------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
MoD limits details of nuclear accidents
Germany Plans for Nuclear Phase - Out
Officials Say Beacon Aids Anti-Missile Test
Rice tells Putin US will pursue missile shield
U.S., Russia still differ on defense ideas
Rice Expects Russian Assent On U.S. Shield
Faith-Based Defense
M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him
Germany: Missile defense won't hurt ties
U.S. Offers Russia a Blueprint for Talks on Nuclear Weapons
Russia, U.S. Discuss ABM Treaty
Russia Heard No New Arguments to Scrap ABM
Russia not ready to set aside ABM treaty
The Case of the Missing H Bomb
Bush Approves Funds for Radiation Victims
Linda McLandrich says she lost her husband to San Onofre
Hanford construction must start or Energy Department will pay
State to fine DOE
Ill nuclear workers get help filing for funds
Powell Hopes to Advance Korean Peace
Crash Highlights Train Hazards

MILITARY
Beijing warns Taipei against arms alliance
7 U.S. Warships to Visit Hong Kong
U.S. Protests Exports Of Missiles by China
Colombia Drug Crop Spraying Halted
Plan Colombia: Washington's Latest Drug War Failure
U.S. Gov't Recalls Indonesia Book
U.S. Tells Iraq It May Retaliate for Missile Attack on Spy Plane
Dem. Leader Vows Support on Vieques
Pentagon staff racked up $9 billion in debt

OTHER
U. S. Could Lose on Climate
Lawmakers Begin Effort to Get U.S. to Fight Global Warming
House Upholds Arsenic Standards
Scientists: Biotech Corn Still Not Safe
Lawmakers Support Stem Cell Research
Genoa Summit Handling Defended
FBI called a 'culture of arrogance'
Digital Defense

ACTIVISTS
Thousands March for Peace in Sudan
Peru's Toldeo Bounds From Protester to President


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

MoD limits details of nuclear accidents
Seven incidents involving weapons admitted, but record incomplete

Rob Evans Guardian
Friday July 27, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4229040,00.html

The Ministry of Defence has admitted for the first time some details of seven politically sensitive accidents involving British nuclear weapons.

But the MoD conceded that the information released was limited, provoking accusations of a continuing cover-up.

In one accident, a torpedo was dropped on top of a nuclear weapon on HMS Tiger which was anchored off Valetta harbour, Malta.

If the torpedo had exploded or caused a fire, it could have detonated the high explosive within the nuclear weapon, scattering radioactive debris for several miles around, said Shaun Gregory, a Bradford University academic who has studied the hazards of nuclear accidents.

The Maltese government, whose relations with Britain were then strained somewhat, was not told about the accident in February 1974. The Guardian understands that a hoist carrying the torpedo on board collapsed, sending it clattering on to the nuclear weapon.

According to one sailor, two crew members were injured. An official inquiry criticised crew training and the design of the hoist.

The ministry has only admitted a "handling incident" involving a nuclear weapon, which produced "some scratching of protective material."

There was another "handling incident involving a Polaris missile" at a nuclear weapons depot at Coulport, Argyll and Bute, in August 1977.

According to leaks from military sources, the Polaris missile was dropped while being hoisted on to a submarine.

Military convoys carrying nuclear weapons on British roads were involved in three crashes - in Wiltshire in January 1987, on the M8 near Glasgow in August 1983, and near the Coulport depot in April 1973.

The ministry also disclosed that the protective casing around Polaris missiles was "compressed" on two occasions, in 1981 and 1974, on board submarines at sea, but gave no other details.

The carefully worded list has been published following pressure from the Guardian, which requested the information more than three years ago under the open government code.

The MoD decided that full descriptions of the accidents could not be released to protect the operational security of the weapons, but some information could be disclosed to allay public worries.

The ministry insisted that the accidents had not endangered public safety since none of the weapons was damaged or leaked radioactive material.

But the MoD has refused to give any details of other mishaps because they did not "involve any threat to public safety".

An inquiry by the then MoD chief scientific adviser, Ronald Oxburgh, in 1992 found that since 1960 there had been around 20 mishaps.

Nigel Chamberlain, a spokesman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said: "Any relaxation of secrecy is to be welcomed, but it has been nine years since the Oxburgh report, and the MoD still has much ground to make up on this front.

"If public safety was their major concern, they would stop sending unmarked nuclear warhead convoys out on our congested roads".

The list confirms for the first time the speculation surrounding the well publicised 1987 accident in Wiltshire, when a 20 tonne MoD truck carrying nuclear weapons skidded off an icy road and turned over.

Armed troops sealed off the crash site and stopped peace campaigners from approaching.

-------- germany

Germany Plans for Nuclear Phase - Out

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's phase-out of nuclear power will begin in 2003, when the first of 19 plants to be closed under an accord between the government and utilities will go off-line, a state official said Friday.

The E.ON utility has filed a plan to close down the Stade plant west of Hamburg -- Germany's oldest -- in the second half of 2003, then dismantle it over 10 to 12 years, Lower Saxony state Environment Minister Wolfgang Juettner said.

The move follows an agreement by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and top power company executives last month to gradually shut down Germany's nuclear plants, a cause championed by the center-left government since it came to power in 1998.

The deal sets a standard life span of 32 years for existing plants, which means Germany's newest nuclear plant would shut down in 2021.

Stade, in operation since 1972, will close about a year earlier than foreseen under the agreement, Juettner said.

Some 100,000 tons of steel and concrete and up to 3,000 tons of slightly radioactive material will have to be dismantled, he said. The highly radioactive spent fuel rods will be sent to France for reprocessing.

Nuclear plants provide almost a third of Germany's electricity. The government says the phased shutdown will allow time to build up other sources, including renewable energy.

Schroeder took office promising to negotiate an end to nuclear power, a goal championed by the environmentalist Greens party, his junior coalition partner. However, many anti-nuclear activists would like to see a quicker shutdown.

-------- missile defense

Officials Say Beacon Aids Anti-Missile Test

Friday July 27 3:49 PM ET
By Charles Aldinger
Reuters
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010727/ts/arms_usa_missile_dc_2.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. anti-missile weapon was able to destroy a test warhead in space on July 14 partly because a beacon on the target signaled its location during much of the flight, defense officials said on Friday.

The officials confirmed a report by Defense Week that the ''hit-to-kill'' weapon was guided to the vicinity of the speeding warhead high over the Pacific Ocean by signals from the electronic beacon in a successful, highly publicized test.

But they stressed in interviews with Reuters that the weapon, fired at the oncoming warhead from Kwajalein Atoll, used its own on-board seekers and navigation system to home in on and shatter the target in the final phase of the test.

Critics have charged that such tests to date have been unrealistic, including this month's second successful U.S. military interception of a warhead in four tries. The test gave impetus to President Bush (news - web sites)'s controversial plan to build a defense against missile attack.

``The only thing that it (the beacon) does is help get the booster in the right direction,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. ``The weapon finds the target and hits it.''

``We have made no secret of this. We have been very open,'' Navy Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman, said. He and others conceded that real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful beacons, but that the beacons would be required in a number of future tests.

COMPENSATING FOR RADARS

In a report to be published on Monday, Defense Week said the electronic beacon was used to help the weapon compensate for deficiencies in the current U.S. ground radar-tracking setup and get into the general area of the dummy warhead.

Lehner said money was being sought from Congress for a powerful and sophisticated ``X-Band'' radar near Hawaii, or perhaps on a floating platform in the Pacific, to provide better real-time tracking of the target in midflight.

Defense officials said U.S. military radars currently located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Kwajalein were too close to launches of the target warhead and kill vehicle to give a clear picture of the target's midcourse flight.

In this month's half-hour test, a sensor on a space satellite detected the launch of the missile containing the target from Vandenberg on its 4,000-mile (6,600 km) flight to the targeting area.

The rocket also carried a Mylar balloon as a decoy to see if the hit-to-kill weapon would be fooled into deviating from the warhead and hitting the balloon. It was not.

``The beacon (on the warhead) tells it (the hit-to-kill weapon) roughly where in space to start looking,'' Quigley said. ''We will get to the point where we develop real final systems. But you can't go any faster now.''

The next test of the anti-missile system is now tentatively set for October, and Quigley said the test and others for the foreseeable future would use such beacons until a more sophisticated radar array was in place.

NOT THE ``FINAL VERSION''

``You can find all kinds of elements of the current tests that are not part of the final version'' of a missile defense, he told Reuters.

Keith Englander, technical director of the ballistic missile program, acknowledged in an interview with Defense Week that the target transponder gave the hit-to-kill projectile a box in space at which to aim.

But thereafter, he said, the Kwajalein radar gave the interceptor three ``in-flight target updates'' on the warhead's flight trajectory that refined the box to half the original size. The kill vehicle did the rest, firing its positioning thrusters 28 times to collide directly with the warhead at more than 14,000 mph.

Phillip Coyle, who until last year oversaw testing of the missile-shield system and other military programs, told Defense Week the Pentagon deserved credit for hitting the target. But he said the active electronic beacon was a big help.

The beacon was ``like a pinger saying, 'Here I am,''' Coyle said.

--------

Rice tells Putin US will pursue missile shield

Chris Stephen, in Moscow
Friday, July 27, 2001
Irish Times
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/0727/wor10.htm

THE US: The United States shield without waiting for Moscow's agreement, US National Security Adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice announced yesterday after meeting the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin.

Ms Rice, in Moscow for talks on missile defence, said there was no question of Washington waiting for Russian acceptance before going ahead with the programme. Russia has said that such a programme would breach the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and it has warned that this may trigger a new arms race.

The move, which is likely to up the ante between the world's main two nuclear powers, comes after a week of confusing diplomacy between Moscow and Washington. After meeting at the G8 summit in Genoa last weekend, President Bush and President Putin announced they had come to a compromise which would end the deadlock between the two.

The new move would see the US's desire for a missile shield linked to Russia's desire for further steep reductions in the two sides' strategic nuclear arsenals.

But on Monday both sides backtracked, with Mr Putin announcing that while productive, the talks had seen "no breakthrough" and reiterating that whatever the result, he remained opposed to missile defence. Mr Bush countered that he would not wait indefinitely for Russia's agreement.

Now it appears to have gone a stage further, with the US saying, in effect, that while talks to get Russian agreement will continue, so will deployment of the missile system, in test form.

Ms Rice was dispatched to Moscow to get this talks progress going, and she emerged in bouyant mood, saying that discussions would now get under way, with the US keen to listen to Russian objections to the system. Groups of experts will begin meetings shortly, followed by ministerial contacts and finally a meeting between Presidents Bush and Putin in Shanghai, China, in October. It is likely the two sides will remain deadlocked by then.

The US, already setting up components of its testing programme for the proposed missile shield, says time is of the essence. But Russian security adviser Mr Vladimir Rushailo said the issue might take far longer - in particular because even if Russia accepts a limited system, there must be changes to the 1972 treaty.

Diplomats in Moscow say the US officials are working hard to point out that their missile system is anyway limited to hitting individual missiles fired by so-called "rogue states", including North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Russian officials counter that in the short term this will encourage the "rogues" to expand their missile programmes, and in the long term even a limited system can be expanded to provide a complete shield against Russia's missiles, upsetting the strategic balance.

---

U.S., Russia still differ on defense ideas

By Dave Montgomery and Warren P. Strobel
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
Friday, July 27, 2001
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/07/27/national/RUSSIA27.htm?template=aprint.htm

MOSCOW - The United States and Russia held preliminary talks yesterday on President Bush's proposed missile-defense shield but quickly confronted a potential impasse as both sides clung to conflicting positions on the treaty that bans such systems.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice denounced the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a Cold War relic and said the United States would proceed with missile-defense tests with or without Russia's acquiescence. Russian officials said they wanted to try to salvage the treaty.

Rice was part of a high-level U.S. delegation sent to Russia days after Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin met at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans also made the journey to Moscow, in an effort to strengthen economic ties between the countries.

Bush and Putin agreed on Sunday to link talks on the proposed U.S. missile-defense shield with efforts to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal. They also agreed to meetings on a range of defense and economic issues to pave the way for a November summit in the United States.

Talks held Wednesday and yesterday produced little more than a commitment to further negotiations. The U.S. delegation met briefly with Putin and more extensively with other Russian officials.

Putin reiterated Russia's insistence that the ABM treaty was a bulwark of nuclear deterrence. The treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union, bans all but the most limited missile-defense systems. It is based on the theory that neither side would launch an offensive nuclear strike if it were unable to protect itself.

Rice described the treaty as "an impediment" to fighting nuclear threats in the 21st century. The Bush administration wants to move as quickly as possible to develop defenses against possible missile threats from nations such as North Korea.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov told reporters that his country also had reiterated its proposal to reduce nuclear stockpiles in each country to 1,500 warheads.

Rice said that there was not much discussion about reducing warheads but that the two sides had agreed to further meetings.

"We do not foresee the kind of tortured arms-control talk about levels that we have seen in the past," she said. "We did not mention a number. In fact, we have said that we are not going to get into a politically motivated number."

U.S. military leaders have opposed paring America's nuclear arsenal as much as Russia has proposed. The United States has about 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons and Russia has about 6,500.

"It's quite clear that the two sides have somewhat different expectations" about the negotiations, said Dimitri K. Simes, an expert on U.S.-Russian relations who is president of the Washington-based Nixon Center, a conservative foreign-policy institute.

Putin eventually will agree to abandon the ABM treaty, Simes predicted, but not without securing specific guarantees that the United States will reduce its arsenal of offensive nuclear weapons.

Bush administration officials said the main achievement of Rice's meetings was to set a timetable for further detailed discussions about replacing the ABM pact with the new security arrangement Bush wants.

Under the plan agreed to in Moscow, a Russian military delegation will travel to Washington on Aug. 7 to discuss the U.S. missile-defense plan and related issues.

In mid-August, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will visit Moscow to meet with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. The week after that, John Bolton, the State Department's top arms-control official, plans to travel to the Russian capital.

Dave Montgomery's e-mail address is dmontgomery@krwashington.com.

-----

Rice Expects Russian Assent On U.S. Shield

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 27, 2001; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56411-2001Jul26?language=printer

MOSCOW, July 26 -- U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice met with President Vladimir Putin and other top Kremlin officials today and expressed optimism afterward about an eventual agreement on U.S. plans for a missile defense system. The two sides have made "considerable progress" in the past few months, she said.

