------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Hands of 'Doomsday Clock' Reset Toward Danger
Doomsday Clock Moved Ahead
Hidden Wrecks: Nuclear Ship Below
Tokyo, Seoul Play Down Bush Rebuke of N. Korea
Tenex agrees to uranium pricing
Harry Polachek, 88; Math, Computer Authority
Northrop: Bond Rating Is Priority
China Says Next Move in Arms Talks Is Up to U.S.
Beijing to negotiate on weapons control
Henry Kissinger's Secret Trip to China
Pentagon Sees Sample Rocket by '04
Russian court strikes down decision to allow nuclear waste imports
Report Faults Security of Russian Arsenal
More Nuclear Security Steps
Transmission problem triggers San Diego blackouts
What Isn't in a Name? 'Nuclear'
Piketon plant has leaked radiation for decades, study says
Time to end embargo against Cuba

MILITARY
Afghan Witnesses Say G.I.'s Were Duped in Raid on Allies
Protesters clash as tension mounts in Madagascar
Belgium Seeks Arms Dealer With Suspected Qaeda Ties
Cuba accuses US of dozens of "biological attacks"
Britain irritated by Rumsfeld's prisoner comment
Bogota ends plan to swap captives
Rebels Go on Killing Rampage
Colombia Claims Coca Crop Decline
Ex-Afghan warlord disappears from Tehran
U.S. meets groups opposing Saddam
U.S. Action Against Iraq in Next Six Months Unlikely
Bush Welcomes Saudi Proposal on Mideast Peace
NATO's overtures to Moscow
Musharraf cites radicals for Pakistan mosque attack
Security tightened as Pakistan mosque victims buried
Russia slams U.S. plan to send troops to Georgia
Lebanon arrests three suspected of spying for Israel
Bush to Nominate Helgerson CIA Inspector General
U.S. Seeks to Extend Ban on Cloning
Rumsfeld shuts down OSI
Rumsfeld Kills Pentagon Propaganda Unit
Pentagon abandons public sentiment idea
Rumsfeld takes dim view of U.S. peacekeeping role
U.S. May Send G.I.'s to Ex-Soviet Area in Training Mission
Marines, Special Operations Command Increase Ties

POLICE / PRISONERS
Hack a PC, Get Life in Jail
FEMA's anti-terrorism role hearing
Ashcroft: Terror top budget factor
Arabs want Guantanamo prisoners back
Salt Lake blast caused by bomb?
Police Gunfire In D.C. Worsens
Man faces charges in alien smuggling
Congressman Wants FBI Records
Pakistan to seek death for Pearl's killers
Ga. Won't Seek Ex - Sheriff Execution
Investigators Show That U.S. Embassy Is Vulnerable

ENERGY AND OTHER
Court Tells Energy Dept to Produce Documents
U.S. reliance on Iraqi oil grows despite "evil" tag
Oil Executives Lobbied on Drilling
Lead Levels High Near Mo. Smelter
Looking Again at Mammograms
With AIDS Therapy, Timing Can Be Vital
Elderly Christians threatened with ouster
Community Leaders Call .. Not to Buy World Bank Bonds
Journalists On Radio In Russia To Resign
A 'Damaged' Information Office Is Declared Closed by Rumsfeld


ACTIVISTS
The Great Deception: Elusive Enemy, Endless War

-------- NUCLEAR

Hands of 'Doomsday Clock' Reset Toward Danger

By REUTERS
February 27, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-nuclear-clock.html

CHICAGO - The keepers of the ``Doomsday Clock'' on Wednesday advanced its hands nearer to the midnight hour symbolizing nuclear weapons conflict, its closest since the Cold War's end, citing worries over lagging disarmament efforts, the security of existing stockpiles and terrorism.

The directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine that has campaigned for nuclear disarmament since 1947, pushed the hands forward by two minutes, to seven minutes to midnight.

It is the closest to midnight that the clock has been positioned since the end of the Cold War, but not as close as the record danger position -- two minutes to midnight -- in 1953 when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb.

``Despite a campaign promise to rethink nuclear policy, the Bush administration has taken no significant steps to alter nuclear targeting policies or reduce the alert status of U.S. nuclear forces,'' said George Lopez, chairman of the Bulletin's Board of Directors.

``Meanwhile, domestic weapons laboratories continue working to refine existing warheads and design new weapons, with an emphasis on the ability to destroy deeply buried targets,'' he said.

Lopez said the directors also were ``deeply concerned that the international community appears to have ignored the wake-up call of Sept. 11. Terrorist efforts to acquire and use nuclear and biological weapons present a grave danger. But the U.S. preference for the use of preemptive force rather than diplomacy could be equally dangerous.''

The announcement cited what it said was a continuing U.S. preference for unilateral rather than cooperative action, and its efforts to impede international agreements designed to limit the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

It criticized U.S. plans to walk away from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in June, and its refusal to participate in talks regarding implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

It also cited a general lack of progress on nuclear disarmament, growing concern about the security of nuclear weapons materials worldwide, and the crisis between nuclear-capable neighbors India and Pakistan. It said more than 31,000 nuclear weapons still are maintained by the eight known nuclear powers, a decrease of only 3,000 since 1998.

The new seven-minute mark is the same position at which the clock was set when it began appearing on the cover of the magazine in 1947. In addition to the magazine cover, the publication keeps an actual clock at its offices, and it repositioned those hands on Wednesday.

The hands last were moved in June 1998, from 14 minutes to nine minutes to midnight. The clock has been reset 16 times previously. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the minute hand was pushed back to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991, completely out of the final 15-minute danger zone.

---

Doomsday Clock Moved Ahead

Wed Feb 27
By F.N. D'ALESSIO
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020227/ap_on_re_us/doomsday_clock_5

CHICAGO (AP) - The hands of the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of the threat of nuclear annihilation, were moved for the first time in nearly four years Wednesday because of the Sept. 11 attacks, increasing tension between India and Pakistan and other threats.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which keeps the clock, set the hands at 11:53, two minutes ahead of the time it has had since 1998.

Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin, said the board originally defined "midnight" as nuclear war. In recent years, however, it has been redefined as the use of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth, he said.

It was the 17th time the clock has been reset since it debuted in 1947 at the same position it was set to Wednesday.

George A. Lopez, the publication's chairman of the board, said it has never been moved in response to a single event.

The Sept. 11 attacks combined with evidence that terrorists were attempting to obtain the materials for a crude nuclear weapon should have served as a wake-up call to the world. He said the world has focused on short-term security rather than solving long-term problems.

"The international community simply hit the snooze button rather than raising the general alarm," Lopez said.

He said such factors as the concern about the security of nuclear weapons materials stockpiled around the world and the crisis between nuclear powers India and Pakistan also figured into the decision.

The board started meeting in November, Bulletin spokesman Steve Koppes said, but did not reach a decision until recently "because of the uncertain nature of what is going on in the world."

The clock is a 11/2-foot-square wooden mock-up in the magazine's office at the University of Chicago. It was started 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.

It came closest to midnight - just two minutes away - in 1953, after the United States successfully tested the hydrogen bomb. It has been as far away as 17 minutes, set there in 1991 in a wave of post- Cold-War optimism.

Doomsday Clock: http://www.thebulletin.org/clock.html

-------- accidents

Hidden Wrecks: Nuclear Ship Below

By KPIX - Ken Bastida
Wednesday February 27
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/kpix/20020227/lo/2579_1.html

For the past few weeks, efforts have been made to stop oil leaks from a sunken ship just off the Golden Gate.

But there other dangerous wrecks off our coast, including one where the problem isn't oil, but radiation.

Nuclear tests on a remote island in the South Pacific helped establish America's military might after World War II.

But the experiments also contaminated dozens of ships with highly radioactive fallout, including one that ended its life here in the Bay Area: The USS Independence.

Kart Herman of the USGS (news - web sites): "It was one of small carriers used in the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test, When it was brought here it was too hot to decontaminate."

Despite that contamination the Navy decided to scuttle the Independence, in waters near the Farallon Islands.

Sailors were still allowed on board the radioactive carrier, just before it was sent to the bottom in 1951.

And the Independence wasn't the only radioactive dumping the government engaged in. Over the next several decades they also sunk thousands of barrels of low-level nuclear waste in the same area.

Several years ago, the USGS was able to photograph some of them with an underwater camera. They also used sonar to map the area. And turned up another tantalizing clue.

A ship that Herman Karl believes could be the Independence.

"We saw features we knew weren't geological, we saw one big object with one could interpret is the Independence.... What you'd have to do is go down with camera system that's submersible."

And now, there may be renewed interest in taking a closer look at the Independence, and those barrels of nuclear waste, because we've recently gotten a first hand lesson in what decades of rust and rough seas can do.

This month, a mysterious oil leak was traced to another rusting wreck, just a few miles away.

And if oil can cause this kind of environmental damage, how concerned should we be about radiation?

Ed Ueber is director of the Gulf of the Farallons Sanctuary: "Should we be zeroing in? Yes. We should have a much better feel because of the episodic nature. What radioactive levels could be if something decays."

Herman Karl adds, "We don't know anything about radioactivity of the vessel. Nobody since it's been scuttled has measured radiation around the vessel."

And the technology is here.

Companies like Deep Ocean Engineering -- which is being contracted to work on the leaking oil tanker -- routinely reach wrecks in water as deep as the Independence. Waters that are also home to some of the most diverse marine life on the West Coast.

But is the risk enough to warrant the expense of a new dive?

Karl: "We can certainly locate and identify these vessels, that's easy enough to do.... It really depends on how much interest there is from the public.

And that interest could build, if the potential danger off our coast becomes even more apparent.

For more Bay Area news and information, visit the PIX Page at kpix.com.

-------- asia

Tokyo, Seoul Play Down Bush Rebuke of N. Korea

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7877-2002Feb26?language=printer

TOKYO, Feb. 26 -- Japan and South Korea are trying to minimize the rift that they see left behind by President Bush's harsh rhetoric toward North Korea during his trip to Asia last week.

Analysts here say Bush's comments, in which he castigated the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, and repeated his judgment that the government is "evil," have further impaired prospects of renewed cooperation by Pyongyang.

North Korea has reacted angrily to Bush's statements, calling the U.S. president the "kingpin of terrorism" and describing his trip a "war junket."

But officials in Tokyo and Seoul have seized upon the invitation repeated by Bush to hold talks with Pyongyang as evidence the U.S. administration is less antagonistic toward North Korea than the president's words suggest.

A spokesman for the presidential Blue House in Seoul said Bush's assurance that the United States does not intend to invade North Korea is "a big help in dispelling our worries."

A spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry said today that Tokyo has "a sincere hope dialogue will be resumed" between the United States and North Korea.

But President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea acknowledged Monday that Bush's stance had increased tensions to a "critical" point. After the president's State of the Union address on Jan. 29 labeling North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil," Kim said, "We had faced a critical moment. North Korea must have felt a great threat after President Bush's axis of evil remarks."

"A war can break out if two parties reject each other," Kim told a group of government and civic leaders in Seoul.

Seoul, whose residents make up nearly half the population of South Korea, is 34 miles from the border with North Korea and a vulnerable missile target if war were to break out. Bush's tough tone toward North Korea produced anti-American demonstrations in Seoul by protesters who support Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy" of seeking reconciliation with the North.

Howard H. Baker Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Japan, met with Japanese and American reporters this week to promote a positive view of the president's Asian trip.

"I think clearly he got their attention," Baker said today of Bush's remarks on North Korea. "I think they're thinking about it. They don't like it, but I think they're thinking about it. They may be on the brink of deciding well, you know, we're about to mess up again and we're about to lose what we thought we had advanced. I think he'll make them focus on the importance of addressing these issues. I think the president realized his objective."

The North Korean reaction came not only from the usual voice, the Korean Central News Agency, but also in a weightier statement from the Foreign Ministry. The statement, issued as Bush ended his trip, complained that the president's comments were "an insult to the national feelings of the Korean people" and "outrageously slandered" the country.

Bush, in remarks before and during his visit to Seoul last Wednesday, called the North Korean government "despotic," repeated his demands that Pyongyang pull back its weapons from the border, criticized Kim Jong Il as a man without "a good heart," and -- after peering through bulletproof glass toward the North, where a museum holds axes used to kill two U.S. servicemen 25 years ago -- mused, "No wonder I think they're evil."

Despite Bush's insistence that he is open to talks with Pyongyang and supports Kim Dae Jung's conciliatory efforts, his remarks were an embarrassing setback to the policies that won the South Korean president a Nobel Peace Prize.

Critics of Bush say he has ensured there will be little progress by personally criticizing Kim Jong Il, an affront to a country that has little except its swollen pride.

Former president Jimmy Carter called Bush's approach "overly simplistic and counterproductive." In Atlanta last week, Carter said, "I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement."

Commentaries in the press here have generally agreed. "The Bush administration is trying to play the role of 'bad cop,' " foreign affairs columnist Yoichi Funabashi wrote in the daily Asahi Shimbun. "But America's allies will not follow a United States which takes the law into its own hands as the guardian of virtue in controlling evil."

Bush "says he is willing to talk to the North, but he is not willing to make it a priority," said Ji Yeon Yuh, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., writing in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper. "When Bush labeled North Korea part of an axis of evil, he heightened the potential for military conflict. The losers in any such conflict would be the Korean people."

"If the North turns a deaf ear to dialogue proposals, it would be all but impossible to predict what actions President Bush will take," said Sah Dong Seok, political editor of the Korea Times in Seoul.

Baker, while playing down the threat posed by the Bush administration, acknowledged that he worried about miscalculation.

"Usually great conflicts start by accident, and I fear that there is some sort of enormous military strength in North Korea," Baker said today while meeting reporters. "You've got an unstable domestic situation there. You've got uncertain leadership there. That is the most dangerous part of the relationship."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

-------- business

Tenex agrees to uranium pricing

ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/20020227-15032512.htm

Russian and U.S. officials reached a breakthrough in a pricing dispute over uranium shipments to the United States that had threatened to disrupt both fuel supplies to nuclear power plants and a program to scrap Soviet missiles, the State Department said.

The accord with USEC Inc. of Bethesda, the largest supplier of enriched uranium to nuclear plants, needs the approval of the U.S. and Russian governments, State Department spokeswoman Brenda Greenberg said. It allows for a continuation of the Russian uranium shipments, which faced suspension.

The state-owned Russian company Tekhsnabexport, or Tenex, felt pressure to accept lower prices demanded by USEC because the U.S. government said it would allow no other buyers of the uranium, said Thomas Neff, a researcher who proposed the method for reusing old Soviet nuclear bombs in 1991.

"This story is far from over," said Mr. Neff, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist. "The big hurdle is the Russian government," which previously rejected the prices that Tenex has now agreed to accept from USEC.

The pricing dispute disrupted a 1993 agreement under which Russia promised to sell weapons-grade uranium from dismantled nuclear warheads to USEC. It also endangered the supply of fuel to U.S. commercial nuclear power plants, which provide about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.

USEC has been seeking discounts from Russia to help it remain profitable. Spun off as a private company in 1998, it last month lowered its 2002 earnings forecast after reporting that profits last year dropped 60 percent to $41 million.

USEC supplies about 32 percent of the global market for enriched uranium used in commercial nuclear power plants. It obtains most of that uranium from old U.S. and Russian weapons. It has only one remaining generation plant, in Paducah, Ky., for producing new uranium fuel.

The proposed new pricing agreement would cover the remaining years, through 2013, of a U.S.-Russia agreement for destroying Soviet nuclear missiles.

The State Department is not releasing details of the pricing agreement while the United States and Russia study whether to approve it, Ms. Greenberg said.

An industry newsletter published by the Ux Consulting Co. LLC, an affiliate of the Uranium Exchange Co., described USEC as winning prices more than 20 percent below market levels.

The agreed price is based on a formula that averages seven U.S. and foreign price indicators for three years preceding the delivery year, with an additional discount of about 12 percent, according to the newsletter, Ux Weekly.

Under the proposed agreement, Ux Weekly said, the price this year would remain around last year's price of $90 per "separative work unit," or SWU, which is used to measure enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. The price in 2003 would then drop to about $77, $30 below the current U.S. market price of $107.

A typical 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor consumes about 100,000 to 120,000 SWU a year. USEC's annual sales are about 11 million SWU.

The agreement would provide USEC an annual profit margin of $120 million to $220 million a year, Mr. Neff said.

"Tenex gave in because they had no choice," he said.

USEC spokesman Charles Yulish said he could not comment.

----

Harry Polachek, 88; Math, Computer Authority

Washington Post
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7994-2002Feb26?language=printer

Harry Polachek, 88, who had been a civilian mathematician and computer expert with the Navy and later with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1941 to 1972, died of a heart attack Feb. 23 at his home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

In the 1950s, he helped establish the Navy's Applied Mathematics Laboratory using some of the first commercially available computers. His career touched on everything from nuclear reactor design to the computerization of shipping lines.

Dr. Polachek was born in Poland and moved to New York in the 1920s.

He received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Yeshiva University. He received a doctorate degree in mathematics from Columbia University. He also was ordained a rabbi from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

He taught math in New York before moving to the Washington area in 1941.

During World War II, he was a mathematician at the Navy's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and later at the Bureau of Ordnance. He was chief of numerical analysis at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and, later, technical director of the Applied Mathematics Lab. He was a computer consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission from 1965 until retiring in 1972.

He received the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1961 for his work at the laboratory. The citation read, "Dr. Polachek's skill and ingenuity have made possible the rapid solution of extraordinarily complex problems through the unique exploitation of computer capability."

--------

Northrop: Bond Rating Is Priority

February 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Northrop-Grumman-TRW.html

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Northrop Grumman Corp. (news/quote) Chairman Kent Kresa said he would work to maintain the company's investment grade bond rating after a proposed merger with TRW Inc. (news/quote), even if it means selling other parts of the company to reduce debt.

Kresa, speaking to an industry conference in New York on Wednesday, also said the combined companies would save at least $80 million by consolidating the headquarters.

TRW has headquarters in Cleveland, while Northrop Grumman is based in Los Angeles.

Moody's (news/quote) Investor Service last week warned it might cut Northrop Grumman's bond rating to ``junk'' status as a result of the TRW acquisition. Northrop has offered to buy TRW for $5.9 billion. It also would acquire about $5.5 billion of TRW debt.

Kresa said much of the debt would be shifted to the automotive part of TRW's business, which would either be spun off into a separate company or sold outright after a merger.

About 60 percent of TRW's business is in automotive products. The remaining is in high-tech defense products, including missile and satellite systems.

Kresa said that after the merger and the sale of the automotive business, Northrop's debt-to-equity ratio would be under 40 percent.

``We will remain investment grade,'' Kresa said. ``We have other ways of doing that, other properties we can sell off.''

Northrop is still waiting for a response to its unsolicited bid for TRW. The company had given TRW until the end of business Wednesday to respond, but TRW has asked for more time to consider the offer.

-------- china

China Says Next Move in Arms Talks Is Up to U.S.

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/asia/27CHIN.html

BEIJING, Feb. 26 - The United States 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 Chinese transfers of missile parts and know-how to countries that include Pakistan and Iran.

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

His remarks helped explain why a long-sought final accord on curbing missile proliferation remained elusive last week.

The official declined to specify what China expected the United States to do before China followed 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 launching of American satellites. Officials here also demand that the United States end punitive measures against a Chinese arms company that China says were unfairly applied.

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

Chinese launching of American satellites was suspended during the Clinton administration because of concerns about the transfer of technological secrets. Mr. Bush would find it politically difficult to allow resumption of that business without strong new anti-proliferation measures from China.

In the accord in November 2000 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 rein in its increasingly free- wheeling arms companies. To American chagrin, the rules and list have still not been issued.

In an 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, Mr. 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, would visit the United States for the first time in late April and that President Jiang Zemin would visit in October.

But the official also cautioned that tensions over Taiwan would rise if the United States did not temper its arms sales to the island, which China considers a renegade part of the motherland.

Today, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, warned in a news conference that Taiwan authorities would "eat their own bitter fruit" if they continued with what he called a push toward "incremental independence."

China 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. China says such a visit would breach the American commitment to shun official contacts with Taiwan; the Bush administration has not announced whether it will grant 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 China shared the American interest in curbing proliferation of weapons, and would 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 reportedly 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 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.

----

Beijing to negotiate on weapons control

By Joe McDonald
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020227-17866826.htm

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

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 the 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. Mr. Hu's itinerary is under discussion, though he is expected to visit other cities in addition to Washington. Mr. 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 September 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.

----

Update: Henry Kissinger's Secret Trip to China

National Security Archive Update,
February 27, 2002
From: NSARCHIVE <mevans@GWU.EDU>
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB66/

The Beijing-Washington Back-Channel and Henry Kissinger's Secret Trip to China

Washington, D.C. - Today the National Security Archive publishes for the first time the verbatim transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secret trip to China in July 1971, as part of an electronic briefing book of 41 recently declassified U.S. documents on Sino-American communications that led to Richard Nixon's historic visit to China in February 1972, 30 years ago.

The transcripts of meetings between Kissinger and premier Zhou Enlai contradict Kissinger's memoirs and show Kissinger readily acknowledging Beijing's position that Taiwan was part of China. Kissinger declared that "we are not advocating a `two Chinas' solution' or a `one China, one Taiwan' solution." Only after Kissinger had taken this position would Zhou declare that he was "hopeful" about prospects for U.S.-China diplomatic relations. In other words, without conceding to Beijing's position on Taiwan's status, it would have been most difficult for substantive discussions to continue and a presidential visit would have been most unlikely. Kissinger made other commitments on Taiwan, e.g., to withdraw two-thirds of U.S. forces from the island once the Vietnam War had ended, but nowhere in his memoirs does he discuss these dramatic concessions. Instead, Kissinger wrote on p. 749 of White House Years (1979) that "Taiwan was mentioned only briefly during the first session."

Besides the transcripts of the Kissinger-Zhou meetings (which covered a range of issues, including Vietnam, South Asia, and Japan), the briefing book includes the first publication of U.S. records of the secret channel that the Pakistani government to provided to expedite Sino-American communications during 1970-1971. The briefing book also documents some of Kissinger's efforts to find other channels of communication with Beijing, such as the Romanian government and French contacts with the Chinese embassy in Paris. A record of a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger on 1 July 1971, before the secret trip, shows the president urging Kissinger to press the Chinese to keep U.S. "political visitors"--Democratic senators--away from China until Nixon had made his trip (giving an ironic twist to the notion that "only Nixon could go to China"). Nixon is also shown urging Kissinger to manipulate Chinese fears of a "resurgent Japan" and the "Soviet threat on their flank."

