------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
COMMENT The creeping nuclear threat
Air Force to Resume Use of Uranium Rounds
South Korea Says That North Agrees to Resume U.S. Talks
N. Korea to Open Dialogue With U.S.
Russia Rebukes U.S. on Disarmament
Two Days of Learning What to Do, and What Not to Do
NRC Opens Centralized Nuclear Security Office
Colorado Governor Signs Waste Bill
Nevada Fights Nuke Waste Storage
U.S. Faults Nuclear Reactor Operator for Corrosion Problem
Feds say D-B missed early damage signs
A Quiet Town Confronts Toxic Dirt
Secret Taiwan Fund Sought Friends, Influence Abroad
Blair's Ties to Bush: Partner, or 'Poodle'?

MILITARY
Questioning the Morality of Military Attcks on Civilians
Al Qaeda still a threat, war's top general says
Tehran concurs on embargo
U.S. Too Busy to Deal With Saddam
Fierce Fighting in Northern West Bank Camp
Arab Foreign Ministers Discuss Mideast Situation
U.S. Envoy Meets Arafat as Israel Steps Up Its Sweep
Arafat, Zinni talk as fighting intensifies
Musharraf Plans a Referendum to Let Him Stay in Power
Navy Uses Gas on Puerto Rico Protesters
Base Closure Savings $16.7 Billion, GAO Says
Pentagon to Cut Navy Role in Afghan War
Israeli Soldiers Force Reporters Out of Ramallah

POLICE / PRISONERS
Believed to Be a U.S. Citizen, Detainee Is Jailed in Virginia
Anthrax-hoax cases test tough policy
Skies still aren't secure
U.S. interests may be targeted

OTHER
Red Cross Criticizes Attacks on Its Facilities
Group: Israel Curbed Our Operations

ACTIVISTS
People Rally Against Israel in U.S.
Police Gas Anti - Navy Demonstrators
Europeans March for Palestinians
Protesters Charge Israeli Consulate in Sydney
Chile's 'Lost' Palestinians in Mideast Protest



-------- NUCLEAR

COMMENT The creeping nuclear threat

By Ehsan Ahrari
April 6, 2002
Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/front/DD06Aa02.html

The increasingly militant face of America's foreign policy since September 11 is a horrific development. Watching President George W Bush rightly expressing his anger over the scourge of global terrorism is one thing, but then watching him lower the nuclear threshold in his recently leaked Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is an entirely different matter.

Even when one does not categorically reject the statement of the Bush officials that the NPR does not represent a policy, but only contingency planning, one wonders whether such contingency planning is only the product of the wild imagination of mid-level Pentagon staffers, or whether it really reflects the thinking of higher-level government officials.

Mary McGrory, in her column "Nuts about nukes" (Washington Post, March 14), makes an excellent point that most military men do not think of "battlefield nukes" as an option. She goes on to quote a statement by Bush's Secretary of State Colin Powell in his autobiography, My American Journey, that is worth repeating. Powell was "disparagingly" narrating his experience of 1958, when he was assigned to guard a nuclear cannon. Regarding that experience, he wrote, "We are not talking about dropping a few artillery shells at a crossing. No matter how small they were ... we would be crossing a threshold ... using nukes at this point would mean one of the most significant policy and military decisions since Hiroshima." Now the same Powell is defending his president's NPR, by stating that the United States does not plan to use nuclear weapons.

But there is also a dispatch of the Los Angeles Times of March 9 that reports, "Pentagon officials have said publicly that they were studying the need to develop theater nuclear weapons" for use against specific targets on a battlefield. At least in the thinking of US officials, the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in future wars is becoming much less than the "unthinkable" option that the late Herman Kahn used to talk about.

But the most objectionable part of Bush's NPR is that it includes countries on its nuclear target list that are nonnuclear states and signatories of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty - Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The United States, the Soviet Union and Britain pledged in 1978 not to use nuclear weapons against such states - a pledge that is generally referred to as "negative security" assurance. The only exception was that such states should not be part of an attack in alliance with a nuclear weapon state. The People's Republic of China and France became parties to that pledge in 1995.

However, that negative security assurance was violated by the United States prior to the initiation of Desert Storm in 1991, when president George H W Bush conveyed to Saddam Hussein of Iraq that if he were to use chemical weapons against the US-led international coalition of forces, his administration would consider "the strongest possible response". Even though Bush Senior has clarified many times since then that he never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons during the Gulf War of 1991, it seemed that the nuclear threshold was tacitly lowered without any hue and cry from the friends or foes of the United States.

Only the Indians made a public note of this reality, when India's Defense Minister George Fernandes is reported to have observed that if you want to tangle with the United States, make sure that you have nuclear weapons.

The conventional wisdom within the US governmental and foreign-policy elite circles was that in the wake of a chemical-biological attack from an adversary, the potential use of nuclear weapons was indeed an option. Since the global environment was heavily clouded with uncertainty after the end of the Cold War, even the US Congress did not assert its foreign policy prerogative of participating in a decision of the magnitude of lowering the nuclear threshold. It appeared that the purposeful ambiguity related to the nuclear threshold was to put fear into the "bad guys" such as Saddam and Kim Jong-il of North Korea. Since the Russians and the Chinese were also actively proliferating nuclear and missile technologies to countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, there was not going to be a critical examination of the rationale underlying that purposeful ambiguity.

The post-September 11 developments took the genie of that purposeful ambiguity out of the bottle. Numerous reports that al-Qaeda was actively seeking the techniques to make the "dirty bomb" - that al-Qaeda was very much interested in the subject of nuclear weapons, and that there is absolutely no credible assurance that the Russian fissile or radioactive material has not fallen into the wrong hands - cumulatively created an environment within the US decision-making circles that it's better to be safe than sorry. And that frame of mind seems to be behind the Bush administration's NPR, and every single item related to the potential use of nuclear weapons.

It seems that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) - the bedrock of nuclear competition during the Cold War years - if not shattered, has been turned on its head (it may also be stated that the MAD doctrine has gone "madder"). If the reports that al-Qaeda and such like groups are interested in the acquisition of techniques to make the "dirty bomb" are indeed true, then it is only reasonable (if not logical) to conclude that all nuclear capable states - five nuclear weapons states plus India, Pakistan, and Israel - may not have much of a choice but to develop and deploy tactical nuclear weapons, purely as a defensive mechanism. The most worrisome development (indeed the curse) of the post-September 11 era is that the use of tactical nukes has entered so casually into international public debates.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is a Norfolk, VA-based strategic analyst.


-------- depleted uranium

Air Force to Resume Use of Uranium Rounds

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4443-2002Apr5?language=printer

The Air Force plans to resume using depleted-uranium rounds in testing and training at a Nevada base, officials said yesterday.

The Air Force stopped all testing and training with the tank-killing rounds in 1993 because of health and environmental concerns, though the ammunition was still used in combat in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. The Air Force said several studies showed the rounds are not a health or environmental threat.

The Air Force supplies 30mm depleted-uranium rounds for use in the cannons aboard the A-10 Thunderbolt ground attack jet. Testing and training with the rounds will resume at the Nevada Test and Training Range, which is associated with Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas.

-------- korea

South Korea Says That North Agrees to Resume U.S. Talks

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/asia/06KORE.html

TOKYO, Saturday, April 6 - South Korea said today that North Korea has agreed to resume dialogue with the United States after months of growing tensions between the two countries.

The announcement was made by a special presidential envoy, Lim Dong Won, on his return this morning from a four-day visit to North Korea.

"Leader Kim Jong Il has expressed willingness to open dialogue with the United States, and will accept a U.S. envoy's visit to the North," Mr. Lim said at a news conference in Seoul.

The White House declined to comment Friday night. One official said the administration was still trying to confirm news media reports.

Although no immediate comment was available from North Korean officials, Mr. Lim's visit appeared to place North Korea and South Korea back on the track of rapprochement, after more than year of limited contacts and scant cooperation.

At the news conference Mr. Lim said the two Koreas had agreed to a resumption of cross-border visits by families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, as well as the resumption of a variety of "good will projects."

He said the new agreements, reached after a long meeting with Mr. Kim, would "fully revive the North-South rapprochement."

In their June 2000 summit meeting in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and his North Korean counterpart, Mr. Kim, agreed to the reconnection of their national railroads, as well as other forms of economic cooperation.

The agreement by North Korea to receive a visit by a United States envoycame after pledges of willingness by the Bush administration to meet "anytime, anywhere."

Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang have risen sharply since Mr. Bush's State of the Union Address in January, in which he included North Korea in what he called an "axis of evil." Since then, the administration has told North Korea that it considers the country to be out of compliance with a negotiated agreement aimed at preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

----

N. Korea to Open Dialogue With U.S.

By Jae-Suk Yoo
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, April 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5818-2002Apr6?language=printer

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea has agreed to resume talks with the United States and revive reconciliation efforts with rival South Korea after months of increasing tension on the world's last Cold War frontier, a South Korean envoy said Saturday.

The two Koreas "have agreed to restore to normal South-North relations that have temporarily been frozen," the envoy, Lim Dong-won told a nationally televised news conference in Seoul after returning from a four-day trip to the communist North.

Lim also said the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "has expressed willingness to open dialogue with the United States, and will accept a U.S. envoy's visit to the North."

Until now, North Korea had balked at Washington's offer to restart talks, and tense relations deteriorated further after President Bush labeled the North Korea part of "an axis of evil" countries that are seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction.

"We're aware of reports that there are indications North Korea may be moving toward dialogue with the United States," State Department spokeswoman Brenda Greenberg said in Washington on Saturday. "We look forward to getting a fuller readout from the South Koreans."

According to Lim, the North Korean leader said he would accept a proposed visit by Jack Pritchard, a U.S. special envoy who met North Korean diplomats in the United States last month. The date of the visit will be set by the two sides, Lim said.

Lim also said he understood that Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, had either arrived in North Korea on a visit Friday or was to arrive Saturday.

After suspending talks with North Korea pending a policy review when he took office, Bush offered last June to resume dialogue with the North to discuss its suspected nuclear weapons program, missile development and massive military deployment near the border with South Korea.

Lim said Kim Jong Il had responded "positively" to a message he conveyed from South Korean President Kim Dae-jung urging the North to break out of isolation and build ties with the outside world. Returning home Saturday at the Panmunjom border post Lim told reporters that his trip to the North "yielded more good results than expected."

The Koreas were divided in 1945 and face each other across a border that is sealed and heavily armed. About 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Inter-Korean ties warmed after Kim Dae-jung traveled to the North for a historic summit in 2000, but a series of exchanges and talks designed to bring the nations closer together subsequently ground to a halt amid U.S.-North Korea tension.

A joint statement issued simultaneously in the two Korean capitals Saturday called for reunions of separated family members - an important part of the reconciliation process - to resume on April 28 at the Diamond Mountain resort in North Korea.

The Koreas also have agreed to resume work on reconnecting a cross-border rail line that was launched in 2000 and build a second rail line across the heavily armed demilitarized zone, the statement said. A North Korean economic survey team will visit South Korea in May, it said.

Also Saturday, the first auto assembly plant in North Korea was opened. The South Korean-owned plant will build Siena subcompact cars, designed by the Italian automaker Fiat SpA, for the market in North Korea, China and Russia's Far East.

Lim said Kim Jong Il reaffirmed his earlier promise to visit South Korea for a second summit with Kim Dae-jung but did not say when. Kim Dae-jung's term ends in February and by law, he cannot seek re-election.

Casting a shadow on his bright assessment of his talks in North Korea, Lim said Pyongyang officials did not respond positively when he urged the country to open its suspected nuclear weapons program to outside inspections.

In a 1994 deal with the United States, North Korea agreed to freeze two nuclear power reactors that Western officials suspected were being used to develop nuclear weapons in return for two replacement reactors of a type that cannot be used for that purpose.

Citing a delay in the $4.6 billion reactor project, North Korea has rejected U.N. inspections of nuclear sites.

The CIA suspects that North Korea may have extracted enough plutonium before the 1994 freeze to make one or two atomic bombs.

North Korea is also believed to have stockpiles of thousands of tons of chemical weapons and missiles that can reach the western U.S. mainland.

-------- russia

Russia Rebukes U.S. on Disarmament

By Judith Ingram
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, April 9, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19352-2002Apr9?language=printer

MOSCOW -- Russia rebuked the United States on Tuesday for deciding to hold back some disarmament projects because of doubts over Moscow's commitment to biological and chemical weapons treaties, accusing Washington itself of undercutting disarmament efforts.

"Such actions can have the most negative impact on achieving mutual trust and can be reflected in the two countries' cooperation in liquidating weapons of mass destruction and in the sphere of nonproliferation," Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement.

The U.S. government put Russia on notice last week it would not certify Russia's full commitment to carrying out the treaties. Such certification is necessary to disburse new funds for existing U.S.-Russian programs to reduce the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Among the reasons behind the U.S. decision were Russia's refusal to share a bioengineered strain of anthrax it had long promised the United States, refusal to provide access to biological institutes run by the Defense Ministry, and failure to own up to decades of secret work on biological and chemical weapons, The New York Times reported. U.S. officials say such withholding of access and information has dented faith in Russia's commitment to disarmament.

Yakovenko said the U.S. decision was not accompanied by concrete examples, and it caused "bewilderment" in Moscow. Russia certainly is observing the terms of the two treaties, he said, and any U.S. concerns could be discussed under existing mechanisms for dialogue.

He added that his government found it "incomprehensible" that the United States could cast aspersions on Moscow's fulfillment of the biological weapons treaty after a November summit when the U.S. and Russian presidents pledged to expand cooperation in the area.

"One gets the impression that the American references to Russia's supposed non-fulfillment of its international obligations are being used basically in order to distract attention from the United States' own actions," Yakovenko said.

He noted that the U.S. government had refused to support a protocol that would have provided for inspections under the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty. U.S. negotiators argued that the inspection system wouldn't work and would expose U.S. secrets to its enemies, but its position provoked protest even from close allies, who argued that the inspections would put teeth in a treaty that is difficult to enforce.

Yakovenko also accused Washington of "disorganizing" the activity of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Last month, Washington initiated a vote of no-confidence in organization chief Jose Bustani, accusing him of financial mismanagement. The U.S. government has said it will not provide funds to the organization - for which it provides 22 percent of the budget - until Bustani goes.

-------- terrorism

ANTITERRORISM TRAINING
Two Days of Learning What to Do, and What Not to Do

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/nyregion/06BIO.html

When Anna Simeone, a forensic chemist with the New York Police Department, arrived at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn on Thursday for a two-day workshop on bioterrorism, she expected that the exercise might be a bit academic, the equivalent, perhaps, of "an interesting seminar in grad school."

Instead, Ms. Simeone felt enlightened, humbled and awed by the experience of getting instruction from Army medical experts, participating in a simulated nuclear fallout exercise and figuring out how to decontaminate a mannequin that had just been exposed to nerve or mustard gas.

"Everything was so interesting; it was like information overload," Ms. Simeone said yesterday after watching an Army expert in chemical agents explain treatment methods. "It's just a little scary to think that this could actually happen, right here," she said.

