------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Nuclear Radiation and its Biological Effects
British Cos. to Develop Nuclear Plants
China Wants U.S. Action on Talks
Beijing Aide Suggests Impasse on Missiles Continues With U.S.
Czech Temelin station turned off for inspection
Scientist's Son Defends His Dad's Work
UPI hears ... Oil trumps geography, Iran's nuclear power
The latest targets amid the blood and violence: Pregnant women
U.S. Analysts Find No Sign bin Laden Had Nuclear Arms
State Pulls Data From Internet in Attempt to Thwart Terrorists
DOE PLANS TWO NEW MOX REACTORS
Groundwater Contamination
Today In Congress
Tom Ridge Holds Stock in Companies Lobbying for Defense Contracts
Senator to join GAO lawsuit, seeking nuclear info

MILITARY
Dividing Afghanistan will return focus to fighting terrorism
Franks Supports An Afghan Army
Peacekeepers Train Afghan Police
Prospect for peace becomes brighter
How American Dream faded in downtown Mogadishu
Officials close in on arms dealer
Arrest Aids Pursuit of Weapons Network
Combat Planes Displayed at Air Show
Small step in Sri Lanka
Serbian atrocities recounted
"Ill-treated" Milosevic's trial hears of massacres
Britain extends Afghan stay
Other Companies Expected to Top Northrop's Offer for TRW
Atrocity of 9/11 to save tech sector - Cheney
Airbus to bid on U.S. military pact
IBM May Hire 250 in Va.
U.S. law bars giving Colombians data
Guerrilla Strategy Perplexes Colombians
Bush lifts sanctions on Afghanistan
U.S. Takes Aim At Afghan Opium
Guatemala Central Bank Chief Kidnapped
U.S. demands on Iraq may be tough to meet
Eyewitness: Bitter legacy of sanctions
Annan to Press Baghdad On Weapons Inspectors
Implications of removing Saddam
Jews bury bombers in pigskin deterrent
Giving Birth Amid Death
Fiji's new image
Fujimori writes book on terrorism
Six death this week in Vieques
No improvement, no elections this year in Chechnya
Saudi Crown Prince Rejects Iran, Iraq 'Axis' Label
Oak Ridge Building Future Soldiers
Transform Space Operations Major Goal For Teets
Special operations
Fourth Venezuelan Officer Demands Chavez Resign

POLICE / PRISONERS
Few, if any, would face US tribunals
Anthrax probe focuses on letter
FBI Still Lacks Identifiable Suspect in Anthrax Probe
Frequent fliers, frequent liars?
Proposal for Web oversight assailed
Police shut off 12 city cameras
For D.C. Police, Funding but Too Few Recruits
U.S. to Weigh Computer Chip Implant
Inmate's death sentence commuted to life
Blast Near Ministry in Rome Heightens Tensions

ENERGY AND OTHER
U.S. SUPPORTS ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES IN CZECH REPUBLIC
Renewables share in German power rises to 7.25 pct
Bush Touts Hybrid-Fuel Cars for His Energy Plan
About 900,000 Americans have HIV, government says
New AIDS Drugs Might Help Against Resistance
U.S. Decides Not to Expand Key Study of AIDS Vaccine

ACTIVISTS
Doomsday Clock to Be Change
Cuban dissidents blocked from rite
End the Cuban embargo
Ecuador jungle provinces in emergency over protests



-------- NUCLEAR

Nuclear Radiation and its Biological Effects
by Dr Rosalie Bertell

From: "Piotr Bein" <piotr.bein@imag.net>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002
http://www.antic.org/du-index.html

The Seed

The future of humankind is present today within the bodies of living people, animals and plants -- the whole seedbearing biosphere. This living biosystem which we take so much for granted has evolved slowly into a relatively stable dynamic equilibrium, with predictable interactions between plants and animals, between microscopic and macroscopic life, between environmental pollutants and human health. Changes in the environment disturb this balance in two ways: first, by altering the carefully evolved seed by randomly damaging it, and second, by altering the habitat, i.e. food, climate or environment, to which the seed and/or organism has been adapted, making life for future generations more difficult or even impossible.

Although examples of maladaptation in nature and resulting species extinction abound, our focus here is on human seed, the sperm and ovum, and the effect on it and on the human habitat resulting from increasing ionising radiation in the environment.

The increased use of radioactive materials, which is a direct outgrowth of the current military and energy policies of the developed world, provides an opportunity for gauging what priority these countries give to the health and well-being of individual citizens, and for gauging governments' understanding of the tension between individual and national survival. The first indicator of underlying national priorities is the precision or lack of precision with which health effects are predicted, and the thoroughness with which an audit is taken and the predictions checked against reality. The audit findings should be reported to the person or people affected, and their participation sought in formulating changes in policy to remedy any unanticipated problems. The individual's sense of self-preservation and personal benefit, in such an ideal system, would give realistic feedback to governments on the acceptability of national policy. The combined experiences of governing and governed would forge a national consensus on future directions.

Dr Rosalie Bertell

-------- britain

British Cos. to Develop Nuclear Plants

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Britain-Nuclear.html

LONDON (AP) -- British Energy PLC (news/quote) and British Nuclear Fuels PLC signed an agreement Tuesday to develop a new generation of nuclear reactors.

The companies said the agreement was a ``significant step forward'' in building replacement nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom.

The agreement covers work to assess whether the Westinghouse AP1000 -- an advanced pressurized water reactor design -- could replace British Energy's existing nuclear power stations when they reach the end of their planned operating lives.

The agreement will run for a year. The companies will assess the technical suitability of AP1000 reactors on existing reactor sites and analyze launch costs.

Westinghouse Electric Co. is a subsidiary of BNFL.

British Energy, created in 1996 by the privatization of state-owned nuclear plants, operates eight nuclear power stations and produces one-fifth of the nation's electricity.

The move was the first concrete commitment from the two companies since the recent publication of a government report that gave cautious backing to new investment in nuclear stations.

Robin Jeffrey, British Energy's chairman, said the government's energy review had helped signal a positive future for the nuclear industry.

``Today's agreement will assess licensing and regulatory issues and deliver robust cost estimates for the new stations we propose,'' he said.

BNFL chief executive Norman Askew said the AP1000 was ``one of the world's most advanced reactor technology systems.''

``This reactor design is ready for deployment now and we are delighted that British Energy want to pursue this option with us further,'' he said.

British Energy said it was also looking at the Canadian-designed CANDU reactor as a potential model and signed a similar agreement with its designers, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., last November.

-------- china

China Wants U.S. Action on Talks

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-Arms-Sales.html

BEIJING (AP) -- China is sending a negotiator to Washington next month for arms control talks, but expects the United States to drop its complaints that Beijing has exported weapons technology, a Chinese official said Tuesday.

The comments, coming days after President Bush visited Beijing, suggested Washington faces more protracted negotiating in its effort to win a formal Chinese commitment to curb the spread of weapons technology.

China promised in November 2000 to tighten export controls, but Washington accused it of supplying missile and nuclear arms technology to Pakistan and imposed sanctions. Beijing wants an end to penalties that include a ban on launches of U.S. commercial satellites on Chinese rockets.

The trip to Washington next month by China's chief arms control negotiator, Liu Jieyi, comes after two visits by senior officials to argue China's case, said the official, who works in China's Foreign Ministry. He said Beijing wants a response before taking any more steps.

``The ball is in their court,'' said the official, who spoke to a group of foreign reporters on condition that he not be identified further.

He wouldn't specify what steps China wants the United States to take to move the talks ahead. But he pointed to one area of conflict: China's contention that it can supply arms technology under deals signed before the November 2000 agreement. U.S. officials reject that.

``The agreement is for the future, not the past,'' the Foreign Ministry official said. ``But we did nothing wrong in the past, so you should not be worried about that.''

He said China is committed to curbing the spread of weapons technology, though he acknowledged that it hasn't published a long-promised list of banned exports.

The official also said the two sides should ``respect each other's concerns.'' He said that includes Chinese opposition to U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its territory.

``You can't just accuse us of ... violating our commitments and at the same time you are selling large amounts of arms to Taiwan,'' he said. Such sales, he said, are ``also a kind of proliferation.''

On other issues in Chinese-U.S. relations, the official said:

--Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao's first visit to the United States, announced last week, will take place in late April. Hu's itinerary is under discussion, though he is expected to visit other cities in addition to Washington. Hu is widely seen as the expected successor to President Jiang Zemin.

--China has agreed to allow the FBI to station an agent in Beijing. Washington made that request more than a year ago, but it took on new urgency when the two sides agreed to cooperate in anti-terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. China is deciding whether to station a law-enforcement official in Washington.

Despite disagreement over the arms talks, the official said China regards relations with Washington as improving.

Over the next several months, meetings are planned to discuss cooperation in a wide range of fields, including anti-terrorism, global warming and fighting money laundering, he said.

Nevertheless, on the sensitive issue of relations with Taiwan, the official complained that the Bush administration was obstructing ``unification of the motherland'' by selling weapons and expanding contacts with Taiwanese officials.

Taiwan's defense minister has been invited to a conference next month in Florida, and the Chinese official said Beijing wants Washington to bar him from attending.

U.S. officials haven't said whether Defense Minister Tang Yiau-ming will be allowed to attend the privately organized conference. It would be the first time a Taiwanese defense minister has visited the United States since 1979, when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

--------

Beijing Aide Suggests Impasse on Missiles Continues With U.S.

New York Times
February 26, 2002
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/international/26CND-CHINA.html

BEIJING, Feb. 26 - Washington should take the next step to resolve the dispute over Chinese exports of missile technology, a senior Chinese foreign policy official said today, in remarks that suggested a continuing impasse over one of the most sensitive issues in Chinese-American relations.

"We think the ball is in your court," the official said of the festering discord over alleged Chinese transfers of missile parts and know-how to countries including Pakistan and Iran.

The official declined to specify what the United States must do before China follows through with promises it made in November 2000 to issue detailed regulations on sensitive exports.

But in the inconclusive negotiations over the last year, China has insisted that the United States first proceed with its own pledge to authorize Chinese commercial launches of American satellites. Officials here also demand that Washington end sanctions on a Chinese arms company that Beijing says were unfairly applied.

The United States says it will not relax the ban on commercial satellite launches, a potentially lucrative and prestigious business for China, until Beijing fulfills the 2000 agreement.

The senior official, who was involved in last week's meetings here with President Bush, called in several American reporters today for a briefing on the condition that he not be identified.

His remarks help explain why a long-sought final accord on curbing the spread of missiles remained elusive last week.

Chinese launches of American satellites were suspended during the Clinton administration because of concerns about the transfer of technological secrets. Without strong new measures to curb the spread of missiles from China, Mr. Bush would find it politically difficult to allow resumption of that business.

In the November 2000 accord, China pledged to end exports of ballistic missiles and technologies. It agreed to issue export-control rules and a list of sensitive "dual-use" items that could help the government reign in its increasingly free-wheeling arms companies. To American chagrin, the rules and list have still not been issued.

In a renewed effort to end the deadlock, China's top arms control negotiator will travel to Washington in March for talks, the official said today.

The official said that despite disagreement over missiles, Taiwan and human rights, President Bush's two-day visit was "constructive, positive and fruitful." He said China was pleased that Vice President Hu Jintao, who is expected to take over as Communist Party leader and president, will be visiting the United States for the first time in late April and that President Jiang Zemin will visit in October.

But the official also cautioned that tensions over Taiwan will rise if Washington does not temper its arms sales to the island, which Beijing considers a renegade part of the motherland.

Today the foreign ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, warned at a news conference that Taiwanese authorities would "eat their own bitter fruit" if they continued with what he called a push toward "incremental independence."

Beijing has been angered by proposals in Taipei to start using the word Taiwan in the official name of its de facto embassies overseas, and by the reported intention of Taiwan's defense minister to attend a private military conference in Florida next month. Beijing says that such a visit would breech the American commitment to shun "official" contacts with Taiwan; the Bush administration has not announced whether it will grant the minister a visa.

The senior Chinese official, elaborating on the stalled missile accord, insisted that China is not placing conditions on its pledge to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

"We will honor our part, and you should honor your part," he said of the 2000 accord.

The official said that China shares the American interest in curbing the spread of weapons, and will act against any company found engaging in questionable sales.

One sticking point is the sanctions applied last year by Washington against a Chinese arms company that is said to have sold sensitive missile parts to Pakistan, China's longtime ally. China says the sales were not dangerous and were arranged before November 2000 and not covered by the accord.

American officials say they had a verbal understanding that China's new prohibitions would apply to pre-existing technology sales.

The Chinese official today denied making any commitment to "grandfathering" the 2000 accord.

"That agreement was for the future, and now the United States is saying it was for the past," he said. But this does not imply that any prior deals posed a risk of weapons proliferation, he added.

-------- europe

Czech Temelin station turned off for inspection

REUTERS CZECH REPUBLIC:
February 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14725/newsDate/26-Feb-2002/story.htm

PRAGUE - The Czech nuclear power plant Temelin, whose operation is strongly opposed by Austria, was turned off for a planned one-month inspection, the plant's spokesman said.

The station, 60 km (38 miles) from the border of the fiercely anti-nuclear Austria, has become a source of unrelenting friction between the two neighbours. Many Austrians fear Temelin is unsafe, which Prague denies.

Temelin spokesman Milan Nebesar said the reactor at the station was shut down shortly after 1700 GMT and would now be cooled off to allow for a thorough inspection of all systems.

"We are coming into a one-month shutdown to revise the device and also to change some valves, which is necessary to finish the dynamic tests at the plant," Nebesar told Reuters.

The $2.75 billion plant is a key asset of the main Czech power utility CEZ , which the government is looking to sell to a foreign investor.

-------- germany

Scientist's Son Defends His Dad's Work

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Heisenbergs-Son.html

DURHAM, N.H. (AP) -- Historians and scientists have long wondered why Nazi Germany didn't build a nuclear bomb, a debate that almost always revolves around Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Did he try and fail in the effort? Or did Heisenberg ensure a bomb wasn't built?

His son thinks his father steered Germany in that direction, despite recent evidence to the contrary. It's an important debate considering Heisenberg's work as leader of Germany's nuclear fission project had the potential to change world history.

A 1993 book, ``Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,'' argued that Heisenberg sabotaged the effort. The book inspired the play ``Copenhagen.''

This month, the family of the late Danish scientist Niels Bohr released a letter that suggests a different conclusion.

Bohr wrote that when the two former colleagues, their countries at war, met in Copenhagen in 1941, Heisenberg shocked Bohr by telling him he was committed to developing an A-bomb for Hitler and confident of succeeding.

``You spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons,'' Bohr wrote about five years before his death in 1962.

Heisenberg's son, Jochen Heisenberg, who teaches physics at the University of New Hampshire, believes Bohr misunderstood his father.

``People who claim he was eager to build a device for Hitler are simply wrong,'' Jochen Heisenberg, 62, said. ``He did not like the idea of having to build nuclear weapons for a regime like Hitler's even though in official records he always maintained that decision was not a moral (one), just a rational decision looking at all the facts.''

Heisenberg's son bases his views partly on conversations with his father in his later years. He acknowledges that he and his siblings generally didn't ask their father critical questions about his wartime work, and he has no letters from his father on the subject. Heisenberg died in 1976.

But he said his father's personality and thinking habits support his claim after the war that he studied the problem for two years before presenting evidence to German leaders that building a bomb was not practical under the circumstances.

Though he did not develop an atom bomb, Heisenberg worked to develop a nuclear reactor to generate power -- work he defended after the war as logical.

``I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb,'' he once said.

Hans Bethe, a Nobel prize-winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, said Heisenberg could tell the Germans he was working on a reactor to build a bomb, and could tell others he was simply working on a reactor.

``Heisenberg was known as anti-Nazi, but very patriotic,'' said Bethe, a retired physics professor at Cornell University. ``He could say he was working on an atomic bomb and yet not working on it.''

The elder Heisenberg could have left Germany before the war, but did not. While some see that as evidence he sympathized with the Nazi cause, the younger Heisenberg disagrees.

``He made compromises which were necessary after he decided to stay in Germany,'' Jochen Heisenberg said. ``He certainly never intended to be a martyr. But he thought it was important to save science in Germany through the war.''

Jochen Heisenberg notes that to survive, his father could not publicly oppose the Nazis -- in Germany, or in Copenhagen, which was occupied by the Nazis in 1941.

``Niels Bohr took what (Heisenberg) said in public situations as being the true representation of his beliefs,'' the younger Heisenberg said.

The Bohr family is not commenting, said Andrew D. Jackson, chairman of the Niels Bohr Archives in Copenhagen. But Jackson is skeptical.

``(Bohr) knew perfectly well political times were difficult and that guarded speech was the rule of the day,'' Jackson said.

Bohr and Heisenberg met after the war to sort out the Copenhagen meeting -- the basis for the ``Copenhagen'' play -- but they never resolved their differences.

Some scholars point out that Bohr's accounts appear to be more detailed -- he even says he remembers everything exactly. Some of Heisenberg's reminiscences, on the other hand, are hedged with phrases such as ``as far as I can remember.''

But Jochen Heisenberg wonders if Bohr's memory was as good as he claimed. And he notes that Bohr never sent the letter that was released this month.

Many doubt the mystery will ever be solved.

``I think the actual question of what happened is going to be left hanging,'' Jackson said. ``They say completely opposite things, so what do you believe?''

-------- iran

UPI hears ... Oil trumps geography, Iran's nuclear power

2/26/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26022002-121101-8385r

Oil trumps geography, which explains why the United States has joined this week's Moscow conference on the Caspian Sea. It used to be shared between Iran and the Soviet Union, but now Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all demanding their cut of the Caspian basin's oil wealth. Russians, Kazakhs and Turkmen want it shared out in proportion to the amount of a country's coastline, and they each have a lot. Iran and Azerbaijan, despite some nasty recent incidents over Iranian gunboats firing on Azerbaijan-based survey ships, want the spoils shared equally. The United States is there as "an interested party," but particularly sensitive to the needs of Azerbaijan despite Exxon-Mobil recently canceling two drilling projects in Azeri waters. The conference should reveal whether Iran is to be defined as part of the "axis of evil" in all contexts, or whether it can become a useful negotiating partner for the energy-conscious Bush administration when oil is at stake.

The Russians have been particularly helpful to U.S. concerns at the conference, announcing with great regret that unforeseen technical and administration problems will delay their completion of Iran's nuclear power station at Busheir -- the one the Israelis are threatening to destroy before its nuclear reactor starts producing enough material for a warhead. Russian Deputy Nuclear Energy Minister Valery Lebedev now explains Moscow only plans to complete construction of Busheir in late 2004 or early 2005 -- safely past President Bush's re-election horizon.

-------- israel

The latest targets amid the blood and violence: Pregnant women

By Phil Reeves in Jerusalem,
UK Independent
26 February 2002
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=139969

The tiny girl called Fida lay cradled in her wounded mother's arms, yawning like any other new-born, blissfully unaware that her life had been irreparably scarred by Israeli soldiers even before it began.

Before her mother, Maysoun, set out for hospital early yesterday, too tortured by labour pains to hang on any longer but knowing that she must travel the West Bank's lethal roads in darkness, the unborn Fida had a father.

By the time they reached hospital, her father was dead, the victim of a hail of bullets pumped into their car at a makeshift Israeli army roadblock. And Fida's grandfather, who was travelling with them in the pathetically misguided hope that the presence of an old man would make them safer, was so badly injured that Palestinian doctors say he may be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Maysoun Hayek and her child were lucky. Fragments from a bullet hit Maysoun's abdomen, but missed the unborn baby. Hours later, amid grief and trauma, she was born, weighing 7lbs 10oz. Maysoun, abruptly widowed at a mere 22 years old, chose the name "Fida" because it is Arabic for sacrifice. Fida is her first child.

There has been much cruelty in the 17-month conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, but the events of the past 48 hours mark another squalid chapter, overshadowing the latest peace manoeuvrings, based on proposals tentatively floated by Saudi Arabia.

Only a day before the attack on Maysoun Hayek and her family, Israeli soldiers shot and injured another pregnant Palestinian woman in the same place as she was travelling to hospital to give birth.

And, as night fell yesterday, doctors in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital were operating on a 33-year-old Israeli settler, who had given birth after being shot and seriously wounded by Palestinian guerrillas who opened fire on cars near Nokdim in the southern West Bank yesterday. Two other Israelis were killed. Reports said the woman was in her 36th week of pregnancy and gave birth to a baby after undergoing a Caesarean section as doctors also treated her injuries. The Al Aqsa Brigades, affiliated with the mainstream Fatah faction, claimed responsibility.

These ugly events were so similar to the Hayek family's suffering that it was impossible not to wonder if it was not deliberate revenge.

In all, three healthy baby girls - two Palestinians and an Israeli - were beginning their lives yesterday as their mothers were recovering from bullet wounds. The blood of war has left its mark on the latest generation even before they were out of the womb.

Maysoun and her husband, Mohammed Hayek, a 24-year-old unemployed labourer, knew about the earlier shooting of another pregnant Palestinian woman before they set out yesterday. They had heard how Shadia Shehadeh was shot on Sunday by the soldiers, and had had to give birth to her baby - now called Hiba, or "gift from God" - while being treated for a shoulder injury. The couple were deeply worried about it. Maysoun Hayek tried in vain to hold out in the morning so that she could make the difficult 12-mile journey from her village, Zeita, to hospital in Nablus during daylight.

"I was afraid that something would happen to us," she said, as she lay in bed in Rafidia hospital, Nablus, yesterday. "My husband told me before we left the house that maybe we would live to see the baby, and maybe we would not."

When her contractions began in earnest, the couple decided to risk the journey, although it meant going through an Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. She said they set out at 1.30am and passed through the checkpoint without any problems after soldiers searched the vehicle and patted her stomach to make sure she was really pregnant, and not concealing a bomb.

Five minutes later, she said, their car came under fire from troops stationed on a hillside, where four Israeli armoured vehicles and two tanks look down on a makeshift road-block. Bullets struck her husband, fragments hit her in the shoulder and three bullets hit her father-in-law, Abdullah, 64, in the chest and back. "They shot at the car's tyres and the car stopped immediately... I got out of the car and all the windows were smashed. I looked at my husband and saw that he was unconscious and the same with my father-in-law.

"I started screaming in English 'There's a baby, there's a baby'," she added tearfully.

Israeli soldiers took them into an armoured vehicle, where they received medical treatment. For 45 minutes, cold and so engulfed by shock and pain that she forgot that she was about to give birth, Maysoun says she lay on the ground as the Israelis made arrangements to move her. She was eventually transferred to a Palestinian ambulance and taken to hospital in Nablus.

Doctors said X-rays of her dead husband showed he had 25 bullet wounds. His father Abdullah was rushed off for surgery; he was on a respirator yesterday. Three minutes after arriving in hospital, shortly before dawn, Maysoun gave birth.

Israeli soldiers have been trigger-happy throughout the conflict, and have killed hundreds of Palestinian non-combatants, including many children. But they are particularly on edge after last week's attack by Palestinian guerrillas on a West Bank checkpoint last week, in which six soldiers were shot dead.

More now than ever, the Palestinians are focusing their attacks on soldiers and settlers inside the occupied territories rather than inside Israel, a trend underscored last night when two gunmen opened fire on a bus stop and injured 10 people - five seriously - in a residential neighbourhood in Neve Yaakov, a Jewish settlement in occupied east Jerusalem.

Israeli army checkpoints in the occupied territories have become the scene of regular shootings. This weekend, soldiers near Ramallah opened fire on the bullet-proof car of Ahmad Qreia, one of Yasser Arafat's top officials.

