------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Three Mile Island
Uranium toxins found in Serbia
UK nuke watchdog weighs implications of US find
Yugoslavia still contaminated by depleted uranium
Britain Backs Depleted-Uranium Study Effort
Nuclear reactor in Iran will be built by '05
Hiroshima bomb log sold for $350,000
Jet could wreck TMI, NRC admits
Weapons Plant Modernization Begins

MILITARY
Rwandan pleads not guilty to Genocide
Seoul Signals It Will Buy Boeing Fighter Jets
Aventis Donates 85M Smallpox Doses
Smallpox Vaccine Turns Up
Rise and Fall of a Navy Missile
Federal government agrees to pay for nerve agent protection
ARMY ABANDONS INCINERATION IN COLORADO
For Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted
Drug Ruling Worries Some in Public Housing
U.S.-India partnership
Iran and its apologists
The Burden On Bush And Blair
Arabs adopt, Israel cool to Saudi plan
After a Dire Day, Trying to See Beyond Revenge
Arab Delegates Endorse Saudi's Mideast Peace Plan
Afghan mine kills U.S. soldier
Afghan Aid Workers Slowed by Mines
Venezuela denies claim on Colombian rebel base
NATO's moment
NATO's expanding waist line
Pakistan Arrests al - Qaida Suspects
Pakistan Says Arrests Three Spies for India
World tribunal 4 signatories away from ratification
Rumsfeld Reconsiders Arming Guard Troops at U.S. Borders
Soldiers in Civilian Clothing
New Light Emerges About Navy's Sealab
Senator: $39M Needed for Plane Radios
Pentagon: Military is Ready for More
Pentagon: Casualties Not U.S. Fault
Ex-prime minister, others win Russian TV license

POLICE / PRISONERS
Large, Small Airports to Use Different Security Systems
At Columbia, Police Recruiters Draw Little Interest, Good or Bad
U.S. to Seek Death Penalty Against Moussaoui
Justices Uphold Verdict Against Killer

ENERGY AND OTHER
Researchers make plastic solar cells
Illinois, Oklahoma get US biomass energy trials
Elephant grass seen as a UK fuel of the future
Fuel Cell Turbine Power Plant Passes Tests
Spurred by Higher Emissions, Britain Boosts Renewables
Energizing Turkey
Bush threatened with court fight on energy report
Environmentalists say they were rebuffed in request for meeting
Bush Energy Order Wording Mirrors Oil Lobby's Proposal
Green groups back off Energy panel complaints
Energy Industry's Recommendations to Bush Became National Policy
Energy Task Force Belatedly Consulted Environmentalists
Potomac dumping to continue
Duke wins initial OK for natgas pipeline in Virginia
US FERC OKs Duke Energy unit's natgas pipeline
Texaco Penalized for Utah Oil Spills
New Rice Research Could Help Poor
Gene Can Clarify Need for Hormones
Israel criticized over child detainees
Illegals not entitled to labor protections

ACTIVISTS
Australia braces for Woomera protest



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- accidents

Three Mile Island

Today in History - March 28
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27692-2002Mar27?language=printer

In 1979, America's worst commercial nuclear accident occurred inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.

-------- balkans

Uranium toxins found in Serbia

SWITZERLAND: March 28, 2002
Story by Richard Waddington
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15250/story.htm

GENEVA - United Nations scientists say they have found widespread traces of depleted uranium from NATO munitions at five sites in Serbia and Montenegro but the level of contamination posed no immediate health threat.

Nevertheless, they warned authorities to take precautions particularly before allowing development projects, such as house building, on the sites because of the risk of stirring up potentially toxic soil and dust.

"There is no health risk at the moment but we do not know if there could be one if you make major soil removals," team leader Pekka Haavisto told a news conference yesterday.

The team organised by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) went to six areas in the two republics that once formed part of Yugoslavia and found "widespread but low-level contamination" by depleted uranium (DU) at five.

Depleted uranium is used to harden the tips of tank-busting shells fired by NATO during its mid-1990s Bosnia action and again during the air war to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo.

"The study concludes that the DU sites studied do not present immediate radioactive or toxic risks for the environment or human health," UNEP said in a statement, adding that the findings were in line with a similar report last year on Kosovo.

The two reports were ordered after a number of soldiers who served in NATO forces in Kosovo and Bosnia contracted leukaemia, stirring fears that exposure to depleted uranium may have been the cause.

The link has been consistently denied by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which says levels of depleted uranium in the munitions were not high enough to cause cancer.

But lower degrees of exposure have been tied to other health problems, including kidney disease.

Although it was not directly part of the study, UNEP noted in the report that the WHO had also found no evidence to link depleted uranium to chromosome changes reported by Montenegro in six people who carried out de-contamination work at its site.

TRACES IN AIR

Haavisto said that there were 11 sites in Serbia where NATO was known or believed to have fired DU-coated munitions and the team chose the five most representative. There was only one such site in Montenegro.

A site is an area of some 100 sq metres (yards) around the spot where depleted uranium munitions struck a target.

Traces of depleted uranium were found in soil samples and in the air, but there was no sign of any contamination of the water supplies, UNEP said.

The lack of any trace in the water could be due to the fact that uranium in the soil had not yet permeated deep enough to reach the water table, and there was a need for vigilance, Haavisto told a news conference to present the findings.

Haavisto said that drinking water should be tested once a year, adding that the team had been surprised at finding depleted uranium in air samples more than two years after the end of the Yugoslav conflict.

Although the concentration was very low - and the traces had probably been kicked up in part by the excavation work of the team - the fact that they were present at all pointed to the need for caution if building work were undertaken.

"Based on these findings, the authorities should carefully plan how DU-targeted sites are used in the future," he said.

-------- britain

UK nuke watchdog weighs implications of US find

UK: March 28, 2002
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15236/story.htm

LONDON - Britain's nuclear watchdog said yesterday it was examining whether unexpected corrosion at a reactor in the United States had any safety implications for a simliarly-designed nuclear power station in Suffolk, eastern England.

"We are aware of the incident at Davis-Besse (the U.S. plant) and we have obtained technical information from the U.S," a spokesman for the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) told Reuters.

"We are pursuing the implications for the Sizewell B plant with operator British Energy ."

U.S. regulators have ordered 69 nuclear plants with the same pressurised water reactor (PWR) design as Davis-Besse to submit safety information after unexpected corrosion was found last month inside the chamber of the reactor in Ohio.

In total the U.S. operates 103 nuclear plants generating about 20 percent of the country's electricity.

British Energy said recent checks of Sizewell B, Britain's only PWR plant, had shown no signs of the type of corrosion found at Davis-Besse.

"Sizewell B was inspected in September 2000 and it was entirely fault-free. It will be inspected in May this year," a spokesman said.

"The type of problem at Davis-Besse is exactly the sort of thing that is inspected as a matter of routine," he said.

Completed in the mid-1990s Sizewell B is Britain's newest nuclear power station.

British Energy said although Sizewell B is a PWR there are several design differences with the much older U.S. plant.

The U.S.' Nuclear Regulator Commission said it did not believe the corrosion problems at Davis-Besse constituted a radiation leak, but that they could reduce its margin of safety.


-------- depleted uranium

Yugoslavia still contaminated by depleted uranium three years after NATO bombing

Thursday, March 28, 2002
By Naomi Koppel,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/03/03282002/ap_46800.asp

GENEVA - Three years after NATO forces bombarded Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, U.N. scientists said Wednesday they found areas where the soil, plants, and even air were contaminated by depleted uranium.

The study of six sites in Serbia and Montenegro found "widespread but low-level" contamination, said the 199-page report by the U.N. Environment Program.

"We did not find levels of radioactivity that could pose a direct threat to the environment or to human health. Nevertheless, we strongly recommend taking precautionary measures," said UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer.

U.S. aircraft used armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium, a slightly radioactive heavy metal, during the 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 as well as in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995.

UNEP investigated following concerns among former NATO soldiers and civilians in the region that the radioactivity in the weapons could be a health hazard.

"The team was surprised to find DU (depleted uranium) particles still in the air two years after the conflict's end," team leader Pekka Haavisto said. "Based on these findings, the authorities should carefully plan how DU-targeted sites are used in the future. Any soil disturbance at these sites could risk releasing DU particles into the air." He said continued monitoring was needed, and the local population should be told of the risks of depleted uranium.

The biggest long-term concern, the study said, was the possible contamination of groundwater by penetrators - ammunition tips made from depleted uranium - that are slowly corroding. The water quality at the sites should be monitored on an annual basis, the report said.

Haavisto told reporters UNEP would not become involved in debate over whether depleted uranium should be used in weapons in the future, but he hoped that the scientific findings would be considered.

The team of 14 experts, funded by the Swiss government, traveled to the region last Oct. 27 through Nov. 5. They investigated 5 of the 11 sites that were struck by ordnance containing depleted uranium in Serbia as well as the only site in Montenegro and one armored personnel carrier that was hit by a penetrator tipped with depleted uranium. The team collected 161 samples, which were sent for study at laboratories in Switzerland and Italy.

The study also printed a report by health authorities in Montenegro, who carried out tests on a group of experts involved in clearing up a contaminated site. It found that there were changes to chromosomes and blood cells in some of the group.

The World Health Organization, which studied the Montenegrin report, said it was not sure that the tests were carried out accurately and that even if they were, the results were not conclusive. "It is certainly not clear, given that the chromosomal changes are real, whether they are due to any environmental exposures - including radiation - the workers may have encountered at the cleanup sites. The data simply aren't strong enough to draw any conclusions," the U.N. health agency said.

In a similar report produced last year following a study of 11 sites in Kosovo, UNEP said it found low levels of radiation in the immediate vicinity of targets and mild contamination from depleted uranium dust. It said remaining radioactive debris could cause contamination that was above normal health standards and recommended action to fence off affected sites and improve monitoring procedures.

The International Atomic Energy Authority is carrying out a similar survey in Kuwait, which was hit by depleted uranium munitions during the Gulf War. Haavisto said that the amount used in the Gulf was more than 30 times as great as that used during the Kosovo conflict.

--------

Britain Backs Depleted-Uranium Study Effort

By Aviation Week's AviationNow.com Staff
[The McGraw-Hill Companies]
28-Mar-2002 2:51

Britain's Defense Ministry is backing a broad research program to examine possible risks to soldiers from depleted-uranium anti-tank rounds in the wake of findings by the U.K.'s science academy that a handful of soldiers could suffer kidney problems from DU exposure.

Though most soldiers' exposure will be too minor to cause heavy-metal poisoning, "the kidneys of a few soldiers may be damaged if they inhale large quantities of DU after their vehicle is struck by a penetrator or while working for long periods in contaminated vehicles," the U.K. Royal Society concluded earlier this month in a report on risks from DU munitions.

The report also warns that soil near the DU rounds' impact sites could be contaminated "and could be harmful if swallowed by children, for example," the group says. "Although only a small number of civilians will be at risk, heavily contaminated soil should be removed if battlefields are re-populated."

The Defense Ministry didn't say whether it would actually sponsor or support further research, but within days of the Royal Society's report the government said it considered a program of peer-reviewed independent research to be "desirable."

Such a study should "help set the risks to our own forces from not using depleted-uranium munitions against certain difficult targets, such as modern armor, in the context of any possible health hazards its deployment might pose," the Defense Ministry said in a formal statement reacting to the Royal Society's report.

It's clear that DU munitions won't go away, the government said, given continual advances in armor and the likelihood that at least some battlefield allies will be using DU shells as well.

"Therefore, although the MOD believes DU munitions to pose an actual health risk under only the most extreme of conditions, further research can only be to the good," the government said.

Worries about DU exposure came to a head in late 2000 in European nations, particularly in Italy, after allied veterans from military action in the Balkans started complaining of higher cancer rates. Similar concerns cropped up after the Gulf War littered the Iraqi desert with depleted-uranium shells.

The material used in the munitions has only been minimally studied and medical researchers still haven't settled on how much residue -- dust swallowed or inhaled when the round hits its target -- can be harmful. But it's plausible that long-term radiation exposure could lead to cancers, and heavy-metal poisoning can damage kidneys.

Even so, most experts think it's unlikely that cancers turning up in some Balkan veterans can be linked to the tank-busting munitions because the illnesses are showing up too quickly. And if the kidneys were going to fail, researchers say, they would have failed much earlier.

In May 2001, a NATO working group said that so far it found that Balkan veterans didn't get sick or die at rates higher than those expected for non-deployed forces and general civilian populations.

-------- russia

Nuclear reactor in Iran will be built by '05

By Vladimir Isachenkov
ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-24133862.htm

MOSCOW - Russia will finish building a nuclear power plant reactor in Iran despite U.S. opposition and is considering a tentative North Korean request for a similar plant, Russia's top nuclear official said yesterday.

The reactor Russia is building at an unfinished nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran, will be completed by 2005 as planned, Nuclear Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said at a news conference.

The United States has repeatedly urged Russia to abandon a 1995 contract with Iran to complete a nuclear reactor at Bushehr worth about $800 million, saying the project could help Iran build a nuclear bomb.

Russia denies that, saying the reactor can only be used for civilian purposes and will remain under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"Iran has signed all required international agreements and undertaken full obligations on transparency and checks ... and unfailingly fulfilled them," Mr. Rumyantsev said.

The controversy over Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran and American claims that Russian companies have leaked missile technologies to Tehran is a major irritant in U.S.-Russian relations amid overall improvement.

Mr. Rumyantsev said Russia's cooperation with Iran poses no threat of nuclear proliferation. He said a Russian law passed last year strengthened nonproliferation guarantees by allowing spent fuel from nuclear power plants abroad to be taken back to Russia for reprocessing.

"We will ship nuclear fuel to Iran under the contract, which envisages that the spent fuel will be taken back to Russia," Mr. Rumyantsev said. "There has been no other cooperation that could help Iran build nuclear weapons."

On a conciliatory note, he said Russia views the U.S. concerns with "great attention" and hopes for a "compromise that would help strengthen confidence and peace while allowing Russia to reap economic benefits."

But he also said his ministry was looking at a tentative request from North Korea for the construction of a nuclear power plant. That could generate considerable anger in the Bush administration, which suspects North Korea of developing nuclear weapons. In January, President Bush labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil" seeking weapons of mass destruction.

"We are holding discussions and trying to find out whether it would be economically feasible," Mr. Rumyantsev said. "But these are only discussions without any specific foundation."

North Korea recently threatened to abandon a 1994 agreement with Washington in which the former agreed to freeze its nuclear program, including two Soviet-designed reactors that the United States suspected of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The move by Pyongyang was made in exchange for U.S. oil shipments and the construction of two replacement reactors of a type that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Hiroshima bomb log sold for $350,000

Thursday, 28 March, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1898000/1898263.stm

Photo Enola Gay: http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/36577000/jpg/_36577831_crew300.jpg

The crew did not know what to expect The logbook written by one of the American pilots aboard the Enola Gay which dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima has been sold at Christie's in New York for $350,000.

The book belonged to Robert A Lewis, co-pilot of the B-29 bomber, and contains a minute-by-minute account of the mission to deliver the bomb codenamed Little Boy.

It was written in flight over the Pacific and over the target on 6 August 1945, and contains a sketch of the explosion.

"It's a terribly sad record. I think that affects the desire to own it," said dealer Seth Kaller.

The log sold for more than the estimated range of $200,000 to $300,000 but far short of some of the other historic documents that were also on sale at the auction.

A forewarning that the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima could be developed at all came in a letter from Albert Einstein to former US President Franklin D Roosevelt, which sold for nearly $2.1m.

His August 1939 missive led President Roosevelt to launch the secret Manhattan Project which culminated in the first atomic bomb.

And an autographed manuscript of Abraham Lincoln's last speech, which he delivered from the window of the White House three days before 1865 assassination, was bought for $3,086,000 - the record for a US historical document.

The documents on sale, 201 in all, were from the Forbes Collection, started by the late financial publisher Malcolm Forbes.

Dawning horror

"My God, what have we done?" the Enola Gay's Capt Lewis wrote in the document marked "Hold for Top Secret Clearance".

Christie's says it is a unique first-hand account of the bombing, along with the navigator's log, which numerically recorded the aircraft's course, airspeed, latitude and longitude.

Japan surrendered five days after the second bomb was dropped in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

'How many did we kill?'

At 0815 on 6 August, the Hiroshima bomb was dropped and the detonation occurred a minute later.

"For the next minute no one knew what to expect... The flash was terrific.

"Fifteen seconds after the flash, there were two very distinct slaps [air turbulence] that was all the physical effects we felt.

"We then turned the ship so we could observe results, and there in front of our eyes was without a doubt the greatest explosion man has ever witnessed.

"The city was 9/10 covered with smoke... and a column of white cloud, which in less than 3 mins. reached 30,000 feet and then went up to 50,000.

"I am certain the entire crew felt this experience was more than anyone human had ever thought possible. It just seems impossible to comprehend. Just how many did we kill?

"If I live 100 years, I'll never quite get those few minutes out of my mind..."

He observes that the massive cloud was still visible after an hour and a half, 400 miles from the target.

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

-------- pennsylvania

Jet could wreck TMI, NRC admits
Designers didn't anticipate size, speed of today's planes

Thursday, March 28, 2002
By Brett Lieberman Of Our Washington Bureau,
Patriot News
http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/10173114372541218.xml

WASHINGTON -- Government regulators have acknowledged for the first time that neither Three Mile Island nor any of the nation's other 102 operating nuclear reactors could withstand the impact of an airliner the size of those that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Industry representatives and federal government officials downplayed the threat in days after the Sept. 11 attacks, insisting that nuclear containment buildings are "robust" and capable of withstanding explosions and natural disasters.

In newly released documents, however, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concedes that even an accidental airplane crash was not factored into the designs of 96 percent of U.S. nuclear plants. At those plants where the threat was considered, design changes were aimed at smaller airplanes traveling at slower speeds.

"When the plants were designed, large aircrafts that are presently used were not in use," NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said.

The agency also acknowledged that critical systems that provide cooling, electricity and storage of spent fuel are mostly in nonhardened buildings that could not withstand an aircraft or missile attack.

The revelations were included in a report made available by U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., based on responses to his queries from NRC Chairman Richard A. Meserve. Markey, a frequent critic of the NRC, said the agency's acknowledgment shows additional steps must be taken to improve nuclear plant safety.

The "NRC has admitted that even an aircraft impact at the auxiliary electrical or cooling facilities could trigger a core meltdown at a nuclear reactor, and yet the NRC refuses to upgrade security, refuses to install anti-aircraft weaponry, refuses to ensure that security at decommissioned reactors is maintained, and refuses to ensure that foreign nationals employed at the reactors undergo security background checks," he said.

Yesterday, the agency maintained that reactors remain difficult targets although it has not evaluated the effects of a plane crash.

"Even though they were not designed to withstand aircraft crashes, they are extremely rugged structures," Gagner said.

While many nuclear plants, including those in Pennsylvania, have had additional protection from National Guard troops and state police since Sept. 11, the NRC has rejected the idea of deploying anti-aircraft weapons.

When most plants were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the NRC and plant owners never contemplated that a large airliner would intentionally be crashed into a nuclear plant. Consideration of an airplane crash was limited to accidents.

Fifty-five of the nation's 60 nuclear plants lie within 15 miles of public airports. Most are small airports, carrying fewer than 100,000 departing passengers a year, according to NRC and FAA data.

Nine operating plants, including TMI, are near airports that serve more than 100,000 passengers. Other airports near nuclear plants include international airports in Charlotte, N.C., and near Pittsburgh.

Three Mile Island in Londonderry Twp., three miles from Harrisburg International Airport, is the only nuclear power plant "constructed with special design features to protect vital areas from crash impact and fire effects," the new documents state.

However, those features -- reinforcement of outer walls, thickening of concrete sections, special fire protection and ventilation -- would likely be inadequate, according to the NRC.

TMI -- which was hit by the nation's worst nuclear accident 23 years ago today, on March 28, 1979 -- was designed to withstand the impact of 200,000 pounds at 230 mph. A Boeing 757 or 767 such as those used in the New York and Washington attacks on Sept. 11 weighs 272,500 to 450,000 pounds. The planes used in those attacks traveled at speeds of 350 mph to 537 mph when they struck.

TMI was not built to withstand the impact of a larger airplane because "the probability of an on-site crash was sufficiently low," the NRC stated.

Two other plants -- the Limerick nuclear plant near Pottstown and Seabrook plant in Portsmouth, N.H., -- incorporated more modest features to help them withstand the impact of an airplane weighing up to 12,500 pounds.

"With respect to the remaining sites, the probability of an aircraft impact was either estimated or judged by inspection to be sufficiently low such that the event need not be considered in the design basis," NRC documents state.

David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said it would be difficult to retrofit existing plants, but new safety features should be incorporated in the next generation of plants.

"The plants are what they are," said Lochbaum. "It's too late to go back and install 6 more feet of concrete."

Brett Lieberman may be reached at (202)383-7833 or blieberman@patriot-news.com.

-------- tennessee

Weapons Plant Modernization Begins

By Duncan Mansfield
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28124-2002Mar27?language=printer

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Workers began dismantling a rusty guard tower at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant Wednesday, a symbolic first step in modernizing the 59-year-old facility involved in building weapons ranging from the Hiroshima bomb to the MX missile.

The $4 billion modernization of the Y-12 plant includes rebuilding facilities that date back to 1943 and building a giant warehouse to house stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium. Most of the uranium is now stored in at least five locations around the complex owned by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The warehouse will be as big as four football fields and hold up to 32,000 cans and drums of bomb-grade material.

"It will be a concrete, heavy structure, seismically resistant. But the key features of it are designed to keep the bad guys out" said Bill Brumley, of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration.

"While uranium itself is radioactive and toxic, the real concern we have is with theft," he said.

The 20-year modernization plan also calls for consolidating the number of buildings.

Many of the 650 buildings on the high-security reservation date to the Y-12's World War II's roots as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project.

The Y-12 plant enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan in 1945.

On the Net:
Department of Energy: http://www.energy.gov


-------- MILITARY

-------- africa

Rwandan pleads not guilty to Genocide

Briefly: Africa
March 28, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-32593174.htm

ARUSHA, Tanzania - A former local council member pleaded not guilty to seven charges of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Vincent Rutaganira of Mubuga in Rwanda's Kibuye province was formally charged with genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and other violations of the Geneva Conventions covering war crimes.

"I did not participate in any killings. I'm not guilty," Mr. Rutaganira told the court on Tuesday.

Mr. Rutaganira, 62, is charged with conspiring to kill Tutsis along with Ignace Bagilishema.

Uganda executes soldiers for Irish priest's murder

KAMPALA, Uganda - Two Ugandan soldiers were publicly executed after a military court found them guilty of murdering an Irish priest.

A firing squad executed a corporal and private - who were not identified - late Monday in the northeastern town of Kotido, about 250 miles from the capital, Kampala, said army spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza.

The two soldiers were arrested over the weekend. At their trial the soldiers were not allowed to appeal the decision.

Women describe sex-for-food Demands

ZIMMI, Sierra Leone - Two Sierra Leonean women have complained that they were forced into providing sex to humanitarian-aid workers in exchange for food.

"We finally agreed to 'go with' the people who were giving us food. We had no choice," said Gloria Kanneh, 38, and Fanta Kaisamba, 29, who recently returned to Sierra Leone from Liberia, where they had fled as refugees from the civil war in their home country.

