submarine fleet since 1998, expanded to his submarines the same program that had become commonplace on aircraft carriers and other surface ships.

Those submarines - including 19 like the Greeneville based at Pearl Harbor, 6 others based in San Diego and 8 ballistic missile submarines based in Bangor, Wash. - had long operated in virtual anonymity. But with the submarine fleet declining and budgets tightening after the end of the cold war, Admiral Konetzni used the visitors program to make a case for rebuilding the fleet, working visits into submariners' busy training schedules, officials said.

"They're doing things they never would have done five years ago - changing schedules, ordering crews to make accommodations," a senior military official in Hawaii said.

In 1999, 1,152 civilians embarked on submarines 54 times, including 28 times aboard attack submarines like the Greeneville. Last year, 1,287 civilians embarked on 50 occasions. While some retired commanders have questioned as high the number of visitors aboard the Greeneville the day it struck the Ehime Maru, submarines like it averaged 17 civilians on each trip last year.

The Greeneville was no exception. Because of Commander Waddle's reputation as an effective, articulate captain, Admiral Konetzni often turned to the Greeneville, especially for important guests, and Commander Waddle shared the admiral's enthusiasm, officials said.

In 1999, Tipper Gore went on a cruise aboard the Greeneville - named after a county in Tennessee - and participated in a simulated emergency maneuver like the one being conducted when the collision occurred last month. During a training mission last summer, the Greeneville stopped in California to pick up James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of "Titanic."

Civilian visits are usually timed to coincide with longer training missions, lasting several days or weeks, officials said. In most cases, the civilians leave port aboard the submarine but are taken off in a skiff by the end of the first day.

In this case, the Greeneville had been scheduled to undertake a training mission lasting "several days," one official said. In preparation for longer deployments, submarine officers and crew members are required to complete an exhaustive list of training exercises, tests and other tasks. But Commander Waddle had decided that his crew, readying the submarine for a six-month deployment to the Western Pacific later this year, no longer needed the training that had been scheduled.

"They thought it was not required," one officer said. That decision was made only days before the 16 had been promised a ride, so the cruise went ahead. The officials said it was unusual, though not unheard of, for a submarine, which costs $25,000 a day to operate and maintain, to deploy for just a day.

Admiral Konetzni, Captain Brandhuber and other officials involved in the decision declined through a spokesman to comment, saying it would be inappropriate until they appear before the court.

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Dispute on Russian Tests Divides Nuclear Experts

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD with PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04NUKE.html?pagewanted=all

For half a decade, Russia has conducted what it says are nonnuclear tests under the ground of an Arctic island, as the United States says it does beneath the Nevada desert.

But the tests have caused bitter divisions among intelligence officials and nuclear analysts in Washington. Some have concluded that Russia is lying and is instead detonating small nuclear blasts; other experts say that charge is reckless and probably wrong.

"This question," one intelligence analyst said, "is tearing the community into pieces."

Beyond the dispute is the question of what, if anything, to do if Russia is lying. Led by Republicans, the Senate rejected the global ban on nuclear explosions and it is unclear whether the United States would now accuse Russia of violating it.

Paradoxically, the rejected test- ban treaty had provisions for inspections by which the United States could have sought to examine the Russian test site.

Still, Russia's truthfulness is relevant since underground tests serve to perfect new kinds of nuclear warheads.

President Clinton was briefed on the dispute shortly before he left office and the Bush administration is reviewing it, federal scientists and officials said. The White House offered no view. "We're not going to comment on intelligence matters," said Mary Ellen Countryman, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

Russia strongly denies any deception and says the tests comply with permitted practice. And some federal experts called the charge most likely false, saying the evidence is weak and the analyses flawed.

The intelligence analysts behind the charge have a history of suspecting the worst of Russia, and in one case of embarrassing the United States by accusing Moscow of conducting a nuclear blast that turned out to be an earth tremor. Such analysts have criticized the test ban treaty as hard to monitor. Moreover, the nuclear scientists who are taking part in the analyses often oppose bans on testing weapons they have designed, and some have argued for renewed American testing.

But both sides are said to agree that Moscow is doing more at the Arctic island, Novaya Zemlya, than it has acknowledged. "It's certain," a federal official said, "that the announced activity doesn't tell the whole story."

A positive outcome of the current dispute, said a senior federal science adviser, could be more intrusive means of verification at the nuclear test sites of both sides, which might cut through the fog of suspicion. "These are examples," he said, "of why we need more transparency."

The silence at most of the world's nuclear test sites comes after a half century of explosions in which new and old designs were checked to see how well they worked. The ban on such tests seeks to curb arms developments and races.

To diplomatic acclaim, President Clinton signed the test ban in 1996 after championing its adoption. It allows small tests in which nuclear materials are thrown together as long as the experiments have an energy output equal to zero. In other words, "zero yield" experiments are to produce absolutely no burst of nuclear energy, however tiny, and are widely agreed to have no use in designing new warheads.

The dispute centers on an inherently tricky area of test-ban verification in which nuclear blasts have yields too small to produce the kind of powerful shock waves that distant nations can track easily as faint rumbles in bedrock. Because of that, the debate tends to turn on sketchy evidence, worst-case scenarios and skeptical retorts.

Russian officials, in denying any violations of the ban, said military scientists on Novaya Zemlya are doing nothing more than simple experiments far too weak to represent an atomic blast.

In an interview, the head of the development and testing of nuclear weapons at Moscow's Atomic Energy Ministry, Nikolai P. Voloshin, said "We are not violating the treaty, absolutely."

Russia says it is doing so-called subcritical tests that are allowed under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which 160 nations have signed. While so far unratified, the ban is mostly observed in practice; Moscow has pledged to abide by its rules.

Subcritical explosions use nuclear fuel like plutonium in small discharges that stop short of producing a self-sustaining chain reaction that releases any nuclear energy.

But some federal intelligence analysts charge that Russia is engaging in a type of outlawed test known as hydronuclear. In those tests, metallic bomb parts are thrown together explosively, liquefying (thus the hydro) while releasing small amounts of nuclear energy. The tests stop short of a large blast, releasing perhaps a millionth of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

Experts agree that hydronuclear tests can have some use in the design of new nuclear arms, although the extent is debated.

The intelligence team that says Russia is lying includes Lawrence Turnbull, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst, and Charles Craft, a Sandia National Laboratory analyst, officials said.

Mr. Craft leads a panel of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a group that represents the nuclear views of many federal agencies.

The two, officials added, form the core of a group within the intelligence community that believes that it has evidence that Moscow is going over the hydronuclear line in an effort to develop new kinds of nuclear arms.

Part of the team's evidence, a federal official said, centers on highly sensitive intelligence sources that are seen as giving Washington a clearer view into Moscow's activities on Novaya Zemlya. Neither Mr. Turnbull nor Mr. Craft responded to requests for comment.

Officials said the State Department is skeptical of the accusation and has written formal rebuttals.

The differing sides in the dispute are trying to influence the formal process by which the federal government periodically makes judgments about secret foreign activities. This National Intelligence Estimate seeks to describe the likely state of development in the Russian nuclear program.

Fueling mistrust, officials said, is the sheer bustle on the hilly island, a seemingly barren place about 500 miles long and 500 miles east of Murmansk, inside the Artic Circle. They said American surveillance has observed a flurry of experimental work as well as Russian planes and ships ferrying supplies and nuclear crews back and forth.

"There's lots of interest, activity and money involved," said a top federal science adviser. "So you can understand why people are suspicious."

Mr. Turnbull and his allies have a history of faulty analyses. In August 1997 they told the White House that the Russians might have conducted an underground test at Novaya Zemlya. But after seismic experts challenged that assessment, the C.I.A. retracted that finding and said the tremor was actually a nearby undersea earthquake.

"They've got an ax to grind and are still trying to save face from that," said one federal science adviser.

Defenders of Mr. Turnbull note that Russia has often cheated on arms-control treaties, and that top Russian experts are arguing for new nuclear arms. In Moscow, Viktor N. Mikhailov, a former minister of atomic energy who still wields much power, has been quoted as advocating "a new generation of super precise nuclear weapons."

But Frank von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton University who advised the Clinton administration on the nuclear test ban, said he had heard rumors of the intelligence dispute and considered the violation charge irresponsible. "As far as I can tell," he said, Washington has no evidence "that would prove that the Russian activities are any different than those that the U.S. conducts at the Nevada test site."

If the intelligence team's finding becomes the American view, it might stir a political storm. Even though the Senate in 1999 rejected the test ban by a vote of 51 to 48, the United States is currently conducting no nuclear tests, and weapons experts said the perception of a Russian violation could erode or end support for testing restraint.

Many arms-control experts see small nuclear tests such as those allegedly being done by Russia as too small to be militarily significant, and argue that branding Russia as a test- ban violator on the basis of slim evidence poses more risks than benefits.

But some intelligence analysts argue that Moscow over the decades has learned to tease so much information from small tests that the secretive work could produce new classes of nuclear arms.

Federal experts said the dispute does not appear to be politically motivated or timed to the change of administrations.

Novaya Zemlya is covered with snow and ice most of the year. Starting in 1955, Russia conducted more than 100 nuclear blasts there, the last in October 1990. Since 1995, Russia has used the remote wilderness for what it says are permissible underground experiments to maintain the reliability of its nuclear arms.

From last August through October, Russia announced a series of small tests there.

---

Everywhereabouts

Sun., Mar. 4, 2001
Slate Magazine
by Charles Davis

All three papers front developments in the USS Greenville inquiry. The NYT off-leads a report that commanding officer Scott Waddle took the sub out solely as a public relations demonstration. He had cancelled a long-scheduled training exercise and his superiors saw the off-day as a chance to accommodate the 16 civilians who were promised a mission on the sub (a mission which Japanese news accounts are referring to as a "joy ride"). The National Transportation Safety Board and a naval court are not only trying to determine whether the presence of civilians contributed to the collision, but they are also evaluating the propriety of the visitors programs run by the military to boost public support. Interesting revelations about the guidelines for the "Distinguished Visitors" program: The Navy requires children to be at least 8 and forbids couples to bunk together on overnight cruises, but civilians aren't necessarily prevented from operating military equipment or throwing hand grenades. The LAT looks at the questions being asked of Waddle: Did he disregard official procedure? Did he receive incorrect information from the sailor in charge of sonar? Should he have taken more periscope sightings? Did he extend the periscope high enough to see over the swells? The WP reports on speculation that Waddle may be forced to retire as a result of the Navy's inquiry and mounting pressure from both the U.S. public and Japan.

-------- canada

Canada's angst -- fear of the future
More dangerous world than decade ago, pollsters told

Sunday 4 March 2001
Edmonton Journal
Mike Blanchfield Southam Newspapers; Ottawa Citizen
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news1/stories/010304/5038297.html

Canada is an angst-ridden nation that fears the future will bring natural disasters, terrorist attacks and even limited nuclear war, a federal government poll suggests.

Despite the end of the Cold War and a decade of unbridled prosperity, a majority of Canadians fear the world is less safe than it was a decade ago, says a comprehensive poll.

It was conducted between Sept. 27 and Oct. 15 for the Defence Department.

Overwhelming numbers of Canadians fear the country will, in the next decade, be struck by a major natural disaster, that a major terrorist incident will strike North America and that the world will be disrupted by an ethnic war.

And, although they don't think North America is particularly susceptible to a hostile missile attack, three-quarters support the U.S. plan to build a national missile defence system that would also shield Canada.

"Clearly, Canadians hold a relatively pessimistic view of the world," concludes the poll completed last fall by Toronto firm POLLARA.

The poll was part of a major annual survey by the Defence Department to gauge the public's support of issues facing the Canadian Forces.

Much of the poll suggests that the Forces enjoy a solid approval rating among most Canadians and that the military needs more resources.

Canadians are worried about a variety of possible catastrophes.

The 1998 Ice Storm in Quebec and Ontario, as well as the 1997 Manitoba floods, are cited by pollsters as reason why 83 per cent of respondents are convinced Canada will face a major natural disaster in the next decade.

Pollsters say the publicity surrounding bloody ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor and Africa account for the fact that 77 per cent believe another ethnic war is on the horizon.

Meanwhile, 72 per cent said they believe "a major terrorist incident in North America is likely."

Those three possibilities were among a list of 10 that pollsters read to respondents.

Two-thirds of Canadians (66 per cent) are also afraid of a computer attack by terrorists or a rogue state. Another 64 per cent fear a major industrial accident is looming.

On the less pessimistic side, only 36 fear that a missile launch against North America is likely, while 29 per cent fear the outbreak of a new Cold War, and 27 per cent think that a war involving many countries, on the scale of the Second World War, is likely to occur.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, is the fact that 54 per cent of respondents think the most important job of the Canadian Forces is international peacekeeping, a runaway first-place response.

Canadians believe the Forces do not have the resources they need, with 67 per cent saying they do not think the military has enough personnel and 55 per cent saying it has inadequate equipment.

As a result, 72 per cent think the Forces budget should increase either "a lot" or "somewhat" in the next decade. (Last week, the Forces received an additional $624 million from the government in its supplementary estimates.)

Interestingly, 76 per cent believe Canada should assist the U.S. in developing an anti-missile defence system for North America.

Chretien has expressed concern that it could spark another global arms race.

-------- korea

North Korea may scrap nuclear accord

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Environmental News Network
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/03/03042001/ap_nukes_42349.asp

North Korea reiterated a warning Saturday that it might scrap a moratorium on long-range missile tests and revive a nuclear program that Washington fears was being used to develop nuclear weapons.

A spokesman for the reclusive communist state's Foreign Ministry accused the United States of failing to maintain its end of a 1994 framework in which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for two Western-designed reactors.

The reactor project has been plagued by delays, upsetting the North's Stalinist regime.

"Under this situation it is self-evident that it is difficult for the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea to unilaterally and indefinitely keep in force such measures as a moratorium on the launch of satellites and missiles," the spokesman said in remarks carried in English by the North's official foreign news outlet, KCNA. As usual, the spokesman was not identified.

North Korea issued a similar warning Feb. 21 in angry reaction to comments by senior Bush administration officials that they would review policies regarding the North - remarks interpreted by both Koreas as a sign that Washington might take a tougher stance toward the communist North.

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, responded to the threat in February by saying that development of missile technology in countries such as North Korea was one of the reasons the United States is considering a missile defense system.

North Korea said, however, that "it is none other than the DPRK which is exposed to threat owing to the conservative hard-line stand expressed by the U.S. administration. We have neither intention nor capacity to browbeat anyone." DPRK refers to North Korea.

Under the 1994 agreement with Washington, a U.S.-led consortium is building the two new reactors in the North at a cost of $4.6 billion. As part of the deal, Pyongyang suspended its own nuclear program, which Washington feared was being used to develop nuclear weapons.

But North Korea has been unhappy with the slow progress of construction. The reactors, originally to be completed by 2003, are several years behind schedule. The North has blamed part of its acute electricity shortage on the delays and has demanded compensation.

North Korea also agreed to suspend missile tests in September 1999 as long as talks continued with Washington on resolving concerns over Pyongyang's missile program. In turn, the United States eased some sanctions.

Washington says the United States will keep its promises under the agreed framework and expects North Korea to do likewise.

Some South Korean officials worry privately that a rekindled standoff between the United States and North Korea could jeopardize Seoul's efforts to engage the North.

-------

North Korea Asks for US Help With Electricity

March 4, 2001
Excite News
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010304/06/politics-korea-north-usa-dc

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has urged the United States to find a solution as soon as possible to the communist state's electricity shortage which it blamed on the U.S. delay in building promised light-water reactors there.

"The prospect for the provision of light-water reactors under the DPRK (Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea) -U.S. agreed framework is becoming more gloomy," a spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry told the official (North) Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) late on Saturday.

The United States, South Korea and Japan jointly lead the $4.6 billion light-water reactor project under which North Korea agreed in 1994 to freeze a nuclear program suspected of developing weapons in return for the two safe reactors and annual supplies of fuel oil. Washington is supplying the fuel oil.

"This (delayed provision of reactors) gravely threatens the DPRK's right to existence as it is suffering acute shortage of electricity," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

"Under this situation, it is self-evident that it is difficult for the DPRK to unilaterally and independently keep in force such measures as moratorium of the launch of satellites and missiles taken by it with good faith for DPRK-U.S. dialogue."

Pyongyang criticized Washington for taking a hardline stance against it, characterizing North Korea as "threatening."

"It is none other than the DPRK which is exposed to threat owing to the conservative hardline stand expressed by the U.S. administration," he said. "We have neither intention nor capacity to browbeat anyone."

South Korean officials said last month they did not expect the new Bush administration to seek changes to the multinational project to build the two light-water reactors in North Korea.

But the North's spokesman told KCNA what it needed were "practical actions" from the Americans, not empty words.

-------- missile defense

Missile Defense, Part VI

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Washington Post
By Jack Ruina
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17202-2001Mar3.html

THE LATEST IN A LONG LINE of proposed anti-ballistic systems has technical and political shortcomings and wouldn't enhance U.S. security, the author argues.

President Bush made it clear in his address to Congress last week that he is as committed as ever to the idea of a nationwide missile defense. "To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses," he said. The key word in that sentence, of course, was "effective."The truth is that the national missile defense system currently under development, the only choice now available to the Bush administration, is anything but that.

It makes little sense, technically, economically or politically, for the new administration to pursue national missile defense, or NMD. I can understand that the president would want to put a high priority on protecting the nation's populace from nuclear attack, but Bush seems oblivious to NMD's many problems: its inherent technical inadequacies, its high cost and the fact that it is hardly ready even for construction to begin.

And deploying NMD would have a paradoxical effect. It would generate political consequences that would run exactly counter to Bush'sprofessed desire, which is to minimize the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, reduce the nuclear stockpile worldwide and promote NATO cohesiveness. We would be trading the relatively limited threat of an attack from a smaller hostile nation for a much greater one: provoking the Russians and the Chinese.

I have been involved with the technology of missile defense for more than 40 years and am familiar with the complexities of developing such a system. I became director of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, when the agency was responsible for U.S. ballistic missile defense research programs. Later, I served as a member of President Nixon's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control at the time of the ABM Treaty negotiations and, in subsequent administrations, on various White House committees dealing with strategic nuclear weapons.

From my standpoint, NMD, the sixth in a series of U.S. missile defense programs, is the sixth to fail to meet its goals. This is due to several basic technical difficulties involved in defending against ballistic missile attack. The bomb payload is carried by a "reentry vehicle" that is relatively small (under 1,000 pounds) and moves at great speed (up to 15,000 mph), giving the defense little time to react. An attacker could easily obscure the reentry vehicle and confuse the defense with so-called "penetration aids" -- everything from decoys, such as balloons, to radar jammers. If an attack consisted of only a single reentry vehicle with no penetration aids, the defense's problem would be much simpler; it is indeed possible to "hit a bullet with a bullet," as the task for the defense is often described. But a real attack would almost certainly include some relatively simple penetration aids.

If we do not yet have a nationwide ballistic missile defense system, it is certainly not for lack of will or adequate funding. Since the 1950s, the United States has given ballistic missile defense research and development the highest priority, has spent well over $100 billion and has involved the best American technological talent in pursuing every promising lead.

The first attempt at a nationwide defense was Nike-Zeus, developed in the late 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration. This system seemed too easy for the Soviets to overcome with the use of penetration aids, and its standard for effectiveness was extremely high: Because even a small fraction of the large nuclear stockpile the Soviet Union was expected to amass could wreak havoc on American cities, the system had to perform virtually perfectly and destroy nearly all incoming missiles to be of any use at all. Although he was under enormous congressional pressure to authorize deployment, President Eisenhower, mindful of these weaknesses, declined to do so.

President Kennedy decided to scrap Nike-Zeus entirely in favor of Nike-X, a system that was to use cutting-edge technology in radar, interceptor and computers. Despite the marvels of these technologies, Nike-X could not overcome the same fundamental shortcomings as its predecessor and was never deployed.

During the Johnson administration, it became clear that if either the United States or the Soviet Union deployed a nationwide defense system with such fundamental weaknesses, the other side would, at much less cost, not only utilize penetration aids but also increase its missile force to ensure that its capability was in no way degraded. Such an action-reaction cycle would only fuel the ongoing, dangerous nuclear arms race without diminishing either side's vulnerability to total destruction.

President Johnson therefore proposed deploying a lighter, limited version of Nike-X called Sentinel, to protect against a potential (but as yet nonexistent) small Chinese long-range missile force. This limited defense system could not be judged to offer any real protection against the massive Soviet force and therefore, it was assumed, would not intensify the U.S.-Soviet arms race.

But Sentinel was only a halfhearted response to political pressures from Congress, and it never went anywhere. The Nixon administration quickly rejected it in favor of its own limited system, Safeguard, which, taking due account of the action-reaction cycle, was intended as protection not for cities and people, but U.S. missile silos only. Construction of Safeguard was begun to give the United States a bargaining chip in arms control negotiations with the Soviets, but the one site was abandoned as useless -- even through it had been permitted by the ABM Treaty, which Nixon signed in 1972.

With that treaty in effect, advocacy for missile defense cooled for a decade until it was revived by President Reagan, who found it hard to accept U.S. vulnerability to total destruction by that "evil empire," the Soviet Union. With his renowned optimism and his faith in U.S. technology, Reagan believed that national commitment, enough funding and streamlined management could produce a successful defense system. Thus began the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, an intensive pursuit of technologies intended to fulfill his goal of making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Such an ambitious goal had to depend upon the success of highly questionable futuristic technologies, mostly space-based, fostering the nickname Star Wars.

Unfortunately, Reagan's goals for SDI were largely fantasy,raising false hopes. SDI received a lot of fanfare, but in fact, it wasted money and technological talent at major universities and industrial laboratories pursuing what was little more than a presidential illusion. After Reagan left office, many SDI projects were discontinued, and the collapse of the Soviet empire abetted its demise. By the time of the Clinton administration, SDI as a program was gone.

Ballistic missile defense advocacy, however, has persisted. Potential missile threats have been posited from hostile nations such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, which are believed to be capable of purchasing or producing crude ballistic missiles carrying nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons. The political pressure to keep going with a missile defense has been reinforced by Iraq's actual use of short-range ballistic missiles to attack Israel and Saudi Arabia, and by North Korea's missile tests and nuclear programs.

That is what led to the start of development on NMD, a system designed to defend against only a limited ballistic missile attack. NMD is not the son of SDI, as it is sometimes described; it does not rely on totally unrealistic SDI technologies,only on upgraded versions of conventional missile defense technologies.It does, however, include one significant design change. The defense systems proposed prior to SDI contemplated using nuclear-armed interceptors, which could destroy all objects within a large volume of space. But deploying interceptors with nuclear weapons poses severe command, testing and political problems, and is no longer considered acceptable. So the NMD interceptor is designed to destroy an attacking warhead by direct collision, so-called "hit-to-kill"; a near-miss would spell total failure. This limits each interceptor to destroying only one object.

Thus, an attack by even a small power could succeed by including a number of simple but varied decoys to mimic the real warhead, which also could be disguised. The interceptor would have only moments to discriminate and to destroy the real warhead within this swarm of confusing objects.