The Israeli army yesterday offered detailed explanations for shooting at the two pregnant women. It accused the drivers of their vehicles of trying to break through a roadblock and ignoring repeated commands from Israeli soldiers to stop. It said that in both cases the soldiers assumed they were under attack.

This will not stop a growing tide of criticism within Israel of the army's conduct, led by more than 200 reservists who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. Yesterday's events will further stoke this.

Nor will it assuage the anger of the Palestinians, any more than the prospect of an Israeli inquiry, also announced by the army yesterday. They know that the Israeli army hardly ever punishes its wayward soldiers, and when it does so they are treated with astounding leniency. That much has again been made clear. Three soldiers were punished for posing for "trophy" photographs as they stood over Israeli Arab shot by mistake at a roadblock last week. The most severe of the three sentences was a mere seven days in prison.

-------- terrorism

U.S. Analysts Find No Sign bin Laden Had Nuclear Arms

New York Times
February 26, 2002
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/international/asia/26NUKE.html http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20020226/ts_nyt/u_s__analysts_find_no_sign_bin_laden_had_nuclear_arms

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 - An analysis of suspected radioactive substances seized in Afghanistan has found nothing to prove that Osama bin Laden reached his decade-long goal of acquiring nuclear materials for a bomb, administration officials say.

The analysis of suspicious canisters, computer discs and documents conducted by the government suggests, in fact, that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda may have been duped by black-market weapons swindlers selling crude containers hand-painted with skulls and crossbones and dipped, perhaps, in medical waste to fool a Geiger counter, officials said.

More than 110 government buildings, military compounds, terrorist camps, safe houses and caves in Afghanistan have been searched for clues about Al Qaeda's plans and development of advanced terror weapons. American intelligence officers and Special Forces found three containers with contents worrisome enough to be shipped back for detailed analysis by nuclear scientists.

No significant amount of radioactive material was found in the containers, two seized at the Taliban Ministry of Agriculture in Kabul and one at an Al Qaeda compound in the Kandahar region, officials said.

"We did not find any type of serious radiological material," one Pentagon official said. "The stuff we found in Afghanistan was not the real stuff. They were swindled, like a lot of other people."

Another administration official who has been briefed on the materials seized in Afghanistan said, "Their value for a weapon was zero."

The analysis, officials at other departments and agencies said, represented the consensus of the government-wide intelligence community. But those officials cautioned that it is impossible to make a blanket assertion that Al Qaeda possesses no nuclear material.

Despite the analysis and Al Qaeda's rout from Afghanistan, the group still has the desire, resources and global network of operatives to seek and, perhaps someday, acquire nuclear materials, or biological or chemical ones, that could be used in a terror attack, officials said.

Still, the cannisters obtained in Afghanistan did not indicate that the group had yet accomplished that goal. The canisters were in fact so crude - made of thin metal but not lead or lead-lined - that any courier transporting them would have been exposed to harmful levels of radiation had the containers actually held prized nuclear material.

The containers were not imprinted with yellow labels accepted worldwide as radiation warnings or even the more common markings for medical waste, either of which might have indicated that the contents were purchased or stolen from a weapons laboratory, nuclear reactor, military installation or hospital.

"One just had a skull and crossbones painted on it by hand," a Defense Department official said. "It was a very primitive container. The people carrying it would have been exposed to radiation."

The search for weapons of mass destruction in Afghanistan provided evidence of how hard it is to acquire sufficient fissionable materials for a small atomic weapon, or even enough radioactive material for a "dirty bomb" in which laboratory waste or civilian nuclear fuel rods would be wrapped around a conventional explosive and detonated, spreading poison and contamination.

Officials said this analysis helps explain a notable section in President Bush's State of the Union address, in which he warned of terrorists joining forces with states possessing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. The alliance would be a logical one for terrorists who have found they are unable to purchase those weapons or their components on the black market.

"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world," Mr. Bush said before a joint session of Congress on Jan. 29. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, have routinely warned that any terrorist group able to hijack airliners and slam them into office buildings would use even deadlier means of destruction if they could.

In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this month, Mr. Tenet said Mr. bin Laden had declared that acquiring unconventional weapons was a "a religious duty."

"We know that Al Qaeda was working to acquire some of the most dangerous chemical agents and toxins," Mr. Tenet said. "Documents recovered from Al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan show that bin Ladin was pursuing a sophisticated biological weapons research program. We also believe that bin Laden was seeking to acquire or develop a nuclear device. Al Qaeda may be pursuing a radioactive dispersal device - what some call a `dirty bomb.' "

American officials also disclosed today that the United States has yet to find evidence that Al Qaeda was able to create a chemical or biological weapon at any of its camps, command centers or caves in Afghanistan.

Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commands American forces in the Afghan war zone, said today that searches have been conducted at about 60 locations suspected as sites for production of weapons of mass destruction and another 50 or so that he described as "sensitive sites."

"We have seen evidence that Al Qaeda had a desire to weaponize chemical and biological capability, but we have not yet found evidence that indicates that they were able to do so," he said at a news conference.

Much of the trafficking in nuclear materials is by swindlers, Pentagon officials report. An internal Defense Department document records that almost 1,000 cases of alleged illicit nuclear trafficking have been tracked since 1991. "Most cases involve at least some degree of swindle, but small amounts of various genuine nuclear materials have been intercepted, including plutonium," the report states.

One Defense Department official described the standard ruse. "All you need is a small amount of radioactive medical waste," the official said. "Pass a Geiger counter over it, and you get a positive reading. You can sell it to an uneducated person as radiological."

Even so, administration officials said they worry most about Al Qaeda receiving bona fide nuclear materials or scientific know-how from illicit sources inside Russia or Pakistan, although the leaders of both nations strenuously state that there is nothing to fear.

However, in a new report to Congress, the National Intelligence Council, which conducts strategic analysis for Mr. Tenet, said some high-grade nuclear material has been stolen inside Russia.

"Weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials have been stolen from some Russian institutes," the report said. "We assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or magnitude of such thefts. Nevertheless, we are concerned about the total amount of material that could have been diverted over the last 10 years."

--------

State Pulls Data From Internet in Attempt to Thwart Terrorists

New York Times
February 26, 2002
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/nyregion/26ALBA.html

ALBANY, Feb. 25 - The Pataki administration has quietly ordered state agencies to restrict information available on the Internet and limit its release through New York's Freedom of Information Law to prevent terrorists from using the material, which includes maps of electrical grids and reservoirs as well as building floor plans.

The new policy, laid out in a confidential memorandum to agency heads from the state's director of public security, James K. Kallstrom, is one of the most far-reaching and restrictive in the nation, according to research librarians and advocates for open government.

Mr. Kallstrom, a former high-ranking official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the order was aimed at preventing details about potential targets, like bridges and nuclear power plants, from falling into the hands of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.

"The intent, clearly, is to remove from the public Web sites that information that serves no other purpose than to equip potential terrorists," Mr. Kallstrom said. "This is not an attempt just to shield legitimate information from the public."

Some state agencies had removed material in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. But in the memorandum Mr. Kallstrom issued last month, he said the Pataki administration was concerned "that there is a disconcerting amount of potentially compromising information still publicly accessible."

The agency commissioners were not only instructed to review again what might be accessible, but were also asked to classify as "sensitive" and make exempt "information related to systems, structures, individuals and services essential to the security, government or economy of the state." He directed agency heads to remove things like data about electrical power, gas and oil storage, transportation, banking and finance, water supply, emergency services and the continuity of government operations.

The state's new policy guidelines to restrict information and tighten security are occurring in lock step with the national debate over how to balance the need for safety and the public's right to information.

While acknowledging the need for protections against terrorism, Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the Pataki administration's new policy "raises serious concerns about the future of open government" and would allow, in the worst case, the government to become "a series of secret operations."

Federal officials have removed information, like the operational status of nuclear plants and certain maps of the nation's infrastructure, that was once at the fingertips of anyone with a computer.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has blocked access to the toxic-release inventory, a listing of all factories and other sources that emit poisonous pollution, and has taken information about dangerous pesticides off its site, environmentalists say.

Some other states have also taken action to limit the free flow of information. Florida, for instance, has stopped posting records of drivers' licenses on the state Web sites.

In New York, the Public Service Commission stopped posting the locations of power plants, including nuclear reactors. The state's Energy Department erased a detailed map of power lines and substations from its site. Directions to stockpiles of water pumps and generators used by the state's Emergency Management Office during floods or other disasters are gone from the Internet. So are the locations of wastewater treatment plants, floor maps of state buildings and some mapping databases used to analyze everything from demographics to infrastructure.

A spokeswoman for Governor Pataki said the administration was still writing more concrete guidelines on what information would be classified and no longer available. "It's a work in progress," said Mollie Fullington, the spokeswoman. "We are putting together a team to review these very issues."

Some advocates of open government contended that New York's new rules were too broad and could cover information - like the locations of chemical factories that emit toxic pollution - that fuels debates at the core of modern democracy.

"No one would argue that the Pataki administration has been transparent," said Blair Horner, the chief lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group. "I think there is a real danger that this directive could be used to further block from public view information the public should have access to. The decision on what should be on the Internet or not on the Internet should be a public discussion, not a private edict."

Robert J. Freeman, the executive director of the State Committee on Open Government, said the Freedom of Information Law in New York State allows officials to censor some information if releasing it would endanger people's lives or compromise criminal investigations.

The administration's new directive to block the release of what it deems sensitive information to people who file requests under the law could easily be justified under those rules, he said. "All they are saying is be careful, be wise," Mr. Freeman said. "All the memo says is comply with the law."

Ms. Fullington, the governor's spokeswoman, said such requests would be determined in the future on a "case-by-case basis."

Mr. Kallstrom's directive also ordered agency heads to review requests made under the state's Freedom of Information Law over the last year to determine if anyone had requested information that might be useful to terrorists. The purpose, he said, was to find leads for investigators trying to thwart terrorist plots.

"We are concerned that terrorism - a very serious issue - doesn't get used to take away information from the public," said Rachel Leon, a lobbyist for Common Cause. "You have to have a balance between security and the public's right to information. We have to make sure the government doesn't overstep."

Mr. Kallstrom says his directives are not intended to keep the public in the dark on policy matters. He said the diameter and location of a suspension bridge's cables and fasteners, for instance, should not be made public. Neither should details be available about the fencing and gates around nuclear plants or the access roads leading to water reservoirs.

One example of the new policy is that fuel delivery schedules and the locations of fuel storage tanks used by state agencies are no longer posted on the Web, aides to Mr. Pataki said. Nor are many details about the state's National Guard posts and units available.

The memorandum also directs agencies to set up security systems using passwords and other devices to protect the information they deem sensitive. Mr. Kallstrom has also led an effort to improve defenses against computer hackers, offering agencies help in constructing stronger fire walls against intruders.

As a practical matter, winnowing the information available on the Internet will force more people to request documents under the Freedom of Information Law, state officials said. Since the law requires a written request, a paper trail would be created for any release of information, making it easier for law enforcement officials to find out who had sought the documents.

New York's open-records law does not require public information to be posted on the Internet, though some bills have been circulating in the State Legislature that would do just that. Other laws require that campaign contributions, payments to lobbyists and information about doctors be published on the Internet.

Experts on Internet security say the state's crackdown on information may not be immediately effective. Once something has been published on the Web, it is hard to control who copies it or where those copies end up. Some search engines save information from old Web sites, for instance, so a terrorist might still be able to find a map of New York's power grid.

"It's a bit of a horse out of the barn," Mr. Kallstrom acknowledged. "But you have to start somewhere. We don't want to unnecessarily and stupidly aid people who want to kill us."

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

DOE PLANS TWO NEW MOX REACTORS

February 26, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2002/2002L-02-26-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, The Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to build two additional nuclear reactors to burn mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel as part of its controversial disposal program for weapons grade plutonium.

A February 15 DOE report to Congress on the disposal program revealed substantial changes to the program, according to the Nuclear Control institute (NCI).

"It is impossible for DOE to safely achieve its accelerated plutonium disposition rate with only two more reactors," said Dr. Edwin Lyman, NCI's scientific director. "DOE will need at least three more reactors for its redefined program. DOE must explain in an amended Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) how the accelerated rate can be achieved and which reactors it will be using."

"Unfortunately, the plutonium disposition plan which DOE has presented to Congress is highly speculative and unlikely to succeed without significant additional costs and delays to the program," Lyman added.

The fiscal year 2002 Defense Authorization Act required that DOE review disposition options for plutonium to be taken to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and present costs of implementation of the various options and a firm schedule for construction of necessary facilities for the MOX option. The DOE has discarded another option of immobilizing the plutonium, along with other high level nuclear wastes, in glass for permanent disposal.

"Rather than charting a clear path forward with the plutonium disposition program, this DOE report only amplifies the problems facing plutonium disposition," said Lyman. "Immobilization of plutonium in nuclear waste, which DOE confirms is cheaper than MOX, is safer from an environmental and non-proliferation perspective and must be restored as a disposition option."

In the report, the DOE states that "successful implementation" of the program will require two additional nuclear reactors to dispose of 3.5 metric tons (MT) of plutonium a year, but fails to identify those reactors or how they will be selected.

The DOE has already designated four reactors owned by Duke Power to use plutonium fuel, disposing of two MT per year. In April 2000, Virginia Power pulled its two North Anna reactors out of the MOX program based on a business decision not to proceed.

The NCI believes that identification of new reactors for the program could prove controversial in communities located near the reactors. An NCI study found that a severe accident at a reactor using MOX fuel could result in 25 percent more cancer deaths as compared to a severe accident using conventional uranium fuel.

The DOE document is entitled "Report to Congress: Disposition of Surplus Defense Plutonium at Savannah River Site."

-------- ohio

Groundwater Contamination

Tue, 26 Feb 2002
By MALIA RULON
Associated Press Writer
From: "vcolley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>

WASHINGTON (AP) - High levels of contamination continue to pervade groundwater around a closed uranium enrichment plant in Ohio, according to a study released Tuesday by area residents and environmentalists.

Using measurements obtained from the U.S. Department of Energy, its contractors and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, the report questioned whether current water treatment operations at the closed Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, are working.

"We found that the DOE was not treating all the materials that were in the water and removing all the contaminates," said Marvin Resnikoff of New York-based Radioactive Waste Management Associates, which wrote the report.

Department of Energy workers at the site pump infected groundwater to five facilities, where it is treated and released into the Scioto River. According to the study, the water is not being treated for a cancer-causing substance called technetium. About 24.6 million gallons of water went through this process in 1999, the study said.

"People still get baptized here. They swim in the creek and they catch fish out of the creek," said Vina Colley, a former uranium enrichment worker who lives 15 miles south of the plant in McDermott. "We want them to do more extensive testing and a better job of the clean up."A spokesman for the Department of Energy couldn't immediately be reached. Colley represents the Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security, which sponsored the study along with the Uranium Enrichment Project, a group that monitors uranium enrichment activities in conjunction with San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute.

The nonprofit groups paid about $25,000 for the study, which they say provides the first non government-sponsored analysis of the data. The groupsare advocating that a trust fund be set up to provide continued treatment at the site.

During the Cold War, the plant produced weapons-grade enriched uranium for national defense projects. At one point, highly radioactive plutonium and neptunium contaminated the plant.

The study also found substantial groundwater contamination on property that may soon be transferred to the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, a nonprofit group that wants to convert 340 acres of the 3,700-acre grounds for industrial use.

Soil samples released by the Ohio EPA last month showed low levels of plutonium, neptunium and mercury on the same property. The group has said it wants an independent analysis of the land to determine whether it is more of a liability than it is worth.

On the Net:
Uranium Enrichment Project: http://www.earthisland.org/yggdrasil/uep.html
U.S. Department of Energy: http://www.energy.gov

-------- us politics

Today In Congress

Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Reuters [excerpted]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2194-2002Feb25?language=printer

SENATE
Meets at 9:45 a.m.

Committees:
Appropriations -- 10 a.m. Foreign operations subc. FY 2003 approps. 192 DOB.

Budget -- 10 a.m. President's proposals for the Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Highway Administration and Education Department. 608 DOB.

Energy and Natural Resources -- 9 a.m. Confirmation hearing. 366 DOB.

Indian Affairs -- 10 a.m. Supreme Court rulings affecting tribal governments. 106 DOB.

Judiciary -- 3 p.m. Technology, terrorism and government information subc. Technologies and procedures needed to secure U.S. ports from terrorist attack. 226 DOB.

HOUSE
Meets at 12:30 p.m.

Committees:
Armed Services -- 4 p.m. National Nuclear Safety Administration's implementation of Title 32 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2000. 2212 RHOB.

Government Reform -- 10 a.m. -- Technology and procurement subc. Information sharing among federal agencies. 2154 RHOB.

Government Reform -- 2:30 p.m. Criminal justice, drug policy and human resources subc. 2002 National Drug Control Strategy. 2154 RHOB.

Judiciary -- 4 p.m. Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2001. 2237 RHOB.

----

Tom Ridge Holds Stock in Companies Lobbying for Defense Contracts

The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 26, 2002; 5:40 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3152-2002Feb26?language=printer

Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge owns stock in several companies lobbying the Bush administration for defense contracts. His holdings also include a modest stake in now-bankrupt Global Crossing.

Ridge's portfolio, worth $61,019 to $392,000, includes stock in at least 19 companies, his federal financial disclosure statement shows.

Those include several corporations registered to lobby for federal defense-related contracts, including Avaya, EMC Corp., General Electric, Merck & Co., Unisys and Oracle.

Most of Ridge's holdings are worth $1,001 to $15,000 each.

Ridge holds less than $1,001 in stock in Global Crossing Ltd., a telecommunications company that filed for federal bankruptcy protection last month.

His biggest stakes, worth $15,000 to $50,000 each, are in General Electric, the American Express Grown Fund and the American Express Tax Exempt Fund.

President Bush named Ridge, then Pennsylvania's governor, to head the new Office of Homeland Security shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Ridge's relationship with Unisys goes back to his time as governor.

The state was a key Unisys customer, and the company knew Ridge, said Ed Hogan, who heads the Unisys Office of Homeland Security Solutions.

Then-Unisys CEO James Unruh was a Ridge political supporter, giving at least $600 to his campaign in 1995-96.

Ridge has no plans to sell any stock, spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, declining to put an exact dollar figure on Ridge's portfolio.

Asked whether Ridge would step away from decisions specifically involving those companies or from setting broader policies that could help them, Johndroe said Ridge would follow White House counsel's advice.

"He will be in full compliance with all government ethics laws," Johndroe said.

In another matter, Ridge has decided against raising money for Republican candidates this year, Johndroe said. Several Bush administration officials are active on the fund-raising circuit.

----

Senator to join GAO lawsuit, seeking nuclear info

Tuesday, February 26, 2002
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/02/02262002/reu_46516.asp

WASHINGTON - A leading Democratic senator said Monday he is joining a congressional lawsuit against the White House, hoping to glean information about the Bush administration's move to dispose of nuclear waste in Nevada.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the chamber's assistant majority leader, said he would file a brief in federal court supporting the lawsuit initiated Friday by the David Walker, Comptroller General of the General Accounting Office, the investigative law of Congress.

The GAO lawsuit, Walker v. Cheney, seeks records of a task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney that was involved in crafting the administration's energy policy last year. The suit was filed at the request of Democratic lawmakers, who say environmentalists were mostly excluded from the closed-door task force meetings while companies like Enron Corp. had ample access. The resulting policy called for more oil and gas drilling and a revival of nuclear power.

Reid said he would join the legal battle because he wants to know whether the task force meetings had an influence on Bush's recent decision to dispose of 70,000 tons of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles (144 km) northwest of Las Vegas - a decision Reid has harshly criticized.

The senator issued a statement saying he will file an amicus or "friend of the court" brief demanding information about the Cheney energy task force meetings. "There is no question that Vice President Cheney met on several occasions with nuclear power executives," Reid said in the statement. "Cheney needs to stop hiding the truth. He should tell the public which executives he met with and when he met with them."

The White House says it will argue that releasing records from the energy task force would erode White House authority, signaling an intense legal and constitutional battle between the legislative and executive branches of government.

Nevada has filed a lawsuit separately against the Bush administration to fight the decision to make Yucca Mountain the final resting place for radioactive material. Critics of that plan worry that radioactive material might seep into the ground and cite the risks of transporting nuclear waste over great distances.

Reid claims that Bush "betrayed our trust" on Yucca Mountain by breaking a campaign promise not to proceed without sound scientific study. "I hope that my actions help the GAO lawsuit," Reid said in his statement. "Americans are entitled to know who was involved in those secret meetings."

The original request for the GAO action came from two members of the House of Representatives, Democrats Henry Waxman and John Dingell, although four key senators have also endorsed the GAO's probe as important to ongoing Enron investigations.

Republican leaders in both houses of Congress say the GAO is not entitled to the information it seeks, but a few Republicans have supported the GAO position.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Dividing Afghanistan will return focus to fighting terrorism

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020226-2162836.htm#2

The project of rebuilding Afghanistan as a sovereign state may be unfeasible and even counterproductive. Once al Qaeda is driven out, it would be better to let established nations with reasonably stable governments control various ethnic regions of Afghanistan, with the condition that terrorist training and other such activities cease.

Let Pakistan take over the eastern Pashto region, Tajikistan the Tajik northeast, Uzbekistan the Uzbek north, and Iran the western Farsi-speaking Shi'ite region. Popular referenda would probably support such a division. Iran is reported as stirring up tribes against the central government in Kabul ("Iran working with Afghan rebels," Feb. 19). The other neighboring countries are likely to carry on similar activities.

Afghanistan, an artificial state, was created by the British out of diverse tribal areas with diverse populations as a buffer between India and Russia. Nation-building is not our job; we need to concentrate on fighting terrorism.

S. FRED SINGER
Arlington

----

Franks Supports An Afghan Army
Commander Opposes Adding Peacekeepers

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1646-2002Feb25?language=printer

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan yesterday endorsed creation of an Afghan national army to deal with the country's "murky and troublesome" security situation and said U.S. commanders oppose expansion of the international peacekeeping force.

"We're sure that the right thing to do is to have an Afghan national army," said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who heads the Central Command. "I don't think any of us are prepared to say that [the peacekeeping force] should be expanded right now."

Franks's remarks came one day after Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan, told reporters in Kabul that the United States is planning to step up its security role, possibly by seeking expansion of the 4,500-member multinational peacekeeping force, which is currently led by Britain.

Briefing reporters from Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Franks's preference for assisting in the development of Afghan forces over expanding the role of peacekeepers echoed the position of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials.

In that stance, they have differed with State Department officials, who have indicated that they believe it will probably be necessary to expand the peacekeeping force and broaden its area of operations from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to other parts of the country while an Afghan military force is trained.

Franks made it clear that he and his subordinates commanding about 4,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan "want to do something that will gain us this stability out in the outlying regions."

But their primary focus is on helping the Afghans develop a force of their own, Franks said, noting that Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Campbell, the U.S. Central Command's chief of staff, had just returned from a mission to Kabul to assess the needs of an Afghan force.

"What we want to do is get ourselves set up with an Afghan national army that is able to serve the country of Afghanistan through time with border security . . . police functions and the like," Franks said. He added that such a force should probably include troops from multiple ethnic groups and tribes that now control various regions of the country.

But much remains to be decided. "The precision of exactly how that will be accomplished is what I think we're all thinking about," Franks said. "What we will do is we'll take the results of this work done by General Campbell and his team, and then we'll carry recommendations to the secretary of defense, who will then carry recommendations to our president."

