Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
UK says British Energy should not sway nuclear issue
Japan's oil demand to rise on nuclear outages - IEA
Crying wolf on terrorism?
Chernobyl: nothing more to worry about?
EPA Defers Oversight of Some Nuclear Sites
At the Heart of a Nuclear Power Plant Ticks a Pitchman's Soul
Cheney Is Fulcrum of Foreign Policy
Lott takes off gloves with Pentagon brass
War Worries
MILITARY
Nations to Discuss Afghan Pipeline
Nations Agree to Create Afghan Fund
N.Ireland Peace Process Begins New Uncertain Era
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Iraq and the War on Terrorism - interactive guide
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
Saudi Minister Says His Country Opposes War on Iraq
Anti-war sentiment rises in Turkey
U.S., Pakistan Plan Joint Exercise
Pakistan Islamists Want U.S. Troops Out
Security Concerns Shade World Space Congress
U.N. Report
Rumsfeld Aide Urges Big Weapons Cuts
Camp Commander Relieved of Duties
Rumsfeld Favors Forceful Actions to Foil an Attack
In Rumsfeld's Words: Guidelines for Committing Forces
U.S. Quietly Sends Forces to Gulf
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Bullets baloney
Illinois Moves to Center of Death Penalty Debate
Researchers Barred From U.S. Papers
undreds missing in Bali bombings
Bombing in Bali Seen as Opening New Front in Fight on Terror
Tourists flee Bali as death toll hits 190
ENERGY AND OTHER
Canadian Prairies to get three new ethanol plants
German wind power market up 35 pct yr/yr January-September
EU firms join forces to make hydrogen dream work
.S. weans itself off oil from Mideast
Electronics Producers Must Pay for European Wastes
Report: Nursing Homes Kill Thousands
ACTIVISTS
Demonstrators encamped on roof at U.K. reactor site
Opposition over Iraq takes rise via the Net
Anti-War Protests Get Louder In Calif.
No easy sentence:
The twilight of free speech at colleges
Pro-life students try for recognition
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
UK says British Energy should not sway nuclear issue
Story by Neil Chatterjee
REUTERS UK:
October 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18153/story.htm
LONDON - British Energy's cash crisis should not sway future decisions on building new nuclear power stations, the UK's chief industry minister said.
"New nuclear build has to be addressed in its own right," said Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, at a Greenpeace organised conference in London.
Britain extended an emergency aid package totalling 650 million pounds ($1.02 billion) last month to the privatised nuclear power firm and the country's largest power producer, a decision criticised by environmentalists looking for an end to nuclear generation.
"The first step is inherited liabilities - we have those whether or not there is any new build," Hewitt said. "These liabilities arise from the last 50 years of nuclear build."
The loan package has been extended until November 29 while the government balances energy, environmental and industry policy concerns to find a long-term solution.
The company shocked investors last month by saying it needed a handout to avoid going bust.
Anti-nuclear campaigners at the conference questioned why the government was spending much larger sums to bail out British Energy than on research for renewable energies.
"The reason we took action (on British Energy) was to ensure the safety of nuclear generation and the security of supply...not to secure the future of British Energy as a company," Hewitt said.
The government is currently reviewing Britain's long term energy options, with about a fifth of the country's power generation now nuclear.
Hewitt said the government's four core energy policy areas were security of supply, the move to a low carbon economy, an efficient market framework and the elimination of fuel poverty.
She said there needed to be a "massive step-change" in investment on renewable energies such as wind power and biomass fuels, in order to meet government targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though nuclear energy had to be considered as it also produced carbon-free energy.
"Building new nuclear power stations to stop emissions is like smoking to keep your weight down," said Greenpeace director Stephen Tindale, adding 72 percent of British people surveyed in a poll commissioned by the pressure group were against new nuclear build.
-------- japan
Japan's oil demand to rise on nuclear outages - IEA
REUTERS UK:
October 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18152/story.htm
LONDON - Japan's nuclear power plant outages will add an average 85,000 barrels per day (bpd) to the country's oil demand in the fourth quarter, the West's energy watchdog said in its monthly report.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that Japan's residual fuel oil demand was expected to rebound by about 11 percent in the fourth quarter, given the unscheduled shutdown of more than 10 percent of its nuclear capacity in September.
Japanese utilities were expected to boost their use of residual fuel oil and direct burn of crude oil to make up for the nuclear loss, following a crisis of confidence over nuclear safety.
"Neither coal-fired units nor operational nuclear units can make up the unscheduled loss of nuclear capacity," the IEA said in its report.
"This report estimates that incremental oil demand will reach a total of roughly 75,000 bpd in October, 105,000 bpd in November and 80,000 bpd in December," it said, classifying all the incremental demand as residual fuel oil.
Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) admitted in late August it had hidden the existence of cracks at several of its nuclear reactors, partly by falsifying data on safety checks.
Since then several other power firms have also said they failed to report cracks at their nuclear reactors.
Resource-poor Japan relies on nuclear power for around one-third of its power supply.
-------- terrorism
Crying wolf on terrorism?
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 14, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021014-10870808.htm
In his Oct. 6 column, "Brewing in Brazil" (Commentary), Deroy Murdock came up with an admirably contrived, if bumptious, thesis maintaining that along with Cuba and Venezuela, an Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva-run Brazil would constitute a potential nuclear threat to the United States and that all three nations should be viewed as possible members of a "nuclear-armed Axis of Evil in the Americas."
In response to this fear-mongering thesis, it is important to observe the inherent danger involved in cheapening anti-terrorist concerns by flippantly playing the terrorist card.
Mr. Murdock should be made aware that dissident political viewpoints do not automatically qualify one for a bunk bed at an al Qaeda training camp. His three "evil" nominees may each be going their own way, but to suggest that they constitute a nuclear bomb club is somewhat of a stretch - and citing the chronically mistaken Constantine Menges as his source hardly terminates the discussion.
To begin with, Cuba is an aging radical regime that nobody - left, right or center - except for a fraction of Miami's fading Cuban-American leadership, could possibly believe is involved in a nuclear program when it cannot even afford the fuel to maintain a credible flight program for its shrunken air force. The constitutional government of Hugo Chavez is confrontational and often unwise, but it has never shown terrorist potential. As for Brazil, a Lula da Silva victory in the Oct. 27 runoff is more likely to witness a move toward economic orthodoxy (to the disappointment of his more militant supporters) than a crash nuclear program.
If the terrorist label is to be preserved for situations of genuine concern and not be wasted on intellectual gobbledygook, it should be saved for identifying real menaces to U.S. security, not wasted on those forging a respectful, if divergent, ideological path. It is true that Brazil once possessed a nuclear potential, developed at a time when it was under right-wing military rule, just as did Argentina under its particularly brutal military dictatorship, but these have long been dismantled under their civilian successor governments.
Brazil's main concern right now, like Venezuela's and Cuba's, is to recover its shattered economy. Clearly, this subject doesn't call for self-indulgence but for dispassionate analysis, which certainly wasn't in evidence in the aforementioned column.
LUISA RUEDA Research associate Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington
-------- ukraine
Chernobyl: nothing more to worry about?
From: Michael Kerjman - mskn23@yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002
"Kreis-Anzeiger", Germany
A group of students and professors from Gießen-Friedberg University, Germany, studied Chernobyl environment recently.
An estimated level of radiation in a reactor-4 fifty metre zone was 8.1-5.0 micRtphr.
With regard to radiation norms in Germany, Professor Juergen Koch has concluded that existing level of radiation in a Chernobyl zone allows working there with no special preconditions.
It was understood, visitors had spent five hours in a zone.
http://www.kreis-anzeiger.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=632963&template_id=1199&_next=GA_Hochschule
Niedrige Strahlung in Tschernobyl überraschte Gruppe der Fachhochschule besichtigte ukrainischen Unglücksreaktor
GIESSEN (fod). Tschernobyl - ein Name, der auch heute noch, über 16 Jahre nach der Reaktorkatastrophe, mit Angst und Schrecken verbunden ist. Was also hat eine 17-köpfige Teilnehmergruppe der Fachhochschule (FH) Gießen-Friedberg dazu bewegt, freiwillig dorthin zu reisen? Und das auch noch direkt an den Unfallreaktor in der damals hauptbelasteten und heute immer noch vollständig evakuierten "Exclusion Zone". "Es war die Möglichkeit, sich mit eigenen Augen selbst einen Eindruck verschaffen zu können", erklärte Prof. Joachim Breckow, Physiker und Strahlenschutzexperte an der FH, das große Interesse an dieser achttägigen Exkursion.
So hatten sich acht Studenten und neun Professoren sowie Lehrbeauftragte mit zwei Kleinbussen auf den Weg in das rund 2000 Kilometer entfernte Tschernobyl gemacht. Zwei Tage dauerte alleine jeweils die Hin- und Rückfahrt, sodass noch vier Tage für die Besichtigung des ukrainischen Reaktors und seiner Umgebung blieben. Die Initiative für die Exkursion ging ursprünglich von Natalia Ladycheva aus. In Russland geboren, ist sie heute Studentin des Aufbaustudiengangs Strahlenschutz und -messtechnik an der Fachhochschule. "1998 hatte ich bereits ein Praktikum am noch im Betrieb befindlichen Reaktor in Tschernobyl gemacht", erzählte sie. Ihr Vorschlag für eine gemeinsame Fahrt sei schnell auf Begeisterung gestoßen.
Verbunden war die Fahrt mit der Teilnahme an einem zweitägigen internationalen Workshop über radio-ökologische Probleme. Höhepunkt war aber zweifellos der fünfstündige Aufenthalt am Unglücksreaktor selbst. "Am meisten hat mich überrascht, dass wir uns dort ohne Restriktionen vollkommen frei bewegen konnten", berichtete Breckow, der auch Mitglied der deutschen Strahlenschutzkommission ist. So habe man bis auf 50 Meter an den umzäunten Reaktor herangehen können.
Die Entnahme von Erdproben, die man zur Untersuchung mit nach Gießen gebracht habe, sei dagegen nur außerhalb der 30-Kilometer-Sperrzone erlaubt gewesen. "Wir konnten zudem unsere eigenen Messgeräte benutzen. Jeder Teilnehmer hatte einen Dosimeter, auf dem die Belastung durch Gamma-Strahlung angezeigt wurde", ergänzte Dipl.-Ing. Hans Hingmann, Dozent im Aufbaustudiengang Strahlenschutz und -messtechnik. Von 8,1 bis 5,0 Mikrosievert schwankten dabei die ermittelten Werte, was einer Belastung von 1,3 Mikrosievert pro Stunde entsprach. "Die Dosis, die wir dort erhalten haben, würden wir innerhalb von 24 Stunden auch in Deutschland durch natürliche Strahlung aufnehmen." Somit habe niemals eine Gefährdung für die Gesundheit bestanden. "Die Werte sind auch nach deutschem Strahlenschutzrecht nicht so hoch, dass sich nicht Menschen dort aufhalten und arbeiten könnten", zeigte sich auch Prof. Jürgen Koch, Chemiker und Experte für Radiochemie und -ökologie an der FH über die erstaunlich niedrigen Werte überrascht.
"Die Messgeräte haben mir ein Gefühl von Sicherheit vermittelt", erklärte André Tonnelier, Student der Energie- und Wärmetechnik. Er habe die Bilder aus Tschernobyl bislang nur aus dem Fernsehen gekannt und räumte ein, dass er ohne Vorwissen sicherlich niemals an der Exkursion teilgenommen hätte. "Ich selbst hatte keinerlei Befürchtungen", erzählte Dennis Bergau, Student der Energie- und Wärmetechnik. "In meinem privaten Umfeld gab es allerdings schon Bedenken."
Thomas Wilhelm, Student der Krankenhaus- und Medizintechnik, dagegen habe insbesondere die Besichtigung der heute einer Geisterstadt gleichenden Ortschaft Pripyt, die dem Reaktor am nächsten gelegen habe, beeindruckt. "Wo früher 50000 Einwohner lebten, sieht es heute vollkommen verlassen aus. Ich war überrascht, dass es dort überall blühte, obwohl die Gegend eigentlich kontaminiert sein sollte." Aus zehnstöckigen Wohnhäusern herauswuchernde Bäume sowie ein damals Hals über Kopf verlassener Vergnügungspark strahlten eine gespenstische und beklemmende Atmosphäre aus, bestätigten andere Teilnehmer.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
EPA Defers Oversight of Some Nuclear Sites
October 14, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-14-09.asp#anchor2
WASHINGTON, DC, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have signed an agreement on the radiological decommissioning and decontamination of NRC licensed sites.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) provides that the EPA will defer exercising its authority under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act - also known as the Superfund law - for the majority of facilities decommissioned under NRC authority.
The MOU includes provisions for NRC and EPA consultation for certain sites if, at the time of license termination:
1.groundwater contamination exceeds EPA permitted levels;
2.NRC is contemplating restricted release of the site for redevelopment; or
3.residual radioactive soil concentrations exceed levels defined in the MOU.
The MOU responds to a 1999 report from the House Committee on Appropriations that stated: "In the interest of ensuring that sites do not face dual regulation, the Committee strongly encourages both agencies to enter into an MOU which clarifies the circumstances for EPA's involvement at NRC sites when requested by the NRC."
The MOU does not fully meet the intent of the Appropriations Committee because the threat of dual regulation remains for certain licensees. While the MOU reduces dual jurisdiction, the NRC said it will continue its efforts to seek legislation that would eliminate the possibility of dual regulation of all NRC decommissioning licensees.
The MOU does not impose any new requirements on NRC licensees and will reduce the involvement of the EPA with NRC licensees who are decommissioning. Most sites are expected to meet the NRC criteria for unrestricted use, and the NRC believes that only a few sites will have groundwater or soil contamination in excess of the levels specified in the MOU, which would trigger consultation with the EPA.
If there are other hazardous materials on the site, the EPA may also be involved in cleanup.
-------- new york
At the Heart of a Nuclear Power Plant Ticks a Pitchman's Soul
New York Times
October 14, 2002
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/nyregion/14NUKE.html
BUCHANAN, N.Y., Oct. 11 - Give him a chance, and Fred Dacimo will try to convince you that the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant is not so bad. He will tell you that it generates power for hospitals and police stations, not to mention your air-conditioner on hot, sweaty days.
If you change the subject, Mr. Dacimo, vice president for operations at the plant, will find a way to change it back.
"What we're doing here is an important thing for society," he said during an interview at his office this week. "The real question is not why aren't you shutting us down, but why aren't you extending our license and building more nuclear plants?"
Since taking charge a year ago, Mr. Dacimo, 49, has been working overtime to turn around a troubled plant with one of the worst safety records in the nation. He has overseen sweeping changes by a new owner, the Entergy Corporation, and sought to motivate the plant's 700-member work force with a forceful management style that mixes tough love with inspirational speeches.
But perhaps his biggest challenge has been deflecting public criticism about Indian Point since the World Trade Center attack. Mr. Dacimo, a big presence with his stocky build and confrontational attitude, has debated the plant's opponents and even invited them to tour Indian Point. Many have accepted his offer.
He often answers his own phone, though he has assistants and a media relations office at his disposal. "I think the adversity makes it more interesting," Mr. Dacimo said. "It adds a dimension to the job that keeps you busy."
It is Mr. Dacimo's unwillingness to take no for an answer that gets results, his supporters say. In the past year, Indian Point's records show that human errors at the plant have dropped by two-thirds, to 0.35 errors per 10,000 work hours. A backlog of work orders for equipment repairs has also dwindled to fewer than 130, from more than 560 a year ago.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission took note of improvements when it raised the plant's dismal safety rating, if only slightly, in August. Indian Point no longer has the worst safety rating of the nation's 103 commercial nuclear plants. Instead, it is only among the six worst.
Mr. Dacimo says it is just the first step. "I'll invite you back in January, and we won't even be one of the worst six," he says. "I hope this doesn't come across as boastful, but we will be one of the best plants in the next three years."
Indian Point's critics remain skeptical, however. "They've fixed the easy things first, and they've been overselling the improvements," said State Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, who represents central Westchester and has called for the plant's closing.
Mr. Dacimo grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the older of two sons of a New York City firefighter and a homemaker. He says he started thinking about alternative energy sources waiting in long lines at the gas station to fill up his father's car.
He earned a degree in nuclear engineering in 1974 from the State University of New York's Maritime College in the Bronx, and went to work for nuclear power companies in Connecticut and Illinois.
In 1999, Mr. Dacimo was hired as the plant manager for Indian Point 3, the other working reactor at the site. Under his supervision, both Indian Point plants have made improvements, but he does not like to take credit alone. He salts his sentences with words like "teamwork," "accountability" and "pride." He has printed up plastic cards for his employees that list the plant's 2002 goals on the front, and the requisites for "personal contribution to success" on the back.
Some of his employees say that he can be demanding and impatient, though also dynamic and inspiring. "I think some people here really like him," said Thomas Burns, a health physics supervisor at the plant. "And everybody respects him."
Mr. Dacimo arrives at the plant every weekday by 6:30 a.m., and cannot recall the last sick day he took. His idea of a family vacation a few years ago was piling their sleeping bags into a pickup truck and driving around the country, covering 14,000 miles in 21 days.
But Mr. Dacimo has a sense of humor. On a table in his tidy office, he keeps a stash of Tootsie Rolls in a candy tray fashioned from the defective lid of a fuel container. Next to it, a clear glass jar bears the sign, "Failure to Use Phonetic Alphabet."
If an employee forgets to converse in alpha, bravo or delta when he or she is supposed to, he makes the offender drop a quarter into the jar. About $5 in bills and coins was in it this week. "This is how I pay for the candy," he said with a grin. "It's important because when using phone communications, you can make mistakes easily."
-------- us politics
Cheney Is Fulcrum of Foreign Policy
In Interagency Fights, His Views Often Prevail
By Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 13, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18257-2002Oct12.html
Vice President Cheney likes to operate discreetly, leaving the spotlight to others. But in the doldrums of late August, as President Bush relaxed on his ranch in Texas, it was Cheney who stepped forward to address the gathering chorus of complaints about the administration's Iraq policy.
"If the United States could have preempted 9/11, we would have, no question," he declared at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville. "Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will, no question. This nation will not live at the mercy of terrorists or terror regimes." Cheney's speech, laden with historical references and a detailed rebuttal of administration critics, was the moment when the administration turned from debating Iraq internally to publicly setting the stage for a confrontation. It also offered a rare glimpse of the singular role that Cheney plays in the making of U.S. foreign policy.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has an approval rating that tops the president's. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is a media star through his frequent briefings. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is constantly at Bush's side. But, inside the White House, Cheney and his small but powerful staff have emerged as the fulcrum of Bush's foreign policy, according to extensive interviews with officials in and outside the White House, as well as diplomats who deal with the administration.
From the moment hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon last year, Cheney has used his power and authority -- unrivaled by that of any vice president in modern times -- to help set the course of the administration's war on terrorism.
Now, on the eve of a possible conflict with Iraq, Cheney's influence is again coming to the fore. Cheney's assertive and active promotion of a forceful U.S. foreign policy in many ways defines the Bush era. In fierce interagency policy battles, Cheney's views -- that the United States, backed at times by military force, must set an example for the world -- often prevail .
Cheney's position about the importance of confronting Iraq over its weapons of mass destruction has changed significantly since Sept. 11, both because of a new sense of vulnerability and increasingly alarming intelligence, according to administration officials.
"He is as concerned as any human being I know about the danger of a much more serious terrorist attack on the United States, that Sept. 11 was only the beginning," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who said Cheney "was influenced significantly by the developing intelligence on Iraq in general and al Qaeda in particular."
"He has shaped a consensus on the need to deal with Saddam Hussein," said Dennis B. Ross, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a Middle East envoy for President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. "It's clear that's not where the State Department was coming from. Cheney's having a clear position on this helped shape the president's view. He's the single greatest influence on the president."
Cheney's influence is not without controversy. In previous administrations, the secretary of state or national security adviser has often been the dominant force in formulating foreign policy. But the roles are more diffuse now, and the resulting differences are more acute in an administration characterized for its often-visible policy disputes.