Ms. Simeone could have just as easily been speaking for the 160 or so people from nearly three dozen city, state and federal agencies, as well as hospitals and community groups, who were trying to learn how to better respond to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism.

The workshop was the Army's first comprehensive bioterrorism seminar for civilians, officials said. And the session was the first gathering since Sept. 11 for such a large and diverse collection of local agencies and groups for the purpose of preparing for bioterrorism.

The Army had actually been planning a much more modest version of this workshop since July, mainly to recruit health care professionals. But after Sept. 11, the scope of the workshop changed and expanded, largely at the behest of Councilman Martin J. Golden, who represents Bay Ridge, where Fort Hamilton is situated.

By Thursday, just about every major agency with even a tangential connection to security or health care in New York was represented. Naturally, the police and fire departments were present. So, too, were the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Coast Guard and the Kings County District Attorney's office.

Even Community School District 20 in Bay Ridge was represented.

"Wherever there is a health danger I have to make sure the superintendent and the district are notified," said Trudy Adduci, director of math, science and health for the school district. The training session began Thursday with classroom presentations on current domestic and global threats, an overview of the 1995 chemical attack on the Tokyo subway system and a discussion of the potential tools of domestic bioterrorism, among other topics.

What made the biggest impression among some participants, though, was the discussion about nuclear threats, in which they offered advice (subways or basements can be excellent fallout shelters) and dispelled misperceptions (do not pack your family and your worldly possessions into a car and flee the scene because you'll only clog highways and other passages for emergency vehicles).

"It's scary to think that the P.D. has to learn this stuff, because you never thought you had to learn it before," said Sgt. Chris Batignani of the New York Police Department. "But even a quick intro is better than never seeing it before it happens. That way, you know the basics."

There was more classroom instruction yesterday, but a big dollop of practical exercises as well, that played out on a baseball field in the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

At one location, Sgt. First Class Mark Epstein and other officials from the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Sciences Branch at the Army's Academy of Health Services in San Antonio offered a demonstration of the latest in chemical-warfare protective suits, skin decontamination kits and radiological devices.

At another site, Maj. Joe Gresenz used three mannequins, lying on gurneys, to explain how one should - and should not - treat a person who has been contaminated with either nerve or mustard gas. He talked, for instance, about the proper way of removing the patient's clothing. He also explained how one would use either water or a bleach solution to treat exposed skin areas.

And at another site, Maj. Steve Cima led a nuclear fallout exercise in which participants were asked to fan out across the baseball field with simulated radiation-detection devices, and determine not just the level of radiation level, but also how much time they could safely treat an exposed patient.

Two minutes? Two hours? Timing was everything.

"When we train our new officers, we're training them for the battlefield," Major Cima said. "And on the battlefield, all the soldiers have training and equipment, and it's much easier to manage those hazards. But in a civilian environment, they don't."

Not everything, of course, was novel to the participants. After all, the Police Department's Emergency Services Unit and the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, to just cite two examples, frequently have similar training sessions. In fact, the most recent multi-agency operations exercise organized by the Office of Emergency Management had been planned for Sept. 12.

But even the most experienced emergency workers said that there was much to be learned in two days of coursework.

Dr. Vincent Eletto, an emergency physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, said that he would recommend that the hospital use soft brushes, and not its current supply of bristly brushes, in preparing to treat patients who had been exposed to chemical agents, because the brushes would be too rough on emaciated skin.

He had also never participated in a nuclear fallout drill. "You are working against time here, and the speed - you don't realize how quickly you have to work," said Dr. Eletto, who, like the other participants, now plans to convey the same information to colleagues.

"There is only so much you can do, and to be effective, you have to make tough decisions as to who you can save," he continued. "But you know what? I feel very good about what happened here this week. I may not be in the military, but I'm a part of the civil defense."

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

NRC Opens Centralized Nuclear Security Office

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4443-2002Apr5?language=printer

Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials created an office yesterday to centralize NRC security planning for the nation's 103 nuclear power plants, saying the step came after a "top-to-bottom" review of operations since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The NRC has issued orders in recent months requiring operators of nuclear power plants to improve security, acting after FBI warnings that the al Qaeda terrorist organization has targeted nuclear facilities for possible attacks. Creating a single security office, instead of scattering duties, will aid coordination, officials said.

The director of the office, Roy Zimmerman, will oversee security and emergency planning efforts and be the NRC's chief link to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, who is coordinating the anti-terrorism activities of more than 40 federal agencies.

-------- colorado

Colorado Governor Signs Waste Bill

By Steven K. Paulson
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, April 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5388-2002Apr6?language=printer

DENVER -- Gov. Bill Owens signed a bill that would require public meetings and state approval before any toxic waste could be shipped into Colorado.

The bill, signed Friday, had been rushed through the Legislature in an effort to prevent a Colorado company from accepting a shipment of 470,000 tons of radioactive soil from a Superfund cleanup site in New Jersey.

The company, Cotter Corp., planned to dump the soil in disposal ponds in Canon City, Colo. The ponds already contain residue from uranium processing.

Under the new law, the state Department of Public Health and Environment has to approve plans such as Cotter's proposal. The department must hold at least two public hearings and gather information on the potential environmental and economic effects of waste disposal before issuing a permit.

State Rep. Lola Spradley, the House sponsor, said a permit could still be issued if a company meets all the requirements.

"This bill does not ban the shipments," she said.

Cotter spokesman Rich Ziegler said his company believes it can meet the requirements and could possibly begin shipments in a few months.

At Owens' request, the health department delayed issuing Cotter a permit until the law could be passed and signed. Many area residents had protested the waste disposal plan, and a group called Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste was formed to fight it.

Cotter is appealing verdicts awarded by federal court juries that heard lawsuits filed by nearby residents alleging that radioactivity from Cotter's uranium-processing operations caused health problems.

On the Net:
Colorado Legislature: http://www.state.co.us/gov-dir/stateleg.html

-------- nevada

Nevada Fights Nuke Waste Storage

By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, April 9, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19900-2002Apr9?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's congressional delegation and its governor predicted Tuesday an uphill fight in Congress to keep thousands of tons of nuclear waste from being shipped into their state for disposal.

"The deck is stacked against us. We're going to try to restack the deck," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who knows something about card games as a former chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission.

While the Nevadans are facing a long-shot chance of succeeding, they outlined their essential strategy at a news conference: Convince enough lawmakers that it's too risky to allow thousands of shipments of nuclear waste to travel by highway and rail across their states.

A majority of nuclear reactors are located in the eastern half of the country.

Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, formally rejected construction of the Yucca facility in papers filed with Congress on Monday, leaving the next step to the House and Senate. President Bush in February directed that the Nevada site be built, but under the law Nevada has a right to veto that decision. Congress, in turn, can override Nevada's objection.

The procedures outlined by the law assures that Congress move as quickly as possible to consider a resolution upholding the president's decision. Unlike normal legislation, no senator may filibuster the resolution and any senator may bring it to the Senate floor for consideration after 60 days. Congress has 90 legislative days to act, or the Yucca site will be abandoned.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle told Reid he would "try and ensure" that no Democratic senator acts to bring the resolution up for floor consideration. Whether he will succeed remains to be seen. While Daschle normally would control when a measure is taken up by the Senate, in this case any Republican senator may force Senate action after a 60-day waiting period. Approval is by majority.

"We have an uphill fight to pick up 49 more votes," said Reid.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and other supporters argue that the Nevada site, which eventually would contain 77,000 tons of waste that will remain radioactive for more than 10,000 years, is scientifically proved and that the waste can be stored there safely. If Congress gives the go-ahead, the Energy Department must still receive a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and also faces a court challenge.

"Our court case will be very strong," said Guinn.

Nevada in a lawsuit charges that the Energy Department was obligated to find a disposal site where the geology will keep the waste from escaping into the environment for thousands of years. The lawsuit alleges the Yucca site does not meet that standard, requiring reliance on manmade barriers whose future performance is uncertain.

For the time being, however, the Nevadans hope to convince enough members of Congress to question the transportation of thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste from civilian power reactors and federal facilities in 34 states.

"It isn't a question of if there will be an accident, it's a question of when and where," maintained Reid, standing in front of a large map showing the likely routes nuclear waste shipments will take, mostly across the country's Interstate system.

He said there will be more than 120,000 shipments over 24 years by both rail and highway. The Energy Department has yet to develop a detailed transportation plan showing routes, but administration officials and the nuclear industry maintain that the shipments can be conducted safely and securely.

The administration has argued that consolidating the highly radioactive waste - most used fuel rods from power reactors - at one location will add to security and safety. If not taken to Yucca Mountain, the wastes would remain in aboveground storage at reactor sites.

Storage at reactors could be done safely and with security for as long as 100 years "while we study the technology to recycle the waste," said Ensign.

Currently the United States has a policy against recycling nuclear waste, although the Energy Department is studying ways to possibly do it in the future, thereby reducing - although not entirely eliminating - the volume of waste that will eventually have to be buried.

Even if the Yucca Mountain repository were opened - as is planned by 2010 if approval is given - there would still be nuclear waste at reactor sites, argue the Nevadans. Fuel rods coming from a reactor must be cooled for several years before they are ready for shipment.

On the Net:
Yucca Mountain Project: http://www.ymp.gov

-------- ohio

U.S. Faults Nuclear Reactor Operator for Corrosion Problem

April 6, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/national/06NUKE.html

OAK HARBOR, Ohio, April 5 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today placed the blame for extensive corrosion discovered in the lid of a nuclear reactor squarely on the power company that operates the reactor. A commission report cites several missed opportunities for officials at the company, the FirstEnergy Corporation, and its Davis-Besse plant, east of Toledo, to have detected the corrosion as much as four years ago.

The Davis-Besse staff had information that could have resulted in identification of the problem before it became a significant issue, the report said. In addition, had the Davis-Besse staff properly carried out programs required by the commission, "this problem would have been prevented," said John A. Grobe, director of the commission's reactor safety division.

The report, presented today to an audience of 300 area residents assembled in the local high school, detailed a lavalike boric acid buildup that had accumulated for so long that it had to be pried off with crowbars.

FirstEnergy officials did not dispute the findings and took full responsibility for the corrosion, the worst reported case at a nuclear power plant in United States history.

"We are clearly responsible for this condition of the reactor head," Robert F. Saunders, president of FirstEnergy's nuclear division, said.

Mr. Saunders qualified this admission with an explanation that FirstEnergy was a "learning organization" and would inevitably encounter occasional problems. His remarks were interrupted occasionally by agitated members of the audience who shouted, "Shut it down!"

Fred Cohn, 74, of Curtis, Ohio, asked officials of the nuclear agency and FirstEnergy, "How can you people tell us you're learning, you're learning, you're learning? Don't you think this is a pretty expensive way to learn at our expense?"

The corrosion was detected in a routine shutdown for refueling in February. The plant, which has not reopened since, will not reopen for several more months at least while plant officials determine whether to repair or replace the reactor head.

Both the nuclear agency and FirstEnergy maintained that the public was never in danger as a result of the corrosion. The worst-case scenario, the agency said, would have been a "radiological mess" contained within the reactor building.

----

Feds say D-B missed early damage signs
Hints of acid damage to reactor vessel showed up in 1999, according to NRC inspection team review.

By BRENDA M. CULLER brendaculler@sanduskyregister.com
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Sandusky, Ohio Register
From: "vcolley" <vcolley@earthlink.net>

OAK HARBOR - Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station workers missed opportunities to diagnose the cause of the reactor head corrosion problem found at the Carroll Township plant.

This was the finding by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Augmented Inspection Team, which was presented Friday to more than 300 people attending a public meeting at Oak Harbor High School.

The NRC is a federal agency whose job is to ensure nuclear power plants are safely designed, built and operated. Davis-Besse is a for-profit electricity producer owned by FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron.

Around 40 people commented and questioned NRC and Davis-Besse officials during the nearly three-hour meeting. Various people, including a group of about 30 from the South Bend, Ind., area carrying colorful anti-nuclear posterboards, spoke against the nuclear industry in general.

Some protesters alleged Davis-Besse was conspiring to hide the corrosion and compared it to Enron Corp., the bankrupt Texas-based energy company.

But numerous people who live within the 10-mile emergency planning zone surrounding the Ohio 2 plant -- including a 14-year-old Oak Harbor resident -- said they have confidence in FirstEnergy, Davis-Besse workers and their own safety.

"My family lives downwind of this place, and I wouldn't have them here if I felt this was an unsafe plant," said 22-year plant employee Steve Fehrmann of Port Clinton.

The public comments came after Melvin Holmberg, senior metallurgical engineer from NRC Region III, detailed the areas where the utility's internal inspections fell short. NRC Region III, based in Chicago, oversees nuclear power plants in the Midwest.

Workers misdiagnosed several problems, including:

- Boric acid deposits which had caused the reactor containment's air cooling vessel to clog and the boric acid in those filters changing from white to brown in 1999;

- Detecting increased amounts of radiation in air monitor filters which caused filter changes to increase from monthly to every other day in May 1999; and

- Boric acid deposits found on the reactor head which were not recognized, not properly evaluated and not completely removed.

These were all indicators reactor head corrosion could be occurring.

"Davis-Besse staff had several chances to prevent and identify the (reactor head) corrosion but failed to do so," Holmberg said.

Brian W. Sheron, of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, said when the filter clogging was occurring in the late 1990s, Davis-Besse officials were aware of and fixed a problem with leaking pressurized relief valves that also come out of the top of the reactor head.

When the pressure in the reactor vessel, which normally operates around 2,200 pounds per square inch, gets too high, extra pressure is released out of these valves, Sheron said.

Howard Bergendahl, vice president of nuclear at Davis-Besse, said the utility's prior inspection evaluations concluded that the iron oxide and boric acid deposits clogging the coolant and air filter systems was caused by the leaking pressure valves.

"We have now been proven wrong," Bergendahl said. "It appears we misdiagnosed the symptoms because they measure what is going on inside the entire building and the equipment within that building."

Davis-Besse executive Bob Saunders said the company takes responsibility for what happens at its power plants.

"There is only one licensee and that is FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company. As such we are responsible to the public and the NRC. We are a learning organization, and we will take this experience and move forward. There is only one kind of nuclear operation and that is a safe one. There was never an unsafe operation in this event," he said.

NRC officials said they do not think Davis-Besse employees' oversight of the cause of iron oxide and boric acid contamination found in the filters was intentional. However, they said human error in terms of miscommunication and misjudgment could have been part of the problem.

On Feb. 16, the nuclear power plant was shut down for refueling and inspection of 69 control ride drive mechanism nozzles in the reactor head. It was found that five nozzles had cracks in them, three nozzles' cracks were all the way through which allowed for leakage of steam laced with boric acid.

During the repair of five nozzles, workers found the boric acid had eaten a 6-inch long, 4- to 5-inch wide and 6-inch deep cavity in the outer carbon steel lining of the reactor head.

