------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Nuclear Plans Go Beyond Cuts
Indian planes in war games near Pakistan border
India's view
Bush Opens Two-Day Visit to S. Korea
Protests greet Bush in South Korea
Bush: Weapons Don't Belong in Korea
Russia expect deal with US as nuclear arms cuts talks begin
US insists it wants arms cut deal by Putin-Bush summit
Russia Says Sub Was Not Sunk by a Collision
Russia, U.S. Officials Consult
U.S. Says Arms Deal by May Summit Could Be Tough
No Quick Relief for Sick Nuclear Workers
Nevada sues Bush administration over Yucca Mountain
Making Money, the Bush Way
On the Road to Yucca Mountain
Nuclear waste disposal news conference
MILITARY
Afghans insist Paras not shot at
U.N. Prepares for Return of Afghan Refugees
U.S. general advises Afghans on raising professional army
Serb leaders acted on their own: Milosevic
Expert: Anthrax suspect ID'd
Biodefense funding creates quandary
'No One Asked Questions'
Civil War Preys on Civilians
Malaysia to Get Tougher with Hardcore Drug Addicts
No FARC in Peru
Court reviews HUD drug-eviction policy
EU goes ahead with Zimbabwe sanctions, pulls out observers
Georgia seeks anti-terror alliance
India Seeks Closer U.S. Relations
Iran working with Afghan rebels
Israel halts Gaza demolition
Reserve generals back unilateral withdrawal
Arafat Unhurt in Israeli Helicopter Attack
China to go ahead with port construction in Pak
Peru's court upholds Berenson's sentence
Pardon Ruled Out in Peru for Berenson
"Ashamed" Peru awards tortured ex-agent $120,000
US special forces to fly night patrols over Philippines hostage island
Where's the outrage?
Terror suspects arrested in Turkey planned bombing in Israel
Special Forces train for Somalia duty
Pentagon: Strikes Could Be Coming
Defense Officials See Need for New Thinking
Driver-draft registration OK likely
U.S. propaganda efforts
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
Iraq Accuses U.S. of Smear Campaign
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
Official publicly demands Venezuelan president step aside
POLICE / PRISONERS
Brazil's prisons under spotlight
South Korean security forces on top alert for Bush trip
Too much surveillance means too little freedom
EU's death-penalty objection divides Turkey
Italy Arrests Four Moroccans with Maps, Cyanide
ENERGY AND OTHER
In Energy Bill, a Daschle Nod to Key Farm States
FIREFIGHTER TOLD BUSH NOT TO DRILL IN ANWR
Jolt to the brain
ACTIVISTS
A Cooperative World Space Industry vs Star Wars
GRANTS AVAILABLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES
Art Nuko World Tour
Welcome to WebLobbying.com
Farrakhan blasts war on terrorism, urges trial of Bush
Expelled Protesters Rally in D.C.
-------- NUCLEAR
[I vote with the South Korean official in current hot water for describing Bush as "evil incarnate." et]
Nuclear Plans Go Beyond Cuts
Bush Seeks a New Generation Of Weapons, Delivery Systems
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30438-2002Feb18?language=printer
The Bush administration is studying the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons and strategic delivery systems at the same time it has announced its intention to sharply reduce the number of operationally deployed U.S. nuclear warheads.
The Nuclear Weapons Council, made up of officials from the Defense and Energy departments, has ordered a three-year study into developing a nuclear-tipped, earth-penetrating weapon that can destroy hardened underground targets. The administration has also established "advanced warhead concept teams" at the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories to work on new warheads or warhead modifications.
Both initiatives were proposed in a year-long study, the Nuclear Posture Review, conducted under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and approved by President Bush last month. But they were only made public Thursday in congressional testimony by retired Gen. John A. Gordon, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the country's nuclear weapons complex.
Some groups are criticizing the Bush administration's plans. "Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan's first term has there been such an emphasis on nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy," said the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that specializes in analyzing U.S. nuclear weapons programs.
At the time the Nuclear Posture Review was released, officials focused attention on its proposals for large-scale reductions in the number of nuclear warheads. Bush announced in November that the United States will reduce the number of deployed warheads from its current level of 6,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 within 10 years. But instead of destroying most of the warheads, the administration plans to put them in storage where they could be reactivated.
In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gordon said the Nuclear Weapons Council study on a bunker-penetrating warhead is examining two possible designs, one by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the other by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Gordon also said the studies "would proceed beyond the 'paper' stage and include a combination of component and subassembly tests and simulations."
The National Nuclear Security Administration workload, at least for the next 10 years, is overwhelmingly devoted to refurbishing nuclear warheads for the land-based Minuteman III ICBM, the sub-launched Trident SLBM, the air-launched cruise missile and versions of the B-61 nuclear bomb. The one new warhead planned for dismantlement is the W-62, the original warhead on the first 500 Minuteman III missiles, but disassembly of those warheads is not expected to begin until late in this decade, Gordon said.
To support this workload, the Nuclear Posture Review calls for almost doubling the capacity of the Nuclear Security Administration's Pantex plant outside Amarillo, Tex., to handle 600 warheads a year, up from today's 350, according to a report issued last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
According to the council's report, the posture review also calls for a new land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to be operational in 2020, a new sub-launched ballistic missile and new strategic submarine by 2030 and a new heavy bomber by 2040.
Gordon said the review calls for accelerating work on development of a new plant to produce plutonium pits, the part of a thermonuclear weapon whose atomic explosion acts as a trigger mechanism.
In addition, Gordon said, there would be an expansion and modernization of the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., which handles highly enriched uranium as well as the other radioactive materials for thermonuclear weapons. An additional $15 million has been allocated to prepare the Nevada Test Site to resume testing within a year's time, although Gordon said the Bush administration still supports the moratorium on underground testing.
-------- india / pakistan
Indian planes in war games near Pakistan border
By Sanjeev Miglani
Tuesday February 19, 7:29 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-90185.html
NEW DELHI - Indian war planes have begun exercises along the border with Pakistan where the armies of both nations have faced off for the past two months, India's air force chief said on Tuesday.
Operation Trishul, named after a trident carried by Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, was being conducted by the western air command, which along with the army and the navy, has been on high alert since a December attack on India's parliament blamed on Pakistan-based guerrilla groups.
"These exercises are aimed at validating our strengths and seeing how we can get better," Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy told Reuters in New Delhi, where he was at a defence exhibition.
"We are serious. It is not a show we are having there."
India has rejected Pakistani calls for talks to end the dangerous confrontation. It says its forces will return to peacetime positions only if Islamabad hands over 20 men men accused of terrorism and halts the flow of Islamic militants into India's rebellion-torn territory of Kashmir.
"We had laid down conditions. Those conditions have not been fulfilled," Defence Minister George Fernandes told a news conference after opening the defence exhibition. "The troops are there. They will remain there until a decision is taken."
Pakistan has detained hundreds of religious extremists, shut down their offices and denounced terrorism in all its forms since a landmark address to the nation last month by President Pervez Musharraf.
INDIA'S MOST-WANTED
But Islamabad, which has also mobilised its military on the border has made no move to hand over the 20 men sought by India, and reiterated its political and diplomatic support to what it calls the freedom struggle of the Kashmiri people.
A makeshift bomb exploded on Tuesday outside a government guest house in Jammu and Kashmir killing a man and wounding nine others. More than 33,000 people have died in the 12-year-old revolt which New Delhi says has been fomented by Pakistan.
Fernandes said the troop build-up, the largest since the two nations last went to war in 1971, had cost a "lot of money" but the government was committed to financial support of the military. "The armed forces will not be starved of money."
He said the morale of the troops, hunkered down for nearly two months on the border stretching from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea, was good.
"The only question they asked me was how long do you want us to wait to handle the enemy," he said referring to a recent trip on the front line. "The morale is on top."
Defence experts have worried about the impact of a prolonged deployment on the army, saying it could not be kept on a war footing for an indefinite period.
Several analysts told Reuters last week that the huge build-up of troops and armour had served a limited purpose and must now be reviewed.
The two nuclear-armed rivals have been locked in a tense military standoff since the bloody December 13 attack on India's parliament which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting its rule in the disputed Kashmir region.
----
India's view
February 19, 2002
Embassy Row
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020219-18890990.htm
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, during his Washington visit last week, received overall praise from Bush administration officials and congressional leaders for his cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
But Pakistan's South Asian rival, India, is also claiming some diplomatic success in limiting the achievements of Gen. Musharraf during the visit.
A senior Indian diplomat who spoke to a group of Washington-based Indian journalists a day after the visit ended, said "overall," India is "pleased" that New Delhi's point of view was reflected in various meetings Gen. Musharraf had with administration officials, our correspondent Desikan Thirunarayanapuram reports.
The diplomat, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, cited Washington's rejection of Gen. Musharraf's request for mediation in talks on the Kashmir dispute, the general's failure to win the advanced fighters he sought and the "tough questions" he faced from congressional leaders.
The Indian official also said the general's credibility suffered a "dent" during the visit because U.S. officials and the media did not bite into his claim that India was preparing for another nuclear test and that New Delhi was behind the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The official said Gen. Musharraf's plan to dramatically produce Mr. Pearl on the eve of his visit to prop up Pakistan's image went awry, with the main suspect saying the reporter may be dead.
The Indian official conceded that Gen. Musharraf's visit was a public relations success and helped restore Pakistan's status to a respectable state.
-------- korea
Bush Opens Two-Day Visit to S. Korea
Bush Faces Protests and a Combative North Korea During Trip
By Sandra Sobieraj
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; 9:58 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31347-2002Feb19?language=printer
SEOUL, South Korea -- Facing protests in Seoul's streets and a combative new message from North Korea, President Bush on Tuesday opened a two-day visit to South Korea that will take him to the dividing line between what he has called good and evil.
Bush, whose provocative labeling of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" has stirred Asian unease, arrived at a South Korean air force base, then flew by helicopter to the main U.S. forces base, Yongsan, in central Seoul. Accompanied by First Lady Laura Bush, the president received an enthusiastic welcome from some of the troops and families there.
The president saw none of the anti-American protests upon arrival that over the weekend marred the run-up to his first visit to Korea. The White House was sanguine about the risk of fresh protests, which are likely to be audible from the U.S. ambassador's residence where Bush will stay in central Seoul.
"There aren't any protests in North Korea," Karen Hughes, a senior Bush adviser, told reporters on the flight to Seoul. "That's a celebration of freedom itself."
On the streets of Seoul itself, police in riot gear stood watch over Koreans who went about their routine with barely a passing glance at Bush's motorcade.
In a speech earlier Tuesday to the Japanese Diet in Tokyo, Bush toned down talk that many in the region have perceived as troublesome saber-rattling and spoke of "a fellowship of free Pacific nations."
Without mentioning North Korea or the weapons trafficking there that has drawn his ire, Bush assured the Diet that he seeks an Asia "where military force is not used to resolve political disputes."
"We seek a peaceful region where the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction do not threaten humanity," Bush said.
He is expected to continue the somewhat muted tone on Wednesday when he rallies U.S. troops patrolling the hostile and heavily armored Demilitarized Zone dividing Koreans into the communist North and democratic South.
A nearly final draft of the president's speech does not contain the words "axis of evil," president counselor Karen Hughes said.
Still, North Korea's Radio Pyongyang continued to hold up the phrase as evidence the United States is trying to incite war.
"If the U.S. imperialists and Japanese reactionaries should provoke the second Korean War, to the end, our military and people will attack them with 100 times to 1,000 times of revenge," the state-controlled Radio Pyongyang said in a commentary monitored by the Radiopress agency in Tokyo.
The president was bringing to the DMZ an unclassified satellite photo of visible light on the Korean peninsula, showing the highly developed South awash in blots of light and only two or three pinpricks of white in the North, the largest in the Pyongyang capital.
Bush sees the photo as proof of the "light and opportunity that comes with freedom and the dark that comes with a regime that's repressive and holds its own people back," Hughes said.
She denied that the omission of "axis of evil" from his speech is any kind of sign Bush was backing off his hard line and said that, as he stands just yards from the border, Bush will forcefully reiterate his contention that North Korea is one of the world's most dangerous and repressive regimes.
On the eve of what promised to be a dramatic visit to the hostile and heavily armored zone, Bush, in Tokyo, added:
"We seek a region in which demilitarized zones and missile batteries no longer separate people with a common heritage and a common future."
His speech in the wood-paneled chamber of the Diet's upper house, which closely resembles America's own House of Representatives, evoked images of Bush's State of the Union address last month in which he condemned North Korea as an "axis of evil" together with Iran and Iraq.
That label, so antithetical to South Korea's "sunshine policy" of engaging the North, sent hundreds of anti-U.S. protesters into the streets of Seoul days before Bush's two-day visit. About 60 demonstrators clashed with police outside the base where Bush arrived Tuesday.
"Bush is a war maniac and an international hooligan," some chanted over the weekend.
Bush's earlier, more aggressive talk of evil in the North has heightened anxiety in the government of South Korea's Kim Dae-jung, which has staked its legacy on nearly five years of trying to entice North Korean leader Kim Jong Il into serious peace talks.
The South Korean president was welcoming Bush to the Blue House, the official presidential residence, on Wednesday morning for two hours of talks expected to focus on their differences over how to achieve inter-Korean reconciliation.
Just last week, Kim reiterated his worry that the new Bush rhetoric could create "a war atmosphere" on the peninsula.
After their private meeting and joint news conference, Bush was venturing to the DMZ, where some 37,000 U.S. troops patrol the curled razor wire alongside South Korean forces.
On the eve of Bush's visit, South Korea again appealed to North Korea to revive the stalled reconciliation process.
"We expect that North Korea will respond to our offer of dialogue at an early date so that mountains of pending issues between the two sides can be discussed and resolved," South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles North Korea policy, said.
North Korea did not respond, instead saying that its missile program was defensive and therefore should not face U.S. criticism.
North Korea's "development of missiles is to cope with the U.S. pronounced maneuvers to ignite a new war of aggression on Korea and defend the sovereignty of the country," said KCNA, the North's official news agency.
----
Protests greet Bush in South Korea
Tuesday, 19 February, 2002,
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1829000/1829351.stm
Photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1825000/images/_1829351_portester300.jpg
Anti-American protests have been building US President George W Bush has arrived in South Korea to protests by demonstrators angry at his references to North Korea as part of an "axis of evil".
Police scuffled with protesters outside a military airport on the outskirts of Seoul, and there were protests in other cities.
During his stay, Mr Bush will get the chance to see North Korea for himself, when he travels on Wednesday to look across the heavily fortified demilitarised zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean peninsula.
The US president arrived from Japan, where he warned that weapons of mass destruction and the proliferation of missile technology threaten the stability of Asia and the world.
Despite the anti-American protests, other demonstrators had planned a warmer welcome for the US president.
Near the Seoul headquarters of the 37,000 US troops in South Korea, several hundred people carried pro-US slogans.
"If you leave Korea today, the communists will be here tomorrow," said one banner.
Cloud over sunshine policy
But outside the military air base where Mr Bush landed, riot police tangled with a crowd carrying their own slogans reading: "No Bush, No War."
The BBC's Caroline Gluck in Seoul says Mr Bush's tough comments about North Korea have disappointed many South Koreans who backed their president's trademark but now faltering "sunshine policy" of engagement.
However, she says some are receptive to the US line, believing too many concessions have been made to the North with to little gained in return.
In an effort to publicly paper over their differences, President Bush is expected to repeat his support for President Kim Dae-jun'gs reconciliation efforts with the North.
And a foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that Seoul and Washington share the same concerns with regard to Pyongyang's weapons of mass destruction, and would jointly call on North Korea to return to the negotiating table.
As well as going to see the DMZ, Mr Bush will make a symbolic visit to a newly opened station on a rebuilt railway line which would connect the two Koreas.
Protection pledge
While Mr Bush has softened his rhetoric during his tour, his speech to the Japanese parliament warned of the threat to Asia's stability from weapons of mass destruction - a clear reference to North Korea.
He promised to use "American power" to support Washington's allies in the region and deter aggression.
"And to help protect the people of this region, and our friend and allies in every region, we will press on with an effective programme of missile defences," he said.
Mr Bush leaves for China, the final leg of his tour, on Thursday.
----
Bush: Weapons Don't Belong in Korea
Tue Feb 19, 2002
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20020219/ap_on_re_as/bush_asia_127
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - President Bush said Tuesday that weapons of mass destruction have no place on the Korean peninsula, where communist North Korea accused the United States of trying to incite war and issued a combative message warning of revenge.
Bush, whose provocative labeling of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" has stirred Asian unease, arrived on a tightly secured U.S. military base in downtown Seoul, accompanied by first lady Laura Bush. The president saw none of the anti-American protests that have marred the run-up to his first visit to Korea, and indulged cheering U.S. military families with handshakes and autographs.
On the streets of Seoul itself, police in riot gear stood watch over Koreans who went about their routine with barely a passing glance at Bush's motorcade.
In a speech earlier Tuesday to the Japanese Diet in Tokyo, Bush toned down talk that many in the region have perceived as troublesome saber-rattling and spoke of "a fellowship of free Pacific nations."
Without mentioning North Korea or the weapons trafficking there that has drawn his ire, Bush assured the Diet that he seeks an Asia "where military force is not used to resolve political disputes."
"We seek a peaceful region where the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction do not threaten humanity," Bush said.
He is expected to continue the somewhat muted tone on Wednesday when he rallies U.S. troops patrolling the hostile and heavily armored Demilitarized Zone dividing Koreans into the communist North and democratic South.
A nearly final draft of the president's speech does not contain the words "axis of evil," president counselor Karen Hughes said.
Still, North Korea's Radio Pyongyang continued to hold up the phrase as evidence the United States is trying to incite war.
"If the U.S. imperialists and Japanese reactionaries should provoke the second Korean War, to the end, our military and people will attack them with 100 times to 1,000 times of revenge," the state-controlled Radio Pyongyang said in a commentary monitored by the Radiopress agency in Tokyo.
The president was bringing to the DMZ an unclassified satellite photo of visible light on the Korean peninsula, showing the highly developed South awash in blots of light and only two or three pinpricks of white in the North, the largest in the Pyongyang capital.
Bush sees the photo as proof of the "light and opportunity that comes with freedom and the dark that comes with a regime that's repressive and holds its own people back," Hughes said.
She denied that the omission of "axis of evil" from his speech is any kind of sign Bush was backing off his hard line and said that, as he stands just yards from the border, Bush will forcefully reiterate his contention that North Korea is one of the world's most dangerous and repressive regimes.
On the eve of what promised to be a dramatic visit to the hostile and heavily armored zone, Bush, in Tokyo, added:
"We seek a region in which demilitarized zones and missile batteries no longer separate people with a common heritage and a common future."
His speech in the wood-paneled chamber of the Diet's upper house, which closely resembles America's own House of Representatives, evoked images of Bush's State of the Union address last month in which he condemned North Korea as an "axis of evil" together with Iran and Iraq.
That label, so antithetical to South Korea's "sunshine policy" of engaging the North, sent hundreds of anti-U.S. protesters into the streets of Seoul days before Bush's two-day visit. About 60 demonstrators clashed with police outside the base where Bush arrived Tuesday.
"Bush is a war maniac and an international hooligan," some chanted over the weekend.
Bush's earlier, more aggressive talk of evil in the North has heightened anxiety in the government of South Korea's Kim Dae-jung, which has staked its legacy on nearly five years of trying to entice North Korean leader Kim Jong Il into serious peace talks.
The South Korean president was welcoming Bush to the Blue House, the official presidential residence, on Wednesday morning for two hours of talks expected to focus on their differences over how to achieve inter-Korean reconciliation.
Just last week, Kim reiterated his worry that the new Bush rhetoric could create "a war atmosphere" on the peninsula.
After their private meeting and joint news conference, Bush was venturing to the DMZ, where some 37,000 U.S. troops patrol the curled razor wire alongside South Korean forces.
On the eve of Bush's visit, South Korea again appealed to North Korea to revive the stalled reconciliation process.
"We expect that North Korea will respond to our offer of dialogue at an early date so that mountains of pending issues between the two sides can be discussed and resolved," South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles North Korea policy, said.
North Korea did not respond, instead saying that its missile program was defensive and therefore should not face U.S. criticism.
North Korea's "development of missiles is to cope with the U.S. pronounced maneuvers to ignite a new war of aggression on Korea and defend the sovereignty of the country," said KCNA, the North's official news agency.
-------- russia
Russia expect deal with US as nuclear arms cuts talks begin
Tuesday February 19, 2002
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020219/1/2ik8n.html
Russia's top arms negotiator said he expected to strike a deal on nuclear disarmament with his Washington counterpart at the start of talks here aimed at drafting an agreement for signature at a May presidential summit.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov said he was looking for "substantial and tangible results" from his meeting with John Bolton, the US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, that began Tuesday morning in central Moscow.
Mamedov said the two sides were negotiating the wording of an agreement "on radical reductions in strategic offensive weapons and a document on a new framework of strategic stability relations between Russia and the United States."
Bolton was expected later Tuesday to announce the first contours of the agreement which will be signed at a summit meeting in Moscow between US President George W. Bush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the end of May.
At the same time Kremlin officials urged other nuclear powers to join the disarmament process now underway as Moscow sought to position itself as a leader in nuclear non-proliferation issues.
"The question of nuclear stability cannot be the prerogative of only Russia and the United States," the Kremlin's advisor on strategic stability issues Igor Sergeyev was quoted as saying by Interfax.
"The parameters of strategic arms limitations announced by Moscow and Washington should be taken into account by all nuclear powers," said Sergeyev, a former Russian defense minister.
