------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
PENNSYLVANIA CANCER CENTER CITED FOR ILLEGAL URANIUM
Uzbekistan will not join military-political blocs
U.S. Ready to End Sanctions on India to Build an Alliance
US Takes on Invader Role in War Games
Achilles' Heel in Missile Plan: Crude Weapons
Army Prepares Alaska Test Site
Diving Work Resumes on Sunken Sub
Russia Seeks Plutonium Deal Delay
A Treaty the World Has Outgrown
A Needed ABM Treaty
Exhuming a toxic tomb
Land for Los Alamos Lab Taken Unfairly, Heirs Say
NRC finds minor violation at Pennsylvania nuke
Nuclear Regulator's Extortion Trial Opens
The Plutonium Nightmare

MILITARY
Macedonians Suspicious of Peace Plan
NATO Mission in Macedonia Rolls On, Problems Loom
Chirac backs wider EU role in world peacekeeping
Iraq Claims to Shoot Down U.S. Plane
Unmanned U.S. Plane Lost Over Iraq
Israeli Death Squads Murder Senior Palestinian
U.N. Chief Blames Israel for Raising Mideast Tension
Details of Plane Missing in Iraq
Preparing for 'Network-Centric' Warfare

OTHER
Wildfires Send Tons of Mercury Up in Smoke
MTBE Leaks Threaten Calif. Wells
Foam like 'root beer' floats on Potomac River
French Green minister wants
Health Officials ID Stem Cell Labs
Honduras Begins Exhumation at Former Contra Base
Report: FBI Supervision Faulted
Cincinnati police say they profiled 'criminals'



-------- NUCLEAR


-------- depleted uranium

PENNSYLVANIA CANCER CENTER CITED FOR ILLEGAL URANIUM

August 27, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2001/2001L-08-27-09.html

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has proposed an $8,800 fine against a Pittsburgh medical facility for violating agency regulations pertaining to the possession and disposal of radioactive material.

Based on an inquiry conducted by the NRC's Office of Investigations, the agency has determined that the South Pittsburgh Cancer Center possessed depleted uranium from January 1994 to December 1, 2000. The center kept the material even though the uranium, which was in the form of bricks used for shielding for two linear accelerators, was not listed as required on an NRC license.

The NRC also learned that the center tried to dispose of the depleted uranium in April 1998 and October 2000 by transferring it to persons who did not have an NRC license authorizing them to possess radioactive material.

In the case of the April 1998 transfer, the material was handed over to a handyman. That individual attempted to dispose of the depleted uranium but was unable to do so after the bricks set off a radiation monitor at a disposal facility. The material was later returned to the Cancer Center.

In a letter to center owner and radiation safety officer Dr. Antonio Ambrad announcing the enforcement decision, NRC Region I administrator Hubert Miller said the agency was concerned that Ambrad had "deliberately" violated NRC requirements.

"It is essential for the NRC to maintain the highest confidence that licensees and their employees will abide by requirements designed to protect the health and safety of the public," Miller wrote.

South Pittsburgh Cancer Center is required to submit a written response to the NRC within 30 days.

-------- europe

Uzbekistan will not join military-political blocs

August 27, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010827-16810153.htm

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (UPI) -- This Central Asian nation will not join the rapid-reaction forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States or sign the CIS Collective Security Treaty, President Islam Karimov said.

"We have pulled out of the Collective Security Treaty and are not going to join again," Mr. Karimov said during a news conference late last week in the city of Fergana, some 150 miles southeast of the capital, Tashkent.

"Uzbekistan is not joining and will not join any military-political blocs."

The CIS, created in 1991, included Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Tashkent, however, pulled out of the treaty in 1999.

Exercises for the CIS's rapid-reaction force, known as Dostlik-2001 (Friendship), began in Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday, according to local media reports. The exercises aim to increase the military readiness of a multinational force to combat terrorism and other foreign incursions.

Participation in military-political blocs contradicts Uzbekistan's goals for the future, according to Mr. Karimov. "We do not want a return to old times," he said, referring to the former Soviet Union.

"Security, maintaining peace and stability in the Central Asian region, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, and quieting creeping expansion of extremism" are priorities for cooperation, the Uzbek president said.

Mr. Karimov stressed that terrorism in Central Asia is a major threat to the security of Uzbekistan and the region.

Last year, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan organized armed incursions into the Surkhandarya and Tashkent regions of Uzbekistan. In February 1999, the IMU took responsibility for a bomb blast that killed 16 and wounded more than 100 people.

The movement seeks to overthrow Mr. Karimov and replace the present Uzbek government with an Islamic state. The State Department put the IMU on its list of international terrorist groups last September.

-------- india / pakistan

U.S. Ready to End Sanctions on India to Build an Alliance

New York Times
August 27, 2001
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/international/27DIPL.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - The Bush administration is moving on a broad front to strengthen relations with India, a nation it views as a neglected and potentially important strategic ally and trading partner in Asia.

The most dramatic step the administration will take, officials say, is the almost certain lifting of American economic and military sanctions imposed on India in 1998 for its test of a nuclear weapon.

Senior administration officials say Congress will be asked to lift the sanctions when it returns next month. Some of the most senior legislators, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, favor the move.

Senator Biden said in an interview that he had sent a letter to President Bush last week expressing his support and indicating that the sanctions could be removed in time for a possible meeting between Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in New York in late September. Mr. Bush is also planning a visit to India early next year.

The sanctions were symbolic as much as practical, the officials said. Lifting them now would remove a significant irritant to closer ties. But it would also signal that the United States - after being surprised and chagrined by India's nuclear test three years ago - had little choice but to accept that India, the second most populous nation, had elbowed its way into the nuclear club.

The reversal is not as awkward as it might once have been, given the administration's own opposition to a nuclear-test-ban treaty and its desire to build a missile shield against what it increasingly seems to regard as the inevitable spread of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction.

In short, as one official said, the United States had to face the fact that India was a nuclear power and that "the genie could not be put back in the bottle."

One senior official said the administration was also likely to ask Congress to lift some sanctions against India's neighbor and rival, Pakistan, which detonated its own nuclear weapon in a tit-for-tat test just weeks after India did. But Senator Biden said he was not prepared to go along with the request for Pakistan, which has since come under military rule.

In the most direct explanation of the administration's position, Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, told an audience in New Delhi earlier this month, "The United States wants to treat India realistically for what it is - a major country and an emerging power.

"We want to engage India in a strategic dialogue that encompasses the full range of global issues," he added. "The United States appreciates that India's influence clearly extends far beyond South Asia."

Mr. Zoellick, the first member of President Bush's cabinet to visit India, said Washington wanted to work with India on fighting terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons, promoting human rights and protecting the environment.

He also urged India to drop its resistance to the start of a new round of trade talks by the World Trade Organization, in Doha, Qatar, in October. India's strong voice on behalf of developing countries contributed to the breakdown of the last round, in Seattle in 1999.

Another high-ranking Bush official, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, said this month in Sydney, Australia: "India is a nuclear power. There are a lot of reasons we ought to engage with India, and we're going to."

Mr. Armitage noted that the Indian-American population in the United States was "very high-tech oriented, very organized, very politically astute, a very helpful" factor in American politics.

In urging the lifting of sanctions, senior Bush officials said, they are not seeking a quid pro quo. They say the end of sanctions will itself produce a closer dialogue and, for example, possibly lead India to tighten its controls on the manufacture of material for nuclear weapons.

The sanctions bar military exports to India and any exports to companies believed to be connected to India's nuclear program. Lifting them now would open the way for joint military operations and the sale of nonnuclear weapons technology to India.

The warming trend toward India, which led a nonaligned movement during the cold war and had friendly relations with the Soviet Union and now Russia, is not new. A visit by President Clinton to India in 2000 went a long way toward breaking down years of mistrust. But Mr. Clinton's efforts to improve ties were complicated by India's nuclear test.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Bush spoke of India as an important but needlessly ignored country, and praised the Indian-American community, one of the wealthiest in the United States and one that includes generous donors to congressional campaigns.

In particular, officials said, the Bush administration is pleased by India's openness to what has become the president's major foreign policy goal: missile defense.

During a visit in April, the Indian foreign and defense minister, Jaswant Singh, was invited for a surprise tête-à-tête with President Bush. Officials said Mr. Singh was sympathetic to key elements of the administration's missile plan, even though some experts have warned that a shield could set off an arms race across Asia if China builds up its arsenal in response.

But the deputy secretary, Mr. Armitage, and others went out of their way to declare that the relaxation toward India was not motivated by a desire to create a counterweight to China. "Whenever you try to establish a relationship with a country which is based on a third country, then you're doomed to failure," he said.

Senator Biden agrees. "I don't view this as playing India off China," he said. "There are all kinds of reasons to treat them as they are - a great nation."

Indeed, India and the United States share a potentially broad range of security interests, particularly given India's location on the Subcontinent, which bridges the Far East and the Islamic world.

Both nations have an interest in countering Islamic extremism, particularly in Pakistan, which New Delhi and Washington have each accused of receiving weapons technology from China. India has also accused Pakistan of supporting Islamic militants in disputed Kashmir.

And though its relations with Beijing have slowly improved, New Delhi has long been conscious of the need to balance against China, which the United States sees a fast-emerging strategic rival in the Pacific.

In the long term, strategic planners preparing for China's expanding military presence see a new friendliness between United States and India as potentially very helpful. Among the top American officials to visit India in recent months was Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"How much do we care about India, qua India, or because it's close to China?" asked George R. Perkovich, an arms expert at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a philanthropic group based in Charlottesville, Va., who has written extensively about India, suggesting that China was indeed on the administration's mind as it thinks about India.

In addition, both India and the United States have expressed an interest in reducing tensions over Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have had several military conflicts. With the addition of nuclear weapons to the region, Mr. Clinton said, the Subcontinent had become "the most dangerous place in the world."

By lifting the sanctions on India, Senator Biden said, the United States would be "setting an example for Pakistan," a reference to India's relatively good behavior on selling nuclear-related materials to other countries. Pakistan has a poorer record, administration officials said.

The United States has also been frustrated by Pakistan's inability to restore a democratic government since Gen. Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup in 1999, and India's place as the largest democracy dovetails neatly with Washington's interest in promoting democracy abroad.

Aware of the possibility of creating an "India only" policy, however, American officials said Pakistan, a strong ally in the 1980's, should not be relegated to the dust heap. "This is not an either/or game with Pakistan," one senior official said.

In particular, officials acknowledged that Washington does not want to alienate Pakistan for fear of encouraging Islamic extremists there or giving them reason to strengthen ties to the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan.

"The United States is not interested in Pakistan becoming more under the influence of Afghanistan," said Mr. Armitage. "There has to be a way out for Pakistan. We're going to play an effective role."

While officials said the administration would seek to remove the sanctions imposed on Pakistan in 1998 because of its nuclear tests, other sanctions - including those imposed after General Musharraf's coup - would remain in place.

Finally, officials said, the administration sees India as an enticing trade partner, but one that must do much more to reform its economy. Mr. Zoellick urged India to do so, noting that the United States was responsible for 15 percent of India's international trade.

"You will not be surprised if I observe that the emerging strategic relationship between our two great democracies will not be resilient and growing if we fail to draw our economies closer together," he said. "I am seeking close governmental cooperation on trade - bilaterally and for the global trading system."

Mr. Bush has appointed a new ambassador in India, Robert D. Blackwill, to cultivate ties. Mr. Blackwill was one of a handful of close foreign policy advisers, known as the Vulcans, who guided Mr. Bush during his presidential campaign. Moreover, Mr. Blackwill was the boss of Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, when they both served on the National Security Council for the president's father.

