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NUCLEAR
Oil Supply, Nuclear Fusion Occupy G-8 Energy Ministers
Nuclear Reactor List
Events Raise Nuclear Safety Questions
Taiwan apologises to island over nuke waste dump
Mutations Can Carry Over Generations
Events Raise Nuclear Safety Questions
Britain needs better nuclear waste storage
EU parliament reassures Lithuania on nuclear plant
Norway calls meeting on nuclear disasters
FDA OKs Breast Cancer Treatment Device
Mutations Can Carry Over Generations
Russian Nuke Minister to Visit D.C.
US Accuses Libya, Syria and Cuba on Weapons Spread
Utility group sees new US nuclear plant on horizon
Newsletter from Congressman Mark Udall
House Offers $29.8B Anti-Terror Bill
Powell, Rice diverge on strategy
MILITARY
U.S. Raids Along Afghan Border Seen as Lasting Past Summer
From Hilltop Perch, British Troops Watch for Holdouts
U.S. Arms Transfers and Security Assistance to Israel
Colombia Gov't: Death Toll at 110
Colombia rebels met with dozen IRA chiefs
Cuba May Have Bio Warfare Program
Tentative Deal for Bethlehem Is Agreed Upon
Israelis Release More Documents Accusing Arafat of Terror
Japan Parliament Readies Attack Plan
Israel Army Says Soldiers Spooked
Israeli Forces Raid W. Bank City in Fresh Incursion
Arab Nations Cool to U.S. Idea of Mideast Peace Conference
Sharon, and Arab Officials, Press White House on Mideast
Nepal Says Over 400 Rebels Are Dead After Several Battles
Pakistan Team Leaves for Washington
U.S. Military Leaving N. Philippines
Official: Russia ID'd 80 Spies
UK Bill will give OFT surveillance powers
U.S. Pulls Out of International Court Treaty
Navy Must Reopen Contract Bidding
Gulf War Vets Ill from Anthrax Vaccination, Medication
Venezuelan Democracy Investigated
POLICE / PRISONERS
Mayor Says No One Is Immune
Ex - Cop in LAPD Scandal Gets 2 Years
Guantanamo's Camp Delta Almost Full
In Michigan, Anti-Terrorism Effort Goes Public
Death-penalty law argued in court
Law Professors Give State Court a Novel Theory on Executions
Mullah Mohammed Omar instructs hidden Taliban
Another Pipe Bomb Found in Nebraska
ENERGY AND OTHER
Japan solar cell makers to boost production
Black cloud spreads in toxic Canada train fire
ACTIVISTS
Burmese Democracy Advocate Is to Be Freed From House Arrest
Greenpeace asks Prodi where EU stands on nuclear
Cuba Releases a Dissident
Myanmar's Suu Kyi Freed, Vows Fight
-------- NUCLEAR
Oil Supply, Nuclear Fusion Occupy G-8 Energy Ministers
May 6, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2002/2002L-05-06-04.html
DETROIT, Michigan, Energy ministers from the world's eight largest economies have formally recognized the critical importance of being prepared to respond to oil disruptions. Ministers from the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting here Thursday and Friday agreed that net oil importing countries must maintain emergency oil stocks and commit to coordinating their use during significant disruptions.
In their final declaration, the G-8 energy ministers said, "We agreed on the importance of physical protection of energy facilities, as well as the value of flexible oil, gas, and electricity transport networks with multiple links between energy suppliers and consumers, to reduce the vulnerability to disruption of these critical resources."
Minister Natural Resources Canada, Herb Dhaliwal (Photo courtesy NRCan)
The first G-8 gathering to focus on energy since a Moscow meeting four years ago, the meeting in Detroit is only the second G-8 energy ministerial meeting ever held. It is one of several meetings being held in the United States and Canada by G-8 ministers in advance of the G-8 Summit this summer. Canada hosts the 2002 Summit of the G-8. Presidents and Prime Ministers will be meeting in Kananaskis, Alberta on June 26 and 27.
The countries participating are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States.
"We recognize the value to all of us when other countries, including those in Asia whose energy demand is projected to increase sharply, build similar stocks to improve their resilience in the face of oil supply disruptions," the ministers said, and pledged to share their experiences with other countries on effective means of doing so.
The energy ministers affirmed the importance of both nuclear power and renewable energy technologies into the future.
In his speech to the ministers, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the Bush administration is seeking to develop nuclear fusion - the kind of reaction that powers the sun - as a "realistic source of energy."
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (Photo courtesy DOE)
Conventional nuclear power is based on the fission reaction that occurs when atoms are split. Fusion of atoms produces vast energy that, to date, has been uncontrollable for human use.
"We are now engaged in serious consultation here in the United States and around the world on how best to pursue a fusion program. President Bush is particularly interested in the potential of the international effort known as ITER and has asked us to seriously consider American participation."
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful purposes. Scientists and engineers from Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia are working to complete the project by 2013. The United States took part until 1998.
Abraham endorsed nuclear power as "one existing source of power that presents no emissions challenge at all." Nuclear power supplies 20 percent of the electric power in the United States; 30 percent in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan; and 80 percent in France.
The United States, France, Japan and others are working together to develop a Generation IV nuclear reactor with enhanced passive safety features and a simpler, more economical design, he said.
"The new generation reactor will attempt to address the two principal objections to nuclear power: the danger of the release of radioactive materials, and the high initial capital investment required for construction of new plants."
To solve problems of energy security, economic growth, and environmental protection, the G-8 ministers said their final declaration, "Most G-8 members stress the value of nuclear energy in this context, providing optimal safety and waste handling are ensured."
Abraham forecast that over the next 20 years energy demand in G-8 countries will rise by 33 percent and in the developing world by 100 percent, bringing them nearly equal to G-8 consumption by 2020.
"In the United States we project a 45 percent increase in electricity generating capacity over the next 20 years. That works out to between 1,300 and 1,900 new power plants. We will have to build more than one power plant a week, and the power lines to go with them, to meet our requirements," Abraham said.
BNFL Chapelcross Magnox nuclear power station (Photo courtesy Freefoto.com)
Europe will have to build new generating capacity equivalent to its entire current electricity generating system in 20 years to meet projected demand, he said.
Ensuring a secure energy supply and a capable infrastructure must be done in "an environmentally responsible manner," Abraham said. "Clearly, in striking the right balance between energy security and environmental performance, we must aim to make the environmental cost negligible and the energy for growth benefit significant."
The G-8 is "making enormous progress in developing new technologies to address our environmental concerns," said Abraham.
G-8 countries account for 60 percent of the world's total energy use consuming nearly 40 million barrels of oil per day, over half the total world demand, he told the ministers.
He said the G-8 nations produce and consume 72 percent of the world's nuclear energy, 56 percent of its electricity; 43 percent of its coal and 68 percent of its natural gas.
Over the next two decades, world oil consumption, about one-half of it for transportation, is projected to increase from about 75 million barrels per day in 1999 to about 120 million barrels per day in 2020, Abraham told the ministers.
The infrastructure challenge is even more daunting, he added, with investment needs in the range of $2 trillion over the same period of time.
The United States depends on the Trans Alaska Pipeline to deliver 17 percent of its domestic oil production. (Photo courtesy Alyeska Pipeline Service Company)
"This rapid oil consumption growth raises concerns about global energy security, the risk of oil price shocks to the global economy, and local, regional, and global environmental quality," Abraham said.
He said the United States is moving towards hydrogen fuel cell cars, the use of alternative fuels such as those derived from biomass, and energy efficient vehicles, including advanced engines, engine hybrid vehicles, and electric vehicles.
Minister of Natural Resources Canada, Herb Dhaliwal, representing the world's largest exporter of uranium, said, "I was also very interested to hear the Secretary's comments about the administration's interest and possible re-entry to the ITER program. Canada has made a formal offer to host ITER at the Clarington site near Toronto, Ontario.
The Spanish government has decided to offer a candidature for the European siting of ITER at Vandellos, near Barcelona.
Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Takeo Hiranuma (Photo courtesy Office of the Minister)
On the global warming issue, Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Takeo Hiranuma asked the U.S. to return to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement on mandatory cuts to emissions of heat trapping greenhouse gases by industrialized countries, the Kyodo news agency reported.
While acknowledging the importance of coping with global warming, Abraham reiterated that the U.S. will deal with the issue mainly through technological innovations, according to a Japanese official.
The energy ministers were offered workshops such as the one on fuel cells and the potential for a hydrogen economy featuring Firoz Rasul, chairman and CEO of Ballard Power Systems of North Vancouver.
The eight ministers underscored their reliance on free market practices to ensure enough clean electricity for all.
"Ultimately," they declared, "success in enhancing energy efficiency and improving access by the public to clean energy technologies depends critically on private investment facilitated by sound policies. We therefore affirm the importance of working with developing countries to share experiences with respect to legal, policy and regulatory practices that can facilitate investment and access to energy."
-------- accidents and safety
Nuclear Reactor List
The Associated Press
Monday, May 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41927-2002May6?language=printer
Nuclear power reactors with the greatest vulnerability to cracking of their control rod nozzles because of age and temperature conditions or a history of cracking. Plants have been subject to inspection for cracking and have committed to making required repairs when cracks are found:
Arkansas Nuclear Unit 1, Russellville, Ark.
Crystal River Unit 3, Crystal River, Fla.
Davis Besse, Oak Harbor, Ohio.
D.C. Cook Unit 2, Benton Harbor, Mich.
H.B. Robinson Unit 2, Florence, S.C.
Millstone Unit 2, New London, Conn.
North Anna Units 1 and 2, Richmond, Va.
Oconee Units 1, 2 and 3, Greenville, S.C.
Surry Units 1 and 2, Newport News, Va.
Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, Pa.
Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
-------
Events Raise Nuclear Safety Questions
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Reactor-Worries.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A nuclear reactor in Ohio is found to have a large hole nobody thought possible, burned almost through its six-inch protective steel cover. Cracks of a type never seen before are discovered at a reactor in South Carolina, triggering widespread inspections.
Both events caught industry leaders and government regulators by surprise, and they are fueling new questions about aging nuclear power plants and plant inspection programs.
The cracks found last year at the Oconee plant in South Carolina and the hole discovered in March in the steel reactor lid at the Davis Besse plant in Ohio were in areas thought largely impervious to such problems.
``It was material degradation that wasn't expected,'' acknowledges Alex Marion of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group.
The 25-year-old Davis Besse reactor on the shore of Lake Erie is one of four nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Corp. It has been shut down since February, waiting for the hole in the reactor dome to be patched.
An inspection of most of the 68 other plants with similar designs and conditions reported no corrosion. But the regulators ordered special inspections at 14 reactors thought to be vulnerable to nozzle cracking because of their age.
Some senior officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are viewing the Davis Besse and Oconee discoveries as the most significant safety issue facing the nuclear industry since the Three Mile Island accident 23 years ago.
The steel reactor vessel, which encloses the reactor's core, has always been viewed as ``a sacred component'' that will not be breached, said Brian Sheron, the commission's assistant director for licensing and technology assessment. ``This really challenges that assumption.''
The problems at both reactors were discovered before they posed an immediate safety risk. A break through the reactor cover would have caused thousands of gallons of radioactive water to spew into the containment building, raising the risks of the core overheating and a potential meltdown and possible release of radiation into the environment.
Only a thin noncorrosive stainless steel membrane kept the hole at the Ohio reactor from bursting open. The cracks at the Oconee plant, owned by Duke Power, were less urgent. But had the crack expanded it could have caused the nozzle to separate, also causing a loss of cooling water inside the reactor, nuclear experts said.
Industry spokesmen said backup safety systems would have averted more serious problems, by pumping more water into the reactor than was being allowed to escape, keeping the nuclear fuel safe until the reactor could be shut down.
But that's true if everything worked perfectly, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and industry watchdog for the Union of Concerned Scientists. And that may not be the case if emergency pumping systems became clogged with debris, if other equipment is damaged, or a gauge is misread by plant operators struggling to make sure the reactor core remains covered with water, he said.
At the very least, argue nuclear industry critics, the Davis Besse and Oconee incidents reveal shortcomings in how utilities inspect older power plants and how the NRC monitors them.
``The industry is trying to ensure safety while turning a profit, so they have competing interests that ... at times diverge,'' says Lochbaum.
The hole and cracks were found in largely inaccessible areas where there is substantial radiation and inspections can be done only when the plant is shut down.
The Davis Besse corrosion was caused by a buildup of boric acid from leaking reactor cooling water dating back to the mid-90s. The first signs of corrosion appeared in 1998. Concerns about nozzle cracking were first raised in 1991 after an incident in France.
Yet their significance was not fully recognized until the recent alarms.
``If this occurred in Russia we would be saying it could never happen here,'' former NRC Commissioner Victor Gilinsky wrote in a recent commentary in The Washington Post on the Davis Besse discovery. Gilinksy called it ``a narrow escape'' from a potential catastrophic accident.
NRC officials said inspections of other reactors have found no buildup of boron contamination. Nozzle cracks have been found at 34 reactors and are being fixed.
FirstEnergy acknowledges signs of corrosion as early as 1998 when filters at Davis Besse became clogged with rust and some of the boron crystals were observed as turning from white to red.
``We didn't do a good job of recognizing pieces of the puzzle,'' says Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the subsidiary that runs the plant 26 miles east of Toledo.
NRC officials and industry executives say the 1991 nozzle incident in France was discounted because a test concluded that the cracking could not cause nozzle separation. A decade later at Davis Besse, similar cracks were leaking as much as 12 gallons of water an hour.
The hole at the Ohio plant was found only because of an NRC inspection order arising from the cracking at the Oconee plant.
A nozzle supposedly affixed to the reactor dome at Davis Besse unexpectedly moved several inches when engineers began repairing cracks in it.
Leaking borated water in itself is not a corrosion problem. But at Davis Besse, the water, rather than evaporating, settled beneath the hardened layers of boron -- just enough moisture needed to turn the crystals back into corrosive boric acid.
This produced ``a whole new phenomenon,'' says John Grobe, head of an NRC task force investigating the incident. ``This kind of corrosion has never been seen before on a reactor pressure vessel head.''
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
Nuclear Energy Institute: http://www.nei.org.
Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org
-------- asia
Taiwan apologises to island over nuke waste dump
REUTERS TAIWAN:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15810/story.htm
TAIPEI - Taiwan Economics Minister Lin Yi-fu has offered an apology to aboriginal residents of a tiny island where the government stored its nuclear waste, local media reported yesterday.
"I can understand how you feel," Lin told the aboriginal tribesmen, residents of tiny Lanyu island, who began to protest outside Taiwan's only nuclear waste storage facility on May 1.
Taiwan currently dumps its nuclear waste - a by-product of its three nuclear power plants - on Lanyu, 80 km (50 miles) southeast of Taiwan.
Lin said on the weekend the government would set up a committee within one month to study plans to remove the waste, but gave no timetable for the actual removal.
The government has pledged to close the dump by the end of this year, but no money has been allocated for the task in this year's budget. The site's 98,112-barrel capacity is nearly exhausted.
Years of efforts to search for a new location have been futile. Possible overseas locations have been considered including the Marshall Islands, Russia and even Taiwan's rival China, Taiwan Power Company has said.
In 1998, Taiwan was forced to abort a plan to ship 60,000 barrels of low-radiation nuclear waste to North Korea after heavy pressure from home and abroad, particularly from South Korea.
----
Mutations Can Carry Over Generations
By Paul Recer
AP Science Writer
Monday, May 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41876-2002May6?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Radiation exposure caused mutations that persisted into the third generation of laboratory mice in an experiment, suggesting genetic changes from high doses of X-rays and other radiation can be inherited by children and grandchildren.
The study, appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to systematically demonstrate the passage of radiation-caused mutations from one generation to another, say experts. But they say the mutations are subtle, with no apparent, proven effect on health.
Earlier studies have found no inherited mutations among human families that were exposed to high levels of radiation, such as those at Hiroshima, Japan, target of the first use of the atomic bomb, and at Chernobyl, site of a major nuclear plant accident.
Richard B. Setlow, senior biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., reviewed the study for the National Academy and said the findings are significant because they prove for the first time that radiation-caused mutations can be inherited in mammals.
"This study will open the way for further experiments to answer ... questions" about inherited mutations from radiation, said Setlow. "Before this study, no one knew what to look for."
In the study, researchers led by Yuri E. Dubrova of the University of Leicester, United Kingdom, exposed a group of male mice from two different strains to whole body neutron and X-ray radiation.
They then allowed the animals to reproduce with unexposed partners and checked the descendants for the rate of mutation. Both the children and the grandchildren of the exposed male mice showed evidence of DNA changes at a rate higher than mutations that naturally occur from generation to generation among unexposed mice.
The researchers noted that the inherited changes they found were subtle and involved DNA that had "no apparent function."
However, the researchers said that the fact that mutations carried over from one generation to another are a matter of concern because of the possible increased risk for cancer and other disorders.
Researchers have never identified an inherited mutation among families of Hiroshima survivors, but that "doesn't mean that they weren't there," Setlow said.
The genetic variability between people is much greater than it is between the mice used in the experiment, he said. This variability could mask the inherited genetic changes caused by radiation, he said.
"We want to know what the risks of radiation are," said Setlow. "So this is something we have to worry about. There could be something transferred to the offspring even though we can't detect it readily."
The mapping of the human genome, or genetic structure, may make it possible for researchers to detected inherited mutations that were not obvious before, said Setlow.
On the Net:
Proceedings: http://www.pnas.org/
----
Events Raise Nuclear Safety Questions
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Monday, May 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41755-2002May6?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- A nuclear reactor in Ohio is found to have a large hole nobody thought possible, burned almost through its six-inch protective steel cover. Cracks of a type never seen before are discovered at a reactor in South Carolina, triggering widespread inspections.
Both events caught industry leaders and government regulators by surprise, and they are fueling new questions about aging nuclear power plants and plant inspection programs.
The cracks found last year at the Oconee plant in South Carolina and the hole discovered in March in the steel reactor lid at the Davis Besse plant in Ohio were in areas thought largely impervious to such problems.
"It was material degradation that wasn't expected," acknowledges Alex Marion of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group.
The 25-year-old Davis Besse reactor on the shore of Lake Erie is one of four nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Corp. It has been shut down since February, waiting for the hole in the reactor dome to be patched.
An inspection of most of the 68 other plants with similar designs and conditions reported no corrosion. But the regulators ordered special inspections at 14 reactors thought to be vulnerable to nozzle cracking because of their age.
Some senior officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are viewing the Davis Besse and Oconee discoveries as the most significant safety issue facing the nuclear industry since the Three Mile Island accident 23 years ago.
The steel reactor vessel, which encloses the reactor's core, has always been viewed as "a sacred component" that will not be breached, said Brian Sheron, the commission's assistant director for licensing and technology assessment. "This really challenges that assumption."
The problems at both reactors were discovered before they posed an immediate safety risk. A break through the reactor cover would have caused thousands of gallons of radioactive water to spew into the containment building, raising the risks of the core overheating and a potential meltdown and possible release of radiation into the environment.
Only a thin noncorrosive stainless steel membrane kept the hole at the Ohio reactor from bursting open. The cracks at the Oconee plant, owned by Duke Power, were less urgent. But had the crack expanded it could have caused the nozzle to separate, also causing a loss of cooling water inside the reactor, nuclear experts said.
Industry spokesmen said backup safety systems would have averted more serious problems, by pumping more water into the reactor than was being allowed to escape, keeping the nuclear fuel safe until the reactor could be shut down.
But that's true if everything worked perfectly, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and industry watchdog for the Union of Concerned Scientists. And that may not be the case if emergency pumping systems became clogged with debris, if other equipment is damaged, or a gauge is misread by plant operators struggling to make sure the reactor core remains covered with water, he said.
At the very least, argue nuclear industry critics, the Davis Besse and Oconee incidents reveal shortcomings in how utilities inspect older power plants and how the NRC monitors them.
"The industry is trying to ensure safety while turning a profit, so they have competing interests that ... at times diverge," says Lochbaum.
The hole and cracks were found in largely inaccessible areas where there is substantial radiation and inspections can be done only when the plant is shut down.
The Davis Besse corrosion was caused by a buildup of boric acid from leaking reactor cooling water dating back to the mid-90s. The first signs of corrosion appeared in 1998. Concerns about nozzle cracking were first raised in 1991 after an incident in France.
Yet their significance was not fully recognized until the recent alarms.
"If this occurred in Russia we would be saying it could never happen here," former NRC Commissioner Victor Gilinsky wrote in a recent commentary in The Washington Post on the Davis Besse discovery. Gilinksy called it "a narrow escape" from a potential catastrophic accident.
NRC officials said inspections of other reactors have found no buildup of boron contamination. Nozzle cracks have been found at 34 reactors and are being fixed.
