------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Nuclear Plant Operators Missed Warning Signs
Nuclear Agency Consolidates Safety Programs
Chernobyl a 'Forgotten Crisis,' UN Official Says
Japanese nuclear plant shut down
Japanese nukes could counter China - politician
Who's fooling whom on missile defense?
Russia to Resume Nuclear Shipments
U.S. Questions Russian Compliance
Russia demands US prove Iran deal poses threat
OF MICE AND MEN: NON-PROLIFERATION IN AN AGE OF TERROR
U.S. Warns Russia of Need to Verify Treaty Compliance
U.S. Questions Russian Compliance
Bush Nuclear Policy Undermines Predictability and Trust
US companies eye early permits for nuclear sites
US nuclear agency steps up post September 11 security
Nevada Lobbies Against Nuclear Dump
Nevada Governor Vetoes Yucca Mountain
Terror war, new nuclear bombs rejuvenate New Mexico weapons labs
Nuclear Escape Route
At Indian Point, the Uneasy Zone
Ohio nuke plant should have seen corrosion sooner
Bush Seeks $50 Million to Boost Volunteers
MILITARY
Afghan Defense Minister Survives Assassination Attempt
Shattered Afghan Families Demand U.S. Compensation
Trade Envoy Urges Bolder Moves by Indonesia
IRA Scraps More Weapons and Ammunition
Afghan Poppy Farmers Revolt
Schroeder defends government funding
Terrorists trained by Iran tracked from Uzbekistan
Iraq Suspends Oil Exports to Support Palestinians
Israeli Military Continues Offensive in West Bank
Bush and Powell Repeat Demand for Israeli Withdrawal
'Trying' to speed withdrawal
Arafat tells gunmen to refuse deal
More than 2,600 US troops due in Philippines this month
Vieques Protesters to Remain Jailed
Space wars
US Loses Edge on Spy Satellites
Pentagon stands behind Army National Guard
Faced with Enron flap, White digs in
Pentagon Criticized on Foreign Aid
Tuning in on a broadcast weapon
POLICE / PRISONERS
Conviction nullified after stun-belt 'abuse'
ENERGY AND OTHER
Oslo says rejects wind farm to protect environment
Environmentalists say US hijacking UN summit
Fertility specialist claims baby cloned
Cancer Patients Need Weight Kept On
Attacks on Afghan Pashtuns Worry Rights Group
ACTIVISTS
Death in Bahrain Brings Demand That U.S. Leave
Campus Tensions Growing With Support for Palestinians
Muslims of world protest vs. Israel
GROUPS PRAISE NEVADA'S VETO OF DANGEROUS NUCLEAR DUMP
The Fight Over Yucca Mountain
Peace And Nuclear Disarmamant
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Plant Operators Missed Warning Signs
By Cat Lazaroff,
April 8, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2002/2002L-04-08-06.html
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - The corrosion that drilled a hole in the cap over the nuclear reactor at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant began as early as 1998, and should have been discovered by utility staff much sooner, government regulators have concluded. A stainless steel plate less than an inch thick is all that remains between the reactor and the inside of the containment building.
The reactor head, seen here from underneath during a maintenance shutdown, is pierced by control rods that can slow or shutdown the reactor. (All photos courtesy NRC)
Boric acid from a leaking nozzle left a hole six inches deep and four to five inches wide in the reactor lid, eating through the vessel until reaching a 3/8 inch stainless steel liner that the acid could not penetrate. The power company that manages the reactor, FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company, discovered the damage during a routing maintenance shut down earlier this year.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the agency that oversees the nation's nuclear materials, says the utility should have found the problem much earlier, perhaps as much as four years ago.
During a public meeting Friday, the NRC detailed the findings of the special inspection team that it sent to the plant in February, after FirstEnergy found the damage while refueling the reactor.
"The team found that evidence of the corrosion damage was present at least as early as 1998 and that the utility missed several opportunities to identify the problem prior to the current refueling outage," the NRC reported.
"This problem would have been prevented," if the utility had followed safety regulations regarding plant monitoring and maintenance, said John Grobe, director of NRC's reactor safety division.
According to the NRC, staff at the Davis-Besse plant noticed in 1999 that they had to change the filters on a radiation monitor with increasing frequency, moving from once a month changes to swapping filters every other day.
The filters were becoming clogged by material now identified as corrosion products created by the leaking reactor cooling system. Deposits of boric acid, an ingredient in the cooling system water, and corrosion products were also building up on the containment air coolers, the NRC learned.
These issues should have signaled the presence of a leak somewhere in the system, and prompted the utility to locate and fix the problem, the NRC concluded.
The utility also failed to implement a boric acid control program required by the NRC that would have uncovered the damaged reactor head much earlier, the agency said. Though the utility had been cleaning boric acid deposits out of the reactor cooling system and radiation filters, it left growing deposits on the reactor containment vessel itself.
During the 2000 maintenance at the plant, the utility noticed that the boric acid deposits had changed color, from a light white or yellow to a rust tinted brown. That should have been a red flag, the NRC says, informing the utility that metal somewhere was being corroded.
Still, FirstEnergy let the deposits on the reactor vessel grow.
So much boric acid had been deposited on the reactor vessel lid by February 2002 that it had to be pried off with crowbars before the utility's crew uncovered the six inch hole in the steel vessel. Two weeks later, the team found another, smaller hole, measuring about 1 3/4 inch deep.
"Boric acid deposits were not properly removed and indications of reactor vessel head corrosion were not recognized or evaluated," the NRC report states. "In the 2000 refueling outage significant deposits of boric acid - different in color and consistency previously associated with reactor cooling system leaks - were found on the reactor vessel head."
The leak from the coolant system also left boric acid deposits on water pipes, stairwells, and other areas of the containment building, the NRC said.
The Davis-Besse nuclear power plant is located about 25 miles east of Toledo, Ohio.
In Friday's meeting, FirstEnergy accepted responsibility for the corrosion.
"We are clearly responsible for this condition of the reactor head," said Robert Saunders, president of FirstEnergy's nuclear division.
Many of the 300 or so members of the public who attended Friday's meeting answered Saunders with cries of "Shut it down!" and "You failed!"
While the NRC is continuing to investigate the cause of the leak, the agency has called on all nuclear power plants with similar cooling systems to look for boric acid deposits that might indicate a leak and possible corrosion damage. Operators of all 69 U.S. pressurized water nuclear power reactors were notified in March to look for damage to their reactor vessels, but not specifically for boric acid deposits.
So far, no similar corrosion damage has been found at other nuclear plants.
If the reactor vessel had been breached by the acid, the NRC and FirstEnergy said that any radiation released would have been contained within the reactor building, and would not have been released into the environment. The release would have created a "radiological mess" within the reactor building, but would not have endangered the public, the NRC said.
----
Nuclear Agency Consolidates Safety Programs
April 8, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2002/2002L-04-08-09.html#anchor2
WASHINGTON, DC, A new Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will consolidate many of the nuclear agency's safety responsibilities.
The new office will report to the NRC's deputy executive director for reactor programs, effective April 7.
The formation of the new office is one result of the NRC's ongoing top to bottom review of its safeguards and physical security program in the aftermath of last September's terrorist attacks.
Until now, the assignment of security responsibilities has been determined by the type of facility requiring protection. For example, the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards has been responsible for the security programs for protection of fuel cycle facilities, materials, transportation, disposal and certain waste storage facilities, along with other regulatory activities relating to those facilities.
Another organization, the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, has been responsible for nuclear power plants and non-power reactors, decommissioning facilities, and certain spent fuel storage facilities. The NRC has concluded that a centralized security organization is a more effective and efficient way of organizing security activities.
Among the intended benefits of the consolidation are improved communications and coordination both within the agency and with external entities, including federal and state agencies. The change will streamline communications and improve the timeliness of information.
The consolidation will also integrate the NRC's management of classified information, unclassified but sensitive information, and secure communications facilities within one organization.
The new office's responsibilities will include the current responsibilities of the NRC's incident response organization, which works with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in cases of radioactive emergencies.
Safeguards for nuclear reactor operations and decommissioning, spent fuel storage installations, non-power reactors, uranium fuel fabrication facilities, and mixed oxide fuel fabrication and processing facilities will also be covered by the new office.
The office will coordinate with the intelligence and law enforcement communities, and develop contingency plans for emergencies.
----
Chernobyl a 'Forgotten Crisis,' UN Official Says
Mon Apr 8, 2002
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020408/hl_nm/nuclear_chernobyl_1
GENEVA - A top United Nations official said on Monday that Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster almost 16 years ago, still needed international aid but was in danger of becoming a "forgotten crisis."
Kenzo Oshima, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, was speaking after a trip to the contaminated region in and around the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, where he put forward a 10-year recovery strategy.
"The human dimension of the Chernobyl disaster has tended to be driven into a forgotten crisis despite the continuing nature of the very serious problems and hardship suffered by a large population," Oshima told a news conference.
On April 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded, releasing a deadly cloud of radioactivity.
Ukraine, Belarus and Russia--the countries of the former Soviet Union most affected by the accident--wanted to work with UN agencies to implement self-help recovery projects, UN officials said.
"We propose to make a shift from an attitude people have where they have often been passive recipients of assistance to making them more active participants in their own life," said Neil Buhne, UN resident coordinator in Minsk.
Between $50 million and $80 million would be needed to address the region's future needs, the officials said.
Oshima said a meeting on Monday of UN agencies and donor countries was not intended to gather pledges, but he did not rule out a new appeal to rekindle the interest of international donors.
Much of the aid for Chernobyl has been used for medicines, hospital care and food for those poisoned by the radioactive cloud. But Oshima said future assistance should focus on longer term economic, social and environmental problems in the region.
-------- japan
Japanese nuclear plant shut down after small radioactive steam leak detected, official says
Mon Apr 8, 2002
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020409/ap_wo_en_ge/japan_nuclear_plant_1
TOKYO - A nuclear reactor in northwestern Japan was shut down Tuesday after a small leak of radioactive steam was detected, but an official said that the steam was not released outside the plant and did not threaten the environment.
The amount of radioactive steam that leaked from the Fugen reactor "was too small to affect humans," said Masaru Matsusaka, a spokesman at the facility in Tsuruga, 330 kilometers (205 miles), northwest of Tokyo.
Technicians discovered late Monday night that the steam was leaking from a pipe in the reactor's turbine system, he said. About 200 cubic centimeters of steam escaped from the pipe.
The operator of the plant - the state-run Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute - began manually shutting down the reactor late Monday night and completed the operation Tuesday morning, Matsusaka said.
Workers were still investigating the cause of the leakage, he said.
Resource-poor Japan depends nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity needs. Recent accidents and cover-ups, however, have made many Japanese uneasy about nuclear power.
---
Japanese nukes could counter China - politician
REUTERS JAPAN:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15347/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
TOKYO - The leader of Japan's opposition Liberal Party, Ichiro Ozawa, said on the weekend it would be a simple matter for Japan to produce nuclear weapons and surpass the military might of China if its neighbour got "too inflated."
Inviting a sharp response from Beijing, which is sensitive to any signs of militarism in Japan, Ozawa told a seminar in the southern city of Fukuoka that "China is applying itself to expansion of military power."
"If (China) gets too inflated, Japanese people will get hysterical," Kyodo news agency quoted him as saying.
"It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads. We have plutonium at nuclear power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such warheads," he said.
Ozawa said his statements, coming only days before Japanese Prime Minster Junichiro Koizumi visits China, were meant to encourage stronger ties between China and Japan, the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack.
He said he made similar comments recently to a person he described as being affiliated with the Chinese intelligence agency.
"I told that person that if we get serious, we will never be beaten in terms of military power," he said.
Ozawa said Japan found itself in a difficult position.
"Northeastern Asia, in which both China and North Korea are located, is the most unstable region in the world," he said.
"China is applying itself to expansion of military power in the hope of becoming a superpower...following the United States."
Koizumi will visit China for three days from April 11 to attend an economic conference on Hainan island, although he is also expected to meet Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
Li Peng, chairman of China's parliament, who is on a visit to Japan, said in an interview published in a regional newspaper on the weekend he was optimistic about Japan-China relations.
Li said Japan and China, long resentful over its treatment at the hands of Japanese invaders, may encounter difficulties on the path to closer ties because the countries were so different.
"Even in such cases, the two nations can solve any problems with effort and foresight," Li said in an interview with the Kitanippon Press, a newspaper in western Japan.
Li's visit is one of several high-level exchanges between China and Japan to mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties in September 1972.
Ties have been strained in recent times by Koizumi's visit last year to a shrine honouring Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals, and Japan's approval of a history textbook that China and other Asian countries say downplays Japan's wartime aggression.
-------- missile defense
Who's fooling whom on missile defense?
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
April 8, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020408-30132226.htm
In his March 23 column "On course for missile defense," James Hackett praises President Bush's recent decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and expresses his belief in the near-term viability of missile defenses. Mr. Hackett should consider that the United States is far from deploying any system capable of destroying an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), after spending approximately $85 billion since President Reagan announced in 1983 his vision for deploying strategic defenses.
Although the intercept test conducted on March 15 succeeded, the rudimentary missile-defensive capability that this might lead to in the next several years will still be vulnerable to missiles accompanied by various countermeasures and would be far from reliable. Just prior to the president's December decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, 50 Nobel laureates penned a letter to Congress, citing that even after years of research, the difficulties of "hitting a bullet with a bullet" have not been overcome. It is irresponsible to suggest to the American people that a missile defense is close at hand.
Additionally, Mr. Hackett's reference to a 1984 intercept test, which he claimed proves the potential success of hit-to-kill technology, is misleading. The test he alludes to could only be considered a triumph if you consider the destruction of a heated warhead a demonstration of effective technology.
Heating the target warhead to 100 degrees Fahrenheit made it much easier for the heat-seeking system to locate the target in space. It was later revealed that this experiment was orchestrated to deceive the Soviets and Congress into thinking that the United States had a viable ICBM-intercept system. It appears that nearly two decades later, the Defense Department has successfully fooled Mr. Hackett as well.
BENJAMIN JOSEPH RUSEK
Granville, Ohio
-------- russia
Russia to Resume Nuclear Shipments
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12072-2002Apr8?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US-Uranium.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia will resume shipments of nuclear fuel from Soviet-era weapons to the United States this month for use in U.S. power plants, after months of debate over prices, Russia's nuclear energy minister said Monday.
The shipments are part of a U.S.-funded program aimed at keeping nuclear materials out of terrorists' hands. The Russian fuel accounts for about half the low-enriched uranium used in U.S. nuclear plants.
The program appeared to be in jeopardy after the previous contract for the fuel expired at the end of last year. USEC Inc., the U.S. government-appointed middleman that buys the fuel and resells it to American utility companies, and its Russian counterpart, Tenex, were at loggerheads over prices in the new contract. After protracted negotiations, officials from both countries reached a deal in February.
``We reached a compromise, and as a result, the real supplies will start in April,'' Russian Nuclear Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev was quoted by the Interfax-Military News Agency as saying Monday. He did not give a specific date.
He said Russia would receive about $500 million annually under the new deal. The program has already funded the destruction of 5,600 Soviet-era nuclear warheads.
Under the February deal, the price USEC would pay for the nuclear fuel would fluctuate with the markets annually and would be based on a three-year average. USEC had argued that the old, fixed price was too high and too inflexible.
The Bethesda, Md.-based company is a former government entity that was privatized in 1998.
----
U.S. Questions Russian Compliance
By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Monday, April 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11653-2002Apr8?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration plans to hold back on some disarmament projects with Russia because of concerns over Moscow's compliance with chemical and biological weapons treaties, a senior U.S. official says.
U.S. law requires the government to certify that Russia is committed to full compliance with existing treaties before new initiatives can be started or additional money provided for existing programs to reduce the treat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, the official noted.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, commented shortly before Secretary of State Colin Powell left Washington on Sunday night for a round of meetings with Russian and other foreign leaders, mostly focused on the Middle East.
Powell plans to dine with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Madrid on Wednesday to lay the groundwork for an upcoming arms-control summit.
A State Department cable sent to Russia last week laying out the U.S. position on treaty compliance came a month before President Bush is to meet Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow.
The United States is not accusing Russia of violating biological and chemical weapons treaties and is not ruling out certification of compliance in the future, the U.S. official said.
Moreover, the administration is seeking a congressional waiver for the certification requirement so that new and expanded programs can be pursued even in the absence of formal certification
Among the programs potentially affected are several intended to help stop the theft of Russian nuclear warheads. That effort began in 1991 and has enjoyed strong support from Congress as well as the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Existence of the State Department cable was first reported by The New York Times.
The U.S. decision was prompted by a range of actions by Russia, including its recent refusal to share a bioengineered strain of anthrax developed by its scientists and failure to provide a complete history of decades of secret work on biological and chemical weapons, the Times said.
While Western scientists have been able to visit several former Soviet facilities where such weapons were made, Russia has denied foreigners access to the four biological laboratories that have been controlled by the military, the newspaper added.
Russia maintains it is not violating the biological or chemical warfare conventions and argues that American military labs are not open either.
----
Russia demands US prove Iran deal poses threat
Story by Andrei Shukshin
REUTERS RUSSIA:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15350/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
MOSCOW - Russia challenged the United States last week to produce proof it was transferring sensitive technology to Iran or let the two countries get on with their relations.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, at a news conference with his Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharrazi, called on Washington to show hard evidence for its claims that Moscow's growing nuclear cooperation with Tehran posed a threat to the United States.
"If there are any concerns, we are ready to look into them. But for that we need facts, not words. And no facts have been presented," Ivanov said. "And after all, (nuclear deals) are a matter of our bilateral relations."
The two ministers were talking at the end of Kharrazi's two-day Russian visit, which focused on fighting terrorism, completing Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station and finding common ground on carving up the oil-rich Caspian Sea.
The United States, which has branded Iran part of an "axis of evil", is watching with growing dismay as Russian engineers proceed with work on the $800 million Bushehr project, due to become operational in 2005.
Russia was the only country to agree to finish work on Iran's sole nuclear power station in Bushehr. Tehran now wants Moscow to build a second reactor in addition to the one initially planned, causing further alarm in Washington.
Moscow, trying to tread a thin line between pursuing closer ties with Washington following the September 11 suicide attacks and reaping lucrative deals in Iran, says it has yet to decide whether to go ahead with the expanded project.
Ivanov tried to soothe U.S. fears about suspected transfer of dual technologies to Iran, saying this was made impossible by international monitoring of the project.
"We strictly abide by all international obligations and all nuclear programmes are under international control," he said.
DIVIDING THE RICHES
Dividing Caspian Sea riches was another matter high on Kharrazi's agenda.
The issue became a problem after the breakup of the Soviet Union left Tehran dealing with four nations - Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan - bordering the Caspian, rather than only with Moscow, with which it had a special accord.
Redistributing the Caspian's huge mineral resources has proved a stumbling block to large investment projects.
The two ministers did not say whether they had forged a compromise, but they expressed hope that progress could be made at a summit of the five Caspian Sea states planned for late April.
Ivanov and Kharrazi said the two sides had also discussed terrorism and escalating violence in the Middle East.
Ivanov said Moscow supported U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region, while Kharrazi said he hoped Muslim nations would heed a call by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for a symbolic one-month oil embargo on the West.
-------- terrorism
OF MICE AND MEN: NON-PROLIFERATION IN AN AGE OF TERROR
By Sean Howard
EDITORIAL,
APRIL 8, 2002
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/howard040802.html
The editor of a prestigious British arms control publication raises important questions about the narrower approach to reducing the threat of nuclear terror that is now being pursued by the U.S. and British governments.
Global Beat Syndicate,
New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media - http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/
In our geopolitically dramatic post-September 11th world, the specter that looms above all others is the danger of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction. In the war against terrorism we must look at the means at our disposal to deter and reduce this threat. But as the furor over the U.S. contingency plans in the Nuclear Posture Review illustrates, definitions are crucial. What means are we talking about? Who controls those means? Where is the heart of the danger?
If the real danger is mass destruction, the logical objective has to be to reduce it everywhere, at every source. We must "drain the swamp" that breeds the potential use of weapons of mass destruction. With that perspective, we can see the threat of terrorists using such weapons as an important part of a much bigger problem.
In 1939, renowned physicist Niels Bohr said that if a country really wanted to build atomic bombs, it would have to transform itself into a giant factory. In 1943, visiting Los Alamos, he said he'd been proved right. The undertaking involved in becoming a state capable of inflicting mass destruction on others is massive.
But once the "giant factories" have been built, crumbs off the table can be stolen or go missing-and do terrible damage.
Before September 11th, gradually ridding the world of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their gargantuan infrastructures and support systems was generally seen as a highly complex but clear priority. For most countries, September 11th underscored the urgency of binding together more closely radical non-proliferation and disarmament measures.
But for a handful of states, led by the United States, the lesson was the reverse: proliferation had to be "decoupled" from disarmament because those states seeking to acquire WMD are "evil," or are non-state terrorists, determined to use whatever means of destruction they can. On the other hand, states that already have WMD are (with the possible exception of China) "good states" whose destructive capability is necessary to maintain international security by deterring evil states.