-------- korea

US Takes on Invader Role in War Games

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-US-War-Games.html?searchpv=aponline

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- U.S. soldiers sitting at computers played the role of an enemy Monday in war games designed to test the ability of South Korea and the United States to fend off a North Korean invasion.

Some 10,000 American troops are taking part in an annual joint exercise that has drawn verbal attacks from the communist North since it was first launched in 1976.

This year was no exception, with North Korea accusing the United States of ``a mock 'cyber warfare' drill'' to hone its skills at spreading computer viruses and hacking into computer networks.

The 12-day maneuvers, called ``Ulchi Focus Lens,'' end Friday. They are among the U.S. military's most advanced war games involving computer simulation.

``It's kind of like a laboratory experiment'' for war, said 2nd Lt. Stephen Koch of Kansas City, Kan. a computer operator at the main U.S. military base in Seoul.

Koch and other soldiers in the ``Combined Battle Simulation Center'' spend 12 to 14 hours a day dispatching messages to unit commanders, monitoring their electronic responses and poring over map coordinates.

In one computer scenario, the crew of a U.S. Navy ship plots how to ferry supplies northward. In another, soldiers on the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas prepare to confront tanks and troops rushing southward.

At Camp Casey, a U.S. base north of Seoul, 200 computer operators act as the invaders, punching in messages about the deployment of their fictional troops. They work with a battle plan that is partly independent from that of the defenders, allowing for more spontaneity in the outcome.

The United States keeps 37,000 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Computer simulated war games are cheaper and more efficient than old-style exercises involving masses of troops, said Capt. John Neal, 27, of Murfreesboro, Tenn.

``You would literally be sending divisions of troops into the field,'' he said. ``It would cost a great deal of money. It would also disrupt the countryside and the activities of the populace.''

In 1994, the U.S. and South Korean armed forces canceled an annual exercise called ``Team Spirit'' in an effort to resolve a standoff over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program.

The biggest maneuver, ``Foal Eagle,'' has been held since 1961. Tens of thousands of troops take part.

North Korea has more than 1 million troops, but is believed to be short of training because of a lack of fuel and modern equipment. Still, Seoul lies within the range of the North's huge arsenal of artillery on the border.

``North Korea and South Korea have been preparing for war since the (1953) cease-fire,'' Lt. Koch said. ``It's just an amazing amount of guns pointing at each other.''

-------- missile defense

Achilles' Heel in Missile Plan: Crude Weapons

New York Times
August 27, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/international/27MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

The missile defense planned by the Bush administration may be least able to destroy warheads from countries that are thought to pose the biggest threat, federal and private experts say.

The trouble is that so-called rogue nations, like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, would fire wobbling, rudimentary warheads during an attack, and those turn out to be among the hardest to hit.

"We've concluded that it's an extremely difficult problem," said a Pentagon antimissile scientist.

Creating any antimissile system would be enormously complex, but stopping a rudimentary missile would be far harder even than hitting advanced warheads, which are made to spin like tops or footballs. The whirling increases accuracy by keeping them pointed in the right direction. This rotation, known as spin stabilization, means that a warhead speeding around the globe can fall within a few hundred feet of its intended target.

But a crude warhead fired by an inexperienced attacker is likely to have no spin stabilization and to gyrate wildly, often tumbling end over end, making it hard to track.

While tumbling nuclear warheads are less accurate than those that are spin-stabilized and lack the precision to hit small targets, experts say they are fine for destroying cities.

"If you fire at New York, it means you might not get Central Park," a federal weapons expert said. "You might get the Jersey side or Queens. But no matter what, you're going to get enough of the metro area that New Yorkers will be unhappy."

While acknowledging that the tumbling issue is a potential snag, the Pentagon last week authorized the clearing of 135 acres in Alaska to prepare an antimissile base. And officials are planning interceptor flight tests meant to track and destroy mock tumbling warheads, but only years from now.

Interceptors that would be installed in Alaska would represent the first weapon against long-range missiles that the United States has fielded in a quarter-century. In theory, interceptors from Alaska could thunder out of their silos to repel a missile attack from North Korea by as early as 2004.

But military experts concede that a Korean strike would most likely involve tumbling objects. Federal and private experts say a tumbling warhead poses an especially challenging target. Antimissile sensors, rather than seeing steady dots in the distance, would see twinkling points of light, like stars. The tumbling objects could include not only warheads and rocket debris, but also unarmed decoys meant to confuse an antimissile system.

Tumbling hampers a defender's ability to identify subtle differences between warheads and decoys, and that increases the odds that an interceptor will zero in on the decoy.

To date, the Pentagon has conducted four tests of its prototype antimissile interceptor, and succeeded twice. But in none of the cases has it faced tumbling warheads, experts say. Military leaders say that step is too daunting.

Prompted by federal panels, scientific critics and its own internal studies, the Pentagon's antimissile program is now confronting the tumbling issue. Officials are planning the first interceptor flight tests meant to track and destroy mock tumbling warheads - though the move lies years in the future.

"Our test philosophy is to add step- by-step complexities over time," said Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish of the Air Force, the antimissile program's director, in an appearance before a House Armed Services subcommittee. "It is a walk-before-you-run, learn-as-you-go development approach."

He cautioned that rushing to add complexity to antimissile testing could backfire, making it hard to understand what failed and why. "Our test evaluators," General Kadish said, "cannot learn by overloading system components with multiple test requirements and testing them too early under highly stressing conditions."

Critics say the antimissile program is ignoring an intractable problem. "Tumbling is a terribly big deal," said Dr. Theodore A. Postol, an arms expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology critical of some antimissile systems. "It's totally unpredictable, a wild card. It makes it much harder to know what to look for."

The problem is so difficult, some critics say, that it threatens to defeat any foreseeable antimissile weapon. Pentagon officials dismiss such judgments as unfounded. Defense technology, they contend, is fast evolving toward a new level of maturity in which complex systems will eventually work together to defeat almost any threat.

The so-called kill vehicle under development for the Alaskan site is meant to zoom into space atop an interceptor rocket and smash enemy warheads to pieces by force of impact, akin to hitting a bullet with a bullet.

Experts agree that its hardest job is sorting out the real enemy targets from the fakes, a task it tries to do in a few dozen seconds with a telescopic sensor and a computerized brain. The prototype weapon is the furthest along of many antimissile technologies that the United States is exploring, including space-based laser weapons and sea-based interceptors.

Iraq, Iran and North Korea have worked to develop intercontinental missiles, experts say, and their warheads would probably tumble.

Spin stabilization is an old art, developed early in the space age, but it is not always easy to accomplish, especially atop a missile packed with heavy nuclear arms.

Experts say the United States military occasionally has failures in trying to make its own missile warheads spin. And new members of the missile club would probably forgo spin stabilization, given the risks and limited benefits, experts say.

Nearly a decade ago, when work on the current ground-based interceptor began, its proposed agenda was dominated by the problem of tumbling warheads.

On Oct. 3, 1994, Jerry W. Cavender, the Army's program manager for National Missile Defense, wrote a weapon's contractor to spell out the most likely threats to the United States. He listed six categories of missiles, from the most rudimentary to the most advanced.

The "highest priority" threat, he wrote, included primitive attacks with tumbling warheads. As examples, Mr. Cavender listed hypothetical attacks by North Korea, firing at Los Angeles, and Iran, firing at Washington.

But enthusiasm for the challenge soon waned.

Dr. Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at TRW, a military contractor, was asked to do computer simulations in which a kill vehicle was tested against 200 types of enemy decoys and warheads, including tumblers. The kill vehicle always failed to distinguish between tumbling warheads and decoys, Dr. Schwartz said in an interview.

Starting in 1999, when the prototype interceptor began zooming into space on flight tests, none of the targets slated for destruction included tumbling warheads. Critics charge that the Pentagon found the problem too formidable and swept it under the rug.

But in an interview, Mr. Cavender, formerly the Army's program manager for National Missile Defense and now retired, said the effort to address the problem had been dropped because there was not enough money for realistic testing. Each flight costs about $100 million.

"Just trying to execute a single test was hard," Mr. Cavender said. "It's a matter of priorities. First you have to prove you can handle a favorable engagement. Then you start doing the other ones."

Mr. Cavender added that as the antimissile program made advances in technology and experience in the future, it would successfully target tumbling warheads. "It's not a show stopper," he insisted.

In 1999 and 2000, as flight testing picked up, critics within the government called on the Pentagon's antimissile program to give renewed attention to tumbling threats.

One of the most vocal experts was Dr. Philip E. Coyle III, the Defense Department's director of testing and evaluation. In an August 2000 report, he urged flight tests using tumbling decoys and mock warheads.

This April, after he had left office, Dr. Coyle announced that the program "has now agreed to do such tests and is planning them, although they are still some years off."

For the moment, the Pentagon is keeping its antimissile focus on easier challenges. On July 14, the program conducted its fourth interception flight test. Officials said the mock warhead was destroyed, but it was also spin-stabilized.

Officials also said the kill vehicle had been able to distinguish between a 5-foot, cone-shaped warhead and a circular 5.5-foot decoy balloon, but critics called that exercise unchallenging and unrealistic. And on Aug. 15, General Kadish, the program's director, told reporters that in the next test, scheduled for October, the program would replay the July test, with no new complexities.

"It is still not totally comfortable for me to say that we can make the hit-to-kill technology work consistently," he said, "even in that simple scenario" with a single decoy. He added, "We still need some more reliability."

In an interview, Lt. Col. Richard Lehner of the Air Force, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said that the program could give out no information on when it planned to do the tumbling tests, but he suggested that the experiments would not be any time soon.

"It's irresponsible to launch off on more difficult flight tests before we've solved the fundamentals," he said.

--------

Army Prepares Alaska Test Site

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Missile-Defense-Base.html

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A contractor for the Army began clearing land Monday to prepare Fort Greely as a possible national missile defense test site.

The Pentagon hopes to transform the shuttered base outside Delta Junction, about 80 miles southeast of Fairbanks, into the eventual core of its desired missile shield. The groundwork is being done through a nearly $5 million contract.

The contractor began clearing trees Monday to allow for the future possible installation of interceptor missile silos, an access road and two water wells. The contract calls for the site work to be completed by mid-December.

The Pentagon hopes to eventually build up to five missile silos at Fort Greely as part of an expanded Pacific ``test bed'' for the proposed national missile defense system. Congress has not yet approved funding for the work.

-------- russia

Diving Work Resumes on Sunken Sub

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Subsiding storms allowed an international diving team to resume carving and clearing work Monday on the sunken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, to prepare it for an ambitious lifting operation next month, officials said.

Thick fog and fierce winds at the Barents Sea site forced divers to suspend their work Sunday -- the third such delay in a week, fueling concerns that the massive submarine wouldn't be ready for the raising operation. The Kursk suffered explosions and sank last August, killing all 118 men aboard.

Skies cleared and waters calmed by Monday morning and work resumed, Russian Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said in a statement. Winds remained at 12 mph.

Divers focused Monday on clearing out a space between the inner and outer hulls above the third compartment, he said.

Before they stopped work Sunday, divers had finished cutting 22 of 26 holes in the thick hull of the Kursk. The holes must then be fitted for the steel cables that will be attached to the Kursk to tug it to the surface.

Officials have said repeatedly in recent days that the mid-September target date for the raising operation had not changed, but much work remains.

--------

Russia Seeks Plutonium Deal Delay

By Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press Writer
Monday, August 27, 2001; 4:14 PM
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4054-2001Aug27?language=printer

MOSCOW -- A long-discussed U.S.-Russian plan to stop production of weapons-grade plutonium in Russia has been stalled by funding shortages, and the government said Monday that it wants the United States to agree to postpone its implementation.