She also said the Bush administration will pursue its program to build missile interceptors whether or not Russia agrees to jointly withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans such defenses. The United States "is going to move ahead," she told reporters following a day of high-level consultations, including 20 minutes with Putin.

Rice's visit follows a surprise agreement between President Bush and Putin in Genoa, Italy, last week to link discussions on missile defense to the prospect of large cuts in both nations' nuclear arsenals. The two leaders plan to meet again in Shanghai in October, and in the United States in November. Rice said she came to Moscow to work out the schedule for intensive talks over the upcoming months broadly aimed at transforming the United States' strategic, economic and political relationship with Russia.

She said the Kremlin understands that the United States will no longer support an arms control system based on the premise that both sides should be equally vulnerable to nuclear attack. She noted that unpredictable countries like North Korea might develop long-range missiles by 2005.

"We are now having an argument, a discussion about how we move forward, not are we moving forward," she said at a 40-minute news conference at the U.S. Embassy. She said that after formal discussions begin, "we expect the distance between us will close."

Russian officials sounded more subdued. "Of course, no agreement has been reached, as you might guess," said Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. But he added that "our principal and conceptual approaches have been confirmed."

Rice was accompanied by Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans, who promised deeper economic ties between the countries. O'Neill promised to help Russia join the World Trade Organization. Rice said more top officials would follow her here as the United States reshapes its relationship with Russia.

----

Faith-Based Defense

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 27, 2001; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58471-2001Jul26?language=printer

How much is the Bush administration willing to sacrifice -- in the rest of the military budget, in relations with America's allies, in dealings with Russia -- so it can rush full speed ahead with a missile defense system? Even supporters of the idea are wondering what the president will cast aside to get the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty torn up to make way for this unproven invention.

The missile defense debate has always been strange. A shrewd Republican foreign policy analyst observed before last year's election that it was "one of the most theological arguments in American politics." Why? "Republicans," he said, "would be for it even if it were proven that it couldn't work. And Democrats would be against it even if it were proven that it could work."

A theology of weaponry can make for comic moments. The administration's desire to get chummy with Russian President Vladimir Putin -- so he'll let go of the ABM Treaty and let missile defense move forward -- has led President Bush to turn the former KGB agent into Mother Teresa. Putin returned the favor this week by casting Bush as Einstein.

Bush, you'll recall, looked into Putin's soul this spring and found him "an honest, straightforward man." On Sunday, Putin looked into Bush's mind and concluded: "It seemed to me that his mental reasoning is very deep, very profound."

No wonder Putin is happy. There were no harsh words from Bush about the Russian leader's brutal policies in Chechnya or the fact that Putin has presided over the shutting down of opposition media. On the contrary, Bush practically welcomed Vlad into the GOP by pointing to the Russian's stand on the issue Republicans care about most. "I am impressed by the fact that he has instituted tax reform -- a flat tax," Bush gushed about his new best friend. "He and I share something in common; we both proudly stand here as tax reformers." Bush-Putin in 2004?

This approach comes from an administration that began by defining Russia as a threat and criticizing Bill Clinton for overpersonalizing Russian policy through his friendship with Boris Yeltsin.

Bush's embrace of Putin is designed to check America's traditional allies. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is on Bush's side on this, put matters plainly. Getting Putin to negotiate on missile defense "holds the potential to provide cover for Mr. Bush" and "would in a stroke silence Mr. Bush's European critics."

But why use the Russian leader against nations and governments that have been on the side of the United States from the beginning of the Cold War and share democratic values? Is a particular defense system so important that the United States would pick Putin over tested allies?

And how much more secure will America be if the expense of missile defense combines with Bush's tax cut to reduce conventional defense spending?

Of course, as Bush argues, the country wants to defend against missiles launched by rogue states. But that's a case for considering limited missile defense, built with no utopian dreams in mind, and negotiated in tandem with new arms control agreements.

You get the sense, though, that a central purpose of this venture is to do away with arms treaties altogether. John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, sent that signal to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. He said the administration was not prepared to negotiate new "formal agreements of hundreds of pages that count every warhead and pound of throw-weight."

The administration can't expect a blank check from Congress until it makes a more convincing case than it has so far that a world without arms treaties would be a more secure place. The current arms control regime prevented nuclear war and helped create conditions that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We shouldn't junk it lightly.

After he spoke with Pope John Paul II this week, President Bush explained that he was approaching stem cell research differently from other issues. "My process has been, frankly, unusually deliberative for my administration," the president said.

That statement is as honest as it is troubling. It suggests that too many of the administration's choices are prepackaged and rooted in ideology. If there are any matters on which we ought to be deliberative, they are war, peace and national security. Winning a quick political victory on missile defense should be less important to the administration than establishing security arrangements that work as well for the future as our existing treaties and alliances have worked for us up to now.

--------

M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/politics/27MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 26 - A leading critic of the military's missile defense testing program has accused the Pentagon of trying to silence him and intimidate his employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by investigating him for disseminating classified documents.

The case has raised questions about whether a document can be considered secret if it is widely available to the public. And it has touched off a dispute between the critic, Theodore A. Postol, and M.I.T. over how to balance academic freedom with the university's obligations to cooperate with Pentagon investigators.

At issue is correspondence between Dr. Postol, a physicist, and the General Accounting Office, an investigative branch of Congress, in which he accused the Pentagon of using doctored data to defend missile defense technology.

Dr. Postol said his conclusions had been based on an unclassified report, which he disseminated over the Internet and can now be downloaded from Web sites around the world, including one in Russia.

But after Dr. Postol began distributing the report last year, the Pentagon determined that it contained secret information. This month, Defense Department investigators asked M.I.T. officials to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating that information and to confiscate the document from him.

The university has not done so. But in an e-mail message to Dr. Postol on Monday, Charles M. Vest, the university president, said M.I.T. might be required to ``move forward with at least the initial steps'' ordered by Defense Security Service, a Pentagon agency. Dr. Postol provided a copy of that message to The New York Times.

``They are basically threatening M.I.T. that it will lose its contract to run this big laboratory if they don't abide by these demands,'' Dr. Postol said in an interview.

The institute operates the Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Mass., under contract with the Defense Department to do research into missile defense, weather forecasting, military surveillance and other sophisticated technologies. The lab's contract with the Pentagon was worth $319 million last year.

M.I.T. officials declined to speculate today on whether Dr. Vest would cooperate with the Pentagon's requests. But Dr. Vest issued a written statement that raised questions about the investigation of Dr. Postol.

``While M.I.T. certainly abides by the laws that protect national security, we also believe that the legitimate tools of classification of secrets should not be misused to limit responsible debate,'' the statement said. ``Trying to treat widely available public information as `secret' is a particular concern.''

Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of their investigation. But Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, argued that the department was obligated to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating potentially damaging information, even if it was readily available.

``Just because it is made public doesn't mean it's declassified,'' Colonel Lehner said.

Dr. Postol agreed that the information was potentially damaging, but only because it showed that the Pentagon was far from developing effective antimissile weapons.

For years, Dr. Postol has argued that the Pentagon's prototype antimissile system could not distinguish between decoys and enemy warheads. He has joined forces with an engineer, Nira Schwartz, who has accused her former employer, cobi TRW,coei

a military contractor, of faking tests and evaluations of the technology to make it appear more successful than it was.

The latest dispute arose when the Pentagon hired five scientists, including two from M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory, to review TRW's technology in the wake of Dr. Schwartz's accusations. The resulting report disputed Dr. Schwartz's assertions and has been used to defend the missile defense program on Capitol Hill.

But Dr. Postol, who in the 1990's successfully challenged the effectiveness of Patriot missiles in the Persian Gulf war, analyzed the report and concluded it had distorted data to make it appear that available technology could reliably distinguish warheads from decoys. In fact, Dr. Postol contends, that technology does not yet exist.

The Pentagon and TRW have denied that assertion.

Dr. Postol first raised concerns about the Pentagon report in a letter to the White House last year. Not long after, the Pentagon determined that officials had inadvertently not removed classified information from the report before releasing it, including the tables and diagrams Dr. Postol has used to attack the testing program.

But Dr. Postol, who has done work for the Pentagon and stands to lose his security clearance, contends that the Pentagon's actions smack of a cover-up. He has recruited supporters in Congress. el3 Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, has asked the Pentagon to review Dr. Postol's accusations about the report. Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has asked the General Accounting Office to study the Defense Department's classification policy.

``The question that naturally arises is whether such a policy really protects national security or whether it merely serves to stifle the ability of Dr. Postol to communicate his views,'' Mr. Markey asks in a letter sent to the accounting office today.

--------

Germany: Missile defense won't hurt ties

July 27, 2001
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010727-88424588.htm

America's largest European ally yesterday signaled that President Bush's plans to build a missile-defense system will not lead to a clash between the United States and Europe.

Despite widespread predictions of a rift over U.S. plans to test and deploy a missile shield, "I don't think missile defense will be or deserves to be a divisive issue in the trans-Atlantic relationship," newly appointed German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger said in an interview with editors and reporters of The Washington Times.

The latest conciliatory words came as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior Russian defense officials in Moscow and set a timetable to try to resolve the missile-defense dispute in the next three months.

Despite public criticisms from leading congressional Democrats that the missile-defense program would put the United States in direct conflict with its leading allies and Russia, Mr. Bush has been able to engage Moscow on the issue while easing skepticism in Europe.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has spoken warmly of the idea, and a number of European leaders now say they are reserving judgment until they learn more of the American plan.

With Europe's largest economy and an increasingly assertive foreign policy, Germany has emerged as a key player in the debate over the future of European security.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, while reserving judgment on whether he would support the still-sketchy American defense shield, said recently that he hoped German firms would be able to participate in the contracts for such a system if the United States were to proceed.

Mr. Ischinger, noting that his country has pledged never to develop a nuclear arsenal of its own, said that "by sheer logic" it followed that Germany would be interested in defensive systems that protect its territory from the missiles of other nations.

"It is simply wrong to say that Germany is opposed as a matter of principle to missile defense," said Mr. Ischinger, who was most recently state secretary of the German Foreign Office in Berlin.

But the diplomat added that Germany remained strongly "against anything which could lead to a new arms race."

Russia has balked at changes to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which blocks development of the expansive missile defense system that Mr. Bush wants. But Mr. Putin in his meeting with Mr. Bush in Genoa, Italy, last week agreed to top-level talks on the dispute, which will also explore deep cuts in U.S. and Russian offensive missile stocks.

Miss Rice, in Moscow with a delegation that included Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, said after her 40-minute meeting with Mr. Putin that U.S. patience is not infinite.

Mr. Bush "has not set a specific deadline, but it should be obvious to all concerned that the president believes that this is something that will happen relatively soon," Miss Rice told reporters in Moscow. "The testing program will proceed."

But Vladimir Rushailo, Miss Rice's Russian counterpart, warned that Moscow would insist on lengthy and laborious talks in an effort to preserve the ABM Treaty.

"This work calls for a long period of time," said Mr. Rushailo, adding that Mr. Putin would insist that Russian security interests be protected under any U.S. missile-defense project.

The two sides set an expedited round of talks aiming for a resolution of the question when Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin are scheduled to meet at a summit of Asia-Pacific nations in Shanghai Oct. 21 and 22.

While Mr. Ischinger has been named by Mr. Schroeder to the Washington post, he does not officially assume his new position until he presents his credentials formally to Mr. Bush next week.

The ambassador said Germany believes there is still a value in Cold War arms-control pacts such as the ABM Treaty. Berlin wants to see what new security arrangements the Bush administration favors before considering whether to abandon existing accords, he said.

Mr. Ischinger said Mr. Bush's two trips to Europe this summer have greatly improved the new president's image on the continent.

Despite some high-profile conflicts over the Kyoto global warming treaty and other issues, Mr. Ischinger said Germany and the United States share broad agreement on a wide range of policy questions, from engagement with Russia to the Balkans to the creation of a European defense force to complement NATO.

• This article was based in part on wire service reports.

-------- russia

U.S. Offers Russia a Blueprint for Talks on Nuclear Weapons

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/international/europe/27RUSS.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, July 26 - Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, offered President Vladimir V. Putin an American blueprint today for talks on building a new nuclear- weapons framework, a process she cast as part of a broader White House plan for "transforming" the relationship between Washington and Moscow.

Ms. Rice said that President Bush hoped to meet Mr. Putin twice this fall, in Shanghai and in Washington, and that members of Mr. Bush's cabinet were planning trips here in the coming months. Two of them - Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans - were in Moscow today, meeting with Mr. Putin and other senior officials.

"What we are trying to do is to change the nature of the strategic relationship, but also to change the nature of the political and economic relationships," Ms. Rice said.

Russian enthusiasm for the American embrace was mixed. Mr. Putin, who met with Mr. Bush last weekend at the summit meeting of industrial nations in Genoa, Italy, expressed hope that the talks would imbue the two nations' relations "with new content free from the problems inherited from the past." In Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Asia-Pacific foreign ministers, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov solidly endorsed the new dialogue.

But the Kremlin's chief arms negotiator reacted coolly, saying Russian opposition to upsetting the existing arms-control framework was unchanged. And unidentified Russian officials told Russian news agencies that the meetings produced nothing new.

Ms. Rice said that in meetings with Mr. Putin and his top security aides, she discussed a schedule for talks on winnowing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and developing limited defenses against nuclear missiles.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush agreed last weekend to link the two issues while seeking a new basis for strategic relations between Moscow and Washington. Russian officials said the Kremlin expected to receive the first substantive proposals from American experts next month.

Ms. Rice said today's meetings dealt far more with missile-defense issues than with the Russians' principal concern - reducing nuclear arms. The Kremlin has long proposed cutting the number of warheads held by each side to 1,500 from the current level of about 6,000.

Ms. Rice said the Joint Chiefs of Staff were still preparing a report for Mr. Bush on how few nuclear warheads the United States could hold and still maintain a deterrent.

In a news conference, she was alternately tough and flexible in laying out the United States' hopes for a new partnership with Russia.

Ms. Rice said the White House's central demand in any weapons talks was all but nonnegotiable: the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which effectively prevents the United States from building a limited defense against missiles, must be scrapped. She called the treaty a cold-war artifact, an accord drafted in an era when "the only thing the two sides had in common was a desire not to blow each other apart."

"The U.S.-Russian relationship is considerably different now," she said. "We are not strategic adversaries."

But the treaty remains so restrictive, she argued, that it has become a hindrance rather than an aid to security in a post-Soviet world.

