------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Foreign-policy stew: Too many chefs in the kitchen?
Secret U.S. Study Concludes Taiwan Needs New Arms
Pentagon to Push Ship for Taiwan
Nuclear Tibet, a double hazard for India
We've Lost That Allied Feeling
Naval review backs arms sale to Taiwan
Slobo Surrenders (No Foolin')
Secret study: Taiwan needs new arms
UCS defends private utilities' nuke plants
Shipment of recycled uranium studied by DOE
Paying Our Debts
Battle over 'monster laser' heats up
New Mexico
Budget Trims Take Parts of Clinton Vision

MILITARY
U.S. Navy plane collides with Chinese fighter
U.S. Plane Makes Emergency Landing in China
States
Astronauts Say Millionaire Tourist Is Welcome
Milosevic Should Face Trial by Hague Tribunal, Bush Says
Army Faces Fierce Fight on Historic Hawaii Valley
Arizona

OTHER
EU leaders declare Kyoto alive
Bush Angers Europe by Eroding Pact on Warming
A Climate Policy That Works
In a Crisis, Vegetables, Not Beef, for British
The Asbestos President
Two Crises: Cows and Current
Bush environmental critics wildly hyperbolic
States
Who Regulates the Regulations?
Summit police to get plastic bullets
Ohio
Lawsuits filed against prisoner-transport firm
Satellite photo provides first new look at Cuba
U.S. Expects China to Return Plane, Crew
China Blames U.S. Plane for Mid-Air Collision
What Did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson's Father?
Detained in China
Trial Aims to Show Bin Laden Plan to Kill Americans
Even in Terror's Path, Batteries Die and Love Notes Flourish

ACTIVISTS
Protesters take to tracks ahead of nuclear train
Animals Could Be Buried Alive
Nuclear Train Protesters Removed
Green Party Report on Foot and Mouth
Chemical Industry Archives
Barring of activist deplored as sign of crackdown
Israeli troops kill protesters
Workers protest lay offs in Seoul
Demonstrators Demand Changes in Plan to Expand Con Ed Plant
Kansas
eggs and teargas
Discover Dialogue: Arjun Makhijani The Nuke Slayer


-------- NUCLEAR

Foreign-policy stew: Too many chefs in the kitchen?

Bergen Record
Sunday, April 1, 2001
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
http://www.bergen.com/editorials/luttwak3020010401.htm

ARE WE HEADING for a foreign policy train wreck?

The decision of the Bush administration to cool relations with Russia can be explained in rational terms, as retaliation for President Vladimir V. Putin's decision to sell weapons to Iran. The decision to cool relations with China can also be explained as retaliation for Chinese military technology sales to Iraq in violation of the U.N. embargo and specific promises to the United States.

Finally, the decision to stop endorsing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's opening to North Korea under his "sunshine policy" can be explained with the argument that North Korean President Kim Jong Il keeps trying to obtain more aid by threatening to resume ballistic missile tests -- straight blackmail.

What cannot be explained in the context of a rational foreign policy is that all three things were done at once.

U.S. leverage on China is enhanced by good relations with Russia and vice versa. To quarrel with both countries at the same time reduces American influence on both countries while increasing their inclination to collaborate in ways that hurt American interests. The Chinese threat to Taiwan, for example, has been increased by its recent acquisition of Russian Sukhoi jet fighters and Sovremenny cruisers armed with missiles effective against U.S. aircraft carriers. It does not make sense for Washington to encourage more intense military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

The same is true on the diplomatic front. The Russians and Chinese have frequently disagreed with U.S. foreign policy, but each has preferred to work out its own compromise arrangements with Washington rather than to jointly collaborate against it. For example, when the Russians and the Chinese vehemently opposed the 1999 Kosovo war, they did so separately, without seeking to combine forces against Washington.

As for North Korea, it remains the single most dangerous real-life military threat for the United States. In an all-out war, its eventual defeat is certain, but with thousands of U.S. troops within range of the huge mass of North Korean artillery and with Seoul exposed to heavy rocket barrages, initial losses could be severe. The United States therefore has the strongest possible reasons to support the glacially slow, still tentative but hopeful detente between the two Korean states, for example by implementing Bill Clinton's promise to remove trade prohibitions.

That becomes even more urgent if Washington's relations with Russia and China are set to deteriorate -- both have done much to restrain North Korea. During his recent visit to North Korea, Putin tried hard to persuade Kim Jong Il to renounce missile development as categorically as he has renounced the development of nuclear weapons. Moscow's priority is to rehabilitate its distressed far eastern provinces, for which South Korean investment is urgently needed.

Likewise, in spite of all the contentions between the United States and China, starting with Taiwan, the Chinese have been very cooperative on Korea. They have pressed Kim Jong Il to liberalize while developing cordial relations with South Korea, and without trying to undermine its alliance with the United States.

It follows that while good relations with Moscow and Beijing favor U.S. interests in Korea, bad relations with both call for an intensified American detente with North Korea to offset the loss of their restraining influence. There is nothing complicated about any of this, it is realpolitik at its simplest: the rational use of power to pursue obvious interests.

So why is the highly experienced Bush team breaking all the rules? The short answer is that there is no Bush "team" but only the contending impulses of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. All are highly experienced, and each one of them could devise an effective foreign policy if left alone to do the job. As it is, their increasingly overt competition for influence over a rather passive president is badly distorting U.S. foreign policy.

Rice -- whose staff has been reduced -- is squeezed between Powell's immense prestige at the State Department and Cheney's unprecedented power, which is backed by a much-expanded foreign-policy staff. So she is seeking Pentagon support by staking out the most hard-line position on every issue. "Realism" is her slogan, an academic term much used in the Cold War.

Rumsfeld is Cheney's ally first of all, but his personal standing in Washington requires presidential approval of the national missile defense, which is strenuously opposed by Russia and China, and which is justified above all by the North Korean missile threat. Therefore, Rumsfeld supports Rice against Powell, who is convinced that good relations with Russia and China are far more important than building a missile defense in the future.

As a former general, Powell knows that an operational system is many years in the future and evidently believes that the North Korean missile threat can be negotiated away long before then.

Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. This appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

To comment on this editorial, please email LettersToTheEditor@northjersey.com.

-------- china / taiwan

Secret U.S. Study Concludes Taiwan Needs New Arms

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/world/01TAIW.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 31 - A confidential review by United States naval officers has concluded that Taiwan needs a significant infusion of new weapons, including a sophisticated ship-borne radar system that China has put at the top of the list of arms it does not want Taiwan to have.

The assessment was carried out by officers from the United States Pacific Fleet, who visited Taiwan to assess its naval requirements in light of China's military buildup. While military factors are not the only consideration, the still secret review is an important element of the deliberations about whether to sell Taiwan the radar system, known as Aegis, and other naval weapons.

The decision on whether to sell naval, air force and army weapons, which President Bush is expected to make in the next few weeks, is one of the first major foreign policy tests for his administration and could set the tone of United States-Chinese relations for years to come.

China has bitterly opposed the sale of sophisticated weapons, which it fears will lead to a new degree of cooperation between Taiwan and the United States and buttress pro-independence sentiment on the island.

Beijing has singled out as particularly objectionable potential sales of three types of weapons: the Navy's Aegis, which China fears may provide the basis for an eventual antimissile defense and blunt China's missile threat to the island; the Army's advanced Patriot antimissile system known as PAC-3; and submarines, which China maintains are offensive weapons and which the United States has never before sold to Taiwan. Taiwan has sought to buy submarines as well as the Aegis and has also been in discussions about the new Patriot system.

In addition to citing a need for the Aegis system by 2010, the American naval officers who conducted the review concluded that Taiwan also needed the Kidd-class destroyer as a stopgap. And they cited the need for new submarines as well as an underwater sonar array to detect Chinese subs. Besides the naval review, similar studies have been carried out concerning other parts of Taiwan's military.

The pending decision on arms sales has split American China hands, including those in the Republican Party, putting pressure on Mr. Bush from both sides.

On one side are policy experts who say it would be foolish to pick a diplomatic fight with Beijing before the Bush administration has a chance to begin a dialogue with the leadership there. Washington's long-term interests, those experts say, are best served by finding a way to engage China, a nation of 1.3 billion people and a nuclear power with a growing economy.

On the other side are pro-Taiwan conservatives who insist that the United States has a moral obligation to safeguard Taiwan, a democratic nation of 22 million, from threats from the Communist government in Beijing. The conservatives also say that Washington should contain China's growing military power in Asia.

While there has been much discussion about China's growing force of short-range ballistic missiles, Beijing has also deployed new warplanes, destroyers, submarines, anti- ship missiles and surface-to-air missiles, many of which it bought from Russia. That has created a growing threat to Taiwan's aging fleet, whose role is to protect the island from attack and prevent a Chinese blockade.

The review of Taiwan's naval needs was begun during the Clinton administration. After Taiwan sought to buy four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis system, the Clinton administration deferred a decision and asked for a Pentagon assessment.

A team of officers from the United States' Pacific Fleet inspected Taiwan's navy. Their conclusions have circulated among officials in Washington and Taiwan and have served as the basis for a Pentagon report on "Taiwan naval modernization."

Experts familiar with the officers' review say it concludes that by 2010 Taiwan will need vessels equipped with long-range surface-to-air missiles, a sophisticated battle management system and a phased-array radar, which is the hallmark of the Aegis system.

The year 2010 is significant since it may take eight years or more to agree on a configuration of the Aegis system for Taiwan's navy, build the ship and integrate it into Taiwan's fleet, according to American military specialists.

As an interim step, the review suggests that Taiwan buy four Kidd- class destroyers, which had most elements of the top advanced air defense systems before the Aegis was developed. The United States developed the destroyers for the shah of Iran, but the sale was thwarted after the shah fell from power. The ships were later used by the United States Navy and were nicknamed "Ayatollah-class" destroyers, but they have since been retired.

In a recommendation that is certain to prove contentious, the United States officers concluded that Taiwan needed new submarines. Currently, Taiwan has only four, including two Guppies of World War II vintage which it uses for training and which cannot descend more than 150 feet.

The review found that Taiwan needed an underwater sonar array to alert it to the presence of Chinese submarines near its ports and coasts. It also describes a need for a new maritime aircraft to hunt for enemy submarines and conduct patrols, alluding to the American P-3, which Taiwan also wants to buy.

The Aegis has been the center of much of the public debate, which has not always been well informed. Unlike a rotating radar antenna, the Aegis's four stationary arrays search the sky electronically. The Aegis is designed to track more than 200 targets, including sea-skimming missiles, and to direct ship-fired missiles at them.

While much of the discussion concerns the Aegis's potential as an antimissile platform, the United States Navy has yet to develop a sea-based theater antimissile system. And even if it does develop such a missile defense, the type of Aegis being considered for sale to Taiwan would not be equipped with an interceptor able to counter the Chinese ballistic missiles directed at Taiwan.

The primary reason to sell the Aegis is to protect Taiwan's fleet, and upgrading the Aegis to serve as a theater missile defense would require a future decision in Washington. "There is a fantastic mythology about the Aegis," said Kurt Campbell, who led the Pentagon effort to improve Taiwan's defense ability during the Clinton administration.

Some liberal critics have complained that the Aegis would have an offensive capability because it would be armed with Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles. But the variant that the Pentagon is considering selling to Taiwan would not be equipped with those weapons.

There is something of a precedent for an Aegis sale. In an little known episode, the United States offered to sell a scaled-back version of the Aegis radar and command and control system in 1992 and install it on Taiwan's Perry-class frigates. Taiwan decided not to buy the system. That was before China continued its buildup in the Taiwan Strait and sought to pressure Taiwan by test-firing its ballistic missiles close to the island in 1995 and 1996.

This is not to say that there is unanimous agreement among military experts, including those in Taiwan, about the Aegis. Advocates of the system say it would provide Taiwan's fleet with the best possible protection against Chinese antiship missiles as well as a top-notch battle- management system. They say it could even serve as a backup command post in the event that Taiwan's land-based command posts were destroyed in missile strikes from China.

Critics cite its cost, $1 billion a ship, and the almost decade-long delivery time. And they question whether the Taiwanese Navy would be able to operate and maintain such a sophisticated weapons platform.

As the political debate over the Aegis has heated up, some analysts have speculated that the Kidd destroyers could be the basis of a compromise that would enable the White House to appear resolute while avoiding a rupture with Beijing.

By selling the destroyers, the Bush administration could argue that it was acting quickly to improve Taiwan's ability to defend its fleet. The administration could then put Beijing on notice that Washington would go ahead with the Aegis sale next year unless China curtailed its military buildup near Taiwan.

Trumpeting the value of the Kidds, Adm. Dennis Blair, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress this week that the Kidd had an effective air defense ability and could be delivered in only two years, a time frame some experts say is somewhat optimistic. He also noted that the Kidds and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have the same propulsion system, suggesting that it could provide Taiwan's navy with some useful training should it eventually acquire the Aegis- equipped Arleigh Burke.

Wu Shi-wen, Taiwan's defense minister, indicated that Taiwan's priority was still to acquire the Aegis because it had the potential to serve as a sea-based antimissile defense. In an interview, he declined to say if Taiwan would buy the Kidds, saying the matter required further study.

But other Taiwanese officials suggested that Taiwan would be willing to defer the Aegis purchase for a year if it was linked to a demand that China restrain its military buildup.

"We are still hopeful that our request for the Aegis will be granted this year," Dr. Tien Hung-mao, Taiwan's foreign minister, said in an interview. "But I think this is something we are willing to give the U.S. administration room to think about. In the end, if the Chinese fail to cooperate, the U.S. will be in a more justifiable position to say, hey, we gave you 12 months. You cannot just make unilateral demands without making any concessions."

Some experts say, however, that while the Kidd might do for now, it is no substitute for the Aegis, especially if the Chinese continue to increase their air, missile and naval forces nears Taiwan throughout the decade.

They say the Aegis's phased-array radar and combat system is capable of tracking and attacking a greater number of targets than Kidd's system, which uses an older, rotating radar.

The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers on which the Aegis is installed also carries more surface-to-air missiles than the Kidd and can fire more quickly. And if the United States succeeds in developing a theater sea-based antimissile defense and decides to provide it to Taiwan, it would use the Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke, not the Kidd, as a platform.

"The Kidds can handle the current Chinese antiship missile threat," said Norman Polmar, a naval analyst. "But the Chinese future missile capability will require a much more sophisticated defense like the Aegis."

----

Pentagon to Push Ship for Taiwan
But U.S. Likely Will Not Sell Aegis-Equipped Destroyer to Ally

Washington Post
Sunday, April 1, 2001; Page A19
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22087-2001Apr1?language=printer

The Pentagon is likely to recommend soon that Taiwan be sold aging Kidd-class destroyers but not sophisticated Aegis-equipped warships, a Defense Department official said yesterday.

After an extensive study of the Taiwanese military, U.S. military experts concluded that agreeing to sell ships that have Aegis radar systems, which can simultaneously track more than 100 aircraft and missiles, would not provide a near-term significant increase in Taiwan's ability to defend itself, but almost certainly would increase tensions between Washington and Beijing, the official said. That is because the Aegis ships would not be delivered for several years and Taiwan's Navy might not be prepared to adequately operate them even then, he said.

China has been especially worried by the Aegis system because it could give Taiwan the leading edge of a regional missile defense system aimed a blunting China's military strength. China has warned that U.S. sales of Aegis systems would increase the chance China would turn to military means to reunify Taiwan and the mainland.

President Bush discussed the Taiwan arms issue in general terms last month with Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen during Qian's visit here, but no specific weapons systems were discussed, U.S. officials said.

Bush is expected to make a decision within weeks on what arms to sell to Taiwan. The annual decision is always closely watched, especially this year, when it will be the Bush administration's first major signal of how it intends to deal with China. Administration officials have said that the two major foreign policy issues facing them are determining how to handle the decline of Russia and the rise of China.

"The recommendation hasn't gotten to his office," the official said yesterday in discussing the Pentagon recommendation to the White House.

The Pentagon position calling for the sale of Kidd-class ships is a kind of intermediate position, the official explained. It would enable Taiwan's navy to begin training in how to operate more modern radar and targeting systems than it currently has, he said. Then, he said, in the following years, the decision on whether to upgrade Taiwanese capabilities by selling the Aegis system would depend on Beijing's behavior. If it continued to act belligerently toward Taiwan, he implied, the Aegis sale would go through.

But for the moment, despite the introduction of new missiles along the Chinese coast near Taiwan, the official said, "The first worry is fleet air defense, not missiles." The Kidd-class destroyers are adequate to counter the current threat from China's aircraft, he implied.

------

Nuclear Tibet, a double hazard for India

New Delhi, April 1, 2001
Source: tehelka.com (India)

The massive nuclearisation of the Tibetan plateau undertaken by China and the reckless dumping of nuclear wastes bodes ill for India, reports Charu Singh

Silently but not entirely unnoticeably, the Tibetan plateau has been converted into one of the most highly militarised zones in the whole world. What is worrying is the massive nuclearisation of the Tibetan plateau undertaken by China on a grand scale. China's nuclear arsenal in Tibet now includes at least eight inter-continental ballistic missiles, 70 medium range and 20 inter-mediate range missiles. Other than this, Tibet also has 17 top-secret radar stations, 14 military airfields, and eight missile bases.

According to Nuclear Tibet, a report brought out by the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington DC, China has set up nuclear manufacturing centres at Dhashu in the Haibei Tibetan autonomous prefecture, and in Tongkhor in Amdo district. The Dhashu centre, located on Lake Kokonor, is China's primary nuclear weapons research and design facility constructed way back in the 1960s. Today it is known as the Northwest

Moreover, China continues to use obsolete shallow burial techniques for nuclear wastes in Tibet. Beijing has also been profiting from nuclear waste by recycling hazardous wastes from western countries in Tibet

Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy, or as the infamous "Ninth Academy." According to the report, this facility has remained one of the most secret organisations in China's entire nuclear programme. It has been the moving agency behind designing China's nuclear bombs through the 1970s. This facility also served as a research centre for detonation development, radiochemistry, and many other nuclear weapons related activities.

The first nuclear weapon reportedly assembled at the Ninth Academy was brought onto the Tibetan plateau in 1971, and stationed at the Tsaidam basin in northern Amdo. China currently possesses approximately 300-400 nuclear warheads, of which a large majority are reportedly stationed in Tibet. The report lists that these ground based nuclear missiles can be transported and fired from moving trailers, making it extremely difficult to count the exact number of missiles located in Tibet.

China has also established a nuclear missile deployment and launch site for DF-4 intercontinental missiles at the Tsaidam basin. The report mentions that the larger Tsaidam site has two missiles stored horizontally in tunnels near the launch pad. There is also a smaller Tsaidam site, details of which remain unknown. More DF-4 missiles are located at Delingha site in Amdo, 200 kms southeast of Larger Tsaidam.

Further, four CSS-4 missiles are also reported to be based in Delingha, in Amdo, with a range of 8000 miles, and capable of striking at the United States, Europe and Asia. Moreover, Chinese military presence in Tibet is conservatively estimated at 500,000 personnel. Data accumulated by the Tibetan government in exile indicates that there are six sub-military districts in the TAR sector alone, with two independent infantry divisions, six border defence regiments, five independent border defence battalions, three artillery regiments, three engineers' regiments, one main signal station and two signal regiments, three transport regiments and three independent transport battalions, four air force bases -the list is endless.

An obvious question that comes to mind is, what does this massive nuclear militarisation in Tibet mean for India, with many missiles deployed near the Indian border, within reach of major Indian cities? Why isn't there enough concern in New Delhi? An extract from a statement made by US representative Benjamin A Gilman, former chairman of the US Congress House International Relations Committee, indicates that, "among all China's military emplacements on the plateau, by far the most alarming for India is an extensive series of missile bases and nuclear installations carrying nuclear warheads in Tibet."

What is of even greater concern is recent evidence of nuclear and other hazardous waste being dumped on the Tibetan plateau. China's official Xinhua news agency admitted in 1995 that radioactive pollutants had been discharged from the Ninth Academy near the shores of the Lake Kokonor in a 20 sq metre dump. Radioactive wastes, liquid slurry and solid/gaseous wastes have been dumped by the Academy into a watershed draining into the Tsang Chu River. There are fears that the river Brahmaputra, originating in Tibet, may be carrying these pollutants into India's northeast.

Moreover, China continues to use obsolete shallow burial techniques for nuclear wastes in Tibet. Beijing has also been profiting from nuclear waste by recycling hazardous wastes from western countries in Tibet. All this has resulted in an abnormal rate of childbirth mortality, birth deformities, unprecedented illnesses among humans, and a high death rate among fish and animals. A high rate of cancer is also prevalent in the local population, due to the radioactive waste dumped in Tibet.

-------- europe

We've Lost That Allied Feeling
Bush's First Moves Aren't Winning Europe's Heart

Washington Post
Sunday, April 1, 2001
By Hugo Young
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20108-2001Mar31?language=printer

LONDON -- Last summer, months before Colin Powell became secretary of state, he paid a visit to Britain. Powell was in his "social" mode, as one of the world's most admired African Americans, and after touring black inner-city areas, he gave a talk on urban regeneration. Looking back on it, a senior member of Tony Blair's cabinet told me that the Powell social vision put him "well to the left of most European politicians." He sounded like a social democrat, even a socialist, which, since most of Europe is in the hands of left-of-center governments, was as reassuring as it was surprising. The omens looked good, in the event that Al Gore was defeated by George W. Bush, in whose administration Powell would surely serve.

There are still a few Europeans, notably in Britain, who put faith in this fellow feeling. But they're a tiny minority. Thursday's meeting between Bush and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was mannerly but cool. "We are happy to admit to you that we hold different opinions," Schroeder said afterward, referring to Bush's new position on climate change. Only two months into the Bush presidency, distance already colors the relationship between the two continents more than intimacy. If there's a social democrat in Washington, he carries little clout. European leaders are already discounting Powell's influence, both at home and, where it matters more, abroad. Bush's questionable mandate has evidently not played a moderating role on Republican attitudes, as Europe sees them, toward the world.

This has come as a surprise. A European Union ambassador told me he thought Bush's narrow majority surely portended a consensual approach to foreign policy. Innocent fellow, brought up on the coalition politics of this continent, where a tight result would automatically impose compromise! In the British Foreign Office, where several top people knewPowell from the Gulf War, much was staked on him as the guarantor of an internationalism they could understand. Instead they have heard the louder voices of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, with his assertion of a security tilt away from Europe and toward Asia, and Vice President Dick Cheney, sketching the silhouette of a more unilateralist United States.

We are promised a shake-up of half a century's priorities. An alienating, if not wholly disastrous, future seems to beckon.

This bleak perception is naturally denied on both sides. The day before Bush's inauguration, Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary, wrote with the usual drooling sycophancy about the unbreakable bonds between Europe -- especially Britain -- and the United States. Everyone routinely exalts the centrality of the NATO alliance, though in Macedonia we may learn more about its limits. But as the philosophical divide widens, the shared strategic interest narrows. Globalization, which supposedly cemented the triumph of liberal economics, has not imposed a single political orthodoxy. Watching Bush, Europe prepares itself for a tectonic shift in the Western world.

For a start, the president doesn't have an ideological ally anywhere in Europe. Unlike Ronald Reagan, for whom Margaret Thatcher was a pathfinder toward a new orthodoxy, Bush meets a Europe going in the opposite direction, with the collapse of the moderate European right. Nominal rightists remain in power. But Jacques Chirac, president of France, is a fading figure mired in scandal, and Spanish prime minister Jose-Maria Aznar, though a conservative, brings trade unions close to government.

So the new rightists in Washington and not-so-new leftists in Europe circle each other without a common anchorage. Real tension radiates from Europe over the Bush commitment to a missile defense, and from Washington over the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), aka the rapid reaction force. It ferments in philosophical ground that is marked by less agreement, and so potentially less trust, than there used to be. The two sides have complaints against each other that seem, as the geo-political plates shift, more likely to escalate than diminish.

