NUCLEAR
Again irradiating Muslims? Are Australians crazy?
British Energy nuclear plant shuts for refuelling
The isolation of India
Nuclear waste shipment to arrive in Japan Jan 22
U.N. nuclear experts to visit North Korea
AWOL NUKES
Report Recommends on Future Attacks
U.S. to Seek Options On New Nuclear Tests
Rumsfeld: Nuke Tests Not Recommended
Administration Eyes Nuclear Testing
NRC WEBSITE BROADCASTS COMMISSION MEETINGS LIVE
US nuclear plants added 1,091 MW capacity in 2001
MILITARY
Pentagon gets tight-lipped about hunt for terror leaders
Osama's Unopened Gift
U.S. Sees Battles After Afghan War in Lawless Areas
Air Force Probes Missile Batteries
Bush to bolster anti-terror spending
Air Force Probes Missile Batteries
U.S. Army Designing Terror-Safe Truck
Colombia says IRA sent 25 to train rebels
U.S. saw Montesinos as asset in war on drugs
Palestinians Promise Investigation
Sharon says Palestinian-Iranian ties threaten Israel
NATO in the balance
Pakistan to defuse India tensions with new policy: US Senator
Musharraf's Bind: Averting War Without Humiliation
Bush Seeks Terror Pledge by Pakistan
Rethinking Coverage on the Front Lines
Carrier barred from Vieques training
U.S. Electronic Jamming Plane Aging
Troops to be surveyed about anthrax vaccine
Military Unaware of Tampa Plane
Pentagon to Seek Budget Hike in 2003
Federal Report
U.S. Army Designing Terror - Safe Truck
POLICE / PRISONERS
Michigan congressman forced to strip
U.S. Takes First Steps On Encoded Licenses
ABA Panel Supports Limited Military Trials
Judge rules ex-radical violated gag order
Agencies going to the dogs
ENERGY AND OTHER
FUEL CELL CARS FACE TECHNOLOGICAL, POLITICAL BARRIERS
AUTOSHOW - Government and automakers to back fuel cell vehicles
FPL starts wind power projects in Texas, Washington
Forget swords turning into plowshares.
In N.Y., Taking a Breath of Fear
Study: Millions Drink Dirty Water
Workers Exposed to Anthrax Shun Vaccine
Court limits 'disability' protection
Interior Halts Indian Payments
ACTIVISTS
NUKEWATCH'S BONNIE URFER RETURNED TO PRISON
Activists Plead Guilty in Calif. Missile Case
Eco-vandals condemned as domestic terrorists
LISTSERVE ANNOUNCEMENT: FOCUS ON THE CORPORATION
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
Again irradiating Muslims? Are Australians crazy?
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2002
From: "vlario" <vlario@yahoo.it>
Dear friends,
I was astonished when yesterday I spoke with the Australian Dalbert Hallenstein, a former The Nation's journalist who cooperated in the writing of "The Plumbat Affair", a book about a 1968 Mossad operation to bring to Israel tonnes of Uranium from Germany to the Dimona plant.
He told me that actually thousand of indonesian refugees, mostly Muslims, are hosted in Australia in two location that were formerly nuclear test fields. One in the Australian desert were british tested the H bomb, and another in the well know Christmas Islands.
I know that this is a little off-topic, but it is another evidence that there are people that thinks that Muslims are radiation-proof, evidently. Just like in Iraq, Somalia, Kuwait, Kosovo, etc.
I ask for the Australian friends in the list to provide more info about this situation in Australia and possibly to send e-mails against this really geopolitically unwise choice from the Australian government. God save Sidney's sky-scrapers!
Thanks,
Marco Saba http://saba.on.to
--
Reply From: "Laurence Aboukhater" <lozabouk@melbpc.org.au>
The site that was used by the British for testing in Australia is called Maralinga. It was Aborigines who bore the brunt of the tests but as far as I know the refugee detention centres, although calculated cruel institutions, are not on previous nuclear test sites. The detention centre at Woomera was previously a rocket launching facility in the 60s and early 70s.
-------- britain
British Energy nuclear plant shuts for refuelling
UK: January 8, 2002
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13946/story.htm
LONDON - UK electricity generator British Energy on Sunday switched off its 1,100 megawatt Dungeness B nuclear power station in southern England in a scheduled stoppage for refuelling, a spokesman said on Monday.
"This was a planned outage, it's for refuelling," he said.
The spokesman declined to say when the plant would resume production. He said refuelling operations of this type were often completed within 24 hours.
British Energy is the UK's biggest electricity generator, accounting for about a fifth of the country's power.
-------- india / pakistan
The isolation of India
By January 8, 2002
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/DA08Df03.html
BEIJING - The renewed tension between India and Pakistan, even if it is short of war, as now seems the case, is likely to remain for some time and further complicate the process of finding new political stability in the area. Despite the fierce military build-up on the two sides of the border, as days go by a settlement appears in sight: in response to Pakistan's crackdown on the organizations, Lashkar-e-Toiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, accused of having masterminded the terrorist attack against India's parliament in New Delhi, India will not attack Pakistan.
The arrests and this political compromise might be not enough to appease the Indians after the parliament attack, which was a serious threat against their security, but the compromise will be less dangerous than the total destabilization of Pakistan. Islamabad's sudden repudiation of the Taliban is reported to have created a rift between itself and Pakistan-based terrorists operating in Kashmir. These groups, whether operating in Afghanistan or in Kashmir, have strong backing among the Pakistani people and the government's decision to oppose them is causing a large rift in the population. This rift would be widened by war with India.
Pakistan would most likely be defeated in a conventional clash with India and Islamabad would be plunged into political unrest that could eventually lead to the "Afghanization" of Pakistan or to the use of Pakistani nuclear weapons against its neighbor. Even without recourse to nuclear weapons, the Afghanization of Pakistan could start a chain reaction in India - trigger more tension in Indian Kashmir, then enhance Hindu militancy in the majority of the population and thus rekindle sedition among the Muslim minority. All of this would in turn squeeze the thin non-religious layer of the Indian establishment.
Thus a war against Pakistan, while serving the purpose of vindicating India's honor and re-establishing its domestic short-term sense of security, would complicate India's long-term regional position. India needs to get out of its geopolitical isolation.
Before September 11, New Delhi had managed to reach out to the United States: it had pledged its support for the US national missile defense plans and, in return, the US was making India, the largest democracy in the world, its South Asian partner. The potentials for the agreement were huge. However, the need to wage a war in Afghanistan brought back the tough reality of geography: Pakistan was essential to the US for its attack on and control of Afghanistan, whereas India was at best secondary.
This reality is even starker now. In the last days of December, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ominously announced that he would move his troops from the Afghan to the Indian border. But the Pakistani troops on the Afghan border were necessary to seal the area and help secure the capture of fugitive Al-Qaeda fighters or of Osama bin Laden, which was the Americans' ultimate goal of the Afghan war. Conversely, the US didn't want a military confrontation between Pakistan and India, which might expand the Afghan destabilization to Pakistan. Therefore Musharraf's announcement of the redeployment of his troops was a cry for help to the US in order to defuse the possibility of war with India, which would further rock his unstable throne. The US soon obliged by putting pressure on Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and pouring cold water on the hot Indian spirits.
The lesson for India thus should clear: The US will try to secure the new, wobbly stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan even if it costs India a little security and pride. India's complaints that the attack against its parliament was even more serious than the September 11 attacks in the United States will be put on the back burner.
The US choice is certainly legitimate in terms of the stability of the whole region, but it doesn't solve India's deep-seated feeling of isolation. India could feel deprived of its former alliance with the Soviet Union, which allowed New Delhi to project itself into the world. India could also come to realize that rapprochement with the US has its limits, and could hark back to the geopolitics it inherited at the end of the Cold War: one of isolation, deep frustration and distrust. The dangers inherent in such feelings are not limited to India itself but affect the whole region.
But things are not as bad as they may look, and there is another actor in the South Asian drama: China. Certainly, there is a long list of issues keeping China and India apart. There are many border controversies, decades of mistrust and, more recently, reciprocal jealousy: India envies China's economic success, and China envies India's international public-relations success, which is due to New Delhi's democratic institutions.
However, the new map drawn by the war in Afghanistan and the renewed tension with Pakistan also pulls India and China together. It is clear that the US will stay in Central Asia and Afghanistan for some time, and for this purpose America must bolster Pakistan; this, for separate reasons, could be an irritant to both China and India. China may fear containment by the prolonged US presence on its western border. Similarly, India now knows that it can't play the American card against Pakistan, and thus Pakistan could be a form of containment to India. To resolve this deadlock, the players should recall the lesson of former US president Richard Nixon.
At the height of the Cold War with the Soviets and the hot war in Vietnam, Nixon opened up to China in a bid to freeze the spread of communism in Asia and introduce a large irritant into the Soviets' side. The game played out so well that the end of the Vietnam War did not usher in a new watershed of communism in the world. Quite to the contrary, thanks to China, the communist tide was eventually stemmed all over Asia and pro-Western regimes were bolstered. Thus victoriously communist Vietnam ended up being isolated and forced first into Chinese-style reforms and then to request admission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was born as an anti-communist organization especially devised to contain the spread of Vietnamese, and Chinese, communism.
In a similar way, to appease reciprocal fears of containment, China and India must reach out to each other, with a long-term plan to learn from each other: the reasons for the economic success of the former and good international PR of the latter. In this new spirit the border issue could find a compromise, as after all seemed to be the case between the two countries in the early 1950s.
A new reciprocal trust between India and China must be rebuilt, but after decades of confrontation this will be very difficult and will take a long time. But mutual concerns could well spur the rapprochement. The fear is that this alliance might take on a risky anti-American veneer.
-------- japan
Nuclear waste shipment to arrive in Japan Jan 22
JAPAN: January 8, 2002
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13957/story.htm
TOKYO - A shipment of toxic nuclear waste bound for Japan after being reprocessed in France will arrive in the northern prefecture of Aomori on January 22, Japanese power firms said on Tuesday.
Spent nuclear fuel from Japanese nuclear reactors is routinely shipped to Europe for reprocessing and later returned both as a recycled fuel known as MOX and waste resulting from the reprocessing.
The latest shipment of waste - the seventh since Japan developed a controversial plan to use MOX in domestic reactors - was reprocessed by France's state-run Cogema nuclear agency.
It is being shipped aboard the Pacific Sandpiper, which set set sail early last month, the Federation of Electric Power Companies and Japanese power utilities said in a joint statement.
Previous shipments of nuclear waste and MOX fuel - a blend of uranium and plutonium recycled from spent nuclear fuel - have sparked protests from anti-nuclear campaigners both abroad and in Japan.
Resource-starved Japan, which relies on nuclear power for a third of its energy needs, has just one small state-run reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel.
It is now building a larger commercial reprocessing plant in a remote corner of northern Japan to extract uranium and plutonium from used nuclear fuel. That project is due to be completed in 2005.
No Japanese power plant has used MOX, despite industry plans to begin loading the fuel in 1999, partly due to strong anti-nuclear sentiment among the public.
------- korea
U.N. nuclear experts to visit North Korea
World Scene
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020108-68190312.htm
VIENNA, Austria - A team of international experts from the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency plans to visit a nuclear facility in North Korea next week.
Three inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency are to visit nuclear facilities in the Yongbyon area from Jan. 15 to 19, an agency spokeswoman said yesterday.
North Korea's nuclear program has been a source of tension with the United States, which fears the communist country may have diverted nuclear materials from peaceful purposes into weapons production.
Russian forces shell town in Chechnya ARGUN, Russia - Russian forces shelled Chechnya's third-largest town yesterday, and fighting erupted in other parts of the separatist republic, leaving at least three soldiers reported dead and eight wounded.
Russian forces also shelled rebel bases in three other districts of southern Chechnya, and four insurgents were killed, an official said.
-------- terrorism
AWOL NUKES
By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11418-2002Jan7?language=printer
Two containers holding radioactive cesium-137 stolen from a Russian industrial facility. Four Georgians busted trying to smuggle two kilograms of uranium into Turkey. Missing from the Russian city of Orenburg: a plutonium source.
Nuclear materials are hot commodities in more ways than one. And now you can read about these unnerving episodes of last summer and many more in the mega-database of nuclear trafficking incidents posted on the Nuclear Threat Initiative's new Web site, www.nti.org.
NTI is a charitable group launched by media mogul Ted Turner and former senator Sam Nunn last January. Through research, advocacy, public education and grants, NTI hopes to limit the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Financed by Turner's five-year, $250 million pledge, NTI has grown to include about 25 staffers in its Pennsylvania Avenue offices, many with relevant government experience. Two weeks ago the group opened a small office in Moscow.
NTI has also begun working with like-minded local think tanks, including the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Web site features an exclusive daily news digest by National Journal Group as well as nearly 3,000 links to other sites. For the first time, folks can browse several country and weapon databases created by the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies without paying a subscription fee. And the site's not merely international in scope, it's multilingual: Much of it is available in Russian.
--------
Report Recommends on Future Attacks
January 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Preventing-Terrorism.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States must do more to secure its borders, protect communications systems and develop drugs to combat bioterrorism, says a new report on homeland defense.
The recommendations, from the conservative Heritage Foundation, is the latest in a series of reports before and after Sept. 11 on how to prevent and prepare for terrorist attacks. It concludes that much remains to be done.
``America is dangerously vulnerable to this new form of terrorism,'' the report concludes.
L. Paul Bremer III, who co-chaired the Heritage task force that wrote the report, said the threat of terrorism will not disappear as long as the United States retains its dominant world position and said he hopes the panel's recommendations will be implemented.
``It's regrettable I had to serve on a third commission,'' said Bremer, who was former President Reagan's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism and chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism that finished its work last year.
The Heritage task force, formed in the aftermath of Sept. 11, was co-chaired by Edwin Meese III, Reagan's attorney general.
Some of its recommendations, such as developing better public health surveillance systems to spot biological attacks, enjoy widespread support and have been recommended by similar groups in the past. Others, such as creation of a national missile defense, are considerably more divisive.
Other recommendations include:
--Monitor more closely who enters the country through airports and seaports.
Specifically: Develop new systems to share passenger information to prevent potential terrorists from boarding planes. Create a new federal center to analyze information about people and products arriving by sea, including experimental point-of-origin inspections for maritime trade. Require airports and port administrations to ensure that only authorized people can enter secure areas.
--Federal law enforcement agencies share more information with one another and with local law enforcers.
--Secure federal computer networks and information systems better.
--Secure the nation's nuclear waste, which could be stolen by terrorists to build radiological weapons. Determine how the Department of Energy can move ahead with a contentious proposal to bury 77,000 tons of radioactive waste beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
--Give the Pentagon control of security for the Global Positioning System frequencies and network, which allow many telecommunications systems to function.
--Encourage drug companies to accelerate development of antibiotics and vaccines to treat and prevent diseases caused by biological agents.
--Develop agreements with Canada and Mexico for working together in case of an attack on the border.
--Develop an improved public relations program for communicating with the public in the event of attack or increasing threats.
--Change federal law to allow closer monitoring of foreigners in the United States.
On the Net: Heritage Foundation study: http://www.heritage.org/homelanddefense/welcome.html
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. to Seek Options On New Nuclear Tests
White House Worries About Arsenal's Reliability
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11120-2002Jan7?language=printer
The Bush administration plans to raise the possibility that it might resume underground nuclear testing in the years ahead to help maintain the safety and reliability of a scaled-back U.S. strategic nuclear weapons arsenal, according to weapons specialists inside and outside the government.
The idea will be raised today when the administration lays out its broad strategic nuclear plans to Congress, including the planned reductions in nuclear weapons announced by President Bush at his meeting last month with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The highly classified Nuclear Posture Review will contain the administration's justification for reducing strategic warheads over the next decade from today's roughly 6,000 warheads to the level of 1,700 to 2,100 proposed by Bush.
But the review will say that the United States needs to be able to resume testing at its Nevada test site in less time than than the two years it would now take under Energy Department guidelines, according to Energy Department sources. Some sources said that the department would like to reduce the period to one year or less, but that the nuclear review does not establish a definite time period.
"They do not want to say they are going to resume testing," one Energy Department official said yesterday. "They want the option to do so if they think they need it."
Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, imposed a moratorium on underground nuclear testing in 1992, and the moratorium was upheld by President Bill Clinton. A decision to resume testing for the first time in a decade would almost certainly provoke an outcry by countries around the world, including leading U.S. allies, which largely support a global ban.
The testing language in the review is nonspecific because "they were trying to not make waves," an administration official said.
But prominent supporters of renewed testing argue that it is necessary to maintain the reliability of the country's nuclear arsenal as the Pentagon refurbishes warheads designed over the past 20 years to last another two decades.
The option to resume testing must continue, "particularly as the stockpile gets smaller," said Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which has been advising Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on broad military matters.
Bush has said since taking office that he would maintain the moratorium, though he has avoided ruling out future testing.
As a candidate for president, Bush said he supported the Senate's decision in 1999 not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an agreement aimed at instituting a global ban on nuclear tests. The prospects for that treaty becoming law remain dim, since it can only go into force after it is ratified by all 44 countries that have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Thirteen of those countries, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, have yet to ratify the pact.
The nuclear review that will be presented to Congress also may discuss the need for preliminary work on new weapons designs to train a new generation of scientists and in case new nuclear devices are needed, according to sources.
