------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Uranium, some background information
MI6 'Firm' Spied on Green Groups
Powell: US Rethinking Arms Treaty
Putin Urges Bush Not to Act Alone on Missile Shield
News Analysis: NATO, Arms Trade and the Men
Powell: US Rethinking Arms Treaty
Report: Bush Stunned by U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Size
Robot Could Protect Nuke Workers
Watchdog holds history of Maine Yankee
Friends of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution
Grass Could Endanger Nuke Reservation
Robot Could Protect Nuke Workers
A Match Made in Brdo
Ambitious. Hard-Nosed. Charming. Quite Clear.
'We Simply Disagree' Allies Offer Esteem, No Accord to President
THE PENTAGON PAPERS
Nuclear Cover-Up

MILITARY
US Army Operated Secretly in Congo
In Rwandan Village, a Turn Against Hutu Rebels
Missile Fired at U.N. Planes
Putin Discusses Plan for Balkans
Putin Proposes Regional Plan for Balkans, Visits Kosovo
Japan Drafts U.N. Peacekeeping Bill
EU Leaders Reach Accord on Expansion
New Zealand's disarming defence policy
Navy and Protesters Ready for Next Round
Way Is Cleared to Raise Ship Sunk by Sub

OTHER
BLUE SKY
Death Penalty Falls From Favor
Malaysians Battle Toxic Leaking Ship
A New Strategy to Help Capture Greenhouse Gas
WHEN LIES KILL
Europe puts up anti-riot barricades
India Arrests 2 in Plot to Attack U.S. Embassy

ACTIVISTS
Seoul Activists Burn U.S. Flag


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- australia

Uranium, some background information

http://www.undercurrents.org/operationalchemy/uranium.html

This is my attempt to compile some of the information I have found in the net which seems to be most relevant to our tour. I am not covering everything, there is lots more important stuff to be looked at on the net and elsewhere. I will try and include references for where I found the information so you can look in more detail. Last year the Earthdream tour visited Beverley Uranium mine on Adyamartha land in South Australia and Roxby Downs on Arabunna land, also S.A. We went on the invitation of local Aboriginal custodians. We made camps outside the mines, and it was all fairly peaceful except for one incident at Beverley, where riot cops beat and pepper sprayed blockaders including an 11 year old Adnyamartha girl, Helen. Needless to say this incident is what got us media attention. The rest of the time we played and partied, we had a hilarious sound clash between the two sound-systems, we put on a cabaret and a film night which off duty police and miners came down to and we even got invited into Roxby Downs primary school to perform for the kids! One of the freakiest things about the mines is just how remote they are. For most of the uranium-consuming world it really is a case of "out of site out of mind" but for Aboriginal people there is no ignoring the drastic destructive changes that the mines are making to their land.

Mining.

This is where the problem starts, there are mines all over the world (including Germany, France, Czech and Poland) but most uranium is taken from remote areas or third world countries. This is how they get it:

At the top of the picture you can see that there are two main ways of getting the ore out of the ground, in situ leaching technique and mining. Mining involves digging tunnels or open pits while insitu leaching is where a chemical such as sulphuric acid is pumped into the ground to dissolve the ore; the resulting sludge is then sucked out for processing. Beverly mine in south Australia is an example of in situ mining, while Roxby Downs, also in south Australia is a tunnel mine. In situ leaching is cheaper and puts miners less at risk but it has got some serious implications.

Environmental impacts of mining.

By far the greatest long-term radiation damage to our planet is cased by uranium mining. Mines release the greatest amount of radiation and they're immediate by products. Although processed uranium, nuclear fuel, depleted uranium and all the other stuff that ends up leaving the mine, releases radiation statistically this is much lower than what gets released at the mines. This brings up the issue of uranium consumers responsibility for the long-term damage they are doing to the countries they mine, which is what our tour is all about. (More on that later)

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/nfcr.html. "In the long term, the continuing radon emissions from the uranium mill tailings and the long-lived nuclide C-14 released from the nuclear power plant cause the highest collective radiation doses by far for the general population."

To summarise the obvious dangers of mining uranium:

In situ leaching makes a big radioactive sludge in the ground, which may at some point connect up with an underground water table and pollute it. This is the case with Beverley where in some places only 5 metres of clay separates the aquifer (sludge pit) from the great artesian basin, the underground water supply that underpins and nourishes most of Australia. (Not a good risk to take in the world's driest continent) There is also a report of an insitu leaching mine polluting the water supply for Dresden. After mining is finished it is very difficult to clean the aquifer. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/#IMPACTS

Tunnel and open pit mining generates big heaps of low-grade radioactive rocks, scraped out while they are trying to get at the ore. These mines also use and contaminate waste quantities of water, Roxby downs uses about 42 million litres a day, very greedy in such a dry place. The raw uranium ore is usually milled on site, that is, processed to make yellow cake. The by product of this is vast amounts of tailings which sit around in dams releasing large quantities of radon (radioactive and toxic gas) into the immediate environment (see the pie chart above) The first ones to suffer are of course the miners and other local population. Examples are the Navajo in America, the Arabunna and Adyamartha people in Australia and in India tailings dams from Jaduguda mine is killing local indigenous people, more on this later.

Navajo http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ureca.html
Jaduguda http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/umopjdg.html

Mining is the root of the whole nuclear problem, the effects from reach far both geographically and over time (250,000 years of radiation) One Australian aboriginal person has said that they feel responsible that something that comes out of their country could be used to cause death and suffering in another place. I don't remember where I heard this but it seems typical to me of aboriginal sense of mutual responsibility between people and the land. This attitude is totally the opposite of that demonstrated by uranium consuming countries who inflict mines on remote communities with no thought for future responsibility for the damage they are causing. It is this simple question of a relationship of responsibility that I feel is most relevant for our show. We went to uranium mines in Australia and now we are back in Europe we can make the connection between consumers and providers clear. The whole nuclear cycle is a massive subject so I am only going to skim over the rest of the process, more info is on the net.

What happens to the uranium next?

The yellow cake (uranium ore) obtained by leaching, mining and milling is processed to end up with enriched uranium for nuclear fuel and depleted uranium, which is used in weapons.

Depleted Uranium

This toxic and radioactive substance is used to tip missiles and shells, tested and made in Britain. These have been used in the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosova. Radiation from these weapons has effected local environment, civilian populations and military personnel. Lots of information on this is available from www.cadu.org.uk

Nuclear Power

This is supposed to be the cheap clean alternative to fossil fuel power. It only seems cheap or clean if you disregard the whole bigger picture around it, including the long-term costs of mining and waste disposal. Obvious short-term dangers include higher leukaemia rates near power stations and the threat of accidents. More on this www.cnduk.org

Plutonium

This is what the fuel rods get processed into. Sellafield does a lot of this. The industry makes a distinction between civil and military grade plutonium saying that only military stuff can be used to make bombs. In fact both kinds can be used. Civil plutonium is the fuel for fast breeder power stations, a type of design that is proving too unsafe to use. C.N.D point out that during the whole reprocessing cycle there are lots of opportunities for plutonium to disappear and end up in the wrong, bomb building hands. www.cnduk.org (nuclear power and nuclear weapons)

Waste

The long-term problem no one has any answers for except for not in my back yard! C.N.D. say: "Since this is very dangerous and very long-lived, any storage facility has to be very secure (i.e. well guarded) and safer over a longer period - some thousands of years - than anything yet designed and built by humanity."

While Earthdream was in Coober Pedy, a small opal-mining town in the desert, we met the Kunga Juda, a group of senior Aboriginal women who had all been affected by the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in the 1950's. Many people died and others suffered permanent sickness as a result of these tests, no one ever got compensation. Now the Australian Government wants to site a nuclear waste dump in the region. The Kunga's have been lobbying against this. Here is an except from their amazing website:

"We were born on the earth, not in the hospital. We were born in the sand. Mother never put us in the water and washed us when were born straight out. They dried us with the sand. Then they put us, newborn baby, fireside, no blankets, they put us in the warm sand. And after that, when the cord comes off, they put us through the smoke. We really know the land. From a baby we grow up on the land.

"Never mind our country is the desert, that's where we belong. And we love where we belong, the whole land. We know the stories for the land. The Seven Sisters travelled right across, in the beginning. They formed the land. Its very important Tjukur the Law, the Dreaming that must not be disturbed. The Seven Sisters are everywhere. We can give the evidence for what we say; we can show you the dance of the Seven Sisters. Listen to us! The desert lands are not as dry as you think! Can't the Government plainly see there is water here? Nothing can live without water. There's a big underground river underneath. We know the poison from the radioactive dump will go down under the ground and leak into the water. We drink from this water. Only the Government and people like that have tanks. The animals drink from this water malu kangaroo, kalaya emu, porcupine, ngintaka perentie, goanna and all the others. We eat these animals, that's our meat. We're worried that any of these animals will become poisoned and we'll become poisoned in our turn." http://www.iratiwanti.org.

Uranium and Indigenous peoples

This massive subject with lots of information on the net, see the links below.

The following comes from a report on a meeting of Navajo people from New Mexico, to discuses how mining had seriously affected their lives:

"The moderator, Phil Harrison, explained that the concept of radioactivity is not easily explained in the Navajo language. He knew from his personal experience that not only the miners were exposed to radiation, but also their families, since the men would come home from the mines with dusty clothes. In the winter the clothes would hang in the kitchens of the small homes. The families didn't know about the radioactivity of the mud. In the mines the workers were breathing the dust, walking in the mud, sometimes drinking water that trickled down the rocks. They were not informed of the dangerous nature of the material they were mining. Often there were three shifts a day labouring to produce their quota of ore for the Government's atomic weapons program." (my underlining) http://www.sonic.net/~kerry/uranium.html

see also whats been happening to the jaduguda people in India http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/umopjdg.html

It's interesting to note that for Navajo people, radiation is not easily explained, Vince Forrester, an Australian Aboriginal man says something similar:

"There is simply no proper information given to Aboriginal people living in the area about the effects of uranium mining on the land. The monitoring scientists have made no attempt to interpret their findings to the effected Aboriginal people." "Without this information, how are we to make a proper decision. It is not correct to say that any Aboriginal community has made a real decision on uranium mining until all the facts are presented to all of our people, and they must be presented in Aboriginal languages in a manner that has meaning to our people." http://www.sea-us.orgau/index.html (it's really worth reading what Mr.Forrester has to say.)

Obviously mining companies don't go out of their way to explain the health hazards involved, but I think that this cross cultural misunderstanding tells us more than that. Can we as scientifically conditioned Westerners and Europeans take indigenous understandings of uranium and radiation seriously? At Roxby Downs the Arabunna say there is a sleeping lizard under the mine, other stories in Australia link uranium to the rainbow serpent and the seven sisters who made the land. If we value aboriginal view points then we have to consider these interpretations along side all the scary scientific stuff.

From Kevin Buzzacott and the Arabunna People:

"In the past we were forced to leave our lands by the killing mobs who massacred our countrymen, our mothers and our little children. The racist system forced our Old People to leave so a few of us would survive. You see our lands as remote just like your principle of law terra nullius. This is not an uninhabited wasteland for your waste. It is our home. We became refugees but always maintained contact with our country. That is only temporary and now we need to have our land back, so we can look after it the proper way and heal ourselves. We plan to go back there and take away the evil. We have to go back whether the land has been poisoned or not. We've got nowhere else to go. Our life exists with our land. It is our foundation. It is our past, present and future. Our lands are sacred."

http://come.to/lakeeyre website for Arabunna people's campaign to protect Lake Eyre from Roxby Downs uranium mine.

http://www.mirrar.net website for mirrar people's campaign against Jabaluka, northern territories.

Responsibility

"most of the uranium produced worldwide is mined in remote areas and is exported to customers abroad. This means that the consuming countries take the benefit of the electricity produced, while the producing countries take a major share of the risk and the long-term problems." antenna uranium customers liability report.

This is what we were looking at before, with the pie chart. This situation is in some ways typical of the whole globalisation model, rich countries consume while the worst damage is done somewhere far away and out of site. However some political parties with in the consuming countries have been questioning this process and pushing legislation to make safety and environmental standards the same for all. In 1989 the German green party pointed out this issue of responsibility to the German government who replied "The buyers of uranium are not responsible for the safety of the installations during construction, operation, and decommissioning." (BT-Drs. 11/5788 of Nov. 23, 1989, questions VI 2, VI 3d, VII 4)

A similar non-uranium story is the Ok-tedi gold and copper mine in Papua New Guinea. This mine was tipping 60 to 70 million tonnes a year of toxic tailings straight into a major river. Then in 1992/93 the German government actually agreed to put pressure on mine share holders and the Papuan government to improve things. Whether they actually have improved the situation the report didn't say, but this sets an important precedent.

In Sweden the green party has been pushing this responsibility issue. 40% of Swedish used uranium comes from mines in Russia which green peace have condemned as particularly deadly. So far the Swedish government haven't agreed to take any responsibility.

Australian uranium and Europe.

"On January 15, 1998, the European Parliament adopted an urgency resolution in favour of indigenous peoples concerned from uranium mining, and against the Jabiluka project in Australia, in particular." http://www.antenna.nl/uranium/uipep.html

This is particularly relevant for us and our tour. The resolution condemns Jabaluka uranium mine, in the unbelievably beautiful Kakadu national park, northern territories, a project that is currently on hold due to the low price of uranium and strong local resistance. The resolution also states: "G. concerned about the health effects of the already existing mining facilities at Roxby Downs, Ranger and the currently planned Jabiluka project for the aboriginal people; H. noting that Australia is exporting uranium into the European Union;" Agenda 21 also gets a mention, it's well worth looking closer at this document because it is particularly relevant to our concerns.

The information we still need is who and where exactly is buying Australian uranium...any ideas? Thank you for ploughing through this with me, hopefully it proves to be inspiring. It's a massive, depressing subject and it's good to be informed about the facts. Once we have the facts though, I think it's up to us to be creative and imaginative, presenting a show that is true to the message but knows how to take the piss, entertain, amuse and generally shake people up a bit...here's to imagining a radiation free future!

Other wedsites.

SEA-US Inc. The Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service Backgound information for schools and community. http://www.sea-us.org.au/

Greenpeace - A New Reactor is Nuclear Waste http://www.greenpeace.org.au/campaigns/nuclear/whatawaste/

Uranium Research Group http://www.urg.org.au/

-------- britain

MI6 'Firm' Spied on Green Groups

Sunday, June 17, 2001
The Sunday Times of London
by Maurice Chittenden and Nicholas Rufford
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0617-01.htm

A PRIVATE intelligence firm with close links to MI6 spied on environmental campaign groups to collect information for oil companies, including Shell and BP.

MPs are to demand an inquiry by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, into whether the secret intelligence service used the firm as a front to spy on green activists.

The firm's agent, who posed as a left-wing sympathizer and film maker, was asked to betray plans of Greenpeace's activities against oil giants.

He also tried to dupe Anita Roddick's Body Shop group to pass on information about its opposition to Shell drilling for oil in a Nigerian tribal land.

The Sunday Times has seen documents which show that the spy, German-born Manfred Schlickenrieder, was hired by Hakluyt, an agency that operates from offices in London's West End.

Schlickenrieder was known by the code name Camus and had worked for the German foreign intelligence service gathering information about terrorist groups, including the Red Army Faction.

He fronted a film production company called Gruppe 2, based in Munich, but he also worked in London and Zurich. His company was a one-man band with a video camera making rarely seen documentaries. He had been making an unfinished film about Italy's Red Brigade since 1985. Another of his alleged guises was as a civil servant of the Bavarian conservation agency in charge of listed buildings and monuments.

One of his assignments from Hakluyt was to gather information about the movements of the motor vessel Greenpeace in the north Atlantic. Greenpeace claims the scandal has echoes of the Rainbow Warrior affair, when its ship protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific was blown up by the French secret service in 1985. A Dutch photographer died in the explosion.

Both BP and Shell admit hiring Hakluyt, but say they were unaware of the tactics used. Shell said it had wanted to protect its employees against possible attack.

Schlickenrieder was hired by Mike Reynolds, a director of Hakluyt and MI6's former head of station in Germany. His cover was blown by a female colleague who had worked with him. Last night he refused to comment.

Reynolds and other MI6 executives left the intelligence service after the cold war ended to form Hakluyt in 1995. It was set up with the blessing of Sir David Spedding, the then chief of MI6, who died last week. Christopher James, the managing director, had been head of the MI6 section that liaised with British firms.

The firm, which takes its name from Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan geographer, assembled a foundation board of directors from the Establishment to oversee its activities, including Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Ian Fleming's model for James Bond. Baroness Smith, the widow of John Smith, the late Labour leader, was a director until the end of last year.

The company has close links to the oil industry through Sir Peter Cazalet, the former deputy chairman of BP, who helped to establish Hakluyt before he retired, last year, and Sir Peter Holmes, former chairman of Shell, who is president of its foundation.

MPs believe the affair poses serious questions about the blurring of the divisions between the secret service, a private intelligence company and the interests of big companies. Hakluyt refutes claims by some in the intelligence community that it was started by MI6 officers to carry out "deniable" operations.

Norman Baker, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, called on Straw to make a statement. "The fact that this organization [Hakluyt] is staffed by people with close ties to MI6 suggests this was semi-official," he said.

Rod Macrae, communications director of Greenpeace International, said: "We are aware of the budgets these big companies have at their disposal to get information. The use of a friendly film maker may sound bizarre but if you go back to when Rainbow Warrior was sunk, one of the French agents appeared in our New Zealand office as a volunteer."

Hakluyt was reluctant to discuss its activities. Michael Maclay, one of the agency's directors and a former special adviser to Douglas Hurd when he was Conservative foreign minister, said: "We don't ever talk about anything we do. We never go into any details of what we may or what we may not be doing."

How Agent Camus Sank Greenpeace Oil Protests

WITH his shoulder-length hair tumbling over the collar of a leather jacket and clutching a video camera, Manfred Schlickenrieder cut a familiar figure among left-wing political parties and environmental groups across Europe for almost 20 years.

Whenever there was a campaign being organized, he was there to make a "sympathetic" documentary.

His political credentials seemed impeccable: he had once been chairman of the Munich branch of the German Communist party and the bookshelves of his office held the works of Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright and poet.

Behind the facade, however, Schlickenrieder was a spy working for both the German secret service and for Hakluyt, a private intelligence agency based in London's West End and set up by former officers of MI6, the secret intelligence service. His codename was Camus after Albert Camus, the existentialist author of L'Etranger.

Hakluyt paid him thousands of pounds to inform on the activities of Greenpeace, Anita Roddick's Body Shop and other environmental campaigners. The BND, the German equivalent of MI6, allegedly paid him £3,125 a month living expenses.

The rewards of espionage brought him a spacious flat overlooking a park in Munich and a BMW Z3, the sports car driven by Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye.

The spying operation for Hakluyt began in April 1996, when Mike Reynolds, one of the agency's directors and a former MI6 head of station in Germany, was asked by Shell to find out who was orchestrating threats against its petrol forecourts across Europe.

The threats followed an outcry over the oil giant's attempts in 1995 to dump the disused Brent Spar oil platform at sea and allegations of environmental damage caused by its oil drilling in Ogoniland, Nigeria.

Schlickenrieder approached environmental groups and far-left organizations including Revolutionärer Aufbau, a Zurichbased communist group. He was finally betrayed to the group by a female colleague.

Last week Shell confirmed it was Hakluyt's client until December 1996. The company said that some of its petrol stations in Germany had been firebombed or shot at. "We did talk to Hakluyt about what intelligence they could gather," said Mike Hogan, director of media relations at Shell UK.

In May 1997, Reynolds asked the German spy for information on whether there were legal moves within Greenpeace to protect its assets against sequestration in the event of it being sued by an oil company. Two months later, Greenpeace occupied BP's Stena Dee oil installation off the Shetland islands in an unsuccessful publicity stunt to stop oil drilling in a new part of the Atlantic. Schlickenrieder sent a report saying that Greenpeace was disappointed with its campaign.

He sent an invoice to Hakluyt on June 6, 1997, billing the agency for DM20,000 (£6,250) for "Greenpeace research".

BP confirmed it had hired Hakluyt, but said it had asked the company to compile a report based only on published sources of information. BP has longstanding links with MI6. John Gerson, BP's director of government and public affairs, was at one time a leading candidate to succeed Sir David Spedding as head of MI6.