Looking at Europe, the Bush administration appears to have struggled to bite its lip over therapid reaction force. It has not been outright hostile. But nor has it been helpful. Rumsfeld is prone to express doubts more than encouragement, muttering, as he did the other day to Winston Churchill's grandson, a Conservative former member of parliament, that it "could put at risk something that's very special" -- i.e. NATO as it has been arranged since the elder Churchill's day.

Europe has no intention of letting NATO be put at risk. The whole EU knows that France has an anti-American, or more precisely non-American, vision of European defense. What this means, in the words of the former British defense chief Gen. Charles Guthrie, who was at the heart of negotiating ESDP, is that France needs constant watching. But it doesn't mean that a version of NATO that Washington cannot tolerate is bound to evolve. Yet that is how Europe is hearing many Bush people talk.

In February, Bush himself told Blair that the rapid reaction force did not threaten NATO -- a view that Cheney and Rumsfeld have since suggested may not be the U.S. position. Whom are we to believe? Is this an early warning shot from the still uninitiated, or muscle-flexing to put Europe in its place?

European leaders are realists -- and much has changed since Bill Clinton, whom many admired as a political polymath, left the White House. To those who engaged with him in the mysterious discourses of the Third Way -- from Blair in Britain to Schroeder in Germany, Prime Minister Antonio Gutteres of Portugal, and cohorts of the Italian left -- Clinton will be remembered as the first U.S. president heard talking about the very European concept of "social justice."

What matters now, though, is that what disappointed them in the Clinton years seems likely to get worse. Where Clinton tried and failed -- with the 1997 Land Mine Treaty, the International Criminal Court and, above all, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- Bush proclaims himself a skeptic anyway. As for national missile defense, Germany and France have softened their initial hostility in the face of what may now be inevitable. If invited, they will assist the vital conversations that have to take place between Bush and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. But I have yet to meet or hear of a European leader who places much hope in the "consultations" with them that Washington has promised before going ahead with its unilateralist scheme.

A harbinger of this unilateralism was Bush's cancellation of his campaign pledges on environmental protection. His abrupt statement that he now opposes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, partly because it "would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy," had the merit of candor. But his blithe reversal of the promise to regulate power plant emissions of carbon dioxide smacked of naked subservience to his industrial paymasters. The participants at the recent EU summit in Stockholm were genuinely shocked that such a renunciation could so smoothly occur in Washington. EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom understated the European feeling when she said she was "extremely concerned and disappointed."

Not that the summit itself was a great advertisement for European unity, as several countries resisted the need to sacrifice their own protected markets. But it was Chirac, the chief culprit for this foot-dragging, who delivered a telling verdict that may or may not have been ironic: "Our methods may be disastrous," he said. "Our ambitions may be limited. But the EU advances nonetheless."

As another of the European leaders told me, the liberalizing agenda is nonetheless on track. Never forget, he said, that the EU is making its single currency work, within a single economic area and marketthat is the biggest in the world and should, this year, grow faster than the United States'.

And that points toward a new trans-Atlantic rivalry. Like every place else, Europe is in thrall to what happens next to the world economy, and European prophets are no more reliable than those on Wall Street. Unless trade disputes ranging from bananas to steel are intelligently addressed, there's a possibility of trade wars across the Atlantic. And the EU won't approach them in a spirit of supplication. Though nobody wants to raise the political heat, a match is emerging between a new administration in Washington, answering its own revisionist instincts about national interest, and a set of governments in Europe already getting better prepared for what that might mean.

One capital city holds out against this tendency. When Blair returned from his Camp David schmooze-in with Bush in February, a senior member of his staff summoned EU ambassadors based in London. Blair's briefer depicted the new president as an astonishing amalgam of Reagan and Kennedy. Here was a man, he said, "of quite unexpected caliber." He could deal with complex issues from the Balkans to national missile defense without notes. He was "hands-on and knowledgeable." He could already be called "an extraordinary president."

The ambassadors heard this with varying credulity. What they could all see, however, was London's desperation to impress on the rest of her EU partners her own hackneyed role as the pivot, or alternatively bridge, between America and Europe. Blair still regards his prime service to both continents as building up the tyro right-wing president into someone who must be taken seriously and could be coaxed into not disturbing the Euro-American universe -- who is essentially, like all his post-war predecessors, "one of us."

A few weeks later, this seems not to be the case.From here, the main voices in Washington seem to be working their way toward a host of fresh assessments: abrasive toward old enemies, mistrustful of internationalist compromise, America First when it comes to global threats, admonitory toward allies, disdainful rather than constructive in face of the messy complexities that have replaced the neat old bipolar world on which most of them cut their teeth.

How long can this ironed-out, freeze-dried attitude to the meaning of superpowerdom last? Though nobody doubts the shared commitment to NATO, it seems plain already that further American intervention in the Balkans is out. The scuttling for cover when fighting broke out in Macedonia was instructive. "Nation-building," as a task fit for American diplomacy, is scorned alike by the social democrat in the State Department and the pugilist at the Pentagon.

For Europe, the biggest challenge is to its own defense commitment. The financial promises underpinning the rapid defense force simply have to be made good. Bush's distancing, which the Rumsfeld plan formalized as a decisive swivel toward Asia, clearly makes it only a matter of time before some, maybe many, U.S. troops pull out of Europe. To that extent, these startling reassessments, by what once looked like a barely legitimate administration, will force the EU to spend more resources on security.

There's a deeper level, though, at which this development seems, if not purely benign, at least congruent with the evolution of two continents. Their economic hierarchies, their social mores and their moral imperatives grow more distant from each other. So do the threats they see to their own security. It is better to adapt to this than pretend it isn't so.

Hugo Young is political columnist of the Guardian in London and the author of "This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair" (Overlook Press).

-------- missile defense

Naval review backs arms sale to Taiwan

Arkansas Online
MICHAEL R. GORDON
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.ardemgaz.com/today/nat/A1nytaiwan1.html
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=taiwan01&date=20010401

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A confidential review by U.S. naval officers has concluded that Taiwan needs a significant infusion of new weapons, including a sophisticated ship-borne radar system that China has put at the top of the list of arms it does not want Taiwan to have.

The assessment was carried out by officers from the U.S. Pacific Fleet, who visited Taiwan to assess its naval requirements in light of China's military buildup. While military factors are not the only consideration, the review is an important element of the deliberations about whether to sell Taiwan the radar system, known as Aegis, and other naval weapons.

The decision on whether to sell naval, air force and army weapons, which President Bush is expected to make in the next few weeks, is one of the first major foreign policy tests for his administration and could set the tone of U.S.-Chinese relations for years to come.

China has bitterly opposed the sale of sophisticated weapons, which it fears will lead to a new degree of cooperation between Taiwan and the United States and buttress pro-independence sentiment on the island.

Beijing has singled out as particularly objectionable potential sales of three types of weapons: the Navy's Aegis, which China fears may provide the basis for an eventual anti-missile defense and blunt China's missile threat to the island; the Army's advanced Patriot anti-missile system known as PAC-3; and submarines, which China maintains are offensive weapons and which the United States has never before sold to Taiwan. Taiwan has sought to buy submarines as well as the Aegis and has also been in discussions about the new Patriot system.

In addition to citing a need for the Aegis system by 2010, the U.S. naval officers who conducted the review concluded that Taiwan also needs the Kidd-class destroyer as a stopgap. And they cited the need for new submarines as well as an underwater sonar array to detect Chinese subs. Besides the naval review, similar studies have been carried out concerning other parts of Taiwan's military.

The pending decision on arms sales has split American analysts on China, including those in the Republican Party, putting pressure on Bush from both sides.

On one side are policy experts who say it would be foolish to pick a diplomatic fight with Beijing before the Bush administration has a chance to begin a dialogue with the leadership there. Washington's long-term interests, these experts say, are best served by finding a way to engage China, a nation of 1.3 billion people and a nuclear power with a growing economy.

On the other side are those who insist that the United States has a moral obligation to safeguard Taiwan, a democratic nation of 22 million, from communist Beijing's threats. The conservatives also say Washington should contain China's growing military power in Asia.

While there has been much discussion about China's growing force of short-range ballistic missiles, Beijing has also deployed new warplanes, destroyers, submarines, anti-ship missiles and surface-to-air missiles, many of which it bought from Russia. That has created a growing threat to Taiwan's aging fleet, whose role is to protect the island from attack and prevent a Chinese blockade.

The review of Taiwan's naval needs was begun during the Clinton administration. After Taiwan sought to buy four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis system, the Clinton administration deferred a decision and asked for a Pentagon assessment.

A team of officers from the U.S. Pacific Fleet inspected Taiwan's navy. Their conclusions have circulated among officials in Washington and Taiwan and have served as the basis for a Pentagon report on "Taiwan naval modernization."

Experts familiar with the officers' review say it concludes that by 2010 Taiwan will need vessels equipped with long-range surface-to-air missiles, a sophisticated battle management system and a phased-array radar, which is the hallmark of the Aegis system.

U.S. military specialists say 2010 is significant because it may take eight years or more to agree on a configuration of the Aegis system for Taiwan's navy, build the ship and integrate it into Taiwan's fleet.

As an interim step, the review suggests that Taiwan buy four Kidd-class destroyers, which had the most advanced air defense systems before the Aegis was developed. The United States built the destroyers for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, but the sale was thwarted after the shah fell from power. The ships were later used by the U.S. Navy and were nicknamed "Ayatollah-class" destroyers, but they have since been retired.

In a recommendation that is certain to prove contentious, the U.S. officers concluded that Taiwan needs new submarines. Taiwan now has only four, including two World War II-era Guppies, which cannot descend more than 150 feet and which are used for training.

The review found that Taiwan needs an underwater sonar array to alert Taiwan to the presence of Chinese submarines near its ports and coasts. It also describes a need for a new maritime aircraft to hunt for enemy submarines and patrol, alluding to the U.S. P-3, which Taiwan also wants to buy.

The Aegis has been the center of much of the public debate, which has not always been well informed. Unlike a rotating radar antenna, the Aegis' four stationary arrays search the sky electronically. The Aegis can track more than 200 targets, including sea-skimming missiles, at which it can direct ship-fired missiles.

While much of the discussion concerns the Aegis' potential as an anti-missile platform, the U.S. Navy has yet to develop a sea-based theater anti-missile system. And even if it does develop such a missile defense, the type of Aegis being considered for sale would not be equipped with an interceptor capable of countering the Chinese ballistic missiles directed at Taiwan.

The primary reason to sell the Aegis is to protect Taiwan's fleet, and upgrading the Aegis to serve as a theater missile defense would require a future decision in Washington. "There is a fantastic mythology about the Aegis," said Kurt Campbell, who led the Pentagon effort to improve Taiwan's defense capability during the Clinton administration.

There is something of a precedent for an Aegis sale. The United States offered to sell a scaled-back version of the Aegis radar and command and control system in 1992 and install it on Taiwan's Perry-class frigates. Taiwan decided not to buy the system. That was before China continued its buildup in the Taiwan Strait and sought to pressure Taiwan by test-firing its ballistic missiles close to the island in 1995 and 1996.

This is not to say that there is unanimous agreement among military experts, including those in Taiwan, about the Aegis. Advocates of the system say it would provide Taiwan's fleet with the best possible protection against China's anti-ship missiles as well as a top-notch battle-management system. They say it could even serve as a backup command post if land-based posts in Taiwan were destroyed by Chinese missile strikes.

Critics cite its cost, $1 billion a ship, and the almost decade-long delivery time. And they question whether the Taiwanese navy would be able to operate and maintain such a sophisticated weapons platform.

As the political debate over the Aegis has heated up, some analysts have speculated that the Kidd destroyers could be the basis of a compromise that would enable the White House to appear resolute while avoiding a rupture with Beijing.

By selling the destroyers the Bush administration could argue that it was acting quickly to improve Taiwan's ability to defend its fleet. The administration could then put Beijing on notice that Washington would go ahead with the Aegis sale next year unless China curtails its military buildup near Taiwan.

---

Slobo Surrenders (No Foolin')

Slate - Today's Papers
By Caroline Benner
Sunday, April 1, 2001

The New York Times leads with conclusions from a secret U.S. navy study which found that Taiwan will need powerful new weapons if its military capability is to keep pace with China's. The Los Angeles Times leads with former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's decision early Sunday morning to peacefully surrender to Serbian police after a 40 hour standoff and two attempted raids on his home. The Washington Post lead and the NYT offlead went to press with the news that a defiant Milosevic had promised death before surrender, but the papers quickly replaced these stories on their Web sites with the updated information that Milosevic had indeed given up.

Among the weapons the U.S. military decided Taiwan needs, reports the NYT lead, is the Aegis, a ship-based radar system. The Chinese really want to keep this technology out of Taiwanese hands because they believe that this weapon could become part of an antimissile defense. Bush will give significant weight to the military's opinion when making his decision on arms sales to Taiwan. The paper says Bush's decision, which is expected in the next few weeks, could shape U.S.-Chinese relations for years to come. China considers any sign of closer U.S.-Taiwanese relations an affront and worries that giving Taiwan greater military capability will just encourage it to seek independence.

---

Secret study: Taiwan needs new arms

USA Today
04/01/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nlead.htm

NEW YORK (AP) - A confidential review by United States naval officers has concluded that Taiwan has a significant need for new weapons, including a sophisticated ship-borne radar system that China has strongly objected to, The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions.

The study was conducted by officers from the United States Pacific Fleet, who visited Taiwan to assess its naval requirements in the wake of China's military buildup.

The still-secret review is an important element of the deliberations about whether to sell Taiwan the radar system, known as Aegis, and other naval weapons, according to The Times.

The decision on whether to sell naval, air force and army weapons, which President Bush is expected to make in the next few weeks, is one of the first major foreign policy tests for his administration and could set the tone for future relations between the U.S. and China, The Times said.

China strongly opposes the sale of sophisticated weapons, which it fears will lead to a new level of cooperation between Taiwan and the U.S. and strengthen Taiwan's pro-independence movement.

Chinese leaders have singled out as particularly objectionable potential sales of three weapons: the Aegis, which China fears may provide the basis for an eventual anti-missile defense and nullify China's missile advantage; the U.S. Army's advanced Patriot anti-missile system known as PAC-3; and submarines, which China believes are offensive weapons and which the U.S. has never sold to Taiwan.

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

UCS defends private utilities' nuke plants

Sun, 1 Apr 2001
The Weekly Standard: Feature
Vol 6, Number 28

More Nukes, Please They're the safest, cleanest, cheapest way to generate electricity By William Tucker

While California frets over rolling blackouts and Washington sounds the alarm about a new energy crisis, the electrical generating industry has quietly passed a milestone. In 1999, nuclear energy-the forgotten player in the arena-became the nation's cheapest source of electricity.

In fact the news is even better than that. Recent improvements in safety techniques and operating procedures have raised the nuclear industry's "capacity factor" (the percentage of time the plants are on line) to an almost unbelievable 90 percent. Coal plants run at only 69 percent of capacity, while oil and natural gas generators run at about 30 percent-mainly because their fuel is so expensive that it's profitable to shut them down whenever possible. Hydroelectric dams, at the mercy of rainfall and snowmelt, ran at only 40 percent last year. While fossil fuel plants must be shut down every week or two for routine maintenance, Three Mile Island Unit I (the one that didn't melt down) set a record in 1999, having operated for nearly two years without interruption.

These accomplishments have occurred with minimal fanfare. Indeed, nuclear power was barely mentioned last week when President Bush and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned of a looming energy crisis. "If you ask Joe Public how many nuclear reactors are operating in the country, they'll probably tell you 10 or 12," says Tom Shiel, spokesman for nuclear operations at Duke Power. "They have no idea we have 103 reactors and that we're producing 20 percent of the nation's electricity. The truth is we've been happy to stay out of the public eye for awhile. As far as this industry is concerned, no news is good news."

Even so, public attitudes are changing. Twenty years ago, nuclear power was personified by Jack Lemmon being chased through the control room by a gun-toting utility executive in The China Syndrome. Today most young people know about nuclear power because Homer Simpson works at a nuclear plant. More than 60 percent of Americans now approve of nuclear power, and 51 percent think we should build more reactors. Ironically the same majority believes that other Americans don't agree with them. It may be time for a breakthrough.

On March 7, Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the Nuclear Energy Electricity Assurance Act, designed to reignite the nation's nuclear effort. "We must abandon our old fears of nuclear energy and embrace a technology that holds the potential of easing us out of our energy woes," he said. In February, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told the National Press Club that his home state had better start thinking about nuclear power: "I have not yet heard anybody utter the phrase 'nuclear power' in California, . . . but in terms of environmental costs and competitiveness, I just don't see any other solution." A month before that, Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, said essentially the same thing: "Nuclear power is the only answer, even though it's politically incorrect."

In fact, nuclear power probably can't do much to help California escape its electricity shortage in the short run (only eliminating price controls will do that). But as a long-range alternative it is looking more and more attractive. Although only two new plants have opened nationwide since 1990, remarkable advances in operating procedures at existing plants have added generating capacity equivalent to 23 large new reactors over the past decade. Nuclear operating costs are now at an all-time low-half of what they were in 1990. In 1999, electricity from nuclear plants averaged 1.83 cents per kilowatt-hour, as opposed to 2.07 cents for coal, 3.24 cents for oil, and 3.52 cents for natural gas.

"These figures can only improve as natural gas becomes more expensive," says Marv Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group. "We still have higher construction costs, but we're basically immune to increases in fuel prices. Uranium is as common as tin and relatively easy to process." Over the past 10 years the uranium costs of nuclear power have actally decreased from .92 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to half a cent in 1999.

How did this revival occur? Basically, nuclear power escaped the claustrophobic environment of regulated utilities and federal bureaucracy and entered the private sector. More than one quarter of the nation's 103 reactors are now "merchant" plants-owned by the new independent energy companies rather than the regulated utilities of yore. Exelon, formed last year from the merger of PECO Energy and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison, owns the nation's largest "fleet"-17 reactors at 10 sites in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

"We've built up a wealth of operating experience," says David Knox, a nuclear expert at Exelon's Chicago headquarters. "In the early 1990s, it would take the industry anywhere from a month to six weeks to do a refueling [i.e., changing the fuel rods, which must be done every 18 months]. In 1998, we did one in 30 days. Last fall we set a record by completing a refueling in 15 days. All this means you've got more time when your reactors are generating electricity."

Newly optimistic about the technology, many owners are applying to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 20-year extensions to the original 40-year operating licenses. Homer Simpson and his neighbors couldn't be happier. When Constellation Energy went for renewal on its Calvert Cliffs plant in Lusby, Maryland (which produces 25 percent of Maryland's electricity), almost the entire county turned out in support. "We had no local opposition," says Mary Krug, a former county commissioner. "Three-quarters of the plant employees live in Calvert County. They donated over a quarter of a million dollars last year to the United Way. They're a very good corporate citizen." Calvert Cliffs also employs 1,200 people and pays $20 million a year in county property taxes.

But are these advances being bought at the price of safety? Quite the contrary. In 1994, former NRC chairman Ivan Selin warned that deregulating utilities and selling reactors to private companies might create "incentives to cut corners" on safety. Now the agency admits this was wrong. "The industry has made tremendous strides," says Victor Dricks, spokesman for the NRC. "Both the number of safety system activations and scrams [automatic protective shutdowns] are about one-tenth of what they were in 1985. Safety and economic efficiency can go hand in hand."

"With proper management you can serve both masters," agrees David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, which, although often critical of nuclear power, is not completely opposed. "When private companies started buying reactors, people said, 'They'll run them until they melt down, collect the decommission money, and move on to something else.' That's not happening. These companies know their future is riding on safety. If one nuclear reactor melts down, they'll lose their whole fleet."

In retrospect it appears that nuclear power's notorious safety problems had more to do with government monopolies than the technology itself. In a remarkable analysis published right after Three Mile Island ("Who Caused Three Mile Island?" Reason, August 1980), industrial psychologist Adam Reed noted the real problem with nuclear plants was the cloistering of the technology in the NRC's precursor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. Shunning the private insurance companies-which had established the Underwriters Laboratory for the explicit purpose of promoting electrical safety-the government overseers missed an entire generation of research about human factors in operational safety. "Some of the manufacturers of nuclear power reactors had highly competent engineering psychologists working for their other divisions, but the AEC insisted on keeping nuclear reactor work secret and isolated," wrote Reed.

By 1970, no new design for a toaster or blender at General Electric could get off the drawing board without being examined by an expert in human factors. Yet the same company was designing, manufacturing, and delivering nuclear reactors that had never even been seen, much less examined, by an engineering psychologist. . . . It was only after Three Mile Island that engineering psychologists asked what the hell was going on in nuclear power plant control rooms. What they saw made them shiver.

In those days plant operators faced a panel of hundreds of identical gauges and switches, many of which could be read only by climbing ladders. Gauges that recorded responses were often on the other side of the room from the switches that controlled them. At many plants the fuel rods were raised and lowered by pulling one of two identical levers that sat side by side. In one famous instance, operators tried to differentiate the levers by attaching Heineken and Michelob tap handles-only to have the utility order them removed for fear of being fined by the NRC. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission imposed safety standards," wrote Reed. "But in 1979, its regulations were still based on the most recent safety research of 1954."

Predictably, the Three Mile Island accident occurred when an improvised cardboard maintenance tag obscured a signal light on the control panel. A resulting human error activated the automatic emergency core cooling system, which lit a red light saying that water had successfully entered the core. But operators mistook the red light as a danger signal that too much water had entered the core and emptied it, setting off a partial meltdown. Homer Simpson would have felt right at home.

Today these government-sponsored hijinks are a thing of the past. "Every nuclear reactor has its own site-specific simulated control room," says Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "On average, our operators spend one week a month in a training environment. They do more simulation practice than airline pilots."

"We share safety information quickly, openly, and thoroughly throughout this entire industry," adds Karl Neddenien, spokesman for Constellation Energy. "We're as knowledgeable about every other plant in the world as about our own. Our first concern is safety."

Other issues that gave nuclear power a black eye have also changed dramatically. During the 1980s, not much was known about the long-term effects of exposure to low levels of radiation. Natural background radiation exposes people to 250-350 millirems per year, while sitting on the property line of a nuclear plant would add an additional 1 millirem. Extrapolating from the damage done by poisonous levels of exposure, and assuming that there is "no safe dose" of radiation at any level, antinuclear activists such as Drs. John Gofman and Ernest Sternglass were able to conjure up visions of thousands of children dying of cancer because of the construction of a nuclear plant.

In 1991, though, the National Cancer Institute published a report concluding that there is "no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 197 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities." Moreover, demographic studies have since revealed that cancer rates vary inversely with exposure to background radiation. People living on the Rocky Mountain Plateau receive the highest doses of background radiation in the country (through radioactive minerals in the mountains and greater exposure to cosmic rays) yet have the lowest rates of cancer in the country. This has spawned a counter-theory which says that high levels of background radiation may be healthy. Just as a vaccine stimulates the immune system against microbial invaders, so small doses of radiation may stimulate the body's known mechanisms for repairing genetic damage.

Neither is the disposal of high-level wastes the problem it once seemed. France (70 percent nuclear) and Japan (50 percent) are reprocessing spent fuel rods into more fuel, which reduces the volume of waste by a considerable amount. Reprocessing has been outlawed in this country since President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order in 1978, but that could be rescinded at any time. (Actually, uranium prices are so low that reprocessing is uneconomical right now.)

Since 1987, the Department of Energy has designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent geological repository for the nation's 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel (2,000 tons added each year). The site has a capacity of 70,000 tons and could probably be extended to 120,000. But political opposition in Nevada has blocked the effort. In 1998, the department reneged on a commitment to start handling high-level wastes. Instead, the wastes remain at reactor sites, stored in pools of boric acid or corrosion-proof casks. Although no one wants a build-up, they can probably remain there indefinitely. The real impediment is that the federal government is not offering Nevada sufficient reward for taking the repository. If a system of financial compensation can be devised, the problem will probably solve itself. "At least we know where the wastes are," says Rod McCullum, senior project manager for used-fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute. "Other technologies just spew them into the atmosphere."