Even before the cataclysmic events of September 11th, the Bush administration had made clear that U.S. military strength, including its nuclear arsenal, posed no danger to anyone except those who deserved to be threatened or attacked. In a profoundly uncertain world, radical disarmament is dangerous: the attacks did not produce this belief, but it certainly brought it into greater focus.
Proponents of this view by no means dismiss all arms control measures. One-sided arms control, non-proliferation in splendid isolation, is still considered useful. In February, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stressed his government's support for arms control, then quoted former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping: "It matters not whether the cat is black or white, but whether it catches mice." Straw then said, "The best criterion for judging a measure is whether it works. Multilateral, global approaches are highly desirable - but this does not mean they cannot be accompanied by unilateral, bilateral, sub-regional or regional action. These, too, can catch mice."
Unexamined, the metaphor can extend itself dangerously. Is not our best-laid plan simply to allow the "cats" to get on with their job, ridding the world of such pests? The bigger they are, the sharper their claws, surely the better for us all. The pest-control metaphor is vivid, but it conveniently obscures some key questions. Who are the "cats" doing the catching? Who owns the cats, or are they acting on their own behalf? Why is there a mouse problem anyway, and what is attracting these pests in the first place?
For supporters of the Bush-Straw view, the question is simply which approach to non-proliferation is appropriate, rather than what mix of non-proliferation and disarmament is best suited to reducing the WMD threat. The problem here is that such a shrunken mandate is certain to be regarded by most states as a betrayal of the search for durable peace that is at the heart of the UN Charter and at the core of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In other words, to avoid betraying its principles, the United States is asking and expecting many other countries to betray theirs.
The stakes could not be higher. If we wait until the war is over before we go back to the search for peace, a world full of weapons of mass destruction may one day become a world finally ruined by them.
Sean Howard is editor of Disarmament Diplomacy, the journal of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, UK, and adjunct professor of political science at the University College of Cape Breton, Canada. The views expressed are his alone.
-------- treaties
U.S. Warns Russia of Need to Verify Treaty Compliance
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/08RUSS.html
The Bush administration has informed Moscow that Washington is curtailing many new disarmament projects because of concern about Russia's compliance with treaties banning chemical and biological weapons, according to senior administration officials.
Some existing projects will also lose additional money, they said.
American law requires that the government decide each year whether Russia is "committed" to complying with its treaty undertakings. In a cable sent last week, the State Department said the United States had not been able to certify that commitment and, therefore, the administration would be unable to start new initiatives or provide new financing for programs to reduce the threat posed by each side's nuclear, biological and chemical arms.
The decision to send the cable is seen as a victory for skeptics of Russia within the White House. Critics had been pushing for months for a tougher stand toward Russia on weapons of destruction and its compliance with arms control treaties, even though the administration has concluded that the programs benefit American national security.
The cable, coming a month before President Bush is to meet the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow, does not accuse Russia of violating the germ and chemical weapons treaties. Nor has the administration absolutely ruled out a certification in the future.
But the decision puts Moscow on notice that Washington insists on more cooperation and candor with respect to weapons of mass destruction. "This is a signal of our seriousness about compliance on arms control and the need to meet all obligations under the chemical and biological weapons conventions," a senior administration official said.
But several arms control advocates called the action disturbing. "It's in our country's interest to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction from leaking out of Russia in any way we can," said Rose Gottemoeller, a former assistant secretary of energy for nonproliferation under President Bill Clinton and now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "So undercutting these programs is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot."
The decision to send the cable was prompted by American concern over a range of actions by Moscow, including its recent refusal to share a bio-engineered strain of anthrax developed by Russia's scientists, despite repeated promises to do so. Officials said Russia had also declined to provide a complete history of the decades of secret work on biological and chemical weapons.
The lack of certification affects a range of disarmament activities - from military exchanges to American help in stopping the theft of Russian nuclear warheads. Such projects account for about $370 million in programs carried out under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, an effort started in 1991 on Capitol Hill that has enjoyed strong support from Congress and the Clinton administration, and record budget requests from Mr. Bush.
Officials said the bulk of the $1.3 billion in projects intended to reduce the threat of unconventional weapons would not be affected by the lack of certification. For example, the $500 million in disarmament projects supervised by the Department of Energy do not require the certification. But the approximately $450 million in programs managed by the Defense Department and the $70 million run by the State Department will probably be affected, officials said.
Several scheduled visits to discuss new projects have been canceled, officials said. In addition, several State Department projects would soon run short of cash, they said.
The threat reduction program has helped countries in the former Soviet bloc destroy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and associated infrastructure, and stop the theft or spread of such weapons.
In exchange for American aid and scientific cooperation, the law requires that the administration certify that Russia is "committed" to complying with the treaties it has signed banning and restricting such weapons. While several similar programs permit the president to waive the certification requirement if the program is deemed vital to national security, the law authorizing Cooperative Threat Reduction projects contains no such waiver.
The Clinton administration issued the certification each year and most recently in January 2001. But the Bush administration did not issue the certification when it was due this January. "There was an election," one official said, noting that this administration took a different approach toward treaty commitments.
In March, Mr. Bush's top aides and cabinet members decided to ask Congress to give the administration the authority to waive the certification requirement. The administration has included the request for such authority in the emergency supplemental spending bills for the State Department it sent to Capitol Hill.
Those officials also recommended that the administration inform Russia that it had not issued the certification and, therefore, that there would be no new Cooperation Threat Reduction projects. Nor would existing programs be extended beyond their current level of financing.
House and Senate aides said in interviews last week that while it was likely that Congress would grant the waiver authority, it was unlikely to do so before Mr. Bush travels to Russia to meet with Mr. Putin.
Hard-liners in the administration have grown increasingly disturbed by Russian actions with respect to its chemical and biological weapons treaty commitments. Though the United States has approved plans to help Russia destroy vast stocks of chemical weapons, officials noted, Moscow has yet to acknowledge that it made in Soviet times "fourth generation" chemical weapons agents, which are many times more lethal than the most advanced nerve agents the United States produced.
Concerns about the Soviet offensive biological weapons activities and Russia's ostensibly defensive program are also increasing, several officials agreed. In light of recent accounts from Soviet defectors from the germ weapons program, one official said, it was absurd that Russia continued denying that the Soviet Union had developed and turned pathogens, some of them genetically manipulated to resist antibiotics and vaccines, into terrifying weapons.
Moreover, while Western scientists have been able to visit several former Soviet facilities where such weapons were made, Russia has not given any foreigners access to the four biological laboratories that have been controlled by the military. Russia maintains that it is not violating the biological or chemical warfare conventions, and argues that American military labs are not open either.
Administration officials had hoped that the situation would improve after Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin announced at a summit in October that they would expand cooperation against bioterrorism.
But two days before Mr. Putin's arrival for the summit, officials said, Washington was notified that Russia's Export Control Commission had refused to let Russian scientists share with the United States a genetically modified strain of anthrax that its scientists said seemed to defeat Russia's anthrax vaccine - at least in hamsters.
Under a scientific strain exchange agreement concluded during the Clinton administration, Russia was supposed to provide a sample of the strain. Since then, Russia's deputy prime minister has reaffirmed the commission's decision not to share the strain, American officials said.
"Russia's actions, like its declarations about what was done in Soviet times, the lack of transparency in its ostensibly defensive programs, and its refusal to share the strain, among other things, raise serious questions about Russia's willingness to abide by its treaty obligations," one official said.
"What we're trying to do," one senior official said, "is send a signal that we require full compliance with the chemical and biological weapons conventions."
"But we've also made clear in the review of our assistance programs to Russia and the record size of our budget requests that these programs are very much in our own national security interests," the official said. "We're trying to find a way to bring these two goals together."
--------
U.S. Questions Russian Compliance
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration plans to hold back on some disarmament projects with Russia because of concerns over Moscow's compliance with chemical and biological weapons treaties, a senior U.S. official says.
U.S. law requires the government to certify that Russia is committed to full compliance with existing treaties before new initiatives can be started or additional money provided for existing programs to reduce the treat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, the official noted.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, commented shortly before Secretary of State Colin Powell left Washington on Sunday night for a round of meetings with Russian and other foreign leaders, mostly focused on the Middle East.
Powell plans to dine with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Madrid on Wednesday to lay the groundwork for an upcoming arms-control summit.
A State Department cable sent to Russia last week laying out the U.S. position on treaty compliance came a month before President Bush is to meet Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow.
The United States is not accusing Russia of violating biological and chemical weapons treaties and is not ruling out certification of compliance in the future, the U.S. official said.
Moreover, the administration is seeking a congressional waiver for the certification requirement so that new and expanded programs can be pursued even in the absence of formal certification
Among the programs potentially affected are several intended to help stop the theft of Russian nuclear warheads. That effort began in 1991 and has enjoyed strong support from Congress as well as the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Existence of the State Department cable was first reported by The New York Times.
The U.S. decision was prompted by a range of actions by Russia, including its recent refusal to share a bioengineered strain of anthrax developed by its scientists and failure to provide a complete history of decades of secret work on biological and chemical weapons, the Times said.
While Western scientists have been able to visit several former Soviet facilities where such weapons were made, Russia has denied foreigners access to the four biological laboratories that have been controlled by the military, the newspaper added.
Russia maintains it is not violating the biological or chemical warfare conventions and argues that American military labs are not open either.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Bush Nuclear Policy Undermines Predictability and Trust, Increases Fear
From: psysrusa@cs.com
Official PsySR Press Release,
April 8, 2002
Psychologists for Social Responsibility is a national non-profit organization of social scientists and mental health professionals focused on social justice, peace, and environmental sustainability. As psychologists we are deeply disturbed by recent moves to change U.S. nuclear policy.
In particular, the White House recently announced:
--Its intent to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,
--A new strategy to make nuclear disarmament reversible,
--A cut in funds for security assurances to non-nuclear weapons states,
--Reduced funding to make Russian nuclear sites secure,
--Plans for development of nuclear weapons for strategic purposes, and,
--Contemplation of preemptive nuclear strikes against specific states.
All of the recent policy changes undermine predictability, understanding, alliance, and trust. Reduced trust means more fear, and more fear usually leads, sooner or later, to attacks in the name of defense.
To quote George Kennan, U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Union, 1952, "To my mind, the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defense against itself. It is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you commit such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would ever wish to have upon his conscience."
Human psychology makes nuclear weapons a horrific threat to continued human existence. Whether in the hands of terrorists or state leaders, nuclear weapons pose unnecessary potential for catastrophe. We urge policy changes that end, rather than promote, their existence. As psychologists, we strongly recommend the development of psychologically sound strategies that reduce tension, fear and hatred, address the root causes of violence and promote human welfare.
----
TAMING THE NUCLEAR MONSTER
By Richard Falk and David Krieger <dkrieger@napf.org>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002
Not since the dawn of the nuclear age at the end of World War II has the danger of nuclear war been greater. And what is as troubling, this danger is not widely understood. Several developments account for this most disturbing situation.
The US Government has apparently adopted contingency plans that look for the use of nuclear weapons against specific countries and in a wide range of circumstances. Terrorist networks with genocidal agendas have been making strenuous efforts to acquire nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The spread of biological and chemical weapons increase political incentives to threaten nuclear retaliation. The American push for missile defense is likely to lead other nuclear weapons states to increase their arsenals. India and Pakistan, hostile neighbors, continue their conflict over Kashmir with their nuclear arsenals lurking in the background. And, in addition, the atmosphere created by the September 11 attacks has given rise to a good and evil worldview that seems less inhibited with respect to nuclear weaponry.
It is against such a background that the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will meet from April 8-19 to review progress on the treaty and, most important, on its Article VI commitment to nuclear disarmament. The recent revelations of the classified US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was first released in partially unclassified form in January 2002, indicated contingency plans for the potential use of nuclear weapons against at least seven named states. These revelations are sure to have alarmed these governments, and hopefully awakened the international community generally to an atmosphere of mounting risk.
Any US plans to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons would be contrary to international law as well as to long-standing US assurances not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states. It also constitutes a provocative threat to the named states and others as well as to international peace and security overall.
This US approach to planning nuclear weapons use, as well as other developments that increase the risk of nuclear war, will undoubtedly adversely affect the approach taken to non-proliferation by all countries. It is likely to induce further nuclear proliferation and to weaken seriously the non-proliferation regime. US policy toward nuclear weapons use, combined with its plans to develop and deploy missile defenses, is almost certain to encourage the expansion of nuclear weapons programs by Russia and China as well as the development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction by other countries. It is also likely to give rise to destructive new arms races.
The fact that the US is developing contingency plans to use nuclear weapons is viewed by most of the world as a dangerous expression of bad faith. In the past, nuclear weapons have been reluctantly tolerated, but only as a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons by other states. The US Nuclear Posture Review reveals that nuclear weapons are apparently being integrated into a full spectrum of potential war fighting situations.
US policy seems to make nuclear weapons no longer weapons of last resort, but rather instruments that may be used in fighting wars, even against non-nuclear weapons states. Detrimental steps have already been taken following the US lead. The UK announced that it is also prepared to use nuclear weapons against any state that may attack it with any weapon of mass destruction. Such an expanded role for nuclear weapons is bound to have other destabilizing effects.
In the post-September 11 world it is vital that the US and other nuclear weapons states assume full responsibility for assuring that nuclear weapons and weapons grade materials, particularly in the former Soviet Union, do not fall into the hands of terrorists. It is also crucial that leading nations do their utmost diplomatically and by way of the United Nations to defuse war-prone tensions in South Asia and the Middle East.weapon
The most urgent challenge at this time involves steps that should be taken to restore the restraints on this most menacing of all weaponry. Just as it is accepted that it is essential to establish reliable regimes of prohibition for biological and chemical weapons, it is long overdue to give the highest priority to establishing a comparable regime for nuclear weapons. Non-nuclear states should insist that nuclear weapons states at least adhere to the declared Chinese position of no-first use, thereby retaining nuclear weapons only for nuclear deterrence purposes until they can be eliminated altogether.
In this vein, the US and the UK should retract their dangerous and destabilizing plans for nuclear war fighting and, in their own interests as well as those of the rest of the world, provide leadership toward eliminating nuclear weapons and ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and all life. The states that are parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty cannot afford to remain passive, but should use their leverage to remind the world that we are all facing an unprecedented and growing danger that nuclear weapons will be somehow used for the first time since 1945.
Richard Falk is professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, and visiting distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
To become a free on-line participating member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, click here: https://www.sbwh.com/wagingpeace/mbrshp.html.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
US companies eye early permits for nuclear sites
Story by Vibeke Laroi
REUTERS USA:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15348/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
SAN FRANCISCO - Several energy companies are taking early steps that might lead to licensing the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, although the plans appear likely to remain on the drawing boards for the next few years.
The move comes amid growing concern about safety and potential terrorist threats against the reactors.
Dominion Resources Inc. said last week it told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week it intends to seek an early site permit for a possible new reactor at its two-unit North Anna power plant in Virginia.
"We want to keep our options open, but we have no plans to build a new nuclear power plant," said Dominion Resources spokesman Richard Zuercher.
"We're more interested in demonstrating the process than building anything," he said, adding that Dominion plans to apply for an early site permit in autumn 2003.
An early site permit allows a company to "bank" the land for up to 20 years for possibly building a new reactor - without having to specify the reactor type or committing to construction.
The program, launched by the NRC in 1999 to smooth the way for new reactors, has not yet been tested.
Exelon Nuclear, the largest nuclear fleet operator in the country and a unit of Exelon Corp., has said it intends to submit an early site bid by June 30, 2003. A company spokesman said Exelon will identify the site, or sites, by June 30 this year.
And a spokesman for Entergy Corp., the nation's second largest operator of nuclear plants, said the company is "actively" considering filing one or two early site permits.
"All three have indicated some interest in filing an early site permit, but nobody has formally done anything," NRC spokesman Victor Dricks told Reuters.
A LONG PROCESS
Although plans are preliminary, the fact that three utilities are considering permits is a big step for an industry that has been virtually in a deep freeze for decades.
No commercial nuclear power plant has been ordered in the U.S. since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident when there was a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
And new problems are raising questions about the future of atomic reactors.
Corrosion in a massive piece of carbon steel atop the reactor at FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis-Besse plant in Ohio has alarmed regulators.
The NRC said today the problem represents an "unacceptable reduction of the margin of safety" at the plant. The NRC is reviewing 68 similar reactors in the U.S. fleet of 103 nuclear plants, which provide one-fifth of the nation's electricity.
Moreover, the NRC also said today it was stepping up its oversight of security risks at nuclear plants by developing contingency plans for emergencies and assessing potential terrorist threats in light of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Despite these concerns, the NRC's Dricks said "We think chances are very good that someone will choose to build a new nuclear plant, whereas a few years ago that didn't seem possible."
Dominion's Zuercher, who does not see anyone announcing plans to build a new nuclear plant in the next few years, believes the euphoria of last summer, when there was talk of building new nuclear plants for the first time in decades, stemmed from unrealistic expectations.
To build new nuclear plants, costs would have to be competitive with those of other types of plants, a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste would have to be in place and the government would have to be committed to supporting new reactors, he said.
Even if companies decide to apply for an early site permit, the process could be lengthy and expensive. Zuercher said it would take about 18 months to produce an application, and an NRC evaluation could take one year to 18 months.
----
US nuclear agency steps up post September 11 security
REUTERS USA:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15349/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said last week it was stepping up its oversight of security risks at the nation's 103 nuclear power plants by developing contingency plans for emergencies and assessing potential terrorist threats.
Since the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, several lawmakers have urged the federal government to improve security at the plants, which could be attractive targets for airplane hijackers bent on releasing clouds of radioactive material.
Critics have also complained that nuclear plant employees and contractors should be screened more closely.
The NRC said beginning on the weekend, its new Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response will work closely with the White House's Office of Homeland Security to protect U.S. plants.
The move is part of a top-to-bottom security review the NRC launched after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The NRC has concluded that a centralized security organization is a more effective and efficient way of organizing security activities," the agency said in a statement.
The NRC is holding a public meeting on Monday to discuss nuclear plant security concerns.
Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have been blamed for the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks that felled the World Trade Center and punched a hole in the Pentagon.
Until now, the NRC's Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards has overseen security programs for nuclear fuel facilities and materials, transportation and disposal.
Meanwhile, the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation has overseen nuclear plants and spent nuclear fuel facilities.
The new office will combine those tasks and develop contingency plans for emergencies, the NRC said. It will also oversee threat assessment and NRC counterintelligence and classified documents.
-------- nevada
Nevada Lobbies Against Nuclear Dump
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Nevada has stepped up its campaign against burying nuclear waste under one of the state's mountains, with the governor vetoing a presidential endorsement and activists readying a lobbying campaign to reinforce his action.
In February, President Bush picked Yucca Mountain as the place to entomb up to 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will remain radioactive for 10,000 years. The site is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
A veto of Bush's endorsement was signed on Friday by Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn and was to be submitted to the House and Senate on Monday.
Guinn's veto was allowed under rules Congress wrote for developing a national nuclear waste dump. Congress will have the final say, however, and a vote on whether to override Guinn is expected before August.
Opponents of the Yucca Mountain plan were organizing a coast-to-coast lobbying campaign against an override vote.
Opposition to the project is overwhelming in Nevada.
``Nuclear energy can be a good thing,'' Earl McGhee, a 74-year-old retiree, said from his home in Amargosa Valley, less than 15 miles from Yucca Mountain. ``But if it's mishandled, it's a bad thing. A longtime bad thing.''
The lobbying effort is being directed by two former White House chiefs of staff -- Democrat John Podesta, who worked for President Clinton, and Republican Kenneth Duberstein, who worked for President Reagan.
The campaign is to include television ads targeting lawmakers in races that could swing on votes from environmentalists.
Spent nuclear fuel has accumulated for decades at power plants and defense facilities in 34 states, as lawmakers debated whether and where to establish a national repository.
Opponents of the Yucca Mountain project, led by environmentalists and Nevada's congressional delegation, are focusing their lobbying effort on the Senate, considering it almost certain that the Republican-controlled House will side with Bush.
Nevada's campaign will focus on lingering questions about the safety of the Yucca Mountain site and fears that the thousands of truck and train trips it will take to haul the waste across the country will lead to accidents and potential radioactive spills.
----
Nevada Governor Vetoes Yucca Mountain
April 8, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2002/2002L-04-08-09.html#anchor1
LAS VEGAS, Nevada, Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn has vetoed the Bush administration's recommendation to build a permanent repository for radioactive wastes at Yucca Mountain.
"Let me make one thing crystal clear - Yucca Mountain is not inevitable, and Yucca Mountain is no bargaining chip," Guinn said Monday morning in an address at the University of Nevada. "And, so long as I am governor, it will never become one."
"Yucca Mountain is not safe, it is not suitable," Guinn continued, "and we will expose the Department of Energy's dirty little secrets about Yucca Mountain."
Guinn traveled to Washington DC today to file his official Notice of Disapproval, also known as a Governor's Veto, with both houses of Congress. In 1982, Nevada was given the unequivocal right to veto the president's recommendation that Yucca Mountain become the nation's sole repository for high level nuclear wastes - the first time a state been given the power to veto a presidential decision.