The agreement, signed in September 1997 by Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was hailed at the time as a historic event and a big step in U.S. efforts to ensure that Moscow safeguards and reduces its vast nuclear stockpile.

But it has already been delayed by disagreements over audits meant to ensure U.S. money would be spent properly. Now Russia wants to push back the schedule of the project to convert three plutonium-making reactors to production of uranium for civilian power plants.

As it stands, the plan calls for two nuclear reactors in the Siberian city of Seversk, once a closed city known as Tomsk-7, to stop producing plutonium in 2002 and 2003, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

A third reactor in Zheleznogorsk - another formerly top-secret Siberian city, called Krasnoyarsk-26 in Soviet times - was to stop in 2004.

But amid persistent funding problems, Russian Cabinet's information department said Monday that Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has ordered the Nuclear Power Ministry to negotiate an amendment to the deal with U.S. officials.

It said the Seversk reactors would keep working through 2005, and the one in Zheleznogorsk until the end of 2006.

In addition to producing plutonium, the reactors also provide electricity and heat for residents of the cities, and the U.S.-Russian deal called for the two countries to share the costs of building replacement power facilities.

The proposed amendment, authorized by Kasyanov, also included a stipulation that the United States would help modify reactors or build alternative power facilities if funds are available. The government statement didn't say when the amendment is expected to be signed.

Officials at the U.S. embassy in Moscow declined to comment.

Also Monday, Sen. Richard Lugar - a chief architect of deals to reduce and safeguard nuclear stockpiles following the 1991 Soviet collapse - was visiting Severodvinsk, a naval port on Russia's northern coast that is the focus of efforts to dismantle scores of aging nuclear submarines with the help of U.S. funding.

The Indiana Republican, who arrived in Russia on Sunday, has complained of massive cuts in the programs designed to help Russia secure its vast cache of nuclear weapons and material, which environmental groups have said pose a major threat to the surrounding area.

He was inspecting a maintenance plant, U.S.-financed disposal projects and a shipyard before heading back to Moscow. He planned to visit the Volga River cities of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan before leaving for neighboring Ukraine later this week, the U.S. Embassy said.

-------- treaties

A Treaty the World Has Outgrown

New York Times
August 27, 2001
By THAD COCHRAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/opinion/27COCH.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's statement on Thursday that the United States will withdraw from the outdated 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty "at a time convenient to America" should put to rest any lingering doubts as to his seriousness about building a national missile defense system.

We should of course hope that the United States and Russia can agree to replace the treaty with a new framework. But if President Vladimir Putin of Russia insists on clinging to the cold war accord, the administration should not hesitate to exercise its rights under the treaty and give notice of our official withdrawal from it.

Mr. Bush's statement again brought suggestions that there is no need to leave the ABM treaty now, that it is sufficiently flexible to allow for all the missile defense research, development and testing that the administration might do for some time. Even if this were true, it would make no sense to continue to pretend that the treaty can be adapted to the new strategic environment. It can't.

In fact, the treaty's first article specifically prohibits precisely what Congress and President Bush already have stated to be our national policy, as spelled out in the 1999 National Missile Defense Act. That law states that the United States will deploy a missile defense system when the technology is ready, while also seeking further reductions in the Russian strategic offensive force.

President Bush is proceeding down both these paths by laying the groundwork in Alaska for the deployment of missile defenses (as well as pursuing more promising technologies) while at the same time discussing with Russia reductions in nuclear forces.

The ABM treaty cannot be "fixed" with cosmetic nips and tucks. Its very purpose was to impede the development and prevent the deployment of missile defenses, and minor adjustments cannot reconcile it with the post-cold-war world. It is not in America's interest to continue the unproductive and needless discussions the Clinton administration held with Russia to amend the treaty.

This is an issue of law and national security, not partisanship. "The prevailing law here - and we're after all a nation of laws - is the National Missile Defense Act of 1999," said Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, at a Senate hearing last month. He added that "our allies and others around the world" should understand that the question "is not whether we will build a ballistic missile defense, but how and when we will do it."

Congress should refrain from imposing restrictions on our missile defense programs that would lead the Russians to believe we do not intend to carry out the missile defense act. If any such restrictions are included in the fiscal 2002 Defense Department authorization bill, President Bush should veto it. Russia should not be emboldened by Congress to resist progress in negotiations to move cooperatively beyond the ABM treaty.

Sending mixed signals would be dangerous: Our interest is not served by a never-ending cycle of suspicion and confrontation between the United States and Russia - in which every event in the missile- defense program becomes a treaty dispute between Washington and Moscow - created by a treaty limbo that has clouded every aspect of the two countries' relations.

Those who insist on clinging to the ABM treaty wish upon us a world in which our security depends only on the threat of nuclear annihilation of those who may threaten or blackmail us, a world where an American president could be forced to choose between backing down or killing untold numbers of people in another country as punishment for their leader's miscalculations.

It is now up to President Putin to decide whether he will move forward with President Bush, or remain mired in a relationship that rests on threats of mutual annihilation of each country's civilian population.

Thad Cochran, Republican senator from Mississippi, is the author of the National Missile Defense Act of 1999.

--------

A Needed ABM Treaty

August 27, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/opinion/L27MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

To the Editor:

It is obviously premature to replace the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with a nascent "Star Wars" system. Yet President Bush intends to do just that (news article, Aug. 24).

Vague notions of a system that may never work and might touch off a new arms race do not justify the cost of withdrawing from a treaty that has maintained a strategic balance between the United States and Russia for 30 years.

"Star Wars" has cost $95 billion since 1983, but according to the head of the Pentagon's missile defense programs, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the system lacks "basic functionality." The security afforded by the ABM treaty far outweighs any false sense of security that an unworkable missile shield would provide.

Mr. Bush's "Star Wars" plans lack basic common sense. It's time for Congress to tighten the reins. CARRIE BENZSCHAWEL Washington, Aug. 24, 2001 The writer is program associate, Peace Action Education Fund.

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

-------- california

Exhuming a toxic tomb
McClellan cleanup prepares for radioactivity

By Chris Bowman
Sacramento Bee
Aug. 27, 2001
http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local06_20010827.html

Construction crews at McClellan today plan to hoist the first section of a mammoth tent that will enclose an extraordinary excavation site at the former Air Force base.

Five stories high, two football fields long and wider than the state Capitol, the bright white polyester shell will encompass a long-abandoned grave of radioactive waste from a still-secret Cold War mission. The mammoth tent will be a compelling symbol of how big the business of environmental cleanup in the region has become.

The big top will be up for as long as it takes moon-suited workers to unearth, evaluate and ship off an estimated 1,000 corroding steel drums of waste from the 30-foot deep landfill on the west side of the decommissioned Watt Avenue base.

The job probably will take two years, according URS Corp., a global engineering company performing the $38 million cleanup for the McClellan Air Force Base Conversion Agency.

Unlike other toxic burial grounds on the 2,800-acre installation, this two-acre site is largely a mystery to environmental investigators. That's because it contains debris and chemical solutions from a top-secret analytical laboratory that operated nearly 50 years on the base without disclosing the full nature of its work or the substances involved.

"If these drums are crushed and opened, we don't know what will be released," said Ray Lidstrom, URS project manager.

Former lab workers, said Roxanne Yonn, a URS spokeswoman who interviewed several of the technicians, told cleanup officials only that they might uncover any amount of radioactive samples, solutions and tainted lab equipment at various degrees of potency.

Yonn said cleanup crews aren't taking any chances. "We're treating the whole site as radioactive," she said.

The dig will be much like an archaeological excavation. Front-loaders and excavators will gingerly remove dirt in 30-square-foot grids, one foot at a time, to avoid striking and damaging buried drums. Any barrels spotted will be removed carefully with hand shovels, and their contents will be analyzed and inventoried by a laboratory on site.

The $2 million shell of PVC polyester fabric and aluminium frames, which takes three weeks to erect, is designed to keep out wind and rain.

Workers will wear full containment suits equipped with oxygen tanks to avoid potential lethal inhalation of radioactive elements. Air in and around the shell will be monitored for contamination.

Nearly three-quarters of the project's $38 million cost goes toward the transportation and disposal of the waste, officials said. The unearthed soil and drums will be shipped to landfills in Andrews, Texas; Clive, Utah; Barnwell, S.C.; and the federal Department of Energy's Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.

The estimated time and cost of the cleanup mushroomed after URS crews made an unexpected discovery in an exploratory dig of the landfill last August.

Workers found a container of glass laboratory bottles labelled "Pu," for plutonium. Highly poisonous and radioactive, the metallic element is produced in nuclear reactors and is the primary fuel in nuclear weapons.

"Everything was placed on hold," Yonn said.

Air Force officials knew from earlier surveillance that the site contained low-level radioactive waste, presumably from the radium in paint once used to illuminate cockpit gauges and gun sights.

Plutonium, however, came as a complete surprise, Air Force spokesman Lt. Robert Firman said after the discovery.

Firman said the base had no records of the element's use at the military installation, where the chief mission was aircraft maintenance.

The McClellan Central Laboratory, however, had a different mission. That operation was staffed with nuclear scientists and technicians who are still sworn to secrecy about whom they worked for and their chief duties.

The plutonium find, which was locally televised, prompted some former lab workers to inform cleanup officials that the radioactive material probably came from their operation.

"When I first saw that picture (of the bottles), I chuckled, thinking, 'Gee, I wonder whether my fingerprints are still on them,' " said Mike Chinnock of Citrus Heights, a nuclear chemistry technician at the lab from 1966 to 1970.

Chinnock and other lab workers agreed to share certain details with Air Force officials in charge of the cleanup

after getting clearance from unspecified national defense authorities.

"Some workers won't talk at all," Yonn said. Those who did talk divulged enough to convince cleanup officials that the old landfill could contain material much more radioactive than previously thought.

"It made everybody pause," she said."

At 57, Chinnock is disabled from surgeries to remove a brain tumor that he believes was caused by accidental radiation exposure on the job. The Board of Veterans' Appeals rejected his claim, however, and he lost on appeal to a federal court. He is blind in his left eye and deaf in his left ear and potions of the left side of his body are paralyzed.

Chinnock told The Bee that samples were analyzed from the fallout of nuclear tests by communist countries to ensure compliance with international treaties. The McClellan lab also examined

debris from the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear plant fire, Air Force officials said. But, Chinnock said, these were "side jobs" unrelated to the lab's primary Cold War purpose, which remains under wraps.

Chinnock said he and other technicians regularly used pure stocks of plutonium and other radioactive elements and they routinely discarded the stocks when their shelf life had expired.

"They either went down the drain and ended up in Magpie Creek or ended up in a 55-gallon drum," he said.

He recalls a truck driver who picked up a loaded drum telling him that they were dumped in a pit now under investigation. The landfill closed in the mid-1960s.

"They are going to run into bottles of uranium. They are going to run into bottles of americium, of neptunium, cobalt -- whole series of radioactive elements and their isotopes," Chinnock said.

McClellan conversion agency officials say the excavation will pose no threat to people outside the cleanup site and is well away from areas planned for industrial tenants.

The Air Force has designated the cleanup a "time critical removal action" because of the threat of radioactive contamination to underground drinking water supplies, about 100 feet below the landfill. Many of the 108 drums recovered during the preliminary investigation last summer were leaking.

Monitoring wells have not indicated any such contamination. But Craig Marchione, an Air Force radiation safety

officer, said, "We do not know how deep the radiation has traveled."

The landfill is the first of an estimated 50 toxic burial grounds on base property to be exhumed, Yonn said. Cleanup work to date has focused on the fuel products and solvents that already have reached the groundwater, she said.

