------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Taiwan Declassifies Military Papers
UK Ministry Makes Atomic Bomb Plans Public - Paper
Gulf war veterans demand inquiry
European lawmakers in "visit of solidarity" to Iraq
Poland a nuke dump for EU?
Ukrainian nuclear plant shut down for emergency repairs

MILITARY
Peacekeepers in Kabul Clash With Armed Group
U.S. Companies Hired to Train Foreign Armies
Defense Industry Has Old Roots in Silicon Valley
Refugee Camp Is a Scene of Vast Devastation
Israeli court says Jenin dead should be buried
Living under the gun
Rebels in Nepal Kill Over 300, Police Say
In Pakistan, a Troubling Victory in Hunt for Al Qaeda
Russia-Georgia Showdown
Russian Makes CIA Drug Allegation
Silicon Valley's Spy Game
Taiwan Declassifies Military Papers
Taiwan military declassifies documents
Navy Drone Washes Up in Puerto Rico
Popular Uprising Allows Chavez to Reclaim Venezuelan Presidency

POLICE / PRISONERS
Japan May Set Up FBI - Style Investigative Body
Ill. Panel Issues Death Row Report
Netanyahu warning confirmed

OTHER
China Evades U.N. Criticism of Rights Abuses

ACTIVISTS
D.C. braces for rallies, protests
D.C. Protest Organizers Take On New Cause
Thousands March in Germany Against Israeli Offensive



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- asia

Taiwan Declassifies Military Papers

The Associated Press
Sunday, April 14, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46498-2002Apr14?language=printer

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan's military has declassified documents about the island's secret plans to retake the Chinese mainland in the 1950s - including a plan to fire nuclear artillery shells at a Chinese port - a newspaper reported Sunday.

Hoping the U.S. military would provide it with nuclear weapons technology, the Taiwanese army drew up a plan in 1958 to fire nuclear shells at China's southern port of Xiamen from the nearby Taiwanese-held islet of Kinmen, the United Evening News quoted the documents as saying.

The report said the U.S. military first worked on the plan with Taiwan's army but later backed off, fearing such an attack could cause a heavy death toll in China and could also prompt China to seek nuclear technology from the Soviet Union.

The Defense Ministry had declassified some documents for use by academics and researchers, but not to the public, a ministry official said on condition of anonymity Sunday. The official declined to comment on the newspaper report.

Officials at the U.S. representative office in Taiwan could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Gen. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communist forces in 1949. Chiang built Taiwan into an anti-communist bastion and pledged to retake the mainland.

But after Chiang died in 1975, his son and successor, President Chiang Ching-kuo, focused more on building the island's economy and defenses against a feared invasion by China.

The newspaper report said the Taiwanese army had also made detailed plans to launch a massive landing in southern China in 1956, involving infantry, marines, paratroopers and a tank unit. But the U.S. military refused to offer logistical support and the plan was dropped, the report said.

Citing the declassified documents, the newspaper said Taiwan also sent troops and planes to Indonesia in 1958 to help anti-communist rebels fighting the left-leaning government. Taiwan also sent warplanes to help anti-communist forces in Yemen in 1962, the report said.

-------- britain

UK Ministry Makes Atomic Bomb Plans Public - Paper

April 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain-atomic.html

LONDON - Britain's Ministry of Defense has made public step-by-step instructions for building an atomic bomb, a newspaper reported on Monday.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper said the ministry had also released papers to the Public Record Office describing ways that such a bomb could be smuggled into the country.

A Ministry of Defense spokesman told Reuters he had no comment to make on the report.

Fears over nuclear terrorism have heightened worldwide since the September 11 hijacking attacks on the United States.

Retired engineer Brian Burnell, who worked on the British atomic weapons program, told the paper the plans were enough to enable a terrorist to make an atomic bomb without difficulty.

``These documents should never have been declassified and since the events of September 11 there is a case for removing them from public access,'' he was quoted as saying.

The main opposition Conservative Party's defense spokesman Bernard Jenkins told the Telegraph the files were ``a monstrous free gift to terrorists.''

The paper said the files related to the construction of Blue Danube, the first British atomic bomb which was built in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The plans gave complete cross-sections, precise measurements and full details of materials used for all the components, including the plutonium core and the initiator that sets off the chain reaction causing the blast, the paper said.

Burnell said a prospective bombmaker would need only a basic machine shop and the right components -- including weapons-grade plutonium -- to make the bomb according to the instructions in the files.

The plans, available for anyone to see, are contained in files released to the Public Record Office over the last five years, the Telegraph said.

Last month researchers based at Stanford University in the United States said they had compiled a database of lost, stolen and misplaced nuclear material.

Their research showed that over the past 10 years, at least 88 pounds of weapons-usable plutonium and uranium had been stolen from poorly protected facilities in the former Soviet Union. Most but not all of the material was eventually recovered.

In March, the International Atomic Energy Agency's governing board announced plans to upgrade worldwide protection against nuclear terrorism.

The measures are aimed at helping states assess and eradicate their vulnerability to nuclear terrorism, including the potential use of nuclear material for attacks.


-------- depleted uranium

Gulf war veterans demand inquiry

Sunday, 14 April, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1926000/1926666.stm

Multiple injections were given to troops

Military veterans have written to the prime minister demanding a public inquiry into the health effects of serving in the Gulf War. Many of those who served in the Gulf conflict in 1991, say they have suffered a range of disorders, some claiming their children suffered birth defects.

They believe the government has ignored their plight and refused to recognise the existence of "Gulf War illness".

Members of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association are appealing directly to Tony Blair to intervene in their fight for compensation. They want investigations into the role of depleted uranium, the use of multiple vaccinations for a range of deadly diseases and possible exposure to pesticides or organophosphates.

Their solicitor Patrick Allen said: "There continue to be grave worries about the causes of Gulf War illness and the things that went wrong during the war. The problem of Gulf war illness and veterans' health is one which will not go away. In our view, the veterans have not been adequately compensated or given appropriate treatment for their condition."

Mental illness

"We believe the 'debt of honour' has not been repaid and the thousands of ill Gulf War veterans deserve better from the government."

A high number of veterans have complained of chronic fatigue, infertility and mental illness. The government says it is committed to addressing the concerns of the veterans. It has commissioned several research studies which involve thousands of participants. These studies are comparing the health of Gulf veterans with others who did not go to the Gulf.

Other research is looking at the possible interactions between the vaccines and tablets given to troops to protect them against attack from chemical and biological weapons.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said: "We accept that some Gulf veterans became ill and we are open minded about the various causes."

But the prime minister has considered calls for a public inquiry and he concluded that it wouldn't contribute to answering the basic questions of why some veterans are ill.

"Only scientific research would establish that and all sorts of research is going on both inside and outside the MoD."

A study of 14,000 servicemen carried out by the University of Manchester, concluded Gulf War veterans are more likely to become ill and suffer more severe symptoms than other servicemen and women.

Their findings, published last April, have been forwarded to the MoD.

--------

European lawmakers in "visit of solidarity" to Iraq

Sun Apr 14, 2002
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020415/ap_wo_en_ge/iraq_europe_2

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A delegation of European lawmakers, physicians and Gulf War veterans from Britain and France arrived in Baghdad Sunday to assess the effects of 11-year-old U.N. sanctions as well as depleted uranium used in NATO munitions during the 1991 war, the official news agency reported.

The 130-person delegation includes demobilized French and British soldiers who fought Iraqi forces in the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War that ended Iraq's seven-month occupation of Kuwait, the Iraqi News Agency reported. The soldiers were reportedly suffering from illnesses linked to depleted uranium used in Gulf War weapons, according to INA. It offered no other details.

Iraq claims depleted uranium is responsible for an increase in cancer rates and birth defects in the country. The World Health Organization was planning to investigate the allegations, while NATO countries have repeatedly denied the ammunition could have triggered cancer in their soldiers.

U.S. aircraft used munitions containing depleted uranium, a slightly radioactive heavy metal, during the 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, as well as in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. The munitions, favored because they have the rare ability to pierce tanks, were also used during the 1991 Gulf War.

INA said the purpose of the two-week visit is to "express solidarity" with the Iraqi people and to examine the shortages in medicine and medical supplies in Iraqi hospitals as a result of U.N. sanctions since 1990.

Iraq says the sanctions have crippled its health services. The sanction cannot be lifted unless U.N. weapons inspectors verify that Iraq has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors left the country ahead of U.S.-British airstrikes in December 1998 and have been barred from returning since.

Iraq says it has complied with all relevant U.N. resolutions and wants the sanctions lifted.

-------- europe

Poland a nuke dump for EU?

April 14, 2002
Piotr Bein
From: "Piotr Bein" <piotr.bein@imag.net>

On January 1, 2002, a new Polish nuclear law came into force, introducing rules for nuclear power plants in a country that prevented a single facility of this type to be finished near Gdansk (over half million people, 5th largest conurbation in Poland).

Stanislaw Latek, the director of training and public information at the Polish Atomic Agency (PAA) wrote advertised the new law in the government daily "Rzeczpospolita": "The fact that we don't yet have nuclear power plants does not mean that laws should not specify the conditions for siting, design and construction of such facilities. The laws will come useful in the future."

The head of the PAA, a professor Jerzy Niewodniczanski equally expertly assured the Polish public in the beginning of 2001 that depleted uranium ammunition used by NATO in the Balkans was harmless to human health and the environment.

The new nuclear law also specifies conditions for nuclear waste disposal and storage. Is Polish land destined for nuclear waste dumps? In a hurry Brussels is trying to force down the Polish throat a process allowing foreigners to purchase Polish land for industrial uses -- one of the conditions for accepting Poland to the European Union.

Is there a connection to a growing demand in 10 EU states for storing nuclear waste? As Western Europe dismantles nuclear power plants, the structures will become mountains of radioactive scrap, adding to the sizeable volume of current nuclear wastes. Why store them in own backyard, when new EU vassals could accept nuclear wastes for a penny?

Nuclear eco-colonialism is likely, given the huge economic gap between Poland and any of the nuclear EU states. Over the past decade, Western "investors" were able to take a lion's share of Polish national assets (worth nearly quarter trillion US$ dollars in 1989) for a laughable fraction of their market value, by bribing the officials and manipulating the system.

Nuclear eco-colonialism already happened in Poland. When Germany and Austria refused transit of British fuel rods to the Temelin nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic, PAA issued a permit to ship the rods via the Polish port of Szczecin and from there by rail. Which way do spent fuel rods travel back to a recycling plant in Western Europe? Would they come back to Poland after recycling?

The ethics of the Polish power elites is questionable at best, corruption is rampant at the central offices in Warsaw as well as in local governments, while competition for depleted public funds is fierce. Coupled with general pauperisation of the country and a poor understanding of nuclear risks, the conditions are ideal for turning Poland into EU's nuclear dump.

No matter how well Poles may now be protected from nukes, existing laws may be overruled or bypassed by "market mechanisms" when Poland joins the EU. Once the wastes enter Poland from Western Europe, they will stay.

-------- ukraine

Ukrainian nuclear plant shut down for emergency repairs

Sun Apr 14, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020414/ap_wo_en_ge/ukraine_nuclear_1

KIEV - Authorities shut down a reactor at Ukraine's Rivne nuclear power plant because of a leak in the generator's cooling system, news reports said Sunday.

Reactor No. 3 at the plant in western Ukraine was shut down for emergency repairs because of the hydrogen leak, the ITAR-Tass news agency said. The reactor was expected to be running again by Tuesday.

Ten of the 13 reactors at the country's four nuclear power plants are currently functioning, the agency said. Other repairs were already underway at Rivne's Reactor No. 1 and at Reactor No. 6 at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and caught fire in 1986. The plant was closed for good in 2000.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Peacekeepers in Kabul Clash With Armed Group

April 13, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-peacekeepers.html

KABUL - International peacekeepers clashed with a 30-strong group of armed men in Kabul and captured some wearing the new Afghan police uniform, a spokesman for multinational force said Saturday.

