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NUCLEAR
Hungary n-plant leaks traces of radioactive gas
America's High Tech Dirty Bombs;
Scientists debate depleted uranium weapons
U.N. Inspectors to Visit Pakistan
Security Council Set To Debate Blix Role
U.S. Balks at Return of U.N. Inspectors to Iraq
Korea's DMZ: 'Scariest place on Earth'
Powell Says Nuclear N.Korea Would Not Intimidate US
U.S. team leaves for nuke talks
Secret US file: oust regime in Pyongyang
Report: U.S. has plan to bomb North Korea
U.S., North Korea in Beijing for Nuclear Talks
S. Korean Leader Assailed for Exclusion From Talks
China Plays Diplomatic Role in N. Korea
Powell Says Nuclear N.Korea Would Not Intimidate US
Russia: Chernobyl's Reactor May Collapse
Russian Minister Fears Collapse of Chernobyl Shield
Expenditures at Los Alamos Lab Questioned
A - Bomb Birthplace Marks 60th Anniversary
Rumsfeld denies plan for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq
Did Bush Deceive Us in His Rush to War?
MILITARY
Rights Group: 'Climate of Fear' Rules Afghanistan
Clusters of Death Bomblets wreak havoc long after their initial deployment
Britain calls home bulk of ground forces
Vietnam urges US aid for Agent Orange victims
Ending the Sanctions
12 Israelis Arrested in Crackdown
Children held at Camp Xray, US admits
Syria expels Iraqi children
Secretive Agency's Maps to Pave Way for Iraqi Relief
Military pullback part of U.S. strategy
End of Iraq war means opportunities for US power projection: official
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Drones may fly patrols on border of U.S., Mexico
Justices to review Miranda frontiers
Sniffing New York's Air Ducts for Signs of Terror
Security high for biker rally
Official: Youths Held at Guantanamo Bay
ENERGY AND OTHER
EU readies first ideas on hydrogen fuel dream
African countries seek to boost geothermal power
Tea helps body ward off germs, study says
Baby teeth found source of stem cells
ACTIVISTS
The Spoils of Antiwar
The Citizen-Scientist's Obligation to Stand Up for Standards
ACLU Seeks Gov't Data on 'No - Fly' List
A Matter of Life and Limb
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Hungary n-plant leaks traces of radioactive gas
REUTERS HUNGARY:
April 22, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20512/story.htm
BUDAPEST - Hungary's only nuclear plant said last week traces of radioactive gas had leaked into the atmosphere earlier this month but the incident, the most serious at the plant to date, posed no environmental danger.
Paks has four Soviet-type VVER-440 pressurised water reactors, the first of which became operational in 1982. "The incident did not affect the installations or technological systems of reactor bloc II," the Paks nuclear plant said in a statement. "Emission levels are within accepted levels, and there is no measurable difference in the background radiation level in the surrounding area."
Reactor II started to leak traces of radioactive gas on April 10, during a routine cleaning of the fuel rods, and the incident was originally classified level two on the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) seven-step scale. Last week, upon opening the reactor bloc which could until then only be inspected through video cameras, Paks raised the level of the incident to three.
This is the highest incident level, as events from four on the scale are considered accidents. The 1979 meltdown at the U.S. Three Mile Island power plant was classified five on the same scale and the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe ranked seven.
Paks said in previous a statement that most of the 30 fuel rods in the reactor bloc have been "seriously damaged" but the leakage of the radioactive gas caused no detectable increase in radiation.
Friday's statement from the plant also said that the damaged fuel rods were currently at the bottom of a pool containing several hundred cubic metres of water and nuclear specialists were planning their removal.
It also said that the other three reactors continue to operate normally.
The four reactors with an installed capacity of 1,860 megawatts cover about 40 percent of this 10 million country's annual power consumption.
-------- depleted uranium
America's High Tech Dirty Bombs;
McDERMOTT INTRODUCES DEPLETED URANIUM BILL
by Abraham Tuesday abraham_94064@yahoo.com
April 22, 2003
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/1603008.php
The Depleted Uranium shells and bombs are dirty bombs. We're afraid the terrorists would use dirty bombs on us, but it's okay for us to sell and detonate our high tech DU bombs on other nations. The radio active dusts as a result of the detonated DU bombs not only will harm the environment, but will harm all human, plants, live stocks come into contact FOREVER. We must ban all DU weapons immediately. Contact your local newspapers, radio, TV stations, politicians and demand them to make the dangerous effects of DU be known to the public. For more information, go to http://traprockpeace.org/index.html
April 22 Update: HR 1483 now has 10 co-sponsors - Rep. Tammy Baldwin - [D-WI-2]; Rep. Julia Carson, - [D-IN-7]; Rep. John Conyers - [D-MI-14]; Rep. Samual Farr - [D-CA-17]; Rep. Robert Filner - [D-CA-6]; Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones - [D-OH-11]; Rep. Dale Kildee. - [D-MI-5]; Rep. Barbara Lee - [D-CA-9]; Rep. Edward Markey - [D-MA-7]; Rep. Charles Rangel - [D-NY-15].
CONTENTS
Press Release (below) also available as pdf file
H.R. 1483 - Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act of 2003 (Introduced in House) (also available as a pdf. file)
See Rep. McDermott's letter to colleagues This letter attached the Major Doug Rokke interview with Sunny Miller - Director of Traprock Peace Center (published by YES! magazine.) (The entire interview was originally a radio interview (mp3 file).
Press Release from Representative JIM McDERMOTT 7th District, Washington
202-225-3106
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 27, 2003 Contact: Eric Lutz
McDERMOTT INTRODUCES DEPLETED URANIUM BILL HR 1483
Washington, DC-Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) today introduced legislation requiring studies on the health and environmental impact of depleted uranium (DU) munitions, as well as cleanup and mitigation of depleted uranium contamination at sites within the United States where DU has been used or produced.
McDermott, a medical doctor, has been concerned about this issue since veterans of the Gulf War started experiencing unexplained illnesses. His concern deepened, he said, after visiting Iraq, where Iraqi pediatricians told him that the incidence of severely deformed infants and childhood cancers has skyrocketed.
"Depleted uranium is toxic and carcinogenic and it may well be associated with elevated rates of birth defects in babies born to those exposed to it," said McDermott. "We had troops coming home sick after the Gulf War, and depleted uranium may be one of the factors responsible for that."
Because of its density, the military uses depleted uranium as a protective shield around tanks. It is also part of munitions like armor-piercing bullets. Because it tends to spontaneously ignite upon impact, it is used to cause explosions.
But depleted uranium, a by-product of the uranium enrichment process, is also linked to grave health concerns because of its chemical toxicity and low-level radioactivity. When depleted uranium explodes, soldiers are exposed to DU in the form of alpha-emitting airborne particles that are inhaled and shrapnel that gets embedded in the body. They are also exposed through unprotected contact with equipment.
About 300 metric tons of depleted uranium was used in the Iraq during the Gulf War, and many citizens of Iraq as well as veterans of the Gulf War have experienced terrible health problems-many say as a consequence of depleted uranium. Increased rates of cancers, leukemia, and birth malformations are among the health problems that may be linked to DU.
The Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, at times claiming DU is not a health hazard, and at other times acknowledging the need for sophisticated protective gear and safety training regarding exposure to DU.
"The need for these studies is imperative and immediate," said McDermott. "We cannot knowingly put the men and women of our armed forces in harm's way."
The Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act of 2003 has several original co-sponsors, including Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).
-------
Scientists debate depleted uranium weapons' possible contamination of Iraq, civilians
22 April 2003
By Joseph B. Verrengia,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-04-22/s_3915.asp
DENVER - As soon as it's safe, the United Nations and international scientists plan to fan out over Iraq's smoking battlegrounds to investigate whether the leftovers of American firepower pose serious health or environmental threats.
Thousands of rounds containing tons of depleted uranium were fired in Iraq over the past four weeks. Fragments of the armor-piercing munitions now litter the valleys and neighborhoods between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That's where most of the combat occurred and where most of Iraq's 24 million people live. Wounded fighters and civilians also may carry depleted uranium shrapnel in their bodies.
Many medical studies have failed to show a direct link between DU exposure and human disease, though a study of rats linked intramuscular fragments with increased cancer risk. Test-tube experiments also suggest DU may trigger potentially dangerous changes in cells.
The munitions are conventional and do not generate a nuclear blast. Depleted uranium, a very dense metal fashioned from low-level radioactive waste, allows them to easily pierce armor and buildings that would deflect other projectiles.
U.S. defense officials vigorously defend the decisive battlefield advantage that the super-hard metal provides and says the munitions do not create pollution or health hazards. Tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and A-10 attack jets all fire depleted uranium rounds. Some missiles also contain the material. "There's going to be no impact on the health of people in the environment or people who were there at the time," said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official. "You would really have to have a large internalized dose. You are not going to get that with casual exposure."
However, experts differ as to what qualifies as casual exposure. Some worry that it could affect civilian populations - especially children - if it enters groundwater used for drinking water and irrigation.
"The soil around the impact sites of depleted uranium penetrators might be heavily contaminated," said Brian Spratt, chair of the depleted uranium committee of the Royal Society, England's scientific academy. "We recommend the fragments should be removed."
Some experiments suggest DU may cause serious illness even if tiny particles are inhaled or ingested. Critics complain that studies so far have not been nearly large or long enough to conclude the munitions pose no long-term risks.
"Depleted uranium is toxic and carcinogenic and it may well be associated with elevated rates of birth defects in babies born to those exposed to it," said McDermott, a Washington state congressman who is also a physician.
Before the current war, Iraqi doctors were blaming high rates of cancer and birth defects in Basra and other southern cities on U.S. munitions fired 12 years ago, when fighting was concentrated along the southern border with Kuwait. Iraqi officials claim their number of cancer patients has risen 50 percent in 10 years, although complete medical surveys have not been conducted.
Some U.S. veterans also blame certain mysterious symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome - illnesses tens of thousands of American veterans reported suffering after returning from the 1991 Gulf War - on DU exposure.
To many, the issue could mushroom into a controversy similar to that involving Agent Orange spraying during the Vietnam War. Exposure to the herbicide has caused catastrophic health problems even to generations born after the war.
"The fact that most of the fighting in Iraq has been in population centers is of great worry to me," said geochemist Vala Ragnarsdottir of the University of Bristol in England.
Ragnarsdottir was one of 17 scientists from 5 European nations who conducted DU field assessments for the U.N. in the Balkans in 2000. That investigation, the first of its kind, found no direct link between DU munitions and current disease rates in Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. However, the study was limited to 11 combat sites.
About 12 metric tons of depleted uranium ordnance was used in the Balkans; that compares with 300 metric tons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and far more in the current campaign.
In Iraq, Ragnarsdottir said, "many hard targets were hit, and therefore DU dust was produced, which still could be blowing around." She continued, "I think that DU water pollution is likely to occur with time."
The U.N. inquiry would sample DU residues in soil, air, water, and vegetation throughout the battle theater as well as measure for radiation hotspots. Investigators will need information from the Pentagon to calculate how much DU ordinance was used and the coordinates of specific Iraqi targets.
"An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm there are potential risks which then could be addressed," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the U.N. Environmental Program, which will manage the investigation.
Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the industrial process in national weapons labs that enriches the energy content of nuclear fuel rods and warheads by adding more of the fissionable U-235 isotope. What's left is a concentrated metal waste that is about twice as dense as lead but 40 percent less radioactive than uranium in its natural form.
A DU-hardened projectile can bore straight through an enemy tank. DU shrapnel also ignites, engulfing the target in fire. What happens then has been studied by several government labs and international agencies with varying conclusions.
The Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Maryland and other labs suggest that DU fragments embedded in the muscle of laboratory rats cause cancerous tumors. But do the animal trials really mimic battlefield exposures? Studies of human patients and health records by the World Health Organization and others found no direct link to cancer rates and other illnesses.
Studies by the RAND Corp. and others suggest the radiation danger from handling the munitions is low. A 2002 study by the Royal Society concluded that most battlefield soldiers won't be at risk.
But dangerous vapors are generated when the weapons are fired or explode. If the particles are inhaled or ingested, they might settle in the kidneys and skeleton of some soldiers or raise the risk of lung cancer.
At the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore, more than 500 urine samples from veterans concerned about DU exposure were evaluated by toxicologists. The medical center reported 20 samples showed elevated uranium levels, but those could be attributed to natural uranium in food and water.
Urine provided by patients carrying DU shrapnel in their bodies from friendly fire during the Gulf War also showed elevated uranium levels, but the higher levels were not tied to disease.
DU critics complain those studies examined fewer than 100 veterans of the 1991 conflict.
"The military's policy is don't look, don't find," said Dan Fahey, a U.S. Navy veteran in the Persian Gulf, who now works for a San Francisco environmental group. Fahey said, "If they don't do proper studies of veterans, they can say there is no evidence of adverse health effects."
-------- india / pakistan
U.N. Inspectors to Visit Pakistan
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Chemical-Inspectors.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- U.N. chemical inspectors will visit Pakistan later this month to inspect a fertilizer plant in the southern city of Karachi to certify Pakistan is not producing chemical or biological weapons, senior government officials said Tuesday.
The Foreign Ministry confirmed the visit, but said it was ``not a chemical weapon inspection as Pakistan is not a chemical weapon state.''
It said the visits are routine for the 150 signatories of the Chemical Weapons Convention, but marked the first time the inspectors have been to Pakistan. Under the treaty, all member countries must open facilities to periodic inspections by the U.N. team.
According to Pakistani officials, the U.N. inspectors will start their work on April 30, the day after they arrive in the country. After completing their inspection they are expected to travel to India.
The U.N. team is to inspect the Fauji Jordan Fertilizer plant in the Southern port city of Karachi, according to a report in The News, Pakistan's largest circulation daily newspaper.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by Pakistan in 1993, gives countries until 2007 to destroy all such weapons, with the opportunity to seek a five-year extension.
The announcement came a day after Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan accused nuclear-rival India of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention, saying it possesses weapons stocks.
He provided no proof.
India is also a signatory of the convention. The two South Asian rivals have fought three wars since independence in 1947 and both possess nuclear weapons.
-------- inspections
Security Council Set To Debate Blix Role
By Colum Lynch and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8139-2003Apr21?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, April 21 -- Russia, Germany and France will urge the United States at a Security Council meeting Tuesday to preserve a key role for the chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, in certifying the disarmament of Iraq, according to council diplomats.
The initiative is setting the stage for the first major confrontation in the 15-nation council since the United States' invasion of Iraq without the council's approval. White House and Pentagon officials want to exclude Blix from verifying Iraq's disarmament, according to U.S. officials.
Blix has been invited by the Security Council to provide an update on his readiness to return to Iraq to continue his effort to verify the destruction of Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, according to Blix's spokesman, Ewen Buchanan.
Blix said today that he is willing to return to Iraq if the council grants its blessing. But he said that he would require "independence" from the U.S. military and the same freedom he possessed during inspections he led from November until shortly before the start of the war in March, including the authority to go anywhere in the country and interview any Iraqi specialists he chooses. "I can't be on a leash," he said in an interview.
The United States, meanwhile, has stepped up the recruitment of current and former U.N. inspectors from the United States, Britain and Australia to participate in an American inspection unit that will verify any discoveries of banned weapons by U.S. military forces. U.S. forces to date have not uncovered any proscribed weapons.
The inspection unit, which is set to expand in the coming weeks, is planning to deploy hundreds of civilian and military weapons inspectors to aid in the hunt for Iraq's deadliest weapons, according to U.S. officials.
The effort has generated friction between the United States and its closest ally, Britain. The British government has discouraged civilian British specialists from joining until their role has been more clearly defined, according to diplomatic sources and former inspectors. "We need to have some element of independent verification," Britain's junior foreign minister, Mike O'Brien, said today.
The British government favors a role for Blix's inspection agency, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), in certifying Iraq's disarmament. It is seeking to persuade the United States to overcome its "residual huffiness" over what U.S. officials see as Blix's failure to deliver a tougher assessment of Iraq's disarmament efforts, a council diplomat said.
Some Bush administration officials have privately criticized Blix, charging he played down the significance of Iraqi disarmament violations in order to forestall U.S. military action. Now that the war has ended, they don't want him to play a role.
"The White House doesn't trust Blix," an administration official said. "DOD [the Department of Defense] wants positively, absolutely nothing to do with UNMOVIC. Some in State [the State Department] feel that way, too; but others feel you have to have a U.N. imprimatur to win support for lifting sanctions."
A senior administration official said that the United States has not made a final decision on what role, if any, UNMOVIC might play in the disarmament of Iraq. But the issue was a topic of debate today in an interagency meeting of deputy administration department heads over the future of U.N. inspections.
European Security Council diplomats said that they would try to convince the administration that it is in its interest to invite the United Nations into Iraq to verify its claims. But one official said that a final agreement may have to wait for the departure of Blix, who plans to step down when his contract expires on June 30. "I don't think it will be Blix," one council member said. "I think it will be post-Blix."
Under the terms of U.N. resolutions, U.N. inspectors must verify progress in Iraq's disarmament before U.N. sanctions can be suspended or lifted. Any effort to deny Blix an opportunity to fulfill his mandate would complicate negotiations aimed at ending sanctions.
Pincus reported from Washington.
--------
U.S. Balks at Return of U.N. Inspectors to Iraq
April 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-un-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday opposed letting U.N. inspectors return to Iraq to verify weapons disarmament, setting up a possible new Security Council confrontation with Russia, Germany and France.
White House officials also made clear they want to avoid any kind of deal that would link a lifting of U.N. sanctions against Iraq to a return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. Russia wants to link the two issues.
Asked if the administration expected U.N. inspectors to resume their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq any time soon, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the United States and the allies with which it invaded Iraq and toppled President Saddam Hussein were now doing that job themselves.
He said President Bush wanted to focus on methods that are ``the most effective to get the job done.''
``The coalition has taken on responsibility for the dismantling of Iraq's WMD and missile programs, which is part of the international community's shared goal...,'' Fleischer told reporters.
``We are looking forward, not backward. Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, and we will need to reassess the framework design to disarm the regime given the new facts on the ground.''
