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NUCLEAR
Nonproliferation Pact Passed
Loads of Radioactive Berries Seized
U.S. Proposes Talks With N. Korea
G-8 agrees to fund Russian arms deal
Some Russians Skeptical of G-8 Plan
$10 Billion Pledged to Ex-Soviets to Dispose of Unconventional Arms
Some Russians Skeptical of G - 8 Plan
Loads of Radioactive Berries Seized
SAUDIS SAID TO SEEK WMD
U.S., France in Cargo Deal
Orphan Radioactive Items Are Potential Dirty Bombs
Delays Threaten Nuclear Program
Congress Endorses Big Defense Spending
Budget Increases for Pentagon Pass Easily
Chief Adviser on Terrorism Resigns Post at White House
MILITARY
Afghan Arms Blast Blamed on Rocket
Al Qaeda fighters replenish arsenals
ASEAN members rule out military cooperation
Hatfill Teaching
Biological Warfare Experts Questioned in Anthrax Probe
Lieberman Recommends Technology Agency
Mayors flee Colombian towns
Israeli Forces Hit Palestinian Offices
Defense Crackdown On Credit Abuse
Rumsfeld Aide Nominated To Command Joint Forces
Defense facilities to disperse
Press angered over isolation at summit
POLICE / PRISONERS
U.S., France in Cargo Deal
Tenet Calls for Security Safety Net
C.I.A. and F.B.I. Promise to Share Data With New Agency
Al Qaeda Network Operating In U.S.
Lieberman Recommends Technology Agency
OTHER
U.N. Publicly Chastises China for Inaction on H.I.V. Epidemic
HHS is thinking big about smallpox
G-8 Adopts African Aid Package, With Strict Conditions
ACTIVISTS
35 Australia Asylum Seekers Break Out
-------- NUCLEAR
Nonproliferation Pact Passed
G-8 Approves an Aid Package for Africa; Leaders Sidestep Firm Commitment on Pledges
By Karen DeYoung and DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A19
CALGARY, Alberta, June 27 -- The world's seven leading industrial democracies and Russia agreed today to a "new deal" to help lift African countries out of poverty, but sidestepped appeals to firmly commit at least half of pledged increases in foreign aid to pay for it.
Leaders of the Group of Eight, holding their annual summit at a resort 60 miles west of here, also agreed to spend up to $20 billion over the next 10 years in a coordinated effort to help former Soviet republics decommission nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and keep them from terrorist hands.
President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the nonproliferation pact, in which group members agreed to collectively match a U.S. contribution of $10 billion to safeguard and destroy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, is an "important initiative," and that its approval was a major victory for Bush.
But some of Bush's summit partners were less pleased with the U.S. position on African aid. International development experts expressed disappointment, saying G-8 members failed to acknowledge that their domestic agricultural subsidies, particularly the massive farm bill that Bush recently signed, take far more money away from Africans by impeding exports than the rich nations dole out in foreign aid.
Nor was there agreement to devote major new funding to international debt reduction efforts, beyond covering $1 billion in shortfalls in the current program. The leaders also did not move to firm up an earlier pledge to educate the world's children by adopting a coordinated and well-funded plan.
"It's all words, no action; all promises, no commitments," said Gene Sperling, director of the Washington-based Center on Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former organizer of G-8 summits as President Clinton's economic policy director. "It's such a shame, such a letdown for the world's poorest children."
Prime Ministers Jean Chretien of Canada and Tony Blair of Britain, both leading advocates of a major new Africa initiative, called the G-8 agreement "a new beginning and a fresh hope for the African continent." But Chretien acknowledged that many would question why there was no firm financial commitment or any movement on reducing trade barriers.
The Kananaskis summit, named after the isolated mountain resort where the meeting was held, "will be remembered as where we have acted collectively to make sure that globalization benefits all the citizens of the globe and that no continent should be left behind," Chretien said.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was one of four African presidents who traveled here to listen to the G-8's response to the partnership, which was first proposed at last year's summit in Genoa, Italy.
"We are satisfied with this commitment," Obasanjo said, but added that "nothing that is human can be regarded as perfect."
Rice put the Africa program far down on the list in her own assessment of the meeting. "This summit was extremely important for a number of the president's foreign policy priorities," she said, noting that "the president's agenda was moved forward substantially" with the nonproliferation agreement and a separate accord on transport security.
The Africa agreement provides that development assistance should be based on a partnership in which recipients agree to be eligible for assistance only if they implement political and social reforms, and adopt free-market economic policies.
The Africans have said they will not only follow through on their pledges, but will police each other. "If any of us is lagging behind," Obasanjo said, "we will give him the push or give him the sanction."
Questions about Bush's new Middle East policy -- which seeks to replace Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat -- raised by his G-8 colleagues from Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy and France in addition to Canada and Britain, dominated much of the informal summit discussion, as well as a dinner last night.
Although most leaders tried to sidestep the controversy in post-summit news conferences this afternoon, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it "one of the most difficult issues we discussed." Arafat, Putin said, "is recognized as the legitimate leader of the Palestinians -- it would be counterproductive to resolve any issues without his cooperation."
Bush, in an apparent hurry to get back to Washington, was the only leader not to make a post-summit appearance to answer reporters' questions. He left for home an hour ahead of schedule.
U.N. members, including the United States, pledged two years ago to cut world poverty in half by 2015, a target that the U.N. Development Program this week said only 10 of the 45 sub-Saharan countries are currently on track to achieve.
The United States spends less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its gross national product on foreign aid, the lowest in the developed world. At a meeting in March on international development in Monterrey, Mexico, Bush pledged to increase U.S. assistance to worthy recipients by 50 percent, to $15 billion a year, over five years.
Bush last week pledged an additional $300 million in spending on international HIV/AIDS in 2004, and said he would double U.S. aid to education in Africa, to $200 million over the next five years.
Overall, donors at Monterrey pledged $12 billion in new assistance per year by 2006, and the World Bank, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and others have said that at least half of that money should be devoted to Africa.
European sources said Bush told his colleagues today that he could not make such a commitment without congressional approval. The plan provides for each country to decide how much to spend in accordance with respective priorities and procedures.
-------- accidents and safety
Loads of Radioactive Berries Seized
The Associated Press
Friday, June 28, 2002; 2:17 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61958-2002Jun28?language=printer
MOSCOW -- Nearly 1,500 pounds of berries from an area heavily hit by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster were seized this month from Moscow markets because of radioactive contamination, an official announced on Friday.
The bilberries, akin to blueberries, were found to have 14 times the acceptable levels cesium, said Yelena Ter-Markirosova, spokeswoman for Radon, the capital's radiation-monitoring agency.
She said experts had confiscated 1,472 pounds of the berries - grown in western Belarus - since June 18.
-------- korea
U.S. Proposes Talks With N. Korea
By George Gedda
Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; 4:16 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62592-2002Jun28?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, hoping to end a prolonged suspension of security talks with North Korea, has proposed they be resumed in the second week of July in Pyongyang, an administration official said Friday.
A State Department official made the proposal to North Korean diplomats Thursday at the United Nations.
The administration official, asking not to be identified, said Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is expected to head the U.S. delegation if Pyongyang agrees to meet.
There have been no security discussions between the two countries since late in the Clinton administration. President Bush proposed resumption of the talks more than a year ago, but it was not until this past spring that North Korea indicated it might accept.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a recent speech that progress on a number of issues is essential for a more normal relationship with the North Koreans.
First, he said, "the North must get out of the proliferation business and eliminate long-range missiles that threaten other countries. It must take itself off the preferred-supplier list of rogue states."
A second issue is International Atomic Energy Agency inspections to determine how much plutonium the North has stockpiled.
A 1994 U.S.-North Korean agreement provides for inspections, but the North has not seemed eager to allow them.
Some administration officials argue that until the IAEA is allowed to begin inspections, the administration should block the construction of light water reactors promised under the 1994 agreement.
Construction is scheduled to begin in August.
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Powell said he prefers to await the outcome of U.S.-North Korean meetings before making a judgment whether construction of the reactors should be delayed.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and some other lawmakers are urging strongly that construction be delayed.
"To allow such steps to be taken in the face of North Korea's continued intransigence on inspections severely undermines our nation's credibility on nuclear nonproliferation matters," Markey said.
Under the 1994 agreement, the North promised to halt all nuclear weapons activity in exchange for light water reactors, which are of a type that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium.
According to the agreement, the inspections must be completed before key components of the two new reactors are installed.
Pyongyang has said it is in no hurry to go ahead with the inspections because of delays in the beginning of construction on the light water reactors.
On the Net: State Department's North Korea page: http://www.state.gov/p/eap/ci/kn/
Framework agreement on reactors: http://www.fas.org/news/dprk/1994/941021-D415.htm
-------- russia
G-8 agrees to fund Russian arms deal
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020628-298861.htm
CALGARY, Alberta - Leaders of the G-8 nations yesterday agreed to spend $20 billion to help Russia decommission weapons of mass destruction, as President Bush sought to downplay a growing rift over his call for Palestinians to oust Yasser Arafat.
"We commit ourselves to prevent terrorists or those that harbor them from acquiring or developing nuclear, chemical, radiological and biological weapons, missiles and related materials, equipment and technology," the leaders of the Group of Eight - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States - said in a statement after three days of meetings.
"The attacks of September 11 demonstrated that terrorists are prepared to use any means to cause terror and inflict appalling casualties on innocent people," said the statement.
The leaders also agreed to send billions of dollars in new funding to Africa and support the creation of an African peacekeeping plan by 2003 as part of an effort to deal with the protracted civil wars in Congo, Sudan and Angola.
As the leaders sought to spotlight their collective efforts to aid Africa and secure the world from attack with weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Bush downplayed a growing division over his call that Palestinians reject Mr. Arafat's leadership in upcoming planned elections.
"I'm very pleased with the response to my proposal in the Middle East. The response has been very positive," Mr. Bush said.
But just one leader at the remote village where the summit was held voiced unequivocal support for Mr. Bush's call to oust Mr. Arafat. The president said Monday that the Palestinian leader is "compromised by terror." The other leaders either opposed the call or sought to find a noncommittal middle ground.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi backed the U.S. call for a change in Palestinian leadership.
But other European leaders were less than positive about the president's proposal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was perhaps the most harsh, saying it would be "dangerous and mistaken" to remove Mr. Arafat, saying such an action risked a "radicalization of the Palestinian people."
Others, such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and G-8 host Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, equivocated about the U.S. call for Palestinians to oust Mr. Arafat.
Despite the cool reception, Mr. Bush said the United States will not accept Mr. Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian people even if he wins elections, set for Jan. 10-20, 2003.
The deal on Russia plutonium and weapons was sealed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin in a one-on-one meeting yesterday.
The joint G-8 statement said the eight nations would explore canceling some of Russia's old Soviet government debts and the debts of other countries willing to devote the money saved to accelerated efforts to safeguard materials that could be used by terrorists.
Under the deal, $10 billion will come from the United States and $10 billion from other G-8 countries over 10 years.
For its part, Russia agreed to provide its new G-8 partners with access to disposal sites, such as facilities where nuclear submarines are dismantled. Moscow also has ensured adequate auditing and oversight authority to its partners.
The agreement on Africa will commit increased aid and foreign investment to countries on the continent that are willing to eliminate government corruption and pursue free-market reforms.
----
Some Russians Skeptical of G-8 Plan
By Mara D. Bellaby
Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; 12:01 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61360-2002Jun28?language=printer
MOSCOW -- The decision by the world's wealthiest industrial nations to help Russia dispose of its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons won support from some quarters here Friday, but angered others as a sign of Russia capitulating to the West.
Retired Gen. Leonid Ivashov warned that President Vladimir Putin was leading the country into a potentially dangerous relationship with the West, first by agreeing to closer cooperation with NATO and then with the full entry of Russia into the Group of Eight.
The G-8 summit in Canada wrapped up Thursday with a pledge of up to $20 billion to help keep Russia's arsenal from falling into the hands of terrorists.
"Russia is invited to join, but we are treated like a beneficiary not as an equal," said Ivashov, who added that he had some questions about "the West's motive" in offering the funds.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov also criticized the G-8 pledge.