Recognition of such problems led a 1998 Defense Department panel, chaired by a former Air Force chief of staff, to characterize the NMD program as a "rush to failure." Today, the rush continues, and the program's failure to meet its goal is more apparent, as demonstrated by recent NMD intercept technology field test failures.

If NMD deployment involved no more than spending a lot of money in pursuit of a vain hope, it would only be a waste -- a bad buy. But it's also bad foreign policy. The Russian and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese nuclear forces still represent the greatest nuclear threats to the United States both for the present and for years to come. Russia retains an enormous, though obsolescing, missile force. The Chinese long-range missile force is small, but it is growing and is still substantially more capable than any threat we might expect from smaller hostile nations.

Although we need not fear the kind of intense arms race we had in the Cold War, it is in our interest to minimize these threats, rather than risk their expansion by pursuing a technology to which those countries will feel the need to respond, in turn triggering buildups in other countries. A further Chinese nuclear buildup, for instance, might well stimulate the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs. We also want to discourage Russian and Chinese exports of military technology and weapons to Iran, Iraq and elsewhere. And we can use Russian and Chinese support in diplomatic efforts to convince the North Koreans to abandon whatever missile and nuclear weapons ambitions they may harbor. Our European allies, meanwhile, are uneasy at the thought of the U.S. abandoning the ABM Treaty, which they see as having a strong stabilizing effect on the worldwide nuclear balance. They also resent having to accommodate to unilateral U.S. actions that have significant consequences for them.

Developing an effective ballistic missile system to defend the U.S. population is conceptually possible. No law of nature prevents it, and we should continue to explore reasonable technologies, if only for the scientific value of learning what it is we can't do. But a better objective might be to develop a ballistic missile defense system to satisfy a limited goal while avoiding the negative political consequences of the NMD. The ongoing theater ballistic missile defense program, designed to counter relatively short-range missiles in a war zone, and the proposed boost-phase system, designed to destroy missiles as they are launched, are two examples. In fact, the Russians have proposed developing a mobile defense system together with the Europeans that could be oriented to deal with whatever short-range ballistic missile threat might develop -- a kind of U-Haul ballistic missile defense. They are also suggesting that the United States join them in developing a launch phase system. These proposals might have some actual merit, but their real purpose is obviously to sidetrack the NMD.

Ultimately, what speaks most against a nationwide missile defense is the fact that even if we succeeded in building one, our vulnerability would remain. A potential adversary does not have to rely on ballistic missiles to deliver a warhead. A small nation could easily resort to using planes, ships, cruise missiles or, as has been facetiously suggested, to hiding a warhead in a bale of marijuana, the shipment of which defies most detection.

The idea of a nationwide missile defense has taken on a life of its own, independent of the state of technology or the political problems it might entail. Advocates cling to it blindly, looking for answers it cannot provide. But in the case of NMD, we are seeking a technical solution to a security problem that would be better addressed through diplomatic and political efforts.

Jack Ruina is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at MIT and a former president of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

---

Do You Know How We Got Here?

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17208-2001Mar3.html

Nike-Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, Safeguard, SDI and NMD -- missile defense has proven too tough so far for the United States, which has spent $120 billion since the 1950s trying to make it work. Test your knowledge of U.S. missile defense history.

1. In what year did the United States launch its first test of an anti-ballistic system?

A) 1946 B) 1961 C) 1962 D) 1957

2. Which system offered two tiers of protection -- nuclear warheads that would destroy incoming enemy missiles above the atmosphere and others that would target missiles within the atmosphere?

A) Nike-Zeus B) Nike-X C) Safeguard D) SDI

3. Which system called for U.S. cities to be surrounded by hundreds of nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles?

A) Sentinel B) SDI C) Nike-X D) NMD

4. Which system was based on space technologies that were never tested?

A) Safeguard B) SDI C) Nike-Zeus D) Sentinel

5. Which system was designed to actually hit incoming enemy missiles instead of detonating nearby in order to destroy them?

A) Sentinel B) Nike-X C) Safeguard D) NMD

6. Which system was deemed too costly given the protection it would provide?

A) Safeguard B) SDI C) Sentinel D) All of the above

7. Which program had its funding cut, and was later allotted twice the money that the Pentagon requested?

A) Safeguard B) Nike-X C) NMD D) SDI

--

Answers to the Quiz

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17216-2001Mar3.html

1. C) 1962. The Army launched a Nike-Zeus missile from its Kwajalein Atoll site in the Pacific;

2. C) Nike-X. It added a short-range interceptor to the Nike-Zeus formula;

3. A) The Sentinel program, which was abandoned in part because of the dangers of such a plan;

4. B) SDI;

5. D) NMD;

6. D) All of the above;

7. C) NMD, under the Clinton administration, in 1993 and in 1995.

Sources: Council for a Livable World; Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

---

Chinese Official To Visit U.S.

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-US.html?searchpv=aponline

BEIJING (AP) -- China confirmed Sunday that its highest-ranking foreign policy expert, Vice Premier Qian Qichen, will visit the United States later this month.

In announcing Qian's March 18-24 visit, the official Xinhua News Agency did not say who he will meet or what would be discussed.

However, the visit comes amid tensions over Washington's plans to build a system to defend against missile attacks, its criticism of Chinese human rights abuses and Beijing's concerns about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, the island China regards as part of its territory.

Qian will be the most senior Chinese official to visit the United States since President Bush was inaugurated in January.

---

Lobbyists Waitin' on the Levy for Their Ship to Come In

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By JILL ABRAMSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/weekinreview/04ABRA.html?pagewanted=all&searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON -- A new president whose road to the White House was paved with hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate donations, the prospect of huge tax cuts and the presence of many comrades in top Bush administration jobs has spread jubilation on K Street, Washington's legendary boulevard of lobbying.

The celebratory mood, built on the prospect of signing new clients, charging heftier fees, and securing special breaks, was already evident during the inauguration, as lobbying firms and corporations vied to flaunt their ties to the new Bush White House. There was General Motors' gaudy Kennedy Center reception for Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff and former G.M. lobbyist. There was Patton Boggs's soiree for Benjamin L. Ginsberg, who argued Bush v. Gore in Florida, the case that gave Mr. Bush the White House.

No sooner had President Bush sent his $1.6 trillion tax-cutting plan to Congress last week than lobbyists and trade associations representing everything from software makers to manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances began salivating over their own share of the tax-cut bonanza.

"Lobbying groups and corporations invested a lot in the Bush presidency," said John B. Judis, author of "The Paradox of American Democracy," a book analyzing the growth and power of special interests. "They all now see a payoff with a Bush presidency, with control of the House and Senate and the tax-writing committees."

But when President Bush invited K- Streeters, including the veteran tax lobbyist Charls E. Walker, to the White House for sandwiches and a tête-à-tête in the Cabinet room, his message was hardly music to their ears. "We should focus on people first, not corporations," he said. Then, at his first White House press conference, the president warned that he would "resist the Christmas- tree effect of tax policy. I don't want people putting ornaments on my plan." Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush's chief economic adviser, has also been pouring cold water over the tax lobbyists.

But if the Bush tax bill may not be all business lobbyists had hoped for, K- Streeters celebrated Friday over news that Senate Republicans plan to introduce a resolution this week to kill a sweeping ergonomics regulation implemented in the final weeks of the Clinton administration.

Meanwhile, with visions of a tax bill festooned with goodies vanishing, some lobbyists, including Mr. Walker, have hunkered down, watching for their next window of opportunity. Many are hoping the tax cuts will be approved in phases this year, and that the climate for deeper business tax cuts will improve as pressure builds on the Congress, if the economy weakens, and as lawmakers begin to look for campaign donations for the 2002 elections. Others have signed on to help the White House push for Mr. Bush's rate cuts, hoping his advisers, especially Karl Rove, will remember their efforts and respond to future entreaties.

IN another area where lobbyists had hoped for a windfall, military spending, the signals from the new White House have also been mixed. While lobbyists for defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, were excited about the prospect of building a new missile defense system during a conference at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center last month, Mr. Bush's order of a top-to-bottom review of military spending makes some nervous.

Longstanding weapons programs might be eliminated, while high-tech companies and others who have not usually enjoyed fat Pentagon contracts could benefit from the administration's new approach.

"The idea that the corporate lobby is some kind of 800-pound gorilla that will get whatever it wants is a myth," said Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. "It's in Bush's interests to stand up to corporate lobbyists."

Still, many interest groups are gearing up. The Club for Growth, an organization of supply-siders who want an even bigger, $2.1 trillion across-the-board tax cut, is budgeting $1 million for TV ads and a lobbying campaign. During the last election, club members poured at least $100,000 into 15 House races and won 10. According to Stephen Moore, the group's president, the ads may target Republican senators who become tax-cut defectors. Another business coalition is pushing to win more favorable depreciation rules for capital purchases.

"The president is going to have to fight hard to hold to his tax plan and not have it balloon," said former Senator Robert Packwood, who helped steer two major tax bills through the Senate, in 1981 and 1986. Soon Mr. Packwood may be among those crowding into Gucci Gulch, the corridor outside the hearing room of the House Ways and Means Committee, where lobbyists often monitor tax-writing developments. He is representing the American Public Power Association, a coalition of municipal utilities that want special tax relief because of changes brought by deregulation.

Some veteran lobbyists, including Kenneth J. Kies, the former staff director of the Joint Committee on Taxation and leading lobbyist at PricewaterhouseCoopers, have been pushing for the same tax breaks for years. Mr. Kies has spent much time trying to get changes in the taxation of offshore corporate affiliates. Mr. Walker has waged a decades-long battle to reduce corporate and capital gains taxes and came out of semiretirement to renew the effort this year. Companies pay $15,000 each to join Mr. Walker's Coalition for Jobs Growth and Competitiveness, a pittance if they get even a fraction of what they are seeking.

"These guys get paid even if they lose," said Robert S. McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, which opposes any big tax cut.

SOME observers of the early jockeying on K Street say that's the point. You don't play the lobbying game to win, just to make enough progress so your client renews its retainer.

"Most of these corporate lobbyists know perfectly well their provisions will get stripped out of any bill," explained Mr. Bartlett, who used to work for Jack F. Kemp, a long-time tax-cutting advocate. "This is all stuff they put on their sheets to show why they deserve their salaries. The perfect provision is one that expires and never gets enacted into law. It allows Congress to milk for contributions. It puts money in everybody's pocket and keeps lobbyists employed."

---

NATO's Robertson To Meet Officials

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NATO-US.html?searchpv=aponline

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- NATO's secretary-general will meet President Bush in Washington this week to discuss the U.S. plan for a missile defense system and the European Union's effort to form its own military force -- sore topics among the allies.

NATO's European members had viewed the new Republican administration somewhat skeptically after hints during the presidential campaign that the United States might pull its forces out of the Balkans and would go ahead with a ballistic missile defense shield whether the Europeans liked the idea or not.

The Americans, for their part, were suspicious about the EU's plans for its own separate military force, fearing it could undermine NATO's role as the primary defense organization in Europe.

NATO's civilian leader, Lord Robertson, arrives Monday and hopes to iron out those concerns during a week of meetings with Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and members of Congress.

By all accounts, worries on both sides were much eased in late February during a visit to NATO headquarters by Powell, who assured fellow foreign ministers that the United States would leave the Balkans only when the rest of them did.

Powell also said that while the decision had been made to develop an anti-missile defense, Washington would consult its allies closely on the kind of system adopted and when it would be deployed.

The system is aimed at shooting down ballistic missiles fired by what Washington calls ``nations of concern,'' such as North Korea, Iran or Iraq.

Powell's first meeting with the allies followed assurances a few days earlier by Bush that Washington supported the idea of a European Union military force, under the right circumstances.

The 15-nation EU plans to develop a 60,000-member rapid reaction force for limited humanitarian or peacekeeping missions, not for fighting wars.

The Americans don't want to get involved ``in every tiny conflict,'' Robertson said. ``That is what the European Union's ambition is, to deal with the small brushfires in Europe.''

Though Europeans were miffed that Washington decided on the missile defense issue on its own, Robertson insisted the allies were ready to discuss the details.

---

Missile-Defense Flaw

March 4, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/opinion/L04ABM.html

To the Editor:

Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay ("Russia Can Be Our Ally on Missile Defense," Op-Ed, Feb. 27) may be right that cooperating with the Russians on a missile defense gets around some diplomatic problems that the Russians and our European allies have with the idea. But it does not alter the basic scientific fact that a missile defense will not work.

To get an idea of how complicated this is, we only need look at our recent bombing of Iraq. We were using our latest technology, aiming at a fixed target, and choosing the time of attack, and we still missed many targets.

--------

Worrywart Canadians fear the worst

01/03/04
Ottawa Citizen
Mike Blanchfield
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/010304/5039009.html

By far, most Canadians believe we will soon be struck by natural disasters, attacked by terrorists, and plunged into a nuclear war, a poll finds.

Canada is an angst-ridden nation that fears the future will bring natural disasters, terrorist attacks and even limited nuclear war, a federal government poll suggests.

Despite the end of the Cold War and a decade of unbridled prosperity, a majority of Canadians fear the world is less safe than it was a decade ago, says a comprehensive poll conducted last fall for the Defence Department.

Overwhelming numbers of Canadians fear the country will, in the next decade, be struck by a major natural disaster, that a major terrorist incident will strike North America and that the world will be disrupted by an ethnic war.

And, although they don't think North America is particularly susceptible to a hostile missile attack, three-quarters support the U.S. plan to build a national missile defence system that would also shield Canada.

"Clearly, Canadians hold a relatively pessimistic view of the world," concludes the poll completed last fall by Toronto firm POLLARA.

The poll was part of a major annual survey by the Defence Department to gauge the public's support of issues facing the Canadian Forces. Much of the poll suggests that the Forces enjoy a solid approval rating among most Canadians and that the military needs more resources.

However, a section of the poll titled, Canada and the World, paints Canadians as worried about a variety of possible catastrophes. The 1998 Ice Storm that struck Quebec and Ontario, as well as the 1997 Manitoba floods, are cited by pollsters as the reason why 83 per cent of respondents are convinced Canada will face a major natural disaster in the next decade.

Pollsters say the publicity surrounding bloody ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, Chechnya, East Timor and Africa account for the fact that 77 per cent believe another ethnic war is on the horizon. The poll does not specify where Canadians think this might occur.

Meanwhile, 72 per cent said they believe "a major terrorist incident in North America is likely."

Those three possibilities were among a list of 10 that pollsters read to respondents.

Two-thirds of Canadians (66 per cent) are also afraid of a computer attack by terrorists or a rogue state. Another 64 per cent fear a major industrial accident is looming.

Some 59 per cent believe that a regional war to deter rogue states is likely. Meanwhile, exactly one half (50 per cent) "expect a regional war involving weapons of mass destruction in the next decade."

On the less pessimistic side, only 36 fear that a missile launch against North America is likely, while 29 per cent fear the outbreak of a new Cold War, and 27 per cent think that a war involving many countries, on the scale of the Second World War, is likely to occur.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, is the fact that 54 per cent of respondents think the most important job of the Canadian Forces is international peacekeeping, a runaway first-place response. Protecting domestic sovereignty, at 24 per cent, was a distant second.

Canadians believe the Forces do not have the resources they need, with 67 per cent saying they do not think the military has enough personnel and 55 per cent saying it has inadequate equipment.

As a result, 72 per cent think the Forces budget should increase either "a lot" or "somewhat" in the next decade. (Last week, the Forces received an additional $624 million from the government in its supplementary estimates.)

As for Canada-U.S. relations, 82 per cent said military matters are crucial to our relations with our southern neighbour. A majority of respondents agreed that Canada benefits in many ways through military partnerships with the U.S., including research and development, training and space programs.

"Interestingly, over three-quarters (76 per cent) believe Canada should assist the U.S. in developing an anti-missile defence system for North America," pollsters found.

The Chretien government has taken no position on the proposal, but has expressed concern that it could spark another global arms race. The U.S. has said it will go ahead with the system with or without Canada's approval.

The telephone survey of 1,537 respondents was conducted between Sept. 27 and Oct. 15. The results are considered accurate within 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

-------- russia

Russian compliance with nuclear test ban stirs U.S. skepticism

Sunday, March 4, 2001
San Jose Mercury News
New York Times
BY WILLIAM J. BROAD AND PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/world/docs/nuke04.htm

For 10 years, Russia has conducted what it says are non-nuclear tests under the ground of an Arctic island, as the United States says it does beneath the Nevada desert.

But the tests have caused bitter divisions among intelligence officials and nuclear analysts in Washington. Some have concluded that Russia is lying and is instead detonating small nuclear blasts; other experts say that charge is reckless and probably wrong.

``This question,'' one intelligence analyst said, ``is tearing the community into pieces.''

Beyond the dispute is the question of what, if anything, to do if Russia is lying. Led by Republicans, the Senate rejected the global ban on nuclear explosions, and it is unclear whether the United States would now accuse Russia of violating it.

Paradoxically, the rejected test-ban treaty had provisions for inspections by which the United States could have sought to examine the Russian test site.

Still, Russia's truthfulness is relevant because underground tests serve to perfect new kinds of nuclear warheads.

President Clinton was briefed on the dispute shortly before he left office and the Bush administration is reviewing it, federal scientists and officials said. The White House offered no view. ``We're not going to comment on intelligence matters,'' said Mary Ellen Countryman, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

Russia strongly denies any deception and says the tests comply with permitted practice. And some federal experts called the charge most likely false, saying the evidence is weak and the analyses flawed.

The intelligence analysts behind the charge have a history of suspecting the worst of Russia, and in one case of embarrassing the United States by accusing Moscow of conducting a nuclear blast that turned out to be an earth tremor. Such analysts have criticized the test-ban treaty as hard to monitor. Moreover, the nuclear scientists who are taking part in the analyses often oppose bans on testing weapons they have designed, and some have argued for renewed American testing.

But both sides are said to agree that Moscow is doing more at the Arctic island, Novaya Zemlya, than it has acknowledged. ``It's certain,'' a federal official said, ``that the announced activity doesn't tell the whole story.''

A positive outcome of the current dispute, said a senior federal science adviser, could be more intrusive means of verification at the nuclear test sites of both sides, which might cut through the fog of suspicion. ``These are examples,'' he said, ``of why we need more transparency.''

The silence at most of the world's nuclear test sites comes after a half-century of explosions in which new and old designs were checked to see how well they worked. The ban on such tests seeks to curb arms developments and races.

To diplomatic acclaim, Clinton signed the test ban in 1996 after championing its adoption. It allows small tests in which nuclear materials are thrown together as long as the experiments have an energy output equal to zero. In other words, ``zero yield'' experiments are to produce absolutely no burst of nuclear energy, however tiny, and are widely agreed to have no use in designing new warheads.

The dispute centers on an inherently tricky area of test-ban verification in which nuclear blasts have yields too small to produce the kind of powerful shock waves that distant nations can track easily as faint rumbles in bedrock. Because of that, the debate tends to turn on sketchy evidence, worst-case scenarios and skeptical retorts.

Russian officials, in denying any violations of the ban, said military scientists on Novaya Zemlya are doing nothing more than simple experiments far too weak to represent an atomic blast.

In an interview, the head of the development and testing of nuclear weapons at Moscow's Atomic Energy Ministry, Nikolai P. Voloshin, said, ``We are not violating the treaty, absolutely.''

Russia says it is doing so-called subcritical tests that are allowed under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which 160 nations have signed. While so far unratified, the ban is mostly observed in practice; Moscow has pledged to abide by its rules.

Subcritical explosions use nuclear fuel like plutonium in small discharges that stop short of producing a self-sustaining chain reaction that releases any nuclear energy.

But some federal intelligence analysts charge that Russia is engaging in a type of outlawed test known as hydronuclear. In these tests, metallic bomb parts are thrown together explosively, liquefying while releasing small amounts of nuclear energy. The tests stop short of a large blast, releasing perhaps a millionth of the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. Experts agree that hydronuclear tests can have some use in the design of new nuclear arms, although the extent is debated.

Part of the team's evidence, a federal official said, centers on highly sensitive intelligence sources that are seen as giving Washington a clearer view into Moscow's activities on Novaya Zemlya.

Officials said the State Department is skeptical of the accusation and has written formal rebuttals.

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

Slicing the sub
Sailor faces 300 years in prison on charges of sabotaging a nuclear submarine.

March 1 - 7, 2001
BY RICK ANDERSON

NEWS HAS NOT BEEN good lately for Navy subs. First, the USS Greenville rammed through a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii three weeks ago, killing nine. Then, at a hearing that concluded earlier this week in Bremerton, the Navy claimed one of its own submarine crewmen tried to sabotage the Bangor-based Trident nuclear sub USS Alaska by cutting at least 105 of its power and communications cables last fall. The accused, Petty Officer 2nd Class Ernesto Cimmino, 23, who allegedly also abused drugs and was having an affair with the wife of another Navyman, then supposedly engaged Navy investigators in a contest of wills. Aware he'd become a suspect, Cimmino telephoned investigators to ask if the Navy had caught him on videotape cutting cables, according to court testimony. In another call, prosecutors claim, he said he was just doing a college paper and wanted to know if polygraph results can be admitted at court martials.

Slightly built, with clipped, forward-swept ebony hair, Cimmino may defy any popular image of a nuclear saboteur. He's a handsome kid in his black Navy uniform, a faint boyish smile flickering when he speaks in a soft voice. Charged with 23 counts of property destruction, conspiracy, theft, obstruction of justice, and drug use, he seems to be weathering his predicament. During a break in the preliminary hearing when he and I were the only ones left in the small, modern courtroom at Naval Station Bremerton, I asked how life was in the brig, where he's been since the day after Thanksgiving. "It's actually fun!" said Cimmino, who is from upstate New York and joined the service in 1997. He beamed and added, "Food's good too."

What the Navy believes Cimmino did, and what he actually did, may not be resolved for months. Evidence and testimony presented by the Navy prosecutor and Cimmino's Navy attorney before an investigating officer who sits as a judge will result in a report and legal recommendation to the regional command. An admiral may then decide to order the court martial of Cimmino or exercise options, which include holding a disciplinary hearing or dropping the charges completely.

Among the questions to be answered is the motivation of whoever cut the cables. Massive sabotage or a crazy prank? Random vandalism or covert destruction? Outside the courtroom, a Navy officer told me he heard that cables had also been cut years earlier when the big aircraft carriers USS Ranger and USS Nimitz were at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard for refitting. "It means delays, and more port time for a disgruntled sailor," he said. "Some are in no hurry to go back to sea." Al Moore, a shipyard manager, testified that dozens of workers had to be assigned from other work to search through the miles of the Alaska's wiring for cuts and defects. So far, he said, "I can't guarantee you I found everything that was done on board," and a more thorough going-over is still needed.

THE NAVY HAS DISCHARGED at least two others who shared a home with Cimmino in Bremerton. In court, Cimmino's counsel, Lt. Ryan McBrayer, portrays the missile mechanic as a fall guy for the others, someone who tried to impress his druggie girlfriend with juvenile tales of cutting harmless cables and now faces as many as 300 years in prison. The Navy says Cimmino has confessed, but McBrayer suggests that, if anything, he might have done only some of the cutting and possibly taken some souvenirs. Also found at the shared rental home were copper cable, an old missile alarm, a discarded missile launch status panel, tools, medical supplies and the nameplate from the captain's stateroom. Unspecified drugs were found as well.