If the country does elect to renew the nuclear effort, it will undoubtedly be because of energy shortages and their accompanying environmental costs. "If you're at all worried about air pollution or global warming, you've got to take a serious look at nuclear power," says Florida senator Bob Graham, a Democratic co-sponsor of the Domenici bill. California has pushed conservation and renewables to the limit yet still finds itself woefully short of electricity. The demand for clean air across the country has steered utilities into burning natural gas-yet this is backfiring as demand pushes prices up. Even if California succeeds in building its 10-15 new gas-fired generators-as governor Gray Davis insists it will-there is a serious question whether the state will have enough gas or pipeline capacity to run them.

Nuclear power has always been handicapped by the perception that the "Atoms for Peace" program that gave birth to the industry wasn't really practical or cost-effective but was pursued only as a way of assuaging wartime guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As history marches on, this argument is getting harder and harder to accept. If war guilt was the motive, how come Japan has the world's third-largest nuclear program?

A better way of understanding the industry is to realize the significance of Albert Einstein's equation E=mc2. Fossil fuels are built on energy stored in chemical bonds created by sunlight, which is itself a release of nuclear energy. The earth has vast reservoirs of these fossil fuels, but they represent relatively low levels of energy and will eventually become harder and harder to access. Einstein's equation says that most of the energy in the universe s locked up in matter itself. When matter is transformed into energy-as it is in the sun or a nuclear power plant-the amount of energy produced is going to be the amount of fuel multiplied by the square of the speed of light, a factor of one quintillion. The amount of matter transformed into energy by the first atomic bomb was one gram.

This explains why small amounts of uranium can produce such fantastic quantities of energy. It is the nature of the universe. If we are to persist as a civilization-without burning up half the earth's furniture in the process-it seems only sensible that we should avail ourselves of some of that energy.

------

Shipment of recycled uranium studied by DOE

Sunday Apr 1, 2001
News Watchman Piketon, Ohio
By Van Rose NW Staff

The U.S.Department of Energy (DOE), on Thursday, released studies on the movement of recycled uranium through nine different sites across the United States, one of them being the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

In an effort to become more independent of foreign sources of uranium, DOE's forerunner, the Atomic Energy Commission, decided that chemical separation plants should recover uranium from spent nuclear fuel. In the late 1950s, this recycled uranium was shipped to the Portsmouth plant, as well plants in Paducah, Kentucky and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and was used for fuel and military applications.

"Recycled uranium is slightly more radioactive than mined uranium because it has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor," said the DOE report. "It contains traces of plutonium and other radioactive isotopes (such as neptunium and technetium) that are not completely removed by the chemical separation plant process."

The uranium exchanged hands often between gaseous diffusion plants and was sometimes blended with mined uranium, increasing the total amount. A "recycled uranium" category was never present in DOE records.

DOE began studying the flow of the material in September 1999 after workers at the Paducah plant voiced their concerns about the handling of recycled uranium. The energy department took several actions to expand medical surveillance of those exposed and review option for compensating them for occupational illness.

According to a DOE site specific report on the Portsmouth plant, it was revealed that potential workers exposure to technetium 99 present in recycled uranium have occurred from equipment at the X705 oxide conversion building as well cascade facilities.

"The oxide conversion facility didn't run right," said Vina Colley, president of Portsmouth/Piketon Resident for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS). "They had to shut it down because the workers were being exposed to too much plutonium and technetium.

Colley, a former electrician at the plant from 1980 to 1985, explained that in the 1960's exposure levels of certain workers were so great that the individuals were sent to the Oak Ridge, Tennessee site for decontamination.

"If you look at the workforce, most workers I worked with have gotten sick and died of cancer," "There is no way any of the workers can protect themselves because the contaminants are airborne and widespread."

DOE has retrieved historical records in order to create site-specific studies. Unfortunately, inconsistencies with documentation among different plant sites have made it difficult for the energy department to come up with an accurate total calculation of recycled uranium amounts.

DOE's Office of Plutonium, Uranium and Special Materials Inventory will conduct a follow-on study on the issue

"The department transfers uranium, including recycled uranium, throughout the DOE complex for the purpose of consolidation and disposal," said DOE Spokesperson Dollie Hatchet.

DOE's material control and accountability system accurately tracks the inventory and transaction uranium."

------

Paying Our Debts

New York Times
April 1, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/L01MINE.html

To the Editor:

Re "Ill Uranium Miners Left Waiting as Payments for Exposure Lapse" (front page, March 27):

This is a disheartening story. I am ashamed and embarrassed for our country when the administration and members of Congress urge a tax rollback that may be as high as $1.6 trillion. It is irresponsible and grossly self-indulgent to accept the theory propounded by President Bush that individual citizens can spend our tax revenue better than the government.

Not only do we have responsibilities to people like the ailing uranium miners, but we also have responsibilities that include rehabilitating our cities, reducing classroom crowding, paying down the debt and saving Social Security and Medicare.

JOHN R. BLIZARD Yarmouth Port, Mass., March 27, 2001

-------- california

Battle over 'monster laser' heats up

Knoxsville News-Sentinel
By LAWRENCE SPOHN Scripps Howard News Service
April 01, 2001

A quiet war over the nation's biggest and most controversial science project, the giant, $3.6 billion National Ignition Facility fusion laser, moves back into the open battlefield this week in Washington.

The project, several years late and a couple of billion dollars over budget - depending on who's counting - is under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, east of San Francisco.

The laser was also being challenged this week in a federal court hearing in the capital.

It undoubtedly will be a hot topic of conversation as well this week in Albuquerque, at the Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor's Second Annual Nuclear Security Decision-maker's Forum.

Meanwhile, Hoya, the Japanese lens company responsible for making half the special glass needed in the laser, has suspended shipments to Livermore and is reassessing its role in the project.

The project is getting heat from some Japanese critics and officials, who see it as a facility for continuing the development of nuclear weapons.

In short, the laser's mission is to generate tiny thermonuclear bomb blasts in the laboratory. Using the force of laser beams from every direction, it aims to compress a fusion fuel pellet to generate fusion-energy bursts.

The Energy Department and its nuclear weapons labs see the laser project as critical in replacing the traditional tool of testing - underground nuclear bomb explosions, now banned.

Critics, like Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group in Santa Fe, see it as a design tool for the next generation of nuclear bombs.

Longtime critic Leo Mascheroni, an independent Los Alamos fusion physicist, insists that the laser "will not work," that it actually represents a threat to national security and that it has been a costly diversion in the 50-year quest for a fusion energy power plant.

The United States currently has a moratorium on nuclear testing, but the Senate two years ago rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has been approved by dozens of nations, including Japan.

For years, the battle lines over the laser have been drawn, with proponents and opponents squaring off over whether it's is needed, whether it's cost-effective and whether it's even technically capable of achieving its mission of fusion ignition and studying the most detailed energy outputs of hydrogen bombs.

How the coming battle plays out will have a substantial impact on the entire U.S. nuclear weapons program.

At issue is whether to continue building the monster laser at full throttle, to substantially alter its marching orders by slashing its budget and reducing its objectives, or possibly to discharge it all together, as Congress did with the Energy Department's last big science fiasco, the Superconducting Super Collider.

Already, the laser has forced Congress to repeatedly supplement the Energy Department's defense programs budget to keep the ever-bloating laser program from completely overwhelming the rest of the nuclear weapons program.

Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore are the nation's three nuclear weapons labs, whose mission has shifted since the Cold War from designing and engineering new nuclear warheads to maintaining the nation's nuclear arsenal through DOE's science-based Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program.

Each has a billion-dollar-plus annual budget, and each has significant pieces of the stockpile stewardship puzzle. Although all three weapons labs directors officially supported NIF, several of their own nuclear weapons scientists have raised serious technical and fiscal concerns about the project.

Several senators last year fired shots across Livermore's bow, and critics - from anti-nuclear groups to tax accountability organizations - are pressing Congress more than ever to blow taps for the troubled project.

On Saturday, the Energy Department sent Congress a mandated report on the program's status, including: a certification that it can get the project back on track; reassurances that the laser can achieve its technical promises; and an assessment of alternatives, such as slashing its design from 192 beams to 48 or even a single module of eight beams.

The project, which rose out of the Energy Department's still partly classified military fusion program, has become far more than a nuclear weapons plum. It is seen as having significant implications for all science, for future research funding and even for Livermore's prestige and life.

"A lot is riding on this," says nuclear weapons program analyst Christopher Paine, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., which has a pending lawsuit against the Energy Department which seeks to bar the department from using two expert reports in justifying the laser program to Congress.

Livermore and Energy Department officials have repeatedly said that the program, while troubled, has survived numerous and continuing scientific and technical reviews that warrant its full support and continuation.

The Energy Department says the report will comply with all congressional requirements, including assessing various permutations of the project and other technical alternatives.

(Contact Lawrence Spohn of The Tribune in Albuquerque, N.M., at http://www.abqtrib.com.)

-------- new mexico

New Mexico

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

Los Alamos - A federal study of radioactive pollution at Los Alamos National Laboratory has resumed. Investigators were forced out last year, first by wildfires and later because of security concerns after the disappearance of hard drives containing classified data.

-------- us nuc politics

Budget Trims Take Parts of Clinton Vision
Bush's Spending Plan Shows a Shift in Priorities, Preparing the Way for Tax Cut

By Amy Goldstein and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 1, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20825-2001Mar31?language=printer

As President Bush prepares to reveal the fine print of his vision of government in his first budget, his administration has decided to curtail -- or redefine -- policies that were hallmarks of the Clinton years. They include efforts to slow nuclear proliferation, coordinate health care for the uninsured and put more police on the streets.

The $1.9 trillion spending plan the president is to issue in a week also will pare recent government initiatives to conserve energy, spur economic development in poor communities and train doctors at children's hospitals. Those and other budgetary details have been gleaned in recent days by congressional staff members, advocacy groups and other budget-watchers and were confirmed by administration sources.

While Bush's aides have been reticent to discuss the budget publicly, they have concluded that they can trim a variety of programs that they consider ineffective or duplicative -- or that have received generous increases in the recent past. The shifts are necessary to meet the president's goal of limiting the growth of domestic spending to 4 percent next year to make room for his main domestic objective: $1.6 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade.

Yet these decisions may foreshadow a rough budgetary road for the White House in Congress, particularly the Senate, according to Democrats and outside policy analysts. Many of the programs Bush wants to trim or change were priorities of President Bill Clinton, and some have been targeted by the GOP in the past.

The politics over the budget will spill into the open in the Senate this week, when the chamber is to consider a resolution based on a more rudimentary spending outline that Bush sent to Congress a month ago.

Senate Democrats argue it is unreasonable to vote on a budget resolution without first seeing the actual budget and have accused the White House of deliberately withholding its spending plan until April 9, the first day of a two-week congressional recess.

The Democrats may complicate this week's action by trying to insert their proposal for a $60 billion tax rebate this year, a move the GOP opposes unless it is linked to the president's overall tax-cut plan.

The House approved its budget resolution last week.

Bush sought yesterday to bolster support for his budget plan. "We can fund our priorities without expanding government beyond the bounds of responsibility," the president said during his weekly radio address.

Bush said he would triple federal funding of reading programs, expand and refocus Head Start, add $25 billion to insure more poor children through Medicaid, and spend an extra $94 billion on nutrition programs for women and children. The president said he also wants to allot more money to research childhood diseases, prevent child abuse and help youngsters in foster care go to college or train for jobs.

As the president draws attention to programs he seeks to enlarge, the administration has been far less forthcoming about where it has chosen to make cuts.

Based on the information from outside groups and analysts -- and administration sources -- the reductions do not represent a complete repudiation of Clinton's agenda. Bush has, for instance, repeatedly said he supports the AmeriCorps national service program.

But coming on top of decisions by Bush to rescind several regulations designed by Clinton, the budget represents a second tool by which the new administration is redrawing government.

In ways that were not evident from the broader blueprint, the more detailed spending plan will shrink or reshape programs both prominent and obscure.

• The Community Policing Services Program (COPS), the centerpiece of Clinton's 1994 anti-crime initiative, will be cut by 13 percent, from $1 billion to about $850 million. The administration says the nation's decrease in violent crime cannot be attributed to the extra police officers hired through the program. It plans to shift money to help state and local law enforcement departments free up officers from desk jobs.

• The "Nuclear Cities" program in the Energy Department, which provides $30 million this year to help former Russian nuclear scientists obtain nonmilitary work, will be reduced by 11 percent because the administration questions whether it is effective. Meanwhile, Energy's plutonium disposal program, in which the United States and Russia convert weapons-grade material so that it cannot be used for bombs, will be funded at the current level of $200 million -- half the sum Clinton had proposed.

• Bush wants to phase out the "Community Access" program, created two years ago to promote collaborations between public hospitals and community clinics to keep track of uninsured patients and make sure they get enough care. Instead, Bush will add $124 million to finance community health centers and clinics for migrant workers.

• Subsidies for research and development in energy conservation will be cut by 22 percent. The largest part of that reduction will occur in the "Industry Sector Program," which largely subsidizes private companies. Like many Republicans, Bush regards this program as a form of "corporate welfare."

• Within the Small Business Administration, the budget will eliminate funding for "New Markets," a tax incentive program created last year to form 40 enterprise zones in urban and rural communities. It was promoted by Clinton and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), but the administration wants to eliminate parts it considers wasteful.

• The budget will reduce subsidies for medical training at children's hospitals from $235 million to $200 million. Those hospitals began to get special training subsidies under Clinton, because they do not qualify for the Medicare payments that subsidize advanced training of young doctors at other hospitals. Administration officials say the program has not yet spent its grant this year.

• Bush will discontinue "First Accounts," a $10 million Clinton initiative started last year as a way to help low-income people without bank accounts for their Social Security checks, disability benefits or other government payments. Intended to reduce reliance on check-cashing centers that charge large fees -- as well as to prevent robberies of people carrying large amounts of cash -- the program sends checks electronically into new accounts and issues automatic-teller cards for withdrawals. The administration says other programs accomplish the same goals.

In addition, the president's budget will reduce funding for administrative costs of the "Section 8" housing subsidy program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It will control growth in funding for the international space station, and restrict spending at the National Science Foundation to an increase of slightly more than 1 percent.

-------- MILITARY

U.S. Navy plane collides with Chinese fighter

USA Today
4/01/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-04-01-collide.htm

BEIJING (AP) - A U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet sent to intercept it over the South China Sea on Sunday and made an emergency landing in China.

The Chinese government said the fighter crashed and its pilot was missing.

China quickly blamed the U.S. aircraft for the collision off the southern Chinese island of Hainan.

But the commander of U.S. Pacific military forces said that the slower U.S. plane was more likely to have been hit by the nimble Chinese fighter.

''It's pretty obvious who bumped who,'' said Adm. Dennis Blair in Hawaii.

The incident comes at an uneasy time in U.S.-Chinese relations.

The Bush administration has taken a warier attitude toward Beijing, and the president is reportedly leaning towards selling Taiwan much of the high-tech weapons it seeks - a sale bitterly opposed by China.

The American EP-3 plane landed at a military airfield on Hainan. None of the 24 crew members was injured, said Col. John Bratton, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii.

The status of the crew and control of the plane on the ground were unclear.

Chinese officials assured the United States the crew is safe, and American diplomats were going to Hainan to see them, said U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher.

He said he had talked several times with Secretary of State Colin Powell. President Bush was briefed on the episode Sunday morning, an administration official said.

The U.S. plane was on a routine surveillance flight in international airspace when two Chinese fighters intercepted it, said Bratton.

In Honolulu, U.S. Pacific Command officials showed a map that put the colliision about 80 miles southeast of Hainan, well outside the 12-mile territorial sea and airspace.

China claims most of the South China Sea as its territorial waters - a claim rejected by countries that use the vast expanse of ocean for shipping. ''The U.S. side has total responsibility for this event,'' the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that it had made a ''serious'' protest.

It said two Chinese fighters were sent up to track the plane as it approached Chinese airspace. ''The U.S. plane abruptly diverted toward the Chinese planes, and its head and left wing collided with one of the Chinese planes, causing the Chinese plane to crash,'' it said. It put the accident about 62 miles southeast of Hainan.

It said rescuers were searching for the missing Chinese pilot. But Blair blamed the Chinese fighters. He told reporters that the fighters, similar to an F-16, fly much faster and have more maneuverability than the EP3, which is about the size of a Boeing 737 and basically flies in a a straight path.

The EP-3 is an unarmed four-engine propeller-driven plane equipped to listen in on radio signals and monitor radar sites. The collision appeared to be an accident and the Chinese did not force the plane down, Bratton said.

The Pacific Command asked China to ''facilitate the immedate return of the aircraft and crew,'' and Bratton said the Chinese appeared responsive to the U.S. requests. Blair, speaking about 4 p.m. ET, said the Navy spoke to the crew about 18 hours earlier.

Prueher, the U.S. ambassador, said it appears ''the Chinese have lost an aircraft and we're sorry that occurred.''

Distrust has risen between Beijing and Washington in recent weeks, exacerbated by China's recent detention of two scholars with links to the United States.

China, in turn, has been protesting the prospect of the United States' selling new arms to Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade Chinese province.

Nick Cook, an aviation expert with Jane's Defense Weekly in London, said the U.S. military routinely sends surveillance aircraft such as the EP-3 to monitor China's military.

The EP-3 can pick up radio, radar, telephone, e-mail and fax traffic, Cook said.

The U.S. plane took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, the U.S. military said. It is based at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state and was flying with a crew of 22 Navy personnel and one each from the Air Force and the Marines.

Bates Gill, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said China was acting like any military power by trying to ward off ''activities aimed at its airspace.''

The collision with the American plane is a ''small victory'' from China's perspective, Gill said. ''You've sent the message about intruding in airspace. You forced it to land. You've got your hands on it.''

One Chinese academic claimed that in-flight encounters were common with U.S. surveillance aircraft flying along China's coastline listening to its military. ''It's very regular for the American Navy to have their planes intruding into Chinese airspace,'' said Yan Xuetong, an expert in international studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

''The Chinese then send up fighters and chase them out.'' Totty, the U.S. military spokesman, confirmed that interceptions are common but denied that U.S. planes routinely intrude on Chinese airspace.

''Our aircraft routinely operate in international air space on reconnaissance missions and it is routine for Chinese aircraft to respond by intercepting and shadowing us,'' Totty said.

The EP-3 landed at a military airfield at Lingshui, a town on the southern end of Hainan, the statement said.

Totty said he had no information about whether either airplane had diverted course. ''We want to know why contact was made,'' he said. ''They were intercepting us on a routine mission, and during the intercept contact was made.

How it happened, we're not able to say at this time.'' Cook noted a similar collision in the 1980s between a Soviet fighter jet and a Norwegian P-3 - similar to the EP-3 - over the Barents Sea, which lies north of Norway and Russia. Both planes landed safely, he said.

-------

U.S. Plane Makes Emergency Landing in China

Associated Press
April 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-US-Plane.html

BEIJING (AP) -- A U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet sent to intercept it over the South China Sea on Sunday and made an emergency landing in China. The Chinese government said the fighter crashed and its pilot was missing.

China blamed the U.S. aircraft for the collision off the southern Chinese island of Hainan. But the commander of U.S. Pacific military forces said the Chinese planes were at fault, sharply criticizing China for more ``aggressive'' tactics in intercepting U.S. planes.

``It's not a normal practice to play bumpercars in the air,'' Adm. Dennis Blair told reporters at Camp Smith in Honolulu.

The American EP-3 plane landed at a military airfield at Lingshui on the southern end of Hainan, and China assured the United States that the 24 crewmembers were safe. American diplomats were going to Hainan to see them, said U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher. The U.S. Pacific Command asked for the return of the crew and aircraft.

But Blair said U.S. officials had had no contact since the crew since its initial report that it landed with no injuries. ``We just don't know'' what has happened to them, Blair said.

``We are waiting right now for the Chinese government to give us the kind of cooperation that is expected of countries in situations like this,'' he said. ``But as time goes on, it's increasingly worse and it's been 18 hours that we don't have a phone call yet from our crew. We're talking about a place that has telephones.''

China's Foreign Ministry said earlier that ``proper arrangements'' had been made for the crew, but did not say where they were.

The incident comes at an uneasy time in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Bush administration has taken a warier attitude toward Beijing, and the president is reportedly leaning toward selling Taiwan much of the high-tech weapons it seeks -- a sale bitterly opposed by China.

The U.S. plane was on a routine surveillance flight in international airspace when two Chinese fighters intercepted it, said Col. John Bratton, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command. Officials In Honolulu showed a map that put the collision about 80 miles southeast of Hainan, well outside the 12-mile territorial sea and airspace.

China claims most of the South China Sea as its territorial waters -- a claim rejected by countries that use the vast expanse of ocean for shipping.

``The U.S. side has total responsibility for this event,'' the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that it had made a ``serious'' protest.

It said two Chinese fighters were sent up to track the plane as it approached Chinese airspace. ``The U.S. plane abruptly diverted toward the Chinese planes, and its head and left wing collided with one of the Chinese planes, causing the Chinese plane to crash,'' it said. It said rescuers were searching for the missing Chinese pilot.

But Blair blamed the Chinese fighters, which he said were similar to F-16s, fly much faster and have more maneuverability than the EP3, which is about the size of a Boeing 737.

``Big airplanes like this fly straight and level on their path, little airplanes zip around them,'' he said. ``Under international airspace rules, the faster more maneuverable aircraft has obligation to stay out of the way of the slower aircraft.

``It's pretty obvious who bumped into who,'' Blair said. ``I'm going on common sense now because I haven't talked to our crew.''

He said the collision was likely an accident -- but that it reflected a ``pattern of increasingly unsafe behavior'' by the Chinese military. He said U.S. officials had protested to Beijing earlier about the behavior but ``did not get a satisfactory response.''

``Intercepts by Chinese fighters over the past couple months have become more aggressive to the point that we felt they were endangering the safety of the Chinese and American aircraft,'' he said.

Distrust has risen between Beijing and Washington in recent weeks, exacerbated by China's recent detention of two scholars with links to the United States. China, in turn, has been protesting the prospect of the United States' selling new arms to Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade Chinese province.

Cmdr. Rex Totty, another spokesman for the Pacific Command, said U.S. planes routinely run reconnaissance missions in the area and ``it is routine for Chinese aircraft to respond by intercepting and shadowing us.'' He denied U.S. aircraft enter Chinese airspace.

The EP-3 -- an unarmed four-engine propeller-driven plane -- can pick up radio, radar, telephone, e-mail and fax traffic, said Nick Cook, an aviation expert with Jane's Defense Weekly in London.

The U.S. plane took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, the U.S. military said. It is based at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state and was flying with a crew of 22 Navy personnel and one each from the Air Force and the Marines.

Bates Gill, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said China was acting like any military power by trying to ward off ``activities aimed at its airspace.''

The collision with the American plane is a ``small victory'' from China's perspective, Gill said. ``You've sent the message about intruding in airspace. You forced it to land. You've got your hands on it.''

Cook noted a similar collision in the 1980s between a Soviet fighter jet and a Norwegian P-3 -- similar to the EP-3 -- over the Barents Sea, which lies north of Norway and Russia. Both planes landed safely, he said.

-------- drug war

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

Florida

Miami - A judge has ruled unconstitutional a city ordinance requiring motorists to pay a $1,000 fine to reclaim vehicles impounded after a drug or prostitution arrest. The fine was levied even if charges were dropped.

Mississippi

Jackson - Gov. Musgrove vetoed a bill that would have allowed construction of a prison in Washington County. He said it would have been a waste of money. The bill would have created a prison for drug-recovering inmates.

Rhode Island

Providence - A grand jury is investigating the slaying of a 15-year-old murder witness shot outside her home on the eve of a murder trial last year. Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse said Jennifer Rivera's death was intended to suppress her testimony against a man serving a life sentence for killing a 17-year-old in a drug dispute in 1999.

Wyoming

Cheyenne - An Israeli man arrested after police found 147 pounds of the party drug Ecstasy in his car will remain jailed without bond, a federal judge ruled. Atzon Gerby, 42, who had been living in Tarzana, Calif., is charged with one count of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance.