On another matter, Franks said there would be no disciplinary action taken against any of the U.S. Special Forces troops or their commanders involved in a Jan. 24 U.S. raid on the village of Hazar Qadam north of Kandahar in which at least 16 Afghan fighters loyal to the country's pro-American interim government were killed.

Franks denied the raid represented an intelligence failure, saying strong but inconclusive indicators led U.S. commanders to opt against bombing what they suspected were two Taliban and al Qaeda compounds and to send U.S. troops instead.

Franks questioned whether all of those killed were "friendly" forces and said that U.S. forces only fired after being fired upon at both compounds. "The one mistake that I know was made was when people shot at American forces doing their job on the ground in Afghanistan," he said.

Asked about the status of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Franks said he has reached no conclusion that bin Laden survived the heavy U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan, based either on new intelligence or interrogations of al Qaeda detainees.

"We simply don't know whether he is [alive] or not," Franks said. "I've said before, and I'll continue to say, until I see evidence that he is not alive, then we'll continue to make the assumption that he is alive."

Franks said U.S. forces have visited nearly all 120 "sensitive sites" related to Taliban and al Qaeda activities, about half of which were suspected of being used to develop chemical or biological weapons. To date, he said, no evidence has been gathered to establish that al Qaeda had succeeded in developing either type of weapon.

--------

Peacekeepers Train Afghan Police

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghanistan.html

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The top brass of Kabul's new police force got their first lesson in fighting street crime Tuesday with a mock demonstration by international peacekeepers. But they're missing a few key crimefighting tools -- from pens to police cars.

Training of the 3,600-member force begins in earnest in March. Tuesday's initial instruction at a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Kabul was meant to show a few of the department's leaders what is expected of them.

``We hope they will be interested in what they see and it will trickle down to the policemen,'' said British Flight Lt. Tony Marshall, a spokesman for the peacekeepers.

Some trainees have been riding around with the peacekeepers for more than a month, just observing. But training the underequipped, underfunded Afghan men to fight crime on their own in the war-battered capital is a daunting task.

A working police force is considered key to establishing the credibility of the government of interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

So far, the issue of resources has been challenging. Police in Kabul didn't even have pens and paper to take notes at crime scenes until they were given them by peacekeepers. Pursuing criminals has been difficult since the force has no cars. For the moment, police are using bicycles supplied by peacekeepers.

Germany plans to donate eight vehicles for the new police force, and Britain is sending communications equipment.

``They are extremely well-motivated, but they lack the resources,'' Marshall said.

Tuesday's mock crime scene was acted out by about a dozen international soldiers. A man lay beside a car, seemingly shot in the head. A woman screamed: ``Help me! Help me! A man is dead!''

The woman was frantic -- but the international police were calm, professional and thorough.

The demonstration was conducted by peacekeepers from Britain, Italy, Germany, and France. The German forces will be largely responsible for teaching the rank-and-file police once training gets under way next month.

Kabul Police Chief Bazeer Salanghi is a former commander in the northern alliance, the military force that seized Kabul last November after U.S. and British bombing sent the Taliban regime fleeing south.

Northern alliance soldiers briefly took over the capital, but agreed to cede control after a U.N.-brokered agreement established Karzai's interim administration.

The accord dictated that the alliance soldiers be replaced by a new police force. Many of the 3,600 men are simply former northern alliance soldiers wearing new uniforms.

Salanghi, for instance, brought 500 of his men into the police force, said Mohammed Rasoul, a policeman who used to fight under the northern alliance commander.

Brig. Barney White-Spunner, chief of the multinational brigade in Kabul, said many of the senior officers are police veterans trained in the 1970s by Germany before Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets in 1979, opening two decades of Afghan wars.

``There is a real effort by the Afghans to develop a strong police force,'' said White-Spunner.

The crime simulation followed the opening Monday of a boot camp set up to train 600 men -- the vanguard of a new national army. Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim has said he eventually wants a standing army of no more than 200,000 men.

In other developments:

-- Karzai met with Indian officials in New Delhi to press for international help rebuilding his country, and Afghan Finance Minister Hidayat Amin Arsala said his nation hoped that nuclear rivals India and Pakistan could resolve their dispute over Kashmir -- saying peace in the region was impossible without that resolution.

--Karzai ended a three-day visit to Iran, saying that no U.S. rhetoric would influence his government's resolve to improve ties with his neighbor.

--Former Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was told to leave the Iranian capital, the Iranian news agency reported Tuesday. Hekmatyar had apparently left his home, but his exact whereabouts were not known. On Monday, an Afghan official said Hekmatyar would be treated as a war criminal if he returns to Afghanistan.

-------- africa

Prospect for peace becomes brighter

By Gus Constantine
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-13738032.htm

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos meets President Bush today, with prospects for an end to Angola's civil war radically transformed by the battlefield death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi.

The meeting was originally planned as a session on regional peace in Central Africa, where six nations are involved in a separate civil war in Congo.

But with Mr. Savimbi killed in battle Friday, the focus is likely to shift to Angola.

Also attending the meeting will be President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and President Festus Mogae of Botswana.

Before leaving for the United States and his meeting with the American president, Mr. dos Santos called yesterday for a cease-fire.

The conflict in Angola, which has raged for 30 years, is Africa's longest-running civil war.

"We intend to establish bridges so that a cease-fire, which will permit the demilitarization of UNITA, can be established as soon as possible," Mr. dos Santos told reporters after meeting Portuguese counterpart Jorge Sampaio in Lisbon. Mr. dos Santos leads the ruling MPLA, or Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

Mr. Savimbi's UNITA - the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola - was expected to delay a response while it selects a new leader.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher yesterday called "upon both sides, in conjunction with the peaceful opposition, civil sectors and the international community, to fulfill their obligation to bring peace to the Angolan people."

In choosing a successor to Mr. Savimbi, UNITA is likely to encounter several obstacles. The group has known no leader other than Mr. Savimbi, an authoritarian but spellbinding spokesman who stood for the poorer Angolans while the government became the party of the middle class and well-to-do.

In line to replace Mr. Savimbi is Antonio Bembo, secretary-general of the movement. Unlike Mr. Savimbi, who was a member of the Ovimbundu ethnic group, Mr. Bembo is from a different tribe.

Also, there is a more moderate faction, UNITA Renovodo (Reformed), that sits in the parliament in Luanda and is now likely to expand its influence.

Evaristo Jose, spokesman for the Angolan Embassy in Washington, said "the situation today offers the greatest hope for national reconciliation" and "a historic opening to end the bloodletting."

Civil war has afflicted Angola since it won independence from Portgual in 1975. Three major guerrilla movements and a few smaller ones took to the field against the colonial power 14 years before that. The long internal conflict has consumed an estimated 1.5 million lives.

The fight has deeply scarred Angola, a country almost twice the size of Texas and rich in minerals and oil reserves.

Since 1966, Angolan rebel chief Mr. Savimbi had attracted major international support in his fight for one cause or another - from China for his anti-colonialism and from the United States and South Africa for his anti-communism.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, he fought for democratic pluralism and embarked on a new ideological war financed with Angolan diamonds.

Mr. dos Santos responded by courting the international community with the claim that he had abandoned Marxism.

Several times Angola has tried to go the cease-fire, military decommissioning route, hoping that these moves would be capped by a free and fair election.

When Mr. Savimbi faced defeat at the polls in 1992, he rejected the results and returned to the bush to continue the war.

----

How American Dream faded in downtown Mogadishu

by janine di giovanni in somalia
February 26, 2002,
UK Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,13-219233,00.html

IT WAS the stuff American dreams are made on. A few weeks ago, Yussuf Hussein, a Somali who came to the United States in his teens, was living in Boston with his wife and two children, earning $70,000 (Ł43,000) working for a computer software company.

Now, he and more than 30 other American-Somali men are holed up in a squalid hotel costing $2 per night in downtown south Mogadishu, without either money or passport, determined to return home.

In late January, officers of the Immigration Naturalisation Service arrived unannounced at the offices of Intel Corp and arrested Mr Hussein. They refused to tell him what he had been charged with, taking him instead to a cell without access to a lawyer or a telephone. He has not been able to contact his family since.

'It was three days after Black Hawk Down was released (on January 18),' he said of Ridley Scott's film depicting the ill-fated mission of the US Rangers on October 3, 1993, to bring peace to Somalia and destroy the grip of the warlords.

His is the tale of about three dozen American-Somalis who have been sent back to Somalia by the US without charge or reason. All, except for one woman, are young men who emigrated with their families to America as young teenagers or babies to escape almost a decade of civil war.

Not under arrest yet and without any means, many are heading north to escape across the Somalian border and make the long journey home to America. But even if they survive the journey, they have no money nor papers to prove their existence.

Somalia, still on the verge of anarchy after a decade of civil war and vicious internecine clan fighting, has become a dumping ground for deportees from America and the Middle East. These American-Somali refugees arrived last week in Mogadishu without any means of support. All had been taken from their homes or offices across America, brought by air marshal to Buffalo, New York, and then transported by a hired Dutch crew first to Amsterdam, later Djibouti and finally Somalia. They claim to have been denied their basic civil rights, beaten and threatened with injected sedatives 'if we caused any problems'.

'We were not allowed to make any telephone calls,' Abdulrazak Allen, 23, from Atlanta, said. 'I was taken from my classroom and met with an immigration officer. The next thing I know I was here. I don't even speak the language.'

En route, the men were shackled. Several say that they were drugged during the flight. Medication, including insulin for one of the deportees, a diabetic, as well as anti- depressants, were taken away. Their cash was frozen and they were issued with cheques that they are unable to cash.

When the group arrived in Djibouti last Sunday they met the local press who announced to the public, 'come and meet the Somali terrorists'.

'They kept asking if we knew any al-ittihad,' said Jama Jama Jaffar, referring to an Islamic group in Somalia that has links to al-Qaeda. 'They kept asking if we knew people who killed people in Somalia. I kept telling them that I left Somalia in 1978! I don't know anybody.'

His first phone call on arrival was to his mother in America to send him some cash. 'I am not a stand up guy,' says another. 'I have a misdemeanour for car theft. But I am not a terrorist, and I know no one connected with any terrorist organisation.'

The men, aged between 19 and 34, are afraid to walk the streets of Mogadishu as any foreigner here is met with hostility. As one Somali put it, 'these men are not Somalis. You can tell a mile off they are from America, and people here do not like Americans.' They are unarmed and cannot hire militias to protect them as the few other foreigners who arrive here are obliged to do.

Amnesty International said it was not aware of the plight of the Somali-Americans, but a spokesman in London said that there had been several other cases of Pakistanis being deported from America in dubious circumstances.

The Immigration and Naturalisation Service said last night it would look into the claims. A spokesman could not confirm that the deportations had taken place but pointed out that under US law any individual who commits certain crimes and is not a naturalised citizen is liable to be deported.

The families of most of the men are taking legal action, though this is hampered by their lack of means. The key to their case, they say, is that under international law it is illegal to deport people to a country without a central government.

There is no central command in Somalia. The Transitional Government is recognised by some Arab countries and grudgingly by the United Nations, but not by Europe or America. It controls only part of Mogadishu and a small coastal strip while the rest of the country consists of two breakaway regions and a land littered with warlords.

-------- arms sales

Report: Officials close in on arms dealer

February 26, 2002
UPI
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/26022002-035601-7481r.htm

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- A key associate gave information to U.S. and European investigators to help them find an arms dealer suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban and the al Qaida network, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Investigators working to crack what some have called the largest weapons trafficking operation in the world, were aided by Sanjivan Ruprah, said to be a close associate to Victor Bout, a former Soviet military officer operating from United Arab Emirates, the Post reported. Ruprah was arrested in Belgium earlier this month, U.S. and European officials told the Post.

Ruprah provided details about Bout's suspected arms deliveries to the Taliban and the al Qaida terror network in Afghanistan, the report said. Bout had long been suspected of supplying weapons to the terror groups, which are blamed for Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Bout's arms dealing operation is thought to be unique because of its ability to deliver weapon systems quickly anywhere in the world, investigators told the Post. He is also thought to supply the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and rebel forces in Africa.

Officials said Bout was thought to have been flying weapons to Afghanistan more recently than had been believed. They said Rout buys weapons from Bulgaria and Romania. Bout has refused to talk to reporters or U.N. investigators, the Post said.

----

Arrest Aids Pursuit of Weapons Network
Dealer Supplied Taliban, Al Qaeda, Officials Say

By Douglas Farah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 26, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2005-2002Feb25?language=printer

U.S. and European law enforcement officials say they have scored an important advance in their efforts to disrupt what some officials describe as the biggest weapons-trafficking network in the world, responsible for supplying the Taliban and terrorist groups from al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, as well as rebel forces in Africa.

For the past three years, U.S. intelligence agencies have covertly been trying to thwart the sprawling arms empire of Victor Bout, a former Soviet military officer whose operation is based in the United Arab Emirates, according to U.S. and European officials. Bout's network is unique, U.S., British and U.N. investigators said, because of its ability to deliver sophisticated weapon systems virtually anywhere in the world.

A suspected top associate of Bout's is under arrest in Belgium, and investigators say he is providing fresh, inside information on how the arms network functions.

While Bout has long been suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban, U.S. and European officials said intelligence gathered in recent months in Afghanistan and elsewhere has provided new details about his flights and deliveries in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The intelligence suggests he was flying weapons into Afghanistan more recently than had been believed, according to U.S. and U.N. officials familiar with the material.

Bout specialized in breaking arms embargoes around the world, according to four separate U.N. Security Council reports on weapons trafficking that were issued between December 2000 and last month. His activities were also described in interviews with U.S., British and U.N. investigators. He traffics almost exclusively in weapons bought in the former Soviet bloc, chiefly Bulgaria and Romania, according to these officials.

"There are a lot of people who can deliver arms to Africa or Afghanistan, but you can count on one hand those who can deliver major weapons systems rapidly," said Lee S. Wolosky, a former National Security Council official who led an interagency effort to shut down Bout's operations during the last two years of the Clinton administration. "Victor Bout is at the top of that list."

U.S. and European officials said the suspected top associate of Bout, Sanjivan Ruprah, was arrested in Belgium earlier this month on charges of criminal association and using a false passport.

Before the arrest, Ruprah, a Kenyan, had secretly been in contact with U.S. officials in recent months, providing them with information about Bout, according to U.S. officials and Ruprah's attorney. The U.S. officials said they were given no warning Ruprah was about to be arrested by the Belgians.

U.S. officials also said they had made no deal with Ruprah. They said that since the arrest, Ruprah has divulged more information about Bout's suspected arms pipeline to the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan until last November, and al Qaeda, which the Taliban had sheltered there.

"We are very, very interested in this case because we understand Ruprah is talking about the supply of weapons to al Qaeda and the Taliban," said a senior U.S. official. "His basic line with us was that, while he had done some bad things, he didn't deal with al Qaeda and he understood that being linked to that now would be very, very bad."

Ruprah was especially valuable to Bout, U.S. and U.N. investigators said, because he was tied to the illicit diamond trade in West Africa andarranged for Bout to be paid for his weapons deliveries with diamonds from Sierra Leone, Congo and Angola.

Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have used an underground network that stretches across Africa to trade in diamonds, weapons and other valuable commodities.

Last year both Bout and Ruprah were placed on a U.N. list of individuals banned from international travel because of their ties to Liberia and the Sierra Leone rebel movement known as the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF.

Johan Peleman, a Belgian weapons expert who has investigated Bout for several years on behalf of the United Nations and has spoken regularly to Ruprah in recent months, said Ruprah was knowledgeable about Bout's financial dealings, especially in the diamond trade. Belgium is interested because Bout's financial network was based in Antwerp, the center of the world diamond trade.

Ruprah's attorney, Luc de Temmerman, said in a written statement that his client engaged only in legal activities in Africa. While acknowledging that Bout and Ruprah knew each other, he said they were not in business together.

De Temmerman said Ruprah had recently been in touch with the FBI, the CIA, the United Nations and British intelligence officials to provide them with information in an effort to have the U.N. travel ban on him lifted. He denied Ruprah knew anything about arms shipments to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

The U.N. reports said Bout originally based his operations in Ostend, Belgium, in 1995, and moved to the UAE in 1997 when Belgian officials began investigating his air freight operations.

The reports, compiled independently by separate groups of U.N. investigators monitoring U.N. embargoes, document Bout's shipments of hundreds of tons of arms to UNITA rebels in Angola, the government of President Charles Taylor in Liberia and several factions involved in the civil war in Congo. All are under U.N. weapons bans.

Ruprah was identified in U.N. reports as a key intermediary between Bout and Taylor. A December 2000 report said Ruprah was issued a Liberian diplomatic passport in the name of Samir M. Nasr, and was identified as Liberia's deputy commissioner for maritime affairs.

Ruprah helped arrange for three flights to Liberia in July and one in August 2000, the report said, delivering two combat-capable helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, machine guns and almost a million rounds of ammunition. The weapons originated in Bulgaria.

U.S. and U.N. investigators say they believe Bout has also run guns for the radical Muslim Abu Sayyaf guerrilla movement in the Philippines and has flown weapons for Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

"Victor Bout, as the largest player in the world in the illicit air logistics business, is a critical aider and abettor to criminal and terrorist organizations, rogue heads of state and insurgencies -- whoever is able to pay," Wolosky said.

According to a U.N. Security Council report issued in April 2001, Bout is 35 years old. Born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he is a graduate of Moscow's Military Institute of Foreign Languages and speaks six languages fluently, according to the report.

The report also describes Bout as a former air forceofficer who holds at least five passports. Investigators said Bout was known as the "Lone Wolf" because he operates by himself. They describe him as short, stocky and usually sporting a bushy mustache.

Telephone calls and faxes to Bout's offices in the UAE went unanswered. An associate of Bout's there said all of Bout's employees in the Emirates had left. The associate said he no longer knew where they were. Bout's brother Sergei, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, also did not return phone calls.

Bout has refused to talk to U.N. investigators or reporters.

He has a fleet of about 60 aircraft, including large Russian cargo planes, according to investigators. His operation is tied together by a complex web of overlapping airlines, charter companies and freight-forwarding operations that give him a global reach. His main company is registered as Air Cess.

In an effort to confound investigators, Bout continually changed the registration of his aircraft from one African country to another, all the while basing his air operations in Sharjah, one of seven emirates that make up the UAE.

Bout's alleged dealings with the Taliban and al Qaeda are the subject of an ongoing, classified U.S. operation that began in early 2000. "There was a concerted effort at the tail end of the Clinton administration, continued into the Bush administration, to put him out of business," said one former U.S. official.

U.N. and U.S. officials said Bout cut a deal with the Taliban in 1996 in UAE, one of only three countries in the world that recognized the regime.

The deal called for Bout's Air Cess to supply and service Afghanistan's Ariana Airways and the Afghan air force, both of which used Soviet-era aircraft. Another company that Bout had an interest in, Flying Dolphin, provided charter flights from Dubai to Afghanistan, the sources said, and soon there were several flights a week from Dubai to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

U.N. investigators say they now believe many of those flights were loaded with weapons. When U.N. sanctions shut down Ariana in November 2000, Flying Dolphin obtained a U.N. waiver, for reasons that are not clear, and continued flying the Dubai-Kandahar route until being shut down by the United Nations in January 2001.

"Bout undoubtedly did supply al Qaeda and the Taliban with arms," Peter Hain, Britain's minister of European affairs and lead investigator into Bout's global arms trade, told the Associated Press on Feb. 19.

A 1998 Belgian intelligence report on Bout's activities, obtained by The Washington Post, says he made $50 million in Afghanistan, selling heavy weapons to the Taliban. However, Peleman and other investigators said they had doubts that Bout had earned that much money from the Taliban and al Qaeda, in part because Bout also supplied weapons to anti-Taliban leaders, some of whom were his close friends.

Nonetheless, the United States launched an effort to disrupt Bout's arms trading, trying to freeze his assets and pressuring other nations, especially the UAE, to expel him. U.S. officials said they were limited in what they could do because they believed Bout had violated no U.S. laws. One of Bout's companies, Air Cess Inc., based in Miami, was dissolved on Sept. 19, according to public records, and its telephone number no longer works.

In late 2000 the Clinton administration asked the UAE at an "extremely high level" to shut down Bout's operation, a former U.S. official said. UAE officials reponded that they had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Bout.

"We would have preferred they shut him down completely but they took helpful incremental steps that disrupted his operation," the source said, including imposing new and costly equipment requirements on his air fleet.

When President Bush took office, the Bout project received less attention, U.S. officials said. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he was back on our radar screen in a very significant way," a senior U.S. official said. "His importance suddenly loomed very large."

----

Combat Planes Displayed at Air Show

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Asian-Aerospace.html

SINGAPORE (AP) -- After being hurled into their biggest crisis in more than a decade by the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the world's airplane makers say the worst damage may be finally behind them.

At the giant the Asian Aerospace 2002 air show running here this week, military aircraft makers appear to be leading the recovery.

Singapore and South Korea were openly shopping for new combat jets, with European and American companies swearing their warplanes are the stealthiest, the most agile, advanced and best value.

``Obviously defense is in the spotlight here,'' Lord William Bach, Britain's minister of defense procurement, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. ``We have many objectives here, but the main one is pushing the Eurofighter.''

The ``Eurofighter Typhoon,'' made by the European consortium EADS, is competing with Boeing (news/quote)'s F-15E Strike Eagle, French Dassault's Rafale fighter jet and the Russian government's Sukhoi Su-35 and Lockheed Martin's F-16 Block 60.

Lockheed's full-scale mock-up of its Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, drew significant interest. The warplane's development price tag is estimated at $200 billion, making it the largest in the history of U.S. defense spending. The U.S. military will eventually replace many F-16s with the F-35.

``We've had a good run the last few years,'' said Bob Thrice, senior vice president of marketing development at Lockheed Martin, which has an order backlog worth $70 billion.

Defense contractors said the war on terrorism has put a new emphasis on military hardware -- and the show has the usual array of fighter jets, armored vehicles, missile launchers and other weaponry on display for potential buyers.

The civilian aircraft industry had less to boast about, but some executives predicted they have hit bottom and are ready for a recovery.

``It's slowly coming back,'' said Larry Dickenson, executive vice president for sales at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. ``I don't think we're ready to declare victory and say it's over, but it's a lot more positive than I thought.''

Although airlines have cut routes, laid off thousands of workers and lost billions of dollars, analysts believe airlines eventually will start ordering new jets again from U.S.-based Boeing and its European archrival, Airbus SAS.

``The airlines might be thinking about the extent to which they should unwind some of the job cuts they made last year, and horror, shudder, when they should revive some of the orders they put on hold,'' said Peter Hilton, a Hong Kong-based aerospace analyst for investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston.

Dickenson said Boeing expects to deliver 380 aircraft this year, about 100 less than it had expected before Sept. 11 and way down from the 527 delivered last year.

Airbus declined to discuss its industry outlook with a reporter Tuesday.

Facing eventual competition from a huge Airbus plane, Boeing said Tuesday it plans to offer a new version of its 747 jumbo jets -- dubbed the 747-400XQLR as it is being developed -- that will better meet stringent European noise rules and be able to fly far enough to make new trans-Pacific routes possible.

Boeing's 747s are the largest passenger airplanes flying, capable of carrying more than 400 people, but Airbus plans to launch an even bigger jet, the A380, which can carry more than 500 people, in 2006.

The new 747s would be able to fly 9,190 miles, compared to 8,830 miles for the current 747-400ER jets. Boeing said, for example, that would enable airlines to fly nonstop from New York to Bangkok, whereas the older 747s can go only as far as New York-Hong Kong.