Though a Navy chief sat in on the hearing to halt proceedings and remove reporters if issues of national security surfaced, testimony depicted the sub as an immobilized, unthreatening nuclear weapon with its missiles removed and nuclear-propulsion system unaffected by the cutting. The Alaska, two football fields long and resting a few hundred yards away from the hearing room, has been dry-docked at the Bremerton yard since last summer for an 18-month conversion to more powerful Trident II missiles. Two 4- by 8-foot openings are cut in its hull for shipyard worker access; its forward compartments have been stripped to receive the new missile equipment and upgraded sonar and computer systems; and many, if not all, of the 100-plus cables that were partially or completely severed were dead wires.

More than 800 Navy yard workers and the boat's two 150-man crews are at the site daily. From that "universe" of 1,100 suspects, said Gary Ross of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) who headed the case, they whittled down the list to Cimmino. Probers' methods included interviews, questionnaires, security camera surveillance, polygraphs, and profiling--10 of the ship's chiefs were each asked to submit the names of three crewmen who fit the suspect profile: 18 to 28 years old, low in rank, and sensitive to criticism, among other things.

It wasn't clear if any chief submitted Cimmino's name (reporters were not allowed to see documents), but one sailor was named on two chiefs' lists, and cleared. Profiling "is not an exact science," Moore conceded, smiling, on the witness stand.

Apparently it was Cimmino's girlfriend who fingered him by contacting investigators. The NIS taped two calls she made to Cimmino in which he allegedly discussed the cable cutting. His face was also seen on one of the 17 video cameras the NIS placed around the sub after the first cut cables were discovered in August. Though investigators collected 18,000 hours' worth of tapes over two months, none showed anyone cutting cables. But one showed Cimmino looking into a camera and then repositioning it.

After searching Cimmino's home and finding evidence, three investigators arrested him at Sea-Tac Airport the day after Thanksgiving, where, Ross said, "We obtained the admissions about him severing cables," during a three-hour interrogation.

Cimmino, who did not testify, sat silently, pondering the sometimes arcane discussions of wiring, procedures, and incriminating testimony. During a break, I asked what he thought. "I'm not sure what's happening," he said earnestly. "But I think it's going OK."

Seattle Weekly

---

Aircraft carrier named after President Reagan

03/04/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-04-reagan.htm

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - Former first lady Nancy Reagan celebrated her 49th wedding anniversary Sunday by christening the $4 billion aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

"I want to thank the navy for giving us such a wonderful present, such a little thing," Reagan joked after christening the boat with a bottle of champagne.

President and Mrs. Bush attended the christening. President Bush spoke about military readiness of the United States and former president Reagan's legacy. Former President Reagan did not attend.

"I wish Ronnie were here," the former first lady said. "But somehow I think he is."

The carrier will hold 80 aircraft and 6,000 sailors. It will have a top speed of 30 knots (34.5 mph) and should remain in service for 50 years.

---

Nevada

01/03/04
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Carson City - Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus proposed license plates featuring a mushroom cloud, but not to support a nuclear waste dump that could be located in the state. The Las Vegas Democrat said her bill recognizes the history of the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear weapons testing was done, and would dedicate revenue generated by license plate sales to the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation.

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

V. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)

March 2001
Uranium Enrichment Newsletter
Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_mar_01.htm

Cuts at headquarters

USEC announced February 13 that the company is reducing its headquarters costs by 20%. It has targeted a reduction of $10 million in headquarters costs for fiscal year 2002. The savings would be achieved by reducing the use of consultants, eliminating 40-50 staff positions at headquarters, and consolidating office space. (USEC Press Release, 2/13/01)

Dumping investigation

The Department of Commerce is extending the time limit of the preliminary determinations in the countervailing duty (CVD) investigations of low enriched uranium from France [Eurodif], Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom [Urenco] from March 2, 2001 until no later than May 7, 2001. The delay results from the fact that the investigations are "extraordinarily complicated." (Federal Register, vol. 66, no. 35, pp. 11000-11001, 2/21/01)

Meanwhile, Duke Energy and Excelon have hired the Washington law firm of Shaw Pittman to put together an ad hoc group to lobby against USEC on the dumping issue. (The Electricity Daily, 2/20/01)

-------- california

Calif. Municipalities Mull Power Business

March 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-utilities-ca.html?pagewanted=all&searchpv=reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's power crisis has spurred a growing number of communities to consider entering the power business -- something no large city in the state has done in more than 50 years.

The interest in municipal utilities is growing in cities such as Berkeley, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose as California grapples with an energy crunch that has roiled the state's economy and sent power bills soaring.

But establishing a municipal utility can also be an expensive, complex affair and not necessarily a cure-all that will lead to a steady, reasonably-priced power supply, analysts and experts say.

``It may work for some people...but I wouldn't automatically think it's a panacea for all your ills,'' Paul Neuhedel, senior director of the public power group at credit rating agency Fitch, said in a recent interview.

The march toward public power is a far cry from 1996 when California lawmakers opened up the state's energy markets, saying an era of low rates was at hand. Five years later, millions of Californians are faced with spiraling power bills and a wobbly power supply.

That flawed deregulation law required Edison International's (EIX.N) Southern California Edison and PG&E's (PCG.N) Pacific Gas and Electric to buy energy on the spot market, where prices have skyrocketed, but maintained caps on the rates they could charge consumers. This caused the state's two biggest utilities to rack up debts of nearly $12 billion, leaving them nearly bankrupt.

Ironically, the crisis also put the state back into the power business. Governor Gray Davis is now feverishly working to cement deals to buy the private utilities' transmission lines to help ease their debts, while lawmakers have authorized state purchases of lower-priced, long-term power contracts.

This power mess, though, has helped spark renewed interest in municipal power, said Madalyn Cafruny, a spokeswoman for the American Public Power Association.

``There have been a number of cities in California that have thought about municipalizing for a long time,'' Cafruny said. ''Once the California power crisis began people saw that the public power communities were able to keep the lights on.''

Currently, there are an estimated 31 public local power agencies in California that provide electricity to about 25 to 30 percent of the state's population. In general, the consumer rates are lower than the three biggest investor-owned utilities in the state, Cafruny said.

Aside from lower rates, advocates say public utilities make decisions in the best interest of local residents, rather than corporate shareholders, she added.

``The orientation of the private power companies has changed over the last 10 years,'' Cafruny said. ``The interest in local communities is not the same.''

Fitch's Neuhedel agrees an energy crisis usually piques interest in public power, but he points out that going municipal is not as simple as it sounds.

It takes a hefty initial investment to buy transmission lines to deliver power and requires expertise to run a utility -- resources many cities and communities lack, he added. And even though tax-exempt status may make it cheaper for public utilities to operate, large start-up costs can offset this benefit.

``There tends to be a much higher amount of these municipalizations spoken about than actually go through,'' Neuhedel said.

Experts also agree a key ingredient for a public utility is access to a steady source of power. This is why the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the nation's largest municipal utility, has been so successful, they say.

The utility, which serves 3.8 million residents, has barely been touched by California's energy crisis and is actually considering cutting rates. A major reason for this is because LADWP owns and operates its own transmission lines and has an abundant power supply at its disposal.

Bob Rozanski, LADWP's assistant chief financial officer and treasurer, noted the utility has stakes in power plants across the west and draws from a diverse pool of hydroelectric, natural gas and nuclear energy to meet its needs.

``We are self-sufficient for both transmission and generation resources,'' he said in a recent interview. ``We don't need to rely on somebody else.''

San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano hopes voters in his city will look to LADWP as a reason to support a plan on the November ballot to form a municipal utility district.

Ammiano acknowledged private utilities have the legal and political clout to knock down such public power proposals. But he said the current anger directed at the investor-owned utilities makes the time ripe for a move to public power.

``If it is going to work any time it is going to be now,'' Ammiano said in a recent interview.

Still, establishing a public utility is no guarantee of protection. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the second largest municipal utility in California with some 500,000 customers, has seen costs soar because it buys about half its power on the open market.

The utility has lost more than $60 million since the state's power crisis began last summer for extra power purchases and may have to boost rates to make up for the shortfall. No large city in California has taken over its electric service since Sacramento did so in 1947.

-------- colorado

Colorado

01/03/04
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

- A federal report says cleanup of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant is several months behind schedule, making it likely that the anticipated $7.5 billion cost will rise. The private contractor hired by the Department of Energy probably won't make its 2006 deadline, according to a General Accounting Office report.

-------- idaho

Lawsuit alleges mishandling at site

03/04/01
Idaho State Journal
By Sean Ellis,
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpID=669&NewsID=57097&show=localnews&om=1

POCATELLO - Allegations by two auditors who have filed a federal lawsuit against past contractors at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory range from contractors forging employee signatures to dumping radioactive plutonium in the Bonneville County Landfill.

The two auditors, Neil A. Mock and Scott H. Lebow, worked at the laboratory from the early to mid 1990s.

In their 300-plus page lawsuit, which was filed in Pocatello in 1996, they claim contractors who were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up waste at the site actually made the contamination worse.

Mock and Lebow filed an amended complaint in Pocatello this week.

The most alarming allegation claims plutonium and other radioactive waste from Pit 9, a 1 1/2-acre garbage can of radioactive and toxic materials, was illegally disposed of in the Bonneville landfill.

According to the suit, Pit 9 contains 30 kilograms of fissionable plutonium

The suit claims that as of November 1995, the Lockheed contractor in charge of Pit 9 "had no formalized or documented plan for the control of nuclear criticality, i.e., the prevention of a nuclear explosion in Butte County, Idaho."

Mock and Lebow also claim that site employees worked in conditions "where the atmosphere is or may be polluted with dangerous substances, such as asbestos, radioactive materials or injurious chemicals."

Despite these clearly identified threats to health and safety, they add, "(contractors) failed to correct ... critical failures in the servicing and replacement of respirator cartridges in reckless disregard of the safety and health of INEEL workers."

Other allegations:

- The two men say that they were told by site employees that an employee in charge of the drinking water program "routinely disposed of numerous radiological, mixed waste and hazardous waste samples down a sink drain...."

- They also claim a PCB-contaminated tray was stored in a refrigerator at the site.

Mock says an employee told him that after a supervisor was notified of the dangerous situation, the employee "again found the PCB-contaminated capacitor in a metal tray on the middle shelf of a refrigerator."

- Contractors mismanaged hundreds of storage tanks that were used to store highly radioactive waste. The two men allege that alarms used to detect spills from the tanks were disconnected or deactivated.

Mock and Lebow say they personally observed two spills that were not responded to.

They say tanks that facility personnel claimed were empty were found to be full and hazardous waste determinations were not performed on the contents of hundreds of the tanks.

- Contractors ignored Mock's recommendations to report and recover spilled substances from leaking underground storage tanks at the site.

The tanks were used to store radioactive waste and other hazardous chemicals.

The suit says that when some of the tanks were removed, "the sides or bottom of the tank resembled Swiss cheese. In some cases, the bottom of the tank was hanging loose ... and in others, the bottom of the tank was so deteriorated that, upon removal of the tank, the bottom separated from the rest of the tank."

- Monitors were disabled at a facility where high-level radioactive waste such as iodine 131 were incinerated and released through stacks. Iodine 131 is readily absorbed by the human body.

"During the years 1995 and 1996, Lockheed on occasion disabled or disconnected the monitoring devices ... to conceal excess emissions of iodine 131," the suit alleges.

In addition, it states, "Lockheed instructed its regulatory personnel not to document and not to report environmental violations ... to state regulators."

- Boxes of soil contaminated with hazardous waste and improperly labeled as low-level waste, were sent illegally to a disposal site in Utah.

Brad Bugger, spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the site but is not a party in the lawsuit, said Tuesday that "most of these issues raised by this lawsuit already have been addressed many years ago. We believe all of the environmental concerns raised five years ago were adequately addressed. They are either no longer an issue or no longer a threat to the environment."

But Debbie Hill, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, says, "We believe there still are issues that may not have yet been addressed."

The site's current contractor, Bechtel BWXT Idaho, LLC, is not included in the lawsuit.

Mark Olsen, managing counsel for Bechtel, said "compliance is the only policy here" and that it would be "incomprehensible that a contract like Bechtel has would (permit the company) to engage in ... the conduct that was alleged to have occurred under those contractors."

The Department of Energy, which owns the site, sent a message to INEEL employees Thursday addressing the allegations. The message was from INEEL President Bernie Meyers.

" ... you've been subjected to some alarming media reports, and rumors have abounded," the message stated in part. "Keep in mind they are based on speculation, and I urge you to treat them accordingly....As soon as (an) analysis is completed and reviewed by DOE, we'll be able to offer more information to all employees. In the meantime, I ask you to continue working safely and productively...."

Sean Ellis covers local government and business for the Journal. He can be reached at 239-6001 or sellis@journalnet.com.

---

Waste mismanagement?
Former auditors update suit against former INEEL contractors

03/04/01
Idaho State Journal
By Sean Ellis, Journal Writer
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpID=669&NewsID=57096&show=localnews&om=1

POCATELLO - Accusations by two auditors that past contractors at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory mismanaged hazardous waste paint a picture of corruption and deliberate ineptness.

If the charges are true, they would stop just short of depicting a disturbing scenario of INEEL workers handling radioactive and hazardous material with little regard for the environment or the safety of their fellow workers.

Two men who audited the cleanup effort at the 890-square-mile site say contractors tried to thwart them at nearly every turn in their investigation and subsequent discovery of a broad array of hazardous waste mismanagement.

Neil A. Mock and Scott H. Lebow, auditors at the laboratory from the early to mid 1990s, filed a federal lawsuit against the contractors in Pocatello in 1996.

An amended version of the complaint, "U.S., et al. v. Lockheed Martin Idaho, et al.," was filed this week in U.S. District Court in Pocatello.

Mock and Lebow are filing the lawsuit under a law that allows individuals who claim contractors committed fraud against the government to recover 25 percent to 30 percent of any judgment.

Lebow was a senior environmental, safety and quality regulatory compliance specialist at the lab and Mock was a senior scientist. Both men were employed as environmental auditors by EG&G Idaho Inc. and later by Coleman Research Corp.

EG&G ran the site from 1976 to 1994 while Coleman was a subcontractor at the site to Lockheed Martin Corp., which ran the lab from 1994 to 1999.

All three companies are named in the lawsuit, along with Westinghouse Idaho Nuclear Co., which ran a portion of the site from 1989 to 1994. The Department of Energy and the site's current contractor, Bechtel BWXT Idaho, are not named in the suit.

In the 300-plus page report, Mock and Lebow allege, among other things:

- Improper dumping and disposal of hazardous materials.

- Mishandling of dangerous chemicals such as mercury and PCBs.

- Falsification of documents to cover up serious non-compliance, including the forging of employee signatures.

- Failure to properly manage the decommissioning of above-ground and underground storage tanks.

- Falsification of documents to hide failures to report spills and discharges of hazardous chemicals.

- Failure to properly manage and monitor emissions of hazardous materials from incinerators.

- Failure to properly manage the shipment, handling and treatment of radioactively contaminated and other hazardous materials.

Both men also claim they were harassed and forced into resigning.

They claim that on Aug. 1, 1995, Lockheed's general counsel, Steven Brumley, pretended to point a rifle at both men as they were walking across the atrium area in the Lockheed building.

The report states that on Oct. 10, 1995, the DOE "received information regarding a possible threat against the lives of Mock and Lebow."

In a Feb. 19 article in the New York Times, lawyers for Westinghouse and Coleman deny the allegations. Edward W. Pike, an Idaho Falls lawyer representing EG&G, declined to comment, the article said.

The Times article said a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, which is based in Bethesda, Md., said "that there might have been environmental missteps in Idaho, but that none were intentional."

Both men charge management of EG&G, Lockheed and Coleman thwarted their environmental auditing efforts and "interfered with (their) free inquiry by refusing to allow auditors to conduct inspections or audits of various facilities."

The lawsuit claims a top Lockheed manager told Mock the manager "did not give a (expletive) about the (expletive) regulations" and that compliance "did not make good business sense."

It also says another top Lockheed manager told a group of the company's managers and employees that Lockheed "was in business to make a profit and cannot comply with all the (expletive) regulations."

Mock and Lebow claim Coleman and Lockheed management prevented them from including in their audit reports words or phrases such as "illegal," "non-compliance," "out of control," "insufficient," and "inadequate."

Sean Ellis covers local government and business for the Journal. He can be reached at 239-6001 or sellis@journalnet.com.

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II. PADUCAH GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT

March 2001
Uranium Enrichment Newsletter
Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_mar_01.htm

Meeting on Exposure Assessment

February 1, DOE briefed employees, former employees, and their families about the report of the Exposure Assessment Project on the Paducah plant, released in January (see February UEN). Current plant health physicist Orville Cypret, who reviewed the report as a citizen rather than in his official capacity, said that, although the report contained errors, he was in agreement with "most of the conclusions." Some attendees disagreed with the risk classifications. (Associated Press, 2/2/01)

Increase in assay

February 15, the Paducah plant enriched uranium to 2.25% uranium 235, a record high for the facility. Normally it enriches to around 2%. The NRC approved enrichment to 2.75% last year, and is expected to approve enrichment to 5.5% in mid March.

USEC is planning to enrich at 2.25% or higher in the next couple of months to create a stock of feed material "to help increase levels up to 5.5% once [the 5.5% assay] is approved," Elizabeth Stuckle of USEC reports. The increase to the high assay will proceed "more easily" if the enrichment process can begin with a relatively high-level feed.

In May USEC will begin to decrease production in preparation for the summer months when the plant will reduce its output in order to cut its use of electricity during the period when electricity is most expensive. The plant will enrich at the higher levels needed for USEC customers when production increases in the fall. (Joe Walker, The Paducah Sun, 2/16/01)

Replacement of monitoring wells

Starting in the spring, DOE will replace at least 19 corroded monitoring wells at Paducah. The corrosion of the stainless steel casing results from enzymes created by bacteria in the groundwater, not from radioactivity, according to a report prepared for the Kentucky Natural Resources Cabinet by Bechtel Jacobs. Because of the corrosion, the state cannot be certain that the samples from the wells are reliable. Replacing 19 wells will cost up to $1.5 million, Greg Cook, a spokesperson for Bechtel Jacobs Co. says. Bechtel Jacobs is still looking into how many wells need replacement. (Bill Bartleman, Paducah Sun, 2/21/01)

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III. PORTSMOUTH GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT

March 2001
Uranium Enrichment Newsletter
Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_mar_01.htm

Funding for cold standby

In a press conference in Columbus March 1, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that the Bush administration will provide $125.7 million to the Portsmouth plant for winterizing, cold standby, and worker transition. The funding will be split between the 2001 and 2002 fiscal years: $59.2 million in FY 2001; $66.5 million in FY 2002. The funding is in addition to $180 million budgeted for dismantling and decontamination. No money is being provided for development of gas centrifuge enrichment technology at the plant. The fate of the plant after September 30, 2002, will be determined by two task forces: a task force on national energy policy to be headed by Vice President Dick Cheney and a task force on defense policy to be headed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The $125.7 million will mean that USEC will be able to retain some 1200 workers at the site for the time being. About 525 workers will lose their jobs this year. (DOE Press Release, 3/1/01; Darrel Rowland, Columbus Dispatch, 3/2/01)

USEC had told the Bush administration that if the company did not have a commitment for funding for cold standby by March 1 when it needed to begin the complex job of winterizing it would not be able to retain 1200 workers. Governor Bob Taft, Senators Mike DeWine and George Voinovich, Rep. Ted Strickland, and the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union lobbied to obtain the commitment by the deadline. Opinions in Ohio differ as to the extent to which Abraham's announcement fills a promise that Bush made in a letter to Taft October 4, 2000: "If I am elected President, my Administration will aggressively explore how the workforce and facilities at the Piketon site can continue to serve our national interest." (Associated Press in the Columbus Dispatch, 2/22/01; Katherine Rizzo, Associated Press, in the Columbus Dispatch, 2/28/01; Eddie Blakeley, Portsmouth Daily Times, 2/19/01)

Shipments of uranium billets

In mid-February DOE began shipping 235 metric tons of uranium billets from the Hanford nuclear reservation to the Portsmouth plant for storage. The billets would have been used to make fuel for the closed N reactor at Hanford. The shipments, which are going by truck, should be completed by the end of March. (Associated Press, 2/16/01)

V. UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION (USEC)

NRC Review

A US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) review of USEC's performance at the Portsmouth plant from October 1, 1998, through September 30, 2000, found no safety or health issues that demanded immediate attention and noted safety improvements. However, the NRC stated that USEC still needs to improve in certain areas, including criticality controls. The company has been lax, in particular, in placing containers with uranium too close together for safety. As a result of the review, the NRC plans to carry out additional inspections during which its staff will pay close attention to criticality controls. (William C. Wallack, Nuclear Fuel, 1/22/01)

Tainted uranium

Responding to USEC's announcement that as much as 9500 metric tons of the uranium that it received from DOE is contaminated with technetium, a DOE spokesperson said that the agency will work with USEC to determine the extent of the problem but that it is too early to say whether the government will compensate USEC. The editors of the Columbus Dispatch are among critics of USEC that hope that the company is "given no more than the simple and timeless advice 'Buyer, beware.'" (Jonathan Riskind, Columbus Dispatch, 2/1/01; "Caveat Emptor," Columbus Dispatch, 2/13/01)

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I. OAK RIDGE GASEOUS DIFFUSION PLANT

March 2001
Uranium Enrichment Newsletter
Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/UEN_mar_01.htm

Land use

January 31, opening a public forum on land use at Oak Ridge Reservation, Leah Dever, manager of the Oak Ridge Operations Office, made three announcements: she will sign an environmental assessment that allows the transfer of 182 acres of floodplain property along the Clinch River to a developer; DOE hopes to finish within the next month an environmental review that will allow the transfer of some property at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for private development; and she is putting on hold the transfer of land for the ED-3 industrial park. The last announcement came as a surprise to all but a few of her close confidantes.

Land use has apparently become the "battleground" in a conflict within DOE's Oak Ridge office. Dever replaced Jim Hall as manager of Oak Ridge in 1999. Hall had ties to the Oak Ridge business community and supported development by private parties of "surplus" federal lands. The current chief of administration Dan Wilken and the assets manager Robert Brown maintain this position. Dever, on the other hand, is seen by pro-development interests as a supporter of environmental interests. At issue is the fate of thousands of mostly forested land, not occupied by buildings or waste dumps.