Conclusive evidence of Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction has yet to be found by invasion forces. U.S. officials, aware they would face global anger if no such weapons are found, say they need more time for the search.
The U.S. relationship with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has been an uneasy one. In the run-up to the Iraq war, some in Washington felt Blix was playing for time to extend U.N. inspectors in order to avoid war at all costs.
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Blix did nothing to dissuade the doubters by questioning intelligence pointing to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction used by the United States and Britain to justify invading the country.
``I think it's been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been shaky,'' Blix told the BBC on Tuesday.
Fleischer suggested Blix failed to achieve disarmament properly by not interviewing Iraqi scientists with knowledge of the banned weapons programs as U.S. forces are now doing.
``To find the weapons you need to have Iraqis tell you where they are. That is consistent with our approach now,'' he said.
Blix addressed the U.N. Security Council in closed session on Tuesday on his readiness to field an inspection team. U.N. verification of whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction may be the key to lifting U.N. economic sanctions on Iraq as pushed by Bush.
Fleischer said there was no need to make lifting economic sanctions dependent on verifying disarmament.
``Clearly the United Nations has the ability to pass new resolutions that supersede old resolutions, particularly when the old resolutions are predicated on the existence of a regime that is now gone,'' he said.
U.S. officials said that by complicating the U.S. effort to have economic sanctions lifted on Iraq, France, Germany and Russia, which together opposed Bush's war plans, could hurt their own push for a bigger U.N. role.
``It's going to depend a lot on their behavior,'' one senior official said of the three nations. ``Let's see how the French, Russians and Germans and others deal with that issue (of lifting the sanctions).''
While U.S. forces have yet to find chemical or biological weapons or evidence that Saddam was building a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials remain confident the evidence will be found but insist it will take time.
``This guy (Saddam) had years to hide things. They are experts at concealing programs and infrastructure in a dual-use capacity designed to fool inspectors,'' said one U.S. official. ``This is not an instantaneous process.''
-------- korea
Korea's DMZ: 'Scariest place on Earth'
By Joe Havely
CNN Hong Kong
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/04/22/koreas.dmz/
(CNN) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton described it as "the scariest place on Earth."
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas is the most heavily fortified border in the world, bristling with watchtowers, razor wire, landmines, tank-traps and heavy weaponry.
On either side of its 151-mile (248 km) length almost two million troops face each other off ready to go to war at a moment's notice.
They have been on a hair trigger for almost 50 years, ever since the last shot was fired in the Korean War and an uneasy truce came into force.
Officially that war has not yet ended -- no formal peace deal has ever been signed and the war could start again at any moment.
Between North and South is a strip of rugged no man's land -- the DMZ proper -- averaging two and a half miles (4km) wide.
A sense of tension fills the air -- along with, from time to time, the sounds of martial music and propaganda blasted out from giant speakers installed along the North Korean side.
Also on the North Korean side is what the Guinness Book of Records lists as the world's tallest flagpole soaring some 160 meters (525ft) into the air. Flashpoint
Monitoring the edgy standoff is a small group of Swiss and Swedish officers who make up the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission.
For its part North Korea is thought to maintain about one million troops along its side of the frontier.
On the southern side, stationed alongside some 600,000 South Korean soldiers are 37,000 U.S. troops, one of the largest single overseas deployments of American forces.
If North Korean forces ever crossed the DMZ again the United States is automatically at war -- under a 1954 treaty backed by United Nations resolutions the U.S. is committed to defend South Korea.
Although one of the world's major flashpoints, the DMZ has become a major tourist attraction drawing in hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
Many come to gawp at the rigid North Korean soldiers stationed along the frontline.
Others take in visits to one of a number of tunnels dug secretly under the DMZ by the North for use in a possible invasion.
Virtually undisturbed for half a century the zone has also become a rugged natural haven for several endangered species including the white-naped and red-crowned cranes as well as nearly extinct Korean subspecies of tiger and leopard.
----
Powell Says Nuclear N.Korea Would Not Intimidate US
Tue April 22, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=2608819&fromEmail=true
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday the United States would not be intimidated by a North Korea with nuclear weapons and could "do whatever might be required" to face such a threat.
Powell made the remark in a television interview as U.S. officials prepared to sit down with North Korean and Chinese officials in Beijing for talks on addressing North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
The United States, which believes the secretive communist nation may already have enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs, hopes the talks may be a first step in persuading Pyongyang to give up its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
North Korea wants security guarantees from the United States, something Powell suggested would not be on the table in Beijing.
Speaking to the Charlie Rose Show, Powell rejected the idea that North Korea may have concluded that it could forestall a U.S. attack by acquiring nuclear weapons.
"The reason it's the wrong lesson is that the United States has such economic, political, diplomatic and military power that we are not going to be intimidated by a small number of nuclear weapons held by a particular regime," Powell said, according to a State Department transcript of the interview.
Asked if the United States might be intimidated by the possibility North Korea might use a nuclear weapon on South Korea, Powell said: "I don't know what they might or might not do, but the one thing they won't do is intimidate us. And we're going to make that very clear in these discussions.
"And it should dawn on them that they can have plutonium programs and they can have enriched uranium programs, and not one of those programs feeds one North Korean child," he added. "There is no future in sitting there on a stockpile of nuclear weapons that we can contain or we can deter or we can do whatever might be required."
The United States has repeatedly said it has no intention of attacking North Korea and Powell said President Bush "believes strongly there is a diplomatic way to resolve this."
In contrast, Bush chose to invade Iraq and topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom he accused of possessing chemical and biological weapons and of pursuing nuclear weapons. Unlike North Korea, Iraq was not believed by U.S. officials to possess nuclear weapons.
Asked if the United States may give North Korea security guarantees, Powell replied: "There is a diplomatic way to resolve this crisis. And in this first set of meetings, nothing is being put on the table."
U.S. officials said in October North Korea had admitted it was pursuing a uranium enrichment program with an aim of developing nuclear weapons, kicking off a six-month stalemate.
Both sides appeared to take the first steps toward resolving the issue earlier this month, when Pyongyang dropped its demand for bilateral talks with Washington, and the United States agreed to take part in the three-way Beijing talks.
Asked if he was convinced that North Korea, which is beset by food and energy shortages, may be more interested in feeding its people rather in nuclear weapons, Powell replied: "No, I think they are more interested in the preservation of the regime and their security, the security of the regime."
----
U.S. team leaves for nuke talks
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 22, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030422-229061.htm
A U.S. delegation left for three days of talks with North Korea in Beijing yesterday - the first such meeting in six months - after Pyongyang clarified a Friday statement about the progress of its nuclear weapons program.
The State Department, the leading agency in the dialogue with the North, said the United States' goal is to discuss "a verifiable and irreversible end" to all nuclear efforts. But it expects the North Koreans to bring up other issues as well.
"Multilateral talks involving the United States, China and North Korea will take place April 23-25 in Beijing," Richard Boucher, State Department spokesman, told reporters. "We intend to conduct serious talks on the situation created by North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons."
Mr. Boucher noted China's key role in persuading Pyongyang to agree to a meeting somewhat different from its initial demand for one-on-one talks with the United States. He said Beijing will be a full participant in the discussions.
"We appreciate China's efforts to achieve the international community's shared goal of a peaceful and stable Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons," he said.
North Korea yesterday corrected a statement it had made Friday that said: "As we have already declared, we are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase."
The statement, which prompted some Bush administration officials to call for canceling the Beijing talks, led to confusion in Washington, where intelligence sources said there was no indication that reprocessing had actually begun.
U.S. officials on Friday blamed the confusion on bad translation from Korean to English by the North's KCNA news agency. They offered a different version, saying that Pyongyang was in the final stages of preparing to start reprocessing.
In the corrected translation, the KCNA said: "As we have already declared, we are successfully going forward to reprocess work more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase."
The U.S. delegation to Beijing, which includes officials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is led by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Mr. Kelly is the highest-ranking Bush administration official to have visited Pyongyang. During his first meeting with the North Koreans in early October, he confronted them with evidence they had a secret uranium-enrichment program, to which they admitted the next day.
Since then, a 1994 nuclear deal, known as the Agreed Framework, has in effect been invalidated. North Korea has made steps toward producing plutonium, and the United States has stopped shipments of free fuel oil to the impoverished communist country.
The U.S. delegation, which then had eight members, now includes five officials: Michael Green, director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council; Brig. Gen. Gary North of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; David Straub, director of the Office of Korean Affairs at the State Department; and Jody Green, senior country director for North Korea in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
After the delegation's talks in Beijing, where they will also discuss bilateral issues with China, members will stop in Seoul and Tokyo on their way home, Mr. Boucher said.
The North Korean delegation will be headed by Li Gun, deputy director-general of the American Affairs Bureau at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said. China will be represented by Fu Ying, director-general of the Asian bureau at the Foreign Ministry.
Mr. Boucher reiterated Washington's insistence that Japan and South Korea, which will be absent from the meetings in Beijing, join the talks with the North as soon as possible.
"We believe that inclusion of others in multilateral talks - South Korea and Japan, above all - would be essential for reaching agreement on substantive issues," he said.
On Saturday, North Korea proposed reopening its dialogue with South Korea within weeks.
----
Secret US file: oust regime in Pyongyang
April 22 2003
The New York Times / Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/21/1050777215129.html
The United States should team up with China to press for the removal of North Korea's leadership, according to a classified memo circulated by the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Details of the document have emerged only days before the US and China are due to meet North Korea to try to convince it to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
It argues that Washington's goal should be the collapse of Kim Jong Il's Government, but this seems at odds with the US State Department's approach of convincing Kim, in the words of one senior administration official, "that we're not trying to take him out".
Hardliners in the Pentagon - and some at the White House - say the US should use its speedy victory in Iraq to drive home to North Korea that it could meet the same fate if it ignores President George Bush's demands: that it dismantle its nuclear weapons program, ship its spent nuclear fuel out of the country and open up to intrusive inspections.
Just days before Mr Bush approved the negotiations with North Korea, scheduled for tomorrow, Mr Rumsfeld circulated the Pentagon memo to some members of the Administration.
Mr Rumsfeld's team, Administration officials say, was urging diplomatic pressure for changing the Government, not a military solution. But the memo highlights the internal struggle over how to pursue Mr Bush's determination to stop the spread of nuclear arms and unconventional weapons.
North Korea is the critical next case in his policy of zero tolerance for "rogue states" because, unlike Iraq, it has active nuclear programs. The CIA believes Pyongyang is selling missiles to Iran, Syria, Pakistan and other nations.
The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is believed to have offered North Korea assurances that the US is not trying to undermine its Government - but has made it clear the country will get no aid and investment until the nuclear programs are dismantled.
He received final approval for his approach in a meeting with Mr Bush last week, a session Mr Rumsfeld did not attend. "There's a sense in the Pentagon that Powell got this arranged while everyone was distracted with Iraq," said one intelligence official. "And now there is a race over who will control the next steps."
On Friday, in its first explicit comment on the Iraq war, North Korea said it had learned something from the fall of Saddam Hussein: "In order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent."
But this week's talks were nearly scuttled when North Korea issued a statement that appeared to suggest it had already begun reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel into bomb-grade plutonium. Yesterday it quietly issued a correction saying it was moving towards this but had not already done so.
On the weekend, Mr Bush said China's willingness to intervene in the negotiations contributed to "a good chance of convincing North Korea to abandon her ambitions to develop nuclear arsenals".
However, few in the Administration believe it will work.
Nevertheless, White House officials say a change of government in North Korea is not official Administration policy - and some suggest the secret memo was circulated for discussion among high-level officials, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and may not represent Mr Rumsfeld's view. His spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said he supported the President's diplomatic strategy for disarming North Korea.
Several officials who have seen it say it is ludicrous to think China would join in any US-led effort to bring about the fall of the North Korean Government. "The last thing the Chinese want," one official said, "is a collapse of North Korea that will create a flood of refugees into China and put Western allies on the Chinese border."
----
Report: U.S. has plan to bomb North Korea
April 22, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030422-044514-8118r.htm
SYDNEY, Australia, April 22 -- The Pentagon has produced plans to bomb North Korea's nuclear plant at Yongbyon, if the rouge state goes ahead with reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods that would yield enough plutonium for six nuclear weapons, according to a published report Tuesday.
Citing "well-informed sources close to U.S. thinking," the Australian newspaper reported the plan also involves a military strike against North Korean artillery stationed in the hills above the border with South Korea.
The artillery threatens Seoul and about 17,000 U.S. troops stationed south of the Demilitarized Zone.
The Pentagon hardliners said to be behind the plan reportedly believe the precision strikes envisaged in it would not lead to North Korea initiating a general war it would be certain to lose.
The United States would inform North Korea it was not aiming to destroy the regime of Kim Jong-il, but merely destroy its nuclear weapons capacity, the newspaper reported.
However, the Bush administration hasn't made a decision to accept the plan.
Instead, President George W. Bush has emphasized that they believe diplomacy can work with North Korea.
The United States, North Korea and China are scheduled to hold talks in Beijing on Wednesday.
----
U.S., North Korea in Beijing for Nuclear Talks
By REUTERS
April 22, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and his North Korean counterpart arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for talks to resolve a standoff over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons program.
With North Korean negotiator Li Gun not considered senior enough to cut deals, there were no expectations of a breakthrough at the talks, which open on Wednesday at an undisclosed venue.
Three days of closed-door meetings appear aimed at letting the United States and North Korea sound out each other's positions, and China would mainly sit in as a facilitator -- not a mediator -- to smooth things, diplomats said.
Both sides struck tough public postures.
The commander of U.S. forces in South Korea said the Communist North posed many threats to global stability with its active nuclear weapons program, proliferation of missile technology, and a massive army aimed at South Korea.
Pyongyang railed against ``U.S. imperialists,'' although analysts expect a more measured tone at the negotiating table.
Kelly made no comment as he arrived in Beijing for the talks with Li, deputy director-general of U.S. affairs at the North Korean Foreign Ministry. Fu Ying, head of Asian affairs at China's Foreign Ministry, would also take part, officials said.
Since the crisis was sparked off last October, Washington wants to talk to the North Koreans about closing down their nuclear program, while the North wants assurances the United States will not attack it.
DIALOGUE BUT NO BREAKTHROUGH
The wide gulf between the two was unlikely to be bridged this week, diplomats said.
``Apart from agreeing on the continuation of dialogue, I am not expecting much to come out of this,'' said an Asian diplomat in Beijing. ``They are not going to be seeing eye to eye on many things.''
China, which invited the two sides, would play ``honest broker'' to keep the talks moving forward, he said. One analyst said China would keep to the sidelines as much as possible.
A breakthrough offer from the North Korean side appeared unlikely. Li would be unable to offer major concessions or cut deals due to his relatively junior rank and would be limited to discussing procedural matters, a Western diplomat said.
``He will have very, very little negotiating room,'' he said. ``He's a deputy director. They didn't even send a director.
Host China was guarded about the talks. It only confirmed officially they would actually take place after both delegations were safely in Beijing.
``We hope the talks can help them to understand one another's positions more clearly and ease the current tense situation,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference.
TRADING RHETORIC
General Leon LaPorte, who commands the 37,000 U.S. troops based in the South, said on Tuesday the North posed ``many threats to global security.''
``Today, the current military demarcation line between North and South Korea is the most heavily armed in the world and it remains an arena for potential confrontation,'' he told a forum hosted by the conservative Korea Freedom League in Seoul.
LaPorte said North Korea, branded part of an ``axis of evil'' by the United States along with pre-war Iraq and Iran, saw the military as its only source of world influence.
``Adding to the increased tensions is the fact that North Korea has not shown 'sincere attempts' to address these threats to peace with the international community,'' he said.
South Korea, excluded from what will be the first formal talks since the nuclear crisis erupted last October, said it would send a senior diplomat to Beijing to monitor the meeting.
Seoul will send envoys to Pyongyang for ministerial talks at the weekend expected to focus on South Korean aid for the North.
North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, has stepped up its own rhetoric but revised a statement which said last week Pyongyang was ``successfully reprocessing'' nuclear fuel rods, a ``red line'' for Washington.
``As the U.S. imperialists' attempt to stifle the DPRK has gone beyond the danger line, the process of peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula has been blocked and the danger of a nuclear war is increasing hour by hour,'' the ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary.
It said the United States was using the nuclear issue and human rights ``to cripple the Korean people's trust in their socialist system and violate the DPRK'S sovereignty.''
The nuclear standoff began in October, when the U.S. said the North admitted it had an active covert program to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms, beside a plutonium program frozen under a 1994 pact with the United States.
This time, the U.S. goal is to eliminate, rather than merely freeze, those programs -- a tall order, experts say.
``I think the talks that are beginning on Wednesday will not solve the nuclear issue in the short term,'' said East Asia analyst James Hoare, a former British diplomat who was London's first envoy to Pyongyang. He described the North as fearful.
``Will the North Koreans cheat? I suspect they probably will,'' Hoare told reporters in Seoul. ``Frightened people usually do.''
----
S. Korean Leader Assailed for Exclusion From Talks
By Joohee Cho and Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 22, 2003; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7351-2003Apr21?language=printer
SEOUL, Apr. 21 -- The exclusion of South Korea from talks later this week on the North Korean nuclear problem has caused an uproar here, with much of the criticism directed at the newly inaugurated president, Roh Moo Hyun, who had promised that his government would not take a back seat on key issues of the Korean Peninsula.
News that the United States, North Korea and China would meet alone in Beijing on Wednesday brought protests from editorial writers and a wide spectrum of politicians. Critics say the South is being relegated to its traditional role of subservience to the United States. Roh acknowledged that the South's absence, a condition imposed by North Korea, brought "disappointment and wounded pride" to his citizenry. But he argued that the outcome of the talks was more important than the form.
The Bush administration has decided to proceed with the talks despite confusion last week over an English-language version of a statement issued by North Korea that said that reprocessing of spent nuclear rods had begun. U.S. officials have said that such a step, which would turn out materials suitable for nuclear bombs, would be a grave development. A Korean-language version of the statement, however, said reprocessing had not yet begun. U.S. officials, citing lack of independent confirmation that such work is underway, have in essence decided to accept the Korean-language statement as the correct one.