Moscow has sought a legally-binding document with Washington that would put a ceiling of 1,700-2,200 warheads on the two sides' respective nuclear arsenals over the next 10 years.
Moscow also wants to able to freely check on the progress of US disarmament, and opposed Washington suggestions that some of the decommissioned warheads could be held in temporary storage rather than destroyed.
The cuts in nuclear weapons were decided by Putin and Bush at their summit in Washington and Crawford, Texas, in November, but Washington has until recently been reluctant to formalise the agreement on paper.
The last meeting between Bolton and Russian negotiators was held in Washington last month, when Moscow officials presented their own proposals for the wording of the summit agreement.
A Putin-Bush summit has been tentatively scheduled for May 23 to 25.
----
US insists it wants arms cut deal by Putin-Bush summit
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Feb 19, 2002
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/020219195929.630iutxs.html
The United States insisted Tuesday it was committed to trying to reach a nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia by the time Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin meet in May, despite gloomy comments by its chief weapons negotiator.
"The intention is to work on a deal and see if it can't be prepared for the two presidents to reach agreement on the strategic framework issues," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"That's always been the intention ... but whether we can actually achieve that will depend on the substance, obviously, and they will keep working on this," he told reporters.
"I'm not going to make any predictions at this point."
Boucher's comments followed remarks made earlier in Moscow by US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton who conceded that a deal might not been done by the Bush-Putin summit in Russia.
After meeting Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and other top Russian diplomats, Bolton cited several "difficult issues" that still needed to be resolved.
"We have a number of difficult issues, questions about how exactly to account for the offensive, strategic warheads, measures of transparency and verification and a series of issues that still have to be resolved," he said.
"In any negotiation there is always a prospect that issues between the parties prevent the agreement from being ready by a particular time."
"I can tell you that both presidents are extremely interested in reaching an agreement but surprising things can happen beside the best intentions," he said. "It may seem like a long time but May is just around the corner."
Boucher said he had only had a preliminary report from Bolton on his meetings -- the second round of talks on the matter between the United States and Russia -- and said they had been "positive and constructive."
And, he noted that the Bolton would be meeting again with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgiy Mamedov "in a few weeks' time" to continue the discussions.
Moscow is seeking a legally binding document with Washington that would put a ceiling of 1,700-2,200 warheads on the two sides' respective nuclear arsenals over the next 10 years.
But Bolton stressed Bush was only willing to codify an agreement on the number of "operationally deployed" nuclear warheads each side could have.
This means that Washington is not willing to put into writing the number of warheads it could keep in active reserve after taking them out of commission.
Russia at first expressed outrage at the idea and then demanded a clear response as to how many of the warheads Washington planned to in storage.
----
Russia Says Sub Was Not Sunk by a Collision
New York Times
February 19, 2002
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/europe/19RUSS.html
MOSCOW, Feb. 18 - Russian investigators trying to determine the cause of the explosions that sank the Kursk submarine acknowledged today for the first time that the sinking was not caused by a collision with another vessel.
They also gave the clearest indication to date that the explosion that sent the Kursk to the bottom of the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, could have been caused by problems with one of the torpedoes on board.
At a news conference in Murmansk, the northern naval city near where the hulk of the Kursk is docked after being raised and towed into port last fall, Russia's prosecutor general, Vladimir Ustinov, said "there were no objects in a dangerous vicinity" of the submarine at the time of the explosions that caused its sinking and the loss of all 118 crew members on board.
"There are no facts that can point to the presence near the Kursk of foreign ships or submarines," he was quoted as saying by the government news service, RIA-Novosti.
It was the first time a Russian official publicly ruled out the theory favored by the Russian Navy that the Kursk had collided with another vessel or a World War II mine.
The Kursk was taking part in a military training exercise when a small explosion tore through its bow. Two minutes later, a larger blast sent the boat plunging.
The news conference marked the formal end of a four-month investigation. It coincided with the announcement that President Vladimir V. Putin was demoting the deputy prime minister who oversaw the ill- fated Kursk rescue, although officials did not link the two events. The minister, Ilya Klebanov, will retain leadership of the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology.
Investigators did release more details on possible reasons for the Kursk's sinking, but they said that they had not yet drawn final conclusions and that a final report would be ready only in May - after the last portion of the submarine's bow was recovered.
The commander of the Russian Navy, Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, was quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax as saying that the problem might have been with the torpedo's fuel, which was "in constant motion, and its contact with certain metals may have the most unpredictable consequences."
Another cause may have been damage to a torpedo. Even before the Kursk departed for the Northern Fleet military exercise from the small port town of Vidyayevo, one of its torpedoes was dropped while being loaded onto the vessel, Mr. Ustinov said. Another possible cause was failure because of age. The navy has withdrawn the torpedoes from use on nuclear submarines, Admiral Kuroyedov said.
-------- treaties
Russia, U.S. Officials Consult
February 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- U.S. and Russian negotiators are working ``under pressure'' to solve their differences and make a nuclear arms deal ready by a presidential summit in May, but remain at odds over Russian cooperation with Iran, a senior U.S. diplomat said Tuesday.
U.S. and Russian negotiators face ``a number of difficult issues, questions of how exactly to account for the offensive strategic warheads, measures of transparency, verification,'' U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said after two days of talks with Russian officials in Moscow.
President Bush has pledged to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads, and Russia's Vladimir Putin has said that Russia could go as low as 1,500 warheads from the current 6,000 the United States and Russia are each permitted under the START I treaty.
Although Bush initially favored an informal deal, he has agreed to Russia's push for a legally binding agreement to ``demonstrate both here in Russia and internationally the extent of the maturation of the U.S.-Russian relationship,'' Bolton said at a news conference.
``At the moment I don't see any insuperable obstacles to achieving an agreement, although there are a number of serious issues that still require pretty detailed discussion,'' Bolton said.
Russian officials, in particular, have strongly protested the Pentagon's intention to stockpile the decommissioned nuclear warheads rather than destroy them.
``Real and irreversible liquidation of nuclear weapons will show the world community how reliable and serious the course for nuclear disarmament is,'' Putin's military adviser Igor Sergeyev said Tuesday, according to the Interfax-Military News Agency.
Bolton said, however, the United States wants to have an ``upward flexibility in the offensive weapons area should the international geostrategic situation change.''
Sergeyev and other officials have also urged the U.S. administration to limit its missile defense program, saying deployment of weapons in space would mean that the U.S. missile shield could also be aimed against Russia.
The United States has shown no intention complying and claims its proposed missile shield is intended to fend off threats from such nations as Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
After a protracted dispute with Russia over U.S. missile defense plans that ended last December with Bush's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ``we aren't about to begin a new process that would result in limits on our missile defense efforts,'' Bolton said.
He said there were ways that the United States and Russia could cooperate in the missile defense program, but did not elaborate.
The United States, for its part, has strongly urged Russia to stop leaks of ballistic missile technology to Iran and abandon its $800 million deal to build a nuclear reactor there. Russia has dismissed U.S. concerns, saying that there have been no leaks of missile know-how and the reactor would only serve civilian purposes.
The controversy acquired a new dimension after Bush recently labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ``axis of evil,'' an irritant for Russia because it has friendly ties with all three countries.
Bolton said he raised the U.S. displeasure over Russian cooperation with Iran in his talks, and said Moscow's intention to provide Iran with advanced conventional weapons was also of ``great concern'' to the United States.
``It's very important as Russia and the United States and the West generally talk about their mutual security interests that we all treat the question of nuclear and missile proliferation in the same way,'' Bolton said.
He said there was no talk about any compensation for Russia for abandoning deals with Iran, adding that Moscow itself must be interested in curbing any transfer of sensitive technology.
``Ultimately it's not a question what we say, it's a question of Russian national interest,'' Bolton said. ``How could any Russian citizen see any benefit whatever in a nuclear-equipped, ballistic missile-capable Iran?''
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was to arrive in Moscow on Tuesday for talks that would touch on military-technical cooperation, but the trip was abruptly postponed because of what the Iranian side called scheduling problems.
--------
U.S. Says Arms Deal by May Summit Could Be Tough
February 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-russia-usa.html
MOSCOW - Top U.S. arms negotiator John Bolton said Tuesday the United States and Russia hoped to cut a nuclear arms reduction deal in time for a May summit but that many important problems remained to be solved before then.
Bolton, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, also indicated that Russia's cooperation with Iran on nuclear and missile technology remained a big obstacle in the road to a better relationship with Washington.
He told a news conference that President Bush was ready to sign a legally-binding document on cutting nuclear arms to the 1,700-2,200 range.
``(But) whether we can embody these reductions in an agreement by May of course requires the resolution of several very difficult issues.''
Russia wants the United States to agree to destroy, rather than store, warheads removed from operational deployment under the arms reduction agreement. But the Pentagon says it must be able to deploy more warheads quickly should new threats emerge.
Moscow is also seeking self-imposed limits on any U.S. missile defense, but Bolton gave that suggestion short shrift.
However, he denied Bush would be reduced to the role of tourist at the summit if no deal was ready, saying the two sides expected to make ``substantial progress'' during his three-day Moscow stay on forging a new post-Cold War relationship.
A new ``strategic framework'' could cover offensive weapons cuts, possible cooperation on missile defense, the joint fight against terrorism, trade ties and the proliferation of nuclear and missile know-how, Bolton said.
Bush has branded Iran, Iraq and North Korea ``axis of evil'' states. Bolton said Moscow should take the same stance on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction as Washington and the West.
``We have a disagreement about the extent of the involvement in those Iranian (nuclear and missile) programs, and we're going to have to work that out,'' he said.
``But let me say this: it is very important as Russia and the United States and the West generally talk about their mutual security interests, that we all treat the question of nuclear and missile proliferation in the same way.''
``No one should have any misunderstanding of the depth of his (Bush's) feeling on the subject or the intensity of his interest in resolving the problem.''
Bolton refused to be drawn into discussion of the abrupt cancellation of a planned visit to Moscow by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi Tuesday.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
No Quick Relief for Sick Nuclear Workers
By Judy Lin
Associated Press
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30496-2002Feb18?language=printer
PITTSBURGH -- Steelworker Stephen Kaurich remembers those mysterious shipments to his mill in the two years after World War II, the strange metal bars he and his crew were told to roll down to a smaller, more usable size.
The shipments arrived hidden under the floorboards of boxcars, and once workers began rolling them through the steel mill's machinery, they noticed the bars did not cool like the materials they were used to shaping.
When the work was finished, the factory was washed down with acids, and the boxcars left as mysteriously as they came.
"They didn't tell us they were uranium bars," Kaurich said.
Now an 80-year-old colon cancer survivor, Kaurich is convinced his illness was caused by exposure to radiation. He is among tens of thousands of sickened nuclear weapons workers and survivors expected to seek federal compensation for the health toll of contributing to the nation's Cold War buildup of atomic weapons.
But six months after workers and their families were allowed to begin applying for the $150,000 lump sums, many applicants are still waiting, with older workers wondering if they will live long enough to see a payout.
"Nothing yet," said Kaurich, who filed last year and was not asked for medical records on his 1974 surgery until last month. "Most of the guys are all dead. They should have done something about it a long time ago."
Program director Pete Turcic said the process for approving claims can be long and asked applicants to be patient. Of 18,980 claims filed in the first six months, 1,228 cases have been paid out and 74 denied, he said.
An additional 2,216 cases have been recommended for approval, and 629 have been recommended for denial.
"I understand people are concerned, but we are committed to processing claims as rapidly as possible," Turcic said.
Two years ago, Congress approved the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program to provide $150,000, plus medical benefits, for living workers who got sick. Survivors of the dead can apply for the lump sum.
The program, administered by the Labor Department, is intended to compensate workers who became ill after being exposed to cancer-causing radiation or silica and beryllium, two metals that can cause lung disease, while working on dangerous weapons materials, often without knowing it.
Officials are anticipating 80,000 claims in the first two years of the program.
The Energy Department has to verify the person was employed at certain installations when dangerous materials were handled. Then the Department of Health and Human Services has to determine whether the illness was caused by the work.
The program covers 318 facilities in 37 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Marshall Islands, with the highest number of sites in New York (38) and Ohio (35). The list includes the University of California at Berkeley, the Great Lakes Carbon Corp. in Chicago, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in New Jersey and a Bethlehem Steel operation in Lackawanna, N.Y.
Kaurich worked at the Vulcan Crucible Steel Co. in Aliquippa, Pa., 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He said many of the workers died long before the compensation program began. He said eight men in his crew of 10 are already gone.
The workers knew the shipments were odd but gave them little thought. Kaurich said he later learned that the uranium was sent to a nuclear plant in Washington state, where it was used to produce plutonium for bombs.
Dorothy Baron filed an application in October for her stepfather, Nick Arbutina, a steelworker who worked at the Vulcan plant from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. He died of leukemia in 1984.
Baron, 71, said she has run into obstacles because the hospital where Arbutina died no longer has his medical records. Baron said she is mainly concerned for her 89-year-old mother, who lost her first husband to a fire in 1937.
"She got nothing then because Social Security was just coming out," Baron said. "It'd be nice if she could get something now."
-------- nevada
Nevada sues Bush administration over Yucca Mountain
REUTERS USA:
February 19, 2002
Story by Chris Baltimore
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14607/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Nevada has filed a lawsuit against the Bush administration to fight a decision to dispose of 70,000 tonnes of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain 90 miles (144 km) northwest of Las Vegas.
Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, filed the lawsuit late Friday in U.S. District Court against U.S. President George W. Bush, the Energy Department and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. The plaintiffs were the state of Nevada, Las Vegas and Clark County.
The Bush administration said on Friday that Yucca Mountain would be the final resting place for radioactive material from the nation's 103 nuclear power plants for an estimated 10,000 years.
Guinn and other critics of the plan worry that radioactive material might seep into the ground, posing health risks for residents, and cite the risks of transporting nuclear waste over great distances.
The lawsuit alleges that the Energy Department violated the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act when it announced in December that Yucca Mountain would require man-made barriers as well as the mountain's natural geology to contain the waste. The 1982 act had specified that the geology of the chosen site had to be sufficient to safeguard the waste without additional construction.
"Instead of geology they're now studying engineering. That's an abrupt change," said Greg Bortolin, a spokesman for Guinn. Bortolin accused the Energy Department of "changing the rules to suit their needs."
The lawsuit also accuses the Energy Department of breaking rules by not allowing the state to review environmental studies 30 days before approving the site.
"The governor's office received the environmental impact statement only hours before the president made his recommendation," Bortolin said.
On Friday, Abraham said no such action was necessary. "The law does not require that the final statement be offered to the governor of Nevada prior to being offered to the president," he said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.
By law, Nevada's state government has the right to appeal Bush's decision to Congress, where a simple majority vote would decide the case within 90 days.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must also approve a license for the site. The energy department hopes to activate the site by 2010.
-------- us politics
Making Money, the Bush Way
February 19, 2002
Robert Scheer:
Los Angeles Times
You have to hand it to George Bush the senior for hustle. Back in 1998, he took at least $80,000 in stock from Global Crossing in return for speaking for the company in Tokyo. The payment was made as the company was about to go public and the stock's value quickly multiplied 175-fold to $14 million. Maybe some congressional committee will turn up how much of that stock the former president sold before the company went belly up a few weeks ago.
But that score was nothing compared with the elder Bush's own global crossings as a highly paid consultant to the Carlyle Group, a $12-billion equity investment firm heavy into the defense and energy games. Carlyle's chairman, Frank Carlucci, who was Reagan's Defense secretary, is a close friend of the current secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his Princeton wrestling partner. The Carlyle company roster also includes top vets of the first Bush administration, led by ex-Secretary of State James Baker--a political gunslinger who worked hard on George W. Bush's postelection campaign to secure Florida's electoral votes and the White House. In fact, the government alums in the Carlyle Group are so well connected internationally that, until Sept. 11, the group was even trusted to invest the funds of the Bin Laden family--although not those controlled by the family black sheep, who is charged with slaughtering several thousand innocents using Saudi recruits and money. The elder Bush himself is well connected with the Saudis, having fought the Gulf War to save the royal kingdom from being gobbled up by wicked Saddam Hussein.
Last year, after George W. assumed the presidency, grateful Saudis welcomed his Poppy and his colleagues from the Carlyle Group who were in town to sign new contracts based on oil wealth. Hey, fair is fair: Bush the senior had saved the sheiks' bacon and now they give him a slice.
Most former presidents putter around their presidential libraries, getting in a game of golf or two while they shuffle papers for their memoirs. Then there's Jimmy Carter, trying to atone for sins he didn't commit in office by becoming a carpenter for the poor, and poor Bill Clinton who still has to prove to right-wing talk show nuts and their spokespersons in Congress that his wife didn't steal the White House silverware.
Nothing like that for George, who has returned to the spirit of his early days, when he used the connections of his family name to strike it rich in the Texas oil fields. This time, the big prize lies in the defense budget. With his son the president defending the biggest military buildup since the darkest days of the Cold War by pointing to the grim work of Saudi-sponsored terrorists, no weapons system is too gaudy or implausible to be embraced with bipartisan fervor.
That's fortunate for the buddies of the president's father over at Carlyle, who have invested heavily in military equipment without military purpose.
Take the 80,000-ton Crusader howitzer cannon designed to defeat the tanks of the Soviet army in a conventional war in Central Europe. As a candidate, even George W. Bush made fun of the antiquated weapon as he campaigned on the principle of a leaner, more efficient military built for modern wars.
But perhaps nobody had told him that the Crusader is being built by a defense contractor called United Defense, owned by the Carlyle Group. Clinton, on the advice of the Pentagon, was set to bury the weapon as a Cold War artifact. Now Bush the younger has embraced it--and Carlyle suddenly found the confidence to take United Defense public after holding off for a decade.
No biggie. What's $11 billion for the Crusader in a defense budget designed to grow to $451 billion by 2007? Only a bleeding heart pinko pacifist would point out that $11 billion is what this "education" president is planning to spend on educating the nation's poor children under next year's Title I appropriation. But hey, child poverty is not the Carlyle Group's business.
Robert Scheer is a syndicated columnist.
-------- us nuc waste
On the Road to Yucca Mountain
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30436-2002Feb18?language=printer
It's easy to understand why Herbert Gilliland [letters, Feb. 5] is astonished at the number of shipments of lethal waste that could occur if Nevada's Yucca Mountain becomes the country's nuclear waste dump. Nuclear waste is perhaps the deadliest material created by humans. A person standing a few feet away from irradiated fuel taken from a reactor receives a lethal dose of radiation in seconds. Even after the waste has cooled for 10 years, it is still so radioactive that a person standing a few feet away would get a lethal dose in less than three minutes.
Waste from commercial nuclear reactors is so radioactive that transport casks to shield us from the radiation would be too heavy to be economically transported. Current truck casks, designed to hold a ton or so of irradiated fuel, weigh a whopping 25 to 26 tons and still leak some radiation. The bottom line is that nuclear waste cannot be transported safely.
The 50 million Americans living in 43 states within one mile of potential nuclear waste transport routes should urge their elected officials to oppose these risky shipments.
ANNA AURILIO
Legislative Director
U.S. Public Interest Research Group
Washington
•Arjun Makhijani [op-ed, Feb. 13] said, "Yucca Mountain is a poor site. Federal Regulations have already been changed or set aside several times to accommodate it." This is a distortion. No changes in regulations have been made for this reason.
The Yucca Mountain site is very promising. The geology is relatively uncomplicated, and stable tunnels can be readily excavated. The arid climate results in low infiltration of water to a repository, and only a small amount would seep into the tunnels, where it could readily drain downward through fractures. The extremely thick unsaturated zone allows the waste to be placed 500 feet below the surface and still be 500 feet above the water table. Because the tunnels do not have to be backfilled with clay or crushed rock as in repositories below the water table, they will remain accessible for monitoring and retrieval for centuries. Natural passive ventilation of the tunnels can help to remove heat and water.
Earthquakes do occur but have only minor effects underground. Studies of the small volcanoes in the region indicate low risk of penetration of a repository, with limited consequences.
Much of the debate is over mathematical models that predict risks for 10,000 years to inhabitants near the repository. Because Yucca Mountain lies in a closed basin near Death Valley, the lowest point in the United States, these are the only persons who could ever be at any risk.
EUGENE H. ROSEBOOM Jr.
Bethesda
-------- us politics
Nuclear waste disposal news conference
February 19, 2002
Daybook
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020219-459510.htm
1 p.m. - The Nuclear Energy Institute sponsors a news conference to discuss President Bush's decision approving underground disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nev., of used fuel from nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs. Location: Holeman Lounge, National Press Club, 14th and F streets NW. Contact: 202/739-8000.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghans insist Paras not shot at
Tuesday, 19 February, 2002,
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1829000/1829424.stm
The arrival of British troops was initially welcomed Afghan police have said a British paratroop team which opened fire on a family taking a pregnant woman to hospital - killing one and injuring four - was not shot at first.
The six soldiers said they returned fire from a Kabul observation post after they were shot at in the early hours of Saturday morning.
But the local police report, which is now with security officials in Kabul, contradicts the British soldiers' version of events.
Two of the six soldiers are flying back to the UK on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning for questioning.
They will be questioned at their barracks in Colchester, Essex, by officers from the Royal Military Police, while other officers carry out an investigation at the scene.
The other four have been removed from the "theatre of operation" - a procedure which the Ministry of Defence describes as "entirely normal".
A senior Afghan officer involved in the investigation told the BBC the suggestion that shots had been fired at the soldiers first was "complete nonsense".
'Tragic mistake'
The officer told correspondent Adam Mynott, in Kabul, that Afghan police were on duty near the observation post and heard no shooting before the soldiers opened fire.