February 7 DOE scheduled and then canceled a press conference at which Dever was expected to announce that DOE would require an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the Oak Ridge Reservation, as requested in January by the Southern Environmental Law Center. Steve Wyatt, DOE spokesperson, said that the announcement of the EIS was canceled, because Dever had not been able to meet with senior-level officials at DOE headquarters. However, Frank Munger later reported that the announcement was postponed after Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN)) met with Jim Decker, acting director of DOE's Office of Science in Washington. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, 2/5/01, 2/7/01, 2/9/01; Paul Parson, Oak Ridger, 2/8/01)

In late February Advocates for the Oak Ridge Reservation (AFORR) found that the deed from the transfer of the 182 acres of land along the Clinch River, next to the Boeing Property, indicates that the federal government sold the land to the "Oak Ridge Land Company, LLC" for $9,828, that is for $54 an acre. The Nature Conservancy had evaluated the land as "of very high biological significance." (John Devereux Joslin, e-mail, 2/27/01)

Dever on Temporary Assignment

February 8 Leah Dever unexpectedly announced that she was accepting an approximately 90-day position as acting chief operating officer in DOE's Office of Science in Washington. She maintained that the assignment had nothing to do with the land-use controversy: "These are two totally separate issues that just seem to come together." She had volunteered for the temporary position a few weeks previously to assist in the transition to the new administration, she said. Ed Cumesty, her deputy, will serve as Oak Ridge manager during her absence. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, 2/9/01)

Cleanup

British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) received $11.5 million from DOE in February for completing Milestone No. 5 in the cleanup at the K-25 site. The terms of the $238 million, fixed-price contract signed in 1997 stipulated that BNFL is to be paid as milestones are completed. The firm planned to submit invoices by the end of March for Milestones 6 and 7, worth $12 million each. Prior to February, BNFL had been paid $56 million. Most of BNFL's work to date has taken place in Building K-33, from which some 2 million pounds of material are removed each week. Much of the contaminated material is sent to Utah. (Frank Munger, Knoxville News-Sentinel, 2/17/01)

New health-risks office

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) opened an office in February in downtown Oak Ridge. The agency, a part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, recently helped to create an Oak Ridge Reservation Health Effects subcommittee. The agency and the subcommittee, with help from other organizations, will shortly carry out two assessments: a community needs assessment and a public health assessment. (Paul Parson, Oak Ridger, 2/19/01)

Refusal to store waste

Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist has refused to allow the US Department of Energy (DOE) to ship about one hundred drums, (ten truckloads) of transuranic waste from Battelle's Laboratories near Columbus, Ohio, to Oak Ridge to await treatment, packaging, and shipping to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The waste was created during the Manhattan Project. Sundquist said that he might consider treating and packaging out-of-state waste on a case by case basis after a treatment plant that Foster Wheeler Environmental is constructing at Oak Ridge is operational. The plant is expected to start up in late 2002. Sundquist's refusal came in a letter to the manager of DOE's Carlsbad, New Mexico office (Michael Hawthorne, Columbus Dispatch, 2/16/01; Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, 2/15/01)

Perma-Fix

Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. announced February 14 that it has signed a Definitive Agreement to purchase all the outstanding voting stock of East Tennessee Materials and Energy Corporation (M&EC). M&EC is licensed to operate the only non-government-run facility to treat mixed waste (hazardous and low-level radioactive) located within the boundary of the Oak Ridge site. (Perma-Fix Press Release, 2/14/01)

Water quality

A public meeting to discuss Phase 2 of an investigation into water quality at the K-25 site, scheduled for February 27 has been postponed until April 9 when "some initial observations and assumptions" should be ready to present. Meanwhile, anyone with information about possible water contamination at K-25 should call the Phase 2 hot line, 481-8290 or the physician Richard Byrd, 781-646-5770. (Paul Parson, Oak Ridger, 2/26/01)

Whistleblower case

The Coalition for a Healthy Environment has filed a "friend-of-the-court" legal brief in support of whistleblower Joe Carson. The US Merit Systems Protection Board has ruled that DOE retaliated against Carson for attempting to report safety and security violations at several DOE sites. Carson and his lawyer are currently trying to get DOE to comply fully with a court order to furnish information on his case. (Paul Parson, Oak Ridger, 2/16/01)

IX. ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY

An article in the Richmond-Times Dispatch, February 27, describes experimentation on the development of a gas centrifuge enrichment process at the University of Virginia from before World War II until June 1985. At that time, the federal government, which had been funding the project, shut it down. A university physicist Jesse W. Beams developed the process. "Only small amounts of uranium" were used, but the largest centrifuge, a hollow metal tube,was sixty feet long. When research ended, the government shipped the equipment to Oak Ridge. (Carlos Santos, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2/27/01)

-------- MILITARY

China denies helping Iraqi military

03/06/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-06-chinairaq.htm

BEIJING (AP) - China on Tuesday denied U.S. claims that its government or private companies helped Iraq install fiber-optic communications cable at military sites in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Washington protested to Beijing about the alleged help to improve Iraqi military communications. U.S. military officials said the Chinese were reportedly working at some of the air defense sites around Baghdad targeted by U.S. and British jets in a Feb. 16 raid.

An official Chinese investigation, launched after the U.S. complaints, has disproved the reports, Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said.

"The result of the investigation is that Chinese enterprises and corporations have not assisted Iraq in building the fiber-optic cable project used for air defense," Tang said.

U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait ban military and many civilian sales to Iraq.

Washington and London said they struck Iraqi defense sites in the February raids because Iraq was improving its ability to track and target planes patrolling a "no fly zone" imposed after the Gulf War.

Chinese government spokesmen previously criticized the American claims but did not directly deny them, feeding speculation that Chinese companies or agencies might be acting without high-level approval.

On Feb. 28, the Foreign Ministry said it was willing to investigate the claims.

On Tuesday, Tang criticized the American claim as an attempt to "divert the attention of the international community from the bombing," which he said was carried out without U.N. authority.

"China has regulations that prohibit any company to go against the U.N. resolutions. So indeed, we in China have been very serious and responsible on this question, and we have a very good track record in the U.N.," Tang said.

Tang also warned the United States to reject a request from Taiwan to sell the island four Kidd-class destroyers, decommissioned by the U.S. Navy.

He said such a sale could encourage forces that want independence for the island. China views Taiwan as part of its territory that should be recovered and it has threatened to use force if the island declares independence.

"I would hope the U.S.-side will come to a sober-minded understanding of the serious dangers involved," Tang said.

The United States is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to sell the island weapons sufficient for its defense. But in recent years, Washington has declined or deferred the island's requests for submarines and destroyers, fearing the sales would provoke an arms race with China.

---

For One Who Suffered, Kuwait Is the Land of Lost Content

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all

SAFWAN, Iraq, Feb. 28 - Most days, Hamza Jabbar comes to this silent, deserted border crossing to sit, and remember. From where he rests, on a concrete plinth bearing a benign portrait of Saddam Hussein, he can see across a rusting barrier to abandoned customs sheds and down a heavily potholed road that leads to Kuwait.

For Mr. Jabbar, the hours spent alone here, hands resting on a walking stick, are filled with unquenchable regret. Down the road, 85 miles away, lies Kuwait City, where for 37 years he was one of thousands of Iraqis with solid salaried jobs - in Mr. Jabbar's case as a $750-a-month storeman in Kuwait's Education Ministry. He had a home and a lifestyle that were better than anything he could have hoped for in Iraq.

That life is gone now, along with the pension that Mr. Jabbar, who is 67, hoped would sustain his retirement. On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait; on Feb. 27, 1991, the Iraqi occupation force fled headlong, pursued by the military might of a 33- nation alliance. Afterward, all Iraqi citizens were ordered out by Kuwait's restored rulers.

Under the United Nations economic sanctions adopted after Iraq's invasion, and reinforced after the war, Iraq was cut off from all normal commerce with surrounding states. Here at the Safwan border post, where thousands of cars and trucks once crossed daily, vehicles from the United Nations force that monitors a nine-mile-wide demilitarized zone straddling the border have been the only traffic for 10 years.

Where Mr. Jabbar sits, there is little but stillness, and a solitude that gives him the time to juggle his painful memories and sometimes, he admitted, to weep.

Asked what solace he found in his vigils, the old storeman, squinting from beneath his Arab headdress in the noonday sun, pondered for some time, then spoke finally, in a quavering voice. "I come here when I am upset," he said. "I had a good life there, in Kuwait, for many, many years, then one day I looked up" - he raised his arms skyward - "and suddenly, everything was gone - my job, my house, my pension, even my son. I lost everything, only because I was an Iraqi."

His 21-year-old son, Ahmed, he said, was shot dead by Kuwaitis amid the wave of recriminations that accompanied the Iraqi withdrawal as he tried to retrieve the family car and drive it home. At the time, thousands of Iraqis were trying to escape with cars they had looted.

In the United States, and other countries, the victory over the Iraqis 10 years ago is remembered, mainly, as a moment of decency restored, and six months of brutality and pillage by Iraqi troops ended.

But the war is viewed through quite another prism in Iraq, and not only in the proud pronouncements that have accompanied Iraq's official commemorations of what Saddam Hussein called "the mother of all battles," and the veiled hints, from senior Iraqi officials, that if they had the chance they might try to take Kuwait again.

The Baghdad government has used the occasion to weave the Kuwait invasion ever more firmly into the hagiography, pronouncing the day of the Iraqi attack "a joyous moment in the history of the Arab peoples' struggle" and pledging, in the "immortal memory" of the estimated 20,000 to 50,000 Iraqi troops who died, that Iraq will never forsake the "road taken" in 1990. Officials in Mr. Hussein's inner circle have indicated that they have nothing to regret.

And then there are the bitter reminiscences of ordinary Iraqis. For the war itself, they paid heavily - as soldiers who suffered injuries and sicknesses attributed to allied bombing, and relatives of people killed in the fighting or when American or allied bombs went astray.

Beyond all this, there are the privations endured by all but the most privileged of the 23 million Iraqis. Surveys by the United Nations, and estimates by Iraqi economists, have put the shrinkage in Iraq's economy under the impact of the war and sanctions at anything between 20 and 50 percent; inflation in the 1990's devalued the local currency, the dinar, by more than 5,000 percent.

As they guide foreign journalists around the country, monitoring every conversation and every photograph, and stepping in abruptly to halt anything they deem potentially injurious, Information Ministry officials lay heavy emphasis on the human suffering. In a country that has never officially conceded defeat, the concern to lay the blame for this suffering on the United States prompts these officials, sometimes, to lead what amount to guided tours of Iraqi troops' humiliation.

One such place is Jabal Sanam, a rocky hill a few miles southwest of Safwan, where, Iraq says, American aircraft attacked a unit of the Iraqi Army's Soviet-built T-62 tanks on the night of Feb. 26 to 27, 1991.

From what is visible now, the American planes struck every tank with such force that they remain, a decade later, where they were hit, their rusting hulks resting deep in gullies, their turrets blown 150 feet or more away, and the burned-out seats for their four-man crews covered with what appear to be human ashes.

A mile north of Safwan, by a highway interchange, is the spot where American and Iraqi generals met in an American tent to sign a cease-fire agreement. But Jabal Sanam is more central to a new Iraqi thrust against the United States.

The Iraqi contention, vigorously contested by the Pentagon, is that the use of depleted uranium warheads on tank-busting missiles, and other bombs and rockets, led to thousands of cases of leukemia, lymphoma and other cancers. Similar charges have been made by groups representing gulf war veterans in the United States and Europe, but officially commissioned British and American studies have reported no evidence that the incidence of cancer is higher than in the general population.

At Jabal Sanam, Iraqi officials behave with self-conscious unease, as though to press home the allegations about depleted uranium. Empty oil barrels painted in the United Nations colors of blue and white carry hand- painted warnings in English, "Bomblet Area," denoting that cluster bombs were used in the American attack, and not cleared. One bomblet was visible only feet from the road leading up the hill to a blasted tank.

While two Westerners walked cautiously over the tanks to inspect and photograph them, the officials lingered nearby smoking, occasionally calling out to drive home their point about high levels of radiation allegedly detected here.

"It is not good to stay here too long," said one. "Radiation here is very high. Many people in Safwan have blood cancer from this place."

Getting closer to the truth of the allegations is difficult, even after visiting supposed victims in Safwan and Basra, the oil city 35 miles north of Safwan that underwent heavy American air attacks. Visits to two sufferers - a 9-year-old boy in Safwan with a mass of suppurating scars on his face that doctors said remain undiagnosed and a 28-year-old war infantry veteran who developed lymphoma in 1996 - produced wrenching personal stories, but little to link the cases to the war.

Perhaps most striking, considering the ceaseless government polemics against the United States, few ordinary Iraqis seem inclined to engage in political recriminations over the causes of the war, or over the heavy American bombing.

Few of those interviewed had anything harsh to say about the American decision to reverse the Kuwait invasion, and only a handful, mostly former officers or officials, seemed ready to depict the conflict as an occasion of glory for Iraq.

Umran Abid Ali, the lymphoma victim, who met visitors in a Basra house shared with 13 relatives, described how he survived an air attack on a retreating column on the night of Feb. 26 by jumping off the tank when he heard approaching aircraft. "When I saw that all the vehicles in the column had been destroyed, I was afraid," he said, describing the fireball that consumed tanks, trucks and cars. "I heard some soldiers who were trapped in their vehicles crying out for help, and then everything went quiet."

For years, Iraq described the battering of retreating columns as war crimes, but Mr. Ali talked as though the attack was to be expected in war. Like many other veterans, he focused his indignation on the economic sanctions; all 14 members of his family, he said, live off one salary, that of his brother Ahmed, who said he makes about $8 a month as a trader in Basra's bazaars.

After a tour of the gulf region this week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he would recommend that Washington revamp the sanctions - for which support has frayed among Arab nations and even European allies - to reinforce elements intended to hinder an Iraqi arms buildup, while easing suffering.

General Powell said Arab allies reported that the sanctions have had the effect of strengthening Saddam Hussein. This observation is supported by United Nations reports and complaints by some intrepid Iraqis, who contend that the government has diverted some of the $10 billion of food and medicines bought with carefully monitored oil revenues to regime loyalists, fostering an artificial crisis among the less fortunate.

Disabled veterans get a pension, equivalent to about $4 a month, enough for three cartons of eggs. But others, including Mr. Ali, said they had received no government money at all. Baghdad and Basra are filled with veterans on sidewalks selling off pitiful remains of their households - old plumbing parts, ancient steam irons, old vinyl records.

Perhaps because his cancer is advanced, perhaps out of weariness at the parade of reporters brought to see him, Mr. Ali responded to a question about what he would say to Saddam Hussein with a directness that was startling, considering the common habit of lauding the Iraqi ruler whenever his name comes up. "If I met His Excellency, I would tell him, `Please, bring us good doctors and medicines and food,' " he said. "I wouldn't tell him, `Make war on America, they did bad things to Iraq' - no, no. I would only say, bring us the best doctors, bring us the best medicines, and bring us food."

-------- colombia

We're Doing Battle Right and Left, Colombia Insists

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04COLO.html?pagewanted=all

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, March 3 - As President Andrés Pastrana shops in Europe and America for more aid, he wants the world to know that his government is committed to fighting his country's right-wing paramilitary groups, not just its leftist rebels.

The message - often repeated in meetings with American members of Congress and in speeches in Europe - is that his administration has captured hundreds of paramilitary gunmen, is pursuing those who finance the groups and is severing ties between military units and paramilitary groups.

"Today, we have a frontal strategy against paramilitarism," Mr. Pastrana said in an interview. "I am combating them through conviction, not because the people are imposing it on us. It's because we care about the theme of human rights."

But to some American officials and human rights groups, who have for years accused the military of a tacit alliance with paramilitary groups, Mr. Pastrana's efforts have not gone nearly far enough. The paramilitary groups have nearly doubled in strength in the last two years and are now responsible for three out of every four deaths in the massacres of villagers the gunmen say are sympathetic to leftist rebels.

Experts on Colombia and local officials in places where fighting has occurred say that while the government has clearly taken a stand in some regions, there have been no detectable efforts to rein in the paramilitary groups in others. In some cases, outright ties between military units and paramilitary groups continue to exist, said American officials and other observers.

"I think that the high command, Pastrana and the Ministry of Defense are totally committed to getting a grip on this problem," said the American ambassador, Anne Patterson, in an interview.

"Where the problem arises, of course, is in the field, and there we get widely mixed reports about what's happening," Ms. Patterson said. "In some areas, clearly the local commander is taking really strong action against paramilitaries, has arrested them and gone after them; and in other places, there appears to be collusion."

Still, in recent months, Mr. Pastrana has begun a highly publicized campaign to demonstrate his commitment to dismantling the paramilitary groups (thought to number more than 8,000 members) and to preserve a lifeline of trade agreements and foreign aid.

Glossy reports, filled with charts and graphs showing operations against paramilitary groups, have been issued. Generals, who a few short years ago denied that the paramilitary groups even existed, now call their members terrorists who must be hunted down. In military briefings and presentations, the paramilitary groups are cast as enemies of the state, just like the rebels.

A Latin America expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, Cynthia Arnson, said that in her view, "a lot of the activity in Colombia is aimed at convincing people who would otherwise be opposed to the aid that the government is doing the right thing."

Yet many in Colombia and abroad are wary of the Colombian government's claims.

Gustavo Gallón, director of an internationally recognized human rights group, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, said the military, despite announcing 316 warrants filed against paramilitary members last year, has not made a single arrest against a top-ranked paramilitary gunman.

Nor has the military prevented paramilitary groups from spreading in the last three years from their northern base of operations to 26 of Colombia's 32 provinces.

"There are no significant or convincing actions against paramilitary groups," Mr. Gallón said.

Most troubling, paramilitary violence - massacres and selective assassinations - have risen dramatically, from 400 deaths in 1998 to 1,560 last year, according to the government's figures.

Last year alone, paramilitary groups killed 577 people in 83 massacres, accounting for 75 percent of the deaths, the Defense Ministry reported. The Commission of Jurists puts the numbers higher: 160 massacres and 1,084 deaths in a one-year period ending in October 2000. Eighty-two percent of the deaths were at the hands of paramilitary groups, the commission said.

"It's evident that there's an intense program of propaganda or publicity to show that they have intensive actions against the paramilitaries," said Mr. Gallón. "But the paramilitaries are causing most of the deaths in this country, with either the tolerance or the cooperation of state agents."

Run by Carlos Castaño, the son of a cattleman who was killed by guerrillas, the paramilitary groups, called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, sustain themselves by extorting money from coca farmers and cocaine traffickers and drawing support from cattlemen and business leaders. Paramilitary gunmen specialize in going after villagers suspected of collaborating with leftist rebels.

American officials say they will soon include Mr. Castaño's group on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.

Mr. Pastrana, who calls the paramilitary groups "a cancer that is gnawing away at the country," said fighting them is not easy. But he said important measures have been taken that demonstrate the administration's commitment, especially to breaking the bonds between military units and paramilitary groups.

He cited the government's dismissal of 388 soldiers in October, some for what government officials said were human rights abuses. Mr. Pastrana has also dismissed five generals believed to have committed abuses, American officials said. Last month, the government also announced the formation of a commission to track government progress against paramilitary groups.

And on Feb. 12, in the first known case involving human rights abuses, a military tribunal sentenced a general to 40 months in prison for having stood by as members of paramilitary groups massacred dozens of villagers in 1997.

"It's more than just public relations," said a high-ranking official in the Pastrana administration. "Some international organizations are putting in doubt what we're doing, and so what we're doing is putting the data out and saying, `these are the results,' to show that the Colombian state has the commitments to go after these groups."

Michael Shifter, an expert on Colombia at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, said the Pastrana administration deserves some credit for the measures it has taken. "They've been pretty tentative and pretty half-hearted, but they should be recognized because they're a step forward," he said.

American officials and human rights groups, however, say measuring the government's progress is difficult. The government, for instance, has failed to provide details about the charges filed against dismissed soldiers and police officials.

"What they're doing is trying to give the appearance of compliance, but in fact when you go back and look at the cases they're using they start to evaporate," said Robin Kirk, a researcher on Colombia for Human Rights Watch, an American group.

The State Department said there is cause for concern in its human rights report on Colombia, released last Monday, despite some improvements in the government's efforts.

"Members of the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups that committed abuses," said the report, "in some instances allowing such groups to pass through roadblocks, sharing information, or providing them with supplies or ammunition."

Examples of the paramilitary groups operating openly, with state security forces in close proximity, are not hard to find.

In Puerto Asís, the largest town in the coca-growing province of Putumayo, the municipality's legal officer and human rights ombudsman, Germán Martínez, has collected testimony from residents who reported seeing military and police officials with known paramilitary gunmen.

In one, a Puerto Asís man said paramilitary gunmen forced him to drive them and their terrified prisoner, a young man accused of being a rebel, into the countryside last year. Upon reaching a military checkpoint, the soldiers greeted the paramilitary gunmen warmly.

"They said, `This is a guerrilla, and we're going to kill him,' " the driver recalled in an interview last month. "They said, `Brother, congratulations.' They held him up like a trophy." The man is believed to have been killed.

---

Rebels Linked to Drug Trade by Arrests in Colombia

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04DRUG.html

RIO DE JANEIRO, March 3 - The capture in Colombia of the chief lieutenant and a common-law wife of Brazil's most notorious drug trafficker has exposed what authorities are describing as a flourishing guns-for-cocaine network run with Colombia's rebels.

The two, Ney Machado and Jacqueline Alcantara de Morais, were apprehended with four other Brazilians in a counternarcotics operation that the Colombian military began on Feb. 11 in the province of Guainía, which borders Brazil and is a stronghold of the rebel group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Both are wanted in Brazil on drug-trafficking charges, and the Brazilian government has asked for their extradition.

Notebooks were captured with Ms. de Morais that, Colombian and Brazilian authorities say, document a recent transaction in which the rebels received more than 500 rifles and machine guns and 2,250 pistols and revolvers as well as ammunition and explosives in exchange for a shipment of cocaine.

She was also carrying a signed photograph of Luiz Fernando da Costa, boss of the Brazilian drug ring, that authorities say she was using as a passport in the rebel zone.

The arrests and the seizures of the documents, which also referred to money laundering activities, are significant because both the rebel group and its supporters in the United States and Western Europe say the rebels are not directly or actively involved in drug trafficking. The group's spokesmen have repeatedly maintained that the group merely "taxes" coca growers and that it welcomes official efforts to shift peasants away from coca cultivation.

The arrest of the Brazilians, however, bolsters the longstanding contention of Colombian military and American counternarcotics officials that the Marxist guerrillas are involved in every phase of the cocaine trade, from cultivation to distribution.

"This operation clearly demonstrates the ties between drug traffickers and the FARC," Col. Alejandro Navas of the Colombian armed forces told reporters last week.

President Andrés Pastrana of Colombia has been reluctant to make such accusations, however, fearing that they could damage the peace negotiations with the rebels that his government began in November 1998. As a gesture of good faith, he granted the guerrillas control of a Switzerland-sized area, which American and Colombian military officials say is now used to process cocaine and hold kidnapping victims hostage and as a depository for weapons and chemicals.

Since January of last year, the Colombian Air Force has destroyed at least half a dozen planes with Brazilian registration after they landed in guerrilla-controlled territory outside the formal demilitarized zone with what authorities say were shipments of arms.

But Brazilian vessels are also known to sail up the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon that extends into Colombia, with arms and chemicals and to return with cocaine.

A recent Brazilian congressional investigation designated Mr. da Costa, better known here by the nickname Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Little Freddie Seashore, in honor of the oceanside slum neighborhood where he was raised, as the country's most dangerous drug trafficker. Mr. da Costa was twice convicted and jailed in 1996, but escaped to Paraguay nine months later and is said by Brazilian authorities to have flown to the rebel-controlled territory last April.