"Despite all the buzz and propaganda, it is clear that the billions of dollars to be allocated to Russia by Western countries are designed to completely annihilate Russia's nuclear missile shield," he said, according to Interfax news agency.
But Sergei Kiriyenko, who heads a state committee for the disarmament of chemical weapons, called the G-8 pledge "a personal victory for the Russian president."
He said Russia last year removed the detonators from its 40,000 tons of chemical weapons and therefore the weapons don't "pose a combat threat to anybody except ourselves."
The G-8 nations said the funding will support a 10-year program to secure Russia's aging nuclear weapons, dismantle decommissioned nuclear submarines and ensure that Russian scientists have adequate employment.
Putin has denied the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, but said Russia was grateful for the assistance.
Putin's increasing cooperation with the West following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States has not been embraced by all Russians. Some fear the Kremlin has moved too quickly to bind Russia to the international community without receiving any tangible results.
Ivashov warned the United States was moving toward a "unipolar world" and Putin was giving up Russia's natural position as a counterbalance. Alexei Arbatov, a deputy chief of the Russian parliament's defense affairs committee, said he feared Russia was focusing too intently on the United States and not enough on Europe.
"It is important to remember that the West is not only America," Arbatov said.
----
$10 Billion Pledged to Ex-Soviets to Dispose of Unconventional Arms
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/international/europe/28PREX.html
CALGARY, Alberta, June 27 - After months of negotiations, Japan, Canada and the European members of the Group of 8 agreed at the summit meeting today to spend $10 billion over the next decade to help Russia and other former Soviet states dispose of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, ending a long argument over how closely those countries could monitor the work.
The figure will roughly match what the United States spends on similar programs, including the Congressional program to secure and dismantle nuclear weapons and keep former nuclear scientists employed.
But the agreement today only begins the process of putting together the money at a time when many experts are worried that Russia's nuclear supplies could be a relatively unguarded target for terrorists.
Some experts say that the $20 billion will be insufficient to solve the problem, and that the agreement today was vague enough to raise the question of whether the sum will ultimately be provided. Past efforts by Japan and the European nations - Britain, France, Germany and Italy - to help dismantle the nuclear material in aging Russian submarines, for instance, have fallen apart over disputes about how carefully Japan could monitor the process.
"There is a lot of old enmity there, and a lot of suspicions about what everyone's real motives are," an American official said.
Another official noted today that the Russians still have "40,000 tons of chemical weapons that they are required to destroy" under the chemical weapons convention. Other money will go to storing nuclear material, or blending it into fuel for power plants. Russia recently signed an accord with the United States to send highly enriched uranium to the United States for use in nuclear plants.
The Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, has suggested that the United States forgive Russian debt in return for further efforts to destroy such weapons. They are now stockpiled at more than 300 sites around the country.
--------
Some Russians Skeptical of G - 8 Plan
June 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-G8-Summit-Reax.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- The decision by the world's wealthiest industrial nations to help Russia dispose of its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons won support from some quarters here Friday, but angered others as a sign of Russia capitulating to the West.
Retired Gen. Leonid Ivashov warned that President Vladimir Putin was leading the country into a potentially dangerous relationship with the West, first by agreeing to closer cooperation with NATO and then with the full entry of Russia into the Group of Eight.
The G-8 summit in Canada wrapped up Thursday with a pledge of up to $20 billion to help keep Russia's arsenal from falling into the hands of terrorists.
``Russia is invited to join, but we are treated like a beneficiary not as an equal,'' said Ivashov, who added that he had some questions about ``the West's motive'' in offering the funds.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov also criticized the G-8 pledge.
``Despite all the buzz and propaganda, it is clear that the billions of dollars to be allocated to Russia by Western countries are designed to completely annihilate Russia's nuclear missile shield,'' he said, according to Interfax news agency.
But Sergei Kiriyenko, who heads a state committee for the disarmament of chemical weapons, called the G-8 pledge ``a personal victory for the Russian president.''
He said Russia last year removed the detonators from its 40,000 tons of chemical weapons and therefore the weapons don't ``pose a combat threat to anybody except ourselves.''
The G-8 nations said the funding will support a 10-year program to secure Russia's aging nuclear weapons, dismantle decommissioned nuclear submarines and ensure that Russian scientists have adequate employment.
Putin has denied the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, but said Russia was grateful for the assistance.
Putin's increasing cooperation with the West following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States has not been embraced by all Russians. Some fear the Kremlin has moved too quickly to bind Russia to the international community without receiving any tangible results.
Ivashov warned the United States was moving toward a ``unipolar world'' and Putin was giving up Russia's natural position as a counterbalance. Alexei Arbatov, a deputy chief of the Russian parliament's defense affairs committee, said he feared Russia was focusing too intently on the United States and not enough on Europe.
``It is important to remember that the West is not only America,'' Arbatov said.
--------
Loads of Radioactive Berries Seized
June 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Radioactive-Berries.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Nearly 1,500 pounds of berries from an area heavily hit by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster were seized this month from Moscow markets because of radioactive contamination, an official announced on Friday.
The bilberries, akin to blueberries, were found to have 14 times the acceptable levels cesium, said Yelena Ter-Markirosova, spokeswoman for Radon, the capital's radiation-monitoring agency.
She said experts had confiscated 1,472 pounds of the berries -- grown in western Belarus -- since June 18.
-------- saudi arabia
SAUDIS SAID TO SEEK WMD
Middle East Newsline,
June 28, 2002
http://menewsline.com/stories/2002/june/06_28_1.html
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- Saudi Arabia is said to be seeking weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. officials said Riyad has been seeking intermediate-range missiles as well as biological, chemical and nuclear weapons from Islamic allies. They said China and Pakistan have been the most prominent suppliers in the Saudi effort.
The Saudi effort was reported in a recent hearing by a House subcommittee. Rep. Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House Middle East and South Asia subcommittee said Riyad has attempted to obtain WMD from China. Gilman suggested that the effort is continuing.
"In the past, it has attempted to procure weapons of mass destruction in the form of Chinese missiles," Gilman told the panel on May 22. "There are press reports of continuing concern about its capabilities and its intentions in that regard."
-------- terrorism
U.S., France in Cargo Deal
June 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Customs-Seaports.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. inspectors, trying to prevent smuggling of nuclear and other deadly weapons, will screen cargo containers destined for the United States before they leave Le Havre, France, the Customs Service said Friday.
The agreement with the French government allows U.S. customs inspectors to be stationed at that port for the first time.
Customs has entered into similar agreements -- aimed at improving cargo security at the world's seaports -- with Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Last year, around 108,300 cargo containers entered the United States from Le Havre, Customs said. Customs hopes to place some officers at the Le Havre seaport in a few months.
--------
Orphan Radioactive Items Are Potential Dirty Bombs
June 28, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2002/2002-06-28-04.asp
VIENNA, Austria, The radioactive materials needed to build a so-called dirty bomb that spreads radioactivity upon explosion can be found in almost any country in the world, and more than 100 countries have inadequate control and monitoring programs to prevent or even detect the theft of these materials, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned this week.
"What is needed is cradle-to-grave control of powerful radioactive sources to protect them against terrorism or theft," says Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations agency that develops nuclear safety standards and protects human health and the environment against ionizing radiation.
Source capsule used in medical teletheraphy units. The gamma rays from its cobalt-60 or caesium-137 source were used to treat cancer. (Photo (c) Oak Ridge Associated Universities)
The IAEA has identified radioactive sources used in industrial radiography, radiotherapy, industrial irradiators and thermo-electric generators as those that are the most significant from a safety and security standpoint because they contain large amounts of radioactive material - such as cobalt-60, strontium-90, caesium-137, and iridium-192.
"One of our priorities is to assist states in creating and strengthening national regulatory infrastructures to ensure that these radioactive sources are appropriately regulated and adequately secured at all times," said ElBaradei.
The United States, Russia and the IAEA have newly established a tripartite working group on securing and managing radioactive sources in the former Soviet Union. On June 12, officials representing the three sides agreed to develop what the IAEA calls "a coordinated and proactive strategy" to locate, recover, secure and recycle orphan sources.
This agreement represents the first concerted international response to the threat posed by vulnerable radioactive sources in the region. Funding and expertise for the initiative will be provided by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Russian Federation's Ministry for Atomic Energy.
U.S. officials reported June 24 that the Bush administration expects to spend $20 million this year to safeguard dangerous radioactive materials in the former Soviet Union.
Lawyer and diplomat, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt has headed the IAEA since December 1997. (Photo courtesy IAEA)
While the tripartite working group is a step forward, the IAEA is also concerned about the more than 50 countries that are not among the 134 IAEA Member States, said ElBaradei, "as they do not benefit from IAEA assistance and are likely to have no regulatory infrastructure."
A dirty bomb contains radioactive material, but does not use that material to produce a nuclear explosion, as nuclear weapons do.
Dirty bombs would be constructed of conventional explosives and radioactive material. Detonation would result in the dispersion of the radioactive material contained in the bomb. As with any explosion, people nearby could be killed or injured by the blast itself. The dispersed radioactive material expose people in the vicinity.
"In all likelihood," the IAEA says, "the most severe tangible impacts of a dirty bomb would be the social disruption associated with the evacuation, the subsequent cleanup of contaminated property and the associated economic costs."
ElBaradei points out that while some countries which have regulatory systems in place are urgently stepping up security measures, many countries lack the resources or the national structures to control radioactive sources.
Orphaned radioactive sources - those outside official regulatory control - are of greatest concern.
Sources used in mobile caesium irradiators in the former Soviet Union containing 3500 Curies of caesium-137. (Photo courtesy IAEA)
Orphaned sources are widespread in the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union, the IAEA says.
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that U.S. companies have lost track of nearly 1,500 radioactive sources within the country since 1996, and more than half were never recovered.
A European Union (EU) study estimated that every year an estimated 70 sources are lost from regulatory control. A recent European Commission report estimated that about 30,000 disused sources in the EU that are held in local storage at the users' premises are at risk of being lost from regulatory control.
"The majority of these sources would not pose a significant radiological risk if used in a dirty bomb," the IAEA says.
Worldwide, the IAEA calculates there are more than 20,000 operators of significant radioactive sources: more than 10,000 radiotherapy units for medical care are in use; about 12,000 industrial sources for radiography are supplied annually.
There are about 300 irradiator facilities containing radioactive sources for industrial applications in operation - some used to irradiate food, others to sterilize items such as the U.S. mail that was suspected of anthrax contamination.
IAEA experts have recently searched out and secured orphaned sources in several countries. In Kabul, Afghanistan in late March, the IAEA was called in to secure a powerful cobalt source abandoned in a former hospital.
In Uganda a week later, the IAEA helped the government to secure a source that appeared to have been stolen for illicit resale.
During the June 2002 survey in Georgia, a team member tests a hand held radioactive detector. (Photo by Petr Pavlicek/IAEA)
In February, a Georgian team supported by the IAEA successfully recovered two unshielded and unsecured radioactive strontium-90 sources that caused injuries to three men in December 2001. In June, IAEA experts assisted Georgian officials in a search for additional strontium-90 sources that may be present in the area where the sources were recovered in February.
"The situation in Georgia may just be an indication of the serious safety and security implications that orphaned sources may have elsewhere in the world," says Abel Gonzalez, IAEA director of radiation and waste safety.
In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation induced skin disease. Eleven were transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany where the cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union.
The IAEA has been working with Georgia since 1997 to improve the safety and security of radioactive sources in this country where over 280 radioactive sources have been recovered and placed in interim storage since the mid-90s.
Trafficking in radioactive sources is of concern, and more than 70 nations have joined with the IAEA to collect and share information on trafficking incidents. The IAEA database contains 284 confirmed incidents since January 1, 1993 that involved radioactive material other than nuclear material, but the agency says "open-source information suggests that the actual number of cases is significantly larger."
Customs officials, border guards, and police forces have detected numerous attempts to smuggle and illegally sell stolen radioactive sources. If the perpetrator is willing to disregard his or her own personal safety, radioactive sources could with little effort be concealed in a truck or packed in a suitcase.
"The danger of handling powerful radioactive sources can no longer be seen as an effective deterrent, which dramatically changes previous assumptions," warns ElBaradei.