The officer, who did not want to be identified, said the incident was a "tragic mistake".
But he said the international security assistance force had prevented his men from going to the scene of the incident shortly after it happened.
He said he was reluctant to criticise the force because they were doing a good job for the country - but was not impressed by their "reluctance to uncover the truth".
Military investigation
The family said they had defied a night time curfew to drive 21-year-old Faria Ishaq to hospital to give birth when they came under fire at about 0120 local time.
Her brother in-law Amaun, 20, was killed outright. Her husband, Mohammed Ishaq, 25, her mother-in-law and a neighbour, who was driving, were all injured.
They believe the soldiers saw the lights of the car and heard the engine, and let off a hail of up to 60 bullets.
A British military spokesman in Kabul said he was aware of the reported police findings, but could not comment further as the military investigation was still underway.
But army sources in Kabul continue to say that the soldiers only fired because they believed they came under attack.
Revenge warning
The incident could threaten otherwise good relations between locals and the British-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).
The MoD said the soldiers, from the second battalion of the parachute regiment, were not under arrest and were cooperating fully with the inquiry.
Isaf spokesman Captain Graham Dunlop told the AP news agency any legal action against the soldiers would be taken in Britain.
"Britain retains exclusive jurisdiction over the soldiers. If they need to be punished, they will be dealt with by us."
Mohammed Ishaq told reporters his family would take revenge unless the soldiers responsible were punished.
"They should be tried and punished in accordance to Sharia [Islamic] law," he told the AFP news agency from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for a hand injury.
"We want their blood in retaliation for the blood of our brother.
"If we kill someone else [from Isaf] that would be the same as if we killed those murderers - it wouldn't matter to us."
Amaun's uncle, Nasrullah Yaqobi, demanded compensation from Isaf and a trial of the troops involved, according to AFP.
----
U.N. Prepares for Return of Afghan Refugees
By REUTERS
February 20, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-afghan-refugees.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR is gearing up to help some 1.2 million Afghan refugees return home this year, a U.N. official said Wednesday.
From March 1, the UNHCR will start giving cash to refugees at border crossings with Pakistan. From the beginning of April, refugees in Iran will also be offered cash, said the head of UNHCR in Afghanistan, Filippo Grandi.
Each family will be given about $100 to pay for the journey home and will also be given food, plastic sheeting and timber and nails to build new homes.
The UNHCR estimates that about five million Afghans have been displaced, either within the country or across its borders, by two decades of war.
``Because of limited absorption capacity and the fragility of Afghanistan we are not campaigning for repatriation, but assisting those who have chosen to go back,'' Grandi said.
About 190,000 Afghan refugees have returned home since November, when the U.S.-backed alliance toppled the Taliban government.
----
U.S. general advises Afghans on raising professional army
February 19, 2002 (AP)
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020219-89407624.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan - A U.S. general arrived in Afghanistan yesterday on a mission to build a national army in a country where most fighters are loyal only to their tribal leaders or local warlords.
Maj. Gen. Charles C. Campbell, chief of staff of the U.S. Central Command, is meeting with the head of the Afghan army, Asif Delawar, and the Afghan military's top intelligence, training and logistics officers as part a mission to create a new training program for the Afghan army.
Gen. Campbell's meetings are "to get a sense of what is the Afghan vision of their own army" and to "help build a multiethnic ... credible Afghan force," the military representative at the U.S. Embassy said on the condition of anonymity.
Afghanistan's central government has no standing army. While Afghan fighters have decades of experience in guerrilla warfare, the forces are divided between local warlords and tribal commanders.
Experts say that building a national army out of fighters whose primarily loyalty has long been to their regional commanders could take years.
Afghan officials estimate that 700,000 Afghans are armed. Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim has said that he wants a standing army of no more than 200,000 men.
Gen. Campbell will be in the country for a week and is expected to submit a report to the Defense Department outlining plans to train an integrated Afghan force.
U.S. soldiers are expected to arrive in the country in about a month to begin training an Afghan force of 600 men, the U.S. official said. The officers of that battalion would be expected to go on to train future army units.
"Within a month we will at least if not begin training have the core training group on the ground here," the U.S. official said.
It is not clear whether all the training officers would be Americans or if some would be from other coalition countries. Gen. Campbell will be making his assessment based on the premise that all of the trainers will be from the United States, the U.S. official said.
On Sunday, peacekeepers in Kabul began registering Afghan soldiers for a military training course that the British-led international force will conduct, Jonathan Turner, a press officer for the peacekeepers said.
Six hundred Afghan soldiers are expected to begin training there in about a week, Mr. Turner said.
-------- balkans
Serb leaders acted on their own: Milosevic
The Hindu,
February 19, 2002
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/02/19/stories/2002021900471500.htm
THE HAGUE Feb. 18. The former Yugoslavian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, today rejected charges by the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal that he had helped the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, drive Muslims and Croats out of Bosnia during the 1992-95 war. ``We were helping the Serbian people on the other side of the Drina river so that they could survive but we had poor relations with their leadership. We were leftist, they were rightist,'' Mr. Milosevic told the court in The Hague.
Mr. Milosevic, the first head of state to be tried by an international tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity, is accused of providing financial, political and logistical support to the Bosnian Serbs and commanding Yugoslav troops involved in the brutal war.
``This is nonsensical,'' he told the court. ``As for carrying out my own alleged orders to Republika Srpska, only somebody who knew nothing about the degree of vanity of Yugoslavian politicians, especially the Serb politicians, and their intolerance towards any kind of interference by anyone else, can come with this kind of construction,'' he continued.
Earlier, Mr. Milosevic began the final few hours of his lengthy opening address at the tribunal. Speaking for two days in court last week, he indicated his defiance of the prosecution's case, branding it ``an ocean of lies''. He told the court he intended to call the former U.S. President, Bill Clinton, and the U.N. chief, Kofi Annan, among other world leaders past and present, to give evidence. Other witnesses included survivors of the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.
In defending himself against charges of genocide in Bosnia, and crimes against humanity in Croatia and Kosovo, he has depicted himself as a victim of a media-led propaganda campaign that ``satanised the Serbs''. In attacking the tribunal's validity, he has repeatedly claimed it is biased against his native Serbs.
In putting his case that NATO was the aggressor during the Balkans conflict, he showed the court numerous photographs of Serbs and Kosovars killed, allegedly during bombing raids. Mr. Milosevic has alleged it was NATO air strikes beginning in March 1999 that killed and wounded thousands of Kosovo Albanians, not Serb forces as the prosecution alleges.
``You tell me I am responsible by virtue of a chain of command but you are actually holding a trial of a whole country here, a country that stood up in defence of its attackers,'' he told the court.
The presiding judge, Richard May, asked Mr. Milosevic to conclude his case introduction on Monday morning. The first of a reported 300 witnesses for the prosecution were scheduled to appear later in the day. - DPA, AFP
-------- biological weapons
Expert: Anthrax suspect ID'd
02/19/02
By JOSEPH DEE Staff Writer,
New Jersey Online
http://www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/02-19-IZAR1IUB.html
PRINCETON BOROUGH -- An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been gathering information about last autumn's anthrax attacks said yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters.
But the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with "secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.
Rosenberg, who spoke to about 65 students, faculty members and others at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, said the FBI has known of the suspect since October and, according to her "government insider" sources, has interrogated him more than once.
The investigation into five anthrax-laced letters and several other hoax letters -- all mailed last fall, including several processed by Trenton Main Post Office in Hamilton -- was the focus of Rosenberg's talk. She also gave her thoughts about what the government should do to control biological weapons.
"There are a number of insiders -- government insiders -- who know people in the anthrax field who have a common suspect," Rosenberg said. "The FBI has questioned that person more than once, . . . so it looks as though the FBI is taking that person very seriously."
She said it is quite possible the suspect is a scientist who formerly worked at the U.S. government's military laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.
Rosenberg said she has been gathering information from press reports, congressional hearings, Bush administration news conferences and government insiders she would not name.
During a brief question-and-answer session after her talk, one man wondered whether biological agents truly pose significant dangers to the public, given the limited number of deaths and illnesses caused by five anthrax-laced letters.
Without mentioning other biological agents that are far more deadly and contagious than anthrax, Rosenberg said the potential for a biological attack is "catastrophic."
Another man wondered if the FBI and other investigators might be focusing too narrowly on one scientist, saying, "New Jersey is the epicenter of the international pharmaceutical industry," and many people in those labs presumably have the skills to handle and refine anthrax.
"I think your argument would have been a good one earlier on, but I think that the results of the analyses (of the letters and the anthrax in them) show that access to classified information was essential," Rosenberg said. "And that rules out most of the people in the pharmaceutical industry. . . . It's possible, but they would have had to have access to the information," Rosenberg said.
Picking up the conversational thread, another man said, "People know a lot, and it's a question of what they choose to focus their knowledge on. Things are invented in parallel," he said.
-- -- --
She said the evidence points to a person who has experience handling anthrax; who has been vaccinated and has received annual booster shots; and who had access to classified government information about how to chemically treat the bacterial spores to keep them from clumping together, which allows them to remain airborne.
"We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington, D.C., area," Rosenberg said. "He had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersey and the United Kingdom. . . . There is also the likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it, probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment and the material.
"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.
"I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said.
"This, I think, would be a really serious outcome that would send a message to other potential terrorists, that (they) would think they could get away with it.
"So I hope that doesn't happen, and that is my motivation to continue to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the perpetrator."
-- -- --
She expressed disappointment that the U.S. government last July decided against signing an international biological weapons treaty that would ban nations from developing such weapons.
"It became clear from congressional testimony that the reason for this rejection was the need to protect our secret projects," Rosenberg said.
During the question-and-answer period, one woman said, "I'm not sure that I understood you completely, but it seems to me that the United States government has a double-standard," of wanting other nations to comply with a weapons ban but wanting freedom to pursue its own program.
"I'm totally shocked by this information," she said, sending a wave of laughter through the lecture hall.
"They make no bones about it," Rosenberg replied. "On many occasions they've argued that rules should be for the bad guys, not the good guys."
Rosenberg said she worries about an "enormous increase" in money in the Bush budget for research into bioterrorism agents. "There is already a rush for this funding," she said.
The number of researchers and labs ought to be tightly controlled, she said. Under the current budget proposal, however, she says the government will be spreading money around to "a lot more people and a lot more laboratories around the country from which bioterrorists can emerge, as one just did.
"By spreading around this access and this knowledge, we're asking for trouble.'
--------
Biodefense funding creates quandary
Increase designed to fight terror also raises risk of attack
By Scott Shane
Baltimore Sun Staff
February 19, 2002
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.biolab19feb19.story?coll=bal%2Dnews%2Dnation
Even as the FBI investigates a possible link between U.S. biodefense programs and last fall's anthrax attacks, a flood of new funding for bioterrorism research promises to increase rapidly the number of labs and people with access to such lethal pathogens. Some scientists say that without new limits and tougher regulations, the law of unintended consequences could come into play. The biodefense research boom could lead to diversions of organisms or expertise for new terrorist attacks, making Americans less safe rather than safer.
"Each one of these labs in essence becomes a full-service shopping center for someone who wants to get hold of a lethal agent for nefarious purposes," says Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who helped spark a debate among scientists with a letter he co-wrote last month to the journal Nature calling for new restrictions. He says the number of laboratories approved to work with potential bioterrorist pathogens should be "fewer than five nationally," a drastic decrease from the scores of labs doing such work.
He acknowledges that, with the federal government budgeting $2.4 billion in new money for bioterrorism preparedness, scientists aren't rallying to support him.
"No one wants to say anything that is likely to decrease funding," he says. "This money is going to attract applications from institutions that have no experience with these pathogens and no previous interest in them."
"It's a sticky problem," says Michael Mair, a molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. "The question is how to provide for security while not putting shackles on scientists. Science works best when there's a free flow of ideas."
The problem is illustrated by the situation of Ebright's co-author on the letter to Nature. Nancy D. Connell, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is calling for tighter regulations even as she prepares her lab in Newark to handle dangerous organisms in bioterrorism research. The first supplies of such microbes, including the Bacillus anthracis bacteria that cause anthrax, are expected to arrive next month, she says.
In preparing her lab for the new work, Connell has voluntarily contacted local law enforcement agencies and imposed strict security rules. A "buddy system" will ensure that no scientist is left alone with the dangerous agents, and advance approval will be required for night and weekend work, she says.
But most of those precautions are not required by law. They should be, Connell says.
Connell, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, says she believes research on bioterrorism agents is important. She knows some colleagues may see her as trying to slam the door to bioterrorism research just after her lab has gotten approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to ship and receive dangerous pathogens.
But unless rules are tightened, "we're concerned that the increased research could actually decrease security," she says.
As a possible model, scientists point to the far stricter regulation of radioactive materials by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state agencies. NRC inspectors, for example, conduct surprise inspections of university laboratories, showing up unannounced to check inventories and record-keeping.
"Universities know exactly how much they have of every radioisotope and where it is," Ebright says. That's not the case with biological agents. After the anthrax attacks, some universities discovered poorly secured anthrax samples with few records of where they had come from or how they had been used.
That's because handling of deadly biological pathogens was not regulated until 1997, when an anti-terrorism act required labs that wished to ship or receive certain "select agents" to go through a demanding registration process with the CDC. The select agents are a nightmarish arsenal including 13 viruses, 12 toxins, seven kinds of bacteria and four other organisms.
There are a little more than 250 labs nationally that are registered to receive the select agents, and the number is growing at about one lab a week, says Jonathan V. Richmond, director of the CDC's office of health and safety. Since 1997, more than 1,500 shipments of such organisms have been reported to the CDC, he said.
But the regulation has many holes, scientists say. Labs that were using select agents in research before 1997 do not have to register, and the CDC can't keep up with the required lab inspections, they say. Bills pending in Congress would close some of the loopholes and tighten oversight.
Richmond says the CDC may not be the right agency to police the burgeoning bioterror field. "CDC's whole mission in life is to be part of the scientific effort, to be collegial with the people we work with," he says. "If CDC pushes the regulatory side too hard, that collegial element could dry up."
He suggests that the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice might be better suited to regulate labs.
Some scientists are skeptical about the need for more regulation. Steven M. Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University, notes that many of the lethal agents can be obtained from natural sources -- notably Bacillus anthracis, which infects cattle and other animals in dozens of countries.
"Anyone bent on obtaining anthrax doesn't have to raid Fort Detrick or a university lab," Block says. A natural source for the anthrax used in last fall's attacks can't be ruled out, though the FBI appears to be aggressively pursuing a possible connection to Army labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick or Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Block says he is worried about the possibility of attacks -- but that's why he wants to see more work on drugs, vaccines and defenses against genetically altered organisms. "I think we should encourage research on these pathogens, not discourage it," he says.
Mair, at the Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, says regulation of radioactive materials may not offer a precise model for bioagents.
For one thing, a radioactive isotope is always decaying -- left alone, it becomes less of a problem over time. But biological agents can grow. A gram of Bacillus anthracis recorded in January may be a kilogram by March.
Inspections, too, are far harder. Radiation experts can use a Geiger counter to check a lab, determining instantly where radioactive substances are stored. But biological agents, stored in test tubes inside freezers, usually don't have a distinctive appearance. "If a vial is intentionally mislabeled, there's no way to know what it is without actually culturing it," Mair says.
Elisa D. Harris, a bioweapons expert at the University of Maryland and former National Security Council official, is helping lead a project at the university's Center for International and Security Studies to design an oversight system for bioagents.
"I'm afraid of an enormous increase in classified research in U.S. government and even university labs," she said. "That would stimulate concerns in other countries about whether we're really doing the work for defensive purposes."
----
'No One Asked Questions'
Scientists Recount U.S. Biodefense Labs' Security Lapses
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30241-2002Feb18?language=printer
Former Army scientist Richard Crosland kept scrupulous notes about the frozen crystals he kept in his lab, and for good reason: The crystals contained botulinum toxin, a biological poison so deadly a single gram could kill a million people.
For 11 years, Crosland carefully logged each shipment of toxin he received and accounted for every molecule, thinking somebody would want to know. But no one asked -- not once during his career as an Army biodefense researcher, and not when he left the job in 1997, hauling away boxes of personal effects that no one checked.
"No one asked questions," Crosland said of his time at U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the Pentagon's top biodefense research center at Fort Detrick, Md. "You could literally walk out with anything."
As the FBI investigates possible military links to last fall's anthrax attacks, new revelations suggest that the nation's premier biological defense labs failed at least through the mid-1990s to adopt strict safeguards against the theft of lethal viruses and bacteria. Informal policies and lax accounting procedures for researchers -- described in Army documents and in interviews with former USAMRIID scientists -- could have provided an opening for someone with a grudge or a desire to make money on the black market.
Even more troubling to some scientists was the Army's policy of recruiting foreign researchers to work in some of USAMRIID's most secure labs. A steady stream of researchers from China, the former Soviet bloc and other nations passed through the lab in the 1980s and 1990s to work alongside U.S. scientists, according to Army documents and interviews.
"It blew me away," said one microbiologist who worked at the lab in the 1980s and early 1990s. "I could have lifted vials of anything and they never would have been missed. There was nothing to stop me."
USAMRIID strongly defends its security policies and says there is no evidence that any hazardous microbes in its care were stolen or misused. Security has been sharply tightened since the mid-1990s -- and still further in the past four months, Army officials say.
The reports of security lapses come amid intense scrutiny of USAMRIID and other military labs by FBI officials probing the anthrax attacks. Outwardly, the investigation appears to have stalled, as the FBI has doubled to $2.5 million the reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever was behind the attack. Agents last month e-mailed 40,000 members of the American Society of Microbiology, asking for help.
Much of the military's biological research on anthrax since the 1940s has been performed at Fort Detrick, one of about 20 research facilities known to possess the strain of the bacterium used in the attacks that killed five people in October and November. No cases of anthrax theft have been reported, but the Army lab's security policies came into question last month with the disclosure that 27 biological specimens had been reported missing in the early 1990s.
The lost microbes, described in Army documents released as part of a lawsuit, included several anthrax specimens as well as the virus that causes ebola hemorrhagic fever. A USAMRIID spokesman said a search turned up all but three of the 27 specimens. Of the three, the only one containing anthrax bacteria had been rendered harmless, spokesman Charles Dasey said. Current security practices are in line with guidelines adopted by the National Institutes of Health, he said.
But, according to former USAMRIID scientists, until recently lab workers could have walked away with live microbes without being challenged. In interviews, the scientists said the lab failed to exercise stringent inventory controls over the pathogens and toxins used by scientists -- a practice that would be considered standard at private labs working with less dangerous material, they said.
"No one ever came in and asked, 'Where's that material you ordered?' Never once did they ask what you did with it," said Crosland, the scientist who worked with botulinum toxin, a substance regarded by bioterrorism experts as the deadliest on Earth. "7-Eleven keeps better inventory than they did."
Another scientist who had worked at Fort Detrick as a young technician said he was surprised to find himself being granted unsupervised access to the most secure, "Bio-hazard Level 4" laboratories, where ebola and other highly virulent pathogens were kept.
"I would work all by myself with some of the most dangerous organisms in the world," said the scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It wasn't just a matter of security lapses -- there was absolutely no security."
Procedures were no different for foreign scientists who worked at USAMRIID for weeks and sometimes months at a time, the sources said. The scientists, some of whom eventually immigrated to the United States, generally were recruited because of their experience with lethal microbes or expertise in biodefense. "These people would often have unrestricted access to secure lab facilities," said one former USAMRIID researcher. "It was not uncommon to see them working nights and weekends."
One of the visiting scientists was promoted to a senior position overseeing the development of liquid aerosols used in exposing lab animals to anthrax -- despite lacking U.S. citizenship and a security clearance.
According to a 1996 Army memo, USAMRIID also tried to recruit Soviet and Eastern European scientists with military weapons research to work at the Fort Detrick lab "for their expertise and as leverage against an aging workforce."
"It was a concern to me that these scientists were being allowed access not only to the [microbes] but to knowledge and information," said Ayaad Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who worked at USAMRIID for nearly a decade.
Army documents from the early 1990s depict an institution in disarray. In a sworn statement in 1992, the newly appointed head of USAMRIID's pathology division told Army investigators that "shenanigans have been going on" at the lab.
Scientists were working "covertly" on unauthorized projects, technicians were being asked to come in on weekends for off-the-books assignments and "quite a bit of stuff was unaccounted for," Lt. Col. Michael Langford is quoted as telling investigators in a transcribed interview.
"It was obvious to me there was little or no organization of that group and little or no accountability of many things," Langford was quoted as saying. Langford, who has since left USAMRIID, declined to comment.
While not disputing that problems had occurred, USAMRIID officials say the chaos of the early 1990s was the product of a major shift in emphasis after the Persian Gulf War. "There was a huge culture change," said Dasey, the USAMRIID spokesman. "Before the war, the threat from weapons of mass destruction wasn't as real as it became after the war. Suddenly the threat was very real."
Part of the change was a shift from an "academic style of research" to an intense focus on the possibility of a biological attack. "Some of the scientists at the time weren't comfortable with that change," Dasey said.
Two of the scientists interviewed, Assaad and Crosland, lost their jobs at USAMRIID as a result of budget cuts in 1997 and have since filed an age discrimination lawsuit, alleging that the Army chose older scientists for the job cuts.
Dasey also defended the recruitment of foreign scientists, a policy that he said is encouraged under the Convention on Biological Weapons. "We have always maintained a posture of openness, including exchanges of information," Dasey said. "Nobody loses when we work together on medical research."
