------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Glossary of Nuclear Terms
Nuclear tests on thousands of Australian bone samples: report
Fed Govt will provide nuclear bone test information to families
Bulgaria negotiates spent fuel transport to Russia
Leaders of India, Pakistan To Meet
Operation to slice off Kursk's bow could be delayed
Kursk Recovery Attempt at a Key Stage
For the Nuclear Submarine Kursk, Plans for a Risky Resurrection
Russia considers next step if U.S. pulls out of treaty
Nuclear waste protesters hit Strip
2 Cents Worth - One tough act for Leah Dever

MILITARY
Taiwan, China Slug It Out on TV
Rebels beyond disarmament in Macedonia?
U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits
Next to Old Rec Hall, a 'Germ-Making Plant'
White House Defends Germ - Warfare Work
Police Say Colombian Rebels Used Gas
US Aircraft Bomb Iraqi Air Defenses
Israeli Outrage at Arafat's Speech Makes Talks With Him Uncertain
Private Space Station Planned

OTHER
California never lost power
Team Says It Coaxed Human Stem Cells to Produce Blood
The Genesis of an Epidemic: Humans, Chimps and a Virus
U.S. and Israel Quit Racism Talks Over Denunciation
F.B.I. Kills Man in Standoff
FBI Agents Resume Cole Probe
The CIA Goes Primetime on CBS

ACTIVISTS
Public Hearings on ELF
40 Days Without Food: A Fast for Good Americans
Health Effects of Military Toxins
Sample Letter to U.S. DOE re Yucca Mountain
Nuclear waste protesters hit Strip



-------- NUCLEAR

Glossary of Nuclear Terms - Nuclear Regulatory Commission
http://www.nrc.gov/NRC/EDUCATE/GLOSSARY/index.html

-------- australia

Nuclear tests on thousands of Australian bone samples: report

Tue, 4 Sep 2001
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-4sep2001-71.htm

A report has revealed bone samples were taken from tens of thousands of Australians to test the effects of fallout from nuclear testing.

Between 1957 and 1978, nearly 20,000 bone samples were taken from post-mortem examinations in most states and territories, and Papua New Guinea.

The samples were taken from stillborn babies and people aged up to 80-years-old.

Research to determine the effects of nuclear fallout on bone tissue were first carried out in the United States and Britain, and then Australia.

A report by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, reveals for most of the 21-year testing program, samples were taken from every autopsy on people aged less than 40.

In 1969, hospitals were offered $50 bonuses for providing bone samples.

The Federal Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge, says he is concerned the informed consent of families was not sought.

Dr Wooldridge says the Government is looking at the best way to inform family members of those involved.

--------

Fed Govt will provide nuclear bone test information to families

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Tue, 4 Sep 2001

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-4sep2001-95.htm

The Federal Health Department is considering the best way to inform families of people whose bones were used in an international program to measure the health effects of nuclear testing.

Between 1957 and 1978 more than 20,000 bone samples were used in research carried out in the United States, Britain and Australia.

For most of the 21 year program, samples were taken from every post-mortem of Australians younger than 40, and families members were not told of the tests.

The head of the Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, John Loy says information will be provided to family members who want further information about the program.

"As I understand it it was not uncommon practice for pathologists in certain circumstances to remove organs and use them for other purposes, and of course those things have been inquired into in other contexts this was a program that had been set up for certainly what was seen at the time and what still can be argued as being a worthwhile thing to do in itself," he said.

-------- bulgaria

Bulgaria negotiates spent fuel transport to Russia

Thomas Nilsen,
2001-09-04 13:06
http://www.bellona.no/imaker?id=21763&sub=1

Next week the Kozloduy nuclear power plant in Bulgaria will make a decision on transporting their spent nuclear fuel to Mayak for reprocessing.

By 2003 the storage pools with spent nuclear fuel at Kozloduy NPP will be filled to capacity if the fuel is not transported away. The only alternative place to transport the spent fuel is to Russia, says the plants management. Negotiations are under way with Russia, which in the first place manufactured both the Bulgarian reactors and its nuclear fuel.

-- The Russians have offered us very attractive terms of spent fuel storage and processing. We believe it should go where it came from in the first place - Russia, says the plant's executive director Yordan Yordanov in an interview with the Bulgarian news agency BTA.

He wants to ship the entire amount of spent nuclear fuel generated at the plant to Russia. The storage pools are becoming a major cause for concern. - Unless it is solved by 2003, we will have to shut down the nuclear power plant, Yordanov said.

The challenge for the plants management is to find funding for the transportation to Russia for reprocessing. Therefore, a plan to export electricity to other countries is made. The proceeds from export of a mere 1,000 kWh of electricity can cover the costs. At present the Kozloduy NPP utilizes less than 60 percent of its capacity. If it operates its reactors at full capacity, and sell part of the electricity abroad, the extra income will cover the costs to get rid of the spent nuclear fuel.

A decision on this will be made at a September 12 meeting of the consultative council. The Kozloduy NPP operates six reactors of the Soviet designed VVER-440 type. The Russian environmental group Ecodefense has for years opposed the planned shipping of spent nuclear fuel from Bulgaria to the reprocessing plant in Mayak in the South-Ural.

-------- india / pakistan

Leaders of India, Pakistan To Meet

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-India.html?searchpv=aponline

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- The leaders of Pakistan and India will meet in New York this month to try to resolve the decades-old dispute over Kashmir, Pakistan's foreign minister said Tuesday.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will meet Sept. 25 on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly session, Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said.

Musharraf and Vajpayee met in July, ending two years of tense silence between the nuclear rivals, but the summit broke down amid disagreement over Kashmir, a Himalayan region both countries claim as their own.

``Kashmir is the central issue between the two countries,'' Sattar said in Karachi. ``But we are also ready to discuss any other issues with India.''

The meeting in New York will be a continuation of the talks he two leaders held in Agra, India in July, Sattar said. He gave no other details.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over Kashmir, and gunbattles across the disputed border are common.

India controls two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan the rest. The Indian ruled part of Kashmir is the only Muslim-majority state in predominantly Hindu India, and Islamic militants -- some based in Pakistan -- have been fighting to separate it from India since 1989.

India accuses mostly Muslim Pakistan of arming, training and funding the guerrillas and helping them cross the mountainous frontier to fight Indian soldiers. Pakistan denies the accusations.

India estimates that 30,000 people have been killed in clashes related to the dispute over Kashmir since 1989. Human rights activists say the death toll -- which includes guerrillas, Indian troops and civilians -- is at least twice as high.

-------- russia

Operation to slice off Kursk's bow could be delayed

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Tue, 4 Sep 2001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-4sep2001-14.htm

The operation to slice off the bow of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, due to start Monday night, could be delayed because of problems in installing the giant saw needed for the job, naval officials said.

"We are having difficulties adjusting one of the two anchors which will secure the saw," an officer from the Northern Fleet headquarters said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Russia is racing against time to lift the sub as winter approaches and Arctic storms whip up the Barents Sea site where the Kursk sank following a mysterious series of explosions in August 2000, with the loss of all 118 crew.

The Kursk is scheduled to be raised on September 15 and delivered to docks on the Kola peninsula by September 21.

The anchor, positioned near the sunken submarine, "is not very stable, which unbalances the entire system," the officer added.

The remote-controlled hydraulic is being installed on the seabed, at a depth of 108 meters (355 feet), by means of anchors either side of the vessel.

The Russian navy was, however, still planning to conduct tests of the saw late on Monday.

"If these tests are successful, then the cutting of the bow can start that night," the Northern Fleet source said.

The work to cut off the Kursk's bow, where the nuclear submarine's arsenal is stored, should take two days, according to the Dutch heavy lifting firm Mammoet, contracted to raise the vessel.

--------

Kursk Recovery Attempt at a Key Stage

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Preparations for raising the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine entered a decisive phase Tuesday with a Dutch consortium beginning to cut off the mangled front section from the rest of the ship.

Northern Fleet chief of staff Adm. Mikhail Motsak said that the remote-controlled underwater saw had already cut more than 3 feet of the submarine's outer hull early Tuesday and was continuing to work.

``We haven't yet reached the inner hull,'' Motsak said during a video conference from the Peter the Great cruiser, parts of which were broadcast on Russian television.

Motsak, who is in charge of the effort to raise the Kursk, said the saw's operation was being monitored by a remote-controlled camera lowered from a ship.

The saw, a line of cylindrical drums covered with an abrasive layer, encountered some problems during tests but representatives of the Dutch Mammoet company said the problems had been fixed.

Mammoet is raising the Kursk in a joint venture with another Dutch company, Smit International, under a contract with the Russian government estimated to be worth about $65 million.

The Russian government has decided to leave the disfigured first compartment on the seabed before the rest of the ship is raised to the surface out of concern that some unexploded torpedoes may have remained in the Kursk's bow.

Experts in the rescue effort also feared that the front section could be torn off during the lifting, throwing the submarine off balance.

The Russian navy has said it will consider lifting the front section or some of its fragments next year.

The salvage operation has faced delays, but officials are still sticking to the original Sept. 15 target date for raising the submarine to the surface. However, with the weather expected to worsen in September, they have warned that a slight delay is possible.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who is overseeing the operation on behalf of the government, said Tuesday that the date for bringing the Kursk into a dry dock near the port of Murmansk could be pushed back by five days, from Sept. 20 to Sept. 25.

Motsak, the Navy admiral, was even less optimistic, saying it could be delivered between Sept. 25 and Oct. 2.

The Russian Navy's weather service said Tuesday that it expected cyclones to rage in the area in the second half of September.

``That will cause difficulties in conducting the planned work,'' the service said in a statement, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

The operation to lift the vessel, which is expected to last approximately eight hours, requires calm seas. Storms could also disrupt the subsequent transportation of the submarine to the dry dock.

-------

For the Nuclear Submarine Kursk, Plans for a Risky Resurrection

New York Times
September 4, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/science/physical/04KURS.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - For nearly 400 days since two mysterious torpedo room explosions ripped open the nuclear submarine Kursk, causing the deaths of all 118 Russian crewmen, the 505-foot vessel has been nestling into the sediments on the bottom of the Barents Sea.

Periodically, Russian warships on guard above the wreck have thrown live hand grenades into the water, to ward off any prying foreign submarines that may be interested in scavenging the Kursk's weapons, codes or electronics.

Now, a fleet of high-tech salvage vessels is taking over from the warships. If all goes according to plan - and little has so far - a Dutch lifting barge called the Giant 4, tethered by eight anchor lines, will raise the Kursk from the seabed later this month using 26 computer-controlled hydraulic jacks in an operation that, its designers say, can be accomplished in 12 to 16 hours.

But the raising of the Kursk, one of the largest and most complex salvages ever attempted, is fraught with dangers. The crews must avoid disturbing the Kursk's twin nuclear reactors and jostling its lethal payload of unexploded torpedoes and 22 supersonic cruise missiles, still snug in their 30-foot launching canisters. Each carries a warhead packed with nearly 1,000 pounds of high explosives.

Russian officials say the risks are outweighed by their duty to the perished crew as well as the Arctic environment. In November, during the first examination of the interior of the submarine by Russian divers since the Aug. 12 explosion, 12 bodies were recovered, but perhaps 100 more remain entangled in the wreckage of the control room or locked in the rear compartments, where sailors fled the onrushing sea, then waited in darkness - some writing farewell notes to loved ones - for the rescue that never came.

President Vladimir V. Putin, criticized in an emotional encounter with the families of Kursk crew members for the navy's inability to stage a rescue, returned to the Kremlin and told Russia's leading submarine designer, Igor D. Spassky, that the sub had to be lifted to pay tribute to the crew and to give proper burial to the bodies that could be found.

"He promised that to the relatives, and our president is from a category of people who keep their word," Mr. Spassky said in an interview at the Rubin Design Bureau in St. Petersburg last week.

Looking on is a nervous Europe, where there are always fears of another Chernobyl-style radiation spill. Big salvage projects can produce big disasters. In 1974, when the Hughes Glomar Explorer latched onto a Soviet Golf-class submarine that sank in 17,000 feet of water northwest of Hawaii - part of a secret recovery scheme conceived by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Navy - the stresses of the lift broke the submarine apart, sending large pieces crashing back to the bottom.

The Kursk will be raised from relatively shallow waters, less than 350 feet, but the Kursk weighs nearly 10 times as much as a Golf-class submarine. And if Kursk breaks apart and spills the highly radioactive contents of its reactors in the Barents Sea, the results will threaten one of the most productive fishing grounds in the Arctic.

"This is a big, supermodern military object which has 22 supermodern missiles on board with big warhead charges - not nuclear - but powerful charges, and two reactors, and all this in the center of an area which is in economic use in shallow waters," Mr. Spassky said. "I cannot conceive that such an object could be left on the ocean bottom."