FirstEnergy acknowledges signs of corrosion as early as 1998 when filters at Davis Besse became clogged with rust and some of the boron crystals were observed as turning from white to red.
"We didn't do a good job of recognizing pieces of the puzzle," says Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the subsidiary that runs the plant 26 miles east of Toledo.
NRC officials and industry executives say the 1991 nozzle incident in France was discounted because a test concluded that the cracking could not cause nozzle separation. A decade later at Davis Besse, similar cracks were leaking as much as 12 gallons of water an hour.
The hole at the Ohio plant was found only because of an NRC inspection order arising from the cracking at the Oconee plant.
A nozzle supposedly affixed to the reactor dome at Davis Besse unexpectedly moved several inches when engineers began repairing cracks in it.
Leaking borated water in itself is not a corrosion problem. But at Davis Besse, the water, rather than evaporating, settled beneath the hardened layers of boron - just enough moisture needed to turn the crystals back into corrosive boric acid.
This produced "a whole new phenomenon," says John Grobe, head of an NRC task force investigating the incident. "This kind of corrosion has never been seen before on a reactor pressure vessel head."
-------- britain
Britain needs better nuclear waste storage - report
REUTERS UK:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15806/story.htm
LONDON - Britain must improve the way it stores radioactive nuclear waste and set up an independent body to deal with its long-term disposal, said the Royal Society, a leading scientific academy, last week.
In a report for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the society said the government and nuclear industry had concentrated on fighting public hostility and neglected developing up-to-date technologies for storing nuclear waste.
Britain's nuclear waste stockpile stands at 10,000 tonnes but is set to grow to 500,000 tonnes over the next century, even if no new power plants are built.
"There has been a failure to recognise that the management, decommissioning and clean-up of radioactive waste require the same focus on research and technological innovation as the programme to develop the nuclear industry," Geoffrey Boulton, chairman of the Royal Society said in a statement.
Last week the government said Britain must invest in its ageing nuclear industry or it would fail to meet its target of cutting emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change.
The Royal Society called for the creation of a Waste Management Commission to design a policy for long-term disposal of radioactive waste from the nuclear industry.
Michael Meacher, environment minister, launched a public consultation into nuclear waste storage in September but admitted it could be five years before a decision was taken.
The academy warned the government should not wait to tackle the problem until after it had decided whether to build new nuclear plants.
"(However), any proposals for building new nuclear power stations would need to be accompanied by acceptable plans for both short-term and long-term disposal of the waste that will be produced," Boulton said.
He called for better collaboration between DEFRA and the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI).
Britain said in November it will set up a national body to take on most of the country's nuclear liabilities, such as the cost of decommissioning old plants and disposing of waste.
The liabilities from state-run nuclear facilities total 42 billion pounds.
Britain presently reprocesses some spent nuclear fuel but other radioactive waste is stored at power stations or at the Sellafield reprocessing plant.
A plan to store nuclear waste underground near Sellafield was blocked in 1997 after the local authority refused planning permission.
-------- europe
EU parliament reassures Lithuania on nuclear plant
REUTERS LITHUANIA:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15814/story.htm
VILNIUS - European Parliament President Pat Cox tried to reassure Lithuania over EU demands it close its Soviet-built nuclear power plant, saying MEPs would approve proposals to help pay the costs.
Agreeing a date to close the Ignalina nuclear power plant - similar in design to Ukraine's ill-fated Chernobyl plant and considered dangerous by the European Union - is the biggest obstacle to the Baltic state's EU entry.
Under EU pressure Lithuania has already agreed to shut down the first of its two reactors by 2005 but talks are deadlocked over Brussels' demand it set a 2009 deadline for closing the second.
The European Commission - the EU executive - has so far proposed funding of 70 million euros per year from 2004-2006 plus another 40 million euros of pre-accession funds for Ignalina's closure.
"I would like to tell you on behalf of the European Parliament that for those funds that have already been signalled by the EU...we will give those funds," Cox told a news conference while on a visit to Vilnius.
Lithuanian officials have said the pledged funds are encouraging, but just the tip of the iceberg. Total decommissioning of the plant is expected to cost 2.4 billion euros - or about 19 percent of the country's 2001 gross domestic product.
Lithuanian officials are eager to make sure any deal on Ignalina ensures closure of the plant does not soak up any aid it gets from the European Union after joining.
----
Norway calls meeting on nuclear disasters
REUTERS NORWAY:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15813/story.htm
OSLO - Norway said last week it would host talks with 20 countries next week on how to cooperate in the case of another Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster.
Experts from the countries are to gather in Oslo from May 6-8 to discuss ways to implement conventions on early notification and assistance in nuclear accidents.
Finn Ugletveit, a senior adviser at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority, said the meeting followed up on a meeting in Vienna last year.
"We want a better flow of information between the countries in cases of accidents," Ugletveit told Reuters.
He said Oslo also wanted to strengthen the role of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency in coordinating different countries' accident alert systems.
Norway, which borders Russia, helped Moscow to open the wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea in August 2000, killing all 118 crew. Moscow initially turned down offers of help from Britain and Norway.
The Soviet Union was harshly criticised for failing to inform other countries about a 1986 accident at its Chernobyl nuclear plant, now in Ukraine. The world's worst radiation disaster was only discovered when a radioactive cloud blew over Sweden.
Russia said it was unable to attend the meeting but was willing to contribute to later work. Countries attending include the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Nordic nations, Brazil and Canada.
-------- health
FDA OKs Breast Cancer Treatment Device
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-Breast-Radiation.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Women who have a cancerous lump removed from a breast won a new option Monday for the required follow-up treatment: a novel way to radiate just the tumor site instead of the whole breast.
Targeted internal radiation, called brachytherapy, has long been available to men suffering prostate cancer, and some doctors had mastered ways to deliver radiation ``seeds'' deep into a breast as well.
But Proxima Therapeutics Inc.'s MammoSite is designed specifically for breast brachytherapy, and the Food and Drug Administration's approval Monday potentially opens the method to more widespread use in breast cancer patients.
Brachytherapy proponents welcomed the move, noting that MammoSite-style radiation treatment takes just five days instead of up to seven weeks that external radiation can require. That lengthy follow-up treatment is considered one reason many women whose breast tumors are small enough and early enough to be removed via lumpectomy instead choose a more disfiguring mastectomy.
With MammoSite, ``what you have is an easier way of performing brachytherapy'' that may entice more doctors to offer it, said Dr. Frank Vicini of William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., who has studied the device.
MammoSite consists of a spaghetti-like hollow catheter with an inflatable balloon that is implanted at the tumor site when the tumor is removed. Later, a radioactive seed is inserted through the catheter, and a targeted dose of radiation emits through the balloon. Once the patient gets enough, the catheter is removed.
``You're restricting the radiation therapy only to the tissues most likely to harbor residual cancer cells,'' Vicini explained.
He has published a study suggesting that five years after treatment, women getting brachytherapy do as well as women who got external radiation.
But some doctors worry about brachytherapy because it doesn't hit cancer cells that may lurk in other parts of the breast, which external radiation could hit.
Indeed, that concern made the FDA throw in a hitch: Proxima submitted no data proving that MammoSite therapy is as effective long-term as regular radiation. The FDA thus ordered Proxima to state that MammoSite isn't a replacement for the whole-breast radiation that today's cancer guidelines call for following a lumpectomy.
Although doctors can use an FDA-approved medical device any way they see fit, that would seem to leave potential users in something of a quandary
``What's not apparent at the FDA is the number of women who do not get radiation therapy today'' in direct violation of guidelines that call post-lumpectomy radiation lifesaving, responded Proxima CEO Tim Patrick.
Patrick cited a National Cancer Institute study that found 25 percent of lumpectomy patients didn't receive radiation, and noted that the chances of foregoing radiation therapy increased the further a woman lived from a clinic that offered it.
Clearly those women are a niche for MammoSite, he said. As for wider use, ``the physicians will decide.''
The American Cancer Society estimates that about 203,500 U.S. women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Oncologists say 70 percent will be potential candidates for lumpectomies.
On the Net:
American Brachytherapy Society: http://www.americanbrachytherapy.org
FDA: http://www.fda.gov
Proxima: http://www.mammosite.com
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Mutations Can Carry Over Generations
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-Radiation-Mutations.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Radiation exposure caused mutations that persisted into the third generation of laboratory mice in an experiment, suggesting genetic changes from high doses of X-rays and other radiation can be inherited by children and grandchildren.
The study, appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to systematically demonstrate the passage of radiation-caused mutations from one generation to another, say experts. But they say the mutations are subtle, with no apparent, proven effect on health.
Earlier studies have found no inherited mutations among human families that were exposed to high levels of radiation, such as those at Hiroshima, Japan, target of the first use of the atomic bomb, and at Chernobyl, site of a major nuclear plant accident.
Richard B. Setlow, senior biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., reviewed the study for the National Academy and said the findings are significant because they prove for the first time that radiation-caused mutations can be inherited in mammals.
``This study will open the way for further experiments to answer ... questions'' about inherited mutations from radiation, said Setlow. ``Before this study, no one knew what to look for.''
In the study, researchers led by Yuri E. Dubrova of the University of Leicester, United Kingdom, exposed a group of male mice from two different strains to whole body neutron and X-ray radiation.
They then allowed the animals to reproduce with unexposed partners and checked the descendants for the rate of mutation. Both the children and the grandchildren of the exposed male mice showed evidence of DNA changes at a rate higher than mutations that naturally occur from generation to generation among unexposed mice.
The researchers noted that the inherited changes they found were subtle and involved DNA that had ``no apparent function.''
However, the researchers said that the fact that mutations carried over from one generation to another are a matter of concern because of the possible increased risk for cancer and other disorders.
Researchers have never identified an inherited mutation among families of Hiroshima survivors, but that ``doesn't mean that they weren't there,'' Setlow said.
The genetic variability between people is much greater than it is between the mice used in the experiment, he said. This variability could mask the inherited genetic changes caused by radiation, he said.
``We want to know what the risks of radiation are,'' said Setlow. ``So this is something we have to worry about. There could be something transferred to the offspring even though we can't detect it readily.''
The mapping of the human genome, or genetic structure, may make it possible for researchers to detected inherited mutations that were not obvious before, said Setlow.
Proceedings: http://www.pnas.org/
-------- russia
Russian Nuke Minister to Visit D.C.
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US-Nuclear.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's nuclear energy minister will try to assuage U.S. fears about Russian nuclear deals with Iran and present a new plan for cooperation with the United States during a visit to Washington this week, his ministry said Monday
Alexander Rumyantsev will meet Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and other American officials during the visit, according to Nuclear Energy Ministry spokesman Yuri Bespalko. The trip comes ahead of a summit this month between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rumyantsev, whose trip runs through Friday, will present a Russian-designed proposal for cooperation on peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
``We want an agreement that will provide a durable foundation for cooperation,'' Bespalko said. While there are many U.S.-Russian programs in the nuclear energy sector, they are not anchored by a broad overall agreement, he said.
Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran will be a ``major subject'' of Rumyantsev's talks, Bespalko said.
``The Americans are always talking about Iran. There are many issues we want to clarify,'' he said, without elaborating.
The U.S. government, which accuses Iran of sponsoring terrorism, is concerned Russia's $800 million contract to build a nuclear reactor at the Iranian city of Bushehr could help Iran build nuclear weapons.
Moscow insists the light-water reactor couldn't be used for developing a nuclear bomb and would remain under international control.
Moscow has also rejected U.S. accusations that Russian institutes or companies have leaked missile technologies to Tehran.
Differences over Iran have strained U.S.-Russian relations despite an overall warming of ties since Putin offered strong support for the U.S.-led anti-terrorist campaign last fall.
Anton Khlopkov, author of a book called ``The Iranian Nuclear Program in Russian-American Relations,'' was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying Monday that it remains unclear whether the Russian government is in full control over the export of sensitive technologies to Iran.
He also predicted that the United States ``will shortly start using economic and political levers against Russia to seek a halt to nuclear cooperation with Iran.''
-------- terrorism
US Accuses Libya, Syria and Cuba on Weapons Spread
May 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-arms.html
WASHINGTON - The United States on Monday accused three more states -- Libya, Syria and Cuba -- of pursuing weapons of mass destruction and warned it would take action to ensure they do not supply terrorists with such arms.
In a speech entitled ``Beyond the Axis of Evil,'' Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in addition to Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- which President Bush several months ago branded an ``axis of evil'' -- there were other ``rogue states'' out to acquire weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons.
``America is determined to prevent the next wave of terror,'' Bolton, who oversees international security policy, told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in a reference to the Sept. 11 attacks that killed around 3,000 people.
``States that sponsor terror and pursue WMD (weapons of mass destruction) must stop,'' he said. ``States that renounce terror and abandon WMD can become part of our effort. But those that do not can expect to become our targets.''
He said there was ``no doubt that Libya continues its long-standing pursuit of nuclear weapons,'' as well as chemical weapons, biological weapons and ballistic missile capability.
``We are concerned about Syrian advances in its indigenous CW (chemical weapons) infrastructurepursuing development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small amounts of biological warfare agents.''
Bolton, calling Cuba's threat to U.S. security ''underplayed,'' said Washington believes the communist government there ``has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort (and has) provided dual-use technology to other rogue states.''
He said he was making these charges public for the first time but refused to name the states Cuba has supplied, citing a need to protect U.S. intelligence sources.
MISSING LINKS
Bolton made only scant mention in his speech of Russia and China, two nuclear powers whose alleged willingness to transfer nuclear, missile and other technology to Iran, Iraq and other states has long been a U.S. concern, prompting sanctions.
In response to a question, Bolton called Russia and China ''unquestionably the two largest sources of proliferant behavior internationally'' and noted the administration is discussing changes in proliferation policy with both countries.
Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran, a subject of Bolton's talks in Moscow last week, will be a ``factor'' in Bush's' summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in two weeks, Bolton said.
But he echoed other officials in voicing optimism Bush and Putin would sign a new ``strategic framework'' slashing nuclear weapons and strengthening nonproliferation measures.
According to Bolton, many states on the U.S. target list signed multilateral arms control accords, like those banning biological and chemical arms, but routinely violate them.
Libya, which the U.S. says produced 100 tons of chemical weapons, has expressed interest in joining the Chemical Weapons Convention. But Bolton was skeptical, saying Libya signed the BW Convention in 1982 but has continued its BW program.
Bolton made no specific threats of military action, saying the United States would concentrate on exposing violators and working with other countries to halt proliferation.
The United States would also crack down on suspect shipments, front companies and financial institutions that launder funds for weapons proliferation, he said.
And it will demand more effective use and enforcement of arms control and nonproliferation treaties and export control regimes, Bolton said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Utility group sees new US nuclear plant on horizon
REUTERS USA:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15816/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The Nuclear Energy Institute said it expects a U.S. utility to soon seek federal permission to build the first nuclear power reactor in a generation as part of the Bush administration's push for more electricity sources.
No nuclear plants have been built since the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant, which had a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
"We soon expect to see the first application for an early site permit for a nuclear power plant," said Christian Poindexter, who is chairman of the institute and of Constellation Energy Group Inc. .
"Once granted, an early site permit will enable the company that holds it to consider building a nuclear plant when it needs new generating capacity," he said in a speech at the industry group's meeting in Naples, Florida.
Poindexter did not identify which company will seek the permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Earlier this week, Exelon Corp. said it might add a new reactor to its existing nuclear plant site in Illinois. The company's Clinton nuclear power station was originally designed for two units and currently houses a single 950-megawatt reactor.
Applying for an early site permit gives a utility the option of building a new reactor without committing itself to construction.
Two other U.S. utilities have also said they are preparing early site permit applications. Entergy Corp. and Dominion Resources Inc.
The Bush administration said in February it would offer three federally-owned sites for U.S. utilities to build new nuclear power plants this decade.
The government's push has been criticized by some activist groups, who cite safety concerns and the growing volume of dangerous radioactive waste generated by 103 existing U.S. plants.
A broad energy bill approved last month by the U.S. Senate includes some provisions to encourage new nuclear construction. A final version of the legislation has yet to be worked out by Senate and House negotiators.
U.S. nuclear plants supply about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
-------- colorado
Newsletter from Congressman Mark Udall
From: <ima_co02iq@mail.house.gov>
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002
UDALL PRESSES FOR LEGISLATION TO END WASTE IMPASSE
I have been working with my House colleagues to enact legislation to address the plutonium disposition situation at the Savannah River facility in South Carolina. A dispute between the Department of Energy and the State of South Carolina has delayed the shipment of plutonium from Rocky Flats to the South Carolina facility and poses a danger to the cleanup and closure goal of December 2006.
As two states that house facilities of the DOE nuclear weapons complex, Colorado and South Carolina need to work together to make sure that the interests of both are protected and to resolve common problems," said Udall in a letter to U.S. Representative John Spratt (D-SC), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over such legislation. It doesn't serve either of our states if the DOE and South Carolina end up in a protracted legal battle in the federal courts. And that is why it may be in everyone's best interest to pass legislation codifying the DOE promises.
The legislation would codify part of a plutonium disposition agreement proposed by the DOE. Under the agreement, the DOE would build a facility in South Carolina to process the waste into mixed oxide fuel, which would be shipped to and used at nuclear power plants. It would specify that if the facility were not producing at least one metric ton of fuel by January 1, 2009, the DOE would remove the plutonium from South Carolina and ship it to another site.
This step would address the concerns of South Carolina regarding the future resolution of plutonium disposition, and hope that this effort could be the basis of resolving this issue to everyone's satisfaction. I want to work with you and other members of the South Carolina congressional delegation to see that this legislation is passed into law.
COLORADO LANDS KEY HOMELAND DEFENSE COMMAND POST
Colorado Springs has been selected as the preferred site of the new Northern Command. The Northern Command, which will begin operating October 1, will oversee the defense of all U.S. territory and will coordinate with the White House Office of Homeland Defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the announcement last month in Washington, D.C.
Colorado is the ideal home for the new Northern Command. We have NORAD, which has served as the first line of defense against an air attack on our homeland. It already has in place critical communication lines and other vital command support infrastructure which can easily absorb the needs of the Northern Command. NORAD has proven itself effective in its roles of watching, warning and responding. In February, I wrote to Secretary Rumsfeld in support of siting the Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
The new command is part of a reorganization of the military that gives higher priority to homeland defense against terrorist attacks. Currently, homeland defense responsibilities are scattered around the country at different military commands. The site selection will not be final until the Pentagon completes a required environmental impact study.
Our military needs an organization that can respond to new threats in a new time in history. As the September 11th attacks showed, our nation faces threats from a different kind of enemy, and our military restructure needs to be updated to reflect these new challenges. With our homeland defense efforts consolidated at the new Northern Command, Colorado will act as the nerve center for defending our country against terrorism.
STATE AND FEDERAL OFFICIALS URGED TO REQUIRE ALL PLUTONIUM BE REMOVED FROM ROCKY FLATS BY 2006
Federal and state officials should implement a provision in the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement which would require that all plutonium be removed from the former nuclear weapons production site by 2006.
A possible approach to address the entire problem and help us remain on a 2006 closure would be to use existing authorities in the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement to establish enforcement milestones for the removal of all plutonium from Rocky Flats. It seems to me that such milestones could provide needed incentives to complete this part of the job and help ensure that we can attain the 2006 closure date. I explained this view in a letter to Governor Bill Owens, Attorney General Ken Salazar, Rocky Flats Closure Manager Barbara Mazurowski and EPA Regional Administrator Robert Roberts.
Enforcement milestones are necessary, because the Bush Administration's plutonium disposition strategy does not provide a home for approximately one metric ton of plutonium at Rocky Flats that is too impure to be converted into nuclear reactor fuel at the planned South Carolina facility. The enforceable milestones could act as an insurance policy for Colorado in case plutonium shipments slated for South Carolina face further obstacles. While we all hope that this issue can be resolved, I remain concerned as we have yet to pass the legislation to codify this agreement, and I have concerns that South Carolina may try and delay things further by taking legal action.
Unless an alternative site is found, this plutonium could remain in Colorado even after shipment of the MOX-suitable plutonium is completed - a scenario that would be a serious obstacle to achieving cleanup and closure by 2006.
-------- us politics
House Offers $29.8B Anti-Terror Bill
By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
Monday, May 6, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42196-2002May6?language=printer
WASHINGTON House lawmakers on Monday unveiled a $29.8 billion defense and anti-terrorism package that provides more than President Bush wanted for the military and the global fight against AIDS while doubling the new security fee paid by airline passengers.
The measure, which has broad bipartisan support, would spend 10 percent more than Bush proposed in March. Administration officials have signaled possible acceptance of the added spending, but a clash could loom over a cut in the president's proposal for the new Transportation Security Administration amid legislators' concerns about a top-heavy bureaucracy.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., whose committee plans to vote on the bill Wednesday, described the measure as "a good, clean, responsible bill that will enjoy broad bipartisan support."