Speaking at a refugee transit camp, the women complained they were subjected to threats and blackmail and had no other choice than to accept the sexual demands of some of the humanitarian-aid workers.

Progress reported in Congo peace Talks

JOHANNESBURG - Peace talks on the Congo are making progress, but the deadline will not be extended beyond April 12, facilitator Sir Ketumile Masire said.

"There is no question of an extension of the talks. The Lusaka [Zambia] accord, from which I take my mandate, does not allow it," Mr. Masire said Tuesday.

He was referring to the 1999 peace deal signed by belligerents in the 4-year-old war in the Congo.

The government quit the negotiating table on March 14 to protest the capture of Moliro,by Rwandan-backed rebels.

Weekly notes ...

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told a summit of African leaders in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, that the whole world was watching to see whether Africa could deal with its economic woes and failed governments. ... Zimbabwean farmer Kumbirai Chikwenengwe said his family will have to endure "a very long year" until the harvest of April 2003. More than 500,000 Zimbabweans faced starvation in a nation that used to be a regional breadbasket.

-------- arms sales

Seoul Signals It Will Buy Boeing Fighter Jets
Bitter Competition Marred by Charges of Bid-Rigging, Bribery, U.S. Pressure

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28106-2002Mar27?language=printer

SEOUL -- The South Korean government moved today toward awarding a $4 billion fighter jet contract to Boeing Co., capping a bitter competition that has sharply raised anti-American sentiment here and underscored the intent of the United States to remain South Korea's chief military patron.

The government announced a virtual tie between Boeing and Dassault Aviation of France in the first stage of competition for the contract. The decision is scheduled to be announced next month after a second stage that includes political considerations widely acknowledged to favor the U.S. company.

The competition for the huge contract, which requires the winner to provide 40 advanced fighter jets by 2008, has bogged down in allegations of political manipulation, bid-rigging, bribery and complaints that South Korea capitulated to pressure from the United States. Some analysts have said the controversy has raised antipathy toward the United States to its highest level in years.

"This selection should be stopped until there is fairness and transparency," said a spokeswoman for a nine-member civic coalition protesting the choice.

Dassault, which contends that its Rafale jet is a lower-cost and superior plane, had no immediate comment but has hinted at the possibility of legal action.

Eliminated by today's decision were two other competitors, Russia's Sukhoi Su-35 and the Typhoon, proposed by a European consortium.

Boeing, however, refused to celebrate. "We don't take it as a final decision yet," said Park Hyeong-Soon, a spokesman for Boeing in Seoul.

Competition to upgrade South Korea's aging air force has been heating up for three years. It reached a boil three weeks ago when a South Korean air force colonel alleged he was pressured by superiors to slant evaluations to favor Boeing. He and another colonel were arrested and accused of taking money from an agent for Dassault.

His allegations came on the heels of a leaked air force evaluation that reportedly showed Dassault's Rafale fighter scoring higher than the Boeing F-15K, perceived here as being an old airplane.

The leaked report led to a series of protests against the Bush administration. Web sites have been flooded with objections to Boeing, and an e-mail that includes a computer voice recording imitating President Kim Dae Jung swearing at Bush for trying to sell "bicycle technology" has raced across Internet-wired South Korea.

U.S. officials deny exerting undue pressure on South Korea to pick Boeing, and have gone to lengths to avoid appearances of impropriety. President Bush avoided the subject on a February visit here and Boeing said it has asked top officials to stay away.

But U.S. military officers and Boeing supporters in Washington have not hidden their dismay at the unprecedented challenge by other countries to the near-monopoly that American contractors have held since the 1950-53 Korean War, in which the United States was South Korea's most important ally.

Despite the build-up for the Afghan war, the U.S. military flew three F-15Es from Alaska -- at Boeing's expense -- to South Korea in October to display them at a big air show, and U.S officials have helped make sure Boeing's arguments were presented to the top brass in South Korea.

"Every embassy goes to bat for its companies," a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said during the thick of the competition last year. Touting the F-15, he said, "Every senior-level encounter that takes place includes our emphasis on the quality of the product and its acknowledged track record."

The French weighed in with their own diplomatic pressure, which included sending an envoy with a message from President Jacques Chirac urging South Korea to keep the competition fair.

"Three years ago, South Korea said there would be an open market, it would be a free and fair competition based on the merits," Yves Robins, Dassault's top representative in Seoul, said this week. "What is wrong and not honorable is to announce you will base the decision on the merits of the competitors and at the end, change the way you make the decision."

Boeing's Park defended the process. "We strongly believe the Ministry of Defense has been extremely fair and transparent," he said Tuesday.

A citizens' group campaigning for good government, however, says there were solid objections to selecting an F-15, the first version of which came out in 1972.

"It's an old aircraft," said Lee Tae-ho, a civic activist opposed to the selection. According to reports here, a leaked 424-page evaluation by the South Korean air force found pilots favored the Rafale, and that the Dassault package was cheaper and offered more work for South Korean companies.

Boeing contends the F-15K can fly faster, carry more weapons and go farther than the lighter Rafale, and that the high-tech guts of the plane are revamped and as new as its competitors'.

-------- biological weapons

Aventis Donates 85M Smallpox Doses

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
MARCH 29, 2002
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=SMALLPOX%2dVACCINE

WASHINGTON (AP) - A pharmaceutical company agreed Friday to donate about 85 million doses of smallpox vaccine to the government.

The exact number won't be known until studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health confirm how many of the doses, frozen for 30 years, still are effective.

``But all indications are that it would be as effective as the supply we already have,'' said Health and Human Service Secretary Tommy Thompson. ``This is just a huge insurance policy.''

The announcement by Pennsylvania-based Aventis Pasteur comes a day after newly published research confirmed that 15.4 million doses of vaccine already in a federal stockpile could be stretched to make up to 10 times as many inoculations.

The two events mean the nation has much more vaccine on hand in case of a bioterrorist attack than previously realized. An additional 200 million brand-new doses of vaccine ordered from a British manufacturer are expected to be produced later this year, but they, too, will have to undergo testing to prove they're safe and effective.

``We hope that a dose will never be needed,'' said Richard J. Markham, chief executive of Aventis Pharma, the French parent company of Aventis Pasteur, which estimated the commercial value of the vaccine at more than $150 million. But ``it's very important to us as citizens, not just in our role as a vaccine producer, to be able to make a contribution during this time of uncertainty.''

Aventis had the stocks left over since the nation quit routine smallpox vaccinations in 1972. The company said federal officials knew about the leftovers for years but no one moved to add the doses to a federal stockpile. Aventis said it formally offered to turn over the vaccine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - but despite widespread anxiety about whether the nation had access to enough vaccine, the Department of Health and Human Services didn't acknowledge the potential extra source until this week.

``We didn't know if it was going to work,'' Thompson explained. ``There was no sense heightening expectations of the American people'' until officials knew if the vaccine was good.

Clinical trials at the NIH will begin soon to prove the vaccine's value. But laboratory testing already conducted suggests Aventis' vaccine is just as potent as vaccine the government had already stockpiled, said Dr. D. A. Henderson, HHS bioterrorism chief.

Although there now is more vaccine than previously thought, the government still doesn't want mass inoculations, cautioned Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH chief of infectious diseases. The vaccine can cause some severe, even fatal, side effects. Scientists say if everyone were vaccinated, 180 to 400 people would die.

``If we could vaccinate people with virtually no incidence of any serious toxicity ... we tomorrow could eliminate the threat of a smallpox bioterrorist attack. Unfortunately, that is not the case,'' Fauci said.

Smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980. But the U.S. and Russian governments hold stocks of the deadly virus, and bioterrorism experts worry that samples could fall into terrorists' hands and be used as a weapon. Health officials believe the risk is low.

Still, the government is buying up vaccine as a precaution. If an attack occurred, doctors would quickly vaccinate people in the vicinity, because inoculations up to four days after exposure still offer protection.

Already stockpiled are 15.4 million doses left over from the 1970s. That vaccine could be diluted, turning each dose into five to 10 additional doses, and still protect, say two studies released Thursday by The New England Journal of Medicine. The studies of more than 700 previously unvaccinated young adults found about 97 percent responded to diluted or undiluted inoculations, although some required two doses.

No one became severely ill. But one person had blisterlike lesions erupt over a swath of his body. More than a third had pain bad enough to miss school, work or other activities. Fever, headache, nausea, muscle aches, lesions and swelling were fairly common.

One catch: A few people never responded, and blood tests suggest they had been vaccinated decades earlier and forgotten. Thus, more study is needed to tell if diluted vaccine can boost the presumed waning immunity of millions vaccinated 30 years ago.

----

Smallpox Vaccine Turns Up
Discovered Doses Buy Time for U.S.

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28223-2002Mar27?language=printer

A pharmaceutical company has discovered 70 million to 90 million long-forgotten doses of smallpox vaccine in its freezers, instantly increasing the known U.S. inventory of the vaccine six-fold and ensuring the nation an adequate supply in the event of a bioterrorist attack, according to government sources familiar with the find.

The immediate impact of the discovery is to buy time for the federal government and its pharmaceutical contractors, which together have been racing to produce tens of millions of smallpox vaccine doses as part of the new biodefense initiative. Companies will be able use that cushion of time to fine-tune some of the new vaccine candidates under development, instead of rushing effective but perhaps less-than-perfect vaccines into production as an emergency stopgap measure.

"It's a great insurance policy," said D.A. Henderson, director of the newly created federal Office of Health Preparedness.

The liquid vaccine doses were produced by Aventis Pasteur of Lyon, France, which has its U.S. operations in Swiftwater, Pa. The vaccine has been stored in freezers since it was made decades ago, sources said. It remained unclear yesterday why its existence had gone undiscovered for so long, exactly when it was discovered or by whom.

Sources said the company is negotiating with the Department of Health and Human Services with the goal of giving the U.S. government access to the supply. Among the issues to be worked out are how much money, if any, would change hands in the transaction, and the extent to which the company may be relieved of liability should problems with the vaccine arise.

Calls to Aventis were referred to HHS, which volunteered few details.

"There are legal things that still need to be finalized," said HHS spokesman Bill Hall. HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson hopes to settle the deal before next week, Hall said. "Until then, our hands are tied."

A global vaccination effort rid the world of naturally occurring smallpox in 1977, after which the vaccine fell out of production. But a few vials of smallpox viruses were saved in the United States and the Soviet Union. Some experts fear that small amounts of the highly infectious, often fatal agent -- which can be expanded with relative ease in a laboratory -- may have fallen into terrorist hands.

The possibility that smallpox might reemerge as an agent of terror recently inspired U.S. health officials to take stock of existing vaccine supplies. That inventory concluded that the nation has about 15.4 million doses -- barely enough to deal with an attack on a major city or two.

The federal government contracted with various companies to make more of the standard vaccine and to begin work on new and safer versions. But no one knows whether the goal of producing 155 million new doses this year is reachable, and even that would leave the nation far short.

At the same time, in an effort to make more with less, federal scientists have been diluting samples of existing stocks and testing them to see if they are still potent. U.S. health officials have said in recent weeks that studies involving five-fold and ten-fold dilutions are looking very promising. Final results of those tests are to be released today. But even a ten-fold expansion of the previously documented 15.4 million doses would produce only half the doses needed to vaccinate every American.

That shortage is more than covered by the Aventis discovery.

The Aventis vaccine is essentially identical to the previously inventoried vaccine, which was made by Wyeth and went by the name Dryvax. Both were grown from the same seed stock of vaccinia, a virus so similar to the smallpox virus that it primes the immune system against both. The key difference between the two products is that Dryvax is stored as freeze-dried powder, which must be reconstituted by adding a liquid diluent, while the Aventis product was reconstituted and then frozen in its liquid form.

Ongoing studies strongly suggest that the Aventis product is fully potent, according to one government scientist familiar with the work. Indeed, the official said, it's likely that the Aventis product can itself be diluted five-fold if necessary, creating far more doses than would be needed in this nation even in the face of a full-blown bioterrorist attack.

That does not mean it will be easy to defend against such an attack or that deaths would be rare. The vaccine must be given within a few days after exposure to smallpox, posing a logistical nightmare if outbreaks were to occur in several locations simultaneously. Smallpox has historically killed about a third of those it infects.

Another problem is that both the Wyeth and Aventis vaccines can be deadly in people whose immune systems are suppressed by AIDS or other diseases or as a result of their taking drugs for cancer or organ transplantation. In fact, such patients are at risk of life-threatening vaccinia infection simply by coming in contact with others who have been vaccinated, since live viruses are shed from the injection site on the arm.

The discovery of the extra doses could escalate an already heated debate over the wisdom of vaccinating doctors, public health workers and other "first responders," a strategy that some have proposed as a way of ensuring that key personnel would be protected in the event of a covert attack.

One expert yesterday expressed concern that the discovery of the added doses, while reassuring, might lead to a federal decision to offer prophylactic vaccination before a careful analysis of such a program's scientific and social impact is conducted.

"Doing that without proper foresight and planning could be a disaster. It could kill people, that's for certain, and it could undermine the government's credibility," said Tara O'Toole, director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies in Baltimore. "There are very significant ethical issues involved in saying, 'Okay, you can have it and you can't.' This is no small challenge."

-------- business

Rise and Fall of a Navy Missile
Interceptor, Hit by Delay and Cost Overruns, Was Grounded

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28097-2002Mar27?language=printer

When the Bush administration canceled a decade-old program to launch missile interceptors from ships, the Navy and prime contractor Raytheon Co. were shocked. Rarely do major new weapons systems get eliminated after years of development.

Though still unproven and despite a history of delays and cost overruns, the sea-based system had several things going for it. The Pentagon had poured more than $2.4 billion into developing it. The project enjoyed strong congressional support. And most important of all, it was seen as a significant component in the administration's push to deploy weapons to defend the country against missile attack.

Instead, armed with a report from the Navy last autumn that the project was 32 percent over budget, the administration killed it.

The demise of the program, called Navy Area Wide, provides an instructive tale about the pressure on the Pentagon to develop a missile defense system and still maintain fiscal discipline. It has underscored the technical difficulties of making missile defense work. The administration's decision also has made credible its intention to cut anti-missile programs that fail to pan out.

In terminating Navy Area Wide in December, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge Jr., the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, cited the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which stipulates that if the cost of any weapons system increases by more than 25 percent, the Pentagon must certify it is vital to national security and offer a plan for restructuring it. Although the law was two decades old, no defense program had ever been canceled as a result of it.

The decision has left the Pentagon without the prospect any time soon of a sea-based weapon for defending ships and coastal areas against short-range ballistic missiles, a need that the Joint Chiefs of Staff say is more urgent than a weapon to defend U.S. territory against long-range missile attack.

The Navy's short-range system was supposed to be the relatively easy part, a steppingstone to targeting faster-moving, higher-flying, longer-range missiles. The administration's interest in developing these longer-range systems was a primary reason for President Bush's decision in December to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans ship-launched interceptors.

What has made the idea of sea-based missile defenses so compelling to some is the notion that the Navy's fleet of 61 Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers can provide ready platforms for anti-missile launchers. The Aegis radar system, introduced in the 1980s, can simultaneously track and target multiple aircraft and cruise missiles. By revising its computer software and modifying its interceptor, the thinking went, the system could be expanded to combat ballistic missiles.

Interviews with Pentagon officials, defense contractors and lawmakers, however, reveal a program that was troubled from the start by tensions between the Navy and the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. Navy authorities, bitter about the cancellation, complain about a Pentagon bias toward land-based interceptors. They contend the program always had to fight for funding and was ended just as it would have proven itself in flight tests that were due to start in February.

Pentagon officials say the Navy oversold the plan. They say the Navy made an ill-fated choice early on to focus on modifying the Standard missile interceptor used to hit aircraft and cruise missiles rather than inventing a new one specifically to strike ballistic missiles.

This meant incorporating two distinct types of technologies: an infrared sensor to home in on ballistic missiles, and a radio frequency seeker to engage traditional targets. Interference and fusing problems arose.

By early 1999, the program, which had been due to enter production by 2001, was $420 million over budget and at least a year and a half behind schedule. Fresh money was appropriated, and the schedule adjusted.

But more delays ensued. A computer chip supplier stopped making the product, forcing adoption of a different chip and redesign of the guidance system. Additional costs resulted when Raytheon shifted personnel from facilities in Massachusetts and Texas to Arizona.

"There were no technological showstoppers," said Jeff McKeel, a Raytheon executive involved in the program. "Things just took longer to get done."

Missile Defense Agency officials grew increasingly frustrated with the program. "They seemed to expect we would pay any price, and showed a sense of entitlement instead of urgency," a senior official said.

Still, Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, the agency's director, suggested a compromise that would have allowed the Navy to move quickly to flight testing, on the understanding that if the testing failed to show success early, the program would be shut down.

But Aldridge rejected this idea and announced the cancellation in December. In an interview, he said the Navy never took the threat of closure seriously. "The other problem is, there was no indication that they were ever going to solve the problem in any reasonable period of time," he added.

Navy and Raytheon officials say cost growth in their program had been less than overruns in two Army missile defense systems. They also insist their program had turned the corner. "We felt that the major technological problems had been solved, that all the risk was behind us," McKeel said.

Senior military officers continue to emphasize the need for a short-range, sea-based system. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this month, Adm. Dennis Blair, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, called the termination of the Navy's program a "blow," adding, "I certainly hope we can put that program back together."

"The requirement is urgent -- there's no doubt about that," a senior official said. "But you can't invent things just because they're urgent."

Aldridge has asked for a study of alternatives to the Navy Area Wide program by May. This time, officials say, the focus will be on developing an interceptor solely devoted to hitting ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is proceeding with another sea-based program that targets medium-range missiles and uses a different interceptor; it scored a hit in its first flight test in January.

Aldridge, a former aerospace executive, has blamed years of Pentagon tolerance for delays and overruns for undercutting the Defense Department's credibility with Congress. By canceling the short-range system, Aldridge says as many as eight or 10 other troubled Pentagon procurement programs have been put on notice.

"Now let me tell you, the message is out," Aldridge said.

-------- chemical weapons

Federal government agrees to pay for nerve agent protection near Alabama incinerator

Thursday, March 28, 2002
By Jay Reeves
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/03/03282002/ap_46797.asp

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The federal government will pay for gas mask-like safety gear for thousands of people who live near an incinerator where the Army will burn deadly nerve agents, officials said Wednesday.

As many as 35,000 people in eastern Alabama could receive the protective hoods and training. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said no money would be released until the state provided a plan for purchasing and maintaining the hoods and for training people to use them. The agency said many details had to be worked out.

The deal laid the groundwork for what could be the first mass distribution of such safety gear to civilians on U.S. soil. State and federal emergency management officials said they were unaware of any such previous effort.

Gov. Don Siegelman's office said the hoods would be distributed under an agreement reached in Siegelman's lawsuit over the chemical weapons incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot, but FEMA denied the agreement was linked to the lawsuit.

Siegelman spokesman Rip Andrews said the state would withdraw its request that a judge block the opening of the incinerator in return for the government's pledge to provide $7 million for the gear and training.

Siegelman filed suit last month to halt operation of the $1 billion incinerator.

The protective hoods, which function like gas masks but are larger and simpler to use, would be given to people who live nearest the incinerator.

The money would also be used to purchase gear for as many as 500 police, firefighters, and emergency management workers who would respond to any accident at the incinerator, said Mike Burney, emergency management director for Calhoun County.

An estimated 75,000 people live within about nine miles of the incinerator, situated about 60 miles east of Birmingham.

"Even a small accident could be catastrophic," Burney said.

While the military has destroyed aging nerve agents at incinerators in the Pacific and the Utah desert, the Anniston installation is the first to be located in a populated area.

The Army plans to begin test burns of nerve gas in September.

--------

ARMY ABANDONS INCINERATION IN COLORADO;
CHOOSES NEUTRALIZATION FOR STOCKPILED CHEMICAL MUNITIONS

A united coalition of citizens, local organizations and elected officials applaud Army decision

Thursday, March 28, 2002
From: <magnu96196@aol.com>

Under Secretary of Defense Edward "Pete" Aldridge has announced that the mustard agent munitions stored at the Pueblo, Colorado Army Depot will be destroyed using a water-based neutralization process rather than incineration. This decision comes after a powerful coalition of local organizations and affected citizens, elected officials, including Colorado Governor Bill Owens and U.S. Senator Wayne Allard, called for neutralization for Pueblo, based on successful proof of the process under the Congressionally-mandated Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program.

Pueblo residents are relieved that the decision is now official because they believe strongly that neutralization has been proven to be safer and more effective than incineration.

Ross Vincent, Pueblo resident and Senior Policy Advisor for the Sierra Club commented, "It has been a 14-year battle for us here in Pueblo. The Army's decision means that we can move ahead quickly and in harmony to destroy the 780,000 mustard-agent-containing rounds stored here. It also means that incinerator salesmen can no longer argue persuasively that incineration is "state-of-the-art" -- the 'best' way to dispose of combustible wastes. There are better ways which substantially reduce impacts on public health and the environment."

For grassroots organizations who have pushed for safer non-smokestack alternatives to incineration, the Army's decision has important implications at all chemical weapons stockpile sites. With this decision the Army has for the first time chosen neutralization as a viable process not only for destruction of bulk containers of chemical agents but also for chemical agents that are encased in munitions. Earlier Army decisions for neutralization were made for bulk agent sites--VX in Indiana and mustard agent in Maryland. Until today Army officials have insisted that neutralization was not viable at sites that have agent in munitions..

Pamela DiFatta, United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) said," This victory shows it means that organizing and building coalitions can pay huge dividends. Democracy works. If small communities working together can move giant bureaucracies like the Pentagon, just about anything is possible."

If neutralization, which doesn't emit toxic chemicals out into the atmosphere, is viable for Colorado's munitions, it is also viable for munitions stored in Alabama, Oregon, Arkansas, and Kentucky.

Anniston, Alabama, where an incinerator is poised to begin burning later this year, is already over burdened with PCBs, lead and mercury from industrial polluters. These same toxins and more have been identified in the emissions from the Army incinerators - Pentagon documents show it will take nine years or more to burn this stockpile, spewing these contaminates into the community 24 hours a day 7 days a week . "There is absolutely no justification to further poison this or the other communities that store these weapons, " said Craig Williams, Director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a national coalition of organizations pushing for safe disposal.

Williams said, "These incinerators have a history of releasing agent and chronically emitting dioxins, furans and other carcinogens. Neutralization is a controlled approach that eliminates these public health threats - it's proven and protective. The reality is that in Colorado they're breaking out the champagne -while in Alabama they're breaking out the gas masks."

CHEMICAL WEAPONS WORKING GROUP PO Box 467 Berea, KY 40403 859-986-7565 859-986-2695 (F) craig@cwwg.org www.cwwg.org

for more information contact Craig Williams 859-986-7565 Ross Vincent: 719-561-3117

-------- chile

For Chilean Coup, Kissinger Is Numbered Among the Hunted

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/international/americas/28KISS.html

SANTIAGO, Chile - With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early 1970's.

In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973.

General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The death of Mr. Horman, a filmmaker and journalist, was the subject of the 1982 movie "Missing." A civil suit that his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States was withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant American government documents. But the initiation of legal action here against General Pinochet and the declassification of some American documents led her to file a new suit here 15 months ago.