Even recoveries from shallow depths can be tricky. The United States Navy recovered the submarine Squalus after it went down in 243 feet of water off Portsmouth, N.H., in May 1939, but the recovery vessels dropped the boat twice before getting it back into port, where it was renamed the Sailfish and served in World War II.

"This is the biggest lift ever made from the seabed," points out Malcolm Dailey, the senior contracts manager with the Dutch heavy lift and transport company Mammoet who is directing the Kursk lift. But even so, he seemed to be full of confidence last week that - weather permitting - it will be done safely.

"Our idea is to peel the Kursk off the bottom," said Mr. Dailey, 49, a Briton who now lives in Houston. "The sub is laying at a five-degree angle and her bow is stuck into the mud that is the consistency of chewing gum." In the year since the sinking, the mud has risen nearly 10 feet around the bow.

Standing on the deck of the Giant 4 the other day as it prepared to depart Amsterdam for the Arctic waters near Kursk, Mr. Dailey said that while he worried about radiation accidents and torpedo and missile explosions during the lifting of the Kursk, his biggest worry was how to break the suction force of a 17,000-ton ship stuck in the mud. Explosions are one thing, but "mud is mud," he said. The slimy bottom sediments may make the hull seem as if it were glued to the earth.

Moreover, Mammoet must ensure that it does not pull harder than the hull of the Kursk can withstand. One great unknown is what hidden structural damage the Kursk suffered along the hull, its ribs, frames and bulkheads when the second and most devastating explosion went off with the force of 10,000 pounds of TNT and produced a shock wave as powerful as an earthquake of 3.5 magnitude.

Much of Mr. Dailey's strategy is focused on the first three to four hours of the lifting sequence when he will raise only the tail of the Kursk, then slide a cable underneath the hull that two auxiliary ships on the surface will pull along the keel trying to separate the Kursk from the mud.

"This is to create a gap to get water between the submarine and the soil so she will want to come up and we can minimize the breakout force," Mr. Dailey said.

This "breakout force" is his nightmare. In the worst case, the lifting barge would pull with thousands of tons of pressure against the Kursk only to have it suddenly pop free of the bottom, surge upward like a yo- yo toward the barge, then fall back to the bottom, yanking the barge with a tremendous whiplash that could damage or destroy the lifting equipment.

Working with Mammoet are Smit Tak, a marine subsidiary of Smit International and Halliburton Subsea, a Norwegian subsidiary of the American energy and construction giant formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Mammoet won the contract on the strength of its pledge to raise the submarine this year; the company said only bad weather could excuse failure.

The preparation for raising the Kursk has taken months, and a complex choreography of engineering tasks must be executed in the next few weeks, or the threat of Arctic storms will shut down operations until spring.

"Good weather is a rare thing in this region," said Timur B. Amirov, the engineer who commissioned the Kursk from the Severodvinsk shipyard in 1994. Working in double shifts, Severodvinsk workers this summer built the two submersible pontoons that will slide under the port and starboard sides of the Giant 4 after it has lifted the Kursk. The extra flotation will help with the transport of the Kursk to a drydock at Roslyakovo 150 miles away.

Russian and European divers, meanwhile, working from mid-July to the end of August, cut 26 holes in the Kursk's hull to provide lifting points for the expandable plugs that will be lowered from the Giant 4 and inserted into the hull.

The engineers had two options to lift the Kursk, cranes or hydraulic jacks. Mammoet opted for jacks, which can lift a greater load, with more than two dozen of them spread along the submarine's hull.

The lifting lines are actually bundles of 54 steel cables attached to the plugs that, once inserted into the submarine, will expand hydraulically and wedge themselves under Kursk's ribs for the lift.

No holes were cut in the Kursk's sixth compartment - where the twin 190 megawatt reactors sit, still generating a low level of heat - because the reactor containment vessels are so close to the hull that the huge lifting plugs could not be inserted without damaging them.

Each of the 26 lifting units will bear about 750 tons of the Kursk's weight. Tests conducted at Russia's Krylov Institute in St. Petersburg demonstrated that each bundle of cables could actually bear at least 2,000 tons each - nearly triple the load that should be necessary to do the job - before the testing device broke.

Before the lift, the most important task is slicing off a 45- to 50-foot section of the Kursk's destroyed bow, where torpedo fragments and even complete warheads could be hidden in the debris.

"In the area where the slicing of the compartment will take place, I can say with confidence there are no torpedoes left," said Rear Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff for the northern fleet. "But there may be torpedoes in the other corners of the first compartment, which are littered with metal debris. That is why we take serious security precautions." No divers will be in the water during the cutting.

So much of Kursk's bow is destroyed, and so much mud has settled in the first compartment, that Mammoet's engineers feared it might break off during the lift, or start shimmying in a way that would destabilize the lift. The Russian navy plans to raise the bow section separately next year as part of its investigation into the explosions.

Still, the cutting could be tricky and already has caused delays.

The cutting tool is actually a huge chain saw of abrasive cylinders strung on a cable stretched between two suction moorings and operated remotely by Smit Tak engineers.

The moorings are really just giant pipes that stand on the bottom and then suck themselves into the seabed mud as water is pumped out of their interior.

The saw is operated remotely between the moorings in a back-and- forth motion controlled from the MT Carrier barge that Smit Tak towed to the Barents Sea. Last month, however, the MT Carrier was forced to retreat to Kirkenes, Norway, for modifications when tests showed that the Kursk's hull - a sandwich of high-tensile steel and sound dampening material - was tearing up the cylinders on the chain saw, threatening to break the carrying cable. The solution was to add spacers between the cylinders.

After more tests on the saw, the cutting operation could begin this week. When the Giant 4 barge arrives from Amsterdam, the stage will be set for the lift.

A Global Positioning System accurate within a meter will be fixed on the front and rear of the barge to help the crew keep it precisely over the Kursk.

As the 26 lifting units are attached to the sub by divers, echo sounders and radiation monitors will be mounted on the Kursk to provide a real-time stream of data to the computers aboard the Mayo, the support ship that will serve as a command center for the lift.

That's where Mr. Dailey will be, surrounded by a fleet of civilian support ships and Russian warships charged with responding to dozens of contingencies that might arise if something goes wrong.

If Mr. Dailey succeeds in coaxing the Kursk out of the mud, engineers on the barge will test the load on each of the 26 jacks to determine the weight of the Kursk minus its bow. They will also try to locate its center of gravity, a critical calculation so as to avoiding stresses that could cause the hull to snap and to keep the boat level in the ascent.

As the estimated 15,000 tons of steel and machinery rise, the barge will continue to ride up and down on waves up to 10 feet high, but the jacks and the Kursk will stand in isolation from the motion of the sea surface. They will be able to do so thanks to computer-driven "heave" compensators on the barge. The heave compensators operate like huge shock absorbers mounted under the lifting jacks, which are suspended high above the deck of the Giant 4. The shock absorbers are filled with liquid nitrogen, chosen because it is not explosive and is quick to respond to the motion of the sea.

"Oil is too slow and air will explode in some circumstances," Mr. Dailey said.

It will take 12 to 16 hours to travel a little more than 300 feet from the bottom to a submerged position directly underneath the Giant 4, whose underside has been modified to conform to the Kursk's contours, with shaped sockets cut out to receive the tail fin and conning tower of the Kursk like a glove.

"If all of the systems they have lined up work as they are designed to work, then it ought to work out nicely, but like any other engineering feat, there are likely to be some glitches," said J. Brad Mooney Jr., a retired rear admiral who in 1964 was the test pilot for the bathyscaph Trieste II more than 8,000 feet down into the Atlantic to find the United States nuclear submarine Thresher, which had sunk the year before.

The Kursk will be squeezed with 2,000 tons of pressure against the Giant 4 and the contoured supports welded on its hull to hold the Kursk in place for the 150-mile ride into port, where the sea and current will create some of the most complex and dangerous "hammering" forces between the sub and the Giant 4 as they are towed at four knots.

Two routes have been selected for this risky passage. One, in open sea, would take less than two days. A second, hugging the coast and passing behind Kildin Island, could take much longer, if the Giant 4 has to evade Arctic storms and high seas.

Finally, when the Kursk, lying hidden under the sandwich of barge and pontoons, prepares to slide into drydock at Roslyakovo, just north of Murmansk, the submarine will be raised high enough to be visible.

Once the Kursk is in drydock, Giant 4 and the pontoons will detach and slide out, leaving the Kursk like a silent leviathan for the post-mortem of the Russian navy.

The first task will be the removal of the bodies still aboard.

-------- treaties

Russia considers next step if U.S. pulls out of treaty

Tuesday, September 4, 2001
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Dave Montgomery
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/09/04/national/RUSSIA04.htm

The U.S. is pushing for a missile-defense system. The move could affect all arms agreements between the two countries.

MOSCOW - President Bush's increasingly pointed threats to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty are prompting Russian leaders to contemplate how they might counter such a move - from scrapping all arms agreements with the United States to strengthening ties with China, North Korea and Iran.

Bush still hopes to encourage Russia to abandon the treaty and support his push for a missile-defense system, coupled with deep cuts in both countries' remaining nuclear arsenals. Although Russian officials have expressed interest in eliminating more nuclear weapons, which are difficult and costly to maintain, they have resisted U.S. efforts to revise or scrap the treaty, which they call the bulwark of nuclear stability.

The ABM Treaty prohibits national missile defenses on the theory that neither country would attack the other so long as it was unable to protect itself from a nuclear counterattack. Bush recently said the United States would withdraw from the pact at "a time convenient to America," and the Kremlin heard the message loud and clear.

Moscow defense analyst Pavel Felgengauer said Russia's initial response to a U.S. withdrawal would be a "political option" intended to portray the United States as a nuclear rogue and to damage Washington's ties with its longtime allies in Western Europe that also are skittish about abrogating the ABM Treaty.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin also has vowed that if Bush abandons the treaty, Russia will withdraw from all arms and nonproliferation agreements with the United States. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has said more than 30 treaties could be in jeopardy. The most obvious target is the START II treaty, which the Russian parliament ratified last year and which would cut the number of strategic nuclear warheads each side can deploy to no more than 3,500.

Defense experts say Russia is prepared to make good on the threat. That would allow Russia to strengthen its nuclear arsenals. Although the country's fragile economy and threadbare military budget would likely prevent an extensive buildup, Russia could begin a limited military buildup, analysts said.

"Once we have walked out of that [ABM] treaty, we have broken that restraint," said Steven Blank, of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "They can build whatever they feel like, just as we can."

Although its defense budget can't sustain a costly arms race, Moscow could threaten to deploy short- and intermediate-range missiles and put multiple warheads on existing long-range missiles that now have single warheads.

Any military buildup in Russia likely would increase tensions with the United States, experts say.

"If Russia would withdraw from these existing treaties, both sides . . . become less predictable to one another, and it gives rise to distrust and more suspicion," said Shannon Kile, an analyst with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "It unravels one of the principal accomplishments of arms control."

A U.S. withdrawal also could push Russia into a strategic partnership with China to help counter U.S. global influence, analysts said. The neighboring, nuclear-equipped nations signed a friendship pact earlier this year and have led the opposition to Bush's proposed U.S. missile-defense system.

Additionally, Western analysts fear that Russia would no longer feel constrained from selling arms and military technology to North Korea, Iraq, Iran and other nations that the United States considers sponsors of terrorism or potential nuclear threats.

Although Russia has been eager to accelerate international arms sales to shore up its defense industry, Putin so far has avoided weapons sales or technology transfers that would upset his efforts to strengthen ties with the United States and other Western nations.

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

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

-------- nevada

Nuclear waste protesters hit Strip
Goal to encourage attendance during upcoming hearings

By LISA SNEDEKER THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tuesday, September 04, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Sep-04-Tue-2001/news/16917436.html

About 40 protesters wore protective gear and wheeled barrels bearing radiation symbols along the Strip on Monday to encourage attendance at hearings on the storage of nuclear waste in Nevada. "Our main message here is to get people out to the meetings," said Kalynda Tilges, a protest organizer and nuclear issues coordinator for Citizen Alert.

The demonstrators marched among the hordes of Labor Day tourists from the Bellagio to the Fashion Show mall. Many carried signs that read, "Last chance to tell the DOE: No Yucca Mountain Dump!" "Nuclear waste never takes a holiday," said protester Jennifer Viereck.

"Those shipments are coming if we don't do something to stop them right now." Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under federal study to accept 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors around the country.

Nevada lawmakers have asked Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to attend the meetings to hear the views of Nevadans and others on the proposed repository.

Their request delivered over the weekend was the latest in a campaign by Nevada officials to pressure Abraham before Wednesday's public hearing in North Las Vegas on the Energy Department's scientific research at Yucca Mountain.

So far, the secretary has not responded. Tilges said her group is planning another demonstration before Wednesday's meeting.

"The DOE is subverting the public process," she said. "They're holding the last public hearing on Yucca Mountain this week with very little notice, and without the required final analysis of the environmental impacts."