Schlickenrieder continued working for Hakluyt until 1999. He made a film on Shell in Nigeria called Business as Usual: the Arrogance of Power, during which he interviewed friends of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nobel prize nominee, who was hanged by the military regime in 1995 after leading a campaign against oil exploration.

Schlickenrieder sent a letter to a Body Shop executive saying he had been researching the activities of Shell in Nigeria, and asked about plans for further activities. Greenpeace said yesterday that Schlickenrieder's activities had effectively sunk its campaign against BP's oil exploration in the Atlantic.

Fouad Hamdan, communications director of Greenpeace Germany, said: "The bastard was good, I have to admit.

"He got information about our planned Atlantic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise." He added: "Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realize we never saw anything."

-------- missile defense

Powell: US Rethinking Arms Treaty

JUNE 17, 09:49 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=ELECTION&PACKAGEID=bushforeign&STORYID=APIS7CMBASO0

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States will abandon a landmark arms control agreement with Russia when it concludes that the curbs on missile defense are blocking U.S. technology, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

That point has not been reached, he said, as the Bush administration weighs its options in search of a shield against missile attack.

Powell also said Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to keep talking to the administration about missile defense aspirations. ``There may be opportunities to move forward,'' Powell said on ``Fox News Sunday,'' a day after Bush's first meeting with Putin, in Slovenia.

Putin renewed his opposition to a national missile defense program, which is outlawed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Powell said the agreement was reached in a different era. ``We cannot allow its constraints'' to bind American technology, he said.

The treaty, a product of the Cold War, is ``designed to keep us from moving in this direction'' of a missile defense system. That era ``no longer exists,'' Powell said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``If there is no ABM treaty tomorrow, there is no nation that's going to run out and start making nuclear weapons,'' he said, adding that the United States has made it clear that ``we are going to go forward with missile defense.''

Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the treaty ``belongs to a relationship of implacable hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so it's time to move on.''

The president wants ``to do that cooperatively,'' Rice said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.'' ``We've launched extensive consultations and we're making progress on the intellectual argument.''

On another topic, Powell said the two countries would hold talks on ``tracking down'' Russian companies and scientists who are assisting Iran develop weapons.

``Russia should see it is more in their interest than ours'' to stop weapons proliferation, Powell said.

One way to accomplish that, he said, is to step up programs designed to give Russian scientists an incentive to remain at home. ``We can do more,'' Powell said, without providing any details.

``We have to keep talking to them about this to make sure we are of a unified mind,'' he said.

----

Putin Urges Bush Not to Act Alone on Missile Shield

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/world/17PREX.html

BRDO PRI KRANJU, Slovenia, June 16 - Russian President Vladimir V. Putin cautioned President Bush today about developing a missile defense shield without Moscow's consent, telling Mr. Bush that such an action could seriously strain relations between the two countries.

But that warning was a surprisingly gentle one, tucked into a news conference here at which the two leaders' manners and words were striking for their warmth and relative ease.

And it was coupled with upbeat statements from Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin, who were meeting for the first time, that suggested at least some possibility of cooperation on the kinds of security issues that have divided Washington and Moscow in the past. In fact, rarely have the two nations' leaders so surpassed the limited expectations of their meeting. [News analysis, Page 10.]

Addressing the topic of missile defense at the news conference, which followed a meeting between the presidents that lasted about two hours, the Russian president made abundantly clear his opposition - shared by some American allies in Europe - to Mr. Bush's ambitious military plan.

"Any unilateral actions can only make more complicated various problems and issues," Mr. Putin said, referring to the recent signals from the Bush administration that it would press on with a missile defense even if allies and the Russians continued to object.

The Russian president also called the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty between Washington and Moscow, which would have to be amended or abandoned if Mr. Bush proceeded with his grand plan, "the cornerstone of the modern architecture of international security."

And he said that when it came to strategic stability, "the differences in approaches do exist and, naturally, in one short moment it's impossible to overcome all of them."

"But," he continued, "I am convinced that ahead of us we have a constructive dialogue and the will to talk about these topics, to discuss, to hear, to listen." [Excerpts, Page 10.]

That statement sounded like conventional diplomatic etiquette but for the fact that Mr. Putin declined to dwell on disagreements about the ABM Treaty or the promise or danger of a missile shield, and he demonstrated a warmth toward Mr. Bush.

Mr. Bush, for his part, was all smiles and frequent laughs as the pair talked to a throng of journalists on the grounds of a 16th-century castle nestled in the Alps near the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana.

He and Mr. Putin stood just a few yards apart at lecterns set up so that from the viewpoint of television cameras a wooden bridge in the backdrop seemed to collapse the distance between them and connect them.

"I am convinced that he and I can build a relationship of mutual respect and candor," Mr. Bush said. "And I'm convinced that it's important for the world that we do so."

"I looked the man in the eye," Mr. Bush later added. "I was able to get a sense of his soul." From this, the president said, he was convinced that Mr. Putin was "a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."

Mr. Bush's aides said beforehand that Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin would not be trying to hammer out an accord of any kind and their discussion of the missile shield and the ABM Treaty would not be detailed.

Afterward, administration officials said that was indeed the case, and the conversation between the leaders had ranged wide and far, giving them an opportunity to get to know each other.

Indeed, today's events turned as much as anything else on the leaders' ability to establish rapport with each other. From outward signs, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin seemed to get along rather well.

They had been scheduled to meet for about 30 minutes with only note- takers and translators present, and then for a longer time with their senior advisers present, as well. But the private part of the discussion ended up lasting more than 90 minutes, leaving only about 20 minutes for the wider circle to meet.

The two will talk again next month in Italy at a meeting of the leading industrial nations, and Mr. Bush said today that he had also invited Mr. Putin to Washington next fall and then to travel on to Mr. Bush's beloved ranch in Crawford, Tex. Mr. Putin accepted.

And Mr. Putin in turn invited Mr. Bush to visit Russia sometime soon. Mr. Bush also accepted.

"Everybody is trying to read body language," Mr. Bush said during the news conference. "Mark me down as very pleased with the progress and the frank discussion."

Mr. Bush's meeting with Mr. Putin was the climax of his first overseas trip as president, a five-day, five- country trip that underscored priorities of his that have caused friction with European allies and Russia.

In regard to the missile shield, some of those allies are also reluctant to scrap the ABM Treaty, and Mr. Bush's success or failure in bringing Russia on board could have a profound influence on, for example, the attitudes of France and Germany, both important allies that have expressed qualms.

Before today's meeting, senior administration strategists said they were prepared to offer the Russians arms purchases, military aid and joint antimissile exercises as incentives to scrap the 1972 treaty. These officials said the proposal might include the purchase of Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missiles that could be integrated into a defensive shield over Russia and Europe.

But Mr. Bush said that nothing like bargaining had occurred today, and aides said that such matters would be discussed in coming weeks and months by the leaders' advisers, not by the presidents themselves.

"I offered something," Mr. Bush told reporters. "Logic and a hopeful tomorrow. I offered the opportunity, which the president is going to seize, for us, as leaders of great powers, to work together."

In fact, Mr. Bush said that he had directed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who accompanied him here today, and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to begin a series of discussions with their counterparts.

Today's meeting brought together two men with extremely different backgrounds - a former Texas oilman with a brief history in government and a former K.G.B. spy with the resume of a bureaucrat - and untold points of potential conflict.

But before their meeting, as they posed for photographers in and around a picturesque castle in what used to be a corner of the former Yugoslavia, they seemed relatively relaxed. At one point, as they sat in adjacent chairs, they leaned so close to one another that their foreheads almost touched.

During their discussions, they took at least a bit of time out from substantive issues to talk about their families. Mr. Bush recalled at the news conference that Mr. Putin had told him, "I read where you named your daughters after your mother and mother-in-law."

"Yes," Mr. Bush remembered replying. "I'm a great diplomat, aren't I?" He said that Mr. Putin responded: "I did the same thing."

But all of that bonhomie could not paper over points of contention, including the issue of NATO expansion. On Friday in Warsaw, Mr. Bush said that he envisioned an Atlantic alliance that would include the Baltic states and stretch to Russia's borders. That kind of talk has long made Moscow nervous.

But Mr. Putin said he had been heartened by Bush remarks that cast Russia as a part of Europe and potential ally. "When a president of a great power says that he wants to see Russia as a partner, and maybe even as an ally, this is worth so much to us," Mr. Putin said today.

Secretary Powell said today that Mr. Bush's expansive talk about a closer partnership with Moscow did not, at least now, take into account the idea of Russia's joining NATO. "I don't think he was talking about an alliance in the sense of a military alliance or a political alliance," Secretary Powell said.

According to Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin strayed often into areas that did not involve missiles or nuclear warfare. Behind closed doors or at the news conference, they talked about Chechnya, about Russia's need to institute certain reforms if it wanted to attract more investment, and about the Balkans.

On the subject of missile defense, the signals that Mr. Putin flashed today were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, he clung in his remarks to the ABM treaty as something not to be discarded.

On the other, he said that he and Mr. Bush must continue to discuss "building a new architecture of security in the world," a phrase that borrowed from the vocabulary Mr. Bush's advisers have been using to sell the concept of missile defense.

-------- russia

News Analysis: NATO, Arms Trade and the Men

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/world/17ASSE.html

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia, June 16 - Whatever happens now, for good or for ill, a new era in America's relations with Russia began today.

Seldom have two leaders so strikingly overcome the limited expectations about their first meeting as George W. Bush and Vladimir V. Putin did today, putting their new friendship on a high plane of newfound trust and instructing their defense chiefs, both hard-liners, and their foreign secretaries, to find a common approach for a new framework for international security.

Whether this constructive new beginning - made with surprising buoyancy and personal engagement - will succeed as the genuine partnership that Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin described here this afternoon will depend on how they follow through on the collaborative venture that they outlined only in broad strokes.

It includes joint work to study security threats, cooperative energy projects and new studies on how American corporations might find investment opportunities in the struggling Russian economy. It also includes American support for Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization.

"This was a very good meeting," Mr. Bush said standing alongside the Russian president. "He is an honest, straightforward man who loves his country," he added, and he called Mr. Putin a "remarkable" leader whom Americans can trust.

Mr. Putin confirmed the American president's assessment and said the meeting had proved that "reality was a lot bigger than expectations." He asserted that an important cold war milestone had been passed with Mr. Bush's declaration that Russia is no longer America's enemy.

The two men had come to look each other in the eye, and Mr. Bush said he did just that to take the measure of Mr. Putin's soul. They both appeared to like what they saw, even as they laid out the agenda of their extensive disagreements on missile defenses, the expansion of NATO onto the territory of the former Soviet Union and Russia's growing arms trade with Iran.

And today's reversal of tone in American-Russian relations may reflect how much each leader needed the positive outcome. Mr. Bush needed to prove to Europe and to the Senate that he was not engaged in recklessness as he pursued a new security concept that includes missile defenses. And Mr. Putin needed to know that the new Bush administration was not looking for a confrontation because Mr. Putin has his hands full at home trying to pull Russia beyond the wreckage of the Soviet era.

For more than two hours, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin discussed a world rapidly transforming itself from the world of their fathers and despite the surprisingly positive outcome of today's meeting, it cannot be separated from the extraordinary week of diplomatic activity that preceded it.

In his first major diplomatic foray abroad, Mr. Bush discovered this week that Europe was becoming its own powerhouse of economic and security interests that, while similar to those of the United States, are by no means identical on issues as diverse as climate change and urgent European calls for NATO to step into the fray in Macedonia.

And though Mr. Bush may have succeeded in fostering what he termed a "new receptivity" to his proposal for missile defenses among some European leaders this week, Germany and France stood as formidable skeptics, each concerned that Mr. Bush's plan would trigger a new arms race by not taking into account Russia's and China's concerns.

As if to sharpen that point, Mr. Putin made his entrance here after flying from China, where he and President Jiang Zemin and the leaders of four Central Asian republics signed the founding charter of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, not quite an alliance, but a potent new expression of Asian interests.

Indeed, despite the warming with Mr. Bush, Mr. Putin seems to be fostering a new era of triangular diplomacy, positioning Russia to be an ally of China and of Europe as a hedge against American unilateralism, a concern he mentioned today. His tactic put Mr. Bush on the defensive, and Mr. Bush this week was at pains to assert that America is not about to go it alone in international affairs, but was trying instead to galvanize support for a new international security concept. The concept remains largely undefined except that missile defenses are a prominent centerpiece.

With all the disagreement, however, what seemed most important was that the two presidents - neither of whom has been in office very long, one a former Soviet K.G.B. officer, the other a scion of American wealth and political dynasty - had finally met in the shadow of the Alps, near the fragile epicenter of European instability in the Balkans.

Mr. Putin had been seeking this meeting since almost the day after Mr. Bush's inauguration, but Mr. Bush's advisers delayed it for months, saying they were formulating a new policy toward Russia, one that now seems to be taking shape.

The two leaders now move on, to see each other again in July and October at the summit meeting of leading industrial nations in Genoa and of Asian and Pacific leaders in Shanghai, and they accepted invitations to visit not just each other's capitals but each other's homes.

Between now and then, both must return to domestic political challenges. Mr. Bush faces the Senate, now led by Democrats, many of whom are as skeptical as some European leaders about the consequences of abandoning the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and how to pay for missile defenses even if they turn out to be feasible.

And Mr. Putin returns to Moscow, where he must prove that he is the democratic leader he advertises himself to be, one who wants to take Russia into Europe, a goal that will be difficult to reach as long as the partisan war in Chechnya continues without negotiation.

Mr. Putin's yearold government also stands at a critical juncture of reform, with sweeping proposals to build a new judicial system, institute jury trials and privatize land ownership this year, an issue still so contentious in post-Soviet Russia that a fistfight broke out Friday among lawmakers. And though Mr. Putin this week reaffirmed his commitment to a free press and to building civil society, his administration has been dogged by incidents of pressure and intimidation that have called that commitment into question.

"This is a unique opportunity," said Aleksei Arbatov, an influential member of the Russian Parliament watching events from Moscow. "There are a lot of problems and mutual suspicions between our countries, and the main issue for both leaders is to decide whether they want to resolve these issues cooperatively, or to deal with those problems without dealing with each other."

"The fact that the United States is the only remaining superpower in the world," he continued, "means that it has to use this opportunity to demonstrate that it is a well-meaning state trying to establish the rule of the game for international relations on the basis of cooperation and not on force."

-------- treaties

Powell: US Rethinking Arms Treaty

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States will abandon a landmark arms control agreement with Russia when it concludes that the curbs on missile defense are blocking U.S. technology, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

That point has not been reached, he said, as the Bush administration weighs its options in search of a shield against missile attack.

Powell also said Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to keep talking to the administration about missile defense aspirations. ``There may be opportunities to move forward,'' Powell said on ``Fox News Sunday,'' a day after Bush's first meeting with Putin, in Slovenia.

Putin renewed his opposition to a national missile defense program, which is outlawed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Powell said the agreement was reached in a different era. ``We cannot allow its constraints'' to bind American technology, he said.

The treaty, a product of the Cold War, is ``designed to keep us from moving in this direction'' of a missile defense system. That era ``no longer exists,'' Powell said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``If there is no ABM treaty tomorrow, there is no nation that's going to run out and start making nuclear weapons,'' he said, adding that the United States has made it clear that ``we are going to go forward with missile defense.''

Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the treaty ``belongs to a relationship of implacable hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so it's time to move on.''

The president wants ``to do that cooperatively,'' Rice said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.'' ``We've launched extensive consultations and we're making progress on the intellectual argument.''

On another topic, Powell said the two countries would hold talks on ``tracking down'' Russian companies and scientists who are assisting Iran develop weapons.

``Russia should see it is more in their interest than ours'' to stop weapons proliferation, Powell said.

One way to accomplish that, he said, is to step up programs designed to give Russian scientists an incentive to remain at home. ``We can do more,'' Powell said, without providing any details.

``We have to keep talking to them about this to make sure we are of a unified mind,'' he said.

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

Report: Bush Stunned by U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Size

Sunday June 17 1:28 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010617/ts/bush_nuclear_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush was stunned last month when told of the extent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Newsweek magazine reported in its June 25 edition, released on Sunday.

``I had no idea we had so many weapons,'' Bush was quoted as saying by an unidentified ``White House insider.''

``What do we need them for?'' the president was said to have asked at a briefing, according to the Newsweek report.

But that was not a dumb question, the magazine noted in detailing the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal, which includes 5,400 warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles ready to be launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers, 1,670 ``tactical'' nuclear weapons and another 10,000 warheads in bunkers around the United States.

That potential for nuclear overkill may be reined in, however, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepares at the Pentagon to implement Bush's stated goal of streamlining and downsizing the arsenal.

Rumsfeld has brought back retired Gen. George (Lee) Butler and former Reagan administration national security guru Richard Perle to spearhead an effort to reduce the arsenal to safer, more manageable and more cost efficient levels, Newsweek said.

``I see no reason why we can't go well below 1,000'' warheads, Perle told the magazine. ``I want the lowest number possible under the tightest control possible.''

``The truth is we are never going to use them,'' Perle added. ''The Russians aren't going to use theirs either.''

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

Robot Could Protect Nuke Workers

JUNE 17, 12:01 EST
By LINDA ASHTON
Associated Press Writer

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - Some waste pits at the Hanford nuclear reservation are so hot they emit in only one hour a dose of radiation 100 times higher than the amount workers are allowed to receive in a year.

But the pits must be cleaned and many of them upgraded for transferring radioactive waste from Hanford's underground tank farms to a vitrification plant now being designed to turn some of the deadly material into glass logs for long-term storage.

In response to the dangers, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has designed the ``Pit Viper,'' a versatile, robotic arm and remote video monitoring station that will allow workers to rehabilitate contaminated pits without getting near them.

Pit work exposes handlers to more radiation than any other cleanup task at the tank farms, where nearly 54 million gallons of highly radioactive waste are stored in 177 aging and leak-prone tanks.

Even workers standing near some pits can be exposed to their annual limits of radiation in a few hours or a few days, said Don Niebuhr, a field work supervisor for the CH2M Hill Hanford Group, which manages the tank farms.

``Doing this work is extremely hazardous. It is the most dose-intensive task,'' said Sharon Bailey, Pit Viper project manager for the laboratory. ``We expect this (Pit Viper) may reduce personnel dose rates by up to 75 percent.''

The lab recently showed off a prototype Pit Viper, a $1 million system that will be used at the reservation this summer. The three-joystick control board and four monitors in the control trailer look deceptively simple.

``That's the idea,'' said Carl Baker, a senior development engineer for the lab. ``We want this to be actually used.''

An operator, working as far away as 200 feet, has views from four cameras showing what the robotic arm is doing. It can lift as much as 200 pounds.

``We have 600 equipment pits that need to be cleaned up before we can proceed with vitrification,'' said Paul Kruger, the U.S. Department of Energy's associate manager for science and technology in Richland.

The swimming pool-like pits average about 8 feet-by-10-feet in area and 8 feet deep. Some pits record radiation dose rates so high that prep work with shields and other protective devices is required before workers can enter, Niebuhr said.

There are no plans to use the Pit Viper at other Energy Department sites - no other site has this particular problem - but if other sites saw potential use, the lab would work on modifications.

CH2M Hill would like to have about six Pit Vipers for its work, said Rick Raymond, the company's vice president for projects.

Whether the money would be available is unknown.

If funding can be found for the Pit Vipers, the pits can be cleaned out more safely and more efficiently, eventually saving money, Raymond said.

The Bush administration has budgeted for the Energy Department's Office of River Protection $814 million for fiscal year 2002. The office, which oversees the tank farms and the glassification project, needs $1.1 billion to meet its contract obligations.

The vitrification plant is expected to be up and running in 2007.

-------- maine

Watchdog holds history of Maine Yankee

MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM
COLUMN: Bill Nemitz -
June 17, 2001
From: Raymond Shadis - shadis@ime.net

EDGECOMB - The reading glasses sit in a small pile in Ray Shadis' cluttered home office, some usable, some too beat up to see through anymore. Shadis buys them cheap at a liquidation store because he's always misplacing them and because, after more than three decades of anti-nuclear activism, his day isn't complete if he doesn't pore over an obscure document or two.

Or two million.

"I have a strong feeling for history," Shadis said Friday when asked why he'd lay claim to a roomful of documents chronicling, beyond minutia, the rise and fall of the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant. Then, with his trademark wry grin, he added, "And I know how quickly history changes."