Industrial radiography source of a type used in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s to inspect welds and metal casting. (Photo (c) Oak Ridge Associated Universities)
Even if they are not used to make dirty bombs, orphan radioactive sources can cause injury or death. Sealed radioactive sources or their containers can be attractive to scavengers for the scrap metal trade because they appear to be made of valuable metals and may not display a radiation warning label. Unsuspecting scavengers or members of the public tampering with them have suffered the consequences.
In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and 10 people were exposed and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome.
In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure.
The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. Authorities believe that scavengers dismantled a metal canister from a radiotherapy machine at an abandoned cancer clinic, rupturing the caesium-137 source. They left it in a junkyard.
Several hundred people in Goiânia were exposed to the caesium-137, but did not know it, the IAEA says. Thinking the caesium powder was "pretty," some people rubbed it over their bodies. Others inadvertently ate food that had been contaminated with the powder.
After a week, a public health worker correctly diagnosed radiation syndrome when a sufferer visited a clinic. The Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 people were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- south carolina
Delays Threaten Nuclear Program
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Friday, June 28, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58798-2002Jun27?language=printer
A new plant that will produce tritium, a key component of all U.S. thermonuclear weapons, is running 25 percent over budget and almost a year behind schedule, possibly endangering the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, said a report released yesterday by the Energy Department inspector general.
Tritium is a gaseous radioactive isotope used in all U.S. thermonuclear weapons. Without it, the bombs or warheads would not work. It has not been produced for U.S. weapons since 1988. The plan was to build a $401 million tritium extraction facility at the Energy Department's Savannah River Site to be completed by February 2006.
The inspector found that "management lacks assurance that the facility will be available when needed" and that delays in completion "have the potential to impede performance of the stockpile stewardship program."
-------- us politics
Congress Endorses Big Defense Spending
By Jim Abrams
Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; 3:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59573-2002Jun28?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Moving with speed and near-unity, Congress endorsed much of the defense spending increases that President Bush sought to improve military readiness and conduct the war on terrorism.
In separate actions Thursday, the Senate passed a $393 billion policy bill that approves programs for the Pentagon and other agencies with military functions and the House agreed to a $355 billion bill that specifies defense spending amounts for fiscal year 2003 starting Oct. 1.
The Senate vote was 97-2, with only Sens. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., dissenting. The House tally was 413-18.
However, these were two different types of measures. The Senate bill must be reconciled with a House authorization bill passed last month. And the spending bill that the House approved Thursday would have to be reconciled with an appropriations measure the Senate has not yet acted on.
The House defense bill was the first of 13 appropriations bills that Congress must pass every year to finance federal programs, and its approval came just days after Bush urged Congress to complete its defense legislation rapidly. "They don't need to delay the defense bill in a time of war," he said in a New Jersey speech.
"We haven't had a better year on the floor," said Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense. Many members were serving for the first time in a war situation and, he said, "You could see that in the response from the House."
At the same time, Congress is heading for its July 4 break without a House-Senate agreement on an emergency spending package that contains billions in anti-terror money. Bush asked for $27 billion and has threatened to veto as too expensive a $31.5 billion Senate bill. The House approved a $29 billion bill.
The defense bills would raise pay a minimum of 4.1 percent for all military personnel, increase spending on aircraft and shipbuilding and target funds to fight terrorism. The House bill includes $4.7 billion to buy 23 F-22s and continue developing the stealth fighter, which is slated to replace aging F-15s. The Joint Strike Fighter, a high-tech aircraft that Lockheed Martin is developing with U.S. allies, gets $3.5 billion.
The House measure would eliminate funding for the $11 billion Crusader artillery system that the administration has sought to kill because it is too heavy and immobile. It does provide $648 million for work on new artillery systems, directing some of that money to contractors in Oklahoma and Minnesota where the Crusader was being tested and would have been produced.
The administration remained unhappy with Senate treatment of its missile defense program: The Senate engendered a veto threat by cutting the president's request from $7.6 billion to $6.8 billion. But it then agreed that, if the Pentagon finds extra money, the president could use that for missile defense with the stipulation that Congress believes the money could be better spent to fight terrorism.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a House hearing Thursday that the Senate restrictions were still unacceptable. The cuts, he said, would "severely delay" efforts to build a prototype defense system for long-range missiles and cripple the Pentagon's efforts to develop defenses that target missiles in their boost phase, shortly after they are launched. The administration last month officially withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned missile defense systems, and it immediately began working on a rudimentary system in Alaska.
The House spending bill would approve $7.4 billion for missile defense, $74 million less than the administration wanted.
The White House has also issued veto threats over a Senate decision to guarantee full retirement pay to all veterans who also receive disability compensation, which the administration says is too expensive. The administration also opposed a Senate amendment to lift a six-year-old ban on privately funded abortions at military hospitals overseas.
The House bill is H.R. 5010.
The Senate bill is S. 2514.
On the Net: Congress, bill text: http://thomas.loc.gov/
----
Budget Increases for Pentagon Pass Easily
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By CARL HULSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/politics/28DEFE.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - Seeking to demonstrate strong support for the military, the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed major defense spending packages today, increasing pay for the armed forces and providing new money for military hardware and research.
After resolving a dispute over investment in the missile defense system, the Democrat-led Senate voted 97 to 2 to adopt a $393 billion Pentagon spending outline for the year beginning Oct. 1. At almost the same time, the House passed, 413 to 18, its $355 billion military appropriations bill, the first of 13 spending measures to advance in Congress this year.
Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California and the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said it was the largest vote in support of a military spending bill in recent memory. He said it demonstrated that even lawmakers who in the past argued that the military was getting too much of the federal budget were making defense a top priority after Sept. 11.
"The vote today is a reflection of the public's strong support for the military," Mr. Lewis said.
President Bush had encouraged Congress to pass military spending measures, and the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, had told the Senate it would not leave town for a Fourth of July recess until the defense bill was finished. The Senate voted earlier in the day to limit debate.
In a statement tonight, Mr. Bush praised House lawmakers "for their strong, bipartisan show of unity in our war against terrorism" in approving the appropriations bill. He urged the Senate to approve similar legislation next month.
The Senate authorization bill includes - and the House appropriations bill would fully pay for - a 4.1 percent across-the-board pay raise for military personnel, and higher raises for selected personnel.
Authorization bills map out the programs Congress wants to support, while appropriation bills detail how the money will be spent.
Both bills represent the largest increases in military spending in decades. The House bill is almost $34 billion more than the amount set last year, the Senate measure allocates $50 billion more.
"It meets the goals that the president has set," said Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee.
The measures still have a considerable way to go. The Senate has yet to take up the bill detailing how it will spend its military dollars. And the measure adopted today differs in some respects from a Pentagon measure passed by the House last month.
Debate on the Senate bill stalled in a dispute over a Democratic cut of $814 million in missile defense, lowering the budget for one of President Bush's priorities to $6.8 billion.
Democrats said the program had not spent its current allocation, and they shifted the money to shipbuilding. Republicans, encouraged by the administration, sought to restore the money, saying the cuts could disrupt the overall program. A compromise allows President Bush to shift projected savings to missile defense, but language included in the bill says that extra money would be better spent on fighting terrorism.
The fate of the Crusader artillery system, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants to cancel, is also treated differently in the House and Senate measures.
The Senate agreed to shift money from the Crusader into the Army's account for development of future weapons systems with the proviso that the Pentagon complete a planned analysis of the Crusader and artillery alternatives. One House military measure kept the program intact, while the defense spending bill approved today accepts the recommendation to kill the program.
--------
Chief Adviser on Terrorism Resigns Post at White House
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/national/28RESI.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - Gen. Wayne A. Downing, President Bush's principal adviser on terrorism, is leaving his post at the National Security Council after less than a year in the job, the White House announced today.
He will be replaced by Gen. John A. Gordon, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency.
General Downing did not return phone calls today seeking comment. A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said General Downing had finished the job he set out to do and was returning to his retirement in Colorado.
But associates of General Downing said he had become increasingly frustrated by his inability to marshal the authority he needed to become the center, as he had expected, of White House counterterrorism efforts.
Mr. McCormack said: "He's given exemplary service. He answered the call of duty for his country when we were in an hour of need, and the president thanks him for that."
General Downing reported to both Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Tom Ridge, the director of domestic security. His job was to organize the Office of Combatting Terrorism that is part of the National Security Council and the Intelligence and Detection Directorate that is part of the Office of Homeland Security.
Associates said General Downing had faced resistance on important initiatives and programs from the administration's other counterterrorism fiefs at the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The general's associates said he had been particularly frustrated about what they characterized as a begrudging response from the F.B.I. to his requests for intelligence information.
Outspoken, aggressive and known for his dislike of bureaucratic rigidity, General Downing was recognized within senior administration circles as a champion of military action to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Pentagon officials said today that General Downing had taken the job thinking he would be able to push forward his views on Iraq and had become dispirited by what he saw as the administration's tough talk but no action.
Associates said that General Downing, a former Army commando who at one point headed the entire United States Special Operations Command, had also wanted to be more aggressive against terrorism in the Philippines, where an American hostage was killed this month.
Administration officials disputed that version of events. "This is just pure Washington gobbledygook," one administration official said.
Mr. McCormack said that "General Downing had some initial tasks that he and the president and Dr. Rice and Governor Ridge set out," and that he had completed them.
General Gordon has most recently been the under secretary for nuclear security at the Department of Energy. Before that, he was deputy director of the C.I.A.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Arms Blast Blamed on Rocket
June 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Explosion.html
SPINBOLDAK, Afghanistan (AP) -- Rockets, bullets and flaming munitions ripped through a dusty border town Friday after a large ammunition dump blew up, killing at least 19 people and injuring dozens of others. The local Afghan commander blamed a rocket attack for triggering the blast.
The explosion was the latest in a series of violent incidents to rock the volatile region on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. On Wednesday, 10 Pakistani soldiers died in a shootout with suspected al-Qaida fugitives in a remote tribal area to the northeast.
Fazaludin Agha, the local commander in Spinboldak, 300 miles southwest of the Afghan capital of Kabul, said it was not known who fired the rocket he said set off the initial explosion at the ammunition dump late Thursday. Secondary explosions continued into the early hours of Friday.
The commander said the victims included women, children and Afghan soldiers. At least seven soldiers who had been guarding the munitions cache were missing.
No American troops were believed to be in the area at the time, and the U.S. military said it had no information about the cause of the explosions or casualties. The arms cache had for some time been under the control of local Afghan forces, who had said they intended to move the munitions away from a populated area.
After the explosions finally subsided, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft rounds and small arms ammunition lay strewn over a wide area of the town. Men with Kalashnikov assault rifles guarded the site.
The most seriously wounded were taken to hospitals in Chaman, about three miles away on the Pakistan side of the border, and to the Afghan city of Kandahar.
Area residents said blasts continued almost until morning as fires continued to detonate live ammunition.
``A series of deafening explosions ... started shaking our houses,'' said Ahmed Ali Achkazai, a Chaman resident who said he was awakened by the first blast. He said he ran outside and saw balls of fire rising over Spinboldak.
Residents said munitions rained down all over town.
``A mortar fell on my house,'' said Abdul Ghaffar, a teen-age soldier who stood guard outside the compound Friday. ``It killed my mother and my brother.''
Children and other people had earlier entered the compound looking for scrap metal they could sell.
The explosions blasted a local government customs house where food aid was stored. A nearby mosque also was extensively damaged, its roof caved in and one wall collapsed.
Also damaged was an office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, located about 70 yards from the arms depot, spokeswoman Jennifer Clark said in Geneva. One UNHCR driver was injured and was taken to hospital in Kandahar, she said.
Two U.N. World Food Program tents used for storage collapsed due to ground vibrations, a spokesman said.
Spinboldak is the principal entry point for Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan's southern Baluchistan province, and relief workers said the explosions could delay the repatriation of an estimated 32,000 Afghans sheltering in five camps around the town.
UNHCR officials who inspected the damage to the office on Friday were escorted by de-mining teams because of the danger of unexploded ordnance.
The area where the munitions dump blew up is close to the tribal-controlled border region with Pakistan where fugitive al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are thought to have fled U.S.-led offensives.
The U.S. soldiers maintain a large base in the southern city of Kandahar, about 90 miles west of Spinboldak.