Associated Press Writer Regan Morris contributed to this story

-------- asia

Small step in Sri Lanka

February 26, 2002
Embassy Row by James Morrison,
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-90821240.htm

The U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka yesterday presented $100,000 worth of medical equipment to the main hospital in an area ravished by war with Tamil terrorists.

Ambassador Ashley Wills visited the Jaffna peninsula to deliver incubators, resuscitators and other hospital equipment.

"The Jaffna peninsula has pressing needs of increased resources, as it deals with the challenges resulting from years of conflict. I am happy to take a small step toward helping them meet those challenges," Mr. Wills said in a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in the capital Colombo.

His visit came as the government and Tamil Tiger guerrillas continued observing a cease-fire reached in negotiations on Saturday. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said "talks about talks" will establish the outline of peace negotiations.

The United States declared the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a terrorist organization in 1997.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday called Foreign Minister Tyronne Fernando to express U.S. support for the peace talks, the Sri Lankan Embassy said.

-------- balkans

Serbian atrocities recounted

By Anthony Deutsch
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-82894960.htm

THE HAGUE - Serbian forces pillaged Kosovo villages in 1999, leaving the bodies of children in the smoldering ruins, a retired farmer testified at the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic yesterday.

A second witness, a Kosovo Albanian physician, said he saw Serbian police gun down two of his cousins in the province's southwestern town of Suva Reka.

The former Yugoslav president's trial before a U.N. tribunal moved into a third week as prosecutors called more witnesses to testify about atrocities in the province. Thousands were killed and more than 800,000 deported during the violence.

Mr. Milosevic faces 66 counts of war crimes during conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo from 1991 to 1999. He could be sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted of any charge.

The retired farmer, Halil Morina, told the court that Serbian troops ransacked his property and burned homes in the southern Kosovo village of Landovice. His family of 39 fled for their lives.

"I saw them [Serbs] when they burned the village. They killed a Gypsy," Mr. Morina said. "An Albanian woman - they set fire to her in her own home."

Mr. Morina said he searched the village for survivors, but found only bodies. Mosques were destroyed and "everything had been razed to the ground," he told the court.

Mr. Milosevic spent about an hour cross-examining the ethnic-Albanian man, asking him if he had seen Albanian rebels in the village or if the inhabitants had suffered during 78 days of NATO bombing.

Mr. Morina told Mr. Milosevic he was "just a farmer" and couldn't tell him about the Kosovo Liberation Army. He said he hadn't seen NATO bombers on their raids or the damage they inflicted.

"I don't know anything," he said.

Appearing frustrated, Mr. Milosevic said the witness must have seen crimes against the Serbs committed by the KLA independence fighters.

"No, there were none because the [Serbian] army was close to the village," the witness replied. "I had six sons and none of them were members of the KLA."

"All right, quite obviously you know nothing of what I am asking you," Mr. Milosevic snapped. He then told the prosecution: "You are obviously bringing in witnesses of this kind to ill treat me."

----

"Ill-treated" Milosevic's trial hears of massacres

Tuesday February 26
By Abigail Levene
Reuters

THE HAGUE - A pregnant woman and children massacred in a pizzeria, a disabled woman burnt alive -- grim allegations of Serb "ethnic cleansing" piled up on Monday as Slobodan Milosevic complained of ill treatment at his trial.

Gory tales of shooting, looting, torching and deportation filled the courtroom as survivors of the 1999 Serb crackdown on Kosovo Albanians, which prompted NATO air strikes, testified against the ex-Yugoslav leader at the Hague war crimes tribunal.

A doctor from the town of Suva Reka said 40 to 50 men, women and children -- many his relatives, including a pregnant woman -- fled to a pizzeria from a house set alight by Serb police.

"Policemen shot pitilessly with automatic weapons and threw grenades at them...Trucks came and loaded up 40 to 50 bodies and took them towards Prizren," said Agron Berisha, who heard of the massacre from a few survivors who jumped from the trucks.

Berisha told the court how Serb forces shot dead his young male relatives, saying: "The police emptied their magazines into their bodies." Terrified Albanians sheltering inside a house were shot and the house was then set ablaze.

"The house was enveloped in flames. The rafters began to fall on the bodies, which were enveloped in flames so the bodies were buried," said Berisha, 38. "It seemed the criminals had that as their daily business and were well trained and knew where to leave the bodies so they were burned up."

Milosevic has been on trial since February 12 for crimes against humanity in Kosovo, in Croatia in 1991-2 and genocide in Bosnia in 1992-5. He has declined to plead, so judges at the U.N. tribunal have entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

Refusing to recognise a court he says is a tool of his Western foes, he has appointed no lawyers and is defending himself, meaning he can cross-examine witnesses.

"Quite obviously you know nothing of which I am asking you," Milosevic said on Monday after relentless questioning of the witness preceding Berisha failed to yield the answers he wanted.

"I must say, gentlemen, that you are bringing in witnesses of this kind to ill-treat me," he said as he grilled retired farmer Halil Morina, who said Serbs torched three quarters of his village in March 1999 after NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.

TODDLER MURDERED, MOSQUE DESTROYED

Morina told the trial's ninth day that Serb forces burned a paralysed ethnic Albanian woman alive in her home, murdered a toddler and blew up a mosque during their crackdown on Kosovo.

Milosevic, who argues that NATO and separatist Albanian guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were the true aggressors in Kosovo, grew irate when Morina insisted he knew nothing of KLA violence in the province.

Morina's statement echoed that of all four victims to testify so far -- to Milosevic's clear irritation.

"These are false witnesses, Mr May," Milosevic, 60, told Judge Richard May. "They are being used to pull out the pieces from the mosaic of war in Yugoslavia."

Morina said he fled his home on March 26, 1999 along with most of his village of Landovica, bearing "only the clothes they had on their bodies", after Serb forces went on the rampage.

He later returned to find his home burnt down and almost all his possessions gone. "Only the livestock remained. Everything had been razed to the ground," Morina told the court.

"First I went to the neighbouring house and saw the 13 dead bodies lying on the floor. Then I searched other houses to see if there was anyone left and we didn't find anyone," he said.

Hundreds of witnesses, including many victims of alleged Serb atrocities, are expected to give evidence at Europe's biggest international war crimes trial since World War Two.

Prosecutors hold Milosevic responsible for the deportation of around 800,000 Kosovo Albanians, part of an alleged grand plan to create an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia".

Berisha said he crammed 11 family members into his car and fled to Albania. The seven-km (four-mile) column of refugees waiting to cross the border was "like a Golgotha -- a river of people leaving Kosovo," he said.

Prosecutor Cristina Romano asked if he left because he was afraid of the NATO air strikes.

"No, not at all," Berisha replied. "We saw the NATO bombing as a hope that might bring freedom to Kosovo."

Milosevic seized on that remark, asking if Berisha knew of NATO's bombing of a refugee convoy near Prizren on April 14, 1999. "I'm asking you this because you said you believed the NATO bombing to be a welcome thing," he said.

Berisha said he had been in Albania at the time.

-------- britain

[Why am I not surprised? Ah, the promises of politicians.... et]

Britain extends Afghan stay

By Michael Smith
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-3268775.htm

LONDON - Britain's Defense Ministry is planning to go back on a government promise that British troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan within three months.

Britain's leadership of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan was made conditional on it doing so for half of the force's six-month term.

But the British ISAF headquarters, from 16 Air Assault Brigade, and the British infantry contribution, at present a parachute regiment battalion, will be replaced by British units.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that a brigade headquarters from within 3 UK Division and a front-line infantry battalion already have been designated to take over for the last three months of the ISAF mission.

That will add to the difficulties for Britain's overstretched armed forces that led Geoff Hoon, Britain's defense secretary, to set the original three-month limit.

The army is supposed to have about 108,000 troops but is struggling to reach 100,000, leaving it unable to cope with deployments in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

Germany initially was scheduled to take charge of ISAF when the British pulled out at the end of April, but Turkey was asked to take over after concerns that the Germans lacked the military infrastructure for the job.

Although the Turkish government initially agreed, it has begun to lay down conditions. In particular it is demanding that someone else pay the cost.

A visit to Turkey and Afghanistan earlier this month by Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, failed to resolve the situation, and Britain is faced with having to keep forces in place for the entire six-month ISAF deployment.

After the visit, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said a compromise had been reached. "But the conditions have not been clarified," he said. "Our financial capabilities will not be enough to take over by ourselves the responsibility of all security, social and economic problems of Afghanistan."

A British defense source said the Ministry of Defense remained "hopeful" that Turkey would take over but admitted that money was the key question, and with the possibility of Britain funding the operation ruled out, the Turks had turned to America.

Given the ambivalent U.S. attitude toward the usefulness of ISAF, a positive response to demands for "serious financial contributions" seems unlikely.

-------- business

Other Companies Expected to Top Northrop's Offer for TRW

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2110-2002Feb25?language=printer

With only two days left before TRW Inc. has been asked to respond to Northrop Grumman Corp.'s unsolicited buyout offer, analysts are questioning whether the $11.4 billion bid is too low, predicting that rival offers are inevitable.

Los Angeles-based Northrop bid $47 a share on Friday for Cleveland-based TRW, placing the value of the company at just under $6 billion. The overall bid includes the assumption of TRW's $5.5 billion in debt.

"I think the bid price is too low. For TRW to be interested in potentially selling itself, I think the price has to be higher," said Prudential Securities senior analyst Andy Casey. Casey said TRW could sell for $55 to $56 a share.

The combination would make Northrop one of the largest defense contractors in the country. Northrop said it would spin off TRW's auto-parts business, which brings in 60 percent of its revenue, and focus on its space defense systems. But analysts have already questioned that idea, given the economic slowdown in the auto industry.

And Northrop may not be able to handle another acquisition, they said. The defense contractor has doubled its size in the past four years with a buying spree that included the acquisition of Litton Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding last year.

"Northrop Grumman was already grappling with some major integration issues," Nick Fothergill of Banc of America Securities said in a research note. "The addition of TRW would double these concerns."

Northrop employs 16,000 in the Washington area (and another 16,000 in Newport News, Va.), part of its worldwide workforce of 100,000. TRW employs 3,500 locally and has a total of 94,000 employees.

A Northrop spokesman defended the offering price as fair but also pointed to a reference in the company's letter to TRW that it would "consider in our offer any enhanced values" that could increase its price.

Other bids are expected, according to industry analysts.

"I'm expecting a higher offer," said Stuart McCutchan, publisher of the industry newsletter Defense Mergers & Acquisitions. "There are companies that should want TRW, and I put Lockheed Martin and Boeing at the top of that list."

Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. declined to comment, and a Boeing Co. spokesman could not be reached for comment. Analysts have also mentioned General Dynamics Corp., which also declined to comment, as a bidder.

Asked about potential rival bids, Northrop spokesman Randy Belote said: "The combination would offer the government the most pro-competitive combination than of any other combination of defense companies."

Northrop asked for an answer from TRW by tomorrow, but a TRW spokesman said last week that the board has set no timetable for responding.

It may be too early to judge Northrop's offer, said Jon Kutler, chairman and chief executive of Quarterdeck Investment Partners LLC. The company's executives have not fully explained their plans should the acquisition succeed, he said.

"I think Northtop has to do a good job laying out its vision to investors," Kutler said. The company "has not had an opportunity" for that yet, he said.

TRW's stock closed yesterday at $50.31 per share, up a penny from Friday, its highest closing price in 18 months. Northrop Grumman's shares closed at $108.44 per share, down $1.51.

----

Atrocity of 9/11 to save tech sector - Cheney

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
26/02/2002
UK Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/24204.html

A profitable surveillance state may rise from the ashes of Ground Zero if the Bush Administration has its way. Indeed, high-tech gizmos will play an increasing role in US military ventures and homeland security, Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday during a speech at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

According to a report by Reuters, the Veep reckons that a shift in emphasis from useless consumer gadgets to weapons and surveillance gear will help bring back the roaring '90s, when the phrase 'technology firm' was one of the most powerful incantations of the marketplace.

The Bush Administration is attempting to allocate an additional $85 billion in federal revenue for defense budget increases and homeland defense initiatives from which the technology sector can profit, if it would only turn its genius to good.

The Veep explained that another attack against the Fatherland is inevitable, and suggested that the industry has now been called to a higher mission. "The forces that defend you five or ten years down the road will come from the research we are conducting today," the wire service quotes him as saying.

It would seem that the forces that irritate and delay us, and peer into databases looking for nasty titbits about us, will also come from this research. We note that a day later, fingerprint-recognition outfit Identix announced plans to buy face-recognition outfit Visionics for $269 million in stock.

The Register was first to report that Visionics' technology is a dismal failure in crowd-surveillance situations, a market onto which the company nevertheless persists in pushing itself. But as we noted, face-recognition has some value in controlled authentication situations, especially when backed up with a second check such as fingerprint recognition.

So the merger makes some sense, practically speaking, and might indicate that Visionics is looking to do more than make a fast buck off everyone's terrorist fears in the wake of 9/11 by carving out a more modest niche where it can actually deliver on its promises. (r)

Related Stories Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance Face recognition technology a proven farce

----

Airbus to bid on U.S. military pact

February 26, 2002
Agence France-Presse
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/20020226-10000990.htm

PARIS - Airbus Industrie has been invited for the first time to compete for a U.S. government defense tender, for a $2 billion order to supply refueling jets.

Airbus' parent company, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., said it had protested to the U.S. government because there had been no call for bids, saying it could propose an offer through Airbus at a much lower price than U.S. rival Boeing.

"We made a request in this sense to the Pentagon," an EADS spokeswoman said. "Our request was deemed acceptable and the process is under way."

French business newspaper La Tribune reported yesterday, without naming its source, that Airbus had been invited to compete with Boeing for the 10-year contract to supply 100 refueling jets to the U.S. Air Force and Navy.

The contract is estimated by Boeing to be worth $20 million per aircraft, or $2 billion over the decade.

Airbus, 80 percent owned by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and 20 percent by BAE Systems of Britain, will propose a modified version of its A330-200 and offer a 40 percent discount on the price quoted by Boeing, the report said.

The two companies were likely to share the order, La Tribune said, quoting a source familiar with the situation.

----

IBM May Hire 250 in Va.
Reston Office to Focus on Government Work

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2036-2002Feb25?language=printer

The 100,000-square-foot Reston building that International Business Machines Corp. agreed to lease last week will soon house a staff of 500 -- including up to 250 new hires -- who will work on projects for the U.S. Customs Service and the Department of Defense.

IBM agreed to lease the six-story building on Sunset Hills Road for a decade and plans to begin relocating employees there early in the second quarter, said John Nyland, vice president of IBM's public-sector division in the Americas.

Last April, IBM was named the leading company in a $1.3 billion contract to update the Customs Service's computer systems and develop new hardware and software to automate work the agency was still doing on paper. Work on the contract began nearly a year ago and will increase as the company moves into the Reston location.

"It's really expansion to allow us to staff to the levels needed per the contract award," Nyland said. "We just didn't have enough space in Bethesda and Gaithersburg, and we needed some additional cleared facilities for [Department of Defense] type work."

IBM employs 4,000 workers in the Washington area and has contracts with numerous government agencies. Nyland said the Reston building was attractive because of its proximity to the Customs Service's headquarters in the District and its previous approval as a secure building under a previous tenant, Lockheed Martin Corp.

Nyland said the company has not made plans to go after specific contracts with the Defense Department but sees a range of potential growth areas with the agency.

"The building is already set up and is cleared and certified by the government to handle classified documents and other material," he said. "This allows us to expand for future growth with the DOD."

Kyle Balluck of Washtech.com also contributed to this report.

-------- colombia

U.S. law bars giving Colombians data

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020226-76879070.htm

The U.S. military has compiled reams of satellite photographs and communication intercepts that could aid Colombia in its revived war against left-wing rebel terrorists, Bush administration official say.

But a leftover Clinton administration policy (Presidential Decision Directive 73), and an accompanying federal law, is keeping the Pentagon from sharing the vital intelligence with Colombian President Andres Pastrana and his armed forces.

Pentagon officials, and commanders at U.S. Southern Command, which overseas American military aid in South America, are described as "frustrated" and "fuming" over the statute that restricts aid to anti-drug efforts.

A senior official said the Bush administration is strictly abiding by the law that restricts intelligence sharing. "No one wants to go to jail," the source said.

The State Department announced last week it was increasing intelligence sharing, but privately officials say the increase has to do with limited "force protection" of American interests and will do little to help Mr. Pastrana win the war.

"It doesn't address his full needs," said a senior policy-maker. "We have to go 10 miles. This gets them one mile down the road."

Mr. Pastrana last week broke off three years of failed peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He ordered a wave of air and ground strikes into what had been a FARC safe haven in southern Colombia after the group hijacked an airliner and kidnapped a senator.

FARC is a U.S.-designated terrorist group that controls much of the country's hugely lucrative cocaine production.

Yesterday, Mr. Pastrana condemned FARC's weekend abduction of a presidential candidate, as his military prepared for a major offensive against the leftist guerrillas.

"Kidnapping members of Congress, now kidnapping a presidential candidate, and kidnapping Colombians is kidnapping democracy," Mr. Pastrana said.

Colombian warplanes are to launch another wave of aerial bombardments "at any moment" in the vast Switzerland-sized region FARC formerly controlled, a military source told Agence France Presse last night.

The French wire service also reported last night that the site where the rebels are holding Ingrid Betancourt, who was seized Saturday with her campaign manager after trying to enter a former rebel enclave, has been located.

However, the army canceled a rescue operation so as not to endanger her life, a general said.

The rescue operation was suspended "at the request of Dr. Betancourt's family, who asked that her life not be endangered," said Gen. Roberto Pizarro, the military commander of the southern Colombian region.

Mr. Pastrana's decision to go after FARC is spurring the Pentagon, State Department and White House to debate whether to significantly expand military aid to Bogota.

Some Pentagon and military officials want FARC included in President Bush's war on terrorism. They want to scrap PDD 73 so Washington can directly aid the Colombian military. The State Department is more cautious, but open to the expansion, senior officials said in interviews.

The president's national security advisers are scheduled to meet this week to discuss a change in Colombia policy.

There are no plans to insert U.S. personnel directly into combat. There are today about 250 American service members in Colombia advising the army on counternarcotics operations.

Mr. Pastrana, who leaves office next fall, also has asked Washington for more spare parts for his helicopter fleet, which include U.S.-made Black Hawks. Colombia is in dire need of more lift capability to get troops and weapons inside the safe haven to attack FARC units.

The Colombian president also has asked Bush officials for what sources termed as "moral and public support" as the country's 38-year civil war heats up again.

But at the top of the list is secret-intelligence sharing. The U.S. military possesses, and can generate daily, photos of FARC troop encampments and movements. Passed along to Colombian pilots and ground commanders, the images would become invaluable in conducting precision strikes. The United States could also provide photos of bomb damage to assess whether a strike was a success.

"Right now, we can't tell him how effective he has been," said the senior official.

In addition, intelligence reports based on communications monitoring could tell Colombian commanders FARC's strategy and where to strike next.

Before Bogota decided to strike the safe haven, the Bush administration already had to ask Congress to expand the military's role. It wants lawmakers to approve $98 million to set up a new Colombian brigade that would protect a critical oil pipeline from persistent rebel attack. If Congress goes along, administration sources said, the United States may be able to greatly increase intelligence sharing in the name of protecting the pipeline.

The FARC obtains most arms from the world weapons bazaars, and much of it comes from Middle Eastern wholesalers. But administration officials said there is no evidence that a particular Middle East regime is supporting the leftist rebels.

The Washington Times reported earlier this month that at the same time FARC leaders were negotiating to extend peace talks, they convened a secret summit and voted to seek the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

Many Bush aides considered the three-year peace process a failure. FARC, enjoying a safe zone guaranteed by Mr. Pastrana, launched strikes from the sanctuary, increased its army from 10,00 to 17,000 fighters and grew richer from illegal drug production.

----

Guerrilla Strategy Perplexes Colombians
Rebels Were Divided On Giving Up Haven

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1761-2002Feb25?language=printer

LAS DELICIAS, Colombia -- A line of abandoned camps along the dusty road leading out of Las Delicias provides vivid testimony of the relative comfort that Colombia's rebel commanders enjoyed for the last three years inside their protected haven.

Magazines, including one with the U.S. ambassador's photo defaced with a blacked-out tooth, lie near wood-plank bunks in groves of jungle. Heads of lettuce and boxes of hot sauce still sit inside a tarp-covered kitchen. A small blue notebook shows a guerrilla's lessons, including a neatly drawn table listing how far to lead helicopters, transport aircraft and warplanes to shoot them down.

But in their hasty departure, prompted by President Andres Pastrana's decision Wednesday to end peace talks and take back the 16,000-square-mile region he ceded to them three years ago, the guerrillas left behind more questions than answers about rebel strategy. Chief among them is the question confounding many Colombians and diplomats involved in efforts to halt the long-running civil war: Why has the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC as the guerrilla group is known, relinquished the safe zone and invited a larger conflict?

By hijacking a commercial plane and kidnapping a prominent senator last week, the guerrillas scuttled a tenuous peace process. They must now give up official control of a vast region that has afforded them protection, comfort and extraordinary military value as a staging ground and training site.

Pastrana gave them the zone in December 1998 as an incentive to begin negotiations to end a war that dates to 1964. Now he has ordered his military to take it back. This may seem like a setback for the rebels, but guerrilla leaders, at least publicly, have instead welcomed the return to a military course unrestrained by peace-table politics.

"The FARC thinks war is good for them. It forces people to choose sides, and they believe many will choose theirs," said a diplomat who has sat with the FARC at peace talks over several years. "And they believe that the worse off the country gets, the stronger their position is."

According to guerrillas interviewed along the road between Las Delicias and La Sombra, about 180 miles south of Bogota, that analysis essentially captures the logic behind the FARC's thinking.

Guerrilla negotiators have always been largely inscrutable on the question of whether they are ready under any circumstances to give up arms and, if so, what those terms might be. Now the guerrillas are in a stronger position than they were three years ago, and they say they are ready to take on a Colombian army they do not believe has improved as much as they have over that time.

Since coalescing 38 years ago from a collection of ragtag rural protection groups, the Marxist-oriented rebels have grown to a force of roughly 18,000 troops -- about a 10 percent increase from 1998 -- in addition to an unknown number of civilian supporters. While its support in opinion polls is abysmal -- largely because of frequent assaults on rural towns and electricity towers, a tactic that has left much of this zone in darkness since Friday -- the FARC has established a presence in every Colombian province and large city.

Moreover, the FARC is richer than ever, thanks in large part to the "taxes" it imposes on coca farmers who supply the raw material for 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States. Those proceeds reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In addition, the rebels benefit from money collected through kidnappings and extortion.

The FARC calls that income the proceeds from "revolutionary taxes." Its leaders have decreed their own law, making it legal to collect such "taxes" from the country's richest businesses and individuals.

But the former government-sanctioned haven here, roughly the size of Switzerland, was both a blessing for the guerrillas and a point of tension among the FARC leadership, according to diplomats and military officials familiar with the rebels.

A group of military-minded commanders, many of them fighting far beyond the comforts of the zone against the army and its paramilitary backers, believed the haven had become a place where the leadership was growing complacent. Manuel Marulanda, the FARC's top commander who has been fighting the state for four decades, lived a few miles west of here in a brick house that resembles a Silver Spring split-level. The hard-line commanders, including the influential Western Bloc commander Alfonso Cano and Northwestern Bloc commander Ivan Marquez, were outraged when FARC negotiators made a rare concession to the government in January to keep peace talks alive and preserve the zone.