A second corroded area, less than 2-inches long, a quarter of an inch wide and 4-inches deep, was found near a second nozzle. Only a piece of stainless steel lining, less than an inch thick, kept the pressure contained in the reactor head.

Information obtained from the removal and inspection of the first nozzle led the NRC's inspection team to its conclusions.

Thursday, the second nozzle with "unprecedented" amount of corrosion near it, was removed for inspection, Sheron said.

Holmberg said the inspection team has determined the reactor head's significant corrosion was caused by boric acid leaking through cracks in the nozzles and began at least four years ago.

The NRC still has to review Davis-Besse's actions to see if its workers complied with NRC regulations.

-------- us nuc waste

A Quiet Town Confronts Toxic Dirt

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/national/06WAST.html

DENVER, April 5 - Residents of Cañon City, a small town in central Colorado, are accustomed to taking in the worst society has to offer. The 13 nearby state and federal prisons are filled with examples, like Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

But prisoners are one thing. Up to 470,000 tons of radioactive dirt - enough to fill 9,700 rail cars - are quite another. The possibility that the dirt may be headed there from New Jersey has set the town on edge, making Cañon City the latest community in the West to join the nationwide debate over what to do with toxic waste.

Political battles over the storage of radioactive and nuclear material are not uncommon in the West. In Nevada, for example, residents are fighting the government over the use of Yucca Mountain as a site for the storage of radioactive waste. But there and elsewhere, people opposed to waste storage almost always knew what was coming and who was bringing it.

That has not been the case in Cañon City, a town of 15,000 on the Arkansas River. People there never even knew they would have a fight until they read about the shipment in a local newspaper. The newspaper reported that a local processing plant operated by the Cotter Corporation, a division of General Atomics, a nuclear technology company based in San Diego, had contracted with the Army Corps of Engineers to receive the radioactive dirt from a Superfund cleanup site in Maywood, N.J. The dirt would fill existing disposal ponds of uranium tailings, residue from processing. Otherwise the company would have to buy ordinary dirt.

The deal is worth millions of dollars to Cotter - company officials declined to say how much - and psychological comfort to people in Maywood, where neighborhoods were built on ground contaminated with thorium, a radioactive mineral once used in gas lanterns, from a chemical plant that operated from 1916 through 1959.

But residents of Cañon City say the deal was a sucker punch, because Cotter failed to share details with them.

"We're scared, really scared," said Lynn Dillon, a member of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste, a group that was formed to stop the shipment. "We're a sleepy little town. We don't want to become a dumping site."

The group organized quickly. Its members began complaining to local, state and federal officials, insisting that the town had never been informed about the possible health and safety risks of bringing such a large quantity of toxic material into the area, which itself became a Superfund site in 1983. (Leaching from the Cotter ponds contaminated air and water near the plant.)

Responding to the complaints, Gov. Bill Owens asked the State Department of Public Health and Environment to review Cotter's deal. That request was enough to delay shipment until Cotter addressed concerns raised by the department. Doug Benevento, the department's director of environmental programs, said the company had not yet responded.

In addition, state lawmakers moved a bill quickly through the legislature that would make public input and environmental reviews a requirement of any deal to bring toxic waste into Colorado. Governor Owens, a Republican, signed the bill into law today.

The new law could further delay the shipments, although Patrick R. Mutz, the plant manager, conceded that the company had not expected smooth sailing.

"It's part of the cost of doing business," Mr. Mutz said in an interview, referring to delays. "We'll do what they ask us to do."

But delays, he said, would do more harm than good. He argued that the Maywood dirt would benefit the community because it had a lower level of radioactivity than the materials it would cover.

"As a result," Mr. Mutz said, "it would reduce the radioactivity in the area."

That is the kind of answer that leaves opponents gnashing their teeth. Cotter, they contend, has never had community interest in mind. They base that assertion on the federal lawsuits the company has lost over health and property damage. A 1989 case was settled eight years later, with 542 plaintiffs winning a large settlement - the amount was sealed by the court - and other judgments against the company are now under appeal.

Residents also say they were never told about the recent revision of Cotter's license to allow for disposal.

Mr. Mutz said the change, made 18 months ago, was approved by the state and the Environmental Protection Agency. But to that point, the plant had been relatively dormant for years, owing to the decline in the nation's nuclear energy industry. Expecting no major new activity there, developers began building large single-family homes on the hills within a mile of the plant, selling them for as much as $500,000.

"Cotter made the change in license with no public input, with no environmental impact studies, with no communication with the community," said Larry LaBuda, a member of the citizens group. "We formed the group to make sure that doesn't happen again."

Once public outrage began building over the Maywood deal, Cotter invited residents to a meeting to discuss the issue, a session that grew so heated that the police were called in. Other meetings are planned.

Mr. Mutz said that residents' overheated emotions had clouded their thinking about the proposed deal, and that if they truly understood what Cotter was doing, they would see the operation in a better light.

"This is a controversial subject," he said. "We appreciate people's fears. It's not something we hold against anybody."

Mayor H. Ben Johnson, a lifetime Cañon City resident who took office in January, said he sympathized with his upset neighbors but believed that many people were reacting to fear, not facts.

The mayor said Cotter had become a better neighbor after losing the lawsuits, and he predicted that no matter what the plant did, Cañon City would continue to thrive as a tourist attraction. Thousands visit the city every summer to gaze at the Royal Gorge and the suspension bridge above it, the highest in the world, at 1,050 feet, and to raft along the river.

"My wife and I were talking about this the other day," Mr. Johnson said. "We've traveled all over the world and, as she reminded me, I can't remember the last time I called ahead to ask if they have a uranium dump."

-------- us politics

Secret Taiwan Fund Sought Friends, Influence Abroad

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 5, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63444-2002Apr4?language=printer

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Desperate for international support, Taiwan under former president Lee Teng-hui established a secret $100 million fund to buy influence with foreign governments, institutions and individuals, including some in the United States, according to current and former Taiwanese officials.

The fund was the source of multimillion-dollar payments to leaders in Nicaragua, South Africa and Panama, according to senior Taiwanese officials and government reports. It also provided financial support, legal under U.S. law, for U.S. think tanks and Washington lobbyists, they said. Several people now in senior positions in the Bush administration, as well as former Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, were beneficiaries, according to the officials and documents.

The fund operated from 1994 until 2000 under the National Security Bureau, Taiwan's main intelligence agency, with no legislative oversight. Taiwan's new president, Chen Shui-bian, closed the fund following the disappearance of one of its senior accountants, Col. Liu Kuan-chun, who allegedly embezzled $5.5 million.

Liu's whereabouts are not known. But a senior Taiwanese official said he feared Liu fled to China and might still be there, which would provide Chinese intelligence with a potential gold mine of incriminating information.

Details about the fund were revealed in secret documents published in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the last two weeks, touching off a political crisis in Taiwan. Interviews with current and former Taiwanese officials confirmed many of the events detailed in the documents and provided information about additional payments made via the fund.

That Taiwan has used money to win friends and influence people has been an open secret for decades. Its lobbying machine is one of Washington's slickest, outclassing the less practiced attempts by its Communist adversaries from China, who in the 1990s were discovered to have attempted to funnel money to the Democratic Party. Senior officials in Taiwan said they worried that Taiwan has lost its advantage in the struggle for influence now that the documents have been leaked. "People will wonder about our ability to keep things secret," said Bi-khim Hsiao, a formerpresidential adviser and now a legislator. "This has been a dark week for Taiwan."

The documents and interviews paint the most detailed picture yet of a small country -- 23 million inhabitants -- trying to compete against the diplomacy of the People's Republic of China.

Taiwan was thrown out of the United Nations in 1971 to make way for China; only 28 countries still recognize the island. The United States has had no diplomatic ties with Taiwan for three decades. The fund was established against that background on June 20, 1994, Taiwanese sources said, when Lee brought the National Security Bureau under his control after years of operation outside executive branch management. Lee suggested that Ying Tsung-wen, the bureau's chief at the time, keep the fund hidden from the legislature, sources said.

The fund was divided into seven steering committees. One was the Mingde, or Clear Virtue, committee, responsible for ties with the United States and Japan, Taiwan's most important relationships. Su Chi, a former Taiwanese official in charge of relations with China, confirmed the existence of the group and his participation in its activities.

Su said the group sought to identify influential Americans and Japanese who would be sympathetic to Taiwan's cause. The group helped formulate Taiwan's policy toward Japan and the United States and tried to raise Taiwan's profile there. One former Taiwanese official involved in U.S.-China relations described Taiwan's payments to U.S. academics and former administration officials as "an insurance policy."

"We did not generally believe that you could buy Americans," he said. "And we were very clear about the law," which bans contributions to political campaigns from foreign donors.

The former official said Taiwan regularly funded research by U.S. academics on Taiwan; backed conferences put on by such think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation; and cultivated relationships in Congress, sending employees of influential legislators on free trips to Taiwan. It did not, he said, attempt to edit U.S. researchers' work or lean on Americans to reach certain conclusions. And, he said, it tried to maintain good relations with people who had been sympathetic to Taiwan while they were in government.

"We know there is a revolving door in Washington," he said. "So we follow the careers of people and hope we can cooperate."

One of the big successes claimed by the secret fund's administrators was then-President Lee's trip to the United States in 1995, which touched off a rapid deterioration of U.S. ties with China and brought Taiwan, China and the United States to the brink of conflict.

Lee's administration cultivated close ties to the Washington-based lobbying firm Shandwick Public Affairs Inc., and its sister firms, Cassidy & Associates and Powell Tate. From Jan. 1, 1995, to Dec. 31, 2000, the firms received $9,818,548 from Taiwan, according to Justice Department records. Taiwanese officials confirmed that half the payments came from Lee's fund and half came from his Nationalist Party through the Taiwan Research Institute.

A spokesman for Cassidy & Associates said the firms assumed "the funding was coming from private sources" via the Taiwan Research Institute. Sources in Taiwan said the research institute is funded almost completely by the Nationalist Party.

Cassidy and the other firms played an important role in lobbying Congress to pressure the Clinton administration to grant Lee a visa to attend a reunion at Cornell University. The trip enraged China, which fired missiles miles into the sea off Taiwan's two main ports. The United States dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region to signal support for Taiwan.

Lee then used the Mingde group to dispatch a leading industrialist, Peng Run-tzu, president of the Taiwan Transport Machinery Corp. and Lee's personal confidant, to Japan to lobby then-Prime Minister Hashimoto to press the United States for a strong reaction, documents and Taiwanese officials said.

The Mingde committee also used Cassidy to lobby for increased arms sales to Taiwan. Among the Cassidy lobbying team at the time was Carl W. Ford Jr., now assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Taiwanese officials said Ford helped fashion a March 1, 2000, letter to then-President Clinton from then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) suggesting that congressional approval of permanent normal trade relations with China might depend on the Clinton administration's moving "promptly" to approve Taiwan's weapons request.

Ford also testified before Congress, where he was identified as a consultant to the Taiwan Research Institute, in favor of major arms sales, including destroyers equipped with the Aegis radar system, a view that goes further than the current Bush administration. The Mingde group also arranged for Ford to travel to Taiwan in 2000 during George W. Bush's presidential election campaign, documents and Taiwanese officials said.

Ford did not return calls requesting comment.

Last April 24, the Bush administration approved an arms package for Taiwan that included destroyers, anti-submarine aircraft and submarines worth more than $4 billion. It was the biggest military transaction since Bush's father sold 150 F-16 warplanes to Taiwan in 1992.

Documents and Taiwanese government sources also said that Mingde was involved in identifying influential Americans, inside and outside government, and attempting to befriend them. Paul Wolfowitz, currently deputy defense secretary, and Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant defense secretary during the Clinton administration, were targets of the group, the Taiwanese weekly magazine Next reported.

A Pentagon spokesman said Wolfowitz was aware of no connection with the Taiwan fund. He said he did not raise money from Taiwan when he was dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies during the Clinton years.

Taiwanese officials said the fund also paid for research by John Bolton, the current undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who received $30,000 over three years in the mid-1990s for research papers on U.N. membership issues involving Taiwan. As a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, Bolton supported U.S. recognition of Taiwan as a separate country and its return to the United Nations. Asked about his research during a confirmation hearing in April 2001, Bolton said his work for Taiwan would not affect his ability to objectively handle Taiwan issues, including U.S. arms sales.

Bolton did not return calls requesting comment.

Documents published in Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily detailed payment in early 2000 of $100,000 to James Kelly, now assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, for two years at Harvard University for former Japanese deputy defense minister Masahiro Akiyama following Akiyama's forced resignation in October 1998 in a contracting scandal.

At the time, Kelly was the president of the Pacific Forum, a Honolulu-based affiliate of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Jay C. Farrar, vice president and spokesman for CSIS, confirmed yesterday that it received two $50,000 donations in 1999 and 2000 from Peng, given through his Taiwan Transport Machinery Corp., to support Akiyama's fellowship. Pacific Forum sent a check for "approximately $40,000" to Harvard, apparently to pay for Akiyama's fellowship there, Farrar said. Peng also gave Pacific Forum $50,000 in general support, Farrar said.

A State Department spokesman said Kelly declined to comment on the matter. Akiyama, who has denied his tuition was paid by Taiwan, did research on Taiwan's inclusion in a theater missile defense system being developed by Japan and the United States.

A former official said Lee also used the fund to buy friendship in small foreign countries. Lee, he said, dispatched Liu Tai-ying, a senior Nationalist Party official, on missions abroad to search for investments that could be used as fronts for laundering Taiwanese money to its friends.

In interviews, officials acknowledged multimillion-dollar payoffs to a variety of countries, much of it through the slush fund. In 1997, they said, Panama's government received $11 million for hosting Lee. Nicaragua received $10 million to build a pink-and-yellow presidential palace for its president, Arnoldo Aleman, and at least $6 million to build a Foreign Ministry building, they said.

One payment was detailed by Eugene Loh I-cheng, a longtime diplomat in the United States who served as Taiwan's last ambassador to South Africa. Loh said that on June 20, 1994, following Lee's visit to Nelson Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first black president, his government approved a plan to pay Mandela $10 million. That was the day the fund was established by Lee.

Loh said the payment was made to help the African National Congress repay a $20 million campaign debt. National Security Bureau documents detailed a payment of $11 million, but Loh said he knew of only $10 million, which he handed in small denominations of South African rand to a senior member of Mandela's inner circle.

Loh identified one senior contact as Thomas Nkobi, the governing African National Congress's late treasurer general. Other Taiwanese sources said Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's current president, was also involved in the transaction. Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC secretary general at the time, denied any knowledge of the deal in an interview last week with the South African Daily Mail and Guardian.

Loh said he believed the payment helped delay South Africa's recognition of China by at least two years, to Jan. 1, 1998.

"South Africa was our last big fish," Loh said in an interview. "We are a little island. We have to hold on to these relations any way we can."

The source of the documents is unclear but speculation is rife -- stretching from the fugitive Col. Liu to opposition leader James Soong to former chiefs of the National Security Bureau. Liu's copying machine was apparently used to reproduce some of the documents, but he is not believed to have had access to such classified material.