Pakistani authorities say they have arrested at least 300 al-Qaida or Taliban fighters in the tribal border region in recent months. Officials estimate there may be 1,000 more in the area.
On Thursday, Pakistani forces intensified their hunt for al-Qaida fighters who escaped a gunbattle with Pakistani troops near the village of Wana, about 190 miles west of Islamabad.
Ten Pakistani soldiers were killed and several others wounded in the clash. Government officials said two al-Qaida fighters were killed and one captured, while dozens more of the group, believed to be Chechens, escaped.
--------
Al Qaeda fighters replenish arsenals
June 28, 2002
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020628-94675008.htm
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that al Qaeda and hard-core Taliban fighters are receiving new shipments of equipment to fight American troops and their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The defense chief said his troops recently discovered a fresh shipment of military gear that was "modern stuff." He declined to identify it. "There's still more money and more new things coming in," he said. Mr. Rumsfeld said he has ordered his commanders to stop destroying all the arms they find and to save the best for the emerging Afghan national army.
In an interview at the Pentagon with editors and reporters of The Washington Times, Mr. Rumsfeld also said it is unlikely that any reform movement in Iraq could rise on its own to topple Saddam Hussein from power. With that statement, he drew a distinction with North Korea and Iran - the two other countries in President Bush's "axis of evil."
"It's not likely to collapse internally like another model might be, and it's not likely that there's going to be a large reform movement from the ground, because he kills them off," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "So I think of the three elements of the axis of evil, the one that is the least likely to alter itself in some way is Iraq."
Mr. Rumsfeld talked of progress in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, noting that about 100 countries are contributing to the U.S.-led military campaign. But he signaled that the war will not be over soon. He said al Qaeda and Taliban foot soldiers remain in probably one-third of Afghanistan's 32 provinces.
"We're continuing to press on the Pakistan side, where there's a lot of these folks, and the Pakistani government's been helpful," he said. "We've worked hard on it. Sometimes it works, like the day we hit 11 spots and captured 50 people. Sometimes it doesn't work so well, like earlier this week when some of the Pakistani soldiers got killed."
Ten Pakistanis were killed early Wednesday during raids on enemy hide-outs near the village of Wana.
Despite an intensive eight-month war that has routed most al Qaeda forces from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's terror network is finding ways to replenish fighters who want to destroy the new Afghan government and kill American troops.
"We have very recently discovered some new stuff that is not old, and it is modern," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is expensive. It is well-done. When we raided some places, we found - I'm not going to say where - we found 25 backpacks all well done with the right equipment and modern stuff and professionally done. So it's not like the money's dried up. There's still more money and more new things coming in."
Asked from where the new equipment is coming, he answered, "Everywhere. If you spread it all out, the passports are from lots of different places. The medical equipment and the weapons are from lots of different places."
When asked to better describe the articles, he said, "It's supplies and equipment and medical gear. These people are well-trained and well-financed and well-equipped."
The pattern in Operation Mountain Lion and other searches in Afghanistan has been to find and destroy the al Qaeda-Taliban arsenal.
Now, however, Mr. Rumsfeld wants some weapons saved for an Afghan national force being trained by Army Green Berets.
"They started blowing it all up rather promptly, and I've stopped them," he said. "And we're starting to triage it and get rid of the stuff that's dangerous and unstable, because a lot of it's very old. I've got them stockpiling the rest of it for the Afghan national army."
Mr. Rumsfeld, a former Navy pilot on his second tour as defense secretary, expressed amazement at the number and size of arms caches that built up during Afghanistan's history of war.
"Literally, you can not imagine the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things armored vehicles and rockets, everything under the sun. Surface-to-air missiles," he said. "There isn't two days that goes by that there isn't another cache discovered someplace of this stuff. It must be from 20 different countries."
On Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld repeated his position that neither sanctions nor U.N. inspectors can prevent Saddam from obtaining the components of weapons of mass destruction.
Asked twice in the interview how the United States can stop the flow of components of weapons of mass destruction from reaching Baghdad, he did not answer directly.
Mr. Bush has threatened Saddam with military action to prevent him from developing weapons that could fall into the hands of terrorists. The military has been drawing up invasion options, and the CIA is looking at ways to disrupt the regime.
Mr. Rumsfeld, while saying his knowledge on the Baghdad regime "is not as good as I'd like to have," expressed doubts that the Iraqi people alone can oust Saddam from power.
"He is a world-class dictator," he said. "He's tough. He's intelligent. He's savvy. He's survived a long time."
But Mr. Rumsfeld said that in Iran there is a "legitimate reform movement" from young people and women oppressed by hard-line Islamic rulers.
"That's the kind of a country that could turn, because of a popular movement away from the extreme positions and the notably unhelpful role in the world that Iran is playing," he said. The United States says Iran is the world's top sponsor of global terrorism.
On North Korea, the reclusive Stalinist state, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "You'd have to say that's a place that is not healthy. It's unhealthy. It's the kind of a thing that could collapse internally, one would think. I'm not predicting that."
-------- asia
ASEAN members rule out military cooperation
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020628-57113512.htm
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has boosted counterterrorism and intelligence links since the September 11 attacks, but the 10-nation bloc has no plans to transform itself into a military alliance, ASEAN Secretary-General Rodolfo Severino Jr. said yesterday.
U.S. troops are assisting the Philippines in a campaign against Islamic rebel groups, and Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore have arrested dozens of militants with suspected links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. But Mr. Severino, meeting with reporters yesterday during a Washington visit, rejected the idea that Southeast Asia was destined to become the "second front" in the U.S.-led war on global terrorism.
"The kind of Islam practiced in Southeast Asia is quite different from the stricter kind of Islam seen in the Middle East," Mr. Severino said. "Our two biggest Muslim members, Indonesia and Malaysia, have taken a strong stand against Islamic extremism, and were doing so long before September 11.
"I think this talk of ASEAN as a haven for terrorists is really out of place," he said. "People have become more conscious of our efforts against terrorism because our own countries have been making arrests."
Still fundamentally an economic bloc, ASEAN clearly has boosted its security profile since the terror attacks in the United States, focusing on joint law enforcement, intelligence sharing and financial policing of terrorist networks.
ASEAN members, which also include Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Vietnam, in April adopted a work plan to fight transnational crime, with an emphasis on combating regional and international terrorist networks.
In November, defense ministers from the ASEAN countries met for only the second time. Philippines army spokesman Lt. Col. Jose Mabanta told journalists at the Manila meeting he could imagine a joint ASEAN army someday.
But Mr. Severino said ASEAN members were looking "to cooperate in practical terms," not build an Asian NATO.
"A military structure is not in the works," he said.
He said the Bush administration has made a conscious effort to boost the profile of ASEAN, dealing directly with the alliance instead of with individual countries in several formats.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick traveled to Bangkok in April for the first formal trade talks between the United States and ASEAN in a decade, although little immediate progress was made on a planned free-trade area.
With 500 million people, ASEAN ranks as America's fifth-largest trading partner, after Canada, the European Union, Mexico and Japan, with annual two-way trade now at $120 billion.
But while praising the United States' generally open markets and the Bush administration's support of free trade, Mr. Severino said recent U.S. moves seen as protecting domestic interests such as steel makers and farmers had damaged ASEAN's own campaign for freer internal markets.
"My concern is that our own protectionist advocates back home cite the U.S. actions as examples of what they want," he said. "They say, 'If even the U.S. goes in for protectionism, why can't we?'"
Ernest Z. Bower, president of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, said the U.S. trade moves "really wing your credibility" when U.S. business leaders push for Southeast Asian countries to open their markets to American exports.
-------- biological weapons
Hatfill Teaching
Bioterrorism Course Program At LSU's Biomedical Training Center Funded By $11.5 Million Grant
June 28, 2002
By DAVE ALTIMARI And JACK DOLAN,
Hartford Courant Staff Writers
http://www.ctnow.com/news/nationworld/hc-2anthrax0628.artjun28.story?coll=hc%2Dheadlines%2Dhome
Steven J. Hatfill, the microbiologist at the center of the FBI's anthrax investigation, has been working as part of an $11.5 million government-funded program to train police and firefighters in the event of a bioterrorism attack.
Hatfill, 48, who in March lost the security clearance he needed for his job at a prominent military contractor, has been working at Louisiana State University's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training. LSU received an $11.5 million grant in January from the Department of Justice, which also oversees the FBI, to train medical and law enforcement personnel responding to attacks such as last fall's anthrax-laced letters.
LSU officials confirmed Hatfill's employment.
"When he works here it's as an adjunct instructor and he develops and teaches his own class," said Gene C. Sands, LSU's executive director of university relations.
"I can't tell you right now whether he is being paid by the university," Sands said.
Hatfill is listed in the LSU phone directory as a lecturer and with the same address as Dean Daniel C. Walsh Jr. The dean, who runs the biomedical research center, could not be reached for comment Thursday night.
Hatfill's position, working indirectly for the federal department investigating him, is one in a series of uneasy interrelations between law enforcement and the close-knit community of biological weapons experts who make up the FBI's pool of potential suspects.
Although the FBI insists Hatfill is not a suspect in the anthrax letter case, agents searched Hatfill's Maryland apartment Tuesday and his rented storage locker in Florida Wednesday, carting away evidence from both locations. Hatfill also has said he is not a suspect in the FBI investigation.
A source said Thursday that Hatfill was hired by LSU based on recommendations from David Franz and David Huxsoll, both former commanders of the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., where Hatfill worked for two years.
Franz and Huxsoll could not be reached for comment.
Huxsoll is now director of Plum Island, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research facility off the coast of Connecticut, accessible only by ferry. The secluded island is used to study exotic animal illnesses including foot-and-mouth disease. No animals leave the island alive.
Despite being popularly known as "Anthrax Island," after last fall's anthrax attacks, officials publicly deny that they have ever studied the deadly pathogen on Plum Island.
But at least one former infectious-disease center scientist interviewed recently by the FBI said agents asked a series of questions about the island: Have you ever been there? Do you know anybody who works there? What do they do?
On Thursday, an FBI spokesman would not acknowledge whether such questions were being asked, or why the FBI would care.
Franz and Huxsoll are part of a cadre of highly placed friends within the biological weapons field who have helped Hatfill over the years. Another of Hatfill's close friends is William Patrick, another former employee of the infectious-disease center. Patrick is known for developing the U.S. method for producing anthrax in aerosol form.
In 1999, while he was working for defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., Hatfill hired Patrick to do a study on a hypothetical anthrax attack by mail. The study depicted the impact of placing 2.5 grams of Bacillus globigii - a nonlethal, simulated form of anthrax - in a standard business envelope, a source at the SACI Corp. said.
The amount is similar to what was placed in the six anthrax-laden letters mailed to government officials and members of the media last fall. Five people died in the anthrax attacks, and 13 others were sickened.
The two most potent letters were mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. FBI Director Robert Mueller met with Daschle and his staff Thursday to update them on the investigation. Daschle declined to comment on the meeting.
Earlier this year, the FBI ordered dozens of university labs to send samples of their anthrax to the Maryland infectious-disease center to be collected for comparison with the powder preserved from the letter to Leahy, also kept at the Army lab.
Then last month, federal agents announced a sweeping series of lie detector tests for current and former employees of the infectious-disease center, where the evidence is being collected. FBI agents working the investigation have visited a number of current and former scientists in their homes. But none of those visits has resulted in the same level of public scrutiny Hatfill has come under this week.
Federal officials said on Thursday that Hatfill is on a list of 20 to 30 "persons of interest" and stressed that his property was searched because, like the others, he possesses the expertise to handle deadly pathogens and at one time had access to the anthrax strain used in the attacks.
FBI sources have said they cannot place Hatfill near Trenton, N.J., where they believe the tainted letters were mailed.
Hatfill's extensive background in biological warfare research includes two years working at the infectious-disease center, where he studied the deadly Ebola virus. He has also been vaccinated against anthrax.
Unlike others on the FBI's list, Hatfill's name has circulated for months among microbiologists prodding federal agents to take a close look at his unusual background.
Hatfill graduated in 1984 from the Godfrey Huggins Medical School in Zimbabwe.
Not far from the medical school is a town called Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in Greendale, a suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital.