The Brazilian police say that Mr. da Costa, operating through associates, remains the leading supplier of cocaine here. His trafficking organization is heavily armed, and, according to the police, has easy access to large stocks of weapons of all sorts that have either been smuggled from Paraguay or bought in the United States or on the local market.

Colombian and Brazilian authorities say Mr. da Costa is now under the protection of Tomás Molina Caracas, commander of the rebel group's 16th Front, which operates in two provinces bordering Brazil. Mr. Molina is said by American and Colombian officials to be one of the group's chief fund-raisers, and was cited by Peruvian authorities last year as the recipient of 10,000 machine guns that disappeared en route from Jordan to the Peruvian Army.

The operation in which the Brazilians were arrested has focused on the area around Barrancominas, a village less than 120 miles from Brazil that Mr. Molina has used as a base of operations in the past.

In commando-style raids there, Colombian troops have found airstrips, military encampments, processing laboratories and some 25,000 acres of coca fields, which they say were capable of producing two tons of cocaine a week.

---

Death in Colombia

March 4, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/opinion/L04COL.html

To the Editor:

President Andrés Pastrana of Colombia says he is cracking down on paramilitary groups (news article, Feb. 27), but during his presidency the human rights situation has deteriorated and paramilitary groups are now responsible for 80 percent of Colombia's politically motivated killings. According to the State Department, there were some 4,000 of these deaths last year, a significant increase.

In 1989, President Virgilio Barco declared paramilitary groups illegal in Colombia. Every successive president has made similar promises. Now President Pastrana says he is developing new strategies, but what is needed is not strategies but action. The government must hold the military and paramilitary architects of human rights violations accountable for their crimes. The Bush administration and Congress should insist on no less.

WILLIAM F. SCHULZ Executive Director, Amnesty International U.S.A. New York, March 1, 2001

-------- drug war

Everywhereabouts

Sun, 04 Mar 2001
Slate Magazine
by Charles Davis

The WP fronts a piece on the reported gains in the drug war in Bolivia. Farmers who were persuaded to switch from coca to legal crops have been hit hard financially and have resumed planting the more lucrative coca. And critics contend that overall coca production hasn't been reduced; rather, it has shifted to other countries, such as Colombia.

---

Maine

01/03/04
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maine - Chief Justice Daniel Wathen opened training for officials involved in the new adult drug courts that will begin taking referrals next month in five counties. The new court system recognizes the link between crime and substance abuse and involves intensive treatment and supervision of offenders, officials said.

Virginia - George Bridges, accused of fatally shooting a co-worker last summer, has pleaded innocent to charges of growing marijuana near where the victim's body was found. Authorities said Bridges, 39, and others grew 4,000 pot plants valued at $4 million at an abandoned mine.

-------- iraq

Why Saddam Hussein Is Back Onstage

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/weekinreview/04BURN.html?pagewanted=all

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Ministry of Information is a vast, Orwellian building in central Baghdad, its labyrinthine corridors ill lit, portraits of Saddam Hussein keeping vigil everywhere, and twin-barreled antiaircraft guns on the roof.

There, one day last week, Western news agencies were alerted, urgently, to the day's scoop: the arrival at Baghdad airport of Azerbaijan's foreign minister, and the reception for him by Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.

In Iraq these days, the arrival of any visiting dignitary is heralded as a triumph. After a decade of international quarantine imposed through the United Nations sanctions, Baghdad, long a candidate, with North Korea, for the title of the world's leading pariah, has found itself suddenly back in the diplomatic game.

Nowhere is the change more evident than at Saddam International Airport. For years after it was bombed during the Persian Gulf war, it had remained a deserted shell. Little stirred on the runways, or in the terminal building, save for occasional visits by U.N. negotiators and sanctions-enforcement teams. Until recently, visitors to Baghdad mostly arrived via a 600-mile journey across the desert from Jordan.

But on a typical afternoon last week, there was a flight from Jordan, one of three Arab countries (including Egypt and Syria) to have defied a United Nations air embargo by resuming scheduled flights; a Russian government plane whose mysterious passengers replied "Nyet, nyet" when asked what they were about; and a mysterious 747, with no markings save a dark blue tail, light and dark blue fuselage stripes, and an Arabic inscription declaring, "We fly by the grace of God."

The air traffic, from about 20 nations so far, is testament to a seismic shift in Iraq's international status. With embassies reopening and hotels packed, Saddam Hussein can boast of renewed ties with a growing number of countries, particularly other Arab states and those from the wider Muslim world.

For anybody who remembers the 33-nation military alliance that Washington assembled to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait, the list of Baghdad's newfound friends is striking. There are the old standbys, like Algeria, Libya and Yemen, which never abandoned close ties with the Baghdad regime. But there are also many nations that supported the military operation known as Desert Storm, including Egypt, Syria and even Turkey, a NATO member state. Saudi Arabia, which had served as the base for the campaign to free Kuwait, has spoken out against the sanctions. So, more mutedly, has the monarchy in Kuwait.

In this new rush to Baghdad, many governments have gone beyond expressing sympathy for the distress endured by ordinary Iraqis under the sanctions to something like political accommodation with Iraq. Watching delegations come and go, beaming as they shake the hands of uniformed, pistol toting Iraqi officials, it is hard not to conclude that the invasion of Kuwait has been all but forgotten, and that Mr. Hussein is once more a leader of international weight.

All of this bodes ill for the new administration in Washington, currently trying to "re-energize" the sanctions by tightening the arms embargo, while expediting flows of food and medicines. At the conclusion of his trip to the Middle East last week, Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state, expressed confidence that Arab leaders would coalesce around a new, trimmed-down set of sanctions. But senior officials in at least one of the countries he visited, Jordan, made no secret of their urge to abandon the economic sanctions altogether.

Part of the international community's attitude is due to Iraq's tireless propaganda campaign, which has done an impressive job of persuading the world that the bully has become the bullied. Over the years, the degree of desperation among ordinary Iraqis has spread far beyond the poor to those who, before the war, belonged to one of the Arab world's most populous bourgeoisie. Today, often enough, the hands reaching out to foreigners in the bazaars belong to men in frayed suits who have known better days, and to gracious, middle-aged women whose embarrassment at begging is plain to see.

Such scenes alone might have been enough to change attitudes toward Iraq, at least in the Middle East. But the timing of the shift, beginning last fall and gathering momentum into the winter, points to another factor, as well: the renewed violence between Israel and the Palestinians. It is an issue that has always had the potential to upstage the threat Mr. Hussein posed to his Arab neighbors. For this reason alone, Washington, a decade ago, strove hard to keep Israel on the sidelines as it prepared for Desert Storm.

At the Camp David talks last summer, the vision then was of a final peace between Israel and the Palestinians, one that would set aside old enmities in favor of a recognition that the region's problems - poverty, illiteracy, water shortages, pollution, disease - would require generations of amity to solve. With his relentless tirades against Israel and Jews and his pledges to assemble an Arab Army to recover Palestinian lands for the Palestinians, Mr. Hussein, at the time, seemed like a voice from an embittered, irrelevant past.

No longer. When he became Iraq's leader in 1979, Mr. Hussein presented himself, as he does now, as the strongman fated by history to end weakness and dissension among the Arab states, the new Saladin appointed by providence to lead them to the destruction of the country still referred to here as "the Zionist entity."

IT is a siren call many Arab leaders believe, privately, would only lead to yet another catastrophic war. But for the moment, with violence in Gaza and the West Bank stirring popular passions throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, it is one that makes reconciliation with the Iraqi leader, or at least friendly gestures toward him, an option many erstwhile opponents have found impossible to refuse.

-------- space

NASA Tries to Contact a Distant Spacecraft

March 4, 2001
Ne York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04NATI.html

LOS ANGELES, March 3 (AP) - NASA is trying to reach across seven billion miles of space to contact a spacecraft it launched 29 years ago.

The space agency has not heard from the probe, Pioneer 10, since August. Nearly three decades after its launching on March 2, 1972, the spacecraft may be gone for good, the signal from its eight-watt transmitter too weak for even the largest radio antenna on Earth to detect.

NASA will listen for a signal through April, then transmit signals to try to rouse the spacecraft.

"It's a combination of nostalgia and an engineering exercise to see how well we can do it," said Robert Ryan, who has managed ground- based communications with the probe for NASA since its launching.

In 1973, Pioneer 10 was the first to obtain close-up images of Jupiter, and in 1983 it became the first man-made object to leave the solar system when it passed the orbit of Pluto.

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

A New Legal Weapon to Deter Rape

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/weekinreview/04CROS.html?pagewanted=all

UNITED NATIONS

WHEN Judge Florence Mumba of Zambia confronted three Bosnian Serbs at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague last month and convicted them of rape and sexual enslavement, she dismissed two excuses that soldiers have used through the ages: "boys will be boys" and "I was only following orders."

For the first time, a war crimes tribunal ruled that rape was a crime against humanity, and did not have to be ordered from above to rise to that highest level of atrocity.

"Lawless opportunists," Judge Mumba said, "should expect no mercy, no matter how low their position in the chain of command may be." In fact, she added, rape did not have to be perpetrated in time of war to be a punishable offense. "In time of peace as much as in time of war, men of substance do not abuse women," she said.

Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who as the American representative at the United Nations pushed for the creation of war crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda, and also pushed for more attention to crimes against women, called the judgments "a huge deal." Rape, she said, "is a weapon of war, and to have that recognized was a very big step forward."

After the United Nations, in the mid- 1990's, set up the first international war crimes courts in half a century, it made the crucial decision to expand the list of crimes to include abuses of women. What Judge Mumba and her panel have now done is to demonstrate that these crimes can be prosecuted successfully.

Gauging the eventual practical impact of that precedent is more difficult.

According to Ruth Wedgwood, an expert on the United Nations and international law who teaches at the Yale Law School, the Hague decisions can be expected to encourage more prosecutions. Those decisions, she said "could mean that in the future, women's cases will get more resources, and attention to gender balance on tribunals, a sufficient number of women in prosecutors' offices and dealing sensitively with rape victims."

"But this is more iconographic, more emblematic, than it is a legal change," she continued.

In fact, she pointed out, rape has been identified as a war crime since the American Civil War, when Francis Lieber included it in his code of conduct for the Union Army. It was also mentioned in the 1949 Geneva Conventions (but demurely, as an "outrage upon personal dignity" in civil wars).

But prosecution of this crime, as of all war crimes, has always been the problem. Typically the military officers who commanded the offenders also made decisions about whom to charge, and that has often meant an unenthusiastic prosecution, or none at all.

On the other hand, international judgments, like those from Nuremberg and Tokyo in the 1940's, do set standards of international acceptability, to which all nations are then expected to adjust the conduct of their troops. In that context, Ms. Wedgwood was struck by the message sent in convicting men who were not committing the kind of large-scale abuses that until now have defined crimes against humanity.

"They've not been charged with the abuse of 10,000 women," she said. "They were not like the commander of the entire comfort- women enterprise of the Japanese Army." She said that the ordinariness of the men "makes the conviction more significant."

Some analysts argue that in the half- century since the war crimes tribunals in Germany, profound changes in the social as well as legal atmosphere helped make this new verdict possible. As women's movements have reduced squeamishness about discussing rape and other sexual abuses, women have slowly become braver in bringing evidence to tribunals, not only in the Balkans but also in Africa. There have also been convictions involving rape at the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, but only under the umbrella of broader criminal definitions like torture.

THE new atmosphere of openness and determination among women to press for attention to crimes against them has had effects in many areas. In East Timor, for example, where evidence is now unfolding of rape and sexual enslavement on a mass scale by pro-Indonesian militias, a special office for women's issues is part of the United Nations administration now governing the territory, and more attention is being paid to women in refugee camps, where they are almost always vulnerable to abuse.

Ms. Wedgwood said the United Nations might heed the message of the trial and begin to take more responsibility for abuses committed by peacekeeping troops sent out under its flag. Under present rules, peacekeepers charged with rape or other offenses are still turned over to their national governments and sent home, not always to punishment.

Looking back over the last decade, some legal experts are surprised at the speed with which the war crimes tribunals have expanded new fields of law governing military behavior, helping to lay a strong foundation for a permanent international court now being considered by the United Nations.

"The whole war crimes operation has gone a lot farther and a lot faster than anybody ever thought when the United States early in the Clinton administration first came out for setting up the tribunals," said Warren Zimmerman, who was the American ambassador to Yugoslavia as it was splintering a decade ago. Since then, he said, not only has it been proved that Balkan war criminals can be caught but also "the whole definition of what's accountable before this court has been broadened."

---

Global Look at Racism Hits Many Sore Points

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04RACE.html?pagewanted=all

UNITED NATIONS, March 1 - A conference on racism this summer could be one of the most explosive meetings this organization has ever held, with moves afoot to cast globalization as a racial issue and to demand reparations for the slave trade and colonialism.

Though the conference is still six months away, the agenda is already being passionately debated, and an increasingly broader range of issues is falling under the rubric of race.

The meeting - to be held in Durban, South Africa, from Aug. 31 to Sept. 7 - was first proposed by developing nations led by Cuba, and it was always expected to have something of an anti-Western bias.

But the opportunity to air grievances rarely heard on an international platform has been seized by groups in developing nations too, from China to Chile, that want to force often hidden - and extraordinarily sensitive - issues into the discussion.

Beyond consideration of the North- South hemispheric divide as a color line, those issues include treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers in developed countries, the caste system in India and contemporary slavery in Africa as well as discrimination in Latin America and parts of the Caribbean against people of African descent.

Governments in some regions have been fighting consideration of many of those issues. But human rights groups, often linking through the Internet, have gained more leverage than ever against the governments that have elbowed them out of the spotlight in the past.

The aim, the human rights advocates say, is to demonstrate that racism is an international phenomenon that manifests itself in many forms. And they point to the full title of the event - the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance - to buttress their argument. Two earlier meetings held in 1978 and 1983 were more narrowly focused.

"The last two conferences on racism were about foreign policy," said Gay J. McDougall, executive director of the International Human Rights Law Group in Washington. "The first one was on decolonization and the second one was on apartheid. But this one is in everybody's back yard, and there's a lot of nervousness about it."

Ms. McDougall is among those pressing for strong international action on the slave trade and the legacy of colonialism on behalf of people of African descent all over the Western Hemisphere. But she has also backed calls to put the Indian caste system, which human rights groups say affects between 100 million and 200 million people, on the conference agenda, over the strong objection of the Indian government.

Smita Narula, who has been studying caste for Human Rights Watch in New York, said that "for Asia, caste has become coterminus with race inasmuch as it defines the exclusion of a people based on their descent." But so far, she said, Asian governments have succeeded in keeping the issue out of conference documents.

Representatives of governments will begin a four-day meeting in Geneva on Tuesday to discuss the conference agenda and the content of documents to be issued in Durban. Some new issues have been assured a place in the conference, and battle lines have been drawn for others in four regional meetings in France, Senegal, Chile and Iran.

In Strasbourg, France, the issue of Europeans' treatment of Roma, or Gypsy, people was put on the agenda by governments themselves. In Santiago, Chile, strong lobbying by African-American groups gave new visibility to racial discrimination in Latin America. And in Dakar, Senegal, where delegates were very strongly in favor of reparations for the trans- Atlantic slave trade, the new president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, cautioned the conference against looking only to history when examining Africa's problems. Ethnic intolerance and the continuation of slavery are still issues.

"The big story for me," said Ms. McDougall - who is also a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and attended the Santiago meeting - "was the cross-regional discourse that was generated in a new way among African-descended communities throughout the hemisphere, the poorest of the poor."

When the meeting was over, she said, the topic of discrimination against black Latin Americans, which was not in the draft of the regional platform, had been added. "It was a recognition for the first time in a multilateral document in Latin America that racism was an issue of current salience," she said.

The Tehran meeting, grouping the Middle East and Asia, was the most contentious, and there was a move to revive something of the old cold war shibboleth of Zionism as racism.

Though the word Zionism was not used, official delegations urged the Durban conference to demand an end to the "foreign occupation" of Jerusalem and characterized Israeli domination of Palestinian areas as "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide, and a serious threat to international peace and security."

Kishore Mahbubani, the author of "Can Asians Think?" and Singapore's ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview that "racism is a sunrise issue."

"It is a natural result of a shrinking globe," he added. "Races that in a sense never had contact with each other are thrown together in close proximity in a new neighborhood. The first sign of this is the new wave of immigrants."

But most controversial is an international movement to make concrete demands for reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and for some form of compensation for centuries of colonialism.

Mary Robinson, formerly the president of Ireland and now the United Nations commissioner for human rights, generally supports such demands, particularly in finding some form of recompense for slavery. "That trauma is still there," she said in an interview, "and it's deep, and it hasn't been properly acknowledged."

Mrs. Robinson said the conference could achieve concrete results just by urging the enforcement of existing laws and international conventions against bias and discrimination. "About 85 percent of measures that can be taken are already in force or will be agreed on without difficulty," she said. "Then there will be a number of issues on which political leadership will be needed.

"One of them will be how we find the language to condemn in full terms the evil of slavery, returning to the issue of compensation for past practices.

"It may sound strange that we still have to do that, but in fact we need to close off a period and say that this exploitation was in real terms a crime against humanity when it took place and that it has had an effect into this century. The more generous and open the condemnation is, the less I believe there will be a push to focus on precise monetary compensation."

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

Everywhereabouts

Sun, 04 Mar 2001
Slate Magazine
by Charles Davis

The Pentagon introduced a non-lethal "burn weapon" to disperse crowds. The "active denial system" uses high-frequency electromagnetic waves that create a burning sensation-up to 120 degrees-without actually burning the skin. (The waves penetrate the skin 1/64th of an inch.) When deployed in five years, it may eventually replace tear gas and rubber bullets as the riot-control method of choice. Pentagon's spin: This weapon has a longer range than tear gas and rubber bullets and reduces the risk of permanant injury. Skeptics' spin: Sounds Big-Brotherish to us.

---

21 Die in Crash of Guard Plane in Georgia Rain

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By KEVIN SACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04CRAS.html

UNADILLA, Ga., March 3 - A military transport plane flying from Florida to Virginia descended through rainy weather this morning and crashed in a freshly plowed field in this central Georgia farming community, killing all 21 people aboard. Officials had not determined the cause of the crash, but today's steady and sometimes heavy rain was clearly a possible factor.

Witnesses reported that the twin- engine propeller aircraft had lost altitude steadily before the crash but has not gone into a freefall, said Van Peavey, the sheriff of Dooly County. Several people said the plane had exploded into flames after impact and remained on fire for hours, with gray smoke billowing from the mangled fuselage.

``We got there within five or 10 minutes and there were no survivors,'' said Mr. Peavey, noting that all the bodies were in the fuselage. ``Most of them that I saw were still strapped in.''

The plane was a C-23 Sherpa assigned to the 171st Aviation Battalion of the Army Air National Guard in Lakeland, Fla., and had started its flight at Hurlburt Field, near Fort Walton Beach, Fla. It was headed to Oceana Naval Air Station, Va., carrying three Army crew members and 18 members of the Virginia Air National Guard, according to a statement released by Robins Air Force Base near here. The victims were not immediately identified because the authorities were still notifying their families tonight. Officials said the Virginia victims, all members of the 203rd Red Horse Unit of the National Guard, were on a routine training mission as part of a military construction and engineering crew.

The Red Horse squadrons are rapidly deployable civil engineering units that can build tent cities and other facilities for troops in the field.

``They have plumbers, electricians, cooks,'' Capt. Carol Kanode of the Air Force, a field spokesman, told The Associated Press. They have everything you need to set up from nothing.''

Late this afternoon, the families of the Virginia-based victims were reported to be gathering at Camp Pendleton State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach.

President Bush released a statement from Camp David saying he was ``deeply saddened'' by the loss of life and extending his condolences to the families of the dead. ``This tragic loss on a routine training mission reminds us of the sacrifices made each and every day by all of our men and women in uniform,'' he said.

Some witnesses reported seeing pieces of the plane separate from the fuselage and fall before the crash, but the authorities could not yet verify those reports. One farmer said he had found a piece of a wing in his fields.

Those who arrived shortly after the crash described a horrible scene.

``There was a pretty good bit of smoke and fire,'' said Justin Posey, 17, who got there about 10 minutes after the crash. ``You could hardly tell it was a plane.

Mr. Posey's mother, Amelia Posey, said she felt helpless.

``It was just sad,'' she said. ``There wasn't anything anybody could do. It had already exploded and was in flames. Parts of the plane were found in my father-in-law's field about a half mile from the scene.''

Sheriff Peavey said that he received the first call about the crash at 10:01 a.m. and that officers found the plane in the middle of a five-acre field, about 30 miles south of Macon. He said the plane had not clipped surrounding trees during its descent.

``The plane is basically in one spot but kind of crumbled up,'' he said. ``It's all in one pile. The fuselage is on top of the rest of the debris.''

The steady downpour made the initial investigation and recovery of bodies an added challenge. The field sits off a muddy road that could not be navigated by conventional police cars. Three sheriff's cars slid into a ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor, Mr. Peavey said.

Mr. Peavey said that witnesses said the plane crashed with ``kind of a glide-like angle.''

``They knew it was losing altitude and that there was no place to put it down,'' he said.

The C-23 Sherpa aircraft can carry up to 30 passengers and provides troop and equipment transport, airdrop and medical evacuation. Military officials said they had experienced no previous problems with the aircraft, which was designed to operate in arduous conditions.

---

Military begins recovery efforts in plane crash

03/04/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-04-military-crash.htm

UNADILLA, Ga. (AP) - Military officials worked in a muddy field Sunday to recover the remains of 21 National Guard personnel killed when their twin-engine C-23 Sherpa crashed into a field south of Macon in heavy rain. Investigators recovered the in-flight data and voice recorders for the plane that crashed Saturday but had not determined whether they were working, said Col. Dan Woodward, an Air Force spokesman.

Three Army personnel and 18 Air National Guard members were aboard the plane, said John Birdsong, a spokesman for Robins Air Force Base.

All 18 of the transport plane's passengers were members of a Virginia-based military construction and engineering crew on a routine training mission. The plane's pilot and two other crew members were members of the 171st Aviation Battalion of the Florida Army National Guard.

The Florida National Guard identified the crew as pilots Chief Warrant Officer John Duce, 49, of Orange Park, Fla., and Chief Warrant Officer Eric Larson, 34, of Land-O-Lakes, Fla., and flight engineer Staff Sgt. Robert Ward, 35, of Lakeland, Fla.

The victims will be taken to an Air Force casualty center in Dover, Del., but officials were not sure how long the recovery would take because of deep mud in the area, which had nearly 4 inches of rain since Saturday morning.

"Recovery operations are going to be difficult and protracted," said Lt. Col. Deborah Bertrand, a Robins Air Force Base spokeswoman. "It's a quagmire."

Air Force officials escorted reporters and photographers briefly Sunday past dozens of muddy all-terrain vehicles and Humvees to a command post about a half-mile from the main crash site. The command post was at the end of a paved road, from which recovery vehicles and investigators had to plow through a dirt road, with gullies carved by the heavy weekend rains. Water stood in ditches and fields that had been plowed 3 feet deep in preparation for spring planting.