On the other side, arguing for preserving the zone, was a mix of politically oriented and military-minded commanders. They believed its uses for training and for propagandizing students, business and union leaders, and foreign visitors brought here for "public audiences" far outweighed its perils. Many analysts and diplomats here now agree with Colombia's military leaders, who say the FARC talked peace mainly to benefit from the haven's military uses.

"This was never a place of rest," said Commander El Pija, leader of a mobile patrol operating 15 miles west of here, who contended that the FARC gained strength over the life of the zone. "The war brings dialogue and dialogue has brought war. They are inseparable."

The rebel camp here belonged to Joaquin Gomez, a FARC peace negotiator and head of its powerful Southern Bloc, with military responsibility for the enclave. Gomez, who joined a mostly youthful guerrilla force at 36 years old, represents both the FARC's military and political impulses.

The son of peasants who were FARC sympathizers, Gomez studied for a dozen years in the former Soviet Union and gained a doctorate in agronomy. His thesis was on artificial insemination methods for the Ceibu cattle that roam these humid pastures. He is one of the FARC's more committed Marxist ideologues.

Diplomats who have sat with him at the peace table say he is among the most politically astute negotiators, and also one who made clear that he was ready, even eager, to abandon the zone and assume daily command of his military bloc. His house here was made of varnished plywood, one of the first buildings in a camp covering an area about the size of a football field.

There is little personality left inside the walls of his house, and only a little among the lines of about 50 wooden bunks whose only shelter is jungle canopy. The foot of one bunk is covered in magazine clippings, including a Cosmopolitan cover and article entitled "99 Things You Should Do to a Naked Man." A photo of a perfect white-crescent Caribbean beach is pasted next to it.

Less frivolous artifacts were also left behind. A magazine picture of Consuelo Araujo, a former culture minister kidnapped and killed by the FARC in September, has a front tooth blacked out, as does a picture of Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. A notebook belonging to a guerrilla trainee named Oscar, alias "The Rock," contains the transcripts of radio news reports, calculations on mortar elevations and a table showing that at a distance of roughly 100 meters, a weapon needs to be fired 7 1/2 meters ahead of a moving helicopter to hit it.

Farther up the road, at a dry hot camp once occupied by Simon Trinidad, a FARC negotiator and Caribbean Bloc second-in-command, a report printed from the U.S. Embassy Web site was left behind. Titled "Terrorism: An Evaluation of the Threat, Preventative Measures and Policies," the report underscores the FARC preoccupation with U.S. involvement in Colombia, particularly a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package that mostly benefits the Colombian military.

Since last week, the United States has also been sharing intelligence -- once restricted to anti-drug operations -- to help the military pick guerrilla targets in its campaign to reassert government control in the zone. The FARC is on the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations, a designation that undermines its standing as a political insurgency with admirers in Europe.

"The people ask themselves, 'If the gringos come here, how do we take them out?' " reads a message left on a chalkboard at another rebel camp. "With a . . . guerrilla war and an organized people."

So far, the Colombian army has yet to venture far from the former haven's urban centers. Any effort to root out the FARC from the mountains -- where the rebels have enjoyed a military advantage and popular support for decades -- will likely not materialize for weeks, if at all. And if it does, Faiber, a FARC soldier and member of the mobile patrol operating near here, is awaiting the army with little fear.

"This is not a war where we will defend positions. It's one of small arms, quick strikes and explosives," said Faiber, who has spent five years in guerrilla ranks and is now 23. "The army will be here. But this is what we are used to. Before the zone existed, we lived here just like now."

-------- drug war

Bush lifts sanctions on Afghanistan

By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-21356661.htm

The United States yesterday waived narcotics sanctions against Afghanistan to bolster the government of interim leader Hamid Karzai, despite the nation's failure to curb drug production and trafficking.

In a letter to Congress, President Bush said "vital national interests" had prompted him to use a waiver provision in U.S. law that requires penalties for countries that are either major narcotics producers or traffickers.

"Stabilizing Afghanistan by providing various forms of assistance, including economic and military assistance in addition to counternarcotics, anti-crime and humanitarian assistance is essential," he said.

Mr. Bush's decision came after an annual review of the world's main drug-producing and transiting countries.

Out of 23 nations, the administration has designated three - Haiti and Burma, in addition to Afghanistan - as having failed to cooperate with Washington in the war on drugs.

But only Burma will continue to suffer from economic sanctions, which include a ban on receiving U.S. aid and a block on borrowing from international financial institutions.

Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, said lifting Afghan sanctions reflects Washington's support for Mr. Karzai.

"This is not a judgment with respect to the current administration, it's with respect to the past," Mr. Beers told reporters at the State Department. He cited a series of steps Mr. Karzai has taken to halt drug production, including offering farmers incentives to grow alternative crops.

About 70 percent of the world's raw opium supply flowed through Afghanistan in 2000, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban government, which ruled Afghanistan until being ousted this fall, had banned poppy cultivation for "moral" reasons but did little to curb production and trafficking.

Although Mr. Karzai has done essentially what the Taliban did, the Bush administration has decided to give him time to implement anti-drug measures.

The interim government, unlike the Taliban, has also promised to work with the United States.

"It is in the vital national interests of the United States to provide the full range of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan," Mr. Bush said in a "statement of justification" for the sanctions waiver.

In his letter to Congress, Mr. Bush said U.S. aid is also important for Haiti, where the rule of law, education, environmental and health programs would suffer from sanctions.

The president accused Burma of doing too little to crack down on the production of both opium and methamphetamine.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's Mr. Karzai sought support in neighboring Iran for his fledgling administration, thanking Tehran for helping Afghanistan fight terrorism and throw off the yoke of Soviet occupation more than a decade ago.

Speaking to the Iranian Majis, or parliament, in Farsi - the language of Iran and western and central Afghanistan - Mr. Karzai assured Iranians the Afghan people would not forget.

Mr. Karzai, whose speech was broadcast live on state-run radio, also praised Iran for taking in some 2 million Afghan refugees over the years.

After repeated charges by Washington that Tehran was sending fighters and money into Afghanistan to destabilize the post-Taliban leadership, Mr. Bush declared that Iran, Iraq and North Korea form an "axis of evil" that seeks weapons of mass destruction and supports terrorism.

Mr. Karzai was hailed in the United States last month when he visited Mr. Bush and other dignitaries. The interim leader was sitting in the gallery of the House when Mr. Bush made the "axis of evil" assertion in his Jan. 29 State of the Union speech.

---

U.S. Takes Aim At Afghan Opium
Worries Grow About Bumper Crop

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1754-2002Feb25?language=printer

With the harvest due to begin next month, preliminary estimates are that Afghanistan is about to produce a "substantial amount" of opium poppy, perhaps approaching the near-record levels immediately before the Taliban government banned cultivation 18 months ago, a U.S. official said yesterday.

"The challenges are enormous," said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. With little time left, he said, the United States is considering providing financial and other incentives to farmers to plow under their fields before harvest, an admittedly difficult undertaking since much of the cultivation is in the most lawless parts of Afghanistan.

Stopping the cultivation of poppy and production of raw opium, the basic ingredient of heroin, is a principal goal of U.S. reconstruction policy in Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, Afghanistan produced about three-quarters of the world's opium supply.

Beers's comments came in a briefing on yesterday's release of the annual presidential certification of countries cooperating in U.S. counter-narcotics efforts. Congress requires such certification of major drug-producing or transit countries as a condition of receiving U.S. aid.

Twenty-three countries have been so designated, and President Bush yesterday named three of them -- Afghanistan, Haiti and Burma -- as having "failed demonstrably to make substantial counternarcotics efforts over the last 12 months." Only Burma, which receives no U.S. assistance, was actually barred from assistance. Bush said in a written message to Congress that he was exercising his authority to waive aid bans on the other two on grounds it was "vital to the national interests of the United States."

Complaints by a number of countries, supported by some members of Congress, led to a change in the certification procedure this year. Rather than certifying which of the 23 countries were cooperating, the president "decertified" those that were not.

Mexico, which protested the previous "guilty until certified innocent" system, made significant progress under the new administration of President Vicente Fox in arresting drug traffickers and assisting interdiction efforts, Beers said. The overall efforts of police and military forces in Colombia, the source of most of the world's cocaine, had been "superior," he said.

In his report to Congress, Bush wrote that total poppy cultivation in Afghanistan had decreased 94 percent following the Taliban ban. But "opium trafficking and heroin processing continued unabated through 2001, indicating the existence of large stockpiles." At no point, the report said, did the Taliban take steps to interrupt the opium trade. Since certification is based on activity last year, Afghanistan was placed on the decertification list.

Moreover, even as cultivation decreased in Taliban-controlled areas of the country, "cultivation and opium production increased in former Northern Alliance territory" in the northern part of the country, Bush wrote. Since the Taliban were driven from power last fall, "drug traffickers in Afghanistan have switched allegiances from the Taliban to local commanders and warlords."

Although the new interim Afghan government of Hamid Karzai has said it would not tolerate poppy cultivation, Beers said preliminary estimates of the U.N. Drug Control program, which provides an annual survey, were that cultivation this year could approach that of 2000. That crop, which produced about 3,600 tons of raw opium, was surpassed only by 1999's all-time record.

"That indicates the magnitude of the problem," Beers said.

Planted in the fall and harvested from late March through May, poppy has long been Afghanistan's most profitable cash crop, and destitute Afghan farmers, whose food crops and stock animals have been decimated by drought and war, are unlikely to want to give it up. In addition, Beers said, much of this year's crop is believed to be located in Helmand province, in southwestern Afghanistan, "one of the last areas to become secure."

Although the United States and other reconstruction donors plan eventually to launch food crop development programs in Afghanistan, they are far from being underway.

U.S. law does not permit the actual purchase of the opium crop, but "we are talking about possible remuneration" to those farmers who can be reached "for the cost of their labor to plow the crop under," Beers said. He said the United States would also assist efforts to interdict drugs smuggled through Pakistan and Central Asian countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan, although he acknowledged that one of Afghanistan's longest borders is with Iran, with which "U.S. relations are not the best in the world."

"Other countries have been working with Iran" on interdiction, he said. "I hasten to add that U.S. assistance will not go to Iran in any of these programs."

-------- guatemala

Guatemala Central Bank Chief Kidnapped

By REUTERS
February 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-guatemala-kidnap.html

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - The head of Guatemala's central bank, Lizardo Arturo Sosa Lopez, has been kidnapped outside his home in the capital of the crime-plagued nation, police said on Tuesday.

Unidentified abductors snatched Sosa near his house in southern Guatemala City at 5:30 a.m. (6:30 EST) Monday when he went out to jog, according to a senior police official who asked not to be named.

``As of now we don't know the motives of the kidnapping,'' the police source told Reuters.

The incident was shrouded in mystery on Tuesday, with government officials declining comment.

President Alfonso Portillo avoided reporters' questions on the kidnapping, saying only that he would hold a news conference on Wednesday.

In addition to his role as governor of the Guatemalan Central Bank, known as Banguat, Sosa is the head of the country's monetary board, in charge of banking and monetary policy.

Guatemala has seen an upsurge in street crime, kidnappings and gang activity after emerging from more than three decades of civil war as former combatants and others have found few opportunities in the ravaged economy.

-------- iraq

U.S. demands on Iraq may be tough to meet

By Barbara Slavin,
USA TODAY
02/26/2002

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is expanding a list of items it wants barred for export to Iraq, but it expects such diplomatic efforts to fail and provide new ammunition for military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials say.

The administration has concluded that Saddam will never satisfy United Nations resolutions, passed after the 1991 Gulf War, that require Iraq to disclose its chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile programs.

To give the impression of building the widest possible coalition against Iraq, U.S. officials are going through the motions of implementing U.N. agreements, the officials say. That includes making proposals that may be difficult for U.S. allies, as well as Iraq, to accept.

One element of this strategy involves "smart sanctions" proposed by the State Department last year to make it more difficult for Saddam to re-arm. Last June, Washington won agreement from three of the four other permanent members of the Security Council - Britain, France and China - on a "goods review list" of 100 items barred for export to Iraq because of potential military use. Russia has agreed in principle but has yet to accept a list.

U.S. officials say they are negotiating in good faith and are optimistic for agreement by the end of May, when the current system expires. But according to U.S. officials, more items are being added to the list, including types of fertilizer and trucks that can be used to transport tanks or heavy artillery. That expansion could make it harder for the Russians - and Iraq - to cooperate.

"In the interest of building the widest diplomatic coalition against Saddam Hussein, the administration is expanding the list of (banned) items and most probably will initiate some activity on the inspection front," says Raymond Tanter, a Middle East expert.

Official U.S. policy is to demand that Iraq admit U.N. weapons inspectors who have been absent from the country for more than three years. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is due to meet with Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri next week to press the issue.

But U.S. officials are skeptical that inspectors would be allowed to do their work and do not want to become ensnared in the sort of cat-and-mouse game that prevailed under the Clinton administration when Iraq barred inspectors from some sites and moved incriminating evidence. U.S. officials apparently intend to set the bar so high that Iraq will not comply. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that new inspections would have to be "much more intrusive."

It would involve "the Iraqis not controlling when they (the inspectors) come in, where they could go, what they could do. And the Iraqis aren't going to agree to something like that," Rumsfeld said.

Before resorting to military action, the administration wants to be able to say that it tried other options. Diplomatic efforts also provide time for the United States to prepare for military action.

-------

Eyewitness: Bitter legacy of sanctions

By Ben Brown in Baghdad
Monday, 26 February, 2001
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1049000/1049892.stm

Saddam Hussein brought sanctions upon his country - but it is not him who is suffering. Instead, the Iraqi people are paying the price from the cradle to the grave.

In Iraq's hospitals, doctors say there are frequent power cuts and only rudimentary equipment because of sanctions.

Many babies are severely malnourished and of every 1,000 babies born, 108 will die before their first birthday.

Paediatrician Dr Abdullah Hamzawi showed me one baby in his run-down ward. "She weighs only 40% of the weight she is supposed to be," he said.

"Such babies carry the risk of 50% mortality. Fifty per cent she may die. I just ask why should this happen," he adds.

Back in time

Ten years after sanctions were first imposed, Iraq is being driven further and further back in time.

This oil-rich nation is becoming more and more under-developed.

Even for babies lucky enough to leave hospital, the prospects are a life of poverty and misery.

In Iraq, education used to be a priority, but under sanctions and Saddam, it comes second to survival.

One 14-year-old boy I met sells cigarettes to support his family. Like about half of Iraq's children, he's dropped out of school.

"My father is old, my mother can't work and my brother is a conscript. I have to sell cigarettes to keep my family alive," he said.

If you do make it through school and on to university, you might wonder whether it's worth it. Forget the internet, books from the 1970s and 80s may be your latest works of reference.

Brain drain

Although there is a brain drain from Iraq, some students are staying.

"Here education is free, so I think it's my turn to pay back, says one young woman. "I'd stay here and I'd serve my country."

But in Iraq's blockaded economy, teachers and civil servants, for example, earn around 50p a week. Out on the streets, many choose to sell their books to supplement their income.

What is the point of graduating, some feel, if you end up at an auction house, selling off your most treasured possessions just to make ends meet?

Recently, the United Nations have eased their blockade and would lift it entirely if Saddam Hussein would comply with their demands.

But for now, those with nothing left to sell have one last choice - to beg.

A decade on, this is still the agony of sanctions, from birth until death.

----

Annan to Press Baghdad On Weapons Inspectors

By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1669-2002Feb25?language=printer

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 25 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will meet Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri next week to press Baghdad to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country for the first time in more than three years, according to a U.N. spokesman.

The U.N. chief is seeking to head off a military confrontation between Iraq and the United States, which has demanded that Baghdad permit unfettered access to U.N. weapons inspectors to let them hunt for the country's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. But U.N. officials say that Iraq has provided no indication that it is prepared to let the inspectors back.

U.N. officials said Annan would try to limit the March 7 discussions to a handful of key issues, including Iraq's obligation to permit the inspectors' return and to account for hundreds of Kuwaiti nationals who disappeared during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. "The secretary general expects to have a focused discussion on the implementation of relevant Security Council resolutions, including the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq," said U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein asked Annan through an Arab League intermediary last month to resume discussions on Iraq's fate. The March 7 talks will last one day, but may resume following the Feb. 27-28 summit of Arab foreign ministers in Beirut.

U.S. officials have made it clear to Annan that he can offer no concessions to Iraq in exchange for a commitment to let the inspectors return to Iraq. "The talks should be brief," said a U.S. official. "Iraq needs to comply with all U.N. resolutions. There is no compromise."

Annan cautioned the United States to show restraint. Following a meeting in London with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Annan told reporters that "any attack on Iraq at this stage would be unwise."

Iraq is bound by a 1991 U.N. agreement ending the Persian Gulf War to permit unconditional access to U.N. weapons inspectors. The inspectors destroyed massive quantities of Iraqi weapons before they were withdrawn from the country in 1998. Iraq has refused to permit the inspectors to return, saying they will spy on Iraq for the United States. There is "no need for the return of the spy teams," Iraq's Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told the INA news agency recently.

Russia's U.N. ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, said he is confident that Iraq can be persuaded to allow the resumption of U.N. inspections. "We have been always saying that this dialogue is one of the main means to achieve some improvement in the overall situation around Iraq," he said.

----

Implications of removing Saddam

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020226-2162836.htm#2

Your Feb. 22 story "White House wants Saddam out of power by 2005" is one of several newspaper reports describing the administration's review of options for removing Saddam Hussein.

These leaks from administration officials are helpful in telling the American public that military action is possible, but they should also explain what the implications would be. The public should be prepared for U.S. casualties and for what a cornered Saddam might do with his weapons of mass destruction, directed against invading forces or neighboring countries. For example, Israel, worried about attacks by Iraqi missiles carrying nuclear or chemical warheads, has asked for a warning before a military strike against Iraq.

The public should also be prepared to pay for keeping troops in the country for months or years, as well as peacekeeping, reconstruction and the like.

Is immediate military action likely? Secretary of State Colin Powell said that President Bush had no plans on his desk for war against any "axis of evil" nation. Some officials estimate that rebuilding weapons stockpiles, lining up support from Iraq's neighbors for basing U.S. forces, and assembling as many as 200,000 ground troops (not counting support personnel) would delay action up to a year.

By that time, if weapons inspections resume and Saddam responds with deception and denial, the administration will be in a better position to make a decision about military action.

JEAN C. WILLIS
Galveston, Texas

-------- israel / palestine

Jews bury bombers in pigskin deterrent

By Alan Philips
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-7281344.htm

JERUSALEM - Jewish settlers have come up with a new way to deter Palestinian suicide bombers - wrapping their corpses in pigskin to deprive them of the fruits of paradise.

The settlers believe that contact with a pig, an unclean animal for Muslims and Jews, will rob the bomber of the reward of martyrdom, traditionally said to be 72 virgins.

Settlers at Gush Katif, in the Gaza Strip, were the first to claim to have defiled the body of a dead Palestinian with "pigskin and lard."

Residents of Efrat, a Jewish settlement near Bethlehem, said they did the same to a Palestinian building worker who tried to blow up their supermarket yesterday, but was shot dead before most of the explosives detonated.

Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of Efrat, defended the practice: "If burial in pigskin will deter suicide bombers, then it is incumbent on us to do this. We should do anything to save life."

There has been no photographic evidence of daubing with lard and no one has come forward as the supplier of the pork, leading some to suspect that the settlers are trying to scare off future suicide bombers, who are mainly impressionable young men.

But the rabbi said: "I truly believe it happened. The pigskin was supplied by someone with a good sense of initiative. The body was lying by the supermarket for three to four hours. There was plenty of time."

Pork is considered an abomination by observant Jews, but is produced at one kibbutz and enjoyed by secular Israelis.

Palestinian Muslims reacted with scorn to the idea, saying the soul went to paradise and was unaffected by any taint to the body.

"The keys to heaven are not in the hands of settlers," said Sheik Hassan Youssef, for Hamas, whose military wing has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel.

Islamic reference books say the body of a martyr who dies for the faith is so pure that it does not need to be washed before burial, in contrast to the usual Muslim practice.

Eve Harow, a member of the Efrat local council, said: "It is sad that our only defense is a pigskin. There is a war on, and all we can do is send someone up to a kibbutz to buy some pork to defend us."

----

Giving Birth Amid Death
Wounded in Shootings That Killed Relatives, Palestinian and Israeli Have Healthy Babies

By Lee Hockstader and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/a2259-2002feb25?language=printer
With photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2259-2002Feb25.html

NABLUS, West Bank, Feb. 25 -- Two pregnant women, one Israeli and one Palestinian, gave birth to healthy baby girls today after being shot without apparent provocation.

The shootings were unconnected but showed once again how the 17 months of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have often led to senseless death and injury among innocent civilians.

The Palestinian woman's husband was shot to death and her father-in-law was critically injured when Israeli troops opened fire as the woman was being driven to a hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus before dawn. Maysoun Hayek was the second Palestinian woman in labor to be shot in as many days, in the same place and under virtually identical circumstances.

Eighty miles away and about 12 hours later, the Israeli woman's father was killed, as was another man in her car, when they were ambushed by Palestinian gunmen south of Bethlehem. The woman, who was shot in the stomach, was rushed to the hospital and gave birth by Caesarean section.

The two shootings were particularly poignant. But they were only two of many violent incidents that occurred the day after Israel infuriated Palestinians by deciding to keep their leader, Yasser Arafat, confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah, where he has been bottled up by Israeli troops since mid-December.

In Neve Yaacov, a northern suburb of Jerusalem, at least one Palestinian gunman shot at bystanders and police on a residential street. At least eight people, including three policemen, were wounded. The assailant was wounded by return fire, and there were reports that a second gunman escaped on foot to hills leading into the West Bank.

The shooting shattered the festive mood of Purim, a Jewish holiday. "When I heard the shots, I thought it was just some kids and fireworks," said Emanuella Bangyev, a 13-year-old who was baby-sitting at a nearby apartment. "Then I looked out the window and saw a man with a rifle hiding behind a parked car. Police were rushing to him and there was shooting all over."

As police hosed down a bloodstained section of sidewalk, a clutch of residents shouted, "Death to the Arabs!"

Earlier today, a 15-year-old Palestinian girl brandishing a knife rushed an Israeli army checkpoint near Tulkarm in the West Bank. She was gunned down. The teenager, Noura Shalhoub, left a suicide note declaring, "I have decided to send a message to the occupation that there is no safety on our soil for Jews."

The first pregnancy of Maysoun Hayek, the Palestinian shot in Nablus, had gone smoothly enough. But as labor began and her husband Mohammed drove her to the hospital around 3 a.m., Israeli soldiers opened fire on their car without warning, she said. Maysoun was hit twice in the back. Her 64-year-old father-in-law, Abdullah, struck four times, was critically injured, partially paralyzed and put on a respirator at the hospital. And her husband, a 22-year-old house painter, was killed on the spot.

Only Hayek's baby girl was unscathed. The young mother said her child was born after Israelis at the checkpoint forced her to strip, laid her bleeding on a stretcher in the cold for 45 minutes, then allowed her to rush to a hospital in an ambulance, her contractions quickening all the way.

In a statement, the Israeli army said its soldiers opened fire on the Hayeks' car when it tried repeatedly to pass through a ditch and boulders in the road and after they called out for it to stop. According to the statement, the soldiers opened fire because they felt in "immediate danger of their lives." It said an investigation by the soldiers' brigade commander showed that the soldiers had acted "according to procedures."