Gen. Deen Mohammad Joorat, the Interior Ministry security chief, said the seven men captured were members of the official security force and alleged their intention was to destabilize the interim Afghan administration.

``Six of them belong to the police of the zone and the other one is from the 61st division of the armed forces. They are part of the government,'' he told Reuters.

``They are under investigation. They pretended they were chasing a group of thieves, but the reality is that they wanted to sabotage the security situation in Kabul. That was for sure their intention,'' Joorat charged.

International Assistance Security Force spokesman Lt. Col. Neal Peckham said the 18-nation force had worried the clash might have resulted from a security operation by the interim administration and it had not been told.

The ISAF was upset earlier this month when the interim administration rounded up scores of people in Kabul to snuff out an alleged coup plot but did not tell the nearly 5,000-strong ISAF about it.

``ROBUST RESPONSE''

Joorat said all seven captured men were Hazaras, a Shi'ite ethnic group which is a minority in largely Sunni Afghanistan.

The clash occurred in an area of southwest Kabul which is largely populated by Hazaras.

ISAF patrols have been fired on several times in the area while trying to halt the depredations of the armed gangs of robbers thought to be made up of unemployed fighters of the Northern Alliance who helped drive the Taliban from power.

Peckham said two patrols of British soldiers from the Royal Anglian regiment were fired on during the night.

``Some 10 rounds were fired, four at one location and six at another, and both of these patrols responded robustly with returning fire,'' he said.

The ISAF swiftly sent reinforcements who arrested seven of the armed men but others escaped in a vehicle, he said.

``The sum total of the operation is that we have detained seven men. All were armed with AK47s, five of them were in police uniforms, one in civilian clothes and one in combats.''

The ISAF handed the seven over to the Afghan Interior Ministry for investigation, Peckham said.

``The size of the reported group is of significance,'' he said. ``If indeed there were 30 men moving in the area, then that is of significant concern,'' the ISAF spokesman noted.

ROCKET ATTACKS

The incident follows attempted rocket attacks on Kabul installations of the 18-nation ISAF, sent to provide security in the capital in the run-up to a Loya Jirga, a council of elders, in June to decide on a government.

Two Chinese-made 107 mm rockets were fired at an ISAF installation earlier this month and four more, on primitive launchers and attached to wrist-watch timing devices, were discovered from were they were launched.

The interim government says a number of people have been arrested in connection with the missiles.

It says dozens of people were rounded up in the operation against the alleged coup plot blamed on former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami group, which denies any involvement.

The interim government says the plot was aimed at destabilizing it in advance of the imminent return from 30 years in exile in Rome of ex-King Zahir Shah, postponed several times because of fears for his security.

Zahir Shah is due to preside over the opening session of the Loya Jirga, which will decide whether the interim administration of Hamid Karzai stays or another government is put in place to guide the country to general elections two years later.

-------- business

U.S. Companies Hired to Train Foreign Armies

By ESTHER SCHRADER
LOS ANGELES TIMES STAFF WRITER
April 14 2002
http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2D000026555apr14

WASHINGTON -- When the Pentagon talks about training the new Afghan National Army, it doesn't mean with its own soldiers. The Green Berets and other elite U. S. troops are needed elsewhere. Instead, the Defense Department is drawing up plans to use its commandos to jump-start the Afghan force, then hire private military contractors to finish the job.

It would be the most vital role yet taken on by a somewhat clandestine industry accustomed to operating on the fringe of U. S. foreign policy by training foreign armies. As the United States pushes its antiterrorism campaign beyond Afghanistan, the role of these private companies promises to grow right along with it.

"The war on terrorism is the full employment act for these guys," said D. B. Des Roches, spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. A little-known but increasingly essential addition to the modern battlefield, the firms, studded with retired American generals, have been training the world's more ragtag armies since the 1970s when a group of Vietnam veterans discovered that there was money to be made marketing military expertise--and sold Saudi Arabia on a plan to teach its army how to guard its oil fields.

Business has burgeoned in the messy post-Cold War world. The firms--modern-day mercenary companies armed with Powerpoint presentations instead of weapons--operate today in more than 40 countries, often under contract to the U. S. government.

For the Pentagon, with one-third fewer soldiers than a decade ago but a growing number of entanglements in unlikely places, hiring out the training of foreign armies has become indispensable. Every U. S. military operation in the post-Cold War era has involved significant levels of support from private military firms, from the Persian Gulf to Somalia, Zaire, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia.

But the industry has met with growing criticism by military experts who charge that the firms work with little oversight and less accountability, particularly when hired by foreign governments.

Plans to use the firms in Afghanistan are still preliminary. Although training of an Afghan military force has begun, there is no timetable for turning the task over to contractors. With Afghanistan still volatile, Pentagon officials are grappling with just how private trainers, who typically do not carry weapons, should be employed.

Since Sept. 11 and the Pentagon's launch of the war on terrorism, the stock prices of the publicly traded contractors have soared. Already, trainers from private military companies are in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where Al Qaeda operatives are believed to be hiding. Executives of several private military companies have met with Pentagon officials about training other armies in Central Asia.

"A lot of people have said, 'Ding ding ding, gravy train,' " Des Roches said. "But in point of fact, it makes sense. They're probably better at doing these sorts of missions than anyone else I could think of."

Boasts retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, an executive at MPRI, the most prominent of the private contractors: "We've got more generals per square foot here than in the Pentagon."

Although the most successful of the U. S. firms carefully screen their employees, prohibit them from carrying arms and generally reject contracts with governments the U. S. considers unsavory, they operate in a world populated by a darker breed of ex-soldiers who serve as guns for hire to thugs throughout the world. Competing military companies in Britain and South Africa have hired out their employees as combatants in Angola and Sierra Leone. And employees of the U. S. companies have sometimes taken up weapons themselves, employees of the firms say.

"We're talking about places where the governments have very little control over their territory . . . where our government has no control over what these firms tell the sometimes very questionable people they work for about how to fight," said Deborah Avant, professor of political science at George Washington University and an authority on the role of the private sector in war. "The more and more we put these people in riskier and riskier areas, the more they have to make these judgments on their own."

The U. S.-based companies say their goals dovetail with a long-held U. S. policy of encouraging military-to-military ties worldwide in the hope that professional armies can help stabilize fragile democracies.

MPRI, founded in 1988 by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono and seven other retired generals, has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon. It counts 20 former senior military officers on its board of directors.

The firm operates from a bland office building in Alexandria, Va., its halls as hushed as those of an insurance firm. But the decor betrays the tough credentials of its founders. A statue of a knight in armor stands in a corner of the lobby. MPRI's emblem is an unsheathed sword.

"These guys are not about to destroy reputations they've spent 30 years building just for a buck," said Soyster, who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. "We go someplace because we are either sent there by the U. S. government or we're contracted by another government. We do it for the money, I'm not ashamed to say. But we do it right."

The financial rewards presumably beat Pentagon salaries. Since Sept. 11, the per-share price of stock in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled.

The top five executives at Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego made between $825,000 and $1.8 million in salaries in 2001, and each held more than $1.5 million worth of stock options.

Revenues from the global international security market, of which the firms are a part, are expected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010, according to a 1997 study by Equitable Services Corp., a security industry analyst.

The renting out of trained killers dates back hundreds of years, and privately recruited regiments were common in the U. S. Civil War. But selling military expertise has its roots in Vietnam, when commercial teams funded by the Pentagon provided military and police training to South Vietnamese forces.

In 1975, McLean, Va.-based Vinnell Corp. won a $77-million contract to train Saudi Arabian infantry and artillery battalions to defend oil fields. It was the first time that American civilians had been permitted to sell military training directly to a foreign military. The job was controversial, and Senate Democrats held hearings. But the contract stuck. And other similar firms began to emerge.

The end of the Cold War led to dramatic growth. Suddenly, there was a pool of skilled former officers, some from Special Forces units, eager to sell the expertise they had developed as relatively low-paid soldiers. They found a ready market at the Pentagon, and in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and the former Soviet sphere eager to professionalize their militaries.

The major U. S. firms in the field include MPRI, Vinnell, BDM International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., Armor Holdings Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla.; DynCorp of Reston, Va., and SAIC. Armor Holdings was among Fortune magazine's 100 fastest-growing companies in 1999 and 2000, one of the few firms on the list not related to technology.

The people they hire are hardly soldiers of fortune.

They are generally former military officers with 20 to 30 years of experience, generously pensioned retirees for whom the money is just part of the allure. Many describe their work as public service, a way to practice military diplomacy. Often they freelance, taking on contracts that send them abroad for a year or so.

They train armies how to use such complex hardware as armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired antitank missiles, ships and aircraft, and other equipment typically sold to foreign armies by the United States. They prep officers in military strategy, run battle simulation centers, and have helped support peacekeeping efforts in troubled regions under contract to the Pentagon and the State Department.

MPRI has trained military forces in dozens of countries, including Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Colombia. DynCorp trained the Haitian police force after the 1994 U. S. intervention in the island nation. And MPRI and several other firms, under contract to the State Department, established the African Center for Strategic Studies to teach fledgling democracies how to run professional armies.

In other words, the French Foreign Legion they are not.

"One leitmotif of the business is how boring the individual jobs can be on almost all of the contracts that the big U. S. firms have. It is like being in the peacetime Army, Navy or Air Force," said one former member of Special Forces and airborne infantry units who for more than two decades has trained foreign militaries in Indochina and the Middle East.

"I'm not a mercenary," this trainer said. "I like excitement, but I have to be on the side of angels. Do not look for me to look for excitement [by] working on the side of vicious people."

But even the most polished of the firms have blemished histories. Employees of DynCorp were fired after being accused two years ago of keeping Bosnian women as concubines. Companies hired by the CIA in the 1980s trained foreign fighters later charged with atrocities in El Salvador and Honduras.

When the firms are hired by the Pentagon or State Department, as they would be in Afghanistan, their work is audited and sometimes supervised by U. S. military personnel, a process the State Department says helps prevent abuse.

But when they sell their services directly to other countries, there are minimal controls.

The only U. S. regulation of such foreign contracts is through the State Department, which issues export licenses under the Arms Export Control Act. The law regulates the sale of military services just as it does the export of a crate of guns. The department reviews applications to ensure that no sales are made or services performed that would "undercut U. S. interests," spokesman Jason Greer said.

The firms say this prevents them from working with governments that the U. S. disapproves of. When MPRI tried to get a license to train the Angolan army in 1994, for example, the State Department turned it down.

But Congress is notified only of contracts worth more than $50 million. Sometimes there are conflicting views of what is in the U. S. interest. And once a license is granted, there are no reporting requirements or oversight of work that typically lasts years and takes the firms' employees to remote, lawless areas.

In 1998, MPRI applied for a license to help the government of Equatorial Guinea build its coast guard. The tiny African country is run by a military dictator who has been implicated in human rights abuses. It has no U. S. Embassy.

The contract was initially rejected by two State Department desks, according to a department official and Soyster. But the decision was reversed two years later after MPRI lobbyists argued that if it was not allowed to do the job, a competitor from another country would.

"There are people who think you should not help people, that they don't deserve to be helped, even though they want to make a change," Soyster said. "We say, don't let past mistakes get in the way of doing something that should be done today."

Even when doing the job they describe, the firms' role is sometimes cloudy.

In 1995, during a U. N. embargo on arms sales to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, MPRI persuaded the State Department to grant it a license to train Croatia's military, pledging that it would teach only leadership skills, budgeting and military ethics.

When the Croatian military, in a highly effective offensive called Operation Storm, captured the Serb-held Krajina enclave later that year, there were suspicions that MPRI instructors must have been directly involved. The operation played a key role in reversing the tide of war against the Serbs and, consistent with American policy, in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. But the same Croatian military was subsequently implicated in uprooting more than 150,000 Serbs from their homes.