Congressional officials complain that, unlike with Powell or Rumsfeld, they have no constitutional authority to require Cheney's testimony.
State Department officials fret that Cheney so frequently sides with Rumsfeld -- Cheney's former boss in the Nixon and Ford administrations -- that Powell is constantly frustrated by his inability to prevail in a host of policy disputes, especially those involving Iraq and the Middle East.
Some officials say that Rice, too, at times is irritated by Cheney's influence, and believes that Cheney's staff roams too freely over the national security council terrain. "I have heard it said, in the situation room, in the White House, that this situation is creating a dysfunctional foreign policy," said a senior administration official who frequently disagrees with Cheney.
White House officials and Cheney's staffers dismiss this as an exaggeration, saying the president values the "creative tension" that emerges from foreign policy advisers -- many of whom worked closely with Cheney in previous administrations.
"The truth of the matter is it is hard to keep score" on whether State or Defense wins more battles, Wolfowitz said. He contends the conflict results in compromises that are often better than the original positions set forth by the agencies.
Cheney and his staff are "not the forces of evil," a White House official said. "But it is a hardheaded approach focused on how to defend America or how to defend American interests." 'War, War, War and War'
When Bush selected Cheney as his running mate in 2000, he got a lieutenant who was remarkably well-connected in Washington, having served as White House chief of staff, a Republican leader in Congress and secretary of defense .
After taking office, Cheney assembled a staff of 14 foreign policy specialists, creating what officials say amounts to a mini-National Security Council. Cheney's office, in effect, is an agile cruiser, able to maneuver around the lumbering aircraft carriers of the departments of State and Defense to make its mark.
Foreign officials, including 17 presidents or prime ministers this year, have learned they must schedule a visit with Cheney as they make their rounds in Washington. A meeting with Cheney is so highly prized that when the vice president recently canceled a meeting with the foreign minister of Kazakhstan because the government had not released a Turkmen dissident, the Kazakh government quickly decided to set the man free.
While Vice President Al Gore had a staff roughly the same size, Gore more often focused on specific issues such as global warming or commissions involving Russian or South African policy. Cheney deliberately scrapped any direct operational responsibility in the foreign policy realm, giving him the freedom to roam across the policy landscape -- and exert a powerful impact on Bush's decisions.
Cheney, officials said, never openly tips his hand in internal debates, instead saving his advice for the president. What he does instead is ask detailed questions, in the Socratic method, that has the effect of demonstrating holes in the other person's argument. "He moves the argument along," an aide said, adding, "Most of the time he knows the answers."
A foreign diplomat who meets frequently with Cheney said he always asks exact questions and rarely ventures his opinion. "He uses the meeting to add to the information he has," he said. "He does not use the meeting to lecture you about what he feels."
Cheney declined requests through his office to be interviewed for this article. But according to sources familiar with his thinking, Cheney believes he brings to the administration's foreign policy debate a hardheaded realism about geopolitics. In his view, the United States owes no apology for being a great power and, in fact, has a responsibility to act forcefully to build a world in the image of the United States.
Cheney contends that the great events of the last century, such as the defeat of communism and the acceptance of capitalism as a global economic model, are due in no small part to U.S. leadership backed by military force. And Cheney is frustrated by those who, in his view, think the United States is a greater threat to peace and freedom than its adversaries are.
"America is again called by history to use our overwhelming power in defense of our freedom," Cheney said in a speech earlier this month. "We've accepted that duty, certain of the justice of our cause, and confident of the victory to come."
While a student at Yale University in the early 1960s, Cheney took a course with H. Bradford Westerfield, then a conservative foreign policy specialist in the tradition of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.). Westerfield, who also taught George W. Bush a few years later, said he stressed the long-term global contest for freedom, promoting the idea that it was permissible to overthrow regimes if it would bring the new government within the Western alliance.
Cheney remembers little of the specifics of the course, but it hooked him on political science. He became a military history buff with a passion for maps and fondness for political biography. One of his daughter's most vivid memories as a child was the annual trek to watch faux soldiers re-create Civil War battles. "He would drag us [her and her sister] around to visit Civil War battlefields in July, in really humid weather, with the basset hound in the back seat of the Toyota station wagon," said Elizabeth Cheney, a deputy assistant secretary of state.
Cheney is now reading "An Autumn of War," by Victor Davis Hanson, and raving to his staff that it captures his philosophy. Hanson cites the thinking of ancient Greeks who would argue that war is "terrible but innate to civilization -- and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent."
It is a measure of Cheney's influence that, by some accounts, he is viewed as responsible for the pace of the administration's campaign against Iraq -- slowing it down when he sides with Powell, a skeptic on a war with Iraq, and speeding it up when he backs the more hawkish Rumsfeld. It is a portrait that White House insiders say is inaccurate, since it ignores the central role of the president, but it is a view prevalent in the bureaucracy.
For a period last spring, as violence erupted in the Mideast, Cheney appeared to agree with Powell's argument that the administration needed to concentrate on settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before turning its attention to Iraq. But Cheney, according to sources, had already concluded after a trip to the region in March that peace could never be achieved as long as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was in power.
It was a position the president adopted publicly in a speech June 24, to the surprise of the State Department. Having steered the Middle East to the policy back burner, Cheney now, in the words of one senior official, "has only four talking points: War, war, war and war."
It Could Have Been Worse
Cheney's impact on the Iraq debate -- or his influence on the president -- cannot be overstated, officials and experts said. Cheney is involved in key aspects of the planning for Iraq, from the wording of the administration's draft U.N. resolution on resumed weapons inspections to what to do with Iraq if President Saddam Hussein is toppled. In interagency councils, Cheney has been consumed with whether the Iraqi president has obtained weapons of mass destruction, officials say.
Cheney was defense secretary when in 1991 Bush's father chose to halt the Persian Gulf War with Hussein still in power. Cheney has never publicly second-guessed his support of that decision. But, even then, he was keenly interested in Iraq's possible use of chemical and biological weapons. He ordered a secret study when he felt that Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not taking the problem seriously enough.
It was also one of the first thoughts that jumped to his mind as he watched the World Trade Center towers collapse while he was sitting in the White House's underground bunker. "As unfathomable as this was," Cheney said to an aide as they stared at the television, "it could have been so much worse if they had weapons of mass destruction."
The anthrax attacks last year, soon after Sept. 11, heightened the vice president's unease about the possibility that Iraq or other countries could distribute biological or chemical weapons to terrorists, one White House official said. Even though the culprit has not been found, he said, "I'm not sure the provenance in the end mattered, because it showed how vulnerable we were to an attack."
Iraq moved to the front burner, once the administration had dispensed with the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Officials such as Cheney were also alarmed by what they considered damning intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorism.
By early summer, the administration decided to roll out its Iraq policy in the autumn. But as the administration debated the best way to challenge Iraq, Senate hearings and a torrent of critical op-ed articles by foreign policy experts, some from previous Republican administrations, threatened to weaken the case for action against Iraq.
The situation was "worse than a vacuum," a senior official said. "The wrong arguments were out there. It was a period when, in the absence of making a case, there was a lot of air time being filled by other people."
Cheney concluded that the administration couldn't wait. He mentioned to Bush that he planned to give a speech on Iraq, and the president contributed a few suggestions, officials recounted. Then, the day before the speech, Cheney laconically mentioned that the speech would be "pretty tough."
"Tough?" Bush asked.
"Yep," Cheney said.
"Okay," Bush replied.
----
Lott takes off gloves with Pentagon brass
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 14, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021014-79765690.htm
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott has been known to resort to a "come to Jesus" meeting when things get bad, like in 1998 when the military's combat readiness was slipping fast.
In his ornate Capitol Hill office sat Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton. Later, the four service chiefs came to see Mr. Lott.
"Gentlemen, you know our situation is subpar and deteriorating, and it's happening on your watch and mine," the majority leader recalls saying in the pivotal sessions. "I don't know what you're going to do about it, even if I think you should show leadership, but I'm going to do something about it."
Spare-parts shortages, dips in retention and recruitment, and overworked ships and planes all combined to create the worst military readiness rates since the years immediately following the Vietnam War. President Clinton was sending the military on a record number of wars and peacekeeping operations, critics said, while keeping the defense budget on a downward track.
In a recent interview on the state of today's military, Mr. Lott says he remained skeptical four years ago that the chiefs would buck the Clinton White House. (After his retirement, one former chief said in an interview that he had been "chewed out" by civilian political appointees for breaking ranks and testifying that the military was hurting.)
The Mississippi Republican said he told the chiefs they should not waste Congress' time if they would not testify frankly. "I used to ask them, 'Why do you guys put up with this. why don't some of you resign?'"
From the fall of 1998 and into 1999, what ensued was a series of successive defense spending increases, as well as a big pay boost for service members. As Mr. Lott demanded, the chiefs delivered candid testimony on the same readiness problems they did not disclose in previous congressional appearances.
Today, Mr. Lott and a number of top military leaders believe that the readiness of the 1.4 million armed forces is improving. Recruitment is up, after the Army, Navy and Air Force missed, or almost missed, goals for the first time in two decades. Retention of key personnel has improved as well.
The Air Force has reversed a downward spiral in the mission-capable rates of its jet fighter - the backbone of the service. After dipping to 73.8 percent two years ago, the rate has bounced back to 76.4 percent this year, thanks to improved maintenance.
An Army spokesman declined to give statistics, saying, "As a war approaches, no one wants to say where our weaknesses are."
A Navy official said Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, diverted millions of dollars toward improving readiness, especially carrier aviation, which was hampered by high cannibalization rates to keep deployed planes flying. The rate of raiding one plane to keep another one airborne is dropping. And pilots in 11 air wings, whether at sea or awaiting sea duty, are getting more flying hours.
"I think it's obviously much, much better prepared," says Mr. Lott, who plays an influential role in shaping each year's defense budget, which is now approaching $400 billion. "The morale is better. The quality of life is better I think the pay raise was as much as an important thing, just because it showed at a critical moment we did hear them. We did care."
The military, however, still faces shortfalls. During strikes on Afghanistan, the Navy nearly ran out of kits to turn a "dumb" bomb into a satellite-guided one. The Navy has fired two aircraft carrier commanders for running substandard ships. Housing also remains dismal on some bases.
President Bush's overall defense plan is ambitious. He has boosted defense spending by $48 billion for fiscal year 2003, and wants the armed forces transformed into a lighter, faster warfighting machine. He expects it to simultaneously fight in Afghanistan, protect Europe and South Korea, and conquer and occupy Iraq.
Democrats have recently accused Mr. Bush of injecting politics into the debate over Iraq. They wonder if the White House is pushing military action to help Republican candidates in the Nov. 5 elections. Some Democrats remind reporters that when Mr. Lott was majority leader, he questioned whether politics played a role in some of Mr. Clinton's decisions to use force.
Mr. Lott says that of all of Mr. Clinton's air strikes against Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Iraq, the senator only vehemently questioned one operation: the four days of bombing Baghdad just as the House began the impeachment debate.
"I remember questioning Shelton and Cohen, 'You guys wouldn't do this if it wasn't really justified would you?'" Asked how the two men responded, Mr. Lott says, "I'll save that for another day."
--------
War Worries
Support for Attacking Iraq Begins to Wane Across the U.S.
By Bill Redeker
ABCNEWS.com
Oct. 14, 2002
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/war_opposition021014.html
- As the administration prepares for war with Iraq, a new mantra has emerged in the campaign to win the hearts and minds of Americans and, in effect, put Saddam Hussein on notice.
"America speaks with one voice," says President Bush.
In Washington, Bush, having been empowered by both houses of Congress to use force, seems to face very little opposition on Iraq.
On the streets of America, nothing could be further from the truth.
Across the nation, in city after city, ABCNEWS found voices of opposition, and many of them were from military towns.
"I am not convinced President Bush has yet made the case," said Miles Harvey, a San Diego retiree. San Diego is home port to the Navy's Pacific Fleet, which directly employs more than 100,000 people.
"We have to be convinced that there is a credible threat from Iraq and that's what I haven't seen," said Harvey.
Algene Miller, a Vietnam War veteran, said he was worried about potential casualties.
"You can't have a war without them," he said. "I know, I've been there."
On the other side of the country, in Charleston, S.C. - home to The Citadel military college and Charleston Air Force Base - there is also opposition, especially from those who remember U.S. forces becoming bogged down in Vietnam while losing support back home.
"If the president could show a clear and present danger I would support action against Iraq, but I don't support it without any evidence, " said Robert Rhame, a retired businessman who served in Vietnam.
"To me, our economy is far more important than removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.
Skepticism Over President's Motives
In the Central Plains states, there is concern about the prospect of the United Staets going to war alone.
At a coffee shop in Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood, homemaker Christa Rogers said unilateral action would be a mistake. "I think we have to go with other people, other countries, I don't think we can take this on, on our own," she said.
Her friend Cathy Roper agreed. "It all seems too fast," Roper added. "We need to do something, but it seems like it's really being shoved onto everybody, it seems too fast."
In addition to concern over timing and unilateral pre-emptive action, people question the president's motives. Many people told ABCNEWS they thought it was a "diversion from the faltering economy."
Debra Cassens, a businesswoman from San Diego, said it was about revenge.
"Bush is trying to settle a score that began with his father," she said referring to the failed Iraqi assassination attempt on the president's father following the Persian Gulf War.
John Schneider, also from San Diego, said, "I think the president wants to take action to enhance his own position.
"The war powers resolution was timed to benefit those running for election this November," Schneider said.
Although organized demonstrations have yet to produce large crowds, there have been several protests. In Los Angeles, 3,000 people gathered outside the federal building this month and chanted "no war," while a group of American Indians staged a peace dance nearby.
In Portland, Ore., approximately 6,000 people recently crowded the narrow streets to march and be heard while about 10,000 people gathered in New York City's Central Park to oppose war plans.
"What concerns me," said Rhame, the retired Vietnam War vet, "is what we do over there could bring more terror to the United States."
Denver resident Cassens agreed. "We need to build some bridges with the Muslim world, not make things worse," she said.
Contrary to what the president says, when it comes to war, Americans do not speak with one voice. A national day of protest has been scheduled for Oct. 26.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Nations to Discuss Afghan Pipeline
The Associated Press
Monday, October 14, 2002; 5:05 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22593-2002Oct14?language=printer
ISTANBUL, Turkey -- The leaders of 10 Central Asian and Caspian nations met Monday to discuss an ambitious natural-gas pipeline project through Afghanistan and other ways to revive the devastated country.
Landlocked Afghanistan wants to bring back plans for a pipeline carrying natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The pipeline would give about $300 billion in transit revenues annually to Afghanistan.
That would be a huge boon to a government heavily reliant on foreign aid after decades of war. However, concerns about the nation's stability still leave the pipeline in jeopardy.
"Afghanistan's peace and stability will without doubt remove poverty and ensure sustainable development," Turkey's President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said at the opening of the Economic Cooperation Organization summit Monday, after accepting the chairmanship of the organization from Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. "Lasting peace in Afghanistan will be an important contribution to regional peace as well as world peace."
The summit brings together 10 mainly Muslim nations, many of which neighbor Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he would use the meeting to ask for more aid.
"This summit should enhance the involvement of neighboring countries ... in the reconstruction of Afghanistan," Karzai said upon his arrival in Turkey.
Plans for the 907-mile gas pipeline were first launched in 1997, but were abandoned the following year after the United States fired cruise missiles at a base of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network in Afghanistan.
The project was brought back to life after the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign forced the Taliban from power last year.
Officials from the three nations met in the Afghan capital to discuss the pipeline last month, but many details must still be worked out.
Monday's summit is also expected to focus on the flow of aid into Afghanistan.
Afghanistan had hoped for $1.8 billion in foreign assistance this year, but has received significantly less. Most of the aid it did obtain went toward the country's humanitarian crisis.
"The reconstruction plans ... ought to be speeded up," Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said. "That will lead to political stability."
Leaders meeting at the summit are expected to propose a redevelopment fund for Afghanistan.
Afghanistan had been excluded from the annual meeting in 2000 because member countries accused the Taliban regime of sponsoring violence against some of them.
The organization was established by Turkey, Iran and Pakistan in 1985 to boost economic cooperation among the three. They later extended membership to six ex-Soviet states and Afghanistan.
----
Nations Agree to Create Afghan Fund
By James C. Helicke
Associated Press Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; 10:06 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23355-2002Oct14?language=printer
ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Central Asian and Caspian nations agreed Monday to set up a fund to help rebuild war-ravaged Afghanistan.
The decision came at the end of an economic summit in Istanbul bringing together 10 mainly Muslim nations to discuss boosting trade and investment.
The leaders agreed to establish a fund "within the possible financial, budgetary modalities acceptable to the member states," according to a joint declaration.
Earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged member countries to help rebuild his country, saying Afghanistan's prosperity would enhance security in the region.
"The establishment of security and prosperity within Afghanistan is a means of promoting security and prosperity in the region," Karzai said. "Afghanistan is open to business."
Officials also discussed a $2.5 billion natural gas pipeline project to carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Afghan officials hope the 900-mile gas pipeline will bring as much as $300 million in annual transit revenues to their cash-strapped government, but no concrete steps emerged at the meeting.
The declaration said the leaders "called on further progress" in cooperation on energy and petroleum issues as well as on a project to interconnect the region's power systems.
"We call upon member states to accelerate their efforts . . . in the area of hydrocarbon resources, building pipelines, roads and interconnection of power grids," Karzai said.
Plans for the gas pipeline were first launched in 1997, but were abandoned the following year after the United States fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan at a camp used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. The project was revived after the U.S.-led military campaign ousted the Taliban last year.
Afghanistan had hoped for $1.8 billion in foreign assistance this year, but has received significantly less. Karzai has complained that the bulk of foreign aid money had gone to humanitarian organizations and the United Nations - not to his administration.
Neighbors "should join hands to help Afghanistan in its efforts for rehabilitation, reconstruction, and a quick economic recovery," Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said.
Afghanistan had been excluded from the 2000 meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organization because member countries accused the Taliban regime of sponsoring violence against other member states.
"We will never permit our soil to be used for any subversive activities against any of our neighbors," Karzai said.
The economic organization was established by Turkey, Iran and Pakistan in 1985 to boost economic cooperation. They later extended membership to the former Soviet Central Asian states and Afghanistan.
-------- britain
N.Ireland Peace Process Begins New Uncertain Era
October 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-irish.html
BELFAST (Reuters) - Britain takes over the day-to-day running of Northern Ireland on Tuesday for an indefinite period until feuding Catholic and Protestant leaders bury their differences over the peace process.
From midnight on Monday, Northern Ireland came under direct rule from London after British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government pulled the plug -- for the fourth time in three years -- on the province's devolved, power-sharing government. The gravest political crisis since the landmark 1998 Good Friday peace agreement prompted predictable recriminations from local politicians blaming each other for the impasse.
But there was an air of shoulder-shrugging disappointment and resignation, rather than panic, on the streets.
``They've let us down, our politicians. We should be able to sort our own problems out,'' said Ian Jeffers, 34, walking down a street in east Belfast.
``Here we go again, right?'' said Jeremy Logan, 23, discussing the situation with a group of friends in a central Belfast pizza restaurant. ``They'll come back to the negotiating table -- eventually. They have to. There's no alternative. Or rather, the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.''
Few seriously feared a return to the open conflict which cost more than 3,600 lives before 1998.
But there were real concerns the political vacuum could fuel gang violence by paramilitary groups on both sides who defy the cease-fires supposed to be in place under the 1998 agreement.
And the political impasse -- precipitated by accusations earlier this month of spying by the Irish Republican Army -- looked harder to resolve than on previous occasions when London halted power-sharing, the longest of which lasted three months.
BLAIR GOVERNMENT HOPEFUL
The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has staked considerable prestige on seeking peace for Northern Ireland, tried to stay optimistic. It wants to reinstate devolution before next May's scheduled elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly.
``Nothing I've said today changes the date of the election, that is still set as the first of May,'' Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid told Reuters hours after formally announcing the return of direct rule.