Tsai Chao-ming, head of the National Security Bureau, told reporters that the revelations, which included the code names of operations and the names of front companies, have seriously damaged Taiwan's ability to collect intelligence and have placed current operations and the lives of Taiwanese agents at risk.

The Global Times, a state-run newspaper in Beijing, crowed recently that Taiwan's intelligence activities in China were a shambles because of the revelations.

In an attempt to quash the report, Taiwanese prosecutors on March 20 raided the offices of Next magazine, which first published the documents, and seized 160,000 copies of the muckraking weekly. Next got the story out anyway by switching to other printing plants. In the end, more than 300,000 copies were sold, according to editor Peir Woei.

Justice Minister Chen Ding-nan said in an interview that prosecutors were preparing to file indictments against reporters and editors at Next and the China Times, a daily newspaper that obtained similar documents. Their crime, he said, was revealing state secrets. "There is just too much press freedom in Taiwan," he said.

Staff writer Robert G. Kaiser in Washington contributed to this report.

----

Blair's Ties to Bush: Partner, or 'Poodle'?
Critics Say Relationship Is One-Sided

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3952-2002Apr5?language=printer

CRAWFORD, Tex., April 5 -- At 7 a.m. Thursday, hours before his Rose Garden speech on the Middle East, President Bush telephoned his friend Tony Blair to brief the British prime minister on what he was going to say. When they first met more than a year ago, Bush promised he would always stay in close touch with Blair, and he has kept his word.

According to their respective governments, the Bush-Blair connection is every bit as tight as Blair's much-touted close personal relationship with Bill Clinton. Cemented by frequent phone calls and three bilateral visits over the last 14 months, it was capped today with Blair's arrival here for a "private" weekend at the Bush ranch.

Bush clearly has benefited from the support of a major European leader -- often, Blair has been the only one of the group firmly on his side -- for controversial administration policies, including a national missile defense and the need to rid the world of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

But the question that vexes many in Europe, as well as inside Blair's own government and political party, is what Blair gets out of it.

Blair, "has put his neck on the block for Mr. Bush," said an editorial this week in Britain's influential Guardian newspaper. "We do not recall even the smallest reciprocal gesture from the president." The tabloid Mirror, previewing Blair's Texas trip, put it more succinctly in a front-page headline that blared: "Howdy, Poodle."

Other people, including Blair's top aides, frequently describe Bush and Blair as standing "shoulder to shoulder" as partners. The Blair they describe is a confidant and moderating influence on Bush, and serving as a bridge between nervous Europeans and a U.S. administration seen as insistent on its views and little interested in theirs. His public support, they say, gives Blair more influence on Bush in private.

But the view that Blair serves as little more than a convenient cover for Bush's unilateralism was reinforced early last month, when Bush ignored personal calls and a written request from his good friend in London asking him not to impose new tariffs on steel, an important British export.

"They just took no notice at all," a senior British official said of the administation's response to increasingly urgent entreaties. His government, the official said, remains furious over the tariffs, which now are the subject of a World Trade Organization dispute.

Blair's setback the one time he publicly put his influence with Bush on the line did little to quell increasingly loud rumblings on his Labor Party back bench and inside his cabinet that he was taking Britain down a foreign policy road many of his countrymen did not want to travel -- particularly regarding Iraq -- even as he seemed uninterested in pressing domestic problems.

Ironically, original expectations for a close Bush-Blair relationship were low, with little expectation in London that the fresh-faced politician who had won office on a New Labor platform similar in tone and centrist position to Clinton's New Democrats would have much in common with a conservative Texas Republican. But both made an effort, with Bush inviting Blair in February last year to be the first European to visit him as president, and the first foreign leader to spend the weekend with him at Camp David.

At a news conference during that visit, Bush joked they were so close he even knew what kind of toothpaste Blair used, and Blair affected mock chagrin. In the future, Bush said, he knew that "there'll be a friend at the other end of the phone."

Last summer, Blair returned the invitation, playing host to Bush and his wife, Laura, at Chequers, the British prime minister's country estate. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Blair sat at Mrs. Bush's side in the House chamber when the president spoke to a joint session of Congress.

Britain instantly became the second most important member of the international coalition against al Qaeda and the Taliban, militarily, politically and diplomatically. While Bush stayed in Washington, Blair traveled several times to the Middle East and South Asia to promote their joint objectives and keep the coalition together.

The number of British troops in Afghanistan nearly equals that of U.S. forces. More than 2,000 British soldiers are participating in the multinational security force and an additional 1,700 are on their way to engage in high-altitude combat with al Qaeda and Taliban forces after the joint U.S.-Afghan Operation Anaconda last month failed to achieve all its goals.

The first real glitch in the smooth relationship appeared in January, when Washington rebuffed British concerns over the treatment of alleged terrorist prisoners, including several British citizens, being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Then came Bush's State of the Union speech, in which there was no mention of British assistance in the war effort. Bush's "axis of evil" reference to Iraq, Iran and North Korea did not sit well with London, which maintains a fairly close relationship with Tehran and views itself as a cultivator of Iranian moderates.

But it is Blair's ostensible support for Bush's saber-rattling toward Iraq's Hussein that has caused him the most difficulty at home. Far from echoing the concern expressed by his European Union partners, Blair's rhetoric on the subject has grown increasingly closer to Bush's call for Hussein's ouster -- even as Blair aides have privately insisted that there is little to worry about in the short or medium term because there is no U.S. war plan on the table.

More than 100 Labor members of the House of Commons have publicly opposed any action toward Iraq, and at least one member of Blair's cabinet has threatened to resign over the issue. Until two days ago, the British media referred to the Texas weekend with Bush as a "war summit" to plan for an invasion of Iraq, questioning why Blair was not using his touted influence to push instead for U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

The Middle East is one of the few issues that finds Blair closer to Europe than to Washington, and there is palpable relief in the British camp that Bush's speech has put them all on the same page and moved the issue of Iraq aside, at least for the weekend.

One British official said Blair feels that his experience with peace negotiations in Britain's once-intractable Northern Ireland conflict offers lessons for how to deal with the Israelis and Palestinians, and is bringing a lot of ideas with him.


-------- MILITARY

BELIEFS
Questioning the Morality of Military Attcks on Civilians

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By PETER STEINFELS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/national/06BELI.html

The headline was "100,000 People Perished, but Who Remembers?" Appearing in The New York Times on March 14, it perfectly captured the essence of a powerful report from Tokyo about the forgotten victims of March 10, 1945, when, as the Times correspondent Howard French wrote, "a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo."

Sixteen square miles of the city went up in flames and 100,000 perished in a single night. Although scores of similar incendiary raids on Japanese cities followed, their memory, even in Japan, seems to have been obliterated by the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Among one group, however, the memory was not lost: philosophers, theologians and military and political leaders concerned with the ethics of warfare. They have long considered those raids leading examples of how a well-established moral principle, forbidding direct attacks on civilian populations, collapsed.

The breakdown began earlier, with the British decision to terror bomb German cities in reprisal for the London blitz, and ended in the nuclear strategy of massive retaliation. To the defense that direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians can ultimately end wars sooner and thus spare lives, most moralists have replied that the end does not justify the means.

Recently "who remembers?" has become a question pertinent to debates over the war in Afghanistan and more recently in the Middle East. Those who do remember can only blink their eyes at the fierce charges and countercharges last year over incidents involving Afghan civilian deaths numbered in two digits. At the same time, television documentaries on biological warfare were showing how only a few decades ago American war planners (and Soviet ones as well) were devising weapons and strategies that would have indiscriminately wiped out civilians by the tens of millions.

Determining the numbers and causes of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as precisely as possible is important, but it already seems indisputable that the United States military not only rejected direct attacks on civilians but also strove mightily to avoid what is antiseptically termed "collateral damage" - and that this represents a major reversal of earlier attitudes.

When opponents of American actions in Afghanistan, as well as in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo, refuse to acknowledge any progress in this area, it suggests that their concern about the fate of civilians cloaks an opposition springing fundamentally from other sources.

That is a complaint of Michael Walzer, the political theorist whose widely used study "Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations" (Basic Books) strongly defended the principle that civilians should be immune from direct attack.

Writing in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, Mr. Walzer challenges the unqualified demand that any response to the terrorism of Sept. 11 had to avoid endangering civilians. This demand, he says, was simply "intended to make fighting impossible."

"I haven't come across any arguments," he writes, "that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths.

"All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars," he continues, but not issues really confronted by demonstrators chanting "Stop the bombing."

Mr. Walzer is ultimately more interested in addressing left-wing attitudes toward the United States than in the soundness of current moral debates about war and peace.

But the integrity of moral discourse about warfare is surely threatened when concern about civilians ceases to have much to do with what is happening on the ground but instead becomes an instrument to support a prior condemnation of all war, or at least all American war. It begins to look like the military is taking the principle of civilian immunity more seriously than many war critics.

On the other hand, one can say that it is easy for the armed forces to agree that the end doesn't justify the means now that smart bombs and other technological advances in weaponry have supplied new means for discriminating between military and civilian targets. What will the United States do if it faces a situation where these new options don't work?

That is exactly the challenge posed by the suicide bombings in the Middle East. A few have been aimed at military targets but most, like the Netanya hotel bombing on the first night of Passover, have been as pure examples of directly attacking civilians as one could conceive.

Defenders of these actions maintain that these are the only effective means that Palestinians possess in the face of overwhelming Israeli military power. What is more, defenders of suicide bombers - "martyrs" would be the language they prefer - argue that they have still not caused as many civilian casualties as the "collateral damage" of Israeli military actions. Those defenders would be incensed by the idea that their small-scale actions, however lethal, represent the same kind of immorality as the destruction of 100,000 lives in a raging inferno.

Those are not things said out loud in Europe and the United States. But they are tempting thoughts to those who identify strongly with Palestinian frustrations and perhaps even to some who feel that a greater balance of power between Palestinians and Israelis could actually force a settlement.

The questions posed by that temptation could not be more basic: Is the moral line against directly attacking civilians going to be crossed once again to fit the circumstances? Does the end justify the means? Who remembers?

-------- afghanistan

Al Qaeda still a threat, war's top general says

April 6, 2002
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020406-26557498.htm

The war in Afghanistan has badly damaged the al Qaeda terrorist network, but the group probably is still capable of mounting terrorist attacks, the war's U.S. commander said yesterday.

"This one also is in the category of a long way to go before we can relax," Gen. Tommy Franks told reporters.

Gen. Franks said there are no immediate plans for any military action in Afghanistan as large as Operation Anaconda, the 17-day assault on hundreds of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts last month. He said he has no plans to add to the U.S. force in Afghanistan, which currently numbers about 6,500 troops.

Those troops are busy searching for remaining groups of Taliban and al Qaeda, said Gen. Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command.

"We will do that work until we have satisfied ourselves that there is not the possibility of a remaining terrorist network in Afghanistan," Gen. Franks told Pentagon reporters via a video link from his headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

With Sunday marking six months since the start of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, Gen. Franks said the operation had met many of its goals. The extremist Islamic Taliban regime is out of power, Afghans are getting humanitarian aid and al Qaeda is on the run, Gen. Franks said.

"I think, without a doubt, the operations of al Qaeda coming out of Afghanistan have been dramatically damaged, dramatically degraded," Gen. Franks said.

But he added, "I think it would be naive of me to say that al Qaeda does not continue to have capabilities to conduct terrorist operations as we speak."

Outside of Afghanistan, the U.S. military is "continuing to build our intelligence and situational awareness in Somalia," Gen. Franks said. Al Qaeda has operated in the Horn of Africa country in the past, and Somalia's lack of an effective government could help the terrorist network regroup there.

"It's too soon to tell" whether that is happening, he said.

Gen. Franks said the United States was working with other countries in the region to gather information about the situation in Somalia. There are no U.S. special-operations troops in Somalia, Gen. Franks said.

-------- iran

Tehran concurs on embargo

April 6, 2002
By Mariam Fam
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020406-91529456.htm

CAIRO - Iran yesterday became the second OPEC country to call for an oil embargo against Israel's allies, while thousands of Arabs across the Middle East protested Israel's incursion into Palestinian territories.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Muslim oil-producing states should halt supplies to countries supporting Israel.

"I suggest, only for one month, as a symbolic gesture, that Arab and Islamic countries switch off oil to all countries who have close relations with Israel," Ayatollah Khamenei said in a prayer sermon yesterday at Tehran University.

During a visit to Moscow, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi suggested his government would support Ayatollah Khamenei's suggestions.

"If other Islamic countries join in this call, it will be a very strong instrument against America and Israel," Mr. Kharrazi said.

Three days ago, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri proposed that Arab countries use oil to pressure the United States into forcing Israel to end its military offensive in the West Bank.

Iraq also belongs to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which pumps about a third of the world's crude. The last Middle Eastern oil embargo against the West was in 1973 because of an Arab-Israeli war.

OPEC Secretary-General Ali Rodriguez told Dow Jones Newswires an oil embargo would counter the organization's goal of promoting a secure oil supply and stable prices.

He also said through a spokesman that OPEC has not received any member proposal for an oil embargo against nations sympathetic to Israel.

Oil analysts said an embargo would be ineffective. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would have to participate for it to be successful and both have signaled they would not join such a boycott.

Also, non-OPEC producers such as Russia, Mexico and Norway likely would pump more oil to cover any supply shortage, analysts said.

OPEC and other major oil exporters pledged in November 2000 not to use oil as a political weapon, although Iraq did not attend that meeting.

Meanwhile, protests by Palestinian supporters in Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan turned violent yesterday.

In Manama, Bahrain, about 10,000 demonstrators called for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is based there, to leave. Molotov cocktails were thrown inside the U.S. Embassy compound, setting alight a satellite dish and a sentry box.

Anti-riot police responded with rubber-coated bullets, nightsticks and tear gas, pushing protesters away from the concrete roadblocks surrounding the embassy.

Protesters said one man was killed after being shot in the head with a rubber bullet, but the shooting could not be immediately confirmed.

-------- iraq

U.S. Too Busy to Deal With Saddam

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Saddams-Reprieve.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Forcing out Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has become a tricky proposition for the United States because of the war on the West Bank.

Just weeks ago, the Bush administration was talking as though Saddam was a new target in the war on terrorism, and military action was an imminent possibility.

But the violence between Israelis and Palestinians has thrown the region into turmoil and further polarized the Arabs, which makes an American military move against Iraq politically more unlikely, many analysts say.

``The world would be better off without him,'' Bush said Saturday during a news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Bush said he told Blair, who was spending the weekend at Bush's Texas ranch, that ``the policy of my government is the removal of Saddam, and that all options are on the table.''

Blair said they have not settled on a way to deal with Saddam.

``How we now proceed in this situation, how we make sure that this threat that is posed by weapons of mass destruction is dealt with, that is a matter that is open,'' the prime minister said.

To retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, an independent analyst in Washington, ``It is absolutely not viable in the near future,'' for America to launch an attack on Iraq. ``The small region simply cannot contain two conflicts at the same time.''