-------- new mexico

Land for Los Alamos Lab Taken Unfairly, Heirs Say

August 27, 2001
By JIM YARDLEY
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/national/27LAND.html?searchpv=nytToday

SANTA FE, N.M., Aug. 26 - The story handed down in Jose Gonzales's family is that his father was working in a field on the day the government men came to take away his farm. Up and down he worked the field until they told him to hitch his team and drive it off the property forever.

At the time, Mr. Gonzales was serving in the Army in World War II, so he admits he cannot document the story. But land records confirm that his family was among the small group of Hispanic homesteaders whose property was used for the Manhattan Project, the secret program that created the atomic bomb.

Now, nearly six decades later, Mr. Gonzales, 83, is suing the government, claiming bluntly "that we were taken for a ride." In a case layered with ethnicity, history and politics, Mr. Gonzales and other heirs are asking for reparations, saying the government cheated their forebears, in some cases paying them nothing, even as nearby Anglo landowners received far more money for their property.

"I don't see that there was justice," said Mr. Gonzales, who fought in Africa and Europe before being sent to Japan, where at Hiroshima he saw firsthand the power of the bomb developed on his family's land.

The case is also complicated. The heirs to the homesteaders, fractured by infighting, have split in two and filed lawsuits pursuing different tactics.

One group, pushing for a political solution, has lobbied the state's congressional delegation for reparations' legislation this fall. The other group, which is more confrontational, is bracing for a court fight. "We're asking for some of the land back," said Joe Gutierrez, the group's leader. "There was some discrimination in how they assessed these properties."

Andrew Smith, the Justice Department lawyer who is handling the cases, said he was confident the government could win in court, particularly since the claims are 60 years old, raising questions concerning the statute of limitations.

"The issues become stale and the facts become cold and the people who were present in the dispute are no longer around," Mr. Smith said. "It makes it about impossible for the court to get at the merits of the case."

The dispute traces to 1942, when the government began looking for a site to develop a nuclear weapon. The director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was familiar with the remote, mountainous area of New Mexico near the town of Los Alamos, about 30 miles from Santa Fe. Eventually, the site was selected for what is now called the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The government needed roughly 54,000 acres for the project, and most of the land was taken from a national forest. But about 8,900 acres were in private hands, owned by the Hispanic homesteaders and two Anglo- owned enterprises, the Los Alamos Ranch School and Anchor Ranch. Both the school and the ranch hired lawyers and negotiated sale prices; the school, according to research commissioned by the Hispanic heirs, was paid $225 per acre, including buildings. Anchor Ranch was paid $43 per acre just for the land.

The Hispanic homesteaders were paid as little as $7 an acre, including improvements, according to the research. Some landowners never received their payments, the study showed, and some people told of being forced off their land at gunpoint.

Teresita Garcia Martinez, 72, recalled how her family owned 300 acres after her grandfather had staked a claim in the late 1800's under the Homestead Act. Her father, Adolfo Garcia, operated a sawmill that employed the entire family and a dozen other men. But when government officials told her father that his land would be needed for wartime national security, she said he obeyed. He was paid $23 an acre.

"The whole family suffered," she said, adding that her father worked temporarily as a janitor at Los Alamos. She said some relatives moved to California and Arizona in search of work. "The whole family had to separate. It was a family business."

In 1997, the claims made by Mrs. Martinez and others gained public attention after Congress approved legislation to turn over more than 4,600 acres of land owned by the laboratory to the surrounding county and to a local Indian tribe. The state's two United States senators, Republican Pete V. Domenici and Democrat Jeff Bingaman, had sponsored the legislation to help development in the city of Los Alamos and because the tribe had never been compensated for land taken to build the laboratory.

The legislation also called for the claims of the Hispanic homesteaders to be examined by the Department of Energy, which asked the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct an investigation. The Army determined that the homesteaders had no legal basis for more compensation, ruling that the original condemnation had been proper, a finding that helped prompt the current lawsuits.

Initially, the heirs were united in a lawsuit filed in January 2000 by a Santa Fe lawyer, Gene Gallegos. Mr. Gallegos met with members of Mr. Domenici's staff and decided that the chances of winning timely reparations were better through an act of Congress than in court. He is negotiating with Congressional staff members. But others, led by Mr. Gutierrez, disagreed and said they felt cut out of the negotiations. Mr. Gutierrez's group filed its lawsuit in May.

Mr. Smith, the Justice Department lawyer, said the government did not have a position on a reparations bill but would probably request that the two cases be consolidated.

Mr. Gonzales, the World War II veteran whose family was one of the original landowners, said he hoped the legal wrangling would not delay a resolution. "Time is marching on, and if the people who were hurt the most are to see justice in their lifetimes," he said, "then it has to happen now."

-------- pennsylvania

NRC finds minor violation at Pennsylvania nuke

USA: August 27, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12160/story.htm

NEW YORK - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said last week it found a violation of its safety rules at Exelon Corp.'s Peach Bottom nuclear station in Pennsylvania.

The NRC, in a statement, characterized the violation as "white," meaning it is an issue of low to moderate importance to plant safety but one which may require additional NRC inspections.

The violation involved several occasions when the public address and evacuation alarm system at Peach Bottom was not maintained or did not work properly.

The NRC said the issue has low to moderate safety significance because a failed on-site communication system would prevent plant operators from informing personnel of protective actions and could delay a site evacuation.

"This problem with the public address system is just one of a number of emergency preparedness related problems that have surfaced in the past several months," said Hubert Miler, administrator of NRC Region I.

Miller said Exelon, based in Chicago, has initiated actions to resolve these problems and strengthen emergency preparedness performance in its Mid-Atlantic operating group.

NRC officials classify safety violations at nuclear plants as one of four colors indicating an increased level of severity, beginning with green and progressing to white, yellow or red.

The NRC said the plant may be subject to increased oversight such as additional meetings or inspections.

-------- utah

Questions Abound as Nuclear Regulator's Extortion Trial Opens

Monday, August 27, 2001
BY JUDY FAHYS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
http://www.sltrib.com/08272001/utah/126430.htm

The federal extortion trial of former state regulator Larry Anderson opens today, with some of the most puzzling questions in the long-running case still unanswered.

Why did the former director of the Utah Division of Radiation Control expose himself to criminal charges by taking money and a condominium from a businessman he regulated?

Why, after being forced from his $65,000-a-year state job, did he take the audacious step of suing landfill owner Khosrow Semnani over a consulting contract no one had seen?

And why did he snub a plea bargain that would have slashed his possible jail time and penalties?

As Anderson's jury trial opens in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, the case has ramifications well beyond the pride of a retired bureaucrat.

Semnani hopes for testimony and a verdict that will exonerate him and his multimillion-dollar company, Envirocare of Utah. And the public will be looking for assurance that a renegade state employee, and not the state's entire environmental program, operated for personal profit rather than the public good.

However, defense attorney Jerry Mooney predicts the two-week trial will not provide much for people seeking broader meanings.

"They come in expecting some truth-seeking," he said, "but often it is a disappointment."

The trial will be the first public exploration of these knotty questions since 1987, when Anderson, as division director, began working with Semnani on starting and growing a hazardous waste business. Anderson holds that it was a legitimate business arrangement that made Semnani enormously wealthy. The businessman insists he ponied up only to avoid the regulator's wrath.

In any case, both profited handsomely from the relationship.

Two years into the arrangement, Semnani purchased a condo on the Park Meadows golf course in Park City that he soon deeded to the regulator. The condo sold for $400,000 a few years later, shortly before Anderson and his wife, Carolee, settled into a townhouse overlooking the Oasis Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev.

Money changed hands under the table. Anderson set up a Swiss bank account. Semnani had money wired into the account from a Paris bank. And along with the coins and piles of cash he received from the businessman, Anderson collected consulting fees through a contractor he had referred to Envirocare.

Semnani's business blossomed apace. Anderson helped him secure an exception to federal law to operate a radioactive waste facility on private property -- still the only exception of its kind in the nation -- and also helped Semnani buy, at a bargain price, state-owned land essential to any growth at Envirocare's 640-acre Tooele County site. Anderson steered government-surplus shipping equipment to Semnani -- personally delivering the check to state surplus officers -- although another company wanted to bid on it.

Anderson oversaw many changes to Envirocare's operating permits that added to the list of lucrative services it could offer. At the same time, he actively fought radioactive waste proposals advanced by Envirocare's rivals in Utah and elsewhere.

The relationship prompted two investigations. The first, ordered by then-Department of Environmental Quality Director Ken Alkema, was deemed "inconclusive" and ordered destroyed.

The second, requested by lawmakers and conducted by the Legislative Auditor General's Office, noted Anderson's ferocious support for Envirocare and concluded "that Utah goes too far in supporting its waste-disposal facilities."

That sentiment lingers today. As Envirocare seeks to update its permit and expand its business, activist Chip Ward often raises the Anderson-Semnani scandal.

"People assume their regulators protect them," he said. " Regulators [in Utah] don't regulate. They mediate."

Brent Bradford, assistant director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, agrees the impact lingers despite all the department's added checks and controls.

"There is a question in folks' minds, 'Could it happen again?' " he said. "We certainly don't want to see this kind of thing recur."

With Dianne Nielson's appointment as DEQ director in 1993, Anderson, the first manager asked to go, was allowed to linger at DEQ long enough to qualify for a pension.

It was almost four years later when the scandal exploded into public view. Anderson sued Semnani for nonpayment of $5 million; Semnani countersued alleging extortion and demanding $2.4 million in damages.

In the ensuing legal firestorm, Anderson and Semnani were pummeled with lawsuits by Envirocare rivals enraged over being excluded from radioactive-waste opportunities worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Radiation Division's oversight of Envirocare was double-checked internally, as well as by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department, Envirocare's biggest customer. The reviews turned up no evidence that the Anderson-Semnani relationship had compromised public safety or health, but the suspicion has endured.

In a December 1998 deal with prosecutors, Semnani pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor tax charge and was ordered to pay $100,000. He also promised to testify against Anderson. It was the most lenient sentence allowed under federal guidelines.

In turn, prosecutors charged Anderson with extortion, tax evasion, tax fraud and mail fraud -- six criminal counts that carried up to 37 years of jail time and fines of more than $1 million. The former regulator agreed to a plea bargain last February, but withdrew at his June sentencing hearing.

For Tom Cochran, a nuclear specialist for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, the outcome of the scandal is dubious.

Anderson "will take the heat, and Semnani gets off with a misdemeanor and a $100,000 fine, which he probably makes in a few minutes," said Cochran, whose group tried unsuccessfully to get federal officials to revoke Envirocare's license. "I don't believe for a minute it was extortion."

After suffering two heart attacks and battling prostate cancer, Anderson pleaded indigence to the court. Mooney, a court-appointed defender assigned to the case last year, said his client no longer expects to see the financial rewards of the radioactive waste business he helped build.

The money is no longer the issue, Mooney said. "He wants the credit."

fahys@sltrib.com

-------- us nuc waste

The Plutonium Nightmare

August 27, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/opinion/27MON1.html?searchpv=nytToday

While the Bush administration is worrying about potential missile threats from North Korea, Iran or Iraq, it must not neglect the more immediate danger posed by tons of inadequately secured Russian plutonium. Any country trying to develop nuclear weapons would love to steal a few pounds of the bomb-making material. Yet the White House is considering indefinitely delaying a plan worked out with Moscow last year to begin disposing of the Russian plutonium.

The agreement provides for each country to gradually eliminate 34 metric tons of plutonium from its own stockpiles, mostly by burning it in power reactors. Citing rising costs, some administration officials prefer to wait until a newer, cheaper disposal technology can be developed. That would be a dangerously false economy.

Russia is the world's most inviting source of plutonium. It has more than 160 metric tons in all, roughly half contained in weapons and the other half stored under less than ideally secure conditions. The stored portion alone is enough to build about 8,000 nuclear bombs. Getting that plutonium out of the reach of would-be bomb makers should be one of Washington's top defense priorities.

