------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Czech Temelin N-plant resumes testing operations
US sanctions on India to go in weeks
India has 'problems' managing nuclear arms
'Revisionist' History Book Rejected in Japan
Japanese Leader Visits Provocative War Shrine
Russian Nuclear Recycling Test Held
What to Do With the New Russia
Russians Resist Rumsfeld Effort to Set Aside ABM Treaty
Russians Resolute on ABM Pact

MILITARY
NATO Set for New Balkan Venture
U.S. Planes Bomb Radar Site in Southern Iraq
U.S. plans sustained strikes in Iraq
Israel Raids West Bank City, a Suspected Suicide Bomber Base
Brutal Israeli terrorism subsidized by U.S.
Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Mess

OTHER
Clearer Guidelines Help Britain to Advance Stem Cell Work
Stem cells from skin grow into brain tissue
Cloning effort hidden in West Virginia town
White House To Share Tab For World Bank, IMF Protests
Justice Dept. Cites Problems in 2 Inquiries at Los Alamos
U.S. Probe of Nuclear Scientist Assailed
High-Tech FBI Tactics Raise Privacy Questions

ACTIVIST
Italian court orders release of American student



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- czech republic

Czech Temelin N-plant resumes testing operations

CZECH REPUBLIC: August 14, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12006/newsDate/14-Aug-2001/story.htm

PRAGUE - The controversial Soviet-designed Temelin nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic reopened for testing operations on the weekend after a three-month stoppage for repairs and maintenance, plant officials said.

The Temelin reactor lies about 60 km (40 miles) from the German and Austrian borders and has provoked anger in both Berlin and Vienna, which argue its Soviet design does not conform to Western safety standards.

The $2.5 billion power station has suffered a string of technical glitches since it was first turned on for operational testing last year, the most recent of which was turbine problems in the non-nuclear part of the plant.

Plant spokesman Milan Nebesar said operations were renewed at 0550 GMT on Sunday morning. The plant will now resume testing operations and connect to the power grid when it reaches around 30 percent of output, Dana Drabova of the state nuclear power regulator (SUJB) added.

"About 100 or so tests will be run on the first reactor before it returns to 55 percent output. This will take about a month," she said.

Drabova said the plant should reach 30 percent by Wednesday and it's start-up would continue to take place in stages over a number of months. She said operation of the plant at full capacity was still months away.

"As far as we are concerned, we estimate that it will take months. This is the best we can tell you, because schedules are of secondary importance to us. We are interested in safety requirements and in meeting these requirements," Drabova told a Czech radio station.

The Czech government has repeatedly said it has no doubts about the safety of Temelin and would not react to calls to close the plant, which has been upgraded with Western safety systems and fuel.

The plant has become a divisive issue in the Czech Republic's efforts to join the EU. Austria and Germany have both said Temelin could cast a cloud over Prague's bid for membership.

-------- india / pakistan

US sanctions on India to go in weeks

Times of India
TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2001
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=969871278

WASHINGTON: Following a long-awaited South Asia policy review that is now in its final stages, the Bush Administration will begin working with the Congress next month to lift sanctions against India. "It will be a matter of weeks, not months," a senior administration official told The Times of India.

Almost the entire administration and the Congress is now on board on waiver of sanctions against India, except for a small group of hawks in the State Department's Bureau of Non-proliferation. But Robert Einhorn, who heads this group, is leaving the bureau soon and that will remove the last hurdle to the removal of sanctions, administration sources say.

The one last remaining point of debate is whether sanctions should be removed both against India and Pakistan simultaneously. The administration is split on this issue, with one section wanting to move quickly on India, and another group, lobbied hard by the Pakistanis, arguing that unless Islamabad too gets the waiver, it will get left behind and "the issue will be difficult to revisit later."

In any case, the administration can only lift nuclear-related sanctions against Pakistan. Other sanctions invited by the overthrow of a civilian government by the military regime will remain in place till democracy is restored in that country. The Pakistanis have been lobbying fervently for removal of some sanctions, including the Pressler Amendment that has forbid aid since 1990 for crossing the nuclear threshold. The Pakistani-American community has been commandeered to try and ensure that Islamabad does not get left behind on what it thinks is a gravy train.

"They are terrified that they are getting further and further behind...that they are becoming completely irrelevant in this town and no one is listening to them," a Congressional source said. Pakistan's foreign secretary Inam-ul-Haq will be here shortly to press the administration for easing of sanctions among other things.

The Indian officialdom has shown little interest -- and some disdain -- over Pakistan's effort to clamber on to the aid train. Some officials noted with delight a lengthy page one Washington Post story -- one of the several in the US media in recent times -- focusing heavily on Indo-US ties with almost no reference to Pakistan.

The Washington Post quoted Richard Armitage as saying State Department officials have held preliminary talks with Capitol Hill and will move forward "at a speed visible to the naked eye" in easing sanctions once Congress returnsfrom summer recess. While commentaries in the American media frequently make a direct reference to Washington's need to cultivate India as a counterweight to China, the Washington Post noted -- to the satisfaction of Indian mandarins -- that "US officials are scrupulous about not depicting their emerging ties with India as an initiative to counter China "an objective that could also offend many Indians long proud of their independent role inworld affairs."

Still, it is no secret in this town that the US endeavour in this regard are based largely on the emerging security paradigm that sees China as a potential competitor and India as a possible ally. Both the Washington Post article and a separate commentary in Salon Magazine spoke of increasing Indo-US military cooperation.

The two sides have been holding some modest joint exercises that are going to be expanded in the coming months. Washington has indicated that it is ready to revive the Defence Policy Group meetings that were suspended in the wake of the May 1998 Shakti nuclear tests. The meeting may take place in December following a visit to the US of the Indian naval chief Admiral Sushil Kumar, the senior-most among the service chiefs, Indian officials said.

There are also plans for training American soldiers in jungle and high-altitude warfare and counter-insurgency at Indian centers. Already, personnel from elite Indian forces have been coming to the US for instructions in mines and explosive detection.

However, some Indian officials -- mostly those directly connected to the country's military and science and technology establishments -- cautioned that despite all the hoopla on the diplomatic front, there had been very little movement on the ground insofar as technology transfers were concerned.

--------

India has 'problems' managing nuclear arms

By Atul Aneja
The Hindu,
August 14, 2001
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2001/08/14/stories/02140003.htm

NEW DELHI, AUG. 13. Armed with limited options to deliver its nuclear weapons, India is facing some difficulties in redefining the military command structure for managing land and air-based atomic weapons.

So far, it has been working on building a triad of land, air and sea-based platforms for delivering nuclear weapons and is integrating them under a coherent military command. As of now, the Agni-II strategic missile is the only land-based weapon the Government has decided to induct into its nuclear arsenal.

According to highly-placed Government sources, it has been decided not to arm the 150-km. range Prithvi missile or any of its variants with a nuclear warhead. The sources also said contrary to existing perceptions, the so-called Agni-III, with a range of around 3,000 km., did not exist. India, however, can do with a new missile, which is out of the Agni pedigree but has an intercontinental reach, to provide greater depth to its nuclear deterrent. Some Indian Air Force planes can also deliver nuclear weapons.

Crucial decision

In June, the Government decided to hand over the Agni-II to the Army. The decision was primarily based on three considerations. First, the Army was the largest of the three forces. Second, it had an infrastructure that could be adapted for storing and deploying the Agni-II with the minimum modifications and cost. Besides, it had the maximum experience in handling the Prithvi ballistic missile.

In determining a military chain of command for its nuclear arsenal, the Government has been guided by the draft nuclear doctrine advocating a small but effective nuclear arsenal and the post-Kargil recommendations of the Group of Ministers on higher defence management.

In defining the new defence architecture, the Government has tried to minimise the disturbance to its existing military hierarchy in the conventional field. It has also sought to separate the tri-service nuclear element for placement under a parallel hierarchy headed by a Chief of Defence Staff. The military chain of command, as far as nuclear weapons go, is therefore headed by the CDS.

After studying the command and control structures of the major nuclear powers including China, it has been decided to establish a Strategic Command. Reporting to the CDS, the strategic command will be tri-service in nature, with representatives from the Army, Navy and the IAF presiding over the nuclear assets.

New architecture

The unveiling of the new defence architecture, however, has been delayed as the cross-linkages between the military and the political leadership for deployment of nuclear weapons is still being worked out. For instance, while it is logical that any decision related to the use of nuclear weapons will be ultimately taken by the Prime Minister, a series of fall-back tie-ups between the political hierarchy and the military, in case the Prime Minister, for some reason, is unavailable for taking a decision, is yet to be finalised. In other words, it is yet to be decided who will hold the nuclear trigger in case the Prime Minister is unable to do so?

The Government's effort to redefine a new command and control set-up has also experienced other hiccups. The IAF is apparently reluctant to being absorbed in a new tri-service architecture. The IAF, as widely reported, first opposed any change in higher defence management even during the early stages of the nuclear debate following the Pokhran tests. It is also not too happy with the likely formation of a strategic command where all the three services will be equally represented.

In a note to the Defence Minister after the handover of the Agni- II to the Army, the IAF reiterated the demand for an apex nuclear air command under it to spearhead the nuclear forces. Sources said it was also not too keen on the strategic tri-service Andaman Nicobar Command, which may be able to exert an influence along the shipping lanes heading towards South-East Asia.

-------- japan

'Revisionist' History Book Rejected in Japan

By Doug Struck and Shigehiko Togo
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; 5:22 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10816-2001Aug14?language=printer

TOKYO, Aug. 14 - Local school districts in Japan are overwhelmingly refusing to use a controversial history textbook that South Korea and China say justifies Japan's wartime aggression.

The expected rejection by almost all of Japan's 542 school districts will relieve some pressure on the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who Monday defied protests of Japan's Asian neighbors by paying homage at a shrine for the country's war dead.

The junior high school textbook, authored by "revisionist" historians who say they want to engender more national pride, has led to angry demonstrations in South Korea and sharp rebukes from China. The book had been approved by Japan's Education Ministry as one of eight choices for junior high school history classes.

The deadline for school districts to select textbooks is Wednesday. Surveys by news agencies and a group campaigning for rejection of the text say only a few schools for disabled children and some private schools have accepted the text.

"We know the result for 98 percent of the [public] schools, and none has adopted the textbook," said Yoshifumi Tawara, head of the Children and Textbooks Japan Network. "I think the belief that we cannot let this dangerous textbook be handed to our children touched the hearts of many people, and they worked against it."

In South Korea, which was under harsh Japanese occupation for 35 years and where anger against the text was high, Foreign Minister Han Seung Soo predicted in an interview last week that the action by local school boards would partly defuse the controversy.

"From the beginning of this issue we knew there were many Japanese who did not agree with this textbook," he said. "It shows the Japanese people are wise enough not to accept the Japanese government version."

Dozens of private and public exchange programs - ranging from elementary school visits to top-level political contacts - have been canceled by South Korea to show its opposition to the Japanese textbook. Last month, a Korean rock band performing in Japan shredded a Japanese flag. And Korean officials warn that the history controversy could sour the mood of the World Cup 2002 games, which are being co-hosted by Japan and South Korea.

After Koizumi's election in April, South Korea and China had strongly pressed the new prime minister to order revisions in the textbook. But Koizumi refused, fueling outside suspicions of his views on Japanese nationalism. Koizumi's visit Monday to the Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 of Japan's top war criminals are enshrined, insured that Japan's treatment of its wartime responsibility will remain a subject of dispute in the region.

"What happened yesterday hurt not only Japanese people, not only China, but many Asian countries," said Zhang Ye Fei, a Chinese student at Quing Hwa University in Beijing, who was in Tokyo today for a forum on historical disputes. Japan "has to accept the truth of history. The true historical fact bridges the past to the future," he said.

The textbook controversy centered on a text that its critics say soft-pedals Japan's conquests in East Asia in the first half of the 1900s and suggests Japan was forced to go to war. Critics protested that the book omits reference to sexual servitude forced upon thousands of women under the Japanese military, minimizes atrocities committed by Japan in the war, and softens the harsh reality of Japan's occupation.