The company denies that its employees played any direct role in the Croatian army's sudden transformation into an effective fighting force.

"I can assure you if we had the capability to train an army in a month to turn it around that fast, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be flying you over to the Riviera on the way to see it for yourself," Soyster said. "If we could do that to Croatia, we could straighten out Afghanistan in a couple of months."

But critics charge that the help MPRI provided the Croatians may have allowed the U. S. to secretly influence events in the war while maintaining its neutral posture and without sending U. S. troops, advisors or trainers.

"MPRI had all these different meetings with top Croatian defense officials right before the offensive. It's inconceivable that they did not have some kind of impact," said one military analyst who has followed the company's involvement in the Balkans. "It was followed by massive ethnic cleansing. Now, had American troops been on the ground, we would have been held accountable for that. The fact that it was a private company made the connection a lot less clear."

In this murky world, the line between training foreign troops and fighting with them sometimes blurs.

When Saddam Hussein's army invaded the Saudi Arabian border town of Khafji in February 1991, Vinnell employees accompanied Saudi national guard units into combat, according to two employees of Vinnell and an employee of another private military company who was in Saudi Arabia at the time.

The Vinnell employees had been stationed in the region to instruct Saudi soldiers in operating heavy weapons systems.

"Their job was to teach those guys, not to fight with them, but sure, the Vinnell instructors accompanied those units into combat," an employee who witnessed the counterattack said. "Under extraordinary circumstances, but very, very rare circumstances, you will see employees of the MPRIs of this world get into a circumstance where they can't say no. . . . Let's face it, they're human beings."

Said Vinnell spokesman Kevin O'Melia: "I'm not aware that that happened, and our company policy is that they not be directly involved. They're hired as advisors only . . . and that's the capacity in which we expect them to act."

In Afghanistan, the plan is for up to 150 U. S. Special Forces troops to begin training Afghan recruits, then to turn the effort over to private U. S. contractors. Defense officials have said for months that only by having an army of its own can Afghanistan hope to create the stability that is critical if the country is to avoid remaining a haven for terrorists. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he might seek money from Congress and other foreign governments to finance the army.

Some basic training of several hundred Afghan recruits is already underway, led by British and German members of the international security force there.

But thousands of other potential Afghan soldiers have yet to be tapped, and international financial support for building Afghanistan's army has been slim.

It is unclear how large an Afghan force would be needed to suppress factional conflicts and patrol the country's borders. But some defense officials have put the number at more than 20,000.

"I think we'll start off with our own guys because the Afghans are more comfortable at this point with people in uniform who they know," said a senior defense official familiar with the plan. "But at some point down the pike, we will move to contractors. We have to. We don't have the people to do it all ourselves."

And if the corporate warriors succeed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon will be eager to send them elsewhere, defense officials said.

"This is big business among these companies. They are furiously bidding on involvement in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism," said P. W. "Pete" Singer, an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The minute the Pentagon started to use the phrase 'a program to train and equip the Afghan army,' buzzers went off."

----

Defense Industry Has Old Roots in Silicon Valley

April 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-defense.html

PALO ALTO, Calif. - When the United States went to war, Silicon Valley mobilized. High-tech companies that had been selling to consumer markets adapted their products for new use in weapons, tanks, remote sensing devices and microwave telephone systems.

This is not the story of the current war in Afghanistan, nor even the Gulf War -- famously high-tech for the precision-guided smart bombs that were broadcast on CNN as they hit their targets -- so much as it describes what happened years ago at the start of the Second World War.

Silicon Valley was more a valley of apricot orchards than office parks back then and ``cutting-edge technology'' described things like oscillators that today are a basic component of all sorts of household devices like radios and television sets.

But the wartime economy opened major new markets for some young companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP.N).

HP had just delivered one of its first orders of oscillators to Walt Disney Co. (DIS.N) for use in the movie ''Fantasia,'' when it received a big order from the Defense Department for oscillators to be used in military radar.

A decade later, defense contractor Lockheed Aircraft Corp. bought a 275-acre tract of land in the valley as the future site of the Missile Systems Division of the defense contractor that is today Lockheed Martin (LMT.N).

In the book ``Beyond the Horizons: The Lockheed Story,'' Walter Boyne described how Lockheed's work building superior high-altitude and high-speed aircraft required new laboratories to recreate the atmospheric conditions in which the planes would operate.

``Implicit in their creation was an unprecedented requirement for new electronic and optical testing equipment, Boyne wrote. ``One incredible by-product of this demand for intellectual resources was the growth of what is now called the Silicon Valley.''

War in the year 2002 is not likely to have the same transforming effect on an industry whose products are entrenched in people's everyday lives.

But what company would not mind a little extra business from a reliable customer, especially when a persistent recession has eroded fat profit margins and left many calculating unemployment benefits instead of stock options?

Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to understand the appeal of such a pitch earlier this year when, during a trip to California, he made a stop in San Jose and told a crowd of people employed in the high-tech industry how their efforts could be put to a higher good.

Cheney spoke of precision-guided missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can be controlled remotely. He even sounded a little bit like a Silicon Valley marketing executive when described how data typically ``travels up and down an organization'' but is not shared with other agencies.

These restrictions on important government data could explain why as recently as this month, one of the hijackers suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks was still on the Federal Aviation Administration newsletter mailing list.

``We need a comprehensive secure system that allows intelligence to be shared among the relevant officials,'' Cheney said, reminding his audience how the defense industry's requirements for technology extend beyond the battlefield all the way to the back office.

Whether his talk was a pep rally or a work order remains to be seen. Military analysts and consultants express reservations that war could be the next big thing for Silicon Valley.

Not only is the scale of this region's commercial production too large to be easily swayed by a new source of business, but it is unclear whether the Defense Department is on the cutting edge of technology the way it fancies itself.

``The military is recognizing that information technology is helping them do their jobs,'' said Ray Bjorklund, vice president of consulting services at Federal Sources Inc., a Washington, D.C., consulting firm.

``But the government also has a reputation for being a bit slow in embracing new technologies. People often say they are 18 months behind the private sector. I'd say its more like a 12 to 14 month lag time.''

The Defense Department does not break out its spending on military technology, but Bjorklund says the best way to measure it is in the category, ``Command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,'' or C4ISR.

He says this area of spending has grown pretty much in line with overall defense budget increases, but adds, ``I think we're

starting to see a slight increase in additional spending in C4ISR.''

Still, he warns that doing business with the Federal Government is very different from doing business in the private sector since government agencies often need equipment built to their own specifications, and require companies to go through lengthy competitive bidding processes.

For companies accustomed to the fast pace of doing business in Silicon Valley, this can be an adjustment.

``It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of walking the hallways of the Pentagon,'' Bjorklund said.

-------- israel / palestine

Refugee Camp Is a Scene of Vast Devastation

New York Times
April 14, 2002
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/international/middleeast/14JENI.html

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - On the second floor of a house here, a few children played today on a striped swing set while Israeli snipers fired solitary blasts into the shattered camp outside.

In a dark corner of the room, leaning against the cinder-block wall and silently watching the children play, sat a surviving fighter of the Palestinian resistance, in hiding.

His face was a web of black burns. Blisters the size of quarters dotted his blackened left hand. His left leg was scorched. He had watched three comrades die in the grenade attack that wounded him, he said. "We didn't expect them to use such military force," he said, though insisting he had no regrets.

A three-hour tour here today, made with local guides who picked paths around Israeli tanks, showed destruction on a scale far greater than that seen in the other Palestinian cities that have fallen before Israel's offensive, its biggest ground operation in 20 years.

Israel says Jenin was a center of terrorism, which it is determined to weed out. Israeli officials have spoken of 100 to 200 dead here, and Palestinians have estimated two, three, or four times that number. No one yet knows how many were killed in fighting that has lasted 11 days, and is now all but over, but already the battle here seems certain to be argued over in the contest between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Palestinians described hiding in caves, hearing a neighbor's handicapped son crying out as a house was demolished on top of him, piling mattresses over children so that Israeli patrols would not hear them wail. They rushed up to strangers to tell their stories.

"My father, my brother, my son I have no one!" wailed a woman in a pink housecoat and pale blue head scarf, standing on the debris in the midday sun. "There are many bodies, many bodies, under the stones, under the sand!"

Along what were once tight alleyways, bulldozers have plowed lanes 25 feet wide through the camp, taking the faces off houses on either side, and exposing their sofa sets, pictures of smiling children, and roses made of cloth to the boulevards of rubble.

The trivia and treasures of people's lives litter the wasteland: a torn Koran among the crushed cinder blocks; a page from an English-language schoolbook with the words "In which country is the Taj Mahal situated?" in a room missing a wall; a picture of the actor Leonardo DiCaprio under a hole left by a missile.

Palestinians said they had removed some of the dead, and the Israeli Army said it had also begun removing bodies, respectfully.

Israel says that its soldiers were careful to avoid shooting civilians, and that most of the dead were fighters. Residents of the camp said many civilians were killed.

Two bodies were seen here today, both found on the second stories of bullet-riddled and scorched houses, both charred beyond recognition.

One was a male, just over five feet tall. Part of a sneaker remained on the right foot. The left foot and hand were cinders.

A woman dressed in black wailed over the body, as flies buzzed in air rotten with the stench of untended death. She pulled away the bit of shoe, in hopes of using it somehow to identify the body.

The other body, a few doors away, was buried beneath a crushed wall. Only the blackened, featureless face was visible.

A child's cleated sneaker, with a green Nike swoosh, lay nearby.

In both cases, no weapons were seen, but one clip from a Kalashnikov rifle, dropped or placed there, lay to each body's right.

A public relations struggle is under way over this ruined place. The battle for the Jenin camp is already becoming another significant, harshly contested episode in the history of both peoples.

The Israeli government has feared that pictures of the dead will be used by Palestinians to make claims of a massacre. Israeli officials accuse the governing Palestinian Authority of refusing to take the bodies in hopes of embarrassing Israel, while Palestinian officials accuse Israel of bulldozing and hiding the dead.

The evidence of the fighting was everywhere. Children had collected spent cartridges, some, from helicopter machine guns, the size of cans of frozen juice concentrate.

A grenade pin lay in the dust, not far from a missile's steel fins.

Palestinians displayed 18-inch rockets, marked in English as Tow missiles, that they said were fired into their homes. The slender filaments used to guide rockets hung from buildings and power lines.

Israeli soldiers and Palestinians said Palestinian fighters had salted the camp with booby traps.

From the second floor of one home, Palestinians pointed to an area, by a blackened building and a palm tree, where they said 13 soldiers died in an ambush. The area is now leveled. In all, 23 soldiers died in the fighting.

Beneath one house, its second floor pierced by a missile, was a dark cave. It was carved from the rock and it smelled of damp earth. Thirty-five people hid here for at least two days, according to Fatmeh Ahmed, who said she had stayed there with her four children.

"Whenever we wanted to go out of the cave to bring water or food for the children, they opened fire on us," she said.

Finally, she said, soldiers found them. Another woman, Nahla Abid, said she called out in Hebrew that those in hiding wanted only peace, and that the soldiers ordered them to come out and stand by a tank.

The soldiers took the men away, she said.

Amini al-Damaj, 60, said that 80 relatives and neighbors crowded into a similar cave beneath her house. "We were putting mattresses over the heads of children so that the soldiers would not hear them crying," she said.

Another resident of the camp, Umm Samir Sabbagh, said that a neighboring family escaped to her home when a bulldozer approached their house. They left behind a handicapped son, she said. She said she returned with his mother to retrieve the man, Jamal, but arrived in time only to hear him crying out as the house collapsed.

The term refugee camp conjures images of tents and transience. But, as in other such camps for Palestinians refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants, people were planted here, even as they longed for homes - homes that were experienced or merely described by elders - in the land that is now Israel.

The buildings were made of cinder blocks, typically of two or three stories, with floors of crushed-gravel tile. Some had satellite dishes. The United Nations agency administering the camp said it has about 10,000 resident.