Nevada lawmakers and Gov. Kenny Guinn are also seeking postponement of the public hearings and a 90-day extension of a public comment period following the Energy Department's Aug. 21 release of a preliminary site suitability report on Yucca Mountain.

-------- tennessee

2 Cents Worth - One tough act for Leah Dever

September 4, 2001
Oakridger,
by R. Cathey Daniels
http://www.oakridger.com/

Either Leah Dever is conducting weird psychological experiments using unsuspecting human subjects -- or she's one smart cookie.

Dever, manager of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Operations office, has officially tossed all the Goliaths of economic development and all the Davids of land preservation and conservation into one room.

We spectators get to watch and see what happens.

The idea is that no one will be slain.

Already the land use focus group -- the twenty-some folks charged with developing a comprehensive plan for the Oak Ridge Reservation that will merge both development and conservation interests -- has met.

No sling shots were drawn.

In fact, there's a hint and scent of optimism afloat. Then again both groups -- conservationists and developers -- are optimistic by nature.

How else would one survive in either world?

But both groups are also leery -- OK, downright distrustful -- of the other.

Rightly so. Their interests have been pitted against one another nationally since the pre-Earth Day days, and locally each has vehemently planned and schemed and charted war strategy against the other for at least the past five years.

Time to disarm, says Dever. Time to talk peace. Time to consider Oak Ridge as a long term, viable city -- not as a developer's dream or a conservationist's refuge.

So true. But if the DOE does not recognize the catalyst in the feuding, the new focus group will not stay focused long.

That catalyst is the employment of the element of surprise -- a specialty of the DOE's.

Let's take our lesson from the text of the past.

It would not be overreaching to say that Oak Ridge Reservation conservationists and scientists were enraged when the DOE made the surprise announcement that it would allow parcel ED-1 (formerly environmentally significant land, now Horizon Center Industrial Park) to be developed.

Some -- who thought and were told by the DOE that they were a part of the planning process -- first heard that announcement while absently listening to news on their car radio.

Later DOE made another surprise announcement which shook developers from the creases of their billfolds. DOE declared that 3,000 acres of the Three Bend area -- long considered prime residential development land -- would be protected as a scenic and wildlife refuge.

These surprise strikes -- likely done in the spirit of what the DOE thought best for itself and for the community at that particular moment -- stirred both sides to battle.

Guess what? DOE doesn't know what's best. Guess what else? Leah Dever seems to be the first manager of the ORO in the past two decades that at least has begun to recognize that.

So now we have both sides of the land use issue gathered in the same room.

Now we have a common goal -- producing a land use plan that does not pit economic concerns against environmental concerns, yet takes both into account.

Now we have a collective thought to rub up against -- that both economic and environmental concerns are valid objectives.

If everyone in the meeting room would admit that, the focus group might have a chance of succeeding.

If some folks refuse to admit that, then Leah Dever could have an interesting psychological study on her hands.

Not to mention a mandate to do whatever she thinks best.


-------- MILITARY

-------- asia

Taiwan, China Slug It Out on TV

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Media-Missiles.html?searchpv=aponline

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Jets fire rockets that leave a trail of gray smoke in the sky, and helicopters shower their targets with machine-gun fire. But what matters most in this round of Taiwanese war games is the cameras.

In the perennial shadow boxing between China and Taiwan, the public on both sides has a ringside seat, courtesy of television and front pages.

The propaganda war has been heating up lately as the Chinese military takes advantage of clear summer weather and stages exercises directly across from Taiwan, the island it claims as a renegade province.

Beijing's leaders hope to convince the Taiwanese that if they continue to reject offers of eventual reunification, China's growing arsenal of Russian-made destroyers, jets and missiles could come storming across the Taiwan Strait.

The most common vehicle for China's fright show is the Hong Kong press.

The pro-China daily Wen Wei Po has been printing a steady stream of photos and stories about war games China is holding on Dongshan Island, just 140 miles from the nearest Taiwanese territory.

A graphic covering much of the front page on Aug. 12 showed Taiwan trapped in a full-court Chinese military press. Submarines and destroyers seal one end of the Taiwan Strait while missiles await launching, warplanes and helicopters control the skies, and satellites direct the troops from space.

About two years ago, stocks tumbled nearly 4 percent on the Taiwan exchange when the Hong Kong daily Ming Pao wrongly reported that China was amassing 100 submarines across from Taiwan.

The market is again down, but this time the reason seems to be sagging world demand for electronics, a mainstay of Taiwan's economy, rather than China's war games.

``We've already been numbed by all this stuff. We hear about these reports every three days or so,'' said Wang Tsai-ming, a retired builder dressed in shorts and sandals as he checked on his stocks at a brokerage.

He said he drew reassurance from the front page of that morning's China Times, a leading Taiwanese daily, showing Taiwanese pilots racing to a line of Super Cobra attack helicopters.

That photo, printed by most of the island's newspapers, was the product of Taiwanese military public relations.

Every month, the military takes Taiwanese and foreign journalists on two- or three-day trips to air bases, warships and firing ranges. Soldiers scale walls in urban warfare drills, helicopters fire rockets at imaginary invading ships and frog men paddle rafts in mock night missions.

It's all painstakingly choreographed for television, and has become a lot more sophisticated than in the 1960s and '70s, when Chinese and Taiwanese artillery would trade salvoes of shells packed with propaganda leaflets.

The elaborate coverage of Taiwanese in mock battle meets a ``subconscious need for martial reassurances,'' said Fu S. Mei, editor-in-chief of Taiwan Defense Review Web site.

While China clings to its authoritarian ways, Taiwan has evolved from a society under martial law into a democracy with free media and a legislature that scrutinizes military spending.

China's advantage in the propaganda war is its ability to control what appears in the nation's state-run media. Hong Kong's media aren't controlled, but depend on the Chinese government for most photos and video footage of military activity.

A misfired Chinese missile goes unreported. Taiwanese authorities often permit live coverage of their exercises, and can only pray that nothing goes wrong on camera.

Taiwan has an array of military spokesmen on call. On a recent trip to the outlying island of Matsu, officers set up tables with computer plug-ins so that reporters could send their stories at the hotel. An officer was assigned to stay up late in case journalists had last-minute questions.

Last year, by contrast, when China's Foreign Ministry invited representatives of various ministries to meet foreign journalists, the military group showed up but immediately walked away without talking to anyone.

-------- balkans

Rebels beyond disarmament in Macedonia?

Deutsche Welle
04.09.2001
http://www.dwelle.de/english/topstory/20010904.html

Collected weapons in Macedonia

Macedonia's nationalist prime minister Lyubco Georgievski has criticised the NATO-backed peace plan but has nonetheless called on parliament to ratify it. Approval is necessary before the country's ethnic-Albanian rebels surrender their weapons.

NATO gave itself 30 days to collect the 3,300 weapons declared by the ethnic-Albanians in Macedonia. However, it looks more likely that the organisation will extend its stay as it has only collected a third of the weapons thus far. There are also concerns about the stability of the peace process, which, NATO feels, will need to be monitored after the National Liberation Army (NLA) has been demobilised.

Moreover, the NLA is refusing to co-operate and hand over the remaining weapons to NATO soldiers until promised changes are made to the Macedonian constitution and relevant legislature. The August 13 peace deal proposed by NATO includes constitutional amendments that will provide the ethnic-Albanians with greater rights. Approximately 23 percent of Macedonia's population comprises ethnic-Albanians, thereby making them a minority ethnic group in the country.

However, these constitutional changes need a two-thirds majority vote by parliament to pass into the constitution. Many delegates are uncertain about whether they should risk their political future by compromising their reputation with their own Macedonian voters or whether to secure peace in the country.

The seeds of doubt are fuelled by Macedonian refugees protesting outside parliamentary buildings. The demonstrators, which have come from villages that have been taken over by Albanian rebels, curse their politicians, "The peace agreement is just a way of delivering their country to the Albanians and their western NATO protectors," they protest.

The Macedonian parliament will begin voting on whether to amend the constitution today. A No vote would delay NATO's mission.

-------- biological weapons

U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits

September 4, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.

The 1972 treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but it allows work on vaccines and other protective measures. Government officials said the secret research, which mimicked the major steps a state or terrorist would take to create a biological arsenal, was aimed at better understanding the threat.

The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.

Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.

The experiment has been devised to assess whether the vaccine now being given to millions of American soldiers is effective against such a superbug, which was first created by Russian scientists. A Bush administration official said the National Security Council is expected to give the final go-ahead later this month.

Two other projects completed during the Clinton administration focused on the mechanics of making germ weapons.

In a program code-named Clear Vision, the Central Intelligence Agency built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market. The C.I.A. device lacked a fuse and other parts that would make it a working bomb, intelligence officials said.

At about the same time, Pentagon experts assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials. Pentagon officials said the project demonstrated the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of the deadly germs.

Both the mock bomb and the factory were tested with simulants - benign substances with characteristics similar to the germs used in weapons, officials said.

A senior Bush administration official said all the projects were "fully consistent" with the treaty banning biological weapons and were needed to protect Americans against a growing danger. "This administration will pursue defenses against the full spectrum of biological threats," the official said.

The treaty, another administration official said, allows the United States to conduct research on both microbes and germ munitions for "protective or defensive purposes."

Some Clinton administration officials worried, however, that the project violated the pact. And others expressed concern that the experiments, if disclosed, might be misunderstood as a clandestine effort to resume work on a class of weapons that President Nixon had relinquished in 1969.

Simultaneous experiments involving a model of a germ bomb, a factory to make biological agents and the developoment of more potent anthrax, these officials said, would draw vociferous protests from Washington if conducted by a country the United States viewed as suspect.

Administration officials said the need to keep such projects secret was a significant reason behind President Bush's recent rejection of a draft agreement to strengthen the germ-weapons treaty, which has been signed by 143 nations.

The draft would require those countries to disclose where they are conducting defensive research involving gene-splicing or germs likely to be used in weapons. The sites would then be subject to international inspections.

Many national security officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations opposed the draft, arguing that it would give potential adversaries a road map to what the United States considers its most serious vulnerabilities.

Among the facilities likely to be open to inspection under the draft agreement would be the West Jefferson, Ohio, laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a military contractor that has been selected to create the genetically altered anthrax.

Several officials who served in senior posts in the Clinton administration acknowledged that the secretive efforts were so poorly coordinated that even the White House was unaware of their full scope.

The Pentagon's project to build a germ factory was not reported to the White House, they said. President Clinton, who developed an intense interest in germ weapons, was never briefed on the programs under way or contemplated, the officials said.

A former senior official in the Clinton White House conceded that in retrospect, someone should have been responsible for reviewing the projects to ensure that they were not only effective in defending the United States, but consistent with the nation's arms-control pledges.

The C.I.A.'s tests on the bomb model touched off a dispute among government experts after the tests were concluded in 2000, with some officials arguing that they violated the germ treaty's prohibition against developing weapons.

Intelligence officials said lawyers at the agency and the White House concluded that the work was defensive, and therefore allowed. But even officials who supported the effort acknowledged that it brought the United States closer to what was forbidden.

"It was pressing how far you go before you do something illegal or immoral," recalled one senior official who was briefed on the program.

Public disclosure of the research is likely to complicate the position of the United States, which has long been in the forefront of efforts to enforce the ban on germ weapons.

The Bush administration's willingness to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile treaty has already drawn criticism around the world. And the administration's stance on the draft agreement for the germ treaty has put Washington at odds with many of its allies, including Japan and Britain.

The Original Treaty

During the cold war, both the United States and the Soviet Union produced vast quantities of germ weapons, enough to kill everyone on earth.

Eager to halt the spread of what many called the poor man's atom bomb, the United States unilaterally gave up germ arms and helped lead the global campaign to abolish them. By 1975, most of the world's nations had signed the convention.

In doing so, they agreed not to develop, produce, acquire or stockpile quantities or types of germs that had no "prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes." They also pledged not to develop or obtain weapons or other equipment "designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."

There were at least two significant loopholes: The pact did not define "defensive" research or say what studies might be prohibited, if any. And it provided no means of catching cheaters.

In the following decades, several countries did cheat, some on a huge scale. The Soviet Union built entire cities devoted to developing germ weapons, employing tens of thousands of people and turning anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague into weapons of war. In the late 1980's, Iraq began a crash program to produce its own germ arsenal.

Both countries insisted that their programs were for defensive purposes.

American intelligence officials had suspected that Baghdad and Moscow were clandestinely producing germ weapons. But the full picture of their efforts did not become clear until the 1990's, after several Iraqi and Soviet officials defected.

Fears about the spread of biological weapons were deepened by the rise of terrorism against Americans, the great strides in genetic engineering and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left thousands of scientists skilled in biological warfare unemployed, penniless and vulnerable to recruitment.

The threat disclosed a quandary: While the United States spent billions of dollars a year to assess enemy military forces and to defend against bullets, tanks, bombs and jet fighters, it knew relatively little about the working of exotic arms it had relinquished long ago.

