------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Hiroshima Survivors Remember 'Hell'
Nuclear waste creates storm in France
Collateral Effect of Atomic Explosions
Korean Survivors Remember Hiroshima Bomb Victims
North Korean Leader Vows to Curb Missile Program
It Takes Two to Tear It Up
On a trail of destruction
'We knew what we were exposed to,' Hanford retiree says
Train to carry nuke waste in Illinois

MILITARY
Brazil Steps on U.S. Toes With a Plan for Fighter Jets
Israeli Soldiers Attacked
Differences Over Vieques Bitterly Divide Democrats
The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space

OTHER
Europe mute on narcotics executions
Electric Chairs Being Retired
Solar Power Gets Its Day in Sun
Program Seeks to Fight Global Warming
For the Record
Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong
Censure of Freeh Was Secretly Rejected
Los Alamos Scientist's Book Creates a New Controversy


-------- NUCLEAR

Hiroshima Survivors Remember 'Hell'

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Hiroshima-Anniversary.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sunday was just another Sunday for almost everybody in the world. But for Fumiko Amano, the 56th anniversary of the day an atomic bomb destroyed her home in Hiroshima rekindled memories of ``a kind of hell.''

Amano was joined by fellow survivor Keiko Hara in a ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial to remember those killed by the bomb, dropped by the United States on Aug. 5, 1945.

``The primary reason for doing this is to keep alive the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,'' said John Steinbach, co-convener in Washington of the Gray Panthers, a multi-issue advocacy group. ``The Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) are very concerned that the world is going to forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.''

Approximately 140,000 people died at Hiroshima and an estimated 70,000 more perished in the second bombing in Nagasaki three days later. The two bombings marked the effective end of World War II. Japan surrendered within two weeks, on Aug. 15, 1945.

According to Amano and Hara -- who were 14 and 5 years old, respectively, when the bomb was dropped -- the ceremony was not just about remembering those who died. Hara said she wants to spread the message that ``we should abolish nuclear weapons, because there is no way they can coexist with humankind. I hope there is no more Hiroshima, no more Nagasaki, no more Hibakusha!''

Dennis Nelson, a retired Navy commander who participated in the commemoration, spoke of victims of another type of U.S. nuclear action. Nelson said he believes his brother and sister died of cancer at young ages because they were exposed to radioactive fallout in his hometown of St. George, Utah, which lies 100 miles downwind from an old nuclear test site.

``I had to speak out,'' he said. ``Too much is too much.''

Nelson, who now serves as co-director of Support and Education for Radiation Victims in Kensington, Md., hopes that ceremonies like these will get the attention of the government. ``The only thing that can possibly change their mind is a grass-roots movement.''

Perhaps surprisingly, Nelson, Amano and Hara said they harbor no ill will toward the U.S. government. ``I wouldn't be spreading the message of nuclear abolition if I didn't love America,'' Amano said.

-------- france

Nuclear waste creates storm in France

By Clare Kittredge, Globe Correspondent,
8/5/2001
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/217/nation/Nuclear_waste_creates_storm_in_France+.shtml

ARENTAN, France - When the Chernobyl catastrophe spewed a radioactive plume across Europe in 1986, the pro-nuclear French government said, in so many words, that the toxic cloud had neatly swerved around France.

Now, 15 years later, even in France, the days of public trust in all things nuclear are gone, French environmentalists are saying as they protest foreign nuclear waste shipments into France.

''There's been an evolution in French thinking,'' Jean-Luc Verret, regional secretary for lower Normandy's Green Party, said last week as a train bearing nine 110-ton casks of spent fuel elements approached Carentan, an upper Normandy town not far from the Allied landing sites.

''They pretended Chernobyl didn't affect France - they can't do that any more,'' Verret said.

Indeed, even here near a giant commercial radioactive waste plant at La Hague, on a wind-swept tip of Normandy, wisps of doubt about nuclear safety have surfaced in recent years.

On Thursday, French environmentalists delayed a rail convoy of German nuclear waste bound for the plant at La Hague. Rail shipments of waste to the plant resumed this spring after a three-year hiatus caused by the discovery of widespread radioactive contamination of rail cars.

The delays, caused by Greenpeace and Green activists, followed charges by a train workers' union that there is a ''lack of transparency'' and too little public information about spent nuclear fuel rail transports to La Hague.

In addition, another environmental group, Manche Nature, has petitioned a Cherbourg judge to stop foreign nuclear waste shipments to the vast La Hague plant.

The argument was that they are illegal. French law forbids storing foreign waste, Didier Anger, representative for the Greens, said last week.

Also turning up the heat last week was an independent radiation testing laboratory in nearby Caen. The lab said a radiation leak in May from the plant at La Hague had been much worse than the company had acknowledged.

A government radiation monitoring agency, the Nuclear Protection and Surveillance Institute, confirmed that its instruments had detected the leak in Alencon, more than 60 miles away.

And the independent testing lab, the Western Radioactivity Verification Association, said health studies based on the company's own figures should be revised.

''Are we in the presence of chronically poor calibration? That would mean a good part of the studies done around the plant would be cast into doubt since they were based on the company's figures,'' said Pierre Barbey, the lab's scientific adviser.

Environmentalists pay much attention to La Hague because France, which relies on reactors for 80 percent of its energy, has cast itself as a global leader in nuclear power and waste.

In addition, money is involved from abroad, though figures are not forthcoming. La Hague is the world's largest commercial facility to separate plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel.

And as world interest in nuclear waste disposal mounts, France is exporting its expertise.

The United States and France, for example, have agreed to do joint research on nuclear waste, among other issues.

But there are problems close to home. Last week, a group of Norman mothers said a new leukemia study adds to their worries about the health effects of the Cogema nuclear waste plant's radioactive discharges on their children.

One group, called Les Meres en Colere (The Angry Mothers), was formed in 1997 when a noted epidemiologist suggested a link between a slight rise in leukemia cases in children playing on local beaches and eating local fish and shellfish near La Hague.

Published on Jan. 11, 1997 in the British Medical Journal, the study, by Jean-Francois Viel, epidemiologist at the University of Besancon in eastern France, far from La Hague, suggested a connection between the reprocessing facility's radioactive emissions and the ailment in local children.

Viel's was the first case-control study conducted around a nuclear installation in France. It provoked furious controversy across France, and Viel was widely vilified.

But this summer, French newspapers declared Viel, whose nickname became the ''nuclear pariah,'' vindicated when a more recent government study, published in the British Medical Association's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, confirmed Viel's finding of a leukemia cluster near La Hague.

The operator of La Hague, a government-subsidized corporation called Cogema, says its activities are safe and carefully monitored. In a statement, the company acknowledged concern but said, ''In the past 20 years, scientifically founded studies indicate no link between operations at the Cogema-La Hague site and the probability of occurence of infantile leukemia.''

The Angry Mothers spokeswoman, Nathalie Bonnemains-Geismar doesn't buy it.

She says her concerns are backed by ''the population's growing anxiety about the health effects of all reprocessing activities at La Hague and its liquid and gaseous radioactive releases.''

On Thursday, as the nuclear waste train approached Carentan, it stopped for a Greenpeace activist who had barred its way by straddling one of the train rails rail, his hands stuck inside a steel tube nestled under the rail.

''Reprocessing is an economic and environmental aberration,'' declared a Cherbourg shipyard worker, Philippe Rousselet, as police pried him loose.

The train moved on as a police helicopter hovered overhead.

-------- india / pakistan

Collateral Effect of Atomic Explosions

New York Times
August 5, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/national/05SUNQ.html

Sunday Q & A appears in this section weekly. Readers are invited to send in questions about national or international affairs; those selected will be answered by Times correspondents who specialize in those issues. Information about submitting questions appears below.

Q. Recent talks between India and Pakistan bring up the question of possible use of nuclear weapons. If there were, say, 2 to 20 atomic explosions in that part of the world, aside from the disastrous consequences at the point of detonation, what would be the likely effects on other continents?

A. James Glanz, a science correspondent for The Times, responds:

By breaking a taboo that has existed for more than half a century, a nuclear exchange of that magnitude would make the world an infinitely more dangerous place and lead to consequences no one could foresee. With millions dead by blast, fire and radiation poisoning on the Indian subcontinent, civilizations there could collapse into chaos, potentially destabilizing governments around the globe.

The physical effects outside the region would be the least of the world's worries - assuming the horrific situation did not spark nuclear war elsewhere. Before 1963, when a treaty banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, radioactive strontium, a fission byproduct, wafted around the globe and generated international outrage. Closer to the explosions, a radioactive isotope of iodine rained from the sky onto plants eaten by cows and goats, which then produced radioactive milk. Those distressing episodes would be replayed in the wake of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

The global economic consequences of such a disaster are incalculable. The world would somehow have to intervene to help more than a billion people whose governments had neglected their interests in the most repugnant way imaginable.

Finally, the United States and other Western countries would rightly fear that the end of the nuclear taboo would mean an increase in proliferation, possibly leading to an era in which nuclear terrorism became a credible threat. The effect of a shadow that dark on humanity's fortunes is beyond reckoning.

-------- korea

Korean Survivors Remember Hiroshima Bomb Victims

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-h.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - South Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima gathered in the city's Peace Memorial Park on Sunday, a day ahead of the 56th anniversary of the bombing, and called for compensation for victims now living abroad.

The ceremony, at a monument to the 2,588 South Koreans who died as a result of the bomb, was attended by some 200 South Korean survivors and their families, Kyodo news agency said.

There are about 2,300 survivors now living in South Korea, who have been unable to receive benefits under Japan's Atomic Bomb Victims Relief Law because they have left Japan.

``It is an issue that should be resolved while surviving hibakusha (atomic bombing victims) are alive,'' Kyodo quoted Pak So Sung, the chief of the Hiroshima regional unit of the pro-Seoul Korean Residents Union in Japan, as saying.

In June, a Japanese district court ordered the Osaka prefectural government to pay 170,000 yen ($1,374) to Kwak Kwi-hun, 76, a Korean survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, who now lives in Seoul.

But the Japanese government appealed the court ruling later that month. Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama has said Japanese law does not require the central or local governments to pay medical allowances to survivors living abroad.

On Monday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will attend a ceremony in Hiroshima to mark the anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing attack.

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the United States on August 6, 1945, is believed to have killed up to 80,000 people instantly, and the death toll rose to some 140,000 by the end of 1945, out of an estimated population of 350,000.

--------

North Korean Leader Vows to Curb Missile Program

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/international/05RUSS.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, Aug. 4 - The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, today repeated a promise to suspend ballistic missile launchings until 2003, saying in a declaration with President Vladimir V. Putin here that his nation's missile program "does not present a threat to nations respecting North Korea's sovereignty."

The declaration, aimed squarely at the United States' proposal to build a defense against ballistic missile attacks by so-called rogue states, came at a Kremlin meeting of the two leaders that capped Mr. Kim's 10-day journey to Moscow by rail.

The United States has repeatedly cited a threat from North Korea as part of its rationale for wanting to build a shield, which Russia opposes for fear it would challenge its own arsenal and scuttle an important arms control agreement with the United States.

The statement today was the major development of the secretive and at times strange visit here by the Stalinist leader, which one television commentator said "created the feeling of a time capsule" in Red Square.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim spent much of the day in negotiations, privately and with advisers, that centered largely on economic issues. The joint declaration, issued at midday, was a striking exception in which Mr. Putin appeared to give moral support - and perhaps reassurance - to a nation making one of its first tentative efforts to enter the world at large.

North Korea first pledged to suspend missile launches in 1999, during an effort by President Clinton's White House to curb missile and nuclear programs that had threatened to escalate into a military crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

The statement today was the second iteration of that guarantee and the first such overture to President Bush, who only recently renewed efforts to cultivate North Korea after a review of American policy.

It also was a victory for Mr. Putin, who not only wants to curb the programs for Russia's strategic reasons but also wants to position himself as an intermediary for North Korea's dealings with the West.

The declaration committed North Korea and Russia to the boilerplate language of Russian foreign policy, the "formation of a new fair world order" framed by international law and beyond the domination of any single power. But it also pointedly committed them to combat international terrorism, underscoring North Korea's insistence that it is not the unpredictable rogue nation that the United States describes.

And it repeated that the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty should remain the foundation of arms control efforts. The United States says the treaty, which prohibits missile defenses like the one Washington proposes, is outmoded and must be scrapped.

In the document, the Kremlin also expressed "understanding" - though not agreement - for North Korea's demand that the United States remove its forces from South Korea, a move it says would speed reunification talks on the peninsula.

Mr. Kim's two-day visit to Moscow began on the same flat note of constricting security that has marked his entire journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad since July 26. Foreign news media have been barred from covering the Moscow talks, and the Kremlin said North Korea had rejected the news conference that often accompanies such events.

The arrival of Mr. Kim's 21-car armored train shut down one of Moscow's busiest train stations, whose walls had been retouched with paint, its rafters embellished with new flags and its Lenin statue stripped of bird droppings for the occasion. Mr. Kim spent the night in the Kremlin guest house used by his father, Kim Il Sung, when he visited the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1984.

This morning, swaddled in a motorcade of nearly 20 cars and watched over by sharpshooters in Kremlin towers, he roared out of the Kremlin gate and onto Red Square. There, clad in a gray military-style tunic and dark glasses, he accompanied goose-stepping guards in laying wreaths at Lenin's mausoleum and the tomb of the unknown soldier.

For the event, the Kremlin restored an honor guard that had been removed from Lenin's Tomb after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.The entire affair was filmed by North Korean crews using ancient 35 millimeter film cameras - an eerie scene which, to older Russians, recalled the glory days of Soviet rule.

"It has to be mentioned that it all looked very natural at this place, Red Square," a reporter for the NTV television network said during its coverage of the event. "There was an expression some time ago - `some chilliness goes down behind the collar.' This is kind of what I felt.' "

Back inside the Kremlin, a one-on- one meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim ran 40 minutes past its scheduled end. But, aside from their joint declaration, there was no indication of what the two men discussed.

North Korea has said virtually nothing about Mr. Kim's visit first official trip to a non-Communist nation, a journey watched by Westerners for markers of North Korea's slow engagement with the outside world.

Still, what North Korea wants from the Kremlin is not hard to divine. Increased trade, military hardware and moral support in its tortuous dealings with the United States and South Korea are atop the list.

Trade between the two nations is minuscule - only about $105 million last year, and rising about 5 percent annually - and since North Korea has virtually nothing to sell, its exports consist mostly of labor.

North Korea's creaking military machine consists mostly of outdated Russian- and Chinese-made tanks and Chinese knockoffs of older models of Russia's MIG fighter jets. A Russian arms expert quoted by the news service Interfax called the North Korean Navy motley.

The Kremlin has not ruled out the possibility of selling arms to North Korea. But any sales are likely to be small, given North Korea's estimated military budget of barely $100 million a year.

But in more than a few ways it was Russia, a country on the uptick following a decade of chaos, that stood to reap the most benefit from one of the oddest and most secretive state visits in recent history. By acting as Mr. Kim's intermediary with the outside world, Mr. Putin not only burnishes Russia's diplomatic status but also gives it a chip to play in relations with the United States.

More than that, North Korea stands solidly between Russia and a pre-eminent goal in Asia: an economic link to South Korea and by extension to the rest of the Pacific.

Russia has cultivated ties to South Korea since the early days of Boris N. Yeltsin's presidency. Mr. Putin has grand plans for the relationship, including a pipeline that would deliver Russian natural gas to South Korean homes and factories, and an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railroad to South Korea's booming ports.

The Kremlin is promoting the Trans-Siberian as a freight highway from Asia to Europe that could cut the shipping costs of manufacturers and customers on both ends by as much as half.

"South Korea is the more important partner of Russia, by force of at least economic considerations, than is North Korea," Sergei Karaganov, deputy director of the Council of Europe, said this week on the Moscow news radio station Echo Moskvy. "We're interested in military and technical cooperation with South Korea, first of all because they have money. Keeping in mind that there will be a process of reunification in the future, we should try to reap the maximum benefits."

