------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Tajiks arrested with stolen uranium
Britain Planned Nuclear War on Back of Envelope
Baghdad Holds Meeting on Depleted Uranium Impact
U.S. Tells NATO Iraq Seeking Unconventional Weapons
US, New Zealand at Odds Over Ships
Weapons Labs Offer Changes to End Boycott
The Failsafe Point
Security Gaps Found at Nuclear Plants
Black hole in US nuclear security - lawmaker
U.S. Orders Checks for Corrosion at Nuclear Reactor
One Safe Site Is Best
Constitutional aggrandizements
MILITARY
World Court for War Crimes Inches Closer to Reality
Afghan War Is a Lab for U.S. Innovation
Afghanistan quake kills at least 1,800
Afghans Falsely Held by U.S. Tried to Explain
U.S. to Send Special Forces to Train Army for Kabul
Somali leaders vow U.S. support
Two Ugandans Executed for Killing Irish Priest
Yugoslavia Releases 145 Prisoners
UPI hears ... Chile supported Britain's Falklands War
Raytheon tanks to Jordan; DoD 2 billion contract carved
Weapons Labs Offer Changes to End Boycott
Brazil Arms Control Chief Says U.S. Interferes
U.S. Warship Barred From Hong Kong
China begins crackdown on N. Korea refugees
DEA Chief Wants Colombia Drug Aid Turned on Rebels
Saddam fuels Mideast unrest with "martyr" handouts: Australian report
Bush: Let Arafat attend summit
Japan extends non-combatant support for US war on terror
NATO left lethal legacy in Kosovo - report
Arab Summit Hit by Absence of Arafat, Mubarak
War Boosts NATO Hopes of Two Nations
U.S. leans to larger expansion of NATO
Romania and Bulgaria Edge Nearer to NATO Membership
Russia begins talks on Chechnya peace
Taiwanese intelligence operations compromised
Spy Trofimoff Says He's Innocent
United States blocks UN resolution on Somalia
Beaming the Battlefield Home
Venezuela's President vs. Military: Is Breach Widening?
Attacks on Journalists, Press Freedom Rise in 2001
Today's Weapons, Tomorrow's Soldiers
POLICE / PRISONERS
U.S. Inspectors Take Up Posts at Canadian Ports
Ex-cop faces charges in Louima case
Belgrade Hands Over Last Kosovo Albanian Prisoners
India Parliament Passes Terror Bill
Army Wants Border Guards Armed
ENERGY AND OTHER
Stuart Energy stock jumps on a fuel-cell agreement
Hazardous Wastes Could Become New Fuel
Energy Contacts Disclosed
Energy task force papers edited, released
Documents Reveal Energy Meetings
List of Energy Meeting Participants
Islands draw attention to global warming
FACTBOX - What is the Kyoto protocol?
FDA Warns of Link in Kava, Liver Injuries
ACTIVISTS
Good Friday at Livermore Labs
NIRS Action Alert
Berenson case said to be 'totally closed'
Civil libertarians take on campus 'free-speech zones'
One nuclear tactician writes...
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Tajiks arrested with stolen uranium
Tuesday, 26 March, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1895000/1895254.stm
Numerous cases of nuclear theft occur in ex-Soviet republics Authorities in Tajikistan have arrested four men caught with two kilos of stolen uranium.
A spokesman for the Tajik security ministry said the group was arrested in the northern city of Chkalovsk.
They refused to say where they obtained the uranium or what they were planning to do with it.
But laboratory tests showed it to have been stolen from the Vostokkredmet metal plant in the town of Taboshar, near Chkalovsk.
An official investigation is under way.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, numerous incidents involving the theft of radioactive materials have been reported in former Soviet republics.
Officials have said that all such thefts involved low-concentration substances in small quantities unfit for making nuclear weapons.
But the incidents have raised fears that the stolen material might be used to build a crude nuclear device or a "dirty bomb".
Radiation released
A "dirty bomb" is made by wrapping radioactive material such as spent nuclear fuel rods around ordinary high explosives, then detonating the device.
The package could be used in a car bombing or a similar attack.
Damage is not caused so much by the explosion, but by the radiation released into the atmosphere.
That could cause deaths, cancers and other health problems over many years, as happened after the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine.
Concerns over the security of former Soviet biological weapons have also been voiced.
On Tuesday, a United States senator called for the clean up of a former testing facility in Uzbekistan.
Tonnes of biological weapons lie buried on an island in the Aral Sea.
Senator Bill Nelson said action must be taken to prevent lethal bacteria falling into the hands of terrorists.
-------- britain
Britain Planned Nuclear War on Back of Envelope
March 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain-bombs.html
LONDON - Britain's early post-World War Two nuclear defense strategy was mapped out on scraps of paper, using the roundest of round numbers and elementary schoolboy sums, according to classified files released Tuesday.
The dossier of top secret letters dating from 1947 and now opened by the Public Record Office, reveals that the tradition of the British amateur extended even to planning a nuclear holocaust.
Viscount Portal of Hungerford, Britain's Controller of Atomic Energy at the Ministry of Supply, heard that the military wanted a stockpile of 1,000 British atom bombs by 1957 in readiness for a possible all-out nuclear war.
But his beleaguered department could churn out enough plutonium for just 15 bombs a year, so he asked top brass if 1,000 were really necessary.
Citing top government scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizard, Air Chief Marshal Lord Tedder replied that ``the round figure of 1,000 (is) a reasonable estimate of what would be required to constitute a 'valuable deterrent' to war.''
Tizard, a respected physicist and founding father of radar, had arrived at the figure using the guesstimate that it would take 25 atom bombs to devastate Britain.
``The geographical area we have in mind is some 40 times the size of the UK, and 25 x 40 - 1,000,'' Tedder explained, coyly declining to make explicit mention of the Soviet Union.
Atom bomb production could not begin before 1952, they agreed, meaning Britain would have to make nearly one a day to meet the 1957 deadline -- an impossible task given the parlous state of her economy.
Tedder therefore mapped out a new timeline on a tiny scrap of paper: they should start with 15 bombs in 1952 and then double production every year for five years, giving a grand total of 945 bombs by the end of 1957.
Portal's reply was more realistic: ``It seems to me that in the present state of the country, it would be a very long time indeed before production at anything like this rate could be achieved,'' he replied.
In the end Britain became a full nuclear power in October 1952 -- after the United States in 1945 and the Soviet Union in 1949 -- but the papers give no hint of how many devices were actually built by 1957.
-------- depleted uranium
Baghdad Holds Meeting on Depleted Uranium Impact
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-health-iraq-uranium.html
BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government opened a conference on Tuesday to examine the effects on health of depleted uranium munitions used by U.S.-led forces during the Gulf War, which it says have caused a rise in cancer in Iraq.
``The conference is to meet the urgent need for researchers and specialists in Iraq and other countries to define negative impacts of DU weapons on humans and the environment,'' Education Minister Fahad Salim al-Shaqra said in his opening speech.
Experts at the two-day conference, organized by the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, include researchers from Egypt, Thailand and Yemen.
Shaqra said cancer among children and congenital deformities had increased in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, in which a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait after it invaded its oil-rich neighbor.
``The rate of cancer cases among under-15s has registered a 120 percent increase from 1997 to 1990, likewise the rise in leukemia cases was 60 per cent for the same year,'' Shaqra said.
He added cancer among children had almost trebled from four cases per 100,000 in 1990 to 11 in 1999. Congenital deformities in Basra, southern Iraq, increased four-fold from 1990 to 1999.
``The rate cancer increased among children in 1999 was 242 per cent, whereas leukemia cases increased by 100 per cent in the same year compared with 1990's figures,'' Shaqra added.
Shaqra said incidence of cancers of the breast, thyroid gland and lymphatic system also rose.
An Iraqi vet said on Saturday thousands of fish that have died at fish farms near Baghdad were poisoned by munitions used by British and U.S. forces.
DU munitions were first widely used in the Gulf War -- declassified U.S. documents show U.S. forces fired about 944,000 cigar-sized rounds against Iraqi armor in Iraq and Kuwait.
DU combusts on impact with its target, making it highly effective at piercing tank armor.
Last year, the World Health Organization began an in-depth study into the health impact of the shells used in Iraq.
But in November, after lobbying from Washington, the U.N. General Assembly voted against an Iraqi proposal for a U.N.-backed study into the effects of depleted uranium used in the Gulf War.
A report by Britain's Royal Society scientific organization published earlier this month said top soil in areas heavily contaminated with depleted uranium should be removed and water quality should be monitored for any contamination.
-------- iraq
U.S. Tells NATO Iraq Seeking Unconventional Weapons
March 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-usa-iraq-nato.html
BRUSSELS - The United States, aiming to reassure NATO partners it still cares about the alliance despite sidelining it in the U.S. ``war on terrorism,'' told its allies Tuesday that Iraq was trying to build unconventional weapons.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declined to give details of the classified briefing but told reporters: ``In general, it was a discussion of the activities of Iraq and the Iraqi regime to regain weapons of mass destruction in the absence of the inspectors for the last four years.''
President Bush has labeled Iraq part of ``an axis of evil'' along with North Korea and Iran, and Washington has warned Baghdad that it may become a target if it does not let U.N. weapons inspectors into the country to verify whether it has chemical, biological or nuclear arms. Iraq, which has barred the U.N. inspectors since they left in December 1998, says it has destroyed all such weapons.
Armitage heaped praise on NATO, saying the alliance had been ``fantastic'' since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, even though its support has been political rather than military.
``I wanted to discuss again the absolute vital nature of the NATO alliance to the United States and, I think, to freedom of the world,'' he said after meeting ambassadors of the 19-nation alliance at NATO's Brussels headquarters.
Armitage said he also briefed the allies on Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East tour last week, which ended without garnering public support from regional leaders for possible military action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
ATTACK ``HYPOTHETICAL''
Bush said last week he believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but that the United States had no ``imminent plans'' to attack.
Armitage brushed off as ``hypothetical'' a question on what role NATO could play in action against Baghdad.
NATO invoked a mutual defense clause in its founding treaty the day after the suicide hijack attacks of September 11 on New York and Washington, a decision Armitage said was ``fantastic.''
Article V of NATO'S founding treaty says an attack on one shall be considered an attack on all, and that allies will take such action as they deem necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain security.
But apart from sending early-warning planes to patrol U.S. skies, sharing intelligence and putting on a show of naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, the alliance was a spectator as the United States unleashed its military might on Afghanistan.
A few major European allies have been involved in recent military mopping-up operations against remnants of the Taliban movement and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters. Several European NATO members are also involved in the ISAF peacekeeping force in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
Asked how NATO could contribute to the fight against terrorism in future, Armitage said: ``This is an ongoing and developing situation. As situations present themselves I'm sure we would make any requests as they popped up.''
He was on a stopover in Brussels on his way back from Bucharest, where he told a conference of eastern European countries lining up to join NATO that Washington wanted to admit as many new countries as are fit to join.
-------- new zealand
US, New Zealand at Odds Over Ships
March 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-New-Zealand.html
WASHINGTON -- Disagreement persists between the United States and New Zealand over a ban that keeps nuclear-powered ships from New Zealand's waters, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday.
``Disagreements between close friends are not that unusual,'' he said after a meeting with Prime Minister Helen Clark. Clark also discussed the matter with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
She again discussed it in a meeting with President Bush, but did not elaborate afterward with reporters.
New Zealand has protested Bush's decision to slap tariffs on imported steel, and Clark said she also talked trade with Bush. She said little about that aspect of the conversation aside from noting that New Zealand Trade Minister Jim Sutton will raise the issue with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in May.
New Zealand exports about $25 million of finished steel to the United States each year. Australia announced shortly after Bush's decision that 85 percent of its steel exports to the United States would not be affected by the new tariffs.
Clark also promoted a proposal for a bilateral agreement that would increase trade between the United States and New Zealand. She said it would boost American exports to her country by 25 percent.
Powell thanked Clark for help New Zealand has provided in the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
``New Zealand and the United States have gone through many challenges and crises and conflicts together,'' Powell said. ``We are at it again now.''
Asked if the nuclear ban was unfinished business between the two countries, Powell replied, ``There is a disagreement that continues.''
Successive U.S. administrations have urged New Zealand to drop the policy, but Clark said last week she had no intention to do so.
The Sept. 11 attacks showed that terrorist groups are prepared to ``do almost anything'' to advance their cause, Clark said.
``Therefore a nuclear-powered vessel in your harbor presents a rather interesting target for such groups,'' she said.
Clark said she had been well received in Washington and had discussed a wide range of international issues with Powell.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Weapons Labs Offer Changes to End Boycott
New York Times
March 26, 2002
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/science/26LABS.html
The nation's three premier weapons laboratories have offered to change their hiring and promotion practices in exchange for the ending of a boycott by two Asian-American academic organizations, federal officials and the leader of the boycott said yesterday.
Citing anger over the treatment of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos weapons scientist whom the government accused of spying, as well as longer standing claims of discrimination, the organizations in early 2000 urged Asian-American scientists to boycott the weapons laboratories by not applying for jobs there.
But the proposed changes are far-reaching enough, said the professor who led the boycott, that his organization, the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education, is prepared to call it off. Moreover, he said, it is willing to help the laboratories start a nationwide recruiting drive for Asian-American scientists.
"I will call an end to the boycott and urge Asian-Americans to begin to apply for jobs there," said the professor, L. Ling-chi Wang, director of the Asian American Studies Program in the department of ethnic studies at the University of California. "I would even take a step beyond and get Apahe to develop a plan" for national recruitment, he said.
John Browne, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has met repeatedly with Professor Wang since the boycott started. Yesterday, Ping Lee, a special assistant to Dr. Browne, said: "We're really close to bringing closure. The three weapons labs have come together with a common set of guidance." That guidance, amounting to a draft agreement for changes, has been sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Energy Department, which oversees the labs and must agree to any changes at the sites, which besides Los Alamos include the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories.
Gen. John A. Gordon, administrator of the security agency, said yesterday, "This thing we're calling an agreement is really very broad."
"I'm very hopeful that this will be the foundation and pave the way to make this change in the the relationship we have with those Asian-American organizations," General Gordon said. "There's a strong business case that I can't afford to cut ourselves off from the best and brightest minds in the country, and there's a strong moral case that we're going to do the right thing."
If a formal agreement is signed, Professor Wang said, it will focus on creating a plan for increasing the promotion opportunities for Asian-American scientists and addressing what he regards as disparities in research opportunities that discriminate against minorities. It will also introduce mechanisms that hold the laboratories accountable to their promises to change the workplace environment for minorities.
Though the Energy Department declined to release a copy of the document pending its review in Washington, Professor Wang said he had insisted - and the laboratories had agreed - that changes in dealings with Asian-Americans should apply to all minority groups at the laboratories, including women.
That requirement is far from academic. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, there is a pending class-action lawsuit alleging wage discrimination against women there. Last week, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of Asian-American employees was filed against the lab. Professor Wang said he hoped the agreement would serve as a spur for the lab to settle those lawsuits.
Though touched off by the arrest of Dr. Lee, who eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling classified data, the boycott focused on what many Asian-American scientists at the labs saw as discriminatory practices in their hiring, salaries, job opportunities, advancement into management positions and their treatment when obtaining and renewing security clearances.
The weapons complex is aware that there is still much untapped talent among scientists of Asian descent. They earn more than a quarter of all Ph.D.'s in science and technology at American universities each year, but still make up only 5 percent of the technical work force at Los Alamos.
Because of those concerns, both the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education and the Association of Asian American Studies passed resolutions urging a boycott of the laboratories by Asian-American scientists. The impact of the initiative has been widely debated, and even some Asian-Americans have criticized it as tending to isolate minority scientists already at the labs.
But everyone agrees that the boycott has been an embarrassment to the labs as well as a hindrance to their recruiting efforts, particularly after Sept. 11, as they have focused on revamping staffs in response to new threats to national security.
"I would think any time something like this is removed, it would be positive, especially in the climate right now when we're in a large hiring mode," said Richard Mah, an associate director for weapons engineering and manufacturing at Los Alamos. Promoted in October, Mr. Mah fills the highest post ever held by an Asian-American there.
The boycott "did have a large impact" on the lab's ability to hire Asian-Americans, Mr. Mah said.
Other scientists, including Dr. Jen-Chieh Peng, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, who until February was a fellow at Los Alamos, said they were unsure of whether a single gesture like lifting the boycott would make a great change.
"I don't think the problem terminates once the laboratory offers corrective action to this," Dr. Peng said. "It's a longstanding problem and it's not finished with the lifting of this boycott."
But Gene I. Awakuni, vice provost for student affairs at Stanford University and a member of the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education Board, said the moves by the labs were a good first step. "If the national labs establish a concrete plan that reflects a genuine effort by the administration to address systemic issues that militate against the interests of Asian-American scientists, I believe the boycott will be lifted," Dr. Awakuni said.
------
The Failsafe Point
The Nation,
March 26, 2002,
by Matt Bivens
http://www.thenation.com/failsafe/index.mhtml?bid=2&pid=40
You've heard of our new enthusiasm for nuclear weapons: the Administration's pursuit of mini-nukes, its hit list of targets from Baghdad to Beijing and its talk of periodically detonating a few by way of "testing."
See, for example, David Corn, ""Bush's New Nuclear Weapon Plan: A Shot at Nonproliferation," and Raffi Khatchadourian, April 1, 2002, "Relearning to Love the Bomb" March 11, 2002.
You've probably heard less about a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, completed in August 2001, but only published in dribs and drabs over the past few weeks. Mandated by Congress, the study is the first ever to estimate what effect radioactive fallout from nuclear testing has had on the lower forty-eight American states.
The CDC finds such fallout has likely killed 11,000 Americans since the 1950s. They died from all manner of cancers, from melanoma to breast cancer to leukemia. Fallout has also caused about 22,000 nonlethal cases of cancer. For those keeping score, that's 33,000 cases of cancer among Americans, courtesy of global nuclear testing.
And it's not just Nevada anymore: The study's maps suggest the definition of "downwinder"-someone living uncomfortably close to a nuclear test site-needs revision. Fallout spreads surprisingly far and wide, with high concentrations in places like Idaho and Montana.
"Hot spots due to testing in Nevada occurred as far away as New York and Maine," says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a Maryland-based think tank that has conducted its own analysis of the CDC's data.
"Hot spots from US Pacific area testing and also Soviet testing were scattered across the United States-from California, Oregon and Washington in the West to New Hampshire, Vermont and North Carolina in the East."
A little perspective: Fallout cancers represent only a tiny fraction of all cases of cancer. The CDC notes, for example, that among the 3.8 million people born in the US in 1951, about 760,000 would normally be expected to die of cancer, while fallout exposure adds only an additional 1,000 deaths to that total.
But even so, it's a helluva price tag for testing the bomb: Eleven thousand dead Americans. Thirty-three thousand American cancers.
That price tag is a subtext in today's nuclear debates. Take Yucca Mountain: The Department of Energy says it will be safe for Nevadans to store the nation's nuclear waste there. But Robert Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, says, "There's huge distrust of DOE here." During nuclear testing, he says, "They promised us it was all perfectly safe too-even as DOE officials moved their own families out of town [on test days]."
Yes, that was then and this is now. But dismissing the ugly sides of this tale as relics of the cold war begs a question: Why were forerunners of the CDC study squelched as late as the mid-1990s? Robert Alvarez, a Clinton-era Energy Department official, recalled hearing in 1997 of a "suppressed" study of fallout by the National Cancer Institute, and asked for a briefing. "They were showing me these color-coded [fallout] maps of the United States. And I'm looking at this and it's really grotesque stuff, because I know what the numbers mean," Alvarez says. "And I look down at the bottom of the page and it's dated September 1992, and here I am in 1997."
That NCI study looked at one kind of cancer-that afflicting the thyroid-and concluded that nuclear-test fallout caused somewhere between 11,300 and 212,000 incidences of the disease among Americans. After it was finally published in 1997, Congress demanded a CDC follow-up.
A report to Congress on the CDC follow-up emphasizes its conservative approach. The study has a large margin of error-the mathematically modeled cancer tolls are more illustrative than definitive-and it is only now being peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences.
Caveats aside, the estimate of 33,000 cases of cancer seems restrained if only because it covers fallout generated over just eleven years, between 1951 and 1962, and sprinkled acorss the forty-eight contiguous US states. As the IEER notes, that omits:
- all Chinese atmospheric tests, which were conducted from 1964 to 1980;
- French atmospheric tests from 1963 to 1974;
- pre-1951 tests in the Marshall Islands and in the Soviet Union;
- the original three 1945 atomic blasts-in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The 11,000 Americans killed by an eleven-year run of nuclear testing represent a fraction of a larger story-a cold war epic that spans five decades and dozens of nations.
Nuclear powers ''owe the world a real accounting of what they did to its health,'' says Makhijani. "It is high time for the United Nations to create a Global Truth Commission that would examine-in detail comparable to the US government studies-the harm that has been inflicted upon the people of the world by nuclear weapons production and testing."
Until that Truth Commission convenes however, the CDC's study is sobering enough. Alvarez says that any one of more than a dozen atmospheric tests in that eleven-year period released Chernobyl-scale radiation levels. "There were at least nineteen shots in the ballpark of the Chernobyl accident," he said. "We're talking about levels [of radioactivity] so large during that period that if today's existing safety standards to protect the public had been applied, large portions of the nation's milk supply would have had to have been withdrawn on numerous occasions." Makhijani of IEER adds that some US farm children who drank milk after the hottest atmospheric blasts were as severely exposed as "the worst-exposed children" of Chernobyl.
Reasonable people could argue, if they were so inclined, over whether 11,000 people in America killed by eleven years of nuclear testing is "a lot." But whether one sees it as horrifying or as merely a few thousand eggs broken for our cold war omelettes, the link between fallout and cancer is a reality oddly absent from discussions of busting bunkers under Baghdad or Tora Bora.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Security Gaps Found at Nuclear Plants
March 26, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-26-09.html#anchor2
WASHINGTON, DC, Representative Edward Markey says documents sent to him by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) show that there are dangerous gaps in security at the nation's nuclear reactor sites.
Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has released a report analyzing more than 100 pages of NRC correspondence sent to him in response to several letters seeking information about the agency's security protocols in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The report, "Security Gap: A Hard Look at the Soft Spots in Our Civilian Nuclear Reactor Security," identifies a number of security lapses, Markey said.
"There is little comfort to be found in the agency's response to my questions," said Markey. "Black hole after black hole is described and left unaddressed. Post 9/11, a nuclear safety agency that does not know - and seems little interested in finding out - the nationality of nuclear reactor workers or the level of resources being spent on security at these sensitive facilities is not doing its job."
Among Markey's allegations:
The NRC does not know how many foreign nationals are employed at nuclear reactors. The agency's background checks for employees are insufficient to determine whether a worker is or has been a member of a terrorist group. The NRC does not track how much money its licensees spend on security, or how many security guards each reactor site employs.
Markey's report echoes concerns raised by other members of Congress and nuclear watchdog groups regarding the ability of nuclear reactors to resist an impact by a commercial aircraft, such as those used to destroy the World Trade Center towers and damage the Pentagon.
Twenty-one commercial reactors are located within five miles of an airport, the report notes. Yet 96 percent of all U.S. reactors were not designed to withstand the impact of even a small aircraft.
Other problems cited in the report include insufficient security around stored spent nuclear fuel. If storage casks were breached by a terrorist attack, dangerous amounts of radiation could be released, the report warns.
The NRC has not determined how long spent fuel casks could withstand a fire, and has not provided information on the worst scenario for breached spent fuel casks.
The report also warns that security exercises at nuclear reactor sites are inadequate, and sites fail to withstand practice attacks about 50 percent of the time.
Last August, for example, a security exercise at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vermont, revealed "potential vulnerabilities in the security program's response strategy," the NRC reported.
The NRC has rated the security problems at Vermont Yankee as "yellow," or one level below the highest level of concern. The security weaknesses "were generally predictable, repeatable and indicative of a broad programmatic problem," the NRC determined, creating an issue of substantial importance to safety."
-----------
Black hole in US nuclear security - lawmaker
Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
March 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15192/story.htm
WASHINGTON - A U.S. lawmaker has released new documents from a federal agency that he claims reveal a "black hole" in security measures at the nation's 103 nuclear power plants.
Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Markey, a long-time nuclear industry critic on safety grounds, has submitted numerous requests for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to detail measures it has taken to shore up plant security.
His requests came amid fears that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network could be plotting a nuclear plant attack, based on intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies. Al Qaeda is blamed by Washington for the September 11 hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
The 100-page response submitted to Markey by NRC Chairman Richard Meserve on March 4, which Markey released yesterday, gives "little comfort" in the NRC's preparedness, Markey said.
"Black hole after black hole is described and left unaddressed," Markey said. The NRC "does not know, and seems to have little interest in finding out" its true security stance, Markey said.
In an accompanying report, Markey detailed lapses in plant security background checks and measures taken to protect against an airplane attack on a nuclear plant.
The NRC and the agency's lobbying group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, have maintained that plants were secure even before the September 11 attacks.
"Long before September 11, the NRC had put in place at commercial nuclear power plants the most robust security regime for any commercial facilities in this country," NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan said at a conference earlier this month, calling nuclear plants "hard targets by any conceivable definition."
Markey's report took aim at the vetting process nuclear plants use to screen employees' background.
According to NRC's response, it requires criminal background checks for U.S. citizens that hold passes allowing them unescorted access to sensitive plant areas. That requirement does not apply to non-citizens, for whom the NRC requires a "best effort" security screening, the NRC said.
Markey called the practice "unacceptable" and likened it to U.S. laws that allowed the individuals who piloted the hijacked airliners on September 11 to enrol in a Florida flight school.
Al Qaeda operatives could "gain unescorted access to the controlled area of a plant, just as (the hijackers) obtained student visas to attend flight school," Markey's report warned.
The NRC also stated in its response that it "does not require licensees to submit information concerning security expenditures," and has not tracked the number of security personnel at nuclear sites over the last 10 years.
PROTECTION AGAINST AIRCRAFT STRIKES
Markey also raised concerns that nuclear plants are not adequately protected against an intentional direct hit from a hijacked aircraft.
In its response, NRC referenced 21 reactors within 5 miles of a major or private airport. Markey said most of those reactors are not designed to withstand an aircraft strike.
The Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg International Airport in Pennsylvania was designed "with the impact of a large airliner in mind," Markey's report said.
Other U.S. plants have taken lesser steps, which the NRC has deemed as adequate. While Markey's report pointed to steps taken by Switzerland to design its plants to withstand such a strike, the NRC had not required such action, Markey said.
"The likelihood of an airplane accidentally crashing onto a reactor site in the U.S. is typically much lower than in Europe," the NRC wrote.
The NRC affirmed that such a strike could cause substantial damage. "The NRC recognises that aircraft crashes may result in multiple-failure initiating events," the agency wrote.
Markey called the statement "highly significant," because they suggest that nuclear industry assurances about the strength of existing protections were "irrelevant."
Markey also criticised the NRC for refusing to deploy military anti-aircraft installations around nuclear plants to shoot down threatening planes.
The NRC stated that it "believes that the proper way to deal with the potential hijacking of large commercial aircraft by suicidal terrorists is through the measures on airline security now well underway."
----
U.S. Orders Checks for Corrosion at Nuclear Reactor
Tue Mar 26
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20020326/ts_nyt/u_s__orders_checks_for_corrosion_at_nuclear_reactor&printer=1
WASHINGTON, March 25 - Nuclear reactor operators have been ordered to check their reactor vessels after the discovery that acid in cooling water had eaten a hole nearly all the way through the six-inch-thick lid of a reactor at a plant in Ohio. The corrosion left only a stainless-steel liner less than a half-inch thick to hold in cooling water under more than 2,200 pounds of pressure per square inch.
At the 25-year-old Ohio plant, Davis-Besse, near Toledo, the stainless steel was bent by the pressure and would have broken if corrosion had continued, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where officials were surprised by the discovery. They said they had never seen so much corrosion in a reactor vessel.
The commission, which has warned plants for years to watch for any corrosion, has ordered all 68 other plants of similar design pressurized-water reactors to check their lids. The commission is particularly worried about a dozen of the oldest plants and ordered them to report by early April whether they were safe enough to keep in service. The commission told these plants to demonstrate that technicians there would have noticed such corrosion in their normal inspections, had it occurred.
If the liner had given way in the Ohio reactor, experts say, there would have been an immediate release of thousands of gallons of slightly radioactive and extremely hot water inside the reactor's containment building.
The plants have pipe systems that are meant to pump water back into a leaking vessel, but some experts fear that if rushing steam and water damaged thermal insulation on top of the vessel, the pipes could clog. In that event, the reactor might have lost cooling water and suffered core damage possibly a meltdown and a larger release of radiation, at least inside the building.
Such extensive corrosion "was never considered a credible type of concern," said Brian W. Sheron, associate director for project licensing and technology assessment at the regulatory commission.
Small leaks of cooling water are common, Mr. Sheron said, but engineers always thought that if cooling water leaked from the piping above the vessel and accumulated on the vessel lid, the water would boil away in the heat of over 500 degrees, leaving the boric acid it contains in harmless boron powder form. At Davis-Besse, however, it appears that the water was held close to the metal vessel lid, or head, perhaps by insulation on top of the vessel.
Boric acid is used in cooling water to absorb surplus neutrons, the subatomic particles that are released when an atom is split and go on to split other atoms, sustaining the chain reaction.
Engineers are not yet certain why the corrosion occurred.
A nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit watchdog group that is often critical of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the discovery was troubling.
"This is really something that shouldn't happen," said the engineer, David Lochbaum. "You shouldn't get such a huge hole in a pressure-retaining vessel."
Edwin S. Lyman, the scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute, an anti-proliferation group based here, said: "This is a pretty serious issue, and it has generic implications. And it was discovered by accident."
Workers stumbled on the problem in the process of fixing a leaking tube that connects to the vessel head, which is 17 feet in diameter and weighs 150 tons. The tube is part of the reactor control system; inside it there is a control rod, which operators can lower into the core to smother the flow of neutrons and stop the chain reaction, or raise to allow the reactor to run.
Technicians discovered that the metal that supports the tube had mostly disappeared.
The plant owner, FirstEnergy Corporation, is hoping to patch the hole, an irregular opening about 4 by 5 inches. But the commission is skeptical about whether this is possible.
No one in this country has replaced a reactor vessel head, although several plants have ordered parts to do so. FirstEnergy ordered a new head just before the extent of the problem became obvious. A company spokesman said the company hoped to install it in the spring of 2004.
That date reflects how the industry, with no new reactor orders in decades in this country, has limited production capacity for such parts.
The plant might also be able to use a vessel head from a reactor in Midland, Mich., that was never completed, or from a similar plant that was retired in 1989.
Davis-Besse, which began operating in 1977, was not designed with the idea that the head would be replaced; technicians would have to cut a bigger hole in the steel-reinforced concrete containment building to get the new head into it.
The company has not said what the job will cost, but Duke Power Company, which operates three reactors similar to Davis-Besse, plans to replace the heads of all three for about $20 million. FirstEnergy could spend nearly that much each month for electricity from alternative sources if it must wait for the replacement part.
Because of the discovery at Davis-Besse, the regulatory commission ordered a dozen other plants to report back within two weeks and prove that inspections they have done in the past would have found any corrosion.
The inspection cannot be done while the plant is running, and if the utilities cannot convince the commission, they presumably face shutdowns of perhaps several weeks just for the checks.
Such shutdowns occurred intermittently in the 1970's and 80's but have become extremely rare as reactors have improved their reliability.
The industry is hopeful, however, that inspections it began under commission orders several years ago, to look for leaks, would have found any similar cases. Those inspections began after the heads of French reactors showed signs of leaks and corrosion.
"It could be something unique to Davis-Besse," said Alexander Marion, director of engineering at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association. A goal for the investigation at the plant, he said, would be to find out not only why the corrosion occurred but also why it was not noticed sooner.
"The plants are getting older and we're starting to see these kinds of problems," Mr. Marion said.
-------- nevada
[To reply, mailto:OPED@washpost.com]
One Safe Site Is Best
By Spencer Abraham,
U.S. Secretary of Energy
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17178-2002Mar25?language=printer
Imagine that at the dawn of the nuclear age, President Truman and Congress had agreed to bury all the radioactive waste that this new source of energy would produce in sturdy casks covered by a secure shield 800 feet beneath a barren desert owned by the government, guarded against intruders, under federally restricted airspace and located 90 miles from the nearest major population center.
Had that choice been made, would anyone today argue that it would be safer to remove all this high-level nuclear waste and scatter it around the nation to 131 sites located near cities and waterways, and to place the waste in temporary, above-ground storage facilities?
Of course not. But this is essentially what the critics of the decision to select Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the nation's permanent site for nuclear waste are asking us to believe -- that the current temporary surface storage system for high-level nuclear waste is preferable to the permanent underground solution offered by the Yucca Mountain site.
Scientists have studied the safety and suitability of Yucca Mountain for the past 24 years at a cost of more than $4 billion. Experts from around the world have mapped the mountain's geologic structure, collected 75,000 feet of core samples and more than 18,000 geologic and water samples, and built more than six miles of tunnels to map its interior features at the repository level.
After all this analysis, the scientists concluded that Yucca Mountain would be safe. In fact, extensive studies prove the repository will secure this material so well that tough Environmental Protection Agency standards will be met for 10,000 years. Here's what this means: Someone living 11 miles away from the site 10,000 years from now would be less exposed to radiation than he would be on a normal plane flight from Las Vegas to New York.
In making this determination, the experts used worst-case assumptions. We took earthquakes into account: Yucca Mountain would still meet EPA radiation protection standards. Volcanic eruptions affecting the repository? The likelihood is one in 70 million per year. And Yucca Mountain would still meet the EPA standards. What about corrosion from water that might drip 1,000 feet down into the cavern? Yucca Mountain is located near Death Valley and has an average precipitation of under 8 inches a year, less than half an inch of which actually makes it below the surface. We even analyzed what would happen during the next ice age when Nevada's climate changed and rainfall increased dramatically: Yucca Mountain would still meet the EPA standards.
This project is critical for national security. Spent fuel from our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines must be permanently disposed of if we are to continue using these valuable systems. And Yucca Mountain is indispensable to joint U.S.-Russian efforts to secure nuclear materials.
The project is critical for energy security as well. Nuclear power provides 20 percent of the nation's electricity, emits no airborne pollution or greenhouse gases and now gives us one of the cheapest forms of power generation we have. Securing these benefits requires finding a permanent, safe and secure site for nuclear waste.
Yucca Mountain is essential for homeland security. More than 161 million people live within 75 miles of one or more nuclear waste sites, all of which were intended to be temporary. We believe that today these sites are safe, but prudence demands we consolidate this waste from widely dispersed above-ground sites into a deep underground location that can be better protected.
The science is sound, and the national interests served by a permanent repository are compelling. That's undoubtedly why opponents of Yucca Mountain have now resorted to scare tactics. They argue, for example, that transporting materials to the site would be unsafe because of potential accidents or terrorist attacks. But we've transported radioactive materials for more than 30 years, covering some 1.6 million miles, without any harmful release of radiation. Europe has already safely moved about as much nuclear material from place to place as we expect to ship over the entire active life of the Yucca Mountain Project.
So far as terrorists are concerned, why wouldn't they first attack stationary, above-ground facilities that lie in known locations near heavily populated cities, rather than wait 10 years until the material is being moved -- in secret -- in secure containers surrounded by heavily armed guards?
If the critics think a "no" on Yucca Mountain means this material will stay put, they are dreaming. Already, the Goshute Indian Tribe in Utah, in consortium with a group of electric utilities, is moving forward on approval of a temporary above-ground nuclear waste storage site on its reservation. Whether or not the Goshutes are successful, sooner or later others will open new sites, and this material will move.
At this point, the administration is simply seeking permission to have independent experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission objectively and scientifically decide whether to approve construction of the repository. That will take at least three years and yet more scientific studies.
But those who oppose Yucca Mountain don't even want the NRC to bring its widely recognized impartial and detached scientific judgment to the table to make an independent determination. They would cut short this extended process in the vain hope a miracle will occur and this problem will just go away. It won't -- and it's our responsibility to solve it.
The writer is U.S. secretary of energy.
-------- us politics
Constitutional aggrandizements
Bruce Fein
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020326-82845924.htm
To paraphrase patriot Patrick Henry on King George III, President Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing scheme provoked a congressional backlash; President Richard Nixon's war powers and impoundment abuses were answered with the War Powers Resolution and the Budget Control and Impoundment Act; and President George Bush should be chastened by these examples.
But instead Mr. Bush is seeking to arrogate power that would have stunned the Founding Fathers, and setting the stage for congressional counterpunching. If the president persists down this worrisome road failing to see that the Constitution's separation of powers is a matter of degree, not of absolutes - then Mr. Bush may leave the White House with lesser prerogatives than when he arrived.
The gauntlet has been thrown down on three fronts. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, a presidential adviser, is balking at testifying before Congress about counterterrorism policies and coordination within the executive branch. The director's views are sought in conjunction with pending legislation that would erect a statutory anti-terrorism czar with greater clout than Mr. Ridge now commands. No classified information has been requested. The congressional demand, pertinent to its oversight and lawmaking functions, stands on firm constitutional ground. As the United States Supreme Court explained in Watkins vs. United States (1957), congressional investigative power "encompasses inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes. It includes surveys of defects in our social, economic or political system for the purpose of enabling the Congress to remedy them.
It comprehends probes into the departments of the federal government to expose corruption, inefficiency or waste."
President Bush, nevertheless, insists that presidential advisers are constitutionally shielded from congressional oversight. But that custom has never received Supreme Court endorsement, and has never been unyielding.
President Ronald Reagan's national security advisers, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, testified before Congress regarding arms sales to Iran; their counterpart under President Bill Clinton, Samuel R. Berger, testified about Haiti; and President Gerald Ford himself testified about the pardon of Nixon.
More important, the congressional oversight and informing functions would be crippled if presidential advisers, ipso facto, were shielded from scrutiny. They could be endowed with policy and management authorities traditionally vested in Cabinet officers yet would operate in secrecy.
History speaks volumes. In foreign affairs, President Woodrow Wilson's Col. Edward House, President Roosevelt's Harry Hopkins, and President Nixon's Henry Kissinger were far more powerful than were their anemic secretaries of state, Robert Lansing, Cordell Hull and William Rogers, respectively. Indeed, to illustrate the potential policy interchangeability of the two offices, one subject to oversight and the other not, under Mr. Bush's outlandish claim - Mr. Kissinger occupied both simultaneously during the Ford administration.
And if that claim were sustained generally, to evade congressional oversight of Mr. Bush's legal policies, authority could be transferred informally or sotto voce from the attorney general to the White House Counsel. Presidential advisers on domestic policy could be similarly appointed to superintend Cabinet Councils to avoid uncomfortable or embarrassing scrutiny by the legislative branch. The informing function of Congress, its most pressing responsibility according to President Woodrow Wilson, would be lacerated.
If President Bush continues his mulishness, then a congressional reaction should be expected. Congress might either prohibit appropriated funds from paying for presidential advisers, make their appointments subject to Senate advise-and-consent authority under Article II, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution, or challenge Mr. Bush in court where it is likely to prevail.
Indeed, under the standards expounded by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo (1976) and Morrison vs. Olson (1988), Mr. Ridge is probably a "principal officer" of the United States whose appointment without Senate confirmation is unconstitutional.
President Bush's concealment from Congress of Vice President Richard Cheney's Energy Task Force discussions with Enron officials, whose underwriting of Bush campaigns has been lavish, is equally ill-conceived.
Disclosure is necessary to dispel the appearance of impropriety or conflicts of interest that shadow the task force recommendations and undermine public confidence in government. Attorney General John Ashcroft has already recused himself from Enron matters because of previous campaign contributions; and, Secretary of Army Thomas White, a former Enron tycoon, has followed suit.
Mr. Bush's fretting that breaching the confidentiality of Enron's lobbying would drive away private advice encroaches on the hallucinogenic. Who of any repute has scoffed at an Oval Office invitation because an iron-clad promise of secrecy was not forthcoming?
In sum, under the balancing test elaborated by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Senate Select Committee vs. Nixon (1974), Congress would probably defeat the president in a judicial tussle over the Enron communications.
President Bush is also seeking to marginalize Congress by concluding a major nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia in the guise of an executive agreement or coordinated unilateral declarations.
Such arms control agreements have been traditionally conceived as treaties, as with SALT I and the ABM covenant, thus constitutionally requiring Senate review and ratification by a two-thirds majority.
The Founding Fathers involved the Senate because they feared executive waywardness or treachery. As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 75: "[I]t would be utterly unsafe and improper to intrust that [treaty making] power to an elective magistrate of four years' duration. ... The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a president of the United States."
President Bush should be wary of wishing for clashes with Congress and the Supreme Court over claimed constitutional turf. He might get what he wishes for, and be worse off for it.
Bruce Fein is general counsel for the Center for Law and Accountability, a public-interest law group headquartered in Virginia.
-------- MILITARY
World Court for War Crimes Inches Closer to Reality
New York Times
March 26, 2002
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/international/26TRIB.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 25 - The world's first permanent international court to try individuals charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity may become a reality within the next few weeks, much sooner than expected, legal experts said today.
"We're creeping very close to the 60 ratifications needed," the United Nations spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told reporters today.
The leader of the nongovernmental Coalition for the International Criminal Court, William Pace, said in an interview that the remaining ratifications - four more are needed - could take place during the opening days of a meeting to discuss the court's budget and other matters, beginning on April 8. Some officials say the finish line could be crossed earlier.
At the end of last week, the 1998 treaty establishing the court had been signed by 139 nations and ratified by 56. Countries are now jockeying to be the 60th to ratify, thus technically bringing the court into existence. Based in The Hague, the International Criminal Court will take at least a year to begin to function.
The Bush administration, breaking with European and NATO allies, strongly opposes the court and has vowed never to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. The treaty, adopted by a conference of nations in Rome in 1998, was signed by the United States in the waning days of the Clinton administration over the objections of the Pentagon and conservatives in Congress who feared that Americans would be easy targets as they carried out missions abroad.
The United States has demanded that no United Nations money be spent on the first organizational meeting of nations that have ratified the court treaty, tentatively set for September. Washington wants an exemption for its citizens from the court's reach.
If the 60 ratifications are received in April, the court's jurisdiction will begin on July 1 in the sense that any crime committed after that date is eligible for prosecution. There is no ex post facto jurisdiction.
Mr. Pace, who leads a coalition of more than 1,000 legal and other organizations supporting the court, said events of the last four years had moved faster than anyone had predicted.
"When we started in the mid-90's, and even right up until Rome in 1998, people thought it was going to take 50 or 100 years before governments would be willing to create a permanent international criminal court," he said.
"After the treaty was adopted - because of the opposition of the U.S., China, India and other countries - it was thought that it would probably take at least 15, 20, 25 years for 60 ratifications. Many countries, like Germany and France, have had to change their Constitutions to ratify. Yet here, less that four years later, we will have achieved the 60 ratifications.
"It's a real demonstration how much the mobilization of democracy and justice and the rule of law is also proceeding in international affairs," he said.
--------
[Sometimes I'm ashamed to have been born an American. et]
Afghan War Is a Lab for U.S. Innovation
New Technologies Are Tested in Battle
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16892-2002Mar25?language=printer
Within weeks of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon last September, dozens of government scientists and engineers at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Fairfax County began working virtually around the clock to develop a powerful new bomb.
Their mission: come up with a device that could penetrate al Qaeda's cave complexes deep in the mountains of Afghanistan and kill the people inside.
By mid-December, the scientists were ready to go. In the Nevada desert, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, they detonated the world's first "thermobaric" bomb, which creates massive amounts of shock wave pressure from its blast.
Ten were quickly dispatched to U.S. forces in Central Asia, and three weeks ago the first one was fired by an F-15E at a tunnel in eastern Afghanistan at the start of Operation Anaconda, the offensive against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts.