The White House insists that a limited ability to knock down incoming ballistic missiles will not upset the balance of nuclear power among major nations, but that it is essential to counter emerging threats from terrorists or rogue states and to protect against accidental missile launchings by other nations. Russia and China have strongly opposed those plans, accusing the Bush administration of dragging the world headlong into a new arms race.

Today, Ms. Rice said those fears were overblown. While the Pentagon has reported that its research program is just months away from technically violating the ABM treaty, the terms of the accord make almost any work on a missile defense a potential breach, she said.

Whatever the legalities, she argued, a workable defense system remains many years away, and there is ample time for the world's nuclear powers to agree on its specifics. "At this stage, we are just talking about a robust testing and evaluation" of a defense system, she said. "There is no system that the United States can just pull off the shelf and deploy."

In an era when superpowers suspected each other of plotting surprise attacks, Ms. Rice said, suspicion of a missile-defense plan like the one offered by Mr. Bush might have been justified. But today, when neither Moscow nor Washington considers a nuclear attack to be a likely prospect, such fears only block a basic restructuring of the American- Russian partnership, she said.

Ms. Rice said that despite the Kremlin's remarks against changes in the arms-control framework, Russia was moving closer to that view. "There is a recognition that the United States intends to move forward with missile defense," she said. "You've got a discussion now about how you move forward, not if you move forward. That's considerable progress in the last several months."

-------- treaties

Russia, U.S. Discuss ABM Treaty

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US-ABM.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia denied it was re-examining its position on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on Friday, following talks with U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

After meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Rice said Thursday that the two sides were now discussing ``how you move forward, not if you move forward,'' toward construction of the U.S. missile defense shield.

But Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said Moscow had no intention of budging from its position.

During talks with Rice, ``we did not hear any new arguments or new elements that would make us depart from the 1972 ABM treaty,'' Yakovenko said in an interview with RTR state television.

Russian officials say abandoning the ABM treaty would destroy the foundations of global security, leading to a new arms race. But Bush's administration contends the treaty has outlived its usefulness, preventing the United States from developing defenses against potential nuclear threats from such nations as Iran and North Korea.

At their meeting in Genoa, Italy, earlier this week, Putin and Bush unexpectedly announced that talks on missile defense would be linked with talks on cutting strategic nuclear weapons.

Rice and Russian National Security Council chief Vladimir Rushailo said that expert-level talks would begin in early August, and Rice said that Bush and Putin would have the first proposals before them when they meet in October.

But Rushailo said he expected a protracted negotiating process.

Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov said that while meeting Rice, Putin repeated his proposal to cut nuclear warheads on both sides to 1,500. Rice, however, said no specific numbers had been discussed.

--------

Russia Heard No New Arguments to Scrap ABM

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-ru.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Friday it had heard no new arguments from the United States that would persuade it to agree to scrap or radically change the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice visited Moscow earlier this week to arrange a schedule for talks in which Washington wants Moscow to agree to changes in the 1972 ABM pact now standing in the way of its missile defense plans.

Rice has said the United States would continue a testing program that will come into conflict with the treaty ''relatively soon.''

But Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a live television interview that Moscow had not changed its position and continued to support the pact.

``We have heard no new arguments from Ms Rice that would convince us to reexamine our principled position toward the 1972 treaty,'' Yakovenko told RTR television.

Asked if Russia had changed its position, he said: ``These suggestions are absolutely untrue.

``Our position in support of ABM as an unseparable part of strategic stability in the world was repeated by the Russian president after his talks with (U.S. President) George Bush in Genoa,'' he said.

Republican U.S. officials say they will unilaterally withdraw from ABM if Moscow does not agree to revise the treaty. But Democrats in the U.S. congress may be reluctant to fund missile defense if it means destroying the treaty.

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed with Bush during a weekend summit in Italy that the two sides would look into missile defense while simultaneously reevaluating their offensive stockpiles.

That agreement has been trumpeted by U.S. Republicans as a breakthrough in pressing Moscow to accept American demands that the treaty be altered to allow it to develop its missile defense.

But Russians say they agreed to nothing new, and point out that they had made a similar agreement with Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, to link offensive and defensive weapons talks.

Yakovenko said Rice had agreed with Russian officials that arms talks would begin in August.

--------

Russia not ready to set aside ABM treaty

USA Today
07/27/2001
The Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian officials heard nothing new from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that would cause them to temper their opposition to jettisoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday.

But a Russian official put a new spin on upcoming U.S.-Russian talks on strategic stability, suggesting North Korea and Iran could join the discussions that are to start in August. The United States has cited both as potential hostile nuclear powers that necessitate development of the missile shield.

"We are for bringing the maximum number of countries possessing nuclear arms or technologies into the process of discussion of strategic stability issues in the framework of the ABM treaty," the deputy security council secretary, Oleg Chernov, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

He said the ABM treaty did not concern just the United States and Russia, but also the world's other nuclear powers "and the world community as a whole," Interfax reported, adding that Chernov suggested that Pyongyang and Tehran be included in the talks.

After meeting with President Vladimir Putin and other top officials Thursday, Rice told reporters that Moscow and Washington had made progress - now discussing "how you move forward, not if you move forward" toward construction of the U.S. missile defense shield.

But Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said Moscow had no intention of budging from its vehement opposition to such a shield, which would violate the ABM treaty that Russia holds sacred as the foundation of strategic stability.

During talks with Rice, "we did not hear any new arguments or new elements that would make us depart from the 1972 ABM treaty," Yakovenko said in an interview with RTR state television.

Russian officials say abandoning the ABM treaty would lead to a new arms race. But the U.S. administration contends the treaty has outlived its usefulness, preventing the United States from developing defenses against potential nuclear threats.

At their meeting in Genoa, Italy, earlier this week, Putin and President Bush unexpectedly announced that talks on missile defense would be linked with talks on cutting strategic nuclear weapons.

Rice and Russian National Security Council chief Vladimir Rushailo said expert-level talks would begin in early August, and Rice predicted the talks would proceed so quickly that Bush and Putin would have the first proposals before them when they meet in October.

However, Rushailo said Thursday he expected a protracted negotiating process.

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

The Case of the Missing H Bomb

In These Times
7/27/01
http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2519/stclair2519.html

Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn't detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. "The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement."

There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: "There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. ... The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities."

But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be "scattered" by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: "The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited."

In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.

That's where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the disclosure prompted fear and outrage among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. "We're horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years," says Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to worry about. "We've looked into this particular issue from all angles and we're very comfortable," says Major Gen. Franklin J. "Judd" Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force headquarters in Washington. "Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy metal contamination."

The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn't fully armed. Moreover, a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W.J. Howard, then assistant secretary of defense, describes the Tybee Island bomb as a "complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule." Howard said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium trigger.

Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned bomb was an "Mk-15, Mod O" hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil genius Edward Teller. The only fail-safe for this weapon was the physical separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.

In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride. Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest in the United States. That's bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as it ages.In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials, such as uranium and beryllium.

The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion. As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Warsaw Sound. If the Pentagon can't find the Tybee Island bomb, others might. That's the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, says that it wouldn't be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, "the essential building blocks of nuclear weapons." What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon located and removed. "Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people know it," says Pam O'Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville, Georgia. "It can get in everything--your eyes, your bones, your gonads. You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there."

The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident. On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there's no question that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil was simply left in the area. "The total extent of the spread will never be known," concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions weren't taken for their Spanish counterparts. "The Air Force was unprepared to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign country," the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified to Congress.

The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850 feet of water, where it rests to this day.

Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the explosives in all four of the plane's H-bombs, which scattered uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews called it "Dr. Freezelove."

More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away, put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal. Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris, often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed "by simply brushing the snow from garments and vehicles."

Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit of military doublespeak: "I don't know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for."

When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so, the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and other toxic) contamination.

These recovery efforts don't inspire much confidence. But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition--so dangerous, in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.

In short, there aren't any easy answers. The problem is exacerbated by the Pentagon's failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. "I believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium, which has a very short half-life," says Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South Carolina. "Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won't blow. However, there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected. Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium all over hell."

Oops, You May Be Glowing

It hasn't been an easy couple of years for the Department of Energy: contaminated workers, nuclear fuel rods misplaced (or lost), Hanford continuing to leak its immortal poison into the Columbia River, the Wen Ho Lee debacle, embarrassing contempt citations for the cover-up at Colorado's Rocky Flats, campaign finance scandals, contractors screwing things up royally then declaring bankruptcy and on and on. So for the past few months, the agency, anxious to be at the center of the Bush nuclear project, which runs the gamut from new nuclear power plants to another round of underground nuclear weapons testing, has been in full image-polishing mode.

As part of this new PR rehab program, the DOE is allowing the public and the press into places that previously had been as difficult to access as Area 51. But when the secretive Savannah River nuclear site opened its gates for a public tour on July 9, things didn't quite turn out as planned.

Savannah River, the big DOE waste dump/weapons complex in South Carolina, has had its own share of problems, including a massive spill of highly radioactive tritium into the Savannah River in 1991. Plant managers are trying to ease public anxiety enough so that the DOE can go forward with a Clinton-era plan to build a mixed-oxide fuel fabrication plant, a ludicrously dangerous scheme that involves the reprocessing of 36 tons of weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

The 25-person tour of the site included reporters, environmentalists and neighbors of the plant. The tour was supposed to highlight the DOE's newly tightened operations. But it turned out to reveal just how dangerously slipshod the agency remains. After the tour group left the site's F-Area "tank farm," where the most highly radioactive waste is stored in underground tanks, Savannah River workers failed to monitor the group for radiation exposure. "This was an appalling breach of safety standards," says Tom Clements, head of the Nuclear Control Institute, who was on the tour.

Savannah River managers admit the mistake, but blame it on a logistical screw-up. "We never intended for them to get off the bus there," says Rick Ford, a spokesman for the DOE.

This is refreshingly candid, but far from reassuring. JSC

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

Bush Approves Funds for Radiation Victims
Government Owes Millions to Those Exposed During Atomic Testing, Mining

By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 27, 2001; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58546-2001Jul26?language=printer

Veterans who witnessed the dawn of the Atomic Age; men who mined and transported uranium for Cold War testing; families whose Western homes and farms were downwind of the nuclear clouds the bombs produced -- nearly 500 Americans who are due $31.8 million for radiation exposure decades ago finally will see their claims paid by the government.

The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Program ran out of money in May 2000, and for the last 15 months, it has issued IOUs for approved claims. The people who received those letters -- many battling cancer caused by their exposure, or the survivors of those who lost their fight -- reacted with confusion, anger and bitterness.

Late last week, however, a joint congressional conference committee passed a supplemental appropriation bill that included funding for the radiation debts. President Bush signed the bill Tuesday in Europe. A spokesman for the Justice Department, which administers the program, said it immediately began sending out information to expedite payments.

"What wonderful news!" exclaimed Natalie Morrison, of Silver Spring, whose husband was a Naval Reserve ensign on diving duty in the Bikini Atoll during two nuclear detonations there in 1946.

Thomas Morrison died at 49 of lymphoma, and his widow, now 71, has pressed his claim on principle as much as anything. She is owed $75,000 under the decade-old program.

"It's an embarrassment that our government has not paid these people," said Sarah Echols, a spokesman for Sen. Pete V. Domenici. The New Mexico Republican was one of the main backers of the measure, which provides for "such sums as may be necessary" to pay about $84 million in claims expected through the end of this fiscal year.

Domenici is working to make future trust fund payments mandatory to ensure that the coffers don't run dry again. By some estimates, valid claims could total more than $700 million by 2011.

Otherwise, Echols said, "This is going to resurface its ugly head."

As of early July, nearly 3,600 claims had been denied, and 3,900 others, for $286.4 million, had been granted since the program's inception. Nearly half of the latter were for "downwinders" in Utah, Nevada and Arizona, with uranium miners the second biggest category.

Although tens of thousands of military personnel took part in the South Pacific test blasts that followed World War II, less than 1,400 have submitted claims under the program.

-------- california

Linda McLandrich says she lost her husband to San Onofre but swears she won't lose again

Anti-Nuclear War
by Nick Schou,
July 27 - Aug. 2, 2001
Orange County Weekly
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/01/47/news-schou.shtml

The time: 1985. The place: inside the Unit 3 containment building at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Several nuclear engineers are eating lunch, unaware that invisible particles of radioactive fuel are leaking from the plant's plutonium rods, filling the air inside the building and clinging to their unprotected clothing-perhaps even the sandwiches they're wolfing down.

In 1989, one of those engineers, Gregory McLandrich, begins to feel a sharp pain in his belly. Diagnosis: leiomyosarcoma-abdominal cancer. McLandrich didn't drink or smoke; he jogged several miles each morning. Doctors slice a milk-carton-sized tumor from his stomach. The tumor is invincible; it reappears and keeps growing. Two years later, it kills the 42-year-old McLandrich, leaving behind a wife and two kids. McLandrich dies so young that he's ineligible for a full retirement package. Southern California Edison (SCE) cuts his pension from 70 percent of his wages to just $255 per month.

Flash forward 10 years. Thanks in part to California's power crisis, the Bush administration is pushing nuclear energy again. Never mind Gregory McLandrich: nuclear power's reputation has never recovered from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But the Bush administration sells nuclear as a safe, clean, cost-effective way to satiate the nation's energy appetite. The stakes are so high that the U.S. attorney general's office recently joined forces with SCE to battle a years-old lawsuit filed by the McLandrich family and five others who claim their loved ones died because they worked at San Onofre.

Linda McLandrich says she won't rest until SCE acknowledges responsibility in the death of her husband and other sick or deceased plant workers. Though the company has acknowledged that faulty fuel rods regularly leaked radiation in the mid-1980s, none of the survivors' families has seen a penny in compensation.

"My battle with San Onofre has been ongoing for years," McLandrich told the Weekly. "In my case, there is documentation of a radioactive particle of unspent fuel-which has a half-life of 50,000 years-being detected on my husband. Edison never made any effort to track whether these particles were going out into the community and affecting workers' families and other people."