In the past few years, Hatfill has publicly discussed the process of turning toxic biological agents into easily inhaled powders - the form of the anthrax placed in the letters sent in the mail attacks last fall.
Hatfill also has said that the United States is woefully unprepared for a biological attack.
The search of his apartment in Frederick, Md., just across the street from Fort Detrick, came exactly a week after microbiologists met with staff from Daschle's and Leahy's offices. Two FBI agents also were present at the meeting.
----
Biological Warfare Experts Questioned in Anthrax Probe
More Than Two Dozen Homes Searched by FBI
By Guy Gugliotta and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58437-2002Jun27?language=printer
The FBI said yesterday it is focusing on about 30 U.S.-based biological warfare experts in its investigation of last year's anthrax attacks, and has searched the homes of more than two dozen in recent months -- always with the owner's consent.
The FBI said that former Army researcher Steven J. Hatfill, whose Frederick apartment was searched Tuesday, was on the floating short list of "persons of interest," but noted both publicly and in private meetings last week that Hatfill is not a suspect in the case.
Ben Haddad, spokesman for the San Diego-based defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), confirmed that Hatfill was a full-time SAIC employee in 1999 when he and collaborator Joseph Soukup commissioned a report investigating the consequences of a hypothetical anthrax attack by mail.
But although the report, first reported in yesterday's Baltimore Sun, eerily foreshadowed the mail-borne attacks that killed five people last fall, Haddad said that commissioning the report "in general, would not be an out-of-the-norm sort of request." He said Soukup still worked at SAIC and Hatfill left the firm on March 4.
The author of the report was William J. Patrick, a former product development chief in the U.S. offensive biological weapons program that was abandoned in the 1970s, Haddad said. Hatfill and Soukup commissioned the report internally -- there was no outside client, Haddad added.
Despite devoting massive resources to the anthrax investigation, the FBI has been largely stymied, and officials stressed that the agency's "persons of interest" list is always evolving and changing as leads are exhausted.
The FBI is administering polygraph tests to more than 200 current and former employees of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Maryland's Fort Detrick -- the Pentagon's top biodefense research center -- and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Both facilities have stores of anthrax spores, and the FBI since the early days of the probe has focused on locating a domestic suspect with scientific expertise.
One item that prompted interest in Hatfill, a virologist who had worked at the National Institutes of Health and at Fort Detrick before moving to SAIC, was his security clearance, One official said it lapsed earlier this year after not being renewed as required last August.
"Obviously, he is somebody who had access to anthrax and scientific capability," one FBI official said. "That is why we want to look at him -- to either remove him from a list of potentials or add him to a list of potentials. . . . Are we saying he's the guy, or even a suspect? No, we're not."
Another law enforcement official said, "We're a long way from working through all this. I would advise caution in drawing any conclusions."
Last Tuesday, Hatfill invited the FBI to search his Frederick apartment, in the shadow of the Fort Detrick labs. The FBI said it found nothing suspicious, although swab tests from the apartment were still pending. Hatfill could not be reached to comment yesterday.
-------- business
Lieberman Recommends Technology Agency
By Jesse J. Holland
Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; 6:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63188-2002Jun28?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The Homeland Security Department will need an alert and aggressive technology development agency that can come up quickly with new security devices and systems, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Friday.
"We need dozens of new security technologies, and we need them quickly," said Lieberman, D-Conn., who is working with the White House to set up the new department.
Congress completed a week of hearings Friday on President Bush's plan to merge 100 federal entities and 170,000 employees into a single Cabinet department devoted to domestic security.
Congressional leaders, while rushing to pass early versions of the plan by the end of July, have been suggesting modifications to specifics among the White House's proposals.
Lieberman wants the department to have what he called the Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, which would be modeled on the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Defense Department's agency was formed after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first manmade Earth satellite, and provided money and computers to facilitate U.S. scientists' competition with their Cold War adversaries.
Money for the agency spurred creation of several commercial technologies as well, including the Internet.
Lieberman wants the security research agency to do the same thing, but for the defense of U.S. territory. He suggested agency scientists might work on devices to detect chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons for border crossings, airports or seaports, or buildings that could detect intruders and protect themselves from sabotage.
"We know our enemies will do their worst to apply technology to try and terrorize our people and disrupt our way of life," Lieberman said. "We have an urgent duty now to do our best to develop better technologies to pre-empt, prevent and protect against even their most advanced and unpredictable attacks."
William Madia, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., agreed with the necessity of an advanced research agency in a Homeland Security Department.
"This program should be designed to close the gap between new ideas and basic science advances and deployable solutions," Madia said.
They are already working on some new domestic defense ideas at Oak Ridge, including a radiation sensor that could be placed on cell phone towers to send early warning data to officials of biological or chemical weapons use in urban areas.
The system was endorsed Monday by the House Appropriations Committee with a $5 million commitment for testing.
Besides detecting poisons, sensors at each site could provide weather information, such as wind speed and direction, that could help predict the path of anthrax, radiation particles from a bomb or lethal gases.
Any of the nation's 30,000 cell phone towers or 100,000 rooftop cell phone relay stations could be used, Madia said.
"This is a good partnership between government needs and private sector needs," Madia said.
On the Net:
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: http://www.darpa.mil/
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/
-------- colombia
Mayors flee Colombian towns
By Andy Olsen
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020628-94740670.htm
A massive effort by Colombian rebels to eliminate local governments and tighten their grip on the country has dozens of Colombian mayors resigning and fleeing their towns - sometimes seeking shelter in the United States.
Colombian newspapers report what the leftist rebels have called "total war" against the state. In a public statement last month, the rebels warned some 130 mayors to be out of their towns by midnight Wednesday or face death.
The announcement accelerated a campaign that has been going on since President Andres Pastrana took office in 1998. Since then, guerrillas in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have threatened to kill more than 203 mayors if they refuse to resign, the Colombian Municipality Federation said.
In those three years, 50 mayors have been assassinated, the group said. No one is taking the latest threat lightly.
"They get a threat and the mayors have to resign tomorrow, or they kill them," said Julian Hoyos, who spent six months kidnapped in Colombia before ending his term as mayor of Sevilla, a small town tucked in the Andes.
Though the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service does not release the figures, there are believed to be three former Colombian mayors and nearly 20 political and labor leaders now living in the D.C. area, said Mr. Hoyos, who resides in Washington and is president of the activist group Unidos por Colombia.
After being held with little food for half a year on a ranch in guerrilla-controlled Darien Valle, Mr. Hoyos paid $50,000 for his release before coming here. But many mayors cannot afford to pay ransom, he said.
"They are not armed players," he said. "Those who have money are paying for their safety. The others are leaving."
This week, two mayors who had been threatened were kidnapped. FARC on Wednesday added Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus to their resign-or-be-killed list, according to Colombian Vice Minister of Interior Nelson Amaya. The mayor of this city of 7 million is the FARC's biggest target yet.
Mr. Hoyos predicted still more mayors would be targeted and that more would flee to the United States.
"The cup is just starting to overflow," he said. "Things have to get a lot worse before they get better."
The threats also extend to municipal judges, mayors' families and their employees.
"It's an easy way of terrorism," Mr. Amaya said. "They are threatening 40,000 Colombians. They can't kill them all."
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson has promised financial support from Washington as well as armored vehicles to the threatened mayors. She said officials facing serious threats would be offered political asylum in the United States.
The Colombian government has offered them bodyguards and increased police support, though Mr. Pastrana has said he will not accept any resignations.
Those who leave their towns can continue governing from military bases, Mr. Amaya said. But he said that if they have to administer their towns from afar for long, the situation would invite social chaos.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Forces Hit Palestinian Offices in Hebron in Effort to Dislodge Gunmen
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/international/middleeast/28MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, June 27 - Israeli troops pounded the Palestinian Authority offices in Hebron for a third day today, firing heavy machine guns and rockets from helicopters to dislodge 15 gunmen they said were holed up inside.
[An Israeli army bulldozer punched a hole in the side of the Palestinian headquarters building in Hebron on Friday, as the Israelis demanded the surrender of gunmen inside, The Associated Press reported.]
The seven Palestinian cities on the West Bank into which Israel has sent troops remained shut down for the fifth day, leaving about 700,000 Palestinians locked in their homes under round-the-clock curfews and more than a million others in surrounding villages cut off from food, medicine and commerce. Jericho is the only major city not taken over by the Israelis. In the Balata refugee camp, near Nablus, two Palestinians were shot dead today in clashes with Israeli Army troops, and about 10 others were wounded, both sides reported. In Qalqilya there was gunfire from soldiers after Palestinians came out for a break in the curfew and Palestinians reported that a child was shot dead. The Israeli Army said it was investigating.
In Nablus itself, Israeli troops stormed a jail being used as a security headquarters and took about 20 Palestinians into custody, most of them members of the Palestinian Navy Police, which has its headquarters in the landlocked city.
At the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, armored bulldozers backed by Israeli troops entered the Rafah refugee camp and destroyed about 10 houses, Palestinians said.
But throughout Israel's reassertion of control over the Palestinian cities, the fighting has been much lighter than in April. At that time, Israeli troops encountered fierce resistance in Nablus and in the Jenin refugee camp to an extensive military operation that was intended, Israel said, to "root out the terrorist infrastructure."
Hundreds of Palestinian militants are still in custody from that action. This time those at liberty appear to be melting away rather than directly confronting Israel's overwhelming military superiority.
The April action, however, did not halt the wave of suicide bombers that have struck Israel, and the current military operation was a direct response to two suicide bombers and an attack on a settlement last week that took 31 Israeli lives in three days. The Israeli police and military are on a constant state of high alert over reports that more bombs can be expected.
President Bush's policy speech on Monday seemed to guarantee, at least for the short run, more of the same, combatants on both sides indicated. Mr. Bush insisted that the removal of Yasir Arafat from authority was crucial to ending the violence here.
Officials around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried hard to contain their glee at Mr. Bush's speech. Leading columnists in the Israeli papers, from a somewhat different political perspective, said the speech could have been written by Mr. Sharon himself. Palestinians glumly agreed.
One possibly American-favored potential successor to Mr. Arafat, Muhammad Dahlan, the former security chief for the Gaza Strip, was reported to be in Egypt today, consulting with security officials there who are cooperating with the United States in the proposed overhaul of the Palestinian security services demanded by Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon. In the current atmosphere on the West Bank, however, an American endorsement is not a big political asset.
Mr. Dahlan was quoted on Israeli radio criticizing some Palestinian officials for competing over who gets to go to the news media first and announce that Mr. Arafat is standing for re-election.
In the course of the assault on Palestinian offices in Hebron - a fortresslike structure known as the Imara that was once used as a barracks by the British - about 120 people have surrendered.
The Israeli Army is still holding about 20 of those who surrendered, officials said, including one person they described as a senior Hezbollah leader from Lebanon who had slipped in to train Palestinians in guerrilla warfare and, presumably, bomb attacks.
Israeli prosecutors today charged a Lebanese-born Israeli, the 35-year-old son of a Jewish mother and a Shiite Muslim father, with being a spy for Hezbollah. Identified only as Nissim, he was accused of making maps of gas and electricity installations in the Tel Aviv area and of trying to obtain information from the army.
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, who is chairman of the Labor Party as well as an uneasy partner in Mr. Sharon's government, said in a statement today that he did not believe there was a military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.
The statement, released to the Arabic newspaper Al Quds, included a peace plan that followed the lines of former President Bill Clinton's Middle East proposal, including some form of Palestinian control over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, a particularly contentious issue.
-------- us
Defense Crackdown On Credit Abuse
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Friday, June 28, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58798-2002Jun27?language=printer
The Pentagon moved to crack down on millions of dollars in abuse of government credit cards by defense workers, including the use of computers to detect suspicious transactions.
Pentagon Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim said the department will increasingly prosecute and cancel security clearances of military and civilian workers who cheat, adding that nearly 300,000 of the department's 1.4 million travel cards were being canceled to make oversight easier because they had been inactive for a year.
Zakheim said senior military and civilian supervisors will be held liable for fraud or other misuse of travel and purchase cards by employees under them.
----
Rumsfeld Aide Nominated To Command Joint Forces
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58466-2002Jun27?language=printer
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced yesterday that President Bush has nominated Rumsfeld's senior military assistant, Vice Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., to head the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk.