Last fall, after gaining approval from Chile's Supreme Court, Judge Juan Guzmán, who is also handling the Pinochet case, submitted 17 questions in the Horman case to American authorities. An American Embassy official here confirmed that the document, known as a letter rogatory, has been received in Washington, but said it has not yet been answered and that he did not know if or when there would be a response.

"We're pressing the case in Chile because this is the first opportunity we have had to see if there is still some real evidence there," Mrs. Horman said by telephone from New York. "But the letters rogatory seem to be in a paralyzed state."

William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger's lawyer, said in a letter that because the investigations in Chile and elsewhere related to Mr. Kissinger "in his capacity as secretary of state," the Department of State should respond to the issues that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger is willing to "contribute what he can from his memory of those distant events," but did not say how or where that would occur.

Relatives of Gen. René Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed Forces when he was assassinated in Oct. 1970 by other military officers, have taken a different approach than Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil rights violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in Washington last fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M. Helms, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Nixon-era officials who, according to declassified United States documents, were involved in plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.

In his books, Mr. Kissinger has acknowledged that he initially followed Mr. Nixon's orders in Sept. 1970 to organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the effort shut down a month later. The government documents, however, indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a coup here and also provided money to military officers who had been jailed for General Schneider's death.

"My father was neither for or against Allende, but a constitutionalist who believed that the winner of the election should take office," René Schneider Jr. said. "That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon government, and so they conspired with generals here to carry out the attack on my father and to plot a coup attempt."

In another action, human rights lawyers here have filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American officials, accusing them of helping organize the covert regional program of political repression called Operation Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout the 1970's to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled political opponents.

Argentina has also begun an investigation into American support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge there, Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr. Kissinger as a potential "defendant or suspect." But lawyers say it is virtually impossible for a foreign court to compel former American officials to answer a summons.

During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year, for instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris hotel to serve him with a request to answer questions about American involvement in the Chilean coup, in which French citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger refused to respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State Department, and flew on to Italy.

"I think it is clear that Kissinger is now one of many, many officials who have to think twice before they travel," said Bruce Broomhall, director of the international justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "It will be surprising to many that an American secretary of state is among that group, but times have certainly changed" as a result of the Pinochet case, he said.

The uproar appears to have forced Mr. Kissinger to cancel a trip to Brazil. He was scheduled to make a speech and receive a government medal in São Paulo on March 13, but withdrew after leftist groups there said they would demonstrate against him and also called on judges and prosecutors to detain him for questioning about Operation Condor.

A spokeswoman for Kissinger Associates in New York attributed the change of plans to a "scheduling conflict." But the organizer of the event, Rabbi Henry Sobel of the Congregacão Israelita Paulista, said "the situation had become politically uncomfortable" both for Mr. Kissinger and local Jewish community leaders who had invited him.

"I spoke with him many times on the telephone and made it very clear to him what was happening behind the scenes, and he was very sensitive to that," Rabbi Sobel said in a telephone interview. "This was a way to avoid any problems or embarrassment for him and for us."

-------- drug war

Drug Ruling Worries Some in Public Housing

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By EVELYN NIEVES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/national/28HOUS.html

OAKLAND, Calif. - Herman Walker is getting too old for all this worry. His feet ache from 79 years of wear and tear; lingering complications from a stroke five years ago have him in and out of his doctor's office; and he is bone-tired. The last thing he needs to fret about is getting kicked out of his apartment and ending up on the street.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Mr. Walker said in a wavering voice after he was reached by phone at the one-bedroom apartment he has called home for more than 10 years.

Indeed, no one at the Oakland Housing Authority has said Mr. Walker has done anything but behave like an upstanding citizen. But minding his own business, keeping his apartment in order and doing right by the neighbors may not be enough to keep him in public housing.

On Tuesday, Mr. Walker became a marked man. When the United States Supreme Court upheld a federal law that permits the eviction of public housing tenants if a family member who lived in their unit, or a guest, was arrested on drug charges, the justices, in effect, said Oakland could evict Mr. Walker and three other elderly residents for drug use they did not know about.

The 8-to-0 decision on Tuesday overturned a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that innocent tenants could not be evicted. Justice Stephen G. Breyer did not take part in the decision because of a conflict of interest.

Public housing residents and tenant rights advocates here and throughout the country say the decision is a harsh punishment for poor and elderly residents.

"What the decision said is if you have a guest and they leave and walk across the street and commit a crime, you can be evicted," said Anne Omura, executive director of the Oakland Eviction Defense Center, which had sued the authority on behalf of the four elderly tenants.

Mr. Walker, who received an eviction notice because Housing Authority officials found that his full-time caretaker had hidden crack pipes in his apartment, has other options before he can be evicted from his apartment in a building in downtown Oakland. He is partly paralyzed, and the Eviction Defense Center has filed a lawsuit on his behalf under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as a state lawsuit that also challenges the Housing Authority's decision to evict him.

But Mr. Walker, who spent part of Tuesday in the hospital and was fielding requests for comment from reporters most of the day, is not resting easy.

"I don't want to leave," he said.

Residents of public housing and their advocates say they are worried because the elderly residents affected by the ruling are stark examples of how the rules adopted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1991 can have the unintended consequence of punishing the innocent. Pearlie Rucker, 63, who challenged the Housing Authority in 1996, faced eviction because her mentally disabled daughter was arrested on charges of possessing cocaine three blocks from their home. Her case was dropped when her daughter moved away and completed drug rehabilitation.

The other two tenants, Willie Lee, 74, and Barbara Hill, 67, had teenage grandsons who lived in their apartments and were arrested on charges of smoking marijuana in the parking lot of the public housing. Both say they did not know about the drug use outside their quiet public housing in a middle-class neighborhood.

Whitty Somvichian, a San Francisco lawyer who helped the Eviction Defense Center prepare its challenge, said that while the four elderly residents in the lawsuit were not facing imminent eviction, public housing residents across the country have reason to worry. As written and as upheld by the Supreme Court, Mr. Somvichian said, the zero-tolerance law could punish a public housing tenant for something a relative does far from the tenant's residence.

"Our argument has always been that if you read the statute literally, you can evict a grandmother who lives in Oakland if their granddaughter is smoking pot in New York," he said.

Lily Tony, a spokeswoman for the Housing Authority, said that the ruling would benefit more people than it would punish, though she conceded that it penalized people for something they did not do. "While it may not be fair, it's what we have to do," Ms. Tony said, adding that the Housing Authority would announce its decision on the four residents in a day or two.

Ms. Omura said she and other housing advocates hoped Congress would change the law to correct its obvious flaws.

Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat who represents Oakland, today issued a statement expressing concern about the law's broad reach and said it was especially troubling given President Bush's elimination of a policing program for public housing that provided programs for substance abusers. But she stopped short of proposing to change the law.

-------- india

U.S.-India partnership

March 28, 2002
Embassy Row
by James Morrison
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-15769640.htm

U.S.-Indian relations have improved so much that the 21st century will be a "century of partnership between the two great democracies," Indian Ambassador Lalit Mansingh predicted this week.

India, which had more favorable relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now is developing ties with the United States on all levels.

"Today, for the first time, we see a strategic dialogue with the United States," Mr. Mansingh said in a speech at Washington's University Club, according to a report by United Press International.

"We have a common interest in maintaining the freedom of the seas, in maintaining free access to the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, in combatting international terrorism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Mansingh also cited the increasing military relations.

"In the 50 years since independence [in 1947], there was only one visit by a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to India," he said. "In the past year alone, there have been two."

"We now have very strong defense cooperation," he added. "We are talking about joint military and naval operations, joint military-training programs, joint peacekeeping operations and the joint production of defense equipment."

Mr. Mansingh noted that the relations began to improve under President Clinton and have grown widely under President Bush.

"The relationship is strong, robust and moving forward," he said.

-------- iran

Iran and its apologists

EDITORIAL
March 29, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020329-853941.htm

Mounting evidence that Tehran is shielding hundreds of fleeing al Qaeda terrorists and is working to destroy what's left of the Arab-Israeli peace process have made it increasingly difficult to push for "closer" U.S.-Iranian ties with a straight face. Nevertheless, a number of high-powered folks in Washington seem determined to try.

The designated vehicle for their campaign is an organization calling itself the American Iranian Council (AIC). The AIC's board of corporate "sponsors and collaborators" includes prominent oil and gas companies that have been effectively shut out of exploration in Iran as a result of U.S. economic sanctions. The board includes representatives of energy firms such as ARCO; Ashland Oil Inc.; BP; Chase Manhattan Bank; Chevron; Conoco Inc.; Exxon; Shell, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute. Its various boards of directors include such luminaries as former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau; former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala; Democratic Party bigwig Sargent Shriver; Under secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, now a vice president with Boeing Corp.; Judith Kipper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Gary Sick, a former member of Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff and leading purveyor of the "October Surprise" fraud - the scurrilous charge that Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign plotted to drag out the Iranian hostage crisis to embarrass Mr. Carter. The head of the AIC is a Rutgers University professor named Hooshang Amirahmadi, who suggests that President Bush's characterization of the current Iranian government as part of an "axis of evil" could result in "colossal death and destruction."

On March 13, the AIC held a conference in Washington, which was addressed by Zalmay Khalilzad, a member of President George Bush's National Security Council staff, Sens. Joseph Biden, Robert Torricelli and Chuck Hagel. In his remarks, Mr. Khalilzad delivered a forceful critique of Tehran's support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and its sheltering hundreds of al Qaeda terrorist operatives fleeing from Afghanistan. The speeches by the three senators, however, verged on the surreal at times. Mr. Torricelli (who has come under fire in the past for receiving campaign donations from supporters the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a radical Iranian opposition group which has been listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism) criticized Mr. Bush's "axis" reference, asserting that this is "not true" and that the president's statement "did not serve American interests." Mr. Hagel, who received an award from the AIC, delivered a rambling speech that, aside from calling for world peace, was remarkably devoid of substance. On June 27, 2001, however, Mr. Hagel, addressing another AIC gathering in Washington, denounced U.S. sanctions against Iran and Libya, asserting that they "isolate us."

Mr. Biden, who in October suggested that the United States might be viewed as a "high-tech bully" in attacking terrorist targets in Afghanistan, this time urged that the Bush administration "acquiesce" to Tehran's demands to join the World Trade Organization. Insight magazine reported several weeks ago that Mr. Biden raised $30,000 at a fund-raiser held Feb. 19 at the home of Dr. Sadegh Namazi -Khah, a Los Angeles activist pushing for a softer U.S. line toward the ruling regime in Tehran; the magazine added that Mr. Biden, in private discussions at that fund-raiser, delivered a sweeping condemnation of Mr. Bush's "axis of evil" remarks.

The central problem with the AIC-Biden-Hagel-Torricelli view of Iran is that it is completely out of touch with reality. On March 18, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is by far the most powerful man in Iran, responded derisively to Mr. Biden's call for closer U.S.-Iranian ties and launched into a lengthy tirade about U.S. "imperialism," slavery and other sins. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an article showing how last May, Iran and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat formed a new terrorist alliance against Israel - the very one that is carrying out suicide bombings today with such devastating success. So much for Iranian "moderation." Mr. Bush would do well to listen carefully to the advice of Mr. Biden et al. - and do precisely the opposite.

-------- iraq

The Burden On Bush And Blair

By David Ignatius
Friday, March 29, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33876-2002Mar28?language=printer

LONDON -- The fog of words surrounding Iraq should begin to clear a bit next week when British Prime Minister Tony Blair visits America, carrying with him detailed intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Blair will visit President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for what the British press has described as a "war summit." Blair will be bringing a dossier on the Iraqi military threat. Reprising the role he played after Sept. 11 in gathering evidence about Osama bin Laden to build public support for military action, he will make much of the Iraq material public -- probably in a speech next week.

It is this problem -- Iraq's continuing and relentless efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction -- that explains the Bush administration's obsession with Hussein. Thus far, Blair is the only European who seems to agree about the seriousness of the threat, but even he doesn't seem sure what to do about it.

(I must caution my fellow scribe William Safire, grande plume of the New York Times op-ed page, that Blair will not be bringing evidence confirming secret meetings in Prague between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence officers to plan the Sept. 11 attacks. The Brits, along with senior CIA officials, think that particular Iraqi conspiracy theory doesn't hold water.)

British and American officials are now sifting the evidence that Blair will make public. Though the investigation isn't finished, here are some of the areas that Blair is likely to discuss:

• Biological weapons. The Iraqis were forced to admit in 1995 that they had produced at least three biological agents: anthrax spores, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin. The Iraqis "weaponized" at least one of these biological agents, so that it could be used effectively against civilians or military forces. They tested devices that could spray biological agents in aerosol form, for example.

• Chemical weapons. The Iraqis admitted in 1991 that they had produced mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun, sarin and "GF." The Iraqis also tried to hide four tons of the nerve agent known as "VX," until it was found by U.N. inspectors.

What worries the British and Americans is that the Iraqis appear to be continuing a covert biological and chemical weapons program at Tareq, in central Iraq near Baghdad. This continuing program may include stocks that have been hidden since the Gulf War or newly produced supplies. And mind you, Hussein hasn't just stockpiled these weapons, he actually used them -- against the Iranians and against his own Kurdish population.

• Nuclear weapons. Despite having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Hussein was secretly racing before the Gulf War to build a nuclear bomb. Analysts estimate that he would have had an Iraqi nuke in less than three years, if the West hadn't gone to war after he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Because it involved so many complex technologies, this nuclear program was severely disrupted by the Gulf War. Hussein doubtless still has nuclear ambitions, but analysts doubt he can build an actual bomb of his own anytime soon.

• Ballistic missiles. At the end of the Gulf War, Iraq was able to hide about a dozen of its Al-Hussein Scud missiles. That's a relatively small number -- compared with the 500 Scuds Iraq fired at Iran during the Iraq-Iran war, and the 93 Scuds it shot during the 1991 Gulf War.

The problem is, analysts don't seem to know where these dozen remaining Scuds are. Even one of them, armed with a biological or chemical warhead, could do catastrophic damage to Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or any other target within the Al-Hussein's 650-kilometer range.

Given Iraq's predilection for weapons of mass destruction, how should the world respond? That's the real issue before Bush and Blair. The standard answer given by most European and Arab governments is to send U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq to find and destroy what's left of Hussein's deadly arsenal. The problem with this approach can be summed up in two words: Hussein cheats. A good illustration comes from a defector who recently provided details about how Iraq is cheating on existing U.N. rules for oil sales.

The Iraqis are operating a kind of shell game, according to the defector's reports to an opposition group called the Iraqi National Accord. Legal oil exports come from the Al Shuaiba refinery in Basra and are sent to the Al Bakr and Al Ameeq loading ports -- all in compliance with U.N. rules.

Meanwhile, other oil products -- mainly diesel and heavy oil -- are secretly pumped from the Al Shuaiba refinery to two ports known as Abu Flous and Khor Al Zubair. From there, the oil products are illegally smuggled out of Iraq by tanker and sold abroad -- with the profits going to Hussein and his secret police.

If the United Nations is unable to stop this simple smuggling operation, it's hard to imagine that it can wrest the weapons of Armageddon from Hussein's hands.

That's why Bush and Blair will be looking next week for tougher measures -- and thinking about how to convince skeptical allies of the need to take action.

-------- israel / palestine

Arabs adopt, Israel cool to Saudi plan

By Dalal Saoud From the International Desk
United Press International
3/28/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28032002-102510-6784r

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 28 -- Arab leaders on Thursday formally adopted a Saudi proposal that offers peace and "normal relations" with Israel in exchange for a series of concessions by the Jewish state, which rejected the plan as a "non-starter."

"Israel cannot keep the land and security," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told reporters at the summit. "If they want security, they must return the land."

He called on the Israelis to take a "gamble on peace."

"Blood only brings blood," Faisal concluded.

The Saudi initiative, first outlined by the country's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, to a New York Times columnist, calls for an Israeli withdraw from land it captured during the 1967 war, the return of Palestinian refugees to the lands they left during the creation of Israel, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The two-day Arab summit, which concluded Thursday, called on Israel to "review its policies and lean to peace by announcing that a just peace is also its strategic option."

But in Israel -- still reeling from Wednesday's suicide bombing that killed 20 people celebrating Passover in the seaside resort of Netanya -- foreign ministry spokesman, Emmanuel Nachshon told the Ha'aretz newspaper Web site that the plan "represents a non-starter in its current form."

The question of the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel appeared to be the major sticking point.

"We cannot accept on the one hand to have negotiations for the creation of an ... independent Palestinian state, and on the other hand have all the Palestinians come into Israel," said Nachshon.

"This means the destruction of the state of Israel and obviously we cannot agree," he went on.

Even the dovish Foreign Minister Shimon Peres expressed caution, saying there were "problematic aspects" to the initiative and that some speakers at the summit had used "tough and rejectionist language."

The Israelis were careful to leave open the possibility that the plan might be a starting point for more negotiations.

"We don't reject the Saudi initiative as such but we do not accept the inclusion of the right of return of refugees," Nachshon concluded.

But the plan's authors cautioned it was an all-or-nothing deal, and that Israel not pick and choose which parts it wanted to accept.

"It is a whole that cannot be divided," Faisal said.

In Washington, the United States welcomed the plan, but highlighted a concern shared by many observers: that the failure of several Arab leaders -- including Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and the region's two key U.S. allies, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan -- to attend, would undermine the proposal.

While describing the plan as "a positive step," and expressing the hope it would "gain momentum," a statement from the National Security Council also cautioned "it will take support from more of the Arab states if a resolution is going to be reached."

But Al Faisal said the initiative was adopted unanimously, with no objection or reservation from an Arab country.

Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said the Palestinians were completely satisfied with the Arab formula.

However, Syrian President Bashar Assad called the initiative a "first step" that required a mechanism for implementation.

His country -- traditionally one of the hardest line Arab nations -- was seen as the most resistant to the deal and Assad asked foreign reporters "What after this initiative?"

In a statement released at the end of the summit, Arab leaders laid out the nuts and bolts of the Saudi plan, dispersing much of the uncertainty that had swirled around key elements. Israel, the statement said, must:

-- Completely withdraw from all occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights and a small area of south Lebanon it still occupies, known as the Shabaa Farms.

-- Implement a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in keeping with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194, of December 1948, which says that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so" as soon as possible, and that those who choose not to return should be compensated.

-- Accept an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem its capital. This would require the dismantling of scores of Israeli settlements.

In exchange the Arab countries would be ready to:

-- Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict terminated and enter into a peace accord between them and Israel with security for all countries in the region.

-- Establish normal ties with Israel within the framework of a comprehensive peace.

Arab leaders maintained that refusing the initiative would mean "a return to violence, pushing to the precipice and a threat of widening the conflict," Al Faisal said.

The Saudi minister said if Israel accepted the proposal, it would have to begin peace talks with Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians.

The Arabs called on the Israeli government and people to accept the Arab initiative in order "to protect the chances for peace and avoid bloodshed so as to allow the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace, side by side, and provide for the coming generation a secure future where prosperity and stability would prevail."

The Arab states also threatened to end any relations with Israel and reactivate a boycott of the Jewish state unless Israel implements international resolutions, the Madrid land-for-peace principle, and pulls out from all occupied Arab territories.

Arab countries also decided to form a special committee, under Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa, to seek support for the initiative from the United Nations, United States, Russia, the European Union and non-Arab Muslim countries.

The U.S. state department greeted the news with warm, but cautious, words. U.S. diplomats have always insisted that the proposal was a "vision," rather than a plan -- leaving open the possibility that it could be the starting point for negotiations -- and stuck to this formulation Thursday.

"The Arab League's unanimous endorsement of Crown Prince Abdullah's very positive speech yesterday," was a "positive and significant development," state department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.

"This vision and the Arab League endorsement of it are very constructive and can help shape a more positive environment for peacemaking," he concluded.

With reporting by Joshua Brilliant in Tel Aviv and by Anwar Iqbal and Kathy Gambrell in Washington

----

News Analysis: After a Dire Day, Trying to See Beyond Revenge

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/international/middleeast/28ASSE.html

JERUSALEM, March 27 - Few doubted, after a Hamas suicide bomber transformed a solemn Seder into a horrible blood bath in Netanya, that Israel would seek to avenge so many victims on so sacred a night.

The cease-fire sought over the past two weeks by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the American mediator, seemed more remote than ever, and further waves of violence almost inevitable.

But there were also those who thought the bombing might just provide the vicious jolt needed finally to call a halt to the bloodshed.

In the immediate aftermath, angry Israelis declared that the American envoy's mission had become hopeless. But the Palestinian Authority hastily condemned the attack, for which the militant Islamic movement Hamas claimed responsibility, and vowed to crack down. And a spokesman for the American Embassy said, simply, "General Zinni's mission continues."

The suicide bombing added another chaotic element to an already confused state of affairs, even by Middle Eastern standards. Only a day earlier, Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had effectively precluded Yasir Arafat from attending an Arab summit meeting in Beirut, and the Palestinian leader had responded with a furious refusal to go.

Then the summit meeting, at which Saudi Arabia was to open a much-heralded peace initiative promising Israel full normalization of relations in exchange for a full withdrawal from occupied territory, fell into disarray. Two central actors, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, failed to appear, and Syria blocked a televised speech by Mr. Arafat, prompting a Palestinian walk-out.

That left the Saudi initiative looking awfully weak. It also left Mr. Arafat feeling abandoned, the Arabs divided, and the Americans - who had pressed the Arabs for a successful meeting and the Israelis for Mr. Arafat's attendance - rebuffed by everyone.

Then, just as President Bush was trying to put the best face on matters by declaring that the real focus of the administration was on General Zinni, who was making "very good progress," the bomb went off in Netanya.

The Passover holiday precluded the full torrent of fiery threats and curses that usually follow an outrage of this scale. But Israelis who did speak left no doubt that the suicide bombing, following almost daily attacks or foiled attacks since General Zinni began his mission two weeks ago, had crossed the line beyond which Israel could not hold back.

"The idea was obviously to hit during the Passover Seder, one of the most important moments in Jewish life," said Emmanuel Nahshon, the deputy Foreign Ministry spokesman. "And it was meant to take place during the Beirut meeting. So it was a double message, to Israel and the Jews of hate, and to the Arabs a message of extremism.

Mr. Sharon was reported to be consulting by telephone with senior aides, and was expected to call a meeting with his security cabinet either in the night or on Thursday.

Israeli military action could follow. But the history of the Middle East conflict also show that the most brutal moments sometimes become turning points, and there were signs that this might be one.

For one thing, the Palestinians issued an unusually prompt and stern statement about the attack, warning that the Palestinian leadership "will not be lenient towards the parties that claimed responsibility for it, and will take all strictly legal measures to bring the perpetrators to justice."

That suggested that Mr. Arafat might be prepared to take on Hamas, whose military wing claimed responsibility for the attack. But previous promises from the Palestinian leader to curb Hamas have proved short-lived.

Even if he does act, Mr. Arafat appeared unlikely to be able to deter an Israeli retaliation. Most attacks in recent weeks have been carried out not by Hamas, but by the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's own Fatah movement. Mr. Sharon has blamed all terror attacks, no matter who carries them out, on Mr. Arafat.

But at least Mr. Arafat now had a pretext to start cracking down on terrorism without appearing to bow to Israeli or American demands. He could argue that Hamas, and other terror groups, were acting also against Arab interests.

The Palestinians were also likely to put up less resistance to General Zinni's proposals. The Palestinians have resisted his plans because they focus on security and not on political talks. But in their statement after the Netanya attack, the Palestinian Authority affirmed its commitment to General Zinni's efforts, noting that he had achieved "tangible progress."