Mr. Kim's marathon rail trip is not over. After a private concert and a visit to Russian space facilities outside Moscow on Sunday, he will head north by rail to St. Petersburg - and then, after a stop there, retrace his 6,000-mile-plus steps back home.

-------- treaties

It Takes Two to Tear It Up
Congress and the President Share the Responsibility

The Washington Post
By Walter C. Clemens Jr.
Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page B04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30322-2001Aug3?language=printer

The Bush administration has heard plenty of reasons why its hopes for a National Missile Defense (NMD) are unrealistic. But there's another potential obstacle. The Bush team could also face a legal challenge from Congress. That's because to implement NMD, the White House seems ready to jettison the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which was ratified by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 only after the Senate gave its consent. And that raises the question: If it takes two branches of government to make a treaty, may the White House act alone to terminate that obligation?

The Constitution provides no clear answer, and American courts have handed down contradictory or highly restrictive rulings. But the precedents established over more than two centuries suggest that the president may not act alone to abrogate U.S. treaty obligations.

In most previous cases, the legislative branch has also played a role.

The first treaties terminated by the United States were its 1778 alliance and commercial treaty with France -- ended in 1798 by an act of Congress. Usually, however, the president has acted pursuant to a joint resolution of Congress or with the consent of the Senate. For example, President James K. Polk asked Congress in 1845 to make provision in law for ending an 1827 treaty with Britain regarding the Oregon Territory. President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876 asked Congress for authority to terminate an extradition treaty with Britain. President William Howard Taft in 1911 asked the Senate, "as a part of the treaty-making power of this Government," to approve his termination of the 1832 treaty of commerce and navigation with Russia.

Unilateral acts by the president to end treaties have been the exception. This has happened about a dozen times, including in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter moved to end America's 1954 mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. When Carter ignored a congressional statement expressing the opinion that he should consult with Congress before making any such change in policy, 16 members of Congress sued the president. Three courts ruled on Goldwater v. Carter, offering four different interpretations.

First, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled, I think correctly, that the president "alone cannot effect the repeal of a law of the land . . . formed by joint action of the executive and legislative branches, whether that law be a statute or a treaty." To terminate a treaty, the court said, the president's action must be approved by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate or by a majority of both houses of Congress. The court ordered the secretary of state not to implement the president's termination notice unless it was so approved.

The White House then took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which overruled the district court. Noting the primacy of the executive branch in foreign affairs, the appellate court argued that the president needed the flexibility to end treaties without approval of one or both houses. Since the Constitution did not specifically require a role for Congress or the Senate in treaty termination, the court ruled, exclusive responsibility belonged to the president.

But the appeals court also made clear that its ruling applied only to the case at hand. It might not apply in other situations, it said, such as a possible U.S. withdrawal from NATO. The decision would be even less relevant to the current White House effort to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, which does not constitute breaking an alliance.

Eventually,Goldwater v. Carter reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in December 1979 that the case presented a "nonjusticiable political question" that could never be considered by the court. The Supreme Court directed the district court to dismiss the complaint against Carter.

However, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who voted with the majority, opened the door for one or both houses of Congress to assert their right to take part in any decision to terminate a treaty. Powell denied that the issue in Goldwater v. Carter was political. He contended merely that the complaint was not presently "ripe for judicial review." It was not yet ripe, Powell said, because courts should not interpret a dispute between Congress and the president until each side has formally asserted its constitutional authority and reached an impasse. In the case at hand, just a few members of Congress claimed that Carter's action had deprived them of their role in altering the treaty. Congress as a whole had taken no official position. The Senate had taken no final vote on a draft resolution declaring its approval necessary to terminate a mutual defense treaty.

Six years later, another American president abrogated a treaty commitment without consulting Congress -- but raised few eyebrows. When the Nicaraguan government in 1984 asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hear its complaints against the United States, Ronald Reagan revoked America's 39-year-old commitment to accept ICJ jurisdiction in cases in which both parties recognized the international court's authority. The ICJ ruled against the United States the following year, and the Reagan team rejected the ruling and challenged the court's integrity. Focused on White House violations of U.S. domestic law in the Iran-contra affair, Congress paid little attention to Reagan's unilateral dismantling of an important part of the international legal order.

Reagan seemed ready also to disregard the ABM Treaty if and when his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- the precursor to NMD -- proved workable. Meanwhile, his State Departmentgenerated a "broad interpretation" of the ABM Treaty that allowed for tests of novel defense systems that probably would have been banned under the traditional interpretation.

But Senate Democrats in 1987 thwarted this one-sided effort to reinterpret, if not rewrite, a treaty. Senators Sam Nunn and Carl Levin argued that the Senate had approved the ABM Treaty after lengthy hearings in which the executive branch had put forward a narrow interpretation of it stipulating what kinds of equipment, research and development, and tests would be permitted. Nunn argued that the White House could not win Senate approval of a treaty with one set of interpretations and then revoke them later. Republicans, he concluded, seemed to believe the president could abrogate the ABM Treaty at any time without congressional support.

When Congress attached restrictive language to the defense appropriations act that year, Reagan vetoed the bill. A compromise was reached: The White House assured senators that its weapons tests would conform with the narrow interpretation of the ABM Treaty. SDI would proceed with caution and in consultation with the Senate. For its part, Congress did not specify in 1987 whether or not the president had the right to reinterpret a treaty.

Following the 1987 confrontation, however, the Senate placed more explicit restrictions on the president when it approved the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1988 and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in 1991. In each case the Senate conditioned its consent on an understanding that the original interpretation of each treaty could not be unilaterally altered by the president.

Pressured by congressional Republicans, the Clinton administration conducted more research on missile defense and obtained Russia's okay for testing systems that might intercept medium-range but not intercontinental missiles. Later, Clinton threatened to break the ABM Treaty if Moscow did not agree to further revisions. But Clinton was spared a confrontation with Moscow -- and the question of whether he could cut those ties single-handedly -- by the failure of several missile defense tests.

When U.S. and Soviet leaders signed the ABM Treaty nearly 30 years ago, they did allow for its termination. It "shall be of unlimited duration," its text states. But if "extraordinary events" related to the treaty jeopardize either side's "supreme interests," either may withdraw from the treaty after giving six months' notice. "Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events the notifying party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests."

The Bush White House acts as though it may ignore even its minimal obligation to give Moscow six months' notice. Last month, the State Department instructed U.S. embassies to alert other governments that U.S. preparations for NMD will likely violate the treaty within a few months. The Bush team talks with Moscow, Beijing and U.S. allies, but it also plows ahead -- come what may -- without stating when, how or why it intends to violate the treaty. It has informed neither Congress nor the Kremlin what extraordinary events are jeopardizing America's supreme interests.

Today, 22 years after Justice Powell rendered his opinion, Congress has still not formally asserted its right to a role in the process of terminating a treaty. But both precedent and logic suggest that they should do so.If the president proclaims the ABM Treaty a dead letter without obtaining approval on Capitol Hill, he will be abusing his authority. Neither the executive nor the legislative branch alone should have the last word -- especially on a security issue as vital as this one.

Walter Clemens is a professor of political science at Boston University, an associate at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the author of "America and the World, 1898-2025: Achievements, Failures, Alternative Futures" (Palgrave).

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

-------- new mexico

On a trail of destruction
Hiroshima was vaporised 56 years ago this week.

Max Anderson visits the US desert where a Bomb was born
August 5 2001
London Times
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/08/05/stitrltrl03013.html?

The sleet fell, and nothing is more miserable than sleet in a desert. "Damn," muttered a father bunched up in his overdesigned winter jacket. "It's one helluva long way to come see a buncha nuthin'."

"Well, honey, it's been ..." his wife struggled "The boys have enjoyed it."

The boys scuffed the soles of their little cowboy boots through the moist dirt. "Are we going home now?" Dad unlocked the wet family saloon: "They shoulda told us there's nuthin' t'see ..."

The Trinity Test Site, in New Mexico, is at least 20 miles from anywhere. There's a good reason for this: in 1945, the US government wanted a place it could go about the business of detonating the world's first atomic bomb without anyone knowing about it. So, if anyone asked, Trinity did not exist. Go home; nothing to see here.

Today, Trinity does exist, but only twice a year for ordinary folk like me and the 3,000 other visitors - on the first Saturdays of April and October, when the US government grants access to the huge White Sands Missile Range, in which the historical site stands.

Trinity is a 51,000-acre site; at its epicentre is Ground Zero, the spot where the "gadget" was fired at 0630, July 16, 1945, marked by a small stone monument. Follow the racing concentrics of the blast, and your wind-blurred, watery gaze sees a chain-ring perimeter fence, a temporary car park marshalled by cheerful volunteers, then miles and miles of semidesert being licked by tongues of wind, lolling from the dark, snow-capped Oscura Mountains.

This semidesert is known on maps as the Jornada del Muerto - the Journey of Death - and in April, it was bleak. The desert flats were peppered with yellow-grey vegetation, spiky stuff with spiky names like

bayonet and yucca. Tucked away thereabouts were collapsed wooden constructions dug into sand levees, where blast-measuring equipment had been housed. Signs read: "Warning: Radiation"; "You are entering active test-range areas potentially contaminated with explosive devices"; and "Stay on the roads".

There was also the sand. And though nobody had told them, this is where the disgruntled family should have started. Here, boys, take a handful of sand - feel it, let it fall. A gram of uranium contains 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Split just one of these atoms and you can make a grain of sand visibly jump.

Around the perimeter fence is a line of information tables sheltered by flapping polythene sheets. Bomb-history buffs buy books, pamphlets and videos; parents placate red-nosed kids with lavish hot dogs; poncho'ed army servicemen dispense jolly baloney as they ferry infirm visitors in golf buggies; tired couples retreat to their cars, clutching souvenirs: "I had a blast at Trinity".

I stopped at a table where a scientist from the White Sands Missile Range was patiently demonstrating how radioactivity is all around us, most of it harmless. "Here," he said to a visitor, handing her a dishwasher-safe saucer, "take this. Even this saucer is slightly radioactive." He waved his Geiger counter over the saucer and it clicked. The woman looked shocked. "Oh, my Gahd! Should I be holding this? I mean - are you saying we should stop using this type of saucer?" The scientist forced a smile.

Inside the perimeter fence a faint depression was discernible - the main explosion area - some 200yd across. A stone obelisk with a plaque stood at the centre; tucked into a crevice was a small folded paper crane, a bright speck among the dark stones, a peace symbol probably left by one of the many Japanese (or Japanese-Americans) visiting that day. Visitors gathered round a man from the Atomic Bomb Museum in Albuquerque, who was explaining the detonation. He pointed to four nubs of concrete poking out of the dirt. These once supported a 100ft tower of steel, he said. It was vaporised by the bomb it held aloft.

I kicked a nub, looked up, felt curiously excited. Vaporised to nuthin'.

Also in the enclosure were knee-high glass shelters. Beneath the glass was sand coated in dull, greenish flakes, like cracked skin. Three physics students from Albuquerque peered down.

"That's trinitite," said one.

"When the bomb went off, the heat was so fierce it fused the sand, like glass," said another. "Only, it's mildly radioactive. It's real rare."

"Let's hope we won't be making any more," said the third.

The explosive heart of the gadget was a uranium isotope - an orange-sized ball of U-235 that was warm to the touch, like a live rabbit. In truth, like the Trinity Site, it never really existed. At least not until 1935, when scientists socked a piece of naturally occurring U-238 with neutrons to create its lighter, rather more unhinged cellmate, U-235 - arguably a substance not directly ordained by God.

The isotope was the progeny of Rutherford, Curie, Einstein, Fermi and others, but the trinitite was Robert Oppenheimer's. "Oppie" was a troubled man. He'd surrendered his human passion once only, on the sunny isle of Capri, and thereafter he donated his body and soul to science, philosophy and self-loathing. During the war, he co-ordinated thousands of scientists, service personnel and their families, 150 miles away to the north on a mesa in Los Alamos. So secret was the project that people who went to work on "The Hill" left the real world and became a postbox number - 1663. Within its confines, non-marriages happened, non-sex was had and non-children were born. Officially, none of them existed.

It's easy to be haunted by Oppenheimer, especially two miles from Ground Zero at the MacDonald Ranch House. The stone cottage withstood the blast, but its outbuildings are a buckled ruin. The gadget, fresh from The Hill, was assembled here four days before the test. I stood on the veranda and a peal of thunder volleyed over the Oscuras. Oppenheimer would look at them and observe: "Funny how mountains always inspire our work."

Then I noticed - was I getting carried away? - that I could smell my school chemistry lab: sweet Bunsens, bitter acids, blue crystals ... "What's that smell?" I asked a volunteer guide in the house. "Ammonium nitrate," he replied. "From all the missile explosions over the years. It's in the ground. Comes up when it's wet ..."

I levelled my gaze at the horizon towards Ground Zero. Fifty-six years ago, on the morning of July 16, in this bit of desert full of wind and thorns, there was a gadget. And it was circled by dry-mouthed scientists, 10 miles away. Then the gadget was gone, and, instead, all around, to a height of two miles, were hot gases and noise and colour and terrible, terrible power. "The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen," said one observer. "You wish it would stop. Then there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green."

After the ultimate laboratory test came the sad, simian face of Oppenheimer, grimly mouthing Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Funny how the Americans say "bomb". It comes out as "balm".

"THE PEOPLE of New Mexico heave a sigh - more like a groan of relief."

This was on the front page of The New Mexico Times, dated August 6, 1945, a day after the bombing of Hiroshima. The page was pasted to a board on the chain-link fence, wet with sleet. I read how Truman had lifted the cloak and put Rumour No 6892 to rest - that the scientists on The Hill were "working lickety-split for the production of windshield wipers for submarines".

So, the residents of New Mexico weren't crazy: the ghost places and ghost people really did exist.

Because I have the heart of a tourist, I decided I wanted a piece of this strange chapter. Outside the desert site, 20 miles away in the one-bar, lots-of-dogs town of San Antonio (the closest town to the site), I found a stone cottage converted into a small shop called Rio Abajo Antiques. This colourful box of Americana (lots of horse tack, mining tools and gorgeous enamelled tin from the 1950s) was run by LuAnn and her elderly mother, MaryRose.

"No," said LuAnn, "I really don't have anything related to the bomb." She thought a moment: "Though, I do have these." She dug out a buckled cardboard box containing tins of water. "The government gave them out before the test.

In case the water got poisoned."

I looked to MaryRose and gingerly asked if she'd been around during the test.

"I was 17 when the bomb went off," she said. "I was asleep in our house a couple of streets from here. I don't remember the noise - but the flash ... this bright-red flash that woke me. I thought the house was on fire. Everything was orange."

"You didn't know what it was?"

"We weren't told until the day after they dropped the bomb on Japan."

HIROSHIMA WAS ordered to stop existing to demonstrate to the Japanese that their astonishing fealty to the emperor would be surrendered or be atomised. The city was chosen as a target not because it harboured war materiel, or had strategic value, but because it was virtually untouched by the Allies - all the better to measure the efficacy of the

Little Boy bomb released from the belly of a B-29.

Today, in Hiroshima, the Industrial Promotion Hall is one of the few pieces of the old city still in existence, left standing as the memorial A-Bomb Dome. It's cordoned off by railings, a piece of dark yesterday, and, with its ribcage of a dome poking into the sky, it has a stark beauty.

And it's strange. I've read several travel stories on how the monument, the Peace Park, and the Peace Museum in particular, is a place of deep mourning, where Japanese old and young file ruefully past the statues and exhibits. These reports usually end (rather embarrassingly) with the writer staggering off to sob somewhere. Perhaps I was there at the wrong time? The spring was rich with blossom scent and birdsong, and in the gardens, children were playing, elders were reading or talking and great heaps of paper cranes had been piled on the peace sculptures, beading the green parklands with dazzling colour.

Inside the museum, the elderly Japanese visitors looked wholly engaged by the history - perhaps a wry look on the faces of some? - while the Nipponese nippers behaved like children at any museum: badly. In front of a ghoulish life-size wax re-creation of victims emerging from the blast, I watched as six infants squealed in delighted terror, ran in circles and dared each other to get close to the scorched mummies with the outstretched arms.