Pentagon insiders immediately took the move as a signal that Rumsfeld intends to use the unit as an engine to power his plans for "transforming" the U.S. military from a Cold War force built to fight the Soviet Union to a high-tech enterprise capable of defeating traditional and nontraditional adversaries, including terrorist groups and rogue states.
Giambastiani, 54, a Naval Academy graduate and former submarine commander, became Rumsfeld's top military aide in May 2001 and is credited with smoothing communications at a time when relations between Rumsfeld and the military brass were at their lowest point.
If confirmed by the Senate, Giambastiani would take his place among nine elite "combatant commanders" responsible for commanding U.S. forces on the battlefield and in such critical functional areas as nuclear readiness and homeland defense. Under Rumsfeld's new unified command plan, the Joint Forces Command will focus on transforming the military through innovative uses of joint air, sea and land task forces.
Retired Rear Adm. David R. Oliver Jr., who worked closely with Giambastiani, described him as a natural innovator. "He has always been a thinker of original ways to do things, and not wedded to any past," Oliver said. "He was operating that way when he was commanding officer of a submarine when he worked for me, and I watched him show the same traits in more senior billets."
For his part, Giambastiani said only that transformation has been a "very clear" priority of Rumsfeld and the president and would be the focal point of the Joint Forces Command.
Giambastiani did not know Rumsfeld when he was summoned to the secretary's office one day last spring for an interview. Rumsfeld offered him the job as his top military assistant the next day.
Almost two decades earlier, in 1982, Giambastiani took command on his first submarine. He would rise to become commander of the Atlantic Fleet's submarine force in 1998. But his career has taken him far from the depths of the sea.
Giambastiani was the first naval officer to serve as special assistant to the CIA's deputy director for intelligence. He was serving as deputy chief of naval operations for resources, warfare requirements and assessments when he got Rumsfeld's call last spring.
Now, it looks as though Rumsfeld has begun assembling an all-star lineup for Giambastiani to manage. Earlier this month, Rumsfeld transferred Army Maj. Gen. James M. Dubik, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, to direct the Joint Forces Command's directorate for joint experimentation.
Dubik, previously the Army's commanding general for transformation issues, spent seven consecutive years, from 1978 to 1985, in academic institutions and then stepped directly from the classroom into a Ranger battalion, arguably the Army's most macho outfit. He remains steeped in military history and Western philosophy.
He will be joined at Joint Forces Command by Maj. Gen. Russel L. Honore, another Army general known for his candor and intelligence, whom the Pentagon announced yesterday would become the command's director of homeland security.
----
Defense facilities to disperse
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020628-19259461.htm
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he wants to impose limits on new defense construction within 100 miles of the Pentagon.
The defense secretary said "concentration of Defense Department activities in a single area is probably not a smart idea."
The new policy has not yet been implemeanted, Mr. Rumsfeld said during a meeting at the Pentagon with editors and reporters of The Washington Times.
"But there's no question but that I have said to some staff people that I think that for a variety of reasons it would be a good idea if we knew before it happened any Defense Department-related entity that plans to build or lease within a hundred miles of Washington, D.C.," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Mr. Rumsfeld could sign a directive outlining the construction limits in the near future, defense officials said.
The defense secretary cited worries about locating too much of the defense and military establishment in one place as one of several reasons for the pending changes.
He said the Pentagon bureaucracy is "pretty big the way it is" and may not need more space. Mr. Rumsfeld also said the department is planning a new round of military base closures and that some area facilities the Pentagon already owns could be used for activities coming from base consolidation.
"Third, it's a big country we've got, and everything does not have to be located in the Washington, D.C., area," he said. "I think that just the health of the country would be better if everything weren't here."
Mr. Rumsfeld said the new construction policy does not mean the department is "halting or stopping or discontinuing anything."
"All we're doing is saying we'd like a little visibility here in my office about who thinks they're going to buy a new building, or buy a 50-acre tract and start erecting more government buildings," he said. "I worry that this area is just going to sink in the ground with government buildings, to be perfectly honest."
Other defense officials said the decentralization effort is part of overall U.S. government plans to prevent the disruption of government agencies from a terrorist attack in Washington.
A draft memorandum on the issue calls for curbing new construction within a 100-mile radius from the Pentagon and for limiting improvements at existing defense and military facilities in that area to projects that cost $500,000 or less, said defense officials familiar with the construction plan.
The policy change would affect about $570 million in military construction and family housing funds contained in the current defense budget for facilities in the District, Maryland and Virginia. Those funds will pay for much-needed improvements to military family housing on military bases in the area.
Military housing at the Army's Fort Meade base in Maryland needs to be improved, and military housing at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va., is said to be in need of repair. Some housing units at those bases are dilapidated, defense officials said.
Congressional defense aides said major military facilities in Washington that could be affected by the construction ban include the Army's Fort Myer in Arlington, Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Quantico. The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Southwest and a major Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence center under construction at Bolling Air Force Base also could be affected, the aides said.
The effort to disperse government is a direct outgrowth of the September 11 attack on the Pentagon by Islamic terrorists. A total of 189 persons, including the passengers on the jet, were killed, and hundreds were injured.
Security officials said government and military facilities will be less vulnerable to disruption from attack by terrorists or others, especially because future militant attacks are expected to involve weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological weapons.
The memorandum outlining the new policy also indicates that Mr. Rumsfeld has been upset by premature disclosures to the press about new defense construction projects and as a result wants all announcements about construction to be made by the defense secretary or his office.
One House Armed Services Committee aide said members of Congress are likely to oppose the new construction limits.
"Members generally don't want to see a lot of headquarters in the area and oppose more headquarters personnel," the aide said. "But I don't believe members of this committee would support such a moratorium."
The White House announced a new terrorist threat advisory system in March. Under that system, when the threat of a terrorist attack is very high, government agencies will have to disperse workers out of the area.
President Bush has made it a priority to see that government agencies do more to disperse their operations and personnel outside Washington and to make contingency plans for relocating in a crisis.
Concerns over future attacks on Washington also affected plans for the creation of a new military command. Defense officials have told Congress that initial plans for the new Northern Command called for setting up its headquarters in an area outside Washington.
Initial locations for the new Northern Command headquarters were McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and Fort Detrick, Md.
The command is now slated to be set up at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
The Pentagon's budget request for military construction and family housing for fiscal 2003, which begins Oct. 1, includes $40.7 million for projects in Washington, $193.3 million for projects in Maryland and $334.8 million for defense construction in Virginia.
-------- propaganda wars
Press angered over isolation at summit
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 28, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020628-491282.htm
CALGARY, Alberta - The Bush administration went out of its way - 60 miles out, in fact - to isolate and infuriate U.S. reporters covering the G-8 summit, sowing ill will that appears unlikely to fade anytime soon.
Frustration boiled over among reporters, who were all but shut out of a three-day meeting among leaders of eight of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. Even the most mild-mannered White House correspondents were angered by a summit beset by logistical errors and lack of interest among low-level Bush staffers.
"It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but what passes for White House coverage these days has finally devolved into a Lewis Carroll absurdity in which White House correspondents can travel on a three-day foreign trip and never once lay eyes on the president - not even if they draw a 12-hour pool assignment," wrote Bob Deans of Cox News Service, the soft-spoken president of the White House Correspondents' Association.
Mr. Deans, who spent a dozen hours seeking news as the only print representative allowed insider access at the remote village where leaders of the Group of Eight were meeting, summed up the exasperation that reached new heights on a foreign trip that began for reporters at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Correspondents learned late Monday that President Bush would stop midway in Arizona to view raging wildfires in the West. A chartered plane carrying U.S. media was rescheduled to put reporters in place - that place being a filing center in Calgary - to watch Mr. Bush on television.
So began days of TV watching for all reporters not given insider access to the meetings of G-8 leaders in Kananaskis village. Briefings - at least those not canceled at the last minute - by "senior administration officials" were piped in from the remote Canadian Rockies site. On the final day yesterday, a low-level Bush staffer simply cut off the audio feed, leaving reporters 60 miles away in Calgary unable to ask questions.
"This has been, without a doubt, the worst-run event in my experience," said a veteran White House reporter who asked not to be named. "The credibility of this administration has gone right down the tubes with this fiasco, and I venture to say they will pay mightily for their shabby treatment of the U.S. media, whose job it is to deliver to the American people the policies of their own government."
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer briefed reporters only once during the summit.
Another reporter said the administration's treatment of the press went from bad to worse - and that Mr. Fleischer was the prime offender.
"There is a certain arrogance, I think because their approval ratings are so high," the correspondent said. "That attitude poisons the relationship, and I think the press is at the breaking point. No one in the White House has credibility anymore. It's disgusting."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
U.S., France in Cargo Deal
The Associated Press
Friday, June 28, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59970-2002Jun28?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- U.S. inspectors, trying to prevent smuggling of nuclear and other deadly weapons, will screen cargo containers destined for the United States before they leave Le Havre, France, the Customs Service said Friday.
The agreement with the French government allows U.S. customs inspectors to be stationed at that port for the first time.
Customs has entered into similar agreements - aimed at improving cargo security at the world's seaports - with Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Last year, around 108,300 cargo containers entered the United States from Le Havre, Customs said. Customs hopes to place some officers at the Le Havre seaport in a few months.
----
Tenet Calls for Security Safety Net
CIA, FBI Can't Protect Nation Against All Threats, Director Tells Hill
By Dana Priest and Bill Miller
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 28, 2002; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56111-2002Jun27?language=printer
CIA Director George J. Tenet said yesterday the government must make "systematic security improvements" to the nation's infrastructure, warning that the CIA and law enforcement can't protect the United States against all threats.
"If there is no strategic security safety net at the back end -- in the homeland -- then we will be left with a situation where we and the FBI will have to be operationally flawless -- in the sports parlance, bat one thousand," Tenet said.
At a hearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on President Bush's proposed homeland security department, Tenet said the federal government should conduct "a systematic assessment of the country's vulnerability" that is divorced from day-to-day efforts to track down terrorists in the United States.
Only such an assessment, which has been talked about for years but never completed, would give the government the ability to "design smart, agile ways to protect" the country. "An assessment of the country's vulnerabilities and a systematic program of protection, that's what the country doesn't have," Tenet testified.
Tenet's assessment was a candid reminder of the challenges confronting the government, nine months after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it seeks to protect the United States from future strikes. While plans have been devised over the years with the help of private industry to protect nuclear power plants and the telecommunications system, they have not been expanded to include all vital infrastructure.
Appearing with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Tenet said the homeland security department's "most important role will be to translate assessments about evolving terrorist targeting strategies, training and doctrine overseas into a system of protection for the infrastructure of the United States."
The Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security would merge some agencies -- the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, the Customs Service and the Transportation Security Administration -- and create a separate intelligence division that would receive information from the CIA and the FBI to assess and react to threats.
As proposed, the reorganization leaves the CIA and FBI largely untouched. The FBI's central mission historically has been to gather evidence to prosecute domestic crimes. Since Sept. 11, "our focus is now one of prevention," Mueller said.
Some members of Congress want to consider folding the FBI's counterterrorism system into the new department. Among them is Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio). "I don't see how the bureau can do all of this and do it well," he told Mueller.
But Mueller and Tenet opposed the idea. "At the very least," Mueller said, "such a move at the present moment would disrupt the current work being done against terrorism."
Also at issue is whether the new department would have the power to order the FBI and the CIA to collect information against certain targets it identified. "I would not give 100 percent assurance," Mueller said. But, he added, the bureau would probably accept such requests as long as they were matters his agents could legally pursue.
Tenet said that "nine times out of 10," such requests for information are followed, but he added that when it comes to directing covert human intelligence, "operational judgment is usually left to us."
Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) said that the committee "may give authority" in legislation to the new secretary to make sure the department's requests are honored.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, stepped up its review of allegations that FBI headquarters staff mishandled the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said he wants to determine if the Justice Department and the FBI have been "gun shy" about pursuing warrants to conduct surveillance on terror suspects.
Moussaoui, 33, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was arrested Aug. 16 for overstaying his visa after arousing suspicions while taking flight training in Eagan, Minn. In a letter last month to Mueller, FBI attorney Coleen Rowley wrote that Minneapolis agents tried to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop computer and personal belongings but were undermined by headquarters officials, who declined to seek one under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Rowley, the chief lawyer for the Minneapolis field office, maintains that investigators had enough evidence of Moussaoui's terror connections to secure such a warrant. Moussaoui subsequently was charged as a conspirator in the attacks.