Congress since 1994 has prohibited the Energy Department's nuclear weapons labs from conducting research or development leading to a new low-yield nuclear weapon or precision low-yield warhead. The fiscal 2002 defense authorization bill prohibits the National Nuclear Security Agency, which runs the labs for the Energy Department, from using funds "to initiate new weapons development programs" not approved by Congress.
However, while the Defense Department recently told Congress it had no current requirements for a low-yield nuclear weapon -- which would be designed to destroy hard, underground bunkers -- several senior Bush defense officials have supported removal of any congressional prohibition of design work on such weapons.
A study on future requirements for U.S. nuclear forces, produced in December 2000 by a panel that included many current Bush administration defense officials, raised the need for "a capacity to design and build new weapons."
Although the threat to resume nuclear testing may stir up opposition from the arms control community and other signatory countries to the test ban treaty, administration officials believe the whole subject of nuclear weapons has receded into the background in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan.
"If we accept that we plan to keep nuclear weapons well into the future, I'm not sure I disagree with the eventual necessity of testing," said William Arkin, a weapons specialist who has worked for the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Arkin said that he has noted a lack of interest in the whole subject, particularly since the war on terrorism began. "Who cares?" he said. "Who has a better plan [than the one Bush proposed]?"
Rumsfeld, who took a major interest in the nuclear review earlier last year, found himself diverted from the subject once the president agreed to make deep reductions in the strategic arsenal.
The review was to have been presented to Congress by Dec. 31. But it was delayed because of "staffing coordination problems," a Pentagon spokesman said.
One cause of the delay was that neither Rumsfeld nor Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham found time over the recent holidays to review the final drafts, according to administration sources.
Photo Nevada Test Site: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20020108/pl/mdf109559.html http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20020108/mdf109559.jpg
An underground nuclear test site is prepared near craters caused by previous tests at the Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site in this undated file photo. (U.S Dept. of Energy via Reuters)
----
Rumsfeld: Nuke Tests Not Recommended
By Susanne M. Schafer
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; 10:15 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13409-2002Jan8?language=printer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration's latest review of its nuclear strategy does not recommend the United States resume nuclear tests, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.
Congress was expected to be briefed on the study, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, on Tuesday.
Following a television interview at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was queried by reporters about a report in The Washington Post that the administration "plans to raise the possibility that it might resume underground nuclear testing in the years ahead." The idea is to be brought up during the congressional briefings, the report said.
Quoting unnamed Energy Department sources, the report said the review will say the United States needs to be able to resume testing at its Nevada test site in less time than the two years it would now take under Energy Department guidelines.
The Pentagon chief declined to directly discuss the review, saying it is highly classified.
But asked whether it contained a formal recommendation to resume testing, he replied, "Absolutely not."
"It certainly doesn't recommend resuming testing," he added.
The Post report said the review will contain the administration's justification for reducing strategic warheads over the next decade from today's roughly 6,000 warheads to the level of 1,700 to 2,100 proposed by Bush at his meeting last month with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Post quoted one Energy Department source as saying, "They do not want to say they are going to resume testing. They want the option to do so if they think they need it."
In December, Bush announced that the United States will pull out in six months from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so it can test and build a missile defense system to protect against terrorists and rogue nations. U.S. and Russian officials are also supposed to begin talks on making new cuts in their strategic nuclear arms, even though they continue to disagree over the U.S. pullout from the treaty.
Bush has proposed cutting U.S. long-range nuclear warheads by about two-thirds, while Russia has said it would bring its warheads down to between 1,500 and 2,200.
----
Administration Eyes Nuclear Testing
January 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Strategy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Envisioning a slimmed-down nuclear arsenal, the Bush administration is telling Congress the United States needs to be better prepared to resume underground testing if necessary, congressional sources said Tuesday.
The warning is included as part of the administration's broad strategic nuclear plan, which also confirms plans for deep cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal along the lines promised by President Bush in November.
The highly classified Nuclear Posture Review, which certifies annually the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, was delivered to key congressional committees Tuesday.
Underground nuclear testing has been banned since 1992 under a moratorium imposed by Bush's father and extended by former President Clinton in 1996.
While the administration has insisted it has no intention of resuming bomb detonations at the Nevada Test Site, defense officials, in a classified briefing, expressed concern about the lag time to prepare for future testing should it be required to ensure warhead reliability.
It would now take from two to three years to ratchet up activities at the nation's nuclear weapons labs and at the Nevada site should the president direct new testing, the officials warned as part of a briefing for members of Congress on the nuclear weapons strategy, according to several people present.
The review, according to these sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, envisions the deep cuts in U.S nuclear warheads over the next decade that have been promised by Bush as part of the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
In November, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush pledged to cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal by two-thirds to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads. The new strategic nuclear plan reflects those numbers, said the congressional sources.
At the same time, the administration officials warned that the warhead reductions are not expected to produce the savings some have envisioned.
``The new nuclear policy will cost more than the current nuclear policy,'' said a congressional staffer. He said no specific cost figures were discussed.
The nuclear strategy review underscores the growing concern within the administration -- and among some members of Congress and the defense establishment -- about ensuring the reliability and possibly the safety of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
So-called stockpile stewardship by the Energy Department and its nuclear weapons laboratories has become more complex and challenging since underground nuclear detonations were halted in 1992.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reiterated Tuesday the administration's commitment to the testing moratorium. ``It certainly doesn't recommend resuming testing,'' said Rumsfeld when asked about the Nuclear Posture Review.
Still, the latest strategic nuclear plan appeared to again raise the possibility of future testing.
``This is not a call for nuclear testing,'' agreed John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, a nuclear watchdog group interested in nuclear proliferation issues. ``But this is part of a pattern that they want to move toward nuclear testing.''
Isaacs, a strong opponent of resumption of testing, said he sees ``very little support'' for nuclear testing in Congress. Bush has said publicly he is committed to the moratorium on testing.
As a substitute, the Energy Department is crafting a stockpile stewardship program that will allow scientists to use the world's most powerful computers and most sophisticated lasers to simulate nuclear detonation as they keep track of warhead performance.
But those systems are still being developed.
Recently several internal audits by the Energy Department's inspector general raised concern about the department's backlog in monitoring and testing of nuclear warhead components. In some cases, tests designed to uncover flaws were a year or more behind schedule.
``If these delays continue, the department may not be in a position to unconditionally certify the aging nuclear weapons stockpile,'' wrote DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
NRC WEBSITE BROADCASTS COMMISSION MEETINGS LIVE
January 9, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2002/2002L-01-09-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has deployed a new website that offers live broadcasts of NRC meetings and other information.
The site is intended to improve the public's access to information, make navigation of the site easier, and give greater visibility to frequently accessed information. Starting in mid-January, the site will provide real time broadcasts over the internet of NRC meetings that are open to the public.
The NRC shut down its website soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11 to review posted material to make sure there was no sensitive information available to those who might seek to harm the nation. As those reviews are completed, the agency is restoring information to the website to encourage public participation in nuclear regulation activities, the NRC says.
The new website includes information on the NRC's mission, activities regarding reactors, nuclear materials and radioactive waste, public meeting schedules, news releases, NRC regulations and rulemakings, and information on how to report a safety concern. The What's New page will be updated as more information is added to the website.
The new website will allow visitors worldwide to view public NRC meetings live, starting with a briefing on the status of nuclear materials safety on January 15 at 9:30 am Eastern Standard Time. All meetings can be viewed live or retrieved from the archives at: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/webcast-live.html
To observe NRC meetings, users will need a computer equipped with a sound card and speakers, access to the Internet, and Real Networks Player software; a free version is available for download from NRC's webpage. Detailed instructions for accessing the meetings are provided at the website, where viewers are encouraged to provide comments on the broadcasts.
----
US nuclear plants added 1,091 MW capacity in 2001
USA: January 8, 2002
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13944/story.htm
WASHINGTON - U.S. nuclear plants in seven states were granted permission last year to expand generating capacity for a combined nationwide capacity increase of 1,091 megawatts, the Nuclear Energy Institute said on Monday.
The record increase was the equivalent of adding a large power plant to the nation's electric grid, the trade group said in a statement.
A plant's increase in generating capacity is known in the nuclear industry as an uprate, and ranges from 2 to 20 percent, the institute said.
Industry costs of the 2002 capacity additions are not yet available, but uprates can cost as little as $10 per kilowatt, the trade group said.
In 2001, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted permission for uprates at 20 reactors of the nation's 103 commercial nuclear power plants. Uprate requests for 10 more reactors are pending before the agency, the trade group said.
Since 1977, some 70 U.S. nuclear reactors have expanded capacity for a combined increase of 3,244 megawatts. One megawatt is roughly equal to the power used by 1,000 American homes.
The following lists the reactors approved in 2001 for uprates or additional capacity:
2001 UPRATES APPROVED BY NRC NAME STATE
Dresden 2 Ill.
Dresden 3 Ill.
Quad Cities 1 Ill.
Quad Cities 2 Ill.
Byron 1 Ill.
Byron 2 Ill.
Braidwood 1 Ill.
Braidwood 2 Ill.
Watts Bar 1 Tenn.
Salem 1 N.J.
Salem 2 N.J.
Hope Creek N.J.
Susquehanna 1 Penn.
Susquehanna 2 Penn.
Beaver Valley 1 Penn.
Beaver Valley 2 Penn.
San Onofre 2 Calif.
San Onofre 3 Calif.
Shearon Harris N.C.
Duane Arnold Iowa.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Pentagon gets tight-lipped about hunt for terror leaders
January 8, 2002
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020108-80011306.htm
U.S. warplanes attacked a terrorist base in Afghanistan for a fourth day yesterday as the Pentagon, frustrated over its failure to catch Osama bin Laden, said it will no longer discuss the locations of elusive Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.
Pentagon officials said the base near Zhawar Kili has been a place where Taliban and al Qaeda forces have been regrouping since last week. They declined to discuss details of the continuing bombing raids on an area of eastern Afghanistan where tanks, artillery and armored vehicles have been spotted days after earlier bombing raids.
"It's an ongoing operation," said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.
"We had bombed there on [Jan. 3 and 4]; we bombed again yesterday. But we're not done there."
Adm. Stufflebeem said the military is "finding stuff, and we're attacking that stuff."
The base is located in Paktia province, which Adm. Stufflebeem described as a "hotbed of support" for al Qaeda terrorists who have set up a large training and supply complex in the area.
The targeted area comprises above-ground facilities and two cave areas.
"After the strikes from the third and the fourth over this weekend, lo and behold we find tanks, so something is coming out of the ground, and we're after it," Adm. Stufflebeem said.
In Florida, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said yesterday that bin Laden had been in the caves of Tora Bora but that his current location is unknown.
Gen. Tommy Franks, commander in chief of the Central Command, said the search in that region is ending. "We'll have that pretty well cleared and will be out of there in the next day or so," Gen. Franks told the Associated Press.
Gen. Franks also said U.S. military would take charge of one or two senior Taliban or al Qaeda leaders in the next day or two.
Meanwhile, Reuters news agency, quoting unidentified sources in Pakistan, reported that a 14-year-old boy is suspected of killing U.S. Green Beret Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman in an ambush in Afghanistan last week.
A group of tribal elders was forced to delay a meeting in Khowst to decide whether to hand over the boy to U.S. authorities after he vanished, the news agency stated.
In other developments, a group of U.S. senators arrived in Afghanistan yesterday and were greeted at Bagram air base by the country's new interim leader, Hamid Karzai. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also traveled to Afghanistan yesterday after visiting India and Pakistan.
Regarding the hunt for Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, the Pentagon will no longer discuss its efforts to capture bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, after officials earlier had said they were close to capturing them several times, Adm. Stufflebeem said.
Adm. Stufflebeem said the military has been "walking somewhat close to the edge of the ice" in identifying possible locations of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.
"And I think from this point, from a Joint Staff perspective, we will stop speculating openly about where they may be at or where they think they're at as we build this intelligence picture which will allow us to have, if you will, the sanctuary to be able to move when the time is right without giving anything away," he said. The Pentagon has detained and killed "senior leadership," and others remain at large, Adm. Stufflebeem said.
Last week, U.S. officials said Mullah Omar had been cornered with some 1,500 fighters in an area northwest of Kandahar, and Afghan interim government officials said they were negotiating for a surrender.
The negotiations apparently were a ruse, as the fighters did not surrender and Mullah Omar escaped.
"We probably assumed a little too much - or I would say some assumed a little too much in believing that the negotiations that were ongoing were on the behalf of Mullah Omar," Adm. Stufflebeem said.
The talks instead led to no prisoners and the loss of the 1,500 fighters, he said.
"Now, whether or not Mullah Omar was ever there, we don't know," Adm. Stufflebeem said. "And we're stepping back now in terms of a tactic, if you will, and stop talking about what we think was, or what we thought it was."
The Pentagon has decided to "stop chasing the shadows," he said, instead focusing on "pockets of resistance" and developing "a better intelligence picture."
Adm. Stufflebeem said the focus of military operations is on locating al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, interrogating prisoners and preparing to move them to a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The main air strikes, including some 250 guided bombs that were dropped since last week, were aimed at a camp at Zhawar Kili where "we found a number of tracked military vehicles and artillery pieces after last week's strikes, and we have worked again to destroy them from the air," Adm. Stufflebeem said.
The strikes were carried out after al Qaeda forces attempted to regroup their forces at the base.
Near the town of Khowst, the military also attacked a small number of anti-aircraft weapons on Sunday, he said.
The U.S. military now has a total of 346 detainees who have been captured in Afghanistan, including 300 held at Kandahar, 21 at Bagram and 16 in Mazar-e-Sharif. Nine high-interest prisoners are being held on the Navy's USS Bataan ship.
"We expect to be able to begin transfer shortly of many of these detainees to the facilities in Guantanamo Bay," Adm. Stufflebeem said.
----
Osama's Unopened Gift
AFTER THE LIBERATION - A report from Kandahar.
BY NANCY DE WOLF SMITH
Tuesday, January 8, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001698
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan--On the outskirts of this city, just down the road from the weirdly ornate compound that Osama bin Laden built for one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, is an even more spectacular monument to the arrogance and folly of those who have dominated this country's politics these last few years.
This monument can hardly be missed. The only natural color in this winter of drought is brown, from the mud villages that dot a seemingly endless desert to the barren mountain ridges that rise out of it. So the sudden appearance of an enormous blue dome, glistening in the afternoon sun, at first creates the illusion of having stumbled onto an artifact dropped by alien space invaders.
Only in this case the invaders were foreign Muslims like Osama and his al Qaeda terror legions. Until Sept. 11, they were close to making Afghanistan their own personal playpen for all time. And they began erecting this giant mosque--for that is what the dome is part of--to give an awesome new pulpit to Mullah Omar and perhaps lull people into a sense of well-being unjustified by the realities of their lives. Come see the paradise was the intended message.
But instead many Afghans saw the project, which was to include a sprawling complex for religious schooling, as what it really was in their cultural context, a kind of monstrosity. The mosque was named Eid Gah, a place for special occasions. But some Kandaharis called it "the cage"--a joking reference to the dome's resemblance in shape to the songbird cages found all over this region. And one night early last year somebody sneaked out to the construction site and scrawled a slogan in black letters across the white perimeter wall: "The cage is beautiful. Unfortunately, the bird is blind."
The Taliban hastily dispatched a squad of scrubbers to remove this insult to the foreign "guests" and the visually impaired Mullah Omar. They had to send the scrubbers out on several occasions, in fact, before the sloganeer, perhaps feeling he had made his point, found another outlet for protest. Through such small acts of defiance do the people of oppressed nations rattle their chains.
But Kandaharis have more interesting and urgent matters to attend to these days than an abandoned mosque complex on the outskirts of town. Since the Taliban fled last month, the music they banned has come back. Crowds are thrilling once more too at the spectacle of weekly dogfights, banned by the Taliban because of the gambling involved. A ban on kite-flying in some cities was raised to a level of strategic significance in October when President Bush mentioned it as a symbol of harsh Taliban rule. On Friday, the traditional day for kite-flying, the skies over Kandahar were full of darting objects.
One thing Kandaharis don't seem to be doing with their new freedom is looking for the fugitive Mullah Omar. Following the latest of several "bad guy in the area" alarms, a convoy of journalists set off for neighboring Helmand province on the trail of reports suggesting that U.S. special forces and their Afghan allies had Omar bottled up in a mountain hideout. Marathon surrender negotiations were said to be under way. But the Afghans making those claims, including interim Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and a functionary in the office of Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai, probably cared more about being in the limelight than preserving their credibility.
In general, though, few Afghans pretend to know where Omar is, and even if they did they would know better than to announce it to the world. Terrorists have long memories. The conventional wisdom among Afghans is that Osama bin Laden long ago "flew away like a bird," as one local put it. No sane person living here would want to be identified as the one who fingered Omar either.
Instead, they're rooting for the Americans, and not just in the hope of seeing "that evil son of a bitch" Osama, as one Kandahari put it, and the "stupid old man" Omar captured and brought to justice. The presence at Kandahar airport of the U.S. Marines, and their Army replacements from the incoming 101st Airborne Division, brings comfort beyond the comprehension of anybody who has not lived through 23 years of near constant conflict and destruction. How else to explain the apparent lack of recrimination over the B-52 bombers and the near-universal Afghan refrain: Send more U.S. soldiers, please. Send as many peacekeepers as you can, too, the more the better?