They were just happy to be there. Happy like the American boys once they'd got home, out of the cold sleet, home to some cookies and TV. Happy like LuAnn and MaryRose, selling two tins of "US Govt Emergency Drinking Water" for $10. Happy in the business of existing.

-------- washington

'We knew what we were exposed to,' Hanford retiree says

The Seattle Times Company
Sunday, August 05, 2001
By Annette Cary Tri-City Herald
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=nukeworkers05&date=20010805

RICHLAND - In 1962, after one of Hanford's worst accidents, Robert Colley of Richland was one of three men to volunteer to enter the contaminated plutonium finishing plant to make sure no one remained inside.

Employees on one shift had left a batch of a plutonium solution in a container inside the plant. Unaware, the next crew added more plutonium-laced liquid.

"That made a subcriticality, and it blew," Colley said.

Today Colley is fighting cancer that he fears might have been caused by that event or the many other times he was exposed to radiation as a senior radiation monitor for 33 years at Hanford.

He was the first person to sign up for compensation and medical coverage at the Hanford Area Resource Center, which was dedicated in Kennewick at a ceremony July 28.

After decades of fighting claims by nuclear workers who feared their cancers or other illnesses were caused by on-the-job exposure, the federal government is paying ill workers or their survivors $150,000 and covering medical expenses.

The law that makes the money available, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, went into effect last Tuesday.

"It's always good to remind ourselves what Hanford is about," said U.S. Rep. Richard "Doc" Hastings, R-Yakima, at the dedication ceremony. "When it was conceived, we were in a hot war. We didn't know if Germany had technology to end the war."

The prototype of the first reactor, the B Reactor, was not finished when thousands of workers began arriving to build it.

"Surely, mistakes were made," Hastings said. "After all, we were dealing with something you couldn't see."

But the work at Hanford helped win World War II and contributed to what could be considered a victory in the Cold War, too, Hastings said.

Colley, who is responding well to cancer treatments, said he has no regrets. During the 1962 accident, he was 40, making him one of the older people in his group. The three volunteers to enter the plant "didn't figure on having any more family," he said.

"We knew what we would be exposed to, and we knew how much time we had" inside the plant, he said.

They figured they had about an hour to check the plant, which would expose them to radiation totaling 25 rems, he said. Normally, they were limited to 3 rems a year.

Colley remembers signing a waiver saying that he was willing to be exposed to the radiation but that the contractor must continue to let him work after he reached his dose limit for the year.

"It was a good job, and I had fine people to work with," he said.

The resource-center office, operated by the U.S. Energy and Labor departments, opened last week. Workers, retirees and survivors can pick up forms and also get help filling out the forms. Forms also may be downloaded from the Internet at www.dol.gov.

Hanford workers with any type of cancer or lung disease caused by breathing in beryllium are eligible for compensation.

The number of survivors eligible for a maximum $150,000 benefit is limited. Children of survivors, for instance, must have been dependent on the parent at the time of death.

-------- us nuc waste

Train to carry nuke waste in Illinois

Chicago Sun Times
August 6, 2001
BY DAVE MCKINNEY SUN-TIMES SPRINGFIELD BUREAU
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-nuke06.html

SPRINGFIELD--For the first time in a decade, Illinois is preparing for a rail shipment of nuclear waste amid the safety concerns of anti-nuclear activists and residents near the train route.

Sometime between now and perhaps late September, the train will be carrying spent radioactive fuel bundles from a New York state nuclear facility bound for a federal storage site in Idaho.

The shipment will roll along an east-west route in the middle of the state, stretching between Danville on the east and south of Quincy on the west.

Going no faster than 35 mph, the train will go through Champaign, Decatur and Springfield, passing only two blocks away from the historic home of Abraham Lincoln in the state capital.

The federal government has planned the trip since 1999 and deliberately steered it away from Chicago or the suburbs, opting instead for the less populated route Downstate.

Federal officials insist that the shipment will pose no threat to anyone along the 2,300-mile path the train will take, starting at the West Valley Demonstration Project near Buffalo and ending at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

John Chamberlain, a spokesman for the federal Department of Energy, said it would take perhaps an hour before someone directly next to specially built containers carrying the material might amass radiation equivalent to a chest X-ray.

"If you're off the rail line by 30 or 40 feet, you won't see any difference in background radiation. For anyone sitting by the rail line or in a car at a crossing, there just won't be any measurable exposure,'' he said.

But David Kraft, director of the Evanston-based watchdog Nuclear Energy Information Service, worries whether every inch of railroad is safe and whether this shipment merely represents the first of many more like it through Illinois.

"A few years ago, there was a hue and cry taken up over napalm shipments that were to go through Illinois to [northwest Indiana]. This stuff,'' Kraft said, "makes napalm look like cupcakes."

The state Department of Nuclear Safety intends to inspect the shipment when it crosses into the state and will have staff that accompanies it during its estimated seven-hour journey through Illinois, agency spokesman Patti Thompson said.

The Illinois Commerce Commission also intends to inspect "every single foot of track" on which the shipment will travel, agency spokesman David Farrell said.

The last time the state had to mobilize for such a rail shipment was in 1991.

Because of safety worries, neither the state nor federal governments will reveal when the radioactive material will come through Illinois, though Chamberlain said it should be before the end of summer.

Despite the safety and security precautions being taken, some of those along the path are uneasy about the deadly material that will be skirting their property.

"I didn't realize it was coming through my backyard. It concerns me, and I'd like to know exactly when it was coming through because I'd choose not to be in the area, to tell you the truth,'' said Mary Jo Nelch, owner of a Springfield concrete company that backs up to the rail line that will be used.

"It should be our right to know when we're being put in danger. We should have the choice of whether to get a chest X-ray or not,'' she said.

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Brazil Steps on U.S. Toes With a Plan for Fighter Jets

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/international/05BRAZ.html

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug. 4 - With drug and arms traffickers flying unchallenged over the Amazon, the Brazilian Air Force has begun taking bids on what is shaping up as a landmark arms deal for a developing nation and a thrust for strategic independence.

The government in Brasília has set aside $700 million to buy up to 24 supersonic fighters. But it is insisting that any supplier provide advanced avionics and that Brazil's burgeoning aerospace industry be allowed to make the planes here for itself.

That bold requirement has put Brazil in direct conflict with the United States, which for a quarter of a century has had a policy of not selling its most sophisticated weaponry in Latin America, let alone transferring the technology.

France, however, has indicated that it may be willing to meet the Brazilian demands. For the United States, a Brazilian deal with France would be "an ugly defeat," as one Brazilian analyst put it this week, and not just in a financial sense.

With the French technology in hand, Brazil would be able to make a cheap fighter plane for sale in the third world, undermining the leverage of the United States, which often uses its weapons sales to sway allies and tilt regional balances of power.

For Brazil, the purchase is one of the main components in a broader $3.35 billion, eight-year plan announced last year to modernize its air force and is the most vivid example yet of Brazil's strategic shift north toward the Amazon.

Brazil has assured neighboring Colombia and Venezuela that it plans to send most of the new and refurbished aircraft to half a dozen bases in the Amazon area to combat drug trafficking and criminals. The Brazilians have also offered to share intelligence, which could prove useful to Colombia in its long war against left- wing guerrilla groups there.

The air force's upgrade is sorely needed, experts say. At the moment, the Brazilian fleet consists of more than 750 planes, many American F- 5E and French Mirage fighter jets that are at least 30 years old. More than half the aircraft are grounded because of budget restrictions and lack of spare parts.

"This is a longstanding and legitimate yearning of the air force, which really is in bad shape," said Luis Bitencourt, director of the Brazil program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "A lot of planes have been cannibalized for many years, and the sense of a threat to society due to the crisis in Colombia is being used to justify the acquisition."

Seven companies from five countries, including Russia, Sweden and Italy, have been aggressively lobbying government officials in Brasília for months in hopes of winning the contract. But the United States, which is represented by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and France appear to be the front-runners, with the French company Dassault, manufacturer of the Mirage, thought to have a slight advantage.

"The Americans have a good price, but the equipment they are offering is not the most modern, so I think the Mirage will win out in the end," said Carlos Andre Spagat, editor of Flap, a Brazilian military aviation magazine.

"But this is a decision that is going to be 90 percent political and only 10 percent financial," he added, "made by a mere handful of top officials, so anyone who claims to know how this soap opera is going to turn out is only guessing."

The competition is expected to produce a decision by December and to be as fiercely fought as the struggle in the mid-90's over the $1.5 billion Sivam radar project in the Amazon. In that instance, all signs appeared to point to the French, until they were trumped at the last minute by American pressure.

The French are still smarting from that episode. This time, however, they have an important advantage. In 1999, Dassault and three other French companies acquired a 20 percent stake in the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, the country's largest exporter.

Founded by the Brazilian Air Force in 1969 to make simple military training and patrol planes, Embraer was privatized in December 1994 and has become the fourth largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft in the world thanks to a highly successful line of regional jets.

"We are certainly going to compete, with strength and determination, to be one of the winners in the bidding that the Brazilian government is going to hold," Mauricio Botelho, the president of Embraer, said in an interview last year. "If we win, we will be in a position, through our alliance with Dassault, to furnish the Mirage."

The United States, in contrast, imposed an embargo on the sale of advanced weapons systems to Latin America in 1977, during the Carter administration. Partly as a result, South America has spent less on arms during the last two decades than any other region in the world.

That policy was formally rescinded, however, during Bill Clinton's second term. Even so, Washington's sale of 10 F-16 jets to Chile, announced last December, is still tied up, in large part because of concerns in Congress over what level of technology should go with the planes.

Senate Democrats have opposed the inclusion of advanced air-to-air missiles or radar, targeting and navigation systems in any aircraft sales in the region.

But Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, said recently that he might favor an easing of restrictions if "another foreign nation introduces comparable technology into Latin America."

The American Embassy in Brasília said it had no comment on the bidding process. But a decision by Brazil to award the contract to the French would clearly give Chile and other potential arms shoppers in Latin America a means to pressure the United States to furnish them with more advanced equipment.

"If Brazil gives the contract to Dassault and Embraer for a full offensive and defensive plane, then Chile, for example, may very well have second thoughts about buying the American plane, which is going to come very stripped down," said David Fleischer, publisher of a political newsletter called Brazil Focus.

"If the Chileans buy the French- Brazilian plane, they get a much better plane, without strings attached."

That, arms control advocates warn, would cause alarm in Peru and Bolivia, which have traditionally been suspicious of Chile, and possibly set off an arms race in the Andes. It would also allow American companies to push Washington to ease existing restrictions.

"The Americans are handcuffed because their defense industry wants to sell planes with up-to-date technology and the government won't let them," Mr. Spagat said.

-------- israel

Israeli Soldiers Attacked; Palestinian Killed by Israeli Missiles

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international/mideast-shooting.html

TEL AVIV, Israel -- A Palestinian gunman opened fire from his car on a group of soldiers on a busy Tel Aviv street Sunday, injuring 10 people in the first mass shooting in an Israeli city since the fighting began last September.

The gunman was hit by return fire and critically wounded in the attack in front of Israel's Defense Ministry in the country's largest city.

Hours later, Israeli helicopters fired missiles in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, killing Hamas activist Amer Mansour Habiri, 23, witnesses said. The car in which he was traveling was destroyed.

Israel's army claimed Habiri was named as a "senior terrorist" during "the interrogations of Hamas activists" in the area. Israel alleged that he was responsible for multiple bombings and shootings, and was organizing suicide attacks that were to take place within days.

Israel has come under international criticism for its targeted killings of suspected Palestinian militants. But Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says the policy will remain in place unless Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat reins in militants.

"One must understand that Arafat could avoid it," Sharon told "Fox News Sunday." Israel sent the Palestinians a list of "about 100 terrorists" it wants arrested, Sharon added. "What (Arafat) has to do is just to stop them."

Sharon also reasserted his strong opposition to the Palestinian demand for international observers in the Middle East conflict. "We will not be able to accept international forces or international observers," he said.

The Palestinians say they want monitors to keep tabs on Israel's military. But the Israelis have long resisted such calls, saying that such a force would not be effective and may be biased against Israel.

Palestinian gunmen carry out daily shooting attacks against Israeli targets, but most take place in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Sunday's shooting in Tel Aviv was the first mass shooting in an Israeli city since the fighting began 10 months ago.

"This is a symbolic issue. (The Palestinians) are bringing attacks to the middle of Tel Aviv, the largest Israeli city, very close to the fences of the main military installation," said army spokesman Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey. "This is the first time they have shot, as far as I remember, in such a way in a large city."

The gunman, traveling in a black car, opened fire with an M-16 automatic rifle as large numbers of soldiers were leaving the Defense Ministry building for lunch. Of the 10 injured, eight were soldiers. The wounded suffered light to moderate injuries.

Soldiers and police fired back and hit the gunman, critically wounding him in the chest, police said. The gunman's car crashed into a nearby lamppost, and he collapsed.

The gunman was identified as Ali al-Julani, a 30-year-old from east Jerusalem, and the Israeli security forces said he had no previous record of involvement in violence.

Tel Aviv was the scene of a Palestinian suicide bombing on June 1 that killed 21 young people outside a disco. That was the deadliest single attack in the Israeli-Palestinian fighting. But Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast, is regarded as safer than most cities because of the large presence of security forces and its distance from the Palestinian territories.

Earlier Sunday, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Palestinian police offices in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli raid followed repeated mortar attacks by the Palestinians.

The commander of Palestinian national security in Rafah, Col. Fawzi Zaqouk, said three missiles hit his office, causing considerable damage but no casualties. He said he and other officers heard the helicopters approaching and left the building.

Asked if he believed he was the target of the raid, Zaqouk told The Associated Press: "All Palestinians are now the target of the Israeli military."

The Israeli military said it acted after Palestinian militants fired 26 mortar rounds at Jewish settlements and army outposts in Gaza. One of the mortars wounded two people, a father and son, at the isolated Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom, the military said.

-------- puerto rico

Differences Over Vieques Bitterly Divide Democrats

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/politics/05VIEQ.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 - Prominent Democrats like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York have helped lead the charge against the Navy's bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. But behind the scenes the national party is bitterly divided over the issue.

Moderate and conservative Democrats nationwide are beginning to complain that the party, under pressure from its vocal liberal wing, has gone too far in trying to stop the training operations.

Their biggest concern, they say, is that the party has left itself vulnerable to charges that it is antimilitary, as Republicans argue that the nation's military readiness will be undermined if the Navy is driven from the island.

The rift in the party worsened after Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, traveled to the island in a gesture of support for its people. "This is a civil rights issue," Mr. McAuliffe said.

A Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Solomon P. Ortiz of Texas, was dismayed. "He may be doing this at the expense of other Democrats," Mr. Ortiz said, adding that the trip caught him by surprise. "We do not want to be seen as antimilitary because we are not."

Representative Gene Taylor, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi, said many Democrats see the Vieques issue as a way to curry favor with Hispanic voters even at the expense of national security. "That's pandering of the worst sort," Mr. Taylor said in an interview, blaming Republicans as well for politicizing the issue. "It's one of the reasons that I've gone out of my way as a Democrat to say that the views expressed by Terry McAuliffe and some of my colleagues are wrong."

While the fight is over the fate of Vieques, it has also exposed once again the fault lines that have long existed among liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats on military matters.

But Democrats siding with the military may be doing so for more than ideological reasons. Many have military bases in their districts and may be wary of attacking the Pentagon on Vieques when the military is undertaking base closings.

The Navy's most vocal critics in the Democratic Party have been Northeast liberals, who have used the issue to attack the Bush administration and to help build support among Hispanic voters.

But the liberals clearly did not expect that they would meet with such resistance, if not hostility, from moderate-to-conservative Democrats in other parts of the country. In many cases, these Democrats represent districts where the military is not only welcome but conducts similar bombing exercises.

In the case of Vieques, the Navy has been reluctant to pull out, arguing that the island gives it the unique ability to conduct naval, aerial and amphibious exercises.