The judiciary panel heard testimony from FBI staff members at a closed hearing. The hearing on the FISA process included Marion "Spike" Bowman, the attorney who heads the FBI's National Security Law Unit, sources said.
Also yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) abruptly canceled a scheduled appearance before the committee by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, saying that Ashcroft had failed to provide a copy of his prepared statement as required.
Sensenbrenner has been strongly critical of Ashcroft's move to loosen restrictions on the FBI's ability to conduct domestic surveillance, the topic of yesterday's canceled hearing, and has locked horns with Ashcroft on other issues.
Staff writers Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
----
C.I.A. and F.B.I. Promise to Share Data With New Agency
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/politics/28INTE.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - The directors of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. told Congress today that their agencies would share secret intelligence with the proposed Department of Homeland Security. But they expressed support for a Bush administration plan that would keep their agencies independent of the new organization.
In a joint appearance before a Senate committee to discuss the relationship between intelligence, law enforcement and domestic security, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and his counterpart at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, promised to turn over all of their terrorism-related intelligence reports and even much raw intelligence data once the proposed department is running.
"I am committed to assuring that the new department receives all of the relevant terrorist-related intelligence available," Mr. Tenet told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
He said the agency would try to make sure that the intelligence was given "the lowest permissible level of classification" so it could be widely shared within the new department and, in some cases, with state and local officials.
Mr. Tenet said the C.I.A., which already shares its intelligence reports with other national security agencies, would withhold only information related to the identities of its sources, along with information on its most secret technical methods of collecting intelligence.
If the director of homeland security asks to know the identities of the spies who provide terrorism-related intelligence, Mr. Tenet said he would go to the president to get his authorization before handing over the information.
Mr. Mueller noted that the recent U.S.A. Patriot Act allowed the F.B.I. to share raw information used in grand jury investigations with the C.I.A., and said that he believed the bureau would also be able to share that information with a new Homeland Security Department. He added that homeland security officials would be included in the bureau's joint terrorism task forces established around the country, which will ensure the new department access to the flow of the latest intelligence the bureau has on specific terrorist threats.
Homeland security's involvement in F.B.I. counterterrorism task forces "will prove to be as valuable as anything else," Mr. Mueller told the committee.
The testimony by the two leaders followed a string of disclosures over the last few weeks about the failures of the two agencies to share critical counterterrorism information just before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those missteps have prompted some Congressional leaders to question whether the nation's foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement agencies could be counted on to share information with the Homeland Security Department without undergoing a major reorganization.
Some lawmakers have even raised the possibility of merging the F.B.I. and C.I.A. into the new department, or at least shifting the bureau's counterterrorism operations into the new agency.
Mr. Tenet and Mr. Mueller tried to ease those concerns by emphasizing that the relationship between the two agencies has greatly improved since Sept. 11 and that they now share information more smoothly than ever before. The C.I.A. has assigned 25 analysts to F.B.I. headquarters to help it assess terrorist-related intelligence, and more of the bureau's agents are working at the counterterrorism center at C.I.A. headquarters as well.
"This relationship has a long history," Mr. Mueller said, "and is the subject of much contemporary comment, most of it critical. But for those commentators, I would counsel caution. The relationship has changed, and is still changing, all for the better."
The Bush administration's proposal for creation of a cabinet-level Homeland Security Department, which Congress is debating, leaves the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. out of the new organization, and Mr. Tenet and Mr. Mueller said they supported that approach.
The administration's plan calls for the department to have its own intelligence unit of analysts who will review reports from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies. The department will then be responsible for alerting the public to terrorist threats, figuring out the best way to take preventive actions and coordinating federal, state and local government responses to terrorist attacks.
Separately, the House Judiciary Committee today canceled testimony by Attorney General John Ashcroft on changes in the F.B.I.'s investigative guidelines.
Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the committee chairman, had invited Mr. Ashcroft to testify, but he called off the hearing after the attorney general did not submit testimony in advance, which would have allowed lawmakers to prepare their questions.
-------- terrorism
Al Qaeda Network Operating In U.S.
June 28, 2002
CBS
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/27/attack/main513641.shtml
WASHINGTON - U.S. officials have collected intelligence that appears to confirm what they have feared most since 9/11 - that al Qaeda is still active in the United States. Officials tell CBS News that accused American al Qaeda member Jose Padilla was apparently expecting help from such a network when he returned here last month on a target scouting mission.
U.S. officials tell CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart that Padilla had contacted a Florida man from overseas before leaving on his mission and was apparently en route to meet him when he was arrested.
Federal investigators monitored the communication between Padilla and Palestinian Adham Hassoun of Sunrise, Fla. They arrested Hassoun earlier this month following months of surveillance.
Hassoun is now being held on an immigration charge at an INS facility and is considered a flight risk. U.S. officials describe him as an "important link" not only to the Padilla investigation, but possibly to a suspected U.S.-based al Qaeda network awaiting orders for future attacks.
Sources said domestic intelligence intercepts have now convinced officials that such a network of al Qaeda fundraisers and operatives exists in the United States.
A number of people are under surveillance. None is believed to have had a supporting role in the 9/11 attacks. Some may have been slated to assist Zacarias Moussaoui - the so-called "20th Hijacker" - who senior officials now believe, in fact, was not scheduled to be part of the Sept. 11 attacks after all, but was to have carried out a separate, unknown mission.
Officials also said there is no known connection between Hassoun, a 13-year U.S. resident who lives with his family, and the 9/11 hijackers. Hassoun attended the same mosque as Padilla, a former gang member who converted to Islam while living in South Florida. Hassoun is also well known in the Muslim neighborhoods of South Florida for his financial and vocal support of extremist Islamic groups, although friends said today such actions were a political statement only.
"I would consider him that he's against violence, but he has a strong tongue, you know, he has a strong tongue!" said Sofian Abdelaziz, with the American Muslim Association of North America.
The FBI did not want to pick Hassoun up, preferring instead to continue their surveillance and see where it would lead them. Sources said the bureau's hand was forced when agents monitored a phone call from a Miami newspaper reporter to Hassoun seeking information about the Padilla case and feared that their subject might flee.
Padilla, 31, remains in military custody. He was arrested May 8 in Chicago when he got off a plane from Pakistan. He was born in Chicago and lived in South Florida in the 1990s, when he converted to Islam and began calling himself Abdullah al Muhajir.
He was arrested by Sunrise police in 1991 on a handgun-related charges. While in the Broward County Jail, he was accused of battery on a jail officer and resisting without violence in January 1992. Padilla was last in the United States in 1998. After that he traveled mostly in the Middle East, officials said.
Moussaoui is currently making waves in a Virginia courtroom, where, most recently, he has been granted the right to represent himself in court. He is charged with six counts of conspiring with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to carry out the hijacked plane attacks, in which 19 hijackers died. U.S. officials have said Moussaoui may have been preparing to be the 20th hijacker. Several of the counts carry a possible death sentence.
Moussaoui, a 33-year-old French citizen, had been in custody on immigration charges when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred.
----
Lieberman Recommends Technology Agency
June 28, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Homeland-Security.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Homeland Security Department will need an alert and aggressive technology development agency that can come up quickly with new security devices and systems, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said Friday.
``We need dozens of new security technologies, and we need them quickly,'' said Lieberman, D-Conn., who is working with the White House to set up the new department.
Congress completed a week of hearings Friday on President Bush's plan to merge 100 federal entities and 170,000 employees into a single Cabinet department devoted to domestic security.
Congressional leaders, while rushing to pass early versions of the plan by the end of July, have been suggesting modifications to specifics among the White House's proposals.
Lieberman wants the department to have what he called the Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, which would be modeled on the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Defense Department's agency was formed after the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first manmade Earth satellite, and provided money and computers to facilitate U.S. scientists' competition with their Cold War adversaries.
Money for the agency spurred creation of several commercial technologies as well, including the Internet.
Lieberman wants the security research agency to do the same thing, but for the defense of U.S. territory. He suggested agency scientists might work on devices to detect chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons for border crossings, airports or seaports, or buildings that could detect intruders and protect themselves from sabotage.
``We know our enemies will do their worst to apply technology to try and terrorize our people and disrupt our way of life,'' Lieberman said. ``We have an urgent duty now to do our best to develop better technologies to pre-empt, prevent and protect against even their most advanced and unpredictable attacks.''
William Madia, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., agreed with the necessity of an advanced research agency in a Homeland Security Department.
``This program should be designed to close the gap between new ideas and basic science advances and deployable solutions,'' Madia said.
They are already working on some new domestic defense ideas at Oak Ridge, including a radiation sensor that could be placed on cell phone towers to send early warning data to officials of biological or chemical weapons use in urban areas.
The system was endorsed Monday by the House Appropriations Committee with a $5 million commitment for testing.
Besides detecting poisons, sensors at each site could provide weather information, such as wind speed and direction, that could help predict the path of anthrax, radiation particles from a bomb or lethal gases.
Any of the nation's 30,000 cell phone towers or 100,000 rooftop cell phone relay stations could be used, Madia said.
``This is a good partnership between government needs and private sector needs,'' Madia said.
On the Net:
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: http://www.darpa.mil/
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
U.N. Publicly Chastises China for Inaction on H.I.V. Epidemic
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/international/asia/28CHIN.html
BEIJING, June 27 - The United Nations today issued a stinging public criticism of China's lackluster efforts to face its rapidly accelerating epidemic of H.I.V. infection and AIDS, saying the country is "on the verge of a catastrophe."
In a new report, "H.I.V./AIDS: China's Titanic Peril," the Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS criticized Chinese officials on many fronts, from the lack of adequate education programs to the absence of treatment for people infected with H.I.V.
"We are now witnessing the unfolding of an H.I.V./AIDS epidemic of proportions beyond belief, an epidemic that calls for an urgent and proper but as yet unanswered quintessential response," the report said, noting that the lack of action meant China could have the largest number of people infected with H.I.V. in the world within a few years.
While much of the report circulated as an internal document among United Nations agencies late last year, its very public release today at a large news conference in Beijing signaled a new willingness by the United Nations to press China into action.
It also reflected widespread frustration among United Nations agencies, international nongovernmental groups and medical experts here that although China officially acknowledged its H.I.V. epidemic last August, it has been slow to create or cooperate in the programs that would effectively control its spread.
The Friday issue of Science magazine has an essay that is similarly critical, by two respected academics with extensive knowledge of China's AIDS problem. They amplify many of the concerns in the United Nations report, specifically taking China's leadership to task.
"Without the highest level of national leadership and directives by the Chinese Communist Party and the state it is unlikely that local governments will implement prevention and care programs," says the essay by Joan Kaufman, who formerly worked for the Ford Foundation in Beijing, and Jing Jun, a professor at Qinghua University.
Both the United Nations report and the Science article said China could limit its AIDS epidemic but only with urgent action.
China estimates there are 850,000 people infected with H.I.V., up from 600,000 last year, although, as the Science article notes, "most agree that these numbers are too low."
The United Nations report sidestepped the sensitive issue of how many people were infected, more or less accepting China's statistics, placing the number of infections at the end of 2001 between 800,000 and 1.5 million. It said 10 million could be infected by 2010 if the epidemic is not checked.
But some United Nations officials say privately that there could be as many as 6 million cases already in China, with 20 million expected by the end of the decade if nothing is done.
There is little good data from some rural areas where the disease is widespread, in part because national H.I.V. surveillance in China focuses on only four groups: drug users in detention, sex workers in detention, people who have had sexually transmitted diseases diagnosed and pregnant women in cities.
A large and ill-defined number of poor farmers in central China have been infected with H.I.V. through unsanitary and slipshod practices at rural hospitals and at blood collection stations.
During the 1990's, blood stations in Henan Province collected blood from dozens of patients at a time, centrifuged the pooled blood to separate the desired components and returned the leftover pooled fraction to donors. In this way, the virus was passed to large numbers of poor peasants who sold their blood for about $5 a bag to supplement their meager farm income.