Congress will have 90 legislative days to override Guinn's veto on a simple majority vote.
"This veto belongs to each and every one of you who have battled against a project that would be detrimental to the public health and safety of our citizens, our precious natural resources and our economy," Guinn said, "and to the other 43 states and hundreds of cities and towns in America through which this dangerous waste will be transported."
In 1987, Congress selected Yucca Mountain as the only site it would study for disposal of high level nuclear wastes, the most dangerous of radioactive wastes. Guinn argued that Yucca Mountain was selected because it is located in a section of Nevada with a population of less than one million, and just four legislative representatives.
But its isolation means that Yucca Mountain is thousands of miles away from 90 percent of the nation's 110 nuclear power plants, requiring the wastes to be transported across country, passing through populated areas along the way. The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to use Yucca Mountain for the disposal of 77,000 tons of high level radioactive waste and spent fuel from throughout the United States and 42 countries.
"The fact that the Yucca Mountain decision was made without any analysis of the transportation risks to the 123 million Americans in states through which this dangerous waste will travel is the dirty little secret," Guinn said.
Citing more than $100 million the nuclear power industry has spent to promote the project, Guinn asked all Nevadans to contribute at least $1 to the Nevada Protection Fund, which has now topped $6 million.
-------- new mexico
Terror war, new nuclear bombs rejuvenate New Mexico weapons labs
Mon Apr 8, 2002
By SUE MAJOR HOLMES,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020409/ap_wo_en_fe/fea_us_labs_fighting_terrorism_2
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico - With the demise of the Soviet Union, America's nuclear weapons laboratories lost much of their mission.
The United States and Russia agreed to cut back stocks of nuclear warheads and ratchet down the targeting of each others' cities. They even stopped testing new bombs.
But after Sept. 11, the Department of Energy's aging weapons labs - Los Alamos National Laboratory is almost 60 years old - got a new vocation: developing counterterrorism gear.
The two New Mexico weapons labs, Los Alamos and Sandia, have embarked on projects including collar cameras for rescue dogs, explosive-sniffing robots and anthrax-killing foam.
Now it appears their old expertise, nuclear bombs, may also be returning to vogue.
The U.S. military has asked Sandia and Los Alamos to design a new bunker-busting nuclear bomb, one that can destroy underground command-and-control centers or stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
The Bush administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the news media in February, fingered Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria as countries that could conceivably be targets for such new nukes.
For the two weapons labs in New Mexico, the first impetus to jump into anti-terror technology stems from an attack closer to home.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing - in which two Americans were convicted and one executed - lab scientists began girding for the possibility that terrorists might someday build, buy or steal a nuclear bomb.
Government logic postulated that scientists who design America's bombs know the best way to detect nuclear or other hazardous materials and somehow prevent a terrorist-mounted nuclear assault.
The labs' scientists have hatched several anti-terrorism projects, including:
_A device that physically dismantled and preserved evidence of a bomb that authorities say airplane passenger Richard Reid carried in his shoe in December.
_A method of pinpointing genetic strains of anthrax and other deadly germs through DNA analysis.
_An anthrax-killing foam used to decontaminate buildings in Washington, D.C. and New York.
_Tiny cameras on rescue dogs' collars used in search missions in the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
_The Sand Dragon Robot, a wheeled metal device fitted with an explosives-sniffing sensor.
_Air monitors at the Salt Lake City Olympics that checked for signs of a bioterrorist pathogen.
_An early warning computer network for public health officials to spot trends in infectious diseases.
New Mexico's two weapons laboratories each enjoy dlrs 1.6 billion budgets and provide a combined total of some 14,000 jobs - big numbers in one of the poorest states in the country.
For people here, the war on terrorism has meant employment.
Sandia hired more than 600 people last year and officials expect to add a similar number this year. Los Alamos is expected to hire 1,000 this year.
The Bush administration's push in counterterrorism is already showing up in lab budgets. This year, Los Alamos has about dlrs 100 million for research and development into such technology. Los Alamos director John Browne expects that to increase to dlrs 116 million in fiscal year 2003.
Research on "bunker-busting" nuclear bombs is expected to bring dlrs 15 million a year for three years to the two New Mexico labs and the nation's third weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore in California.
Los Alamos began in 1943 as a top-secret project to develop the world's first atomic bomb.
Sandia, its design and engineering stepchild, traces its beginnings to a bunch of engineers in prefab buildings surrounded by junked World War II planes in the Albuquerque desert.
It became a separate lab in 1949.
-------- new york
Nuclear Escape Route
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/opinion/08HERB.html
Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power complex in Westchester County are taking some of their most important cues from the successful fight against the trouble-plagued Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island.
It was the absence of a credible evacuation plan that ultimately killed Shoreham more than a decade ago. Shoreham was a colossal fiasco in many respects. It had been in the works since the 1960's, a dream project that was supposed to provide energy that was plentiful, safe and economical. By the end, its costs had ballooned from the earliest estimates of $70 million to a staggering $5.5 billion.
It was the nation's most expensive nuclear power plant. And it never made it to the starting gate.
There were plenty of problems with Shoreham. From the beginning there were worries about safety. Cracks developed in the plant's three backup generators. And federal officials were not satisfied with the strength of the original containment vessel.
But it was the federal requirement that evacuation plans be developed for the areas surrounding nuclear plants that finally doomed Shoreham. That requirement was imposed after the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island. The opposition to Shoreham, already strong, intensified after Three Mile Island. And when Shoreham was unable to come up with a viable evacuation plan, it was finished.
Now, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, opposition to Indian Point is intensifying. And once again a major focus is the viability of the plan for evacuation.
The federal government has approved the existing Indian Point plan. But Indian Point opponents have always insisted that the plan was not just flawed or inadequate, but basically unrealistic. That feeling has grown since Sept. 11.
Opponents fear that if a catastrophic event occurred at Indian Point there would be widespread panic in the region. Under the current plan, if it were necessary to evacuate an area during the school day, buses and vans are supposed to immediately head toward the schools, pick up the children and take them to designated areas outside the danger zone, where they would be united with their parents. What is more realistic, say the plan's opponents, is that fearful parents would immediately rush to the schools to pick up their children, thus clogging roads and making the overall evacuation effort that much more difficult.
Uncertainties of this nature abound. If there were an event serious enough to warrant an evacuation, would all of the bus drivers be willing to drive into a possibly contaminated area to rescue the schoolchildren? Some drivers have already expressed their reluctance to enter a contaminated zone.
What happens to people who are elderly or ill? What happens to those who become confused, or people who don't know the drill?
If a mass exit were required, could the roads and bridges handle it? Or would traffic come to a standstill?
The county and the owners of Indian Point (the Entergy Corporation, based in New Orleans) are engaged in elaborate efforts to update and improve the emergency response plan. But the plan applies only to a 10-mile radius of Indian Point, and the concern of residents in the region is spread far wider than that.
That widespread concern, in the view of officials at Entergy, is misplaced. A company spokesman, Larry Gottlieb, said applying an evacuation plan to even a 10-mile radius was unnecessary. The danger zone, according to Mr. Gottlieb, would be much smaller - about a two-mile radius around the plant.
And not everyone, even in that two-mile radius, would have serious cause for worry, he said. If a plume of radiation were released by some disaster at Indian Point, Entergy officials believe it would affect - depending on wind conditions - just a small wedge of the two-mile radius.
"It's kind of like if somebody is pointing a gun at you," said Mr. Gottlieb, "and all you have to do is step to the left or to the right to get out of the pathway of the bullet. That's all you have to do. "You don't have to get into a car and go 50 miles out of the area to be protected. If we're telling you that the wind is blowing in a northeast direction and only this grid is affected - and we can tell this grid very simply - we recommend you stay in your home and don't move. And the rest of the folks aren't affected because the wind isn't blowing that way. It's really as simple as that."
--------
At Indian Point, the Uneasy Zone
April 8, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/opinion/L08INDI.html
To the Editor:
"Rising Anxiety," by Bob Herbert (column, April 4), about the Indian Point nuclear power plant's troubling safety record and current threats, should be a wake-up call for the New York metropolitan area.
As numerous area residents and local elected officials have already concluded, Indian Point has become an unacceptable risk for the region. Westchester County's Board of Legislators is currently considering a resolution to permanently decommission the nuclear plant, a move that seems warranted in light of the new terrorist threats.
The consensus to close the nuclear plant is rapidly forming, with more than one-third of Westchester's local governments already passing resolutions to shut it down, and others actively considering similar moves. We can all live without Indian Point in our region. JOSEPH BIBER Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., April 4, 2002
• To the Editor:
Re "Rising Anxiety," by Bob Herbert (column, April 4): My father, who was 4F during World War II, was an air raid warden. Why not bring back a civilian volunteer army to police nuclear plants, water reservoirs, bridges, tunnels and so on? There are a lot of people who could be used to protect our vulnerable spots. EVELYN LAURIE New York, April 4, 2002
• To the Editor:
Here in the lower Hudson Valley, concerned neighbors of Indian Point appreciate Bob Herbert's assessment of the threats posed by this facility (column, April 4).
What many fail to realize is that before Sept. 11, the so-called emergency evacuation plan was never vigorously critiqued or debated by the public and local municipalities that would be affected by a disaster at Indian Point, terrorist-related or otherwise. Now this is finally happening.
What is surfacing is the realization that the plan can never really work. Though it can be improved, it can never reach the point of being truly viable considering the enormousness of the risks to the 20 million people who live within a 50-mile radius of the fallout zone.
Indian Point would never be built where it is today. The time for orderly decommissioning is now.
TED HERMAN
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. April 5, 2002
-------- ohio
Ohio nuke plant should have seen corrosion sooner - NRC
REUTERS USA:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15345/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
OAK HARBOR - U.S. nuclear regulators last week scolded FirstEnergy Corp for failing to recognize as early as 1999 that dirty air filters covered with rust and boric acid indicated a serious problem near the company's reactor in Ohio.
Nearly 400 local residents, anti-nuclear activists, FirstEnergy employees and others crowded into a public meeting held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discuss corrosion found at the company's Davis-Besse nuclear plant.
The unexpected discovery last month of corrosion in a massive 17-foot (5.2-meter) piece of carbon steel bolted on top of the plant's reactor has alarmed regulators.
The corrosion in the steel plate, known as a reactor head vessel, was so severe that the acid had eaten nearly all the way through the 6-inch (15-cm) thick vessel head.
"It simply represents an unacceptable reduction of the margin of safety at Davis-Besse," said Jim Dyer, the NRC's Midwest regional administrator.
If the slender strip of steel remaining atop the reactor had been penetrated, it would have caused a "radiological mess within the containment area," Dyer said. Although not a direct threat to public health, radioactive steam would have filled the cement containment building, breaching one of three key safeguards surrounding the reactor, he said.
Melvin Holmberg, an NRC engineer, said that FirstEnergy should have discovered the corrosion much sooner than last month, when the company shut the plant for refueling.
Holmberg said the firm recently told the NRC that beginning in November 1999, the Ohio plant had to change the filters on its radiation air monitors every day because of rapid build-up of airborne rust and boric acid. Normally, filters are changed once a month and do not have any brownish coating.
"The NRC team believe the Davis-Besse staff had several opportunities to prevent the corrosion and didn't," he said.
Boric acid is used in the primary coolant bath surrounding uranium rods in the reactor core. Tiny amounts of leakage through joints are normal and do not cause major corrosion.
The NRC, alarmed by the Ohio plant's problem, is reviewing 68 similar plants to detect any problems elsewhere in the nation. The United States has 103 operating nuclear power plants, which provide one-fifth of the nation's electricity.
FirstEnergy officials agreed that the dirty air filters should have alerted them to potential problems at the plant.
"We could have and should have found it in previous inspections," said Howard Bergendal, a FirstEnergy vice president. "It's our responsibiility to expect the unexpected and we did not do this."
During the three-hour public meeting, held in a high school near the plant, many speakers urged regulators to close the plant until a new reactor head is installed. The plant has been closed since mid-February, when it began refueling operations.
The company has estimated it would cost about $20 million and take two years to buy a new reactor vessel head from a French manufacturer. Alternatively, FirstEnergy has begun negotiating with Consumers Energy to buy an unused reactor head from an abandoned Michigan nuclear plant.
The company will present its proposals for repairing the plant at another NRC meeting next week in Washington.
The Ohio Public Interest Research Group and other anti-nuclear groups said a temporary closure was not enough.
"We oppose any plans to temporarily mend, repair, fix up or patch the unprecedented damage to the Davis-Besse nuke reactor," the groups said in a statement. "We call for the most stringent inspection ever undertaken of a nuclear reactor in order to ensure that no additional safety hazards exist."
Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, has also called for the plant to be shut.
Last December, the NRC threatened to shut the Ohio plant for an unrelated problem.
Brian Sheron, an NRC associate director, said the agency was concerned then because of unexpected circular cracks found in control nozzles at the similarly designed Oconee plant in South Carolina. The NRC agreed to an offer by FirstEnergy officials to move up the Ohio plant's next refueling to Feb. 16 - instead of March 30 - and examine the nozzles then.
Sheron said FirstEnergy failed to mention at the December meeting the plant's problem with dirty air filters and airborne rust and boric acid particles.
"If we had known that, obviously it would have affected our decision," he said. "Had we known they had seen these brown deposits, we wouldn't have made the decision we did."
-------- us politics
Bush Seeks $50 Million to Boost Volunteers
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- President Bush, eager to refocus attention on his domestic agenda amid the Mideast crisis, lauded elected officials Monday for heeding his call to bolster police and emergency teams with volunteers.
``It makes sense to come to the Volunteer State to talk about the need for our citizens to help each other,'' Bush said.
Bush toured Knoxville's Citizens' Police Academy, a training center for volunteers, saying he considers it a model for what he is trying to create around the nation.
``I'm here to explain to the nation the importance of citizens becoming involved with preparedness in their communities,'' Bush said. ``I want other people to see what is possible.''
Hecklers repeatedly interrupted Bush's speech at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium; he watched as authorities removed them, but didn't change his standard address on the war against terrorism. The demonstrators shouted: ``We won't fight your racist war!''
Bush had to yell at one point as counter-hecklers shouted the protesters down.
He praised local officials who have set up councils to coordinate the Citizen Corps that Bush called for in his State of the Union address. It is a network of everyday Americans pitching in on community-level police, emergency response and counterterrorism efforts.
The president has proposed spending $230 million in 2003 to establish Citizen Corps councils in local communities. Monday, the White House said he would seek another $50 million for the effort.
Among the mayors in Knoxville for the announcement were Anthony Williams of Washington and James Hahn of Los Angeles, two Democrats who flew with Bush on Air Force One.
History will view Bush's new effort as the period when communities banded together to prepare for terrorism, said John Bridgeland, head of the USA Freedom Corps.
``And in the process, if no terrorism comes, (they) strengthened crime prevention, natural disaster preparedness and emergency and public health response,'' Bridgeland said.
After returning to the White House Monday afternoon, Bush planned to address labor leaders, urging the Senate to pass legislation aimed at protecting businesses against skyrocketing premiums on terrorism insurance.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush wants to address the insurance industry's reluctance to take out terrorism insurance because it anticipates tremendous costs in the event of another attack.
As an example, Fleischer said, a resort planned in Nevada that would generate 1,600 jobs is on hold because of a lack of terrorism insurance. The Miami Dolphins and New York Giants football teams have lost coverage, Fleischer said, and the Mall of America saw its premiums increase tenfold.
``It's a real vulnerability in our safety net to protect America from another terrorist attack,'' Fleischer said.
Bush's trip was notable for the absence of a political fund-raising event. Of the 11 domestic trips he has taken since the start of March, he has raised campaign cash for Republicans in all but three.
In part, the visit here had no fund-raiser because the White House has been unable to dissuade Rep. Ed Bryant, R-Tenn., from running for the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Fred Thompson.
Twice last month, White House political chief Karl Rove talked to Bryant, subtly urging him not to run against Lamar Alexander, the president's choice to win the nomination.
Bryant said he is running anyhow, and told associates the White House should stop butting into GOP primaries.
The visit here to discuss the Citizen Corps also offered an opportunity for Bush to change the subject from the Mideast crisis that has been vexing him to the noncontroversial volunteerism effort.
Fleischer said Bush spoke to Secretary of State Colin Powell Monday morning about Powell's trip to the region, and said envoy Anthony Zinni would meet with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon later in the day to reinforce Bush's demand that Israelis begin to withdraw from Palestinian territory immediately.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Defense Minister Survives Assassination Attempt
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Attack.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A bomb exploded Monday near a convoy carrying Afghanistan's defense minister, killing four bystanders and injuring 16 others, a local official said.
Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim was not hurt when the bomb exploded in front of his convoy in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, said Agha Jan, an aide to the region's top military commander, Hazrat Ali.
The dead and injured were people who had lined up along the road to welcome Fahim to Jalalabad, where the minister was on a trip to meet with local commanders and tribal leaders to discuss, among other issues, a new government campaign to eradicate heroin-producing poppies.
Jan, who himself was traveling in one of the vehicles, said the convoy was not hit, and that Fahim was taken to a safe area where he was holding his meetings.
A Defense Ministry official in the capital of Kabul called it an assassination attempt.
The perpetrators ``were trying to destabilize the country and disrupt the minister's plans'' in Jalalabad, said Mir Ajan.
Afghan authorities on several occasions have denounced attempts to destabilize the interim administration.
Security forces last week arrested at least 160 people on suspicion of plotting attacks against interim leader Hamid Karzai and the exiled former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, whose homecoming is expected later this month.
Those still in custody are linked to a hard-line Islamic group, Hezb-e-Islami, headed by former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, officials said. A spokesman for that group denied it was connected with the alleged plot.
Fahim's trip was linked to a government program launched Monday to eradicate illegal poppy crops, offering farmers about $500 an acre to destroy the narcotic-bearing flowers.
Authorities have said they will destroy the crops if farmers do not comply.
In February, Karzai accused senior members of his own administration of assassinating aviation minister Abdul Rahman during a riot among would-be Islamic pilgrims at the Kabul airport. The investigation is ongoing.
--------
CIVILIANS
Shattered Afghan Families Demand U.S. Compensation
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/asia/08CIVI.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 7 - Victims of the bombing in Afghanistan handed in petitions from 400 families to the American Embassy here today, part of a growing movement to demand compensation from the United States for the loss of their families and homes.
Dozens of families traveled to Kabul, the capital, from all over the country to tell harrowing stories of whole families lost and of children maimed in the bombing. An 8-year-old girl named Amina, who lost 16 relatives in the bombing, her entire family except her father, handed the heavy folder of petitions to Michael Metrinko, who heads the embassy's political and consular sections.
The petitioners represent just some of possibly thousands of civilians who suffered in the campaign against the Taliban leadership and Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, that began exactly six months ago today. Global Exchange, a human rights organization based in San Francisco that is supporting the victims in their claims, estimates that about 2,000 families may have suffered losses in the bombing.
About 300 people are thought to have died in the bombing around the northern city of Kunduz, and 300 more in five villages in eastern Afghanistan, journalists who have investigated the areas say.
"It is the responsibility of the U.S. government to do a survey and to help the innocent victims impacted by the air campaign," said Marla Ruzicka of Global Exchange, who helped organize the petitions.
But the petitioners got only a short meeting in the street with Mr. Metrinko and no promise of assistance. "I am telling them that we are trying, we hope we can help," he said. "But I cannot make a commitment."
Afghans have been handing in petitions since January, he said, and the embassy had asked Washington what answer should be given to them. "The embassy has recommended that a positive response be given," he said, but added that neither the Defense Department nor the State Department had replied yet.
Mr. Metrinko expressed his own frustrations at the Washington bureaucracy. "You cannot imagine how difficult it is to listen to stories like this and not to be able to give an answer," he said.
Emotions veered from weariness to anger among the petitioners gathered outside the embassy.
Juma Khan, Amina's father, a cobbler who borrowed money to travel from their home town, Khanabad, to deliver the petitions, said he was worried it had been in vain. "He said he would try to help, but I don't know when," he said of Mr. Metrinko.
It was a cold day in November when American planes bombed Khanabad and hit Mr. Khan's house. "We were all sitting inside, 18 of us, when suddenly a bomb hit," he said crouching against a wall with his daughter. "Just two of us are left."
"The house completely collapsed, and two beams landed on my shoulders." he said. "But fortunately, I survived."
Amina, who had been in another room, wriggled out from the rubble unhurt and ran for help. Neighbors dug Mr. Khan out. Then they dug deeper and found his wife, Bibi Gul, his seven other children, his mother, and his brother and wife and their five children. They were all dead.
The house was hit in an intense battle as American warplanes pursued Taliban forces toward their last stronghold in the town of Kunduz. But Mr. Khan said the Taliban had withdrawn two days before. "They destroyed our house and killed our children," he said of the American forces. "They should help us."
They live with relatives now, and his daughter often wakes at night, crying, he said. Amina, a clear-eyed, calm girl, said the same of her father. "He has mental problems," she said. "He wakes up at night."