``We will do everything possible to try and find a way of restoring the confidence and therefore power-sharing before that date...it depends on the parties here trusting and working with each other.''
Reid has appointed an extra two junior ministers to his Northern Ireland Office to take over from the 12 local ministers whose devolved powers ended at midnight.
Locals were worried the situation may create paralysis in essential social services like education and health.
And the 108 legislators and several hundred civil servants, at the Northern Irish Assembly were calculating the personal cost, with many salaries halved during the freezing of the power-sharing administration. Hardline Protestant unionists, who say a mixed local government will never work until the IRA disbands, said the Good Friday accord was dead and called for completely new talks.
``This thing could not last. It had to come down and down it has come,'' said preacher-politician Ian Paisley, whose Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) says it will not work in the future with the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein without disbandment.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said unionist intransigence, rather than ``fabricated'' charges of IRA spying on the British government, had brought the current impasse.
``This is not the re-negotiation of this contract,'' he said, brandishing a copy of the 1998 deal. ``It is a serious crisis, but it needs to be sorted out.'' -- Additional reporting by Alex Richardson in Belfast
-------- business
[The industrialists are enchanted by this war, no doubt. et]
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
States News Service
Monday, October 14, 2002; Page E09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21837-2002Oct13.html
Earth Tech of Alexandria won a $598 million contract from the Army for environmental, engineering, professional, technical and remediation support services for the Air National Guard.
Anteon International of Fairfax won a $94 million contract from the Navy for systems engineering and integration services, program management and test support for the Aegis ballistic missile defense project. Anteon International of Fairfax won a $66 million contract from the Coast Guard for systems engineering and information technology support for the national disaster system and other programs.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Reston won a $63 million contract from the Air Force for contracting services.
Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories of Washington won a $583,376 contract from the Health and Human Services Department for anatomical pathology and clinical laboratory testing services.
Chenega Technology Services of Springfield won a $50 million contract from the Air Force for development of Air Control Squadron courseware and training in support of Air Combat Command.
Exxon Mobile of Fairfax won a $47.8 million contract from the Defense Department for gasoline, diesel fuel and motor oil.
Anteon International of Fairfax won a $40 million contract from the Navy for rapid response engineering and integration support for major ship components onboard military vessels.
AverStar of Vienna won a $29 million contract from the Navy for engineering services.
SRA International of Fairfax won a $27 million contract from the Defense Department for database design and development along with other information technology services.
Facchina Construction of La Plata, Md., won a $27 million contract from the Defense Department for the design and construction of a Pentagon secure bypass.
NW Systems of Largo won a $25 million contract from the Justice Department for information technology services related to narcotics and dangerous drugs information systems.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Reston won a $20.99 million contract from the Navy for simulation/stimulation software systems engineering support for submarine fleet training and trainers and combat control system laboratory development.
Danya International of Silver Spring won a $20 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for logistics support for the Head Start program.
Anteon International of Fairfax won an $18.8 million contract from the Air Force for information technology, systems engineering and integration, and program management support services.
AMSEC of Virginia Beach won a $13 million contract from the Navy for contracting services.
Dimensions International of Alexandria won a $12.7 million contract from the Navy for maintenance and repairs to Naval Air Systems Command support equipment.
Computer & Hi-tech Management of McLean won an $11.7 million contract from the Drug Enforcement Administration for records management support for the narcotics and dangerous drugs information system.
Eagle Systems of California won a $10 million contract from the Navy for technical and engineering support services.
Shirley Pentagon Constructors of Lorton won a $9.3 million contract from the Defense Department for design and construction of a remote delivery facility secure access lane for the Pentagon.
Honeywell Technology Solutions of Columbia won a $9.25 million contract from the Navy for program management, high performance computing, information security, modeling & simulation, systems engineering, integration, technical support and integrated logistics support for designated Navy cryptographic requirements.
Northrop Grumman Information Technology of Reston won a $7.84 million contract from the Navy for engineering services in support of combat systems and weapons systems.
Bell-Boeing of Patuxent River, Md., won a $6.97 million contract from the Navy for the development of source data and software necessary for training and functionality of the Aircraft Maintenance Event Ground Station under the V-22 engineering and manufacturing development program.
Whiting-Turner Contracting of Baltimore won a $6.7 million contract from the Navy for alterations and repairs to the east runway at Andrews Air Force Base.
Anteon International of Fairfax won a $6.5 million contract from the Central Command for information technology and systems engineering support to maintain secure and reliable communications within the Central Command Theatre of Operations.
W.M. Scholster of Hyattsville won a $6.4 million contract from the Navy for repairs and upgrades at bachelor quarters at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek.
AMSEC of Virginia Beach won a $6.3 million contract from the Navy for training systems engineering services for an AEGIS training and readiness center.
Virtexco of Norfolk won a $6 million contract from the Navy for building repairs. Forrester Construction of Rockville won a $5.90 million contract from the Navy for repairs and upgrades of the clinical lab and pathology lab at the Naval Medical Center, Bethesda.
Brown & Root Services of Arlington won a $5.3 million contract from the Navy for emergency repairs to the breakwater that protects the petroleum oil and lubricants pier facility at Lajes Field, Azores.
Chenega Technology Services of Springfield won a $5.22 million contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency for the Defense Department data management enterprise services test demonstrations.
Bell-Boeing Tilt Rotor Team of Patuxent River, Md., won a $5 million contract from the Navy for flight simulator equipment and support services.
Circle Solutions of Vienna won a $3.47 million contract from the Department of Health & Human Services for professional, administrative and management services.
Cornet Technologies of Springfield won a $2.4 million contract from the Navy for automated technical control switches.
PTFS of Bethesda won a $1.9 million contract from the Army to provide the technical infrastructure to transition the Military History Institute into the new Army Heritage and Education Center.
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel won a $1.8 million contract from the Navy for research and development services.
Analytical Decision Support of Woodbridge won a $1.75 million contract from the General Services Administration for logistics worldwide.
Petrillo & Powell of Washington won a $500,000 contract from the General Services Administration for logistics worldwide.
Tech Systems of Cabin John won a $364,077 contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for warehousing services.
Professional Products of Gaithersburg won a $282,761 contract from the Navy for general-purpose information technology equipment.
TRW of Fairfax won a $269,543 contract from the Army for special studies and analysis.
Kaydon Ring & Seal of Baltimore won a $256,500 contract from the Defense Supply Center for plain encased seals.
Teledyne Energy Systems of Hunt Valley won a $252,289 contract from NASA for research and development related to membrane electrode assemblies life testing.
Mitretek Systems of Falls Church won a $242,496 contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for environmental advisory and assistance services in transferring Air Force properties to the civil sector.
Hiller Systems of Chesapeake, Va., won a $201,318 contract from the U.S. Coast Guard for fire alarm/flooding systems.
MTS Technologies of Arlington won a $172,872 contract from the Army for research and development services.
FDGM of Chesapeake won a $69,665 contract from the Defense Supply Center for engine accessories.
The contracts listed were awarded by the federal government to companies and other vendors in Virginia, Maryland and the District. For more information, contact states2001@aol.com, or 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- iraq
Iraq and the War on Terrorism - interactive guide
Washington Post,
October 14, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/iraq/front.html
People: Iraq has a population of more than 23 million people, living in an area slightly more than twice the size of Idaho. The population is 75-80 percent Arab, 15-20 percent Kurdish, and 5 percent Turkoman, Assyrian or other. Approximately 60-65 percent of the people are Shi'ite Muslims and 32-37 percent Sunni Muslims. Christians and other constitute 3 percent of the population.
Armed Forces: The Iraqi Army, according to Jane's World Armies in 1996, is estimated to consist of two or three armored divisions, three mechanized divisions, and 15 to 17 infantry divisions
The Republican Guard is estimated to have eight divisions: three armoured divisions, one mechanised division and four infantry divisions. These units probably have a maximum of 8,000 soldiers each.
Human Rights "Hundreds of people, among them political prisoners including possible prisoners of conscience, were executed. Hundreds of suspected political opponents, including army officers suspected of planning to overthrow the government, were arrested and their fate and whereabouts remained unknown. Torture and ill-treatment were widespread and new punishments, including beheading and the amputation of the tongue, were reportedly introduced. Non-Arabs, mostly Kurds, continued to be forcibly expelled from their homes in the Kirkuk area to Iraqi Kurdistan."
Is the U.S. going to war with Iraq? According to administration officials President Bush is committed to asking Congress to authorize military force before its pre-election recess, which is scheduled for early October. But despite the increasingly forceful language of Vice President Cheney and other administration officials, military planners say that, barring a provocation by Iraq, no attack on Iraq is likely until January 2003 at the earliest.
Post Coverage:
War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack (Sept. 9, 2002)
Officers: Iraq Could Drain Terror War (Sept. 1, 2002)
--
From Amnesty International Report 2001
Who favors war on Iraq?
The American people do--tentatively. Fifty seven percent of respondents in a recent Washington Post poll said they supported a U.S. invasion of Iraq, while 36 percent were opposed. If the war were to produce "significant" U.S. casualties, support plummeted to 40 percent and opposition rose to 51 percent.
Leaders of virtually every nation have said they oppose a war, including U.S. allies in Germany, France and Saudi Arabia. Only the leaders of Great Britain and Israel are supportive so far, and British prime minister Tony Blair faces strong public disapproval for his support.
Post Coverage: Poll: Americans Cautiously Favor War in Iraq (Aug. 13, 2002) Diplomatic Gap Widens Between U.S., Its Allies (Sept. 1, 2002)
Saudi: U.S. Can't Use Kingdom to Attack Iraq (Aug. 8, 2002)
Britons Grow Uneasy About War in Iraq (Aug. 7, 2002)
Does Iraq support terrorism? The State Department has designated Iraq as a sponsor of terrorism. In its latest report on "state-sponsored terrorism" the Department noted that Iraq has "continued to provide training and political encouragement to numerous terrorist groups, although its main focus was on dissident Iraqi activity overseas."
From the U.S. State Dept, Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2001/html/10249.htm
Was Iraq involved in the Sept. 11 attacks? There is little evidence that it was. The U.S. government initially gave credence to a report that hijack ringleader Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in June 2000. Iraqi officials denied the report. U.S. intelligence sources later concluded that the alleged meeting never took place.
Post Coverage: U.S. Not Claiming Iraqi Link to Terror (Sept. 10, 2002)
Does Iraq possess anthrax? Suspicions that Iraq might have supplied the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill and the news media come from the 1999 final report from UNSCOM, the United Nations group that conducted inspections of Iraqi facilities after the Gulf War. The report expressed "serious doubts" that Iraq had terminated its offensive biological weapons program.
Post Coverage: Anthrax Type That Killed May Have Reached Iraq (Nov. 25, 2001)
Does Iraq have nukes? While Iraq is not known to possess nuclear weapons now, two recent studies say it is close to having the ability to build them. "With sufficient black-market uranium or plutonium, Iraq probably could fabricate a nuclear weapon," reports the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Iraq's ability to use weapons of massive destruction against its enemies is even more uncertain.
Center for Non Proliferation Studies on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/iraq.htm
---
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
IRAQ Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, and Missile Capabilities and Programs
March 19, 2002,
Center for Nonproliferation Studies
http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/iraq.htm
- With sufficient black-market uranium or plutonium, Iraq probably could fabricate a nuclear weapon.
- If undetected and unobstructed, could produce weapons-grade fissile material within several years.
- Engaged in clandestine procurement of special nuclear weapon-related equipment.
- Retains large and experienced pool of nuclear scientists and technicians.
- Retains nuclear weapons design, and may retain related components and software.
- Repeatedly violated its obligations under the NPT, which Iraq ratified on 10/29/69.
- Repeatedly violated its obligations under United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 687, which mandates destruction of Iraq's nuclear weapon capabilities.
- Until halted by Coalition air attacks and UNSCOM disarmament efforts, Iraq had an extensive nuclear weapon development program that began in 1972, involved 10,000 personnel, and had a multi-year budget totaling approximately $10 billion.
- In 1990, Iraq also launched a crash program to divert reactor fuel under IAEA safeguards to produce nuclear weapons.
- Considered two delivery options for nuclear weapons: either using unmodified al-Hussein ballistic missile with 300km range, or producing Al-Hussein derivative with 650km range.
- In 1987, Iraq reportedly field tested a radiological bomb.
Biological[3]
- May retain stockpile of biological weapon (BW) munitions, including over 150 R-400 aerial bombs, and 25 or more special chemical/biological Al-Hussein ballistic missile warheads.
- May retain biological weapon sprayers for Mirage F-1 aircraft.
- May retain mobile production facility with capacity to produce "dry" biological agents (i.e., with long shelf life and optimized for dissemination).
- Has not accounted for 17 metric tonnes of BW growth media.
- May possess smallpox virus; tested camelpox prior to Gulf War.
- Maintains technical expertise and equipment to resume production of Bacillus anthracis spores (anthrax), botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, and Clostridium perfringens (gas gangrene).
- Prepared BW munitions for missile and aircraft delivery in 1990-1991 Gulf War; this included loading al-Hussein ballistic missile warheads and R-400 aerial bombs with Bacillis anthracis.
- Conducted research on BW dissemination using unmanned aerial vehicles.
- Repeatedly violated its obligations under UNSC Resolution 687, which mandates destruction of Iraq's biological weapon capabilities.
- Ratified the BTWC on 4/18/91, as required by the Gulf War cease-fire agreement.
Chemical[4]
- May retain stockpile of chemical weapon (CW) munitions, including 25 or more special chemical/biological al-Hussein ballistic missile warheads, 2,000 aerial bombs, 15,000-25,000 rockets, and 15,000 artillery shells.
- Believed to possess sufficient precursor chemicals to produce hundreds of tons of mustard gas, VX, and other nerve agents.
- Reconstructing former dual-use CW production facilities that were destroyed by U.S. bombing.
- Retains sufficient technical expertise to revive CW programs within months.
- Repeatedly used CW against Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and against Iran in 1983-1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
- An extensive CW arsenal-including 38,537 munitions, 690 tons of CW agents, and over 3,000 tons of CW precursor chemicals-has been destroyed by UNSCOM.
- Repeatedly violated its obligations under UNSC Resolution 687, which mandates destruction of Iraq's chemical weapon capabilities.
- Not a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Ballistic missiles[5]
- May retain several al-Hussein (modified Scud-B) missiles with 650km range and 500kg payload.
- May retain components for dozens of Scud-B and al-Hussein missiles, as well as indigenously produced Scud missile engines.
- Maintains clandestine procurement network to import missile components.
- Reconstructing missile production facilities destroyed in 1998 by U.S. bombing.
- May possess several hundred tons of propellant for Scud missiles.
- If undetected and unobstructed, could resume production of al-Hussein missiles; could develop 3,000km-range missiles within five years; could develop ICBM within 15 years.
- Launched 331 Scud-B missiles at Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and 189 al-Hussein missiles at Iranian cities during the 1988 "War of the Cities."
- Developing Ababil-100 with 150km range and 300kg payload, flight-testing al-Samoud with 140km range and 300kg payload, and producing Ababil-50 with 50km range and 95kg payload.
Cruise missiles[6]
- C-601/Nisa 28 and HY-2 Silkworm with 95km range and 513kg payload.
- SS-N-2c Styx with 80km range and 513kg payload.
- Exocet AM-39 with 50km range and 165kg payload.
- YJ-1/C-801 with 40km range and 165kg payload.
Other delivery systems[7]
- Reportedly converting L-29 jet trainers to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for delivery of BW or CW.
- May possess spraying equipment for BW dissemination by helicopter.
- Experimented with MIG-21 as unmanned delivery vehicle for BW.
- Fighter and ground attack forces may total 300 fixed-wing aircraft, including Su-25, Su-24MK, Su-20, Su-7, MiG-29, MiG-25, MiG-23BN, MiG-21, Mirage F1EQ5, and F-7.
- Ground systems include artillery and rocket launchers, notably 500+ FROG-7 artillery rockets and 12-15 launchers, with 70km range and 450kg payload.
Sources:
[1] This chart summarizes data available from public sources. Precise assessment of a Iraq's capabilities is difficult because most weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs remain secret and cannot be verified independently. Although inspections by UNSCOM and the IAEA's Iraq Action Team provided detailed information about past Iraqi programs, assessing Iraq's current capabilities is difficult due to its policies of denial and deception, and to its expulsion of UNSCOM inspectors in November 1998.
On Iraq's deception and denial policies, see:
Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein,
Saddam's Bombmaker
(New York: Scribner, 2000).
David Albright,
"Masters of Deception,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54:3 (May/June 1998).
Barton Gellman,
"A Futile Game of Hide and Seek,"
Washington Post, 10/11/98.
Barton Gellman, "Arms Inspectors 'Shake the Tree,"
Washington Post, 10/12/98.
On UNSCOM's efforts to disarm Iraq of WMD, see
Robert Einhorn, Robert Gallucci, Dimitri Perricos, Jere Nichols, Gary Dillon, Ephraim Asculai, and Michael Eisenstadt, 6/14-15/01, transcripts from a conference,
"Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq:
A Ten-Year Review,"
Washington, DC. Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). <http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/index.html>.
Richard Butler, The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Growing Crisis in Global Security,
(New York: Public Affairs, 2000).
Tim Trevan,
Saddam's Secrets-The Hunt for Iraq's Hidden Weapons,
(New York: Harper Collins, 1999).
[2] IAEA Action Team on Iraq, 7/13/01,
"Fact Sheet: Iraq's Nuclear Weapon Programme,"
International Atomic Energy Agency,
<http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/nwp2.html>.
Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD),
Proliferation: Threat and Response,
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001).
Kelly Motz, undated [accessed 9/12/01]
"What Has Iraq Been Doing Since Inspectors Left? What Is On Its Shopping List?" Iraq Watch,
<http://www.iraqwatch.org/updates/update.asp?id=wpn200107231601>.
William J. Broad,
"Document Reveals 1987 Bomb Test by Iraq,"
New York Times, 4/29/01, p. 16.
David Albright,
"Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Program: Past, Present, and Future Challenges," PolicyWatch #301, 2/18/98,
<http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/watch/Policywatch/policywatch1998/301.htm>.
U.S. Government White Paper,
"Iraq Weapons Of Mass Destruction Programs," 2/13/98,
<http://www.state.gov/www/regions/nea/iraq_white_paper.html>.
Steven Dolley, 5/12/98,
"Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Program: Unresolved Issues,"
Nuclear Control Institute,
<http://www.nci.org/iraq/iraq511.htm>.
Steven Dolley, 2/19/98,
"Iraq and the Bomb: The Nuclear Threat Continues,"
Nuclear Control Institute,
<http://www.nci.org/i/ib21998.htm>.
Anthony H. Cordesman,
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East: Regional Trends, National Forces, Warfighting Capabilities, Delivery Options, and Weapons Effects,
Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 2001,
<http://www.csis.org/burke/mb/me_wmd_mideast.pdf>, pp. 85-86.
David Albright,
"A Special Case: Iraq,"
Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press/SIPRI, 1997), pp. 309-50.
[3] United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), Report:
Disarmament, 1/25/99, United Nations,
<http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/ucreport/index.htm>.
Motz undated. Steve Bowman,
"Iraqi Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) Capabilities,"
(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2/17/98), pp. 1-5.
Barbara Starr,
"UNSCOM Inspectors Still Doubt Iraq's Arms Claims,"
Jane's Defence Weekly, 2/25/98, p. 18.
U.S. Government White Paper 1998.
Cordesman 2001, pp. 81-84. Gellman 1998.
Jonathan Tucker,
"Lessons of Iraq's Biological Weapons Program,"
Arms Control Today, 1993, 14(3): 229-71.
[4]
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
"Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 July Through 31 December 2000," 9/7/01, <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/bian/bian_sep_2001.htm>.
Motz undated. Javed Ali, Spring 2001,
"Chemical Weapons and the Iran-Iraq War: A Case Study in Noncompliance," Nonproliferation Review 8(1): 43-58.
UNSCOM 1/25/99.
Bowman 1998, pp. 1-5.
U.S. Government White Paper 1998.
Starr 1998, p. 18.
Cordesman 2001, pp. 75-79.
