------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Corpses used in N-testing: research
EU Official Decries Bush Effort on GE-Honeywell
Pakistan to Hold Summit with India July 14 - 16
India Says Pakistan - Held Kashmir on Summit Agenda
Pakistan Envoy Vows Nuclear Restraint
TEPCO to close reactor due to cooling water leak
Kazakhstan mulls storing foreign nuclear waste
North Korea Rebuffs U.S. on Troop Talks
An Alternative to Missile Defense
U.S. to go ahead with NMD project
Coalition Backs Bush On Missile Defense;
"How Real Is The 'Rogue' Threat?"
Tanaka commends, criticizes U.S.
Putin Says Russia Would Counter U.S. Shield
Putin Is Upbeat on U.S. Ties
Bush, Putin and the Missile Card
Experts Say Much Work Ahead To Secure Russian Nuclear Materials
Putin warns of nuclear arms race if US missile plan goes ahead
Putin reassures Jiang about Bush
Putin Warns Against Dismantling Treaty
Useful Legacy of Nuclear Treaty: Global Earphones
Beryllium testimony thrown out
USEC security deal fortifies ties
YUCCA MOUNTAIN:
Weapons scientist sues over China book
Physicist Sues Over Book Delay
Handicapping Reactors by the Numbers
Nuclear waste disposal: A safer solution?
EPA official hedges on Yucca investigation
MILITARY
Yugoslavia Wants Arms Embargo Ended
Reports: Taiwan to Test US Missiles
Taiwan Ready to Test - Fire Patriot Missiles
Colombia coca protest shows drug policy's social challenge
Colombia Rebels to Free 250 Prisoners in Peace Bid
Colombia's FARC rebels living in time warp
Colombia Rebels to Free War Prisoners
Grants to fund rehab for inmates
AMA Rejects Medical Marijuana
100 Afghan Refugees Captured in Iran
Bush Urged on Policy on Iran
Iraq Calls U.N. Reports Lies
Iraq No - Fly Zone Becoming Riskier
Panel passes bill allowing inciting violence against terror suspect
Japan, U.S. Reaffirm Ties, Air Disputes
Advancing freedom east
New Zealand builds peacekeeping force
Protests 'Quiet' as Navy Practice-Bombs
Bombing, and Protesting, Resume on Vieques
Vieques Protesters Credit Tactics
19 soldiers detained for killings in Chechnya
Afghan Rulers to Let Women Carry Out a U.N. Survey
Navy possibly caused death of rare whales
Ogg bill to aid Persian Gulf vets
OTHER
Asia makes big push into clean, alternative fuels
Japan's Toyota unveils 2 fuel cell hybrid vehicles
China strikes hard at crime
China Justice: Swift Passage to Execution
House Panel Erases Bush Energy Cuts
Price Limits Extended on Power
Military Utilities May Go Private
Army Utility Contracts at a Glance
Chemical site fears trigger health study
Amazon Chief Says Big Firms Threaten Forests
Bill Gates Pledges $100 Million to Fight AIDS
'Silly Little Virus' May Cure Brain Cancer
Back to Chechnya
War-crimes case filed against Sharon
Justice system that is short on justice?
Court Gives More Protection to Officers Sued Over Force
Ex - KGB General Testifies in Spy Trial
F.B.I. Agents on Bomb Case Pulled From Yemen After Threats
Death Sought for Terrorist Bomber
ACTIVISTS
ACTION ALERT To Nuclear Weapons Campaign Activists
Italian Chief Worried About Summit Protests
Algerian Government Bans Protests
Prisoner of Conscience
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
Corpses used in N-testing: research
From AAP
19jun01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,2143242%255E2,00.html
NUCLEAR experiments may have been carried out on the bodies of as many as 15,000 Australian men, women and children over a 20-year period, a newly discovered document suggests.
The single sheet of paper from the National Archives of Australia in Canberra shows almost 800 skeletons were used in experiments in one year alone - 230 of them from the corpses of children younger than five years old.
"That is a rather high rate of 'bodysnatching' for one year alone, in a program that went on for more than 20 years," Scottish researcher Sue Rabbitt Roff, who found the document today, said.
"If they were doing 792 samples a year, that would be about 15,000 humans."
Roff, who is involved in ongoing research on British nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s and their health effects on servicemen involved and their children, turned up the document while going through a bundle of papers brought back for her from Australia by a student.
"It was tucked in there with some other material that wasn't all that interesting. I was going through 700 pages of this for a totally other purpose and this thing popped out," she said.
The document, with the file number A6456/3 R029/148, lists the levels of radioactive isotope Strontium 90 in the calcium of Australian bone samples and the number of individuals the samples were taken from.
It shows that between January and December 1965, a total of 792 bodies were used, of which 174 were babies under 12 months old.
A further 56 were aged under five years, 102 were between five and 19 years old, and 460 were adults.
The paper also contradicts Australia's radiation safety authority's claim that the testing program only covered people aged up to 40, with 326 of the specimens taken from skeletons of people aged 40 or older, including 46 who were aged 80 or over.
The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency admitted a fortnight ago that Australia ran a testing program from 1957 to 1978 after the US government released details of a similar program, codenamed Project Sunshine.
It said the experiments were designed to measure the impact of fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests all over the world on the Australian population by measuring the level of Strontium 90 in bones.
The bones were collected from pathology laboratories in capital cities and were reduced to ash, with the ashes sent overseas for analysis, without informing or seeking consent from the next of kin.
-------- business
EU Official Decries Bush Effort on GE-Honeywell
Top Antitrust Commissioner Cites Political Interference by U.S. in Troubled Talks on $45 Billion Deal
By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; Page E01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15372-2001Jun18?language=printer
BRUSSELS, June 18 -- The European Union's top antitrust official today denounced what he described as political pressure by President Bush and other members of his administration to influence the EU's review of General Electric's $45 billion bid for Honeywell International.
Mario Monti, the EU's commissioner for competition affairs, condemned any political intrusion in the case and insisted the merger will be judged strictly on legal and economic merits. GE and Honeywell broke off negotiations with Monti's staff last week, saying the merger would not be worth pursuing if they had to meet the EU executive commission's demands.
After two fruitless meetings with Monti, GE's chairman and chief executive, Jack Welch, called White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. last week to express his disappointment and inform him that prospects for the deal looked bleak. A day later, just before giving a major foreign policy speech in the Polish capital of Warsaw, Bush told reporters, "I am concerned that the Europeans have rejected it."
Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans, speaking to reporters at the Paris air show last week, also publicly pleaded for a more positive assessment by EU regulators. "I would like to encourage them to think seriously about how constructive a merger like this could be," he said.
The Americans' remarks appeared to infuriate the normally mild-mannered Monti. "I deplore attempts to misinform the public and to trigger political intervention," he said after giving a speech today in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "This is entirely out of place in an antitrust case and has had no impact on the commission whatsoever. This is a matter of law and economics, not politics."
Only hours after Monti's criticism, U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick told reporters that although the Bush administration did not wish to question the EU commission's sovereign powers, it was troubled by the apparent impasse between Monti's staff and the companies. "If it ends up this way, it's an unfortunate result," Zoellick said.
If the commission decides to block the deal, it will mark the first time European regulators have rejected a merger between American companies that has already been approved by the U.S. Justice Department. Although Monti says the case should not be perceived as a transatlantic dispute, many analysts say that a negative decision could reinforce protectionist sentiments in the U.S. Congress.
The top two members of the U.S. Senate's antitrust subcommittee said Friday that they plan to examine why U.S. and EU antitrust officials reached such divergent conclusions on the deal. Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and ranking minority member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in a statement that "we intend to make further inquiries" into whether the difference in outcomes reflects "a rift in coordination and legal standards or is the product of a legitimate difference in opinion."
The senators expressed concern about the effect of the EU's stance on other U.S. businesses, saying that "uncertainty about either coordination or the legal ground rules will hinder the development of free and open markets and will impede efforts by American companies to expand into the global marketplace."
European Union law requires that all companies, regardless of where they are based, notify the EU commission about planned mergers if their combined worldwide annual sales exceed 5 billion euros (about $4.3 billion) and at least 250 million euros (about $215 million) worth of their business is done among the 15 EU nations.
Monti said he and his staff have worked closely over the past decade with their counterparts in the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. He denied that any anti-American prejudice had tainted his staff's assessment of the GE-Honeywell deal and stressed that "the merger had raised strong concerns among suppliers and customers, particularly the airlines, on both sides of the Atlantic."
Monti said the Bush administration's comments were all the more regrettable because unless GE and Honeywell formally withdraw their proposal, the case is still alive and will not be decided until the EU executive commission rules by July 12.
Honeywell's board of directors met today in New York City and issued a statement afterward reaffirming its commitment to the deal and saying that Honeywell "expects that GE will do everything possible to secure regulatory approval for the transaction."
The board, however, did meet "to review contingency plans to ensure the company is fully prepared for any outcome," said Honeywell spokesman Tom Crane. The company declined to comment specifically on the plans.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, Honeywell must pay GE $1.35 billion if the deal falls through because either Honeywell's shareholders or board disapproves it, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and posted on Honeywell's Web site. But the documents do not outline any penalty if GE walks away.
Welch and other GE executives called off negotiations in Brussels last Thursday after saying they had made a final offer but were no longer optimistic that the deal would be approved. They said GE had proposed selling assets with $2.2 billion in annual sales, but the commission was seeking divestments worth more than $6 billion a year.
GE said that it was willing to dispose of its regional jet business and parts of Honeywell's avionics systems but that it drew the line at the EU's request to spin off GE Capital Aviation Services, or GECAS, the company's highly profitable financial and airplane leasing arm.
Monti said the commission would be willing to accept smaller divestments in the aerospace industry by the two companies if they would entertain "a structural commitment to modify the commercial behavior" of GECAS without putting into question its control by GE.
Staff writer Carol Vinzant in New York contributed to this report.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan to Hold Summit with India July 14 - 16
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-pakista.html?searchpv=reuters
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan said Tuesday its military ruler General Pervez Musharraf would visit India from July 14 to 16 for the first summit talks between the two arch-rivals in more than two years.
Vajpayee invited Musharraf last month to discuss disputes between the two nuclear rivals and break a two-year deadlock in a peace process.
A Foreign Ministry statement said that Musharraf, visiting at the invitation of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, would also go to the Taj Mahal city of Agra near the capital New Delhi and the northern Indian city of Ajmer, site of a famous Muslim shrine.
--------
India Says Pakistan - Held Kashmir on Summit Agenda
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-p.html?searchpv=reuters
BOMBAY, India (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee insisted Tuesday that all of disputed Kashmir forms part of India, saying that July's summit with arch-enemy Pakistan would discuss only the Pakistani-run portion.
The meeting with General Pervez Musharraf will focus heavily on trying to ease tension between the two nuclear-capable neighbors over the divided Himalayan region, where a rebellion has raged against Indian rule for 11 years, and where the two countries last came to blows two years ago.
The Indian Foreign Ministry said Musharraf would visit from July 14 to 16 and the summit would be held in Agra, site of the Taj Mahal.
``I am an optimist,'' the 74-year-old Vajpayee told a news conference before heading back to New Delhi from Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital, where he had surgery to replace his right knee.
``I have invited General Musharraf with the hope that a proper climate will be created for resolving issues between the countries, and I am still hopeful.''
But he held firm to New Delhi's claim to all of Kashmir.
``There is no change in our position on the status of Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir is part of India and it will remain part of it,'' Vajpayee said. ``We will discuss the status of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and try to find a solution.''
India holds roughly 45 percent of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan holds a third, which it refers to as Azad, or Free, Kashmir, while India calls it Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. China controls the rest.
Islamabad denies New Delhi's charges that it backs the militancy in India's only Muslim-majority state, saying it provides only moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people's struggle for self-determination.
Kashmir has sparked two of the three full-scale conflicts between the two nations since they won independence from Britain in 1947.
Vajpayee said he would call an all-party meeting to discuss relations with Pakistan.
--------
Pakistan Envoy Vows Nuclear Restraint
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said Tuesday that his country will refrain from further nuclear testing so long as India shows similar restraint.
Sattar met with Secretary of State Colin Powell for 90 minutes, hoping to reverse the decline in Pakistani influence in Washington after the Cold War-era partnership between the two countries.
U.S. relations with Pakistan have been damaged by a number of factors, including the close ties Pakistan maintains with the Taliban militia in Afghanistan. The Taliban is harboring terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden, who is wanted in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.
Powell indicated he was satisfied with the meeting. ``There was no issue we could not discuss in a spirit of openness and candor, reflecting the great respect that we have for Pakistan,'' he said.
He added that he was encouraged by Sattar's account of the preparations Pakistan is making for restoring democracy next year. The country has been under military rule since October 1999.
Later, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked about the nature of the discussion between Powell and Sattar on Pakistan's support for the Taliban.
``The secretary made quite clear that the relationship with the Taliban was a matter of great importance to the United States,'' Boucher said.
Afghanistan is under United Nations Security Council sanctions because of its harboring of terrorists.
On the nuclear issue, Sattar said he told Powell that ``Pakistan will maintain the moratorium on further tests, that Pakistan will not be the first country to resume testing in the future, as we were not the first country to conduct tests in the past.''
Boucher said Powell welcomed that commitment.
He also indicated that the United States is no longer exhorting Pakistan and India -- as the Clinton administration did -- to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
This is an apparent reflection of the administration's own reservations about that treaty.
Powell said he informed Sattar of what Pakistan must do to get out from under sanctions, some of which have been in effect for more than a decade.
Others stem from the 1998 period when first India, then Pakistan, carried out a series of underground nuclear tests. The Bush administration hopes to phase out sanctions against both countries over time -- to the extent permitted by law.
Sattar said, ``This is a moment of hope in relations between Pakistan and India,'' a reference to the upcoming Kashmir summit meeting between the leaders of the two countries.
Powell said he supports the meeting. ``Any time leaders of two great countries get together to discuss issues of enormous complication, it's got to be a good thing,'' he said.
-------- japan
TEPCO to close reactor due to cooling water leak
JAPAN: June 19, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11245
TOKYO - Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) said yesterday it will temporarily shut down a 1.356-gigawatt nuclear reactor in northern Japan after it found cooling water had leaked from a tank.
TEPCO, Japan's largest power company, said no radiation had escaped into the environment from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power plant's No 6 reactor as a result of the incident.
TEPCO will manually close the reactor late yesterday for checks and repairs, the company said, adding that the leak occured in a place unrelated to the operation of the reactor.
The company did not say when the reactor would restart.
Japan has 51 commercial nuclear reactors, which provide about one-third of the country's power.
The industry has been criticised for a series of accidents, including Japan's worst-ever at a uranium-processing plant in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, in 1999 that killed two workers.
-------- kazakhstan
Kazakhstan mulls storing foreign nuclear waste
KAZAKHSTAN: June 19, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11231
ASTANA - A senior Kazakhstan official said yesterday the vast but sparsely populated Central Asian state might boost revenues by burying imported low-radioactivity nuclear waste on its territory.
Mukhtar Dzhakishev, head of the state nuclear firm Kazatomprom, told parliament that Kazakhstan might earn $30-40 billion in the next 25 to 30 years by storing foreign nuclear waste.
Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe but has a population of only 15 million.
"This is a very lucrative business, and we may arrange deals under which the government receives annual bonuses worth $200-500 million," Dzhakishev told deputies.
He said large amounts of waste could be buried in existing open-cast uranium mines in the western Mangistau region and sophisticated storage technology would not be needed.
"Barrels with compressed low-radioactivity waste are received, put in pits and covered with soil, and there is no radiation on the surface," he said.
Dzhakishev said Kazakhstan did not possess technology which would allow it to process and store high-radioactivity waste, but it could easily handle low-radioactivity waste like gloves, overalls, and other material from foreign nuclear power plants.
It was not immediately clear whether or when the government would submit a draft law to parliament. Dzhakishev gave no time frame or details of possible deals with foreign nuclear plants.
Earlier this month the lower chamber of the Russian parliament adopted a bill that is likely to open Russia to imports of spent nuclear fuel.
The bill, expected to be passed into law, has been given a hostile reception by environmentalists and the public in Russia who say it could turn the country into a nuclear dump.
Environmental concerns are also strong in Kazakhstan, whose northeastern Semipalatinsk region underwent hundreds of atmospheric, surface and underground nuclear tests in 1949-89.
The Soviet-era tests are blamed by scientists for a rising number of cancer cases and birth defects among local people.
-------- korea
North Korea Rebuffs U.S. on Troop Talks
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19KORE.html
TOKYO, June 18 -- In its first official reaction to American proposals to resume talks, North Korea has dismissed a Bush administration request that the issue of conventional forces be included along with questions of nuclear and ballistic missile control.
In a statement read on the state radio on Sunday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman accused President Bush of setting the agenda for the talks unilaterally. The statement said the United States must remove its 37,000 troops from South Korea before any discussion of North Korean troop deployments would be possible.
The North Korean spokesman said that with the American request to include conventional arms in the talks, "we cannot construe this otherwise than an attempt of the U.S. to disarm" North Korea "through negotiations."
Officials in Washington said they had no immediate comment on the North Korean statement.
When Mr. Bush came to office, he suspended talks with North Korea pending a complete review of United States policy toward the country.
Then, apparently after being urged by his father, the former president, to adopt a more moderate stance toward North Korea, Mr. Bush announced on June 6 that the United States would restart negotiations with the North on a range of issues -- including that nation's production and exporting of missiles and its stationing of soldiers on the South Korean border.
The apparent North Korean rejection of talks on conventional troops came one day after a conference held on the South Korean island of Cheju marking the first anniversary of the first summit meeting between leaders of North and South Korea.
At the conference, the South's president, Kim Dae Jung, said the most important achievement in rapprochement last year was the North's acceptance of the American military presence in South Korea. "The continued presence of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula serves the interest of the Korean people," Mr. Kim said he had been told by his Northern counterpart.
The word "apparent" is often used when describing North Korea's positions, not only because the country still remains largely closed and secretive but also because the statements of state media and even official spokesmen often matter little in the end. Major decisions are invariably made at the top, and without high level contacts it is often impossible to gauge the true disposition of the leadership.
The Bush administration's proposal to discuss conventional troop deployments in its talks with North Korea marks a significant departure from the policy of the Clinton administration. The previous efforts focused almost exclusively on eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons production in the North and ending the testing and sale of North Korean ballistic missiles.
In one of her final trips abroad as secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright visited the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. She met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, trying to secure final agreement over controls on the country's nuclear and missile technology, paving the way for a normalization of relations.
Mr. Bush suspended discussions with North Korea almost immediately after taking office, ordering a complete review of policy toward the country. But in announcing that he would resume talks, he promised that if North Korea "responds affirmatively" to American proposals, the United States will increase its efforts to help the North Korean people, ease sanctions and take other political steps.
The American announcement that it was prepared to resume talks was made on the eve of a visit to Washington by Foreign Minister Han Seung Soo of South Korea. President Kim of South Korea has made his "sunshine policy" of improving relations with the North central to his administration, and the American decision to halt talks had put a damper on that policy.
The United States' decision to move ahead with talks was made after the completion of the policy review, which pitted hard-line skeptics on North Korea at the Pentagon and the National Security Council against more pragmatic officials at the State Department.
Mr. Bush said he had directed officials to undertake serious talks with a broad agenda that included "verifiable constraints on North Korea's missile programs and a ban on its missile exports, and a less threatening conventional military posture."
The Bush administration's new policy toward North Korea had been awaited by American allies in Asia and Europe because of the perception that the administration was using the threat of North Korea's long- range missiles as a justification to develop a missile defense. In late 1998, North Korea sent a long-range unarmed missile toward Japan.
The American contacts with North Korea began in 1993 over concern that it was using material from nuclear power plants for weapons. During the Clinton administration, a former defense secretary, William J. Perry, laid out a strategy for talks and other actions to try to ease North Korea out of its long-term isolation.
North Korea has an estimated 700,000 troops out of its 1.17 million- member army stationed near the border with the South. The North also keeps thousands of artillery pieces stationed in forward positions, where they threaten the South's capital, Seoul. In recent Congressional testimony, American military officials have described the North Korean conventional threat as growing, largely as a result of increased readiness drills.
North Korea has always maintained that its troops are stationed there as a defensive measure, aimed at warding off attack by better trained and armed American and South Korean combat aircraft stationed close to the border.
The North Korean spokesman said talks held during the Clinton administration had been "in conformity with the interests of both sides" and had produced results helpful to improving relations. "In this sense," he added "we cannot but interpret the U.S. administration's proposal for resuming dialogue as unilateral and conditional in its nature and hostile in its intention."
-------- missile defense
An Alternative to Missile Defense
by Dietrich Fischer,
June 19, 2001
Antiwar.com Editorial
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/fisher1.html
During his trip to Europe, President Bush faced opposition to his planned missile shield from Russia's President Putin and the leaders of France, Germany and the Netherlands, while some others, especially the heads of state of the newly admitted NATO members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, who were eager to play the role of "good boys," voiced support. Bush is right on one point: what ultimately matters most is whether National Missile Defense (NMD) improves our security. He is wrong in believing it would.
One of the strongest arguments against NMD was made inadvertently by Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, when he tried to argue in favor of star wars, NMD's predecessor. He said, "Imagine how dangerous it would be if the Soviet Union got such a system first. They could launch their missiles without fear of retaliation." The same, of course, is true in reverse.
It is doubtful that such a system would ever work reliably, but even if it did not work, a leader who falsely believed it would work could be tempted to strike first. Therefore Russia and China announced they would have no choice but to increase their nuclear arsenals to make clear to a potential opponent that they could penetrate any such system. Thus if the United States were to embark on a plan to build a national missile defense system, this would precipitate a new nuclear arms race.
NMD would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and could unravel the whole process of arms control. The main beneficiaries and supporters are US defense contractors, who hope to make an estimated $60-100 billion at taxpayers' expense.
If the nuclear powers break their commitment under the ABM treaty gradually to eliminate all nuclear weapons, this double standard encourages others to acquire their own nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan justified their nuclear weapons programs by rejecting the monopoly of the established nuclear weapons powers.
If nuclear weapons proliferate, it is only a matter of time until "countries of concern" (formerly called rogue nations) and terrorist groups acquire some. NMD would offer no protection, even if it worked perfectly, because it cannot intercept bombs delivered in a suitcase, on a truck, or sailboat.
What we need instead is a more open world in which nuclear weapons can be effectively banned, as we have already concluded treaties banning biological and chemical weapons, with intrusive verification. The treaty with North Korea negotiated during the Clinton administration, which allows the United States to verify that North Korea has abandoned its programs to develop nuclear weapons and long range missiles in return for two nuclear power plants from the West which cannot generate nuclear weapons fuel, is a good example of what we need.
President Bush's opposition to stringent verification provisions to enforce the biological weapons treaty is shortsighted. We need more thorough inspections, also to prevent nuclear proliferation, and if we wish to inspect other countries, we must be willing to open our country to such inspections as well.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) can now inspect only sites that member countries voluntarily place under its supervision. If a suspected drug smuggler could tell a border guard, "You may check my trunk, but don't open the glove compartment," such an "inspection" would be meaningless. The IAEA must have the power to inspect any suspected nuclear facilities, without advance warning, even in non-member countries, otherwise it is impossible to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Many governments today object to such intrusive inspections as a "violation of their national sovereignty." But many airline passengers also protested first against having their luggage searched for guns or explosives, when that policy was introduced after a series of fatal hijackings. Many protested, "What's in my bag is my private business" and "why do you suspect me as a terrorist?" But most have come to realize that such inspections protect their own security. Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Sooner or later, governments will reach the same conclusion. The question is only whether this will happen before or after the first terrorist nuclear bomb explodes.
"National sovereignty" is a false issue here, since no country today has sovereign control over the world's nuclear arsenals. By giving the IAEA effective authority to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, we do not give up any control over our lives that we now possess, but gain added control that we could never achieve at the national level.
Ultimately, we must destroy all nuclear weapons. Some have argued that we cannot disinvent nuclear weapons and therefore will have to live with them as long as civilization exists. But nobody has disinvented cannibalism either, we simply abhor it. Can't we learn to abhor equally the thought of incinerating entire cities with nuclear weapons?
Dietrich Fischer, a Professor at Pace University, New York, is Co-Director of TRANSCEND, a peace and development network.
---------
U.S. to go ahead with NMD project
By Sridhar Krishnaswami,
June 19, 2001
The Hindu
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/06/19/stories/03190003.htm
WASHINGTON, JUNE 18. The United States will walk away from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty if it is determined that curbs on missile defence are blocking American technology, the Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, has said. But he was quick to point out that the point had not been reached.
At the summit meeting in Slovenia, the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, made it clear that he opposed the abandoning of the 1972 arrangement by the United States, but Bush administration officials maintained that the treaty was reached in a different era. ``We cannot allow its constraints'' to bind U.S. technology, Gen. Powell remarked. The Secretary of State has also argued that abandoning the ABM Treaty did not mean that a country was going to start making nuclear weapons. ``If there is no ABM Treaty tomorrow, there is no nation that is going to run out and start making nuclear weapons,'' Gen. Powell said, adding that the U.S. was going forward with the missile defence system.
Gen. Powell also said the U.S. would continue to track Russian companies and scientists who were helping Iran develop weapons system. ``Russia should see it is more in their interest than ours'' in coming to terms with weapons proliferation, he remarked. While last week, the President, Mr. George W Bush, tried to sell the idea of his missile defence to a sceptical Europe, this week his administration has to do the same with another major ally in Asia - Japan. The problem for this Republican administration is that much as it may want Japan to go back to its ``lynchpin'' status in the Far East, Tokyo is quite reluctant to assume a high-profile role, for regional reasons.
Today, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Ms. Makiko Tanaka, is expected to hold high-level meetings here with Gen. Powell and the National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleeza Rice. Japan has not exactly rushed to embrace the Missile Defence plan and has in fact, expressed reservations on the issue.
The Japanese Defence Minister has been quoted as saying that Tokyo has made no plans to participate in the Missile Defence initiative as it will be in conflict with the country's Constitution. Japan has said that it will stick to the present joint study with the U.S. on the Theatre Missile Defence which is aimed at protecting American troops in north-east Asia and allies like Japan.
----
[Know thine enemy.]
Coalition Backs Bush On Missile Defense;
Conservatives Highlight Government Responsibility To 'Provide For The National Defense'
U.S. Newswire
19 Jun 12:13
To: National Desk
Contact: Ian Walters of the American Conservative Union, 703-836-8602, ext. 16
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 /U.S. Newswire/ -- American Conservative Union (ACU) Chairman David A. Keene today unveiled a letter to President Bush, co-signed by more than fifty conservative leaders, supporting his efforts to establish a National Missile Defense. The letter also urges scrapping the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, arguing that it has been rendered obsolete by technology and changing world events.
"Our letter demonstrates a united front from conservatives and reflects the groundswell of public support for the President's defense proposals," said Keene. "It's clear that more and more of the American people agree that a missile defense is essential to preventing international nuclear blackmail, and that the ABM treaty, which prevents deployment of a missile defense, must be set aside."
Through its website, Americans for Missile Defense is in the process of gathering one million signatures in support of the President's Missile Defense Initiative. The information-website is available at http://www.conservative.org, which has lobbying tools and "action items" to help grassroots activists and groups make their voices heard.
To schedule a comment or interview with David Keene, or to receive an additional copy of the letter to President Bush, contact Ian Walters at 703-836-8602 x16, or e-mail iwalters@conservative.org
------
"How Real Is The 'Rogue' Threat?"
MSNBC.com -
June 19, 2001 -
By Robert Windrem,
NBC News
From: Kevin Martin <kmartin@projectabolition.org>
U.S. intelligence details missiles that fall far short of U.S. shores As President Bush, forging ahead with a plan to build a national missile shield, continues to trumpet the threat posed by missiles from so-called "rogue" nations, no missile currently deployed by countries hostile to the United States has the range to strike any of the 50 U.S. states. And only one missile system currently being developed by a foreign nation would have such a capability in the near future, according to intelligence and expert analysis.
Of the five "rogue" states usually mentioned in discussions of missile programs - Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Pakistan - only North Korea has what can be called an advanced missile development program. North Korea's Taepo-Dong 2 missile, still under development, would have the range to strike the United States - but likely only at Alaska's thinly populated western edge, or under the most optimistic assessments, the city of Anchorage. While it would be the first missile strike on U.S. soil, it would do little damage to U.S. strategic interests and would almost certainly be met by a devastating U.S. counterstrike, and that would do little damage to U.S. strategic interests, say U.S. officials.
Only two of the five "rogue" nations - North Korea and Pakistan - have nuclear weapons, and only Pakistan is believed to have successfully built nuclear warheads for its missiles. While U.S. intelligence believes North Korea has built one or two nuclear weapons, there is no evidence that it has built missile warheads, say U.S. intelligence sources, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Limited Programs
The five countries' missile development programs are hindered by other limitations, say U.S. officials and independent experts:
-None has fielded a missile with a solid rocket engine or even tested such an engine in flight. Each uses liquid fuel engines, which require hours and in some cases days to load and fire. A solid rocket engine can be lighted and fired within in minutes.