"This book approves of war of aggression and beautifies it. It institutionalizes colonization, and draws Japanese history with the emperor at its core," said Tawara. "The whole movement and content of this textbook are parts of an effort to shift Japan to become a country that can fight in wars."

Tawara said his group had organized more than 1,000 meetings, lectures and "study groups" in its campaign to dissuade public schools from adopting the text. They collected thousands of signatures, distributed 250,000 pamphlets, and put advertisements in Korean and Japanese papers, he said.

There also was pressure from those supporting the text. At a rally last week, more than 500 people jammed into a hall in Tokyo under a giant Japanese flag of the rising sun to support Koizumi's plans to visit Yasukuni Shrine and to applaud what speakers described as "a good move" by the government to approve the textbook.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has proclaimed the tome "a good textbook." He complained that "the state of education is truly miserable" in urging education authorities to "do your duty" in making the textbook choices.

Ishihara's Tokyo Metropolitan Government ordered the book used for 1,641 handicapped students over whom it has jurisdiction. Ehime prefecture, in southeast Japan, also approved the book for use in handicapped classrooms. But local school boards have the final say over most public school curriculums. A few school districts publicly considered approving the text, but retreated under criticism from parents and the public.

Tawara said about eight private schools have accepted the text. He said their curriculum is nationalist and "we had expected this to happen."

The authors of the disputed text, the Japanese Society of History Textbook Reform, declined comment, saying they would speak after the deadline.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this story.

----

Japanese Leader Visits Provocative War Shrine
Asian Neighbors Voice Anger Over Gesture

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5398-2001Aug13?language=printer

TOKYO, Aug. 13 -- Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reopened the wounds of the past by paying homage today at the symbolic heart of right-wing militarism, a shrine that honors the hanged leaders of Japan's war machine.

Koizumi made a gesture to warnings from China and South Korea by retreating from his pledge to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine on Wednesday, the anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II. But that gesture was swept aside by a chorus of outrage from neighboring countries after he made his sudden visit late this afternoon.

"The Chinese government and people lodge their fierce anger and dissatisfaction," China's Foreign Ministry said.

South Korea's government said it "cannot find the words to express our concern that a Japanese prime minister would pay homage to war criminals." Fourteen of the top Japanese war leaders, of whom seven were hanged and seven died in prison, are honored at Yasukuni, a shrine of the Shinto religion that distilled worship of the emperor into fervent nationalism in the war.

South Korea's ruling Millennium Democratic Party said the visit was like "throwing a dagger into Asian countries. The death knell has just rung for Japan's conscience."

Activists in Hong Kong protested the visit. In Manila, Philippine women who were among the thousands forced to provide sexual services to the Japanese military during the war said the visit "honors Japanese soldiers who raped women."

Earlier in the day, about 20 South Koreans cut off their little fingers in public to protest Koizumi's planned visit. Singapore television interspersed its news with film clips showing Imperial Japanese Army firing squads executing Asian people, and soldiers burying others alive.

In Japan, Koizumi's move brought a mix of reaction.

"His visit expresses the frank attitudes of the Japanese. It's a good thing," said Akira Nishimura, 77, standing on the grounds of the shrine, a broad pathway ending at high-gabled wooden temples where the spirits of Japan's war dead are said to reside.

"The other countries have a right to complain. But we don't have to obey them," said Ko Ikuta, 40.

Koizumi's visit came as South Korea and China were fuming over a Japanese junior high school history text, approved by the government, that they have said plays down Japan's wartime aggression. These have fueled a suspicion by Japan's neighbors that it remains unrepentant for its conduct during the war and that Koizumi harbors right-wing sympathies.

The prime minister sought to offset that appearance by explaining his visit to the shrine with strong pacifist language. Japan caused "immeasurable disaster and pain, and left a still uncurable scar on many people in the region. Japan should never again walk on the path to war," he said in a statement.

"I wish, in light of our country's regrettable history, to take this to heart, to express my deepest regret and remorse toward all the victims of war," his statement said.

But, four months into office, Koizumi's failure to put to rest the ghosts of Japan's wartime past has created his first major foreign policy test. His decision to visit the shrine, overriding the advice of his Foreign Ministry and political allies, negated an opportunity to defuse the history issue: Japan's school districts are rejecting use of the disputed history text one by one.

Instead, the visit appears likely to put his administration at odds with Japan's neighbors and set back its long efforts to improve relations with South Korea and China.

Koizumi acted swiftly after his decision was announced late today. Wearing a formal morning coat, Koizumi arrived at the shrine and walked briskly up the steps of the inner temple, lead by a silk-robed Shinto priest.

The plain room in the cedar temple is said to hold the spirits of 2.5 million dead from Japan's civil and foreign wars stretching back to 1868. Their names are enshrined in calligraphy on paper. In 1978, priests overseeing Yasukuni quietly included the names of the war criminals and refused calls to remove them after the act was discovered the following year.

The broad grounds of the shrine, bracketed by three huge torii gates, have become the symbolic focus of Japan's conservative, nationalistic and right-wing politics. Those on the edge of that political wing have rejected accusations that Japanese soldiers committed atrocities during their invasions of Korea, China and much of Southeast Asia, and justified Japanese militarism by saying the nation was forced to go to war.

"The Greater East Asian War was basically self-defense," argued Tatsuo Inami, 73, who stood at the shrine clutching two small paper flags with the red rising sun. Inami said his older brother, who died on a submarine near Okinawa during the war, was enshrined at Yasukuni. He said it was "only natural that Koizumi worship here."

Just why Koizumi has been so adamant about going to Yasukuni, risking censure at home and abroad, has been the subject of much commentary here. Some said he was pleasing the conservative wing of his party to gain political leverage for tough economic reforms ahead. Others said the move showed Koizumi's true right-wing politics. Other analysts said the shrine visit was simply the result of the prime minister's personal convictions that he should honor the country's war dead.

Koizumi said today's "peace and prosperity is built upon their noble sacrifice." That formulation angers the countries that suffered under Japan's often brutal sweep through East Asia, culminating in Japan's 1945 defeat.

Koizumi said he had decided against going on the anniversary on Wednesday because the visit "could, against my intention, lead people of neighboring countries to cast doubts on our country's basic principle of renouncing war and embracing peace."

Only one Japanese prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, in 1985, had previously made an official visit to Yasukuni. Others have made visits they described as private.

Koizumi declined to characterize his visit, although he arrived with a government entourage and signed the visitors' book with his formal title, "Prime Minister of the Cabinet, Koizumi Junichiro." An aide at the shrine said Koizumi bowed only once; by not following the religious custom of bowing twice and clapping twice for the gods, Koizumi followed a prescription set by Nakasone to abide by constitutional strictures requiring separation of religion and state.

-------- russia

Russian Nuclear Recycling Test Held

August 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- A Russian facility selected to process spent nuclear fuel that Russia plans to import has carried out the first test of a furnace for recycling the waste, an official said Tuesday.

President Vladimir Putin signed a law last month allowing Russia to import spent nuclear fuel, despite protests by liberals and environmentalists who insist it will turn Russia into the world's nuclear dump. Proponents say it will create jobs and bring in money.

For a fee, spent fuel will be sent by armored train to the Mayak facility near Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. The recycling process extracts useable nuclear material from the spent nuclear rods, while improving safety by reducing the material's potential to be used in weapons, the Russian nuclear ministry has said.

Mayak has staged the first tests of a furnace for turning radioactive waste that remains after fuel processing into glass, the facility's deputy chief Yevgeny Kyzhkov told the Interfax news agency.

Engineers used ordinary glass in place of spent fuel during the trial run, but later this month will stage tests using solutions that imitate radioactive waste, Kyzhkov said. He did not specify when the test took place.

Mayak has done no vitrification -- or processing into glass -- of nuclear waste since 1997, the report said.

Mayak has been the site of several accidents, including a 1957 waste facility explosion that contaminated 9,200 square miles. The region has been called the most radioactive place on the planet due to accidents and Soviet-era nuclear waste dumping into lakes and rivers.

--------

What to Do With the New Russia

Los Angeles Times
By Henry Kissinger
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7007-2001Aug13?language=printer

In its sixth month in office, the Bush administration stands on the threshold of a new era of post-Cold War international relations. Despite occasional tactical clumsiness, it has grasped the unique opportunity that, for the first time since World War II, no major nation is in a position to challenge the United States; and, more important, that every major nation has more to gain from cooperating with the United States than from confronting it.

A good example is the American relationship with post-Communist Russia, which has the potential to become as symbolic of the new era as the opening to China was after 1972. President Vladimir Putin's unexpected agreement to discuss both offensive levels of nuclear weapons and modifications of existing missile defense arrangements shows that the first leader of a genuinely non-Communist Russia is coming to grips with the emerging international realities.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had made their careers in the life-and-death struggles that led to their positions on the Politburo. They were used to the Soviet Union as a superpower equal in reach -- at least in its own perception -- to the United States. Instinctively believing that Russia's turmoil was but a brief interruption before resumption of its mission, they oscillated between posing as a superpower side by side with the American president and fitful stabs at traditional Soviet policies based on opposition to the United States in regions such as the Middle East and the Balkans.

By contrast, Putin's career was made in the bureaucracy of the KGB and later as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The former position placed a premium on analysis of the international situation; the latter brought Putin face to face with the dilemmas of post-Soviet reconstruction. Like his predecessors, he wants to restore Russia's role, but unlike them he understands this is a long-term process.

In terms of Russian history, Putin is best understood as comparable to Prince Alexander Gorchakov, who conducted Russian foreign policy for 25 years after the Russian debacle in the Crimean War in 1856. Patient, conciliatory policies and avoiding crises allowed Gorchakov to restore an isolated and gravely weakened country to a leading international position.

Thus Putin, in his first policy statements as premier in 1999 and later as president in 2000, appealed to Russian pride by putting forward the restoration of Russian greatness as a national objective. But he showed his understanding of the limited means available by admitting that even a heady annual growth of 8 percent for 15 years would allow Russia to reach only the per capita income of present-day Portugal.

Putin's priorities appear to be the recovery of the Russian economy; the restoration of Russia as a great power, preferably by cooperation with the United States but, if necessary, by building countervailing power centers; combating Islamic fundamentalism; establishing a new security relationship toward Europe, especially with respect to NATO expansion to the Baltic states; and solving the missile defense issue.

These priorities explain why Putin has not pushed this agreement on missile defense to the point of confrontation. A clash with the United States would drain Russian resources and encourage a return to postwar patterns. Cooperation would symbolize a new era and perhaps bring some technological progress in shared anti-missile technology. And the price would be tolerable: The size of the Russian nuclear and missile arsenal will prevent any missile defense foreseeable for the next quarter-century to threaten Russia's ultimate retaliatory capability.

On the political plane, the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism is probably the dominant Russian concern. Russia's leaders perceive Afghanistan's Taliban and to a lesser extent Iran and Pakistan as threats to the newly independent states of Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, formerly Soviet republics. Furthermore, Moscow fears that militant ideologies could stimulate irredentism in Russia's southern Muslim provinces. America has its own concerns about the spread of fundamentalism toward Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and into the Middle East. An effort should be made to achieve concurrent or at least compatible policies with Russia on the Middle East, including Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and, at least as far as Russia is concerned, the Balkans.

During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States were convinced that a gain in influence by either would amount to a weakening of the global position of the other. The basic strategy of each side was to reduce the influence of the other. Under post-Cold War conditions, neither side can make lasting gains at the expense of the other in the Middle East. Russia may believe it is foreclosing an American option by tolerating assistance to Iran in the nuclear and missile fields. Some American policy-makers may perceive comparable opportunities in other regions of the Middle East. But in the end, the test of either country's policy will not be whether one or the other has greater influence in Tehran but whether the Tehran regime alters its policies and conduct. Unless such a change occurs, both Russia and America are under threat.