There was also the possibility that General Zinni would be given greater clout by Washington. After the mess in Beirut, President Bush declared that General Zinni, at least, was making "good progress," and "that is where the focus of this administration is."

That was before the blast in Netanya. Now Mr. Bush had an even greater need to ensure that General Zinni succeed. That, experts agreed, required a far higher level of involvement by the president himself, and a far clearer sense of what the administration wanted to achieve.

"In the past, an absence of strategy was sustainable," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. "Now the situation is too inflammatory to be sustained."

The wild card now appears to be Israel and its response to the attack. In any circumstances, Mr. Arafat would not agree to any cease-fire while he was under fire, or if there was any suggestion that he was bowing to pressure.

But Mr. Sharon has made clear he is not in a mood to hold off. The prime minister openly crossed the Americans when he declared he was not prepared to allow Mr. Arafat to travel, and his government has let it be known that it is ready to resume major military operations in Palestinian territories should the cease-fire effort fail

--------

Arab Delegates Endorse Saudi's Mideast Peace Plan

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/international/28CND-ARAB.html?pagewanted=all

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 28 - Arab leaders today endorsed a Saudi peace plan for the Middle East and called on Israel to give the initiative its backing.

"It's a new call for peace," the Palestinian Authority's planning minister, Nabil Shaath, said. "I hope nothing will be done in the next few days to dim those chances."

The plan, outlined by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday in an extraordinary appeal directed largely to the Israeli people, proposed to Arabs that they pledge as one to accept Israel as their neighbor if it meets three demands.

Those demands, spelled out by the prince at a summit meeting here of Arab states, were Israel's withdrawal from all occupied territories; creation of a Palestinian state, with its capital in Jerusalem; and the return of Palestinian refugees.

In adopting the plan today, the delegates added one point to what will now be known as the Arab Peace Initiative: they rejected the idea that Palestinians would be nationalized in the countries in which they are now living.

Lebanon, the host country, said the Arab leaders had taken a unified stand in endorsing the initiative. A so-called Beirut Declaration was read out by Lebanon's culture minister, Ghassan Salameh.

The initiative demanded the lifting of United Nations sanctions on Iraq imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and rejected any attack on Iraq.

Palestinian delegates voiced fears that Israel was planning devastating reprisals for Wednesday's suicide bombing, which killed 20 people in the Israeli coastal resort of Netanya.

"Israel is preparing for a massive assault, Mr. Shaath told reporters. "We call on our Arab brothers to help pre-empt an Israeli offensive." The United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in Beirut for the meeting, said he had telephoned Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to demand an immediate cease-ire in the Middle East.

"I urge the leadership of both peoples to stay the course and continue the quest for peace," he said in a statement. "The essential first step is an immediate cease-fire." Prince's Abdullah's peace proposal is an attempt to rekindle the desire for a negotiated settlement by holding out the possibility of "normal relations" and security for Israel. But it came on a day of fresh violence in Israel and disarray at the Arab meeting itself - exceptional even in the stormy history of the gatherings.

In the confusion here, Syria hailed the proposal on Wednesday, but demanded that Arab states sever any current ties with Israel, and Lebanon tried to prevent Mr. Arafat from delivering a speech via satellite.

Mr. Arafat, who stayed away for fear that Israel would not allow his return, resorted to Al Jazeera's television network and delivered his speech anyway. He said all Palestinians welcomed the Saudi proposal and expressed the hope that it would lead to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Aides to Mr. Sharon said the term "normal relations" was too vague. He has also rejected any right of return for refugees and a full withdrawal from occupied territories.

"We would like to hear directly from Saudis what they mean by normal relations," said Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Mr. Sharon. "That's why we suggested contacts, or that we send a special envoy so that we could learn more about the end game. Does this mean recognition of the right for a Jewish state in the Middle East?"

Prince Abdullah often addresses remarks to the Palestinian people in an avuncular tone, and in today's 10-minute speech he made almost poetic references to Palestinian lands as something that all Arabs treasure.

But the truly remarkable moment came as he sat amid a gathering of Arab kings, princes and presidents and appealed to the Israelis themselves - this from the effective leader of a desert kingdom whose role as guardian of Islam's holiest shrines means that it has long been expected to be the last Arab state to recognize Israel.

"Allow me at this point to directly address the Israeli people, to say to them that the use of violence, for more than 50 years, has only resulted in more violence and destruction," he said.

"Israel, and the world, must understand that peace and the retention of the occupied territories are incompatible and impossible to reconcile or achieve," he said as he reached the heart of his message.

"I would further say to the Israeli people that if their government abandons the policy of force and oppression and embraces true peace, we will not hesitate to accept the right of the Israeli people to live in security with the people of the region."

At one point the prince did finesse the difference between Arab and Western perceptions, saying the future capital should be Al Quds Al Sharif, or Holy Jerusalem, while the English text called it East Jerusalem. A Saudi official suggested that Arabs rarely refer to the geographic division of the city, but that the prince was in no way suggesting that the Palestinians should get anything more than Al Aksa Mosque.

"It's the mosque," this official said. "Everything else is real estate. If you go to the lines of 1967, it's talking about East Jerusalem."

Within hours of the prince's speech, however, another suicide bomber struck in Israel, killing 19 people at a hotel. Word of the attack came just as the early evening session closed and most of the leaders were sweeping off to dinner, so there was little reaction.

Officials here said that given the frequency of such bombings, they did not believe this one was specifically intended to counter the Saudi's message. But the militant group Hamas was quoted in Israeli news media as saying that the attack was intended to disrupt the talks here.

"We all agree that civilians should be spared," said Hesham Youssef, the spokesman for the Arab League. "The situation has been going from bad to worse, and that is why we need the peace initiative, why we need it now."

Arab summit meetings are supposed to be all about Arab unity and brotherhood. More often they reflect the reality, with endless squabbling and jockeying for position. Wednesday was exceptional even by the Arab League standards.

In February, when Abdullah first suggested his formula, he offered normalization with Israel. But Syria objected to the word, saying it offered too much too soon to Israeli without any pledge in return.

So Abdullah used the phrase "normal relations." His vision is that other Arab states will offer those relations once the Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians all conclude their treaties.

Soon after the prince broached the subject of peace, President Bashar Assad of Syria held forth on the subject for about an hour. He repeated the Syrian mantra that no peace was possible until the return of the Golan Heights. "If we talk about land for peace, we talk about the whole land, not a quarter of the land, not half the land, not three-quarters of the land," he said.

In the current absence of any peace agreement, he suggested that all relations be severed. Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania maintain diplomatic ties with Israel, although only Mauritania has kept an ambassador there since the current violence erupted in September 2000.

"We are asking those countries who have relations with Israel just to tell us when they will sever relations with Israel," President Assad said. He noted that more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed during the intifada. "If this is not enough justification," he asked, "then what is? Are you waiting for half a million Palestinians to be killed?"

Such moments periodically made it seem like the Saudi plan would sink amid the competing viewpoints.

President Assad joined other states in condemning what was perceived here as weak American sponsorship of peace negotiations.

The entire peace process had already appeared wobbly even before the first session convened because of Mr. Arafat's absence and, consequently, the absence of almost half the leaders of the 22-member Arab League, including the two key supporters of peace with Israel, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan.

President Mubarak said he stayed away to protest the fact that Mr. Sharon was treating Mr. Arafat like a schoolboy, while the somewhat unconvincing official explanation from Jordan was that the king had the flu.

The king's absence was seen by some as expressing his displeasure at the way the Lebanese were handling the Palestinian refugee issue, after Prince Abdullah softened the usual Arab stand by calling for the "return of refugees" rather than the "right of return."

There was much grumbling by delegates about how President Émile Lahud of Lebanon was handling the meeting, with some saying he was erecting obstacles where his role as host was supposed to be that of conciliator.

In the most extraordinary move, Mr. Lahud rejected an attempt by Mr. Arafat to address the conference live from Ramallah, on the West Bank, where Israel has kept him bottled up for weeks.

Some Palestinian delegates were convinced that the decision reflected Lebanese resentment at Mr. Arafat's role in the 1970's in creating a state within a state in the refugee camps and thus becoming a party in the Lebanese civil war.

The official Lebanese explanation was that Mr. Sharon might try to interrupt the broadcast to address the conference himself.

In either case, confusion reigned as furious Palestinian delegates threatened to walk out.

-------- landmines

Afghan mine kills U.S. soldier

By Richard Tomkins
From the International Desk
UPI
3/28/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28032002-043129-5520r

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, March 28 -- One U.S. special operations forces soldier was killed and another was injured Thursday when their vehicle apparently struck a land mine at an abandoned al Qaida training base near Kandahar, military sources said.

The Department of Defense identified the dead solider as Chief Petty Officer Matthew J. Bourgeois, 35, of Tallahassee, Fla. Bourgeois, a Navy SEAL, was the 39th member of the U.S. military killed while attached to Operation Enduring Freedom.

A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, however, confirmed that a U.S. serviceman was killed and another injured. The causalities occurred when one soldier stepped on an "enemy ground-placed munition," the spokesman said.

At least 10 million land mines are believed to have been sown in Afghanistan during 20 years of anti-Soviet and ethnic fighting.

At the U.S. base, land mines outside the immediate perimeter of a "cleared" area continue to pose a danger to soldiers and civilians.

"We entered a village last week, and this little boy came running up with no arms," said a U.S. soldier who works for a psychological operations unit. "He was warning us frantically to be careful of the land mines nearby. It was just heartrending to see him."

An Australian soldier was killed recently by a land mine, and reports of mines injuring and killing civilians are commonplace.

The former al Qaida training base where the incident happened southwest of Kandahar is known as "Tarnac farm" to U.S. forces. It was abandoned by Osama bin Laden's network when anti-Taliban forces moved into the area in November under the protection of U.S. airstrikes.

--------

Afghan Aid Workers Slowed by Mines

March 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Quake.html

NAHRIN, Afghanistan -- Land mines disgorged by aftershocks and landslides are slowing aid workers trying to reach earthquake victims in a desperately poor region of Afghanistan.

Crews trying to deliver food and tents must now move gingerly on roads once considered safe, the United Nations and private aid groups said Thursday. Other shipments are being brought in by British and U.S. helicopters.

``When the land moves like this, it litters the areas that have been de-mined,'' said Chris Hyslop, an emergency program officer with the aid group Mercy Corps. ``I can't speak for all the humanitarian agencies, but we don't go anywhere it isn't safe.''

On Thursday, the battered country observed a national day of mourning as it struggled to count the dead from Monday's quake.

The 6.1-magnitude quake heavily damaged nearly 80 villages in a mountainous region nine miles wide, leaving an estimated 100,000 people homeless or cut off from food supplies.

The United Nations said the death toll stood at about 600 Wednesday but the final toll was expected to be between 800 and 1,200.

On Wednesday, relief workers brought food, medicine and tents to the quake-shattered town of Nahrin, 100 miles north of Kabul. U.S. and British forces dispatched six helicopters laden with California dates, wheat, blankets, and military rations.

Authorities decided to distribute supplies in Nahrin's neighborhoods rather than a central location, but in a country without local radio, few got the word. Many of them who showed up at the central aid point were driven off by Afghan soldiers wielding long sticks.

Abdul Ghahir, whose 3-year-old daughter died in the earthquake, joined the line at an abandoned air base in Nahrin, but came away with nothing.

``My wife and children sent me here to bring bread,'' he said. ``What should I do?''

In the largely isolated Burka region, an estimated 12,000 people were homeless, Hyslop said. Monday's quake leveled 95 percent of the mud brick homes in the area's 11 villages, while aftershocks took care of the rest, he said.

``If it's not destroyed,'' Hyslop said. ``It's about to fall down.''

Tents and blankets had been distributed to 9,000 families by midday Thursday, said U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker. In all, an estimated 23,000 families, or 140,000 people, were affected in the two districts where the earthquake hit, and the majority need some kind of assistance.

The scale of the devastation surprised Chief Warrant Officer Sam Baker, who landed his Chinook helicopter among mounds of mud rubble that was once Nahrin.

``There couldn't have been more than five or 10 houses that were intact,'' said Baker, 38, of Clarksville, Tenn.

U.S. soldiers jumped out of the helicopters and circled them as aid was unloaded, providing cover in case of attack.

A mobile hospital unit from the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry was heading from Tajikistan, Interfax news agency reported. The international force in Kabul was to bring a mobile medical unit, along with four doctors and eight medics.

Teams of physicians from Medecins Sans Frontieres were being sent to look for injured survivors not able to make their way to Nahrin.

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Venezuela denies claim on Colombian rebel base

World Scene
March 28, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-89489578.htm

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela formally protested to Colombia yesterday over what it called a "malicious" Colombian army report that left-wing guerrillas were operating from a base in Venezuelan territory.

The diplomatic protest note, which was delivered to the Colombian Embassy in Caracas, rejected claims made last week by a Colombian army general who said Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels had crossed from Venezuela to attack Colombian troops.

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[To reply, mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]

NATO's moment

Petar Stoyanov
March 28, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020328-6566842.htm

The debate over whom NATO will invite to be new members at its November summit meeting in Prague is under way - with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and my own country of Bulgaria all in the running.

Inevitably, this debate will get political and technical. The political reforms and defense capabilities of the different candidate countries will come under scrutiny. These are very important aspects of the debate, but I firmly believe that NATO enlargement must be understood above all as a cause - something higher than ordinary politics. With this next round of enlargement, the West has a historic opportunity to complete the process begun after World War II of making the whole Euro-Atlantic landmass stable and democratic.

It is time to close the door on the Cold War, which exacted an enormous toll on both East and West. Millions east of the Iron Curtain were stripped of their human rights, their dignity and their property. Some dissenters paid with their life. (Therefore, it is unfair to those people to argue today that the Cold War ended without casualties.) Those in the West were spared oppression, but lived in fear and had to spend billions of their tax dollars on defense that might otherwise have been used to fund schools, bridges or healthcare.

What was the sense of the Cold War, the suffering of millions of East Europeans, and the high political and economic price paid by the United States and Western Europe, if we now leave the job unfinished? The sad story of the Cold War is not yet over. The lifting of the Iron Curtain put an end to communism, but not the problems it created. Today, Eastern Europeans face complex challenges as they make their post-communist transition to democracy - from jump-starting once centrally planned economies, to resolving ethnic disputes, to building effective political institutions. Until these problems are solved - and Eastern Europe is secure and democratic - neither Europe nor the United States can claim to have accomplished their historic mission.

The people of Eastern Europe know that they must put their own house in order. However, to do so they need support and encouragement from the West. The promise of NATO membership provides a powerful motivation to complete post-communist reforms.

For former communist countries, NATO would provide both a security guarantee and a source of confidence for the future. NATO membership would end two generations of a "Yalta syndrome" in which East Europeans fear geopolitical trade-offs or the emergence of new spheres of influence, and would help them firmly stay the course towards liberal democracy and free market economy.

The benefits of NATO enlargement are not merely one way. NATO is not a charity club. Each new member must contribute to the common security of all NATO allies. In the wake of September 11, East Europeans were among the first to sign up to President Bush's coalition against terrorism. Bulgaria and Romania sent contingents to Afghanistan.

Similarly, during the Kosovo crisis, Bulgaria and Romania - both neighbors of Yugoslavia - were among the first to support the Alliance-led operation against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

We created a security belt friendly to NATO around Yugoslavia and, acting in solidarity with the Alliance, prevented any conflict from spilling over into the rest of the region. Bulgaria now has units in Kosovo and Bosnia as part of NATO operations there. Why? Because after 45 years of communism and 12 years of post-communist transition, we know the costs of extremism and fanaticism. Our present and future labors must not be jeopardized by fanatical supporters of extreme causes.

As the debate over NATO enlargement unfolds, let us stay focused on what is essential.

I believe that the cause of advancing democracy and security across the whole Euro-Atlantic territory, if presented as such rather than as a dull technocratic or bureaucratic policy issue, is one that American and European taxpayers alike would willingly support.

Petar Stoyanov served as the president of the Republic of Bulgaria from 1997 to 2002. He is an adviser to the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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NATO's expanding waist line

March 28, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020328-21307642.htm

At a NATO summit of prospective members in Bucharest Monday and Tuesday, a pep rally for the largest possible round of NATO members was underway. At the last round of NATO expansion, even the invitation of five members - Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia - seemed unattainable. This week, Romania and Bulgaria were given hope by current Eastern European NATO members, the United States and others that they may get their invitation to join at Prague in November as well. The need for a Southern dimension, which would provide a land bridge to Turkey and better access to Afghanistan, was highlighted in the Bucharest declaration, by Sens. Tom Daschle and Trent Lott in an address to Romanian Prime Minister Adrain Nastase and by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who called for "the most robust possible accession to the NATO membership." Unfortunately, what should have been the true focus at this meeting seemed to have gotten lost in the excitement over a numbers game. Namely, a definition of NATO's new mission in a post-September 11 world in which the alliance has been on the sidelines.

The need to redefine the mission was not lost on either President Bush or NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson, however. "We will move to adapt NATO's structures and improve its capabilities so that our citizens are better protected against new threats, wherever they emerge," Mr. Bush said in an address read to the Bucharest summit Monday. Lord Robertson, in a pre-summit address at Charles University in Prague on March 21, highlighted NATO's need to adapt its strategy in the fight terrorism and in its new cooperation with Russia.

In what may be his most pointed remarks about the shortcomings of NATO, Lord Robertson challenged Europe to make the sacrifices needed to counter the new threats: "There is a lot of talk at the moment about United States unilateralism and European weakness. Much of it is wrong. But it is absolutely right that unless Europe does more militarily, we will not be able to operate alongside America's rapidly modernizing armed forces . . . So if Europe wants to punch its economic weight when it comes to crises on its doorstep or more widely, we must modernize our militaries. And do so quickly," he said. The way to be prepared, he said, was for Europe to make a priority of higher defense budgets and smarter investments.

He is absolutely right. Only countries that have shown signs of making those adjustments should be assured consideration in the next round. In the meantime, both the United States and NATO's current European members should focus less on numbers and more on defense spending, military preparedness and greater trans-Atlantic military cooperation needed to face the new threats posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Unless NATO redefines its mission, the benefits of the alliances' broader membership will be wasted.

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Pakistan Arrests al - Qaida Suspects

March 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-al-Qaida.html

FAISALABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Police raided Islamic extremist hide-outs Thursday throughout eastern Pakistan, arresting dozens of suspected al-Qaida members and seizing computers and other materials, officials said.

One person was killed and at least five others, including a policeman, were wounded in the biggest raid, which took place before dawn in this city, about 160 miles south of the capital, Islamabad.

The Interior Ministry reported the raids but refused to give details except to confirm the dead and injured in the Faisalabad raid.

However, police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said more than 35 people had been taken into custody in raids here and elsewhere in Punjab province. The sources said raids were continuing late Thursday.

One senior Pakistani police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the raids had cracked a major al-Qaida cell operating inside the country.

The police sources said they were investigating links between the militants and the March 17 grenade attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad in which five people were killed, including U.S. Embassy employee Barbara Green and her 17-year-old daughter Kristen Wormsley.

About 45 others were injured, most of them foreigners. The assailant was believed among the dead.

Concern has been growing in Pakistan about Islamic extremism following the collapse of Taliban rule in neighboring Afghanistan.

Pakistan had supported the Taliban and Pakistani extremist groups until Sept. 11, after which President Gen. Pervez Musharraf threw his support to the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

After the Taliban fell, hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of Taliban and al-Qaida members were believed to have fled into Pakistan. Thousands of Pakistanis had been training in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and many apparently returned home after Taliban rule collapsed.

In January, Musharraf banned five Islamic extremist organizations, some of which were closely affiliated with al-Qaida.

Late Thursday, about 35 uniformed and plainclothes police stood guard at the hospital where the four wounded extremists were taken.

Hospital employees said Pakistani intelligence officers ordered them not to speak to reporters. However, one doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said two of the wounded were foreigners, including one Syrian.

Hassan Raza, who lives near the scene of the raid here, said several people had been living in the house for more than a month but kept to themselves.

Raza said police surrounded the house before dawn and called on those inside to surrender. Instead, the occupants began shooting, triggering a half-hour gunbattle. He saw police removing computers and documents from the house following the raid.

The raids occurred one day before British-born Islamic extremist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and three others were to appear in a Karachi court to face charges in the kidnap-slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Pearl was kidnapped Jan. 23 in Karachi while looking into links between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, who was arrested in December on a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives in his shoes.

A videotape confirming Pearl's death was received last month by U.S. diplomats. His body has not been found.

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Pakistan Says Arrests Three Spies for India

March 28, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-pakistan-india.html

ISLAMABAD - Pakistani intelligence agencies arrested three Pakistanis who were working as spies for India, the official APP news agency reported on Thursday.

It described the three men as agents of India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence network and said they were picked up on Wednesday night at Riah railway station in the eastern border district of Sialkot as they headed to India.

Pakistani agencies recovered from them a map of Lahore garrison in the central province of Punjab, ``some lethal weapons and other objectionable documents which they were about to pass over to their Indian contacts,'' the report said.

Pakistani and Indian officials often accuse each other's intelligence agencies of sponsoring sabotage in the other country. Earlier this month, both countries expelled two embassy officials on spying charges.

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World tribunal 4 signatories away from ratification

By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-7602228.htm

The International Criminal Court is on track to become a reality by mid-April, claiming a mandate to indict and try anyone in the world, including Americans, U.N. officials and supporters said yesterday.

With just four more countries needed to ratify the 1998 Rome Statute that creates the court, "it is very close," said U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq. "It is reasonable to assume that there will be a few more ratifications in the next few weeks."

The Bush administration strongly opposes the court, which claims jurisdiction even over citizens of countries that do not ratify the treaty. The Clinton administration signed the treaty shortly before leaving office, but President Bush said he would not submit it to the Senate for ratification.

"If a U.S. citizen committed an alleged war crime on the soil of a member of the treaty, or a member of the [U.S.] armed forces committed an alleged crime on the soil of a member of the treaty, they could be brought before the ICC," said Mark Lagon, a legal authority on the staff of Sen. Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican.

Mr. Haq agreed that a U.S. citizen theoretically could be prosecuted, but said safeguards in the document made that unlikely.

He and other legal analysts said the court could act only if the national courts of a suspect's home country proved unwilling or unable to act.

"This is not designed to go after U.S. citizens. It is meant to go after the Pol Pots and the Foday Sankohs," said Bruce Broomhall, director of the International Justice Program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York.

Pol Pot was responsible for the Cambodian regime that killed an estimated 1 million of its own citizens in the 1970s. Sankoh was the head of a rebel movement in Sierra Leone that cut off the limbs of many civilians.

Three countries - Mauritius, Macedonia and Cyprus - ratified the Rome Statute on March 7, and Panama acted last week, bringing the total to 56. Court supporters hope four more countries will sign at a U.N. meeting to discuss the court's budget beginning April 8, producing the needed 60 ratifications.

If that happens, the court could begin operating in The Hague by July 1, Mr. Broomhall said.

The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Bush administration has inquired and been advised by the United Nations that the United States has the right to remove its signature from the Rome Statute - though the act would be unprecedented.

But both the State Department and the U.N. legal department said there had been no such request for information.