The documents in this briefing book were compiled by William Burr, editor, The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New Press, 1999), for a conference on the Sino-American rapprochement that was sponsored by the George Washington University Cold War Group of the Elliott School of International Affairs, on 8-9 February 2002. Among the participants in the conference were three veterans of the Nixon National Security Council Staff, Winston Lord, William R. Smyser, and Helmut Sonnenfeldt. Both Lord and Smyser accompanied Kissinger during the July 1971 secret trip. Today's posting includes an audio recording of their public discussion of their experience.

The documents, audio and photographs are available at the following URL: http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB66/

-------- missile defense

Pentagon Sees Sample Rocket by '04

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14123-2002Feb27?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States probably will have prototype rockets capable of destroying an enemy's long-range missile available in about two years, Pentagon officials told Congress Wednesday.

The military plans to build silos for the interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. He told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that four prototype interceptors capable of shooting down an enemy missile should be in place there by September 2004.

The Defense Department is working to develop several ways to block long-range missiles fired at the United States. President Bush last year announced he was withdrawing the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that bans such anti-missile systems.

Russia and other countries oppose the decision.

The Pentagon has tested prototypes of missile interceptors fired from silos on land and Navy ships at sea in recent months. Although all of the most recent tests have destroyed dummy warheads, officials say the tests were designed to evaluate system components and were virtually guaranteed to knock down the dummy warheads anyway.

Designing, testing and building a system of land- and sea-based missile defenses would cost between $23 billion and $64 billion by 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year.

Critics of the missile defense program say it's too expensive and question whether the defenses would really work. Expecting to have prototype rockets capable of shooting down missiles ready by 2004 is unrealistic, critics said.

``It's wishful thinking,'' Chris Madison of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation said Wednesday.

The land-based program aimed at destroying long-range missiles in space is the furthest along -- and is the program that Wolfowitz said should have prototypes capable of shooting down a missile by 2004.

Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday about plans to have operational prototypes ready in two years.

-------- russia

Russian court strikes down decision to allow nuclear waste imports from Hungary

Wednesday, February 27, 2002
By Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/02/02272002/ap_46526.asp

MOSCOW - The Russian Supreme Court on Tuesday handed a victory to environmentalists, striking down a government decision that allowed the import of nuclear waste from the Paks nuclear power plant in Hungary for storage in Russia.

Under a 1992 law, Russia imports spent fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Hungary for reprocessing, but it is required to return the waste to the countries of origin for permanent storage.

Greenpeace, the For Nuclear Safety environmental movement, and citizens of the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals Mountains filed suit against the government last year when they learned of a 1998 decision to allow nuclear waste from the Paks plant to be sent to Chelyabinsk for storage, said Yevgeny Usov, a spokesman for Greenpeace. "The Atomic Energy Ministry is selling Russia's territory for nuclear waste storage," Usov said.

Environmentalists have been up in arms about a law signed last summer that allows the import of spent nuclear fuel from other countries for reprocessing and storage.

According to the plan, spent fuel will be sent by armored train to a facility near Chelyabinsk for reprocessing. The recycling process extracts usable nuclear material from the spent rods while reducing their potential to be used in weapons, the Atomic Energy Ministry has said.

The plan's advocates say Russia could earn US$20 billion over the next decade, importing some 22,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. They say part of the money could be used to clean up existing nuclear pollution.

Yet environmentalists warn that with Russia's crumbling infrastructure and weak government, importing radioactive materials would be dangerous.

----

Report Faults Security of Russian Arsenal
Insider Nuclear Thefts A Risk, U.S. Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7786-2002Feb26?language=printer

Although Russia has been slowly improving its physical security systems at nuclear facilities, today's major threat comes from insiders stealing weapons-grade or weapons-usable nuclear materials, according to a recent U.S. intelligence report.

While a handful of nuclear-material thefts have been detected and foiled, primarily from Russian production facilities and laboratories, "undetected smuggling has occurred," according to the report produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the senior analytic body made up of representatives of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The old Russian security structure, which focused primarily on threats from outside the country, "may not be sufficient to meet today's challenge of a knowledgeable insider collaborating with a criminal or terrorist group," the NIC found.

Concern over insider security breaches arose after September 1998, when a Russian navy conscript shot a sentry guarding a nuclear submarine and killed five other sailors inside the sub. The armed conscript had walked unimpeded through an open shed near the submarine that contained nuclear weapons, according to Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, who has worked with Russia on nuclear security issues. The incident ended when the conscript shot himself.

The Russians realized one person going berserk could be handled, "but if two or more insiders collude [to steal something] all safeguards are non-effective," Blair said. Senior Russian military officials subsequently asked the United States for assistance in meeting the threat.

"Major assistance began after the Russian officials realized they had an insider problem," Blair said. Since that time, Russians have instituted psychological, lie detector, and drug and alcohol testing for all nuclear warhead personnel, the NIC report said. The polygraph equipment and drug and alcohol tests were provided by the United States under the Pentagon's threat reduction program.

Last October, Gen. Col. Igor Valynkin, chief of the organization responsible for protecting nuclear weapons, said heightened security in early 2001 "had twice thwarted terrorist efforts to reconnoiter nuclear weapons storage sites," the report said.

Blair noted that another weak point in the Russian security program that is being reformed is in Moscow's transportation system for nuclear warheads, primarily because new and old nuclear weapons are constantly being shipped from one site to another. "Enlisted guards, who had low morale, little training and alcohol problems are being replaced by officers," Blair said.

While concern over insiders has grown, the report said that the threat most feared by the United States in the past, an unauthorized launch or accidental use of a nuclear weapon, "is highly unlikely" as long as the highly centralized system built by the Soviet Union years ago remains in place.

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

More Nuclear Security Steps

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Washington Post
Wednesday, February 27, 2002; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8099-2002Feb26?language=printer

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered stricter security measures at all 104 U.S. nuclear power plants to guard against terrorist attacks. Citing a "high-level threat environment," the NRC ordered more security posts and personnel, additional physical barriers and tighter restrictions on employee access.

The plants already had taken many of the steps voluntarily in response to roughly 30 security advisories issued by the NRC since the Sept. 11 attacks, federal and industry officials said. Federal authorities have warned repeatedly that nuclear power plants could be terrorist targets.

Although the order takes effect immediately, the NRC is giving companies that are unable to comply as long as 20 days to seek an extension of up to six months. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) accused the NRC of "operating in a pre-September 11 world."

-------- california

Transmission problem triggers San Diego blackouts

Wednesday February 27
Reuters
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/020227/n27267555_2.html

LOS ANGELES. - San Diego Gas & Electric said on Wednesday that it was forced to cut service to 210,000 customers due to a transmission problem which also triggered an outage at the San Onofre nuclear plant in southern California.

The utility, a unit of Sempra Energy (NYSE:SRE - news), said it was ordered by the California Independent System Operator (ISO) to drop 300 megawatts of power immediately following the problem which occurred around 10.42 a.m. Pacific time (1.42 p.m. EST).

The 1,080 MW Unit 3 at the San Onofre plant was shut down. Service to all customers had been restored by 11.35 a.m. Pacific, the SDG&E spokesman said.

The San Onofre plant is operated by another utility, Edison International unit Southern California Edison. There were no outages in SCE's service territory as the problem occurred on lines which feed power from the plant to SDG&E.

A plant spokesman said they were still investigating the exact cause of the outage and it had not yet been determined when the unit would return to service.

``By this time tomorrow (Thursday) we should be able to have a return to service scheduled,'' he noted.

The 1,080-MW Unit 2 at the plant was not impacted. Unit 1 at the plant was retired from service in 1992.

San Onofre, in San Clemente, Calif. has two nuclear units, each with a capacity of about 1,080 MW. SCE has a 75 percent stake in the plant and SDG&E owns 20 percent. The cities of Anaheim and Riverside own the balance.

The ISO, which controls most of the state's power grid, said it quickly lined up replacement generation to minimize the impact on customers.

-------- connecticut

OUR TOWNS
What Isn't in a Name? 'Nuclear'

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
New York Times
February 27, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/nyregion/27TOWN.html

WATERFORD, Conn. -- The Virginia company that took over the nuclear power plant here last year wants you to know that security is tight. Very tight.

Armed guards and a slalom run of concrete barriers have made it impossible to drive all the way up the half-mile access road to the plant. Aerial photographs have been pulled off the Web. And in case any terrorists happen by en route to the submarine base a few miles up the road, or perhaps while day-tripping to Mystic, the word "nuclear" has been removed from the sign out front.

Millstone Power Station, it says. That'll fool 'em.

Over the drawbridge in tiny Niantic, the name change, like most of what emanates from the power plant across the bay, was greeted by rolling eyes and biting cynicism. "Maybe no one'll notice now when it blows up," said Glenn Shea, the otherwise amiable guy behind the counter at the Book Barn.

Sure, the new plant operator, Richmond-based Dominion, says the name was shortened strictly to be consistent, since neither of its two other nuclear plants, in North Anna and Surry, Va., have the N-word in their names. (There is a Dominion Hydro Station, but then people don't worry about getting wet as much as they do about glowing in the dark.)

Dominion officials even went so far as to assure the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that shortening the plant's name would not "affect the likelihood, the consequences, or introduce a new or different kind of accident" - which may be as unsettling to some as it is comforting to others.

Not surprisingly, both the weather- beaten locals and nuclear opponents are having a bit of fun. "It's a good safety move," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It's a little-known fact that the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island wouldn't have happened if `nuclear' wasn't in their titles."

Mr. Shea, who lives in Uncasville, home of the Mohegan Sun casino, was reminded of another local bit of newspeak: how the gambling industry calls itself the gaming industry, so "it doesn't sound like you're gambling your children's inheritance away."

Mr. Lochbaum, too, dared to suggest that public relations had played a role in the trim, although the plant's public relations man, Peter Hyde, held fast to his denials.

Millstone was regarded as probably the worst-run nuclear plant in the country in the 1980's, and its image is still recovering from the shutdown in 1996 that lasted two years, Mr. Lochbaum said.

All of which raises another question: why cut loose the "nuclear" when you've got "Millstone" around your neck?

"We had a fleeting thought of dropping the Millstone name," said David Christian, the plant's chief nuclear officer. "But people here take a tremendous amount of pride, and we've turned around our performance significantly. Millstone's now a name the industry can be proud of."

Indeed, Millstone's Unit 2 reactor just shut down for maintenance after 283 straight days in which both it and Unit 3 operated without a hitch - a plant record, the company said. (Unit 1, which opened in 1970, shut down for good in 1995 and is now being decommissioned.) And Mr. Lochbaum said he expected Millstone's performance to improve, judging from Dominion's record elsewhere: in a 1997 review of 10 nuclear plants by the Union of Concerned Scientists, its Surry station ranked best, he said.

Not everything about Millstone is in tiptop shape just yet. Its Discovery Center, a storefront in Niantic that is part of the "Family Fun Trail" promoted by state tourism officials (their motto: "Connecticut - We're Full of Surprises"), is a bit worn. Its centerpiece, a scale model of Millstone, has been shoved behind a display case, for security reasons. Only pint-sized saboteurs will be foiled, however; anyone five feet or taller can lean over to get a nice long look.

The interactive games for kids could use some updating, too. Maybe something along the lines of "Where's Waldo." Say, Find the Missing Fuel Rod.

Old failings, after all, keep haunting Millstone's new owners. Like the spent uranium rods that were missing around 1980.

"An exhaustive root-cause investigation," Mr. Christian said, concluded recently that the two 12-foot-long, lethal-for-a-millennium-or-so rods had been mislaid by crews cleaning up a spent-fuel pool because of faulty "fuel accounting procedures" - i.e., someone lost count.

Mr. Christian said his best guess was that the rods wound up in nuclear dumps in South Carolina, Washington or California - unless they're still in the 40-foot-deep pool. Nobody has volunteered to don a wet suit to find out for sure.

-------- ohio

Piketon plant has leaked radiation for decades, study says

Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Columbus Dispatch Staff Reporter
http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/news/news02/feb02/1113238.html

A study released yesterday reports that since at least 1975, radiation has been leaking from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where workers once processed nuclear-power-plant fuel. Marvin Resnikoff, nuclear physicist at Radioactive Waste Management Associates, says his group's study of federal Energy Department documents supports local residents' belief that radioactive compounds have escaped from the Pike County plant for decades.

The Energy Department, which oversees operations at the plant at Piketon, about 65 miles south of Columbus, has denied that any radioactive compounds have leaked from the facility, despite state reports in the 1990s about radioactive chemicals found in fish and at least one water well in the area.

The Energy Department said the report by Radioactive Waste Management Associates, a New York public-interest firm that advises nuclear-opposition groups, offers no new information.

"It is our general understanding that the report focuses on issues the department has been working on with the state and EPA regulators to clean up Portsmouth in accordance with the law,'' spokeswoman Dolline Hatchett said.

Resnikoff said that although cleanup efforts are working to control solvents and other harmful chemicals in groundwater, more needs to be done. He recommended creating a special fund to pay for the cleanup so the effort is not at the mercy of the federal government's annual budgeting process. The study, conducted for two Piketon-area watchdog groups, indicates that high levels of radioactive technetium, a byproduct formed when uranium fuel is split apart in a nuclear reactor, was measured in a stream flowing out of the plant in 1975.

Technetium was found in a groundwater plume extending from a holding pond on the east side of the plant to Little Beaver Creek on the plant property. The creek flows from the plant into the Scioto River.

"Much of the material was released a long time ago,'' Resnikoff said. "They didn't monitor technetium until 1975, and they were releasing far before then. ''

Ken Dewey, manager of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's Division of Emergency and Remedial Response, said the agency was aware that technetium was in the creek.

"There's not a lot of data to support technetium causing a major problem,'' he said.

The Ohio EPA found radioactivity in fish and stream sediments in Little Beaver and Big Beaver creeks and the Scioto River in 1995.

The study also indicates that trace amounts of mercury and radioactive compounds are in the soil in a 340-acre area in the plant's buffer zone. There are plans to turn the area over to local officials for use as an industrial park.

Graham Mitchell of the Ohio EPA said the Energy Department thinks that the tiny amounts of plutonium, neptunium and mercury recorded might be the result of laboratory error.

"We want more information to support that argument,'' he said.

Vina Colley of the Portsmouth- Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety Security said Resnikoff's study confirms what she and other critics of the facility have been saying for years.

"I cleaned down uranium-contaminated equipment with TCE (a carcinogenic industrial cleaning solvent), and when we were done, we dumped it down the drain,'' said Colley, who worked as an electrician at the plant from 1980 to '85. "So I knew that was getting away. ''

Colley, who blames the plant for her health problems, said she eventually realized that the hazardous chemicals being flushed down the drain might be escaping off the plant site.

"We did it for six months before I complained about it to (plant officials),'' she said.

Uranium is no longer processed at the plant, which opened in 1955. The facility now packages fuel processed at an Energy Department plant in Paducah, Ky.

The department began a multibillion-dollar cleanup at the Piketon site in the 1980s. Not satisfied with the speed of the cleanup, the Ohio EPA began monitoring plant operations in 1989.

Mike Lafferty -- mailto:mlafferty@dispatch.com

-------- us politics

Time to end embargo against Cuba

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
February 27, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020227-1619343.htm#2

Paul Greenberg's Feb. 20 Commentary column "Trading with the enemy," which criticized Sen. Blanche Lincoln for supporting opening trade relations between the United States and Cuba, might leave the impression that she stands alone in the Arkansas congressional delegation in advocating a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba. In fact, all of Arkansas' congressional delegation, Republican and Democrat, support ending the trade embargo.

We are joined in our support by our governor, Mike Huckabee, a Republican. In a letter to President Bush, Mr. Huckabee wrote, "U.S. policy on Cuba has not accomplished its stated goal of toppling the Castro regime and instead has provided Castro with a convenient excuse for his own failed system of government."

The time to end our failed embargo against Cuba is now.

VIC SNYDER
U.S. Representative
@Text.noindent:Arkansas


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Afghan Witnesses Say G.I.'s Were Duped in Raid on Allies

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By CARLOTTA GALL with CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/asia/27RAID.html?pagewanted=all

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan - Up in these mountains in southern Afghanistan, a culture of blood revenge runs strong. Local officials and relatives of Afghans killed by United States Special Forces angrily reject the Pentagon's inquiry into the raid, on Jan. 24, insisting that men were shot without a chance to surrender and that in many cases the Americans, not the Afghans, fired first.

"The men who were killed were not animals," Jan Muhammad, the governor of Oruzgan Province, said in dismissing the results of the Pentagon's investigation. "The Americans know that, and if they have any love for human beings, they will help us find the truth."

The Pentagon says 16 people were killed in the raid on two compounds in an area it calls Hazar Qadam; local Afghans insist 21 people died in Oruzgan town, once the capital of the province.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Americans generated the intelligence that led to the flawed raid; Afghans insist the Americans were manipulated by bad information from locals caught in a complex feud. The Pentagon, which has said the raid had some unfortunate consequences but was not in any way a failure, said Americans were fired upon; witnesses to the raid, on a school and a government compound, say the opposite.

"The Americans fired first," said Muhammad Kadir Agha, 30, who was awakened by helicopters and watched the raid at the school from the roof of his house, 200 yards away. He said that although weapons were fired by both sides, it was easy to distinguish between the fire of the American weapons and the shots from Afghan guns.

In addition, an Afghan who found bodies hours after the raid said at least eight had their hands tied behind their backs with the white disposable plastic binding that Special Forces use as handcuffs.

In the case of a man named Tor Jan, his cousin said he saw Mr. Jan fall as he tried to escape during the raid. The next morning, the cousin said, he found Mr. Jan where he fell, his body still bound. He had been shot in the neck, shoulder and stomach, said the cousin, who uses only one name, Amanullah.

Small entry wounds on Mr. Jan's back and large exit wounds on his front suggested that he had been shot in the back while running away, Mr. Amanullah said.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said standard procedure during a raid requires troops to handcuff the wounded to ensure that even they do not grab a weapon.

Subsequently, some of the wounded may have died, he said, "but they certainly weren't shot in their handcuffs."

Afghan officials, including Governor Muhammad, are most adamant about the origin of the information that led to the raid.

Secretary Rumsfeld said the United States, which had the compounds under direct surveillance from the air and the ground in the days beforehand, had decided on the raid because the information gathered was not solid enough to justify an airstrike against what was suspected to be a Taliban or Al Qaeda base.

But the Afghans insist the Americans were fed false information from a local warlord hoping to help his side in a power struggle.

"We want the man who informed the Americans," said Abdul Qadoos Irfani, the newly appointed district chief of Oruzgan. "The Americans know who it is and they should show him to us."

The School Strangers Arrive, Guns Blazing

One of the few men to escape alive from the school compound, Amanullah, who is 25, remembers first an explosion.

He looked through the open door and saw American soldiers running and shooting in the courtyard outside. None of the survivors interviewed during two visits to the town recalled the Americans identifying themselves by loudspeaker or any other means.

"They were shooting and they were coming toward the room," Amanullah said. As the Americans opened fire into the classroom where they had been asleep, he said, he and several other Afghan soldiers scrambled out the windows on the far side.

As they dropped down the side of the building, they were caught in the glare of a powerful light and a hail of more bullets. Mr. Amanullah ran for cover, but saw his cousin fall behind him. American soldiers were quickly upon the man, he said, tying his hands behind his back.

The precise reason for the American raid remains unclear. But what is clear is that the school was used by the Taliban during their final weeks in power. It was taken over in late December by government soldiers who were collecting weapons as part of a general effort at disarmament, residents said.

Some weapons and vehicles seized were from men loyal to a senior Taliban commander, Mullah Muhammad Abbas. Formerly the Taliban's minister of public health, Mr. Abbas has a home in Oruzgan and had been in the town weeks before the raid, residents said.

He is said to have fled six or seven weeks ago - before the American raids - and to be hiding now in still higher mountains, perhaps with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.

American military officials said stolen vehicles, supplies of ordnance and bustling nighttime activity were part of the information gathered by American sources that led them to believe there was a Taliban or Al Qaeda base in Oruzgan.

For several nights before the Americans attacked, townspeople said, they heard helicopters overhead in the dead of night.

On Jan. 24, at about 3 a.m., helicopters landed in two places, a short distance south of the stone school and just south of the hill on which the district government compound sits.

The helicopters dropped at least one armored vehicle on the open ground behind the school, witnesses said. A spotlight from the vehicle bathed the school in light as American soldiers in black masks and desert camouflage fanned out around the compound.

An executive summary of the Pentagon inquiry said an armed Afghan came out of the school as the American forces were approaching and then quickly disappeared inside. Gunfire erupted from the school moments later, the summary said.

Survivors from the school said that some of their comrades fired on the Americans, but that the Americans had fired first. At least three survivors said the shooting began with an explosion near the room in which the school's two commanders were sleeping.

Those two commanders, Abdul Qadoos and his deputy, Sana Gul, died in the room, which was gutted from fire and contained the twisted remains of a rocket-propelled grenade several days after the raid. There was also a large mass of congealed blood on the wall outside the room.

Mr. Amanullah said that at least three men were found dead in classrooms where they had been sleeping, and apparently had no chance to surrender before being shot; neighbors who removed the bodies and two other survivors interviewed suggested that more than three men had died this way.

Six large blood stains mark the floor of one of the classrooms, dried to a dark greasy brown.

Sayeed Muhammad, 25, was sleeping in a classroom with 12 people, including his cousin Shah Muhammad, when he was awakened by shooting through the windows and near the commanders' room.

He said that Shah Muhammad picked up the only weapon in the room and started shooting from the door but that there were only four rounds in the gun.

Sayeed Muhammad said he jumped through the back window along with other men and a bullet or shrapnel hit him in the foot. Both he and Mr. Amanullah fled barefoot across the open ground and through the compound's gate, and took refuge in a nearby mosque.