The crash development of the weapon is just one example of how the war on terrorism is proving to be a potent laboratory for military innovation. Thirty new technologies, from armed aerial drones to dosimeters that measure exposure to toxic chemicals, have been rushed into use at home and abroad, the offspring of a $688 million effort over the past eight years to stimulate innovation at the Pentagon.
Among the devices being hurried into the development pipeline are foliage-penetrating radar sensors, micro-drones and microwave antipersonnel guns that stun, rather than maim or kill, officials say.
The results of the scientists' work likely will reverberate far beyond the campaign against terrorism. As the German blitzkrieg tactic of sudden, swift land attacks or the American Manhattan project that developed the first atomic bomb during World War II demonstrated, major wars lead to military innovations that revolutionize how conflicts are fought.
"Many of the weapons that remain the centerpiece of our military posture trace their origins directly to previous conflicts: the tank in World War I, radar on the eve of World War II, and of course the nuclear bomb, which defined an entire age," said Loren B. Thompson, a defense consultant at the Lexington Institute, a public policy research organization.
Eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ronald M. Sega, who directs research and engineering at the Pentagon, called a dozen defense technology officials together to talk about what projects should be accelerated to support the impending war.
Sega said three emerged from a crowded field of 150 projects: the thermobaric bomb, a bunker-busting, air-launched cruise missile, and a "nuclear quadrapole reasonance" sensor to detect the presence of bulk explosive materials in trucks and shipping containers.
He said all three have been deployed, either in Afghanistan or the United States.
The thermobaric bomb resulted from a problem bedeviling Pentagon planners. Many al Qaeda fighters were burrowed deep inside vast cave complexes in Afghanistan's mountains. Short of a ground invasion to roust them cave by cave -- a proposition that would likely lead to a large loss of American lives -- getting at the terrorists was problematic.
"We looked at thermobarics and said, 'Hey, we could do this really quickly and provide a significantly improved capability,' " said Stephen M. Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The thermobaric bomb releases and then detonates a fine cloud of high-explosive chemicals, creating devastating shock waves that destroy everything -- and everyone -- inside a cave, bunker or building. The term thermobaric is derived from the effects of temperature -- the Greek word for heat is "therme" -- and air pressure -- the Greek word for pressure is "baros" -- on the target.
Only one has been dropped in Afghanistan on what Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called a "tactically significant" cave. Although the device detonated as envisioned, a problem with the laser-guidance system caused it to fall short of the cave entrance, negating its effectiveness, a defense official said.
In addition to the thermobaric bomb, the Afghan war will be remembered for its tactical advances -- the fusion of Special Operations Forces spotting targets on the ground and long-range bombers firing at them from the air, for example. It also has marked the first use of armed unmanned drones, with the CIA using surveillance Predators to launch Hellfire antitank missiles, and the first operational flight of the Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance plane that flies higher and longer than the Predator.
Air Force officers working out of a special operational cell at the Pentagon called Checkmate figured out how to feed surveillance video from a Predator directly into an AC-130 gunship's computers for real-time targeting.
Navy pilots flying EA-6B Prowlers off aircraft carriers found themselves playing a new role in jamming enemy ground communications. Army Special Forces troops devised new ways of communicating target coordinates to incoming fighter and bomber pilots.
There can be dangerous and costly consequences to such experimentation, however.
One $30 million Global Hawk crashed in late December after a mission over Afghanistan. And two friendly fire incidents that left three U.S. soldiers dead and more than two dozen wounded apparently took place after target coordinates were miscommunicated from U.S. ground forces to pilots firing satellite-guided bombs.
But even with such setbacks, defense officials and analysts say the pace and scope of innovation in wartime -- and the immediate feedback on how the new weapons are performing on the battlefield -- are invaluable. In this respect, they say Operation Enduring Freedom, as the Pentagon calls the Afghanistan war, is already proving its worth.
"The most important innovation of Operation Enduring Freedom was the netting together of forces that traditionally weren't regarded as having much to do with each other: strategic bombers and Special Forces, ground forces and Navy electronic aircraft," Thompson said.
Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory, according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer and CIA operative, said the success came because the al Qaeda network and the Taliban government sheltering it were overmatched opponents.
"When great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in between the old military world and the new military world -- you can experiment more because there's no doubt you're going to win," he said. "You experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't get that very much in the military."
In Afghanistan, Vickers drew a distinction between technical innovation, such as development of the thermobaric bomb, and what he considers even more important organizational and tactical innovation, such as linking Special Forces on the ground with bombers in the air.
"This was a new way of war, a new operational concept," Vickers said. "And it was a pretty significant innovation, because we got fairly rapid regime change with it. This wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned to overthrow governments."
But even this tactical advance was highly dependent upon new military technology, largely information technology linking the ground and air forces.
According to one Air Force case study documenting the fusion between soldiers and bombers, one lethal attack took place last fall after a commander with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance asked U.S. Special Forces troops to help him maneuver through a valley occupied by a large Taliban garrison and troop concentration.
Using satellite communications, the Army troops called the Air Force operations center in Saudi Arabia to request an aircraft. The operations center immediately told an "on-station" B-52 to contact the soldiers.
Using a device called a Viper -- a portable laser range finder, digital map display and Global Positioning System receiver -- the soldiers calculated the coordinates of the Taliban garrison and troops and radioed them to the B-52 crew.
"Less than 20 minutes after the Special Forces operator was contacted, the B-52 crew passed over the target area and dropped a series of munitions on the Taliban garrison and troop concentration," the case study said. "The airstrike resulted in heavy Taliban casualties, the destruction of numerous fighting positions and artillery pieces, and significant damage to a command bunker."
One senior Navy official told of how Special Forces called in a carrier-based Navy warplane on four al Qaeda fighters in a sports utility vehicle who stopped and took cover under a bridge as soon as they heard the approaching jet.
With the Special Forces troops shining a laser designator on the enemy, the official said, the Navy pilot was able to "bounce" a laser-guided bomb and kill the enemy without damaging the bridge. "They didn't know where it [was] coming from," the official said. "A lot of it was technology per se that enabled us to just kick these guys every time they put their head up."
-------- afghanistan
Afghanistan quake kills at least 1,800
3/26/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26032002-055208-3888r
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 26 -- A series of earthquakes played havoc in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 1,800 people and destroying an entire town and adjoining villages, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan said Tuesday.
The office of interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said unofficial estimates are that 4,800 people might have died and more than 20,000 made homeless.
Around 4,000 houses and shops also have been destroyed while thousands of people are hiding in the caves. Thousands others spent the night out in the open in subzero temperatures as the tremors continued.
The town of Nahrin -- about 108 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul -- is the worst affected. The city has a population of 54,000.
"Almost 90 percent of the town has been destroyed," a UNOCHA spokesman said. "Some villages have been annihilated."
The shock waves that began late Monday and continued until early Tuesday devastated the northern Baghlan province. Tremors could be felt as far away as Peshawar and Islamabad in Pakistan.
UNOCHA already has confirmed "approximately 1,800 deaths with 1,200 bodies counted so far, nearly 4,000 people were injured, approximately 1,500 homes were destroyed and 20,000 people were left without shelter," the spokesman said.
UNOCHA also reported damage in the nearby Burkha district but said it was still waiting for more information.
Karzai, who chaired an emergency meeting of his cabinet in Kabul on Tuesday, declared an emergency in the affected areas and appealed for international assistance.
"The immediate need is to take food, tents, blankets and medicines to the survivors," he said.
"Not just Nahrin but several other places in eastern Baghlan have also been devastated. We are trying to reach the victims," Afghan Minister for Water and Natural Resources Haji Mangal Hussain told reporters in Kabul.
The Afghan Red Crescent Society, which is affiliated with the International Red Cross, has sent an emergency medical unit to the affected area.
"The need for medical support to the injured is our main concern at the moment. That's why our first intervention is the deployment of a team of doctors and nurses," said International Federation delegation head, Jean Gilardi, in Kabul.
The first quake measured 6.0 on the Richter scale and may have destroyed up to 85 percent of Nahrin, according to the French relief agency ACTED, which has an office in the town. The agency has distributed 500 tents and 1,000 blankets to people in the affected area and currently is deploying an assessment team. The ACTED Office itself collapsed overnight, but radio communication remained intact
The epicenter of the earthquake is in Baghlan province about 99 miles from Mazar-i-Sharif where the International Federation has a sub-delegation and stocks of emergency supplies for up to 5,000 families. The province is home to 726,000 people.
Arrangements were being made to have the stock moved by road to the survivors in co-ordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations.
The Nahrin area also is known to relief agencies as particularly vulnerable, with malnutrition identified as one of the major problems because of Afghanistan's long-running drought.
Two of the three roads accessing the Nahrin area are blocked, making rescue and relief efforts even more difficult, Afghan authorities said.
The International Security Assistance Force, deployed in Kabul to help the interim government, is providing helicopters to the relief agencies for search and rescue operations and for sending medical supplies, U.N. officials said.
The U.N. and other international assessment teams were to return to Kabul late Tuesday or early Wednesday to review reports and for an emergency meeting with Karzai.
Northern Afghanistan and Pakistan are known as earthquake-prone areas because of geological changes taking place in the region. Geologists say a clash between the Himalayan and the Eurasian plates deep inside the earth crust causes the earthquakes.
Another earthquake -- measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale -- hit the northern Samangan province on March 3, killing at least 150 people.
Two earthquakes in February and May 1998 left about 9,000 people dead in northeastern Afghanistan.
----
Afghans Falsely Held by U.S. Tried to Explain
Fighters Recount Unanswered Pleas, Beatings -- and an Apology on Their Release
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16915-2002Mar25?language=printer
HAUZIMATED, Afghanistan, March 25 -- When U.S. tanks and helicopters surrounded a walled compound in this tiny desert outpost on March 17 and arrested more than 30 men suspected of belonging to the al Qaeda network, the Pentagon depicted the operation as a good example of how U.S. forces would finish rooting out terrorists from Afghanistan.
But last week, after four days of imprisonment, all of the suspects were released. U.S. officials had discovered that the compound was a security post manned not by al Qaeda or Taliban forces, but by fighters from the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance hired by the government of Kandahar to help control crime.
Eighteen of the men said in interviews that they quickly surrendered and tried to explain that they were U.S. allies as their small compound was surrounded by eight to 10 U.S. tanks and dozens of American soldiers at about 3 a.m. that day. But they said their explanations were either not understood or ignored and that they were tied up, punched, kicked and kneed by the soldiers and then held in cages at a U.S. military base for four days before being released with an apology.
The incident and others like it raise questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis in Afghanistan. U.S. forces frequently have been accused of not recognizing when they are being fed bad information by local Afghan leaders who want to settle political, personal and tribal disputes by accusing their rivals of being members of the Taliban or al Qaeda.
The incident is reminiscent of a Jan. 24 U.S. military operation in the town of Uruzgan in which 21 villagers were killed and 27 were detained for two weeks before being released. The villagers complained that they had been severely beaten during their capture and detention by U.S. military forces who had misidentified them as al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
The U.S. Central Command, which runs the war in Afghanistan, has refused to acknowledge error in the Uruzgan operation, saying its troops were fired on in what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Feb. 21 called an "untidy" situation. But the CIA has made reparation payments to the families of those killed, according to reports from local authorities here.
Maj. Ignacio Perez, a spokesman at the U.S. military base at Kandahar airport, said the operation eight days ago in this tiny hamlet about 25 miles west of Kandahar is not under investigation. "These individuals were treated in a highly professional manner," he said. "We treat all detainees humanely and consistent with the protections provided for under the Geneva Convention."
Perez refused to provide specifics about how the men were detained, citing "operational security." He said he did not know why the outpost had been targeted by U.S. forces as an enemy camp. No shots were fired during the incident, officials said.
In revealing the operation at a Pentagon briefing last week, Air Force Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa Jr., deputy director for current operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was "a set of indicators" pointing to possible enemy activities and "when those indicators line up, we're going into those compounds."
Several days later, when announcing that the men had been released, Rosa explained, "We had looked at that site some time ago. And what happened through intelligence -- we saw more ammunition, more weapons in that area. We also saw folks that we didn't necessarily recognize. More importantly, the Afghanis that were with our troops did not know who was in that compound."
"We never processed them and they never became detainees," Rosa added.
But many of the men interviewed showed what appeared to be official U.S. government identity cards stating: "This card is issued to prisoners of war in the custody of the United States Army."
The compound here officially is a police post surrounded by a 10-foot wall about 100 yards off the Kandahar-Herat highway, in a community that exists principally to make emergency automotive repairs. Men stationed here said that if anybody wanted to know who they were and why they were there, all they had to do was ask.
"They should have sent someone here and taken our leader to their base and asked, 'Who are you?' and solved this through dialogue," said Ahmed Younis, 22. "But they didn't ask anything. They just took all of us to their base, beat us and insulted us, and then apologized."
Residents of the community said they, too, could have told the U.S. forces that the people in the compound were not enemies, but they were too afraid to leave their homes when tanks and soldiers rumbled into town.
After their post was surrounded, one of the men from the compound opened the front gate with a light and invited the unexpected guests inside, but he was told to go back in and not to come out again, the men here said. Finally, about 30 U.S. soldiers entered and ordered the men to surrender their weapons. They said they turned over 24 AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
"They told us that 'We have information you belong to al Qaeda or the Taliban,' that 'this is [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar's house, and you are going to attack us and turn the people against us,' " said Faida Mohammed, a commander at the outpost who was sporting a black eye he said he received that night. "We laughed and said, 'We're from the government.' But we didn't move or say anything against them."
The men said their feet were bound, their hands tied behind their backs and black hoods placed over their heads while U.S. soldiers punched and kicked them. Many of the 18 men who gathered to describe what happened showed a variety of cuts and bruises they said they had received during the beatings. In all, they said, 34 men at the outpost were taken into custody; U.S. officials put the number at 31.
They were driven to the U.S. base about 40 miles away, and once there, at about 7 a.m., they were ordered to lie on their stomachs on a patch of rocky ground for the next seven hours. "Whenever we moved, they hit us," Faida Mohammed said.
For the next four days, the men said they were held in a large, walled detention area at the base that had about 15 cages, each about 32 feet long and 15 feet wide, made with wooden posts surrounded by metal fencing and topped by weatherproof material. Each cage held 10 to 18 people, they said.
The men were divided among three of the cages, sharing the space with Pakistani, Iranian, Chechen, Bangladeshi, Palestinian and other Arab prisoners, they said. Each man was given two blankets and a space on the wooden floor on which to sleep. There were two buckets for the latrine, but otherwise they were ordered to sit on the floor all the time, not look up and not talk to anyone, the men said.
They were fed regularly, and after the first day, they were not mistreated, the men said. Each underwent about an hour of personal interrogation during the first two days, which consisted principally of questions about their family background and their political and military allegiances. They said they were not threatened or hit during the questioning. They said that after two days, it appeared that their true identities had been discovered, and they were mostly ignored for the last two days.
"Finally, they believed us, and they said, 'It was a misunderstanding -- someone gave us bad information,' " Faida Mohammed said. "They said, 'We apologize,' and they flew us back here in five helicopters, accompanied by the top leader of the air base himself."
--------
THE MILITARY
U.S. to Send Special Forces to Train Army for Kabul
New York Times
March 26, 2002
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/international/asia/26MILI.html
WASHINGTON, March 25 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld assigned the American military a complex new mission in Afghanistan today as he announced that Special Forces troops would begin training the new Afghan national army within the next six weeks.
The first training phase, to last two and a half months, will prepare three ground combat battalions, each with 600 troops, and two border patrol battalions, each with 300 troops, senior military planners said.
Up to 150 Army Special Forces troops will be assigned at this initial stage to the Training Task Force, with senior military officials saying they will probably come from units not already in Afghanistan. In addition, allied nations will be invited to contribute troops.
Thus far, however, the other nations have shown reluctance to help Afghanistan fill a domestic security vacuum that is now the domain of powerful regional warlords and local bandits - and pockets of tenacious Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
The United States and its allies decided not to expand the international peacekeeping force beyond the size needed to patrol the capital, Kabul. And at conferences in Germany and Japan to discuss post-Taliban rule and economic development, no money was pledged to reconstruct an Afghan army, although $4.5 billion was promised for civilian projects.
Pentagon officials said one goal of Special Forces assigned to the mission would be to train Afghans to become their own military trainers eventually. Retired American military officers could also be contracted over time to replace the Special Forces trainers.
The assessment on how to build an Afghan army was carried out by a 15-member team led by Maj. Gen. Charles C. Campbell, chief of staff for the United States Central Command. He said he had come away from talks with Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, with a clear sense that he wants a new army "to be a powerful symbol of national unity, stability and pride."
General Campbell said the Afghan forces would also be instructed in the highly nuanced and vastly more complicated issues of civilian control over military affairs, loyalty to a legitimate central government and respect for human rights and the rules of armed combat.
Mr. Rumsfeld indicated that the United States was willing to pay some costs of raising an Afghan force. But he said other nations must share the burden - a crucial point since the central government must be able to clothe, arm and, most important, pay any soldiers it hopes to wean from warlords who now dominate much of Afghanistan outside Kabul.
"The United States is going to work with some other countries to try to raise some funds for the purpose of training the Afghan army," Mr. Rumsfeld said today. "And needless to say, the pace at which it happens and the size will be somewhat dependent on the success of that effort."
In a telephone interview today, General Campbell expressed optimism over prospects for what he termed "a migration of power from regional-based warlords to the central authorities."
"My sense from a number of conversations is that the notion of a national army is one that resonates with all of the parties, including the regional leaders of armed factions," he said. "At least right now, there is a window of opportunity where you have warlords - for lack of a better term - prepared to make available soldiers to participate in establishing a national army."
But that window of opportunity is held open by anticipation of international support - both in money and weaponry, said an expert in the nation's military history, Ali A. Jalali.
Mr. Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan Army and co-author of "The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahedeen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War," noted that for two decades rival militaries have created the nation's political structures, rather than a situation in which a national government controls the military.
"So unless you have a politically stabilized government, with the money to pay for an army, the people who are controlling the provinces are not going to dissolve their militias," said Mr. Jalali, who is now with Voice of America.
No cost figures for raising an Afghan national army were released. While experts, including Mr. Jalali, have said that an army of 50,000 to 60,000 troops was appropriate, Pentagon officials said final projections for the size of the force remain the subject of consultations with the Afghan Defense Ministry.
-------- africa
Somali leaders vow U.S. support
By Gus Constantine
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020326-12861612.htm
Jolted by last September's terrorist strike against the United States and the strength of the American commitment to rid the world of terrorist threats, Somalia's nominal leaders say they have swept aside any doubts about their refusal to harbor Muslim extremists.
"We have invited the United States to take any reasonable actions in assuring itself that Somalia will not harbor terrorists," Yusuf Hassan Ibrahim, the foreign minister of the Transitional National Government, said in an interview.
It was a welcome message that Mr. Ibrahim delivered during a visit to Washington last week. Unfortunately, his government's authority barely reaches beyond the building it occupies as a headquarters in the capital, Mogadishu.
The rest of the seaside city still is ruled by the warlords and armed gangs whose turf battles have created virtual anarchy since the overthrow of President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991.
In the south, a rival political organization, the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council, holds sway. Somalia's western neighbor, Ethiopia, has started attacks in support of that group and has provided a haven to one of its leaders, Hussein Mohammed Aidid, the son and clan successor of warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.
It was an effort to break up the Aidid organization that resulted in the death in 1993 of 18 Americans soldiers and searing television pictures of the body of one of them being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Next month, the contending forces are scheduled to meet in Nairobi, Kenya, for yet another try at forming a government of national unity.
"We are very hopeful that the conference will serve to broaden the recognition of the TNG as the legitimate government of Somalia," Mr. Ibrahim said.
Under relentless U.S. presssure, Somalia, like Pakistan and Yemen, has swung from toleration to formal opposition to religious extremists.
The extremists, al-Ittihad al-Islami (Islamic Union), have had their assets frozen by the United States for their support of terrorism, and the government of Abdikassim Salad Hassan has dissociated itself from the movement.
"The militants have either gone underground or have disbanded," Mr. Ibrahim said.
With Somalia's cooperation, the United states has begun continuous air surveillance over Somalia and is sharing intelligence with government officials. European forces meanwhile are monitoring Somalia's coasts and harbors.
"Right now we're watching them like a hawk," one U.S. official said.
Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration identified Somalia as a possible target for U.S. military action. But in light of the Somali cooperation, the U.S. official said, "We're not thinking right now of anything huge."
One of Mr. Ibrahim's main goals in Washington was to seek a restoration of remittances sent into the country by Somalis living abroad.
The remittances, one of the few sources of funding available to the fractured nation, were largely cut off when the United States froze the assets of the conglomerate.
----
Two Ugandans Executed for Killing Irish Priest
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-uganda-execution.html
KAMPALA (Reuters) - Two Ugandan soldiers were shot dead by firing squad for murdering an Irish Catholic priest and two other men in the country's first public execution in a decade, an army spokesman said on Tuesday.
An Irish aid agency and a colleague of the murdered priest condemned the executions which took place before hundreds of spectators at an army barracks on Monday.
The soldiers, corporal James Omedio and private Abdallah Mohammed, dressed in plain green fatigues, were lashed to trees a few yards from the gate of the Kotido army barracks in northeastern Uganda. They were shot by 10 masked soldiers.
The pair were hooded, barefoot and had their hands tied behind their backs, a local reporter told Reuters.
A medical officer who checked the soldiers after the firing said Mohammed was not dead. An officer drew his pistol and shot the private once in the head.
The bodies were then taken away for burial.
Father Declan O'Toole, 31, his driver and another passenger were shot dead on Thursday about 220 miles from the capital Kampala as they traveled by road in the volatile Karamoja region.
Army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza said: ``It is a kind of a sacrifice. We are showing the people that we do not tolerate such acts of indiscipline.
``This is the first time in the last 10 years that we have executed someone in public,'' he said.
BRUTAL
Irish aid agency Goal said the execution highlighted the brutal nature of President Yoweri Museveni's government. It described the former guerrilla leader's 16-year rule as one of the most repressive regimes in Africa.