Today there were signs of people coping in the chaos. A yellow pencil, its tip wrapped in cloth, was shoved into a bullet hole in a water tank on top of one damaged house.

"He's the father of three children," began Ali Damaj, 45, telling the story of a friend who died. "Two years ago he had a mental problem. When the bulldozer came and destroyed the house of his uncle, he was inside with his father. He was an abnormal person, and when everyone escaped he stayed in the house. They thought he was a fighter and they opened fire at him."

The body remained in the house for six days, Mr. Damaj said, before he and some others carried it away in two garbage bags.

Mr. Damaj, like most Palestinians and Israelis, can speak with great fluency about the details of the Oslo peace process, in which, he said, he once believed.

"After 50 years of fighting, we reached the conclusion that there is a chance for coexistence," he said. Now, he said, "We cannot live together in one place. This is the simple fact."

--------

Israeli court says Jenin dead should be buried

04/14/2002
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2002/04/14/bethlehem.htm

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - Israel's Supreme Court told the army Sunday that it must give the Palestinians the bodies of those killed in this refugee camp. The army gave journalists a limited tour of the devastation and denied that mass killings took place. The court also ordered the army to include workers from the Red Cross in teams searching for the bodies following more than a week of battles in the camp, the site of the heaviest combat since Israeli troops launched a West Bank offensive March 29 to find militants responsible for attacks on its civilians.

The decision came as Secretary of State Colin Powell held more than three hours of talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as part of his search for a cease-fire agreement to end the fighting.

Traveling with extremely heavy security, Powell met Arafat at the Palestinian leader's badly damaged compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and said afterward that the talks were "useful and constructive" but reported no progress toward a cease-fire.

Arafat told Powell that there would be no political or security coordination with Israel before it first pulls out from towns and villages it has occupied since it began its West Bank incursions, Palestinian officials said.

During Powell's visit, periodic explosions echoed through Ramallah, part of the ongoing Israeli operation that involved blowing doors off a cell phone company and other office buildings in order to conduct searches.

In another development, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed to Powell that peace talks be held among Israel and Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon - but without Arafat, said Raanan Gissin, a Sharon spokesman.

"We're talking about a conference with the Arabs where they present their proposals and we present ours," Gissin said. However, without Arafat's participation, there appeared little chance such a meeting would take place.

The court decision addressed the escalating dispute over Palestinian bodies still in the Jenin refugee camp. The Palestinians accuse Israel of burying Palestinians killed in the camp in mass graves.

The petition to the Supreme Court was filed by Arab Israelis who said Israel was attempting to hide the number of dead.

It has been impossible to confirm the death toll in the camp. Palestinians officials have not been allowed into the camp, but claim the death toll is in the hundreds.

The army, which suffered 23 deaths among its soldiers in the camp, has been saying that about a 100 Palestinians were killed, most of them gunmen, and that it wanted to bury the militants in unmarked graves in a cemetery in northern Israel.

Col. Dan Riesner, an adviser to the army's advocate-general who was present at Sunday's court hearing, said the bodies of 37 Palestinians, including at least 23 young men believed to be gunmen, had been found in a search of half of the camp.

Of the 37 bodies, Riesner said at least 26 were left where they were found pending the court action and also because of fears they may be booby trapped. Israeli officials said 11 civilian bodies were turned over to relatives or hospitals, and were buried.

Israel has declared the Jenin refugee camp a closed military zone, though some journalists, including several from The Associated Press, have managed to get inside over the past four days.

The army on Sunday gave a group of journalists a tour of part of the camp, which was home to some 15,000 Palestinians.

The powerful stench of sewage mixed with garbage strewn on the camp's narrow alleyways. Many houses were empty, some with their front doors open.

Bullet casings littered the streets and alleyways, sitting in the midst of shattered glass and shards of rubble. Walls bore Hebrew letters and numbers, the work of the Israeli army to mark the roads. Alongside them were slogans of the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Some homes had their windows shut, but the sound of children playing and the aroma of baking bread wafted through, indicating that some people were still around.

Most residents who have remained inside the camp were too afraid to venture out.

But Mariam Fayed and the remaining five members of her family came out Sunday to survey the devastation. She said men in her family had left the camp before the Israeli army moved in.

For 10 days, the family survived on meager portions of bread and rice, said Fayed, displaying a pot of chopped greens from her garden and mixed with fried onions.

"We heard they lifted the curfew, but the last time they said that one of our neighbors went out to buy food and the soldiers shot at him," she said.

At one spot, a strong stench filled the air near the corpse of a man in a blue jacket and with a burnt face. The front of his house was missing, and a chicken wandered around the corpse.

Nearby, an elderly woman peered anxiously from behind a white curtain. "My goats are gone," she shouted. "I'm starving. Give me bread."

Elsewhere in the camp, entire floors of apartment blocs had tumbled, with the few walls left standing pockmarked with shell and bullet holes.

A group of Israeli soldiers patrolling the camp on foot and with two sniffer dogs later stopped a group of journalists touring the camp on their own and asked them to leave. On the tour organized by the army, journalists were told that Palestinian militants booby trapped everything in the camp from rifles to garbage bags to refrigerators. The Israeli troops fighting them "window to window" and "house to house" could only advance about 100 yards a day.

So fierce was the fighting that the camp's central square has been reduced to a vast mass of rubble, dust and dirt. Most of the rest of the camp, was not much different, resembling a town in the wake of a devastating earthquake.

Col. Yoram Lavie, commander of the army's main battalion in the camp, said Palestinian resistance had ceased entirely on Saturday, but he suspected some Palestinian gunmen were still hiding.

Lt. Yoni Wolff, commander of a platoon that took part in the main battle around the camp's square, said the great majority of the Palestinian gunmen had surrendered, but acknowledged that when the rest refused to do so, the army's bulldozers moved in.

"We never bulldozed houses if we knew civilians were inside, only when firing persisted despite our repeated calls for surrender," he said.

He also acknowledged that bodies could still be under the rubble, but said he doubted there were very many.

Journalists saw one body there - a bearded and burly Palestinian in his 30s wearing fatigues caked with dust. The left side of his face was charred and one eye missing. A horizontal streak of blood ran across the left side of his forehead as flies swarmed over his face.

--------

Living under the gun

April 14, 2002
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020414-25428180.htm

The Israelis say their war is against terrorism. The Palestinians say their war is against occupation. In the past 18 months, the two sides have racked up nearly 2,000 deaths, although the real toll may not be known for weeks.

Since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell left Washington for his Mideast peace mission one week ago, Israeli troops have battled Palestinian gunmen throughout the West Bank, with hundreds dead. Israel also has suffered two suicide attacks, which killed 13 Israeli commuters and shoppers.

The suicide bombing Friday at a packed market in Jerusalem pummeled Mr. Powell's peace mission only hours after he arrived.

"We go out to do our shopping, and we don't know if we'll come home," said Udi, who was buying vegetables on Jaffa Street when the teen-age girl blew herself up. "Peace is better than this."

But day by day, it seems, a thirst for vengeance supplants the desire for peace in all of these hearts.

"The last straw for me was the Passover massacre. Thirty people at a Seder. On our holiday. That is making it personal," said a Jerusalem shop owner. A suicide bomber killed 27 persons in a hotel dining room as they sat down to begin the weeklong holiday on March 27.

On the Palestinian side, Suzanne Abutair, a U.N. medic who lives in Bethlehem, said she supports the suicide bombings because they are resisting an occupying army that is far better armed.

"We are not leaving, and we will not put up with this anymore," said Mrs. Abutair, whose family of four has been under curfew in their Bethlehem home for nearly two weeks. "We will not die quietly any longer."

With both the Palestinians and the Israelis living under an emotional and physical siege, here is a look at life in wartime as it unfolded last week in the Middle East.

Lost hope

JERUSALEM - On Friday afternoon, David Margan watched the emergency units scream past on their way to Jaffa Street, where so many Israelis come to buy their groceries.

He was only a few blocks from the lethal bombing that afternoon outside the Mahane Yehuda market, and for the computer programmer, it is a queasily familiar sensation.

Another bomb exploded on nearly the same site two years ago, and his mother was nearly trapped in the rubble.

"I am an ordinary man. I don't seek out this danger," Mr. Margan said, "but this is everywhere now. This is our life, and it's not going to get any better while the Palestinians, the terrorists, are allowed to run free."

A tall, slender man whose yarmulke is nearly hidden by unruly hair, Mr. Margan said he once had hopes for a peace between the two states, with a divided Jerusalem as their capitals. But now, he said, that is just too close.

"I don't know why Palestinians need Jerusalem. It is not in the Koran. It is in the Old Testament. It belongs to us, to the Jews."

Mr. Mardan, a somewhat shy man in his 30s, tried to speak deliberately and politely. But he raised his voice to be heard above the passing sirens, and before long, the words rushed from him like air from a blown tire.

"Why do they need a state? Why do they have to be here? They could go anywhere. There is no other place for us, the Jewish people, to go. We are hunted everywhere. Now," he said, slamming the counter at a convenience store, "we are even hunted, persecuted, here."

Mr. Margan said he just came back from Amsterdam, on a business trip that he admitted he extended because he couldn't bear to come home to the land he loves.

"I am white with envy; I am just white," he said. "They walk, they shop, they don't need to have the eyes in the back of their heads."

He turned to face the street, where ambulances were in less of a hurry, but police jeeps streamed to the scene of Israel's 36th completed or attempted bombing incident since late January.

He took the change from an orange drink that had turned warm on the counter. And after apologizing for his "anguish," he ambled off to watch the cleanup begin.

The crying man

HAIFA, Israel - Ahmed Masri, a burly man who used to teach karate, refused to take off his sunglasses because his eyes were swollen.

"My crew said I am the crying man," he said, "but I can't help it."

Mr. Masri, an Israeli Arab with six small children, is the foreman of a road crew that cleans up accidents around the port city of Haifa.

Usually, it's a fender-bender with broken glass and maybe spilled oil.

But during the rush hour Wednesday, a Palestinian from the nearby Jenin refugee camp boarded a commuter bus and detonated a belt packed with explosives and nails.

Seven Israelis died with the suicide bomber, and 14 were wounded. Mr. Masri's crew was summoned to clean up.

"I found people on the road, [body] parts, their clothing, all up and down the road. I know I will keep seeing this day. I am not going to feel good for a week."

Mr. Masri, 40, said he cannot understand what would drive a man, even a desperate one, to kill himself and many others.

"I have to say, when this happens, I don't feel good about the Arabs. They are wrong, this is wrong."

It was the third suicide bombing in the Haifa area in the last six weeks.

By now, he says, his eight-man emergency crew can clean up the scene of a bombing in under three hours.

"The only hope is peace," Mr. Masri said, lighting up a fresh Marlboro with the stub of a smoldering cigarette butt crushed between his fingers.

Separate lives

JERUSALEM - It is a pleasant Friday evening in West Jerusalem, and there is only one restaurant open, a pleasant Italian eatery with a welcoming patio and soft pop music.

As darkness falls and the Sabbath begins, two men in the black frock coats and broad-brimmed hats of Orthodox Judaism pause, scowl and shout abuse into the restaurant, called La Piatto.

Sarah Barkai, 26, rushes to the street, yelling after them in Hebrew.

"I'm very sorry," she said later. "I never shout at them, but tonight I just got too angry. Week after week, they don't let us live."

With the recent spate of suicide bombings, business has been bad all over Jerusalem. Tourism has evaporated, and Israelis have moved their vaunted cafe society inside. Restaurants, bars and coffee shops are surviving on hope.

But it's been especially hard on secular Jews such as Miss Barkai, whose family moved here from France a decade ago and who think of themselves first as Israelis.

"We want to work, we want to stay open on the Sabbath," she said, sitting down on the patio with a glass of red wine that shakes in her hands.

"Why can't they live their lives and we live ours?" she asked of the Orthodox Jews.