The 34 metric tons of Russian plutonium and most of America's corresponding share - the United States has about 100 metric tons altogether - were to be mixed with uranium and burned as fuel in power reactors. The remaining American plutonium was to be mixed with other materials and turned into logs of radioactive glass and buried, a cheaper and safer method but one that Russia could not be persuaded to adopt. Earlier this year the Bush administration suspended the glass logs approach indefinitely, arguing that it would be cheaper to use just one disposal method. Now it may give up on the burning method as well.

Cost estimates for both methods have risen steeply since the plan was first proposed. Nevertheless, it is still a bargain compared with the risk of plutonium theft by a foreign government or terrorist group. Even using the more expensive burning method, the total cost of disposing of some 80 metric tons of plutonium would be about $6.6 billion on the American side and somewhat over $2 billion on the Russian side, spread out over nearly two decades. Most of the Russian cost would have to be assumed by the United States, although Europe has also promised to help.

In return, enough plutonium to build thousands of nuclear warheads would be eliminated. An administration prepared to spend more than $8 billion in a single year testing an unproven missile defense system should not object to spending much smaller yearly amounts to eliminate a tempting source of plutonium. There is no harm in exploring other potential disposal technologies. But such experimentation should not delay carrying out the present agreement with Moscow. If anything, that arrangement, which calls for each side to dispose of just two metric tons per year, should be accelerated. Meanwhile, Washington should increase its investment, currently $140 million a year, in improving security at Russian plutonium storage facilities.

Missile defense, even if technologically perfected, cannot by itself provide adequate protection against nuclear dangers. Ballistic missiles are only one of several ways a potential foe could subject the United States to nuclear threat or attack. The faster excess bomb plutonium can be eliminated, the safer Americans will be.


-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Macedonians Suspicious of Peace Plan
NATO to Collect Arms As Disputes Continue

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 27, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A325-2001Aug26?language=printer

SKOPJE, Macedonia, Aug. 26 -- NATO plans to collect the first of 3,300 weapons, including two tanks, from ethnic Albanian rebels Monday, in an operation that Macedonian authorities dismissed as an exercise in empty symbolism even before it has begun.

Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski today labeled "humiliating" the number of weapons the rebels have agreed to turn over to NATO, which insisted the surrender is in line with its estimates of the insurgents' firepower. Government officials have put the number of rebel weapons at between 8,000 and 85,000.

And following an explosion that destroyed a motel and killed two Macedonian Slavs who worked there early today, Georgievski threatened military retaliation against the rebels he held responsible, raising the specter of further violence as NATO troops assemble between the insurgents and government forces.

The explosion ripped through a motel owned by Macedonian Slavs in Celopek, six miles south of the country's second-largest city, Tetovo, and just across a river from rebel-held territory. A bartender and a waiter were killed in the explosion, which occurred in the home town of Macedonia's hard-line interior minister, Ljuben Boskoski.

Macedonian police said the two workers appeared to have been tied down inside the motel before the blast.

Both the explosion and the dispute over the number of weapons held by the rebels threatened to derail a fragile and twinned process in which the rebels are supposed to turn over all their weapons in three stages while parliament introduces and then ratifies constitutional changes that expand the rights of the ethnic Albanian minority.

NATO expects to withdraw from Macedonia 30 days after it picks up the first weapon, but the symbiotic process -- disarmament tied directly to parliamentary action -- could easily falter, forcing the alliance to rethink its role. There are already reports in the media in Britain, which provided most of the 3,500 troops here, that the alliance is making contingency plans for a much longer operation and could get sucked into the kind of peacekeeping operation it has strenuously said it would avoid.

On a more hopeful note, ethnic Albanian rebels released seven Macedonians and a U.S citizen of Macedonian descent whom they had held for weeks. Four of the hostages, two of whom were members of the Macedonian security forces, waved as they left a building in Lipkovo, a village deep behind rebel lines in northern Macedonian, and climbed into a Red Cross vehicle, a Reuters cameraman at the scene said.

U.S. officials had attempted and failed to secure the release of the American, sources said. Tonight an embassy spokesman here said officials were happy that he was out.

Vojislav Mihailovic, a retiree, was seized by rebels in June. He was being examined tonight in a hospital in Skopje, the capital, and Red Cross officials said he was in "reasonably good health."

Red Cross officials who met with the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army gave the rebels a list of 26 Macedonian Slavs reported missing. But the rebel group has acknowledged holding only half that number, according to NATO officials.

Red Cross spokeswoman Amanda Williamson said officials had met NLA leader Ali Ahmeti and that more releases could follow.

"Two days ago Ahmeti said he would give us unconditional access to all people being held by the NLA," she said. "We will only have an idea of who remains unaccounted for when we have gone through that whole process."

Some rebel commanders have said Macedonian Slav hostages would be released only if authorities release imprisoned ethnic Albanians and a political settlement takes hold.

A Western-mediated settlement, which cleared the way for the deployment of NATO troops, calls for an amnesty for rebels in the hills, but the fate of those in prison remains unclear.

In the last six months, more than 125,000 people from Macedonia's two principal ethnic groups have been forced from their homes after the NLA began an insurgency, purportedly for greater rights, seizing large swaths of territory in northern and western Macedonia.

In a stern, almost sermon-like tone, Danish Maj. Gen. Gunnar Lange, the military commander of NATO's Operation Essential Harvest, told reporters today that if the linked process of disarmament and political change breaks down, "the alternative is war."

Lange said NATO expected to collect 2,950 assault weapons, 210 machine guns, 130 mortars and antitank weapons, six air defense systems, two tanks and two armored personnel carriers. The rebels also planned to hand over 110,000 rounds of ammunition, he said.

Lange repeatedly refused to be drawn out on what might happen if the Macedonian government rejects as inadequate the numbers of weapons handed over to NATO and parliament votes down the political settlement on which the disarming of the NLA hinges.

NATO officials said the Macedonian estimates of arms are wildly inflated, although they privately indicate the rebels will keep some weapons and can easily acquire more from Albania or the neighboring Serbian province of Kosovo. Alliance officials argued that the process, however symbolic, can weaken the rebels and reestablish the primacy of the political process.

--------

NATO Mission in Macedonia Rolls On, Problems Loom

Mon, Aug 27 6:45 PM EDT
By Andrew Gray
Reuters
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010827/18/international-balkans-macedonia-dc

SKOPJE (Reuters) - NATO soldiers were set on Tuesday to collect hundreds more weapons from ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Macedonia after an initial day's haul of more than 400, but several potential obstacles to peace loomed on the horizon.

Vowing not to be deterred by the death on Monday of a British soldier killed after his car was hit by a chunk of concrete thrown by youths, NATO hopes to have gathered by Wednesday a third of its total target of 3,300 weapons in "Operation Essential Harvest."

Officers from the 4,500-strong Task Force Harvest voiced satisfaction at the first day of collecting weapons which the rebels have agreed to surrender as part of a peace plan meant to give greater rights to Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority.

The NATO mission aims to help nip Macedonia's conflict in the bud and prevent the all-out warfare which engulfed many parts of the old Yugoslavia in the past decade. Monday's surrender of weapons passed smoothly.

While the precise circumstances remain unclear, the attack on the 20-year-old soldier offered a reminder that many members of the Macedonian majority view NATO's mission with skepticism or downright hostility.

Several senior Macedonian politicians have made clear they believe the disarmament operation is a charade and that NATO's target figure is nothing like the full number of weapons held by the rebels, who began their insurgency in February this year.

"This is a country that's been torn by conflict and there are many people on many sides, emotions running high, and a lot of rhetoric that helps feed these emotions," said Major Barry Johnson, a NATO spokesman in Macedonia.

"Particularly in youth, we all know (people) sometimes take action based on the rhetoric they have heard."

MONASTERY VISIT MAY BE FLASHPOINT

Feelings may run high on Tuesday as a group of Macedonians plan an Assumption Day visit to a monastery in the northwestern village of Lesok, where a church on one of the country's most revered Orthodox Christian sites was blown up last week.

The site is close to rebel-held territory but guerrilla leaders have denied they were responsible for the blast.

In another potential flashpoint, Macedonians displaced by the conflict are reported to be planning a rally in the capital Skopje on Thursday night -- the eve of a parliament session meant to begin discussing the political parts of the peace plan.

A key question for many analysts is whether Macedonian deputies are ready to change the constitution and pass the new legislation required to turn the peace deal into reality.

The deal aims to create greater representation of ethnic Albanians in the police force and greater official use of the Albanian language, among other measures.

NATO insists that most Macedonians are not hostile to its mission and points out that its task force is in the former Yugoslav republic at the invitation of the government.

But Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski and Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski, two leading hawks in a cabinet which also includes moderates, have both voiced strong doubts about both the peace process and NATO's role in it.

Boskovski on Monday dismissed the NATO operation as nothing more than symbolism and proof "the international community is playing with the feelings of the nation and playing with the feelings with every honest Macedonian."

Boskovski's ministry has estimated the National Liberation Army (NLA) guerrilla group has some 85,000 weapons.

Many Macedonians see NATO as having sided with ethnic Albanian guerrillas in neighboring Kosovo during the war there and believe the alliance has failed to stem the flow of weapons and personnel from the province to support the NLA.

But NATO counters that its peacekeepers in Kosovo have detained 750 suspected NLA members since stepping up its border surveillance operations in June. The KFOR peace force said they had detained 96 suspects on Sunday evening and Monday morning.

-------- europe

Chirac backs wider EU role in world peacekeeping

Reuters
27 Aug 2001 16:17
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27312648

PARIS, Aug 27 (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac said on Monday the European Union's planned defence force could play a vital role in helping international peacekeeping missions get off the ground.

Chirac told an annual reception of French ambassadors in Paris that the 60,000-strong European rapid reaction force could be deployed to help United Nations forces in crisis areas around the world.

"We all know that the first few months of an operation are the most difficult," he said in a speech on foreign policy at his Elysee Palace.

"That's where Europe's contribution could be vital," said Chirac, suggesting any such a cooperation would be framed by an accord with the United Nations. He said France would be making proposals to international partners on the suggestion.

EU member countries have pledged to contribute about 100,000 troops, 400 combat aircraft and 100 ships as part of a pool -- from which some 60,000 troops will be drawn -- to support the rapid reaction force.

Its prime duty will be to handle European security missions which NATO does not wish to take on, Chirac said, insisting that there was no danger of the new force undermining NATO

-------- iraq

Iraq Claims to Shoot Down U.S. Plane

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-US.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq claimed it shot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane Monday that was flying over southern Iraq. There was no immediate American response to the claim.

Iraq's desire to shoot down an American plane is well-known, but the United States has always denied any of its planes have been hit and no evidence has been produced to counter that.

``Iraqi air defenses have shot an American reconnaissance plane coming from Kuwaiti territory,'' the official Iraqi News Agency quoted an unidentified military spokesman as saying.

The plane, according to INA, contained ``high-tech equipment'' and was shot down near the southern city of Basra, 340 miles south of Baghdad.

The agency did not further specify the type of plane or say anything about any pilots aboard. Images did not immediately appear on Iraqi television.

The United States and Britain set up the ``no-fly'' zones in 1991-92 to protect Shiite Muslim rebels in the south and Kurdish insurgents in the north from government forces. Iraq has never recognized the zones and, in recent months, has stepped up its efforts to shoot down the planes.

From the zones, the United States and Britain regularly have fired on Iraqi targets. Iraq maintains they often injure civilians; the Western allies say they responding to Iraqi radar and anti-aircraft fire by striking back only at the Iraqi air defense units.