``The fact that these men were taken out and put up against a tree and shot dead stinks,'' Goal Chief Executive John O'Shea said in a statement. ``It is a case of dead men tell no stories.''
Father Joseph Jones, a Dublin-based colleague of O'Toole, said senior officers may have been to blame for the killings.
``If the army was involved then they are the ones that should be punished and not those two poor fellows who were executed yesterday, because if they did fire the shots then they were only acting on orders from senior officers,'' Jones, a member of St. Joseph's Society for Foreign Missions, told Irish radio.
Jones said O'Toole had been beaten by army officers two weeks ago after appealing to them to tone down their violence against locals.
Ugandan newspapers said O'Toole had been beaten by soldiers earlier this month after he accused them of torturing parishioners whom the army suspected of hiding guns.
Karamoja has been unstable for years, partly due to the number of arms held by the area's nomadic tribesmen.
The soldiers, who were arrested on Friday, were convicted on Monday in a four-hour court martial held under a tree in the center of the army post, a collection of grass-thatched huts.
-------- balkans
Yugoslavia Releases 145 Prisoners
March 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Yugoslavia-Prisoner-Release.html
MERDARE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Clapping and chanting, thousands of people on Tuesday welcomed a convoy carrying to Kosovo the last ethnic Albanian prisoners of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's regime.
Two NATO helicopters flew low and U.N. police and peacekeepers controlled the large crowd in Merdare -- a Kosovar town on the boundary with Serbia -- as five buses took 145 ethnic Albanian inmates from Serbia into Kosovo under tight security. Many of the onlookers waved Albanian flags -- red with a black eagle.
The convoy stopped here briefly before speeding west to a U.N.-run prison in Dubrava, about 45 miles west of Pristina.
The inmates had been held in prisons in Serbia for more than three years. Most were arrested for struggling for liberation against Milosevic's repressive regime and are considered political prisoners by human rights groups.
The chief U.N. administrator for Kosovo, Michael Steiner, said the return helps heal some of the wounds from the 1998-99 war.
``This brings to a closure a painful legacy of the war,'' Steiner told reporters in Pristina, the province's capital.
Steiner said most case files have been reviewed by international judges. Those whose convictions were deemed invalid will be released -- many on Wednesday, with some to follow in the next weeks. Inmates who were convicted as common criminals will serve their time in Kosovo prisons, Steiner said.
Among those who came out to welcome the convoy was Xhevahire Asllani, a 20-year-old whose father was sentenced to 15 years by Milosevic's regime on charges of terrorism.
``I can't wait to see my father,'' she said tearfully. ``I haven't seen him for five years.''
The Belgrade government last week decided to allow all the ethnic Albanian prisoners still in jails in Serbia to be transferred to their native Kosovo province. The government hopes the United Nations will return the favor by handing over Serb inmates held in Kosovo prisons.
The transfer is one of the key requirements the United States has demanded fulfilled if it is to continue giving aid and support to Yugoslavia.
U.S. authorities have also demanded that Belgrade cooperate with the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, by handing over war crimes suspects. So far, Yugoslav authorities have resisted fulfilling this requirement.
The prisoners on the buses included 104 inmates from a prison in Nis, 125 miles south of Belgrade, and 41 from a prison in Sremska Mitrovica in northern Serbia.
Seven ethnic Albanian prisoners declined the transfer, saying they wanted to stay in Serbian prisons, said Bruno Vekaric, a Justice Ministry official.
The United Nations has run Kosovo since NATO forced Milosevic's troops out of the province with a 78-day air war in 1999. The alliance launched the war to halt Milosevic's brutal crackdown on the province's ethnic Albanians, thousands of whom were killed. An estimated 800,000 were driven from their homes.
When Milosevic's troops pulled out, they brought with them 2,015 ethnic Albanian prisoners from Kosovo and placed them in Serbian prisons.
Many were subsequently released and Milosevic's successor, President Vojislav Kostunica, pardoned four of the most prominent ethnic Albanians.
Milosevic is now on trial by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for atrocities his forces carried out in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.
-------- britain
UPI hears ... Chile supported Britain's Falklands War
United Press International
3/26/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26032002-113702-6035r
Retired Chilean Air Force Gen. Fernando Matthei has created a sensation in Santiago by revealing the extent of his country's support of Great Britain during the 1982 Falklands war.
According to Matthei, the British traded a significant amount of weapons and equipment in return for their collaboration on intelligence gathering. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had hinted at the extent of this cooperation when former dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in 1999 for possible trial on human rights violations during his rule as requested by Spain. Thatcher noted only that Chile had provided "alert of imminent Argentinean air attacks which allowed our fleet to take defensive action." Britain supplied Chile with advanced aircraft, selling at low cost Canberra long-distance and other advanced reconnaissance aircraft, bombers and anti-aircraft missiles. Communications and electronic surveillance was also provided. Matthei said of Britain's largesse, "We had nothing like it." Chile in exchange provided intelligence on Argentine military deployments, providing "real time" data on military movements and electronic signals gathering. Chile had its own fears about Argentine aggression; Matthei said, "Galtieri (former head of the Argentine military junta) had already said that we would be next."
-------- business
Raytheon tanks to Jordan; DoD 2 billion contract carved
In Brief
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17207-2002Mar25?language=printer
• Raytheon of Reston received a contract valued at nearly $50 million from a Jordanian government agency to provide up to 100 upgrade kits for integrated fire control systems for tanks. Raytheon said it will make, deliver and install 50 upgrade kits for a battalion of Jordanian Arab Army M60A3 main battle tanks. Raytheon will also provide a pre-installation survey of tanks, installation support and instructor training. The contract includes an option for up to 50 more kits to upgrade a second battalion. Raytheon, with 2001 sales of about $16.87 billion, said the contract concludes a two-year joint development and integration effort between Raytheon and Jordan's King Abdullah II Design Development Bureau. Raytheon shares fell 81 cents yesterday, to $39.39.
• Computer Sciences and TranTech, information technology firms with operations in Falls Church and Alexandria, respectively, said they were two of nine companies awarded contracts potentially worth $2 billion by the Defense Information Systems Agency. Under the seven-year contracts, the firms will provide technology planning, management, research and engineering to the Department of Defense and other agencies. Computer Sciences said it estimates the value of the award will be $225 million over seven years.
----
Weapons Labs Offer Changes to End Boycott
Tue Mar 26
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=68&u=/nyt/20020326/ts_nyt/weapons_labs_offer_changes_to_end_boycott
The nation's three premier weapons laboratories have offered to change their hiring and promotion practices in exchange for the ending of a boycott by two Asian-American academic organizations, federal officials and the leader of the boycott said yesterday.
Citing anger over the treatment of Dr. Wen Ho Lee (news - web sites), a Los Alamos weapons scientist whom the government accused of spying, as well as longer standing claims of discrimination, the organizations in early 2000 urged Asian-American scientists to boycott the weapons laboratories by not applying for jobs there.
But the proposed changes are far-reaching enough, said the professor who led the boycott, that his organization, the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education, is prepared to call it off. Moreover, he said, it is willing to help the laboratories start a nationwide recruiting drive for Asian-American scientists.
"I will call an end to the boycott and urge Asian-Americans to begin to apply for jobs there," said the professor, L. Ling-chi Wang, director of the Asian American Studies Program in the department of ethnic studies at the University of California. "I would even take a step beyond and get Apahe to develop a plan" for national recruitment, he said.
John Browne, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has met repeatedly with Professor Wang since the boycott started. Yesterday, Ping Lee, a special assistant to Dr. Browne, said: "We're really close to bringing closure. The three weapons labs have come together with a common set of guidance." That guidance, amounting to a draft agreement for changes, has been sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Energy Department, which oversees the labs and must agree to any changes at the sites, which besides Los Alamos include the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories.
Gen. John A. Gordon, administrator of the security agency, said yesterday, "This thing we're calling an agreement is really very broad."
"I'm very hopeful that this will be the foundation and pave the way to make this change in the the relationship we have with those Asian-American organizations," General Gordon said. "There's a strong business case that I can't afford to cut ourselves off from the best and brightest minds in the country, and there's a strong moral case that we're going to do the right thing."
If a formal agreement is signed, Professor Wang said, it will focus on creating a plan for increasing the promotion opportunities for Asian-American scientists and addressing what he regards as disparities in research opportunities that discriminate against minorities. It will also introduce mechanisms that hold the laboratories accountable to their promises to change the workplace environment for minorities.
Though the Energy Department declined to release a copy of the document pending its review in Washington, Professor Wang said he had insisted - and the laboratories had agreed - that changes in dealings with Asian-Americans should apply to all minority groups at the laboratories, including women.
That requirement is far from academic. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, there is a pending class-action lawsuit alleging wage discrimination against women there. Last week, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of Asian-American employees was filed against the lab. Professor Wang said he hoped the agreement would serve as a spur for the lab to settle those lawsuits.
Though touched off by the arrest of Dr. Lee, who eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling classified data, the boycott focused on what many Asian-American scientists at the labs saw as discriminatory practices in their hiring, salaries, job opportunities, advancement into management positions and their treatment when obtaining and renewing security clearances.
The weapons complex is aware that there is still much untapped talent among scientists of Asian descent. They earn more than a quarter of all Ph.D.'s in science and technology at American universities each year, but still make up only 5 percent of the technical work force at Los Alamos.
Because of those concerns, both the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education and the Association of Asian American Studies passed resolutions urging a boycott of the laboratories by Asian-American scientists. The impact of the initiative has been widely debated, and even some Asian-Americans have criticized it as tending to isolate minority scientists already at the labs.
But everyone agrees that the boycott has been an embarrassment to the labs as well as a hindrance to their recruiting efforts, particularly after Sept. 11, as they have focused on revamping staffs in response to new threats to national security.
"I would think any time something like this is removed, it would be positive, especially in the climate right now when we're in a large hiring mode," said Richard Mah, an associate director for weapons engineering and manufacturing at Los Alamos. Promoted in October, Mr. Mah fills the highest post ever held by an Asian-American there.
The boycott "did have a large impact" on the lab's ability to hire Asian-Americans, Mr. Mah said.
Other scientists, including Dr. Jen-Chieh Peng, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, who until February was a fellow at Los Alamos, said they were unsure of whether a single gesture like lifting the boycott would make a great change.
"I don't think the problem terminates once the laboratory offers corrective action to this," Dr. Peng said. "It's a longstanding problem and it's not finished with the lifting of this boycott."
But Gene I. Awakuni, vice provost for student affairs at Stanford University and a member of the Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education Board, said the moves by the labs were a good first step. "If the national labs establish a concrete plan that reflects a genuine effort by the administration to address systemic issues that militate against the interests of Asian-American scientists, I believe the boycott will be lifted," Dr. Awakuni said.
-------- chemical weapons
Brazil Arms Control Chief Says U.S. Interferes
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-brazil-usa.html
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Jose Bustani, the Brazilian head of an international arms control body said on Monday he is refusing to resign, despite the United States wanting him out.
``There is a fundamental principle to defend -- my position as a director of an international organization should be immune to political interference and not passive to instructions from any government, however powerful,'' the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in reference to Washington.
Last week, the United States threatened to convene the member states the body to vote on ousting Bustani, whom it accuses of mismanagement, if he does not resign.
The move followed a no-confidence vote of the body's executive council in the Hague that was inconclusive and deepened a diplomatic imbroglio over his performance amid speculation Washington is at odds with the body over Iraq.
Speaking to a conference held by his organization and the Brazilian government, Bustani told an audience of Latin American government officials he learned in February of Washington's intention to get rid of him.
``No reason, other than my 'administration style' was given to me, in spite of vague allegations having been communicated to various delegations,'' he said.
The body polices chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which now has 145 member states, and lent the U.N. arms inspectors in the 1990s to remove chemicals from a U.N. laboratory in Iraq.
Brazil's government has given its backing to Bustani while sources have said Washington wants him out because he has set in motion contacts with Iraq to sign-up to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention which aims to eliminate chemical weapons.
Washington has signaled it wants to get rid of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but could find it difficult to win support for military action if Iraq agrees to let U.N. arms inspectors return to the country.
Bustani said Washington had turned down a probe by member countries of the body to decide whether he should stay or go.
-------- china
U.S. Warship Barred From Hong Kong
By Elaine Kurtenbach
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18927-2002Mar26?language=printer
HONG KONG -- Signaling its anger over U.S. dealings with Taiwan, China has blocked a port call by a U.S. warship to Hong Kong and refused Tuesday to say whether Vice President Hu Jintao would go ahead with plans for a U.S. visit.
The U.S. Consulate said Tuesday that Beijing had rejected a request for an April 5-9 visit by the USS Curtis Wilbur, a guided missile destroyer belonging to the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan.
"No reason was given for the disapproval," said Barbara Zigli, a U.S. Consulate spokeswoman. She declined to speculate on China's motives.
The March 18 rejection came a day before the Chinese government accused Washington of committing a "series of erroneous acts" and spoiling the aura of good relations set during a February visit to Beijing by President Bush.
As often happens, the spat is over Taiwan. Beijing objected to a U.S. decision to let Taiwan's defense minister, Tang Yiau-ming, attend a private defense convention this month in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Since this former British colony reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Beijing has occasionally protested U.S. actions by barring U.S. warships from visiting Hong Kong, long a popular port of call.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said Tuesday that port calls by foreign warships and aircraft are approved on a "case-by-case basis."
Zhang declined to say whether Vice President Hu Jintao, heir apparent to President and Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, would go ahead with a visit expected for April or May.
Instead, she demanded that Washington "cease interfering in China's internal affairs by using Taiwan issues and undermining bilateral ties."
"To secure a healthy and smooth development of bilateral ties, the U.S. side should properly handle this question," she said during a routine news briefing.
Meeting Tuesday with visiting U.S. senators, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji cited Tang's trip to Florida as one in "a series of actions that violated" China-U.S. communiques, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
"The Chinese government and people feel nothing but strong indignation over the action and firmly oppose the carrying out of any similar acts," Zhu told the senators, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Ted Stevens of Alaska, according to Xinhua.
China and Taiwan split amid a civil war on the mainland in 1949. Beijing says it will attack Taiwan if the island declares formal independence or delays too long in talks over uniting with the mainland. It has sought to isolate Taiwan diplomatically.
America severed formal ties with Taiwan in 1979 when Washington recognized China. Since then, high-level exchanges and meetings between U.S. and Taiwanese officials have been rare.
The attendance by the Taiwan defense minister attendance at a three-day conference in Florida - sponsored by the private U.S.-Taiwan Business Council - was the most recent result of Bush's push for closer relations with Taiwan.
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan's popularly elected government have long been a sore point. Washington does not dispute Beijing's claim to Taiwan but is bound by U.S. law to help the island defend itself.
----
China begins crackdown on N. Korea refugees
World Scene
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020326-8413246.htm
BEIJING - Chinese authorities are catching North Koreans and sending them home, police said yesterday, beginning a crackdown after 25 asylum-seekers were allowed to leave for South Korea in an incident that embarrassed Beijing.
The roundup comes after international appeals for Beijing to give refugee status to North Koreans fleeing famine and repression in their communist homeland. It also comes as South Korea plans to send a presidential envoy to the North next week for talks marking a resumption of the reconciliation process on the divided peninsula.
Police and residents in five Chinese towns along the North Korean border reported new efforts to catch North Koreans, though police there confirmed detaining fewer than a dozen so far.
Thousands of North Koreans have streamed across the border in recent years. China carries out periodic roundups, insisting that the North Koreans are illegal immigrants that it is bound by treaty to send home.
-------- drug war
DEA Chief Wants Colombia Drug Aid Turned on Rebels
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-colombia-drugs.html
BOGOTA, Colombia - The head of the U.S. anti-drug agency said on Tuesday American lawmakers should let Colombia's military use anti-cocaine aid in their fight against Colombian guerrillas because they are indistinguishable from drug-traffickers.
Asa Hutchinson, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, singled out Negro Acacio, a fugitive Marxist FARC rebel commander who was charged with drug offenses in the United States last week, soon after Congress began considering President Bush's request that restrictions on the use of U.S. anti-drug aid to Colombia be loosened.
``It is clear that there is really not a distinction between the drug traffickers and the terrorist organizations. So I'm optimistic that the Congress of the United States will broaden the support for Colombia,'' Hutchinson told a news conference at police headquarters.
The United States has given Colombia more than $1 billion in mainly military aid to crack down on cocaine.
U.S. law prevents the aid from being used against Marxist rebels and far-right paramilitaries. But Bogota and Washington say both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries are increasingly funded by drug money, and American attitudes against Colombia's rebels have hardened since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Colombia's army wants to use U.S.-supplied resources such as Black Hawk helicopters against rebels. The armed forces have improved their human rights record in recent years, but rights groups say soldiers still have links to outlawed paramilitaries.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known by the Spanish initials FARC -- is the largest illegal group fighting in a 38-year-old conflict, which claims about 3,500 lives a year. The FARC, whose peace talks with the government collapsed in February, admits to ``taxing'' drug traffickers but says it is not directly involved in the business.
FARC GUERRILLA A 'CROUCHING LION'
Negro Acacio and two other FARC members were the first Colombian guerrillas charged with drug trafficking by the United States. The evidence against Acacio was seized last year when Colombia's army said it smashed an operation in the country's eastern jungles trading drugs for arms supplied by Brazilian drug lords.
``Negro Acacio, the leader of the 16th front of the FARC, has been charged as a drug trafficker. As he and others hide in the jungle, waiting as a crouching lion to pounce on his next victim, he believes he is above the law. He is wrong,'' Hutchinson said.
He also called on Congress to approve the resumption of U.S.-backed aerial drug interdiction flights. These were suspended last year after a Peruvian military jet, acting on a U.S. tip-off, mistakenly shot down a small civilian plane, killing an American missionary and her baby.
The United States is also investigating far-right warlord Carlos Castano -- one of the heads of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, Hutchinson said.
Castano, who admits his group gets some money from the drug trade, said on the AUC Web page (www.colombialibre.org) on Tuesday he had recently met 50 major Colombian drug traffickers and many agreed to turn themselves over to U.S. justice.
Hutchinson was not dismayed by the failure of the first year of U.S.-backed ``Plan Colombia'' crop spraying to reduce the area planted with cocaine's raw material -- coca.
``This was designed, Plan Colombia, to be a multiyear approach and we have to remain constant, we have to continue the plan,'' he said.
-------- iraq
Saddam fuels Mideast unrest with "martyr" handouts: Australian report
Tuesday March 26, 2002
Agence France Presse
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020326/1/2n05l.html
Saddam Hussein's regime handed out cheques totalling almost 500,000 US dollars to the families of suicide bombers in the West Bank this week.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that in a public ceremony witnessed by a Herald correspondent, the besieged Iraqi leader's men were said to have doled out cheques to 47 families as an enticement for others to volunteer for martyrdom.
The widows and families of suicide bombers were given 25,000 dollars each while the relatives of others who had died in clashes with the Israeli military were given 10,000 dollars, the paper said.
The ceremony, at Tulkarm, 90 kilometres (56 miles) north of Jerusalem, was described as the first public distribution organised by the Arab Liberation Front, a small PLO faction closed aligned with Saddam's Ba'ath Party.
Previously, the cheques were delivered privately by officials of the front to the homes of the martyr families.
The 500,000 dollars distributed on Monday was said to have brought to more than 10 million dollars the total distributed by Saddam to grieving families since the new intifada began 18 months ago.
A senior official of the front, Ma'amoon Tayeh, told the paper an extra 15,000 dollars on top of 10,000 dollars previously paid, was intended to encourage more Palestinians to volunteer as suicide bombers to "help confirm the legitimacy of our national questions."
Tahey added: "Saddam Hussein considers Palestine to be a governate of Iraq and he thinks the same of the Palestinian martyrs as he does of the Iraqi martyrs -- they are all martyrs for the whole Arab nation."
A member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Dr. Hassan Khraisheh, praised Iraq as the only Arab country officially donating to the Palestinian cause.
"Saddam Hussein's 25,000 US dollars is a message to those who might offer themselves as martyrs that their families will be supported," he reportedly said.
The report comes amid intensifying speculation that US President George W. Bush is preparing to launch an attack on Iraq which he has described as one of three "axis of evil" countries promoting international terrorism.
-------- israel / palestine
Bush: Let Arafat attend summit
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 26, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020326-10941.htm
President Bush yesterday urged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to allow Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to attend this week's Middle East summit in Lebanon and pressed Arab nations to accept a Saudi land-for-peace proposal.
"The president believes it is time for Arab nations in the region to seize the moment, to create a better environment for peace to take root," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. He said Mr. Bush "believes that Prime Minister Sharon and the Israeli government should give serious consideration to allowing Yasser Arafat to attend the meeting in Beirut."
The White House prodding comes as the war-torn Middle East awaits word on whether Israel will permit Mr. Arafat to leave Ramallah to attend the summit tomorrow and Thursday. Israeli troops have kept the top Palestinian from traveling after a series of Palestinian suicide bombings, insisting that a cease-fire be in place before Mr. Arafat leaves the Palestinian areas.
Bush administration officials hope Mr. Arafat's appearance at the summit will remove a major distraction and allow all parties to move toward a workable peace plan - such as the proposal presented recently by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
"The president thinks that the summit should devote its energies to focusing on how to bring peace to the region, and not discuss who is in or who is not in attendance," Mr. Fleischer said.
Prince Abdullah's plan calls for diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state and a demand that Israel relinquish all the land the Arabs lost in their 1967 war with Israel.
In Jerusalem, Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin said Israel would not lift its travel ban on Mr. Arafat until the Palestinian leader takes decisive steps against militants. Israel will make its decision by today, Mr. Gissin said.
Meanwhile, expected talks yesterday between Israel and the Palestinians over implementing a truce plan negotiated last June by CIA Director George J. Tenet did not occur.
An Israeli official said the Palestinians canceled the talks, while the Palestinians denied such a meeting had even been agreed upon.
The Palestinians agreed late last night to attend cease-fire talks with U.S. mediator Gen. Anthony Zinni today.
The United States has demanded Mr. Arafat take a series of steps - such as giving the Israelis advance warning of potential violence, collecting illegal arms, halting weapons smuggling and closing bomb factories - before he can meet with senior Bush administration officials.