It's not clear to most people here what exactly the Marines do when they make sorties out of the airport late at night, and we may never learn what the U.S. Special Forces who were based behind the walls of Omar's wrecked compound got up to when they weren't sleeping. For sure in one recent case the Marines scoured a bombed-out al Qaeda camp in the desert foothills west of Kandahar, because the mountainside above the camp is now branded with the letters U.S.M.C. In the minds of most Afghans, however, the troops are not so much about rooting out terrorists as they are a symbol of protection against the depredations of their own warlords and political predators now trying to make a comeback.
The reaction on the streets of Kandahar as a muscular red Toyota jeep rolls by with a gun-toting American soldier perched high in the back says it all. He's returning waves from the roadside crowd like a prom queen on her float, and while not every pair of watching eyes is smiling, they all take in and respect the message: You're safe as long as we're here--and we mean business this time.
Let's hope that's true, and not just for the sake of Afghans. On another highway out of town, the "cage" mosque waits, its main minarets unfinished, its elaborate garden grounds barely trod upon. Given the cost of completing it, Eid Gah could have ended up like Nicolae Ceausescu's half-built Bucharest palace, a forlorn reminder of a nation's near-death experience at the hand of a megalomaniac. But Kandaharis now say they will reclaim it and make it their own in a new Afghanistan.
Yet if Afghans, together with Americans and other well-wishers, don't secure a lasting peace in the months ahead, there may be no second chance for their ravaged country, and the evil that some men do will continue to spread.
Ms. Smith is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
--------
U.S. Sees Battles After Afghan War in Lawless Areas
New York Times
January 8, 2002
By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/international/08PENT.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - The war on terrorism after Afghanistan could focus on denying terrorist groups sanctuary in places like Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia and the Philippines, countries where they have sometimes operated freely, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said today.
Mr. Wolfowitz's remarks, in an interview, provided one of the clearest outlines of the military's strategy for destroying terrorist networks.
While Mr. Wolfowitz has a reputation as one of the more aggressive members of President Bush's war council, his statements suggested that the Pentagon could opt to put off the bigger and politically more difficult targets in the war on terrorism like Iraq, and therefore avoid conflict with some of its most important Arab and European allies, which have been leery about taking on Baghdad.
Instead, Mr. Wolfowitz said, the military is now engaged with friendly countries like the Philippines that would welcome American help in ridding themselves of terrorist networks. The Pentagon is also looking hard at possible terror bases in countries like Somalia and Yemen that are weakly governed and ill equipped to uproot them.
Mr. Wolfowitz stressed that he was not providing an explicit forecast for the next step in the war on terrorism and that the Pentagon had not ruled out imminent military action against any country.
But he has been one of the leading advocates in the Bush administration for ousting President Saddam Hussein. And he seemed to signal to Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism that unless they stopped harboring terrorists, they could face increased diplomatic, financial and, if necessary, military pressure from the United States.
He asserted that America's devastating air campaign in Afghanistan had already induced many nations that have supported terrorism to change their ways, and that it would serve as a powerful deterrent against future acts of terrorism.
"I'd say almost everywhere one has seen progress," he said. "A lot of that progress is motivated by the sense of American seriousness and the fear of getting on the wrong side of us."
"To the extent that's the motivation," Mr. Wolfowitz continued, "then obviously you don't want to issue a report card on those people and have them let up, because they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart."
Iraq, however, has shown no signs of opposing terrorism, Mr. Wolfowitz said. While President Saddam Hussein "is keeping his head down these days," Mr. Wolfowitz said, "that should not leave the impression that he doesn't continue to do a bunch of things that concern us." Those things include firing at American warplanes patrolling the no-flight zones in southern and northern Iraq.
He also asserted that the Pentagon's main focus remained Afghanistan, which he described as being "at least as treacherous and dangerous now as it was a month or two ago." Last week, a Special Forces soldier was killed in an ambush near the Pakistan border, an attack that a Pentagon spokesman today called "a setup." Remnants of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces continue to operate in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials said today that American B-52 and B-1 bombers had continued attacking one terrorist enclave near the Pakistan border in an attempt to destroy heavily armed Al Qaeda forces that have been trying to regroup. The bombers struck the base at Zawar Kili, near the town of Khost, on Sunday for the third time in a week, destroying tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery and other heavy weapons that had been piled up there by American troops who searched the compound, officials said.
"One of the most difficult things in the next few months is going to be establishing which of our allies of convenience in the early stages of this war can become real allies over the longer term, and which ones are going to be major troublemakers, and which ones are going to just switch sides," Mr. Wolfowitz said in the interview.
So far, Hamid Karzai, the leader of the interim government in Kabul, has "proven to be an impressive man," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "Whether he's up to the formidable job he has is a different question."
While careful not to identify countries where America might next aim its military might, Mr. Wolfowitz said Somalia, perhaps more than any other place, fitted the bill of a lawless state that draws terrorists like a magnet. The administration has identified Al Itihaad, a militant religious group based in Somalia, as a terrorist organization with ties to Al Qaeda. The United States has also shut down Somalia's major money- transfer company and stepped up reconnaissance flights off its coast.
"Obviously Somalia comes up as a possible candidate for Al Qaeda people to flee to precisely because the government is weak or nonexistent," Mr. Wolfowitz said.
But he acknowledged that American options were limited in Somalia, where, he said, "by definition you don't have a government you can work with." The Central Intelligence Agency, he added, is "looking for exactly those sorts of people" that the United States can use as proxy forces, as it did with anti-Taliban groups in Afghanistan.
In the Philippines, he said the government was eager to quell a rebellion by hundreds of Muslim militants from the Abu Sayyaf group who have been linked to Al Qaeda and have been battling government forces on Basilan Island, in the southern part of the country. American officials have already begun training the country's forces in counterterrorist and Special Operations activities.
American involvement "might include direct support of Philippine military operations," he said. "There's no question that we believe that if they could clear the Abu Sayyaf group out of Basilan Island, that would be a small blow against the extended Al Qaeda network."
But he added that the Manila government was "very anxious to do it themselves," adding: "That's the crucial standard for them. They're very willing to take help within the framework of helping them help themselves."
In Indonesia, Islamic militants have fought with Christians on Sulawesi Island and in Maluku Province, areas where the government "is extremely weak," Mr. Wolfowitz said.
"You see the potential for Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists to link up with those Muslim groups in Indonesia and find a little corner for themselves in a country that's otherwise quite unfriendly to terrorism," he said. "In the case of Sulawesi, the concern is there isn't enough military to protect the local population or to create the kinds of stable conditions that keep terrorism down."
He said that while Indonesia had expressed a willingness to crack down on terrorists, the government there was fearful of causing a violent backlash among its large Muslim population. He also said the United States was prepared to provide assistance, though the Pentagon was under restrictions about conducting certain joint exercises with the Indonesian military, which has been accused of human rights abuses. Those restrictions, Mr. Wolfowitz said, "really need to be reviewed in the light of Sept. 11."
He said it was unlikely, however, that the United States would consider direct military action in Indonesia, "because it's such a big and disparate place."
Yemen also has pockets or regions of lawlessness that lie outside the control of the central government, he said. "There are very significant back regions of Yemen," he said. "That's a case of an ungoverned piece of a country."
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States put pressure on Yemen to crack down on suspected Al Qaeda cells in the country. Three months later, Yemeni special operations troops exchanged fire with tribesmen in remote parts of the country's central region, as the troops tried to capture suspected members of the terrorist network.
Canada to Send Troops
OTTAWA, Jan. 7 (AP) - Canada will send 750 troops to Afghanistan, where they will join United States forces in the Kandahar region, Canada's defense minister said today.
The minister, Art Eggleton, said the troops would head to Afghanistan in mid-February. The Canadians will be under the command of American forces and will work with an American battalion.
"They will carry out a range of activities including potential combat to destroy residual and combative Al Qaeda pockets," Mr. Eggleton said. "This mission is not without risks."
-------- business
Air Force Probes Missile Batteries
By Libby Quaid
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; 7:29 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16061-2002Jan8?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The Air Force is sending a review team to a Missouri company to look into allegations it knowingly produced faulty batteries used to power missiles and "smart" bombs.
The batteries, made by Joplin, Mo.-based Eagle-Picher Technologies, are the subject of a federal whistle-blower lawsuit by a former employee. The company denies that it made defective batteries.
An Air Force spokesman said Tuesday a group of government and industry experts and thermal battery test designers and manufacturers would conduct a review and report back by early next month.
"Let me make it clear this is not an extraordinary action," Capt. Joe Dellavedova said. "The Air Force routinely commissions independent review teams to review issues of interest to service leadership."
In the lawsuit, former Eagle-Picher employee Rick Peoples alleges the company manufactured batteries for the U.S. military that failed to meet contractual specifications. Peoples, who worked for the company from 1983 until he was fired in 1994, also alleges the batteries either were not tested or were tested improperly.
Boeing Co., maker of the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, powered by the batteries, has said it has not experienced any problems with Eagle-Picher batteries and that a safety feature prevents the bombs' release if the battery is defective. The satellite-guided JDAM bomb system guides free-fall bombs in any weather.
In addition, the federal prosecutor for the region views the lawsuit's allegations as baseless and declined to pursue the matter, a spokesman said.
"We simply don't feel there's any merit to it," said Chris Whitley, spokesman for U.S. Attorney for the Western District in Kansas City, Mo.
The company issued a statement: "Eagle-Picher Technologies stands firmly behind the quality and reliability of its batteries used in various weapons systems. Eagle-Picher's batteries have demonstrated a solid track record of reliable performance in a variety of weapon systems for many years."
----
Bush to bolster anti-terror spending
Around the Nation
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020108-24970600.htm
Congress has provided more than $60 billion since September to combat terrorism and to rebuild after the attacks on New York and Washington, roughly five times what the nation spent to fight terrorism in the previous year.
When President Bush sends Congress his $2 trillion fiscal 2003 budget next month, he is expected to propose a hefty increase in governmentwide anti-terrorism efforts and propose billions more for the military's $345 billion wartime budget for the rest of this year. Fiscal 2003 begins Oct. 1
--------
Air Force Probes Missile Batteries
January 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Warhead-Batteries.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Air Force is sending a review team to a Missouri company to look into allegations it knowingly produced faulty batteries used to power missiles and ``smart'' bombs.
The batteries, made by Joplin, Mo.-based Eagle-Picher Technologies, are the subject of a federal whistle-blower lawsuit by a former employee. The company denies that it made defective batteries.
An Air Force spokesman said Tuesday a group of government and industry experts and thermal battery test designers and manufacturers would conduct a review and report back by early next month.
``Let me make it clear this is not an extraordinary action,'' Capt. Joe Dellavedova said. ``The Air Force routinely commissions independent review teams to review issues of interest to service leadership.''
In the lawsuit, former Eagle-Picher employee Rick Peoples alleges the company manufactured batteries for the U.S. military that failed to meet contractual specifications. Peoples, who worked for the company from 1983 until he was fired in 1994, also alleges the batteries either were not tested or were tested improperly.
Boeing Co., maker of the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, powered by the batteries, has said it has not experienced any problems with Eagle-Picher batteries and that a safety feature prevents the bombs' release if the battery is defective. The satellite-guided JDAM bomb system guides free-fall bombs in any weather.
In addition, the federal prosecutor for the region views the lawsuit's allegations as baseless and declined to pursue the matter, a spokesman said.
``We simply don't feel there's any merit to it,'' said Chris Whitley, spokesman for U.S. Attorney for the Western District in Kansas City, Mo.
The company issued a statement: ``Eagle-Picher Technologies stands firmly behind the quality and reliability of its batteries used in various weapons systems. Eagle-Picher's batteries have demonstrated a solid track record of reliable performance in a variety of weapon systems for many years.''
----
U.S. Army Designing Terror-Safe Truck
By David Runk
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; 6:34 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15787-2002Jan8?language=printer
DETROIT -- With newfound relevance in the war on terrorism, the U.S. Army's vehicle research and development unit is working on a next-generation, multipurpose military vehicle that could evolve into a heavy-duty pickup truck for civilians.
The National Automotive Center made its debut Tuesday at the North American International Auto Show, highlighting projects - such as the SmarTruck built by MSX International - under development with companies including the Big Three automakers.
"Today we're on a new battlefield," said center director Dennis Wend. "That battlefield is terrorism, and the automotive companies are pitching in here today to help us with technology."
The SmarTruck concept dominates NAC's display - and is a stepping stone for the future. Looking like a customized Ford F-350 pickup, it features bulletproof armor, as well as gadgets to make James Bond proud, like the ability to toss out dozens of tire-popping tacks.
In the works is a new version that considers concerns - and threats - raised since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as well as homeland security demands, said GerMaine Fuller, lead project engineer on the SmarTruck program.
Unlike the current SmarTruck, this new version - 18 months from completion at the earliest - isn't expected to remain in the concept stages, Fuller said. Contracts for the chassis it might be built on, as well as design specifics, are being worked on.
"We are still trying to hammer out the details for it, but the next one will go beyond a showpiece," Fuller said. "It will actually be something that we can put in the field."
Any new version would have issues raised by Sept. 11 in mind. Occupants could be protected from nuclear, biological or chemical attack, as well as traditional weapons, Fuller said. It would be capable of rugged driving and work without need for constant maintenance.
Features could be added or removed relatively easily if the vehicle it makes it into production.
"The concept is very agile, very chamelion-like," Fuller said. "The vision was to have something that the military could use as well as other law enforcement agencies - but even for private security types of purposes, obviously without all of the features."
The NAC is part of the Warren-based U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, or TACOM. It acts as the Army's link with the auto industry and universities in developing technology for both defense and commercial applications.
Other concepts on display at the NAC booth include a program developed by DaimlerChrysler AG and Oakland University for automotive electronics design, and General Motors Corp.'s hybrid electrical transmission that produces lower levels of carbon monoxide.
"Not everything you see will be on every single vehicle, but many of the features will find their way into the trucks used to protect the embassy, the personnel, patrol our hot zones around the world," Wend said of the NEC's truck projects.
"Still, other advances will be adapted by trucking companies looking for state-of-the-art location reporting systems, and a few might even find it onto your new SUV."
On the Net:
TACOM Web site: http://www.tacom.army.mil
-------- colombia
Colombia says IRA sent 25 to train rebels
BY DAVID LISTER, IRELAND CORRESPONDENT
TUESDAY JANUARY 08 2002
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002012318,00.html
COLOMBIAN authorities believe that up to 25 IRA members may have entered the country to train local terrorists over the past decade, it was claimed yesterday.
New allegations were published in newspapers in Dublin and Bogotá as prosecutors in Colombia completed their case against three Irishmen arrested in August. The three could face eight years in jail if they are charged with training anti-government terrorists.
The new claims paint an alarming picture of links between the Provisional IRA and Colombian rebels, and could further alienate support in the United States, where patience is low with the republicans after Gerry Adams's Cuba visit.
Sinn Fein said that the claims were from "unnamed" sources and "spooks". The detainees "haven't been charged with anything and are denying the allegations that have been put to them. My concern is that they are not going to get a fair trial," a spokesman said.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, has faced international isolation since the September attacks on America. Washington has put it on a list of international terrorist groups.
The US has given £1 billion to Colombia to help it to defeat terrorism and wants the extradition of a number of FARC leaders in connection with drug-trafficking and the kidnap of American citizens.
Following the arrests in August, the US Congress began a preliminary investigation into the IRA's Colombia links. It is expected to press ahead with a full hearing at which the CIA will be called to testify.
Three defectors from FARC have now identified the three Irishmen being held in Bogotá on suspicion of training terrorists, according to the Dublin-based Evening Herald newspaper and Colombia's El Espectador. Two defectors have claimed that they were trained by Martin McCauley, who was born in Lurgan, and James Monaghan, of Dublin, in the assembly of an anti-personnel mine, according to the Evening Herald.
The newspaper said that Colombian intelligence had evidence of at least three visits by IRA cells, each with five members, in recent years. It said that at the time of the arrests in August another two Irishmen were working with anti-government rebels but apparently managed to flee to Venezuela and returned to Ireland.
Last week the Colombian authorities received evidence from a third defector, considered the most reliable witness so far, who claimed that Mr McCauley, Mr Monaghan and Niall Connolly, Sinn Fein's representative in Cuba, had attended a meeting with Manuel Marulanda a FARC commander. The defector, who is described as a driver to one of FARC's "special commanders", has reportedly claimed that the three Irishmen were wearing full combat fatigues during the meeting.
Colombian prosecutors are also understood to be looking at evidence that FARC guerrillas are using mortars powered by oxygen cylinders, a trademark of the Provisional IRA.
FARC's 16,000 guerrillas control about 30 per cent of Colombia - and also the country's cocaine and heroin trade, supplementing their income through kidnapping.
The three Irishmen, travelling on false passports and believed to be bombmaking experts, were arrested in Bogotá airport in August after flying from San Vicente del Caguan, the largest town under FARC control, en route for Paris. They claim they were in Colombia as tourists.
-------- drug war
U.S. saw Montesinos as asset in war on drugs
World Scene
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020108-68190312.htm
LIMA, Peru - The United States considered Peru's jailed former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos a valuable asset in battling drugs, but warned his shady past made him a dangerous friend, according to declassified documents released by U.S. officials here yesterday.
"Like it or not, he is the go-to guy, short of the president [Alberto Fujimori] himself on any key issue, particularly counternarcotics," U.S. officials in Lima said in a 1999 dispatch to Washington.