-------- space

Astronauts Say Millionaire Tourist Is Welcome

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/science/01SPAC.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 31 - The newest residents of the international space station say they will welcome a California millionaire if he shows up at their door next month over NASA's objections.

The American astronaut Col. Susan B. Helms said Friday that she and her crew mate Col. James S. Voss barely knew Dennis Tito, who is trying to become the world's first space tourist. But Colonel Helms pointed out that she and Colonel Voss did not know the two Russian cosmonauts who are expected to accompany Mr. Tito in the Soyuz spacecraft.

"I'm not uncomfortable with any of them," Colonel Helms told The Associated Press in an interview from orbit. "I would welcome anybody who has done the service of bringing us a new Soyuz, and if they're on the other side of the hatch when we open it up, they're welcome to the dinner table."

Mr. Tito, a 60-year-old investment banker, is scheduled for liftoff aboard a Soyuz rocket April 28 and will spend about a week aboard the international space station Alpha.

NASA officials say Mr. Tito is insufficiently trained and can get in the way of the busy station crew and jeopardize everyone's safety.

Russian space officials say that it is their Soyuz rocket, and that they can fly anyone they want. Mr. Tito paid as much as $20 million for his ticket, money that is sorely needed by the Russian space program.

Mr. Tito has had months of training in Russia. He tried to take part in weeklong instruction at the Johnson Space Center in Houston with his Russian crew mates this month, but was turned away by NASA.

Colonel Voss said he would make sure any visitors to the space station knew all the emergency procedures and escape routes to protect the orbiting complex and themselves.

The station commander, Yuri V. Usachev, said recently that he favored space tourism. The Russians often had paying customers aboard Mir, including a Japanese television journalist and a British chemist.

A new three-person Soyuz capsule is needed every six months at the space station to serve as a lifeboat.

One of NASA's arguments against Mr. Tito is that he did not train with Colonel Helms or Colonel Voss.

Colonel Voss said Friday that Mr. Tito's presence would be no more of a distraction than "a beautiful view out the window."

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

Milosevic Should Face Trial by Hague Tribunal, Bush Says

New York Times
April 2, 2001
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/world/02DIPL.html

President Bush praised the Yugoslav government yesterday for arresting Slobodan Milosevic but cautioned that the extent of his crimes warranted a trial at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague and not just a trial on local charges in Serbia.

In relatively strong language, Mr. Bush's statement described the "chilling images of terrified women and children herded onto trains, emaciated prisoners interned behind barbed wire and mass graves unearthed by United Nations investigators," all traceable to Mr. Milosevic's "brutal dictatorship."

Mr. Bush did not specify whether he believed that the United States should move ahead and certify that Yugoslavia had met conditions that call for cooperation with the war crimes tribunal before American economic assistance can be released.

But he seemed to suggest that for the moment, the Yugoslavs had done well enough in meeting the demands, saying, "I am encouraged by the actions that Belgrade has already taken to work with the tribunal, including its assistance over the last several weeks in transferring two indictees to The Hague."

Mr. Bush said that he appreciated the "hard job" Yugoslavia faced in building "its new democracy" and that its government could "count on the friendship" of the United States as it continued on a path of reform.

But one author of the aid legislation, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in an interview yesterday that while the Yugoslavs had a taken a step forward with Mr. Milosevic's arrest, it was not enough.

The decision to arrest Mr. Milosevic just as the deadline for the renewal of aid approached showed that the Yugoslav authorities had acted only under outside pressure, Senator Leahy said. That leverage should be maintained in an effort to encourage the government to comply fully with the legislation by extraditing Mr. Milosevic to The Hague, he added.

"A good administration policy would be to say, `You adhere to international law or you don't get the money,' " Mr. Leahy said.

Prosecuting Mr. Milosevic on Serbian charges of corruption was a "long way away" from prosecuting him on international charges of crimes against humanity, Mr. Leahy said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whose department was preparing last week to certify Yugoslavia as cooperative, is expected to indicate today what he will do.

What is at stake is $50 million in economic assistance, Washington's support for Yugoslavia's membership in the World Bank and support for loans from the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Leahy said there was no rush for certification, because some aid appropriated last year to Yugoslavia was just being distributed now. "It is not as though a check for $50 million is going to be written tomorrow," he said.

Mr. Leahy said he would consider working out a compromise with the administration to allow some aid to move forward without certification. That could prod the Yugoslavs to extradite Mr. Milosevic before a local trial began, the senator added.

In reaching his decision, General Powell must balance what turned out to be a dramatic test of the resolve of the government of President Vojislav Kostunica to follow through on the arrest and the fact that the authors of the legislation say the arrest alone does not satisfy their intent.

Mr. Leahy was joined in writing the law by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. The two senators, who run the approprations subcommitteee that handles foreign aid, could block further assistance to Yugoslavia, Mr. Leahy said.

But the administration is eager to have Yugoslavia as a partner in dealing with Albanian insurgents in the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia, and on a broader scale it wants to help the ruined country revive itself as a going economic concern.

The stability of southeastern Europe, which includes the economically and politically precarious Macedonia, is largely dependent on a rebound in Yugoslavia, administration officials assert. Among the results of withholding certification, they argue, could be a backlash from Serbian nationalists and a fraying of a very fragile political consensus.

As a way of illustrating what he described as the progress of the Kostunica government, a senior administration official said the arrest of Mr. Milosevic was not a last-minute act but a result of groundwork laid over several months.

The Yugoslav leadership, as it went through fierce internal debates on Mr. Milosevic's future, made efforts to prepare the public for his arrest, the official said.

Thus, a recent public opinon survey showed that when foreign economic assistance was tied to Mr. Milosevic's extradition to The Hague, people wanted the money rather than maintaining the principal of keeping Mr. Milosevic in Serbia.

The Bush administration was also encouraged by a draft Yugoslav law that specifically provides for extradition, the official said. Once that law is passed, officials have argued, it may be only a matter of time, perhaps a year, before Mr. Milosevic would be transferred to the international tribunal.

But human rights groups have argued that the drafting of the law on extradition is a delaying tactic. As a member of the United Nations, Yugoslavia has an obligation to transfer Mr. Milosevic to a United Nations tribunal, they say.

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

Army Faces Fierce Fight on Historic Hawaii Valley

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/national/01RANG.html?pagewanted=print

SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii - The Makua Valley rises from the leeward coast of Oahu into the volcanic bluffs of the Waianae Mountains, home to a multitude of endangered species. The valley floor is peppered with archaeological ruins, including the remnants of temples where humans were once sacrificed.

The valley, just over the ridge from this Army post, is said by some to be a sacred place, the mythic birthplace of the Hawaiian people. To the United States Army, it is a sorely needed training area, where troops from the 25th Infantry Division could fire rifles, mortars and howitzers in the closest approximation to combat short of war. The Army's guns, however, are silent.

The Army suspended training at the Makua Military Reservation two and a half years ago amid a public outcry that followed several brush fires sparked by gunfire. Now the Army's plan to resume training has met fierce resistance from a coalition of residents and environmentalists who assert that military training, particularly with live weapons, is destroying the valley's cultural, historic and environmental legacy.

"Our problem with the military is they don't understand the significance of Makua Valley," said William J. Aila Jr., a leeward coast resident and outspoken opponent of the Army's plans. "They're bombing the Earth Mother."

The controversy here in Hawaii is not simply local. It represents something that military commanders say is becoming one of the greatest threats to the readiness of the nation's military forces.

All of the armed services are fighting to keep or expand the training areas they say are needed to sustain combat-ready forces - from the Navy's bombing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques to the Army's National Training Center in California's high desert.

The challenges, known broadly around the Pentagon as "encroachment issues," have simmered for years, but in the last decade they have become more frequent and more intense. Bases across the country are facing legal and political challenges. The Air Force is fighting a sweeping lawsuit that would halt low-level training flights nationwide until a comprehensive study could be done on their impact.

And many believe the challenges will only increase as environmental awareness grows, as American Indians demand greater respect for traditional homelands and as suburban sprawl reaches once-remote bases, sharply increasing complaints about noise, safety and health.

"It is a problem that is real," the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, said at his Senate confirmation hearing in January. "The United States needs bases. It needs ranges. It needs test ranges. And it cannot provide the training and the testing that people need before they go into battle unless those kinds of facilities are available. And each year that goes by, there are greater and greater pressures on them."

Here in Hawaii, where the issue has become entwined in local politics, the nascent sovereignty movement and concerns over economic development in the relatively impoverished leeward coast, the pressure may just be enough to shut down military training in the Makua Valley once and for all.

The Army's presence in the valley dates to the 1920's, when the service installed gun emplacements there. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army confiscated 6,600 acres in and around the valley to train troops for World War II, evicting ranchers who lived there. It still occupies nearly 4,200 acres today.

For decades, the Army and the other services bombed, strafed and otherwise carried out training exercises in Makua Valley with relative impunity. In recent years, however, the training has drawn protests from residents and, increasingly, the attention of federal regulators.

The fires that prompted the Army to suspend training in September 1998 raised concerns among officials with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service about the threat posed to 41 endangered species of plants and animals in or near the valley.

It was then that the Army's legal battle began. A group of residents and an advocacy group, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, filed a lawsuit demanding that the Army comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and conduct a thorough review of the impact that training was having on the valley.

The Army ultimately settled the lawsuit, agreeing not to resume firing weapons in Makua until it had reviewed any potential impact and notified the public in advance.

After more than two years of study, the Army announced last December that it planned to resume training, though in a more limited way, with units of more than 100 soldiers conducting operations and firing weapons in narrowly drawn zones.

The 25th Division's commanders argued that they had designed the training to minimize, if not eliminate, the effects on Makua Valley's historic sites and environment, but the plan provoked a new round of protests and a new lawsuit.

This time, the residents contended that the Army had failed to conduct a more rigorous and expensive environmental impact study. The less time-consuming environmental assessment, they said, did not consider a variety of issues, including whether there were alternative sites for military training.

"There have been a significant number of impacts from the training that the Army has just not considered fully," said Paul H. Achitoff, a lawyer for Earthjustice.

After protests that included a raucous community meeting in the town of Waianae in January, the division's commanders withdrew their plan, saying they wanted more time to consult with residents and others.

The Army also tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but on March 1, a federal judge in Honolulu refused.

The division commanders say the prolonged suspension of training in the Makua Valley has caused what one officer called "a slow degradation" of readiness. Last year only 8 of the division's 18 companies completed the annual live-fire training exercise the Army requires.

The Schofield base itself has firing ranges, but the commanders say only Makua has the space to allow a company of soldiers to maneuver through the terrain while firing their weapons and experiencing the thunderous impact of artillery and other weapons exploding near them.

"You don't want to experience that sensation for the first time in combat, with all of the other stress you face," said the division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry.

The Army's use of Makua has been greatly complicated by the expansion of the list of endangered species. In the early 1990's, the number of plants given protection jumped sharply, with 186 new species listed in Hawaii alone.

General Eikenberry maintained that the Army had gone to great lengths to protect the environment at Makua, despite the fires. Evidence of the fires is still visible in the scorched trees along the valley floor. The division has a team of scientists monitoring the plants and trying to propagate the rarest of them, and an archaeologist working to protect the ruins from the troops.

But Fred Dodge, a doctor from Waianae and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the Army still acted as it had in the past, refusing to consider alternative ways to simulate combat.

"This is the 21st century," he said. "I think if they can break out of that cold-war mentality, they could find there are other ways to train."

---

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

Arizona

Phoenix - A newly completed passenger terminal at Williams Gateway Airport in southeast Mesa is ready for use. There's just one flaw: Despite several years of marketing, no major or regional carriers have agreed to use the remodeled Air Force facility. The 24,000-square-foot terminal can handle 250,000 passengers a year.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

EU leaders declare Kyoto alive

Australian News Network
01apr01
From AP
http://news.com.au/newspulse/pulseframe/0,4711,1853832^401,00.html

EU environment ministers say the Kyoto global warming agreement is alive, saying they will go ahead with ratification plans with or without the United States.

The ministers condemn President George W Bush's rejection of mandatory reductions of carbon dioxide emissions in the 1997 climate treaty.

The issue has dominated the start of their three-day gathering that began last night.

Swedish Environment Minister Kjell Larson says no individual country has the right to declare a multilateral agreement dead.

The treaty - negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, calls for countries to agree to legally binding targets for curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuel.

---

Bush Angers Europe by Eroding Pact on Warming

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/world/01GERM.html

FRANKFURT, March 31 - European leaders frequently bristle about American behavior, but President Bush's abrupt decision this week to abandon a treaty on global warming has provoked even more than the usual level of anger and frustration.

"Irresponsible," "arrogant," even "sabotage" are just a few of the charges that Europeans have leveled at Mr. Bush since he announced his refusal to follow through on the treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. And European Union representatives will take their case in favor of the accord to Washington on Monday, though their arguments are not expected to prevail.

The response is so intense in part because the decision has aggravated a mixture of grudges that have gnawed at Europeans for years.

They are angry that the United States appears oblivious to widespread environmental concerns across most of Europe.

They are frustrated that the United States, by virtue of its size, can undermine a treaty that was negotiated by more than 100 countries.

Most of all, they are depressed that there is not much they can do about it.

The United States produces about 25 percent of the gases associated with global warming, and its refusal to meet goals set by Kyoto to reduce those emissions makes it difficult for competitors to stick with their goals.

"To suggest scrapping Kyoto and making a new agreement with more countries involved simply reflects a lack of understanding of political realities," said Margot Wallström, Europe's commissioner for environmental affairs. "We could lose years of work if we were to start from scratch."

Ms. Wallström will lead the delegation that meets on Monday with Christie Whitman, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The group is also expected to include Environment Minister Kjell Larsson of Sweden, whose country currently holds the rotating European Union presidency, and representatives of Belgium, which takes over from the Swedes in July.

The meeting is part of a diplomatic push that is also supposed to include visits to China, Russia, Iran and Japan to assess whether it would be possible to carry through on the Kyoto treaty without the United States.

Today, environment ministers from European Union countries discussed the Bush decision at a previously scheduled meeting in Sweden, where the reaction was one of indignation.

"Kyoto is still alive," said Mr. Larsson, who was host of the meeting in Kiruna, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. "No country has the right to declare Kyoto dead."

The anger at the United States is spread evenly across Europe.

Dominique Voynet, France's minister for the environment, called Mr. Bush's decision "completely provocative and irresponsible" and warned the United States against "continuing the work of sabotage" if other countries decided to embrace the goals of the Kyoto agreement on their own.

Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, called Mr. Bush's decision "a brutal form of unilateralism." In London, The Independent reported that "history will not judge George Bush kindly."

When Mr. Bush met with the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, in Washington on Thursday, Kyoto formed a central disagreement. "We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America," Mr. Bush said.

This kind of America-first sentiment prompted sharp criticism from the European Union Commission president, Romano Prodi. "If one wants to be a world leader, one must know how to look after the entire earth and not only American industry," the former Italian prime minister told La Repubblica newspaper.

But nobody has any illusions about changing American policy, and the real question European leaders are asking is whether they can or should press ahead without America.

"It is a catastrophe," said Gerd Billen, executive director of Germany's biggest environmental group, Naturschutzbund Deutschland, which has 350,000 members. "Everybody knows how hard it is to reach an international agreement on environmental issues like this, and this could destroy it."

Mr. Billen and other environmental leaders are pushing for a boycott against American companies, particularly oil companies that have extensive gas-station networks in Europe.

"It would be a citizens' action, and if it is done right, it could really put pressure on the oil companies," said Alexander de Roo, deputy chairman of the European Parliament's environmental committee. "I don't think that begging will be very effective. I think they will only listen to powerful arguments."

As in many other international issues, from the decision to send peacekeeping forces to the Balkans to coordinating international currency rates, Europeans know from experience that it is difficult to accomplish anything without American collaboration.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, which was approved in 1997 after years of negotiation, 37 other industrial countries agreed to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012 to 5.2 percent below the levels in 1990.

But the United States is by far the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, both per capita and in total. The average American consumes twice as much energy as the average European, and the emission of greenhouse gases is also about twice as high per capita in the United States as in Europe.

If European countries press ahead with their own goal, European companies run the risk of incurring higher expenses while American companies benefit from easier rules.

Ms. Wallström, the environmental commissioner, noted at a news conference in Brussels on Thursday that Europe did not want to end up rewarding the United States for its refusal to go along.

But abandoning the goals is politically treacherous, because they enjoy strong popular support in most countries. Despite the anger that many Europeans feel toward high gasoline taxes, support for environmental regulations remains much stronger than in the United States.

In the months leading up the Kyoto meetings in 1997, the European Union proposed a remarkably ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse emissions to 15 percent below the levels of 1990.

Reflecting the enormous difference in the political and social climates in the United States and Europe, European business groups merely tried to moderate those goals and many industrial associations committed themselves to steep reductions in emissions as a way to escape direct government regulation.

Many European environmental leaders argue that Europe needs to press ahead.

"If 55 countries representing 55 percent of worldwide CO2 emissions ratify the Kyoto protocol, then it begins to function," Mr. de Roo said.

On a broader level, many Europeans are convinced that Mr. Bush is leading the United States into greater isolation. Many commentators seized upon Mr. Bush's comment last week that he would not do anything to weaken the American economy. The announcement was front-page news across Europe, and it quickly prompted a storm of criticism.

"We are back to Ronald Reagan and America First," said Noel Mamer, a leader of the French Green party and a member of Parliament. "I think the decision is completely mad, and it is a reason for more isolation for America."

But even some of the fiercest European critics admit that they have little leverage. In Brussels, European leaders carefully avoided making any threats and said they merely planned to "explain" their position to the Bush administration.

"The United States will probably come out of this crisis of trans-Atlantic relations as the winner," said Libération, the left-leaning French newspaper. But, it added, "Those who spew gases run the risk of reaping, long before the climate has heated up, an explosive hostility in public opinion and diplomatic isolation."

---

A Climate Policy That Works

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By WILLIAM K. REILLY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/01REIL.html

SAN FRANCISCO - President Bush and Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, have now definitively abandoned any intention to regulate carbon dioxide from utilities and confirmed that they oppose the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to fight global warming.

Many the world over are speculating on the significance of these moves, some countries concluding they can relax their own efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, others despairing that the United States may not lead on the environmental issue of the era.

Is there another way to address the problem of climate change while accommodating the Bush administration's concerns about the science and the costs of a climate policy? Is there a conservative response to global warming?

I believe that a distinctive Bush policy on climate could involve three parts. First, the administration should ask the National Academies of Science and of Engineering to review the scientific evidence on climate change and the availability of energy-efficient technologies - both issues on which the president has expressed concern. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recently concluded that anthropogenic emissions have "contributed substantially" to warming. The National Academies could be asked to review the panel's findings, along with the state of technologies. In this way, President Bush could fulfill his campaign promise to follow the science on climate.

Second, the administration should ask the private sector what it can achieve by way of energy efficiency. What is practical and cost-effective, and how quickly can it be done? It is little known, though quite astonishing, that 11 major companies, eight of them American, have committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a total that exceeds the reductions required of Britain under Kyoto. United Technologies, I.B.M., Baxter, Polaroid and others have committed to improve energy efficiency, or to cut carbon dioxide, by at least 25 percent.

And those who say these are only commitments should look at DuPont, the nation's largest chemical company, which has already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent and promises to cut them by 65 percent by 2010. It has also pledged that 10 percent of its energy needs will be met by renewable sources by that time.

After consulting carefully with companies, the administration should identify realistic goals for the major sectors of the economy. Auto executives, for example, have indicated that their industry cannot make the substantial changes called for by Kyoto in the next seven years but could achieve major improvements in 10 to 15 years. The president needs to get the automobile companies and other important industries to spell out what they can achieve and then commit to these goals.

Finally, we must realize that very few countries are cutting emissions; most will not come close to equaling the reductions required of the United States by the Kyoto Protocol. Many nations would support the administration if it instead made a convincing commitment to abide by the 1992 international convention to combat global warming - which President Bush's father signed - while also agreeing to exceed the goals of Kyoto over a longer period of time. Such commitments would permit a more orderly replacement of capital equipment and put to rest concerns that energy taxes are required or that electricity supplies would be disrupted.

President Bush and many in the Senate have decried the Kyoto Protocol's failure to require cuts in greenhouse gases from developing countries. But the United States must have a cogent, credible policy before it can speak with authority to developing countries.

China, second only to America in its emission of greenhouse gases, has actually reduced its carbon emissions over the past five years. The Chinese, in an effort to curb suffocating air pollution, have reduced coal subsidies, switched to cleaner transportation fuels and converted power plants to natural gas from coal. Helping the Chinese to make further progress could be another distinctive element of the Bush climate policy.

In sum, there is another way: Review the state of science and technology, involve the private sector, set realistic goals and seriously engage developing countries. This is the path toward energy efficiency and progress on the environment.

William K. Reilly, chairman of the World Wildlife Fund, was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first Bush administration.

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In a Crisis, Vegetables, Not Beef, for British

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/world/01BRIT.html

LONDON, March 31 - The love of red meat was once so much a part of the national makeup of the English that the French called them "les rosbifs." The 18th-century painter William Hogarth titled a famous canvas portraying the quintessential robustness of his countrymen "O the Roast Beef of Old England."

A well-marbled rib was the symbol of British well being and power, but eating habits have moved on. With rampant disease striking British herds for the second time in a decade, the change is accelerating.

"We've had a huge increase in phone calls and 14,000 hits a day on our Web site from people asking for information on balancing diet and going vegetarian," said Samantha Calvert, director of public affairs for the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom. "There was a poll that said that 32 percent of respondents would consider not eating meat, and that's a very good day for vegetarianism."

The British are shunning beef even though the malady now afflicting their animals - foot-and-mouth disease - does not harm people who eat infected meat. The cows and pigs and sheep recover in a matter of weeks, though with weight loss and reduced capacity to produce milk.

People are reacting to the vast coverage in newspapers and on television that has focused on heaps of carcasses being incinerated and on affecting images of farmers grieving over the animals being sacrificed in the mass cull now under way to stem the spread of the highly contagious virus. The images have also engaged the traditional British concern for animal welfare.

"Lots of people are finally making the connection between that neat slice of red meat in the polystyrene wrapping that they buy in the supermarket and that fluffy little lamb being held by the crying farmer on TV," Ms. Calvert said.

The Ministry of Agriculture reported today that the cull had now marked 832,000 animals for slaughter and that the number of confirmed cases had risen by 50 more in the last day to reach a total of 841 in the six- week epidemic.

Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely reported to have decided on a one-month delay of a national election planned for May 3. He must declare his decision on Monday. Beef sales fell in 1996, when it was discovered that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad cow disease, could provoke the incurable brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Ninety people have died of it, and five more cases have been confirmed.

"We stopped serving all beef and offal when the B.S.E. crisis hit, and every time we think about putting it back on, something else happens," said Ruth Rogers, co-owner and chef of the River Cafe, one of London's most popular restaurants. She said that diners are eating more fish than meat and that some people choose two appetizers to confine themselves to vegetables, a specialty.

The British government has mounted a vigorous effort to combat what it considers misinformation - particularly abroad - about the safety of food here and about the wisdom of moving about the countryside when there are many restrictions to keep the infection from spreading. Tourist offices have reported Europeans and Americans inquiring whether food is available and edible, and customs officials say people are showing up at Channel ports with provisions to last a week.

Contrary to its old reputation, Britain was the most vegetarian country in Europe even before the outbreaks of disease. Ms. Calvert said a study in June estimated that 5.4 percent of people in Britain were vegetarians, and new surveys this month raised the estimate as high as 12 percent - a level that might not be sustained once the crisis has passed. Figures for France and Germany in the mid- 1990's, considered comparable to the British figure a year ago, were 0.9 and 1.25 percent.

Vegetarianism tends to be an urban phenomenon, and Britain's rural population is down to 10 percent, the lowest in Europe, according to a new MORI poll. Its farming community is also smaller and less politically powerful than those on the Continent.

While British farmers' incomes have plummeted, the big British chains, where nearly 80 percent of Britons buy their food, have enjoyed record profits.