United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM),
"UNSCOM Main Achievements," 5/98, <http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/achievement.htm>.
Physicians for Human Rights,
"Winds of Death: Iraq's Use of Poison Gas Against its Kurdish Population," (Boston, MA: Physicians for Human Rights, 2/89), pp. 1-2.
[5]
CIA 9/7/01. Cordesman 2001, pp.71-75.
"German Assessment: Iraqi Missiles Will Reach Europe by 2005,"
Deutsche Presse Agentur (Berlin), 2/23/00,
<http://www.BerlinOnline.de>.
Jane's Online,
"Country Inventory - In Service," and "Offensive Weapons, Iraq,"
Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems 36, 7/24/01,
<http://online.janes.com>.
National Intelligence Council, Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015, 9/99, <http://www.cia.gov/nic/pubs/other_products/foreign_missle_developments.htm>.
Carnegie Nuclear Non-Proliferation Project, undated [accessed 8/14/01],
"World Missile Chart, <http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/resources/ballisticmissilechart.htm>.
Motz undated. UNSCOM 1/25/99.
Federation of American Scientists, undated, "Iraq," <http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/missile/>.
Centre for Defence and International Security Studies (CDISS), undated, "National Briefings: Iraq," "Ballistic Missile Capabilities by Country," and "Iraqi Ballistic Missile Capabilities,"
<http://www.cdiss.org/>.
U.S. Government White Paper 1998.
Starr, p. 18.
Dilip Hiro,
The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (London: Grafton Books, 1989). Interview with Tim McCarthy, Senior Missile Analyst,
Center for Nonproliferation Studies,
Monterey Institute of International Studies, 4/30/98.
[6]
National Defense Industrial Association,
Feasibility of Third World Advanced Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat: Volume 2, Emerging Cruise Missile Threat, 8/99, <http://www.ndia.org/committees/slaad/ECMTVol2.pdf>, pp. 138-145.
CDISS, undated,
"Emerging Cruise Missile Capabilities," <http://www.cdiss.org/images/tabled.htm>.
[7]
CIA 9/7/01.
Motz undated.
Jane's Online 7/24/01.
The Military Balance 2000/2001 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2000), p. 141.
September 2001 update by Michael Barletta and Jeffrey Fields. November 1998 original by Michael Barletta and Erik Jorgensen.
Center for Nonproliferation Studies Monterey Institute of International Studies
Center for Nonproliferation Studies 460 Pierce Street, Monterey, CA 93940, USA Telephone: +1 (831) 647-4154; Fax: +1 (831) 647-3519 E-mail: cns@miis.edu; Web: http://cns.miis.edu
[See also http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/israel.htm (Israel)]
-------- mideast
Saudi Minister Says His Country Opposes War on Iraq
October 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-saudi.html
TIARET, Algeria (Reuters) - Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Monday his country opposed war on Iraq and would not participate in any possible U.S. strike against the kingdom's northern neighbor.
Wrapping up a two-day official visit to Algeria dominated by talks on a possible U.S. war against Iraq, al-Faisal appeared to indicate that Saudi Arabia had altered its position toward Washington's drive against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
``We reject entering into a war against Iraq,'' al-Faisal told a news conference in the town of Tiaret after talks with Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
Last month, al-Faisal signaled that Saudi Arabia, Washington's main Gulf Arab ally, had edged away from its declared opposition to a U.S. war on Iraq after President Bush told the United Nations he would task the Security Council to endorse its disarmament resolutions on Iraq.
``I had never said that Saudi Arabia agrees to allow the use of its territory to strike Iraq,'' he added, in a reply to a question on whether Saudi Arabia would let the U.S. use its territories as a launching pad for strikes on Iraq.
He said if the Security Council issued a new resolution under ``article seven of the U.N. charter,'' every country had to cooperate accordingly.
``But this resolution would not force every state to participate in the war and open its sky and land for use (in that war),'' he added.
Al-Faisal said his country would focus on diplomatic efforts to ward off a U.S. strike against Iraq.
``We want to protect Iraq from a strike and we are not seeking a balance on the oil market,'' he said. He did not elaborate more on the oil subject.
----
Anti-war sentiment rises in Turkey
October 14, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021014-022036-8164r.htm
ISTANBUL, Turkey, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Shouting anti-war slogans, more than 1,000 lawyers took to the streets of Istanbul Monday to protest the United States' threatened strike on Iraq.
Hailed by bystanders, members of the Istanbul Bar Association marched from their headquarters to Taksim's main square and laid a red carnation wreath, which read: "No to the war" at a monument.
The group, wearing court attire, carried banners emblazoned with anti-war and anti-Bush slogans.
"War is disaster, war means thousands of losses of life, coffins and loss of territory," Bar Association chairman, Yucel Sayman said, reading from a statement.
Monday's demonstration followed a similar protest on Sunday, in which university students gathered in Istanbul shouting slogans against a strike on Iraq.
Anti-war and anti-U.S. demonstrations have been rare in recent years.
Turkish leaders have openly opposed an attack on Iraq, arguing that such a move would bring widespread war in the area. However, they have reportedly consented to opening Turkey's air bases should airstrikes become inevitable.
A group of Pentagon officials thought to be headed by a lieutenant general is due in Ankara next week to discuss Iraq, Turkish officials said, adding that the group would hold talks with Turkish Armed Forces commanders and Foreign Ministry officials.
Last week, the cabinet authorized the chief of General Staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, and Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel to conduct talks on Iraq.
Turkey has been angered by recent reports that the Iraqi Kurds have agreed to a draft constitution for a federal Kurdish region in the north ahead of possible U.S. strike on Iraq.
Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit on Sunday said that developments were "getting out of control" and noted that a loose plan has emerged "in a deceiving way," which Turkey would not accept.
"We do not want to enter a war, but we are being dragged into it," Ecevit said in a private TV interview.
Accusing the United States of being behind developments in northern Iraq, he said the United States was not only encouraging the Kurdish groups in northern Iraq, "but is actually steering them."
Asked about the situation in northern Iraq, Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu repeated Monday that Turkey would not accept an independent Kurdish state and would take measures -- including military -- to prevent it.
(Reported by Seva Ulman in Ankara, Turkey.)
-------- pakistan
U.S., Pakistan Plan Joint Exercise
By Paul Haven
Associated Press Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; 5:10 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22601-2002Oct14?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- U.S. and Pakistani troops are set to conduct their first joint military exercises since Washington lifted sanctions on Pakistan and renewed military ties earlier this year, the U.S. Embassy said Monday.
The exercises, dubbed "Inspired Gambit," will focus on small arms training and small unit tactics and will go on for about three weeks, the embassy said. The embassy would not say where the exercises would be held, or when they would begin, but a Pakistani military official said the American troops would begin arriving Monday.
The embassy said the troops were primarily being drawn from the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry division based in Fort Stewart, Georgia. It was not clear how many American troops would be taking part.
The exercises would promote relations between the militaries of the two countries and enhance "interoperability of forces, equipment and procedures," the embassy said.
The United States imposed sanctions in 1998 to protest Islamabad's decision to follow rival India and conduct nuclear tests, and withheld weapons and equipment it had earmarked for Pakistan.
"Inspired Gambit," began in 1995 and was conceived as a series of exercises. None have been held since 1997 because of the sanctions.
Pakistani military officials acknowledged the exercises were going on, but also declined to give details.
"The location is classified," said Brig. Saulat Raza, a military spokesman. "Yes they are taking place."
The exercises follow high-level talks in Islamabad in September between U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and top Pakistani defense officials. Pakistan hopes to parlay the new ties into contracts to buy more F-16 fighter jets from Washington.
In recent months, U.S. and Pakistani security forces have been carrying out raids on suspected al-Qaida hide-outs in remote areas along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. It was not clear if the joint training operation would focus on tactics used to hunt terrorists.
There has been heightened concern that the strong showing of anti-American Islamic parties in Pakistani elections Thursday could hinder the U.S. military's ability to fight terrorism along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
But Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has promised that the elections will not effect the nation's foreign policy, or its decision to be a strong backer of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
--------
Pakistan Islamists Want U.S. Troops Out
October 14, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-election.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Hard-line Islamic parties that have emerged as potential coalition partners after a general election in Pakistan said Monday they would seek to impose Islamic law in the country and ask U.S. troops to leave.
Talks over who would form a coalition in parliament gathered pace, with the focus of the outside world on whether the Islamic front, which recorded stunning gains in last Thursday's poll, would be part of the government or in opposition.
The election, designed to return Pakistan to civilian rule after a coup in 1999, has been strongly criticized by European Union observers who said the military tipped the voting in its favor to allow President Pervez Musharraf to hold on to power.
``We assure the international community that we are not terrorists,'' Qazi Hussain Ahmed, vice president of the Mutahidda-e-Amal (MMA) Islamic coalition, told a news briefing in Islamabad where he set out his party's stall.
``We will not use this country for terrorism, nor allow anyone to use this country for terrorism,'' he said, before adding:
``But we do not approve of foreign interference. For this we do not need any help from the American forces nor their bases in the country. There should also be no such bases here which could be used for interference in the affairs of neighboring states.''
He was referring to the small U.S. military presence in Pakistan concentrated at the Jacobabad air base, from where search and rescue operations in Afghanistan are launched.
The MMA is also likely to oppose the small numbers of U.S. intelligence agents helping Pakistani forces track down al Qaeda suspects in tribal areas near the Afghan border.
But Musharraf, a key ally to Washington in its campaign against the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda network, said the rise of the religious right would not derail his policies.
``As far as national policies are concerned...the national strategy does not change with a change of government, it continues,'' he told reporters after a summit in Istanbul.
MMA Chairman Shah Ahmed Noorani told reporters in Karachi that his party supported the introduction of Islamic sharia law.
``Our first priority is to implement Islamic laws in the country and we will not compromise in this issue. Now it is the responsibility of the state to protect Islam and do away with secular norms.''
``KING'S PARTY'' LAYS LOW
The MMA won 50 seats, eclipsing religious parties' performance at the 1997 election when they won just two. It makes them the third largest party behind the Pakistan Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam or PML(QA) with 77 seats and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) which won 62.
In contrast to the vocal MMA, the PML(QA) has kept a low profile since becoming the largest party in parliament.
Dubbed the ``king's party'' for its perceived support of Musharraf, its leader Mian Mohammad Azhar suffered the humiliation of not winning a seat, forcing him to hand over the reins to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain.
Local media reported talks between PML(QA) and the PPP led by exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
But it is far from clear whether the two parties would be able to resolve their differences, with PML(QA) seen as a loose union of candidates designed to weaken the anti-Musharraf lobby and the PPP fiercely opposed to continued military rule.
The fact that the MMA is a grouping of such disparate religious parties opposed to each other in the past raises questions about its ability to remain united, analysts said.
How much the composition of the coalition in Pakistan actually matters remains to be seen.which have given him the right to dissolve parliament and cemented the role of the military in government, Musharraf remains strong.
His decision to ban Bhutto and another exiled former premier, Nawaz Sharif, from contesting the election infuriated opponents, as did a controversial referendum in April that extended his rule for five years.
-------- space
Security Concerns Shade World Space Congress
October 14, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-14-01.asp
HOUSTON, Texas, The Space Policy Summit, a top level "private and frank" discussion of space policy over the past three days, was influenced by "the renewed emphasis on national and international security concerns," said organizers from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
The Space Policy Summit was held in connection with the World Space Congress that opened October 10 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Held once every 10 years, the World Space Congress has attracted 13,000 scientific, technical, business and government leaders, who will explore every facet of space activity until the Congress closes on Saturday.
International Space Station in orbit (Photo courtesy NASA)
"In bringing together key space leaders from around the globe for a cooperative dialog," said Dr. Brian Dailey, vice president international of AIAA, "the Space Summit has provided the framework and path forward for addressing the most compelling challenges facing world space endeavors."
Among the 39 international leaders from government and industry of 16 nations and five international organizations who took part in Space Policy Summit discussions at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, were 12 national space agencies, 12 aerospace corporations, and eight additional government agencies. It was sponsored by the Lockheed Martin Corporation.
There were three sessions at the summit - commercial space activities, space exploration, and space applications. A fourth, closed door, session on international security space issues will be convened in the spring of 2003.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave a glimpse into U.S. space security concerns in February when he told Congress in support of his $200 million space budget request for 2003, "From the dawn of time, a key to victory on the battlefield has been to control the high ground. Space is the ultimate high ground."
The 2003 budget requests about $2 billion to strengthen U.S. space capabilities - $1.5 billion over the five years from 2003 to 2007, an increase of 145 percent. The budget still has not been approved by Congress.
Edward Djerejian, director of the Baker Institute, said today, "As government and private sectors pursue the use of space for everything from satellite communications to human spaceflight, a coherent and effective policy to regulate such activities will be of paramount importance."
Space Policy Summit participants said the commercial satellite market is not strong enough to sustain current space launch systems or justify industry investment in new systems and technologies. "Government support is necessary for the foreseeable future to achieve national objectives in the security, civil, and commercial sectors," the AIAA said in a statement.
Export controls on space technologies reflect "legitimate national security and non-proliferation concerns," but they limit international cooperation and inhibit growth of the commercial sector, the summit participants acknowledged.
A "multinational approach" to harmonizing export control requirements according to "true national security needs" and the creation of "timely, predictable and transparent systems for licensing space technologies," was viewed as productive.
The New Face of Space is the theme of the World Space Congress, and organizers have made an effort to ensure that new face is one of international cooperation.
Astronaut Frank L. Culbertson, Jr., Expedition 3 mission commander, wearing a Russian Sokol suit, is seated in the Soyuz spacecraft that is docked to the International Space Station. (Photo courtesy NASA)
Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev spoke today in a session covering the International Space Station (ISS), along with Mikhail Sinelschikov, chief of Piloted Space Programs of the Russian Aviation & Space Agency. They were on a panel with NASA Astronaut and ISS Expedition 3 Commander Frank Culbertson, Hideshi Kozawa, manager of Japan's Space Station Program, Benoit Marcotte, program manager of the ISS Canadian Space Agency, and Alan Thirkettle, head of the Manned Spaceflight Department of the European Space Agency.
The International Space Station, a joint endeavor of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, circles every 90 minutes approximately 240 miles overhead, and traveling the distance to the moon and back every day.
Hundreds of national and international exhibitors at the convention center include displays from the International Space University, and exhibits from the British National Space Centre, China National Space Administration, German, Space Systems Finland, Israel Aircraft Industries, the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan, Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes, the Swedish Space Corporation plus dozens of corporate, state and local space exhibits.
University of Houston (UH) scientists are showcasing some cutting edge research on commercial applications of space technology to benefit Earthlings.
Physicist Dr. David Criswell, director of University of Houston's Institute for Space Systems Operations, is presenting his lunar solar power research at the Congress. He believes it is feasible to build large banks of solar cells on the Moon to collect solar energy and beam it back through space to fill needs for electricity on Earth.
Dr. David Criswell is director of the University of Houston's Institute for Space Systems Operations. (Photo courtesy Texas Space Grant Consortium)
Criswell says his system could be built on the moon from lunar materials and operated on the Moon and Earth using existing technologies. He estimates that a lunar solar power system could begin delivering commercial power about 10 years after program startup.
"A priority for me is getting people to realize that the lunar power system may be the only option for sustainable global prosperity," Criswell says. He contributed a chapter to a new book, "Innovative Solutions for CO2 Stabilization," published in July, which addresses major aspects of sustainability and global commercial power.
Alex Freundlich, UH research professor of physics, says, "The raw materials needed to make solar cells are present in the Moon's regolith," the loose, fragmental material on the Moon's surface.
Freundlich, together with research scientist Charles Horton, Alex Ignatiev, director of Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials, and a team of NASA-Johnson Space Center and industry scientists have used simulated moon soil to determine how to go about manufacturing the solar cell devices on the moon.
"Our plan is to use an autonomous lunar rover to move across the moon's surface, to melt the regolith into a very thin film of glass and then to deposit thin film solar cells on that lunar glass substrate," Freundlich says. "An array of such lunar solar cells could then be used as a giant solar energy converter generating electricity."
View of a full Moon photographed by one of the crewmembers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for Expedition Five. September 22, 2002 (Photo courtesy NASA)
Freundlich and Horton are developing solar cells that are more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity than those currently used to power orbiting satellites. The materials used in their advanced solar cells, and the way those materials are configured, also make them more resistant to the damaging effects of radiation.
"The best space solar cell technology currently in use converts only about 28 percent of the sunlight hitting the device into electricity," Freundlich says. "By adding a thin layer of nano-engineered material in these cells we are capable of boosting solar cell efficiencies to well above 35 percent. These cells potentially would last much longer because they are much more resistant to being degraded by radiation from the sun and space."
Education to nurture the interests of young people in space exploration is an important component of the exhibits and activities presented by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the World Space Congress. To inspire young people, NASA astronauts Dan Bursch and Jim Voss, two recent residents of the International Space Station, will give keynote addresses.
On Friday, the Space Rocks! KidsFest at the University of Houston includes the Robotics Invitational with teams from all over the United States participating in an invitational robotics competition. Kids can design their own space station, and explore Wright brothers' gliders, the vacuum of space, prism optics, inclined planes, rockets, tornados, gyroscopes, wind tunnels, Bernoulli's principle, a Van de Graaff generator, bubbles, angular momentum, space based math learning games, and videos.
There will be eight interactive distance learning webcast and chat events hosted directly from the Congress. For the full schedule of educational events log on to: http://www.aiaa.org/WSC2002/special_educ.cfm
-------- un
U.N. Report
October 14, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021014-99901501.htm
Off to Mongolia
The Security Council is preoccupied by the stalled Iraq resolution that will return U.N. weapons inspectors to Baghdad and that has sharply divided the council along familiar fault lines.
If the inspectors are, as chief Hans Blix says, to return by the end of the month, the five permanent members of the council are likely to have to draft a resolution by the end of the week, and approve it before the end of the following week.
There is no shortage of advice available to key council members, but one person who won't be doing so is Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Mr. Annan, who has carefully deferred to the council on difficult matters while maintaining close contact with the governments involved, including Baghdad, appears to have been sent packing for the next two weeks.
He left Saturday for a two-week visit to China and Central Asia, a trip he tried to postpone before it was announced. But after Asian diplomats complained and the five permanent council members told him he could go, he did.
"Obviously, he discussed [it] with the P5 and they told him to go," said a U.N. official, using insider code for the permanent members - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. "If he's needed, he'll come back."
Mr. Annan arrived in Beijing yesterday for a four-day visit, to be followed by stops in Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Although China holds a veto in the council, it is not considered a key player on the Iraq issue. U.N. officials stressed that Mr. Annan tries to visit the P5 governments annually, and this visit does not hinge on current events.
Mr. Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, defended the secretary-general's absence during such a tense period, saying that he is "scrupulously" not influencing the negotiations.
"Talking is not necessarily action, and not talking is not necessarily ducking," Mr. Eckhard said Friday in response to questions. "The secretary-general is not disengaged. His head is down, but his hand is in."
Mr. Annan infuriated the Clinton administration in 1998 when he returned from Baghdad with a new agreement to block surprise inspections of "presidential sites." Although that memorandum of understanding was later adopted by the Security Council, the United States and Britain now say the council and Iraq must explicitly reject it.
The question of when to authorize the inspectors to return - with or without approving the U.S. use of military force at the same time - is one that continues to bedevil council members.
An open debate on the subject has been scheduled for Wednesday, after the Non-Aligned Movement group of 130 developing nations demanded an open hearing. The group was moved, in large part, by the sidelining of the 10 elected council members.
"We believe that the proposed elements of such a resolution include issues that are of importance to the entire membership of the United Nations," said South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, who requested the meeting on behalf of the Non-Aligned members.
The Iraqi government last week issued vague pledges of cooperation to the two U.N. officials who are coordinating weapons inspections, but offered no explicit assurances in response to questions about access to sites, Iraqi officials and other concerns.
U.S. officials say this is setting the stage for another showdown, but other council members and even U.N. officials were reluctant to criticize or even comment on the two-page letter.