Even if the warfare between Israel and the Palestinians is contained, Carroll said, ``keeping the peace will remain a top priority. An attack against Iraq could throw another match on the kindling.''

Some administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have made clear in recent days they still view Iraq as a priority threat.

Rumsfeld has criticized the Iraqi president for his link to the Palestinians' campaign of suicide bombing attacks that have killed dozens of Israelis. Saddam's government has said he pays each dead bomber's family $25,000.

The Bush administration accuses Iraq of developing weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terror. Bush repeatedly has demanded that Iraq readmit U.N. weapons inspectors unable to work there for almost 3 1/2 years. Officials say the administration is weighing options ranging from diplomatic pressure to possible eventual military strikes.

Now, however, any move against Iraq undoubtedly would be complicated on many levels.

Vice President Dick Cheney's recent trip to the Middle East confirmed that political support among Arab nations for military action is scarce. At their recent summit, Arab countries issued a statement saying that any attack on Iraq would be considered a threat to the security of every Arab country.

``The Arab nations simply are not going to tolerate our support of Israel and a decision to attack another Muslim nation,'' said Joe Stork, an adviser for Washington-based think tank Foreign Policy in Focus. ``Even if the leaders agreed with the United States that Saddam is bad for Iraq, their people wouldn't support it.''

The problem is not just one of offending regional allies; the lack of support could hinder the United States' tactical position.

Saudi Arabia has made clear that U.S. troops could not operate from Saudi soil in any move on Iraq, although many U.S. officials contend the Saudis might cooperate behind the scenes.

Kuwait and Turkey might still allow U.S. forces and airplanes to operate from their territory by providing the space and bases necessary for air or ground assault.

Still, some military experts suggest any attack without Saudi Arabia would be more dangerous.

``It is definitely more risky in terms of human lives,'' said Christopher Helleman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information. ``If we have to kick the door down by using a smaller border, we're going to lose more people. And creating a major base in another country is going to make it several times more expensive.''

-------- israel / palestine

Fierce Fighting in Northern West Bank Camp

April 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html

JENIN, West Bank - Fierce fighting raged across the northern West Bank on Saturday as Israel pushed ahead with its military offensive, undaunted by a U.S. call for a withdrawal of its armor and troops from Palestinian areas.

Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen battled in the Jenin refugee camp, where heavy casualties were reported just days before Secretary of State Colin Powell was due in the region on a mission aimed at halting the spiral of violence.

Powell, toughening a call made earlier by President Bush, said on Friday Israel should withdraw its forces from reoccupied Palestinian areas ``without delay'' and not use the days before his arrival to continue military incursions.

The Palestinian Authority called for international intervention to stop what it called Israeli ``massacres'' in the Jenin camp, a key stronghold of Palestinian militants. Israel dismissed the appeal as propaganda and denied targeting civilians.

A Palestinian official said if Powell chose not to meet besieged Palestinian President Yasser Arafat when he visits next week then other Palestinian officials would refuse to meet Powell.

The fiercest fighting on the ninth day of Israel's West Bank offensive was at the Jenin camp. The commander of Israeli forces in the area said there had been many Palestinian casualties.

``They (Palestinian fighters) have their backs against the walls. We trapped them in there, attacked them with the intention they should surrender. Those that don't surrender, we will kill them,'' Brigadier-General Tat Aluf Eyal Shlein said on Israel Radio. ``It is determined fighting.''

Palestinians speaking by telephone reported seeing dead and wounded in the streets of the camp. They said there had been intense bombardment throughout the night by Israeli tanks and helicopters.

``I myself counted 30 dead bodies. There are a tremendous number of injured people,'' said Abu Irmaila, a Palestinian fighter contacted by Reuters. ``We will not give up until the last fighter.''

The accounts could not be independently confirmed because Israeli authorities had declared the camp off-limits to journalists.

U.S. PLEAS IGNORED

The fighting raged on despite the increasingly insistent calls from the United States, Israel's closest ally and provider of $3 billion in annual aid, for Israel to halt the offensive.

In a statement, the Palestinian Authority called on the U.N. Security Council, the United States, the European Union and humanitarian organizations to ``intervene immediately to stop the massacres and the war of extermination being waged by the Israeli occupation army.''

The Israeli army said it was doing its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. ``Any claim of intentional killing is absolutely baseless and a lie, it's pure unadulterated propaganda,'' an Israeli army spokesman said.

The army said on Saturday three soldiers died in Jenin in clashes on Friday.

A Palestinian woman said by telephone from the camp the helicopter bombardment had set houses on fire. ``It's real war. We did not sleep for the past few days. I did not get a wink of sleep,'' said the woman, who gave her name only as Hayat.

Walid al-Saifi of the Palestinian Red Crescent said from the organization's headquarters in the West Bank town of al-Bireh, some 50 miles (80 km) away: ``Our office in Jenin is surrounded with tanks and armored vehicles. No ambulance is allowed to get out of the compound.

``We are receiving calls from the refugee camp that there are dozens of wounded and killed in the streets of the camp.''

OFFENSIVE IN NINTH DAY

Israeli forces pushed into West Bank cities eight days ago in an offensive they say is aimed at finding those responsible for a wave of attacks on Israelis.

The drive began two days after a devastating suicide bombing which killed 26 people in the coastal city of Netanya at the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover last week.

A White House spokesman said on Friday Powell had no plans ''at this moment'' to meet Arafat, besieged by Israeli forces at his headquarters in Ramallah on the West Bank, but Powell said that did not mean there would no such plans in due course.

``If Powell chooses not to meet Arafat, he will not meet any Palestinian official,'' senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters.

Troops moved into the town of Qabatia, near Jenin, and fought fierce gun battles with Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian residents reported.

In Ramallah, hospital sources said a 55-year-old Palestinian baker died after being shot on his way to his bakery to make bread ahead of the lifting of the Israeli-imposed curfew.

The new fighting flared after 25 Palestinians, including six Islamic militants, died on Friday in one of the bloodiest days of the Israeli offensive to date. Israel says it has confiscated thousands of weapons, bombs and explosives in the operation.

The army said another four Palestinians were killed on Saturday as they laid roadside mines near Askar refugee camp, near Nablus.

In Gaza, Israeli security sources said two Palestinian ''terrorists'' were killed trying to enter a Jewish settlement.

A stand-off between Israeli soldiers surrounding Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity and armed Palestinians inside entered its fifth day on Saturday. Dozens of Christian clerics were also trapped in the church.

In Rome, Vatican sources said Vatican diplomats had put forward a proposal to Israelis and Palestinians to end the standoff, but gave no details.

At least 1,196 Palestinians and 418 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against occupation began in September 2000 after peace negotiations deadlocked.

--------

Arab Foreign Ministers Discuss Mideast Situation

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mideast-Palestinians.html

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Arab foreign ministers met Saturday to discuss ways of strengthening their response to an Israeli military offensive amid calls from Iraq and Iran to cut off oil supplies to Israel's allies.

The Arab League ministerial meeting came after a week of daily protests against Israel and the United States, the likes of which the Arab world has rarely seen. Jordanian demonstrators beat up riot police in Amman on Saturday while Bahraini protesters set fire to a sentry box and satellite dish in the U.S. Embassy compound in Manama.

Addressing the opening session, Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath compared the actions of Israel's troops in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus to the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israeli-allied militiamen in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.

Shaath said President Bush showed a ``limited change'' in U.S. foreign policy in a speech on Thursday and said this shift stemmed from the ``courageous Palestinian resistance'' to Israel and Arab support.

In his speech, Bush called on Israel to withdraw from the six Palestinian towns and cities it has occupied, and he announced he was sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region. He also said Israeli troops should ``show a respect for and concern about the dignity of the Palestinian people.''

The Palestinians have said Powell must meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has been confined to his offices by Israeli troops, or his trip next week would be boycotted by the Palestinians.

``Powell will not meet a single Palestinian'' if he does not meet Arafat, Shaath said. He called upon Arab governments to ``refuse to meet him (Powell) in any Arab capital'' if Powell did not visit the Palestinian leader. U.S. officials said Friday that Powell had no plans to meet Arafat.

Shaath urged the Arab community to make ``use of its pressure cards, and there are many cards'' -- an apparent reference to the proposal, first proposed by Iraq, to cut off oil supplies.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei came out Friday in support of the Iraqi proposal.

``I suggest, only for one month, as a symbolic gesture, that Arab and Islamic countries switch off oil to all countries who have close relations with Israel,'' Khamenei said in a Friday sermon in Tehran.

Two other oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have spoken out against using oil as an instrument of foreign policy. A Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press on Saturday that such proposals were illogical.

``To help (the Palestinians), we have to have income,'' he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

However, support for a cutback came from a newspaper in a fifth oil producer, the United Arab Emirates, on Saturday.

``The time has come to stop talking and start action ... time now to reflect upon the success of the oil embargo of 1973,'' said an editorial in the English-language Gulf News. ``It is time to use it again. Then, perhaps, the international community will once again listen to the voices of the Arab peoples.''

The Syrian and Lebanese foreign ministers did not attend the meeting, allowing their countries to be represented by their permanent representatives to the league. Neither minister explained his absence, but the official Syrian news agency indicated it was a protest against Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania's refusal to break relations with Israel.

--------

U.S. Envoy Meets Arafat as Israel Steps Up Its Sweep

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom

BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Saturday, April 6 - President Bush's envoy to the Middle East broke Yasir Arafat's diplomatic isolation on Friday, meeting in Ramallah with the Palestinian leader while Israel accelerated its military sweep through the West Bank despite President Bush's call on Thursday for a withdrawal.

Israeli officials declared that their military mission would continue until it destroyed the Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure" or until Mr. Arafat cracked down on violence himself.

Fierce gun battles in several West Bank cities and towns early today and on Friday left at least 40 Palestinians and 2 Israeli soldiers dead. Among those killed was the West Bank military leader of the Islamic group Hamas, whom Israel accused of masterminding the devastating suicide bombing that killed 26 Israelis in Netanya at a Passover Seder last week. The Israeli military campaign began after that attack.

Protests erupted again in Arab cities, and Israel's northern border continued to heat up. Israeli warplanes struck targets in southern Lebanon in retaliation for antitank grenades fired across the border by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, the Israeli Army's planning chief, said Israel had an understanding with the United States to permit the operation to continue. Israel has seized control of every West Bank city but Jericho and Hebron, where forces have taken some positions in Palestinian-controlled territory, Palestinian officials said.

"No one expects us to leave these places just to encourage the terrorists to continue causing us this terrible damage," General Eiland said.

In a speech on Thursday, Mr. Bush harshly criticized Mr. Arafat, accusing him of not fighting terrorism, but also said, "I ask Israel to halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal."

On Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who will visit the region next week, said, "The president's expectation is that the incursions will stop and the withdrawal process will begin as soon as possible, or without delay, whichever formulation you choose."

Palestinian officials had interpreted Mr. Bush's remarks on Thursday as a demand for immediate action. "What a big `no' to Bush, in the form of the shell of the tank," said Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator. In his speech, Mr. Bush did call for "immediate action" to ease the Israeli closing off of Palestinian areas and to permit "peaceful people" to return to work. There was no sign of such action Friday.

The speech caught Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, off guard, Israeli officials said.

Raanan Gissin, the spokesman for Mr. Sharon, said, "We didn't get any green light from the United States; we didn't get a red light." He said there was a "clear understanding" between the allies. "When it comes to the basic issue of defending Jewish lives, defending the lives of the citizens of the state of Israel," he said, "Israel has the right to exercise self-defense."

Israeli officials concluded that by omitting a specific deadline for the Israeli withdrawal, Mr. Bush had allowed Mr. Sharon some leeway. Still, the Israeli operation appeared suddenly to be working against a clock. Israel would find it difficult to sustain such an aggressive action during Secretary Powell's visit, some Israeli officials said. That meant, an official said, that the mission now had "days and not weeks."

During the meeting on Friday in Ramallah, Mr. Bush's envoy, Anthony C. Zinni, the retired Marine Corps general, asked Mr. Arafat to appoint a committee to discuss preparations for the visit of Secretary Powell. Friday night, the Israeli government blocked the first scheduled meeting between General Zinni and that committee, Palestinian and American officials said.

Mr. Sharon welcomes General Zinni's mission but has little confidence that it will succeed, Israeli officials said. Israel has declared Mr. Arafat an enemy, but the Bush administration has grown increasingly alarmed that the fighting here could disrupt the region and its own strategic aims, including a possible attack on Iraq.

The Israeli offensive is overwhelmingly supported by the Israeli public, and it has boosted Mr. Sharon's flagging popularity, according to polls published Friday. Palestinian suicide attacks have subsided as the operation has gathered force. Some Israeli and Palestinian officials noted that the pattern has been for such attacks to come on the heels of Israeli incursions, rather than during them.

Here in Bethlehem, the standoff continued around the Church of the Nativity, revered by Christians as marking the place of Jesus' birth. About 200 Palestinian gunmen are believed to be holed up in the church, surrounded by Israeli forces.

On Friday, four priests slipped out of the church with the help of the Israeli Army, the army said.

General Eiland said Israeli forces would not storm the church. But, he said, "we are determined to stay there, surrounding the building, until those who captured those hostages give up or leave this place." People reached by telephone inside the church have denied that anyone is held there against their will. One person said there were 10 wounded inside.

General Eiland, speaking in Jerusalem, said Israeli forces had found five Palestinians dead here whose bodies had been "treated in a brutal way." He said they were suspected collaborators with Israel.

The general added that, in the weeklong operation, Israeli forces had rounded up about 1,200 Palestinians. Among them, he said, "many dozens are very dangerous terrorists, people we have been looking for a long time."

He said Israeli troops had found "more than 2,000 weapons of various kinds, including types not permitted according to the agreements with the Palestinians."

Some Palestinian men released here Friday showed abrasions on their wrists from plastic handcuffs that they said they wore for three days. They said they also wore blindfolds and were asked only basic questions, like their names.

Israeli patrols continued to range through the city and to cordon off the area around the Church of the Nativity, and gunfire still rang out periodically. One armored vehicle paused as it rolled down a boulevard to let loose several ear-splitting bursts of machine-gun fire.

But the Israeli curfew was lifted for a few hours Friday afternoon, and some Palestinians moved through the streets, many of them looking for food or medicine. The shelves of a vegetable store were stripped bare by looters, but stores carrying nonessential goods, like shoes, went untouched.

Ilyas Thaljieh, 32, stopped two people on the street, anxiously asking them if they had passed an open drug store. He needed medicine for his 9-month-old son, he said, who had an infection in his eyes. "He cannot see, my son," he said.

In the village of Tobas, in the northern West Bank, Israeli troops Friday night killed six members of the Islamic group Hamas, Palestinians said. Among them was the military leader of Hamas in the West Bank, Qais Odwan, the man held responsible for the Netanya attack.

Palestinians officials said a 14-year-old girl had also been killed by the Israeli strike, conducted by soldiers and tanks. Hamas promised retaliation for the attack.