Differences between nonobservant Jews and the Orthodox have been simmering for decades and have shaped everything in Israel from the placement of hospitals to the character of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

But some secular Jews say the friction has been exacerbated by fears of the next suicide attack.

The restaurant has just hired a security guard, a shy Ethiopian Jew, to sit on the patio and screen all diners.

He seemed to tense up when groups of Othodox Jewish men, called Haredim, slow down to scowl and shout.

"It's one threat or the other," Miss Barkai said. "We paid extra for the permit to open over Passover, and we were busy every night. But if you ask me, never again."

Miss Barkai, a short-story writer who loves music, said she has never been so afraid of anger and prejudice.

With Israel's incursion into Ramallah that began nearly three weeks ago, and a new bus bombing on Wednesday morning, an already tense city has redlined into fear.

La Piatto, like many restaurants in Jerusalem's central pedestrian mall, have begun to impose a one-shekel surcharge - about a quarter - to subsidize the cost of a security guard.

So far, merchants say, no one objects to the extra expense.

Suffering Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM - It's all far too quiet for Sister Munera, who runs a Catholic orphanage and maternity hospital on the western edge of this small city best known as Jesus' birthplace.

The facility has about 100 maternity patients, one-third of normal, and 50 orphans right now.

Sister Munera, a Catholic nun in her 50s, is perplexed, fearful and very angry.

"The mothers cannot get here, and I don't know what they are doing," she said. "The babies will not wait for the Israelis to leave."

Sister Munera fears that women, unable to get to the hospital, are trying to deliver babies at home, or in small clinics that may not be equipped for complicated births.

"When they open up the roads again, I am afraid of what we will find," she said.

More than a week after Israeli troops stormed Bethlehem, the overwhelming impression here is one of silence, occasionally broken by the sound of gunfire and exploding tank shells.

Around the Church of the Nativity, the city center has been immobilized by a tense standoff between armed Palestinians inside and Israeli soldiers outside.

But only four blocks away, just beyond the Israeli army's tourniquet of tanks and troops, shops are closed with metal shutters pulled tight.

An Internet cafe, a dry cleaner, electronics shops and grocery stores have folded in on themselves to present the most anonymous face possible.

Above the street, apartments lie strangely quiet: Without television, there is no sound. Without electricity, there is no light.

The only sounds are the crunch of our boots over broken glass and the gurgling of broken water pipes. Occasionally, there is the pop of gunfire from the direction of the Deheishe refugee camp, a few miles south.

Posters of young men line the empty streets. A few have suits and smiles; the rest are posing with rifles, sunglasses or the Palestinian flag. These are local martyrs, heroes: Some were killed by Israeli soldiers. Others became suicide bombers bent on dying a death that matters.

The posters evoke memories of the weeks after September 11, when faces of World Trade Center victims lined the streets of New York. Public mourning here seemed every bit as intense.

At night, Sister Munera said she and her staff carry tiny mattresses into an inner hallway, so the children can sleep away from the boom of firing tanks.

Even so, she says, the constant rumble and recurring booms are creating psychological problems for her charges.

The younger children, no more than 6, have begun wetting themselves and picking fights. The babies cry all the time.

"Do I tell them they are Nazis?" the nun said of the Israelis. "Do they think this way of treating people will stop the attacks? They will see more attacks now and again when these children grow up."

Beyond rage

GAZA CITY - Abu Ahmed Motteer has been angry for so long that he has transcended the rage and instead displays an outward calm.

He has fought the Israelis and has served time in their prisons.

With a quiet voice, he said his tormenters are about to taste Palestinian vengeance and that he's just waiting.

Mr. Motteer is a refugee living in a teeming and noisy camp on the edge of Gaza City, very close to the Mediterranean Sea he never looks at.

"This massacre in Jenin is nothing new," he said, referring to last week's battle in the West Bank city in which more than 100 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israeli soldiers died.

"Soon [the Israelis] will move here. And they will learn what resistance really is."

Mr. Motteer said he used to be a militant, although he has given that up to be an entrepreneur - making furniture - and to start a family. Today he is a businessman with a worried wife and four young children.

He used to belong to the Patriotic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group dedicated to the eradication of Israel.

"I have been in Israeli prisons five times," he said. "The last time was for three years, during the first intifada."

He hoisted his leg onto his desk and proudly displayed a horrific scar that runs most of the way around his ankle.

"Bullet," he said with pride. "Israeli." Mr. Motteer said he won't be doing any more fighting, but he also seemed confident that his neighbors will know what to do when the Israeli army tries to penetrate the camp.

"When they come, we will be armed," he said through an interpreter. "Daytime, everyone is a worker. At night, we don't know who they are."

The narrow streets around his shop have been barricaded with sand berms, a trick that slows invading tanks and provides convenient sniper positions and a hiding spot for explosives.

Mr. Motteer said he thinks the Israeli invasion is inevitable and that when the war ends, he hopes business will pick up.

"No one can afford furniture now," he said, offering cigarettes to his visitors.

But when the Israelis are repulsed, people "will need new furniture," he said.

Saddened sisters

RAMALLAH - Aya and Lamia Hamayel skittered quickly through the sunshine on a recent afternoon, liberated from their Ramallah home for the second time in two weeks.

The girls, both civil engineering students at Bir Zeit University, were happy to be out buying cucumbers and yogurt when the curfew was lifted. But they also were grieving for the city they love and the life of study that has been interrupted.

"The city is destroyed," Lamia, 22, said as the girls took in the trash-strewn streets the broken windows, and paused beside a poster of Yasser Arafat that Israeli soldiers had graffitied in Hebrew.

"I am so sad to see this. Look at what they have done," said Aya, seeming to shrink into her long cloak and head scarf.

The Hamayel family has been living without water, telephone lines or reliable electricity since the Israeli army invaded March 28. To cope, they began collecting rainwater in every bottle and bucket they could find.

"We wash clothing with the rain, but we have to buy our drinking water," said Aya, 24.

The Hamayel home quickly became a prison to the two older daughters.

"At first we would watch television, but then we couldn't do anything but cry," said Aya. "We cannot read at night. That is a torture."

-------- nepal

Rebels in Nepal Kill Over 300, Police Say

April 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nepal.html

KATHMANDU - Nepal's king on Sunday appealed for peace and unity in a New Year message to his nation, three days after more than 300 people were believed killed in the increasingly bloody communist revolt to topple him.

``All Nepalese... must...unite in widening the base of mutual confidence and understanding through democratic exercise,'' King Gyanendra said in a message broadcast to the nation marking the Himalayan Hindu kingdom's new year.

``Continued violence and destruction of development infrastructure in the country has left our economy in shambles,'' said the king, who assumed the throne last June when the crown prince killed King Birendra and other relatives in a palace massacre before shooting himself.

The tiny impoverished nation is under emergency rule as King Gyanendra and his government try to crush Maoist rebels seeking to create a one-party communist state and who control about a quarter of the country.

Authorities fear more than 300 people died in two of the bloodiest attacks of the six-year rebellion on Thursday, including dozens of policemen forced to strip before being executed. Some were reportedly beheaded.

About 100 bodies have been recovered and officials said the area around Dang in Nepal's remote western region was littered with many more.

``The entire area is flooded with vultures, flying over looking for bodies,'' said police officer Lokendra Malla.

He said about 250 rebels were feared dead, including 45 bodies already recovered.

Rebel officials could not be immediately contacted.

``Soldiers are digging ditches for more rebel bodies,'' Dang district officer Mathur Prasad Yadav said. ``Bodies are scattered around the jungle, the fields and the riverbanks.''

Buildings were still smoldering on Sunday.

``It was a devastating scene out there,'' local journalist Sharat K.C. told Reuters by telephone from nearby Nepalgunj after visiting both sites.

Residents said the firefight raged for more than three hours and the guerrillas fled with their fallen comrades before dawn.

``On Friday morning, villagers saw two tractors packed with the bodies of rebels killed in the battles who might have been buried in the nearby jungle or riverside,'' a radio station in Kantipur said.

On Saturday, four people were taken from their homes and executed by a group of 50 people. No one has claimed responsibility, but officials blamed Maoist guerrillas.

The rebellion has wrecked Nepal's economy -- four percent of which comes from foreign tourism -- and forced the government to divert vital money away from development.

More than 3,500 people have been killed since the insurgency began in February 1996 -- about 1,500 of them since the rebels walked away from peace talks in November. The violence has devastated an economy dependent on tourism and aid.

-------- pakistan

THE FUGITIVES
In Pakistan, a Troubling Victory in Hunt for Al Qaeda

New York Times
April 14, 2002
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/international/asia/14STAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom

FAISALABAD, Pakistan - This industrial city deep in the interior of Pakistan was never high on the list of places deemed likely to provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terror network.

But on March 28, at about 2 a.m., F.B.I. agents and Pakistani police commandos raided Shahbaz Cottage, a two-story house on the city's outskirts that had been rented out only four weeks earlier to what the owner thought was a Pakistani family trading in auto parts on the other side of town.

After a shootout on a neighbor's roof, the raiders retreated with a group of captives who included about 20 Arabs, and Faisalabad awoke to find itself at the heart of a drama with little precedent in its largely uneventful history. Among those arrested, the Bush administration later confirmed, was a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia who uses the pseudonym Abu Zubaydah. He is believed by American intelligence to be the operations director for Al Qaeda and the highest-ranking figure of that group to be captured since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since confirming Mr. Zubaydah's identity and the fact that he was seriously injured in the shootout, Washington has said almost nothing about the raid or its implications and has not disclosed where Mr. Zubaydah was taken.

Speculation in Pakistan has centered on the air base at Jacobabad, about 425 miles southwest of Faisalabad. The United States leased the base last fall along with at least three other bases needed for military operations in Afghanistan.

Another possibility is that Mr. Zubaydah has been flown to the American base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where other Al Qaeda and Taliban captives are being held. All that has emerged from statements by the F.B.I. and the Pentagon is that he and the other captives were transferred to American custody, and that Mr. Zubaydah, who is said by Pakistani police officials to have been shot three times, in the chest, groin and thigh, is receiving appropriate medical care.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also said that Mr. Zubaydah will not be tortured as his questioners seek information about other Al Qaeda fugitives, including Mr. bin Laden, the most wanted of them all.

From what is known about the Faisalabad raid and similar raids in the neighboring city of Lahore that netted suspects, there appears to be a new dimension to the hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda figures: the possibility that other fugitives, too, have disappeared deep into the teeming cities of this nation of 140 million people. There, help in finding hide-outs from sympathetic groups would be virtually assured.

Bush administration officials have frequently said that they have no leads on where Mr. bin Laden or his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may be, or even if they are still alive. Still, the recent focus of the American search has been mainly in the mountainous tribal areas on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, and mostly around the southeastern Afghan city of Khost, where sympathies for Al Qaeda and the Taliban run high.

Finding Mr. Zubaydah in Faisalabad, along with a group of Al Qaeda men who Pakistani police said included men from the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, is the surest indication yet that the possible hide-outs reach far beyond the tribal areas.

In Faisalabad, the Qaeda men were captured only four weeks after moving into the rental house. But Pakistani police officials said the breakthrough came when the fugitives made a mistake others may now avoid - making telephone calls from their hide-out, possibly on a satellite phone, that triggered electronic monitoring systems run by American intelligence.

Although it is Pakistan's third largest city, with a population of more than three million, Faisalabad could lay claim to being the most anonymous of the country's major urban areas. Primarily a textile city, it has its share of radical madrasas, the seminaries that have nurtured a generation of Islamic militants. It is 200 miles southeast of the closest border point with Afghanistan, the area near Khost, and has had links to that country since young men from the madrasas here went to fight Soviet occupation troops there in the 1980's.

But Faisalabad has never had the sort of turbulent reputation that attaches to Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, cities that have been factories of Islamic extremism. Perhaps it was just this anonymity that attracted Al Qaeda.