Designing a Delivery System

In the mid-1990's, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies stepped up their search for information about other nations' biological research programs, focusing on the former Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq and Libya, among others. Much of the initial emphasis was on the germs that enemies might use in an attack, officials said.

But in 1997, the agency embarked on Clear Vision, which focused on weapons systems that would deliver the germs.

Intelligence officials said the project was led by Gene Johnson, a senior C.I.A. scientist who had long worked with some of the world's deadliest viruses. Dr. Johnson was eager to understand the damage that Soviet miniature bombs - bomblets, in military parlance - might inflict.

The agency asked its spies to find or buy a Soviet bomblet, which releases germs in a fine mist. That search proved unsuccessful, and the agency approved a proposal to build a replica and study how well it could disperse its lethal cargo.

The agency's lawyers concluded that such a project was permitted by the treaty because the intent was defensive. Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had reports that at least one nation was trying to buy the Soviet- made bomblets.

A model was constructed and the agency conducted two sets of tests at Battelle, the military contractor. The experiments measured dissemination characteristics and how the model performed under different atmospheric conditions, intelligence officials said. They emphasized that the device was a "portion" of a bomb that could not have been used as a weapon.

The experiments caused concern at the White House, which learned about the project after it was under way. Some aides to President Clinton worried that the benefits did not justify the risks. But a White House lawyer led a joint assessment by several departments that concluded that the program did not violate the treaty, and it went ahead.

The questions were debated anew after the project was completed, this time without consensus. A State Department official argued for a strict reading of the treaty: the ban on acquiring or developing "weapons" barred states from building even a partial model of a germ bomb, no matter what the rationale.

"A bomb is a bomb is a bomb," another official said at the time.

The C.I.A. continued to insist that it had the legal authority to conduct such tests and, intelligence officials said, the agency was prepared to reopen the fight over how to interpret the treaty. But even so, the agency ended the Clear Vision project in the last year of the Clinton administration, intelligence officials said.

Bill Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, acknowledged that the agency had conducted "laboratory or experimental" work to assess the intelligence it had gathered about biological warfare.

"Everything we have done in this respect was entirely appropriate, necessary, consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and was briefed to the National Security Council staff and appropriate Congressional oversight committees," Mr. Harlow said.

Breeding More Potent Anthrax

In the 1990's, government officials also grew increasingly worried about the possibility that scientists could use the widely available techniques of gene-splicing to create even more deadly weapons.

Those concerns deepened in 1995, when Russian scientists disclosed at a scientific conference in Britain that they had implanted genes from Bacillus cereus, an organism that causes food poisoning, into the anthrax microbe.

The scientists said later that the experiments were peaceful; the two microbes can be found side-by-side in nature and, the Russians said, they wanted to see what happened if they cross-bred.

A published account of the experiment, which appeared in a scientific journal in late 1997, alarmed the Pentagon, which had just decided to require that American soldiers be vaccinated against anthrax. According to the article, the new strain was resistant to Russia's anthrax vaccine, at least in hamsters.

American officials tried to obtain a sample from Russia through a scientific exchange program to see whether the Russians had really created such a hybrid. The Americans also wanted to test whether the microbe could defeat the American vaccine, which is different from that used by Russia.

Despite repeated promises, the bacteria were never provided.

Eventually the C.I.A. drew up plans to replicate the strain, but intelligence officials said the agency hesitated because there was no specific report that an adversary was attempting to turn the superbug into a weapon.

This year, officials said, the project was taken over by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Pentagon lawyers reviewed the proposal and said it complied with the treaty. Officials said the research would be part of Project Jefferson, yet another government effort to track the dangers posed by germ weapons.

A spokesman for Defense Intelligence, Lt. Cmdr. James Brooks, declined comment. Asked about the precautions at Battelle, which is to create the enhanced anthrax, Commander Brooks said security was "entirely suitable for all work already conducted and planned for Project Jefferson."

The Question of Secrecy

While several officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations called this and other research long overdue, they expressed concern about the lack of a central system for vetting such proposals.

And a former American diplomat questioned the wisdom of keeping them secret.

James F. Leonard, head of the delegation that negotiated the germ treaty, said research on microbes or munitions could be justified, depending on the specifics.

But he said such experiments should be done openly, exposed to the scrutiny of scientists and the public. Public disclosure, he said, is important evidence that the United States is proceeding with a "clean heart."

"It's very important to be open," he said. "If we're not open, who's going to be open?"

Mr. Leonard said the fine distinctions drawn by government lawyers were frequently ignored when a secret program was exposed. Then, he said, others offer the harshest possible interpretations - a "vulgarization of what has been done."

But he concluded that the secret germ research, as described to him, was "foolish, but not illegal."

--------

Next to Old Rec Hall, a 'Germ-Making Plant'

New York Times
September 4, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.html

CAMP 12, NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada - In a nondescript mustard-colored building that was once a military recreation hall and barbershop, the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities.

Adjacent to the pool tables, the shuffleboard and the bar stands a gleaming stainless steel cylinder, the 50-liter (53- quart) fermenter in which germs can be cultivated.

The apparatus, which includes a latticework of pipes and other equipment, was made entirely with commercially available components bought from hardware stores and other suppliers for about $1 million - a pittance for a weapon that could deliver death on such a large scale.

The factory was built by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to contain the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Officials said the project was intended to assess how hard it would be for a terrorist or rogue nation to assemble a germ factory.

The agency also wanted to see if a small operation produced any telltale "signatures" - sounds, chemical emissions or patterns of operation that could help intelligence agencies find such plants.

"The project also showed us how relatively simple it would be for a terrorist to assemble such a facility without being detected," said Jay C. Davis, the former director of the agency who, with the Pentagon's permission, showed the secret plant to a Times reporter and a team from ABC News.

Officials stressed that the plant never made anthrax or any other lethal pathogen. Rather, it produced only harmless biopesticides during two production test runs in 1999 and 2000. Dr. Davis declined to say how much was made. But if it had been anthrax germs, he said, it would have made enough to kill at least 10,000 people.

Officials said the Pentagon built the plant in this largely deserted camp because it was well guarded. Building 12-7, the former recreation hall and about four dozen other buildings here were abruptly closed in January 1993 after the global moratorium on underground nuclear testing took effect.

Between 1951 and 1963, more than 800 nuclear tests were conducted here at the vast Nevada Test Site, whose parched sands and eerily quiet, sagebrush-covered mesas and mountains are scarred by giant atomic craters.

The interior of Building 12-7 - 120 feet long and 40 feet wide - seems frozen in time. Dusty signs warn visitors not to sit on the pool tables or to talk about secret projects with anyone who has no "need to know."

Dr. Davis and other officials said the Defense Department's lawyers had carefully reviewed the project to ensure that it did not violate the biological weapons treaty or American law. Because it was purely defensive and never made deadly germs, it was both legal and appropriate, he and others said.

But apparently few outside of the agency or even in the Pentagon's upper echelons knew much about the secret project. Dr. Davis said the White House was never briefed about it, given its small scale and low cost.

When subsequently told about the germ factory, several former White House officials said they were stunned that the agency's lawyers had approved it without having referred it to the White House or Congressional oversight committees for legal review.

The Pentagon's decision to permit a visit to the site came after The Times requested information about the program, called Bachus.

Some officials said the project, with its fermentation aspect, was named for Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. But an agency spokesman said the name was an acronym for Biotechnology Activity Characterization by Unconventional Signatures.

--------

White House Defends Germ - Warfare Work

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Germ-Warfare.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States has spent years conducting secret research on biological weapons with the goal of developing a vaccine to protect U.S. soldiers from chemical attacks, the White House said Tuesday.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer cast the research as purely defensive in nature and in keeping with a 1972 treaty banning biological weapons.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the research, begun under the Clinton administration, pushes the limits of that treaty, which allows nations to work on vaccines and other protective measures. Citing government officials, the Times said the secret research mimics the major steps a state or terrorist group would take to create a biological arsenal.

Fleischer said the U.S. program is ``designed to protect our servicemen and women in particular.'' He did not say how long the research has been under way, but noted concerns during the 1991 Gulf War that American soldiers were vulnerable to a chemical attack by Iraq.

``That was a real issue,'' Fleischer said. ``The United States does have a program, it's been around for a while, to develop vaccines and protective measures in case we are attacked.''

National security spokesman Sean McCormack said the research did not mean the United States wants to move away from the global chemical weapons ban. He noted that the United States did away with its offensive biological weapons years ago.

``We fully support the biological weapons program,'' McCormack said. ``This is purely biodefense research, which is allowed.''

Bill Harlow, a CIA spokesman, told the Times that the agency conducted laboratory or experimental work to assess the intelligence it had gathered about biological warfare.

``Everything we have done in this respect was entirely appropriate, necessary and was briefed to the National Security Council staff and appropriate congressional oversight committees,'' Harlow said.

The secret U.S. work included a Pentagon project to assemble a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials, the newspaper said. It quoted Pentagon officials as saying the project demonstrated the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of deadly germs.

-------- colombia

Police Say Colombian Rebels Used Gas

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Gas-Attack.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia's biggest rebel army used gas during an attack on a village police station, killing four policemen who died slow, agonizing deaths, a police commander said Tuesday.

Biopsies were taken from the four policemen to determine what agent was used, said police Col. Francisco Henry Caicedo. He described the gas as ``toxic,'' but acknowledged it could have been tear gas, which can be lethal in enclosed spaces.

Results of the biopsies were not expected for several days. If poisonous gas -- and not tear gas -- were used, it would be the first such known case in Colombia's 37-year civil war.

Caicedo said that according to officers who survived the attack Sunday in San Adolfo, in Huila province 230 miles south of Bogota, rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia tossed bombs into their compound that sent dark gray smoke into their bunker and tunnels.

``They were suffocating -- they couldn't breathe and felt their lungs were going to explode. They were immediately blinded by the gas,'' Caicedo told The Associated Press.

One officer died in a hospital in Pitalito, near San Adolfo; another died in the provincial capital of Neiva; a third was airlifted to a Bogota hospital and died; and the fourth was kidnapped by the rebels but collapsed and died in a village near the scene of the attack, Caicedo said.

``They didn't die right away. They died slowly,'' said Caicedo, who commands the police forces in Huila province.

Caicedo ruled out the possibility that rebel missiles had cause toxic material to accidentally leak during the attack, saying no such materials were stored at the police station.

National police chief Gen. Ernesto Gilibert said he could not confirm what devices were used and that authorities were investigating. He said it would be ``very worrisome'' if the rebels were using poisonous gas.

The FARC had no immediate reply to the accusations.

-------- iraq

US Aircraft Bomb Iraqi Air Defenses

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. fighter jets attacked Iraqi air defense forces south of Baghdad on Tuesday, marking the fourth such assault in southern Iraq in less than two weeks, defense officials said.

In a brief announcement, U.S. Central Command said the attack was in response to recent Iraqi ``hostile threats'' against the American and British aircraft that regularly patrol the skies over southern Iraq.

The announcement gave few details beyond saying the targets were Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile sites.

A defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the targets were near the city of As Samawah, about 130 miles southeast of Baghdad. They were attacked by U.S. Air Force F-16s and U.S. Navy F/A-18s. The Navy jets were launched from the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

The attack happened at about 9 a.m. EDT.

U.S. forces have been attacking air defense targets in southern Iraq with increased regularity.

Last Thursday, four Air Force F-16 fighter jets attacked a long-range radar stationed at Basra airport in southern Iraq. U.S. officials said the radar was not active at the time of the attack but had been used in the past to coordinate Iraqi air defense targeting of U.S. and British aircraft in the area.

On Aug. 25, U.S. and British warplanes attacked a mobile radar in southern Iraq, and on Aug. 28 they hit an Iraqi aircraft command and control facility.

U.S. and British aircraft regularly patrol southern and northern Iraq to prevent Iraqi forces from attacking Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south and to provide early warning of Iraqi troop movements toward Kuwait.

Iraq considers the ``no fly'' zones illegal and has vowed to shoot down an American or British pilot.

Central Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf area, said there have been 1,015 separate incidents of Iraqi surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire directed against U.S. and British aircraft since December 1998.

-------- israel

Israeli Outrage at Arafat's Speech Makes Talks With Him Uncertain

New York Times
September 4, 2001
THE MIDEAST VIEW
By CLYDE HABERMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04MIDE.html?searchpv=nytToday

JERUSALEM, Tuesday, Sept. 4 - More bombs and new fighting today reinforced what was already amply clear for Israelis and Palestinians: if they manage to work out a truce in their 11-month-old conflict, they will first have to overcome mutual hostility that is intensifying almost by the day.

For Israelis the mood was greatly darkened by the strong - and as far as Israeli officials are concerned, outrageous - anti-Israel denunciations dominating the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. "We regret very much the very bizarre show in Durban," Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said. "An important convention that's supposed to defend human rights became a source of hatred."