-None of the states have extensive missile-launch facilities or even missile-development facilities. North Korea's facility on the Sea of Japan is limited to a single, unprotected launch pad and nearby assembly building, connected by a dirt road.
-None have the industrial capability to build even moderately large numbers of missiles.
North Korea's Taepo Dong-2, the most advanced missile in development by any of the "rogue" states, has yet to be fired from the Koreans' rudimentary missile-test facility.
Under the most optimistic assessments, the missile would have a range of 3,600 miles when fielded, U.S. intelligence officials say. At that 3,600-mile range, it could strike as far east as Anchorage. If its range is at the low end of estimates - 2,400 miles - it could strike only the westernmost islands of Alaska's sparsely populated Aleutian chain.
The Taepo-Dong 2, named for the city where it is built, would need a range of more than 4,800 miles to strike the U.S. mainland, and somewhat less to hit Hawaii.
"North Korea has a very modest facility ... more of a missile proving ground, like White Sands out of 1946, not Vandenberg [Air Force Base] or the Kennedy Space Center," said Tim Brown, senior analyst for Globalsecurity.org. The White Sands Proving Ground was established in New Mexico at the tail end of World War II by the U.S. military to test new weapons' systems.
Short-Range Weapons No other nation on the "rogue" list has fielded a missile with a range greater than 900 miles, according to U.S. officials. Pakistan has the Ghauri missile, which it bought from North Korea and renamed for a Muslim king who invaded Pakistan's archrival India. Iran has yet to test any missile with a range greater than 600 miles.
Libya has only Scud-B missiles with ranges of 180 miles, and Iraq is limited by U.N. sanctions to missiles with ranges no greater than 90 miles.
Although Baghdad is believed to have hid Scud missiles from weapons inspectors, none have ranges greater than 540 miles. Development programs in each of those states is aimed at incremental increases in range, officials say.
Two of the missiles - the Pakistani Ghauri and the Iranian Shehab - are derivatives of North Korea's No-Dong missiles, which Pyongyang has sold and transported by both ship and cargo aircraft to buyer nations.
"One question is how reliable these systems would be," said Globalsecurity's Brown. "Putting a crude rudimentary system in operation without doing a lot of testing is risky. Military generals want a lot of testing. The question is, is this a serious military program or a terrorist program where you wouldn't necessarily have a lot of testing?"
The United States fears that North Korea could ultimately sell the longer range missiles it has under development as well. Still, because of geography, even if the Pakistanis or Iranians bought a North Korean missile and wanted to aim at the United States instead of one of their neighbors, neither is close enough to to strike even Alaska.
'Rogue' threat? -- Missile ranges fall short of U.S. shores
Iran
Scud C: 300 miles, Status-deployed
Shehab-3: 600 miles, Status-tested
Shehab-4: 900 miles, Status-in development
Distance to US -- 5,400 miles (Alaska), 7,200 miles (Mainland)
Libya
Scud B: 180 miles, Status-deployed
Distance to US -- 7,200 miles (Alaska), 9,000 miles (Mainland)
Iraq
Ababil-100: 60 miles, Status-deployed
al-Samoud: 90 miles, Status-tested
al-Hussein: 360 miles, Status-forbidden, possibly hidden
al-Abbas: 540 miles, Status-forbidden, possibly hidden
Distance to US -- 5,400 miles (Alaska), 7,800 miles (Mainland)
North Korea
Scud B: 180 miles, Status-deployed
Scud C: 300 miles, Status-deployed
No Dong: 600 miles, Status-tested
Taepo Dong 1: 900+ miles, Status-tested
Taepo Dong2: 3,600 miles, Status-in development
Distance to US -- 2,400 miles (Alaska), 4,800 miles (Mainland)
Pakistan
Shaheen: 180 miles, Status-deployed
Tarmuk: 180 miles, Status-deployed
Ghauri: 900 miles, Status-deployed
Distance to US -- 4,800 miles (Alaska), 6,600 miles (Mainland)
Note: Distances to the US are calculated over the pole or west to east.
Flying east to west, even though shorter in some cases, is inefficient since the missiles would be flying against the rotation of the earth, lengthening the flight.
Robert Windrem is an investigative producer for NBC News.
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Tanaka commends, criticizes U.S.
June 19, 2001
By Emily Charnock
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010619-704967.htm
Japan´s new foreign minister, on her first visit to Washington yesterday, welcomed U.S. consultation with China and Russia on missile defense, but objected to President Bush´s rejection of the Kyoto protocol on global warming.
Makiko Tanaka had been quoted in the Japanese press as criticizing the Bush administration´s plan for a missile defense shield. But speaking to journalists after a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, she said she "appreciates that the U.S. position [on missile defense] is to consult with interested states such as Russia and China."
Mrs. Tanaka, in office for seven weeks, was thought to want to reassure American officials that her opposition to a missile shield did not reflect any undue sympathy for China.
She had acted as informal first lady to her father, former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, when he normalized relations with China, and some have suggested that she may have forged strong ties with Beijing´s communist elite at that time.
At her meeting yesterday morning with Mr. Powell, Mrs. Tanaka expressed an understanding of the need for further research on missile defense, which she said could yield civilian applications.
A Japanese foreign ministry official, speaking on the condition he not be identified, said Mr. Powell had been unable to tell the foreign minister how long the research phase might take before the United States was ready to deploy a system.
A State Department spokesman said Mr. Powell told Mrs. Tanaka that the answer was in the hands of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is "working on the technology."
Referring to the Kyoto treaty to limit the emissions of gases associated with global warming, Mrs. Tanaka said Japan "is aware of the U.S. position but Japan does not agree with it."
She indicated there was strong support for ratification of the protocol within Japan.
The Japanese official, speaking later, said, "Japan would like to see the Kyoto protocol take effect. However, we still would like to see the U.S. involved."
Emphasizing the need for continued U.S.-Japanese cooperation, Mrs. Tanaka indicated that the tone of those relations could change.
"The Japan-U.S. alliance is the pivot of Japan´s foreign policy," she said.
"The security arrangements have already lasted 50 years and we would like to look at its benefits and burdens carefully as we may be at a milestone in the Japan-U.S. security arrangement."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher quoted Mr. Powell as telling Mrs. Tanaka: "You should always remember that the best friend of Japan is the United States."
Any changes in the security relationship could affect the size of the U.S. troop deployment on the Japanese island of Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the approximately 50,000 American troops in Japan.
Questions on troop deployment are raised often in the Japanese parliament. Mr. Powell assured Mrs. Tanaka that her concerns would be passed on to Mr. Rumsfeld and that efforts would be made to minimize the burdens of troop deployment on Japan.
Notably present at an earlier meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, whom Mrs. Tanaka failed to meet during his trip to Japan last month.
Mrs. Tanaka also met with U.S. Trade Representative Robert R. Zoellick to discuss economic issues. A Japanese foreign ministry official said Mr. Zoellick asserted that "the trends of the Japanese economy are important not only for Asia but for the world."
The Japanese government is planning structural reforms in order to kick-start the flagging economy. These reforms would control the issuance of national bonds and address the country´s fiscal structure. Mrs. Tanaka said the Japanese people would accept whatever pains came with these policies in order to restore the economy.
The ministry official characterized the meetings on the whole as "warm and friendly." Mr. Bush dropped in on the meeting with Miss Rice, saying he was looking forward to an upcoming visit by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who came to power at the end of April.
Mr. Bush outlined a broad agenda for the visit, including discussions on security, economic issues and U.S.-Russian relations. Mrs. Tanaka said she hoped that missile defense and the Kyoto protocol also would be discussed.
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Putin Says Russia Would Counter U.S. Shield
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19RUSS.html
MOSCOW, June 18 -- President Vladimir V. Putin said today that if the United States proceeded on its own to construct a missile defense shield over its territory and that of its allies, Russia would eventually upgrade its strategic nuclear arsenal with multiple warheads -- reversing an achievement of arms control in recent decades -- to ensure that it would be able to overwhelm such a shield.
Mr. Putin made his comments in a meeting with American correspondents that lasted nearly three hours tonight and was organized last week to give him an opportunity to explain his views after his summit meeting with President Bush in Slovenia on Saturday.
The Russian leader emphasized that though he is buoyed by Mr. Bush's pledge that Washington and Moscow will work cooperatively in coming months to investigate the full ramifications of Mr. Bush's vision for a new security framework that includes missile defenses, Russia is also very alert to unilateral American actions.
And in response to comments made Sunday in Washington by Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that the United States would proceed with missile defense with or without Russia, Mr. Putin said Russia would not threaten or try to prevent American actions, but would "augment" its nuclear forces without regard to treaties that now require the elimination of multiple warheads.
"When we hear statements that the programs would go with us or without us, well, we cannot force anyone to do the things we would like them to," he said. "We offer our cooperation. We offer to work jointly. If there is no need that such joint work is needed, well, suit yourself."
However, Mr. Putin added, "we stand ready" to respond to any unilateral American action, even though Russia does not see an immediate threat from a missile shield.
"I am confident that at least for the coming 25 years" American missile defenses "will not cause any substantial damage to the national security of Russia," he said. But he added, "We will reinforce our capability" by "mounting multiple warheads on our missiles" and "that will cost us a meager sum." And so, he said, "the nuclear arsenal of Russia will be augmented multifold."
He said both the Start I and Start II treaties would be negated by an American decision to build missile defenses in violation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. Such a step would eliminate verification and inspection requirements, he said, reviving an era in which Russia would hide its abilities and intentions.
Mr. Putin said Russia was ready to move expeditiously on talks with Mr. Bush's top aides, but he said he believed that the two sides first needed to discuss whether serious threats actually existed or might emerge in the future, then determine what missile defense technologies might be brought to bear against them, and then determine what provisions of the ABM treaty came into conflict with such a system.
Speaking in the Kremlin library at the round conference table where he met President Clinton last year, Mr. Putin also stated for the first time that Russia had taken an interest in ensuring that China's strategic concerns are addressed in the debate.
China has a much smaller nuclear missile force and fears that its national nuclear deterrent would be nullified by missile defenses.
"One must be very careful here," he said. "The transparency of our action is very important, lest none of the nuclear powers would feel abandoned or that two countries are making agreements behind their backs."
Asked if he had made a commitment to China, he replied, "there is a commitment to preserve the balance of security that we have now in the world as a whole and in this sense, China is an important element, and not only China." Mr. Putin said the United States should bear in mind China's strong economic potential and its growing ability to respond to national security threats.
He said what concerned him most was that a unilateral American deployment of missile defenses could "result in a hectic, uncontrolled arms race on the borders of our country and neighboring countries."
Mr. Putin said he reported to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, by telephone today the results of the meeting and Mr. Bush's message about a cooperative approach to examining threats to international security. Mr. Jiang and Mr. Putin met last week in Shanghai with Central Asian leaders to form a security and trade cooperation pact.
Speaking through an interpreter, Mr. Putin joked that he had tried to speak some English with Mr. Bush, but he said he feared that Mr. Bush had only pretended to understand him.
He also spoke with pride about his record as a career K.G.B. officer, pointing out that former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had once told him that "all decent people start out in intelligence," as Mr. Kissinger did. Then Mr. Putin added, referring to President Bush's father, who served as director of central intelligence, "The 41st president was not working in a laundry, he was working at the C.I.A."
While Mr. Putin directed his most pointed remarks at the comments of Ms. Rice, he praised a statement by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that the United States was not seeking the "destruction" of the ABM treaty. He said he had "taken due note" of Mr. Powell's assertion that Washington was seeking "effective but limited" defenses against potential ballistic missile threats from so- called rogue nations.
In identifying with Mr. Powell's formulation, Mr. Putin appeared to be signaling a hope that the Bush administration could be persuaded to work within the ABM treaty to develop the kind of limited defense system that Russia itself proposed.
Mr. Putin acknowledged that he and Mr. Bush had talked in detail about Iran, and Russia's growing arms relationship with its leaders. He said Russia had a "complex relationship" with Iran, but he praised President Mohammad Khatami as a "very moderate and very worthy partner" who was trying to bring Iran out of isolation.
He said Russia was committed not to supply nuclear or ballistic missile technologies to Iran, but would continue to sell defensive arms to Tehran, and he complained that the United States was guilty of "unfair competition in the arms market" by insisting that these sales should cease. He revealed that he had provided Mr. Bush with the names of American companies who have recently been in Iran offering "large scale" cooperation, which he did not specify.
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Putin Is Upbeat on U.S. Ties
Missile Defense Aside, He Sees Partner in Bush
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15045-2001Jun18?language=printer
MOSCOW, June 18 -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that he forged a "very high level of trust" with President Bush during their weekend summit but remained unpersuaded by Bush's arguments for building a missile defense system.
Putin said in an interview with The Washington Post and eight other news organizations at the Kremlin that he and Bush failed to reach a "common position" on a new strategic framework to replace the Cold War approach that still governs U.S.-Russian nuclear weapons doctrine. Taking issue with Bush's rationale for building a missile defense system, Putin said missile strikes from such "rogue states" as North Korea are not realistic threats to the United States.
But Putin, who has traveled the world leading opposition to U.S. missile defense plans in the last year, sounded far more interested in compromise and even collaboration on a nuclear defense shield than he has in the past. Putin even suggested he was now open to revising, though not abandoning, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and other arms control agreements. Despite his doubts, Putin seemed strikingly upbeat about the new relationship, referring repeatedly to Bush as a "partner" and calling him "a nice person to talk to."
"The president now says that Russia and the United States are no longer adversaries; moreover they can become partners," Putin said of Bush. "It is precisely from this standpoint that we should have a look at the entire package of previously concluded agreements between us."
Putin conducted the wide-ranging, nearly three-hour interview with news organizations from the United States in the wood-paneled Kremlin Library. He defended his conduct of a brutal war in the breakaway region of Chechnya, denied that Russia is selling sensitive nuclear technology to Iran, and asserted that genuine media freedom in Russia has been held hostage by rich owners trying to "blackmail" the state.
He also revealed that he had passed along a message to Bush from Chinese President Jiang Zemin that China is ready to "forget about" the period of tensions following the collision of a U.S. surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter in April. Putin went to Slovenia for the summit meeting with Bush on Saturday after meeting with Jiang in Shanghai, and he called the Chinese president today to brief him on the results.
The Russian president, who invited American correspondents to the Kremlin for the first time in his 1 1/2 years in office, gave long, detailed answers to questions, holding forth on everything from his career as a Soviet KGB agent (good training, he said, for "working with people") to the Taliban's destruction of centuries-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan ("a horrible act") to the velocity of a ballistic missile (4.3 to 4.6 miles per second).
Putin, who has been learning English and tried it out on a walk with Bush on Saturday, even interrupted his translator at one point to correct a word. Told by an aide it was time to end the session just before 11 p.m., a president who rarely gives interviews and has never given a full-fledged news conference, said simply, "Thank God!"
Today's meeting marked a new public relations strategy for Putin as he basked in the goodwill generated by a convivial summit in which Bush, who began his term skeptical about engagement with Russia, effusively praised the Kremlin leader. Bush said after the meeting with Putin that he had gotten "a sense of his soul" and found him to be an "honest, straightforward man who loves his country" and who could be trusted.
At the same time, Putin made it clear he remained skeptical about missile defense after hearing Bush's case for why it is needed. In particular, Putin questioned the nature of threats from such countries as North Korea, suggesting they have outdated technology not capable of posing a serious danger to the United States for decades, if ever.
Reiterating Russia's position that the 1972 ABM Treaty is a cornerstone of international stability and should not be scrapped, Putin said abandoning the pact would make it much easier for new countries to develop nuclear weapons. Then, he asked rhetorically, "Will the world be a more secure place?"
Asked about suggestions by Bush advisers that the White House is prepared to build a missile defense shield whether Russia participates or not, Putin replied testily, "When we hear that some program or other will be carried out 'with or without us' -- well, we cannot force anyone to cooperate with us, nor will we try to." And, he added: "We have offered to work together. If that is not needed, fine. We are ready to act on our own."
A breakdown in the new joint approach with the United States could set off a new arms race, he said, and result in Russia taking action to bolster its nuclear stockpile by placing multiple warheads atop its current single-warhead missiles. This could slow or halt the projected sharp decline in Russia's nuclear arsenal in the years ahead, caused by obsolescence and arms control treaties. Adding such multiple warheads "will cost only a meager sum of money," Putin said, "and the nuclear arsenal of Russia will be augmented multifold."
In the meantime, Putin said, it's unlikely that a U.S. decision to go it alone on missile defense would pose a serious threat to Russia because he said he doubted that the U.S. could successfully build a shield to counter a nuclear strike.
"It's like a bullet hitting a bullet. Is it possible today or not? Today experts say that it is impossible to achieve this," he said. "And the experience of real tests demonstrates that today it is impossible."
Despite objections to missile defense, Putin characterized his meeting with Bush as the inauguration of a new era in U.S.-Russian relations -- "a clean sheet of paper," he called it -- and suggested that the recent frostiness between the countries is a result of intelligence agencies stuck in outdated, Cold War antagonism.
Putin denied again selling technology to Iran that could help it build nuclear weapons. As for improper contacts with the Iranians, Putin said he gave Bush the names of U.S. businessmen who have been quietly working out deals with officials in Tehran. He suggested a joint secret police operation to prevent the spread of sensitive technology.
"I'm proposing that the U.S. and Russia special services agents pool their efforts, join hands, in order to counter the threat of nuclear missile technology proliferation," he said.
Putin hotly defended his actions in Chechnya, where Russia is waging its second war to keep the breakaway region under its control. "When it comes to Chechnya, I am getting tired of repeating these things again and again. . . . It would appear that it takes a real dumb person not to understand," he said. He added that he told Bush to consider a scenario in which "people invade the South" and want to take away "half of your state of Texas."
And he dismissed concerns about freedom of the press in Russia, suggesting media owners such as Vladimir Gusinsky, founder of the NTV television network, deserved no sympathy because they profited from misuse of state assets. Gusinsky "got almost $1 billion and didn't give it back and doesn't intend to," Putin said, referring to financial support Gusinsky received from the state energy monopoly Gazprom.
As for his own past with the KGB, Putin said it taught him how to work with people from different walks of life; describing his experience, he sounded as if he were talking about his new relationship with Bush. "If you want to achieve a result, you must treat your partner with respect."
Correspondent Peter Baker contributed to this report.
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Bush, Putin and the Missile Card
New York Times
June 19, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/opinion/L19BUSH.html?searchpv=nytToday
To the Editor:
Re "Putin Urges Bush Not to Act Alone on Missile Shield" (front page, June 17):
At President Bush's meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, both leaders called for a partnership between their two countries, and they tactfully avoided arguing over the American administration's intention of proceeding with a national missile defense system.
One way to foster this partnership and at the same time facilitate the development and possible deployment of an American national missile defense system would be for the United States to offer to share that technology with the Russians and help them to develop such a system of their own. In light of the likely limitations in such a system on either side, this offer would not be inconsistent with American (second-strike) nuclear strategy.
ROLAND PAUL
Westport, Conn., June 17, 2001
The writer was counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on United States Security Commitments Abroad, 1969-71.
•To the Editor:
The initial positive result from the meeting between President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin (front page, June 17) presages an important shift in United States-Russia relations, although not necessarily policy. That should come in time, as old perceptions give way to a new pragmatism on both sides.
The United States clearly has a strategic interest in a stable, democratic and economically prosperous Russian Federation, whether as a geopolitical ally or as a trading partner.
The American private sector can take advantage of the modest opening in trust and dialogue that occurred in the presidents' meeting to promote better mutual understanding and cooperation on many levels. It can do this by supporting the efforts of nonprofit, professional and other bilateral groups to effectuate a rebuilding of bridges between our two countries. It is in our self-interest to do so.
GEORGE STANISLAUS BOREY
New York, June 17, 2001
The writer is president, Russian American Institute for Law and Economics.
To the Editor:
Re "Misrepresenting the ABM Treaty" (editorial, June 15):
President Bush wants to protect us from a nuclear missile attack by North Korea, Iraq or Iran. But in the years that it will take to deploy a missile shield, the political situation in those countries may be completely different. And even if we spend our country's wealth on a missile shield, it would still not protect us from a bomb delivered by motorcycle, truck or ship.
In the meantime, we will have unleashed a dangerous new arms race.
SYLVIA FOX
Scarsdale, N.Y., June 16, 2001
•To the Editor:
As a Dutchman living in this country, I would like to say that Gregg Easterbrook is right that the United States is "the best friend Europe has ever had" (Week in Review, June 17). But to suggest that the main reason for the European Union's recent criticism of positions taken by the United States is the political convenience of such criticism glosses over the fact that many of the issues raised are truly anathema to Europeans.
For many years, Europeans accepted American values as strong, right and worthy of emulation. Thus, to many Europeans today, it is a source of wonder and astonishment that just when Europe is coming of age and is legitimately raising issues like the environment, the death penalty and social solidarity, such critique is considered mere political posturing rather than as the realistic observation of a good and old friend.
SANDOR JOO
Greenwich, Conn., June 17, 2001
•To the Editor:
Re "Plain-Talking Bush Is Using His Charm on European Stage" (front page, June 16):
The president of the United States makes "an irreverent, towel-snapping" remark to the British prime minister, Tony Blair? Then engages in "an evolving Abbott-and-Costello routine" with the NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson? Have we lowered the bar that much on what constitutes "charm"?
SAM LUDU
Baldwin, N.Y., June 16, 2001
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U.S./Russia: Experts Say Much Work Ahead To Secure Russian Nuclear Materials
By Robert McMahon,
June 19, 2001
Radio Free Europe
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/06/19062001114133.asp
A new report from independent experts says that despite progress, a large amount of nuclear weapons-grade material in Russia is still at risk for proliferation. The report says cooperation between U.S. government agencies and Russian officials helped bring hundreds of metric tons of nuclear material under control, but the concern over theft or diversion is still high. RFE/RL correspondent Robert McMahon reports.
New York, 19 June 2001 (RFE/RL) -- As U.S. and Russian leaders discuss possible changes in the Cold War arms control regime, cooperation at a lower level has begun to gradually bring under control nuclear material in the vast complex of storage sights in the former Soviet Union.
A new report from two prominent U.S.-based think tanks says significant progress has been achieved during the past decade in U.S.-Russian programs aimed at securing dozens of sites where nuclear weapons-grade material is stored.
Hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. government assistance programs have helped improve security at nuclear storage sites in Russia and other former Soviet republics, where warheads or materials such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium were stored.
But according to the report -- released on 18 June by the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- hundreds of metric tons of Russian nuclear materials remain in facilities without upgraded security.
Leonard Spector is deputy director of the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies. He tells RFE/RL that the U.S.-funded program has secured about one-third of the weapons-grade material so far:
"It's a substantial program under any circumstances, but many believe it needs to be moving faster and more funds are needed for that purpose."
About $150 million is allotted by the U.S. Energy Department annually for the program to secure nuclear materials. The proposed budget of President George W. Bush calls for some cuts in this funding. It also calls for deep cuts in a program that provides aid to Russian scientists who formerly worked on nuclear weapons in closed cities.
The U.S. government's National Security Council is currently reviewing the effectiveness of several of these U.S.-Russia programs.
The 200-page Carnegie-Monterey report provides a catalogue of all facilities in the former Soviet Union where nuclear weapons-grade material is stored. It notes a lack of progress at some sites in part because Russian officials refuse to provide U.S. experts direct access to those facilities.
The Monterey Institute's Spector says the former secret status of some weapons storage sites continues to pose a challenge for the U.S. Energy Department program:
"A lot of the facilities in Russia are quite sensitive. So we have to often work out special arrangements that allow [the United States] to be confident that [its] money is being spent the way [it] wants it to be spent on security equipment, and that the material equipment is being installed properly. But sometimes you cannot get actual access to these plants, because it is just too secret."
An example of such a site is a nuclear warhead production and dismantling facility in Sarov, about 400 kilometers east of Moscow. The site, known in Soviet times as Arzamas-16, received monitoring devices and other equipment from the United States in 1998, but installation has been delayed because U.S. experts have not been given access to the site. The Department of Energy says there are more than 1,000 kilograms of both plutonium and highly enriched uranium at the site.
In areas where U.S. experts have been allowed access, they have provided protection systems such as fences around buildings that contain nuclear material, metal doors for rooms where material is stored, and video surveillance systems monitoring storage rooms.
At the Mayak Production Association, for example, the Department of Energy has installed huge interlocking concrete blocks over trenches containing more than 5,000 containers of plutonium.
The General Accounting Office, which is an investigative body for the U.S. Congress, said in a report earlier this year that the concrete blocks were protecting more than 15 metric tons of plutonium. But the office said in the same report that it found security lapses during a random tour of three sites that were supposed to have been secured. At one site, the office said, it found a gate to a nuclear storage facility left open and unattended during the day.
Spector of the Monterey Institute says the work involved in securing a storage site can be exhausting and expensive:
"The Russians certainly have capable individuals and many of them are quite dedicated to this mission. The trouble is that it's very costly to upgrade all these different sites, put the fences in, put the sensors [in], upgrade the vaults, and so on -- and there's simply too much work to be done, in a certain sense, and not enough money."
The Department of Energy estimates that it will need until 2020 to complete the Material Protection, Control, and Accounting program, at a cost of about $2.2 billion. But continued cooperation with Russia is crucial to meeting this goal.
The Monterey-Carnegie report, meanwhile, cites clear progress in facilities in other former Soviet republics, saying it has removed Georgia from the list of countries storing weapons-grade nuclear material. It says the last five kilograms of highly enriched uranium were removed from the Institute of Physics near Tbilisi in 1998 and airlifted to Scotland as part of an operation involving the United States and Britain.
The majority of Kazakhstan's weapons-grade material has also been removed or secured. The report says Kazakhstan, as well as Ukraine, has benefited greatly from U.S. assistance in creating export control systems to help in nonproliferation. And it says Kazakh officials have worked to strengthen export control over military goods and technology since 1999, in part responding to the controversial export of MiG aircraft to North Korea.
The report says Belarus and the Baltic countries also have fairly well-developed export control systems in place, but adds that most of Central Asia needs help in creating more effective controls. There are concerns the region could serve as a route for the illegal trafficking of nuclear materials because of its location between countries that already have nuclear weapons -- Russia and China -- and those reportedly seeking nuclear technology, such as Iran, Iraq, India, and Pakistan.
Nuclear experts say as little as 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and eight kilograms of plutonium are needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, says that since 1993, there have been more than 370 confirmed incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear material and radioactive sources. Most of these incidents have not involved material that can be used for making nuclear weapons, but they have led to increased efforts to prevent and combat trafficking.
IAEA general director Mohamed El Baradei said last month that broad international cooperation will be needed to upgrade security measures, improve capabilities for intercepting illicit trafficking and to strengthen the protection of nuclear facilities against terrorism and sabotage.
----
Putin warns of nuclear arms race if US missile plan goes ahead
June 19, 2001,
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-19jun2001-121.htm
Russian President Vladmir Putin has warned that his country is prepared to engage in a renewed nuclear arms race if the United States goes ahead with its planned nuclear missile shield program.
The blunt warning was issued during an interview with a number of American News Organisations at the Kremlin.
President Putin said it would cost Russia only a meagre sum of money to fit multiple nuclear warheads to its existing missiles, but that such an action would greatly increase Russia's striking power.
He was speaking after returning from a meeting with US President George Bush in Slovenia last weekend at which Mr Bush stressed his determination to push ahead with the missile shield despite deep suspicion from Russia and other European countries.
Mr Putin, who yesterday phoned Chinese President Jiang Zemin to brief him on the Summit, said Russia was open to revising though not abandoning the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, and that if the United States did not want to work together, Russia was ready to act on its own.
----
Putin reassures Jiang about Bush
Tuesday, June 19 12:53 AM SGT
http://english.hk.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/asia/afp/article.html?s=hke/headlines/010619/asia/afp/Putin_reassures_Jiang_about_Bush.html
MOSCOW, June 18 (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin told his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin Monday that he feels there is a real chance of having constructive talks with US President George W. Bush, the Kremlin said.
In a telephone conversation, Putin underscored to Jiang "the real possibility of maintaining a constructive and continued dialogue with George Bush," said the Kremlin statement.
The call to Beijing followed a US-Russian summit in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana on Saturday.
Putin, who is seeking to counterbalance US influence in the world by aligning himself with China, sought Jiang's advice on the eve of Saturday's summit in Ljubljana.
Moscow and Beijing oppose US plans to deploy a missile shield that Washington argues would protect its territory from attacks by so-called rogue states such as Iraq, North Korea and Iran.
Putin and Jiang "confirmed their shared views on strategic stability," the Kremlin statement added.
Bush came away from his talks with Putin sounding a positive note and saying that the former KGB official is a man Washington can do business with.
But the two leaders continue to disagree on the need to boost missile defenses, with Moscow reasserting its view that it would be an unacceptable violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.
China and Russia has both said that the ABM treaty is a cornerstone of international security arrangements.
Putin and Jiang also "have similar views concerning Kosovo and the Balkans," the Kremlin added.
Putin traveled to Belgrade and Kosovo on Sunday.