Certainly, the house the group chose was situated in about as quiet an area as any Pakistani city could offer. Just off the road leading into the city from Lahore is a new suburb called Faisal Town, named like the city itself after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who was a major benefactor of Pakistan. Much of Faisal Town consists of open building plots, and the houses that have been built belong mostly to lawyers, doctors and well-to-do businessmen.

"It's a peaceful area, and it's just my bad luck that I had to rent it out to Al Qaeda," said Shaheen Kausar, the travel agent who owned the house.

Although using the telephone led to their capture, the Qaeda men operated, in other ways, like men disciplined by a clandestine life, using local contacts to keep their own profile virtually invisible.

Ms. Kausar said her property agent in Faisalabad was approached on Feb. 28 by a man in his early 30's calling himself Saeed Jibran. The man claimed to be a Pakistani and said he needed the house urgently for two Pakistani brothers who were his friends, and for their parents, who the man said were just returning from a pilgrimage to holy places in Saudi Arabia. A 12-month lease was signed, at the equivalent of about $270 a month, and the man paid the first month's rent and a security deposit of about $250.

The only identification used in the transaction, Miss Kausar said, was a business card Mr. Jibran said belonged to one of the two brothers, identified on the card as Abdul Jabbar, owner of Millat Autos, an auto parts business on the city's north side. But a visitor to the area 10 days after the raid found the premises abandoned. Other traders said it had closed down three months ago, and that the owners were "clean-shaven men" who showed no sign of being Islamic militants. "They liked to watch Indian video films, with dancing girls," said a trader who gave his name as Nasir.

In Faisal Town, immediate neighbors of the rented house said they never saw anybody entering or leaving the house. Ali Raza, who owns an adjacent house and runs a business selling textiles, said the first inkling he had that anybody was living in the house came when he was awakened on the morning of the raid by shouts from outside his gate demanding that he open up. "Before that night, I never saw a single person come or go," he said.

Fearing a robbery, Mr. Raza said, he withdrew into an inner bedroom with his wife and two children, then listened as the men at the gate - Pakistani commandos and F.B.I. agents - broke down the gate and stormed up an outer staircase to his roof. There, he said, the raiders caught up with several of the occupants of the rented house who had leaped from a parapet onto his roof. Gunfire followed that left one of the fugitives dead and another, apparently Mr. Zubaydah, seriously wounded.

Pakistani newspapers quoted police officials as saying that the dead man was identified from documents found in the house as a 31-year-old Syrian named Abu Hasnaid, and that F.B.I. forensic specialists who visited the Faisalabad hospital where the body was taken removed tissue samples for DNA testing. Senior police officers said they were unable to confirm these or other details because they were informed of the raid only at the last minute by superiors in Lahore, the Punjab capital. "This was something run by the S.S.G., and we were kept in the dark," said one officer, referring to the Special Services Group, an elite Pakistani police unit.

Another detail that received extensive coverage in Pakistani newspapers was a handwritten schedule of duties found taped to the kitchen wall in the house. Among a list of Muslim names of those detailed to do kitchen duties on successive days of the week, there was one intriguing entry.

"Saturday, Osama," it said. For days after the schedule was published, Pakistani papers cited it as evidence that Mr. bin Laden may have been in the house and left before the raid.

But Faisalabad police officials who were asked about the entry mostly chuckled, noting that Osama is a common name. In any case, one of the officers said, there was something improbable in supposing that Mr. bin Laden would have been assigned to a regular kitchen duties, even if he had been in the house. "Osama bin Laden is not a man to wash dishes, as I know of him," the officer said.

The raid on the house in Faisal Town was one of two conducted simultaneously in Faisalabad. Across the city, in an area known as Muslim Town, another mostly middle-class neighborhood, F.B.I. agents and Pakistani commandos stormed the home of an education professor at a government-run college, Hamidullah Khan Niazi, on suspicion of aiding the Qaeda fugitives in Faisal Town. At the professor's home and that of his brother next door, 12 men, including Mr. Niazi, relatives and student lodgers, were arrested.

All were released after several days of questioning, and F.B.I. agents who carried off boxes full of documents, books, audio tapes and computer disks sent word that everything seized could be recovered from a police intelligence center in Lahore.

Pakistani newspaper accounts said the raid, like the one in Faisal Town, had been triggered by American electronic intercepts indicating that Mr. Niazi's home telephone had been used for calls involving Al Qaeda, and that those making the calls were loyalists of a banned Pakistani Islamic group with close links to Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Over an evening's discussion, Mr. Niazi insistently denied any connection to Al Qaeda or Mr. Zubaydah, and said that if his phone had been used to make such calls, they had to have been made by strangers tapping into his line through what Pakistanis call a public call office - a common ruse in Pakistan, where the lowly paid officials who man the curbside call offices sometimes earn extra money by placing calls on lines belonging to local homes.

But as the interview continued, it became clear that Mr. Niazi and the men in his family, all of them with the long beards favored by Islamic conservatives, were not enemies of Al Qaeda's causes or friends of the United States, even if they had nothing to do with helping fugitives find a hide-out. After 25 years of tolerance, and in some cases connivance, from Pakistani civilian and military governments, pockets of Islamic militancy can be found in virtually every neighborhood in the country.

"I have this opinion about America," said Ziyad Ikram Niazi, the professor's nephew. "America is a country that has everything, and still it imposes its will on distant countries that have nothing. Is that justice?" His uncle, picking up the theme, said the raid had proved another point about America.

"I am a distinguished professor of the city, and I am hauled from my bed at the dead of night and humiliated," he said. "The Americans are always crowing about human rights this, human rights that, but where are the human rights in what they did here?"

-------- russia / georgia

Russia-Georgia Showdown

WORLD
In Brief
Saturday, April 13, 2002
Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41631-2002Apr12?language=printer

AZHARA, Georgia -- Russia triggered a showdown with the former Soviet republic of Georgia yesterday, landing heavily armed troops in a remote gorge, but Georgia's president, Eduard Shevardnadze, said he had secured the commander's pledge to withdraw.

Helicopters filled with Russian troops wearing blue helmets and camouflage body armor landed in the Kodori Gorge, a no man's land on the edge of Georgia's rebel Abkhazia region, and began unloading supplies to build a checkpoint.

The deployment outraged Georgian officials, just weeks before the planned arrival of U.S. military instructors for a training mission that has infuriated Moscow.

Georgia's parliament erupted in turmoil when the announcement was made. Defense Minister David Tevzadze warned that his troops would shoot if the Russians failed to pull out.

But Shevardnadze flew to the site and met the Russian commander. By nightfall the Georgian leader, known in the West for helping end the Cold War as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's top diplomat, seemed to have defused the standoff.

-------- spy agencies

Russian Makes CIA Drug Allegation

April 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US-Espionage.html

MOSCOW -- A Russian government defense employee at the center of the latest spy scandal with the United States was drugged and recruited by the CIA while seeking information about long-lost relatives, he said on state-run television Sunday.

The employee, identified only as Viktor, told RTR television he was trying to fulfill his dying father's wish to contact relatives who fled to the United States decades earlier and wrote a letter back. That letter in the 1950s was ignored at the KGB's request.

Viktor's face was blacked out during Sunday's broadcast.

Russia's Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, said last week it foiled an alleged U.S. espionage effort involving Viktor. The accusations came after a string of spy scandals in recent years and amid preparations for a U.S.-Russian presidential summit next month.

In the interview with RTR, Viktor said he decided against contacting the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to fulfill his father's wish last year because he works for a Russian Defense Ministry installation and thought such a visit would raise suspicion.

Instead, he approached an embassy in another ex-Soviet republic. The FSB has not named which country.

Embassy employees promised to help Viktor and arranged another meeting.

``I started to understand in the middle of the conversation that they were trying to recruit me,'' Viktor told RTR. ``But I cannot describe how the conversation ended or how I ended up at the Russian Embassy.''

Viktor later was found on a public bench suffering from shock and amnesia, RTR said. The Russian Embassy sent him to Moscow, where the FSB concluded that U.S. officers had slipped him psychotropic drugs in drinks and cookies in an effort to extract information.

Under FSB control, Viktor then received instructions and secret packets from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The Russian security service identified Viktor's contact as Yunju Kensinger, a third secretary in the embassy's consular department, and reported its discoveries to the U.S. Embassy.

The embassy did not respond, RTR said. Kensinger -- who allegedly never met with Viktor but instead used secret drop points and messages in invisible ink, according to the security service's press office -- left Moscow last month.

CIA officials and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow have declined to comment on the allegations, which were first reported last week.

--------

Silicon Valley's Spy Game

April 14, 2002
By JEFFREY ROSEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/magazine/14TECHNO.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

Gilman Louie is one of the most successful computer-game developers of all time. ''I'm your classic entrepreneur,'' he told me recently. ''I started my first business with my fraternity brothers at San Francisco State.'' Louie, an amateur fighter pilot, had his first big success in 1987 with a game called Falcon, which allowed players to simulate the flight of an F-16. Falcon sold millions of copies, not only to teenage boys but also to pilots in the United States Air Force, who found it so realistic that it helped them learn to fly real fighter jets. Louie's biggest success came in 1988, when he imported from the Soviet Union an unexpectedly addictive game called Tetris, which became the best-selling computer game ever. ''Between Nintendo sales and PC sales, 70 or 80 million copies of that game sold,'' Louie says. ''We even found out that Hillary Clinton loved playing Tetris on the Game Boy.''

Lots of companies were impressed by Louie's success, including Hasbro, which put him in charge of creating its games Web site. And then in 1998, Louie was recruited by an even more powerful employer: the Central Intelligence Agency. ''The C.I.A. actually thought that my computer-game background was a valuable asset,'' Louie recalls. ''I look at the world as one big system -- one big game.''

The C.I.A. had just founded an unusual venture-capital firm called In-Q-Tel, and the agency wanted Louie to be the C.E.O. ''The 'Q' stands for the 'Q' factor -- it's named after the character in James Bond,'' says Louie. In-Q-Tel was the brainchild of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, who believed that by investing $30 million a year in Internet startups in Silicon Valley, the C.I.A. could encourage the development of cutting-edge technologies that might be useful for national intelligence. Louie's marching orders were to provide venture capital for data-mining technologies that would allow the C.I.A. to monitor and profile potential terrorists as closely and carefully as Amazon monitors and profiles potential customers.

The valley has long indulged its own antiestablishment mythology -- rebellious, libertarian hackers in their parents' garages, bucking the system by inventing world-changing, personally empowering technologies -- and Louie was worried that persuading programmers to collaborate with the C.I.A. would be ''borderline ludicrous.'' Despite his doubts, Louie agreed to open one In-Q-Tel office in Menlo Park, Calif., and another near Washington. He quickly discovered that far from recoiling at the idea of working with the C.I.A., Internet entrepreneurs flocked to his door. The chance to play with the government's cool toys trumped their fears of Big Brother.

After the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley, desperate for venture capital, began to depend more and more on the federal government. Then came Sept. 11, and the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel now finds itself just one of several deep-pocketed federally financed investors that are eager to back technological solutions to our new security challenges. The Bush administration is asking Congress for $38 billion for homeland security, and much of this money will be parceled out among competing federal agencies -- including the Defense Department and the F.B.I. -- which can then use the money either to invest directly in security technologies or to follow In-Q-Tel's model of providing venture capital to young companies in the private sector. Like the C.I.A., the Office of Homeland Security has concluded that the same technologies that were useful before Sept. 11 for tracking, profiling and targeting potential customers can be turned today on potential terrorists. In the wake of the bursting of the tech bubble and in the thick of the war on terrorism, Silicon Valley is reinventing itself as the new headquarters for the military-technological complex.