Tiniest mission ends
The Security Council agreed last week to wind up the tiny U.N. peacekeeping mission in Prevlaka, a move that will send 27 military observers home and reduce to 14 the number of active missions.
The U.N. Mission of Observers in Prevlaka was created in 1996 to police the peace on the Croatian peninsula south of Dubrovnik, which occupies a strategic location near the deep-water port of Montenegro.
It is the United Nations' smallest peacekeeping mission and draws its funds from an account shared with the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A true microcosm of the world body, its 27 observers come from 22 nations.
The mission found few significant disturbances and little tension in recent years.
It will wind down by Dec. 15 - or sooner if Croatia and Yugoslavia prefers.
•Betsy Pisik can be reached by e-mail at UNear@aol.com.
-------- us
Rumsfeld Aide Urges Big Weapons Cuts
Reuters
Tuesday, October 15, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25526-2002Oct14?language=printer
A top aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is proposing cuts in major weapons programs, including the Army's RAH-66 Comanche helicopter and its $4 billion Stryker combat vehicle, defense and industry officials said yesterday.
Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's director of defense program analysis and evaluation, is scheduled to present his proposal to trim more than $10 billion from the 2004-09 defense budget to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz later this week, the sources said.
Cambone's proposal, first reported in Inside the Army, also calls for the Army to procure fewer than half its planned 1,213 Comanche helicopters.
----
Camp Commander Relieved of Duties
By Amy Forliti
Associated Press Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; 7:14 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25241-2002Oct14?language=printer
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The commander of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, camp where suspected terrorists are being detained has been removed from his post, officials said.
Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus left the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay on Oct. 9, amid unconfirmed reports he had philosophical differences with those interrogating detainees. Navy officials say Baccus was removed only because his duties at the base were consolidated with those of a commander who outranked him.
Baccus has also been relieved of his duties with the Rhode Island National Guard. Its commander, Maj. Gen. Reginald Centracchio, told The Associated Press he relieved Baccus for various reasons that "culminated in my losing trust and confidence in him."
Lt. Col. Michael McNamara, a Guard spokesman, said Baccus wasn't keeping Rhode Island informed of the well-being of troops, even when officials asked for updates. For example, Baccus didn't notify Centracchio about the medical evacuation of a Guardsman, he said.
Centracchio said he has not talked to Baccus since the removal.
Baccus has an unpublished phone number in Rhode Island and could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.
He told Providence radio station WPRO-AM that "in no instance did I interfere with interrogations." He also said he has not been notified that he was relieved of his state duties.
Lt. Col. Bill Costello, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, Fla., which oversees Guantanamo Bay, said Baccus' departure was related to the merging of operations at the Naval base.
Baccus, 50, had been in charge of the imprisonment of detainees for about seven months, while Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey was overseeing interrogations. Dunlavey, who outranks Baccus, assumed command of the merged operations.
Costello could not confirm published reports - this past weekend in the New York Post and earlier in The Washington Times - that Baccus was undermining interrogators by being too nice to detainees, or that he had a conflict with Dunlavey.
He said Baccus did a good job overseeing the safety and security of detainees, who are accused of having links to the fallen Taliban regime of Afghanistan or the al-Qaida terrorist network.
----
Rumsfeld Favors Forceful Actions to Foil an Attack
October 14, 2002
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/international/14MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a personal set of guidelines for committing forces to combat, wrote that America's leaders must quickly judge when diplomacy has failed, then "act forcefully, early, during the precrisis period" to foil an attack on the nation.
If those actions fall short, America must be "willing and prepared to act decisively to use the force necessary to prevail, plus some," he wrote.
Mr. Rumsfeld's memorandum, written in March 2001 but updated as recently as this weekend, said the nation's leaders must never "dumb down" a mission to gain support from the public, Congress, the United Nations or allies.
In particular, he wrote, leaders must avoid "promising not to do things (i.e., not to use ground forces, not to bomb below 20,000 feet, not to risk U.S. lives, not to permit collateral damage, not to bomb during Ramadan, etc.)."
Such pledges simplify planning for a foe, he wrote, just as artificial deadlines for American withdrawal allow an enemy to "simply wait us out."
The Rumsfeld guidelines both echo and refine military thinking set down in past years by Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, and by Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first President Bush and secretary of state for the second.
For example, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote that American lives should be risked only when a clear national interest is at stake, when the mission is achievable, when all required resources are committed for the duration of combat - and only after the nation's leadership has marshaled public support.
But the Rumsfeld guidelines can be read as diverging from eight years of Clinton administration policy. During those years, the armed forces were assigned a number of missions - from Haiti to Somalia to Bosnia to Kosovo - that critics, often Republicans, said risked American lives for humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and democracy-building efforts that had less clear benefit for American national security.
An early draft of the memo was obtained over the summer, but under strict ground rules set by the person who provided the memo, it was meant for informational purposes only and could not be published. Repeated requests for Mr. Rumsfeld to discuss his thinking were made in the intervening months, and he agreed this weekend to provide the current version of his guidelines.
The two-page memorandum said that before committing military forces, the nation must consider how it might affect American interests around the world "if we prevail, if we fail, or if we decide not to act."
"Just as the risks of taking action must be carefully considered, so, too, the risk of inaction needs to be weighed," he wrote. Shortly after being sworn in as defense secretary for President Bush, "I sat down and I said, `You better have a damn good reason if you're going to put somebody's life at risk. What ought we be thinking about?' " Mr. Rumsfeld said in an interview this weekend. "So I started writing."
Mr. Rumsfeld regularly reviews the memo, he said. "I pick it up and read it every couple of months when something comes up." He said the memo shaped his thinking for the war in Afghanistan and today is guiding his advice to Mr. Bush as the administration ponders war with Iraq.
One of the memo's passages on public confidence rings loudly at a time when President Bush is moving to use a vote in Congress supporting an attack on Iraq as leverage to push for a tough United Nations resolution forcing President Saddam Hussein to disarm.
"If public support is weak at the outset, U.S. leadership must be willing to invest the political capital to marshal support to sustain the effort for whatever period of time may be required," Mr. Rumsfeld wrote. "If there is a risk of casualties, that fact should be acknowledged at the outset, rather than allowing the public to believe an engagement can be executed antiseptically, on the cheap, with few casualties."
A senior Defense Department official said that in releasing the memo, Mr. Rumsfeld was responding at least in part to urgings from his civilian and military advisers, who said the public should have insight into the thinking of President Bush's principal adviser on national defense as the nation girds for possible war with Iraq.
"This is how the senior civilian in the Department of Defense is thinking before Pfc. Pace goes in harm's way," said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "This document really makes you feel very, very comfortable and very good that these are `tick points' that he's using for those kinds of decisions."
The guidelines do not represent official policy that has passed through the national security process, although Mr. Rumsfeld has shared the memo with a small circle, including President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, General Pace, and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The memo is thought to be the first public restatement by a defense secretary of guidelines for the use of force since the Reagan administration, when Mr. Weinberger similarly defined when to use combat forces.
In a November 1984 speech, Mr. Weinberger said the American military should only be sent into action when a vital national interest was at stake, when decisive force was brought to bear in a wholehearted effort to win, and when support from Congress and the public was reasonably assured.
At the time, that message was seen as a counterpoint to Secretary of State George P. Shultz and his senior diplomats, who were said to argue that diplomacy would suffer if the threat of military action could not be used for a far broader range of issues that might not involve supreme national interest.
The doctrine was later restated by Secretary Powell when he was chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. He argued that when a clear national interest had been defined - and if the objective could be achieved through combat - then overwhelming military force should be deployed.
--------
In Rumsfeld's Words: Guidelines for Committing Forces
October 14, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/international/14MTEX-WEB.html
Following is the text of a memorandum, "Guidelines to be Considered When Committing U.S. Forces," written by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumseld in March 2001 and revised as recently as this weekend. This version was provided by the Department of Defense.
Is the proposed action truly necessary?
A Good Reason: If U.S. lives are going to be put at risk, whatever is proposed to be done must be in the U.S. national interest. If people could be killed, ours or others, the U.S. must have a darn good reason.
Diplomacy: All instruments of national power should be engaged before resorting to force, and they should stay involved once force is employed.
Basis for the Action: In fashioning a clear statement of the underpinning for the action, avoid arguments of convenience. They can be useful at the outset to gain support, but they will be deadly later. Just as the risks of taking action must be carefully considered, so, too, the risk of inaction needs to be weighed.
Is the proposed action achievable?
Achievable: When the U.S. commits force, the task should be achievable _ at acceptable risk. It must be something the U.S. is capable of accomplishing. We need to understand our limitations. The record is clear; there are some things the U.S. simply cannot accomplish.
Clear Goals: To the extent possible, there should be clear, well-considered and well-understood goals as to the purpose of the engagement and what would constitute success, so we can know when we have achieved our goals. To those who would change what is falls the responsibility of helping provide something better. It is important to understand that responsibility and accept it.
Command Structure: The command structure should be clear, not complex _ not a collective command structure where a committee makes decisions. If the U.S. needs or prefers a coalition to achieve its goals, which it most often will, we should have a clear understanding with coalition partners that they will do whatever might be needed to achieve the agreed goals. Avoid trying so hard to persuade others to join a coalition that we compromise on our goals or jeopardize the command structure. Generally, the mission will determine the coalition; the coalition should not determine the mission.
Is it worth it?
Lives at Risk: If an engagement is worth doing, the U.S. and coalition partners should be willing to put lives at risk.
Resources: The military capabilities needed to achieve the agreed goals must be available and not committed or subject to call elsewhere halfway through the engagement. Even with a broad coalition, the U.S. cannot do everything everywhere at once.
Public Support: If public support is weak at the outset, U.S. leadership must be willing to invest the political capital to marshal support to sustain the effort for whatever period of time may be required. If there is a risk of casualties, that fact should be acknowledged at the outset, rather than allowing the public to believe an engagement can be executed antiseptically, on the cheap, with few casualties.
Impact Elsewhere: Before committing to an engagement, consider the implications of the decision for the U.S. in other parts of the world _ if we prevail, if we fail, or if we decide not to act. U.S. actions or inactions in one region are read around the world and contribute favorably or unfavorably to the U.S. deterrent and influence. Think through the precedent that a proposed action, or inaction, would establish.
If there is to be action
Act Early: If it is worth doing, U.S. leadership should make a judgment as to when diplomacy has failed and act forcefully, early, during the pre-crisis period, to try to alter the behavior of others and to prevent the conflict. If that fails, be willing and prepared to act decisively to use the force necessary to prevail, plus some.
Unrestricted Options: In working to fashion a coalition or trying to persuade Congress, the public, the U.N., or other countries to support an action, the National Command Authorities must not dumb down what is needed by promising not to do things (i.e., not to use ground forces, not to bomb below 20,000 feet, not to risk U.S. lives, not to permit collateral damage, not to bomb during Ramadan, etc.). That may simplify the task for the enemy and make our task more difficult. Leadership should not set arbitrary deadlines as to when the U.S. will disengage, or the enemy can simply wait us out.
Finally
Honesty: U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. We must not make the effort sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become. Preserving U.S. credibility requires that we promise less, or no more, than we are sure we can deliver. It is a great deal easier to get into something than it is to get out of it!
--------
U.S. Quietly Sends Forces to Gulf
October 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Gulf-Buildup.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is preparing and positioning U.S. forces in ways that suggest they soon will be able to move swiftly against the Iraqi regime, although President Bush says war is neither imminent nor inevitable.
Two aircraft carrier battle groups, each with about 10,000 sailors and marines, are within striking distance of Iraq and two more could join them by year's end. The Navy has accelerated training schedules for other warships.
The USS Lincoln arrived last month in the Gulf, and the USS George Washington, which had been on Gulf patrol, has shifted to the Mediterranean. The Lincoln has on board the first F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters jets to be deployed abroad. They have longer range and newer arms than the older F/A-18 Hornets.
The USS Harry S. Truman, based in Norfolk, Va., is due to begin a six-month deployment in early December, relieving the George Washington, and the San Diego-based USS Constellation is due to deploy near year's end.
One of the most significant signs of preparation is the decision by Gen. Tommy Franks, who would run any war with Iraq, to move his battle staff in November to a newly outfitted command post in Qatar, in the central Persian Gulf.
In addition, the battle staffs of the Army's V Corps and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force are being moved to Kuwait, officials disclosed this weekend. They would coordinate the ground element of an invasion.
The Navy already has its 5th Fleet headquarters in the Persian Gulf and the Air Force has warplanes and a command post in Saudi Arabia, although it is problematic whether the Saudis will allow their use in an invasion of Iraq.
The United States also has warplanes and troops in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Turkey and in Central Asia, but, like Saudi Arabia, it's not clear whether the Pentagon has completed arrangements for using bases in those countries for an offensive.
Most of the recent movement of U.S. land forces to the Persian Gulf area has been for routine training exercises, but they could shift to a war footing on short notice if Bush decides to attack Iraq.
Franks has said the shift next month to Qatar is simply a test of Central Command's ability to move the battle staff to al-Udeid air base and to command a simulated war from a new set of deployable headquarters buildings. In a recent AP interview, he said it was uncertain whether he and the battle staff will move back to Central Command's permanent headquarters in Florida when the exercise is completed in December.
``This just happens to be a very good time, a very good place and a very good way'' to do the exercise, he said.
The timing coincides with other exercises. For example, about 1,400 U.S. special operations forces began an exercise, dubbed Early Victor '02, in Jordan on Oct. 6. They are training with Jordanian, Omani and Kuwait troops in the kind of unconventional warfare techniques -- such as operating behind enemy lines -- that likely would be important in any war against Iraq.
The Pentagon has not announced the exercise in Jordan, which may be more sensitive than similar sessions held over the past decade because of news reports that Pentagon war planners have considered Jordan a potential launch point for a U.S. invasion force. Jordan's public position is that it does not want to become involved in a war against Iraq and has pressed Iraq to accept U.N. weapons inspections.
More than 1,000 Marines from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit have finished an exercise, dubbed ``Eager Mace '02,'' in Kuwait. One Marine was killed and another wounded last week when two men identified by the Kuwaiti government as Kuwaiti civilians opened fire; other Marines then shot and killed the assailants.
The Army has kept a contingent of 2,000 soldiers in a permanent rotation at Camp Doha in Kuwait since the early 1990s, and it has added several thousand more over the past year. U.S. Air Force planes also are based in Kuwait, and the Air Force is considering moving B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
If the Pentagon began a full-scale buildup in preparation for war, it would need to mobilize many more forces than it has moved thus far, plus it likely would be compelled to call up tens of thousands of reservists. The Army also likely would send Patriot air defense weapons to countries in the region such as Turkey.
The Pentagon is accelerating vaccinations of troops against anthrax -- an infectious, often fatal disease. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is expected to order limited troop vaccinations against smallpox.
The Navy has long maintained a prominent presence in the Gulf. Its 5th Fleet headquarters is based in Bahrain, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Carrier-based fighters have helped enforce a ``no fly'' zone over southern Iraq.
Carrier battle groups include not only a variety of aircraft -- fighter-bombers, electronic jammers, reconnaissance, search-and-rescue and others -- but also surface ships and submarines armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles.
``For the first time in a number of years we have the capability to surge a significant portion of our force,'' Vice Adm. Charles Moore, the Navy's chief of fleet readiness, said last week. He did not mention Iraq but made clear he believes the naval fleet is prepared to expand the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan.
On the Net:
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil
Central Command: http://www.centcom.mil
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Bullets baloney
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 14, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021014-10870808.htm
Clarence Page is quick to place blame on the National Rifle Association for the lack of a national database of ballistics information on firearms ("'Fingerprint' bullets?" Commentary, Friday). The reality, however, is that lawmakers at the federal and state levels acknowledge the total lack of evidence that such a system would reduce violent crime and have been unwilling to invest the billions of dollars it would waste.
It is well-established that the majority of firearms used in criminal activity (perhaps even the Washington-area's sniper killings) are obtained illegally. Thus, a ballistics database would be useless for tracking their current status.
A database could only be applied to new guns, unless a national firearms registry were instituted that would require all firearms owners to submit their firearms for "fingerprinting." Proponents usually fail to count the gigantic cost of such a measure, as seen by Canada's recently instituted firearms registry program.
Canadian politicians initially promised that their national firearms registry would cost less than $20 million and would drastically reduce firearm crime. The true cost of the program has soared to more than $1 billion, and an estimated 30 percent of firearms in Canada have not been registered due to noncompliance - and gun crime is still on the rise in Canada.
If we extrapolate the cost of Canada's system to fit the United States, such a program would exceed $100 billion, and we could reasonably assume that more than 100 million firearms would remain unregistered. In short, I wish Mr. Page would explain to readers how a national firearms ballistics database makes sense. After all, it won't match a shooter with a weapon, it will cost the taxpayer more than $100 billion, it would leave at least 100 million illegal firearms untested, and there is no data whatsoever in any nations with such registries that these measures will reduce crime. International experience shows that stringent gun-control measures are more likely to actually increase violent crime.
Alan Gottlieb, the gun-rights advocate whom Mr. Page quoted, was only partially right when he said that "ballistics-fingerprint proponents are not gun experts." Based upon Mr. Page's own analysis, they are neither crime-control nor economic experts, either.
RICK SCHWARTZ
Crown Point, Ind.
-------- death penalty
Illinois Moves to Center of Death Penalty Debate
October 14, 2002
New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/national/14CLEM.html
CHICAGO, Oct. 13 - It has been 25 years since Illinois re-established the death penalty. It has been almost three since exonerations based on DNA evidence prompted Gov. George Ryan to halt executions. Six months have passed since a commission called for a sweeping overhaul of the state's capital punishment system. Advertisement Click Here
Now, the national debate over the death penalty returns to the stage here, with an unprecedented set of clemency hearings for nearly all 158 prisoners on Illinois' death row scheduled to begin Tuesday.
Experts on false confessions, torture, mental retardation and witness identification are being flown in from California, New Mexico and Texas. Some 300 lawyers have prepared briefs.
Hundreds of relatives of murder victims plan to pack hearing rooms here and in Springfield, the capital. Governor Ryan, who ordered the hearings as he considers a blanket commutation to life in prison for all of the condemned, will sit in.
On trial are not just the people convicted of the murders, but the criminal justice system itself.
"Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, of course, is the question of proportionality and fairness of the sentencing process," said Rob Warden, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, which is helping coordinate the petitions for clemency. "Isn't it better that we let 10 absolutely guilty men who committed horrible crimes spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than risk one, a single execution of an innocent person?"
But Richard A. Devine, the Cook County state's attorney, says the mass hearings turn the deliberative justice system into a sham and are an affront not only to the surviving relatives, but also to police officers, prosecutors, witnesses, state legislators and even voters.
"These are the worst of the worst," Mr. Devine said of the 142 convicted killers who will ask the Prisoner Review Board for mercy over the next two weeks. "Many of these individuals are the personification of evil. They richly deserve the penalty they have received under due process of law."
Lawyers asking for clemency have raised a broad-based critique of the capital punishment system here, pointing out in each brief which of the changes recommended by the Ryan commission would invalidate their clients' death sentences. In every case, they argue that defendants must be spared because they did not have the benefit of new State Supreme Court rules requiring better-qualified defense counsel in capital cases. Prosecutors, on the other hand, are trying to focus on the particulars of each case.
Governor Ryan is most likely to commute the sentences of those who would not be eligible for the death penalty under the 85 changes proposed by the bipartisan commission, many of which he hopes to enact before he leaves office in January. If he were to clear death row with a mass reprieve, he would become the fourth modern governor to do so. Gov. Lee Cruce of Oklahoma spared 22 men before leaving office in 1915; Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas commuted 15 death sentences in 1970; and Gov. Toney Anaya of New Mexico granted clemency to 5 convicts in 1986.
The Illinois Prisoner Review Board typically hears about 300 clemency petitions a year in quarterly meetings; this year, it has 350 cases to process just this month. The 14 members will be split into four panels hearing cases simultaneously. They plan to make confidential recommendations next month to the governor, who may commute sentences or pardon defendants unilaterally.