As the talks draw near, U.S. officials have hastened to assure South Korea and Japan, which also was excluded from the talks, that they would be brought in before any deal is signed.
This weekend, North Korea reached out to the South, offering to reschedule cabinet-level talks that had been canceled last week. The discussions, now set for April 27-29, will deal with contact between the two Koreas. Officials in Seoul accepted the offer, but that did little to quiet critics for their failure to get a seat in Beijing.
South Korea's opposition Grand National Party has called the exclusion from the Beijing meeting a miserable defeat for South Korean foreign policy and demanded that Roh apologize for shaming the nation. "Roh's government is shivering like a mouse facing a cat in front of [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il," said Cho Woong Kyu, an opposition member of Korea's parliament.
Politicians within Roh's ruling party also were critical of the format. "For national interest, we must swallow it, but emotionally, this is humiliating," said Cho Soon Sung, chairman of the party's special committee on the North Korean nuclear issue.
The events carry an uncomfortable echo for South Korea. In 1993, the United States began preparing for war against North Korea because of its nuclear program and then reached a major accord with it the following year, as South Koreans largely watched from the sidelines.
Roh was elected in December on a campaign pledge to bring South Korea out from the shadow of the United States and play a more independent role in inter-Korean affairs. He has even offered himself as a mediator between U.S. and North Korean officials.
South Korean subservience to the United States is a popular theme in South Korea, where resentment against U.S. influence has been rising. Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation efforts, engaged in five years of "sunshine policy" diplomacy, wooing North Korea independently. Roh has promised to continue that effort.
One adviser to the Roh government, whose recommendations were overridden, said the Beijing negotiations represent "a very positive turning point" in the standoff. But, he added, "the serious problem is that South Korea has been left out of this play. It's a replay of 1994."
Japan, which also had expected to be invited to the talks, has more quickly fallen in line publicly with Washington's concession to the North on the format of the talks. When the talks were disclosed last week, Taku Yamasaki, secretary general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, fumed that "we cannot accept the multilateral talks which exclude Japan and South Korea." By that evening, however, he had accepted the government's script that Tokyo and Seoul would join the talks later.
----
China Plays Diplomatic Role in N. Korea
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
BEIJING (AP) -- A half-century after the United States forged an armistice with North Korea and China to halt the Korean War, the three sides are meeting again to resolve a new regional crisis -- the North's suspected efforts to build nuclear arms.
The talks are an unusual diplomatic venture by China and reflect how much its communist government has changed since Beijing sent 1 million soldiers to die fighting for its North Korean allies during the Korean War.
The 1953 agreement that ended that fight left the Korean Peninsula one of the world's most heavily armed as well as a legacy of tensions between North and South Korea.
Though it still gives North Korea fuel and food, China is increasingly viewed as a potential partner in efforts to ensure stability on the peninsula and rein in Pyongyang's ambitions to join the club of nuclear-armed nations.
None of the governments will give details of the talks, which start Wednesday. But U.S. diplomats say they are to last through Friday and are aimed at achieving a ``verifiable, irreversible end to North Korea's nuclear program.''
Beijing says it doesn't want North Korea's hardline communist regime to have nuclear weapons and is committed to finding a peaceful negotiated settlement.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Tuesday that the ``top priority'' of the talks is for the parties to meet face to face and ease the strain of the standoff.
``We hope that the talks will be conducive to relevant parties for having a better knowledge of each others' stand and to release the current tension,'' said Liu, who wouldn't provide details.
China got involved only grudgingly. It usually tries to keep a low diplomatic profile and says it doesn't want to get involved in other conflicts.
But while Beijing kept on the sidelines during the Iraq war, it has critical interests in North Korea, said Pan Shaozhong, a United States specialist at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing.
China worries that a new U.S.-North Korean conflict could bring Western forces to its border and unleash a flood of refugees into its northeast, Pan said. That would threaten the stability that China's new generation of leaders seek as they try to concentrate on easing poverty and other domestic tasks.
``It's a very dangerous situation,'' Pan said. ``We don't like this at all.''
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is leading the American delegation to the talks, which includes military and Defense Department officials. The United States keeps 37,000 soldiers in South Korea.
Japan and South Korea were sending diplomats to Beijing to monitor the talks, though the Chinese spokesman Liu said it was ``still up in the air'' whether they would be allowed to take part in later rounds of discussions.
Tensions over the North Korea's nuclear program rose in October after U.S. officials said North Korea acknowledged it had embarked on a uranium-based nuclear weapons program.
Since then, Pyongyang has become the first country to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted a plutonium-producing reactor.
``Step one is for North Korea to rectify the situation and give up its nuclear weapons program,'' Thomas Hubbard, the U.S. ambassador in Seoul, said Tuesday in an interview on South Korean radio.
North Korea had demanded one-on-one talks with the United States but agreed this month to a multilateral format, though South Korea and other nations were left out. The two sides have never had formal diplomatic ties.
Officials in South Korea and Washington have said the swift U.S. victory in Iraq prompted North Korea to talk.
Pyongyang agreed to the talks after a March 8 visit March 8 by a Chinese envoy who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, according to the Chinese newspaper Global Times, which is published by the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily.
China also sought to reassure Pyongyang by saying its call for a security guarantee from the United States ought to be considered. U.S. officials say they won't offer a formal treaty but might provide a less formal commitment not to attack.
Unconfirmed reports also speak of bolder moves to encourage talks by China, the biggest aid donor to the North, whose decrepit, isolated economy depends on foreign food donations to feed its people.
China has already come far in its role of mediator, raising hopes that it will become an active, constructive diplomatic force.
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Powell Says Nuclear N.Korea Would Not Intimidate US
April 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday the United States would not be intimidated by a North Korea with nuclear weapons and could ``do whatever might be required'' to face such a threat.
Powell made the remark in a television interview as U.S. officials prepared to sit down with North Korean and Chinese officials in Beijing for talks on addressing North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
The United States, which believes the secretive communist nation may already have enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs, hopes the talks may be a first step in persuading Pyongyang to give up its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
North Korea wants security guarantees from the United States, something Powell suggested would not be on the table in Beijing.
Speaking to the Charlie Rose Show, Powell rejected the idea that North Korea may have concluded that it could forestall a U.S. attack by acquiring nuclear weapons.
``The reason it's the wrong lesson is that the United States has such economic, political, diplomatic and military power that we are not going to be intimidated by a small number of nuclear weapons held by a particular regime,'' Powell said, according to a State Department transcript of the interview.
Asked if the United States might be intimidated by the possibility North Korea might use a nuclear weapon on South Korea, Powell said: ``I don't know what they might or might not do, but the one thing they won't do is intimidate us. And we're going to make that very clear in these discussions.
``And it should dawn on them that they can have plutonium programs and they can have enriched uranium programs, and not one of those programs feeds one North Korean child,'' he added. ``There is no future in sitting there on a stockpile of nuclear weapons that we can contain or we can deter or we can do whatever might be required.''
The United States has repeatedly said it has no intention of attacking North Korea and Powell said President Bush ``believes strongly there is a diplomatic way to resolve this.''
In contrast, Bush chose to invade Iraq and topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom he accused of possessing chemical and biological weapons and of pursuing nuclear weapons. Unlike North Korea, Iraq was not believed by U.S. officials to possess nuclear weapons.
Asked if the United States may give North Korea security guarantees, Powell replied: ``There is a diplomatic way to resolve this crisis. And in this first set of meetings, nothing is being put on the table.''
U.S. officials said in October North Korea had admitted it was pursuing a uranium enrichment program with an aim of developing nuclear weapons, kicking off a six-month stalemate.
Both sides appeared to take the first steps toward resolving the issue earlier this month, when Pyongyang dropped its demand for bilateral talks with Washington, and the United States agreed to take part in the three-way Beijing talks.
Asked if he was convinced that North Korea, which is beset by food and energy shortages, may be more interested in feeding its people rather in nuclear weapons, Powell replied: ``No, I think they are more interested in the preservation of the regime and their security, the security of the regime.''
-------- russia
Russia: Chernobyl's Reactor May Collapse
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Ukraine-Chernobyl.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- The concrete-and-steel sarcophagus containing the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine is in danger of collapsing, Russia's atomic energy minister said Tuesday.
``There may come a moment when the roof can no longer hold,'' Alexander Rumyantsev said in Moscow.
Chernobyl was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident when a reactor exploded April 26, 1986, spewing radiation across a vast swath of then-Soviet Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Western Europe.
Rumyantsev said the shell over the damaged reactor was constructed hastily ``under the most difficult'' conditions and has gaps that threaten to leak radiation.
He also doubted that Ukrainian officials were carrying out the necessary scientific monitoring of the site.
``No one is conducting tests on the damaged walls,'' Rumyantsev said, adding that a stronger concrete shelter could be built over the existing sarcophagus.
International donors have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new shelter but construction is not expected to start before next year.
Rumyantsev said he was well acquainted with the deficiencies of the Chernobyl shell because he worked for years at Moscow's Kurchatov nuclear institute, which has monitored the plant since Soviet times.
--------
April 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-chernobyl.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The concrete shield thrown up to block radiation escaping the Chernobyl nuclear power station after it exploded in 1986 is collapsing and needs urgent reinforcement, Russia's atomic energy minister said Tuesday.
Alexander Rumyantsev was speaking at a news conference almost exactly 17 years after one of Chernobyl's four reactors exploded and spewed clouds of radioactivity over much of Europe in the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster.
``We can see a situation where the roof could fall in, or rather the supports that hold up the roof could fall down,'' he said, adding that the concrete itself was leaking radiation. ``There are a lot of holes in the sarcophagus,'' he said.
He said workers from his ministry involved in monitoring the reactor in ex-Soviet Ukraine kept him informed.
``I know how the sarcophagus was built. It was built in difficult radioactive conditions for the builders. They had to work fast to get away from the danger,'' he said.
``We need to surround it with another sarcophagus.''
The Chernobyl disaster killed about 30 firefighters in the immediate aftermath, and many of the people involved in the clean-up died in the next weeks.
Rumyantsev said a collapse of the Soviet-era sarcophagus, dramatic as it may be, would have much more limited consequences than the original disaster.
``There is a strong chance it could happen, but it would not be such a catastrophe, it would be more of a local affair,'' he said. ``It would be bad for Ukraine.''
Rumyantsev, a staunch believer in the future of nuclear energy, said that despite the shock experienced by the public in 1986, estimates of the number of victims were often exaggerated.
Environmentalists and doctors in Ukraine say there have been thousands of deaths from radiation-related illnesses and a huge increase in thyroid cancer following the accident.
``Say there were 200 deaths ... an accident in a chemical factory would be more horrible judging by the number of victims. It was about as deadly as a plane crash -- Concorde, say,'' Rumyantsev said, referring to a supersonic jet which crashed in Paris nearly three years ago.
``When Greenpeace or other ecologists talk about a million victims, I am prepared to agree that a million people were scared. That was the main medical result of the disaster.''
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
Expenditures at Los Alamos Lab Questioned
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Probe.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Porous financial management at Los Alamos National Laboratory allowed for $11.1 million in questionable expenditures, government inspectors reported.
Energy Department Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman recommended Monday that the government require the University of California, which has managed the lab for six decades, to repay any unallowable charges, pay appropriate penalties and improve its internal controls.
``The caliber of business operations is simply inadequate given the nature and size of operations at Los Alamos and the requirements of the university's contract with the Department of Energy,'' the report said.
Lab Interim Director Pete Nanos took ``strong exception'' the Energy Department's conclusions.
``We believe the laboratory's operations related to meal and travel costs, and the operation of its audits and assessments function, are consistent with its contract,'' Nanos said in a statement. ``We also believe we have been consistent with the requirements of federal travel regulations and other federal requirements and guidance for allowable and unallowable costs.''
The audit covers $5.2 billion in charges during the 2000-2002 budget years. It comes amid allegations of weak fiscal oversight, costly cases of equipment theft and financial fraud, and the firing of two investigators who pressed the issues with management.
The Energy Department is considering whether to allow bidders to compete for the lab's contract. That decision is expected April 30.
Friedman identified $3.7 million in meals and $7.4 million for travel costs that were potentially not allowed under the contract, and said $3.5 million on internal audits did not meet government or professional standards.
Friedman also identified ``control weaknesses'' in the lab's audit function, financial reconciliation, payroll and travel approval. There was also a backlog of audits of subcontracts at the lab, about half of all lab expenditures.
In a letter responding to a draft audit, Anthony R. Lane, associate administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the university and lab managers ``have taken positive steps to strengthen the laboratory's control environment and business practices.''
Earlier this month, the university released its own report on gaping holes in procurement policies that left the lab vulnerable to theft and fraud, but did not attempt to put a dollar figure on an amount lost.
On Monday, the university released a 107-page independent review of the lab's business operations by Ernst and Young LLP. UC spokesman Michael Reese said the report suggests specific program and accounting changes.
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing -- the third -- on management problems at the lab on May 1.
Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow, NNSA administrator Linton Brooks, and University of California President Richard Atkinson are expected to testify.
McSlarrow is expected to report to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on whether bidding for the contract is appropriate.
On the Net:
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
Energy Department Inspector General: http://www.ig.doe.gov
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A - Bomb Birthplace Marks 60th Anniversary
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Los-Alamos-Lab.html
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) -- Los Alamos National Laboratory celebrated its 60th anniversary Tuesday amid uncertainty over who will end up running the birthplace of the atomic bomb in the years to come.
A parade of speakers -- from National Nuclear Security Administration head Linton Brooks to Gov. Bill Richardson, a former energy secretary -- commended the weapons facility for decades of cutting-edge science.
``Los Alamos owes its existence to a marriage of science and the fighting spirit of America,'' Brooks said.
However, the lab that grew out of the secret World War II Manhattan Project is now fighting to save its 60-year management contract with the University of California. A review of the contract requested by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to be completed next week.
At the heart of the review are management, purchasing and inventory problems at the lab.
Allegations of weak financial oversight, costly cases of equipment theft and financial fraud arose late last year. The laboratory also was criticized for firing two investigators. Several lab officials have resigned or been demoted or fired in recent months.
UC President Richard Atkinson said the university ``cannot escape the experience of the last few months,'' but said the reality is that Los Alamos employees are committed to their scientific and national security mission.
With management improvements the lab and university are instituting, ``I'm confident that we will get to where we need to go,'' Atkinson said.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said that while he hopes the university keeps the contract, he has also told Abraham he believes the contract should eventually be open to competition.
``I worry that the attacks on Los Alamos will only intensify if we do not take dramatic action to improve the lab's management and reputation,'' he said.
-------- us politics
Rumsfeld denies plan for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 22, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030422-89128996.htm
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday the military has no plans to set up long-term bases in Iraq for U.S. forces.
Mr. Rumsfeld said four bases are being used by the military for "stability operations" and for supplying humanitarian aid.
He said the Pentagon is starting to pull forces out of the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, which includes Iraq.
As for how U.S. forces will be deployed in the Middle East in the future, Mr. Rumsfeld said he has some ideas but no concrete plans or anything to announce now.
U.S. military forces attacked Iraq to change a regime, he said.
"We went in there to find weapons of mass destruction," he said. "We went in there to stop them from threatening their neighbors."
In Iraq yesterday, Marines fought a battle near Mosul against unidentified gunmen, said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In northern Iraq, Special Forces troops found a large cache of weapons south of Kirkuk. The arms in 40 bunkers included rockets for multiple launchers, artillery rounds and other munitions, including 50 SA-7 hand-held surface-to-air missiles, Gen. Myers said.
"There's still a lot of dangerous work to do in terms of continued security and stability, as well as the search for weapons of mass destruction and support to humanitarian operations," Gen. Myers said.
As for Iraq's hidden weapons, Mr. Rumsfeld said U.S. forces are not likely to uncover chemical, biological or nuclear-related arms and equipment by accident.
"What's going to happen, ultimately, is we'll find people, and the people will decide that they want to look forward instead of back, and they will come to us, as they are, and offer up suggestions as to where one might look and how one might approach it, and testimony on their personal involvements," Mr. Rumsfeld said, noting that "we will obviously look with favor on people that do that."
An Iraqi scientist who worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program disclosed to an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical and biological arms equipment days before the war began.
The scientist led military weapons specialists to a stockpile of chemicals used in making illegal weapons, defense officials said.
The scientist also said Iraq moved some of its weapons of mass destruction to Syria. Officials confirmed the scientist's cooperation with Army teams after it was first reported in the New York Times.
Defense planners are considering how U.S. forces will be arranged in the future, Mr. Rumsfeld said. The issue will be discussed with other governments, including those in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Also, there are no plans for ties to a post-Saddam Iraqi government because "there isn't even an emerging government to plan it with at the present time," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
He acknowledged that the ouster of Saddam's regime and its replacement with a government friendly toward the United States could lead to a cut in forces in the region.
The four Iraqi air bases being used by U.S. forces are: the international airport, west of the city; the H-1 airfield in western Iraq; Tallil airfield near Nasiriya in the south; and Bashur airfield in northern Iraq.
"We are using those bases, properly so, to help with stabilization forces and humanitarian assistance," he said.
The secretary made the comments to counter what he said was an inaccurate report in Sunday's New York Times. The report quoted unidentified Bush administration officials as saying the United States wanted to keep four permanent military bases in Iraq.
The report was "unhelpful," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The impression that's left around the world is that we plan to occupy the country, we plan to use their bases over the long period of time, and it's flat false," he said.
U.S. military forces will be in Iraq as long as they are needed to assist the new government and "not one day longer," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld also defended the military's failure to provide security at key sites in Baghdad to prevent looting immediately after the fall of the Iraqi capital.
Military planners had a large number of things to do before they could focus on protecting places like museums or banks, Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Hospitals and enemy headquarters that had valuable documents were protected against looters, Mr. Rumsfeld said, but not everything could be secured.
----
Did Bush Deceive Us in His Rush to War?
The 'threats' that Hussein posed to the United States are nowhere to be seen.