--------

Unmanned U.S. Plane Lost Over Iraq

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. Air Force unmanned reconnaissance aircraft failed to return from a mission over southern Iraq and may have been shot down by Iraqi air defense forces, a U.S. official said Monday.

In a brief statement from U.S. Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., a spokesman, Col. Rick Thomas, said it was not yet clear why the Predator aircraft was missing.

``The aircraft may have crashed or been shot down,'' Thomas said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Lapan, said it was the first U.S. aircraft of any kind lost in Iraq in the 10 years since U.S. and British planes began patrolling ``no-fly'' zones. The patrols began in northern Iraq in 1991 shortly after the Gulf War and in the south a year later.

Also on Monday, U.S. planes attacked a SA-3 surface-to-air missile site in northern Iraq, a U.S. official said. The U.S. European Command, which is responsible for U.S. operations in northern Iraq, said in a brief statement that U.S. planes retaliated when Iraqi forces fired anti-aircraft artillery from sites north of Mosul.

American and British aircraft regularly patrol ``no-fly'' zones over northern and southern Iraq to protect minority Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north from attacks by government forces. The southern patrols also provide early warning of potential Iraqi military moves toward the Kuwaiti border.

Thomas said there is no plan to attempt to recover the low-speed aircraft, which other officials said was lost near the southern city of Basra.

``No sensitive technology will be compromised by not recovering the aircraft,'' Thomas said.

The plane, whose wing span is less than 50 feet, flies at about 140 miles per hour at altitudes up to 25,000 feet. It was reported missing at 2 a.m. EDT., Thomas said.

One U.S. official said operators of the Predator lost communications and radar contact with the aircraft and were not immediately sure why.

The first word came from Baghdad.

``Iraqi air defenses have shot an American reconnaissance plane coming from Kuwaiti territory,'' the official Iraqi News Agency quoted an unidentified military spokesman as saying.

The plane, according to the news agency, contained ``high-tech equipment'' and was shot down near Basra, 340 miles south of Baghdad.

The Iraqi news agency did not further specify the type of plane or say anything about any pilots aboard. There were no pictures immediately on Iraqi television.

The United States has lost Predator reconnaissance planes to hostile fire before, mainly in the Balkans, but rarely if ever over Iraq.

Iraq has been stepping up its efforts to shoot down the U.S. and British aircraft that patrol ``no-fly'' zones over southern and northern Iraq. It has come closer in recent weeks, prompting occasional retaliatory U.S. and British attacks on air defense radars and communications sites.

In July, Iraq fired a missile at a U.S. Air Force U-2 surveillance plane flying at high altitudes over Iraq. The spy plane was not hit but the missile exploded close enough to be felt by the crew.

Several days earlier the crew of a Navy E2-C radar plane flying over Kuwait reported seeing the plume of an Iraqi surface-to-air missile fired in its direction.

Over the last three years, Iraq has occasionally claimed it had hit a U.S. or British plane, but Monday's is the first downing that has been confirmed.

-------- israel

Israeli Death Squads Murder Senior Palestinian Political Leader

Mon, 27 Aug 2001 15:02:11 -0500
From: Nabil Mohamad <nmohamad@adc.org>

ADC Press Release:
Israeli Death Squads Murder Senior Palestinian Political Leader

Washington, D.C., August 27--In a major escalation of the conflict in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel, today Israeli death squads assassinated a senior Palestinian political leader at his office in a residential neighborhood of Ramallah. Israeli helicopter gunships fired two missiles at Mustafa Al-Zibri as he sat working at his desk. Three other persons were injured in the attack. Al-Zibri, widely known as Abu Ali Mustafa, was the Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and is the most prominent Palestinian political leader to be assassinated by Israel for over 10 years. He took over the leadership of the PFLP in April 2000 after its founder, George Habash, retired. Al-Zibri is survived by his three daughters and two sons.

As a major element in its campaign to crush the Palestinian uprising against its occupation, Israeli death squads have assassinated at least 50 Palestinian activists in the last eleven months. Ten innocent bystanders, including several children, have also been killed in those attacks and numerous others seriously injured. Israel's Deputy Minister of Internal Security, Gidon Ezra, suggested last week that Israel may widen the list of Palestinians it targets for assassination and should "liquidate the family members" of targeted Palestinians.

ADC President Ziad Asali said, "This latest assassination once again demonstrates Israel's determination to use any method, no matter how brutal or illegal, to enforce its thirty-four year occupation of Palestinian lands and impose its will on the Palestinian people. It is this occupation which is the cause of the conflict. Israel has it within its power to end the cycle of violence once and for all by ending the occupation and acknowledging the Palestinian right to self-determination."

Asali noted that "this expanding campaign of deliberate murder only serves to reinforce the urgent need for international protection for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. We call on President Bush to do everything in his power to ensure that extra-judicial executions by Israel be stopped immediately. Had Palestinian fighters assassinated Israeli political leaders, killing them and injuring innocent Israeli civilians, this would be universally condemned as an outrageous act of terrorism. The moral inconsistency which permits Israel to violate all international laws, norms and standards must end."

ADC noted that this Israeli assassination, like many others before it, appears to have been committed using American made and supplied weapons in contravention not only of the 4th Geneva Convention but also American law. The Arms Export Control Act stipulates that American supplied weapons may only be used for defensive purposes, which clearly cannot include the murder of political leaders. ADC reiterated its call on the Bush Administration to halt all further weapons transfers to Israel until it can ensure that these weapons are not used against Palestinian civilians living under Israeli occupation or in violation of US law.

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Organizing Department 4201 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20008, U.S.A. Tel: (202) 244-2990, Fax: (202) 244-3196 E-mail: nmohamad@adc.org Web: http://www.adc.org

----

U.N. Chief Blames Israel for Raising Mideast Tension

August 27, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-austria-mideast-annan.html?searchpv=reuters

ST. GILGEN, Austria (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday Israel had exacerbated the Middle East crisis and called for international action before violence spread to neighboring countries.

``The Israelis have raised tensions in the region to levels we have not seen in many years,'' Annan told reporters during an official visit to Austria.

Annan was speaking after Israel Monday assassinated Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in a helicopter missile attack on the group's offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Mustafa had the highest profile of anyone killed under Israel's policy of tracking and killing militants since a Palestinian uprising erupted in September.

At least 537 Palestinians, 153 Israelis and 14 Israeli Arabs have been killed since the uprising started after peace talks stalled.

Annan urged the international community to help bring the parties together for a new round of peace talks, warning that violence could spill over into the rest of the region if not controlled.

``I am worried that if we do not contain the crisis it will spread,'' he added. ``We have innocent people suffering and I think the international community has an obligation to do whatever it can to bring an end to this misery.''

KICK-START

Speaking after a meeting with Austria's Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Annan said U.N. officials would liaise with Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to kick-start a new dialogue between Israel and Palestine.

``The killing underscores the urgency of getting them together,'' Annan said at a news conference held at the lakeside resort of St. Gilgen in northwest Austria.

``I have spoken to Foreign Minister Fischer who is trying to see what can be done to organize such a meeting...but no date has yet been fixed.''

The U.N. chief, who will meet Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel for talks Tuesday, is visiting Austria ahead of the United Nation's World Conference Against Racism, to be held in Durban, South Africa in four days' time.

Annan urged the United States not to boycott the conference, after Washington threatened to stay away over fears that Arab nations would use the forum to equate Zionism and Israel with racism and apartheid.

The United States also disagreed with African nations over planned discussions about financial compensation for the slave trade, which flourished for 200 years between Africa and the United States until early in the 19th century.

``Obviously each government has to take its own decision whether it plans to attend or not,'' Annan said, adding that disagreements over the wording of declarations to be drawn up over the week-long meeting could keep U.S. delegates away.

``There are indications that if (the United States) does not get the language they want they may not participate,'' he said. ''Efforts are being made and people are working on the language as we speak.''

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

Details of Plane Missing in Iraq

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq-Plane.html

Details on the RQ-1 Predator, an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft apparently shot down Monday by Iraqi air defense forces:

--Medium-altitude planes used for surveillance and reconnaissance. They fly between 20,000 and 25,000 feet.

--Designed for areas of moderate risk, such as in chemical contaminated areas.

--Used during day and night; radar allows crew to see through smoke, clouds and haze.

--Camera equipment provides radar images and full motion video.

--Designed for rapid deployment; Can be disassembled into six main parts.

--Flies up to 140 mph.

--27 feet long; 48.7-foot wingspan.

--$25 million system is made up of four planes commanded by a ground control station and a satellite link for communication.

--Operated by 11th and 15th reconnaissance squadrons at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field in Nevada.

Source: U.S. Air Force

--------

Preparing for 'Network-Centric' Warfare

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 27, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A741-2001Aug26?language=printer

Less than a month on the job, the Pentagon's senior civilian intelligence official said last week that his top priority will be using data networks to bridge the divide between "sensors" and "shooters."

John P. Stenbit, the new assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence, called it "network-centric" warfare.

"That means anybody can get any information at any time," Stenbit told reporters at the Pentagon. "So anybody in the world who's got a gun at any moment can be solving the problem of what are his 10 best targets, and it's not somebody waiting for somebody else to tell him."

A former TRW executive vice president and CalTech engineer, Stenbit noted that he first worked in the Pentagon 25 years ago during the Ford administration -- the first time Donald H. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense.

After all this time in the private sector, Stenbit said he now realizes that the Pentagon manages its money in "upside-down" fashion, allowing the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to recruit, train and equip the nation's forces -- when it's the global, joint force commanders-in-chief (CINCs) who actually lead the fight.

Using a private sector model, Stenbit said, the CINCs would get the money and buy "what they needed from the services."

Thus, Stenbit said, the mission of his office is to make sure the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines bring computer networks to the battlefield that can talk to one another -- so, for example, Army soldiers on the ground can get real-time intelligence from Air Force planes in the air.

AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE: Peter Teets, former Lockheed Martin president, is being considered by the Bush administration to become undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), intelligence sources say.

President Bush announced in May that he planned to nominate Al Smith, chief of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, for the service's No. 2 post. But Smith withdrew, citing family reasons.

Teets retired from Lockheed in late 1999, accepting responsibility for "disappointing" profits. Shortly before he stepped aside, Lockheed lost a contract valued at $4.5 billion to rival Boeing for design and construction of the NRO's next-generation spy satellites, an effort known as "Future Imagery Architecture." If nominated and confirmed, Teets will inherit the FIA contract again, this time from the other side of the equation.

ROGUE MISSILE THREATS: Addressing a missile defense conference last week in Huntsville, Ala., CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin focused on three rogue state missile threats -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- and a "cross fertilization" among these and other nations that makes missile threats possible.

Iran, he said, will soon field a Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile (range 1,300 kilometers) capable of hitting Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey -- and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.

Iraq has rebuilt "several critical missile production sites," McLaughlin said, and is hiding a small number of Al Hussein short-range ballistic missiles (range 650 kilometers) that can strike Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

North Korea, the biggest threat of all, he said, could test a long-range Taepo Dong 2 capable of hitting parts of the United States with a "nuclear-sized payload" sometime in 2003.

How do such nations develop sophisticated ballistic missile technology?

The North Korean No Dong, developed initially from Russian Scud technology, forms the basis of the Iranian Shahab-3 as well as Pakistan's medium-range missile, McLaughlin said.

Iran and Pakistan, meanwhile, are viewed by CIA analysts as potential "secondary" proliferators, eager to turn their technology imports into exports for hard cash they can turn around and use to import still more technology.

Russia and China further complicate the picture, McLaughlin said, peddling technological know-how and missile components to the rogue nations of the world.