But the White House has not imposed such conditions for his travel to the Beirut summit, and said yesterday the two matters are completely different.
"As far as a meeting with the vice president is concerned, that meeting will take place if and when Chairman Arafat performs, in terms of reducing the level of violence," Mr. Fleischer said. "Then the vice president will be happy to travel to the region to meet with him. ...
"It's a different matter, and the United States' position is different on that. ... The president believes that the best way to pursue peace, as far as the Arab summit, would be for Chairman Arafat to travel there."
Vice President Richard B. Cheney said on Sunday: "If Arafat is not there, the concern is that he will become the focus - the fact that he is not there. We think the summit probably will be a positive contribution. So as a general proposition, we believe that it would be better for him to be there than to not be there."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conveyed Mr. Bush's request to Mr. Sharon, Mr. Fleischer said.
Mr. Powell also had a 35-minute conversation with Mr. Arafat in which the Palestinian pressed for more U.S. intervention in the Middle East conflict and more pressure on Israel, said Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh.
Prince Abdullah's proposal is not without controversy. The Saudi offer to Israel of "full normalization" of relations with Arab governments depends on Israel giving up the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights and accepting a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.
Still, the prince's plan is the only recent proposal to draw the administration's interest.
"The president welcomed those ideas, and he hopes that those ideas would be a real focal point of the Arab summit so that, for the first time, several Arab nations would focus on recognizing Israel's right to exist in peace and security," Mr. Fleischer said, noting that Mr. Bush said in a recent U.N. speech that there should be a Palestinian state.
The truce terms on which Gen. Zinni is working do not require Israel to give up the land the Arabs lost in the 1967 war.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell, however, regularly hold out to the Palestinians the vision of eventually getting a state for themselves on that land.
The administration says it is realistic about how much can be achieved at the Beirut summit.
"The trick - and this is where the summit can be helpful - is creating an environment in which the peace talks can take root and be fruitful," Mr. Fleischer said.
Mr. Arafat "can do more, should do more, and must do more in order for that violence to be reduced."
But Mr. Arafat said yesterday that he cannot end all violence.
In an interview with ABC, the Palestinian leader said, "I am making a 100 percent effort ... but no one can get 100 percent results except God."
Violence raged Sunday even with the cease-fire effort. Israeli commandos backed by helicopters tracked and killed four militants who slipped across the normally quiet border with Jordan, and seven other persons were killed in incidents elsewhere.
Fighting abated somewhat yesterday, a day after the Israelis killed four Palestinian militants trying to cross the border from Jordan.
Palestinian witnesses told reporters that Israeli tanks and troops had sealed off all exits from the West Bank town of Bethlehem last night following a firefight.
In Gaza, a Palestinian was killed in an explosion in his house in a refugee camp, Palestinians said. It appeared that he was preparing a bomb.
-------- japan
Japan extends non-combatant support for US war on terror
Tuesday March 26, 2002
Agence France Presse
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020326/1/2n105.html
Japan will extend its non-combatant operations in support of the US-led anti-terror war in Afghanistan until May 19, the government said.
Japan sent 1,200 military personnel, three destroyers and two supply ships to the Arabian Sea to back the US campaign, and its mission was scheduled to end on March 31, a spokesman for the Defense Agency said Tuesday.
But the government said it would continue its operations until May 19.
"We are committed to offering our support as the United States remains engaged in the war," the agency spokesman said.
In October last year, the Japanese parliament passed a law allowing its military to give medical and logistical support to US forces in any action against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan but only in "non-combat zones."
It was the first time since World War II that parliament had passed legislation allowing Japanese troops to support US military action outside Japan and surrounding areas.
Kyodo News agency said Tokyo might extend its operations again by around six months after May 19, but the agency spokesman declined to confirm the report.
-------- landmines
NATO left lethal legacy in Kosovo - report
Story by Michael Holden
REUTERS UK:
March 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15191/story.htm
LONDON - NATO's military campaign in Kosovo three years ago has left a lethal legacy of unexploded bombs which have killed 58 people including children, according to a charity report.
Landmine Action, a coalition of more than 50 charities, said yesterday that 97 other people were injured by unexploded ordnance (UXO), such as cluster bombs, mortars, and rockets, in Kosovo from June 1999 to May 2001. Two-thirds of the victims had been children.
NATO warplanes carried out a bombing campaign in Kosovo during a 78-day war in 1999 to drive out Serb forces conducting a crackdown on Albanians while Slobodan Milosevic was Yugoslav president.
Milosevic is currently on trial in The Hague for genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and crimes against humanity in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in 1999.
In his defence he said NATO leaders should be in the dock themselves for killing civilians during the bombing campaign, which was mostly undertaken by the United States, Italy, France, Britain and Canada.
Landmine Action said UXO was a far bigger killer of innocent victims than landmines, while those that used such weapons had no legal obligation to clear them up afterwards.
Its report focused on the UXO impact on a number of communities affected by conflict but particularly those in Kosovo and Cambodia, Richard Lloyd, director of the London-based campaign group, said.
In Cambodia, 397 people had been killed or injured in the year up to August 2001, from bombs dropped during the civil war between the government and the Khmer Rouge, and also by U.S. planes during the Vietnam War.
"UXO are a forgotten but lethal legacy of every war. Thousands of people around the world must live with the constant threat as they go about their daily lives," Lloyd said.
Monday's report said most of the UXO victims had been carrying out rural activities such as farming, and the presence of UXO could have huge economic consequences forcing a change in the use of land or the abandonment of entire communities.
It said that unlike with landmines, cluster bombs were far more likely to cause death.
Landmine Action called for a new international humanitarian law to force states that used explosive munitions to clear them up, or pay for their removal, when hostilities ceased, along with a moratorium on the use and sale of cluster bombs.
-------- mideast
Arab Summit Hit by Absence of Arafat, Mubarak
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast-summit.html
BEIRUT - Israel defied world opinion on Tuesday by refusing to let Palestinian President Yasser Arafat attend an Arab summit devoted to a Saudi Middle East peace plan.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak dealt another blow to the two-day summit that opens on Wednesday by staying away because of what his foreign minister called ``domestic commitments.''
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who masterminded an invasion of Lebanon that drove Arafat from Beirut in 1982, said he could not lift a travel ban that has kept the Palestinian leader cooped up in the West Bank since early December.
``Unfortunately the conditions are not yet ripe for Chairman Arafat's departure for Beirut,'' Sharon told Israeli television.
He said it would be easier for Israel to let Arafat go abroad if the Palestinian leader addressed his people in Arabic to declare a cease-fire and call for an end to violence in an 18-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation.
Sharon effectively shrugged off appeals from the United Nations, the European Union and many world leaders for Israel to let Arafat attend the summit. Even the United States, Israel's closest ally, had urged Sharon to consider such a move.
The United States is keen to swing reluctant Arab leaders behind its goal of toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but ending Israeli occupation is a far more urgent Arab priority.
Arafat told a U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva earlier that an Israeli belief that ``might is right'' lay at the heart of violence racking the Middle East.
``We are witnessing an obsolete and anachronistic mentality among hard-line extremists in the Israeli government that suffers from the illusion that military superiority is sufficient cause for claiming superior rights,'' Arafat said in a speech read in his name by Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.
MUBARAK'S BOMBSHELL
The Israeli decision to block Arafat's trip to Beirut surprised few summit delegates. But they were visibly shocked and puzzled at the Egyptian leader's last-minute change of plan.
``The absence of President Mubarak is a surprise and a setback. It weakens the summit and its ability to make correct decisions and clear plans,'' Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi told Lebanese television.
Egypt, an Arab heavyweight and close U.S. ally at the heart of Middle East peace efforts since its 1979 treaty with Israel, has not withdrawn support from the Saudi plan, but Mubarak's presence at the summit would have lent it more credibility.
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri said he expected the summit to endorse the Saudi initiative even in Arafat's absence. ``Surely if he comes it will be better, but I don't think it will make any decisions any different,'' he told CNN in an interview.
Asked about the significance of the proposal floated by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah last month, Hariri said: ''It means that Israel and the Arabs can live as neighbors. There is no war, there is peace and they can live normally.''
The Saudi plan offers Israel peace and normal relations with the Arab world in exchange for full withdrawal from occupied Arab land, an independent Palestinian state and a ''just solution'' for some 3.6 million Palestinian refugees.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whose country currently heads the EU, are all due at the summit.
Solana said Arafat was certain to be the focus of the Beirut gathering whether or not he was there in person.
``There is no question that he is going to be the key figure of this summit regardless if he is coming or if he is not allowed to come,'' Solana told Reuters.
``Therefore it will be much better if he is allowed to come, if he is allowed to express himself,'' he added.
IRAQ SEEKS ARAB SUPPORT
Iraq wants the summit to proclaim Arab opposition to any U.S. attack on a country that President Bush has lumped into an ''axis of evil'' with North Korea and Iran.
``In this summit, the general trend is to have a resolution rejecting any threats of aggression against any Arab country, especially Iraq,'' Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told CNN.
But enmity between Iraq and its 1990 invasion victim Kuwait may once again upset prospects for a united Arab stand.
Kuwaiti Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah said his country would insist on its demands. Kuwait wants Iraq to admit its invasion was wrong, guarantee Kuwait's sovereignty, pledge non-aggression and account for some 600 people missing since U.S.-led forces ended Iraq's occupation in 1991.
-------- nato
War Boosts NATO Hopes of Two Nations
Romania, Bulgaria Gain New Relevance
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16904-2002Mar25?language=printer
BUCHAREST, Romania, March 25 -- The post-Sept. 11 strategic importance of the Black Sea region, which has served as a staging area for the Afghan war and could be used in an attack on Iraq, has catapulted Romania and Bulgaria into serious consideration for membership in NATO, according to U.S., NATO and East European diplomats.
The two countries are getting favorable consideration despite long-standing concerns in Western capitals about whether they are serious about democratic reform, military readiness and efforts to fight corruption.
With four or five other post-Communist countries all but certain to receive invitations to join the alliance at a summit in Prague in November, NATO is on the threshold of its largest expansion ever.
Determined to be on that list, Bulgaria and Romania are working closely with the United States in the campaign in Afghanistan to show how valuable they can be as military partners. The two countries "are making the best use of this tragic opportunity," the Bulgarian foreign minister, Solomon Pasi, said in an interview here in the Romanian capital.
In November and December, U.S. tanker aircraft based in Bulgaria flew about six missions a day to refuel warplanes in the Afghan theater, according to U.S. and Bulgarian officials. A Bulgarian military airport in the Black Sea is now a de facto U.S. base with about 200 Americans stationed there.
Both countries have also opened their airspace unconditionally and offered the use of all land and port facilities. Twenty U.S. military flights to or from Afghanistan cross Romania each day, officials here said.
Bulgarian and Romanian troops are serving as peacekeepers in Kabul and the Romanian government has offered a specialized mountain unit for service in Afghanistan. The two countries have each tripled their presence in international peacekeeping missions in the Balkans to free up allied troops for Afghanistan. And a Romanian military facility in the Black Sea city of Constanza is about to become a staging ground for U.S. troops rotating in and out of the Balkans and possibly other theaters, officials said.
"September 11 transformed the Black Sea into a natural springboard," said the Romanian foreign minister, Mircea Geoana.
And in the rush to impress the Bush administration, viewed as the critical voice in determining the final list of countries invited to join NATO, Romania and Bulgaria are refurbishing airstrips and ports with the implicit promise that if the United States wishes to use them in future campaigns, including possible strikes against Iraq, they are available for the asking.
"The next time when [the United States] asks for support, or needs support, Bulgaria will be an excellent ally," Pasi said when asked about Iraq. Romanian officials echoed his comments.
With Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other countries hosting U.S. military bases wary of a possible attack on Iraq, the offers have not gone unnoticed in Washington, diplomats said.
U.S. officials continue to say that for the two countries to secure an invitation to join NATO and jettison their image as regional laggards, they must speed political reforms, particularly regarding endemic corruption. The United States and NATO have specifically cited the countries' treatment of minorities, notably the Roma people, also known as gypsies.
In Romania, NATO officials have objected to the erection of statues to commemorate a World War II fascist figure. Romanian officials have pledged to pass legislation allowing them to pull all the statues down.
The United States had been particularly concerned that the countries' military spending is low and that their armed forces cannot "inter-operate" with NATO's. Both countries have boosted their military budgets above 2 percent of their gross domestic products in an effort to accelerate the restructuring process and modernize equipment. At the same time, Romania is slashing the ranks of its top-heavy military and moving to create a professional, non-conscript army by the end of the decade, officials said.
"I'm here to encourage both countries to sprint to the finish line," said Richard L. Armitage, U.S. deputy secretary of state, whose appearance at a summit here today of 10 aspiring NATO countries underlines the seriousness of the Romanian and Bulgarian claims on membership. "The U.S. wants the widest possible and most robust accession."
U.S. and NATO officials appear to have agreed that Slovenia and the three Baltic states -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- will get invitations. A fifth country, Slovakia, also will be invited if a former authoritarian leader, Vladimir Meciar, is not returned to power in fall elections.
Albania, Croatia and Macedonia, also in attendance at the summit, are not regarded as viable candidates.
But the possibility of seven countries joining NATO, following the 1999 accession of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, is a significant turnaround from just nine months ago. "The big bang is real," said one diplomat from a NATO country. "And I couldn't have imagined it possible because I couldn't imagine September 11."
Russia's role in the anti-terrorism coalition has led it to redefine its relationship with NATO and drop many objections to membership for the Baltic nations, which would become the first former members of the Soviet Union to be added to the Western alliance.
In an unlikely coalition, Turkey and Greece have united behind the candidacies of Romania and Bulgaria, arguing that expansion in the alliance's south is critical for security reasons because of transnational crime and continued instability in places such as Macedonia.
"There was a lack of dialogue between Greece and Turkey," said Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. But now "we have interests -- the preservation of the stability of the region." NATO expansion, he said, cannot be limited to northern and central Europe.
The foreign ministers of the four southern countries are planning a joint trip to Washington to press the case of Romania and Bulgaria.
The region remains a corridor for trafficking in weapons, drugs, cigarettes, illegal migrants and women sold into sexual slavery. And the level of criminality has been facilitated by rampant corruption, U.S. and NATO officials said.
----
U.S. leans to larger expansion of NATO
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 26, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020326-47608864.htm
BUCHAREST, Romania - The United States has given its clearest indication yet that it will back a broad expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe when the alliance meets this fall in Prague.
"In Prague, our nations will take a historic step toward removing the remaining divisions of Europe," President Bush said yesterday in a message read at a summit of nine candidate nations in Bucharest.
"We will move to adapt NATO structures and improve its capabilities so that our societies and our citizens are better protected against new threats, wherever they emerge," he said.
NATO, which last expanded in 1999 by taking in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, would say nothing officially about which countries were likely to get the nod at the summit in Prague.
But Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said yesterday that the politics of NATO enlargement had changed since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The terrorist attacks in the United States "have had a riveting effect on NATO and on the aspirant countries to NATO," Mr. Armitage said. "Certainly a number of our friends and allies have stepped up" in the wake of the September 11 strikes.
Mr. Armitage said several East and Central European NATO hopefuls had aided their cause by offering tangible military and logistical support to the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The leaders of nine formal candidates - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania - are gathered here along with their Croatian counterpart.
Washington is expected to have a decisive say in which countries and how many are accepted, and delegates here have scrutinized Mr. Armitage's words for hints as to the Bush administration's sympathies.
All nine nations are scrambling to complete detailed military reform programs, while at the same time trying to ensure NATO they have the political and economic stability to be useful allies.
Expansion options range from a minimal expansion that might include Slovenia, Slovakia and a Baltic applicant to a much more ambitious enlargement round to embrace all three Baltic states and Romania and Bulgaria as well.
Macedonia and Albania are given little chance of winning an invitation in this round of enlargement.
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, in taped remarks to the delegates assembled in the massive, marble-covered Parliament House, said the number of countries invited could range from "one to nine."
Mr. Armitage made clear Mr. Bush was leaning heavily toward a larger number.
"The United States looks forward to the most robust possible accession to the NATO membership at the summit in Prague," he said in an appearance with Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase.
Mr. Armitage said he planned to deliver the same message when meeting today in Brussels with members of NATO's Executive Council.
Romania and Bulgaria, considered at best long shots a year ago, have won several supporters in recent months, pushing effectively a line that the terrorist attacks have made it imperative to shore up the alliance's southeastern flank and provide a "land bridge" to Turkey.
Both countries have supplied men and materiel to NATO and U.S. missions in the Balkans and in Afghanistan.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy said in an interview that "it was clear NATO's mission would have to be changed with September 11."
Bulgaria allowed U.S. forces the use of an air base for the Afghan campaign, the first time in its history it had permitted the stationing of foreign troops on its soil, Mr. Passy said.
Romanian officials also touted a joint letter read to delegates yesterday from Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, and Minority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican.
The leaders said enlargement "continues to enjoy bipartisan support" in the Senate.
While offering hope on a major enlargement round, Mr. Armitage said he was cautioning NATO hopefuls that the hard work of preparing their militaries for the alliance must be maintained and would not end at Prague.
Noting the mounting optimism of many of the countries gathered here, Mr. Armitage said, "We want to make sure they continue to work as hard as possible to get in."
Russian objections have been cited as a key obstacle to NATO enlargement.
But Mr. Bush, in his message, took note of Russian President Vladimir Putin's new entente with the West against terrorism that had tempered Moscow's criticism of the alliance's expansion.
"We are determined to take advantage of an unprecedented chance to shape a relationship with Russia that focuses on realistic and concrete cooperation against common threats," Mr. Bush said.
--------
Romania and Bulgaria Edge Nearer to NATO Membership
New York Times
March 26, 2002
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/international/europe/26NATO.html
BUCHAREST, Romania, March 25 - A year ago, the idea that Romania and Bulgaria might join NATO this autumn in the next round of enlargement seemed laughable, and many thought that the aspirations of the Baltic nations for NATO membership might be held hostage again to relations with Moscow.
But in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and with the war on terrorism, the southern flank of NATO suddenly seems more important, and the domestic blemishes of candidate countries like Romania less important.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has apparently decided not to make too big a fuss over Baltic memberships in return for more influence with NATO, a better relationship with the United States and a freer hand in Chechnya, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.
The prime ministers of 10 NATO candidate countries are meeting here in another joint effort to press their case. They are receiving warm messages of general support from President Bush and from Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who came here to demonstrate the American commitment to enlargement.
The Bush administration, concentrating on the larger war in Afghanistan and beyond, sees the chance to make the NATO summit meeting in Prague in November a celebration of European unity and of completing the current plans for NATO enlargement, by taking in up to seven countries - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria.
Three other countries represented here - Albania, Macedonia and Croatia - are considered to have little chance of being offered NATO membership in this round.
Bush officials stress that no final decision on American preferences is likely until late September because of the election planned for Slovakia, where Vladimir Meciar, a strong nationalist, could return to power, once again undermining its chances of joining NATO.
Mr. Armitage, in an interview here today, praised Romania's and Bulgaria's quick efforts to help the United States and NATO after Sept. 11. He noted that Bulgaria has allowed American tanker planes and some 200 American soldiers to use an air base at Burgas while Romania sent troops to take part in the Afghan peacekeeping force in Kabul.
"Sept. 11 had a riveting effect on NATO and applicant countries," Mr. Armitage said. "A lot stepped up to the plate."
The Bulgarian foreign minister, Solomon Passy, noted that his government had never before allowed a foreign country to use its air bases, "not even the Soviet Union," and that the Bulgarian Parliament had declared itself, after Sept. 11, a "de facto ally of NATO."
The Romanian foreign minister, Mircea Geoana, said his country and Bulgaria were now seen as increasingly important to stabilize the Balkans, to fill the hole in NATO between Hungary and Turkey (itself more important after Sept. 11), to be in a better position to protect oil pipelines and to serve as a kind of bridge to Central Asian states like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
"It is an important challenge to the West to assist in the creation of moderate Muslim nations in Central Asia," Mr. Geoana said. "We also can help stabilize this arch of instability in the south for a NATO that is already more global." He, too, stressed Romania's support for American leadership in NATO.
Mr. Armitage said all the candidate countries would be required to continue the "heavy lifting" required to meet NATO standards, even after possible entrance, and to keep reforming and democratizing their governments and economies.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia begins talks on Chechnya peace
World Scene
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020326-8413246.htm
MOSCOW - Russian lawmakers have begun a dialogue with Chechen political figures in an effort to bring the Kremlin and Chechen rebels together for talks on ending the war in Chechnya, participants said yesterday.
The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly and the State Duma, Russia's lower parliament house, organized a forum called the Chechen Consultative Council, which had its first meeting in Moscow last week.
The forum has not been endorsed by President Vladimir Putin, and neither Chechnya's Kremlin-backed civilian administration nor separatist Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, the leading rebel figure, sent representatives to the meeting.
Nonetheless, participants said they hope the discussions will create a framework for the resumption of direct contacts between the Russian government and the rebels, which have been on hold since a single, unproductive meeting last fall.
-------- spies
UPI hears ... Taiwanese intelligence operations compromised
United Press International
3/26/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26032002-113702-6035r
Asian intelligence circles are agog with word that the whole Taiwanese network in China has been burned, and most other Taiwanese intelligence operations compromised, by the curious disappearance of Col. Lie Kaun-chun, senior cashier of the National Security Bureau. The scandal began to break two years ago, when a Justice Ministry's special investigation team on money laundering accused Liu of taking $5 million from the secret budget in order to play the stock market. The NSB stalled an inquiry, trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that the cash came from a massive $100 million slush fund of unspent budget that the NSB should have returned to the state treasury. Liu has disappeared, taking with him computerized files on the funding of Taiwan's entire intelligence effort, at least until March 2000 -- and juicy extracts are now emerging.
Taiwan's opposition People First Party got two computer disks from Liu, to back up their claim that the $100 million slush fund was being run on behalf of the political and personal agenda of former president Lee Teng-hui. This led the NSB to protest that the money was used for covert diplomacy, like a $10 million bribe to the African National Congress to ensure that South Africa maintained diplomatic links with Taiwan. Now the flap begins among Taiwan's friends in Japan and the United States about the prospect of their own "consultancy" fees being exposed.