Hugo Arnold, author of "Buying the Best," a book on food shopping, said he thought that the current nervousness about food would produce a more discerning and demanding shopper. "In five years' time," he told The Evening Standard, "dinner parties are going to be divided between the people who buy their meat in a supermarket and the people who buy direct from specialist suppliers, farms which have reared the meat themselves, slaughtered it in small abattoirs and can tell you how it was fed.

"What I like about it is that it's a traditional kind of model of going to market, except it's done by modern methods."

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The Asbestos President

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/01DOWD.html

WASHINGTON - Being witty about poisoned drinking water isn't easy. It requires a certain obtuse savoir-faire.

Our president gave it a go Thursday night at a press dinner here.

"As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water," he told the crowd of radio and TV correspondents at the Washington Hilton. "To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating."

I guess a guy who can yuk it up about a woman he has executed in Texas can yuk it up about anything.

But it was a creepy moment.

It worked for Erin Brockovich to joke about the carcinogens in the water enviro-villains were sipping because she wanted to get the poison out. W. wants to keep the poison in - to help the enviro-villains who contributed to his campaign.

Forgive me, Al Gore.

I used to think you were striving too geekily to be Millennial Man. The Palm Pilot on your belt. The Blackberry. The Earth-cam you dreamed of. Citing "Futurama" as your favorite show. The obsessions about global warming and the information highway. Boldly choosing the first Jewish running mate.

But now I'm going hungry for a shred of modernity. Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally, globally, culturally, it's redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white Kansas.

With the guidance of his regents, the Duke of Halliburton and Cardinal Rumsfeld, W. has set off the specter of a mushroom cloud of carcinogens and carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear power and "China Syndrome" fears, rapacious drilling and retrenchment on women's rights, the missile shield, spy tensions and the cold war.

The son has become what the father used to privately deride as an "extra- chromosome" conservative.

W.'s press conference on Thursday boiled down to one exhortation: "Let's hear it for corporations!"

This administration is so hawkish that Colin Powell is cast as a sandals- and-beads peacenik. And John Ashcroft threatens to fry the F.B.I. spy.

The Clinton team wrestled with the messy grays of a post-cold-war world. The Bush team decided it was easier to bring back the cold war.

"These guys are linear," says a top official from Bush I. "They have to have black and white. They have to have bogeymen."

One veteran cold warrior who served under several presidents told me he was shocked that Bush II had refrozen the cold war.

"They've turned the clock back to 1983," he said. "It doesn't make any sense to slap the Russians around. They're already on their knees. We don't have to humiliate them. We need to use some finesse, to allow them some dignity.

"The thing I always hated about Clinton foreign policy was they seemed to be making it up as they went along. But these guys seem to be doing that, too. They are negative toward old policies, without coming up with anything positive."

The regents moved quickly to cast the administration in the gray-flannel image of their salad days. (One Republican says that Henry Kissinger once called Mr. Rumsfeld the most ruthless man he knew, all global despots included.)

Not satisfied with smacking around the Russians, humiliating Christie Whitman, downsizing Condi Rice and brushing back Colin Powell, the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis has no patience for the plaints of health-conscious yuppies, either.

You can just hear Rummy, slugging back a Scotch with Cheney in the Oval after they've put the Kid to bed, grousing about the gazillion dollars' worth of investments he has to sell to avoid a conflict, and growling: "Real men can drink twice that much arsenic. And how soon can we get some lead back in the lousy paint?"

What's next? Asbestos, DDT, bomb shelters, filterless cigarettes? Patti Page? Rummy griping that Laura Bush is too assertive?

W. never seemed happier than he did on Friday at the White House, surrounded by the old-timers from the Baseball Hall of Fame, basking in memories of his beloved 50's.

He is only our second boomer president, but his White House needs Geritol. He seems older than his sprite of a father. He goes to bed early and, except for sports, is oddly disconnected from the culture. He seems to have no engagement with contemporary America, except by virtue of being the president of the United States.

---

Two Crises: Cows and Current

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/weekinreview/01MICK.html

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. - CUMBRIA and Orange County belong to very different worlds. But the fells of northern Britain and the sprawl of Southern California are now both digesting yet more bad news. In Britain, despite the pyres of burning sheep and cattle, foot-and-mouth disease is now set to jump tenfold. This week Californians discovered the harshest consequence yet of their energy crisis: an immediate rise in electricity prices by as much as 50 percent.

Foot-and-mouth is a far more gruesome tragedy. On the other hand, California's electricity crisis may be both more expensive and more prolonged. Yet the reactions to the disasters in Britain and California have been strikingly similar.

There has been anger, to be sure, but, so far, it has been strangely dissipated. Given the failure of either government to deal with the crisis, heads might have been expected to fall. Instead, the people in charge - Prime Minister Tony Blair and Governor Gray Davis - have suffered relatively little politically so far.

This is partly to do with the complexity of the issues. Foot-and-mouth is no easier to explain than electricity deregulation. Without obvious culprits, the media, particularly television news, often jumped to more straightforward stories - the chances of a general election in Britain, the decline of Nasdaq, and (inevitably) the worldwide debate about Björk's dress sense.

But complexity alone does not explain the muted anger. There has also been a marked degree of separation, a sense of distance from the pain. In Britain, farming accounts for only about one in a hundred jobs - something disgruntled Londoners are quick to point out. For all his empathizing with the farmers, Mr. Blair will probably call a general election in May - something The Sun, Britain's biggest tabloid, supports.

In California, consumers have had even longer to get used to the crisis (the problems with power emerged last year). The Public Utility Commission is also inflicting the price rises mainly on businesses rather than homes; many consumers will only suffer indirectly.

The prevailing emotion among both Britons and Californians seems to be resignation: "We had it coming," one Hollywood executive explained, using the same words heard often in London. In many cases, this is linked to a suspicion that people are paying the price for unfettered capitalism. What on earth, Britons ask, was a farm in Northumberland doing feeding Asian meat to their pigs? In California, deregulation is often blamed for the energy crisis.

Whether this detached fatalism is realistic is another matter. It is already clear in Britain that foot-and-mouth is about far more than just farming. The much bigger tourism industry stands to lose $1.5 billion to $5 billion this year - twice as much as the farmers. The deathly quiet that has fallen on many of the more beautiful parts of Britain has been caused not only by the much-cited "silence of the lambs," but also by the silence of American tour buses and holidaying German cyclists.

In California, electricity may be an old industry, but it is the lifeblood of the new economy. Price rises and, particularly, power cuts threaten not just Silicon Valley, but also California's core competence - persuading ambitious people from all over the world to come to the state. Indian programmers will not flock to work in a hot place where the air-conditioning keeps breaking down. They can get that in Bangalore.

Another reason to be relatively pessimistic about California is that its crisis will last longer. The acrid smoke drifting across Wordsworth country may be grimly apocalyptic; but by the end of this summer, Britain should have killed or vaccinated enough animals to get rid of the disease. By contrast, the imbalance between the demand and supply of energy in California may not be fixed until 2003. And there is already talk that last week's price rise will not be enough to cover the state's bills.

Meanwhile, the deeper arguments about unfettered capitalism seem far from finished. People throughout Europe, already angry about mad cow disease (which unlike foot-and-mouth is dangerous to humans), call for more barriers against food imports, and more rules for agribusiness. Consolidation in the slaughterhouse industry helped spread foot-and-mouth, forcing infected animals to be driven around the country.

Economic liberals reply that farming is the most protected and regulated industry in Britain (as it is everywhere in the Western world). The disease may have been partly spread by farmers' "bed-and-breakfasting" sheep, selling animals on a short- term basis just to claim subsidies.

Neither side seems ready to admit that bad luck played a role. Foot-and-mouth is, literally, a disease that can blow in from anywhere: it is carried by the wind. The route by which infected Asian meat found its way to a restaurant in northern England and was then fed as leftovers to pigs was a haphazard affair few could have predicted.

While foot-and-mouth might be excused as an act of God, California's electricity mess is man-made. But by whom? President Bush has jumped at the chance to imply that environmental regulators have held back the energy industry. Governor Davis, who clearly still hopes to enter the Democratic primaries in 2004, attacks greedy out-of-state power providers.

EVEN when you reach the heart of the problem, the state's regulatory system, another smog descends. Many on the left blame liberalization. Free-marketers reply that "deregulation" in the mid-1990's does not deserve that label. The state protected its incumbent suppliers, making it difficult for competitors to get into the market. It imposed rules that seem downright Soviet - rate freezes that oblige suppliers to sell power at a small fraction of the price they pay for it.

The bigger, more complicated arguments about the cause of the crises may recede into the background as long as most Californians and Britons continue to grin and bear it. If, on the other hand, frustrations, perhaps heightened by gloomier economic news, begin to boil to the surface, the politics could change dramatically. That will be the test of the coming long hot summers in both Britain and California.

---

Bush environmental critics wildly hyperbolic

USA Today
04/01/2001 - Updated 10:18 PM ET
By Richard Benedetto, Gannett News Service
http://www.usatoday.com/news/e98/benedetto/253.htm

WASHINGTON - To hear environmentalists tell it, President Bush, given his way, would allow business and industry to freely pollute our waterways, poison our air, spoil our parks and wildlife refuges, and leave us all to die.

At least that's the alarming way the president's stands on environmental issues are being presented by the various news outlets in recent weeks.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, a leading pro-environment lobby, was quoted far and wide last week when he said in reaction to various Bush environmental decisions, "Environmental policy is being taken back to the 19th century."

Does Pope mean we're going back to the 1800s, when factory chimneys belched black smoke into the air so thick you could cut it with a knife; stinking raw sewage ran in fetid urban gutters; and thousands died annually from typhoid fever contracted from feces-laden drinking water?

Or was he just using the kind of hot rhetoric he knows the media love?

Chances are, the latter.

After all, it is better theater to present the story as a clash between the environment-destroying president and the brave defenders of the public health than to offer a neutral forum for the reasoned debate between people with different views on a controversial topic.

That would make the story too gray, and therefore, in the eyes of many making news decisions, dull and uninteresting.

Consider reports last week that Bush would not seek Senate approval of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, which would impose tough restrictions on the United States and other industrial countries in the emission of so-called greenhouse gases that may contribute to global warming.

The television networks reacted as if the world were about to end.

"Global temperatures on the rise, glaciers retreating, storms more frequent and severe ... Yet, claiming potential harm to the economy, the White House today confirmed it will abandon the global accord to curb emissions of carbon dioxide," is the way CBS played it.

This from Tom Brokaw on NBC: "Now to another controversial decision on the environment from the Bush administration today, which announced that the president considers a worldwide treaty on global warming worthless."

Missing from the TV reports was a bit of history and perspective that would have made the story less sensational and more accurate if included:

First, it never was a secret that Bush opposed the Kyoto Treaty. He repeatedly said he was against it during the campaign, for two reasons: It did not impose the same standards on developing countries, which have few curbs on greenhouse gases, and costs of complying would be far too high for American business and industry.

Second, while former President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, said they supported the treaty, negotiated in 1997, they did absolutely nothing to get it approved by the Senate in the remaining three years of their tenure.

Why did Clinton and Gore drop Kyoto like a hot potato? Because they knew it didn't have a prayer of winning Senate ratification.

The Senate passed a resolution in 1997 by a 95-0 vote urging the administration not to pursue the treaty unless it requires developing countries to control their rapidly growing emissions at the same time. The final treaty did not impose that requirement.

Fox News did present the Kyoto story as the president following through on a campaign promise and doing what Clinton and Gore did - nothing. But most of the media chose to portray it as a major environmental reversal by Bush.

Sierra Club's Pope, always ready with a sound bite, said, "What we're seeing here is a complete capture of the presidential ear by extremists."

And who have captured the media ear?

---

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

Alaska

Denali National Park and Preserve - Volunteers will spend four days in June gathering dandelions for incineration. The dandelion is considered an exotic pest.

Hawaii

Port Allen - A Kauai tour boat company reported that a group of tourists spotted a pod of killer whales near Niihau Island. Such sightings are rare in Hawaii. Blue Dolphin Charters said the orca whales were attacking and eating a small whale or large dolphin and left a blood trail in the water. Orcas are most commonly found in cold coastal waters.

Idaho

Ketchum - The East Fork of the Salmon River is a popular place for the wolf packs that have formed since 30 animals were released in central Idaho in the mid-1990s. But the packs aren't popular with area ranchers. A stockman killed a wolf he caught in the act of killing a calf March 19, officials said. Biologists also worry that the White Hawk pack arriving in the area may fight with the resident White Cloud pack for territory.

Iowa

Des Moines - Antibiotics fed to livestock and later applied to farm fields in manure could be washing into streams, where they could be contributing to a rise in drug-resistant bacteria. The Des Moines Register says health experts fear that people will get sick when they drink untreated water or go fishing or swimming, because it will become harder to treat illnesses.

Montana

Helena - Mine-safety regulators fell short in ensuring worker safety at a vermiculite mine in Libby but probably could have done little to prevent asbestos-related illnesses there, a federal Labor Department report concludes.

South Dakota

Mitchell - The federal Bureau of Land Management will offer 80 wild horses and 20 wild burros for sale at auction. The sale April 20-21 is part of a plan to keep the herds from overpopulating federal land in the West. It is the first time the BLM will sell surplus animals in Mitchell. Bidding will begin at $125 per animal; bidders will be required to apply in advance.

Tennessee

Gatlinburg - The National Park Service wants to hear from residents of the Smoky Mountains foothills whether a long-delayed parkway should be completed. Congress authorized the Foothills Parkway in 1944, but only about 30% of it has been built.

Utah

Moab - The Bureau of Land Management has renewed a permit for an off-road safari for another five years. The Easter Jeep Safari attracts 1,700 4-wheel-drive vehicles each year. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sought to close a few of the routes but failed. This year's event will be April 7-15.

Wisconsin

Madison - Wisconsin will be able to use federal money to offset some of the cost of fighting the spread of gypsy months, insects that defoliate trees. Under the plan approved by the Natural Resources Board, about 1,400 acres of trees in Brookfield and Appleton will be sprayed in May.

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Who Regulates the Regulations?

New York Times
April 1, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/L01CZAR.html

To the Editor:
Re "Regulations Czar Prefers New Path" (front page, March 25):

John D. Graham's use of benefit- cost analysis to evaluate regulations would not be new. Every president since Jimmy Carter has required such analysis. What would be new is the prospect of a public health scholar, rather than a Washington lawyer, running regulatory analysis in the White House.

Some Americans favor any environmental regulation regardless of the costs, others oppose any environmental regulation regardless of the benefits. Only a few brave souls are willing to do the serious work of comparing the pros and cons. Using sober analytic methods, Dr. Graham and his colleagues at Harvard have criticized some regulations, but advocated others, like automobile air bags and air- pollution controls. John Graham has more expertise on health and environmental issues than any prior nominee for the job.

JONATHAN B. WIENER Durham, N.C., March 26, 2001 The writer is a professor of law and of environmental policy at Duke University.

•To the Editor:
Re "Regulations Czar Prefers New Path" (front page, March 25):

Most scientists engaged in research and policy analysis scrupulously avoid any conflict of interest. But John D. Graham, President Bush's nominee to head the regulatory affairs office, has long conducted studies on public health regulation while his work has been financed by the industries that would be regulated.

Not surprisingly, he has consistently produced reports that supported industry positions - including a study that overestimated the cost of preventing leukemia associated with benzene in gasoline while he was taking funds from the American Petroleum Institute.

At a time when the Bush administration is ignoring the scientific community on a number of environmental health issues, it would be well advised to nominate someone whose objectivity is beyond question.

ERIC CHIVIAN, M.D. Boston, March 29, 2001 The writer is director, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School.

-------- police

Summit police to get plastic bullets

Sun, 01 Apr 2001
[radtimes] #190
Martin Patriquin STAFF REPORTER www.thestar.com

``Less lethal'' guns that fire plastic bullets have been added to the RCMP arsenal to deal with protesters at the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Quebec city.

But those weapons are powerful enough to crack ribs and cause extreme pain, according to those who have used them.

The Anti Riot Weapon Enfield, or Arwen 37, is described as ``the first multi-purpose, multi-shot weapon system to combine lightweight, high accuracy and the ability to fire up to five shots before reloading'' by its Canadian distributor, Police Ordnance Company.

The weapon was approved for use by the force last summer, and the RCMP has placed ``a very substantial order'' for the guns several months ago according to Police Ordnance president Brian Kirkey. The force would not divulge exactly how many of the guns were ordered.

The RCMP tactical force and its SWAT team will be equipped with the Arwen 37 at the Quebec City Summit in April, said a spokesperson for the Mounties. Although several Canadian police emergency task forces already use the Arwen, it is believed this is the first time the RCMP will be equipped with the weapon.

``The Arwen 37 was approved for our emergency response teams in our continuing effort to resolve confrontational situations with a minimal amount of force,'' RCMP Sergeant Paul Marsh said.

``It is a tool at the disposal of our tactical team and I would imagine they will have them (in Quebec city),'' he added.

RCMP tactical squads from across the country, along with other police forces, will converge on Quebec City. The Quebec provincial police force also has bought new Arwens and 2,000 rounds of ammunition in preparation for the summit.

The Arwen 37 relies on severe pain to subdue a target. It is classified as a ``less lethal'' weapon that ``has less potential for causing death than conventional police weapons,'' said Marsh.

And it gets the job done.

``If it hits someone in a rib, it is meant to crack a rib and put them in a lot of pain,'' said Toronto police Constable Bob Leighton, who helps train the force's Emergency Task Force.

Tactical squads are usually required to test such less-lethal weapons - such as Tasers, which deliver electric shocks - on themselves. But Leighton said it would be ``too dangerous'' to do so with the Arwen.

`It is meant to crack a rib and put them in a lot of pain'

The Arwen 37 fires a round 15 centimetres (six inches) in length and 3.7 cm (1* inches) wide. The plastic slug emerges from the muzzle at 74 metres per second, or about 160 miles per hour.

``It is equivalent to getting hit by a fastball,'' Kirkey said.

The Arwen 37 can also fire tear gas and smoke rounds, and has the ability to five rounds in four seconds with what's considered 100 per cent accuracy from 20 metres.

The gun can also fire special penetrating ammunition that will go through car windshields, double-pane windows and doors.

``It will hit an adult-size torso at 100 metres with an accuracy appropriate for its size and use,'' Kirkey said.

Designed by Royal Ordnance, a division of British Aerospace, in the late 1960s, the weapon was meant to subdue rioters in Northern Ireland without killing them. Officers using them are trained to aim for the torso, though the hit can be disastrous if they miss their mark.

A 19-year-old man was critically injured during the 1994 Stanley Cup hockey riots in Vancouver when he was hit in the head by a plastic bullet fired from an Arwen 37.

Police Ordnance Company, based in Markham, will be North America's sole producer and manufacturer of the Arwen 37 by the fall.

---

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

Ohio

Cincinnati - Police Chief Thomas Streicher said he won't publicly dispute his estranged wife's allegations that he abused her. He said he didn't want his two children to be embarrassed any further. His wife, Kathryn, has filed for divorce.

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Two lawsuits filed against local prisoner-transport firm

TENNESSEAN--APRIL 1, 2001
Sunday, 04/01/01
By ROB JOHNSON Staff Writer

From the nation's highways, where the extradition vans of Nashville-based TransCor America ferry thousands of wanted men and women, come graphic tales of alleged civil rights abuses committed by the people in the driver's seats.

Two female detainees in Texas say they were sexually assaulted during a five-day odyssey by a driver previously implicated in a New Mexico assault. In Colorado, a mother of four filed a federal lawsuit alleging sexual assaults during a TransCor journey across the West. A busload of Wisconsin inmates sued in federal court alleging the group endured a frigid winter trip to Oklahoma on a TransCor bus awash in human waste.

State and local law enforcement agencies, including the Tennessee Department of Correction, have embraced private extradition as a cost-saving alternative to sending its officers to retrieve detainees from faraway jurisdictions.

TransCor, the self-declared giant in the extradition industry and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Corrections Corporation of America, says it safely and routinely hauls 77,000 detainees annually.

The people moved by these companies range from stone-cold killers to housewives accused of passing bad checks. Prisoners call the trips ''diesel therapy.''

Regardless of the extradition firm, hundreds of these trips pass routinely without incident.

But in 1997, a Memphis-based Federal Extradition Agency van exploded, and its six caged prisoners were incinerated. In February, a federal jury in Nashville awarded $9.5 million to one prisoner's daughter. A plaintiff's attorney asserts that the underlying facts in the burned FEA van incident are echoed in the TransCor assault case now before a U.S. District Court in San Antonio, Texas.

''The parallels between the cases are eerily similar,'' said San Antonio attorney Tim Maloney. ''The absolute and total disregard for the prisoners' rights, welfare and safety. That the most important thing is the bottom line. That it is nothing to transport these people for three or four or five days. That they are absolutely and completely helpless and at the mercy of these guards.''

The facts of the Texas case stretch from New Mexico to Nashville. One of the plaintiffs, a 39-year-old suspect in a jewelry-store theft, says she was shackled inside a TransCor van in October 1999. During three or four days, while she was locked inside with its shotgun-wielding agents, the lawsuit says, she was ''subjected to individual acts of sexual assault perpetrated by two employees of defendant, TransCor.''

She says she was forced to perform sexual acts and was penetrated with fists and a gun barrel. She says she was subjected to ''screen tests'' when the drivers stomped on the brakes, hurtling her face against the van's wire mesh security screens.

After she was delivered to the Houston jail, Harris County officials were able to collect evidence that helped them build sexual assault cases against TransCor agents Michael Jerome Edwards and David Jackson.

Jackson has agreed to plead guilty to an undisclosed charge, according to the Harris County district attorney's office. Edwards is in jail awaiting trial.

Women file civil right lawsuit

A federal civil rights suit filed by the woman and another female extradition passenger charges that TransCor did little to protect female prisoners from its male agents after at least four allegations of similar sexual assaults in the past five years.

Those allegations include a one-page statement that a female TransCor prisoner handed to a company official during a stopover in Nashville. It described a New Mexico assault perpetrated by the same agent, Edwards.

Because it was delivered a month before the alleged Texas assault, its existence could constitute a potentially damning corporate oversight, plaintiff's attorneys say.

Company officials repeatedly told a New Mexico attorney general's investigator that they couldn't find the statement. When the investigator arrived at TransCor's Nashville headquarters, she had a plan to execute a search warrant, and she took a Davidson County district attorney general's official with her.

But before there was any search, a TransCor attorney suddenly produced the long-sought document. He said it had been misfiled.

It is now part of a continuing criminal investigation in New Mexico and the civil litigation in San Antonio.

Because of the ongoing lawsuits, TransCor officials say they cannot discuss the particulars of the Texas case or others involving charges of civil rights violation by TransCor's agents.

''But we move about 77,000 people a year,'' said Gus Puryear, CCA's general counsel. ''So the fact that there's a handful of allegations in and of itself - and the allegations themselves may be serious - but viewed in the context of the overall business, we think that it's a pretty impressive record that TransCor has.''

Sexual assault, he says, is clearly a cause for termination.

''That's something that no one, public or private, ought to be doing and that TransCor has no tolerance for. It will fire anybody who does something so beyond what they're supposed to be doing.''

The company's employees have a record of which they can be proud, he says.

''They move so many people annually without incident. And they do so in a quality, cost-effective way for the customers, the public-sector customers,'' Puryear said.

In Colorado, TransCor is the defendant in a lawsuit filed by a married woman of four who was picked up in Texas on a welfare theft charge.

The all-male TransCor crew that delivered her back to Colorado, the lawsuit says, repeatedly assaulted her while she was wearing an agent's shackles. ''When you are wearing my jewelry,'' he allegedly told her, ''you belong to me.''

In a Davidson County Circuit Court case, a Texas state inmate charges that a TransCor driver raped and repeatedly sexually assaulted her in a rest room. The 2-year-old case was moved from state court to federal court and back again.