--------
Putin Warns Against Dismantling Treaty
By Deborah Seward
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; 4:11 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010619/aponline041123_000.htm
MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said he and President Bush reached a "very high level" of trust during their weekend summit, but warned that Russia would strengthen its nuclear arsenal if the United States developed missile defenses that undermined key security treaties.
In a 21/2-hour interview Monday night with American reporters in the wood-paneled Kremlin library, Putin said Bush was a "very attentive listener" during the meeting in Slovenia. Putin said he was pleased America no longer considered Russia an enemy.
The mini-summit was the first between Bush and Putin, and the meeting the Kremlin had arduously pursued was a prize for Putin. The globe-trotting Russian leader had visited China just before Slovenia and made lightning stops in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and in Kosovo on his way home.
Putin revealed publicly for the first time that he had passed on a message from Chinese President Jiang Zemin to Bush saying his country was ready to put the April downing of a U.S. reconnaissance plane by the Chinese military behind them.
While acknowledging that Russia is not an equal partner in its relationship with the United States, Putin seemed confident and optimistic about Russia's future and pleased by Bush's assessment that he was a man who could be trusted.
"It seemed to me the words that we said during the press conference were not just formal statements," Putin said. "They indeed reflected a very high level of trust between the two of us. I must say that the president is a nice person to talk to."
Putin said he and Bush agreed to work together to identify security threats. The United States has cited so-called rogue states such as North Korea as the reason for wanting to change the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty to allow for a missile shield Russia opposes.
Specialists, Putin said, had been assigned to analyze possible threats and how the treaty might affect efforts to counter them. But he was clear that Russia didn't see the same threats as the United States does.
"Here we do not have a common position," Putin said.
Putin said he was worried about possible unilateral action such as U.S. abrogation of nuclear treaty commitments. But he said Russia would strengthen its nuclear capability - a claim Russia has made in the past - if America insisted on going it alone.
"But at least for the next 25 years, unilateral action will not cause substantial detriment to the national security interests of Russia," he said.
Putin also repeated Russia's position that the United States should not abandon the ABM treaty, saying that would undermine efforts to limit the numbers of nuclear weapons.
"If one would imagine that we would throw away the ABM treaty, it would mean that automatically the START I and START II (treaties) are thrown in the trash immediately," he said.
Disposal of the treaties would compel Russia to reinforce its nuclear capability, he said.
"Our nuclear potential will be strengthened," he said, adding that it wouldn't take much money to upgrade the nuclear arsenal and that it would be done by putting multiple warheads on strategic missiles.
The Russian leader dismissed U.S. concerns that countries such as North Korea could pose a security threat, saying Pyongyang's missile technology was based on antiquated German and Soviet technology. Putin cited religious extremists as a real threat, including the Taliban, who have imposed harsh Islamic rule in Afghanistan. He called the Taliban destruction of ancient Buddhist statues "a catastrophe."
He also insisted that Bush's proposed missile defense shield would never work.
"It's like a bullet hitting a bullet. Is it possible today or not? Today experts say that it is impossible to achieve this," Putin said.
It was the first time Putin had invited a group of U.S. journalists for a sit-down in the Kremlin since his election in March 2000. The self-assured Putin said he was "getting tired" of repeating Russia's position on its much-criticized war in Chechnya, and that his past as a KGB officer had given him a special ability to work with people.
Putin also said in a joking manner that Bush put up with his efforts to speak English, a language he is learning.
"I attempted to say a few words to President Bush in English," he said. "He was extremely nice about it. He pretended to understand what I was talking about."
Putin and other Kremlin officials have said they achieved their goals at the summit by renewing a dialogue with the United States that had diminished in recent months amid spy scandals, the ABM disagreement, and talk in the United States that Russia no longer matters much.
Answering another U.S. concern, Putin said Russia does not provide weapons to Iran that the United States or Israel could consider a threat. He also denied that Russia helped spread the technology for weapons of mass destruction.
"Even in the interest of our own national security, we have no plans to transfer these nuclear missile technologies to other countries, including Iran," he said.
Although Russia has "complicated" relations with Iran, Putin praised Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as a "modern leader" and a "worthy partner."
Putin said Moscow was worried unilateral action by the United States on weapons pacts "will result in a hectic uncontrolled arms race" in countries near Russia with nuclear aspirations.
"The U.S. is talking a lot about this concern, but for us it's a real one."
-------- treaties
Useful Legacy of Nuclear Treaty: Global Earphones
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/science/19NUKE.html
Though the Senate voted two years ago to reject a treaty that bans nuclear testing, one of its provisions is alive and thriving: the global network of sensors meant to listen for clandestine nuclear blasts.
Though still under construction, the International Monitoring System is already yielding a wealth of science spinoffs, detecting violent winds, volcanic eruptions and the crash of meteoroids from outer space.
"It's a vast new tool," said Hank Bass, director of the National Center for Physical Acoustics, based at the University of Mississippi. "For the first time, we'll have a global system of microphones listening to the atmosphere of the planet."
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty calls for 90 countries to be host to a network of 321 stations whose sensors monitor the land, sea and air for faint vibrations and other telltale signs of nuclear blasts. More than 100 stations are now relaying data by satellite and cable to Vienna, where 220 people work at the system's headquarters.
Despite the Senate rebuff in 1999, the United States is a major backer of the monitoring system. It pays about a quarter of the total costs, and United States technical and scientific support is regarded as crucial to the network's success.
Earlier this year, some treaty opponents tried to halt the financial aid, saying the ban's goals were illusory or contrary to American interests. But its backers fought back vigorously, led in part by Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, whose defection from the Republican Party put Democrats in control of the Senate earlier this month. Battles over the monitoring system continue in Washington, and it is unclear if American support will continue.
Experts on both sides say the existence of an effective monitoring system, which its proponents see as central to treaty policing, would increase the chances that the accord might one day be revived.
In all, the surveillance system is to have 170 stations that detect underground shock waves, 11 that track undersea explosions, 80 that sniff the air for telltale radioactivity and 60 that listen for revealing sounds in the atmosphere, including winds and shock waves.
Dr. Gerardo Suarez, a geophysicist from Mexico who directs the International Monitoring System in Vienna, said the emerging network was starting to excite experts far beyond the world of arms control. "The scientific community is awakening to the enormous possibilities," he said in an interview.
Interested groups, he said, include the World Meteorological Organization, which wants wind data for global weather forecasting, and the World Health Organization, which wants to track radioactivity in the atmosphere.
"It's a tremendous challenge," Dr. Suarez said of building the global network. "There's never been anything like it. We have stations from the Arctic to Antarctica."
New additions to the surveillance system include ground-based microphones that listen to the air for low- frequency sounds far below the range of human hearing. Dr. Douglas Christy, head of the acoustic group in Vienna, said that by the end of the year some 20 of the 60 sound stations will be operational.
"Things are moving along very rapidly," he said. "It's hectic. But we're happy with it."
On April 23, the fledgling system detected a speeding meteoroid that crashed into the atmosphere over the Pacific, where it produced a blast nearly as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
In the past, such explosions often escaped notice because they usually occur over the sea or uninhabited lands. The new information will help scientists calculate how often these strikes occur and the odds of "doomsday rocks" hitting the planet.
Today, the International Monitoring System and its member states are keeping the data private among themselves until global agreements can be made for its wider release, Dr. Suarez said. A few nations, he said, fear that improper analysis of the data might confuse small explosions in the mining or construction industries with clandestine nuclear blasts.
Preliminary work on the monitoring system began in late 1996 after the treaty was opened for signature and has been accelerating ever since. In the United States, the Defense Department does much of the work.
Treaty opponents have argued that small blasts can elude the monitoring system and that America might one day need to test its old nuclear arms or design new ones.
When the Senate in 1999 rejected the treaty, conservative Republicans tried, but failed, to cut the monitoring funds as well.
Early this year, just after President Bush took office, they launched a new drive. On March 12, Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who then was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote the State Department to urge that the United States remove its signature from the test-ban treaty and "terminate funding" for its organizations, including the network of sensors.
On April 4, 10 Senate Republicans, including Mr. Helms and Trent Lott of Mississippi, then majority leader, made the same argument to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. "We urge you," they wrote, "to terminate Defense Department efforts to implement the treaty."
Treaty opponents call support for the system -- or any provision or organization called for in the treaty -- a surrogate for backing the treaty itself, which is why they want the monitoring effort halted.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a former Pentagon official who opposes the pact, said in an interview that the monitoring is "a backdoor way to get us" into the treaty. Mr. Gaffney, who directs the Center for Security Policy, a private group in Washington, said establishing the monitoring system "creates a rubric in which a future administration might endorse the treaty."
Senator Jeffords, a longtime treaty supporter, fought back on April 6, urging Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to persevere. "We must avoid any weakening of our commitment to international nuclear test monitoring," he wrote in a letter with Senator Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island.
A few weeks later, on May 10, Secretary Powell told Congress that the Bush administration would seek $20 million for the test-ban work next year. That figure is what the program office in Vienna had requested.
Secretary Powell is one of the few officials in the Bush administration to have supported the Senate's approval of the treaty, which he did in January 1998 along with three other former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Jeffords, in announcing his departure from Republican ranks on May 24, made no mention of the test ban or its monitoring. But aides said the topic was one of many where he foresaw growing disagreements with the Bush administration and Senate leaders.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, a private group in Washington, said the Senate's shift into Democratic hands will aid the monitoring and "make life far more difficult for the Dr. Strangelove caucus."
If the United States and the 159 other nations of the treaty organization maintain their contributions, construction of the monitoring system could be completed by late 2005, Dr. Suarez said. That is somewhat behind the schedule envisioned a few years ago.
By late this year, he said, his team will have finished surveying 90 percent of the proposed station sites around the world, many of which lie in remote or inhospitable regions.
In the United States, despite the political clash over monitoring, 26 of 37 planned stations have already been built, a Bush administration official said.
The White House might want to pull out of the monitoring program after it finishes its reviews of nuclear policy, the official added. But the president and his aides, though largely treaty opponents, will probably choose to avoid that step and the likely uproar.
"The politics are really hairy," the official said. "They may want to let it limp along because of its high political profile."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Beryllium testimony thrown out
Expert witness violated gag order, judge says
By Ann Imse,
June 19, 2001
Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_674437,00.html
A Jefferson County judge threw out the testimony of an expert witness for the Rocky Flats beryllium victims Monday, after being told the witness violated his gag order with an inflammatory Web site and threatened to deliberately cause a mistrial. District Judge Frank Plaut also threatened to punish the plaintiffs for hiring David Egilman by removing their lead lawyers.
But Plaut denied the defense motion for a mistrial in the case, in which 55 people are suing beryllium producer Brush Wellman Inc. of Cleveland. They claim Brush Wellman conspired with the federal government to conceal the dangers of beryllium for 50 years, because it was needed to make nuclear weapons at Rocky Flats.
It is the first of 76 lawsuits filed by 200 beryllium victims against Brush Wellman around the country, and the jury's verdict was expected to influence both sides in deciding whether to settle the other cases.
The judge read some of the offensive lines in court -- accusations of criminal activity against Jones Day, the defense law firm, and references to a longtime Brush Wellman medical director being educated in Nazi Germany.
Egilman, a Brown University occupational health historian who said he testifies about "who knew what when," said after the judge's ruling that he never threatened a mistrial. He also denied violating the gag order, saying he took the Web site down by making it password-protected.
Egilman also said that defense attorneys from Jones Day hacked into the Web site illegally, and that he was trying to catch them.
That left plaintiffs' attorney Alicia Butler hard-pressed to explain to the court why, just after Jones Day complained about the Web site last week, she sent Egilman an e-mail saying, "They bit. A copy of your new page showed up in court just now."
Plaut ignored the question of how defense attorneys accessed the site.
The jury heard nothing of this, and was told only to disregard Egilman's testimony. But the judge read into the record his opinion that Egilman's comments about the case on his Web site were "scurrilous and inflammatory," casting "great doubt on his legitimacy and integrity as a witness."
Beryllium is now used in a variety of products, despite growing evidence that breathing the tiniest amount can bring on an incurable, wasting lung ailment in a small percentage of workers.
-------- kentucky
USEC security deal fortifies ties
The new agreement between USEC and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant clarifies when security officers can use firearms.
June 19, 2001
By Joe Walker jwalker@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2001/nn11271.htm
A new agreement with USEC Inc. clarifying when security officers can use firearms has eased strained union-management relations at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, said union President John Driskill. "We see all this as a positive change in our relationship with USEC, and we hope it bodes well in the last few months preceding discussions about a new contract," he said.
Driskill said he expressed those feelings to USEC President and Chief Executive Officer William "Nick" Timbers during Timbers' visit to Paducah last month celebrating the plant's upgrade to stand-alone status.
The five-year contract with Security Police and Fire Professionals of America Local 111 is up for renewal March 1, 2002. The local has 36 members.
Driskill credited the U.S. Enrichment Corp. with meeting the union "in the middle" to reach the revised agreement, which went into effect Monday. It defines when officers are allowed to be armed, such as when patrolling the plant perimeter fence. Individual patrol officers may be armed, as may one of two officers manning a post.
In recent years, Driskill criticized the company for what he saw as the erosion of officers' firearms use and arrest powers, leaving them and the uranium-enrichment plant vulnerable, in his view.
"The agreement is designed to limit the possibility of that happening," he said. "We think it's a good agreement. It will not only safeguard us, but safeguard the plant."
USEC also agreed to allow the security force to upgrade firearms this summer, which has further improved union-management rapport, Driskill said. The union also will resume joint training with outside law enforcement.
A year ago, Driskill criticized USEC for plans to eliminate some jobs in the security force amid cost-cutting layoffs plantwide. Since then, two officers have left the company and two others have been promoted to management, but four officers have been hired to fill those spots, he said.
"This is concrete proof that USEC is wanting to keep us around and that makes us feel a lot better about our jobs," Driskill said. "I think things are looking better now than probably they have in the last 12 years."
USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said the company is "always pleased" at being able to work with employees to find mutually beneficial solutions.
"These changes in our security approach are an excellent example of that kind of teamwork," she said. "Security is one of our most important responsibilities and we continue to look for ways to improve the way we protect our people, materials and property."
-------- nevada
YUCCA MOUNTAIN:
Ombudsman might have jurisdiction
EPA official seeks to probe complaints
By KEITH ROGERS,
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Jun-19-Tue-2001/news/16353330.html
Environmental Protection Agency National Ombudsman Bob Martin launched a preliminary inquiry Monday to see if he has jurisdiction to probe complaints by Nevada officials and citizens regarding the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. At a meeting in Las Vegas arranged by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., Martin met with state Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux, representatives from Clark County, several environmental groups and a physicist from UNLV's Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies.
Berkley said she asked Martin to review whether radiation safety standards were set properly for the proposed repository. The volcanic rock ridge, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is where the Department of Energy wants to entomb 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, most of it metal-encased spent fuel pellets from commercial power reactors.
This month, the EPA set a final standard of 15 millirems per year of allowable radiation exposure from "all pathways," which includes air, soil, water and the food chain. A separate 4 millirem per year limit for radiation has been established for groundwater. A millirem is one-thousandth of a rem, the measurement of a radiation dose.
The standards are more stringent than a 25 millirem guideline suggested by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the point where the standards apply, 11 miles from Yucca Mountain, is closer than the 12-mile buffer zone that project scientists were analyzing.
Nevertheless, the standards drew criticism from both proponents and opponents of the project, including Berkley.
"What I'm considering is opening a national ombudsman investigation," Martin said. "I think the case is broader than the standards."
He said he has about two dozen pending investigations into hazardous waste matters, most of which were brought to his attention by members of Congress.
Some who attended Monday's meeting, including Clark County representative Dennis Bechtel, asked Martin to investigate why the EPA's standard covers only the 10,000-year regulatory period for the site and does not extend for hundreds of thousands of years when peak doses would be expected.
Harry Reid Center physicist Dennis Weber said Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site share the same regional aquifer, one that is threatened by massive amounts of radioactive contamination stemming from hundreds of underground nuclear weapons tests. The test site's problem and potential releases from a Yucca Mountain repository should be studied in tandem, yet, he said, "All they care about is something that might happen in 10,000 years at Yucca Mountain."
Loux said he wanted to know why, in his opinion, the Department of Energy has been allowed to stray from the intent of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in basing potential releases from a repository on the ability of the mountain and engineered barriers to contain radioactive materials.
"It's clear to us that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the site should have been disqualified," Loux said.
Martin noted that if he has jurisdiction over an issue, such as the Yucca Mountain Project, he can seek documents, reopen decision records, and make nonbinding recommendations to the EPA, of which about 80 percent of the time the agency agrees to follow.
Martin said he might be able to probe Yucca Mountain complaints because the mountain has been assigned a hazardous waste identification number.
Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson said the identification number stems from petroleum products used at the site. "It's not anything nuclear. It's normal industrial material."
-------- us nuc politics
Weapons scientist sues over China book
June 19, 2001
Around the Nation •
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010619-3449080.htm
A retired physicist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory filed suit in U.S. District Court yesterday to allow publication of his book on China´s nuclear weapons programs.
Danny Stillman submitted a manuscript of his book, "Inside China´s Nuclear Weapons Program," to the Energy and Defense departments as required under secrecy agreements that dated to when he worked for the U.S. government´s nuclear weapons research lab in New Mexico. The goal of the agreements is to ensure that no classified material is revealed.
Mr. Stillman´s manuscript was delivered to the Energy Department, which oversees Los Alamos laboratory, in January 2000, but after 18 months there has been no final determination, even though changes the government has requested have been made in the book.
---
Physicist Sues Over Book Delay
Material on Nuclear Weapons Raises Security Concerns
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; Page A19
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16178-2001Jun19?language=printer
The former intelligence chief at Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday filed suit against the Department of Energy, the Pentagon and the CIA for allegedly blocking publication of a 500-page manuscript about his meetings with Chinese nuclear weapons scientists.
Danny B. Stillman, a physicist and nuclear intelligence analyst who retired from Los Alamos in 1993, filed the federal complaint after the agencies failed to release his manuscript for publication or detail their objections after 17 months of review.
In correspondence with Stillman, the Pentagon has contended that his book, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program," contains secret information and would damage national security if published.
Stillman traveled to China nine times between 1990 and 1999 and gathered a wealth of information about China's nuclear weapons program in a variety of open settings with Chinese scientists. Six of the trips came after his retirement.
He argues in the suit that none of his information was gathered at the government's behest. Nonetheless, Stillman submitted the manuscript to both the Pentagon and the Department of Energy for pre-publication review because of secrecy agreements he signed with them.
"The defendants are not permitted to violate or abridge Stillman's constitutional right to publish unclassified information or any information obtained as a private citizen," according to the lawsuit filed on Stillman's behalf by Mark S. Zaid, an attorney at Lobel, Nevins & Lamont.
Spokesmen at the Pentagon and Energy Department declined to comment, saying Stillman's manuscript is still under review. One U.S. intelligence official declined comment on the lawsuit but said that "there are very legitimate national security concerns about some of the material in the book."
-------- us nuc power
Handicapping Reactors by the Numbers
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/business/19ENER.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 -- To provide more electricity and less carbon emission, the Bush administration has revived talk of nuclear power, with top officials discussing the possibility of hundreds of new reactors.
But it has been nearly 30 years since the last plant was ordered in the United States, and whatever policy makers say, ending that drought will largely depend on three numbers, industry experts argue: $5 natural gas; $1,000 capital expenses; and storing 77,000 tons of radioactive waste. And there is substantial doubt that those numbers are realistic.
The last item, waste storage, is getting new attention as the Energy Department tries to determine whether Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles from Las Vegas, is suitable for a long-term repository. And the change of power in the Senate brings a fierce Yucca opponent, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, to the position of deputy majority leader. But whether Yucca can be built and accept 77,000 tons of waste -- the amount it is supposed to accept in coming years -- is not the only prerequisite for the industry to start again.
"Yucca is a necessary, but insufficient, condition," said David Morris, a Minneapolis electricity expert who does not favor nuclear power. He and others, including people who want new reactors, say the industry needs a licensing system that will not subject reactors to the last-minute problems that increased costs on the current batch. But most of all, they say, the industry needs plants that are far cheaper to build than even the current optimistic estimates suggest.
A permanent increase in the price of natural gas would also be nice, along with a consensus that the other competing fuel, coal, is too dangerous for the global climate.
For the nuclear industry, the problem most under its control is the reactor's price. The people who want to sell reactors do not yet have an acceptable new design on the market but say they can develop one to compete with natural gas.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association, says that reactors would have to sell for no more than $1,000 for each kilowatt of generating capacity -- an industry measure. (A kilowatt is the amount required to keep 10 bulbs of 100 watts each lighted; a kilowatt-hour, the typical unit on a homeowner's bill, would keep those bulbs lighted an hour.)
That $1,000 is substantially more expensive than natural gas plants, which make up about 90 percent of the power plants built the last five years and sell for $500 or $600 for a kilowatt of capacity.
But reactors are less costly to run because uranium is cheap, while a million B.T.U.'s of gas -- enough to generate about 170 kilowatt-hours in the most efficient plant -- will sell for $4 to $5 over the next few years, the nuclear industry says. In briefings for Wall Street analysts, the Nuclear Energy Institute has said that reactors at $1,000 a kilowatt produce electricity more cheaply than do gas plants when gas hits $5 for a million B.T.U.'s; Westinghouse Electric, which hopes to sell new reactors, says the figure is $4.
Not counting some recent sharp spikes in California, gas has been in the $4 range lately, double what it was two years ago, and has sometimes surpassed $5. But some people doubt whether gas will stay that high for long.
Among them is William T. McCormick Jr., chairman and chief executive of CMS Energy, which operates the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan and runs a system of natural gas pipeline and distribution companies. It owns the largest terminal in North America for unloading ships carrying liquefied natural gas from abroad, in Lake Charles, La., which it is doubling in size, and is also trying to build terminals in Mexico.
If the price stays at $5, "on a long- term basis, you can find an awful lot of gas," Mr. McCormick said in an interview. And if drillers find a lot of gas in North America, he added, the price will come back down. And he said imported liquefied natural gas could be found for little over $3 for a million B.T.U.'s.
Indonesia, Australia and countries in the Persian Gulf region and on the west coast of Africa will all drill, liquefy and export for that price, he said, and their supplies are vast.
And is it possible to build a reactor for $1,000 a kilowatt? Some of the 103 now in service cost more than triple that amount -- even more in today's dollars. But proponents are counting on more efficient building techniques and lower interest costs.
Westinghouse Electric spent much of the 1990's designing a reactor that would be easier to build and operate. It wanted fewer moving parts and more parts that could be assembled at a factory instead of in the field, cutting construction costs and reducing quality questions.
The plant, called the AP-600 -- for advanced passive, 600 megawatts -- would have cost $1,400 to $1,500 a kilowatt, the company said, but the real number is uncertain because none were ordered.
Similarly, General Electric designed the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor, which it said would sell for $1,400 to $1,600, "depending on the host country," but nobody in the United States ordered one either.
Now Westinghouse is redesigning the AP-600 as a 1,000-megawatt plant. That increase in capacity, it says, will raise capital costs only 10 percent, bringing the capital cost per kilowatt down to $1,000. But that cost, Westinghouse says, can be brought that low only after builders get practice putting up plants efficiently.
"We're quite comfortable in competing with both gas and coal," said Charles W. Pryor, chief executive of Westinghouse Electric -- now a subsidiary of BNFL, the former British Nuclear Fuels.
The plants would largely be built in factories to cut costs and quality problems, Mr. Pryor said, and legal questions would be settled before construction started. In fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already revised its licensing process, although no one has tested it.
There is some belief that not all the energy eggs should go in the natural gas basket. The Georgia Public Service Commission, for example, regularly requires utility companies to ask for bids from outside companies to provide new plants. This year the commission demanded that Georgia Power, the biggest utility in the state, mention nuclear and coal in its requests for proposals.
One idea, said Daniel R. Cearfoss, a staff engineer for the commission, is fuel diversity. The commission would like to know how much extra it would cost to hedge the state's energy bets by building plants that would use uranium or coal.
But Mr. Cearfoss said that he doubted anyone would propose a nuclear plant, and that even if someone did, the bid would be hard to evaluate because there was no modern track record for construction costs.
Georgia, however, is often cited as a possible ice-breaker for nuclear power; its twin-unit Vogle plant has space for four reactors, and the betting among experts is that if another reactor is ordered, it will go next to an existing one.
The Southern Company owns Georgia Power, along with Alabama Power, Mississippi Power and Gulf Power, and operates six reactors. Laura Gillig, a spokeswoman for Southern, said that even though nuclear power "is going through some sort of renaissance, it still needs that public support."
"And," she added, "it does need to be competitive."
-------- us nuc waste
Nuclear waste disposal: A safer solution?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
19 JUNE 2001
Contact: Patrice Pages patrice-pages@tamu.edu 979-845-4618
Texas A&M University
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/tamu-nwd061901.html
COLLEGE STATION - Disposal of nuclear waste has always been a hot topic, but a Texas A&M University chemist's new approach could lead to new waste treatment procedures - and even a boost to nuclear medicine.
A main component of President George W. Bush's energy policy is to increase use of nuclear energy. However, according to Abraham Clearfield, a professor of chemistry at Texas A&M, "to accept this part of Bush policy, the general public must be confident that nuclear waste disposal will be effectively dealt with."
One of the most common ways to dispose of highly radioactive waste is to use devices similar to water softeners called ion exchangers, which are either inorganic - mineral-type - compounds or synthetically produced organic resins.
An ion exchanger usually contains a harmless element such as sodium, present in ordinary salt, which is exchanged for a harmful element such as cesium 137, present in radioactive waste, says Clearfield.
Clearfield has been developing inorganic ion exchangers for more than 30 years. He has been studying their role in nuclear waste for 10 years in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and the Savannah River Site, a weapons research facility based in South Carolina.
Nuclear waste coming from nuclear weapons plants is made of highly radioactive elements, mainly strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239 and 240, as well as other less radioactive elements.
The highly radioactive waste is either extracted by a solution that does not mix with the waste solution - a process called solvent extraction - or is removed by ion exchangers. The high-level wastes are then to be immobilized in a special glass, placed inside steel drums and buried about 1,000 feet deep in salt mines, in sites to be designated. The remaining low-level waste may then be encased in cement and stored on site at Hanford, Wash., and the Savannah River Site, S.C.
The inorganic ion exchangers remove cesium and strontium 90, while plutonium is handled separately. Clearfield and his collaborators have devised more than a dozen of these exchangers. Among them is a class of crystals called titanium silicates that have tunnel structures containing sodium ions. One of the most important was developed at Sandia National Laboratory, by the late Robert Dosch and Rayford Anthony of Texas A&M's Department of Chemical Engineering.
"In these tunnels, sodium ions are very loosely held," explains Clearfield. "Because cesium ions are bigger than sodium ions, when a cesium ion goes in and replaces a sodium ion, it cannot move around like the sodium ion. Instead it gets trapped."
In other inorganic ion exchangers, the ingoing and outgoing ions can each have different charges or the channels have different sizes. To study the exchangers' properties, Clearfield and his collaborators study their crystal structure by X-ray diffraction before and after the exchange of different types of ions.
"We try to make compounds in which either a sodium or a potassium ion is exchanged, and then we do the crystal structure," says Clearfield. "We try to exchange a given ion species with these crystals and then we do the crystal structure again, and we see what has happened to the ingoing and outgoing species. It can take from a few weeks to many months before we understand what happened."
Inorganic ion exchangers can also be used in nuclear medicine. Radioactive elements with short half-lives currently are used to determine blood flow or to locate a tumor. With the ion exchanger, it might be possible to better target the tumor by sparing surrounding healthy cells.
"If you could target a radioactive species directly into the tumor," says Clearfield, "and the health physicist would calculate, from the size of the tumor, how much radioactivity to inject, you would not damage the healthy tissue around."
Work is in progress and part of a project with Lynntech, Inc., a technology development company based in College Station, where most of the scientists are Texas A&M alumni.
"The first phase of that work has just been completed," Clearfield says. "We are now waiting for a second phase of funding on the project."
Clearfield has shown that inorganic materials exchange ions more efficiently than organic materials, and they can better withstand radiation as well.
"For applications in nuclear waste and nuclear medicine, organic exchangers can only do part of the job," he says," because radioactivity may destroy the carbon-carbon bonds, which are essential in organic compounds."
Clearfield is eager to participate in a major project currently being set up by the European Commission, called the European Consortium. Focusing on the many applications of inorganic ion exchangers, the project will be led by the University of Helsinki in Finland, with groups at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, and the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, and four industrial firms.
Clearfield says that work on inorganic exchangers is far from being over.
"There are thousands of naturally occurring inorganic materials that can be used," he says. "Some of them are clays, others are natural minerals. Having solved their structure, we can use the information to synthesize materials that could select, by removing them, harmful species from the environment or industrial processes."
Contact: Abraham Clearfield, 979-845-2936 or clearfield@mail.chem.tamu.edu.