Abdul Ali, 39, whose house is to the southwest of the school, said he was awakened by one of his two wives, who said there was shooting outside. He ran to the roof and saw that helicopters had landed nearby.

Soon an explosion blew the heavy metal gate of his compound off its hinges, and a dozen or more American soldiers ran into his yard throwing down plastic tubes that emitted bright light, he said.

The Americans tied his hands with the white plastic band that the Special Forces use as handcuffs.

"They were asking me things in Arabic but I don't understand Arabic," Mr. Ali said several days afterward. The soldiers did not appear to understand Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's main languages, he said.

The Americans eventually cut his hands free and then locked him, his wives and 17 children in their kitchen, where they heard the subsequent bombardment of the school. His father-in-law found them at about 6:30 a.m.

Other neighbors said they saw bright bursts of gunfire at the school but could see little else on the moonless night. The Pentagon said one man was taken into custody at the school. Mr. Amanullah said he saw one of the guards having his hands tied by the Americans. All of the other people who failed to escape from the school were killed.

The District Office `Don't Worry, They Are Friends'

Almost simultaneously with the school raid, American commandos were swarming over the district government office, police station and jail, less than a mile away.

Survivors there, mostly newly recruited guards, said they were awakened by helicopters, gunfire and shouting in English and saw figures wearing camouflage, black masks and goggles and carrying flashlights.

Allah Nur, 40, got up from his mattress on the floor and went outside to see soldiers tying the hands of his comrades. He went back inside and told the police chief, "There are people outside whose language I do not understand."

"He said, `Don't worry, they are our friends,' " Mr. Nur said, recalling the chief's response. " `They will do nothing. Stay in here.' "

The chief, Abdul Rauf, 60, said he stepped outside and tried to tell the Americans that the Afghans were friendly forces.

"I was shouting, `Dost! Dost!' [`We are friends!'], but they were not listening," Chief Rauf said. "And I was telling my men that they are friends, but American soldiers came over and started to beat me."

He said none of his men fired.

The Americans fired a stun grenade into the room where Mr. Nur had been sleeping and all the men there surrendered immediately, Mr. Nur said. "We put up our hands and said `Don't shoot - we are friends,' " he added.

Ziauddin, 50, said that as they filed out he saw his friend, Abdul Nafi, 20, dead outside the room.

"He was here and went out when he heard the aircraft," Mr. Ziauddin said. He was not sure whether Mr. Nafi had been carrying a gun.

"He just got engaged," Mr. Ziauddin said. "He's dead now."

The executive summary of the Pentagon inquiry said 26 of the Afghans detained in the two raids were detained at one compound where the American forces had achieved an element of surprise.

"Most of the Afghans present dropped their weapons when confronted," the summary said, making no mention of Afghans just then wakened. "Others fled. Only those that shot at or clearly threatened U.S. forces were engaged, resulting in only two Afghans killed."

The Afghans say the Americans punched, kicked and beat them nevertheless, tied their hands and feet with white plastic bands and hung light sticks around their necks before blindfolding and hooding them and leading them away to helicopters.

Mr. Rumsfeld rejected claims that some captured Afghans were mistreated or beaten.

Other soldiers, meanwhile, swept down the hill to another group of buildings where the former district government chief, Muhammad Yunas, had been sleeping with dozens more men. He, too, called for his men to hold their fire, having recognized the soldiers as Americans.

Instead, he said shortly after the raid, the Americans opened fire.

Mr. Yunas and most of the other men in the building escaped. A guard who was killed, Muhammad Karem, was only 16, according to Mr. Irfani, the new district chief in Oruzgan.

The Americans moved through the remaining buildings, scattering light sticks and searching for people. They found six ethnic Hazaras locked in a windowless dungeon. The Americans bound the prisoners' hands and took them into the helicopters as well.

When the detained Afghans were released on Feb. 7, the Pentagon said some had been held in jail, and suggested at least some captives were "criminals."

The Follow-Up U.S. Airstrikes Against Munitions

Mr. Rauf, 60, the police chief, who was among the captives taken to helicopters, said someone there did inquire in Dari: "Where are your children? Because we are going to bomb." Mr. Rauf told the questioner there were no children.

Shortly after the helicopters left, an AC-130 gunship showered both compounds with rockets and heavy fire, apparently an attempt to destroy munitions stored at both sites. The airstrikes destroyed one ammunition dump at the district government compound but missed other weapons caches there and left the weapons storerooms at the school untouched.

After an anxious night in the mosque, Mr. Amanullah was the first to return to the school. He found Tor Jan where he had fallen on a pile of rocks. "I laid my shawl over him," he said.

Mr. Amanullah said he counted eight dead with their hands tied behind them. He and a few friends cut the white plastic bands off and carried the bodies away for burial.

"They had bullet wounds but I did not look more," he said. "I was very sad and confused, and took my cousin and went."

Most of the dead were found in the rooms and the central courtyard of the school, many burned from fires in the rooms. Shah Muhammad had nearly reached the gate and had half his foot blown away and a fractured femur protruding from his thigh. He, too, was found with his hands bound behind his back.

Local officials in Oruzgan, loyal followers of Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, believe the Americans were fed false information in a complex maneuver by the former governor, Mr. Yunas, to regain control of the town. Mr. Yunas has not been seen in Oruzgan since mid-February, when he was ordered to disarm, Mr. Irfani said.

Since the raid, the Americans have told Mr. Karzai that they would check with him before mounting any similar ground operation, an Afghan source said. Mr. Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali, an official in Kandahar, said such an incident "will never happen again."

[Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of American troops in the Afghan war zone, said on Monday that while American forces would strive to inform local authorities of military operations, it would not always be possible. "It is important to share information amongst all the people on the ground, to include the local Afghans when it's possible to do that," he said. But, he noted, "we will retain the ability to act unilaterally when we believe it's best of us to do so."]

Neamatullah, a government official from Tirin Kot charged by the governor of Oruzgan to find out who supplied information to the Americans, has named Mr. Yunas and two others as suspects. He has arrested a man named Dadiullah, who he said was the messenger between Mr. Yunas and government officials in Kandahar in contact with the Americans.

Local leaders appear determined to find culprits, in part because they are worried that relatives of the dead will take matters into their own hands.

"Everyone knows who did this, they are just not saying," said Bari Gul, 45, brother of Sana Gul, the deputy commander who was killed. "If the Americans are not going to prove themselves friends with us, the families of the victims will not sit by, they will fight and have their revenge."

-------- africa

Protesters clash as tension mounts in Madagascar

By Fiona O'Brien
Wednesday February 27, 11:14 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91929.html

ANTANANARIVO - Thousands of rival protesters clashed in Madagascar's capital on Wednesday, leaving at least 10 people injured and the city in chaos as the struggle over who should rule the island-state erupted into violence.

Pro-government Radio Madagascar said two government supporters were killed in confrontations between backers of opposition candidate Marc Ravalomanana, who declared himself president on Friday, and veteran incumbent Didier Ratsiraka. There was no independent confirmation.

Chaos reigned in the centre of Antananarivo, where witnesses said protesters using sticks or their bare hands traded blows and hurled stones at rivals while others screamed in panic or from the pain of their injuries.

The running battles followed a sharp increase in tension in the capital, where mayor Ravalomanana has orchestrated seven weeks of largely peaceful protests following December elections he says were rigged by the government to keep him out of power.

"We are very worried," said a Ravalomanana supporter, carrying stones in his fists as hundreds of demonstrators ran past. "People should be allowed to protest in peace."

Unidentified demonstrators torched the privately owned pro-Ratsiraka Radio Tsiokavao, run from a house on a hill overlooking the capital, after soldiers guarding the installation shot at them, witnesses said.

NEGOTIATIONS REJECTED

Ravalomanana, a self-made dairy millionaire, rejected calls by the international community for negotiations to resolve his power struggle with one of Africa's longest-serving rulers.

In his imposing mayoral offices in the city centre, Ravalomanana, wearing a bulletproof vest under a suit, said his self-staged inauguration ceremony had ended almost two months of uncertainty since he accused Ratsiraka of voter fraud.

"Negotiations about the elections are finished," the slim opposition leader said from behind a huge leather-topped desk.

The international community has condemned Ravalomanana's attempt to seize power, saying it is unconstitutional and therefore illegitimate, and urged him to talk to Ratsiraka about cooperating in a second round of voting.

Witnesses said the clashes started after thousands of Ratsiraka supporters staged their biggest demonstration in favour of the president since the crisis began in January.

"Ravalomanana's supporters came down from where they were protesting. They met at the edge of the lake. Ratsiraka's people threw baskets of stones," said Emile Razafintsalama, a pro-Ravalomanana journalist who witnessed the clash near a lake in the centre of the city of four million.

The violence fuelled growing uncertainty as to who holds power on the island of 15 million, where hundreds of thousands of Ravalomanana supporters consider him the rightful president of the Indian Ocean state.

Ratsiraka, who has ruled for 23 of the past 26 years, declared a state of emergency after Ravalomanana declared himself president on Friday. Demonstrators have defied a ban on rallies for five days running.

CASUALTIES UNCERTAIN

There was no immediate word from the authorities or medical services on the number of people wounded. Reuters reporters said they counted at least 10 injured, some in bloodied T-shirts.

"Two Ratsiraka supporters were killed. We still don't know how, but there are rumours they were killed with sticks," said a journalist at the pro-Ratsiraka state radio station when contacted for details. There was no immediate confirmation of the report from police or hospital sources.

Police and local officials had said on Monday that a Ravalomanana supporter was shot dead in a town on the east of the island on Monday, apparently by Ratsiraka supporters.

At Radio Tsiokavao, residents said the protesters had climbed the hill to stage a demonstration outside the station and were confronted by soldiers.

"The radio is protected by the military," resident Jean Jacques Rahamefy said. "They fired into the crowd, some of whom escaped. Then people came and there was a riot, they started ransacking the radio, they broke everything and then they set fire to it."

Government sources said the opposition torched the radio. But Ravalomanana supporters said Ratsiraka's camp did it to stir tensions. Witnesses said they did not know who was responsible.

Government results from the December 16 presidential polls give neither Ravalomanana nor Ratsiraka an outright majority. The government has announced a second round run-off on March 24, but Ravalomanana says he will not participate.

-------- arms sales

THE MONEY
Belgium Seeks Arms Dealer With Suspected Qaeda Ties

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times
February 27, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/europe/27BOUT.html

PARIS, Feb. 26 - Belgian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for one of the world's most notorious arms traffickers, who is suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and of pouring huge arms shipments into Africa's civil wars.

The arms trafficker, known as Victor Bout, 35, a former Soviet air force officer, was charged only with money laundering in the warrant, issued 10 days ago. But United Nations reports and other investigations have concluded that he may run the world's largest arms-smuggling network. Peter Hain, the British minister for Europe, who investigated the arms-for-diamonds trade, has called him "Africa's chief merchant of death."

Jos Colpin, a spokesman for the Belgian judge-prosecutors office, said that Mr. Bout was believed to have used a small airport on the North Sea near Ostend, Belgium, as his western air-smuggling hub, flying planes from there to central Europe to load up with arms, and then to Africa or Afghanistan.

Many of the arms he supplied came from Bulgaria and Romania, and were loaded aboard with false end-user certificates to keep the United Nations from discovering that they were bound for arms-embargoed countries.

Belgium has an interest in the guns-for-diamonds trade because many gems end up with cutters in Antwerp who have been accused of turning blind eyes to the sources.

Asked if the arrest involved Al Qaeda, even though Mr. Bout is charged only with money laundering, Mr. Colpin said, "Well, where there was a war, he sold arms, and there was war in Afghanistan."

The Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in an investigation, described links between Mr. Bout and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in an article published on its Web site, www.public-i.org, on Jan. 31. Three of Mr. Bout's associates are in a Belgian prison and at least one is believed to be giving evidence against him.

Mr. Bout, who was born in Tajikistan and educated at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, is said to speak six languages and to have started in the arms trade when his air force unit was disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the time, many cargo plane crews left with their aircraft and hired themselves out.

He has homes in Russia, Rwanda and in the United Arab Emirates, as well as one in Johannesburg that is for sale but in the meantime being managed as a brothel, a South African journalist said. Mr. Bout was most recently seen in Ukraine, said Phillip van Niekerk of the investigative journalists consortium.

Mr. Colpin seemed to hold out little hope that Russia would extradite Mr. Bout, who is a Russian citizen. The government of Ukraine may be even less likely to cooperate.

The United Nations has accused Mr. Bout of violating arms embargoes by shipping weapons to rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone and to the president of Liberia, Charles Taylor.

The journalists consortium and the Belgian paper Le Soir said they had learned from Belgian intelligence sources that Mr. Bout earned $50 million between 1995 and 1997 supplying the Taliban with arms. He is also suspected of supplying arms to the Abu Sayyaf rebel movement in the Philippines, to Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and to some South American groups.

"He got around," Mr. van Niekerk said.

The consortium said he had 40 to 60 aircraft and 300 employees.

Belgium's military intelligence service has been watching Mr. Bout for years, and three weeks ago, 18 premises in Belgium were searched and four Bulgarians linked to his network were arrested, Le Soir said.

Some details of the smuggling network emerged when a telex message sent to the wrong address fell into the hands of the intelligence services. It detailed the history of a Boeing 707 with a Swiss crew that belonged to an airline of Mr. Bout's called Trans Aviation Network.

The plane was registered in Congo and partly financed by Afghan generals so arms could be flown to Afghanistan. According to Le Soir, the telex message says that payments of $10,000 a flight were made to pilots delivering arms.

-------- biological weapons

Cuba accuses US of dozens of "biological attacks"

By Andrew Cawthorne
Tuesday February 26
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91623.html

HAVANA - Immersed in a nationwide battle against an outbreak of dengue fever, President Fidel Castro revived on Monday an old accusation against the United States of carrying out biological attacks against Cuba.

"I say to our people, I say it here, we have suffered dozens of biological attacks," Castro said in a television address on Cuba's massive campaign to eradicate a recent outbreak of the potentially fatal dengue fever.

Castro did not blame Washington for the current dengue problem, which has killed two and stricken hundreds but is now receding. He said, however, that U.S. authorities were responsible for past attacks against Cuban tobacco, sugar and pigs.

Last year, Havana also blamed the United States for a disease that has destroyed 16,000 beehives, causing an estimated $2 million in lost honey output since 1996.

In Monday's sometimes-rambling comments on state television, Castro particularly lashed out at the U.S. government's aid agency USAID, which he said was dedicated to spreading subversion in Cuba and backing corrupt elites elsewhere in Latin America.

"This is the famous agency, well-known in our country, very charitable, very humanitarian," he said sarcastically, after reading a media report of USAID's work in El Salvador, which is also fighting a dengue outbreak.

"We know 10 times more than them" about combating dengue, Castro said after a lengthy explanation of how Cuban authorities had managed to control the disease thanks to a massive public health campaign since early January.

"The most they (USAID) know about, really, is how to transport and develop viruses -- they did it for years -- and how to attack a country with viruses," he added.

USAID sets aside millions of dollars each year for anti-Castro groups in the United States, some of whom support local dissidents. But Washington denies illegal actions against Cuba.

U.S. RIDICULES CUBA FOR PARANOIA

For decades, Havana has been alleging chemical attacks by U.S. agents, sometimes speaking of planes spraying chemicals, or of individual travellers carrying germs. American officials generally ridicule those claims as fantasy and paranoia.

Further signalling a possible change in tone from recent conciliatory comments by Cuba's communist leaders toward its decades-old political foe, Castro promised a response soon to hostile comments in past days from a senior U.S. diplomat.

"There are some other little things to discuss here on the round-table, some public comments, some stupid things," he said in a more than two-hour speech on a nightly TV round-table programme dedicated to promoting the Castro government's views.

"They waste their time completely every time they stupidly talk about waiting for change in Cuba ... and the hope, I don't know what, for the post-Castro era," he added.

The Cuban leader clearly was referring to a slew of recent public comments from Washington's chief envoy to Havana, Vicki Huddleston, who heads the U.S. diplomatic mission.

Huddleston has been countering speculation of a possible U.S.-Cuban rapprochement following cooperation over the use of the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, on Cuba's southeastern coast, for Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan.

She has said the Bush administration plans no changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba, including a four-decade-old economic embargo, unless the Castro government undertakes reforms including releasing political prisoners and allowing free speech.

On Cuba's dengue problem, which has been centred mainly on Havana, Castro said "the battle is being won" after a vast fumigation and clean-up drive since the start of the year, mobilising thousands of workers, students and activists.

He noted Cuba's apparent greater success than other Latin American countries also fighting dengue, including Brazil, where 14 people have died this year. Cuba's previous worst dengue epidemic was in 1981 when 158 people died.

-------- britain

Britain irritated by Rumsfeld's prisoner comment

Wednesday February 27
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91662.html

LONDON - Britain bristled on Tuesday at suggestions from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that it might "simply turn loose" British nationals captured in Afghanistan and being held in Cuba if they were sent home.

But Home Secretary David Blunkett also insisted that the detainees were entitled to due judicial process.

"It is not appropriate to make a judgment about what we do with someone before they have been charged, never mind afterwards," Blunkett told BBC radio.

He had not spoken to Rumsfeld about the comments, but said he had no doubt that "my other colleagues in the cabinet who deal with him will be seeking clarification, as I will from the (U.S.) Attorney General John Ashcroft."

Rumsfeld said at the weekend that Britain must prosecute any Britons returned home from detention at the U.S. base in Cuba "rather than simply turning them loose, putting them back out on the streets and having them go get more aeroplanes and flying into the Pentagon and World Trade Center again".

Blunkett said it appeared Rumsfeld was "not aware" that Britain has a Crown Prosecution Service, under which evidence had to be examined before anyone could be detained or charged.

"The Crown Prosecution Service has to examine the evidence that is being presented against them, and that is what we will do," he said.

"If anyone is transferred to this country it will be on the evidence -- in this case the evidence that the United States has deduced from picking up them up in Afghanistan."

The United States is holding about 300 foreigners captured during the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan at a high-security military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Five of the detainees are reported to be Britons.

Washington says they are suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network or of Afghanistan's Taliban.

Images of detainees shackled and on their knees at the Camp X-Ray base have sparked concern around the world, but Britain, Washington's staunchest ally in the global coalition against terror, has declined to criticise Washington's actions.

The United States has not classified the captives as prisoners of war, a label which carries specific rights under the Geneva Conventions. It has said some could be tried before a military tribunal.

-------- colombia

Bogota ends plan to swap captives

By Juan Pablo Toro
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020227-75817152.htm

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia - Colombia's government yesterday ruled out swapping captured rebels for a kidnapped presidential candidate, and the rebels responded to an army offensive by killing three soldiers and destroying power lines, roads and bridges.

Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, at a roadblock in a war zone Saturday. The rebels had reportedly offered to free her and other kidnapped politicians in exchange for the release of imprisoned guerrillas. The FARC is holding five members of Congress, in addition to Mrs. Betancourt.

"The government does not see the possibility of carrying on swap negotiations," Interior Minister Armando Estrada said yesterday. "Prisoner exchanges are done between equals, between combatants. She was not a combatant, nor are the lawmakers."

Meanwhile, military operations to search for Mrs. Betancourt, who is a candidate for the small Oxygen-Green party, have been suspended on the family's request for fear they could put her life in danger, said Betancourt campaign spokeswoman Diana Rodriguez.

On Monday, an army soldier was killed after troops fired at rebels tampering with power lines, and the rebels responded. Two other soldiers died trying to defuse a bomb on a bus blocking a highway.

In the capital, Bogota, 190 miles north of the war zone, guerrillas detonated a bomb at a reservoir serving the capital city. The attack didn't affect water supplies, Mayor Antanas Mockus said.

In 1998, the government gave the FARC a Switzerland-sized parcel of land to lure the nation's largest rebel group into peace talks. But when the FARC hijacked a civilian airliner last week and kidnapped a senator, President Andres Pastrana canceled talks, ordered the rebels out of the zone and sent his troops in.

Since then, rebels have toppled utility pylons both inside and outside the zone in southern Colombia, blacking out or forcing electricity rationing in at least 56 towns, the Energy Ministry said.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday that "the good will of the Pastrana government and the Colombian people has not been reciprocated by the FARC." Rebel "terrorist actions are a real affront to people who seek peace in Colombia," he said.

U.S. intelligence sharing is being increased, and deliveries of spare parts for U.S. helicopters are being accelerated. Officials also were addressing an existing ban on U.S. military assistance for anything other than counternarcotics activities.

San Vicente del Caguan - the former rebel capital that was the first town occupied by the army on Saturday - has been among those hit the hardest. A downed bridge and rebel roadblocks have virtually isolated the sweltering town. Food stocks are dwindling, and drinking water is scarce.

Mayor Nestor Ramirez declared a local state of emergency and asked troops to supply his town of 22,000 by using military helicopters.

The FARC has blown up 11 bridges since Thursday, disrupting transportation in southern Colombia.

Colombian news media reported Monday that the FARC executed five persons in La Macarena, which the army had yet to reach. The reasons for the killings were not known.

Mr. Pastrana was reviewing the volatile situation with his Cabinet and "looking for other ways to stop the terrorism and abductions," Justice Minister Romulo Gonzalez said.

Mrs. Betancourt's kidnapping aroused international concern for the security of candidates in the March legislative elections and May 26 presidential vote.

----

COLOMBIA
Rebels Go on Killing Rampage

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/americas/27COLO.html

LA MACARENA, Colombia, Feb. 25 - The final slaying happened this afternoon, when Cecilia Gallego was dragged from her home in front of her children, led to the backyard and shot at point-blank range.

Moments later her 11-year-old son, Felipe Grajales, ran shirtless and shoeless from the house, screaming: "They shot my mommy! They shot my mommy!"

On Sunday the leftist guerrillas had begun the killings by summoning Paco Ardila to a meeting, then riddling him with bullets. The local pharmacist, Vianey Murcia, was killed at the door of his shop, as was another man, Porfirio Roa. Two other men, their bodies bearing multiple gunshot wounds, were found dead on the road just outside the town.

The killers, rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC, its Spanish acronym), even held a gathering to tell residents they were responsible, villagers and relatives of the victims said.

Last week President Andrés Pastrana, responding to a kidnapping and other violence by rebel forces, canceled a three-year-old peace process. In a visit on Saturday to a town nearby, he assured the local population that army troops would quickly reoccupy a vast demilitarized enclave here that the guerrillas controlled during the talks.