The McLandrich family's claim is just one of five being considered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Diego. The joint lawsuit also includes a claim filed by the family of Ellen Kennedy, whose husband, Joe, worked at San Onofre when the fuel rods were leaking. Ellen died of chronic myelogenous leukemia at the age of 43, leaving behind four children. Another plaintiff is Glen James, an electrical designer who worked at the plant from 1982 to 1986 and now suffers from chronic myelocytic leukemia. Vicky Rock, who changed the facemasks of workers inside the containment unit, performed her job without protective gear. Over the years, she has suffered from a string of mysterious illnesses, and her son has leukemia. Finally there's Jason Mettler, a San Onofre plant operator who suffered from acute myelogenous leukemia. He died in 1995, just days after filing a personal-injury lawsuit against SCE alleging the company exposed him and other workers to radiation and then conspired to cover it up.

SCE doesn't deny that its fuel rods leaked radiation into the plant or that radiation particles likely "migrated" off-site via its workers. But SCE does deny responsibility for any of the deaths or illnesses suffered by its own workers, arguing that cancer kills one in three Americans and that plant workers' families are simply blaming San Onofre without any real evidence. Three years ago, SCE won the first lawsuit, which involved Ellen Kennedy. Los Angeles-based attorneys Suzelle Smith and Don Howarth appealed that verdict, won, and re-filed the lawsuit on behalf of all five families. The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs need only prove that radiation leaks inside the plant "significantly contributed" to a higher cancer risk.

In March, all five lawsuits finally went back to court. That's when the Bush administration's Justice Department stepped in to defend SCE. The federal attorneys filed a brief on behalf of the company, requesting the court adopt a new, much tougher standard of proof-specifically, that radiation leaks caused a 51 percent or greater increase in cancer risk among San Onofre workers.

"With nuclear power, the stakes are apparently so high that the attorney general felt he had to send lawyers in to help defend SCE from these families," Smith concluded.

San Onofre spokesman Ray Golden says SCE is confident that it will prevail in the ongoing lawsuit. "We believe the facts and science have and will continue to demonstrate that San Onofre did not cause any employee or family member of an employee to contract cancer," he said.

Four months after the March hearing, the court still hasn't issued a ruling. But McLandrich says her battle against San Onofre will continue whatever the outcome. Describing the San Onofre leaks as a radiation "epidemic," she recently attended a meeting in San Clemente and argued against SCE's plans to keep radioactive waste buried on-site for the foreseeable future.

"They are trying to present this myth to the public that there haven't been any accidents at San Onofre," McLandrich said. "My husband had stomach pains for three years before we found out that he had cancer. We had no idea he had been exposed to radiation because they never told us. Had they said something, my husband would have received the medical care he needed much earlier. He'd still be alive to see his children grow up."

-------- washington

Hanford construction must start or Energy Department will pay

By Linda Ashton
The Associated Press,
Friday, July 27, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=hanford27m&date=20010727

YAKIMA - The state will begin assessing thousands of dollars in penalties next week against the U.S. Department of Energy for missing the construction deadline on a radioactive-waste-treatment plant at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The fines will stop if the department comes up with a plan by Oct. 1 showing it will be ready to begin treating the lethal waste by 2007, Tom Fitzsimmons, director of the state Department of Ecology, said yesterday.

"Ultimately, the start of construction isn't the most important milestone - it's the start of treatment that counts more than anything else," he said.

The Energy Department has a credible plan to begin processing waste by 2007, said Harry Boston, manager of the agency's Office of River Protection, which oversees management of Hanford's tank farms and the glassification-plant project.

"The state Department of Ecology and the USDOE share the same sense of urgency to clean up Hanford's tank waste and protect the Columbia River," Boston said.

"We're doing what we promised to start waste processing by 2007."

The federal agency and its contractors plan to begin building the glassification plant in December 2002 to convert 10 percent of nearly 54 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste into glass logs for long-term storage.

The waste is stored now in aging underground tanks. Some have leaked, spilling nearly 1 million gallons into the soil, contaminating the groundwater and threatening the Columbia River.

Under the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact governing cleanup at Hanford, the Energy Department was to begin construction on the glassification plant by Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Fitzsimmons said, the state will levy a $5,000 penalty against the Energy Department. Fines will be assessed at a rate of $10,000 every week thereafter until construction begins or an acceptable plan is submitted.

No decision has been made on whether to appeal the state's decision, Boston said. The Energy Department has 30 days.

"We understand the Department of Ecology's urgency and their desire to hold the Department of Energy accountable. We want to be accountable, and we want to work to get this job done," Boston said.

Fitzsimmons called the Energy Department's history on the glassification project "one of many delays and broken promises."

In recent months, Fitzsimmons said, the Energy Department and its contractors have done "a great job" of getting ready to build the plant. Last year, the Energy Department hired Bechtel-Washington to take over the project after it fired contractor BNFL when cost estimates on the project skyrocketed.

"But we've seen them gear up before, only to have the DOE headquarters pull out the rug from under all of us," Fitzsimmons said.

Washington and several other states have been frustrated by Bush administration cuts in the national cleanup budget for Energy Department sites over the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

The U.S. government is legally and morally obligated to provide sufficient funding to clean up Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country after 40 years of making plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal, Fitzsimmons said.

If the Energy Department wants the penalties to stop, it will have to show it can get adequate funding for next year, he said.

The state is sending a message to the Bush administration.

"It is either the last time we are at odds because they produce a plan that is fully supported and provide the leadership necessary, or they wiggle around all of these issues and signal to us that they aren't committed," Fitzsimmons said.

"This is a test - this is a measured, metered approach, a first step with this new administration."

Boston said he believes with budget markups in the House and Senate, there should be full funding for the 2002 phase of the glassification project in the next fiscal year.

----------

State to fine DOE

Fri, Jul 27, 2001
Tri-City Herald
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/0727.html

Washington plans to start fining the Department of Energy after it misses next week's deadline to start construction of Hanford's tank waste glassification plant, state officials said Thursday.

DOE will be fined $5,000 for the first week after the missed deadline, then another $10,000 each week until the state is satisfied the much-delayed project is solidly back on schedule, according to the state.

That means providing a plan that the state believes will lead to the first glassified wastes by 2007, plus getting guarantees from the Bush administration that glassification efforts will be fully funded next year, said Tom Fitzsimmons, director of Washington's Department of Ecology.

If the federal government doesn't meet those goals by Oct. 1, the state will likely lead to Washington following through on its threat to file a lawsuit against DOE to force it to keep Hanford's glassification project on schedule, he said.

"We're not after the actual dollars. The money is not important. What is important is the signal we send by taking this action," Fitzsimmons said.

If DOE doesn't meet the state's conditions until Oct. 1, the fine would total $85,000, taken from Hanford's cleanup coffers.

Fitzsimmons said if the state eventually is satisfied with DOE's efforts, it would consider rolling the fines back into Hanford's cleanup.

Todd Martin, chairman of the Hanford Advisory Board, said he lauded the move.

"The state has always been willing to bark (about enforcing Hanford's cleanup deadlines), and now it has reached the end of its rope, and is willing to bite. ... This certainly signals that the intentions of the Tri-Party Agreement are alive and well," he said.

DOE has not decided if it will appeal the fine, said Harry Boston, manager of DOE's Office of River Protection. The agency has 30 days to file an appeal.

"We understand the Department of Ecology's urgency and its desire to hold the Department of Energy accountable," Boston said.

Tuesday's deadline has been a considered a lost cause by all parties for at least a year. DOE's latest estimate is that construction won't begin until December 2002, Boston said.

However, Boston believes DOE will meet the new conditions outlined by the state by this fall.

He said DOE already has a plan ready to convert the first wastes into glass by 2007 and is getting ready to show it to the state.

And Boston believes Bush will sign off on congressional appropriations to fully fund the project for 2002.

Actually, the Bush administration planned to underfund the glassification project by $190 million next year, but the U.S. House and Senate restored the money to meet the project's full $690 million for 2002.

It's not clear whether Bush will approve the additional money. On May 10, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told a Senate committee that DOE didn't want it.

The glassification project is Hanford's top priority. And it has stalled at least four times in the past decade. "It has a history of many delays and many broken promises," Fitzsimmons said.

Hanford has 53 million gallons of highly radioactive wastes in 177 underground tanks. Sixty-seven tanks are suspected of leaking more than 1 million gallons into the ground, where it's seeping toward the Columbia River at an unknown pace.

Hanford's master plan is to build plants to convert the tank wastes into glass for safer permanent storage.

The glassification concept floundered through much of the 1990s. Then in 1997, BNFL Inc. began putting together a partial design for the project.

Meanwhile, DOE and the state nailed down four enforceable deadlines in the Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact governing Hanford's cleanup:

-- Start of construction Tuesday.

-- The first glass created in 2007.

-- Full-speed glassification by 2009.

-- Glassification of 10 percent of the most radioactive wastes by 2018.

In addition to problems with meeting deadlines, BNFL calculated last year that the project would cost $15.2 billion -- not the expected $6.9 billion that DOE counted on.

DOE fired BNFL, changed the glassification contract's conditions so the price tag is now supposed to be about $4 billion, and hired Bechtel National as lead contractor last December.

After firing BNFL, DOE asked the state to change the deadline for starting construction, but the state refused.

However, if DOE appears on track to meet the 2007 and 2018 production deadlines, Fitzsimmons said the state might not contest DOE's plan to delay the full-speed glassification deadline from 2009 to 2011.

----

Ill nuclear workers get help filing for funds

Seattle Times Company
By Linda Ashton
The Associated Press,
Friday, July 27, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=center27m&date=20010727

YAKIMA - People made ill by exposure to radiation or dangerous substances while doing national defense work can get help filing for federal compensation at a new resource center.

The center was established under a 2000 law that provides defense workers who contracted radiation-related cancer, beryllium disease or chronic silicosis with a $150,000 lump-sum payment. If the worker has died, the payment could go to relatives.

The Hanford resource center in Kennewick - officially called the Energy Employees Compensation Resource Center - will be open for business Monday, though staff were taking calls and assisting walk-ins this week.

"Our goal is to take care of the men and women who were harmed as quickly as possible," said Labor Secretary Elaine Chao in Washington, D.C. "These workers gave their labor - and many of them gave their health - in the service and protection of our country during the Cold War."

The Hanford resource center is one of 10 opening around the country, operated jointly by the U.S. Energy and Labor departments. People can also get assistance at some federal Labor Department district offices, including the one in Seattle.

Between 650,000 and 750,000 workers nationwide may have been exposed to radiation and the toxic materials beryllium and silica, the Labor Department said.

An undetermined number of workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation, where plutonium was made for nuclear bombs for 40 years, and at the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are among those eligible for compensation.

Eunice Godfrey, office manager for the new Hanford center, said that based on calls to the Energy Department, several hundred claims may be filed in south-central Washington.

"We will be open as long as we have people that need us - that could be anywhere from six months to 10 years," Godfrey said.

Under the Energy Employees Occupational Injury Compensation Program Act, workers who became seriously ill from exposure to radiation from beryllium or silica while working in the nuclear-weapons industry for the Department of Energy and its contractors could be eligible for $150,000 plus additional payments for related medical expenses.

The workers also will be assisted in applying for benefits that may be available through state workers' compensation.

"We're going to help folks understand the criteria of the law, help them fill out their forms and gather the information they might need to help support the claims," Godfrey said.

-------- us nuc politics

Powell Hopes to Advance Korean Peace

By George Gedda
Associated Press Writer
Friday, July 27, 2001; 8:25 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010727/aponline082523_000.htm

SEOUL, South Korea -- Secretary of State Colin Powell encouraged Russia on Friday to tell North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that it is in his interest to resume reconciliation efforts with Seoul and to reopen the stalled security dialogue with Washington.

Kim is en route by train to Moscow where he will meet with President Vladimir Putin during the first week in August.

Powell was asked about the visit during a joint news conference with South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo.

He declined to predict the outcome of the Moscow deliberations but said it would be very useful if the Russians would encourage Kim to visit Seoul for a second summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

"I think it also would be very useful if President Putin and other Russian leaders would point out to Chairman Kim the importance of resuming discussions with the United States," Powell said.

He said North Korea's terrible economic problems can only be dealt with if Pyongyang is willing to resume the reconciliation process with the South and accepts President Bush's invitation to resume the U.S.-North Korean dialogue.

Han said the Moscow deliberations offered hope because Russia has been supportive of North-South cooperation and of a second summit between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Han added there is no discrepancy between Washington and Seoul on North Korean policy.

North Korea moved decisively in 2000 to mend ties with South Korea, hosting a highly successful North-South summit meeting. It also conducted security talks with the United States that seemed to hold out the promise of a thaw.

There has been no progress on either front of late.

Powell arrived here Friday afternoon, the third stop on a five-nation Asia-Pacific tour. He came here from Vietnam after a visit to Japan and will travel to China on Saturday and Australia on Sunday.

In central Seoul some 300 anti-American protesters chanting "Stop the Star Wars madness!" rallied against the United States for pursuing a high-tech missile defense system that they say has disrupted relations between the two Koreas.

"Colin Powell, you are not welcome to South Korea," read one placard.

In Vietnam, Powell said the United States is prepared to meet with North Korea any time, any place and to discuss any issue Pyongyang wishes to raise.

The United States is willing to help North Korea economically if Pyongyang agrees to cut back its missiles and conventional forces.

During meetings here with President Kim and Han, Powell offered reassurances of U.S. support for their efforts to reach out to the North.

Powell also met with Gen. Thomas Schwartz, commanding general of the combined U.S.-South Korean Forces, for an update on the military balance on the peninsula.

On China, Powell described as mixed that country's record of compliance with a November 2000 nonproliferation agreement with the United States. He said he will be raising the issue with Chinese officials in due course.

The Washington Post, quoting diplomatic sources, said in its Friday editions that the United States has formally protested to China about continued exports of missiles and related technology to Pakistan and other countries.

A senior official traveling with Powell said only that Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told Powell in Hanoi that China was putting in place an export control system.

On another issue, the senior official declined to confirm a Washington Post report that the United States will not attend next month's World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, if two contentious issues are included in the conference.

The Post, quoting administration sources, said the boycott will occur if the agenda includes an attempt to equate zionism and racism or to discuss reparations for slavery.

The official said the level of U.S. representation would depend on the outcome of a preliminary conference that will set the agenda for the Durban conference.

-------- us nuc waste

Crash Highlights Train Hazards

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Toxic-Trains.html?searchpv=aponline

BALTIMORE (AP) -- The iron horse that rumbled through America's cities in the early 1800s carried grain, cows and coal. Today, it's carrying acids, corrosives and combustibles.