In Wisconsin, 39 prisoners have filed a federal lawsuit protesting their transfer on a TransCor bus to a private Oklahoma facility in frigid winter temperatures. They say their feet and legs were splashed with waste from an overflowing toilet. They say they vomited on one another because they were sickened by the smell. Dressed only in jumpsuits for the 31-hour journey, the prisoners claim some arrived in Oklahoma with frostbite and hypothermia.

Company officials say that because of the ongoing litigation, they cannot comment on those allegations.

Executive raising standards

TransCor's president has been on the job since December.

Sharon Johnson Rion, a former Maryland corrections official, says she has been busy improving TransCor's standards for its vans and buses. For instance, rather than relying too heavily on cheeseburgers and Egg McMuffins, TransCor says, it stops at a network of CCA prisons to pick up sack lunches, milk and fresh fruit. They're studying plans to offer airline-style food to its riders.

The white Ford diesel vans the company uses have metal security screens and upholstered bench seats. Prisoners sit facing each other, knee-to-knee. The passenger compartment is segmented to allow drivers to segregate female prisoners from the males. But the TransCor vans don't have the locked cages that the Federal Extradition Agency van had, which made it impossible for the drivers to rescue the men from the burning vehicle. TransCor says it uses its vans for shorter trips and as a feeder service to the big buses that make the long-distance, cross-country hauls.

At the Nashville headquarters, one of those buses was inside the company's spacious garage. But the bus interior was still cluttered after a long overland tour. It smelled of sweat and cigarettes. The upholstered seats looked like those on a Greyhound bus. Security screens separated the driver's compartment from the passenger area. A large television screen hung from the bus ceiling, and speakers were arrayed down both sides: in-transit movies. Prisoners, Rion says, are checked into local jails nightly.

The doomed riders aboard the FEA bus, by contrast, spent their last night inside a van that was parked in a Memphis parking deck. By failing to pay its bills, FEA had lost its ability to house prisoners in Memphis-area jails overnight.

Standards to prevent such conditions were almost non-existent. Only in December, for example, were federal oversight laws passed.

Prompted by the Oct. 13, 1999, escape of Kyle Bell, a convicted child rapist and killer, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and then-Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., sponsored legislation that oversees private extradition companies.

Bell escaped from a TransCor vehicle while it was stopped at a New Mexico truck stop. Two guards were asleep, one was in the restaurant buying a sandwich, and the other was getting gasoline. Bell, dressed in street clothes, used a hidden key to unlatch himself from his shackles, then crawled out of the van and vanished. The TransCor agents didn't notice that the convict was missing for nine hours. He was captured three months later in Texas.

Dorgan later said that ''it was a shock to learn that private companies were not required to meet even basic regulations or standards when transporting violent criminals.'' The legislation he drafted is designed ''to protect the safety of the American people if and when state and local governments use private companies to transport violent criminals,'' Dorgan said.

The legislation, signed into law by President Clinton on Dec. 21, 2000, gives the U.S. attorney general - now Bush-appointee Ashcroft - 180 days to draw up requirements for types of restraints and for identifiable clothing violent offenders must wear. The law will dictate the length of training that extradition agents must complete. Potential employees must undergo background checks and drug screens. The Interstate Transportation of Dangerous Criminals Act of 2000 also requires the creation of rules restricting the number of hours that employees can be on duty during a given time.

''We wholly support the new regulations,'' Rion said. She's working with public and private organizations, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the American Correctional Association, to draw up the new rules as law requires.

TransCor now has a policy against transferring women without female agents aboard. It's a company rule that Rion said was on the books when she took the job.

In the Texas and Colorado cases, the plaintiffs charge that TransCor was at fault for failing to put female agents on board with the female prisoners.

The current TransCor rule is simple, Rion said. If TransCor can't schedule a female agent when a customer calls in with a request to move a woman prisoner, the company turns down the business.

''At some point, that female is going to have to go to the rest room,'' said Rion. ''And at some point, that woman is going to have to be searched. And third, we do it protect our staff against frivolous complaints.''

-------- spying

Satellite photo provides first new look at Cuba

Seattle Times
Nation & World
Sunday, April 01, 2001
By Warren P. Strobel Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=cuba31&date=20010401

WASHINGTON - A private satellite firm has released the first commercially available picture of Cuba as seen from outer space, depicting in crisp detail ships in Havana harbor, railroad tracks, even the lettering on the roof of a huge warehouse.

The image, snapped in January by a spacecraft orbiting 423 miles overhead, is the latest example of how spy satellites, once the exclusive domain of defense and intelligence agencies, have gone private. And the impact of that shift is just beginning to be felt, say experts on the technology.

In the case of Cuba, the effect could be both political and economic. Some Cuban exiles in the Miami area say satellite photographs could be used to inspect and map properties they still claim on the island.

"Many of these people have not seen their properties for 40 years," said Nick Gutierrez, a Miami-area lawyer with about 100 clients who have claims. "We are not going to get these properties back until Fidel Castro is gone. But there are certain steps we can take to prepare for that day."

An American hotel chain also has expressed interest in satellite photos of Cuba's beaches to prepare for when the U.S. economic embargo against the island is lifted, said Mark Brender, director of Washington operations for Denver-based Space Imaging, which owns and operates the satellite.

Launched in 1999

The 1,600-pound satellite, called Ikonos, was launched in 1999, joining a handful of other commercial "remote sensing" spacecraft in orbit.

Over the next five years, the number of such satellites "is expected to explode," a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank, concluded last year.

Because other countries also operate imaging satellites, government "attempts to control access to high-resolution satellite imagery are bound to fail," the Carnegie report concluded.

Ikonos' camera is capable, under optimal conditions, of photographing objects on Earth that are slightly less than 1 meter (about 39 inches) square.

That's far less detail than photographs from the Pentagon's classified spy satellites, but still good enough for many purposes.

After a lengthy security review, the U.S. government late last year approved Space Imaging's license to launch an even more powerful orbiting camera with half-meter resolution, meaning it can photograph objects on the ground larger than half a meter, or slightly less than 20 inches.

Ikonos has provided images of many hidden military installations previously seen only by government intelligence analysts. They range from North Korea's missile launch pad to Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor to the U.S. Air Force's secret Area 51 testing facility in Nevada.

"In a way, we're entering an age of transparency," said Brender, a former naval officer and ABC-TV news producer.

Yet while those high-profile images make headlines, he said, other markets will determine if the new commercial industry thrives. They include mapping, coastal zone management, insurance and risk assessment, urban planning and agriculture.

The image of Havana doesn't appear to show any military secrets. But it clearly depicts sections of Old Havana, the Capitol building and docks jutting into the harbor.

The photo's details are best seen by using a computer to zoom in on individual sections.

First photo since 1962

John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area defense policy group, said it is one of the first "overhead" (aerial or satellite) images of Cuba made public since the Cuban missile crisis.

On Oct. 25, 1962, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson, refuting Soviet denials that it had missiles in Cuba, stunned the world by unveiling U-2 spy plane photographs of the missile emplacements.

Pike thinks the only photograph released since then is an overhead image of the Russian electronic-eavesdropping post at Lourdes, Cuba, published in a Pentagon report in the mid-1980s.

Pike said he recently scoured Space Imaging's archives for an updated photograph of the Lourdes installation, but could not find an image. "I looked at an awful lot of clouds," he said.

Space Imaging and its competitors have to be profitable.

Predictions several years ago that there would be a rapidly expanding market for commercial space images have "certainly not turned out to be the case," said John Baker, a technology policy analyst at the nonprofit research institution RAND.

Aerial photography still prevails, said Baker, co-editor of an upcoming book on commercial imaging satellites. "The satellite firms get all the PR, all the media attention, but it's really the aerial firms that dominate the market," he said.

Still, commercial satellite imagery has several benefits. Ikonos can see 90 feet under clear water, Brender said, helping environmentalists inspect the coral reefs.

Florida's Division of Forestry is using less-detailed images from the U.S. government's Landsat satellite to build a statewide database of vegetation and other matter that could fuel wildfires.

---

U.S. Expects China to Return Plane, Crew

Yahoo News
Sunday April 1
By Tabassum Zakaria
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010401/ts/crash_comment_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Sunday it expected Beijing to return a Navy surveillance plane and its 24-member crew that made an emergency landing in China after a midair collision with a Chinese fighter aircraft.

China said its plane crashed after the collision, and blamed the United States, saying the American plane veered and that its nose and left wing hit the Chinese plane.

A spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command based in Hawaii said he had no details yet on how the collision happened. ``We do not know at this time how that contact was made, that's something of great interest to us,'' Cmdr. Rex Totty said.

The American surveillance plane landed safely on Hainan Island without any apparent injuries to the crew, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials have been in contact with Chinese officials in an attempt to have the crew and the plane, which contains classified electronic eavesdropping equipment, returned.

President Bush was informed of the incident shortly after it took place, but did not respond to shouted media questions when he returned to the White House from a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

The White House was ``closely monitoring'' the situation, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

The White House said it expected China to return the crew. ''That is our expectation. That is the standard practice. We would expect them to follow it,'' Fleischer said.

A statement from the U.S. Pacific Command said, ``We expect that the PRC (Chinese) government will respect the integrity of the aircraft and the well-being and safety of the crew in accordance with international practices, expedite any necessary repairs to the aircraft, and facilitate the immediate return of the aircraft and crew.''

The incident came at a delicate moment for Sino-U.S. relations as the new Bush administration formulated its approach toward China.

Meeting To Resolve Situation

The U.S. ambassador to China, Adm. Joseph Prueher, met with China's vice foreign minister on Sunday Chinese time ``in an initial meeting to resolve the situation,'' said Michelle King, a State Department spokeswoman.

``We've been in touch with the Chinese since last night and throughout the day, both in Washington and China,'' she said.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing was sending a group to Hainan Island to see the crew on Monday local time. ``We've been assured they are safe and well,'' King said.

The U.S. plane was on a ``routine surveillance mission'' in international airspace over the South China Sea when it was intercepted by two Chinese F-8 military planes, a Navy spokeswoman said.

The collision at about 9:15 a.m. local time on Sunday (8:15 p.m. EST on Saturday (0115 GMT on Sunday) caused sufficient damage to the U.S. plane that it issued a ``Mayday'' distress signal and made an emergency landing, U.S. officials said.

``One of our goals right now is to find out the extent of damage. We know the crew appears to be OK, and we want to find out what the status of the aircraft is also,'' Air Force Lt. Col. Dewey Ford, spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, said.

The crew of the EP-3 maritime patrol aircraft included one Air Force member, one Marine, and 22 Navy personnel, he said.

Listening

The U.S. Navy plane was conducting a ``routine signals security flight,'' the Navy spokeswoman said. That essentially means it was ``listening'' or collecting signals intelligence.

It was attached to the VQ-1 electronic countermeasures squadron that operates from the Kadena Air Base in Japan.

The EP-3 is a four-engine propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft that uses electronic surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on ships and land targets.

It has a nearly 100-foot (30-meter) wing span, is nearly 106 feet (32 meters) long, and has 24 seats. It is capable of flying for more than 12 hours and has a more than 3,000-nautical mile range.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, a former Navy combat pilot who was shot down over Vietnam, said Chinese authorities should not enter or inspect the aircraft because of the sensitive equipment on board. ``I hope the Chinese will help us repair the airplane and get it off that island quickly,'' McCain, an Arizona Republican, told NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on CNN's ''Late Edition,'' ``It's obviously serious whenever a military collision like this takes place, but I think that what is important now ... is that the diplomatic channels be fully used and to try to resolve this in as peaceful a way as possible.''

---

China Blames U.S. Plane for Mid-Air Collision

Yahoo News
Sunday April 1
By Andrew Browne
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010401/ts/crash_china_dc_11.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - China accused a U.S. spy plane of ramming one of its fighters in mid-air on Sunday in a military incident that threatened to blow up into a political storm.

The fighter plane crashed after the collision over the South China Sea and rescuers were searching for the pilot, China said.

The U.S. aircraft made an emergency landing on China's southern island of Hainan without permission.

U.S. officials immediately scrambled to try to secure the release of the 24 crew, who were all reported safe, along with the plane and its sensitive surveillance equipment.

An angry statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Beijing had lodged a ``solemn representation and protest'' and reserved the right to seek damages.

It threatened further ``representations'' over the plane entering Chinese air space and landing without permission.

China-U.S. relations have only recently been fully restored after a U.S. plane on a NATO mission bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999.

The bombing sparked furious protests by stone-throwing crowds outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

Sunday's incident again whipped up public outrage, with one visitor to a popular Internet chat room declaring: ``This is war.''

According to the U.S. Navy version of the incident, one of its EP-3 maritime patrol aircraft was on a routine surveillance mission in international air space when there was contact between it and one of two Chinese F-8 fighters on an interception mission.

But China laid the blame squarely on the U.S. plane.

Plane ``Suddenly Veered''

``In accordance with international practice, the Chinese military aircraft were engaged in normal pursuit and monitoring activities of the U.S. military surveillance plane near China's coast,'' the Chinese foreign ministry statement said.

It said the U.S. plane ``suddenly veered'' toward the Chinese aircraft about 104 km (60 miles) south of Hainan.

``The nose and left wing of the U.S. plane hit the Chinese plane and caused it to crash,'' the statement said.

China was making ``proper arrangements'' for the 24 U.S. crew, the statement added, without giving any details.

The U.S. ambassador to China, Admiral Joseph Prueher, met China's vice foreign minister to try resolve the issue, State Department spokeswoman Michelle King said.

U.S. diplomats were headed to Hainan to try to get access to the crew. ``We've been assured they are safe and well,'' King said.

President Bush, who was at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, had been informed of the crash, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

He said the White House was ``closely monitoring'' the situation and expected China to return the crew.

``That is our expectation. That is the standard practice. We would expect them to follow it,'' Fleischer said.

Mayday Distress Signal

A U.S. Navy statement said the American plane issued a ''Mayday'' distress signal before making an emergency landing on a Hainan airfield. The incident occurred at about 9:15 a.m. Chinese time (0115 GMT) on Sunday.

``One of our goals right now is to find out the extent of damage. We know the crew appears to be OK, and we want to find out what the status of the aircraft is also,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. Dewey Ford, spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command.

One member of the Air Force, one Marine, and 22 Navy personnel were believed to be on board the plane, which operates from the Kadena Air Base in Japan.

The EP-3 is a four-engine, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft that uses electronic surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on ships and surrounding areas.

``We expect that the (Chinese) government will respect the integrity of the aircraft and the well-being and safety of the crew in accordance with international practices, expedite any necessary repairs to the aircraft, and facilitate the immediate return of the aircraft and crew,'' a statement from the U.S. Pacific Command said.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, a former Navy combat pilot who was shot down over Vietnam, said Chinese authorities should not enter or inspect the aircraft because of the sensitive equipment.

``I hope the Chinese will help us repair the airplane and get it off that island quickly,'' McCain, an Arizona Republican, told NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

Sino-U.S. Ties Strained

The online chat room of popular Internet portal Sina.com was seething with anti-U.S. commentary.

``Kill, kill, kill, kill -- first kill the 24, then kill Little Bush,'' said a message signed by Wen Xin, who used China's nickname for President Bush.

``The 24 American pigs should be used as political pawns and the plane should be slowly analyzed, then we should stir up public sentiment and return them,'' said another message.

China claims sovereignty over the entire South China Sea, including islands also claimed wholly or partly by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

The United States officially takes no position on the territorial disputes, but insists that freedom of navigation must be maintained in the important sea route.

The collision comes amid a period of uncertainty and strain in China-U.S. relations under the new Bush administration.

Beijing fears the new administration is more pro-Taiwan, inclined to stress ties with Japan over China and adopt a more confrontational approach on human rights.

China is particularly worried about possible U.S. sales of high-tech weaponry to Taiwan, including the Aegis radar system, and the prospect that Washington will press ahead with an anti-missile defense shield.

---

What Did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson's Father?

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/01OLSON.html

For a quarter of a century, a close friend of mine, a Harvard classmate, has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. Believing this means, in my friend's words, "leaving the known universe," the one in which it is innocently accepted that an agency of the American government would never do such a thing. My friend has left this known universe, even raising his father's body from the grave where it had lain for 40 years to test the story the C.I.A. told him about his death. The evidence on the body says that the agency may have lied. But knowing this has not healed my friend. When I ask him what he has learned from his ordeal, he says, "Never dig up your father." Then he laughs, and the look on his face is wild, bitter and full of pain.

On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m., Armand Pastore, night manager at the Statler Hotel opposite Penn Station in New York, rushed out the front door on Seventh Avenue to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk in his undershirt and shorts. "He was broken up something awful," Pastore told reporters many years later, flat on his back with his legs smashed and bent at a terrible angle. Looking up, Pastore could see a blind pushed through an empty window frame high up in the Statler. The man had fallen from the 10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a closed window -- but he was alive. "He was trying to mumble something, but I couldn't make it out. It was all garbled, and I was trying to get his name." By the time the priest and the ambulance came, the stranger on the sidewalk was dead.

When Pastore went up to the stranger's room -- 1018A -- with the police, they found a man who gave his name as Robert Lashbrook sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. Down at reception, Pastore asked the hotel telephone operator whether she had overheard any calls from 1018A. Two, she said. In one, a voice had said, "He's gone." The voice on the other end replied, "That's too bad." Lashbrook admitted making two calls but has denied saying anything of the sort.

The high trees over the family house in Frederick, Md., were still in darkness when Eric Olson was woken by his mother, Alice, and taken into the living room. Upstairs, his younger sister, Lisa, and brother, Nils, slept undisturbed. Lt. Col. Vincent Ruwet, his father's boss at the Army research establishment at Fort Detrick, told Eric something bad had happened. "Fallen or jumped" and "accident" were the words he heard as he looked across the room at his mother, frozen and empty-eyed, on the sofa opposite. "In that moment when I learned that my father had gone out a window and died," Eric later wrote, "it was as if the plug were pulled from some central basin of my mind and a vital portion of my consciousness drained out." He was 9 years old.

When I first met Eric Olson in 1974, both of us were working on doctorates at Harvard. Mine was in history, his in clinical psychology. What I liked about him was his maniacal cackle. One minute he would be laboring some abstruse point in his Southern drawl, the next his face would be alight with a snaggle-toothed grin, and his body would be electrified by the joke he had just slipped by me, deadpan. The laugh was an attractive and alarming trait, because sometimes he would laugh about things that weren't funny at all.

His Harvard research was about how to help people recover from trauma. With the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, he had been to Man, W.Va., to interview survivors of a disaster in which 125 people had been killed and 4,000 people made homeless when a dam burst and a wall of black water containing coal waste swept down Buffalo Creek. He and Lifton wrote a paper that spoke of the way sudden, violent loss left people imprinted with death anxiety and long-term psychic numbing.

I remember Eric talking for hours in his Cambridge apartment about a technique he had been using to help the people of Buffalo Creek. It was called the "collage method," and it involved getting survivors to paste together pictures, using anything they felt like clipping out of newspapers and magazines. It seemed childish to me at first, but Eric said that for people whose lives were in pieces anyway, collage was mysteriously satisfying. They would work for hours in silence, he said, moving about the floor, sticking things down, and sometimes when they had finished, they would contemplate what they had done and start to cry.

After 75 years of psychoanalysis -- the talking cure -- here was a therapy, Eric believed, that didn't start from words but from images. It seemed to unfurl the winding processes of a person's unconscious and lay them out flat on paper. Eric had been playing around with his father's camera and making photomontages since childhood. But he didn't stumble on the power of collage until he was in his 20's. One stoned night, he and a girlfriend got down on their knees in her apartment and began cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them down. When Eric finished, the central image of his collage was a grainy picture of a man falling head first out of a window.

On June 11, 1975, The Washington Post revealed that a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had discovered that "a civilian employee of the Department of the Army unwittingly took LSD as part of a Central Intelligence Agency test" and "developed serious side effects." After being sent to New York with a C.I.A. escort for psychiatric treatment, the employee jumped from a hotel window and died as a result. The Rockefeller report added a footnote: "There are indications in the few remaining agency records that this individual may have had a history of emotional instability."

Back in Frederick, Lisa Olson confronted Vincent Ruwet, her father's old boss at Detrick. He had regularly visited Alice Olson, shared a drink with her, become a trusted friend of the children. Ruwet stalled at first but eventually confirmed that the man in the story was Frank Olson and that he had known the details in The Post story all along.

If Ruwet had known all along, then the family had lived for 22 years in a community of lies: families of government scientists who had kept the truth away from a family dying from the lack of it. This culture of secrecy had also contaminated the family from within. Alice Olson covered the whole subject of Frank's death with a silence that was both baffling and intimidating. Her mantra, whenever Eric would ask what really happened in Room 1018A, was, "You are never going to know what happened in that room."

Maintaining stoic silence took its toll. By the 1960's, Alice Olson was routinely drinking on the quiet, locking herself in the bathroom and then coming out mean and confused. One time, when Eric returned from a year away in India, he walked right past her in the airport. The drinking had left her so thin and wasted that he didn't recognize her. All the time, Ruwet had been there for her, keeping her company. It later turned out that he had received orders from the C.I.A.'s director, Allen Dulles, to keep in touch with her.

With their mother locked in silence, the children were left alone with their own sense of shame about their father's death. Eric told other children that his father had suffered "a fatal nervous breakdown," without knowing what that could possibly mean. Thanks to The Post's revelations, the summer of 1975 was the family's "Copernican Revolution." They gave the exclusive on their personal story to Seymour Hersh of The New York Times, and when he came through the door of the house in Frederick, his first words were: "This must be the most uncurious family in the United States. I can't believe you fell for that story for 22 years." Later, at a news conference in the backyard at Frederick, under the big trees, the family announced that they were going to sue the government for wrongful death. Their ultimate purpose, they said, was to imprint what had happened to their father in "American memory."

The news conference had immediate results. On July 21, 1975, Alice, Eric, Nils, Lisa and Lisa's husband, Greg Hayward, were invited to the White House. In the Oval Office, according to newspaper accounts, President Gerald Ford expressed "the sympathy of the American people and apologized on behalf of the U.S. government." There is a photograph of Alice shaking the president's hand. Her face is glowing. Even so, catharsis was brief. The meeting with the president lasted 17 minutes.

A week or so later, Eric, Lisa, Nils and two lawyers met the C.I.A.'s director, William Colby, at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. In his memoirs, Colby remembered the lunch as "one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had." At the end of the lunch, Colby handed the family an inch-thick sheaf of declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. What Colby did not tell them -- did not reveal until he published his memoirs just three years later -- was that Frank Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick.

The Colby documents were photocopies of the agency's own in-house investigation of Olson's death and like Eric's collages: a redacted jumble of fragments, full of unexplained terms like the "Artichoke" and "Bluebird" projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination.

The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detrick scientists at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson's glass of Cointreau. After 20 minutes, Olson developed mild symptoms of disorientation. He was then told the drink had been spiked. The next day, Olson returned home early and spent the weekend in a mood that Alice remembered as withdrawn but not remotely psychotic. He kept saying he had made a terrible mistake, but she couldn't get him to say what it was.

On Sunday night, they went to see a film about Martin Luther. It followed the young Luther to the moment of spiritual crisis -- Here I stand, I can do no other" -- when he decided to take on the might of the Catholic Church. The next day, Olson went straight to Ruwet's office and said he wanted to resign. Ruwet told him to calm down. The next morning, he returned to Ruwet's office and insisted that his resignation be accepted. While Alice's memory was of Frank being in the grip of an ethical dilemma, Ruwet told C.I.A. investigators that Olson "appeared to be greatly agitated and in his own words, 'all mixed up."'

Ruwet and Robert Lashbrook, a C.I.A. liaison at Fort Detrick, took Olson to New York -- ostensibly to seek psychiatric advice. But the doctor Olson saw, an allergist named Harold Abramson, was receiving C.I.A. financing to experiment with LSD, and his sole exercise of therapeutic attention was to prescribe Nembutal and bourbon to help Olson sleep.

Olson was also taken to see John Mulholland, a New York magician on the C.I.A. payroll, who may have tried to hypnotize him. Ruwet told C.I.A. investigators that in Mulholland's presence, Olson became highly agitated. "What's behind this?" he kept asking his friend Ruwet. "Give me the lowdown. What are they trying to do with me? Are they checking me for security?" "Everyone was in a plot to 'get' him," he told Lashbrook. He begged them to "just let me disappear."