--------
EPA official hedges on Yucca investigation
June 19, 2001
By Jace Radke <jace@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/jun/19/511974956.html
Nevada officials and environmental groups may have to wait two months to learn whether the Environmental Protection Agency's top consumer advocate will open a case into the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
EPA Ombudsman Robert Martin, accompanied by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., held a preliminary hearing Monday on a possible review of safety standards at Yucca Mountain. But before Martin can begin investigating in earnest, jurisdictional questions have to be answered, he said.
"The agency feels that I, as an ombudsman, may not have jurisdiction over these standards," Martin said at the hearing at the Bank West office building on West Sahara Avenue.
Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied to hold 77,000 tons of highly radioactive commercial and defense waste. The EPA recently issued guidelines that would restrict the amount of radiation allowed to escape from the proposed repository, if it is built.
Those guidelines -- 15 millirems per year of exposure to an average person outside the repository boundaries, with 4 millirems of that allowed to come through ground water -- are stricter than those sought by the nuclear industry. A chest X-ray is 5 millrems.
"Because this issue is so important, I will take the next day or two to put together a service list of all parties who are affected by this," Martin said. "I'll then get opinions on my jurisdiction over the case and make a decision if we'll go forward in the next 30 to 60 days."
His role could be stymied by proposed rules that would allow the EPA to veto the ombudsman's role in some cases, but those are on hold after EPA administrator Christie Whitman said she would work with Congress to create an independent and accountable ombudsman.
Berkley said she was delighted that Martin made the trip to Las Vegas to consider investigating Yucca Mountain.
"Obviously this man doesn't travel if it's not something he thinks needs to be looked into," Berkley said. "We need to protect the people in this community. We need the EPA ombudsman to look at the standards and make a determination about whether they are just or reasonable."
About 10 people, including Robert Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, and representatives from Clark County and the Sierra Club, gave Martin their opinions about the proposed dump.
"Since this started in 1979, the state has been concerned about the way that science and politics have seemed to mesh to point to this site, even though it should have been disqualified," Loux said. "The goalposts have always seemed to shift on this so that the ball always goes through. If it's not up to the standards, then new standards are adopted."
While Martin has no power to compel the EPA to accept his findings, he said that during his nine years as ombudsman in the EPA's Office of Solid Waste the agency has agreed with his recommendations about 80 percent of the time.
Martin said that he would like Loux and the others at the meeting to get the word out that the possibility of an investigation exists.
"The more people involved, the more successful this will be, and I mean that for both sides," Martin said. "This is going to be a long service list."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
Yugoslavia Wants Arms Embargo Ended
New York Times
June 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Yugoslavia.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Yugoslavia has asked the U.N. Security Council to lift a three-year-old arms embargo imposed because of the campaign to clear the Serb province of Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population.
In a letter to the Security Council made available on Monday, Yugoslav Ambassador Dejan Sahovic argued that his nation has undergone a major leadership change and is complying with the U.N. resolutions.
It was unclear when or how the Security Council, currently on a mission to Kosovo and the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, may respond to the request.
The arms embargo was imposed in March 1998, almost a year before NATO began 78 days of bombing to end then-President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and drive his forces from the province.
It called for a ban on the sale and supply of arms and established a committee to monitor the embargo.
The United States and European nations imposed their own economic sanctions against Yugoslavia but began to lift those once Milosevic was voted out of power in October elections.
The letter noted that international peacekeepers now in Kosovo work to prevent illegal arms shipments to the province and said Yugoslavia will do the same ``in compliance with assumed international obligations.''
-------- china
Reports: Taiwan to Test US Missiles
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-China-Defense.html?searchpv=aponline
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan will begin test-firing U.S.-made Patriot missiles on Wednesday -- at the same time China is conducting major war games across the Taiwan Strait, newspapers said Tuesday.
The military declined to confirm when it will fire the Patriot missiles, which are intended to intercept incoming missiles. Officials said previously that they plan to do so this month and have insisted the timing is coincidental and not intended to provoke China.
The military warned civilian aircraft and fishing boats to stay away from an area of the southeastern coast in the mornings of Wednesday through Friday for live-fire drills, but the civilians weren't specifically warned about the Patriot missile tests, the United Daily News reported.
Other papers said a missile battalion was stationed in the southern Pingtung base getting ready to fire the Patriot missiles -- at the same time China is conducting war games off the southeastern coastal province of Fujian, facing Taiwan, that include a simulated attack on a Taiwanese island.
Defense Ministry spokesman Huang Shuey-sheng said all preparations for the Patriot missile tests ``have gone on smoothly.''
``But for national security reasons, we cannot specify the time of the tests,'' Huang told reporters.
Taiwan acquired 200 Patriot missiles, an improved version of the weapons that gained notoriety for missing their targets in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They have been deployed around Taipei, the capital, but the tests will be the first time they have been fired on Taiwanese soil.
Washington does not have formal ties with Taiwan but has repeatedly said it is committed to selling the island weapons needed for its defenses.
Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Taiwan has sought to build up its missile defense, arguing that China may have as many as 800 missiles pointed at the island within the next decade.
--------
Taiwan Ready to Test - Fire Patriot Missiles
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/news-arms-taiwan-dc.html?searchpv=reuters
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan said Tuesday it will test-fire its U.S.-made Patriot missiles for the first time this week in a display of resolve with Chinese war games under way in a nearby Beijing-held island.
Taiwan military officials and analysts said the test-firing had been in the works for a long time and it was a mere coincidence that Beijing was also flexing its military muscles.
The military refused to shed light on the test-firing, but aviation authorities said they had received orders to advise aircraft about ``gun firing'' from Wednesday.
An official at the Civil Aeronautics Administration, who declined to be identified, said the agency has declared specific ``gun firing'' air zones in southern Taiwan between 8.00 a.m. and 10.30 a.m. (0000-0230 GMT) from June 20 to 22 and on June 26.
``Preparations for the test-firing of Patriot missiles have been very smooth. Everything is according to the plan,'' defense ministry spokesman Huang Suey-sheng told a news conference.
``But to ensure national security, the exact date and time of the test-firing cannot be revealed,'' Huang said.
Huang said such test-firing was normal activity and repeated that China's ongoing war games on an island opposite Taiwan were routine and had no wider significance.
Taiwan and Chinese media have suspected the exercises on Dongshan Island off China's southeastern province of Fujian were a warning to Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian following his breakthrough visit to the United States and Latin America.
``While the test-firing of Patriot missiles marks a significant step for Taiwan's defenses, I think the timing is a coincidence,'' said Andrew Yang, a military expert and secretary-general of the Chinese Council for Advanced Policy Studies, a private think-tank.
``It's not a competition and not politically motivated.''
CHINESE OPPOSITION
Asked to comment on Taiwan's Patriot test-firing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue reiterated opposition to foreign countries selling advanced weapons to the island it views as a breakaway province.
Zhang called any arms sales to Taiwan a gross interference in China's internal affairs.
``We hope that Taiwan authorities will realize that reunification with the mainland at an early date is in accordance with the interests and wishes of the whole Chinese nation, including people of the Taiwan island. It is also a historical trend,'' Zhang said.
``Any attempt to oppose reunification by means of arms purchases and deployment will come to no end at all.''
China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has vowed to attack if the island declares independence or drags its feet indefinitely on unification talks.
Taiwan leaders have warned of an ever-growing battery of missiles on the Chinese coast where up to 500 missiles have been deployed within easy range of the island's main political, economic and military facilities.
Over Beijing's objections, Washington agreed in 1993 to sell Taiwan the Patriot Advanced Capability, or PAC-2, anti-missile system.
Taiwan has deployed three batteries of Patriot missiles -- 200 in all -- in the northern portion of the island to protect the Taipei area, its political and economic center.
The island is armed with homegrown anti-aircraft Sky Bow and Sky Sword missiles and the Patriots finally give it the ability to shoot down at least some ballistic missiles.
Taiwan is also eager to buy a more advanced version of the Patriot, PAC-3, and the Aegis air defense system -- both requests were turned down by Washington this year.
But President Bush has agreed to sell Taiwan eight submarines and four Kidd-class destroyers in the biggest arms package for the island in a decade.
-------- colombia
Colombia coca protest shows drug policy's social challenge
JUAN PABLO TORO,
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2001/06/19/international0359EDT0456.DTL
(06-19) 00:59 PDT VETA CENTRAL, Colombia (AP) -- Coca pickers held the largest grassroots protest yet to stop fumigation planes from flying over the cocaine-producing fields in this northern hamlet.
As about 4,000 itinerant workers headed home Sunday without any accord to stop forced eradication under a U.S.-backed plan, fumigation planes continued their runs. But the 10 days of sometimes violent protests in the nearby town of Tibu did highlight Colombia's challenge in trying to carry out the anti-narcotics plan without igniting a social tinderbox.
Hundreds of thousands of Colombians are believed to make a living either by farming coca, or working as field hands picking the green leaves used to make cocaine.
They feel threatened by President Andres Pastrana's Plan Colombia, to which Washington has promised $1.3 billion in mostly military support, including the airplanes dropping chemical herbicides over the crops.
Frustrated by the government's lack of response, the protesters looted stores, clashed with riot police, and burned down the police station where they believed the herbicide was being stored.
One protester was killed and two police officers were injured, in addition to property damage estimated at $350,000.
For Graciela Rincon, a harvester who stood in a coca field, the protests were a matter of survival.
"One cannot survive here without coca," she said above the buzz of a crop dusting plane flying overhead, and the clatter of three helicopter gunships escorting it over the field. "It's the only thing this land produces."
The protests began June 7 when farmers and harvesters from this eastern region near Venezuela called for an end to the fumigation -- estimated to have killed more than a third of the region's 17,000 acres of coca in only a matter of weeks.
Government officials accused right-wing paramilitary militias of instigating the protests -- a charge the demonstrators and the militias deny. Both groups are believed to finance themselves from revenues collected by taxing and drug production.
The spraying offensive around Veta Central follows record eradication during the beginning of the year in southern Putumayo state, the largest coca-growing region, and the main target of the U.S.-backed program.
After spraying a record 86,000 acres, the government halted forced eradication in Putumayo in April and has used the pause to try and enlist farmers in voluntarily eradication agreements offering them aid for alternative crops.
----
Colombia Rebels to Free 250 Prisoners in Peace Bid
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-colombi.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia's largest rebel force, the FARC, announced on Tuesday it will free more than 250 soldiers and police from bush prison camps next week in a peace gesture.
The surprise decision would more than double the number of prisoners scheduled to be freed by the FARC under a June 2 agreement with government, and mark the biggest prisoner release in the history of Colombia's 37-year war. Some of the men have been held for three years.
``The FARC, in a demonstration of its agreement to search for peace with social justice for Colombians, has made the decision to unilaterally release more than 250 soldiers and police (who are) prisoners of war,'' said FARC spokesman Raul Reyes.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials FARC, will release the men on June 28, Reyes said.
President Andres Pastrana cheered the news, saying it showed the Marxist rebels were getting serious about peace talks he started with them 2-1/2 years ago.
``Colombians can see the peace process advancing, that agreements are possible and, above all, that peace is possible,'' Pastrana said.
The FARC was required to only free 142 soldiers and police under the prisoner swap agreement. But with Tuesday's announcement, the FARC would release at least 305 men in total -- including 55 members of state security forces already freed earlier this month.
Reyes invited the United Nations, the European Union and countries ranging from to China to Libya to monitor the release.
The FARC also extended the invitation to the leaders of Colombia's armed forces, who have been skeptical of the FARC's motives in the prisoner swap and who blasted the government's decision to release 15 rebels from prison.
``We are sure that this nation and the world would view the presence of commanders of the military forces and the police during the handover as an meaningful act of solidarity with their men,'' Reyes said in a communique, broadcast by radio.
FARC SNUBS THE UNITED STATES
In a notable omission, the FARC did not invite the United States, which is pouring more than more than $1 billion into Pastrana's ``Plan Colombia'' anti-drug offensive. U.S. officials, which accuse the FARC of deep involvement in the global cocaine trade, said this month the FARC's release of prisoners did not show commitment toward peace.
But the swap agreement is the first breakthrough after years of tortuous talks between Pastrana and the 17,000-strong FARC, a 1960s-era force fighting to impose a Marxist state. The conflict has claimed 40,000 mainly civilian lives in the past decade.
Pastrana, who was elected on a peace ticket and whose term ends next year, desperately needs to show progress with the FARC. Polls show growing impatience with the talks and Pastrana's popularity ratings have languished amid criticism that he's been too soft with the rebels.
FARC commanders, who have privately voiced fears that the next president might suspend Pastrana's peace process, also have touted the swap as a step forward.
The prisoner swap agreement was declared the first objective of the peace process when the government renewed the FARC's Switzerland-sized demilitarized enclave in February. Pastrana first ceded the enclave to the rebels more than two years ago to lure them to the negotiating table.
Despite the gesture, fighting has intensified in Colombia's lawless countryside, with nearly half of the nation controlled by Marxist rebels or illegal far-right paramilitary groups. The FARC continues to kidnap civilians for ransom and demand extortion payments to companies to bankroll its war.
On Tuesday, suspected FARC rebels attacked a small town about 50 miles (80 km) south of Bogota, tossing dynamite-rigged explosives and destroying a district attorney's office, a cultural affairs center and a bank -- killing two people, the governor's office said.
--------
Colombia's FARC rebels living in time warp
June 19, 2001
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters06-19-192844.asp?reg=AMERICAS
SAN VICENTE, Colombia, A portrait of a young Fidel Castro and guerrilla icon Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara is the first sight that greets you when you enter the rebel office.
A stereo tuned to Radio Resistance crackles with songs about the ''Revolution'' knocking on the doors of the powerful. Lenin, Marx and Engels look down from black-and-white portraits as rebels in military fatigues, with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, answer phones and greet visitors. This might sound like a scene from the heady days of the 1960s, when leftist rebel armies sprang up across Latin America, demanding social justice and an end to poverty. But this is San Vicente, Colombia, in the year 2001. In a hemisphere where most armed leftist movements laid down their arms and entered the political arena after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia remains as the oldest surviving rebel army. For nearly four decades, the FARC has waged a guerrilla war against the government with the aim of installing a socialist regime in Latin America's third-largest country. Created in 1964 as an outgrowth of peasant self-defense groups, the FARC has become Latin America's most powerful guerrilla army with 17,000 fighters on some 70 fronts and a strong presence in about 40 percent of Colombia's countryside. Its armed men and women mainly still prowl jungle and mountain terrain, but President Andres Pastrana has ceded the FARC a demilitarized zone the size of Switzerland in southern Colombia in return for opening peace talks 2-1/2 years ago. With the army kept away, the dusty town of San Vicente has become the de facto guerrilla capital. And last month, the FARC, which claims to defend peasants, workers, Indians and the poor, marked its 37th birthday.
MARXISM LENINISM COLOMBIAN STYLE Despite a worldwide repudiation of Marx, FARC leaders say they remain Communists and have not dropped plans to take power by force if peace talks with the government fail. In recent years, the FARC has added 19th century South American liberator Simon Bolivar to its pantheon of heroes, but its communiques still brim with Cold War-era slogans against neoliberalism, class oppression and ''gringo imperialism.'' Effusive salutations to ''fellow comrades'' in North Korea, China and Cuba appear regularly in the FARC's magazine along with pictures of smiling commanders surrounded by pretty female rebels who gaze at them admiringly. The FARC's leader is 71-year-old Manuel ''Sureshot'' Marulanda, a rumpled and inscrutable former peasant who has spent most of his life leading rebel bands in the jungle and who has never been to the capital Bogota, let alone overseas. ''The FARC is a Marxist-Leninist organization. We take Marxism-Leninism as our guide for action and struggle but not as a dogma,'' said senior commander Raul Reyes, a member of the seven-man ruling council. ''Our model doesn't have to be Cuban, Vietnamese or Chinese, nor Russian. We want to create our own model, Colombian-style,'' said the bearded, bespectacled 51-year-old Reyes, who was a school teacher before joining rebel ranks 20 years ago. Since early 1999, the FARC has been engaged in peace talks with the government to end a war that has killed 40,000 people in the last decade. But the talks, centered around a complex 12-point agenda that includes wealth distribution, unemployment and foreign investment, have made little progress. Under a prisoner swap agreement signed on June 2, the FARC has released 55 sick soldiers and police officers, but it still holds 400-odd servicemen in primitive jungle prisons. In return, the government freed 11 rebels from state prisons. ''One of the problems is that the FARC is living in a time warp and refuses to accept that the world has changed,'' a European diplomat told Reuters. ''You have two groups of people at the table using the same words but with totally different meaning. On one side you have a group of peasants talking about land reform and using Marxist-Leninist dialect, and on the other you have government whiz kids discussing globalization,'' the diplomat said. THE FARC's ''EURO TOUR'' Despite its growing military strength from drug cash, the FARC remains largely confined to jungles and mountain areas. Most members are peasants, meaning they have been unable to establish support networks in large cities, and polls show the FARC's popular support is very low. ''The FARC has failed to urbanize itself and attract the middle classes,'' said Alfredo Rangel, one of Colombia's leading political analysts. ''They have shown military skills but have an elemental political discourse: rich vs. poor, the oligarchy vs. the people and the exploiters vs. the exploited.'' In February of 2000, six senior FARC commanders traveled to Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and other Western European countries to study economic development models. The idea behind the ''Euro tour,'' a foreign diplomat said, was to allow FARC leaders to see countries that have successfully combined economic development with far-reaching social programs, as well as force them to face criticism for their practices of kidnapping of civilians and other human rights violations. No one expected the tour would end the FARC's isolation but it brought no breakthrough in talks either. The FARC continues kidnapping civilians for ransom and using homemade mortars made of gas canisters to launch deadly attacks on towns. ''The grand European tour was a good first step but it has not been followed up. They were not taken to East Germany or Lithuania to see that the system they want totally failed. They saw the successes of social democracy but not the failures of rigid centralism,'' said one European diplomat. Although the FARC lack political sophistication, the group is not completely isolated from the world. It has political offices in Latin American countries and in Europe and still receives support from radical socialist organizations, unions and nongovernmental organizations outside Colombia.
REVOLUTION ON THE WEB The FARC is also connected to the Internet. Its Web site at www.farc-ep.org is in seven languages and features its history and political agenda and pictures of guerrilla life, including one on rebel romance titled ''Love beneath the intimacy of the mosquito netting.'' Commanders communicate with reporters through e-mail. Unlike guerrillas in Central America who disarmed once they lost Moscow's patronage at the end of the Cold War, the FARC has been able to fight on thanks to the drug trade. Estimates by anti-drug agents say it makes between $200 million and $600 million a year in drug profits that it uses to purchase arms. Analysts say it will be years before a peace accord is signed and the rebels set aside their distrust for democratic institutions. In 1984, the FARC declared a cease-fire and formed a political party, the Patriotic Union, but right-wing death squads killed more than 3,000 of its sympathizers, including two presidential candidates, prompting the rebels to step up their military campaign. Peace talks take place in a jungle hamlet outside San Vicente. Under palm-thatched huts, college-educated government envoys in designer clothes meet weekly with weather-beaten rebel negotiators in military fatigues clutching AK-47s. When time comes to iron out the fine points of a future peace deal, Rangel believes the FARC will show more of the political pragmatism that has allowed it survive this long. ''The FARC's goal is to become a permanent political and economic actor in Colombia,'' Rangel said. ''I don't think it will just demobilize and turn into a political party without making sure it still has a good share of power.''
----
Colombia Rebels to Free War Prisoners
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-War-Prisoners.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia's largest leftist insurgency promised on Tuesday it would free more than 250 additional police and soldiers next week as a goodwill gesture to boost peace negotiations.
The announcement by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, follows its release over the weekend of 55 ill police and soldiers under a ``humanitarian'' swap in which the government freed 11 ailing rebels from jail in return.
The prisoner exchange, begun Saturday and completed Monday, was the first in the South American country's 37-year war. Both sides heralded it as a major breakthrough that could pave the way for future accords.
The group is believed to be holding at least 358 servicemen captured in ambushes and large-scale attacks. Many have languished for more than three years in rebel captivity, some held in open-air jungle pens surrounded by barbed-wire.
The two sides have made no known advances in discussions about a cease-fire or on the FARC's demands for sweeping political and economic reforms as the price of ending their long war. Critics of the prisoner swap say it will encourage the FARC to capture servicemen and use them as bargaining chips.
-------- drug war
Grants to fund rehab for inmates
June 19, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010619-73474242.htm
The Justice Department yesterday awarded more than $58 million in grant money to states and the District of Columbia for substance abuse treatment programs for offenders at state and local correctional facilities.
Grants of $1.32 million went to Virginia, $1.09 million to Maryland and $470,000 to the District.
"The link between drugs and crime is clear and unmistakable," said Attorney General John Ashcroft, adding that when offenders return to society drug-free, they are 73 percent less likely to commit more crimes and return to prison, and 44 percent less likely to use drugs again.
"The Justice Department is committed to breaking the cycle of drugs and crime," he said.
With the new grants, coordinated through the Justice Department´s Office of Justice Programs, more than $288 million has been awarded to states and territories since 1996 through the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) for State Prisoners program.
In 1999, more than 80 percent of all jail and state prison inmates said they previously used drugs, while 60 percent admitted having regularly used drugs as least once a week over a three-month period.
States use RSAT funds to support individual or group treatment for offenders in residential facilities operated by state and local corrections agencies. Each offender´s treatment program lasts between 6 and 12 months, during which time the offender is regularly tested for drugs.
Justice Department spokesmen said the treatment facilities are set apart from other correctional facilities. RSAT-funded programs also work closely with community-based substance abuse treatment programs to ensure that offenders continue treatment, they said.
States and eligible territories received about $57.9 million in RSAT funds in 2000; $57.8 million in 1999; $59.3 million in 1998; $27.7 million in 1997; and $24.7 million in 1996.
--------
AMA Rejects Medical Marijuana
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-AMA-Meeting.html
CHICAGO (AP) -- A proposal to endorse the limited use of medical marijuana for seriously ill patients was rejected at the American Medical Association's annual meeting.
An AMA committee on Monday voted against the proposal and the groups's House of Delegates on Tuesday approved a revised policy that did not support medical marijuana use.
Under the new policy, adopted without debate, the AMA endorses ``the free and unfettered exchange of information on treatment alternatives.''
The previous policy simply endorsed additional research into its effectiveness and safety of medical marijuana use.
The proposal to support some use of medical marijuana was put forth by the AMA's Council on Scientific Affairs. Dr. Melvin Sterling, a member of the council from Orange, Calif., told a committee Monday, ``This report is about the relief of suffering; it's not about getting high.''
But others testified they were concerned that the AMA's endorsement would have led to more widespread use of medical marijuana than the proposal intended.
Also Tuesday, the 547 delegates approved a resolution calling on the AMA to ask the Boy Scouts to reconsider its ban on homosexuals.
But the measure deleted language that said the Scouts' ban on gays risks driving youngsters to suicide. The committee that heard the proposal cited a lack of scientific testimony in doing so.
The AMA also, for the second year in a row, rejected a resolution asking it to endorse a moratorium on executions. Opponents called it a legal issue, not a medical one. The AMA did reaffirm its opposition to physicians participating in executions.
-------- iran
100 Afghan Refugees Captured in Iran
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iran-Afghan-Refugees.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- About 100 Afghan refugees were captured by Iranian authorities on Tuesday, and are being held at a detention facility near Iran's frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday.
The refugees, captured by Interior Ministry forces, are being held at a holding center in Zahedan, about 700 miles southeast of Tehran. The group is to be repatriated to Afghanistan in several days, according to Iranian authorities.
Conflict and drought have combined to drive hundreds of thousands of Afghans from their homes in recent years, sneaking across sealed borders to Iran and Pakistan. Once there, they are often forcibly returned home or sent to squalid, ill-equipped camps.
Afghanistan has the world's largest internal refugee population, with more than 470,000 living in camps. More than 1.5 million Afghans live in Iran -- in and outside of camps, the United Nations said.
Iran and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees signed an agreement in February 2000 for the repatriation of Afghan refugees living in Iran.
Last year, the U.N. General Assembly designated June 20 to be World Refugee Day to commemorate the 1951 the 1951 Refugee Convention, which established the legal foundation for refugee rights.
--------
Bush Urged on Policy on Iran
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Iran.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Iran hopes the Bush administration will improve ties between the two foes, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations said Tuesday, noting that a landslide win at the polls should embolden his president to move forward with reforms.
``If (the United States) finally decides to come up with a considered policy on Iran, one might hope that it would be a wide, forward-looking policy that would be conducive to the betterment of bilateral relations,'' Ambassador Bagher Asadi said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Iranians gave a strong mandate for reforms in June 8 presidential elections, handing President Mohammad Khatami a landslide re-election victory over his hard-line rivals.
While clearly popular with the public, the reform program has been unwelcome by the country's conservatives, who control the judiciary, military and police. In the past year, hard-liners have closed down some 40 publications, mostly pro-democracy newspapers, and jailed dissidents and liberal journalists.
Khatami has advocated improving relations with the United States, which were severed after militant students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic revolution, holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Asadi, a well-respected career diplomat, sat out of the revolution to study economic development at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he received a master's degree.
He said Iran -- the only country that refuses to have political discussions with the United States -- was now waiting to see what direction the Bush administration would take with Tehran.
``We have not yet seen any particularly positive signs from the Republican administration on its Iran policy and not until we see that will we be able to read anything into it,'' Asadi said.
The Bush administration will likely support the extension of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, due to expire in August.
The sanctions law, which also applies to Libya, is designed to impose penalties on foreign companies that do business with the energy sector in either country, but no company has been penalized since the act was approved in 1996. The United States also bans bilateral trade with Iran, one of several nations on a U.S. list of countries alleged to sponsor international terrorism.
The Clinton administration eased sanctions on some Iranian goods last year and sought to open an official dialogue with Tehran which persistently said no, preferring exchanges of scholars and athletes instead.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said recently that the U.S. offer of dialogue was no longer on the table and Vice President Dick Cheney said Washington would have to see some change in the climate in Iran before the Bush administration endorses lifting the sanctions.
Asadi said the Iranian president's re-election signaled overwhelming public support for Khatami ``to keep the light on,'' and should embolden him to move forward on reforms. But the president would still have to consider the sensitivities of hard-liners.
``One thing the president has been very careful about and has been very insistent and clear on is that we should be able to continue the reform process without causing open friction and tension in the country,'' he said.
-------- iraq
Iraq Calls U.N. Reports Lies
By Waiel Faleh
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; 11:01 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010619/aponline230122_001.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A top Iraqi foreign ministry official on Tuesday night called reports that Baghdad evaded U.N. sanctions in the 1990s "sheer lies and fabrications."
Naji Sabri, Iraq's state minister for foreign affairs, said the unpublished U.N. weapons inspection reports obtained by U.S. arms control researchers were aimed at "preparing excuses" to drum up support for a U.S.-British plan to overhaul sanctions, which the Iraqi government vehemently opposes.
"The lies were leaked by intelligence offices to prolong and tighten sanctions, to prevent Iraq from using its resources and practice its rights in independence and conducting trade ties with other countries," he told The Associated Press.
The findings by Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a nonprofit watchdog group, and researcher Kelly Motz, are being published in the July-August issue of Commentary magazine.
The unpublished U.N. weapons inspection reports were obtained by sources outside the United Nations, according to Motz. Their publication coincides with the U.N. Security Council's consideration of a U.S.-British proposal to lift most restrictions on civilian goods entering Iraq while tightening enforcement of a decade-old arms embargo and plugging up lucrative smuggling routes.
The reports cited have never been made public by the United Nations.
According to the report, Iraq decided in the early 1990s to target Eastern Europe for purchases, following the collapse of the Soviet empire, which spurred a wholesale weapons market.
In the Commentary article, the experts describe trips by high-level Iraqi delegations to companies in Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Russia. The only other company mentioned in the article is one based in Taiwan.
"These are no more than sheer lies and fabrications aiming at preparing excuses to support atmosphere for the Anglo-American proposal which aim at forcing the colonial domination on Iraq," said Sabri, who until recently was Iraq's ambassador to Austria.
An embargo and wide-ranging sanctions were imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent 1991 Gulf War.
Sanctions cannot be lifted until U.N. weapons inspectors certify that the country's programs to build weapons of mass destruction have been dismantled.
----
Iraq No - Fly Zone Becoming Riskier
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Patrolling-Iraq.html
NORTH OF THE TURKISH-IRAQI BORDER (AP) -- Lt. Col. T.J. O'Shaughnessy steers toward Iraq, where the American pilot patrols the skies with laser-guided bombs under the wings of his jet fighter. In his vest, he carries a pistol and a letter urging his safe return if he is shot down.
The no-fly zone over northern Iraq is becoming more dangerous for its enforcers, with Iraqis firing more often -- from beefed-up air defense facilities -- at U.S. and British aircraft. The United States is responding by avoiding risky areas and making sure pilots are ready for a possible rescue mission.
The most recent shooting incident was Tuesday, when Iraqi gunners opened up with anti-aircraft artillery on a patrol that included O'Shaughnessy and his F-16 squadron, the Buzzards. No planes were damaged.
``Pretty much every day, they are shooting at us,'' said O'Shaughnessy, of Boston. ``That keeps guys on their toes. It keeps you focused.''