"Nations are sovereign and usually interpret their treaty obligations themselves," said Palitha Kohona, chief of the treaty section of the U.N. legal-affairs office.

Mr. Broomhall said a removal of the U.S. signature from the treaty "would open the door for the United States to pull out of other treaties, and give other countries an excuse to unsign treaties we'd rather see them in."

Mr. Helms has introduced a bill that would prohibit U.S. troop participation in any U.N. peacekeeping mission unless Americans are granted immunity from the court.

The act also blocks U.S. aid to countries that ratify or participate in the court. Another section authorizes the president to use force if necessary to free a U.S. citizen unfairly imprisoned by the court.

Mr. Haq said the United Nations is aware of U.S. concerns about the ICC, but that the court will not violate the national sovereignty of the United States or any other country.

"We are hoping that once the court is in operation, the United States will see that it is working in a way that is responsible and complementary to national efforts to deal with criminal matters," he said.

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Rumsfeld Reconsiders Arming Guard Troops at U.S. Borders

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28204-2002Mar27?language=printer

Facing protests from senators, governors and National Guard commanders, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reconsidering a decision to dispatch Guard troops to the borders with Canada and Mexico without their weapons, defense officials said yesterday.

An internal Army report from Forces Command, which oversees domestic troops, recommended last week that at least some of the 1,600 troops being deployed receive 9mm pistols, particularly soldiers along the Canadian border. The recommendation increased the likelihood that Rumsfeld will reverse the original plan.

Critics of the plan have charged the Bush administration with placing unarmed troops in potentially dangerous situations. Security for the Guard members is supposed to be provided by civilian agents of the Customs Service, Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service, the same agencies that requested the federal troop assistance after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Pentagon officials have worried that arming the soldiers would risk a deadly accident, like the 1997 shooting death of an 18-year-old goat herder on the Texas border with Mexico. The herder was shot by a Marine Corps corporal assisting in a counter-drug operation.

Defense officials argue that the duties involved this time -- inspecting vehicles, directing traffic, providing administrative support -- pose a low risk to troops. They also want to minimize any perception that U.S. borders are being militarized or that the Pentagon is assuming a greater law enforcement role than allowed under federal law.

From the start, the deployment has been problematic for the Pentagon. Within weeks of Sept. 11, the Pentagon received appeals for help in bolstering U.S. checkpoints while the civilian agencies normally responsible for policing the border recruited additional personnel.

Long reluctant to let federal troops be used for civil law enforcement missions, defense officials deliberated for weeks before agreeing last month to deploy Guard troops -- and did so only with limits on the duration of the deployment and on the arming of the troops. They also insisted that the troops come under federal control rather than stay under the command of state governors.

The decision to ban weapons and federalize Guard members on border duty drew sharp objections from state governors and from the Adjutants General Association, which represents the top Guard commander in each state. On Capitol Hill, senators from border states led a campaign to get the Bush administration to undo the conditions.

"Guard forces need the flexibility to carry out the mission, including the ability to protect themselves in the event of danger," said a letter to President Bush last week signed by 58 senators. "These forces will be in battle dress uniforms, which will make them more of a target for an attacker or fleeing suspect."

In its review, Forces Command concluded that duty along the border with Canada posed a greater risk to Guard members than duty along the border with Mexico, because the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service maintain more agents on the southern border to deal with greater smuggling of contraband and illegal immigrants.

Army officials recommended giving pistols to 405 Guard soldiers at 72 northern ports of entry. But they said that no armed soldiers were needed at border crossings in California, Arizona and New Mexico and that only six armed Guard members were necessary in Texas to help secure three remote ports of entry at night.

With other senior defense officials still in line to review the matter, a Pentagon spokesman said he could provide no time frame for a final decision by Rumsfeld.

Other military officials said the arming of Guard soldiers on the border, if authorized, would require special training and additional cost. Care also must be taken, they said, to ensure that the rules for use of force by the soldiers conform with those issued to armed civilian agents at border stations.

"There are a lot more issues associated with arming than people realize," a senior Army officer said. "There's training, transporting the weapons and securing them. Also, the vast majority of infantrymen don't have experience with 9mm pistols. They're issued M-16 rifles, not handguns."

----

Soldiers in Civilian Clothing
U.S. Forces' Humanitarian Effort in Afghanistan Draws Ire of Aid Agencies

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28373-2002Mar27?language=printer

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Their guns are hidden from view, tucked away beneath neutral khakis and polo shirts. There is no sign on the door to their heavily fortified compound. When they cruise around the city, they ride in a fleet of unmarked sport-utility vehicles.

U.S. Special Forces, the vaunted soldiers who have taken the lead in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, are also involved in a more benevolent undercover operation in Afghanistan: the largest and fastest humanitarian deployment by the military since it got into the assistance business in the 1990s in such places as Somalia and Haiti.

In the past, the U.S. military has waited until the bombs stopped falling before handing out aid. This time, a force of about 150 is here even as the war continues. They are supervising road building and school construction, well digging and crop planting.

But the nature of the humanitarian mission -- and the civilian dress of soldiers in its ranks -- has angered nongovernmental humanitarian organizations. Civilian aid workers say the military's efforts endanger the effectiveness of their longer-term projects, and the near-term safety of their employees.

"It's not purely a hearts and minds operation," said Sally Austin, country director for CARE International. "They are here in civilian clothes, saying they are doing humanitarian work. But they are blurring the lines. They are putting our own efforts as humanitarians at risk."

U.N. officials and nongovernmental groups said they have protested the military's use of civilian cover to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Some aid organizations flatly refuse to work with soldiers, saying that the military's aid efforts undermine the principle of neutrality that allowed aid groups to keep working in Afghanistan even during the toughest years under the Taliban government.

To these critics, the ambiguity of the soldiers' dress also raises broader questions about the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, a project that continues to emphasize military might over civilian reconstruction even as U.S. officials tout their interest in helping rebuild the shattered country.

Those in charge of the operation describe it as a hybrid mission that recognizes that U.S. soldiers are still fighting and dying in the name of ridding the country of al Qaeda terrorists and their allies. "We are here for a short time as a bridge between war and peace," said Brig. Gen. David Kratzer, who commands the Coalition Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force, known as Chickmotif for short.

"The war's still going on. We're soldiers. We don't try to hide that fact," Kratzer said. However, he said, civilian dress is the only way to ensure the safety of his troops. "We couldn't do what we're doing and walk around in uniforms."

Although the U.S. administration has expressed an aversion to the term "nation-building," an explicit goal of the operation is political: to shore up the U.S.-backed government of the interim leader, Hamid Karzai. "Why are we here? We only had six months to support the interim administration," Kratzer said. "We can't wait until things are absolutely safe."

Chickmotif has set up its headquarters in a tattered Kabul compound christened Taliban House in honor of its former occupants. Small teams of four to six men each are already scattered in other cities across Afghanistan, including Herat in the west, Mazar-e Sharif and Kunduz in the north, Khost in the east, Kandahar in the south and Bamian in the central part of the country. The teams are nicknamed Chicklets.

Apart from clothing, there is no mistaking the military cast of the operation. Polite young reservists with short haircuts bustle about with duty rosters. There are acronyms for everything, and conversations about planned aid projects inevitably return to the collision between the precise demands of bureaucratic forms-in-triplicate and the chaos of a country after 23 years of war.

A reservist who is an administrator at the University of Florida, Kratzer led the first wave in, arriving on Christmas Eve. He brought with him civil engineers, public health specialists, a hydraulics expert, a veterinarian, a dentist and even two military lawyers.

Kratzer's budget for the year is a modest $5 million in a country ravaged by war and drought. The U.S. soldiers on his team landed with no Afghan expertise and no plan for how to help. They have scrambled to build a to-do list.

The team has come up with a list of 130 projects they hope to start, with an initial infusion of more than $2 million in congressionally approved funds. They include a $200,000 proposal to repair the road from Kabul to Bagram air base, a major public works project that could employ hundreds of Afghans, and a $3,800 plan to rebuild a girls' school in Mazar-e Sharif that was hit by U.S. bombs.

"Money means a different thing here," Kratzer said. "We think our $2 million is comparable to maybe $20 million in the States."

But only about 30 projects have secured final approval from headquarters in Kuwait, and Kratzer has spent much of his time making the rounds of Karzai's cabinet, securing wish lists from ministries that have yet to receive any funding.

A few ground rules for the military's operation have already been established. "There are definitely things we don't want to do," Kratzer said. Livestock is one example. "If it has a face, we don't want to be part of it. If somebody wants sheep or goats, we can't help them. We don't do horses, goats or sheep."

The military also makes clear that it is not here to repair damage done by the U.S. bombing campaign, exactly the sort of humanitarian work most nongovernmental groups believe the military should be doing. Although about five of the proposed projects would fix facilities damaged by U.S. forces, "We're not the bombing damage inspectors," as Maj. Greg Jicha, leader of the teams covering southern Afghanistan, put it.

Despite the modest accomplishments so far, soldiers say the program has ambitious aims. "Everyone here is helping to add stability and credibility to the interim government," Maj. Mike Warmack said.

Such assertions don't sit well with the aid workers who see rebuilding Afghanistan as a long-term vocation and are suspicious of the military, especially as it pursues its war aims while carrying out aid work.

Anita Anastacio, who runs projects in central Afghanistan for Mercy Corps International, said the confusion about the U.S. military's intent has been a concern since the bombing campaign started in October, when the military dropped yellow cluster bombs on Afghanistan while other planes rained down yellow packages of ready-to-eat meals for the famine-struck population.

Anastacio said that when she confronted Kratzer at a meeting last month, he told her that wearing uniforms would make humanitarian work impossible. He also said that the soldiers were instructed to carry a document, translated into Dari, identifying them as members of the military. She said she told him: "This is a country where 80 percent of the people can't read and write. It's just not clear to everyone who you are."

Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers are not required to wear uniforms at all times but are obliged to carry their weapons openly to distinguish themselves from civilians.

Afghans say they don't care whether the soldiers wear uniforms but contend the U.S. humanitarian program has been inappropriate in other ways. It is already shaping up as a clash between the expectations generated by American cash and the limits of a federally funded program with little of that money to spend.

According to several top Afghan officials, the U.S. aid is too slow in coming and modest in scope to lend credibility to Karzai's administration. "They just come and ask questions and make promises," said the agriculture minister, S. Hussain Anwari. "But we've received nothing so far; it's just words."

Anwari said he was still waiting for a single dollar to help the spring planting, which should be 90 percent finished by now. Kratzer called spring planting "a top priority."

Then there is the case of the 100 wells.

The deputy minister of rural rehabilitation and development, Mohammed Naim Nazari, told Kratzer the military should help dig 1 million wells to cope with the effects of the drought. Kratzer agreed to dig 100.

"Of course it's not enough, especially during these years of drought," Nazari said. "It's not enough, even for a small area."

By the time Kratzer came calling, Nazari said he had already met with 70 or so Westerners who wanted to help -- U.N. officials, foreign diplomats and aid groups. "The Americans came at the end," Nazari said.

"In fact, none of the money from any foreigners has come through yet," Nazari said. "People had high hopes after the Taliban that the foreigners would help us rehabilitate the country. But we are slow, we are late. Now people are feeling disappointed and frustrated."

Over a cup of coffee in Taliban House, Capt. Greg Johnson hinted at the complexities involved when the military engages in humanitarian projects. A lawyer in the 3rd Army's judge advocate corps, Johnson is responsible for ensuring compliance with U.S. law in a country where gunmen rule and courts don't exist.

He spends his days worrying about dealing in Afghanistan's all-cash economy and how to get financial references for businessmen operating out of mud offices. He combs the fine print of proposals to ensure they "satisfy a basic humanitarian need -- food, shelter, education," and "no-goes" proposals that don't pass muster. Anything that smacks of "nation-building," he said, earns a "non-concur," including a request for vehicles to run the Kabul International Airport.

And those are the simple issues.

Asked about how the military guards against child labor, which is a regular feature of life here and a major problem faced by the international aid groups, he said, "Well, a typical contract provision requires our contractors to comply with federal law as it relates to fair labor practices, and that would certainly include child labor."

But, he said, "it would be hard to police something like that."

Equally troublesome is the question of federal nondiscrimination law, which requires that contractors don't discriminate on the basis of race, sex or ethnicity. That may be a practical impossibility in Afghanistan, with its tribal rivalries among the Pashtun and Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek.

Johnson said the teams in the field are instructed to get "verbal assurance" that everyone will be welcome to benefit from the aid. In the end, he said, discrimination may be "the lesser of two evils" if the alternative is no aid at all.

----

New Light Emerges About Navy's Sealab

By Seth Hettena
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31654-2002Mar28?language=printer

SAN DIEGO -- History has not been kind to the men who proved that humans could live and work at the bottom of the sea.

In the 1960s, the Navy sent teams of divers to live for weeks on the ocean floor in three successive habitats known as SeaLab. It was a daring series of experiments, paralleling the nation's push to get a man on the moon.

By most accounts, SeaLab ended in failure with the death of one of its participants. But in a little-known chapter now coming to light, the undersea work that began at SeaLab continued in secret and eventually helped yield major Cold War espionage successes.

"The world in general thinks the Navy failed," said Jack Tomsky, 82, the officer in charge of SeaLab's third and final mission. "But we didn't fail. We just took it to another level."

The dozens of SeaLab veterans, who met earlier this month in San Diego for a gathering that takes place every other year, hope their achievement will be recognized even as their ranks dwindle.

"People are dying off all the time," said Walt Mazzone, 84, a retired Navy captain and project officer on the first SeaLab off the coast of Bermuda.

Although a military oath prevents SeaLab participants from describing much of their work, some details have been unclassified. Some emerged in "Blind Man's Bluff," a 1998 bestselling account of Cold War submarine espionage.

In 1971, a specially-designed submarine, the USS Halibut, reached the floor of the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk. Divers, using work pioneered at SeaLab, ventured into the depths and retrieved Soviet test missiles. They also installed a tap on a phone cable that gave U.S. intelligence officials an inside look at the Soviet Navy.

"We proved it could be done," Tomsky said.

Details of the Navy's Okhotsk cable-tapping operations emerged after the arrest of a former employee of the National Security Agency who sold the secret to the Soviets. But SeaLab's role in the affair has remained classified until recently and the full story has never been told.

"It was a very significant project," said Gary E. Weir of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, who specializes in submarine and anti-submarine history. "It played a role in the Cold War once the Navy discovered the possibility of reaching the very deep ocean."

The SeaLab program began as an expedition to uncharted realms: Could a man live on the ocean floor for long periods of time?

Life on the sea floor presented a daunting challenge. Hundreds of feet below the waves, the weight of sea water exerts huge forces, compressing air down to a fraction of its volume on the surface. A single lungful of air at a depth of 300 feet contains 10 times the surface levels of oxygen and nitrogen. At those levels, nitrogen acts like a drug and oxygen becomes toxic.

But the Navy had developed "saturation diving" using a mix of mostly helium, which is not toxic, and small amounts of oxygen that allowed divers to go to new depths.

In 1964, SeaLab I was lowered off the coast of Bermuda to find out if life could be sustained on the helium-oxygen mix. An approaching tropical storm ended the experiment after only 11 days.

SeaLab II was more ambitious. The 57-by-12-foot habitat, lowered to a depth of 205 feet off the coast of San Diego the following year, rested on skids at an angle, earning it the nickname "The Tiltin' Hilton." More modern conveniences were added, such as hot showers and refrigeration.

A bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy ferried supplies from the surface to the so-called aquanauts below.

"It's just like living on the surface except you can look out a window and see seaweed and fish instead of trees and birds," said Scott Carpenter, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, who spent a record 30 days living and working in SeaLab II.

The helium left the aquanauts sounding like Daffy Duck, and on a call to the White House an operator was befuddled by Carpenter's voice. But President Lyndon Johnson sounds unfazed in a recording.

SeaLab III in 1969 was to be the most ambitious of the three missions, operating at a depth of 600 feet off San Clemente Island.

It was also the most secret. SeaLab III's true purpose was to test a system that would allow divers to exit a submarine, walk on the sea floor and retrieve objects, said John Craven, a former Navy scientist who oversaw classified work at SeaLab. To that end, it succeeded, he said.

But the program had unforeseen problems. Diver Berry Cannon died after going down wearing equipment that lacked the chemical needed to remove carbon dioxide. SeaLab effectively ended with his death.

The notion that SeaLab had failed "turned out to be a perfect cover to establish a major program of submarine intelligence using that technology," Craven said. "To do that, we couldn't announce to people that SeaLab was successful."

But SeaLab's surviving members hope the program will be remembered for being an underwater pioneer. Today, divers going far below the surface to build the oil industry or explore a shipwreck owe a debt to SeaLab.

Carpenter, 76, the second American to orbit the Earth, said he preferred his experience on the ocean floor to his time in space.

"In the overall scheme of things, it's the underdog in terms of funding and public interest," he said. "They're both very important explorations. One is much more glorious than the other. Both have tremendous potential."

On the Net:
Scott Carpenter's phone call with Lyndon Johnson, /www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/991015.stories.html
SeaLab, www.onr.navy.mil/focus/blowballast/people/habitats2.htm

--------

Senator: $39M Needed for Plane Radios

March 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Military-Radios.html

WASHINGTON -- F-15 fighter jets flying combat air patrols over the United States as part of homeland defense must have radios that can communicate directly with any commercial airliner deemed suspicious, Sen. Charles Grassley says.

Because of different frequencies used by F-15s and commercial airlines' radios, communication now is accomplished by relay through ground controllers, he said in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense panel.

``A few short seconds and a miscommunication could lead to a tragic situation,'' Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote the subcommittee chairman, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and the top Republican, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. His office released the March 20 letter on Thursday.

Grassley asked that $39 million -- the cost estimated by the Air Force -- be included in an upcoming spending bill to equip 583 of the F-15s with such radios.

Airlines communicate on the Very High Frequency, or VHF, band, while the F-15s communicate on the Ultra High Frequency, or UHF, band, and do not carry the VHF radios needed to talk to the civilian aircraft, Grassley wrote.

``We need to find a way to ensure that these two planes can talk to one another,'' Grassley said in a statement Thursday. ``Funding to make certain that no commercial airliners are diverted, or tragically, terminated, should be of utmost importance for homeland security.''

The F-15s have been assigned to intercept commercial airliners that are identified or suspected of being under terrorist control.

``If hostile intent is determined, the interceptor acting through its chain of command, may be ordered to direct the airliner to an available airfield or, in the extreme case, to terminate the airliner's flight,'' Grassley noted.

Lacking the ability to contact the airliner directly, ``communications are accomplished in an indirect way, by relay through ground controllers,'' Grassley wrote. ``This can be cumbersome, time consuming, and subject to error.''

There was no immediate reaction to the letter from Inouye or Stevens.

--------

Pentagon: Military is Ready for More

March 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Readiness.html

WASHINGTON -- America's top military leaders said Thursday that despite the war on terrorism and other pressures on U.S. forces around the world, the Pentagon will be able to take on any additional mission that President Bush orders.

``You can be absolutely certain that to the extent that the United States of America decides to undertake an activity, that we will be capable of doing it,'' said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

``We'll be ready to do whatever the president asks us to do,'' Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference with Rumsfeld.

They were responding to reporter's questions about assertions by U.S. military commanders in recent congressional testimony that they didn't have the people and other assets to do all they needed to do.

Myers said that it's true the Pentagon in recent months has assigned resources based on a different set of priorities than it used before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America.

``And so, some ... commanders might feel they don't have everything they need to do everything they want to do,'' Myers said.

He said the decisions made have been appropriate.

Commanders for U.S. forces in the Pacific and Europe were asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week whether they had what it would take to carry out all current operations as well as possible military action against Iraq.

``We do not have adequate forces to carry out our missions for the Pacific if the operations in the Central Command (Afghanistan) continue at their recent past and current pace,'' Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief of the Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee.

Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, commander in chief of the European Command, gave a similar response.

``The answer to your question as you posed it is: I do not have the forces in EUCOM today to carry out these missions,'' he said, adding that he would have to go back to Myers and Rumsfeld to ask for more and that they would have to make more choices.

A week before that, another top general told the same committee hearing that an increase in forces is needed to keep up with the pace of fighting in Afghanistan, protecting the homeland and other efforts.

``They're tired, sir,'' Army Gen. William F. Kernan, commander in chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, told the same committee. ``We are busy. We are busier than we have ever been.''

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., noted that leaders of the four military services have indicated they need a total of 51,400 more people: The Army, 40,000; Air Force, 6,000; Marines, 2,400, and Navy, 3,000. The current cap on Army personnel is 480,000; Air Force 358,800; Marines 172,600, and Navy, 376,000.

----

Pentagon: Casualties Not U.S. Fault

By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press Writer
MARCH 29, 2002
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=AFGHAN%2dUS%2dMILITARY

WASHINGTON (AP) - The first U.S. soldier killed during the Operation Anaconda assault on al-Qaida this month in Afghanistan may have been hit by friendly fire, officials disclosed Friday.

Previously, it had been thought that the soldier, Army Chief Warrant Officer Stanley L. Harriman, 34, of Wade, N.C., was killed in an enemy attack March 2 on a convoy of U.S. and Afghan forces at the beginning of the operation in eastern Afghanistan's Shah-e-kot valley.

But war commander Gen. Tommy Franks said Friday that he asked for an investigation after noticing that an AC-130 gunship reported hitting an enemy convoy in the same region at about the same time.

``The coincidence of the timing of the AC-130 strike and the strike on that convoy were in my view sufficient to cause me to ask the question,'' Franks told a Pentagon press conference.

Franks' disclosure came as part of report making public some of the findings on 10 cases of friendly-fire and civilian casualties since the war in Afghanistan began nearly six months ago.

The report confirmed that U.S. communications and procedural errors resulted in several other friendly-fire incidents causing the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan. But it said the United States was not at fault in several other incidents that harmed innocent civilians.

One was a Jan. 23 raid on two suspected enemy compounds in which U.S. troops killed 16 and captured 27 who later turned out to be neither al-Qaida nor Taliban. The 27 were later released.

``The investigation concluded that there were no systemic errors in the targeting process, mission planning or mission execution,'' according to the report.

``The fact is we're never going to be able to absolutely eradicate the loss of life - and in some cases the loss of the wrong life - when we are engaged in these kinds of operations,'' Franks said, discussing the case at the briefing.

``If we're honest and we're sincere, we want to be lifelong learners from each one of these incidents,'' Franks said.

On other matters, Franks said U.S. officials continue to receive hundreds of tips on Osama bin Laden's possible whereabouts and check them out. None has proved fruitful, he said.

``I have not seen anything that (indicates that) if we'd only been a little quicker, we'd have had him,'' Franks said.

Franks also disputed reports that large numbers of al-Qaida fighters had escaped into Pakistan after Operation Anaconda. ``I wouldn't buy the numbers,'' he said.

Because U.S. and allied forces were encircling the area during the U.S. assault to prevent escape, Franks called it ``unfeasible'' that large numbers of enemy forces had managed to get away.

``But small numbers - sure,'' the war commander said.

On another issue, Franks said that U.S. ``assets'' were involved in raids inside Pakistan this week that resulted in the capture of several suspected extremists, although he said no U.S. military troops were involved. That indicated law-enforcement or intelligence officials might have been involved, but U.S. officials have refused comment.

``I think there was cooperation between assets of our government and assets of the (Pakistani) government,'' Franks said. ``I don't think it would be appropriate for me'' to comment further.