But government forces failed to secure the zone swiftly to make it safe for civilian residents. The rebels swept through this village in a bloody operation to settle scores with unarmed villagers.

Across this region the rebel presence remains strong. With peace talks dead, the guerrillas have also been carrying out attacks across the country. They toppled electrical and communications towers and blew up bridges. On Saturday, in another kidnapping, they seized a presidential candidate from a small party, Ingrid Betancourt.

"This is supposed to be part of the state," Luis Ernesto Villar, 43, a former government official here, said with a hint of sarcasm. "This is the most irresponsible thing the president could have done, lifting the demilitarized zone and doing nothing to make a presence."

Although military brass has spoken about rapid gains, the fact is that soldiers have a solid hold on only three of the five towns in an enclave that is twice the size of New Jersey.

They have not arrived here, or in another village, Uribe. It was evident today to a group of foreign journalists who took a 13-hour tour through the region that the guerrillas still move freely in the jungles and fields of the zone. Rebel units patrol dusty country lanes, staff roadblocks and guard those camps that were not hit by an intensive government bombing campaign.

"Look at us, we are still here," said Arbey Ramírez, 26, a midlevel commander, at what was once the region's largest rebel base, which the guerrillas were dismantling and burning.

Another rebel, who goes by the nom de guerre Edwin, said the rebels planned to retaliate soon against government forces.

"This is our home, so we will stay here and wait for the government," he said. "We are prepared to hit the enemy, here or there."

Long before the government ceded this region to the rebels for the peace negotiations, the guerrilla group had de facto control here, as it does in much of the isolated south of the country. They had time to learn every wrinkle in the topography and prepare for any eventual army incursion. They have tunnels and hidden jungle camps, trenches and informers, said a foreign diplomat familiar with the guerrilla group.

Once the demilitarized zone was created, they became further established. The abandoned camp had a slaughterhouse, an auto repair shop, buildings where military strategists could study maps and intelligence information, sturdy barracks for 5,000 fighters and bathrooms with showers and running water.

"This is all history now, just quiet; what is coming now is war," Mr. Ramírez said.

The war has already come to La Macarena - unexpectedly, several residents said. Villagers and rebels quietly coexisted during the three years the zone was under rebel control, most people here said. At most, guerrilla commanders would summon everyone to the town plaza every two weeks and speak about the peace negotiations, accusing the government of failing to keep promises.

But spats between rebels and residents spilled out into the open when the guerrillas came this weekend and began killing.

"I never imagined we would have this problem - never," said Adel Horacio Murcia, as he sat with grieving family members next to the coffin of his brother, Vianey, who was shot in the head at his pharmacy.

Rubén Matallana, a town official, said three of the victims had argued with the rebels over land. At least one had been attacked after he apparently paid money, under pressure, to right-wing paramilitaries, the rebels' archenemy. Ms. Gallego was a community leader.

Mr. Matallana said he believed that the rebels felt they could not kill civilians here while the town remained in a legally established safe haven that was supposed to be a laboratory for peace. "They felt they had a responsibility with people, as long as dialogue was going on" with the government, he said. "Once that was over, they felt they did not owe people here anything."

No one has fled from here, because the roads are too dangerous. But businesses were shuttered today, with people hiding behind their doors.

"Right now, there is no order. Right now, we are despondent," said Ulises Mira, 37. "They are coming with ire, with rage, to do what they did, and the government has done nothing, absolutely nothing."

-------- drug war

Colombia Claims Coca Crop Decline

February 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Coca-Crop.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia's illegal coca crop, the plant used to make cocaine, has dropped off significantly for the first time on record, the government announced Wednesday.

Justice Minister Romulo Gonzalez said the reduction shows that coca eradication efforts, supported with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, are succeeding.

But separate estimates expected soon by the U.S. government will likely show a large increase in coca cultivation in Colombia, U.S. and U.N. counterdrug officials say.

Gonzalez said 336,000 acres of coca were being cultivated in Colombia at the end of December. He said this was 16.8 percent fewer acres than in August 2000. That would work out to roughly 392,000 acres under cultivation 16 months ago, though Gonzalez didn't provide such a figure.

Gonzalez said the Colombian government's figures are ``a clear demonstration'' that the eradication program is working. In the offensive, which began in December 2000, crop dusters protected by U.S.-donated helicopters and U.S.-trained Colombian army troops spray the drug crops.

Although officials here were claiming success, a war of statistics is apparently brewing.

U.S. and U.N. officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity they expected CIA figures due out Friday to show Colombia's coca crop increased dramatically -- possibly by as much as a third.

That would suggest coca eradication efforts are failing, even as fumigation efforts have intensified. Police say they fumigated a record 210,000 acres of coca last year.

Colombia is the world's main cocaine producer and the most important supplier of heroin to the United States.

-------- iran

Ex-Afghan warlord disappears from Tehran

By Afshin Valinejad
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020227-81903748.htm

TEHRAN - A former Afghan warlord who opposes the interim government in Kabul and its American ties has disappeared from his home in Iran's capital after being told to leave the country, Iran's official news agency said yesterday.

Reports of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's disappearance came a day after an Afghan official said he would be treated as a war criminal if he returns to his homeland and as Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai ended a three-day visit to Iran.

Earlier this month, Iranian authorities closed Mr. Hekmatyar's offices in the country, apparently as part of diplomatic efforts to ease growing tension with the United States. Washington has accused Iran of working to destabilize Mr. Karzai's government by harboring its enemies and sending commandos across the border into Afghanistan.

Mr. Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister, has called Afghanistan's interim government a U.S.-imposed administration.

The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quoted an unidentified official as saying that Mr. Hekmatyar "has left his place of residence in Tehran" and that his whereabouts are unknown.

IRNA said Mr. Hekmatyar had been told to leave Iran a few days ago. He had lived in Iran for the past five years.

Mr. Hekmatyar "will be treated as a war criminal if he decides to return" to Afghanistan, Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad told the Associated Press in Tehran on Monday.

In recent months, many Iranian legislators had called for the "expulsion" of Mr. Hekmatyar, saying his presence was "detrimental to Iran's national interests."

Mr. Hekmatyar was a strong ally of the United States and Pakistan during the war against Soviet invaders in the 1980s. However, he was blamed for the chaos that engulfed Kabul after the fall of the pro-Moscow government in 1992. He fled to Iran after the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996.

Mr. Karzai's first visit to Iran since becoming prime minister in December came after President Bush branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" and his administration repeatedly accused its government of trying to undermine Mr. Karzai's government.

Mr. Karzai, who left Tehran for India yesterday, said he would not let the U.S. accusations influence efforts to improve relations between the nations, IRNA reported.

"Remarks by U.S. officials will have no impact on the resolve of the Afghan government and people in [improving] ties with Iran. Iran's help will allow us to regain our position in the world," the radio quoted him as saying.

Iranian President Mohammed Khatami and Mr. Karzai signed a memorandum of understanding on fighting terrorism and drug trafficking and promoting trade, which will see Iran help Afghanistan reorganize its police and army, IRNA reported.

On Monday, Mr. Karzai addressed Iran's parliament, where he said Iran and Afghanistan shared "a common culture and language and these bonds have made our friendship eternal."

Also on Monday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cautioned Mr. Karzai about foreign interference in a reference to the United States.

He said Mr. Karzai's government "should be careful that the issue of reconstruction is not exploited by others to infiltrate Afghanistan politically and economically."

Iran has pledged more than $500 million over five years for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

-------- iraq

U.S. meets groups opposing Saddam

By Barry Schweid
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020227-73785539.htm

Small groups of American diplomats and intelligence analysts infiltrate northern Iraq periodically to confer with Kurds and other opponents of the Baghdad government in an attempt to unsettle President Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials confirmed yesterday.

With the area protected by U.S. and British overflights and beyond the reach of Saddam's air force, the American forays are part of an unabashed, mostly psychological campaign to rattle him.

At this stage, the main Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, has not produced any plan that holds promise of success, a senior U.S. official said. As a result, the United States has not approved any military move inside the country and is not attempting one of its own.

The Defense Department yesterday denied rumors that any U.S. ground troops were inside Iraq. Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said the rumors had apparently originated with a Fox News Channel report of U.S. covert activity inside Iraq.

President Bush is considering military as well as diplomatic and political tactics to try to end the rule of a leader he denounced last month as part of an "axis of evil."

U.S. air patrols of Iraq's no-fly zones have remained constant since September 11, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and touched off a worldwide campaign against terror groups and countries that support them.

Saddam's refusal to admit U.N. weapons inspectors for more than three years has heightened concern over his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Combined with Iraq's designation by the State Department as a country that supports terror - one of seven countries so branded - the threat is considered unequaled by administration analysts.

Still, U.S. warplanes have launched fewer retaliatory strikes against Iraqi targets since September 11 because the Iraqis are firing at the U.S. planes less frequently, Col. Lapan said.

In December, a State Department group headed by American diplomat Ryan Crocker went to northern Iraq to help pull together Kurdish and other anti-Saddam forces.

It was the last such trip by U.S. officials, but there were several earlier and they are likely to happen again, said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday that "very small numbers" of Americans from various departments were involved.

Late last year, a bipartisan group of nine members of Congress asked Mr. Bush to support Iraqi opposition forces with humanitarian assistance, information gathering and military training.

The lawmakers said in a letter to the president that U.S. efforts to replace Saddam would not succeed without the help of allies on the ground inside Iraq. They suggested the support should be directed to the London-based Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella organization for all major groups opposed to Saddam.

Previous administrations have denied U.S. assistance for the Iraqi National Congress to carry out operations inside Iraq.

The Bush administration, however, has funded an information-collection program and humanitarian-aid offices in New York and Washington, but the opposition group has not provided a plan for distributing the assistance.

Under a congressional grant, some non-lethal training has been provided. In all, the Iraqi National Congress has received $12.4 million since 1998.

--------

U.S. Action Against Iraq in Next Six Months Unlikely

February 27, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-scenario.html

WASHINGTON - Depleted stocks of precision weapons, reluctant allies and a will to do the job properly in Iraq all work against America launching military action against Baghdad any time soon, defense and political analysts say.

Speculation has mounted in recent weeks that the United States is preparing a massive military campaign against Iraq, particularly after the president branded Iraq as part of an ''axis of evil'' with Iran and North Korea.

But several analysts said U.S. action -- if it took place at all -- was unlikely in the next six months for both military and political reasons.

They pointing to depleted laser-guided weapons stocks after the war in Afghanistan and opposition from key nations such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well as some NATO allies.

Retired Adm. Steve Baker, who commanded the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier during the Gulf War, said the United States would only attack Iraq when it was certain it had ``overwhelming force'' to be successful and not before.

``For that reason, I don't see it happening at the very earliest until fall this year or spring next year. Any kind of failure or less than 100 percent success in Iraq is totally unacceptable, particularly to the Bush administration.''

``I don't think we would ever contemplate a limited response. The risk is too high,'' he said.

Baker said laser-guided weapons were now at ``war-time reserve levels'' and that weapons manufacturers were working around the clock to boost supplies.

Raising jitters over military action, President Bush has repeatedly warned Baghdad in recent weeks that Washington would not stand by while Iraq developed weapons of mass destruction and refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country.

However, Arab leaders and some Europeans caution any military action against Iraq would smash global cooperation against terrorism and further destabilize the region.

Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said if the Pentagon were planning a low-risk campaign against Iraq, it would take several months before any bombing began.

``I think the military would be more than happy to say 'look we are still not done with Afghanistan and we don't want to be fighting a war on two fronts,''' he said.

U.S. WILL HAVE TOUGH FIGHT AHEAD

Another factor pointing against imminent action was the windy spring weather in Iraq, which brought with it dangerous sand storms that played havoc with military equipment.

``A September to March time frame would be a more attractive window (for military action), I would think,'' said Krepinevich.

Echoing other views, Krepinevich predicted the United States would push heavily for U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq and then use Baghdad's anticipated refusal to muster international support for strong military action.

While massive military action was unlikely soon, Baker suggested the United States might send in covert forces to suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites in Iraq to prove to the world that it was dangerous.

``If we had credible evidence ... of chemical and biological facilities that are there in Iraq, that helps out our effort quite a lot.''

One of the biggest hurdles for Washington is on the diplomatic front, with Saudi Arabia reluctant to allow U.S. forces to use its land as a base for attacks against Iraq, said Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

``The constraints (for launching a big attack) at the moment are not so much American assets and readiness but the support of allies in the region,'' Cordesman said.

``The problem is not which allies are reluctant, it's which allies are not reluctant,'' he added.

Vice President Dick Cheney is set to make a trip to the Middle East in mid-March, when he is expected to try to boost support for possible military action against Iraq.

While it was becoming more and more difficult for Iraq to get weapons, military analysts said Baghdad was still a force to be reckoned with.

In a report last month, Cordesman said despite the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was the most effective military power in the Gulf, with an army of around 375,000 men, about 2,200 main battle tanks, 3,700 other armored vehicles, 2,400 major artillery weapons and over 300 fixed-wing combat aircraft.

But he said Iraq lacked the training, funds, spare parts and production capabilities to sustain the quality of its forces.

Suggestions for U.S. troop commitments needed to defeat Iraq range as high as 200,000 but Baker predicted about half that amount would be enough to do the job.

-------- israel / palestine

Bush Welcomes Saudi Proposal on Mideast Peace

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER with SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/middleeast/27MIDE.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - President Bush thrust himself into the Mideast peace effort today, calling Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and publicly praising his proposal for Israel to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza in return for full normalization of relations with all Arab countries.

The administration also said it was growing more enthusiastic about the prospects of a major Saudi role in the peace effort. Though President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, characterized the proposal as short of a "breakthrough," he said, "The president praised the crown prince's ideas regarding the full Arab-Israeli normalization once a comprehensive peace agreement has been reached."

Some administration officials said they were less impressed by the content of the Saudi proposal - "It's not a plan, it's a vision," said one - than by the symbolism of having a leading Arab state, the caretaker of Islam's most treasured sites, put forward a plan that would lead to full normalization of relations with Israel.

They cautioned, however, that for decades, successive Israeli governments have rejected calls for a withdrawal to Israel's pre-1967 borders, and they were unsure how Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would view a long-term plan at a time of such rapidly intensifying violence.

Palestinian officials have reacted favorably to the Saudi proposal, which has not been spelled out in detail yet, but Mr. Sharon has made no public comment. After a meeting with the Israeli leader today, Javier Solana, head of foreign and security policy for the European Union, said Mr. Sharon considers the Saudi plan "an interesting idea."

The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, after his meeting today with Mr. Solana on the Saudi concept, announced, "I cannot say no to Solana's suggestion," and dispatched his team to Tel Aviv to discuss ways of lowering the level of violence.

Mr. Solana said he would travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to meet with Prince Abdullah, who first put forward his proposal last week. On Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell initially called the Saudi statement a "minor development," but on Monday he upgraded it to an "important step."

After his return from Asia, Mr. Bush decided there were numerous advantages in embracing the Saudi vision, if not its still-vague specifics.

"This is the first time we've heard any nation in the region talk about full normalization between Arab nations and Israel at the end of the peace process," one senior administration official said. "The president decided that he had to embrace the moment." Other officials and outsiders noted possible benefits for Mr. Bush.

Embracing the Saudi proposal helps the president counter critics who say the administration's hands- off approach to the Middle East for much of its first year only worsened the cycle of violence.

It also helps to change the subject with the Saudis: Mr. Fleischer said today that Mr. Bush and Prince Abdullah never discussed what Saudi Arabia was doing to root out extremists, and never mentioned the investigation of the Sept. 11 hijackers, 15 of whom were raised in Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, with Vice President Dick Cheney scheduled to leave for the Middle East in two weeks to describe the president's reasons for wanting to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq, an embrace of the Saudi plan could give Mr. Bush some diplomatic leverage by softening Saudi objections to bringing pressure on Mr. Hussein.

American support could also change the tone of the next Arab League summit meeting, scheduled for March 27 in Beirut, Lebanon, when the Saudi proposal is likely to be actively debated. That debate may now drown out criticism of Prime Minister Sharon.

"By legitimating the Saudi initiative, which they had to do, they have changed the context of this coming month," the Mideast scholar Stephen P. Cohen said today.

"It is significant because for all these years, the Arabs have always been clear in spelling out the territory side of `land for peace,' but studiously silent on the peace side of `land for peace.' "

Still, the White House made clear today that it would take a long while for the Saudi proposals to play out.

"It's important to have a vision for what peace should look like at the end of the day," Mr. Fleischer said, "but it's a long time until the end of the day in the Middle East."

He added that the president still believed that it was important for both sides to follow the "Mitchell process" to bring about peace, followed by political and territorial talks. The process is named for its author, the former senator George Mitchell, but it never got beyond its first stages before street violence cut it short. Mr. Mitchell's intention was to halt violence on both sides to build enough mutual confidence to support diplomatic talks between Isarael and the Palestinian Authority.

Mr. Bush's entry onto the state came as American-brokered security talks resumed between Israeli and Palestinian officials in Tel Aviv, with hopes swelling after Saudi Arabia's surprise proposal. The concept, which threw the weight of the Saudi kingdom behind Mr. Arafat at a time when Israel has grounded and humiliated him, heartened the Palestinians, but Palestinian officials are still waiting to hear from Mr. Sharon.

"His reaction was very positive," said a senior lieutenant of Mr. Arafat, Nabil Abu Rdeineh. "We support and welcome the Saudi initiative, and hope it will lead to a breakthrough in the Middle East. The problem is that we hear nothing from Sharon. We need to hear from the Israeli government."

Another senior Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, said, "We believe that this is the most significant and strategic idea that came from the Arab world since the convening of the Middle East conference in 1991, and I really hope that the American administration will concentrate on the strategic concept of the ideas and not go into the details of any agreement."

But Prime Minister Sharon remained wary, and made no public comment on a plan that revived demands for an Israeli withdrawal far greater than the Israeli right could agree to, and so threatened to put him on the defensive.

After meeting with Mr. Sharon, Mr. Solana said the prime minister "considers it an interesting idea and he would like to know more about the content, and he would like to meet anybody from Saudi Arabia, formally, informally, publicly, discreetly, whatever, to get better information about this initiative."

Despite Mr. Sharon's reserve, centrist members of his cabinet seemed heartened by what commentators described as the first concrete peace signal in 17 months of unmitigated violence.

The defense minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, said the plan "should be looked at positively," according to his spokesman. "It has new elements, and it should therefore be encouraged and must not be rejected."

On Monday the Israeli president, Moshe Katzav, said he was prepared to go to Riyadh to discuss the plan, or to welcome Prince Abdullah in Jerusalem. The plan was also being discussed in Paris between the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who has welcomed it, and President Jacques Chirac.

From Lebanon came cautious but significant support for the Saudi's proposal. The foreign minister, Mahmud Hammud, said the ideas "grow out of concern for long-held Arab positions and the demand for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab lands."

The importance of Mr. Hammud's statement lay in the fact that Syria holds effective authority over Lebanon.

Syria has made no direct comment on the proposals but the Lebanese response suggested that Damascus could fall in line behind the plan if one of the conditions was the return of the Golan, which Israel occupied in 1967.

-------- nato

NATO's overtures to Moscow

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
EDITORIAL
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020227-15032359.htm

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance that has long existed to ward off a Soviet threat, has invited Russia into its fold. After three months of wrangling over the safeguards the United States would want implemented before making Russia a virtual member of the world's largest military alliance, NATO has offered Russian President Vladimir Putin a list of proposals that would allow NATO's 19 members and Russia to make decisions in a new NATO-Russia council. Mr. Putin is considering the offer. Before the deal is finalized, however, the American people deserve to know what safeguards are in place to ensure U.S. security is not being compromised and the mission of NATO is not undermined. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee should hold a hearing as soon as possible so the Bush administration and NATO officials can clearly answer those and other questions.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow said the new council "will be a fundamental and historic change in NATO's dealings with Russia - a move toward a more substantial partnership and genuine collaboration that might be called an 'alliance within the alliance'." In his Feb. 22 speech at St. Petersburg University, Mr. Vershbow said that areas for joint action with Russia could include military and political projects, counter-terrorism efforts, non-proliferation, and response to regional conflicts. "It will be a qualitative step beyond today's 19-plus-one format, in which NATO formulates its position before engaging with its Russian partners," he said, referring to the Permanent Joint Council, which has been the forum for making joint decisions with Russia to this point, but has not given Russia joint decision-making power. "Through concrete joint projects, joint discussions, and eventually even joint decisions, NATO and Russia will be able to take responsibility together for dealing with some of the new challenges to security that threaten peace and stability in Europe," he said.

If this is the case, as Mr. Vershbow implies, then the extent to which Russia will have veto power over NATO member states must be clearly defined. If, as Mr. Vershbow says, Russia could respond militarily with NATO members, NATO must make clear what safeguards are in place to ensure that Russia will not try to divide Europe and the United States.

NATO's U.S. envoy, Nicholas Burns, said yesterday in Vilnius that Russia would not have a veto right over NATO operations, and he reassured NATO aspirants that Russia would not be able to block their chances for membership. NATO officials and diplomats said Monday that any issues in which Russia and NATO cannot reach consensus could be pulled off the table by any member.

So, Washington, which is it? The Senate Foreign Relations Committee should ask that and other pertinent questions as soon as possible.

-------- pakistan

Musharraf cites radicals for Pakistan mosque attack

By Nasir Malick
Wednesday February 27, 6:42 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91752.html

ISLAMABAD - President Pervez Musharraf blamed opponents of his war on terrorism for an attack on a Shi'ite Muslim mosque in Rawalpindi on Tuesday that killed 10 people and wounded 15.

Musharraf was swift to condemn the attack in the mainly Sunni Muslim country and blamed extremist groups for the second killing of Shi'ites in less than a week.

Doctors at Rawalpindi's Holy Family Hospital, just outside the Pakistan capital of Islamabad, said they were overwhelmed by the number of dead and wounded from the Shah-i-Najf mosque.

"We have 10 dead and at least 15 wounded," a police spokesman said. At least eight of the wounded were in critical condition, according to one doctor.

Police said three gunmen had opened fire on worshippers during evening prayers. One witness said there were up to 40 worshippers in the mosque at the time.