There are, however, clear limits beyond which neither country may be able to go. America cannot, in the name of opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, acquiesce in Russia's methods for suppressing the upheavals in Chechnya. Nor can America be indifferent should Islamic fundamentalism become a pretext to force the newly independent states of Central Asia back under Russian strategic domination. The safety of Israel remains a fundamental American goal. Russia has not in the past displayed a similar concern -- though this attitude may be changing on the part of some Russian leaders who are beginning to view Israel as a strategic counterweight to Islamic fundamentalism. Finally, it is possible that the competition for access to oil and the routes for its delivery will prove a major obstacle to policy coordination. In the end, the possibilities of Russo-American cooperation regarding Islamic fundamentalism depend on the ability to carve out a passage between Cold War tendencies and reigniting a new competition for dominance.

The most immediate challenge to Russo-American relations is NATO expansion, especially to the Baltic states, which is on the agenda for 2002. The Soviet subjugation of these states in 1940 was never recognized by the United States. And surely no group of nations is more deserving of protection by the Western democracies than these small countries incapable of posing a threat to any neighbor.

At the same time, for Russia, the advance of NATO to within 40 miles of St. Petersburg, into countries considered by it until the last decade as part of the Soviet Union, is bound to be disquieting no matter what reassurances are given. Baltic membership in NATO would produce a strong Russian reaction, if only to maintain the Putin government's domestic standing. On the other hand, it is morally and politically impossible to ignore or postpone the appeals of the Baltic democracies -- especially in view of the support given to their entry into NATO by President Bush in his recent Warsaw speech. Three options present themselves:

(1) To face down Russia by admitting all the Baltic states with some security assurances such as agreeing not to station NATO forces on Baltic territory (selective membership for some but not all Baltic states would solve nothing; it raises all of the psychological and political problems and creates a festering sore).

(2) If the European Union were serious about strengthening its defenses and if it were prepared to assign a meaningful mission to the projected European force, a solution might be accelerated membership of the Baltic states in the European Union, coupled with a security guarantee by both the European Union and the United States but without the formal machinery of the NATO military structure.

(3) Treating eligibility for NATO not so much as a security issue as a recognition of political and economic evolution. On this basis, any country meeting stated criteria could be declared eligible, including Russia some years after the Baltics, when its domestic evolution has progressed further. This has been hinted at by Putin and urged explicitly by various of his advisers.

It is a seductive proposition, but before embarking on this road, careful thought must be given to its implications.

Russian membership in NATO would end the guarantee against Russian intervention most desired by countries formerly under Soviet occupation, because NATO provides no guarantee against attacks from other members of the alliance. Indeed, it would put an end to NATO as heretofore conceived. For an alliance protects a specific territory; once Russia joins, the alliance will be either a general collective security system or an alliance of North Atlantic nations against China -- a step with grave long-range implications.

It is highly desirable for Russia's relations with NATO to improve to a point that the question of security disappears -- much as happened between Germany and France after World War II. But to formalize such an outcome to facilitate Baltic membership in NATO is both premature and ironic.

Russia should be welcomed immediately into a North Atlantic political system, but membership in the military arrangements should be deferred. This poses the following challenges:

• Russo-American relations need to be lifted from the psychological to the political level; they cannot be made to depend on the personal relations of leaders. This requires concreteness of objective and substance. With respect to missile defense, it is unlikely that Russia will give us carte blanche, as President Putin has made clear in his conversations with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; discussions will have to revolve around some specific scheme or schemes; some form of understanding that has some binding quality has to evolve -- though I agree with the administration that the upcoming discussion should not give Russia a veto and that some time limit must be established.

• In the political field, the necessities of the present must be related to hopes for the future. This applies especially to America's NATO relationship, which is our only institutional link to Europe. But it applies as well to America's relations with China, Japan and Israel.

• By the same token, Russia will seek to maintain its influence in regions of geopolitical and historical importance to the Russian state and as a hedge should the effort to create a new basis for Russo-American relations flounder -- as is seen in its recent friendship treaties with China and North Korea.

• All this imposes a new need for imagination in American foreign policy. With a wise foreign policy, America for the foreseeable future should be in a position to create incentives that cause both Russia and China to stand to gain more from cooperative relations with the United States than from confrontation with it.

• The frozen relationships of the Cold War no longer fit a world in which there are no principal adversaries and in which the very distinction between friends and adversaries is in transition in many regions. In such circumstances, the United States needs to design a diplomacy that prevents threats to fundamental American interests and values without designating a specific adversary in advance, and above all by a policy based on the widest possible international consensus on positive goals.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.

-------- treaties

Russians Resist Rumsfeld Effort to Set Aside ABM Treaty

New York Times
August 14, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/14/international/14RUMS.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, Aug. 13 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met President Vladimir V. Putin and his defense minister today for talks that threw into sharp relief the disagreements over whether to deploy missile defenses, how to slash nuclear arsenals and whether arms control talks can even be the tool to bridge their differences.

It was a day when Mr. Putin spoke of negotiations and Mr. Rumsfeld spoke of consultations to create a new relationship in which treaties are unnecessary.

When Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov said any missile defense deployment would have to be tightly linked to reducing warheads, Mr. Rumsfeld only agreed that the two issues were related.

"We still think that the ABM treaty is one of the major important elements of the complex of international treaties on which the international stability is based," Mr. Ivanov said.

Later, Mr. Rumsfeld urged again that "the Antiballistic Missile Treaty be set aside, and new arrangements between our two countries be established, so that we will in fact be able to take steps to no longer be vulnerable to handfuls of ballistic missiles."

But in welcoming Mr. Rumsfeld to the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said that the treaty was unequivocably a part of the security relationship between the two countries and that it was bundled with current treaties that limit nuclear arsenals. "For us, it is unconditionally linked with both the Start II and Start I Treaties," he said, referring to strategic arms reduction treaties negotiated between Washington and Moscow. "I would like to underline that."

If the two countries are to move forward in their talks, Mr. Putin said, Russia requires specifics on proposed levels of offensive weapons, a timetable for cuts, understandings on verification and transparency and confidence-building. In essence, Mr. Putin was demanding detailed and formal negotiations.

Mr. Rumsfeld demurred. Afterward, he said, "With respect to how these discussions and consultations will evolve, I think that's an open question." The absence of cold war hostilities simply makes arms talks unnecessary, he added.

President Bush, after meeting Mr. Putin last month in Genoa, ordered his national security team to begin consulting with Russia on missile defenses and reducing arsenals. The president envisions a framework of relations that would dispose of treaties and seek to bind the United States and Russia more broadly and more loosely through trade and economic and military ties.

A senior Pentagon official said, "The dialogue is proceeding as we expected it would." Mr. Rumsfeld stressed that he would not discuss specific proposals for shrinking the offensive arsenal because a strategic Pentagon review will be completed "in the next month or two." Asked to describe the direction the study would push the arsenal, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "There is no doubt in my mind that we'll be able to go down to substantially lower numbers."

Mr. Rumsfeld also said the United States could not possibly brief the Russians on its exact plan because it is in initial research, development and testing. The tentative schedule for testing is widely expected to violate ABM limits by late next spring.

Mr. Rumsfeld's mission was to illustrate the administration's broader approach to security ties with the Russians, and he trumpeted the virtue of investment.

--------

Russians Resolute on ABM Pact
Rumsfeld Blocked in Push For National Missile Shield

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A09

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5401-2001Aug13.html

MOSCOW, Aug. 13 -- President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials rebuffed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's efforts to secure a joint withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty today, telling him that treaty commitments on national missile defense and on reducing strategic nuclear arsenals are "unconditionally linked."

After meeting with Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov at the Kremlin, Rumsfeld said the talks focused on ways both nations could "move beyond" the ABM Treaty so the Bush administration could pursue its ambitious missile defense agenda.

But Putin told reporters that Russia would not withdraw from the treaty and said he wanted to "underline" its connection with both the first and second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START).

Ivanov, who held additional talks with Rumsfeld at the Ministry of Defense, said Russia feels "no compunction to leave one or any other treaty or accord which we currently have signed" and called for comprehensive negotiations on a new "series of limits."

Putin noted that he and President Bush had agreed last month in Genoa, Italy, to link consideration of the administration's missile defense plan with steep reductions in both countries' massive nuclear stockpiles.

He called today for clearly defined "thresholds" for missile defenses and cuts in offensive warheads, and said any new agreement would require provisions to assure transparency and verification.

"We now have to look at how we limit offensive systems, and how we link it very carefully to defensive systems," Ivanov said. "And it becomes a very, very complicated algorithm. . . . I don't see any possible way to take something that complicated and do it in only a couple of months." He added, however, that the sides were "talking very energetically and actively about it."

Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials have said the administration's plans for missile defense tests and construction of testing facilities in Alaska would "bump up against" the ABM Treaty within months, not years.

Rumsfeld said today the administration will announce within a month or two how sharply it plans to reduce the U.S. arsenal of approximately 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads and added that he had no problem simultaneously discussing both nuclear reductions and missile defenses with the Russians. But he made it clear that the issues were merely related, not linked -- meaning that the United States would not promise to eliminate a certain number of warheads in return for Russia's agreement to change or scrap the ABM Treaty to allow further missile defense research, development and testing.

Last month, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told Congress that a new security framework with Russia would not involve "formal agreements with hundreds of pages that count every warhead and pound of throw-weight. These are not going to be traditional arms control negotiations with small armies of negotiators inhabiting the best hotels in Geneva for months at a time."

The ABM Treaty was negotiated by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev to prohibit precisely the kind of nationwide defenses against long-range missiles that the Bush administration wants to construct. During the Cold War, missile defenses were seen as destabilizing in that they encouraged the United States and the Soviet Union to build more and more missiles to overwhelm those defenses.

President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed START I in 1991 that called for each side to limit its offensive nuclear weapons to 6,000. While Russia's arsenal now numbers about 6,000 warheads, the United States has 7,000 and is still in the process of reaching the START I limit.

START II was signed by the Bush and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia in early 1993. It calls for each side to reduce its arsenal to between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads, but it has not gone into effect because the Russian legislature attached conditions that have not been met by the United States.

Ivanov noted today that Russia has made it clear on numerous occasions that it favors both sides reducing their arsenals to about 1,500 warheads each. Rumsfeld said he would recommend a number to President Bush within one or two months as part of a nuclear forces review underway at the Pentagon.

But Rumsfeld said the question is complicated by numerous factors. The number of warheads, he said, must be viewed in terms of possible threats, and by alliances of nations with nuclear capabilities that the United States considers threats to international security.

Rumsfeld began the day by meeting with a group of Russian journalists, who pressed him on missile defense issues and the accuracy of a 1998 report on ballistic missile proliferation he directed at the behest of Congress.

Rumsfeld defended the report, which now serves as a foundation of the administration's missile defense agenda. The report said several countries identified as threats could develop ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States and Europe over the next five years. That, Rumsfeld said, is precisely what has happened.

"North Korea has tested a three-stage ballistic missile within that time and demonstrated the very thing that people said states like North Korea and Iran were not capable of doing -- taking Scud [missile] technology and modifying it for multiple-stage ballistic missiles," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld said the report also noted these states could use other means beyond long-range ballistic missiles to deliver chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, including ship-launched missiles fired from much shorter range.

"A rogue state has done that -- they have fired a ballistic missile from a ship," Rumsfeld told the reporters, saying that the identity of the country in question was classified.

Furthermore, Rumsfeld said, states interested in developing ballistic missile capabilities could move their weapons to a country in closer proximity to the intended target, or could test a weapon in another country to mask what they are developing.


-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

NATO Set for New Balkan Venture
Cautious Military Planners Set Out Steps for Sending Troops Into Macedonia

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5394-2001Aug13?language=printer

BRUSSELS, Aug. 13 -- With the signing today of a shaky peace deal between the Macedonian government and the ethnic Albanian minority, NATO is about to launch another Balkan venture that officials say is fraught with uncertainty and risk.

A cease-fire and a peace agreement were the prerequisites for NATO to begin Operation Essential Harvest, in which 3,500 NATO troops would be deployed to Macedonia to collect weapons and ammunition from the National Liberation Army (NLA), an ethnic Albanian rebel force. Although the rebels were not a party to the peace agreement, their leaders have said they will honor it.

Officially, NATO wants to move soon. "There is a sense that it has to be done rather quickly," said a NATO spokesman, Yves Brodeur. "The more we wait, the higher the chances this may all unravel."