Few people noticed in 1999 when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it was going completely electronic in its record-keeping and would no longer send materials to the public document rooms maintained near nuclear plants throughout the country. Nor did most Mainers seem to care when the NRC told the Wiscasset Public Library, home of the public records for the now defunct Maine Yankee, that it could dispose of the piles of printed paper and mountains of microfiche as it saw fit.

But Shadis noticed. Earlier this month, under pressure from the library to get this stuff out of here, he and a handful of other veterans from Maine's nuclear wars pulled up in a caravan of three pickups and a van. Forty-five backbreaking minutes later, they drove off with a rapidly fading chapter in Maine history.

"This, taken as a whole, is Maine's experience in the nuclear age," Shadis said. "It keeps speaking to us about the conditions of the plant, the mind-set of the operators, the corporate culture, the relations with the community. All of that is part and parcel of this thing."

And therein lies the problem. Now that Friends of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution, led by Shadis, is the proud owner of the Maine Yankee archives, it has no place to put them.

At the moment, the 20 boxes of papers, some carbon copies on onionskin, and three large cabinets of microfiche with headings like "General Electric Type SBM Control Switches Defective Cam Followers, March 28, 1980" sit in a barn owned by Roger Sherman, 88. A friend of Friends of the Coast and a onetime Central Maine Power Co. worker, Sherman is concerned at this point only about mice.

"They'll get into anything," he warned Shadis during a visit to the barn on Friday.

Ideally, Shadis envisions a room at a Maine college or university where the records will be permanently accessible to the public. In addition to their historic value, he said, they could still prove useful, should any problems arise with the Maine Yankee site - or if nuclear power someday returns to Maine and folks want to know what happened the first time around.

But first, someone has to go through it all: five statewide referenda - three to close the plant and two on nuclear waste. Countless inspections - some notorious, some obscure. Endless problems - the cracked pipes, the mysteriously cut wires, the faulty valves . . .

Shadis will start with the thousands of microfiches inside what's been marked "Ray's Drawer." It's the one he dropped during the move, spilling the clear plastic cards all over the place.

But hey, he's got plenty of eyeglasses. And while he's still on the road many days a month attending this hearing or that meeting (these days, he's a member of the NRC's Initial Implementation Evaluation Panel), Shadis somehow will find the time to catalog how Maine Yankee came . . . and went.

High atop the file cabinets sits a microfiche reading machine. It prints only on silver paper - which these days is hard to come by. But when was this ever easy?

"It's not the best," Shadis said, patting the old contraption. "But it's a start."

Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: bnemitz@pressherald.com In addition to the 24 year history documented in the NRC documents, Friends of the Coast holds over 200,000 pages of additional documentation, much of it not public, regarding Maine Yankee operations, technical issues, policy setting, and corporate culture. We also hold several hundred books and numerous official and technical reports on nuclear subjects, plus documents, correspondence, and clippings from the 24 continuous opposition to nuclear energy in Maine. This part of Maine history must be preserved and made accessible for scholars and for future generations. To that end we are seeking a patron to endow a permanent library collection.

Friends of the Coast -Post Office Box 98, Edgecomb, Maine 04556

--

Friends of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution

Post Office Box 98,
Edgecomb, Maine 04556

June 11, 2001

Contact: Ann D. Burt- 207-882-6848

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ray Shadis - 207-882-7801
Environmental Group Receives Bulk of Maine Yankee Federal Records

"We will write the definitive history on Maine's nuclear experience" says spokesman.

Wiscasset, Maine- On June 6th, the Maine environmental group, Friends of the Coast-Opposing Nuclear Pollution became the owners of the contents of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Local Public Document Room. Established by law in the 1960's, NRC Public Document Rooms were located near each nuclear reactor in the country including Maine Yankee Atomic Power Station. The document room was intended provide the public all federal legal records, plans, reports regarding the nuclear station plant as well as all relevant correspondence to and from the NRC. In 1999, the NRC advised libraries housing document collections that no new materials would be added to the document rooms because the agency now intended to provide public access through its electronic (computer) system. Libraries were advised that they could retain or dispose of printed paper and microfiche materials as they saw fit. Early in 2000, Friends of the Coast- Opposing Nuclear Pollution applied to the Wiscasset Library to take over the documents.

" We believe it is vital that the next generation have access to the whole story on Maine's nuclear experience," said Raymond Shadis, the group's spokesman and a veteran anti-nuclear activist. " We tried to get Maine Yankee to fund a permanent archive at the Wiscasset Public Library, but they would not," he said, " so we will be seeking a private donor or grant money or both to establish and endow a permanent collection, perhaps at one of our Maine colleges."

Shadis added, " In it's 24 year history Maine Yankee was the basis of three statewide referenda aimed at closing the plant and two referenda on low-level nuclear waste disposal. Today, the US NRC has an entirely new reactor oversight process based on some hard lessons in oversight that FRIENDS 6/11,2001 (continued) we all learned at Maine Yankee. If the whole record is not preserved, all we will have left will be those puffy press releases about record setting electricity production. Who, for example, will remember the effect of local earthquake that occurred just a few weeks before the accident at Three Mile Island? It's all contained in letters that local people wrote to NRC. Twenty-four years from now, people can visit our high level waste dump and then read about the early promises that no batch of irradiated waste fuel would never remain more than two years" Friends of the Coast members used three pick-up trucks and a large van to move the materials to private storage. Also included in the materials are NRC generic reports on topical issues such as material fatigue and component failure in various nuclear applications. The group intends to add the Public Document Room materials to an already impressive collection that holds:

·over 200,000 pages of Maine Yankee material, including previously internal documents, gained by legally intervening in a Federal Energy Commission rate case,

·several hundred donated and collected books on nuclear subjects, and

·documents, clippings, studies, and memorabilia stemming from 25 years of citizen activism.

Shadis explained that while NRC does make current information available on its internet "homepage", much of the historical data is simply not available electronically.

In 1996 Shadis used copies of documents from the Wiscasset Public Document Room to remind the NRC of a 1978 Inspector's Fire Protection Report which detailed electrical identification and separation issues that were rediscovered at Maine Yankee in 1996 and that contributed to the owner's decision to close the plant. "This time," Shadis said, " We will write the definitive history on Maine's nuclear experience." END

PHOTOS OF REMOVAL and CREW AVAILABLE

Raymond Shadis, Post Office Box 76, Edgecomb, Maine 04556 (207) 882-7801 e-mail - shadis@ime.net

-------- washington

Grass Could Endanger Nuke Reservation

JUNE 17, 12:01 EST
By LINDA ASHTON
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS7CMD8J83

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - Blackened Rattlesnake Mountain is green again, a year after the largest fire in Washington state threatened radioactive waste storage areas at Hanford nuclear reservation and burned 11 homes in nearby Benton City.

Unfortunately, a lot of that green, green grass of spring is an invader species called cheat grass, with the potential to boost fire danger at Hanford again this summer.

``The cheat grass is bad news. It is the scourge of the West,'' said Greg Hughes, a project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Hanford Reach National Monument, including the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve.

The fast-moving, 163,000-acre Hanford fire was sparked by a fatal traffic collision last June 27 on the northwestern edge of the reservation, where plutonium was once made for the nation's nuclear arsenal.

It was a scorching summer day, with plenty of grass and sagebrush to burn in the arid desert country of south-central Washington. Steep slopes made firefighting difficult.

``The fire blew up. It came roaring out of the canyon. The wind and fuel and heat forced it down the face of the mountain,'' Hanford Fire Chief Don Good said.

At one point, the flames traveled an almost unheard of 20 miles in 90 minutes, Good said. ``This fire had all the elements that you don't want to happen all at one time,'' he said.

Some 850 firefighters and support staff from around the Northwest were called to help the 106-member Hanford Fire Department.

The flames moved perilously close to Hanford's 200 West Area, where some of the most deadly radioactive waste here at the most-contaminated nuclear site in the country is stored in underground tanks and pits.

Firefighting activities are believed to have released minute amounts of radioactive elements into the air, elevating readings at monitoring sites around the 560-square-mile reservation, which is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Within reservation boundaries, the biggest environmental casualty was the 77,000-acre Arid Lands Ecology Reserve - an uncontaminated portion of Hanford that is home to hundreds of elk and the rare and fragile shrub-steppe ecosystem. The reserve burned, some elk suffered burn injuries or fled and a few died in the fire.

But time and nature have transformed the Rattlesnake Hills on the reserve, and though charred sticks that once were sagebrush still poke out of the dirt, the area is now briefly verdant with grasses, pink phlox and purple lupine.

Native plants are relatively resistant to fire in the Columbia Basin, which gets only about 7 inches of rain and snow each year. Summer temperatures that top 100 degrees are not uncommon.

But when the land is disturbed, the native habitat is degraded, inviting such invader species as cheat grass and Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed, said Larry Cadwell, a staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

``Each time we have a fire, we lose some element of native grasses,'' he said. ``Sixty percent of the 15 million acres of shrub-steppe in the entire Columbia Basin is gone.''

Hanford's native grasses are bunch grasses, which grow just as their name indicates, in clumps separated by bare patches of dirt. Cheat grass grows in a more continuous mat that aids the spread of fire.

``Cheat grass is a ladder fuel that brings fire up into the sage like a candle, ... and cheat grass is like gasoline next to the highway,'' Hughes said.

Through the Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation plan, the Fish and Wildlife Service is working to control invader species such as cheat grass by chemical and mechanical means.

It is a high-tech form of weeding, using global positioning satellite data and aerial photography to identify sites for monitoring and control.

While the goal is total eradication, cheat grass, much like tumbleweeds, was already well-established before the fire.

``On the ALE (reserve), the plan would be to wipe out as much cheat grass as we can, and plant native grass as needed if it doesn't come up naturally,'' Hughes said.

``Because of this fire, the invasion of nonnatives has been accelerated. We can't continue to go out and put Band-Aids on little pieces and watch it get reinvaded by cheat grass and invasive weed species.''

The price tag for revegetation is high - $6.5 million - and it is still undetermined how much money would be available for restoration, Hughes said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has planted on the reserve about 150,000 sagebrush seedlings that were scheduled for planting before the fire.

Because the reserve is a research site, the invasion of alien plant life also is seen as a learning opportunity, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has hired a specialist to monitor the effects of the fire on the Hanford vegetation.

Off the reserve and on Hanford's central plateau, some replanting also is under way, but high winds and the dunelike nature of parts of the burned area have made that a challenge, said Ray Johnson, a biological control manager at Fluor Hanford, the contractor managing the site for the Energy Department.

Crews have been planting and in some areas, replanting, bunch grasses on 1,000 acres around the 200 West Area, where dust from the burned-over area has been so bad that workers sometimes are sent home by midday.

``The winds have been absolutely brutal on those,'' Johnson said. ``We had excellent growth as early as last fall, then we had 50 to 70 mile an hour winds. The young grass didn't survive that well. The moving sand either shears the young grass off or else will cover it up.''

Fluor is looking for innovative ways to help young grasses survive and is considering, among other things, sprinkle irrigation to get the plants established.

----

Robot Could Protect Nuke Workers

JUNE 17, 12:01 EST
By LINDA ASHTON
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS7CMD8J82

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - Some waste pits at the Hanford nuclear reservation are so hot they emit in only one hour a dose of radiation 100 times higher than the amount workers are allowed to receive in a year.

But the pits must be cleaned and many of them upgraded for transferring radioactive waste from Hanford's underground tank farms to a vitrification plant now being designed to turn some of the deadly material into glass logs for long-term storage.

In response to the dangers, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has designed the ``Pit Viper,'' a versatile, robotic arm and remote video monitoring station that will allow workers to rehabilitate contaminated pits without getting near them.

Pit work exposes handlers to more radiation than any other cleanup task at the tank farms, where nearly 54 million gallons of highly radioactive waste are stored in 177 aging and leak-prone tanks.

Even workers standing near some pits can be exposed to their annual limits of radiation in a few hours or a few days, said Don Niebuhr, a field work supervisor for the CH2M Hill Hanford Group, which manages the tank farms.

``Doing this work is extremely hazardous. It is the most dose-intensive task,'' said Sharon Bailey, Pit Viper project manager for the laboratory. ``We expect this (Pit Viper) may reduce personnel dose rates by up to 75 percent.''

The lab recently showed off a prototype Pit Viper, a $1 million system that will be used at the reservation this summer. The three-joystick control board and four monitors in the control trailer look deceptively simple.

``That's the idea,'' said Carl Baker, a senior development engineer for the lab. ``We want this to be actually used.''

An operator, working as far away as 200 feet, has views from four cameras showing what the robotic arm is doing. It can lift as much as 200 pounds.

``We have 600 equipment pits that need to be cleaned up before we can proceed with vitrification,'' said Paul Kruger, the U.S. Department of Energy's associate manager for science and technology in Richland.

The swimming pool-like pits average about 8 feet-by-10-feet in area and 8 feet deep. Some pits record radiation dose rates so high that prep work with shields and other protective devices is required before workers can enter, Niebuhr said.

There are no plans to use the Pit Viper at other Energy Department sites - no other site has this particular problem - but if other sites saw potential use, the lab would work on modifications.

CH2M Hill would like to have about six Pit Vipers for its work, said Rick Raymond, the company's vice president for projects.

Whether the money would be available is unknown.

If funding can be found for the Pit Vipers, the pits can be cleaned out more safely and more efficiently, eventually saving money, Raymond said.

The Bush administration has budgeted for the Energy Department's Office of River Protection $814 million for fiscal year 2002. The office, which oversees the tank farms and the glassification project, needs $1.1 billion to meet its contract obligations.

The vitrification plant is expected to be up and running in 2007.

-------- us nuc politics

A Match Made in Brdo

Washington Post
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8521-2001Jun15?language=printer

"If this doesn't work out, it sure won't be my fault."

Neither George W. Bush nor Vladimir Putin spoke those words into the microphones and television cameras set up at Brdo Castle just outside Ljubljana, Slovenia, yesterday. But the thought seemed to shape the approach of these two consummate persuaders to each other and to the global audience watching.

As they portrayed it, the initial encounter of the 43rd American president and the second elected leader of Russia had the air of a prenuptial negotiation more than a high-stakes diplomatic parley. This was all about sentiment and personal trust, they soothingly assured each other and the world. This was not, Bush insisted twice, "a bargaining session."

Certainly not. How tacky would that be, especially for the well-heeled one drawing lines around the nonnegotiable assets of missile defense and NATO enlargement, in the smoothest way, to protect the feelings of the impecunious other.

Putin reciprocated Bush's delicacy. He soft-pedaled such grubby topics. Instead Putin gushed over the American president actually noticing something he had said, to wit, Putin's view that maybe someday when they knew each other much better that Russia itself might be invited to join NATO. "Why not?" he asked, just as a thought.

A year ago that other fellow, that Clinton or whatever his name was, had Madeleine Albright bark back: In your dreams, Vlad. Finally, Putin said, an American president had responded to that thought by saying Russia certainly could be an American partner and maybe even an ally.

Someday. When we know each other much better.

The meeting with Putin capped a week in Europe in which Bush made his way onto the world stage without a serious stumble. For all the schmaltz, the Bush-Putin session served useful purposes for both men and their nations, as did Bush's earlier encounters with the leaders of the European Union and NATO.

In his public statements, Bush showed a surprising grasp of and openness to European Union integration, including an enhanced defense role for the EU. He put his personal prestige behind a continuing U.S. troop presence in the Balkans.

He gave a knockout speech in Warsaw on Europe in the last century, and unveiled his thinking about today's Russia being a part of Europe, not some distant evil empire, and pretty much like all those other countries.

By the time Bush rolled into Ljubljana, the man who hates to sleep away from home was tossing out well-oiled regrets that he did not have time to visit Lake Bled or the even more obscure resort I heard as "Mount Trigadof," but which my geographical dictionary suggests may have been Mount Triglav. You know, the 9,395-foot-high peak in the Julian Alps? But not to worry. Bush suggested that his future trips to Slovenia would include them.

It was that way with Putin as well. Baited by reporters to do the unthinkable and give a candid assessment of the former espionage agent who is skilled at getting others to see what they want to see in him, Bush went way beyond "trustworthy" and "straight-forward":

"I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch" if Putin wasn't to be trusted. Under similar journalistic provocation, Putin confessed that he had been bowled over by Bush as "a person who has studied history."

Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev met each other as conspirators working for peace behind the backs of disloyal aides. Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin played back-slapping, bear-hugging good ol' boys to each other. Bush and Putin are also a well-matched pair: They are persuaders much more than conciliators or big thinkers. Neither allows himself or the person with whom he is doing business to harbor any doubts.

My guess is that each understood the other's game in Ljubljana perfectly. Bush will attempt to escape both from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and the blame for collapsing it, while Putin will talk and talk and talk some more to keep Bush ensnared in both. If the breakup comes despite everything they can do, the key question will be who will get the Europeans in the settlement?

Or maybe Bush and Putin will find real harmony and a missile deal. They could sign it on the shores of Lake Bled. You know, the resort village in the mountains about 30 miles of Ljubljana, near Mount Whatever?

----

Ambitious. Hard-Nosed. Charming. Quite Clear.

Washington Post
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9768-2001Jun16?language=printer

AS THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT criss-crossed the European continent the past five days, he left a wealth of editorial opinion behind. Outlook excerpted a sample, day by day.

'George W. Bush's Spanish stopover'

EL MUNDO, Madrid, June 11

It is not by chance that the president of the world's foremost power has chosen Spain in which to begin his first official visit to Europe. George W. Bush's stopover in Madrid is in line with the priorities of U.S. foreign policy in the new Republican era. Since he was elected president, this Texan who seasons his speeches with phrases in Spanish has made clear his intention of reorienting the strategy promoted by his predecessor. Instead of playing the role of the world gendarme of democracy, Bush aims to reconquer America. Proof of this is the fact that his first two official visits were to Mexico and Canada. And proof of this is his visit to Spain.

Spain and the U.S.A. have a relationship independent from the one between the U.S.A. and Europe: historically and culturally, Spain is the bridge between the New World and the Old.

'George W. Bush's 'Me-Nation''

LE MONDE, Paris, June 12

Americans born after the war, the baby boomers, are thought of as having made up what in the United States is called the "me generation."

The expression suggests a philosophy of life that runs on one prime principle: "me first." Wrongly or rightly, it is supposed to stigmatize a thorough selfishness, unfettered individualism, and a search for immediate satisfactions. George W. Bush the baby boomer, who is visiting Europe this week, is applying this principle to his foreign policy. His ambition seems to be to turn the United States into a sort of me-nation, a country essentially busy, on the international stage, defending national interests defined in the narrowest way. . . . (Alain Frachon)

'Mr. Bush is not the only one who needs to change some of his ways'

THE INDEPENDENT, London, June 12

Rarely has an American president arrived on this side of the Atlantic in such inauspicious circumstances. . . .

The slightest garbling of syntax, the merest confusion of Slovenia with Slovakia, will confirm every fashionable prejudice on the European centre-left that the 43rd president is a bloodthirsty, ignorant Texas oilman, in way over his head. . . .

Before we Europeans yield to fury or condescending mirth, it is worth considering how our continent appears, not only to a hard-nosed Republican administration in Washington, but to some of its own more thoughtful citizens, too. It is a Europe which self-righteously howled at President Bush for his abandonment of Kyoto, but which has failed to ratify the convention itself, and which prattles about defence cooperation and burden sharing within NATO -- but where defence spending instead of rising, continues to fall. . . . Beyond question, the Atlantic relationship is in urgent need of attention . . . . Mr Bush has perhaps done everyone a service by bringing the strains into full focus.

'More than allies'

ABC, Madrid, June 13

The new U.S. administration no longer sees Spain as a mere ally, but rather as a partner and a really important reference point. We refer to Latin America, an area on which Bush has focused a large proportion of his efforts abroad and where Spain and the United States have a dominant position because they are the main investors; the Middle East, a region in which our country enjoys the trust of Arabs and Jews; and Europe. Could Spain become the U.S.A.'s second-favorite ally in the Old Continent, alongside Britain? The great scope of the presidential visit, and the trust and cordiality between the two leaders, seem to confirm it.

'Europe Does Not Need Leaders'

LIDOVE NOVINY, Prague, June 13

Bush and his people are not short of leadership qualities. 'We have a democratic mandate from American voters,' they claim when vigorously enforcing measures that have an impact on the security and the environment of the entire planet. . . .