Thirty-eight declassified documents, spanning the entire 1990-2000 term of ousted President Fujimori, were released by the U.S. Embassy following a request from lawmakers here probing charges of corruption linked to the ex-spy chief.
"Montesinos carries a significant amount of negative baggage with him," said one 1996 document. "Montesinos: A valued ally in the drug fight, but no choirboy," it said.
-------- israel / palestine
Palestinians Promise Investigation
By Louis Meixler
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; 12:10 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13917-2002Jan8?language=printer
JERUSALEM -- The Palestinian Authority said Tuesday it will question government officials accused by Israel of trying to smuggle Iranian arms to the Gaza Strip, while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused the Palestinians of conspiring with Iran against Israel.
Israel has accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of being directly involved in the operation, saying he had to have known of the attempt to smuggle tens of millions of dollars worth of Iranian-made rockets and anti-tank missiles. Palestinian leaders have denied any links to the shipment, as has the Iranian government.
Sharon said that if the Palestinians had obtained the weapons, it would have put the country "in an impossible situation where all of Israel becomes hostage to Yasser Arafat."
"The great danger is those relations that were developed between the Palestinian Authority and Iran," Sharon said. "Iran at the present time is the center of world terror."
As some of his ministers criticized the United States for its low-key response to the weapons shipment, Sharon dismissed U.S. statements that the destination of the weapons was unclear.
"I can assure you that the (U.S.) administration, they know exactly all the details," he said. "They know exactly that millions and millions of dollars were spent by the Palestinian Authority and things like that are not done without the direct approval of Arafat."
The weapons, seized in an Israeli raid on a ship in the Red Sea, included rockets that could reach Israeli cities from Palestinian areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials point to the weapons shipment as evidence that Iran is trying to give the Palestinians the ability to launch large military strikes on the Jewish state.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi, speaking on Iranian TV on Monday evening, said Israel was making the allegations in order to "intensify a crackdown on the Palestinian intefadeh," or uprising.
Sharon said security talks between the Israeli and Palestinians could continue, but he opposed any resumption of the peace talks that broke down a year ago.
The Palestinian leadership confirmed the captain of the ship is an official in its naval unit, but denied links to the shipment.
"The Palestinian Authority is not interested and does not want any form of escalation in this situation," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told a news conference. "It is not a Palestinian option to lead the confrontation toward a military one between the two sides."
Abed Rabbo said those accused of involvement would be questioned by a four-member committee of senior security officials. The captain of the freighter has said he received his instructions from Adel Awadallah, also known as Adel Mughrabi and identified by Israel as a major weapons buyer in the Palestinian Authority.
The U.S. State Department said Monday it was still looking into the affair and did not know who hired the ship and who the recipient of the weapons was.
Israeli Transport Minister Ephraim Sneh said Washington was deliberately taking a low-key approach in order not to encourage Israeli retaliation against the Palestinians and to avoid a diplomatic confrontation with Tehran.
"It appears that the problem is that those who are hearing our words are not willing to admit the full significance," Sneh told Israel Army Radio on Tuesday.
Sharon has said his Cabinet would soon meet to review its already tense contacts with the Palestinian Authority. Several Cabinet ministers demanded Tuesday that Israel cut off ties with Arafat's government.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who is on a visit to India, said he would vote against such a proposal.
"Do we want to change their (the Palestinians') leadership or do we want to change their policy? If we want to change the leadership, the result will be to unite everyone around it. If we want to change policy, there is every chance that we will succeed," Peres said on Army Radio.
Despite distrust heightened by the smuggling allegations, Israeli and Palestinian security officials were still holding meetings in the hopes of working out a truce to end 15 months of violence. There has been a lull in fighting since Arafat's Dec. 16 call for a halt to attacks on Israel, and a U.S. envoy was to return to the region Jan. 18 to evaluate progress toward a formal truce.
The "Karine A" was captured last week by Israeli naval commandos some 300 miles from Israel in the Red Sea. No one has claimed ownership of the vessel or the weapons.
The captain, Omar Akawi said in jailhouse interviews that he picked up the weapons at Iran's Qeys island, just off the country's southwest coast.
Akawi said he works in the Palestinian Transportation Ministry, and agreed to smuggle the weapons because "it's the Palestinian right to defend ourselves." He gave interviews Monday to Israeli television and the Fox News Channel in Ashkelon Prison on Israel's Mediterranean coast.
--------
Sharon says Palestinian-Iranian ties threaten Israel
01/08/2002
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2002/01/08/sharon-pa.htm
JERUSALEM (AP) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called Iran the "center of world terror" and said Tuesday a recently captured arms shipment showed that Iran and the Palestinians were collaborating to strike at Israel. Israel said it would soon release documents that show the Palestinian Authority was responsible for the 50 tons of weapons captured by Israeli commandos last Thursday on a cargo ship in the Red Sea. "We have all the evidence and it will unfold, and we will present it soon," said Sharon adviser Daniel Ayalon.
The Palestinian Authority insists it had nothing to do with the arms shipment and said its senior security officials would question those accused by Israel of trying to smuggle the weapons.
While Mideast violence has dropped sharply since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Dec. 16 speech calling for an end to attacks against Israel, the dispute over the weapons-laden ship has kept the two sides exchanging heated words.
The weapons included 62 Katyusha rockets that could reach Israeli cities from Palestinian areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher described as "credible" the Israeli allegations that the Palestinians were trying to smuggle the weapons.
"We have some of the evidence," Boucher said, adding that U.S. diplomats had examined a number of the weapons. "The quantity and quality of these weapons are of serious concern."
Sharon said that if the Palestinians had obtained the weapons, it would have put the country "in an impossible situation where all of Israel becomes hostage to Yasser Arafat."
A senior Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel believed Iran sold the weapons to the Palestinians for $10 million - far below their actual worth - in hopes it would allow Iran to threaten Israel by proxy.
At a meeting Sunday, Israel demanded the Palestinian Authority punish those involved in the shipment. U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni was present at the meeting, the Israeli military official said.
Israel has accused Arafat himself of direct involvement in the arms shipment, saying an operation of this magnitude, involving millions of dollars worth of rockets, rifles and anti-tank missiles, could not have taken place without the approval of Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority.
"The great danger (to Israel) are those relations that were developed between the Palestinian Authority and Iran," Sharon told some 200 visiting American Jewish leaders. "Iran at the present time is the center of world terror."
Iran has denied involvement with the weapons shipment. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi, speaking Monday on Iranian television, said Israel was making the allegations to "intensify a crackdown on the Palestinian intefadeh," or uprising.
The Palestinian Authority has acknowledged that the Palestinian captain of the weapons ship, the Karine A, is in its naval unit, but has denied links to the shipment.
"The Palestinian Authority is not interested and does not want any form of escalation in this situation," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told a news conference.
However, Palestinian naval captain Omar Akawi said in prison interviews Monday that he picked up the weapons off the coast of Iran and received his instructions from Adel Awadallah, also known as Adel Mughrabi and identified by Israel as a major weapons buyer in the Palestinian Authority.
Asked about the statements by the ship captain, Abed Rabbo said, "there are so many holes and loopholes in what he declared."
Sharon said that Israel had kept the Americans fully informed.
"They know exactly that millions and millions of dollars were spent by the Palestinian Authority and things like that are not done without the direct approval of Arafat," Sharon said.
The United States has for years cited Iran as a sponsor of international terrorism. But during the current U.S. military campaign, the United States and Iran have shared an interest in seeing the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have managed to avoid any direct confrontations.
Despite distrust heightened by the smuggling allegations, security officials from both sides were still holding meetings in the hopes of working out a truce to end 15 months of violence. The Israeli security source said the sides promised Zinni to try to reach a detailed document on implementing a full truce before Zinni returns on Jan. 18.
Israel says the Palestinians purchased the Karine A last year in order to smuggle the weapons.
Lloyd's Register, which tracks ship ownership worldwide, said the Karine A was sold last Aug. 31 by the Lebanese company Diana K to an unknown buyer. The ship is now registered in Tonga, but the owner is not available, according to Chris Owens, the registrar of ships for Lloyd's.
-------- nato
NATO in the balance
Jessica Fugate
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020108-2187400.htm
The war in Afghanistan has opened the door to a vigorous debate about NATO's purpose and U.S. strategic interest in Europe. America's response to the September 11 attacks marked a shift in U.S. attention and resources to other parts of the world. Are our European allies of diminished importance to U.S. interests? There is a strong case to make that the United States must remain fully engaged in Europe.
Our most important political allies are in Europe. They are our principal trading partners, share common values and traditions, and provide the hard assets of military forces and military bases that can help to secure U.S. interests in the European region. The United States is now rightly driving NATO to embrace policies that protect U.S. and European global interests.
In the view of many Europeans, there has been an element of pick-and-choose in Washington's European policy-making during the past decade. Some of the U.S. officials who supported the last round of NATO enlargement opposed U.S. involvement in the Balkans. And some of the officials who backed both enlargement and involvement in the Balkans decried a European Union security and defense policy because it might "rival NATO," or undermine U.S. influence on the continent. But NATO enlargement, the Kosovo war, Balkans peace operations and the EU's effort to build stronger political and security institutions have all served the same goal: European stability.
Today, the stakes for U.S. engagement in Europe are clearly higher.
There is a new relationship between the United States and our European allies and Russia. It is driven by the reminder of September 11 that we face common threats that demand coordinated responses. It must be said that Russia's relevance to U.S. interests in this conflict is of greater importance than that of our European allies. The United States should use its leverage to induce Russia to abandon policies detrimental to the alliance. The emerging NATO-Russia Council should solidify a Russian commitment to Western values and interests - even after Russian President Vladimir Putin is gone.
The administration's decision to carry the burden in Afghanistan, including its newly found interest in developing greater cooperation with Russia, must not undermine Washington's long-held policy of standing by Europe. Many U.S. policy-makers wish to extend NATO's original mission of collective defense, once intended to contain the Soviet Union, to combat proliferation, fight terrorism and ensure the flow of oil well beyond Europe. The United States is a global power, with a global view of threats that our European allies have not shared until Afghanistan. The military option is high on the American list for dealing with adversaries. Previously low on the Europeans' list, they have now awakened.
Europeans do not have the military capability for a mission of collective defense distant from the NATO treaty area. We do have such a capability. We have demonstrated the will to use it in the past and we are using it in Afghanistan. With the possible exception of Britain and France, the allies that assisted the United States in the 1991 Gulf War cannot in 2001 project their forces into the Middle East and South Asia, nor are many of those forces sufficiently trained and equipped for high-intensity conflict. Today, the European forces may not even be able to quell ethnic conflict. They may be able to enforce a peace settlement or, as in Macedonia, nascent ethnic conflict. But only the United States can supply the leadership to forge a coalition to win a war, as in Afghanistan.
Yet there is a gap between the administration's political rhetoric and the reality of the allies' military contribution. At NATO's annual winter heads-of-state ministerial in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "So the suggestion that NATO has been kept on the sidelines is not an accurate one. NATO was right there at the very beginning with the offer of its capabilities. And then we had the option, the pleasant option, of choosing from that menu that was provided and all that capability that was made available to us by NATO."
But in fact, NATO's military relevance is very much at issue. The Afghan conflict has brought to the fore the need for an allied response to threats well beyond Europe and has demonstrated the distance between U.S. and European capabilities. To note, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said at last month's NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels that "major deficiencies and major shorftalls" exist in the defense spending among NATO allies.
At the same time, the political value of NATO remains. France alone in the alliance was able to persuade Algeria and Tunisia to cooperate in the pursuit of terrorists from their soil. There is an imperative for the allies to develop mobile forces comparable to the United States.
Other important allied interests remain and should not be forgotten, such as NATO enlargement. The Bush administration, and the Clinton administration before it, have supported NATO enlargement as a means to build stability by ensuring the leavening of new democracies in Central Europe. And reluctantly, the two administrations ultimately came to the conclusion that there must be some U.S. political, as well as military, role in settling conflict in the Balkans. Both NATO enlargement and Balkans peace operations are the essence of "collective security," a phrase that was anathema on Capitol Hill during the last enlargement debate.
While a range of issues such as European criticism of the death penalty and the administration's position on the Kyoto Treaty has caused tensions in allied relations, Washington is placing higher value on traditional strategic perspectives, such as NATO's military capability that defends against post-Cold War threats. At the same time, we should heed the allies' demand to avoid unilateralism. All the allies, including prickly France, accept that a strong U.S. role is desirable, and now see the value of NATO that can act far beyond the treaty area. This sentiment is apparent in every allied capital.
U.S. leadership in Europe will not wither away if we nurture it and do not abuse it.
Jessica Fugate is a research associate for European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan to defuse India tensions with new policy: US Senator
Wednesday January 9, 1:47 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020108/1/29tqj.html
Senior US Senator Joseph Lieberman said he believed Pakistan's new plan to combat militancy will defuse the dangerous stand off with India when it is unveiled this week.
After talks with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the former vice presidential candidate said he believed the blueprint to fight extremism will play a "critically important" role in ending the crisis.
"He is reaching for a speech to the Pakistani people... that will change the history of this country," said Lieberman, the Democrat senator who is touring Central Asia with a nine-member bipartisan group of US lawmakers.
"I hope and believe that (his remarks) will be... so bold and principled and fresh that they will encourage a response from the Indian government," he told reporters.
"Most particularly, I am hopeful that both nations... will move some of their troops on the border between India and Pakistan away from the border."
Lieberman said the proximity of the two national armies, who are in battle-ready positions either side of the frontier that divides the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir, was a cause for great concern.
"I think (Musharraf) is searching for a fresh initiative that will not only reduce the tensions that exist now between Pakistan and India, but will begin a whole new chapter in the Kashmir dispute."
Musharraf has said he will address the nation in the next few days to unveil steps to establish "some degree of normalcy, balance, introducing a tolerant society (and) checking any form of militancy within our society."
The regional crisis erupted last month after an attack on India's parliament which New Delhi blames on two Pakistani-based militant groups.
However, Pakistan's efforts to rein in extremists, including the arrest of the leaders of both groups an 100 of their supporters, has been dismissed by India as window-dressing.
Lieberman said he understood India's anger over the assault on its seat of democracy.
"But we all hope that while understanding that, the leadership of India will measure what President Musharraf has done already to take action aginst terrorist groups in Pakistan," he said.
"He (Musharraf) hopes very much that Pakistan can emerge as the model of a nation with a majority Islamic population that will be tolerant and moderate and modern," he continued.
However, one of the other senators in the delegation, Tennessee's republican representative Fred Thompson, sounded a more cautious note.
"I don't think that there is a magic bullet. I don't think the speech itself or anything else individually or any particular action is going to resolve this problem (of militancy)," he said.
"But what we're hopeful for is a de-escalation. We have two nuclear powers with troops on a common border. That's cause for concern for the entire world."
Another high-profile member of the delegation, former Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, thanked Musharraf for Pakistan's contribution to the US-led campaign against terrorism.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who met with Musharraf Monday as part of a peace-making tour of South Asia, also welcomed Pakistan's "difficult" decision to throw its weight behind the US after the September 11 attacks.
----
NEWS ANALYSIS
Musharraf's Bind: Averting War Without Humiliation
New York Times
January 8, 2002
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/international/asia/08MUSH.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 7 - Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, became so concerned last week that tensions over Kashmir would spill into war with India that he telephoned the American ambassador in Islamabad, Wendy J. Chamberlin, to ask where Washington intended to draw the line in supporting India.
"What General Musharraf wanted to know was how Washington could guarantee that India wouldn't wait for some new incident to occur, then claim that it was backed by Pakistan and use it as a pretext to go to war," an aide to the general said, insisting on anonymity. "The general's reasoning was: `What if some outraged Kashmiri takes a Kalashnikov and shoots an Indian politician or puts a bomb in a parking lot? Is Pakistan going to be held accountable every time anybody picks up a weapon? Is Washington saying that all freedom struggles, everywhere, can be suppressed under the guise of the war on terrorism?' "
The questions illustrated the narrow, hazardous course that the general must steer to make Pakistan what he calls "a dignified and responsible nation" in which Islamic extremism and bloodshed will cede to caution, tolerance and good-neighborliness, especially with India.
General Musharraf is under strong pressure from the United States and Britain to totally renounce terrorism in Kashmir - something India has long sought.
Tonight, after a quick visit from Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, he again strongly condemned terrorism, though he continues to consider the struggle for Kashmir, by local groups, not as terrorism but as a fight for freedom. But India refused to abandon its buildup of troops on the two countries' border.
Whether General Musharraf can satisfy India and avert a war between the nuclear-armed neighbors is not clear. He cannot be seen to abandon the Muslims of Kashmir, which Pakistanis believe should have been incorporated into their country when the British Raj split violently in 1947 into Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu, if officially secular, India.
He now intends to outline his program in a speech to his nation. The address is seen as the second in three months in which the 58-year-old general faces an uncomfortable choice.
After the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, he had to tell his nation that he was siding with Washington and abandoning the Taliban in Afghanistan, a stance that risked retaliation by Islamic extremists.
Now, the general again courts danger, or even political suicide. Supporting Kashmiri Muslims fighting Indian rule is a national cause in Pakistan, not a sectarian one like the fate of the Taliban. Many in Pakistan believe that a war with India could touch off an upheaval in which the general would be replaced by a more hard-line military ruler and the promised October elections would fall away.
Yet General Musharraf can also not appear to be bowing to India's will, particularly when many influential Pakistanis believe that evidence for the involvement of Kashmiri militants supported by Pakistan in the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament is thin.