The plane crashed in an open field, but the crash site was obscured from the command post by a line of trees.

A National Transportation Safety Board investigator arrived to assist investigators from the Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., in searching for the cause of the crash.

Heavy rains and winds swept the area throughout Friday night and Saturday as part of a huge storm system moving across the South.

John Allen Bryant Sr., 57, heard the crash in a field on his farm, about two miles from his house. He rushed to the site.

"It was just a horrible, horrible scene," Bryant said in a telephone interview. "The plane was just about completely gone. There was very little of its stuff left. It just about all had burned up. It was just awful."

Dennis Posey, a farmer who lives about a half-mile from the field, jumped into his pickup and headed to the crash site after hearing a loud thud. He said the plane exploded only moments after it landed.

"As soon as I seen that plane, I knew nobody could come out of that," Posey said.

Neighbor Mike Bryant said he could tell the plane was in trouble as it pass overhead.

"I turned around and I saw it just fall to the ground," Bryant said. "It exploded. It wasn't on fire until it hit the ground. Then it exploded and burst into flames."

The plane was assigned to the Florida National Guard's 171st Aviation Battalion and based at Lakeland, Fla. It had taken off at 9:57 a.m. Saturday from Hurlburt Field near Fort Walton Beach and was headed to Oceana Naval Air Station, Va. No trouble was reported then, said Air Force Capt. Carol Kanode, a field spokeswoman.

Families of the 18 Virginia-based victims - all members of the 203rd Red Horse Unit of the National Guard - gathered at Camp Pendleton State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach.

"Military service involves great danger, in times of peace as well as war, and this accident provides stark proof of that," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfield said Sunday in a written statement. "We will do our very best to take care of the needs of family members in this difficult time. All 21 of these fine Americans served their country honorably and well and we will remember their service and sacrifice."

Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore ordered state flags to be lowered to half-staff.

The Red Horse squadrons are rapidly deployable civil engineering units which can erect tent cities and other facilities for troops in the field.

"They have plumbers, electricians, cooks," Kanode said. "They have everything you need to set up from nothing."

President Bush said he was deeply saddened at news of the crash.

"This tragic loss on a routine training mission reminds us of the sacrifices made each and every day by all of our men and women in uniform," Bush said.

The C-23 Sherpa aircraft can carry up to 30 passengers and provides troop and equipment transport, airdrop and medical evacuation.

Before Saturday's crash, the deadliest military aviation accident in Georgia occurred in 1986 at Fort Stewart when two Army helicopters collided, killing eight soldiers.

-------- OTHER

-------- biological weapons

LANL Squad Tracks Anthrax

Sunday, March 4, 2001
Albuquerque Journal
By Jennifer McKee
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/266820news03-04-01.htm

It goes like this: You're the leader of a rogue nation. You've got charismatic power in spades, but are tight on cash and badly in need of an arsenal. Nukes? Don't even try, said Paul Jackson, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory overseeing the lab's bioweapons project. Nuclear weapons are too expensive.

But that's no problem. Mother Nature has already perfected dozens of ways to wipe out human beings.

Voila: biological warfare, the cheap, effective alternative to nuclear weapons.

Jackson and his team of scientists in the lab's Biosciences Division play a unique role in tracking biological weapons around the world. They're in charge of mapping the genes of a spate of possible weapon-ready microbes. First on the list is Bacillus anthracis, the common soil spore that causes the disease anthrax.

The Los Alamos scientists have mapped the DNA of hundreds of strains of the microbe and the lab is now home to the world's largest repository of genetic information on Bacillus anthracis and its closely related microbe cousins. The scientists are mapping the DNA because the organism's genes vary slightly depending on the soil where it originated. Bacillus anthracis in New Mexico, for example, is slightly different from Bacillus anthracis in France.

With enough genetic information, Jackson said, scientists can take a sample of the organisms - say, some spores deployed as weapons on a city - and tell exactly where they came from and, therefore, what country probably made and deployed the weapon.

Knowing the genes also speeds up the time it takes doctors to identify an anthrax outbreak, especially one caused by weapons, Jackson said.

So far, the lab handles only the DNA of disease-causing microbes, not living cells. The only "live" Bacillus anthracis at the lab is the anthrax vaccine, said Jill Trewhella, head of the lab's Biosciences Division, which oversees the Bacillus anthracis research. Anthrax vaccine, which is sold at many feed stores for veterinary use, is living Bacillus anthracis organisms with part of their genetic material removed. The organisms look normal to the body's immune system, but are incapable of causing infection.

Los Alamos wants to build a different laboratory, one designed to safely handle small amounts of live, and possibly deadly, microbes. The plan is opposed by some northern New Mexicans who fear having any amount of deadly disease near their homes.

Both Jackson and Trewhella said they're not deaf to those concerns. But they stress the importance of LANL's bioweapons research and the strict safety measures scientists must take when working such organisms.

Incidentally, Jackson said, live Bacillus anthracis microbes couldn't infect people, anyway. The disease is spread by the organism's spores, and the actual Bacillus anthracis organism doesn't live long outside its host.

Rare in humans

Anthrax, nonetheless, is a good bet for a weapon, Jackson said. The organism that causes it is found in most soils and can be easily cooked up and stored for decades as spores. Better yet, it's especially deadly with no reliable treatment after certain kinds of infection.

Descriptions of the disease's path are downright awful: According to information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease takes hold in the body after about six days, at which time it starts pumping out lots of toxins, eventually killing the body's lymph glands. In quick order, the disease then spreads to the blood - poisoning it - and whips through several organs, which it also kills. If the disease destroys the liver, as it often does, blood no longer coagulates and patients have been described as "bleeding out," a term that more or less speaks for itself.

Lucky for us, Jackson said, anthrax is pretty hard to catch in the wild. Because the disease kills so quickly, it isn't spread communicably, like the common cold, but becomes spores in the body of the deceased. Most of the deceased, by the way, are livestock.

Traditionally, anthrax-killed animals were buried, which, fortuitously for the bug, is not the end of the line. Instead, Bacillus anthracis spores can live relatively happily for decades in the body of their last victim, just waiting for a strong rain to wash it back up to the surface.

Livestock, in particular goats and sheep, are usually the organism's only victims. In fact, most anthrax outbreaks in the United States occur along the paths of the old cattle drives, Jackson said, from Texas to Montana. Grazing animals both eat and inhale lots of dirt as they eat, he said.

The dirt contains the spore and if the animals breathe in enough of them, they become sick.

Humans almost never get the disease that way.

"Most people don't graze," Jackson said.

The most common, naturally-occurring form of anthrax in people is informally known as "woolhandler's disease," Jackson said. This is a much milder disease, typified by open sores on the hands and fingers which are easily treated by antibiotics. That form is spread by skin contact with the spore, which can be found on hides of sick animals.

It is also possible, although very rare, according to the CDC, for people to get a form of intestinal anthrax from eating the meat from animals who died of the disease.

Figuring it out

Anthrax is good for weapons, Jackson said, because it's cheap and easy to make, stores for a long time, and when delivered properly can kill lots of people.

"All you need is a background in microbiology," Jackson said, and you can cook up a batch of Bacillus anthracis pretty easily.

The United States once played with the idea of weaponizing the spore. In the 1950s, America's brief biological-weapons program looked specifically at Bacillus anthracis, according to the CDC. President Nixon banned all such research in 1969, Jackson said.

Since then, most Americans who gave the disease much thought were veterinarians, ranchers or isolated researchers like Jackson.

The former Soviet Union also had an active anthrax program. An accidental leak at one of its factories killed 66 people in 1979. Iraq threatened to deploy the disease during the Gulf War.

During the Cold War, however, Jackson said, most bomb-watchers were looking at nuclear weapons. Today, the fear is of rogue nations and leaders lacking the money and scientists needed to pull off a nuclear bomb, which even 55 years after its debut is still pretty difficult to build.

Weaponized Bacillus anthracis spores are usually cooked up with thickeners into a "peanut brittle" type stuff, Jackson said. Then it's ground up into tiny flakes ready to be launched.

According to a World Health Organization report, 95,000 people in a city of 500,000 would die within three days of the release of 50 kilograms of Bacillus anthracis spores. Under ideal conditions, the report reads, the disease could prove fatal to about half the population as far as 160 kilometers downwind.

The disease also is easily traceable, Jackson said, given the genetic differences dependent upon its point of origin.

Mapping the DNA is easy, Jackson said. The hard part is getting samples of Bacillus anthracis from every corner of the world, especially places like Russia, which don't necessarily want the United States knowing anything about the Bacillus anthracis in their nations, and more than likely, in their weapons.

Trewhella said people may not value this research now, but they will if someone ever uses an anthrax weapon.

"They'll want to know" someone was working on the problem, she said.

-------- environment

Road to Disaster Is Paved With Oil

3/04/2001
Newsday
Robert Reno
http://www.newsday.com/coverage/current/business/sunday/nd1933.htm

THE Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have served notice that oil-drilling for it, pumping it, burning more of it, keeping it cheap so we can afford more of it-will be the chief imperative of their energy policies.

What did we expect? We've just elected a couple of oil men president and vice president. The petroleum industry has a valid claim to the political spoils. The people have spoken-or rather five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have ruled, which, while not the same thing, still trumps Al Gore's clear victory in the popular vote.

Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the earth is about to get 10 degrees hotter. This confluence of political and climatic events has all the makings of a policy disaster. If President Bush's tax cut is everything bad they say about it, it will be a trivial event compared with the other mistake we are about to make. It will be a horse race whether consequences will be more ravishing to the earth's climate or to its economy.

As for climate change, it requires colossal stupidity to ignore evidence it is already happening and that the burning of fossil fuels has something to do with it. There's nothing as reliable as a DNA test to prove that emissions alone are causing climate change, but we do know they foul the air because on some smoggy days we can look out the window and see it. A simple four-cylinder motorcar parked running in a closed garage is an experiment most Americans can easily perform themselves. No, don't sit in the car until you pass out. Just come back and check in a few minutes and you'll get a nauseating whiff of what is happening to the earth's atmosphere as millions of exhausts, power plants, furnaces and smokestacks belch stuff into its finite space at an ever increasing rate.

By some estimates, it took an average temperature change of less than 10 degrees to produce the last ice age. This variation was enough to cover a good part of the earth in ice 10,000 feet deep. Ice covered Europe as far south as Kiev. What are now the cities of New York, Cincinnati and St. Louis were buried under ice.

Now earth could be facing a similar and much more sudden temperature change in the opposite direction. What is left of its glaciers is melting fast. If this continues it could put much of the globe's low-lying land areas, whole nations, vast tracts of Florida, under water in the lifetimes of our grandchildren. Soon we'll have to rent a movie to see the very snows of Kilimanjaro because it has lost 82 percent of its ice cap since 1912, a yard's thickness of it in the past year alone. Ice at the North Pole is now 40 percent thinner than in 1950. Aggravating this process, vast tundras may soon defrost and decay, pumping more greenhouse gases into air already thick with man-made emissions.

The fatalist approach, I suppose, is to turn up the air conditioning and keep burning all the coal, oil and gas we need to keep comfortable. When most of the beaches disappear under the assault of rising salt water, we could build ugly levies that would block the view and devalue some of the nation's most expensive oceanfront real estate.

We know that getting hysterical about something rarely helps. But we may have reached a point where getting hysterical is the only prudent course if that's what it takes to get the attention of at least the one nation which, with only 5 percent of the world's population, produces one-fourth of all its emissions. That would be the United States.

If the Republican answer to this threat is any guide, we're in trouble.

Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska, who may soon be choking on tundra gas, introduced a 300-page energy bill that sends a loud pump-more, burn-more message. He's chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and besides opening up the Arctic reserves, he'd shower the industry with tax breaks to promote oil and gas production.

Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, called it "a very good start." I suppose it is-in the direction of disaster.

---

Why we should let wolves be

Sun, 04 Mar 2001
by Cameron Smith
http://www.thestar.com

"Unless someone like you cares a whole lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." --Dr. Seuss, 'The Lorax'

Two townships near where I live, north of Gananoque, have asked the provincial government to restore a bounty on wolves.

It already is legal to shoot wolves at any time of the year in southern Ontario. So it's not the right to kill wolves that the townships want. It's a bigger incentive.

What has sparked the calls for a bounty is the occasional loss of a lamb to a predator. Local evaluators inevitably say they were killed by wolves or coyotes.

Undoubtedly they were killed by something canine: wolves, coyotes, wolf/coyote hybrids, dogs, or dog/coyote hybrids. However, farmers are compensated only if an evaluator declares that a wolf or a coyote did the killing, and almost always they're the ones found guilty.

Local councils pay the compensation, with money provided by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. In the latest case, concerning a large lamb, the compensation was $200.

My guess is that there are no wolves anywhere near the two townships. If there were, they'd be eastern timber wolves, a type of red wolf native to Algonquin Park. However, wolves maintain their distinctiveness only by living in highly disciplined packs.

When their social structure is disrupted, when the links that bind them together are broken, young males will wander off in search of romance and mate with coyotes. Their offspring may be more wolf than coyote, but behaviourally and psychologically, they sure won't be wolves.

Differences between the two species are well-defined. Coyotes will breed in their first year; wolves only in their second or third. So killing coyotes is a hapless venture. They can breed as fast as you can kill them. Despite all attempts to kill them over the past 200 years, there are now more coyotes in North America than ever before. Wolves used to keep them under control, killing any that ventured into their territories. But as humans slaughtered wolves, coyotes moved in.

The main sources of food for wolves is moose, deer and beavers. For coyotes it is mainly mice, rabbits, and other small game.

A wolf pack will have a territory of 200 to 300 square kilometres. The territory of a group of coyotes can be as small as four square kilometres.

Killing wolves disrupts their social structure, especially if it is the older wolves that are killed, the ones that teach the younger wolves and enforce discipline.

Wolves are at the top of the chain of predators and so have a tremendous ability to influence an ecosystem. It's called a top-down influence. I saw it at work on Lake Gananoque last winter. A deer had been killed on the lake, and what probably were two wolf/coyote hybrids were feeding on it.

Also feeding were two bald eagles. It reminded me that when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States, ravens and bald eagles returned to the park.

In addition to supplying food in winter to winged scavengers, foxes, fishers, and a host of other species, wolves keep prey populations, such as beavers, under control. In our area, beavers are so far out of control that they are considered a major nuisance, damming culverts and every trickle of water they can find, exasperating township road crews and landowners. Since coyotes rarely tackle a beaver, it's a sure sign there aren't many wolves around.

The two townships are on the most southern part of the Canadian Shield. As farmers have been leaving marginal farmland, the forest has been returning. So the edge of the wild has been moving southward. With it have come species such as fishers, otters, red shouldered hawks, bald eagles, bobcats, bears and wolves - or, at least, wolf-coyote hybrids.

New ecosystems are establishing themselves, and wolves will be an essential part of creating a balance. Surely it's time to recognize their role instead of slaughtering them and, in the process, deforming and destabilizing nature.

---

Everywhereabouts

Sun, 04 Mar 2001
Slate Magazine
by Charles Davis

Europe slaughtered tens of thousands of livestock to combat foot-and-mouth disease. The discovery of several dozen cases of the livestock ailment in Britain and Ireland has set off waves of slaughter across Europe. (Animal movements to the continent, where there are no reported cases, stopped Feb. 23.) France will kill 20,000 animals; Belgium, 2,000; Germany, 2,000. Because humans can spread the disease, customs agents are requiring travelers to sanitize clothing and baggage upon arrival. Britain has banned rugby tournaments, horse racing, and dog shows. British pundits'spin: Prime Minister Tony Blair may have to delay this spring's election or he'll lose the crucial rural vote. British veterinarians' spin: Because of the two-to-14-day incubation period, the number of cases will increase before is subsides. U.S. veterinarians' spin: If you've been to England in the last month, don't go to the zoo! Americans' spin: First genetically modified food, then mad cow disease, now foot-and-mouth disease. Technophobic environmentalists and alarmist governments have turned Europe into morass of panic. (To learn more about foot-and-mouth disease, click here.

---

Britain Livestock Disease Spreads

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Foot-and-Mouth.html

LONDON (AP) -- An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that has swept the United Kingdom spread to France on Sunday, where the agricultural minister said some sheep imported from Britain tested positive for the highly contagious ailment.

The disease was also found at a huge national park in southwest England, officials said Sunday, while Belgium shut down its two largest zoos and Denmark quarantined seven farms in a bid to ward off the livestock disease.

Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany, speaking in an interview with France-Info radio from Montreal, said tests of slaughtered sheep in France ``show that these animals were in contact with the malady but were not necessarily carriers of the malady.''

The Agriculture Ministry said nine herds were involved in the testing, including three in the Oise region just north of Paris and one in suburban Seine-Saint-Denis. Three herds in the Cher region in central France also were among those tested.

A farm near Saint-Etienne, in southeast France, was placed under quarantine on Saturday after a herd of sheep imported from Britain tested positive. Results on a second set of tests were to be available on Monday.

In Britain and Northern Ireland, 69 separate outbreaks have been reported. About 45,000 animals -- sheep, cows and pigs -- have been destroyed in an effort to stop the ailment from spreading. Agriculture officials said 8,000 more animals will be destroyed.

An outbreak at a farm inside Dartmoor National Park raised fears that wildlife could spread the disease to other livestock. Hiking and horseback riding have been restricted on the moor, where about 46,000 cattle and sheep graze.

The affected farm is part of the Duchy of Cornwall -- land that is Prince Charles' royal heritage and provides his income. It is run by his tenant, Roger Winsor.

``We are very sorry for the tenant concerned, and our thoughts are with him and all other farmers at this difficult time,'' a spokesman for the Duchy said.

Since the first cases were discovered Feb. 19 at a slaughterhouse in southern England, authorities have banned exports of British milk, meat and live animals. At outbreak sites, herds are being destroyed, with pyres of carcasses burning around the clock.

Mainland European countries have destroyed thousands of animals imported from Britain before the export ban took effect. France last week began destroying 50,000 sheep imported from Britain as a precaution.

The first suspected foot-and-mouth cases outside the United Kingdom were reported last week in northern Belgium. Authorities closed Belgium's two biggest zoos Sunday while awaiting test results on three pigs found with blisters on their snouts, a symptom of the disease.

In Denmark, seven farms near Lemvig, 185 miles northwest of Copenhagen, were quarantined Saturday after a farmer there reported blisters on the tongue of one of his cows. An initial test proved negative and health authorities said Sunday they were certain it was not foot-and-mouth. But surrounding farms have been quarantined until a second test is completed Monday.

British agriculture officials say the spread of the disease may begin to slow.

``What we have not seen is a lot of lateral spread from infected premises to premises around them, or a lot of airborne spread,'' said Richard Cawthorne, Britain's deputy chief veterinary officer.

``Though the outbreak has spread across the country, it is in pockets where sheep may have mixed in markets and spread it.''

If current restrictions continue to hold and there are no secondary outbreaks, the number of afflicted areas could drop by next week, Cawthorne said.

Farmers in Britain on Sunday began restricted movement of livestock unafflicted by the disease, under a special permit system.

But officials warned against other rural movement by people or animals, criticizing animal rights activists who staged a protest march near farmland Sunday.

A group of about 70 activists gathered outside the headquarters of pharmaceutical group Huntingdon Life Sciences in Huntingdon, 70 miles north of London. Farmers, government officials and police said the group should have postponed their protest against animal testing because they could have spread the virus.

Officials also said a man found injured Saturday night after hiking in a restricted park in north Wales could face a fine of $7,300.

It is extremely difficult to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which infects cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, cows and pigs. The virus can be carried for miles by the wind, people, clothes or cars, surviving for lengthy periods on boots and clothing. It can also be spread by contaminated hay, water and manure.

The outbreak has forced cancellations of scores of sporting events and other large gatherings. Hundreds of parks, zoos, nature preserves and countryside trails in Britain have been closed.

---

Gipper Meets 'Survivor' as G.E.'s Image Hardens

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/nyregion/04GENE.html?pagewanted=all

One of the more upbeat theories of postmodern capitalism is that nice companies will eventually finish first. In a market of instant information, where perception and image are increasingly linked to stock prices, investors will reward the environmentally green and the socially conscious because such companies have fewer potential liabilities, or so the thinking goes.

But the nice-guy theory is getting a major test in upstate New York, where General Electric is waging a vehement, line-in-the- sand battle against dredging the Hudson River to remove the PCB's that its factories leaked or dumped into the water in the decades after World War II.

Environmentalists, economists and stock market experts say that as the company has poured tens of millions of dollars into a campaign of television infomercials, billboards and lobbying over the last year, an argument about the future of the river has increasingly mutated into an argument about G.E. itself. The messenger has become the message. Whether the federal Environmental Protection Agency's proposed $460 million dredging plan to remove the river's pollution at G.E.'s expense is the right scientific answer has become a battle instead over which side to trust.

And that in turn presents a whole series of questions, not only for the local residents who are being bombarded with sound-bites about E.P.A. high-handedness and river hydrology, but for the legions of investors who for years on end have worshiped the company and its chief executive, John F. Welch Jr. Last month, G.E. was declared the most admired corporation in the world for the fourth year in a row by Fortune magazine.

Is there a point at which G.E.'s Hudson strategy backfires and becomes an environmental liability? Is G.E.'s dismissive tone about the federal government a mark of arrogance, as critics suggest, or the righteousness of a just cause in the face of a dictatorial federal bureaucracy, as company officials claim?

Perhaps most crucially, what does the campaign say about its intended audience? What, in the end, do Americans really admire - the stand-up citizen who admits responsibility and takes a poke in the eye, or the win-at- any-cost competitor? Do people want the most decent person in the Australian outback to win a million dollars, or the most cunning?

Some experts on corporate behavior and the environment say the most revealing thing about the Hudson- G.E. fight is that it could occur at all.

"It's a testament to how much times have changed that a company can even float a campaign like this," said Andrew J. Hoffman, a professor of management at Boston University who has studied the frontier of business and the environment. In the early days of environmental regulation, Professor Hoffman said, corporate public relations efforts mostly focused on damage control - like Exxon's strategy after the Valdez oil spill or Union Carbide's after the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India.

A proactive campaign like G.E.'s, charging that the environmental regulators are simply wrong, incompetent or politically motivated, shows not only how much more complex environmental issues have become, he said, but also how much the power bases have shifted. Fewer people believe the government has all the answers, and corporations have charged in to fill the gap.

General Electric used polychlorinated biphenyls for nearly three decades at two factories in the towns of Hudson Falls and Fort Edward. An estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCB's, oily chemicals that were later linked to cancer in humans and various problems in wildlife, leaked or were discharged into the river. Most of it is gone, E.P.A. officials say - absorbed into the tissues of fish, animals and people, or washed out to sea. The government's plan, announced in December, would try to recover about 100,000 pounds of PCB's from the most polluted hot spots along a 40-mile stretch north of Albany.

The company's counterattack to dredging - on which it has spent by some estimates $60 million or more over the last year in the Albany media market alone - is stark and stylistically striking. The G.E. spokesmen are invariably tieless and looking relaxed, often before an inviting river backdrop. Everyone looks windblown and outdoorsy - at home in the natural world.