Last month, Attorney General Jim Ryan, the Republican nominee for governor, filed a lawsuit to block the hearings, claiming they were too rushed. That suit was dismissed last week.
Cook County prosecutors are handling 96 of the 142 clemency cases (some on death row are not having hearings because they did not sign petitions requesting them or because their cases are still in litigation). Of those, 18 defendants say they are innocent; 23 say they had ineffective lawyers; 21 contend they should be spared because they are mentally retarded; and 9 others say they are mentally ill.
Ten of the Cook County prisoners say their confessions were coerced, five by a former police lieutenant fired in 1993 for torturing suspects. Three were convicted based on accomplice testimony, two on the word of a jailhouse informant and two others because of a single witness - all things that would be prohibited under the Ryan commission recommendations.
"No matter how persuasive the evidence appears, there is always, there is inevitably, an element of doubt," said Mr. Warden of Northwestern. "Even if you were to take a handful of these cases and say there is no doubt in these cases, where do you draw the line? We just submit there is no place to draw the line."
To the chorus of critics that sees the capital punishment system as hopelessly broken and unfair, Mr. Devine, who was elected Chicago's top prosecutor in 1996, would like to introduce Lawrence Jackson.
Mr. Jackson, 39, was convicted of the 1986 killings of a 4-year-old girl, her mother and two of her mother's friends, after the testimony of her 6-year-old sister, who survived the attack despite 48 stab wounds. He had been arrested three times before, including once on a weapons charge. Once, after a sentencing hearing, Mr. Jackson slashed the face of a sheriff's deputy with a sharpened paper clip.
"He is just a machine that will hurt other innocent people, and he'll keep doing it," said Mr. Devine, who decided to handle the case personally in part because he met the surviving child when she received a scholarship to Purdue University a few years ago. "He's not rehabilitated, he would never be rehabilitated, and he has no interest in being rehabilitated or showing remorse or anything."
About 175 of Mr. Devine's 930 prosecutors, in teams of two or three, are working on the clemency hearings. Many of them tried the cases or handled the defendants' appeals, working thousands of hours to put them on death row and are now laboring to keep them there. They met en masse with victims' relatives last month.
"He killed three guys; he killed two cops; he killed two people," John Gorman, the spokesman for the office, said the other day as he flipped through the cases in one of four big boxes of briefs. One man starved his 16-month-old daughter to death. "They shouldn't kill this guy," Mr. Gorman said, "they should tear his fingernails off one at a time."
Mr. Devine, whose office is adorned with courtroom sketches of his appearances before the Illinois and United States Supreme Courts, said that while preparing responses to the extraordinary number of clemency petitions has been a challenge for his office, his real concern is that the exercise is useless and that Governor Ryan plans to clear death row regardless of the review board's recommendations.
"You should look at the merits of the case," Mr. Devine said. "If there's a fair trial, the appeals were handled appropriately, that's what you should be looking at, not some reforms you came up with 15 years later."
-------- FOIA
Researchers Barred From U.S. Papers
October 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Attacks-Document-Access.html
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Some scientists are running into a major post-Sept. 11 stumbling block: Federal restrictions have eliminated access to information vital to their studies.
The government has cut Internet links, stripped information from agency Web sites and even required federal librarians to destroy a CD-ROM on public water supplies. Researchers worry that the rush to protect national security will hurt their efforts and the public.
``It can be so expensive to engage in a public dialogue under these conditions of secrecy,'' said Greg Mello, head of the environmental watchdog group Los Alamos Study Group.
The White House in March provided government agencies with a guide to help them review information that could be ``misused to harm the security of our nation and the safety of our people.''
The memo was intended to remind agencies to examine security issues regarding government documents, said Laura Kimberly, associate director for policy with the federal Information Security Oversight Office.
``If there was a question about whether something should be declassified or not before Sept. 11 probably the attitude was to declassify,'' Kimberly said. ``Now there's a more conservative approach.''
The result, say experts, has been an information clampdown.
For example, University of Michigan researchers lost access to an Environmental Protection Agency database with information vital to their three-year study of hazardous waste facilities.
``We hadn't counted on spending time on having to cajole for publicly available information,'' said Robin Saha, one of the researchers. He said the EPA added new query tools, but the information comes up in a different format.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, says unclassified technical reports have been yanked from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Web site.
``It either creates unnecessary labor to identify and track down a copy of the missing document or it yields an inferior or incomplete product,'' Aftergood said of the new restrictions.
The government watchdog group OMB Watch has sent Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies asking what information was removed from Web sites because of the terrorist attacks.
``Because the pressure is off to deal with this, they've kind of done this hatchet job on their Web sites and are making no real effort to repair them,'' said Sean Moulton, a policy analyst for the group.
A year ago, government librarians received a letter telling them to destroy copies of a U.S. Geological Survey CD-ROM about public water resources. The agency decided the CD-ROM had information that could be used to damage the nation's water supply, said Katherine Lins, science adviser for water information at the Geological Survey.
The request was the only one depository libraries received to take information off the shelves over security concerns. But librarians also fear a chilling effect on government Web sites.
``It's sort of the national history that's being withdrawn,'' said Andrea Sevetson, former head of government information at the University of California at Berkeley. She fears people won't post information at government Web sites ``because they don't want to get in trouble.''
On the Net:
Information Security Oversight Office: http://www.archives.gov/isoo
OMB Watch: http://www.ombwatch.org
-------- terrorism
Hundreds missing in Bali bombings
Indonesia's 'worst act of terrorism'
Monday, October 14, 2002
CNN News
http://asia.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/10/13/bali.blast.missing/index.html
KUTA, Indonesia (CNN) --The death toll from the Bali nightclub bombing -- most recently confirmed at 187 -- is expected to rise after authorities said there were still more than 200 people missing.
At least another 300 people were injured by the blasts -- believed to be the work of terrorists -- which ripped through two Bali nightclubs.
A spokesman for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs told media there were 13 Australians dead, 110 injured and a further 220 unaccounted for.
Some of the most seriously injured were flown overnight to Royal Darwin Hospital by the Australian air force.
Officials and volunteers in Bali say the majority of foreigners wounded in the blasts had either been evacuated from Indonesia or were being discharged from hospital, Reuters news agency reports. (Injured evacuated)
Identification of the dead was difficult because of serious burn injuries.
The majority of the dead and wounded were Australians, but Indonesian, German, French, British and Americans also were among the casualties. Two Americans and five Britons were among the confirmed dead.
Government officials Sunday called attacks the work of terrorists, while U.S. and regional intelligence officials linked the bombings to the al Qaeda terror network.
The blasts were "the worst act of terrorism in the country's history," according to Indonesian police Chief Da'e Bakhtiar.
Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri arrived Sunday in Bali, visiting the injured before heading to the blast scene. She returned to Jakarta on Sunday night, where she was expected to convene an emergency Cabinet session.
President Bush offered U.S. assistance to the Indonesian government and said the bombings were designed to "create terror and chaos."
"On behalf of the people of the United States, I condemn this heinous act," Bush said in a statement. "I offer our heartfelt condolences to the families of all the murder victims from numerous countries and our wish for the swift and complete recovery of those injured in this attack." (Bush condemns attacks)
According to witnesses, an explosion occurred at one nightclub. As people streamed out, another, larger blast tore through the Sari Club, which caters to international visitors. (Gallery: Bali's nightmare)
"There was just a procession of people covered in blood, covered in glass, glass embedded in people, people's backs which have obviously been on fire," said witness Richard Poore. "It was just horrible."
An official with the American Chamber of Commerce said the explosion rattled windows at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) away.
The blasts and subsequent fire destroyed an entire city block, said Robert Koster, a journalist on the scene. It appeared the second explosion may have been caused by a car bomb, he said.
Another explosion occurred around the same time near the U.S. consular office on the island. There was no immediate report of casualties. Region's seventh bombing in three weeks
U.S. and Asian intelligence authorities said they had linked the attacks to the al Qaeda terrorist network in Southeast Asia because they bear the hallmarks of the terrorist group:
- Coordinated, simultaneous bombings, a tactic outlined in an al Qaeda training manual.
- Attention to timing: The blasts took place two years after the terrorist attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 others in the Gulf of Aden.
- Aiming at an economic target, a recent switch in al Qaeda tactics. Tourism is Indonesia's third-largest source of income.
- A likely role by Jemaah Islamiah, a radical Islamic group linked to al Qaeda which experts say is the only one in the region with the capability to coordinate such attacks.
It is the seventh major bombing in the region in the last three weeks. They include an explosion Saturday outside the Philippine consulate in Manado, Indonesia, a grenade attack outside a U.S. Embassy warehouse in Jakarta and a blast at a bar in the southern Philippines that killed one U.S. Marine and three Filipinos.
Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which authorities suspect is al Qaeda's network in Southeast Asia, is blamed for the September 23 grenade explosion near the U.S. Embassy warehouse as well as several other bombing attacks in Southeast Asia.
Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Baasyir, accused by Washington of being the spiritual leader of JI, has denied any involvement in the Bali explosions, instead blaming "foreign parties" including the United States for the attack.
Speaking in the Central Javanese city of Solo on Sunday, Baasyir said it was "highly possible" that America was behind the blast to strengthen its claim that Indonesia was a hotbed of terrorism. (Cleric denies involvement)
Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said "preliminary indications" suggested that an Islamic radical group could be behind the blasts.
"We have been very concerned about terrorist organizations operating in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, organizations such as Jemaah Islamiah, and there are at least preliminary indications that one of those types of organizations is behind this," Downer said.
Australia is sending an investigative team to work with Indonesian authorities to find out who was behind the attack, Downer said.
Many Australians among victims
Friends and family of the victims flooded the local hospital in Bali on Sunday, trying to find any information about the status of their loved ones. Hospital officials appealed for volunteers to help care for victims with serious burns.
Just after midnight Monday in Sydney (1400 GMT, 1000 EDT Sunday), the first of four Royal Australian Air Force C-130 transports touched down in Darwin, Australia, carrying 27 Australians wounded in the back-to-back blasts.
Medical facilities were overwhelmed in Bali, causing concerns in Australia about the other nation's ability to provide treatment.
Extra flights were scheduled to ferry Australians and other tourists to Australia.
Many football and rugby players from Australia were in the Bali nightclub at the time of the explosion.
"At this point in time we have seven unaccounted for," said Brian Andersen of Australia's Kingsley Football Club. "We found one this morning in the hospital with burns, but we can't get any other information regarding the other seven at this stage." 'Despicable act of terrorism'
Ralph Boyce, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, called the attacks "a despicable act of terrorism, the likes of which Indonesia has never seen."
"No cause or aspiration justifies the taking innocent life," Boyce said in a statement. "The United States has offered all appropriate assistance to the government of Indonesia to see that those responsible for this cowardly act face justice."
Hospital sources said that one American and five Britons were among the dead.
The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta is "currently re-evaluating the extent of its presence in Indonesia," said a statement posted on its Web site Sunday. "Americans visiting or residing in Indonesia are advised to examine the necessity of continuing to remain in Indonesia."
The United States had warned it was considering evacuating nonessential government personnel if Indonesian authorities did not do more to battle terrorism within its borders, U.S. sources in Indonesia and Washington said.
On Thursday, the U.S. State Department warned posts abroad about the possibility of an attack by Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, alerting all posts to be at the "highest level of vigilance," a senior State Department official said. (Indonesia probes al Qaeda links)
The State Department has had a travel warning in effect for Indonesia for more than a year, but Bali had been widely considered insulated from the troubles plaguing much of the rest of the archipelago.
-- CNN Correspondents Maria Ressa, Atika Shubert, journalist Robert Koster and White House Correspondent Kelly Wallace contributed to this report.
----
Bombing in Bali Seen as Opening New Front in Fight on Terror
October 14, 2002
New York Times
By RAYMOND BONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/international/14BOMB.html
The blast that killed nearly 200 people on the Indonesian resort island of Bali this weekend is a different type of terrorism from what the Bush administration has campaigned against, and will open a new geographic front in that campaign, Western officials said yesterday.
The target was not an American embassy, military outpost or financial institution that would represent American power, of the sort that terrorists have attacked in the past. Rather, it was a nightclub whose revelers were mostly Europeans and Australians; indeed, Indonesians were often turned away at the door.
President Bush called the attack "heinous," and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia said it was "an act of barbarity."
The State Department ordered all dependents of American diplomats in Indonesia to leave the country, along with all nonessential personnel, a department official said last night.
The attack puts intense pressure on the Indonesian government to face the terrorist threat at home more seriously, Western officials said.
For months, American and Singaporean officials have been saying Al Qaeda cells were hiding in Indonesia, a Muslim nation with porous borders and weak law enforcement. The attack confirms those warnings, which the Indonesian government has until now ignored, Western officials said.
Prime Minister Howard of Australia said, "We would like to see a maximum effort on the part of the Indonesian government to deal with the terrorist problem within their own borders." He added, "It's been a problem for a long time."
The attack killed mostly foreigners, and an early tally of the dead who have been identified included at least 15 Australians, 3 Singaporeans, 2 Britons, several others from elsewhere in Europe and one Ecuadorean. Two Americans were reported to be among the dead, and three Americans were wounded.
The outpouring of condemnation of the attack and sympathy for the victims echoes that which followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon 13 months ago.
"This will be the event that changes Indonesia's perception of terrorism like 9/11 did ours," a senior Bush administration official said.
With cold calculation and meticulous planning, including reconnaissance, the bombers chose an unusual target, one that was certain to sow fear far beyond Bali, said a Western security analyst in Jakarta.
It was on a faraway island, primarily populated by Hindus, with a reputation for tranquillity, and popular as a resort with backpackers and the wealthy alike.
It was one of the deadliest attacks on civilians anywhere in the world in the last decade, one that seemed intended to undercut feelings of safety even in a remote enclave.
The response will be a renewed determination against international terrorism, several world leaders made clear yesterday. The search for Al Qaeda operatives so far has been focused in Pakistan, and to a lesser degree in Yemen, with the cooperation of those governments.
"There is a definite terrorist link here," Senator Richard C. Shelby, senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said yesterday. He was briefed Sunday morning by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
Speaking on the ABC News program "This Week," Mr. Shelby said: "We don't know all the facts. Is it directly Al Qaeda? Is it an affiliated group?"
"I believe that this is the beginning of a lot more that we're going to see," he added.
In Indonesia, the United States Embassy was bracing for more attacks, and other governments were responding similarly, the Western security analyst said.
Although lacking any immediate evidence, American and Australian officials concluded that based on earlier intelligence gathering and the nature of the blast, the bombing was probably the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, a regional fundamentalist Islamic organization based in Indonesia and headed by Abu Bakar Bashir. Many of the group's members have trained at Al Qaeda camps in Indonesia, they said.
"As far as I'm concerned this is Jemaah Islamiyah, in some form," said the security analyst, who has worked in Indonesia for many years.
"A lot of planning went into this, into the preparations and execution," he said. "This is not the work of some weirdo radical group."
"This bomb was beyond the expertise of Indonesian terrorists working alone," he said. The blast compared in magnitude to the attack on two American Embassies in Africa in 1998, he said.
Singaporean intelligence officials said in a recent interview that there were not many explosives experts who knew how to make and detonate bombs capable of destroying large buildings, and that Jemaah Islamiyah had at least two experts who had been trained at Al Qaeda camps.
Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, said Australia had been worried about an attack on Australians in Indonesia since Jemaah Islamiyah plotted to blow up the Australian Embassy in Singapore in December. That plot that was foiled when the Singaporean authorities rounded up a score of suspected members of the group.
He added that Jemaah Islamiyah had "financial as well as personnel links to Al Qaeda."
When Australian troops were in East Timor, which is predominately Christian, in support of that country's transition to independence from Indonesia, Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, publicly accused Australia of being on a crusade to break up Muslim Indonesia.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain said there was "no question this is a terrorist outrage." The British government advised its citizens to stay away from Bali and offered assistance to the Indonesian president, Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In an open letter to her, the French president, Jacques Chirac, offered to provide "all possible assistance to identify the perpetrators of these ignoble deeds and their commanders, and to bring them before justice."
The pressure will now be on Mrs. Megawati to cooperate with other governments and to crack down on the Islamist fundamentalists at home, to arrest Mr. Bashir and to mount a serious search for Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who Singaporean intelligence says is the operational head of Jemaah Islamiyah.
Mr. Hambali has pledged personal fealty to Mr. bin Laden, a senior Singaporean intelligence official said in a recent interview. After the suspected Jemaah Islamiyah members were arrested in Singapore in December, Mr. Hambali "was so angry that he vowed revenge," the official said.
Mr. Hambali, an Indonesian national who lived and operated in Malaysia alongside Mr. Bashir, has not been seen since December. Singaporean officials believe that he has been hiding in Indonesia, a view shared by American officials, though with somewhat less certitude.
The attack will strengthen those in Mrs. Megawati's government who want to take a stronger stand on terrorism and against Mr. Bashir, Western officials said. But she will still have to face her vice president, Hamzah Haz, and his allies who have been open admirers of Mr. Bashir.
----
Tourists flee Bali as death toll hits 190
By Irwan Firdaus
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 14, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021014-77881551.htm
BALI, Indonesia - Terrified tourists yesterday tried to flee this island paradise as the death toll from a pair of bombings climbed to 190 and fears grew that al Qaeda has taken its terror campaign to the world's largest Muslim country.
World leaders called for renewed efforts in the war on terrorism after the attack, which killed vacationers from Australia, Germany, Canada, Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and South Africa.
Three Americans were among the more than 300 people injured, but authorities said most of the remains had not yet been identified.
No one claimed responsibility for the bombings, the worst terrorist attack in Indonesia's history. But suspicion turned to al Qaeda and an affiliated group, Jemaah Islamiyah, which wants to establish a pan-Islamic state across Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines. It is accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and other embassies in Singapore.
In Denpasar, Bali's main city, the airport was thronged by stunned travelers cutting short their vacations and desperate to go home after the most terrifying night of their lives.
Crowds camped out near a McDonald's, working their mobile phones to make hard-to-get airline bookings. Many spent the night on the beach, terrified after the blasts to go near built-up areas.
The Australian air force set up a massive evacuation operation to bring home survivors for medical treatment. The first flight arrived yesterday in the northern city of Darwin, carrying 15 persons identified as American, Australian and Canadian.
President Bush condemned the attack as "a cowardly act designed to create terror and chaos" and offered U.S. help in finding the perpetrators. "The world must confront this global menace, terrorism," he said.
The State Department late yesterday urged all U.S. citizens in Indonesia to leave the country and ordered the departure of nonemergency U.S. government personnel from there. The department also warned U.S. citizens to defer travel to Indonesia.
Officials from Australia, Britain, France and the European Union also offered to help investigate the bombings, which tore through a nightclub district on the island of Bali Saturday.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch supporter on the U.S.-led war on terrorism, said: "The war against terrorism must go on with unrelenting vigor and an unconditional commitment.
"It is not an occasion for hotheaded responses, but certainly not an occasion to imagine that if you roll yourself up into a little ball all these horrible things will go away," Mr. Howard told Australian television's Channel Nine.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw offered to send forensic and counterterrorism specialists to Indonesia, and French President Jacques Chirac said France would offer "all possible help to help identify the perpetrators of these vile acts and bring them to justice."
In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Mr. Straw called the attackers "the most evil and most perverted people who think that some political aim of theirs can be achieved by attacking mainly young people."
Russian President Vladimir Putin also called for more international cooperation against international terrorism.
"We should have only one conclusion: The vital necessity of an uncompromising, truly general struggle everywhere with this evil of the 21st century," he said in a condolence message to Mr. Howard.
The destruction began when a small homemade bomb exploded outside Paddy's Discotheque in the maze of clubs and bars on Kuta Beach, a popular haunt with young travelers. Shortly afterward, a huge blast from a bomb in a Toyota Kijang, a jeep-like vehicle, devastated the crowded Sari Club, a surfers' hangout 30 yards down the street.
A third, smaller bomb exploded outside the U.S. Consulate. No one was injured in that blast.