Every petitioner had a similar sad story. Rabia and Ghulam Hazrat lost four children, ages 7 to 14, when a missile exploded in their courtyard on the outskirts of Kabul. They live near a military base used by the Taliban, but the neighborhood was showered with cluster bombs and other explosives, Ms. Hazrat said.
"There was no warning," she said. "I was in the kitchen making dough when I heard a huge explosion. I came out and saw a big cloud of dust and saw my children lying on the ground. Two of them were dead and two died later in hospital."
Abdul Rashid, 9, was blinded by shrapnel in a similar air raid, and he arrived with his father, Dad Muhammad, 45, a farmer still hobbling on a crutch from his injuries. "I just remember the airplane," Abdul Rashid said. "We wanted to water the animals, and suddenly my eyes were injured and I lost my sight." He could see a bit from his left eye for a few days before darkness closed in, he said. Now he can only see bright lights from a car or electric light, he said.
"The doctor told us that maybe they can treat him abroad, but they can do nothing in Afghanistan," his father said. "We just ask the U.S. government that they help us." His house had been demolished in the raid, he added.
There was anger, too. Hajji Ghulam Hussein, a Pashtun from the eastern province of Paktia, where the battle against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces continues, was scathing about the American diplomat. "I told him that our country has been suffering for 24 years and that we need an experienced physician, not a man who cannot do much," he said.
-------- asia
ASIAN ARENA
Trade Envoy Urges Bolder Moves by Indonesia Against Terror, and Vows U.S. Backing
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/asia/08TRAD.html
JAKARTA, April 7 - The United States trade representative, trying to embolden President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia to take steps against terrorism, promised in talks here today to cooperate with her government against the "dangers" in her society.
Robert B. Zoellick, the trade representative, held talks with Mrs. Megawati and several of her ministers that were broader than his usual trade brief. He said that Indonesia's success in dealing with terrorism was extremely important to the United States.
This nation of more than 220 million people, most of them Muslim, has been a model of "tolerant Islam," and Washington would like it to remain that way, Mr. Zoellick said after the talks and dinner in Mrs. Megawati's official residence.
The subtle public message was that the Bush administration was anxious to help Indonesia, but that the nation must begin to reform its army to receive the military assistance that it wants.
The Pentagon wants to provide training to the Indonesian military but has been stalled by an American law that forbids such assistance until the army shows some accountability for the deaths of civilians in East Timor in 1999.
A prolonged debate within the administration has centered on how to get Mrs. Megawati to be more vigorous in stemming trends toward Islamic extremism here.
Indonesia, which rejected the idea of becoming an Islamic state after independence from the Dutch more than 50 years ago, has traditionally been one of the most open-minded Muslim countries.
But there have been recent signs - including the arrests of suspected Islamic militants from Indonesia in the Philippines - that Indonesians are involved in militant groups with suspected links to Al Qaeda.
Administration officials also have urged the Indonesian government to search for an Indonesian Islamic cleric, Riudan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, who is believed by American officials to have been the operational director in a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Singapore.
In talks with the foreign minister, Hassan Wirayudha, Mr. Zoellick suggested that the government halt the activities of Abu Bakar Baasyir, an Islamic cleric and school principal in central Java who is said to have links to Al Qaeda.
In recent months, administration officials have expressed frustration with what they consider Mrs. Megawati's slow pace in acting against the Islamic militants who they say are recruiting cadres in her country.
But the more administration officials hear the outspoken anti-Israeli sentiments of two other potential leaders - Vice President Hamzah Haz and the speaker of the Parliament, Armen Rais - the more senior officials in Washington say they appreciate Mrs. Megawati.
Mr. Zoellick is the second senior Bush administration official to visit Indonesia within a month, a reflection of the frustration with the leadership here.
The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, was here several weeks ago. But Mr. Zoellick knows the president better than his colleagues and gets along well with her.
Mrs. Megawati, the daughter of Indonesia's post-independence leader, Sukarno, is a mystery to most officials in Washington, who find her sphinxlike public posture bewildering. Judging from Mr. Zoellick's public comments today, the trade negotiator turned diplomat-for-a-day apparently tried to play to the Indonesian president's own recent self-assessment. She described herself as "soft on the outside, but hard as rock on the inside."
So Mr. Zoellick suggested to her that as the carrier of her father's torch, it was her destiny to help Washington deal with its overriding concern: terrorism. Or as he put it more euphemistically on the doorstep of her home after dinner, she should deal with "the dangers" in Indonesia - phraseology apparently intended to offend as little as possible and to encourage action.
-------- britain
IRA Scraps More Weapons and Ammunition
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Northern-Ireland.html
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) -- The Irish Republican Army has scrapped more guns and explosives in a secret ceremony, North American weapons inspectors announced Monday, to the praise of politicians from Britain and Ireland.
The widely expected move -- more than five months after the shadowy organization made history by starting down the road to disarmament -- bolstered the key achievement of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, a Catholic-Protestant government that includes the IRA's Sinn Fein party.
``It is time to recognize that profoundly important progress is being made, and the Good Friday agreement is achieving results that are good for all the people of Northern Ireland,'' said Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of the neighboring Republic of Ireland.
Retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, who has led Northern Ireland's independent disarmament commission since 1997, said he and his American deputy, diplomat Andrew Sens, had ``witnessed an event in which the IRA leadership has put a varied and substantial quantity of ammunition, arms and explosive material beyond use.''
De Chastelain said he couldn't specify when or where the disarmament took place, nor the method used, because the IRA was insisting on releasing no details.
David Trimble, the Northern Ireland government leader who has long battled Protestant hard-liners opposed to Sinn Fein's participation in Cabinet, welcomed the IRA move as evidence the group would gradually surrender its entire arsenal of stockpiled weapons.
And Trimble, whose Ulster Unionist Party represents a narrow majority of the province's Protestants, said the IRA actions must spur outlawed Protestant groups ``to start their own process.''
Like the IRA, such groups were supposed to get rid of their own less elaborate arms supplies in support of the 1998 pact. But unlike Sinn Fein, the Protestant outlaws' politicians have won little electoral support, weakening any leverage they might have to deliver disarmament from their quarter. Attacks on Catholics, chiefly involving crude homemade pipe bombs, have escalated in the past year.
In October, the IRA's confirmation that it had begun to put weapons ``beyond use'' -- a deliberately vague term that could mean their handover, destruction or sealing in concrete -- persuaded the Ulster Unionists not to topple Northern Ireland's government. It also spurred Britain to accelerate its program of dismantling military installations, a process begun following the IRA's 1997 cease-fire.
This time, analysts agreed that the IRA acted specifically to boost Sinn Fein's chances of winning parliamentary seats in an election next month in the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Ahern was expected to specify a polling date later this week.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams told a news conference the IRA move was ``not a mere election stunt. It's too big an issue.''
Speaking alongside Arthur Morgan, one of Sinn Fein's parliamentary candidates, Adams said the IRA was ``leading by example'' and expected Britain to make fresh gestures in response. ``We've only to look at the Middle East to see that the imperative of peacemaking must prevail,'' he said.
One of Sinn Fein's immediate demands is for Britain to grant an amnesty to a few dozen people wanted on outstanding IRA charges. Among them is Rita O'Hare, Sinn Fein's chief representative in the United States, who jumped bail in 1972, while awaiting trial for the attempted murder of British soldiers.
De Chastelain said he believed the IRA was ``on the path to peace.'' But he also expressed frustration that the hidden IRA arsenal -- involving an estimated three tons of plastic explosive, detonators, rockets and thousands of guns -- was taking so long to neutralize. The Good Friday pact had envisioned a conclusion to disarmament by mid-2000.
``Our patience has been tried and our expectations strained,'' he said. ``Clearly we need something that's regular, convincing and has an end in mind. We would like to see this moving faster than it is moving. We have been here for a very long time.''
-------- drug war
Afghan Poppy Farmers Revolt
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12929-2002Apr8?language=printer
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Poppy-Blockade.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- Tribal poppy farmers in eastern Afghanistan opened fire on provincial officials surveying their fields as a government program to eradicate opium poppies began Monday. At least one official was reported killed.
Shenwari tribesmen also blocked the highway between Kabul, the Afghan capital, and Pakistan, pelting vehicles with rocks, according to travelers arriving in this border town.
Pir Haideri, an official with the Nangarhar provincial government in Jalalabad, said the official in charge of security on the Pakistan-Afghan Highway was killed in the shooting in Marco, 12 miles into Afghanistan. Four others were wounded, he said.
Hashim Khan, a traveler arriving here, put the death toll at four, including the security official and two Afghan workers for a nongovernment organization working to eradicate poppy fields. Haideri said he knew of one death but that his information could be incomplete.
Afghanistan once was the source of roughly 70 percent of the world's opium. The Taliban banned the crop in 2000, but the rout of the Islamic extremist militia after a U.S. bombing campaign last year prompted farmers to quickly replant their crops.
As of Monday, the new Afghan government was offering poor farmers about $500 an acre to destroy narcotic-bearing poppy flowers. The program has angered many farmers because the sum falls far short of the narcotic's market value.
There also were reports of violence at a demonstration against the program in southern Helmand province. Khan Aka, a 40-year-old farmer, said one man was killed and two were wounded when security forces opened fire on the protesters.
-------- germany
Schroeder defends government funding for German military, says finances `solid'
Mon Apr 8, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020408/ap_wo_en_ge/germany_military_1
HANOVER, Germany - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Monday defended his government's financing of the German military as "solid," insisting there is no room for spending hikes as Germany strives to cut its budget deficit.
The United States and NATO officials have pressed Germany and other European countries to step up military spending to train and equip their forces better, while German military officers have openly complained of underfunding and aging equipment.
"I know that not a few of you would like to see more money for the defense budget," Schroeder told a meeting of Bundeswehr officers in the city of Hanover. But, he insisted, "we have ensured solid financing for the military without giving up our aim of balancing the budget."
Germany, which in February narrowly avoided a formal European Union (news - web sites) reprimand over its surging budget deficit, has committed itself to balance the budget by 2006.
Late last year, the government said the military would get an extra 1.5 billion marks (dlrs 685 million) a year in funding. Before that, the Defense Ministry budget was to dip gradually from 46.8 billion marks (dlrs 21 billion) in 2001 to 46.2 billion (dlrs 20.8 billion) marks in 2006, as the government trims spending and modernizes the military - cutting troop strength and shifting toward a more professional force.
"There is no sensible alternative either to balancing the budget or to reforming the military," Schroeder said Monday.
Germany has sent some 800 soldiers to Afghanistan as part of an international security force.
It has also sent ships and planes to cut off possible terrorist escape routes and supply lines off the Horn of Africa and dispatched a unit specialized in chemical and nuclear warfare to Kuwait for exercises, while German special forces have been helping U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The country also is leading a NATO peacekeeping operation in Macedonia.
-------- iran
Terrorists trained by Iran tracked from Uzbekistan
April 8, 2002
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020408-76554392.htm
Iran is secretly training Islamic terrorists from Uzbekistan for future operations in Central Asia, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Military officials from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran's radical Islamic military units, have been training and supporting militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, known as IMU.
The IMU has close ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, and the group used Afghanistan as a sanctuary in the past. Its relationship to al Qaeda and Afghanistan was a major factor in the decision by the Uzbek government to support U.S. military action in the region.
The new intelligence, gathered by the U.S. Central Command, shows that Iran's government is backing the IMU despite some steps toward reform within the leadership.
IMU fighters were among the several hundred al Qaeda militants killed during Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan last month.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumfeld last week stated that Iran is assisting al Qaeda terrorists fleeing Afghanistan. He also said Iran has been working with Syria to send terrorists to conduct attacks against Israel.
"This is all well known," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "These countries are not only trying to kill people outside their countries, but they are repressing their own people. They have an active program of denying the rights of the people in those three countries that is vicious, repressive and, unfortunately, successful."
Iran has provided safe haven to al Qaeda terrorists and allowed others to pass through Iran to other countries, he said.
Asked whether Iran, Iraq or other states were behind the September 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "I'm not in the law enforcement business where we run around and try to connect things to certain events for the purposes of prosecution. That's the Department of Justice and others."
U.S. intelligence agencies have been looking for signs of state sponsorship for the September 11 attacks, which many analysts believe were too sophisticated for amateur terrorists to have carried out alone.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps was implicated by U.S. intelligence to the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, according to intelligence officials.
There also are intelligence reports linking the Revolutionary Guards and Iran's intelligence service to al Qaeda terrorist operations, the officials said.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov told reporters in Tashkent last week that Pakistan was harboring IMU terrorists who fled Afghanistan. "The Pakistani authorities have done nothing to detain bandits from Uzbekistan who were trained in Afghanistan and took part in the al Qaeda terrorist network," Mr. Karimov said on Thursday.
Up to 2,000 IMU members were in Afghanistan last year, including Takhir Yuldash, the head of the IMU.
Mr. Karimov said the IMU leader fled Afghanistan's Paktia province during the U.S. military's Operation Anaconda in March.
"Now he only can be in Pakistan," Mr. Karimov said. "Uzbekistan has an extradition agreement with Pakistan, but we haven't seen its practical implementation."
U.S. officials said Mr. Yuldash and other IMU members have been working with military officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Some training of IMU members has taken place inside Iran, and the group is also getting help from Iran with travel, documents, weapons and explosives.
"The Iranians are helping to coordinate IMU activities," one U.S. intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The IMU has been blamed for a string of bombings in Tashkhent in 1999. The group is seeking to set up a radical Islamic state in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations.
Currently, there are about 1,000 U.S. military personnel inside Uzbekistan. Most of them are deployed at a military airfield near Khanabad, in southern Uzbekistan.
Mr. Karimov said U.S. troop levels in his country will be limited to 1,500.
"We have no complaints against the United States," Mr. Karimov said. "The agreement is being observed fully, and the Uzbek side is notified in advance about what planes will land in Khanabad."
Iran is one of three states President Bush has identified as an "axis of evil."
U.S. intelligence officials said Iran's government appears to have a dual-track policy on terrorism. It is covertly supporting terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the IMU while stating publicly that it opposes terrorism.
The Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet reported last week that Iran had captured Cemil Bayik, a key leader of the Marxist terrorist group Worker's Party of Kurdistan.
Mr. Bayik was arrested along with two bodyguards on March 30 after the Turkish government supplied Tehran with information about his location in a region of Iran near the Turkish border.
-------- iraq
Iraq Suspends Oil Exports to Support Palestinians
April 8, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-energy-iraq.html
BAGHDAD - President Saddam Hussein of Iraq on Monday announced an immediate month-long suspension of all Iraqi oil exports to protest Israel's incursion into Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
The unilateral decision, halting two million barrels a day or some four percent of international oil supplies, comes as Baghdad seeks diplomatic support among its Arab neighbors against the threat of a military attack by the United States.
In a speech broadcast over national media, Saddam said: ''The Iraqi leadership declared the complete stoppage of oil exports starting from this afternoon April 8 for a period of 30 days when we will further decide policy, or until the Zionist entity's armed forces have unconditionally withdrawn from the Palestinian territories.''
Washington wants to oust Saddam as part of its campaign against countries it identifies as a threat to its security after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
The U.S. said on Sunday, after a meeting in Texas between President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that it was not yet planning a military campaign against Baghdad but that the use of force remained an option.
Saddam said: ``The decision is basically taken against the Zionist entity, and the American aggressive policy and not against anyone else. It is not meant to harm anyone but those who have decided to harm the Arab nation, including the Palestinian people.''
Iraqi Oil Minister Amir Muhammed Rasheed said the suspension had been implemented at 6 a.m. EDT from its export points on the Gulf and through Turkey. Turkish pipeline company Botas confirmed that the pipeline from Iraq had stopped pumping and traders said they had been told Gulf shipments were being put on hold.
The suspension helped propel oil prices sharply higher, adding $1.01 to benchmark Brent by the close of trade in London, taking it to $27.00 a barrel, near a six-month high.
Saddam is resisting pressure from the U.S. and Britain to permit the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq to investigate its capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction. Iraq remains under U.N. sanctions for failing to eliminate those weapons nearly 12 years after Saddam ordered his forces to invade Kuwait, in August 1990.
Iraq's decision came as Israel pressed ahead with a 10-day-old military offensive, in defiance of demands from its ally the United States for a withdrawal.
Israel Radio later said Israeli troops would begin a pullout from two West Bank cities within hours, spurring oil prices on the New York market to give back some of the day's gains.
Iraqi officials said the suspension would be lifted once the leadership was satisfied that Israel had withdrawn.
Hours after Saddam's speech nearly 3,000 Iraqis marched through the streets of Baghdad to support the move, chanting ''Arab oil for the Arabs.''
IRAN, LIBYA
There was no immediate response to the Iraqi decision from two other Muslim oil producing nations, Iran and Libya. Both have said they would back an embargo but only if the ban found support from all Arab producers.
Such a move would appear highly unlikely because big producers Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have already rejected a repeat of the 1973 Arab oil embargo that quadrupled oil prices, triggering a severe economic recession in the West.
Iraq exports oil under a humanitarian exchange with the United Nations, permitted as an exception to 1990 Gulf War sanctions. Cash from the sales is banked in a New York escrow account controlled by the U.N. and released only for approved imports of foods and medicines.
Despite its hard line on Iraq, the U.S. is easily the world's biggest consumer of Iraqi crude, taking more than half of Baghdad's oil and depending on Iraqi supplies for about nine percent of its huge imports.
The West's energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, said the suspension was not a big loss to world oil markets and that the agency had the capability to step in and release emergency stocks in the event of any severe disruption.
``It's regrettable but not a huge volume,'' IEA Executive Director Robert Priddle told reporters. ``We've seen losses from Iraq before in different circumstances. The market has not reacted sharply to this.''
``We do have the capability to respond to this but we would expect the oil producers to be concerned in the first place and we will give them time to react to this.''
But OPEC Secretary General Ali Rodriguez said cartel ministers needed time to study the market reaction and had no plans to meet or provide extra supplies to fill the gap left by Iraq.
``There is no shortage,'' added Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Military Continues Offensive in West Bank
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/08CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, April 8 - Despite President Bush's call for a withdrawal from Palestinian-controlled areas, Israel intends to carry on with its broad military sweep through the West Bank, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Israeli Parliament today.
Mr. Sharon said he had promised President Bush that he would expedite the military campaign. The prime minister also said he was willing to work with other Arab nations to try and negotiate a peace agreement.
But as Mr. Sharon spoke to a special session of the Knesset, heavy fighting continued in Nablus and the Jenin refugee area.
Several gun battles also took place at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Since last week, more than 100 Palestinian gunmen have been holed up inside of the church's sanctuary. Israel had promised not to fire on the historic church, built on the site where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born, but Israeli military officials said today that they had begun firing only after Palestinians inside the church threw grenades at them.
Mr. Sharon called on the international community to demand that the gunmen surrender and release the clergy inside.
"Until then, the army will remain in its positions and prevent them from evading justice," Mr. Sharon told the Parliament. The priests, however, say they have not been taken hostage.
Meanwhile, in Gaza City, at least 60,000 Palestinians, mostly school-aged children, staged a rally to protest Israel's actions and the efforts of President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to reach a peace deal.
Secretary Powell landed in Morocco today and met with King Mohammed VI, who later criticized him for not going to Israel immediately. He is scheduled to visit Israel later in the week.
Before the start of Israel's weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr. Sharon said that his country would continue its offensive because the Palestinian Authority had refused to fight terrorism.
"We cannot accept going back to the situation as it was before the operation began,"Mr. Sharon said on state radio. "Israel is at the point of no return, because Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have no intention of respecting any accord."
At its meeting, the cabinet took no formal decision about the offensive, which the army said Sunday had caused the deaths of about 200 Palestinians since March 29, when the operations began, and had left 1,500 wounded. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, the chief of staff, said 13 Israeli soldiers had been killed.
But participants at the meeting reported "overwhelming" support for a continuation of the operation, even if it meant defying President Bush, who on Saturday called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled areas "without delay."
"I would say that this is a time in our history when even the arguments of our best friends are not strong enough in comparison with reality," said Natan Sharansky, the minister of housing.
Another member of the government, Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, said: "We should do everything in our power to convince the United States of America of our point of view to clear the West Bank of terrorist infrastructure and terrorists. I think this is the main attitude in the cabinet."
Military chiefs, who normally avoid public comment on political debates, were blunt in their demands for more time for the operation, which began 11 days ago. "If our time winds up at the end of this week, we won't be able to do the job," Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the chief of operations in the defense forces, told reporters at a news briefing. General Mofaz reportedly told the cabinet that he required eight more weeks inside the Palestinian-ruled areas.
As the government met, heavy resistance to the Israeli incursions was reported in Nablus and Jenin in the West Bank. The standoff in Bethlehem, where about 200 armed Palestinians have taken refuge in the Church of the Nativity, continued with no sign of a breakthrough.
Israeli forces were also in control of Ramallah, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and some smaller West Bank villages.
Along the border with Lebanon, a barrage of rockets, mortars and automatic weapons fired by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim movement, wounded five Israeli soldiers. It was the 10th straight day of shelling across the border, which Israelis believe is intended to provoke them into striking back at Syria, the real power in Lebanon, and embroiling them in another conflict.