The bill is for the remaining five months of the federal fiscal year. It is much larger than most midyear spending measures, reflecting a bipartisan consensus to funnel funds at the Pentagon and the campaign against terrorism.
The Senate has not yet written its own package.
Though easy committee approval is expected, the bill could run into trouble when it moves to the full House. Republican leaders want to attach must-pass language boosting the federal borrowing limit, which could bog the package down because Democrats blame that need on last year's GOP-backed tax cut.
The changes lawmakers would make in the wide-ranging bill underline Congress' desire to assert itself in shaping the counterterrorism effort. In one instance, the measure would lop $30 million off the $130 million Bush wanted for the Pentagon to disperse money to allies in the fight against terrorism, reflecting an unease with granting that much authority to the Defense Department.
Bush's $14 billion proposal for the Pentagon would grow by $1.8 billion, including money for training, parts and the Reserves and National Guard, who represent influential home-district constituencies.
There is also more funds than Bush sought for protecting government nuclear facilities and water projects; for the FBI to purchase computers; and to train Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agents.
The Transportation Security Administration, responsible for security at airports, would get $4 billion instead of the $4.4 billion Bush requested.
But the current $2.50-per-flight segment security fee would be doubled following testimony by Transportation Department officials that the revenue now raised was falling well short of the security administration's budget. The original fee was expected to raise about $1 billion this year.
The proposed increase would add $10 to a round-trip flight if a passenger changes planes each way.
The bill would provide $200 million for battling AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria overseas, amid worldwide pressure on the United States to increase its contribution to a global effort against AIDS. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has said he will seek $500 million to battle the AIDS epidemic in Africa and elsewhere, and Democrats on the House committee are likely to offer an amendment that would at least match Helms' figure.
Colombia could receive up to $20 million more than the $35 million Bush requested for that country's war against narcotics dealers. The bill has language similar to what Bush sought allowing Colombia to use its anti-drug money for battling terrorists.
The bill contains the same $5.5 billion extra Bush wanted for New York, fulfilling his pledge for at least $20 billion to help the city rebuild from the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lawmakers also added $1 billion for Pell grants for low-income college students; $650 million to help communities improve their voting systems; and $100 million to help Congress relocate in case the Capitol is damaged in an attack.
--------
Powell, Rice diverge on strategy
May 6, 2002
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020506-83910710.htm
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in the United States yesterday for talks with President Bush on the Mideast peace process as the president's key foreign-policy advisers expressed sharp disagreement over the importance of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Mr. Sharon, who arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, brought with him documents that he says show direct complicity by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in suicide bombings and other terrorism.
The prime minister will discuss terrorism and other Middle East issues in Washington tomorrow in his fifth meeting with Mr. Bush.
In interviews yesterday on network news talk shows, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the president's chief national-security advisor, expressed sharply different views on the settlements, which are regarded as a key issue in the "peace process."
Mr. Powell said the Bush administration will urge Mr. Sharon to end Israeli "settlement activity" in Palestinian areas because the settlements are an impediment to peace.
"Something has to be done about the problem of settlements. The settlements continue to grow; they continue to expand It's not going to go away," Mr. Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I'm sure this will be part of our discussion with Prime Minister Sharon."
Miss Rice, in several appearances on the Sunday interview shows, said the administration will not pressure Israel on the settlements at least until Palestinian terrorism ceases.
On "Fox News Sunday," Miss Rice said, "Let's take one thing at a time. Settlements will eventually be an issue. But I think we have to get the context right here. We need to end the terror, create a situation in which there is better security and no violence."
"We're not going to get ahead of ourselves and talk about pressuring anyone," she said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." She said settlements would be one topic of discussion.
Mr. Powell's emphasis on settlements and Miss Rice's emphasis on ending Palestinian terror reflects a split within the administration between those who support Israel's tough actions against the Palestinians and those, such as Mr. Powell, who would first address Palestinian concerns.
However, Mr. Powell, in an interview on ABC's "This Week," said he recognizes that a resolution of the settlement issue could take a long time. But he said resolving it is essential "in due course."
Mr. Bush said last month that "Israeli settlement activity in occupied territories must stop. And the occupation must end through withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries."
Israeli sources told Reuters news agency that the prime minister will propose to Mr. Bush a plan that leaves Israeli settlements in place in Palestinian areas. Such a plan, especially if combined with earlier Israeli proposals to annex part of the West Bank, would clash with Palestinian demands for sovereignty.
Mr. Bush has declared his support for the creation of a Palestinian state, without offering specific details of how this would be accomplished.
The lengthy dossier Mr. Sharon brought to Washington purports to show the Palestinian leader's signature on payments to terrorists who organized suicide attacks and arranged weapon purchases. The 100-page intelligence file accuses Mr. Arafat of routinely diverting American and European aid to finance these terrorist operations.
Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on "Fox News Sunday" that the documents "apparently" were to have been presented to representatives of the Bush administration in Washington late yesterday and "will be a focal point for the discussion" tomorrow between Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bush.
He said the documents "confirm suspicions that Yasser Arafat has been at the center of actions of terrorism by various PLO forces and that Arafat has had a goal of the destruction of the state of Israel rather than arriving at a peace with the state of Israel."
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called the documents "lies, forgeries and fabrications."
On "Fox News Sunday," Miss Rice said the U.S. government "has long been concerned about the potential ties between the terrorists and the Palestinian Authority." She said these ties could make a Palestinian state impossible.
"The Palestinian leadership that is there now, the Authority, is not the kind of leadership that can lead to the Palestinian state that we need," she said.
Mr. Erekat expressed outrage, calling her comments "unacceptable arrogance and interference."
Last week, Mr. Powell announced that the United States was planning an international peace conference at an undetermined location this summer. Yesterday on "Meet the Press," he said the meeting "should be at ministerial level" and that overhauling the Palestinian Authority would be a fit topic of discussion.
Mr. Sharon is said by diplomatic sources to be prepared to tell Mr. Bush that he will negotiate with Palestinians only if "violent terror attacks stop completely" and will not negotiate at all with Mr. Arafat.
Both Mr. Powell and Miss Rice yesterday rejected Israel's attempts to sideline Mr. Arafat and to shelve talk of a Palestinian state. "It serves us all better if we continue to work with all Palestinian leaders and to recognize who the Palestinian people look to as their leader," Mr. Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
Miss Rice said on the Fox network: "The White House position is that we're not going to try to choose the leadership for the Palestinian people. Chairman Arafat is there."
At tomorrow's meeting with the president, Israeli sources say Mr. Sharon also will propose constructing a physical buffer between Israel and the West Bank to keep terrorists out and will ask for U.S. financial help in building it.
Mr. Powell said he would be skeptical about such an approach's ability to address the root causes of terrorism.
"I'd like to hear if that really is the prime minister's position," Mr. Powell said on NBC. "But I don't know that you're going to solve the problem with a fence, unless you solve the underlying problems of the Palestinians feeling they are disenfranchised."
Mr. Powell was asked about reports that he is "frustrated by bureaucratic battles with administration hard-liners" and by Mr. Bush's "willingness to tolerate" what Mr. Powell is said to view as "meddling" in foreign policy by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
• This article was based in part on wire service reports.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Raids Along Afghan Border Seen as Lasting Past Summer
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/asia/06WAR.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom
WASHINGTON, May 5 - The new American strategy for wiping out enemy fighters in the most lawless area of Afghanistan calls for mounting continuous counterinsurgency operations on both sides of the border with Pakistan that could last beyond this summer, senior officials at the Pentagon say.
The operations, including day-and-night raids and methodical sweeps, are far less reliant on airstrikes or on friendly Afghans than the earlier stages of the war were. Instead, they are being carried out by rapidly moving and highly trained Western soldiers with intensive intelligence-gathering elements. Already, the operations involve about 150 American troops and several hundred British, Canadian and other coalition forces in an area of southeast Afghanistan roughly the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Their mission is to hunt relatively small numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have dispersed to avoid detection. In some ways, it is more like what the United States Army tried to do in the middle of the Vietnam War than it is like the last seven months in Afghanistan. The operation also carries considerable risks: of suffering American casualties, of mistakenly attacking the wrong people, of being misled by faulty intelligence and of inflaming local hostility to foreigners on Afghan soil.
"The goal here is to apply unrelenting pressure, so wherever they turn, they never can find any breathing space," a senior defense official said.
After seven months, the war's new phase features a new level of cooperation with Pakistan, senior officials say. In just the last few weeks, handfuls of American military intelligence and communications specialists have joined Pakistani forces who had been searching for fugitive fighters in the mountainous tribal border areas traditionally outside the control of the government in Islamabad.
The assistance of American Special Forces may help squads of elite troops drawn from Pakistan's Frontier Corps to move quickly to block the mountain passes chosen by enemy fighters fleeing from coalition forces in Afghanistan, the Americans say.
In addition, another official said, small numbers of American Special Operations forces are conducting cross-border reconnaissance missions into Pakistan, ready to strike at Qaeda fighters if they are found. The Pakistani and American forces have been treading gingerly, however, since they are operating for the first time in the Pakistani tribal zones and do not want to provoke resistance from locals who have ethnic ties to the Taliban.
From now through the summer, and probably beyond, the American commanders intend to mount similar operations. That is meant to buy time for a new Afghan government that will be chosen next month. Another bonus, officials said, is that the operations are expected to produce more intelligence about opposing forces' activities and plans.
What is not lost on those building this strategy is the continuing search on both sides of the rugged border area for their most notorious quarry, Osama bin Laden. "If there's a large pocket left in that tribal area, bin Laden is most likely in it," a senior military officer said. But he added that American officials had no firm intelligence on Mr. bin Laden's precise whereabouts.
What is just as important to guarding the success of the campaign in Afghanistan, senior Pentagon and military officials said, will be the American military's influence on Afghan warlords, whose rivalries in recent days have resulted in shootouts and dueling rocket attacks.
Teams of American Special Forces, who built relationships with anti-Taliban commanders during the first phase of the war, have been assigned to remain with those leaders as they have become provincial governors wielding control sometimes greater than the nascent government in Kabul.
"They are the centers of power," a senior defense official said. "We have influence we can exert in subtle ways with regional leaders, and we are using that influence to reinforce stability."
The dueling priorities of stamping out the remnants of the enemy and ensuring that simmering factional rivalries do not boil over combine to require a long-term American military presence in Afghanistan, senior defense officials said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that "the situation in Afghanistan is far from over," and Bush administration officials have quite purposefully avoided setting any exit date from Afghanistan.
Just over 7,000 American troops are now stationed throughout Afghanistan, but Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war's overall commander, is likely to reduce that force over time and to tailor it to meet specific threats. The United States is acutely aware of the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan, and is consciously keeping a relatively small military presence in the country and conducting operations as discreetly as possible.
American officials rush to note the two starkest differences from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980's: that many Afghans welcome the American combat role today and that the United States is not itself trying to occupy or pacify the entire country.
"If you look out ahead six months or so, I think gradually you're going to see the number of U.S. forces come down and the number of coalition forces go up," a senior Defense Department official said this weekend.
In southeast Afghanistan, coalition forces are playing an increasing role in an array of missions. About 1,700 British royal marines are now in Afghanistan conducting missions. Canadian light-infantry forces began a mission over the weekend.
Scores of Special Operations forces from several other countries - including Australia, Denmark, Germany, France and Norway - are also conducting operations.
While those activities center largely on three southeastern provinces - Paktia, Paktika and Logar - military officials have briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on what they call their "crescent of concern," an arc of territory sweeping from west of Kandahar to just south of Kabul.
The difficulties include those that have plagued the military campaign since the end of sweeping battles under cover of substantial aerial bombardment that toppled the Taliban: sorting friend from foe as the adversary melts into the rugged terrain or hides among the population. Because of confusing, uncertain and occasionally contradictory intelligence, Americans have killed suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters who turned out to be neither.
But officials say their planning acknowledges the fact that the land and air battles have long since peaked in Afghanistan. On Friday, eight B-1 bombers based in Oman began returning home to Dyess Air Force Base in Texas. Last month, the Pentagon cut its commitment of naval forces to Afghanistan in half, to one aircraft carrier and 2,000 marines afloat.
Yet with the country's long-term security question still unresolved, and America's commitment to help Afghanistan build a multiethnic army loyal to the central government in Kabul, a senior defense official declared, "we'll have some number of forces on the ground there for a couple of years."
In fact, the United States appears committed to be Afghanistan's de facto air force, national intelligence service and emergency ground force until an Afghan national army proves that it can maintain security. President Bush last week spoke by phone with Hamid Karzai, the interim Afghan leader, pledging $2 million to help equip and train an army.
"Having done all this to liberate Afghanistan," a senior Defense Department official said, "we're not going to walk away and leave a vacuum, a vacuum either for terrorists to fill or for certain neighboring countries to fill."
In the latest sign of the long-term American military commitment, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, a three-star officer who heads the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., will soon relieve one of his subordinates, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, a two-star officer who commands the 10th Mountain Division, as commander of ground operations in Afghanistan.
The change, announced on Friday, does not reflect unhappiness with General Hagenbeck, defense officials said. General Hagenbeck was sent to Central Asia last fall. During the ground campaign this year, his blunt, candid descriptions of encounters with the enemy in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan might have been more than officials in Washington wanted to hear, but they did not contradict him. He was one of the first to say that American forces might venture into Pakistan.
The change was made because General Franks wanted a more senior officer with a larger headquarters staff to consolidate the growing international coalition forces under a single command reporting directly to him, officials said.
To balance their worldwide troop commitments, the individual armed services have already adopted schedules to rotate troops in and out of Afghanistan. "The Air Force, along with the other services, are gearing up for having to deal with pursuit of terrorists over the long term," said Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff.
In fact, senior military planners express a grudging respect for the tenacity - and flexibility - shown by their adversaries in Afghanistan. "Al Qaeda and Taliban are evil, but they're not stupid," a senior defense official said. "They are very much of a learning enemy. If they try something and it works, they'll try it again. If they try something and it doesn't work, they stop."
That is why the military is paying so much attention to the small numbers congregating in southeast Afghanistan, which they have been able to do apparently because there is no single powerful warlord who has been policing that area.
"What we're finding is that there are worse things than having warlords in place, and that's having nobody in charge," a senior official said. "Then you have chaos. That's worse."
--------
From Hilltop Perch, British Troops Watch for Holdouts
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/asia/06AFGH.html
SOUTHEAST OF GARDEZ, Afghanistan, May 5 - The British gunner scanned the rocky crags with his binoculars and gazed down the long valley to the distant mountain ridges. Nothing stirred.
"I think there is Al Qaeda or Taliban out there, but not a main force of them," said Bombardier Johnny Hague, 35. "But it's going to take a long time to find them. I think a lot have gone to Pakistan, and when we go home they'll come back and then we'll have to send more troops out."
The men on this hilltop lookout post, part of the 1,000-strong British commando force that has been scouring the mountains in southeastern Afghanistan for any signs of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces, have yet to find a single fighter after a week of operations. So far they have only spotted three people, about three miles away down the valley. The only thing that has disturbed their watch was the scream of a wild cat.
The royal marines who are leading the operation have discovered several caves and defensive positions and seized several thousand rounds of rifle ammunition, but they have encountered no opposition. The only British casualties so far have been cases of appendicitis and dehydration from the altitude.
Another, Canadian-led, operation elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan has turned up a few weapons and some underground bunkers. But those troops have not had any contact with their adversaries either.
The commander of the royal marines, Brig. Roger Lane, drew one conclusion on his return from a tour of the mountain operation today. He suggested that Al Qaeda and Taliban forces had been so devastated that they could no longer challenge the United States-led coalition forces in Afghanistan as they did six weeks ago, when they ambushed American forces during a battle in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was named Operation Anaconda.
It was now clear, he said, that that operation, which featured heavy aerial bombing in this same mountain range, dealt the adversaries a heavy blow.
"I do not think we fully appreciate how devastating Anaconda was," Brigadier Lane said, as he emerged from a Chinook helicopter. "I do not think the enemy is going to try to attack and take on the strongest military power in the Western world."
Nevertheless, he did not rule out finding Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in these mountains, the scene of fierce fighting in March, when eight members of the United States special forces were killed and more than 100 were wounded, according to British military officials.
"We are still in the preliminary stages," Brigadier Lane said. "It is possible there were still some Al Qaeda or Taliban in there."
The British marines are now closing in on two important mountains where they suspect that people may still be holding out, he said. "There has been some intelligence that it is an area we should go into."
The British operation appears to be an encirclement of a large mountainous area south of Gardez, which includes the area where the Shah-i-Kot battle took place. The steep and rocky valleys that run east through the range toward the border with Pakistan are established trails, used by the mujahedeen in the 1980's during their guerrilla war against the Soviet Army, and more recently by the Taliban after they retreated from Kabul last November.
The hillsides here are littered with rusted shrapnel, possibly from Soviet-era bombs, and there are signs of more recent battles, where shrapnel has cut into the stubby trees and shattered rocks. American military-issue rations and plastic water bottles lie in heaps still, on their pallets, apparently dropped in for American troops in March.
Now men of the 29th Commando Regiment of the British Royal Artillery have set up six howitzers in a dry riverbed on the southwest corner of the operational area. The big guns sat silent today under desert camouflage netting, as the men brewed tea and waited. There to back up the men in the mountains, they were doubtful of seeing any action. They had yet to fire a shot.
"It's pretty quiet," said Sgt. Darren Hughes, 30, who is in charge of one of the two-ton howitzers. "It's disappointing. It's what you train for and you come out for."
Staff Sgt. Steve Stewart said, "If we had come a couple of months earlier we would have found them."
Said Capt. Michael Bayliss, 41, a man clearly as frustrated as his men: "The mission in the end is to kill or capture Al Qaeda and Taliban and if we don't, then we have not fulfilled the mission. It means they are not here."
But the senior commanders insist that the marines are playing an important role in combing the area and destroying any caves, bunkers or defensive positions Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters could return to.
"Success for me will be when I have denied him the opportunity to re-form in any kind of organized way to conduct offensive or defensive operations, and deny him a sanctuary from which he can train and then export terrorism around the world," Brigadier Lane said.
"If I don't fire a bullet in anger and I have cleared that area," he said, "that will be a success."
-------- arms sales
U.S. Arms Transfers and Security Assistance to Israel
Arms Trade Resource Center Fact Sheet William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan
May 6, 2002
From: "Frida Berrigan" <BerrigaF@newschool.edu>
For more information Contact: William D. Hartung: 212-229-5808 ext. 106 hartung@newschool.edu Frida Berrigan: 212-228-5808 ext. 112 berrigaf@newschool.edu
U.S. press coverage of Israeli attacks on the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian towns on the West Bank often treat the U.S. government as either an innocent bystander or an honest broker in the current conflict, often without giving a full sense of the importance of the United States role as a supplier of arms, aid, and military technology to Israel. In its role as Israel's primary arms supplier, the United States could exert significant potential leverage over Israeli behavior in the conflict, if it chooses to do so.
Military and Economic Aid
Since 1976, Israel had been the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. According to a November 2001 Congressional Research Service report, Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance, U.S. aid to Israel in the last half century has totaled a whopping $81.3 billion.
In recent years, Israel remains the top recipient of U.S. military and economic assistance. The most commonly cited figure is $3 billion a year, with about $1.8 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants from the Department of Defense and an additional $1.2 billion a year in Economic Support Funds (ESF) from the Department of State. In the last decade FMF grants to Israel have totaled $18.2 billion. In fact, 17% of all U.S. foreign aid is earmarked for Israel.
For 2003, the Bush administration is proposing that Israel receive $2.76 billion in foreign aid, with $2.1 billion in FMF and $600 million in ESF. An additional $28 million will go to Israel for the purchase U.S. manufactured counter terrorism equipment.
Weapons Sales and Grants
Israel is one of the United State's largest arms importers. In the last decade, the United States has sold Israel $7.2 billion in weaponry and military equipment, $762 million through Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), more than $6.5 billion through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program.
In fact, Israel is so devoted to U.S. military hardware that it has the world's largest fleet of F-16s outside the U.S., currently possessing more than 200 jets. Another 102 F-16s are on order from Lockheed Martin.
The United States has also underwritten Israel's domestic armaments industry, by giving:
· $1.3 billion to develop the Lavi aircraft (cancelled)
· $625 million to develop and deploy the Arrow anti-missile missile (an ongoing project)
· $200 million to develop the Merkava tank (operative); the latest version, the Merkava 4, uses a German V-12 diesel engine produced under license in the U.S. by General Dynamics
· $130 million to develop the high-energy laser anti-missile system (ongoing).