Some Palestinians reported that the leader of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group linked to Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction, died in Nablus Friday night when a bomb he was assembling exploded. The leader, Naser Awais, is among Israel's most wanted men. Members of the militant group said they were checking the reports of his death.

The toll on Friday and early today was heaviest in Nablus, where at least 15 Palestinians died. Backed by American-made Apache helicopters firing machine guns, Israeli tanks and other armored vehicles moved through the city and encircled the casbah, a dusky warren of stalls selling figs, candy and sneakers.

"The battle did not start yet," said Naser Badawi, a member of the Aksa Brigades. "They are still in their tanks. The battle will start only when they leave their tanks and enter on foot. We are waiting for that."

Four wanted people were killed by a tank shell in the refugee camp of Askar in Nablus on Friday, and residents there reacted by killing a Palestinian they suspected of directing the fire for Israel.

At the edge of the casbah, Abu Waddah and his wife, Najwa Um Waddah, had taken to sleeping with their children on the floors of their kitchen and bathroom to avoid the gunfire. When shooting suddenly broke out again, the entire family dropped to the floor.

"Where is Bush?" asked Mrs. Waddah. "We want to live like any other human beings." She added that "the Israelis should pressure their leader, in order for us to live in peace." But polling released on Friday suggested that Israelis were happy with their leaders' decision for an all-out military operation. A poll by the newspaper Yediot Ahronot found that 62 percent of Israelis "have faith in Ariel Sharon to lead the country successfully," up from 45 percent in March.

In addition to striking at nests of gunmen, the Israeli operation appeared aimed at the authority of the Palestinians' governing institutions. On Friday, Israeli forces searched the home of the Palestinian minister of information, Yasir Abed Rabbo, Mr. Abed Rabbo said.

In Nablus, a tank burst through the gate of the home of the mayor, Ghassan Shakaa, said Suha Shakaa, the mayor's daughter. Israeli troops arrested all the men inside, including Mr. Shakaa's two sons, she said. The mayor was out of the country.

--------

Arafat, Zinni talk as fighting intensifies

April 6, 2002
By Laura King
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020406-94494816.htm

RAMALLAH, West Bank - U.S. envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni met with Yasser Arafat at the Palestinian leader's tank-encircled headquarters yesterday, the bloodiest day of fighting since the beginning of the week-old Israeli military campaign.

At least 35 Palestinians, including the suspected mastermind of a Passover attack that triggered the incursion, died as gunmen and Israeli forces fought in Nablus, Tubas and Jenin in the West Bank. At least one Israeli soldier also died.

In advance of a planned visit to the region next week by U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Gen. Zinni traveled to the West Bank town of Ramallah for a 90-minute meeting with Mr. Arafat at his battered, encircled compound.

Mr. Arafat has been confined to a few rooms in his headquarters by Israeli troops since March 29. Gen. Zinni was the first senior American official to meet with him during his confinement.

Mr. Arafat told Gen. Zinni that the Palestinians support a cease-fire negotiated last year by CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas. Israel and the Palestinians have been at odds over the timetable for implementing the agreement.

Ramallah has been declared a closed military zone by Israel, and Israeli troops fired stun grenades from close range at about two dozen journalists who were outside Mr. Arafat's compound trying to cover the meeting.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, a key aide to Mr. Arafat, said Israeli soldiers forced their way into his Ramallah home yesterday on the pretext of conducting a search, Reuters news agency reported. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops and tanks pushed into another town in the northern West Bank yesterday, despite a strongly worded appeal by President Bush on Thursday to stop the offensive. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer vowed, "We are finishing the operation we started."

New violence on the northern border with Lebanon raised concerns that Israel could find itself bogged down on two fronts. The Lebanese government, trying to stem intensifying clashes along the frontier, said it seized a ready-to-fire Katyusha rocket and arrested nine Palestinian militants.

The day's heaviest fighting came in the northern West Bank town of Nablus, where smoke from burning vehicles and buildings filled the air as Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships fought pitched battles with hundreds of Palestinian gunmen. Houses in the Balata refugee camp and the winding alleyways of the casbah, or old city, were peppered with heavy machine-gun fire.

Israeli rockets rained on the city's eastern market district, destroying hundreds of shops and stalls, witnesses said. Gunmen at one point holed up in a small shampoo factory, which was demolished by rockets while civilians living nearby cowered in their homes.

Palestinian sources and Israeli TV reports said among the dead in Nablus was Nasser Awais, a regional leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian militia that has claimed responsibility for scores of shooting and bombing attacks against Israelis during the past 18 months of conflict.

In the town of Tubas, the scene of the latest Israeli incursion, Israeli troops trapped six Palestinian gunmen in a house and then riddled their hide-out with tank shells and missiles fired from helicopters, killing them all, witnesses said.

Later, Palestinian sources confirmed reports identifying the six as members of the militant group Hamas. One of them was Qais Idwan, whom Israel TV called the mastermind of a March 27 attack at a Seder, or ritual meal, at the start of Passover.

Israelis bulldozed the building afterward and made people living nearby leave, witnesses said. Troops left the town soon afterward, they said.

Among at least 35 Palestinians killed in fighting yesterday was a 14-year-old girl who had gone out onto her balcony in Tubas to look around. After the Israelis left, Palestinian security officials said three suspected collaborators with Israel, who had been held in the local jail for the past several months, were shot dead by Palestinian police.

The Israeli military also retrieved the bodies of five men in Bethlehem, apparently killed by fellow Palestinians as suspected informers for Israel.

In the northern West Bank town of Jenin and the adjoining refugee camp - where three Israeli soldiers had died a day earlier - shells and rockets trapped hundreds of families in their homes and prevented the evacuation of dozens of wounded, witnesses said. At least four Palestinians were killed, the Palestinians said.

In addition to the two top militants killed yesterday, Israel made an apparent attempt on the life of a leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group. Witnesses said an Israeli helicopter fired missiles on a car in the town of Hebron driven by Ziyad Shuweiki, but he escaped.

Five bystanders, including an 8-year-old boy, were injured, the witnesses said. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

At the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, one of Christianity's holiest sites, a standoff between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen inside continued into a fourth day. Four of about 60 priests trapped in the church came out yesterday and left Bethlehem under Israeli escort, the military said.

In the Gaza Strip, some 10,000 supporters of Hamas rallied in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas founder, said the group would not stop attacks on Israelis.

International pressure was building on the Israelis to end their offensive. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution early yesterday calling on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian cities and towns "without delay."

However, Israeli officials and newspaper editorials noted that Mr. Bush did not demand an immediate withdrawal from the West Bank and did not provide a timeline.

"From the outset, it was said that we will be in the territories only for a few weeks," Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel's Channel Two. "I think that the difference between what Bush demanded and the government decided is not great."

-------- pakistan

PAKISTAN
Musharraf Plans a Referendum to Let Him Stay in Power

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/asia/06STAN.html

KARACHI, Pakistan, April 5 - Asserting that "I am not power hungry," President Pervez Musharraf announced today that he would hold a referendum next month that would allow him to stay in power after Pakistan elects a new civilian Parliament six months from now.

In an animated televised speech that lasted more than 90 minutes, he said his aim was to create "real democracy" with a strong system of checks and balances in a nation that has been under military rule for 28 of its 55 years.

General Musharraf, who seized power in a nonviolent coup in 1999, did not say exactly what question the referendum would pose or how long he intended to stay in power. He is widely expected to set his term at five more years.

October will mark the third anniversary of his coup, a date set by the Supreme Court for a return to democracy. A referendum to extend his term would place his presidency beyond the reach of the federal Parliament and provincial assemblies, which are to be elected in October and whose constitutional role it is to select both the president and prime minister.

As word leaked out in advance of the speech, the general's plan was widely condemned. It is opposed by religious groups, which say they will boycott the vote; by most political parties, whose role in choosing a president he is usurping, and by most newspaper columnists, who say he is subverting democracy and following the path of earlier Pakistani dictators.

But in his speech, the general, smart in his well-pressed uniform, seemed to have no doubt about either his policies or his popularity. He said he needed more time to complete democratic reforms, combat corruption, address Pakistan's widespread poverty and quell religious extremism.

"I want you, the people of Pakistan, to tell me whether I am required or not," he said. "I have self-confidence, but when you tell me, my confidence will grow. I want your power, the power of 140 million people."

Throughout his speech, he gestured vigorously and spoke with an earnestness that seemed intended to persuade by sheer force of will.

But critics said that rather than bringing democracy, five more years of rule by a general would only cement the military's grip on power in Pakistan.

Despite his talk of democracy, General Musharraf conceded that he did not come from a democratic background. "I am a soldier," he said. "I don't believe in power sharing. I believe in the unity of command."

The speech was a reminder that even in a nation at the center of an international crisis, it is domestic issues that drive politics.

The general made only passing references to Pakistan's support of the United States and abandonment of its Taliban allies in Afghanistan, saying, "After Sept. 11, the world has changed."

He added: "Now we are an honorable state. No one is saying that we should be declared a terrorist state."

But his support of the United States and his crackdown on militant Islamic organizations have drawn anger from some groups. With the referendum galvanizing political opposition well in advance of the October election, those issues may now play a larger role.

The United States condemned General Musharraf's coup in 1999. But he has become a crucial figure in America's war on terror, and the reaction from Washington to the pending announcement of his referendum had been little more than a whisper.

"I am not going to indulge in the specific dynamics of politics in Pakistan," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Donald Camp said when asked about the referendum plan this week.

Unless the Election Commission requires people to vote in the referendum, some political experts said they expected the turnout to be small and General Musharraf to rely on pressure, inducements and the malleability of poorly educated voters to give him a victory.

"The general seems very much convinced of his own popularity, but he is going to get a big surprise," said Tehmina Daultana, vice chairman of the Pakistan Muslim League, one of the major parties, which has urged a boycott of the vote. "His call for a referendum to stay in power is totally illegal and unconstitutional."

General Musharraf has made his path easier by barring the return to Pakistan of his two exiled predecessors, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who lead Pakistan's two largest parties.

The general described his mission as putting an end to the kind of corruption and misrule that he said characterized their governments, even though they were democratically elected.

"In the past two and a half years, we have done a lot, and I think whatever we have done in whatever field will go to waste if we do not cap it with true democracy or the essence of democracy," he said.

In an effort to end what he termed impulsive government, he said he would seek to amend the Constitution to create a military-led National Security Council that would monitor the Parliament, prime minister and presidency.

Newspapers have been full of reminders in recent days of a referendum engineered by an earlier military leader, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who in 1977 also seized power in a military coup. The vote in that manipulated referendum was 97 percent for General Zia, a moment that is seen as a low point in recent political history.

By taking direct action to remain in power, General Musharraf has alienated even some people who believe that his tenure and his goals are in Pakistan's best interests.

"My view is that it is neither likely to strengthen General Pervez Musharraf's position politically," said Nasim Zehra, a leading political analyst, "nor is it going to do much for the political stability of Pakistan, which indeed is General Pervez Musharraf's sincere objective."

-------- puerto rico

Navy Uses Gas on Puerto Rico Protesters

April 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-vieques.html

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico - A nun and Episcopalian priest were detained for trespassing on restricted land on Saturday and crowd control gas was used by military police as about 50 people demonstrated against U.S. Navy bombing on the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

So far, 14 people have been arrested for trespassing on Navy property since the exercises began last Monday.

Navy officials confirmed the arrest Saturday of the nun and priest, who protesters identified as Carmen Gonzalez Arias and Pablo Maysonett Marrero.

The destroyer USS Mahan and the guided missile frigate USS Barry conducted ship-to-shore military training on Saturday.

Navy spokesman Lt. Corey Barker said exercises involving the USS George Washington Battle Group will resume on Monday.

A protest involving about 50 people at one of the camps established by demonstrators near the front gate of the Camp Garcia military reservation was interrupted on Saturday by Navy security personnel shooting gas canisters from within the restricted zone.

Despite contrary eyewitness accounts, Barker said CS gas spray was launched on Saturday after protesters threw ``rocks and debris at Navy vehicles.''

When told rock throwing occurred after Navy security dispersed the crowd with gas, he added: ``If there is an imminent danger that the crowd is going to throw rocks or break down the fence, then gas will be sprayed to disperse the crowd. Gas is used to disperse a threatening crowd.''

Demonstrators were observed taunting the sailors before the gas was used. After the crowd was dispersed, a few protesters came back and threw rocks, prompting Navy personnel to fire more gas.

A barbed-wire fence, and a line of Puerto Rico police officers separated the military security personnel from protesters, who included members of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, a group of Puerto Rican political and civic leaders from the United States making a one-day visit to the island.

FLEEING FROM GAS

Dozens of protesters and journalists fled the gas, and at least two people affected by the gas were treated at a local clinic, protesters said.

Two Puerto Rico officials said the Navy reaction was too strong.

``They are provoking the situation,'' Police Col. Cesar Gracia said of the Navy security personnel, adding that reports of rock-throwing by protesters were false.

``I witnessed the incident, and there was no rock-throwing. Right now, my superiors are on the phone to complain to the Navy about the situation,'' Gracia said.

Juan Fernandez, the commonwealth government's special commissioner charged with overseeing Navy military exercises, said he believes security on Camp Garcia has been increased and that security personnel have been given orders to take a firmer approach against trespassers and protesters.

``They are using exaggerated, unnecessary force and violating people's constitutional rights,'' he said, adding he would make a formal complaint to Navy officials.

Commonwealth officials are also complaining that military officials are unnecessarily using pepper spray and aggressive treatment against trespassers arrested on Navy property.

Ismael Gonzalez, a 67-year-old retired warehouse worker from Camuy, one of three trespassers arrested on Friday, needed medical attention after hitting his head on a rock while being detained. Barker said the incident was being investigated.

Barker, who declined comment on security levels on Vieques, said training had not been interrupted by protests this week.

-------- us

Base Closure Savings $16.7 Billion, GAO Says

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4443-2002Apr5?language=printer

Base closings have saved the military about $16.7 billion already and are expected to generate more than $6 billion a year in future savings, government auditors said yesterday.

As substantial as they are, those net savings accrued from the first four rounds of military base closings -- in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995 -- even take into account the costs of environmental cleanups, according to the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative branch.

The $16.7 billion was saved through last Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2001.

The Defense Department anticipates reaping another $6.6 billion a year in the future from those four rounds, which closed or realigned 451 installations, including 97 major ones.

But the GAO reported the figures with reservations. "Our reviews have found that the department's savings estimates are imprecise and should be viewed as rough approximations of the likely savings," the report said.

----

AMERICAN FORCES
Pentagon to Cut Navy Role in Afghan War

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/asia/06MILI.html

WASHINGTON, April 5 - The Pentagon has ordered a reduction in naval forces committed to the war in Afghanistan, a sign that the peak fighting there has passed and that the military is adjusting its troops for the long-term global war on terrorism, officials said today.

Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the Pentagon has assigned two aircraft carriers and more than 4,000 marines aboard ships to the northern Arabian Sea, within striking distance of Afghanistan. But the new order, to take effect within days, would cut that commitment in half, to one carrier and about 2,000 marines afloat.