Israeli officers said the day was drawing near when they would have no choice but to strike back.
The statements by President Bush, in a speech on Thursday and then in comments on Saturday, that Israel must withdraw, have opened an intense debate in Israel over whether to heed the president, who carries enormous authority here, or to continue with an operation that has overwhelming public support, especially after a suicide bombing attack at a hotel where Israelis were gathering for a Passover meal.
The drive has been all the more popular because since it began, terror attacks have effectively stopped, apparently because Palestinians have been on the run from the army.
Mr. Bush also dispatched Mr. Powell in an effort to
forge a cease-fire. Israeli officials believe that Mr. Powell's arrival will be the moment by which they either have to convince the Americans of their need to continue the onslaught, or risk an open dispute.
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on Sunday that while the president understood that the withdrawal could not be "helter-skelter and chaotic," she reiterated that he did "expect withdrawal to begin." On another Sunday talk show, Secretary Powell, preparing to leave Washington on a voyage that will end in Israel, said he would spend "whatever time and effort" were necessary to ease the conflict. But he added, "I'm not even sure I'll have a cease-fire in hand."
Though Mr. Sharon and the government have avoided publicly defying Mr. Bush, their comments have indicated that they intend to continue the military operations, though both Mr. Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer have talked of accelerating the campaign. Officials say they will try to convince the Bush administration that if the operation is curtailed, it will only lead to a resumption of terror.
A communiqué issued after the cabinet meeting on Sunday made no mention of the American pressures, but pointedly lauded the operation and quoted Mr. Sharon as telling the ministers that "this is a fateful campaign for our homes."
After Mr. Sharon spoke by telephone with Mr. Bush on Saturday, Mr. Sharon's office issued a statement saying he had told the president that Israel would "make every effort to accelerate" the offensive.
Privately, officials said more time was needed because the searches were largely driven by intelligence. The interrogations of captured men led to more searches and arrests, requiring the army to remain in control for a prolonged period of time.
Another problem for Mr. Sharon, as well as for Mr. Bush, was what to do about Mr. Arafat. By besieging him in his compound, the Israelis have greatly enhanced his standing among Palestinians.
But Mr. Sharon has declared him an enemy, and Mr. Bush has called him a liar, making it very difficult for them to start dealing him again.
One possibility reported in the Israeli press was that Secretary Powell would propose to Mr. Sharon that he end the operation immediately and start diplomatic talks, but with Palestinians other than Mr. Arafat.
On the Israeli side, government ministers said there was an active search under way for arguments and actions that would persuade the Americans to ease their pressures.
One argument used by officials was that the last American missions, those of Vice President Dick Cheney and Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, were undermined by terror attacks, and that Secretary Powell's chances of success would be improved if Israel was allowed to "root out terrorist infrastructures." Another possibility, officials said, was to put some of the captured Palestinians on trial as soon as possible to demonstrate that they were "terrorists."
General Harel said the army had detained about 2,000 people; about 700 have since been released. Of the remaining detainees, he said, 60 or 70 were "heavy terrorists."
General Harel also said the army had found 10 belts of explosives, 10 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, mortars and more than 2,000 small arms.
While fending off the Americans on one flank, Mr. Sharon has also worked to strengthen his coalition in case the Labor Party, his major partner, bolts over the operations. On Sunday, two small parties agreed to join the government, the National Religious Party and Gesher. The head of the National Religious Party, Effie Eitan, a former general, is regarded as a messianic nationalist who has talked of "transferring" Palestinians out of the West Bank. Gesher is led by David Levy, a former foreign minister.
Israeli actions on Sunday were accompanied by ever-louder protests from human rights groups and foreign governments. A spokesman for Amnesty International, Mark Neuman, said at a news conference, "War on terrorism does not mean that every member of the Palestinian population should be terrorized."
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Bush and Powell Repeat Demand for Israeli Withdrawal
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/08CND-POWELL.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom
AGADIR, Morocco, April 8 - President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell repeated their demands today for an immediate Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank as Mr. Powell began his quest for peace in the Middle East today by meeting with King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
King Mohammed, who is viewed as a moderating influence in Israeli-Palestinian relations, urged Mr. Powell beforehand to press hard for an Israeli withdrawal, and the Bush administration gave every indication that it plans to do just that.
Mr. Bush himself said today that he expected "a withdrawal without delay" as he reiterated his call for Arab nations to condemn terrorism.
"I repeat: I meant what I said about withdrawal without delay," Mr. Bush said on a political foray to Knoxville, Tenn. "Now, I mean what I say when I call upon the Arab world to strongly condemn and act against terrorist activities."
Secretary Powell had similar words after his meeting with the king, demanding "a clear statement from Israel that they are beginning to withdraw" from Palestinian territories.
Mr. Powell said the continuing Israeli military presence in the West Bank was having "a significant and severe" impact.
"We want to see this operation brought to an end as soon as possible," Mr. Powell said. He said he had asked the king to tell the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to halt violence against Israelis. Mr. Powell said he hopes to see Mr. Arafat this week.
In a statement released by the palace before King Mohammed met with Mr. Powell, the king reiterated Morocco's "total condemnation of the deliberate Israeli military invasion" and the "siege" he said had been imposed on Yasir Arafat and other leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
In a brief session for photographers, King Mohammed told Secretary Powell, "I wish you luck, because it is going to be difficult."
The secretary agreed, repeating the message he delivered in Washington on Sunday. "It is going to be difficult," he said.
Secretary Powell's trip to the Middle East, which began late Sunday, is widely seen as one of the most urgent and challenging attempts at American peacemaking since the shuttle diplomacy of Henry A. Kissinger in the 1970's.
Mr. Powell and his advisers left with no optimistic illusions about their mission, an enterprise ordered by President Bush with broad implications for his own personal prestige - and for the strategic interests and international standing of the United States.
"It's going to be a difficult trip," Secretary Powell said Sunday. "I'm not going to come back at the end of this trip with a peace treaty in hand. I'm not even sure I'll have a cease-fire in hand. But that will be my goal, to try to help both sides out of this tragic situation in which they find themselves." He spoke on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
Even as Secretary Powell spoke, the challenges were heightened. Israel showed no public signs of heeding his and Mr. Bush's calls for a prompt withdrawal from its occupation of Palestinian areas in the West Bank. Palestinian leaders have yet to issue firm demands for an end to the violence that prompted the Israeli military moves.
But Secretary Powell's caution seemed to reflect more than the simple fact that the two sides in the fight were not backing down.
Over the years, he has built his international reputation and his influence in part through a consistent strategy of never squandering his political capital. Now, having just turned 65 on Friday, the nation's top diplomat might have to spend much of the stake he has saved up, beginning most prominently 10 years ago as the nation's top general in the Persian Gulf war.
Senior administration officials have already sketched the outlines of Secretary Powell's emerging strategy, which is reflected in his itinerary. It starts with the moderate Arab allies who remember him well from the war.
Mr. Powell wants them to step up pressure on Mr. Arafat and the Palestinians to stop the suicide bombings that have led to such major Israeli military reprisals. Hence, his stop in Morocco for talks with King Mohammed VI and with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who keeps a vacation home in Casablanca.
The crown prince proposed the recent Arab peace initiative, which calls for normal relations with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal of all lands occupied after the 1967 war.
Secretary Powell is then to fly to Egypt to deliver the same message to President Hosni Mubarak, whose country is one of only two Arab states that have made peace with Israel. But Egypt has recently cut diplomatic relations to a bare minimum in anger at the current Israeli military action.
Then, Secretary Powell will use a meeting in Madrid with European Union ministers and the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to persuade allies who have chided the Bush administration for its diplomatic reticence earlier on that the United States is serious about finding a political resolution to the Arab-Israeli dispute.
Finally, aides said, he expects that by the time he arrives in Israel at week's end, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will have taken meaningful steps to withdraw Israeli forces from Palestinian areas, and that Mr. Arafat will have kept violence under control enough to merit a meeting.
Palestinians have complained, and Israelis have asserted, that the weeklong interval between the announcement by Mr. Bush of Secretary Powell's trip and his arrival gives Israel more time to continue its military operations, but administration officials have insisted that they had not intended that.
As he and other officials made the rounds of television talk shows on Sunday, Secretary Powell said he had made clear to Mr. Sharon in a telephone call that very morning that Mr. Bush wanted Israel to withdraw its soldiers "without delay, meaning now.
"The president doesn't give orders to a sovereign prime minister of another country, but as one of Israel's best friends and most supportive friends, I think Prime Minister Sharon has taken very much to heart and he understands clearly the message the president gave him," he said in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."
Secretary Powell said that Mr. Bush, in his own call to Mr. Sharon on Saturday, "didn't talk about a specific deadline," and Secretary Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the administration realized that a major military operation could not instantly be ended. "He understands that it cannot be helter-skelter and chaotic," Ms. Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition." "But he does expect this withdrawal to begin.'`
This is Secretary Powell's third trip to the Middle East since taking office, but by far the most complicated. "The portfolio of the Arab-Israeli issue, with all of its tentacles, has always been Powell's portfolio, but it was like a sideshow for the administration," said Stephen P. Cohen, a scholar with the Israel Policy Forum. "They didn't see it as central to the major goals of this administration in the region - first when they were focusing on Iraq and then in the war on terrorism."
"Now this is the president's mission and they have to chart their own way of going beyond just ending the violence, because the president has said, `We're going to solve this conflict.' "That means that Powell has a different level of responsibility, because he has to actually design a strategy that is going to be this administration's approach," Mr. Cohen said.
Secretary Powell is heading into the fray for one overriding reason: his commander in chief has finally asked him to, because the administration's larger strategic goals and the overall stability of the region are threatened.
That amounts to some vindication for Secretary Powell, who often says he has spent more time on the Middle East than any other single problem, and for his State Department, which has long pressed for more robust political discourse in an effort to break the stalemate.
But until last week, Secretary Powell himself, ever the loyal staff man, had often expressed reluctance to shuttle between Israelis and Palestinians, hearing the grievances of both sides without prospects for progress, in service of a president for whom the issue was not a priority.
Now, officials said, the administration is determined not only to reach a cease-fire but to move as quickly as possible into broader political discussions. One senior administration official said on Sunday that it was not yet ready to propose some comprehensive "Bush plan" on the most difficult issues.
"It's not that kind of plan yet," the official said. "We're not at, `What do you do about Jerusalem?' This says we are in this with both feet, as bad as it is. It walks away from walking away."
Friends say that Secretary Powell is well aware of the risks of this trip. The last top official to visit the region, Vice President Dick Cheney, came back with little to show, in part because both sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute assumed he was paying attention to their conflict mostly to shore up Arab support for American action against Iraq.
"Colin knows how difficult this thing is, and yet it comes with the territory," said Kenneth Duberstein, his close friend and White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan.
For his part, Secretary Powell said on Fox News, "If we have brought the violence down, if we have started to create a dialogue again between the two sides, then my trip will have been worth the energy that I'm going to put into it."
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'Trying' to speed withdrawal
April 8, 2002
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020408-1089760.htm
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell says Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assured him yesterday he is "trying to expedite" withdrawal of troops from cities it has occupied in the West Bank, but he gave no time frame for completing the job.
"He did not give me a specific timetable of the withdrawal, but I know he is trying to expedite the operation, to get it over with as soon as possible. And we'll see what happens in the next couple of days," Mr. Powell said yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The secretary made his remarks just hours before embarking on a crucial trip to the Mideast, where he hopes to drum up support among Arab leaders for getting a cease-fire to end the violence between Israelis and Palestinians and get them back to the peace table.
A cease-fire, he said, "must be our goal." However, he acknowledged he is not sure he will obtain one.
On Saturday, President Bush told Mr. Sharon to withdraw his forces from the West Bank "without delay," and many interpreted that as meaning immediately.
But the Israeli government yesterday praised the army's West Bank attacks, designed to root out terrorists and prevent more Palestinian suicide-bombings, and it did not say when it would pull out from Palestinian cities, Reuters news agency reported.
In a statement issued by Mr. Sharon's office in Jerusalem following the weekly Cabinet meeting, the prime minister said "a difficult campaign is under way and much has been achieved." The statement made no mention of withdrawing the troops.
According to Reuters, Israeli commentators expect the withdrawal to begin by the time Mr. Powell visits the region later this week, following stops in Morocco, Egypt and Spain.
On NBC yesterday, Mr. Powell said, "I'm planning to visit Prime Minister Sharon Thursday or Friday," adding that he will hold such a meeting whether or not the troops' withdrawal has been completed.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, interviewed yesterday on ABC's "This Week," said Mr. Bush did not mean that the troops should pull out from the West Bank immediately. The operation "needs time," Mr. Eliezer said.
Mr. Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who both made multiple appearances on Sunday talk shows, said the administration recognizes the withdrawal cannot be completed in a day. However, Miss Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that Mr. Bush used the word "now" in his telephone conversation with Mr. Sharon Saturday, when he demanded the withdrawal.
On CBS "Face the Nation," she said, "The important point is to begin now, without delay. Not tomorrow, not when Secretary Powell gets to the region, but now."
Zalman Shoval, a top adviser to Mr. Sharon, confirmed on "Meet the Press" that Mr. Sharon has promised President Bush "we're going to expedite" the withdrawals.
"But we don't want to do this again. We don't want to be put in a position where we withdraw, suicide bombings go on and in a few weeks from now, we have to do this over again," Mr. Shoval said.
Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on ABC's "This Week" he believes the Israelis will withdraw. "But I do believe the Israeli government's first obligation is to capture and neutralize as much as possible these elements that are in the Palestinian area that continue to pose a threat to the lives of their citizens," he said.
In appearances on NBC and "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Powell said he would meet with Mr. Arafat this week "if circumstances allow." He has refused to make a firm commitment to meet with Mr. Arafat, whom the administration has criticized for failing to make a public statement urging an end to the Palestinian suicide-bombings in Israel.
In an interview yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, expressed doubts about whether Mr. Powell should sit down with Mr. Arafat, citing evidence he's seen that the chairman of the Palestinian Authority has "personally paid terrorists."
The documents in question were obtained by Israeli officials after their troops stormed Mr. Arafat's Ramallah compound in the West Bank a week ago Friday. On Thursday, Israel made public two documents it says were signed by Mr. Arafat, authorizing payments totaling $6,000 to 15 Palestinian militants wanted by Israel for bombing attacks and shootings. Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told the Los Angeles Times he believes the documents were forged.
On CNN yesterday, Mr. Specter called on Mr. Powell to analyze the handwriting on the documents. If the secretary concludes it is Mr. Arafat's, he should not meet with the Palestinian leader, Mr. Specter said.
A CNN-USA Today poll released last week found that 77 percent of Americans think Mr. Arafat should be treated as a terrorist.
Mr. Powell said he thinks the jury is still out on Mr. Arafat. "We have to maintain contact with Palestinian leaders," he said, and at this time Mr. Arafat is the top leader.
The secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, told ABC Mr. Powell's trip will be a failure if he doesn't meet with Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Powell said that as deaths climb on both sides, "the consequences [of Israel´s military action] are affecting Israel, the United States, and the interests of peace and the interests of the political process." He expressed concerns that U.S. relationships with some Arab countries are starting to be "damaged, perhaps irrevocably."
However, Mr. Powell acknowledged the "massive presence" of Israeli troops in the West Bank has been a "deterrent" to suicide bombers and other terrorist attacks. He said Mr. Sharon told him Israeli troops prevented a car bombing yesterday.
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Arafat tells gunmen to refuse deal
April 8, 2002
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020408-8724550.htm
LONDON - Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has ordered a group of around 200 militant gunmen, Palestinian police and civilians holed up inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity complex to refuse any deal for resolving the standoff, the governor of Bethlehem said in a telephone interview from inside the church last night. "Our instructions from president Arafat were very clear," Bethlehem Gov. Mohamed el-Madani said on a cellular phone reaching the end of its batteries. "We cannot negotiate anything with the Israelis. We are staying until there is a solution, which is that the Israelis withdraw their troops not just from around the church but from all of Bethlehem and go back home."
The governor said his last instruction had come in a cell-phone conversation Thursday from one of Mr. Arafat's closest aides at the chairman's besieged Ramallah headquarters.
He added: "I've not spoken to them since then, but there's no need for any further instructions, as we have our orders."
A Vatican negotiating mission has met with no success. Israeli jeeps yesterday were driving around the huge church complex with megaphones, calling on the gunmen to "surrender and you will be treated peacefully."
One of the few priests evacuated from the church told Israeli television yesterday that gunmen had shot their way in, and that the priests, monks and nuns were essentially hostages.
About 150 armed men, a number of them alleged by Israel to be on their "most wanted" list of terrorists and bombers, blasted their way through a steel door into the church, a clergyman inside the complex said using its only still-working telephone.The church is on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born.
The priest, who chose not to supply his name, declined to call the clergy "hostages," but repeatedly said in fluent English: "We have absolutely no choice. They have guns, we do not."
He added: "We tried to get the Palestinian gunmen to leave by a back door, but they refused, saying they could be shot by the Israelis.
They have taken up security positions inside our living quarters, and they are refusing to meet our repeated requests to leave at least some part of our premises."
A senior Israeli military official, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, told journalists yesterday that his forces considered the priests inside the church to be hostages, and added: "We are reserving the right to free these hostages when the right time comes."
But he added: "Palestinian terrorists are using holy places to shoot at our forces, because they know that we are not going to retaliate toward holy places."
The priest interviewed from inside the church complex said that around half the 150 armed men were from the militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, part of the fighting forces of Fatah, the dominant Palestinian movement founded and presided over by Mr. Arafat, while the rest were employees of the Palestinian Authority's security services.
But Anton Salman, a lawyer who went into the complex together with the governor two to three hours after the gunmen had entered, said yesterday via cell phone that no churchmen were being held hostage, and that the convent staff had been dishing out food equally to civilians, church staff and gunmen. They were surviving on a diet of rice and spaghetti, and drawing water from wells within the church compound, he said.
He maintained that Israel had refused to allow Red Cross food supplies to be brought in to the complex.
One of the leaders of the Al Aqsa brigade, Jihad Jearah, 28, said on Saturday by cell phone: "We are prepared to fight to the last man. Everyone here is prepared to become a shaheed [martyr]."
Mr. Jearah, who was shot in the leg as he ran into the church complex, was featured a week ago in a British television documentary showing how his group prepared bombs and how it went about recruiting suicide bombers.
Fatah in Bethlehem has claimed credit for several suicide bombings this year, including the killing by 18-year-old Mohamed Daraghmeh of five children and four women in Jerusalem as they completed their Sabbath meal.
The Al Aqsa group has carved out a fearsome reputation in Bethlehem. Just before Israeli soldiers entered the town, it killed two suspected collaborators, dragging their bodies through Manger Square, and then killed six more.
Local inhabitants say the group has conducted a long-running extortion racket forcing Christian shopkeepers and manufacturers of holy items and souvenirs to pay protection money. A 70-year-old cafe owner in Manger Square was recently shot in the face by an Al Aqsa gang member.
The Al Aqsa fighters, who often drive luxury cars stolen from Israel proper, used to sweep into the Christian hillside suburb of Bet Jala and fire into the nearby outer Jerusalem suburb of Gilo.
After an Al Aqsa leader was arrested for the suspected rape of a Christian girl last year, his fighters stormed the jail and freed him.
-------- philippines
More than 2,600 US troops due in Philippines this month
AFP
MONDAY, APRIL 08, 2002
Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=6284851
MANILA: About 2,665 US troops are to arrive in the Philippines for annual joint exercises with Filipino counterparts later this month, the military said Monday.
The upcoming maneuvers are separate from ongoing joint US-Philippine military exercises in the south targetting the Muslim Abu Sayyaf group, who are holding two US citizens and one Filipina hostage.
The two-week exercises are to begin on April 22 on the main Philippine island of Luzon and will include "humanitarian and civil assistance," such as medical missions and construction and repair of schools, the Filipino military said in a statement.
It is also aimed at improving combat readiness in combined operations and "interoperability" between Filipino and US soldiers through training exchanges of skills and techniques in conventional and unconventional warfare.
"There are approximately 2,665 US and 2,900 (Filipino) forces expected to participate in the exercises," the statement said.
"Material and equipment for US forces necessary in the exercise are expected to be flown to the Philippines starting April."
President Gloria Arroyo has already allowed the deployment of 660 US forces to help "train and assist" the local armed forces against the Abu Sayyaf, which the government says is linked to the al-Qaeda terror network.
Their mission officially ends in July, but Arroyo has said she favors future training exercises involving more US troops in the south.
Meanwhile, one Abu Sayyaf guerrilla was wounded in a clash with Philippine soldiers who had caught up with the rebels near the town of Lamitan on Monday.
Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya was seen taking refuge inside the town mayor's residence and his men opened fire as the troops approached, triggering fighting.
The military said Sabaya later escaped and that an investigation was underway to determine why he had been allowed inside the mayor's house.
-------- puerto rico
Vieques Protesters to Remain Jailed
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Vieques-Bombing.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Two opponents of U.S. Navy exercises on the island of Vieques, including a nun, were ordered jailed without bail Monday while current exercises continue.