Robert G. Torricelli, the senior senator from New Jersey, who ran the Senate campaigns for the Democrats last year, acknowledged the risks the Vieques debate poses for the party. "Nationally, there is certainly a backlash," Mr. Torricelli said. "It's a very regional issue."

One Democratic strategist questioned the national party's decision to take a stand on Vieques.

"There are a lot of Southern and Midwestern Democrats who are very pro-defense," he said. "I don't think they'd be too happy to see the party taking a position on this."

Several Democrats said in recent interviews that they were sympathetic to concerns that have grown in Puerto Rico in the two years since a civilian security guard was killed in a bombing accident in Vieques.

They also say the Navy has deepened resentment and suspicion toward it by dismissing the concerns raised by its critics. Making matters worse, some protesters arrested for trespassing on Navy property have said they were mistreated by the authorities while staging peaceful protests outside the military camp.

But these same Democrats said that preserving national security ought to be the main priority and that the Navy should not allow itself to be driven from the island.

One sentiment in the party is voiced by Mr. Taylor of Mississippi who says the Navy should not leave under any circumstances because the island is such a crucial training site. He says the Navy ought to go about repairing its image on the island by taking a more civic-minded role there as it does in other places where it has a presence. But other Democrats say that the Navy should leave, though only after another training site is found.

In any case, President Bush announced in May that the Navy would stop its operations on Vieques in May 2003, a decision that has alarmed the Navy's conservative supporters as well as its liberal critics.

Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who is chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the debate over Vieques had put him in a very difficult position.

On the one hand, Mr. Reyes said he was frustrated with the Navy's lack of responsiveness and felt sympathy for the people of Vieques.

On the other hand, Mr. Reyes said that he could not support calls for the Navy to leave the island immediately. "We can't afford to send our men and women into harm's way without the proper training," he said.

In contrast to other Democrats, he commended Mr. Bush's proposal, saying it could give the Navy the time it needs to find somewhere else to train.

Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a centrist Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also argued that the Navy needs to stay put on the island until it finds a new training site. He expressed frustration with how politicized the Vieques issue has become and brushed aside the Democratic Party chairman's characterization of it as a human rights issue. "It's a military preparedness issue," Mr. Cleland said.

-------- space

The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By JACK HITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/magazine/05SPACEWARS.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

The Defense Department's newest satellite technology, Warfighter I, sits inside a protected clean room in Germantown, Md. To enter, you must run your shoes through a cleaning device and then don a "bunny suit," a layered hooded outfit that covers every part of your body except your eyes.

"Human skin sloughs off as many 30,000 particles a second," says the program manager, Michael Lembeck, as we step onto a tacky mat, essentially an enormous piece of flypaper. "If one speck of skin got on the Warfighter's lens," he adds with friendly hyperbole, "it would set us back 20 years."

The satellite, which is not much bigger than a college sophomore's dorm refrigerator, is undergoing final tests. Several different machines -- producing an artificial magnetic field, digitally created blinking stars, phony sunshine and computer-generated Global Positioning System signals -- are fooling the satellite into acting as if it were in real orbit. Several lights click on and motors grind. "It must think it just cleared the North Pole," Lembeck says, "and is reorienting itself toward the sun."

After a few more tests confirm the on-board systems are working, Lembeck says, "We'll get all the graybeards in the room, tell them what we've done here and they will bless us and say, 'Go fly."'

In fact, Warfighter I is an extremely powerful camera, one that will give the Pentagon revolutionary new powers of surveillance. But its importance goes beyond its technological wizardry. The launch of Warfighter -- scheduled for early September -- will mark the latest effort by the Pentagon to end a new threat to American security. According to the nation's war planners, America has had a free ride in space during the last 40 years, when the only country capable of even getting there was Russia. Now there is a satellite rush in the final frontier, with both countries and companies entering space. Commercial space launches started to outnumber military ones in 1998. Of the 1,000 active satellites currently in orbit, about an eighth belong to the U.S. military, and that percentage will diminish by the end of the decade, when experts estimate that operating satellites in space will reach 2,000. (Warfighter is being launched by a private company called Orbital Imaging, itself a sign of the times.)

America's war planners fear that we could soon lose our advantage in space. As a result, the military has commissioned numerous studies and long-range plans, all of them coming to the same conclusion. Space, the Pentagon believes, is the ultimate military "high ground" -- the tower from which to pour boiling oil. Therefore, America's goal there should be, in the felicitous phrase used in an early study, "Global Battlespace Dominance."

Perhaps that term sounded a little too Strangelove, for the Pentagon's preferred phrase has since become "Full Spectrum Dominance." Last year, the Air Force developed its Strategic Master Plan for space, which states our goal bluntly: "To maintain space superiority, we must have the ability to control the 'high ground' of space. To do so, we must be able to operate freely in space, deny the use of space to our adversaries, protect ourselves from attack in and through space and develop and deploy a N.M.D. capability."

N.M.D. stands for national missile defense, the controversial $8.3 billion missile shield that President Bush and his secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, have championed. (Last month, the Pentagon announced that it was ready to pour concrete on the first missile-defense test site, in Alaska.) And yet the political attention devoted to national missile defense, which is an updated version of President Reagan's Strategic Defensive Initiative, has obscured its larger purpose. According to the Strategic Master Plan, N.M.D. is but one part of a triad of technologies -- along with improved space surveillance and antisatellite offensive weaponry -- that, the Air Force hopes, will lead to total "space control." George Friedman, an intelligence consultant and the author of "The Future of War," calls the national missile defense plan a "Trojan horse" for the real issue: the coming weaponization of space.

The cost of expanding our space assets is only now beginning to show itself. Many of the specific systems for space have had their budgets increased in President Bush's first defense-spending proposal, which has been otherwise criticized for being stingy. A new system of space sensors went from $239 million to $420 million. (By comparison, the Air Force's new F-22 Raptor fighter plane has a price tag of $180 million.) A previously unfunded space-based radar program is budgeted at $50 million. And a line for "space control technology" -- a euphemism for antisatellite weaponry -- was expanded from $8 million to $33 million. Carefully budgeted space technologies like the Warfighter will cost only $42 million, but the more exotic ideas face a long climb up the technological curve and will cost billions.

Warfighter's camera features a new form of imaging called hyperspectral. Space is already home to multispectral cameras, which can take a picture of an ecosystem and discern conifer from deciduous trees. But hyperspectral goes much further, distinguishing the subtle "light signatures" that separate a field of oats from barley and telling you the precise species of oats. And then whether the field contains natural or genetically altered oats. And then whether the field is infested with insects or damaged by nitrogen depletion.

The eventual commercial potential of such a technology is obvious. But if you talk to enough colonels and experience what old Pentagon hands call "death by briefing," -- and I have -- you will hear mentions of hyperspectral quickly followed by the new mantra of contemporary war planners: tanks under trees. To put it briefly: as with oats, so with tanks. Warfighter I will be able to discern the unique light signatures of extremely specific things -- like tanks hiding under trees or tanks covered in camouflage or tanks painted with a paint meant to make them not look like tanks.

Consider what such space-assisted technology would have meant to a commander in, say, Kosovo two years ago. He could have swept the contested area with Warfighter I and zeroed in on every enemy tank, missile, ammo dump or plane, almost no matter how hard the Serbs tried to conceal them. Then the commander could have called in a cruise missile to blast each one. In theory, the entire conflict could have been finished off in time for lunch. It's a nice, sweet, hammock-tempting image if you're a war planner.

In preparation, space planners have already engaged in some feverish brainstorming. They envision a high-tech arsenal that will take full advantage of the military potential of space, ranging from the near-term possible to long-term notional: kinetic energy rods, microwave guns, space-based lasers, pyrotechnic electromagnetic pulses, holographic decoys, robo-bugs, suppression clouds, 360-degree helmet-mounted displays, cluster satellites, oxygen suckers, microsatellites, destructo swarmbots, to name a few.

Some civilians find these plans deeply troubling. "If you start talking about putting actual weapons in space, you can take the unhappiness that our allies, Russia and China already have with the missile shield and multiply it by 10," warns Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Such critics see the Pentagon's effort to weaponize space as profoundly dangerous for national security -- not to mention expensive and potentionally unfeasible.

"Once you start spinning this baby out," says Dan Smith, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information, "it becomes more complex, more expensive and more impossible to protect ourselves. After the next country introduces space weaponry, then what do we do? Live with a new, unpredictable threat orbiting right above us? Or commit an act of war by pre-emptively removing their weapons from space? The basis of security is that it never works for just one. You have to have security for everyone or it fails."

Not surprisingly, the Realpolitik leadership at the Pentagon disagrees. Just before taking over Defense, Rumsfeld led a space commission that was established not long after Congressional Republicans grew enraged that Clinton had line-item-vetoed funds for a space plane, antisatellite weapons and a missile-defense technology. The commission issued its report nine days before Bush was sworn in as president, and it concluded: "Every medium -- air, land and sea -- has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different." And Warfighter I, it turns out, is the beginning of a many-splendored arsenal to ensure we're ready for battle when it does.

Much of the military's research into space technology takes place at the Space Research Lab. It is divided into 10 missions scattered across the country, ranging from the Propulsion Directorate to the Munitions Directorate. On a blazing hot afternoon in June, I arrive at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque to get cleared into the Space Vehicles Directorate, which specializes in satellite technology. Many outposts of the emerging bureaucracy of space distill their enthusiasms into a shoulder patch. The First Space Operations's patch shows stars and a plane above the words "Always in Control." The 50th Space Wing's logo is an image of Pegasus above the claim "Master of Space." Some divisions have more informal slogans. The motto of the Space Warfare Center is "In Your Face From Outer Space."

I first meet with Alok Das, the head of the Space Vehicle Directorate's innovative concepts group. His latest work has been perfecting the microsatellite. Unlike traditional satellites, which can weigh tons, microsatellites are the size of a suitcase and weigh about 200 pounds. Since it costs "a bar of gold to launch a can of Coke," as Das put it, lightweight microsatellites will be much cheaper to launch than their obese precursors. The idea is to send microsatellites into space in flocks. In this cluster, they would be reprogrammable, able to switch to new tasks when the Pentagon required it. They might be set in linear formation to conduct ground reconnaissance or grouped in a circle to serve as a communications satellite. "It's like going from a mainframe computer to a network of PC's," Das says brightly. "Together, they'd form a larger virtual satellite."

Yet a flock could also be launched with separate missions. One microsatellite might refuel a larger satellite or upgrade its software. Others might scoot about with small on-board cameras to provide live video feeds from space -- a capability no nation currently has.

As I am escorted into a clean room to the see the first microsatellite under construction, one officer offhandedly confides, "It could also go right up to an enemy satellite and look at it real close -- maybe even bump it."

That's how easy it is to go from peaceful mission to offensive weapon. A suitcase-size microsatellite would just have to put a little shoulder and some thrust into an S.U.V.-size satellite to push it off its proper orbit and render it temporarily unable to communicate with the ground. Another idea is to mount a microwave gun on board so that once the microsatellite maneuvered right beside an enemy satellite, it could emit a pulse of microwaves and fry the electronics permanently. Space planners call this application a high-power microwave pill. Better yet, this microsatellite's sabotage operations would be covert, undetectable from earth. It would give a nation complete deniability: that Chinese satellite that Saddam Hussein has been using doesn't work? Must have been a solar storm.

The first microsatellite launch is planned for this fall.

Later, I talk with the lab's experts in hyperspectral imaging. How, I ask them, will the Warfighter learn the precise "light signature" of, say, a tank hiding beneath a pine-forest canopy?

"Think of them as fingerprints," says Tom Cooley, one of the lab's top researchers. "The wavelength of any kind of camouflage, regardless of composition, can be distinguished -- by the dyes, cotton, different lignants from plants. If you look at black-and-white images of camouflage next to scrub brush, they look the same. But a leaf from the scrub brush does not look at all like camouflage to hyperspectral. It would be sharply different."

Before hyperspectral can work, it will require some novel research and testing, says Col. Jack Anthony, chief of space experiments. "Take a tank under a tree," he says, explaining some coming tests. "We'll take some panels made of wood and paint them with different paints, government paint, some paint you might buy at a store. Then we'll take some images with the Warfighter I, and that will give us what's called 'truth."'

To build what Anthony calls "a library of light signatures," a lot of truth will have to be collected. All possible contingencies -- tank under trees, tank under branches, tank under government paint -- must be cataloged, one by one. "So if the bad guys are hiding tanks under trees," Anthony explains, "and you have a good idea what the bad guy's tank is made out of and you know what the local trees look like, then you can screen out the trees' wavelength and just see the tank's signature. Then you're going to know there's something bad under that tree. And we can arm our soldiers accordingly."

Cooley adds that "anything from Somalia to Bosnia to Haiti would have dramatically different backgrounds," making it necessary to bank in a library the differences among, say, Honduran swamps and Libyan deserts. "And by the way, water vapor is terribly opaque and will cause the special signature to be completely invisible." However, Cooley continues, another project will be to gather data in order to "correct for water vapor that may blur some of those special features."

To a civilian, hyperspectral surveillance can sound amazing and then -- once you hear about light-signature libraries and water-vapor snafus -- it can seem a bit iffy, about as dependable as launching a Xerox machine into the stress of low-earth orbit and then counting on it to work during a war.

That's how the Pentagon's critics see it. "There are already countermeasures for this kind of technology," Lisbeth Gronlund says. She describes a new kind of camouflage that entails bundling, say, two dozen Mylar balloons beside a nuclear warhead. After launch and the boost phase, the balloons and the warhead are scattered into space. Each has a slightly different light signature. So which target do you shoot down? "The military is very sensitive about this problem," Gronlund says.

Yet Anthony is doggedly optimistic. He believes that hyperspectral could be working successfully in the battlefield before the end of the decade. And he thinks the technology will help save lives: "It makes me feel good if I can help a soldier, sailor, airman, marine to know there is something bad hiding on the other side of that hill. We're just putting another arrow in our quiver."

Anthony's robust enthusiasm for space is shared among the research scientists. This enthusiasm is extraordinary. The Nasdaq bubble that burst around election time last year has not affected the military. Space-wise, war planners are prebubble techno-enthusiasts. (And their visions of space warfare are as cinematic as a summer blockbuster. Just look at the language: "Full Spectrum Dominance," "destructo swarmbots," "robo-bugs." It's hard to imagine the Pentagon's idea of space without Hollywood's.)

Inside the military, all technological setbacks -- like the fact that two out of the four major missile-defense simulations conducted so far have failed -- are set aside as part of the natural arc of any technological testing. Failure is just proof that there needs to be more research. But the real reason the military is so excited by space is that so much that is already up there, both civilian and military, works splendidly. Nearly all the emblems of our technologically quotidian life -- the A.T.M., credit-card transactions, cell phones, the Internet -- rely upon satellites.

When space technology has catastrophically failed, the public's reaction has not been greater skepticism but mere annoyance. In May 1998, the Galaxy IV satellite malfunctioned, causing 45 million pagers to shut down and credit-card transactions to cease. The public did not decide to return to making house calls, paying cash and reading by candlelight: it simply expected it to be fixed because it has so internalized the presumption that such technology works, and works wonders. And so has the military.

If the A.T.M. is the shorthand symbol of how easy modern space-based technology has made our lives, then the precision-guided munition is that symbol for the average grunt. The invention of a missile that can be aimed after it has been fired has fundamentally changed modern warfare. It is why arguments about the possible failure of new technologies bounce off space researchers as if off a force field.

Back in World War II, it took, on average, 5,000 bombs to take out one target like a bridge. By the time of the Vietnam War, the ratio had dropped to 500. But in all those wars, bombs were dumb, meaning once you let go of them, they fell in the general direction in which they were pitched.

Then came the gulf war. During this conflict, the U.S. military used space to conduct nearly all of its secret communications, reconnaissance missions and bombing raids. And space-based technology guided new "smart bombs" with such accuracy that the hit ratio plummeted to 1 in 10. "The 500-year history of ballistic warfare has come to an end," George Friedman says. "The gulf war was the first space war."