He spoke as Israel announced on Monday night that it would join the United States in walking out of the conference, after being attacked by a coalition of rights groups as "an apartheid regime" guilty of "ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide" against the Palestinians.

The events in South Africa thickened the pall over already troubled attempts to cobble together an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. So did new violence, which included five bombs that went off in the last two days in various areas of Jerusalem.

During the morning rush today, a suicide bomber blew himself up on the heavily traveled Street of the Prophets in downtown Jerusalem, not far from the spot where another bomber killed 15 people besides himself at a crowded pizzeria last month.

Early reports said the attacker today had set off explosives as he approached a group of Israeli border policemen. Ten people were said to have been wounded, one critically, the others slightly.

On Monday morning, four bombs went off in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. No one was gravely hurt. But after those explosions, in Jewish neighborhoods, Israelis and Palestinians pounded each other all day, especially in and around Hebron, where two Palestinian men were killed and about 30 others wounded by Israeli Army fire on Monday night.

Hopes for a truce, to the extent that they exist, have been pinned on the possibility of Mr. Peres working out arrangements with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Yasir Arafat. With European Union diplomats working as middlemen, a Peres-Arafat meeting has been bruited about for the last two weeks.

But the two sides keep parrying and thrusting, neither wanting to appear overly eager to reach out to the other, and both warning that it will be difficult to come to terms. For all the considerable talk about a meeting, nothing has been set, although a business conference in northern Italy at the end of the week has been mentioned as a possible setting.

Within the Israeli government, some cabinet ministers on the political right said Mr. Peres should not bother sitting down now with Mr. Arafat after the Palestinian leader went before the Durban gathering and attacked Israel as a racist colonial power.

Israel, Mr. Arafat said on Friday, has displayed a "supremacist mentality, a mentality of racial discrimination," and he repeated an old charge, long denied by the Israelis, that they shot bullets tipped with depleted uranium at Palestinians.

Uzi Landau, Israel's internal security minister, said it would "cause great damage" if Mr. Peres were to meet with Mr. Arafat, "especially after Arafat has called us war criminals in Durban."

Israeli anguish and rage at the course that the conference in South Africa has taken was reflected in an article on Monday in the mass circulation newspaper Yediot Ahronot. An editorial writer, Sever Plotzker, likened the Durban events to Kristallnacht - in German, the "night of the broken glass" - the name given to widespread attacks on German and Austrian Jews, their synagogues and property in November 1938.

"The road - ideologically, not practically, speaking - from Durban to Bergen-Belsen is shorter than many people think," Mr. Plotzker wrote, referring to a Nazi concentration camp.

He added: "From this standpoint, there is no difference between Nazi ideology and the ideology of Durban. In both the Jews are seen as undermining the righteous order of humanity. They are the embodiment of evil, and they have no place among the nations striving for peace."

Despite such views, and despite anger at Mr. Arafat for his remarks in South Africa, Israeli officials said they would continue to pursue truce talks, even if hopes for success did not run high on either side. "We have to take this opportunity, because the alternatives are quite worse," said Yaffa Ben-Ari, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

The alternatives, obviously, are continued gun battles and more bombs like those that went off Monday in three sections of Jerusalem.

Two exploded in French Hill and one in Gilo. Both are neighborhoods that Israel considers integral parts of Jerusalem but that sit on land captured by the Israelis in the 1967 Middle East war, making them settlements in Palestinian eyes. The fourth explosion occurred in Maalot Dafna, an area inside Israel since before 1967.

Altogether, five people were slightly injured, the police said.

A military arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility. Its leader, Mustafa Zibri, was killed by the Israeli Army last week.

-------- space

Private Space Station Planned

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Space-Station.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- A partly Russian-owned company that once tried to bail out the Mir space station announced a plan Tuesday to launch a private space station for paying tourists.

The new orbiter, called Mini Station 1, will cost about $100 million and is expected to enter orbit in 2004, said Jeffrey Manber, president of the Netherlands-based MirCorp.

He said it would be manufactured by the Russian RKK Energia company, which designed and built the Mir and owns a majority stake in MirCorp. The rest belongs to private investors.

Russia's increasingly troubled Mir was taken out of orbit in March after a 15-year career. MirCorp leased the Mir from Energia and paid for a cargo ship and a 73-day manned mission there in 2000, but the Russian government later dumped the station, saying that MirCorp had failed to provide enough funds to keep it in orbit.

``We don't have the problems that we had the first time,'' Manber said in a telephone interview. ``We don't have an old space station with a poor image and we are able to start a new one here.''

Manber said MirCorp has several customers willing to pay for a ride on the new station, and their contributions would help build it.

In April, California multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the world's first space tourist, paying about $20 million to ride a Russian rocket to the new International Space Station. His trip vexed the U.S. space agency NASA, which said commercializing the ISS would hamper the crew's work.

Manber said he had told NASA about MirCorp's plans.

``I have been briefing NASA on every step, and I believe they view us as a good development,'' he said. ``The ISS is for science, and the Mini Station will be commercial.''

Manber said the new space station would be slightly bigger than the Russia's Soyuz space capsule and could accommodate three visitors on visits of up to 20 days at a time.

``The Mini Station is simply a place to live and work for two or three weeks,'' he said. ``This is an inexpensive platform.''

Manber said MirCorp had already signed an agreement to build the station with Energia and the Russian Aerospace Agency, the Russian government's space agency.

But Russian Aerospace Agency spokesman Konstantin Kreidenko said Tuesday that the document signed was merely a declaration of intent to work together to explore commercial space projects.

``It's too early to speak about specific details yet,'' he told The Associated Press.

Under MirCorp's plan, Soyuz capsules that ferry crew members to the International Space Station could dock at the private station and then continue on to the ISS. Manber said the scheme would help Russia finance construction of its capsules and fulfill its obligations for the ISS.

Kreidenko said that plan is only theoretical and would require the consent of all 16 nations involved in the International Space Station.


-------- OTHER

-------- energy

California never lost power

September 4, 2001

By Thomas D. Elias SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010904-160594.htm

LOS ANGELES -- Remember all those doomsday forecasts of blackouts rolling across California day after day, hour after hour, all summer long? They turned out a lot like the warnings of the much-vaunted Y2K problem: a lot of hot air, a paper tiger, a complete no-show.

With summer almost gone, no part of California has experienced so much as one second of power outage, as expected, from the supply shortages that have plagued the state since May 8.

Wind damage to power lines, yes. Short circuits, occasionally. But systematic blackouts, none.

That's in stark contrast to the forecasts of so-called experts.

The California Independent System Operator, which runs the state's power grid, said in April that Californians could expect at least 34 days of rolling blackouts in the summer months if they used as much electricity as last year.

The North American Electric Reliability Council predicted 260 hours of summer blackouts.

The reasons for the debunking of those seemingly overblown predictions of disaster vary from conservation to mild weather and brand new power generating capacity.

Several power plants also returned to service after being closed much of last winter and spring for repairs or "routine maintenance."

Both state and consumer groups maintain that many of those closures were deliberate attempts to drive up the price of power.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a Democrat with gubernatorial aspirations, is currently investigating the possibility that a criminal conspiracy produced the shutdowns.

Whether the massive winter and spring price boosts were criminal or merely driven by market forces, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has indicated it may approve as much as $4 billion in rebates to California for overcharges.

Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis says he will sue unless the rebate amount is much, much higher.

Meanwhile, wholesale power prices are down more than two-thirds from winter, averaging $67.42 per megawatt-hour over the last month, compared with a range of $200 to $400 per megawatt-hour in February and March.

Most analysts, however, point to the weather and consumer conservation as key factors that helped avoid blackouts altogether.

In June, Californians consumed 12.4 percent less electricity than one year earlier.

The reduction in use was 5.2 percent for July, as the weather in some parts of the state heated up a bit and many air conditioners started to run.

During peak hours, when shortages are most likely, usage was down 14.1 percent in June and 10.7 percent in July.

Consumers trimmed between 1,000 and 3,000 megawatts of usage during the daily peak hours from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. -- enough to power between 1 million and 3 million homes.

"Without the conservation, there would have been a major problem," said Greg Fishman, an official of the Independent System Operator.

And no one here is saying the danger of blackouts is completely gone.

"We're not out of the woods yet," said Mr. Davis as he cut a ribbon to open a "peaker" power plant near Palm Springs two weeks ago.

"We face our toughest test in early September when temperatures should hit three digits on a regular basis in many places. But this much we do know: Californians everywhere -- from the workers working day and night to build new plants to the families waiting to do laundry after 7 p.m. -- all of them are exceeding expectations and meeting this energy challenge."

Mother Nature has helped considerably, especially in June and July.

Cooler-than-expected temperatures in Oregon and Washington state made more power than expected available from the dams of the federal Bonneville Power Administration along the Columbia River.

"Overall, it seems like most of the summer has been a little on the low-temperature side," said Dan Atkin, a National Weather Service meteorologist stationed in San Diego.

But no one in government or the power industry is ready to say the crisis is over.

"We certainly aren't ready to stand down the bombers yet," said Stephanie Donovan, a spokeswoman for the San Diego Gas & Electric Co.

But, as Mr. Atkin noted, "We didn't get $3-a-gallon gasoline, either. Now you see how difficult forecasting is."

-------- genetics

Team Says It Coaxed Human Stem Cells to Produce Blood

New York Times
September 4, 2001
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/health/04STEM.html?searchpv=nytToday

Biologists at the University of Wisconsin report today that they have transformed human embryonic stem cells into blood-making cells, a step that they say lays the basis for an "entirely novel" set of therapies based on fabricating laboratory- made tissues and organs from embryonic cells.

A major roadblock to grafting these new organs into patients would be immune rejection, the body's attack on tissues recognized as foreign. Creation of blood cells could be the key to overcoming this problem, based on the observation that patients given bone marrow transplants can become tolerant toward other tissues from the same donor.

The Wisconsin scientists envision infusing a patient with blood cells made from a line of human embryonic stem cells and then, once tolerance is established, implanting new tissues made in the laboratory from the same line of embryonic cells, like heart muscle or pancreatic islets. They caution that it would take many years to put all the elements of this program in place.

Separately, the researchers said the method could also provide a virus-free and inexhaustible source of blood products to supplement the present blood bank system that is dependent on the vagaries of donated blood.

The authors of the report include Dr. Dan S. Kaufman, a hematologist, and Dr. James A. Thomson, who in 1998 was the first to grow human embryonic stem cells in culture. The cells are derived from the surplus human embryos that are unavoidably created in fertility clinics. The embryo, a hollow sphere of cells a few days old, is destroyed in the process.

Embryonic stem cells hold great promise for understanding how the human body is generated from an egg because the cells are capable of morphing into the many different cell types - at least 260 are known so far - of which the body is composed.

Biologists hope to learn the language of stem cells by identifying the chemical signals they exchange among themselves to guide their development. The knowledge could allow tissues and organs to be grown outside the body for implantation into a patient, provided that the immune rejection and other problems can be overcome.

Dr. Kaufman, Dr. Thomson and their colleagues, who report their findings in today's issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not yet know the signals that tell an embryonic stem cell to turn into a blood-forming cell. They tricked the cells into choosing this fate by growing them in the presence of blood-forming cells derived from a mouse. Mice and people are so similar at the cellular level that the chemical signals released by the mouse blood cells were presumably recognized by the human embryonic stem cells and taken as a cue to morph into the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow.

The Wisconsin biologists report that from Dr. Thomson's human embryonic cells, they grew colonies of cells, some of which were primed to make red blood cells, some white blood cells and some platelets, the three main types of blood cell.

Transplanting blood-making cells into a patient to induce tolerance to grafts of other tissues is "a lovely concept," said Dr. Malcolm Moore, a hematologist at the Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan who was not involved in the study. "I think a few years down the line, this would be a very exciting clinical strategy," he said.

Most biomedical researchers have been unable to study human embryonic stem cells because of objections raised by abortion opponents to the destruction of human embryos. But on Aug. 9, President Bush opened the door for federally financed scientists to start research, provided they use embryonic cells that were established in culture before that date. The new study would not previously have qualified for federal financing.

Dr. Moore said the Wisconsin researchers had taken a good first step but now needed to prove that their blood-forming cells could be stably grafted into bone marrow and form red and white blood cells in the usual way.

This step, for some unknown reason, has so far proved impossible for biologists who have followed the same trail with mouse cells. They have taken mouse embryonic stem cells, converted them to blood-forming cells, and injected the cells into mice whose own bone marrow has been destroyed by radiation. But the blood-forming cells have not yet been made to engraft properly, as if the test-tube version of the mouse blood- forming cells lacks some necessary ability or signal. The human blood- forming cells in the new research were generated by the same method as is used in mouse work and could possess the same drawback.