"This is going to be a very long war, this war on terrorism," Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in remarks taped today for CNN's "Novak, Hunt & Shields," to be broadcast on Saturday. "We are in maybe the first chapter of a many-chapter book. We do need to work our rhythm and our pacing to make sure that we have the forces needed to do whatever the president calls upon us to do."

The carriers John F. Kennedy and John C. Stennis are now in the Arabian Sea, but the Stennis is scheduled to leave in a few weeks. The carrier Kitty Hawk, based in Japan, was to have relieved the Stennis, but commanders in the Pacific object to leaving the region without a carrier and its warplanes, given American operations in the southern Philippines and fears that tensions could flare on the Korean peninsula.

Combat flights over Afghanistan have declined since the end of the attack last month on Shah-i-Kot, in eastern Afghanistan. Allied warplanes operating from a new base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, could help if the Pentagon leaves only one carrier in the region, officials said.

There are other signs that the military is preparing for the long haul in Afghanistan.

The Air Force has been rotating pilots, flight crews and some combat aircraft from bases in the Middle East and Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean.

More than 1,000 soldiers from the Army's 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y., who deployed to Central Asia last October, are leaving Afghanistan over the next four weeks, a senior official said. The first 265 soldiers from the main force returned home today. About 4,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and several hundred Special Operations troops remain in Afghanistan, officials said.

The commander of the Afghanistan operation, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, said today at a news conference in Tampa, Fla., where his headquarters are located, that the total number of American troops in Afghanistan had dipped in the past week to 6,500, from 7,000, and could fluctuate in coming months, depending on the threats perceived.

General Franks also said coalition forces conducting mop-up operations in the area between Gardez and Khost, after the 11-day battle in Shah-i-Kot, have discovered caches of weapons and documents, and were collecting intelligence for future operations.

When asked if another operation the size of the one in Shah-i-Kot was imminent, General Franks said, "Right now, as of this minute, I don't see something that indicates a size enemy force that would warrant something such as you described."

-------- propaganda wars

JOURNALISTS
Israeli Soldiers Force Reporters Out of Ramallah

April 6, 2002
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/middleeast/06JOUR.html

RAMALLAH, West Bank, April 5 (Agence France-Presse) - Israeli soldiers fired warning shots and threw stun grenades this morning at a group of reporters, who have become the Israeli Army's bugbears in recent weeks. The incident occurred here in front of Yasir Arafat's besieged headquarters.

Foreign journalists, including representatives of CNN and ABC, The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, and the Gamma photo agency, had just arrived outside Mr. Arafat's offices, hoping to see the arrival of the American envoy, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni.

The reporters had barely got out of their armored cars when the two jeeps burst onto the scene. A Merkava tank also rumbled in, blocking access to the heavily damaged compound where Mr. Arafat, who has been confined to a single building since March 29, was expected to confer with General Zinni.

A dozen Israeli soldiers armed with M-16 assault rifles first fired half a dozen warning shots in the air to frighten off the journalists. One soldier then fired in the direction of the reporters, and one shot hit the bulletproof windshield of CNN's vehicle.

The soldiers, who were 10 feet from the reporters, then threw stun grenades. One exploded at the feet of a Reuters cameraman, who was unhurt. Seeing that some journalists were reluctant to leave, one soldier with a loudspeaker yelled, "Press out! Press out!"

The journalists' convoy headed back toward the center of town to take an alternative route to a spot some 50 yards from Mr. Arafat's headquarters.

Two Israeli armored personnel carriers pulled up at the new location, and soldiers held the group at gunpoint while checking passports and press cards. Some journalists managed to avoid the check but others, including Inigo Gilmore, correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of Britain, had their documents seized.

Suddenly, an angry soldier muscled his way to the middle of the group and shouted: "Get in your cars! Leave the sector immediately!" putting an end to the news media's presence for the day.

Israel has declared Ramallah a closed military zone, but journalists have continued to operate there, despite brushes with the Israeli Army.

Tension has risen considerably since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began his latest push into Palestinian territory. Scores of journalists have been stopped in Ramallah over the past few days, and two reporters were forced at gunpoint to take off their flak jackets before being searched. Israeli fire hit a car full of journalists in Ramallah on Monday, but caused no casualties.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

PRISONERS
Believed to Be a U.S. Citizen, Detainee Is Jailed in Virginia

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/06DETA.html

WASHINGTON, April 5 - A prisoner from the war in Afghanistan who is believed to be an American citizen was flown today to Norfolk, Va., from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and locked up in a jail there.

The military considers the man, Yasser Esam Hamdi, an enemy combatant, but officials said they did not yet know what to do with him. The Defense Department has retained custody of him, although officials said he could be turned over to the Justice Department.

But in order to move him to a civilian detention center, officials would have to charge him with a crime; it is not clear at this point what charges he might face. American investigators have not suggested that they have any statements from Mr. Hamdi or any evidence that may implicate him in particular activities, although he was first captured in November, along with John Walker Lindh of California, after a prison uprising near Mazar-i-Sharif. He was taken to Guantánamo on Feb. 11.

Officials said today that Mr. Hamdi's American citizenship was almost certain, complicating his case for the United States. The officials were still unsure whether he holds dual American-Saudi citizenship.

The military could keep Mr. Hamdi in custody and in theory could subject him to a court-martial, because the Uniform Code of Military Justice allows anyone, including American civilians, to be court-martialed if charged with war crimes.

Legal experts said his American citizenship would require the military to take him before a military magistrate within 48 hours of his imprisonment on American soil, although that could be done in secret.

This morning, the Pentagon dispatched a C-130 plane to the United States Naval Air Station at Guantánamo Bay, where he was being held, and flew him first to Dulles International Airport outside Washington and then to Norfolk. He was put in the brig at the Norfolk Naval Air Station around 3 p.m.

He could be transferred to the custody of the Justice Department. Officials said they were considering possible charges with the help of the guidelines they had prepared before they charged Mr. Lindh.

The charges in the Lindh case are conspiracy to kill Americans, providing support to terrorists and using destructive devices during crimes of violence.

The charges that fit within the guidelines, which the Justice Department said would apply to any American found fighting with the Taliban, include treason, which carries the death penalty; murder of American government employees, which carries a life term; providing material support or resources to terrorists, which carries a maximum of 15 years; and various conspiracy charges, which can also carry life terms.

General Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the military operations in Afghanistan, discussed Mr. Hamdi's situation briefly with reporters today but shed little light on it. "I am not on the inside of the thinking about what the next step should be with this man," he said.

Asked why it took five months to figure out he was an American citizen, General Franks said, "I think from the very beginning there was possibility in everyone's mind that he might be an American, because he spoke English."

--------

Anthrax-hoax cases test tough policy

April 6, 2002
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020406-10805450.htm

The upcoming trial of a U.S. Capitol Police officer accused of leaving powdered sugar on a desk with a threatening note during the height of an anthrax crisis in the fall will reveal whether federal authorities meant business when they said they were going to throw the book at anthrax hoaxers.

His attorney says that indicting and prosecuting Officer James J. Pickett on charges of making false statements and obstructing police would be an example of the Justice Department unfairly turning a bad joke into a crime in its get-tough policy on terrorism.

The 13-year veteran officer has been suspended since the November incident. He faces trial April 30.

Meanwhile, an April 17 sentencing date is set for a Stafford, Va., postal worker who pleaded guilty to sprinkling baby powder inside a bulk-mail envelope.

Letter carrier Sharon Ann Watson, 31, told FBI agents that she meant no harm when she powdered an envelope at the Falmouth Post Office on Oct. 26. According to court documents, she said she wanted to prove her suspicions that post office management wasn't taking the anthrax attacks seriously enough.

After a plea agreement, Miss Watson was indicted in Federal District Court in Alexandria on charges of the delay or destruction of mail. She faces as many as five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

After the anthrax attacks in October - during which two letters laced with the fatal bacteria were delivered on Capitol Hill - federal authorities vowed to take a no-holds-barred approach to prosecuting such accused hoaxers.

President Bush called the cases a "wave of terrorist attacks" on the United States and said anyone using them as an "opportunity for a prank should know that sending false alarms is a serious criminal offense."

Anthony Salvatore Mancuso, of Wheaton, for example, sprinkled white powder on a co-worker's computer keyboard, mouse and mouse pad at Financial Insight Systems in Rockville on Nov. 1.

But if he is convicted, he may end up facing a softer sentence than Miss Watson, according to Montgomery County State's Attorney Douglass M. Gansler, because he and another accused hoaxer will be tried in local, not federal, courts.

Miss Watson was tried in federal court because she was a federal employee, but Mr. Mancuso, 27, will be tried in Montgomery County Circuit Court on May 13 for making a false statement about a destructive device, which is a felony in Maryland. If convicted, he could face 10 years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

Arlo K. Allen, 44, of Mitchellville, will stand trial April 16 on charges similar to those in Mr. Mancuso's case. According to court documents, Mr. Allen used a powder-filled bag that he said contained anthrax to threaten a customer-service employee at a Ford dealership in Silver Spring.

Prosecutors won't have an easy time sending the accused pranksters to such lengthy prison sentences, however, because they will have to duplicate what the "climate was like [when] these hoaxes took place."

"That climate exacerbated the crime. We were in a national crisis in November, and hoaxers like Mancuso preyed upon the fear and paranoia of the people," Mr. Gansler said. "The problem is that we're at a different place in time right now, and it's unclear how a judge will rule on it now."

Officer Pickett's case will be heard in Federal District Court in the District. Prosecutors say that on Nov. 7, he poured two packets of a sugar substitute on a police desk in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. He left a note reading: "Please inhale. Yes this could be? Call your doctor for flu symptoms. This is a Capitol police training exercize (sic)! I hope you pass!"

-------- terrorism

Skies still aren't secure

April 6, 2002
By Frank Bass and John Solomon
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020406-20207144.htm

Military patrols and tighter security didn't prevent pilots from entering America's protected airspace at least 567 times since September 11, highlighting the continued challenges of thwarting a terrorist air strike.

In each case, a pilot wrongly flew into one of the country's six prohibited flight zones or into one of many zones where air traffic is limited because of sensitive military or nuclear operations or special events.

The post-September 11 incidents include four commercial jetliners and one medical helicopter flying into the forbidden airspace protecting the White House, Capitol and vice presidential mansion, officials said. The most recent incursion occurred this week.

"Practically speaking, by the time a violation is discovered, it is too late to do anything to prevent a crash into the White House," former Federal Aviation Administration security chief Billie H. Vincent said.

FAA Deputy Administrator Monte R. Belger said Thursday that the agency recognizes there's little time to react once planes penetrate the safety zone. So the government has imposed numerous other precautions to ensure that planes with ill intent don't get close.

"The restricted area is kind of the last line of defense," Mr. Belger said. "The additional on-the-ground security procedures and in-flight protocols put in place give us a much higher level of confidence."

Borders have been tightened; pilots, flight crews and passengers are screened; and planes approaching Washington or prohibited zones elsewhere must complete authentication procedures, including providing passwords.

FAA enforcement records obtained by the Associated Press show that most pilots who have violated protected airspace during the past decade usually walk away with nothing more than a warning letter.

Of the 111 pilots on 94 flights that flew into Washington's no-fly zone since 1992, just one was fined, for $1,000, and nine had their licenses suspended for seven to 120 days, the records show. At least 90 were settled with administrative action, nearly all of them warning letters, the analysis showed.

Planes that violate Washington's prohibited zone are quickly warned by air traffic controllers to correct course, and the Secret Service is alerted. Nearly all pilots comply immediately, officials said.

Military planes that patrol the capital skies are permitted to force the trespassers to land or, as a last resort, shoot them down if pilots don't respond.

None of the five planes that flew into the capital's protected space since September 11 have required such action, officials said.

One pilot died when he crashed his small plane into the White House in September 1994; no one else was harmed. In 1999, a pilot drifted so close to the White House that agents fired a warning flare. That pilot ended up with a warning letter, FAA records show.

Prohibited zones outside Washington are President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas; the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine; the presidential retreat at Camp David in Thurmont, Md.; the Pantex nuclear assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas; and the area around George Washington's home at Mount Vernon.

Elsewhere, there are numerous permanent and temporary restricted zones across the country. They cover military and nuclear sites, special events such as the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah and the Super Bowl in New Orleans, or places such as New York and Boston, where threats have prompted demarcation of temporary zones.

--------

U.S. interests may be targeted

April 6, 2002
By Andrew Borowiec
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020406-77938740.htm

NICOSIA, Cyprus - Diplomats from moderate Arab nations fear that recent Syrian newspaper reports and radio broadcasts signal an effort by Damascus to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis by promoting terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in the region.

Even while it moves its troops in Lebanon away from the Israeli border to avoid being dragged into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syria appears to be instigating Arab neighbors to strike back at Israel and the United States.

As Israel keeps Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat isolated in Ramallah and takes control of most cities in the West Bank in response to a series of suicide bombings, large protests have erupted in nations throughout the Middle East. As a traditional ally of Israel, the United States has also been targeted by the protesters.

U.S. interests in the Middle East "might become a target of the angry Arab masses," an Arab diplomat in the Syrian capital said.

Editorials and radio comment throughout the Middle East are also warning of possible strikes "against U.S. interests" in the area.

The Al-Watan daily in Doha, Qatar, quoting Syrian sources, said, "The growing Israeli aggression against the unarmed Palestinian people is likely to lead the region to a war, which will seriously reflect on world security and peace."

Official Syrian radio, in a warning aired this week, said: "There must be tangible work on the ground and concrete measures to increase Israel's predicament. The Arabs do not need much thinking and contemplation about what needs to be done."

The radio also urged Jordan and Egypt, the only countries with diplomatic relations with Israel, "to sever these ties and close down the enemy's offices and missions so that the criminals of Tel Aviv realize that the Arabs are one nation and that they cannot penetrate Arab territory and dismember it."

Egypt announced this week that it was scaling down its relations with Israel in protest against the incursions.

The Damascus daily Al-Thawrah said the recent statements from Washington are a "justification of [Israel´s] crime, and racist and ethnic war" against the Palestinians. The United States "has became a real and actual partner in the Israeli war by providing political cover for it," the newspaper said.

It urged Arab nations to "use all economic and diplomatic means," such as recalling their ambassadors to the United States and other Western states. "They must also show a real disposition to threaten Western interests in the region," the newspaper said.

Syria, which the State Department considers a state sponsor of terrorism, began moving its troops in Lebanon away from the Israeli border this week. Islamist Hezbollah guerrillas based in southern Lebanon have been firing rockets into Israel, and Israel has retaliated with missile strikes.

Last year, Israel hit Syrian positions in Lebanon after a similar wave of Hezbollah attacks across the area.

According to Voice of Israel radio in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has met with reserve and regular service commanders in the areas bordering Lebanon and Syria, and "100 percent of reserve troops have been mobilized in that sector."