But NATO's military planners appear to be more cautious, recognizing, they say, that many questions remain unanswered and that the troops could be entering a still-volatile situation marked by mistrust on the part of both parties.

As a result, it could be weeks before the main NATO force arrives in Macedonia. The British-led mission would include troops from the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

"NATO must negotiate with the Macedonian military authorities and the NLA," said a military spokesman. Among the unanswered questions, he said, were: "Where are the land mines? And who does the mine-clearing?"

The basis for the peace deal and the NATO deployment is an agreement by the rebels to voluntarily hand over their weapons. But that raises more questions: How many weapons are there to be handed in? Where are the weapons caches located? And how can NATO verify that all the weapons are being turned in?

"Voluntary disarmament is a tricky issue," the military spokesman said. "To what extent do we trust them? Why should we send troops in to a risky operation if we can't trust the parties?" He added, "We want to be careful, and we are hesitant to be pushed time-wise."

NATO officials said they were aware that other international military operations have bogged down, or failed, over the problem of disarming warring factions that don't want to surrender all their weapons. The U.N. Operation in Somalia in 1993, for example, collapsed into a guerrilla warfare when U.N. troops began trying to disarm Somali factions whose leaders had committed to disarmament in a peace agreement. Northern Ireland's peace process has stalled over the issue of the Irish Republican Army handing in its weapons.

Once weapons are identified, other questions are raised. What is the state of the weapons and ammunition? And can they be moved safely over mountain roads, without danger of, for example, an explosion?

All the questions seem to signal a protracted period before Operation Essential Harvest begins. In the meantime, several procedural steps must take place.

First, after being formally informed that the cease-fire and peace accord are in place, NATO ambassadors will meet Thursday to discuss whether conditions seem right for deployment. They will assess how well the cease-fire is holding, whether there is a common understanding of NATO's role in seizing the weapons and whether the insurgents have volunteered to disarm. Another unresolved issue is how the Macedonian population accepts the peace accord, since that will determine the reception received by NATO troops.

The ambassadors then will likely want time to consult with their governments, meaning a decision to begin deployment probably would not come before next week, at the earliest.

Once that decision is made, the next step would be to send in a small advance team. One military official said this initial "implementation group" would likely consist of no more than 20 people, whose job will be to negotiate with all the parties on the details of the weapons handover. They will also be asking for detailed maps locating land mines and working out the question of who will be responsible for de-mining.

The length of this group's mission -- Phase I of the operation -- remains uncertain. Brodeur, the NATO spokesman, said "we don't know how long that will be. . . . 10 days? Five days?"

As with any military operation, there is also danger that the NATO troops could be attacked. Civilian and military officials said that while they hope the troops will be entering into "a permissive environment," the soldiers will also be operating under robust rules of engagement that will allow them to defend themselves.

And finally there is the question of time. NATO is eager to avoid being drawn into another open-ended Balkan mission. There are still 20,000 NATO troops in Bosnia with no prospect of leaving soon, and another 40,000 in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The Macedonia operation is scheduled to last 30 days from the time weapons collection begins. While officials said it might take longer, they are reluctant to say so publicly.

"We're going in with a very specific mandate, to collect those weapons," Brodeur said. "When that's done, we're out of there."

-------- iraq

U.S. Planes Bomb Radar Site in Southern Iraq

August 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For the second time in a less than a week, U.S. warplanes bombed a radar site in southern Iraq Tuesday in another attempt to disable increasingly effective air defenses used against allied pilots, the Pentagon said.

Tuesday's strike was much smaller than an attack by dozens of British and American allied planes against three sites Friday and a strike by 24 allied planes against five targets in February, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

The 8:15 am. EDT strike Tuesday targeted only one site, a fire-control radar that helps Iraq guide its missiles and is located near An Nasiriyah, about 170 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Friday's strike was against Iraqi military communication, radar and missile sites.

Air Force F-16s bombed the site with precision guided munitions and returned safely to their base, Whitman said.

``This radar has been an element of the Iraqi air defense system that has been directly contributing to effectiveness of their integrated air defense system,'' he said.

In Iraq, the air defense spokesman, quoted by the Iraqi News Agency, confirmed the raid but made no mention of casualties. He said the U.S. and British planes flew out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with the support of the governments of those countries.

Iraq in recent months has stepped up efforts to shoot down the allied planes patrolling ``no fly'' zones in both southern and northern Iraq. The patrols began shortly after the end of the 1991 Gulf War to protect Shiite rebels against attacks by government forces and to keep Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from threatening his neighbors.

``If Iraq were to cease its threatening actions, coalition strikes would cease as well,'' said a statement from the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.

There have been more than 1,000 separate incidents of Iraqi surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire against coalition aircraft in the two zones since December 1998, including more than 375 this year, officials have said. Allied planes have struck back two dozen times, with the largest raids being in February and last week.

Officials have said that Iraq has rebuilt its air defenses since U.S. and British warplanes attacked radar and communications targets around Baghdad on Feb. 16 and had been getting better at targeting allied patrol planes.

--------

U.S. plans sustained strikes in Iraq
Officials tell NBC of long-term campaign against Saddam

NBC NEWS AND WIRE REPORTS
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14
http://www.msnbc.com/news/613702.asp?cp1=1

The United States will conduct a sustained campaign of air strikes against Iraqi military targets in an effort to disable the country's increasingly effective air defenses, Bush administration officials told NBC News on Tuesday after U.S. planes bombed a radar site in southern Iraq, the second such attack in less than a week.

THE DRAWN-OUT campaign was devised after the White House rejected Pentagon plans for a more aggressive air strike that would take out most of President Saddam Hussein's integrated air defenses in one fell swoop, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported.

The White House was concerned that a major attack would incite Arab anger and aggravate the current Mideast tensions.

"Hitting targets one by one doesn't draw the same kind of attention or reaction," said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It takes longer, but it should eventually get the job done."

The Iraqi site targeted Tuesday was a "low-blow" radar near An Nasiriyah, about 170 miles southeast of Baghdad, that could be used to guide surface-to-air missiles, officials said.

It's part of the same overall air defense system that was targeted in Friday's attack, when British and American planes bombed three Iraqi military sites. U.S. Air Force F-16s bombed Tuesday's target with precision-guided munitions and returned safely to their base, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Advertisement

"This radar has been an element of the Iraqi air defense system that has been directly contributing to effectiveness of their integrated air defense system," he said.

In Baghdad, a spokesman for the Iraqi air defense division said that there had been a Western air attack on "infrastructure facilities" in Missan province, 225 miles southeast of Baghdad. He gave no details about whether there were any casualties.

Iraq in recent months has stepped up efforts to shoot down the allied planes over the "no fly" zones in both southern and northern Iraq, where allies have been patrolling since shortly after the end of the 1991 Gulf War to protect Shiite rebels against attacks by government forces and to keep Saddam from threatening his neighbors.

"If Iraq were to cease its threatening actions, coalition strikes would cease as well," said a statement from the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

UPSURGE IN ATTACKS

There have been more than 1000 incidents of Iraqi surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire against coalition aircraft in northern and southern no fly zones since Dec. 1998, including more than 375 this year, officials have said. Allied planes have struck back some two dozen times, with the largest raids being in February and last week.

While no Western warplanes have been shot down by Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said recently that Iraq was improving its air defenses "both quantitatively and qualitatively" with fiber-optic communications cabling.

A fiber-optic air defense control center is near an-Numaniyah, southeast of Baghdad, while the radar and anti-aircraft missile bases are farther southeast, near an-Nasiriyah, U.S. defense officials have said.

Pentagon officials said last month the Iraqi military came close to hitting a high-altitude U.S. U-2 spy plane with a missile on July 24.

Baghdad has denied firing at the plane, saying U.S. officials wanted a pretext for a military attack on Iraq.

NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

-------- israel

Israel Raids West Bank City, a Suspected Suicide Bomber Base

New York Times
August 14, 2001
By CLYDE HABERMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/14/international/middleeast/14MIDE.html

JERUSALEM, Tuesday, Aug. 14 - In Israel's deepest thrust into Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank, army tanks rolled early today into Jenin, the suspected base for some of the suicide bombers who have attacked Israel in recent weeks. The Israelis withdrew from the city about three hours later, after their bulldozers demolished a Palestinian police station.

Palestinians in Jenin, the northernmost city in the West Bank, said that the Israeli forces commandeered the headquarters of the city's governor for a while, and as they left, took with them about 70 Palestinians who had been jailed by the Jenin authorities on charges of having collaborated with Israel.

Palestinian witnesses also said there were fierce exchanges of fire between Israelis and Palestinians in the center of Jenin and at the entrance to a refugee camp in the city. Unconfirmed reports said that at least two Palestinians were killed and others were wounded.

But a spokesman for the Israeli Army said this morning that its soldiers did not shoot back when fired on "due to the fact that this was a highly populated area." Which version was correct could not be immediately determined.

Israeli tanks and several hundred soldiers had massed outside Jenin throughout Monday for a middle-of- the-night assault that the army said in a statement came "as a response to various terrorist activities." Among them was a Palestinian suicide bombing that wounded 21 Israelis on Sunday at a café in Qiryat Motzkin, a suburb of Haifa.

Jenin is what is known as an Area A city under the tattered Israeli- Palestinian peace agreements of the mid-1990's, meaning that it is entirely under the control of the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasir Arafat. This was not the first time that Israel had entered an Area A center during the last 11 months of conflict, only to pull back each time within hours. But the assault today seemed the strongest to date.

Jenin was also a likely target for Israeli retaliation after the terrorist attack on Sunday. It has been described by Israeli officials as a training ground for suicide bombers under the tutelage of Islamic Holy War, which claimed responsibility for attacks in northern Israeli cities, including the one in Qiryat Motzkin.

Israel has vowed to avenge these attacks, and in the last few days it has done so in ways that are taking the conflict with the Palestinians in new directions.

On Friday, hours after a Palestinian terrorist bombing had killed 15 people, plus the suicide attacker, in a Jerusalem pizzeria, Israeli forces took over the unofficial Palestinian headquarters in eastern Jerusalem. That building, Orient House, has been a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and is the most prominent of nine sites that the Israelis have occupied since Friday.

On Monday, stores closed and metal gates came down across the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a general strike that was nearly total, encompassing Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem as well. There, the Israeli police fought once more with protesters on the streets outside Orient House.

While the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dealt with its response to terrorism, Palestinians sought to turn the Israeli reprisal to their advantage. Their rallying cry for the last few days has been that it amounted to an Israeli "re-occupation" of Arab strongholds in Jerusalem - a point that the Sharon government has shrugged off by insisting that all of Jerusalem was, and remains, under Israeli control, Arab and Jewish neighborhoods alike.

The strike was a Palestinian show of strength, and it was effective, judging from the empty streets in Palestinian cities.

Such protests had been standard during the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in Arabic, which ran from the late 1980's to the early 1990's. But general strikes have not been the rule in the new uprising, now nearly 11 months old, and Palestinian leaders pointed to the one on Monday as a sign of broad popular support on this issue. Similar strikes reportedly took place in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

"Unfortunately, the meaning of what happened in Jerusalem is far more serious than many people would like to think," Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's minister of planning and international cooperation, said in Ramallah.

In Jerusalem, Palestinians and foreigners, mostly European leftists, resumed their protests on the streets near Orient House, demanding that Israel hand back the building.

Their numbers were not great, several dozen at a time. But the Israeli police were out in force and clearly under orders to take a no- nonsense approach. When a demonstrator raised a Palestinian flag - hardly a rare sight in Jerusalem in recent years - it was yanked from her hands. She was then surrounded by officers, and roughly led away. Other protesters were also pushed and dragged. Some of them threw stones, prompting the police to fire two stun grenades at them. About 10 people were arrested.

At the same time, Israel seemed to take a somewhat softer line about its intentions. Over the weekend, in defending the legality of the Orient House takeover, government officials said it would be "for good." On Monday, the Jerusalem police chief, Mickey Levy, said the plan was to hold on to the building for six months.

Either way, Palestinian leaders called the Israeli action unacceptable, and said that, until it was reversed, there was nothing to talk about with Israel.