Freight trains like the one that derailed last week in a 106-year-old downtown Baltimore tunnel and spilled hazardous materials run through densely populated areas all the time. Unbeknownst to most people, they carry chlorine for water treatment plants and ammonia for plastics and pesticides. Sometimes, they carry nuclear waste.

``I would say people are pretty much clueless,'' said Steven Moss, a consultant for Railwatch, a railroad watchdog group. ``I think they tend to have a charming, antiquated view of farming products at best and coal at worst.''

The CSX derailment in Baltimore sparked a fire that raged for five days beneath a major intersection, burning so hot at times that metal on the rail cars glowed. But it wasn't the flames that prompted officials to halt traffic into the city for hours and postpone three Baltimore Orioles games.

It was the cargo, which included hydrochloric acid, 5,000 gallons of which spilled before workers began pumping it out. The train also carried tripropylene, a combustible lubricant similar to paint thinner, and hydrofluoric acid, a corrosive used in making gasoline.

The derailment was unusual. The shipment was not.

CSX said 26 freight trains run through Baltimore on an average day. Some days, all of them carry hazardous materials.

``This is basically, believe it or not, considered routine transport,'' said John Verrico, spokesman for the state Department of the Environment.

And not just in Baltimore. Trainloads of hazardous materials cut through metropolitan Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Many cities, after all, grew up around the railroads.

``Rail tracks almost by definition run through densely populated areas,'' Moss said. ``Probably every major city has a train running 10 to 20 miles from it with hazardous materials.''

The Federal Railway Administration says there are no federal regulations telling the rail industry which kinds of hazardous materials can be transported where.

Federal officials say 2 million tanker loads of hazardous materials were shipped last year, with 35 accidents releasing dangerous chemicals.

``It's the safest way of moving hazardous material in this country,'' said Chuck Dettmann, executive vice president of safety and operations at the Association of American Railroads trade group.

The Coast Guard's National Response Center keeps a database on railroad oil and chemical spills, from minor gas leaks to major chemical runoffs. Since 1990, there have been 64 such incidents in Baltimore. There were 196 in both Chicago and New York and 110 in Los Angeles.

No one was seriously injured in Baltimore. But three factory workers were killed, nine injured and hundreds evacuated July 14 when a rail car filled with methyl mercaptan exploded at a chemical plant in Riverview, Mich.

Baltimore's derailment also caught the attention of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who opposes an Energy Department plan to bury 70,000 tons of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas.

A proposed train route would take the nuclear waste from 77 sites in 35 states, snaking through Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Rail cars have been designed with a protective cask to contain the radioactive material after a 30-foot free-fall or a 1,500-degree fire.

``I hope everyone recognizes the tremendous tragedy that was just barely averted in Baltimore,'' Reid said. ``People think hydrochloric acid is bad, which it is, but not as bad as nuclear waste. A speck the size of a pinpoint would kill a person.''

After the wreck in Baltimore, the Coast Guard tested water in the Inner Harbor, which briefly registered an acidic level. And environmental officials monitored the air for days, declaring it safe each time.

However, the city's 440-page emergency plan had no provisions for accidents involving chemicals in transit.

Paul Orum, director of the national Working Group on Community Right-to-Know, said Baltimore dodged a bullet. ``There's some important questions to ask about the best means of routing these chemicals or rerouting them,'' he said.

Wherever possible, he said, companies should avoid transporting hazardous materials by generating chemicals on site or by considering using safer substances.

Gov. Parris Glendening acknowledged the dilemma when he toured the derailment site last week: ``The problem is, in modern industrial society, you've got to move some of this stuff around. Hopefully, we'll learn something from this.''

-------- MILITARY

-------- asia

Beijing warns Taipei against arms alliance

July 27, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010727-318342.htm

China's military warned Taiwan yesterday not to join a cooperative missile defense with the United States and Japan.

The official military newspaper Liberation Army Daily said Chen Shui-bian, the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan), was "playing with fire" by seeking a military alliance with the two nations.

The newspaper was responding to remarks made by Mr. Chen in an interview July 16 with The Washington Times.

Mr. Chen said in the interview that the growing Chinese missile threat against Taiwan -- also known as the Republic of China -- shows the need for developing a joint U.S.-Japan-Taiwan missile-defense system to counter it.

"Avoiding a [People's Republic of China] threat against Taiwan is something that the United States, Japan and Taiwan must jointly deal with in a manner of division of responsibilities and cooperation," Mr. Chen said during the interview.

Mr. Chen said Taiwan's defense agencies are actively studying the option of joining a joint theater missile-defense project, but have not made any final decisions.

The Taiwanese leader also called for increasing military cooperation and exchanges with the United States, while acknowledging that a military alliance would be "difficult to achieve."

The United States broke its military alliance with Taiwan in 1979 when Washington officially recognized Beijing's government. Communist China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province.

The Chinese military newspaper stated that a joint missile defense would be "dangerous."

"This is a dangerous signal that Chen is moving farther away down the road of resisting reunion by means of force," the article said.

The newspaper said Mr. Chen is turning Taiwan into "an ideal battlefield for Americans."

China has repeatedly threatened to use force to reunite the island with the mainland.

A Beijing official "white paper" issued last year stated that China would go to war with Taiwan if it were occupied by foreign forces or declared independence.

The military newspaper said yesterday that China will not tolerate Mr. Chen "stepping further down the road of dividing the motherland."

"The People's Liberation Army is a great wall of iron and steel which separatism can never surpass," the paper said. "Any attempt to interfere in China's civil affairs by foreign forces will fail, as will any attempt to separate Taiwan from the Chinese territory."

The newspaper's report was carried in the state-run Xinhua news agency.

The military newspaper said the awarding of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing had hardened China's resolve to reunify the mainland with Taiwan.

The campaign to win the Olympics showed the world "a brand new power that breaks through brambles and thorns and makes no stop before reaching its goal," it said.

Mr. Chen, in his interview, said the Olympics should not be awarded to a nation that uses missiles to threaten other nations.

Taiwan's military, according to Taipei's official Central News Agency, is open to conducting joint exercises with the U.S. military. A Taiwanese military spokesman said proposals to join regional missile defenses would be studied carefully.

China has opposed U.S. plans to provide missile defenses to Taiwan, saying it constitutes an interference in its internal affairs.

However, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Dennis Blair, said China's buildup of hundreds of short-range missiles opposite Taiwan justifies U.S. sales of missile defenses to the island.

Taiwan currently has deployed Patriot anti-missile batteries around Taipei and is seeking a more advanced PAC-3 version of the system.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese government conducted an air-raid drill in the northern part of the island on Wednesday that was designed to test emergency preparedness for any Chinese aerial or missile attacks.

Cars on streets stopped and people hid in shelters as an air-raid siren sounded an alarm. It was the last of seven drills known as the Wanan 24 Exercise.

Pentagon officials said any attack against Taiwan by Chinese military forces would begin with computer-based information warfare attacks, followed by massive missile and aircraft attacks.

-------- china

7 U.S. Warships to Visit Hong Kong

By Dirk Beveridge
Associated Press Writer
Friday, July 27, 2001; 6:03 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010727/aponline060327_000.htm

HONG KONG -- The Chinese government agreed to let seven U.S. warships stop in Hong Kong next month - as Beijing and Washington put the spy plane crisis further behind them.

The USS Constellation battle group, with 6,500 sailors aboard, received clearance for a routine port call here from Aug. 20-25, U.S. Consulate spokeswoman Barbara Zigli said Friday.

Zigli declined comment on the significance of the visit, which was approved Thursday - the same day that two small American warships arrived in Hong Kong in the first U.S. military port call since the April 1 spy plane crisis harmed relations between the United States and China.

Beijing refused the first request by the U.S. Navy to let a ship visit Hong Kong after the American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, killing the Chinese pilot.

After NATO forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, Beijing refused entry for 10 U.S. warships before the Americans could resume with their port calls.

Hong Kong has long been a popular port of call for U.S. sailors, and the feuding between Washington and Beijing had upset the owners of local bars, restaurants and shops who count on the military visits for business.

Zigli said the ships to stop here in August are the USS Constellation, an aircraft carrier; the USS Thach, a frigate; the USS Kinkaid and USS Benfold, both destroyers; the USS Rainier and USS Kiska, both supply ships; and the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine.

Hong Kong has been governed with a great deal of local autonomy since Britain handed it back to China four years ago, but Beijing maintains control over military and foreign affairs.

----

U.S. Protests Exports Of Missiles by China
Beijing Denies Sales; Powell to Raise Issue on Visit

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 27, 2001; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56428-2001Jul26?language=printer

BEIJING, July 26 -- The United States has formally protested to China about continued exports of missiles and related technology to Pakistan and other countries despite a pledge last year to halt the trade, diplomats and other sources said today.

China has denied that it is selling the weapons, but so far has not responded to U.S. complaints and requests for clarifications from the Foreign Ministry, the diplomats and sources said. The topic is expected to be at the top of the agenda this weekend during a visit by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell now that Beijing has released several Chinese scholars with U.S. ties who had been detained for months.

Powell is the most senior U.S. official to come to China since President Bush took office. During the Clinton administration, Republican Party leaders criticized Clinton's handling of China's alleged weapons proliferation activities. Now that Republicans are in the White House, Powell's visit could be a test of whether the Bush administration is able to curb China's missile sales and ensure that it adheres to agreements with the United States.

"Since November, we have been following closely and discussing the [proliferation] issue with them, and the results are mixed," Powell told reporters on the way to Hanoi, where he stopped before heading to Beijing. "We'll discuss where we think there has been a satisfactory response and where we think more action is required. Yes, proliferation will come up, it will be discussed."

China's sales of missiles and missile technology along with weapons of mass destruction have been a headache for the United States for almost 20 years. During that time, the United States and China have concluded 15 formal nonproliferation pledges. China's main customer has been Pakistan, although others include Iran, North Korea and Libya, according to a CIA report last year.

The report said that during the first half of 1999, "Chinese entities provided increased assistance to Pakistan's ballistic missile program." The assistance was linked, diplomats said, to India's testing of a nuclear device in 1998.

Subsequent reports said that China continued its assistance throughout last year, furthering Pakistan's efforts to build missiles that could carry nuclear warheads.

It was this assistance that caused the Clinton administration to redouble its efforts to halt the Chinese exports. But Clinton administration officials opposed the idea of imposing sanctions on China or Chinese companies.

The efforts apparently bore fruit on Nov. 21 with the announcement that China had agreed not to export ballistic missile components and technology restricted by the Missile Technology Control Regime, a global pact limiting trade in missiles. The agreement marked a step forward in extended U.S. efforts to stem Chinese missile proliferation.

In exchange, the Clinton administration announced it would resume processing applications for U.S. companies to launch satellites on Chinese rockets and not impose sanctions against Beijing for past missile transfers to Pakistan and Iran. The administration did impose sanctions on the Pakistani and Iranian entities that received Chinese missile-related assistance.

But diplomats said that after the November 2000 deal, China continued to export missiles and missile-related technology to Pakistan. "After November 2000, there have been instances that make the agreement meaningless and show China has no intention of implementing it," said a diplomat who has been briefed about China's alleged violations.

In response, he said, the United States has lodged formal protests and asked for information from China about the alleged sales. So far, he said, the Chinese have not acknowledged the sales.

The diplomat and other sources declined to say how many times the U.S. government has formally protested alleged Chinese missile or missile-related deals since November. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing declined to comment, as well.

China has denied it is continuing to export missile technology and has reiterated its willingness to abide by the regulations, most prominently in May, as Premier Zhu Rongji prepared to depart on a trip to Pakistan.

According to U.S. analysts, a central difficulty is that influential parts of China's government are not convinced that stopping missile sales benefits China's security.

Bates Gill, of the Brookings Institution, and Evan Medeiros, of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said in a recent interview that China's army has little interest in limiting missile proliferation.

In addition, China's government has linked its missile proliferation practices with U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Chinese government officials raise the issue almost every time Americans raise proliferation problems, Gill and Medeiros said. The United States rejects any link. Moreover, in trying to forge a deal in November, they said, the U.S. government sought to win support from China's aerospace industry, offering the prospect of earning millions of dollars by launching U.S. satellites. But China's aerospace industry does not occupy a powerful place in China's national security bureaucracy.

Powell's visit is supposed to lay the groundwork for a state visit by Bush in October. Gill and Medeiros said Chinese officials might be overly optimistic in hoping the Bush visit will restore U.S.-China ties to the level achieved during the Clinton administration.

"That is not going to happen," Medeiros said, citing the April 1 crash between a Chinese fighter and a U.S. reconnaissance plane, among other irritants to the relationship. "There is just too much uncertainty in Washington as to how to deal with China."

While U.S. officials will be seeking progress on proliferation and human rights, Chinese officials appear more interested in learning more broadly the intent of the new administration. Chinese scholars have said Beijing is confused about Bush's approach and will be seeking an authoritative characterization of U.S.-China relations from Powell.

Bush has called China a "strategic competitor," leading some Chinese officials to worry that the U.S. government believes conflict with China could be inevitable. China also wants a clarification of U.S. policy toward Taiwan, the self-governing island of 23 million people that Beijing claims is part of "one China." Bush shocked Chinese officials this year when he pledged that the United States would spare no efforts in defending Taiwan.

Gill said a best-case scenario for the visit would involve Powell saying something about "China not being an enemy, restating the 'one China' policy and laying out what 'strategic competitor' means." In exchange, China would finally issue missile export control regulations.

"But that's optimistic," he said.

While the release of American Li Shaomin, American University researcher Gao Zhan and Qin Guangguang was hailed by U.S. officials, human rights are still on Powell's agenda.

Today, the wives of Xu Wenli and Wang Youcai, two prominent Chinese dissidents jailed in 1998, appealed for their husbands' release.

Thirty-five activists also released an open letter urging Powell to press China to release Xu, who is serving a 13-year sentence for his role in establishing the banned China Democracy Party.

-------- colombia

Colombia Drug Crop Spraying Halted

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Fumigation.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A Colombian court on Friday ordered a suspension of aerial eradication of drug crops using the chemical glyphosate, the main prong of a U.S.-backed counterdrug offensive in the South American country.

The ruling by a Bogota district court came in response to a petition by an organization representing Colombia's native Indian communities.

President Andres Pastrana said his legal experts were studying the ruling. He did not indicate whether he was ordering an immediate stop to the spraying against the plants used to make cocaine and heroin.