According to the documents Colby had given the family, Olson spent an agonized night wandering the streets of New York, discarding his wallet and identification cards. He said he was too ashamed to go home to his wife and children, so he and Lashbrook ate a cheerless Thanksgiving dinner at a Horn & Hardart automat in Midtown.

Late the next day, according to the C.I.A. story, it was decided that Olson needed to be institutionalized. Yet when Olson phoned Alice that night, he said that he felt "much better" and "looked forward to seeing her the next day." That night, in Room 1018A, with Lashbrook in the bed by the door, Olson was calm: he washed out his socks and underwear and went to sleep. Four hours later, Armand Pastore found him lying on his back on Seventh Avenue.

The C.I.A.'s general counsel, called in immediately in 1953 to investigate Olson's death, noted that the official story -- that LSD "triggered" the suicide -- was "completely inconsistent" with the facts in the case. Disciplinary action was recommended against Gottlieb and Lashbrook, but the agency's director, Allen Dulles, delivered only a mild reprimand. Lashbrook left the agency, but Gottlieb remained in senior positions for 20 more years. He told the internal inquiry that Olson's death was "just one of the risks running with scientific experimentation." Far from ending with Olson's death, the LSD experiments continued for two decades.

The Colby documents left the family marooned, no longer believing that Frank's death was a simple suicide but not knowing what to believe instead. A photograph in People magazine in July 1975 shows each of them in the living room in Frederick, unsmiling and not looking at one another. In 1976, after negotiations in which they traded away their right to further civil or criminal proceedings against the government, the family received a total of $750,000, half a million less than originally recommended by the White House and even the C.I.A. itself.

If this was "closure," it was of an especially cursed kind. Shortly after receiving her portion of the money, Eric's sister, together with her husband and their 2-year-old son, Jonathan, set off by small plane from Frederick to a destination in the Adirondacks, where they were going to invest the money in a lumber mill. The plane crashed, and everyone on board was killed.

In the aftermath of Lisa's death, Eric took his portion of the money and went to Sweden to escape the accursed story. In Stockholm, he read intensively, exploring the connection between his spatial, collage-based theory of the mind and linguistic accounts of mental processes. He also had a son, Stephan, by a woman he never married. If distance was supposed to heal him, however, the cure didn't work. He "smoldered" in Stockholm and in 1984 returned to the States determined, he said, to find out the truth "once and for all."

"Once and for all" meant returning to the hotel and checking into Room 1018A. He recalls this strange night now as a revelation. "It just hit you," he says. The room was simply too small for his father to have gained the speed to take a running plunge through the window. The sill was too high and too wide -- there was a radiator in front of it -- for him to have dived through a closed window and a lowered blind in the dark.

Eric, Nils and Alice, now recovered from alcoholism, tracked down Sidney Gottlieb in his ecologically correct home in Culpeper, Va., where the retired spymaster was raising goats, eating yogurt and preaching the values of peace and environmentalism. He received them pleasantly but conceded nothing. "I was outclassed," Eric remembers. "This was a world-class intelligence." They also found Lashbrook, at his vine-covered stucco house in Ojai, Calif., where they watched him twitch in his seat as he told his version of what happened in room 1018A -- that he was awakened by a crash, saw a broken window and an empty bed and concluded that Frank Olson had jumped to his death.

From these encounters, Eric realized that he was up against a brotherhood of silence and that his father had once belonged to it. It was, as one former Detrick employee called it, "a community of saints" dedicated to using the most fearful and secret science to defend the republic.

Frank Olson's specialty, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. With the discovery in the 1950's that the North Koreans were brainwashing American prisoners, the Special Operations Division at Detrick became the center for the development of drugs for use in brainwashing and interrogation. LSD emerged as one of the interrogation drugs of choice. Alice Olson never knew exactly what her husband was doing -- he was, in fact, working for the C.I.A. by this time -- but she did know that whenever his lab tested chemical or biological compounds on monkeys and the monkeys died, her husband would bring a testy silence home.

One mystery -- entry and exit stamps in Frank Olson's passport, indicating that he had been to Sweden, Germany and Britain in the summer of 1953 -- seemed to offer a crucial clue to his state of mind in the months before his death. Through Gordon Thomas, a British journalist and author of numerous books on intelligence matters, Eric learned that during a trip to London his father had apparently confided in William Sargant, a consultant psychiatrist who advised British intelligence on brainwashing techniques.

According to Thomas, who was a lifelong friend of Sargant's, Olson told Sargant that he had visited secret joint American-British testing and research installations near Frankfurt. Thomas's hypothesis is that the C.I.A. was testing interrogation and truth serums there -- not on monkeys but on human subjects, "expendables," captured Russian agents and ex-Nazis. Thomas says that Olson confessed to Sargant that he had witnessed something terrible, possibly "a terminal experiment" on one or more of the expendables. Sargant heard Olson out and then reported to British intelligence that the young American scientist's misgivings were making him a security risk. He recommended that Olson be denied further access to Porton Down, the British chemical-weapons research establishment.

A document Eric later saw from his father's personnel file confirmed that doubts had been raised about Olson's security clearance before his death, possibly because of Sargant's warning. Alice Olson, who knew nothing about the nature of his visit, did recall that when he returned from Europe that summer, Frank was unusually withdrawn.

Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, his son says he believes, a naive American patriot faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. If the C.I.A. was in fact experimenting with "expendables" in Germany, and if Olson knew about it, Eric reasoned, then it would not be enough to hospitalize him, discredit him with lies about his mental condition and allow him to slip back into civilian life. It would be better to get rid of him altogether but make it look like suicide. This was the truth, Eric came to believe, that lay hidden in the collage of the Colby documents.

If Eric is right, slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was not an experiment that went wrong: it was designed to get him to talk while hallucinating. The trip to New York was not to manage and contain his incipient psychosis. It was intended to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary. Housing a possibly deranged and desperate man in a hotel room high above Seventh Avenue was not a regrettable error of judgment. It was the prelude to murder. If Frank Olson had realized this, his son could now read his father's last words ("Just let me disappear") as a cry for help.

In 1997, after the C.I.A. inadvertently declassified an assassination manual dating from late 1953, Eric Olson was able to read the following: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. . . . The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge." The manual went on to recommend a blow to the temple to stun the subject first: "In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him."

Reading this passage at the kitchen table in Frederick, Eric realized that the word he had been looking for all his life was not "fallen" or "jumped" but "dropped." It was, he recalled, one of the few moments when, after nearly 50 years, he actually experienced his father's death, when the truth he had been seeking finally took hold of him.

In allowing the Olson family to receive the ultimate sacrament of American healing -- a formal apology from the president in the Oval Office -- the C.I.A. tacitly acknowledged that it had committed a sin against the order that holds citizens in allegiance to their government. Now, it seemed to Eric Olson, that apology had been a cynical lie. It enabled the C.I.A. to hide, forever, a perfect murder.

It is one thing to believe in a truth as painful as this. It is another to prove it. In 1994, Eric had his father's casket raised from the ground. At the funeral in 1953, the coffin was shut because the family had been told that the body was broken up and that there were extensive cuts and lacerations to the face caused by the fall through the glass. In fact, the body had been embalmed, and it was in nearly perfect condition.

Eric stared down at a face he had last seen 41 years before. There were no lacerations consistent with damage by glass. On further examination, the forensic team, led by James Starrs of George Washington University, discovered a blow to Olson's temple, on the left side, which caused a fist-size bleed under the otherwise unbroken skin. It could not have occurred, the pathologists agreed, after he went out the window because the velocity of his descent would have caused more extensive trauma. While one team member thought it could have occurred as the head hit the window frame on the way out, Starrs and the others were certain it had been inflicted before that. The conclusion that both Starrs and Eric drew was that someone had knocked Olson out, either while he slept or after a struggle, and then thrown him out the window.

Since the autopsy, Eric has pursued leads to find out who actually carried out "the wet work" on his father. H.P. Albarelli, a writer-researcher with contacts among retired C.I.A. agents in Florida, has found agents who say they know the identity of the men who went into Room 1018A that night in November 1953, supposedly to tip Olson through the window. They were not C.I.A. men, they say, but contract killers associated with the Trafficante mob family hired by the C.I.A. But none of the retired C.I.A. agents, men now in their 70's and 80's, are about to come forward unless they are released from their confidentiality agreements with the agency.

In 1996, Olson approached Manhattan's district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to see if his office would open a new investigation into the Olson case. Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb of Morgenthau's "cold case" unit have deposed Lashbrook in Ojai; they have followed up a few of the hundreds of leads that Eric Olson besieges them with almost daily. But the Manhattan D.A., while probably agreeable to immunity for Albarelli's sources in Florida, has not pursued the confidentiality releases. If you talk to Saracco and Bibb in the Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan where they hang out after-hours, you get the impression that they don't think there's a case to send to a grand jury. If you ask them why they don't go down to Florida to talk to Albarelli's jealously guarded sources, they look at you as if to say, "How do you know these people exist?"

If there isn't enough for the Manhattan D.A. to take to a jury, Eric and his lawyer, Harry Huge, will have to bring a civil suit of their own, claiming that the C.I.A. lied in 1976 when it secured the family's agreement to waive further legal proceedings. Eric says he knows the truth, but it is not the "smoking gun" kind of forensic truth that will force the agency to go to court and be put through the discovery process. And if you lack provable truth, you do not get justice. Without justice, there is no accountability, and without accountability there is no healing, no resolution.

Last autumn, after nearly 25 years of our lives going in different directions, I went to see Eric in Frederick. The family home, a ranch house, is in a decayed state of suspended animation -- seemingly the same carpets, same couches, same dusty jar of Vaseline in the bathroom cabinet that were there the night Frank Olson died. Living there is worst at Thanksgiving, the time of his death.

Eric has taken a break from his work on the collage method, and the huge books of patients' collages now lie shut up in storage nearby. The house is full of drafts of books on collage, as well as books about his father's story that remain unfinished because the story itself lacks an ending. Eric lives on foundation grants, book advances and some help from his brother and others. He spends his days hounding journalists, the Manhattan D.A., anyone who will listen, with a steady stream of calls and e-mail messages from an office just feet away from the same living room, the same chair, the very spot where he was told by Ruwet that his father had "fallen or jumped." That he is convinced that the word was neither "fallen" nor "jumped," but "dropped," does not heal. Indeed, his story makes you wonder about that noble phrase "The truth shall make you free." As it happens, that phrase is inscribed in the entry hall of the C.I.A.'s headquarters.

Eric knows that to charge the most secretive agency of American government with murder is to incur the suspicion that you have become deranged by anger, grief, paranoia, greed or a combination of all four. "Eric is crazy, Eric is obsessed," he says, mimicking his accusers. "Fine. I agree." A maniacal cackle. "But it's not the point. The point is" -- and here his eyes go flat and cold and relentless -- what happened in the damned room."

Just before I left, we went to the graves of his mother, sister and brother-in-law and their child, the place where he wants his father to be buried. When I asked him when the reburial will happen, he paused to think. "When we know what to say," he said finally, looking down at the spare piece of grass beside his mother's grave. "When it is over. When we can do it right."

It takes me a while after I leave Eric to grasp one salient fact that may make resolution difficult. For seven years, his father's bones have lain in a filing cabinet in James Starrs's office. Only the bones -- and not all of them -- remain intact. To get at the truth of what happened to Frank Olson, the pathologists had to rip the skin off his limbs and tear his body apart, macerate it and send it in chunks to various labs for analysis. In the search for truth, Eric had to tear his father's body limb from limb.

The fact is, it will never be possible to bury all of Frank Olson again. Now I understand why, when I asked Eric what he had learned from his 25-year ordeal, he told me that no one should ever dig up his father's body. Now I know why my friend's wild laugh is so full of pain.

Michael Ignatieff is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

---

Detained in China

New York Times
April 1, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/opinion/L01CHIN.html

To the Editor:
Re "Beijing Says Chinese-Born Scholar on Visit From U.S. Is a Spy" (news article, March 28):

Beijing's detention of Gao Zhan on undisclosed and unsubstantiated charges of "spying" reminds us that China remains a country where rights are violated, guilt is presumed and legal mechanisms are distorted to advance the political interests of the state.

This is a particularly important reminder as the United Nations Human Rights Commission prepares to debate a resolution on human rights abuses in China and Tibet.

It is to be hoped that China will one day recognize the rule of law, where an impartial legal system constrains state actions and provides enough transparency to prevent such arbitrary detentions. In the meantime, Beijing's conduct should signal the Human Rights Commission that the resolution must be passed.

NIMA R. TAYLOR Cambridge, Mass., March 28, 2001

-------- terrorism

Trial Aims to Show Bin Laden Plan to Kill Americans

Yahoo News
Sunday April 1
By Gail Appleson, Law Correspondent
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010401/ts/crime_bombings_dc_1.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors are expected to end their case against four Osama bin Laden followers this week after two months of chilling testimony they said shows the Saudi dissident's aim to kill Americans.

Government lawyers have said they hope to conclude their portion of the trial in Manhattan federal court by Wednesday. By reducing the number of witnesses they originally planned to call, prosecutors sharply cut the length of the proceedings that could have continued through the summer and possibly into the fall.

After the government ends its presentation of evidence, the trial is expected to be in recess for more than a week before defense lawyers begin their side of the case.

Testimony in the case against the four defendants began February 5 amid tight security. The men are charged along with bin Laden of being part of a broad conspiracy to kill Americans.

The indictment, listing more than 300 counts, accuses them of trying to kill U.S. military personnel and civilians in schemes that began in 1989 and included the August 1998 bombings of the embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.

Bin Laden, who remains a fugitive believed living in Afghanistan, allegedly masterminded the twin blasts that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured thousands.

``What it did to human beings that day defies description,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Butler told the jury as the trial began. ``The story about to unfold before you is long, complicated and chilling.''

Indeed, much of the testimony that followed was horrifying. It included graphic descriptions by victims who had been disfigured and blinded in the attacks as well as testimony about one defendant's alleged confession in which he said the Nairobi embassy was chosen because of its female ambassador. Her death, he allegedly said, would have resulted in even more publicity.

Bombing Victim Still Hears Voice

In one unforgettable account, a Kenyan man employed by the embassy in Nairobi had told a hushed courtroom how he could still hear a woman calling his name from among the corpses.

``It's been haunting me,'' said George Mimba who told the jury about his attempt to rescue the woman from the rubble.

Mimba described how the explosion ripped through the building and how he desperately reached through the heavy smoke toward a female voice yelling ``George.''

He grabbed and dragged out of the rubble the only moving person he could feel. But the person was a man, not the woman he had been searching for.

Mimba said the woman's voice kept coming back to him. ''I really want to know if she survived,'' Mimba said.

Prudence Bushnell, the former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, who was injured in the blast, told the jury how she thought she would die in the attack. As she was being hit with pieces of falling ceiling, she envisioned herself plummeting to her death as the floors beneath her collapsed. She fled though a blood soaked stairwell only to see the charred remains of a human body as she escaped outdoors.

FBI agent Stephen Gaudin testified how one of the defendants, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, 24, agreed to speak to authorities in return for being tried in the United States. Gaudin quoted the defendant as saying he wanted a U.S. trial ``because America is my enemy and Kenya is not.''

Al-'Owhali was allegedly a passenger in the truck used in the Nairobi bombing.

Defendants

Gaudin said al-'Owhali described his training for the attack and explained the embassy in Kenya was chosen for several reasons including the fact that Bushnell was a woman and her death would generate ``further publicity.''

Al-'Owhail and defendant Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, a Tanzanian who allegedly took part in the Dar es Salaam bombing could both face the death penalty if convicted. The other two defendants Wadih El-Hage, 40, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 35, a Jordanian. could face life imprisonment if convicted.

There are several other defendants awaiting separate trials in New York. Among them is Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who was severed from the current trial after he allegedly attacked a prison guard on Nov. 1, driving a sharpened comb through his eye and into his brain. Salim was allegedly a high-level adviser to bin Laden.

Bin Laden is among 13 fugitives listed in the indictment. The U.S. government is offering rewards of $5 million for information leading to their arrest. Three other men are in extradition proceedings in Britain.

---

Even in Terror's Path, Batteries Die and Love Notes Flourish

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/nyregion/01TERR.html

They saved everything: accounting ledgers with entries for milk and artillery; tape-recordings about marital fidelity and unpaid debts; security reports in which television sets were said to have been bugged; computer files that read like the early drafts of a "Terrorism for Dummies" manuscript.

The four defendants in the embassy bombings trial - and the numerous men accused of conspiring with them - left behind a staggering paper trail that spanned nearly a decade and at least three continents. As the prosecution inches toward finishing its case this week, it has largely switched from introducing witnesses to presenting this avalanche of documentary evidence to the jury.

The landslide is fearsome - boxes of paper appear in Federal District Court in Manhattan each day. The letters and phone records and computer printouts are a far cry from the mangled crankshafts and twisted axle parts from the bomb trucks that destroyed the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998. They suggest that even an international terrorist conspiracy, as the government calls it, can be a daily grind, complete with office mishaps and bureaucratic red tape.

"I got the Pagemaker - Word 6.0 Windows 3.11 program because the brothers' one is sluggish," reads a letter written to Wadih El-Hage, a defendant in the case.

"The battery for the mobile phone is almost dead; it cannot be used for more than 15 minutes," the missive goes on. "The second battery, which I haven't been using much, doesn't work well, and I don't know why."

The government contends that letters like this prove that Mr. El-Hage and his co-defendants - Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali - used the cloak of legitimate business to disguise their terrorist plot with the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. While Mr. Mohamed and Mr. al-`Owhali have confessed to taking part in the bombings, Mr. El-Hage has maintained that he is simply a businessman who worked for Mr. bin Laden and had nothing to do with the deadly attacks.

Mr. Odeh, on the other hand, has told the government that while he felt morally responsible for the Kenyan blast, he was never involved in its planning or execution. The government has seized a good deal of his correspondence, which provides a humanizing glimpse of him as a dedicated Muslim who misses and loves his wife.

In one tape recorded message to his wife, Mr. Odeh begged her to write to him only moments after telling her to hide his passport and personal papers in a safe place. "Tell me everything," he said. "Everything you feel whether it is big or small. I wouldn't get bored listening to your voice."

Considerably more incriminating are files that federal agents secretly copied from a computer belonging to Ali A. Mohamed, a former United States Army sergeant, who has already pleaded guilty in the case. One document entitled "Coktail" contains the draft of a terrorist primer with advice on how to scout a target and how to evade arrest.

The government dumped so much evidence on the jury last week that one panelist wrote a note to Judge Leonard B. Sand, begging for help. "I am finding the delivery of information in stipulations, letters and phone numbers much too rapid to record on paper," the juror wrote. "Could you ask the prosecutors to slow down?"

Here's to Their Health

The last two weeks have been somewhat rough on the jurors.

Two of them have already been excused - an alternate juror on March 12 because of illness, and a regular juror, No. 11, within days of that.

A third wrote a note to Judge Sand last week complaining of gastrointestinal distress from accidentally eating someone else's side dish at lunch. While there was a moment of concern, it vanished when the juror decided to tough it out and stay.

Judge Sand has repeatedly asked the panel to do its utmost to remain healthy, particularly since the trial is moving much quicker than expected and could be finished by early summer. The judge has apparently done his best to insure the jurors' comfort, announcing in court last week that a new microwave for the jury room had just arrived.

A Not-for-Profit Tale

Hollywood might be calling, but Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl won't be picking up the phone.

Mr. Al-Fadl is the onetime associate of Mr. bin Laden who split from his former boss several years ago and provided the prosecution with a spectacular bit of turncoat testimony during the first few days of the trial. He has pleaded guilty to being a terrorist and has decided to work with the American authorities by giving them whatever information about Mr. bin Laden that he can.

While the details Mr. Al-Fadl rattled off in court - AK-47's being smuggled across the desert on camels, terrorists inspecting uranium cylinders in hopes of building a nuclear bomb - would spice up any international thriller, he is not allowed to lunch with the media crowd.

His cooperation agreement with the government bars him from ever writing books or screenplays about his experience, granting interviews to newspapers, magazines or television stations or even selling the rights to his story.

-------- activists

Protesters take to tracks ahead of nuclear train

BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1244000/1244540.stm

About 1,000 anti-nuclear protesters have occupied a stretch of German rail line along which a train carrying nuclear waste is due to travel. Germany's largest ever peacetime security operation was under way to ensure that protesters do not prevent the controversial shipment being delivered to Gorleben in northern Germany. Earlier, police clashed with demonstrators and cut down Greenpeace activists who attached themselves to a rail bridge.

Related story: Activists chain themselves to bridge - Ananova http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_256176.html

Background: Gorleben nuclear plants resistance - OneWorldWeb http://www.oneworldweb.de/castor/english/wendish.html

Feature: The anti-nuclear movement - Frankfurter Allgemeine, 26.3.01 http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FE5-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={A2E741C0-1338-11D5-A3B3-009027BA22E4}

Previous events: Germany braces for week of protests - CNN, 25.3.01 http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/24/germany.waste/index.html

Campaign: Stop the nuclear waste transports - Greenpeace (in German) http://www.greenpeace.de/GP_SYSTEM/1QIC5EME.HTM

Special report: Nuclear industry - Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/0,2759,181325,00.html

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Animals Could Be Buried Alive

Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/story/0,7369,464503,00.html

Fears have been raised that animals involved in the foot and mouth crisis could be buried alive, as 2,000 sheep arrived for culling and burial at the Great Orton airfield near Carlisle today. Army butchers are assisting in the operation. The RSPCA said it had "grave concerns" about many aspects of the slaughter, urging that animals must be killed and not simply stunned before burial. Defence secretary Geoff Hoon insisted that the RSPCA will have access to the site.

Related story: Blair makes tourism plea - ITN http://www.itn.co.uk/news/20010328/britain/10foottourism.shtml

Related story: Plan for firewall vaccination - Guardian http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/footandmouth/story/0,7369,464340,00.html

Audio: At the burial pits - Guardian Unlimited http://www.pixunlimited.co.uk:7080/ramgen/news/politics/0328richardson.ra

Comment: Don't let farmers blackmail us, by Simon Jenkins - Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,248-105849,00.html

Factfile: Foot and mouth disease - Maff http://www.maff.gov.uk/animalh/diseases/fmd/default.htm

Special report: Foot and mouth disease - Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/

Email: Sign up for Guardian Unlimited's daily foot and mouth update http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/email/

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Nuclear Train Protesters Removed

BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1246000/1246928.stm

German police today managed to clear the last of the protesters who stopped a train carrying nuclear waste to north Germany by attaching themselves to the tracks with concrete. Track repairs will be carried out before the train continues its journey to Gorleben. Over the past three days police have battled against protesters trying to sabotage the train's journey, in Germany's largest ever peacetime security operation.

Previous events: Germany braces for week of protests - CNN, 25.3.01 http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/24/germany.waste/index.html

Feature: The anti-nuclear movement - Frankfurter Allgemeine, 26.3.01 http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FE5-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={A2E741C0-1338-11D5-A3B3-009027BA22E4}

Analysis: Anti-nuclear protests hit Germany's Greens - Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,464062,00.html

Background: German nuclear protests - IndyMedia http://www.indymedia.org/

Campaign: Stop Castor http://www.oneworldweb.de/castor/english/wendish.html

Campaign: Stop the nuclear waste transports - Greenpeace (in German) http://www.greenpeace.de/GP_SYSTEM/1QIC5EME.HTM

Special report: Nuclear industry - Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/0,2759,181325,00.html

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Green Party Report on Foot and Mouth

Relocalising Europe's Food Supply
Green Party Report
rasguno@netscapeonline.co.uk (Nick Whittingham)

A new report from the Green Party - 'Stopping the Great Food Swap - Relocalising Europe's Food Supply' shows how the globalisation of the food industry is causing huge environmental and economic problems.