The possibility of Israeli-Palestinian discussions on a cease-fire arose on Sunday when Mr. Sharon agreed to let his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, meet with Palestinian officials. Boiled down to basics, the Palestinian response was: Don't waste our time. "It is a farce, an Israeli farce, really," Mr. Shaath said.

He and other Palestinian officials also spoke scornfully about the United States' reluctance to intervene forcefully in the conflict. David Satterfield, a deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, met with Mr. Sharon and Mr. Peres on Sunday and with Mr. Arafat in Ramallah Monday night. But Mr. Shaath dismissed the Satterfield trip as nothing more than an attempt "to baby-sit the parties."

In Hebron on Sunday, an 8-year-old girl, Sabreen Abu Snaineh, was killed when a bullet, apparently from an Israeli soldier's gun, struck her in the head during a fierce exchange of fire between Israelis and Palestinians. On hearing the news, the girl's grandmother, Wadha Sidawi, 60, suffered a fatal heart attack.

On Monday, grandmother and granddaughter were buried side by side in a Hebron cemetery.

--------

Brutal Israeli terrorism subsidized by U.S.

By Kathryn Kingsbury
August 14, 2001
The Capital Times (Madison Wisconsin)
http://www.captimes.com/opinion/column/guest/3952.php

The morning after I returned from a two-week trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, I awoke to appalling news.

A suicide bombing by a member of Hamas, a Palestinian liberation group, killed at least 15 people, including several children, last Thursday during lunch hour at a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem. The bombing came in retaliation for an Israeli attack July 31 that killed eight people, including two Hamas members, in the West Bank city of Nablus. Hamas is one of several Palestinian groups seeking to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through political and military means.

I had just come back from a two-week trip with Christian Peacemaker Teams, a pacifist group that documents human rights abuses and works with Israelis and Palestinians to promote peaceful and just means for ending the ongoing warfare.

Before I left, several well-intentioned acquaintances politely informed me I was crazy. "Palestinians don't know any way other than violence," they said. "They kill Jews left and right, after all that the Israelis have done for them. Pacifism won't work in the Middle East."

This perception is understandable. As Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres so astutely pointed out after Thursday's atrocity in Jerusalem, the world has allowed rogue militants to speak for all of Palestine. "If we say we won't talk under fire, it means every mad gunman can decide there will be no dialogue."

At the same time, we ignore Palestine's lively peace movement - you, dear reader, have likely never heard of it, even though it works at a grass-roots level in every Palestinian community throughout the occupied territories.

And by our silence, we condone Israel's own atrocities against the Palestinian people. The Israeli death toll from the current 10-month conflict is around 140. In the same period, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed. As with the Israeli deaths, many of the dead Palestinians were civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That's right. Middle East terrorism goes both ways.

Aweek ago Monday, I visited a desert community of about 75 cave-dwelling shepherds near the West Bank town of Yatta. Only two weeks before, the Israeli Defense Forces had bulldozed every one of the community's centuries-old caves, burying clothing, cars and even live sheep under tons of rock. When the Red Cross supplied emergency tents to the families, the Israelis returned with their heavy machinery and buried those as well.

An elderly shepherd named Jaber led me from crumbled cave to crumbled cave. It was early in the afternoon, a time when most Middle Easterners stay indoors or under a canopy. But Jaber and I had no choice. The entrances to the caves were blocked by jagged stones, crumpled cars and torn tents. His face glowed a deep pink from days on end of living under the desert sun with almost no access to shade.

He led me past his surviving goats and sheep, several of whom were gnawing on a fallen tree, to the cave where he had kept them at night and during the harsher parts of day. Through a gap in the stones, we could see buried containers of feed. "Everything is in there," he said in Arabic. "I have no food to give them."

The Israeli government has justified the cave demolitions, saying that they were built without the required construction permits. Israel has used this process to block virtually all Palestinian construction - schools, homes, you name it - on these lands.

And it regularly demolishes structures that predate the 1967 permit law in order to make way for Israeli colonies in the West Bank that are illegal under international law. In its occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel continuously violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which outlaws attacks against civilians and forbids permanent settlements by any nation outside of its boundaries, even though Israel itself pushed for this convention and signed onto it.

These home demolitions are only one part of Israel's ongoing policy of harassing, impoverishing, torturing and killing Palestinian civilians in an effort to force them to flee their homeland.

Take the two children and several bystanders who were killed as "collateral damage" during the Israeli attack two weeks ago in Nablus. Or the Palestinian pacifist, Isaac Saada, who was murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces last month in Bethlehem. Or my Palestinian friend who was stopped by an Israeli security officer as he drove on an ostensibly Palestinian-controlled road, ordered out of his car, beaten and threatened with death. Or my encounter early last week with a group of Israeli soldiers who surrounded my group's Palestinian taxi drivers and calmly discussed kidnapping and torturing them, forgetting that the Israeli peace activists among us would understand Hebrew.

The policy of terror is working. Jacob, a Palestinian friend of mine who lives in Beit Jala, a village just outside of Bethlehem, recently told me of his plans to move to Bolivia. The tourist-dependent Bethlehem economy has crashed since the beginning of this intifada.

"There's no work," he told me. "And I'm sick of this shooting." He waved his hand in the direction of Gilo, a walled Israeli settlement that stands like a fortress on a nearby hill. Besides housing Israelis, Gilo holds a military outpost that regularly barrages Bethlehem and its surrounding villages with shells and machine gun fire.

The night before, Jacob and I had huddled in a corner room of the house with several other friends as Israeli bullets zipped through the hallway and burst holes in the gas and water tanks on the roof.

Israel claimed that the shelling was in response to Palestinian gunfire. If so, why did the Israeli Defense Forces blanket residential areas with bombs and bullets, rather than targeting the handful of gunmen who were acting in opposition to the majority will of Beit Jala residents?

The Israeli government is as guilty as Palestinian military groups of waging war against civilians. But unlike Hamas or Islamic Jihad, it is using U.S. taxpayers' money to do so - to the tune of $2.23 billion in military aid a year.

It is time for the United States to wake up and hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.

Kathryn Kingsbury is a reporter for The Capital Times.

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

Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Mess

Insight Magazine
By Kelly Patricia O'Meara komeara@InsightMag.com
http://insightmag.com/archive/200109031.shtml

The Defense Department cannot account for $1.1 trillion that seems to have vanished within the tangled system of financial accounting put in place by private contractors.

Every year trillions of dollars are unaccounted for by federal agencies, and every year these same agencies are called before congressional oversight committees to explain this mismanagement of taxpayers' funds.

Year after year the bureaucratic mea culpas are longer on process and shorter on substance, leaving overseers with little or no information that is useful to correct the gross mismanagement. Take, for instance, the financial mess at the Department of Defense (DOD).

In May, DOD Deputy Inspector General Robert Lieberman reported to Congress that "the extensive DOD efforts to compile and audit the FY [fiscal year] 2000 financial statements for the department as a whole and for the 10 subsidiary reporting entities like the Army, Navy and Air Force General Funds, could not overcome the impediments caused by poor systems and unreliable documentation of transactions and assets."

Without ever using the word "money," a practice common among inspectors general (IGs), the deputy IG at the Pentagon read an eight-page summary of DOD fiduciary failures. He admitted that $4.4 trillion in adjustments to the Pentagon's books had to be cooked to compile the required financial statements and that $1.1 trillion of that amount could not be supported by reliable information. In other words, at the end of the last full year on Bill Clinton's watch, more than $1 trillion was simply gone and no one can be sure of when, where or to whom the money went.

For most Americans, an official admission that $1.1 trillion in taxpayers' money cannot be accounted for is incomprehensible. To put it in perspective, consider that this missing sum would buy the following:

- nearly 14 million accounting degrees from any four-year state college, estimating the cost at $20,000 per year;

- 36 million automobiles at an estimated cost of $30,000 each; and

- about 8 million single-family houses costing $140,000 per home.

Also, consider this:

Assuming the average working life is 30 years, the average annual income is $34,000 and the average federal tax on that income is $6,830, nearly 5.5 million Americans will work their entire lives to pay $1.1 trillion in taxes.

In fiscal 1999, 124,227,000 Americans paid a total of more than $855 billion in individual income taxes, which means that the next year the Pentagon misplaced, lost or otherwise cannot account for all the money the IRS collected in fiscal 1999 from individual, estate, gift, corporate and excise taxes.

The General Accounting Office (GAO), which is the investigative arm of Congress, wrote in its January 2001 report, DOD Major Management Challenges and Program Risks, that the Pentagon "continues to confront pervasive and complex financial-management problems ... and has been on our list of high-risk areas vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement since 1995. To date, no major part of the department's operations has passed the test of an independent financial audit because of pervasive weaknesses in the department's financial-management systems, operations and controls."

Specifically, the GAO found that the DOD had "(1) an inability to reconcile an estimated $7 billion difference between its available fund balances and the Treasury's balance; (2) there were frequent adjustments of recorded payments between appropriation accounts - with nearly $1 of every $3 in fiscal year 1999 contract payments representing an adjustment; and (3) there are incorrect or unsupported obligations."

What this means to the average American is that the Pentagon checking-account balance doesn't match the bank (Treasury) balance. One out of every three dollars entered in the ledger had to be adjusted to get the account in balance - with the Pentagon owing huge sums for which it cannot account.

Despite the comprehensive analysis of the DOD's finances by the GAO, little, if any, specific information is provided about the contractors paid hundreds of millions of dollars to put reliable and accurate financial-accounting systems in place at DOD.

The GAO made it clear in the January report that the DOD's financial-management system is "flawed with decades-old problems that will be impossible to reverse overnight: They do not comply with federal financial-management-systems requirements and were not designed to collect data in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles." Yet nowhere in the GAO report are the companies identified that were contracted to put such systems in place.

When asked why these contractors were allowed to remain anonymous, especially in light of the enormous amount of money at stake, GAO Director of Financial Management and Assurance Gregory Kutz tells Insight: "That's a good question. I don't think we've ever been asked by Congress to look at that. ... Our work is mandated by Congress, and it is based on how they ask us to carry out investigations. We tend to point the finger at the department and not the contractors they hire. But it's a good point and it would be interesting to do a report about what level of blame might be placed on specific contractors. There are pockets of excellence but, for the most part, we're not getting good value for our money."

How many contractors has the DOD hired to set up a reliable financial-management system? The GAO doesn't have the information. In fact, Kutz tells Insight, "I'd have to spend months trying to find who the contractors are, and even then there is no way to be sure. With DOD you don't know if you have a complete list of the systems, and even then the list probably would be several pages long. DOD has so many people building systems for them it's part of the problem."

DOD public-affairs spokeswoman Susan Hansen explains that "the systems currently in place weren't developed to link all the information. It isn't one particular vendor's fault that the system isn't integrated. For decades leading up to the legislation calling for auditable financial statements, having the system linked together was not part of the vendor's requirements. This administration is looking at developing at DOD a financial-management architecture - a system that works together."

Like GAO's Kutz, Hansen also was unable to provide a list of past or present contractors tasked with setting up the financial-management system at the DOD.

While it seems clear that dozens of contractors have been involved in designing financial systems at the DOD, the names of some are known. One in particular is on the hot seat at other federal and state agencies for delivering systems that met neither the contractor's promises nor the agency's expectations: American Management Systems Inc. (AMS).

This Fairfax, Va.-based software company last month was hit with a $350 million lawsuit by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board for "fraudulent procurement, fraudulent performance and reckless breach of a contract with the Board to build a computerized record-keeping system." AMS was contracted to "design and develop a new record-keeping system to automate, simplify and improve the Board's service to the Fund's participants." The estimated cost of the project was $30 million.

However, more than a year later, "AMS has been unable to deliver a reduced-function system at its most recently estimated cost of approximately $87 million. The delays and cost overruns have been caused by AMS' reckless and willful misconduct."