Air Force commanders say Saddam Hussein's forces are firing their anti-aircraft guns and missiles more often at planes patrolling the zones established to protect Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south.
Pilots say Saddam orders the missiles fired without radar guidance because American aircraft carry missiles designed to home in on radar.
Brig. Gen. Edward Ellis said Tuesday that while the chance of an Iraqi missile hitting an airplane was small, ``he shoots more often than he did in the past ... and the bottom line is he could get lucky.''
``If it were more accurate, he would have hit one of us,'' said Ellis, the U.S. commander of Operation Northern Watch, the air mission over the northern no-fly zone. Ellis also pilots an F-15 Eagle.
U.S. aircraft try to avoid areas where there are Iraqi guns and have significantly reduced their bombing of northern Iraq, pilots said. This year, U.S. warplanes have struck targets just seven times, even though Iraq fired on the aircraft 49 times. Last year, the United States bombed northern Iraq 47 times.
The northern no-fly zone was created in 1991 to protect rebellious Kurds from Saddam's forces. The southern zone was set up a year later and is also patrolled by U.S. and British aircraft. Iraqi gunners began shooting at the aircraft in December 1998.
On Tuesday, F-15 fighters took off from Incirlik air base in southern Turkey and head toward Iraq, followed by F-16s carrying anti-radar missiles and the Buzzards, which carry 500-pound laser-guided bombs.
A radar plane and an electronic monitoring plane flew overhead while refueling aircraft cruised up and down the border but did not enter Iraqi airspace.
From the back of a KC-135 aerial refueler, the dull gray fighter planes could be seen flying over the craggy brown mountains of Iraq. During the daylight flight Tuesday, no Iraqi gunfire could be seen from the refueler. At night, the flash of the gunfire would sometimes light up the sky, said Capt. Ben Bjerk of Anacortes, Wash.
If a plane were shot down, O'Shaughnessy and his men would be responsible for locating the pilot on the ground. After making contact with the pilot, O'Shaughnessy could call in Air Force commandos for a rescue mission.
O'Shaughnessy and all American pilots who fly over Iraq carry a 9 mm Baretta and a letter -- in English and Arabic -- urging anyone who finds them to help. Some also carry cash.
Experts say that after almost a decade of air patrols, Iraq is so desperate to shoot down a U.S. plane that its gunners try to bait the pilots to approach heavily defended areas.
``They are going to try to come up with any tactic that could work,'' Ellis said.
Pilots say Saddam has been placing anti-aircraft guns in civilian areas so that they can fire without being attacked.
``An Iraqi civilian does not deserve to die because Saddam Hussein placed a gun near his home,'' Ellis said. ``But if it is out in the open, we will respond violently.''
In Washington, officials are considering cutting back the dangerous mission, which costs some $1 billion a year.
Ellis said that with Saddam still well armed and capable of posing a threat to his neighbors, he would recommend continuing the patrols.
``I'd have to say that even though it presents ... more of a danger to the air crews, that we still have to do it,'' Ellis said.
(On the Net: Operation Northern Watch site, http://www.eucom.mil/operations/onw)
-------- israel
Panel passes bill allowing inciting violence against terror suspect
Ha'aretz Knesset
By Gideon Alon,
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=6/19/01&id=121972
The Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee yesterday passed the second and third reading of a bill that includes an article that decriminalizes inciting a lynch mob to against a suspected terrorist.
The article is part of a bill being prepared by the committee on incitement to violence in Israel. It generally seeks more severe punishment for such incitement, setting a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment.
Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, and State Prosecutor Edna Arbel tried to dissuade the committee's MKs from passing the bill, to no avail.
Sheetrit said a bill that legalizes attacking a suspected member of a terrorist organization "is a very dangerous measure that undermines democracy and basic human rights in our country. It accomodates 'field trials' ... and even a lynching or sentencing to death by a mob that suspects someone is a terrorist."
Five of the MKs supporting the bill were Shaul Yahalom (National Religious Party), Nissim Zeev (Shas), Yuval Steinitz (Likud), Yosef Lapid (Shinui) and Yael Dayan (Labor). Against it were the chairman of the committee, Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor), Nehama Ronen (Center) and Anat Maor (Meretz).
Sheetrit said he intends to propose removing this article when the bill is brought to the Knesset plenum for a vote in the next few days. Sheetrit, Rubinstein and Arbel did manage to change one article in the bill making it possible to charge those suspected of inciting violence.
Sheetrit said the original wording of the article prevented authorities from indicting suspects of incitement - because police had to prove "with near certainty" that the incitement would have led to an act of violence. The article was changed to "with reasonable possibility.
-------- japan
Japan, U.S. Reaffirm Ties, Air Disputes
Reuters
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16193-2001Jun19?language=printer
Japan and the United States reaffirmed their close ties despite differences over global warming and arms control during a visit yesterday by Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, who met briefly with President Bush.
Tanaka drew fire at home this month after reports that she had questioned the U.S.-Japanese alliance and criticized Bush's missile defense plan. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher quoted Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as telling Tanaka yesterday: "You should always remember that the best friend of Japan is the United States."
She said she told Powell that, "The relationship with the United States is key."
But Tanaka also said she had raised the issue of moving some U.S. military training from the island of Okinawa, home to 25,000 of the 48,000 American troops stationed in Japan.
"Powell said he understood that this kind of thing was the source of many headaches, and said they will look into every possible option," she said. "But he also said that keeping the troops in Okinawa is important, as is their training."
According to Boucher, Powell said the U.S. aim was to "have the smallest footprint possible that was consistent with the need to achieve the mission -- a mission that has brought security and prosperity in both Japan and the United States and created stability in the region."
Tanaka said she told U.S. officials that Japan "understood" Washington's arguments for researching a missile defense system. But Tokyo has stopped short of endorsing the U.S. plan to build a missile shield and abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty if necessary.
On the question of the Kyoto global warming pact, which Bush has declared "fatally flawed," Tanaka said she told Powell: "We can understand your stance, but we cannot sympathize with it."
Boucher quoted Powell as saying he was seeking "a technologically oriented, market-driven way to move forward in dealing with the [global warming] problem."
-------- nato
Advancing freedom east
June 19, 2001
Washington Times Editorials
Sven Jurgenson, Aivis Ronis and Vygaudas Usackas {Ambassadors fro Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania]
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010619-52477.htm
In the early 1990s, as democracy and freedom began to take shape in Central and Eastern Europe, President George H. W. Bush spoke in Warsaw about his vision of a "Europe Whole and Free." How fitting that the new President George W. Bush would return to this symbolic place and provide the American leadership necessary to help move this vision closer to reality.
The president´s trip to Europe was for the Baltic states a week of hope and trust that America will lead NATO toward further enlargement at its summit in Prague in 2002 and that no country would be excluded because of history or geography. From the U.S. president´s first comments as he addressed the leaders of the alliance in Brussels, we watched with pride. He urged them to "extend our hands and open our hearts" to former Soviet bloc nations that aspire to join the alliance to Secretary-General George Robertson´s characterization that "we agreed that NATO must prepare for further enlargement of the alliance. All aspiring members have work to do, yet, if they continue to make the progress they are making, we´ll be able to launch the next round of enlargement when we meet in Prague. We agreed that all European democracies that seek to join our ranks and meet our standards should have the opportunity to do so without red lines or outside vetoes."
And we knew that the United States would provide the leadership necessary for the next expansion of the alliance when President Bush said in Warsaw: "Poland and America share a vision. As we plan the Prague summit, we should not calculate how little we can get away with, but how much we can do to advance the cause of freedom." It was a firm step forward by not only the United States but by all members of the alliance. This decision gives us even stronger incentives and self-confidence while pursuing our further membership preparations. We also agree with the president that "Russia is part of Europe and, therefore, does not need a buffer zone of insecure states separating it from Europe."
We have already been acting and contributing as if we were members of the alliance. All three of our countries have sent troops to peacekeeping operations under the auspices of NATO, the United Nations, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE). All three countries are committed to increasing their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP in order to set their force structures right, and further develop their defense capabilities. To maximize our regional effectiveness, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have been cooperating through joint trilateral frameworks such as a peacekeeping battalion, a joint naval squadron, a joint airspace control center, and a joint defense college. Recently all three have decided to closely cooperate in the area of military procurement and discussions with Poland about joint procurements have also begun. Lithuania is a party to the joint Polish-Lithuanian military unit. We have spared no effort in actively implementing our Membership Action Plans while using them as the most comprehensive and candid NATO-candidate feedback mechanisms.
We have been engaged in all these efforts because we believe in cooperation as the primary driving force of today´s Atlantic alliance. We have been acting as future allies because we think it is the right thing to do for each of our countries and for our neighbors. The progress achieved to date was recently recognized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in a meeting with Nordic and Baltic ministers said that "there is no question that the three Baltic nations have made good progress and they have indicated a desire to be a part of NATO."
We wholeheartedly share Mr. Bush´s view of a Europe whole and free, where all of Europe´s democracies can freely choose their defense and security alliances and their future. The people of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have firmly chosen the path of democracy, prosperity and credible security through membership in the Euro-Atlantic institutions.
We could not agree more that with NATO enlargement, stability and security in Europe will be further extended. Indeed, we know that an enlarged NATO is not a threat to anybody. Moreover, we are fully convinced that membership of the Baltic states is going to be the most telling proof of the alliance´s non-threatening nature and, therefore, is going to help build greater cooperation with all of our neighbors. This is exactly what happened with Poland in the last round of enlargement. We thank the president for his leadership during his first visit to Europe. We look forward to working with this administration as well the continuing bipartisan leadership shown by the U.S. Congress on this issue and finally to the Prague summit next year, and what we still hope will be a "rendezvous with history."
Sven Jurgenson is the ambassador of Estonia, Aivis Ronis is the ambassador of Latvia and Vygaudas Usackas is the ambassador of Lithuania.
-------- new zealand
New Zealand builds peacekeeping force
June 19, 2001
By Ray Lilley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010619-19972152.htm
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- When it comes to military matters, New Zealanders are more likely to hear from the minister of disarmament than the minister of defense these days.
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 defenses.
The left-of-center government announced last month that it is junking the air force´s combat jets, turning the force into a transport service.
The small army, meanwhile, is being remade into a peacekeeping force and the navy cut to just two oceangoing warships.
The army also has been instructed to do a feasibility study on setting up a peace school at which soldiers would sit in seminars with aid workers and peace campaigners to discuss methodology and share experiences.
New Zealand may be small and far away from just about everywhere, but the Labor Party government believes it can set an example to the world on defense.
Opponents of the cutbacks contend the government is really pursuing total disarmament by stealth, cloaking its true aim with talk about peacekeeping because most New Zealanders want a strong defense.
"These are peaceniks trying to run the armed forces," said defense commentator Graeme Hunt. "Every other center-left government in the world -- except New Zealand is spending more on defense."
"We have a naive belief that if we run down our armed forces, others will too," Mr. Hunt said.
Prime Minister Helen Clark insists the changes are justified because there is virtually no chance of New Zealand being attacked. She denies she is leaving the country almost defenseless, and she rejects the notion the government wants to withdraw into isolationism.
New Zealand is investing in the army to carry out peacekeeping missions with the United Nations and other world bodies, she said. "This defense strategy is the very opposite of being isolationist."
While the government is buying new vehicles and other equipment for the army, defense analysts say little of the money is going for weapons or front-line combat gear despite an urgent need for such items.
"The army is an orphan army now ... and they´re deeply concerned about their combat viability," said David Dickens, director of the independent Institute for Strategic Studies.
Opinion polls indicate that just under 60 percent of New Zealanders believe the country needs strong defenses and must play a full role in defense alliances with the United States and Australia.
-------- puerto rico
Protests 'Quiet' as Navy Practice-Bombs
14 Are Detained for Allegedly Trespassing on Puerto Rican Training Grounds
By John Marino and Sue Anne Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; Page A08
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14505-2001Jun18?language=printer
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico, June 18 -- The Navy today began dropping inert bombs on Navy-held parts of this slender island of 9,000 people -- but without the massive protests and arrests that usually accompany such training exercises, Navy officials said.
"Things are quiet as far as the protesters are concerned," said Lt. Commander Katherine Goode, "and we are happy to be able to be training our sailors."
Last week, President Bush announced that the Navy will pull out of Vieques by 2003, ending a six-decade-old military presence that had been drawing more aggressive protests since the death of a civilian guard during a bombing exercise two years ago. Since then, the Navy has switched to the use of dummy bombs, which do not contain explosives, but critics have vowed to continue protesting until the Navy leaves the island altogether, citing harm to residents' health and to the environment.
Fourteen people were detained today and turned over to federal marshals for gaining illegal entry to the Navy's Camp Garcia, Goode said. During the last training exercise, held April 27-May 1, 187 people were arrested and charged with federal trespassing, including Al Sharpton and Robert Kennedy Jr., with some alleging abusive treatment by Navy personnel.
This time, there were no incidents, Goode said. "Everyone was cooperative and gave their names," she said.
Jacqueline Jackson, the wife of civil rights leader Jesse L. Jackson and vice president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, who had joined protesters at Camp Garcia's front gate, was among those detained. "Yours is a noble cause," she told about 100 residents Sunday night who gathered to tell her how the Navy presence had damaged their lives.
Protest leaders denied that the movement has lost momentum after Bush's announcement. "We get phone calls, faxes, e-mails, from volunteers and people just showing up here from all over Puerto Rico," said Nilda Medina, one of the organizers of the Peace and Justice Camp, located in a rental house across the street from Camp Garcia's entrance. "There's still enthusiasm. We're just being more strategic about the civil disobedience."
Leaders said about 30 protesters gained access to restricted areas of Camp Garcia today in an attempt to force the Navy to postpone or scrap its exercises. Navy officials said no trespassers have been found near the target area and denied protesters' claims that they had successfully postponed the exercises for several hours today.
"Every hour they don't bomb is a victory for us," said Ishmael Guadalupe, who was jailed for two weeks for trespassing during the last round of exercises and protests.
The Navy will practice aerial bombardment on its Vieques target range all this week, using F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Hornets and EA-6B Prowlers to drop about 1,500 inert bombs. But it will not practice ship-to-shore shelling, normally a key part of the training exercises. The Puerto Rican government has sued the Navy, claiming the shelling violates newly enacted noise regulations.
The maneuvers, which began on the high seas last week, involve the USS Theodore Roosevelt battle group, which includes 11 ships and 10,000 sailors.
Pressley reported from Miami, special correspondent Marino from Vieques.
----
Bombing, and Protesting, Resume on Vieques
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By DAVID GONZALEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/national/19PUER.html
VIEQUES, P.R., June 18 -- The faint roar of jet fighters returned to this disputed island today, as the Navy resumed bombing practice after arresting 14 protesters who had slipped into the firing range to demand an immediate end to the military maneuvers.
Among those arrested this afternoon was Jackie Jackson, the wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who, with five other protesters and three masked men wearing camouflage fatigues and carrying wire cutters, made her way through thick brush before crouching to get through a hole in the fence by a perimeter road.
There, the group was met within minutes by military police clad in riot gear and carrying shields. They were arrested without incident, taken to the camp for identification before being turned over to United States marshals to be charged with trespassing.
Eight other protesters, who landed by boat on a beach early today, were arrested this morning.
"We are here as a human chain attempting to stop the bombing and this imposed level of militarism on the people of Vieques," Mrs. Jackson said. "Victory is on the way."
The protests, much smaller than those in April, when some 180 people were arrested, were the first since President Bush announced that the Navy would leave Vieques in 2003. But opponents, ranging from the governor of Puerto Rico to the fishermen who ply the surrounding waters, have demanded that the military exercises stop now.
Protesters said they had changed their tactics and had spread people out along the nine-mile fence topped with razor ribbon that runs along the perimeter road. They said that 20 to 30 protesters managed to enter the area.
Pierre Vivoni, the superintendent of Puerto Rico's police force, which has 220 officers patrolling the area, said he was unable to say that they had prevented all efforts to enter the zone.
"It is impossible to effectively patrol nine miles of fence," Mr. Vivoni said. "I will be doing as much as humanly possible."
Navy officials had said they were confident they had arrested everyone who had penetrated the secure area, where F-14 and F-16 jets were scheduled to drop dummy bombs from 2 p.m. until 11 p.m.
"Obviously they would not have continued with the exercises if they did not feel confident there was nobody or no trespassers out on the range," said Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode, a Navy spokeswoman.
Commander Goode added that while the bombing runs had been thought to be scheduled for 8 a.m., the delay was attributable to boat scheduling and not to any concern that individuals had illegally entered the zone.
Protesters hailed the delay as a victory and said that they would hold the Navy responsible should anyone inside the zone be injured by the practice runs. They also said they would continue to sneak people onto the firing range.
"That we are still on our feet is a triumph for us," said Ismael Guadalupe, an organizer of the protest. "The second triumph is that we have been able to make a mockery of the Navy in the restricted area."
--------
Vieques Protesters Credit Tactics
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vieques-Bombing.html
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Some sneak onto the bombing range by boat. Others don camouflage and use the cover of night to cut through fences.
The idea is to halt bombing practice on Vieques island and being arrested is part of the deal, even for the nephew of President Kennedy and the wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
``We are not violent criminals even though we have endured the act of shackles and have been treated as common criminals,'' an indignant Jacqueline Jackson told a federal judge Tuesday. She was jailed because she refused to pay $3,000 bail.
Activists working to end the U.S. Navy's six decades of bombing exercises on Vieques claim their peaceful guerrilla tactics succeeded in repeatedly pausing the military maneuvers and contributed to President Bush's surprise announcement last week that the Navy must withdraw in two years.
``The people of Vieques have defeated the most powerful military apparatus in the history of humanity,'' activist leader Robert Rabin said Tuesday.
Another protest leader, Ismael Guadalupe, said the Navy wasn't bombing Tuesday because protesters were on its prized firing range -- a claim the Navy quickly disputed.
``Our courage has turned Vieques into a world stage of peaceful protest,'' Guadalupe said.
The cause lately has drawn celebrities like Jackson and environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. to back charges that the bombing harms the environment and health of islanders.
The Navy denies that and describes as unscientific local studies that claim Vieques residents suffer a higher incidence of cancer and other ills.
Actor Edward James Olmos and the Rev. Al Sharpton were among 180 people arrested during exercises in late April and early May. Sharpton has been on a hunger strike in a New York jail since May 29, and dozens of Puerto Rican protesters also are still in jail.
On Monday, as Navy jets dropped dummy bombs, Jackson walked through a quarter-mile of thick underbrush and woods to breach a Navy fence. She was arrested soon afterward.
Protesters say they want to reach the 900-acre beachside bombing range that is on 12,000 acres the Navy owns on the eastern end of the island. The Navy land is protected by a nine-mile arc of fencing that is regularly cut and then repaired.
Seven protesters were arrested near the firing range Monday night, said Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode. She said they were caught after they launched several flares, an hour before the Navy began its bombing runs.
Protesters use flares to alert the Navy to their presence, and then retreat to avoid arrest, said Luis Angel Torres, a spokesman for the Socialist Movement of Workers.
More Navy exercises were scheduled for Tuesday. But Goode said they had not started by late afternoon because fighter jets were performing defensive maneuvers.
Vieques Commissioner Juan Fernandez, who observes the exercises for the Puerto Rican government, said the maneuvers were delayed as Navy security rounded up activists.
-------- russia
19 soldiers detained for killings in Chechnya
AP June 19, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/190601/19euro6.htm
MOSCOW: Russian authorities on Monday announced the detention of 19 servicemen on suspicion of killing civilians in Chechnya - a move that comes amid international accusations that Russia is unwilling to prosecute military abuses.
The servicemen are suspected of killing civilians in the region of the Chechen capital Grozny last week, according to a statement by Chechnya's pro-Russian administration. The statement, which was carried by the Interfax news agency, provided no other details, saying that discussion of the cases might stoke protest in the republic.
The detentions appeared to be connected with the killing of seven or eight people near the Grozny district village of Pobedenskoye on Thursday, an incident reported in the Russian media. Interfax said that Chechen prosecutors had opened a criminal case of homicide in connection with the killings, which it said occurred after servicemen opened fire against local civilians who were allegedly trying to steal oil from a well.
The news agency also said that 19 servicemen had been questioned in the case and released. It was unclear from the report whether the soldiers had later been detained or were already free, and no Russian or Chechen officials with knowledge of the killings could be reached for clarification.
Meanwhile, an envoy from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Monday urged the Russian military to stop alleged abused of civilians' rights in Chechnya.
Gerard Stoudmann, a top OSCE human rights official, noted an "increasingly large number of complaints from refugees and residents of Chechnya about the violations of their rights by federal power bodies," Interfax reported.
Federal troops in Chechnya routinely seize local men, women and teen-agers from the streets or their homes as suspected rebels or sympathizers, and rights groups say some have been tortured or killed. Russia denies the accusations, but authorities have been reluctant to launch a large-scale investigation.
Russian forces have controlled most of Chechnya for months, but have been unable to crush resistance by rebels, who continue to fire at federal positions and plant land mines daily.
Chechen rebel commanders said Monday they hoped that U.S. President George W. Bush would press Russian leader Vladimir Putin to stop the abuses, but that they abandoned hopes of international pressure following thettwo presidents' weekend summit.
"Every time people representing huge powers meet, they analyze the profits they can derive from their relations, and they always forget about small people," said rebel field commander Akhmed Basnukayev. (AP)
-------- u.n.
Afghan Rulers to Let Women Carry Out a U.N. Survey
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19AFGH.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 18 -- After a yearlong standoff, the Taliban government of Afghanistan has agreed to let the World Food Program employ local women to survey the food needs of the most vulnerable households in the country, which is suffering the effects of drought and famine.
Under an agreement reached Sunday and announced today, the agency will be allowed to select, hire and train women -- 30 initially -- from a list of potential employees drawn up by the Ministry of Health.
The new surveys are necessary to find out which families are going hungry and how best to deliver aid to them, but that task is complicated by the government, which discourages if not prohibits social contacts between men and women.
"The only way we can do it properly is to hire women, because only women can talk to women in the household," said Catherine Bertini, the executive director of the World Food Program. "That's why it's so critical."
"We also have a commitment to our donors that the food will go to those who are in need," Ms. Bertini said in a telephone interview from Ottawa, where she is traveling. "Our lists were developed five years ago. We could no longer confirm to the donors that we were giving food to the people who were most in need."
Frustrated, officials of the World Food Program set a June 15 deadline, telling the Taliban that without up-to-date surveys, there was no point in continuing food deliveries.
The Taliban consented to let women be hired after the World Food Program suspended deliveries of flour to bakeries that help feed more than 400,000 Afghans in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. The bakeries closed over the weekend for lack of flour, but resumed baking once deliveries started again. Each family is allowed to buy 4.4 pounds of bread a day at a subsidized price.
The World Food Program already feeds an estimated 3.8 million Afghans, supplying nearly 200,000 tons of food annually at a cost of nearly $77 million. That may not be enough, a new United Nations report suggests. After the most recent harvest disaster, the report estimates that five million Afghans now have little or no access to food and will need international assistance to survive until next year's crops are planted.
The United Nations food agency already supports 257 bakeries in Afghanistan, 45 of which are operated by women. The bakeries offer one of the limited job opportunities available to Afghan women since the Taliban stripped them of the right to work under its strict interpretation of Islam. More than 500 women, mostly widows or sole breadwinners for their families, are employed at the bakeries, earning $20 and 220 pounds of flour a month.
Now, with permission to hire women as interviewers, the agency hopes to be able to pinpoint where the poverty and hunger are worst.
The urgency is growing because a third consecutive drought, exacerbated by civil war and economic mismanagement, threatens millions of Afghans with starvation, according to a United Nations mission.
The mission, jointly sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Food Program, reported on June 8: "There is mounting evidence of emerging widespread famine conditions in the country, reflecting substantially reduced food intakes, collapse of the purchasing power of the people, distress sales of livestock, large-scale depletion of personal assets, soaring food-grain prices, rapidly increasing numbers of destitute people, and ever swelling ranks of refugees and internally displaced persons." Wheat and barley crops that depend on rainfall mostly failed, and drought has killed off farm animals.
-------- u.s.
Navy possibly caused death of rare whales
06/19/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-06-19-whales.htm
VERO BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- The U.S. Navy is investigating whether its training activities off the Florida Coast may have led to the deaths of two rare whales, Navy officials said Monday.
Both beaked whales -- an adult female and a younger male -- beached themselves and died Sunday.
The adult female, which was 14 feet long and about 2,000 pounds, was already dead when marine rescue officials arrived. The male -- 10 feet long and 1,500 pounds -- was found alive but was euthanized because it was so ill.
The cause of their deaths was not immediately determined.
U.S. Navy officials said they are investigating to see if recent training activities off the Florida coast may have led to the deaths.
"We are aware of the beachings and taking a good hard look at what, if any, training exercises we may have had in the area, and whether these may have caused these beachings," said Lt. Commander John Kirby, a spokesman with the Navy's second fleet.
Both whales were malnourished, said Gregory Bossart, director of marine mammal research and conservation at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce. He said the younger whale showed signs of kidney and liver trauma.
Bossart said the deaths may be linked to Navy tests of sonar equipment conducted off the Florida coast last week. The National Marine Fisheries Service has asked officials to be on the lookout for an increase in strandings.
Last year, dozens of beaked whales were stranded in the Bahamas after similar tests were conducted by the Navy near there.
Sonar would not have immediately killed the whales, but would have rendered them incapable of eating, Bossart said.
Kirby did not disclose what kind of exercises the Navy had been conducting.
A National Marine Fisheries Service biologist said Monday his agency issued the Navy a permit to carry out tests with high explosives off the coast near Jacksonville this summer.
"The Navy requested permission to do something known as 'ship shock testing' of a new guided missile destroyer, the U.S.S. Winston Churchill," biologist Eric Hawk said.
Under the permit, the Navy is required to move its tests elsewhere if endangered sealife is spotted nearby. Hawk said the Navy was forced to move several times during its recent tests.
The heads of the whales were sent to Harvard University for further testing. Results should be available in two to three weeks, Bossart said.
--------
Ogg bill to aid Persian Gulf vets
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
By JEFF BARRON,
Portsmouth (Maine) Daily Times
From: "vcolley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>
State Rep. Bill Ogg has been trying for seven years to get financial aid to state military personnel who served in the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Ohio House Bill 49, which Ogg helped draft, would give a $300 bonus to those who served in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The total cost to the state would be $3 million. However, the bill has failed to get past the finance committee three times previously. "It has hit opposition every time because of the $3 million cost," Ogg said. "But we waste more money than that."
Section 1 of HB 49 explains who is eligible for the bonus should it eventually be passed:
"Any person who, as a member of the armed forces of the United States, served, on or after Aug. 2, 1990, in the area designated as a combat zone...any person who, as a member of the Ohio National Guard or the reserve components of any of the armed forces of the United States, served on active duty in support of Operation Desert Shield or Operation Desert Storm..."
All service personnel must have been an Ohio resident for one year prior to deployment. Also, anyone who received a bonus from another state is ineligible for the Ohio bonus.
Ogg said Ohio is one of the few states in the country not to give such a payment to Desert Storm veterans.
The next step for the bill will be testimony in front of finance committee chairman John Carey, R-Wellston. Speaking on behalf of the bill will be various veterans groups. Carey will then decide whether HB 49 will move to the floor of the House for voting. The House plans to adjourn July 1 for the summer, so it will be a while before the bill could be passed.
"A bill like mine won't receive any notice until we get back," Ogg said.
Ogg is passionate about HB 49, if it is passed or not.
"The $300 is not much," he said. "It's just a token of appreciation for those who served. Three-hundred dollars today is not like $300 was after World War II." If the bill doesn't pass in the fall, look for a fifth attempt from Ogg.
"I'm just going to keep pushing it," he said. "I don't give up easy."
-------- OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Asia makes big push into clean, alternative fuels
SINGAPORE: June 19, 2001
Reuters
Story by Godwin Chellam
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11238
SINGAPORE - In a few years' time, you could be driving along the Great Ocean Road in Australia or the treacherous Karakoram Highway in Pakistan in a vehicle powered by coconut oil.
At least, that is what some scientists in Asia are hoping.
From petroleum sludge to coconuts, the Asia-Pacific region is considering some radical clean alternatives for the essential but pollutant-spewing lifeblood of the region's transport industry - gasoline.
"This whole push is being driven by a bid to at least halt our carbon dioxide emissions," said Stephen Lucks, a renewable energy scientist and research fellow at Australia's Curtin University.
Carbon dioxide is one of the many noxious gases released through tailpipe emissions that cause smog and health problems.
"In Southeast Asia alone, carbon dioxide emissions rose 69 percent to 618 million tonnes from 1990 to 1998," said the executive director of the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE), Guillermo Balce.
But why bother about pollution and seeking an alternative fuel, especially when the United States, the world's largest energy consumer, recently withdrew from the Kyoto treaty on global warming?
Part of the answer is available in the balance sheets of most Asian countries - crude oil imports.
Gasoline is refined from crude oil, which remains Asia's main source of energy. Since the region does not produce enough oil for its own purposes, it has to import most of it.