"There is no question that we do have a problem with extremism in this country, and we cannot deny that there is a monster in our midst that has arisen in the past decades," Abdul Sattar, Pakistan's foreign minister, said in an interview. "But India's threats in the past three weeks have very greatly reduced our room for action, because our people will say: `These people are doing India's dirty business. They are Pakistanis, so why don't they stand up for Pakistan?' "
Hamid Haroun, publisher of The Dawn, an influential Karachi newspaper, spoke for many in Pakistan's establishment when he said India's two-page summary of evidence against the Kashmiri militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e- Muhammad was so lacking that it raised questions about whether the two groups had been responsible for the Parliament attack.
"If Pakistan has its Islamic militant groups that nobody really controls, India has its own counterparts," he said, referring to a far- right Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has strong influence on the party headed by India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee.
"Both India and Pakistan have shown in the past that they are capable of getting into some pretty sinister stage-setting," Mr. Haroun said. "If you look at the events of Dec. 13, the least you'd have to say is that they call for a very close examination."
In October, as the United States began bombing Afghanistan, General Musharraf ordered a shuffling of the army leadership that sidelined three powerful generals with links to Islamic militant groups. But others still active in the officer corps might not remain quiescent if Indian pressure for concessions is sustained, some retired officers say.
"These people are perfectly capable of saying, `We should abandon Musharraf's line and be much more aggressive,' " said Talat Masood, a retired general who has become a prominent commentator on military and political affairs, "and that would bring to pass exactly the opposite of what India and the United States say they want."
In the long history of violence between India and Pakistan, the toll in the attack on India's Parliament, which killed nine Indians and the five attackers, was relatively low.
But the attack occurred in an entirely new context of an international war on terrorism, and India has seized the opportunity to put maximum pressure on General Musharraf to crack down on Kashmiri militant groups supported by Pakistan's military intelligence agency, Inter- Services Intelligence.
India asserted, for instance, that the true purpose of the Dec. 13 attack, which killed no legislators, was to kill India's top leaders, including Prime Minister Vajpayee.
Pakistan has even suggested, obliquely, that the incident might have been stage-managed for India to have a Sept. 11 of its own, an attack so outrageous that it could be presented as tantamount to an act of war.
Pakistan's leaders have been seriously alarmed by India's threats of war. Military analysts here say privately that Pakistan would be almost certain to lose, because of India's wide superiority in combat troops, armor and air power.
General Musharraf has ordered that nothing be said that could undercut Pakistani concessions, which have included the arrest in the last two weeks of the leaders of Lashkar- e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, the groups India accused in the Parliament attack, a freeze on their bank accounts and an order that the intelligence services cut all holy-war groups out of its support for the insurgency in Kashmir.
Senior officials here concede that the general's moves were overdue. They say that even after he took power in a coup in 1999, he was too weak to correct a course set in the early 1980's by Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who fostered Islamic extremism before being killed in a mysterious plane crash, blamed by many on Islamic militants, in 1988.
Some senior Pakistani officials argue that General Musharraf already started to move against Islamic extremists before Sept. 11. Now, his government has drafted regulations intended to regulate the 7,000 madrasas, or religious schools, that General Zia helped establish.
The new rules would broaden the education of the half-million students and require foreigners to show approval from their home governments before enrolling in such schools. There are currently 35,000 foreigners studying in Pakistan's madrasas, roughly half of them Arabs.
Senior Pakistani officials further suggest that Pakistan never exercised tight enough supervision of the Kashmiri militant groups to know who mounted the Dec. 13 attack. Mr. Vajpayee, they say, is merely using the assault as a pretext to get American backing to end half a century of violent confrontation over Kashmir.
"They accuse Pakistan of the incident in New Delhi, then refuse to give us proper evidence, then find us guilty without even a hearing," Mr. Sattar, the foreign minister, said. "It's just like Alice in Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter says, `I'll be judge and jury, and I'll sentence you to death.' "
--------
THE WHITE HOUSE
Bush Seeks Terror Pledge by Pakistan
New York Times
January 8, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/international/asia/08INDI.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 - President Bush warned today that the standoff between India and Pakistan remained serious and volatile, and he called on Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, to make a clear pledge to crack down on terrorism.
"I don't believe the situation is defused yet, but I do believe there is a way to do so, and we are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there's a way to deal with their problems without going to war," Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House.
While trying to ease tensions between the neighboring countries, Mr. Bush raised some eyebrows by using the term "Pakis." It is considered an ethnic slur in Britain, which has a large Pakistani immigrant population. White House officials said the president meant no disrespect.
At the same time a senior administration official said that a regional summit meeting in Nepal over the weekend, in which the leaders of both countries at least shook hands, had provided some encouragement and that the United States was urging both countries to "keep up the momentum and give each other some credit."
India and Pakistan, nuclear rivals, have been on the brink of war since a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13 in which 14 people died, including 5 attackers. Both countries have massed troops on their common border, and India and the United States and other Western nations have pressed Pakistan to move against militant groups that India blames for the attacks.
After pressure from Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, General Musharraf today made his strongest statement yet in an effort to avert conflict, saying that Pakistan rejected all forms of terrorism. Bush administration officials said they expected him to make further similar statements in coming days.
In his own brief remarks today, Mr. Bush said: "I think it's very important for President Musharraf to make a clear statement to the world that he intends to crack down on terror. And I believe if he does that and he continues to do what he's doing, it'll provide relief, pressure relief, on a situation that's still serious."
A recent crackdown by Pakistan has so far focused on two groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, that India blames for the attack on the Parliament building in New Delhi.
Some Indian officials have continued to complain that Pakistan has not taken enough credible steps to deal with militants who operate within its borders, but the Bush administration has sought to pressure both sides to keep the conflict from getting out of hand.
"The Pakistanis have in fact done quite a bit, and we have been told that Musharraf intends to make some more statements in next couple of days that are very clearly a condemnation of terrorism and a reorientation of Pakistani society in a more moderate direction," a senior administration official said here today. "The Indians are not going to give them the benefit of the doubt and I don't think we expect that, really."
With troops poised to fight over the disputed Kashmir region, the official added, "The military aspects of this are still so dangerous." But, he said, the United States hopes both sides can keep up the momentum toward calmer relations and "not keep rushing to war."
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy here, Asad Hayauddin, said he had received several telephone calls "from reporters and members of the community," inquiring about Mr. Bush's use of "Pakis," which many Americans do not know is considered a pejorative term.
"I would give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was said in passing," Mr. Hayauddin said. "In all fairness, I would not say it's a racial slur."
-------- propaganda wars
Rethinking Coverage on the Front Lines
By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11418-2002Jan7?language=printer
It was D-Day and CBS news correspondent Charles Collingwood was broadcasting live from Omaha Beach. As U.S. troops stormed ashore, Collingwood approached a Navy officer. "Excuse me, commander. I am Charles Collingwood at CBS News. I wonder if you have any idea of what the whole picture is on this beach?"
"Beats the [expletive] out of me, Charlie," the naval officer replied. "I'm the NBC correspondent."
Much has changed since World War II, when journalists proudly wore uniforms as they reported the news, said veteran journalist Daniel Schorr, who recounted the Collingwood incident at a recent Brookings/Harvard forum on "Press Coverage and the War on Terrorism."
Each week for the past two months, the Brookings/Harvard panels have featured top journalists and government officials talking about war coverage, past and present. Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, hosts the sessions with Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Washington office of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center and a former network news correspondent.
They continue tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. at Brookings with a panel evaluating the performance of the media and the government since Sept. 11. Panelists include Torie Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs; Michael Getler, Washington Post ombudsman; Sanford Ungar, former director of Voice of America; and John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News.
Previous sessions have featured ABC's Ted Koppel, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick and onetime defense secretary James Schlesinger.
The journalists have not been shy about acknowledging their own qualms about the way they are covering aspects of America's latest war.
"The press has a lot of trouble with scientific uncertainty," said PBS correspondent Susan Dentzer at a session last month on media coverage of bioterrorism. " . . . [H]ow do I sit here as a journalist and write about all of this in a way that doesn't completely terrify people, but gives adequate attention to the realm of the possible?"
-------- puerto rico
Carrier barred from Vieques training
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 8, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020108-24387732.htm
The Navy, overruling two top commanders, has decided not to let the USS John F. Kennedy battle group train on the island of Vieques before deploying this month for the Arabian Sea near Afghanistan.
Citing the war on terrorism, Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, and Gen. James Jones, the Marine Corps commandant, had asked Navy Secretary Gordon England to permit limited live-fire training for the Kennedy armada on the Puerto Rican island. The Puerto Rican governor had urged him to deny the request.
Gov. Sila M. Calderon apparently has won.
Navy officials said yesterday the carrier Kennedy will not train on Vieques before departing. Instead, pilots and gun crews will use ranges in Virginia and North Carolina.
"The battle group will not use Vieques," Capt. Mike Brady, a spokesman for the Atlantic Fleet, said in response to questions from The Washington Times. "All exercises will be at training ranges on the East Coast. The Kennedy battle group will not use Vieques."
Capt. Brady said it is not unusual for a battle group to skip Vieques in a final tuneup before deploying overseas. He said the Kennedy task force ships were able to conduct preliminary exercises there in the fall using dummy ammunition. Training has been limited to less-realistic inert bombs under an agreement between Puerto Rico and the Clinton administration.
However, both Adm. Clark and Gen. Jones thought enough of the value of live-fire training for the Kennedy in January at Vieques that they sent a private letter to Mr. England this fall asking for permission.
"Their crews would benefit greatly from live-fire practice achieved over a three-four day period at Vieques," the two said in a jointly signed letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. "This would ensure that our sailors and Marines can train under combat conditions as they prepare for deployment operations which may call for direct action missions in the war on terrorism."
Capt. Frank Thorpe, a spokesman for Adm. Clark, said yesterday, "The CNO has great confidence in [the Atlantic Fleet commander's] plan to ensure we deploy the JFK battle-ready."
The Navy declined to comment on what spokesman called "private communication." Capt. Brady said yesterday he had not seen the letter to Mr. England and would not comment.
The Kennedy is scheduled to leave its home port in Mayport, Fla., in mid-January, two months ahead of schedule. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of U.S. Central Command is running the war in Afghanistan, wants at least two carrier battle groups on station in the Arabian Sea. By leaving early, the Kennedy can relieve the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on station without the Roosevelt having to extend its six-month deployment, Navy officials said.
Kennedy aircraft may see action over Afghanistan, where Navy aircraft have conducted the bulk of the tactical missions. Somalia and Iraq are also known terrorist-harboring states and could face air strikes.
Two carriers, the USS Roosevelt, and West Coast-based USS John C. Stennis, are now operating in the Arabian Sea. Two other carriers in the region, the USS Carl Vinson and USS Kitty Hawk, had been in the Arabian Sea and are returning to their home ports.
Vieques has been a hot political topic for Congress, President Clinton and now President Bush.
Puerto Rican activists, joined by many leading liberal Democrats, including members of the Kennedy family, demonstrated outside the range, demanding an immediate end to practice bombing.
The Navy, and pro-military members of Congress, say the training is essential.
Mr. Bush, in a decision critics linked to his desire to garner Hispanic votes, announced earlier this year that the Navy must find alternative training sites by 2003.
Adm. Robert J. Natter, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, is now searching for new sites, including ranges in North Carolina and Virginia.
The Kennedy and its air wing will depart with a partial battle group of cruisers, destroyers, an oiler and an attack submarine. Remaining ships will leave the United States as originally scheduled in mid-March.
Capt. Brady said the decision to send the Kennedy to other training sites does not mean the Navy is abandoning Vieques before the deadline of May 1, 2003.
"Right now, we don't have a suitable replacement for it, so I would anticipate we would use it again," he said. "We have not made a decision yet with regard to future training."
The carrier Kennedy was in the news last month. The Navy fired its commanding officer after an inspection board found a rash of operational failures. "The ship was seriously degraded in her ability to conduct air operations," said a report by a Navy Board of Inspection and Survey.
"Three of four aircraft elevators were out of commission, two of four catapults were degraded and the overall flight deck fire-fighting capability was seriously degraded," the report said.
Capt. Brady said the new commander is correcting the problems in time for a January deployment.
-------- us
U.S. Electronic Jamming Plane Aging
By Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; 4:13 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12164-2002Jan8?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The EA-6B Prowler's ability to blind enemy anti-aircraft radar is so important to protecting U.S. pilots that the jammers led the way when the U.S. military launched airstrikes in Afghanistan.
But the 1970s-vintage plane, nicknamed the "Electric Sky Pig," is used so often that the aging warplanes are wearing out fast.
Of a total of 122 Prowlers, 31 are grounded for maintenance, including eight with potentially cracked wings, said Capt. John Scheffler, Prowler program manager at the Naval Air Systems Command.
That leaves 91 Prowlers to support the war in Afghanistan and all other U.S. air operations worldwide. And more than half - 51 - are prohibited from making certain quick maneuvers because their wings are in deteriorating.
The strain on the Prowlers raises questions about whether there will be enough radar jammers to go around if the war on terrorism spreads, particularly to countries like Iraq with sophisticated air defenses.
"This ugly, bulbous aircraft is the key to victory," said Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican and ex-Prowler electronic warfare officer.
The average Prowler, a four-seat jet based on the A-6 bomber, is 18 years old and the newest was built more than a decade ago. Without them, U.S. warplanes are more vulnerable to threats ranging from radar-guided missiles to human spotters with night-vision goggles and cellular telephones.
The Pentagon wants the Prowlers to keep flying until at least 2010, though officials haven't picked a replacement. Candidates include an unmanned, remote-controlled plane; a version of the F/A-18 jet; or a modified commercial airplane.
"Ultimately, the Prowler issue is about the lives of American military personnel," said military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a think tank. "Without enough Prowlers, we can't protect our aircraft from enemy fighters and enemy missiles."
Two EA-6Bs crashed in November, one into a mountain in Washington state and one into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina. Military officials have said they do not believe structural problems were to blame. All the crew members on those planes ejected safely, though both aircraft were destroyed.
With U.S. warplanes flying hundreds of missions each day over Afghanistan, the stress on the aging Prowlers is increasing.
The Prowler's problems are a symptom of a wider predicament for the Pentagon: Many of the airplanes and other weaponry in the U.S. arsenal are difficult to maintain and are often older than the service members using them.
Last month, for example, the Air Force briefly grounded all 99 of its C-141 cargo planes after a wing fell off one during refueling in Memphis, Tenn. The C-141 has been in use since the 1960s.
The Prowler's situation is particularly ironic, since the planes are bristling with some of the latest electronic warfare gadgets. The plane's equipment detects, intercepts and jams both radar targeting systems and wireless communications such as mobile telephones. Prowlers also carry missiles designed to destroy anti-aircraft sites.
The Prowler's ability to jam mobile phones and hand-held radios has been particularly useful in Afghanistan, said Kirk, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who flew the Prowler over Yugoslavia in 1999.
"Terrorist organizations love mobile communications devices. When you're up against the Prowler, you just get a busy signal," Kirk said.
The increasing use of the Prowlers makes their parts wear out faster. Navy analysts predicted the problems with wing cracks as long ago as 1991, but the wings are still being replaced.
This year's budget includes $138 million to replace wing sections on 10 Prowlers. The Navy is asking for an additional $35 million to fix an additional eight planes.
Wings aren't the only problem parts for the Prowlers.
Congressional investigators found last year that Prowlers have been plagued with parts shortages. For example, the Navy couldn't find a contractor to build more navigational computers because they were so obsolete, the General Accounting Office report said. The solution: Modifying an even older version of the computer to substitute for the newer version.
"We go into battle with computer screens that were made long before Windows (operating system software) was even invented," Kirk said.
The parts shortages led to high rates of cannibalization, or using parts from one plane to replace broken parts in another aircraft. During the strikes on Yugoslavia, an essential part was swapped among four planes 16 times in 6 days, the report said.
Scheffler, the Prowler program manager, said the Navy has purchased more spare parts since the report's release and is working to fix its other problems.
----
Troops to be surveyed about anthrax vaccine
Around the Nation
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020108-24970600.htm
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will survey military personnel about the anthrax vaccine in hopes of learning how fears about its safety can be lessened.
The Pentagon began inoculating about 2.4 million troops against anthrax. But the program has been on hold since 1998, after 500,000 personnel had received the vaccine, because of a shortage of supplies.
Some service personnel also have refused to take the injections because of fears of severe side effects. The vaccine's only manufacturer, Lansing, Mich.-based BioPort Corp., insists the vaccine is safe.
The Pentagon says severe side effects occur about once per 200,000 doses.
----
Military Unaware of Tampa Plane
Student Pilot Entered Restricted Area Before Crash
By Greg Schneider and Bill Miller
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11147-2002Jan7?language=printer
The military command that sends fighter jets to respond to acts of terrorism did not learn of Saturday's flight of a private plane into a Tampa office building until after the plane had crashed, officials said yesterday.
The situation raised questions about continuing holes in the nation's defense against terrorism, especially because the small plane's flight took it into restricted airspace over MacDill Air Force Base, where the military's Central Command is coordinating the war in Afghanistan.
Even if the Air Force had been notified immediately, officials said, its jets would not have been able to get to the scene in time because they were located at the other end of the state. If F-15 fighters had somehow managed to intercept 15-year-old student pilot Charles J. Bishop, they would have been unlikely to do anything to prevent him from crashing his stolen Cessna into the Bank of America building in downtown Tampa.