The second blast ripped into the open-air bar, triggering a massive burst of flames that officials said was caused by the explosion of gas cylinders used for cooking. The explosion collapsed the roof of the flimsy structure, trapping revelers in flaming wreckage. The explosions and fire damaged about 20 buildings and devastated much of the block.
Identification of the dead was slow, because some were burned beyond recognition.
American Amos Libby, 25, felt himself lifted off his feet as he walked by the Sari Club as the bomb detonated.
"All the buildings in the vicinity just collapsed, cars overturned and debris from the buildings fell on them," he said, without giving his hometown. "I have never seen anything so horrible. There were so many people, 18-to-20-year-olds, people in pieces all over the street."
President Megawati Sukarnoputri flew to Bali, a mostly Hindu island in a Muslim archipelago, and wept as she toured the wreckage. Asked about a possible link to al Qaeda, she said: "That will be continuously investigated so that this can be uncovered as soon as possible." She promised to cooperate with other nations to fight terror.
U.S. Ambassador Ralph Boyce said it was not possible yet to pin the Bali attack on al Qaeda, but noted that increasing evidence in recent weeks has confirmed that al Qaeda is present in Indonesia and reaching out to local extremists.
"In recent weeks, we have been able to put an end to a year of speculation as to whether al Qaeda might be in Indonesia, or relocating to Indonesia, or using Indonesia as a base of operations, after the fall of Afghanistan," Mr. Boyce said.
While its neighbors have arrested scores of militants from Jemaah Islamiyah, Jakarta has done little and denied that it is a haven for terrorists.
Several countries have pressed Indonesia to arrest Jemaah Islamiyah's suspected leader, Abu Bakar Bashir. But Indonesia says it has no evidence and Mr. Bashir has sympathizers in Mrs. Megawati's government.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Canadian Prairies to get three new ethanol plants
REUTERS CANADA:
October 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18164/story.htm
WINNIPEG, Manitoba - Saskatchewan will become Canada's largest ethanol producer with three 80-million liter (17.6 million gallon) plants built by Broe Cos. and the provincial government, premier Lorne Calvert said.
The first C$55-million plant is scheduled to open in the spring of 2004 in Belle Plaine, Saskatchewan, near the provincial capital of Regina. It will use 218,000 tonnes of wheat per year.
"For decades, Saskatchewan people have shared a dream that one day our agricultural products will no longer have to be shipped out of the province to be processed," Calvert said in a release.
Ethanol is a high-octane, water-free alcohol fuel made from converted plant starches seen to reduce carbon monoxide emissions.
"You have the raw materials and sit at the crossroads of the North American marketplace," said Broe official Dwight Johnson in a release. "Together we are going to build a world-class industry."
Johnson is president of Omnitrax, a short-line railway owned by Broe that operates in Western Canada.
Broe will be the majority owner of each plant, with a 60 percent share in the first plant. The Crown Investments Corp. of Saskatchewan will own 40 percent of the first plant. Community groups will also invest in the projects.
Announcements on the other two plants are expected early in the new year, Johnson said. They are planned for the Tisdale and Melville-Yorkton regions of the province.
The provincial government passed new ethanol laws in July, providing grants to offset fuel taxes on ethanol produced and used in Saskatchewan.
When the province produces enough ethanol, and as ethanol prices fall, the government will make it mandatory to use ethanol-blended gasoline.
The Manitoba government is considering a similar law.
----
German wind power market up 35 pct yr/yr January-September
REUTERS DENMARK:
October 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18151/story.htm
COPENHAGEN - Germany's wind power organisation Bundesverband Windenergie said last week the country had increased the number of installed wind turbines by an annual 35 percent in the first nine months of the year to record-high 1,889 megawatt.
Germany is by far the world's leading wind power nation with total 10,643 megawatt installed by end-September.
German privately owned wind turbine maker Enercon had 43 percent of the market in the first nine months, down from 46 percent by end-June, data showed.
Danish Vestas' market share grew to 14 percent from 11 percent, while GE Wind Energy had an unchanged slice of 14 percent.
----
EU firms join forces to make hydrogen dream work
REUTERS EU:
October 14, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18156/story.htm
BRUSSELS - European car and energy firms said they were joining forces to bring hydrogen-fuelled transport closer to reality.
Royal Dutch/Shell , DaimlerChrysler , Renault and 15 other companies joined a group founded by the European Commission to keep Europe's hydrogen firms on track with rivals in Japan and the United States.
"Compared with the United States and Japan, up to now we didn't really have a European programme," said Pierre Beuzit, vice-president of research at Renault.
"One company alone is not able to develop the technology. We need to work together," he said.
The Commission said the group's role would be to advise it on introducing hydrogen as a major source of electricity and the economic impact of making the change.
A Commission statement said EU firms' efforts to make hydrogen production viable and develop fuel cells to convert the gas into electricity were unstructured and underfunded, with 50-60 million euros ($49-59 million) of public funding a year.
U.S. government funding was about three times higher, with about 150 million euros going to the "Freedom Car" programme and 25-30 million euros to a smaller scheme each year.
DaimlerChrysler's head of environmental affairs Herbert Kohler said the EU firms had a clear expectation: "To have at a minimum what the U.S. guys have in their Freedom Car programme.
"The Japanese are doing similar things," he added.
Japanese firms receive four times more government funding for hydrogen research than EU companies, the Commission said.
Kohler said DaimlerChrysler, which unveiled its first electric vehicle almost 20 years ago and its fifth version earlier this year, was optimistic that the group would help to speed up the development of a hydrogen economy.
"Hopefully it will bring us to a situation in 2010 or 2012 when we can drive down the street in an electric car," he said.
Several firms said the group would enable them to agree on how to develop infrastructure needed for making and distributing hydrogen, allowing them to overcome a "chicken and egg" problem.
"Fuel cells can only prosper if there is an infrastructure and the infrastructure can only be built if fuel cells are credible," said Roberto Cordaro, president of Nuvera, a fuel cell firm with facilities in Massachusetts and Milan.
-------- energy
U.S. weans itself off oil from Mideast
By Timothy Burn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 14, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20021014-16777455.htm
The Bush administration is accelerating efforts to diversify America's sources of oil imports and reduce its dependence on the Middle East. The bid to strengthen ties with major producers like Russia and the Caspian Sea region has gained momentum as the United States prepares for war against Iraq.
While prospects dim for passage of President Bush's energy goals in Congress, including oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. officials are aggressively promoting more oil exploration and imports from around the world.
"What you're seeing now is all of the work we did last year come to fruition," said Robert Card, undersecretary of energy. "It took some time for us to get the momentum where we were involved in on-the-ground activities."
The effort gained a sense of urgency after the September 11 terrorist attacks, which for many showed that some of the world's major energy producers might not have America's best interests at heart.
The United States receives about 58 percent of the oil it consumes from imports. With domestic production waning, imports are expected to increase in the coming years.
Administration officials say the Bush energy policy also emphasizes conservation. Still, it is pursuing new oil partners, dispatching top officials across the globe to encourage more development.
"Every million barrels of oil counts," Mr. Card said. "We think it is vitally important, and there is a lot of oil production that hasn't been fully realized yet."
Some recent developments:
•Mr. Bush has reached out to Russian President Vladimir Putin to encourage the third-largest oil producer to boost development with the help of Western investment.
•The administration has promoted construction of a pipeline from the oil-rich Caspian Sea to the Black Sea that is expected to deliver up to 1 million barrels per day by 2005. After years of delays, the project began in September.
•Several administration officials, including Mr. Card and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have visited Africa in the past year to demonstrate U.S. interests in developing petroleum there.
The results of these efforts won't be apparent for a few years, but non-Middle East production, particularly in Russia and the Caspian Sea region, shows signs of increasing.
In the meantime, the United States and other nations are boosting their own reserves of petroleum to offset any price surges from a war with Iraq. The price of a barrel of oil has risen about $2 since July to around $28.50. Analysts warn that a war with Iraq could push oil costs over $30, perhaps higher, which would raise prices at gasoline pumps.
Saudi Arabia has vowed to release more of its oil into the world market to keep prices in check if a war chokes off Iraqi exports. Saudi Arabia evidently has increased production gradually.
The most hopeful signs for more production have come from the budding relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin. Building on cooperation from Mr. Putin in the war on terrorism, the two leaders in May signed a "joint communique" to encourage investment and development of Russia's vast oil fields.
The administration says increased Russian oil production could offset price quotas established by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Russia produces about 7 billion barrels of oil per day. Russia's oil industry has struggled under corruption and a lack of capital since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is eager to burnish its image and lure much-needed Western investment and technology.
"I think that the central focus should be Russia, and the way to get more oil on line from Russia is to get them to privatize their pipelines and to get Western investment involved," said James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency who now works for Booz Allen Hamilton, a Washington management consulting firm.
Skeptics counter that Russia never will produce enough petroleum to overtake Saudi Arabia at the top.
"There has been a lot of cheerleading by lawmakers, but right now Russia and the Caspian region are not providing much oil to the United States," said Fiona Hill, a fellow in the foreign policy studies program at the Brookings Institution.
Miss Hill and others in the petroleum industry say it will take several years and dramatic investment before Russian oil can be shipped directly to the United States in a cost-efficient manner.
Despite the challenges, both nations appear committed to forging a mutually beneficial relationship on energy matters.
Government officials and oil industry chiefs from Russia and the United States met last week in Houston to discuss the new relationship. At the meeting, the U.S. Export-Import Bank said it would underwrite $100 million in sales of U.S. equipment and services to Russian oil companies. Also, Russia announced that it would make its first contribution to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The Bush administration also is looking to the Caspian Sea region as a source for non-Middle East, non-OPEC oil. The sea contains 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, potentially more than 230 billion barrels, according to the Energy Department.
The region's potential has prompted a rush of investment and fierce dispute over exploration and development rights. The United States hopes to get American companies involved.
Caspian oil exports, currently limited by geography, could increase by 1 million barrels by 2005 with the new Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, the Energy Department says.
"We have been pursuing an East-West energy corridor for many years now, and the fact that Baku-Ceyhan is now going to happen is a big win for U.S. policy," said Steven Mann, senior adviser for Caspian Basin energy diplomacy for the State Department.
-------- environment
Electronics Producers Must Pay for European Wastes
October 14, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-14-02.asp
BRUSSELS, Belgium, EU governments and the European Parliament have concluded a conciliation deal finalizing texts of two key laws dealing with recycling waste electrical and electronic equipment, and restricting hazardous substances in their manufacture.
The agreement ends more than two years of negotiations and creates legislation that is set to revolutionize product stewardship in the electronics industry.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) walked away from the final conciliation committee meeting on the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and restriction of hazardous substances (RoHS) directives in the early hours of Friday morning with most of their demands met.
Most significantly, they established a presumption in favor of individual producer financial responsibility as the pivotal principle in the law.
In return, they had to settle for the Council of Ministers' preferred annual waste collection target of four kilograms (8.8 pounds) per head. The MEPs had wanted six kilos (13.2 pounds).
In the European Parliament, from left: MEP Karl-Heinz Florenz of Germany, former President of the European Commission MEP Jacques Santer of Luxembourg, both Christian/European Democrats (Photo courtesy EPP-ED Group)
Most provisions will enter into force 30 months after the legislation is officially published later this year or early next. The full parliament and council must still approve the final texts, though this is a formality.
Parliamentary delegation leader Karl-Heinz Florenz said the agreement "meets the needs of consumers, environmentalists and industry."
It will deal with "a waste mountain of over six million tons of electrical scrap" annually, Florenz said.
EU environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom hailed it as a "landmark in achieving a more sustainable waste management."
"I am particularly happy we could convince member states to strengthen individual responsibility," she said.
The European Environmental Bureau (EEB), representing 134 member nongovernmental organizations in 25 countries, is "delighted" that the producers must finance the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment. The coalition is pleased that individual producer responsibility, whereby each individual producer is responsible for the waste from its own products, will be the basis of this financing.
"This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time the EU requires individual, as opposed to collective, producer responsibility in any area of environmental legislation, setting a precedent for future policy," said EEB's Secretary General John Hontelez.
"We would like to congratulate the European Parliament's team and the rapporteur Mr. Florenz in sticking to their guns on this issue. Now we call on member states to take full advantage of this opportunity to work towards the long-term goal of prevention of Waste from EEE," he said.
"Making companies consider the end of life implications of the design of their products at the time they place the products on the market in the future is a strong driver for eco-design in electrical and electronic equipment," said Hontelez.
Debate over producer responsibility had dominated talks on the two laws. The Parliament wanted individual producers to be required to assume financial responsibility for their own wastes. The Council of Ministers, representing EU member governments, had insisted on leaving member states the option of collective financing.
The final text leaves ample scope for collective financing. It says producers are responsible for funding the treatment of their own products, but may execute this obligation through collective or individual financing schemes.
This wording is subtly different from proposals previously emanating from either side, but much closer to the Parliament's.
Industry sources believe the reference to "own products" is the key, giving legal backing to firms wanting to reduce costs through better product design.
"There is now a real incentive for every manufacturer to create products of which more parts can be recycled more completely," Henrik Sundstrom of appliance maker Electrolux said Friday.
When the laws enter into force, EU Member States must try to ensure no waste electronic and electrical equipment enters the municipal waste stream. An average of four kilos annually must be collected per inhabitant by the end of 2006.
Members of the public will be able to return waste equipment free of charge.
This year's treasures, next year's trash. (Photo courtesy Freefoto)
Historical waste generated before the laws enter into force is to be treated through collective financing. Producers will be able to recoup this cost through a "visible fee" sales tax on new products for eight years, or 10 years in the case of large household items such as refrigerators.
"Orphan" wastes are to be avoided through a system of financial guarantees required from all firms before their products can be placed on the market. Labeling of goods with the producer's name will be mandatory.
Firms will have to meet recycling targets of between 50 percent and 75 percent of product weight depending on appliance type. Recovery targets are slightly higher.
Small businesses are not exempted from the law, and companies are "encouraged" to make all products and components reusable.
Lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and the brominated flame retardants PBDE and PBB are to be banned in manufacture from July 2006. National bans in place before entry into force may remain.
Attention will now turn to implementation of the laws in member states, likely to prove a daunting task for authorities. A UK survey by the polling firm Mirec Environmental found that fewer than one in five companies were aware of the laws.
-------- health / health care
Report: Nursing Homes Kill Thousands
October 14, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nursing-Homes.html
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- A review of government documents and court records indicates hundreds of elderly patients in nursing homes are dying from neglect, according to a newspaper report.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in a weeklong series that began Sunday, reported that the quiet epidemic is rarely detected by government inspectors, appraised by medical examiners, or investigated or prosecuted by law enforcers.
Most of the deaths are caused by neglect traced to caregivers whom the elderly rely on for food and liquid, and for turning them in their beds to prevent life-threatening sores, investigators and researchers say.
The latest national compilation of more than 500,000 nursing home deaths -- for 1999 -- lists starvation, dehydration or bedsores as the cause on 4,138 death certificates.
Most of the deaths can be traced to an inadequate number of nurses and aides; the Department of Health and Human Services reported to Congress this year that nine of 10 nursing homes have inadequate staff.
The Post-Dispatch interviewed about 700 professionals for its stories, including nurses, doctors, patient advocates, death investigators, nursing home operators and prosecutors.
Many workers say they are unwilling to accept poverty-level wages for unpleasant, demanding work that often requires mandatory overtime or double shifts. Corporate focus on the bottom line, the newspaper reported, frequently requires managers to operate homes with skeleton staffing because the industry says it lacks enough government money to provide proper care.
The American Health Care Association, the lobbying group for most nursing homes, said in a statement that the newspaper unfairly included deaths from neglect with deaths from natural causes.
``AHCA states unequivocally that any incident of neglect or abuse is unacceptable, but drawing a link of patients passing away from these maladies as a result of alleged poor care is simply irresponsible,'' the statement said.
In 1998, the General Accounting Office assigned three nurses and a physician to determine what actually killed 62 people who had died in California nursing homes. The GAO probe determined that 34 of the 62 had received ``unacceptable care'' and had died of dehydration, malnutrition or infections from bedsores.
A year later, Little Rock, Ark., coroner Mark Malcolm reviewed about 100 questionable nursing home deaths that occurred from 1993 to 1999. He determined that more than 30 percent of the death certificates listed an incorrect cause of death.
The finding prompted the Arkansas Legislature to immediately pass a law -- the only one in the nation -- requiring nursing homes to notify a coroner of every death.
A Post-Dispatch examination of hundreds of court cases nationwide found that the vast majority of death certificates for nursing home residents attributed the deaths to natural causes such as pneumonia, heart attack and -- in some cases -- ``cessation of breathing,'' ``heart stopped,'' ``old age'' or ``body just quit.''
``Some physicians go to amazing lengths to avoid admitting that by omission or commission, the nursing home killed these people,'' said Tim Dollar, whose law firm in Kansas City is Missouri's largest litigator of nursing home deaths.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Demonstrators encamped on roof at U.K. reactor site
London
Nuclear News Flashes
14 Oct2002
From: magnu96196@aol.com
Forty-four Greenpeace demonstrators were encamped on a roof at the Sizewell B-1 reactor site early this evening, calling for an end to the British nuclear energy program, after police had driven another 49 protestors from the premises. Four other protestors were arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage. The antinuclear group said that roughly 100 protestors had entered the site this morning via the main gatehouse and the perimeter fence "unopposed." Though no protestors entered any buildings or interferred with the PWR's operations, the demonstration is expected to raise serious security concerns. The protestors vowed to occupy the roof until the U.K. government expressed a commitment to terminate the nuclear program, saying reactors are vulnerable to terrorist attack, uneconomic, and sources of dangerous radioactive waste. Greenpeace claimed that a recent study by AEA Technology found that 40 wind farms on Britain's southeast coast could produce as much electricity as all U.K. power reactors combine.
----
Opposition over Iraq takes rise via the Net
By Farah Stockman,
Boston Globe Staff,
10/14/2002
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/287/metro/Opposition_over_Iraq_takes_rise_via_the_Net%2B.shtml
As Congress prepared to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq last week, college campuses were quiet and just a few dozen peace demonstrators stood with signs outside Senator John Kerry's Boston office.
Yet on Amy Hendrickson's computer, a movement was brewing. ''I get 600 e-mails a day,'' said Hendrickson, a Brookline software consultant who works from home. ''These days, I spend 10 to 12 hours a day on the computer.''
When tens of thousands of people came out on Oct. 6 to protest US policy on Iraq, the seeds of action had been sown not on college campuses, which had their own, much smaller protests last Monday, but on the computer desktops of people like Hendrickson, 58. From her living room, she helped organize simultaneous protests in 14 countries, including Japan, Bangladesh, Germany, Austria, Australia, India, and Nepal.
This year, for the first time since the advent of the Internet, Americans are engaging in public debate about whether to go to war, and a great deal of the opposition has coalesced online. The ease of electronic communication allows like-minded people to sign petitions and coordinate protests far more easily than they could in the 1960s, or even a decade ago during the Gulf War. But it also raises a question: Can a movement with no physical center and no pen-and-ink signatures really have a political impact?
''The Internet makes the potential for protest much more vast, but at the same time much more elusive,'' said Timothy McCarthy, a faculty activist at Harvard University who teaches in the history and literature department. ''You can sign an e-mail protest, but you can't engage in civil disobedience on the Internet.''
Hendrickson's sons were young when the Vietnam War broke out in the 1960s, so she watched the peace protests from afar and did not become an activist herself. But earlier this year, she became part of an e-mail group discussing newspaper articles about the war on terrorism. The articles she read made her increasingly alarmed with the Bush administration's policies, so she signed her name on Internet petitions and wrote peace groups offering her help.
She got a message back from Not In Our Name, a New York-based peace group that asked her to get the word out in Boston about the Oct. 6 protest.
Not In Our Name is, in many ways, typical of the groups protesting the White House stance on Iraq. Formed eight months ago by veteran peace activists worried about the direction the war on terror was taking, it gained sudden momentum when the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein. The group picked up celebrity endorsements from actress Susan Sarandon, radio emcee Casey Kasem, hip-hop musician Mos Def, playwright Tony Kushner, and authors Alice Walker and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, who signed a call to resist the government's policy of ''military coercion'' and published it in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times.