Robert Scheer
April 22, 2003
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/la-war-oescheer22apr22,0,1263293.column
Now that the war has been won, is it permissible to suggest that our emperor has no clothes? I'm not referring to his abysmal stewardship of the economy but rather the fig-leaf war he donned to cover up his glaring domestic failures.
President Bush went to war with Hitler's Germany and found another Afghanistan instead. After comparing the threat of Hussein to that of the Führer, it was odd to find upon our arrival a tottering regime squatting on a demoralized Third World populace.
Now the pressure is on for Bush to find or plant those alleged weapons of mass destruction fast or stand exposed as a bullying fraud.
Of course, our vaunted intelligence forces knew well from our overhead flights and the reports of U.N. inspectors freely surveying the country that Iraq had been reduced by two decades of wars, sanctions and arms inspections to a paper tiger, but that didn't keep the current administration from depicting Baghdad as a seat of evil so powerful it might soon block the very sun from shining.
And while Emperor Bush piled on the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, his bespectacled vizier for defense presented a mad-hatter laundry list of Iraq's alleged weapons collection, as long and specific as it was phony and circumstantial.
Secretary of State Colin Powell's now infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council employed "intelligence" cribbed from a graduate student's thesis, documents later acknowledged as fakes, and a defector's affirmation of the existence of chemical weapons while excluding his admission that they had subsequently been destroyed.
Having taken over the country, we now know with a great deal of certainty that if chemical or biological weapons were extant there, they were not deployed within the Iraqi military in a manner that threatened the U.S. or anyone else.
Likewise, Bush's fear-mongering about Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program has proven baseless. There was no reason to hurriedly yank the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq.
Even Bush's only real ally outside of Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is worried that the fearsome weapons will not turn up - or that a skeptical world will believe they were planted as an afterthought. "Some sort of objective verification" of weapons finds would be a "good idea," he said last week.
However, the refusal of the U.S. to permit the return of U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team to continue their work is damning evidence of our fear that the weapons simply do not exist, at least in any usable quantity or form. It also raises the suspicion that Iraqi scientists now held incommunicado in U.S. captivity will be squeezed until they tell us what we want to hear. Whatever happened to the prewar demand that those same scientists be given the freedom to tell their story in a non-intimidating environment?
Bush may fear the truth because the still-AWOL weapons are a potential tar baby for this administration. Undoubtedly the U.S. will find mixed-used chemical precursors for weapons, as was claimed only this week, but that is a far cry from being an "imminent threat."
As Joseph Cirincione, a top weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment, put it, the purported existence of those weapons "was the core reason for going to war with Iraq and the reason we had to go now If we don't find fairly large stockpiles of these weapons, in quantities large enough to pose a strategic threat to the United States, the president's credibility will be seriously undermined and the legitimacy of the war repudiated."
That concern is largely absent in the U.S. media, where "liberation" is now a code word that smoothes over any irritating questions one may ask when a Christian superpower invades the heart of the Muslim world. Its partner phrase, "the building of democracy," is also all the rage, as if real democracy was something you could create with Legos or SimCity software.
At this point, though, we can only hope it will all turn out for the best, and that a retired U.S. general will figure out how to use the country's natural resources to end poverty, build excellent schools and provide crime-free streets and an electoral system where positions of power don't go to the highest bidder. Then he can come back and apply this genius at home, where we've got plenty of unwelcome violence, poverty and on-the-take politicians.
However, in the unlikely case this fantasy comes true, albeit at an untold price in money, lives and human suffering, it should be remembered that this was not the justification for war given to the American people.
And, in a more sober mood, one must still ask the embarrassing yet essential question: Did our president knowingly deceive us in his rush to war?
If he did, and we are truly concerned about our own democracy, we would have to acknowledge that such an egregious abuse of power rises to the status of an impeachable offense.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Rights Group: 'Climate of Fear' Rules Afghanistan
April 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-rights-afghan.html
GENEVA (Reuters) - Warlords terrorize the population with a ``climate of fear'' and religious fundamentalism is rising in Afghanistan 18 months after U.S. forces toppled the ruling Taliban regime, a rights watchdog said on Tuesday.
Even the opening of schools and colleges for women -- a widely hailed product of the collapse of the Taliban in late 2001 when U.S. troops entered the country -- was also under threat, New York-based Human Rights Watch said.
``The international community has allowed warlords and local military commanders to take control of much of the country,'' its representative Loubna Freih told the U.N. Human Rights Commission, now ending its annual six-week session in Geneva.
She said that instead of providing security, the warlords were terrorizing the local population in many parts of the country, with kidnappings, arbitrary arrests, armed robbery, extortion and beatings widespread.
Freih said the warlords had in some places maintained law and order ``by creating a climate of fear, not unlike under the Taliban...''
Political opponents, journalists and ordinary Afghans ``are attacked and intimidated into silence,'' she added.
An Afghan regional commander said on Tuesday the Afghan government needed to take courageous action against unruly warlords if it was to extend its rule around the country. He said the government's authority did not extend much beyond the capital, Kabul.
Soldiers and police -- who were to have been retrained by U.S. and other troops involved in an international security force also largely limited to the capital -- ``regularly abduct and rape women, girls and boys,'' Freih said.
GIRLS' EDUCATION AT RISK
``Religious fundamentalism is on the rise, with new restrictions on freedom of expression and movement of women and girls. Gains in education are now at risk as many parents, afraid of attacks by troops and other gunmen, keep their daughters out of school,'' she said.
Under the hard-line Islamic Taliban, women and girls were largely restricted to their homes and were only allowed out if fully veiled and in the company of a male relative.
Washington sent troops into Afghanistan to try to destroy the Taliban which was accused of harboring Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. The United States blames bin Laden and al Qaeda for the September 11 attacks.
The Bush administration hailed education for women as one of the successes of the operation.
There are some 11,000 U.S. and allied troops still in Afghanistan, many hunting Taliban leaders and members of al Qaeda. Bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Omar are still at large.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission is considering proposals to replace its current investigator who has a special mandate to look into the rights situation in Afghanistan with a ``special expert'' whose mandate would be much less clearly defined.
Sources close to the commission say the United States has been opposed to any resolution at all on Afghanistan this year as well as to creation by the U.N. body of an international commission of inquiry into past rights abuses in the country.
In her speech, Freih said creation of such a commission was ``crucial in establishing the rule of law.'' Without it, efforts to break a ``cycle of impunity and the stranglehold of gunmen are unlikely to succeed,'' she added.
-------- arms
Clusters of Death Bomblets wreak havoc long after their initial deployment
By James Rupert
NEWSDAY STAFF CORRESPONDENT
April 22, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woclus223248630apr22,0,125416.story?coll=ny%2Dworldnews%2Dheadlines
Baghdad - On April 9, as U.S. troops were reaching central Baghdad to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi army units were retreating along the main highway from the city's western edge and Iraqi artillery pieces were parked here and there among the homes on either side of the road.
For perhaps 2 miles along the highway, U.S. forces attacked with cluster bombs, according to several Iraqi eyewitnesses. The canisters broke open in midair, showering many of their explosive bomblets onto the road being used by the retreating Iraqi forces. Many others fell into large suburban neighborhoods like explosive rain, blasting craters and spewing steel shrapnel into homes, schools and civilians north and south of the road.
The cluster bomb attack on the Ghazaliya district appears to be one of the largest and deadliest in a civilian area reported so far in the war. A partial survey by Newsday yesterday among people in many of the affected neighborhoods gathered eyewitness reports of 27 people killed and 54 injured. "But actually, we must be afraid that the real death toll might easily be two or three times this number," said Dr. Hussain Nasser, head of a first aid station at Siddiq Mosque in Ghazaliya.
Some Iraqi eyewitnesses said the cluster bombs were dropped by a B-52 bomber, but a spokesman for the U.S. military's Central Command said it had no record of an air attack at that time. John Pike, a civilian munitions specialist in Washington, examined pictures of the bomblets and said they were U.S. munitions and appeared to be of a type fired from rockets or possibly artillery.
The Defense Department says cluster bombs are essential weapons for use against massed troops, tanks or anti-aircraft defenses. Opponents of the weapons, including the Federation of American Scientists, church groups and human rights organizations, say they should be banned, at least from use in urban environments, because of exactly what happened in Ghazaliya.
From his middle-class home at the eastern end of the bombed zone, Farooq Rubaii watched part of the attack. "It was a large plane, very high, with four trails of smoke" behind, he said. He saw it drop "four or five" dark objects, one of which fell toward Rubaii's home. It "opened up, and spread many smaller bombs," at which point Rubaii stopped watching and dashed into the nearest doorway.
"Just after that, the explosions started, everywhere. Nothing outside could have stayed alive," he said.
Another concentration of bomblets fell in Sector 651, a neighborhood of upscale villas north of the highway.
For residents here and cluster bomb opponents, the weapon's evil is not only in the spillover of bomblets beyond their intended target on April 9. It is also in the way they have continued to kill, nearly two weeks after the attack. Like any explosive weapon, cluster bombs include duds. Especially when landing on softer surfaces - grass, gardens, garbage dumps or pastures - a number of the bomblets fail to explode.
The bomblets in Ghazaliya are what the military calls "combined effect munitions." Each is shaped like a can of shaving cream, but only slightly bigger than a D-cell battery. It can blast through the armor of a tank. The bomb's body, of gray steel, is made to fragment into shrapnel to kill the troops operating the tank or artillery weapon targeted by the bomb.
Walid Hijazi, 20, knew none of this on April 11, when he and relatives went to check on the home of his uncle Mohammed Hijazi in Ghazaliya. Walid and his cousin Seif Hijazi, 17, found the bombs scattered near the house.
"I saw more than 100 of them, all the same," Walid Hijazi said. "We thought they were pieces, maybe from a bomb, but not that they were bombs themselves."
Amid the poverty that typically accompanies war, people's survival instincts often lead to scavenging. Curious about anything of interest or value inside the foreign objects on the ground, the young men took a half-dozen of them back to central Baghdad, where the Hijazi family was sheltering from the war in the apartment of a relative. There, "I checked the thing all over, trying to see how I could open it, but I couldn't," Walid Hijazi said.
With more than 20 people camped in the three-room apartment, seven of Hijazi's family were in the living room the next morning as the bomb sat on the floor near the sofa.
His baby sister, Rawand, was on the floor near the bomb, "but my back was turned," he said, "and I didn't see whether she touched it or not."
When the explosion rocked the house, those who ran in found Rawand with her legs blown away. She died quickly in her father's arms.
Neighbors carried the injured, stunned or unconscious into two cars, which rushed off to local hospitals. Walid and Seif Hijazi were in the car of Seif's father, Mohammed. As they rode, they discovered four of the objects they had gathered in Ghazaliya still on the car's floor. Now they knew what they were.
Panicked, they threw the bombs out of the car windows into empty areas along the street, they said. Each erupted, blasting shrapnel back into the car that smashed its windows, destroyed its tires and wounded Mohammed Hijazi. They had to flag down another car to get to the hospital.
Saturday, five members of the Tamimi family, who had fled their home in another part of the city, were walking on a footpath near the main highway, and Haithem, 7, spotted a bomblet.
"He thought it looked interesting. He picked it up and looked at it," said Haithem's brother Khalid, 23.
Then, as a child will, he threw it down. The explosion killed him and his cousin Nora, 9. Khalid Tamimi and the children's mothers, Amal and Mayasa, all were seriously injured.
In Newsday's partial count of victims in Ghazaliya, seven of the 13 people who were killed or injured by duds after the initial attack were children. That fits a pattern seen in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kuwait and other areas that have suffered cluster bomb attacks in the past two decades, according to Human Rights Watch and other monitoring groups.
"The United States should not be using these weapons," Steve Goose, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, said in a recent report. Because dud bomblets effectively turn into land mines, "Iraqi civilians will be paying the price with their lives and limbs for many years."
The indiscriminate way in which cluster bombs kill - both in the initial attack and as volatile duds - leads some critics to question whether they violate the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war. The accords include a requirement that military forces "take all feasible precautions in the choice of ... methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life."
The Pentagon insists it has done that in this war.
"I will tell you that the care which was taken in targeting throughout this campaign, the right munition for the right target, has been unprecedented," said Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, responding to a question last week about cluster bomb use.
Suha Jamal doesn't see it that way. She is the aunt of Rawand, the baby killed in the living room.
"No one asks that they prohibit a tank or a gun, because these weapons can be pointed at the person who is an enemy," Jamal said Sunday from her hospital bed. "But Rawand was the enemy of no American. This weapon kills by chance and by attracting the attention of children ... And we have a saying that broken things such as this can't be put back as they were before."
Deadly Duds
Cluster bombs, which unleash hundreds of smaller explosives on large, sprawling targets such as enemy convoys, have proven destructive to civilians as well as to enemy troops.
Cluster bombs can be carried by bombers such as the Air Force's B-52 Stratofortress.
Once dropped, bomb is designed to spin, giving bomblets inside more momentum.
Outer casing splits, scattering bomblets over an area as big as a football field.
Each bomblet inflates parachute-like device to orient itself as it strikes target.
Mechanical and fuse failures can leave about 5 percent of bomblets unexploded but still armed. Their bright, toy-like appearance can attract children - with tragic consequences.
SOURCE: Federation of American Scientists; GlobalSecurity.org; Human Rights Watch; staff reporting
-------- britain
Britain calls home bulk of ground forces
By Jack Fairweather in Basra
24/04/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/24/nbrit24.xml/
British ground forces in Iraq will be reduced from three brigades to one, a senior military source said last night.
In the next few months, 3 Commando Brigade and 16 Air Assault Brigade will be withdrawn, leaving 7th Armoured Brigade in the country.
A senior military source said: "The UK land commitment will be drawn down from three brigades to one brigade over the coming months."
The news came as Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said Saddam Hussein was still alive and hiding in Iraq.
"In the end we don't know [Saddam's whereabouts], but it is still our best judgment that he is [in Iraq]," Mr Hoon said yesterday as he made the first post-war ministerial visit to the country. Television pictures of the Iraqi leader released during the war suggested that he survived air strikes and rumours of his possible whereabouts abound.
Coalition commanders are anxious to avoid a protracted search that might see the ousted dictator escape in the same way as Osama bin Laden.
"There are any number of stories coming in about where he might have been," Mr Hoon said in the southern port town of Umm Qasr. "We have seen, day by day, successes as we capture some more of those who are to blame."
Mr Hoon said he was confident coalition forces would find weapons of mass destruction. "We will increasingly be able to find weapons of mass destruction as we get co-operation, as we are doing from individuals who are part of the regime," he said.
Mr Hoon, the first British or American politician to visit Iraq since the fall of Saddam, shook hands with Iraqi port workers in Umm Qasr and petted a sniffer dog named Buster which has found several arms caches.
Fadel Abbas Jassem, a 40-year-old port worker, said he was grateful for the visit. "The British saved us, I feel good that he came here. It makes me feel safe," he said.
The trip was intended as a morale-booster for British troops stationed in the south. Mr Hoon was unable to give a timescale for withdrawal, but said: "British troops will not stay a day longer than necessary."
One senior British officer said: "What we would have liked to have been told, and I know the troops felt the same, is how well we have done."
In the main hall of the old RAF base, now occupied by the ist Battalion the Royal Fusiliers, Mr Hoon shared a cup of Fanta with the officers as a brass band played.
Mr Hoon's choice of footwear once again drew attention. Visiting troops shortly before the war began, the Defence Secretary arrived fresh from a skiing holiday in the Alps wearing tasselled loafers. This time he wore more sensible desert boots.
But as one soldier ruefully observed: "I spent most of the war with standard issue black boots which led to foot rot."
-------- chemical weapons
Vietnam urges US aid for Agent Orange victims
Story by Christina Toh-Pantin
REUTERS VIETNAM:
April 22, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20523/story.htm
HANOI - Vietnam called on the United States last week to help victims of the dioxin-containing Agent Orange defoliant used during the Vietnam War after a study found more was used than previously thought. Vietnam estimates more than one million of its people have been exposed to Agent Orange, used from 1962 to 1971 to strip trees and plants and deny communist fighters forest cover and food.
It says the product caused tens of thousands of birth defects and other diseases.
"In our opinion the most urgent task now is to bring in aid, in parallel to the ongoing research, to help Agent Orange victims overcome the consequences," Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh told Reuters.
"The U.S. has a moral responsibility for this."
The study by researchers at Columbia University in New York who reanalysed military records said the amount of Agent Orange used was underestimated by seven million litres.
It said the estimates of how much chemical U.S. forces sprayed were greater by about 10 percent than previous estimates.
Washington provides no compensation to Vietnam victims of Agent Orange and says the communist country dropped claims for war reparations when ties were normalised in 1995.
The war ended in 1975.
Last year the United States and Vietnam agreed to investigate the effects of the chemical. Exposure to it has been linked to a higher risk of leukaemia and other types of cancer.
"NO EVIDENCE"
A U.S. embassy spokesman in Hanoi, asked to respond to the study, noted that Washington funds "multi-million dollar health programmes" which from the 1990s have targeted a number of diseases and conditions "including some the Vietnamese attribute without medical evidence to Agent Orange".
Agent Orange was also sprayed in Cambodia and Laos. The chemical got its name because of the coloured stripes on the containers.
The use of the herbicide was stopped in 1971 after it was discovered to contain dioxin.
An Agent Orange expert in Vietnam said he did not believe the latest assessments were significant.
"I don't think it changes the dynamics of the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam," said Craig Leisher, who worked for four years with the U.N. Development Programme as an environmental adviser on cleaning up Agent Orange.
"The sticking point is over humanitarian assistance, and the U.S. says 'no'."
-------- iraq
Ending the Sanctions
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Washington Post; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6586-2003Apr21?language=printer
THE QUESTION of whether to lift United Nations sanctions on Iraq ought to be beyond debate. The Security Council imposed the sanctions in 1990 to force the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to evacuate Kuwait. Despite considerable anxiety about the suffering of Iraqis, the sanctions were maintained for a dozen years in a failed attempt to force the regime to give up weapons of mass destruction. Now, to the relief and joy of most Iraqis, Saddam Hussein's regime has been eliminated, meaning there is no longer a need for such international punishment. That the Security Council is unlikely to agree on this simple and happy conclusion at its meeting today -- and may, in fact, spend weeks or months in bitter debate over it -- is further testimony to the cynical diplomacy of Russia and France. But it is also a reflection of the Bush administration's failure to pursue the multinational partnership in postwar Iraq that the president repeatedly promised.