"Last year, Russian entities continued to supply ballistic missile-related goods and technical know-how to countries like Iran, China and Libya," McLaughlin said. "The transfer of ballistic missile technology to Iran -- to cite just one case -- was substantial. And we believe it will permit Iran to further accelerate its missile development programs and to move ever closer toward self-sufficiency in production."

China has helped Pakistan develop solid-propellant missiles and provided missile-related items and raw materials to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

"Many countries developing longer-range missiles," McLaughlin said, "probably believe that the very possibility of their use would complicate American decision-making in a crisis."


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Wildfires Send Tons of Mercury Up in Smoke

August 27, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2001/2001L-08-27-06.html

BOULDER, Colorado, The wildfires now burning across the Western United States are releasing tons of mercury into the atmosphere, say researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. More than 21,700 firefighters and support personnel are now battling wildland fires burning on more than 200,000 acres in seven states.

Mercury laden smoke from wildfires blows over suburban and urban areas (Photo courtesy National Interagency Fire Center)

During a wildfire, mercury stored in the foliage and ground litter is released and carried into the atmosphere, says Hans Friedli, a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He and colleague Lawrence Radke are conducting experiments in the laboratory as well as in research flights over wildfires and prescribed burns.

Scientists from NCAR and the University of Washington are currently flying over wildfires in the Pacific Northwest to measure mercury emissions in their smoke.

Scientists are trying to understand the global sources of atmospheric mercury, as well as how much ends up in the food chain after deposition on land and water. Friedli and Radke's research provides one more piece in the global inventory puzzle.

Gaseous elemental mercury in the atmosphere travels the globe for about a year before being deposited on land or water. About 6,500 tons, all well mixed, are circulating at any one time.

About half the atmospheric mercury got there from natural sources in soil, oceans and volcanoes, and the other half through human activity. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 41 tons of mercury are released each year by coal fired plants in the U.S.

Mercury is transformed in the atmosphere through chemical processes and then rains or falls out as wet or dry deposition to the surface. For trees, "wet deposition is most important," said Friedli. "Mercury is picked up by the surfaces - the leaves or needles - and it stays there." At least until those trees burn.

Hans Friedli will be measuring mercury emissions from fires in the Pacific Northwest this month (Photo by Carlye Calvin, courtesy NCAR)

Friedli and Radke conducted laboratory tests to find out how much mercury a fire could release. For the experiment, forest samples from across the continental U.S. were set alight at the U.S. Forest Service Fire Science Laboratory's burn facility in Missoula, Montana.

The team's sensors immediately detected mercury. All samples released almost all of the mercury they had stored - from 94 percent to 99 percent. All the samples contained mercury at levels ranging from 14 to 71 nanograms per gram of fuel. A nanogram is one trillionth of a gram; about 28 grams make an ounce.

The team extrapolated their findings to global biomass burning from wildfires and from human activities, such as clearing land for agriculture. They estimated the contribution at up to 800 tons per year, or 25 percent of all manmade sources of airborne mercury.

When the mercury enters the food chain, it can put wildlife and humans at risk. The highest levels of atmospheric mercury ever observed were reported this spring from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Point Barrow Observatory in Alaska.

Native Arctic populations consuming the region's game and fish are thought to be at severe risk. Long range atmospheric transport brings the mercury to the Arctic, where chemical reactions tied to springtime ozone depletion lead to increased mercury deposits to the region's land and water.

The mercury studies grew out of Friedli and Radke's National Science Foundation sponsored research with colleagues at NCAR to understand and predict the erratic, deadly behavior of wildfires. To develop better forecasts of wildfire behavior for firefighters, the researchers are combining computer models with observations from infrared cameras.

Friedli and Radke will aim ground based sensors at a prescribed burn in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, Canada this September. Last summer, when the team flew over a wildfire in Quebec, the mercury emissions were higher than in the lab experiment, "presumably because mercury in real fires is also emitted from heated soil," explained Friedli, "a source not yet considered in our experiments."

Mercury emissions from this boreal forest fire near Hearst, Ontario, last July were measured with instruments aboard a Twin Otter aircraft. Flights over wildfires are used to confirm Friedli and Radke's laboratory findings (Photo by Ian MacPherson, courtesy National Research Council of Canada)

This month, the team will overfly one or more of the large fires burning in the Pacific Northwest.

The National Interagency Fire Center said today that fire activity seems to be stabilizing across the western U.S., with only one new major fire reported in Wyoming yesterday. One large fire in Washington was contained yesterday, while other fires in Washington and California are nearing containment.

Some lightning caused fires are considered to be beneficial for the restoration of wilderness areas, and are being allowed to burn themselves out naturally.

NCAR is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 66 universities offering PhDs in atmospheric and related sciences.

----

MTBE Leaks Threaten Calif. Wells

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-MTBE-Contamination.html

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The gasoline additive MTBE has leaked into 48 wells in public water systems serving hundreds of thousands of people throughout the state, state records show.

The San Francisco Chronicle analyzed data from the Water Resources Control Board and the Department of Health Services and found that leaks of the additive from nearly 1,200 underground tank sites threaten the drinking water supply of millions of Californians.

The data do not include tens of thousands of private wells in California and hundreds of thousands nationwide. Such water supplies are not regulated by public agencies and generally are not tested for MTBE unless holding tanks buried nearby cause concern.

``The regulators should use the data that's being collected to identify the sites that pose the greatest threat, those closest to drinking water wells,'' said Anne Happel, a member of the Environmental Protection Agency's blue ribbon panel on MTBE.

MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, is added to gasoline to make it burn cleaner, but it has been linked to cancer. Oil companies have until the end of 2002 to phase out its use.

State records show the 1,189 underground tank sites leaking MTBE are within 1,000 feet of public supply wells or on vulnerable drinking water aquifers. An additional 1,729 leaking tank sites father away from drinking water wells also could be a threat.

More than 2,500 public drinking water systems that serve 30.5 million -- or 90 percent of the state's population -- have been sampled for the carcinogen. Of the 8,311 groundwater sources sampled, 48 contained MTBE.

Just last week, a judge in San Jose signed an agreement forcing five major oil companies to clean up sites they own that have been contaminated MTBE.

--------

Foam like 'root beer' floats on Potomac River

August 27, 2001
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010827-719616.htm

It is illegal to discharge foam into the Potomac River, but eyewitnesses report a federal agency is discharging large amounts of root beer-colored foam from the Washington Aqueduct shores in addition to high sludge disposals that threaten fish populations.

The federal permit held by the Army Corps of Engineers allowing the sludge dumping says "there shall be no discharge of floating solids or visible foam in other than trace amounts."

The National Park Service Police noted the suds in a 1999 investigation of the discharges piped through the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park before it was dumped into the river. Fishers say the foam is coming from the Corps drainage pipes and "looks like a giant washing machine."

Thomas Jacobus, chief of the Washington Aqueduct, a division of the Baltimore District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says foam discharges would violate their permit and the law. However, Mr. Jacobus said the foam is naturally occurring in the river and is not coming from the discharge pipes. One pipe is located above the Chain Bridge, and two others below Fletcher's Boat House.

"We are not producing pillows of foam into the water -- the fishermen and others are misinterpreting the cause-and-effect relationship" of the foam's origination, Mr. Jacobus said.

Mr. Jacobus said foam on the Potomac is caused by agitation of the river's natural flow, and compared it to foam caused by ocean waves crashing onto the shores and leaving froth, caused by agitation, on the beach.

"He's wrong," said Gordon Leisch, a retired biologist for the Interior Department's Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, who has fished the affected waters for 30 years.

"Any biologist can distinguish from naturally occurring foam and what is coming out up there," Mr. Leisch said.

The biologist said there are three types of foam occurring on the Potomac: a white foam and green-white foam that occur naturally, and the "root beer"-colored foam he has witnessed on numerous occasions flowing from discharge pipes.

Mr. Leisch recorded the dumpings as they occurred and some details of the discharge characteristics in his fishing log.

He noted significant amounts of foam discharged this year, separate from the sludge dumpings, on Feb. 14, March 5, and April 23. Last year he recorded foam dumpings on Feb. 13 and 14, April 7 and 20 and May 24.

Sens. John W. Warner and George F. Allen, Virginia Republicans, are calling for Senate hearings to look into the sludge dumps, and Mr. Allen issued a "cease and desist" letter to the Environmental Protection Agency after the discharges were reported by The Washington Times.

The EPA allows the Corps to discharge chemically treated sediment, including alum, into the Potomac River under a permit that expired in 1994.

The Corps has been granted an extension while the federal government studies whether the dumpings are harmful to the river and fish, and looks into alternatives to sludge disposal.

Although Maryland technically owns the river and has one permit issued to the Corps controlling discharge water temperatures, en-forcement of the Clean Water Act as the river passes through Washington is the responsibility of the EPA.

The discharges contain 40,000 to 70,000 milligrams of suspended solids per liter, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.

Virginia is allowed to discharge fewer than 100 milligrams per liter of total suspended solids.

"This is outrageous," said Becky Norton Dunlop, who was Virginia's secretary of natural resources when Mr. Allen was governor from 1994 to 1998.

"The EPA was constantly hammering on Virginia to engage in activities that would result in less pollution in the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay, and the entire time they knew about this, which contributes more sediment ... than probably all of Virginia's other sources," Mrs. Dunlop said.

Another critic of Clean Water Act enforcement is Roger Marzula, who served during the Reagan administration as assistant attorney general in charge of the environmental and natural resources division.

Mr. Marzula declined to comment on the specifics of this case, but he said it underscores the unfairness with which the EPA pursues or ignores Clean Water Act violations.

He cited a California case in which a man in his 70s was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for discharging water mixed with apple juice into a stream.

Prosecutions, or lack thereof, are "tremendously arbitrary," Mr. Marzula said.

The sludge and foam discharges into the Potomac are also the target of a lawsuit by the National Wilderness Institute (NWI) against the Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The lawsuit charges that the sludge dumps are excessive and hurt aquatic wildlife and that the foam discharges are illegal.

Rob Gordon, executive director of the NWI, said foam discharges are illegal because of their effects on river aesthetics, and compared them to littering waterways with beer cans.

A U.S. Park Police officer has reported seeing foam from a pipe on Jan. 30, 1999, but an aqueduct representative said the foam was soap suds from a cleaning agent used after solids were flushed from the basin, documents show.

The police officer and Mr. Leisch also report a strong smell of chlorine during the discharges.

However, Mr. Jacobus told The Washington Times soap is not used to clean the basin, chlorine is not part of the treatment, and reiterated that foam is not being discharged.

"This is not Love Canal," Mr. Jacobus said. "This is water treatment putting a bit of alum back into the river."

-------- genetics

French Green minister wants

FRANCE: August 27, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12149/story.htm

PARIS - French Environment Minister Yves Cochet said last week he wanted a public debate on whether genetically modified crops should be grown in open fields rather than enclosed sites after activists destroyed a test site.

Cochet condemned Wednesday's destruction of a test site of GM maize run by U.S. biotechnology giant Monsanto Co by activists, including members of the left-wing Confederation Paysanne farm union, but said the issue raised was legitimate.

"I think the issues posed by the Confederation Paysanne are real and that a debate on the aim and objectives of growing GM crops on open fields is vital," he said on France 2 television.

"It is very difficult, except in a confined area or in certain very isolated regions, to not mix GM crops with others. The issue has been raised, it has to be solved in a democratic manner, through a debate on this matter."

Around 150 activists tore up bio-engineered maize being grown on around 800 square metres in the southern French town of Beaucaire on Wednesday.

It was at least the fourth incident of GM crop destruction in France since late June, when the farm ministry was forced to publish the list of districts where genetically engineered plants were being tested.

In July, French food safety agency AFSSA said it had found traces of genetically modified organisms in non-test fields, but it insisted the small amount of GMOs found would pose no threat to human health.