A judge ordered Sister Carmen Gonzalez, 51, and Puerto Rico Independence Party member Ismael Gonzalez Rodriguez, 67, to remain jailed without bail until April 22, when ongoing Navy exercises are expected to end.
Both are charged with illegally entering restricted Navy land. Gonzalez Rodriguez was detained on Friday and Gonzalez on Saturday.
Both have prior convictions for trespassing on Navy land.
Three other demonstrators were released on bail and ordered not to return to Vieques until the exercises were over.
Since maneuvers began a week ago, more than a dozen people have been detained. The Navy says 13 sailors and Marines have been injured by protesters throwing rocks, nails and other objects at military personnel.
The demonstrators said their protests have been peaceful.
Demonstrators routinely break onto Navy lands to thwart exercises on the firing range. Protests intensified after an off-target bomb killed a civilian guard in 1999. Since then, the Navy has used only inert bombs.
Opponents of the Navy exercises say they harm the environment and the health of Vieques' 9,300 residents. The Navy denies that claim.
President Bush says the Navy will leave by 2003. The Navy says it is looking for alternative training sites.
-------- space
Space wars
Arnold Beichman
April 8, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020408-83668540.htm
With globalization in the ascendant, the 21st century space- technology rivalry between the United States and the new united Europe is heating up. Before the decade is over, India and China will be part of the technology battle. In fact, China successfully launched its third unmanned spacecraft on March 25 with the hope of sending a manned craft in 2005.
In the meantime, the EU countries are challenging what has been a virtual U.S. monopoly: space positioning. Until now, the remarkable military-controlled U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) has held a dominant position, simply because there was nothing else in scope or accuracy like the U.S. creation available worldwide and free to anyone. Now there is a rival to GPS - Galileo - a satellite navigation system nearing takeoff under the aegis of Western Europe civilian authority (and not to be confused with NASA's Galileo journey to planet Jupiter). Russia has a satellite navigation system called GLONASS, which is not much used in the West, if anywhere.
More significantly, the U.S.-EU rivalry has created a national-security concern for the Defense Department. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Navy Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, have told Congress of those concerns. Mr. Wolfowitz has written to EU officials asking them to consider the "security ramifications for future NATO operations." His concern? Once Galileo's 30 satellites go to work they could, unwittingly, degrade GPS signals intended for use in military emergencies. His letter, the Associated Press reported, argued that Galileo "will significantly complicate our ability to ensure availability of critical military GPS services in a time of crisis or conflict and at the same time assure that adversary forces are denied similar capabilities."
Ralph Brabanti, a State Department official who has been meeting with EU executives about the project, has said bluntly that "the United States sees no compelling need for Galileo." French President Jacques Chirac responded that if Europe did not become independent in space, it would achieve "vassal status." Antonio Rodata, head of the European Space Agency, asked a rhetorical question: "Is it essential for Europe that we have our strategic independence or not?" His unspoken answer was in the affirmative.
Adm. Wilson has told Congress that "by 2015, future adversaries will be able to employ a wide variety of means to disrupt, degrade, or defeat portions of the U.S. space support system." A chilling prospect.
What some observers hope is that GPS and Galileo-to-be, operated after all by allied nations, will be able to make both systems interoperable and able to support joint military ventures. An interoperable system could be an additional weapon in the NATO armory and tactically useful in military emergencies in the Terror Age. It will be several years before Galileo will be online, so there is time for the United States and European Union to work something out. One question that the Pentagon is asking concerns an important military attribut. The United States can selectively turn off civilian access to GPS as it did in Afghanistan; will Galileo be similarly designed so it can be turned off in a time of crisis?
The European Space Agency (ESA) has already taken a big bite out of what was once U.S. domination of advanced air and space technology. Ariane, the 20-year-old European launch vehicle system, already has half the world market of commercial space launches. Eutelstat produces communications satellites. Airbus Industrie has cut into Boeing sales and won half the commercial airliner market.
This U.S.-EU rivalry will soon have more participants. According to Central Intelligence Director George Tenet, India and China are building sophisticated reconnaissance satellites. Aerospace Daily is reporting that foreign military, intelligence and terrorist organizations are exploiting an expanding commercial supply of communications and high-resolution satellite imagery.
Adm. Wilson has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the country's present or potential adversaries are looking for ways to disrupt space object tracking systems and satellite ground stations, the capabilities of directed energy weapons like lasers, jamming of radio and other signals. These methods are all within reach of friend or foe.
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.
-------- spy agencies
US Loses Edge on Spy Satellites
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Spies-in-the-Sky.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pictures from sharp-eyed satellites, once the domain of the United States and Russia, are becoming so easy to obtain that the military may have to alter its strategies knowing adversaries with a minimum of know-how and money can be watching.
Perhaps a half-dozen countries as well as some private companies have spy satellites that, while not as good as those used by the United States, are able to supply solid military intelligence.
``The unique spaceborne advantage that the U.S. has enjoyed over the past few decades is eroding as more countries -- including China and India -- field increasingly sophisticated reconnaissance satellites,'' CIA Director George J. Tenet said in a recent Senate hearing.
Tenet said adversaries are quickly learning how to take advantage.
``Foreign military, intelligence and terrorist organizations are exploiting this -- along with commercially available navigation and communications services -- to enhance the planning and conduct of their operations,'' he said.
In the past, only Moscow had satellite capability approaching that of the United States.
Now, with its own spy satellites, China would be able to learn of the location and composition of a U.S. carrier battlegroup dispatched during a potential dispute over Taiwan.
Eleven years ago, the United States threatened an amphibious assault on Iraq from the Persian Gulf before hitting Iraq's army with a ``left hook'' from the western flank. If Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had had access to the kind of commercially available satellite imagery now for sale, it's conceivable he could have moved his troops to meet the coalition's surprise land assault.
The latest advances in foreign countries are largely the result of their research rather than technology purchases or espionage, experts said. The United States pioneered much of the technology; now, other countries are replicating it.
``We're losing our monopoly,'' said James Lewis, a former Commerce and State Department space policy expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``After the war in the Persian Gulf, other countries figured out it was really good to have space capabilities.''
U.S. military satellites remain the best -- they can discern far more detail and collect more images. Their numbers allow them to take pictures more frequently of a given area. A new generation of spy satellites, part of a project called ``Future Imagery Architecture,'' is planned.
But now that other countries have access to high-resolution imagery, they can count tanks, track fleets and acquire other information useful in predicting U.S. military moves.
That means the military will have to practice the same ``denial and deception'' techniques adversaries have used to avoid detection by U.S. reconnaissance, experts say. Tanks are camouflaged under trees. Secret projects are hidden in buildings when a reconnaissance satellite is overhead.
During the first months of the Afghan war, the United States simply bought exclusive access to the right parts of the orbit of the Ikonos satellite, then the best commercial satellite in the skies. This prevented anyone else from having a look at Afghanistan, and the U.S. company that runs Ikonos, Space Imaging Inc., was happy to sell.
It's unclear if the U.S. government will do that in future wars. While it can exercise ``shutter control'' over U.S.-owned satellites, foreign-owned satellites are under no such restriction. Foreign companies also may not want to sell imagery solely to the Americans.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, who has studied these issues, suggested the military develop ways to jam satellite transmissions and prevent ground stations from receiving the pictures.
``The more information an adversary has, the more vulnerable we are,'' he said. ``We have to think about jamming and other capabilities at the appropriate times.''
Both the United States and the former Soviet Union worked on weapons that would bring down spy satellites in the event of a major war. But interest in those technologies has waned.
James also said he worries that the United States is losing its edge in building the best satellites. New restrictions on exports of satellite components, while slowing the transfer of sophisticated technology, have also caused U.S. manufacturers to close, he said. These rules were enacted after an investigation into the Clinton administration's decision to let two U.S. aerospace companies export satellites to be launched atop Chinese rockets.
-------- us
Pentagon stands behind Army National Guard
04/08/2002
USA TODAY
By Jim Drinkard and Dave Moniz
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2002/04/08/usat-guard.htm
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon takes "very seriously" charges of senior-level misconduct and misleading troop-strength reports in the Army National Guard but says the problems are being effectively addressed, the Defense Department said in response to a congressional inquiry.
"The soldiers of the Army National Guard and their leaders earn the trust, confidence and appreciation of the American people each day - they need our continued support," wrote David Chu, undersecretary for personnel.
The letter from March 12 and 24 pages of supporting documents obtained by USA TODAY did not address specific misconduct cases the newspaper cited in a series of stories beginning last December.
More than four dozen Guard officials across the USA also have told the newspaper that states routinely falsify their troop numbers to avoid losing positions and the federal money that comes with them.
The General Accounting Office, in a separate report, said the Guard overstated funding requests for the past two fiscal years by $74.5 million based on inflated troop numbers.
Chu said the Pentagon is working with the GAO to produce accurate numbers. Charges of widespread "ghost" soldiers in the Guard are based on anecdotal evidence, he said.
The charges have raised questions about whether the 470,000-member Guard is ready to assume a major role in homeland defense.
The Pentagon response was sent to Reps. John McHugh, R-N.Y., and Vic Snyder, D-Ark., the chairman and senior Democrat on the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee. They had no immediate comment. But congressional sources said the material does not appear to fully address the inquiry.
Chu's letter stated that information in the news stories on misconduct by top Guard commanders, "while for the most part factual, is dated." Since the letter was written, however, the Army acknowledged that the top Guard officials in four more states have violated military regulations. That brings to at least 13 the number of such cases in the past decade. The violations include embezzlement, perjury, misuse of government property and adultery.
The Army refused to identify the state commanders in the four latest cases, but one was found by Pentagon investigators to have carried on a five-year affair with an enlisted woman. The general is still believed to be in command even though adultery is typically a career-ending offense.
Because nearly all state commanders are political appointees of their governors, the Pentagon has no power to remove them if they violate military regulations.
----
Faced with Enron flap, White digs in
April 8, 2002
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020408-5619734.htm
Army Secretary Thomas E. White is in survival mode these days, fighting to save prized weapons from Pentagon budget cutters while watching his flank for those who want him ousted over the Enron debacle.
Mr. White, the son of a Detroit bus driver who rose to the rank of Army general and then earned millions during 11 years at Enron Corp., has become a key target in the Democrats' probe of the Houston energy firm.
Asked in an interview if he will remain Army secretary despite scrutiny of his Enron ties, Mr. White said: "I intend to."
"I came back here with a very simple objective, that was to try to do something good for soldiers and their families," he said. "And we have done a lot of good things for soldiers and their families in addition to fighting this war that has come upon us. And I'm excited about staying."
Sitting in his Pentagon office, the decorated Vietnam veteran said the Army has made great progress in recruiting young soldiers and in transforming the force into a lighter, faster one.
"When I walked in the door, we were still arguing about berets. We're no longer arguing about berets," he said, referring to the political brouhaha over changing Army headgear. "We have focused on what's important, and transformation is important. And I made it clear to everybody since day one, 'It ain't optional. We got to get on with it.'"
The Enron questions come on two fronts: Was he late in selling Enron stock options, as demanded by the Senate Armed Services Committee as a requirement for his confirmation last summer? And, in his 70 to 80 contacts with former Enron colleagues, did he get any inside information on the corporation's financial collapse?
Mr. White, who ran Enron's Energy Services division, said the calls he made were prompted by compassion for the many friends he had made in Houston. He said he has completed stock sales, except for two private funds in which he is a limited partner and so cannot control the liquidation timing.
"They know what remains to be done and we're very clear on that," he said, referring to Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, and Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the panel's senior Republican.
Mr. White faced his first criticism from a Republican lawmaker when Mr. Warner co-signed a letter with Mr. Levin scolding the Army secretary for not selling all his Enron stock. "We do not believe that your actions satisfied the requirements of this committee," the two wrote on March 1.
Meanwhile, Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz is examining trips Mr. White took to Florida and Colorado since he became Army secretary last year. In both cases, he mixed personal business with official work but says he strictly followed legal requirements.
On a stopover in Aspen, Co., to sell a home, he was on rotation in the classified "continuation of government" program and was required to be out of Washington. In Florida, he took personal leave and rented a car to visit a home he owns.
"In my opinion, we followed the rules," Mr. White said. "Now, the issue is going to be a matter of perception because the rules come down to whether there is a perception of misuse of government resources. People inside the department, the department ethics officers are very comfortable with where we're at. In our view, we have acted consistent with the regulation."
The bad press alarms Mr. White's allies on Capitol Hill. Conservatives view the West Point graduate as a needed "old school" ex-officer who can reorient the Army back to basics after years of "political correctness."
Mr. White, 59, served two tours in Vietnam. As a platoon leader in 1969, he was awarded a Silver Star for rescuing a wounded soldier amid intense enemy fire.
"It would be a shame to lose a guy like this while the Army is engaged in the war on terrorism," said a senior congressional defense aide.
Mr. White has the backing of the man who counts most - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. They talked privately two weeks ago. Mr. Rumsfeld is said to have counseled Mr. White and inquired on how he was holding up. Mr. White said he was weathering the attacks but would quit if the investigations distracted him from running the Army.
"Secretary Rumsfeld is a great boss and he's been in this town a long, long time, so I pay very close attention to his counsel," Mr. White said.
The Army secretary also has communicated with longtime friend Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. As a brigadier general, Mr. White served as Mr. Powell's executive assistant when the latter was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. White retired from that post in 1990.
"He's a great friend and provides very sound advice and the advice is, 'Hang in there,'" Mr. White said.
As Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, stepped up his inquiry into Mr. White's Enron contacts, the Army's top civilian largely remained silent. But in recent weeks, as some friends came to believe his job was hanging in the balance, Mr. White began telling his side.
"I tried to stay focused on running the Army and hoped the other stuff would subside," he said. "But it hasn't subsided."
--------
Pentagon Criticized on Foreign Aid
April 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Foreign-Aid.html
WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers who oversee foreign aid took a dim view Monday of a Pentagon request to direct $130 million toward military aid overseas to further the war on terrorism.
The defense secretary would determine how and where the money was spent.
``We are not going to give a blank check to the president,'' Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the House Appropriations foreign aid subcommittee, said in a conference call from Cape Town, South Africa.
The proposals are in a Bush administration request for $27 billion more in spending this year, $14 billion of it for the Pentagon.
``I think Congress will insist on exercising its say over how those funds are spent,'' said Kolbe, who was completing an eight-day, five-country tour of Africa with four fellow House members. ``The president's going to have to be more explicit in outlining where the funds are going.''
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations panel, has already raised some concerns with the administration, said spokesman David Carle.
``The substance of this request deserves close scrutiny -- especially its breadth and scope -- but so does the troubling precedent it would set,'' Leahy said Monday. ``This would open a new spigot for foreign assistance, while short-circuiting existing human rights laws, without adequate consultation with either Congress or the State Department.''
The State Department, which handles foreign military sales and other foreign aid, has prohibitions on aid to those who violate human rights and sponsor terrorism, among other things.
Those limits would not apply under the Pentagon proposals.
In the pending spending bill, the Pentagon seeks the right to use a maximum of $100 million to support foreign nations to help the war on terrorism, ``on such terms and conditions as the secretary of defense may determine.'' That support may include defense materiel, services and training, it says.
The Pentagon also asks to be able to use up to $30 million more to ``support indigenous forces engaged in activities in furtherance of United States national security aims, including Operation Enduring Freedom and related activities in combating terrorism,'' also as the defense secretary deems fit.
Neither section specifies who would get the aid.
Asked if it is wrong to give that authority to the Defense Department rather than the State Department, Kolbe said, ``That's something that needs to be sorted out.''
``In general, I'd say if ... we're providing assistance to our allies or to countries in military programs, that generally should belong under State and AID,'' the Agency for International Development. ``To put the Defense Department into the business of doing aid programs, I think, would be a mistake.''
The administration plans to consult with appropriate congressional panels to ensure the ``appropriate interests of all agencies are clearly preserved,'' the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
OMB Director Mitchell Daniels says the authority is aimed at addressing costs the Pentagon incurs while prosecuting the war, the statement said.
``This authority is intended to assure timely compensation in circumstances where the United States may not have an agreement in place allowing for reimbursement,'' the OMB statement said. That was the case with Pakistan until a special agreement was reached, it said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld did not address the issue with reporters Monday.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the OMB statement makes clear that State's jurisdiction over foreign aid ``remains very clear and separate'' from the proposed authority.
-------- propaganda wars
Tuning in on a broadcast weapon
April 8, 2002
Washington Times
Donald Lambro
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020408-68182164.htm
Killing or capturing the murderers who are plotting the next attack on the U.S. is America's first line of defense in the war against terrorism. But there is another nonlethal offensive being waged by the administration that may be far more effective in the long term.
This offensive - the first of its kind ever undertaken by the United States - is aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world's huge youth population. And it will do it through an old technology known as radio, broadcasting what young people like to listen to most, pop music, but also news, features and information that will expose them to local moderate religious leaders and entertainment icons.
The Middle East Radio Network is a creative and promising new venture that has just been launched by the Voice of America in a handful of Arab countries from Amman, Jordan, to Kuwait City. When it is fully up and running, it will be beamed to all the Arab countries in the region and in North Africa, operating seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
The programming will emphasize Arab and American pop music aimed at listeners under the age of 30 who, surprisingly, comprise most of the overwhelmingly youthful Arab population. Nearly 75 percent of the Arab world is under 35. The network will be called Radio Sawa, which means "together" in Arabic.
Spliced in between the music will be news reports, sports, analysis of world events, special interviews with important leaders, round-table forums, weather and a variety of features on social, political and cultural subjects, all delivered in regional Arabic dialects.
Of critical importance, the broadcasts will be beamed over AM and FM radio, a first for the VOA and through digital radio satellite channels that will be able to reach millions of listeners.
"Until now we have only been on shortwave in Arab countries which very few people listen to and on a very inferior signal," VOA Director Robert Reilly told me in a recent interview. "For the first time, VOA will have the capability to reach large audiences in the Middle East."
The underlying communications strategy in this new effort is to effectively reach out and influence today's younger generation - the next leadership generation - who might otherwise be drawn to the poisonous, anti-American hatred preached by radical and terrorist Islamic groups.
"This is a very tough audience to reach, and this is a very imaginative way to attempt to reach it," Mr. Reilly said. He stressed that the broadcasts will expose young Arabs to the views of tolerant, mainstream Islamic religious leaders to counter the militant, hateful Islamic sects that vie for their allegiance.
"That will be part of it. That is why there will be a strong local component in our bureaus there that will be engaging people who are significant in that region, and who can reach the leaders of the region and get them on the air," he said.
"This particular approach has not been done before. It is bringing to VOA some of the lessons of commercial radio. It is asking the question: If you were a commercial radio, what would you have to do to succeed in the Middle East?"
The project is the brainchild of Norman Pattiz, a successful radio mogul who created the Westwood One radio network, before he became a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors that oversees all of the government's broadcasting services.
Mr. Reilly calls Mr. Pattiz "one of the principal inspirations" who championed the idea and pushed it into development faster than most ideas ever get developed in this town.
Congress put up $35 million for the project last year, including $16 million for one-time capital costs to purchase the transmitters. At a time when many Americans are justifiably questioning the way Washington spends our taxes, Congress could not have put this money - a pittance in a $2.1 trillion federal budget - to better use.
We can kill and capture hundreds more terrorists in the weeks, months and years to come, but the ultimate outcome of this long-term struggle will be for the young minds of the next generation and those who come after them. The Middle East Radio Network is a smart and innovative weapon in the war against terrorism that kills no one. It is a friendly, entertaining, non-lethal and pre-emptive strike aimed at the Islamic world, delivering America's message of freedom and religious tolerance in an irresistible, youth-oriented, pop music format that may be the only unifying cultural force we have going for us right now.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Conviction nullified after stun-belt 'abuse'
April 8, 2002
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020408-298620.htm
A federal appeals court has nullified a bank robber's conviction and 105-year sentence because a trial judge let U.S. marshals strap a 50,000-volt stun belt on him.
"Use of a stun belt as a security device at trial imposes substantial burdens upon a defendant's constitutional rights," said the 3-0 decision, which establishes the first legal standards for courtroom use of the restraint device. U.S. courts and prisons have used stun belts to deter escapes since 1991.
"The district court abused its discretion in ordering [Jeffery S.] Durham to wear the belt," the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday in ordering a new trial for Durham. If the court's ruling stands, it would take 105 years off the 1321/2-year sentence Durham is serving, including for other robberies, at a federal "supermax" prison in Florence, Colo.
Durham never was shocked by his belt, but the Atlanta-based appeals court accepted his claim that fears of accidental triggering distracted him from helping his attorney at the trial, and that prosecutors failed to show that didn't affect the verdict.
The $800 belts - universally called StunTechs for their original brand name - are concealed by a shirt or jacket and avoid the need for handcuffs or shackles that may prejudice jurors. Fear of an electric jolt inhibits a prisoner who is violent or an escape risk.
A prisoner who attacks someone or attempts to flee can be disabled by electrical shock, triggered by a radio control held by a nearby officer.