As always, the entrepreneurs are following the money. In January, this led them to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show of futuristic gadgets in North America. After Sept.11, the conference organizers decided to sponsor a special exhibition hall at the Riviera Hotel for technologies that are especially well suited to homeland defense. That old familiar gold-rush feeling was in the air at the Riviera: one speaker estimated that federal spending on security technologies would grow by 30 percent a year, rising to $62 billion by 2006. (''God bless America'' read the PowerPoint slide, over an image of firefighters raising the flag.) In the buzzing exhibition hall, participants admired a hologram of the Statue of Liberty, as well as a man in a gigantic thumbprint costume, who had been hired by a company called DigitalPersona to advertise its fingerprint-recognition device.

After displaying their wares, the technologists flocked to an In-Q-Tel reception near the exhibition hall, trolling for federal investors from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Defense Department. ''All we served was pot-stickers and 7-Up,'' Louie recalls, ''but people didn't want to leave.''

In Las Vegas, several companies predicted that profiling techniques that are now used to detect credit-card fraud could soon be used to detect potential terrorists. A few weeks later, this prediction turned out to be a reality, when The Washington Post reported that the federal aviation authorities and two technology companies called Accenture and HNC Software are planning to test at airports a profiling system designed to analyze each passenger's living arrangements, travel and real-estate history, along with a great deal of demographic, financial and other personal information. Using data-mining and predictive software, the government then plans to assign each passenger a ''threat index'' based on his or her resemblance to a terrorist profile. Passengers with high threat indexes will be flagged as medium or high risks and will be taken aside for special searches and questioning.

Our system ''will check your associates,'' Brett Ogilvie of Accenture told Business Week. ''It will ask if you have made international phone calls to Afghanistan, taken flying lessons or purchased 1,000 pounds of fertilizer.'' The only problem: in order for the system to obtain answers to those questions, the nation's privacy laws will need to be relaxed. Federal laws currently restrict the personally identifiable information that the government can demand from credit-card and phone companies except as part of a specific investigation.

When I called Brett Ogilvie to ask what data Accenture proposes to analyze, his spokeswoman, Stacey Jones, said that she couldn't reveal that information: it's a trade secret. ''Anyone who is interested in beating the system can, once we start divulging what the systems are,'' she explained. I said that I wasn't interested in the specific profiling factors; I only wanted to know whether Accenture proposed to include information in its database that the government isn't now permitted to examine. But Jones stuck to her script: ''National security and client confidentiality prohibits us from divulging what the factors are.''

Accenture's profiling scheme is open to question not only because it would almost certainly violate the privacy rights of airline passengers, but also because it seems unlikely to work. Investigators will tell you that people who commit credit-card fraud often fit a consistent profile -- using the stolen card to buy gas at self-service stations, for example, and then using it to buy clothes. By contrast, terrorists don't fit a consistent profile: you're looking for a needle in a haystack, but the color and the shape of the needle keep changing. Mohamed Atta might have been kept out of the country if immigration officials had been aware that there was a warrant for his arrest in Broward County, Florida. But Accenture's profiling system is not designed to check passengers against a watch list of suspected criminals or terrorists. Instead it is designed to compare the purchasing activities and personal behavior of millions of passengers with those exhibited in the past by a tiny group of terrorists -- to create a predictive profile of likely hijackers.

Lawrence Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford and is the nation's leading authority on the law and architecture of cyberspace, argues that the Accenture system is unworkable. ''I can understand these massive data systems to deal with things like stealing from the government or not paying your taxes -- systematic repetitive large-scale deviations from the law,'' he says. ''The problem I really have with the terrorism stuff is, do we have any good reason to believe we could ever predict this type of behavior?'' Because the sample of known terrorists is so small, Lessig says, the profiles are bound to be inaccurate.

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are undaunted by questions about whether it makes sense to profile terrorists the way they profile e-business consumers; they haven't been so enthusiastic about a race to innovate since the height of the dot-com bubble. In the glory days of the late 90's, Silicon Valley was consumed by the search for the ''killer app,'' the software application that was just so cool and effective that everyone had to buy it. After Sept. 11, the consensus in the valley is that the national-security ''killer app'' will allow government agencies to access and share information about Americans that is currently stored in different databases -- from your chat-room gossip to your shopping history to your parking tickets, and perhaps even the payment history for your child-support checks.

''Today, every federal intelligence and law-enforcement agency and all manner of state and local bodies maintain their own separate databases on suspected criminals,'' Larry Ellison, the founder and C.E.O. of Oracle Corporation, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last October. ''Do we need more databases? No, just the opposite. The biggest problem today is that we have too many. The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file.'' Oracle, in fact, is the world's largest database manufacturer, and Ellison offered to donate the software for a single national database free of charge to the United States government. (The company, Ellison added, would charge for upgrades and maintenance.)

Oracle's office in Reston, Va., is near the headquarters of the C.I.A., which is appropriate enough: when Larry Ellison founded the company 25 years ago, his first client was the C.I.A., to whom he sold a program called Oracle, the world's first ''relational'' database. At that time, information in computer databases was stored in unrelated files: a company like Ford, for example, could keep one file of its employees and another file of its departments, but it had no easy way of relating the two files. Ellison saw the commercial potential of the relational database and began marketing it in 1979. By the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, Ellison's net worth had soared to $80 billion, making him (briefly) the richest person in the world.

When I visited Oracle in January, the security guard in the lobby gave me a high-tech ID badge that could track where I was in the building at all times. I was ushered upstairs to a bright conference room where seven people were sitting around a huge oval table. One of them, David Carey, turned out to be the former No. 3 man at the C.I.A.; he had just retired as executive director after 32 years with the agency. Carey joined Oracle to head its new Information Assurance Center, which was founded in November to design homeland-security and disaster-recovery solutions and market them to the federal government.

Like his colleagues, Carey was in an expansive mood. He said that the United States government accounted for 23 percent of Oracle's multibillion-dollar licensing revenue last year and that he expected the federal side of the business to improve after Sept. 11. ''How do you say this without sounding callous?'' he asked. ''In some ways, Sept. 11 made business a bit easier. Previous to Sept. 11, you pretty much had to hype the threat and the problem.'' Carey said that last summer, leaders in the public and private sector wouldn't sit still for a briefing. Then his face brightened. ''Now they clamor for it!'' After Sept. 11, Carey and Ellison held a series of top-level meetings in Washington about the use of Oracle technology for homeland security. ''In November, Larry had a serious discussion with Vice President Cheney, and I met with Ridge, Ashcroft and Mueller,'' Carey says, referring to the director of the Office of Homeland Security, the attorney general and the director of the F.B.I.

I asked to see an example of Oracle's new homeland-security technology, and I was ushered into a demonstration hall outside the conference room that looked like something out of the last ''Star Wars'' movie. ''I'll give you an overview of 'Leaders,''' said Brian Jones, then the head of Oracle's health-care consulting unit. ''It stands for Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System.'' By collecting health-care information from hospital emergency rooms across the country, Leaders is designed to monitor outbreaks of suspicious diseases and provide early warnings for biological attacks.

At 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 11, Jones had received a phone call from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which feared that the attack on the twin towers might be followed by a bioterrorism attack. Working for 10 straight hours, Jones put into his computer the address of every hospital in New York State, to detect unusual disease outbreaks, like smallpox. ''Every hospital was capable of submitting data to a repository,'' he explained. ''The Centers for Disease Control's experts could sit back in Atlanta and pull up a map just like I'm showing you here.'' Jones punched a key and a digital map of New York City appeared on the screen. Using a combination of 7,500 digital photographs and architectural plans of more than 6,000 miles of underground pipes, Oracle has created a detailed map of every building, sewer and water line and curb in the city. By the evening of Sept. 11, Jones was ready to monitor every emergency-room bed in the state.

Oracle is now working with the federal government to apply the same surveillance system to hospitals throughout the country. The system would allow hospitals to report incidents of suspicious diseases like anthrax, smallpox and Ebola to a central database. The program can then send out e-mail or voice-mail alerts to law-enforcement officials if it detects suspicious patterns of diseases anywhere in the country. Steve Cooperman, Oracle's new director of homeland security, said, ''We're going to build a bioterrorism shield, so eventually everyone is going to have to participate -- every hospital, every clinic, every lab.''

The prospect of every hospital in America reporting your medical condition to a central Oracle database might cause some patients alarm. (Oracle insists that the information can be stored in ways that can't be linked to individual patients.) The same potential for invasions of privacy is raised by Larry Ellison's proposal to centralize all of the separate criminal databases run by federal and state authorities into a single national database. After we filed back into the conference room, David Carey explained that Oracle is already discussing with various federal agencies methods of sharing information that are currently restricted by law.

''We think of it as a triangle,'' said Tim Hoechst, a senior vice president for technology at Oracle, holding up a Dorito. ''At one corner is privacy, at one corner is assurance of security -- how safe is the data -- and at another corner is usability. It's all a matter of trade-offs. What we focus on is making the Dorito here, and putting you in any corner that you feel comfortable with. On Sept. 12, most Americans would say, Privacy out the window; go catch the folks. So we would have moved it all the way to usability. But maybe day to day, we move it a little bit more toward security.''

As the databases are consolidated, I asked, who should decide the proper balance between privacy and access? How do you avoid a situation in which someone could be kept off a plane because he had skipped jury duty or had an overdue parking ticket? A hush fell over the room, and people looked awkwardly at their sandwiches.

Finally Hoechst spoke up. ''You'll notice that we all became suspiciously quiet when we started talking about policy questions,'' he said. ''At Oracle, we leave that to our customers to decide. We become a little stymied when we start talking about the 'should wes' and the 'whys' and the 'hows,' because it's not our expertise.''

The Tom Lehrer song about the Nazi rocket scientist who defected to America popped into my head: ''Once ze rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.''

''I expect that if you ask Larry Ellison the question he'd give you a much better answer,'' one of Hoechst's associates chimed in. Hoechst agreed. ''My experience with him is that he knows an extraordinary amount about a lot of things. Every time I think I know something, he knows much more. He's read more books on it.''

So I set off for Silicon Valley to meet Larry Ellison. The Oracle campus near the San Francisco airport is known as the Emerald City, for its artificial lakes and silo-shaped towers of glass and silver. Ellison's private palace, however, is a $30 million mansion in nearby Atherton, modeled on the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. I was checked in there by two bodyguards with dark shirts and dark tans and escorted into the house to wait. The living room was large and airy, with lots of blond wood and shoji screens. It overlooked a beautiful Japanese garden, where ducks swam and waterfalls shimmered.

Ellison appeared a few minutes later from behind one of the screens, wearing a pressed charcoal suit over a black turtleneck. He appeared fit and tanned, with piercing hazel eyes and a trimmed beard slightly flecked with gray. He suggested that we talk in the garden, but the loud whine of a neighbor's mulcher made this impossible. (In Silicon Valley, even $30 million doesn't buy you quiet.) Defeated by the noise, we retreated to the dining room, with its high-backed black lacquer chairs and black lacquer table.

Ellison is not a shy or enigmatic billionaire. He is entertainingly indiscreet -- he answered every question with a torrent of confident opinions. ''The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything,'' he said. ''The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo is stored in an Oracle database.'' Much of the information in these separate commercial databases is also centralized in large databases maintained by credit-card companies like TRW to detect fraud and to decide whether customers should get credit at the mall.

When it comes to government data, by contrast, there are hundreds of separate, disconnected databases. ''The huge problem is the fragmented data,'' he said. ''We knew Mohamed Atta was wanted. It's just that we didn't check the right database when he came into the country.'' Ellison wants to consolidate the hundreds of separate state and federal databases into a single Oracle database, using the centralized credit-card databases as a model. ''We already have this large centralized database to keep track of where you work, how much you earn, where your kids go to school, were you late on your last mortgage payment, when's the last time you got a raise,'' he said. ''Well, my God, there are hundreds of places we have to look to see if you're a security risk.'' He dismissed the risks of privacy violations: ''I really don't understand. Central databases already exist. Privacy is already gone.''