Addressing a news conference, Pastrana reiterated his government's official policy of spraying herbicides only against large-scale drug plantations and of inviting poor peasant farmers to join voluntary manual eradication programs.

But Indian groups, small farmers and environmentalist say that poor farmers' drug crops are also being wiped out by planes dumping herbicides and that the spraying is poisoning rivers and making people sick.

``As a provisional measure, all aerial fumigation with glyphosate is ordered suspended,'' the ruling said.

The court decision comes amid growing opposition in Colombia to herbicide use against drug crops and as Congress considers additional drug fighting aid for the country. Last year U.S. lawmakers approved a $1.3 billion package.

Washington is bankrolling the offensive against coca and poppy fields in Colombia. The aid program provides crop-dusting aircraft and escort helicopters that carry out spraying missions using glyphosate -- the main ingredient in the commonly used backyard fertilizers.

A court official, speaking on condition that he not be identified, emphasized that Friday's ruling was preliminary. He said it a more definitive verdict would be issued within 10 days.

The officials said the court would clarify as early as Monday whether the suspension applied to spraying in the entire country or only on Indian reservations. Judge Gilberto Reyes could not be reached for comment.

His ruling asked the government to respond within three days to a series of questions about the legal framework, precision and the possible health and environmental damage caused by the fumigation program against coca and poppy plantations.

Colombia is the world's leading producer of cocaine and a growing exporter of heroin to the United States and Europe.

--------

Plan Colombia: Washington's Latest Drug War Failure

Cato Institute.
July 27, 2001
by Ted Galen Carpenter
http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-27-01.html

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

The centerpiece of the Bush administration's "supply side" campaign against illegal drugs is staunch support for the Colombian government's "Plan Colombia." But the facts show that the plan is a waste of time and money.

Washington is backing Plan Colombia to the tune of $1.3 billion, primarily in military aid. Green Beret personnel are training several anti-drug battalions, U.S. funds have helped the Colombian military buy Black Hawk helicopters and other hardware, and employees under contract to the State Department fly dangerous aerial spraying missions to eradicate drug crops.

Plan Colombia's goals are certainly ambitious. Since December, more than 75,000 acres of drug crops have been sprayed with an herbicide. U.S. satellite data suggest that there are about 340,000 acres of coca (the raw material for cocaine) under cultivation throughout the country. Colombian officials express the hope that the eradication campaign will cut that acreage at least 50 percent by 2002.

But evidence has recently emerged that Plan Colombia's claims of success are erroneous-or at least irrelevant. Even as President Andres Pastrana and other leaders boasted of the plan's achievements, reports were leaking out that a new study, funded by the United Nations, indicated that there were more than 340,000 acres under cultivation.

Even more to the point, previous U.S. estimates of total cocaine production in Colombia-580 tons annually out of total world production of 780 tons-were too low. The new study concluded that Colombia's actual cocaine production was between 800 and 900 tons per year.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration inadvertently provides additional evidence of Plan Colombia's futility. Donnie Marshall, chief of the DEA, recently conceded that street prices of cocaine in the United States have remained virtually the same since Colombia's vigorous crop-eradication measures began. Yet if those efforts were successful, they should have produced a sharp decline in cocaine exports. That development, in turn, should be driving up street prices to reflect increasing scarcity. The fact that not even a modest price spike has occurred clearly indicates that Plan Colombia is having no meaningful impact on the supply of cocaine.

What Plan Colombia has done is increase the animosity of farmers toward the Pastrana government and, indirectly, toward the United States. One of the most unfortunate aspects of the aerial spraying campaign is that it has destroyed thousands of acres of legal crops along with the coca. That has threatened the livelihood of peasants in the affected areas, and in some cases created the specter of famine.

The level of public anger at the Pastrana government is rising ominously. When Pastrana recently traveled to one drug-producing region to sell the "soft side" of Plan Colombia (economic development), he received a harsh reception. At stop after stop he was greeted by angry demonstrators. And their message ought to trouble U.S. leaders as well as Pastrana. Many of the demonstrators waved signs showing a Colombian flag being subsumed by the Stars and Stripes, with the caption "Plan Colombia's Achievements." Other protestors greeted the president with chants of "Pastrana subservient to the gringos."

Given the political situation in Colombia, the outpouring of such sentiments is cause for great concern. The Pastrana government already confronts a three-decade-old insurgency being waged by two left-wing guerrilla armies. The last thing Bogota should be doing is giving in to U.S pressure to wage a drug war against its own population. That course of action is certain to produce more recruits for the radical leftist insurgencies.

Nor should Washington be complacent. Given the long-standing history of anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America, the resurgence of such attitudes in Colombia is alarming. Latin American paranoia about U.S. imperialism, a fear that never slumbers too soundly to begin with, is beginning to resurface. That development could have widespread, negative ramifications.

Plan Colombia is ineffectual in achieving its stated objectives, and it produces a number of highly undesirable side effects. The brutal reality is that, as long as drugs are illegal, there will be a huge black-market premium-a lucrative potential profit that will attract producers. Plan Colombia cannot repeal the economic laws of supply and demand. In attempting to do so, the United States is creating even more trouble for an already troubled neighbor.

-------- indonesia

U.S. Gov't Recalls Indonesia Book

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Purge-History-Recall.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government on Friday scrambled to call back all copies of a State Department history that details the U.S. role in Indonesia's deadly purge of communists in the 1960s.

In a diplomatically embarrassing case of terrible timing, hundreds of libraries across the country are stocking the recently released history of American officials' secret support for the anti-communist campaign that undermined the rule of Sukarno, Indonesia's founding president. Sukarno's daughter became the country's new leader this week.

The State Department blamed the Government Printing Office for issuing the book without approval from State, but the GPO said it had gotten clearance from State in April.

``We did not inadvertently release this history,'' said GPO spokesman Andrew Sherman.

``Only within the last two weeks have we been contacted by the State Department'' and ``every now and then an agency will say, `There is a problem with a document, can you pull it back.' That's what we have been in the process of doing over the last several days -- talking to the State Department and finding a way to ask the libraries to take those books off the shelves,'' said Sherman.

The State Department said that it discovered this month, before the internal process of deciding when to release the volume was completed, that the printing office had begun distributing copies.

``We asked the Government Printing Office not to sell any more copies because the process was not yet complete and no release date set,'' said a State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The National Security Archive, a private group specializing in national security issues, said the CIA had tried to suppress the history.

The text of a four-page CIA memo from then-Far East Division Chief William Colby is deleted in its entirety. The history identifies the source and date of the memo. Colby, who later became CIA director, died in 1996.

The CIA memo is dated the day after a State Department cable contained in the history spells out a U.S. plan to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to a group bent on the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party.

``This is to confirm my earlier concurrence that we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs requested by him for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movement,'' says a Dec. 2, 1965, document from the American ambassador in Indonesia to William P. Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 1964 to 1969.

``The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be,'' the document concluded.

Of the Gestapu, the ambassador's document said, ``This army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group is still carrying burden of current repressive efforts targeted against the PKI,'' a reference to the Indonesian Communist Party that was allied with Sukarno.

In a message to Washington dated April 15, 1966, the embassy acknowledged: ``We frankly do not know whether the real figure'' of communists who have been killed ``is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press.''

Adding detail to revelations of over a decade ago, the volume also points out that the U.S. Embassy supplied lists of top communist leaders to the Indonesians who were trying to destroy the PKI.

The history quoted from an airgram from the embassy to the State Department saying that an embassy-prepared list of communist leaders ``is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership.''

-------- iraq

U.S. Tells Iraq It May Retaliate for Missile Attack on Spy Plane

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/international/middleeast/27IRAQ.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 26 - President Bush declared today that Saddam Hussein "is still a menace" and a Pentagon official warned that the United States reserves the right to respond at any time to Iraq's attempt this week to shoot down a U-2 plane with a surface-to-air missile.

A high-flying U-2 spy plane came close to being struck by a missile over southern Iraq on Tuesday, officials said, prompting President Bush to promise today, "We're going to keep the pressure on Iraq."The president did not elaborate.

Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said the attack "continues the pattern of Iraqi aggressiveness" in shooting at American and British aircraft patrolling no-flight zones over northern and southern Iraq.

"Saddam has had a longstanding goal of downing a coalition aircraft by any means he can," Admiral Quigley said. He noted that this was not the first time a U-2 had been fired at by Iraqi missiles and that American and British aircraft had been shot at "virtually every day that they're up on patrol in either of those two areas for the recent past."

"We have said on any number of occasions that we reserve the right to respond in a time and a location and a manner of our choosing to these aggressive actions against coalition air crews," Admiral Quigley said.

An administration review of Iraq policy - which includes sanctions, support for opposition groups and the no-flight zones - is not completed, officials said. Several options are under consideration for the no-flight zones, among them continuing sorties at the current rate or decreasing the number of patrols but responding more forcefully to Iraqi violations.

The U-2 was flying at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet when the missile came close enough that the surveillance plane flew through its turbulence, but was not actually threatened with being hit, a senior Defense Department official said.

Officials said it did not appear that Iraq had built or bought a new, more accurate missile, but was able to adapt its current technology for more effective attacks.

-------- puerto rico

Dem. Leader Vows Support on Vieques

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) -- A Democratic Party leader promised to use his influence Friday to defend a symbolic vote on the future of U.S. Navy bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

``We want you to know that the Democratic Party will back your decision 100 percent,'' Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said on a visit to the island. McAuliffe said he supports an immediate end to the bombing, one of the options in Sunday's local referendum.

The Democratic leader -- who insisted he was not pushing for a certain outcome -- addressed a group of islanders who also support a permanent bombing halt.

``You all have my word that the next day I will be in the Congress defending your decision,'' he said.

The nonbinding referendum also allows Vieques islanders to choose for the Navy to stay indefinitely or leave by 2003. President Bush plans a naval withdrawal from Vieques in 2003.

The Navy has conducted exercises on Vieques for six decades, but has used dummy bombs since two off-target bombs killed a civilian guard on the range in 1999, igniting mass protests.

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

Pentagon staff racked up $9 billion in debt
Credit cards also used for personal expenses

Chicago Tribune
By John Solomon
The Associated Press
Published July 27, 2001, 5:50 AM CDT
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-pentagon.story?call

WASHINGTON -- Here's what a Pentagon infamous for buying overpriced toilets and hammers produced when it handed out credit cards to its employees: 10 million purchases, $9 billion in debt and plenty of examples of fraud.

The fraud ranged from a soldier who spent $3,100 at a nightclub to an Army reservist's wife who went on a $13,000 shopping spree in Puerto Rico, according to documents obtained Thursday by The Associated Press. Congress intends to make the materials public next week.

In the past two years alone, there have been more than 500 purchase fraud cases filed involving military credit cards, according to information gathered by Sen. Charles Grassley's office. One bank company has been forced to write off $59 million in fraudulent debts from military cards.

"In the past, Pentagon employees needed a phony invoice to trigger a fraudulent government check, but that obstacle is gone," Grassley, R-Iowa, said. "Credit cards provide a shortcut to the cash pile. The Pentagon is giving everyone a big scoop shovel and telling them to rip into the national money sack at both ends."

Reviews by Grassley; Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on government efficiency; and the General Accounting Office found the Pentagon has inadequate controls on the cards it issues for official purchases or travel and also is slow to respond even in the face of fraud.

Grassley said purchase credit cards, many with limits from $20,000 to $100,000, are being issued without credit checks on the employees receiving them and purchases are not being checked for legitimacy. "There are no controls, no responsibilities, and no accountability," he said.

The Pentagon, along with other federal agencies, began issuing credit cards to employees in the 1990s to make purchases more efficient. So far, 1.8 million cards have been issued to defense workers, according to the GAO.

Defense officials say the cards have significantly sped up purchases and eliminated red tape, and the idea shouldn't be judged solely by instances of fraud. They promise to be responsive to problems that will be discussed Monday at a hearing by Horn's subcommittee.

"This administration, and specifically Secretary (Donald H.) Rumsfield, has made fiscal responsibility a hallmark," Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Hansen said Thursday. "We will have representatives attending the hearing so we can hear the committee's concerns, answer their questions and make sure that any concerns are fully addressed."

Documents gathered by Grassley from the Bank of America, which handles Pentagon travel credit cards, detail the case of a Marine sergeant who ran up $20,000 in charges, then left the service -- and the bill unpaid.

The Marine's credit card for travel, issued in March 2000, was restricted because he had a questionable credit record. His bosses soon quadrupled its limit from $2,500 to $10,000, the documents show.

The bank issued a fraud warning in August 2000 after suspicious activity on the card, but the Marines raised the credit limit twice more to $25,000. The sergeant eventually made two cash withdrawals from the card over two months totaling $8,500.

The Marine's credit was finally revoked in February, almost a year after it was issued, and he left the service. The bank was forced to write off the debt as a loss.

Under its contract for travel cards, Bank of America isn't allowed to charge the government interest and must write off fraudulent purchases if it can't recover it from violators. The bank has written off $59 million in fraudulent debts involving more than 43,000 military travel credit cards.

A GAO review of purchase cards at two San Diego naval facilities also found abuses and weak protections against fraud, according to a final draft report prepared for Horn's subcommittee.

The GAO documented five recent fraud cases in San Diego involving at least $660,000 in personal purchases. They stretched over as long as two years before being detected.

"Items that were purchased for personal use in these cases included home improvement items from The Home Depot, numerous items from Wal-Mart, laptop computers, Palm Pilots, DVD players, an air conditioner, clothing, jewelry and other items such as eyeglasses, pet supplies and pizza," the GAO draft said.

Navy officials said they will dispute some of the GAO's conclusions at Monday's hearing, and explain what actions they have taken to correct problems.

The GAO found San Diego naval authorities were slow to react even in the face of fraud. For instance, the Navy still hasn't canceled all credit card numbers compromised in September 1999 when they showed up on a computer printout at a community college library, it said.

Navy investigators believe at least 30 of the compromised credit cards were used by 27 suspects to make more than $27,000 in fraudulent purchases involving pizza, jewelry, phone calls, tires and flowers, the GAO draft said.

The GAO draft documented other credit card excesses, such as $100 designer cases for a handheld computer and a $400 Coach leather briefcase.

Many items purchased with credit cards by Navy personnel were never entered into inventory as government property as required by law. A quick sampling of 65 items bought on military credit cards found 46 weren't listed in inventory, the GAO said.