France and Russia enter the latest Security Council round with more leverage than they had before the Iraq war. By blocking a council decision on sanctions, they could make it impossible for Iraq to sell its oil or even feed itself; under the oil-for-food program, the United Nations controls all of Iraq's oil revenue as well as its imports. Russia claims that it is only following U.N. requirements that inspectors certify Iraq's disarmament. Yet both Moscow and Paris fought to have the sanctions lifted when Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein; at that time they opposed any link to inspections. That they may now reverse themselves reveals their underlying interest in the privileged position they held as economic partners of Saddam Hussein. The dictator's former favorites want to keep their contracts; they also would like to force the United States to accept U.N. leadership in postwar Iraq, thereby advancing their contain-America strategy. Their blocking action would harm Iraqis most of all; by impeding reconstruction, they would also show themselves, even more than with their prewar maneuvering, to be untrustworthy as allies.
U.S. officials are betting that this morally repugnant stance will prove unsustainable. Yet the Bush administration is making an impasse more likely with the relentless pursuit of its own narrow agenda. Though the president has variously promised "partnership" or "a vital role" for the United Nations in postwar Iraq, on the ground the Pentagon is rapidly creating an administration that excludes the United Nations and every other nation except Britain. In advocating the lifting of sanctions, the administration is, in effect, proposing that control of Iraq's oil wealth be transferred from the United Nations to the occupation authority headed by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner. That prospect is unsettling not just to U.S. rivals and adversaries but also to many countries that supported the Iraq campaign.
U.S. diplomats say they may seek to break the Security Council's decision-making on Iraq into stages. By the time a vote is necessary on the oil-for-food program, which expires in early June, a U.S.-orchestrated transition to a new Iraqi administration may be so far advanced that French and Russian objections will be easily discarded. Yet that approach will work only if the administration succeeds in constructing a new Iraqi regime with a speed that is historically unprecedented. The United States can sustain its unilateral military rule of Iraq only for a few months without inviting a violent backlash from Iraqis and other Arabs.
There is no need for such a high-risk policy. The Bush administration could better protect U.S. interests and improve the chances of a successful postwar transition if it quickly invited more allies and more multilateral institutions to join in Iraq's reconstruction. U.N. and other international experts could help in the process of forming a transition government; Arab and European peacekeepers could take some of the burden off U.S. troops. U.N. weapons inspectors could provide critical validation of U.S. discoveries of weapons of mass destruction. Another international brawl over Iraq is not inevitable, but the Bush administration, as much as France and Russia, must act if one is to be avoided.
-------- israel / palestine
12 Israelis Arrested in Crackdown
From Reuters
April 22, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-arrests22apr22,0,7587992.story
JERUSALEM -- JERUSALEM - Israel has arrested 12 men from its paramilitary border police in an investigation of incidents that include the death of a Palestinian youth in custody in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Three of the suspects appeared at a hearing in a Jerusalem court Monday as the Justice Ministry widened its examination of the death of 17-year-old Imram Abu Hamdia on Dec. 30.
Palestinian witnesses told the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem that Hamdia hit his head and died after border policemen threw him from a moving jeep.
Israeli media said Justice Ministry investigators believe the suspects were avenging five comrades killed, along with seven other Israelis, in a Palestinian ambush in November.
Justice Ministry officials were not available for comment.
No charges have been filed so far in the case.
Four of the 12 suspects from the border police's 25th Platoon were arrested in connection with Hamdia's killing. The other eight in custody are suspected of nonlethal attacks on Hebron residents and their property, including setting off stun grenades close to crowds.
-------- prisoners of war
Children held at Camp Xray, US admits
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s836988.htm
The US military has revealed it is holding juveniles at its high-security prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, known as Camp Xray.
The commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, says more than one child under the age of 16 is at the detention centre.
However, Maj Gen Miller has revealed little more about their welfare.
Maj Gen Miller says the US is holding "juvenile enemy combatants" at the centre, confirming rumours of children being held.
He has refused to reveal how many there are, their exact ages or their countries of origin.
He says they are being well cared for and are kept in facilities separate to adult prisoners.
The children are still being interrogated and will continue to be held at Guantanamo.
About 660 prisoners are in the camp.
They have not been tried or convicted of any offence but are being held as part of what the US calls its war on terror.
-------- refugees
Syria expels Iraqi children
Extra burden for refugees from Tikrit
Tuesday, 22 April, 2003
UK BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2967705.stm
More than 30 Iraqi refugees - mostly children - have been expelled from a camp in Syria and sent back across the border, says the United Nations refugee agency.
Another 12 Iraqis were expelled from the same camp, El Hol, last week.
The UN High Commission for Refugees said Syrian authorities cited "security concerns" when asked to explain the expulsions.
The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva, says all the expelled refugees are believed to have come from Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein, and it is thought Syria does not want to be seen to be harbouring anyone connected with him.
But the UN refugee agency is especially concerned that most of those expelled were children.
It said it appreciated the pressure Syria was under not to give sanctuary to Saddam Hussein loyalists, but urged that safe haven be given to asylum seekers.
"We are aware of the complexity of the situation, but we insist that the basic norms of international refugee law be observed by all concerned parties," said UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers.
Iranian Kurds
The 1951 Convention on Refugees only allows for exclusion or expulsion where there is serious reason to believe that an individual has committed a war crime or a crime against humanity - not something, the agency believes, which is likely to be the case among children.
The UNHCR is also worried about an estimated 1,000 people - Iranian Kurds and other Iraqi residents - who have been stuck on the Iraqi-Jordanian border after being refused permission to enter Jordan.
According to the UN, nearly 100 people, mostly Palestinians with Jordanian spouses, were allowed to enter the Ruweished camp in Jordan on Monday.
"But the bulk of the group remain in no-man's land in increasingly difficult conditions," the agency said in a statement.
Most of them are Iranian Kurds who have fled an Iraqi refugee camp over the last week.
-------- spies
Secretive Agency's Maps to Pave Way for Iraqi Relief
High-Tech Details That Aided Military To Be Released
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8184-2003Apr21?language=printer
Relief workers encountered rough conditions during their first week inside Iraq, including gunfire, looted offices, a shortage of supplies and a lack of telephone service and electricity. But they will soon have a new, valuable tool: detailed maps of major Iraqi cities, courtesy of some high-tech work and a policy of increased openness at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Drawing on both restricted and unclassified satellite photos and archival intelligence on Iraq, the typically secretive military agency has publicly released a street map of Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, that also shows the area's palaces, roads, mosques and industrial sites. It plans to release similar maps of Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk in coming weeks; a detailed street map of Baghdad was released before the war began last month.
NIMA has also helped one of its major contractors -- Space Imaging -- prepare digital maps of 16 Iraqi cities on which public users can highlight such features as pipelines, tunnels, railroads, airfields and land mines. The collection of maps arguably represents the most sophisticated graphic database on the Iraq's infrastructure available. The State Department's Future of Iraq project spent more than $250,000 on it so expatriate Iraqis could assist in the country's reconstruction.
NIMA officials say that while their major aim is to assist U.S. military operations in Iraq, a subsidiary goal is to inform relief workers heading into the country without information on the location of warehouses, hospitals and government buildings in cities damaged by fighting.
"We don't have access to that type of information currently," said Jules Frost, director for emergency response and disaster mitigation at World Vision, a private relief agency.
Similar city maps of a war-torn country were released by NIMA only once before, in 1999, as relief workers and coalition military forces entered Kosovo after an 11-week U.S. bombing campaign. But those maps were mostly derived from old Yugoslav plots rather than satellite images or U.S. intelligence data. No NIMA maps have been released so far to relief workers in Afghanistan, where the military has far less data and U.S. combat operations are continuing.
A few maps derived from satellite photos over Iraq are already available through Web sites organized by the United Nations and the European Space Agency (www.reliefweb.int and www.agoodplacetostart.org). They display concentrations of Iraqi ethnic and religious groups and the locations of Iraqi airfields, water supplies, areas with undernourished children and pollution from oil fires.
But the city maps prepared with NIMA's help are more detailed than those available from other sources and reflect the increasing use in public mapmaking of digitized imagery taken by high-resolution cameras carried by satellites.
NIMA, the intelligence agency formed in 1996 from the Defense Mapping Agency and several photographic interpretation centers, is the dominant player in this field. Based in Bethesda, it has unique access to high-resolution spy satellite photos of most of the Earth, and it has bought and kept off the market selected photos of certain countries that have been snapped by commercial firms. More than 51,000 commercial images are stored in NIMA's library.
To prepare the unclassified map of Tikrit, NIMA's photo analysts used images snapped on five occasions in 2001 and 2002 by Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite, which zooms around the Earth at 17,000 mph, flying a constant orbit between the North and South poles at an altitude of 423 miles. The Ikonos camera can discern objects as small as three feet in diameter; by next year, the firm will have lofted a satellite capable of seeing objects half that size.
Steve Ott, an analyst at NIMA's office in Arnold, Mo. -- it was once the Air Force's aeronautical charts center -- said he had little difficulty discerning the location of five palaces allocated to Hussein or members of his family in Tikrit.
"They have a standard design" everywhere in Iraq, involving lakes and ponds surrounding grand entrances, he said. The city's 15 mosques were also easy to pick out -- the doors all face Mecca, and some had prominent minarets -- as were their10 helipads, many located next to palaces or large manors.
In the photos, Ott said trees looked like the tops of cauliflower; swampland glistened; marketplace tents had a mottled texture with alternating tones of gray; cemeteries were marked by disorderly rock piles with alternating gray and white tones; electrical transformers were denoted by dots connected by thin lines and surrounded by a fence.
After tentatively identifying such sites, Ott and his colleagues double-checked their work by using NIMA's restricted line map and "feature foundation" database, consisting of software that assigns digital markings to key structures. They also consulted NIMA's extensive listings of Iraqi place names. In the end, the analysts effectively undid some of their work, stripping out identifying information still considered sensitive by the U.S. military, including the locations of Iraqi military installations.
As a result, none of the resulting maps -- which are being sold by the U.S. Geological Survey -- are as sophisticated as the classified, digital maps prepared by NIMA for the military's wartime use. Those maps allowed users in Washington or the Central Command's headquarters to click on any site and instantly learn its function and the structure's durability, a key factor in deciding what type of bombs U.S. warplanes dropped.
NIMA officials said that during the Iraq war, they carefully followed rules established in 1999 to ensure that sites were not misidentified. A U.S. bomb that year was aimed by mistake at the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, instead of a military export organization's headquarters down the street.
The Chinese government took no chances during the war in Iraq: It repeatedly published the embassy's address and evacuated all its employees.
-------- us
Military pullback part of U.S. strategy
2003/4/22
China Post, Taiwan WASHINGTON, Agencies
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/detail.asp?onNews=1&GRP=A&id=18704
With the threat of Saddam Hussein all but extinguished and Arab suspicions of American intentions running deep, senior administration officials say the U.S. military has begun taking steps to significantly reduce its presence in much of the Middle East.
Last week's quiet removal of 30 of 80 fighter jets and almost half the 4,500 personnel from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where the United States has maintained thousands of troops since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, is just the beginning, officials said.
Within months, the Pentagon plans to close down most of its operations at Prince Sultan Air base in Saudi Arabia, leaving only a skeleton crew, and to move most of its aircraft and troops out of Qatar and Oman.
The plans, which are preliminary and subject to review, are a response to pressure from Arab governments incensed by the U.S. military buildup in the region over the past 12 years, the financial burden of maintaining vast numbers of troops overseas and the strain it has caused for families and military readiness.
"One of the unstated goals of the (Iraq) war was to be able to lance that boil and get out of this steady state of a very high-level commitment of forces in an area where that not only wears out the force but causes all sorts of political problems," said retired Army Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, who commanded U.S. forces in the Mideast from 1991 to 1994 and helped negotiate agreements to base U.S. troops throughout the region after the Gulf War.
"The war has always been envisioned as a way to get out of the need to have forces in place designed to protect against an immediate assault," he said.
The plans are also in line with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's goal of transforming the military into a more agile, more easily deployed force.
By cutting back on costly overseas deployments in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the Pentagon has spent more than US$1 billion a year for much of the last decade, Rumsfeld hopes to have more money to spend on new technologies to modernize the armed forces.
Already in Europe, the Pentagon is reviewing its big military contingents in places such as Germany and has discussed replacing them with smaller units in Romania, Poland and Bulgaria where they could jump rapidly into hot spots.
The decision to shrink what the Pentagon calls its "footprint" in the Middle East does not, for now, affect the more than 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Pentagon officials said recently that it plans to maintain large numbers in Iraq for at least a year and probably longer. And Defense and State Department officials have been relatively open about their hopes to use the U.S. presence in Iraq as a stabilizing force throughout the region.
Ever since the buildup preceding the 1991 war to drive Saddam's forces from Kuwait, the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region has been the subject of increasing tension. Anger at American troops in the area - particularly in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's two holiest sites - helped fuel the terrorist activity that led to the Sept. 11 attacks. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly called for their removal from his homeland.
"There's a certain focused hostility in Saudi Arabia to the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil, and to the extent you can change that you may be able to change some of the dynamic of tensions to U.S. presence around the Arab world," said Jon Alterman, a former member of the policy planning staff at the State Department.
"It would not make them start singing the `Star-Spangled Banner,' but it would remove or lessen a major irritant to U.S.-Saudi or, more broadly, U.S.-Arab relations."
Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, suggested that a change of the troops' status is only natural in the wake of the Iraq war. "This is more of a military question, and should be directed to the ministry of defense. But what I know is that after the war in Iraq, a new reality has emerged, which is bound to reflect on this question," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Prince Sultan base was basically used for monitoring the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. One would assume that this will change."
----
End of Iraq war means opportunities for US power projection: official
Tuesday, 22-Apr-2003
AFP / Jim Mannion (via ClariNet)
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/dg/Qiraq-war-us-forces.R0pp_DAM.html
WASHINGTON, April 22 (AFP) - The United States sees an opportunity in the aftermath of the Iraq war to change how it projects force around the world, relying more on military operations launched over long distances from a global network of "strategic hubs," a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.
Coupled with a trend toward smaller, more mobile forces, the changes envisioned could lead to a dramatic overhaul of the bases in Europe and Asia that have defined the United States' military posture overseas since World War II.
"When you come out of an engagement (like the one) that we've just had it would be naive to suppose that you just reset everything to where it was before," said retired admiral Arthur Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's office of force transformation.
"We accept the fact that by virtue of what we have done (in Iraq), we create a new strategic reality, which means there is a different opportunity to do a different force laydown," he told defense reporters.
The question of what happens to US forces in the Gulf now that Saddam Hussein no longer is in power in Iraq is a touchy one because of the potential for upsetting longstanding US security relationships.
But after more than 12 years of keeping substantial forces at ready for a war against Iraq, the Pentagon is rethinking how to reposition them for challenges that might arise in the future.
On Monday, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied that the United States seeks a long-term military presence in Iraq and suggested that it may reduce the number of troops it keeps in the region.
"Some nations want to think in terms of balance of power, and great power politics. That's one view and large nations have been doing that for a long time," said Cebrowski. "It'll have enduring value, but I'm also thinking it's somewhat anachronistic."
He believes that the challenges are more likely to come from those areas of the world left behind by globalization than from conventional military powers.
"These tend to be the disconnected elements of the world, and disconnectedness is emerging as one of the great signals of danger," he said.
The United States, he said, has "a certain moral imperative to shrink the gap."
"The broad strategic thrust of the nation has moved from being reactive and punitive to being preventative," he said.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, the United States has tended to respond to crises abroad with wholesale deployments of forces from the continental United States to garrisons like Kuwait, from which it fought the war against Iraq.
"The more you do strategic deployment from home, the more the force tends to look operationally punitive. It means you're not out there doing preventative work as much. So there is going to be a change in that," he said.
The change Cebrowski and other Pentagon strategists envision falls somewhere between a fortress America from which forces sally out to do battle and having troops garrisoned around the world in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
"What we need to do is richen the mix so we have an increased emphasis on operational maneuver from the sea, and increased maneuver from strategic distances," Cebrowski said. "The reason you do that is because of the military and political vulnerability of the forward garrison."
Cebrowski pointed to the deployment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade from Italy into northern Iraq during the war and of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from ships in the Mediterannean as small scale examples of the kind of long distance operational maneuvers that he expects will gain in prominence.
The extensive use in the war of special operations forces offers another model for US power projection: their depth of local knowledge, ease of insertion, connectedness to intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets are characteristics the Pentagon wants its regular forces to adopt, he said.
"Strategic distance may not mean from the United States, but from a strategic hub forward. It may be from a place in Europe, it may be from Guam or Australia," he said.
US forces overseas currently are centered in Germany and Japan as they have been since the end of World War II. There may be better places to put a strategic hub than the north German plains, Cebrowski said.
"We don't have to do that any more," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Drones may fly patrols on border of U.S., Mexico
Jon Kamman
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 22, 2003 12:00 AM
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0422drones.html
They've proved their worth by scouting hostile territory in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, firing lethal missiles in the war on terrorism, and flying round-the-clock reconnaissance.
Before long, unmanned aircraft, or drones, may be patrolling the nation's borders to protect against intruders of any type.
"I am extremely supportive of the idea," said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., a member of the newly created Homeland Security Committee and chairman of a subcommittee that will have a major say in what kinds of equipment will be pressed into service.
Until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most security measures along the U.S.-Mexican border were aimed at two categories of people: drug smugglers and countless undocumented migrants seeking work in the United States. After the attacks, terrorists became the most serious focus.
Shadegg said two recent visits to the Mexican border underscored for him that "we don't have anything approaching control of that border."
Less than half a mile from border stations, fences are riddled with holes large enough to drive vehicles through, he said, and beyond there, fencing often is missing.