AMS' problems with the Thrift Investment Board are only the latest resulting in a string of lawsuits plaguing a company deeply involved in developing financial-management systems for federal and state agencies - including Vermont, where AMS' system is used in the state's tax department, and Ohio, where AMS is the defendant in a class-action lawsuit involving the child-support-payments system. Last year, AMS paid a record settlement to Mississippi for failure to implement the system for the state's tax department. How involved AMS is in developing the new "architecture" for the DOD's financial-management system is unknown. Neither the GAO nor the DOD could provide specific information about the kind of contracts awarded to AMS at the Pentagon. Despite Insight's repeated attempts to obtain the information from the contractor, AMS did not return the calls.

Rep. Steve Horn (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations, is concerned about all of this. He tells Insight that "over the last few years federal agencies have made incremental progress toward producing financial statements which received clean audits. But good financial management also requires systems that provide accurate, day-to-day financial information. If some government contractors are unable to develop systems that can provide that type of information, Congress needs to know it, and we're asking the GAO to look into it."

Many financial analysts familiar with contractor gouging believe that bringing the contractors out of the shadows is the first step toward turning around the government's financial problems. A Wall Street analyst, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, put it this way: "How is it that the companies hired to develop financial-management systems for government that never seem to do the job - that can't track the money or produce auditable financial statements - don't have any problem with the financial systems in their own companies? How is it that regardless of their size they can track their own money and come up with clean financial statements?"

Corporate-securities attorney Jack Spidi of the Washington law firm of Malizia, Spidi and Fisch tells Insight, "You don't get a 10-year grace period when you're publicly traded. You have to submit certified audits from day one or you're in trouble. There's no calling the Securities and Exchange Commission and telling them, 'Oh, our financial systems aren't talking to each other.'"

Spidi explains: "The government, if it were treated like a publicly traded corporation on the stock exchange, would be required by the SEC to have these systems in place and would be subject to very detailed and rigorous accounting and reporting standards. If a large corporation like any of the defense contractors were unable to provide financial statements, it could lose its ability to trade on the exchange. Stockholders would be filing lawsuits right and left, which would cause the stock to tank. The question is: Should there be public reporting by government agencies like all publicly traded corporations in the U.S. are required to provide? And, if there were, would these agencies be more rigorous and careful about how they account for the money? Public companies are accountable for the accuracy of their financial statements; why shouldn't government agencies be held to the same standard?"

The situation faced by the incoming Bush administration was grave, and nowhere graver than at the Pentagon, where insiders say Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been heavily focused on the problem. Deputy IG Lieberman told Congress that "although DOD has put a full decade of effort into improving its financial reporting, it seems that everyone involved - the Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, the audit community and DOD managers - have been unable to determine or clearly articulate exactly how much progress has been made."

This soon may be remedied. With Rumsfeld demanding accountability and hacking furiously at waste, and lawmakers now calling for an investigation of which contractors have been paid how many hundreds of millions of dollars for financial-reporting systems that don't work, there is just a chance that something may be done about that $1.1 trillion for which the Clinton administration could not account.


-------- OTHER

-------- genetics

Clearer Guidelines Help Britain to Advance Stem Cell Work

New York Times
August 14, 2001
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/14/health/genetics/14RESE.html

While American researchers wait for politicians to issue rules on research involving human embryos, scientists in Britain are working under a less restrictive and more predictable system that allows many forms of research on embryonic stem cells and cloning.

For a decade, researchers in Britain have been allowed to create human embryos for research purposes, an idea that was proposed in 1994 by a National Institutes of Health committee, specifically rejected by President Bill Clinton, and widely condemned in the United States when a clinic in Virginia announced last month that it had created scores of embryos expressly for research.

Scientists in Britain also have received approval to proceed with therapeutic cloning, the idea of generating healthy replacements for diseased tissues from embryonic cells derived from the patient's own mature cells. The research is controversial because it takes the same route as human cloning - also known as reproductive cloning - creating an embryo from the adult's cell. But in therapeutic cloning, the embryos, instead of being inserted into a womb to develop into a fetus, would be kept in lab dishes and used to generate embryonic stem cells.

"I have been very impressed with the British system," said Dr. R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin. "They have taken this field forward more than any other country in the world with careful, sequential decision-making, and have created probably the best research environment globally."

The reasons for Britain's less restrictive approach include less intense lobbying from opponents of abortion; a longer track record of research in the area, much of which was pioneered in Britain; an earlier start on the public debate; and a generally respected regulatory authority that oversees both in vitro fertilization clinics and human embryo research.

Congress has just begun to grapple with the issue of therapeutic cloning, and may wind up framing such a fierce ban on human cloning that therapeutic cloning also may be outlawed. The House last month passed a bill that would ban both types of cloning, and was praised by President Bush for having done so.

In Britain, the House of Commons decided after a lengthy debate last December to permit therapeutic cloning, and the House of Lords gave its approval in January.

One reason for Parliament's more adventurous approach is that human embryo research and in vitro fertilization have been intensely discussed in Britain since the birth in 1978 of Louise Brown, the first baby conceived in a test tube. After a decade of debate, and a report prepared under the direction of Mary Warnock, a moral philosopher, Parliament in 1991 set up the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an agency that licenses both fertility clinics and research institutions that study human embryos.

The agency regulates details of clinical practice, such as how many embryos may be implanted in the uterus, and rules on knotty ethical issues such as whether a couple may choose the sex of their baby (yes if for a medical cause, no if for social reasons) and whether a woman may conceive with sperm taken from her dead husband (only if he gave consent before he died).

Scientists in Britain have been leaders in developing techniques for both in vitro fertilization and the generation of embryonic stem cells. The stem cells were first generated from mouse embryos by scientists in Cambridge, England, and this technique was adapted by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin to generate the first human embryonic stem cells in 1998.

British researchers have also had clearer guidelines for what research is permissible.

"Scientists realize that the confidence the public has in them and the haven in which they do their work is due in part to the fact that we oversee their work," said Ruth Deech. Ms. Deech, a family lawyer and principal of St. Anne's College at Oxford University, has been chairwoman of the embryology agency since 1994.

Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge, an embryologist at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, said, "I think that generally people are really happy that the regulations are clear and that the way the H.F.E.A. is set up, with a mixture of scientists and ethicists, makes it a very good system to work under."

The agency has permitted five categories of research with human embryos, all related to human fertility. Since 1991 it has allowed 118 embryos to be created for research purposes, Ms. Deech said.

Parliament's decision to allow therapeutic cloning means the agency will now approve a sixth category of research - for studies aimed at generating new human tissues.

A bill to ban human reproductive cloning is pending, but the agency already indirectly controls cloning. In Britain, it is a crime to create a human embryo outside the body without a license from the agency, and officials have made it clear they will not issue one for human cloning.

The agency keeps detailed statistics of the number of human embryos that are created, implanted and destroyed in fertility clinics. Since 1991, a total of 925,747 human embryos have been created and more than 50,000 babies have been born. Human embryos have a high imperfection rate and, as in nature, a clinic must create eight or nine for each successful pregnancy. The surplus embryos are often stored in freezers.

In the United States, each clinic follows its own procedure for disposing of surplus embryos. In Britain, embryos may be stored for only five years, except in special circumstances. Since 1991, a total of 294,584 embryos have been destroyed and 53,497 have been used for research purposes, said James Yeandel, the agency's spokesman. In 1996, when the first legally mandated five-year period came due, there was a "mass destruction" of embryos, Mr. Yeandel said, but since then embryos have been discarded yearly.

Such statistics are not available in the United States because there is no national authority that regulates in vitro fertilization clinics. The lack of statistics on embryo destruction, an inevitable part of the fertility treatment, has enabled opponents of abortion to focus attention on the small number of embryos that would be destroyed to create stem cells, while saying little about the thousands that are discarded by the clinics.

While Mr. Bush has decided that federally financed research must be confined to the already established lines or colonies of human embryonic stem cells, Britain is considering setting up a collection of stem cell lines for research use. The project grew out of a recommendation last year in a report on stem cell research by Liam Donaldson, the government's chief medical officer. A spokeswoman for Britain's Medical Research Council yesterday denied reports that the stem cell bank would be operating in a year.

Embryo research enjoys a more supportive climate in Britain because the abortion debate is not so intense, and members of Parliament are less fearful of single-issue activists than are representatives to Congress, some legal scholars suggest.

"In my view the parliamentary system is better for this kind of debate than the representative system we have in the United States," Dr. Charo said. "There are arguments that a parliamentary system is less democratic because less immediately responsive to the public, but it does allow a conversation to take place at one degree of separation further from the population."

An ethical bedrock of the British agency's operations is Parliament's decision to permit research on human embryos until the appearance of the "primitive streak" some 14 days after conception. The streak, which marks the point at which the embryo changes from a flat disk of cells to a recognizable structure, is regarded by some as the moment when an individual life begins, although others say that life begins at conception.

"Some think the soul enters the body at the moment of fertilization and others don't," Ms. Deech said. "You'll never resolve it so you have to move forward in a pragmatic way, and in a typically British fashion we have reached a compromise that embryos may have research carried out on them."

Britain's early decision to regulate all research on human embryos has had its costs. All research until now has been restricted to issues of fertility, which may be one reason why researchers in Britain failed to translate their lead in developing mouse embryonic stem cells into being first to generate human embryonic stem cells, a step that involves essentially the same techniques.

But the agency's role in overseeing both the fertility clinics and research has helped keep the two issues separate. In Dr. Charo's view, the United States has suffered for not having a national regulator of the clinics.

"The price has been paid in a confusing mixture of therapeutic care and research in these clinics, to the point that many patients are genuinely confused about what exactly they are involved in," she said.

--------

Stem cells from skin grow into brain tissue

August 14, 2001
By Carolyn Abraham
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010814-73539816.htm

For the first time, researchers have captured from the skin of adult mice and humans stem cells capable of growing into brain cells and a range of other tissues.

The feat offers new hope for treating neurological disorders, and comfort to President Bush, who last week set strict limits on publicly funded U.S. research using stem cells derived from human embryos, which are destroyed when the powerful cells are extracted.

The new research, published Monday in Nature Cell Biology, bolsters the view that scientists can find alternative -- and less controversial sources of stem cells, which have the unique power to divide indefinitely before growing into the various tissues and parts that constitute any living being.

The stem cells harvested at McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute have grown into smooth muscle cells, fat cells and brain cells -- including neurons, the individual thinking units of the human mind, and glial cells, which, among other things, produce the fatty white sheaths around nerve fibers in the brain that speed signals between neurons.

"They are beautiful neurons," said molecular biologist and co-author Freda Miller. "You kind of look at them and say, 'This can't be true.' But then you go back and do it 10 times, and you realize it is true."

While no one yet knows if these neurons can transmit electrical and chemical signals as they do in the brain, one intriguing aspect of growing them from stem cells found in skin is that scientists could have a vast and easily accessible supply.

Dr. Ronald Worton, CEO and scientific director of the Ottawa Health Research Institute and head of Canada's Stem Cell Network, said stem cells that can produce brain cells have been found in the brain itself, but this is the first time they have been grown from stem cells found in skin.

"Two years ago, I would have said this is a big surprise, and I wouldn't have believed it unless it could be widely reproduced," Dr. Worton said. "But then the dogma used to be that if you were a stem cell in [adult] bone marrow, you could only make blood cells, or if you were a stem cell in skin, you only make skin. There's now enough lab work to say the dogma was wrong."

Scientists hope to one day chemically goad stem cells into becoming replacement tissues for ailing patients, such as insulin-producing cells for diabetics, brain cells that pump out dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers, or cells rich in dystrophin for people with muscular dystrophy.

Patients receiving new tissue grown from stem cells taken from their own skin would face far fewer problems of rejection, if any, than they would after receiving a transplant of stem cells derived from human embryos.

Miss Miller and Jean Toma, the paper's lead author, thought several years ago that because skin, like blood, regenerates itself on a rapid and regular basis, it could be a rich source of stem cells.

In particular, they wondered about cells beneath the epidermis in the skin's second layer, the dermis. That layer contains nerve cells that relay sensations such as touch to the brain. Since these cells regenerate after injuries such as burns or gashes, the Montreal group looked for the precursors of these sensory cells, hoping to find the stem cells that produce them.

They isolated them first in the nasal passages of mice. But the source was not practical, given the difficulty of extracting enough from a tiny, damp airway. Then they tested their hypothesis with skin from mice and from a human scalp.