"I guess there is a moral question involved, and that is, you know, was anybody unilaterally going to try to go up and shoot down a 15-year-old in a Cessna? And the answer is, probably not," said Air Force Lt. Col. Ken McClellan, a spokesman for the Department of Defense.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, some things remain beyond the expectations of agencies that are charged with protecting the public -- and until the past weekend, an attack by a teenager in a small plane was one of them. Realizing that the boy could have been armed with a bomb or a biological agent such as anthrax, authorities from the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration said they are once again reexamining their procedures.
But they were hard pressed yesterday to say what they might change.
"From what I know of it so far, the alert process, there was not a perceived threat. I mean, here was a 15-year-old flight student who did something untoward and unknown to anybody else," said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem. Authorities need time to review the case "to know exactly what happened and then what would need to be different, if anything at all," he said.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, whose job calls for him to coordinate the federal response to domestic terrorism, made no public comments on the incident yesterday.
He was notified immediately about the incident and has been following developments, according to spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Ridge's office has been engaged in discussions about aviation security in recent months with the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Transportation and other agencies, Johndroe said, and will review Saturday's events to determine if changes are needed.
FAA officials met yesterday with representatives of the general-aviation industry to begin the process of reviewing security procedures around aircraft and flight schools, FAA spokesman William Shumann said.
With more than 340,000 private and student pilots in the United States, "the issue becomes, how do we regulate or can we effectively regulate such a large and diverse industry, and is it possible to do this without having a serious effect on the industry itself?" Shumann said. The FAA reported to Congress last month on potential ways to improve aviation security, including grounding private planes.
Robert Cooper, the owner of National Aviation Academy, where Bishop had taken lessons since March and where he stole the plane on Saturday, said yesterday that there was no simple fix for what happened.
Contrary to published reports, Cooper said, Bishop had not been left alone in his plane to do preflight preparations. Instead, he said, Bishop arrived about 15 minutes early for his lesson and picked up emergency manuals and the keys to a plane. He was allowed onto the flight line because he was so well known and well liked around the school, and then the boy just untied a plane and took off, Cooper said.
Bishop's family released a statement yesterday noting that there had been no warning before the event. "The family of Charles Bishop is appalled and devastated over the incident," the boy's mother, Julie Bishop, and grandmother, Karen Johnson, said in a statement. "We had absolutely no prior indication that this might occur. We are exceedingly grateful that no one else was injured."
Police said they found a handwritten note in a satchel on the plane in which Bishop said he had acted alone and expressed support for Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11 attacks. Tampa police spokeswoman Katie Hughes said that an FBI review of the hard drive of Bishop's computer turned up no clues and that agents have subpoenaed his e-mail records.
Several people in the flight school saw Bishop taking off in the plane and called the flight tower at the adjacent St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport immediately, Cooper said.
According to the FAA, Bishop took off around 4:55 p.m. An unarmed Coast Guard helicopter was already in the air and was quickly diverted to the Cessna, where the pilot made visual contact with Bishop and signaled for him to land.
Apparently local aviation officials decided that because a government aircraft was already on the scene, there was no need to notify the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military command responsible for defending the skies over North America, said FAA spokesman Shumann.
While some officials at MacDill were aware of the flight as it was happening, that base is not home to any fighter jets. According to military officials, NORAD found out about the flight around 5:13 p.m. -- several minutes after Bishop hit the building.
NORAD immediately scrambled two F-15 fighters from Homestead Air Force Base in southern Miami-Dade County, but they did not arrive until about 5:40, officials said.
The FAA is supposed to notify NORAD of such incidents as soon as possible, and since the attacks of Sept. 11, the Air Force has placed more than 100 fighter jets on standby to respond in minutes anywhere in the nation. Before the attacks, only 14 fighter jets were kept on standby nationwide.
In addition, the military has begun flying combat air patrols over key sites such as major cities -- routinely over the D.C. area and New York, and randomly over the rest of the country.
There is no standing patrol over MacDill, even though it serves as headquarters for Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who runs the military's Central Command and is coordinating the war in Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials said the base can defend itself in other ways. Franks told the Associated Press yesterday that he was not alarmed by the incident and planned no major increases in security at MacDill.
Another military official pointed out that the Air Force has finite resources for its combat air patrols and constantly makes choices about what areas or even events to protect. Still, the official said, the Florida incident raises many questions.
"This kid certainly brought to light a significant potential vulnerability, which does in fact need to be addressed. Everything from putting locks on your airplane at small airports around the country to flight instructors not letting students run airplanes by themselves and on and on," the official said.
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Pentagon to Seek Budget Hike in 2003
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11413-2002Jan7?language=printer
The Pentagon plans to seek an increase of $20 billion or more in military spending in its 2003 budget, a senior defense official said yesterday.
"No final decisions have been made," the official told Reuters. "But as the president and secretary have said, you can't cheaply make up for years of treading water."
The Pentagon is sure to press Congress for money to stockpile laser- and satellite-guided bombs and missiles along with funds for warplanes and other arms, including military intelligence and attack weapons such as pilotless aerial drones.
----
Federal Report
Mike Causey
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020108-6365240.htm
At a time when many private firms are cutting 401(k) plan benefits, federal and military personnel this year have more money to invest, more investment options and higher limits on how much they can invest tax-deferred.
With their investment track record, a new raise (4.77 percent for Washington-Baltimore feds and 4.6 percent for military personnel) and new higher investment limits, the amount federal-military personnel pump into their Thrift Savings Plan this year could increase $100 million or more.
Federal and military personnel will be able to invest an additional percentage point of salary (up to 8 percent and 12 percent of pay) this year, and the amount they can invest has gone from $10,500 last year to $11,000 this year.
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U.S. Army Designing Terror - Safe Truck
January 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Anti-Terror-Truck.html
DETROIT (AP) -- With newfound relevance in the war on terrorism, the U.S. Army's vehicle research and development unit is working on a next-generation, multipurpose military vehicle that could evolve into a heavy-duty pickup truck for civilians.
The National Automotive Center made its debut Tuesday at the North American International Auto Show, highlighting projects -- such as the SmarTruck built by MSX International -- under development with companies including the Big Three automakers.
``Today we're on a new battlefield,'' said center director Dennis Wend. ``That battlefield is terrorism, and the automotive companies are pitching in here today to help us with technology.''
The SmarTruck concept dominates NAC's display -- and is a stepping stone for the future. Looking like a customized Ford F-350 pickup, it features bulletproof armor, as well as gadgets to make James Bond proud, like the ability to toss out dozens of tire-popping tacks.
In the works is a new version that considers concerns -- and threats -- raised since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as well as homeland security demands, said GerMaine Fuller, lead project engineer on the SmarTruck program.
Unlike the current SmarTruck, this new version -- 18 months from completion at the earliest -- isn't expected to remain in the concept stages, Fuller said. Contracts for the chassis it might be built on, as well as design specifics, are being worked on.
``We are still trying to hammer out the details for it, but the next one will go beyond a showpiece,'' Fuller said. ``It will actually be something that we can put in the field.''
Any new version would have issues raised by Sept. 11 in mind. Occupants could be protected from nuclear, biological or chemical attack, as well as traditional weapons, Fuller said. It would be capable of rugged driving and work without need for constant maintenance.
Features could be added or removed relatively easily if the vehicle it makes it into production.
``The concept is very agile, very chamelion-like,'' Fuller said. ``The vision was to have something that the military could use as well as other law enforcement agencies -- but even for private security types of purposes, obviously without all of the features.''
The NAC is part of the Warren-based U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, or TACOM. It acts as the Army's link with the auto industry and universities in developing technology for both defense and commercial applications.
Other concepts on display at the NAC booth include a program developed by DaimlerChrysler AG (news/quote) and Oakland University for automotive electronics design, and General Motors Corp. (news/quote)'s hybrid electrical transmission that produces lower levels of carbon monoxide.
``Not everything you see will be on every single vehicle, but many of the features will find their way into the trucks used to protect the embassy, the personnel, patrol our hot zones around the world,'' Wend said of the NEC's truck projects.
``Still, other advances will be adapted by trucking companies looking for state-of-the-art location reporting systems, and a few might even find it onto your new SUV.''
On the Net:
TACOM Web site: http://www.tacom.army.mil
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Michigan congressman forced to strip to underwear for security at Washington airport
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
Breaking News Sections
AP
Security guards at Washington's Reagan National Airport forced U.S. Rep. John Dingell to strip to his underwear before boarding a flight to Detroit.
The guards at the Northwest Airlines terminal did not believe the 75-year-old congressman's explanation about his metal hip, which he received after a horse fell on him 20 years ago.
"They felt me up and down like a prize steer," Dingell, D-Mich., said. "I was very nice, but I probably showed I was displeased."
The private security guards made him take off his overcoat, then his suit coat, then his shoes and socks on Saturday. When he still triggered metal detector alarms, the guards took him to a back room and asked him to remove his trousers.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta heard about the incident and said he would look into it, Dingell said.
"I asked Norman to check to see if they treated me like they do everybody else," Dingell said. "I just wanted to be sure that what they did was necessary, that I got the same treatment, no better or no worse, than anyone else."
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U.S. Takes First Steps On Encoded Licenses
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Washington Times
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11413-2002Jan7?language=printer
The federal government is taking first steps with the states to develop driver's licenses that can electronically store information, such as fingerprints.
Privacy experts fear the effort may lead to de facto national identification cards that would allow authorities to track citizens electronically. Supporters said it was predictable after Sept. 11. With careful use, they say, these new licenses could alert authorities if a suspected terrorist tried to board an airliner, withdraw cash or enter the country.
The Transportation Department, under instructions from Congress, is expected to develop rules for states to encode data onto driver's licenses to prevent criminals from using them as false identification.
----
ABA Panel Supports Limited Military Trials
By Anne Gearan
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11085-2002Jan7.html
A panel of the American Bar Association found the magnitude of the crime committed on Sept. 11 justifies limited use of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, the lawyers' group said yesterday.
"The unprecedented and horrible attacks of Sept. 11 demonstrated that the United States faces an organized enemy with the resources and the will to cause mass death and destruction in the United States and elsewhere," the study panel wrote in a report sent to the Pentagon.
"It is the duty of our government to bring those responsible to justice and to take all legal measures to minimize the possibility of future terrorist attacks, consistent with its duty to preserve fundamental rights and liberties," the report said.
The Pentagon is putting final touches on rules for military tribunals and has formed an office to deal with details such as where the tribunals might operate. Under an executive order issued by President Bush, military tribunals to try non-American suspects are an option for the president and prosecutors. They also could decide to try in civilian courts all those facing terrorism charges.
The report submitted to the Pentagon does not represent a policy statement from the full ABA, the nation's largest lawyers' group with more than 400,000 members. Such a statement could come next month, when the ABA's policymaking body meets in Philadelphia.
Many civil liberties groups have criticized Bush's preliminary plans to use special military tribunals to try foreigners suspected of involvement in the September hijackings and attacks.
The ABA's president has urged the White House to move with caution but has taken no formal position. The ABA has opposed government monitoring of suspects' conversations with their lawyers.
The association created the panel on terrorism and the law to look at legal and civil liberties questions arising from the attacks and the United States' war on terrorism.
Military tribunals like those outlined by Bush on Nov. 13 should be used only in "narrow circumstances in which compelling security interests justify their use," the panel's report said.
For example, military tribunals should not be used to try anyone legally in the United States nor anyone in the United States accused of crimes unrelated to the Sept. 11 attacks, the panel said.
The panel recommended that the tribunals follow rules for regular military courts-martial, which differ from civilian rules but nevertheless accord recognized legal rights for defendants.
Use of tribunals instead of regular civilian courts, which have broader protections for the accused, "would be a controversial step," the ABA panel wrote. "If conducted under reasonable procedures, . . . they can deliver justice with due process."
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Judge rules ex-radical violated gag order
Around the Nation
Washington Times
January 8, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020108-24970600.htm
ATLANTA - The former '60s radical once known as H. Rap Brown violated a gag order in his murder case and will lose some jail privileges, a judge ruled yesterday.
Fulton County Judge Stephanie Manis said Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin deliberately tried to taint the jury pool by writing public letters from jail and by giving an interview to the New York Times, which was published Sunday.
To make sure it doesn't happen again, Judge Manis stripped him of his telephone privileges and limited his visitors to the Fulton County jail. Jury selection begins today.
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Agencies going to the dogs
January 8, 2002
By Matthew Barakat
Washington Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020108-20227414.htm
FRONT ROYAL, Va. - Find a bomb, get some kibble. Find a gun, get some more kibble.
That's the message drilled into the dogs at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' (ATF) Canine Training Center, which turns out about 50 Labrador retrievers each year to sniff out bombs, guns and all kinds of explosive materials.
The ATF facility trains dogs not only for itself, but for local, state, federal and international police agencies. The Front Royal dogs are now used by K-9 officers in 38 states and 12 countries.
Since September 11, demand for the dogs has increased significantly.
"I used to get about one call a week asking about our program. Now I get four or five," said Shawn Crawford, one of about 10 dog trainers at the ATF site.
The standards the dogs must meet are strict. In their final test, the dogs are given 80 unmarked samples, including 20 with explosive material. The dogs must identify all 20 explosive samples, and are allowed just two "false positive" errors - mistaking an innocuous sample for an explosive.
The dogs undergo a 16-week training process in which they learn to work with a specific handler to identify five nitrogen-based compounds that are essential to almost every explosive and firearm. Any time the dog correctly identifies the explosive, it sits quietly to alert its handler. If the dog is correct, it is rewarded with food.
In fact, the only time the dogs ever eat is when they identify an explosive material. That means the dog's handler must practice with his dog every day, allowing it to identify explosive samples to earn its sustenance.
The system also ensures that dogs won't be distracted from their work by the scent of a salami on rye.
"We train them to ignore novel odors that a normal dog would be attracted to," Mr. Crawford said. "They're conditioned pretty quickly to learn that if they smell food, it doesn't mean that they're going to eat food."
The food-reward system is very different from that employed by the U.S. Customs Service, which also trains its dogs at a nearby site in Front Royal, about 60 miles west of the District.
Customs dogs are trained to sniff out narcotics and currency, not explosives. A dog that identifies those substances will respond by pawing and biting at the material, and will be rewarded with a game of tug-of-war.
But Carl Newcombe, acting director of the Customs Service's canine program, said the agency is considering a change in focus to train its dogs to sniff out explosives as well as narcotics. That would require a change to a food-reward system with a passive response.
"Based on our current objectives, anti-terrorism is now our No. 1 priority. So we may be training our own explosive dogs," Mr. Newcombe said. "If you had a dog finding explosives, you wouldn't want it pawing and scratching at the target location."
Both agencies use Labrador retrievers as their dogs - male or female, all colors. The Customs Service will use some other breeds, including German shepherds and mixed breeds. Mr. Crawford said the dogs don't necessarily have better noses, but their easygoing temperament makes them ideal.
The dogs need to be able to operate in noisy environments and be friendly, Mr. Crawford said.
"People are going to pet them. They're a magnet. But as soon as they're done getting petted, they get right back to work," he said. "They're fantastic public relations. They're good with children."
Because of the increased demand for the dogs, the ATF hopes it will receive additional funding to expand its training program.
The Customs Service also has had increased inquiries for dogs from police agencies, but most of the dogs trained by Customs are used by the agency itself. Customs trains about 100 dogs a year, but has 500 active dog-and-handler teams, Mr. Newcombe said.
ATF, on the other hand, has just five special agents who regularly work with dogs.
With the ATF's dogs in use all over the world, the bureau hears success stories on a regular basis. A few years ago, an ATF-trained dog in Egypt alerted a SWAT team to the presence of explosives. The agents later learned that the door they were about to knock down was booby-trapped with 40 pounds of dynamite. The Egyptian police sent a note back to Front Royal: "Your dog saved 11 lives."
Mr. Crawford said he is glad that more police agencies are starting to recognize the role a bomb-sniffing dog can play. The ATF provides the training to police agencies for free. Once completed, that agency has a low-cost, low-tech, highly effective crime-fighting tool.
"If you can't afford a few bucks for dog food and teeth cleaning, something's wrong," Mr. Crawford said.
-------- OTHER
-------- alternative energy
FUEL CELL CARS FACE TECHNOLOGICAL, POLITICAL BARRIERS
January 8, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2002/2002L-01-08-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, A comprehensive study of fuel cell vehicles published by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) details the hurdles to be crossed before fuel cell vehicles can see market success.
John DeCicco, a senior fellow with the conservation group Environmental Defense, has released a study of fuel cell vehicles published by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The study highlights rapid progress in fuel cell research and the technology's future promise, but notes that technical and public policy barriers are hindering the technology's development.
"Compared to other long run options," said DeCicco, "fuel cells hold great promise to address multiple concerns, including air pollution, oil dependence, and global warming, while efficiently meeting car customers' growing needs for on board electricity."
In light of the report's findings, Environmental Defense is calling on auto makers to take a more constructive stance on fuel economy standards and other policies that will pull advanced, energy efficient technologies such as fuel cells into the market sooner.
The study finds that the absence of market wide requirements for higher fuel economy blocks progress on many vehicle technologies, including fuel cells.
"It is inconsistent for the industry to tout its work on fuel cells while fighting higher fuel economy standards," said Mills.
Several auto makers have committed to putting fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2005. But the report identifies a "deployability gap" of another 10 to 15 years before a business case can be made for mass market fuel cell cars.