While overall aid to Israel is slated to decrease over the next five years, military aid will increase significantly. One of President Clinton's last acts was to sign an agreement with Israel, phasing out the ESF by 2008. At the same time, FMF funds to Israel will increase $60 million each year, reaching $2.4 billion by 2008.
Free Weapons to Israel
The U.S. also gives Israel weapons and ammunition as part of the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program, providing these articles completely free of charge. Between 1994-2001 the U.S. provided many weapons through this program, including:
· 64,744 M-16A1 rifles
· 2,469 M-204 grenade launchers
· 1,500 M-2 .50 caliber machine guns
· .30 caliber, .50 caliber, and 20mm ammunition
U.S. Weapons in the Israeli Arsenal Selected list
Weapon Quantity Manufacturer Cost Per Unit
Fighter Planes
F-4E Phantom 50 Boeing $18.4 million
F-15 Eagle 98 Boeing $38 million
F-16 Falcon 237 Lockheed Martin $34.3 million
Helicopters
AH-64 Apache 42 Boeing $14.5 million
Cobra Attack 57 Bell Textron $10.7 million
CH-53D 38 Sikorsky
Blackhawk 25 Sikorsky $11 million
Missiles
AGM 65 Maverick Raytheon $17,000-$110,000
AGM 114 Hellfire Boeing $40,000
TOW Hughes $180,000
AIM 7 Sparrow Raytheon $125,000
AIM 9 Sidewinder Raytheon $84,000
AIM 120 B AMRAAM Raytheon $386,000
Patriot Raytheon and Lockheed Martin
Harpoon Anti-Ship Missile Boeing $720,000
Weapons that Kill
"It is in the United States' national interest to promote the existence of a stable, democratic and militarily strong Israel, at peace with its neighbors." U.S. Department of Defense statement on Israel, in Joint Report to Congress, January 3, 2001
The scale of Israeli attacks on Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank has been "disproportionate and often reckless," according to a recent Amnesty International report. Amnesty estimates that in the six weeks from March 1, through mid-April, more than 600 Palestinians have been killed and over 3,000 wounded by Israeli soldiers.
The use of U.S. weapons in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian authority appears to be a clear violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act prohibiting U.S. weapons from being used for non-defensive purposes. The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2001, released in March 2002, stated that the IDF employed "excessive use of force" against the Palestinians, noting their use of live ammunition, even when not in imminent danger. The State Department report also stated that Israeli military "shelled Palestinian Authority (PA) institutions and Palestinian civilian areas in response to individual Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians or settlers." These comments demonstrate that the U.S. knows that weapons are not being used for the "legitimate defense" purposes stipulated in the Arms Export Control Act.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently expressed his concern with the use of U.S. weapons by the IDF, saying "I feel obliged to call your attention to disturbing patterns in the treatment of civilians and humanitarian relief workers by the Israeli Defense Forces*. Judging from the means and methods employed by the IDF-- F-16 fighter-bombers, helicopter and naval gunships, missiles and bombs of heavy tonnage-- the fighting has come to resemble all-out conventional warfare. In the process, hundreds of innocent noncombatant civilians -- men, women and children -- have been injured or killed, and many buildings and homes have been damaged or destroyed. Tanks have been deployed in densely populated refugee camps and in towns and villages; and heavy explosives have been dropped mere meters from schools where thousands of children were in attendance."
Instances of the IDF's Use of U.S. Weapons against Civilians
Gaza, CNN, February 11, 2002
"On Sunday [February 10, 2002], Israel attacked the headquarters of Force 17, the elite guard for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Two employees of the United Nations were wounded and a UN facility was damaged in the attack, prompting condemnation of the action from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The UN said it was the third time the office of Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, had been damaged as a result of attacks by the Israelis. The bombing also caused damage to other UN offices, including that of the representatives of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Jenin, New York Times, April 18, 2002
"The decaying body of Mr. Khurj's sister appears to be one of the clearest examples to date of a civilian having been killed in an Apache helicopter missile attack. There is an enormous hole in the wall of her bedroom and a two-foot-wide crater in the floor. Shards of a missile, including one with labels in English describing ''firing temperature'' and ''cooling temperature,'' littered the floor. Near the hole in the wall was a pool of dried blood. Mr. Khurj said the missile struck in the middle of the night on the third day of the attack. It killed his sister instantly."
Deheishe, Washington Post, March 10, 2002.
"Today Israeli tanks and troops invaded the other camp, Deheishe, which has a population of 8,000. Tanks and bulldozers had been positioned on a hill behind the community, and armed AH-64 Apache attack helicopters had hovered overhead. Soldiers knocked down a pedestrian bridge that led to the camp's school."
Bethlehem, Washington Post, March 8, 2002.
"The Israeli military almost immediately launched more missiles and opened fire with gunboats at official Palestinian buildings in the Gaza Strip, where there were heavy casualties. Israel also sent dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers into Bethlehem, two adjacent Palestinian refugee camps and a pair of neighboring West Bank towns, bringing full-scale military action to the suburbs of Jerusalem. The bark of heavy machine guns atop Israel's armored vehicles echoed throughout Bethlehem, considered the birthplace of Jesus, and U.S.-supplied AH-64 Apache helicopters fired into the Aida refugee camp between Bethlehem and Beit Jala."
Resources for More Information
· Foreign Policy In Focus: April 2002 issue brief on U.S. Military Aid to Israel available on their web site at www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org
· Arms Sales Monitoring Project, Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org/asmp) has a searchable database on U.S. arms transfers by country, plus a list of recent arms sales agreements entered into by the U.S.
· Jane's Defence Weekly has done an Israel country briefing in its May 1, 2002 issue, containing about eight pages of analysis of current Israeli armed forces with details on key holdings. Available on the web at www.janes.com
Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung of the Arms Trade Resource Center prepared this fact sheet. The ATRC is a project of the World Policy Institute at the New School University. Contact the project at berrigaf@newschool.edu or 212-229-5808 ext. 112.
Frida Berrigan Research Associate, World Policy Institute 66 Fifth Ave., 9th Floor New York, NY 10011 ph 212.229.5808 x112 fax 212.229.5579
The Arms Trade Resource Center was established in 1993 to engage in public education and policy advocacy aimed at promoting restraint in the international arms trade.
www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
-------- colombia
Colombia Gov't: Death Toll at 110
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Fighting.html
QUIBDO, Colombia (AP) -- Even as government troops struggled Monday to reach a village where 110 civilians were reported slain, President Andres Pastrana called for a U.N. commission to look into the bloodbath.
Wooden boats carrying some of the wounded -- men, women and children -- began arriving in Quibdo, a grimy port town upriver from the jungle village of Bojaya, where the civilians, including about 40 children, died during fighting between rebels and paramilitary gunmen. Many were killed Thursday when a mortar round allegedly fired by rebels hit a church, where the villagers had sought shelter.
``Hopefully, the United Nations will come and see firsthand what the terrorists are doing here,'' Pastrana told reporters in the capital, Bogota.
He rejected accusations that the attacks -- some of the worst against civilians in Colombia's 38-year war -- could have been prevented had authorities heeded warnings from U.N. and Colombian human rights monitors.
``We are in an internal conflict and we are trying to cover all the national territory,'' said Pastrana, indicating that his U.S.-backed security forces were stretched too thin.
Army Gen. Fernando Tapias, head of Colombia's armed forces, accused the rebels of intentionally targeting the civilians in the village of Bojaya.
Those who survived the attack on the church in Bojaya described a hellish scene. Residents of the poor fishing village had agreed to meet in the cement-walled church in case of an attack. Some 600 people were inside when the explosion occurred.
``There was sound like thunder and then the mortar crashed down. People's faces were destroyed, their bodies bloodied,'' said Oscar Guzman, a teacher who was hiding in the church along with his wife and 15-year-old son, who all escaped unharmed.
Waving T-shirts and any other white cloth they could find, stunned survivors fled the church, boarded boats, and crossed the river to the sister town of Vigia del Fuerte, from where Guzman was reached by telephone on Monday. Some fled on foot through the swamps.
Journalists trying to reach the village Monday by boat on the muddy Atrato River were turned back at a military checkpoint just outside Quibdo.
Two wooden boats carrying 10 wounded villagers, four of them children, reached the docks of Quibdo. A Red Cross official carried ashore an infant with a splint on his leg, and other wounded villagers were hoisted aboard stretchers.
``The people thought the church was a place that would be respected,'' said Joaquin Palacio, a Choco State assemblyman in Quibdo who said he lost two brothers and other relatives in the attack on the church. ``I'm feeling so terribly impotent, because I can't even go and bury my dead.''
An official in the federal human rights ombudsman's office in Bogota -- which runs a U.S.-funded ``early warning system'' to prevent attacks on civilians -- said letters warning of impending fighting were faxed to the Interior Ministry and nine other government and military offices on April 24, a week before the clashes broke out.
The letter noted that 300 paramilitaries had moved into the area, and that massacres, clashes or selective assassinations could occur at any moment, said the official.
Interior Minister Armando Estrada said the death toll had reached 110. He acknowledged the government had received warnings, but told reporters in Bogota that: ``Nobody believed that civilians would be so drastically affected in the fighting between paramilitaries and the FARC.''
Troops backed by helicopter gunships were trying to get to Bojaya, located 85 miles north of Quibdo, but air force Gen. Hector Fabio Velasco said flooding and skirmishes were frustrating the efforts.
Pope John Paul II sent a message of condolences to the families of the victims, saying he was profoundly saddened by the guerrilla attack and condemned ``these new acts of terrorism.''
--------
Colombia rebels met with dozen IRA chiefs
May 6, 2002
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020506-3465432.htm
Marxist rebels in Colombia, seeking to escalate terrorist attacks against that country's government, have met with more than a dozen Irish Republican Army leaders in the past three years, including a trusted confidant of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, authorities said.
Colombian military and police officials, British intelligence officers and U.S. House investigators say the meetings are part of an ongoing effort by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, to upgrade its ability to wage urban terrorism.
Among the IRA leaders believed to have been at the meetings, the sources said, was Padraig Wilson, 44, a convicted bomber and former commander of IRA inmates at the Maze prison near Belfast who had been identified as a longtime Adams confidant.
Wilson was freed in December 1999 after serving eight years of a 24-year sentence as part of the Belfast Agreement, an April 1998 initiative informally known as the Good Friday accord, which was aimed at bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
Since his release, Wilson has played a key public role in persuading IRA members to support the peace process. Last year, as part of that process, he was given temporary parole to attend with Mr. Adams a special meeting of Sinn Fein's ruling council in Dublin to discuss the ratification of the Belfast Agreement.
But the sources say Wilson is believed to have been among as many as 15 IRA members who have traveled to Colombia since 1999 to meet with FARC leaders, who have since escalated their terrorist campaign against the Colombian government.
A report by the General Command of the Colombian military forces said IRA members were escorted to FARC-controlled areas of the country to train the rebels in "terrorism, explosives and military tactics." The report said terrorist tactics used by the FARC "were taught by members of the IRA."
House investigators said the IRA was paid $2 million for members of its engineering department to teach the FARC how to build booby-trapped bombs and to produce a version of the IRA's deadly "barracks buster" mortar.
Three IRA members, James Monaghan, Neil Connolly and John McCauley, were arrested in August 2001 in Bogota, accused of training FARC rebels. Their trial is scheduled to begin this summer.
Mr. Monaghan, 55, headed the IRA's engineering department and has been identified by British authorities as the designer of the sophisticated Mark 1B long-range mortar known as the "barracks buster." A former member of the Sinn Fein executive council, he was convicted in 1971 for possession of explosives and served three years in prison.
Mr. McCauley, 38, has been identified as the former second-in-command of the IRA's engineering department. An expert in the use and production of weapons and mortars, he served two years in prison after his 1985 conviction for the illegal possession of weapons.
Mr. Connolly, 36, also is a weapons expert and is believed to have first made contact with the FARC five years ago through ETA, the Basque terrorist group that specializes in bombings and assassinations of Spanish government officials.
Wilson, the longtime Adams confidant, was sentenced to prison after British authorities caught him making a booby-trapped bomb. He also is believed to be a weapons and explosives specialist.
Mr. Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, has denied any involvement by the organization in the training of FARC guerrillas. He recently told the Irish Times "with certainty," that the three men arrested in Colombia did not represent Sinn Fein, and that he did not authorize them to be in Colombia in connection with the party.
"The IRA has not interfered in the internal affairs of Colombia and will not do so," the IRA said in a statement. "The IRA is fully committed to a successful outcome of the Irish peace process. The threat to that process does not come from the IRA."
In testimony last week before the House International Relations Committee, Gen. Fernando Tapias, chairman of Colombia's joint chiefs of staff, attributed an "onslaught of terrorist acts" over the past 18 months - including the bombing of 320 electrical towers, 30 bridges and 46 car bombings - to IRA training.
Gen. Tapias, who said the bombings killed 400 police and military officers, told the committee he did not know if the IRA members were in Colombia at the order of the organization's leadership, but there was no doubt they had trained the FARC in the use of explosives and other weapons.
The FARC and six of its members were named in a federal grand jury indictment Tuesday in the 1999 murders of three Americans.
-------- cuba
Cuba May Have Bio Warfare Program
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Cuba.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration believes Cuba is trying to develop biological weapons and transferring its technical expertise to countries hostile to the United States.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton's accusation Monday marked the first time the United States raised the possibility of Cuban involvement in weapons of mass destruction. He said transfers to what he described as ``rogue states'' involve biotechnology that can have legitimate uses as well.
Bolton, the State Department's top official dealing with proliferation of mass-destruction weapons, spoke to a gathering at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group.
The allegations appeared to add to the administration's rationale for keeping Cuba on State's list of countries accused of engaging in international terrorism.
Bolton said the administration believes a definite link exists between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a leading congressional opponent of the President Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, praised Bolton for the speech. ``It's about time that those who continue to defend Castro realize that they are defending a terrorist,'' he said.
An administration official said U.S. intelligence officials have known for some time about Cuba's secret program but withheld the information to protect its sources. Bolton believed the information was too important not to be made public, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Bolton did not identify countries with which he alleged Cuba has been sharing biotechnology but noted that last year that Castro visited Iran, Syria and Libya, all members, with Cuba, of the State Department's list of terrorism sponsors. A CIA report released in January said Iran has a biological weapons program and that Libya and Syria are believed to have them as well.
For four decades Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry, Bolton said. Analysts and Cuban defectors long have cast suspicion on activities conducted in the facilities.
Cuba's ability to threaten U.S. security has received less attention in recent years as Castro halted his efforts to promote Cuban-style revolutions elsewhere.
The administration acknowledged last year without elaboration that it was examining whether Cuba could engage in computer network attacks that could disrupt American military movements.
Bolton noted that a 1998 Pentagon report concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region. In the preface, however, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said he worried about Cuba's potential to develop biological weapons, given its ambitious biotechnology program.
Bolton said a major reason the report may have understated the threat potential was that a contributor to the study was Ana Belen Montes, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who was arrested last fall on charges of spying for Cuba. She pleaded guilty in March.
Bolton said: ``The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort.
``Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support BW programs in those states.
``We call on Cuba to cease all BW-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.''
There was no immediate reaction to Bolton's speech from the Cuban government. A man who answered the telephone at the Foreign Ministry spokesman's office in Havana said he was unfamiliar with Bolton's declaration and no response had been issued.
Castro's government in the past has accused the United States of using biological means to destroy crops and livestock on the island.
On the Net: State Department's Cuba page: http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2461.htm
-------- israel / palestine
Tentative Deal for Bethlehem Is Agreed Upon
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By C. J. CHIVERS with STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html
BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Monday, May 6 - Palestinian and Israeli officials seeking to end the 35-day Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity here reported today that the two sides had agreed on a framework for ending the impasse.
News of progress toward a deal followed a day of diplomatic maneuvering in which Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, headed to Washington to meet with President Bush and Egypt's foreign minister visited Yasir Arafat in a show of solidarity at his headquarters in Ramallah.
A agreement would end the final siege in the Israeli incursion into Palestinian-controlled territory, the extraordinarily sensitive standoff at the church, which was built on the spot where Christians believe that Jesus was born.
Early this morning, Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was said to be at his Ramallah headquarters reviewing a list of 123 people and terms for their exit from the Church of the Nativity, where Palestinian gunmen took refuge after the Israeli military swept into the city early last month.
Under the terms of the proposal presented to Mr. Arafat, about a half-dozen Palestinian men whom Israel considers terrorists would be sent to live in Italy. As many as 35 others would be removed to the Gaza Strip, and the rest would go free, according to Palestinian officials and a person directly involved in the negotiations.
In turn, Israel would withdraw its forces from Bethlehem.
Such a settlement - which some Palestinians said was under active consideration by Mr. Arafat and others said he had accepted in principle - would represent a significant compromise by the Palestinian leader, who has fiercely resisted the notion of exile for any of the besieged men.
Accordingly, Palestinians said this morning that the wording would be drawn up carefully. They said the men leaving Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled territories would assume "temporary residence abroad."
Hassan Abed Rabbo, a leader in Bethlehem of Mr. Arafat's faction, Al Fatah, used a euphemism: "They will be hosted in Italy."
There were many signs that the Palestinians were ready to accept the proposal, as a committee appointed by the local police commander and the Bethlehem governor were ordered by Mr. Arafat about midnight to take over Manger Square and maintain order in the area once the Israelis left. The police began assembling early this morning.
Several mid-level Palestinian officials also told reporters that Mr. Arafat had accepted the proposal, and that among the men to be sent to Italy would Ibrahim Abayat, a member of a local crime family that had frequently attacked Israelis from nearby Beit Jala, and Abdullah Daoud, the Palestinian Authority's director of intelligence in Bethlehem.
But even as Palestinians spoke of the settlement as a foregone conclusion, Israel remained cautious, noting that Mr. Arafat himself had not yet spoken publicly on the matter and that Israel had not received official notice of the deal.
"We know the Palestinians are saying that we've got an agreeement," said Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "As far as we are concerned, we've got some progress regarding the framework for an agreement, and we hope the agreement will be final as soon as possible, because Israel wants to end this crisis."
That view was corroborated by a person directly involved in the talks, which have been conducted by an international team of British and American negotiators, with representatives of the Vatican, the European Union, and religious denominations taking part. "The list has been sent to Arafat, and he's still going through it in Ramallah," the person involved in the talks said. "We're nearer than we have been before."
As events in Bethlehem unfolded, Prime Minister Sharon was preparing for his meeting with Mr. Bush on Tuesday. Mr. Sharon has said he cannot make peace with Mr. Arafat and wants him replaced, and was bringing with him a long dossier that Mr. Sharon says ties Mr. Arafat to terrorism.
Washington, for its part, has been sending mixed signals, calling Mr. Arafat the Palestinian leader but saying that he "has responsibilities that he has not been meeting," as Condoleezza Rice, the American national security adviser, said on "Fox News Sunday." "The Palestinian leadership that is there now, the Authority, is not the kind of leadership that can lead to the kind of Palestinian state that we need," Ms. Rice said. "It has got to reform."
Mr. Sharon was carrying other concerns to Washington. One senior aide said it was important for "Israel's voice to be heard in Washington" since the diplomatic coup by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who put pressure on President Bush to push Israel harder to stop its attacks on the Palestinians.
The Israelis were nonplussed by the announcement last week of an international peace conference to be held this summer by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Israeli officials say such a conference could eventually mean the imposition of a settlement that neither Mr. Sharon nor Mr. Arafat particularly favors.
Mr. Sharon, for his part, is pushing a long-term "interim solution," predicated on an end to the violence, reform of the Palestinian Authority - ideally without Mr. Arafat - and Israeli economic help to the Palestinians followed, down the long road, by negotiations for a Palestinian state.
But senior Palestinian, Arab and European officials see the Sharon plan as a nonstarter devised more to deflect criticism than to promote peace.
The Arabs have their own concerns. Israeli Army actions, broadcast on Arab cable television channels, have infuriated large parts of the Arab population. That is one reason why Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian foreign minister, and Osama el-Baz, a senior adviser to the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, wanted to be seen with Mr. Arafat so soon after his release.
Mr. Maher and Mr. Baz emerged from their meeting on Sunday to laud Mr. Arafat. Before there can be any talk of a peace conference, they said, Israeli troops must withdraw to the lines they held before March 29, when Israel launched its West Bank offensive in reponse to a series of suicide bombings.
Mr. Maher said Mr. Arafat could not be excluded from peace talks.
"The Palestinian Authority and its president must not be excluded from this conference, in which all the Arab countries concerned - Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon - must take part," he said. "Nobody can put in doubt the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority or that of Mr. Arafat as elected president at the head of this Authority."