Franks also said he had never talked with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf about the possibility that U.S. troops might cross into that country to search for al-Qaida fighters.

But he added: ``The relationship we have had with Pakistan has not foreclosed the possibility of anything.''

He also denied he is building up forces in Kuwait as a prelude to attacking Iraq, saying troops there are a ``hedge against miscalculation.'' U.S. officials have said they wanted to ensure they had enough forces in the area in case Iraq decided to invade Kuwait.

On the civilian casualties report, the military also said it had determined there was no evidence of wrongdoing involving several detainees who reported they had been mistreated by U.S. forces while in custody in Afghanistan. The people detained in January at Hazar Qadam had injuries that ``were not serious or life-threatening and were consistent with what might be expected from the application of force reasonably necessary to secure them,'' the report found.

The U.S. report reiterated that U.S. procedural errors caused a friendly-fire incident that killed five Americans troops Nov. 26. Another friendly-fire incident Dec. 5 that killed three U.S. military personnel remains under review.

Neither Afghan nor U.S. authorities have calculated Afghanistan's civilian death toll in the war on terrorism. Although estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands, a review by The Associated Press suggests the toll may be in the mid-hundreds, a figure reached by examining hospital records, visiting bomb sites and interviewing witnesses and officials.

-------- propaganda wars

Ex-prime minister, others win Russian TV license

World Scene
March 28, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-89489578.htm

MOSCOW - A Russian commission awarded a TV license yesterday to an unusual alliance of political heavyweights and journalists seeking to preserve an independent voice on the country's increasingly state-dominated airwaves.

The license became available after Russia's only major nongovernment broadcaster, TV6, was forced off the air in a complicated legal battle with a minority shareholder that had ties to the government.

A nine-member federal commission voted to give the TV license to a team including former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Large, Small Airports to Use Different Security Systems

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28326-2002Mar27?language=printer

While the nation's bigger airports will be getting expensive X-ray machines to scan every piece of luggage for explosives by the end of the year, many smaller airports will rely on less costly equipment that critics describe as less sophisticated.

Smaller airports, such as Norfolk International Airport in Virginia, will use trace-detection systems -- equipment that tests only parts of the outside surface of a piece of luggage for residue of explosive substances, a Transportation Department official said yesterday.

By contrast, bigger airports will use both the trace-detection equipment and the bulky conveyor-belt machines that scan for explosives with enhanced X-ray images of the luggage -- both inside and outside.

When the aviation security act was passed in November, requiring that all luggage be checked for explosives by this Dec. 31, many aviation experts and members of Congress assumed the deadline would be met by using the X-ray machines at all airports. But that has turned out to be a tall order, requiring the installation of more than 2,000 X-ray machines in 429 U.S. airports, at a cost of about $1 million per machine. It has since become clear that the manufacturers could not turn out enough of the machines in time to meet the deadline.

Additionally, each X-ray machine is the size of a minivan and weighs several tons, causing airport officials to conclude that they would need to reinforce many floors or reconfigure ticket counters in order to make room for them.

So the Transportation Security Administration, the agency in charge of overhauling airport security, is conducting trials of the much smaller trace-detection machines -- which cost $40,000 each -- at airports in Salt Lake City and Norfolk. Although the trials are continuing, officials have decided the equipment is good enough to be relied on at smaller airports, said Michael P. Jackson, a deputy secretary in the Transportation Department, which oversees the TSA. "We need both of them [X-ray and trace-detection machines] to make it work both because it would be difficult, frankly, impossible, to get [the X-ray machines] into every single place," Jackson said. He said the TSA would decide the mix of equipment used at each airport over the next several weeks and the technology will depend on a variety of factors, including airport layout and volume of passengers. The TSA has not decided how many or which airports will get only the trace-detection equipment, he said.

"There is no final plan yet," he said.

Many airports already use the trace-detection machines occasionally to scan carry-on luggage.

Trace-detection machines are so named because they can detect a millionth of a gram of chemicals used in explosives. Typically, a security screener rubs the outside of a bag, such as a lock or handle or zipper, with a cotton swab and then inserts the swab into a machine that heats the swab, turning the sample into vapors. The machine reads these vapors and can detect certain chemicals.

"Explosives by their nature are very sticky," said Brook Miller, vice president of Warren, N.J.-based Barringer Instruments Inc., one manufacturer of the machines. "You touch them, you wash your hands 20 times and you will still have some residue on your hands."

But some security experts warn that relying on trace detection as the sole means to screen luggage at some airports would be, in effect, skirting the law.

"If a terrorist is extra careful . . . they'll never detect it" using trace detection because it only involves swabbing the outside of the bag, said Billie Vincent, former associate director for security at the Federal Aviation Administration. The TSA "know[s] full well what they're doing is not a secure system."

Capt. Edmond Soliday, who retired in November as a vice president of safety and security at United Airlines, said trace detection is imperfect but perhaps the best short-term way to meet the deadline.

"I don't think I could ever agree it's the right long-term solution," Soliday said. "We all have known that there was no way to get those [X-ray] machines at all the airports by the end of the year. Even if you could manufacture them, where are you going to put them?"

Executives at Barringer and another manufacturer, Ion Track Systems Inc. of Wilmington, Mass., said their trace-detection equipment works best with other security methods, and while it is not perfect, neither are the X-ray machines. The X-ray machines "do what they've been designed to do, but the bar is fairly low," said Barringer's Miller, noting the machines' high false-alarm rate.

The DOT's Jackson said both technologies have strengths and weaknesses and "are good to do the job."

"We're not going to put equipment in [the airports] that we think is not an appropriate technology match for the job," he said.

In Salt Lake City, screeners are swabbing bags at the curbside check-in and at ticket counters, sometimes using one swab for several bags checked by one passenger and other times using one swab for an entire family's bags, according to Tim Campbell, executive director of the airport there.

In Norfolk, an airport that handles 3 million passengers annually, screeners are also swabbing passenger's palms to check for explosives, according to airport director Kenneth Scott.

Although trace detection required the TSA to hire more than 380 additional screeners, more than doubling the airport's current screener workforce, Campbell said the swabbing did not delay a single flight.

"Airlines love our system because it's non-invasive, non-intrusive for passengers," Campbell said. He said a recent airport survey showed it took an average of 47 seconds to inspect a passenger's luggage using the trace-detection method. "This model is probably the way most airports are going to have to go, at least on an interim basis."

Jackson said trace detection requires more screeners to work at each machine, but the agency has not yet determined the total number of screening employees to be hired.

----

At Columbia, Police Recruiters Draw Little Interest, Good or Bad

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/education/28RECR.html

In the first day of the Police Department's Ivy League recruitment campaign yesterday, turnout was so poor that a forum at Columbia on 21st-century policing had to be canceled. But recruiters still managed to sign up more than 35 students willing to take the next police examination.

That degree of interest, though small, students and professors said, represents a significant shift in campus attitudes toward the police since the heady days of rage 34 years ago, when protesting students took over an administration building and more than 200 were arrested.

In one sense, Columbia has changed. It has become more conservative, students agreed. But times have changed too, especially since Sept. 11. The Police Department is also trying to change. After years of casting the widest net possible to replenish its ranks, it is now stepping up efforts begun to seek the best and the brightest from elite universities.

"The department has come a long way since the days of the 60's," said Officer Mahaan Chandu, 39, a 10-year veteran who was not on campus yesterday but who has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia. "Recruiting is a very hard sell at a school like Columbia, where people go to get a good head start in life."

Most students who were loping lazily between the ivy-covered buildings yesterday said without hesitation that they would never dream of becoming a New York City police officer.

"Absolutely not," said Adrienne Leduc, 18, a freshman political science major. "Never."

Whether the students who signed up to take the exam will actually show up on test day is an open question.

Still, many students said they understood the Police Department's thinking: the department needs smart, responsible officers, and society needs committed public servants.

As part of the campaign, police commanders are scheduled to visit other elite colleges, including Howard University on Tuesday, Yale on Wednesday, Temple and New York Universities on April 9, and Harvard on May 11.

Certainly, there are more graduates of top universities on the New York force now than in the past, though department officials said they were still rare. Since 1995, recruits have been required to have two years of college or two years of military service.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, a graduate of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has admitted that the current campaign is as much symbolic as substantive, and part of a larger effort to diversify the department. He is also recruiting at military bases, churches in minority neighborhoods and train terminals.

But students at top universities are hard to lure. The stress and danger of police work and the relatively modest pay tends to keep away even the loftiest of idealists with a yen for public service, students said yesterday.

"Most kids coming out of here are looking to make some large social change or big money," said Paul Niesen, 22, who is studying psychology and philosophy. He said he had two words for police recruiters on campus: "Good luck."

Other students were less accepting.

"I don't really believe in the police force, and especially the New York version of it," said Mark Weiner, 20, a sophomore history student, as he sat in the shadow of the "Alma Mater" statue on the library steps, smoking cigarettes. "They apply brutal tactics to other human beings."

His friend Imani Alexander, 20, a senior at Barnard, said she saw police work as a vital job, just not one she was called to perform. She said she chose to use her education "to help raise others up."

Some students also raised practical questions about police work, asking, what student who stands to earn a six-figure salary within a few years of leaving Columbia would be interested in a Civil Service career, one for which the $31,305 starting salary is less than the annual cost of attending the university?

How many would have to put up with raised eyebrows from their peers or parents, who never saw Columbia as preparation for a career in law enforcement? In the precinct station houses, would they be considered misfits, too bookish for a blue-collar job patrolling the streets?

For its part, the department, which has had difficulty attracting potential officers, is not giving up hope. It is selling the job with all the patriotic fervor of a military campaign. A flier advertising the forum yesterday featured American flag and Statue of Liberty logos.

"What we say to people is that you're not going to make a lot of money, but you're going to be rich, rich in experience," Mr. Kelly said yesterday after a graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden for 1,359 new officers. He later visited Columbia.

So far, recruitment efforts are well ahead of recent recruitment efforts, primarily because of a new online application system, said Assistant Chief Rafael Pineiro, who was encouraged by the number who signed up yesterday. He said the figure was comparable to the number who had signed up at other campuses in the past.

Students told the police that e-mail was an effective advertising approach for the next forum.

Still, in a word or with one shake of the head, most students simply rejected the recruitment efforts.

When asked why they signed up to take the test, many shrugged and said, "Why not?"

-------- death penalty

U.S. to Seek Death Penalty Against Moussaoui

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/politics/28CND-ASH.html

The United States will ask for the death penalty if a French citizen charged with conspiracy in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is found guilty, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today.

A notice of intent to seek the death penalty contained "numerous reasons, called aggravating factors, which we believe indicate why the death penalty is appropriate," Mr. Ashcroft said at a news conference in Miami.

"Among these reasons," he added, "is the impact of the crime on thousands of victims. To that end we remain committed not only to carrying out justice in this case, but also to ensuring that the rights of the victims are fully protected." About 3,000 people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and aboard a hijacked airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Ashcroft said he had authorized the United States Attorneys for the Easter District of Virginia and the Southern District of New York to seek a sentence of death.

The accused man, Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, is said to have conspired in the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks, but no evidence has been made public directly tying him to any of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks.

Mr. Moussaoui, the only person so far charged in the attacks, was in prison in Minnesota for visa violations on Sept. 11.

Four of the six conspiracy charges on which he has been indicted carry the death penalty. Mr. Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent, is scheduled to stand trial this fall at federal court in Alexandria, Va., outside Washington.

Mr. Ashcroft's decision, which was widely expected, is certain to upset the French authorities, who warned this week that they might end their cooperation in the case if the United States sought Mr. Moussaoui's execution. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

The French Justice Ministry sent a letter to Mr. Ashcroft this week, officials in Washington said, pointing out that an agreement between the two governments allowed France to end cooperation in a case in which a French citizen faced execution in the United States.

Legal analysts have said that if the French decide to withhold evidence it could be a serious blow to prosecutors, since French intelligence agencies are said to maintain a voluminous file on Mr. Moussaoui and his possible ties to Al Qaeda and other militant Muslim groups.

Michael Tigar, a professor at the American University Law School who defended Terry L. Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing case, told a New York Times reporter on Wednesday that there were many obstacles to carrying out a death sentence in Mr. Moussssaoui's case.

"There's no chance at all in a death sentence for conspiracy in this case to be upheld by the Supreme Court," he said.

--------

SUPREME COURT ROUNDUP
Justices Uphold Verdict Against Killer Represented by Victim's Ex-Lawyer

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/national/28SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, March 27 - A sharply divided Supreme Court today upheld the conviction and death sentence of a Virginia inmate whose court-appointed lawyer had represented the murder victim in an unrelated case until the victim's death.

The 5-to-4 majority rejected the inmate's argument that the lawyer had a conflict of interest so obvious as to undermine the fairness of the trial without the need to prove that the lawyer's performance harmed the defense. A "mere theoretical division of loyalties" was not enough to call the validity of the conviction into question, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority.

Several of the five opinions filed in the case had a bitter edge, reflecting what appeared to be growing tension on the court over the death penalty. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the lawyer's position was "the kind of representational incompatibility that is egregious on its face." He said that to carry out a death sentence under the circumstances "would diminish that public confidence in the criminal justice system upon which the successful functioning of that system continues to depend."

Justice Scalia responded for the majority that Justice Breyer's concern that the result would not be seen as fair "is not a rule of law but expression of an ad hoc `fairness' judgment with which we disagree."

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence M. Thomas signed Justice Scalia's opinion. Justice Kennedy also filed a concurring opinion. The other dissenters were Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, who each filed dissenting opinions, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who signed Justice Breyer's dissent.

None of the current members of the court has taken the position that the death penalty is unconstitutional in all respects, a view held by Justices William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun, who retired in the 1990's. But some justices have appeared increasingly concerned about aspects of capital punishment, particularly the adequacy of legal representation for defendants.

Justice O'Connor expressed such concerns in widely reported remarks last summer. She did not write separately today to explain why she joined the majority.

The decision today was not limited to death penalty cases, but rather addressed a more general issue about what should happen when a defense lawyer has a conflict of interest. Such cases come in many varieties; last month, for example, the federal appeals court in New York overturned the conviction of a police officer in the Abner Louima torture case, ruling that a defense lawyer's contract to represent the police union and other officers was a conflict of interest.

The case the court decided today, Mickens v. Taylor, No. 00-9285, had one highly unusual aspect. The defense lawyer, Bryan Saunders, had been appointed by a juvenile court judge to represent Timothy Hall, 17, on an assault charge. After Mr. Hall was found dead several weeks later, the judge dismissed that charge and then appointed Mr. Saunders to represent Walter Mickens Jr., who was charged with Mr. Hall's murder.

Mr. Saunders did not disclose the previous relationship, and because juvenile court records are sealed, Mr. Mickens did not learn of it until years after his 1993 conviction, when a new lawyer was researching the case to prepare a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

In that petition, filed in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. in 1998, Mr. Mickens argued he had been deprived of effective assistance of counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment and was entitled to an automatic reversal. The district court rejected his petition, but a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., granted it.

The full appeals court then voted, 7 to 3, to reinstate the conviction and death sentence, ruling that the situation did not warrant an automatic reversal and that Mr. Mickens had failed to demonstrate an "adverse effect" on his representation.

In his opinion today upholding that ruling, Justice Scalia said it made "little policy sense" to presume that a verdict was unreliable just because a trial judge had not inquired into a potential conflict of interest. The dissenting opinions said that, to the contrary, such a presumption was the only way to assure confidence in the criminal justice system.

"Mickens had a constitutional right to the services of an attorney devoted solely to his interests," Justice Stevens said. "That right was violated."

Mr. Mickens was a day from execution last April when the court granted a stay and agreed to hear his case.

These were among the other developments at the court today.

Aliens' Back Pay

By the same 5-to-4 division, the court ruled that employers who violate federal labor law in their treatment of illegal immigrant workers could not be required to pay back wages. The decision, with an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, overturned a decision of the federal appeals court here and rejected a policy of the National Labor Relations Board, which the Bush administration had defended.

The case dated to 1989, when a California company, Hoffman Plastic Compounds Inc., dismissed several employees who were engaged in organizing a union. The labor relations board ordered reinstatement and back pay for the workers, including Jose Castro, a Mexican who, it was later determined, had never been legally admitted to the United States, was not authorized to work, and had used fraudulent documents. The board held that Mr. Castro was nonetheless entitled to back pay for the more than three years between the time the company dismissed him and when it learned of his illegal status.

Writing for the court today, Chief Justice Rehnquist said that because the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 prohibited the employment of illegal immigrants, the labor board had no authority to order back pay. "Awarding back pay in a case like this not only trivializes the immigration laws, it also condones and encourages future violations," he said.

The opinion, Hoffman Plastic v. National Labor Relations Board, No. 00-1595, "does not mean that the employer gets off scot-free," the chief justice said, because an employer could still face contempt proceedings for continuing to violate labor laws.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Breyer called the employer's violation in this case "crude and obvious" and said that Congress had not spelled out the relationship between the immigration laws and labor laws. Consequently, he said, the court should defer to the labor board's "reasonable" position that the worker's illegal status did not remove the employer's obligation to make a "meaningful monetary payment" for violating labor law.

John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the decision would permit employers to "unlawfully victimize undocumented workers without any economic consequence."

Census Battle

The court heard a lively argument today in a dispute between Utah and North Carolina over the method used in the 2000 census to attribute residents to 620,000 addresses that could not be verified or for which information was incomplete.

Under a method known as imputation, the Census Bureau ascribed to these addresses the characteristics of nearby homes, and counted some 1.2 million extra people. North Carolina picked up more of that population than did Utah, and edged Utah out in entitlement to an additional seat in the House of Representatives.

The question in the case, Utah v. Evans, No. 01-714, is whether the method constitutes sampling, which the court ruled in 1999 cannot be part of the population count used to determine seats in the House. Utah lost its challenge before a special three-judge Federal District Court in Salt Lake City. One question for the justices today was, If Utah was right on the law, was it too late for a judicial remedy because the official census numbers had already been submitted to Congress?


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Researchers make plastic solar cells

From the Science & Technology Desk
3/28/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28032002-044016-5606r

BERKELEY, Calif., March 28 -- A combination of organic polymers and microscopic rods of metal could prove to be an inexpensive, effective way to put solar cells onto clothing and other flexible surfaces, scientists at the University of California said Thursday.

A team led by A. Paul Alivisatos, a chemistry professor at UC-Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., has created crude plastic solar cells that convert light to electricity at least as well as the best previous efforts with unconventional solar cells. The team details its findings in the upcoming issue of the journal Science.

The cells' generating capacity comes from rods of cadmium selenide, a material similar to what's found in computer chips. The rods are a few atoms wide and a few dozen atoms long, suspended in a seminconducting polymer, Alivisatos said.

"It's a material we have a lot of experience making, and it (absorbs light) in the visible, so it's easy to work with," Alivisatos told United Press International. "We can control the diameters and lengths to within a few percent through self-assembly -- there are organic molecules that guide the growth."

The mixture is sandwiched between two electrodes, one transparent and one aluminum, to complete the device. When the rods absorb light, each one gives off an electron, leaving a "hole" in the rod; the electron and the hole move to different electrodes, creating the electric current.

At the moment, the rods' orientation in the polymer is fairly random, Alivisatos told UPI, restricting their ability to generate electrons. Establishing a method to line up the rods inside the plastic will improve the cell's efficiency, especially if the rods end up perpendicular to the electrodes, he said.

One approach to doing so could involve using a different polymer to create a pattern for the rods to fill. The polymer would then be washed away and replaced with the one found in the solar cell. Another method would create the rods as liquid crystals, which would be aligned by magnetic or other fields, Alivisatos said.

Solving the alignment problem shouldn't take too long, Alivisatos said, and existing methods for improving solar cell performance will most likely help the plastic cells. Nevertheless, he said, the new cells probably won't be commercially viable for at least three years.

The primary benefit with these cells is their inexpensive fabrication methods. Today's solar cells are made with computer chip-making processes that require ultra-clean facilities. The essential parts of the new plastic cells can be mixed in an ordinary laboratory flask, the team said.

So far, each cell has produced slightly less than one volt, not enough to run many devices. The cells are thinner than a human hair and flexible, however, so it should be possible to place many of them on any surface, even clothing. This could result in "computer clothing" that could power personal digital assistants and other portable electronics, the team said.

"The color might not be so beautiful," Alivisatos said with a laugh. "It depends on how much power you need, but it's certainly a possibility. People are definitely talking about trying to weave these solar cells into clothing."

The technology has more than enough potential to generate the current needed for portable devices, said Sheila Bailey, a senior physicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Bailey has studied solar cells for many years, and polymer developments such as Berkeley's are attracting attention from existing solar cell makers, she told UPI.

"NASA's been keeping an eye on developments in that arena because of the potential of having a very low-cost photovoltaic material that was very thin and very light," Bailey said. "The drawbacks to date have been (the materials') stability and potential for degradation in the space environment."

Solar cell material such as Berkeley's could also have applications in very high-flying unmanned planes, which would use solar power to avoid the need for landing. NASA will have to work out the tradeoffs, however, between the material's lighter weight and lower efficiency, she said.

While the Berkeley material shows promise, bringing it to market will take more than just lining up the rods, she said. Researchers will have to better understand the material interactions at the junctions between the polymer, rods and electrodes to get the highest efficiency, she said.

----

Illinois, Oklahoma get US biomass energy trials

REUTERS USA:
March 28, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15237/story.htm

WASHINGTON - Switchgrass grown on idled cropland in Illinois and Oklahoma will be used in tests as an alternative to coal at electric power plants, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said this week.

The biomass fuels projects were the last of six selected nationwide for pilot programs on use of biomass for energy production. Congress authorized the programs, which will run at least 10 years, in late 2000.

With grain prices mired at low levels, interest in farm products as a source of renewable energy has grown. Farmers have sought a larger market for ethanol, distilled from corn (maize), and to popularize biodiesel, or diesel fuel derived from soybeans.

Under the biomass projects, switchgrass will be harvested from land enrolled in the long-term Conservation Reserve, which pays growers an annual rent to idle environmentally fragile cropland.

"Both projects promote the use of a renewable fuel and a cleaner environment," said Veneman, who announced approval of the projects during a trip to the Midwest. "The grass is easily obtained compared to coal, a fossil fuel."

In the project, switchgrass will be harvested from an Illinois River watershed near Havana in central Illinois. It will be converted into pellets and used to co-fire energy plants that normally use coal.

In Oklahoma, the program will allow researchers to seek markets for agricultural biomass and study methods to combine grass pellets with high-sulfur Oklahoma coal to see if a cleaner-burning product could be sold to power companies. Grass used in the project will come from five counties in the Panhandle and include some native varieties.

When Congress authorized the projects, it said a total of up to 250,000 acres could be used in six sites. Harvesting was allowed once every two years and growers must accept a 25 percent reduction in rental payments on the harvest year.

The four other sites were approved a year ago. Their work was:

- developing warm-and cool-season grasses in Iowa as a source of renewable energy.

- growing hybrid poplar trees in Minnesota as a source of biomass energy.

- growing willow biomass crops in New York state.

- producing switchgrass in Pennsylvania for sale to a cooperative for use in a coal-fired fluid-bed combuster that burns alternative fuels.

----

Elephant grass seen as a UK fuel of the future

UK: March 28, 2002
Story by Oliver Bullough
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15235/story.htm

LONDON - It may look like an overgrown ornamental bamboo, but elephant grass is seen by Britain's government and agricultural bodies as a key to helping embattled farmers and generating green power.