Alas, leadership conceived in this way elicits in Europeans the exactly opposite reactions. In lieu of leadership they offer partnership, otherwise they will go to the other side, perhaps a little bit out of spite. Bush's insistence is, however, good in one thing. It makes Europe realize that it must cultivate its own leadership qualities.

Nonetheless, would it not be better, after all, to start contemplating partnership again, Mr. Bush? ( Pavel Masa)

'A European Cause'

LE MONDE, Paris, June 13

The death penalty has become a diplomatic problem for the United States. And in particular in Europe. . . .

As if expressly, [Bush's] trip begins the day after the media-saturated execution of the terrorist Timothy McVeigh that sparked a wave of indignation in Europe, where the death penalty no longer applies. Another unfortunate coincidence for Mr. Bush is that the first stage of his trip takes him to Madrid at a time when Spanish public opinion has been brought to fever pitch over the death penalty: Joaquim Martinez, a Spaniard sentenced to death in Florida, returned home Sunday [10 June] after having successfully established his innocence.

A diplomatic problem becomes embarrassing when it starts to interfere with scheduled agendas and speeches. . . . [Bush] no doubt did not expect to have to defend the death penalty under pressure of public opinion. An argument of the type: "We have our laws, you have yours" has little chance of disarming the critics. It is the one used by the Chinese leaders when condemned for human rights violations. . . .

The Europeans have rightly found a providential cause in the rejection of the death penalty. It allows them to lay claim to a moral and legal superiority over the U.S. power.

'The Boss -- Charming and Tough'

SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, Munich, June 14

The atmosphere in Europe before Bush's visit was a little like a firm that is expecting a new boss: Some have already seen him, no one really knows him, but there's one point everyone agrees on: He is disgusting. . . .

The Europeans have learned three things from their first meetings with Bush, and they are the same experiences that the opposition in Washington has had. First, it's risky to underestimate Bush. Second, he can be exceedingly charming, but he is, thirdly, brutally tough when he is set on something. George W. usually gets what he wants.

Sure, he didn't stint on cheap blandishments toward his European colleagues, whom he even called "the other leaders of the free world.". . . But on the facts he remained tough. Neither on the climate protection nor with the ABM treaty did he give a millimeter. . . .

In NATO and the EU, just as in a firm, there are troublemakers and rebels, who don't want to take everything the new boss orders. For Bush these are Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, who still want to resist America's missile shield. . . .

Bush himself made his priorities unmistakably clear: The heart of a free and peaceful Europe is NATO. The EU was not even mentioned. (Wolfgang Koydl)

'Mr. Bush and Europe'

THE IRISH TIMES, Dublin, June 15

President George W. Bush's visit to Europe this week comes at a crucial time in the transatlantic relationship, making it important from his point of view that it should go well. And so it has, judged on the evidence so far. At his meetings with NATO and EU leaders in Brussels and Gothenburg, he has been authoritative and cooperative, displaying a good grasp of the issues and a readiness to address them constructively . . .

The statement issued after the summit meeting in Gothenburg goes well beyond the usually obscure trade policy disputes that have dominated these summits in recent years. High politics intrudes, with agreement to disagree on global warming, a firm joint commitment to trade liberalisation and a new World Trade Organisation round (if little concrete progress toward setting its agenda).

'Vital fight for future of planet'

THE MIRROR, London, June 15

The Kyoto treaty without America's signature will not be worth the paper it is written on. Around a fifth of the pollution which is destroying the ozone layer comes from the United States.

The rest of the world can curb the environmental damage it is doing, but that will have little effect without America's involvement.

President Bush says he and the European Union countries will have to agree to disagree. What a stupid thing to say.

He clearly does not realise the importance of Kyoto. Even if he did, he is no more than a mouthpiece for the US oil industry, which employed him and funded his presidential campaign.

'A Better Understanding Between Us and Europe'

THE SCOTSMAN, Edinburgh, June 15

(I)t might help if we Europeans tried harder to understand where Mr. Bush is coming from. Begin with his "rejection" of Kyoto. For a start, it was the entire U.S. Senate -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- who threw out the Kyoto treaty by 95 to 0 in 1997. It is permissible to think they were wrong, but it is then necessary to try to understand why Kyoto has produced this popular rejection in America -- a rejection any U.S. president must respect.

. . . Above all, Europeans need to understand that America is in the middle of a major energy crisis. . . . Seen from this perspective, the Bush remedy of a massive expansion of fossil fuel extraction is rational. . . .

Or consider the question of National Missile Defence. . . . If anyone in Britain wants to get angry over this issue, why not start with Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has just fought an election without mentioning the subject? At least the U.S. president can't be accused of duplicity on this one. Again, Europeans need to remember that it was President Clinton who initiated this programme and that it was also supported by candidate Al Gore. . . . Missile defence is only destabilising if it is unilaterally deployed by one nation. Bush has offered to take the 'national' out of the equation and let other countries have access to the technology. . . .

'Gothenburg morning'

THE TIMES, London, June 16

There is a Swedish proverb which asserts that "the afternoon can know what the morning never suspected." That is an apt reflection on the teargas-scented meetings held this week in Gothenburg, first between George W. Bush and the European Union and then within the EU leadership itself. The two sides deployed as much diplomacy as they could muster to disguise what are profound disagreements over the pursuit or not of national missile defence (NMD) and the ratification or not of the Kyoto protocol . . . New forms of missile defence and international environmental protection have much in common. Both involve an assessment of distant risks.

. . . [But] political structures and systems in our time are particularly poorly conditioned for coping with issues which demand an investment now but give scant return, if any return at all, until 20 or 30 years later. . . .

President Bush . . . represents those who are confident that the technical difficulties associated with NMD can be overcome and that similar knowledge will limit the damage of carbon emissions. Most EU leaders are caught somewhere between their fearful protesters and the forthright President. Only one thing is certain. Whatever decisions are eventually taken, the case for massive current expenditure must somehow be judged against incalculable and distant future benefits. All will have to wait for the afternoon to discover what secrets were denied to the morning.

----

'We Simply Disagree' Allies Offer Esteem, No Accord to President

By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10715-2001Jun16?language=printer

BRUSSELS, June 16 -- President Bush arrived in Europe derided as the "toxic Texan" for his skepticism toward global warming and the "son of Star Wars" for his zealous support of missile defense. He left the continent today having impressed most of his European peers with his confident manner and backslapping bonhomie, but on matters of substance Bush did not win over many hearts and minds.

Although the White House asserted that Bush found sympathy for his missile defense plan, there is still a great deal of suspicion among NATO allies who fear that Bush's pet project will encourage larger and more dangerous arsenals of offensive weapons and destroy the foundations of international arms control.

Bush also failed to convince European leaders that he made the right decision in rejecting the Kyoto agreement to curtail "greenhouse gas" emissions, which are deemed largely responsible for the global warming phenomenon that scientists believe will lead to damaging storms and floods in this century.

"We simply disagree," said Sweden's prime minister, Goran Persson. "The problem is we think Bush has chosen the wrong policies. European Union governments intend to ratify the treaty, and we will try to persuade the rest of the world to follow our example, and not that of the United States."

Many analysts agreed that while Bush may have improved his image during the five-day, five-nation trip across Europe, he made little or no headway on important security matters. "It was a polite dialogue of the deaf," said Jacques Beltran, a military affairs expert at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris.

Having taken office vowing to pay closer attention to Mexico and other Latin American countries, Bush is discovering that he cannot afford to neglect Europe as it enters a critical new phase in the post-Cold War era. Managing transatlantic interests may turn out to be one of his more difficult foreign policy challenges.

Over the next two years, NATO and the European Union are set to embrace new members among former communist states and finally eradicate the old dividing lines between East and West. How those expansion plans are handled will have a fateful effect not only on the continent's political center of gravity, but on future relations with Russia. At the same time, EU nations are scheduled to create a rapid reaction force, capable of deploying 60,000 troops within a month, that will have a profound impact on NATO's traditional security role.

As the world's leading commercial blocs, the United States and the European Union must also work closely in coming months to navigate a minefield of disputes, from hormone-fed beef to steel imports and aircraft subsidies, and orchestrate a new round of global trade negotiations that could prove critical in reversing the recent downturn in the world economy.

Meanwhile, a common European currency, the euro, will enter into circulation in 12 countries at the end of this year and, despite its troubled start, could become a powerful rival to the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

"Bush will learn, just as his predecessors did, that the most important strategic relationship for the United States is still with Europe," said Karl Kaiser, research director at Germany's Council on Foreign Relations. "American presidents can try to shift the focus to Asia or Latin America, but they wind up spending a lot of time and effort sustaining the Atlantic relationship because it is so essential to U.S. interests."

In that sense, Bush's trip this week to Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Poland and Slovenia, to be followed by another continental swing next month to Britain and to the G-8 summit of industrial democracies in Genoa, Italy, appear designed to acquaint the new U.S. president with his European counterparts as well as the complicated variety of issues that may occupy much of his foreign policy agenda.

But with most of Europe's governments dominated by center-left Social Democrats, Bush found a scarcity of ideological soul mates. While Bill Clinton struck up close personal bonds with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder -- who share a common strategy of occupying the political center -- Bush's brand of frontier conservatism does not resonate much in Europe.

During four hours of discussion at NATO headquarters, participants said, Bush gave a forceful defense of his missile defense project and explained why he considered the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- which many European leaders still revere as a cornerstone of strategic stability -- to be a relic of the Cold War that must be discarded.

"You could see he was very carefully rehearsed in making his case by citing points to which nobody could object," a senior NATO diplomat said. "The logic was that since the Cold War is over, we need to think about a changed security environment and start preparing for new threats. Everybody would agree with those points, but it doesn't mean everybody agrees with breaking the ABM Treaty and building a missile defense system."

Even though Bush was pressed to provide more specific descriptions of how and when the system would be constructed, he studiously avoided giving anything more than vague generalities. Schroeder later told reporters he was disappointed that Bush did not offer a clearer picture of the administration's intentions, but acknowledged that it was understandable because the meeting was largely a get-acquainted session with Bush.

"It raised a host of questions that still need to be answered," Schroeder said of Bush's presentation. "In any event, many of us believe that as we move forward in assessing these new threats, it is very important to preserve the architecture of arms control that has been built up over the years."

French President Jacques Chirac also issued a public warning against any hasty moves that might abrogate the ABM Treaty. As a leading skeptic who contends that "the sword will always defeat the shield," Chirac predicted that China, India and other nations would regard any U.S. initiative to build a missile defense network as "a fantastic invitation to proliferate nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction."

Not surprisingly, Bush preferred to emphasize the positive by asserting that the allies were becoming more receptive to his plan. He also disputed the views of European diplomats who questioned the value of such alliance consultations while Bush continues to insist that he is determined to press ahead with missile defense come what may.

"I hope the notion of unilateral approach died in some people's minds here," Bush said after the NATO meeting. "Unilateralists don't come around the table to listen to others and to share opinion."

Despite their differences of opinion, European leaders said Bush had surpassed the low expectations they had before his trip. Caricatured as an ignorant cowboy by the European news media, Bush impressed many as confident and in command. At NATO, Bush's personal informality and locker-room humor played well among his alliance peers. When he ran into Blair, he referred to the Labor Party leader's recent election victory by shouting, "Hello, Landslide!" Blair erupted in laughter, in contrast to the pained expression he wore when Bush told reporters after a February encounter at Camp David that the main thing they shared in common was the same brand of toothpaste.

By the end of the week, even his critics had concluded, as the left-wing French daily Liberation said in an editorial, that "George W. Bush is manifestly not the superficial buffoon and arrogant Texan" many Europeans once imagined.

Bush appeared on top of the issues -- even if he also appeared to stick closely to the script crafted by his advisers. Diplomats said his best performance came over a three-hour dinner Thursday night at a castle in Goteborg, Sweden, where the EU's 15 leaders peppered him with tough questions about what the United States intended to do about global warming if it was not going to support the Kyoto treaty.

"The personal chemistry was very good, very frank," said Peter Hain, Britain's minister for European affairs. Hain and other officials said Bush parried questions well, without referring to notes or cue cards, and displayed broader knowledge about the subject than many leaders expected. "He may talk in strange ways at times," said a senior Dutch diplomat, "but there's no doubt that he's done his homework."

----

THE PENTAGON PAPERS: MEDIA PRAISE RINGING HOLLOW

Norman Solomon,
Sunday June, 17 2001,
Creators Syndicate
http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=nso

When they challenged the power of the White House by claiming the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, the nation's two most influential newspapers took a laudable stand. During the three decades since then, praise for their journalistic courage has become a time-honored ritual in the media world.

Thirty years ago, The New York Times and The Washington Post engaged in fierce legal combat with President Nixon. The U.S. government got a temporary injunction to stop them from continuing to inform readers about the contents of the Pentagon Papers, a secret official study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The legal battle went on for 15 days -- ending on June 30, 1971, when the Supreme Court ruled (6 to 3) in favor of the newspapers and the First Amendment. Publication of the Pentagon Papers resumed.

This month, pundits have again applauded media stars in the historic drama.

On CNN, liberal Al Hunt declared that The Washington Post's Katharine Graham and Benjamin Bradlee "are the most significant publisher and editor of the last half century."

Conservative Robert Novak also paid homage: "There was a terrible effort by the Nixon people to have prior restraint of a newspaper's publication. ... I certainly credit Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham for fighting for the freedom of the press."

Meanwhile, farther north along the elite media corridor, columnist Anthony Lewis likes to extol his bosses for their bravery. Five years ago, he wrote about "the decision that, more than any other, established the modern independence of the American press -- its willingness to challenge official truth. That was the decision of The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers." He added that "the episode had a galvanizing effect on the press" -- and now, "the spirit is there to hold government accountable."

Days ago, Lewis was at it again, assuring readers that the Pentagon Papers marked a profound transformation of American journalism: "What changed the attitude of the Times and other mainstream publications was the experience of the Vietnam War. In the old days in Washington the press respected the confidence of officials because it respected their superior knowledge and good faith. But the war had shown that their knowledge was dim, and respect for their good faith had died with their false promises and lies."

In contrast to all the talk about the glorious defeat of prior restraint, we hear very little about the ongoing and pernicious self-restraint exercised by media outlets routinely touted as the best there is.

High-profile reporters and commentators like Hunt, Novak and Lewis are much too circumspect to mention, for instance, the November 1988 speech that Graham delivered to senior CIA officials at the agency headquarters in Langley, Va., where the Washington Post publisher said: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

On an earlier occasion, Graham recounted: "There have been instances in which secrets have been leaked to us which we thought were so dangerous that we went to them (U.S. officials) and told them that they had been leaked to us and did not print them."

During the 1980s, the powerful publisher enjoyed frequent lunches with Nancy Reagan, often joined by Post editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield. Graham comforted the president's wife while the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded. Graham developed close relationships with such high-ranking foreign policy officials as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. But she has always denied any harm to the independence of her employees at The Washington Post and Newsweek.

"I don't believe that whom I was or wasn't friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham wrote in her autobiography, published in 1997. However, Robert Parry -- who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s -- recalls firsthand experiences that contradict her assurances. Parry witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures."

Among Parry's examples: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation." Overall, Parry told me, "the Post-Newsweek company is protective of the national security establishment."

With key managers at major news organizations deciding what "the general public does not need to know," the government probably won't face enough of a media challenge to make a restraining order seem necessary.

To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

---

Nuclear Cover-Up: 49+ Years Old, Going Strong & Killing Us All

From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 16:20:50 GMT
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/inetSeries/nukeCU.html

Excerpts from an exceptionally lucid speech follow (speech begins 178 lines below this one) given by author and journalist Norman Solomon at UCSC on February 24, 1992 articulating the critical issue of the almost 50-year-old nuclear age and industry and its continuous promotion by official mythologies about the "peaceful atom," about how we are "safe" from the deadly toxicity of high-level and low-level radioactive material, fallout, waste, and contamination of the biosphere, and about how the production and operation of nuclear power plants and the nuclear weapons assembly line--not to mention "temporary" radioactive waste sites--make us "secure."

--

In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the entire technology was born in secrecy. It's been called the nuclear priesthood. We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests. We are supposed to defer to them. They have an aura of holiness about them and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their greater wisdom. Presumably when people die in southern Utah because of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the "Big Picture." The "Big Picture" is supposed to be the important one, and it comes to us from "on high." That's the kind of theocracy that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of America.

We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed consent. What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment. . .

One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste. There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear waste. If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front door and there was water in your living room having run down the steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the first things you should do is turn off the water. But that's too logical for the nuclear priesthood. Here we have nuclear waste being produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities; high-level radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year; many, many pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they can't figure out what to do. They can't figure out that if you don't know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it. You know, that would be a logical step. Somehow the waste is out there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.

In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant, you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site. Other facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the test site. It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the more important something is--the more important something is in human terms--the less coverage it should get. So the Nevada Test Site got almost no coverage at all. It's a DOE facility. It's an environmental catastrophe. There's plenty of documentation to that effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons escalation game. And it's a game that is of course very lucrative. It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the people in the Pentagon love to play. So the Nevada Test Site is virtually unknown to most people in the United States. . . .

Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than "national security," and that's where we are in 1992. We are told that a nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia, causing genetic injury, is there for our national security. The nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're told that those isotopes are part of our national security. . . .

The book Killing Our Own and other books such as Deadly Deceit document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through the national security pseudo-science establishment. When the evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken. This new awareness had to be given some novocaine. It's kind of like anaesthesia without surgery. That's the response that we get from the media managers and the military planners when there is public awareness. We're told that there's a crisis in our country because the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the executive branch of the US government. But rather than there being not enough trust, there is still too much trust. As people have found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly. . . .

People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988. There was a front-page article in The New York Times by Fox Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats plant. The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--history that was inconvenient. This news article said, "Although the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread in this area as a result of a number of problems." There were tens of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats plant in the late 1970s and '80s. But that didn't count. People sat on the railroad tracks to early block the shipping of material into the Rocky Flats plant. Again, that didn't count as far as The New York Times was concerned. The Times headlined that front-page article, "Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant." Two days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat. He wrote in The New York Times that Idaho's refusal to accept more of Rocky Flats' nuclear waste "has posed a serious threat to the continued operations of Rocky Flats."

So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened. That's where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry. It's to the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons. That's where the threat is aimed. As for the people who live downstream and downwind from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat to their existence--that's secondary. . . .

The New York Times has habitually tried, on this issue of nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring. A front-page headline in December 1988 declared "Wide Threat Seen in Contamination at Nuclear Units." Yet a subheadline incredulously stated that "No effect on humans has yet been found." So of course what the Times was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish that had been fed to them by their official sources. The account was very illogical and contradicted by health studies. . . .

. . . I often think of a statement attributed to the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he called the need for "pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will." Sometimes when we talk about these very pressing and real issues we may hear from family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-workers that we're being cynical. I beg to differ. The real cynicism is to say "I don't want to know." The real cynicism is to say "This doesn't concern me." The real cynicism is to say "Well, gee, the people in power wouldn't do that to us." Which is what people said when they got up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud and the fallout blow through their communities.

The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the nuclearized state. We need to challenge the militarized state. We need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern Utah, and northern Arizona.

This article is excerpted from The Monthly Planet, a publication of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County. (Subscriptions are available for $15; add $1.24 tax in Santa Cruz County; add $1.09 tax for subs mailed to other CA addresses.)

Contact: John Govsky c/o The Monthly Planet Address: P.O. Box 8463, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-8463 Voice: 408-429-8755 Fax: : 408-429-8889 Internet: freezecruz@igc.apc.org scfreeze@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us PeaceNet: freezecruz Cruzio: scfreeze

Nuclear Cover-Up:

Norman Solomon Blasts Mainstream Media Coverage of Nuclear Issues Excerpts from a speech by Norman Solomon on February 24, 1992

Norman Solomon is an author, investigative journalist, and a board member of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), one of the country's most successful and articulate media watch groups. His articles about nuclear weapons, news media, and US-Soviet relations have appeared in dozens of major newspapers and magazines, including The Nation, The Progressive, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the San Jose Mercury News. He has appeared on national programs such as ABC's Good Morning America, CNN's Crossfire, and NPR's All Things Considered. During eight visits to Moscow in the Gorbachev era, Solomon has reported for Pacifica Radio National News, Pacific News Service and other American media.