The statement also said the car accelerated after it was fired on. Hayek, interviewed in her hospital bed, said that may have been true because her husband, dead in the driver's seat, had his foot on the gas pedal.

Twenty-four hours earlier, in virtually identical circumstances and at the same location, Israeli troops shot at Shadyah Shehadeh, 27, striking the Palestinian woman in the chest, as her husband Issam drove her to the hospital. Despite her wounds, she also gave birth to a healthy baby girl, named Heba, or God's gift.

In both incidents, the Palestinian passengers said soldiers had waved them through an initial checkpoint about a mile south of Nablus before they came under gunfire at the second Israeli position, just inside the city limits. There, an Israeli tank and armored vehicle have been parked on the side of the road leading downtown since Wednesday. In both incidents, the passengers said they were fired on without notice.

"They never apologized," said Issam Shehadeh, who displayed his wife's floral robe, soaked in blood and punctured by a bullet hole. "There was only one human person [among the Israeli soldiers], and that was the medic," who briefly treated his injured wife before sending them on to the hospital.

The army expressed sorrow at the incident, explaining that the area was tense at the time because of reports of a possible suicide car bomb threat. The army said the Shehadehs' car had tried to break through the barrier and ignored a signal to stop. Issam Shehadeh, a quarry worker who speaks English and Hebrew as well as Arabic, denied that he was signaled to stop.

As Palestinians intensify their attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, jittery Israeli soldiers manning roadblocks and fortified positions have been opening fire on civilians with what Palestinians say is a hair trigger. In the past two days, the Israeli army has issued a string of statements expressing sorrow for the incidents and explaining them by saying Palestinian drivers failed to stop, slow down or heed soldiers' instructions.

On Sunday night, troops opened fire when approached by the car of Ahmed Qureia, speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a top Palestinian negotiator, at an army checkpoint north of Jerusalem. Qureia, known as Abu Ala, is widely regarded as a possible successor to Arafat and is seen by Israelis as a leading moderate. He said the troops fired at his car. The army, which expressed sorrow at the incident, said the soldiers fired warning shots in the air.

Increasingly, though, Israelis acknowledge that troops are shooting first and asking questions later, secure in the knowledge that the army rarely punishes soldiers for harming Palestinians. For some, the incidents are the inevitable result of a dizzying escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence, including the killing last week of six Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint. For others, the incidents and absence of punishments are signs not only that Israeli soldiers have become trigger-happy, but that Israel's continuing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has had a corrupting influence on a new generation of Israelis.

Today, Israel Radio reported the case of an Israeli combat officer who walked off his post in the West Bank after repeatedly protesting that his troops were not being given clear guidelines on when to fire.

"We've reached a situation where we are shooting out of fear," said the officer, who used the assumed name of Ilan in a radio interview. "So we're shooting and shooting and shooting and, in the end, the guys are becoming trigger-happy and very edgy and afraid. . . . You reach situations where we killed a woman, I think -- I'm not absolutely sure. . . . You just shoot at cars."

Williams reported from Neve Yaacov.

-------- pacific

Fiji's new image

February 26, 2002
Embassy Row by James Morrison
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-90821240.htm

If he were a travel agent, Fiji Ambassador Anare Jale would know exactly how to promote his island nation of sun-kissed beaches and lush rain forests where English is spoken everywhere.

However, he being a dipomat and this being Washington, Mr. Jale knows he has to take a different approach.

Two years after a military coup landed the tropical paradise on the front pages of newspapers around the world, Fiji is trying to re-establish its democracy and reacquaint American tourists with the South Pacific nation.

Mr. Jale, who arrived here about two months ago, is making the rounds of official Washington to explain that "we are getting back to democracy."

Most observers declared last year's parliamentary elections free and fair, and the county now has a functioning government.

"I am trying to improve Fiji's image," Mr. Jale told Embassy Row. "We have to do a lot of explaining. It's fortunate that I arrived after the elections. It would have been more difficult otherwise.

"Tourism is a very sensitive industry," he said, explaining that most tourists in Fiji are from Australia. Only about 57,000 Americans visited last year."

Fiji is a peaceful country, he added.

"Out of all of the commotion," he said, referring to the coup, "fewer than 10 people were killed."

The coup exposed ethnic tensions between Fijians descended from immigrants from India and indigenous Fijians of Polynesian and Melanesian background. George Speight, an indigenous Fijian, overthrew Mahendra Chaudhry, the first Indo-Fijian prime minister. Speight held Mr. Chaudhry and most members of Parliament hostage for about eight weeks, when the military ended the siege. Speight was recently sentenced to death for treason.

Fiji has been out of the foreign news for months, an indication that things probably are going well there.

Mr. Jale said Fiji is proving itself to be an active partner in international affairs with detachments of peacekeepers in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As the ambassador settles into his new position, he notes a certain irony in his government career. While this is his first ambassadorial position, it is actually a step down in the bureaucracy. Mr. Jale headed the entire civil service and now reports to the official who took his place.

However, the new job comes with other benefits.

"It's been a big experience to meet the most powerful person in the world," he said, referring to his first meeting with President Bush.

Mr. Jale took his family to the White House ceremony to present his diplomatic credentials.

"We were a bit worried about what to expect," Mr. Jale said of the president, "but he is a loving, caring person."

-------- peru

Fujimori writes book on terrorism

World Scene
February 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-465447.htm

TOKYO - Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, wanted in Lima on suspicion of homicide and corruption, has written a book that chronicles his administration's success in crushing leftist rebels and compares the decade-long struggle to the U.S.-led war on terror.

In "Alberto Fujimori Fights Terrorism," which arrived in stores here yesterday, Mr. Fujimori takes credit for liberating Peru from fear by defeating the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, two groups that terrorized Peru with car bombings, assassinations and peasant massacres.

-------- puerto rico

Six death this week in Vieques

26 February, 2002
Press Release
From: bieke@prdigital.com

The Committee for the Rescue and Development denounced the deaths this past week end of 6 persons, four of them cancer victims. Lung and stomach cancer were the principal causes. The victims were residents of the Monte Santo and Lujan sectors, areas that receive winds directly from US Navy's the bombing zone on the Northeast part of the island. Several scientific studies show how military toxics produced during sixty years of bombing, get to the population through the breezes and the food chain.

The Vieques community is alarmed by four deaths from cancer in one weekend. The previous week saw the death of another victim, this time cancer of the kidney.

Dr. Rivera Castańo, Viequense epidemiologist and member of the Committee said, "the Department of Health and Dr. Rullán are very slow with the cancer study of Vieques and it is high time that a cancer alert be declared Vieques for Vieques and all the services to deal with this alarming situation should be offered."

Dr. Rivera Castańa mentioned that ". more than a year ago the Legislature assigned funds for an epidemiological study on cancer to be ready in five months and we have not yet seen any results."

The Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques demands the Navy begin the cleanup of the environmental disaster that little by little is killing our people.

Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques Apartado 1424 Vieques, Puerto Rico 00765 Tel. 787 741-0716 Fax. 787 741-0358 Email: bieke@prdigital.com

-------- russia / chechnya

No improvement, no elections this year in Chechnya: Russia

Wednesday February 27, 2:39 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020226/1/2jqn0.html

Russia conceded that a lack of improvement in the situation in war-torn Chechnya meant it would not be possible to hold elections in the southern republic this year.

"The military situation has not changed much since the end of 2000," said Vladimir Yelagin, the Russian minister in charge of Chechnya, referring to the passage of time since he took up the post.

"The large bandit groups have been dispersed, but the situation remains difficult with the landmine war and the widespread pilfering," Yelagin added.

He said it was not possible to organise elections at a time when "thousands of Chechens had fled the country," a view endorsed by the republic's pro-Russian civilian administrator Akhmad Kadyrov on Tuesday, Interfax reported.

The breakaway republic had been slated to hold elections last year when separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov's original term as president was due to expire.

But with guerrilla warfare still claiming dozens of lives on both sides each week, the vote has been indefinitely delayed.

Meanwhile local elections, originally slated for this year, have also been postponed, with Moscow officials citing a prior need to resolve Chechnya's constitutional status within the Russian Federation.

Russia long ago stopped recognizing the legitimacy of Maskhadov, who it brands a "terrorist," but he has still vowed to remain in power until his republic wins full independence and repels the Russian troops.

-------- saudi arabia

Saudi Crown Prince Rejects Iran, Iraq 'Axis' Label

By REUTERS
February 25, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-saudi-usa-axis.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah said in an interview published on Monday that Iran and Iraq should not be targeted in an expanded U.S. war on terrorism despite President Bush's description of them as part of an ''axis of evil.''

``I do not believe that the war on terrorism applies to Iran and Iraq. If you have a situation (of Iranian or Iraqi terrorism), it is the result of a small fringe group, and not government,'' the crown prince and de facto Saudi Arabian ruler said in a Time magazine interview posted on the publication's Web site.

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, branded Iraq and Iran, along with North Korea, as an ``axis of evil'' committed to developing weapons of mass destruction and a direct threat to U.S. security.

Abdullah told Time that Iran, in fact, has been a stabilizing influence in the Gulf region.

``Iran is contributing to stability in the Gulf region. In the past there were tensions, but these have been worked out,'' Abdullah said.

Asked what he would say to an American plan to use force to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Crown Prince Abdullah said he already had conveyed his thoughts to Washington but declined to be more specific.

``I have given an answer on this matter to President Bush, and that is where my answer will remain,'' he said in the interview.

On the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Abdullah told Time that international peacekeepers were needed to help curb the violence so peace efforts could resume.

``We can separate the two sides and introduce peacekeepers. And then it will be time to pressure both sides to return to the negotiating table,'' Abdullah said.

As for who should apply pressure on the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate, Abdullah suggested that the United States would be the best choice, but added that it should not stand in the way of other parties that might be willing mediators.

``If the United States assumes the primary role, it will give the process great credibility and effectiveness,'' he said. ''If the U.S. has no desire to contribute to this, it should let others do it.''

-------- us

Oak Ridge Building Future Soldiers

Feb 26, 2002
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-02g.html

Oak Ridge - Feb 26, 2002 -- Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator has nothing over the Objective Force Warrior envisioned by the Army and a team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and organizations throughout the country.

The goal is to develop a high-tech soldier with 20 times the capability of today's warrior and to have that soldier commissioned by about 2010. With advanced technologies, the Army plans to create an overmatch and greatly minimize danger to its soldiers.

"With the Objective Force Warrior, the Army wants to stretch the bounds of technology but still have something that is feasible and can be built," said George Fisher of ORNL's National Security Directorate. "The Army wants an independent look into the future to see what emerging technologies and innovative combinations of these concepts might allow."

Because of ORNL's unique capabilities and its connections to industry, institutions and technologies, the Army has asked the laboratory to coordinate a unique visioning process.

"What we're calling 'the art of the possible' in enabling technologies will leverage the Department of Energy's considerable investment and technologies," Fisher said. Concept design teams were composed of futurists, systems engineers, biologists, military experts, human factors specialists, writers and others of diverse backgrounds. The teams met late last year and submitted a proposed plan of attack to the Army in December.

Innovative technologies would allow a soldier to engage and destroy the enemy at longer ranges with greater precision and with devastating results, Fisher said. Technologies that would make that possible include better communications devices, advanced situational awareness software, chem-bio detection and protection, advanced weapons, and protective equipment.

Fatigues and the flak jacket of the past, for example, would be replaced by a system designed to protect a soldier and provide hemorrhage control in case a bullet penetrates. The helmet of the future warrior might be a sealed unit that contains communications, vision enhancements, a laser for target ranging and a heads-up display.

To provide a glimpse into the future, one of the panels submitted a hypothetical letter from a soldier to his parents dated Oct. 30, 2017.

In the letter, the young soldier writes, "My suit has the ability to stop a rifle bullet. It is made of a material that is as flexible as my football jersey but gets hard as steel when a bullet or knife is pushed into it. The material has some kind of chemical in it that lets fresh air pass through it but stops and destroys chemical warfare agents...

"If I do get injured, the suit automatically inflates over the wound, stopping the bleeding and applying medicine to the injury until our medic can come help me." The letter continues: "Remember how you used to tell me that playing all those video games wouldn't get me anywhere in life? You have to see my helmet to believe it. It's like an IMAX movie right before my eyes."

The helmet of the future will allow a soldier to monitor power reserves, will show the range of an enemy and will provide an enormous amount of additional information, including the capabilities of the enemy.

While many of the technologies to make the Objective Force Warrior a reality are maturing today, several others, called "breakthrough technologies," have yet to be developed. These include advanced fuel cells, exoskeletons, directed energy lethal and non-lethal weapons, and lethal robotics. The exoskeleton would augment the strength of a soldier and enhance mobility, speed, endurance, range and load-carrying capabilities.

Immediate areas of focus are situational understanding, weapons, power generation and individual protective equipment.

In addition to the members from ORNL, Objective Force Warrior panel members come from disparate backgrounds, including Business Week, Battelle Memorial Institute, Axis Solutions, Yale University, NASA Langley Research Center, the Y-12 National Security Complex, Natick Soldier Center, Picatinny Arsenal, Computer Associates, U.S. Armor Center and Meridian.

Related Link: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge ORNL science technology transfer research development energy biology environment materials neutron computing manufacturing human genome project genetic solar nuclear) http://www.ornl.gov

----

SPACEWAR
Transform Space Operations Major Goal For Teets
Feb 13, 2002

Washington -- Transforming the best aspects of military and national space operations into one integrated national space security capability is the goal of the nation's highest space official.

Please support: http://Antiwar.com and http://www.Space4Peace.org.

----

Special operations

Gary Anderson
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020226-12640486.htm

The Tom Clancy writing machine has produced the third volume in its "Commanders" series. "Shadow Warriors" is about the special operations forces, and it may be the best to date. Mr. Clancy details the history of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) from its World War II origins in the Office of Stategic Service through Vietnam, the Cold War and into the post-Cold War world.

The narrative history is intermixed with the personal recollections of Gen. Carl Stiner, whose personal biography parallels that of SOCOM from the Vietnam era, when he joined the Army to his stint as SOCOM commander. I have had the honor and pleasure of meeting Gen. Stiner on several occasions. He is a genuine professional and a gentleman of the old school. And on active duty he was also one of the most innovative and inventive commanders produced by American arms during this century.

The story of special operations has been told previously, most recently in the W.E.B. Griffith's "Brotherhood of War" series of novels that always provide a great read. "Shadow Warriors" is a comprehensive nonfiction account that mirrors the Griffith series. Readers who enjoy either account will be gratified to digest the other, as Mr. Griffith's fictional characters compare with the real-world soldiers who populate the Clancy effort.

The special operators have a long, and sometimes well-deserved, reputation as mavericks. This has made their rise to independent status a long haul in a U.S. military dominated, at least in peacetime, by conventional thinkers. The Special Forces are made up primarily of Army personnel, although Navy SEALS and Air Force special operations air crews now make up a large portion of the SOCOM roster. Nonetheless, the challenges associated with creating the Special Forces are largely a story dominated by turf fights within the Department of the Army until very recently.

The Special Forces have always been led by strong-willed innovators; all of these characters possessed clear vision and equally effective marketing skills. Beginning with "Wild Bill" Donovan in World War II, they pushed a brand of war-fighting that featured a combination of psychological and civil affairs operations combined with a daring willingness to operate deep in hostile territory. Often this did not sit well with conventional soldiers tasked with the linear battles that would characterize a World War III that would never happen.

John Kennedy shared the special operators' vision, and they flourished during his short tenure that coincided with our build up in Vietnam. Kennedy's assassination did not mark an immediate decline in the fortunes of the Special Forces, but their decline did parallel the deterioration of the war effort in Vietnam although their performance there was superb. The '70s marked a nadir in the Special Forces' fortunes, but this was reversed following the debacle of Desert One, the failed 1980 hostage rescue operation in Iran. After that, Congress acted to strengthen our special operations capabilities in the '80s and created a career path for special operators in the Army.

Today, SOCOM is a unique command, in that it possesses characteristics of a separate service while simultaneously serving as a joint command. The post-Cold War world has been custom-made for the special operators, and their performance has been exemplary. They have fed disaster victims in Bangladesh, hunted Scuds in Iraq and snatched hostile factional leaders in Somalia. The last example is portrayed in the motion picture "Black Hawk Down" that accurately portrays the heroics of an outnumbered group of special operators fighting for their lives in a near-impossible situation.

Despite the heroics of Mogadishu, Mr. Clancy accurately points out that most of the best work done by SOCOM is the unglamorous but vital task of nation-building and training allied forces. This is Kennedy's vision writ large, and they are doing him proud in corners of the world never heard of by most Americans. In my last few operational tours with the Marine Corps, I had the privilege of working with special operators on a number of occasions. If anything, the author understates their dedication and professionalism.

If the book has a weakness, it is that it does not portray the struggles of the SEALS and the Air Force special operations personnel to gain recognition within their services as fully as it does with the experience of the Army special operators. However, it remains a definitive account of the development of a capability that was critical to our success in Afghanistan. The book was obviously wrapped up as the events of September 11 were happening and does not include the performance of SOCOM personnel in Afghanistan that have proven to be their finest hour. I suspect the paperback version will remedy that when it is published. Nonetheless, this is a worthy effort.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine, is director of the Center for Unconventional Thought at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington.

-------- venezuela

Fourth Venezuelan Officer Demands Chavez Resign

By REUTERS
February 25, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-venezuela-military.html

CARACAS, Venezuela - A Venezuelan air force brigadier general on Monday became the fourth military officer this month to call on President Hugo Chavez to resign.

Only days after military top brass had affirmed their loyalty to ex-coup leader Chavez, Brig. Gen. Roman Gomez -- apparently speaking as an individual -- joined the small group of officers who have publicly declared their opposition to the president's rule.

``I am asking President Chavez, for the good of the country, to peacefully hand over power and face the consequences of his own failure. Don't do any more harm to Venezuela,'' Gomez, dressed in blue military dress uniform, told a news conference in a Caracas hotel.

The bespectacled Gomez, a low-ranking general in the Air Force chain of command, called on the 120,000-strong armed forces to step in and act as the guarantor of democracy in the troubled oil-reliant South American nation.

However, he ruled out a coup to oust Chavez, whose fiery leftist rhetoric has split Venezuela along class lines and eroded his own popularity to less than 40 percent.

Only a week after Gomez had announced his resignation from the head of air transport at the infrastructure ministry for ''personal reasons,'' the brigadier general said the real reason for his departure was that he was ``not in agreement with how the president and his cabinet run the country.''

Responding promptly to Gomez's statement, Defense Minister Jose Vicente Rangel belittled the brigadier general as a disgruntled officer who had already been fined and could face criminal charges for administrative irregularities.

``We are going to carefully investigate this case. ... Gen Gomez has a history,'' Rangel told journalists. ``This does not create any uncertainty (in the armed forces).''

DISSIDENTS HAD SHOCKED NATION

Air Force Col. Pedro Soto and National Guard Capt. Pedro Flores had shocked Venezuela earlier this month when they attacked what they said were Chavez's use of the military in politics, his close ties with Cuba and links with Colombia's leftist guerrillas.

Their calls for Chavez's resignation prompted several days of anti-government protests by the opposition. They were followed last week by Rear Admiral Carlos Molina, who said 90 percent of the military wanted the president to step down.

Gomez, who now faces a disciplinary investigation, insisted discontent within the armed forces was even more widespread than suggested by his fellow dissidents.

Addressing the military, Gomez said: ``Remember that our duty is to the nation and not to any particular government, particularly if its actions harm the people and the country's development.''

On Friday, Armed Forces head Gen. Lucas Rincon led commanders of the four branches of the military in a profession of allegiance to Chavez, who is battling to prop up the faltering economy and overcome growing opposition to his three-year rule.

Col. Soto was ordered into retirement last week, while Capt. Flores was sentenced to 15 days arrest. Rear Admiral Molina still faces a disciplinary hearing.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Few, if any, would face US tribunals

By Pamela Hess
Pentagon correspondent
2/26/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26022002-035722-6981r

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday he is getting closer to finalizing procedures for the military tribunals to try foreign terror suspects, but he indicated few if any prisoners would face the commission.

"In most cases, we would prefer to have the people go back to their own countries to be tried there," Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon news briefing.

Rumsfeld said the military commission, as it is officially known, could mutate slightly to reflect the circumstances of each prospective defendant.

He also said U.S. government officials who were formulating the procedures and rules for the tribunals had reached a unanimous conclusion as to what the requirements for a death sentence would be. He declined to specify what those conditions would be, however.

"Justice is achieved as a result of a total process," Rumsfeld said, refusing to parse the individual decisions being made on the tribunals.

An initial construct for the tribunals crafted by Defense Department lawyers suggested a death sentence would require unanimous consent by the military panel, comprised of at least five U.S. officers. Guilty verdicts could be issued with a two-thirds majority, and there is a possibility defendants could appeal their verdicts to a three-officer panel.

The military now holds 194 prisoners in Afghanistan and 300 at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.

Rumsfeld said most of the prisoners were "sorted" for interrogation for intelligence-gathering purposes and now law enforcement officials were reviewing each prisoner's case to decide what would happen to them in the legal system.

In addition to the military tribunal, prisoners could be subjected to the U.S. criminal justice system, face a traditional military court-martial, or be sent back to their home country to face trial. They could also be released if law enforcement determines no criminal charges should be made. Those same prisoners could also be kept in detention until the conflict in Afghanistan is over so they could not rejoin the fight, standard practice in wartime, Rumsfeld said.

In a Feb. 23 interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, Rumsfeld said the preferred option was to return prisoners to their home countries.

"I have no desire to fill up our jails and spend time and money holding people," he said. "We'd prefer to only give them back to countries that have an interest in prosecuting people that ought to be prosecuted rather than simply turning them loose, putting them back out on the street and having them go get in more airplanes and have them fly into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center again."

President Bush authorized the tribunals in November 2001.

----

Anthrax probe focuses on letter

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020226-79962344.htm

A former U.S. scientist identified as a focus of the FBI's investigation into the mailing of anthrax-laced letters that killed five persons is believed to be the author of an anonymous letter falsely accusing another biochemist of the crime.

Law-enforcement authorities, microbiology specialists and others familiar with the FBI's anthrax probe said the unsigned letter to military police at the Quantico Marine Base identifying Egyptian-born scientist Ayaad Assaad as the anthrax mailer was an attempt by the unnamed co-worker to deflect the bureau's investigation from himself.

"There is a connection between the person who sent that letter and the person who sent the anthrax," said Rosemary A. McDermott, attorney for Mr. Assaad, a former scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.

"The person who wrote that letter knew intimate details of my client's life and his professional history, and about the Fort Detrick operation," she said. "I don't think that is a coincidence."

Mr. Assaad, a U.S. citizen, was interviewed Oct. 2 by the FBI concerning accusations outlined in the anonymous letter and was cleared of any connection to the anthrax attacks.

The Washington Times reported yesterday that the FBI's five-month search for the person who mailed anthrax-filled letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat; Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat; and others had focused on a former U.S. scientist who worked at the Fort Detrick facility.

The unnamed scientist was identified from among 50 government researchers known to have the technical ability to produce the sophisticated weapons-grade anthrax strain found in the letters that went to Florida, New York, Connecticut and Washington, D.C.

The FBI yesterday, however, vigorously denied that its agents had targeted a specific suspect in the anthrax probe, saying the investigation had yet to identify the person responsible for sending the anthrax-laced letters.