"It was a sudden firing and many of us immediately lay on the floor," one of the wounded, Anjum Abbass, told Reuters.

Shabbir Zaki, caretaker of the mosque, said two gunmen wearing shirts and baggy trousers entered the mosque hall and started hurling abuse at worshippers as they prayed.

"Suddenly they opened fire," Zaki said. "As soon as the shooting started, the worshippers, who were up to 40, lay on the ground to save themselves.

"There were screams and groaning of wounded all over," the caretaker said. "There were pools of blood all over the hall… it was a horrible scene."

CRACKDOWN ON EXTREMISM VOWED

Musharraf reiterated his government would remain firm in its resolve to stamp out extremism.

"Groups opposed to the government's policy of fighting against terrorism are out to distract it from pursuing its (policy) vigorously," he said in a statement released by the official Associated Press of Pakistan.

Rawalpindi's Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Fareed Nawaz, also condemned the attack.

"This is terrorism, not sectarianism," Nawaz said. "They used automatic weapons, which we believe were Kalashnikovs."

Shi'ite political leaders added their voices denouncing the attack as a blow to Pakistan, not to relations between the two wings of Islam.

"This is not a Shi'ite and Sunni fight. It's a conspiracy against Shi'ite and Sunni. And through this plan they are trying to provoke both sides," said Syed Razi Rizvi, head of the Shi'ite group Tehrike-e-Jafria Pakistan.

Hamid Ali Mousvi, another Shi'ite political leader, agreed.

"Anyone who tries to create a fight between the two groups is not a friend of Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, is not a friend of Islam and Pakistan -- he is our biggest enemy."

The attack underscores the problems Musharraf faces in reining in militant groups in a country of 140 million where Shi'ites account for about 15 percent of the population.

In 2001, sectarian violence killed 400 people, mainly in attacks on places of worship.

But Musharraf also faces the wrath of Islamic groups opposing his support of the United States in its war against terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere. That rage was highlighted on Tuesday by shots fired at a U.S. military plane as it came in to land at a Pakistani airfield.

The aircraft was not hit and there was no damage or casualties at the airfield, used as a U.S. logistics base for the war in Afghanistan and site of previous Islamic militant protests against Americans.

----

Security tightened as Pakistan mosque victims buried

Wednesday February 27
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91918.html

ISLAMABAD - Thousands of Pakistanis, some carrying placards reading "Remove terrorism, save Pakistan", turned out on Wednesday for the funeral of Shi'ite worshippers gunned down as they prayed in a mosque.

Pakistani police beefed up security in the garrison city of Rawalpindi after Tuesday's attack at the Shah-i-Najf mosque in which 11 people died and 14 were wounded.

The attack, which occurred around the same time as a U.S. military aircraft was fired on as it landed at a southern Pakistani airfield, underscored the huge task Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf faces in stabilising his volatile country.

Eight of the 11 dead were buried opposite the mosque after a procession filled with people calling for revenge and scenes of relatives weeping and policeman crying.

"It is Koranic principle, blood for blood," the crowd shouted as the eight coffins were taken to the graves.

The attack is the second in less than a week on minority Shi'ites in Pakistan. A family of five was gunned down last Thursday.

"We have sent reinforcements around the mosques and Imam bargahs (Shi'ite community centres) throughout the city," a police official said on Wednesday.

GRENADE

He also said a Russian-made hand grenade had been found outside the mosque.

"The grenade was found in a shopping bag hung on a bicycle parked outside the mosque."

Police said three gunmen using automatic weapons raided the mosque in the most serious attack on Shi'ite Muslims since Musharraf launched a crackdown on Islamic militants last month.

The president was swift to condemn Tuesday's attack in the mainly Sunni Muslim country and blamed extremist groups.

"Groups opposed to the government's policy of fighting against terrorism are out to distract it from pursuing its (policy) vigorously," he said in a statement.

Police said no one had yet been arrested and that no group had claimed responsibility for the attack.

Shi'ites account for about 15 per cent of Pakistan's 140 million people, and sectarian violence has killed thousands in recent years, 400 alone in 2001.

Shi'ite leaders condemned the attack and said this was not the work of Sunni Muslims.

"This is not a Shi'ite and Sunni fight. It's a conspiracy against Shi'ite and Sunni. And through this plan they are trying to provoke both sides," said Syed Razi-ud-Din Rizvi, leader of the banned Shi'ite group Tehrik-e-Jefria.

"Anyone who tries to create a fight between the two groups is not a friend of Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, is not a friend of Islam and Pakistan - he is our biggest enemy," said Hamid Ali Mousvie, president of another Shi'ite group.

Musharraf last month outlawed Tehrik-e-Jaffria Pakistan and four other militant groups that are suspected of carrying out tit-for-tat killings across the country.

-------- russia

Russia slams U.S. plan to send troops to Georgia

By Charles Aldinger
Wednesday February 27
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91761.html

WASHINGTON - U.S. plans to send elite military anti-terrorism trainers to the former Soviet republic of Georgia drew a quick warning from Russia and a cautious response from Tbilisi on Wednesday.

U.S. officials said on Tuesday that Army special forces troops soon were likely to go to Georgia to train that impoverished and volatile Russian neighbour's forces in what could be a new front in America's war on terrorism, which was sparked by the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York.

"We train and equip a lot of militaries. Don't read too much into this," one U.S. military official said of the discussions and the recent U.S. provision of 10 military helicopters to forces in mountainous Georgia.

But Georgia, with warm ties between President Eduard Shevardnadze and Washington, has moved into the international spotlight with suggestions from Washington that fighters linked to Islamic militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network could be based in the lawless Pankisi Gorge bordering Russia's separatist Chechnya region.

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said the deployment of U.S. forces in Georgia could only aggravate the security situation in the Transcaucasus region.

A Georgia spokesman in Tbilisi stressed that the country, located on Russia's southern fringe, was not planning joint anti-terror operations with U.S. forces such as those now ongoing between American and Philippine troops. But he said U.S. trainers could be coming.

The United States launched a war in Afghanistan in early October in response to the September attacks and recently began sending nearly 200 special forces trainers and hundreds of support troops to the Philippines to take part in bilateral exercises and to train Manila's armed forces in their battle against Muslim Abu Sayyaf guerrillas.

TRAINING, NOT FIGHTING

Georgia shares a long land frontier with Russia to its north. If the U.S. operation takes place it will be the first time U.S. forces have been stationed in a country bordering Russia.

The U.S. officials, who asked not to be identified, stressed that any troops sent to Georgia would not be involved in fighting Muslim guerrillas there, but would be in a support role similar to those in the Philippines.

The planned U.S. training, along with 10 UH-1H "Huey" military helicopters already provided to Georgia by the Pentagon, could help Shevardnadze's forces battle Islamic militants, including armed groups possibly linked to fugitive Osama bin Laden.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Shevardnadze in Tbilisi in December in the latest step in a decade-long rapprochement that has irritated Russia. Moscow has repeatedly accused Georgia of allowing Chechen rebels to set up bases in the Pankisi Gorge.

"Regarding possible U.S. military deployment in Georgia, we think it could further aggravate the situation in the region, which is difficult as it is," Ivanov told ORT public television in Moscow.

"That is our position and Washington is well aware of it," he added as Russian airwaves gave saturation coverage to the move said to be planned by Washington.

VINDICATING RUSSIAN CHARGES?

Ivanov said, however, the U.S. decision vindicated Russia's charges that Georgia had become a hotbed of terrorism -- a reference to the Chechen separatist rebels Moscow says are taking refuge there.

Russia says the Chechen rebels have links with bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, which Washington blames for the September airliner attacks and is committed to destroying.

Russia itself has had fractious relations with its small southern neighbor since the mountainous Transcaucasus country, once a jewel in the crown of the Soviet Union, gained independence in 1991 after the collapse of communism.

Georgia, which is contending with two secessionist regions in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, has frequently claimed that its big northern neighbor was trying to undermine its precarious political stability.

But Tbilisi played down the report that U.S. military trainers sent to Georgia could open a new front in Washington's war on terrorism.

"At this stage there is no question of holding a joint anti-terrorist operation of any kind, including in the Pankisi Gorge," Mirian Kiknadze, spokesman for the Georgian Defense Ministry, told Reuters.

Kiknadze said he was not aware of any extra U.S. personnel arriving in Georgia, where a small group of military advisers from Washington have been stationed for some time.

-------- spies

Lebanon arrests three suspected of spying for Israel

By Samia Nakhoul
Tuesday February 26
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-91650.html

BEIRUT - The Lebanese army said on Tuesday it had detained three men on charges of spying for Israel and providing it with information on Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas and the Lebanese and Syrian armies.

It said Imad Hussein al-Ruz, 43, Muhammad Abdel Aziz Abi Melhem, 45, and Radwan Khalil al-Haj, 38, had confessed to working for Israeli intelligence since 1993 and would be referred to a military court.

"After investigations, Lebanese army intelligence was able to expose and detain a spy ring working for the Israeli enemy," the army said in a statement.

A senior Lebanese security official told Reuters the group has allegedly focused its intelligence gathering on Lebanese and Syrian army positions and the movement and activities of Hizbollah figures, including its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

They also collected information on Hizbollah social work and charities, the official added.

He said the men were detained 10 days ago after people they tried to recruit informed the authorities. The last meeting between the alleged spies and Israeli intelligence officers took place at the Israeli embassy in Rome, the official added.

HIZBOLLAH PRAISE ARRESTS

Hizbollah praised the arrests "as a great achievement".

"This shows that the enemy is still pursuing its plan to target the powerful elements that are embodied in the Resistance and the national policies of Lebanon," Hizbollah's media official Sheikh Hassan Ezzedine told Reuters.

Hizbollah, known as the Resistance, is Israel's main enemy in Lebanon. Attacks by the group, backed by Syria and Iran, forced Israel to withdraw in May 2000 from south Lebanon, which it occupied for 22 years.

Israel assassinated former leader Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi in an air raid attack on his convoy in 1992. It also abducted two other Hizbollah leaders, Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid and Mustapha al-Dirani, in subsequent commando operations in 1989 and 1994.

The army said al-Ruz was an administrator in a Beirut hospital, Melhem a former bank executive and al-Haj a trader.

It alleged they had given Israeli officers information on Lebanese and Syrian military positions, as well as data on the activities of Hizbollah and some Lebanese political figures, and on the country's economic and financial institutions.

The statement said the alleged network had coordinated with Israeli embassies in Europe, and had recruited people to provide Israeli officers with intelligence abroad.

Last year the army detained 12 people on charges of spying for Israel, with which Lebanon is officially at war, also accusing them of gathering information on Hizbollah.

Military prosecutors last year also charged senior members of a banned Lebanese Christian militia which sided with Israel during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war with conspiring with Israel to undermine Lebanon and Syria.

Syria is a key power broker in Lebanon, where it maintains around 20,000 troops.

--------

Bush to Nominate Helgerson CIA Inspector General

February 27, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-bush-cia.html

WASHINGTON - President Bush intends to nominate John Helgerson to the post of CIA inspector general, a position that conducts investigations of possible internal wrongdoing at the U.S. spy agency, the White House said on Wednesday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Helgerson would fill the vacancy left by former CIA Inspector General Britt Snider, who retired in January 2001 and this month was appointed to lead a congressional investigation into intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

While inspector general, Snider conducted reviews into the CIA's handling of the computer-misuse scandal involving former CIA Director John Deutch, who placed classified material onto non-secure home computers, and into the CIA picking a target for the NATO bombing campaign on Yugoslavia that mistakenly turned out to be the Chinese Embassy.

The CIA inspector general also conducts inspections of different components of the spy agency to identify strengths and shortcomings, as well as financial audits.

Helgerson, 58, had a lengthy tenure with the CIA, joining in 1971 and serving from 1989 to 1993 as its deputy director for intelligence, which is the head of the spy agency's analytical department.

Helgerson currently is chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which operates like a government think tank for intelligence issues, producing classified assessments on topics ranging from missile threats to terrorism. He joined the National Intelligence Council in August from the post of deputy director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

``John's breadth and depth of experience at CIA and throughout the intelligence community -- as well as his sense of fairness and his absolute integrity -- make him eminently qualified for this demanding and extraordinarily important position,'' CIA Director George Tenet said in a statement.

-------- un

U.S. Seeks to Extend Ban on Cloning
U.N. Proposal Would End Work Using Human Embryos

By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8119-2002Feb26?language=printer

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 26 -- The United States today proposed a "global and comprehensive ban" on human cloning and all experimentation involving human embryos. The announcement marked an expansion in the Bush administration's campaign to restrict the uses of human embryos for scientific and medical purposes.

"Human cloning is an enormously troubling development in biotechnology," U.S. delegate Carolyn L. Willson said at a meeting of the U.N.'s Committee on an International Convention Against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings. Such cloning, she said, could lead to a future in which "human beings are born for spare body parts, and children are engineered to fit eugenic specifications."

Scientists have not yet demonstrated the ability to clone a human being, but one U.S. biotechnology company claims to have cloned human embryos consisting of a few cells. Although there is broad support at the United Nations for a ban on the cloning of babies, delegates from Europe to Asia today cautioned that it would be unwise to stifle research on cloned embryos, a promising field that might yield medical breakthroughs.

"It would be a mistake to close the door to future scientific and technological progress which could save human lives," said Yoshiyuki Motomura, Japan's representative at the meeting -- though he opposed reproductive cloning.

Stem cells harvested from cloned human embryos are capable of growing into human tissue, and thus hold out the promise of replacing damaged human organs. Many scientists have sought to persuade the Bush administration and Congress to permit such research, known as "therapeutic cloning," and to outlaw only "reproductive cloning."

"It's bad enough that the administration would seek to impose its views on the American people, let alone the entire world," Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said after the meeting. "We need to keep these avenues of research open."

In August, France and Germany proposed a global treaty that would prohibit the cloning of babies but permit the production of human embryos for scientific research. But the United States said it did not go far enough and presented an alternative proposal today. The General Assembly is to decide in August whether to begin negotiations on a treaty.

Willson said that "therapeutic or experimental cloning" could lead to an international black market in embryos.

"Implantation of cloned embryos would take place out of sight," she said. "Once begun, an illicit clonal pregnancy would be virtually impossible to detect and, if detected, governments would be unlikely to compel the pregnancy to be aborted or severely penalize the pregnant woman."

-------- us

Rumsfeld shuts down OSI

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020227-77693081.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday reluctantly announced the shutdown of the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence, blaming inaccurate press reports for ending a legitimate counterpropaganda operation. Mr. Rumsfeld said "inaccurate speculation and assertions" in the press made it impossible for OSI, as it was known, to carry out its mission in President Bush's war on terrorism.

"I guess not withstanding the fact that much of the thrust of the criticism and the cartoons and the editorial comment has been off the mark, the office has clearly been so damaged that it's pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively," he said. "So it's being closed down."

Mr. Rumsfeld said he met yesterday with Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, who decided to terminate the 15-member office.

Press reports last week said OSI, whose operational plan had not yet been approved by Mr. Rumsfeld, wanted to plant false news stories in the foreign press to confuse or mislead terrorists.

OSI supporters inside the administration said such proposals never existed. Instead, the office, which was created shortly after the September 11 attacks, planned programs to counter radical Islamic propaganda. It also wanted to coordinate information programs already run by the military, such as psychological warfare and information pipelines to civilians caught up in war.

Mr. Rumsfeld said planting false news stories is the sort of "activities that the department has in fact not done, is not doing and would not condone."

Efforts to counter terrorist diatribes will continue. "We'll just do them in a different office," the defense secretary said.

One proposed OSI program would have the Pentagon help the Pakistani government shut down a network of madrassas - schools where radical clerics teach children a hate-ridden version of the Koran, the Muslim holy book. U.S. officials view madrassas, which are funded in part by Saudi Arabian money, as nothing more than terrorist training schools.

OSI also wanted to mount a campaign to blunt Iranian radio broadcast in western Afghanistan designed to destabilize the interim government of Hamid Karzai.

"The Iranian objective is to destabilize Afghanistan," said an administration official. "The Iranian special operations people and the intelligence people in the western part of Afghanistan are really causing problems there."

OSI developed enemies inside the administration, including officials in the Pentagon office of public affairs, who saw it as infringing on their turf and feared it would hurt the department's credibility.

Some conservative activists had mounted a last-ditch effort to save the office, but its future turned bleaker on Monday when Mr. Bush denounced any Pentagon effort to deceive the public.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a former Reagan administration defense official who heads the Center for Strategic Policy, said OSI itself is the victim of disinformation.

"It is a terrible shame," he said, "that one of the most effective acts of disinformation in the war on terrorism has been perpetrated for the purpose of destroying an organization that was not going to engage in disinformation, but did in fact have very important functions to perform to ensure the success of the war."

He added, "As Secretary Rumsfeld has said, those are important functions. I hope that they will all be continued, and I hope that it will be done nearly as well."

OSI supporters contended the press coverage took on a life of its own, even though there was no evidence that the office planned to plant false news stories and its draft charter made no mention of such an operation.

The office was headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, an astrophysicist by training who played a key role in President Reagan's missile-defense program in the 1980s.

---

Rumsfeld Kills Pentagon Propaganda Unit
News Reports Decried As Damaging, Inaccurate

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld emphatically killed the Pentagon's new Office of Strategic Influence, saying yesterday that inaccurate news reports had damaged the new propaganda coordination office beyond repair.

Rumsfeld defended the office even as he buried it. Even though much of the media commentary was "off the mark," he told reporters at the Pentagon, "the office has clearly been so damaged that it's . . . pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively, so it's being closed down."

Pressed by reporters about whether the office would have disseminated false information overseas, as had been reported, Rumsfeld insisted that it wouldn't have done so. At any rate, he said, the new office's charter hadn't been completed, "so what it was to do was an open question, even today as it ends its very short, prominent life."

Rumsfeld added, with characteristic vigor: "The office is done. It's over. What do you want, blood?"

The swift demise of the new office, which was created in November to better coordinate the military's dissemination of information overseas, represents a victory for the military public affairs community and a surprising setback for the new "information warfare" specialty.

Military public affairs specialists had worried that the new office would blur the line between their work of dealing with the media and the public and the "black" world of covert operations, which sometimes involves disseminating false information. "I'm sure that the public affairs community is having a drink tonight," said one veteran military spokesman.

But specialists in information warfare -- which can cover anything from dropping leaflets to hacking into foreign computers -- believed that the Pentagon public affairs community had done a poor job in the Afghan war, especially in putting U.S. views before foreign audiences.

"It's frustrating for us" to see the office shut down, one officer involved in information operations said yesterday. He said the new office was mainly involved in what might be called "defense marketing," and that only about 5 percent of its planned work would have involved covert operations.

One idea under consideration, he said, was to seek to justify U.S. actions to the Pakistani public by putting up billboards in that country showing an image of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11 and indicating the death toll resulting from that day's terrorist attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

"The lesson is what a lot of us have known for a long time, that truth is always the best weapon, and everyone who works for Secretary Rumsfeld knows that to be true," said Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon's chief spokeswoman.

Rumsfeld said that the functions of the now-defunct office would be carried on by other Pentagon offices. "We'll just have to do it with the offices that existed previously," he said.

The public affairs veteran predicted that the propaganda function now would be performed by other, lower-profile offices, perhaps by private companies working on contract. But the officer involved in information warfare said the incident has shaken the confidence of his colleagues and has done some damage to their emerging specialty.

At the same briefing yesterday, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that, with another 14 people turned over by Pakistan over the past two days, there are now about 500 suspected members of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in U.S. custody, with about 300 being held at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and another 194 in captivity inside Afghanistan.

Myers said he expects that the number of captives will continue to increase. "We still have a lot of people we've not looked at completely that the Afghans and the Pakistanis have," he said.

Rumsfeld indicated that the top U.S. priority in interrogating the detainees is to gather intelligence, and then to deal with them in terms of possible law enforcement actions. "We are beginning that process now," he said.

He said the U.S. government is "pretty close" to releasing the rules under which trials might be held. Most of those rules have leaked already, and they generally seem to resemble the U.S. military justice system, legal experts say.

---

Pentagon abandons public sentiment idea

Los Angeles Times
February 27, 2002
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/02/27/news_pf/Worldandnation/Pentagon_abandons_pub.shtml

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's flirtation with a high-level office to influence public sentiment abroad came to an abrupt end Tuesday, when the fledgling effort was ingloriously disbanded in response to pressure from the White House and dissension within the Defense Department.

But with or without an Office of Strategic Influence, the Pentagon intends to continue its long-standing practice of dispensing misleading information to enemies in wartime, officials said.

That means telling the truth to reporters -- but not necessarily the whole truth -- conducting and publicizing military exercises with the express purpose of misleading foes about future military operations, and keeping the details of new weapons systems under wraps. All have been routine practice at the Pentagon for generations.

"We're going to preserve our option to mislead the enemy about our operations," said Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy who oversaw the office.

What the Pentagon will not and never intended to do, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week, is to consciously plant false stories about its operations in the press.

Established in November, the Office of Strategic Influence was described as an effort to consolidate various functions such as psychological and information warfare that until now had been spread through the Department of Defense. It grew out of the Pentagon's frustration over early backlash in the Islamic media against the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

But the operation came under fire last week when the New York Times said the office, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, had proposed spreading false information to foreign journalists as a means of furthering the war on terrorism.

Rumsfeld and others responded that the Pentagon would never lie. The Pentagon's public affairs office, which coordinates news media coverage of the military and works with journalists daily, expressed its reservations publicly, with officials telling reporters they feared the new operation would undermine their credibility. Inside the Pentagon, pressure became intense to dismantle the office.

"I can't say anything more than that the biggest disinformation campaign was leveled at us," said Lt. Col. Marty France, a spokesman for the office.

The idea was to "make sure that all our efforts among all the agencies are better coordinated, not conflicting or stepping on each other's feet," France said. "We're interested in getting the facts out to foreign audiences that are prevented from receiving them."

When the controversy broke, Rumsfeld professed to know little about its mandate. But on Tuesday, in disclosing that the office would be shut down, he said criticism of the office had been "off the mark" and had made it impossible for the agency to do its job. He appeared to blame the press.

"The office is done. What do you want, blood?" Rumsfeld asked reporters.