Solomon is co-author of Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (Lyle Stuart, 1990) and Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation (Delacorte Press and Delta Books, 1982). He has also co-authored The Power of Babble: The Politicians' Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for Every Occasion (soon to be published).

On February 24th, Norman Solomon spoke in Santa Cruz on the news media's coverage of nuclear issues. The following condensed text of his speech was transcribed by Vianne Neblett, and edited by Catherine Banghart, Sara Nisenson, and John Govsky.

Ten years ago I came to the University of California at Santa Cruz campus and spoke about the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, the local hazard and the global threat. At the time I was writing in publications like Nuclear Times, expressing my concern about what seemed to me to be a hazardously narrow focus of what was then the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Ten years later many locally based grassroots organizations that grew out of the Nuclear Freeze movement showed that my fears were unjustified. I can't think of a better example than the Santa Cruz Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign which is making exactly the kind of connections month in and month out in The Monthly Planet newspaper that the news media were urging the anti-nuclear movement not to make a decade ago.

When we deal with the implications of nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants and assorted other corporately backed technologies, we're urged to segment the planet, not to look in holistic terms at what is going on.

One of the big dangers of any movement is when we start to take seriously what Time and Newsweek and the networks say about our movement. I'm afraid this happened in the early and mid-1980s, when the movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear power reached at least a temporary height, and we got a lot of prompting from the mass media to not get too radical; to be careful; to be respectable. We had a burst of publicity in 1988 and 1989 about nuclear weapons production in the United States. Unfortunately we were often successfully encouraged to believe that the mass media of this country had finally come to terms with our legacy of radioactive pollution. What I'd like to do is briefly try to put what happened in late 1988 with the Department of Energy and nuclear weapons scandal in a historical context, then talk a little bit about what happened in the late '80s in the propaganda wars, and what's been happening since then.

In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the entire technology was born in secrecy. It's been called the nuclear priesthood. We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests. We are supposed to defer to them. They have an aura of holiness about them and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their greater wisdom. Presumably when people die in southern Utah because of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the "Big Picture." The "Big Picture" is supposed to be the important one, and it comes to us from "on high." That's the kind of theocracy that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of America.

The last time I wrote to the US Department of Energy for a complete official roster of the so-called "Announced United States Nuclear Tests," I found on the list the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico in the early summer of 1945 which was kept secret at the time. Then the second and third listings of "Announced United States Nuclear Tests" were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think that tells us a lot about the psychology of the US government's attitude towards the development and "testing" of nuclear weapons. Because in a real sense what happened in Japan on August 6th and 9th in 1945--the dropping of those two bombs--were in fact tests. That's clear if you look at the historical documentation. It's clear that in fact those cities were chosen for test reasons. And it's chilling because, for one thing, World War II began with a public ethic that one did not drop bombs on civilian populations. In 1939 it would have been pretty much unthinkable that the US government would do such a thing. But after the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo the US government had acclimated its own citizens to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; to accept the very atrocities, the anti-ethical activities that were to be condemned at Nuremberg.

We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed consent. What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment. These cities were laboratories that were selected by the planners for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. And we often hear in public discussion from government officials that somehow these were not real uses of nuclear weapons. You'll hear that nuclear weapons have never been used in war. It's kind of gone again down the memory hole: forget about it, it's not convenient.

In the late 1940s there were some major decisions to be made about nuclear weapons and it's no coincidence that this happened concurrently with the establishment putting the fix in, so to speak, for the national security nuclear state. In the summer of 1946 there were the first peacetime explosions in history, and one of the main purposes of the tests was to put the American people to sleep about nuclear weapons; to say "Don't worry, you can relax, nuclear weapons will make you secure, they can be aimed in a certain direction." It was an important illusion. And to make matters more convincing, about 42,000 US troops were deployed within a few miles of those atomic explosions. Later many US Navy personnel were deployed to scrape the radiation off of the ships. Some of the ships, however, were so radioactive that they had to be sunk. And of course this has been a pattern ever since. In the last few years we've heard a lot about the "cleanup" of Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapons facilities and these words are presented to us to substitute for reality. We're encouraged to confuse the myth and the real world.

In 1951 the United States expanded the nuclear test program by setting up the Nevada Test Site. It's clear from declassified documents that the government knew that the radiation would be dangerous. There were warnings provided privately by some scientists that people would be at risk, but the US government had some solutions. One was to lie to the American people, and another was to wait until the wind was blowing in the "right direction." In this case it meant the wind would be blowing away from Las Vegas, away from Los Angeles and towards communities in southern Utah, central Nevada, and northern Arizona; communities that housed people in small- and medium-sized towns, rural people who had sheep herds and other livestock.

Diseases began to appear that had never been seen before in those small communities. It's worth recalling that these were primarily Mormon communities. These people didn't smoke cigarettes and they didn't drink alcohol. They didn't have leukemia among their children or among the adult population to speak of, yet in places like Fredonia, Arizona, St. George, Utah, and Railroad Valley, Nevada, children began to be diagnosed with leukemia in the mid-1950s. In the book that I co-authored with Harvey Wasserman titled Killing Our Own, we quoted a letter written by a senator from the state of Nevada to the parents of a child who had died of leukemia. The senator said, "You must not believe the Communist scare stories about radioactivity." It was decades later in the late 1970s when Congress finally held some kind of hearings. And as one parent from Nevada who had lost a child testified, "I feel like we--we were treated as guinea pigs, only worse."

So the US government continued to set off atomic bombs in the South Pacific and around the Nevada Test Site. In 1958, when there was a temporary moratorium in the works, the US nuclear testers were eager to set off a bunch of atomic bombs quickly in a row. They were up against their deadline and the weather conditions weren't right, that is, they weren't pointing the radiation with the wind patterns towards those who had been bureaucratically deemed expendable--again echoes from the dock at Nuremberg. But the tests continued and the mushroom clouds rose over Nevada and the fallout blew for hundreds of miles around. It blew, among other places, to Los Angeles. You could say that after 15, 20, 25 years, there's not much that can be done about the initial exposure, which is true. Then you could say so there's no point in going into it, which is not true because early screening even today would be helpful for those people who were born in 1959 in Los Angeles. But then, as now, the US government is not interested in candor, it's not interested in public health. It's interested in furthering its own agenda.

After many hundreds of nuclear tests by the United States and the Soviet Union, which began testing in the late 1940s, there was the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Often John Kennedy is cited for what is really a moving speech at the American University where he discusses the threats to the health of the world from nuclear testing. The speech was very significant because it did reflect a desire of the Kennedy administration to end at least above ground or, as it is sometimes called, atmospheric nuclear testing. But the speech also provides some windows into the limits of that historical period and for every presidency in the nuclear age. Because unfortunately when a president says that "We don't want to go to war" the real translation is "We are planning to go to war." It's like Bertolt Brecht said, "When the government speaks loudest about the need for peace, get ready for the war." In many ways what Kennedy was saying was that it was necessary for the United States to sustain--to continue a situation of dominance. One of the reasons that I think the Limited Test Ban Treaty could be continued to be sold to the military people was that the US would continue to test underground. In fact that's what happened and the arms race continued right on.

While it was a public health victory to ban above-ground nuclear tests with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, at the same time it was not in any way a disarmament measure. Today, in 1992, the ground still shakes in southern Nevada every time the bombs explode and the arms race lurches forward. The Limited Test Ban Treaty put our consciousness about nuclear weapons underground as well. Meanwhile the nuclear weapons assembly line that had been established in the years after World War II was functioning in high gear and two of the most important institutions for continuing the nuclear arms race were administered by the University of California. That great humanitarian institution of higher learning was committed in the 1950s, as it is in the 1990s, to give its seal of approval and its supposed respectability to an industry that is continually finding better ways to incinerate the planet. It was also a very important move to get companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, Monsanto, and DuPont involved in post-war weapons production and then sanitize it with the Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories being administered by the University of California. In this way it can seem very erudite to figure out what J. Robert Oppenheimer called the "sweet problem" of designing nuclear weapons. Of course that problem never ends because there's always a way to tinker with the design to make a warhead smaller and more compact, giving it more bang for the weight.

In the 1950s they called Hanford, Washington a boomtown. People moved in, housing was built, jobs were plentiful. People went to work and didn't talk to the kids at home in the evenings and weekends about what they did. They were making bombs which were supposed to be normalized and the mass media, as is their usual role, put cosmetics on the corpse, happy-faced stickers on weapons of mass destruction. And so, as industries will do, the nuclear industry kept functioning and needed more PR.

One of the PR tricks had been what Eisenhower had called the "peaceful atom": nuclear power plants. The electrical utilities were not invited in, they were kicked into the nuclear parade through all kinds of bribes and inducements. There was the insurance cap that limited their liability with the government picking up the tab. There were all kinds of subsidies great and small. And there was a tremendous PR machine--the old Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Dixie Lee Ray in the '60s. She would go in front of the cameras and say, "I would eat plutonium. I'm not worried, you know, these isotopes don't worry me." And of course that's proof positive that patriarchy is culturally caused rather than biologically. So nuclear plants began to be built.

Nuclear issues add an interesting little wrinkle now, in the Democratic presidential campaign. In the primaries for instance, in one of the debates, the national media seemed astonished that the issue of nuclear power was even being brought up. Jerry Brown made some very good points. He challenged this kind of acceptance--this tacit support for nuclear power--from many Democrats and kind of throw-back retrograde support for nuclear power coming from Paul Tsongas. The news media were very surprised. Why do people care about nuclear power? Isn't that passe? If you grew up in the '60s you heard a lot about it and in the '50s, from the outset, it was a rationale. The US government and its PR flacks could always say, "Well, if we're going to have nuclear power it's going to be a peaceful atom." It was a way to tell ourselves that nuclear technology, that fission, wasn't such a bad deal after all. Those myths are still with us. Sometimes I think it's simply a matter of industry officials playing dumb.

One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste. There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear waste. If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front door and there was water in your living room having run down the steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the first things you should do is turn off the water. But that's too logical for the nuclear priesthood. Here we have nuclear waste being produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities; high-level radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year; many, many pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they can't figure out what to do. They can't figure out that if you don't know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it. You know, that would be a logical step. Somehow the waste is out there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.

In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant, you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site. Other facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the test site. It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the more important something is--the more important something is in human terms--the less coverage it should get. So the Nevada Test Site got almost no coverage at all. It's a DOE facility. It's an environmental catastrophe. There's plenty of documentation to that effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons escalation game. And it's a game that is of course very lucrative. It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the people in the Pentagon love to play. So the Nevada Test Site is virtually unknown to most people in the United States.

A related phenomenon would be the fact that the United States refuses to pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, even today in 1992. These have been called public secrets and this says a lot about how the pseudo-democracy in the United States works. No, it's not secret, just hardly anybody knows about it. So it's a public secret. It's part of the functioning of the propaganda system. Most years a dozen or more nuclear bombs explode under the desert floor in Nevada and most of them are larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It goes on and on and the designers have a field day. They can continue to tinker and find nuclear bomb designs that will be part of still more accurate nuclear weapons. Why is accuracy so important and speed so important? Because the faster the delivery of nuclear weapons, the faster and more accurate the attack, the more tempted officials may be to use them in a first strike.

People in the Pentagon have always treasured the option of first strike, that is, the initiation of nuclear war. What a great example of the entire militarists' psychology. We don't make weapons because there are targets that are appropriate; we make weapons and then figure out how to concoct some targets that are then reported to have something to do with this notion of "national security."

Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than "national security," and that's where we are in 1992. We are told that a nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia, causing genetic injury, is there for our national security. The nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're told that those isotopes are part of our national security.

It's a major challenge for us to regain the use of language, to talk about security, to discuss the true costs of nuclear weapons, and not only the budgetary costs. We must also insist that the human costs of nuclear technology be discussed. That's where the entire presidential campaign has nothing to say. From Buchanan to Harkin, they don't have much to say about the real issues of nuclear weapons. I know that Tom Harkin has more of an interest in nuclear disarmament than the Bushes and the Buchanans, but I've been listening to all the debates thus far and I don't hear any of the "major" mass media-anointed candidates addressing this issue at all. So it falls back again and again on us to raise these issues and not necessarily in a polite way, in order to build and rebuild a movement; to build on what's been done in the past years so that these issues are real in human terms when they're publicly discussed and when policy decisions get made.

I want to say a little bit about some of the verbal mechanisms and publicity strategies that have been used to diffuse what has been a crisis for the nuclear weapons makers in this country. I'd like to give just a few examples of how the very deep and angry concern of people in this country has been blocked by the news media. I want to be sure to mention that there were at least 300,000 US soldiers exposed to nuclear bomb tests, atmospheric tests at short range between 1945 and 1962. These soldiers have suffered increased incidences of leukemia and cancer. Our book titled Killing Our Own documents the situation, and our book was published in 1982 when there was a great deal less evidence than there is today, a decade later. In a sense what we're getting in the fifth decade after the Manhattan Project is a whole first echo of the atomic age coming back.

The book Killing Our Own and other books such as Deadly Deceit document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through the national security pseudo-science establishment. When the evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken. This new awareness had to be given some novocaine. It's kind of like anaesthesia without surgery. That's the response that we get from the media managers and the military planners when there is public awareness. We're told that there's a crisis in our country because the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the executive branch of the US government. But rather than there being not enough trust, there is still too much trust. As people have found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly.

The Soviet Union stopped all nuclear testing for a year and a half in the mid-1980s and beseeched the United States to join in for a permanent ban on nuclear test explosions. The US, to this day, has refused to engage in anything like a moratorium on nuclear tests.

People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988. There was a front-page article in The New York Times by Fox Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats plant. The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--history that was inconvenient. This news article said, "Although the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread in this area as a result of a number of problems." There were tens of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats plant in the late 1970s and '80s. But that didn't count. People sat on the railroad tracks to block the shipping of material into the Rocky Flats plant. Again, that didn't count as far as The New York Times was concerned. The Times headlined that front-page article, "Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant." Two days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat. He wrote in The New York Times that Idaho's refusal to accept more of Rocky Flats' nuclear waste "has posed a serious threat to the continued operations of Rocky Flats." So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened. That's where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry. It's to the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons. That's where the threat is aimed. As for the people who live downstream and downwind from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat to their existence--that's secondary.

Now of course any officially orchestrated scandal is incomplete without very high-profile redemption. So the mass media, while beginning to report on the sins of the nuclear bomb makers, seemed very eager to bring tidings of repentance. So in late 1988, Time magazine revealed that the DOE "finally seemed bent on reform" and "has taken commendable steps to infuse a safety-conscious attitude in the weapons facilities." It's really easy to turn over a new nuclear leaf. The US government has done it hundreds of times. The idea though that safe nuclear weapons production could be an oxymoron was just too much off the beaten path for the mass media to even entertain. Instead the kind of official self-flagellations were taken at face value. The Washington Post front page printed a contrite quote from an undersecretary of the DOE saying, "We have a moral obligation to rectify past sins." The New York Times asserted that, "The Energy Department has provided a candid account of its failings." I think it's pretty evident that the strategy for the DOE was to say "yeah we made a mess of things and you're gonna need to give us a bunch more money so we can make things right."

The entire new generation of nuclear weapons production facilities is going to be financed largely with the rationale that the weapons plants have to be cleaned up. What better Orwellian way to do it than to say that for environmental reasons we have to budget a whole lot more money to make nuclear weapons. It makes about as much sense as the rest of the news media that we get.

The New York Times has habitually tried, on this issue of nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring. A front-page headline in December 1988 declared "Wide Threat Seen in Contamination at Nuclear Units." Yet a subheadline incredulously stated that "No effect on humans has yet been found." So of course what the Times was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish that had been fed to them by their official sources. The account was very illogical and contradicted by health studies.

One of my favorite editorials to appear in daily newspapers in this country on the subject of nuclear weapons was printed by The New York Times in the period when George Bush was about to move into the White House. The editorial was titled "The Bomb on Mr. Bush's Desk." The New York Times, in its wisdom, in its official editorial, urged the incoming President George Bush to "escape catastrophe by moving fast and setting priorities." The "catastrophe" that the Times was intent on avoiding was the prospect that the US government's ability to manufacture more nuclear weapons might be impeded by a shortage of tritium. As a matter of fact the Times referred to "the operation of the bomb complex" as being a matter of tremendous importance and concluded, "Mr. Bush has only a limited time to avert its collapse." But, as we might have predicted at the time, George Bush in fact knew to quickly avert the collapse and therefore avert what the Times referred to as the catastrophe of disarmament.

I was very interested in the term "bomb complex" by the Times editorial. They were hell-bent on safeguarding what they called the operation of the "bomb complex" but I don't think they were talking about the psychological mechanisms. They were talking about the literal assembly line. There was a follow-up on the top of page one by a Times reporter, Michael R. Gordon, under the headline, "How a Vital Nuclear Material Came to Be in Short Supply." They were banging on the drums, they were getting it together to produce more tritium as soon as possible. And it was interesting to look at all 43 paragraphs of that article. You had exactly one half of one paragraph devoted to any kind of contrary view. I want to read to you how they handled it in the Times: "Not everyone is convinced that the shortage of tritium is a national emergency. Some critics of the administration say that the United States could afford dismantling some nuclear weapons to salvage the tritium it needs, but the administration rejects this idea." End of quote. That's all we get to hear about that idea. When Bush got into office, the new DOE Secretary James Watkins was really like the new cleric for the nuclear priesthood. He arrived admitting to sins and promising absolution through pouring more money into the nuclear weapons assembly line. He got tremendous amounts of great press stating that finally he was going to set things straight. Then years later in 1991 the news quietly came out, on the back page with two or three paragraphs, that come hell or high water Watkins was committed to restarting weapons material production facilities at the Savannah River plant, whether or not the environmental regulations were met. So it's the same old hustle over and over again.

We are, in 1992 more than ever, in a situation where the news media function to put a cloak of murky mystification over events large and small. The corporate control of the media itself is consolidating. There are corporations larger in size and fewer in number that are making a killing off of the media industry. Sometimes they are owned by corporations that are directly involved in contracting to the Pentagon and the nuclear departments of the federal government. One prime example of course is NBC, which is owned by General Electric (GE). When the Gulf War happened in early 1991 Tom Brokaw never told the people watching NBC Nightly News that the people signing his paycheck were making a killing, literally and figuratively, off of the Gulf War. GE had sold huge quantities of weapons systems and components to the Pentagon that were then used during the Gulf War.

This process of mystification is one that we have to challenge. We have to strip away the falsehoods, the deceit, and the dangerous ways in which words and images are manipulated to shield us from the realities of control. It's one of the great paradoxes that the more these corporate forces manipulate and control the mass media, the less those mass media tell us who really controls them and, to a large degree, controls public perception. We, to put it mildly, have a big task ahead of us. I often think of a statement attributed to the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he called the need for "pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will." Sometimes when we talk about these very pressing and real issues we may hear from family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-workers that we're being cynical. I beg to differ. The real cynicism is to say "I don't want to know." The real cynicism is to say "This doesn't concern me." The real cynicism is to say "Well, gee, the people in power wouldn't do that to us." Which is what people said when they got up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud and the fallout blow through their communities.

The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the nuclearized state. We need to challenge the militarized state. We need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern Utah, and northern Arizona. Thanks very much.

daveus rattus yer friendly neighborhood ratman

KOYAANISQATSI - ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

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US Army Operated Secretly in Congo

New Vision (Kampala)
June 17, 2001
John Kakande
http://allafrica.com/stories/200106170005.html

The United States military has been covertly involved in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a US parliamentary subcommittee has been told. Intelligence specialist Wayne Madsen, appearing before the US House subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, also said American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Snr, the father of the current US President, are stoking the Congo conflict for monetary gains.

In a prepared testimony seen by Sunday Vision, Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist, said on May 17 that US Special forces have been training troops on both sides of the Congo war. He said US defence has at times been using Private Military Contractors (PMCs) to engage in these covert operations because PMCs are far from the reach of congressional investigators.

Madsen is a specialist on intelligence and was also the author of "Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999", a work that took him three years of research and interviews in Rwanda, Uganda, France, the UK, USA, Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands.

Madsen said the US military worked with Rwanda and the Congolese rebels to overthrow Mobutu. He said they again supported the rebellion against Laurent Kabila because "by 1998, the Kabila regime had become an irritant to the United States, North American mining interests, and Kabila's Ugandan and Rwandan patrons."