"There is no prime suspect in this case at this time," FBI spokesman Bill Carter said.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer also said that several individuals were under investigation and that the FBI had not narrowed that list to one. "I wish it were that easy and that simple right now," he said, adding that President Bush wants the matter resolved quickly but also wants the FBI to take its time to "build a case that would stand in court."

The FBI generally considers someone a "suspect" when he has been advised formally that he is the target of an investigation.

But the law-enforcement sources and others, including biochemical specialists whom the FBI had questioned, said the bureau's probe began to focus on the unidentified Fort Detrick scientist after extensive interviews with more than 300 people associated with the government's anthrax program. The former scientist has been interviewed, they said, and his house has been searched.

The Fort Detrick facility has maintained stores of weapons-grade anthrax, commonly known as the Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis.

The sources said the anonymous letter writer would have been among a narrow population to know that Mr. Assaad had been laid off at Fort Detrick or to have knowledge of his areas of chemical and biological expertise.

The letter also mentioned Mr. Assaad's two sons, identified the floor on which he worked, noted his security clearance, named the train he took to work and where he lived, and recounted a pending discrimination lawsuit he filed against the U.S. Army.

"Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," the letter said, according to Mrs. McDermott, who was allowed to read but not make a copy of the document. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad, and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on."

The letter was sent after the September 11 terrorist attacks but before the threat of anthrax-laced letters became public. On Oct. 5, more than a week after the anonymous letter was mailed, Florida photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, became the first of five individuals to die from anthrax inhalation.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist at State University of New York who heads the biological arms-control panel for the Federation of American Scientists, tells The Times that the FBI has been working on a "short list" of those who could have been involved, and that agents have narrowed that list to "a particular person ... a member of the biochemical community."

Mrs. Rosenberg also said she did not understand why the FBI had not yet made an arrest "considering that the person responsible for this comes from a very narrow list of people who have the necessary skill to do what was done." But, she said, there is "a common suspect."

In a letter last month to the 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology, FBI Assistant Director Van A. Harp, who heads the bureau's anthrax task force, said the person responsible for mailing the deadly bacteria had experience working in a laboratory, had legitimate access to select biological agents and had the technical expertise to produce a "highly refined and deadly product."

In the letter, Mr. Harp said: "It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual."

In addition to Mr. Stevens, the others who died as a result of anthrax infection were U.S. postal workers Thomas Lee Morris, 55, and Joseph P. Curseen, 47, both of whom worked at the Brentwood facility in Northeast; Kathy Nyugen, a 61-year-old hospital stockroom employee in New York; and Ottilie W. Lundgren, a 94-year-old woman from Connecticut.

All the deaths were traced to the Ames strain of the bacteria, first isolated in Iowa and maintained by the U.S. Army since 1980 for testing purposes.

---

FBI Still Lacks Identifiable Suspect in Anthrax Probe
Investigators Continue to Focus on People Connected to Labs That Had Strain Found in Letters

By Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1690-2002Feb25?language=printer

The FBI has conducted anthrax tests in the homes, offices and vehicles of about a dozen people who have been investigated in the deadly anthrax mailings, but the individuals were cleared of suspicion after the tests came back negative, according to officials familiar with the government's probe.

The tests, which use swabs to detect the presence of anthrax spores, were conducted with the consent of those under investigation and did not require search warrants, authorities said.

Disclosure of the searches comes amid increasing concern on Capitol Hill and among some scientists over an apparent lack of progress in the FBI's anthrax probe, which has yielded no firm suspects despite thousands of interviews conducted since the deaths of five people last fall.

Investigators keep a running list of as many as 20 people who are under scrutiny at any time. But no individual has remained on the list for more than a month, and none has emerged as a solid suspect, authorities said.

"It's frustrating, because we don't have a target yet," said one official familiar with the case. "It's not stalled . . . but there are no easy answers or instant gratification."

FBI investigators continue to focus particular attention on former and current employees at laboratories and research facilities that have had samples of the Ames strain of anthrax, which has been identified as the type contained in letters mailed last fall.

At one lab alone, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., FBI agents have conducted hundreds of interviews, officials said. One FBI agent now is assigned full time to USAMRIID to supervise a hastily formed reference library of anthrax strains.

Investigators have determined that fewer than 20 labs possessed live cultures of the Ames strain, and all but three of the labs are in the United States. The FBI last week dispatched agents to a Canadian defense lab with anthrax stocks. More visits are planned to research agencies in Britain and France.

Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed through a New Jersey postal distribution facility in September and October to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the New York Post and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. Those letters, and at least one other suspected letter that was never recovered, have been linked to deaths in Connecticut, Florida, New York and Washington, D.C.

FBI profilers have said the culprit is likely an older man, a loner living in the United States who has substantial scientific and laboratory skills. He has no ties to organized terrorists but sought to use the Sept. 11 terror attacks as cover for the mailings, according to the profilers.

At least nine research institutions are assisting with the analysis of the lethal powder used in the anthrax attacks. Various experts are studying the genetic structure of the bacteria and looking for chemical and physical evidence that might help pinpoint where and how the powder was made.

Tests so far have shown a match between spores used in the attacks and a strain of anthrax used in U.S. biodefense research since the mid-1980s.

With no suspects in sight, the FBI has doubled its reward to $2.5 million, mailed fliers to 500,000 New Jersey residents appealing for help and sent letters requesting assistance to 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology.

But the FBI and outside scientists are only now beginning their analysis of the largest single repository of anthrax spores from the attacks: the contents of the Leahy letter, which was discovered Nov. 16 in a barrel of quarantined mail. Authorities say the highly sophisticated tests have been delayed to allow the design of elaborate protocols that will ensure that the analyses are scientifically accurate and legally defensible.

"You can't be in a hurry on this stuff," one official said yesterday.

Law enforcement officials said Army scientists are cooperating closely with investigators, although the relationship is awkward because USAMRIID employees are also regarded as potential suspects. "We are not blinded to the fact that someone in our midst could have been involved," one official said.

Speculation that the FBI may be close to cracking the case has increased in the past week, in large part because of the public comments of Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a professor at the State University of New York-Purchase and a prominent bioterrorism expert.

In a series of widely circulated commentaries for the Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg has contended that the FBI likely knows the identity of the terrorist but is "dragging its feet," possibly because the suspect "knows something that he believes to be sufficiently damaging to the United States to make him untouchable by the FBI."

In a speech at Princeton University last week, Rosenberg said the FBI was focusing on a single scientist who had been fired twice from USAMRIID and was now working for a defense contractor in the Washington area. She said she learned of the suspect from law enforcement officials, whom she declined to name.

FBI officials over the last week have flatly discounted Rosenberg's claims, which were included in a Washington Times article yesterday reporting that a suspect had been identified. Numerous Bush administration officials, including White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, yesterday called the report erroneous and said the FBI was not close to identifying a suspect.

Law enforcement officials said they are working on myriad possibilities, and believe they are making progress in identifying potential suspects among hundreds of current and former employees of laboratories with Ames anthrax stores.

Some have been investigated because they had access to labs that possessed the Ames strain. Even a negative result on an anthrax swab test doesn't rule someone out entirely, sources said. "It just knocks them aside for now and gives us a level of confidence" that the person was not involved in the attacks, one official said.

Sources close to the investigation noted that people whose homes have been swabbed for anthrax live throughout the United States, including the Washington area.

Other names and leads have been received by the FBI through its Web site or through tips to field offices, officials said.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is briefed on the case twice a day, authorities said. Agents are also nearly finished with an initial sweep of people associated with the U.S. biological defense program.

----

Frequent fliers, frequent liars?

Joel Mowbray
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020226-11575467.htm

In a move that should not be surprising, but nonetheless is, the Department of Transportation (DOT) announced last week that the new trusted-traveler ID cards would be tested in a pilot program reserved exclusively for members of Congress.

In legislation passed during the peak of post-September 11 bipartisanship, Congress authorized DOT to create a program where frequent fliers can bypass extensive scrutiny in a special "fast lane." The so-called "fly-D" cards will contain not just a photo but also a fingerprint, and will only be issued after a criminal background check and a 15-minute in-person interview with a government official.

Members of Congress will no doubt be duly impressed when they breeze through airport security with a minimum of hassle, while their constituents - the people they're supposedly serving - wait in sometimes grueling lines. They will be able to provide testimonial support for the new two-tiered approach, boosting the likelihood that trusted-traveler cards will reach the masses.

But, rather than being pleased with going unmolested at airports, members of Congress should be deeply troubled. Of course, a member of Congress will not hijack or bomb a plane, but what safeguards are in place to stop a member of a sleeper cell with no criminal history from obtaining a trusted-traveler ID when the program expands?

At the moment, there are only two protections to prevent sleepers from using the security fast lane: the U.S. citizenship requirement and the face-to-face interview. The former is not written in stone yet, but it is tough to imagine a plan garnering political backing if it allows aliens or residents to enjoy relaxed security. But this is by no means a complete bar, since al Qaeda has been able to recruit U.S. citizens. As for the interview process, a quick look at the numbers tells you this could be a difficult chore to carry out.

If you assume conservatively that there are 1 million Americans who fly often enough to warrant getting the special ID, that's 250,000 man-hours if one agent conducts each interview. If there are two persons per session - something that common sense would dictate a reasonable measure - the government faces a half-million labor-hours, and that's assuming each interview lasts precisely 15 minutes. The logistics of pulling together enough highly trained personnel won't be an easy task.

During a recent conversation with Rep. John Culberson, the leading advocate in the House of Representatives for the special IDs, he assured me that sleepers wouldn't get past the interview, the step in the process he dubbed "the best check." "Take that Mohammed Atta," he said. "An agent would've been able to detect his robotic stare." When pressed, though, he conceded that "it's a possibility" that a sleeper not burdened with a robotic stare could attain a trusted-traveler card.

So if a sleeper has the special ID, he would, by design, saunter through the airport with less scrutiny than someone without the card. True, he would have to walk through a metal detector and have his bag scanned, but he would not be subject to any of the more extensive measures that have become commonplace in the past few months. Mr. Culberson maintains that this lower level of inspection is still adequate, likening it to "security policies that existed before September 11." Not terribly reassuring.

In fairness to Mr. Culberson, he is ardently opposed to DOT's plans to initially allow only 535 Beltway politicians to utilize the fast lanes. "This is not a privileged traveler card, but a trusted-traveler program," he stressed. He promised to exhort DOT to make the trial run open to military and law-enforcement personnel instead. That's a noble goal, but it doesn't change the fact that there are sleepers who will be waiting with bated breath for the program's expansion.

Trusted-traveler cards, which promise lesser security and shorter lines, will undoubtedly be embraced by the millions of Americans who fly even somewhat regularly. But there can be no denying that the prospect of acquiring the ID will hold unparalleled appeal for sleepers who wish to do us harm.

We mustn't forget that if Richard Reid hadn't been such a ninny, one more plane could have fallen victim to terrorism. The only reason he was detected is because he failed on his first attempt to ignite the fuse to his shoe bomb. Plastic explosives such as C-4 are not picked up by a metal detector, the only examination of the person to which trusted travelers would be subjected. And there have been too many other post-September 11 incidents in which people carrying a whole host of contraband have gotten past metal detectors and bag scanners.

As tempting as a security fast lane is to frequent fliers, travelers cannot trust this new system, which would prove even more tempting to sleeper terrorists.

Joel Mowbray is a freelance writer. E-mail: jdmowbra @erols.com.

----

Proposal for Web oversight assailed

February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/20020226-14966809.htm

NEW YORK (AP) - The world's governments would have a greater say in how the Internet is run under a proposal that is being roundly criticized by public-interest groups and other Internet watchdogs.

Under the plan to overhaul the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, representatives chosen by governments would replace ones directly elected by the Internet community at large.

The proposal, issued Sunday by ICANN President Stuart Lynn, would drop the U.S. government's original objective of transitioning to the private sector the policy decisions over domain names and other issues.

Karl Auerbach, an ICANN board member often critical of his own organization, said Mr. Lynn's proposal goes in the wrong direction. "This is closing the door, clamming up and being more non-responsive to the public," Mr. Auerbach said.

The plan also creates the possibility that the huge U.S. segment of the Internet might be unduly influenced by hostile foreign interests.

"I'm uncomfortable with any plan that would give totalitarian governments power to influence rules that would go into direct effect in the United States," said Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami.

ICANN was selected in 1998 to oversee Internet addressing policies, which had been the responsibility of the U.S. government as the Internet's original developer. ICANN's decisions ultimately affect how people reach Web sites and what domain names they can have.

The organization has had a rocky history, facing criticisms that it is out of touch with the general Internet community and the needs of domain-name administrators outside the United States.

Mr. Lynn's proposal amounts to throwing in the towel.

Efforts to create a new global democracy have bogged down work on such pressing matters as determining how best to settle domain-name disputes and improve the security of key Internet infrastructure, Mr. Lynn said.

He said national governments - not something ICANN could ever hope to create - are "the most evolved form of representation of the public interest" - though many of them are not democratic.

Getting governments involved could also help ICANN gain the respect of skeptical stakeholders, said Mr. Lynn.

The proposal also calls for more funding sources - something possible as more Internet constituencies recognize ICANN's authority. Many managers of country-specific domain names have refused to pay dues, leaving ICANN short-staffed and unable to make decisions quickly.

The proposal increases the importance of a March 10-14 ICANN meeting in Accra, Ghana, where board members are to begin considering the overhaul, though they won't likely make any final decisions.

During a transition period, the U.S. Commerce Department retains a veto over ICANN policies. Congress also could override them.

Commerce spokesman Clyde Ensslin said it was too early to comment on the proposal's merits, but said the department supports any efforts by ICANN to evaluate how it could better fulfill its mission.

Few would dispute Mr. Lynn's conclusion that the current system is broken. The criticism is over whether his proposal goes too far.

"So far there's nothing in it to make us comfortable that ICANN's activities are going to be properly constrained and properly representative of the public's interest," said Alan Davidson, staff counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

Former ICANN Chairman Esther Dyson said board members directly elected by Internet users would have greater accountability than ones picked by governments.

The proposal does not specify how governments would nominate board members, other than to say one member would come from each of five geographic regions.

Government nominees would make up one-third of the 15-member board. Another third would come through a committee process, with the rest consisting of ICANN's president and appointments by four policy and technical groups.

Currently, five of the 19 board members are elected by the general Internet community.

----

Police shut off 12 city cameras

By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020226-70525150.htm

D.C. police say they have shut off a dozen cameras that were monitoring federal buildings, the National Mall and areas in the city deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Metropolitan Police Department officials yesterday said the heightened state of alert issued by the FBI last month has passed - though they acknowledge the cameras can be reactivated any time the local police determine the city is in a state of crisis.

"We only turned them on after the FBI issued a state of emergency to monitor areas sensitive to terrorist attacks," said Chief Charles H. Ramsey. "We kept the cameras running until the Olympics were over and then stopped monitoring."

Privacy advocates and civil liberties groups have been critical in recent weeks of the Metropolitan Police Department's plan to link hundreds of cameras in schools, Metro stations and other locations around the city to the Synchronized Operations Command Center.

D.C. Council Member David Catania, speaking at a public oversight hearing of the Judiciary Committee yesterday, said his concern is extensive use of the cameras in high crime areas would lead to the city relying on cameras instead of actual police officers to keep the city safe.

"We might have the very real dilemma of having activity on tape and our officers doing nothing about it," said Mr. Catania, at-large Republican.

D.C. police, eager to answer concerns about potential abuses of the cameras by officers, invited media representatives again yesterday to tour the SOCC.

The SOCC houses three surveillance monitoring and communications stations: the Joint Operations Command Center, the Command Information Center and the Intelligence Information Center.

The Command Information Center is the only station operating around the clock. The other two are only used as needed, presumably during a heightened state of alert or in emergency situations.

D.C. police officials presented several examples of how their new communications technology can be used to aid officers in solving crimes by transferring up-to-the-minute details about scene and suspects to officers on the street.

Fourth District Cmdr. Cathy Lanier showed how she could conduct her morning rundown of patrols with her command staff from the Joint Operations Command Center.

Using Web-based technology, Cmdr. Lanier was able to show her staff, sitting in a 4th District meeting room on Georgia Avenue, where all of the robberies in two public service areas, 410 and 412, occurred from 4:30 p.m. Sunday to 12:30 a.m. yesterday morning.

Neil Trugman, who oversees operations for the SOCC, gave one example where a bank robbery occurred in the 4th District at 2:30 p.m. during the shift change.

"In real time, we were able to give the evening shift, during their role call, a description of the car and the license plate number from witness accounts," Mr. Trugman said. "With the old system, the evening shift officers would not have been aware of what to look for, and the information would not have been available until the next day."

Police officials emphasized the city's use of surveillance cameras are incident-driven - monitored when there is a specific reason.

Chief Ramsey said people shouldn't be concerned about cameras because the debate on how they are to be used is still evolving.

"We had the American Civil Liberties Union in last week on a tour, and they raised some important issues that we plan to address," Chief Ramsey said.

The Washington Times reported last week that the D.C. police agreed with the ACLU that restrictions and regulations on the use of the cameras will be necessary.

Officials from the ACLU said they want tougher legislative restrictions that can be legally enforced.

----

For D.C. Police, Funding but Too Few Recruits

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2720-2002Feb26?language=printer

They have the money to pay them, a plan to deploy them and citizens who desperately want to see more of them. The problem is that the D.C. police department can't seem to find 185 people who want to become police recruits.

At a hearing last night, several D.C. Council members pushed Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey to explain why their constituents are not seeing the results of his new deployment plan to put more police officers on District streets.

The plan was introduced last month to wide approval from council members, but Ramsey told the Committee on the Judiciary last night that it cannot be fully implemented until the department's force reaches 3,600.

In his testimony, Ramsey said that the plan to put more officers on the streets has been implemented and that more than 1,800 sworn members -- 58 percent of all officers, sergeants and lieutenants -- are on neighborhood patrols.

Augmenting the force has proved difficult, Ramsey said, and until it is up to full strength, he cannot have officers covering all the city's police service areas.

Ramsey told the committee he plans to hold a career fair in April to attract potential candidates, who are more difficult to come by since the Sept. 11 attacks caused demand for law enforcement officers to surge.

Department staffing levels will be further imperiled when a contract recently negotiated with the police union is finalized. In the agreement, officers are to get substantial payments to cover previous pay raises.

Ramsey said he fears that the 259 police officers who have at least 20 years on the force and are eligible for retirement may leave when they receive their back pay.

Ramsey is proposing a $10,000 bonus for those officers if they promise to stay for another two years and said he is working on legislation to propose the bonus.

Ramsey also heard complaints last night about too much policing.

About half a dozen speakers expressed concern about the department's plan for wide use of surveillance cameras in public places.

"Where will it stop? This is not merely a single image for a brief moment in time. This is an intergrated network that can track license plates, identifying the car's owner, and log where a car moves," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice in D.C.

Ramsey said the District's growing network of surveillance cameras isn't being used frivolously. The cameras were used during the Olympics because federal officials called it a time of heightened security, Ramsey said, but the command center was shut down after the games ended Sunday.

The most biting exchange of the hearing came when D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), chairman of the committee, questioned Ramsey on the fairness of the department's promotion and discipline process.

Ramsey recently overturned a department rule that restricted promotions for anyone who has been disciplined. Ramsey abolished the rule not long after Mark Beach was removed from his post as commander of the 3rd Police District after he was accused of making false statements.

Even though a disciplinary board supported Beach's demotion, Ramsey overturned the decision and promoted Beach again, to serve as the department's representative on the national Counterdrug Intelligence Executive Secretariat.

Patterson asked whether Beach was promoted after Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer, along with his attorney, met with Beach's attorney in private.

Ramsey snapped at Patterson: "I don't think it's appropriate to speak publicly about an open personnel matter."

Neither Ramsey nor Patterson would give details about the incidents involving Beach and Gainer.

Patterson asked Ramsey whether he investigated complaints filed against Gainer, who was not at the hearing.

Ramsey said that complaints have been filed against Gainer since he came to the department in 1998 and that each one is investigated.

Patterson pressed Ramsey, asking how he could assure her that he has not been influenced in his decisions on discipline.

"My decisions aren't influenced by anyone," Ramsey said, "including you."

--------

U.S. to Weigh Computer Chip Implant

February 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Human-Computer-Chip.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a first-ever computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person's skin.

For airports, nuclear power plants and other high security facilities, the immediate benefits could be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.

The implant technology is another case of science fiction evolving into fact. Those who have long advanced the idea of implant chips say it could someday mean no more easy-to-counterfeit ID cards nor dozing security guards.

Just a computer chip -- about the size of a grain of rice -- that would be difficult to remove and tough to mimic.

Other uses of the technology on the horizon, from an added device that would allow satellite tracking of an individual's every movement to the storage of sensitive data like medical records, are already attracting interest across the globe for tasks like foiling kidnappings or assisting paramedics.

Applied Digital Solutions (news/quote)' new ``VeriChip'' is another sign that Sept. 11 has catapulted the science of security into a realm with uncharted possibilities -- and also new fears for privacy.

``The problem is that you always have to think about what the device will be used for tomorrow,'' said Lee Tien, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group.

``It's what we call function creep. At first a device is used for applications we all agree are good but then it slowly is used for more than it was intended,'' he said.

Applied Digital, based in Palm Beach, Fla., says it will soon begin the process of getting Food and Drug Administration approval for the device, and intends to limit its marketing to companies that ensure its human use is voluntary.

``The line in the sand that we draw is that the use of the VeriChip would always be voluntarily,'' said Keith Bolton, chief technology officer and a vice president at Applied Digital. ``We would never provide it to a company that intended to coerce people to use it.''

More than a decade ago, Applied bought a competing firm, Destron Fearing, which had been making chips implanted in animals for several years. Those chips were mainly bought by animal owners wanting to provide another way for pound workers to identify a lost pet.

Chips for humans aren't that much different.

But the company was hesitant to market them for people because of ethical questions. The devastation of Sept. 11 solidified the company's resolve to market the human chip and brought about a new sensibility about the possible interest.

``It's a sad time ... when people have to wonder whether it's safe in their own country,'' Bolton said.

The makers of the chip also foresee it being used to help emergency workers diagnose a lost Alzheimer's patient or access an unconscious patient's medical history.

Getting the implant would go something like this:

A person or company buys the chip from Applied Digital for about $200 and the company encodes it with the desired information. The person seeking the implant takes the tiny device -- about the size of a grain of rice, to their doctor, who can insert it with a large needle device.

The doctor monitors the device for several weeks to make sure it doesn't move and that no infection develops.

The device has no power supply, rather it contains a millimeter-long magnetic coil that is activated when a scanning device is run across the skin above it. A tiny transmitter on the chip sends out the data.

Without a scanner, the chip cannot be read. Applied Digital plans to give away chip readers to hospitals and ambulance companies, in the hopes they'll become standard equipment.

The chip has drawn attention from several religious groups.

Theologian and author Terry Cook said he worries the identification chip could be the ``mark of the beast,'' an identifying mark that all people will be forced to wear just before the end times, according to the Bible.

Applied Digital has consulted theologians and appeared on the religious television program the ``700 Club'' to assure viewers the chip didn't fit the biblical description of the mark because it is under the skin and hidden from view.

Even with the privacy and religious concerns, some are already eager to use the product.

Jeff Jacobs in Coral Springs, Florida has contacted the company in hopes of becoming the first person to purchase the chip.

Jacobs suffers from a number of serious allergies and wants to make sure medical personnel can diagnose him.

``They would know who to contact, they would know what medications I'm on, and it's quite a few,'' he said. ``They would know what I'm allergic to, what kind of operations I've had and where there might be problems.''