--------

Cloning effort hidden in West Virginia town

August 14, 2001
By James A. Haught and Tara Tuckwiller
CHARLESTON (W.VA.) GAZETTE
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010814-70295756.htm

Nobody in the small town of Nitro, W.Va., knew. Toddlers played in day care downstairs, senior citizens lunched in the cafeteria, the entire Nitro Police Department worked out of the same building.

And all the while, upstairs in Room 201 of the former high school building, a French woman and her assistant worked to clone a West Virginia politician's dead baby.

Mark Hunt didn't tell his secret until after he had given up the quest -- for now. And only on the grounds of failure.

Mr. Hunt, a Charleston lawyer whom Kanawha County voters elected three times to the state House of Delegates, rented the space in the Nitro Community Center for $347.58 a month. On the lease, he said his purpose was a "research venture."

Mr. Hunt paid Brigitte Boisselier -- who is also a bishop in a church that ascribes divine status to cloning -- $5,000 a month to work on the first human clone, that of his 10-month-old son Andrew, who died after surgery for a heart defect. He spent nearly $500,000 all told, he said, and he'll spend more if he gets the chance.

The lawyer said in a telephone interview last week that he and his wife "decided, for the first time in human history, since Jesus raised Lazarus, to transcend the great gulf of death and bring our baby home -- to create an identical twin of Andrew."

Mr. Hunt said he and his wife realize that a clone wouldn't restore their son, but a duplicate child would be "some solace." Miss Boisselier's group Clonaid was the only group prepared to attempt a human clone from cells of a deceased person, he said.

He called the undertaking "a great adventure" and said he isn't ashamed of seeking to duplicate life, "but we kept it secret because press coverage would have jeopardized it."

Last week, Mr. Hunt announced that he had severed ties with the cloning group and closed the lab where researchers had hoped to clone DNA from Mr. Hunt's dead child.

Mr. Hunt said he lost confidence in Miss Boisselier recently because she became "a press hog," giving many international news interviews on behalf of the cloning project, and on behalf of the Raelian religion.

Miss Boisselier was one of a team of scientists, led by Dr. Severino Antinori, who announced at a National Academy of Sciences panel last week that it would clone babies for 200 couples within the next few months.

Agents of the Food and Drug Administration came to Mr. Hunt, alarmed by reports that a human clone was being attempted in Nitro. Mr. Hunt said he promised the federal officials that no human cloning would occur in Nitro, but Miss Boisselier gave another TV interview saying a cloned baby would be achieved within six weeks

Mr. Hunt said the FDA asked him if he had misled the U.S. agency. So he closed the Nitro laboratory and changed its locks.

But when the people of Nitro found out -- four months after federal officials started investigating the lab -- several were not happy.

Greg Casto, director of the Nitro Community Center, said he did not know the lab was being used for work aimed at cloning a human being.

Mr. Casto related to the Gazette details of a phone conversation he had last week with Mr. Hunt when the news about the lab broke in Nitro. Mr. Hunt has since refused to speak to reporters.

"I've got two sets of parents out front -- in fact, they're still there -- saying they don't want to bring their children to the day care," Mr. Casto said he told the lawyer.

Mr. Hunt will remove the equipment from the now-closed lab as soon as he can find "a safe, dry place" to store it, according to Mr. Casto.

He also told Mr. Casto that the scientists had not been there since "probably the beginning of June."

According to Mr. Casto, the lawyer told him: "Between you and me, that's the reason I let them go. Because they weren't doing anything. They weren't working. What I wanted them to do was look at the DNA of my son Andrew, to see if it was viable or not. They weren't doing it."

Mr. Hunt said the lab's refrigerator contained only a medium used to keep DNA alive. He said no actual cloning was ever supposed to happen in the Nitro lab.

The scientists were only supposed to study Andrew's DNA there, to see if they could successfully clone him.

Upstairs from the Nitro Community Center cafeteria -- past the old high-school lockers, and classrooms-turned-offices rented to more ordinary businesses -- there's a locked classroom door with a little glass window.

Through the window, you can see Miss Boisselier's lab. Even to the untrained eye, it hardly looks like it cost $500,000 to set up.

The walls are decorated with huge blown-up photos of egg cells, either human or animal. In front of the blackboard, there's a desk, much like a teacher's desk, with a computer and printer and scanner. Then there are two chemistry lab tables, with the sinks everyone remembers from high school.

On one table, the sink holds a bar of soap. The rest of the table is occupied by a scale, a Brita pitcher full of clear liquid and one piece of equipment the size of a microwave oven. On top of the machine rests what appears to be a box of rubber gloves Evolution One brand.

On the other table, the sink holds a big bottle of washing-up liquid and a roll of paper towels. The equipment on that table is an incubator, which Mr. Hunt told Mr. Casto "burned up the first time we plugged it in."

The Clonaid Web site listed no physical address -- only a cellular phone number in Las Vegas for public relations employee Nadine Gary. Miss Gary said Miss Boisselier was attending a conference on human cloning and referred questions to her. Miss Boisselier could not be reached for comment last week.

The Clonaid site does offer brief explanations of the services it sells:

c Clonaid: For as little as $200,000, Clonaid will clone a person as soon as its scientists figure out how. Especially targeted "to wealthy parents worldwide After the first success, it is likely that the next clients on the list will be chosen according to their bid (for financial priority reasons) so that the money collected will help improve the technique from which everyone will benefit."

c Clonapet: Coming soon: "The cloning of pets to wealthy individuals who wish to see their lost pet brought back to life." Also available for owners who want to resurrect dead racehorses.

c Insuraclone: For $50,000, get anyone's DNA cryogenically frozen until science can cure whatever killed them.

The Clonaid site also offers a link to a letter credited to Mr. Hunt. It is addressed to James C. Greenwood, chairman of the House subcommittee on oversights and investigations.

"Who am I and why do I support human cloning?" the letter begins. "I am a successful attorney, a former state legislator, a current elected official, a husband, a son, a brother, but most importantly, I am a father."

The letter reveals that the writer, at age 38, was "blessed with a perfect baby boy," that the boy grew to recognize his father and call him "Dada," that he and his wife were told their son had a 94 percent chance of making it through his heart surgery, and that the writer spared no expense in trying to find a way to bring his son back.

"I must withhold my identity until after the project is successful," the letter concludes. "However, our commitment to human cloning and to duplicating our child is unlimited.

"Hopefully one day we can all celebrate our family and friends, my wife and our son, Dr. Brigitte and the brave new world."

-------- imf / world bank

White House To Share Tab For World Bank, IMF Protests
Demonstrators Vow to Fight Security to Exclude Them

By Manny Fernandez and Serge F. Kovaleski Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page B01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6789-2001Aug13?language=printer

District officials went to the White House yesterday to ask the federal government to underwrite security preparations for September anti-globalization demonstrations, just hours after protest organizers talked about challenging police precautions in court.

Several weeks remain before thousands of demonstrators are expected in downtown Washington to protest meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But organizers said they were already angry about anticipated plans to secure the area.

Yesterday, District Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and other city leaders went to the White House to make their case. The District officials met with representatives of the Bush administration, including White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, for about 50 minutes in the Roosevelt Room, and were pleased with the session, said Deputy Mayor Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, who also attended the meeting.

Bush administration officials "understand and recognize the exigency and needs of the circumstances," said Kellems, who oversees public safety.

The city wants about $30 million in federal money for its security plans, which include recruiting police officers from throughout the East Coast and fencing off swaths of downtown. Budget officials from the District and the White House will work to identify costs and develop a funding arrangement acceptable to both sides.

Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said last week that the security plan would include a patchwork of fences -- including six-foot-high barriers in some places -- to keep protesters from meeting sites and travel routes for delegates.

Yesterday, organizers held a news conference to challenge the constitutionality of such tactics. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice Inc., said the District-based public interest law firm is preparing to seek an injunction against what organizers call "exclusion zones." She said protesters have the right to be within sight and earshot of their intended audience.

She said lawyers are waiting for D.C. police and federal authorities to provide more details about their plans. Police have said that they are making plans and have not announced what streets would be closed or where security sections would be. Top law enforcement officials, who attended the White House meeting, did not return calls for comment last night.

Among the protests planned from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, the International Action Center is calling for thousands of demonstrators to surround the White House and march to the IMF and World Bank headquarters downtown. Organizers said the Sept. 29 action would be a nonviolent demonstration to demand that President Bush, the IMF and World Bank cancel Third World debt and end policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"It is our contention today that the police decision to create an exclusion zone . . . is a brazen attempt to replicate the Genoa-style police state" in Italy, Brian Becker, co-director of the center, said at yesterday's news conference at the National Press Building.

Becker referred to protests in Genoa at a Group of Eight conference last month. One protester was shot and killed by police there. "We will not accept the police relegating the demonstrators to a token presence," Becker said.

Last week's announcement that the World Bank and IMF plan to confine their fall meetings to the last weekend in September was seen by protest organizers as a victory. The shortened schedule would have no effect on protester plans, they said yesterday.

Staff writer Arthur Santana contributed to this report.

-------- police / prisoners

Justice Dept. Cites Problems in 2 Inquiries at Los Alamos

New York Times
August 14, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/14/national/14ALAM.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 - The Justice Department today made public two chapters of a classified internal inquiry that harshly criticized the investigation of the Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.

The report faulted the Energy Department as producing a deeply flawed preliminary report and the F.B.I. as conducting an inadequate investigation into accusations that Dr. Lee had mishandled nuclear weapons data.

The existence of the report has long been known, along with its generally critical commentary on the Wen Ho Lee case. But the chapters released today, which were heavily edited to delete references to material that remains classified, show how the government's own post-mortem harshly criticized the Lee inquiry over faulty assumptions, slipshod methods and an unwillingness to look beyond Dr. Lee to other suspects.

The undated report, written more than a year ago by Randy I. Bellows, a veteran federal prosecutor in Virginia, said that an administrative inquiry used by the Energy Department as the basis for recommending an F.B.I. investigation of Dr. Lee, was "a deeply flawed product whose shortcomings went unrecognized and unaddressed due to the F.B.I.'s own inadequate investigation."

Critics had accused investigators of singling out Dr. Lee because of his Chinese ancestry.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said today that the report indicated that the Lee investigation was mismanaged.

"The report paints the picture of a wayward investigation that was flawed from inception," Mr. Leahy said.

"It provides newly public details of communications breakdowns, flawed assessments and inaccurate representations that for years misdirected the Department of Energy's administrative inquiry and the later F.B.I. investigation," Mr. Leahy said. "Even if not racially motivated, the abysmal handling of the initial phases of this case caused serious harm and delay in resolving fundamental questions about a grave compromise of our nuclear secrets."

The report found that the Energy Department and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation mistakenly narrowed their investigation to Dr. Lee as a suspect in the possible, but unproven, theft of nuclear secrets. The report concluded that the F.B.I. accepted the department's conclusions about Dr. Lee without a rigorous examination of the agency's rationale, or predicate, for suspecting him.

"But to say that D.O.E. misled the F.B.I. as to the predicate and to say that D.O.E. improperly focused its conclusion only on Wen Ho Lee is only to describe half the problem," the report said.

"The other half was the F.B.I.'s unfortunate and unwarranted acceptance of D.O.E.'s description of the predicate, its unhesitating and unquestioning acceptance of D.O.E.'s identification of Lee as `the most logical suspect,' " the report said.

The case against Dr. Lee collapsed in September 2000 when the government dropped all but one of the 59 felony charges against him. He pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets, and the case became an embarrassment for the F.B.I., which conducted the criminal inquiry that led to the criminal charges against him.

The chapters were disclosed under orders of Magistrate Judge Thomas R. Jones Jr. in Alexandria, Va., as part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former chief of counterintelligence. Mr. Trulock has sued Dr. Lee and two Energy Department investigators who, Mr. Trulock said, had wrongly accused him of singling out Dr. Lee for investigation because of his Chinese ancestry.