Support for putting electronic eyes in the sky is building in Congress, Shadegg said.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Service Committee, wrote President Bush this month saying the case for non-military use of unmanned aerial vehicles is "compelling," but he emphasized that privacy concerns also must be addressed.
Technological marvels
Rapid advancements in the range, endurance and reliability of drones have endeared them to the military in the past decade.
Various models have been built, at least experimentally, to carry heavy payloads, stay in the air for days, soar at altitudes of 100,000 feet, sneak under radar, cross the Pacific non-stop, or explore concealed military depots, all the while beaming back startlingly detailed photos, video, infrared and radar images to controllers.
The most widely known craft is the Predator, used by U.S. forces, NATO and U.N. peacekeepers since first being put into action in Bosnia in 1995.
The Predator, many generations removed from hobbyists' model airplanes, is a super-sophisticated system that costs an average of $4.5 million, counting both the aircraft and a truckload worth of control equipment.
The machine's "pilots" can maneuver it over several hundred miles and order imaging equipment to take a close look at anything of interest, day or night, with clear or overcast skies.
The vehicle, about 7 feet tall and 27 feet long, has a wingspan of 49 feet and can fly for more than 24 hours at 25,000 feet.
Defense Department officials say it can fly about 400 miles and circle for 14 hours before returning to base.
The Predator became a star in the war on terrorism in November when the CIA used it to deliver a Hellfire missile onto a car in Yemen, killing a top al-Qaida operative and five other suspected terrorists.
Flying limited now
Air patrols along the Mexican border now are conducted sporadically by fixed-wing aircraft and aging Black Hawk helicopters, which Shadegg said pose disadvantages of costly operation, limited range and relatively short periods for staying aloft.
"High tech, including drones, is precisely where we should be going," Shadegg said.
As chairman of the emergency preparedness and response subcommittee, "I want to put all my energy into looking at high-tech ways to stop incidents from occurring, or detect them the instant they occur," such as in cases of sabotage of water supplies or unleashing of chemical agents, he said.
Whether the military would have a role in border overflights remains to be decided, but Shadegg said surveillance most likely would be conducted and used only by agencies of the new Department of Homeland Security.
After testing drones in south Texas during the late 1990s, Border Patrol officials decided against using them. But Asa Hutchinson, the nation's top border security official in Homeland Security, told Congress last month, "I think that we have to revisit some of this technology since September 11th and see if it has greater application."
Mario Villareal, a spokesman for the Bureau of Customs and Border, said Border Patrol agents are using drones for specific investigations along the northern and southwestern borders.
Last summer, agents teamed up with the Drug Enforcement Administration and local law enforcement agencies in Idaho to break up a drug-smuggling ring that involved undocumented immigrants crossing the border from Canada. A drone operated by the U.S. Marine Corps was used to do surveillance work.
Flight paths and safety
Besides privacy concerns on both sides of the border, a number of issues remain to be resolved.
One is to create a relatively narrow air corridor to ensure safe flight paths for both drones and regular aircraft. An especially sensitive area is the Air Force's Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, which already limits border-enforcement flights.
The Defense Department and Federal Aviation Administration began conferring this month on how to restructure longstanding rules that have complicated efforts to use unmanned aircraft.
Safety is another question. An industry group reports that drones, although improving in reliability, crash at least 10 times more often as manned aircraft.
The ability to spot surreptitious border crossers anywhere at any time would be a powerful tool to combat drug smuggling and illegal migration, but enforcement would require sufficient ground forces, too.
The Border Patrol, now part of Homeland Defense, recently was authorized to add 139 agents along the Arizona-Sonora border.
"You're going to see more personnel, but also . . . more high-technology equipment down on the border," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said at a news conference this month.
"You may see unmanned drones."
Shadegg wouldn't predict how soon drone patrols could be launched but said, "If we can build enough support for them, I think they could be up pretty quick."
-------- courts
Justices to review Miranda frontiers
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 22, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030422-236649.htm
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide how far the Constitution protects a suspect from his own words when police are prevented from reading the full Miranda rights.
The question arose from a 2001 Colorado gun-possession case against a convicted felon who told police he knew his rights and interrupted their warnings that he could remain silent and have a lawyer.
The Justice Department concedes that Samuel F. Patane was not "Mirandized," but asked the high court to allow the .40-caliber Glock pistol hidden in his bedroom to be placed in evidence even though Patane disclosed its location to detectives who had not fully read him his rights.
Solicitor General Theodore Olson asked the justices to resolve a circuit court split on the question by permitting "fruits of the poisoned tree" to be used as evidence even as the criminal's own words remain inadmissible.
"Suppression of probative physical evidence in such cases imposes serious costs on the administration of justice," Mr. Olson said in petitioning the court to hear his appeal during the term that begins in October.
He told the justices that such situations arise often and argued that Miranda restrictions should not apply when a suspect declines to listen or when warnings are not given "in a fast-moving investigation."
Patane's federal public defender, Jill Wichlens of Denver, declined comment yesterday, but D.C. lawyer Deanne Maynard offered a view for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
"The words out of his mouth led them to this evidence," Miss Maynard said, arguing that the government's concession Patane was not warned should settle the question.
The 10th U.S. Circuit of Appeals suppressed the gun as evidence and said the Supreme Court was clear in its 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision that said, "Unless and until such warnings and waiver are demonstrated by the prosecution at trial, no evidence obtained as a result of interrogation can be used against him."
Patane had the .40-caliber Glock in violation of two federal firearms laws - one bars felons from having guns and the other forbids them to people under domestic restraining orders.
After Patane refused to hear his rights, officers asked him if he owned any guns. He said yes and told them where to find them.
His incriminating statement was made during an investigation after his girlfriend said she feared being on Patane's "list of people he wanted to kill," and his violation of a court restraining order issued after she said he "menaced" her.
The high court reaffirmed its Miranda decision in a 2000 decision on an Alexandria bank-robbery case, Dickerson v. U.S. It blocked prosecutors from using confessions taken without the now-familar warning, and barred Congress from nullifying the "constitutional rule."
In other actions yesterday the court:
•Refused to hear San Diego's plea that it was "scrupulously neutral toward religion" when it sold a 43-foot cross at its Mount Soledad war memorial to an association that would preserve it. An atheist activist won a lawsuit contending that groups wanting to dismantle the cross were not allowed to bid.
•Agreed to reconsider police rules for searching stopped cars in an appeal by Arizona authorities whose cocaine case against Rodney Gant was thrown out because officers searched his car after he parked in his own driveway.
•Declined to hear a challenge to National Park Service policies that allow helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon only by companies that pay the Hualapai tribe for rights that earn the tribe about $2 million a year.
•Agreed to decide if Delma Banks' 1982 murder conviction and death sentence was unconstitutional. Banks, senior inmate on Texas' death row, said his lawyer was inept and that authorities used witnesses who later recanted and kept blacks off the jury. Banks, who is black, was convicted of killing his white 16-year-old former co-worker.
-------- homeland security
Sniffing New York's Air Ducts for Signs of Terror
April 22, 2003
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/nyregion/22WEAP.html
Since the war began in Iraq, and even before, the response to the threat of terrorism in New York City has been jarringly visible: heavily armed police officers in the subways, truck checkpoints on bridges, Black Hawk helicopters in the skies.
But there is another layer of protection, on the rooftops and down deep in the basements of some of the city's most notable buildings. Here the threat is nearly invisible, as are the soldiers defending against it, but the danger is still real for those working unawares in their offices.
For a little more than a month, a team of specially trained National Guard soldiers has been testing for biological agents in hotels, tourist sites, government buildings - including City Hall - office buildings like the World Financial Center and other places on a list of possible targets, primarily in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. They have made repeated, almost daily visits to as many as 30 sites.
"Our job is to give the local authorities quick, preliminary information so they can save lives," said Maj. Kaarlo J. Hietala, a soft-spoken career soldier originally from upstate New York who is the National Guard unit's commander. "We help provide the preliminary information they need to make decisions about whether to restrict access or quarantine an area, and how to handle patients."
The 22-member unit is based in Scotia, N.Y., and is one of 32 Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams around the country, although it is the only one now testing for unconventional weapons in urban areas. The Pentagon began forming the teams in 1998 to help assess the scope and severity of a possible terrorist attack by testing for unconventional weapons and then advising civilian agencies on how best to deal with them.
The list of potential targets was compiled by the Police Department, which relied on a combination of intelligence and common sense. On one recent morning, as thousands of people settled into their offices at the World Financial Center, Major Hietala and Master Sgt. Michael Hartzel, both wearing nondescript blue uniforms, were guided through a warren of passageways in the subbasement. There, in a cinder-block fan room painted pale blue, they began their task.
Major Hietala pulled on latex gloves and climbed through a small access panel in the financial center's subbasement. He took a wooden-stemmed cotton swab from a kit in a black knapsack and drew it across a filter that cleans the air pumped into a garage beneath the building.
He handed the swab to Sergeant Hartzel, a chemical and biological weapons specialist, who sealed it inside a pinky-finger-size bottle, which he then put in a larger specimen bottle and then in a heavy zippered plastic bag. The day before, soldiers from the unit checked the ventilation system that filters the air that office workers breathe in the tower above, the major said.
The swabs were tested for a wide range of biological agents, including smallpox and anthrax, he said. As they have each day since the team arrived in New York City on March 19, the results came back negative.
In addition to checking for biological agents, the soldiers, working with the Police Department, have also been monitoring for chemical agents and radiological contamination, supplementing open air testing done in several areas by the City Health Department and, under a new nationwide program, by the federal Homeland Security Department.
The soldiers use sensitive equipment and a mobile laboratory that allows them to do a preliminary analysis, which can be forwarded to more sophisticated city, state or federal labs. They carry small radiation detectors, like those used by some police officers and firefighters, chemical agent detectors and other detection and testing gear.
Their work underscores the growing concerns among local and federal authorities about a terrorist attack using such unconventional weapons, concerns that heightened when United States and British forces invaded Iraq. Al Qaeda, according to intelligence agencies and testimony in several federal terrorism trials, has long sought chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, including a so-called dirty bomb - a conventional explosive jacketed in radioactive material that would send out a plume over a limited area.
While the $143 million nationwide civil support team program for biological, chemical and radiation weapons stumbled in its early days, with criticism over a ballooning budget that might have been better spent on training and equipping local agencies, the New York team has earned praise from some local officials. Gov. George E. Pataki ordered the unit to New York City when the war began. It continues to work, even while hostilities appear to be cooling overseas.
The New York team's annual budget is about $600,000, for personnel, equipment and training, according to officials. Among their tools are a computer modeling program that, using real-time weather information, can roughly predict the course and effects of a release of biological, chemical or radiological agents, Major Hietala said.
The program tracks the course of a plume, delineated as a scarlet cloud across an aerial map of the city, roughly defining the affected area and allowing the soldiers to set up what is known as an exclusion zone. Using census data, the program can also make casualty estimates, Major Hietala said, but he noted the figures for some areas can be unreliable because they are based on nighttime population, which could be a fraction of the daytime figures.
They have gone about their tasks in recent weeks with little fanfare, in large measure because officials view the testing as a precaution, and because Major Hietala says he views the unit's role as supporting the work done by local authorities.
So the soldiers have abandoned their camouflage battle dress for unremarkable blue uniforms - actually low-level chemical protection suits - and drive mostly in unmarked vehicles, traveling with the New York Police Department officers with whom they work.
Made up of full-time National Guard soldiers who are each trained in a particular specialty, the unit also has a sophisticated communications truck that can send encrypted data to laboratories like the one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta over a secure satellite link. (After the unit came to New York City the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, senior F.B.I. officials, who lost the use of their communications center in Lower Manhattan, used the team's secure link to communicate with F.B.I officials in Washington.)
And the support team's assistance, according to Major Hietala and several other officials, has not been limited to the Police Department.
Major Hietala has met with officials from several other city agencies, including the office of the chief medical examiner, which has an unusual problem surrounding the possible use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
"They have concerns," the major said. "What if something bad did happen and how would that affect remains? They talked to us about what they've been working on, how do they certify people as clean to release them to their families."
-------- police
Security high for biker rally
April 22, 2003
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030422-68460618.htm
LAUGHLIN - The tens of thousands of bikers at this year's Laughlin River Run motorcycle rally will find twice the usual number of police, plus motorcycle searches for drugs and weapons, a ban on cans and bottles, and a curfew for those younger than 18.
The changes come a year after a brawl with guns, knives and wrenches killed two Hell's Angels and one Mongols motorcycle gang member and injured at least 12 other persons at Harrah's Laughlin hotel-casino. Another Hell's Angels member was fatally shot in California.
The bikers attending this year will have to cross checkpoints before they even enter the town for the rally, which is scheduled to begin tomorrow.
Police at checkpoints and volunteers will distribute fliers listing laws and event rules - including a 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for anyone younger than 18.
Most hotels will ask the expected 80,000 motorcyclists not to wear gang emblems or logos, said Andre Carrier, an executive at the Golden Nugget hotel-casino and chairman of the town's organizing committee. Some hotels will have metal detectors at entrances.
"What we're trying to do is ensure their safety," said Lt. Thomas Smitley, head of the Las Vegas police substation in Laughlin, a town of 8,000 on the banks of the Colorado River. "We'll be proactive and highly visible."
After last year's brawl, the town briefly considered canceling the five-day rally.
"But it's an important event for us - important for our brand, important for our economy," Mr. Carrier said.
In 1983, the first River Run drew fewer than 500 people. It has grown into a signature event for this town 100 miles south of Las Vegas, near the Arizona-California state line.
The rally now pours an estimated $25 million into the town; weekend room rates at nine major casinos jump from $40 per night to $190 or more.
"Ninety-nine percent of the people are there to party, to play," said Maryland State Police Lt. Terry Katz, a past board member of the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association and a former rally attendee. "The problem is the one-percenters."
These days the riders of $20,000 Harley-Davidsons are more likely to be doctors or lawyers than outlaws.
"We're a group, not a gang," said Davy Weller, 56, a retired insurance broker with homes in Sun Valley, Idaho, and Las Vegas.
"Our feeling is it was an isolated instance," he said of last year's violence. "I'd be shocked if there were any problems this year."
Lt. Katz, who has been studying motorcycle gangs nationwide since the mid-1970s, said gang members use gatherings like Laughlin to stake turf and display power. Officials said last year's violence came after months of skirmishes between Hell's Angels and competing biker gangs.
"There was shadowboxing leading up to it," said Patrick Schneider, assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix and president of the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association.
Mr. Schneider said recent sources of worry have included the March 22 slaying of the Hell's Angels chapter president in Cave Creek, Ariz., hometown of Hell's Angels chief Ralph "Sonny" Barger, and the stabbing two days later of a Mongols member near Reno. Authorities aren't sure whether the two deaths are connected.
"I can tell you that something's going to happen," said Tim McKinley, a retired San Francisco FBI agent who investigated the Hell's Angels for 15 years. "But I would be surprised if it's in Laughlin this year because of the massive police presence."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Official: Youths Held at Guantanamo Bay
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Guantanamo-Detainees.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Terror suspects under age 16 are being held at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a military official said Tuesday.
The teenagers are kept in cells separate from the adult detainees but also are considered enemy combatants, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, chief spokesman for the mission, told The Associated Press.
He would not say how many teenagers are being held, only that they are ``very few, a very small number,'' nor would he say how old the youngest prisoner is.
All the teenagers were ``captured as active combatants against U.S. forces'' and were brought to Guantanamo after Jan. 1, he said. Johnson confirmed their presence following a report by Australia's ABC television that youths were being held at the camp.
Officials determined the detainees were younger than 16 during medical and other screenings after their arrival, Johnson said.
Roughly 660 detainees from 42 countries are being held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida terrorist network or Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. They have not been charged and are not allowed access to lawyers.
Human Rights Watch said the youths' situation exacerbates concerns about the indefinite detention of the detainees.
The fact that children are being held ``reflects our broader concerns that the U.S. never properly determined the legal status of those held in the conflict,'' said James Ross, legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York.
Holding ``captured children ... obviously makes the problem worse.''
Johnson indicated the teenagers are being interrogated, saying ``they have potential to provide important information.''
Lawyers have blamed the indefinite detentions for depression suffered by some detainees, and an increase in suicide attempts at the camp, which received the first terror suspects in January 2001.
Johnson reported a repeat attempt at suicide Monday night by a detainee who was under close supervision in the acute care unit of a new mental health ward.
That brings the number of suicide attempts to 25 by 17 individuals, with 15 attempts made this year, according to the military.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
EU readies first ideas on hydrogen fuel dream
Story by Jeremy Smith
REUTERS BELGIUM:
April 22, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20518/story.htm
BRUSSELS - The European Union's dream of weaning people off dependency on oil and getting them hooked on hydrogen-fuelled transport may be closer to reality but critics say it disguises an emphasis on coal and nuclear power.
European car and energy firms have joined forces in a group founded by the European Commission to keep the EU's hydrogen firms on track with rivals in Japan and the United States.
Both the EU and the United States have voiced ambitions to move to a "hydrogen economy" where the carbon-free gas is used in fuel cells to create electricity that one day could replace oil as the main propellant for cars.
For the European Commission, the goal is for renewable energy sources to meet 12 percent of the EU's needs by 2010, as well as contributing 22 percent of its electricity. Hydrogen, a potential source of energy, is key to hitting the target.
Most hydrogen is produced on a large scale by reforming natural gas, using steam. This is an energy-intensive process and requires temperatures of up to 900 Celsius, so nuclear power has been suggested as a source of cheap heat.
Hydrogen can also be thermochemically generated from water decomposed by nuclear heat at high temperature. In addition, the light gas is a by-product from oil refining or electrolysis
The group's draft report, which has Thursday as a deadline for comments and objections, concludes that fossil fuels are likely to be the main source for hydrogen generation in the short term. In the longer term, nuclear power could be used.
"Early on, these resources will probably be fossil fuels, with their widespread availability and low prices. Successful carbon sequestration techniques would allow fossil hydrogen to be used on a large scale with limited greenhouse gas emissions," said the draft report.