But Mr. Arafat is also under considerable internal pressure to make improvements in the Authority, especially from Palestinian leaders in the Gaza Strip. While his own position is considered sacrosanct, other Palestinians want to respond to international and internal complaints about corruption and mismanagement. On Saturday, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, told European diplomats: "Major changes are due in the coming weeks. You can expect results. We don't have any choice."
Elsewhere on Sunday, the tight security and the violence continued. The Israeli Army said troops had killed a Palestinian woman and two children in error as they ran from the scene of a roadside bomb aimed at an armored patrol near Jenin. The army said the soldiers had mistaken them for fighters.
An Israeli man, 74, died from his wounds from a the bombing of a Passover seder on March 27, bringing the toll from that attack to 29.
The Israeli security service Shin Bet was interrogating two Palestinians arrested at a vehicle checkpoint in the Gaza Strip, officials said. The two men were said to be on a most-wanted list and weapons were found in their car, the officials said.
--------
INTELLIGENCE
Israelis Release More Documents Accusing Arafat of Terror
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/middleeast/06DOCU.html
JERUSALEM, May 5 - As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flew to Washington, Israeli officials intensified their campaign today to discredit Yasir Arafat, distributing three compilations of captured Palestinian documents to American officials here that Israelis contend are indisputable proof that the Palestinian leader personally approved terror attacks. Mr. Sharon is expected to show the documents to President Bush when he meets with him at the White House on Tuesday.
The documents related to Mr. Arafat, many of which have already been released, indicate that he approved payments to members of his Fatah political party who later carried out terror attacks, that his security service was aware that some Fatah members were engaging in terrorism and that the militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad had infiltrated parts of the Palestinian security apparatus.
But they do not appear to show definitively that the Palestinian leader ordered terror attacks. In some documents, Mr. Arafat criticizes certain suicide bombings and the distribution of money from Saudi Arabia to Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
However, Danny Naveh, the Israeli minister of parliamentary affairs and a member of Mr. Sharon's Likud Party, described the compilation of documents he released today as indeed proving Mr. Arafat's guilt. "Yasir Arafat was personally involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks," he said. "He encouraged them ideologically, authorized them financially and personally headed the Fatah Al Aksa Brigades organization."
Mr. Naveh went on to suggest that the Palestinian Authority has used donations from European Union countries to pay the salaries of "400 to 500" Palestinian Authority employees whom he described as terrorists. He also said that Tawfik Tirawi, the Palestinian intelligence chief in the West Bank, planned and supported terrorist attacks.
Palestinians dismissed the claims as gross exaggerations timed for Mr. Sharon's trip to the United States. "Is there any document where President Arafat orders the purchase of weapons or the manufacture of weapons? Or any document where President Arafat calls for attacking Israeli targets?" asked Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a top aide to Mr. Arafat. "These are nonsensical and meaningless Israeli accusations."
A Western diplomat said the Israeli officials were exaggerating the role of Marwan Barghouti, a top Fatah official whom Israel has arrested and accused of secretly running Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a group of militant Fatah members who have carried out a series of suicide attacks in Israel after their leader was killed in January.
"They're making of Barghouti more than he was," the diplomat said. "If he's said anything, it's been amplified and magnified."
The documents do suggest that Mr. Arafat's intelligence agencies closely monitored the activities of militants from Fatah, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, including terror attacks. What is unclear is whether senior Palestinian officials approved the attacks, tried to stop them or tacitly backed them by not intervening.
Israeli officials released documents again today showing that Mr. Arafat approved payments to lists of Fatah members that included men who later carried out terror attacks. Palestinian officials have pointed out that Mr. Arafat approved payments to hundreds of Fatah members, and that weeks and sometimes months separate the payments from the attacks.
Two additional reports provided to American officials today included letters from Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades requesting funding from Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barghouti. There are no markings on the letters saying whether the requests were approved. The letters are either undated or are dated before the killing of the group's leader in January, when the brigade began its suicide attacks.
In a letter to Mr. Barghouti on May 8, 2001, the brigades' Jenin group summarized its attacks on settlers and soldiers and complained that "to this day there is no budget for all this activity," adding, "all the expenses of this activity were paid out of their own pocket."
Two other requests for funding for munitions, bomb parts and lathes, apparently to make mortars, were found in the office of Fuad Shubaki, an aide to Mr. Arafat accused of trying to smuggle a boat full of Iranian weapons and explosives into Palestinian-controlled areas. One was undated, and the other was marked Sept. 16, 2001.
Calculations are scribbled on the letters, but there are no other markings.
Israeli officials say the letters are proof that Mr. Arafat's aides ran and financed the brigades. Mr. Barghouti has denied the charge and Palestinian officials say the documents are being misportrayed.
The report also included an internal Palestinian transcript of a meeting on March 21, 2002, of Palestinian leaders after two terrorist attacks scuttled a trip by the American special envoy, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni. In the meeting, Mr. Arafat criticized the timing of the attacks, saying at one point, "I do not know who these occurrences serve" and referred to the brigades as "secessionists." He then announced that the United States has placed the brigades on its list of terrorist organizations and warned of American retaliation.
"The group is the first Arab organization to be on the terror list together with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda organization," Mr. Arafat said, according to the transcript. "May God protect us from what will come next."
Israeli officials say Mr. Arafat was lying because he feared that an account of the meeting would become public and complicate his relationship with the United States. Palestinian officials deny this.
-------- japan
Japan Parliament Readies Attack Plan
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Emergency-Law.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Tuesday that Japan has no choice but to prepare itself for possible foreign attack.
``We don't know when or how an emergency situation affecting the state might occur,'' he told lawmakers starting debate on legislation to beef up the government's ability to respond. ``It's most important work is to have a proper response ready before something happens, rather than after.''
Japan's ruling coalition has submitted to Parliament three bills that would expand the country's military role and give the government new powers in case of foreign attack. Opponents say the move runs up against Japan's post World War II pacifist constitution.
The legislative package is designed to give a greater latitude to the prime minister and the military in time of emergency. Parliament has until mid-June to vote the bills into law.
Their adoption would be a victory for Koizumi, who swept to power last year on pledges to bolster Japan's military.
The 1947 constitution prohibits Japan from having an army and commits it to renouncing war as a means of settling international disputes. Japan calls its military, one of the world's largest, the Self Defense Forces.
There are no detailed laws outlining how the military may mobilize in the case of actual or imminent attack from abroad. Critics say dictating such guidelines is unconstitutional, stokes militarism and undercuts civil liberties.
The push for the bills got a major boost by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, as well as a December gunbattle between the Japanese Coast Guard and a suspected North Korean spy boat.
Koizumi insisted those incidents highlighted the need for better home defenses. Opposition parties say the bills overemphasize military engagements and don't have enough specifics about countering terror and espionage.
Under the legislation, the prime minister would have greater power to take steps to counter attacks and order local authorities to implement defensive measures. A special task force could be appointed.
--------
Israel Army Says Soldiers Spooked
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinians-Civilians-Killed.html
JENIN, West Bank (AP) -- The snapping of a tank tread, rather than an explosion, produced the loud noise that spooked Israeli soldiers who then opened fire on nearby Palestinians, killing a mother and her two preschool children, the Israeli military said Monday.
The military initially said a mine went off near the tank on Sunday. Searching for Palestinians they believed might have placed the explosives, members of the tank crew opened fire on nearby Palestinians.
The tank fire killed a 30-year-old Palestinian woman farmer and her children, ages four and six, who were picking grape leaves in the area, southwest of the Palestinian city of Jenin, Palestinian witnesses said.
The army expressed regret for the killings and said it would investigate the shooting. Military investigators found no traces of a bomb in the area, and an inspection of the tank found that its tread had come loose, causing the sound of an explosion that misled the crew, an army spokesman said Monday.
Mohammed Zakarneh, his wife Fatma and two of their children, 4-year-old Abir and 6-year-old Bassel, had set out at dawn Sunday for the vineyard. The family made the trip daily from their town of Qabatiya, just a short ride away.
On a nearby road, the tread snapped off the Israeli tank. Searching for those who might have placed a bomb for them to drive over, soldiers came upon the Palestinian family.
Zakarneh said he saw the tank's machine gun swivel toward them and fire. In a moment of horror, he looked at his little girl, Abir -- bullets had pulverized her small face. His wife lay bleeding from her head and neck. Bassel, was barely breathing; he later died, Zakarneh said.
Zakarneh said he wept and tore at the earth, throwing soil into his face in grief. One of the soldiers who came to him fainted at the sight of the dead girl.
Other soldiers cuffed Zakarneh's hands and questioned him with seven others they rounded up, Zakarneh said.
Some three hours later, Zakarneh was allowed to go. An Israeli officer apologized to him in Arabic, saying the soldiers had killed his family by accident.
--------
Israeli Forces Raid W. Bank City in Fresh Incursion
May 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM - Israeli troops raided the West Bank city of Tulkarm early Tuesday to search for wanted Palestinian militants, an army spokesman said.
The spokesman told Reuters the troops ``entered Tulkarm to thwart an impending terror attack and detect terror infrastructure.''
``The forces are acting in the city and will remain for a short time till the operation is concluded,'' he said.
He said the army was looking for ``specific people and once that is done we will leave the city.''
The army has raided Tulkarm and several other Palestinian-ruled towns several times in operations it says were aimed at capturing suicide bombers, since withdrawing from most West Bank cities under intense U.S. pressure to end a crushing military offensive launched on March 29.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is holding talks in Washington where he is lobbying U.S. leaders to bar Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from Middle East peacemaking.
President Bush has demanded a full Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian-ruled areas, an Arab condition for a conference on peacemaking steps that world powers want held this summer.
-------- mideast
DIPLOMACY
Arab Nations Cool to U.S. Idea of Mideast Peace Conference
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/middleeast/06ARAB.html
CAIRO - The still vague proposal from Washington for a Middle East peace conference has elicited only tepid enthusiasm from Arab governments, which are perturbed by continuing Israeli military assaults and question whether the Bush administration is sincerely seeking a fair deal.
The United States' failure to force the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from the West Bank underscores Arab doubts about the goal of any such conference, not to mention doubts about Washington's ability to push through far more difficult compromises needed to create a Palestinian state.
"The Egyptian position stresses that the first step before discussing any meeting or conference has to be the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Palestinian territories occupied in the past weeks," Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian foreign minister, said before traveling to Ramallah to visit Yasir Arafat today.
Both he and Osama al-Baz, the political adviser to President Hosni Mubarak who accompanied him, stressed that any such conference had to be based on the old formula of Israel's exchanging territory for peace and not starting a new round of talks that might dilute what has been negotiated already.
Their trip was clearly meant to underscore Arab support for Mr. Arafat at a time when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is going to Washington and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, has suggested that Mr. Arafat is not the man who can bring about an independent Palestinian state.
"Nobody can put in doubt the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority or that of Mr. Arafat as elected president at the head of this authority," Mr. Maher said.
Senior Arab officials contend that Mr. Sharon is trying to replay events of 20 years ago, when his forces invaded Lebanon. Then, the Israelis signed a peace treaty after helping install a Lebanese government more to their liking. The president-elect was assassinated, however, the peace deal collapsed, and Lebanon descended again into chaos.
"If Arafat is pushed around and forced into a treaty, it will suffer the same fate as the treaty of Lebanon after the Israeli invasion," Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, said in an interview. "Difficult or easy to deal with, he is the one the Israelis will have to deal with."
Arab League foreign ministers are to meet this week to discuss both the proposed conference and the Saudi peace initiative, adopted in Beirut in March, in which the Arabs agreed to normal relations with Israel if it withdrew to its 1967 borders.
Mr. Moussa said he expected Arab governments to support a conference only if it involved discussion of a full-scale plan on how to reach a final peace with a Palestinian state - a far more ambitious goal than that enunciated by Washington so far.
Arab leaders say they do not want another fruitless round of talks while Israel keeps expanding its settlements and undermines agreements.
"The conference should be to reach a comprehensive settlement that would deal with Jerusalem - Jerusalem should be negotiated, refugees should be negotiated, the question of security, general security in the region, should also be negotiated," Mr. Moussa said.
But from an Arab standpoint, recent statements by Mr. Sharon, such as one that no negotiations would be conducted over settlements until his term ends, indicate that there is not much point in talking.
"The problem is with Sharon, not only with his not wanting to meet Arafat," Mr. Moussa said. He said he would not accept Israeli positions that there should be only an interim agreement, that not all occupied territory would be returned and that the Israelis should have the right to send tanks back into the West Bank.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria suggested that the conference idea was a poor one because it was so ill defined. "What are we going to negotiate on?" the official news agency quoted him as saying. "What are the negotiations going to yield if there is no clear course?"
Syria put great stock in the Madrid conference of 1991 called by the United States to negotiate the land-for-peace idea, expecting that it would get back the Golan Heights, which it lost in the 1967 war. That has not happened.
"If the Madrid conference was unable to make peace after 10 years of negotiations, how can we accept a new conference now - to do what?" said Imad Fawzi Shueibi, a political analyst and professor at Damascus University. "How can we accept that the Americans cannot make Israel withdraw from the territories it reoccupied a month ago, and yet Bush can now make a peace that will depend on Israel's withdrawal from all the territory occupied since 1967?"
The Saudi government has been notably silent publicly on the conference. The Bush administration proposed the idea after talks with Crown Prince Abdullah, who had expressed anger at the relative lack of action by Washington, But Saudi officials have said they think negotiations should be carried out by the two parties and that a peace conference should not be mistaken for the objective.
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Sharon, and Arab Officials, Press White House on Mideast
May 6, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM with STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/middleeast/06CND-SHAR.html
WASHINGTON, May 6 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel began talks with top Bush administration officials here today, outlining his vision of the next phase in Middle East peacemaking, which he says should bypass Yasir Arafat and offer only interim steps toward a Palestinian state, Israeli and American officials said.
``Everyone knows we're not going to start drawing lines on a border for permanent status and dividing Jerusalem,'' an Israeli official said today. ``That's just a nonstarter today.''
Israeli officials pressed their case against Mr. Arafat and continued to circulate documents that they say show payments by Saudi Arabia to the families of suicide bombers.
At the same time, King Abdullah II of Jordan and the Saudi foreign minister, also in Washington, pursued their own cause, including seeking backing for Mr. Arafat, in a day of closed-door diplomacy with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
In a speech here tonight to the Anti-Defamation League, Mr. Sharon expressed relief that the United Nations had been forced to abandon a proposed fact-finding mission into Israel's actions in the Jenin refugee camp, calling Palestinian accusations of a massacre there ``a Palestinian blood libel.'' He thanked President Bush and Secretary Powell for helping avoid the inquiry, saying, ``They stood firm in order not to allow that Israeli soldiers will be interrogated.''
Mr. Bush, who is to meet Mr. Sharon on Tuesday, repeated his sharp criticism of Mr. Arafat but did not echo Mr. Sharon's demands that the Palestinian leader be replaced, instead calling on him and other Middle East leaders ``assume their responsibilities and lead.''
``He has disappointed me,'' Mr. Bush told reporters during a visit to an elementary school in Southfield, Mich., speaking of Mr. Arafat. ``He must lead. He must show the world that he believes in peace.''
But he added, ``In order to achieve peace, all parties - the Arab nations, Israel, Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority - must assume their responsibilities and lead.''
In his speech tonight, Mr. Sharon offered no details of his ideas, but said Israel had faced ``a brutal campaign of terror instigated and encouraged by the Palestinian Authority and its leader.''
While not mentioning Mr. Arafat by name, he said, ``A responsible Palestinian Authority that can advance the cause of peace should not be dependent on the will of one man.''
The ``blood libel'' mentioned in his speech was a term Mr. Sharon often uses. Before he began applying it to the accusations about Jenin, he accused Time magazine of blood libel in his libel suit against the magazine two decades ago.
In Israel, talks continued on how to settle the armed siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where more than 120 people have been holed up while Israel demands the handover of Palestinian militants on its most-wanted list. In return, Israel says it will withdraw from Bethlehem, the last major Palestinian-controlled area it still occupies in force.
The outlines of a deal were sketched late Sunday, but officials said Mr. Arafat had objected to Israel's demand that up to 13 men be exiled from the region, probably to Italy, holding out for deporting only four to six men. Israeli officials said they believed that Mr. Arafat was reluctant to give Mr. Sharon any kind of victory before his meeting with Mr. Bush, who has pressed hard for an end to the standoff.
In the meantime, Arab diplomats said they expected that Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia would meet with Mr. Arafat in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik this weekend to press him to rein in violence and pave the way for resumption of serious peace efforts.
But the unusually hectic round of meetings here served to emphasize the gaps separating Arab, Israeli and American positions. Israeli officials with Mr. Sharon's party issued an 85-page document they say offers proof of Saudi payments to the families of suicide bombers and to the Hamas terrorist group. The Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, issued a statement condemning the allegations as ``totally baseless and false.''
For days, Israeli officials have circulated such material and similar captured documents alleging Mr. Arafat's complicity in terrorist acts.
But Saudi officials took particular umbrage today. Prince Bandar expressed frustration that Mr. Sharon had not been more supportive of his kingdom's recent peace initiative calling for broad Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from occupied territories.
``The question is, when will Prime Minister Ariel Sharon take `yes' for an answer?'' the prince said.
Neither the Israelis nor Bush administration officials would offer much detail about Mr. Sharon's expected discussions with the president, but they said enough to suggest there would be some disagreements.
Senior European and Arab officials have repeatedly said that any new peace effort will require a specific, phased timetable toward guaranteed creation of a Palestinian state. Israeli officials made it plain that Mr. Sharon was prepared at the moment to discuss only interim measures toward that goal, while Israel builds up security defenses and reserves the right to make strategic raids in Palestinian areas in the short term if violence continues.
``I think we're looking today to see what steps can be taken that we can agree on, that we can move forward on, steps that are toward the final solution but not the big deal,'' an Israeli official said. ``In the framework of that, I think Sharon is willing to show flexibility. No one wants to close off talking about the final settlement.'' But, he added, Israel is not ready for those talks now.
``The flexibility that Sharon is going to offer is not going to come in a vacuum,'' the official said. ``It's presupposed on cooperation on the security side. If the bombings begin again, we'll go right back in.''
Secretary Powell met with Mr. Sharon in the prime minister's hotel suite for about 45 minutes, but the two men did not meet with reporters. Afterward, Mr. Powell said only, ``We had a very good meeting.''
American and Israeli officials said that Mr. Sharon had not brought up his dossier on Mr. Arafat in the meeting with Secretary Powell, and that it had come up only in passing in a later meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Secretary Powell, after meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan at the State Department, said he and Mr. Sharon had talked about how to improve security, rebuild Palestinian institutions and pave the way for a political solution to the conflict, but that the administration itself had not made final judgments about how to proceed.
``There were different points of view on that political dimension,'' Secretary Powell said. ``And what we'll be discussing with our friends in the weeks ahead is the nature of a comprehensive settlement or settlement that would involve way stations on the way to a comprehensive settlement. We have not made a judgment on this, and that's why we're consulting with our friends.''
After his own meeting with Secretary Powell at the State Department, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said he could not yet offer an opinion on a foreign ministers' peace conference on the Middle East proposed by the United States because too many details remained unknown.
Asked in Arabic if he intended to meet with anyone in Mr. Sharon's delegation while they are both here, Prince Saud replied first in Arabic and then in other languages: ``That's no, nyet and nein.''
-------- nepal
Nepal Says Over 400 Rebels Are Dead After Several Battles
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/asia/06NEPA.html
NEW DELHI - The government of Nepal says that its security forces have killed more than 400 Maoist rebels since Thursday in training camps hidden in remote areas, at a cost of only three soldiers' lives.
Such a rout of the Maoists would constitute the worst military blow yet to the rebels in their six-year-long insurgency.
The government's claim of victory is difficult to verify because no journalists have been allowed to visit the battlefield. If true, it would also mean the security forces had finally taken the offensive. In February and again last month, thousands of guerrillas successfully mounted surprise attacks on police and army posts.
Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who engaged in three rounds of peace talks with the Maoists last year, has now turned fully to war. The rebel leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, issued a statement Thursday calling for renewed negotiations and "a positive political way out."
But Mr. Deuba, who said in a recent interview that the rebels betrayed him in the last rounds of negotiations, forcefully rejected Mr. Dahal's overture, saying today that the government would not talk to the rebels "until they laid down arms and surrendered."
Mr. Deuba is aggressively seeking foreign military assistance, casting Nepal's battle with the Maoists, in which more than 4,000 people have died since it began in 1996, as part of the global war against terrorism.
He left Katmandu today for the United States and Britain. He is to meet on Tuesday in New York with President Bush, whose administration is proposing $20 million in military aid, and with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on his way home.
"I will appeal to them to help us fight and defeat terrorism," Mr. Deuba said today before he boarded his flight.