Although not of the same scale, one notable fact of the Kosovo conflict of 1999 is that no Americans died in combat. Military planners credit that result in part to munitions directed by the Global Positioning System, a constellation of 24 satellites orbiting the earth that is capable of precisely geo-locating any object equipped with the proper receiver. Couple such technological progress with the ultimate lesson of Vietnam -- no body bags on TV -- and you begin to understand the military's profound enthusiasm about space and why there has been so much blue-sky planning to maintain "Full Spectrum Dominance."

Inside the lab of the directed energy directorate, where research on everything from microwave beams to lasers begins, the machines thrum to a start. A long pipe of fuzzy purple light in a large tube seems to vibrate like a plucked string. In an adjacent chamber that has had most of the air removed to mimic the high altitude of a missile trajectory, a piece of carbonized steel like that which might clad a rocket fuel tank is set in a grip. It begins to spin rapidly to simulate a missile in its ascent. Visual access to the vacuum room is supplied by a closed-circuit television. Technicians call out from one system to another that they are ready. The machines screech into action. On the TV screen, the piece of spinning metal is suddenly blasted with bursts of columnated light that scorch it, back-splashing in a dramatic laser fan.

"We're testing the laser's effect on what would be the body of a rocket spinning in flight," says Capt. Eric Moomey, the chief of this facility. (His insignia reads "Peace Through Light.") In effect, what I am seeing is a small part of what might one day become the national missile-defense shield.

At one point, Moomey clamps a four-inch-square piece of thick plexiglass in a C-clamp and orders the crew to fire up the laser. We all put on safety goggles as the laser shouts for a portion of a second. Burned neatly in the center is an indentation, just big enough, the captain tells me as he hands me the square, to hold a coffee cup. It is holding mine right now. I suspect that my souvenir coaster is not the first of its kind.

Such laser parlor tricks suggest just how far we've come since President Reagan first suggested this idea. Back then, the technology was far off and impossible. The Strategic Defense Initiative amounted to a bluff against the Soviets, and in the end it collapsed amid political ridicule. Back in the early 80's, the idea of shooting down a missile with another missile was widely scoffed at as trying to "shoot a bullet with a bullet." The Star Wars program specifically designed to do this was called Brilliant Pebbles. Besides being technologically complex, it frightened many people with its inherent idea: ringing the planet with thousands of space-borne projectiles, each of which could drop down into the atmosphere to collide with an enemy's missile.

Brilliant Pebbles is now being revived by President Bush, but given the instantaneous speed of lasers, it may soon be joined by a companion technology. With the ability to lock onto the trajectory of a missile, Moomey explains, you might be able to aim an air-based laser at an enemy missile's fuel tank and rapidly heat up the cladding so that "the liquid propulsion vents out and it rips open like a tin can." Moomey says that this kind of laser defense weapon, budgeted at $11 billion, should be operational sometime around 2010.

I next speak with Doug Beason, another expert on laser weaponry. Colonel Beason is a thin, amiable man and a widely read scientist. His magazine rack has well-thumbed editions of Sky and Telescope, Science and Wired. He is the author (sometimes co-author) of 10 novels, including "Virtual Destruction," "Assemblers of Infinity" and "Assault on Alpha Base." A few of his works have just been issued in paperback. When I casually use the word "sci-fi" in a sentence, Beason stops me politely to say that "techno-thriller" is the genre in which he labors. Sci-fi is a "50's expression," he says, trying to be cordial, even though it's clear that I've committed a faux pas on the order of asking Jane Campion about her next chick flick. There are bright lines in Beason's world -- between techno-thriller and science fiction, but also between research that looks great on paper and technology he can help put in the hands of an American space warrior.

"The time between invention and mass use of the fluorescent lamp was 79 years," he says. "For the jet engine, 14 years; for the wireless, 8 years." This lag time is shrinking rapidly, he says. "We have the tools to exploit the technology, and that's why I'm so excited. Lasers, for example, are no longer used just for CD's and light pointers."

As a result, the Pentagon has its hopes set on a space-based laser. President Bush doubled the research budget this year to $165 million. The estimated cost for a working space laser test is about $5 billion. Actual testing in space is expected to take place as early as 2008.

"This is the technology that can provide the next revolution in military affairs," Beason says, "the Buck Rogers kind of thing."

He adds that lasers have many warfare applications besides outright weaponry. "We've also been working on a flexible-membrane mirror," Beason says, one that would be deployed in space. Then, from earth, a commander could fire a certain frequency of laser, bounce it off the mirror and "onto the battlefield to light up the night only to people with certain types of goggles."

Whenever I express any sense that these technologies sound a bit too, um, sci-fi, Beason responds the same way all his colleagues do. "These are all concepts," he explains, "and like any weaponry in a mature technological arsenal, it all depends on how much money you want to spend." Men like Beason are supremely confident in the technology; it's the political will to have space-based weapons that's the problem.

The peculiar thing about space warfare is that many of the innovations that sound the most far-fetched -- like illuminating a battlefield at night with light that only one side can see or the deployment of high-power microwave pills -- are actually much closer to existence, technologically, than some items that might seem more logically in line for development. Consider the spaceplane. It would be a tremendous tool for the military, since it could get to any point on the globe in a few hours. But building a manned craft that can quickly glide in and out of low orbits has proved incredibly daunting. Earlier this year, the X-33, NASA's big experiment in flying into space, ended in failure. The image that most people have of "Star Wars"-style combat -- manned spaceplanes engaging in dogfights near the moon -- is very far off. But the use of space for weaponry directed back at earth or guided from space is pretty much at hand.

"I'm particularly excited about high-power microwaves," Beason tells me. Lacking the thousand-mile reach of lasers, H.P.M.'s, as they are called, can be projected only about a half-mile. But were an unmanned plane guided from space able to transport a high-powered microwave device close to a battlefield, the possibilities could push the Pentagon's bomb-to-target ratio even closer to perfection. To an invading army of modern soldiers, a massive hit by high-powered microwave could ground their high-tech weapons, leaving them to wage modern warfare with their fists.

The time lag between the current R.&D. on microwaves and its application in the battlefield may be a while. Beason himself estimates 15 years, although one use is on the verge of showing up in battlefields soon. On the ground, a microwave weapon could be used to drive back an invading squadron. "It'll feel like opening the door of an oven," Beason says. "We're testing it on humans now." He pauses and worries that he is bumping up against classified information. "If you want to know more," he adds, "you'll have to contact the Human Effectiveness Directorate."

The Pentagon's passion for space also derives from the thrill of discovering the medium's own peculiar disadvantages and advantages. True, you have to worry about new problems -- space debris traveling at 16,000 miles per hour, solar flares, the Van Allen radiation belt. But it is never overcast in space, the field of vision is planetary and the speed of light is really, really fast. For the far term, war planners have conceived scores of new and exciting weapons. Talking about them is not a conversation the military wants to have in public, given the gnarly debate over the missile shield, but it is one they have been having in private for some time.

Among the internal reports generated by the war colleges and service branches are a half-dozen that imagine how space will be integrated into the U.S. military: The Strategic Master Plan, New World Vistas, Long Range Plan, Guardians of the High Frontier, Almanac 2000, Joint Vision 2010, Spacecast 2020 and Air Force 2025. Taken together, they form an encyclopedia of our war planners' dreams.

Any military response in the future would rely heavily on technologies aloft in space or directed from there. As a result, the U.S. Air Force will little resemble the service as we now romantically conceive it. According to a study entitled Counterair: The Cutting Edge, "uninhabited aerial vehicles will be widespread in 2025." Our new fleet of pilot-free planes would be directed from space and would range from small devices permitting a squadron leader to see over a hill to much larger craft that could deliver powerful weapons to a distant battlefield with tremendous speed. For example, one notion for an unmanned space-directed vehicle -- called Strike Star -- could "loiter over an area of operations for 24 hours" to deliver "stun bombs' producing overbearing noise and light effects to disrupt and disorient groups of individuals."

Weapons like the Strike Star would exist on earth but be orchestrated from space. If we can get used to the idea of weapons actually in space, though, then a new arsenal would emerge. For example, if a laser cannon were to be inserted in space, its potential as an offensive weapon would make a cruise missile look like a firecracker. Why? Because, according to one study on directed energy, "a full-power beam can successfully attack ground or airborne targets by melting or cracking cockpit canopies, burning through control cables, exploding fuel tanks, melting or burning sensor assemblies and antenna arrays, exploding or melting munitions pods, destroying ground communications and power grids and melting or burning a large variety of strategic targets (e.g., dams, industrial and defense facilities and munitions factories) -- all in a fraction of a second."

Just as the sea and the air presented different advantages in maneuverability, so will space. Having a weapon up there means being at the top of the "gravity well"' so that the force that frustrates rocketeering is suddenly your friend. "Kinetic energy weapons" are the subject of a study included in Air Force 2025, with one application being rods, or "flechettes," designed to be tossed down to earth from space. Like the legendary penny tossed off the Empire State Building boring 10 feet into the sidewalk, flechettes could travel at supersonic speed (by aiming a laser just in front of them to create an "air spike," eliminating most of the effects of shock and heat). At such a speed, they could pierce the earth's surface to a depth of one-half mile and obliterate a hidden underground bunker.

Another idea is to set into orbit a number of "giant mirrors" that would take a boy's notion of burning ants with a magnifying lens and loft it into space. "This concept constructs a 10-kilometer magnifying glass or focusing element in space to illuminate targets on the ground or in space," reads one report touting it. "This illumination can turn night to day on the ground, scorch facilities or overheat satellite components." There is a database of such ideas at the Air War College in Alabama. This "solar energy weapon" is colloquially known as "concept No. 900163."

What precisely some of these concepts do is not known, but their names can be tantalizingly glimpsed in footnotes throughout the reports that reference the space database. For example: No. 901178, "space debris repulsion field"; No. 900168, "meteors as a weapon"; No. 900231, "gnat robot threat detectors"; No. 900288, "swarms of micromachines"; No. 900390, "holographic battlefield deception"; No. 900522, "space-based AI-driven intelligence master mind."

In these internal documents, real-world constraints like political will are postponed and the enormous issue of cost is finessed. The one roadblock that is seriously addressed is the bureaucratic resistance from pilots upset at the very concept of unmanned warcraft. In such moments, the tone of the language is melancholic -- the problem referred to sorrowfully as "pro-pilot bias" -- and suggests that listening to such woes is akin to hearing out the complaints of old sergeants a century ago harrumphing about all that crazy talk of a horseless cavalry.

In a clear blue Colorado afternoon, a bus with high-security officers, civilian engineers and computer techies rumbles into the entrance tunnel to Cheyenne Mountain, the underground cold-war city built on giant springs to withstand a Soviet ICBM attack. I have come here to try to see the emerging space bureaucracy, the elements that may one day make up a new branch of the military, the United States Space Force. At the first checkpoint, we set out on foot. A cool persistent wind practically pushes us through the 30-ton blast doors. For most of the last 40 years, Cheyenne was famous for being the home of Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command -- the U.S.-Canadian early-warning system that scanned the globe looking for the telltale launch plume of an intercontinental ballistic missile. In fact, it is a Canadian officer from Norad who escorts me into the command room and to the chair where a commanding general would make the decision to launch a nuclear weapon.

"Don't mash the distress button under the desk there," the Canadian warns me, "or armed guards will storm the room." Before me are a wall of television screens reporting global data. (On account of my presence, several are draped with blankets marked Top Secret.) And right away, the shift toward space is obvious. The main screen reads "Combined Command Center for NORAD/USSPACECOM."

The U.S. Space Command is the proto-bureaucracy of our emerging space force. Its current commander, a four-star general named Ralph E. Eberhardt, was given more prominence last May when Rumsfeld reorganized the space command structure. Eberhardt is being touted as the possible next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Should he be appointed, it will be the most powerful signal yet that President Bush's campaign promise to "leapfrog" to the next generation of weaponry will mean the militarization of space.

The clearest evidence is across town from Cheyenne at Schriever Air Force Base. The Space Warfare Center was established there in 1993. It has three branches, the Space Battle Lab (patch: "Above All Others"); the Space Warfare School (patch: image of missile shooting off lightning bolts); and, as of last October, the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron (patch: image of cartoon bird standing on a cloud tossing a missile to earth). A good deal of the theory about how space can assist our troops during wartime on earth -- today -- is being developed here. It is the Space Battle Lab that will soon be figuring out how to take a reading from the hyperspectral camera aboard Warfighter I and make that information meaningful to a pilot flying an Air Force bomber.

"We are trying to bring the utility of space directly to the fighter," says the battle lab commander, Col. Ron Oholendt, "by either increasing lethality or mission effectiveness." Another project under way is to make better use of space for "bomb-impact assessment."

"As a cruise missile is heading for its target," Oholendt says, "it would transmit a data burst into space just before impact. It might tell us, 'I'm armed; here's where I am; the scene I see matches the target I was given.' So we'd have a confidence it was successful. Or it might say, 'I'm here; I don't see anything familiar so I'm going to blow up some dirt.' After we downloaded the information from the satellite, we'd be fairly confident that site would have to be retargeted."

Rumsfeld has said that the military must prepare itself to avoid a "space Pearl Harbor." This is where such preparations are being made. The commander of the space aggressor squadron, Col. Conrad Widman, spends his days envisioning how an enemy might exploit space -- in order to train our forces how to react.

"The one thing you don't want to do is go to war and encounter the enemy's capability for the first time," Widman says. In one simulation exercise, he and the 527th posed as an Iranian terrorist cell set against some real U.S. troops stationed in South Asia. During the exercise, Widman hired a French satellite to take a picture, which can be paid for with a credit card.

"The guys on the Iranian team were able to count airplanes and see entry control points," Widman explains. "They could even see the tent-city area and figure out how many people they had deployed. They could also tell there was some kind of air-defense batteries. They knew that Patriot missiles often played that role, so they went to the Raytheon home page and learned that Patriot batteries are normally laid out in a format with the radar in the center." By the time the 527th had finished the simulation, they had learned the surrounding landscape, the best approach path and the entry points into the concertina-wire-protected camp.

"Is this how the terrorists in Yemen figured where the U.S.S. Cole was?" Widman says chillingly. Widman's work repeatedly reveals that technologies once carefully held as national-security secrets are now commonplace because of satellite proliferation and the Internet. "More and more," Widman's colleague Col. James Rogers says, "the problem is not another superpower, but a guy with a credit card."

As a sign of space's growing importance to the military, the first large-scale war game devoted to space issues was held for five days in January. The hypothetical conflict was set in the year 2017 and involved fighting a space battle with a "near-peer competitor" country named Red that resembled China. During the simulation exercise, which involved 250 people, the two main weapons used to duke it out were laser cannons and microsatellites. Even though select journalists were invited to "watch," the Pentagon did not provide many details of the fighting, except to say that the conflict hinged on attempts to blind each other's satellites as a first step toward waging war. The message of the demonstration, however, was clear: whoever doesn't control space in the next conflict will lose.

The future of space depends a great deal on how we describe it, a struggle that is largely metaphorical. Is space merely an extension of the air and therefore the province of the Air Force? Or is it an entirely separate medium for power, like the land or sea, in need of a new doctrine? The first comparison more easily allows a militarization of space as just more of what we already have, while the second challenges us to debate space as the frontier it still is.

Rumsfeld leans toward the first comparison. His reorganization of the space command structure two months ago put Eberhardt and the Air Force in charge. The changes are even linguistic; the Air Force has revived the antique word "aerospace" to remarry the two domains. The Strategic Master Plan, for example, describes the current Air Force as being engaged in a "transition from a cold-war garrison force to an expeditionary aerospace force" in order to train "21st-century aerospace warriors."

At every stop, I was reminded of the incremental militarization of air after World War I. The Air Force began as a wing of the Army, flying over enemy territory and providing surveillance. Then the pilots began shooting one another down; later they started to drop bombs. Space can be seen as undergoing the same process, progressing out of its current stage as an arena of surveillance to microsatellites attacking other satellites to, finally, space-based lasers aiming down at fighter jets to blast them from the sky.