As Ellison spoke, it occurred to me that he was proposing to reconstruct America's national security strategy along the lines of Oracle's business model. When Oracle moved its business to the Internet in 1995, Ellison complained that its customer information was scattered across hundreds of separate databases, which meant that the German office couldn't share information about customers with the French office. By consolidating 130 separate databases into a single database on the Internet, Ellison said, Oracle saved a billion dollars a year and found it easier to track, monitor and discriminate among its customers. This was what Ellison now wanted to do for America.

I asked if there would be any controls on access to the database. For example, would Ellison want people to be kept off a plane because they were late on their alimony payments?

''Oh, no, I don't think we would keep anyone off on alimony payments,'' Ellison said. ''But if the system designed to catch terrorists also catches mere bank robbers and deadbeat dads, that's O.K. I think that's a good thing. I don't think it's a bad thing.''

There are, at the moment, legal restrictions prohibiting the sharing of data by government agencies. The most important restriction was passed in 1974, to prevent President Nixon from ordering dragnet surveillance of Vietnam protesters and searching for their youthful marijuana arrests. I asked Ellison whether these legal restrictions should be relaxed. ''Oh, absolutely,'' he said. ''I mean absolutely. The prohibitions are absurd. It's this fear of an all-too-powerful government rising up and snatching away our liberties.'' Since Sept. 11, Ellison argued, those qualms no longer make any sense: ''It's our lives that are at risk, not our liberties,'' he said.

Ellison proposes to link the central government database to a system of digital identification cards that would be optional for citizens but mandatory for aliens. He wants each card holder to provide a thumbprint or iris scan that would be stored in the central database. I recalled that Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School had explained to me that a national fingerprint database was probably the most invasive of all possible designs for an identification system, because it would allow the government to dust for fingerprints in a nightclub or a protest scene and identify everyone who was there. I asked Ellison why the government couldn't minimize these privacy concerns by storing the fingerprint on the ID card.

Ellison dismissed the suggestion. ''Everyone's got this amorphous idea that the government will somehow misuse this,'' he said, ''but no one has given me a substantive example of what will happen that's bad.''

I tried again. What about the centralized storage of health information, as Oracle was proposing to do with the Leaders system. Would Ellison want government officials to have access to personally identifiable genetic information?

''I feel like Alice has fallen through the looking glass,'' Ellison said. His voice rose; he was starting to get a little testy. ''Does this other database bother you here? We can't touch that database because I won't be able to use my credit card. Like, I won't be able to go to the mall!'' He took on the voice of Sean Penn's stoner from ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'' ''Like, that's really disturbing. Like, don't mess with my mall experience. O.K., so people have to die over here without this, but that's not going to affect my experience going to the mall.'' He exhaled, and in his regular billionaire voice asked, ''I mean, what the hell is going on?''

Ellison said he was late for an appointment at Intel and started to make motions to leave. I tried one more question. Were there no differences between Oracle and the United States government, I asked, that should make us hesitate before centralizing all of our national databases using Oracle as a model?

''From the information-science standpoint, there's no difference at all,'' he replied. ''These central databases are cheaper and better and they solve all these problems. We can manage credit risks that way. We should be managing security risks in exactly the same way.''

It's not surprising, of course, that Larry Ellison sincerely believes that what's good for Oracle is good for America. But there are, in fact, differences between an e-business and the American government, differences that perhaps should make us hesitate before reconstructing America along the business model of the Oracle Corporation.

''Depending on how these technologies are designed, they can respect traditional values of liberty or not,'' says Lawrence Lessig, ''and whether they do depends on the values that drive the designers and the institutions we build to check the design.'' Although Lessig's path-breaking book ''Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'' argues that it's possible to design technologies that protect privacy and security at the same time, he has become pessimistic that Silicon Valley, left to its own devices, will get the balance right. ''The reality is that all the market power is going to be on the side of delivering the security, and there's no strong claim on the other side for delivering the privacy,'' he says. ''There's no court that will stand up and push the demand for heightened review for privacy, and there's no politician. And then you have Larry Ellison types riding in with the glow of the market. He's like a rich version of a North Korean dictator.''

Here, then, is the Catch-22 of the integrated databases that are being constructed in the wake of Sept. 11: the technologists want the politicians to decide the balance between privacy and security, but because the technology is so complicated and unfamiliar, very few politicians seem up to the task. I visited Maria Cantwell, the newly elected senator from the state of Washington and perhaps the most technologically savvy member of the Senate. (She complains that Congressional rules prohibit her from taking her BlackBerry wireless communicator onto the Senate floor but allow her to use a spittoon.) Cantwell learned about the importance of Internet privacy as an executive for RealNetworks, which markets one of the most popular Internet music players. In 1999, RealNetworks got into trouble when privacy advocates noticed that the player could send information to RealNetworks about the music each user downloaded. RealNetworks had the capability to match this data with a Globally Unique Identifier, or GUID, that exposed the user's identity. Although RealNetworks insisted that it had never, in fact, matched the music data with the GUID, the company was eager to avoid a public-relations disaster, and so it quickly disabled the GUID. The experience helped turn Cantwell into a crusader for privacy, but her time in the Senate has made her more pessimistic that her colleagues in Congress have the understanding or inclination to regulate technology in a meaningful way.

''What I don't think people realize is that we are just at the tip of the iceberg,'' she told me. ''I think they're trying to be prescriptive on some very basic things, not understanding the world that's yet to come. I try to explain some of the new technology to my colleagues'' -- by which she means her fellow senators. ''You're going to be able to be driving and say, 'Hey, take me to the nearest Starbucks,' and they all think that's great. And then I say, but it also might be stored in a database that may also be able to track where you were at 2 o'clock in the morning.''

Cantwell worries that her Senate colleagues are so swept up in the search for a technological solution to our security problems that regulating access to the databases isn't on their agenda. ''I mean, databases can become a threat in themselves if you don't think through the right safeguards,'' she said. ''People are getting enamored with the power of the technology and not thinking through the privacy issues and how they might apply.''

In the face of Congressional indifference and judicial passivity, it has fallen to the technologists to sort out the appropriate balance between liberty and security. But this is a challenge that the technologists are ill equipped -- by culture and temperament -- to meet.

The gonzo entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley like to think of themselves as antigovernment libertarians; the business nostrums of the precrash era assumed that the Internet would lead inevitably to the end of hierarchy and centralized authority and the flourishing of individual creativity. When the e-business technologies of tracking, classifying, profiling and monitoring were used to identify the preferences of American consumers and to mirror back to each of us a market-segmented version of ourselves, Silicon Valley could argue that it was serving the cause of freedom and individual choice. But when the same software applications are used by the government to track, classify, profile and monitor American citizens, they become not technologies of liberty but technologies of state surveillance and discrimination. They threaten the ability of Americans to define their identity in the future free from government predictions based on their behavior in the past. Far from leading inevitably to the end of centralized authority, the age of the Internet turns out to include powerful economic and political forces that are determined to centralize as much information about individuals as possible.

The technology for integrated databases already exists, waiting to be activated by the flip of a switch. In the wake of Sept. 11, few politicians or judges seem willing to keep the forces of centralization in check. And no one should count on the technologists to police themselves.

I had one last question for Larry Ellison. ''In 20 years, do you think the global database is going to exist, and will it be run by Oracle?'' I asked.

''I do think it will exist, and I think it is going to be an Oracle database,'' he replied. ''And we're going to track everything.''

Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His last article for The Times Magazine was about the growth of surveillance.

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Taiwan Declassifies Military Papers

April 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Taiwan-Military.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan's military has declassified documents about the island's secret plans to retake the Chinese mainland in the 1950s -- including a plan to fire nuclear artillery shells at a Chinese port -- a newspaper reported Sunday.

Hoping the U.S. military would provide it with nuclear weapons technology, the Taiwanese army drew up a plan in 1958 to fire nuclear shells at China's southern port of Xiamen from the nearby Taiwanese-held islet of Kinmen, the United Evening News quoted the documents as saying.

The report said the U.S. military first worked on the plan with Taiwan's army but later backed off, fearing such an attack could cause a heavy death toll in China and could also prompt China to seek nuclear technology from the Soviet Union.

The Defense Ministry had declassified some documents for use by academics and researchers, but not to the public, a ministry official said on condition of anonymity Sunday. The official declined to comment on the newspaper report.

Officials at the U.S. representative office in Taiwan could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Gen. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communist forces in 1949. Chiang built Taiwan into an anti-communist bastion and pledged to retake the mainland.

But after Chiang died in 1975, his son and successor, President Chiang Ching-kuo, focused more on building the island's economy and defenses against a feared invasion by China.

The newspaper report said the Taiwanese army had also made detailed plans to launch a massive landing in southern China in 1956, involving infantry, marines, paratroopers and a tank unit. But the U.S. military refused to offer logistical support and the plan was dropped, the report said.

Citing the declassified documents, the newspaper said Taiwan also sent troops and planes to Indonesia in 1958 to help anti-communist rebels fighting the left-leaning government. Taiwan also sent warplanes to help anti-communist forces in Yemen in 1962, the report said.

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Taiwan military declassifies documents about secret plans to retake Chinese mainland

Sun Apr 14, 2002
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020415/ap_wo_en_ge/taiwan_military_5

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan's military has declassified documents about the island's secret plans to retake the Chinese mainland in the 1950s - including a plan to fire nuclear artillery shells at a Chinese port - a newspaper reported Sunday.

Hoping the U.S. military would provide it with nuclear weapons technology, the Taiwanese army drew up a plan in 1958 to fire nuclear shells at China's southern port of Xiamen from the nearby Taiwanese-held islet of Kinmen, the United Evening News quoted the documents as saying.

The report said the U.S. military first worked on the plan with Taiwan's army but later backed off, fearing such an attack could cause a heavy death toll in China and could also prompt China to seek nuclear technology from the Soviet Union.

The Defense Ministry had declassified some documents for use by academics and researchers, but not to the public, a ministry official said on condition of anonymity Sunday. The official declined to comment on the newspaper report.

Officials at the U.S. representative office in Taiwan could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Gen. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communist forces in 1949. Chiang built Taiwan into an anti-communist bastion and pledged to retake the mainland.

But after Chiang died in 1975, his son and successor, President Chiang Ching-kuo, focused more on building the island's economy and defenses against a feared invasion by China.

The newspaper report said the Taiwanese army had also made detailed plans to launch a massive landing in southern China in 1956, involving infantry, marines, paratroopers and a tank unit. But the U.S. military refused to offer logistical support and the plan was dropped, the report said.

Citing the declassified documents, the newspaper said Taiwan also sent troops and planes to Indonesia in 1958 to help anti-communist rebels fighting the left-leaning government. Taiwan also sent warplanes to help anti-communist forces in Yemen in 1962, the report said.

-------- us

Navy Drone Washes Up in Puerto Rico

April 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Beach-Bomb.html

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- An inert 13-foot U.S. Navy missile washed up on a northern beach of Puerto Rico on Sunday, not far from where children swam and played.

Most likely the drone was used in military maneuvers in the area ``and got lost in the ocean,'' Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr Katherine Goode said. ``It happens sometimes.''

A local man found the inert cruise missile, painted orange and gray and marked ``target,'' in shallow water at Jarealito beach, near the town of Arecibo, on Sunday morning, police spokesman Rodrigo Perez said.

The man alerted police, and two other men dragged the missile onto the sand, police said. Children played and people swam near the drone until the Navy arrived at about 2 p.m. and cleared a 50-foot perimeter around it.

``I'm not against the Navy, but they should take better precautions,'' said resident Ricardo Lopez, who was at the beach with his 7-year-old daughter, Paulette.

Goode said the drone was unlikely to be from exercises that began two weeks ago around the Navy's contested bombing range on the outlying island of Vieques, off Puerto Rico's east coast.

Twenty-three protesters have been arrested for trespassing on Navy land during the current round of war games, in ongoing efforts to force the Navy to abandon its range on the island inhabited by 9,100 people.

There were no exercises Sunday, the Navy said.

-------- venezuela

Popular Uprising Allows Chavez