Past weaknesses in security were documented not only at USAMRIID, but also at Department of Energy labs that carry out basic research on "biological select agents" -- bacteria and viruses that can potentially be used as bioterrorist weapons. At one DOE facility, scientists experimented with anthrax bacteria for years before anyone notified the officials responsible for security, an internal audit found.
An investigation by the DOE's inspector general completed last February found that several labs exchanged microbe samples -- including anthrax and the bacteria that cause brucellosis and plague -- without reporting the transfers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as required by the law. Another lab had "provided potentially misleading information" to the CDC about whether it was qualified to handle certain kinds of dangerous pathogens, the inspector general's report said.
No one was harmed, but the lapses could have placed the public at risk, the investigators concluded.
"The department's activities lacked sufficient federal oversight, consistent policy and standardized implementing procedures, resulting in the potential for greater risk to workers and possibly to others," the report said.
The DOE, in a statement, said it had adopted several measures in the past year to safeguard its workers and the public. New polices require all DOE labs and contractors to follow CDC guidelines on handling hazardous microbes, a department spokesman said.
Tara O'Toole, DOE undersecretary for the environment, safety and health from 1993 to 1997, acknowledged that biological security at that time was not the priority it is today.
"It's a measure of how fast things have changed," said O'Toole, now director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "It is unfair to impose January 2002 standards and sensibilities on 1999."
-------- colombia
Civil War Preys on Civilians
Thousands of Colombians have been slain as rebels and paramilitary groups assert their control.
By T. CHRISTIAN MILLER, TIMES STAFF WRITER
February 19, 2002
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-000012805feb19.story
PURACE, Colombia -- When the guerrillas came to destroy this little town, Jhimmy Guauna was there to stop them.
The musician and member of an indigenous band left his simple whitewashed home with weapon in hand: his flute. Soon, nearly everyone in town had joined him in the main square. They chanted. They sang. They waved white flags and told the guerrillas to leave.
The New Year's Eve uprising did not succeed. When the rebels left a few hours later, several buildings were in ruins. Two police officers had been killed. And Guauna was dead. Medical workers said a single bullet had passed through his throat, silencing the singer, painter and aspiring lawyer. Whether stray round or deliberate shot, the townspeople got the message: Next time, let the guerrillas win.
"I'm going to stay inside" if the guerrillas return, said Guauna's brother Diego, who lived with Jhimmy in this town that clings like a wasp's nest to a cliff ledge high in the western Andes. "It'd be tough to confront them."
Jhimmy Guauna was not the first civilian killed in Colombia's guerrilla war, nor the most recent. As Colombia's 38-year-old conflict has intensified in the past few years, it has become one of the deadliest in the world for noncombatants.
The number of civilians killed each year by one of Colombia's bewildering array of armed groups has skyrocketed, from 1,552 dead in 1998 to an estimated 5,400 in 2001.
For every soldier killed in combat, six civilians die, either from cross-fire, assassinations or massacres carried out by the military, leftist guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary groups, according to figures kept by the Center for Investigation and Popular Education, a research group based in Bogota, the capital.
Colombia, in fact, is one of the few war zones in the world where all illegal armed groups at times explicitly target civilians, according to human rights activists. In Colombia's drug-financed conflict, civilians often become targets as armed groups try to exert control over rural areas where coca, the plant used in making cocaine, is grown. Farmers, housewives, store owners and teachers are shot, blown up or hacked to death. The murders take place day and night, in cities and towns, at home and in schools and churches.
It's a crisis the Colombian government has so far failed to end. Peace talks begun three years ago have made little progress, nearly collapsing earlier this year. Hundreds of towns and hamlets are without police or soldiers because of lack of money or fears for the officers' safety, leaving citizens vulnerable to the whims of local rebel or paramilitary commanders. Even when towns do have protection, it's usually provided by poorly equipped police facing battle-hardened fighters.
In response, an extraordinary grass-roots resistance has flourished in the last several years.
Towns have declared themselves peace islands, where neither the army nor insurgents are welcome. Other communities have mounted ad hoc displays of resistance. Still others have attempted to directly negotiate with the armed groups.
So far, there have been few successes, although some civilians continue to hold out hope.
"It's a long, slow process and there's no magic bullet," said Robin Kirk, an expert on Colombia with New York-based Human Rights Watch.
What is clear is that none of the armed groups will allow any such movements to threaten their power.
Comandante Vladimir is the nom de guerre for a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which attacked Purace on Dec. 31. Standing at a rainy, wind-swept roadblock in Colombia's high plains 12 miles from the village, he explained that the civilian resistance was a "serious" issue that the guerrillas would soon clear up.
"We are going to make people understand things," said Vladimir, a 17-year-old who has been a rebel for four years. "We are going to call everyone who has been doing this civil resistance together to explain to them what is happening. The government is putting the people against us.
"The people are confused," he said.
Two leftist rebel groups have fought the government through most of the nearly four decades of conflict. More recently, right-wing paramilitary groups have joined the battle, sometimes with support from the army.
Unlike other conflicts in which private armies must depend on locals for food, shelter or supplies, none of Colombia's armed groups need the goodwill of civilians.
Instead, all sides finance their activities at least in part from drugs. Colombia accounts for nearly 80% of the world's supply of cocaine and most of the heroin sold on the East Coast of the United States.
The Colombian military estimates that more than $500 million a year from drugs and kidnappings flows to the country's leftist rebel groups--FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN. The groups tax farmers who grow coca, and the Colombian military says FARC has also begun to process and transport illegal drugs.
Meanwhile, paramilitary leader Carlos Castano has said that as much as 70% of the income for his right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia comes from drug sources as well, financing its explosive growth from a few hundred men in the 1980s to more than 10,000 today.
More than any other factor, this growing reliance on drug money has thrust civilians onto Colombia's killing fields as each group grapples for territory. In addition, the desire to control transit corridors and natural resources fuels the land grab.
The farmers and merchants living in areas controlled by paramilitary forces are seen by guerrilla groups as right-wing sympathizers, supplying labor and money to the enemy. Civilians in rebel-controlled territory are viewed with suspicion by the rightists.
That is why a sense of dread gripped the town of San Vicente del Caguan last month, when it seemed that peace talks between rebels and the government were on the verge of collapse.
The town is the capital of a special zone ceded to guerrillas by the government for negotiations. Residents feared that the military would roll into the region to regain control if the talks ended, to be followed by paramilitary forces.
"If the zone goes, we are cannon fodder," said Victor Ayala, the second in command of the unarmed local police force.
The self-sufficiency provided by drug money has also meant that the paramilitary groups and guerrillas don't have to answer to outside forces. There are no superpowers that can yank their funding, no external groups to influence their thinking. Both easily ignore repeated pleas from the United Nations and national and international peace groups to show more respect for human rights.
As a result, Colombia's conflict is more a brutal clash for power than an effort to win the hearts and minds of the populace.
"As the sides fight for territory and economic resources, each year the conflict becomes more degraded," said Ana Teresa Bernal, head of Redepaz, a leading Colombian peace group. "It's a conflict that more than anything else affects the civilian population. It is tearing apart the fabric of society."
The first, scattered attempts at organized civilian resistance came in the 1980s, when the right-wing paramilitary groups began to flourish. But it wasn't until the late 1990s that local peace groups began a concerted effort to advance the cause of civil resistance, especially in rural areas.
The first "communities of peace" arose in northern Colombia, in a volatile and isolated region near the border with Panama. People from several towns banded together and pledged to remain strictly neutral in the conflict, following three simple rules: no guns, no participation in the war and no sharing of information with any side.
The hope was that the paramilitary forces and guerrillas battling for control of the region's transit routes to the Pacific and Atlantic would leave the communities alone.
But the theory was complicated by the realities of life. Families had children who belonged to guerrilla units. Paramilitary fighters would visit girlfriends in the towns.
And so, both sides continued targeting civilians.
By some estimates, more than 100 people have been killed in the peace communities since 1997. Those who have worked to foster the growing number of peace communities insist that many more people would have been killed if not for the towns' desire to remain neutral. But they acknowledge that results could have been better.
"The idea was that the armed groups would respect the communities. That never happened," said one researcher, who declined to be named because she is still involved in the project.
Jhimmy Guauna's rebellion here in Purace was one recent example of a spontaneous grass-roots backlash. Several other towns throughout Colombia have held similar demonstrations.
Many of them have taken place in indigenous communities, where there is a long history of social organization as groups have fought for recognition by the government. Still, the protests seem mostly a rush of adrenaline and frustration, quickly quashed by the reality of confronting armed guerrillas.
For instance, in Coconuco, about 10 miles south of Purace, a squad of ELN guerrillas attacked the police station Dec. 17, firing machine guns for less than an hour, then retreating. No one was injured.
As the guerrillas were leaving town, they ran into a band of carolers celebrating the Christmas holidays. The revelers shouted at the guerrillas and were joined by other townspeople.
Local media portrayed the event as though the citizens had driven out the guerrillas.
When the ELN and FARC guerrillas came back two weeks later, striking the police stations in Purace and Coconuco in a coordinated attack, there was no effort to take to the streets.
"The first display was a valiant act, a defense of the country, the people, the land," said Gustavo Valencia, Coconuco's mayor. "But in front of the power of guns, we are vulnerable. People are terrified now."
The tiny coffee town of Tarso in western Colombia is yet another experiment in civilian resistance. Three years ago, ex-guerrillas got together with local residents and held meetings that led to the creation of a municipal assembly with 150 representatives.
The idea was that widespread citizen participation would stave off attacks by convincing the leftist rebels that the town was run by the people, not Bogota's central government.
Last year, the assembly worked with the mayor to develop a plan to provide night classes for poor farmers, free bus transportation for students and a fund to support small businesses.
Then, cars and motorcycles without license plates--an effort to conceal the vehicles' origin--began to appear. Strangers with side arms were seen idling on street corners with local police officers.
In October, they struck. A squad of right-wing fighters, angered that ex-guerrillas were involved in the process, approached one of the leaders of the assembly in front of the white church that dominates the town. They gave the former ELN member and four friends 24 hours to leave town.
The threat put a halt to the experiment in self-reliance. The assembly has not met since October. The town seems a broken place, with fragments of the assembly's vision scattered around like so much shattered glass.
One assembly member, a coffee rancher, said he would consider it a blessing if the right-wing paramilitary forces told him to leave.
"At least that way, I know they won't kill me," said Gabriel Jaime Gomez, 40, who was once kidnapped by an ELN band. Rebels who later left the same group worked with him to forge the assembly.
The former guerrillas who fled are more hopeful. They acknowledge that many of Colombia's civil resistance movements have only ended in more deaths.
But Tarso, they hope, will be different.
"The process has collapsed, but it will recuperate," said William Zapata, one of those threatened by the right-wing fighters. "It cannot be stopped."
-------- drug war
Malaysia to Get Tougher with Hardcore Drug Addicts
By REUTERS
February 19, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-malaysia-drugs.html
KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia wants to remove hardcore drug addicts from rehabilitation centers to give people who are less dependent on the habit a better chance of reforming themselves, newspapers and officials said on Wednesday.
Regular drug users who could not shake off their addiction have been moving in and out of rehabilitation centers and were a bad influence on those there who had just been hooked, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi was quoted as saying.
He said hardcore addicts will be placed in different detention centers and no special treatment had been planned.
``I will bring this proposal at next week's cabinet meeting,'' Abdullah, who is also Home Minister, was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times daily.
``As we are treating the drug problems in the country very seriously, we will implement the proposal very soon,'' Abdullah said.
A spokesman for the deputy premier told Reuters the detention centers would be for addicts who had been treated three times or more at rehabilitation camps.
Officials said there were about 40,000 hardcore addicts at drug rehabilitation centers now, along with about 200,000 who were less prone to the habit.
Malaysia has a mandatory death sentence for convicted drug pushers and whipping and jail for those caught in possession of a certain quantity of dangerous drugs but not deemed traffickers.
----
No FARC in Peru
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
February 19, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020219-73366120.htm#2
Allow me to express my appreciation for your editorial meeting last week with the foreign ministers of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and for the subsequent editorial, "The message from the Andes." I also appreciate the news coverage you have given to the Andean Trade Preferences Act - a matter of crucial importance to the economies of the four Andean countries.
I should also like to point out an inaccuracy in your Feb. 15 editorial. You state that while the foreign minister of Peru, Diego Garcia Sayan, denied in a meeting with your editorial board last week that the FARC guerrillas from Colombia have penetrated, or are penetrating, Peruvian territory, I had said the contrary during a previous meeting with the editorial board of your paper. According to the editorial, I said that the FARC are assisting Peruvian guerrillas with arms and poppy seeds.
If you review the records of our conversation, what I said is that drug traffickers are returning to Peru because of the absence of aerial interdiction and the success of the anti-drug programs in the countries of the region, among other factors. At no time did I say that FARC had penetrated Peruvian territory or were aiding the Shining Path guerrilla movement with arms or poppy seeds. What I said on that occasion - and you cited it verbatim in your Dec. 30 editorial "Terrorism down south" - is that "As we succeed in fighting drugs and terrorism in Colombia ... drug-traffickers are trying to come back to Bolivia and Peru."
Thank you for allowing me to clarify what I am sure was an involuntary misunderstanding.
ALLAN WAGNER
Ambassador of Peru Embassy of Peru Washington
----
Court reviews HUD drug-eviction policy
By Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
2/19/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=19022002-010542-3936r
WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- A lawyer for the federal government told the Supreme Court in argument Tuesday that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has the right to kick tenants out of public housing if any member of the tenant's household commits a drug offense anywhere.
That right endures even when the tenant has no knowledge of the offense, he said.
A lower court saw the case differently, ruling in favor of four elderly tenants who were in the process of being evicted from public housing in Oakland, Calif.
Federal law requires public housing leases with local housing authorities to contain a clause saying "any drug-related criminal activity on or off premises engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household or any guest or other person under the tenant's control, shall be cause for termination of tenancy."
The four tenants were the targets of eviction proceedings in state court in late 1997 and early 1998.
Pearlie Rucker, 63, has lived in public housing since 1985. The Oakland Housing Authority alleged that her mentally retarded adult daughter, who lives with her, was "found with cocaine and a crack cocaine pipe three blocks from Rucker's apartment." However, OHA sought and obtained a dismissal of the complaint in February 1998.
Willie Lee, 78, is a woman who has lived in public housing for more than 25 years. OHA alleged that Lee's grandson, who lives with her, was caught smoking marijuana in the public housing parking lot.
Barbara Hill, 63, has lived in public housing for more than 30 years. Her grandson was caught with Lee's grandson smoking marijuana, OHA said.
Finally, Herman Walker, 75, is disabled and has lived in public housing 10 years, and requires an in-home caregiver. OHA said that three times in two months, the caregiver and two others were caught with cocaine inside Walker's apartment.
After the eviction proceedings began in state court, the four filed suit against HUD in federal court.
They asked a federal judge for an injunction preventing eviction of an "innocent" tenant.
The federal judge issued the injunction against eviction, but limited it to situations in which household members committed drug crimes outside of a tenant's residence.
In Walker's case, where the drug offense allegedly occurred inside his apartment, the judge said his eviction might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bans discrimination against the disabled.
A divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judge, but the full circuit court reversed the panel by a 7-4 vote.
The majority said HUD was misinterpreting Congress's intentions when it passed the law.
Acting for HUD, the Justice Department then asked the Supreme Court for review.
Speaking for HUD during argument Tuesday, Assistant Solicitor General James Feldman said the government was within its rights to require eviction of tenants under the provisions of the law.
"This is the government's property to begin with," Feldman said. "It can say you have to do this as a condition of signing the (public housing) lease."
Public housing parking lots and other places outside a tenant's apartment "have become war zones and drug markets," he added.
"Congress was facing a very serious problem" when it enacted the requirement, Feldman argued. " ... I think Congress took the only course available."
San Francisco attorney Gary Lafayette spoke for the Oakland Housing Authority. All public housing tenants in Oakland were given a statement showing the new eviction rules and were asked to sign it, he said.
On the other side, the tenants who face eviction are claiming that the process is unconstitutional, and their attorney, Paul Renne, pressed that argument Tuesday.
The housing authority "is the judge and jury (deciding) whether or not innocent tenants can ... be evicted from their homes," Renne said.
Renne, who also practices in San Francisco, told the justices that Congress cannot eliminate the "innocent tenant defense" through a statute. Such a defense "is recognized in all state and federal court proceedings," he said.
Responding to questions from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Renne also disputed the narrowness of the federal judge's injunction, even though the judge ruled in his clients' favor.
"We believe that the 'defense of an innocent person' should apply" when drug offenses are committed "both on and off the premises" of a public housing residence, he said.
Justice Stephen Breyer did not take part in Tuesday's argument and will not participate in any final decision. His brother Charles Breyer is the federal judge who earlier issued the injunction.
The Supreme Court should rule in the case within the next couple of months.
(No. 00-1770, HUD vs. Rucker et al; and No. 00-1781, OHA vs. Rucker et al)
-------- europe
EU goes ahead with Zimbabwe sanctions, pulls out observers
Tuesday February 19
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020218/1/2ifit.html
Foreign ministers of the European Union agreed to go ahead with targeted sanctions against President Robert Mugabe's regime and pull its election observers out of Zimbabwe.
The sanctions, against Mugabe himself and 19 other members of his administration, include a ban on travel to the European Union and freeze on assets they might have in the 15-nation bloc, as well as an arms embargo.
The decision follows Saturday's expulsion from Harare of the Swedish chief of the EU election mission to Zimbabwe, Pierre Schori. Just over 30 other observers remain in the country.
Hotly contested presidential elections in Zimbabwe, where Mugabe has been in power for nearly 22 years, are set for March 9-10.
"These sanctions are aimed solely at those whom the EU judges to be responsible for the violence (in the run-up to the elections), for the violations of human rights and for preventing the holding of free and fair elections in Zimbabwe," a statement by the foreign ministers said.
"The sanctions are designed not to harm ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe or her neighbors, nor should they prevent dialogue between the EU and Zimbabwe to address its economic and other problems," it said.
Others on the sanctions list include Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, Defense Minister Sidney Sekeramayi and Agriculture Minister Joseph Made.
The foreign ministers' statement alleged that all 20 on the list were responsible for "serious violations of human rights and of the freedom of opinion, of association and of peaceful assembly in Zimbabwe."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who had pushed hard for a common EU position on Zimbabwe, said Mugabe's promise of free and fair elections had proven "entirely bogus."
"We have made many, many accommodations with the government of Zimbabwe, but today is the end of the road," Straw told reporters.
"It's clear (from a report that Schori presented to the foreign ministers) that it's not possible for the observers to do their job, and that's why we agreed unanimously ... that sanctions should be applied," he said.
Straw also said that the decision "sends out a strong message about the credibility" of EU election observer missions, wherever they might be deployed.
-------- georgia
Georgia seeks anti-terror alliance
World Scene
February 19, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020219-25518103.htm
TBILISI, Georgia - Georgia's president said yesterday his country would consider conducting a joint security operation with the United States to uproot terrorists hiding in a gorge on the border with Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya.
"As for the possibility of a future joint action with the U.S. special forces in the Pankisi Gorge, we haven't yet had systematic discussions on that," Eduard Shevardnadze told reporters.
The pressure on Georgia to deal with crime and instability linked to the gorge increased last week when U.S. charge d'affaires Philip Remler told a Georgian newspaper that several dozen terrorists from Afghanistan were operating in the region.
-------- india
India Seeks Closer U.S. Relations
February 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-US.html
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India is building a closer military relationship with the United States after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, easing a chill that dated to the Cold War, India's defense minister said Tuesday.
Defense Minister George Fernandes' comments came a day after Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said India intends to buy U.S. surveillance radar -- its first major military purchase from the United States.
The radar would be used to help fight Islamic militants in the disputed province of Kashmir, an Indian Defense Ministry source said. U.S. officials have not indicated that the radar would be used in Kashmir, and Washington has often said that it would not interfere in the dispute.
``It is unprecedented, since our cooperation was at such a low level,'' Fernandes told a news conference Tuesday. ``Where there was a certain standoffishness, it went away.''
``Post-Sept. 11, a different relationship was developed. Military-to-military cooperation has been worked out,'' he said.
During the Cold War, India professed to be nonaligned but depended politically and militarily on the Soviet Union. Washington tilted toward Pakistan, India's traditional rival.
India -- one of the world's biggest arms purchasers -- has traditionally bought most of its weapons from Moscow, but is now considering purchases from Washington as well. Indian officials say they need a strong defense against Pakistan and China.
Fernandes stressed that India's closer ties with the U.S. military will not clash with its defense ties with Russia.
``In international relations, we always do balancing acts,'' Fernandes said at a defense show in New Delhi. ``We are working together (with both) and I don't think there is any conflict of interest between our relations with the U.S. and our relations with Russia.''
In Honolulu, Indian and U.S. air force officials began a weeklong conference Monday to promote military cooperation. Joint army, navy and air force exercises ``are on the cards and the program has been worked out. These will be regular features,'' Fernandes said.
India-U.S. relations went through their roughest phase after New Delhi conducted nuclear tests in 1998, followed by tests in Pakistan. The United States and other Western countries imposed economic sanctions on both nations. The U.S. has since lifted most of the sanctions.
On Monday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said his nation was ``alarmed by India's relentless pursuit and acquisition of defense equipment which are far beyond India's genuine defense needs.''
Fernandes rejected Khan's criticism on Tuesday, saying: ``Pakistan will not decide what we need. We will decide.''
Fernandes also ruled out any immediate pullback of Indian troops massed on the border with Pakistan, saying Islamabad has not responded to demands that it end cross-border terrorism and extradite 20 men wanted for crimes in India.
India mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the frontier after blaming a bloody Dec. 13 attack on its Parliament on two Pakistan-based militant groups and Pakistan's spy agency. Pakistan and the militant groups denied any connection.
``We laid certain conditions. Those conditions haven't been met. So, the forces will remain there until a final decision is taken,'' Fernandes said.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they won independence from Britain in 1947, two over the divided Himalayan province of Kashmir. India also fought a war with China in 1962.
-------- iran
Iran working with Afghan rebels
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020219-11153881.htm
U.S. intelligence agencies have spotted scores of Iranian intelligence and military personnel deep inside Afghanistan working to destabilize the interim government.
The Iranians include agents from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the Iranian spy service, and Iranian special forces troops from the Revolutionary Guards Corps, said officials familiar with intelligence reports.
According to the officials, the Iranians are working with several hundred Afghan fighters operating near the strategic city of Mazar-e-Sharif in an effort to undermine the pro-U.S. government now in place in Kabul.
The Iranian Islamic fundamentalists also are working to prevent the return of Afghanistan's former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, from exile in Italy. He could return as soon as next month.
"They are armed to the teeth, and they have lots of money to buy people off" - a common Afghan political tactic, one U.S. official said of the pro-Iranian fighters.
U.S. officials have said Iranians are operating near the Afghan border with Iran. But the new intelligence indicates an extensive covert action program in other parts of the country as well, the officials said.
Disclosure of the covert activities comes as the Iranian government announced yesterday that Afghanistan's interim prime minister, Hamid Karzai, will travel to Tehran next week for talks.
The Iranian operations are prompting heightened worries inside the Bush administration because of the fragility of the interim government in Afghanistan.
An Afghan Cabinet minister was assassinated last week by rival warlords.
"It's a concern," a senior official said of the covert Iranian activities. "As a neighbor of [Afghanistan], the Iranians have a particular interest in the region close to their border."
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration's special envoy to Afghanistan, said last week that the administration had formally protested the Iranian activities to the Foreign Ministry of Iran. He said the Iranians are arming and financing Islamic fighters in Afghanistan who oppose the government now led by Mr. Karzai.
"We have given them [the Iranians] the information we have with regard to what we think is happening, particularly with regard to al Qaeda presence in Iran and movement across Iran," Mr. Khalilzad said in an interview Feb. 15 with the British Broadcasting Corp.
U.S. officials said yesterday that the Iranians have sent 200 to 300 Afghan Islamic fighters from Iran to the area around Mazar-e-Sharif during the past several weeks.
The fighters are covert members of the Shi'ite group Sipha-e-Mohammed, or Soldiers of Mohammed, who were trained in Lebanon with the pro-Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah. The Sipha group is also known as Afghan Hezbollah.
Iranian special forces troops, members of the al Qods division of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, are working with the fighters, the officials said.
The Iranians around Mazar-e-Sharif appear to be working independently from Iranian intelligence and military personnel in two other parts of the country - around Herat, in western Afghanistan, and near Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan.
U.S. officials said Iran's strategy appears to be to use pro-Iranian Afghan fighters to get control of Mazar-e-Sharif, a key crossroads city and the location of a celebrated Shi'ite mosque.
The Iranians' objective appears to be destabilizing Afghanistan so that it rejects the presence of U.S. military forces and prevents the return of the former king.
Islamic fundamentalists now in power in Tehran fear that the return of the king will inspire pro-monarchist sentiments inside Iran, where a power struggle is under way between reformers and Shi'ite fundamentalists.
The shah of Iran was ousted in 1979, leading to the current Islamic dictatorship.
President Bush has said Iran is part of an "axis of evil" because of its repressive system and support for international terrorism. Iraq and North Korea are the other nations he has named.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi yesterday rejected U.S. assertions that Iran is trying to destabilize Afghanistan. "We are determined to remain in Afghanistan as long as the government and the people want us to do so," he said in Tehran.
CIA Director George J. Tenet told Congress two weeks ago that Iran was not doing enough to stop al Qaeda members who fled to Iran from Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld first raised the issue of Iranian help to fleeing al Qaeda fighters last month.
However, U.S. officials have said little about Iranian activities inside Afghanistan before Mr. Khalilzad's comments last week.
One U.S. official said Iran is collaborating with the Kabul government's defense minister, Gen. Abdul Qassim Fahim, who traveled recently to Iran.
"Neither the Iranian Revolutionary Guards nor Pakistan wants to see a stable Afghan government," the official said.
"He's using his partnership with Iranians, who are no longer opposing al Qaeda and the Taliban, against his own rivals for power," the official said of Gen. Fahim.
The official said Mr. Karzai, the current Afghan interim leader, has little real power and is unable to stop the re-emergence of factionalism among Afghan warlords.
In Tokyo, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that Iran is not doing enough to stop terrorism.
Mr. Khalilzad, the special envoy, said in a PBS television interview broadcast Friday that Afghanistan is facing the threat of "warlordism returning" because of "multiple armies that continue to exist."
Mr. Khalilzad said the risk of conflict is small but exists in areas near Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Mr. Khalilzad said the United States is worried that Iran has two policies on Afghanistan - one that is constructive and a second emanating from Iranian hard-liners and Revolutionary Guards that is negative.
He said Iranian assistance to members of the al Qaeda terrorism network has involved helping them to travel to other international locations outside Iran.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel halts Gaza demolition
Tuesday, 19 February, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1829000/1829727.stm
Palestinians had just a few hours to leave their homes An Israeli high court injunction has temporarily halted the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip - but not before four had already been destroyed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks.
The 20 houses stand near the Kissufim crossing point, by a road leading to a Jewish settlement.
Overnight, a Palestinian gunman ambushed Israeli soldiers and settlers on the road, killing three people before he himself was killed.
In a separate incident, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired at an office of the radical Islamic militant group Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing two people.
It was the latest in a series of deadly reprisals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the Kissufim ambush and the separate murder of an Israeli officer.
Eleven Palestinians have been killed in the same period.
A Palestinian blew himself up while trying to board a bus on Tuesday outside Mehola, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. There were no other casualties.
The driver pushed the Palestinian off the bus and sped off before the suicide bomber triggered the device, Israeli security officials said.
Earlier, the army said it had struck the Hamas post in the Jabaliya refugee camp "in response to the recent wave of murderous terror attacks".
Two people inside, said to be Hamas members, were killed. Four others, including a 10-year-old girl passing by, were critically injured.
Human rights pressure
Despite reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has decided to step up the pressure on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Israeli high court injunction was seen as a victory for the Palestinian al-Mezan human rights centre.
The homes earmarked for demolition were the last properties in a one kilometre-wide security zone that Israel has created inside Palestinian territory.
Al-Mezan director Issam Younis said that although the court's decision was temporary, it would at least give the families time to relocate.
The BBC's Kylie Morris in Gaza says Israel normally defends the demolition of houses on the grounds that they provide cover for militants who attack its soldiers and settlements.
About 400 houses have been destroyed by Israel since the Palestinian intifada began 16 months ago.
Correspondents say Mr Sharon's policy is facing increasing criticism inside Israel. He decided to intensify military strikes after meeting his top security advisers on Monday.
The extreme right want Mr Sharon to be tougher in his response, while those to the left want a resumption of peace talks, arguing that violence will bring yet more terror.
The attack on a Hamas office in the Gaza Strip was unusual, our correspondent says. In the past, Israeli aircraft have generally targeted security compounds belonging to Palestinian forces linked to Mr Arafat
--------
Reserve generals back unilateral withdrawal
By Lily Galili
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Ha`aretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=131193&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0
After four months of intense discussion, the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1,000 top-level reserve generals, colonels, and Shin Bet and Mossad officials, are to mount a public campaign for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and much of the West Bank.
Taking care to avoid the term "separation" - council member Shlomo Avineri, a former foreign ministry director general, said it smacks of apartheid - the organization is calling for evacuating Gaza, dismantling 50 settlements, the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, and immediate peace talks with Palestinians, whether there is a cease-fire or not.
The debate inside the organization involved some 300 of its members, and about 80 percent of the full membership has signed on to the campaign. It will include public appearances, bumper stickers, and a pamphlet titled "Saying shalom to the Palestinians." During the debates, many members raised objections to a unilateral withdrawal from the territories. The arguments ranged from how it would forestall talks with the Palestinians, because a withdrawal would be seen as similar to the "escape" from Lebanon, to the opinion that the council should not deal with withdrawal, which implies leaving settlements.
But as the debate continued, a consensus evolved to encompass 80 percent of the membership that believes the immediate establishment and recognition of a Palestinian state would force the Palestinian leadership to change its behavior. Council sources said Palestinians shown the plan are firmly opposed to it because they fear the new lines to be drawn - mostly along the Green Line - would become permanent, if only de facto, borders.
"I went into the discussions without a firm opinion," said reserve major general Danny Rothschild, president of the council. "But I was convinced by the contacts I have through back channels with Palestinians in recent months. I've learned from them that the street has taken over the entire moderate camp, and the moderate positions they take behind closed doors change the minute there's fear that they will be exposed to the threatening street. I also took into account the demographic issue, and without any chance right now for negotiations, it requires withdrawal in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state."
But more than anything else, Rothschild said the deciding factor for him was the sprouting movement of soldiers refusing to serve in the territories, even before the officers letter issued late last month that has already grown to more than 200 signatories. "Four months ago it was clear to me that the movement would grow if we continue calling up reserves to accompany settlers to music lessons and to protect real estate that has nothing to do with ideology."
According to Rothschild, the council members "said to ourselves that precisely because we aren't politicians, but people who look at the situation through a security perspective of how to use power, it was clear that those two jeeps and a tank that accompany a settler who refuses to use a bypass road, would do much more good if they were on the seam," meaning on both sides of the Green Line, the pre-1967 armistice lines. "Shifting a company of soldiers from protecting a settlement to protecting the seam is the proper use of force," says Rothschild.
Unlike some of the other unilateral withdrawal plans, like "Life Fence," for example, the council's plan involves evacuating some 40-50 settlements, where some 15 percent of the settlers live. The council has detailed maps, but it won't make them public yet to avoid being perceived as an alterative to the army.
The council plan will be dubbed "Saying shalom to the Palestinians," using the double meaning of both farewell and peace for the word shalom, and includes a full withdrawal from Gaza, except for a narrow zone along the international border with Egypt; new military deployment along a new line east and south of the Green Line in the northern West Bank, and east and north of it in the south Mt. Hebron area. The Green Line would become the new line in the Bethlehem and Ramallah areas. According to the plan, Israelis would remain - at this stage - in the Jordan Valley, the Gush Etzion bloc, the Ariel finger, and in Kiryat Arba and in the Jewish neighborhood in downtown Hebron.
The plan does not touch on the issue of Jerusalem, except for noting that by moving troops out of other places, more will be available for protecting Jerusalem. "This is not a 100 percent solution," Rothschild admits, "but the plan solves the anomaly of there being the most number of troops in the places with the least number of settlers to protect."
One of the most vehement of the council member opposed to the plan is reserve major general Shlomo Gazit, a member of the council's executive. Gazit argued for redeployment to new lines, but said as much as possible has to be left to negotiations. Indeed, Gazit seems to be expressing the ambivalence in other organizations that back unilateral separation but are afraid it will sabotage any negotiations with the Palestinians.
Thus, the Peace Coalition, comprised of Peace Now, Meretz and Labor Party doves, is speaking in two voices as it calls for unilateral separation and for negotiations. Indeed, the bumper sticker the Council for Peace and Security encompasses that ambivalence: "Withdrawal for security, talks for peace."
In the past, the council threw its considerable weight behind the Oslo agreements, most of whose architects are now opposed to a unilateral withdrawal. But Rothschild has a different view. "The negotiations for a permanent agreement have to be based on Oslo. But an army commander cannot be dogmatic. When conditions change on the ground, he must change his behavior. If Oslo is dead, it's because we killed it, and now we're shooting. But now there's no choice except to do what's best for us."
At the latest session of the council's executive, last week, which was attended by among others reserve major generals Nati Sharoni and Ami Ayalon, the former Shin Bet chief, the executive challenged Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy of refusing to negotiate with the Palestinians under fire. The council called for immediate talks, under fire, with the Palestinians, and for the immediate evacuation of isolated settlements that require a large military presence to protect.
Sharon refused to meet with them
During the months of preparation, discussing the plan, council members met with a host of figures, including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and former justice minister Yossi Beilin, who oppose unilateral withdrawal; Haim Ramon who favors unilateral withdrawal and a permanent agreement with international peacekeeping forces, which the council rejects; Minister Dan Meridor, who supports separation primarily for demographic reasons, and with Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, who opposes evacuating settlements.
As part of their planned public campaign, the council was supposed to meet with the Labor Party Knesset faction this week, to present the plan. But the meeting was canceled at the last minute, with the conventional wisdom saying Ben-Eliezer did not want to provide a platform to the proponents of unilateral withdrawal, like Ramon.
The council is due to meet President Moshe Katsav and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to present the plan. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has refused to meet them.
The council has an appointment at Rafael in two weeks time to examine new technologies, including a new security fence, developed by the state-owned weapons R&D firm, that could be integrated into their security plan.
--------
Arafat Unhurt in Israeli Helicopter Attack
February 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-arafat.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank - An Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a West Bank compound where Yasser Arafat is under Israeli siege but the Palestinian leader was unhurt, a Palestinian security chief said.
The security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, told Reuters: ``A missile from an Israeli Apache helicopter hit the military intelligence office in Arafat's compound in (the West Bank city of) Ramallah.
``Arafat and his aides are safe in his office,'' Dahlan said.
There was no immediate Israeli comment. Arafat has been surrounded by Israeli tanks for the past two months amid Israeli demands that he arrest militants who killed an Israeli cabinet minister in October.
The Ramallah attack came hours after Israeli naval gunboats fired at Arafat's seaside headquarters in Gaza City, killing four people, in apparent retaliation for the killing of six Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint late on Tuesday.
-------- pakistan
China to go ahead with port construction in Pak
PTI
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2002
http://origin.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1450788
BEIJING: Overcoming the initial hiccups, China and Pakistan have decided to implement their ambitious plan to develop the strategically located Gwadar deep-sea port along the Balochistan coast.
"The Gwadar deep-sea port plan will go ahead as planned as it would enhance China's strategic depth in the region," an official source said here today.
A high-level Chinese government delegation led by Vice Premier Wu Bangguo is set to visit Pakistan next month to attend the ground-breaking ceremony at Gwadar, he said.
Apart from the Gwadar port, Pakistan and China are actively pursuing 653-kilometre-long coastal highway from Karachi to Gwadar. China is to partly fund the phase-I of the port with an estimated cost of 248 million US dollars.
Several Chinese technical delegations have already visited the site and a Pakistani delegation is likely to visit Beijing soon to tie up pending issues concerning the Gwadar project.
Earlier there were reports that China threatened to pull out of the project to protest Islamabad's handing over of two airports to the US for operations in Afghanistan.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who visited Beijing en-route Kathmandu for the SAARC summit, was reportedly asked to explain circumstances in which the US was allowed exclusive access to the two major airports at Jacobabad and Pasni.
China was also upset that the US had reportedly been allowed to set up some listening posts in the northern areas to monitor any nuclear or army activities in the region, which borders China's restive provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet.
-------- peru
Peru's court upholds Berenson's sentence
World Scene
February 19, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020219-25518103.htm
LIMA, Peru - The top appeals court yesterday upheld the 20-year sentence on terrorism charges of Lori Berenson, a U.S. woman convicted of aiding Marxist rebels, exhausting all her legal options in Peru, a senior judge said.
"Her sentence has been confirmed," said Guillermo Cabala, president of the section of the court that reviewed her case. He said four of the five judges wanted the sentence upheld while he argued for it to be reduced to 15 years.
It was not clear whether Berenson herself, who began a hunger strike yesterday in support of jailed leftist rebels, had been informed of the Supreme Court ruling.
---
Pardon Ruled Out in Peru for Berenson
Tue Feb 19, 2002
By CRAIG MAURO,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20020219/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/peru_berenson_17
LIMA, Peru (AP) - An American woman will seek a pardon from Peru's president after a court ordered her to serve out a 20-year prison sentence for collaborating with leftist rebels in a failed bid to seize Congress.
Peru's Justice Minister Fernando Olivera, however, ruled out a pardon on Tuesday for New York-native Lori Berenson a day after the Supreme Court confirmed her sentence.
"She is a proven terrorist, sentenced by the Supreme Court," Olivera said. "There is simply nothing more to discuss about the matter ... a presidential pardon is not under consideration."
Olivera did not say whether he had discussed the matter with President Alejandro Toledo, who would grant the pardon.
The Supreme Court was Berenson's last recourse through Peru's justice system.
Berenson's lawyer and parents said she will pursue the remaining options for being released from prison: a presidential pardon or a favorable ruling by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Berenson, 32, has already been jailed for six years and must now serve out the sentence that ends in 2015.
She condemned the Supreme Court decision Monday and said she was joining hundreds of jailed guerrillas in a hunger strike to protest prison conditions and Peru's anti-terrorism laws.
Berenson was convicted in June of terrorist collaboration in the thwarted attempt by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to take over Peru's Congress in 1995.
But she was acquitted of being a member of the rebel group.
That was Berenson's second terrorism conviction. The first came in 1996 when a secret military tribunal of hooded judges sentenced her to life in prison for being a rebel leader.
In that trial, the court ruled that Berenson aided the guerrillas by renting a house for their hide-out and posing as a journalist to enter Congress to gather intelligence.
Berenson denied the charges and said she didn't know her housemates were rebels.
The life sentence was overturned in August 2000 and a new trial ordered after years of pressure from the United States.
Presiding Justice Guillermo Cabala said five Supreme Court judges decided Berenson's appeal last week but held off releasing it until Monday.
Cabala said four judges upheld the 20-year sentence while he supported reducing it to 15 years.
Berenson's parents, Mark and Rhoda Berenson of New York, already have urged Toledo to pardon their daughter.
Rhoda Berenson also said she will ask the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, to accelerate its review of the case. The issue eventually could reach the OAS court, which has the power to overturn her conviction. Peru is a member state of the court and is obliged to adhere to its rulings.
Berenson, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student, considers herself a political prisoner and says authorities unfairly portrayed her concern for social justice as a terrorist agenda.
She condemned the Supreme Court's decision in a statement released by her parents, who have spoken regularly with their daughter by telephone from New York.
"This judicial process was a farce from its beginning to its end. I am innocent of the charges," Berenson said in the statement.
Berenson's parents said they will appeal to President Bush to lobby for her release.
"We know that Lori is innocent, and we remain optimistic that she will be released. We call upon President George W. Bush to right this wrong and to secure Lori's release," the Berensons said in the statement.
The State Department had no immediate comment.
A pardon of Berenson might be unpopular in Peru, where she is seen as a foreign terrorist in a country that suffered through years of guerrilla violence.
Bush will visit Peru March 23 to discuss trade and combating drug trafficking and terrorism with Toledo. Foreign Minister Diego Garcia Sayan last week did not rule out that the two presidents could discuss Berenson's case.
Bush urged Toledo during a June meeting in Washington to consider humanitarian concerns in Berenson's case.
"Lori was a victim of the previous administration," Rhoda Berenson told The Associated Press from her New York home.
"She was a political pawn for their personal gains and she's already been in jail for six years under horrendous conditions," she said, referring to the previous administration of President Alberto Fujimori.
----
"Ashamed" Peru awards tortured ex-agent $120,000
By Jude Webber
Tuesday February 19, 4:37 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-90037.html
LIMA, Peru - A former Peruvian army intelligence officer, crippled when she was tortured by fellow agents in 1997 for allegedly leaking secrets about the hard-line rule of ex-President Alberto Fujimori, received $120,000 compensation on Monday and an official apology.
"Today with pride, and shame on the part of the nation, I apologise to you in the name of the state," President Alejandro Toledo told wheelchair-bound Leonor La Rosa at a solemn ceremony in government palace.
"We're not going to give you back your health. We're not going to take away all you have suffered in the last five years. But this democracy wants to honor you. ... I swear to you that the state will never again be your enemy," he said.
La Rosa suffered such severe injuries when she was beaten and burned with a smouldering iron that she is wheelchair-bound and cannot feed herself or go to the bathroom unaided.
Wearing a rust-coloured dress, her dark hair cropped at her shoulders, La Rosa, who is partially paralysed, lay on a specially inclined wheelchair, holding a spray of yellow roses presented by first lady Eliane Karp.
Hailing her as a "pioneer in the fight for democracy," Toledo vowed to allow no impunity for abuses of the past and kissed the woman he called "dear Leonor" on the forehead after handing her a check for $120,000.
La Rosa, who smiled briefly as Toledo spoke, "thanked the good intentions of the new president." She added: "I think justice is starting to be done and ... I hope justice will also be done by punishing those responsible for such cruelty."
La Rosa's feet and fingers were burned and she was beaten in an underground cell by fellow agents who suspected she had leaked information to the media about alleged attacks on politicians and journalists. The torture was only halted when La Rosa, who has two children, suffered a haemorrhage.
SYMBOL OF STATE REPRESSION
Later in 1997, Peru sentenced four army officers to eight years in prison for the torture.
The compensation, described by the government as a "friendly settlement" came after La Rosa sued the Peruvian state for damages. She has been living in Sweden since her torture and flew into Lima on Sunday night.
La Rosa's case, and the murder of another woman agent whose body was chopped into pieces, highlighted the repression for which Peru's intelligence services were feared under Fujimori's hard-line 1990-2000 rule.
Peru wants to try Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos, his top adviser and National Intelligence Service (SIN) chief, for a host of corruption and human rights charges, including allegedly ordering the creation of death squads.