The United States government has already offered considerable moral support to Nepal, a constitutional Hindu monarchy surrounded by India and China. In January, Colin L. Powell became the first American secretary of state to visit the impoverished Himalayan kingdom, which has a population of 23 million.
The American ambassador in Katmandu, Michael E. Malinowski, has publicly described the rebels as terrorists who "under the guise of Maoism or the so-called people's war are fundamentally the same as terrorists elsewhere - be they members of the Shining Path, Abu Sayyaf, the Khmer Rouge or Al Qaeda."
Last month, a team of 15 American military officers spent more than two weeks in Nepal to assess the situation and the country's military needs.
The rebels, inspired by the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, say they are fighting against the monarchy and for land reform and the liberation of Nepal. They call themselves Maoists, but have not won the support of China, the neighboring behemoth and birthplace of Maoism.
Some critics of the Nepalese government's approach say it focused too much on a military solution and too little on addressing the abject poverty that has made Nepal fertile soil for guerrillas. Nepali human rights groups, as well as Amnesty International, have also accused the security forces of using torture and summary executions.
Mr. Deuba has said he will act firmly against those who commit human rights abuses. He maintains that the government cannot effectively pursue antipoverty programs until peace is restored.
Defense ministry officials have yet to provide a detailed description of how the security forces managed to kill hundreds of Maoists in the new military operation while losing only three men. But journalists and Western diplomats in Nepal say the government may have done much of its fighting from helicopters.
Suman Pradhan, the news editor of The Katmandu Post, said reporters for the newspaper in the districts that encircle the Maoist strongholds say they have seen helicopters heading into the Maoist areas where the death toll has been highest.
A Western diplomat said tonight, "If the Royal Nepal Army is engaging from helicopters, they may just have the Maoists in their line of sight. If you're battling people and they're on the ground and you're in the air, you have an advantage."
According to the Defense Ministry, 40 rebels were killed Thursday night when security forces attacked a Maoist training camp in the western Doti district. About 350 more died in a raid in the jungles of the Rolpa district. Today, the ministry said 15 more bodies had been recovered in the two districts.
The government has suspended civil liberties and press freedom since declaring a state of emergency in November to combat the Maoists.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Team Leaves for Washington
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-US-Terror-Talks.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- A top Pakistani security team left Monday for Washington to discuss ways to tighten control over the country's porous 870-mile border with Afghanistan.
``We will enhance security at the Afghan border by setting up more check posts and watchtowers to prevent illegal crossing to Pakistan,'' Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said.
The talks are aimed at improving cooperation in shutting the al-Qaida terrorist network off from its funding, as well as clamping down on narcotics smuggling out of Afghanistan, Haider said.
Some delegation members also will travel to the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to help interrogate Pakistanis among al-Qaida and Taliban suspects imprisoned there, said officials in Islamabad.
The participation of U.S. forces in the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives in Pakistan's restive tribal lands along the border remains sensitive.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Saturday there were only about a dozen U.S. specialists in the area, but tribal leaders say many times that number of U.S. forces are involved.
Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, a member of the Washington delegation, said the Pakistani team would meet with Attorney General John Ashcroft, Christina Rocca, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia, and FBI, CIA and counterterrorism experts.
-------- philippines
U.S. Military Leaving N. Philippines
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Philippines-US-Military.html
CLARK AIR BASE, Philippines (AP) -- Nearly 6,000 U.S. and Philippine troops ended three weeks of training Monday aimed at strengthening the countries' military relationships amid the U.S.-led war on terror.
``The United States military has gained as much from the exercises as I hope our hosts have,'' said U.S. Marine Col. Brendan Kearney, co-director of the exercise.
The training mission combined 2,700 American troops and 2,900 Philippine soldiers.
He told reporters that the U.S. soldiers, many based in Japan, will leave the country in coming days after weeks training, which included living off the land, fashioning mortars from bamboo tubes and other aspects of jungle warfare on the Philippines' main island of Luzon.
Several hundred protesters gathered on the main road leading to Clark Air Base, the headquarters of the exercises, to demonstrate against what they said was a violation of Philippine sovereignty
About 1,000 U.S. troops are still in the southern region of Mindanaov to train Filipinos in battling rebels.
For nearly a year, the Abu Sayyaf, which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, has been holding Wichita, Kan., missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham and Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap hostage on the southern island of Basilan.
On Monday, officials said an unidentified assailant stabbed an American sailor in the face and neck while he guarded a Navy ship at a Manila dock, officials said Monday.
David Edward Spencer, a dental technician on the USS Fort McHenry transport and landing ship on the exercises in the north, was hospitalized in stable condition, said Philippine military Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Narciso Abaya.
Philippine authorities said there was no known motive for the attack.
-------- spy agencies
Official: Russia ID'd 80 Spies
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Spies.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia identified more than 80 foreign intelligence agents operating on its territory last year and prevented illegal activities by more than 31 foreign journalists, the head of Russia's counterintelligence department said in comments published Monday.
``Foreign special services have begun to employ new, nontraditional forms and methods of work with Russian citizens, many of which seemed impossible...just a few years ago,'' Lt. Gen. Nikolai Volobuyev told the Gazeta newspaper. The rare interview was timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Russia's counterintelligence service.
Volobuyev said foreign intelligence agencies are increasingly recruiting Russians by offering them high-paying speaking tours in the West, inviting them to scientific lectures and conferences, giving them grants and subsidies from international foundations, arranging work for their relatives at joint economic ventures and paying for their children's education abroad.
He also said foreign agents are using more advanced technology to communicate and send information to their home countries.
Despite the end of the Cold War and the general warming of relations between Russia and the West, the espionage trade remains alive and well with Russia and the United States frequently trading accusations of spying.
Critics say the Federal Security Service or FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, has become more active and gained in prominence since President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, came to power in 2000. Putin is a 16-year veteran of the KGB's foreign intelligence department and has invited many former colleagues into the government.
Volobuyev said more than two-thirds of the spies identified last year were stopped from carrying out their work. He added that 18 foreign journalists were deprived of their visas and are barred from entering Russia for the next five years. He did not say where the alleged spies and journalists were from, or what they were accused of doing.
There was no official ceremony marking the Russian counterintelligence service's anniversary Monday, though Putin did meet in the Kremlin with FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to discuss the war in Chechnya and security along the Russian-Georgian border.
Russia's counterintelligence service was created as a unit of the Cheka, the dreaded precursor to the Soviet KGB, in 1922. Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was one of the first people to head the unit.
Also Monday, the Russian government expanded the list of Russian territories that are off-limits to foreigners, adding a large swath of land in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district in Siberia, the Interfax news agency reported. No reason for the decision was given
--------
UK Bill will give OFT surveillance powers
By Jean Eaglesham,
Legal Correspondent, Financial Times
May 6 2002
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3BJ3UTW0D&live=true&tagid=ZZZPB7GUA0C&subheading=UK
Anyone working for a company suspected of anti-competitive behaviour could be secretly followed and have their e-mail, internet and telephone records monitored under new powers requested by the Office of Fair Trading from the government.
The competition watchdog will be able to ask the courts to disqualify directors for up to 15 years if they were unaware their company was breaking competition rules but "ought to have known" about it.
The sweeping new powers are contained in the small print to the enterprise bill, which is passing through Parliament. Media and ministerial attention has focused on the powers in the bill to jail individuals who take part in hardcore cartels. The OFT will be able to use surveillance to catch such individuals.
But the competition watchdog is seeking new snooping powers that stretch far beyond the criminal offence.
Paragraph 416 of the explanatory notes to the bill reveals that the OFT has applied for an order giving it surveillance powers for "both civil and criminal investigations" .
The order, which requires parliamentary approval, would allow OFT officials to undertake "directed surveillance [essentially monitoring the movement of people and vehicles]", to use informants and to "access communications data [primarily postal and telephone records]".
Martin Coleman, head of competition law at Norton Rose, the law firm, said the "dazzle of the cartel offence has hidden everything else, but these new powers will give the competition authorities a formidable array of weapons... It's going to shoot competition law right up the boardroom agenda".
The OFT told the Financial Times it would use the new powers to investigate cartels only. But the watchdog is adamant its surveillance should not be restricted to criminal activity. It claims to be unearthing an average of one cartel a month, only a few of which will qualify for the new criminal offence - dishonestly engaging in price-fixing, market-sharing or bid-rigging.
The OFT's proposed powers to seek to have directors disqualified will not be restricted - as many had thought - to people involved in deliberate breaches of competition laws. Instead, clause 195 of the enterprise bill reveals directors "must" be disqualified if they had "reasonable grounds to suspect" their company was breaking competition law and took no steps to prevent it.
"My guess is that disqualification powers are going to have as much impact on the boardroom as the new criminal offence," Mr Coleman said.
An order granting various public bodies - including the OFT - access to communications data was expected to go before Parliament in the next couple of months.
-------- un
U.S. Pulls Out of International Court Treaty
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-International-Court.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States said Monday it wants nothing to do with a treaty creating the first permanent international war crimes tribunal, a decision immediately criticized by human rights groups and some lawmakers. Others welcomed the move.
``We believe that states, not international institutions, are primarily responsible for ensuring justice in the international system,'' Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, said in announcing the Bush administration decision.
As constituted today, Grossman said, the international criminal court ``claims the authority to detain and try American citizens, even though our democratically elected representatives have not agreed to be bound by the treaty.''
That threatens U.S. sovereignty, he said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the tribunal's planned July 1 start-up ``means that our men and women in uniform --as well as current and former U.S. officials-- could be at risk of prosecution.
Particularly in the midst of the war against terrorism, Rumsfeld said, the flaws in the treaty are ``particularly troubling.''
Although nations have the authority to try non-citizens who commit crimes against their citizens or on their territory, ``the United States has never recognized the right of an international organization to do so'' without its consent or without a U.N. Security Council mandate, Grossman said.
The International Criminal Court gained the necessary international backing to come into being last month when 10 nations joined 56 others in ratifying the treaty, negotiated in Rome in 1998.
President Clinton signed the treaty, but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. The Bush administration has made its opposition clear.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, said the United States has no intention of ratifying the treaty and now considers itself ``no longer bound in any way to its purpose and objective.'' The declaration was contained in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered to U.N. headquarters in New York.
Grossman, in a speech Monday in Washington, said President Bush wanted to formally renounce the treaty to avoid creating expectations of U.S. involvement in the future.
Instead, the United States favors working with nongovernment organizations, private industry and universities and law schools to help individual countries set up tribunals when needed, officials said.
But Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was dismayed by the decision.
``Beyond the extremely problematic matter of casting doubt on the U.S. commitment to international justice and accountability,'' Feingold said, ``these steps actually call into question our country's credibility in all multilateral endeavors.''
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said Bush ``sent a clear message we do not support this rogue court ... an institution of unchecked power that poses a real threat to our men and women fighting the war against terror.
Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said, ``We simply cannot accept an international institution that claims jurisdiction over American citizens.''
But Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, described the decision as an empty gesture that will further estrange Washington from its allies.
The Washington Working Group on the ICC, a coalition of organizations that support the tribunal, said the decision ``signals to the world that America is turning its back on decades of U.S. leadership in prosecuting war criminals since the Nuremberg trials.''
The coalition includes human rights organizations such as Amnesty International-USA and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The court, to be formed this summer, will fill a gap in the international justice system first recognized by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials for World War II's German and Japanese war criminals.
Tribunals have been created for special situations -- like the 1994 Rwanda genocide -- but no mechanism existed to hold individuals criminally responsible for serious crimes such as genocide.
-------- us
Navy Must Reopen Contract Bidding
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Navy-Contract-Questioned.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Navy improperly relied on information from an Internet site in awarding an emergency construction contract to a subsidiary of a company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, a government arbitrator ruled.
The ruling recommends that the Navy reopen bidding on the contract, awarded in 2000 to Brown & Root Services. The Perini/Jones construction company, which had held the contract, protested the award to Congress' General Accounting Office, which decides on such disputes.
The contract was to provide construction services for the Navy to respond to natural and manmade disasters and humanitarian relief projects.
Anthony Gamboa, GAO's acting general counsel, ruled that Navy officials mistakenly relied on information from an Internet site in judging how much construction experience Brown & Root Services had.
The information from an engineering industry trade journal listed the construction experience of Kellogg, Brown & Root, an affiliated company that was not involved in the contract bid, Gamboa wrote in a ruling released Monday. Brown & Root Services actually had little or no construction experience, Gamboa wrote.
Both Kellogg, Brown & Root and Brown & Root Services are subsidiaries of the Halliburton Co., which Cheney headed until Aug. 16, 2000.
Navy evaluators found that the bid from Perini/Jones would cost more than the bid from Brown & Root Services -- but the contract could have gone to Perini/Jones had the other company's lack of experience been taken into account, Gamboa ruled.
Gamboa rejected a claim from Perini/Jones that Brown & Root Services' bid had a conflict of interest. Perini/Jones complained that Brown & Root's proposed program manager was a Navy officer in the construction field. Gamboa ruled that Perini/Jones didn't show that the Navy officer's involvement gave Brown & Root an unfair advantage.
On the Net:
GAO: http://www.gao.gov
--------
Gulf War Vets Ill from Anthrax Vaccination, Medication
May 6, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2002/2002L-05-06-09.html#anchor2
MANHATTAN, Kansas, The Gulf War illness that has troubled veterans for over a decade is due to a cocktail of medications and vaccinations, including a vaccination for anthrax, researchers at Kansas State University conclude in a report released today.
Pills of pyridostigmine bromide were given to Gulf War military personnel as a pretreatment for exposure to nerve agents. A vaccination for anthrax and several others were given at the same time, and many contained mercury as a preservative, said the research team, led by Walter Schumm, a Kansas State professor of family studies and human services.
Inaccurate shot records, little rest, stressful conditions in the field, and you have the recipe for a "significant association" between subsequent declines in subjective health experiences and Gulf War veterans, Shumm's team found.
Schumm noted that their research confirms results reported previously by British, Canadian, and other U.S. research teams with respect to vaccinations and pyridostigmine bromide consumption. He is working on a critique of a report recently released by the Institute of Medicine, clearing anthrax vaccine of any connection to health problems.
The extensive review of published literature in 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War, is entitled "Gulf War and Health, Volume I."
Schumm said that it is possible that the anthrax vaccine as given today may be safe while the product as manufactured and administered during the Gulf War - in combination with all the other factors - was less than optimal with respect to the long term health of recipients.
On August 2, 1990, Iraqi armed forces invaded Kuwait; within five days, the United States began to deploy troops to Operation Desert Shield. The last troops to participate in the ground war returned home on June 13, 1991. In all, approximately 697,000 U.S. troops had been deployed to the Persian Gulf area during the conflict.
A large number of Gulf War veterans have had a range of unexplained illnesses including chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, loss of concentration, forgetfulness, headache, and rash. They were potentially exposed to a wide range of biological and chemical agents including sand, smoke from oil well fires, paints, solvents, insecticides, petroleum fuels and their combustion products, organophosphate nerve agents, pyridostigmine bromide, depleted uranium, anthrax and botulinum toxoid vaccinations, and infectious diseases, in addition to psychological and other physiological stress.
Ohio state officials were concerned over numerous reports of veterans in Ohio being ill with various problems and hired the team of researchers to take an independent look at the problem.
Schumm and his team studied a random selection of nearly 1,000 reserve component veterans from all branches of the military, who had either been living in Ohio in March 1996 or who had been in Ohio as of August 1990.
Among those veterans who reported excellent health before the war, 36 percent who said they received an anthrax vaccination reported poor to fair health in 1996 compared to 18 percent of those who did not report receiving the anthrax vaccination. In contrast, those who were not mobilized and did not receive an anthrax vaccination or pyridostigmine bromide pills reported much lower levels of poor to fair health in 1996 - less than five percent.
Schumm said researchers also found that many of the medical records or shot records of the veterans had been falsified or destroyed, making it virtually impossible to use clinical data to assess the impact of vaccinations or the pyridostigmine bromide pills.
"I get angry sometimes because you hear on the news that the Gulf War Syndrome symptoms are psychological; it's all in their heads," Schumm said. "I think our research suggests that there is something else going on. If it was just all just psychological I don't think we'd get these correlations with the exposures like we have. I think our findings are equivalent if not better than other studies done."
The Institute of Medicine committee recommended careful, longterm study of veterans exposed to depleted uranium and sarin; and recommended study of interactions between pyridostigmine bromide and insecticides and stress. Because few vaccination records were kept, the committee recommended long term sudy of those who were vaccinated for anthrax.
-------- venesuela
Venezuelan Democracy Investigated
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela.html
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- The Organization of American States' rights commission began a weeklong investigation into the state of Venezuelan democracy Monday at the urging of President Hugo Chavez, who is hoping to win a vote of confidence after surviving a failed coup.
Chavez had invited the seven-member OAS Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to Venezuela before the bloody April 11-14 military and popular uprisings that ousted and then restored him.
The leftist former paratrooper is hoping to disprove allegations from the opposition and the United States that he has weakened democracy and threatened press freedoms during his three-year, self-described ``revolution'' to help the poor.
Foreign Minister Luis Alfonso Davila said the government is confident the commission will observe a situation ``different from the reality reflected by the news media,'' which Chavez has accused of unfairly portraying his government as autocratic.
Davila spoke after meeting with Juan Mendez, president of the OAS commission.
Although its visit was planned before the coup, the commission's investigation will largely focus on the country's efforts to explain the deaths of 50 people in demonstrations and rioting during the coup and countercoup.
``We are very interested to see how responsibilities for the deaths during those days will be determined, but we also hope our visit will serve as catalyst for constructive discussion in Venezuela,'' Mendez told reporters.
The commission plans to meet with families of victims, human rights groups and congressional leaders trying to create an independent ``truth commission'' to investigate the deaths.
Opponents say impartial congressional and criminal investigations into the coup deaths are impossible because Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez is Chavez's ally and because the government has a majority in Congress.
Since his 1998 election, detractors have accused Chavez of accumulating autocratic powers by pushing through a new constitution and packing the legislature and judiciary with his allies.
Chavez fiercely denies allegations that he has been undemocratic. He stresses that Venezuelans voted in six elections to overhaul the constitution and the country's institutions -- opting to throw out a corrupt and unpopular political establishment.
In a speech to swear in five new Cabinet ministers Monday, Chavez explained that his government enjoys popular support, unlike the one he tried to overthrow in a failed 1992 coup.
``During the rebellion of Feb. 4, 1992, did the people come out to defend that government? No way,'' he said of his attempt -- with 2,500 troops -- to oust the unpopular government of President Carlos Andres Perez.
Chavez spent two years in prison for that insurrection.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Mayor Says No One Is Immune in Review of D.W.I. Crash Case
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By MICHAEL COOPER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/nyregion/06GRAY.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that "nobody is above the law," and the police commissioner pledged a thorough inquiry into whether police officers tried to stymie the investigation of a fellow officer who killed several members of a Brooklyn family while driving drunk.
The Brooklyn district attorney's office and the Police Department are looking into whether a series of errors revealed at the officer's trial were innocent mistakes or part of a concerted effort by police officers to help a colleague in trouble.
"I think anybody that tries to obstruct justice is not serving the public well," Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday before the Salute to Israel Parade, when he was asked about the case. "And we'll let the courts and the D.A. do the investigation, and the Police Department do their investigation, to see who actually said what. But nobody is above the law, whether you work for the N.Y.P.D. or not. I know the police commissioner would second me 100 percent."
The case involved an officer, Joseph Gray, 41, who struck and killed a pregnant woman, her son and her sister as they crossed a street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, last August. Mr. Gray ran into them after completing a night shift in the 72nd Precinct and then going on a 12-hour drinking binge that began with fellow officers outside the station house and continued at a nearby strip club.
Mr. Gray was convicted on Friday of the top charges that he faced: four counts of second-degree manslaughter, including one for a boy who was delivered by Caesarean section as his mother, Maria Herrera, was kept on life support. The boy died less than a day later.
At Mr. Gray's trial, prosecutors complained about errors in the police investigation. An accident report was incomplete. Photos of the crime scene never came out. A chemist failed to turn over 60 pages of reports on Mr. Gray's blood-alcohol level to the defense, as required by law. Evidence was temporarily misplaced.
An accident investigator, Martin Finkelstein, who has since retired, testified that police union officials asked him which sobriety test Mr. Gray would be most likely to "beat" and acknowledged that he had sought to give Mr. Gray "a benefit."
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said yesterday that the deputy police commissioner for legal matters, Stephen L. Hammerman, would coordinate the Police Department's investigation with that of the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes.
Commissioner Kelly said that police officials and prosecutors would meet today to exchange information. "I feel very confident we'll do a very thorough examination of all of the issues," he said.