The military has several agencies charged with conducting various types of information warfare. Most are kept under wraps, but one, the Army's 4th Psychological Operations group at Ft. Bragg, N.C., has been widely publicized recently for the leaflet campaigns and radio broadcasts it has conducted.

----

Rumsfeld takes dim view of U.S. peacekeeping role

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020227-7659523.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday said he does not favor using military forces for peacekeeping operations because of strains they put on military forces and personnel.

"I think that we organize, train, and equip, and recruit for people to come in and serve in the military in military functions," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. "And to the extent we can have as few people in uniform doing nonmilitary functions, I think we better serve ourselves, our country and our personnel."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the current size of the U.S. military is limited, and that service personnel are being discouraged from retiring because of the war on terrorism. The military also has called up tens of thousands of reservists and National Guard personnel.

The defense secretary made the remarks when asked if he has a "philosophical" opposition to using U.S. forces in peacekeeping. He denied his opposition was philosophical.

"We also have a whole lot of ... military people doing a lot of things that are not military jobs," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he prefers to assign military personnel to relieve activated National Guard and reserve forces, who "need to go back to their normal lives and families and employment." He said the military needs to return "to functions of our government and our defense establishment."

The comments are in sharp contrast to the Clinton administration, which ordered U.S. troops on scores of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations around the world. The deployments hampered training, wore out equipment and stretched U.S. military forces, officials have said.

Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, said on Monday that the United States would not take part in an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

The four-star general said he prefers setting up a national Afghan army, which can maintain border control and stability in place of a peacekeeping force.

Currently, there are about 6,000 international military troops in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), led by the British military.

By contrast, the total number of U.S. military personnel is around 5,000, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said the U.S. military is helping without sending combat troops. "We are making a contribution, philosophical or non-philosophical, as it may be ... in Afghanistan by providing some logistics, some airlifts, some intelligence," he said.

"We are also providing a quick reaction-force availability in the event that the ISAF has some difficulties, which I hope they don't. So it's not like we're not making a contribution to the security in the country. I think we are; indeed, I know we are."

In other developments, Mr. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is prepared to hold military tribunals for captured al Qaeda terrorists, if the president decides to order people to stand trial. He declined to provide details on how the tribunals would operate, but said they could be set up quickly.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that U.S. military forces in Afghanistan are continuing to gather intelligence on terrorist activities and operations and are searching for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

Authorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan recently turned over 16 additional prisoners to the U.S. military, Gen. Myers said.

The total number of detainees held in Afghanistan is 194. An additional 300 prisoners are being kept at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he said.

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U.S. May Send G.I.'s to Ex-Soviet Area in Training Mission

By ERIC SCHMITT
New York Times
February 27, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/europe/27TROO.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - The United States is considering sending as many as 200 Special Operations forces to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to help train that nation's military in counterterrorism tactics, a senior military official said today.

The aim of the training mission, which is close to being approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to prepare Georgian troops for combatting foreign fighters who have been operating in a mountainous region of the country and could have links to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's network, the official said.

The impending deployment to Georgia would open a new front in America's war on terrorism, building on the current operations in Afghanistan and in the Philippines, where more than 600 American forces are advising Philippine troops. The Pentagon has recently approved the transfer of 10 UH-1 helicopters to the Philippine armed forces, some of which have already arrived in the country.

The Georgia plan calls for 100 to 200 Special Operations forces, but that number could grow depending on how the operation unfolds, a senior military official said. Pentagon officials said any American troops in Georgia would not be allowed to take direct part in combat operations, but they could defend themselves against any attack.

Right now it has not been determined how long such a mission would last. The possible deployment of American forces to Georgia comes after an assessment team from the military's European command visited Georgia about a month ago to study the potential of such a cooperative mission.

The State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said last week that Georgian officials had confirmed the presence of foreign fighters and that the United States had discussed the problem with Georgia's president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister.

"We have supported them in the antiterrorism training and cooperation, and we'll continue to do that," Mr. Boucher said.

One Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said tonight that the United States was seriously exploring a possible role in Georgia. "Clearly, where we can offer support in the fight against terrorism, whether it is training or intelligence information sharing, we will do so," he said.

The region where the guerrilla fighters are believed to operating is the Pankisi Gorge, a lawless region northeast of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi along the border with Russia.

In his remarks, Mr. Boucher noted that a State Department report on patterns of global terrorism said that foreign mujahedeen were using Georgia as a conduit to Chechnya.

Russian officials have raised concerns about the activities of the rebels, but Mr. Boucher said the United States' was "that this situation is best dealt with through cooperation with the United States and Georgia so that Georgia would have better control over the area, better control over the borders."

----

Marines, Special Operations Command Increase Ties

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7502-2002Feb26?language=printer

The Marine Corps and the U.S. Special Operations Command have signed a memorandum of agreement that calls for much closer training and a new integrated command structure during wartime deployments, a top Marine Corps general said yesterday.

"There's a closeness in the way we do things that is already there," said Lt. Gen. Emil R. Bedard, the Marine Corps' deputy commandant for plans, policy and operations. "It's just a matter of bringing it together."

In an interview with defense reporters, Bedard said a provision in the Nov. 9 memorandum calls for Special Operations liaison officers to be included in Marine Expeditionary Units. The practice was put in place weeks later, he said, when Special Operations officers were deployed with the first Marines who landed in Afghanistan to secure an airfield southwest of Kandahar.

A close operating relationship between Marines and Army Special Forces troops in Afghanistan actually preceded the agreement, he said, with Marines deploying a quick reaction force and providing search and rescue aircraft to support an initial parachute drop by U.S. Army Rangers onto the airfield in late October.

Bedard said the origins of the agreement date back more than a year to discussions Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James L. Jones had with Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, head of the Special Operations Command, over the V-22 Osprey, the tilt-rotor aircraft now in development for both the Marines and Air Force Special Operations.

The Marines' experience in Afghanistan, Bedard said, reaffirmed the need for the Osprey, now set to begin a new operational flight test program after two recent crashes killed 23 Marines. Bedard said the Osprey can carry three times the load, five times as far and twice as fast as current Marine helicopters.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Hack a PC, Get Life in Jail

By Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate
Feb. 27, 2002
Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,50708,00.html

WASHINGTON -- A House panel voted unanimously late Tuesday to expand the types of hacking crimes that would be punished by life imprisonment.

Citing the possibility of terrorists wreaking havoc electronically, the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime voted 8-0 to rewrite the Cyber Security Enhancement Act and forward a more Draconian version to the full committee.

CSEA's original language said in cases where miscreants knowingly attempt "to cause death or serious bodily injury" through electronic means, the punishment would be life imprisonment.

That wasn't strong enough for the committee, which succumbed to pressure from the Bush administration and voted during the 45-minute session for a replacement bill (PDF) promising life terms for computer intrusions that "recklessly" put others' lives at risk.

"Until we secure our cyber infrastructure, a few keystrokes and an Internet connection is all one needs to disable the economy and endanger lives," said CSEA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the subcommittee's chairman. "A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb."

Smith said: "Just as a physical attack can cause injury, a cyber attack can substantially harm our economy and endanger public health and safety."

Another section of CSEA would permit Internet providers to disclose the contents of e-mail messages and other electronic communication to police in cases where the companies believe -- "in good faith" -- that the danger of death or physical injury exists.

Currently, it's illegal for an Internet provider to "knowingly divulge" what you're doing except in some specific circumstances, such as when it is troubleshooting glitches, receiving a court order or tipping off police that a crime is in progress. CSEA expands that list to include when "an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of the information without delay."

"We have serious problems with (that part of CSEA)," said Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It expands disclosure authority to include disclosures to any government entity: State, local, federal and even foreign. It allows carriers to disclose information in response to any government request when government claims an emergency with no oversight, no accountability after the fact."

Despite the objections of civil libertarians, CSEA enjoys strong support from the private sector.

"If we are to protect American consumers, businesses and government, federal laws against cyber-crime must be strengthened," said Robert Cresanti, vice president of the Business Software Alliance. "The Cyber Security Enhancement Act will provide law enforcement with needed digital age tools and impose tougher sentencing on those who would threaten our security."

CSEA also formalizes the existence of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. The center, which investigates and responds to both physical and virtual threats and attacks on America's critical infrastructure, was created in 1998 by the Department of Justice, but has not been authorized by an act of Congress.

The original version of CSEA set aside $57.5 million for the NIPC. Smith's replacement increases the NIPC's funding to $125 million for the 2003 fiscal year.

Another amendment, offered by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) and approved by the panel, gives the U.S. Sentencing Commission more flexibility than in the original bill in deciding penalties for illegal hacking offenses. It aso directs the commission to report back to Congress.

A full committee hearing on CSEA has not been scheduled.

----

FEMA's anti-terrorism role hearing

Daybook February 27, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020227-418090.htm

FEMA's anti-terrorism role - 9:30 a.m. - The Senate Appropriations subcommittee on VA, HUD and independent agencies holds a hearing on "FEMA's Role in Responding to Acts of Terrorism." Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, testifies. Location: 124 Dirksen Senate Office Building. Contact: 202/224-3471.

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Ashcroft: Terror top budget factor

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020227-1376390.htm

The Justice Department's top priority in its proposed $30.2 billion budget is to "protect America against acts of terrorism and to bring terrorists to justice," Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday told a Senate subcommittee.

"Since my last appearance before you, America and the world have been awakened to a new threat from an old evil: terrorism," Mr. Ashcroft told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the department's budget.

"As a result of the attacks of September the 11th, the FBI, with the cooperation of other federal, state, local and international law enforcement, is conducting the largest criminal investigation in history," he said.

Some subcommittee members questioned department proposals to cut programs aimed at assisting state and local law enforcement officials as the federal agency shifts its emphasis to terrorists and the prevention of new attacks.

Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, South Carolina Democrat and subcommittee chairman, targeted reductions in the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which spent $385 million last year to hire new police officers nationwide.

Mr. Hollings called proposed cuts in the COPS progam "a non-starter as far as the subcommittee is concerned," adding that the proposed funding reduction "decimates local law enforcement, decimates cops on the beat. We don't mess with something that's working."

The Bush administration, in exchange for the cuts, has offered to create an $800 million grant program for state and local police for various spending on projects, although Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, said he was "not convinced this is going to help law enforcement."

In defending the proposed budget, Mr. Ashcroft told the subcommittee that the proposal calls for 263 new FBI agents, increases border and courthouse security, and creates 56 joint terrorism task forces throughout the country - one in every FBI field ofice.

He also said the department remained committed to reducing the demand and supply of illegal drugs, to the enforcement of gun laws and to the protection of civil rights.

He said the budget seeks increases for federal detention and incarceration capacities and funding designed to end the trafficking in human beings.

The Justice Department, in the wake of attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 3,000 people, faced challenges that were both "complex and unprecedented," Mr. Ashcroft said.

The proposed budget requests $23.1 billion in discretionary funding and $7.1 billion for the department's mandatory and fee-funded accounts. He said federal law enforcement programs would increase by 13 percent, that the budget was designed to streamlined resources available to support state and local law enforcement and to defend U.S. interests.

"To help secure our nation's borders, we are proposing program improvements totaling $856 million, including $59.1 million from fee-funding for the Immigration and Naturalization Service," he said. "Of this amount, $734 million is dedicated to improving border security."

Mr. Ashcroft also said the department was requesting $362 million to begin a multiyear effort to provide a comprehensive, land, sea and air entry/exit system for the United States; and $372 million to hire 570 new Border Patrol agents and additional immigration inspectors.

He said the budget also requests $223 million for increased intelligence, surveillance and response capabilities; $109 million for information technology projects; and $78 million for enhanced personnel and information security.

The attorney general told the subcommittee the proposed budget requests $400 million to begin a new three-year program for states to improve state and local jurisdictions' voting technologies and administration, including voting machines, registration systems, voter education and worker training.

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Arabs want Guantanamo prisoners back

2/27/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=27022002-080638-7645r

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Arab countries, following the European lead, have asked the United States to hand over their citizens who were captured in Afghanistan and thought to be members of al Qaida.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz on Wednesday said his country will not deliver any detained al Qaida suspects to the United States while Yemen demanded the repatriation of 21 of its nationals held by the U.S. military at a base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Commenting on U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statements that Arab detainees at the Cuban base could be allowed to return to their countries on the condition they could be summoned back at any time, the prince said, "Whenever a citizen is returned to his homeland, he becomes the responsibility of the concerned authorities in his country."

He was quoted by the Saudi Okaz newspaper as saying U.S. officials "know the kingdom's wish to have its citizens back" and expressed hope Washington will respond to that wish "at the appropriate time."

Asked about the Saudi detainees held at the Guantanamo base and at prisons in Afghanistan, the Saudi interior minister said Yemen has handed over to Saudi Arabia "one Saudi suspect for his link to al Qaida." Al Qaida is thought to be a network of terrorist cells controlled by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, the man the United States believes masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

As for Afghanistan's willingness to hand over the Saudi prisoners, he said: "This matter is still in its early stages but we expect that (the interim government of Hamid Karzai) would not hesitate in delivering any one of them."

He denied having any information about bin Laden's fate "as we give no interest to this."

The prince assured Saudi businessmen, who expressed fears of reported pressures by the United States to disclose the bank accounts of some Saudi companies, saying the kingdom was eager "to respect such privacy ... but if it was proven to us that there is something harming our security or contradicting the kingdom's policies, then it is expected to be limited and individual."

For its part, Yemen on Wednesday called on the United States to hand over its 21 nationals held at Guantanamo.

"Keeping the detainees in prison in Cuba without any fair trial is not justified," an official source was quoted by the Ath Thawra newspaper.

Last month, Yemen said Washington approved its request to send a Yemeni investigation team to Guantanamo to check on Yemeni prisoners there. It said the United States also agreed that the Yemeni officials participate in the investigation.

Yemeni investigators hoped to obtain information from Guantanamo prisoners that would help the investigation into the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. A total of 17 servicemen were killed and 35 others were injured in the blast.

----

Report: Salt Lake blast caused by bomb?

2/27/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=27022002-112632-8253r

SALT LAKE CITY -- Railroad spikes found at the scene of an explosion that knocked out power in Salt Lake City on the final day of the Winter Olympics were being examined Wednesday for possible indications of an explosive device.

The Salt Lake Tribune said Wednesday that the federal and Utah state law enforcement agents were investigating whether the spikes had been used as shrapnel to destroy a circuit breaker at a Utah Power substation.

Sunday's explosion occurred eight hours before the Olympics closing ceremony. It knocked out power to around 33,000 homes in the Salt Lake area and led to a fire at an oil refinery, although damage from the blaze was minimal.

Agents collected the steel spikes and other material from the scene and took them to a federal crime lab to be tested for explosives residue, the Tribune said.

"This is under investigation by the FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), and we don't want to say anything to compromise their investigation," said Utah Power spokesman Dave Eskelsen, who confirmed that security at substations had been increased during the Olympics.

The explosion and outage were the only reported incidents that hinted at terrorism during the games, which were staged under intensive security that was beefed up even further following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast. The impact was more an annoyance to the Olympics than a disruption as the closing ceremonies proceeded without incident, and flight operations continued at the nearby Salt Lake City International Airport.

The worst damage occurred at the Tesoro refinery in North Salt Lake. Some oil-soaked materials were carried into the refinery's catalytic converter and ignited as technicians restarted the unit once the power came back on. The resulting fire forced closure of part of Interstate 15 and caused minor damage to the converter, which is used to turn crude oil into gasoline.

----

Police Gunfire In D.C. Worsens
Deaths, Injuries Increase From 7 To 17 in a Year

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7577-2002Feb26?language=printer

The number of people shot by District police more than doubled last year -- from seven to 17, including three fatalities -- reversing a two-year decline that police had attributed to better training.

A new report by the D.C. police department that chronicles the use of force shows a 143 percent increase in the number of people injured or killed by police gunfire last year and a 45 percent increase from 2000 in the number of times police shot at suspects.

The 17 shootings represented a better record than in 1998, when the department began tracking shootings after officers shot 32 people, killing 12. But the increase -- from 11 shootings in 1999 and seven in 2000 -- comes despite an overhaul of police training and creation of a team to investigate such incidents.

"We had an increase last year, but when you go as low as we did in 2000, you're going to have slight increases," Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday. "We're stabilizing."

The police shooting statistics "aren't as important as the justification for each incident," Ramsey added. "There were 233 murders in this city last year. We still have a lot of violence. . . . When our officers do have to use any form of force," the department wants to make sure it's done properly and with a minimum of injury.

Ramsey was new to his post in 1998 when a Washington Post investigation found that D.C. police had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other large U.S. city police force. After that report, Ramsey and Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) requested a two-year federal investigation, which concluded last summer that there was a "pattern of excessive force" in the department in the 1990s.

By agreement between the police and the U.S. Justice Department, an independent monitor was appointed last year to oversee the police force for five years. The agreement includes an elaborate computer program to track officers' conduct, changes in training programs, mandatory firearms training sessions and creation of a Force Investigation Team in the police department. If D.C. police violate the agreement, the Justice Department can sue.

The comprehensive analysis of police shootings released this week was done by the Force Investigation Team, which Ramsey established in 1999.

For the past three years, every time a police officer fired a weapon in the District, investigators analyzed the incident in detail. They logged the time of day, the race and gender of the officer and the distance between the officer and the target, among other criteria.

Joshua A. Ederheimer, the D.C. police inspector who did most of the analysis for the report, researched shootings and set up methods to compile statistics on them. The data showed that 89 percent of the officers who fired a weapon last year were men, the average age was 37, and the officers involved had an average of 8 1/2 years on the force.

Each shooting is analyzed by investigators the way a football coach picks apart games. They go over the details of the shooting, search for tactical errors, smart reactions and alternative actions. The analyses are sent to the training academy and are incorporated into the curriculum, Ramsey said.

In January 2001, when the bar graphs and pie charts on Ederheimer's computer showed a spike in accidental shootings while officers were struggling with suspects, the team alerted the academy, and its instructors tweaked the training to pay special attention to the handling of weapons during a struggle. Last spring, when the data showed a spate of animal shootings, investigators told shooting range and academy instructors to mention dogs in weapons training -- and the rate of animal shootings dropped, the report said.

D.C. Council member Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) said that her constituents have not said police use of force is a major issue and that microscopic scrutiny may affect officers' initiative. "I think we have to walk a very fine line between not making officers reluctant to take action and creating a cowboy force," Ambrose said.

Sgt. G.G. Neill, chairman of the D.C. police union's labor committee, complained: "I've already had officers tell me they're slowing up on taking any action because they're being second-guessed. They're going to investigate the police officers harder than they investigate the criminals."

The department also tracks the number of times police fire at people -- whether officers hit them or not. The report said police fired at people 29 times last year, compared with 20 times in 2000.

This year, the department plans to track other uses of force, including baton strikes, broken bones and "pointing the weapon at someone," said Assistant Chief Kim C. Dine, head of the department's office of professional responsibility. It will also analyze bites by police dogs.

Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) said she wants to see several years of steady decline in use of force before she calls the current efforts a success or failure. During a hearing Monday, she asked Ramsey about a 23 percent increase in citizen complaints about excessive force.

Ramsey said those numbers are based on allegations, not on substantiated complaints. He said the numbers are increasing because the department is more open to accepting such complaints.

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Man faces charges in alien smuggling

Around the Nation
February 27, 2002
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020227-23453917.htm

The Justice Department yesterday announced the arrest and indictment of Maher Wazzen Ahmed Yusof Jarad on charges of encouraging or inducing aliens to enter and reside in the United States in violation of U.S. immigration laws.

Mr. Jarad, 35, is accused by a grand jury in Washington of smuggling aliens in connection with the U.S. government's interception of an Ecuadorian vessel named "Esperanza," which was bound for Guatemala with a final destination of the United States. Passengers on board the ship included Ecuadoreans and Iraqis.

The ship was ordered to return to Ecuador by Ecuadorean authorities after the U.S. authorities advised them the vessel was so unfit for travel that it endangered the lives of those aboard and that several migrants were already seriously ill. If convicted, Mr. Jarad faces up to five years in prison for each migrant.

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Congressman Wants FBI Records

February 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-Privilege.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Faced with a contempt threat, the Justice Department agreed Wednesday to give a congressional committee records on the Boston FBI's handling of mob informants in the 1960s, the committee chairman said.

``My committee has been investigating this tragic case for over a year,'' said House Government Reform Chairman Dan Burton. ``We've finally reached an agreement with the Justice Department to see the documents we need to see to move forward with this investigation.''

A department spokesman declined comment, saying he was reviewing the details.

For now, the agreement settles the showdown between Burton and the White House over its use of executive privilege to shield prosecutorial documents from congressional scrutiny. The dispute had led to charges by both Democrats and Republicans that Bush was trying to run an ``imperial'' presidency.

At a committee hearing Wednesday, Burton said he might try to hold President Bush in contempt because he and Attorney General John Ashcroft had yet to comply with a subpoena for the documents.

After department officials and committee aides met later, the department agreed to provide five documents in question, the aides said. The committee had sought 10 records, but four were found to be irrelevant to the case or not responsive to the subpoena. One was provided earlier.

Executive privilege is a doctrine recognized by the courts that ensures presidents can get candid advice in private without fear it will become public.

Bush invoked it in December when he ordered Ashcroft not to turn the Boston records over. He argued that releasing the records could have a chilling effect on prosecutors' willingness to discuss criminal matters.

Burton has focused on revelations that Joseph Salvati of Boston spent 30 years in prison for a murder he did not commit even though the FBI had evidence of his innocence.

-------- death penalty

Pakistan to seek death for Pearl's killers

By Shahid Iqbal
2/26/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26022002-010758-8755r

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Pakistan said Tuesday it would seek the death penalty for those involved in the kidnapping and slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Sindh Province Attorney General Raja Qureshi said the prosecution would invoke the country's anti-terrorism laws that allow it to seek the death penalty for those "aiding and abetting a terrorist act."

"Acts such as providing financial assistance and encouragement to terrorists can be punished with death as well," said Qureshi, who heads the government's legal team in the Pearl case.

"The laws also define murder and kidnapping as an act of terror, proposing the maximum penalty of death and the minimum of life imprisonment."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States was seeking custody of Ahmed Omar Saeed Shaikh, the chief suspect in Pearl's kidnapping who is also known as Shaikh Omar.