From his mysterious location, Liu is in touch with the Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who publishes the daily China Times in Taiwan and also the magazine Next -- whose entire print run has been seized this week on order of the High Court, supposedly to defend state secrets. But Next, on the advice of lawyers who say the High Court is on shaky ground, Lai reprinted, along with new pages about the seizure -- and the China Times goes on merrily publishing more details every day from the Liu dossiers. And now there is a new storm. The government's top watchdog agency, the Control Yuan, has been investigating another scandal, the $3 billion purchase 10 years ago of Lafayette frigates from France -- from which $500 million was skimmed off in various 'commissions' -- and one Taiwanese naval captain was found dead after he tried to blow the whistle.
--------
Spy Trofimoff Says He's Innocent
March 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Espionage.html
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- The highest ranking military officer ever found guilty of spying is maintaining his innocence while in prison, saying he never betrayed his country and is appealing his conviction.
In an interview to air Wednesday on CBS' ``60 Minutes II,'' George Trofimoff called himself ``a patriot that served this country.''
``That's who I am. And that's how I'm going to die,'' said the 75-year-old retired Army Reserve colonel.
Trofimoff was convicted last year in U.S. District Court in Tampa on a single espionage charge, and sentenced to life in prison.
He was accused of being a master Cold War spy, spending decades smuggling secret documents out of the interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany, he'd supervised for more than 20 years.
Trofimoff passed photographs of the documents to the Soviets through a childhood friend, a Russian Orthodox priest.
Former KGB head Oleg Kalugin testified he had rewarded Trofimoff for being one of the Soviet Union's top spies. Notes from KGB archives smuggled out of the Soviet also gave prosecutors a detailed description of the well-placed spy that fit Trofimoff's profile, but did not name him.
Trofimoff's 25-year career as a civilian Army employee ended when he was arrested in 1994. The charges were dropped when the statute of limitations in Germany expired.
Trofimoff moved to Melbourne, Fla., where he bagged groceries and lived in an exclusive community for military retirees. His home was located on Patriot Drive.
The FBI revived the case in 1997, sending an undercover agent posing as a Russian diplomat to meet with Trofimoff and offer him payment for past services.
Trofimoff later testified he had pretended to be a spy because he was having financial trouble. He said in the CBS interview he never could have gotten away with spying for so long.
``Could I hide all of this for 25 years? Could I take these documents out of my office, over and over and over again?'' Trofimoff said. ``I could do it once. I could do it twice. I could do it 10 times. And get away with it. But somewhere around the 11th or 12th, I would get caught.''
-------- un
United States blocks UN resolution on Somalia
Tuesday March 26, 2002
Agence France Presse
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020326/1/2n02s.html
The United Nations blocked a UN Security Council resolution on Somalia which included the establishment of a pilot peace-building programme in Mogadishu, diplomatic sources said.
Norway, which currently holds the rotating security council presidency, prepared a multi-point resolution that has since last week been the subject of intense debate among the council's 15 members.
After apparent progress over the weekend, Norway had been set to announce the resolution's adoption during a Council meeting Monday. But absent any agreement, the meeting was adjourned, with Norway's ambassador to the UN, Ole Peter Kolby, telling reporters the council "will pursue the discussion" Tuesday.
Diplomatic sources confirmed that the United States was alone in its opposition to point 17 of the resolution, which asks UN Secretary General Kofi Annan "to establish... a pilot peace building programme in Somalia to prepare for a comprehensive and integrated peace-building mission."
Reasons for the US opposition to the measure were not immediately known.
-------- us
Beaming the Battlefield Home
Live Video of Afghan Fighting Had Questionable Effect
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16954-2002Mar25?language=printer
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, March 25 -- During fighting this month between U.S. troops and al Qaeda forces, Predator drone aircraft gave generals and civilian leaders back in Washington something they had never seen before: a continuous live view of Americans in ground combat in the mountains of Afghanistan, 10 time zones away.
Cameras on the 27-foot drones beamed back dramatic scenes from the heat of battle in the Shahikot region, notably the killing of a Navy SEAL commando. Never before had an extended battle by U.S. forces been piped into U.S. command centers around the globe in hour after hour of real-time video that made distant officials feel unusually close to the battlefield.
And that was one of the problems, according to U.S. commanders here. In a review of the Predator's role in the biggest U.S. ground assault in a decade, soldiers involved in the battle said the live video links gave them little useful information and were sometimes a distraction, encouraging higher-level military staffs to try to micromanage the fighting.
"Tactically, I don't think it affected what I did on the ground," said Army Col. Kevin Wilkerson, a 10th Mountain Division brigade commander who led the regular Army forces in the battle. "To be honest with you, I didn't watch it a lot," he added. The reason, he said, is that "the Predator can be mesmerizing -- like watching TV."
Maj. Louis Bello, a fire support coordinator for the division, said the video tends to be seductive, fixing the attention of its viewers on whatever it shows. "The danger is you get too focused on what you can see, and neglect what you can't see," Bello said. "And a lot of the time, what's happening elsewhere is more important."
For example, he said, the Predator may beam back an image of two tanks moving, capturing the attention of people watching -- but it might not notice several hundred enemy troops hiding nearby who are more threatening. Bello called Predator video "fraught with both blessings and curses."
Another 10th Mountain Division officer, who asked not to be identified, went further, dismissing the Predator as "entertainment for division staff," the people at headquarters.
Since the dawn of warfare, military commanders have felt they lacked the proper information to direct their forces. In ancient times, everything over the next hill was often a mystery; now, Predators can let them peer over that hill and the one after that, and the problem is how to sift through the information quickly and find what is useful.
Among the first troops that the U.S. Central Command dispatched to Central Asia after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were Predator teams sent to Uzbekistan and Pakistan. These drones were operated by the military and used purely for reconnaissance; the CIA controlled a separate set of Predators that recorded another first in military history, the firing of weapons by an unmanned aircraft.
Pictures from the military-operated Predators have been distributed to a variety of command posts around the world, including the air operations center in Saudi Arabia, Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., and the Pentagon and CIA headquarters in the Washington area.
Army Maj. Gen. Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck, the commander of regular U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview that from his perspective, the biggest problem caused by the Predator was that its transmission of real-time images made staffs above his own division's staff feel they were in a position to get involved in the battle.
"It proved at first to be disruptive" to his headquarters when levels of command above -- in the Persian Gulf, at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa and at the Pentagon -- watched Predator imagery and called with questions about what they saw, he said.
During the first days of the Shahikot battle, Hagenbeck recalled, "People on other staffs at higher levels would call all the way down to my staff and get information and make suggestions, or they were pulling information for details that they presumed their bosses would want to know."
The answer to that micromanagement problem, he said, was to anticipate questions and answer them by posting detailed battle reports several times a day on the military's own secure, internal computer link. After his staff started doing that, he said, the higher staffs "started backing off."
The initial conclusion of officers here is that the Predator, in its current configuration, is probably better suited to narrow tasks, such as shooting missiles at small convoys of al Qaeda leaders, than at helping commanders manage a far-flung battle.
Military experts said problems are to be expected as part of the settling-in process during the introduction of any radically new technology. "This happens frequently when new . . . technologies like Predator are introduced," said Michael Vickers, an expert on military innovation at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington research organization.
Wilkerson emphasized that he sees some uses for the Predator, especially in planning attacks. "What it did do is prepare us -- when we went into that valley, we knew where to go," he said. This allowed ground forces to maintain a faster pace of operations when they moved in -- a key advantage in keeping an adversary off balance.
"We had pinpointed the caves, so we could do in a day and a half what could have taken a week and a half," he said.
Several people involved in overseeing the battle also said the Predator would be far more useful to them if they could communicate directly with its operator, as they can with the pilots of attack helicopters and fighter jets. The Predator operator can be sitting hundreds or thousands of miles away.
If the Army can "figure that out, it would be a great asset," said Maj. Brad Herndon. "There's no doubt it's a good system. But we need to refine how we use it."
For all of the problems, said Sgt. 1st Class Roger Lyon, a 10th Mountain Division intelligence specialist, the Predator is still a nice thing to have in combat. "It's a comforting sound on the battlefield, when you're going to sleep and you hear that sound of the Predator engine, somewhere between a propeller airplane and a lawn mower, knowing it is looking out for you."
Staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington contributed to this report.
------- venezuela
Venezuela's President vs. Military: Is Breach Widening?
New York Times
March 26, 2002
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/international/americas/26VENE.html
CARACAS, Venezuela, March 19 - Rear Adm. Carlos Molina had ruled out conspiring to overthrow President Hugo Chávez, but he still wanted to be heard. He wanted the country to know that he and other military men were steadfastly opposed to the left-leaning, mercurial Venezuelan president.
So, during a series of raucous anti-Chávez street protests last month, Admiral Molina decided on a course of action, he said in a recent interview. He put on his navy whites, called a news conference in a Caracas hotel and told Venezuelans to "unite to demand the immediate resignation of President Chávez."
"I spoke, not as an admiral, but as a citizen," he recalled.
But Admiral Molina, 48, was not just any citizen. Rather, he was a high-ranking naval commander who became the third active-duty officer in an ll-day period to call publicly for Mr. Chávez to leave office. A week later a fourth officer, Gen. Román Gómez of the air force, joined the call, raising serious questions about the loyalties of the 120,000-member armed forces that the president says strongly backs him.
Mr. Chávez has played down the opposition, although his government swiftly forced Admiral Molina into retirement and punished other outspoken officers as well. But the vocal public appearances by the officers are seen by many experts here and abroad as a crack in his three-year-old presidency.
"This signifies a high degree of discontent in the armed forces," said Fernando Ochoa, a retired general who has been both minister of defense and foreign affairs. "To hear an admiral and a general come out like that must have been like a bucket of cold water in the face for the armed forces."
The rebellious officers helped energize a disjointed but growing opposition movement that is using regular street protests to try to weaken Mr. Chávez, whose autocratic style and left-wing policies have alienated a growing number of people.
Polls have shown that the popularity of Mr. Chávez, a former paratrooper who led a failed coup against the government in 1992 before winning election in December 1998, has dropped from 56 percent in July to just above 30 percent last month.
Some officials close to the military say the discontent in the armed forces has risen sharply as more Venezuelans have turned on its once-popular leader. Although he promised a "revolution" to improve the lives of the poor, Mr. Chávez has instead managed to rankle nearly every sector - from the church to the press to the middle class - with his combative style, populist speeches and dalliances with Fidel Castro of Cuba and the Marxist rebels of Colombia.
The recent military protests began on Feb. 7, when Col. Pedro Soto of the air force joined demonstrators in a pubic square in Caracas.
"The objective was to unmask the president," said Colonel Soto, 49. "He has said the military forces were with him. I wanted to tell people they were not."
The show of dissidence was unusual in a country where the military has, for the most part, been respectful of civilian rule. In 1958, the army helped civilian protesters oust the dictator Marcos Pérez Jímenez. After that, the military stayed largely out of politics until Mr. Chávez emerged.
The dissident officers defended their public criticism noting that a new Constitution that Mr. Chávez engineered guarantees free expression for all Venezuelans, including them.
But in addition to retiring Admiral Molina, the government also forced Colonel Soto to retire, and is proceeding with disciplinary measures that could end the career of General Gómez. An army captain who spoke out with Colonel Soto was jailed for 15 days.
Still, the military activism has had a galvanizing effect on the protests by other groups, said Felipe Mujica, president of Movement Toward Socialism, a political party that broke with Mr. Chávez and now helps organize demonstrations.
"This strengthens us," Mr. Mujica said of the military opposition. "It is important support, because this means Chávez would not be able to use force."
It remains unclear how deep the disenchantment with Mr. Chávez runs in the military, and what steps anti-Chávez officers are willing to take.
But Mario Iván Carratú, a retired vice admiral with close contacts in the military, said some active-duty officers had spoken of playing a more aggressive role. He said a few had even privately spoken of a need to stage a coup to oust Mr. Chávez.
"I have been in contact with many active officers, and they are of the belief that if society does not organize to take steps, then they are going to have to take control," said Mr. Carratú, former director of the Institute for National Defense Studies here.
The office of Defense Minister José Vicente Rangel did not respond to requests for an interview. But after the recent declarations by the military officers, Mr. Chávez said there was "no serious threat from the military ranks to the nation."
"There are people who are inciting rebellion, calling for a coup d'état, promoting confrontation," said Gen. Lucas Rincón, the armed forces' top commander, who is loyal to the president. "They are playing with fear and panic. It is very dangerous."
The army has chafed as Mr. Chavez has tried to recast the military's mission from one of security to that of an agency with social functions, like transporting food and running mobile clinics.
But most worrisome to some officers has been Mr. Chávez's alliances with Mr. Castro, his close friend, and with the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which the United States considers a terrorist organization. The officers see Mr. Chávez's tilt toward Cuba as imprudent given Venezuela's longstanding close ties with Washington.
Meanwhile, accusations abound here about ties between the military and the rebels, with critics saying the government has permitted guns for them to enter neighboring Colombia from here while allowing rebels to enter this country to escape the Colombian Army.
But experts point out that Mr. Chávez has taken steps to shore up his control of the military.
During his term the president is believed to have forced into retirement several dozen officers who were deemed disloyal, while many officers and former officers have been placed in key government positions. They include the vice president, Diosdado Cabello, a retired officer; the minister of the interior, Ramón Rodríguez, a former naval captain; and the finance minister, Gen. Francisco Uson Ramírez.
Current and former high-ranking officers insisted that the military as a whole does not believe that shedding blood to oust Mr. Chávez is a realistic option. They are well aware that the United States has said it will not support a coup.
"The armed forces do not want to gain a place in history with a coup," said one high-ranking military officer, who asked to remain unidentified. "If they want to pass into history, then what they want to do is support civil society in its protests."
-------- propaganda wars
Attacks on Journalists, Press Freedom Rise in 2001
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-rights-journalists.html
WASHINGTON - The number of journalists killed last year rose by more than a third over 2000, mainly due to the war in Afghanistan, and governments cited security concerns as a reason to attack press freedom, said a survey on Tuesday.
``The September 11 attacks and subsequent 'war on terrorism' precipitated a press freedom crisis that was global in scope,'' said the Committee to Protect Journalists in its annual survey of press freedom conditions worldwide.
The survey said 37 reporters were killed as a direct result of their work, a big jump from 2000 when 24 died. Eight journalists, including two from Reuters, were killed while covering the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.
The majority of journalists, however, were murdered in reprisal for their reporting on sensitive topics, including official crime and corruption in countries such as Bangladesh, China, Thailand and Yugoslavia.
Giving a breakdown of deaths, three journalists were assassinated in Colombia, one of the world's most dangerous places for reporters. Two radio reporters died in the Philippines and two were killed in Thailand.
In the United States, a free-lance news photographer was killed while reporting on the attacks on the World Trade Center, while a tabloid photo editor died of inhalation anthrax in Florida soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Other countries where journalists were killed in the line of duty were Yugoslavia, Algeria, China, Bangladesh and Haiti.
After four years of decline, the number of reporters imprisoned worldwide rose by nearly 50 percent, to 118 in 2001 from 81 the previous year, the survey said.
A massive crackdown in Eritrea and Nepal, carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks, accounted for the most arrests. Eritrea jailed 11 reporters; in Nepal, 17 were held, many of them in the hours before the government declared a state of emergency last November.
China kept its rank as the leading jailer of journalists for the third consecutive year, with eight more reporters arrested last year, bringing the total behind bars to 35.
The CPJ said governments used ``national security concerns'' to impose new restrictions on the press. In Zimbabwe, where reporters have come under particular attack, the government denounced some journalists as ``terrorists'' to justify actions against them.
As it does every year, the CPJ named the 10 biggest enemies of the press, focusing on leaders responsible for the worst abuses against the media.
This year, Liberian President Charles Taylor was near the top of the annual list of press tyrants along with Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and China's President, Jiang Zemin.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castano, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Cuba's President Fidel Castro, Tunisian President Zine Ben Ali and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad were also in the list.
----
Today's Weapons, Tomorrow's Soldiers
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17214-2002Mar25?language=printer
We asked Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld if there was a weapon that he thought kids would be especially interested in. His answer? The Predator. That's the pilotless airplane that can fly all day over the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan while an onboard video camera sends images back to American soldiers. It's flown by remote control. Some Predators have missiles mounted on them that can be fired if an enemy is spotted.
Controlling a Predator sounds more like playing a video game than fighting a war. And 10 years from now, when today's GameBoy-playing kids are old enough to join the military, weapons will be even more advanced.
"I think there's no question but that having youngsters who are used to computers and are comfortable in that environment is probably a very good thing for the military," Rumsfeld said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
U.S. Inspectors Take Up Posts at Canadian Ports
The Associated Press
Monday, March 25, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16909-2002Mar25?language=printer
HALIFAX (AP) - U.S. customs inspectors took up posts at three busy Canadian ports for the first time Monday in a bid to seize dangerous goods that could arrive in the millions of containers that pass through the gateways every year.
Three American agents were stationed each in Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax, months after U.S. officials announced a common anti-terrorist border security plan. There were fears terrorists may place a nuclear device in a shipping container and time the bomb to detonate as it arrives in a major American port.
Canadian inspectors were also due to begin work at ports in Newark, N.J., and Seattle, some of the busiest transit points for the millions of containers that move across the border via truck or train every year.
"It's just a more efficient, smarter way of managing the border," said Roy Jamieson of the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency in Halifax.
"They'll be exchanging information back and forth about goods that are coming into our respective countries."
U.S. inspectors will screen manifests of ships arriving at the three Canadian ports and ask their colleagues to check the containers if there are concerns about suspect goods.
Canadian officials will be able to make the same request of their U.S. counterparts, rather than doing the container inspections themselves.
---
Ex-cop faces charges in Louima case
Around the Nation
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020326-91488438.htm
NEW YORK - Former New York police Officer Charles Schwarz, whose conviction was overturned in the case of a Haitian immigrant tortured by police, was charged in a new indictment yesterday with lying on the witness stand.
Mr. Schwarz, freed on bail March 7 after serving almost three years in prison, now faces two additional federal counts of perjury - as well as retrial - on charges he violated the civil rights of Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a broomstick in a Brooklyn precinct house.
Mr. Schwarz was convicted in 1999 of conspiring to obstruct a grand jury investigation and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But that conviction was overturned last month by a federal appeals court that ruled Mr. Schwarz, 36, had been denied effective legal representation.
----
Belgrade Hands Over Last Kosovo Albanian Prisoners
By REUTERS
March 26, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-yugoslavia-kosovo-prisoners.html
MERDARE/PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Around 150 Kosovo Albanian prisoners were transferred from Serbia proper to jails in their homeland on Tuesday, fulfilling a key condition for keeping U.S. financial aid flowing to Belgrade.
Thousands of people cheering and waving red Albanian flags lined the route of seven buses carrying the prisoners after they crossed into Kosovo at the village of Merdare. Police escorted the convoy and a United Nations helicopter flew overhead.
Kosovo's U.N. governor Michael Steiner said the transfer meant all Kosovo Albanian prisoners in Serbian jails who wanted to return to the province had now done so. Those who did not have legally justifiable convictions would be freed swiftly.
``This is about the rule of law. Those who have committed a crime will serve out their sentences not in Serbia but here in Kosovo,'' Steiner told reporters in the Kosovo capital Pristina.
``Those who have not committed crimes will be released, most of them tomorrow, the rest within weeks, not months,'' he said. The German diplomat say did not specify how many prisoners were involved but Serbian authorities put the figure at 145. Kosovo legally remains part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia but has been a de facto international protectorate since NATO's 1999 air war to end Serb repression of the province's ethnic Albanian majority, during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic.
Under U.S. legislation, reformers who ousted Milosevic in 2000 have to pass several key tests including the release of political prisoners by the end of this month or a face a freeze in aid from Washington worth around $40 million.
EMOTIONS RUN HIGH
Many of those transferred on Tuesday were convicted of terrorism during Milosevic's crackdown in Kosovo and are regarded by rights groups as political prisoners. Milosevic is now on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal.
At the end of the Kosovo war, rights groups say there were around 2,000 Kosovo Albanians in jails in Serbia proper. Many were detained during the conflict and transported out of the province in its dying days in June 1999.
Emotions ran high among relatives of the prisoners at Merdare. A woman fainted after seeing her son in one bus.
``Now that my son has stepped onto Kosovo land, I can feel that it is really free,'' declared one man, Fatmir Qarri, from the western town of Djakovica whose son was arrested as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla group during the war.
According to the U.S. legislation, Belgrade must also show it is cooperating with the war crimes tribunal. Many analysts believe Serbia will hand over at least one indictee to the court before the deadline to try to satisfy this condition.
Serbian officials have insisted the transfer of the prisoners to jails in Kosovo is a humanitarian gesture unconnected to the U.S. deadline.
Under a related deal with the United Nations, Serbian officials say 38 Serbs jailed in Kosovo will be allowed to serve their sentences in central Serbia if they have relatives there.
-------- terrorism
India Parliament Passes Terror Bill
By Neelesh Misra
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19305-2002Mar26?language=printer
NEW DELHI, India -- A rare Parliament joint session, the third since India's independence, voted after a daylong debate Tuesday to pass an anti-terrorism bill that the opposition said will curtail civil rights.
"I think the ayes have it," P.M. Sayeed, deputy speaker of Parliament's lower house, said after both sides shouted their voice votes. He then granted the opposition's request to count paper ballots and the total was 425-296, with 60 of the 781 parliament members absent or abstaining.
The government said the legislation, which gives it greater powers to detain and try terror suspects, is crucial after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States and a Dec. 13 militant attack on India's Parliament.
After the Parliament vote, the bill was expected to be signed into law by India's constitutional figurehead, President Kocheril Narayanan.
The Prevention of Terrorism bill allows police to detain suspects for questioning for three months without bringing charges against them, and an additional three months with approval from a special court. The bill also says that anyone suspected of giving money, shelter, transportation or other support to terrorists could be tried on terrorism charges.