He argued that when Kabila received assistance from other African countries, the US changed tactics. "US Special Operations personnel were involved in training troops on both sides of the war in the DRC - Rwandans, Ugandans, and Burundians (supporting the RCD factions) and Zimbabweans and Namibians (supporting the central government in Kinshasa," Madsen told the US congressional subcommittee. Testifying about the Mobutu overthrow, Madsen said: "One reason why Kabila's men advanced into the city so quickly was the technical assistance provided by the DIA (US Defence Intelligence Agency)."

Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

----

In Rwandan Village, a Turn Against Hutu Rebels
Once Welcoming, Farmers Call Army To Attack Militia

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page A16
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10798-2001Jun16?language=printer

CYANZARWE, Rwanda -- The last time Hutu extremists emerged from the shadows between the banana leaves and set up camp here, they found a welcome befitting the cradle of the Rwandan genocide.

It was here in Rwanda's gorgeous northwest, a patchwork of farms in the shadow of volcanoes, where "Hutu Power" first gained the traction that culminated in the 1994 slaughter of 500,000 countrymen. The victims were not only ethnic Tutsis but also Hutus who refused to join the Interahamwe, a militia whose name translates as "those who act together." And the Hutu peasant farmers of the northwest showed exceptional solidarity.

So when Interahamwe forces began returning to their old stamping ground here this month, the brutal reception they encountered stunned many people -- but none more than the guerrillas themselves.

"He is not somebody who can fight for us," said Augustin Subwanone, a local farmer, who gestured contemptuously toward a Hutu fighter whom local residents had captured and marched to the Rwandan government army, the Tutsi-led force that ended the genocide and has controlled even northwest Rwanda unchallenged for more than three years.

"At the beginning, we supported them," Subwanone said of the extremists. "But at the same time we saw they were liars. So we really don't support them."

The crowd around the captive, a short, stunned man who gave his name as G. Niyonzima, laughed when he told a reporter the Interahamwe were fighting for "human rights."

"But we have sufficient rights," a woman replied, to assenting murmurs. "When peasants can get something to eat, when they can sleep without any problem, then they have sufficient rights."

The change in public opinion here appears to have come gradually. Residents say they not only have come to value the relative peace their area has enjoyed since the often-brutal Interahamwe force moved into Congo, but that life under a Rwandan government led by Tutsis has proved less trying than the extremists had warned.

"They used to tell people the government of Rwanda was for Tutsis and against Hutus," said Ramadan Barengayabo, the mayor of this district 15 miles northwest of Gisenyi, a town in Gisenyi province along the border with Congo. "They have themselves realized that all Rwandans have the same rights and are equal. If it were the opposite, people would support these [extremists]."

But if the shift was gradual, its expression could scarcely have been more dramatic. A battalion of Hutu fighters arrived here at dusk on June 5, marching barefoot the two or three miles from Congo, where the guerrillas are no longer welcomed by a government intent on making peace. Without uniforms and in many cases without guns, they numbered between 500 and 1,000, swelling the local population.

"We are not going to leave this place," one of them announced.

But the locals disagreed. Rather than turning over their harvest of cabbages and sweet potatoes, the farmers summoned the army. The next morning, the same population that once hid Interahamwe from government sweeps made for the bolt-holes themselves, leaving the guerrillas in the gun sights of a hovering army helicopter.

Within hours, more than 100 guerrillas were dead. Rwandan officials say the death toll for June stands at more than 700.

Jean Bosco Rukorereka, a captured guerrilla sergeant, sat in the back of a pickup truck after the fighting, with his head bowed.

"I'm surprised and disappointed, because when we came here in '97 we were really supported by people," he said, referring to the last time his fighters were in the area. "This time we thought it was going to be the same."

It's not known how far the change of heart extends in Rwanda, which is more than 80 percent Hutu, but the episode here surprised analysts, who for more than a generation have found ethnicity the most reliable -- if depressing -- prism for examining the turmoil in central Africa's Great Lakes region.

"That is amazing," said Hannelie de Beer, a researcher at the Institute of Security Studies, a South African research organization. "I think it's a question of people who have tasted stability and don't want to give it up."

In the dense matrix of fear, self-interest and personal politics that constitutes the ongoing conflict in central Africa, ethnic hatred has been the most stubborn element of all -- and the last impediment to the budding peace in Congo.

The national armies that have poured into Congo since its most recent war erupted in 1998 may have wearied of fighting. And the ascension of Joseph Kabila to Congo's presidency following the assassination of his father, Laurent, in January, may have breathed life into the Lusaka peace accord, named for the Zambian capital where it was signed.

But the ethnic fighting that sparked Congo's war has continued unabated, carried out chiefly by the extremist militias the Lusaka accord blandly identifies as "negative forces." The term takes in Hutu fighters originally from Rwanda and Burundi, another tiny country riven by ethnic discord. Both countries border Congo, which throughout the 1990s served as a convenient base for the insurgent groups. The larger neighbor had porous borders and no army strong enough to deter them.

In fact, the second time Rwanda sent its army after them, in 1998, the Hutu fighters in effect became Congo's army: Assembled on a military base in Kamina, in Congo's south, the Hutu fighters received uniforms from the Congolese government and training from Zimbabwe, one of five countries that sent forces to defend Congo against the Rwandan incursion, which was supported by Uganda.

But while the war grew international, its core conflict remained ethnic. When Congo and its allies launched an offensive against Rwandan positions near Lake Tanganyika in December, the Interahamwe led the charge. And when a Rwandan counterattack routed the enemy at the town of Pweto, the streets were littered with hate literature. The grubby pink fliers urged Hutu members of Rwanda's army to abandon "the snakes," a favorite Interahamwe slur for ethnic Tutsis, the target of the 1994 genocide.

The slur was not lost on Rwandan officers, most of whom are Tutsis. But as part of a government that claims to represent an inclusive, supra-tribal Rwanda, they pointed out that 16,000 members of the Rwandan Patriotic Army are now Hutu. An unspecified but significant percentage of them once fought on the extremist side, only to be welcomed -- after capture or desertion -- into the government force once they were cleared of participation in the genocide.

"We don't consider our struggle against the Interahamwe an ethnic war," said Patrick Mazimhaka, a senior Rwandan official. "It is really a struggle to put an end to criminal acts performed in 1994."

The distinction goes to the heart of the Lusaka accord, which calls first for national armies to cease firing and return home. It then calls for "negative forces" to be disarmed, those who took part in the genocide to be brought to justice and the leaders turned over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

These would include Col. Tharcisse Renzaho, who, as mayor of Rwanda's capital at the start of the genocide, supervised the erection of the roadblocks where Tutsis were butchered, and now commands the Interahamwe units that coordinated with Congo's national army in the south. A second force, in the Congolese provinces of North and South Kivu that border Rwanda, is said to be led by Maj. Protais Mpiranya, who commanded Rwanda's presidential guard during the genocide.

But much of the infantry now fighting as Interahamwe are simply too young to have taken part in the slaughter of 1994, an effort to exterminate the minority Tutsis that Belgian colonialists had installed as a privileged elite. Rwandan officials describe the youths as merely misguided, cut off from everything but the poisonous views of their superiors.

The Lusaka accord also calls for "disarmament, demobilization, reintegration or resettlement," a process the U.N. Security Council has made clear it will not allow peacekeepers to risk undertaking, and so the task has fallen to Rwanda.

"Who will be disarming them?" said Brig. Gen. James Kabarebe, the Rwandan army's deputy chief of staff. "It seems they are all coming here. We will have to do it."

For an Interahamwe force that Congo puts at 5,000 -- but other experts say may be closer to 15,000 -- the process will not be quick. It will take even longer if the Rwandan extremists double back into Congo, where residents disdain the Rwandan army as foreign invaders and will be even less cooperative. And the entire region may be engulfed in a new war if the perhaps 10,000 Hutu guerrillas returning to their native Burundi elect to bring down that country's extremely fragile peace process, especially if they act in concert with the Interahamwe.

But in Rwanda's northwest, the apparent tectonic shift in peasant opinion augers some hope. In the Gisenyi fighting so lethal to the infiltrators, not one civilian died in the crossfire, residents said. The only innocents killed during the previous week, in fact, were a pair of rare highland gorillas butchered and eaten by Interahamwe in a nearby national park.

"Last time, a lot of people died because they supported them," said Francois Mukayisenga, head of a local women's organization, and a Hutu. "There are no good things that come from them."

----

Missile Fired at U.N. Planes

WORLD In Brief,
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11163-2001Jun16?language=printer

LUANDA, Angola -- The United Nations has halted all its aid flights in Angola after a ground-to-air missile narrowly missed two of its planes in the second attack on aid aircraft this month.

The U.N. World Food Program warned of an "unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe" if it is unable to resume food deliveries in the war-devastated country this week.

The program provides vital aid to about 1 million people in Angola, where a civil war between the government and the UNITA rebel group has driven nearly 4 million people -- about one-third of the population -- from their homes.

On Friday afternoon, an antiaircraft missile exploded close to two Hercules cargo planes that were ferrying food to Kuito, about 350 miles southeast of the capital Luanda, the WFP said. The missile caused no injuries or damage to the aircraft, each of which carried 17 tons of food. The WFP said it did not know who fired the missile.

-------- balkans

Putin Discusses Plan for Balkans

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Yugoslavia-Russia.html http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=yugoslavia

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Reasserting Moscow's interests in the Balkans, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an unscheduled stop Sunday in Kosovo, where NATO commanders call the shots for some 3,000 Russian peacekeeping troops.

His flight from Belgrade was announced at the last minute because of security concerns in the province, where the majority ethnic Albanians view Russia as pro-Serb because of historic ties between the two Slav nations.

Putin is the first Russian president to visit Yugoslavia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since taking office, Putin has sought to strengthen Russia's role especially in areas of former influence like the Balkans.

A string of world leaders have visited Kosovo's provincial capital since the end of the NATO bombing in 1999, but Putin was the first to travel straight from meetings in Belgrade -- emphasizing that U.N.-administered Kosovo remains part of Yugoslavia despite ethnic Albanian wishes for independence.

Putin was greeted by a white-gloved Russian military honor guard and the Russian national anthem as he disembarked at Pristina airport, where the 3,000-strong Russian contingent to the NATO-led force is based.

Accompanied by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian armed forces General Staff, Putin shook hands with several Russian soldiers before getting into a motorcade taking them from the tarmac to the Russian command center.

After a military parade, where Putin handed out 11 medals to soldier serving in Kosovo, he went into a meeting with the commander of the NATO-led force, Danish Lt. Gen. Thorstein Skiaker, and U.N. officials.

Russia has been pushing for the 45,000-strong peacekeeping force to do more to disarm ethnic Albanian extremists in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. The extremists have been attacking minority Serbs in Kosovo and contributing to clashes with government troops in neighboring Macedonia.

U.N. Security Council representatives, in Kosovo for their own fact-finding mission, said the talks covered security issues, the return of Serbs to their homes and the future of Kosovo.

``We discussed with him in quite frank terms ... should we be confident in going forward because some things are going wrong, or should we be confident in going forward because some things are going right,'' said Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations.

A source who was in the meeting, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Putin as ``very critical'' of the NATO-led force's performance.

In Belgrade, the Russian and Yugoslav presidents blamed ethnic Albanian ``terrorists'' for the instability in Macedonia and Kosovo and called for a regional agreement on borders and minority rights to end the violence.

Fresh from his summit with President Bush, Putin said he told Yugoslav officials that he and Bush had discussed the crises and pledged to do ``everything possible to achieve a fair solution'' for the region.

``The stability of the region is seriously endangered by national and religious intolerance and extremism, and the main source of the problem is in Kosovo,'' Putin said, referring to ethnic Albanian extremists.

``We must do all to disarm the terrorists,'' Putin said.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said Putin presented a plan calling for a regional conference to reaffirm the inviolability of borders and the territorial integrity of the countries in the area as well as minority rights.

``This conference would once and for all put an end to the practice of attempts at redrawing state borders and the wars in the Balkans,'' Kostunica said.

The guarantor of the agreement would be the U.N. Security Council, sources close to the Russian delegation said.

Putin and Kostunica criticized NATO and the U.N. administration in Kosovo for not fully implementing U.N. resolutions guaranteeing the integrity of Yugoslavia and the rights of minority Serbs in the province.

``Wrong moves'' by the international community have ``destabilized the entire region,'' Kostunica said.

Although Russia has cultural, religious and historic ties to Yugoslavia's Serbian and Montenegrin population, it also was critical of then-President Slobodan Milosevic's ``ethnic cleansing'' campaign against majority ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Still, Russia strongly opposed NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia over Kosovo and has been eager to play a role in settling that and other conflicts in the Balkans.

Moscow has pledged to help Yugoslavia repair destruction from the NATO air campaign, and Putin pledged Sunday ``unconditional'' delivery of natural gas.

That would be a boost to Kostunica's efforts to improve Yugoslavs' living conditions, which suffered under international sanctions imposed to punish Belgrade for its role in inciting Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Kostunica spearheaded a pro-democracy movement that led to Milosevic's ouster in October.

--------

Putin Proposes Regional Plan for Balkans, Visits Kosovo

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/world/17WIRE-PUTI.html

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Reasserting Russia's interests in the Balkans, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an unscheduled stop in Kosovo on Sunday after blaming ethnic Albanian "terrorists" there for most of the region's instability.

His flight from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, was announced at the last minute because of security concerns in the province, where the majority ethnic Albanians view Russia as pro-Serb because of historic ties between the two Slav nations.

Putin was greeted by a white-gloved Russian military honor guard and the Russian national anthem as he disembarked at Pristina airport, where the 3,000-strong Russian contingent to the NATO-led force is based.

Walking with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Putin shook hands with several Russian soldiers before getting into a motorcade taking them from the tarmac to the Russian command center.

Along with Russian troops, Putin also was to meet with the commander of the NATO-led force, Danish Lt. Gen. Thorstein Skiaker, and U.N. officials including representatives of the U.N. Security Council, who were on the second day of their visit to Kosovo.

A string of other world leaders have visited the provincial capital since the end of the NATO bombing, but Putin was the first head of state to travel straight from meetings with Belgrade government officials.

Russia has been pushing for the 45,000-strong peacekeeping force to do more to disarm ethnic Albanian extremists in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. The extremists have been harassing minority Serbs and contributing to clashes with government troops in neighboring Macedonia.

In Belgrade, the Russian and Yugoslav presidents blamed ethnic Albanian "terrorists" for the instability in Macedonia and Kosovo and called for a regional agreement on borders and minority rights to end the violence.

Fresh from his summit with President Bush, Putin said he told Yugoslav officials that he and Bush had discussed the crises and pledged to do "everything possible to achieve a fair solution" for the region.

"The stability of the region is seriously endangered by national and religious intolerance and extremism, and the source of the problem is in Kosovo," Putin said, referring to ethnic Albanian extremists.

"We must do all to disarm the terrorists," Putin said.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said Putin presented a plan calling for a regional conference to reaffirm the inviolability of borders and the territorial integrity of the countries in the area as well as minority rights.

"This conference would once and for all put an end to the practice of attempts at redrawing state borders and the wars in the Balkans," Kostunica said.

The guarantor of the agreement would be the U.N. Security Council, sources close to the Russian delegation said.

Putin and Kostunica criticized NATO and the U.N. administration in Kosovo for not fully implementing U.N. resolutions guaranteeing the integrity of Yugoslavia and the rights of minority Serbs in the province.

"Wrong moves" by the international community have "destabilized the entire region," Kostunica said.

Although Russia has cultural, religious and historic ties to Yugoslavia's Serbian and Montenegrin population, it also was critical of former President Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaign against majority ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Still, Russia strongly opposed NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia over Kosovo and has been eager to play a role in settling that and other conflicts in the Balkans.

Moscow has pledged to help Yugoslavia repair destruction from the 1999 NATO air campaign, and Putin pledged Sunday "unconditional" delivery of natural gas.

That would be a boost to Kostunica's efforts to improve Yugoslavs' living conditions, which suffered under international sanctions imposed to punish Belgrade for its role in inciting Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Kostunica spearheaded a pro-democracy movement that led to Milosevic's ouster in October.

Putin is the first Russian president to visit Yugoslavia since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev toured the old Yugoslav federation, then consisting of six republics, in 1988.

In 1999, five months after the U.S. military led NATO to victory in Kosovo, then-President Clinton came to the remote Camp Bondsteel army base to talk to American troops there.

-------- japan

Japan Drafts U.N. Peacekeeping Bill

JUNE 17, 18:52 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7CMJ9400

TOKYO (AP) - The government has drafted a bill that would make it easier for Japan to dispatch troops for United Nations peacekeeping operations, a Japanese newspaper reported Sunday.

The legislation would revise a 1992 law that requires Tokyo to get permission from all parties involved in a conflict before sending peacekeepers and restricts Japanese troops to playing a purely self-defense role, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said, without citing a source.

The law has held up government decisions to send Japanese troops on international peacekeeping missions and, at times, has left them vulnerable to enemy fire.

The revisions - drafted Saturday by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party - would allow Tokyo to send troops with permission only from the host country, the daily said.

It would also give Japanese peacekeepers broader discretion in using their weapons, permitting them to protect the lives of Japanese citizens and peacekeepers from other nations, the Nihon Keizai added.

The revision is expected to be approved because the LDP and its two coalition partners hold a majority in both houses. But the report didn't say when the bill would be submitted to Parliament.

Phones rang unanswered at LDP headquarters and government offices on Sunday. Officials at Japan's Defense Agency were also unavailable for comment.

-------- nato

EU Leaders Reach Accord on Expansion
Applicants From Eastern Europe to Be Admitted by 2004

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 17, 2001; Page A18
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11162-2001Jun16?language=printer

GOTEBORG, Sweden, June 16 -- After a three-day summit marred by the worst street violence in Swedish history, leaders of the 15-member European Union agreed today to a firm timetable to admit new members from Eastern Europe by 2004.

Summit host Goran Persson, the prime minister of Sweden, which holds the EU rotating presidency, had been pressing for the clear dates. He said he wanted to prevent potential members from becoming disillusioned after Irish voters on June 7 rejected the Treaty of Nice, the accord that would reform the EU's often-cumbersome decision-making structure and make possible a new round of expansion.

Some EU heavyweights, notably Germany and France, were opposed to setting a firm timetable for enlargement. Germany specifically wants its neighbor, Poland, to be admitted first, but is worried that it may not meet the entrance criteria in time. New EU members must institute a dizzying variety of laws and economic reforms to bring their judicial, taxation and agricultural systems in line with European standards.

The reluctance to set a timetable had led to speculation -- reinforced by the Irish vote -- that some EU members were becoming less enthusiastic about expansion, which might result in their losing some of their traditional clout.

But today, EU leaders set the end of 2002 as the target date to complete negotiations with as many as a dozen countries, in time to allow them to participate in European parliamentary elections in 2004.

"We have been able to bring the harvest home in terms of a fixed date and a fixed timetable for new memberships of the European Union," an obviously pleased Persson told reporters.

The summit's final communique called the enlargement process "irreversible." That was particularly good news for the candidates likely to be admitted first -- Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia and Poland. The EU began talks with those countries and with Cyprus in 1998 and with Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Malta last year. It has not indicated which countries -- or how many -- might join in the first wave of expansion.

"Poland hails this . . . with satisfaction," said Jerzy Buzek, the Polish prime minister, who was invited to attend part of the summit along with leaders from other countries seeking membership. "This fully corresponds to Polish plans for preparing for membership."

But the negotiations could be tricky. For example, once countries are members, their workers are allowed to travel and work anywhere in the EU. But some countries, notably Germany and Austria, fear being swamped by laborers from countries with lower wages, such as Poland. They have asked for a moratorium on the movement of labor for several years after the new members join. This summit will be remembered as Europe's most violent yet. Three protesters were shot -- one remains in critical condition with damage to his liver and kidneys -- after police opened fire to help save an injured colleague. The rioters smashed shop windows, damaged police vehicles and ripped up the cobblestones from Goteborg's ancient streets and hurled them at the outnumbered police.

The violence was a shock to this country, which rarely experiences instances of discord, and politicians angrily denounced the protesters, many of whom apparently came from surrounding countries. Sweden took the unprecedented step of temporarily reinforcing its border controls to block new troublemakers from arriving. Opening borders for free movement of people has been one of the most visible successes of the European Union.