Cochet echoed Farm Minister Jean Glavany's opinion that the research on GM crops should continue, even if confined to enclosed areas.

Glavany had earlier said that although he was "suspicious and wary" of GM crops it was necessary to allow research to continue.

--------

Health Officials ID Stem Cell Labs

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-Stem-Cells.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The National Institutes of Health on Monday identified 10 companies and research laboratories with embryonic stem cell colonies that the Bush administration says are eligible for federal research funds.

The groups have a combined 64 stem cell lines, derived from 64 ``genetically diverse'' embryos, the NIH said in an announcement on its Web site.

``The NIH has met or spoken extensively with each of the investigators who have derived these cells,'' the announcement said. ``These scientists are very interested in working with the NIH and the research community.''

Scientists who developed the cell lines, or self-replenishing colonies, reported that some have been tested in lab mice and show that they are able to transform into other types of cells.

Embryonic stem cells are the precursors to all the 200 or so cell types in the body. Researchers hope to be able to direct this transformation to make cells that could be used to treat diabetes, Parkinson's, heart diseases or other disorders. Producing the stem cells, however, requires the death of a human embryo, which is opposed by many people.

Bush, after weeks of studying the issue, announced Aug. 9 that he would permit federal funding using stem cell lines that had been produced before that date. This meant, he said, that no more human embryos would be killed to advance federally funded research.

The companies and research laboratories and the number of stem cell lines:

BresaGen Inc., Athens, Ga., 4; CyThera Inc., San Diego, 9; Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden, 19; Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, 5; Monash University, Australia, 6; National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, 3; Reliance Life Sciences, Mumbai, India, 7; Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, 4; University of California, San Francisco, 2; and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Madison, Wis., 5.

-------- human rights

Honduras Begins Exhumation at Former Contra Base

Mon, Aug 27 11:15 PM EDT
By Daniel Leclair
Reuters
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010827/23/international-rights-honduras-exhumation-dc

EL AGUACATE, Honduras (Reuters) - An international forensic team began digging on Monday at a former base of the U.S.-backed Nicaragua Contra rebels that may hold remains of leftists who disappeared during Nicaragua's civil war and were presumed dead, including a U.S. priest and an ex-Green Beret.

The anthropologists, including one from the United States and four Guatemalans, began work near a hospital that once served the El Aguacate Contra base, 85 miles east of the capital Tegucigalpa.

They are seeking remains of members of a leftist rebel Honduran group, loosely affiliated with Nicaragua's leftist Sandanista government, annihilated in 1993 by Honduran troops with U.S. logistic support.

Rights workers say rebel supporters James "Guadalupe" Carney, a U.S. Jesuit priest, and Arturo Baez, a nationalized U.S. citizen born in Nicaragua who served in the Green Berets before returning to his homeland, were captured and brought here to be interrogated. They disappeared along with Honduran rebel chief Jose Maria Reyes.

"There are testimonies of former soldiers who saw various of the rebels alive, among them Father "Guadalupe" Carney and Reyes Mata, who say they were taken to El Aguacate," said Berta Oliva, head of a committee of family members of Honduras' disappeared.

The CIA-backed Contras took up arms against the leftist Sandinista government that ruled Nicaragua from 1979-1990. The U.S.-built El Aguacate, with its own airstrip, warehouses, camps and hospital, served as a supply and personnel base for sending provisions and troops into Nicaraguan territory.

CONTRAS DIED HERE TOO

Rights officials say it also holds a clandestine cemetery. State rights prosecutor Aida Romero told reporters officials had information on 14 leftist activists buried here.

As excavations began on the muddy, forested plot, a handful of Nicaraguans gathered in the hope of finding remains of their loved ones, who were from the other side of the political fence.

Paula Davila, 62, said her son died at the hospital after stepping on a land mine fighting with the Contras.

"Basically they are looking for the remains of members of the guerrilla column annihilated in 1983, who witnesses say were brought to Aguacate to be interrogated," Melvin Duarte of the Honduran prosecutors office said. "But there was a hospital and surely Nicaraguan remains also are buried here."

Carney, Baez and Reyes Mata are on a list of 184 leftist rebels who disappeared in Honduras in the 1980s at the hands of the military in a wave of repression against union members, students and socialists.

Duarte said the cemetery also could hold remains of activists who were captured in different parts of the country.

The exhumation is expected to take 20 days. Oliva said her groups hopes the evidence uncovered will help bring to justice those responsible for the disappearances, torture and executions to justice.

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Report: FBI Supervision Faulted

August 27, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Wen-Ho-Lee.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An unreleased portion of a classified Justice Department report suggests the FBI's investigation of Wen Ho Lee was more seriously bungled than officials have previously disclosed, The Washington Post reported.

Referring to a 166-page chapter it obtained, the paper said in Monday's editions that it paints a picture of inept agents making amateurish mistakes and ignoring orders to consider other suspects.

Part of a larger report on the Lee probe, the Post said the chapter outlines a succession of blunders, misjudgments and faulty assumptions by the FBI that contributed to a shoddy investigation of the former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, who was suspected of giving nuclear secrets to China.

FBI supervisors in Washington compounded the problem by failing to correct the mistakes or to keep the investigation on track, it said.

The chapter says FBI Director Louis J. Freeh was not kept informed of the case's shortcomings, including problems with the investigation in New Mexico and disagreement among government experts over the seriousness of the suspected security loss.

``This investigation was a paradigm of how not to manage and work an important counterintelligence case,'' says the report, written by federal prosecutor Randy I. Bellows.

If Lee was a spy, Bellows concludes, the FBI let him get away. If he was not, the bureau blew repeated opportunities to consider other options -- including the possibility that nuclear weapons secrets were not obtained by the Chinese in the first place.

Originally charged with 59 felony counts, Lee pleaded guilty in September to one felony charge of mishandling classified information. He was not charged with espionage and has repeatedly denied giving information to China.

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Cincinnati police say they profiled 'criminals'

August 27, 2001
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010827-7643255.htm

CINCINNATI -- Police Officer Doug Frazier profiled the hooker.

The 26-year-old blond woman, wearing a skirt slit to the top of her thigh, was strolling leisurely through a drenching rain in the early morning hours. Her domain was Cincinnati's beleaguered Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, a 4-square-mile mixture of squalor and urban rehabilitation.

She was walking through the squalor.

"That was a classic case of profiling," Officer Frazier said after booking the woman on a probation violation charge. She had been arrested five times for solicitation in the past year.

"I profile," Officer Frazier continued. "I do criminal profiles. If someone looks like they might be doing criminal activity, I talk to them."

"At least that's what we used to do."

Cincinnati police are in the middle of a polarizing political battle. The force is seen by many as merely watching while the city's crime rate has climbed since three days of riots in April shook this traditionally low-crime city of 331,000. Perhaps most pointedly, they are accused of racial profiling.

The department is being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union. It is being investigated by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Three Cincinnati police officers this year have been indicted on various charges of malfeasance, and the entire department has been accused by several black community leaders of racial profiling and outright racism.

The fallout has left many in the city's 1,000-officer force "shell-shocked," according to one policeman.

"I have to ask myself, 'Am I willing to go the extra mile any more if this is what is going to happen,'" said Officer John Vaughn, Officer Frazier's patrol partner and a 10-year veteran of the force. "I'm not sure. We aren't as likely to now."

Several officers talk of the upcoming trial of "Steve," their comrade in District 1, which includes Over-the-Rhine. Officer Steve Roach is a white officer who faces a Sept. 17 trial on misdemeanor manslaughter charges in the April 7 shooting of a fleeing black suspect in Over-the-Rhine.

The death of Timothy Thomas, 19, sparked three days of rioting that tore up parts of Over-the-Rhine and prompted demands from the city's formidable black leadership. The demands included the removal of both Police Chief Thomas Streicher and police union President Keith Fangman.

Both men are white. Both men even attended the same high school, Elder. They are still in office today.

Cops as villains

"The cops have been villainized," says Chris Frutkin, president of the Over-the-Rhine Chamber of Commerce. "The police are really in a thankless position now," Mr. Frutkin says. "If you are a cop wearing your hat and badge, you don't want to be walking down the street."

The riots drove several businesses from the area just north of downtown and gave further jitters to those who have stuck it out.

Strong-arm robberies are up in those more gentrified areas, where white entrepreneurs have taken to the area for its Gothic architecture and low rent.

Black-on-black crime has become almost routine; since the April disturbances, 100 such shootings have occurred.

"It's like we're baby-sitting their own neighborhood for them," Officer Frazier says, pulling his cruiser up to a group of youths standing two deep in the doorway of a shuttered storefront on Race Street around 1 a.m. The officer says nonchalantly that they are selling crack.

The one in front, with a red headband and a black football jersey, glares back. Another kid, maybe 14 years old, wears a white T-shirt with the words "Official Cincinnati Police Target" emblazoned on the back, transposed over a drawing of a target.

The black teen-agers stare down the patrol cars. Some cops have been shot, with one taking a bullet on his belt buckle. He lived.

Mayor Charlie Luken said Aug. 16 that the city has "turned the corner" in its post-riot violent spell. That evening, two more persons were shot.

"They used to punch each other," says a waitress at Kaldi's, a bookstore/cafe on Main Street, where black gangster hopefuls and white bohemians are trying to exist side-by-side. "Now they have guns, and they shoot each other."

On WDBZ-AM, the local black radio station known as the Buzz, a caller refers to the police as "outsiders" in the black community.

That would include Officers Frazier and Vaughn, who are both black.

"I was shot at during the riots," Officer Frazier said, matter-of-factly. "They shoot at us, and it's a fairly new thing. I never would have thought of giving any to police when I was a kid. But things are different now."

Police: 'We are accountable'

Dave D'Erminio heard a joke the other day at a bar frequented by cops. The former officer comes by occasionally, having served on the Cincinnati force from 1967 to 1990.

"A cop is sitting watching a traffic light," Mr. D'Erminio relates in his gristly Midwestern accent. "A car with its windows tinted goes through a red light. The cop pulls the car over, gets up to the car, and there's a black woman driving. She says, 'You pulled me over because I'm a black woman.'

"The cop says, "Move along.'"

Mr. D'Erminio remembers a simpler past when he could enforce the law with an iron hand. Hardly politically correct, he says, but efficient and effective.

He notes that street officers in Cincinnati are facing trouble for every "self-initiated contact," which means any time an officer acts instead of reacts to a situation.

"These guys can lose their jobs, their careers and disrupt their families," Mr. D'Erminio says. "The average taxpayer has no idea what is going on."

Police will gladly tell you that the force has some bad people -- the department has tried to get rid of 11 since 1996. But each one has been reinstated through arbitration.

That fact gets repeated through the neighborhoods, and the word spreads that rogue cops can stay, as long as they appeal their case.

"That's not true," says Mr. Fangman, sitting in his office in the Fraternal Order of Police building, 12 blocks north of District 1 headquarters where he was once a patrol officer.

"We have made mistakes, and we are accountable. We have three officers awaiting trial," he said "We have four former officers who are sitting in state jail right now for crimes committed while they were here.

"If that is not being held accountable, what is?"

But the union official prominently displays a memento from the riots to remind him what police are up against.

Hanging on a bookcase is a plastic placard that denounces the police uses an obscenity. The three-word phrase is taken from a song by the rap stars NWA.

"I found that hanging on the door here during the riots," Mr. Fangman says.

But police have also committed some public relations blunders, by their own admission.

The Cincinnati Enquirer uncovered several hundred public complaints that the city claimed did not exist.

And their reticence to police more aggressively in recent weeks has prompted some denizens of Over-the-Rhine to question the officers' dedication.

"If