"We want to see him in U.S. custody for the crimes that he has committed against Americans. The Pakistanis also have charges against him for crimes that he has committed in Pakistan," Boucher said. "So we're discussing with the Government of Pakistan how to proceed to ensure that justice is served in this matter."

To that end, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain Tuesday met with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke by telephone later in the day with Musharraf.

"She (Chamberlain) also thanked the president for ongoing police cooperation on the Pearl case and encouraged further movement in it," said Mark Wentworth, an embassy spokesman.

The State Department said Tuesday the United States had an extradition agreement with Pakistan under an arrangement signed into force in 1932 with the former British India, of which the present Pakistan was a part. The agreement went into effect 10 years later.

On Monday, the White House said it wanted Omar and others linked to Pearl's death extradited to the United States.

Pearl, 38, was kidnapped Jan. 23 from Karachi while trying to interview a radical Muslim leader. He was the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and was based in Bombay, India, but had moved to Karachi to cover the U.S.-led war on terror.

On Feb. 21, Pearl's kidnappers sent a videotape to U.S. and Pakistani officials showing his throat being slashed and his severed head. But investigators say Pearl was already dead when the film was made.

A week after the kidnapping, the abductors sent e-mail messages to media offices, listing their demands for his release. They had demanded the transfer of some Taliban and al Qaida prisoners from the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Pakistan and better treatment for others.

One e-mail message also had Pearl's pictures with a gun pointed to his head.

Qureshi said under Pakistan's anti-terrorism laws "even those who sent the e-mail could face a death sentence."

A joint FBI and police team has arrested three men from a Karachi neighborhood in connection with the e-mail messages. One of them, Fahad Naseem, later told a court in Karachi he had sent the messages on the orders of the chief suspect, Omar, who is also in police custody.

Omar, a 28-year old Muslim militant, is a British national and attended the London School of Economics. He spent five years in Indian prisons for trying to kidnap Western tourists in New Delhi and was released in December 1999 in return for the passengers of a hijacked Indian plane.

A week before Pearl's death was officially confirmed, Omar told a court in Karachi he believed the journalist was killed while trying to escape but U.S. and Pakistani officials rejected his claim.

In Karachi, police produced Omar before a magistrate on Tuesday "as part of the ongoing investigation," a police spokesman said.

This was his second appearance in two days.

The official said the magistrate wanted Omar to be present in the court where a key witness recorded his testimony. The police did not disclose the identity of the witness but said he claimed to have arranged a meeting between Omar and Pearl before the reporter's abduction.

On Monday, police had produced Omar before a court with the intention to charge him with Pearl's death but the judge asked the police to gather more evidence against him and also to try and recover Pearl's body. The court also gave police 14 days to interrogate Omar.

(Eli J. Lake at the State Department contributed to this report)

--------

Ga. Won't Seek Ex - Sheriff Execution

February 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Sheriff-Killed.html

ATLANTA (AP) -- Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty against a former sheriff on charges that he ordered the assassination of his successor, the district attorney's office said Wednesday.

Sidney Dorsey, 61, was indicted Friday in the December 2000 for allegedly ordering Dekalb County sheriff-elect Derwin Brown killed so he could retain his post.

Dorsey's lawyer has said the former sheriff had nothing to do with the shooting, and that the state's witnesses concocted the assasination plot to avoid punishment.

Prosecutors are also not seeking the death penalty against two others indicted separately in Brown's slaying. Melvin Walker, a former deputy, and David Ramsey, are scheduled for trial March 10.

Paul Skyers, a former employee of Dorsey's private security firm, and Patrick Cuffy, one of Dorsey's deputies, have admitted involvement in Brown's death but were granted immunity for their testimony against the three men charged.

Cuffy pleaded guilty to evidence tampering in a separate slaying and was sentenced to 12 months in prison.

-------- terrorism

ROME
Investigators Show That U.S. Embassy Is Vulnerable

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By MELINDA HENNEBERGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/europe/27ITAL.html

ROME, Feb. 26 - American and Italian investigators demonstrated today that terrorists might have been able to make their way through more than a mile of tunnels to the American Embassy here and place a chemical bomb in the water pipes.

Starting from a manhole at the Piazza della Repubblica where a discarded ladder and pair of overalls recently aroused suspicions, the investigators made their way to a spot under the street in front of the diplomatic compound.

A city public works official said the investigators had no trouble reaching the place near the embassy where a suspicious hole, big enough for a person, was recently dug through a three-foot protective concrete cap on the utility tunnel outside the American Embassy.

That tunnel is filled with water pipes as well as phone and electrical lines into the embassy, the city technician said. It is not clear who dug into the utility tunnel or when.

The findings today add weight to a police theory that a group of Moroccan men arrested here recently might have been planning an underground attack on the embassy. The men were found with nine pounds of a potentially dangerous cyanide compound and a detailed map of the utility tunnels under the embassy.

The city official interviewed today said a chemical attack through either the water lines or the other pipes around the American Embassy compound would have been "difficult, but not impossible if you knew what you were doing." The police had been wondering, given tight security around the embassy, how anyone could have gotten under the street to drill the hole into the embassy's utility tunnel.

"We knew you couldn't get in through a manhole on Via Veneto" in front of the embassy, the official said, "or you'd be surrounded by police in three seconds. But this morning, with the American experts, we did a test, starting one kilometer away, at the Piazza della Repubblica, and arrived at the embassy, right where the hole is."

The hole, which the official had inspected several times in recent days, could only have been dug by professionals, he said. It measured about two feet across and more than a foot high, and created an uninterrupted passageway around the embassy, he said. The last time he saw the concrete cap on the tunnel intact was on Jan. 26.

He also said that, contrary to recent statements by embassy officials who have played down the threat, a chemical bomb placed in the tunnel on the other side of the newly chiseled hole could have sent poison gas or water into the embassy.

Neither embassy officials nor the Italian police were available for comment tonight.

But earlier in the day, one Italian official close to the case also suggested that the threat to the embassy was far more serious than embassy officials and some other Italian investigators had indicated.

Adding to anxieties, a bomb exploded early this morning near the Italian Interior Ministry, destroying several cars and smashing some shop windows. The ministry in downtown Rome is the headquarters for Italy's national police and security services.

There were no injuries, and officials said they did not believe that the bomb, which exploded at 4 a.m. and was apparently attached to a motor scooter, was the work of Islamic or any other international terrorists. Similar incidents over last couple of years have been attributed to anarchists.

But in the context of recent events, this latest bombing was particularly unnerving.

Police have not spoken on the record about the embassy case, and were initially furious that news of it had gotten out, saying the investigation had been compromised by the leaks.

Embassy officials, meanwhile, have said they are taking the threat seriously but are not sure that any such plan could have been carried out.

The Italian official who spoke today said that the suspects had not been linked to Osama bin Laden's terror network or any other terrorist group. But he said the investigation, which he expected to go on for some time, was only beginning.

All nine men, who have denied knowledge of any plot, remain in custody.

They were arrested here over the last two weeks. Four were found with the cyanide compound, the maps and about 10 pounds of firecrackers that could have been used to ignite the compound.

The substance, potassium ferrocyanide, is not in itself dangerous and is commonly used by gardeners. But scientists have said that if heated, it can emit hydrocyanic acid, which is highly toxic.

A judge has denied bail in the case, saying the men, who have been charged with subversive association, were working together "to form one single group, to whom the poisonous substance belonged."

After the arrests, the police checked the tunnels around the embassy and discovered the hole in the concrete leading to the tunnel. The concrete was poured as a security measure several years ago, specifically to block access to the pipes leading into the embassy, the city official said.

Embassy officials said on Monday that there were no water pipes in the tunnel, only electrical and phone wires. But the city official, who has worked in the tunnels for years, said the embassy officials were mistaken on that point.

Or, rather, they were technically correct in saying water lines in the tunnel do not go straight into the embassy, he said. "But they are the general water lines for the whole area, including the embassy."

He also said that because there is space around the protective wiring on the electrical and phone cables, fumes from a chemical bomb placed in the tunnel might theoretically have reached the embassy as well.

The city supervisor also disputed the suggestion by embassy officials that the hole might have been cut by workers for an innocuous purpose like passing tools back and forth.

"If you wanted to put a hole there, you would need to apply to us for a permit, and there was none," he said.


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- energy

Court Tells Energy Dept to Produce Documents

February 27, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-enron-bush-documents.html

WASHINGTON - A federal judge has ordered the Department of Energy to hand over documents to an environmental group seeking to learn what influence Enron Corp. and other companies had on the administration's energy policy.

The order means the department could soon release some of the information that the White House has declined to make public about the workings of its inter-agency task force on energy, which was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney last year.

U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the Department of Energy to start handing over by March 25 the thousands of pages of records that it has relating to the task force's work, which was conducted behind closed doors, and from which environmentalists complain they were largely excluded.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which sued for the documents in December, said in a statement that it would make the records public when it got them ``and expose which energy companies or industry lobbyists influenced the work Department of Energy staff did on the Bush-Cheney energy plan.''

It said it learned of the order, which was dated Feb. 21, only on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy said the department would comply with the order. But the department could still seek exemptions for some papers -- although the NRDC says it would fight those exemptions in court.

GAO WANTS RECORDS TOO

Judge Kessler meanwhile was scathing about the Energy Department's ``glacial pace'' in dealing with the environmentalists' request, and noted that the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, was also seeking the records.

The GAO's Comptroller General David Walker filed a landmark lawsuit against Cheney last week demanding the documents as part of congressional oversight of the executive branch.

It is doing so on behalf of Democratic lawmakers who say environmentalists were shut out from the meetings of the task force, which produced a policy calling for more oil and gas drilling, as well as a revival of nuclear power.

But the White House says handing over the documents would damage the executive branch's ability to get candid outside advice. It has promised a constitutional battle in court, saying the GAO has overstepped its authority.

Records of the Cheney task force are also being sought in court by two other private groups -- Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club.

The Natural Resources Defense Council chose not to take on the White House in court, but instead filed its lawsuit against the Department of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) -- arguing that the public had the right to know what the government was doing.

``We felt like, as a lead agency in the workings of task force, they had a lot of relevant information, and it would be easier and faster to get the information from them,'' NRDC attorney Sharon Buccino told Reuters.

``The department has always said that we would comply with this request and have worked diligently to do so,'' said Department of Energy spokeswoman Jill Schroeder. ``We are going to fully comply with the order.''

But she added that the department had to review the relevant documents to determine which ones complied. The court order says the department must start providing the paper by March 25 and finish by April 25.

The environmental group has asked for the names of the people who attended the task force meetings, the dates, and the topics discussed, as well as notes of meetings, Buccino said.

While the department can claim exemptions, it would have to list the documents and explain why they should be exempt under the Freedom of Information Act, Buccino said, adding that the environmentalists would challenge them.

``There is probably going to be a fight over the notes and minutes,'' she said. The GAO has dropped a demand for notes from its request.

Judge Kessler's opinion noted that the environmental group first made the FOIA request of the department in April before resorting to a lawsuit in December, and said the papers should be produced now, before Congress passes an energy policy.

``There can be little question that the Department of Energy has been woefully tardy in processing of plaintiff's FOIA request,'' the judge said.

``It is very hard to discern ...what in the world Department personnel were doing from July 2001 through December 2001 when they were conducting ``periodic'' reviews of the 2,149 documents (comprising 7,584 pages) deemed responsive to the request,'' the judge added.

----

U.S. reliance on Iraqi oil grows despite "evil" tag

By Bernie Woodall
Wednesday February 27
Reuters
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/020227/n27598170_1.html

NEW YORK - As U.S. President George W. Bush singles out Iraq as the keystone of a global ``axis of evil,'' the U.S. oil industry last year deepened its dependence on Baghdad's supplies, U.S. Energy Department figures show.

Despite Washington's hard line towards Iraq, the United States is comfortably the world's largest consumer of Iraqi crude oil and depends on Baghdad for some 9 percent of its oil imports. Valero Energy Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp. are the biggest U.S. buyers of Baghdad's oil and would be most in need of alternative supplies if, as some fear, military confrontation with the United States disrupts Iraqi oil flows in coming months.

U.S. firms gobbled up some 790,000 barrels per day of Iraqi crude oil in 2001 -- nearly half of Iraq's crude sales under the U.N.-supervised oil-for-food program (see table below).

With Exxon Mobil Corp., Marathon Oil Corp. and privately traded Koch also buying heavily, U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil in 2001 jumped nearly 30 percent from the previous year, and the appetite for Baghdad's oil only got stronger as the year wore on.

From July 2001 to the end of last year, U.S. refineries ended up with almost 70 percent of crude oil shipped out of Iraq in the U.N. program, which since 1996 has allowed Iraq to export crude oil despite international sanctions.

While U.S. firms are free to buy Iraqi oil through the program, Baghdad does not sell oil directly to U.S. companies, as it favors nations that are politically friendly to Iraq, principally Russia.

Iraq usually sells its crude oil to trading firms that resell the crude oil at least once before it reaches U.S. shores.

MARKET NERVES FRAY

Oil markets have become increasingly jittery since Bush's State of the Union speech last month in which he called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an ``axis of evil'' because of their alleged support of ``terrorism'' and attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon denied market rumors that U.S. special forces were on the ground in Iraq. It was the second such denial in a week.

Top officials from Baghdad are due to meet next week with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to discuss the possible return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, which has refused such inspectors since 1998.

Iraq's oil-for-food program began in December 1996 as an exemption to economic sanctions placed on Iraq when Saddam Hussein's forces took over Kuwait in August 1990.

Crude exports under the program can average as much as 2.2 million bpd but often suffer sharp falls in the event of political flare-ups, or attempts by the U.N. to curb illegal smuggling.

Exports are particularly prone to disruption during the rollover between each six month phase of the program. The current six-month phase will expire in late May.

OPEC COULD MEET SHORTFALL

Producers from the OPEC cartel such as Saudi Arabia, also key U.S. supplier, have pledged to make up any shortfall if Iraqi supplies are disrupted this year.

OPEC has cut production quotas by some 5 million bpd over the last year to shore up weak world oil prices, creating a large cushion of spare capacity.

The oil-for-food program is a way to ease the impact of sanctions by allowing Iraq to sell its crude oil under U.N. supervision.

Money from Iraqi oil sales goes into a U.N.-controlled escrow account to buy humanitarian supplies and pay Gulf War reparations, mainly to Kuwait.

The figures, from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistics branch of the Energy Department, do not include crude oil smuggled out of Iraq -- which some industry analysts say has reached 180,000 bpd or more.

The EIA figures include refineries in the Caribbean that supply gasoline and other refined oil products to the United States. Following is a list of Iraqi crude purchases by U.S. oil firms during 2001:

Valero 55.41 million bbls (151.800 bpd)
ChevronTexaco 47.66 million bbls (130,600 bpd)
Exxon Mobil 32.29 million bbls ( 88,500 bpd)
Koch 30.50 million bbls ( 83,600 bpd)
Marathon Ashland 24.53 million bbls ( 67,200 bpd)
Total Petroleum 15.68 million bbls ( 43,000 bpd)
Citgo 14.38 million bbls ( 39,400 bpd)
BP 14.18 million bbls ( 38,900 bpd)
Fina 11.40 million bbls ( 31,200 bpd)
Premcor 10.71 million bbls ( 29,300 bpd)
Bayoil 7.32 million bbls ( 20,100 bpd)
Hovensa 7.01 million bbls ( 19,200 bpd)
Coastal 5.01 million bbls ( 14,000 bpd)
Phillips 2.96 million bbls ( 8,100 bpd)
Equiva 2.89 million bbls ( 7,900 bpd)
Lion 1.99 million bbls ( 5,500 bpd)
Orion 1.16 million bbls ( 3,200 bpd)
Motiva 1.05 million bbls ( 2,900 bpd)
Murphy 0.63 million bbls ( 1,700 bpd)
Vitol 0.54 million bbls ( 1,500 bpd)
Lyondell 0.50 million bbls ( 1,500 bpd)
US Oil & Refining 0.48 million bbls ( 1,500 bpd)
Tesoro 0.25 million bbls ( 700 bpd)
TOTAL 288.53 million bbls (790,500 bpd)

Valero total includes 4.89 million bbls from Ultramar Diamond Shamrock
BP total includes 10.95 million bbls by ARCO and 2.73 million bbls by Amoco
Phillips total includes 1.86 million bbls by Tosco.

-------- environment

Oil Executives Lobbied on Drilling
Two Went to Cheney Task Force to Push for Gulf of Mexico Sale

By Eric Pianin and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7724-2002Feb26?language=printer

Shortly after Vice President Cheney launched a task force on energy policy last year, he met with two top executives from the oil and gas industry. The men from Shell Oil Co. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. pressed the new administration to stick to a long-standing plan to open a huge tract in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration.

The executives' hour-long meeting with Cheney on Feb. 8, 2001, offers a rare glimpse into a process that has become draped in questions and controversy. The General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, has sued Cheney to obtain details of his task force's meetings, hoping to learn more about efforts by energy executives and others to shape White House policy.

Relatively few details are known about those meetings because the White House is fighting the GAO's effort to have their contents revealed. But the February meeting shows how at least two politically connected energy executives tried to use Cheney and behind-closed-doors access to his task force to steer policy the way it would best serve their interests.

The two men had reason to be concerned that theirs was an uphill fight. The president's brother -- Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) -- had recently written a letter urging that the plan be scrapped, arguing it would threaten his state's coastline and tourism.

As it turned out, the executives found a receptive audience in Cheney. Like them, the new president and vice president were oilmen. Cheney recently had stepped down as chairman of Halliburton Co., a Dallas-based oil services company with extensive operations in the Gulf. Halliburton had done business with Anadarko since 1959. Cheney's wife, Lynne, had been a director and significant stockholder of an energy company that had merged with Anadarko.

Moreover, the two White House visitors -- Anadarko Chairman Robert J. Allison Jr. and Shell Chairman Steven L. Miller -- had generously backed George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Allison gave $150,000 to the Republican Party; Miller gave $10,500 to the party and $1,000 to Bush's presidential campaign.

The two ultimately got much -- though not all -- of what they wanted. In July, the administration said it would allow drilling in a 1.5 million-acre sector of the Gulf's outer continental shelf, rich in natural gas and oil. The area, though one-fourth the size approved by the Clinton administration, still contained nearly half the available resources, Interior Department officials said.

In a December auction, Anadarko and Shell won the right to develop several prime sites.

The Anadarko-Shell episode suggests that Cheney's energy task force -- whose work resulted in the national energy policy released in May -- was subject to complex and competing forces. The sharp scaling back of the gulf drilling area, for example, represented a compromise between the wishes of Jeb Bush and his allies and those of Anadarko, Shell and others pushing greater oil and gas exploration.

When the July compromise was reached, Jeb Bush hailed it as reflecting "significant progress in Florida's fight to protect our coastline."

Anadarko spokeswoman Teresa Wong said, "We applauded them for going forward with the [reduced] size, but we were disappointed it was cut back."

Precisely how such compromises were reached is unclear. The White House says disclosing the task force's actions would inhibit its ability to solicit confidential advice and conduct internal deliberations.

"There were all manner of people and groups that came in and were briefed and shared their suggestions," Cheney aide Mary Matalin said. "But the deliberative process and decision-making process took place among the Cabinet-level group and only that group and their staffs."

But even some GOP lobbyists say they are baffled by the administration's stance. "It may be a fine intellectual argument, but it's not a good road for Republicans to go down right now, what with the Enron thing," a former GOP House aide said.

Aides to Cheney have said he met with only a few of the interest groups seeking input. In addition to Allison and Miller, the list includes then-Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth L. Lay; Haley Barbour, a utilities industry lobbyist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee; and officials of the Edison Electric Institute, a utilities trade association.

Andrew Lundquist, the task force's executive director, and Cheney deputy Karen Knudsen met with half of the 400 or so groups that requested access. Aides cited meetings with 118 energy industry or corporate groups, 40 renewable-energy providers, 22 unions, 13 environmental groups, five academics, 63 governmental groups, six energy efficiency proponents and a consumer group.

Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, has said that a meeting between Cheney and his board focused on the need for more coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric generation. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham attended several task force meetings, including one with Teamsters President James Hoffa and one in California with Gov. Gray Davis (D).

Complicating any assessment of the meetings' influence is the fact that many industry priorities coincided with the views of the market-oriented Bush administration.

The controversy over drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was rooted in a Clinton-era plan to auction off rights to a 5.9 million-acre section of the outer continental shelf south of Alabama known as Lease Sale Area 181. Under a moratorium established by President George H.W. Bush and extended by President Bill Clinton in 1998, new drilling in the gulf is largely restricted until 2012, except for Lease Sale Area 181 and another section off Florida called the Destin Dome.

But three days after President Bush's Jan. 20, 2001, inauguration, Jeb Bush wrote the Interior Department urging cancellation of Lease Sale 181 "to protect sensitive natural resources" and tourism along Florida's west coast.

Houston-based Anadarko had merged in 2000 with Union Pacific Resources. Lynne Cheney was a Union Pacific director until the merger. From the merger, she received Anadarko stock worth $250,000 to $500,000, which she sold before her husband took office.

The merger gave Anadarko access to gas and oil fields on more than 7 million acres of land in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Allison urged the administration to open still more government property to exploration. He also called on it to stick with the plans for Lease Sale 181 in December.

Anadarko's Wong said last week that there was nothing new in Allison's message, as he had long advocated expanding mineral exploration on government land. "We didn't go marching up there just to talk about 181," Wong said.

Anadarko, she noted, had already spent more than a year studying the area and had invested $34 million in acquiring seismic data. Vice President Cheney expressed concern but said the Interior Department must settle the matter.

The energy task force's final report did not directly address the Gulf drilling controversy, but it did call for Interior to approve offshore oil and gas leases "on predictable schedules." Cheney made clear at a May meeting with members of Florida's congressional delegation that the administration would not agree to a ban on new offshore drilling in the Gulf.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said Cheney "spoke as if he knew this issue backwards and forwards" and sounded out the lawmakers on possible compromises, including a reconfiguration of the drilling area that would keep it at least 100 miles from Florida shores.

Nelson and some environmental groups saw the eventual compromise as a cave-in to industry interests. Nelson called it "the proverbial camel's nose under the tent."