Applied Digital says technology to let the chip to be used for tracking is already well under development.

Eight Latin American companies have contacted Applied Digital and have openly encouraged the company to pursue the internal tracking devices. In some countries, kidnapping has become an epidemic that limits tourism and business.

-------- death penalty

Inmate's death sentence commuted to life

Around the Nation
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020226-91242669.htm

ATLANTA - After an outcry from advocates for the mentally ill, the Georgia parole board commuted the death sentence yesterday of a killer who is said to be so delusional he believes actress Sigourney Weaver is God.

Alexander Williams' sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole just hours before a stay of execution was to expire at midnight.

Williams, 33, had been facing lethal injection for the 1986 murder of a 16-year-old girl.

The board announced its decision after hearing from a panel of three psychiatrists who examined Williams last week.

-------- terrorism

Blast Near Ministry in Rome Heightens Tensions

By REUTERS
February 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-italy-blast.html

ROME (Reuters) - A small bomb exploded near the Interior Ministry in Rome Tuesday, damaging several vehicles, blowing out windows and ratcheting up tension in a city on edge after the threat of an attack on the U.S. embassy.

The blast occurred at about 4 a.m. on a side street by the ministry, destroying a motor scooter and damaging other cars parked nearby. There were no injuries.

Interior Minister Claudio Scajola called it an assault on state security and the blast sparked a war of words between government figures and opposition groups.

Conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said recent mass demonstrations by leftist opposition groups had heightened political tension.

``(The explosion) is worrying...I think the political tension needs to be lowered,'' Berlusconi told reporters.

The bomb came a week after police arrested four Moroccan men in possession of a tourist map circled with the U.S. embassy, maps of utility tunnels around the diplomatic mission, and a potentially lethal cyanide compound.

A senior source close to that investigation said there was no indication the blast was linked to the embassy probe but Scajola said the attack was very worrying.

``This is a very serious act carried out against the symbol of the state's security and that of its citizens,'' Scajola said, referring to the ministry building.

The blast was heard across the center, shattering windows and sending residents into the streets before police arrived.

POLITICAL WAR OF WORDS

In a country where politically-motivated bombings by the extreme right and extreme left were rife in the 1970s and 1980s, the blast quickly became a political football.

Some government figures suggested the extreme left may have been responsible.

``I see a connection between those who say this is a Fascist government and those who plant bombs,'' Rocco Buttiglione, European Affairs minister, told reporters in Brussels.

The opposition center left bristled at such suggestions.

``Establishing a relation between democratic, peaceful and legitimate protests with what happened last night, as some members of the (ruling) coalition are doing, is unacceptable,'' said Gavino Angius, Senate leader of the Democrats of the Left, the largest opposition party.

He was referring to government criticism of some left-wing demonstrations in recent weeks.

Security officials have been on edge for months with threats made against the U.S. embassy as long ago as January 2001.

Tension rose sharply in the past week following the detention of three Moroccans on suspicion of being part of a terrorist group. Their lawyers say they are innocent and have called for the investigation to be reviewed by a senior judge.

U.S. security experts went down into a utility tunnel to see whether the mission could have come under attack from there.


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- alternative energy

U.S. SUPPORTS ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES IN CZECH REPUBLIC

PLZEN, Czech Republic,
February 26, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2002/2002L-02-26-09.html

The U.S. Trade and Development Agency (TDA) has awarded a $234,500 grant to a heating company in Plzen to help assess a potential waste to energy facility for the city.

Plzenská teplárenská, a.s. will use the money to fund a feasibility study on the proposed facility, which would transform about 120,000 metric tons of municipal solid waste per year into energy. The feasibility study will help assess various technical and financial options for this waste to energy facility.

Plzenská teplárenská is now considering installation of two incinerators to handle its waste capacity. This project will assist the region in complying with new, more stringent Czech Waste Regulations.

Another $123,000 grant will fund a biomass to energy feasibility study by an agricultural company, Druid, a.s. Druid intends to use waste biomass to fuel cogeneration units to generate heat and electricity for its operations.

Frequent power interruptions from an outdated grid now make it difficult for the company to maintain productivity. The feasibility study will assist in selecting an appropriate technology for the pilot project and formulate a strategy for its implementation.

The biomass units would reduce the need for landfills and use of coal as a fuel source, benefiting the environment.

The U.S. Trade and Development Agency helps U.S. companies pursue business opportunities in developing and middle income countries by funding feasibility studies, orientation visits, specialized training grants, business workshops and various forms of technical assistance.

----

Renewables share in German power rises to 7.25 pct

REUTERS GERMANY:
February 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14723/newsDate/26-Feb-2002/story.htm

FRANKFURT - Renewable energy sources contributed 36.25 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in the German power market in 2001, accounting for 7.25 percent of total consumption, electricity body VDEW said yesterday.

So-called eco-power in 2000 had totalled 35.5 billion kWh, which represented 7.1 percent of total power usage in that year, the association said in a statement, citing preliminary estimates.

It also said that 2001 had brought less rain and wind than the previous year.

As a consequence, hydro-power production dropped by nine percent.

But despite that, wind power output was still be up by 21 percent over 2000 because of the rapid pace of new turbines coming on stream.

Biomass and solar power output were also both up on the year before.

VDEW gave the following breakdown for estimated eco-power output totals -.

PRODUCTION (in billion kWh) 2001 2000
Hydro-power 19.8 21.7
Wind power 11.5 9.5
Bio mass power 4.9 4.3
Solar power 0.05 0.03
TOTAL 36.25 35.53.

-------- energy

Bush Touts Hybrid-Fuel Cars for His Energy Plan

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1654-2002Feb25?language=printer

Some people put politicians in the same category as car salesmen. Yesterday, they became one and the same.

President Bush emerged from the White House yesterday morning to view three shiny new vehicles lined up in the driveway: a tan GMC pickup, a red Ford SUV and a white Chrysler minivan. He looked under the hoods. He poked his head into the cabins. Checked out the engines. Everything but kick the tires.

"Today we had a chance to see some of the best new technologies being developed by American ingenuity," the president announced after examining the futuristic hybrid-fuel models. "I was told by the representatives of the manufacturing companies that more and more hybrid cars will be available in the marketplace next year, and this is good news."

On the eve of Senate debate on competing energy proposals, Bush touted the hybrid vehicles as a way to demonstrate the conservationist elements in his plan, which opponents say emphasizes energy production too much. He noted that he favors $3 billion in tax credits for those who buy hybrid or fuel-cell vehicles over the next 11 years.

The South Lawn showroom event completed a turnaround for Bush, who ridiculed Al Gore during the presidential campaign for proposing tax credits targeted to those who buy hybrid vehicles.

"How many of you own hybrid electric gasoline engine vehicles?" Bush often asked to laughter, telling the crowd it did not qualify for Gore's "target."

Democrats mocked Bush's change of heart yesterday. "Once again, we see that George W. Bush is a man of his most recent word," Democratic National Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Japanese carmakers, which already have hybrid cars on the streets, were angry that the White House included only the Big Three, who will not have hybrid cars available until model year 2004 at the earliest.

"I don't know what the president was so impressed for -- he could have driven one of ours," said Honda North America Vice President Edward Cohen.

Honda has a two-seat hybrid out now and a hybrid Honda Civic coming out in May. "We made inquiries about bringing our cars over there but nobody called us back," he said.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, in his morning briefing, touted the American vehicles' capabilities.

"The Chevy Silverado GMC hybrid truck, which combines an electric motor and a conventional V-8 engine," he said. "There's a Ford Escape HEV hybrid electric vehicle, which combines an electric motor and fuel-efficient gas engine, and has acceleration similar to a 200-horsepower engine while getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon in stop-and-go driving.

"And there's also a Chrysler Town and Country Atrium, which is a hybrid fuel-cell minivan and produces no tailpipe emissions, and contributes no carbon dioxide, no carbon monoxide, no hydrocarbons to the environment."

Transportation for the future was also on the mind of a group of governors who visited the White House yesterday afternoon, during a meeting of the National Governors Association.

Kentucky Gov. Paul E. Patton (D), the NGA's vice chairman, gave Bush an earful about states' needs for more highway funds.

"Due to some unusual and unanticipated circumstances, the funding level as mandated under the law right now would result in a 27 percent cut in the level of funding for our transportation program," Patton said. "Having been a governor, you know how important transportation issues are. So, to the staff, please take note of this position of the governors."

The dispute over highway funding stems from changes pressed by the governors and enacted in 1998. The governors had objected that money was building up in the trust fund rather than being spent. They won approval of guaranteed appropriations for highways, based on estimates of how much the trust fund will accumulate.

Because of the recession, declining sales of gasoline and other factors, the money available in fiscal 2002 will be $8.6 billion lower than in fiscal 2001, a 27 percent reduction. An NGA background paper estimates that more than 360,000 construction jobs could be affected.

The session at the White House prompted some private grumbling from the governors.

White House officials switched the meeting, which for years has been held in the morning, to midafternoon and, citing security, dispensed with the tradition of allowing governors to fan out on the White House grounds afterward to meet with reporters from their states. Some governors complained the new arrangement made it easier for the White House to control accounts of the meeting.

In between highway-money pleas and hybrid-fuel pitches, the president retired to the Oval Office, where New York Gov. George Pataki (R) presented him with the bullhorn Bush used to rally rescue workers at the World Trade Center on Sept. 14. "It's really an historic memento," Bush remarked.

Bush aides had said the bullhorn was lost. New York Times reporter Frank Bruni, in his just-published book about Bush, wrote that the president's aides tried "fruitlessly" to find the bullhorn. Two weeks ago, Bruni said, he was told it still had not been found.

Asked about the sudden appearance of the bullhorn yesterday, Bush replied, "The colonel found it," referring to a New York state trooper in the room. "It's the actual one."

Staff writer Dan Balz contributed to this report.

-------- health

About 900,000 Americans have HIV, government says

By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent
Tuesday February 26, 4:57 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91487.html

WASHINGTON - About 900,000 Americans are infected with the AIDS virus, and a quarter of them do not know it, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.

Another 25 percent are not getting any kind of care for their disease, the CDC told an AIDS conference. That means more than 400,000 people are going untreated for HIV, and may be spreading it through unprotected sex or shared needles.

"We estimate that roughly half of all people living with HIV either don't know that they are infected, or they are not in care, or both," Dr. Harold Jaffe, acting director of the National Center for HIV, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis Prevention at the CDC, told reporters.

The United States does not keep national records on who has HIV and AIDS, so the CDC used computer programs and information available from 25 states that do keep track to make its projections.

The data suggest that 50,000 more people are living with HIV or AIDS than two years ago, the CDC's Dr. Pat Fleming told the Ninth Annual Conference on Retroviruses in Seattle.

"That then gives us an estimated total of between 850,000 and 950,000 currently living in the United States with HIV infection," Jaffe said.

The CDC reports 40,000 more people are being infected with HIV every year. It said 17,200 died from AIDS in 1999 and 15,300 in 2000. AIDS is the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.

This is a small number compared to the global epidemic. Worldwide 3 million people die of AIDS every year and 40 million are infected -- most of then in Africa.

More people are alive with HIV in industrialized countries than ever before because of good drug treatments that do not cure the disease but that can keep it at bay.

But far too few in the United States are getting these drugs, Jaffe said.

RAPID TESTS

"A major part of what we are trying to do at CDC is to get people tested," he said, adding that the agency was starting a new public information drive to educate people about testing.

He said a big help would be approval of rapid tests that would allow people to get a one-stop answer to whether they are infected, instead of having to come or call back into a clinic to find out the results of a blood test.

Several are being considered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Jaffe said he hoped they would be approved soon. "I am not making any accusations," he said.

Dr. Constance Benson of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who heads the scientific committee of the meeting, said she has seen people's penchant to be tested wax and wane.

"Some of the trends that we observed in treatment have made an influence on the willingness of individuals to be tested," she said. In other words, people get tested if they feel there is hope but see no point in testing if they feel they will die regardless.

"One of the things we noticed, at least in many areas of the country -- the overall swings in optimism or pessimism in therapy have had influences on patients wanting to come into care and wanting to get tested."

But now people are hearing about some of the adverse effects of treatment, such as high blood cholesterol, diabetes and osteoporosis.

"That really resulted in people feeling maybe they don't want to be on therapy and there is no reason to be tested," Benson said.

----

New AIDS Drugs Might Help Against Resistance

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1734-2002Feb25?language=printer

SEATTLE, Feb. 25 -- A new generation of drugs to fight the AIDS virus is showing promise in early testing, researchers reported today.

Scientists attending the 9th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections -- the annual mid-winter U.S. AIDS meeting -- heard about developments in three new classes of HIV medicines, and about potent new members of one of the existing classes of drugs.

"It is a phase of accelerated development that's likely to keep pace with the current problem of drug resistance" in AIDS viruses carried by patients, said Brian Gazzard, a physician at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. "After a lull for two or three years, the sort of data we're seeing is very exciting."

There are 15 drugs on the market that inhibit replication of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) -- the essential strategy for slowing or stopping the disease's progression. All work by attacking two of the three enzymes -- known as reverse transcriptase or protease -- that HIV employs inside a human cell. The new compounds -- some not yet tested in people -- either target the third enzyme, called integrase, or seek to stop HIV before it even enters the cell.

In themselves, the new compounds don't appear markedly different from their predecessors. HIV can also mutate into forms that resists their action, for example. Their importance stems from the fact that they may offer alternatives to people who have run through the existing antiretroviral drugs.

Although there are no good studies quantifying the extent of the drug resistance problem, AIDS specialists say that 30 percent to 40 percent of their patients eventually need to change one of their medicines because of resistance. Antiretroviral drugs are rarely prescribed alone, but usually in combinations of three or more drugs.

One of the new substances, being developed by the pharmaceutical firm Schering-Plough Corp., attaches to the CCR5 receptor, one of two parts of the docking bay that HIV uses to land on (and eventually pierce) cells of the human immune system. It was tried in 12 people with moderately advanced HIV infection who were taking no other drugs.

The patients began with, on average, 40,000 viruses per milliliter of blood. The compound, called SCH C, reduced the amount of bloodstream virus by 68 percent in 10 of the 12 people, and by 90 percent in 4 of them.

Earlier in development is a substance called BMS-806, which interferes with the virus's ability to attach to the other part of the docking bay, known as the CD4 receptor, on immune system cells. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. researchers screened more than 100,000 compounds to find one with this particular action; the compound blocks gp120, a part of the HIV "envelope" that attaches to the CD4 receptor. It's the first drug candidate to target that step.

In test-tube studies it was active against a wide variety of AIDS viruses. Human tests probably will start sometime this year, said Richard Colonno, a company researcher.

The third new class of drugs described today is an "integrase inhibitor" being developed by Shionogi & Co., a Japanese pharmaceutical company. (Integrase is the enzyme that stitches HIV's genes into the human cell's genes, making the infection permanent.) It was highly active against strains of HIV that were resistant to reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitor drugs -- in other words, all the ones now available.

The compound, called S-1360, was well tolerated by rats and dogs. A small study in human beings is underway.

Researchers here also heard about the early success of a drug specifically designed to avoid resistance problems encountered by nevirapine and efavirenz, the two existing members in its class of drugs, known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors.

TMC125, made by the Belgian company Tibotec Inc., appears to have an unusually powerful effect on HIV replication. In 12 patients it reduced the amount of circulating virus by nearly 99 percent when given alone for one week. This was equivalent to the reduction seen several years ago in a study of a combination of five drugs.

TMC125 will never be used alone because many antiretroviral drugs are extremely powerful at first, only to be rendered near-useless in weeks as the virus mutates.

Exactly how many AIDS patients in the United States and other wealthy countries are now dying because they exhaust all existing antiretroviral options is uncertain. Reports from academic AIDS clinics suggest the number is small.

At the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, the annual death rate of HIV patients under care has fallen from 13 percent in 1995 to 2.4 percent in 2000, said Robert Schooley, an AIDS physician there. Furthermore, half the people who died in 2000 succumbed to non-AIDS illnesses or trauma.

In an unrelated presentation yesterday, Patricia Fleming, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the estimate of the number of people living with HIV infection in the United States is 850,000 to 950,000. That's 50,000 people higher than the estimate made in 1998. Fleming said longer survival, not a rising number of new infections, is the reason for the higher number.

----

U.S. Decides Not to Expand Key Study of AIDS Vaccine

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1727-2002Feb25?language=printer

The federal government has decided not to expand a closely watched AIDS vaccine study because the vaccine has fallen short of prompting a key immune system response in volunteers, health officials said yesterday.

The AIDS vaccine regimen, one of many at various stages of testing in the United States and abroad, involves an initial "primer" shot made by Aventis Pasteur followed by a "booster" vaccine made by VaxGen of Brisbane, Calif.

Researchers had hoped that the federally funded study would shed light on which components of the immune system are most effective at fighting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. But results to date indicate that by one key measure, at least, the vaccine is not potent enough to answer that question, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has been funding the study.

That does not mean the U.S. government has lost faith in the vaccine combination, Fauci and others said. A nearly identical regimen, with components made by the same two companies, has a good chance of being expanded into a large-scale, federally funded test in Thailand next year, health officials said yesterday.

That vaccine combination was already under study by the Department of Defense. The program is to be shifted to the National Institutes of Health as part of a large-scale transfer of AIDS vaccine research from the military to the civilian sector.

The reorganization, ordered last month by the Office of Management and Budget, calls for oversight and administration of the Defense Department's AIDS research and development program to be transferred to the NIH from its current location in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. The move effectively consolidates within the NIH all federal AIDS vaccine research, which until now has been conducted by NIH and the Defense Department on two parallel -- and according to some critics, sometimes redundant -- tracks.

Despite years of research, scientists do not know which component of the immune system is best able to kill HIV -- information that could help them design more effective vaccines. The "prime-boost" vaccine study known to the AIDS community as HVTN 203 had sought to answer that question but now appears unlikely to do so, Fauci said, because the study design had counted on a more robust effect than has been seen in volunteers.

But a differently designed study with a similar vaccine has a good chance of being expanded to include large numbers of volunteers in Thailand, Fauci said. That study seeks to answer a simpler question -- "Does the vaccine help prevent HIV infection?" -- without trying to settle the question of how it may be providing that protection.

A large study of the VaxGen vaccine by itself is already underway in Thailand.


-------- ACTIVISTS

Doomsday Clock to Be Change

The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9224-2002Feb27.html

CHICAGO -- The hands of the symbolic Doomsday Clock that gauges the threat of nuclear danger are moving for the first time in nearly four years as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the turmoil that followed.

The board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which oversees the clock's movements, scheduled a news conference Wednesday to reset the clock. The clock's time, reflecting the state of international security, had remained unchanged since 1998.

At that time, the hands of the clock were moved forward to nine minutes to midnight after India and Pakistan conducted tests of nuclear weapons.

Bulletin spokesman Steve Koppes would not say Tuesday if the clock was to be set closer to midnight, which symbolizes a greater threat of a nuclear disaster.

The board started meeting in November to consider the issue, Koppes said. But it did not reach a decision until recently "because of the uncertain nature of what is going on in the world," he said.

Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin, has said the clock was not reset after previous terrorist acts "because those events did not alter the global security landscape."

But that has changed, he said. "If al-Qaida got its hands on nuclear weapons it would have little compunction on using them. It is no longer an issue to worry about in the abstract," Schwartz said.

Also, since the attacks, the situation in Afghanistan and neighboring countries has become that much more volatile.

The clock at the University of Chicago was started at 11:53 p.m. in 1947, two years after the bulletin began as a newsletter among scientists of the Manhattan Project - the top-secret U.S effort during World War II to develop an atomic bomb.

Since then the clock has moved to within two minutes of midnight and as far away as 17 minutes.

Doomsday Clock: http://www.thebulletin.org/clock.html

----

Cuban dissidents blocked from rite

Briefly, February 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020226-847056.htm

HAVANA - A score of Cuban dissidents were arrested Sunday for trying to commemorate the 1996 shoot-down of four Cuban exile pilots.

"There were around 20 arrests in Havana, most for a few hours, though four people remain in jail," Elizardo Sanchez of the dissident Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation said Sunday night.

About a dozen people were picked up in the morning as they tried to reach a beach in the Miramar district to throw flowers in the sea, Mr. Sanchez added.

----

End the Cuban embargo

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,
February 26, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020226-2162836.htm#2

Paul Greenberg's Feb. 20 Commentary column "Trading with the enemy" exemplifies the problem with conservatism today - and the reason young people like myself are increasingly reluctant to align themselves with the Republican Party.

It's one thing to listen to someone moralize, but it's wholly another to hear a moralizer promoting a position that is inherently immoral. In defending the Cuban embargo, Mr. Greenberg employs the old "we'll save the Cubans from Castro" rhetoric. In fact, the Cuban populace's poverty is caused partly by the embargo, or at least that is how Mr. Castro is able to portray it to the Cuban people. All the embargo does is direct the Cuban people's anguish, the product of Mr. Castro's failed economic system, back at the "Colossus to the North." What is far too often overlooked is the purpose of economic embargoes generally: to make the people of the target country so miserable that they overthrow the undesirable regime. Mr. Castro has not been hurt in any way by decades of sanctions, but the Cuban people are starving. This is very shaky moral ground indeed.

Mr. Greenberg's interpretation of history is also flawed. Apartheid in South Africa ended partly because of multilateral sanctions, not American unilateral ones. Unilateral sanctions are utterly pointless, as experience has proved time and again. I thought that conservatives were supposed to believe in the beauty of capitalism: that industry finds a way.

Until the Jesse Helmses, Dan Burtons, and Paul Greenbergs of the world wake up and realize that the Cold War is over, people like me will take their votes elsewhere.

JUSTIN LOGAN
Chevy Chase

----

Ecuador jungle provinces in emergency over protests

REUTERS ECUADOR:
February 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14721/newsDate/26-Feb-2002/story.htm

QUITO - Ecuador's President Gustavo Noboa decreed a state of emergency in two Amazon jungle provinces where protesters have blocked work on a $1.1 billion oil pipeline, a statement said.

The action is aimed at opening routes for supplies and allowing work on the pipeline to continue.

The move lets the government deploy troops and limit public meetings in oil-rich Sucumbios and Orellana provinces near Colombia's border, whose residents are protesting to seek more development funds from the company building the pipeline.

It follows Noboa's decision last week to declare Sucumbios - a poor province used as a safe-haven by Colombian rebels - in emergency to prepare for possible spillover from the breakdown of peace talks in Colombia.

Roads have been blocked in Sucumbios about 113 miles (180 km) east of Quito since Monday, halting area construction of a crude pipeline that is expected to more than double the country's oil output and buoy the economy.

The protests "are putting the population's security and property at risk, creating a serious internal commotion," said the decree, which was dated Friday and made public on the weekend.

"Halting the construction of the heavy crude pipeline affects the economy and the nation's development," it gave as another reason for the emergency.

Several local politicians and residents are leading protests to push pipeline builder OCP Ecuador SA to hand over more development funds for Amazon towns and villages where the duct will run.

OCP says it already signed an agreement with local authorities on development funds last year.

Demonstrations so far have remained peaceful but have blocked off a key highway linking Sucumbios with Ecuador's capital in the Andean highlands, making transport difficult and some goods scarce.

"It is affecting us. There's no traffic and it's been six days now that products can't come in," Sucumbios' provincial governor Victor Velasco told Reuters via telephone.

Ecuador bolstered border patrols in Sucumbios this week and is preparing for a potential influx of Colombian refugees since Bogota halted peace talks with its biggest guerrilla group and took back a former rebel enclave.


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