Film clips of E.P.A. officials, by contrast, especially the former administrator, Carol M. Browner, show her standing awkwardly at a lectern, with the clear suggestion that she is a woman of the indoors - or worse, a Washington insider. Harsh, metallic background music that sounds like something from the movie "Hannibal" surges up whenever a clip is shown of an E.P.A. dredging site. Even city buses in Albany now carry anti-dredging billboards.

General Electric's vice president for corporate communications, Beth Comstock, said that G.E.'s strategy was simply to educate. The company's scientific inquiries have shown the E.P.A.'s dredging plan to be ill conceived and potentially disastrous for the Hudson's ecosystem and the local economy, Ms. Comstock said, and G.E. has an obligation to make sure residents are informed of that. Under the E.P.A.'s rules, the government must consider local opinion in the area of any proposed environmental remediation - a comment period that in the Hudson case runs through mid-April.

The fight is not about saving the company half a billion dollars, Ms. Comstock said. "The easiest thing in the world would be for G.E. to write a check, but that's not what this is about; it's about finding the right answer for the river. People admire G.E. because we're willing to fight for what we believe in."

Stock market analysts say that for now G.E. seems to be suffering not at all for its defiance.

"Those appreciative of G.E. tend to be appreciative of Jack Welch's hard-charging style," said James N. Kelleher, a senior analyst at Argus Research in New York. "G.E.'s aggressive brand of capitalism and unwillingness to kowtow to environmentalists may not be winning them any enemies in the investment community, and may be winning them some adherents."

But there are also some subtle indications that what had been a kind of fire wall within G.E.'s image - investors cheering on one side, environmentalists booing on the other - may be eroding a little. Last year, a resolution put to the company's shareholders by a coalition of religious groups asking G.E. to give a full report of how much it was spending on media and lobbying drew more than 8 percent of all votes cast. That was nearly three times the number needed to keep the resolution alive for presentation a second year. And in February, a column in Fortune magazine - in the same issue crowning the company as most admired - forcefully called on G.E. to "just do it," and announce a cleanup of the river.

Sociologists and other researchers who study corporate behavior say that G.E. has long been a mirror for American society, because so much of its culture has been bound up in the presentation and cultivation of its own image. In the 1950's, for example, when Ronald Reagan became G.E.'s front man and "General Electric Theater" was the company's national television platform, G.E. was paternal and competent, an unflappable commander just back from the war, said Peter D. Kinder, the president of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Company, a Boston-based firm that does social research for institutional investors. But beginning in the 1980's and 1990's, he added, a different ethos emerged in America, and at General Electric.

"Now they're tough in all the areas it's fashionable to be tough in," Mr. Kinder said. And while he stressed that G.E. failed most of his tests to qualify as a socially responsible investment, he confessed to a certain admiration for its "They're brilliant," he said.

Some experts on science and economics say that part of the backdrop of G.E.'s fight is that environmentalism itself has changed. The anti- establishment, anti-business youth culture groups that put together the first Earth Day in 1970 have in many cases become powerful and well-financed environmental lobbying organizations. Many corporations, meanwhile, have seen that environmentalism can be good for business, and have actively marketed themselves as ecologically correct pillars of hardheaded real world expertise.

Instead of passively embracing the values of environmentalism, some business researchers say, companies are redefining what it means to be green at all. In the same way that many once-radical environmentalists of the street were tamed, so too were anti-environmentalists of the boardroom.

What has not changed, at least at the E.P.A., is the idea that rational science will carry the day. The agency's mission on the Hudson, a spokeswoman said, is not to manipulate public opinion, or use emotion on the river's behalf, but rather to put forward the best evidence available and trust in the intelligence of the public.

"We are not out there to sell this like a can of soup," said Ann C. Rychlenski, a spokeswoman for the agency.

---

Animal Illness Suspected on Continent Prompts Ban

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By SUZANNE DALEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04FOOT.html

PARIS, March 3 - After nearly two weeks of hoping that Britain's outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease would not cross the English Channel, both France and Belgium today reported suspected outbreaks of the highly contagious virus inside their borders.

In both cases, preliminary tests were negative. But the farms - one in central France and one in southern Belgium about 15 miles from the French border - were quarantined while final results are awaited early next week. Both countries began to take additional measures to stop the spread of the disease, which rarely affects humans but can be carried by people, cars, clothes, manure, water, hay and even the wind.

In the district of France closest to the quarantined Belgian farm, local officials banned the movement of animals and shut down local markets for the week, French television reported. Belgian officials imposed a nationwide ban on the transportation of all cloven-hoof farm animals - including cattle, sheep pigs and goats - as well as farm pets. Officials also set up a 12-mile buffer zone around the suspect farm, allowing access to only veterinarians and Agriculture Ministry inspectors.

"The signs were such that measures had to be taken immediately," Jef Imans, the Belgian Farm Ministry's cabinet chief, told The Associated Press.

But government officials also tried to reassure the public and particularly farmers, many of whom are already reeling from the panic over the spread of mad cow disease, which has caused beef prices to plummet. "For the time being, I am saying, and I repeat, that there is not yet a case of foot-and-mouth in France, and I am keeping my fingers crossed," said Jean Glavany, France's agriculture minister.

There is no relationship between mad cow and foot-and-mouth. Mad cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, remains a somewhat mysterious and fatal disease that causes the deterioration of the brain, both in cows and in humans.

Foot-and-mouth is a virus that rarely kills animals or humans and is considered roughly the equivalent of a bad cold. It is usually detected in animals by the sores it causes on the lips and hoofs. But once infected, dairy cows begin producing less milk, and in general animals lose weight, making them less valuable on the market. For many farmers, the possibility of such a financial disaster could not come at a worse time. Many say they are barely keeping their businesses afloat.

In France, the quarantined farm is in Roche-la-Molière, a village southwest of Lyon in the Loire region. The suspected cases were among a flock of 80 sheep, some of which had been imported from England. Officials have said final test results should be available on Monday.

In Belgium, the quarantined farm is in the town of Diksmuide in western Flanders. Symptoms - including sores and fever blisters - were seen on pigs that were imported from Britain shortly after the outbreak there. Final test results are expected on Tuesday.

In the meantime, Britain reported that the disease had cropped up in 11 more sites today. The cases, scattered across the country, brought the number of confirmed cases to 51.

Only in Ireland was the news slightly better as tests on a suspected case of foot-and-mouth disease on a farm in County Louth, near the border with Northern Ireland, turned out to be negative.

---

Foot-and-mouth cases found in British park

03/04/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-04-footdisease.htm

LONDON (AP) - Foot-and-mouth disease has turned up in a huge national park in southwest England, agriculture officials said Sunday, raising fears it will be spread by wildlife to livestock that graze there.

Nearly 60 separate outbreaks of the highly contagious livestock disease have been reported in Britain and Northern Ireland, and about 45,000 animals - sheep, cows and pigs - have been destroyed in an effort to stop the spread of the ailment.

The outbreak in the Dartmoor National Park was found at a tenant farm inside the sprawling moor in Devon, in southwest England. The National Farmers Union called the spread of the disease to the park - where about 46,000 cattle and sheep graze - a "nightmare scenario."

Hikers had already been told to stay off the moor.

Since the first cases were discovered Feb. 19 at a slaughterhouse in southern England, authorities have banned exports of British milk, meat and live animals. At outbreak sites, herds are being destroyed, with pyres of carcasses burning around the clock.

The first suspected cases were reported in continental Europe last week, with the discovery of blisters - one of the telltale symptoms - on the snouts of three pigs in northern Belgium.

Authorities immediately created a buffer zone around the farm, which specializes in British pig imports, banned horse races through the weekend and imposed a three-day ban on the transport of all farm animals in Belgium. On Saturday, 323 pigs were destroyed.

On Sunday, authorities closed Belgium's two biggest zoos, in Antwerp and Plankendael, as a precautionary measure as they awaited full test results on the pigs, expected Tuesday. Initial tests were negative.

Petting zoos in Belgium were closed Saturday.

The livestock ailment, which poses no danger to humans, has already dealt a heavy blow to British farmers, and could do the same to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe if the outbreak spreads.

It is extremely difficult to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which infects cloven-hoofed animals like sheep, cows and pigs. The virus can be carried for miles by the wind, people, clothes or cars, surviving for lengthy periods on boots and clothing. It can also be spread by contaminated hay, water and manure.

The outbreak has triggered cancellations of scores of sporting events and other large gatherings. Hundreds of parks, zoos, nature preserves and countryside trails in Britain have been closed.

---

Arizona

01/03/04
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arizona - The National Park Service has started planning the removal of non-native tamarisk trees along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon National Park. Preliminary surveys conducted in 157 side canyons indicate that tamarisk is in the early stages of invading tributaries from the main river corridor. Tamarisk displaces native vegetation.

Georgia - The state's chief environmental official approved paying Flint River basin farmers not to irrigate their crops from feeder streams and lakes, based on forecasts of a fourth consecutive year of severe drought. The state could pay up to $10 million to persuade about 1,450 Flint basin farmers not to withdraw water to preserve flow into the river.

New Hampshire - A bald eagle's nest near the path of a proposed access road to the Manchester Airport will delay the $75 million project by at least three months and could require moving the road farther south. Officials said federal guidelines call for a 660-foot buffer zone around the nests. Construction was supposed to begin in the winter of 2002-2003.

Wisconsin - The deaths of nine wolves this winter, mostly from mange, should not hamper efforts to reclassify the state's 250 wolves from endangered to threatened. State ecologists said there have been more deaths than normal this winter, but the state should have enough wolves to change their classification from the more serious endangered to threatened.

Wyoming - Two men accused of killing two bighorn rams are scheduled for trial beginning May 7. Gary Vorhies, 38, and Cody Cannady, 32, have pleaded innocent to misdemeanor poaching charges. The case has outraged hunters who sometimes wait decades before drawing by lottery a license to hunt the rare bighorns.

---

Oil and Blasphemy

March 4, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/opinion/L04ARC.html

To the Editor:

Re "Neither Barren Nor Remote," by William Cronon (Op-Ed, Feb. 28), about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which President Bush has promised to open to oil drilling:

How the administration treats all creatures, great and small, and the Gwich'in "sacred place where life begins" in the wildlife refuge will be one of the first tests of the credibility of the Republicans' stated "faith based" commitment. Time will tell if Native American belief qualifies.

GAIL MINTHORN Wilton, Conn., Feb. 28, 2001

-------- police

Police Learning Spanish as Latino Population Grows

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By KEVIN SACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04COPS.html?pagewanted=all

McMINNVILLE, Tenn., March 2 - The woman raised a hammer over her head and waved it menacingly at the police officer.

"Voltéese," the officer barked, ordering the woman to turn around. "Ponga el arma en el suelo," he continued, and she responded by placing her weapon on the ground.

But Ava R. Gregersen, who has taught high school Spanish here for 31 years, was not satisfied. The officer's delivery was stilted, the accent closer to Tullahoma than to Tijuana. "Boy, did you get rusty on me," Ms. Gregersen scolded. "You guys would have been killed. Let's do it again."

After a long day shift, 17 McMinnville police officers and Warren County sheriff's deputies spent Thursday night being drilled by Ms. Gregersen in a functional Spanish class designed for law enforcement officers. Through role-playing and repetition, the 30-hour course is designed to teach the officers how to make an arrest, conduct a basic interrogation, calm a victim, read a Miranda warning and even recognize swear words, all in Spanish.

Almost overnight, those skills have become essential to policing in this hamlet in the Tennessee hills, midway between Nashville and Chattanooga. As in cities large and small across the South and Midwest, a growing Hispanic population of low-income immigrants - almost nonexistent only a decade ago - has placed new stresses on a police department that is utterly unequipped to deal with barriers of language and culture.

The rapid growth in the immigrant population, particularly in places that have no experience with heavy immigration, has produced a national law enforcement challenge. Though slow to start, police departments across the country are now requiring officers to learn what is known as survival Spanish. They also are recruiting Hispanic and Spanish-speaking officers with offers of higher pay and bonuses.

And they are trying to sensitize officers who may harbor bias against Latinos or view them as an added burden. "That's absolutely there," said Dennis Ray Martin, a spokesman for the National Association of Chiefs of Police. "Some officers feel bitter and angry about them coming in, and they don't like the additional problems it creates."

Complicating the situation in many places is the targeted victimization of immigrant Hispanics by armed robbers who have learned that some Latinos distrust banks and carry large amounts of cash. Robbers have also learned that some of the immigrants, mainly Mexican field workers and laborers, are reluctant to report crimes because of fear of either the police or the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In Charlotte, N.C., for instance, about 527 Hispanics reported being robbed last year, many of them while at home, The Charlotte Observer reported. That was up from 137 reported cases in 1997, and police officials say that the reported crimes are only a fraction of the actual number of robberies. Similar patterns have emerged in the Atlanta area and in Memphis. Here in McMinnville, none of the police department's 34 officers are Hispanic (or African-American, for that matter) and none are fluent in Spanish. The 911 operators know only a few words of Spanish, and court translators have been hard to find and keep.

The 1990 census found fewer than 300 Hispanic residents here in Warren County out of a population of about 33,500. Today, police and city officials put the number at 4,000 to 7,000, though no one knows for sure. Most are permanent residents.

They have been drawn by jobs in this area's vast wholesale nursery industry, which ships dogwoods and forsythia up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In Atlanta and Memphis, Hispanics dominate the construction and landscaping trades. In eastern North Carolina, they process hogs. In Arkansas, they pluck chickens.

They arrive, mostly from Mexico, often with minimal education, little understanding of American laws and customs, and intense suspicion of law enforcement in part because of police corruption in their home countries. Their discomfort with the police is exacerbated by a language barrier that the police themselves say contributes to inequitable and sometimes dangerous treatment.

"We try to treat everybody the same," said Lisa Norris, a McMinnville officer who said the area's Hispanics have problems with domestic abuse, driving without a license and drinking-related offenses. "But it's hard if we don't have the skills."

Ryan Moore, one of Ms. Norris's fellow officers, recalled that he almost shot a Hispanic man four years ago because of their inability to communicate. After responding to a report of shooting in a trailer park, Mr. Moore found himself trying to talk a man into surrendering his weapon. "I was scared that he didn't know what I was telling him because of the language barrier," he said. "I didn't know what `arma' was then. I had this lump in my throat and the lieutenant's going, `Don't shoot him. Don't shoot him.' It was close."

Mark Mara, another McMinnville officer, said that when he cannot understand what a suspect is telling him, or if a confrontation pits an English-speaker against a Spanish-speaker, his tendency is to arrest the Hispanic person and let the courts settle the issue. "Sometimes we have no choice but to arrest them because they can't tell us what they're doing," Mr. Mara said.

Though there have been no charges here of serious police harassment or brutality, several Hispanic residents said that many Hispanics say they are not treated fairly by particular officers.

"Some don't like it when you don't speak English," said Efraín Amparan, a nursery worker from Mexico who gained his American citizenship three years ago. "And if they don't understand you, they'll take you to jail."

Mr. Amparan said he had to spend $600 to repair his truck after a recent accident that he said was clearly the other driver's fault. The officer on the scene refused to ticket the other driver. "I don't explain very good to the police," he said. "I think he blamed me."

That may change somewhat after the McMinnville officers complete their Spanish training at the Tennessee Technology Center, a state college here.

But some prominent Latinos question whether the training really will be effective, particularly in high-pressure situations. "It takes four years to become fluent in a language and two years to become proficient," said Dilka Román, the Tennessee director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "You're expecting them to go out on the street and be able to speak Spanish in a crisis, and I just don't see it."

---

D.C.

01/03/04
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

D.C. - District of Columbia's police department will soon have equipment that some big-city police forces take for granted. Police Chief Charles Ramsey says the city has leased a helicopter, which will take to the air in the next few weeks. Ramsey said he expects the copter will help monitor highway traffic and combat illegal drug operations.

New Jersey - A fugitive who was turned away by Somerset County Jail officers has been captured after police learned that David Coote, 36, was in the Hillsborough area. Coote wanted to turn himself in Sunday, but officers said they had no warrant for him. They later learned of a warrant issue on Feb. 16 when Coote failed to appear for an aggravated assault sentencing.

-------- spying

Everywhereabouts

Sun, 04 Mar 2001
Slate Magazine
by Charles Davis

The New York Times leads with newly-discovered damage done by accused spy Robert Hanssen, who is believed to have warned Russia of a tunnel the U.S. was digging beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington in order to eavesdrop. The U.S. hasn't publicly acknowledged its existence, but intelligence and law enforcement officials speculate the tunnel is referred to in an FBI affidavit that states that Hanssen "compromised an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance. . . ." The non-local lead in the Los Angeles Times reports on the collateral damage inflicted by the year-long stock market plunge. The infrastructure that rose up around the bull market has begun to teeter: online stock trading has plummeted, CNBC has lost viewers, and membership in investment clubs has declined. In addition, money thrown into technology stocks was diverted from more deserving projects--power plants in California, for example. The Washington Post leads the crash of a Florida National Guard plane that killed 21 people, 18 of whom were members of the Virginia Air National Guard. The cause has not yet been determined, though the NYT, which fronts the story, notes that heavy rain may have been a factor.

A NYT front-pager addresses the growing concern about wireless locating devices that track the positions of people and vehicles all over the world. Scientists have developed a chip that can be inserted beneath the skin and used to plot a person's every move. Privacy advocates argue that the benefits of the technology, such as improving 911 and emergency services, will be far outweighed by the abuses, such as health insurance companies refusing coverage to people based on incorrect inferences made about their whereabouts.

---

Locating Devices Gain in Popularity but Raise Privacy Concerns

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/technology/04LOCA.html?pagewanted=all

Wireless systems capable of tracking vehicles and people all over the planet are leaving businesses aglow with new possibilities, and some privacy advocates deeply concerned.

Companies seeking to tap the commercial potential of these technologies are installing wireless location systems in vehicles, hand-held computers, cell phones - even watchbands. Scientists have developed a chip that can be inserted beneath the skin, so that a person's location can be pinpointed anywhere.

One early user of this technology is David Hancock, the owner of a small company in Dallas that installs automobile alarms. Mr. Hancock uses a wireless tracking service to monitor his fleet of six Dodge Dakota pickup trucks, and the equipment alerted him recently when one of his trucks turned up in the parking lot of the Million Dollar Saloon, a strip club.

"When I signed up for this service I told my guys, `Big Brother's keeping an eye on you, and I'm Big Brother,' " Mr. Hancock said. "After I fired that one fellow, you bet they all believed me."

These technologies have become one of the fastest-growing areas of the wireless communications industry. The market for location-based services is already estimated at nearly $600 million and is forecast to approach $5 billion within three years, according to IDC, a technology research company.

A federal effort to make it easier to pinpoint the location of people making emergency 911 calls from mobile phones means that by next year cell phones sold in the United States will be equipped with advanced wireless tracking technology.

Various plans already under way include alerting cell phone users when they approach a nearby McDonald's, telling them which items are on sale, or sending updates to travelers about hotel vacancies or nearby restaurants with available tables. One Florida company wants to provide parents with wireless watchbands that they can use to keep track of their children.

But while the commercial prospects for wireless location technology may be intriguing, and the social benefits of better mobile 911 service are undisputed, privacy-rights advocates are worried.

"By allowing location-based services to proliferate, we're opening the door to a new realm of privacy abuses," said James X. Dempsey, senior staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology. "What if your insurer finds out you're into rock climbing or late- night carousing in the red-light district? What if your employer knows you're being treated for AIDS at a local clinic? The potential is there for inferences to be drawn about you based on knowledge of your whereabouts."

Until recently, location-based services belonged more in the realm of science fiction than to commerce. In the 1999 novel "All Tomorrow's Parties" by William Gibson, the writer who coined the term "cyberspace" back in the 1980's, malfunctioning eyeglasses with location- based technology suddenly flash up street maps of Rio de Janeiro just when other, more crucial information is needed.

And although satellite-based Global Positioning System technology has been commercially available for some time for airplanes, boats, cars and hikers, companies have only recently begun manufacturing G.P.S. chips that can be embedded in wireless communications devices. G.P.S. uses satellite signals to determine geographic coordinates that indicate where the person with the receiving device is situated.

Real-life improvements in the technology have come largely from research initiatives by start-up companies in the United States, Canada and Europe, and from large companies like I.B.M., which recently formed a "pervasive computing" division to focus on wireless technologies like location-based services.

"Location technology is a natural extension of e-business," said Michel Mayer, general manager for pervasive computing at I.B.M. "It's no surprise that a whole new ecology of small companies has been formed to focus on making it all more precise."

For instance, Peter Zhou helped to create a chip called Digital Angel that could be implanted beneath human skin, enabling his company to track the location of a person almost anywhere using a combination of satellites and radio technology.

After all, he reasoned, wouldn't the whereabouts of an Alzheimer's patient be important to relatives? Wouldn't the government want to keep track of paroled convicts? Wouldn't parents want to know where their children are at 10 p.m., or 11 p.m., or any hour of the day?

A review of Digital Angel's commercial potential, though, revealed concern over the possibility of privacy abuses. So Professor Zhou, the chief scientist for Applied Digital Solutions, a company in Palm Beach, Fla., that makes embedded devices for tracking livestock, altered his plans for Digital Angel, which is about the size of a dime, so that instead of being implanted it could be affixed to a watchband or a belt.

"Embedding technology in people is too controversial," said Professor Zhou, a scholarly man who used to be a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. "But that doesn't mean a system capable of tracking people wherever they go won't have great value."

While Digital Angel is still in the prototype stage, Applied Digital Solutions is planning to make it commercially available later this year. That Professor Zhou found himself in the middle of the privacy debate is no surprise, given the growing interest in location-based services. Through the use of existing cellular communications technology or the Global Positioning System, researchers' ability to track wireless devices more precisely is growing.

Some of the world's largest wireless carriers, like Verizon Wireless, Vodafone of Britain and NTT DoCoMo of Japan, are promoting the technology, in addition to dozens of small companies in the United States and Europe.

The SignalSoft Corporation, based in Boulder, Colo., develops software that allows tourists or business travelers to use their mobile phones to obtain information on the closest restaurants or hotels in a given city, while Cell-Loc Inc., a Canadian company, is already testing a wireless service in Austin, Tex., and in Calgary, Alberta, that, after determining a caller's location, delivers detailed driving directions.

Some companies are even more ambitious. Webraska, a French company that recently secured $50 million in financing from investors in the United States and Europe, plans to map every urban area in the world and allow these maps to be retrieved in real time on wireless devices.

Yet while businesses around the world seek to improve the quality of location-based services, the biggest impetus behind the advancement of the technology has come from the federal government, through its effort to improve the precision of locating wireless 911 emergency calls. Nearly a third of the 150 million 911 calls made last year came from cell phones, according to the National Emergency Number Association.

With the number of wireless users growing, the Federal Communications Commission has determined that by the end of this year carriers will need to begin equipping either cell phones or their communications networks with technology that would allow authorities to determine the location of most callers to within 300 feet, compared with current systems that can locate them within about 600 feet.