--------

Lead Levels High Near Mo. Smelter

February 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Herculaneum-Lead.html

HERCULANEUM, Mo. (AP) -- Jack Warden, one of the most vocal critics of the nation's largest lead smelter, expected the results of a government lead exposure study to be troubling. But he said the findings still left him devastated.

``It's just unacceptable,'' said Warden, who lives a quarter-mile from the Doe Run Co. smelter. ``Everyone else wants to break out their study books. To hell with the study books. Study time is over. It's time to act.''

In releasing a report on what they called ``an urgent public health hazard,'' state health officials said Tuesday that more than a quarter of the children living close to the smelter have elevated lead in their blood.

The findings are the most comprehensive yet to gauge the extent of lead exposure in the home of the 110-year-old Doe Run Co. smelter in Herculaneum, about 30 miles south of St. Louis on the Mississippi River.

State officials conducted the comprehensive study based on blood samples given voluntarily by 935 people last fall.

About 28 percent of children under 7, considered the most vulnerable to lead poisoning, had lead levels above the federal limit deemed safe. On the side of U.S. Highway 61 that includes the Doe Run smelter, about 45 percent of children had high lead levels. That compares with a national rate of 7.6 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

``This is extremely high,'' said Scott Clardy, a public health expert at the health department. ``This is far and away the highest rate I've seen anywhere, and it's the reason we declared the site an urgent public health hazard.''

Doe Run spokeswoman Barb Shepard said the company agrees with the recommendations, and she identified lead paint as one of the sources that needs to be reduced. But she said the company doesn't agree with the numbers and would have more to say after further review.

Lead exposure is known to hamper brain development in children and cause other health problems. The situation in Herculaneum already is considered severe enough that families are asked to wash hands frequently, leave shoes outside and wash children's toys if used outdoors.

Under orders and oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency, Doe Run is spending millions of dollars to replace yards and reduce air pollution. The company has been ordered to pare its emissions to meet federal standards by July. The latest findings will help the EPA decide whether the current cleanup efforts will be enough to protect public health.

Gov. Bob Holden and House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, whose district includes Herculaneum, have urged the EPA to put the site on its national priority list for Superfund money.

``Given these findings, it is imperative that this problem be addressed immediately,'' Gephardt said in a statement.

Three-year-old Madison Shores, whose family lives about three blocks from the smelter, likes playing on her swing set and in a back yard playhouse. Both must be hosed down frequently.

``She wants to play outside all the time,'' Nikita Shores, 26, said Wednesday. ``You feel like you're being a good mom, not letting her play outside. Then whenever she throws a fit wanting to go outside, you feel like a bad mom.''

On the Net:
State's case information: http://www.dnr.state.mo.us/deq/herc.htm

-------- health

Looking Again at Mammograms

Washington Post
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7985-2002Feb26?language=printer

In his announcement that women older than 40 should continue having mammograms, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson left the impression that the only harm associated with this practice is anxiety over unnecessary biopsies [front page, Feb. 22]. But far more serious harm has been done.

Widespread acceptance of mammography has led to a massive increase in the detection of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Little is known about the natural history of these microscopic cancers within the milk duct, but studies of a small number of women with DCIS left untreated for 10 to 20 years indicate that only about 20 percent of all DCIS would become invasive cancer. Almost all women with DCIS, however, are treated as if they have a potentially invasive cancer. So about 40,000 women this year alone will be treated with six weeks of radiation therapy or a mastectomy for a cancer that never would have killed them.

MARYANN NAPOLI
Associate Director
Center for Medical Consumers
New York

----

With AIDS Therapy, Timing Can Be Vital
Studies Find Dangers in Waiting, Interruptions

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7703-2002Feb26?language=printer

SEATTLE, Feb. 26 -- New information suggests that people infected with the AIDS virus may face substantial hazards if they wait a long time before starting treatment or interrupt therapy in the late stage of HIV infection, researchers reported today.

Just when a person infected with the AIDS virus should start treatment, what the trade-offs between early and late treatment may be, and whether there is any advantage to on-and-off cycles of therapy are among the more important questions in AIDS medicine. The issues are pressing because AIDS drugs have side effects and possible health risks, and the psychological burden of taking three or more medicines a day is heavy.

Current federal treatment guidelines suggest that people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) begin taking three or more antiretroviral drugs when the number of CD4 cells -- a measure of immune system health -- falls below 350 per milliliter of blood. The normal CD4 count is about 800.

At the 9th Annual Retrovirus Conference being held here, European scientists running the 25-country EuroSIDA study today described the experience of about 5,400 people with HIV infection who have received therapy with combinations of three or more antiretroviral drugs. As a group, they had relatively advanced infections, with about 215 CD4 cells on average when they started the medicines.

By five years later, nearly 20 percent of the people had stopped taking the drugs for at least three months. In most cases it was because the medicines were not fully quelling virus growth, although there were other reasons. For example, there is some evidence that treatment interruptions may actually be beneficial, allowing the virus to essentially vaccinate a person and stimulate the immune system to fight more vigorously.

Whatever their reasons, people who stopped had six times the risk of dying or developing a serious AIDS complication than people who did not. Even if they restarted treatment, and most did, they continued to have nearly twice the risk of death. This trend was seen only in people with CD4 counts below 200 -- indicating that interrupting treatment above that level may not be harmful.

The study suggests that treatment interruptions are unsafe in the end stage of disease, said Stefano Vella, an AIDS researcher from Rome who was not directly involved in the study.

A study from the University of Washington suggests that starting treatment early -- a strategy less popular now than five years ago -- may have advantages.

Researchers examined the experience of people who enrolled for treatment at the university clinic and remained symptom-free for at least a year. (This second condition ensured that people who entered medical care near the end of their lives were excluded from the analysis.) They found that patients who began antiretroviral treatment in that first year had less than half the risk of dying or developing an AIDS complication as those who put off treatment for more than a year. Surprisingly, this was true for people at all CD4 cell counts.

A third study found that antiretroviral treatment may be especially important in people over 50, who comprise about 11 percent of Americans infected with HIV.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University compared the experience of about 250 older people with that of about 550 people under age 50. Everyone had relatively advanced infection, with CD4 cell counts below 200.

The older patients who chose to forgo antiretroviral treatment had double the mortality of younger patients who made the same decision. However, the older ones who chose to take the drugs got the same benefit as younger people.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated presentation today, a vaccine researcher from the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. reported that its AIDS vaccine, previously studied only in monkeys, stimulates a robust immune response in humans.

In animals, the vaccine has not prevented HIV infection. However, it has stimulated the immune system enough that virus replication is suppressed almost indefinitely.

The vaccine is made by stitching an HIV gene into a respiratory microbe, called adenovirus 5, that has been rendered harmless. A study in healthy, uninfected people found that after a series of shots, two-thirds showed a strong immune response, as measured by the ability of cells called T-lymphocytes to recognize the AIDS virus in laboratory tests.

This is substantially higher than the response in a study of a vaccine made by Aventis Pasteur that uses HIV genes in a microbe called canarypox virus. That study was shut down this week when researchers decided the response was too disappointing to pursue it further.

-------- human rights

Elderly Christians threatened with ouster

By David Rennie
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020227-2383936.htm

BEIJING - More than a dozen elderly Christians - three of them in their 90s - face eviction from a Beijing old people's home after police raided a suspected prayer meeting on the premises and ordered the home closed.

A police deadline for closure of the home passed Monday, one of the managers, Yang Guizhi, said yesterday.

More than 30 police and security guards smashed the locks and entered the home last week, on the same day that President Bush was in Beijing calling for greater religious freedoms.

Mrs. Yang and her husband, Chen Zhongxin, were ordered to move out of the home, in Haiqingluo village, within two days.

"If they ask us to leave, where can these old people go, where can we go? We have nowhere," she said.

Mr. Chen, 63, said the head of the Yandan township police gave him two days to leave the area, and levied a fine on local officials that he is sure he will be made to pay.

"The police chief said he would be fining the production brigade of the village 50,000 yuan ($6,041). I am now praying for the police, and hoping that God will save them," Mr. Chen said. The fine represents 24 years income for Mr. Chen, who is himself a pensioner.

The home, in the rural suburbs of northwestern Beijing, was raided at lunchtime and 47 suspected Christian worshippers taken into detention. The oldest detained was 80 years old.

"They took us to the police station, and asked us how we had contacted each other to plan the meeting," Mr. Chen said. The worshippers were told they had conducted an "illegal gathering."

Mrs. Yang, 57, denied that her home was an underground church, or that the meeting was linked in any way to the Bush visit.

"The police came because Bush came to China. But we live in the countryside. We didn't even know the dates of his visit. If we had known, we would not have held the meeting on that day."

Under China's religious laws, Christian worshippers may only gather in state-registered churches, where sermons and teaching activities are closely controlled by Communist Party officials.

-------- imf / world bank

Community Leaders Call on City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin State Investment Board Not to Buy World Bank Bonds

WORLD BANK BONDS BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN /
WISCONSIN FAIR TRADE CAMPAIGN

For Immediate Release
February 27, 2002
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>

CONTACT:
In Milwaukee -- Frances Bartelt 414-559-9583/ Steve Watrous 414-933-3033
In Washington, DC -- Neil Watkins 202-393-6665

Milwaukee Finance Committee Votes 5-0 to Endorse Boycott of World Bank Bonds; Full Council Vote Next Week

MILWAUKEE -- After hearing testimony from community leaders and experts on the impacts of World Bank policies and projects, the Finance Committee of the Milwaukee Common Council voted 5-0 this morning to support a resolution which would prohibit the city of Milwaukee from purchasing World Bank bonds in the future. The resolution also calls on the Wisconsin State Investment Board, which currently holds $35 million in World Bank bonds, not to buy such bonds in the future.

"The World Bank's policies foster a global race to the bottom, driving down wages, environmental conditions and democratic institutions from Argentina to Zimbabwe," said Alderman Don Richards, chief sponsor of the resolution. "There is a direct link between the loss of family-supporting jobs and our tax base in Milwaukee and the World Bank's promotion of investor-rights globalization. While the Bank claims to be offering a helping hand to poor nations, it actually forces Third World nations to follow self- destructive economic policies. This is a disaster for poor nations being kept poor by the Bank's onerous conditions for financial assistance, and also a disaster for cities like Milwaukee having its industrial base plundered.

"In the past, cities and other governmental units took action against South African apartheid, Americans were able to play a crucial role in forcing the abandonment of apartheid. With this resolution, we aim to take the same kind of substantive--not merely symbolicaction against an institution, the World Bank, that is actively harming communities like Milwaukee as well as Third World nations," said Richards.

Local community leaders and national experts representing labor, human rights, and religious constituencies testified before the committee and spoke at a press conference today where they urged City Council to pass the resolution. Among those who testified at the hearing today or spoke to the press were the resolution's chief sponsor, Milwaukee Alderman Don Richards; John Goldstein, President of the Milwaukee County Labor Council; Don Burmester, a worker laid off from the Milwaukee Master Lock factory; Cathy Rose of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign; Bill Lange of Faith Community for Worker Justice; and Mark Weisbrot, co-Director of Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

"This is an important victory for working people in Milwaukee," said John Goldstein, President of the Milwaukee County Labor Council. "We have seen tens of thousands of jobs leave our community as a result of World Bank policies of corporate globalization. It's very encouraging to have the city council support those working families as we shed light on the damaging policies of the World Bank."

The Milwaukee effort is part of a global World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign. The campaign is organizing municipalities and institutional investors to stop buying World Bank bonds as a means of putting political and financial pressure on the World Bank for fundamental change. Already, 5 U.S. cities, 10 investment firms, and dozens of unions and churches have adopted the boycott of World Bank bonds. The campaign is modeled upon the anti-Apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s, and is based on the fact that the World Bank raises a majority of its funds by issuing bonds to institutional investors.

"World Bank policies seek to commodify that which sustains our life water," said Cathy Rose, a member of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign, the group leading the effort for the boycott in Milwaukee. "Even though the World Bank doesn't operate in the U.S., World Bank programs and policies which promote corporate globalization have directly affected us through the de-industrialization of Milwaukee and the Heartland of the U.S."

The World Bank Bonds Boycott calls on the World Bank Group to cancel 100% of debts owed to it by impoverished countries, stop destructive 'structural adjustment' and similar policies, and end all lending for oil, gas, mining, and dam projects. The World Bank Bonds Boycott resolution will be considered by the full city council in Milwaukee on Tuesday, March 5.

-------- propaganda wars

Journalists On Radio In Russia To Resign
Top Editor Protests State Interference

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7781-2002Feb26?language=printer

MOSCOW, Feb. 26 -- The editor of Russia's most influential radio station said today that he and dozens of other journalists are quitting rather than work for a news outlet he said is becoming another voice of the state.

Alexei Venediktov, editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy, announced his resignation less than three weeks after a subsidiary of a state-controlled monopoly moved to seize control of the station's board of directors.

"I am not going to work for a radio station that belongs to the state," said Venediktov, 46, a fixture at Ekho Moskvy for more than a decade. "I prefer to keep my reputation but not my job."

His decision appears to spell the end of an era for Ekho Moskvy, the first radio station to broadcast from Russia without state control. Since its initial broadcast in 1990, Ekho Moskvy built a reputation for breaking news, hard-hitting analysis and interviews with key political figures, including visiting presidents. It broadcasts in 70 cities, reaching an audience of between 4 million and 6 million.

Ekho Moskvy lost financial independence in June when Gazprom-Media, an arm of the state-controlled natural gas monopoly, took over 51 percent of the station's shares. But the station's board remained autonomous until this month, when Gazprom-Media exercised its right as majority shareholder to name five of nine directors.

Venediktov said today he believes that a change in editorial policy is not far off, and that the only hope for him and the station's reporters to practice objective journalism is to find another frequency.

Venediktov and 12 other Ekho Moskvy journalists have bid in a state auction for two radio frequencies on the same FM band as Ekho Moskvy. The frequencies were formerly held by the Russian military, according to an Ekho Moskvy reporter. Venediktov said 58 of the station's 98 journalists have voted to go with him if he wins. Asked how many would quit if he didn't, he said, "57."

The government's press ministry is scheduled to announce the results of the auction Wednesday. The announcement will be followed next month by an auction for a television channel that formerly belonged to the independent channel TV-6.

Taken together, the auctions will help determine the new shape of Russia's broadcast media. They will also help settle a debate about whether the Kremlin is carrying out a wholesale crackdown on the media or a vendetta against two media tycoons, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky.

Gusinsky controlled Ekho Moskvy and a national television network, NTV, until Gazprom-Media took over his shares. Berezovsky owned the smaller TV-6 until a state-connected shareholder forced the station off the air last month.

Lawrence McDonnell, a spokesman for Gazprom-Media, said Venediktov's announcement seemed timed to attract publicity for his bid for his own radio frequency. He said that Gazprom-Media planned no editorial changes and would not even own the station much longer, and suggested that Venediktov had manufactured a crisis. Gazprom has said it intends to sell its media assets, although it has not set a date for the sale and has failed to give some potential buyers information that might support a bid.

Others characterized Venediktov's departure as a new low for Russia's independent media. "My reaction is very emotional," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, a politically independent and influential legislator from southern Siberia. "This is a very dangerous trend.

"We have lost all the national television channels, and now we are losing the only independent radio station that broadcasts news and political analysis across the country."

"This is really a blow to the whole system of free information," said Yasen Zasursky, dean of the journalism department at Moscow State University. "The situation is really getting out of hand."

The relationship between Venediktov and Boris Jordan, who runs Gazprom-Media, has been acrimonious for months. Venediktov said the station's journalists wanted to buy up Gazprom-Media's shares, but Jordan did not answer their letters.

Venediktov said Jordan promised him complete editorial freedom. But Venediktov said he could see what lay ahead simply by turning on the Gazprom-controlled version of NTV.

--------

A 'Damaged' Information Office Is Declared Closed by Rumsfeld

New York Times
February 27, 2002
By ERIC SCHMITT and JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/27/international/27MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence today, ending a short- lived plan to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to unwitting foreign journalists to influence public sentiment abroad.

Mr. Rumsfeld denied that the new office would have spread misinformation, but he said commentaries and editorial cartoons about the office's proposed activities made it impossible for it to do its job.

"The office has clearly been so damaged that it is pretty clear to me that it could not function effectively," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. "So it is being closed down."

Mr. Rumsfeld moved swiftly to quell a controversy that threatened to undermine the entire Defense Department's public credibility. Asked today if the Pentagon's integrity had been compromised, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "I doubt it. I hope not. If it has, we'll rebuild it."

The office's demise came just a day after President Bush expressed alarm at some of its proposed activities. On Monday, when asked whether he had told Mr. Rumsfeld to close the office, Mr. Bush said: "I didn't even need to tell him this. He knows how I feel about this."

The small but well-financed office was created shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in response to concerns in the administration that the United States was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic nations.

The office's director, Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, circulated classified proposals that called for the military to not only drop leaflets and broadcast messages into hostile countries, but to expand that mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe. The proposals included aggressive campaigns that used the foreign news media and Internet, plus covert operations, military officials said.

Though Mr. Rumsfeld said the office did not yet have a charter, classified briefings circulating in the Pentagon said the office should find ways to "coerce" foreign journalists and opinion makers and "punish" those who convey the wrong message.

Since the office's proposed activities were made public last week, Mr. Rumsfeld repeatedly said that the Pentagon had not spread lies and that it would not do so in the future.

Mr. Rumsfeld supported the office's broad mandate to integrate the Pentagon's information warfare machinery with other federal agencies. But top aides said he never approved any of the specific proposals that raised opposition.

"What it was to do was an open question, even today as it ends its very short, prominent life," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Until the disclosures, little was known about the office. Its multimillion-dollar budget, from a $10 billion emergency supplement to the Pentagon's budget authorized by Congress in October, has not been disclosed. Congressional aides said the office had discussed financing perhaps as much as $100 million in activities, many through other agencies, like the State Department, that have limited budgets for information warfare.

Pentagon officials said Mr. Rumsfeld was upset that the internal debate over the new office had become public. Today, even military officials who said they were happy to see the office closed said they were afraid the damage had already been done.

"It makes us all look bad," said one public affairs official. "Every day now reporters ask me if I've lied to them."

Other senior officials said they had barely been aware of the new office and had not realized the implications of its activities until the debate broke into public view last week.

"If I had known about this earlier, I would have gone to him and recommended he kill it," one adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld said. "You don't want things like O.S.I. in the Pentagon. It elevates that kind of work to a level you don't want."

A Pentagon spokesman said General Worden, an astrophysicist who has specialized in space operations in his 27-year Air Force career, would be reassigned, but it was not immediately clear when or where.

The Defense Department will continue trying to get its message across overseas, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

The Pentagon had hired the Rendon Group, an international communications firm, to help the new office. Pentagon officials said that the firm, headed by John W. Rendon Jr., a former campaign aide to President Jimmy Carter, would continue to be paid about $100,000 a month to do work for other Pentagon offices.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, has long had a task force responsible for "developing, coordinating, deconflicting and monitoring the delivery of timely, relevant and effective messages to targeted international audiences," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 6.

But Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, decided after Sept. 11 that the military office needed civilian oversight. So the Office of Strategic Influence was born.

Today, Mr. Feith, fresh off a plane from Moscow, met with Mr. Rumsfeld to close the office. "The office is done," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. "What do you want, blood?"

-------- ACTIVISTS

The Great Deception: Elusive Enemy, Endless War

Howard Zinn,
February 27, 2002
From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>
http://TomPaine.com

It is becoming clearer every day that the nation has been seriously, tragically deceived by the Bush administration, with the collaboration of a timorous Democratic Party. The clue to this was in Bush's State of the Union Address. He began by saying we are "winning the war on terror." A few paragraphs later he said "tens of thousands of terrorists are still at large," and, "Terror training camps still exist in at least a dozen countries."

If so, how can we be "winning" the war on terrorism? And if it is clear that we are not, why have we bombed Afghanistan, an already bombed and starving country, for four months? Why have we killed a thousand or two thousand or four thousand (no one knows the exact number) innocent men, women, and children? Was not the bombing intended to destroy the Al Qaeda network?

The Boston Globe reported on February 21st: "Four months into the campaign in Afghanistan, U.S. officials acknowledged that American forces have killed or captured only one senior Al Qaeda figure and seven far less prominent leaders." In fact, there was no chance from the beginning that we could "win" a war on terrorism because terrorism is not that kind of phenomenon. It is not Japan or Germany in World War II, or Iraq in the Gulf War. It is a phenomenon that can spring from any country in the world where there are people who are angry at the United States.

The prospect is for a war without end. For, as the President says: "These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are." He says: "The campaign may not be finished on our watch." He will pass on the war to the next president, and perhaps the next and the next.

How useful to have an enemy who is so elusive, whose defeat will require an endless war. Because so long as the nation is in a state of war, it is possible to control the population by saying: we are at war, and this is no time for division, we must sacrifice our freedoms. But it is exactly when the nation is at war, when we are dealing with life and death matters, that freedom of speech is most necessary.

We are told we have all sorts of enemies to fear: non-citizens and dissidents at home, an infinite number of mysterious enemies abroad. We will have to concentrate not only our resources, but our attention, on that endless war. We will be looking everywhere in the world for our enemies. The "war on terrorism," which cannot locate the perpetrators of the crime of September 11th, is useful for our political leaders, because while searching for an invisible enemy we will not be paying attention to what the government is doing to the citizens of this country in the name of that war.

If citizens are forced to concentrate on a "war against terrorism" they may not have time to consider that perhaps our most serious problem, despite the awful event of September 11th, is a political system in which the government can fund four hundred billions for its military machine, but cannot find the money to give free health care, decent housing, minimum family incomes -- all those requisites for children to grow up healthy.

Is it possible that the war being waged is really a war against us? Yes, we do have enemies in caves and compounds abroad, but perhaps our greatest danger comes from the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that take away our tax dollars and satisfy the greed for profit and power. If that is so, we will need a resurgence of democracy, a revival of free speech, a new citizens movement, a mobilization of Americans to insist that the nation's wealth be used for human needs, not for war. Joined to similar movements abroad, it could be the beginning of global solidarity, looking to a long-delayed sharing of the fruits of the earth.

Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People's History of the United States.


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