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Ex - Cop in LAPD Scandal Gets 2 Years
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-LAPD-Corruption.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The former officer at the center of the Rampart police corruption scandal was sentenced Monday to two years in federal prison for violating the civil rights of a man he shot and framed in 1996.
Rafael Perez, 34, declined an opportunity to speak as U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder accepted his guilty pleas to conspiracy and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
The length of the sentence was the only remaining issue in the case against Perez, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department's anti-gang unit in the Rampart area west of downtown.
Perez, 34, earlier served nearly three years in state custody for stealing cocaine that had been seized by police.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Andrues praised the sentence. She also said the outcome ``was important for the people of Los Angeles, it was important for justice and it was important for upholding the standards in which we would like our police officers to act.''
Perez and partner Nino Durden shot Javier Francisco Ovando when he entered an apartment they were using as an observation post. They planted a sawed-off .22-caliber assault rifle next to Ovando, and falsely testified at his trial that he attacked them.
Ovando was paralyzed by the shooting. He served three years of a 23-year sentence before his conviction was overturned when Perez admitted he concocted the story.
The shooting was one of the most serious crimes that surfaced in a probe of the Rampart anti-gang unit after Perez was found to have stolen $1 million of cocaine from an evidence room and began cooperating with investigators in exchange for leniency.
Perez's allegations of widespread wrongdoing in the unit led the district attorney's office to throw out about 100 felony cases considered tainted by involvement of Rampart officers.
Some inmates, including Ovando, were freed as a result. The city's liability for damages stemming the scandal could eventually reach $125 million, officials have said.
Perez was among nine officers to face criminal charges. Durden, who has pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of Ovando and two others, is scheduled to be sentenced May 20.
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Guantanamo's Camp Delta Almost Full
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Guantanamo-Prison.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Another 21 accused terrorists have arrived at this remote outpost, pushing Camp Delta to its capacity and setting the scene for fresh interrogations, officials said Monday.
The newest detainees, which bring the total number of captives in Guantanamo Bay to 384, arrived Sunday aboard a C-141 military plane. U.S. officials would not say where the plane came from.
Wearing orange jumpsuits and shackles, the men were also forced to don ear muffs and goggles to block their senses, and face masks to protect U.S. officials against diseases such as tuberculosis.
The arrivals ``went very smoothly and efficiently,'' Maj. James Bell, a spokesman for the detention mission, said by telephone from the base. ``All the detainees appeared to have no significant medical issues.''
The number of nationalities represented was still at 34, Bell said, cautioning though that the number was only an estimate since many of the detainees arrive with no passport or identification.
The arrivals leave only 24 open units at Camp Delta, the permanent detention facility that replaced the makeshift Camp X-ray. Officials, however, say they may keep those cells open for security reasons.
To accommodate more detainees, construction crews hoped to finish another 204 cells at Camp Delta by the end of May. Delta could eventually be expanded to have more than 2,000 cells, and officials haven't ruled out using Camp X-ray again.
In Kuwait, the minister of state for foreign affairs said Monday that the United States will allow a Kuwaiti delegation to visit Guantanamo Bay base where 10 Kuwaitis are in custody. No date has been set, Sheik Mohammed Al Sabah said, according to the official Kuwait News Agency. He said there were conditions, but he declined to disclose them.
Scores of Kuwaitis were believed to have fought in the war in the ranks of al-Qaida, the terror group led by Osama bin Laden that is blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
--------
In Michigan, Anti-Terrorism Effort Goes Public
Haddad Case Forces Rare Glimpse of Secret U.S. Campaign
By Dan Eggen and Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 6, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37210-2002May5?language=printer
When three immigration agents knocked on his apartment door in Ann Arbor, Mich., in December, Rabih Haddad already had his attorney on the phone.
Earlier on Dec. 14, federal agents raided the Illinois offices of the Global Relief Foundation, the Islamic charity that Haddad had helped found, freezing its assets and accusing it of funding terrorists. That afternoon, they took him into custody. Haddad, 41, has been in jail ever since.
In court papers, U.S. officials have accused him of having contact with groups and individuals associated with the al Qaeda terrorist network. But they have not charged him with a terrorism-related crime, and they have declined to provide details of the allegations to him or to his legal team. They have held him on the comparatively minor charge of overstaying his visa.
Haddad's attorneys and supporters, including Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), say he is a gentle man, a Muslim who has worked to bring together people of different faiths. They say he is a victim of an overzealous Justice Department that has targeted innocent Arab and Muslim men since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Haddad's case is like those of hundreds of other post-Sept. 11 detainees, except in one important aspect: At least part of his fight is being waged in public. Last month, federal judges ordered that documents and hearing transcripts from Haddad's immigration case be made public. When the Justice Department reluctantly complied, Haddad's case became the first of the Sept. 11-related prosecutions to be unsealed.
The case provides a striking example of the government's controversial, secretive campaign of arrests and detentions since Sept. 11. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other U.S. officials say the effort is aimed at capturing suspected terrorists and disrupting future attacks, yet none of the hundreds of immigrants detained has been publicly charged with crimes related to terrorism. Among activist groups concerned about the treatment of those swept up in the dragnet, the Haddad case has become a cause célèbre.
"How I long for those peaceful evenings I used to spend with my family huddled around a huge bowl of buttered popcorn watching a movie or just talking and teasing," Haddad wrote recently to one of those groups. "It's been four months now, and there still doesn't seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel."
The government says that domestic imagery in no way describes the Haddad they know or the organization he represents.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, the government has alleged, Haddad was "directly linked with and observed at multiple overseas locations that housed and supported terrorist organizations associated with the al Qaeda network" and was seen "in the company of leaders and members of al Qaeda-related terrorist organizations."
But among more than 1,000 pages of documents -- motions, filings, transcripts and hundreds of petitions from Haddad's supporters -- that is all there is from the government about his alleged links to terrorists; the evidence, prosecutors say, is classified.
In the absence of details, the two portraits of Haddad remain unresolved.
A Detainee's Background
This much can be gleaned from the released court documents and interviews with people who know Haddad:
He was born in Beirut in 1960, to a Presbyterian father and Greek Orthodox mother. He became a Muslim in the 1980s. He first entered the United States in 1980, when he began engineering studies in Nebraska. He spent about 14 of the next 22 years here, interrupted by travels back to Lebanon and elsewhere, including Pakistan and Kuwait.
Haddad has told authorities that from 1988 to 1992, he was a humanitarian aid worker in Peshawar, Pakistan, which served as the base for Muslim guerrillas who fought the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. War-torn and flooded with refugees, Peshawar was awash in both aid workers and militants who later joined al Qaeda or the Taliban militia.
"I converted to Islam wholeheartedly and I was looking for the best way to please my God," Haddad testified at a December hearing. "I thought this would be one of the best ways . . . helping others and doing good."
After returning to the United States in 1992, Haddad joined with several others to found Global Relief in Bridgeview, Ill. Before the government closed it in December, it ranked as the second-largest Islamic aid organization based in the United States, with programs in more than 20 countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Pakistan and the West Bank.
Global Relief reported donations of more than $5 million in 2000 and said it used the money to provide food, health care and other emergency services, according to court documents filed by the group.
Haddad served as the group's chairman, traveling frequently around the United States to raise money for Muslims in need in the Balkans and the Middle East, according to court records and officials. He has testified that he was not paid by the group, which would have violated his immigration status, but lived off zakat, or alms, from fellow Muslims.
According to released court documents, early efforts to hold Haddad on the immigration charge focused on his unlawful possession of a shotgun and on varying explanations of how he supported himself financially.
In court, he said he had the shotgun because he was an avid bird hunter and member of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society. An application for a subsidized apartment in Ann Arbor listed Global Relief as his employer, but he testified that he lied on the application because "if you tell them that your source of income is charity, nobody is going to let you live there."
The seeds of his current immigration troubles were sown when he last entered the country, in 1998. Haddad was granted a six-month tourist visa, and then a six-month extension. The Immigration and Naturalization Service said his visa has expired, and he is awaiting a hearing to decide whether he should be deported.
His wife, Kuwaiti national Salma Rashaid, and three of the couple's four children also face deportation for overstaying their visas. They, unlike Haddad, are free on bond awaiting hearings. A fourth child was born in the United States and is considered a U.S. citizen.
Days after he was arrested, and for months afterward, Haddad was held in 23-hour solitary confinement, with limited contact with his attorneys or family. The proceedings in his immigration case were sealed under broad secrecy rules Ashcroft ordered after Sept. 11.
For months, Conyers, the American Civil Liberties Union and several Michigan newspapers fought in court to open those proceedings. The Justice Department and INS contended that doing so would jeopardize national security. But after a U.S. District Court judge and a three-judge appellate panel ruled against them on the issue last month, prosecutors said they no longer believed that.
However, their suspicions of Haddad and Global Relief remained intact.
Suspicions Denounced
As part of a crackdown on charities suspected of funneling money to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, the Treasury Department froze Global Relief's assets while the Justice Department launched a grand jury investigation of the organization in Chicago. About the same time, NATO forces raided a Global Relief office in Kosovo and said the group "is allegedly involved in planning attacks against targets in the USA and Europe."
Global Relief's name was also included on a U.S. list of groups suspected of having ties to terrorism that was circulated after the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, officials said.
Federal prosecutors in Detroit did not directly accuse Haddad of involvement with terrorists until March 1, 2 1/2 months after his arrest, when they included descriptions of a sealed FBI declaration in papers opposing his release. The description implies that a grand jury is examining more serious allegations.
The same Chicago grand jury handed up an indictment on Tuesday against the leader of another Islamic charity that was shuttered at the same time as Global Relief.
Enaam Arnaout, executive director of the Benevolence International Foundation, was charged with perjury for stating in court papers that he and his group had never aided Osama bin Laden. Prosecutors allege that he and his group have been intimately connected with bin Laden for years, moving large sums of money to fund al Qaeda operations around the world.
A senior Justice Department official said prosecutors have not ruled out using a similar strategy against other groups, including Global Relief. But the government has not provided Haddad or his attorneys details of the alleged evidence against him, other than declaring in court papers that it shows "him to pose a threat to persons and a danger to the national security."
People who know Haddad say they cannot believe it.
Religious leaders who have known him in Ann Arbor -- including a rabbi and a minister who testified on his behalf -- describe him as a gentle man who spoke out against terrorism and worked to bring together adherents of different faiths.
Imam Mufap Algalaieni of the Islamic Center of Ann Arbor said Haddad emphasized that "Islam came for peace, to spread peace and harmony among people. And he stood strongly against violence."
No other Global Relief leader has been arrested or detained. Roger C. Simmons, a Frederick, Md., attorney representing the group, said the allegations against it and Haddad are unfounded.
"It's unbelievable the lengths the government is going to undermine this upstanding organization," Simmons said. "These aren't radicalists in any sense of the word. They are decent people. Their whole mission for 10 years has been the converse and opposite of violence."
Nazih Hassan, president of the Islamic Center of Ann Arbor and a friend of Haddad's, said there were many shady characters in western Pakistan as the Soviet war wound down. He noted that the United States, which provided support to the anti-Soviet militants, had many advisers there.
"To say he met people who later on might have become terrorists or talked to terrorists is ridiculous," Hassan said. "It's not even guilt by association. It's guilt just by being in the region."
As the two sides hold their separate views of Rabih Haddad, the man himself has been moved to Chicago, where he is to testify before the grand jury investigating Global Relief.
Lydersen reported from Ann Arbor.
-------- death penalty
Death-penalty law argued in court
May 6, 2002
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020506-781393.htm
The future of New York's never-used death-penalty law will be at stake today when the state's highest court hears Darrel K. Harris' groundbreaking appeal.
The full Court of Appeals has the option to rule on his mental state or motives, but the judges also will consider many larger questions in the case of the onetime-hero prison guard now first in line to die on New York's death row. He was convicted of killing three persons at Brooklyn's Club Happiness in 1996.
"Certainly there are claims on which the fate of the death penalty in New York could turn, but one can as easily imagine the courts deciding the case on the narrowest ground," New York Capital Defender Kevin Doyle said Friday.
The death penalty itself will be on trial with four hours reserved for argument on more than 40 constitutional issues raised by Harris' three-lawyer team from the state Capital Defender Office, created in 1995 in conjunction with the law they now challenge.
The paperwork is immense. Defense lawyers filed 1,039 pages in their appeal and reply, and prosecutors filled 1,181 pages. Mr. Doyle said the size of the briefs is of little moment.
"If it is noteworthy, it's because human life is given such short shrift in other jurisdictions," he said. "The public will come to understand that in New York the death penalty is not going to be carried out in a slapdash, lick-and-a-promise fashion."
New York's last execution was in 1963. The state Court of Appeals struck down the last legislative effort in 1984.
Jonathan L. Frank, who led the Brooklyn prosecution and is now with a private law firm, and Keith Dolan, a deputy district attorney in Brooklyn, seek to uphold the conviction of Harris, now 44, who blames the killings on being emotionally upset over insults at the club. At the end of a three-month trial, Harris' lawyer asked the jury to convict his client only of manslaughter.
Harris was honored by the city prison agency in 1986 for saving another officer's life during a riot.
Among those filing briefs supporting the defense was the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Cornell Death Penalty Project.
Christopher Dunn, assistant legal director for the ACLU state affiliate, focused his brief on charges the state law is applied at random, supported by statistics showing the death penalty was sought in just 16 cases out of 701 in which prosecutors formally considered capital punishment. Six of those 701 defendants were sentenced to death over seven years.
"The very fact that there are that few convictions out of all the people who are eligible for capital prosecutions is strong evidence that people are being randomly selected in New York for a potential death sentence," Mr. Dunn said.
Mr. Doyle acknowledged the spectrum of constitutional issues has no particular application to Harris' case and would have been raised by whomever was first among the state's six condemned prisoners to reach the high court. The unique law provides for appeal to the top state court directly from the trial court with no intermediate stops.
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Law Professors Give State Court a Novel Theory on Executions
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/nyregion/06DEAT.html
ALBANY - In a brief filed with the state's highest court, a group of law professors has made new claims about the meaning of a provision in the New York State Constitution that are likely to help shape battles over capital punishment in New York for years.
The brief, signed by 19 law professors who oppose the death penalty, asserts that new research about events in the 1840's shows that the State Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment was intended to give the state's top judges special authority to limit capital punishment. The law professors made the argument in the death penalty case that reaches the state's Court of Appeals on Monday.
Legal experts say the professors' argument is a novel way of framing the court battle over New York's current death penalty, which was enacted in 1995.
"It is planting a seed that these are arguments that have to be considered in a very serious way," said James R. Acker, a death penalty expert at the University at Albany who is not part of the law professors' group.
The professors' claims are drawing strong opposition from lawyers working to sustain the death penalty. If it is accepted, the professors' interpretation would effectively free the judges to make their own judgments about the acceptability of capital punishment, even though it was approved by the Legislature.
The case to be argued Monday is an appeal by Darrel K. Harris, a convicted multiple murderer.
It is the first appeal of a death sentence since the court struck down New York's last death penalty law in 1984, and is expected to be the first of many capital punishment appeals.
Other legal experts say there are few definitive records about why the ban on cruel and unusual punishments was added to the State Constitution in 1846. As a result, the growing battle over its meaning is being fought through differing interpretations of history.
Lawyers for the state attorney general and the Brooklyn district attorney say there is no evidence to support the professors' interpretation.
Jonathan L. Frank, the lead appellate lawyer for the prosecution in the Harris case, said that the Constitution itself undermines the professors' argument because it refers to capital punishment in several places.
A brief filed by the attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, notes that New York had capital punishment long before and after the 1846 provision was adopted.
But the law professors say the political atmosphere surrounding the 1846 constitutional convention shows the state's ban on cruel and unusual punishment was intended specifically to take battles over the death penalty "out of the theater of political judgment."
In the decade before the convention, the law professors say, the public was angered by what a new penny press portrayed as unfair death sentences and commutations based on favoritism.
The year after the convention, a State Assembly committee condemned the "odious inequalities" of capital punishment.
Rather than ban capital punishment, the professors said, the constitutional convention adopted the provision, to permit the Court of Appeals to review the acceptability of the death penalty measured against the shifting values of the times. The court was established in its present form at the same time.
The law professors' argument, raised in a supplemental brief, is an effort by opponents of execution to overcome a major legal hurdle. The United States Supreme Court has rejected arguments that capital punishment is inherently cruel and unusual under the United States Constitution. Many judges and lawyers have assumed that the provision barring cruel and unusual punishment in the New York Constitution had the same meaning as the federal provision.
Even if the court avoids the issue raised by the professors in Mr. Harris's appeal by deciding the case on other grounds, death penalty lawyers say the claim about the 1846 provision has become part of the long-term strategy of opponents of capital punishment in the state.
Though the brief was prepared for the Harris case, lawyers say it has already been filed in at least half a dozen other cases around the state.
The law professors' brief is attracting attention partly because its primary author, Anthony G. Amsterdam, has been known as one of the leading anti-death-penalty legal strategists from coast to coast since the 1970's.
"The fact that the most famous and respected death penalty advocate in the last 30 years has done this is extremely important," said Norman L. Greene, the chairman of the committee on capital punishment of the City Bar Association.
Among the prominent law professors who signed the brief are James S. Liebman and Jack Greenberg of Columbia Law School, Bryan A. Stevenson of N.Y.U. Law School and Ursula Bentele of Brooklyn Law School.
Mr. Amsterdam is a former winner of a MacArthur Foundation genius award and a nationally known law professor at N.Y.U. He argued the landmark 1972 case in which the Supreme Court struck down the generation of death penalty laws then in effect. That decision, Furman v. Georgia, set the stage for a new generation of death penalty laws across the country that divide capital cases into two phases. The first determines guilt or innocence. The second phase involves whether to impose a death sentence according to certain legal criteria.
Mr. Amsterdam, who is now 66, has been a leading architect of strategies against the death penalty in courts from coast to coast ever since Furman was decided.
At his Manhattan office last week, Mr. Amsterdam said the research for the brief took more than two years and involved professors from several law schools and about 30 law students.
Besides traditional legal sources, he said, the professors had the students do research in New York City and Albany about the political and legal atmosphere surrounding the 1846 convention.
What they uncovered, he said, was a surprising history of public dismay about execution and the criminal justice system in the 1840's. They found legislative reports urging abolition of the death penalty and extensive news accounts about death sentences that caught the public imagination.
One involved a man who had drawn public sympathy with claims of self-defense in an 1841 murder case and shot himself with a smuggled pistol on the eve of his execution. Another involved two rent protesters who had been in a mob when a sheriff was shot in 1845 and were sentenced to death even though prosecutors essentially conceded they could not be sure who had fired the fatal shot, according to the law professors' account.
As they pieced the information together, Mr. Amsterdam said, he and several other law professors concluded that the context of the times explained why the 1846 constitutional convention adopted the cruel and unusual punishments provision. A similar convention 25 years earlier found adoption of such a provision unnecessary in New York.
"It suddenly struck us," Mr. Amsterdam said, "that the unique set of circumstances in New York in the 1840's had created a debate about the death penalty that was 150 years ahead of its time."
Eventually, he said, the law students produced cartons of photocopies of materials from the 1840's.
Lawyers who have read the brief say it could give the Court of Appeals judges an unconventional lesson in constitutional history. But Aaron Edward Carlos, a lawyer who helped research 160-year-old news clippings when he was a law student, said he learned a different lesson from working with Mr. Amsterdam on the brief.
"One thing I learned from Tony," he said, "is you do what you need to do to make a case."
-------- terrorism
Mullah Mohammed Omar instructs hidden Taliban
May 6, 2002
By Kathy Gannon
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020506-74809480.htm
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Biding time on the instructions of elusive leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban is regrouping in mountain hide-outs, waiting for the Afghan government to falter, a Taliban intelligence official in hiding said yesterday.
The official, who uses the single name Obeidullah, was an important member of the Taliban command structure as the deputy to Qari Ahmadullah, the intelligence chief targeted and killed by the U.S.-led coalition in a bombing raid in December in eastern Afghanistan. Mr. Obeidullah oversaw Kargai, the military training camp where al Qaeda and other radicals trained north of Kabul.
"We are not unhappy, afraid or finished. We are just waiting, gathering our strength," Mr. Obeidullah said.
He said Mullah Omar, though high on the U.S. wanted list, is safe in Afghanistan and continues to lead the Taliban. But the man the Taliban call "the guest" - Osama bin Laden - "could be anywhere."
"He could be in Afghanistan, or Chechnya or Yemen," Mr. Obeidullah said.
Mr. Obeidullah said senior members of both Taliban and al Qaeda move relatively freely in Afghanistan despite the 6-month-old war against terrorism.
He said Mullah Omar himself has recently been to Shah-e-Kot, scene of the largest U.S. ground assault in the war. The Taliban leader has spent 20 days in the stark, arid region of eastern Afghanistan since the assault in March, Mr. Obeidullah said.