Dr. Kaufman said he was now working on the problem and would need to show that the cells could make long-surviving bone marrow grafts to prove they included hematopoietic stem cells. Hematopoietic stem cells are the source in the bone marrow from which a constant stream of red and white blood cells is produced throughout a person's life. Like embryonic stem cells, they can renew themselves indefinitely, but their potential is restricted to making just the cells of the blood system.

Dr. Kaufman said that if hematopoietic stem cells could be derived from human embryonic stem cells, they might in time provide a plentiful source of bone marrow transplants for the thousands of patients who cannot find appropriately matched donors.

Eventually, the cells could also provide blood products, screened for bacteria and viruses, "in virtually unlimited amounts," Dr. Kaufman and colleagues said in their article.

Embryonic stem cells seem to be considerably less provocative to the immune system than are ordinary cells. "So if we derived cells from embryonic stem cells, maybe we don't need a perfect histocompatibility match," Dr. Kaufman said, referring to the markers on a cell's surface by which the body distinguishes its own cells from aliens.

The cells could be used to take over the patient's bone marrow, creating an individual composed of two different types of cell and known as a chimera, after the mythical animal that was part lion, part goat and part dragon. A chimeric patient, the Wisconsin scientists write, "should be tolerant to other tissues derived from the same embryonic stem cells" and would not require continued doses of drugs to suppress immune rejection, as do most transplant patients.

Dr. Moore said the same principle was being followed by doctors who had developed a technique for transplanting pancreatic islets from cadavers into patients. They have started to transplant the cadaver bone marrow as well so as to induce tolerance.

Dr. Kaufman said that he had approached Dr. Thomson to ask if anyone else was converting his embryonic stem cells into hematopoietic stem cells, and that Dr. Thomson let him try it.

-------- health

The Genesis of an Epidemic: Humans, Chimps and a Virus

New York Times
September 4, 2001
AIDS AT 20 / WHERE IT ALL STARTED
By GINA KOLATA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/health/anatomy/04ORIG.html?pagewanted=all

Three years ago, Dr. Beatrice Hahn got a call from a colleague asking if she wanted some body parts from a chimpanzee that had died a decade ago.

The colleague said, "I have the spleen, the brain and the lymph nodes in my freezer. I need to clean my freezer, so before I throw it out, do you want to look at it?"

Then the scientist said the animal had antibodies in its blood very much like ones that people develop when they are infected with the AIDS virus.

Dr. Hahn leapt at the chance. It was a long shot, but it was possible that the long-dead chimpanzee could be a missing link in the search for the origins of AIDS. A few days later, Federal Express delivered a huge box of frozen chimpanzee parts, packed in dry ice, to Dr. Hahn's laboratory at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is a professor of medicine.

Three days later, she had her answer. That chimpanzee, which had been healthy until she died in childbirth at age 26, held clues that eventually enabled Dr. Hahn and an international group of 11 others to unravel the mystery of the origin of the epidemic. It was a mystery that took years to solve and that had frustrated researchers and the public, stunned by the sudden emergence of such a terrible new disease.

Some said AIDS was caused by a mutant virus, a sort of Andromeda strain. Others favored conspiracy theories suggesting that H.I.V. had been created by scientists and escaped from germ warfare labs. There was a Western medicine disaster theory, which held that the virus was injected into Africans in bad batches of polio vaccine.

Then there was a more pedestrian idea - that people got H.I.V. from primates in Africa.

Scientists tended to favor the primate hypothesis because they knew that diseases can jump from animals to people. Dengue fever, Hanta virus, influenza and hepatitis B all originated in other species. But, researchers learned, it was not easy to trace the virus causing the human AIDS epidemic, H.I.V.-1, to an animal. And even when they started seeing provocative hints about the origins of AIDS, those hints soon turned contradictory.

The first evidence that H.I.V.-1 jumped to humans from primates came about a decade ago, when scientists isolated a virus from an African chimpanzee that very closely resembled the AIDS virus now infecting tens of millions of people. The chimpanzee virus looked so much like H.I.V.-1 that it was almost irresistible to think that the animals had somehow given the virus to people. Its genes were arranged the same way, and it even had a distinctive gene, called vpu, that had never been seen in any other virus.

While AIDS-like viruses were starting to emerge in other primates and in other animals, none looked so much like H.I.V.-1 as this chimpanzee one did.

Adding to the evidence was a tantalizing snippet of another AIDS-like virus found in a tube of blood from a baby chimpanzee that had died. While the fragment was too small for anyone to be certain that it closely resembled H.I.V.-1, the genetic sequence from this second chimp lined up exactly with a piece of the first chimpanzee's virus.

But soon the picture became clouded. A few years ago, scientists found a third chimpanzee with an AIDS-like virus, but when they analyzed that virus, they discovered that it was only distantly related to H.I.V.- 1. So, some asked, were chimpanzees really the source of the human AIDS epidemic? Or were chimpanzees, and humans, becoming infected by some other animals?

One way to find out would be to study wild chimpanzees and see whether they had a virus like the human form, H.I.V.-1, whether they had a different virus like the third chimpanzee's virus or whether they were infected with a variety of AIDS- like viruses. But the only way to find viruses was to look for them in blood. And researchers could not draw blood from the elusive animals without stunning them first with a tranquilizer gun, and the stunning effort was impractical.

To make matters worse, no one could show that the animal with a virus like H.I.V.-1 came from the region where the human epidemic first exploded.

That was when Dr. Hahn examined the frozen chimpanzee organs, and the mystery began to crack. That animal, she discovered, also had a virus in its tissues that looked like H.I.V.-1.

Suddenly, said Dr. Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, he and others who had questioned whether chimpanzees really were the source of H.I.V.-1 in humans, became convinced. While scientists had found only two, or possibly three chimpanzees that had the virus, Dr. Hahn's information, added to three other lines of evidence, was enough.

One line of evidence pointed to west-central Africa - a region where chimpanzees live - as the place where the human AIDS epidemic began.

Scientists, analyzing the genetic sequences of AIDS viruses found in patients from around the world, were discovering that the viruses in west- central Africa were the most diverse. And it is a general rule that the more diverse an organism's genes are, the longer it has been around. That is because as the years go by more and more variations accumulate in an organism's genes.

For example, Dr. Holmes said, human DNA is most diverse in Africa, supporting the idea that the human species originated on that continent.

The second line of evidence was a plausible way for the virus to get from chimpanzees to humans. People in west-central Africa eat chimpanzees. It was entirely reasonable to think that an infected animal's blood gave the virus to a person who was handling the chimpanzee meat, infecting the person and setting the stage for an AIDS epidemic.

"People eat chimpanzees," Dr. Hahn said. "We expect that transmissions occurred through the exposure to blood through hunting or preparation of meat."

Finally, researchers were discovering AIDS-like viruses in other animals and other primates in Africa, but none were as closely related to H.I.V.-1 as the viruses in the three chimpanzees.

The only species that fit all the evidence as the source of H.I.V.-1 was the chimpanzee, Dr. Holmes said.

A scientific paper that Dr. Hahn had published about the frozen chimpanzee "was extraordinarily important," Dr. Holmes said. "It really made people believe that chimps were the ancestral species."

Dr. Paul M. Sharp, a professor of genetics at the University of Nottingham who worked on the analyses of the viruses, said: "It had been a gradual shift in our perceptions. At first we had been saying that either chimps are the source or they are recipients, like humans." Dr. Hahn's chimp made all the difference, Dr. Sharp said.

Now, researchers say, they have found two more chimpanzees that were infected in the wild with a virus like H.I.V.-1. The animals were among a group of 29 captured in Cameroon, in the west-central region of Africa.

It would be ideal, of course, to find stored blood from the original people who contracted H.I.V.-1 and stored tissue from chimpanzees in the same area, and then show they had exactly the same virus, Dr. Holmes said. But, he added, that is not going to happen.

"You haven't got a smoking gun, but you're never going to have one," Dr. Holmes said. "The gun's long gone. You're never going to find it."

Yet, he said, there is the virus in chimpanzees, there is the geographical overlap between where chimpanzees live and where H.I.V. started, and there is a mechanism.

"That was it for us," Dr. Holmes said.

But knowing the virus came from chimpanzees left two pressing questions. When did the virus take hold in the human population? And how?

Dr. Bette T. Korber, a molecular geneticist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and her colleagues had a way to get an answer to the question of when. They had the genetic sequences of viruses isolated from people and knew when those viruses were found, starting with the oldest human H.I.V. sample available. It was from a man in what is now Kinshasa, Congo, in west-central Africa, in 1959.

Since the viruses mutate at a roughly constant rate, the researchers could construct a path of how the virus had mutated and determine how long it would take to move from one virus to another one with the amount of genetic diversity found today. From those calculations, they found a date when the spark of the epidemic was lit: 1931, plus or minus 15 years.

"You might think, if the virus was present in 1930, how on earth did we not see it?" Dr. Korber asked. "But if it is only present in a few thousand individuals and it takes a decade to get sick, it could easily have been missed."

Researchers say the virus almost certainly infected humans repeatedly as they killed and ate chimpanzees over the years, but that it is hard to start an AIDS epidemic. For it to develop, the virus must be prevented from dying with its victims and a steady chain of transmissions must occur.

"We think that these transmissions have gone on forever and a day, for all the centuries that people hunted chimpanzees," Dr. Hahn said. "The rule is that these transmissions go nowhere. They just peter out, unless you have additional factors that promote subsequent spread in the new human host."

One possible explanation for the extensive spread of H.I.V.-1, several scientists said, was that people began congregating in cities in Africa. There, the conditions were ripe for an AIDS epidemic.

"If you look at the population of Kinshasa, it's an exponential curve going up," Dr. Sharp said. "During the 20th century, you have far more movement of people into urban areas and perhaps changes in behavior." In addition, doctors in clinics in Africa commonly reused needles without sterilizing them between patients, a practice that, he said, "would have played a role in getting the virus kick-started."

Another possible explanation is less comforting.

Dr. Korber asked if it was possible that nothing really special made the epidemic grow, other than an initial transmission that, by chance, did not die out. Could a very slow curve of exponential growth, starting around 1930, end up in an epidemic that finally caught the world's attention around 20 years ago?

Her mathematical models showed that it made sense. For the first 30 years, the number of cases would have climbed into the hundreds. As the web of infections grew, the numbers would jump, reaching large numbers in Africa by 1980. At that point, enough people would be infected that the epidemic would be noticed. That model is particularly troubling, Dr. Hahn said.

"If you say, `I don't know how it got started; it could have been this, it could have been that,' and if all you need are a certain set of circumstances in the beginning so that it doesn't die out, then it could happen again," she said.

"People don't want to hear that."

-------- human rights

U.S. and Israel Quit Racism Talks Over Denunciation

New York Times
September 4, 2001
THE OVERVIEW
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04RACE.html

DURBAN, South Africa, Sept. 3 - The United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations meeting on racism here tonight, denouncing a condemnation of Israel in a proposed conference declaration and lamenting that a meeting intended to celebrate tolerance and diversity had degenerated into a gathering riven by hate.

South Africa rushed tonight to convene emergency meetings to redraft the declaration and program of action in the hope of averting other walkouts, and a spokesman for the European Union delegation, which also raised concerns, said its diplomats would take part in the efforts to rewrite the draft documents.

In announcing his decision in Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "I have taken this decision with regret because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that the conference could have made to it."

"But following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am convinced that will not be possible," he said.

Secretary Powell said negotiators here had failed to persuade Arab delegates to remove criticism of Israel from proposed conference documents that assail "the racist practices of Zionism" and describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians as a "new kind of apartheid."

Questions about whether Israel should be condemned for its treatment of Palestinians and whether the West should pay reparations for slavery and colonialism have roiled conference preparations for months. Washington has said repeatedly that it would not consider language that criticized Israel or legitimized reparations for descendants of slaves.

The fact that the United States did not send Secretary Powell to the conference, which opened on Friday, was a sore point with many of the countries represented here. The United States and Israel both sent mid-level delegations.

The decision to withdraw even those delegations dashed the hopes of thousands who have brought their fight against intolerance to a country chosen by conference organizers for its remarkable story of racial reconciliation.

Olivier Alsteens, spokesman for the European Union delegation, said it had no immediate plans to withdraw, "But if at one moment, we feel there is no other opportunity, then we will leave all together."

The American and Israeli pullout was warmly applauded by Jewish groups but greeted with great regret by South Africa and other developing countries and with anger by black Americans and their supporters. It seemed likely only to heighten the frustration and divisions between the increasingly polarized groups.

Tonight, black Americans and their allies took to the streets here, chanting "Shame, shame U.S.A." The protesters said they were deeply disappointed that the United States could not find a way to compromise and sign an international declaration that is expected to condemn slavery and racial discrimination.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been urging the Arab League to back away from the charged language, and members of the Black Congressional Caucus also criticized the Bush administration's decision.

Representative Donna M. C. Christensen, a Democrat who is the delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands, said, "It leaves African- Americans with no recognition of all the suffering we have had and all of the suffering we continue to have."