As renewable energy technologies matured and costs continued to fall, more hydrogen would come from renewable sources, it said. In the distant future, hydrogen might be produced from a wide range of resources and sent through pipelines to end-users.
"In the longer term, nuclear energy could provide large amounts of cheap hydrogen, complementing the renewable energy sources," said the report.
GREENS SCEPTICAL
Environmental groups favour hydrogen as a green fuel of the future because gram for gram, it produces more energy than any other substance and produces only water and energy when burnt.
But the idea of using fossil fuels and nuclear power in order to generate it has, unsurprisingly, raised their hackles.
"It's not an efficient or cost-effective way (to use fossil fuels and nuclear power). It doesn't make sense at all," said Oliver Raps, environment and climate change officer at the World Wildlife Fund's Europe Policy unit in Brussels.
"All the investments that would have to be taken are long term. If you build the facilities for doing this, you won't build them only for 10 years and shut them down. The life-cycles in these industries are usually between 30 and 50 years.
The Commission plans to spend close to 2.1 billion euros ($2.30 billion) on hydrogen-related research over the next four years, up from about 120 million over the last four. It will hold a conference on hydrogen fuel in June, where the proposal will be presented. "This is a draft report and not final. It's true that nuclear and coal are mentioned," said a senior Commission official. "They (the group) consider coal and nuclear energy as being one possible source for hydrogen."
"The idea is that the development of hydrogen could be supported in the first stage by fossil fuels - then it would facilitate the transition to renewables in the longer term."
----
African countries seek to boost geothermal power
REUTERS KENYA:
April 22, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/20528/story.htm
NAIROBI - Ten African countries are aiming to boost geothermal power generation to reach a combined 1,000 megawatts by the year 2020, officials said.
Geothermal power is electricity produced by trapping steam released by hot rocks with water reservoirs deep in the earth. The electricity is clean and also reliable, unlike hydroelectricity, production of which fluctuates according to rainy seasons, experts said.
Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia planned to increase the production from the current tiny 57 megawatts (MW) produced only in Kenya.
Geothermal power in the African countries has remained underdeveloped despite its untapped potential of 7,000 MW mainly because of the high initial costs required to assess the commercial viability of a geothermal resource, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) says.
"Part of the plan is to get additional funding from many organisations and to do exploration and initial drilling," Peter Omenda, a senior geologist with KenGen, Kenya's state-owned electricity producer said.
Three American organisations, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation of the United States, have pledged to help finance the countries in exploring and expanding their geothermal resources.
Total amounts pledged for this projects were not readily available.
Omenda spoke after a UNEP-organised conference on geothermal energy held in Nairobi.
"Another factor inhibiting geothermal energy is that African nations are perceived as high risk by the international finance community," said John Garrison of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy that helped organise the conference.
One of the resolutions of the conference was to set up a risk guarantee fund for exploratory and appraisal drilling projects, Garrison said.
-------- health
Tea helps body ward off germs, study says
ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 22, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030422-63867756.htm
A wee cuppa tea may help keep the doctor away.
A new study finds that tea boosts the body's defenses against infection and contains a substance that may be turned into a drug to protect against disease, researchers say.
Coffee does not have the same effect, they say.
A component in tea was found in laboratory experiments to prime the immune system to attack invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, says a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences released yesterday.
A second experiment, using human volunteers, showed that immune system blood cells from tea drinkers responded five times faster to germs than did the blood cells of coffee drinkers.
"We worked out the molecular aspects of this tea component in the test tube and then tested it on a small number of people to see if it actually worked in human beings," said Dr. Jack F. Bukowski, a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School.
The results, he said, gave clear proof that five cups of tea a day sharpened the body's disease defenses.
Penny Kris-Etherton, a nutrition specialist at Penn State University, said Dr. Bukowski's study adds to a growing body of evidence that tea is an effective disease fighter.
"This is potentially a very significant finding," she said. "We're seeing multiple benefits from tea."
But she said the work needs to be confirmed in a much larger study, involving more people.
In the study, Dr. Bukowski and his co-authors isolated from ordinary black tea a substance called L-theanine.
Dr. Bukowski said L-theanine is broken down in the liver to ethylamine, a molecule that primes the response of an immune system element called the gamma-delta T cell.
"We know from other studies that these gamma-delta T cells in the blood are the first line of defense against many types of bacteria, viral, fungal and parasitic infections," he said. "They even have some anti-tumor activity."
The T cells prompt the secretion of interferon, a key part of the body's chemical defense against infection, Dr. Bukowski said.
"We know from mouse studies that if you boost this part of the immune system it can protect against infection," he said.
To further test the finding, the researchers had 11 volunteers drink five cups a day of tea, and 10 others drink coffee. Before the test began, they drew blood samples from all 21 test subjects.
After four weeks, they took more blood from the tea drinkers and then exposed that blood to the bacteria called E. coli. Dr. Bukowski said the immune cells in the specimens secreted five times more interferon than did blood cells from the same subjects before the weeks of tea drinking. Blood tests and bacteria challenges showed there was no change in the interferon levels of the coffee drinkers, he said.
Dr. Bukowski said scientists may be able to further isolate and refine L-theanine from tea and use that as a drug to boost the infection defense of the body.
The health effects of tea have been studied extensively. It has been linked to lower heart disease and cancer risk through the action of flavonoids, a type of antioxidant. Other studies have linked tea to helping combat osteoporosis, the brittle bone disease, and to relieving some allergy symptoms.
----
Baby teeth found source of stem cells
By Charles Choi
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
April 22, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030422-77780325.htm
Instead of leaving baby teeth out for the tooth fairy, parents might do better to send them to doctors, who someday could harvest their hidden stem cells to help combat diseases, researchers reported yesterday.
Just like those in the primordial tissue from which all organs arise, the stem cells in baby teeth can transform themselves into nerve and fat cells in laboratory dishes, said the investigators in the report, which appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the future, stem cells plucked from a child's discarded molar could be frozen in cell banks to benefit its donor for decades.
"Deciduous teeth ... may be an ideal resource of stem cells to repair damaged tooth structures, induce bone regeneration and possibly to treat neural tissue injury or degenerative diseases," the report said.
Dr. Songtao Shi, a stem-cell researcher and pediatric dentist at the National Institutes of Health, said the baby-tooth stem cells are prolific and versatile.
"These cells are a very surprising resource that is exciting, and they are very capable of providing huge numbers of cells," he said in an interview with UPI.
All stem cells begin as "blanks" without a dedicated task, unlike nerve, blood, fat and other cells. They can become specialized, a potential scientists have been attempting to harness in order to replace damaged cells in diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes.
Stem cells from embryos can transform into virtually any of the more than 200 types of cells found in the human body. But extracting those cells requires the destruction of the embryo, which is opposed by pro-life groups, many lawmakers and including President Bush.
"Of course they pose a major controversy. It's ethically very tough to deal with embryonic stem cells," Dr. Shi acknowledged.
Two years ago, Dr. Shi's daughter, then 6, lost her first baby teeth.
"I'm a pediatric dentist, so naturally I was the first person to take care of it," Dr. Shi said.
"Then I thought about the pulp tissue left inside. I was a dentist for years, but I never even thought about baby teeth until I looked at my daughter's carefully," he recalled.
Because children are physically immature, stem cells from baby teeth could differ importantly from those from adults studied so far.
Dr. Shi and his team, experimenting with baby teeth from seven children, found that human stem cells from the pulp not only became a range of cells, but also could trigger bone formation in mice. They also found the cells multiply two to three times faster than stem cells from adult bone marrow and adult teeth.
Incisors and canines only yield roughly 20 stem cells each, with molars yielding fewer still. Nevertheless, each stem cell from a baby tooth can reproduce itself billions of times.
"We haven't had a problem with having enough cells to work with," Dr. Shi said.
Someday, he added, we can ask parents to put the baby tooth that comes out in milk, put it in the refrigerator and give a call the next day, and we can get stem cells out.
"You can freeze them in liquid nitrogen and save them for years and years," he said.
If the cells are grown into tissues and implanted back into a person's body, they should avoid the immune rejection often seen in organ transplants. "But more studies definitely need to be done before we can use them to treat disease," Dr. Shi said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
The Spoils of Antiwar
For Some Celebrities, a Dissenting Role Has Turned Into a Good Career Move
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7229-2003Apr21?language=printer
Janeane Garofalo sounds energized about her whole antiwar thing: "I knew when I started speaking out that it was going to be unpleasant," says the actress-comedian, "and I've taken my punches. But the positives have far outweighed the negatives."
Such as? Such as all the unsolicited offers Garofalo has received -- speaking engagements, stand-up gigs, stage roles -- in the weeks since she proffered her antiwar opinions on news programs. Such as the bundles of attagirl letters and the hearty congratulations of strangers in the street. Such as the sitcom pilot she's making for ABC. The other day, after a decade and a half of doing comedy, she made America Online's "Comedians to Watch" list.
"Before this I was a moderately well-known character actress," she says. "Now I'm almost famous."
Not to be too cynical about it -- Garofalo and other celebrities say they've been speaking from the heart -- but dissent, it seems, can be a pretty good career move.
In the weeks preceding or during the war, some entertainment figures took flak for their outspoken opposition. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, perhaps Hollywood's foremost anti-warriors, have both been publicly rebuked and disinvited to events organized by the Baseball Hall of Fame and a Florida United Way chapter, respectively. Martin Sheen has been assailed by critics for his views. Sean Penn alleges in a lawsuit that he lost a role in a movie as a result of his antiwar stance and his prewar trip to Iraq. And, of course, a handful of radio stations launched well-publicized "boycotts" of the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines said at a concert in mid-March that she was "ashamed" that President Bush was from her native Texas (she later apologized).
But it's hard to find much lasting damage. All told, widespread publicity about celebrities' war views has helped, not hurt, the careers of the famous.
In the weeks after Maines's comments, for example, sales of the Chicks' latest album, "Home," fell out of the top spot on the country charts -- before bouncing right back into the No. 1 position last week.
After his outburst at the Oscars last month ("Shame on you, Mr. Bush!"), author and filmmaker Michael Moore saw his book "Stupid White Men" return to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Two days after the Oscars, he reported on his Web site that his documentary "Bowling for Columbine" had received more video orders on Amazon.com than the Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Chicago."
Moore also reported that he's received funding for his next documentary and has been approached by an unnamed network to revive his old show, "TV Nation."
Even Robbins, who frets about "a climate of fear" for lesser-known actors, can't really complain. "I'm okay," he says in an interview. "I just finished two films," including one with Clint Eastwood. "I don't believe there's fallout. If there was, I don't think anyone would say, 'We're not hiring you for political reasons.' "
His longtime romantic partner, Sarandon, is also working steadily as a leading lady, which is far more than most 56-year-old actresses can say.
"I know we're lucky," adds Robbins. "We have money in the bank. We have careers that support us continuing to work. [But] if I was a mid-range or supporting actor, in this kind of environment, it would be a lot scarier for me to risk the progression of my career [by criticizing the war]. I know people like that, and they've said thank you to me for saying the things that they can't."
Being an outspoken celebrity has its own self-perpetuating momentum, however. A celebrity, being celebrated, is already in the public eye. Expressing an opposing, novel or even outrageous opinion stimulates the media's curiosity, thus keeping the celebrity in the public eye.
Exhibit A: Madonna's career.
It may be that many obscure actors harbor incendiary or insightful views, but no one in the media is asking for their opinions.
At the same time, many famous people said nothing at all about the war. Notably silent were reliable lefties like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams and Woody Harrelson, who've rendered opinions freely before.
"If you're a producer or a studio, I can't imagine in our time some studio executive saying, 'Let's not use Martin Sheen,' or 'Let's not use Tim Robbins' [because of their views]. That would be in Variety the next day," says Howard Suber, professor emeritus at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television.
"These days," he adds, "you don't get used if you're a kook, if you're difficult or you snort too much coke. If it doesn't get in the way of making a film, they don't care what you do."
In fact, outspoken opinions can attract as well as alienate. Millions of people, after all, opposed the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, and celebrities such as Sheen, Robbins and Barbra Streisand gave a famous face to those views. When critics fired back, the backlash merely created a sympathetic counter-backlash, Garofalo says. The counter-criticism, she says, "galvanized the left and the center and people who weren't political before."
Ever since the blacklist era of the 1940s and 1950s, when suspected Communist sympathizers were banished from Hollywood, few well-known actors or artists have been hurt by speaking out on political subjects.
After his highly public protests against the first Persian Gulf War, Harrelson said Miller beer stopped talking to him about starring in its commercials and the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans reneged on an invitation to serve as grand marshal. But Harrelson's career only got stronger; he went from being an Emmy winner on "Cheers" to a succession of big-screen roles in such movies as "White Men Can't Jump," "Indecent Proposal," "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and the current "Anger Management."
The bitterness about Jane Fonda's opposition to the Vietnam War and her trip to North Vietnam in 1972 lingers to this day, but Fonda's greatest commercial and artistic triumphs came not long after the war's end. Between 1977 and 1981, she made the box office hits "The China Syndrome," "The Electric Horseman" and "Nine to Five." She also won an Academy Award (for "Coming Home") and was nominated for her performance in two other films ("Julia" and "On Golden Pond") during that period. Then she became a best-selling exercise guru.
Why the lack of a backlash?
Part of the reason may be that baby boomers grew up with dissent and are used to it by now. And young people -- the primary audience for much of popular culture -- either aren't paying attention or aren't turned off by antiwar comments.
"Back in the old days, you could fear the American Legion and its minions because everybody went to the movies," says Suber. "But people who go to the movies today are not likely to be people offended by Martin Sheen or Tim Robbins."
But Joseph Janeti, professor of screenwriting at the USC School of Cinema-Television, says there is a backlash, although it's hard to document. "I think it actually goes on, usually at very subtle levels," he says. "People want to avoid someone saying unpopular things, don't want to be seen rocking the boat. . . . It's innuendo. Suddenly there's a reason to cancel a show. Or for saying, 'He's not too hot anymore.' "
Despite Hollywood's reputation as a liberal haven, famous entertainers who've espoused conservative views have flourished, too.
Bob Hope became for many young people a symbol of hidebound establishment values in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of his outspoken support of the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. But those views did little to tarnish Hope's legendary status; his TV specials continued to draw blockbuster ratings through the 1980s (a retrospective of his career aired on NBC on Sunday). His 100th birthday next month will likely be an occasion for national tributes.
Similarly, Charlton Heston was an aging actor whose best days seemed behind him when he began speaking out in behalf of gun owners' rights and the National Rifle Association in the late 1980s. Until early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease slowed him last year, Heston, 78, had appeared in nearly three films a year for the past dozen years.
And who could forget that B-list actor who turned his avocation for politics into a vocation? Ronald Reagan, an old contract player for Warner Bros., did just fine expressing his political opinions.
Staff writer Sharon Waxman contributed to this report.
--------
ESSAY
The Citizen-Scientist's Obligation to Stand Up for Standards
April 22, 2003
The New York Times
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/science/22ESSA.html
On April 2, I appeared at a symposium for students and teachers sponsored by the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a remarkably successful high school founded by Dr. Leon M. Lederman, a Nobel laureate in physics, to foster young people's interest in science.
The symposium, called "Science, Technology and Society: Ethical Awareness for Tomorrow's Leaders," was convened to discuss the way ethical issues might be explicitly raised for young scientists.
I was somewhat hesitant to appear on a panel on ethics because, like almost all scientists I know, I have no formal training in this subject. Indeed, like many of my colleagues, I have been reluctant to include formal courses on ethics in the physics curriculum, and I have tended to suppose that students should learn the ethos of science "by example."
Presumably, in laboratory courses and in research projects with faculty, students can learn the values of honesty, creativity and full disclosure that are the hallmarks of good science. Also, in spite of the implicit hierarchy associated with education, students should get a sense of the "anti-authoritarianism" of science: that there are, or should be, no scientific authorities whose views are not subject to question.
Indeed, proving one's colleagues (and oneself) wrong is one of the great pleasures of scientific progress.
Scientific ethics have been mightily tested of late. In my own field of physics in the past several years, two important examples of scientific fraud were uncovered in subfields as diverse as molecular electronics and nuclear physics. In each case the fraudulent results were brought to light relatively quickly, but not before they were published in articles involving numerous co-authors who should have been more skeptical.
This lack of internal critical review has prompted much hand-wringing. It has also raised an issue of ethical responsibility: do scientists who take credit as co-authors of papers need to verify all of the results cited in those papers?
The problem is that by nature science does not deal well with fraud. Scientists assume some basic level of honesty in the scientific enterprise, and while we expect mistakes to occur, we do not anticipate deliberate obfuscation of the facts.
Moreover, scientists tend to expect that ultimately the truth will win out without explicit and immediate action on their part. Future experiments that do not reproduce earlier results will expose fraudulent experimentalists, while theoretical nonsense will be exposed when it leads to nonsensical predictions.
Nevertheless, confronting misconceptions, deliberate or not, our own or others', is probably the single most important factor driving progress in science, and in a broader sense society. Scientists must not allow nonsense to remain unconfronted, regardless of whose sensibilities we offend. Once we allow empirical truth to be blurred with impunity in one important area of human activity, we jeopardize the very basis of a healthy democracy.
Only when we are willing to accept the universe for what it is, without myth or fear or prejudice, can we hope to build a truly just society.
So I found myself in Chicago in early April proposing a possibly unpopular thesis: scientists have a special ethical responsibility at this particular time to question our government's actions. It appears that this administration is marginalizing the recommendations of major scientific organizations on the one hand, while defending artificial "research" to support political goals, or, worse still, manufacturing it.
Empirical constraints that may otherwise guide sensible policy making seem to be evaporating.
When a Bell Labs scientist was shown to have based some of his results on fraudulent data, his other scientific results, no matter how exciting, lost credence. We should be prepared to apply the same skepticism to the political arena.
Last month, the National Academy of Sciences presented the reports of an expert panel that assessed current plans for examining the effects of global warming. The scientists concluded that the research program proposed by the administration lacked the most basic elements of a strategic research plan.
In particular, the panel said it lacked "a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress, an assessment of whether existing programs are capable of meeting these goals, explicit prioritization and a management plan."