In what it billed as an exclusive, La Republica newspaper on Monday cited one member of the notorious Grupo Colina death squad as telling judges that squad members convicted of murder but later granted amnesty by Fujimori were given $50,000 and offered travel out of Peru and a house when they were freed.
Montesinos, who sparked the scandal that felled Fujimori in November 2000 and is in jail awaiting trial on charges that range from ordering murders to money laundering, made the SIN a feared instrument of repression for Fujimori's opponents.
Under Fujimori, Peru had one of Latin America's worst human rights records.
Toledo, who took office last July vowing to rebuild Peru's shattered image and institutions, has also compensated survivors and relatives of a 1991 attack in which Grupo Colina mistook party-goers for leftist rebels and shot dead 15 people, including a child.
-------- philippines
US special forces to fly night patrols over Philippines hostage island
Monday February 18, 4:37 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020218/1/2id1j.html
US Special Forces troops will mount night air patrols over a southern Philippine island to help track down Islamic militants holding an American couple hostage, a military spokesman said.
The flights are part of training for the poorly-equipped Philippine military in its battle against the Abu Sayyaf rebels, who are also accused of having links with Saudi militant Osama bin laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.
A spokesman for the US forces, Air Force Master Sergeant Michael Farris, said several American giant MH-47 Chinook helicopters would be used in the joint operations because the Philippine military had no night-flying aircraft -- a major handicap in pinning down the rebels on Basilan island.
"As the airlift operation in Basilan continues, we expect to have an increase in night flight operations," Farris said. "These night flights do not indicate any special mission or clandestine operations.
"Night flying and the use of infrared goggles is one of the special skills that we want to share with our Armed Forces of the Philippines counterparts to provide them an aid in combating terrorism."
Farris said the Chinooks would be flying at night "all over the area of operations" but the air crews would strive to avoid flying over heavily populated areas.
Philippine officials say the guerrilla units move stealthily through the island mostly at night, dragging along their hostages with them and evading the 5,000 Filipino troops hunting them.
Basilan is a jungle-clad volcanic island about the size of Los Angeles.
US officials have gone to extraordinary steps to assure Filipinos that the mission, which has been criticised by some Filipino groups, largely consists of ground-breaking joint training exercises in a potentially hostile environment.
The operations involves a total of 660 US troops, most currently based in the southern city of Zamboanga and central Cebu.
But Farris said about 52 American soldiers were already in Basilan, and the rest would be deployed "with the next coming days".
Abu Sayyaf Muslim gunmen have been holding Christian missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham and a Filipina nurse in Basilan since June last year.
The rebels have murdered 14 other captives, including Californian tourist Guillermo Sobero.
Zamboanga and Cebu airfields are expected to host all of the US troops' air assets during the Philippine operations, which are scheduled to last six months starting from their official launch on January 31.
Farris said a special operations aviation regiment flies the reconfigured Chinooks.
"With the use of certain types of equipment and night vision devices, the air crew can operate in any environment in all types of terrain and at low altitudes," he said.
US forces here said the Chinooks include a MH-47E type that can conduct "covert and overt infiltrations, exfiltrations, air assault, air supply and sling operations over a wide range of environmental conditions" as well as combat search and rescue missions.
Exercise guidelines approved by both countries last week allows the US troops in Basilan to carry firearms and to defend themselves if attacked.
-------- spy agencies
Where's the outrage?
Frank Gaffney Jr.
February 19, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020219-51291568.htm
I have one word for those who thought the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were going to conduct a thorough, no-holds-barred investigation of problems within the U.S. intelligence community that may have contributed to its failure to warn of, and prevent, September 11: Fuggedaboutit.
To be sure, there will be a formal inquiry, featuring some number of open hearings, plus probably large quantities of testimony taken in secret session. The Senate committee's chairman - Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat - declared at a Capitol Hill press conference last Thursday: "We owe [it] to the 3,000 who died, their families and the rest of America ... to ascertain why the intelligence community did not learn of the September 11 attack in advance and identify what, if anything, might be done to better position the community to warn and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States."
You would never know from this forthright pronouncement that Mr. Graham had steadfastly resisted conducting such an investigation. The truth of the matter is, however, that both he and his House counterpart - Rep. Porter Goss, Florida Republican and a former secret agent - were as reluctant as CIA Director George Tenet, and the Bush administration writ large, to see the intelligence community subjected to close scrutiny.
Until Thursday, the argument was that an investigation at this time would distract the agency's personnel from the war on terrorism. Then suddenly, on Valentine's Day, everything changed. The Committee chairmen expressed their commitment to - in Mr. Graham's words, "Let the chips fall where they may, whether it's individuals, institutions or processes." For his part, Director Tenet announced that he welcomed the inquiry, saying: "It's important we have a record. It is a record of discipline, strategy, focus and action."
What, it might reasonably be asked, prompted such an apparently complete reversal since it seems the demands on the U.S. intelligence community to ferret out and defeat terrorists are as great as ever? There appears to be only one explanation: The fix is in.
On Thursday, Mr. Graham and Mr. Goss disclosed that they had hired one L. Britt Snyder to run their $2.6 million investigation. They lauded Mr. Snyder's extensive experience on Capitol Hill and in the CIA and spoke with confidence about his ability to conduct a "thorough" and "independent" inquiry. Given the actual nature of his associations in Congress and at the agency, however, it is no more reasonable to expect Britt Snyder to be thorough, let alone truly independent, than it would be if Enron's general counsel had been tapped to run hearings into his company's meltdown.
After all, Mr. Snyder is George Tenet's guy. When Mr. Tenet was staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee in the late 1980s - during which period he forged close personal and professional ties with many of the legislators now charged with overseeing his conduct - the future CIA director made Mr. Snyder the panel's general counsel. Later, when Mr. Tenet was appointed director of central intelligence (DCI), he asked Mr. Snyder to be his "special adviser," in which capacity the latter served for two years.
Then, in 1999, Mr. Tenet persuaded President Clinton to give this hand-picked and reliable subordinate the role of in-house watchdog, the CIA's inspector general.
Now, it would be one thing if George Tenet had said from the get-go after September 11 that there were serious problems in the way his agency, and the intelligence community more broadly, had been doing business. If, for example, he had acknowledged that over the past decade such problems - including an insistence on the political correctness of U.S. intelligence products, the diminished priority accorded to human intelligence and serious restraints on domestic surveillance of potentially subversive elements - had contributed to the nation's vulnerability to terrorist attacks, and pledged his full cooperation to document, address and correct those problems, perhaps having the DCI's proxy run a congressional investigation into these matters might have made sense. Perhaps.
One could at least argue that such a sweetheart arrangement would facilitate the promised cooperation between the agency and the investigators. But under the actual circumstances - where, incredibly, Mr. Tenet denies there was any failure - can someone closely tied to the director, someone who shares some measure of responsibility with him for whatever went wrong, possibly be the best choice to lead this important inquiry? If, as the Republican vice chairman of the Senate Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, put it "We should leave no stone unturned; we've got to turn them all up," that job should not be entrusted to someone who was supposed to have done it long before now.
Unfortunately, this is not simply a question of a bad choice for a key staff position. Rather, it calls into question whether the Senate and House select committees on intelligence can conduct a truly thorough and independent investigation. In calling for a Warren Commission-style board to conduct this inquiry, Sen. Robert Torricelli correctly observed in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post that: "Those committees have had continuing oversight responsibilities for the very intelligence agencies they would be investigating" and "would not provide the full and impartial investigation needed."
The nation desperately needs to learn - and to apply urgently - the lessons of September 11. In the midst of President Clinton's myriad scandals, William Bennett once famously asked, "Where's the outrage?"
Regrettably, the outrageousness, and the potential costs, of failing to get to the bottom of the September 11 intelligence failures demand an even greater outcry now.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.
-------- turkey
Terror suspects arrested in Turkey planned bombing in Israel
Tuesday February 19, 10:47 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020219/1/2ilr1.html
Three Muslim militants who trained in Afghanistan and were detained in eastern Turkey several days ago were planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel, Turkish police revealed.
The detainees -- two Palestinians and a Jordanian -- received military training in camps run by Afganistan's ousted Taliban regime and had fought in their ranks, police spokesman Feyzullah Arslan said Tuesday.
The suspects were captured last Friday in the eastern province of Van, along with a Turkish man, after sneaking into Turkey illegally from Iran, and were planning to go to Israel via Istanbul, Syria and Jordan, Arslan told a news conference.
The suspects said they had crossed into Iran from Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
One of the extremists, 24-year-old Firaz Suleiman, was ordered by the Beyyiat El Imam group to carry out a suicide bomb attack in a crowded area in the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan, Arslan said.
The militant was instructed not to tell his accomplices, Mustafa Hassan and Ahmet Mahmudi, both aged 25, of their mission until after they reached Jordan.
"We established contact with foreign police who confirmed that the suspects were involved in such activities," Arslan said, without elaborating.
The suspects were found to be in possession of forged passposts, identification cards and Arabic documents which were believed to be instructions on making bombs, he said.
Arslan added that the militants did not possess any weapons or explosives, and did not harbour any plans to carry out attacks in Turkey.
Turkish police had also exchanged information on the militants with US authorities, but denied earlier reports that US security officials had participated in their interrogation, he added.
Following the capture of the three suspects, police had detained six other people in Van and Istanbul, who did not have links with the Beyyiat El Imam group, but who were to help the militants with their clandestine journey through Turkey.
"They were helping the militants for financial benefits...to get them from the border to Van, supply them with passposts and tickets," Arslan said.
Earlier Tuesday, a security official had told AFP that the detainees were believed to be members of the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, but declined to give further details.
Turkey, a key Muslim ally of the United States, has lent full support to the US operation in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda.
It has contributed 267 soldiers to the international security force in deployed in the country after the fall of the hardline Taliban regime, which was accused of sheltering bin Laden and his militants.
-------- us
Special Forces train for Somalia duty
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES,
February 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020219-17948736.htm
Army Special Forces have formed anti-terrorist units and are training for missions in Somalia, but as of last week the United States lacked sufficient intelligence on al Qaeda to start a mission inside the impoverished East African nation.
Senior administration officials say Green Berets in the 5th Special Forces Group have practiced missions against terrorist compounds. They also have been briefed on Somalia's gallery of warlords who might protect members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, some of whom fled Afghanistan and are presumed to be in Africa.
But the inaction, to date, in launching strikes on any military target outside Afghanistan points up the difficulty President Bush's war on terrorism faces: The targets have become smaller, scattered and harder to isolate.
When the war began Oct. 7, U.S. strike aircraft and commandos were able to attack al Qaeda fighters in clusters, killing and capturing hundreds. But with their Taliban protectors ousted from power in December, al Qaeda foot soldiers dispersed and scrambled for cover in Afghanistan, or fled to nearby countries, including Somalia. In these small groups, al Qaeda does not present ripe targets for Green Beret "A Teams" or precision air strikes.
"There is not enough intelligence on Somalia right now on which to base an attack," a senior administration official said last week.
There are about 3,500 Green Berets. The 5th Special Forces Group, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., provided most of the Special Forces who are operating today inside Afghanistan. The group is assigned to U.S. Central Command, which is running the war in Afghanistan and oversees U.S. military actions in the Arabian Sea-Persian Gulf regions.
Most U.S. action aimed at Somalia since September 11 has come in the form of stepped-up satellite and aerial surveillance to keep an eye on suspected al Qaeda training camps and meeting places. The Navy has stationed warships off the coast to intercept any of bin Laden's men trying to sneak across the Arabian Sea in tramp freighters to Somalia where they could reconstitute the al Qaeda training network.
A possible Somalian target is a fundamentalist group called al Itihaad al Islamyay, or Islamic Unity. It has ties to bin Laden himself. Mr. Bush in September said Islamic Unity is one of 27 groups that finances terrorists and he asked foreign banks to freeze any assets.
Somalia's prime minister, Hassan Abshir Farah, has urged Washington not to strike his country and promised to arrest terrorists identified by the United States.
The surogate method is the administration's evolving strategy to smash al Qaeda. Two nations, Yemen and the Philippines, are now hunting, and sometimes, killing al Qaeda-linked fighters with U.S. assistance.
Mr. Bush's aides acknowledge that sizable numbers of al Qaeda fighters slipped across Afghanistan's leaky borders into Pakistan and Iran.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld believes the exodus has gone further. He said some al Qaeda have spread beyond neighboring countries, heading toward the Middle East.
Iran has "been quite accommodating to al Qaeda people transiting from Afghanistan through Iran towards the Middle East, various countries in the Middle East," Mr. Rumsfeld told National Public Radio. "It's now pretty clear that the al Qaeda have fled in large numbers.
"They've drifted into the mountains, they've drifted over borders," the defense chief added. "These are serious people. And we didn't catch them all. We didn't kill them all, as hard as we've tried. And it is not possible to do that. ... And so we have an effort going on to try to run them down."
----
Pentagon: Strikes Could Be Coming
February 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Afghan-US-Military.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pre-emptive strikes by the United States could be on the horizon as the United States fights terrorism, the Pentagon's No. 2 official said Tuesday.
``We've already lost enough Americans. We're not going to lose any more by hesitating,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a group of defense contractors.
Wolfowitz did not offer any details of where or when such a strike could happen, and he did not answer questions during an appearance at a conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Pentagon officials have repeatedly said that no decision has been made on when or where the next U.S. action will be. Speculation in recent days has focused on Iraq, which President Bush named as part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and Iran last month.
Wolfowitz is widely viewed as one of the strongest voices within the Bush administration in favor of military attacks aimed at toppling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Wolfowitz said he was worried that Americans were beginning to act as if the threat from terrorism is over. Dozens of al-Qaida fighters remain alive within Afghanistan, although the military campaign there has severely disrupted the group, Wolfowitz said.
``The success is only interim success. There is still a great deal of work to be done,'' Wolfowitz told the conference. ``I do fear the country has not absorbed that the conflict is far from over.''
Pentagon strategy in Afghanistan relied on the fact that the Taliban rulers that sheltered al-Qaida terrorists were unpopular among Afghans, Wolfowitz said. The lesson, Wolfowitz said, is that key allies against governments that support terrorism include the people who must live under those governments.
About 60 percent of the U.S. weaponry used in Afghanistan has been precision-guided, steered to their targets by lasers or satellites, Wolfowitz said. A technological development that's just as important is the communications system that allows soldiers on the ground to describe targets to pilots, he said.
During the Gulf War, U.S. soldiers in western Iraq identified Scud missile sites but had no way to tell pilots where to drop their bombs, Wolfowitz said. As a result, American bombs didn't destroy any Scuds, he said.
On the Net: Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil
--------
Defense Officials See Need for New Thinking
February 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-military.html
WASHINGTON - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Tuesday said the Pentagon would not hesitate to trim unnecessary or outdated military programs despite a $48 billion increase in its proposed budget for fiscal year 2003.
Wolfowitz said the hefty increase in the defense budget was long overdue, but no reason for defense industry complacency.
``We must work to find the savings that are necessary to fund transformation'' in the U.S. defense establishment. ''Because we are at war, the imperative is even greater to cut things we don't need,'' he told defense executives, analysts and military officials at a conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Wolfowitz underscored the need to modernize the U.S. military for the 21st century, even as it wages what he called a ``long, hard and difficult'' war against terrorism.
He said the administration's proposed $379 billion fiscal 2003 defense budget included $21 billion in funds earmarked specifically to transform a U.S. defense establishment still shaped by Cold War-era strategies and weapons systems.
``We have to have transformation in how we think, how we lead, and how we fight,'' he said.
For instance, he said, U.S. Air Force fighter pilots were now being asked to steer unmanned Predator fighter jets from remote locations, fundamentally changing the definition of what it once meant to be a fighter pilot.
The 2003 budget includes $1 billion to speed development and procurement of pilotless aircraft like the missile-firing RQ1 Predator, built by General Atomics of San Diego, and the Global Hawk, a spy plane built by Northrop Grumman Corp . Both played a role in the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
The budget also includes $7.8 billion for research, development and testing of a rudimentary missile shield, as well as $1.1 billion for stepped-up production of Boeing Co. tail kits that convert unguided free-fall bombs into satellite-guided ``smart'' munitions and laser-guided bombs.
Wolfowitz said the military had learned key lessons from the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people and the subsequent U.S. war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
He said he aimed to have 10 percent of the military workforce embrace a new, more innovative way of thinking in the next decade. ``Transformation is about ... new approaches, a new culture,'' he said.
Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told the conference that efforts to transform the U.S. military were well underway.
He said the Pentagon was relying on defense industries to innovate and would continue seeking ways to streamline and improve the efficiency of cumbersome procurement procedures.
``You all have your work cut out for you,'' Aldridge told business executives from the biggest U.S. defense contractors.
He said the United States had three clear priorities: fighting and winning its war on terrorism, restoring a decade of cuts in forces and weapons after the end of the Cold War, and preparing the military for future challenges. ``We are juggling three balls simultaneously. Dropping any one of them will place our national security in peril,'' he said.
Defense analysts at the conference said efforts to modernize the U.S. military were long overdue, and efforts to beef up U.S. homeland defense did not go far enough.
Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies, also warned against an inflated sense of U.S. military capabilities in the aftermath of the ouster of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban.
``There is a real danger of complacency about our military prowess,'' he told conference participants.
----
Driver-draft registration OK likely
By Mary Shaffrey
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 19, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020219-77914333.htm
RICHMOND - Virginia's Senate is expected to approve a bill today that would require young men to register with the Selective Service when they obtain their driver's license or a learner's permit - even if they have not yet turned 18.
"We only have 74 percent of all 18-year-old males registering with the Selective Service," said Delegate M. Kirkland Cox, Colonial Heights Republican and sponsor of the bill.
"The next time we have a draft, we want it to be as fair as possible. Ninety-nine percent in the pool would be fair; 74 percent is not," he said.
Mr. Cox said he began thinking about such a bill after the September 11 attacks and the beginning of the war on terrorism.
The legislation passed the House last month, and observers noted likely approval in the Senate.
The bill would require all males who apply for a driver's license to check a box that registers them with the Selective Service. Those younger than 18 would be required to have a parent's signature. Their names would not be added to any draft list until their 18th birthdays.
Delegate John Rollison III, Prince William Republican, called the bill unfair. "Requiring a 15-year-old to get a parent's permission, and not allowing them to get their driver's license, punishes them if they don't want to register," he said.
Sen. W. Henry Maxwell, Newport News Democrat, one of three members of the Senate Transportation Committee to vote against the bill in committee last week, agreed with Mr. Rollison.
"I am as supportive of getting people for the draft as anyone," Mr. Maxwell said. "But I think it's the wrong approach. A driver's license may be necessary to support a family or to go to work - and the more I thought about it, the more it seems punitive to me."
Federal law requires all males, regardless of physical ability or religious convictions, to register with the Selective Service when they turn 18. Failure to register could mean a $250,000 fine and/or five years in prison. Should their names be called in a national draft, they would have an opportunity to present evidence as to why they could not serve.
For example, both a quadriplegic and a conscientious objector must register, but were their names called, they could go before a board and ask to be excused.
If the Senate passes the measure, it goes to the desk of Democratic Gov. Mark R. Warner, who has not indicated whether or not he would sign it.
-------- us propaganda wars
U.S. propaganda efforts
From: "Andrew Lichterman" <alichterman@worldnet.att.net>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002
(The New York Times today ran an article on a new Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, which will be responsible for a wide range of open and covert propaganda and information operations, particularly outside the United States. According to the Times, the OSI will use methods ranging from distribution of "news items, possibly even false ones," via foreign news services and the internet to covert operations....)
---
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT
February 19, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/19PENT.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 - The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.
The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials who say they might undermine the credibility of information that is openly distributed by the Defense Department's public affairs officers.
The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile nations - for instance, by dropping leaflets and broadcasting messages into Afghanistan when it was still under Taliban rule.
But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence, which is proposing to broaden that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. The office would assume a role traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly the State Department.
The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response to concerns in the administration that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.
As part of the effort to counter the pronouncements of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and their supporters, the State Department has already hired a former advertising executive to run its public diplomacy office, and the White House has created a public information "war room" to coordinate the administration's daily message domestically and abroad.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, while broadly supportive of the new office, has not approved its specific proposals and has asked the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes, to review them, senior Pentagon officials said.
Little information is available about the Office of Strategic Influence, and even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans. Its multimillion dollar budget, drawn from a $10 billion emergency supplement to the Pentagon budget authorized by Congress in October, has not been disclosed.
Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the new office has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.
The new office "rolls up all the instruments within D.O.D. to influence foreign audiences," its assistant for operations, Thomas A. Timmes, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer, said at a recent conference, referring to the Department of Defense. "D.O.D. has not traditionally done these things."
One of the office's proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said.
General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.
"It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white," a senior Pentagon official said.
Another proposal involves sending journalists, civic leaders and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote American views or attack unfriendly governments, officials said.
Asked if such e-mail would be identified as coming from the American military, a senior Pentagon official said that "the return address will probably be a dot-com, not a dot- mil," a reference to the military's Internet designation.
To help the new office, the Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group, a Washington-based international consulting firm run by John W. Rendon Jr., a former campaign aide to President Jimmy Carter. The firm, which is being paid about $100,000 a month, has done extensive work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family and the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition group seeking to oust President Saddam Hussein.
Officials at the Rendon Group say terms of their contract forbid them to talk about their Pentagon work. But the firm is well known for running propaganda campaigns in Arab countries, including one denouncing atrocities by Iraq during its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The firm has been hired as the Bush administration appears to have united around the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein. "Saddam Hussein has a charm offensive going on, and we haven't done anything to counteract it," a senior military official said.