Yet at some point the future of space will emerge as a great American debate. Over and over, as I interviewed military scientists and generals assigned to space, I was reminded that the decision to move into space will, at the end of the day, be made in Washington. Already, a few politicians have foreseen this conversation and staked out positions.

"Space is our next manifest destiny," explains Senator Bob Smith, Republican of New Hampshire, "because it's a dangerous world out there." Smith says that we have to weaponize space before somebody else does or face the consequences: "I don't want to see a president in the position where he has to step up to the microphones and say that the next Iraq has threatened us with a full-scale attack tomorrow, and we've either got to surrender or nuke them."

On the other side is Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio. This fall, he intends to introduce a bill to ban completely the weaponization of space. "It's bad enough that we've turned space into a junkyard, but they want to turn space into a place of death," he says. "Think about the metaphysics. For all of human history, space was a place of wonder, of dreams, of aspirations -- an almost visual portrayal of Browning's poem: 'Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?"'

Ugh. Maybe this is how the debate must begin -- duck-and-cover fear-mongering versus mawkish piety. Yet both positions are really built around the same fear: weaponizing space is terrifying. Smith resolves his fear by weaponizing first; Kucinich by appealing to a pristine notion of space that hasn't existed for 40 years. But this fear is real precisely because space weapons, unlike those at sea or on land, would orbit invisibly above us all. That fear would be irresolvable, like the nuclear nightmares of the last century, with their bomb shelters, gas masks and decades of mass-destruction anxiety. It is bad enough that space-surveillance technology has conspiracy theorists convinced the government can see them stepping out of the shower. Can you imagine the global neuroses if deadly lasers could be fired from space?

There is, however, a middle ground between hang-nukes-from-every-star and leave-space-the-inky-domain-of-magi, one that is occupied by some civilian theorists and military war planners.

"If we aggressively move weaponry into space," warns Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, "then we will start an arms race." By inspiring nations to compete directly and immediately with our space-based assets, we will almost certainly guarantee the loss of the very advantages we seek to protect. Krepon supports a doctrine called "space sanctuary," a woolly phrase that sounds more feel-good than it is. His position is really that of a space pragmatist.

Pragmatists like Krepon want the military to continue research into space technologies; it would be foolish not to do so. But instead of testing or deploying a space-based arsenal, pragmatists would hold up a threat: if any rival country goes into space to test armaments, then America will go up with its own devices immediately. In the meantime, pragmatists believe, the United States should be promoting efforts to create rules of the road for space. As a model, Krepon suggests the bilateral agreements that currently regulate behavior among blue-water ships on the oceans. They are informally negotiated navy to navy, rather than through the more potentially hostile venues of governments and treaty arrangements.

Space pragmatists also believe there is great danger in abandoning the treaties that so far have guided behavior in space: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which forbids putting weapons of mass destruction in space, and the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which created the surveillance system to prevent nuclear conflict (and forbids most antimissile testing). President Bush has roundly condemned the ABM treaty as a "relic" and has said that he will test antimissile technology no matter what -- prompting precisely the kind of reaction Krepon fears. Even our allies have expressed "concern."

"If the ABM treaty is trashed, its protections of satellites also go by the boards," Krepon cautions. "The ABM treaty contains the most explicit protections of satellites on the books. They pertain only to those satellites that monitor treaty provisions, but when you kill the treaty, you also remove the protections." Indeed, if the U.S. abandons the treaty, a rogue nation might well respond by tossing into orbit what experts call a "keg of nails" -- that is, putting thousands of metal shards into a 16,000-mile-per-hour counterorbit against our low-orbit satellites.

Kaboom.

The Pentagon's certainty that "Full Spectrum Dominance" is the only answer is curious because its own actions undercut the theory. Throughout all the conversations I had, I was perplexed by one glaring paradox. The linchpin of our precision-guided munitions is the Global Positioning System. After making the system public in the 90's, we opened it up further two years ago so that anyone on the earth can use its efficacy down to one meter of accuracy. This is an amazing gift to the world. Why did we make it? I kept asking the officers this question and heard an answer that didn't quite satisfy: "American businessmen could make some money off it."

But there is one other theory that is not stated so publicly: if we permitted everyone to use it, then no one would feel driven to build a competing system. Rather, everyone would become dependent on it. And, in fact, everyone has. The world has incorporated our G.P.S. into its daily life as rapidly as Americans took up the A.T.M. banking network, and the rules of the G.P.S. road are getting written. The entire military forces of Australia now rely upon our G.P.S., and the new generation of cell phones will automatically locate a 911 caller.

By sharing G.P.S., no one feels so threatened to compete with it. And its use is so ubiquitous internationally that any country that damaged it would provoke a global fury. There is a sense of transparency on our part by giving away access to the G.P.S., even a feeling of generosity. Naturally, there are encryption devices on our satellites. In a crisis, we could block a bellicose nation's access to G.P.S. What was done with G.P.S. is a kind of space pragmatism.

A similar protocol could be done for introducing direct video access to space. Once it is developed, the U.S. military could make technology that allows us to see and confirm exactly what is happening up in space publicly available. This would, once again, be viewed as American generosity. It would ease competitive tensions since there would be mutually assured awareness in space. A nation with a defunct satellite would be able to confirm that it was not sabotage but the usual wear and tear of, say, subatomic bombardment (another new space hazard) that caused a breakdown. The benefit for us would be that when the crunch time of a crisis came, the visual infrastructure to see precisely what's going on in space, like G.P.S., could be made unavailable to a hostile force.

The strength of the pragmatic position is that it seeks neither to march into space while locking and loading nor does it naively strive for a purity that no longer exists. Space pragmatism doesn't pretend to keep space unsullied, because it can't. Without a doubt, more and more satellites will go up. More businesses will operate there, new uses will be discovered and quarrels will occur. And gradually, a military presence that is already there will get expanded. But the pragmatist intent is to hold the line at surveillance.

Can we? Can we hold the line without necessarily filling space with weaponry? The pragmatist position holds out the hope that by writing rules now -- and by sharing technology -- the United States could make it much harder for anyone to ever breach that line. On the other hand, if we plan, test and deploy aggressively as the lone superpower, we make certain that after a brief respite from the cold war's nuclear competition, we will once again embark on a fresh and costly arms race. And with it, assume the dark burden of policing a rapid evolution in battlespace.

Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the magazine.

-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

Europe mute on narcotics executions

August 5, 2001
By Marc Lerner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010805-6668300.htm

BANGKOK -- Death sentences meted out to 38 drug dealers in Thailand have raised howls from human rights groups, but no word of protest from the European Union and Western European countries, which are usually quick to denounce executions in the United States.

"It does seem a bit odd, considering the unprecedented numbers," said a foreign envoy who requested anonymity. "If this had happened in America, there would be alarm bells going off in Rome, in Paris and in Bonn."

The first group of traffickers was sentenced July 25 in five separate cases involving nearly 2 million methamphetamine pills and some 20 pounds of heroin.

Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, denounced Thailand's "assembly line of death sentences."

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra rejected the criticism as misguided.

"To call Thailand a barbaric state is to say the same of the United States, which as a developed country still has the death penalty," he told reporters. "If international organizations want to study these cases, they should study how drugs affect Thai society."

Any hope that Mr. Thaksin or the judiciary would back down under international pressure was dismissed on Tuesday when the court condemned to death another 14 drug dealers. Five more death sentences were handed down on Friday.

Opponents of the death penalty argue that it has not been an effective deterrent against drug trafficking. But the government minister in charge of drug suppression, Gen. Thammarak Issarangkura na Auytthaya, disagrees.

"I used to supervise the execution of many drug convicts," he said after the first batch of sentences was announced. "I would be glad to do the same with these people."

Somchai Homla-or, a spokesman for the Bangkok-based Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development, acknowledged that groups opposed to the death penalty are unlikely to prevail.

In large part, that's due to the growing alarm throughout the kingdom over the rising use of methamphetamines, or speed, particularly over the past four years.

Still, human rights workers were hoping for some response by the European Union, which last month sent letters of protest to the governors of Oklahoma and Texas over death sentences in those states.

A spokesman for the EU's regional office in Bangkok acknowledged the lack of reaction over the recent sentences but said the organization's opposition to the death penalty is well known. He referred specific questions to the Belgian Embassy in Bangkok, as Belgium currently holds the rotating presidency of the 15-member EU.

Pierre Vaesen, Belgium's ambassador to Thailand, declined a request for an interview, saying through his personal secretary that he prefers not to give any comment "at this time."

"It does seem a bit out of character," said one European diplomat. "The EU has a very strong position opposing the death penalty, and the last week has been rather extreme. It would seem like an appropriate time to speak out."

The silence on the part of the European critics might be due, in part, to the unyielding line being taken by Mr. Thaksin.The chief judge of the Criminal Court, Sombat Diew-isaret, acknowledged that the sentences are meant to send a stern warning that the court supports the government crackdown. The court hears an average of 40 drug-trafficking cases every day.

Thailand, once reeled with a heroin problem. But it now faces an even more devastating scourge -- methamphetamines pouring in from illicit labs across the border in Burma.

King Bhumibol, Thailand's revered monarch who rarely speaks out on political issues, recently told a group of 165 newly appointed judges that he favored stern penalties for drug traffickers. He also revealed that he recently had rejected a petition for a royal pardon from a death-row inmate convicted of trafficking 50,000 speed pills.

Thailand resumed executions in 1996 after a nine-year moratorium. Eight felons, have faced firing squads so far this year. In all, 326 convicts are on death row, the highest number since the corrections department was established.

The United States and Japan are the only developed nations that still impose the death penalty. And while there is vocal domestic opposition to the death penalty in both nations, public opinion surveys indicate that majorities support the laws.

--------

Electric Chairs Being Retired

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Unplugging-the-Chair.html?searchpv=aponline

NEW YORK (AP) -- Despite the affectionate nicknames -- Old Smokey, Yellow Mama, Old Sparky -- there has been nothing gentle about America's most lethal line of furniture.

More than 4,300 people in 26 states have gone to the electric chair since William Kemmler, convicted of the ax-murder of his lover, was electrocuted at New York's Auburn State Prison on Aug. 6, 1890.

Now, 111 years later, experts predict the electric chair will soon become a relic. No inmate has been electrocuted for 13 months, and most states that have the chair have switched to lethal injection, considered less likely to be outlawed as cruel and unusual punishment.

Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, expects to see the electric chair retired ``very shortly. It's bad press for the death penalty. It's not the kind of emblem that proponents want to have.''

Several states that once relied exclusively on the chair now offer condemned inmates a choice of electrocution or lethal injection. Only Nebraska and Alabama have the chair as the sole method of execution.

Pro-death penalty lawmakers in both states are trying to switch to lethal injection; opposition has come from die-hard supporters of the chair and from legislators who prefer abolishing capital punishment.

In a standard electrocution, the condemned prisoner is shaved and strapped to a chair before electrodes are attached to the head and ankle.

The executioner pulls a handle, sending up to 2,200 volts through the prisoner for 30 seconds or more. Doctors check the inmate's heart; if it is still beating, another jolt is applied.

During electrocutions, internal organs burn and skin changes color. Condemned prisoners sometimes urinate or vomit blood; witnesses have said they smelled burning flesh. William Brennan, the late U.S. Supreme Court justice, assailed the practice as the ``technological equivalent of burning people at the stake.''

Abolitionists like Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers scoff at the notion that lethal injection is progress.

``That term is a euphemism,'' Chambers said. ``If I did something like that to someone, they'd call it poisoning. It's designed to prettify the death penalty, portray it as something other than the barbaric throwback it is.''

Chambers predicts electrocution will soon be outlawed by the courts, and hopes no substitute method is established.

``I'm opposed to any method of killing by the state, I don't care how benign and user-friendly,'' Chambers said.

In Alabama, state Sen. Hinton Mitchem was among the legislators who worked in the 1970s to resurrect a death penalty law that would withstand court challenges.

Like many Alabamans, Mitchem has no objection to continued use of the state's electric chair, nicknamed Yellow Mama. But he fears electrocution may be ruled unconstitutional and has pushed to make lethal injection an option.

``To save our death penalty bill, we need to change it,'' he said.

Mitchem's bill was opposed by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Rodger Smitherman, a black lawmaker who wants a moratorium on executions while the death penalty's fairness is studied.

``Blacks are afraid that if we pass the lethal injection bill, it would encourage juries to execute more individuals than we do now,'' said Mitchem, who is white. ``They feel the electric chair is a little more inhumane than lethal injection, and maybe in some cases that's true.''

The electric chair, like the guillotine and gas chamber, owes its existence to the paradoxical quest for humane executions.

New York authorities in the 1880s were seeking an alternative to hanging, and encouraged experiments with electrocution. Two pioneers of electric power, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, wrangled over the chair's development.

Though some witnesses described Kemmler's electrocution as gruesome, the chair became America's foremost method of execution. It was used on Bruno Hauptmann, the convicted kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh's infant son; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets; and serial killer Ted Bundy.

The advent of lethal injection has pushed the electric chair into an increasingly marginal role. Since January 1999, there have been only eight electrocutions -- none since Virginia executed Michael Clagett on July 6, 2000.

Defunct electric chairs are in storage or police museums. The chair from New York's Sing Sing prison, where the Rosenbergs died in 1953, is displayed at the Newseum in Arlington, Va.

After several grisly executions -- one inmate bled from the nose and two had flames shoot from their heads -- Florida switched to lethal injection last year to avert a U.S. Supreme Court review of whether electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.

Georgia's Legislature then switched to lethal injection for inmates condemned for crimes committed after May 1, 2000. Prisoners already on death row still face electrocution.

Bright was among the lawyers urging Georgia's Supreme Court last month to outlaw the chair. Electrocution inflicts ``excruciating pain,'' he argued. The state's medical experts said it causes instant unconsciousness.

In Ohio, which offers a choice between lethal injection or electrocution, prison officials asked lawmakers last month to abandon the chair because of concerns about possible malfunctions.

Ohio's next execution is scheduled for Sept. 12, and the condemned man, John Byrd Jr., has requested electrocution.

``If they're going to take his life,'' said Public Defender David Bodicker, ``he wants them to have to do it in the most difficult manner.''

-------- energy

Solar Power Gets Its Day in Sun

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Sun-Power.html?searchpv=aponline

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Buoyed by generous government subsidies and plummeting costs, solar power is enjoying a rare day in the sun.

In places like sun-kissed California, the energy source that once languished on the economic fringe is now carving out a booming niche among consumers hamstrung by high electricity prices and the threat of blackouts.

``As the energy problems in the United States increase, it slides more into the mainstream,'' said John Thornton, a principal engineer in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

The situation has sent a jolt through sales of solar power equipment.

Domestic shipments of photovoltaic cells increased 74 percent during the two-year period ending in 2000, according to the federal Department of Energy. That's enough equipment to generate at least 75 megawatts of power at peak usage times. One megawatt can power 750 average homes.

The DOE projects that total could reach 3,200 megawatts by 2020.

Meanwhile, the price of those cells continues to fall; they now cost just 20 percent of what they did 25 years ago. Rooftop systems that can meet half a home's electricity needs for more than 20 years now cost as little as $10,000 with rebates and tax credits available from the federal and state governments.

``You're talking a five- to six-year payback range in California, compared to 20 a few years ago,'' said David R. Lillington, president of Sylmar-based solar cell manufacturer Spectrolab Inc.

Dan Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California, Berkeley, said it's the first time that solar power systems can be justified economically. ``Before it was just a good idea environmentally,'' he said.

Photovoltaic cells produce electricity when struck by sunlight, and a portion of that energy is absorbed by a semiconducting material such as silicon. That knocks loose electrons, sending them coursing through the material. The current can then be drawn off as a source of power.

Photovoltaic output peaks when demand for electricity and the wholesale price of power both spike -- typically on hot, sunny days.

But even today, three decades after those cells were first made available on a commercial basis, photovoltaic systems still produce less electricity at a greater cost than all other significant means of generation.