"StunTechs have been worn 60,000 times but only activated intentionally 37 times, and there were nine accidental activations prior to us putting a guard over the switch seven years ago," said Dennis Kaufman, whose company sold about 1,800 waist belts and now markets a smaller, less bulky version that fits an arm or a leg.
The belts are used routinely by governments in the United States and abroad. They administer a temporarily disabling eight-second surge of electricity that stops men in their tracks or knocks them down, causing brief pain and muscular weakness that can last 45 minutes.
Amnesty International labels the belts "torture devices," and the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in May 2000 that U.S. use of stun belts on prisoners may violate a Geneva Convention against torture.
Mr. Kaufman argues the temporary discomfort caused by the stun belts may save a criminal's life and protect those around him.
"If you can control somebody from a distance and it's nonlethal, what better way is there? We're protecting everybody, including the defendant in court. It's really a no-brainer," Mr. Kaufman said in an interview.
Mr. Kaufman said defibrillators that shock a heart back into rhythm produce 400 joules of energy, while StunTech produces 0.35 joules.
"StunTech puts out four milliamps, not enough to light a small Christmas tree bulb," he said.
U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade said StunTechs are used in virtually all 95 federal court districts.
"We've never had an accident," Mr. Wade said.
Mr. Kaufman said stun belts are used in 30 of the 50 state prison systems and have been sold to the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Mr. Wade said most districts own one or two stun belts. In Washington, D.C., he said, six were used during last year's three-month capital-murder trial of Tommy Edelin and his "1-5 Crew." U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth let marshals use the belts in the interest of "maintaining a secure courtroom."
The 11th Circuit opinion written by Circuit Judge Charles R. Wilson was joined by Judges Rosemary Barkett, who like Judge Wilson is a Clinton appointee, and by Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat, a Nixon appointee.
By declaring that stun belts infringe on a defendant's constitutional rights, the appeals court imposed a court duty to scrutinize each case, saying trial judges must consider facts on the record to justify each use of a belt, weigh alternatives to electroshock security, and decide how the belt should operate.
Durham still was serving 271/2 years for a bank robbery to which he pleaded guilty. The court said Durham and his accomplices got away with almost $500,000 in a series of robberies.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Oslo says rejects wind farm to protect environment
REUTERS NORWAY:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15351/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
OSLO - Norway's energy minister last week rejected state utility Statkraft a license to erect 35 wind turbines at Stadlandet in western Norway, saying the wind farm would harm the environment.
"The wind farm that Statkraft is seeking to build in this area would to a considerable degree harm the interests of nature, outdoor activities and culture at Stadlandet," Oil and Energy Minister Einar Steensnaes said in a statement.
The planned wind farm was part of a Statkraft initiative to build three wind farms along the coast with a total annual production of 800 megawatts of renewable energy.
-------- environment
Environmentalists say US hijacking UN summit
Story by Irwin Arieff
REUTERS UNITED NATIONS:
April 8, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15357/newsDate/8-Apr-2002/story.htm
UNITED NATIONS - Environmental groups last week accused the United States and oil exporting nations of trying to gut a global action plan for environmentally friendly development to be adopted at a U.N. summit in South Africa.
Organizers of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, opening in Johannesburg in August, acknowledged the meeting could fall far short of what they had hoped, but said it could still succeed if governments wanted.
Greenpeace International accused Washington of trying to use the conference to dismantle "more than three decades of international efforts to protect the environment, enhance social justice and ensure economic opportunities for all."
"The United States' only vision is that this planet should be run like a business park," Greenpeace's Remi Parmentier told a news conference at U.N. headquarters.
Daniel Mittler of Friends of the Earth International blamed Washington - with help from Canada, Australia and OPEC countries including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela - for "two weeks of chaotic negotiations resulting in a long document, strong on platitudes but weak on substance."
Mittler urged governments preparing for the Johannesburg conference to "chuck the fluff" from the action plan as it now stood and drastically rewrite it.
A U.S. official dismissed the criticisms, saying Washington was working hard to make the conference a success and shared the groups' desire for a healthy environment "although we may disagree on the tactics to get there."
"You can have a safe and healthy environment and develop at the same time. We are a good example of that," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We also produce a lot of pollution but we are working hard to reduce it."
10 YEARS AFTER EARTH SUMMIT
The 10-day summit opening Aug. 26 is expected to draw thousands from government, business and interest groups to Johannesburg along with delegations from most of the United Nations' 189 member-nations.
It was timed to fall 10 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which adopted "Agenda 21," a blueprint for balancing the world's economic and social needs with its environmental resources.
Organizers say part of the problem is that, even at this stage, they have a hard time saying precisely what the conference is intended to achieve.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has described it as an environmental conference teamed with a strategy meeting on how to achieve broad development goals set out by the world body at its 2000 millennium summit.
The millennium goals include halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, and reversing the AIDS epidemic by the year 2015.
But many others see it as far broader - a summit in search of a global blueprint for altering the sum total of human activity so that it no longer depletes the world's resources.
"Sustainable development is about human activity and the Earth. It must include every aspect of life," said Carlos Rivera, an activist participating in summit preparations as a representative of young people.
The environmentalists' criticisms surfaced at the close of the third of four two-week preparatory meetings leading up to Johannesburg.
One more preparatory session opens in Bali, Indonesia, on May 27. While preparations have been conducted by low-level envoys to date, cabinet ministers have been invited to Bali.
The action plan began as a 21-page document drafted by Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who is chairing the preparatory meetings.
By Friday it had ballooned to more than 100 pages, and delegates were far from agreement on a final version, Salim said.
-------- genetics
Fertility specialist claims baby cloned
April 8, 2002
By Bruce Johnston
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020408-77930539.htm
ROME - The world's first cloned baby is the son of a rich Arab, according to claims made by Severino Antinori, the Italian fertility specialist.
Dr. Antinori said that the embryo was the clone of a VIP, and that he had been experimenting to produce human clones in an Islamic country.
The doctor, who pledged with Panos Zavos, of the Andrology Institute of America in Lexington, Ky., to attempt to clone a baby by the end of 2001, caused outrage last week when he told a scientific meeting in the United Arab Emirates that a patient was eight weeks pregnant with a clone.
His claim has met with disbelief from infertility specialists worldwide, coupled with concern that such a pregnancy could result in a severely malformed baby, as has been the case in animals.
Dr. Antinori, however, has told Giancarlo Calzolari, a friend and science reporter at Il Tempo newspaper in Rome, that the pregnancy is real, and that he has a "limitless supply of money" for his experiments.
Mr. Calzolari said he had been contacted by the doctor on Friday.
"He told me it was a clone of an important, wealthy personality," Mr. Calzolari said. "However, he was vague when I asked him the name of the woman and to at least describe the father. He would only say that he was a grosso personaggio [a big cheese].
"The doctor added, 'I have at my disposal whatever amount of money is needed to reach the result. Imagine, it has been possible to carry out in a Muslim country a kind of research that was impossible to do in the West.'"
Dr. Antonori has also dismissed concerns about malformations, claiming that it was a "certainty" that the problems seen in other cloned animals did not occur in human beings, Mr. Calzolari said. The doctor claimed that all the embryos implanted during the program were examined first, reducing the risk of malformations "almost to nothing."
A leading Arab infertility specialist said that he was highly skeptical of Dr. Antinori's claim of working in an Islamic country.
Samir Abbas, the president of the Saudi Arabian Fertility Society, said that the religious authorities had ruled against the procedure a long time ago, and that anyone involved would face heavy sanctions.
-------- health
Cancer Patients Need Weight Kept On
By Lauran Neergaard
AP Medical Writer
Monday, April 8, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14696-2002Apr8?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Ric Haury is fighting both tonsil cancer and a second battle - trying not to waste away, even as the radiation and chemotherapy needed to save him make it impossible to eat normally.
First a week of nausea. Then a throat too painfully swollen to swallow anything more solid than gravy-laden mashed potatoes. Then his appetite disappeared. Now his saliva has, too.
Haury is lucky - so far he's lost only 15 pounds. But it's a constant battle.
About half of all cancer patients suffer serious weight loss and malnutrition, a wasting syndrome that makes surviving harder. But experts say there are ways to head it off and wish more patients were like Haury, armed with the help of a nutrition specialist almost from the moment of diagnosis.
"Unfortunately with the vast majority of patients, quite often nutrition is an afterthought," says David Grotto of the American Dietetic Association. "The key message is to be aggressive with nutrition before they develop a problem."
Wasting, also called cancer anorexia or cancer cachexia, is not just losing excess fat but vital muscle. Wasting makes therapy harder to tolerate, and studies suggest patients who lose more than 5 percent of their original weight have a worse prognosis than stable-weight patients.
Tumors themselves can cause the wasting, particularly gastrointestinal cancers. But therapies often are to blame. Radiation and, to different degrees, different chemotherapy regimens can cause nausea, appetite suppression, mouth sores, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth or - one of the most common problems - strangely altered taste.
Nausea is the best-known side effect, although for many patients it is periodic, striking for a few days and then abating until the next treatment, says Abby Bloch, an American Cancer Society nutrition consultant.
And anti-nausea medications developed in the last decade bring relief to many patients. But some of the most potent are very expensive and not covered by all insurance plans, so clinics may not give them until a patient complains, Bloch says. That's "unfortunate because these medications have made enormous differences for individuals who are able to use them."
The taste problem, however, often comes as a shock because doctors seldom warn about it, Bloch says. Some patients develop an aversion to a particular food: meat tastes rotten or bread like sawdust. But many get a metallic taste in their mouths so bad they simply can't bear to eat.
Add a sore or dry mouth that makes chewing difficult, and it's not unusual to go days with very little food - risking electrolyte imbalances that can make patients pass out even before much weight loss is apparent.
Once wasting is diagnosed, doctors may try different medications to stimulate appetite. But the cancer society and dietitian group stress that nutritionists often can help prevent or minimize the side effects before someone's too sick.
Help ranges from little tips - suck lemon wedges or lemon drops and keep hydrated to cut that metallic taste; choose crackers, sherbet or rice when nauseated - to customized care that may include special high-calorie liquid foods.
But access to nutritionists can be a problem. Some hospitals, like the Cleveland Clinic where Haury sought care, routinely include a cancer nutritionist as part of the treatment team. For patients who seek nutrition help on their own, insurance typically doesn't pay for it, or for those special liquid meals. A registered dietitian charges $65 to $150 an hour.
Yet it's cheaper to keep a patient from needing tube-feeding, which insurance does cover, laments Haury's wife, Beverly.
The Stow, Ohio, man is responding well to cancer treatment. Now his challenge is packing at least 2,200 calories a day into an all-liquid diet to keep strong.
Menus evolve as treatment progresses, a Cleveland Clinic nutritionist helped the couple learn. Crackers helped nausea, but as radiation inflamed Haury's throat, gravy helped foods slide down. Now that he eats no solids and has no appetite, Mrs. Haury is scouting creative recipes for extra-fat, extra-protein milkshakes tasty enough that her husband will force down at least 20 sips a half-hour.
"That is a struggle," she says. "He has a strong will, but you have to be creative."
NOTE - Lauran Neergaard covers health and medicine for The Associated Press in Washington.
-------- human rights
Attacks on Afghan Pashtuns Worry Rights Group
April 8, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-afghan-rights-pashtuns.html
NEW YORK - Ethnic militia attacks on Pashtun communities across northern Afghanistan could undermine selection of a new Afghan government that begins later this month, Human Rights Watch said Monday.
The New York-based rights group said a four-week investigation had turned up evidence of summary executions, beatings, rapes, abductions and lootings targeting Pashtuns in the country's north since November, when Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were toppled in a U.S.-led military campaign.
The attacks are at least partly motivated by a perception that the Pashtuns backed the Taliban, the group said.
Pashtuns from Kandahar and other southern provinces dominated the Taliban, who were implicated in massacres and other serious abuses in the north between 1997 and 2001.
Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai named a three-person team in February to investigate abuses against northern Pashtuns.
But Human Rights Watch said he would have limited ability to carry out any recommendations the team might make.
Under a U.N.-brokered plan for Afghanistan's transition to democratic rule, a Loya Jirga, or grand tribal council, is to be held in June that could either endorse Karzai or choose a new government for a two-year transitional period.
Afghan districts are to begin picking their representatives for the Loya Jirga later this month.
``If northern Pashtuns are unable to take part in district or regional meetings to choose their representatives, then the validity of the entire Loya Jirga process will be called into question,'' said Human Rights Watch staffer Peter Bouckaert.
The group said more money should be provided for human rights monitoring in Afghanistan and troops responsible for human rights violations should be excluded from the country's fledgling defense and police forces.
-------- ACTIVISTS
PERSIAN GULF
Death in Bahrain Brings Demand That U.S. Leave
April 8, 2002
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/international/08GULF.html
MANAMA, Bahrain, April 7 - Muhammad Jumaa, a 24-year-old hospital worker, died today, two days after being shot in the head at a demonstration that penetrated the grounds of the American Embassy here, his death feeding a brooding resentment of the extensive American presence on this Persian Gulf island.
"America's blind support for Israel and its silence encourage Israel to kill more Palestinians, just as America did in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Ibrahim Abdullah, one of a steady stream of mourners who made their way to the dead man's dusty grave on the edge of a poor village populated by Shiite Muslims just north of Manama, the capital.
The men and women at the graveside echoed the sentiments of thousands of mourners who marched in the funeral procession earlier in the day. "No American base in Islamic Bahrain!" they chanted, referring to the United States Fifth Fleet's headquarters here.
They also demanded that Bahrain expel the American ambassador for what they consider highly insensitive remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The American base is very dangerous here," Mr. Abdullah said. "Because of their presence we feel crippled. They will stand with the government against the people. They are against Islam. Americans hate Islam."
Mr. Jumaa, by all accounts a quiet man who was engaged to be married in February, died of internal bleeding two days after he was shot 30 yards from the embassy.
There are conflicting reports about whether he was hit by a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet and whether the fatal shot came from the embassy itself or was fired by the Bahraini police.
His family contends that the shot came from the embassy grounds, but in a brief statement, the American mission here denied that its Marine guards had shot at any protesters. It said the guards had resorted to tear gas only after protesters had scaled the walls of the compound, shattering windows and setting embassy vehicles on fire.
"In response to this provocation, embassy security personnel fired tear gas cylinders to compel the intruders to leave the embassy ground," the statement said. "Embassy personnel did not fire at demonstrators."
Three leading Muslim clergymen on the island and six of its nascent political groups issued separate statements today demanding an investigation of the episode as well as the expulsion of the ambassador, Ronald Neumann.
Ambassador Neumann had requested that a model United Nations school assembly observe a moment of silence for Israeli victims of suicide bombings. His suggestion came after a student asked the assembly to stand to observe a moment of silence for the Palestinians.
"While I understand and respect the deeply held anger and frustration that Bahrainis feel about the events currently taking place in the region," the ambassador said later in a statement, "it would have been inappropriate for me to accept being forced into a one-sided demonstration of respect simply because the conference organization had called for respect only for one side." The State Department has said it fully backs his decision.
But given the raw mood in the Arab world, the message beamed around Bahrain and indeed throughout the region was that the Americans were openly siding with the Israelis, even in death.
"Maybe the ambassador thought what he was doing was fair," said Mansoor al-Jamri, a former spokesman in exile for the Bahrain Freedom Movement, an Islamist opposition group, who has come home under a general amnesty. "But to Muslim people around the world who feel the Americans value them at less than zero, this sparked everything."
The public anger was evident in graffiti sprayed on this sleepy island's usually pristine walls during the funeral march. "Death to Sharon!" some of them read, and "Down With U.S.A!" along with the more striking "Death to al-Khalifa!"
The latter most likely referred to Bahrain's emir, Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who moved to calm the public mood today by ordering the interior minister to begin an immediate investigation of the episode at the embassy.
Until now the Bahraini ruler, scion of a minority Sunni Muslim family that has ruled over the Shiite majority for more than 200 years, has enjoyed a certain honeymoon with his people. After succeeding his father in 1999, Sheik Hamad pardoned the leaders of the Shiite opposition groups who fomented unrest on the island and began carrying out political reforms that will bring the island's first parliamentary elections in more than two decades this fall.
The presence of the Fifth Fleet headquarters was not an issue here. Bahrainis were aware that an aircraft carrier and other vessels assigned to the fleet helped to patrol southern Iraq and supported the fighting in Afghanistan.
After an initial public distaste for incidents of drunkenness by sailors prompted the Navy to introduce more stringent discipline, the Americans have been popular for the money they bring to myriad businesses.
"The Saudis who come here just spend their money on Russian girls," said one Bahraini. "The Americans go to all the shops, the gold market, and they tend to be polite."
But political groups began to make the United States presence an issue in February, when they say the Bahraini government made a ham-handed attempt to intimidate them by warning that they would be placed on American terrorism watch lists if they fomented trouble at home.
The American Embassy denied any such prospect. But that incident, followed by the Israeli offensive in the West Bank and the ambassador's remarks, suddenly made Americans very much an issue.
"The people want the government to close the embassy and to remove the American soldiers from Bahrain," said Hassan Mansour, 30, who visited Mr. Jumaa's grave, decorated with the Palestinian flag and that of the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah. "They are undesired people here. We feel very angry."
--------
THE COLLEGES
Campus Tensions Growing With Support for Palestinians
New York Times
April 8, 2002
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/education/08CAMP.html
ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 6 - As violence in the West Bank and Gaza has escalated over the last few weeks, pro-Palestinian groups on campuses across the country have asserted themselves with new vigor, organizing demonstrations and national campaigns to try to counteract what they see as a better-financed, better-established effort by pro-Israel student groups.
To the alarm of Jewish students who read the campaigns as anti-Semitism, the pro-Palestinian groups have become something of a cause célèbre on university campuses. Using emotional demonstrations that depict the Palestinian struggle as one for human rights and justice, they have attracted support from other popular campus movements of recent years, including sweatshop opponents, affirmative action supporters and campaigners for a so-called living wage.
On Tuesday, students at more than 30 schools, including Columbia, Georgetown and the Universities of California, Massachusetts and Washington, plan a national "day of action" to start a campaign that they hope will persuade universities to divest themselves of stock in corporations that do business with Israel, as they did in isolating South Africa in the 1980's.
"The ideal situation for the pro-Israel groups has been the status quo, where no one asks any questions," said Fadi Kiblawi, a University of Michigan student who was born in Kuwait and raised in this country by Palestinian parents. "This is a group of students who are fed up with how we are being portrayed. We've always been characterized as terrorists. But we present a logical argument, one based in international law and human rights."
The movements have heightened tension on campuses, as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups draw their own battle lines on opinion pages and in common areas, with each side accusing the other of racism and support for terrorism. In Ann Arbor, pro-Israel groups protested last week when students at a conference in support of the Palestinian cause sold a book calling the Holocaust a myth. Arab and Jewish students have reported receiving death threats.
At the University of California, Jewish students were advising one another to walk in groups after the son of a rabbi was beaten this week. The beating was the latest in a string of incidents in Berkeley that has included the spray-painting of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian slogans outside a church and a synagogue on the edge of campus.
Jewish leaders on campus accuse the pro-Palestinian groups of using scare tactics and intimidation. They say that while they doubt any universities will be persuaded to divest, they fear the campaign will be an effective public relations tool.
"Their goal is to get Israel to be disliked, to see it as this racist, horrible, Nazi regime," said David Livshiz, a senior at Michigan and a member of the American Movement for Israel. "It has become a trendy cause, and that's unfortunate. To a large degree it's because they are using this language of human rights; they make themselves very appealing. Because they're so much louder, they get support."
Jewish and pro-Israel student groups still outnumber the pro-Palestinian organizations on most campuses. At the University of Michigan here, there are about 6,000 Jewish students, compared with about 2,000 Arab or Muslim students - a relatively high figure for an American campus, reflecting the large concentration of Arab-Americans in the nearby Detroit area.
But students on both sides say the pro-Palestinian groups have attracted more attention with louder, more persistent appeals.
In Ann Arbor, about 100 pro-Palestinian students have sponsored three demonstrations over the past month, carrying placards reading "Israel = Terror" and "Free Palestine." A group that began on the Berkeley campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, has now spread across the country. At Harvard, members held a peace vigil to denounce what they called Israeli terrorism; at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the same group has begun holding weekly sit-ins in the main campus plaza.
A march planned for April 20 in Washington suggests the kind of coalitions that are forming: it is to include pro-Palestinian groups from Howard and George Washington Universities, demonstrators from environmental groups, supporters of a living wage and protesters of the United States military buildup.
The protests reflect a significant change from the months immediately after Sept. 11. When the current intifada began in the fall of 2000, pro-Palestinian groups began staging war-crimes tribunals and other events to demonstrate against Israel. They planned to start the divestment campaign last fall, and Hillel and other national organizations for Jewish students began planning their own protests in opposition.
These plans were abandoned after the Sept. 11 attacks. Pro-Palestinian groups canceled conferences and protests, and Arab and Muslim students assumed a low profile, fearful of - and, in several cases, victims of - verbal and physical attacks.