"This is a crop we take very seriously, and we wish to see the opportunities for growers increasing," said Nick Starkey of the National Farmers' Union (NFU).

The plant, which originates in the Far East and grows to five metres tall, can be burned to generate electricity in biomass power stations, and in smaller boilers to produce heat for individual farmer's houses, he said.

He said the crop, also known as miscanthus, was quick-growing and yields about 15 tonnes a hectare every year.

Biomass power has been overlooked for years, owing to its expense and a lack of government support, but a new plan called the renewables obligation, which obliges power companies to buy electricity from green sources, is seen as guaranteeing it a market.

Britain currently has about 100 megawatts of biomass generating capacity, and the industry says 10 times this amount is needed if the government is to meet its target of generating 10 percent of the UK's power from green sources by 2010.

Because when plants burn they produce no more carbon dioxide than they absorb in growing, electricity produced from them is a key element of reducing emissions, primarily carbon dioxide, which are blamed by many scientists for causing global warming.

"Miscanthus is part and parcel of how we want to secure a sustainable future," said a spokeswoman for the Department of Farming, the Environment and Rural Affairs.

She said there were currently only 100 hectares - an area smaller than London's Hyde Park - of miscanthus in Britain, but the government intends it to make up 10 percent of power generated from plant matter.

Growers of the crop can receive grants to cover the relatively high costs of planting the rhizomes the perennial plant grows from.

Dr Paul Carver of Bical, a western England-based company which specialises in growing miscanthus, said that to generate enough power under the renewable energy plan, 125,000 hectares of all energy crops were needed.

Carver said it was very easy to harvest with traditional machinery, and required no chemical fertilisers or pesticides.

"Once you plant it you forget about it, and it's a higher earner than winter wheat," he said.

Neil Bond of Energy Power Resources Ltd (EPR), which built and runs the world's largest straw-fuelled power station near Ely, Cambridgeshire, said the company had tried burning miscanthus and was interested in its further use as a fuel.

"In five to 10 years it could be a major fuel ... but no one yet is putting their money where their mouth is," he said.

"Straw and miscanthus are interchangeable in the biofuels industry, and they provide a guaranteed income for farmers," he added.

--------

Fuel Cell Turbine Power Plant Passes Tests

March 28, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-28-09.html#anchor5

IRVINE, California, The world's first fuel cell gas turbine hybrid power plant is now generating electricity on the campus of the University of California at Irvine.

Linked together in a mini power plant the size of a small house trailer, the world's first combination of a fuel cell and microturbine is being tested at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the university.

"This new technology has the potential to alter the landscape of tomorrow's power industry," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "It offers a preview of the day when more of our electricity will be generated by super clean, high efficiency power units sited near the consumer. Distributed generation could play a key role in strengthening the security and reliability of our power supply, and fuel cell turbine hybrids could help make distributed power a reality."

Abraham joined Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation and Southern California Edison in announcing that the advanced generator has passed a key site acceptance test, and the major endurance phase of its test program is underway.

The hybrid generator is the latest innovation to emerge from the Energy Department's fossil energy fuel cell program. The system combines a Siemens Westinghouse solid oxide fuel cell with an Ingersoll Rand microturbine.

Solid oxide fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert energy in a fuel cell into electricity, much like a battery. Microturbines are small, high speed gas turbines.

In the California unit, the two technologies combine to produce about 190 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power about 200 homes.

The combination is pushing power efficiencies to unprecedented levels, the research team says. Test data show electrical efficiencies of about 53 percent, believed to be a world record for the operation of any fuel cell system on natural gas.

Improvements in the technology could raise efficiencies to 60 percent for smaller systems and 70 percent or higher for larger systems, the team believes.

"In the power industry, efficiency gains of even a few percentage points can make a major economic difference over the life of a generating system," said Richard Rosenblum, senior vice president for transmission and distribution at Southern California Edison, the system's owner and operator.

Because it operates on an electrochemical process, rather than combustion, the system emits almost none of the air pollutants released by conventional power plants. Its emissions of nitrogen oxide, which can contribute to urban smog, are almost 50 times less than today's average natural gas turbine.

----

Spurred by Higher Emissions, Britain Boosts Renewables

LONDON, UK,
March 28, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-28-04.html

"The time for action is now," said UK Energy Minister Brian Wilson today, reacting to new figures showing a small increase in emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the last two years.

After substantial reductions during the 1990s, data published in "Energy Trends" shows that despite an overall six percent fall in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, there was a slight increase for the years 2000 and 2001. This was as a result of increased use of coal in electricity generation and colder weather in the winter months.

Solar panels on a British office building (Photo courtesy Freefoto.com)

Wilson said, "For anyone who might have grown complacent, these figures demand that we must do more to address our environmental obligations. We met the Rio target to keep greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2000, but this is still not enough."

"All sectors of the economy need to contribute to more sustainable use of energy. We need greater energy efficiency and more renewable energy. The government has now created an economic and legislative environment in which the renewables industry can flourish," Wilson said.

Wilson made his remarks while visiting Renewable North West, a new nonprofit company set up by the North West Development Agency and United Utilities. It is partly supported by the government's fund for regional renewables development. The company, which is expected to be fully operational in summer, will lay out a strategy for developing green energy schemes by working with existing agencies and small and medium size companies which specialize in renewable energy technologies.

On Wednesday, Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt announced a UK£20 million ($US28.5 million) fund to support photovoltaic solar power. The funding will be released over the next three years to help cut the cost of solar panels and increase the rate of installation ten-fold.

Thousands of homes and offices across the UK will benefit as installation grants will be offered to both the private and public sectors.

The move was widely welcomed by stakeholders as a first significant downpayment since Prime Minister Tony Blair promised UK£100m of new spending on renewable energies in a speech last year.

House in Wales fitted with solar photovoltaic panels (Photo courtesy Powys Energy Agency)

"This represents a massive boost to solar power in the UK," said the Energy Savings Trust, the body that will lead the grants program.

The trust stressed that another important part of its program would be public education, "not least in dispelling the myth that solar energy is a non-starter in the UK's climate." It also aims to grow the market in solar products, as well as trained and accredited installers.

The government has also recently announced UK£4 million (US$7.1 million) worth of funding for the installation of solar systems on public buildings including schools, galleries, church halls and sports centers across the United Kingdom.

Another UK£4 million program will provide solar power for 380 houses, flats and bungalows.

The UK's Kyoto Protocol environmental target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 percent from 1990 levels by 2010, while the UK's domestic goal is to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent on 1990 levels.

-------- energy

Energizing Turkey

March 28, 2002
Embassy Row
by James Morrison
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-15769640.htm

The United States and Turkey have signed agreements to increase energy-technology cooperation between the two countries.

"The agreements provide assistance to enhance Turkey's development of clean-coal technologies and diversify its natural-gas supplies, as well as improvements to several other energy-related technologies," the U.S. Embassy said.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who signed the agreement last week on behalf of the United States, said, "Turkey, like the United States, is fully aware that energy-related research can help increase efficiency, reduce emissions and achieve a stronger energy security."

He added that the agreements "will improve Turkey's ability to provide for its own energy needs through a diversified resource base."

----

Bush threatened with court fight on energy report

REUTERS USA:
March 28, 2002
Story by Chris Baltimore
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15245/story.htm

WASHINGTON - A legal activist group threatened the Bush administration this week with a long court battle after receiving thousands of documents, many of them censored, detailing how big business influenced energy policy.

Judicial Watch received 11,000 documents, including many blanked out pages, from the Department of Energy late on Monday that showed Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force met last year with industry but not with any environmentalists.

"These documents will ultimately have to be produced," Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman told a news conference. "Judicial Watch will not rest until all of the documents and all of the information is available to the American people."

Arguing that confidentiality is needed if it is to continue receiving candid advice from outsiders, the administration refused to disclose who it had met with from energy firms like now-bankrupt Enron Corp., once U.S. President George W. Bush's biggest campaign donor.

Judicial Watch filed its suit to gain access to the documents alongside a similar suit from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, after the task force produced a report recommending more oil and gas drilling and greater emphasis on coal-fired power plants.

"It would appear that consultation was skewed in favor of energy companies," said Klayman, whose group frequently filed suit against the policies of the Clinton administration.

The documents that were made public showed Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met dozens of energy industry executives and lobbying groups in the months leading up to the energy policy release in May 2001.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said "the approach that the government took was in accordance with the law" and tried to downplay the energy industry's influence on the report: "News flash: it is no surprise to anybody that the secretary of energy meets with energy-related groups."

STALLING TACTICS ALLEGED

Judicial Watch said it was equally troubling to hear the administration's claim that many more potentially inflammatory documents are exempt from the judge's request because of federal laws.

Klayman accused the administration of stalling tactics, and said it may ask the court to proceed with criminal proceedings to determine whether the administration had obstructed justice in withholding documents.

"This is a full-court obstruction on the part of the administration, an absolute stone wall," added Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch's president.

The Energy Department cooperated with the Department of Justice to determine which documents were not suitable for release. Many of the omitted documents contained draft versions of the energy plan, which the department said were exempt under three provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

Ironically, that act is a primary tool used by Judicial Watch and other interest groups and media outlets to compel the government to release documents.

Judicial Watch attacked the practice as improper. "The DOJ is not supposed to be running the show this way," Fitton said.

The Energy Department excised some 15,000 of 26,000 Energy Department documents from Monday's document delivery, and heavily vetted many others.

Klayman predicted that appeals pressed by the administration will likely reach the Supreme Court, and "the reason for that is simply delay."

Klayman linked the administration's heavy redactions to an earlier directive from Attorney General John Ashcroft to "air on the side of withholding documents if any reason can be conjured up."

----

Environmentalists say they were rebuffed in request for meeting

Thursday, March 28, 2002
By H. Josef Hebert,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/03/03282002/ap_46802.asp

WASHINGTON - Environmentalists said they had requested a meeting with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in the months prior to release of the administration's energy report but were rebuffed by an aide who cited Abraham's busy schedule.

John Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Wednesday that the refusal to meet with the environmentalists stands in sharp contrast to the eight meetings Abraham had with energy and business groups in early 2001 to discuss the energy plan.

Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force issued its report in May.

"Big energy companies all but held the pencil for the (energy) task force," said Adams at a news conference where NRDC attorneys discussed some of the 11,000 pages of documents the Energy Department provided the group under a court order. The documents, released Monday, included a calendar schedule that showed Abraham's meetings with representatives of nuclear, oil, natural gas, electric utility, and manufacturing groups.

"It should come as a surprise to no one that the energy secretary consults with energy experts," said DOE spokeswoman Jeanne Lopatto. "That is his job, that is something we have done from day one."

NRDC attorney Sharon Buccino said the documents released Monday in response to an NRDC lawsuit were "scrubbed, purged, and sanitized" but still provide the "first hard evidence" of the influence the energy industry had in crafting the Cheney energy report.

But she said NRDC was filing papers with the federal court seeking a hearing to get additional documents released. She expressed astonishment that among the 11,000 pages she could find only one document mentioning Enron, which had been an aggressive advocate on energy issues in Washington before it collapse. "We're in court asking for what was left out," said Buccino.

The Energy Department, in releasing the documents, maintained that it had sought out environmental organizations but suggested a lack of interest. "Even though contact was sometimes unsuccessful, DOE actively sought all viewpoints," the department said.

"That's the biggest lie since Richard Nixon," snapped Buccino.

The NRDC released a letter, dated Feb. 20, 2001, from the Green Group, a coalition of the major environmental organizations, that asked Abraham "to set aside a short while (in mid-March) to discuss important energy and environmental concerns." The letter was signed by Fred Krupp, executive director of Environmental Defense. A few days after it was sent, Abraham's appointments secretary called to say Abraham was too busy, according to the environmentalists.

In March, Abraham held separate meetings with groups representing the nuclear industry, the oil industry, and public utility industries to discuss the energy task force, according to the papers released this week.

The environmentalists also asked to meet with Cheney, but that request was also denied. Instead, members of the Green Group met with Andrew Lundquist, the task force director, on April 4.

----

Bush Energy Order Wording Mirrors Oil Lobby's Proposal
Directive Targeted Regulations With 'Adverse Effects'

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28281-2002Mar27?language=printer

President Bush last year issued an order on energy policy that closely followed a proposed draft given to the administration two months earlier by oil lobbyists, according to documents released by the Energy Department under a court order.

An official from the American Petroleum Institute sent an e-mail on March 20, 2001, to Joseph Kelliher, then a Department of Energy policy adviser, proposing language for a Bush policy on energy regulations. API called it "a suggested executive order to ensure that energy implications are considered and acted on in rule-makings and other executive actions."

The lobby group recommended a directive requiring agencies to consider whether environmental or other regulations would cause "inordinate complications in energy production and supply." On May 18, Bush issued Executive Order 13211, directing agencies to assess whether regulations would have "any adverse effects on energy supply, distribution or use."

The API proposal defines the order to apply to "any substantive action by an agency that promulgates or is expected to lead to the promulgation of a rule, regulation or policy, including, but not limited to, notices of inquiry, advance notices of proposed rule-making, notices of proposed rule-making, and guidance documents."

The Bush executive order states that it applies to "any action by an agency . . . that promulgates or is expected to lead to the promulgation of a final rule or regulation, including notices of inquiry, advance notices of proposed rule-making, and notices of proposed rule-making."

The similarity was identified yesterday by the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups that forced Monday's disclosure of Energy Department documents. The NRDC said the wording was unusually expansive. "The oil companies seem to be putting words in our president's mouth," said Sharon Buccino, senior attorney for the NRDC.

White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the task force got suggestions from a wide range of interests. "When ideas were submitted, we took a look at them, and if they had merit they were incorporated in part," she said.

Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said his organization recommended the executive order and sent it unsolicited. He said the charge that "the administration lifted ours is probably a little overstating the case." Cavaney said that API wanted the order to apply retroactively, which the Bush order did not do.

The claim that industry lobbyists helped to shape part of the administration's energy policy came as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. yesterday asking for details of all communications and meetings involving the task force between Enron Corp. and officials at the White House and eight federal agencies.

Womack said the administration was reviewing the request but added, "The American people are pretty tired of open-ended fishing expeditions."

The request does not have the legal force of a subpoena, although Lieberman's committee has issued subpoenas to Enron, the collapsed energy company, about its contacts with the White House. Lieberman, who seeks documents dating back to 1992, had announced the letter last week. He set an April 12 deadline.

In part to obtain a fuller account of Enron's involvement with the energy task force, the NRDC yesterday filed a motion seeking to hold the Energy Department in contempt of court for providing incomplete information under last month's order. Energy turned over 11,000 of 26,000 relevant pages and deleted information from many of the documents it did release.

Buccino said Enron was "the dog that didn't bark" because it did not appear in the documents. The Energy Department has said officials spoke to Enron representatives on other subjects.

The NRDC also pointed to a March 23 e-mail from Southern Co. to Kelliher. An attached document said national energy policy should include "Reform of EPA's New Source Review Program," regulations that impose tighter limits on emissions from retooled power plants. Southern complained that the Environmental Protection Agency's interpretation of the statute, part of the Clean Air Act, "discourages any repair or replacement project" that could make a power plant operate longer.

----

Green groups back off Energy panel complaints

By Patrice Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20020328-13910220.htm

Leading environmentalists yesterday backed off charges that the Bush administration did not consult them in drafting its energy plan, but continued to press their case for full disclosure of executive deliberations.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the lead environmental group suing the administration for disclosure of its energy task-force contacts, abandoned its year-long complaint against the administration amid evidence released this week that the Energy Department reached out for advice from environmentalist groups - and in some cases got snubbed.

The NRDC yesterday conceded that the department obtained its recommendations and weighed them in drafting its energy plan. And the NRDC revealed it had three more previously undisclosed meetings with top energy task-force officials last year while the energy plan was being drafted.

Two of those meetings were early in the drafting process, throwing into question the latest charge by environmentalists that they were left out until the very end. The NRDC and other environmental groups previously complained that they didn't meet with task force director Andrew Lundquist until April 4, well after the administration consulted with industry executives.

But yesterday the NRDC said its senior scientist Dan Lashoff met with Mr. Lundquist much earlier, on March 7, when they discussed alternative-fuel technologies along with representatives from the Ford Motor Co., Environmental Defense and Union of Concerned Scientists. Mr. Lashoff met with Mr. Lundquist again on May 11 to discuss energy efficiency.

Also "early last year," the NRDC's energy expert, Patricio Silva, met with Karen Knudson, Mr. Lundquist's deputy, to discuss air-conditioning efficiency standards and energy-budget priorities, the environmental group disclosed.

These contacts show not only that the group participated in the energy deliberations earlier, but more frequently than previously admitted. The NRDC contends the May 11 meeting was too late to affect the task-force report, which was released on May 17.

High-level contacts notwithstanding, the NRDC continued to lambaste the administration yesterday for giving more weight to industry recommendations than environmentalists' demands.

Sharon Buccino, an NRDC attorney, said 11,000 pages of documents released by the Energy Department Monday "confirmed what everybody suspected: the White House worked in tandem with a few industry friends and favorite donors to craft a plan that overwhelmingly benefits corporate interests."

As an example, Ms. Buccino cited evidence that the administration adopted almost verbatim an American Petroleum Institute proposal to issue an executive order requiring agencies to consider the energy impact of their regulations.

The NRDC yesterday asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which ordered the release of the documents in February, to compel the department to turn over another 15,000 pages of documents before a previously set April 10 deadline.

The environmental group and Judicial Watch, a government watchdog that joined in suing the administration, are promising to contest the administration's decision to blank out the vast majority of internal communications in the documents they released.

"They can withhold opinion, but they cannot withhold factual material," said Larry Klayman, executive director of Judicial Watch. He said the secrecy issues are "exactly the same" as those conservatives raised with former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force in 1993.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It would be hypocritical to take any other position now," he said.

Mr. Klayman agreed with environmentalists that the Energy Department documents released this week show "much more consultation with energy interests than environmentalists."

Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott said the administration followed the proper procedures.

"The Energy Department talked to people who can produce more energy; EPA talked to people about environmental issues. ... Then they all pooled their findings," and the result was a "comprehensive and balanced plan," the Mississippi Republican said.

----

Energy Industry's Recommendations to Bush Became National Policy

New York Times
March 28, 2002
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and NEELA BANERJEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/politics/28ENER.html

WASHINGTON - A review of documents released this week by the Department of Energy showed that several recommendations from energy industry representatives were written into the White House's national energy report and into an executive order signed by President Bush.

At a news conference today, lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said they had found the industry's recommendations among thousands of heavily edited documents released this week by the Energy Department. The environmental advocacy group sued the agency 11 months ago to obtain the records on its work regarding the national energy policy.

In one example cited by the natural resources council, the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the country's largest oil companies, submitted a proposed draft executive order on energy policy to the Energy Department on March 20, 2001. Two months later, Mr. Bush signed an executive order that the council's lawyers said was nearly identical in structure and language to the trade group's proposal. The executive order concerned government regulations that affect energy supply and distribution.

"Big energy companies all but held the pencil for the White House task force as government officials wrote a plan calling for billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, and the wholesale elimination of key health and environmental safeguards," John H. Adams, the president of the council, said at a news conference today.

Sharon Buccino, a senior lawyer at the resources council, said, "The oil companies seem to be putting words in our president's mouth."

White House officials said the energy report was the product of a balanced process that heard advice from a wide array of interests.

"As we have said before, we received input and ideas from a variety of sources, whether it be an industry group or an environmental group, an individual citizen or a member of Congress," said Anne Womack, a White House spokeswoman. "Of course, those ideas and suggestions were reviewed and those that were meritorious were discussed by the energy working group. If they were consistent with the goals of the group to provide more energy to the American people in a cleaner, safer way, then we incorporated those ideas into the final product."

Ms. Womack said she did not know whether the American Petroleum Institute's suggested executive order was used to draft Mr. Bush's May 18 executive order.

The resources council was one of several organizations that sued federal agencies for the release of records related to work on Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy policy, which was made public last May and then was used for an energy bill passed by the House of Representatives. Mr. Cheney has refused to release a list of industry executives who advised the administration, and the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, has filed a lawsuit against the vice president to gain access to the list.

But a picture of the task force's work has begun to emerge through thousands of documents released this week. They show that some senior administration officials, including the energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, heard advice exclusively from executives and lobbyists from large energy corporations.

In another example cited by the resources council today, a lobbyist for the Southern Company, among the country's largest utilities, sent an e-mail message to a senior Energy Department official suggesting "another issue" should be added to the energy plan: a revision of the Clean Air Act. The suggestion was adopted in the national energy policy, which was released on May 17. Lawyers for the council said the recommendation had weakened enforcement actions against large utility companies, including the Southern Company.

A review by The New York Times of thousands of pages of documents released to the council and other groups found a stream of policy papers and e-mail messages to the Energy Department from the American Petroleum Institute, the leading lobbyist for the domestic oil industry.

Among the steps the petroleum institute advocated, was an executive order from the president to highlight a law that the industry group said was already on the books but was not being enforced. The institute's top lobbyist, Jim Ford, sent an e-mail message dated March 20, 2001, to Joseph Kelliher, who was the policy adviser at the Energy Department. The message included a draft executive order. Mr. Ford wrote that it was imperative that agencies consider the energy implications of environmental and other regulatory actions.

On May 18, the day after the release of the energy policy, Mr. Bush signed an order calling for just that. One passage that defines what regulatory action is needed at other federal agencies reads very similarly to a passage in the draft order the petroleum institute submitted.

The petroleum institute's president, Red Cavaney, said today that his organization had been calling for such an executive order since spring 2000. Mr. Cavaney said that his group thought an executive order would highlight part of a law, the Environmental Policy Act, that called for federal agencies to analyze the impact of regulations and laws on energy supplies and prices.

The institute had submitted draft executive orders on other issues to the Clinton administration in the late 1990's, but they were ignored, Mr. Cavaney said. He contended that the institute did not get much of what it wanted in the draft order that it shared with the Bush administration. He pointed out that the Bush executive order on a topic important to the institute and the similarity of some of the language used may be coincidental.

"What we gave them was our best view of what we thought would make this system most efficient," Mr. Cavaney said. "What we got in and didn't, only the administration can answer that since they had the deliberative process."

The organizations and companies whose influence the resources council cited maintained that they were pushing for their best interests, an approach the council conceded was to be expected. The industry groups said it was up to the administration to determine whose opinions would get the most consideration.

"It's very flattering to think that one e-mail can determine energy policy," said Laura Gillig, a spokeswoman for the Southern Company.

Also today, the resources council asked a federal judge to compel the administration to immediately turn over 15,000 pages not released by the Energy Department this week.

----

Energy Task Force Belatedly Consulted Environmentalists
Documents Show Administration Sought Input Only After Protests

By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22511-2002Mar26?language=printer

President Bush's energy task force moved to include a chapter on environmental matters only late in last year's deliberations, despite administration officials' assertions that the panel weighed conservation and production equally as it assembled a national energy policy.

The new information, indicating that the task force added a section on the environment only after an outcry from environmentalists excluded from deliberations, came from Monday night's court-ordered release of documents by the Energy Department and other government agencies.

"This is the environment chapter," wrote Margot Anderson, a deputy assistant secretary, in an e-mail sent to Energy Department colleagues March 23, 2001. "I am unclear about the process on this one. I do know the topic was added in late."