The report, by trade and development expert Dr Caroline Lucas MEP (Green, South East England), links the increase of long-distance food transportation with foot-and-mouth disease, climate change, economic instability, lower animal welfare standards, and other major environmental and health problems.

The report reveals the extent of the export-import madness caused by policies of cheap fuel and subsidised road transport. In a single year:

- Britain IMPORTED 61,000 tonnes of poultry from the Netherlands but EXPORTED 33,000 tonnes of poultry back to the Netherlands.

- Britain imported 240,000 tonnes of pork and exported 195,000 tonnes.

- We imported 125,000 tonnes of lamb, but exported 102,000 tonnes.

- We imported 126 million litres of milk, while exporting 270 million litres.

Caroline Lucas MEP commented: "Long-distance transportation of farm animals and meat has been a major factor in the spread of foot-and-mouth - but it will take over FOURTEEN YEARS' worth of meat exports to compensate for the $A39 billion damage caused by foot-and-mouth disease to the UK economy.

"We need a major change of direction. We need local production for local need to protect vulnerable producers, to reduce environmental impacts, to improve animal welfare standards, and to help tackle climate change."

For comment/interviews, please call Spencer Fitz-Gibbon on 0161 225 4863, media@greenpartynw.fsnet.co.uk.

The Greens in The European Parliament Dr. Caroline Lucas MEP, Suite 58 The Hop Exchange, 24 Southwark St., London SE1 1TY

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Tel: 0207 407 6281/Fax: 0207 234 0183

Countryside Sacrificed for Future Meat Exports That Will Take 14 Years to Earn What the Present Crisis has Cost $AD the Answer: Local Production for Local Consumption

On Sunday 25th March, at the Green Party's Spring Conference in Chesterfield, Green MEP Dr Caroline Lucas will launch a new report calling for a dramatic reduction of international trade in food.

Dr Lucas, MEP for the South East region, will say, "Why is it that Foot and Mouth, a disease that doesn't harm humans and from which most animals recover in a matter of weeks, has virtually shut down the countryside, downgraded vaccination, led to massive slaughter of healthy animals, and crippled our tourist industry? The answer is to ensure that we can continue to export meat in a world where politicians treat globalisation like a god."

The Report, Stopping the Great Food Swap - Relocalising Europe's Food Supply, shows that according to the National Farmers Union all the UK earns from meat and dairy exports is $A3630 million per year. Yet one estimate of the cost of the Foot and Mouth epidemic in terms of losses predominantly in tourism, but also to farming, was put at =A39 billion. Even this huge sum was based on the optimistic assumption that the problem would have peaked by the end of the month. In effect that means that it will take more than 14 years of exports to match the cost of the mayhem and damage done in a few weeks of the present 'cull to eradicate' approach to foot and mouth. According to the report, "It is time for a radical rethink of the need for ever more international food trade, which exacerbates climate change and forces down food and animal welfare standards and contributes to such disasters as Foot and Mouth and BSE."

The Report, (based on background research by the UK food and griculture group, Sustain, and Colin Hines, author of 'Localisation $ADa Global Manifesto') details the rise in exports in and out of European countries, points out how this often involves the same products and asserts that European countries could reduce imports and compensate for this by increased local production. That would result in safer food, better animal welfare and a dramatic reduction in carbon emission, thus helping to tackle climate change. Its findings include:

-- Britain imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from the Netherlands in the same year that it exported 33,100 tonnes of poultry meat to the Netherlands.

-- Britain imported 240,000 tonnes of pork and 125,000 tonnes of lamb while it exported 195,000 tonnes of pork and 102,000 tonnes of lamb.

-- In the UK in 1997, 126 million litres of liquid milk was imported into the UK and at the same time 270 million litres of milk was exported out of the UK. 23,000 tonnes of milk powder was imported into the UK and 153,000 tonnes exported out.

-- In 1996 the UK imported 434,000 tonnes of apples, 202, 000 of which came from outside the EU. Over 60% of UK apple orchards have been lost since 1970. Even if all the UK's home-grown fruit was consumed domestically, the UK could at present be only 5% self-sufficient in fruit

-- Trade-related transportation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and is therefore significant in terms of climate change. Although most food is distributed by road and ship, the airfreight of foodstuffs is increasing. For example, UK imports of fish products and fruit and vegetables by plane between 1980 and 1990 increased by 240% and 90%, respectively. UK air freight (imports and exports) grew by about 7 per cent a year in the 1990's and is expected to increase at a rate of 7.5 per cent a year to 2010

The Report's demand that trade and relocalisation of food production be part of the debate about transforming the Common Agricultural Policy has been welcomed as 'a very important contribution' by the and Chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, the Green MEP Friedrich Wilhelm Graefe zu Baringdorf.

He also commented that: 'Addressing the transport issue is also essential if we are to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to tackle climate change. This is therefore a key issue for debate not just in Brussels, but also in the World Trade Organisation and in environment and agricultural ministries everywhere.'

Caroline Lucas MEP promised that:

"As more consumers, farmers and workers are feeling the downside of destructive globalisation, now is the time to consider how we replace this with localisation. This would keep production much closer to the point of consumption and protect and rebuild local economies around the world. As a member of the European Parliament's Trade Committee, I am committed to working to achieve this. It is the race for ever greater international trade and competitiveness that should go up in smoke, not animals and the future of our farmers and countryside."

The report ends with the demand that the Common Agricultural Policy be replaced by a Localist Rural and Food Policy which must:

(a) give priority to short supply routes and regional markets by measures that would include introduction of eco-taxation to ensure that the real costs of environmental damage and unsustainable production methods are included in the costs

(b) promote the production of healthy foodstuffs by providing assistance in change-over costs and marketing to ensure that intensive systems are replaced by more natural ones such as organic farming

(c) end the long distance transport of animals

(d) restrict the concentration and market power of the major food retailers and

(e) encourage rural regeneration and employment

For further details contact: Caroline Lucas MEP =AD 0802 721996 (after 22 March) Colin Hines, Research Adviser $AD 0208 892 5051 Alan Francis, Press Officer $AD 0776 997 0691

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Chemical Industry Archives

EWG http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/
Trade Secrets http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/

This week, PBS aired a disturbing two-hour special hosted by Bill Moyers that explores the history of the chemical revolution of the past 50 years and how companies have long sought to withhold information from the public and their employees about the safety of many substances. The program draws on a large collection of previously secret industry documents unearthed during a ten-year lawsuit by the family of a man who died from a rare brain cancer after working at a vinyl-chloride plant. The family's lawyer eventually charged all vinyl-chloride-producing companies with conspiracy, and the discovery process brought to light hundreds of thousands of pages of documents which reveal a closely planned and well-executed campaign to limit regulation of toxic chemicals and the liability of manufacturers and to withhold important health information from all parties. A large selection of these internal documents, over 37,000 pages, is now available for the first time at the Chemical Industry Archives, created by the Environmental Working Group. The site offers several essays on the archive and the industry, including a selection of some egregious examples of companies hiding or denying known health risks of their products. The archive itself may be searched by keyword with several modifiers. The documents are presented in .pdf format. This site is sure to become an extremely important resource for health activists, journalists, and the concerned public. The companion site to the PBS program offers an overview of the film, interview transcripts, selected documents in HTML and .pdf formats, chemical worker profiles and videos, and a section on the 84 chemicals detected in Bill Moyers's blood and urine. Visitors will also find features on industry secrecy, regulation, money, and politics, as well as right-to-know efforts and what people can do to help protect themselves. These are enhanced by interactive features, documents, and links to related resources. If you only have time to visit two sites this week, they must be the Chemical Industry Archives and Trade Secrets.

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Barring of activist deplored as sign of crackdown

Montreal Gazette
Sunday 1 April 2001
ALLISON HANES The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010401/5015132.html

Jose Bove, the French farmer cum Robin Hood of the anti-globalization movement, said yesterday he was shocked to learn that he will be barred from entering Canada this month - especially because he was warmly welcomed only four months ago.

"I'm very surprised to hear this news," Bove told the Quebec all-news network LCN from Millau, France. "I was just in Quebec a few months ago, in November, to present the book I wrote, and I had an excellent reception."

The bushy-mustached, pipe-smoking sheep farmer, who shot to international fame by vandalizing a McDonald's, has already booked his airplane ticket to attend protests at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City April 20-22.

He was invited to the parallel Peoples' Summit by the Council of Canadians.

But a federal official confirmed yesterday Bove's name is on a list of individuals who will be turned away at the border if they try to enter Canada.

"Mr. Bove is not admissible to Canada because he has a criminal record," said Richard St. Louis, a spokesman for Canadian Citizenship and Immigration. "It's the law. Anyone with a criminal record who tries to enter Canada at any time is turned away."

Those with criminal records who wish to come to Canada can apply for a special ministerial permit, St. Louis said.

But Bove, who is the head of an agriculture group called Confederation Paysanne, argues his recent conviction in France for the McDonald's incident shouldn't stand while under appeal: "I am completely free right now ... to go anywhere."

Bove is a veteran of anti-globalist protests.

Besides taking out his wrath on McDonald's to protest U.S. trade sanctions against French cheese and foie gras, Bove also helped landless peasants in Brazil destroy an experimental genetically modified crop run by Monsanto.

He said he is still determined to be present in Quebec City.

The barring of Bove confirms what many protesters planning to participate in Quebec have long predicted: that the government is cracking down on activists attending from abroad.

A U.S. civil-rights activist was detained at the Ottawa airport for over four hours Friday night when he arrived to attend a training seminar on Parliament Hill.

George Lakey, 62, is the director of Training for Change, a group that has led seminars for Sri Lankan monks and Russian gays and lesbians. He is also the author of A Manual for Direct Action, a book considered the bible of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s.

Lakey has traveled to Canada many times in recent years without incident.

Philippe Duhamel, a member of the Montreal-based protest group SalAMI, said he was disturbed by the restrictions on Lakey and Bove.

"It's becoming clear that in this age of increasing trade, financial flows can get across borders but people can't," he said from Ottawa, where he attended the sessions on Parliament Hill and will participate in a protest tomorrow outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Maggie Dickinson, a member of the New York City Coalition to Stop the FTAA, said she and two fellow activists entered Canada easily en route to Ottawa - but only after taking precautions.

"We were worried, so we made sure we didn't have any propaganda in the car," she said. "We crossed at 2 a.m. and we said we were going to visit friends in Montreal."

Fellow members of her group were turned away from the Canadian border a few weeks ago. After Canadian border officials found some campaign literature in their van, they dug up a 10-year-old driving charge against the driver and threatened two female passengers with strip searches.

Thousands of activists are planning to be in Quebec City later this month and many are worried they might be denied entry to Canada, Dickinson said.

U.S. activists are planning to show up at the Champlain border crossing today to protest against that possibility.

Dressed as free-flowing goods - a genetically modified tomato, a U.S. greenback and President George W. Bush - the activists will attempt to enter Canada.

"The idea is if they're dressed up as capital, they'll be allowed to cross," Dickinson said.

"There has been an increased militarization of the border to deny people the right to voice opposition. ... I think that's a disgusting abuse of power."

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Israeli troops kill protesters

Australian News Network
01apr01
http://news.com.au/newspulse/pulseframe/0,4711,1851688^401,00.html

TEL AVIV: Israeli troops shot dead at least six Palestinians yesterday during the strongest wave of protests to sweep the West Bank and Gaza Strip in weeks.

Increasing pressure on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to end a six-month uprising, Israel banned his Gaza-based ministers from crossing its territory to attend a weekly cabinet session in the West Bank, forcing the meeting's cancellation.

Passions were inflamed by a week of Palestinian bomb attacks, Israeli missile strikes on security targets in Gaza and the West Bank, and demands by US President George W. Bush that the Palestinians, in particular, do more to halt the violence.

The unrest coincided with largely peaceful "Land Day" rallies by Israeli Arabs. The day marks the 25th anniversary of the killing of six Arabs by Israeli forces during protests against government expropriation of their land.

"Today is Land Day -- day of pride, dignity and challenge, the day of victory and martyrdom, the day to get revenge from the cowardly killers," Mr Arafat's Fatah faction said in a statement.

Troops shot dead five Palestinians during stone-throwing protests in the West Bank city of Nablus, where some 10,000 people took to the streets, witnesses and local hospitals said.

Another Palestinian was killed by an Israeli bullet to the head in Ramallah, also in the West Bank, after 1000 people marched on an army checkpoint.

Soldiers and Palestinian gunmen also exchanged fire in the city.

The crowd in Ramallah burned an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

---

Workers protest lay offs in Seoul

Australian News Network
01apr01
From AFP
http://news.com.au/newspulse/pulseframe/0,4711,1853840^401,00.html

SOME 7,000 angry workers marched through the centre of Seoul Saturday in protest at lay-offs, burning portaits of South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and US President George W Bush, witnesses said.

They walked about 1.6 kilometres from Chongmyo public park to the busy commercial district of Myungdong, chanting slogans and waving banners as they proceeded along the street.

They called on the South Korean leader to step down, accusing the government and managers of trying to shift responsibility for economic failures onto the workers by laying them off en masse.

The workers blamed the United States for pressing South Korea to open up its markets.

Hundreds of riot policemen were deployed at street corners but they did not intervene as the slogan-chanting protestors walked through the city centre.

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Demonstrators Demand Changes in Plan to Expand Con Ed Plant

New York Times
April 1, 2001
By SHERRI DAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/nyregion/01PROT.html

More than 150 community leaders and residents of Manhattan's East Side, some pounding pots and pans and wearing gas masks, protested outside Consolidated Edison's power plant on East 14th Street yesterday and demanded that the utility make the plant environmentally safer before expanding it.

At the same time, in a related matter, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in a news conference that unless electricity companies increase the amount of power they generate, New York could face an energy crisis like the one in California. "We're about 350 to 400 megawatts short of where we should be for this summer," he said.

Con Edison plans to install new turbines at the East River plant on East 14th Street between Avenues C and D after the utility closes its Waterside steam plant on First Avenue between East 38th and East 40th Streets in Midtown. Last November, the company agreed to sell the land on which the Waterside plant sits to a developer for $680 million. The process could take several years.

Led by the East River Environmental Coalition, residents asked yesterday that Con Edison eliminate the use of diesel fuel at the East River plant and increase the size of its smoke stacks so that pollution from the plant could pass over the neighborhood, which some call Asthma Alley.

"They think that they can just do that to us because we're a minority community and we're not going to stand up and fight," said Pia Simpson, 33, whose son has asthma. "Our health means something and we know about it and we're not going to stand for anything else."

After protesting at the plant, the demonstrators marched to Con Edison's headquarters on East 14th Street and Irving Place.

Joseph P. Petta, a Con Edison spokesman, said that despite the proposed increase in production at the East River site, equipment upgrades at the plant would result in a 10 percent decrease in emissions.

"This will be a benefit for both the community and citywide," Mr. Petta said. In order to move forward with plans to expand the East River plant, Con Edison needs approval from the state's Public Service Commission. Officials from the utility said they expected to obtain approval by spring of 2002.

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

Kansas

Topeka - The Topeka Symphony Orchestra, a frequent target of the Rev. Fred Phelps' anti-gay pickets, plans to use Phelps' next appearance as a fundraiser. The symphony is asking people to pledge money to the orchestra for each minute Phelps and his followers demonstrate before its April 21 concert. Phelps said his Westboro Baptist Church would pledge $1 per minute. WBC wishes the Topeka Symphony Orchestra well, Phelps said. That's why we picket them. He routinely pickets events at the concert hall.

---

eggs and teargas

Sun, 01 Apr 2001
From: Sabrina Gorbett <sgorbett@frognet.net>

so recently, a post came up on starcgrassroots about what to bring to quebec. very cool info. there was one spot in there, though, that made me wince. The Superdeluxe Pregassing Antidote. having worked just a little bit with the street medics, i remembered them debating this goo back in january.

so... for anyone planning to go to quebec (or be in any teargas anywhere), pasted below is the medics post about the goo from january. read this, and debate for yourself and with your affinity group on whether you want to take eggs with you to QC.

note: the street medics will be out en masse in quebec, and have a very good protocol for dealing with tear gas and pepper spray. the first thing you wanna do if you get hit with this shit is to yell for a medic.

ps: for more on the street medics, go to http://zena.secureforum.com/ontheground/action-medical/index.htm

(paste from the medics)

"The Superdeluxe Pregassing Antidote: Mix 8-10 eggs, one cup water and a teaspoon baking soda in a bowl. Beat mixture well. Keep refrigerated in small plastic bottles until a demonstration. Wipe the stuff on your face before a gassing occurs."

After reading this, we had nightmarish visions of coming across people in Quebec with their faces covered in this dried on "Superdeluxe Pregassing Antidote" (referred to from here on out as goo) mixed with the chemical weapons of your choice. The questions arose: Who thought this was a good idea????!!!!! Does this goo work? Will it make it worse? How the hell are we going to get this goo off of people's skin? Will MOFIBA still work? Will it make a difference if it's dry or wet?

So in the spirit of the Black Cross and insanely passionate medical people everywhere, we decided to experiment.

We experimented with initially applying pepper spray with the goo at different stages of wetness from freshly applied to crusted on. At the same time we experimented with the variable length of time (from immediate to over an hour) between pepper spray exposure and treatment. We used un-goo-ed areas as controls. Our results are as follows:

DOES THIS GOO WORK?

If the goo is wet or tacky at the time of exposure to pepper spray, initially it hurts more than the control, but after the goo dries it reduces pain considerably (relative to the control) for 15-20 minutes, after which there is no distinguishable difference.

If the goo is dry at the time of exposure to pepper spray, it reduces pain considerably relative to the control for 15-20 minutes after which there is no distinguishable difference.

HOW THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO GET THIS GOO OFF OF PEOPLE'S SKIN? (After it's been exposed to pepper spray)

What didn't work at all:

-Water (including running water)
-Baking Soda Dilution
-Liquid Antacid and Water Solution (LAW)

What sort of worked:

MOFIBA (mineral oil followed immediately by alcohol - a medics protocol) -when the goo was wet MOFIBA left a slight goo residue on the skin -when the goo was dry MOFIBA was ineffective, leaving behind caked goo

10% Vinegar broke the goo up somewhat 50% and 100% Vinegar worked equally well, breaking up and removing the goo whether the goo was wet or dry. Vinegar did not remove the pepper spray from the skin, therefore in some cases causing an increase in pain.

What worked:

50% or 100% Vinegar followed by MOFIBA if pain persists. Showering with soap, though it took more scrubbing than the control area. These results were consistent regardless of how long the goo and pepper spray had been on the skin. As a result, we are going to be carrying Vinegar on the street in DC, cause you know we're going to run into those somebodies who obeyed their Slingshot Organizers.

For questions feel free to email either of us keep your heads up, Stella tellamachine@yahoo.com

Blessed Be, Delyla kitchenwitchrune@yahoo.com

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Discover Dialogue: Arjun Makhijani The Nuke Slayer

Discover Magazine,
April 2001
http://www.discover.com/apr_01/breakdialogue.html

Say the word nuclear, and scandal seems to follow, from Chernobyl to America's polluted nuclear-weapons production facilities. The latest controversy centers on the Balkans, where NATO forces fired more than 40,000 shells with dense, armor-piercing tips made of depleted uranium. At least 15 European soldiers who served there have developed or died of leukemia in the past five years. Outraged relatives blame the deaths on these munitions, a link the Pentagon hotly disputes. Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environment Research, has analyzed past environmental abuses in his book Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and its Health and Environmental Effects (MIT Press, 2000). He shares his thoughts with Discover associate editor Josie Glausiusz.

What's your opinion of current controversy over depleted uranium missiles? It's a huge, huge scandal. These complaints deserve to be investigated seriously, but instead the American government is dismissing them without adequate study. This is very reminiscent to me of what the government did with the people who helped make nuclear weapons. It said, "No, you weren't hurt; we are sure the doses were low; really conditions were very safe; you didn't breathe very much radioactive material." Last year, of course, they made a blanket admission that half-a-million workers were put in harm's way, and we don't know how many of them got cancer as a result.

How could these missiles harm human health? When they're fired, the metal burns at a very high temperature. And the fine particles that result are not the same as is seen typically, say, in a factory that makes depleted uranium metal. Some researchers have suggested that the uranium oxide dust created at very high temperatures will stay in the body for much, much longer than oxide which is generated at lower temperatures, because it is a kind of insoluble ceramic particle that dissolves a lot more slowly, and so may be eliminated from the body a lot more slowly.

How might these particles cause cancer? Depleted uranium is primarily dangerous when it's inside your body, because it emits alpha radiation, which gravely damages the cells near where it is located, or even a single cell. So if you breathe it in, for instance, it can increase the risk of lung cancer, and it can migrate to the bones. Soldiers and civilians who handle depleted uranium shells could get cuts in the hands or arms, and so get oxide particles directly into the bloodstream.

Do you believe that depleted uranium missiles caused cancer deaths among soldiers who served in the Balkans? I don't know. Cancer is a very common disease, there were a lot of soldiers there, and we must be careful in making scientific conclusions. I think four things are called for. One, the suspension of use of depleted uranium missiles. Two, conducting independent studies. Three, giving the benefit of the doubt to both the civilians and combatants so that they get the medical treatment they deserve. Fourthly, committing to cleanup. You cannot pretend that modern war is precise in its effects, and that just because no NATO troops died during the 1999 Yugoslavia-NATO war [in Kosovo] the long-term effects on the combatants and noncombatants are negligible or can be ignored. In the case of depleted uranium, there's a lot of it lying around. There should be some declaration of what was used, where it was used, how much, where it's expected to be found, and where it can be recovered.

What in your opinion are the most pressing nuclear issues today? In the nuclear power field, it's the continued use of plutonium as a fuel for reactors, and the continued reprocessing and piling-up of commercial plutonium stocks in Russia, France, England and Japan. It's a waste of money, it's a proliferation risk and there are problems with significant discharges of radioactivity into the environment.

Then there is the problem of about 4400 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert in the United States and Russia combined. The high alert state is getting more and more dangerous all the time, because Russia is losing its infrastructure. They don't have radar coverage of the sky. They don't have sufficient satellites up to provide them with 24-hour tracking of up-and-coming missiles. So they are more prone to make mistakes. I think it is extremely dangerous for the United States and Russia to persist in keeping warheads on tactical alert.

Have nuclear weapons contributed in any way to peace? No. The most you can say about nuclear weapons is that they seem to have prevented white people from going at each other's throats. They have not directly fought each other in Europe for the last fifty years. But instead they have exported wars to the Third World. This idea that nuclear weapons have maintained the peace is a fantasy that has been created by the short-sightedness and self-absorption of the Europeans who have been writing history for the last couple of hundred years.

Do you think the world will ever rid itself of nuclear weapons? Well, my mother sometimes wonders what I am doing in this business. She keeps telling me it's not going to change. My answer to her is, "I have to try. I can't look at myself in the face and say I'm not trying, knowing what I know." I do think that if the world doesn't rid itself of nuclear weapons, that we are inviting nuclear chaos. Look at the Middle Eastern question. There is also a commitment under the extension of the non-proliferation treaty to create a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Now, if there is no resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian question, then how the nuclear situation in the Middle East evolves will be anybody's guess.

Why do you do what you do? We want to democratize science. We don't think you can really be a democracy in the true sense unless you understand the important scientific issues of modern life, especially in the environmental and energy fields. Right now we're doing a study on the environmental effects of modern war. Our work on depleted uranium will be part of that.

Do you think that nuclear materials should be allowed in space for peaceful purposes? I respect the idea of space exploration. I think we know a lot more about our planet because of what space explorers have done. But what many people don't realize is that the amount of plutonium in the Cassini mission to Saturn contains more radioactive plutonium than has been released in all the atmospheric weapons testing. I think there are other ways to do these missions, and we should carefully evaluate the priority for doing them. What is the hurry to get to Pluto or Saturn? We are doing a very bad job of husbanding this planet. Maybe we ought to leave the other planets alone for a little while until we learn to take care of the one we've got.

RELATED WEB SITES:
"Discover Dialogue: Arjun Makhijani."
For more information about the work of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, see http://www.ieer.org/.
For data on depleted uranium use in the Balkans see http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/dissbk.html


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