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and a delegation member, said he was sorry that the United States was pulling out. But he said the team, headed by E. Michael Southwick, a deputy assistant secretary of state, had no choice because the Palestinians and their supporters refused to compromise.

The American and Israeli decision came after officials from the United States and Norway had huddled for hours in closed-door meetings with Palestinian and other Arab officials, trying to broker a deal.

Norwegian diplomats proposed new language that mentioned the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but was fair to both sides, according to American officials. But the effort failed, and some meetings were so heated that participants ended up shouting.

"It was an ugly meeting," Mr. Lantos said in an interview. "This was not a question of persuading people. This was a question of an iron wall we were up against, and there was no give."

Arab officials blamed the Bush administration for the failure of the talks. Farouk Kaddoumi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused the United States of using the dispute as a pretext to avoid serious discussion of slavery and reparations for the descendants of African slaves.

The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, said the Norwegian compromise document trivialized Palestinian suffering.

"The only mention of Israel is that the Palestinians and Israelis should go back to the peace process," Mr. Maher said in an interview. "That is not enough.

"We are talking about a war waged using the most sophisticated weapons on a civilian population," Mr. Maher said. "This is a government that has taken an official decision to assassinate people. You want this conference, which deals with discrimination, not to mention these things? That is precisely what must be raised."

Polarization has also been evident in the interactions of delegates from civic groups meeting here in the hope of influencing the final declaration on racism, which is to be completed on Friday.

Last week, some Arab groups here distributed offensive literature that included posters of Jews with big noses and bloody fangs. Members of Palestinian and Jewish groups shouted at each other during competing rallies. And on Saturday, about 25 Jews walked out of a meeting of civic groups when someone suggested removing references to anti-Semitism.

After the Jewish groups walked out, the coalition of civic groups approved a report that accused Israel of "racist crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide" in its treatment of Palestinians. The report is not binding, and it is unlikely the language would be adopted.

"The U.S. did not reject a discussion about racism, they rejected a conference that was tainted by racism," said Stacy Burdett, an assistant director at the Anti-Defamation League, who is attending the conference. "This wasn't a discussion about legitimate issues. It was a hijacking that vilified and demonized Jews."

Mordechai Yedid, the head of the Israeli delegation, said in an interview, "Our position has always been to agree to generic language, to the suffering of people, to war, to occupations."

"This time because the conference was so important to us and to our history as a people who suffered from anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, we have gone beyond, to specific language," he said.

Several human rights groups argued tonight that the United States should have stayed to improve the language about Israel and to show solidarity with the many suffering people in the world.

"We're very troubled by the whole Zionism as racism formulation as well, but we think our responsibility is to stay and have the conversation," said Karen K. Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. "You certainly don't build your moral standing in the world by running away."

And the South African government warned that by leaving, the United States might give the impression that it was ducking tough issues, like race relations within its own borders.

"It will be unfortunate if a perception were to develop that the U.S.A.'s withdrawal from the conference is merely a red herring demonstrating an unwillingness to confront the real issues posed by racism in the U.S.A. and globally," the South African government said in a statement.

-------- police / prisoners

F.B.I. Kills Man in Standoff

September 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/national/04FBI.html

VANDALIA, Mich., Sept. 3 - A campground owner facing drug and weapons charges was fatally shot by an F.B.I. agent tonight after a four-day standoff, the authorities said.

The man, Grover T. Crosslin, 47, was shot and killed after he pointed a rifle at the agent, Sheriff Joseph Underwood Jr. of Cass County said.

The situation began on Friday when deputies went to the farm after neighbors said Mr. Crosslin was burning buildings on his property, which is the target of civil forfeiture proceedings.

--------

FBI Agents Resume Cole Probe
In Yemen More Cooperation, Security Pledged

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37010-2001Sep3?language=printer

FBI agents returned to Yemen last week to resume their investigation into last year's bombing of the USS Cole, having received adequate assurances of cooperation from Yemeni authorities, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

FBI agents and State Department security personnel returned to the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa on Thursday, with another team of investigators from the FBI and the Navy Criminal Investigative Service scheduled to arrive later this week, said the official, who asked not to be quoted by name.

"They have some additional leads, and the sense is the cooperation is good enough to send these people back -- they wouldn't be sending FBI agents back in if it wasn't," the official said.

A security plan worked out jointly by the State Department and the FBI has allayed the bureau's concern about threats directed at its investigators, the official said.

"There's still a lot of concern out there for their people, but nothing that would dissuade them from going back in," the official said.

The FBI withdrew its investigators from Yemen in June after intelligence reports indicated they had been targeted for attack by suspected terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi militant who is the bureau's top terrorism suspect. But the bureau's decision to evacuate its personnel also reflected a turf battle with the State Department over security and tensions with Yemeni officials over access to witnesses and suspects.

FBI investigators have clashed with Yemeni officials since the Cole was attacked Oct. 12 by suicide bombers who pulled alongside the warship in a skiff and detonated a massive explosive, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39 others aboard the destroyer.

Although senior Yemeni officials have said in recent weeks that they want to proceed with a trial for eight people they have arrested in connection with the bombing, FBI officials have asked for a delay so that they can continue gathering evidence against additional suspects.

FBI agents have been trying to determine whether bin Laden is linked to the bombing but have yet to announce a definitive relationship. Bin Laden, a fugitive in Afghanistan, has been indicted in New York for orchestrating the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Shortly after the FBI pulled its agents out of Yemen, a new bin Laden videotape began circulating in the Middle East in which the exiled Saudi millionaire hailed the bombing of the Cole.

Appearing in the video wearing a traditional Yemeni dagger, bin Laden recited a poem referring to the bombing and said: "And in Aden, they charged and destroyed a destroyer that fearsome people fear, one that evokes horror when it docks and when it sails."

Within days of the FBI's departure from Yemen, authorities in Sanaa arrested nine suspected terrorists for plotting attacks against the American investigators. Additional terrorist threats against the U.S. Embassy there resulted in its closure to the public from mid-June to mid-July.

Compounding the tensions at the embassy was a turf battle between a top FBI official supervising the Cole investigation, John O'Neill, and the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara K. Bodine, who believed the bureau had been overly aggressive in pursuing its probe, officials have said.

Bodine had barred O'Neill from returning to the country, fearing his tactics could strain relations between Yemen and the United States. One of the reasons behind the FBI's decision to evacuate its agents in June, the officials said, was Bodine's refusal to allow them to carry automatic rifles for protection.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker told reporters two weeks ago that the United States and Yemen were "committed to bringing the investigation of the USS Cole bombing to a successful conclusion."

"Currently we're working together on logistical and administrative requirements, as well as security arrangements, in order to send an investigative team back to Yemen," Reeker said.

O'Neill, a 31-year FBI agent who headed the counterterrorism section in the bureau's New York field office, retired last month. At the time, FBI sources confirmed that he was under investigation for leaving his briefcase filled with classified information in a Tampa hotel last year. The briefcase was stolen but found in another hotel a short time later, the sources said.

-------- spying

The CIA Goes Primetime on CBS

Tuesday, September 4, 2001
Newsday,
by Jeff Cohen
http://commondreams.org/views01/0904-08.htm

In a country where separation of media and state is so valued, should a TV network allow a government agency to have an editorial role in how that agency is portrayed on the air?

The question is raised by the input and support CBS has accepted from the Central Intelligence Agency in producing its new weekly drama about the CIA, "The Agency," which premieres this month.

One wonders if CBS executives remember "The FBI," the dramatic series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that was one of the great feats in propaganda history.

Week after week for nine years, it presented an unvaryingly upbeat -- and largely distorted -- portrait of a highly ethical, non-politicized institution keeping America safe from internal and external enemies. It was a portrait jointly shaped by ABC, a private network, and the FBI, a secretive government agency that had say over scripts and story lines.

Each episode displayed the FBI seal and thanked director J. Edgar Hoover for his cooperation. As far back as the newsreels of John Dillinger's capture, Hoover knew that polishing the Bureau's image through the mass media was a key to ever more power and more funding.

After "The FBI" went off the air in 1973, Congressional hearings and Freedom of Information lawsuits revealed that -- during the nine years of sanitized hero-worship on ABC -- the Bureau was systematically abusing the First Amendment rights of countless civil rights and peace advocates, from grass roots activists to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI" offered no episodes about that FBI.

Zimbalist and his TV cohorts waged war against organized crime, but in the real world, the FBI's efforts were half-hearted at best. In 1968, for example, when activist/comedian Dick Gregory made a speech denouncing the Mafia as "snakes" for importing drugs into the inner city, J. Edgar Hoover reacted by trying to provoke the mob into retaliating against the comedian. Hoover wrote that the FBI should develop "a counterintelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory's attack on LCN."

Those dozen words shed more accurate light on the character and activities of the Bureau than all the weekly ABC episodes that year.

Apparently unconcerned with this history, CBS's "The Agency" has invited the participation of the CIA, an institution with a history at least as controversial as the FBI's. The CBS project readily won the support of the CIA and its public liaison officer with Hollywood, Chase Brandon, whose job is CIA image-enhancement.

A decade after the collapse of our Soviet enemy (which the CIA largely failed to predict), positive media presentations can help sell the public on the need for the CIA and its estimated $30 billion price tag. Each week "The Agency" will glorify CIA officers who save the world from Arab terrorists, drug-runners, kidnappers and assorted cutthroats.

A new ABC spy series, "Alias," has also received some CIA assistance, but Brandon refused requests to help two forthcoming CIA-related movies -- one starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt , another starring Matt Damon -- because he deemed them insufficiently positive: "If someone wants to slander us," Brandon told the Washington Post, "it's not in our interest to cooperate." Echoes of J. Edgar. After meeting the creator of "The Agency" and reviewing scripts, Brandon granted unprecedented CIA support for the CBS series because "it would show our spirit, patriotism and dedication." As the New York Times described, CBS was even allowed to shoot parts of its pilot at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, using off-duty CIA employees as extras. For interior sets in Los Angeles, the CIA has provided agency seals. "Much to the delight of the agency," the Times reported, "CBS clearly has become an agency booster."

Series creator Michael Beckner explained CIA involvement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "[The series] is not going to demonize them.What attracted them to cooperating with us is the fact that we want to tell stories about the lives of the people that work there."

Producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script "approval." Executive Producer Shaun Cassidy commented on the CIA's script involvement : "Their support is a strictly case-by-case basis. If they don't like the script, we won't have their support that week."

But should network TV producers be showing scripts to a government agency in hopes of getting its support? And if a series is that cozy with its subject, how much integrity can the program have?

In recent years, the CIA has worked hand-in-hand with brutal regimes and armies. It has helped overthrow elected governments. CBS knows it will abruptly lose its access and support if "The Agency" focuses on the CIA's less savory activities or blunders.

As long as CBS and the CIA remain wedded, don't expect a hard-hitting episode on the agency's alliance with the corrupt, often-brutal military in Colombia. Or on the CIA's past links to terrorists like Osama bin Laden now protected by the Afghan government. Or on the agency's role in the bombings of the Chinese embassy in Serbia and the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

In other words, expect far more fiction than fact. -- Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, a national media watch group based in New York.


-------- activists

Public Hearings on ELF

Tue, 4 Sep 2001
From: Stephen Kobasa <skobasa@pop.snet.net>
Web http://www.nukewatch.com

NORTHERN WISCONSIN - The Wisconsin Sierra Club, Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, and the Great Lakes Intertribal Council will sponsor five public hearings this month regarding the health and environmental impacts of the Navy's Project ELF submarine transmitter system near Clam Lake.

The Lac Courte Oreilles Project ELF Public Participation Project, as the panels are dubbed, seeks to inform the public about the effects of electromagnetic pollution on human health and the environment from the Navy's Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) antennae.

The hearings are free and statements by concerned citizens are encouraged. The hearings will be recorded and scientific experts will be available to answer questions about electromagnetic pollution. The first and last hearings will be broadcast live on WOJB-FM, (88.9).

The World Health Organization has listed ELF (extremely low frequency) electromagnetic radiation as a "possible human carcinogen." More than forty peer-reviewed medical studies now point to a link between electromagnetic pollution and human cancers.

The Lac Courte Oreilles Tribe has worked since May of 1998 toward reaching an agreement with the Navy to study the impact of Project ELF, including studies of breast cancer incidence, stray voltage, and the impact of electromagnetic pollution on fish and wetlands.

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Tammy Baldwin have repeatedly introduced legislation in congress to close the Navy antennae, starting with the ELF Termination Act bill in 1995. The current ELF Termination Act amendments are S. 112 and HR 1160.

Public concern about Project ELF has resulted in hundreds of arrests at peaceful demonstrations at the site. On September 26, five activists from Duluth, MN, and Luck, WI, will go on trial in Ashland County for their participation in a nonviolent protest at Project ELF on Mother's Day 2001. They are each facing fines up to $1000.00 or 2-6 months in jail if convicted.