"Closing this gap entails speeding up progress along several challenging technical pathways," said said DeCicco.
In addition to its technology assessment, the study evaluates fuel cell vehicles within the broader context of competing technologies, market trends and pertinent public policies.
"Fuel cell technologies should receive a high priority for government research funding," said Kevin Mills, director of Environmental Defense's Clean Car Campaign. "Well targeted tax incentives such as the Senate CLEAR Act [Cleaner Efficient Automobiles Resulting From Advanced Car Technologies] will also help advance clean vehicle technologies."
----
AUTOSHOW - Government and automakers to back fuel cell vehicles
USA: January 8, 2002
Story by Michael Ellis and Justin Hyde
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13943/story.htm
DETROIT - The U.S. government has agreed to a program with major automakers to promote the development of hydrogen as an alternative fuel for cars and trucks, as part of efforts to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said on Monday he would announce the program on Wednesday with the heads of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler arm of DaimlerChrysler AG, who have gathered in Detroit this week for the industry's annual auto show.
Under the program, expected to be called "Freedom Car," the government will fund research into fuel cells, which use hydrogen to produce electricity without creating pollution as gasoline engines do.
"That would be a major achievement," said Thad Malesh, director of alternative power technologies practice with J.D. Power and Associates, an automotive industry consulting group. "Without their (government) involvement, it means the industry is out there blowing in the breeze."
The deal will also advance different ways of handling hydrogen and creating an infrastructure to make the fuel widely available.
Automakers have been spending billions of dollars on research to develop fuel cells as an eventual replacement for gasoline-powered combustion engines, which have powered cars for 100 years. But a big hurdle for the widespread adoption of fuel cell vehicles is the need for an infrastructure to make hydrogen more available - a replacement for the gasoline station found along most roads.
"The more certain we are about the infrastructure, the more aggressive we can be about the cars. Bottom line - (the government is a) huge force in what we're talking about," said Byron McCormick, GM's executive director for fuel-cell activities.
American drivers now burn about 370 million gallons of gasoline a day in passenger vehicles, which is projected to grow to 433 million gallons over the next decade if fuel economy does not improve, according to the U.S. government. Last year, passenger vehicle engines created 284 million metric tons of carbon dioxide gas, a major contributor to global warming.
Having more cars on the road that run on fuel cells would reduce gasoline consumption, which accounts for 44 percent of total U.S. demand for petroleum products. The cars should help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, which accounts for 60 percent of America's petroleum supply.
The "Freedom Car" program, focusing on fuel cells, will replace the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles program, a multibillion-dollar research effort between automakers and the U.S. government that sought to develop an affordable gasoline-burning family sedan capable of getting 80 miles per gallon by 2004.
Automakers have succeeded in building a few highly fuel-efficient cars, but they would cost several thousand dollars more than comparably-priced vehicles if they went on sale, according to a government report.
The Bush administration proposed last year to slash the program's $141 million research budget within the Energy Department by $40 million, but Congress restored most of the funding.
The "Freedom Car" program comes as automakers fight tougher federal fuel economy requirements under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, Japanese automakers have already begun selling high-mileage "hybrid" vehicles, which are powered by a small gasoline engine and an electric motor.
Environmentalists have pushed for higher mileage standards and wider uses of hybrid power, but many automakers contend the mileage standards do little to curb fuel consumption, and that hybrids are too expensive currently for mass production.
Studying future uses of hydrogen is "legitimate research, but it's a smokescreen," John DeCicco, a senior fellow with Environmental Defense. "It's using legitimate future research needs to hide the fact the Japanese have beaten the pants off them for delivering the goods to the marketplace."
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FPL starts wind power projects in Texas, Washington
USA: January 8, 2002
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13945/story.htm
NEW YORK - FPL Group unit FPL Energy LLC said on Monday it began full operation of two large wind power plants, one in Texas and one in Washington state.
The company, the nation's largest wind energy producer, said the 278-megawatt (MW) King Mountain Clean Energy Center near Odessa, Texas, and the 263-MW Stateline Clean Energy Center near Walla Walla, Washington, began operations in mid-December 2001.
The two plants join three other wind power facilities FPL started in 2001 - 160 MW at Woodward Mountain, also near Odessa, Texas, 112 MW in Gray County, Kansas, and 30 MW in Monfort, Wisconsin.
FPL Energy operates 1,830 MW and owns 1,439 MW of wind power facilities in eight states.
"(Wind power) is a clean, renewable source of energy that can be sited, built and in operation much more rapidly than conventional fossil fuel facilities," FPL Energy vice president of wind development, Dean Gosselin said.
The company said it will continue to look for appropriate sites for wind power development, but expressed concern about the future of the renewable energy source following the December 2001 expiration of the federal wind energy production tax credit.
"Elimination of the federal production tax credit for wind power will negatively impact future construction of these important renewable energy power plants across the country," Gosselin said.
"FPL Energy will continue working with members of Congress to extend the wind energy production tax credit," he added.
Juno Beach, Florida-based FPL Group's principal subsidiary, Florida Power and Light Co., serves some 7.3 million people along the eastern seaboard and the southern portion of Florida.
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Forget swords turning into plowshares.
UPI hears ...
1/8/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=08012002-121659-2306r
As part of their conversion to the new euro, Germans are turning banknotes into booze. The Landesbank (central bank) for the states of Berlin and Brandenburg has sent 200 tons of old German deutsch mark notes worth 56 billion DM -- about $26 billion -- to the old East German Schwarze Pumpe factory to be distilled into pure industrial alcohol. More conventionally in Dusseldorf, bank notes are being burned to produce electricity and heat.
-------- environment
In N.Y., Taking a Breath of Fear
Illnesses Bring New Doubts About Toxic Exposure Near Ground Zero
By Christine Haughney
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11173-2002Jan7?language=printer
NEW YORK -- There was something about the air. For a while after Sept. 11, George Tabb and his wife tried to stick it out in their apartment just north of the World Trade Center, tried to ignore his twice-nightly asthma attacks and her pounding headaches.
Eventually, they moved in with Tabb's stepfather. But Tabb still goes home to pick up his mail, and within 20 minutes the metallic taste returns to his mouth, and the wheezing.
"All of a sudden, boom, I've got a nosebleed, the asthma, a headache," he said.
Recently Tabb received evidence that the air in his apartment may be as dangerous as he suspects. Independent tests -- results of which are disputed by the city -- found that dust taken from an air vent in his apartment building's hallway contained 555 times the suggested acceptable level for asbestos. Samples from a bathroom vent show dangerous levels of fiberglass.
"No one knows what was burning down there" at ground zero, he said. "I am concerned that in five years or 10 years, I'm going to be part of a cancer cluster."
Nearly four months after the World Trade Center attacks, the fires there are largely extinguished. But fears of the toxic brew left behind in lower Manhattan's air remain -- as do concerns that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies did not warn residents sufficiently or soon enough of the dangers.
Many of those who live or work downtown report strikingly similar symptoms: nosebleeds, sore throats, bronchial infections and an endless racking cough.
"People's airways are narrowing down," said Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of the nationally renowned Mount Sinai I.J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. "We have cases of new onset reactive airway disease for people who were in excellent physical condition prior to September 11th."
About one-fourth of the city's firefighters have complained of severe coughing after working at ground zero, and more than a thousand have filed notices of claims against the city. Last week four Port Authority police officers were reassigned from the site after they tested positive for elevated mercury levels in their blood.
Dozens of students at nearby Stuyvesant High School have complained of rashes, nosebleeds, headaches and respiratory infections. Three teachers have left because of respiratory problems.
"I'm really concerned," said Marilena Christadoulou, head of the school's Parents' Association. "It's a concern that comes from the whole unprecedented and unknown nature of what is down at ground zero."
The EPA, which has conducted thousands of tests of Lower Manhattan's air since Sept. 11, has repeatedly assured residents that the air is safe to breathe. Doctors note that some symptoms could be caused or enhanced by stress -- and many will undoubtedly dissipate as the last smoldering fires go out and the air grows clearer.
But Levin and others fear the unpredictable effects of the combination of many dangerous substances released into the downtown air could lead to significant long-term health problems.
"Nobody knows," said Regina Santella, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan. "We know what the monitoring data tells us and we know the symptoms of what people have. It's just hard to reconcile the two pieces of information."
EPA's Role Questioned
In the weeks after the World Trade Center towers fell, tens of thousands of New Yorkers tried to decide whether it was safe to move back into apartments and businesses near the site of the attacks. The EPAplayed a leading role in calming those fears.
"I am glad to reassure the people of New York . . . that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink," EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said a week after the attacks. "The good news for the residents of New York is that the air, while smoky, is not dangerous," an EPA spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times at about the same time. And at the end of September, another spokeswoman, citing recent tests for asbestos, told the New York Daily News: "There was not a significant risk, even in the early days."
The agency released selected test results that seemed to buttress those assertions.
But the EPA also found more troubling results, and it did not release that data until after the nonprofit New York Environmental Law and Justice Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request. These tests found elevated levels of dioxin, PCBs, lead and chromium, all toxic substances, in the air, soil and water around the site.
In a Sept. 26 EPA test, for example, three of 10 samples near the attack site showed elevated readings for lead. Exposure to lead can damage the kidneys and central nervous system, and is especially dangerous to children. An Oct. 11 EPA test in the ground zero area found benzene, a colorless liquid that evaporates quickly but can cause leukemia in long-term exposure, measured 58 times above the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration's limit.
Those results were not released until late October.
EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow said the late release was an oversight, caused by the chaos of those first weeks. She added that the agency had performed 3,561 tests for asbestos in New York, and only 29 of those recorded higher levels than the federal standard.
But Joel Kupferman, the environmental law project's executive director, is not convinced.
"They've created this false climate that things are safe," he said. "They're trying to insinuate that since September 11th, the problem is gone and it's going to get better."
Alerted to concerns about Tabb's building, he said, the project hired an independent industrial hygienist to conduct tests of surfaces there on Dec. 3, using methods published by the American Society for Testing and Materials. The tests found the presence of settled asbestos dust 555 times above the suggested acceptable level.
Asked about those results, spokesman Geoff Ryan of the city's Department of Environmental Protection said the department does not recognize this type of test, and that its own tests at the building, done on Dec. 12, had come back negative.
Scientists with HP Environmental Inc. of Reston, Va., warn that the asbestos dust in Lower Manhattan is so finely pulverized that the EPA's more conventional tests may not pick itup. The company tested the air forthe Port Authority of New York and New Jersey following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, andit returned after Sept. 11 to test for dangerous levels of asbestos.
Their first tests on Sept. 21 and 22 found that the air was safe.
But follow-up tests, aimed at detecting finer particulate matter, recorded much higher levels of contamination. Now they suspect that asbestos is embedded in the walls and carpeting of nearby buildings, according to the study team's leader, Hugh Granger.
EPA officials offer conflicting advice at this point. They say the apartments and office towers around ground zero are safe -- but they advise landlords to seek professional asbestos cleaners. And they've advised all workers on the site to wear respirators.
"There is nothing we have found that is at a significant level," said Bellow of the EPA, "that would say you should not come here to live or work."
Some environmental experts say that the EPA, at the very least, failed to promptly communicate test results to the public. The agency was too quick, they said, to interpret a few test results as a clean bill of health.
"The public did not receive the information it needed in a prompt fashion," said Eric Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who is working on an environmental assessment of the World Trade Center area. Asked about the EPA's early assurances that the air was safe, he said: "A week after this event it would have been very hard to make conclusive statements about air quality in either direction."
Kathryn Freed, a City Council member until her term ended Dec. 31, is still worried. She lives a few blocks from the World Trade Center site and has suffered from bronchitis and nosebleeds.
"They should be measuring us. They should be monitoring us," she said. "There's like a disconnect between what's actually happening here and what they're saying."
Problems at a Nearby School
Stuyvesant High School, one of the city's most prestigious public schools, reopened to students on Oct. 9. Five blocks north of the World Trade Center site, it is next to the pier where rubble from ground zero is loaded onto barges to be taken to the Staten Island landfill.
From the start students and teachers complained of eye and respiratory problems. When the Department of Health announced that students could report their illnesses for a study, teenagers waited in line for more than an hour outside the nurse's office.
Sophomore Georgia Faust said her eyes became infected, "watering so much it would feel like you're peeling onions." Several students needed inhalers to rid themselves of sinus infections.
The city's Board of Education insists the site is safe, and that its air quality is monitored each day. And special floor mats have been installed at the entryways to prevent students from tracking in dust.
"There's something in the air and that's dust," said spokeswoman Catie Marshall. "But it's not the kind of thing that's going to have a long-term effect."
When Brooklyn firefighter Palmer Doyle arrived at the World Trade Center after the second tower collapsed, there was one respirator for 47 firefighters. He worked almost a month of 12-hour shifts wearing a flimsy paper mask. Later in October, his hoarseness, bronchitis and a hacking cough kept him off the job for 16 days.
"Guys are a little scared. They're nervous," he said. "We know what environment we worked in and it wasn't healthy."
The Uniformed Firefighters Association estimates that about one-third of its 9,000 members suffer from the "World Trade Center cough." Tom Manley has it too; he's a union chief who spent countless hours at ground zero consoling relatives and digging for victims. He carries an inhaler and cough medicine. "You wake up in the morning with a heavy cough, which I've never had before," he said. "You can't breathe."
David Prezant, a doctor who has spent 15 years with the New York Fire Department, says he is more concerned about chemicals than dust: "There is treatment for particulate matter exposure," he said. "There is no treatment for PCBs."
Apartment Ills
Tribeca and Battery Park City are two of this city's newest residential neighborhoods, the former constructed out of old industrial lofts, the latter on landfill. Thousands of young families flocked here. Now the area's proximity to ground zero has many talking about getting out. Who wants their children exposed to the air and dust?
George Tabb and his wife say their symptoms disappear within 48 hours of leaving their Tribeca apartment. But the landlord refuses to tear up their lease. Tabb's insurance company won't pay to clean his apartment of dust and asbestos until his landlord cleans up the building's ventilation system. Management started a cleanup last month,but not an asbestos abatement.
The Tabbs had planned to start a family. The city Health Department recently stated that the air is safe for pregnant women. But the Tabbs aren't buying that.
"We're going to have kids," he said, "and I don't know what's going to happen."
--------
Study: Millions Drink Dirty Water
January 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Water-Quality.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Millions of Americans have been drinking tap water contaminated with chemical byproducts from chlorine that are far more than what studies suggest may be safe for pregnant women, two environmental groups say.
Chlorine is commonly used to disinfect drinking water. When it is added to water that contains organic matter such as runoff from farms or lawns, however, it can form compounds such as chloroform that can cause illness.
The study released Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group and Public Interest Research Groups identified areas that may have increased health risks including miscarriage, neural tube defects and reduced fetal growth from women drinking chlorination byproducts.
``By failing to clean up rivers and reservoirs that provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of Americans, EPA and the Congress have forced water utilities to chlorinate water that is contaminated with animal waste, sewage, fertilizer, algae and sediment,'' the report says.
Jane Houlihan, EWG's research director, said the report also shows how that cleanup failure has ``a direct impact on human health.'' Pregnant women need to drink plenty of water, she said, but they can reduce their exposure to potential risks through simple measures such as home filters and purchasing bottled water.
However, C.T. Howlett Jr., executive director of the Chlorine Chemistry Council, said government agencies found no compelling link between reproductive hazards and chlorinated water.
He said chlorine has been added to drinking water for more than a century, and the environmental groups' study ``may unnecessarily alarm the public and, in particular, pregnant women, about risks that are not supported by scientific evidence.''
Catherine C. Milbourn, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, said, ``EPA has standards in place for these byproducts and has set even stricter standards in 2002 that local water providers are beginning to implement.''
Milbourn added that the EPA ``has an ongoing health research program to provide additional scientific insight into the potential risks posed by disinfection byproducts.''
Still, if the pregnancy studies are proved, millions could be at risk, said Dr. Robert Morris, an environmental epidemiologist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.
``That body of literature isn't necessarily conclusive but people ought to be aware of it,'' Morris said. ``It's pretty clear that some of these compounds can be pretty bad actors. The fact that these levels are as high as they are is certainly something to be concerned about.''
The environmental groups combed water quality records in 29 states and the District of Columbia and matched them with various research into birth defects and miscarriages conducted by state and federal agencies and universities.
The groups said the places statistically most at risk due to chlorination byproducts were those that are populous, lacked buffers from urban sprawl and were downstream from agricultural sites. But women in small towns generally face twice the risk from drinking high levels of the byproducts, Houlihan said.
Matching high rates doesn't prove the environmental risk caused the health problems, however. Also, the results are limited because, among other reasons, such health records do not exist in some states.
-------- health
Workers Exposed to Anthrax Shun Vaccine
Low Participation Is Blamed on Confusing Signals From U.S. Health Authorities
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11026-2002Jan7?language=printer
Only 152 people of more than 5,100 exposed to deadly anthrax bacteria in the attacks last fall have accepted the federal government's offer to take an anthrax vaccine on an experimental basis, federal health officials reported yesterday.
As a group, congressional staffers were far more inclined to get vaccinated, while employees of the Brentwood postal station -- where two workers died of pulmonary anthrax and two others became ill with the disease -- overwhelmingly rejected the offer.