In short, it lacks the characteristics on which empirical science is based.
A year ago, the American Physical Society passed a resolution calling on the government to delay deployment of a missile defense system until it was demonstrated to be workable against realistic threats.
Yet the administration scrapped a longstanding international treaty, committing billions of dollars to the deployment of a missile defense system that even under the most liberal interpretation of the data has a success rate of 40 percent.
We would not accept such innumerate policies in the private sector. What if Detroit put on the assembly line a new breed of S.U.V.'s that toppled over when executing curves at greater than 30 miles an hour 60 percent of the time, or if the makers of nuclear power reactors demonstrated that prototypes catastrophically failed 40 percent of the time?
Dr. Shirley Tilghman and Dr. David Baltimore, internationally known biologists, and the presidents respectively of Princeton and Caltech, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that human reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning to produce stem cells that might be used for research were completely different biological investigations.
Further, they said a wholesale ban on cloning designed to stop efforts to produce the former would have dire consequences for important biological research on the latter. Yet the White House has supported a wholesale ban on cloning, driven it seems by inappropriate fears of science.
Equally worrisome is what apparently is the distortion of the results of medical studies in government Web sites, like the National Cancer Institute's. It used to state that the best studies showed "no association between abortion and breast cancer," but was altered to say that the evidence was inconclusive until a scientific review panel insisted the original language, which correctly reflects current research, be reinstated.
Or consider the Web page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used to point to studies showing that education on condom use did not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity; now, it omits this discussion.
A democracy, like science, functions best only when all actions are open to question, and when we require the highest levels of accountability. If there is a risk that politics is being placed above empirical truth on issues of vital national importance, inaction by scientists may be unethical.
--------
ACLU Seeks Gov't Data on 'No - Fly' List
April 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-No-Fly-List.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI and other government agencies Tuesday on behalf of two peace activists detained at an airport because their names popped up on a secret ``no-fly'' list.
The women were among 339 travelers briefly detained and questioned at San Francisco International Airport during the past two years after their names were found in the database, the ACLU said, citing government documents. Those travelers ultimately were allowed to continue on their journeys.
``Thousands of passengers are likely being subjected to the same sort of treatment at airports across the country,'' said Jayashri Srikantiah, an ACLU attorney.
The database was created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a way to prevent potential terrorists from boarding planes. The Transportation Security Administration gets names from law enforcement officials and gives the lists to airlines to screen passengers.
The ACLU is asking a federal judge to demand that the TSA, FBI or the Justice Department disclose who is on the list, how they got on it and how they can get off it.
The plaintiffs, Rebecca Gordon and Janet Adams, publish the San Francisco-based War Times. They were stopped in August while checking in for a flight to Boston.
``It was very distressing,'' Gordon said.
The two invoked the Freedom of Information Act to demand that authorities reveal why they were stopped. The TSA did not respond to their request and the FBI said no files on the two existed, the ACLU said.
An FBI spokesman on Tuesday referred inquiries to the TSA.
TSA spokesman Niko Melendez said those on the no-fly list pose, or are suspected of posing, a threat to civil aviation and national security. He added that the agency does ``not confirm the presence of a particular name of an individual on a list.''
----
A Matter of Life and Limb
These Protesters Put Their Bodies On the Line. But Are Their Heads In the Clouds?
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8088-2003Apr21?language=printer
FRESHWATER, Calif.
It's not like you just telephone the Earth First! offices and say: Take me to your leader. Doesn't work like that. Messages are left for activists who insist they be known only by their "forest names." For Remedy or Wren. For Lodgepole or Shunka. Radical environmentalists and their affinity groups don't work in cubicles. They couch-surf. When they're not living in trees.
It is Shunka who leaves his pager number. The meet is set: parking lot at the organic food co-op in Arcata, the trippy little college town in the far north California woods a six-hour drive from San Francisco.
And here comes a junker compact now, filled with tie-dye and fleece. A rear side window rolls down and a bearded face appears. Shunka looks like an extra from the set of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Frodo's hairier cousin, and he shouts out: "You the dude from The Washington Post?" and we are. "Right on. Get in your car and follow us, man, because it's going down."
And away we go. The sheriff's deputies are raiding the tree-sits.
Up in the hills, the skinny kids are rolling video-cams and speaking into walkie-talkies and swinging around the trees like squirrel monkeys, and the beefy cops are leading their handcuffed charges away. The woods are filled with war whoops, chain saws buzzing and shrieks ("Agggg, they're torturing me!") and taunts ("What happens when we all have to live in a giant plastic bubble?").
This is the front line behind the Redwood Curtain: Humboldt County, famous for Green Party-majority city councils and third-generation lumberjacks, chewy buds of homegrown marijuana and big hoary redwoods. Trees so fat that one trunk can fill the bed of a logging truck, enough timber to build a thousand hot tubs, a single tree worth $30,000 or $40,000 or more.
In its broadest strokes, what's happening here is straightforward. Pacific Lumber Co., now a wholly owned subsidiary of Charles Hurwitz's Houston-based Maxxam Corp., is harvesting redwoods, including some ancient trees. Its public relations officers point out that Palco is certified as a "sustainable" timber company, vital for the regional economy, removing a renewable resource of high-quality wood products desired by the home-building industries from Palco's own private 200,000 acres. The company says it has set aside or sold to the state and federal governments most of its oldest groves of trees.
The Earth First! take is less charitable: that Maxxam and junk-bond timber baron Hurwitz took a local and respected company and turned it into a cash cow, accelerating the logging, clear-cutting hills too steep, fouling streams, choking salmon and massacring ancient redwoods. They want the clear-cuts stopped, the oldest trees saved in new reserves or on company lands.
The protesters are not alone. In February, Humbolt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos filed civil suit against Palco, charging unfair and fraudulent business practices in obtaining government approval to cut down 100,000 trees on unstable slopes. The DA is seeking injunctive relief and millions in penalties. The company is denying the charges.
In the past few months, as Palco began harvesting in new sections, the woods here have been filling with more protesters willing to live in trees. It is now perhaps the nation's largest direct-action environmental confrontation between polar opposites -- and the unrest is only likely to get bigger when summer comes and college students are free to bolster the ranks.
The protests possess all the angry intensity of standoffs at World Trade Organization or International Monetary Fund meetings in Seattle and Washington, with the added drama that these Earth Firsters are not lying down in an intersection, pretending to be dead, but chaining their arms together in metal sleeves called lockboxes to branches hundreds of feet in the air. One slip, one shove, means somebody could be dead.
At last count, about 30 trees were occupied by sitters trespassing on the Palco lands in Humboldt County. In the late 1990s, when the first sits began, there were one or two, the most famous of which was the two-year occupation of the tree called Luna by Julia "Butterfly" Hill, named by Good Housekeeping magazine as one of the most admired women of 1998.
The skills of modern rock-climbing have been grafted to these protests to hoist aloft -- to heights equal to 13-story buildings -- plywood sleeping platforms suspended by ropes and carabiners. To cut down the tree, the company must send its own climbers up to remove the protesters. But this is not easy. And as soon as the platforms and sitters are removed from a tree, other activists scurry back up at night.
Some sitters perch for weeks, others go months. Jen Card, a 28-year-old bookseller from Oregon who went by the forest name Remedy, just did 361 days before her arrest. She was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. Card is free on bond (she wants to write a book about her experience); none of the activists has served any substantial jail time.
"Their presence is effective in slowing down the process," said Palco spokesman Jim Branham. "We're a convenient target. It's clear their objective is to shut our company and the timber industry down." Branham said the fight is not about the environment. "It's a political and social battle," he says.
"We put the rad in radical," one activist tells a reporter. And indeed, this is far removed from the 2003 Sierra Club calendar. The Earth Firsters say they maintain a strict code of nonviolence. But to an onlooker, it all appears to be incredibly dangerous. For everybody. Which is the point. Out on a Limb
Just outside the little town of Freshwater, a 15-minute drive from Arcata, the "Men Working" signs appear along the roadside in the ferny forest. Then you see the clear-cut, a hillside of raw red earth and splintered stumps, then the Palco subcontractors' white-and-green pickup trucks, then Humboldt County sheriff deputies' four-wheelers, and finally the activists' "lower village," where the first eight tree-sits are set up.
They are way up there.
A photograph or video does not do it justice. The sitters are more than a hundred feet in the air, some standing on the very top of the redwood crowns. They're 20 miles from the ocean, but on a clear day they say they can see the wave sets breaking. You need binoculars to watch them.
You can see blue plastic tarps and hanging milk jugs filled with water and wet sleeping bags, and between the trees the sitters have strung rope traverses that allow them to move from platform to platform, like modern-day Tarzan and Jane.
And they can see you, too. One sitter, whose forest name is Synapse and who's in the tree they call Aurora, shouts down that the "mainstream media" has arrived and "don't talk to him, he's just out to make a buck."
Still, the couple dozen or so "ground crew" mostly welcome "the corporate media tool," as one barefoot activist puts it, to their communal gorp and berries. At least nobody makes the media tool for a "feddy-dready," Earth Firster slang for an undercover agent.
A sitter named Tree occupies a redwood called Poseidon. Tree has slung a rope with a weight around the limb of a neighboring redwood, then looped his end around his neck so that if lumberjacks cut the other redwood down, the young man will strangle -- or worse.
"His head would pop off," says a moon-faced woman with starter dreads.
Eric Schatz, a Palco contractor the Earth Firsters call Climber Eric, puts spikes on his boots and begins to scale the redwood with confidence and speed. All around -- so close you have to wait to continue a conversation -- are the sounds of chain saws working through the clear-cut below.
The lumberjacks and the protesters seem sometimes like long-lost siblings. Like Palestinians and Israelis. They both seemingly love these lands, and are in touch with the feel of duff and moss beneath their feet, the smell and taste of rain, the pure physicality required to hump up and down these trailless hills. The lumberjacks crack open a tin of Copenhagen and have a spit. The activists roll their own cigarettes and have a smoke. The lumberjacks wear old sweat shirts and wool pants and worn boots. So do the Earth Firsters.
They know each other's forest names and faces. And they share a bond of common danger. When Climber Eric heads up a tree to pull down a protester, the Earth Firsters say he often coos to them; that up there in the treetops, they're in this together: "One bad move. Somebody falls. Let's work together." The two sides, timber harvesters and activists, even sat down together to formulate loose rules of nonviolent engagement under the rubric of the Forest Peace Alliance -- rules both sides say are routinely crossed.
As Climber Eric ascends, the protesters are close enough to talk to him.
"You're doing the Devil's work, Eric."
"You're not a quality dude, Eric. This isn't quality."
"This isn't safe, man."
"Think about your karma!"
"We love you, Climber Eric. Don't hurt our friend."
A lanky activist named Four Winds keeps heckling. "Quit your job, Eric! Leave the forest. We'll have the biggest party of your life down on the beach. We'll eat tofu! You'll eat salmon! Kick up your feet and roll up a fatty and ask yourself: Should I quit my job and become a hippie?"
Eric dislodges the rope thrown by Tree and descends. The protesters keep at him. Finally, Eric answers. "It's okay to terrorize my family?" he asks. The hecklers say they didn't terrorize his family. "Part of your community did," Eric says. A few weeks ago, the Earth Firsters and their allies showed up, first at Eric's house to protest, and later at his insurance agent's offices to get his policy revoked. Eric says they terrorized his family. The climber shouts back at the protesters: "That shows me the quality of you people -- you don't care about my wife and kids."
A Palco subcontractor, whom the Earth Firsters call Faller Dave, cranks up his chain saw and rips into the tree. Two, three expert cuts. A crack. A whoosh. Then a ground-rolling ka-thump, a bounce, and it's down.
What about the tree? What about the tree? the protesters are now shouting.
Faller Dave counts the rings. The tree was 101 years old -- not anywhere near the old-growth redwoods towering nearby, trees that might be 500 or 1,000 years old, slated for the saw but occupied by sitters.
"The tree did good," Dave says. It fell right where he aimed it. Into the Green
"You cool with trespassing?"
Shunka agrees to take a reporter out to a remote tree-sit where Palco is slated to begin another harvest, the place Shunka calls Gypsy Mountain, near Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park.
Along with Shunka are his "brothers" Four Winds and Eddie. The young trio are as bonded as a platoon; they've been doing this together since the late 1990s. They've filled backpacks with supplies bought with donations -- dried bananas, coconut flakes, fresh bread -- and are moving up the steep mountain like billy goats. The hike takes an hour and leaves the group dripping in sweat. There is mountain lion scat on the trail. A pair of vultures circle.
It is a beautiful forest, steep and carpeted by redwoods and Douglas fir. There are a few enormous virgins, but lots of second growth, too. And plenty of old stumps. These forests of Humboldt County have been logged for more than a century; the redwoods built San Francisco.
In the silence, it feels like what people always compare this landscape to: a cathedral of green gemstone light. This is where hot tubs and backyard decks come from. This is watching the sausage get made.
Here and there are strands of yellow plastic and red tape marked "Botany."
What's this?
"Ologists," Shunka says. You know, he explains, zoologists, ecologists, silviculturists.
"It's just a sham," says Four Winds. "They pretend they're doing something and they just leave a lot of petroleum products hanging in the trees." The activists support the science that supports their cause; anything produced by Palco is perceived to be junk. To talk about "sustainable harvest plans" and "habitat conservation plans" is bunk, Shunka says.
The three are vague about who they are, using only their forest names. Local law enforcement knows them; they've all been arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest. A few details do emerge. Shunka (Jason Wilson) is 28, a stout fellow with a reddish beard that grows down his neck; his forest name was given to him by a Lakota Indian medicine man. He wears amulets. He was raised in Missouri, educated in philosophy and environmental studies. Out of college, Shunka worked as a landscaper and at a bagel bakery. His co-workers didn't like him because he kept talking about the "bourgeoisie."
They stop to take a break. They point out trees with names. Four Winds finds a salamander and pats its head. It starts to rain.
At a tree called Iridia, a sitter named Terrapin eagerly lowers a rope for his supplies.
He calls down, "You got somebody to sit?" Terrapin has been in the branches for three weeks and asks when will a replacement arrive. He hasn't seen any loggers. Recently, he reports, it snowed, and another day there was hail. "It was so beautiful," Terrapin says. He can watch the Van Duzen River course the valley below.
Four Winds mentions that the river was probably named "for some general who killed Indians," but it was actually named for James Van Duzen, a member of the Gregg party that explored these forests in 1850.
Terrapin shouts, "You remember the rolling papers?" Of course. The supplies go up the tree.
Shunka wants to visit the nearby site where his friend David "Gypsy" Chain was killed on Sept. 17, 1998, when a Palco contractor dropped a tree on him. Back then, one of the direct-action strategies was to run around the woods acting as "human shields." No charges were ever filed, though Palco reached an undisclosed settlement with Chain's family. Shunka was there that day. Chain was the one who taught Shunka to climb the redwoods.
Palco agreed to leave the downed tree in the woods as a memorial. There is a makeshift altar: shells, stones, crystals, a necklace, a plastic Buddha, a kazoo, a Bic lighter and half a joint. The men get on their knees.
Four Winds pulls a bag from his pocket and scatters sawdust from the tree felled earlier this day. Shunka places cedar bark, and says, "From the doorway in to the doorway out and back out again."
Four Winds (Alexander Carpenter) hails from San Francisco, and he's 26, with partial dreads, chipped teeth. He divides his time between Earth First! direct actions and his music. He is funny and a hustler. He is also, he confides, a priest, a healer, an adherent to a homegrown animist tradition that combines Native American ritual and worship of nature. Several times this day he has stopped and led a moment of prayer.
Now he produces a rattle and the three men began to chant, in a mix of English and a pidgin of Indian languages. When Shunka leads a song, a refrain in English repeats: "We want to live." Shunka's throat becomes rough. Four Winds begins to cry. Eddie has his eyes shut tight. They mourn their friend.
On the way down the mountain, Eddie confesses to Shunka and Four Winds that he is no longer sure what he is doing here in the woods. Eddie is 24 and seems to live with his mother in San Francisco and likes to play drums.
"How many trees are we really saving?" he asks. His friends hear him out. It is not a bad question. Four Winds says: "What's important is that we all stay together."
Hiking back to the car, they begin to dream of a possible future: that they form a band, called FLAN (for Freedom, Love and Nature), and that Eddie plays drums, Shunka sings and Four Winds plays guitar and didgeridoo. They'll set up a recording studio in a group activist house. They'll get supporters to send them $10 a month to make music and fight for the trees. They'll get a bio-diesel bus. They'll tour. They'll cut . . . a CD.
Huckleberry Finn didn't want to be civilized by Aunt Sally either. A Long Way Down
Next morning, we go back to Freshwater. Climber Eric is attempting to use a grinder to cut a sitter named Jungle out of his metal lockbox, while another protester named Phoenix is serving as a diversion. They're all up in a tree they call Allah. Phoenix screams that he is being hurt by Palco climbers attempting to pin him down. The protesters by turns are thrilled by the alleged aggression ("the video is unreal") and appalled.
Eddie is gone. He jumped out of the car yesterday and talked about hitchhiking back to San Francisco. Four Winds scurries 50 feet up a redwood, without ropes, and starts heckling Climber Eric.
"How was your breakfast at the Cotton Cafe? How was your sausage? We know where you order at. We work where you eat!" The threat is obvious, that Climber Eric might have his eggs spit in or . . . what? Poisoned?
"Not everyone has a nonviolent code like we do!" Four Winds is yelling.
Another protester is spewing profanities at the top of his lungs.
Where are the sheriff's deputies? The protesters are upset they have not come, and they keep calling 911 on cell phones.
When the deputies do arrive, they are heckled, too. One deputy hears the complaints that Phoenix is being assaulted, but when she asks to see their videotape, the activists say they'll get one to her later.
A couple of deputies stand around a pickup and light cigars. Shunka goes over and calls them goons, fascist thugs and neo-Nazis.
Another protester, a college-age woman, says, "Did I ever tell you I had a dream about being a bird?" It feels like the children's crusade. Another activist offers the officers a hug. They decline.
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