The Bellows report said a full inquiry of Mr. Lee was warranted, but concluded that the Energy Department's own administrative report focused on Dr. Lee, a Taiwanese-born, naturalized citizen, without considering other suspects who had access to the same highly secret W-88 warhead design information that Dr. Lee was suspected of compromising. No one else was ever subjected to similar scrutiny.

Mr. Bellows's report concluded: "The final report was so poorly written and organized that this alone made it difficult to evaluate and comprehend. More significantly, it contained very serious deficiencies, including numerous inconsistent and contradictory statements as well as unsubstantiated assertions."

But the report "found no evidence of racial bias" and Mr. Bellows rejected complaints by some officials that the initial Energy Department review was little more than "a mechanism to summarily finger a Chinese American."

The chapters released today are only a small part of the report, law enforcement officials said. They said the remainder would be made public in several weeks.

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U.S. Probe of Nuclear Scientist Assailed

By Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5279-2001Aug13?language=printer

The U.S. government's investigation of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was a "slapdash" affair that ignored other potential suspects and was deeply flawed from the beginning, according to portions of a classified Justice Department report released yesterday.

The scathing report by federal prosecutor Randy I. Bellows said the FBI spent "years investigating the wrong crime" -- a suspicion that Lee gave nuclear weapons secrets to China -- when the secrets could have leaked from dozens of federal facilities and defense contractors.

Although the report cited "no evidence of racism," it said Energy Department officials were too quick to focus on Lee and his wife in an initial, administrative inquiry that became the basis for the FBI's criminal investigation.

"Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee should never have been the sole suspects," the report said. "The AI [administrative inquiry] should have been a sieve resulting in the identification of a number of suspects. Instead, it ended up as a funnel from which only Wen Ho and Sylvia Lee emerged. . . . Once Wen Ho Lee was 'tagged' with the patina of suspicion, the AI was all but over. He would be 'it'."

The long-awaited report by Bellows, an assistant U.S. attorney in Alexandria who also spearheaded the prosecution of FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen, has been classified since its completion more than a year ago. The Justice Department yesterday released two heavily censored chapters of the 800-page document at the behest of a federal magistrate who is presiding over a defamation lawsuit filed by Notra S. Trulock III, the former head of intelligence at the Energy Department.

The report, ordered by former attorney general Janet Reno, is the government's official accounting of the missteps that led to the nine-month incarceration of Lee despite widespread doubts about the government's case. The former Los Alamos scientist's prosecution spawned congressional hearings, civil lawsuits and a strong rebuke from the judge in his case, who said the treatment of Lee "had embarrassed this entire nation."

Lee, a U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, was charged in December 1999 with 59 felony counts of mishandling classified information and violating the Atomic Energy Act, which could have brought a life sentence. After the government's case largely fell apart, he pleaded guilty last September to a single felony charge of mishandling classified information and was sentenced to the time he had already served. He was not charged with espionage and denied giving information to China.

Lee is pursuing a civil lawsuit against the FBI and the departments of Energy and Justice for violating his privacy by leaking his name as a suspect. Trulock, meanwhile, is suing Lee and two Energy Department officials for allegedly accusing him of racism in the investigation.

Bellows portrayed the case against Lee as a scattershot and misguided spy hunt, built on faulty assumptions about Chinese espionage and focused on one suspect to the exclusion of many others. Although large sections of the 155 pages released yesterday had been blacked out, many of the review's key conclusions were left intact.

Trulock and other investigators at the Energy Department decided early on that Los Alamos National Laboratory was the probable source of design secrets allegedly obtained by China about the W-88, America's most advanced nuclear warhead, and they soon focused on Lee as "the most logical suspect," the report said.

It added that the Energy Department "converted the [initial probe] from a broad identification of potential suspects to a virtual indictment of Lee." When the investigation was turned over to the FBI, its agents ignored other leads, instead embracing Energy's "grandiose claim that Wen Ho Lee was 'the only individual identified during this inquiry who had the opportunity, motivation and LEGITIMATE access' " to leak the secrets, the report said.

Lee ultimately acknowledged copying classified nuclear data onto portable computer tapes and removing them from Los Alamos. Despite an intensive debriefing by the FBI under the terms of his plea agreement, the tapes have never been found, and Lee has never publicly explained why he made them or what became of them.

The Bellows report said that "at first blush, the claim of ethnic targeting" appears to have some merit, because investigators proposed in 1995 to "identify those U.S. citizens, of Chinese heritage, who worked directly or peripherally" with nuclear weapons designs. However, the report said, the proposal was never carried out and, in any event, it was "simply acknowledging the fact that the PRC [People's Republic of China] specifically targets ethnic Chinese for espionage purposes."

In the end, the report said, Energy Department investigators weighed a variety of factors, including extensive foreign travel and prior security infractions, in assembling a list of 32 potential suspects at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. A full investigation of Lee was "warranted," but he should not have become the only suspect, it said.

A month after Bellows submitted his report to Reno in May 2000, two former Energy officials who were directly involved in the investigation said in sworn affidavits that Lee had been singled out largely because of his race.

Trulock said yesterday he was heartened by the Bellows report's finding that racism did not drive the probe, but disputed the assertion that Lee was treated as the only suspect.

"What went to the FBI was a list," Trulock said. "The list had on it at least six Caucasians and three Asian Americans" at Los Alamos.

The Energy Department last night issued a brief statement emphasizing that the Lee investigation "was conducted under policies and procedures" that have been scrutinized and improved. "We will review the Bellows report to determine whether or not further policy changes are necessary," it said.

The FBI also said in a statement that it had already made reforms based on the report.

Mark Holscher, Lee's lead defense attorney in the criminal case, said he was pleased by the report's finding that Lee was improperly singled out. "From the beginning, we believed that Dr. Lee should not have been the sole focus of an espionage investigation," he said.

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High-Tech FBI Tactics Raise Privacy Questions

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 14, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55606-2001Aug9?language=printer

When federal prosecutors set their sights on Nicodemo Scarfo, son of reputed Philadelphia mob boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, for alleged illegal gambling and loan-sharking, they had to employ some sophisticated high-tech techniques.

The younger Scarfo, it seemed, was savvy enough about computers to use an encryption program to protect his electronic files.

So investigators secretly installed a way to capture every keystroke so they could learn his password. In the process, they made Scarfo an unlikely symbol for privacy advocates, who are worried about the government's ability to conduct surveillance of personal computers.

It is a case at the heart of how technology increasingly strains notions of privacy and whether established law works in a digital age. Scarfo's defense team, with assistance from privacy organizations, is trying to force the government to reveal how the "key-logging" technology works as a possible prelude to asking that the evidence it yielded be thrown out.

Privacy advocates are especially concerned that the key logger was planted on the basis of a simple search warrant and not a court-approved wiretap order, which is more difficult to obtain and carries far greater restrictions.

Federal law requires that any device that listens in on communication, whether it be a bug in a room or a phone tap, requires a wiretap order. In the case of electronic communication via computers, the law specifically requires a wiretap order only if the communication is intercepted in transmission via computer modems and phone lines. That preserves the government's ability to seize a computer, with a simple search warrant, and examine copies of e-mail already sent or received, or anything else that might be stored on the computer's hard drive.

Prosecutors insist that the key logger planted by the FBI did not intercept communication, but they have refused to divulge how the technology works to back up that claim.

And privacy groups note the new issue posed by key-logging technology, which is commercially available and used by some companies: Even if the key logger didn't intercept communication after it was sent by the computer's modem, it effectively does the same thing by capturing what is typed on an e-mail or instant message form just before the user hits the send button.

"The logical consequence of the government's argument is that the government will never need to get a wiretap order for a computer," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who is now vice president of cyberlaw at Predictive Systems Inc., a Reston-based computer-security consulting firm. "With the technology that's available today, the government can remotely install software on a computer to capture all keystrokes and transmit that report to its agents in real time."

Attorneys on both sides are under a court order not to speak about the case, but prosecutors argue in court filings that disclosing the key-logging technology would enable criminals to find ways to defeat it in the future. As a result, it's unclear whether the key logger used by the FBI is purely software or whether it involved some sort of device attached to the keyboard. It's also unknown how the data from the key logger was collected.

The key logger is "a highly sensitive law enforcement search and seizure technique, the disclosure of which would compromise use of this technology . . . and jeopardize the safety of law enforcement personnel," according to an affidavit by Donald Kerr, assistant director of the FBI's laboratory division.

In an initial ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Politan in Newark rejected that argument.

"The government has not satisfactorily confirmed for the court that the key-logger device did not operate in conjunction with the computer's modems, or otherwise, to cause the interception of a communication," Politan wrote.

He added that pages of captured keystrokes that the government placed in evidence "are in the truest sense 'gobbledygook,' " and that he cannot determine whether the search was legal if he doesn't know how this key-logging technology works.

But the judge gave prosecutors one last chance to convince him otherwise, saying he would review the technology in secret before making his final decision. Prosecutors have until tomorrow to respond.

According to court records, confidential informants told FBI agents in January 1999 that Scarfo and an associate, Andrew Knapik, had been running a sports-betting and loan-sharking operation linked to the Gambino crime family out of a one-room office of a company known as Merchant Services Inc. in Belleville, N.J.

It appeared to agents that Scarfo, 35, who had several arrests and convictions on assault, conspiracy and weapons charges, was being groomed to take over the operation from Knapik, who was heading to prison. The two would drive around collecting on bets and loan payments, and when Scarfo was arrested he had more than $6,000 in cash on him, according to court records. Scarfo also would use the Merchant Services office for loan collection, the records said.

As part of the investigation, FBI agents went into Scarfo's office with a search warrant and copied his computer files. One of them, labeled "Factors," was encrypted, or scrambled, with a program called PGP -- Pretty Good Privacy -- which can be bought on the Internet for as little as $50.

Unable to crack the encryption code without a password, agents went back again with a search warrant and placed the key-logging device on his computer, and monitored it for about two months. The surveillance ultimately produced the password -- nds09813-050 -- which a source close to the case confirmed is the prison identification number of Scarfo's father.

Former law enforcement officials said that criminals are increasingly using sophisticated high technology and that the government must have, within reason, the ability to keep one step ahead of them.

"Encryption is virtually unbreakable by police today, with programs that can be bought for $15," said Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and now partner at the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

Although agreeing that surveillance should be done under strict guidelines, Baker said that "to a degree, the privacy groups got us into this by arguing that there should be no limits on encryption, and the police have to deal with it."

David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, which has been advising the defense team, disagreed.

"Because of this technology there are a lot of gray areas," Sobel said, "but law enforcement is always attempting to resolve them in favor of more aggressive techniques."

As an example he wondered whether, if the key-logging system used in the Scarfo case was able to turn itself off when the modem was activated to ensure that a wiretap order was not required, why it couldn't instead have been configured to activate only when an encryption program was run.

<a name="activists"></a>
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Italian court orders release of American student

USA TODAY
08/14/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/08/14/italy-americanreleased.htm

GENOA, Italy (AP) - An American student arrested in connection with violence at last month's Group of Eight summit was ordered released from prison Tuesday, her lawyer said.

Susanna Thomas, 21, from Warren, N.J., was arrested July 22 outside of Genoa with an Austrian theater group. She had been held in a prison in Voghera, midway between Genoa and Milan.

Gilberto Pagani, Thomas' lawyer, said that he was seeking further details from the court on when she would actually leave the prison.

Pagani had said Monday that he expected her to be expelled from Italy but that the charges would not be dropped.

Pagani said he would be traveling later in the day to the Voghera prison to meet with his client.

Meanwhile, a Genoa court was also expected to make a decision Tuesday on whether to continue detaining 19 members of the Austrian theater group.

Along with 15 Austrians, the group included a Slovak, a Swede and two other Americans - Andre Patrick Stoffel, born in 1978 and from Illinois, and Brian Sating, born in 1965, from Ohio, said Pagani. The hometowns and exact ages of the two were not immediately available.

The judges are also considering the cases of five other people - three Austrians, a Slovak and an Australian.

Thomas was arrested with the Austrian political street theater company Publix Theater as the group was leaving Genoa in a caravan of vehicles.

Police alleged that the Publix Theater group had conspired with the violent anarchists known as Black Bloc - who were considered mainly responsible for the riots - before and during the July 20-22 summit.

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