Verizon Wireless and Western Wireless have chosen to develop a network-based system that pinpoints the signal on a handset using the existing cellular network to determine the location, while other carriers including Sprint PCS, Alltel and Nextel favor handsets equipped with G.P.S. chips. Supporters of the initiative, called E-911 for "enhanced 911," expect the technology's precision to be even better than the federally mandated 300-foot radius.

"If your cell phone is on while you're driving, we'll be able to tell which intersection you're at," said Mark Flolid, executive vice president of SignalSoft, a company that developed early versions of E-911 systems for wireless phone companies in Europe.

While the E-911 initiative has driven wireless carriers in the United States to improve their location technology, industry groups have started to grapple with privacy issues. The Wireless Advertising Association, a group of carriers, advertising agencies and device manufacturers, encourages companies to allow consumers to choose whether they want location-based services. The association will endorse companies that adhere to the policy.

And, late last year, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a Washington group that represents several hundred wireless companies, submitted a proposal for privacy guidelines for location-based wireless services to the Federal Communications Commission.

The principles of the proposal suggested that companies inform each customer about the collection and use of location-sensitive information; provide customers with the opportunity to consent to the collection of location information before it is used; ensure the security of any information collected; and provide uniform rules and privacy expectations so consumers are not confused when they travel in different regions or use different kinds of location- based services.

"People are justifiably concerned with the rapidity with which this technology is being deployed," said Albert Gidari, a lawyer with the Seattle firm of Perkins Coie, who advised the industry association on the creation of the proposal. "We need to assure them that there is no conspiracy to use this information in an underhanded way."

---

U.S. Thinks Agent Revealed Tunnel at Soviet Embassy

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN with LOWELL BERGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/national/04SPY.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, March 3 - The United States government constructed a secret tunnel under the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington to eavesdrop, but federal investigators now believe the operation was betrayed by the F.B.I. agent who was arrested last month on charges of spying for Moscow, current and former United States intelligence and law enforcement officials say.

The secret tunnel operation, which officials indicated was run jointly by the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, was part of a broad United States effort to eavesdrop on and track Soviet - later Russian - facilities and personnel operating in the United States.

Spokesmen at the F.B.I. and the White House declined to comment on the tunnel operation today.

Current and former United States officials estimated that the tunnel construction and related intelligence-gathering activities cost several hundred million dollars, apparently making it the most expensive clandestine intelligence operation that the agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, is accused of betraying. The tunnel was designed to aid in a sophisticated operation to eavesdrop on communications and conversations in the Soviet Embassy complex, which was built in the 1970's and 1980's but was not fully occupied until the 1990's.

In the 1980's, at about the time the tunnel operation was under way, the United States and the Soviet Union argued bitterly over their respective embassies in Moscow and Washington, with the United States accusing Moscow of spying at both locations.

The government has never publicly disclosed the existence of the tunnel operation. But in an F.B.I. affidavit in the Hanssen case, the government stated that Mr. Hanssen "compromised an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States government." Officials said that was a reference to the tunnel operation and related intelligence activities.

The government charges that Mr. Hanssen, a 25-year veteran of the F.B.I. and a counterintelligence expert, volunteered to spy for Moscow in October 1985. He was arrested on Feb. 18 in a Virginia park after leaving a package containing classified documents for his Russian handlers, according to the affidavit.

It could not be determined when the government believes Mr. Hanssen betrayed the tunnel operation and related intelligence-gathering activities targeting the embassy complex. Nor are many details known about how and when the operation was mounted, or whether it ever succeeded in collecting useful intelligence.

But the emerging belief that the tunnel program had been compromised was a factor in the government's decision to keep looking for additional spies after the 1994 arrest of the C.I.A. officer Aldrich H. Ames, according to current and former officials.

A secret investigative team was established to identify the source of a series of damaging intelligence losses, including the tunnel and related activities against the embassy, that could not be explained by Mr. Ames. Other unexplained intelligence losses - including other technical intelligence programs, as well as the 1989 disclosure to Moscow that the F.B.I. was conducting an espionage investigation of a State Department official, Felix S. Bloch - also prompted officials to begin a new mole hunt, officials added.

That mole-hunt team played a critical role in the counterespionage probe that led to Mr. Hanssen's arrest, United States officials said. It was a successor to an earlier C.I.A. mole-hunt team that helped uncover Mr. Ames. The tunnel was built under Moscow's embassy complex on Washington's Wisconsin Avenue, a hilltop location known as Mount Alto, officials said.

The Soviets were prevented for years from fully occupying the embassy complex as a result of a long- running dispute with the United States about charges that the American Embassy in Moscow had been thoroughly bugged. Soviet diplomats occupied apartments there in 1979, and Congressional critics charged that they were using those buildings as espionage outposts. In the mid- 1980's, some American lawmakers claimed that the hilltop location would give the Soviets an edge in intelligence gathering against United States government buildings in Washington. The new embassy complex was not fully occupied until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the American intelligence offensive against the embassy remained hidden from public view even as the United States publicly protested a Soviet campaign to lace the new United States Embassy in Moscow with listening devices. Construction on the new American Embassy in Moscow was halted in 1985 after the Reagan administration protested that Soviet construction crews were imbedding eavesdropping equipment within the walls of the new chancery building. The disclosure that the United States believed that the new embassy was bugged sparked Congressional hearings and criticism of the handling of the matter by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ultimately, after considering tearing the embassy down, the United States flew in American construction workers and lopped off the top two floors and replaced them with two new secure floors before finally occupying the new facility.

The United States operation against the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, like the Soviet bugging of the United States Embassy complex, was designed to eavesdrop on electronic communications and conversations inside the facility. F.B.I. agents were secretly placed in critical jobs in some of the key contractors hired by the Soviets, according to an individual knowledegable about the planning of the operation. That individual said that bugging the building involved the use of secret technology developed by the intelligence community to pick up sounds inside a large building.

The tunnel operation against the Soviet complex, designed to tap into electronic communications inside the embassy facility, is just one of many similar clandestine technical operations run by the United States intelligence community, both during and since the cold war. And, like the embassy operation, many of those other operations were eventually compromised by spies.

In the 1950's, the C.I.A. dug a tunnel into East Berlin in order to tap into Soviet telephone lines. But George Blake, a British intelligence officer who was then a spy for Moscow, is believed to have betrayed the operation to the Soviets.

In the 1970's, the United States Navy used submarines to tap into Soviet undersea communications cables. In 1972, the Navy tapped into an undersea cable used by the Soviet Navy in the Pacific, largely in hopes of gaining intelligence about the locations of Soviet ballistic missile submarines. In 1979, the Navy began a similar operation in the Barents Sea to tap into a communications line that went to and from the headquarters of the Soviet Union's biggest fleet.

In 1980, Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency employee, compromised the Pacific cable tap operation by alerting the Soviets to the operation. But Mr. Pelton, who was arrested in 1985 on espionage charges, is not believed to have known about the Barents Sea operation, which continued for years afterward.

The C.I.A. also conducted a secret operation to tap into a communications line outside Moscow. Code- named TAW, that cable-tapping operation continued for several years in the early 1980's. But it is believed to have been compromised by Edward Lee Howard, a C.I.A. case officer who was fired from his job in 1983 and later began to spy for Moscow. Mr. Howard defected to Moscow in 1985. Mr. Ames may also have betrayed the TAW operation. He also apparently compromised a technical operation code-named Absorb, in which the C.I.A. hid sophisticated nuclear detection equipment on a rail car crossing the Soviet Union in an attempt to identify the locations of Soviet nuclear warheads.

Indeed, the record on the value of the intelligence gleaned from many of these high-cost technical intelligence programs is mixed, current and former officials say.

In fact, a former United States intelligence official said he was not certain that the Soviet Embassy tunnel operation ever actually produced any intelligence.

Another official suggested that technical problems prevented the operation from becoming productive. That official suggested that the tunnel was both compromised by a spy, and also failed on technical grounds.

---

Spy may have revealed embassy tunnel

03/04/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-04-hanssen.htm

NEW YORK (AP) - The U.S. government built a secret tunnel under the Soviet Embassy in Washington but its existence may have been betrayed by an FBI agent arrested two weeks ago and accused of spying for Moscow, The New York Times reported in its Sunday Internet edition.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials indicated the tunnel operation was run jointly by the FBI and the National Security Agency, as part of a sophisticated eavesdropping operation used to track Soviet Union - and later Russian - facilities and personnel in the United States.

Spokesmen for the FBI and the White House declined to comment on the operation in interviews with The Times.

Former agent Robert Philip Hanssen, a 25-year FBI veteran and counterintelligence expert, was arrested last month and charged with spying for Moscow since 1985.

The government has never publicly disclosed the existence of the tunnel operation, but an FBI affidavit filed in the Hanssen case states Hanssen "compromised an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States government."

Officials told The Times that was a reference to the tunnel operation and related intelligence activities.

The operation is estimated to have cost several hundred million dollars. FBI agents infiltrated the Soviety Embassy under the guise of contractors, an individual familiar with the planning of the operation told the newspaper.

The embassy complex, which was built in the 1970s and 1980s, was not fully occupied until the 1990s as a result of a long-running dispute with the United States about charges that U.S. embassy buildings in Moscow had been bugged.

The new embassy complex was not fully occupied until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government arrested CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994, and when he was not able to explain a series of damaging intelligence loses, it is believed the investigation intensified and ultimately led to Hanssen.

-------- terrorism

Weapon of Choice:
How Terrorists Use the Web

Monday February 26
Technology News
Yahoo News
By Jay Lyman,
www.NewsFactor.com
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nf/20010226/tc/7731_1.html

The same advantages the Internet and advanced technology bring to the general public and to business -- speed, security and global linkage -- are helping international terrorist groups organize their deadly and disruptive activities.

"The Internet and e-mail provide the perfect vehicles for these groups to communicate with each other, to spread their message, to raise money and to launch cyberattacks," iDefense director of intelligence for special projects Ben Venzke told NewsFactor Network.

A recent report from U.S. officials indicates that terrorists' use of the Web for communication and coordination through the use of encrypted messages is widespread, with numerous sites -- many of which are unaware of the use to which they are being put -- serving as conduits for terrorist conspiracies.

Government and private Internet security firms are doing their best to keep up with the terrorists, but the task is made more difficult by advancing technologies available to groups bent on targeting the U.S. and its citizens, allies and businesses.

Terror Tool

Security officials in government and private industry agree that the Web is heavily used by terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and other extremist groups, including Middle East terror organizations Hezbollah and Hamas.

"Terrorists use the Web mostly for propaganda and for information exchange," said Matthew Devost, founding director of the Terrorism Research Center. "If you move beyond the Web, terrorist organizations do use information technology as a very viable and secure communication mechanism."

Devost told NewsFactor that despite the Internet's viability as an economic medium, it has proven somewhat insecure for commercial transactions.

He said the Web could help facilitate attacks by terrorist groups on not only the Internet economy, but on power, transportation and other systems that rely on information that is linked to the Web.

'No Limit'

Terrorists are beginning to use the Web in interesting ways, Vigilinx director of intelligence Jerry Freese told NewsFactor.

"There's really no limit to it," Freese said. "Anywhere you can send an e-mail with an audio or graphics file is fair game."

Freese, whose security company provides secure servers, intruder detection and security audits, said terrorist cells around the world use the Internet for scheduling, meeting and organizing.

"We see the Web as a terrorism-assistance tool that allows them to do things in secrecy," he said, referring to encrypted messages. "The thing is, it can originate from anywhere. The Web, of course, is ubiquitous."

Freese said steganography -- putting encrypted messages in electronic files -- is widely used by terrorist groups. A recent government report indicated that terrorists have been hiding pictures and maps of targets in sports chat rooms, on pornographic bulletin boards and on Web sites.

Reliance on the Net

Despite their ongoing efforts to cripple parts of the Web, disrupt infrastructure systems such as electrical power or steal money and information from government and businesses, terrorists have a vested interest in keeping the Internet working.

"It's a very good tool for them," Freese told NewsFactor, "so they don't want to disrupt the flow of the Web; rather, they'll target specific companies that are working with or are sympathetic to their enemies."

Rogue Rights

While law enforcement officials are aware of terrorists' use of the Internet, they cannot monitor Web sites for both logistical and legal reasons, according to spokesperson Steve Berry of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations' National Infrastructure Protection Center.

"However repugnant to our perception and to the general public and law enforcement their Web site or use of it might be, that does not give us the authority to block them," Berry told NewsFactor. "That's free speech. That's the country we live in." Venzke, whose company tracks Web-based threats for Fortune 500 companies and government, said law enforcement is also limited by national culture and geography. The Web offers entry into any country from anywhere, and with so many points linked together, terrorist activity is often impossible to track.

"How do you force an [Internet service provider] halfway around the world, which may not be friendly to you to begin with, to shut down a Web site?" Venzke asked.

Predicting Protection

The rapid advancement of technology makes it hard to fight terrorists, who, experts agree, are adept at using the Internet and other advanced technology. Bin Laden's al Qaida and other terrorist groups have reportedly used encryption programs available free on the Web, as well more powerful anti-spy software purchased on the open market.

The Terrorism Research Center's Devost said that despite a number of valid efforts to combat terrorists, targeted countries and businesses are not prepared.

"Most nations, and most companies, are not being diligent with regard to addressing information security concerns and fortifying their security posture," said Devost.

Counter Strike

Security experts claim they are getting better at detecting and decoding terrorist communiques, but more awareness and information sharing is needed.

"Right now, it's very hard to detect where these messages are coming from and what their intent is," said Freese. "Information exchange is a key issue here. We have a lot of repositories of information, but it isn't shared. The government is trying to collate information from private and government sources to coordinate defenses."

Devost agrees, adding that despite increased efforts to keep tabs on terrorists, vulnerabilities are on the rise.

"Governments are making great progress in understanding the way these groups are utilizing technology," Devost said, "[but] while we are making progress, it is not enough."

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In Embassy Bombing Trial,
Prosecutors Read bin Laden Poetry

March 4, 2001
Associated Press
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/world/04TERR.html?pagewanted=all

Think of a trial as a dysfunctional family reunion. Mom, Dad and Crazy Uncle Eddie are all packed in a room, and everyone has to get along.

There is, of course, one major difference between family gatherings and trials. The folks at a reunion get to go home when Labor Day weekend ends. But the folks at a trial have to stay much longer, particularly if it is the marathon embassy bombings trial.

The trial, which will enter its fifth week in Federal District Court tomorrow, concerns the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998. Four men, Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, have been charged with joining forces with Osama bin Laden in a global terrorist conspiracy that eventually led to the attacks, which killed more than 200 people.

Last Tuesday, there was a little fraying of family nerves as one of Mr. El-Hage's lawyers, Sam A. Schmidt, complained to Judge Leonard B. Sand that his frequent objections were being met with annoyance from the bench.

"Your Honor has chastised me, perhaps unintentionally, in front of the jury in a manner I do not believe the jury should be seeing," Mr. Schmidt said while the jurors were on a break. "I ask Your Honor, if Your Honor indeed disagrees with me, that you simply overrule my objection."

Judge Sand is an avuncular man - wise, not particularly harsh, mostly good-natured but sometimes cranky, and occasionally funny. He seemed a little baffled by Mr. Schmidt's concerns. "I really don't know what to say about that," Judge Sand said from the bench. "I don't believe I chastise you."

A moment later, he went on: "Indeed, one of the, I think, relatively few bright spots about the trial is that there has been relatively little bickering among counsel or occasion for me to make comments."

Which was all it took for the lawyers to make some comments of their own.

"In my own defense," said Frederick H. Cohn, who represents Mr. al-'Owhali, "remember this is a capital trial and not a Victorian tea."

(Mr. Cohn had tested out this very remark one day before the trial began. He apparently had it stashed away, waiting to use it in open court.)

Soon, one of Mr. Mohamed's lawyers, David Ruhnke, rose to his feet as well. "Your Honor, not to jump into this too far," he said, "but there has been some annoyance expressed in the tone of voice that Your Honor used in ruling on objections, particularly Mr. Schmidt's."

The lawyerly wagons had been circled, but Judge Sand reacted with restraint.

"If my tone of voice is not my usual amiable, genial tone of voice," he said, "why then I apologize."

Fishing in Deeper Waters

He was a regular guy caught up in a trial of international intrigue and terror.

Kibarua M. Mjitta hands out fishing permits for a living. He works as an inspector for the fisheries department in the tiny town of Kilifi on the Kenyan coast. He was called as a witness in the bombings trial last week to testify about a fishing boat that one defendant, Mr. Odeh, owned.

Having spent the last 13 years working out of a tiny building on a quiet beach, Mr. Mjitta looked absolutely star-struck to have suddenly landed in the halls of a Manhattan court. On the witness stand Monday in Courtroom 318, he faced more than a dozen lawyers. He was surrounded by overhead projectors, monitors, laptops and a sophisticated audio system with speakers mounted on all the walls.

Mr. Mjitta's testimony showed he is a proud man, a man who loves his job. With the dignity of a prince, he told the jury that a permit to catch fish costs 500 Kenyan shillings, about $6. A permit to transport fish costs 1,000 Kenyan shillings, he said.

And when Mr. Odeh's lawyer, Edward D. Wilford, asked Mr. Mjitta whether he recognized the picture of the beachfront shack projected on a monitor, Mr. Mjitta's eyes lighted up and he smiled broadly. "Yeah," he said, "that's my office!"

The Poetry of bin Laden

Mr. bin Laden, it turns out, is a prolific author.

Last week, the prosecution read aloud one of his long-winded fatwas, or decrees, denouncing the American military presence in Saudi Arabia.

On Friday, the Arabic newspaper Al Hayat published one of his lesser-known works: a poem about the attack on the American destroyer Cole, which was bombed in Aden, Yemen, in October, killing 17 sailors.

Al Hayat reported that Mr. bin Laden read the poem aloud at a recent wedding party for his son, Muhammad, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. According to the newspaper, it goes like this:

Your brothers in the East prepared their mounts and Kabul has prepared itself and the battle camels are ready to go.

A destroyer: even the brave fear its might. It inspires horror in the harbor and in the open sea.

She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might. To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion.

Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves, disappearing and reappearing in view.

---

To Deter Terror,
Show No Mercy

March 4, 2001
New York Times
HOWARD C. KAVALER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/opinion/L04TER.html

I was appalled by Jessica Stern's naïve willingness to spare terrorists from the death penalty (Op-Ed, Feb. 28). I dare say she would sing a different tune had she searched in vain for her spouse, as I did, through the rubble of the decimated United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, two and a half years ago. It is imperative that a clarion and unequivocal message be sent around the world that the ultimate penalty will be paid by those who kill any Americans serving our diplomatic missions abroad.

To do otherwise would not only demean the memory of all those heroes and heroines who were murdered on Aug. 7, 1998, but would also be an abdication of our nation's commitment to the rule of law, a matter that Ms. Stern believes is "our most powerful weapon against terrorists."

-------- activists

Activists say incinerator, not site, should close
Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free is in 'watchdog phase'

03/04/01
Idaho State Journal
Emily Jones
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpID=669&NewsID=57113&show=localnews&om=1

POCATELLO - Despite what many believe, Erik Ringelberg and the Jackson, Wyo.-based Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free environmental group do not want to see the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory shut down.

Ringelberg said he does not even mind nuclear projects.

"We have no problem with the government operating a facility out there," he said. "We have no interest in shutting them down."

Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free was originally designed in opposition to a hazardous waste incinerator at INEEL, but now its members are dedicating most of their time to making sure regulations are followed and the research site remains safe.

"We've slowly entered into the watchdog phase," Ringelberg said.

The organization spends most of its time studying air quality issues. Other organizations, such as the Snake River Alliance and the Environmental Defense Institute, watch other areas of the INEEL.

Ringelberg and other members of Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free request documents through the Freedom of Information Act, and talk with current and former employees to get information about the site.

The recently updated lawsuit between two former environmental compliance officers and former site contractors is a step in the right direction, Ringelberg said, but there is more work to be done.

"I don't think it will be a victory unless (the compliance officers) win," he said.

Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free is also working with Clint Jensen, an employee who has sued the Department of Energy, saying his work environment at the site made him sick. Ringelberg said there are now 14 people who have come forward with similar allegations.

"That really opened up the door and people started coming forward," he said.

---

Students work to fight hate

03/04/01
Idaho State Journal
Kurt Friedemann
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpID=669&NewsID=57117&show=localnews&om=1

Ashley Schei came to the Idaho Faith Communities anti-hate workshop alone on Saturday.

She was there because her Spanish teacher asked her to go, but she was also there to learn. Schei wasn't soaking up information about hate groups and how she could fight them for her class. She was doing it for herself.

The 16-year-old Highland High School sophomore participated in the break-out group near the end of the seminar that dealt with hate on the Internet and what people can do to combat it. Her group was one of three set up near the end of the three-hour workshop called:

Overcoming Hate: Reclaiming Our Voices. The workshop was funded through grants by the Greenville Foundation and the Greg Carr Foundation. It was run by the Rev. Peter Southwell-Sander and intended to help community members deal with hate groups and their literature.

Schei's group talked about how young people can guard against hate groups' messages and how they can fight back.

Here were some of the group's suggestions the group came up with:

More interaction between high schools in Pocatello.

Interrupting "hate speech".

Creating "no tolerance" policies to deal with discrimination and hate.

Holding peer-to-peer discussions.

In the other groups, people talked about either taking the anti-hate message to the masses or creating a community rapid-response network to deal with hate crimes and propaganda. Some Pocatello neighborhoods were recently inundated by hate-based literature supplied by the National Alliance, a well-known white supremacy group based in West Virginia.

In the group committed to getting an anti-hate message to the public, people suggested:

Distributing a newsletter.

Holding short sermons.

Contacting church leadership for help.

Using the Internet.

Working with the Parent-Teacher Association.

Using community bulletin boards.

The third group, committed to creating a rapid-response network talked about:

Developing a phone tree.

Creating safe places for victims of hate or bias.

Encouraging public officials to speak out.

Community policing.

Neighborhood watch.

Creating slogans, stickers, posters and logos that all suggest people don't want hate or bias in their neighborhood.

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China to Release Dissident, Human Rights Group Says

March 4, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Dissident.html

BEIJING (AP) -- China has granted early release to a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who was rearrested and sentenced in 1996 to five years imprisonment on hooliganism charges, a human rights group said Sunday.

Guo Haifeng was released Feb. 5 from prison in central Henan province, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. It speculated that the release may have been designed to boost Beijing's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Citing human rights concerns, some critics have urged the International Olympic Committee not to pick Beijing when it chooses from five 2008 candidate cities in July.

The Hong Kong-based group said Guo was due for release in August. But that appeared to contradict previous accounts of his case.

Guo may have been eligible for release in May, five years from his May 1996 disappearance from a roundup of dissidents before the anniversary of the military's quelling of the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4, 1989.

He was sentenced Nov. 21, 1996, in his hometown of Anyang, 300 miles south of Beijing, according to a 1997 report by the official Xinhua News Agency. It claimed he seduced six women with talk of love or buying houses, leading to the charge of hooliganism.

Guo was first jailed after the 1989 protests. Accused of trying to set fire to an armored vehicle, he was sentenced in 1991 to four years in jail for counterrevolutionary sabotage. He was released on parole in 1993, as Beijing was bidding for the 2000 Olympics, which it eventually lost by two votes to Sydney.

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