The stark contrast revived criticism that the decision to offer vaccine without providing specific medical recommendations left thousands frustrated and frightened about how best to protect themselves from a disease that has confounded the experts.
"I don't think they should have offered this if they weren't going to give a recommendation," said C.J. Peters, former chief of special pathogens at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who is now a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "If you don't think a treatment will be useful, you shouldn't bring it up."
Although a half million military personnel have received anthrax inoculations as a preventive measure, the vaccine has never been administered as a post-exposure treatment. In addition, the vaccine maker, BioPort Corp., has yet to receive final government approval for its Lansing, Mich., plant.
Two weeks ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced that uncertainty about how long anthrax spores can survive in the lungs prompted the decision to offer the vaccine as an additional treatment option. But Thompson and the CDC refused to take a position on the vaccine, and the public heard sharply divergent opinions from some of the nation's most respected physicians. The numbers suggest those conflicting messages were a factor in whether a person decided to take the vaccine.
On Capitol Hill, where doctors began promoting the vaccine even before Thompson's announcement, more than 38 percent of the people most likely exposed to anthrax spores opted for it. Most of them were in close proximity to a tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.). At the Brentwood post office, where local officials and union leaders opposed the vaccine, just 37 of 1,914 people received the first of three shots.
"The absence of a clear recommendation from CDC about who should take vaccine, coupled with the absence of any follow-up care, made it very difficult for the postal workers to say 'we'll take it,' " said D.C. Health Director Ivan Walks.
Walks and Mayor Anthony Williams recommended against the vaccine, citing the lack of evidence that it worked for this purpose and its possible side effects.
CDC released its tally after running educational programs for two weeks in the District, Florida, New York and New Jersey. A limited number of postal workers in Connecticut may yet be offered the vaccine.
Nationwide, 2 percent of postal workers and members of the media took the vaccine. Many more people -- about 1,200 -- opted for an extra 40-day supply of antibiotics, calculating that the medication would provide sufficient added insurance.
After studying the numbers and speaking to numerous patients, CDC Director Jeffrey Koplan said he believed people based their decision on their perceived sense of risk. "The folks most likely to go for the vaccine felt they really had a significant exposure that merited this response," he said.
Several researchers and clinicians, however, said the results revive questions about whether the public has been adequately educated on the possible risks and benefits of such vaccines.
"We've not done the proper informational job to acquaint people with its safety and efficacy," said Philip Brachman, an anthrax expert at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. "That's a major problem."
Peters said he was baffled why Thompson and Koplan waited until mid-December to mention the prospect of vaccination.
"The information was available," he said referring to a handful of animal studies. "People knew this was going to be a problem and they had time to consider this and present it to the people who were involved."
As experts continued to debate the federal government's handling of the recent anthrax attacks, the CDC was moving forward with another controversial treatment. Health officials said they are stockpiling protein taken from the blood of vaccinated soldiers in case another attack occurs. Researchers believe the protein, called immune globulin, could neutralize the deadly toxin produced by the anthrax bacterium and have asked for permission to test the theory.
-------- human rights
Court limits 'disability' protection
By Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
1/8/2002 1:47 PM
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=08012002-103925-4633r
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court has severely limited the definition of a disability under the federal law that bans discrimination against the disabled.
The court ruled Tuesday that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not necessarily protect those with impairments that prevent them from doing manual tasks associated with a particular job.
The unanimous decision was bad news for anyone who performs some manual task as part of a job, from assembly line workers who perform repeated motions to computer programmers who type in endless lines of source code.
The decision also means workers may have to show an impairment with effects substantially beyond the workplace, one that reaches into the most intimate parts of their lives, before a company can be forced under law to "accommodate" their disabilities.
The decision came in the case of Ella Williams, who began working at the Toyota manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Ky., in August 1990.
Her duties on the assembly line included work with pneumatic tools, which eventually caused acute pain in her hands, wrists and arms.
A company doctor diagnosed her with carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis, and her personal doctor placed restrictions on how much weight she could lift and told her she should no longer work with pneumatic tools.
Toyota tried to accommodate her disability by placing Williams on modified duty over the next two years, but the employee eventually filed a claim under state workers' compensation.
When she returned to work, she again had trouble doing what Toyota required of her, and Williams filed suit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.
That suit was settled and Williams returned to work, but her new job eventually required her to apply highlight oil to cars passing on the assembly line, something that made her raise her arms to shoulder height for hours at a time.
Williams again sought help from the company doctor, who diagnosed her as having, among other things, inflammation of muscles and tendons around her shoulder blades, nerve irritation and something called "thoracic outlet compression," causing pain in the nerves that lead to the upper extremities.
At this point, employer and employee disagree as to the record. Williams says Toyota wanted her to continue in her duties, which she refused for medical reasons. Toyota says Williams simply began to miss work.
On Dec. 6, 1996, Williams received a letter from her doctors saying she could do no work of any kind at the plant. The following month, she received a letter from Toyota that terminated her employment.
After her complaint was approved by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Williams again filed suit against Toyota, saying the company had violated the ADA by failing to reasonably accommodate her disability and by firing her.
The ADA requires companies to reasonably accommodate those who suffer a physical or mental impairment "that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities ..."
Williams' suit said she was substantially limited in performing manual tasks; housework; gardening; playing with her children; lifting and working.
A federal judge ruled summarily for Toyota. But a federal appeals court reversed. The company then asked the Supreme Court for review.
The justices heard arguments last November.
Tuesday, they reversed the appeals court in favor of the company, and in doing so, substantially narrowed the protection of the ADA.
In the court's unanimous opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the appeals court made a mistake in its definition of a "major life activity."
The "manual tasks unique to any particular job are not necessarily important parts of most people's lives," O'Connor wrote in her opinion. "As a result, occupation-specific tasks may have only limited relevance to the manual task inquiry" under the ADA.
The appeals court "should not have considered (Williams') inability to do such manual work in her specialized assembly line job as sufficient proof that she was substantially limited in performing manual tasks," O'Connor said.
"At the same time, the court of appeals appears to have disregarded the very type of evidence that it should have focused upon," she added. "It treated as irrelevant" the fact that Williams can tend "to her personal hygiene" and carry out "personal or household chores."
"Yet household chores, bathing and brushing one's teeth are among the types of manual tasks of central importance to people's daily lives, and should have been part of the assessment of whether (Williams) was subtantially limited in performing manual tasks," O'Connor said.
Tuesday's ruling sends the case back down to the appeals court for a new decision based on the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion.
(No. 00-1089, Toyota Motor Mfging of Ky. vs. Williams)
----
Interior Halts Indian Payments
Many Checks Stopped After Judge's Order Closed Internet Links
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11034-2002Jan7.html
Forty thousand Native Americans have not received any royalty checks from the federal government since Dec. 6, when a federal judge ordered the Interior Department to shut down its Internet links, ironically, to help protect the Indians' money.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who is presiding over a long-running lawsuit alleging federal mismanagement of Indian trust funds, concluded last month that inadequate computer security left the trust accounts, with about $3 billion in assets, vulnerable to outside hackers.
The federal government is supposed to issue royalty payments -- some monthly, some quarterly, some annually -- for the use of the Indians' land.
But because the Interior Department relies on its Internet system to track the accounts, it has not been able to make the last round of payments -- what Native Americans say is about $40 million worth.
"The hardship to Indian country has been substantial," said Keith Harper, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which is representing the Indians in the five-year-old legal battle. "This is sorely needed money that fulfills basic needs for a lot of folks."
The Interior Department, Harper said, is playing "a really cruel game of politics" by keeping its Web sites down to increase public -- and Native American -- pressure on the court to restore the Internet links.
"That's an unfortunate characterization and it's patently untrue," Interior spokesman Eric Ruff said.
Ruff said that general-assistance checks have been issued to Indians to help them cover basic needs. Royalty payments will be made eventually, he said, "as soon as we can work out with the [court's] special master to bring some of our systems back up that relate to this lease information."
Lamberth's order, which came at the request of the plaintiffs, affects all Interior agencies with possible connections to Indian trust data through the Internet, thus pulling the plug on Web sites for the U.S. Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.That means people cannot go online and look up campground information from the National Park Service or data on leasing land from the Bureau of Land Management.
The Interior Department restored its U.S. Geological Survey Web site over the weekend, with permission from the court, because the USGS gathers and transmits data used by the National Weather Service and other agencies.
The department has a temporary site with speeches and press releases linked via the USGS site.
-------- activists
NUKEWATCH'S BONNIE URFER RETURNED TO PRISON
From: "Nukewatch" <nukewatch@lakeland.ws>
Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2002
Longtime Nukewatch staffer and co-director Bonnie Urfer (who was convicted last February of misdemeanor damage to Navy property for helping cut down three antenna poles that are part of the Project ELF submarine transmitter system) turned herself in to federal prison camp in Greenville, Ill. Friday, January 4.
At a December 12 hearing in Madison, WI, U.S. Magistrate Stephen Crocker sentenced Urfer to another five months in prison for her refusal to pay restitution to the Navy for the estimated damage to the ELF system. She had been ordered to pay over 4,700 dollars.
Urfer has already served six months for the conviction, which was handed down by after a jury trial in Madison last February 21. She will be released June 4, 2002.
In a Nov. 20 conversation with her federal probation officer, Bonnie said that giving restitution money to the Navy "would make me feel like a killer." Bonnie said, "I can't pretend that paying restitution isn't a bloody business, especially now with the government bombing even more." Bonnie was of course referring to the long-term bombardment of Iraq and the relatively recent bombing and missile attacks on Afghanistan.
The Navy ELF transmitter sends one-way signals to submerged British and U.S. missile-firing submarines around the world, and has been the target of five similar "plowshares" actions that involved cutting or damaging the system. More than 550 anti-war activists have been arrested at the site since the end of the Cold War.
The annual Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday demonstration against the system is scheduled for Sunday, January 20.
The Duluth [Minnesota] News Tribune reported Oct. 4, 2001, that "U.S. subs get orders out of Wisconsin station," and said, "If American submarines patrolling waters of the Middle East get ordered to action, it's likely that message, or at least part of it, will come by way of Clam Lake in northern Wisconsin."
You can write to Bonnie, and send magazines or books, at:
BONNIE URFER 04970-045 F.P.C. GREENVILLE P.O. BOX 5000 GREENVILLE, IL 62246 USA
Or write C/O Nukewatch and I'll forward your letter to her. Sincerely, John LaForge For Nukewatch
----
Activists Plead Guilty in Calif. Missile Case
January 8, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-crime-protest.html
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sixteen people who were arrested during a protest at a July missile test at a U.S. Air Force base in California pleaded guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges that could land them in jail for up to six months.
The defendant each pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of conspiracy to enter a military property without permission.
A 17th defendant did not appear in court for the hearing and Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, said the man was out of the country and claiming medical issues that made it impossible to travel.
Prosecutors said 15 of the defendants who appeared in court were Greenpeace activists. The other defendant had press credentials when he was arrested but authorities said they doubted he was a bona fide journalist.
The guilty pleas came as prosecutors were preparing to go to trial against the defendants, who could have faced 11 years in prison if convicted on all of the counts against them.
Under the terms of a plea deal with prosecutors, each defendant faces a maximum of six months in a federal detention center.
The protesters were accused of using inflatable rafts and boats to enter a restricted zone in the Pacific Ocean off California's central coast last July to prevent the Air Force from launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The test, in which an unarmed missile was fired over the ocean and then destroyed by another rocket, was delayed while the Air Force cleared the 17 out of the restricted area.
The protesters, from Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, India, Sweden and the United States, were initially charged with conspiracy and trespassing into restricted space.
----
Eco-vandals condemned as domestic terrorists
But activists say all groups being tarred with extremist brush
Robert Schlesinger,
Boston Globe
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/01/08/MN42119.DTL
Washington -- On Sept. 20, as much of the country was still in shock from the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, self-proclaimed members of the Animal Liberation Front firebombed a primate research lab in New Mexico, causing $1 million in damage.
In October, a federal land management facility in California was torched, causing $85,000 in damage. Members of the Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility. The same movement is suspected of planting two homemade bombs in November at a forestry research center at Michigan Tech University.
As the Bush administration pursues its war on terrorism at home and abroad, some political leaders, particularly from Western states, want to ensure that extreme environmental and animal rights groups share the focus.
While even the harshest critics acknowledge that there is no proportionate comparison between Al Qaeda and groups like the Earth Liberation Front -- particularly because these radical environmental and animal rights groups have avoided taking lives -- they say that terrorism is terrorism.
"The point has come when we need to strip away the Robin Hood mystique from this terrorism in our country," said Rep. Scott McInnis, a Republican from Colorado.
McInnis's district includes the famed ski town of Vail. Earth Liberation Front members burned down a ski resort there in 1998, causing $12 million in damage. An estimated $40 million in damage is attributed to these radical groups over the past few years. That figure includes the fires at the Coulston Foundation labs in Alamogordo, N.M., in September and the Bureau of Land Management Wild Horse and Burro Facility in Litchfield (Lassen County), in October.
State bomb squad technicians defused the two bombs found outside forestry research buildings at Michigan Tech last month. The Earth Liberation Front has not claimed responsibility for planting the explosives, but self-identified members of the group sent threatening e-mails to the university.
FBI REPORT ON TERRORISM
The FBI, in its most recent report on terrorism in the United States, identified such groups as among the biggest and fastest-growing domestic threats.
"The threat posed by special interest extremism -- most notably the extreme fringes of the animal rights and environmental movements -- is also emerging as a significant concern for law enforcement," said the report, issued last year.
Group members style themselves as defenders of Earth or animals against rapacious corporations and a complicit government. They ask who the "extremists" really are.
"I find that torturing sentient animals, harming animals who would otherwise live a free life in the wild, I find that a bit extreme," said David Barbarash, a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front, which opposes the often-painful use of animals in medical or product testing. "I don't find torture a normal practice; I think that's an extreme practice."
CHARACTERIZATION REJECTED
Barbarash dismissed descriptions of his group and the Earth Liberation Front as terrorist organizations, saying that no one has ever been killed by their actions.
But there are similarities to terrorist organizations. ALF and ELF are organized in a cell structure, with small groups acting independently and without a central leader. The Internet is used as a tool to spread information and exhortation. ALF's Web site has a "recommended reading" section that includes a document on "Setting Fires With Electrical Timers -- An Earth Liberation Guide."
The decentralized set-up is designed to prevent interference with the groups' activities. "This decentralized structure helps keep activists out of jail and free to continue conducting actions," the ELF Web site says. Activists who damage property are rarely identified or caught.
Representative Darlene Hooley, a Democrat from Oregon whose district has endured a lot of clashes over the environment, is sponsoring a bill that would set up a national environmental terrorism information clearinghouse and step up federal aid for areas of high activity.
"There has been increased activity on ecoterrorism in our state and in the Northwest and in my district," said Hooley, who added that Oregon has experienced 100 "major acts of terrorism" in the past 20 years -- one-third of them in the last four years.
In February, McInnis will chair a hearing of a House Resources subcommittee focusing on ecoterrorism, and he has subpoenaed the former spokesman for ELF.
McInnis and a half-dozen other Western Republican legislators have also sent a letter to prominent mainstream environmental groups calling upon them to disavow groups like ELF and ALF. McInnis, who is regularly at odds with these groups on policy matters, likens his effort to the coalition-building the United States has done internationally against terrorism.
He hopes to form "coalitions with governments that do not necessarily agree with the U.S. on policy but agree that terrorism is not a way to solve policy differences," McInnis said.
Most of the environmental groups -- who had long-standing, vocal positions opposing the radical fringe of their movements -- rolled their eyes at the political posturing while reiterating their positions.
"I wonder why seven congressmen are so interested in challenging an organization to disavow ecoterrorism when Greenpeace has a perfect, 30-year record of peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience used to engage corrupt governments and corporations around the world," John Pasacantando, Greenpeace USA's Executive Director, wrote to McInnis. "I wish that you would drop this ruse of trying to link peaceful environmental efforts to terrorism -- just at the moment when the country needs you to actually focus on real issues."
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LISTSERVE ANNOUNCEMENT: FOCUS ON THE CORPORATION
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2002 13:39:22 -0800
Corp-Focus is a moderated listserve which distributes the weekly column "Focus on the Corporation," co-authored by Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, and Robert Weissman, editor of Multinational Monitor magazine.
Focus on the Corporation scrutinizes the multinational corporation -- the most powerful institution of our time. Once a week, it reports and comments critically on corporate actions, plans, abuses and trends. Written with a sharp edge and occasional irreverence, Focus on the Corporation covers:
- Globalization and corporate power;
- The double standards which excuse corporations for behavior (e.g., causing injury, accepting welfare) widely considered criminal or shameful when done by individuals;
- Trends in corporate economic blackmail, political influence and workplace organization;
- Industry-wide efforts to escape regulation, silence critics, employ new technologies or consolidate business among a few companies;
- Specific, extreme examples of corporate abuses: destruction of communities, trampling of democracy, poisoning of air and water; and
- The corporatization of our culture.
You can check out back columns, and information about Mokhiber and Weissman's book, Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy, at http://www.corporatepredators.org. To go directly to back columns, go to http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus.
Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve corp-focus@lists.essential.org. To subscribe to corp-focus, send an e-mail message to corp-focus-request@lists.essential.org with the text: subscribe
Focus on the Corporation columns are posted at <http://www.corporatepredators.org>.
Postings on corp-focus are limited to the columns. If you would like to comment on the columns, send a message to russell@essential.org or rob@essential.org.
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