Proponents say the new Pentagon office will bring much-needed coordination to the military's efforts to influence views of the United States overseas, particularly as Washington broadens the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan.
But the new office has also stirred a sharp debate in the Pentagon, where several senior officials have questioned whether its mission is too broad and possibly even illegal.
Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office might be authorized to use not only covert operations like computer network attacks, psychological activities and deception, but also the instruments and staff of the military's globe- spanning public affairs apparatus.
Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon's credibility with the media, the public and governments around the world, critics argue.
"This breaks down the boundaries almost completely," a senior Pentagon official said.
Moreover, critics say, disinformation planted in foreign media organizations, like Reuters or Agence France-Presse, could end up being published or broadcast by American news organizations.
The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency are barred by law from propaganda activities in the United States. In the mid-1970's, it was disclosed that some C.I.A. programs to plant false information in the foreign press had resulted in articles published by American news organizations.
--
(... The article above implies that this is a new initiative, part of the hurried (and perhaps not carefully thought out) response to 9/11. The activities of this office as described in the article, however, bear a resemblance to those recommended in a May 2000 Defense Science Board report on psychological operations. That report can be found at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/psyop.pdf
Andrew Lichterman Program Director
Western States Legal Foundation
1504 Franklin St. Suite 202
Oakland, CA 94612 USA
phone: +1 (510) 839-5877
fax: +1 (510) 839-5397
web site: www.wslfweb.org)
--------
Iraq Accuses U.S. of Smear Campaign
February 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Iraq-Terrorism.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Iraq on Tuesday accused the United States of conducting a campaign of ``state terrorism'' to topple Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi government used a report to the United Nations on what it is doing to combat terrorism to focus instead on what it said were terrorists trained to infiltrate the Mideast country and attack its leaders.
The United States ``openly spends tens of millions of dollars on troops of mercenaries to carry out terrorist operations against Iraq,'' Baghdad said.
``Iraq's charges that we are involved in state-sponsored terrorism are laughable,'' a U.S. official said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. ``Iraq is a country that's engaged in this kind of activity.''
The official said the report was another attempt by Iraq to divert attention away from demands by the international community for them to allow weapons inspectors back into the country.
The U.N. Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The sanctions cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors declare that its weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated, but Iraq has barred inspectors from the country since December 1998.
Iraq's report was submitted to the Security Council committee monitoring implementation of a resolution adopted Sept. 28 requiring all U.N. members to take steps to counter terrorism.
---------
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
February 19, 2002
From: "FAIR" <fair@fair.org>
The New York Times reported today that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence is "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations" in an effort "to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries."
The OSI was created shortly after September 11 to publicize the U.S. government's perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.'s "war on terror." This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad. At the same time, involving reporters in disinformation campaigns puts the lives of working journalists at risk.
Despite the OSI's multi-million-dollar budget and its mandate to propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, "even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and plans," according to the Times. The Times reported that the OSI's latest announcement has generated opposition within the Pentagon among those who fear that it will undermine the Defense Department's credibility.
Tarnished credibility may be the least of the problems created by the OSI's new plan to manipulate media-- the plan may compromise the free flow of information that democracy relies on. The government is barred by law from propagandizing within the U.S., but the OSI's new plan will likely lead to disinformation planted in a foreign news report being picked up by U.S. news outlets. The war in Afghanistan has shown that the 24-hour news cycle, combined with cuts in the foreign news budgets across the U.S., make overseas outlets like Al-Jazeera and Reuters key resources for U.S. reporters.
Any "accidental" propaganda fallout from the OSI's efforts is troubling enough, but given the U.S. government's track record on domestic propaganda, U.S. media should be pushing especially hard for more information about the operation's other, intentional policies.
According to the New York Times, "one of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the Office of Strategic Influence" is the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). The Times doesn't mention, however, that PSYOPS has been accused of operating domestically as recently as the Kosovo war.
In February 2000, reports in Dutch and French newspapers revealed that several officers from the 4th PSYOPS Group had worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters as part of an "internship" program starting in the final days of the Kosovo War. Coverage of this disturbing story was scarce (see http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html), but after FAIR issued an Action Alert on the story, CNN stated that it had already terminated the program and acknowledged that it was "inappropriate."
Even if the PSYOPS officers working in the newsroom did not directly influence news reporting, the question remains of whether CNN may have allowed the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against the network itself. The idea isn't far-fetched-- according to Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00), a rear admiral from the Special Operations Command told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place. One of CNN's PSYOPS "interns" worked in the network's satellite division. (During the Afghanistan war the Pentagon found a very direct way to "gain control"-it simply bought up all commercial satellite images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.)
It's worth noting that the 4th PSYOPS group is the same group that staffed the National Security Council's now notorious Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), which planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies during the 1980s. Described by a senior U.S. official as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory" (Miami Herald, 7/19/87), the OPD was shut down after the Iran-Contra investigations, but not before influencing coverage in major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post (Extra!, 9-10/01).
The OPD may be gone, but the Bush administration's recent recess appointment of former OPD head Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs is not reassuring. It suggests, at best, a troubling indifference to Reich's role in orchestrating the OPD's deception of the American people.
Indeed, as the Federation of American Scientists points out, "the Bush Administration's insistent efforts to expand the scope of official secrecy have now been widely noted as a defining characteristic of the Bush presidency" (Secrecy News, 2/18/02). The administration's refusal to disclose Enron-related information to the General Accounting Office is perhaps the most publicized of these efforts; another is Attorney General John Ashcroft's October 12 memo urging federal agencies to resist Freedom Of Information Act requests.
In addition, the Pentagon's restrictive press policies throughout the war in Afghanistan have been an ongoing problem. Most recently, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck claims that U.S. soldiers threatened to shoot him if he proceeded with an attempt to investigate a site where civilians had been killed; Struck has stated that for him, the central question raised by the incident is whether the Pentagon is trying to "cover up" its actions and why it won't "allow access by reporters to determine what they're doing here in Afghanistan" (CBS, "The Early Show," 2/13/02).
Taken together, these incidents and policies should raise alarm bells for media throughout the country. Democracy doesn't work if the public does not have access to full and accurate information about its government.
-------- venezuela
Another military official publicly demands Venezuelan president step aside
Tuesday February 19
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020218/1/2ifei.html
A third active-duty military official in under two weeks rolled out a high-stakes challenge to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, publicly demanding that he step down.
Rear Admiral Carlos Molina Tamayo, the highest-ranking military rebel of the three, defiantly told a press conference: "I am calling on the national armed forces and the people to publicly show their opposition to Hugo Chavez's unpatriotic stand and for them to demand his resignation."
The clash with Chavez comes on the heels of protests led by Air Force Colonel Pedro Soto who on February 7 demanded the president step aside and call new elections.
Molina Tamayo said Venezuela's Supreme Court should put Chavez on trial if he refuses to go.
Soto -- who maintained 75 percent of Venezuelan officials and troops shared his view that Chavez should resign, and rallied pot-banging marchers to the presidential palace -- had the support of National Guard captain Pedro Flores, and both are now free following their bids to undercut Chavez' government.
"The president must go, he should resign, and before he does so, he should organize elections so that he leaves the country with a democracy, in the hands of a civilian," Soto boldly proclaimed at the "pro-freedom" forum.
Soto said military discontent was running high because the armed forces were being used to Chavez' political ends.
He cited the government's Bolivar 2000 Plan which uses military staff and civilian crews for social projects. Soto called them "outside the scope" of the military's duty "to protect national sovereignty."
Chavez -- a populist former paratrooper and one-time failed coup leader himself -- accompanied his announcement last Tuesday of the free float of Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, with a set of budget cuts that have earned him some criticism from the left as a by-the-book "neoliberal" economic thinker.
With crude oil prices sliding, the president moved to devalue to make exports more competitive. While the bolivar's devaluation of some 17 percent for now has stunned many shoppers it has not touched off major street protests.
Chavez, who spent two years in jail for a failed coup attempt in 1992, was elected president in 1998 and re-elected in 2000 after sponsoring extensive constitutional reforms.
The desperately poor of Venezuela's 24 million people largely continue to support him, but with the economy under serious strain, Chavez -- Cuban President Fidel Castro's closest ally in the region -- has strained relations with the United States, Roman Catholic Church officials and the middle and upper classes.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this month openly questioned Chavez' commitment to democracy and the war on terrorism and criticized his visits to countries such as Iraq and Libya. Venezuela is the United States' fourth largest supplier of crude oil.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Brazil's prisons under spotlight
By SUSANNE PADILHA
2/19/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=19022002-074209-7485r
MACEIO, Brazil -- A string of prison riots across Brazil on Monday, which left at least 15 inmates dead, became the latest in a series of incidents that turned the spotlight on Brazil's failing penal system.
The riots, which lasted two days, were said to be masterminded by the First Commando of the Capital, or PCC, one of Brazil's largest criminal gangs, which also claimed responsibility for two grenade attacks Monday that left a woman slightly injured.
At the site of one of the grenade attacks, a banner was left bearing the message: "If the mistreatment of prisoners does not stop, the attacks will continue."
Inmates at a prison in Sao Paulo appeared at the windows, their faces heavily disguised by clothing, and they hung bed sheets bearing the slogan of the PCC, "Peace, Justice and Liberty."
Nagashi Furukawa, the secretary of the Penitentiary Administration of Sao Paulo, said the latest killings were a result of disputes between rival gangs.
"With 65,000 prisoners in the state (of Sao Paulo), I don't consider the situation to be too grave," he said.
These latest disturbances come exactly a year after Brazil saw a nationwide uprising in its prisons, also organized by the PCC, which came to be known as the "mega-rebellion" in which 19 prisoners were killed and several injured. PCC leaders used cell phones to spread the rebellion to jails across the country.
Following Monday's riots, Federal Judge Rita Stevenson on Tuesday ordered the National Agency of Telecommunications, Anatel, to install mobile phone blockers in prisons throughout the country within the next 120 days.
These latest riots highlight the desperate state of Brazil's prisons, which human rights organizations have frequently described as inhuman. Chronic overcrowding, corruption and insufficient state funding are a lethal mix that result in squalid conditions leading to riots and killings. In many state prisons, the ratio of prison guards to prisoners is so disproportionate that authorities readily admit they have lost control of certain areas.
Instead, an elite of powerful and well-connected inmates runs these "no-go" areas.
"Massive overcrowding, poor health provisions and pitiful opportunities for rehabilitation have allowed for a culture of violence to proliferate," said Tim Cahill, researcher on Brazil for human-rights group Amnesty International. "It is time for the Brazilian authorities to confront the fundamental problems that exist in the heart of its criminal justice system."
In a study conducted last year by Amnesty International, it was revealed that fellow prisoners were responsible for more than 80 percent of deaths of prisoners in custody.
Already this year, Brazil has seen several uprisings with the worst occurring in a maximum-security prison in the northern state of Rondonia after an escape attempt was foiled. Frustrated rival gangs battled it out with knives, metal bars and guns, which had been previously smuggled in, leaving more than 30 inmates dead.
In a separate incident last month, a 22-year-old prisoner was found dead in a Sao Paulo prison under suspicious circumstances. His crime was to kidnap the daughter of a well-known TV magnate last August that involved the killing of two police investigators, leading to claims by his lawyer that he was "marked to die" while in detention. Although a further autopsy of the kidnapper was ordered and no foul play detected, the question on most Brazilians' lips remains: "Who did it?"
Latin America's largest and most notorious prison, Carandiru, in the state of Sao Paulo, saw Brazil's worst prison massacre in October 1992 when Col. Ubiratan Guimaraes ordered special units to storm the prison. It resulted in the killing of 111 inmates, many of them shot execution-style.
In June last year, Guimaraes was sentenced to 632 years, though under Brazilian law he will serve a maximum of 30 years.
It was this uprising that led to the formation of the PCC by survivors of the brutal rebellion.
Carandiru, which was built to accommodate 3,600 but houses more than 7,000, has the worst overcrowding problem of all Brazil's prisons. According to Human Rights Watch, in some cells and dormitories, prisoners are tied to window bars to maximize the floor space while others are forced to sleep over hole-in-the-ground toilets. In a place where infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV are rife, chronic overcrowding exacerbates the problem. In 1998, the state government of Sao Paulo announced plans to close Carandiru prison with the date for demolition now set for April 21. In December, the first 180 inmates of the current 7,500 were moved to prisons in the interior of Sao Paulo. With the transfer of prisoners comes the hope that the conditions of their confinement will improve.
----
South Korean security forces on top alert for Bush trip
Tuesday February 19, 2:08 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020219/1/2ij3d.html
South Korean police went on top alert following a raid by radical students opposed to a landmark visit by US President George W. Bush.
Some 15,000 riot police were deployed across Seoul, with all military and police anti-terrorism units put on alert ahead of Bush's arrival Tuesday from Tokyo for a three-day visit.
US and South Korean army units, backed by surveillance aircraft, also stepped up monitoring of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which divides the Korean peninsula, military authorities said.
"US spy planes have strengthened surveillance flights to monitor troop movements along the border," a defense ministry official told AFP.
"Our anti-terrorism units are on alert, although there has been no particular troop movements on the northern side," he said.
Security will reach its peak on Wednesday when Bush goes to the Mount Dora observation post in the DMZ following a summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung.
Dora, overlooking what has been one of the world's most high risk conflict flashpoints since the 1950-53 Korean War, will be watched by fighter jets, surveillance planes and satellites, newspapers said.
A US surveillance satellite is watching North Korea's Scud missile units and long-range artillery units arrayed along the border, they said.
Police also boosted security around the US embassy and other US facilities in Seoul after 28 radical students took over the American Chamber of Commerce (Amcham) office for three hours on Monday.
Radical groups have vowed to stage more protests during Bush's three-day visit starting Tuesday, particularly during his summit with President Kim Dae-Jung on Wednesday.
During the Amcham occupation, protesters hurled leaflets proclaiming Bush to be a "war freak" and condemned the United States for heightening tension on the peninsula.
Bush's speech last month in which he said North Korea was part of "an axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq infuriated radical groups and caused concern in the administration of South Korea's president that Bush could hamper Kim's attempts to peacefully draw the North into dia logue.
-------
Too much surveillance means too little freedom
William Safire
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/48463.htm
'Big Brother' in America
WASHINGTON Stipulated: The protection of the U.S. capital, its monuments and its centers of authority is a vital national interest.
Early in American history, when faced with a potential rebellion of unpaid officers, one U.S. leader employed an uncharacteristic emotional trick - pretending to be going blind - to appeal to the infuriated military not to march on the capital. He soon had them in tears and in hand. In another time, another leader risked all by turning the capital's defense over to the man most opposed to his political aims, gambling that he could later overcome the nation's gratitude to a man on horseback. In contemporary times, after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted and the Capitol anthraxed, Washington again saw itself besieged. But now, in terror of an external threat, U.S. leaders are protecting the capital at the cost of every American's personal freedom.
Surveillance is in the saddle. Responding to the latest Justice Department terror alert, Washington police opened the Joint Operation Command Center of the Synchronized Operations Command Complex (SOCC). In it, 50 officials monitor a wall of 40 video screens showing images of travelers, drivers, residents and pedestrians.
These used to be the Great Unwatched, free people conducting their private lives; now they are under close surveillance by hundreds of hidden cameras. A zoom lens enables the watchers to focus on the face of a tourist walking toward the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial.
The monitoring system is already linked to 200 cameras in public schools. The watchers plan to expand soon into an equal number in the subways and parks. A private firm profits by photographing cars running red lights; those images will also join the surveillance network.
Private cameras in banks and the lobbies and elevators of apartment buildings and hotels will join the system, and residents of nursing homes and hospitals can look forward to an electronic eye in every room. A commercial camera atop a department store in Georgetown catches the faces of shoppers entering malls, to be plugged into omnipresent SOCC. Digital images of the captured faces can be flashed around the world in an instant on the Internet. Married to face-recognition technology and tied in to public and private agencies around the world, an electronic library of hundreds of millions of faces will be created. Terrorists and criminals - as well as unhappy spouses, runaway teens, hermits and other law-abiding people who want to drop out of society for a while - will have no way to get a fresh start.
Is this the kind of world Americans want? The promise is greater safety; the trade-off is government control of individual lives. Personal security may or may not be enhanced by this all-seeing eye and ear, but personal freedom will surely be sharply curtailed. To be watched at all times, especially when doing nothing seriously wrong, is to be afflicted with a creepy feeling. That is what is felt by a convict in an always-lighted cell. It is the pervasive, inescapable feeling of being unfree. As the law now stands, there is no privacy in public places; that's why sports stadiums are called "Snooper Bowls." A whisper to your spouse on your front porch is the public's business, say the courts; and on that intrusive analogy, long-range microphones may soon be allowed to pick up voice vibrations on windowpanes. When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control. This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear.
By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans. So far, the reaction has been a most un-American docility.
This Monday was Presidents' Day. To save the capital and thus the nation, the leader who manipulated his rebellious officers with an emotional pretense of incipient blindness was George Washington, and the one who risked creating a Caesar out of a necessary general was Abraham Lincoln. Neither would sacrifice America's freedom to protect his monument.
-------- death penalty
EU's death-penalty objection divides Turkey
By Peter Sisler
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 19, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020219-42862525.htm
ISTANBUL - A government move to abolish the death penalty and spare the life of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan has driven a wedge into Turkey's fragile coalition government and placed the country at odds with the European Union (EU) that it hopes to join.
Nationalist politicians in the three-party government said over the weekend they would pull out of the coalition led by Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit if he submits a constitutional amendment to parliament that would outlaw capital punishment.
The debate, which is essentially about the fate of Ocalan who was sentenced to death three years ago, came to a head after the EU Commissioner Gunther Verheugen spelled out conditions for Turkey to begin formal talks on EU membership.
During a visit to Ankara last week, Mr. Verheugen, who is in charge of EU enlargement, said officials in Brussels expected Turkey to abolish the death penalty.
The EU, he said, also expected to allow for education in the Kurdish language as a precondition for talks to begin.
The EU also has demanded that Ocalan's sentence be commuted to life in prison.
Mr. Ecevit has said he favors abolishing the death penalty but that Turkey "cannot accept Kurdish education"
Despite public support for the death penalty, Turkey has not carried out a state execution since 1984. Its rules for imposing the death penalty were amended last year to only apply to convictions during times of war or for acts of terrorism and acts against the state.
"This is a debate over Ocalan's fate that could endanger the coalition. With a low crime rate, Turkey has no use for the death penalty. But Europe requires that it be abolished for admission into the club," said a Western diplomat who monitors human rights issues.
Ocalan is by far the most prominent of Turkey's 57 prisoners held on death row. As the former leader of the Kurdish separatist movement in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, Ocalan was vilified by the state. Most Turks hold him responsible for promoting a guerrilla war that led to the deaths of about 35,000 people during the 15-year conflict.
Ocalan's movement, known by the initials PKK, have gained significant support in Europe, where there is widespread sympathy for the Kurdish cause. Messages of reconciliation since his captivity have gained an audience in the EU, which has rejected Turkish demands to place the PKK on a list of terrorist groups as the United States has done for years.
The conservative National Movement Party led by Deputy Prime Minister Devlet Bahceli pledged during national elections in 1999 that it would do everything in its power to ensure that Ocalan's death sentence is carried out.
"We are determined in our objection to lifting the death penalty for crimes against the state," party spokesman Ismail Kose said on Sunday.
The issue of Kurdish language education, meanwhile, looms as a far more difficult issue for Turkish politicians to resolve before they open talks with the EU. More than a hundred Kurdish activists were arrested last month during demonstrations in major cities, where they called for Kurdish to be taught in schools.
Turkish officials fear national unity would be lost with Kurdish education.
The country's secular constitution bans any promotion of political causes along ethnic or religious lines.
Kurds make up about 18 percent of Turkey's 67 million population, but Ankara has never classified them as a separate ethnic group. Kurdish was only recently allowed to be spoken in public places. It remains banned on radio and television stations, although Kurdish songs can be broadcast.
A Kurdish publisher was acquitted last week in an Istanbul court from charges brought by the state after he published a lecture by American intellectual Noam Chomsky, who backs use of the Kurdish language.
-------- terrorism
Italy Arrests Four Moroccans with Maps, Cyanide
February 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-italy-cyanide.html
ROME - Italian police arrested four Moroccans on Tuesday in possession of large quantities of cyanide and maps of Rome highlighting the location of the U.S. embassy, ANSA news agency reported early on Wednesday.
ANSA quoted police sources as saying the Moroccans, aged 30 to 40, also had maps of Rome's water system.
Police were not immediately available for comment.
At least two of the men arrested had been followed after three other Moroccans were arrested last week, ANSA said.
-------- OTHER
-------- energy
In Energy Bill, a Daschle Nod to Key Farm States
Ethanol Provision Spurs Lobbying Fight
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30162-2002Feb18?language=printer
The Democrats' comprehensive energy bill that the Senate plans to debate next week has a provision sure to appeal to farm state voters. It would require gasoline refiners to triple their use of corn-based ethanol by 2012.
The provision's author? No less a power than the Senate's majority leader, Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.).
His provision also would ban by 2006 the use of ethanol's principal competitor, the petrochemical MTBE. Both ethanol and MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether) are blended into reformulated gasoline to make it burn more cleanly, reducing smog.
The prospect of imminent legislation has produced a furious round of lobbying by corporate and environmental interests. Sources say the oil industry, in exchange for agreeing to a "phasedown" of MTBE, wants modifications in some tougher environmental standards proposed by Daschle.
While the Daschle provision would be a boon to the largest ethanol producer, Archer Daniels Midland Co., delays are being sought by MTBE producers, including Enron Corp. The MTBE trade group, the Oxygenated Fuels Association, is represented by, among others, former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour.