The legislation provides punishments ranging from a minimum five years in prison to death.
"We cannot score a decisive victory against terrorism unless a special law of this kind is enacted," Lal Krishna Advani, the powerful interior minister, said as he presented the bill. The government says the law will be effective against Islamic guerrillas fighting to separate Kashmir from India.
The opposition said the law would be used against innocent Muslims.
Opposition parties said the proposed law gives unbridled power to police. They fear that people who unwittingly rent a room or car to a suspected terrorist or engage in a financial transaction with them could be detained for up to six months without trial.
"The proposed legislation is unacceptable because it violates the basic right of the individual," retorted main opposition leader Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress party. "This government has revealed its true intentions by using every device to arm itself with the menacing powers of" the Prevention of Terrorism bill.
"The real victims of this legislation will not be the die-hard terrorists, because you catch hold of them anyway, but the political detractors and ordinary people, especially the minorities," said a communist leader, Somnath Chatterjee.
After more than nine hours of debate, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee responded to what he said were Gandhi's personal attacks on him and allegations that he was under pressure from Hindu extremists.
Shouting his defense amid cries of support from his own party and derision from the opposition benches, Vajpayee said his government's testing of nuclear weapons and support from the United States in the global battle against terrorism were proof that he does not act under pressure.
"I am pained because our intentions are being questioned," Vajpayee said. "This is an assault on my personality and I won't tolerate it."
He made no comments about why his government needs the new law.
The government has said the legislation has built-in safeguards to prevent human rights abuses.
The legislation was passed by the Lok Sabha, where the government has a majority. But the upper house, dominated by Congress, rejected it. A bill must pass both houses before it goes to the president.
To break the deadlock, Vajpayee called the joint session, where his alliance of parties has a comfortable majority.
Since December, the government has enforced the law as a presidential ordinance.
Advani, the interior minister, said 69 arrests had been made under the ordinance, more than 50 of them in Jammu-Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state, where militants have been fighting since 1989 for independence or merger with Pakistan.
The two previous joint sessions of the Indian Parliament were held in 1961 and 1978.
--------
Army Wants Border Guards Armed
March 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Border-Guards.html
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- The Army is recommending arming some of the National Guard troops working along the Canadian and Mexican borders.
The recommendation came Friday from the Force Command, which oversees domestic troops. In a memo, it said some border troops, including all those at border crossings in New York and New England, carry 9mm pistols.
The memo was sent to the Joint Forces Command in Virginia, which is responsible for the military's homeland defense and is using National Guard troops as part of increased security following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Separately, a representative of the secretary of defense said the decision not to arm National Guard troops could be reconsidered. Peter Verga, a special assistant for Homeland Security, told Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in a letter that troops could be armed if there is a ``compelling need.''
The final decision will be made by the secretary of defense.
Under current rules, the troops are protected by the armed agents of U.S. Customs and the Immigration and Naturalization Service they are assisting. Critics say the Pentagon should arm them.
``It is just amazing to me we could put soldiers in those positions and not provide for their basic protection,'' said Maj. Gen. Martha Rainville, head of the Vermont National Guard.
About 1,700 guard troops are on active duty along the two borders.
A civilian spokesman for Force Command wouldn't discuss the memo. Defense Department spokesman Maj. Mike Halbig said the recommendation from Forces Command was being considered.
``I am sure it will be considered fairly quickly,'' he said Tuesday.
Soldiers working on administrative tasks, intelligence or flying above the borders don't need weapons, the memo said.
But those working at small outposts or those without special areas to search vehicles or people, need weapons, the memo said.
It said all 339 National Guard troops working at 39 ports of entry in New York, Vermont, Maine, Michigan and Minnesota need to be armed. In Washington, Montana and North Dakota, 68 soldiers at 33 ports of entry should be armed.
The memo was detailed enough that it suggested how many weapons should be provided at each border crossing.
The Mexican border, which has a much larger presence of Customs and INS agents, doesn't need as many armed soldiers, the memo said. No armed soldiers are needed in California, Arizona and New Mexico. In Texas three ports of entry should have a total of six armed soldiers.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Stuart Energy stock jumps on a fuel-cell agreement
REUTERS CANADA:
March 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15188/story.htm
TORONTO - Stuart Energy Systems Corp. stock shot up as much as 16 percent yesterday after the company said it had signed an agreement with a subsidiary of Ford Motor Co. to jointly develop hydrogen-fueled power systems.
Stuart was up 79 Canadian cents to C$6.95 at mid-afternoon on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Earlier, the shares rose as high as C$7.15.
In a release, Stuart said it will integrate its proprietary hydrogen generation technology with Ford Power Products hydrogen-fueled internal combustion engine generator package, jointly developed by Ford and a division of Ballard Power Systems .
Stuart said under the joint agreement, the companies will develop the systems for the global back-up power generation and other power markets.
Fuel cells use a chemical reaction to produce electricity from hydrogen, which can be derived from such sources as natural gas, methanol and modified versions of gasoline.
Fuel cells have been hailed as an environmentally friendly technology because the reaction produces only heat and water as emissions.
-------- energy
Hazardous Wastes Could Become New Fuel
March 26, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-26-09.html
WASHINGTON, DC, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to allow certain hazardous waste materials to be burned in special power generating plants
The proposal would exempt some byproducts of petroleum refining and perhaps other industries from hazardous waste regulations such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The materials would be processed, along with fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, coke and even municipal solid waste and sewage sludge, to produce a synthetic gas.
The EPA estimates that from the petroleum refining industry alone, up to seven to 10 million tons of hazardous byproducts now managed under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) could be transferred to gasification systems.
Gasification is a technology that puts coal and other carbon containing materials under high temperature and pressure to convert them into synthetic gas. This gas is then used as a fuel to generate electricity or steam, or as a basic chemical building block for many uses in the petrochemical and refining industries.
When used as a fuel, the synthetic gas, or "syngas," is cleaner than almost any fuel in use today and is comparable to natural gas, the EPA says.
The agency says the gasification proposal will promote increased energy efficiency while reducing the volume of hazardous waste that would otherwise be treated and disposed of on land. It will also conserve natural resources by supplementing crude oil sources in electricity production, petroleum refining and chemical manufacturing, the EPA says.
"Today's action is a step forward for the environment and energy self sufficiency," said Marianne Lamont Horinko, EPA assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response. "The agency's objective is to increase recycling and energy recovery. This proposal encourages recycling of waste materials by lessening the regulatory burden on industry, while protecting public health and the environment."
The proposal is part of an EPA initiative to promote flexible, innovative ways to recycle more wastes while reducing the nation's reliance on fossil fuels.
"Today's announcement is the first in a series of agency initiatives on this issue, with more to be announced later this spring," added Horinko.
----
Energy Contacts Disclosed
Consumer Groups Left Out, Data Show
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16943-2002Mar25?language=printer
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with 36 representatives of business interests and many campaign contributors while developing President Bush's energy policy, and he held no meetings with conservation or consumer groups, documents released last night show.
The information was released by the Energy Department just a few hours before a court-ordered deadline, and after 11 months of resistance by the administration to lawsuits by public interest groups seeking to determine who influenced the writing of the administration's energy plan.
A first review of the 11,000 pages of documents bolsters the contention of Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups that the Bush administration relied almost exclusively on the advice of executives from utilities and producers of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy while a White House task force drafted recommendations that would vastly increase energy production.
Of the corporations that met with Abraham, all but a few were large contributors of unregulated soft money to the Republican Party during the 2000 election cycle. A dozen of the companies that had meetings with Abraham contributed $1.2 million to the GOP, mainly for Bush's election. Ten of the 12 gave more soft money to Republicans than Democrats.
Large portions had been deleted from the documents released last night by the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Most attachments were missing and in many cases documents were withheld except for the subject line. Thousands of other documents were withheld entirely, and the groups that won release of the documents through lawsuits said they may return to court.
Abraham's meetings, between Feb. 14 and April 26 of last year, included groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Nuclear Energy Institute. Top executives of Westinghouse Electric Corp., Duke Power, Entergy, Exelon Corp., UtiliCorp United (now Aquila Inc.), American Coal Co. and others sat down with Abraham.
Environmental groups said their efforts to meet with the energy task force were rebuffed. The Energy Department has said that environmental groups did not respond to its request for input, and the administration has said it held at least one substantive discussion with 10 environmental groups in late March, prior to the May release of the energy policy.
Because of the deletions and omissions, there is little information about what the donors and business interests were seeking in their high-level meetings. The documents released include hundreds of unsolicited suggestions from citizens, companies and lawmakers, most of whom received form responses promising the ideas would receive "close and careful attention."
Among the items released is a letter from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers favoring tax credits for hybrid-fuel and fuel-cell vehicles and similar incentives for fuel efficiency that were included in the Bush energy report.
One company, Citgo, urged the administration "to exercise federal authority to prevent states" from establishing separate fuel standards. These "boutique fuels" cause distribution problems for the industry, and Bush's energy plan directed the EPA to work with states to eliminate them.
An Energy Department e-mail indicating close coordination with industry notes that Texaco was seeking to help Bush's energy policy rollout. Texaco "has offered to try to produce an announcement on a 1500 megawatt facility at a TVA site in harmony with such a rollout," the May 7 e-mail said.
"Finally there is some evidence of who was actually shaping the energy policy," said Sharon Buccino, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which won the court order on Feb. 27 requiring the Energy Department's information release.
Buccino said the group plans to challenge many of the omissions in court. The Energy Department released a chart suggesting Vice President Cheney's task force had adopted nine NRDC recommendations, which Buccino called "an outright lie." Another 15,000 pages were withheld for privacy, security and other reasons, Energy officials said.
Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, the watchdog group that won the court order requiring the OMB, EPA and Agriculture releases, said the White House appeared to be "playing games" with the release. He said he expects to "go back to court to seek testimony as to why we don't have the substantive e-mails."
Trent Duffy, OMB's spokesman, would not explain the deletions beyond saying, "The items that were part of the deliberative process were redacted."
Abraham issued a statement calling the energy plan "a balanced and comprehensive energy plan for America," and said that the administration "not only sought but included all viewpoints."
Several of the documents indicate that officials were aware of efforts to obtain information about their actions under the Freedom of Information Act, and they adjusted their correspondence to limit the release of materials. "We have an FOI request for all NEPP material," said one April 25 e-mail, referring to the task force. "Keep in mind that whatever I get I will have to include with it." Another e-mail about the FOIA requests asked, "Did you want me to include Kyle?" -- an apparent reference to Abraham's chief of staff, Kyle McSlarrow, whose e-mails were not included in the release.
Abraham held meetings with more than 20 other heads of oil companies and energy trade groups while the report was being written, but the Energy Department said those meetings included other topics.
Abraham's staff had several meetings with Enron officials, the documents showed. Enron, a major Bush donor that collapsed late last year and is facing a criminal probe, met with other representatives of the task force six times, the administration has disclosed. Energy Department officials said most of their meetings with Enron were not related to the energy policy. Abraham met with two Enron executives on March 29 as part of a meeting of 16 industry officials about the California electricity shortage. Energy officials said Abraham declined requests for meetings with Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay of Enron Corp.
The OMB materials that were released also indicate the energy task force's emphasis on production over conservation. One e-mail from Feb. 22 listed seven chapters for the energy policy report: short-term supply disruptions, consumers, economic impact, alternatives, increased production, infrastructure and energy security. There was no mention of conservation. An e-mail from March 22 made reference to an "energy efficiency" chapter, and a March 27 e-mail indicates that an "environment chapter" had been included. By April 2, there were "energy conservation targets."
The Energy Department documents indicate a late surge of activity to include more renewable fuels in the energy report. Karen Knutson, the deputy director of the task force, wrote to the Energy Department on April 27 seeking information about solar energy.
The OMB documents indicate Bush was involved in the shaping of the report well before it was released May 16. The task force briefed him on March 19, a schedule indicates, and a final report was circulated on April 23.
The e-mails also indicate that the task force was involved in Bush's March 13 decision to reverse a campaign pledge to characterize carbon dioxide as a pollutant that should be restricted, a position shared by environmental groups. A March 7 e-mail among task force staffers refers to "CO2 as a Pollutant." Ultimately, the report did not take a position on whether to raise fuel economy standards for vehicles, but the e-mails indicate there was extensive work on making recommendations about the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.
The EPA and Agriculture documents were also stripped of content except for meeting and publication schedules and interoffice chatter and bureaucratic fencing. "Lots of typos and the like," said an EPA official, "but I assume they'll catch those."
A long redacted section in one memo closed with a comment, "just kidding -- Mona."
Included among stacks of documents from the EPA and Agriculture Department were a few position papers from industry groups, including the Fertilizer Institute and the Clean Energy Group -- a coalition of electric power companies urging a "reasonable time frame" for pollution control strategies. Their pitches to the administration appeared to be familiar agendas the groups have lobbied for and testified about many times.
The subject lines on thousands of pages of government e-mail traffic described the wide horizon of energy and resource issues, from "boutique" gasolines blended for a particular region's needs to rules on offshore drilling disputes.
The documents released indicated some dissension about how the energy report was assembled. A March 28 OMB e-mail requests that "if you see any particularly egregious recommendations that you alert me to by tomorrow 10:30 . . . . I could raise it in the meeting to highlight the process problems." A Feb. 26 e-mail states: "The agency/chapter meetings got a little discombobulated."
Bush's energy plan encourages increased production of fossil fuels, including relaxed regulations and subsidies for the coal and nuclear industries, oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and construction of 1,300 to 1,900 power plants over the next 20 years.
Most of Bush's energy recommendations were incorporated in a bill that passed the House in August after heavy lobbying from labor unions. The Senate has begun debating its version and is expected to take up the most controversial part, the Arctic drilling, when lawmakers return from recess in two weeks.
Large donors meeting with Abraham included Duke Energy, which contributed $61,500 in soft money, all to the GOP, according to figures kept by the Center for Responsive Politics. Constellation Energy gave $38,950, all to the GOP. Northeast Utilities contributed $43,580, all but $2,000 to the GOP. UtiliCorp United gave $66,000, all to the Republicans. American Coal Co. gave $20,500, all to the GOP. Kerr-McGee gave $240,350, all but $20,000 to Republicans. Exelon Corp. gave $454,305, 74 percent to the Republicans.
Staff writers Peter Behr and Dan Morgan contributed to this report.
------
Energy task force papers edited, released
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020326-84009037.htm
The Bush administration turned over thousands of documents yesterday related to Vice President Richard B. Cheney's energy task force, including some showing that industries tried to influence regulations and proposals affecting them.
But most of the papers, released in response to court orders, were blanked out and provided little substantive information. This prompted critics to accuse the administration of continuing to hold back information on consultations over the development of President Bush's energy plan.
Two federal judges ordered the release of the papers, including numerous copies of e-mail messages, as part of lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative government-watchdog group, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a liberal environmentalist group.
"There should be many more documents from energy industry executives, and they are missing," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Associated Press.
The groups were trying to determine who influenced the crafting of the administration's energy plan. The papers came from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agriculture and Energy departments and the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Of the nearly 5,000 documents obtained by Judicial Watch, most of the internal communications were heavily redacted, often with only the names of the senders and recipients, and subject headings, left readable, said Larry Klayman, the group's chairman.
"What we've seen so far, the Bush administration is withholding an inordinate amount of documents, suggesting they are obstructing these proceedings," Mr. Klayman said.
The administration also was facing a lawsuit by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, which wanted to learn the names of people who met with Mr. Cheney or his top aides leading up to the energy report's release. That lawsuit was not involved in the release of documents yesterday.
Documents from the EPA showed that industry groups tried to persuade the task force of the industries' publicly stated stances.
Among the papers turned over by the EPA was a three-page memo from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, dated March 22, 2001, declaring that the federal auto fuel economy rule, known as CAFE, "is an ineffective energy policy."
The alliance instead supported consumer tax credits for advanced-technology vehicles, and urged development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The task force report supported such tax benefits, refrained from urging higher fuel economy requirements and urged development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.
At least three major oil companies, according to papers released by EPA, urged the administration to take steps to eliminate the "boutique" gasoline required in many parts of the country.
One of the companies, Citco, urged the administration "to exercise federal authority to prevent states" from establishing separate fuel standards. The Cheney task force urged the EPA to deal with the boutique fuels issue.
----
Documents Reveal Energy Meetings
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, March 26, 2002; 12:17 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19753-2002Mar26?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The White House firmly defended Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Tuesday as newly released documents showed he held at least eight private meetings with industry leaders - but none with environmentalists - while the administration crafted its energy plan.
"News flash: it's no surprise to anybody that the secretary of energy meets with energy-related groups," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
The meetings between Abraham and the energy industry executives were disclosed in thousands of papers made public Monday related to agency participation in Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force in early 2001.
Critics of the administration's energy policies have long argued that industry had an open door to top-level administration policy makers, while those advocating conservation, energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy sources were given largely lip service.
Abraham said in a statement that the 11,000 pages of documents - everything from daily schedules to congressional testimony - "will further confirm" that the administration sought out a wide range of views, including that of environmentalists.
But the papers document no top-level meetings with advocates of energy efficiency or renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power.
The department took pains to note that the documents also catalogue 23 requests that were denied for meetings mostly with industry representatives to discuss the energy plan. Among those turned down were Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skillings of Enron Corp.
While documents included reams of energy policy statements including some from environmental groups such as the Wilderness Society, it was the industry executives who had the access to Abraham, a key member of Cheney's task force.
In all, three dozen energy executives and lobbyists participated in eight meeting with Abraham from mid-February to late April of 2001. The Cheney energy report was released in May.
He met with a top executive of the American Coal Co.; officials of the Independent Petroleum Association of America; the chairman of Utilicorp, a major power company to discuss electricity deregulation; and with a half dozen utility executives and other oil and gas industry leaders.
A "drop-by" session to "discuss nuclear energy's role" in the Bush energy plan lasted 30 minutes on March 20 and included the head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, chairman of Westinghouse and the chief executives of a half dozen major nuclear power utilities.
Industry's access was shown in other papers among the 3,000 Energy Department documents and 4,000 documents also released Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In one e-mail to Joe Kelliher, the DOE's point man on the Cheney task force, an official of Southern Company, the Atlanta-based power conglomerate, offers reasons why the administration should revamp a clean air regulation known as "New Source Review" which is at the heart of a series of ongoing lawsuits against Southern and several other utilities.
"I hope this is helpful," the utility official, Michael Riith, wrote Kelliher, adding, "I look forward to lunch on Tuesday."
The Cheney task force called for the EPA to review the clean air regulation - a review expected to lead to an easing of the regulation.
Among the papers also were EPA documents revealing an oil industry push to ease state regulation of so-called "boutique" gasoline blends and auto industry pressure to ease federal fuel economy rules.
One of the oil companies, Citgo, urged the administration "to exercise federal authority to prevent states" from establishing separate fuel standards. The Cheney task force urged EPA to deal with the boutique fuels issue.
Also among the Energy Department and EPA papers was a three-page memo from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers declaring that the federal auto fuel economy rule, known as CAFE, "is an ineffective energy policy."
The alliance instead supported consumer tax credits for advanced technology vehicles, and urged development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The task force report supported such tax benefits, refrained from urging higher fuel economy requirements and urged development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.
The documents, many with large portions marked out, were ordered released by two federal judges as part of lawsuits brought by private groups trying to determine who influenced the administration's energy plan.
The disclosed papers stem from Freedom of Information lawsuits filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
The Energy Department withheld 15,000 pages, citing exemptions for information related to internal agency practices, deliberations and personnel.
The administration also faces a similar lawsuit by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. That lawsuit was not involved in Monday's releases.
Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.
----
List of Energy Meeting Participants
March 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Energy-Donors.html
Of the 20 companies and industry groups that landed meetings with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to discuss the Bush administration's development of a national energy plan, nearly all were Republican donors. Together, they, their employees and parent companies gave at least $4.1 million to the GOP from 1999 through last year and at least $1.7 million to Democrats. The contributions include:
DOMINION SUBSIDIARY WOLVERINE GAS AND OIL CORP.:
-- GOP: at least $1,164,232
-- Bush campaign: at least $7,000
-- Bush inauguration committee: at least $100,000
-- Democrats: at least $527,888
ENTERGY:
-- GOP: at least $537,259
-- Bush campaign: at least $10,000
-- Democrats:: at least $410,764
BECHTEL NATIONAL:
-- GOP: at least $468,690
-- Bush campaign: at least $3,250
-- Democrats: at least $176,950
CMS ENERGY:
-- GOP: at least $468,465
-- Bush campaign: at least $5,000
-- Bush inauguration committee: at least $100,000
-- Democrats: at least $232,150
NUCLEAR ENERGY INSTITUTE:
-- GOP: at least $436,154
-- Bush campaign: at least $1,900
-- Democrats: at least $148,433
DUKE ENERGY:
-- GOP: at least $404,531
-- Bush campaign: at least $3,750
-- Democrats: at least $143,366
KERR-MCGEE:
-- GOP: at least $275,408
-- Bush campaign: at least $500
-- Democrats: at least $20,000
WESTINGHOUSE:
-- GOP: at least $120,350
-- Bush campaign: at least $1,000
-- Democrats: at least $40,250
UTILICORP:
-- GOP: at least $100,550
-- Bush campaign: at least $5,250
-- Democrats: at least $10,500
NORTHEAST UTILITIES:
-- GOP: at least at least $81,380
-- Bush campaign: at least $500
-- Democrats: at least $18,598
CONSTELLATION ENERGY:
-- GOP: at least $27,800
-- Democrats: at least $13,500
MILLER ENERGY:
-- GOP: at least $18,500
-- Bush campaign: at least $1,000
AMERICAN COAL CO.:
-- GOP: at least $17,050
MUSKEGON DEVELOPMENT GROUP:
-- GOP: at least $3,450
EOG RESOURCES:
-- GOP: at least $2,250
-- Bush campaign: at least $250
INDEPENDENT PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA:
-- GOP: at least $1,250
-- Bush campaign: at least $500
CABOT OIL & GAS:
-- GOP: at least $1,000
NOBLE AFFILIATES:
-- GOP: at least $750
-- Bush campaign: at least $500
Source: Center for Responsive Politics.