In addition to the rioters, 20,000 other protesters representing unions, environmentalists, animal rights activists, Communists and others marched through the streets, shouting "No to the EU!" and voicing opposition to the common currency, the euro.

-------- new zealand

New Zealand's disarming defence policy

AP Wellington,
June 17 2001
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/180601/detFOR01.asp

HAVING ANGERED the United States and other allies in the 1980s by banning visits by nuclear-powered or armed warships, New Zealand now has opted to be the first advanced nation to virtually scrap its air defences.

The left-of-centre government announced last month that it is junking the air force's combat jets, turning it into a transport service.

The small army, meanwhile, is being remade into a peacekeeping force and the navy cut to two ocean-going warships.

The army also has been instr-ucted to do a feasibility study on setting up a peace school where soldiers would sit in seminars with aid workers and peace campaigners to discuss methodology and share experiences.

New Zealand may be far away from just about everywhere, but the Labour Party government believes it can set an example to the world on defence.

Opponents of the cutbacks say the government is pursuing total disarmament by stealth, cloaking its aim with talk of peacekeeping because most New Zealanders want a strong defence.

-------- puerto rico

Navy and Protesters Ready for Next Round

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By DAVID GONZALEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/national/17VIEQ.html

VIEQUES, P.R., June 16 - Carlos Ventura sat in the shade and watched as his brother Angel strung together a fish trap from tamarind tree branches and chicken wire. Once the fish swim through the funnel-like entrance, the fishermen say, no amount of energy will ever let them escape.

The trap was one of several Angel Ventura was making to replace those the brothers said were destroyed in April during the previous Navy military maneuvers off the eastern tip of Vieques. And those maneuvers have led, the fishermen say, to another trap: one where the Navy cannot silence the protesters who demand an immediate end to the Navy's use of this Puerto Rican island for bombing practice.

This week President Bush announced that the Navy's military training in Vieques will end in May 2003, but that is not soon enough for many people, who see the Navy's policy as smacking of colonial arrogance toward Puerto Rico, a self- governing commonwealth of the United States.

On Monday, when bombing practice runs and other military exercises are set to resume, protesters plan to trespass into Camp García, which occupies the eastern third of Vieques where the maneuvers take place, and be arrested as they call for an immediate silencing of the guns and the return of their land.

"We are pacifists," said Carlos Ventura, the head of a local fishermen's group and a leader in the anti- Navy movement. "They don't how to deal with that. They use pepper spray, yet we hold out our hands to be cuffed. They get angry and every day put their foot in it more. Every day they become more ensnared."

The scene and mood this week on this slender island that is home to 9,300 people off the eastern coast of the "Big Island" of Puerto Rico has been subdued. There is a sense of dissatisfaction among Navy opponents and supporters alike. Where opponents see unacceptable delays in ending the bombing, supporters feel let down by their government's decision to end the exercises.

Navy officials say that claims that the maneuvers have hurt the health of Vieques residents are not supported by research. They say they are ready to arrest anyone who breaks the law, trespasses on the Camp García range or tosses rocks or bottles at guards, as happened in April.

But Navy opponents, like those who have been camped out in wooden houses and tents outside the entrance to the bombing range, say the bombing has contaminated their land, leading to higher than average rates of cancer, lung and skin ailments. They have planted two dozen white wooden crosses near the entrance to commemorate those who have died from those illnesses.

For some, the desire to rout the military began when they were children, growing up in houses whose walls trembled and cracked from the reverberations. They, too trembled, for other reasons.

"The soldiers would come to our family's house looking for women," said Luz Leguillou, 57, a retired English teacher. "Without asking they would just come in the door. My father had to deal with that. They did not respect us."

For older residents, the memories of land they had to leave behind as the Navy took over two-thirds of the island are still vivid.

"My mother, her neighbors were relocated by the government for $50," said Venancio Torrez, 79, who sells lottery tickets from his jeep. "They were taken to cane fields where they had to build ranchos. There are people still alive, children who were born under two planks."

For him, the fact that the military, while more respectful, continues to use the island, is a double hurt, since he is a World War II veteran.

"This very nation of mine betrayed me," Mr. Torrez said. "America. The American military betrayed me."

Yet around the corner from where Mr. Torrez was parked, several women in a variety store said they felt betrayed by President Bush, saying he caved into pressure from a small group of outsiders.

"I depend on the Navy," said Evelyn Sanes, a clerk at the store whose husband is a security guard on the Navy camp. "Let them stay."

The United States military, Ms. Sanes said, had helped Vieques, explaining that when she gave birth to one of her children, a military helicopter took her to the hospital on the mainland of Puerto Rico.

Ms. Sanes said she was a distant relative of David Sanes, the security guard whose death two years ago in a bombing accident ignited the protest movement. She said David Sanes's father did not want to see the Navy leave, even though other relatives opposed them.

"A great part of the Vieques family is divided," Ms. Sanes said. "It has distanced people."

Juanita Torres Castro, a customer at the store, said the protesters were sympathizers of Puerto Rico's small independence movement.

"They are people from the Big Island who come here to do their work," Mrs. Torres Castro said. "They want communism here, so they can do what they want with Puerto Rico."

But Wilfredo Matos, the owner of a corner lunch counter, said the question was not about independence, but purely American rights. Puerto Ricans, he said, were American citizens not only by birth, but also by the blood they spilled in military service.

"I'm a Puerto Rican and Americano, U.S.A.," he said. "In all wars Puerto Ricans have died. They are not going to take that away from us, no sir. We have the right as any other American who has a base next to them."

Many residents here complained that the Navy has done little for Vieques's economy. The original land expropriation destroyed the sugar cane industry here that was once so busy that workers had to be imported. Young people say there are few career opportunities, leaving them little choice after college except to leave. And tourism has dwindled among Americans who fear - incorrectly - that chaos reigns on the streets and beaches.

The Navy recently handed over more than 8,000 acres it had used as a munitions depot on the island's western tip. City officials plan to convert it into a marina, tourist- friendly eco-lodges and low-income housing, but they have yet to hear from the federal government about cleaning up the land.

"The city cannot do any projects there until it is cleaned up," said Henry González, the acting mayor. "It is only a symbolic handover."

But symbolism has been a sure strategy among the protesters, whose only weapon is civil disobedience. It is a symbolism that for some has political overtones, as Puerto Ricans navigate nebulous political waters and - in the words of Héctor Pesquera, an independence advocate - decide "we're either Yankees or Puerto Ricans."

But first, said Ismael Guadalupe, a drama teacher who has been at the forefront of the Navy opposition for decades, Vieques's own status must be decided.

Mr. Guadalupe's own patch of land once belonged to his father, and though he now owns it, he still has a debt to repay. For him, it encompasses the entire island.

"This is the cost of the struggle from years ago," he said. "We have to respect history and recognize our moral duty to give back to the old ones that which was once theirs."

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

Way Is Cleared to Raise Ship Sunk by Sub

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/national/17SUB.html

HONOLULU, June 16 - A Navy environmental study has cleared the way for the recovery of a Japanese fishing vessel that sank off Hawaii in February after an American submarine surfaced beneath it.

The three-month study found no significant environmental impact from recovering the vessel, the Ehime Maru, which could be completed by October. The bodies of nine missing students and crew members are believed to be inside. The victims' families have pressed the United States to recover the remains.

"Although the Navy is confident it will be able to successfully conduct the operation, the recovery is not without risks, and there is no guarantee of success," a statement from the Pacific Fleet said. "If it is not possible to safely lift and move the vessel, it will be left at its current location in 2,000 feet of water."

The Ehime Maru, a fisheries training vessel from Uwajima, Japan, was sunk on Feb. 9 in a collision with the submarine Greeneville. Twenty- six crew members, teachers and students were rescued.

The Navy announced in March that engineers had a plan for recovery, estimated to cost $40 million. The plan calls for the Dutch company Smit Tak to drag the Ehime Maru to water 115 feet deep about a mile south of Honolulu International Airport, where divers can search the vessel.

Before the ship is moved, its deck will be cleared of cargo nets, hooks and other obstacles that could harm marine life, Navy officials said. Absorbent booms and oil dispersants will be available to contain and clean up any leaks, officials said.

The Navy has never recovered a ship as large as the 190-foot-long Ehime Maru from such a great depth, where experts say unprotected divers cannot work safely.

-------- OTHER

BLUE SKY
Sure, It's Rocket Science, but Who Needs Scientists?

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/weekinreview/17GLAN.html

AT a news conference in Madrid last week, a puzzled journalist's question to President Bush expressed, with mathematical concision, the growing suspicion in the scientific community that it carries no more weight with the administration than do the American League baseball standings with the average Basque:

"You say the scientific evidence isn't strong enough to go forward with Kyoto. So then how do you justify your missile defense plan when there is even less scientific evidence that that will work?"

Mr. Bush avoided answering the question directly. But some scientists argue that the president and his top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, are trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, they cite the lack of conclusive research on climate change to argue against the Kyoto accord on global warming. At the same time, they are eager to push ahead with the development of a national missile defense despite even greater scientific uncertainties.

This sort of reasoning has led some scientists in the United States to conclude that the current administration is uninterested in scientific research or its conclusions.

That scientists are sometimes ignored by politicians is nothing new. But Dr. Hugh Gusterson, a cultural anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies American science and the federal laboratories, said he believed there is a particular problem with the Bush presidency, in that most major scientists today, whatever their politics, are unwilling to accept White House policies.

"Usually Republicans have their scientists and Democrats have their scientists," said Dr. Gusterson. "What's extraordinary about this moment in time, on both missile defense and the greenhouse effect, is the substantial consensus against the White House policy."

Indeed, some experts believe that science's influence in public policy matters has not been at such a low ebb since before World War I.

Mr. Bush has not yet appointed a national science adviser or filled other top science positions in agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. And with the exception of health and defense, which have fared well, the administration's proposed 2002 budget includes sharp cuts in real spending for most research funding agencies.

"The major thing that's happening is that a science adviser, or science and technology adviser, to the president has not yet been named," said Dr. D. Allan Bromley, the Yale physicist, the science adviser for President Bush's father, who has criticized the current administration for its tepid financial support of science. Dr. Gusterson pointed out that President Ronald Reagan had no trouble plucking a simpatico science adviser, Dr. George A. Keyworth II, out of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Previous administrations, however, have sometimes been slow to fill scientific posts, and Dr. Bromley pointed out that Mr. Bush's prolonged election count left him with less time than others to make his appointments. Dr. Bromley also said that in his view, the Kyoto accord contained flaws unrelated to climate science that fully justified its rejection.

But others see a more fundamental difference between this administration and its predecessors. "My own impression is we've entered a new era," said Dr. David C. Cassidy, a science historian at Hofstra University. "Physicists in particular have lost a lot of clout, and they've even lost a lot of esteem in the public eye, and I think that's reflected in the fact that they're now being more ignored in their advice."

UNHAPPILY out in the cold, scientists are asking, among other things, whether it is just a coincidence that their current marginal status in the policy arena coincides with the fact that there is no grand, moral figure among their ranks, no Albert Einstein or Andrei Sakharov to whom politicians would have to pay attention. And they question whether it isn't the scientific community itself, having arrogantly dismissed scientist-popularizers like the astronomer Carl Sagan or the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that has discouraged others from aspiring to public visibility and influence.

Science historians point out, too, that research in general has become a vastly more cooperative enterprise in recent decades, with teams of hundreds of scientists working on the genome project and particle physics experiments, leaving no hero alone in the spotlight.

It was not always so. Perhaps the single most influential bit of scientific advice to a politician came when Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Aug. 2, 1939, warning him that Germany might be working on an atomic bomb and urging that the United States undertake a similar project.

Offical science committees also played major roles in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and President Richard M. Nixon's decision to cease work on germ weapons.

But Dr. Paul Forman, curator of the modern physics collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, says that scientists, like politicians, live in a culture that has grown suspicious of public figures, especially those who come with high reputations or are allied to prestigious institutions. Even if they were here today, Mr. Forman said, Einstein, Sakharov or Richard Feynman (who in 1986 interrupted the staid choreography of a Congressional hearing by showing, with a glass of ice water, how an O-ring could have failed and caused the Challenger space shuttle disaster) would not have the authority they once had.

The demotion of science in political circles is not unprecedented - witness the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment, which advised Congress on scientific and technical issues, during the Gingrich revolution of the mid- 1990's. And that was just one highly visible point on a long downward arc from an intoxicating height achieved during the world wars and the cold war, said Dr. Spencer Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.

"As they say, radar won the war and the atomic bomb ended it," Dr. Weart said. "Physicists of the time told me they were regarded with almost supernatural awe. They were the masters of time and space."

Since then, said Dr. Weart, as science has become more abstract, it has grown harder to understand and easier to ignore. But he noted that around the world, as governments grapple with global warming, the ozone hole, declining fisheries and public health problems from foot and mouth to AIDS, there is ever greater reliance on scientific advice.

"The issues nowadays are unbelievably pluralistic," said Dr. Daniel Kevles, a science historian and professor at Yale. "There's hardly an issue you can think of that doesn't turn to some extent on technical knowledge."

This fact may, over time, turn science itself into a kind of advocacy group. Already in the United States, scientists have helped build support for particular issues - AIDS research, for example. And scientists are learning how to organize in their self-interest through groups like the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists. An e-mail sent out last week by George H. Trilling, president of the American Physical Society, included a sample "Dear Congressman" letter to help members agitate for more science funding.

SCIENTISTS are also coming to the realization that, once a scientific matter becomes a public issue - whether having to do with missiles or birth control or Earth's climate - how a position is presented and argued may well outweigh pure research.

"In an area like climate change, the science at this point is only going to tell you so much," said Dr. Robert J. Lempert, a senior scientist and expert in risk analysis at the Rand Corporation. "And then the question is, how do you deal with risk which is inevitably going to be there. Science is only part of the story."

-------- death penalty

Death Penalty Falls From Favor as Some Lose Confidence in Its Fairness

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/national/17VOIC.html

After a decade in which there appeared to be an unshakable near consensus in favor of the death penalty, Americans say they are now rethinking and debating capital punishment as a moral issue the way they argue over abortion.

The debate came into sharp relief last week with an unlikely confluence of events: the execution of the Oklahoma city bomber, Timothy J. McVeigh, the protests during President Bush's European visit criticizing America's death penalty policy as a violation of human rights, the decision by the embassy bombing jury in New York against giving the death penalty for a convicted terrorist and the execution in Ohio on Thursday of a murderer who contended he had schizophrenia.

Interviews in six states this week reflect the poll numbers, which show that while there is still a majority in favor of the death penalty, the size of the majority is shrinking.

While many people cited the biblical command to take "an eye for an eye," and few objected to the execution of Mr. McVeigh, others said they had recently changed their minds after concluding that the death penalty was administered unfairly.

Some said that what persuaded them was the news that 13 prisoners on death row in Illinois were discovered to be innocent - a revelation that led Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, to declare a statewide moratorium on the death penalty last year. Others said they were troubled by reports that the death penalty may be disproportionately imposed on blacks and Hispanics.

"I've slowly been changing my mind about the death penalty," said Fredrica Hicks, a mother of three who works in a Social Security office in Chicago, where the exonerations of prisoners in her state gave her pause. "What would happen if something went wrong and someone accused me of something and there was no way for me to prove my innocence, or evidence was lost and I was sitting on death row? If it has happened to someone else, it could happen to anyone. It could be me."

But Charlotte Stout, a retired nurse in Greenfield, Tenn., rebutted that, saying: "To me, that is the system working. If it hadn't been working, the innocent people wouldn't have been released."

Last year, Ms. Stout witnessed the execution of Robert Glen Coe, who had kidnapped, raped and killed her 8-year-old daughter, Cary Medlin, in 1979. Ms. Stout said that the death penalty was a morally and "biblically appropriate" punishment because it served the victims' families.

"When I walked out of that execution chamber that night, I felt like I had been given my life back," she said. "It could not bring Cary back, but it gave us our life back. Coe no longer had control of our lives through his legal maneuvers."

But in Portland, Ore., Ellis Martin, a 34-year-old sales associate for a specialty beer importer, said: "The justice system has been proven to be racist, a lot of people have been found innocent after being found guilty and there's just too much room for a flaw to use something so final as to kill someone."

The turning point in the national dialogue about the death penalty came last year with the moratorium in Illinois, said Austin Sarat, a professor of political science and law at Amherst College.

"Today to be raising questions about capital punishment is to be in the company of the pope, Governor Ryan, the Legislatures of Nebraska and New Hampshire, the columnist George Will, Pat Robertson and William Sessions, the former director of the F.B.I., all of whom have come out in favor of a moratorium, said Mr. Sarat, the author of "When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition" (Princeton University Press, 2001).

"Moratorium doesn't necessarily mean abolition," he continued, "but it's a far piece from where we were in the early 90's, when to be against the death penalty was to be considered outside the American mainstream."

The last time there was such passionate debate over the death penalty was in the 1970's. The Supreme Court called a stop to executions in 1972, but 38 states eventually passed new death penalty laws to comply with the court's decision. The executions began again in 1977 in Utah.

Polls show support for the death penalty has fallen since 1994, when about 80 percent of the public favored it. Recent polls have found about 65 percent in support, but the problem with polling on the death penalty is that outcomes vary with the way the question is asked. When respondents were asked whether murderers should get life in prison or the death penalty, the response in recent polls showed the public to be about evenly split.

Still, a majority of Americans continue to regard the death penalty as a fitting, even biblically mandated punishment for people who murder. Randy Voepel, the mayor of Santee, Calif., where a student opened fire in a high school in March, said: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not about revenge. It's about a punishment that is commensurate with the offense. It's the old punishment-fits-the-crime belief."

In interviews, some people ridiculed Europeans, who have outlawed executions, as hypocrites for pointing fingers at Americans. Harold Christopher Bray, who installs fire sprinklers in Portland, Ore., said: "I think that its pretty humorous considering that France invented the guillotine and Spain had the Spanish inquisition and the Germans had the Holocaust. I think as a country, we've probably killed less than a lot of other countries. There's plenty of European countries that created a lot of death."

But Lang Dunbar, a job trainer for welfare recipients in Cleveland, said he was embarrassed to be a citizen of a country that still has the death penalty.

"It's awfully funny how George Bush and his crowd can hang a Ten Commandments on the wall - it says not to kill - but then they turn their back when they want to kill someone," he said.

Advocates of capital punishment once promoted it as a deterrent to crime, but experts said that despite falling crime rates, that argument has not proved convincing with the public, as indicated in the interviews.

"Go down to the police department and look at the police blotter and you'll be convinced it's not deterring anything," said Jerry Jones, an election worker in Chicago.

Contributing to the debate, religious groups have recently amplified their positions. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, passed a resolution last year supporting "fair and equitable use of capital punishment." Last week, Quakers, Reform Jews and Roman Catholic bishops denounced the execution of Mr. McVeigh.

But many of those interviewed said they neither knew nor cared about the stance of their denomination's leaders. Gloria Jiacalone, 75, a Catholic in Chicago who regularly attends Mass, said: "How the Cardinal reacts to the death penalty, I don't care. It's a personal thing. I think everybody has their own personal idea about this. The church or a pastor or anybody isn't going to tell me or anybody else how to think."

Professor Sarat said that in this "period of reconsideration," it was too early to project whether the change in public opinion would result in banning the death penalty, or merely reforming it.

"It may be," he said, "we end up with a `mend it, don't end it' view, that we want capital punishment available for the worst of the worst, but we want to improve the process, or use it more sparingly."

-------- environment

Malaysians Battle Toxic Leaking Ship

JUNE 17, 08:53 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7CMAGE00]

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Workers began cutting a hole in a leaking ship Sunday to pump out a highly toxic chemical that has ruined seafood farms in southern Malaysia.

Officials want to remove the ship's remaining cargo of the industrial solvent phenol before the leaking toxin causes further damage, said Damon Nori Masood, deputy general manager of the port authority in southern Johor state.

The task was considered ``quite dangerous'' and might take four or five days if the initial work proceeds smoothly without spilling more of the chemical, Damon said.

The Indonesian-registered MT Endah Lestari is lying on its side in shallow water near a busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Singapore.

The ship was carrying 660 tons of the chemical and has leaked an unknown amount since it tipped over on Wednesday near partially submerged wooden cages used to breed mussels and other seafood.

Authorities in Malaysia and Singapore have banned the sale of seafood from the zone and warned people not to enter the water. Villagers say thousands of fish and mussels have died.