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- human rights

AID WORKERS
Red Cross Criticizes Attacks on Its Facilities

New York Times
April 6, 2002
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/international/middleeast/06CROS.html

WASHINGTON, April 5 - In a rare public rebuke of one side during warfare, the International Committee of the Red Cross today branded the Israeli Army's behavior "totally unacceptable" for attacking its vehicles and buildings.

After Israeli soldiers threatened Red Cross staff members in Bethlehem at gunpoint and two Red Cross vehicles were damaged by Israeli tanks this week, the international committee issued a statement saying it could no longer risk the lives of its doctors and staff in many parts of the West Bank.

"This behavior is totally unacceptable, for it jeopardizes not only the lifesaving work of emergency medical services, but also the I.C.R.C.'s humanitarian mission," the statement said.

The international committee's decision to limit the movement of its staff on the West Bank follows weeks of complaints by other international organizations and the United Nations that the Israeli Army was blocking their ability to feed and provide medical care to Palestinian civilians.

The United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees complained on Tuesday that Israeli Army officers had arrested one of its staff members and that they had threatened the other members of a team delivering food and medical supplies to the Ramallah hospital.

"We're quite shocked and worried about these growing incidents," said Pierre Salignon, program director for Médecins sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders. "We have had direct attacks against our ambulances."

For its part, the Israeli relief society Magen David Adom, or Red Shield of David, charged last week that the staff or the ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society had abused their humanitarian immunity in three incidents and "actively participated in terrorist activity or misused the protective emblems."

Both the Israeli and Palestinian societies are under the broad umbrella of the International Red Cross movement. They were jointly awarded a human rights award from the University of Oslo last year for their work.

Today's complaint from the International Committee of the Red Cross was seen by international legal experts as an alarming sign that the protection of civilians was becoming impossible.

"One has to take very seriously what the I.C.R.C. says," said Robert K. Goldman, professor of humanitarian law at American University. "This shifts the burden over to the Israelis."

Top officials from the international committee visited Israel today and pressed the government to allow their staff safe passage to resume transporting food and medicine to hospitals and to allow municipal engineers to repair water pipes and electricity in the West Bank under the escort of committee staff members.

Arthur Helton, a human rights lawyer at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Israel should guarantee the safety of the committee's staff as they attempted to help civilians in the conflict.

As a Western-style democracy, Israel is expected to adhere to the principles and practices of the Geneva Conventions, he added.

"If these rules to protect civilians and noncombatants are disrespected, then anything goes," Mr. Helton said.

--------

Group: Israel Curbed Our Operations

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mideast-Red-Cross.html

GENEVA (AP) -- The International Red Cross said Saturday that it had reduced its humanitarian operations in the West Bank to ``a strict minimum'' because of actions by Israeli forces, which it said have shot toward ambulances and threatened workers.

The International Committee of the Red Cross was able to move some sick and wounded patients with ambulances from besieged Palestinian towns, but it took hours to receive Israeli permission and soldiers stopped the vehicles frequently, a spokeswoman said.

The Israeli military denied it is threatening or delaying ambulances.

The only reason for holding up an ambulance is because there is dangerous gunfire in the area, an Israeli military spokesman said on condition of anonymity.

The ICRC said actions by Israeli soldiers were ``totally unacceptable, for it jeopardizes not only the lifesaving work of emergency medical services but also the group's other humanitarian activities.''

``Over the past two days, ICRC staff in Bethlehem have been threatened at gunpoint, warning shots have been fired at ICRC vehicles in Nablus and Ramallah, two ICRC vehicles have been damaged by Israeli tanks in Tulkarem and the ICRC premises in Tulkarem have been broken into,'' it said in a statement from Tel Aviv.

Aleksandra Matijevic, a spokeswoman in Jerusalem, told The Associated Press on Saturday that all the threats and attacks came from Israeli forces.

The organization said it ``has been obliged to limit its movements in the West Bank to a strict minimum.''

ICRC Director-General Paul Grossrieder is in Israel trying to meet officials and ``appeal to them to meet their obligation under international humanitarian law to spare the civilian population and respect the work of the ICRC.''

Earlier in the week the ICRC said from its Geneva headquarters that Red Cross workers and volunteers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society were frequently prevented from performing their duties in the West Bank.

Matijevic said Israeli restrictions continued to make operations ``very difficult'' Saturday, but that the ICRC had been able to arrange the evacuation of eight sick and wounded people in Ramallah -- after six hours of coordination with Israeli officials.

``The ambulances were stopped many times,'' she said.

The Israeli army acknowledged that it checks even when there is no fighting in the area because the Palestinians ``have misused ambulances.'' But the military said this sort of checking should not involve long delays.

The military cited an incident in the West Bank last week when Israeli forces were checking an ambulance with a 3-year-old girl inside. Under the stretcher, tucked inside a mattress, was a 22-pound explosives belt, the kind used by suicide bombers, the army said.

The ICRC said it is awaiting the results of the Israeli investigation into the incident.

``If it were found to be true that there was the abuse of the emblem in that case, we absolutely in the strongest terms condemn that kind of misuse,'' ICRC chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari said in Geneva.


-------- ACTIVISTS

People Rally Against Israel in U.S.

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Mideast-Reax.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Calling Israel's offensive in the West Bank tantamount to the exploits of Nazi Germany, hundreds of people around the nation marched in protest Saturday, demanding the United States intervene in the escalating crisis.

In New York, hundreds of people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge toward City Hall carrying signs that read ``SharonHitler.'' Police vans and hundreds of officers shadowed protesters, though no arrests were reported.

``Things could really spin out of control,'' said Shaheen Rehman, 50, a native of Pakistan. ``The United States has a powerful role and should play it now.''

Meanwhile, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Miami Beach, Fla., about 250 protesters staged a rally at the city's Holocaust Memorial on Saturday, calling the Israeli treatment of Palestinians a present-day holocaust. No arrests or counter-protests were reported.

The protesters were mostly Palestinian Muslims living in South Florida. Mahmoud Eltalla, 42, a gas station owner who was born in the Gaza Strip, held a sign replacing the first letter in Israel with a swastika.

``They're killing children, women, they're killing everybody,'' he said. ``What the Nazis did to them, they're doing to us right now.''

Protest organizers distributed flyers calling for the end of Israeli occupation and asking the United States to place Israel on its lists of targets in the war on terrorism.

About 300 supporters of the Israeli military campaign had gathered on the lawn of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Friday, some wearing T-shirts that said, ``United against terror'' with the words United States and Israel wrapped around the countries' flags.

In Cleveland, a Friday demonstration drew about 60 people holding banners saying ``We Stand for Peace.''

``I'm here to support my people, my family and my leader Yasser Arafat,'' said American-born Abdeljawad Ewais, 29, who has relatives in the West Bank.

In California, protests have been staged all week at campuses including the University of California, Los Angeles and San Francisco State University, but none appears to have tensions as high as at UC Berkeley, where a series of incidents has prompted the chancellor to call for calm.

In recent weeks, vandals heaved a cinder block through a window of a campus Jewish center and scrawled anti-Semitic obscenities, and Jewish students say they've been pelted with eggs while leaving services.

Palestinian students have set up simulated refugee camps and they say they're unfairly labeled anti-Semitic for opposing Israel's military action.

``It's just a reflection of the escalations going on there in the Middle East,'' Moatasem Elgheriany, a Berkeley law student from Egypt, said Saturday.

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Police Gas Anti - Navy Demonstrators

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Vieques-Bombing.html

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Military police on Saturday fired tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators as officers detained a man and woman whom they said broke onto restricted U.S. Navy land.

The incidents occurred during the sixth day of military exercises on the outlying Puerto Rico island of Vieques.

Tear gas was used to disperse the crowd, which according to Navy spokesman Lt. Corey Barker, was throwing rocks at military personnel.

Witnesses denied the claim, saying the crowd began throwing canisters of the tear gas only after officers began firing.

Demonstrators routinely break onto Navy lands to thwart exercises on the firing range whose use by the Navy has raised anger that flared after off-target bombs killed a civilian guard in 1999.

On Friday night, military police fired tear gas at demonstrators who threw rocks at officers guarding the perimeter of the bombing range, Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode said Saturday.

Local police were called in to calm the crowd Friday. One protester, Jaime Collado, suffered a cut to the back of the head and received five stitches, said officer Cesar Gracia. Collado said there were no rocks thrown in the incident. Collado said he was injured by the aluminum tear gas canister used by the military police.

On Saturday, ship-to-shore shelling and air-to-ground exercises continued. The maneuvers could last for nearly three weeks. The Navy says protests have not stopped the bombing practices since they began Monday.

Opponents of the Navy exercises say they harm the environment and health of Vieques' 9,300 residents. The Navy denies that claim.

President Bush says the Navy will leave by 2003, and the Navy says it is looking for alternative sites.

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Europeans March for Palestinians

April 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mideast-Reaction.html

PARIS (AP) -- Tens of thousands of activists marched through Paris and Rome on Saturday in protests demanding Israel stop its offensive in the West Bank and expressing solidarity with the Palestinians.

More than 20,000 people marched in the French capital to the Place de la Bastille, where hundreds of police stood by. Some protesters carried shredded American flags and shouted slogans against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

``Sharon Assassin'' and ``Arabs, Jews together against Sharon,'' they chanted in the protest, organized by dozens of pro-Palestinian, anti-racist and Communist groups.

Supporters of Israel were to march in Paris and other cities on Sunday, with a dual goal of backing Israel and denouncing a series of anti-Semitic attacks in France in recent weeks.

International pressure has been growing on Israel to end its operation in the West Bank, launched on March 29 after a series of suicide attacks. Israel troops have swept into six Palestinian towns, battling gunmen and arresting hundreds, as well as confining Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to his offices.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in a statement Saturday that he was concerned about the ``humanitarian situation throughout the Palestinian territories.''

In Rome, about 20,000 protesters marched through downtown, ending up at a rally in Piazza del Popolo, where the crowd swelled to about 50,000 people.

A few marchers at the front of Saturday's procession wore black face masks and bandanas like those worn by Palestinian militants. Others carried banners calling for ``Intifada until victory,'' and chanted for a ``Liberated Palestine.''

Italy's three main unions and two major leftist parties, however, decided at the last minute not to participate in the march, amid criticism of the protest by Jewish groups.

Andrea Parrella, who walked his labrador draped in Palestinian flag in the procession, expressed some concern about the march turning into a venue for anti-Jewish sentiments.

``I think it's important for me to show my support -- these people (Palestinians) have neither land nor water,'' he said, but added that ``there is a risk that this demonstration could be turned into something anti-Semitic.''

Other pro-Palestinian marches took place in smaller French and Italian cities. A protest in Bern, Switzerland, drew about 9,000 people. In Sydney, Australia, some 5,000 activists marched, shouting ``Free Palestine'' and waving flags and placards, to the Israeli and U.S. consulates.

``We are here to condemn the Palestinian occupation of the territories, but also to condemn the recent racist attack in France, against both Jews and Arabs,'' said Jean-Claude Vessillier, a spokesman for MRAP, one of France's leading anti-racism groups.

As Mideast violence escalated in recent weeks, there have been a rising number of arson and vandalsm attacks on Jewish sites in France, including cemeteries and synagogues.

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Protesters Charge Israeli Consulate in Sydney

April 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast-australia-protest.html

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A small group of pro-Palestinian protesters tried to force their way into the Israeli consulate in Sydney on Saturday and burned makeshift Israeli and U.S. flags during a protest against Israel's West Bank military offensive.

Mounted police drove the group of about 30 angry protesters back after they tried to charge the entrance of an office building housing the Israeli consulate-general in central Sydney.

Two police officers received minor injuries when they were hit by projectiles thrown by protesters during the confrontation, a police spokeswoman told Reuters. No arrests were made and the crowd had dispersed, she said.

The group of protesters, some wielding pieces of wood, broke away from a larger demonstration of more than 2,000 people as they marched peacefully through the city streets demanding that Israeli troops be withdrawn from the West Bank.

Fireworks were let off, makeshift Israeli flags were burned and rocks were thrown before police on horseback responded with batons. The confrontation dissolved quickly, police said.

Israeli flags were spat on and burned during a smaller protest in the Queensland state capital of Brisbane on Saturday.

The United States, Israel's key ally, on Thursday called on Israel to withdraw its troops from the West Bank.

Israel is yet to show any sign of complying and 25 Palestinians were killed in Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the West Bank during clashes on Friday, one of the bloodiest days of the offensive.

Israel says the eight-day-old offensive is aimed at rooting out people suspected of planning and carrying out a series of suicide bombings which have claimed scores of Israeli lives.

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Chile's 'Lost' Palestinians in Mideast Protest

April 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast-chile.html

SANTIAGO, Chile - Chile's Palestinian community, separated from the Arab world by both language and geography, staged a protest on Saturday against the Israeli military offensive in the West Bank.

Several thousand demonstrators, many wearing the traditional Arab ``kaffiyeh'' black-and-white checked headgear, chanted ``Viva Palestina Libre!'' (Long Live Free Palestine) at a rally in central Santiago.

Some 300,000 of Chile's 15 million population claim Palestinian family ties.

Unlike the mainly Muslim Palestinian diaspora in the Middle East, most of Chile's Palestinians are Christians whose ancestors immigrated in the 19th and early 20th century in search of economic opportunities in a young land.

``Palestine resist, the world is with you,'' read a banner at the rally held behind the La Moneda presidential palace.

Israel began an incursion into the Palestinian-controlled West Bank nine days ago after a suicide bombing at an Israeli hotel with the stated intention of stopping suicide bombings. Palestinians say the offensive is aimed at destroying the Palestinian Authority.

Chilean protesters clapped hands and danced to Palestinian folk music played at the demonstration but very few knew the songs' Arabic words.

Palestinians in Chile maintain ties to relatives, but hardly any speak their ancestors' language or visit the Middle East.

CHILEANS FIRST

``We are Chileans who are completely integrated in all aspects of life: universities, government, banking, the media, and agriculture, but there is still a sentiment toward Palestine -- particularly due to the injustice there,'' Nancy Lolas, head of Chile's Palestinian Federation, told Reuters.

Her federation has held Orthodox Christian religious services for Palestinians, including Islamic suicide bombers, killed in the conflict with Israel.

The Christian Palestinians in Chile see no contradiction in supporting a cause often spearheaded by Muslim militants.

``Unlike the Israelis, our struggle is not run along religious lines but national lines,'' said protester Claudio Gustavo Sumsille, 35, a social worker.

His grandparents emigrated to Chile from the West Bank town of Beit Jala in 1910.

Community leaders say Chile's Palestinians have begun to rediscover their identity in recent years, inspired partly by the uprising against Israeli occupation.

Chile plays no role in Middle East diplomacy. Its main foreign policy concern is striking trade deals with the United States and Europe, plus avoiding fallout from the Argentine financial crisis.

Fans and players of First Division soccer team Palestino, founded by Arab emigrants, held a minute's silence in memory of

the Palestinian dead in the Middle East conflict before their

league game with Temuco on Saturday.

Soccer authorities allowed the observance, and the lowering of Chilean and Palestinian flags at the stadium, despite complaints from Chile's small Jewish community.


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