Daschle, whose state is home to a growing number of farmer-owned ethanol plants, has long championed greater ethanol use. "He firmly believes it is good public policy," said his spokesman Jay Carson.
But with farm states posing a key political battleground in the Democrats' fight to keep control of the Senate this fall, a senior Daschle aide acknowledged the political import "has not escaped our attention."
Democratic senators face strong Republican challengers this year in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and Missouri -- all states with ethanol plants and heavy corn production. In addition, Iowa's party caucuses in 2004 will serve as the first test for a new field of presidential candidates. One likely Democratic contender, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), said recently that promoting ethanol should be part of U.S. energy policy.
Ethanol refined from corn has been touted since the 1970s as a renewable, domestic alternative to gasoline made from foreign oil. But the expansion of production has depended heavily on the federal government and political decisions.
Over the years, ADM executives courted top politicians, from then-Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) to Daschle. In the last election cycle, ADM contributed $660,000 to the two political parties, including $100,000 in August 2000 to the campaign fund of Senate Democrats.
The 5.3 cents-a-gallon tax subsidy for gasohol, a blend of ethanol and gasoline, already costs the government nearly $1 billion a year in lost gasoline excise taxes, according to the American Highway Users Alliance. The figure could rise to $2.5 billion under Daschle's proposal to require refiners to increase ethanol production from the current 1.7 billion gallons a year to 5 billion gallons.
"We are concerned about the impact on the highway trust fund," which finances road construction out of excise tax revenues, said William Fay, president of the Highway Users Alliance.
The ethanol issue pits Daschle against another prominent Democrat, Gov. Gray Davis of California.
Ethanol received a major boost in 1990 when Congress, with strong farm state support, directed that cleaner-burning reformulated gasoline used in high-smog areas such as Los Angeles be made from oxygenates, replacing harmful additives such as benzene. Both MTBE and ethanol qualified. The legislation ignited a battle between the two industries, especially in California's huge gasoline market.
Because the state had no network of ethanol plants and lacked a major corn industry, refiners initially turned to MTBE. But in the wake of complaints that MTBE tainted groundwater in some communities, Davis announced in 1999 that the state would ban MTBE effective Jan. 1, 2003.
One Canadian company complained in a federal trade arbitration dispute that ADM brought Davis to its Decatur, Ill., headquarters in 1998 and later contributed $100,000 to his campaign. A Davis spokesman said last week that the MTBE ban was "based on science, and there was no nexus between a contribution and the policy decision." Davis's 1998 campaign budget was about $50 million, he added.
In fact, Davis's decision to ban MTBE did not open the way for ethanol to take over the California market, as some ethanol proponents had hoped. Instead, Davis pressed the federal government to waive technical provisions of the Clean Air Act to allow California refiners to meet the smog standards with new fuel mixes other than ethanol.
California officials said that, with limited ethanol production facilities, California could suffer severe shortages and price spikes once MTBE was banned. But the ethanol industry contends it can meet demand by building more plants and shipping Midwest ethanol by rail to California.
Daschle lobbied hard against California's waiver request, and farm state lawmakers were elated when the Bush administration denied it last June. A month before the decision, ADM sent a $100,000 check to a 2001 Republican presidential dinner fund, according to the watchdog group PoliticalMoneyLine.
Democrats hope the Daschle provisions, which would allow California refiners greater flexibility in meeting smog-reducing requirements without ethanol, will settle the row with Davis. A national mandate for ethanol use would make the industry far less dependent on sales in California.
But oil industry officials say they want changes in Daschle's provision that would require gasoline made with ethanol to meet the same clean-air standards as regular gasoline. Environmental groups say the industry modifications would add at least 35,000 tons of pollutants to the air annually.
Nonetheless, oil industry officials expressed hope that a deal could be reached. "There's an opportunity to hit a home run here," said Edward Murphy, the American Petroleum Institute's general manager for refining. "All we're suggesting is that states should have a range of fuels to choose from."
-------- environment
FIREFIGHTER TOLD BUSH NOT TO DRILL IN ANWR
February 19, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2002/2002L-02-19-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, The Sierra Club began airing radio ads in nine states on Monday featuring Portland firefighter Ed Hall, who used a recent meeting with President George W. Bush to criticize proposals for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Hall and four other firefighters who helped with recovery efforts at the World Trade Center were hand picked to welcome President Bush at the airport when he visited Oregon in January. Hall used his face time with the President to shake Bush's hand and say, "Mr. President, it really is an honor to meet you, but you don't have to drill for oil in the Arctic."
In the radio ads, Hall explains the reasoning behind his message to the President. "If you look at maybe being able to recover six months worth of oil ten years down the road, that's not worth the cost to the ecosystem of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge," Hall says.
The ads target several U.S. Senators who have yet to demand protection of the refuge. The ads ask residents to call their Senator to urge him or her to oppose Arctic drilling and instead support a balanced energy plan that promotes conservation and efficiency, raises the miles per gallon of cars and light trucks, and uses more solar and wind power.
The Senate plans to start debate on Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's energy bill the week of February 25. Although the bill does not contain a provision to open the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling, Senator Frank Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, is expected to try to add this controversial amendment on the Senate floor.
The House of Representatives passed an energy bill last summer that would increase U.S. use of fossil fuels and open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil companies.
"Soon Senators will have the opportunity to vote on an energy bill that, in stark contrast to the bill passed by the House, is based on the premise that the best way to ensure our energy security is through higher fuel economy standards and greater use of renewable energy such as wind and solar power," said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. "By keeping drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Senate can affirm what the American people already know - that we don't have to sacrifice national treasures like the Arctic Refuge to meet our country's energy needs."
To read a transcript of an interview with Ed Hall, visit: http://www.sierraclub.org/currents/facetime/firefighter.asp
-------- health
Jolt to the brain
By Christian Toto
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 19, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020219-26337532.htm
The image isn't easily eradicated from memory - malcontent Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) writhing in agony while undergoing shock treatment in 1975's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Yet shock treatment - or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), as its practitioners dub it - isn't barbaric, as that classic movie moment might have us believe.
The procedure, which involves sending electric currents through a patient's brain to alleviate severe depression, is conducted with considerable safety precautions. Patients are anesthetized and given muscle relaxants to prevent their bodies from thrashing about. Experts say it is an effective way to treat seriously depressed patients and those in acute manic states.
Yet some former ECT patients say the treatments are, in a way, just as horrific as they are portrayed in the Oscar-winning "Cuckoo's Nest." They point to significant memory loss as the price they paid for enduring the therapy.
Even those who favor ECT are left scratching their heads over precisely why it works.
"It's been talked about since it came into being in 1938," says Dr. Frank Moscarillo, a Chevy Chase physician who administers ECT. "It's only a stimulus to a grand mal seizure. Why in the world that should help depression, we don't know."
Doctors first incorrectly believed that instigating seizures in a schizophrenic patient would negate that condition.
Modern ECT involves a series of six to 12 treatments that pass electric currents through the brain via two electrodes placed along the skull.
"It's the single most effective treatment for delusional depression," says Dr. Moscarillo, who also serves as executive director of the Association for Convulsive Therapy, an international group with just under 400 members worldwide that, in part, gives credentials to psychiatrists to use ECT.
Successful ECT sessions yield a break in a patient's depression, a lifting of the dark veil that can induce suicidal thoughts. Side effects can include temporary confusion and short-term memory loss of events around the time of the treatment.
ECT, even at its most effective, only tackles the current depression. It does not necessarily preclude future depressive episodes. Some patients undergo maintenance treatments once every six weeks or so to sustain their depression-free state.
ECT can be conducted through unilateral or bilateral application of electrodes. The former places the electrodes on the right temple and right vertex of the skull and is less likely to affect memory. Bilateral application affixes electrodes on both sides of the skull.
A newer process, what Dr. Moscarillo calls bifrontal, places the electrodes farther down the face, away from the brain. This seems to spare the temporal lobe and is less damaging to short-term memory.
Convincing patients that electroconvulsive therapy can help them isn't always easy, Dr. Moscarillo says. "There is a stigma, no question about it," he says. "They're fearful of it though they don't know about it."
"Sam," a 59-year-old Arlington resident who asked that his name not be revealed, turned to ECT in 1999 when an approaching retirement intensified his lifelong battle with depression.
"My wife had some fear I might commit suicide," says Sam, who eventually came under Dr. Moscarillo's care.
"I remembered my aunt had [ECT] in the early '50s, and the way it sounded was terrible," he says, "but I was in no state to object."
With his wife's consent, Sam underwent about 20 treatments, the last in July 2000.
"Maybe it doesn't work for some people, but these new pills don't work for everybody, either," says Sam, who battled memory problems before the treatments. "Looking back, I'm certain I did the right thing."
Some contend depressed patients have every right to fear ECT.
Dr. Peter Breggin, author of "The Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox," says the therapy works by "damaging the brain ... rendering the patient unable to feel depressed" or experience "any other subtle human emotion."
The seizures induced are more profound than typical epileptic seizures, Dr. Breggin says. Without the muscle relaxants, a patient could snap his or her bones during the body's thrashing.
"If a woman got an electric shock from her refrigerator, they'd whisk her off to the [Intensive Care Unit]," says the Bethesda doctor, who isn't sure why ECT seizures should require a different response.
Some patients may not speak out against the procedure because they can't, he says. "Closed-head injuries produce an inability to evaluate one's condition.
"It's indicative of the abusive history of my profession," he says, adding that early in the 20th century, "they might give the whole [mental] ward shock treatments. It tends to make people more docile."
Elderly patients often are convinced ECT can be of help, he says.
"It's a moneymaker; it keeps the wards going," he says. "Insurance companies don't question it."
Dr. Lenore Teter, medical director of George Washington Hospital's psychiatric unit, disputes the "cash cow" charge.
"I think that's the most absurd statement. If this person only knew ... how grateful people are when they get better," Dr. Teter says. "It's a very inexpensive treatment, as far as treatments go," she adds, estimating a session's price tag to be about $1,500, including ECT, anesthesia and hospital fees.
Dr. Teter denies that the treatments cause brain damage but says that in some isolated cases, patients have memory loss beyond the days surrounding the treatment.
The process is safe even for patients in their 90s, she adds.
Retired Lt. Col. Elizabeth McGillicuddyofLocust Grove, Va., would disagree.
Ms. McGillicuddy underwent ECT in 1994 to combat severe depression. The treatments had little beneficial effect, but they did profoundly affect her memory.
"It took me a long time to realize how much I lost," the 53-year-old says.
The 20-year Marine Corps veteran says she "couldn't remember anything, my duty stations, the people, anything."
"It's like you're climbing up a mountain, and you look down, and the mountain is not there. It's gone," she says. "There's no way to describe how horrifying that is. Those people killed the person I was.
"The danger is so great," she continues. "The risk that any person is taking for the small possibility of benefit... you run the risk of losing everything."
Dr. Moscarillo doesn't discount the fact that some patients have such adverse reactions, particularly to their memory, but he says he has never had that happen to a patient under his care. He insists such incidents are very rare.
He does not make lofty promises about ECT, however.
"I tell patients, 'This may not work,' " he says.
Many others are quick to say it won't work. Forty-year-old Juli Lawrence, who runs www.ect.org, wants potential ECT candidates to know all the facts - and risks - before submitting to the procedure.
Ms. Lawrence, who runs her Web site from her Belleville, Ill., home, struggled with depression for years. In 1994, her psychiatrist suggested she undergo ECT.
"I resisted at first," Ms. Lawrence says. She particularly recalls broaching the topic with a physician friend who performed ECT on his patients. The normally warm, convivial man "would go cold and refused to talk about it," she says.
Her own psychiatrist insisted on the treatment, though, and she eventually agreed.
"I did weird things. I woke up and refused to speak English. I only spoke Russian. It was just defiance," says Ms. Lawrence, who studied Russian in college. She says she used to speak Russian when angered or dealing with authority figures.
She says the treatments did little for her condition and left her a changed person.
"I felt extremely betrayed by my psychiatrist, by the industry," says Ms. Lawrence, whose depression lifted on its own several years after the treatments. "I lost a couple of years' worth of memory."
Her Web site, listed by the search engine Google under "anti-psychiatry organizations," receives 150 to 200 e-mails a week, many expressing dissatisfaction with the senders' own ECT experiences.
Dr. Moscarillo suggests that no matter how well-informed the public may be about ECT, some sense of caution always will remain.
"We're told to be afraid of electricity... it may be a primitive kind of instinct," he says.
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A Cooperative World Space Industry vs Star Wars
An Invitation to Transform the World
February 23, 2002;
Malibu, California
http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1014149327,62833,
The Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) is inviting leaders for peace, newsmakers and celebrities, who are committed to shifting consciousness, to join them for an initiation of a 90-day action plan that includes the goals of the Space Preservation Act of 2002, H.R. 3616. Find out why Life on this planet could shift dramatically after June 13, 2002, from the current US administration's aim to weaponize space to a new beginning of arms control and a realistic approach for the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction before it is too late.
Join ICIS during the evening of Saturday, Feb. 23rd and find out details on how this issue can be transformed, while creating a grassroots movement to shift the new space-age paradigm to a new way of thinking and functioning that is beyond fear and war consciousness. Get inspired and join leaders of this campaign to help transform the weapon industry to an industry supporting a peace dividend that can be lasting.
Speakers for the February 23rd event include:
- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Chair of the House Progressive Caucus and Co-Chair of the House Space and Aviation Caucus. Meet an emerging national progressive leader of the Democratic Party. On January 23rd he introduced a national bill in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3616, the Space Preservation Act of 2002 to ban space-based weapons.
- Carol Rosin, President of Institute of Cooperation in Space, International speaker and leading the way in transforming the weapons and war based economy and security system into a cooperative world space industry and program.
- Daniel Sheehan J.D., General Counsel of ICIS, was legal counsel for Pentagon Papers, Karen Silkwood, Iran Contra & Three Mile Island. Sheehan will identify immediate steps that need to be taken and guide us through creating a successful movement to preserve space and the domination of Earth from space based weapons.
- Lindsay Wagner, actress and advocate for human potential has stepped up to the plate to be a voice and advocate for others to be a call to action.
Learn (Join us) about immediate things you can do to create awareness and activate the people in your spheres of influence.
Find out about an event that will provide education and a call to action with entertainment from top celebrities. Saturday, March 30th 2002 and is being sponsored Season for Nonviolence.
The February 23rd event will begin around 6pm, speakers begin at 7pm, and doors will close at 6:45pm. The location is PCH and the Big Rock turnoff in Malibu; get specific directions when you RSVP to the office of Carol Rosin 805/641-1999 or email to rosin@west.net
Sponsored by Institute for Cooperation in Space and Global Citizens for Sustainable Existence Now!
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GRANTS AVAILABLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES
February 19, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2002/2002L-02-19-09.html
BOSTON, Massachusetts, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is accepting grant applications for companies to develop and commercialize new, cost efficient technologies aimed at New England's most pressing environmental problems.
Through EPA's national Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program, the EPA will be awarding $11 million in grant contracts. All small businesses working on environmental technologies are invited to apply for the awards.
Of that, $2.5 million will be focused on environmental problems chosen by EPA's New England Office, including pollution from combined sewer overflows (CSOs), stormwater runoff and contaminated sediments in urban rivers.
Another $1 million will go towards technologies for removing arsenic from drinking water and $2.5 million for control and monitoring of mobile source air pollution emissions. The remaining $5 million will go towards all other environmental technologies.
"This grants program holds great promise for finding new, cost efficient technologies that communities can use for tackling many of the region's most serious pollution problems," said Robert Varney, regional administrator of EPA's New England Office. "Many of New England's cities and towns are facing big financial challenges in controlling CSOs, stormwater and other contamination problems. These grants are one way we're working to ease the burden."
SBIR contracts are open to any small business across the country. The EPA began accepting applications on January 31 and will continue to accept them until March 21 for grants designated for mobile sources, arsenic control, or CSO, stormwater and urban sediments. Applications for grants designated for all other technologies will be accepted from March 28 to May 23.
EPA held a training workshop in December to teach small businesses how to apply for the contracts. Copies of materials and presentations from the workshop are available from EPA New England's Center for Environmental Industry and Technology CEIT at 1-800-575-CEIT.
"The special SBIR programs and our partnership with EPA New England provide an opportunity for the agency to help businesses accelerate the development and commercialization of new environmental technologies that are needed to control important sources of pollution in a cost effective manner," said Dr. Jim Gallup, program manager of EPA's national SBIR Program.
More information about the SBIR program is available at: http://es.epa.gov/ncerqa/sbir/
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Art Nuko World Tour
http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/
"Waiting for the Messiah in Jerusalem" - http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/tv.jpg - This painting is of a nuclear explosion over Jerusalem; part of the ART NUKO World Tour. It was painted twenty years ago as warning to all of just how bad things could get if they got out of hand.
It may now be time to bring out the thirty some paintings in the show and travel again to the Middle East. They were last in Amman during the Gulf War and before that in Jerusalem and Cairo during the original intafata.
Please use the image as you see fit, if you feel they are useful and not inflammatory.
If so, credit them to Dr. Arthur Nuko as part of the Art Nuko Show.
I also have postcards of the image, along with Baghdad, Washington, (and jegs of many of the others) if you are interested in having some sent to you. There would be NO cost to you if you wanted to some to distribute. A box of 1000 would probably cost $20 to ship.
Hoping for peace,
Dr. Arthur Nuko
You can reach Dr. Nuko c/o peace@islandnet.com
Stealing the Joules of Baghdad http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/baghdad.jpg
Spending Eternity in Egypt http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/egypt.jpg
Testing Allah's Will in Pakistan http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/pakistan.jpg
Containing the Reaction in China http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/pakistan.jpg
Leading the Lambs to Slaughter in Nagasaki http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/nagasaki.jpg
Setting the Sun on Tokyo http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/tokyo.jpg
Getting Bombed in Bangkok http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/bangkok.jpg
Winning the Arms Race in Red Square Moscow http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/redsquar.jpg Testing the French Reaction http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/frenchre.jpg
Bringing Power to the People - The nuclear priesthood http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/priest.jpg
1000 Cranes http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/cranes.jpg
Exposing Ourselves to Explo Vancouver http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/explo.jpg Cruising Down the Rideau in Ottawa http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/ottawa.jpg
Waking Up to Reality in theWhitehouse Washington, DC http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/whitehs.jpg
TV http://www.pej.ca/artnuko/tv.jpg
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Welcome to WebLobbying.com
http://www.weblobbying.com/
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Farrakhan blasts war on terrorism, urges trial of Bush
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 19, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020219-278564.htm
The Rev. Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, denounced the U.S. war on terrorism in a speech at a weekend conference in Los Angeles, and suggested that President Bush should be tried for war crimes in a court like that at Nuremberg which sentenced several Nazi leaders to be hanged after World War II.
"There's a lot of ugliness in America the beautiful," he said, "ugliness that can be turned into beauty."
Mr. Farrakhan encouraged Americans to criticize U.S. policy in Afghanistan and its war on terror and said a "shadow government" was readying a war on Iraq.
"True patriots," he said, should speak out against bad policies.
"If the truth were known, there would be a Nuremberg trial for American presidents. I cannot allow them to use the American soldier, black, brown and poor white, to fight a war that is unjust and wrong."
He suggested that the president is provoking Muslims worldwide and said Mr. Bush's actions "can summon the whole Muslim world against the West by how you prosecute this war [in Afghanistan]."
Mr. Farrakhan's remarks were included in a 21/2-hour speech that closed a four-day "Saviour's Day" celebration.
It marked the birthday of Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, the largest Islamic group in America.
The conference drew an estimated 20,000 people to the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and included speeches by Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat; former pro basketball star Magic Johnson; and the Rev. Al Sharpton of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Giant video monitors displayed images meant to illustrate how U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts - including the war on terrorism in Afghanistan - is hinged on America's "insatiable appetite" for oil.
In recent years Mr. Farrakhan, who fought a successful battle with prostate cancer, appeared to tone down his fiery rhetoric, which had been aimed at whites, whom he once called "subhuman," and Jews, whom he called followers of a "gutter religion."
But since September 11, he has on several occasions criticized U.S. policy on terrorism.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
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Expelled Protesters Rally in D.C.
February 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some two dozen Americans expelled from China after staging a protest against the crackdown on the Falun Gong religious sect are complaining to Congress and the State Department.
The Americans, and about a dozen supporters, said the protesters had been mistreated during their detention, an accusation U.S. diplomats could not verify because they were not permitted to see the Americans while they were held in China.
With Congress in recess Tuesday, the protesters met with aides to the lawmakers. Similarly, at the State Department, they talked to low-level officials.
As a result of their account, the State Department will ask the Chinese government about the accusations of abuse, a department official said.
President Bush is due in Beijing on Thursday. He is expected to make a point of human rights in his talks with Chinese officials, but the topic, a familiar one, is unlikely to dominate his agenda.
In the meantime, 94 House members sent Bush a letter last weekend asking him to express concern over what the Falun Gong calls a campaign of terror.
In a separate letter, five U.S. senators expressed concern about restrictions on the sect and treatment of its adherents.
The Falun Gong information center says it has verified 358 deaths since persecution of the sect began three years ago.
Last Thursday's protest in Beijing's central Tiananmen Square resulted in the expulsion of 42 foreign demonstrators -- 33 Americans, four Britons and five Germans. All were put on planes back to their countries Friday.
The protest was the largest involving foreigners. Possibly to avert a diplomatic backlash during Bush's visit, Chinese authorities took the unusual step of issuing a statement saying they had treated the detainees humanely.
Falun Gong was outlawed in July 1999 as a threat to social order and communist rule.
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