The meeting with Mr. Obeidullah in Peshawar underscored that senior fugitives of the U.S.-led war on terror are able to find safety in neighboring Pakistan, one of Washington's chief allies in the campaign. In recent weeks U.S. special forces have joined Pakistani troops in patrols along the border.
[Newsweek magazine reports in its edition appearing today that commanders in eastern Afghanistan have received credible reports that bin Laden is also hiding in Pakistan, where he has trimmed his beard and appears healthy.
[The Washington Times two [JUMP]weeks ago quoted a Pakistani tribal leader saying bin Laden was safe and being protected by supporters in Peshawar, where the interview with Mr. Obeidullah took place.]
The interview was arranged through an intermediary. A telephone call directed the car to a nondescript hotel near a bustling market, then to a ramshackle kiosk.
A boy wearing the woolen cap now associated with Afghanistan's interim regime emerged, followed by Mr. Obeidullah, who quickly got into the car.
The car then wove through a maze of narrow streets, past open sewers and narrow buildings jammed up against each other to a padlocked room hidden behind high walls and steel gates.
From his hide-out in Peshawar, a city of 1.5 million about 30 miles east of the Afghan border, Mr. Obeidullah said the Taliban in Afghanistan was waiting - and confident.
"There aren't just 100 or 200 of us - there are thousands. We know how to fight a guerrilla war," Mr. Obeidullah said.
"We will give this government time to show the people how they aren't able to govern. Then we will show our face more and more."
With bitter fighting between rival warlords turning cities and towns in eastern Afghanistan into war zones, many people there say they long for the relative security that existed during the Taliban rule.
Mr. Obeidullah said fugitive Taliban members are taking advantage of the anarchy in eastern Afghanistan's Khost, Paktika and Paktia provinces to establish small cells in villages and towns throughout the region and create the core of a revived Taliban movement.
In eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. special forces and their allies are concentrating their resources, other Afghan sources say there have been sightings of senior figures like Egyptian Ayman al Zawahri, bin Laden's lieutenant and convicted killer of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the No. 3 man in the Taliban movement.
Pakistan's intelligence service, the InterServices Intelligence, supported the Taliban until the country's about-face six months ago to join the U.S.-led war on terror. Its search for Taliban members is not an all-out effort, Mr. Obeidullah said.
"They aren't really looking for us, but we have to be careful," he said stroking his wispy black beard, hidden to the public by a portion of the black turban worn by the Taliban.
Still, Mr. Obeidullah was jumpy. Although the room was padlocked from within, a knock on the door or a horn blaring outside sent his eyes glancing nervously toward the door.
"This is the pressure I feel," he said. "I won't stay in Peshawar for long."
Mr. Obeidullah expressed confidence he would have no trouble returning to his homeland, despite coalition forces scouring mountains along the border.
"It's a long border, with so many ways to cross," he explained. "If not one way, then I will go another. It's not a problem. I just came from Afghanistan. It was easy."
--------
Another Pipe Bomb Found in Nebraska
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mailbox-Bombs.html
SEWARD, Neb. (AP) -- Another mailbox bomb was found in rural Nebraska on Monday, the eighth discovered in the state and the 16th in the Midwest since the domestic terrorism spree began last week.
Authorities also said a pipe bomb was found Monday in a mailbox in the small mountain community of Salida, Colo., 100 miles southwest of Denver.
A resident found the device in a sandwich bag with a piece of folded paper and alerted authorities. It did not explode.
FBI spokeswoman Ann Atanasio said the pipe bomb is similar to those found in three Midwest states, but investigators were doing more work to determine if it fit the pattern or was a copycat crime.
Authorities did not immediately release other details, including whether the paper was a note similar to the anti-government letter found with the other devices.
Pipe bombs wounded six people in Illinois and Iowa on Friday, while two other bombs found in Iowa did not explode. Over the weekend, seven bombs were found in Nebraska, but they were detonated harmlessly by authorities.
None of the wounded suffered life-threatening injuries.
The latest Nebraska pipe bomb was found near Hastings in the mailbox of someone who had been away for the weekend, authorities said. It did not explode. There was no immediate word on it was accompanied by the same anti-government note found with the other devices.
``We have confirmed that an eighth bomb has been found, beyond that we don't have any information,'' Postal Service spokesman David Failor said.
There have been no arrests in the case.
The FBI said Monday that the first 15 bombs clearly come from the same source, but officials have not said whether they are searching for an individual or a group.
The latest bombs were found as hundreds of nervous letter carriers went back to work across the Midwest. Rural residents in at least four Midwest states and Colorado were asked to leave their mailboxes open or remove the mailbox door as a safety measure.
Jim Pelzer wore safety goggles and earplugs as he delivered mail in Tipton, Iowa, where one of the bombs exploded Friday. The protective gear was a gift from his wife.
``My feeling was when we had 9-11 and the anthrax scare, I was a little concerned about my job safety,'' Pelzer said. ``But now I'm intimidated and scared.''
Mail carrier Doris Fehlhafer, who was working outside Seward, added: ``With the boxes open, you feel a lot safer.''
Authorities were not surprised by the discovery of the latest bomb in Nebraska because of an apparent pattern by the person or persons planting the devices, said Mike Matuzek, a Postal Service district manager.
The bombs in Iowa and Illinois were found in locations that form a large, uneven ring about 70 miles in diameter. The Nebraska bomb sites form a large ring of about 90 miles across.
The areas are separated by about 350 miles. Salida is more than 400 miles from the Nebraska sites.
The FBI said the bombs and the notes were nearly identical.
FBI agent Larry Holmquist said the only differences in the bombs were slight variations in the detonating mechanisms. He refused to elaborate.
``There is no question that these were planted by the same person or persons,'' Holmquist said.
Officials described the Midwest bombs as three-quarter-inch steel pipes attached to 9-volt batteries, and said they appeared to be triggered by being touched or moved.
The typewritten note found with the bombs read, in part: ``If the government controls what you want to do they control what you can do. ... I'm obtaining your attention in the only way I can. More info is on its way. More `attention getters' are on the way.''
The FBI considers the attacks a case of domestic terrorism, and profiling experts have said whoever wrote the note is probably an older American man.
Dan Mihalko of the Postal Inspection Service in Washington said there is no indication that the Postal Service or its employees are the intended targets.
``When this guy is talking about the government, but it (the note) never gets into specifics about the government,'' he said. He said the Postal Service could be ``just a convenient place of dropping things off.''
Mail delivery, which was suspended Saturday, resumed Monday with added precautions. Homeowners with roadside delivery in Nebraska, Iowa and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin left their mailbox doors open or removed them.
Mail carriers were told that if a customer's mailbox was not open, they should bring the mail to the door.
Bob Temple of Morrison, Ill., said he cautiously opened his mailbox Sunday night to ease his carrier's fears. Temple's carrier was wounded when a pipe bomb blew up in her face while she was delivering mail to his next-door neighbor.
``I was pretty confident that the people that done it probably wouldn't be back this way, but it did kind of scare me,'' Temple said. ``It was a relief when the door opened and nothing happened.''
Postal Service: http://www.usps.com
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Japan solar cell makers to boost production - paper
REUTERS JAPAN:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15817/story.htm
TOKYO - Major Japanese solar cell makers, Sharp Corp , Kyocera Corp and Sanyo Electric Co , are boosting output capacity as demand grows on heightened environmental awareness, a newspaper said on the weekend.
Sharp, the world's largest solar cell manufacturer, will double output capacity this year by building new production lines, investing about 10 billion yen ($79 million), the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said without citing sources.
Its output capacity would reach 200 megawatts, compared with the current 94 megawatts, the business daily said. Sharp's increased output capacity would be enough to power some 50,000 houses.
Sharp will also increase the number of workers at its solar cell division by 20 percent and aim to boost revenue there by 55 percent to 49 billion yen in the current business year to March 2003, it said.
The company said in January it would boost output by 50 percent this year to outdistance rivals such as Kyocera, after raising capacity last May. The news had sent its share price up almost four percent.
The Nihon Keizai said Kyocera would follow Sharp's lead, lifting output capacity by 20 percent, while Sanyo Electric would raise output by 40 percent as it resumed exports of solar cells for the first time since 1997 last month.
While the use of solar cells as a source of energy is still negligible, demand is expected to rise as countries around the world seek to reduce emission of greenhouse gases under the Kyoto treaty against global warming.
Sharp said late last year it expected industry-wide solar cell output to soar at an annual rate of 40 to 50 percent over the next several years, with Japan accounting for over 50 percent of global production by 2003.
-------- environment
Black cloud spreads in toxic Canada train fire
REUTERS CANADA:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15805/story.htm
TORONTO - A toxic fire was blazing in chemical-filled rail cars in rural southwestern Manitoba last week morning and a thick, spreading black cloud of pollution was hugging the ground, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents and raising concern over livestock.
A 7O-car Canadian National train carrying hazardous materials burst into flames after it collided with a semi-trailer at an unprotected level crossing near the hamlet of Firdale, a 130 kilometres west of Winnipeg, late on Thursday afternoon, said Cindy Stevens, a communications officer at the Manitoba Emergency Measures Organization.
The fire was allowed to burn overnight out of fear of getting too close to the toxic soup being mixed as several types of chemicals burned together. Emergency teams that were rushed to the farming area were planning an assault on the fire last week morning.
The cargo contained benzene, hexane and plastic pellets, said Stevens.
No one was reported hurt, but 150 people were evacuated from the area.
"We're not sure of the environmental implications, but we're mostly afraid of the airborne damage," said Stevens.
"We're testing the air on site and keeping track of the water. The fire is so intense that we've been repelled back."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Burmese Democracy Advocate Is to Be Freed From House Arrest
New York Times
Monday, May 6, 2002
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/asia/06BURM.html
BANGKOK - The military government of Myanmar announced today that it was releasing Daw Aung San Suu Kyi after 19 months of house arrest and that it would allow her to pursue her political activities as leader of the country's democratic opposition.
"Today marks a new page for the people of Myanmar and the international community," said a government spokesman, Lt. Col. Hla Min, in a statement faxed from the country, the former Burma, that was framed as an overture to the outside world for improved relations.
"We shall recommit ourselves to allowing all of our citizens to participate freely in the life of our political process, while giving priority to national unity, peace and stability of the country as well as the region," he said.
Myanmar's ambassador to Washington, U Linn Myaing, was more specific, saying, "Suu Kyi is at liberty to carry out all activities relating to her party as of May 6."
The key to assessing the significance of the move will be the degree of liberty granted to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi to travel and organize her party, experts said.
"If it is truly a freedom that she can go wherever she chooses, see whoever she wishes and not have to get government approval in advance, it is a monumental change, because it opens a door that has been slammed shut since 1962, when all opposition was suppressed," said Josef Silverstein, a professor emeritus from Rutgers University and a leading authority on Myanmar.
"If she is truly free to meet and talk with people, that would probably be the most important change to have occurred."
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been in conflict with the country's military rulers since before her party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 percent of the seats in a parliamentary election in 1990. The military government summarily set aside the results.
Many elected members of Parliament and many more of their supporters have been arrested in the years since. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has been under house arrest twice. When she was freed the first time in 1995, tight restrictions on her activities only led to further confrontations and a return to house arrest in September 2000.
Political analysts said that if the announcement was a real compromise by the government, it was likely to have been a result of the political isolation and tough economic sanctions that have driven the junta into a corner, reviled by the outside world and scorned by its own people.
Myanmar has been a closed state under military rule since U Ne Win staged a coup in 1962 and instituted the "Burmese way to socialism," an autocratic government that drove his country from prosperity and a flourishing culture steadily backward into poverty and harsh repression.
He stepped aside in 1988 in the face of a nationwide popular uprising that was violently crushed by the military, which instituted the current, equally repressive government.
In the months since Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi was returned to house arrest, she has held talks with military leaders to work out some form of accommodation. The government has made a series of conciliatory gestures, including the releases of what human rights groups say are about 250 of an estimated 1,500 political prisoners.
In his statement today, Colonel Hla Min said that a much higher number of prisoners had been freed and that the releases would continue.
"We have released nearly 600 detainees in recent months and shall continue to release those who will cause no harm to the community, nor threaten the existing peace, stability and unity of the nation," he said in what seemed a thoroughly qualified promise.
"As we look forward to a better future we will work toward greater international stability and improving the welfare of our diverse people," he said. "We celebrate today the security and unity of Myanmar."
The United States has made it clear that any relaxation of its economic sanctions - which have been joined by the European Union and international donor agencies - would require the unfettered freedom of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.
"It is important that the release be unconditional, that Aung San Suu Kyi be afforded full freedom of movement and association," a State Department spokeswoman, Julie Reside, said last week.
Such freedom of movement and political activity could pose a difficult challenge to the government because of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's high popularity among the population and her potential ability to rally huge crowds.
It is a decision the government has been reluctant to take, and it was a result of long and delicate discussions with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi.
"I think there were external forces at work here that pushed this dialogue and that this step had to be taken," Mr. Silverstein said. "Burma has no money and has no way of gaining money. The moneys it has earned from the sale of natural gas from the Andaman Sea to Thailand amount to about $400 million a year."
Myanmar is also one of the world's leading exporters of opium, a trade that also helps somewhat to sustain the struggling government.
In what seemed to be an overture to the United States and other donors, though, Colonel Hla Min said his government would join with other nations to combat terrorism and would work toward the "total eradication of narcotic drugs which are threatening mankind."
The manner in which the military government has chosen to use its money raises questions for future donors - the kind of questions Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has presented in advocating sanctions over the years.
Last year, the government signed an agreement with Russia to buy 10 new MIG-29 fighter jets for $130 million. It is also making plans to build a nuclear plant with help from Russia and may have also had to make a down payment on that project.
In addition, Myanmar sustains an army of 400,000 troops, many of whom run government departments and economic enterprises but many more of whom are engaged in a decades-long war against ethnic insurgencies.
International donors want any assistance to go to the underfinanced education and health systems and other badly needed social services, rather than to further military spending.
In addition, Colonel Hla Min acknowledged the largely hidden problem of an explosion of H.I.V. and AIDS in Myanmar, saying his government hoped to work with the international community to combat the disease.
----
Greenpeace asks Prodi where EU stands on nuclear
Story by Robin Pomeroy
REUTERS BELGIUM:
May 6, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/15803/story.htm
BRUSSELS - Environmental campaigners Greenpeace have written to European Commission (EC) President Romano Prodi demanding to know whether the EC supports the pro-nuclear power position of one of its commissioners.
The head of energy policy at the European Union's Brussels-based executive arm, Loyola de Palacio, has repeatedly voiced her support for the technology - which many EU countries are planning to phase out - to the indignation of anti-nuclear campaigners, who see it as dangerous and polluting.
De Palacio is expected to tell a Group of Eight (G8) energy ministers meeting in Detroit later last week that the EU cannot meet its commitment under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without nuclear power.
In its letter, obtained by Reuters, Greenpeace has asked Prodi if de Palacio's opinions are shared by the rest of the Commission's 20 members.
"We would...like to ask you as president of the European Commission and all other commissioners to publicly distance yourself from Ms de Palacio's recent statements," the letter said.
The choice of energy mix is a matter for national governments, not EU authorities, but efforts to combat climate change and the liberalisation of Europe's electricity and gas markets means energy is increasingly discussed at EU level.
The 15-country bloc has promised to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases - much of which is carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plants - by eight percent of 1990 levels by the end of the decade, under the Kyoto agreement.
Nuclear power does not emit CO2, but does produce waste that remains dangerously radioactive for generations. The technology has always been a target of environmentalist actions.
Greenpeace points out in its letter that the Commission's climate change strategy says the EU can achieve its Kyoto target via policies like energy efficiency and renewable power.
----
Cuba Releases a Dissident
New York Times
May 6, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/international/americas/06CUBA.html
HAVANA - Vladimiro Roca, one of Cuba's leading dissidents and the son of one of Cuba's Communist founding fathers, was released from prison this morning after almost five years behind bars. He predicted that the government's days were numbered.
"I plan to continue working like I was before being arrested," said Mr. Roca, 59, who told reporters that he was in good health but looked pale and tired. "I believe I will see a change in Cuba before too long."
Word of Mr. Roca's imminent freedom over the weekend, after he had served all but 70 days of a five-year sentence for inciting sedition, led to speculation his release was a government gesture before the scheduled visit next Sunday of former President Jimmy Carter.
--------
Myanmar's Suu Kyi Freed, Vows Fight
May 6, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Myanmar-Suu-Kyi.html
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Aung San Suu Kyi returned to public life Monday after 19 months of house arrest, breathing new life into the opposition's struggle for democracy but aware that Myanmar's military rulers will be loath to give up their iron grip on power.
Thousands of cheering supporters, including monks, nuns with shaved heads and ordinary people, greeted the beaming opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate, who said she will do ``everything I can to bring democracy'' to the country.
Her hair pulled back and tied with a garland of flowers, the petite Suu Kyi, 56, appeared radiant as she addressed a news conference at her party headquarters.
The European Union and the United States, which had been pressing for Suu Kyi's release, hailed the move. President Bush said he hoped Suu Kyi's release will lead to the restoration of democracy.
``All parties should seize this opportunity to press ahead with the urgent work of restoring the rule of law and basic political and civil rights for all Burmese,'' Bush said.
Suu Kyi drove from her lakeside villa around noon, the car inching its way through a huge crowd of supporters and party workers wearing white shirts and sarongs and chanting ``Long Live Aung San Suu Kyi.''
She said her release had been dubbed ``a new dawn'' for the country. ``We only hope that the dawn will move very quickly to a full morning,'' said Suu Kyi.
Her release is seen partly to be the result of intense international pressure, including the severe economic sanctions imposed by the West on the impoverished country in a bid to force political change.
Suu Kyi said the policies of her party would be maintained for now, implying that she still supported sanctions and bans on aid to Myanmar until democracy is established.
The sanctions have caused increased unemployment and the departure of international firms haven't helped the Myanmar economy, already in a shambles. The United States had stopped all aid to the country and the European Union has had an arms embargo and a suspension of bilateral aid for the past 11 years.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said it is premature to talk about lifting sanctions. ``We see this as a first step toward political dialogue,'' he said.
Since 1995, more than 50 multinational corporations including PepsiCo, Wal-Mart, Texaco and ARCO have cut ties with Myanmar. In 2000, the U.N. International Labor Organization increased the pressure on the junta by exposing the pervasive use of ``forced labor'' throughout the country.
The military has been in power in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, since 1962. The current group of generals took over in 1988 after crushing a pro-democracy uprising that saw Suu Kyi come into prominence.
The junta put Suu Kyi under house arrest in 1989 and called elections in 1990. It nullified the results after Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won overwhelmingly.
Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, was freed from house arrest in 1995 but was banned from traveling outside the capital, Yangon. She defied the order in September 2000, resulting in the latest round of house arrest.
But even while keeping her confined to the house, the junta began reconciliation talks with Suu Kyi in October 2000, brokered by U.N. special envoy Razali Ismail, who made his seventh trip to Myanmar last month.
Razali told The Associated Press on Monday that he expects democracy to return in ``a couple of years'' in Myanmar in terms of an elected government.
The junta, which said Suu Kyi will be free to carry out her political activities, said Monday ``marks a new page for the people of Myanmar and the international community'' and said it looks forward to improving the ``social welfare of our diverse people.''
Although the junta has complied with a major Western demand by releasing Suu Kyi, it does not mean democracy is around the corner in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
The government is not expected to call elections and it is not clear what shape its cooperation with Suu Kyi will take place. Suu Kyi denied that she has accepted a role in the government but said her party is ``flexible'' to make sure the people benefit.
``The next step is discussions about policy,'' Suu Kyi said.
In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Suu Kyi's release ``provides fresh momentum to the ... national reconciliation progress.''
Suu Kyi said she will now hold renewed negotiations with the generals to search for democracy.
``Both sides agree that the phase of confidence building is over. We look forward to moving on,'' she said.
Suu Kyi said there will be no restrictions on her movements around the country, unlike 1995. The government also said she will be allowed to travel everywhere but will be provided security.
She said political prisoners -- believed by rights groups to number around 1,500 -- were high on her agenda but that she was ``disappointed with the slow rate of releases.''
The military government has released more than 200 political prisoners since October 2000, when Suu Kyi began secret talks with the regime.
Asked about the current political climate, Suu Kyi joked to reporters in the sweltering room: ``It's very hot don't you think?''
After the one-hour conference, Suu Kyi spent about three hours with leaders of her party before returning home. In the evening, as the temperature dropped, she drove out again to the gold domed Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar's most important Buddhist temple, to pray.
Myanmar government Web site, http://www.myanmar.com/e-index.html
Burma Project Web site, http://www.burmaproject.org
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