Last year, oil demand from the region totalled 20.55 million barrels per day (bpd) out of global oil demand of about 76 million bpd, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said.
IN THE THICK OF IT
While expensive crude oil imports remain the prime reason for the push, the search for alternatives has recently been kicked into overdrive because toxic emissions from vehicles were found to be the leading cause of air pollution in Asia. Vehicle emissions pose a greater threat than industrial emissions as they are close to ground level and are constantly swirled in the air by passing traffic, said senior environmental engineer with the World Bank, Jitendra Shah.
"Much needs to be done if you look at the air quality trend in cities such as Manila, Jakarta and Dhaka. It's not getting any better," Shah said.
According to the World Health Organisation, four to eight percent of all deaths in the Asia-Pacific region are due to air pollution.
This prompted the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to launch a Clean Air Initiative in February with officials from eight Asian countries.
The programme strives to share knowledge and expedite pilot air-quality projects through a series of workshops.
So from Pakistan to China, Asian governments are trying to encourage the use of different types of alternative fuels.
Pakistan and Australia have turned to natural gas, either in compressed or liquefied form, because of its relative abundance in those countries while resource-poor countries such as Singapore are pursuing fuel-cell technology.
A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that combines hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, which can power a car.
Other countries such as China, India and Thailand are looking at biofuels.
The two most common biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel, a diesel-engine fuel that can be made from vegetable oils, animal fat or algae.
Thailand has even explored the use of coconut oil and palm oil, with King Bhumibol Adulyadej taking an interest in the latter by patenting a palm oil formula at the beginning of May.
The formula, which consists of one part crude palm oil and nine parts diesel, can easily power vehicles with no harm to the engine, said the state-run Petroleum Authority of Thailand, which conducts tests for the king.
Australian researcher Lucks has also developed a technology to convert discarded petroleum sludge at the bottom of oil tanks and oil tankers into a gas which can be used as an alternative source of energy.
"Basically, this is stuff that refiners throw on the ground, turn over and over, hoping it eventually goes away," Lucks said.
"But by introducing a special bacteria, I can turn it into natural gas."
NOT EVERYONE WINS
But not everyone is popping champagne corks at this push towards alternative fuels.
It stands to reason that the producers of motor gasoline could either lose a large chunk of their profits or have to incur extra costs to export their product somewhere else.
Take Pakistan as a case in point.
The country has about a million vehicles on the road, but only 160,000 to 170,000 are equipped to use compressed natural gas - the alternative fuel of choice in Pakistan.
But this number is growing rapidly.
"Everyday, we see about 300 to 400 older vehicles being converted from petrol to compressed gas, while most new cars already come equipped with compressed gas kits," said manager of supplies at Pakistan State Oil (PSO), Nazir Zaidi.
Zaidi said gasoline demand, which had been expected to grow three to five percent year-on-year, has now shrunk to 1995 levels.
This has left Pakistan refiners with about 500,000 tonnes of surplus gasoline this year, he said. With total annual production running at 1.5-1.6 million tonnes, a third of all gasoline produced is now surplus to domestic requirements and much of it is being exported.
---
Japan's Toyota unveils 2 fuel cell hybrid vehicles
JAPAN: June 19, 2001
Story by Tim Large
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11236
TOKYO - Toyota Motor Corp said yesterday it had developed two fuel cell hybrid vehicles, one jointly with truckmaker Hino Motors Ltd, as part of efforts to meet 2010 emissions standards by as early as 2005.
The environmentally friendly vehicles - a 63-seater bus and a five-seater passenger car - promise to be three times as efficient as conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, Japan's top carmaker said.
The news comes just days after Toyota unveiled its new four-wheel-drive Estima Hybrid minivan - the world's first hybrid minivan - for the Japanese market.
Automakers are increasingly turning to hybrid technology, which combines two or more sources of power, such as a gasoline engine, an electric motor or a fuel cell. The goal is lower emissions of toxic gases and greater fuel efficiency.
The development of "greener" cars is seen as the key to surviving global competition under stricter environment laws.
Toyota said it and Hino Motors had come up with a low-floor city bus powered by a high-pressure hydrogen fuel cell hybrid system. Known as FCHV-BUS1. The bus has a cruising range of 300 km (186.4 miles) and can reach a top speed of 80 km per hour.
Road tests will begin as part of the bus's ongoing development, the company said without elaborating.
The FCHV-BUS1 uses a hybrid system that includes secondary batteries to store energy while braking. It also has roof-mounted high-pressure hydrogen storage tanks and a high-performance fuel cell stack, Toyota said.
Fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen via a catalyst that converts chemical energy into electrical power to feed an electric motor.
ADVANCED PASSENGER CAR
Toyota also announced the development of its hybrid FCHV-4 passenger car which is powered by hydrogen held in high-pressure tanks and can reach a maximum speed of 150 km per hour, with a cruising range of 250 km.
Developed together with the FCHV-3, a more basic fuel cell hybrid unveiled in February, it has been approved for road tests by the transport ministry. Those tests will help Toyota launch an advanced version in the autumn.
"We believe that hybrid technology will be one of the core technologies in the 21st century," Toyota President Fujio Cho told an environmental forum organised by the carmaker yesterday.
Toyota aims to meet Japanese 2010 auto emissions standards in all weight classifications of gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2005, he said.
Some 34 percent of Toyota's vehicles currently meet those standards. The company also hopes to achieve ultra-low emissions vehicle status for the majority of its passenger vehicles in 2005.
That means producing cars with emissions that are 75 percent below regulated levels for 2000.
"We'll endeavour to install hybrid technology in as many vehicles as possible," Shinichi Kato, Toyota's executive vice president, told the forum.
Last Friday, the carmaker said it aimed to boost output of environmentally friendly hybrid-powered vehicles to 300,000 in 2005, up from 19,000 in 2000.
It currently has two hybrid vehicles on the market - the Estima Hybrid minivan and the Prius compact sedan, first launched in Japan in December 1997. Toyota has sold about 60,000 Prius vehicles in Japan, Europe and North America, it said.
Toyota shares dipped 0.48 percent to close at 4,150 yen, slightly outperforming the benchmark Nikkei stock average, which fell 0.72 percent.
Hino Motors shares gained 0.73 percent to 552 yen.
-------- death penalty
China strikes hard at crime
By Paul Wiseman,
USA TODAY 06/19/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/june01/2001-06-20-china-usat.htm
http://usatoday.com/news/world/_photos/2001-06-19-china-inside.jpg
HONG KONG - China, caught up in one of its periodic anti-crime frenzies, has executed more than 500 people since early April.
On April 11, the day the "Strike Hard" campaign officially began, 89 people were put to death.
The latest nationwide Strike Hard campaign - the first was in 1983, the most recent in 1996 - is in part a reaction to rising crime. Police say the number of reported crimes shot up 50% last year. Gang-related crime increased 700%, the government says. The rise follows two decades of economic reforms that have enriched many Chinese but left millions of others unemployed and unprotected by the social benefits offered under the old communist economy. According to U.S. estimates, China's urban jobless rate hovers around 10%. Unemployment is believed to be much higher in rural areas.
"The dramatic social change taking place in China is producing a growing disadvantaged population," the government newspaper People's Daily noted at the beginning of the Strike Hard campaign. "This is likely to give rise to underground violent gangs."
Many see the government's efforts as a pointless ritual that does little to cut crime and much to undermine China's attempts to reform its criminal justice system. And now there is some concern that the new campaign has incited criminals to retaliate. "The evidence indicates that (executions) do not really work," says Harold Tanner, a historian and author of a book about the crackdowns, Strike Hard! "Campaign-style justice and enthusiastic use of the death penalty have not brought about lower crime rates. These severe tactics simply do not scare potential criminals."
Analysts reckon the anti-crime campaign also is connected to domestic politics. Up-and-coming Chinese officials want to look tough ahead of next year's shake-up in the nation's leadership. President Jiang Zemin and four other senior leaders will turn 70, the mandatory retirement age for Communist Party leaders.
State Councilor Luo Gan, who is leading the Strike Hard campaign, is believed to have his eye on a seat on the Politburo's powerful Standing Committee, one of China's top decision-making bodies. The government also wants to crack down on corruption before it further erodes public support for Communist Party rule.
"The party's legitimacy is undermined by economic crime," Tanner says. Party members are among those who have been charged with corruption in recent years. "So in order to shore up its image with the people, the party makes a big deal out of pursuing economic criminals."
Even before the latest Strike Hard campaign, China was the world's most enthusiastic user of the death penalty, according to Amnesty International. From 1990 to 2000, China executed at least 19,446 people and probably many more, Amnesty says. China's population of 1.26 billion is 4 1/2 times as large as that of the USA, but China executed at least 34 1/2 times as many people in the 1990s. In the USA, 563 people were put to death over the same period.
Amnesty counted 4,367 executions during the Strike Hard year 1996, 72% more than the year before and 133% more than the year after. The number of executions is expected to be inflated again this year by the latest campaign.
Under Strike Hard, the government exhorts local prosecutors and police to crack down on specific crimes. Violent crime, gang-related crime and theft have been targeted this time, along with corruption. Criminals can be executed for organizing a prostitution ring, taking bribes or trafficking in drugs. Officials hold rallies in sports stadiums at which convicted criminals are paraded before massive crowds. Later the same day, many of the convicts get a bullet to the back of the head - the most common method of execution, though China sometimes uses lethal injection.
During the campaigns, the government-controlled media are filled with sensational stories about cold-blooded criminals meeting justice at the hands of a powerful state. In one case, though, the media repeatedly ran stories about executed gang leader Zhang Jun, unintentionally turning him into something of a John Dillinger-style folk hero.
Courts and prosecutors are under enormous pressure to send criminals to jail or to the executioner, and they often ignore legal niceties in the process. Indeed, officials in Sichuan Province recently advised investigators, "Don't get entangled in details" as long as the weight of the evidence points to a suspect's guilt.
Chen Feirong, 32, a student working on a master's degree in business at Beijing's Tsinghua University, says that during Strike Hard years, criminal suspects "will be treated unfairly. The government should enforce the law, not rely on this kind of campaign."
This year's effort has netted a wide variety of criminals:
Four tax cheats in southern Guangdong Province were executed May 11 for bilking the government out of nearly $10 million in inflated tax rebates. A bank robber who disguised himself as a woman, wearing a wig, a dress and high-heeled shoes, was sentenced to death last month in southwestern Yunnan Province. An official from central Hubei Province was executed May 28 after embezzling nearly $2.4 million from two state-owned companies and blowing the money on gambling excursions to Macao.
Strike Hard might be taking the lives of more than convicts. In the city of Nanchong in Sichuan Province, four college students have been murdered. It is widely believed that they were victims of a campaign of terror by gangsters trying to intimidate the local government into refraining from executing their arrested leaders.
The gang members reportedly threatened to kill 100 students if the executions were carried out, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy has reported. Local officials deny any connection between the killings and Strike Hard. They say they have already arrested the murderers.
----
China Justice: Swift Passage to Execution
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19CHIN.html
KEIBAISHA, China -- Nothing in Hao Fengqin's abbreviated life suggested that she would end her days on an execution ground.
The 45-year-old Ms. Hao lived a hard life in this village of low brick houses, set in wheat fields 200 miles south of Beijing. She was born poor and married poor, and she bore two daughters, considered a misfortune in rural China because girls traditionally leave the family after they marry and offer little support to their parents later on.
But Ms. Hao unwittingly sold explosives for a mass murder: a man named Jin Ruchao was found guilty of killing 108 people with some of Ms. Hao's homemade ammonium nitrate, which she sold to nearby quarries and which was the type of explosive that brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
Like Timothy J. McVeigh, Mr. Jin was executed, though his death was swifter and less gentle: he was shot in the back of the head, the usual method of capital punishment here, just 37 days after his arrest and less than seven weeks after the crime.
For her unintentional role in the bombing, Ms. Hao was shot in the head too, one month after the police took her away from her home. Typically, someone found guilty of making and selling unlicensed explosives would have been fined.
China has made great strides in enforcing the rule of law for commercial transactions, particularly those involving foreigners. But without more uniform enforcement of the law in other areas, and in the absence of institutions like a free press and a strong judiciary, the country continues to rule most of its people in the same brutal way it has for centuries: by occasionally singling out a suspect for severe punishment as a warning -- "killing a chicken to scare the monkeys," as an ancient Chinese saying goes.
There is a randomness to who dies, given that many technically criminal activities flourish across China. Those practices are considered only moderately risky because they are so widespread. But there is always the threat of death for an unlucky few at the ever-shifting perimeter of tolerance.
Since 1983, Beijing has mounted periodic "Strike Hard" campaigns to eliminate a changing list of crimes. The campaigns have resulted in tens of thousands of executions, more each year than in the rest of the world combined. Amnesty International said the Chinese press reported at least 4,367 executions in 1996 -- about a dozen a day -- during that year's Strike Hard campaign.
China is in the midst of another such campaign now, focused on corruption. The number of executions, which rights groups say had begun to subside, is again on the rise. One Western diplomat said his government counted 800 reports in May alone. The real number may be much higher; many executions are never reported.
It is impossible for the average lawbreaker to know when the government will crack down on a particular activity. But when it does, Chinese justice is swift, often unexpected and, in cases like Ms. Hao's, unmerciful.
A decade ago, for example, smuggling was largely ignored and smugglers' markets operated openly in many port cities. The People's Liberation Army was one of the worst offenders. Then the government cracked down to stem the loss of badly needed tax revenue, and that caught many people in the smuggling chain by surprise. Hundreds of people have since been put to death for the crime.
But there is little long-lasting deterrent from such campaigns; as the intensity of the crackdown inevitably wanes, old practices return. Organizing prostitution is also punishable by death, for example, but the sex trade is rampant.
Ms. Hao graduated from high school, making her one of the best educated people in this village, where few people speak standard Mandarin, conversing instead in a local patois. Her schooling helped her survive after her husband fell ill 11 years ago. She supported her family any way she could, baking cakes, raising chickens, selling shoes, keeping the books for a friend's small factory.
After her husband died from a blood clot two years ago, she learned how to make ammonium nitrate, a common fertilizer but also a powerful explosive that is in high demand among the small quarries that pock the razor-back hills near her home.
In March last year, she began mixing explosives with a neighbor, Wang Yushun, in an empty building in the village, local residents said. Like thousands of other explosive-makers on the fringe of quarries and mines across China, Ms. Hao and Mr. Wang operated without a license.
Two months after she started up the business, the police say, a mute man appeared at her home and indicated that he was looking for someone to supply inexpensive explosives to a small quarry. He bought a sample of about four pounds of ammonium nitrate from her. His name was Jin Ruchao.
Then on March 12 this year, Mr. Jin returned wearing a green padded-cotton overcoat against the dry, frigid air. He wrote on a piece of paper that he wanted to buy half a ton of ammonium nitrate, not an unusual order for a quarry.
Ms. Hao and Mr. Wang mixed the explosives the next day and packed 1,300 pounds of it in 11 yellow chicken-feed sacks. Mr. Jin came back that afternoon and paid 40 yuan for 55 pounds, saying he wanted to test the batch first.
He paid for all 11 bags the next day, and Mr. Wang gave him a key to the warehouse where the bags were stored so he could remove the explosives at his convenience. Ms. Hao and her colleague pocketed a total of 980 yuan, about $118, earning a modest profit.
Two days after he bought the gray, granular powder, Mr. Jin bombed four apartment houses in Shijiazhuang, a nearby provincial capital, killing 108 people. The police said he acted in revenge against relatives who had angered him.
Ms. Hao recognized Mr. Jin in the next day's newspaper. She fled to a nearby orchard and spent two nights in a pump house.
The police knew where to look for the likely source of the ammonium nitrate. On March 18, they swept through the villages below the quarry-flecked hills, shutting down illegal explosives shops and detaining more than 100 people. In Beibaisha, they seized Mr. Wang and put up posters calling for the arrest of Ms. Hao. They finally caught her, on March 20 at 1:20 a.m., after she returned to her home from the orchard.
Mr. Jin was found a few days later and confessed to the bombings. He named Ms. Hao as the woman who had provided the explosives.
-------- energy
House Panel Erases Bush Energy Cuts
By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2001; 7:39 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010619/aponline193908_000.htm
WASHINGTON -- A House subcommittee voted Tuesday to spend $1.2 billion more next year than President Bush proposed for energy and water programs, underlining lawmakers' sensitivity to the West's power problems and their desire for home-district projects.
The $23.7 billion measure, approved by voice vote by a panel of the House Appropriations Committee, is normally one of the more routine of the 13 annual spending measures Congress must approve. But with this year's escalating battle between Bush and Democrats over energy policy, the measure's profile has been raised.
The bill would provide $18.7 billion for the Energy Department, $641 million more than Bush requested and $444 million more than this year. Fiscal 2002, which the bill covers, begins Oct. 1.
It also includes nearly $4.5 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers and the hundreds of water projects it has under way across the country, $568 million more than Bush proposed but $73 million less than this year.
One member of the subcommittee, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., took credit for winning 47 water projects for his state worth $150 million for dredging, beach protection and other activities, plus $248 million for fusion energy research at Princeton University.
"I make no apologies for fighting for New Jersey's fair share," Frelinghuysen said in a written statement.
The measure was approved shortly after top members of the committee met with Bush at the White House.
Participants said Bush and the lawmakers reaffirmed their goal of keeping the price tag of the 13 bills to $661 billion, which is one-third of the overall federal budget. That would be a 4 percent boost over 2001, which many Democrats - and some Republicans in private - say is too low.
"He said there would be attempts to raise this as we go through the process, and let's stick with him," said Rep. Sonny Callahan, R-Ala., chairman of the energy and water subcommittee.
Illustrating the pressures Republicans face, David Sirota, spokesman for the Democrats on the committee, said the bill lacked the new spending needed for renewable energy and other programs that could help alleviate power shortages.
Under the bill approved Tuesday, renewable energy programs would get $377 million, $100 million more than Bush wanted and $1 million more than this year. Nuclear energy, basic energy sciences, biological and environmental research and a study of whether spent nuclear fuel should be stored at a Nevada site would all get about what Bush proposed.
The bill's $7.03 billion for environmental cleanup is $699 million more than Bush proposed. Programs aimed at containing the nuclear arsenals of former Soviet states would get $845 million, $71 million more than Bush's plan.
Members voted to hold the brief meeting behind closed doors after citing the national security sensitivity of publicly discussing some of the nuclear weapons programs covered by the bill.
------
Price Limits Extended on Power
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By JEFF GERTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/national/19POWE.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 -- Broadening their efforts to rein in California's power crisis, federal regulators today ordered that restraints on electricity prices be applied at all hours and extended to 10 other states across the West.
By extending the price limitations to the whole Western region, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hopes to prevent electricity suppliers from exporting their power out of California to avoid the restraints that have applied only there. And by applying the restrictions to all hours, the commission hopes to cover all transactions in the spot market for electricity, where previously it covered only emergency periods.
The commission, whose action came as California faced a heat wave and warnings that power supplies could run short, asked power generators that have been accused of overcharging in California to settle their cases within a few weeks.
The broad outlines of the decision had been widely expected, as both Democrats and Republicans in Congress had urged stiffer measures to curb prices by the independent regulatory agency. In something of a surprise, the plan was supported by all five members of the often fractious commission, including William Massey, a Democrat who has complained in the past that the agency's actions have not gone far enough.
The agency's chairman, Curt Hébert Jr., a Republican, said the approval of the plan meant it was "time to stop blaming and start solving the problem."
Gov. Gray Davis, who has attacked the commission for not taking enough action to address California's crisis, called the commission's action "a step in the right direction" but said that the federal government needed to do more to ensure that spot prices were reasonable and past overcharges addressed.
On Tuesday, commission members are to testify before a Democratic-controlled Senate committee examining Western electricity markets. Some Democrats want the agency to set prices based on each generator's cost of producing power.
The politics of energy prices, as well as the mounting public outcry over spiking prices and power blackouts, have transformed the commission from one of Washington's bureaucratic backwaters to the focus of heated debate. According to a new poll by The New York Times and CBS News, when asked if they favored or opposed putting price caps on power, 79 percent of respondents said they favored the caps.
President Bush opposes price controls because he says they do nothing to increase supply while interfering with the market's ability to operate efficiently.
"To the extent that FERC's action represents a market-based approach and not price controls, we would view that positively," said Claire Buchan, White House deputy press secretary.
Whether the government should intervene in electricity markets surfaced as an issue in today's meeting. Mr. Hébert emphasized that the plan was an effort to "restrain prices" through market incentives while Mr. Massey simply called the effort "price controls," an action that Republicans abhor.
The action is intended to let producers recover their fixed and capital costs but also tries to keep prices competitive based on a benchmark tied to market conditions.
This spring, the agency tried to restrain prices, only in California and only in times of emergency. Today's broader plan, which also affects Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, includes the following:
¶The commission would monitor all wholesale spot-market prices for electricity in the West until Sept. 30, 2002. The order would also cover publicly controlled sellers, which previously had been exempt. Any price above a benchmark -- set at 85 percent of the highest clearing price -- would be subject to a refund.
¶Sellers of power to California would be able to recover a 10 percent premium to reflect the credit risk for those sales. Mr. Massey and the other Democratic commissioner, Linda Breathitt, both expressed reservations about this provision, saying it was not needed.
¶The commission calls for generators to reach a settlement within 15 days, working under the auspices of an administrative law judge. California regulators have assessed the overcharges in the billions, while the commission, which has jurisdiction over some but not all of the sellers, has been seeking refunds of up to $125 million.
Mr. Massey objected to this provision as well, saying the agency was shirking its responsibility to determine what constituted fair prices.
Today's action was the latest in a series of temporary efforts by the commission to address California's chaotic electricity market. The earlier efforts raised questions about the agency's ability to enforce its rules.
The Federal Power Act of 1935 requires that wholesale rates be "just and reasonable," but the commission never defined what it means as it moved toward competitive power markets.
Late last year, after prices in California skyrocketed, the commission found that rates there were unjust and unreasonable, and attributed the situation to a flawed market. At the same time, it instituted a limited price cap of $150 a megawatt hour.
When that plan proved inadequate, the commission tried a different approach. In March, it ordered power generators to pay refunds if their prices exceeded the cost of the least efficient generator in California, but only during so-called Stage 3 emergencies in the state, when supplies fell to within 1.5 percent of demand.
In April, the agency broadened the plan by extending the March price- mitigation scheme to situations whenever supplies fell to within 7.5 percent of demand.
In its April order the commission also took its first steps toward defining what kinds of economic behavior might be unlawful in a competitive market. For example, it called on generators to supply all their available electricity, making the withholding of power subject to possible penalties.
That order took effect on May 29 and Mr. Hébert said today that as a result, "California consumers are better off today."
In recent weeks, prices there have fallen to less than $100 a megawatt hour, compared with more than $300 earlier this year. State officials say that the long-term contracts they signed are a moderating influence. Today, Mr. Massey also credited other factors in the marketplace for the recent price drops.
But even if prices have eased and California is not just in a lull before a summer storm, the costs of power in the state are a far cry from where they were in 1998 or 1999, when the price averaged $30 a megawatt hour.
While Mr. Massey and Mr. Hébert often are at odds with each other, the political dynamic at the agency may have shifted in recent weeks with the addition of two new Republican commissioners: Pat Wood 3rd, a former Texas regulator and associate of President Bush, and Nora M. Brownell, who served on Pennsylvania's utility commission.
Today, Mr. Wood showered praise on his fellow commissioners, including a comment that a lot of Mr. Massey's earlier dissents had "shown up in this order."
Pension Fund Group Acts
The board of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund at $152 billion in assets, voted 7 to 4 yesterday to send a special delegation to some of the companies that generate and distribute power to California. The delegation, which is to include Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. of San Francisco, will express concerns about the business practices of companies like Enron, Reliant Energy and Mirant during California's energy crisis and how those practices will affect the long-term performance of their stocks, according to Philip Angelides, the state's treasurer and a Calpers board member.
Calpers has about $4.4 billion invested in the stock and bonds of power producers, distributors and utilities.
"This goes beyond our normal corporate governance activities," Mr. Angelides said. "It was a chance to express our extraordinary level of concern."
--------
Military Utilities May Go Private
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Army-Utilities.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The new Army secretary wants to shift control of more military base utilities into private hands, a multimillion-dollar business that his former energy company is pursuing.
Army Secretary Thomas White has said he would step away from decisions involving Enron Energy Services, where he served as vice chairman until this year, if there was a clear conflict of interest.
The former brigadier general is consulting with lawyers on whether he should remove himself from Enron-related decisions and is in the process of selling more than $25 million in company stock, the Army says.
For the last two years, the Pentagon has been seeking to save money by hiring companies with energy expertise to run the electric, natural gas and other utilities on military bases. White said last week he was frustrated by the slow pace of the program and wanted to see it accelerated.
Enron has already won one such contract and has a bid pending to run utilities at several Texas bases.
A military ethics expert questioned White's decision to raise the utility issue so soon on the job.
``When you have that interest in the past, to bring that up as the very first thing, I don't think that was a very smart move on his part because, again, it brings that appearance of conflict,'' said former Army Maj. Jeffrey Whitman, an ethics professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa.
Whitman said White should recuse himself if there is a clear conflict of interest as defined by federal law -- and in any case will have to tread carefully on Enron issues.
``It certainly gives the appearance of a conflict of interest, and oftentimes in situations like this appearances can become reality,'' Whitman said.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said President Bush and the staff involved in White's nomination were unaware Enron was seeking Army contracts.
Buchan said she was confident White is working with counsel ``to ensure that he is in full compliance not only with the letter of the ethics laws but with the spirit of them.''
Houston-based Enron has a bid pending to run utilities at seven Air Force bases, a naval base and the Army's Fort Bliss in Texas, company spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney said.
``I can only say the federal government is one of the largest users of energy and so we continually look for ways to offer a product for them,'' she said.
Mahoney said she didn't expect White would play a role in decisions on Enron's contracts.
``We don't anticipate working with him on these issues at all,'' she said. ``It's a very public process and the proposal will stand on its own or not. It's not his decision ultimately. It's base by base.''
Enron won a $25 million, 10-year contract in 1999 to run natural gas and other utilities at the Army's Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, N.Y.
White played an active role in the company's quest, including having Enron join the Army last fall in rebuffing a lawsuit that challenged the military's right to spurn local utilities and hire contractors of its choice.
During his first month as Army secretary, White has made clear he wants faster action on utility contracts.
``I see no reason whatsoever why the Army is in the energy business,'' White said last week. ``It's a stupid business practice for the Army to be running itself that way.''
The Army used to run all base utilities and had to pay for repairs or upgrades.
But in December 1998, the Pentagon ordered each service to hire companies to take over base utilities, where appropriate, by September 2003. The contractors undergo a thorough security check.
White said Fort Hamilton is the only Army base to turn over all its utilities to a private company. ``Any business that was that slow in taking advantage of an opportunity would not be in business very long,'' he said.
Of 320 Army utility systems in the United States, 49 are run by private contracts and dozens more are up for bids. Several bases have been exempted for security reasons or costs. Besides Enron, other companies running base utilities include Northern States Power Co. at Wisconsin's Fort McCoy, Washington Gas and Light Co. at Fort Detrick in Maryland and Oklahoma Natural Gas and Light Co. at Oklahoma's Fort Sill.
While Enron has the Texas bid pending, it says it has stopped submitting new offers while it awaits decisions from the Defense Department on contract-related issues. Those include the level of interest Enron and other base utility contractors can charge the military on their investments in base improvements.
Enron was passed over for utility contracts at the five Washington, D.C.-area bases involved in the lawsuit. The Army awarded contracts at two bases to Enron competitors and has reopened bidding on the other three.
Enron has many ties to the new administration. Its employees rank as President Bush's all-time top campaign contributor. Enron chief executive officer Kenneth Lay raised more than $100,000 for Bush's presidential campaign and was a member of his energy transition team.
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Army Utility Contracts at a Glance
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Army-Utilities-Glance.html
The Army has signed contracts with companies to run utility systems on at least 12 bases. Here is a look at the bases and the utilities the contracts cover:
-- Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.: water and wastewater systems.
-- Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, N.Y.: electric, natural gas, water and wastewater.
-- Fort Sam Houston, Texas: natural gas.
-- Fort Detrick, Md.: natural gas.
-- Fort Pickett, Va.: electric.
-- Fort Benning, Ga.: electric.
-- Fort Lee, Va.: water.
-- Presidio of Monterey, Calif.: water, wastewater.
-- Fort Sill, Okla.: natural gas.
-- Fort McCoy, Wis.: electric.
-- Parks Reserve Force Training Center, Dublin, Calif.: water, wastewater.
-- Stewart Army Subpost, West Point, N.Y.: natural gas.
Source: U.S. Army
-------- environment
Chemical site fears trigger health study
A federal agency will assess effects of the Stauffer Chemical plant. It may include students who attended a nearby school.