Solar power contributes just 0.02 percent of the total amount of electricity fed into the nation's grid. And even at its cheapest, it costs 20 cents per kilowatt-hour to generate, or roughly four times as much as electricity produced from fossil or nuclear fuels on average. That makes large-scale plants unfeasible, experts said.

``From an electric utility standpoint, it's developing, it's being used, but the technology costs have to come down more for it to be more usable,'' said Jayne Brady, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder-owned utilities.

Still, for individual homeowners like Karina Garbesi, an assistant professor of geography and environmental studies at California State University, Hayward, the rooftop panels can be an attractive alternative. The system atop her Bay Area home regularly produces excess electricity that she can sell to her utility.

``My meter runs backward during the day,'' Garbesi said.

In housing developments being built in places like San Diego and Sacramento, solar panels are now standard in some new homes, their cost factored into the sale price.

``We're seeing more use of photovoltaics in new construction,'' said Joe Wiehagen, an engineer with the research center of the National Association of Home Builders in Maryland. ``It can be a bit less expensive in a new home and you don't have to worry about working it into your mortgage because it's already there.''

Subsidies also make the capital costs of the systems less prohibitive.

At the Los Angeles headquarters of Neutrogena Corp., officials recently installed a 200-kilowatt system that should cut the amount of power the firm buys by 20 percent, said Senaka Nanayakkara, the cosmetics company's director of facilities.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ponied up $1 million of the system's $1.4 million price tag, as part of its program to add the equivalent of 100,000 residential rooftop solar systems by 2010.

Similar subsidy programs should continue to drive down prices and prevent the solar power industry from foundering as it did in the 1980s, when fossil fuel prices fell and interest in emerging alternative energy sources waned.

``We could still screw it up. Yank price supports and you could drive industries out,'' Garbesi said.

-------- environment

Program Seeks to Fight Global Warming

Washington Post
By Linda A. Johnson AP Business Writer
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 5, 2001; 12:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34479-2001Aug5?language=printer

TRENTON, N.J. -- Using the best of incentives - money - New Jersey is recruiting businesses, utilities, colleges and other groups to fight global warming.

The state Department of Environmental Protection is enlisting their help to meet a self-imposed goal of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, stressing that by volunteering to conserve energy and switch to more-efficient or renewable energy technology, they can cut their power bills.

The idea is to help businesses prosper by cutting production costs - an easy sell now, when the rising price and availability of energy have become concerns.

"We think we can make New Jersey the most efficient (state) in making products," said Mike Winka, administrator of DEP's Office of Innovative Technologies and Market Development. "That's how we're going to help New Jersey businesses compete, not only on the national market but on the international market."

About two dozen states have, or are developing, plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to spokesman Dave Ryan of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

"But New Jersey has done better. New Jersey is the only state that has a target," he said, adding the state's plan could be applied to other states with some customizing.

In spring 2000, state environmental officials set a deadline of 2005 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 3.5 percent below their 1990 level: about 135 million metric tons of gases, then 10 percent of all U.S. emissions.

New Jersey's emissions kept rising until the late 1990s and, without intervention, were forecast to hit 151.4 million metric tons by 2005, Winka said. The state's Greenhouse Gas Action Plan aims to cut the total to 131 million metric tons by then.

"We can easily meet that goal," Winka predicted.

Along with encouraging businesses to convert to more efficient equipment or cleaner, renewable energy sources, New Jersey is doing the same at all state parks and DEP facilities. Every New Jersey college has pledged to do its part, as has an interfaith coalition called Partners for Environmental Quality that is working with the state's 6,000 religious congregations to switch members and their own facilities to "green" power suppliers.

Now the DEP is working with military bases and county and municipal governments, and trying to ensure new schools built under the state's $8.6 billion school construction program use renewable energy sources where possible and have energy-saving roofing, windows and other features.

With the deregulation of power companies in New Jersey, the state recently created a $358 million fund to subsidize purchases of renewable or high-efficiency energy technology by businesses and residents.

The state has plenty of incentives for the effort, Winka said.

If global warming makes the sea level rise, as scientists predict, billions of dollars worth of homes and businesses along New Jersey's 127 miles of coast could be destroyed, the crucial tourism industry could be crippled and commercial fishing revenue would fall.

Also, the state has many businesses making alternative energy technologies, from photovoltaic and fuel cells to geothermal systems and clean-burning microturbines. All those industries stand to gain new customers, and installation of new energy systems will mean more work for plumbers, electricians and others in the skilled trades.

"There's a lot of companies that this could help," Winka said.

Scientists believe greenhouse gases are raising the Earth's temperature by trapping heat in the atmosphere. The most prevalent greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, produced by burning oil, coal and other fossil fuels in cars, power plants and factories. Others include methane, produced by farm animals and decomposing garbage in landfills; refrigerants called hydrofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide, released by fuel combustion and fertilizer application.

Businesses and individuals can help by turning off unneeded lighting and switching to high-efficiency light bulbs, appliances and machinery.

But many companies and groups pledging to help the DEP are doing much more, and most of the first ones to sign on already had an energy-saving program.

For instance, L'Oreal, the Clark-based hair products maker, significantly lowered the temperature of ionized water used in its manufacturing plant, converts some of its waste to energy

-------- genetics

For the Record

Here's how some major bills fared recently in Congress and how local congressional members voted
by Thomas's Roll Call Report Syndicate.

The Washington Post
Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page LZ09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30343-2001Aug3?language=printer

NV means Not Voting.

HOUSE VOTES

HUMAN CLONING BAN

For: 265 / Against: 162

The House voted to outlaw human cloning for any purpose. The bill (HR 2505) makes it a federal crime to perform reproductive cloning, in which a person's DNA is used to help create a genetically identical baby, and therapeutic cloning, in which a cloned human embryo is used for medical research in a laboratory. The bill also makes it illegal to import cloned human embryos or treatments that derive from research on such embryos.

A yes vote was to outlaw cloning.

MARYLAND

Bartlett (R) Yes
Cardin (D) No
Cummings (D) No
Ehrlich (R) Yes
Gilchrest (R) No
Hoyer (D) No
Morella (R) No
Wynn (D) Yes

VIRGINIA

J. Davis (R) Yes
T. Davis (R) Yes
Moran (D) No
Wolf (R) Yes
Cantor (R) Yes

THERAPEUTIC CLONING

For: 178 / Against: 249

The House rejected a substitute to HR 2505 (above) that would have outlawed reproductive cloning but allowed human embryos to be cloned for medical research that could lead to the development of new treatments.

In such therapeutic cloning, stem cells are extracted from a cloned human embryo, then used to grow tissue for treating the person whose DNA was used in the cloning. Backers say it holds promise for breakthroughs in treating diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Foes say that to legalize it inevitably would lead to the cloning of humans.

A yes vote was to legalize therapeutic cloning.

MARYLAND

Bartlett (R) No
Cardin (D) Yes
Cummings (D) Yes
Ehrlich (R) No
Gilchrest (R) Yes
Hoyer (D) Yes
Morella (R) Yes
Wynn (D) Yes

VIRGINIA

J. Davis (R) No
T. Davis (R) No
Moran (D) Yes
Wolf (R) No
Cantor (R) No

-------- human rights

Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong
China Systematically Eradicating Group

By John Pomfret and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33055-2001Aug4?language=printer

BEIJING -- Expanding its use of torture and high-pressure indoctrination, China's Communist Party has gained the upper hand in its protracted battle against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to government sources and Falun Gong practitioners. As a result, they say, large numbers of people are abandoning the group that presented the party with its most serious challenge since the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square.

After a year and a half of difficulties in suppressing the movement, the government for the first time this year sanctioned the systematic use of violence against the group, established a network of brainwashing classes and embarked on a painstaking effort to weed out followers neighborhood by neighborhood and workplace by workplace, the sources said.

They said the crackdown has benefited from a turn in public opinion against Falun Gong since five purported members set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square, leading many Chinese to conclude the group is a dangerous cult.

In recent interviews, the sources and practitioners described for the first time in detail the methodical efforts being used to eradicate the Falun Gong movement, efforts that the Chinese call "reeducation." They told of believers being beaten, shocked with electric truncheons and forced to undergo unbearable physical pressure, such as squatting on the floor for days at a time. Many adherents are also sent to intensive classes where the teachings of Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi are picked apart by former believers, sometimes friends who have already been tortured into submission.

"I am a broken man," said James Ouyang, 35, an electrical engineer who was forced by labor camp guards to stand facing a wall for nine days and then sent to a brainwashing class for 20 more. "I have rejected Falun Gong. . . . Now, whenever I see a policeman and those electric truncheons, I feel sick, ready to throw up."

Two years ago, the Chinese government outlawed Falun Gong, a nonviolent movement that mixes Buddhist beliefs with slow-motion martial-art-type exercises, and denounced the group as an evil cult and a threat to society. But the underlying reason for the crackdown is the leadership's view that Falun Gong is an independent organization that threatens the Communist Party's monopoly on power.

The crackdown's recent gains have been a boost to both President Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader most closely associated with the campaign, and the party, which some experts had thought was too fractured and ineffectual to defeat the unusually well-organized group.

"This campaign should teach us not to underestimate the Communist Party," said one party official who has advised the government on the crackdown, but opposes its use of violence. "The party has a powerful ability to synthesize experience and come up with methods to deal with challenges. All the brutality, resources and persuasiveness of the Communist system is being used -- and is having an effect."

A Strategy for Success

At the start of the crackdown, government officials estimated that between 3 million and 6 million people were serious followers of Falun Gong, which translates roughly as Wheel of the Law. About 10 percent, up to 600,000, were considered willing to fight the government crackdown, Chinese officials said. Estimates outside the government have put membership much higher -- in the tens of millions, but exact numbers are not available.

The government's campaign against Falun Gong, launched in July 1999, struggled at first, hampered by uneven enforcement and a split between central government leaders, who viewed the group as a threat to the party's rule, and local officials, who did not. But over the past six months, China's security forces have regrouped and devised an approach they say is producing results.

That approach has three ingredients, according to another government adviser.

The first, he said, is violence. The crackdown has always been associated with police and prison brutality, but the adviser said it was only this year that the central leadership decided to sanction the widespread use of violence against Falun Gong members. Citing government reports, he said practitioners who are not beaten generally do not abandon the group.

The adviser said the second element, a high-pressure propaganda campaign against the group, has also been critical. As Chinese society turned against Falun Gong, pressure on practitioners to abandon their beliefs increased, and it became easier for the government to use violence against those who did not. The self-immolation of five purported members in Tiananmen Square on Jan. 23 was a turning point. A 12-year-old girl and her mother died, and the party made the incident the centerpiece of its campaign to discredit Falun Gong. By repeatedly broadcasting images of the girl's burning body and interviews with the others saying they believed self-immolation would lead them to paradise, the government convinced many Chinese that Falun Gong was an "evil cult."

Finally, the security apparatus has begun forcing practitioners to attend intense study sessions in which the teachings of the Falun Gong leader are picked apart by former followers. These brainwashing classes have been key to persuading members to quit practicing Falun Gong, the government adviser said.

"Each aspect of the campaign is critical," he said. "Pure violence doesn't work. Just studying doesn't work either. And none of it would be working if the propaganda hadn't started to change the way the general public thinks. You need all three. That's what they've figured out."

Some local governments had experimented with brainwashing classes before, but in January, Beijing's secret 610 office, an interagency task force leading the charge against Falun Gong, ordered all neighborhood committees, state institutions and companies to begin using them, government sources said. No Falun Gong member is supposed to be spared. The most active members are sent directly to labor camps where they are first "broken" by beatings and other torture, the adviser said.

At the same time, Beijing is getting more efficient at forcing local officials to carry out its orders on Falun Gong. Internal polls conducted by the Central Party School show county-level officials placing a greater priority on eradicating the group, the government adviser said. The 610 office also dispatches teams of investigators to check up on local officials, and a "proper attitude" toward Falun Gong is now required for any promotion, he said.

No One Spared

Neighborhood officials have compelled even the elderly, people with disabilities and the ill to attend the classes. Universities have sent staff to find students who had dropped out or been expelled for practicing Falun Gong, and brought them back for the sessions. Other members have been forced to leave sick relatives to go to class.

A university student in Beijing, Alex Hsu, said he was on his way to a computer lab earlier this year when a school official stopped him and told him he had to take the class. The school had confronted him before about his faith in Falun Gong, but he had never participated in protests and had never been arrested.

Six men surrounded him, forced him into a car and drove him to a hotel near a labor camp outside Beijing. About 20 practitioners were there, all of them students, teachers, university staff members or retired professors. Hsu later learned the class was organized by the Education Ministry. "We were all very scared," Hsu said. "We didn't know what was going to happen next."

By relying on "work units," to which all state employees are assigned, and neighborhood committees to ferret out and convert believers, the government is taking a page from the mass campaign tactics used by the Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The plan has been surprisingly effective, especially given other changes that have undermined the party's control over Chinese society, such as the rise of a private business sector and looser rules governing migration and housing.

Each work unit is responsible for paying the "tuition" of its practitioners. And township governments that have been successful in converting Falun Gong members, most notably in Shandong province, have been encouraged to sell their services to other townships, Chinese sources said.

Hsu said school officials told him they paid about $800 to send him to the brainwashing class. The morning after he was picked up, the class began in a cafeteria inside the labor camp. The first lesson was a threat.

"They said if they didn't achieve their goals, if we didn't give up our beliefs, we'd be taken to the labor camp," Hsu said. "Reeducation through labor is a frightening thing to a Chinese person. We all knew we would be harmed and our lives would be in danger. We all knew someone who had died in the camps."

In the cafeteria, Hsu sat at a table with three former Falun Gong members, all of them still detained at the camp. For 12 hours a day, they tried to persuade him to abandon Falun Gong. As the days passed, more "teachers" joined his table, analyzing the writings of Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi and refusing to let Hsu rest.

"It was mental torture. . . . The pressure just kept growing," Hsu said. "And the threat was always there. You could see these people all had suffered, and you knew what would happen to you if you didn't give in too."

Practitioners are forced to remain in the classes until they renounce their beliefs in writing and then on videotape. On average, the government adviser said, most people abandon Falun Gong after 10 to 12 days of classes, but some resist for as long as 20.

"It was like being drugged with a potion. They came at you fast, frightening you and confusing you," said Sydney Li, a practitioner who escaped from a class organized by neighborhood officials in which he was beaten about the head. "If you weren't a strong believer, it would be easy to be tricked."

The turning point for Hsu came in the third week. He looked up one morning and recognized one of the "teachers" at his table -- a friend, classmate and fellow practitioner who had disappeared earlier in the year. The student looked thin and sickly. He later told Hsu he had been tortured.

"It was a shock. I didn't know he had been sent to the labor camp, and he looked so different," Hsu said. "He didn't say much at first, but the others made him talk. I felt so sad."

A few days later, Hsu signed a statement promising not to practice Falun Gong again and another attacking the group as an evil cult. He read them aloud to his class and in front of a video camera. He wept on the ride back to his university.

"I'm not sure about the others, but I never believed what I was writing," he said. "It was very painful. They forced us to lie. We knew Falun Gong is good, but they forced us to say it was evil."

Hsu has since dropped out of school and gone into hiding because he wants to continue practicing. But he acknowledged many followers have given up Falun Gong completely. There are no reliable estimates of how many followers have abandoned the group.

Those who refuse to submit in the classes are sent to the labor camps, where members face a more systematic regime of violence than in the past, according to practitioners and government sources.

Days of Beatings

The sting of torture was felt by James Ouyang, a slight man with thick glasses and crooked teeth. On the sixth day of beatings this April, he recalled, he began to denounce the Falun Gong.

"I cursed and cursed Falun Gong, but the police said it wasn't enough," he said, running a trembling hand through thinning hair. "They continued beating me for three more days until they were satisfied."

When Ouyang, who asked to be identified only by his Chinese last name and an English name he calls himself, was first arrested in early 2000 for going to Tiananmen Square to unfurl a banner praising Falun Gong, police roughed him up but released him after a week. At the time, the government adviser said, China's security services were inflicting only a "normal amount" of abuse on Falun Gong practitioners. And in many parts of China, police ignored Falun Gong as long as practitioners did not go to Beijing to protest.