Officials "could not provide conclusive evidence that 31 of them, including laptop computers, personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilots and digital cameras were in the possession of the government," it said.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

U. S. Could Lose on Climate

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Climate-Talks.html

BONN, Germany (AP) -- With the United States opting out of the Kyoto climate treaty, American businesses may be left on the sidelines while the rest of the world plays a new game: pollution trading.

It's a game the United States invented. It drew up most of the rules. It has even been playing an early version on its own playgrounds.

During two weeks of negotiations that ended Friday, nearly 180 nations accepted guidelines for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, which scientists believe are warming the Earth and dramatically changing its climate.

Germany's top negotiator, Karsten Sach, said the deal was ready to ratify, though some technical details were left to be worked out at the next meeting in Morocco in the fall. ``We don't need the small print for that,'' he said.

The United States alone rejected the Kyoto accord as flawed and too expensive. That means the world's biggest polluter -- responsible for 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide -- won't be in on the effort to cut emissions. President Bush has promised to draft his own proposals for domestic rules and international cooperation.

But environmentalists and many U.S. businesses say it may be more harmful to be left out of a game everyone else is playing.

That's especially true for U.S.-based multinational companies. Dealing with different rules on emissions in the United States and abroad makes their business planning more difficult.

``For efficiency and investment decisions, it's much more rational to have one set of rules,'' said Eileen Claussen, of the PEW Center on Global Climate Change in Washington.

Claussen, a former assistant secretary of state for environment affairs, said large corporations may pressure the administration to create ``a system that is at least compatible'' with Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol requires about 40 countries to reduce emissions of pollutants -- mainly carbon dioxide from industries and vehicles -- below 1990 levels by 2012.

Among the rules for Kyoto refined in Bonn were mechanisms to make it easier for countries to meet ambitious reductions targets, including trading in pollution credits. Under the system, a country that cannot meet its target can buy credits from a country that surpasses its target and has a surplus to sell.

Countries also can earn credit by helping others meet their targets, or by investing in emission-reducing projects in developing countries.

Those mechanisms were written into the protocol at U.S. insistence, overriding resistance of other countries that considered them to be loopholes to avoid action to reduce emissions.

``The Kyoto architecture is largely American,'' said Ian Bowles, who was a climate negotiator in the Clinton administration. ``For us, those were tried procedures, but in Europe they were much less known.''

The rules were modeled on the 1990 Clean Air Act, which forced U.S. utilities to slash sulfur dioxide emissions blamed for causing acid rain -- a program widely deemed successful.

Some U.S. companies have already begun trading in carbon credits, anticipating that one day they will face mandatory limits.

In one such deal, TransAlta, a Canadian electric company in Calgary, Alberta, last November sold 210,000 tons of carbon credits to Murphy Oil Corp. in El Dorado, Ark. Details were not published, but the market price for such credits is $2-$3 per ton.

If the United States adopts mandatory carbon reductions, that deal could mean substantial savings for Murphy Oil. Cutting 210,000 tons of emission would likely be more expensive than buying the credits from Canada.

An executive of Natsource, the brokerage firm that put together the TransAlta deal, said he expected trade to continue, despite Washington's rejection of the pact.

``Many companies in the U.S. are continuing to be active in greenhouse gas trading in the expectation and hope that we will have some kind of regime that will require them to cut emissions,'' said Michael Intrator, managing director of global emissions markets.

But unless countries and companies face a binding limit on their emissions, many people believe they have little incentive to trade.

``There is no voluntary credible alternative,'' said John Gummer, a former British environment secretary. ``Voluntarism doesn't work.''

The Global Climate Coalition, an anti-Kyoto alliance of companies, disagrees. It says competition in an unregulated market is the most efficient inducer of change. The coalition president, Glenn Kelly, said Kyoto would compel companies to invest excessively in energy.

The reversal of U.S. policy when Bush came to office flabbergasted the Europeans, Gummer said.

``Kyoto was negotiated by right-wing conservative parties. The conservatives feel betrayed by Bush,'' he said.

--------

Lawmakers Begin Effort to Get U.S. to Fight Global Warming

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/politics/27ENVI.html

WASHINGTON, July 26 - With the United States now alone in the world in opposing the treaty to combat global warming, some lawmakers are pressing for Congress to take the lead toward reducing emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, the issue on which the Bush administration has so far kept to the sidelines.

Both Democratic and Republican Congressional aides say it is now likely that Congress will pass one or more measures this year calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide, a main provision of the Kyoto global- warming treaty. But it is less clear whether majorities would back the mandatory restrictions spelled out in the treaty and rejected by the administration, or whether they would favor a voluntary approach.

Still, when Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, arrived on Capitol Hill this morning, she heard calls for Congress to make up for the administration's inaction this week in Bonn, where the United States opted out of an agreement on the Kyoto treaty that was backed by more than 180 countries.

"The administration can refuse to commit the United States to the Kyoto accord; that is their choice," Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont told Mrs. Whitman at a hearing on power plant emissions that was his debut as chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a job he won in May by shifting his party affiliation to independent from Republican.

"But this Congress, this Senate, and especially this committee will not let our international partners down," Mr. Jeffords said. "We plan to take steps to reduce our nation's contribution to this growing problem by working with industry to reduce carbon emissions."

The White House has criticized the Kyoto treaty as "fatally flawed," saying its provisions are unfair to the United States. This morning, Mrs. Whitman defended the administration's go-slow approach in offering any alternative to the treaty, saying it would be premature to present any plan for carbon dioxide reductions until further studies are completed.

"We're still a long way from knowing how to solve the problem," she said.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are widely regarded as the main contributor to global warming, and the United States is the world's largest source of that gas, about one-third of which comes from old coal-burning power plants.

The Bush administration's refusal to adopt mandatory limits on carbon dioxide has put it at odds not only with Europe and Japan, but also with senators like Mr. Jeffords, who has introduced a bill requiring power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The bill is also sponsored by 2 Republican senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, and 12 Democrats.

Other measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are also floating around Congress, including some, like one that Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, is expected to introduce next week, that would stop short of mandatory restrictions in favor of voluntary measures.

Even as the administration scrambles to come up with its own stand on the issue, the Congressional aides and several senators said, the pressures of public opinion and concern over international fallout appear to have added to a view that Congress would be irresponsible to do nothing.

"Very few of us up here want to have America seen as not participating in something that's important," Mr. Hagel said in a telephone interview. He said that what happened in Bonn had redoubled a sense of broad support for doing something.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said, "I certainly feel that leadership's got to come from somewhere. It's not coming from the administration."

"And I think it would be a failure for us," Mr. Bingaman said, "to just sit by idly and let the rest of the world work on this problem while our scientists tell us that the problem is very real."

Today's hearings on the subject were the first since the breakup of the Bonn meetings, and a sense of frustration over the administration not offering an alternative was evident even among Republicans who have been supportive of the White House position. Their comments may have reflected recent opinion polls showing that increasing numbers of Americans see the problem as serious.

In the months before the Kyoto treaty was framed in 1997, the Senate voted 95 to 0 for a resolution opposing any treaty that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions unless developing countries were also made subject to the rules that would bind industrialized countries like the United States.

The Bush administration has often pointed to that vote as an indication that a treaty requiring mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide emissions could never win Senate ratification. But supporters of mandatory measures point out that the mounting evidence of the scope and potential severity of climate change problems that has emerged in the last four years has significantly altered both the political and the scientific debates. Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, told Mrs. Whitman, "The fact of the matter is that we need to deal with the carbon issue, substantively and politically."

In a telephone interview, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a leading critic of the administration's policy, was more explicit, saying: "What happened in Bonn has reinvigorated the notion that the United States is in a very unfortunate position, which encourages many here to think that we've got to take some steps to respond domestically, to put the United States in better graces."

President Bush has said that his administration takes the problem of climate change seriously and is determined to address it. But he has criticized the Kyoto treaty because it does not require immediate action from developing countries and because, he has argued, the steep cuts it would require in carbon dioxide emissions would exact a heavy cost to the American economy.

The administration has said little about its plans since last month when Mr. Bush promised more money for research into causes and possible solutions to global warming.

Administration officials now say that the White House hopes to come up with an alternative to the Kyoto plan in time for the next meeting of the Kyoto group, in October.

Today's hearing focused on emissions from power plants. Mr. Jeffords, whose bill would rein in power- plant emissions of four problem- causing gases said it was wisest to address all four of the gases at once.

But Mrs. Whitman, advocating the administration's three-pollutant approach, said it would be more prudent to move now to tighten restrictions on three undisputed public health problems - nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury - while deferring action on carbon dioxide until its role in global warming was better understood.

"It would be a shame to deny people an important public health goal while we await consensus on carbon dioxide emissions," she said.

--------

House Upholds Arsenic Standards

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Arsenic-Rules.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Democrats succeeded Friday in blocking the Bush administration from weakening or delaying tough new standards on arsenic levels in drinking water announced in the final hours of the Clinton presidency.

Democrats, renewing their attacks on the administration's environmental policies, said the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to reconsider the Clinton standards put millions of Americans at risk. ``The bottom line,'' said Rep. Bill Luther, D-Minn., ``is that the U.S. standard for arsenic should not be among the worst in the world.''

Republicans accused Democrats of exaggerations not based on sound science.

The House, in a 218-189 vote, approved a measure by Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., and other Democrats that would prevent the EPA from weakening the drinking water standard set by the Clinton administration in January. Nineteen Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the proposal, an amendment to a $112.7 billion bill to fund veterans, housing, environment and other federal programs in fiscal 2002.

The Clinton administration set the standard at no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water, compared to the current 50 ppb level set in 1942.

The National Academy of Sciences in 1999 released a report calling for stricter standards, saying arsenic is a potent human carcinogen linked to lung, bladder and skin cancer.

In March the EPA proposed that the Clinton standards be put on hold pending further study. It also put off until February the date when the new standard will become effective, leaving in place a 2006 target date for compliance.

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has not ruled out the 10 ppb standard, but says more research is needed to determine whether that tough standard justifies the estimated annual cost of $200 million it will take to implement. The EPA earlier this month said it would accept public comment on a 20 ppb standard.

The Bush White House, said Bonior, is saying that ``it will ignore 25 years of research, cast aside extensive expert testimony, override official recommendations and reject the clear will of the American people.''

But Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., said Democrats were resorting to ``heated rhetoric, wild exaggerations and sound-bite politics'' to support ``a very arbitrary decision based on questionable studies.''

The 10 ppb level was strongly opposed by Western lawmakers who said arsenic occurs naturally in their water supplies, has never been shown to be harmful at low levels and that meeting the standards would be economically ruinous to small communities.

``We don't know what the health effects are of arsenic at very low levels,'' said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. ``We do know that if you set that standard so low, it will force rural water systems to close and we'll go back to having untreated water with wells.'' She said there were 150 rural water systems in her state where the naturally occurring level of arsenic was above 10 ppb.

But Democrats pointed out that the 10 ppb level has been adopted by the World Health Organization and the European Union. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said the total cancer risk goes from one in 500 at 10 ppb to one in 250 at 20 ppb.

Democrats and their environmental allies have been strongly critical of the administration's positions on such issues as global warming, expanded drilling for energy supplies and opening up federal land to logging.

-------- genetics

Scientists: Biotech Corn Still Not Safe

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Biotech-Corn.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists advising the government said Friday that genetically altered StarLink corn has not been proven safe for food.

The panel of scientists urged mandatory testing of grain and a wider search for people who may have had allergic reactions to the biotech corn.

Discovery of the corn in taco shells last fall spawned nationwide recalls of food products. Developer Aventis CropScience withdrew the corn from the market but has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to allow trace amounts in food in order to avoid further recalls.

The scientists advising EPA said they believe there is a medium chance that the corn is an allergen, although there is a low risk that consumers would eat enough corn to develop an allergy to it.

The scientists said they could not determine a maximum safe level of the corn ``where there would be a reasonable scientific certainty that exposure would not be harmful to public health.''

Grain processors have been testing voluntarily for StarLink at the recommendation of the Food and Drug Administration, but the scientists said the testing should be made mandatory, at least until this year's crop clears the market.

EPA officials had no immediate comment on the report.

``At least for the time being, I don't see how EPA'' can approve the Aventis request, ``given that the panel feels that there is still a medium risk that Cry9C is an allergen,'' said Rebecca Goldburg, a scientist with the activist group Environmental Defense.

StarLink corn was never approved for human consumption because of questions about whether a special protein it contained, known as Cry9C, was an allergen. The protein breaks down relatively slowly in the digestive system, an indication that it could cause allergic reactions in some people.

Aventis wants EPA to set a maximum level for Cry9C in food of 20 parts per billion. That's the equivalent of one StarLink kernel in 800 kernels of corn.

EPA says the actual levels of StarLink in U.S. corn supplies range from 0.34 to 8 parts per billion, depending on the method used to make the estimate.

In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cleared StarLink as the cause of allergic reactions in 17 people who thought they may have been sickened by the corn.

However, the scientists questioned the reliability of the test that was used and said the government should be contacting doctors to look for possible allergy cases related to StarLink. The search for such cases needs to continue for two years, the report said.

``The public would benefit from assurance of the safety of the food supply,'' the scientists said.

--------

Lawmakers Support Stem Cell Research

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Congress-Stem-Cells.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 200 members of Congress, including 40 Republicans, have sent a letter to President Bush urging him to support federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

``You have the lives of millions of our -- and your -- constituents in your hands,'' the 202 lawmakers wrote.

Circulated by Reps. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., the letter cites reports that a private lab has created human embryos for stem cell research as evidence that federal oversight is needed.

``The only way to ensure that embryonic stem cell research is conducted with strict ethical and legal guidelines is to provide federal funding and oversight,'' the letter states.

The lawmakers also note the research's potential to find cures for diseases.

Last week, 59 senators sent Bush a letter supporting the research. More than a dozen Republican senators are on record urging Bush to support the research, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate's only physician, who opposes abortion.

Other abortion opponents are against the research because the embryos would have to be destroyed to conduct the research.

Some scientists say that stem cell research could benefit more than 100 million patients with such disorders as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Most of the Republicans who signed the letter, including Ramstad, support abortion rights.

``With my own mother totally debilitated by Alzheimer's disease, a first cousin who died from diabetes and several close friends suffering from Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries, I plead with you to give hope to my loved ones and 100 million other Americans suffering from cruel, deadly diseases,'' Ramstad said.

The anti-abortion lawmakers who signed the letter include Phil English, R-Pa., Randy Cunningham, R-Calif., and John Duncan, R-Tenn.