By KATHERINE GAZELLA,
St. Petersburg Times,
June 19, 2001
http://www.sptimes.com/News/061901/TampaBay/Chemical_site_fears_t.shtml
[Times photo: Jim Damaske] Community activists and some officials think this is potentially radioactive slag spilling from the banks of the Stauffer Chemical Superfund site in Tarpon Springs.
http://www.sptimes.com/News/061901/photos/tb-stauffer.jpg
TARPON SPRINGS -- Prodded by concerns from residents and a government watchdog, a federal agency is planning a wide-reaching study of the effects the former Stauffer Chemical plant had on the environment and, perhaps, on the health of students, workers and neighbors.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry announced Monday it will produce a new public health assessment by next summer that discusses the impact of the phosphorus-processing plant, which is now a Superfund site.
The report could include health studies of the former students who attended Gulfside Elementary School from 1978 to 1981, the year the plant closed, and former Stauffer workers. The agency will decide whether to do the health study after determining how many of the workers and students can be identified and found, said Dr. Henry Falk, assistant administrator of the agency.
"There is concern here in the community," Falk said. "What I do hope is that the effort over the next year will address some of those concerns."
The announcement that the agency will study air and water, and possibly the people who may have been exposed to contaminants, validates concerns expressed by residents and the agency's watchdog.
"I'm disappointed that it's going to take a year, but I'm very pleased that they're going to do a thorough look," said Mary Mosley, a longtime activist from Tarpon Springs.
The agency's decision to do a new health assessment came after a scathing report released in January by a watchdog for the agency. Ombudsman Ronnie Wilson said in a 196-page report that public health officials previously did not consider all the information available and downplayed the risks posed by Stauffer.
"I'm very pleased," Wilson said Monday. "It's far-reaching, it's progressive, it's systematic."
Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Tarpon Springs, who had requested the ombudsman's participation, said Monday he is pleased about the agency's plan but wishes it would not take a year to complete.
A health study on students and former workers is one step closer to happening, but it is not a sure thing. First, agency officials will have to determine whether such studies would be feasible, Falk said.
Officials think there are 2,567 former Stauffer employees, perhaps 2,000 of whom might still be alive, and 3,000 people who attended Gulfside Elementary from 1978 to 1981.
There is no set number of people needed for the studies, Falk said, but the agency needs to find a large percentage for the results to be statistically valid.
Former students and workers can contact PerStephanie Thompson toll free at the agency, 1-888-422-8737.
Marilyn Satinoff's two sons attended the school during that time, and she has taught at Gulfside since 1981. The Palm Harbor resident hopes the agency decides to test former students and staff members.
"They're both married, and they both want to have kids. I'm concerned," Satinoff, 54, said of her sons. "I'm worried about my health, too."
Stauffer Management Co. president Brian Spiller said that health studies are unnecessary and that he doubts the agency will find enough people to make one worthwhile.
He said he doesn't think there are any long-term health effects on students or workers, and he pointed out that 80 percent of Stauffer workers were employed there for a year or less.
"You now have another year that these people are concerned," he said.
Spiller said he was "disappointed but not surprised" that the agency plans to study the issues related to Stauffer.
The agency also plans to examine whether asbestos used at the plant affected the surrounding community.
The agency will work with the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate what kind of waste was buried in drums on the Stauffer site.
In a bow to residents' requests, the agency will review radiation exposure and will determine whether additional radiation monitoring is needed to address concerns about slag, a rock-like byproduct of the production of elemental phosphorus. Along with being dumped on Stauffer's property, slag was used in construction of nearby roads, driveways and some home foundations.
The agency also will look at:
Air monitoring data to find out if students and residents were affected by air emissions from the plant.
Whether residential wells could be affected by contaminants.
Surface water, sediment and fish sampling data to determine the impact of contaminants dumped into Meyer's Cove on the Anclote River.
Whether military maneuvers and munitions manufacturing ever took place at the site. Stauffer management has said this did not occur.
Whether sinkholes could result in the contamination of drinking water. Concern over sinkholes was a major reason that the EPA last year withdrew its cleanup plan and announced further studies.
Whether uranium extraction or recovery was ever conducted at the site. EPA, Stauffer management and the Department of Energy have said there is no evidence that this happened.
--------
Amazon Chief Says Big Firms Threaten Forests
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-brazil-.html
GENEVA (Reuters) - Brazilian Indian Chief Raoni, on a fund-raising tour of Europe, said Tuesday the Amazon rainforest was increasingly threatened by multi-national forestry and mining firms.
``I am anxious about this situation, and you should be anxious too,'' said Raoni, who is known for his protruding lip plate and has led environmental campaigns with British rock star Sting.
Companies were stripping the rainforests and mining without proper respect for the environment, he told a news conference in Geneva.
``We don't have the means to protect this immense forest... We need your help.''
Raoni is a guardian of the Kaiapo Indian reserve and Xingu National Park -- a territory of 180,000 square kms in the Brazilian Amazon and home to around 12,000 Indians.
``This year the reserve has been invaded by all sorts of mining and logging companies,'' said Jean-Pierre Dutilleaux, president of the Paris-based Rainforest Association.
Raoni and Dutilleaux were in Switzerland to showcase a plan to create a Raoni Institute at a cost of 3.6 million euros ($3.1 million) to help protect the reserve and its indigenous people.
They have already presented the proposal, which includes plans for a hospital, school, library and research center, to governments and institutions in France, Belgium and Sweden.
Dutilleaux said he hoped French President Jacques Chirac, whom the two met earlier this month, would fight the rainforest cause at meetings of the world's richest states, the so-called G7.
-------- health
Bill Gates Pledges $100 Million to Fight AIDS
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/health-aids-gates.html
BRUSSELS, June 19 (Reuters) - Computer billionaire Bill Gates said on Tuesday his charity foundation would donate $100 million to a global fund which aims to stop the spread of AIDS and other diseases ravaging developing countries.
``As we reflect on 20 years of AIDS and the 22 million lives it already has claimed, we believe that there is no higher priority than stopping transmission of this deadly disease,'' the Microsoft (MSFT.O) founder said in a statement.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will pay the money over an unspecified number of years to support a new campaign against AIDS launched by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in April.
Annan has proposed an anti-AIDS war chest for poor countries, estimating $7 billion to $10 billion a year in additional spending was needed to combat the disease in the developing world along with malaria and tuberculosis.
At U.N. headquarters, a spokesman for the secretary-general said the Gates Foundation's gift would serve as a powerful example to other private donors and governments and ``will probably also save millions of lives.''
``It is only through a truly global partnership, bringing together governments, corporations, foundations, civil society and individuals, that we can hope to pool the leadership and raise the resources needed to defeat this scourge,'' said Annan spokesman Manoel Almeida e Silva.
The foundation, which spent more than $1 billion on health projects around the world last year, also urged governments, private firms and non-profit groups to follow its example and support Annan's fund.
``This is only part of a comprehensive and unprecedented effort that is needed to stop this pandemic,'' Patty Stonesifer, co-chair of the foundation, said.
U.S. President George W. Bush said last month the United States would contribute $200 million to the global fund.
Switzerland, France and Winterthur Insurance, a unit of Swiss investment firm Credit Suisse Group (CSGZn.S), have also pledged money to the fund although the European Commission said last month it would not participate in the fund if it concentrated solely on AIDS and ignored other diseases.
European Union Development Commissioner Poul Nielson has also said the global fund could not succeed if the pharmaceuticals industry did not commit to sell drugs at lower prices in developing countries.
--------
'Silly Little Virus' May Cure Brain Cancer -Study
By Will Dunham,
Tuesday June 19 5:29 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010619/sc/health_cancer_brain_dc_1.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An innocuous virus commonly found in the human body shows great promise as a potential cure for a ferocious form of brain cancer in a novel strategy pitting virus against tumor, researchers said on Tuesday.
University of Calgary scientists tested whether the reovirus, which does not cause disease in people, could be used against malignant gliomas, the most common form of brain tumor.
The live reovirus destroyed human glioma cells growing in a test tube and human glioma cells that were implanted into mice, the scientists said. It also killed cells from brain tumors removed from human patients, they said.
Malignant gliomas are aggressive, invasive and resistant to treatment. Most patients die quickly and long-term survivors are rare.
``It's a ferocious cancer where the average survival is about a year and the prognosis for patients hasn't changed in the past 20 years in spite of better neurosurgery, better radiotherapy, better MRI scans, better anesthesia,'' Dr. Peter Forsyth, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
``We're still not attacking this properly. And the use of a virus is a new way to think about treating these (tumors), and it might be very exciting,'' added Forsyth, whose study appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (news - web sites).
The reovirus, short for Respiratory Enteric Orphan virus, is commonly found in the human respiratory and gastrointestinal tract, and does not appear to do anything bad in the body.
``Actually it's a silly little virus,'' Forsyth said. ``It's something that we've all been exposed to.''
But it's cancer-fighting potential is far from silly. The researchers said that while it does not infect normal cells, it infects and destroys tumor cells.
HUMAN CLINICAL TRIALS IN SIX MONTHS
Forsyth said the researchers were planning a first phase of human clinical trials.
``In about six months time, we anticipate starting a trial in patients with brain tumors who have failed all conventional treatment -- to radiation or surgery or chemotherapy. We would inject the virus directly into the brain tumor and basically evaluate if it was safe to deliver in that way, and also look and see if it shrank tumors and made them go away,'' he said.
He said it would be several years before it could be used widely to treat gliomas, assuming the clinical trials go well.
No existing cancer treatment involves the injection of a live virus into a tumor, Forsyth said.
``We're going to do some more studies in mice and rats and probably in monkeys to make sure the virus is safe to put directly into the (human) brain. So far the mice look fine, and mice are very closely related to people. But of course they're not people,'' Forsyth said.
In an editorial accompanying the study in the journal, Dr. Matthias Gromeier of Duke University praised the ``very encouraging results,'' but cautioned that it still is too early to know whether the reovirus may have some dirty little secrets that could manifest themselves in the human body.
``There is justified concern that intracerebral inoculation (an injection into the brain) of reovirus preparations in humans may unleash unknown properties of these agents or provide a suitable milieu promoting adaptation events that give rise to altered pathogens with new properties,'' Gromeier said.
The University of Calgary researchers used the live reovirus against 24 brain tumor cell lines in culture, and it killed 20 of them.
It also destroyed all nine cell cultures of gliomas removed from human patients. Tested against another type of brain tumor (meningiomas), it was ineffective. Glioma cell cultures getting dead reovirus or no virus also were unaffected.
The reovirus worked against human tumors implanted into mice. Following a single injection of live reovirus into the tumors, nine of 11 mice were alive after 90 days.
The clinical trials will be sponsored by Calgary-based Oncolytics Biotech Inc., which owns the patent to use the virus as an anti-cancer treatment, Forsyth said.
-------- human rights
Back to Chechnya
June 19, 2001
Embassy Row
by James Morrison,
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010619-98590768.htm
Romania´s former ambassador to the United States has reopened an office of the world´s largest security organization in the war-torn Russian region of Chechnya after a 21/2-year absence.
Mircea Dan Geoana, now acting head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said his main objectives are to monitor human rights and to oversee the return of refugees.
"We have a number of projects of a humanitarian nature, and I think our presence in Chechnya will be a positive signal to encourage to return to the field," Mr. Geoana told Agence France-Presse last week.
The OSCE shut its office in Chechnya because of fears of kidnappings. About 25 armed guards will protect the six-member staff in the new office, he said.
Mr. Geoana, now Romania´s foreign minister, was ambassador in Washington from 1996 until earlier this year.
The OSCE represents 55 countries from Europe, Central Asia and North America.
----
War-crimes case filed against Sharon
World Scene
June 19, 2001 •
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010619-86081635.htm
BRUSSELS -- Survivors of the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees during Israel´s 1982 invasion of Lebanon filed a case in Brussels yesterday accusing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of crimes against humanity.
The 52-page complaint, also accusing Mr. Sharon of genocide and war crimes, was handed to Investigating Judge Sophie Huguet, who will decide whether the case is admissible.
"We hope that Mr. Sharon will be brought to justice, will be tried and will defend himself," Chibli Mallat, a Lebanese lawyer representing the 23 Palestinian and Lebanese plaintiffs, told Reuters.
-------- police
Justice system that is short on justice?
Paul Craig Roberts,
June 19, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010619-19243240.htm
Justice has been squeezed out of the criminal justice system. Wrongful conviction has become routine as heartless prosecutors and police seek to close cases and mount up convictions. The system today is budget and career driven, justice be damned.
An ever-growing number of books, innocence projects and overturned convictions speak to the unreliability of conviction. A surprising number of death row inmates have been discovered to be innocent of the capital offense for which they were convicted. A criminal justice system that convicts innocents on the serious charge of murder is certain to convict innocents on less serious charges as well.
The rate of wrongful conviction is high because of serious flaws in what passes as "evidence." For example, criminologists know that eyewitnesses are wrong 50 percent of the time. This means that half of inmates convicted by eyewitness testimony are innocent.
Junk science plays a large role in the conviction of innocents. Microscopic hair-comparison evidence has sent many an innocent person to jail. The weakness of hair analysis is well established. For example, it is a known fact that hairs from the same head often do not match. A test of 240 crime labs found error rates in hair analysis of 50 percent, 54 percent, 68 percent and 56 percent. Yet prosecutors desperate for convictions continue to use the junk science of hair comparison to send innocent people to prison.
Because of the activities of law professor Barry Scheck and various law school innocence projects, DNA analysis is bringing about the release of many victims of microscopic hair-comparison in cases where the evidence was kept.
Forensic fraud is another source of wrongful conviction. Believe it or not, crime labs have traditionally been dependent on police budgets and beholden to prosecutors. Consequently, crime labs have tended to be politically sensitive to the needs of police and prosecutors for evidence. Often the labs withhold caveats and present ambiguous results as compelling evidence. In some instances, the labs actually create the needed evidence.
A suspect´s confession usually convicts him. But in many cases the confession is false. There are various causes of false confessions. Some people with low IQs get through life by being agreeable and telling authority figures what they want to hear. In other cases, confession is propelled by a need, at least once in their life, to be the center of attention. Sometimes police claim a suspect confesses, knowing that people will tend to believe the police and not the suspect.
A growing number of wrongful convictions result from the disreputable practice of paying inmates and police informants with money or reduced prison time for testimony that either identifies a suspect in unsolved cases or convicts a suspect against whom there is no other evidence. In the vast majority of cases, "snitch" testimony is unreliable, and those convicted by it are innocent.
Bad lawyering also plays a role. Lawyers have been known to sleep through their client´s murder trial. Public defenders are often overwhelmed with cases and cannot prepare. Many lawyers are simply unaware of the junk character of much forensic evidence and do not know how to challenge it.
Misconduct by police and prosecutors is one of the main causes of wrongful conviction. Both police and prosecutors suppress exculpatory evidence that points to the suspect´s innocence. Once upon a time prosecutors presented the case for and against the suspect and left it to the jury. But today suspects do not receive the benefit of the doubt.
Police and prosecutors coerce witnesses and knowingly use false testimony. When this isn´t enough, they fabricate evidence. In an analysis of 62 known wrongful convictions, Mr. Scheck found that prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence in 43% of the cases, knowingly used false testimony in 22% of the cases, coerced witnesses in 13% and fabricated evidence in 3% of the cases.
Police suppressed evidence in 36% of the cases, fabricated evidence in 9%, and lied in other ways in 55% of the cases.
What can be done to halt the railroading of innocents? Reforms could be instituted, such as making crime labs independent and substituting DNA evidence for junk forensic science. Coercive plea bargains could be halted. Prosecutors and police could rededicate themselves to justice and restore the integrity of the criminal justice system.
The public could read books such as Mr. Scheck´s "Actual Innocence" and Donald Connery´s "Convicting the Innocent" and become aware that there is a high probability that the suspect on trial is an innocent person.
Until the system is reformed and the public becomes aware, we cannot presume a connection between conviction and guilt.
----
Court Gives More Protection to Officers Sued Over Force
New York Times,
June 19, 2001
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/national/19SCOT.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 -- The Supreme Court added an extra layer of protection today for police officers accused in suits of using excessive force.
In a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled that a lawsuit against a police officer for using excessive force must be dismissed even if the officer's behavior was unreasonable under existing law, as long as a reasonable officer could have made the same mistake under the particular circumstances.
The decision overturned a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, that grew out of a brief altercation at the Presidio Army base there in 1994. During an appearance by Al Gore, then the vice president, to mark the conversion of the base to a national park, an animal-rights activist at the front of the crowd started to unfurl a banner objecting to the possible use of an Army hospital there as a site for animal experiments.
Two military police officers quickly dragged the man away and threw him into a nearby van. The man, Elliot Katz, president of a group called In Defense of Animals, was then 60 years old and wearing a leg brace due to a fractured foot. Though he fell to the floor of the van, he was not injured. He sued one of the officers, Donald Saucier, for subjecting him to an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
When any law enforcement officer is sued for a constitutional violation, the question immediately becomes whether the officer is entitled to have the suit dismissed under the doctrine of "qualified immunity." Under this doctrine, as defined by Supreme Court precedents, an officer cannot be found liable for behavior that was objectively reasonable under law that was clearly established at the time. Under this standard, many suits accusing police officers of making illegal searches or arrests are dismissed at the summary judgment stage, without a trial.
The Ninth Circuit, though, viewed excessive-force cases in a way that effectively ruled out qualified immunity and sent many of those cases, including this one, to trial. The appeals court concluded that since the issue of reasonableness was at the heart of both the immunity question and of excessive force itself, the issues merged and should be left to a jury to sort out.
Writing for the majority today, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said this was the wrong approach because the two issues were really not the same.
"The concern of the immunity inquiry is to acknowledge that reasonable mistakes can be made as to the legal constraints on particular police conduct," Justice Kennedy wrote.
Thus, he continued, even police behavior that is objectively unreasonable might be entitled to immunity.
"If the officer's mistake as to what the law requires is reasonable," Justice Kennedy ruled, "the officer is entitled to the immunity defense."
Having established the analytical framework, the court went on to decide the merits of the case, Saucier v. Katz, No. 99-1977. Justice Kennedy said that under the particular circumstances -- including the presence of the vice president, the need for heightened security and the fact that Mr. Katz did not suffer a physical injury -- the officer's behavior "was within the bounds of appropriate police responses."
Justice Kennedy added, "The suit should have been dismissed at an early stage in the proceedings."
The decision was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice David H. Souter joined the part of the opinion that set out the test to be applied, but said the Ninth Circuit should have been given a chance to apply it in the first instance.
In a separate opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer, agreed that the officer was entitled to immunity because "Katz's submissions were too slim to put Officer Saucier to the burden of trial."
But Justice Ginsburg disagreed with the court's analysis, which she said "holds large potential to confuse" by establishing a complex two- part reasonableness inquiry.
She said the test should be the Ninth Circuit's simpler one: an officer whose use of force is objectively reasonable "simultaneously meets the standard for qualified immunity" while one whose conduct is objectively unreasonable "should find no shelter under a sequential qualified immunity test."
In another decision, the court ruled 8 to 1 today that the United States Customs Service is entitled only to a modest degree of judicial deference for its classification rulings that decide whether particular import items are subject to a tariff.
The decision vacated a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized appeals court here with jurisdiction over certain trade cases. That court refused to defer to the Customs Service's judgment that three-ring notebooks known as day planners, imported from China by the Mead Corporation, should be classified as bound diaries and subject to a 4 percent duty. Mead had appealed the agency's determination, arguing that the day planners were not bound, were not diaries and were not subject to any duty.
The question for the Supreme Court in United States v. Mead Corp., No. 99-1434, was the extent of judicial deference to which a federal agency is entitled for its administrative determinations that are not the product of a formal regulatory process. Customs officials in 46 regional offices make more than 10,000 classification rulings a year of the sort at issue in the case.
The government argued that these determinations were entitled to the highest degree of deference, known as Chevron deference after a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
Writing for the court today, Justice Souter said that while the agency was entitled to modest deference under a 1944 Supreme Court decision, Skidmore v. Swift & Co., it was not entitled to Chevron deference because there was no evidence that Congress intended to delegate to the Customs Service the power to issue rulings with the force of law.
"Any suggestion that rulings intended to have the force of law are being churned out at a rate of 10,000 a year at an agency's 46 scattered offices is simply self-refuting," Justice Souter said.
The court sent the case back to the Federal Circuit to apply the 1944 decision.
Justice Scalia filed a vigorous dissent to argue that the court should not have departed from the high degree of deference called for by Chevron. He called the decision today "one of the most significant opinions ever rendered by the court dealing with the judicial review of administrative action," and added: "Its consequences will be enormous, and almost uniformly bad."
After appearing only a few weeks ago to be on track for a peaceful conclusion to the term, the court now is facing a ragged close, with all the remaining decisions pushed off until next week or, possibly, later.
There were four decisions today, with 10 still to go, including three cases involving immigration and deportation; a campaign finance case involving the constitutionality of limits on political parties' use of so- called hard money; a case on the First Amendment rights of tobacco companies; and a Rhode Island zoning dispute that poses constitutional issues of land-use regulation.
Theodore B. Olson, the Bush administration's recently confirmed solicitor general, performed his first ceremonial duty in the courtroom today, formally presenting Attorney General John Ashcroft to the justices.
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Ex - KGB General Testifies in Spy Trial
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Espionage.html
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- A former KGB general testified at the espionage trial of a Florida retiree Tuesday that he met with the man in the mid-1970s and put him at the top of a list of valued Soviet sources.
Oleg Kalugin, who was chief of counterintelligence for the former Soviet spy agency, said he spent hours with George Trofimoff at an Austrian resort town discussing Trofimoff's work as a Soviet spy during the Cold War.
``I had no reason to doubt his honesty and integrity as a Soviet agent,'' Kalugin said.
Trofimoff, 74, could get life in prison if convicted of espionage. A retired Army Reserve colonel, Trofimoff is considered the highest-ranking military officer to be arrested on spy charges. He has denied the allegations.
From 1969 to 1994, Trofimoff was a civilian chief of a U.S. Army installation in Nuremburg, Germany, where refugees and defectors from the Soviet bloc were interrogated.
``I cautioned him he should not go overboard in his zeal to obtain the documents and compromise his security clearance,'' Kalugin said.
Kalugin said the KGB considered Trofimoff a valued agent but wanted him to obtain more important documents than he had been supplying. He said Trofimoff's motive was purely financial.
Kalugin said one document Trofimoff turned over to the KGB was a CIA report that outlined the American intelligence service's targets and plans for the Soviet Union and its allies from 1978 to 1981.
``It was very helpful to the Soviet military machine,'' Kalugin said.
Kalugin said the two met a second time when the KGB brought Trofimoff to a resort for Soviet military officials as a reward for being a valued spy.
Trofimoff's attorney, Daniel Hernandez, challenged Kalugin's memory and truthfulness, saying Kalugin was a ``master of deception.''
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F.B.I. Agents on Bomb Case Pulled From Yemen After Threats
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19YEME.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 -- F.B.I. agents investigating the bombing of the destroyer Cole last October in Yemen were pulled out of the country on Sunday because of a security threat, F.B.I. and State Department officials said today.
"There is a very real and credible threat specifically against those investigating the Cole bombing," said John Collingwood, assistant director of the F.B.I. "Based upon what we know, we thought it prudent to remove our personnel rather than endanger both investigators and those U.S. officials around them."
The investigators were relocated to a neighboring country, said an F.B.I. spokesman, Bill Carter. He would not disclose the nature of the threats in Yemen, how many agents were removed or where the team was taken.
President Bush, speaking to reporters before meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said he would not discuss it until an investigation of the episode is complete.
The move follows a State Department warning on June 9 of an increased threat of terrorism against Americans and United States interests in Yemen. The department authorized non-emergency embassy staff and their families to leave the country and urged Americans to postpone trips to Yemen.
The Cole was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden last October when a small harbor skiff pulled alongside it and detonated explosives that killed 17 sailors and injured 39 others, and nearly sank the ship.
"This increased threat in Yemen is, obviously, of concern to us in terms of our official personnel, but also in terms of traveling Americans and others," said the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher.
The American Embassy in Yemen is closed to the public but diplomats there continue to do their jobs, he said. "The F.B.I. made a decision to leave Yemen, based on what they saw as a credible threat to their employees," he said.
An office set up in Aden to investigate the bombing was shut recently and its American investigators moved to the United States Embassy in Sana. An embassy official has said the closure was not related to new security concerns.
More than 30 people have been detained in connection with the bombing attack.
Interior Minister Rashad al- Eleimi of Yemen met today with the American ambassador, Barbara Bodine, and discussed security cooperation between the two sides, security officials said.
Security has been tightened in the area of the American Embassy in Sana, and there were patrols and checkpoints today in streets close to the embassy.
Mr. Boucher and Mr. Carter both declined to comment on reports that members of a group planning an attack on the embassy had been arrested.
"In light of the heightened threat, the government of Yemen has taken extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our personnel," Mr. Boucher said. "The department has sent additional diplomatic security personnel to help the embassy and to ensure that all personnel receive appropriate protection."
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Death Sought for Terrorist Bomber
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/AP-Embassy-Bombings.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- A prosecutor argued Tuesday that a man convicted in a terrorist bombing at a U.S. embassy should be put to death because he remains a threat, having maimed a prison guard with a sharpened comb and vowed to kill again.
In opening statements at a penalty proceeding, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia called the defendant ``the killer who said he would kill again -- and he almost did.''
Jurors convicted Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, last month, saying he helped build and deliver a bomb that killed 11 people in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. A simultaneous bombing at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killed 213, including 12 Americans.
The jury must now must decide if Mohamed should be executed.
Garcia told jurors that Mohamed confessed that, if not for his arrest, he would have taken part in other terrorist attacks. The prosecutor added that Mohamed and his cellmate allegedly stabbed a guard in the eye, causing permanent brain damage.
Mohamed's attorney, David Ruhnke, claimed the cellmate was the sole assailant.
The same jurors convicted Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali of murder in the Nairobi attack. But they could not agree on imposing the death penalty, meaning he will receive a life sentence.
Prosecutors say Al-'Owhali, 24, and Mohamed were soldiers in a worldwide scheme to kill Americans allegedly masterminded by fugitive Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.
Also convicted of conspiracy at last month's trial were Wadih El-Hage, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh. They face life in prison.
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ACTION ALERT To Nuclear Weapons Campaign Activists
From: jloretz@ippnw.org (John Loretz)
THIS ALERT HAS TWO ITEMS. THE FIRST CONCERNS AN IPPNW DELEGATION TO NATO ON MONDAY JUNE 25. WE URGE EVERYONE TO ACT ON THIS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THE SECOND RELATES TO A REGIONAL PROPOSAL FOR A EUROPEAN NUCLEAR WEAPON-FREE ZONE. IT IS INTENDED PRIMARILY FOR AFFILIATES IN OSCE COUNTRIES.
I. SUPPORT IPPNW'S NATO DELEGATION
BACKGROUND
On Monday June 25, a delegation of IPPNW physicians and advisors (Sergei Kolesnikov, Russia; Joanna Santa Barbara, Canada; Herman Spanjaard, Netherlands; Liz Waterston, UK; Gunnar Westberg, Sweden; Ben Cohen, US) will be meeting with senior NATO officials in Brussels. They will meet, among others, with Robert Irvine, Director of Nuclear Policy, and Ted Whiteside, head of the new Weapons of Mass Destruction section. That afternoon, the delegation will participate in a European Parliament forum on missile defenses. Other meetings are scheduled with EU and UN defense and security officials based in Brussels.
Among the subjects the delegation plans to discuss are missile defenses, dealerting, and the proposed fissile material cut off treaty. These IPPNW/NATO consultations, coming as they do one week after European leaders expressed their concerns about Bush administration defense policies to George W. Bush, give us an extraordinary opportunity to reinforce the message that elimination of nuclear weapons, not a US missile defense system, is the only way to prevent nuclear war.
We urge all IPPNW affiliates and individual activists to send letters to Mr. Irvine and Mr. Whiteside, with copies to the President of the European Union and appropriate officials in your own country this week.
Please make the following points in your letter:
1) The missile defense proposals of the Bush administration are not a solution to the problem of nuclear attack in the post-Cold War world. Missile defenses will provoke other nuclear weapons states to counter what they see as a threat to their own security by building more nuclear weapons rather than by honoring their treaty commitments. Abandoning the ABM Treaty, as the US administration has now clearly said it will do in order to deploy missile defenses, will undermine the foundation for reductions in nuclear arms. Large numbers of nuclear weapons will become a permanent part of the landscape, which will increase the likelihood of accidental launch or miscalculation.
2) Despite the name, missile defenses are not just defensive systems. The US has publicly stated its intention to develop comprehensive space-based systems for military and commercial purposes and to deny access to space to other states. Missile defenses are an early phase of the militarization of space.
3) Characterizing nuclear weapons as "essential" to NATO -- an assertion made both by the US and its NATO allies -- is incompatible with the promise to eliminate nuclear weapons made at the conclusion of the 2000 NPT Review Conference. Calling nuclear weapons "essential" is a stimulus to proliferation. Deterrence with nuclear weapons is impractical, immoral, and illegal, as the World Court made clear in 1996.
4) De-alerting nuclear weapons while we work toward their elimination is essential to preventing a nuclear catastrophe. While all NATO-controlled nuclear weapons are off high alert, NATO countries could play an important role in urging the US and Russia to take their own weapons off alert, thousands of which are ready to be fired at a few minutes notice. This makes no sense in the world today, and puts us all in very real and constant danger.