The adviser, contradicting some Western reports, said the government previously had no systematic campaign of violence to break Falun Gong. "Before this year, practitioners were beaten if they broke rules in jail or if the police were normally brutal," he said. "It must be understood that anyone in a Chinese jail will get beaten for breaking the rules. Deaths in custody are commonplace."

But the adviser said the policy changed after the Jan. 23 self-immolations and a Communist Party work conference in early February. At that time, party officials concluded the self-immolations and the unrelenting propaganda campaign that followed had turned the public against Falun Gong. The self-immolations seemed to show that Falun Gong was a bizarre cult, and that freed the party's hand, he said.

"The immolations had a huge effect," he said. "Previously, most Chinese thought the crackdown was stupid, like a dog catching a mouse. After those people burned themselves and the party broadcast that little girl's face on TV for almost a month straight, people's views here changed. Now many agree that it's an evil cult. That was a huge defeat for Li Hongzhi."

Li also played into the party's hands. His spokesmen in the United States denied the people who burned themselves were Falun Gong members, disappointing some in China who felt he was rejecting his flock. And Li continued to issue circulars encouraging his followers to confront the authorities, upsetting people because he seemed unmoved by the growing casualties. So far, Falun Gong says more than 250 followers have died in government custody.

Ouyang was arrested again in April after going to Tiananmen Square to show his support for Falun Gong. This time, he said, police methodically reduced him to an "obedient thing" over 10 days of torture.

At a police station in western Beijing, Ouyang was stripped and interrogated for five hours. "If I responded incorrectly, that is if I didn't say, 'Yes,' they shocked me with the electric truncheon," he said.

Then, he was transferred to a labor camp in Beijing's western suburbs. There, the guards ordered him to stand facing a wall. If he moved, they shocked him. If he fell down from fatigue, they shocked him.

Each morning, he had five minutes to eat and relieve himself. "If I didn't make it, I went in my pants," he said. "And they shocked me for that, too."

By the sixth day, Ouyang said, he couldn't see straight from staring at plaster three inches from his face. His knees buckled, prompting more shocks and beatings. He gave in to the guards' demands.

For the next three days, Ouyang denounced Li's teachings, shouting into the wall. Officers continued to shock him about the body and he soiled himself regularly. Finally, on the 10th day, Ouyang's repudiation of the group was deemed sufficiently sincere.

He was taken before a group of Falun Gong inmates and rejected the group one more time as a video camera rolled. Ouyang left jail and entered the brainwashing classes. Twenty days later after debating Falun Gong for 16 hours a day, he "graduated."

"The pressure on me was and is incredible," he said. "In the past two years, I have seen the worst of what man can do. We really are the worst animals on Earth."

-------- police / prisoners

Censure of Freeh Was Secretly Rejected
Review of FBI's Flawed Ruby Ridge Probes Had Prompted Disciplinary Recommendation

By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 5, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28610-2001Aug3?language=printer

Justice Department officials who reviewed the FBI's flawed investigations of the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, called for disciplinary action against FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and three other FBI veterans, but the recommendations were secretly rejected in the closing days of the Clinton administration.

Stephen R. Colgate, an assistant attorney general who had the authority to mete out final sanctions in the Ruby Ridge case, denied a recommendation to censure Freeh for condoning the shortcomings of the FBI investigations. In a brief interview on Friday, Colgate, who is now in private practice, said he stood by his Jan. 3 decision. He said a prominent FBI ethics official also favored no action.

But FBI agents who spent years turning up flaws in the FBI's initial inquiries into the events at Ruby Ridge denounced Colgate's refusal to impose sanctions on top FBI officials as "outrageous" and "a whitewash."

The agents told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which learned only last month of Colgate's decision, that they were especially dismayed because senior FBI officials had subjected them to threats and retaliation for conducting a thorough investigation.

The lead agent, John E. Roberts, testified that his wife, an FBI support employee, was hounded from her job in the Boston division and that his attempts to win a promotion have been rejected 14 times.

"Ruby Ridge . . . has been a textbook example of [FBI] abuses," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the committee chairman, said in a statement. "It appears from this that the 'good old boy' network has been allowed to persist at the FBI. It serves to protect some senior FBI executives from the same scrutiny and discipline applied to rank-and-file agents. . . . This double standard is unfair and demoralizing."

Freeh, who left the FBI on June 22, did not respond to a request for comment.

The FBI and Freeh have been buffeted in recent months by the revelation that an agent had secretly spied for Moscow since 1979, by problems with the investigation of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and by the FBI's failure to turn over thousands of documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case. Five separate reviews of FBI conduct are underway.

The aftermath of events at Ruby Ridge -- where an FBI sniper killed the wife of separatist Randy Weaver -- is an example of what even Justice Department officials acknowledge is the FBI's unwillingness to police itself, especially when top officials are involved.

A spokeswoman for Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said he views the situation as "a serious matter." Ashcroft recently ordered the Justice Department's inspector general to take the primary role in investigating allegations of FBI misconduct.

The recommended disciplinary actions against Freeh and others were cited in a July 27 letter to Ashcroft from Leahy and four other committee members seeking documents related to Colgate's decision.

They noted that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and a task force of the Justice Management Division "recommended in 1999 that two senior FBI executives be suspended and that the FBI director and one other FBI agent be censured." However, committee officials refused to disclose the names of the other three FBI officials.

They also noted that officials at Justice had urged that the disciplinary actions taken by Freeh in January 1995 against three other unnamed agents involved in Ruby Ridge be rescinded, because they believed the punishments were not warranted.

Nothing was done about the recommendations until Jan. 3, when Colgate, the assistant attorney general for administration, decided that "no new discipline would be imposed." Colgate, designated by Attorney General Janet Reno as the final arbiter in the matter, also refused to rescind any previous disciplinary actions.

He conveyed his decision in a memo to then-Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. It was not announced publicly or reported to Congress. Leahy said the decision surfaced when he asked direct questions about "final discipline" while preparing for a July 18 FBI oversight hearing.

The reasons for Freeh's proposed censure have not been spelled out, but Leahy suggested a rationale in written questions he sent to the agents who testified at the hearing.

Leahy asked whether it would be a breach of conduct warranting discipline if an FBI official ordered or took part in an inquiry knowing that the person conducting the inquiry was biased or a friend of the target. Leahy also inquired about officials accepting the results of such an investigation when it had "obvious holes."

Agent Roberts, the OPR unit chief in charge of the FBI's internal investigations, said this would amount to "investigative dereliction."

"In the case of the Ruby Ridge investigation," said Roberts, who won the FBI's Ethics Award last year, "we are talking about senior executives in the FBI with many years of experience." He said at the hearing that culpability "goes to the highest levels of the FBI."

FBI agent Frank Perry, who worked with Roberts on the final Ruby Ridge probe, said he agreed, "without question," that discipline would be warranted in the scenario Leahy described.

The 11-day Ruby Ridge standoff began with a shootout between three camouflaged federal marshals and Weaver, his 14-year-old son, Sammy, and a family friend, Kevin Harris. One of the marshals, William Degan, and Sammy Weaver were killed.

FBI sharpshooters were among the hundreds of lawmen who surrounded the Weaver cabin the next day. The snipers were given unprecedented rules of engagement later deemed to be illegal: that "any armed male observed within the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should" be shot.

A federal appeals court ruled this year that "such wartime rules are patently unconstitutional for a police action."

One of the snipers, Lon Horiuchi, killed Randy Weaver's wife, Vicki, as she stood in the doorway of the cabin. Horiuchi has testified that he was trying to kill Harris as Harris was ducking back into the cabin and that he did not see Vicki Weaver. State authorities charged Horiuchi with involuntary manslaughter, but the charge was dropped.

The first FBI review of the debacle was conducted by Robert E. Walsh, a longtime friend of one of the targets of the investigation, then-Assistant Director Larry Potts. Potts was in charge of the siege from FBI headquarters.

A Senate subcommittee investigation later found that Walsh's 1994 report was tilted to justify the shooting of Vicki Weaver. A Justice Department task force had already rejected Walsh's report. The task force concluded that the shot that killed Vicki Weaver was illegal and that FBI officials at headquarters must have known about the controversial rules.

A second internal FBI review was then assigned to longtime agent Charles Mathews III, a friend of another target, then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny O. Coulson, who was Potts's deputy in the Ruby Ridge crisis.

Mathews blamed on-site commander Eugene F. Glenn for the controversial rules of engagement and maintained that they were crafted without the knowledge of anyone at FBI headquarters.

Agents of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility were not assigned to the case until Glenn, who received the stiffest punishment meted out, protested in May 1995 that he had been made a scapegoat. He said Potts approved the rules of engagement and that Coulson knew of them. (Potts and Coulson retired in 1997.)

Former FBI agent John Werner, who also testified at the July 18 hearing, said he and Roberts found that many officials at FBI headquarters were not interviewed and that "very serious allegations of misconduct" had not been thoroughly explored.

The OPR investigators finished their work in June 1999, forwarding the still secret report to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which recommended the disciplinary actions. A Justice Department management division task force -- which reviewed the report -- agreed.

In rejecting the recommendations, Colgate appears to have relied entirely on an April 17, 2000, memo from two of his deputies in which highly questionable assertions were made, Senate investigators said.

Leahy said in his written questions that these included claims that there was "little purpose in 'parsing' the exact language of the [rules of engagement] to determine their legality" or in focusing "on the niceties of" whether the rules said deadly force "could" or "should" be used.

The memo, Leahy said, also questioned whether the FBI director could be disciplined by the Justice Department, noting that he is a presidential appointee and that the judgments of the FBI director "should not [be] the subject of discipline, no matter what others may think of them."

Colgate said that he had the "utmost respect" for Roberts and the three other FBI agents who testified at the July 18 hearing and that he agreed generally that "there is a double standard [at the FBI] and it needs to be corrected."

But he stood by his decision in the Ruby Ridge matter, saying he took into account the advice of his staff and "the views of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility." Although Agent Roberts and his colleagues favored disciplinary action, their boss, FBI Assistant Director Michael DeFeo, did not.

Staff researcher Margaret Smith contributed to this report.

-------- spying

Los Alamos Scientist's Book Creates a New Controversy

New York Times
August 5, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/national/05LEE.html

Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist who was charged with security violations and jailed for nine months, may be on a collision course with the government over whether he has violated security rules in the handling of his forthcoming autobiography.

The bubbling dispute puts the federal government in an awkward position. Critics said that the government imprisoned Dr. Lee because of his ethnic background and federal officials are wary of new accusations of racism. But other would-be authors who fall under the same security rules as Dr. Lee, as well as some federal officials, say fairness demands that the government deal with Dr. Lee no differently than anyone else if he has broken the rules.

Individuals like Dr. Lee who receive security clearances, especially high-level ones that give access to nuclear secrets, pledge to submit any manuscripts to federal censors before letting other people see them. The aim is to prevent the inadvertent release of government secrets.

Dr. Lee submitted his manuscript to federal censors in July, three months before its intended publication, in October. Federal and private security experts said the submission for security review was belated and raised the question of whether people other than the author - like his co- author and his editor, among others - had seen the manuscript. If so, he could have violated federal rules and in theory could find himself facing new charges and penalties.

One person who admitted reading the manuscript, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that at least five people had seen it and that it contained nothing that would get Dr. Lee in trouble.

"This is not national secrets he's revealing," the person said. "It's a nice little story."

Joseph H. Davis, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which runs Los Alamos and is reviewing Dr. Lee's manuscript, said the agency would make no exception to its rules for the scientist. "We're not going to shortcut that process or cut any corners for anybody," he said.

Normally, Mr. Davis added, if the government finds that a manuscript under review has been distributed to others and contains secrets, "then it becomes a question of whether the U.S. Justice Department would pursue that" to see if laws were broken. He said he could not say when the review might be completed.

Mark Holscher of Los Angeles, one of Dr. Lee's lawyers, said the scientist would have no comment. "From our perspective," he said, "Dr. Lee is following the procedures that we believe are required by law for the publication of his book."

Dr. Lee's book, "My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy," is described as an autobiography and was written with Helen Zia, a journalist. It will be published by Hyperion Books.

While the book is scheduled for publication in October the dispute over the security rules and over whether his manuscript contains federal secrets could delay its publication, the security experts say.

Will Schwalbe, the book's editor and the editor in chief of Hyperion Books, which is based in New York, defended Dr. Lee's actions and denounced any attempt to slow the book's publication.

"The way he was treated was a disgrace," Mr. Schwalbe said, referring to how the government handled Dr. Lee's case. "If there were attempts made to stop this book's publication or hinder it, that would add to the disgrace." He said he believed that Dr. Lee is a "patriotic American who has no intention whatsoever of revealing any classified information."

A Lee family friend said that Ms. Zia was deferring all questions to the book's editor. Mr. Schwalbe declined to say whether he had read the manuscript. Usually, any book this close to publication would have been thoroughly edited, with publicists working hard to win favorable reviews for it.

Hyperion's publicity describes the book as a "compelling narrative that takes readers inside Los Alamos," the New Mexico birthplace of the atomic bomb and today a sprawling federal laboratory complex. It says the book's disclosures include why Dr. Lee downloaded nuclear weapons codes to insecure computers, what he really did at Los Alamos for two decades and how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was "hell- bent on proving Wen Ho Lee was a spy, even if they had to resort to deception and fabrication to do so."

In December 1999, prosecutors charged Dr. Lee with 59 counts of mishandling classified information. But in September 2000, after Dr. Lee had spent nine months in jail awaiting trial, a judge freed him after he pleaded guilty to one felony count of mishandling secrets. His jailing, the judged declared, had "embarrassed our entire nation."

Dr. Lee's plea agreement put no restrictions on his writing about his experiences. A publisher's advertisement says the book tells the story of Dr. Lee, his legal battle and "how violations of nuclear security were rampant throughout the weapons laboratory."

People have gotten into serious legal trouble for ignoring the censors, which Mr. Lee has not done. Frank Snepp, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, was accused of violating his security oath after he skipped the security review to publish "Decent Interval," about the fall of Saigon. Eventually, he was forced by the Supreme Court to give the government $140,000 from the book's earnings.

One expert critical of both Dr. Lee's handling of his manuscript and the government's stance in his own case is Danny B. Stillman, who once directed intelligence at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and has a reputation for being a stickler on security rules. On June 18, Mr. Stillman sued the government after his manuscript on the Chinese nuclear arms program had been delayed 18 months by a prepublication security review. He charged that the government was blocking his freedom of speech.

On July 24, Mr. Stillman's lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, who is based in Washington, wrote the Justice Department to warn of a potential for perceived unfairness in Dr. Lee's security review. He said he suspected that the government would find a way to respond quickly to Dr. Lee's submission, "unlike the 19 months my client had to wait." Mr. Stillman and Dr. Lee met at Los Alamos.

Mr. Zaid, in the letter to Gail Walker, the Justice Department trial lawyer assigned to his client's case, said that Dr. Lee "obviously provided his co-author and the publisher with full access" to the manuscript and "may very well have committed an unauthorized disclosure of classified information."

Mr. Zaid added that if his client's case went into prolonged litigation, he would bring the Lee security review "to the court's attention." The two sides are in negotiations.

A senior federal official familiar with government security reviews for secrets, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Lee case was so politically charged that Washington might pull its punches. "They're scared to death of the guy," he said, most especially of new "charges of racism."

A private expert familiar with Dr. Lee's case, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the government was unlikely to go after Dr. Lee even if he did share the manuscript with other people. The reason, he said, is that "you can't write a book in the modern age without violating security rules." For instance, he said, individuals are likely to use home computers to write books rather than going to a secure federal site with computers specially prepared to handle secrets, as the letter of the law requires. "You're not going to prosecute people for that," the private expert said.

Some experts have suggested that the rush to publication and the security dispute is simply a way for Dr. Lee to thumb his nose at the government or for the publisher to win publicity. Others say it reflects simple bumbling or confusion.



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