But by January, the student groups had begun to take up the cause again. In recent weeks, they say, the violence shown on television has swayed opinion to their cause.
"When people see images of tanks rolling into Palestinian cities, of ambulance drivers being shot at by Israeli defense forces, women giving birth at the checkpoints, it becomes clear that this is not just a case of two equally wrong sides fighting," said Snehal Shingavi, a Berkeley student and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The groups are adopting many of the tactics used by Jewish student groups like Hillel. This summer, the Palestine Solidarity Movement, a national coalition of student groups, will send students to deliver money and supplies to the Middle East. In the words of a manifesto adopted by about 500 students at a Berkeley conference in February, the students will act as observers and a "protector force for the Palestinians living under the illegal Israeli occupation."
The groups have attracted support from non-Muslim and non-Arab students. At Berkeley, Mr. Shingavi said, fewer than one-fifth of the core 70 members of his organization are Arab or Muslim. They have also drawn support from Jewish students.
"I always had this view that Jews wouldn't do anything bad," said Laura Pearl, a Jewish student who is a member of the Palestine Committee at Michigan. "Once I started to question that assumption, I saw how many things there were that Israel had done that were really bad."
The movement has also spread to campuses without a strong tradition of political activism. At North Carolina State, the Arab Club started out as a support network for students with relatives in the Middle East. As the violence has escalated, members say, they have become more political. On Friday they rallied with students from Duke and the University of North Carolina outside a campus mosque.
The campus groups shy away from talking about suicide bombers or Yasir Arafat. "Arafat is a problem for us," said Amer Zahr, an Arab student at Michigan. "He's not Gandhi." They talk about the Palestinians as "indigenous people" and Israel as an "apartheid state."
Jewish groups on campus resent the efforts to draw parallels between Israel and South Africa, and fear the demonstrations will become more emotional and less rational as the divestment campaign begins.
"The issue of divestment is predicated on the idea of Zionism equals racism. To that we have to say, `Hold on a second,' " said Richard M. Joel, the president of Hillel International.
The pro-Palestinian groups recognize that divestment may be a tough sell. But, as Salah Husseini recently told his fellow students at a meeting in Michigan: "Right now, it's not about getting it passed. It's about getting people to think about it."
--------
Muslims of world protest vs. Israel
April 8, 2002
Washington Times
From combined dispatches
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020408-37136430.htm
RABAT, Morocco - Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the Islamic world yesterday to protest Israel's 10-day-old operation on the West Bank and U.S. support for the Jewish state.
The biggest rally filled the main boulevards of the Moroccan capital Rabat. "The five-hour pro-Palestinian march ended in a civilized manner. First estimates put the number of protesters at at least half a million," said a senior government official.
"Sharon assassin, Bush his dog," chanted veiled women and bearded men. "God is great. We want jihad [holy war]."
It was the first pro-Palestinian protest allowed by the Moroccan authorities since October 2000, and took place a few hours before the arrival of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Political leaders, including Socialist Prime Minister Abderrahmane El Youssoufi and other government members, participated. Political groups who organized the march claimed as many as 1 million took part.
Thousands of demonstrators, many of them Palestinian, marched throughout Lebanon. In the center of Beirut, around 3,000 supporters of the militant group Hamas gathered in front of U.N. regional headquarters.
They chanted slogans demanding that Israel's neighbors let exiled Palestinian groups attack the Jewish state across their borders and accusing Egypt and Jordan of treason for maintaining diplomatic ties with Israel.
A similar demonstration organized by pro-Syrian Lebanese groups took place in the country's second city, Tripoli. Around 3,000 supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization marched in Tyre to the south.
The Lebanese government said it would not tolerate attacks on Israeli targets from its territory and arrested several Palestinians who reportedly fired rockets over the border at Israeli positions last week. Hezbollah guerrillas attacked Israeli troops in a disputed border area yesterday.
In Bahrain, thousands of people chanting "Death to America, Death to Israel" joined a funeral procession for a 24-year-old Bahraini who died of injuries sustained during a violent pro-Palestinian rally at the U.S. Embassy on Friday.
"We call on the government to kick out the American ambassador," Abdul-Amir al-Jamri, an influential Shi'ite Muslim cleric, told mourners setting off from the capital Manama to the village of the dead man, Mohammed Jumaa Ahmed.
Two days ago, thousands of protesters hurled gasoline bombs and stones at the U.S. mission in Bahrain - home to the U.S. 5th Fleet - to demonstrate against Israeli operations in the West Bank.
Between 3,000 and 5,000 Indonesians, mostly from the Muslim-oriented Justice Party, defied scorching heat to gather near the presidential palace in central Jakarta and burned an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
On Friday, Indonesian police turned water cannons on hundreds of protesters who tried to approach the U.S. Embassy. Around 85 percent of Indonesia's 210 million population are Muslim.
Angry Muslims took to the streets of European capitals as well.
Hundreds of demonstrators battled in Paris during a march against anti-Semitism, attacking journalists and stabbing a police officer before police dispersed them with tear gas.
-------
GROUPS PRAISE NEVADA'S VETO OF DANGEROUS NUCLEAR DUMP
CONGRESS SHOULD UPHOLD NEVADA'S WELL-FOUNDED OBJECTION
for immediate release,
April 8, 2002
Washington, D.C. - National public interest and environmental organizations today applauded Governor Kenny Guinn's decision to officially reject a plan to store 77,000 tons of radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain and urged Congress to similarly reject the proposal.
"This issue concerns not only Nevada, but virtually the entire country," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "Roads, rails, and waterways in 44 states would become thoroughfares for dangerous radioactive waste shipments en route to Yucca Mountain. Elected leaders in other states should join Governor Guinn in opposing this unjustifiably risky project."
The threats to public health and the environment at the repository site itself are equally concerning. Scientists have been unable to demonstrate that Yucca Mountain could effectively isolate waste throughout the time it remains dangerously radioactive. The site is in an earthquake zone and sits atop a source of drinking water.
"Regulators, eager to 'rubber stamp' this dangerous dump have downgraded environmental regulations and safety standards to allow the unsafe Yucca Mountain Project to move forward," said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
"This will threaten the drinking water for future generations and sets a dangerous precedent that could outlast the current repository debate."
"The Department of Energy is riding roughshod over the science" said Debbie Sease, Legislative Director of the Sierra Club. "Decisions on what to do with the most dangerous substance we have created must be grounded in science, not expedience."
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham recommended the plan in February. Congress could override Nevada's veto with a majority vote in both Houses. A vote is expected in the coming months.
Citizens groups across the country have consistently opposed the Yucca Mountain dump and the flawed process that has characterized the project. In 1998, when the Department of Energy announced proposed changes (since adopted by the Bush administration) to weaken repository siting guidelines, nearly 200 groups petitioned Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to disallow the rule change and disqualify the Yucca Mountain site. In January 2002, responding to revelations of unchecked conflicts of interest involving Department of Energy Yucca Mountain contractors, 232 groups from 50 states urged Congress to shelve the repository proposal. Last month, in response to Energy Secretary Abraham's site recommendation, 16 national environmental organizations sent a joint letter to Congress advocating opposition to the Yucca Mountain dump.
"Yucca Mountain is a top priority of the major national environmental, consumer and safe energy organizations because of the potential harm to human health and the environment that this project poses," said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth. "We stand as one in urging Congress to uphold Governor Guinn's veto."
ALLIANCE FOR NUCLEAR ACCOUNTABILITY
CLEAN WATER ACTION
EARTHJUSTICE
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL TRUST
NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
NUCLEAR INFORMATION & RESOURCE SERVICE
PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
PUBLIC CITIZEN
SIERRA CLUB
U.S. PUBLIC INTEREST RESEARCH GROUP
THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY
Contact: Lisa Gue, PC (202) 454-5130
Anna Aurilio, U.S. PIRG (202)546-9707
Kevin Kamps, NIRS (202) 328-0002
Bob Schaeffer, ANA (941) 395-6773
---
The Fight Over Yucca Mountain
The Nation Magazine emailnation@thenation.com
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002
Dear EmailNation Subscriber,
Imagine you're buying a car. You ask: Does it have an air bag? The salesman hems and haws--and then offers to sell you a titanium crash helmet, a flame-retardant racing suit and a comprehensive health insurance plan.
Would you buy that car?
Would you buy it if George W. Bush and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham were doing the selling?
Welcome to Yucca Mountain, the site in Nevada that President Bush has recommended for permanent storage of the nation's radioactive nuclear waste despite a host of unresolved scientific and health concerns.
For the full story, check out recent installments of The Failsafe Point -- Matt Bivens' exclusive Nation Online feature.
Currently available at:
http://www.thenation.com/failsafe/
And, after you read the piece, you may want to think about joining opponents of Bush and Abraham's plan to ship nuclear waste to Nevada at a rally on Tuesday April 16 outside the Capitol in Washington, DC.
Or, if you want to help devise a better solution to dealing with the country's radioactive waste, you can sign up for the People's Nuclear Waste Summit, to be held April 12-14 in Middletown, Connecticut.
Check this site for details on both events:
http://www.nirs.org
And, if you want to tell Washington to rethink the Yucca Mountain project but can't make it to the April 16 rally, Public Citizen has made it possible for you to customize and send a free fax to your Senators.
Go to Public Citizen's special page for details:
http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=42&source=3
Finally, please remember that you can email articles on The Nation website (http://www.thenation.com) to friends, family and foes using the Email-To-A-Friend feature found by clicking on the "email" link in the box adjoining each published article.
Best Regards, Peter Rothberg, Associate Publisher
--------
Peace And Nuclear Disarmamant:
A Call To Action by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
truth out
Feature
April 8, 2002
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/03.30C.Kucinich.Peace.p.htm
Congressional Record
MARCH 20, 2002
http://www.house.gov/kucinich/press/sp-020320-disarmanent.htm
Peace Efforts and comments:
http://www.house.gov/kucinich/action/peace.htm
". . . Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world," . . . Alfred Lord Tennyson
If you believe that humanity has a higher destiny, if you believe we can evolve, and become better than we are; if you believe we can overcome the scourge of war and someday fulfill the dream of harmony and peace earth, let us begin the conversation today. Let us exchange our ideas.
Let us plan together, act together and create peace together. This is a call for common sense, for peaceful, non-violent citizen action to protect our precious world from widening war and from stumbling into a nuclear catastrophe. The climate for conflict has intensified, with the struggle between Pakistan and India, the China-Taiwan tug of war, and the increased bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians. United States' planned troop deployments in the Philippines, Yemen, Georgia, Columbia and Indonesia create new possibilities for expanded war. An invasion of Iraq is planned. The recent disclosure that Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Libya are considered by the United States as possible targets for nuclear attack catalyzes potential conflicts everywhere.
These crucial political decisions promoting increased military actions, plus a new nuclear first-use policy, are occurring without the consent of the American people, without public debate, without public hearings, without public votes. The President is taking Congress's approval of responding to the Sept. 11 terrorists as a license to flirt with nuclear war.
"Politics ought to stay out of fighting a war," the President has been quoted as saying on March 13th 2002. Yet Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution explicitly requires that Congress take responsibility when it comes to declaring war. This President is very popular, according to the polls. But polls are not a substitute for democratic process. Attributing a negative connotation here to politics or dismissing constitutionally mandated congressional oversight belies reality: Spending $400 billion a year for defense is a political decision. Committing troops abroad is a political decision. War is a political decision. When men and women die on the battlefield that is the result of a political decision. The use of nuclear weapons, which can end the lives of millions, is a profound political decision. In a monarchy there need be no political decisions. In a democracy, all decisions are political, in that they derive from the consent of the governed.
In a democracy, budgetary, military and national objectives must be subordinate to the political process. Before we celebrate an imperial presidency, let it be said that the lack of free and open political process, the lack of free and open political debate, and the lack of free and open political dissent can be fatal in a democracy.
We have reached a moment in our country's history where it is urgent that people everywhere speak out as president of his or her own life, to protect the peace of the nation and world within and without. We should speak out and caution leaders who generate fear through talk of the endless war or the final conflict. We should appeal to our leaders to consider that their own bellicose thoughts, words and deeds are reshaping consciousness and can have an adverse effect on our nation. Because when one person thinks: fight! he or she finds a fight. One faction thinks: war! and starts a war. One nation thinks: nuclear! and approaches the abyss. And what of one nation which thinks peace, and seeks peace?
Neither individuals nor nations exist in a vacuum, which is why we have a serious responsibility for each other in this world. It is also urgent that we find those places of war in our own lives, and begin healing the world through healing ourselves. Each of us is a citizen of a common planet, bound to a common destiny. So connected are we, that each of us has the power to be the eyes of the world, the voice of the world, the conscience of the world, or the end of the world. And as each one of us chooses, so becomes the world.
Each of us is architect of this world. Our thoughts, the concepts. Our words, the designs. Our deeds, the bricks and mortar of our daily lives. Which is why we should always take care to regard the power of our thoughts and words, and the commands they send into action through time and space.
Some of our leaders have been thinking and talking about nuclear war. Recently there has been much news about a planning document which describes how and when America might wage nuclear war. The Nuclear Posture Review recently released to the media by the government:
1. Assumes that the United States has the right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike.
2. Equates nuclear weapons with conventional weapons.
3. Attempts to minimize the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.
4. Promotes nuclear response to a chemical or biological attack.
Some dismiss this review as routine government planning. But it becomes ominous when taken in the context of a war on terrorism which keeps expanding its boundaries, rhetorically and literally. The President equates the "war on terrorism" with World War II. He expresses a desire to have the nuclear option "on the table." He unilaterally withdraws from the ABM treaty. He seeks $8.9 billion to fund deployment of a missile shield. He institutes, without congressional knowledge, a shadow government in a bunker outside our nation's Capitol. He tries to pass off as arms reduction, the storage of, instead of the elimination of, nuclear weapons.
Two generations ago we lived with nuclear nightmares. We feared and hated the Russians who feared and hated us. We feared and hated the "godless, atheistic" communists. In our schools, each of us dutifully put our head between our legs and practiced duck-and-cover drills. In our nightmares, we saw the long, slow arc of a Soviet missile flash into our neighborhood. We got down on our knees and prayed for peace. We surveyed, wide eyed, pictures of the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We supported the elimination of all nuclear weapons. We knew that if you "nuked" others you "nuked" yourself.
The splitting of the atom for destructive purposes admits a split consciousness, the compartmentalized thinking of Us vs. Them, the dichotomized thinking, which spawns polarity and leads to war. The proposed use of nuclear weapons, pollutes the psyche with the arrogance of infinite power. It creates delusions of domination of matter and space. It is dehumanizing through its calculations of mass casualties. We must overcome doomthinkers and sayers who invite a world descending, disintegrating into a nuclear disaster. With a world at risk, we must find the bombs in our own lives and disarm them. We must listen to that quiet inner voice which counsels that the survival of all is achieved through the unity of all.
We must overcome our fear of each other, by seeking out the humanity within each of us. The human heart contains every possibility of race, creed, language, religion, and politics. We are one in our commonalties. Must we always fear our differences? We can overcome our fears by not feeding our fears with more war and nuclear confrontations. We must ask our leaders to unify us in courage.
We need to create a new, clear vision of a world as one. A new, clear vision of people working out their differences peacefully. A new, clear vision with the teaching of nonviolence, nonviolent intervention, and mediation. A new, clear vision where people can live in harmony within their families, their communities and within themselves. A new clear vision of peaceful coexistence in a world of tolerance.
We must move away from fear's paralysis. This is a call to action: to replace expanded war with expanded peace. This is a call for action to place the very survival of this planet on the agenda of all people, everywhere. As citizens of a common planet, we have an obligation to ourselves and our posterity. We must demand that our nation and all nations put down the nuclear sword. We must demand that our nation and all nations:
Abide by the principles of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Stop the development of new nuclear weapons. Take all nuclear weapons systems off alert. Persist towards total, worldwide elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Our nation must:
- Revive the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty.
- Sign and enforce the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
- Abandon plans to build a so-called missile shield.
- Prohibit the introduction of weapons into outer space.
We are in a climate where people expect debate within our two party system to produce policy alternatives. However both major political parties have fallen short. People who ask "Where is the Democratic Party?" and expect to hear debate may be disappointed. When peace is not on the agenda of our political parties or our governments then it must be the work and the duty of each citizen of the world. This is the time to organize for peace. This is the time for new thinking. This is the time to conceive of peace as not simply being the absence of violence, but the active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness. This is the time to conceive of peace as respect, trust, and integrity. This is the time to tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness which compels violence at a personal, group, national or international levels. This is the time to develop a new compassion for others and ourselves. When terrorists threaten our security, we must enforce the law and bring terrorists to justice within our system of constitutional justice, without undermining the very civil liberties which permits our democracy to breathe. Our own instinct for life, which inspires our breath and informs our pulse, excites our capacity to reason. Which is why we must pay attention when we sense a threat to survival.
That is why we must speak out now to protect this nation, all nations, and the entire planet and:
- Challenge those who believe that war is inevitable.
- Challenge those who believe in a nuclear right.
- Challenge those who would build new nuclear weapons.
- Challenge those who seek nuclear rearmament.
- Challenge those who seek nuclear escalation.
- Challenge those who would make of any nation a nuclear target.
- Challenge those who would threaten to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations.
- Challenge those who would break nuclear treaties.
- Challenge those who think and think about nuclear weapons, to think about peace.
It is practical to work for peace. I speak of peace and diplomacy not just for the sake of peace itself. But, for practical reasons, we must work for peace as a means of achieving permanent security. It is similarly practical to work for total nuclear disarmament, particularly when nuclear arms do not even come close to addressing the real security problems which confront our nation, witness the events of September 11, 2001.
We can make war archaic. Skeptics may dismiss the possibility that a nation which spends $400 billion a year for military purposes can somehow convert swords into plowshares. Yet the very founding and the history of this country demonstrates the creative possibilities of America. We are a nation which is known for realizing impossible dreams. Ours is a nation which in its second century abolished slavery, which many at the time considered impossible. Ours is a nation where women won the right to vote, which many at the time considered impossible. Ours is a nation which institutionalized the civil rights movement, which many at the time considered impossible. If we have the courage to claim peace, with the passion, the emotion and the integrity with which we have claimed independence, freedom and, equality we can become that nation which makes nonviolence an organizing principle in our society, and in doing so change the world.
That is the purpose of HR 2459. It is a bill to create a Department of Peace. It envisions new structures to help create peace in our homes, in our families, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, in our cities, and in our nation. It aspires to create conditions for peace within and to create conditions for peace worldwide. It considers the conditions which cause people to become the terrorists of the future, issues of poverty, scarcity and exploitation. It is practical to make outer space safe from weapons, so that humanity can continue to pursue a destiny among the stars. HR 3616 seeks to ban weapons in space, to keep the stars a place of dreams, of new possibilities, of transcendence.
We can achieve this practical vision of peace, if we are ready to work for it.
People worldwide need to be meet with like-minded people, about peace and nuclear disarmament, now. People worldwide need to gather in peace, now. People worldwide need to march and to pray for peace, now. People worldwide need to be connecting with each other on the web, for peace, now.
We are in a new era of electronic democracy, where the world wide web, numerous web sites and bulletin boards enable new organizations, exercising freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, to spring into being instantly. Thespiritoffreedom.com is such a web site. It is dedicated to becoming an electronic forum for peace, for sustainability, for renewal and for revitalization. It is a forum which strives for the restoration of a sense of community through the empowerment of self, through commitment of self to the lives of others, to the life of the community, to the life of the nation, to the life of the world.
Where war making is profoundly uncreative in its destruction, peacemaking can be deeply creative. We need to communicate with each other the ways in which we work in our communities to make this a more peaceful world. I welcome your ideas at or at . We can share our thoughts and discuss ways in which we have brought or will bring them into action. Now is the time to think, to take action and use our talents and abilities to create peace:
in our families.
in our block clubs.
In our neighborhoods.
In our places of worship.
In our schools and universities.
In our labor halls.
In our parent-teacher organizations.
Now is the time to think, speak, write, organize and take action to create peace as a social imperative, as an economic imperative, and as a political imperative. Now is the time to think, speak, write, organize, march, rally, hold vigils and take other nonviolent action to create peace in our cities, in our nation and in the world. And as the hymn says, "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me."
This is the work of the human family, of people all over the world demanding that governments and non-governmental actors alike put down their nuclear weapons. This is the work of the human family, responding in this moment of crisis to protect our nation, this planet and all life within it. We can achieve both nuclear disarmament and peace. As we understand that all people of the world are interconnected, we can achieve both nuclear disarmament and peace. We can accomplish this through upholding an holistic vision where the claims of all living beings to the right of survival are recognized. We can achieve both nuclear disarmament and peace through being a living testament to a Human Rights Covenant where each person on this planet is entitled to a life where he or she may consciously evolve in mind, body and spirit.
Nuclear disarmament and peace are the signposts toward the uplit path of an even brighter human condition wherein we can through our conscious efforts evolve and reestablish the context of our existence from peril to peace, from revolution to evolution. Think peace. Speak peace. Act peace.
Peace.
To reach Congressman Dennis Kucinich contact: info@thespiritoffreedom.com
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