-------- police / prisoners

Genoa Summit Handling Defended

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Summit-Fallout.html

ROME (AP) -- Facing an outcry in Italy and abroad, Premier Silvio Berlusconi promised on Friday there will be ``no cover-up of the truth'' regarding charges of police brutality against protesters during the Group of Eight summit in Genoa.

But Berlusconi defended his government's handling of the summit and gave no indication he will agree to opposition demands for a separate parliamentary investigation of the events that included the first death during anti-globalization protests.

Addressing the Senate, Berlusconi said the summit was a ``political and diplomatic success for our country.''

Protesters in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere have claimed upon returning home that they were beaten by police and denied access to their consulates after their arrests.

Much of Berlusconi's 40-minute address was devoted to a defense of his government's actions and to noting that the summit was largely prepared by the center-left opposition. The prime minister took office five weeks before the summit.

Police in Genoa were unable to quell the violence, which did millions of dollars worth of damage and shocked the nation. One protester, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani, was fatally shot by police.

More than 100 foreigners were arrested in Genoa, including dozens of Germans. Almost all had been freed by Friday.

Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero, visiting Austria on Friday, assured Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner that Italy would spare no efforts to get a ``full clarification'' of the riots, news reports said. Seventeen Austrians were arrested in Genoa.

Ferrero-Waldner also said lines of communication should be established with nonviolent anti-global groups. The Italian media has carried reports about violent groups -- some of them from the far right -- infiltrating the Global Social Forum, the umbrella for hundreds of protest organizations.

According to some reports, the police knew in advance about the infiltrators.

The reports raised questions about why the police didn't move to head off violence before the July 20-22 summit and about the Global Social Forum itself.

The Genoa Social Forum spokesman, Vittorio Agnoletto, said Friday that his group alerted police about the presence of violent demonstrators in Genoa before the summit but that nothing was done.

Agnoletto said the forum is gathering material proving that unarmed and peaceful protesters were brutally beaten up by the police.

``We thought police forces were supposed to guarantee public order, but this is not the case in Italy,'' he told reporters. ``We got caught in the middle, between violent rioters and the police.''

At least 100,000 people flocked to Genoa, championing a host of causes such as the environment and debt relief for poor countries. Only a small minority was violent, but they highjacked what the Global Social Forum had said it hoped would be peaceful protests.

The rioters smashed storefront windows, set cars and trash bins on fire and threw rocks and firebombs at police, who responded by clubbing protesters and firing tear gas at them.

In Athens, Greece, firebombs exploded Friday outside a National Bank branch, apparently the latest backlash to police crackdowns during anti-globalization demonstrations.

The blasts by three firebombs outside the state-run bank branch in central Athens caused minor damage but no injuries, police said.

In an anonymous telephone call to a newspaper, a previously unknown group calling itself the Angry Proletariats claimed responsibility for the attack, police said.

``Reaction for the victims of Goteborg and Genoa,'' the caller said, according to police.

During a European Union summit in June in Goteborg, Sweden, 70 protesters and nearly 20 police officers were injured in clashes.

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FBI called a 'culture of arrogance'

July 27, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010727-96485474.htm

A leading Senate Republican yesterday said an internal report showing that senior FBI managers traveled to Washington at government expense to attend a retirement party is part of a "culture of arrogance" at the bureau that needs to be corrected.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley cited a report sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week saying senior managers lied to obtain improper travel reimbursements to attend a party for former FBI Deputy Director Larry A. Potts, but none was disciplined other than to receive a letters of censure.

The Iowa Republican, a member of the panel that begins confirmation hearings Monday for a new FBI director, has been a frequent critic of what he has described as "institutional arrogance" within the FBI in the way it deals with its own employees.

In recent weeks, he has focused on what he has called a "double standard" of discipline between the FBI's senior managers and rank-and-file agents, saying the bureau's management system is "broken." He is expected to ask FBI Director-designate Robert S. Mueller III during the hearings about how he intends to improve the embattled agency.

"This story shows the clash of cultures between the culture of arrogance that pervades FBI management and the culture of ethics that's taught to new FBI recruits," he said in a statement.

"We need FBI leadership that gets back to practicing what it preaches at the FBI training facility in Quantico."

The Washington Times reported yesterday that senior FBI managers traveled to Washington in October 1997 to attend the Potts party and, according to an investigation by the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), did so under the pretext of attending a conference at the FBI's training academy in Quantico, Va.

More than 140 people, including as many as a dozen executives and special-agents-in-charge of bureau field offices, attended the Oct. 9, 1997, party in Arlington, while only five persons showed up for the Oct. 10, 1997, conference in Quantico.

The conference, which lasted about 90 minutes including lunch, had been put together six days before the Potts party -- specifically for special-agents-in-charge of various FBI field offices to discuss new agent curriculum and training. Only two of them showed up.

The sessions included one on "Integrity in Law Enforcement" and another on "The Ethical Golden Thread."

OPR investigators concluded the conference was a sham used to justify travel reimbursements for the senior FBI managers. They found that senior managers filed false vouchers, misused government property, and lacked candor or lied under oath during an investigation of the party and the conference.

Similar conduct by the FBI's rank-and-file agents would have led to their firing.

The investigation of the Potts retirement party was the impetus behind a 2000 decision by former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to change the bureau's disciplinary procedures so that punishment for misconduct by senior FBI managers would be the same as that handed out to other bureau employees, including rank-and-file agents.

FBI spokesman John Collingwood has called the probe of the retirement party the "exact issue" that caused Mr. Freeh to ultimately change the FBI's disciplinary procedures.

"There is an expectation that all FBI employees will be held to a very high standard commensurate with our responsibilities," Mr. Collingwood said. "Senior executives must expect to be held to an even higher standard, simply because of their position of leadership."

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Digital Defense

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THOMAS FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/opinion/27FRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

With many dot-coms blowing up, it is now fashionable to dismiss the Internet as just another tulip mania. That Internet stocks were a classic bubble is without question. But the Internet isn't just tulips, and if you think it is, well, let's talk in five years. By then it will be clear that the Internet is a business evolution - reshaping how businesses communicate, educate and purchase materials; a social revolution - connecting people who have never been connected before; and, for both of these reasons, a strategic dilemma that we are just beginning to understand.

Recently I wrote a memo that the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden might have written to his men, after the Bush team hastily withdrew a contingent of Marines exercising in Jordan following death threats from the bin Laden gang. One day after the column appeared in The Times and on its Web site, I received e-mails from two Marines who had been part of the exercise in Jordan. They were upset about what I had written and they e-mailed me from their ship, the U.S.S. Harpers Ferry, as it sailed away from Jordan, to scold me for suggesting that they were retreating.

As one of them, a lance corporal, wrote: "We have not been driven out of the Middle East. We are not in port, but believe me, we are here. . . . Marines do not retreat, Mr. Friedman. . . . Semper Fidelis. @harpers-ferry.usmc .mil."

That's the Internet social revolution, connecting people who have never been connected. In 2001, the use of the Internet by companies to reach customers, suppliers and employers will triple to about $260 billion worth of business worldwide. That's the Internet business evolution.

The strategic dilemma flows from both: the more tightly connected we become, socially and financially, the more vulnerable we are to any breakdown in the system. Did you see that train tunnel fire in Baltimore last week? It burned some key network cables that used the same tunnel, which knocked out part of the Internet in Baltimore and slowed Internet service in regions across the U.S.

In five years, with the Internet being used to run more and more systems, if someone is able to knock out the handful of key Internet switching and addressing centers in the U.S. (until recently, a quarter of all Internet traffic passed through one building in Tyson's Corner, Va., next to Morton's steak house), here's what happens: many trains will stop running, much air traffic will grind to a halt, power supplies will not be able to be shifted from one region to another, there will be no e-mail and your doctor's CAT scanner, which is now monitored over the Internet by its manufacturer, won't work if it breaks.

Why? Because corporate data, telephone calls and e-mail, which 10 years ago ran on separate networks, are now all running together on the same fiber-optic cables through the same routers. This is called the "I.T. cloud" - a huge complex web of lines and routers, where, like a cloud, you see your voice, data or e-mail going in one side and coming out the other, but never quite know how it works in between.

The Bush missile defense plan is geared to defending the country from a rogue who might fire a missile over our walls. But the more likely threat is from a cyberterrorist who tries to sabotage our webs. The more tightly we get woven together, the more we become dependent on networks, the more a single act of terrorism can unleash serious chaos.

What compounds this Internet strategic dilemma is that the web is largely in the hands of the private sector. The U.S. Army can't protect our webs as easily as our walls. What the government can do is to cajole every industry in the private sector to improve its network security, backups and information about cyberattacks to make our relentless integration less vulnerable to a systemic failure.

To his credit, President Bush will soon unveil an upgraded program to defend against cyberterrorism. But so far, the U.S. government spends only $1.8 billion a year to protect our webs, which, the F.B.I. will tell you, are already under daily hack attack by cyberterrorists. Meanwhile, we are considering spending $100 billion on a missile shield to defend our walls from missiles that terrorists don't yet possess and may never use. It will probably take a cyberattack that causes real chaos for us to see that our big threat is not a mushroom cloud but the I.T. cloud, and that threat will come up the web, not over a wall.

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Thousands March for Peace in Sudan

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Sudan-March.html

WAD MEDANI, Sudan (AP) -- Tens of thousands of people -- including thousands of children -- began a two-day peace march through war-ravaged Sudan on Friday.

``We are appealing to all sides to stop the war in our country and achieve peace here, in the continent and in the whole world,'' said 12-year-old participant Omar Awad el-Basha.

The march began in Wad Medani, 90 miles southeast of Khartoum, with about 1,000 marchers. Within a few hours, the count had reached 25,000.

Many of Sudan's leading actors and comedians were taking part in the march, which was to take them past the cities of El-Hasaheisa and El-Kamlin before reaching Khartoum.

The march, organized by UNICEF and the Sudanese Movement for Children, aimed to highlight the stark conditions in the country devastated by civil war and famine, and the humanitarian needs of its children.

Sudan has been embroiled in civil war since 1983, when the Sudan People's Liberation Army took up arms, demanding greater autonomy in the south where most of the people follow traditional African beliefs. About 5 percent are Christian. The north is mostly Arab Muslim.

The war has pushed 4 million people from their homes and more than 2 million people have died in fighting and famines.

Thomas Ekvall, UNICEF's representative in Sudan, said past reliance on a single government ministry or group may explain why aid programs have not always succeeded.

``If we all work together in a coherent, coordinated, realistic fashion, we can all insure that we can achieve these goals for the children,'' Ekvall told The Associated Press.

President Omar el-Bashir was expected to address the marchers upon their arrival in Khartoum on Saturday.

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Peru's Toldeo Bounds From Protester to President

New York Times
July 27, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-peru-dc.html

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - A year after leading street marches against ousted President Alberto Fujimori, Peru's Alejandro Toledo readied on Friday for his own inauguration and pledged to twin fiscal discipline with alleviating poverty.

The 55-year-old former World Bank consultant won a runoff last month amid populist pledges to create 1 million jobs, boost state salaries and cut taxes. He will be sworn in on Saturday at a ceremony with regional presidents plus ministers and dignitaries from the United States, Japan and Israel.

The centrist economist, who rose from grinding poverty, has a tough task ahead delivering on promises to fix a flagging economy and build confidence in Peruvian institutions after a year of corruption scandals, according to political analysts.

``I will push market economics with a human face ... because I'm not interested in zero inflation, or what the IMF wants without advances in employment and poverty,'' Toledo told RPP radio in an interview aired on Friday.

Police said some 45,000 officers would be mobilized for Saturday's inauguration in Congress and an unprecedented ceremony on Sunday at the Inca citadel Machu Picchu, near the southern city of Cusco. There Andean priests will burn offerings and spit a corn brew to honor Toledo's Indian roots.

Toledo, who revels in the nickname ``Pachacutec'' after the great Inca emperor, says he will be the first ``cholo'' -- as Peruvians of native descent are called -- to reach the nation's highest office in 500 years. Although many Peruvians identify with him ethnically, almost half the country did not vote for him.

Analysts have warned strikes and protests could flare if Peru's stagnant economy does not improve swiftly. More than half of Peru's 26 million people are poor.

``I'm proud a 'cholo' like me is president. I trust he won't forget he was poor like us once,'' said Simeon Chuquitanta, a 54-year-old Cusco peasant. ``We're sick of lies and promises.''

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES

The security plans for Saturday evoked memories of the troops that were on the streets for protests when Fujimori was sworn in for a third term after he won an election widely seen as rigged. Then, Toledo led demonstrations in which six people died.

Last year, only two regional leaders -- the presidents of Bolivia and Ecuador -- attended. Fujimori's 1990-2000 time in office unraveled amid a corruption scandal sparked by his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, and he fled to Japan in November, where he was fired by Congress as ``morally unfit.''

This year, Toledo will be flanked by a score of dignitaries including Argentina's Fernando de la Rua, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and Spain's Prince Felipe.

Toledo's first bilateral headache could flare with the presence of Chilean President Ricardo Lagos amid a dispute over Chile's decision to ground Peru's biggest airline, Aero Continente, on charges of money laundering.

On Friday, workers of Aero Continente published a full page advertisement in El Comercio daily telling Lagos: ``If this injustice is not resolved, you are not welcome.''

The presence of Chavez, who is bringing five ministers, the head of his armed forces and a delegation of Indians, is expected to defuse tensions after both countries claimed triumph for the June 23 surprise capture in Caracas of Montesinos.

Both countries recalled their ambassadors last month but Chavez has said relations would return to normal after Toledo took office.

Toledo also swears in his Cabinet on Saturday amid concern of a shift to the right that could clash with populist campaign pledges.

In the key economics portfolio is Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a respected banker and fund manager. Close to him is Prime Minister-designate Roberto Danino, a Harvard-trained lawyer.

Both have said they will work to turn around Peru's stalled $54 billion economy and wage an ``all out war on poverty.''

The Cabinet also has leftists, including Fernando Olivera controversially handed the justice portfolio. The selection of Olivera, who has long dogged ex-President Alan Garcia on corruption charges, has upset Garcia's American Revolutionary Alliance Party, whom Toledo must work with in a divided Congress.

But Toledo told RPP the Cabinet's apparently strange bedfellows would mesh: ``That old idea that social concerns were one thing and responsible economic policies another is a broken paradigm.''

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