Lac Courte Oreilles Project ELF Public Participation Project, Public Hearings:

Tues. Sept. 18 6:30 - 9:00 p.m. Great Lakes Visitor Center, Ashland, WI Thurs. Sept. 20 6:30 - 9:00 p.m. Flambeau Lanes, Park Falls, WI Tues. Sept. 25 6:30 - 9:00 p.m. Cable Community Center, Cable, WI Thurs. Sept. 27 6:30 - 9:00 p.m. Spider Lake Town Hall, Hayward, WI Wed. Oct. 3 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. LCO Casino Convention Center Hayward, WI (to be broadcast live on WOJB)

Nukewatch, P.O. Box 649 Luck, WI 54853 Phone (715) 472-4185 Fax (715) 472-4184

Contacts: Dan Peterson, Project Coordinator (503) 772-9253; Lac Courte Oreilles Health Center (800) 323-2650; John LaForge, Nukewatch.

----

40 Days Without Food: A Fast for Good Americans

by Ramzi Kysia, written
September 2, 2001
From: Guin <guinstigator@yahoo.com>

This article appears in:
Al-Nashra http://www.arabmedia.com/alnashra.html
The Washington Peace Letter http://www.washingtonpeacecenter.org/

"It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it; and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied; and it is all one." --M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

I once read an essay about the Holocaust that really struck me: in it the author made the point that when the Nazis came to power some people worried, some people protested, but for the majority of the German people life went on as before. When Kristallnacht happened ­ some people worried, some protested, but for the majority ­ life went on as before. And when the Camps opened, when the Holocaust began, the German people clung fast to their willful ignorance and indifference. They went to work or to school or into the military. They came home to spend time with their families. They went to the movies and played sports. They had picnics and barbecues ­ they sat around their tables every night sharing food and fellowship. What did they talk about over dinner? In the midst of Genocide, of terrible violence being committed all around them and in their names ­ they laughed and cried, kissed their children, made love to their husbands and wives, and simply went on with life. And as much as this essay struck me when I read it, I never understood it until I began to work on Iraq.

What did you talk about over dinner last night?

August 6th, 2001 was the 11th anniversary of the U.S.-led, international sanctions against Iraq. In commemoration and protest of the ongoing blockade, myself and 12 others began an action called, "Breaking Ranks: A Fast to End the Siege of Iraq." The fast is being sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, the same organization I illegally traveled to Iraq with two years ago, taking medicine and toys to hospitals there in direct violation of U.S. law. We are fasting from food for 40 days, from August 6th until September 14th, and demonstrating every day in front of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Kathy Kelly, co- founder of Voices, and twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, explains our purpose well, "We are trying to encourage the member states of the UN to 'break ranks' with the U.S. in its insistence on endless sanctions for Iraq. The more 'smart' they try to make the sanctions, the more adept they are at killing the Iraqi people." And to that I would add that I am trying to encourage my fellow Americans to break ranks with our government as well, and to begin seeing the Iraqi people as we see ourselves. Gandhi once said that "whenever there is distress which one cannot remove, one must fast and pray." So I am fasting and praying: for the people of Iraq, for the people of America, and for myself.

I am so sick of this war, as I am sick of all the excuses made by all of the people responsible for keeping it going. I am sick of having to explain how a country two-thirds the size of Texas with a GDP of roughly 6 billion dollars a year is not a threat to the United States of America. In fact, quite the opposite ­ we have bombed Iraq at will and with absolute impunity for over a decade. Our "defense" budget alone is 50 times larger than Iraq's entire economy. I am sick of having to repeat over and over again the findings of reports repeatedly issued by OIP, or UNICEF, or the FAO, or the WHO, or the International Red Cross ­ all documenting the numerous ways sanctions have ravaged and continue to ravage the Iraqi people. I am sick of having to explain, as if to small children, that collective punishment is illegal and immoral, and that the forcible impoverishment of an entire nation, leading to the excess deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens is itself a crime against humanity ­ and, more than that, a crime against God.

Most of all, I'm tired of the cynical way our government continues to posture itself for short-term political gain to the total disregard, and at the total expense, of the Iraqi people. Such as with this recent nonsense over "smart" sanctions. "Smart" sanctions may make it easier for suppliers outside of Iraq to ship consumer goods there, but who in Iraq will be able to afford them? Sanctions have already devastated Iraq's economy, causing hyperinflation, chronic unemployment, and the collapse of critical civilian infrastructures ­ including the public health care and educational systems ­ resulting in the virtual destruction of Iraq's once prosperous middle class; resulting in the excess deaths of perhaps well over 1,000,000 people in all. Until we lift sanctions, once and for all, Iraq cannot even begin the process of rebuilding its economy.

When the Allied forces won WW II, and liberated Belson, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, and all the Camps ­ the world was horrified. We asked ourselves, "how could this have happened?" We asked ourselves, "where were the good Germans?" Today I am fasting in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who have suffered so much in this ongoing war of bombings and blockade, and I am asking, "how could this have happened?" I am fasting in atonement for my failure to stop their slaughter, and for my sins as a citizen of the nation that is killing them. And I am fasting for my fellow Americans, for our failure to recognize the spirit of God present in all the peoples of Iraq. I am fasting for our failure to see that their humanity is equal to our humanity. I am fasting for our failure to feel the injustice of their suffering, or the offense of our role in creating and maintaining that suffering. I am fasting for the good Americans who refuse to see the evil they commit; for the good Americans who refuse to see the evil they permit ­ and for those who having seen it refuse to do much of anything to end it.

God, I am so hungry for peace.

In Arabic, when we see a table filled with sumptuous food, or an exceptionally pretty face, we say "ma'shallah," which means "what God has willed." We also say it when someone dies. It's an exclamation that God's Will is bountiful, and that His Creation is beautiful, even in death.

I look at our country today and wonder that we have been granted so much wealth, so much material bounty, privilege, and power. I look at our country and wonder that we can create so much pain, kill with such casual and cynical disregard, and remain so seemingly untouched by it ­ untouched within ourselves as within our common lives with one another. And all I can think is, ma'shallah, and wonder what it will take to make us see the bounty of God in the children we'll kill today by allowing this war to continue. Is it really so much to demand that our government allow the children of Iraq a chance to live?

Ramzi Kysia is a member of Voices in the Wilderness, and serves on the board of directors for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group. He traveled to Iraq in August 1999.

Voices in the Wilderness: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw Education for Peace in Iraq Center: http://www.saveageneration.org

----

Health Effects of Military Toxins

From: "Steve Taylor" <Steve@miltoxproj.org>
Tue, 4 Sep 2001

MTP is stepping up the piece of our Healthy Communities Campaign concerning health effects of military activities. Please take a look at the points below and see if you can provide any information or if you are interested in any activities.

We are collecting documentation of health effects. We explicitly have a broad definition of "documentation" here - it does not mean just scientific studies but includes community health surveys, anecdotal information, news stories, etc. We want to compile as much information as possible. If you have anything, please send it to MTP or contact me at Steve@miltoxproj.org or (207) 783-5091. Our ultimate goal is to build a data bank of documentation of health problems caused by military environmental practices.

We will help community organizations document health effects in their communities through community health surveys and other means. We specifically DO NOT mean expensive scientific studies, but community-based means of documenting what is happening to us. If you are interested in this, please email or call me (see above).

MTP will be organizing a national day of actions around health effects next summer. It's not too early to think about participating, and about producing some documentation between now and then to use in your action. Actions are great ways to build involvement and media exposure, while helping put national pressure on the Pentagon.

In Solidarity,

Steve
Steve Taylor National Organizer
Military Toxics Project (207) 783-5091

----

Sample Letter to U.S. DOE re Yucca Mountain - URGENT

LETTERS HAVE TO BE SENT BEFORE THE FIRST HEARING ON WED. SEPT. 5.

FACSIMILE ­ 202-586-4403

The Honorable Spencer Abraham
Secretary of Energy
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave. SW
Washington, D.C. 20585

Dear Secretary Abraham:

I (or my organization) object to the lack of proper, reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing on the DOE's site recommendation of Yucca Mountain for a national high-level nuclear waste repository. On August 21, 2001, with less than 30 days for any interested person to read the DOE's more than 370 page long technical report, "Yucca Mountain Preliminary Site Suitability Evaluation," your agency announced it was holding public hearings on the site recommendation of Yucca Mountain in Nevada between September 5th and 13th. Not only are these hearings provided with totally inadequate notice, but, for persons who will be affected by the requisite transportation of high-level nuclear waste through their hometowns via rail and road, your agency has provided no opportunity to comment on the suitability of the recommendation. A few meetings in Nevada does not come close to providing an opportunity for public hearing on a project of this magnitude and immense potential danger to those on transportation routes throughout the county. In addition, it is plain that the notice you provided was defective not only for being absurdly short notice, but for providing notice to meet at a place, canceling that site, then providing another site with an incorrect address. Moreover, your agency provided that final notice of the meeting at the wrong address on August 31st, the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend, less than five days to the meeting including the intervening weekend and holiday.

Finally, it is plain from the notices your agency published in the Federal Register on August 21, 27 and 31, that the public is not clearly placed on notice that these are public hearings on your agency's decision to recommend Yucca Mountain as the site for a national high-level nuclear waste repository. Persons reading the notice are given the impression that these are merely hearings on the preliminary site suitability evaluation. Even then, your provision of less than thirty days notice from the availability of the 370 page evaluation and the few hearings in Nevada make it impossible for ordinary citizens to have any meaningful participation in such meetings. The notice was absurdly short even to arrange one's schedule to attend, too far away from most persons who are interested due to being on the high-level nuclear waste transportation routes, too little time to acquire and assimilate the substance of the 370-plus page evaluation of the site, and completely defective due to the errors mentioned above.

There is no doubt that, no matter what provisions may be in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the United States Constitution's Fifth Amendment protections require that persons such as ourselves--and affected Nevadans--must have at least reasonable notice and an opportunity to be heard on a decision such as this one, a decision with vast repercussions and grave potential dangers. Your agency's actions in this regard have not come even close to meeting the most minimal constitutional protections of citizens' rights to due process in this instance. We are certain you have violated our rights and those of the citizens of Nevada.

We call on you to reschedule these hearings with adequate notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard by all persons who will be affected by your agency's recommendation of Yucca Mountain as the national high-level waste repository.

Sincerely,

[NAME OF PERSON,
OFFICE/TITLE IN ORGANIZATION
NAME OF ORGANIZATION
ADDRESS OF ORGANIZATION
TELEPHONE NUMBER OF ORGANIZATION]

cc: Lake Barrett, Acting Director
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20585

FAX: 202-586-2672

Carol Hanlon U.S. Department of Energy Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office (M/S #025) P. O. Box 30307 North Las Vegas, NV 89036-0307

FAX: 800-967-0739

--

PUBLIC HEARINGS are scheduled from 5-9 pm

Las Vegas, NV: Wednesday, Sept. 5, at the DOE Nevada Operations Headquarters at 232 Energy Way in North Las Vegas (Losee Road, between Cheyenne and Lake Mead, off I-15), Call 702-295-1000 for more info

Amargosa Valley, NV: Wednesday, Sept. 12, Longstreet Inn and Casino

Pahrump, NV: Thursday, Sept. 13, Bob Ruud Community Center

----

Nuclear waste protesters hit Strip
Goal to encourage attendance during upcoming hearings

By LISA SNEDEKER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tuesday, September 04, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Sep-04-Tue-2001/news/16917436.html

About 40 protesters wore protective gear and wheeled barrels bearing radiation symbols along the Strip on Monday to encourage attendance at hearings on the storage of nuclear waste in Nevada.

"Our main message here is to get people out to the meetings," said Kalynda Tilges, a protest organizer and nuclear issues coordinator for Citizen Alert. The demonstrators marched among the hordes of Labor Day tourists from the Bellagio to the Fashion Show mall. Many carried signs that read, "Last chance to tell the DOE: No Yucca Mountain Dump!"

"Nuclear waste never takes a holiday," said protester Jennifer Viereck.

"Those shipments are coming if we don't do something to stop them right now." Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under federal study to accept 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors around the country.

Nevada lawmakers have asked Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to attend the meetings to hear the views of Nevadans and others on the proposed repository.

Their request delivered over the weekend was the latest in a campaign by Nevada officials to pressure Abraham before Wednesday's public hearing in North Las Vegas on the Energy Department's scientific research at Yucca Mountain.

So far, the secretary has not responded. Tilges said her group is planning another demonstration before Wednesday's meeting.

"The DOE is subverting the public process," she said. "They're holding the last public hearing on Yucca Mountain this week with very little notice, and without the required final analysis of the environmental impacts."

Nevada lawmakers and Gov. Kenny Guinn are also seeking postponement of the public hearings and a 90-day extension of a public comment period following the Energy Department's Aug. 21 release of a preliminary site suitability report on Yucca Mountain.


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