The e-mail was consistent with environmental groups' claims that they received a sudden flurry of inquiries from the task force in late March, two months after the task force was created and as the panel was preparing interim drafts.

Gary Skulnik, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said the group was called March 22 and "given 24 hours to provide any input on energy policy -- not to meet or talk to them, but to send any material we might have, or links to Web sites." He added: "It looked to us like a move to cover their rear ends." An Energy Department official said conservation was originally to have been part of another chapter on energy efficiency.

An "environmentally sound" approach is mentioned in Bush's Jan. 29 directive creating the task force, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in March the report would "enhance our commitment to conservation." Abraham called it a myth that it is "impossible to balance energy exploration and environmental protection."

Behind the scenes, documents indicate, Energy Department officials, who handled most of the energy task force's work last year, seemed to be skeptical of conservation measures. On April 28, then-Department of Energy policy adviser Joseph Kelliher wrote to colleagues about California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis's conservation plan. "Can we assess the accuracy of his claims of success on conservation?" asked Kelliher.

Interest groups and others yesterday gave the thousands of pages of documents a more thorough review than was possible when they were released. The documents showed that in addition to Abraham's meetings with three dozen industry representatives, lobbyists and executives -- several of them large campaign contributors -- worked extensively with administration officials at various levels as they assembled Bush's energy policy.

Representatives of the Edison Electric Institute, American Gas Association, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association collaborated with those developing the policy recommendations.

The Center for Responsive Politics studied the individuals and groups that met with Abraham about the energy task force and found total contributions to Republicans of more than $4.5 million since 1999. Of the 36 representatives of industry interests who met with Abraham, 29 were contributors individually or through their organizations.

The documents also indicate that Abraham met with more than the 36 individuals about the task force. An April 26 e-mail said he was meeting May 4 with two officials from the American Gas Association and the chief executive of NiSource Inc., a gas distributor.

The information that was released Monday night in response to lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act was of limited value because the vast majority of relevant documents had sections deleted or were omitted. The groups that had sued for the documents, Judicial Watch and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said they planned to go back to court because so many thousands of pages were withheld.

Still, a close reading of the available documents provides a rare glimpse at the inner workings of policymaking in the administration. The e-mails detailed a significant level of cooperation between government officials and energy industry representatives.

By late March, as environmental groups were first being reached, industry players already were assuming a favorable outcome and were working together to sell Bush's then-secret plan. A March 22 memo from the American Gas Association to Kelliher says the group "had a good meeting this morning" at the Energy Department, and offers any assistance to a "new coalition" to support the Bush policy.

Next, an AGA official wrote to Andrew Lundquist, the task force director, on April 3 offering a map of natural gas transmission lines with notes about "access restrictions and the impact of Clinton's roadless initiatives." The official continued: "Please let me know if the materials on distributed generation that we provided were adequate for your purposes???" The Bush energy report called for increases in natural gas production and enhanced pipelines.

An e-mail with the words "possible recommendation" in the title was sent on April 5 to Robert Kripowicz, acting assistant secretary for fossil energy, from an Energy Department colleague stated: "I have now spoken with Fred Davis at EEI and to Bob Szabo at Van Ness, Feldman, on this issue. Chuck Linderman suggested by yesterday's voice mail that I contact both in his absence."

Fred Davis is a lobbyist and has been treasurer of the political action committee of EEI, or Edison Electric Institute, which contributed $193,888 in the 2000 election cycle -- 71 percent to Republicans. Linderman is also from EEI. Szabo served as director of the National Wetlands Coalition, a business group opposed to the regulatory approach taken by environmentalists. Around the same time, Kripowicz sent an e-mail to Kelliher about an "interim report on coal transportation issues." Kripowicz wrote: "I will have someone follow up on this tomorrow . . . with EEI." Documents released by the EPA in response to the same lawsuit also indicate close cooperation with industry. "Citgo Petroleum Corporation is providing the following response to a question EPA has posed to the refining industry," one memo states. The question EPA proposed was, "If refineries were allowed to turn off their air pollution controls or increase their operating hours beyond permit limits, then would industry be able to supply more gasoline to market this summer?"

Citgo said a more practical solution would be for the federal government to prevent states from establishing their own standards for "boutique" fuels. The energy report seeks to phase out such fuels.

American Petroleum Institute President Red Caveny, who brought five oil company presidents along when he met with Abraham on Feb. 21, said in an interview that Abraham was attentive as they argued "more regulatory flexibility" to avoid shortages. Caveny said his group was pleased with the outcome, calling it a "balanced" report, adding: "On 11 out of the 12 key areas, we're covered."

Bob Slaughter of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association used a March 22 e-mail to thank an Energy Department official for calling and said he was attaching the group's "current thinking as to what changes in national energy policy are needed to help the refining sector." Slaughter said "everyone had a chance to input."

The energy officials seemed to be aware that their contacts with groups seeking favorable recommendations in the report could be controversial. One e-mail in February about a draft chapter provided a "Reminder on secret location: P://Analysis/Calls/External Requests." Another e-mail proposes a meeting with General Atomics and asks, "Could you please advise whether you think the meeting is appropriate." The cooperation continues after the energy report's release. On July 3, two Energy Department officials exchanged documents provided to them by American Electric Power and Southern Co. offering additional proposals for energy policies. "As per our discussions," one of the executives wrote, attaching a document titled "proposed energy policy language."

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer yesterday said the government acted appropriately. "News flash: It's no surprise to anybody that the secretary of energy meets with energy-related groups," he said.

Staff researcher Brian Faler contributed to this report.

-------- environment

Potomac dumping to continue

By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 28, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020328-81846855.htm

A new permit will be issued today by the federal government allowing itself to continue dumping tons of sludge into the Potomac River, despite scientific reviews that say the dumps endanger wildlife and should be stopped immediately.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams yesterday said the sludge dumping "is an issue very, very important to us."

"We are working with the EPA to see that we are on top of the situation and ensuring everyone is doing their fair share to clean up the river," Mr. Williams said.

The new permit from the Environmental Protection Agency allows the Army Corps of Engineers to continue dumping tens of thousands of milligrams per liter of solids into the Potomac River for the next five years, said Rob Gordon, director of the National Wilderness Institute.

The dumps coat and kill wildlife and one discharge covers the only potential spawning ground for the endangered short-nose sturgeon, Mr. Gordon said.

Details of the new permit for dumps at several points along the river near Fletchers Boathouse were announced at a community meeting Tuesday night across the street from the Dalecarlia water treatment plant. One person attending noted that the EPA official giving the presentation on the new permit was drinking bottled water.

"The EPA is essentially permitting the Corps of Engineers to violate both the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts, and I think it's criminal," said Rep. George P. Radanovich, California Republican and leading critic of the sludge discharges.

Mr. Radanovich, chairman of the House Resources national parks, recreation and public lands subcommittee, has been investigating whether the federal government violates the law by allowing the dumps.

"It is ironic that the federal agency responsible for protecting our environment is actually permitting toxic discharges into the Potomac River," Mr. Radanovich said. "The fact that the EPA is issuing a new permit for sludge dumping is appalling and preposterous."

The sludge is created when the Corps uses alum to separate sediment from drinking water taken from the Potomac and pushes it back into the river in heavier concentrations.

The new permit replaces one that expired in 1994, but the Corps was allowed to continue discharges under the old rules. The new permit limits dumping to certain times of the year and calls for a plan to be produced "sometime in the future" to reduce discharges by 35 percent, Mr. Gordon said.

"It is indefensible and outragous they are going to allow this facility to continue dumping the same volume of sludge through a national park and into crucial spawning grounds," said Mr. Gordon, who is suing the federal government to stop the dumps.

The discharges dramatically exceed all other facilities on the Chesapeake Bay and along the East Coast, which typically allow only 30 milligrams of solids per liter be discharged.

A scientific peer review by the Institute for Regulatory Science said the government is using faulty science to allow the dumpings and that it should be discontinued immediately.

"The review determined their science to be faulty at best, if not bogus," said Mr. Radanovich who released the review last week.

The scientists commissioned for the peer review recommended that the dumping cease immediately and that a treatment facility be constructed to treat the toxic sludge appropriately.

In 1999, a government panel called for terminating the discharges. It included the National Marine Fishery Service, Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.

The permit also requires the corp to make the outfalls where the crude-oil-like dumps occur be more aesthetically pleasing.

"That means hide the discharges so people can't see them," Mr. Gordon said.

----

Duke wins initial OK for natgas pipeline in Virginia

REUTERS USA:
March 28, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15234/story.htm

WASHINGTON - Federal regulators gave preliminary approval yesterday for a natural gas pipeline that would cross Virginia's scenic Blue Ridge Mountains, a project opposed by local farmers, hunters and politicians who say it would mar the natural beauty of the region.

The project's sponsor, Duke Energy subsidiary East Tennessee Natural Gas Company, wants to have the Patriot Pipeline operating by May 2003 to eventually ship more than 500 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must still review the environmental impact of the pipeline before deciding whether to give final approval for the project.

Although the four-member commission gave unanimous preliminary approval to the project, FERC Chairman Pat Wood said there was "substantial" opposition from landowners concerned about the environmental impact on the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"The applicant is going to have some work to do before I sign off on the final order," said Wood, speaking at a regular commission meeting.

The $289 million project would transport natural gas along a new 94-mile pipeline route, as well as through the company's existing pipeline system.

In southwest Virginia, hundreds of opponents to the pipeline turned out at a public meeting last autumn to express concern about the impact on the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway and the River Trail State Park. Critics have gathered more than 4,500 signatures on a petition opposing the pipeline.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the nation's best-known highways, was built during the Great Depression to link the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks.

Farmers, environmentalists, hunters, fishermen and local politicians complain that the pipeline would disturb more than 1,270 acres of agricultural land and nearly as much woodland.

Duke maintains the pipeline extension is needed to supply natural gas to the region to fuel new electric generating plants and improve reliability. The project will also create jobs in rural Virginia and North Carolina, the company said.

The pipeline extension will bring natural gas service to portions of southwest Virginia for the first time and introduce a competitive supply of natural gas to North Carolina from Appalachian and Gulf Coast producers, according to Duke.

The company plans to develop the Patriot project in three phases, initially having the capacity to transport 130 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d), increasing to 310 MMcf/d in November 2003 and eventually transporting 510 MMcf/d in January 2004.

--------

US FERC OKs Duke Energy unit's natgas pipeline

REUTERS USA:
March 28, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15240/story.htm

WASHINGTON - The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave preliminary approval yesterday for the Patriot pipeline project to eventually transport more than 500 million cubic feet of natural gas per day into the southeastern United States.

The project's sponsor, Duke Energy subsidiary East Tennessee Natural Gas Company, wants to have the pipeline operating by May 2003.

FERC must still review the environmental impact of the pipeline before deciding whether to give final approval for the project. FERC Chairman Pat Wood said there is "substantial" opposition from landowners to the project.

The $289 million project will transport natural gas along a new 94-mile pipeline route, as well as through the company's existing pipeline system.

The Patriot project will be developed in three phases, initially having the capacity to transport 130 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d), increasing to 310 MMcf/d in November 2003 and eventually transporting 510 MMcf/d in January 2004.

The pipeline extension will run from Virginia to North Carolina and will bring natural gas service to portions of southwest Virginia for the first time and introduce a competitive supply of natural gas to North Carolina from Appalachian and Gulf Coast producers.

--------

Texaco Penalized for Utah Oil Spills

March 28, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-28-09.html#anchor2

ANETH, Utah, Texaco Exploration and Production, Inc. has agreed to pay $848,622 to settle charges over oil spills and related violations at its oil and gas field on the Navajo Nation in Aneth.

The settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice includes a $369,922 penalty and two environmental projects totaling $478,700. The environmental projects were recommended by the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency (NNEPA) and the local community.

Texaco is also required to spend about $1.2 million over three years to improve its operational practices at the oil field.

One of the environmental projects under the settlement will construct a potable water extension to provide drinking water and sanitation facilities to a number of local Navajo Nation residents. Other local residents will be served by a water supply station that Texaco will construct as the second environmental project.

Some local residents now drive 50 miles to get drinking water, the NNEPA said.

"Companies not in compliance with environmental regulations not only pollute the environment, but gain an unfair competitive advantage," said Wayne Nastri, the EPA's regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest office. "This settlement levels the playing field, ensures that Texaco will operate its field in an environmentally responsible manner, and also provides clean, accessible drinking water for families who have gone for much too long without."

The EPA claimed that between December 1991 and January 1998 there were about 88 spills at the Aneth oil field that reached tributaries of the San Juan River including Montezuma Creek, in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

Texaco also failed to prepare and implement an adequate spill prevention and control plan, and discharged oil and oil and water mixtures without notifying the EPA.

The EPA and NNEPA began investigating the spills in 1995, and the EPA took administrative enforcement in 1996. The EPA sued Texaco in March 1998.

Texaco's oil field is located on lands leased from the Navajo Nation. The oil production fields lay adjacent and north of the San Juan River in southeast Utah. Montezuma Creek, a tributary to the San Juan River, runs through Texaco's oil fields from north to south.

-------- genetics

New Rice Research Could Help Poor

March 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rice-Genome.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An agricultural biotechnology company agreed Thursday to make public its data on the rice genome so that scientists can use the research to develop improved crops for the world's poor.

Syngenta AG, a Swiss firm, said academic institutions, governments and nonprofit organizations will be allowed to use the data as they wish, but competing companies will have to pay for rights to commercialize their uses of the material.

Rice is a staple for half the world's population. Its genetic model is relatively simple and so similar to other grains that scientists can use the rice map to manipulate genetic traits in a variety of crops.

Syngenta made the agreement with Science magazine, which is publishing the company's research next week.

``This is a balance between humanitarian goals and commercial goals,'' said Steven Briggs, president of Syngenta's San Diego-based Torrey Mesa Research Institute.

A Syngenta competitor, Monsanto Co. of St. Louis, decided two years ago to open its rice research to the public.

Science ordinarily requires that scientists place such data in an international repository, known as Genbank, but Syngenta balked at the demand because the company wants to prevent other companies from using the material commercially. Science editor Donald Kennedy said the Syngenta research was valuable enough to warrant making an exception to its policy.

The data will make it easier for scientists to add nutrients to crops or increase resistance to drought and pests through both conventional breeding techniques and genetic engineering.

``By making this information available in the public domain, we are making a major step in the right direction,'' said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

He said Syngenta was risking bad publicity by refusing to release the data in Genbank.

The rice genome provides a road map for altering genetic traits of corn and wheat, crops also descended from wild grasses.

So far, researchers have completed only a rough draft of the rice genome. Once the map is completed, in a year to 18 months, the data are likely to be made freely available in concert with work done by other researchers, Briggs said. Until then, Syngenta wants to keep control of the data so it can get a head start on its competitors, he said.

Syngenta used its rice research to develop a variety of corn that is more resistant to cold, damp weather in the spring. Field tests are beginning this summer.

-------- health

Gene Can Clarify Need for Hormones

Thursday, March 28, 2002
FINDINGS
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28699-2002Mar27?language=printer

Testing women for a common genetic variation may help doctors predict which patients can lower their risk of heart disease by taking estrogen.

Millions of women take estrogen supplements to relieve hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and it was long assumed that the pills also prevented heart disease by improving cholesterol levels. But recent studies have raised doubts about an across-the-board benefit.

Now researchers say there could be a way to zero in on women who might lower their risk of heart disease by taking estrogen. They found that a specific version of a gene appears to enhance estrogen's effect on HDL, the so-called good cholesterol.

Women with the gene variant had double the increase of HDL when taking estrogen compared with those lacking it, according to the study in today's New England of Journal of Medicine.

If heart benefits are confirmed, doctors could do a simple test to find out if their patients have the gene variant. The results could help them decide whether to recommend hormone supplements.

-------- human rights

Israel criticized over child detainees

March 28, 2002
Agence France-Presse
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020328-519951.htm

GENEVA - A U.N. human rights specialist said yesterday he had gathered evidence suggesting that Israel's treatment of Palestinian child detainees was inhuman and could amount to torture.

In a report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, John Dugard, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, called on Israel to carry out an independent inquiry into the charges.

He said about 1,000 children under the age of 18 had been arrested and detained since September 2000 in connection with crimes relating to the Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

More than 90 percent were arrested on suspicion of throwing stones at Isareli soldiers, he said.

"The evidence collected by [nongovernmental organizations] - and I also spoke to a number of children who had been detained - indicates fairly convincingly that children are subjected to inhuman treatment, probably amounting to torture in terms of the torture convention," Mr. Dugard said.

He said the children were held for lengthy periods while being interrogated, blindfolded, forced to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions, denied food or sleep, and on occasion, assaulted.

The U.N. rapporteur said he had wanted to discuss the charges with Israeli officials, but the government declined to cooperate with him during two visits to the region in August and February.

Voicing disagreement, Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Levy reiterated that the government did not recognize Mr. Dugard's "flawed" mandate and said that Israel was especially concerned about the involvement of children in conflict.

"Israel makes every effort to ensure that Israeli and Palestinian children do not suffer as a result of current hostilities and are able to dedicate their energies to education and the pursuit of a normal life," he told Agence France-Presse.

Mr. Levy said the discovery of three children in a Palestinian ambulance carrying explosives in the West Bank earlier yesterday was an example of Palestinians' abuse of children's rights that the U.N. rapporteur "constantly overlooks."

Mr. Dugard suggested that Israel appoint a judge to make "surprise visits" to interrogation centers and prisons to ensure children are properly treated.

"What troubles me in particular is that Israel is a state that has a proud legal tradition. It's the state in the region that is probably most firmly committed to the rule of law within its own territory," he said.

"But when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians outside its territory, there seems to be a lack of concern for human rights, and this I find very disturbing."

In a report published Monday, the U.N. expert called for an international peacekeeping mission, saying it was the only way to control both sides, reduce violence and provide the right climate for negotiations.

Speaking the day after two international observers serving with the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) were killed in the West Bank, Mr. Dugard said TIPH plays a useful role, but its powers are weak.

"I certainly believe that any peacekeeping mission that would be established in the region at present would have to have greater powers than that body," he said.

----

Illegals not entitled to labor protections

By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020328-391159.htm

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that undocumented aliens working illegally in the United States were not eligible for payments by employers who mistreated them.

The court set aside a National Labor Relations Board award of $66,000 in back pay, plus 13 years' interest, to Jose Castro, a Mexican national who lied to get his job in a California plastics factory and was laid off for trying to organize a union.

The high court by a 5-4 vote said illegal aliens may not collect "such relief" as back pay for jobs they were not entitled to hold, language that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said will affect its policies on back-pay orders and other remedies for victims of sexual, age, racial or other discrimination.

"However broad the [NLRB´s] discretion to fashion remedies ... it is not so vagrant and unbounded as to authorize this sort of an award," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in announcing the decision from the bench.

He also said action by the NLRB, a federal agency, required Hoffman Plastic Compounds Inc. to violate a federal law against knowingly employing illegal aliens and contributed to keeping Mr. Castro in the United States illegally.

Others in the majority were Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Justice Stephen H. Breyer wrote a dissent that contradicted the majority claim that the NLRB action ran counter to immigration policies. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"As all the relevant agencies (including the Department of Justice) have told us, the ... backpay order will not interfere with the implementation of immigration policy. Rather, it reasonably helps to deter unlawful activity that both labor laws and immigration laws seek to prevent," said their dissent, which called the company's action "a crude and obvious" violation of labor laws.

"Clearly, today's Supreme Court ruling has an impact on our policy guidance on remedies for undocumented workers, the extent of which we are closely examining," EEOC spokesman David B. Grinberg said last night.

The decision, ending a 13-year legal nightmare for the company, was greeted gleefully at the Paramount, Calif., family-owned business. Its 85 employees produce plastic compounds used by other companies to mold electrical and construction parts.

"Today the Supreme Court restored the proper balance between our country's labor laws and immigration laws," operations manager Roland Hoffman said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Castro used a friend's Texas birth certificate to identify himself as a citizen when he obtained the job.

He was laid off in January 1989 because of organizing work for the United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum and Plastic Workers of America, AFL-CIO. Because the dismissal violated federal labor laws, the NLRB ordered him reinstated and he worked at the company for four more years, Mr. Hoffman said.

The chief justice noted that rehiring a person once the company learned he was undocumented was illegal under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which took effect on July 1, 1987. That law requires all job applicants to prove they are legally eligible to work in the United States, bars applicants from using false papers to prove citizenship and forbids employers from knowingly hiring people in the country illegally.

"The aim of our immigration laws is to preserve jobs for those lawfully in this country. The Supreme Court's decision furthers that goal. We feel vindicated after more than a decade of proceedings with the NLRB," Mr. Hoffman said.

The likely impact on EEOC enforcement was pointed out in an interview with Ann Reesman, general counsel of the Equal Employment Advisory Council, which filed a friend of the court brief in the case.

"Under the employment discrimination laws, the EEOC issued guidance in 1999 using the same reasoning to apply remedies under the discrimination laws which amount to a lot more than just back pay," Miss Reesman said.

Mr. Grinberg said his agency is studying the new ruling for its impact on policies that often include such remedies as back pay, future pay, reinstatement to a job, money damages and attorneys' fees. He said those alternatives generally derive from the National Labor Relations Act, the same law involved in yesterday's decision.

Previous high court rulings protect undocumented workers under other federal labor laws, but that does not entitle them to back pay "for wages that could not lawfully have been earned and for a job obtained in the first instance by a criminal fraud," the court said yesterday.

Mr. Grinberg said EEOC traditionally included undocumented workers among those protected by discrimination laws and in 1999 issued updated reminders to employers that he said were based on current appeals-court rulings.

Asked how frequently illegal aliens become engaged in EEOC complaints, Mr. Grinberg said, "In rare instances. It's not something that's been prevalent."

Attempts to contact several advocacy organizations active in the case were unsuccessful.

Attorneys for groups that were reached, including the American Civil Liberties Union and National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, said they were too busy in meetings to discuss the decision.


-------- ACTIVISTS

Australia braces for Woomera protest

Thursday, 28 March, 2002
By Phil Mercer in Woomera
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1898000/1898829.stm

Hundreds of activists are expected to converge at the controversial Woomera detention centre in the South Australian desert for an Easter protest over the government's asylum policies.

The camp has seen several violent demonstrations by detainees in the past two years, including a hunger strike earlier this year when many of those involved sewed their lips together.

Refugee advocates have described Woomera as "a concentration camp".

The Australian Government however says it is a humane environment, and has defended the mandatory detention of asylum seekers on security and health grounds.

The organisers of a mass rally say it will highlight how humanity has been obliterated inside this remote desert facility.

About 800 detainees, including many children, are kept within its razor wire fences while their applications for refugee status are considered.

The process takes a few months on average, but can last up to five years.

In January, hundreds of Afghan asylum seekers staged a two-week hunger strike to protest about conditions inside Woomera.

Security stepped up

They were also unhappy at the length of time it was taking immigration officials to assess their refugee claims. Extra security has been brought in ahead of the planned demonstrations.

Estimates as to how many people will turn up vary from several hundred to several thousand.

There were a series of large-scale protests against the government's uncompromising stance on illegal migrants in Australia's capital cities last weekend.

Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock defended the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, despite international criticism.

The minister has insisted it is necessary to ensure all heath and security screening can be carried out before genuine refugees are allowed to live in the community.

Those detainees not considered to have authentic asylum claims are eventually deported.


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