-------- environment
Islands draw attention to global warming
3/26/2002
UPI
by Katrina Woznicki in Washington
HONOLULU -- Leaders of Pacific Island nations want to hold industrialized countries responsible for global warming -- saying since they emit the majority of greenhouse gases they should help prevent rising sea levels from swallowing up islands.
While scientists agree the Earth is warming and human activity has contributed to this climate change, they cannot come to a consensus on what the extent of the damage could be.
That does not matter to island nations, which have grown impatient with the debate while they watch their beaches slowly disappear.
They met in Honolulu to discuss the problem and Tuvalu Prime Minister Koloa Talake told the other nine Pacific Island leaders he has witnessed the beach outside his house lose about 50 yards over the past 50 years.
Talake also is expected to visit U.S. attorneys later this month to discuss possible legal action. Tuvalu is an island nation near New Zealand and Australia with a population of about 10,000 people.
"Pacific island nations are extremely vulnerable to changes in the climate," Eileen Shea, climate project coordinator for the East-West Center in Honolulu, a nonprofit, private research institute that hosted the meeting, told United Press International. "They sit in the heartbeat of the Earth's climate system."
One of those nations is the Federated States of Micronesia, whose president, Leo Falcam, chair of the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, took their fight to Mexico this past week. Falcam has said he will use whatever means necessary to get major industrialized countries to pay attention to this threat.
While all islands could suffer from global warming, Pacific Islands are more vulnerable than those in the Atlantic or Indian oceans, Shea explained, because the Pacific is the largest body of water holding the most islands. The size of the Pacific also means its islands are more isolated from larger mainlands.
Islands depend on tourism to keep their economies afloat so environmental damage could have devastating short-term and long-term effects, said Jeffrey Langholz, professor of international and environmental policy at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies in Monterrey, Calif.
"I'm sure Hawaii will lose a lot of real estate," from rising sea levels, Langholz told United Press International. "The stakes are high for those (island) people."
The United States is responsible for about one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, he noted, adding it also produces a large percentage of goods.
Langholz said, however, island nations do have a case in holding industrialized countries, particularly the United States, culpable for rising sea levels and could be successful in getting the United States to finance strategies to minimize the impact of global warming on islands.
"I think it's a good strategy for them," he said. "Their backs are against the wall."
There are no clear time table for islanders, but there are some projections, said Henry Pollack, professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
"The likely change of sea level in the 21st century (is) on the low end about 20 centimeters and on the high end of 80 centimeters," Pollack told UPI. That would mean falls in the range of slightly less than 1 foot to 3 feet. "This is a century-long scenario," he added.
Global warming is not just an island issue, Pollack said. "It concerns people in Florida. A rise of 3 feet would mean a significant loss of a part of southern Florida." Parts of New Orleans already are under sea level, he said, and cities such as Miami, the California shoreline and the country of Bangladesh all could suffer.
"After 2050," Pollack said, "if the steps have not put in place right, then you're going to embark on the 80 centimeter path, so in a sense our grandparents and parents have already given us the first half this century ... so in some ways we're going to have to live with what's in place in already."
Global warming could be curbed, however, so the Earth is dealing with the lower end of the spectrum, sea levels rising at 20 centimeters instead of 80, he added.
Either way, island nation leaders feel they have no time to lose. For them, Shea said, this is by no means an environmental issue. "This is a national security issue," she said.
--------
FACTBOX - What is the Kyoto protocol?
REUTERS UK:
March 26, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15186/story.htm
LONDON - The UK is set to officially start greenhouse gas emissions trading on April 2 as part of its commitments to cut emissions under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol.
Here are some frequently asked questions about the protocol.
WHAT IS THE KYOTO PROTOCOL?
It is a pact agreed on by governments at a 1997 United Nations conference in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during the five-year period 2008-2012. Eighty-four countries have signed the pact and 50 of have ratified it or acceded to it, according to U.N. data.
IS IT THE FIRST AGREEMENT OF ITS KIND? Governments originally agreed to tackle climate change at the "Earth Summit" in Rio in 1992. At that meeting, leaders created the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which set a non-binding goal of stabilising emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Although the convention has more than 160 participants, it is widely considered to have failed to halt a global increase in emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol is the follow-up to that and is the first legally binding global agreement to cut greenhouse gases.
SO IT'S LEGALLY BINDING?
It is binding once it has been ratified (approved at government or parliament level) by 55 percent of the signatories representing 55 percent of developed countries' carbon dioxide emissions.
HOW WILL IT BE ENFORCED?
Under a deal made by environment ministers in Bonn, Germany, in July 2001, if countries emit more gases than allowed under their targets at the end of 2012, they will be required to make the cuts, and 30 percent more, in the second commitment period which is due to start in 2013. Ministers rejected the idea of having a financial penalty. Compliance will be overseen by a special committee.
WHAT WAS AGREED IN MARRAKESH IN NOVEMBER 2001?
The rules cover issues such as what penalties countries that fail to reach their targets will face, how they can buy and sell the right to emit greenhouse gases, and to what extent countries must report on the amount of emissions they produce each year.
The Bonn agreement set out the sanctions a country would face if it failed to meet its emissions targets. Wrangling at Marrakesh centred on whether this would be legally binding. Japan and Russia resisted moves to make it so.
A compromise wording was found which postponed a formal decision on the exact legal nature of compliance, but stated that countries must accept the agreed compliance rules if they want to take part in emissions trading.
Supporters of the pact say this provides the detailed legal basis for countries to ratify it and bring it into force.
DOES EVERY COUNTRY HAVE TO REDUCE EMISSIONS BY 5.2 PERCENT?
No, only 39 countries - relatively developed ones - have target levels for the first five-year commitment period, adhering to the principle established under the UNFCCC that richer countries should take the lead. Each country negotiated slightly different targets, with the United States aiming for a seven percent reduction, Russia for stabilisation at 1990 levels and Australia allowed an eight percent increase. The 15 European Union countries took an eight percent cut and then later shared out the effort differently among member states.
WHAT ARE THESE "GREENHOUSE GASES"
Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. The main one is carbon dioxide (CO2), most of which comes from burning fuel. The protocol also covers methane (CH4), much of which comes from agriculture and waste dumps, and nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly a result of fertiliser use. Three industrial gases used in various applications, such as refrigerants, heat conductors and insulators, are also included - they are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6). One group of greenhouse gases not included is chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), previously used in aerosols and refrigeration, because these have been banned by a separate treaty aimed at protecting the ozone layer.
SO EACH COUNTRY HAS TO REDUCE ITS EMISSIONS BY THAT AMOUNT BY THE 2008-2012 PERIOD? WHAT IF IT CAN'T?
The protocol provides for "flexible mechanisms" - ways for countries to reach their targets without actually reducing emissions at home. These include emissions trading - where one country buys the right to emit from another country which has already reduced its emissions sufficiently and has "spare" emissions reductions.
Another is the "clean development mechanism" where developed countries can earn credits to offset against their targets by funding clean technologies, such as solar power, in poorer countries. Countries can also claim credits for planting trees that soak up CO2 - so-called carbon "sinks".
DOES THIS MEAN THE KYOTO PROTOCOL IS NOW UP AND RUNNING?
Kyoto will only come into legal force when it is ratified by the governments of at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of 1990 CO2 emissions. The EU has said it will do so this year. Without the United States - which pulled out of Kyoto in March - it is critical that the other main industrial countries ratify to make up the numbers. If they do not, Kyoto will collapse. UK: FACTBOX - What is the Kyoto protocol?
LONDON - The UK is set to officially start greenhouse gas emissions trading on April 2 as part of its commitments to cut emissions under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol.
Here are some frequently asked questions about the protocol.
WHAT IS THE KYOTO PROTOCOL?
It is a pact agreed on by governments at a 1997 United Nations conference in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during the five-year period 2008-2012. Eighty-four countries have signed the pact and 50 of have ratified it or acceded to it, according to U.N. data.
IS IT THE FIRST AGREEMENT OF ITS KIND? Governments originally agreed to tackle climate change at the "Earth Summit" in Rio in 1992. At that meeting, leaders created the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which set a non-binding goal of stabilising emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Although the convention has more than 160 participants, it is widely considered to have failed to halt a global increase in emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol is the follow-up to that and is the first legally binding global agreement to cut greenhouse gases.
SO IT'S LEGALLY BINDING?
It is binding once it has been ratified (approved at government or parliament level) by 55 percent of the signatories representing 55 percent of developed countries' carbon dioxide emissions.
HOW WILL IT BE ENFORCED?
Under a deal made by environment ministers in Bonn, Germany, in July 2001, if countries emit more gases than allowed under their targets at the end of 2012, they will be required to make the cuts, and 30 percent more, in the second commitment period which is due to start in 2013. Ministers rejected the idea of having a financial penalty. Compliance will be overseen by a special committee.
WHAT WAS AGREED IN MARRAKESH IN NOVEMBER 2001?
The rules cover issues such as what penalties countries that fail to reach their targets will face, how they can buy and sell the right to emit greenhouse gases, and to what extent countries must report on the amount of emissions they produce each year.
The Bonn agreement set out the sanctions a country would face if it failed to meet its emissions targets. Wrangling at Marrakesh centred on whether this would be legally binding. Japan and Russia resisted moves to make it so.
A compromise wording was found which postponed a formal decision on the exact legal nature of compliance, but stated that countries must accept the agreed compliance rules if they want to take part in emissions trading.
Supporters of the pact say this provides the detailed legal basis for countries to ratify it and bring it into force.
DOES EVERY COUNTRY HAVE TO REDUCE EMISSIONS BY 5.2 PERCENT?
No, only 39 countries - relatively developed ones - have target levels for the first five-year commitment period, adhering to the principle established under the UNFCCC that richer countries should take the lead. Each country negotiated slightly different targets, with the United States aiming for a seven percent reduction, Russia for stabilisation at 1990 levels and Australia allowed an eight percent increase. The 15 European Union countries took an eight percent cut and then later shared out the effort differently among member states.
WHAT ARE THESE "GREENHOUSE GASES"
Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere. The main one is carbon dioxide (CO2), most of which comes from burning fuel. The protocol also covers methane (CH4), much of which comes from agriculture and waste dumps, and nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly a result of fertiliser use. Three industrial gases used in various applications, such as refrigerants, heat conductors and insulators, are also included - they are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6). One group of greenhouse gases not included is chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), previously used in aerosols and refrigeration, because these have been banned by a separate treaty aimed at protecting the ozone layer.
SO EACH COUNTRY HAS TO REDUCE ITS EMISSIONS BY THAT AMOUNT BY THE 2008-2012 PERIOD? WHAT IF IT CAN'T?
The protocol provides for "flexible mechanisms" - ways for countries to reach their targets without actually reducing emissions at home. These include emissions trading - where one country buys the right to emit from another country which has already reduced its emissions sufficiently and has "spare" emissions reductions.
Another is the "clean development mechanism" where developed countries can earn credits to offset against their targets by funding clean technologies, such as solar power, in poorer countries. Countries can also claim credits for planting trees that soak up CO2 - so-called carbon "sinks".
DOES THIS MEAN THE KYOTO PROTOCOL IS NOW UP AND RUNNING?
Kyoto will only come into legal force when it is ratified by the governments of at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of 1990 CO2 emissions. The EU has said it will do so this year. Without the United States - which pulled out of Kyoto in March - it is critical that the other main industrial countries ratify to make up the numbers. If they do not, Kyoto will collapse.
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FDA Warns of Link in Kava, Liver Injuries
FINDINGS
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17248-2002Mar25?language=printer
The popular herbal supplement kava may be linked to serious liver injury, the Food and Drug Administration warned, urging consumers to see a doctor at the first sign of symptoms.
People who have liver problems, or who take medications that can harm the liver, should ask a doctor before taking kava, the FDA said.
The FDA began investigating the herb after a previously healthy 45-year-old woman used kava and suddenly required a liver transplant. European health officials report 25 similar cases of liver toxicity, including four transplants.
As a result, Canada has urged consumers not to take kava until the safety question is settled. Sales were halted in Switzerland and France and suspended in Britain. Germany is acting to make kava a prescription drug.
The FDA hasn't concluded if kava, or its use together with some other supplement or medication, is to blame. But the seriousness of side effects, and other countries' actions, made FDA officials alert Americans.
Kava users should consult a doctor if they experience symptoms of liver disease, the FDA said. Those include: jaundice, or yellowing of the skin or eyes; brown urine; nausea or vomiting; light-colored stools; unusual tiredness or weakness; stomach or abdominal pain; or loss of appetite.
Kava is promoted to relieve anxiety, stress and insomnia. A member of the pepper family, it has long been used as a ceremonial drink in the South Pacific; until recently, its biggest danger seemed to be in drinking too much of the sedative before driving. Then, about two years ago, kava in pill form suddenly boomed, bringing in about $30 million in sales -- and Europe reported liver damage.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Good Friday at Livermore Labs - From Whence Cometh Our Security?
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002
From: marylia@earthlink.net (marylia)
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory March 29, 2002 Participants will include:
Carla DeSola, noted liturgical dancer, teacher at the Graduate Theological Union
Laura Magnani, American Friends Service Committee
Tom LaBlanc, Ecumenical Peace Institute
Andy Lichterman, Western States Legal Foundation
Wilson Riles, Jr., community leader
Francisco Herrara, musician and activist
Gather at East & Vasco in Livermore at 6:45 a.m. Opening Music 6:45 a.m. Litergy, speakers at 7:00 a.m. including Procession to the gate & Acts of Witness
Community Gathering, immediately following 5720 East Ave. 10 a.m. - Noon Light refreshments provided.
All are welcome who are concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the growth of unmet human need. Call (510) 548-4141 for further information.
Directions: Take Highway 580 to Livermore. Exit at Vasco and go south (right) to the corner of East Ave. Parking will be difficult. It may be necessary to park several blocks away. It would probably be well to add 10-15 minutes to your usual travel time.
For nearly twenty years, people of faith and others concerned about the ongoing research and development of nuclear weapons have gathered on Good Friday for prayer and witness outside the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. We also raise up at this time the connection between military spending and the economic and social problems facing many people in this country and abroad.
In the format of the Stations of the Cross, using music, dance and the spoken word, we will reflect on the forces of death in our society and rededicate ourselves to the service of love, life and peace. Within this framework will be raised issues of prisons and the death penalty, the misuse of the earth, the intent of the U.S. to achieve "full spectrum dominance" militarily, the impact upon people in the U.S. and abroad of the social structures we are making.
Marylia Kelley Executive Director, Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) 2582 Old First Street Livermore, CA 94550 Phone: 1-925-443-7148 Fax: 1-925-443-0177
Web site: http://www.trivalleycares.org is our new web site address. Please visit us there.
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NIRS Action Alert
National Rally and Lobby Day at U.S. Capitol against Yucca Mountain Atomic Waste Dump
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
sponsored by NIRS, Public Citizen, and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability
From: Michael Mariotte <nirsnet@nirs.org>
9:30 a.m. Pre-lobbying preparation briefing on Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste transport issues in the basement of the US Capitol (House Conference Room 8), by Lisa Gue of Public Citizen and Kevin Kamps of NIRS.
11 a.m. Rally at the foot of the Capitol Dome, on the west (Mall) side of the U.S. Capitol Building. Speakers will include Members of Congress, as well as environmental, public interest, and Native American leaders from across the country.
1 to 5 p.m. Lobby your U.S. Senators and Representative! Urge them to sustain Nevada's veto of the unacceptable Yucca dump, and to fight against high-level atomic waste trucks and trains through your community!
BACKGROUND:
Disregarding his campaign promise to Nevadans that "sound science" would rule his decision on Yucca Mtn., on Feb. 15th George W. Bush hurriedly approved Energy Secretary Abraham's rash recommendation that the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump move ahead despite weak and incomplete technical studies and the ever-more-obvious scientific unsuitability of the site.
Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn has vowed to veto Bush's decision by mid April, which then kicks the battle into the US Congress, where a simple majority vote in both the House and the Senate would be required to override Nevada's veto. It appears the House Leadership will move very quickly to override Nevada's veto, and that a Senate override vote could happen by the end of July, if not earlier. The Yucca Mountain showdown on Capitol Hill is imminent!
In conjunction with its annual "D.C. Days," the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability has asked NIRS and Public Citizen to help organize this national rally and lobby day. The vision is for grassroots activists and concerned citizens from States that would be impacted by atomic waste shipments bound for Nevada to come to Washington, D.C. to take part in the rally, and then to lobby their Members of Congress and/or their staffpersons, urging the Members to vote to sustain Nevada's veto, to oppose the Yucca Mountain dump, and to oppose high-level atomic waste shipments through their State.
Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist at NIRS, is available to help figure out travel and lodging needs for folks coming in -- contact him at 202.328.0002 or kevin@nirs.org for help.
For those of you already planning to attend the Citizens Awareness Network "People's Nuclear Waste Summit" in Connecticut from April 12 to 14, please consider swinging down to D.C. for April 16th! Kevin is already helping some folks figure out carpooling from CT to D.C., and would be happy to help you too!
For those of you who are planning to come to D.C. for the many events on the weekend of April 20th (anti-war protests, World Bank protests, School of the Americas protests), please consider coming a few days early to take part on April 16th!
For those who can't come to D.C., consider helping to set up local lobby visits at your U.S. Congress Members' district offices near you. Coordinate a coalition of local organizations and concerned citizens opposed to Yucca and high-level waste shipments through your area. Arrange to meet with your Members' district staffpersons, urging your U.S. Senators and Representative to uphold Nevada's veto.
As always, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste transport fact sheets are available on NIRS website at www.nirs.org, or by contacting Kevin Kamps at 202.328.0002 or kevin@nirs.org. Hope to see you in D.C. April 16th!
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Berenson case said to be 'totally closed'
World Scene
March 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020326-8413246.htm
LIMA, Peru - President Alejandro Toledo told President Bush that the issue of Lori Berenson, an American jailed here on terrorism charges, is "totally closed," Peru's vice president said yesterday.
Raul Diez Canseco said Mr. Bush brought up the New York native's case in closed-door talks with Mr. Toledo on Saturday. Berenson, 32, was sentenced in June to 20 years in prison for collaborating with leftist rebels in a thwarted plot to seize Peru's Congress in 1995.
According to Mr. Diez Canseco, Mr. Bush was "respectful" of the court decision and said that the trial was fair. But he also suggested "something about clemency" for Berenson, the vice president said.
Mr. Toledo replied that "for us, that issue is totally closed," Mr. Diez Canseco told cable news station Channel N.
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Civil libertarians take on campus 'free-speech zones'
By Ellen Sorokin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 26, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020326-8385768.htm
A policy at West Virginia University that limits free-speech protections to two tiny designated areas on campus has come under attack by civil libertarians who say the policy violates First Amendment rights.
The policy prohibits students from passing out pamphlets, holding protests or engaging in any other type of political debate almost anywhere on campus, except in two areas designated as "free-speech zones." Those students who violate the policy can face several disciplinary actions, including explusion.
"WVU is boxing in free speech," said Matthew Poe, a 20-year-old political science and philosophy major. "It's like they are afraid of dissent, and that makes them look foolish in the long run."
Civil libertarians and some educators argue that the policy at WVU and ones like it at other colleges and universities across the country show the difficulty of telling students and faculty when and where public commentary can take place on campus.
Critics of the policies contend that by limiting free speech, universities are sending a message that speech should be feared, regulated and monitored at all times - a message they say is contrary to the foundations of a free society and the ideals of higher education.
One group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in Philadelphia, sent a letter to WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr., urging his administration to revoke the policy because the group argues the guidelines violate the Bill of Rights.
"These absurdly named 'free-speech zones' have no place at the free institutions of a free society," said Alan Charles Kors, FIRE's president. "A public university does not have the authority to repeal the Bill of Rights."
As a result, university officials have asked an ad hoc committee of the school's Faculty Senate to revise the current policy. A draft of the revised policy will be made public April 1.
The Faculty Senate can make only recommendations to policies, but Mr. Hardesty can accept, reject or modify the senate's proposals, said Robert Griffith, a chemistry professor and chairman of the WVU's ad hoc committee.
Mr. Griffith declined to discuss the proposals but did say there is hardly any opposition to changing the current policy. "Everyone is pretty much in agreement on this," he said.
Each of the two free-speech zones at WVU is the size of a small classroom. The zones are in front of and behind the university's student union building - locations that students and professors claim are too far from that building, which hosts some of the school's most politically charged events. WVU has three campuses that are about four miles away from one another, and only one campus has the free-speech zones.
Free-speech zones are a relatively recent campus phenomenon, and there is no estimate of how many institutions have adopted such policies, said Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a nonprofit organization in Washington that represents 1,800 colleges and universities.
Several schools that have tried to enforce such policies have either abandoned or revised them:
•Administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater last month rescinded the school's "free speech area" policy after students and faculty members criticized it.
•Officials at New Mexico State University last year adopted a new policy that clarifies free-speech rights after settling a lawsuit brought two years ago by a student who claimed the university's free speech zone policy restricted him from expressing his views.
•Educators at University of South Florida in Tampa abandoned their "speaker area" policy in 1999 after students and faculty called it controversial.
Mr. Steinbach said campuses may be creating free-speech zones for security purposes. "Security is an issue on campuses now, and administrators are trying to come up with lawful and reasonable means to control, to enforce it," he said.
Although such policies may frustrate students, Mr. Steinbach said, universities like WVU are treating their students the same way a body of government would treat a group of people who want to hold an event like a parade in a city or town.
"These students aren't being put in a cheese box," he said. "No one is being precluded from speaking their mind."
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One nuclear tactician writes...
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002
From: Paul Knittle <pukaman2000@yahoo.com>
I read an old flyer of your anti nuke rally, and was wondering if you were planning any new events. I am an ex nuke from the US navy, and understand its dangers....
My tactics are quite radical, in no way illegal or unethical, and are very effective.
One method. While in the store pick up a bag of potatoes from Idaho. When at the register, hold up the potatoes and say nicely to the clerk "Oh, these potatoes are from Idaho, there are a lot of nuclear reactors in Idaho, these potatoes may be radioactive, I don't want them."
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