5) The countries of the European Union -- especially those in NATO -- have been right to challenge these proposals and to demand that the US engage in meaningful consultations about international security in the 21st century, rather than rush ahead unilaterally with an unproven, vastly expensive, provocative plan that primarily benefits the high-tech corporations that would build the components.
Attached to this alert are copies of IPPNW's briefing paper on missile defenses (PDF file, text version available at www.ippnw.org) and a new article by Jonathan Schell ("The New Nuclear Danger"), published in the June 25 issue of The Nation (Word file). Both pieces will provide additional talking points on the dangers of missile defenses and on the need to remove the nuclear threat at its source: the weapons themselves.
ACTION REQUESTED
Please send letters during the week of June 25 (or sooner) to the following individuals:
Robert Irvine Director of Nuclear Policy, NATO International Staff NATO B1110 Brussels Belgium Fax 32 2 707 41 17
Ted Whiteside Director, Weapons of Mass Destruction Centre NATO B1110 Brussels Belgium fax 32 2 707 52 28
Romano Prodi President, European Commission 200 Rue de la Loi Brussels 1049 Belgium fax 32 2 200 1929
Nicole Fontaine President, European Parliament Room PHS 11B11 Rue Wiertz 1047 Brussels Belgium tel: 2845562/43495 fax: 2849562 nfontaine@europarl.eu.int
Elmar Brok President, Foreign Affairs Committee, European Parliament ebrok@europarl.eu.int
We recommend that you send copies of your letters to the appropriate ministers in your own country. ALL AFFILIATES ARE ENCOURAGED TO ACT ON THIS ALERT; EUROPEAN AFFILIATES SHOULD CONSIDER THIS AN ESPECIALLY HIGH PRIORITY.
__________
II. HELP CREATE A NUCLEAR WEAPON-FREE ZONE IN EUROPE (NWFZ-E)
The 10th Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly Annual Session took place in Paris from 6-10 June, 2001. IPPNW affiliates in OSCE countries have an opportunity to support an amendment proposed by German and Austrian delegates that promotes a nuclear weapon-free zone in Europe. The amendment is being put forward as a measure to implement the commitments made at the 2000 NPT Review Conference.
BACKGROUND
OSCE includes all nations of Europe, plus the USA and Canada. Its scope reaches, therefore, from Vancouver to Vladivostok. According to the OSCE constitution, even small nations have a comparatively strong right of co-determination. (Monaco has 2 votes; Switzerland 6; the UK, France, and Germany 10 each; Russia 15; the US 17), making the OSCE better balanced than NATO or the EU.
NGOs have many opportunities to cooperate with the OSCE, and IPPNW traditionally has had good contacts. The only structure within OSCE functioning according to the majority principle is the Parliamentary Assembly (PA). In the PA we have the best leverage to convince the delegates of each country, who have to be elected parliamentarians and tend to be carefully selected by their national parliaments.
The region covered by the proposed NWFZ-E, though it is not yet specified in the amendment, is envisaged to extend from Scandinavia to the Baltic, to Belarus, Ukraine, and Central Europe down to the Balkan region, starting with a nucleus of the two neutral nations, Austria and Switzerland, which both are de facto and de jure nuclear weapon free. IPPNW support for the NWFZ-E is currently being organized by the affiliates in Austria and Switzerland, with prospects of help from the UK, France, Germany, and Sweden.
ACTION REQUESTED
Send letters supporting a European nuclear weapon-free zone to the OSCE parliamentary delegates of your country. (The Parliamentary Service of your government can give you the addresses of these delegates. If you have a personal contact with a delegate, please consider calling him or her on the phone.)
Sample letter to OSCE delegates:
The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly voted in 1996 in Stockholm to "promote the creation of Zones Free of Nuclear Weapons in Europe, as a necessary and important component of a new all European security system." Since then, there has been no real progress toward nuclear disarmament in Europe.
In the present delicate security situation and in view of the urgent goal of creating a safer future for the continent as a whole, an effective confidence building measure is indispensable. We are asking you, therefore, to support the proposed amendment to the Draft Resolution for the General Committee on Political Affairs and Security, which urges the OSCE to promote a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in Europe, as a top priority.
Signature
REPORTING
As always, please report to Brian Rawson in the Central Office about your progress in reaching your government officials. We would appreciate receiving copies of any letters you send, as well as copies of replies. THANK YOU FOR YOUR EFFORTS!
-- John Loretz Program Director International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) Executive Editor, Medicine and Global Survival 727 Massachusetts Ave., 2nd floor Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 868-5050, ext. 280 (617) 868-2560 (fax)
http://www.ippnw.org http://www.ippnw.org/MGS
----
Italian Chief Worried About Summit Protests
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19ITAL.html
ROME, June 18 -- Worried about a repetition in Italy of the violent protests that occurred at a European Union meeting in Sweden last weekend, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said today that he wanted to open a dialogue with demonstrators who are planning to march at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Genoa next month.
In a maiden speech before the Italian Parliament to present the goals of his new government, the prime minister also had to deal with a continuing debate about his extensive media holdings. A conflict-of- interest debate that began after his speech will end with a confidence vote in the Senate on Wednesday.
But today, Mr. Berlusconi seemed more preoccupied with how his government would deal with the next major international meeting when more than 100,000 anti-globalization demonstrators are expected to converge on the medieval port city.
Mr. Berlusconi, like other leaders, was alarmed by fierce clashes between anti-globalization demonstrators and the riot police in Goteborg, Sweden, last week. Concerned that something similar -- or worse -- could happen when he plays host to President Bush and other world leaders on July 20-22, he met with his interior minister on Saturday to review security measures.
Clearly worried that his government might be blamed for any violence in Genoa, Mr. Berlusconi went on the offensive, telling reporters that any problems there would be "the responsibility of the preceding governments." Genoa was selected as the site for the meeting in 1999, when Massimo D'Alema was prime minister. But when the issue came up for a vote in Parliament last year, Mr. Berlusconi's center-right opposition also voted in favor of Genoa.
Although Mr. Berlusconi wants to open a dialogue with the protesters, few expect him to be able to soften their attitudes. "No dialogue, no participation in fake negotiating tables," Luca Casarini, a leader of an Italian anti-globalization group, said today in the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera. "After Seattle, the point is to block the meetings, not tame them."
Even inside Parliament, there were signs of defiance. Hard-line Italian Communists view the summit meeting as an elitist club that undermines the United Nations General Assembly. As Mr. Berlusconi spoke, a few Communist lawmakers held up red signs saying, "No to the G-8."
Members of Parliament also reacted to the prime minister's defiant tone in announcing a draft law to resolve potential conflicts of interest involving his media companies.
"The situation I find myself in was well known to the 18 million Italians who voted for me," said Mr. Berlusconi, a conservative media tycoon who owns Italy's three largest television networks. He said he would propose a law before the summer recess, but added, "My history as a communications entrepreneur and my personal conscience permit no one to suspect that my institutional goals would be contrary to the common good."
That phrase drew scattered applause, and some hissing.
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Algerian Government Bans Protests
New York Times
June 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Algeria-Violence.html
ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) -- The Algerian government has banned all demonstrations in the capital following the fierce rioting that broke out last week during a massive pro-democracy demonstration.
The move comes as the military-backed government grapples with violent protests that began two months ago, leaving at least 55 people dead.
The unrest began among ethnic Berbers in the eastern Kabyle region but has since spread to the capital, Algiers, and other parts of this North African nation.
Newspapers reported Tuesday that three police officers were killed and dozens of people injured Monday during fresh riots in the mountainous Kabyle region, 65 miles east of Algiers. One of the police officers died when he fell from a balcony while firing tear gas, Liberte newspaper reported.
In a statement released late Monday, the government said it was determined ``to tackle serious excesses ... during the tragic and painful events that have taken place in recent days.''
It accused unnamed groups of exploiting events to ``drag the country into chaos and anarchy.''
The riots were triggered by the April 18 death of a Berber teen-ager in a Kabyle police station.
Relations between the Berbers and the Algiers-based authorities have been tense for decades. The Berbers, who claim to be the original inhabitants of North Africa, have long demanded more recognition, including an official status for their language, Tamazight.
France, Algeria's former colonial ruler, cast a critical eye on the military-backed government on Tuesday, calling the people's movement ``profoundly legitimate.''
France ``is very sensitive to the demand, the desire, the call that has risen from the depths of Algeria's people for real change, for a return to political, democratic, economic and social modernization,'' Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told France's National Assembly.
On Thursday, close to a million people demonstrated in Algiers, in what was described by organizers as a ``march for democracy.'' But the protest turned violent, with riot police using water cannons and tear gas to push back demonstrators trying to reach the presidential palace.
Four people were killed, including two journalists, by a bus as it sped away from a burning depot. Authorities said 365 people were injured, including 36 police officers.
The recent protests have overshadowed a nine-year insurgency by Islamic militants who are seeking to topple the government. The uprising has claimed more than 100,000 lives since it started in 1992, when the army canceled elections a Muslim fundamentalist party was set to win.
The riots are not linked to the insurgency, and most Berbers dislike the fundamentalists as much as they dislike the army-backed government.
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Prisoner of Conscience
Melinda Welsh,
Sacramento News and Review;
June 19, 2001 AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11062
The loudspeaker crackles on and the call goes out across the prison yard for inmate No. 83276-020 to report to the administration building. Within minutes, a lanky man in khakis with white hair and clear blue eyes enters the interrogation room. The prisoner is tanned and wears an unexpected beard. He has the large hands of a working man -- powerful and full of intent.
The door is closed behind him and locked from the outside. A guard peeks in from an adjacent room through a glassed-in security window. The federal prisoner asks at once if the warden will "monitor" the interview as anticipated and advises a reporter that, if so, he intends to object because this would constitute a violation of First Amendment rights. The prisoner, ever ready to do battle for what he believes is a just cause, readies for a confrontation with the warden.
But when his keeper shows no interest in witnessing the session, the prisoner's tension is releaved and he takes a deep breath. "In truth," he says, "life in this level of security is not much worse than military boot camp."
Charlie Liteky should know. He is now serving a one-year prison term in Lompoc Federal Prison near San Luis Obispo after being arrested for leading nonviolent protests against a Pentagon-funded school he claims violates the human rights of poor people in Latin America. And Liteky is certainly no stranger to the military. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an army chaplain and, for an exceptional act of valor, was awarded this country's highest medal.
"I'm trying to help create a nonviolent world and to do so a person must face violence ... and death if necessary," writes the ex-priest in a prison diary that is read on-line by tens of thousands of religious people and peace activists across the country, including many here in Sacramento. It is no surprise to find Liteky's journal writings full of references to Gandhi and Martin Luther King -- both of whom died fighting for justice and standing up for the poor, no matter what the personal consequences.
Liteky pens the diary entries while standing on a creaky metal folding chair in his cell, leaning across a bunk bed that serves, for now, as his desk. He doesn't have it too bad at Lompoc. He lives in the "minimum security" section and gets along with most of the men. There are 300 of them here, crammed into two warehouse-like buildings. "I liken it to submarine living," says Liteky, who turned 70 years old in prison back in February. Thanks to the diary, Liteky remains active in the cause, able to communicate his thoughts and experiences despite his prison locale.
"Charlie is my hero," gushes Sacramento's Barbara Wiedner, a lifelong peace activist and friend of Liteky's who sends him books and corresponds with him regularly in prison. "He has proven with his life that he is a hero."
Still, in Liteky's presence, one can't help but wonder what the word "hero" means and whether the word "crazy" might be a more accurate way to describe this man for his seeming willingness to do anything, including risk his life, for what he perceives to be a just cause. And for choosing, through his actions, to spend so much time in prison among criminals and convicts instead of out in the free world, sharing his passions with wife and friends. After one of his arrests for civil disobedience, a government prosecutor questioned Liteky about his life's choices and remarked on his tendency to take the protesting "too far." One can't help but wonder, however, if Charlie Liteky has yet to take things as far as he intends.
The dense jungle of the Bien Hoa Province in 1967 sets the stage for an exploration of how this man turns his beliefs into action.
The air was thick that winter morning near Phuoc-Lac, 35 miles northeast of Saigon. The Vietnam War was heating up and Chaplain Liteky and other members of the U.S. Army's 199th Light Infantry Brigade set out early on patrol and tramped through mud and brush on a mission to check out a mortar site.
Suddenly everything exploded. The brigade marched unknowingly into the edge of a Viet Cong battalion whose 500 men were so well dug in as to be invisible. "They stunned us," says Liteky. "Nobody knew they were there."
The enemy opened machine gun and rocket fire on the leading 15 men in Liteky's group and almost every one of them went down. A few died immediately, but most did not. The shock arrived, the pain moved in. Blood streamed from the men's chests, legs, arms. Then the screaming began.
At first, Liteky did like the rest of the unwounded men and hugged the ground, praying not to get caught himself in the fusillade of fire. But then -- moved by compassion or courage, or both -- he jolted into action. Eyewitnesses on that day say Liteky rose from the ground and began moving through hostile fire toward the wounded. He crawled to them, knelt by their mangled bodies, presided over their agony. He administered last rites to the dying. "For some reason I didn't get hit," he says.
One wounded man became entangled in the dense, thorny underbrush. Liteky broke the vines and freed the man, ignoring the intense gunfire. He lugged the man away to a clearing nearby. Another man was too heavy and badly wounded to carry, so Liteky rolled onto his back, placed the man on his chest and carefully, as if in slow motion, crawled the man back to the clearing using elbows and heels to push himself along. He returned to the action again. At one point, said a witness, Liteky crawled to within 15 meters of enemy machine guns so as to "place himself between the enemy and the wounded men." For most of the day, Chaplain Liteky did not carry a weapon, though he wore fatigues and looked the part of a soldier. "I did stop and pick up a gun," he remembers, "but then I remember thinking -- that would be a helluva way for a priest to die! So I put it down."
Later, when medevac helicopters arrived on the scene, Liteky reportedly stood up in the face of small arms and rocket fire and directed the helicopters into and out of the area. Captain Donald Drees, the company commander, told the military press that "Charlie Liteky inspired 50 men to hang on that day in the face of the most intense fire I have ever witnessed."
The siege at Bien Hoa went on for eight hours. Liteky, who had not been wounded during the first three hours of the fight, was eventually hit and sustained shrapnel wounds in the neck and foot. All told, Liteky saved 23 men that day.
For his actions, Liteky received the Congressional Medal of Honor. This medal is sacrosanct--less than 4,000 people have ever received it; only 150 of them are alive today. In November 1968, in the East Room of the White House, President Lyndon Johnson placed the medal around Liteky's neck, saying, "Son, I'd rather have one of those babies than be president."
Today, Liteky is nonplussed about his actions on December 6, 1967. "I don't think we should even be awarded for compassionate action," he says. "It's just part of being a decent human being."
Being a decent human being, after all, is why Liteky became an army chaplain in the first place. It's also why he joined the priesthood. After a youth spent skipping school and rebelling against his career military father, Liteky eventually straightened up and got an education. He decided to do the toughest, most honorable thing he thought a young man could do in life, and this meant joining the priesthood. In 1960, he joined up with the Missionary Servants Of The Most Holy Trinity, wore a collar and did God's work on the East Coast for six years. When the call went out for religious men to volunteer for duty in Vietnam, Liteky was glad for the opportunity to serve. At that time, he believed in the war; he believed the American government was right in wanting to fight communism.
After training at a military base in Fort Benning, Georgia, Liteky went "in-country." He stayed for one tour, then extended it by six months. After the action at Bien Hoa, he returned home, then volunteered to go back again for yet another tour.
From his prison home, Liteky seems ready to talk about the politics of Vietnam and the protest movement that arose to try and stop an unjust war. But he's uneasy talking about his day of heroism and the courage and the fear and the medal and what any of it might mean about his character.
"All I can say is ... death did not hold much fear for me that day. Even now, being in here ... it doesn't make sense for me to fear death."
When Liteky arrived home from his second tour in Vietnam, he had another battle on his hands -- the celibacy aspect of his priestly vows. Among other things, he carried guilt about the fact that, while a priest, he'd lost his virginity to a prostitute in Saigon. "I struggled with it," he says of his promised celibacy. "It was the biggest internal struggle I've had in my life. To have vowed oneself to God, then say 'I can't do it!' " Liteky ended that struggle in 1975 by deciding to leave the priesthood. After spending the next six years in what he calls "the grand world of women," he met his soul mate and future wife, Judy Balch.
The two were fixed up on a blind date in 1980 and shared dinner and conversation. The following Sunday, Liteky showed up without notice at Judy's church, St. John of God in San Francisco's Sunset District. "He didn't tell me he was coming," says Judy, who had been a nun for 13 years before leaving the order. "I remember being aware of him being there -- and just the electricity of that. He knew this church was an important place for me so it was just amazing to me what he was saying by showing up there."
The pair began dating in earnest and immediately recognized that this was the Big One for them both. Tall and slender with short-cut auburn hair, Judy did not know about Liteky's medal and war heroism until several months into their relationship. Eventually, the former priest and former nun married at St. John of God on October 22, 1983.
Where Liteky is spontaneous, Judy is measured. Where the husband is eager, Judy is earnest. Liteky prides himself on thinking like a common man, while Judy can't help but come across as more of an analyst, an intellectual.
Liteky credits his wife with his transformation into a political activist; she's also the one who first got him focused on Central America. A longtime proponent of social justice, Judy urged her husband to start making the political and economic connections. Liteky began to listen to the stories of the refugees coming up from El Salvador. He started reading everything he could get his hands on regarding U.S. foreign policy in Central America.
Once in a while he would attend a protest rally with Judy but he'd usually respond with frustration. "I wasn't impressed," he says of the demonstrations he attended. "All these people shouting and marching around not doing anything. ... I just didn't think it was enough!"
Soon Liteky traveled to Central America with a group of Vietnam veterans and heard more firsthand stories from people whose families had been disappeared or tortured with the complicity of the U.S. government. "We all came to the same conclusion -- that we were exploiting the people just like in Vietnam."
When Liteky returned home, something turned over in him. "The idealism that I had as a youth ... the pledge of allegiance and America the Beautiful and the Declaration of Independence -- to have that idealism shattered and realize that we're no more than an empire trying to maintain ourselves -- it made me sick to think of this kind of hypocrisy."
Wanting to make a dramatic statement about what he had learned, Liteky took center stage at a press conference held at the Vietnam Veteran's Wall in Washington, D.C., in July 1986. He renounced his medal, as well as the $600 a month veteran's pension he was otherwise earmarked to receive for life. He left the decoration at the wall with a letter he wrote to then-President Ronald Reagan: "I find it ironic that conscience calls me to renounce the Congressional Medal of Honor for the same basic reason I received it -- trying to save lives." It was an opening salvo from a man who was to become more and more willing to go to great lengths to bring attention to his cause.
News of what this former war hero had done resonated in the press across the country and caused a new awareness in Liteky and his wife. It was the first time they realized that his heroism during the war could focus substantial media and public attention on their cause.
In the fall of 1986, Liteky made another bold move. In the tradition of Gandhi, he and three other veterans -- George Mizo, Brian Willson and Duncan Murphy -- began a water-only, open-ended fast on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. It was to bring attention to how wrong they believed the U.S. government was in pursuing a foreign policy in Central America that undermined democracy and punished the poor. Liteky stated outright that he was willing to die for this cause.
Judy did not, at first, support her husband's spontaneous choice to begin the fast. In fact, when Liteky announced what he was about to undertake to his friends at St. John of God, nobody liked the news. Liteky's own brother Pat called him "nutso" for considering starving himself to the death. Another parishioner pointed out that Liteky was being selfish, that his act could mean tremendous suffering for his wife. Somebody else accused him of arrogance, saying, "Who do you think you are? Gandhi? Or do you think you're Jesus Christ?" Liteky responded no, he was just trying to be the best man he could be.
But there was no changing his mind. Eventually, Judy decided she had no option but to honor her husband's choice to fast, so three weeks after Liteky stopped eating, she joined him in D.C. The pair spent their afternoons on the expansive steps of the Capitol, facing the Supreme Court and Library of Congress. They spent hour after hour talking with the veterans and others passing by about the cause. "It was a most remarkable time," Judy says.
The fast grew long. On their 47th day without food, Liteky and Mizo, the two who had begun the fasting earliest, were near starved to death. Letters poured in by the thousands begging the men to take food. The New York Times and Washington Post covered the story; Dan Rather talked about the veterans on the evening news; Phil Donahue promised them a forum on his talk show. Supporters tried convincing the men that the media attention meant the fast had worked. They urged them to take food and live on to fight another day. Also, Judy was aware that if the men took the fast to its ultimate conclusion, he would not be the first to die. "Charlie knew George would go first," she says, and he knew he had the power to stop this.
Ultimately, the men decided to end the fast. On the evening of October 17, 1986, a group of 500 supporters gathered to break bread at midnight with Liteky and the other veterans at a Mass and celebration on the steps. Judy gets tears in her eyes now recalling that evening's events. "People were moved to want to be with these men," she said.
The fast was over, but the protests were not.
In the fall of 1988, Liteky journeyed to the Guatemalan Embassy. With a handful of others, like a scene from a movie, he chained himself for more than a week to its front gates, protesting the U.S.'s support of a Guatemalan military government that was well-known for human rights violations against the country's poor and peasant class. That action was dramatic, but "it didn't get much story," says Judy. "No press took that anywhere."
On Independence Day 1990, Liteky came up with yet another idea for getting attention for the cause of changing U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Flag burning was a hot-button issue at the time, so Liteky made a huge American flag banner, scrawled peace messages between the stars and stripes, and took it to the Capitol steps on the Fourth of July. At an event staged for the press, he read his "citizen's declaration of independence," hung his flag upside down and proceeded to burn it. He fully expected to be locked up for desecrating the flag that day, but nobody arrested him, nobody seemed to care.
"You can't say all his actions work out as dramatically as he might have imagined," Judy says with a smile. "I've watched him do these protest actions for 20 years. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
It was later in 1990 when the Reverend Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, invited Liteky to focus his protests on a Defense Department-funded institution called the School of the Americas (SOA). Based in Fort Benning, Georgia -- ironically the same town where Liteky had undergone his Army training and across the river from where he'd attended seminary -- the SOA was a school designed by the Pentagon to help foreign soldiers and officers fight communism in Latin American countries.
Peace activists documented how, during its 54-year history, the SOA had readied over 60,000 Latin American troops in commando tactics, military intelligence, psychological operations (such as torture), and advanced combat skills (such as assassination). Among others, the SOA was the alma mater of notorious Panamanian military "strongman" General Manuel Noriega and the late Roberto d'Aubuisson, the man credited with planning the 1980 assassination of El Salvador's much-loved Archbishop Oscar Romero.
During the early years, the campaign to shut down the SOA was so small as to be minuscule. After staging a few protests that didn't get much attention, core members of the group -- Liteky, his brother Pat and Bourgeois -- trespassed in 1990 onto the grounds of the school, illegally entering the SOA museum's "hall of fame." The protestors proceeded to squirt red paint (signifying blood) from baby bottles up onto the portraits on the walls. Liteky was arrested for destroying government property and was given a "permanent ban" -- forbidden by the U.S. government to ever return to the base. In 1991, Liteky did his first real jail time for this act of trespass -- six months in a federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.
But the prison experience did not stop him. Far from it. Going to prison actually became a way for Liteky and others to draw attention to the cause. So, despite the ban, Liteky was to return to the SOA again and again over the following years. Sometimes he'd be arrested. Sometimes he'd be held and released without arrest. One time, Liteky thought he was sure he'd be arrested at the SOA for climbing a tree and unfurling a banner, but instead the police arrested the people who had gathered below the tree to support him.
In the late 1990s, and as a result of the early actions by Liteky, Bourgeois and others, the SOA Watch movement began growing in earnest. The activists started holding an annual protest march around the Thanksgiving holiday in memory of six Jesuit priests who were murdered at that time of year in El Salvador by men who were trained at the SOA. By 1997, the annual protest drew 2,000 demonstrators. Last year, the number surged to 12,000, with celebrities like The West Wing's Martin Sheen getting arrested. The effort to close down the SOA had become the center of a significant nonviolent protest movement in America.
It took Liteky several months in his garage to construct the symbolic coffins that he and others carried in the November 1999 demonstration to signify the death of innocent civilians in Latin America. Liteky led thousands of protestors to "cross the line" -- many carrying the coffins -- and enter the SOA grounds on that November day. He was arrested then and again in December doing this. He was given the maximum sentence: two misdemeanor counts of trespassing; two six-month terms to be served consecutively in Lompoc Federal Prison, starting last July.
Has Liteky and the SOA Watch movement made a difference? Yes and no. As the ranks of the protestors grow, so too do the number of representatives in Congress who support efforts to stop the Pentagon's $20 million a year funding of the school. In 1999, the House of Representatives voted 230 to 197 to cut $2 million off the SOA budget. But a joint Senate/House conference committee later overturned that vote.
And last December, while Liteky sat in jail, the SOA was officially "closed," then re-opened under a new name as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. No one doubts that this happened as a result of the protests. School authorities say the new name symbolizes a new "human rights" emphasis at the institution, but Liteky and others claim the name change is cosmetic at best, and that students of the school are still being taught the same old tactics. Indeed, a February 2000 Human Rights Watch Report in Colombia implicates seven recent SOA graduates in 1999 crimes including kidnapping, murder, massacres and the setting up of paramilitary groups.
Ultimately, the sacrifices made by Liteky and others have not yet had their desired effect. The school remains open.
It should come as no surprise that Charlie Liteky's intensity and dogged sensibilities have taken a toll on his marriage. In fact, he and Judy have spent long stretches of time apart over the past decade. A math teacher, Judy earned most of the couple's income while her husband worked as an activist or served jail time. At one point, the pair moved to Washington, D.C., to spend more time together and be "closer to the action," but Judy says her husband found himself constantly drawn back to Fort Benning.
"The actions were always pulling us apart," she says. Judy found herself alone much of the time and in a part of the world she wasn't familiar with. She missed her friends and her church. Ultimately, she made the decision to return to San Francisco regardless of whether her husband would follow.
Judy lives now in a small pink home in that neighborly section of San Francisco that borders the city college. The place is cozy with comfortable couches, a bountiful garden and brightly colored art everywhere. Two cats -- JoJo and Ceci -- roam the place. The man of the house resides here in spirit only.
When the judge handed Liteky the one-year sentence, it was a time of reckoning for the marriage. In the late spring of 2000, Liteky returned home to the pink house for the months before he was to report to prison and settled into the simple joys of living with Judy. The couple spent quality time with each other, connected with old friends, visited old haunts. On the verge of being separated for a full year, the Liteky's rekindled their union.
Since July 2000, Judy has made the day-long trek to visit her husband at Lompoc one weekend per month. To say Charlie Liteky looks forward to these visits is an understatement. The prisoner doesn't hesitate to tell a reporter that he'll probably "get restless" once out of prison and go back to fighting for the cause. But ask him his immediate plan of action upon release and he says: "I think first God will give me a little time with Judy. ... We are very different and we approach things very differently. But when our two approaches are brought together into a unified view of life, then it's balanced, it's beautiful."
Indeed, talk to anyone in the Sacramento SOA Watch movement and they're bound to wax eloquent about the Litekys and what is perceived as their model union. "They're a wonderful couple," says Wiedner. "They're extremely dedicated." And Janice Freeman, who was arrested and banned from the SOA last fall along with other Sacramento activists, describes the Litekys as the ideal couple. "They spend a great deal of time apart, but they work for this common cause," she says. "I find them both remarkable. Their lives are a statement."
If that is so, perhaps the statement would be this: Liteky's wartime heroism cannot be questioned. And his devotion to protesting injustice, especially surrounding U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, is equally clear. But his stubborn penchant to take things further than most makes it difficult to determine if this man is a hero or a fanatic, lunatic or a sage. And what of a married couple whose passionate concern for the poor -- however shared -- often finds them apart, adrift, alone.
"I see Christ as a very loving person who basically preached love," says Liteky, when asked to describe his life philosophy. "And it seems to me that if one grows in that, then the oppression of poor people becomes heightened. You see it more clearly and feel it more deeply. And your reaction to it comes out of love ... and in perfect love, there is no fear."
Perfect love and no fear. Perhaps Charlie Liteky longs now for that exact combination -- for the clarity of compassion and lack of fear he felt that day in the Bien Hoa Province, where he won a medal that was retrieved after he renounced it and today sits in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Liteky himself would like to be a part of history, to die a martyr's death for the cause of justice. He has referred many times -- in person, in his diaries and in court -- to the nobility of dying in prison. At his pre-trial hearing before the Lompoc sentencing, Liteky even told the judge that he would like to die in jail. He quoted Thoreau, saying prison is "an appropriate place for a protestor to die."
It is a kind of death reserved for the brave, for the faithful, for those few who manage, with their lives, to line up what is in their nature with what is in their hearts and minds. It is a death reserved for patriots, saints and holy men. Flawed and extraordinary, perhaps Charlie Liteky is one of these.
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