Phenol is colorless and mixes easily with water, making it impossible to determine the exact size of the spill until all the remaining cargo has been recovered and measured.

Humans can absorb the substance though their skin, eyes and respiratory system. Experts say a high concentration of phenol exposed to a large area of skin can kill a human being in half an hour.

Phenol is used mostly in making plastics but also as a disinfectant in mouthwash and other products. Concentrated amounts can cause diarrhea if ingested and blisters and burns if applied directly to the skin.

----

A New Strategy to Help Capture Greenhouse Gas

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/science/17CARB.html?searchpv=nytToday

Each day, 5,000 tons of compressed carbon dioxide flow from a natural gas plant in central North Dakota beneath the prairie, through 200 miles of pipes, to an oil field in Saskatchewan.

There, the carbon dioxide is pumped nearly a mile below ground into depleted oil reservoirs, where it is expected to remain for thousands if not millions of years, away from the earth's atmosphere and climate.

Most efforts to cut emissions of carbon dioxide - one of the main "greenhouse gases" contributing to the world's rising temperatures - take one of two approaches. One is developing alternative energy sources, like nuclear and solar power, that do not produce greenhouse gases. The other is trimming energy use through conservation and more efficient appliances and cars.

Now scientists and policy makers are exploring a third strategy: snaring carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it reaches the air and storing it in the ground or ocean.

On Monday, President Bush said, "We all believe technology offers great promise to significantly reduce emissions, especially carbon capture, storage and sequestration technologies."

That could eventually help the administration reconcile the divergent goals of its energy and climate policies, enabling the construction of power plants that burn fossil fuels while still cutting harmful emissions.

"If you want to stabilize CO2 emissions over a long period of time, we think carbon sequestration is essential," said Robert S. Kripowicz, acting assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy.

But not all the technologies are ready, and financing of research in the United States remains modest, about $40 million a year. As acknowledged by Mr. Bush, current carbon dioxide scrubbers are too expensive. The Department of Energy has set $2.75 as a reasonable cost for storing a ton of carbon dioxide. Current technologies cost 15 to 20 times as much.

The science of what happens to the sequestered carbon dioxide is also incomplete.

A small quantity of carbon dioxide is harmless - it provides the fizz in soda - but a cloud of it can be deadly, as in 1986 when carbon dioxide-rich waters from a lake in Cameroon in West Africa suddenly welled to the surface and suffocated 1,700 people. Most scientists contend a sudden, catastrophic release of carbon dioxide from a storage site is unlikely, but environmentalists worry that the carbon dioxide could harm nearby ecosystems, particularly if it is injected into the oceans.

The $15 million project in the Weyburn oil fields in southern Saskatchewan has attracted little attention, in part because it is unremarkable in many aspects. Oil drillers have for years injected carbon dioxide into wells, not to avert global warming, but to increase the flow of oil.

"You can think of it as a detergent," said Roland Moberg, general manager of the Petroleum Technology Research Center in Regina, Canada, which oversees the project. "It washes out additional oil."

What is new about Weyburn and an earlier effort by a Norwegian oil company in the North Sea is that scientists are watching whether the carbon dioxide stays down. A similar project is scheduled to begin in New Mexico this year. Researchers are also creating computer models to predict how the carbon dioxide will shift in the coming years.

The Weyburn fields will eventually hold about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide from the Dakota Gasification Company plant in Beulah, N.D. Until the project started last September, the 12,000 tons a day of carbon dioxide produced by the plant was all released into the air. The carbon dioxide is produced as a waste product from the transformation of coal into natural gas.

Though the disposal of carbon dioxide is straightforward, the technology for pulling it out of emissions is not. A study by Alstom Power Inc. found that installing carbon dioxide scrubbers on a power plant in Ohio would cost several hundred million dollars, sap one-third of the plant's power output and double to triple the cost of electricity.

"Technically, we can do it," said Dr. Nsakala Y. Nsakala, a principal consulting engineer at Alstom in Windsor, Conn. But, he said, "To get something that is commercially viable from a cost point is probably a decade away."

Many environmentalists take a cautious view of carbon sequestration - intrigued by the potential, but worried that policy makers might conclude that a simple technological fix exists for global warming.

"As long as it doesn't displace support for efficiency and renewable energy programs," said David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The first line of defense should be minimizing the creation of CO2 in the first place."

A larger controversy is where to put the carbon dioxide. Depleted oil and natural gas reserves appear to raise the least concern - the geologic formations that capped the oil and gas underground for millions of years presumably can hold the carbon dioxide as well - but they probably offer enough space to put away the carbon dioxide from a few decades of fossil fuel burning worldwide.

Deep saline aquifers and unminable coal deposits might hold a few centuries worth of carbon dioxide, but are less well understood.

The potential capacity of the deep oceans - perhaps a trillion tons of carbon dioxide or more - dwarfs those on land. But as ocean waters well up, much of the carbon dioxide would rise back to the surface and into the air, perhaps within a few centuries. Environmentalists also say deep-sea creatures could suffer. The dissolving carbon dioxide makes the water more acidic.

Burning of fossil fuels currently releases about 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, of which about a third, or 25 million tons a day, is absorbed by the oceans.

"We already have an ocean CO2 disposal program," said Dr. Peter G. Brewer, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Monterey, Calif. "We just pretend we don't."

For several years, scientists led by Dr. Brewer have been conducting what would be called tabletop experiments, except that they are done at the bottom of Monterey Bay.

In 1998, the scientists, using the robotic arms of the institute's small research submarine, squirted about five pounds of liquid carbon dioxide into a glass beaker more than two miles down. To their surprise, the clear blob quickly swelled as chemical reactions drew in surrounding sea water. Viscous tendrils burbled out of the beaker, then bounced and rolled along the sandy floor.

The carbon dioxide does not appear to bother the fish, Dr. Brewer said.

A larger experiment to inject about 60 tons of liquid carbon dioxide from a ship to a depth of 2,600 feet off Hawaii has run into opposition from environmentalists and has been delayed.

The 60 tons of carbon dioxide, which would be piped from a ship several miles offshore, is minuscule in relation to what the oceans absorb from the atmosphere, the researchers said. "You're not going to have any visible mortality," said Howard J. Herzog, a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is involved in the project. "We may affect the bacteria."

Isaac D. Harp, president of the Coalition Against CO2 Dumping, agreed that the experiment itself would not cause much harm, but said that it would provide impetus for larger experiments and then full- scale implementation. "The oceans serve so many beneficial purposes," he said. "Why go screw it up?"

Mr. Herzog said the experiment was meant to provide basic science data, not to advocate ocean carbon storage. "Down the line, people are going to want to do this," he said, "and it's better that our policy makers have some scientific evidence."

More advanced concepts could offer less controversial options. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have designed a coal-burning power plant that releases no carbon dioxide at all. Instead, a stream of pure carbon dioxide from the plant is mixed with magnesium silicate, a chemical reaction that produces solid rocks and locks up the carbon for eons. A small pilot plant could be built within five years.

Mr. Herzog said that when he started his carbon storage research in the early 1990's, others regarded it to be on the scientific fringe.

"It's not going to be the silver bullet," Mr. Herzog said. "There are no silver bullets." But, he added: "It's very encouraging that this type of mitigation path is now being taken seriously at the highest levels of government. It's hard to believe a president of the United States is sort of endorsing this as a viable option."

-------- health

WHEN LIES KILL
In China, the Right to Truth Meets Life and Death

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/weekinreview/17ECKH.html

BEIJING - THEY were a pitiful sight here the other day, four adults and three children from the distant countryside, wandering through Beijing looking scruffy and slightly dazed. Several were already ill from their H.I.V. infections. They had boarded a train and arrived in the capital in hopes that someone, somehow could help.

They spoke of going to a hospital, but changed their minds, saying there was no cure anyway and that hospitals were too expensive. They spoke to some foreign reporters about conditions in their village, where AIDS is rampant. Then they feared they might be detained for disturbing the capital's peace and they took the all-night journey by train and bus back home, back to the place, filled with fresh graves, where they began.

Chinese researchers believe that hundreds of thousands of people in the seven villagers' home province of Henan alone were infected with H.I.V. when they sold blood for use in medical products. The purchasing companies were often run by local government agencies, and right into the mid-1990's - far into the global AIDS epidemic - they used recklessly dangerous blood-collection methods. The buyers pooled the blood of many people, extracted plasma to sell and then re-injected the remaining pooled cells back into the donors - perhaps the most efficient method ever devised to spread blood- borne diseases like AIDS and hepatitis.

Chinese leaders say demands for Western-style democracy and an independent press are still esoteric and alien concerns in this giant, poor country with 5,000 years of its own history. They say that such ideas are championed only by a tiny elite of dissidents, and that an impoverished country must give priority to the far more basic human rights of food and shelter and life itself.

But the AIDS epidemic in Henan, which local officials have tried to cover up and have done little to relieve, is only the latest of many indications that this distinction between freedom from hunger and political freedom - especially the freedom to tell the truth when officials lie - is too glib. For it has long been clear that China's most widespread human rights violations, by any standard, afflict the country's poor masses most of all, endangering their physical as well as political welfare, and that official silence about bitter truths undermines public faith in the political system itself.

The most egregious human rights problem, in terms of numbers affected and the suffering that results, may be China's rigid system of residence controls, which prevents most rural people from moving legally to cities, or from holding high jobs there if they do. The system subsidizes those lucky enough to have been born in cities and severely restricts the opportunities of the majority - tens of millions of whom are forced to join a furtive underclass of migrants, doing the unwanted dirty work in dangerous mines and unwelcoming cities. Many discriminations are even enshrined in regulation: to gain scarce university entrance slots, for example, high school students from villages and small towns, where they are usually at an educational disadvantage, must test considerably higher, not lower, than urban youths. This is justified with the twisted logic that urban students are likely to fare better in college, but it also reflects the constant bias of the party toward placating the more politically dangerous urban population.

THE number of democracy campaigners who are now in prison or in labor camps is probably only in the thousands. But hundreds of thousands of others, accused of petty crimes, have been sent to labor camps for up to three years, with no due process at all. Torture and framing of suspects by the police are so commonplace in China that even the official press has cried for change. The corrupt and high-handed official measures that have set off so many angry demonstrations by workers and farmers - a burgeoning threat, according to a new report from a top research group of the Communist Party - arise directly from the lack of accountability and scrutiny.

Among villagers in Henan, awareness is just dawning of the medical disaster wrought by gross official negligence; in other countries, the afflicted people now might expect generous compensation and a thorough accounting of how it happened. But in Henan, that same provincial government has obstructed research on the scale of H.I.V. infections and persecuted those working to prevent the further spread of the disease, making more deaths a certainty.

About 40 years ago Henan was an epicenter of an even bigger man-made catastrophe. Historical and demographic records have shown that tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation and related diseases because of the senseless farm policies of Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950's. The ensuing famine was concealed and its reach broadened by the routine lies passed up the bureaucratic chain, and through the press, about harvests and village conditions.

In a published 1998 reminiscence, Zhang Shupan, a former party official in Henan, told of being castigated for questioning the preposterous official reports that grain yields had multiplied tenfold under Mao's inspiration. He recalled the vicious campaign against peasants for supposedly concealing their bountiful grain - this after the drought of 1959, which came on the heels of the Great Leap's ill-conceived collectivization and led to mass starvation.

Times have changed, of course. Today, such a huge calamity could not be entirely hidden. But some of the basic causes persist. Officials still tend to refer to Mao's famine as the "time of natural disasters" rather than a policy debacle. And, although the central government has begun to act against AIDS, and is said to be concerned about events in Henan, central officials have not spoken out about the coverup there, apparently putting the party's reputation and stability first.

The same week that those seven villagers made their sad foray to Beijing, Dr. Gao Yaojie, a 74-year-old retired gynecologist in Henan, was supposed to travel to Washington to receive a prestigious public health award. Not a dissident, but a doctor who is out to save lives and considers herself too old to mince words, Dr. Gao has used her own time and money to visit the province's afflicted villages and teach people about the dreadful new disease, and she has spoken frankly about the devastation and the blood trade to some Chinese and foreign journalists. For this, she has been harassed by the police, and she was denied a passport to go accept her award; Henan health officials said she was being "used by anti-Chinese forces."

It would be presumptuous and foolish to assert that China must duplicate Western multiparty democracy to solve its problems. At the same time, events here constantly make clear the heavy costs of the controls on information and political choice.

If Chinese reporters had a longer leash, it would be inconceivable for a smuggling ring in the southern city of Xiamen to bribe hundreds of top customs, police and party officials for years without exposure. If the people of Henan had freewheeling access to world news, they surely would have known well before 1995 that the injection of pooled, untested blood into people was asking for trouble; if unscrupulous companies went ahead and did it anyway, a critical press could quickly have sounded the alarm.

It may be true, as Chinese officials like to say, that people are freer in their daily lives than ever before. And there are glimmers of progress in protection of rights. When a schoolyard explosion in southern China killed scores of children and teachers, villagers openly contradicted the official line that the school had not served as a fireworks factory, causing a remarkable public retraction by Prime Minister Zhu Rongji.

China's leaders increasingly acknowledge the existence of acute social ills like inequality and corruption, and constantly promise to correct them. But the long and continuing history of official lying has left the public skeptical of assurances and done more to corrode support for the Communist Party than the arrest of any number of democracy advocates.

WHERE and how fast China could go politically in the coming years without flying to pieces is open to legitimate debate. It is plausible to argue that the late Deng Xiaoping was a genius in the late 1970's, as China emerged from Mao's turmoil, when he decided to open up the economy but keep the lid on politics. The country enjoyed a measure of stability - though it was enforced with bullets in 1989 - and a period of spectacular economic growth. The fear of chaos he voiced to justify continuing political controls is real and understandable, and shared by ordinary people who suffered through decades of upheaval.

Still, many Chinese, including many party insiders, sense that Mr. Deng's vision has run its course. The leaders have already decided that radical new jolts to the economy are needed to keep it booming, hence the risk-laden quest for membership in the World Trade Organization. But in the political arena they have offered little but defensive crackdowns, platitudes and speculation about more "democracy" inside a one-party state, which history suggests is an impossibility. Unless the new leaders taking over in the next few years offer a sweeping and inspiring vision of political change, many Chinese intellectuals say, the country may get that dreaded chaos anyway.

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Europe puts up anti-riot barricades
Arrests embarrass furious Blair
Genoa to shut down for G8 meeting

by Kamal Ahmed in Gothenburg and Faisal Islam in London
The Observer UK
Sunday June 17, 2001
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,508266,00.html

European leaders are to introduce Draconian measures to deal with the growing threat of violence from anti-capitalist protesters. They are bringing forward plans to stage all European summits in Brussels behind tough new security barriers.

And in an extraordinary response to the massive disturbances in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Italian government is planning to seal off the major city of Genoa for next month's G8 world economic summit, closing airlinks, railways and roads.

The plan follows the increasingly violent protests which have marred gatherings of international leaders since Seattle, and which left three people with gunshot wounds after riots in Gothenburg on Friday night.

Senior police revealed last night that an undisclosed number of Britons had been arrested over the riots, which caused millions of pounds worth of damage. Police and protesters fought pitched battles on the city's streets.

The disclosure that Britons were involved caused acute embarrassment to Tony Blair, who blamed the trouble on a 'travelling circus' of anarchists intent on violence.

As doctors battled to save the life of one of those injured after a second emergency operation last night, the Prime Minister condemned the riots: 'Peaceful protest is an essential part of democracy. Violent protest is not, and there is no place in democracy for an anarchists' travelling circus that goes from summit to summit with the sole purpose of causing as much mayhem as possible.' He added: 'Their actions have nothing to do with anything other than a desire to cause violence that threatens the lives and livelihoods of innocent people. I would like to send the clearest possible signal that such protests must not and will not disrupt the proper workings of democratic organisations.'

The government of the new Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is to shut down Genoa for four days in an unprecedented security crackdown on anti-globalisation protesters.

The airport, main train stations and key motorway junctions will all be closed from 18 to 22 July in an attempt to restrict access to tens of thousands of demonstrators who plan to converge on the city.

'The airport is shut to all civil and commercial air traffic. It sounds like a pre-emptive state of emergency,' said Dave Timms of the World Development Movement, whose flight to the city has been cancelled by BA.

Italian anarchist groups have vowed to wreak havoc at the summit, considered by more peaceful campaigners as a key deadline for delivery of international promises on debt relief and fair trade for poor countries. Anti-debt campaigners were told late last week that their flights had been cancelled or diverted to Turin.

'We can't quite believe it. There are certain issues regarding security, but we wouldn't have thought they were serious enough to close the airport,' said a spokesman for Ryanair.

Road junctions and train stations will shut with entry to Genoa restricted to a small number of access points, policed by the paramilitary carabinieri. Genoese working in the controlled zones near the conference centre have been told to stay at home.

Italian newspapers speculated that the main talks might be moved to a more secure venue such as a castle, or even a cruise liner.

The measures came as Swedish police revealed that a 40-year-old British man was among those being held last night. He was arrested at 9.30pm on Friday, suspected of being involved in violence.

It is thought that those held were among a 'hard core' of protesters from all over Europe. Police said Germans, Danes and Finns had also been arrested. In a series of statements, the European Union made it clear that there would be a 'fortress' approach to the next summit in Belgium in an attempt to kill off future protests.

After 2002 formal summits will only take place in Brussels where experience of dealing with protesters is much greater. Huge security cordons will be thrown up around the summit centre.

An emergency meeting of Home Office and Foreign Office ministers is to discuss new security measures with British intelligence services. Mr Blair said the riots had nothing to do with allegations that the EU had become detached from the people it was supposed to be serving.

-------- terrorism

India Arrests 2 in Plot to Attack U.S. Embassy

New York Times
June 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/world/17INDI.html

NEW DELHI, June 16 - A Sudanese man suspected of working for the Islamic militant Osama bin Laden was arrested along with an Indian accomplice for allegedly planning to blow up the American Embassy in India, domestic news agencies reported today.

Abdil Rauf Hawas, of Sudan, was arrested Friday in a residential neighborhood in New Delhi, where authorities discovered 13 pounds of the explosive RDX and some improvised bomb devices, the United News of India said, quoting a senior police official.

Interrogation of Mr. Hawas and his suspected accomplice, Shamim Sarvar, who was also arrested Friday, revealed they were planning to blow up the American embassy in July, UNI said, quoting police officials.

-------- activists

Seoul Activists Burn U.S. Flag

JUNE 16, 08:23 EST
By SANG-HUN CHOE
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7CLKVC80

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Activists burned an American flag and the effigy of a U.S. missile Saturday to protest Washington's plan to build a missile defense system, which they say is hurting stability on the divided Korean peninsula.

Dozens of students later hurled garbage and brandished wooden sticks at riot police in sporadic street clashes. Police fought back with plastic shields and batons.

A mob of demonstrators stomped on a policeman. But no serious injuries were reported. At least one student was hauled off by police for questioning. Traffic was blocked for hours.

About 2,000 students, labor activists and civic group members marched in downtown Seoul, demanding a better social welfare system and protesting layoffs amid government-pushed corporate restructuring.

``We oppose (President) Kim Dae-jung, who is ruining the lives of workers,'' they chanted.

Shoving matches first erupted when police confiscated an effigy of President Kim that workers had intended to burn.

The protesters included activists who oppose the Bush administration's missile defense program, saying it was jeopardizing reconciliation on the divided Korean peninsula.

The communist North, along with Russia and China, vehemently opposes the U.S. missile shield project.

``Let's repel the MD (missile defense) and advance national reunification,'' the protesters chanted.

They set fire to a large U.S. flag and a tall effigy of an American missile, together with a photograph of President Bush, who arrived in Slovenia on Saturday for a first-time meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was expected to focus on the missile defense plan.

Also Saturday, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions vowed to step up its struggle to win wage increases and fight the government's corporate restructuring that it says is causing mass layoffs.

The threat came after the government decided Friday to arrest the confederation's leadership, accusing them of organizing illegal strikes at the nation's metal, chemical, aviation and hospital industries.

Operations at Asiana Airlines, South Korea's second-largest airline, remained crippled for a fifth straight day as union members continued their strike Saturday.

After overnight talks failed to resolve wage disputes with the union, the airline canceled 34 of its 69 scheduled international flights and 173 of 217 domestic flights on Saturday.

U.S. officials say they need a new missile defense system to protect U.S. territory and their allies from missile threats from such rogue states as North Korea.


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