Hendrickson joined the movement alone, in a living room cluttered with Mexican tapestries, wind chimes, origami peace cranes, and foot-high stacks of books on computer programs.
On her own, she decided to send more than 1,000 e-mails to peace groups she found on the Internet around the world, inviting them to demonstrate alongside protesters in the United States by holding protests outside US embassies at noon. People at Not In Our Name discouraged her, Hendrickson said, saying the group wanted to focus on Americans.
But she pressed on anyway, with e-mails that suggested slogans and possible demands on the US government, as well as a copy of Not In Our Name's resistance pledge, which is translated into 12 languages on the group's Web site. ''Help launch the first World Wide Peace Demonstration!'' she wrote, calling on them to ''protest current US policies.''
A few days later, the first message came back, from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
''They said, `We'll be demonstrating with you,''' she said. ''That first [e-mail response] was a hell of a kick.''
Next came a missive from Nepal. ''Dear Peacefriends,'' it read. Then Manila (''Dear comrades'') and Berlin (''Hi peace-loving Americans!'') and ''Hello from Helsinki, Finland.''
In all, people in more than 14 cities wrote back that, in groups large and small, they had demonstrated. Some sent e-mail pictures to prove it.
''Part of the promise of the Net is that people can communicate unmediated,'' Hendrickson said. ''It's people to people, not from one government to the other.''
Boston did not host a protest of its own. Hendrickson handed out thousands of flyers inviting Bostonians to the rally in New York and she helped gather a group of about 40 people to travel to New York, where an estimated 10,000 people crowded Central Park in what is believed to be the largest-yet protest against military action in Iraq. At least 20,000 more demonstrated in Los Angles, San Francisco, and Seattle, according to Not In Our Name and newspaper estimates. And thousands of others gathered in smaller cities across the country, using kits downloaded from Not In Our Name's Web site.
Several petitions opposing the war are also circulating, including an open letter on www.noattackiraq.org, signed by more than 19,000 faculty and students around the United States, and a peace pledge by American Friends Service Committee that has gathered 50,000 signatures.
In the last week, Kerry's office says, it has received more than 20,000 e-mails about Iraq - most of them against US military action, said Kyle Sullivan, a spokesman for the senator. Kerry went the other way - deciding to vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of force.
For Hendrickson, who rarely travels but makes her living sending tech support e-mails to strangers worldwide, there is nothing strange about engineering a peace movement from her Hotmail account with people who will never meet each other.
''I don't think it's different from any political movement,'' she said. ''You're trying to reach out to people who share the same point of view.''
Apart from Hendrickson's efforts, bizarre, unconfirmable e-mails are still rolling in: Scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica said they took the pledge, and even 100 people in Phnom Penh in Cambodia took it.
''We think they are Americans living there,'' said Mary Lou Greenberg, a volunteer at Not In Our Name's New York headquarters who was trying to tally the total number of participants. ''We don't know for sure.''
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 10/14/2002.
----
Anti-War Protests Get Louder In Calif.
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21785-2002Oct13.html
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13 -- In all the years he has spent on street corners, talking himself hoarse trying to convince the world that war is hell, Jeff Grubler has never been so popular.
Life has become one big anti-war rally. Last Wednesday, Grubler, a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee, agreed to lead a rally of 200 students at the University of California, Berkeley. On Thursday, he joined 200 people on a march to the Federal Building here to protest the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq. On Saturday, Grubler spent a good part of the day sifting through a mountain of e-mails about upcoming anti-war events. Today, he led a teach-in at Stanford University.
The prospects of a U.S. war on Iraq have prompted so many teach-ins, protests, marches and forums that he can't keep up. "In the Bay Area," said Grubler, a 34-year-old bartender who began working for the Service Committee about five years ago, "there are literally multiple events every day."
In the Bay Area, bastion of the most liberal Democrats in the country, speaking out against unilateral action on Iraq is like preaching the dangers of binge drinking at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. Anti-war rallies on two consecutive weekends drew 10,000 people each, and hastily called protests draw several hundred. Unlike the rest of the country -- or even the rest of California -- activists here can boast that most of their elected representatives (10 of 13) heeded their thousands of phone calls and voted against the resolution on Iraq.
But the Bay Area is not, as some pundits would have it, "out there" alone.
It is simply the most obvious place, veteran peace organizers say, to see a burgeoning national anti-war movement that is gaining momentum by the day.
Peace groups believe they can still avert a war by convincing politicians that the majority of Americans oppose unilateral action against Iraq.
Most Americans -- about 61 percent, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll -- support using force to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but anti-war activists contend that is true only when people are asked the question in the broadest terms. When voters in the Post-ABC poll were asked whether the United States should launch an attack over the opposition of its allies, for example, support dropped to 46 percent.
Most polls find that a majority of Americans believe the United Nations should be allowed to try diplomacy first.
Approval of the resolution on Iraq, though disheartening to groups that spent weeks organizing citizens to inundate members of Congress with thousands of phone calls and e-mails registering opposition to a war, was expected, peace organizers say. (Even before the final vote, anti-war groups planned national protests on Oct. 26 in San Francisco and the District, hoping for at least 100,000 participants.) In fact, the resolution has increased the anti-war effort, organizers say. Some say politicians who ignored the will of their constituents and voted to approve the resolution will face repercussions, such as more protests and sit-ins at their offices -- and possible retribution in the next election. But the greater effort will be in convincing Congress and the president that war is not the way to go, said Mary Lord, director of the national peace-building unit for the American Friends Service Committee.
"I think that the Democratic leadership made a mistake in thinking that voting for the war would get them off the headlines," Lord said. "Now there's going to be accelerated troop deployment. This issue is not going to go away."
The latest Pew Research Center survey, taken early this month, found that 88 percent of Americans are following the Iraq debate very or fairly closely.
No one can say what will happen to the peace movement if Bush does launch strikes on Iraq and the nation is plunged into a sustained war. But time-tested organizations such as the Service Committee, which is run by the nation's oldest pacifist institution, the Quakers, as well as groups that have sprung up in response to the threat of a U.S. invasion, talk in elated terms about how overwhelmed they are with the sheer number of people who want to join their effort, as well as the multiplying number of anti-war activities. They talk of a rising tide of student activism, of protesting by people who have never protested before and of an engagement on the issue that was absent prior to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think tank, had compiled a list of more than 250 anti-war events planned throughout the country over the next two weeks, only to discover it had missed at least 150 others. "People are organizing at all levels," said Amy Quinn, co-director of the institute. "I'm hearing from the older generations that there was nowhere near this level of activism at this stage in the Vietnam War. I'm not surprised that people are coming out against the war. I am surprised at how organized and vocal people are."
Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based human rights organization that has been leading many of the anti-war efforts, created a Web site, www.unitedforpeace.org, just before Sept. 11 so that peace organizations could list their events. In the past month, as Bush began increasing his arguments to wage a war on Iraq, the list of anti-war events "in every state" has been growing by the day, said Andrea Buffa, a Global Exchange organizer. "Teach-ins, sit-ins, rallies, you name it -- I think that the nation is seeing a growing peace movement the likes of which we have not seen in a long time."
Not In Our Name, an anti-war group based in New York, has been receiving more than 25,000 hits and more than 1,000 e-mails a day from all over the world on its Web site, www.notinourname.org, said Miles Solay, an organizer with the Refuse and Resist Project, an arm of the organization. A call from Not In Our Name for national rallies on Oct. 6 led to more than 40 rallies involving more than 85,000 people, he said. Although those rallies had hoped to affect the outcome of the congressional resolution, Solay said, many more activities are planned. Not In Our Name is organizing the Oct. 26 rallies and others. "There will be lots of response to the no-surprise resolution," he said. "On the day the bombing begins, there will be organized protests across the country. There's a new student movement growing all over the country. Thousands of youth are organizing and getting involved. . . . We are coming together."
The American Friends Service Committee has launched an ambitious effort, organizing war protests by faith groups as well as student teach-ins, coalitions among anti-war organizations big and small, and citizen involvement in campaigns where candidates have expressed support for a U.S. attack, Lord said. "We'll be encouraging people to go to candidate meetings and campaign forums to tell them that this is not the way to get elected."
That also will mean more calls to more politicians, as well as more protests directed at political leaders. Alpesh Patel, who has been leading protests at the San Mateo, Calif., office of Rep. Tom Lantos, one of the first local Democrats to support the resolution on Iraq, said he has found that there is almost unanimous opposition to war in the district. "With the vote done, we are not done one bit," he said. "We will be back in front of Lantos's office. We want to make it abundantly clear that everybody in this district who speaks for anybody is opposed to Lantos's war."
Bill Ramsey, a coordinator for the Human Rights Action Service in St. Louis, who has been leading sit-ins at the district office of House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and the state Democratic Party headquarters, said those protests will continue and multiply. "There are hundreds of people here engaging in action they are initiating themselves," he said. "The kinds of responses we're getting are astounding us."
In San Francisco, groups are planning sit-ins at Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office to protest her vote for the resolution after the California Democrat expressed opposition to it a few weeks ago. Efforts to persuade her to oppose the resolution failed despite 11,000 calls that her office logged in the week before the vote, with only 150 of those calls supporting the resolution.
Even House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who opposed the resolution (after receiving 12,000 calls from constituents in three weeks, with only 20 of those supporting the resolution), is getting calls complaining about Feinstein's vote. Brendan Daley, Pelosi's press secretary, said her office had received a few hundred angry calls regarding Feinstein's vote Friday morning.
Grubler, who had expected the resolution to pass, said he would probably participate in a few sit-ins in the next few weeks. He specializes in dressing up and performing skits, which explained why he was wearing orange coveralls, a hard hat and rubber boots last Thursday -- his weapons inspector outfit -- as he walked through downtown San Francisco to meet members of the Service Committee at a weekly peace vigil. He was hoping to squeeze in some street theater, but as usual these days, he had no time. "I am sleep-deprived," he said, sighing at the current state of affairs for peace activists.
----
No easy sentence:
Peace protesters do time with hardened cons
Monday, October 14, 2002
AP
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/South/10/14/jailed.protesters.ap/index.html
CORDELE, Georgia --For years, peace protesters arrested for trespassing at Fort Benning were allowed to serve their sentences at minimum-security federal institutions closer to their homes, where they could kiss relatives and hold babies in visiting rooms.
Not anymore.
Some protesters -- including a priest and a grandmother-to-be -- were sentenced earlier this year to serve their six-month sentences alongside thieves and drug addicts behind razor wire in a rural Georgia jail.
"The only thing I can come up with is that they are getting mean," the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, founder of the protest group School of the Americas Watch, said of Bureau of Prison officials.
Protesters Toni Flynn and the Rev. Jerry Zawada were among a group of 28 who pleaded guilty or were convicted in July for trespassing at a Fort Benning training school. All but five went to federal institutions.
The protesters are members of the School of the Americas Watch, which blames the Army's School of the Americas and its successor, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, for human rights abuses in Latin America. Opponents say some of the school's graduates have been linked to the slayings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989.
Defense officials replaced the School of the Americas nearly two years ago with the new institute, which still trains Latin American soldiers, but now includes police officers and public officials. Human rights courses are mandatory.
Zawada, a 65-year-old Franciscan priest from Cedar Lake, Indiana, and Flynn, a 56-year-old Catholic volunteer from Valermo, California, were among three sent to the Crisp County Jail, a boxy, single-story brick building in the middle of a clearing of pine trees, where a chain-link fence topped by razor wire encloses a recreation yard.
The third person was later transferred to a federal institution. Two others served three-month sentences at the Harris County Jail in west-central Georgia.
Supporters of Flynn and Zawada bombarded Crisp County Sheriff Donnie Haralson with hundreds of letters and faxes, questioning the quality of the food and water, the availability of health care, the use of pepper spray to subdue an unruly inmate and the death of an inmate from natural causes.
Haralson responded by having his 12-year-old jail, which has about 175 inmates, inspected four times by the Bureau of Prisons, twice by the U.S. Marshals Service and once by a jail mediator.
"It's a modern-run facility," he said. "I've shown I'm human and I've done what's right. But I catch the devil both ways. I catch it from the protesters and from the working taxpayers who do not sympathize much with people put in jail."
The Bureau of Prisons defended its decision to send some protesters to county jails.
Paige Augustine, a spokeswoman for the bureau's Southeast Regional Office in Atlanta, said federal policies provide for sending inmates serving less than a year to county jails, instead of federal institutions. Such decisions are usually determined by space availability, she said.
"We deal with it on a case-by-case basis," she said. "We may have lots of beds open today and none tomorrow."
Wearing pumpkin-colored jump suits during a recent jailhouse interview, Flynn and Zawada said they have no regrets.
Flynn said she spends her days praying for a peaceful resolution of the Iraqi crisis, doing aerobics and getting used to Southern food. "I'm learning to love grits and greens, but I'm getting tired of beans," she said.
Zawada, who said he's lost 30 pounds while praying and fasting for peace, shares a cell with three other men -- two of whom he refers to as "the Huck Finns."
"I've never felt threatened," he said. "The Huck Finn guys are delightful, but they are very simple. They live in a trailer by the railroad tracks."
The pair are asking supporters on the SOA Watch Web page to stop harassing the sheriff.
"When I leave here, I'm going to write the sheriff and let him know I support anything that's restorative to human beings," she said. "It would be so easy to say the sheriff is the bad guy, but he's a human being, too."
Still, they said they were surprised when they were sent to Crisp County.
A volunteer with a Roman Catholic worker community and prison ministry in Southern California's high desert, Flynn is about 3,000 miles from her four grown children on the West Coast and will miss the birth of her first grandchild this month.
"I am heartbroken that I was not transferred to California," she said. "I would plead with the Bureau of Prisons to consider the hardship on my family. I have not had one visit from a family member or my Catholic workers. No one can afford the $700 plane ticket."
----
The twilight of free speech at colleges
Nat Hentoff
October 14, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021014-26977040.htm
Originally, only the federal government was bound by the First Amendment. But Justice Hugo Black extended it to state and local governments. Annually, Wesleyan University presents the Hugo Black Lecture on Free Expression. This year I was the speaker.
Part of my lecture concerned the dismaying attacks on freedom of expression for more than a decade by students at many college campuses. Student newspapers, usually of a conservative bent, have been stolen in large quantities, sometimes burned. And students with dissenting viewpoints have told me they have learned to censor themselves in and out of class.
Wesleyan is a justly well-regarded university. One of my sons went there in the 1980s and was editor of the student paper, the Argus. He has fond memories of the place and had resisted this plague of political correctness on campuses that was just starting then. The extent that expressions of independent views, in public, have diminished since the 1980s at Wesleyan and other colleges was illustrated in an editorial in the Argus soon after my last lecture.
The newspaper surveyed students about the campus culture of Wesleyan. Most troubling, the editorial said, was that 32 percent of the students "feel uncomfortable speaking their opinion . . . Debate is limited to a dialogue between liberal and progressive, which has the effect of silencing any and all conservative views. When the rare conservative stance is taken, a shouting match usually results, making impossible the dialogue, which the university claims to value so highly."
In my experience - buttressed by reports from the Student Press Law Center and The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - a similar survey administered at other college campuses would result in an even higher percentage of students intimidated by the chilling climate of political correctness.
I was quoted in the editorial as saying (in my Hugo Black lecture) that too many students across the nation believe they "have a constitutional right not to be offended."
The Argus editorial ended: "In our attempts to foster discussion and wrestle with issues, we have forgotten the basic liberal tenet of promoting freedom of expression. The booming voice of the left has almost completely drowned out a considerable portion of the campus's population."
But "when liberals and progressives are silenced, they decry it as ignorant and unjust."
The editor of the Argus, Bobby Zeliger - a true upholder of the spirit of Hugo Black - sent me a copy of the survey. Freddye Hill, the dean of the college, was quoted saying that she thinks "we need to provide more spaces where people can be honest with each other."
Michelle Rabinowitz, the chair of the American Civil Liberties Union on campus, noted, "Wesleyan and most Wesleyan students think that Wesleyan is a lot more open than it really is. I'm not sure that the students are open to diverse viewpoints other than saying that they are."
"Diversity" is a much-valued goal at colleges and universities, but its meaning is too often limited to ensuring sufficient representation of race and gender in the student body. The concept of diversity of IDEAS, however, is often far less valued.
Miss Hill understands the wider and deeper definition of diversity, "As a community [we] need to support groups that have diverse viewpoints, viewpoints that are not commonly heard on campus, and encourage new organizations with new voices." Maybe a Hugo Black Club.
The need for that kind of diversity was inadvertently revealed in the survey by Elizabeth King of the Wesleyan Democrats. "The question is how tolerant we are of intolerance," she says. "Personally, I'm not very supportive of homophobic, racist and xenophobic opinions. Nor do I feel necessarily inclined to provide those people with a venue for their opinions."
In the Argus editorial, I was quoted as having said in my lecture that "the ultimate test of a belief in free speech should be whether it can be extended to people you hate." I, in turn, was quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also said that this principle of the First Amendment "calls for attachment more than any other."
And if freedom of thought is not honored at college campuses, how devoted to this source of all our other freedoms will graduates be as they become influential in America's future?
At Wesleyan, however, voices are rising to keep the spirit of Hugo Black alive.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column runs on Mondays.
----
Pro-life students try for recognition
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 14, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021014-35230818.htm
The Student Bar Association at Washington University's law school in St. Louis is scheduled to vote today on whether the institution should recognize a student pro-life group, which it has rejected twice already.
"It does not look good for us," said Jordan Siverd, a second-year law student who heads the group, Law Students Pro-Life.
"Almost all of the SBA members who spoke at a meeting last Thursday spoke against us. And some who had abstained in earlier votes said that they will vote against us, saying they don't like having the media or anyone else infringe on their power," he said.
The Student Bar Association has said Law Students Pro-Life is "too narrowly focused." SBA President Elliott Friedman has sent letters to the group, objecting to the fact that its constitution does not include opposition to the death penalty as one of its missions.
Like many pro-life organizations, Law Students Pro-Life concentrates on opposition to abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is helping the pro-life students group, said colleges and universities often have student governing bodies in charge of approving or rejecting student organizations.
"But I've never before seen a student organization that makes decisions about the content of a group's" goals and purposes, Mr. Lukianoff said in a telephone interview.
"It's as if the SBA is barring a Catholic organization because it believes in the doctrine of transubstantiation," he said.
David Hacker, secretary of Law Students Pro-Life, said that because the group is not officially recognized by the SBA, it cannot use campus facilities for its meetings or receive funding from the university.
When it was previously turned down by the SBA, Law Students Pro-Life appealed to law school administrators.
If rejected again today, Mr. Siverd said, his group will "probably reappeal" to the chancellor and other law school officials.
The university's hierarchy seems to have little influence with the SBA. Late Thursday, Joel Seligman, dean of the school, told The Washington Times he had intervened in the case. He said an SBA meeting would be held that day, and he was confident the body would recognize Law Students Pro-Life. That didn't happen.
However, the pro-life group gained another advocate as the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri on Friday backed the cause of Law Students Pro-Life.
The two groups issued an "open letter" in which they urged the SBA to "recognize the right of your fellow students to organize in accordance with their own beliefs, even if you disagree with those beliefs."
Sarah Foster of Feminists for Life, a group that helps organize pro-life groups on college campuses, said, "I am stunned and disappointed to hear that the Washington University law school is not allowing a pro-life group on campus. I know the university has an active pro-life undergraduate group."
However, Mr. Hacker said Saturday that the constitution of the undergraduate pro-life group at Washington University states that it opposes the death penalty.
Leaders of major pro-life organization such as National Right to Life Committee, the Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America said they were appalled at the treatment Law Students Pro-Life had received.
Ken Connor, president of FRC, said this case flies in the face of academic freedom and "exposes academics for the frauds they are."
David N. O'Steen, executive director of NRLC, questioned how the Washington University law school's SBA can say the pro-life group's focus is too narrow, when it recognizes a group called the Golf Club.
"Are they going to make the Golf Club take up basketball and hockey?" he asked.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.