In some poor villages in the province more than 50 percent of adults are infected and some experts have put the number of infections in the province alone at more than a million. Such people "have little or no access to even the most basic treatment such as first-line antibiotics, let alone counseling, antiretroviral therapy and hospital care," the United Nations report said.
There has also been no surveillance of gay men in China, even though Beijing's two hospitals that care for people infected with the virus that causes AIDS say that a third of patients fall into this category.
"The virus is still spreading and we need to marshal all our resources in a very different way if we want to stop the virus," said Kerstin Leitner, the United Nations chief representative here.
At the news conference today, Ms. Leitner and other United Nations officials took pains to praise the progress that had been made, noting, for example, that China held its first international conference on H.I.V. and AIDS last year. And the report held up a few examples of successful projects, mostly sponsored by foreign nongovernmental organizations.
But it found far more cause for concern than for optimism, deploring widespread ignorance about H.I.V. and discrimination against those who carry the virus. It noted that patients who had tried to complain were "sometimes even opposed by local authorities."
The report highlighted a law in Chengdu forbidding people with H.I.V. to work at hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, beauty salons, swimming pools and public baths, for example. It also noted that China's five-year action plan against H.I.V. and AIDS fell far short of the United Nations goals for combating the worldwide spread of the epidemic.
-------- imf / world bank / G8
G-8 Adopts African Aid Package, With Strict Conditions
New York Times
June 28, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/28/international/africa/28AFRI.html
CALGARY, Alberta, June 27 - President Bush and leaders of the major industrial countries ended their meeting today by committing billions of dollars in aid to African nations that successfully reform their economies and governments. But they offered only the vaguest assurances that they would dismantle the huge subsidies for their own farmers, which African leaders bitterly complain have undercut the ability of the poorest nations to compete in world markets.
The agreement today, announced when the leaders of South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria and Senegal arrived for its formal adoption, might eventually provide more than $6 billion in yearly aid starting in 2006. But the program requires recipients to implement a wide range of reforms, in areas from government to education.
"We are satisfied with the commitment," said President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. "There is nothing that is human that can be regarded as perfect."
The aid to Africa would be part of a broader commitment of $12 billion in new international aid per year by 2006 that many nations made at a United Nations conference in March in Monterrey, Mexico. But today's endorsement at the summit meeting, in Kananaskis, ratified an approach to using the money that was drawn up in large part by African leaders, led by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Called the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the program is intended to ease a crushing debt burden by relying more on grants than loans and by attracting foreign investment through economic liberalization.
But the plan is very controversial in Africa, where many view it as just a new way to impose Western-style economic theory on their countries. Moreover, many African leaders have expressed anger and dismay that just as they are improving Africa's economic competitiveness, the United States is greatly increasing subsidies for its biggest farmers.
In March, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations warned Mr. Bush and other leaders of the industrial world, "We can no longer continue to give with one hand and take with the other." Two months later, Mr. Bush signed into law a $51 billion increase in farm subsidies over the next six years. Mr. Bush made no public mention of those subsidies at the summit meeting, and Mr. Annan, clearly seeking to encourage the Western aid program, barely alluded to the issue.
In a statement today, Mr. Bush and the other G-8 leaders - from Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia - pledged that they would reduce farm subsidies, but only after global trade negotiations. "We have committed ourselves to phasing out the agricultural subsidies that keep African goods out of our markets," said Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. "Free trade is what Africa needs."
In another major accord, Europe and Japan agreed to provide up to $10 billion for the dismantling of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Russia and, to a lesser degree, in other former Soviet states. That roughly matches the $10 billion the United States had already committed for similar programs.
Mr. Bush left the summit meeting this afternoon without commenting on its outcome. But earlier in the day, during a meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Bush insisted that the leaders had largely agreed with his new approach to the Mideast. "The response has been very positive," he said, "and for that, I'm grateful."
But he skirted the question of whether the others were willing to join him in pressing for the ouster of Yasir Arafat, words that only Mr. Blair came close to endorsing.
As the leaders left this afternoon, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, the host of the meeting, argued that his determination to hold what he called "a different kind of summit" had paid off. He said the decision to isolate the leaders at a mountain resort, where there was no chance that protesters could come within earshot, led to agreements on everything from improving airport security to the Africa accord.
President Jacques Chirac of France is to be the host of next year's talks, and the leaders announced that in 2006, Russia would be the host for the first time, cementing its integration into the group despite the comparatively small size of its economy.
Little of what the United States committed to Africa today is new; Mr. Bush announced an increase of 50 percent in overall foreign aid in March, to $15 billion by 2006, though it is not clear how much of that would go to Africa. This month, he reinforced the increase with a commitment of $200 million for education in Africa over the next five years, a doubling of the existing level. He also announced he would travel to Africa early next year.
Mr. Annan and the African leaders here are clearly skeptical that the developed nations would follow through with their promise of aid after so many failed efforts to help the continent. "By and large we know what needs doing," he said today. "But we have been much too slow to act on that knowledge."
The leaders here said they were drawn to the Africans' commitment to liberalize markets and crack down on rampant corruption by reviewing, and enforcing, each others' performance.
There is no history of that kind of pressure among African states, but Mr. Obasanjo said today: "There is one thing that is different from all previous programs - peer review. We will review ourselves in political, social and economic fields. If someone lags, we will give him a push or a sanction, whichever is necessary to get him to perform."
But increasingly, the problem is in establishing freer trade, something the West has promised but that has not materialized. The national incomes of most African states are overwhelmingly dependent on the price of commodities, which have fallen steadily in recent years. While the United States has relatively few formal barriers to importing African goods, it has retained sharp limits on imports of textiles, a major export good for the continent. Those protections were established mostly to preserve political support in American states where textile mills still exist.
In today's accord, the developed nations also said they would find a way to help set up an African peacekeeping force by next year, part of an effort to address continued conflicts in Sudan, Congo and Angola. The force would be African, with the West contributing training.
While leaders endorsed a modest program for debt forgiveness, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill told Congress today that his tour of Africa had convinced him that eliminating debt burdens was not a solution to the continent's problems. "Even without debt, it is impossible to prosper without income," he said. "Even if we forgave all debts, many of these countries still couldn't fund their own budgets and would immediately have to borrow more."
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has been a champion of the president's decision to increase American foreign aid, a move that runs counter to the Republican Party's orthodoxy. But she stressed today that "development is a two-way responsibility" and that "there needs to be responsibility on the part of the recipient countries for good governance."
A senior African official here said he did not know whether that message was yet permeating many African capitals. "But Mr. Bush has a great advantage here," the official said. "To African ears, it sounds different coming from Dr. Rice and Colin Powell than from the white leadership of Europe and America. It will be interesting to see how much difference that makes."
--------
HHS is thinking big about smallpox
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
June 28, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020628-73039800.htm
On June 20, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention delivered recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that expand the current smallpox vaccination policy. In addition to laboratory personnel working with smallpox, these recommendations broaden the existing smallpox vaccination policy to include those individuals who would be most likely to come in contact with smallpox victims in the event of a biological attack.
Charles V. Pena's "Small thinking on smallpox" (Commentary, June 20) criticizes the revised ACIP smallpox vaccination recommendations as misguided and manifesting a lack of knowledge about the complexity of the issues that demand address. Specific criticisms of direct quotes taken from Mr. Pena's article include:
Error No. 1: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are meeting behind closed doors." Not true. During the past month, public forums were held in New York City, San Francisco, San Antonio, St. Louis and Washington. Furthermore, the ACIP meeting held in Atlanta on June 19 and 20 welcomed and received public comment.
Error No. 2: "The bottom line is that an unvaccinated population is completely vulnerable and an attractive target. A better approach than leaving the population exposed would be to take preventative measures." This is untrue and dangerously misleading.
The smallpox vaccine, vaccinia, is a live virus that is closely related to smallpox. Vaccines are infectious and may unintentionally transmit the virus to individuals who may develop life-threatening complications. Because there is a risk of endangering others, this is not simply an issue of an individual's right to choose. The health of the American public must be our primary concern.
The smallpox vaccine is the least safe vaccine ever used in the United States, with 2 to 4 deaths per million vaccines and another 3,000 severe and potentially disabling complications expected. The vaccines available are currently labeled as "Investigational New Drugs" that require the approval of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for participation in clinical trials. Appropriate informed consent, screening, patient follow-up and administrative oversight by federal, state and local public health officials would be required, as well as policy decisions regarding a host of legal and procedural issues, including responsibility for liability and costs incurred. Having trained and prepared health care workers who can detect smallpox cases early with a work force that can implement a mass vaccination plan will be as important as having smallpox vaccine available.
Experts anticipate as many as 30,000 severe complications in a mass vaccination campaign that would require treatment with vaccine immune globulin (VIG). Current government stockpiles contain only enough VIG to treat 700 persons. Furthermore, the smallpox vaccine is protective if given within four days of exposure, during a time when the risk of vaccine to the public will be better justified. The best preventive measure already being exercised consists of strengthening our state and local preparedness to deal with a smallpox outbreak.
HHS has moved aggressively to protect citizens from bioterrorism since last fall's anthrax attacks. There has been significant progress at HHS in recent months, including:
• HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson's creation of the Office of Public Health Preparedness to direct and coordinate HHS efforts to prepare for, protect against, respond to and recover from all acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies that affect the civilian population.
• HHS has provided guidance and more than $1 billion to state and local authorities to enhance preparedness.
• Nearly 25 percent of today's population is ineligible to receive the current vaccine due to increased risk of serious complications. HHS is aggressively pursuing the research and development of safer vaccines, as well as safe and effective smallpox anti-viral treatments.
The U.S. government bears responsibility to maximize resources and minimize risks for the common good of the citizenry. Recommendations regarding pre-outbreak vaccination are being made on the basis of a thoughtful and carefully planned process that considers the risks of disease in balance with the benefits and risks of vaccination. HHS and ACIP will continue to review smallpox vaccine policy in step with new information or developments.
JEROME M. HAUER
Director Office of Public Health Preparedness
Department of Health and Human Services Washington
-------- ACTIVISTS
35 Australia Asylum Seekers Break Out
By Peter O'connor
Associated Press Writer
Friday, June 28, 2002; 9:28 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60614-2002Jun28?language=printer
CANBERRA, Australia -- Thirty asylum seekers were at large in the Australian desert Friday after a daring escape from the nation's most notorious detention center.
Thirty-five people escaped the Woomera detention center just before midnight Thursday after activists used a car to pull down a fence topped with razor wire, the government said.
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said 15 asylum seekers were allegedly involved in the mass breakout. The other 20 took advantage of the confusion and fled into the desert surrounding the camp at Woomera, a former missile testing base in central Australia.
"This is a deliberate, organized breakout by people who have been in contact with detainees," Ruddock told Melbourne radio station 3AW.
Ruddock said five of the detainees were recaptured. Police were using a helicopter, an airplane and dogs on the ground to search a 80,000-square-mile area for the rest of the escapees.
Ruddock said members of an activist group drove a car up to one of the camp's fences, pulled a portion of it down and ferried away the asylum seekers.
Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio said it had received an e-mail from a group calling itself Our Sacred Country, which claimed responsibility for the breakout.
Kate Denman, a South Australian state police spokeswoman, said police had arrested and charged three men and a woman with assisting the breakout and were searching for others. All of them were in their 20s. Their identities were not released
"It's very cold out in the desert (at) night and we have concerns for their welfare," said Denman.
An angry Prime Minister John Howard said helping people escape was "inflammatory and unhelpful and potentially criminal." He said the government would pursue the culprits.
The detention center at Woomera is one of five camps where hundreds of mostly Middle Eastern boat people are held while authorities consider their requests for asylum. The policy has been criticized by human rights activists but is popular with most Australians.
Woomera has been the most troublesome of the camps and has been plagued by riots, hunger strikes, arson and self-mutilation by inmates.
About 160 of the 200 Woomera detainees had been on a hunger strike for four days. Two of them had sewed their lips together.
Earlier this year, 47 inmates escaped when hundreds of people protesting Australia's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers tore down part of the fence. Most of them were later recaptured.
Most of the people now detained at Woomera are from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost all have had their applications for refugee status refused but cannot be returned home because Australia does not have repatriation arrangements with their home countries. Some have been in the camps for more than three years.
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