------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Bush Calls Putin, Who Brings Up Kremlin Figure Held in U.S.
UK's Blair Calls Russia's Putin
U.N.: No link proven depleted uranium, illnesses
"FLASH" FUNDS TO TAKE FORWARD WORK ON DEPLETED URANIUM
Deception Over Health Risks of Depleted Uranium
Rumsfeld To Consult With Europeans
Pollution Is as Big a Threat
U.S. intends to hold Iraq to its commitments
Taiwan Leader To Mediate Nuke Debate
Taiwan Legislature Reverses Leader on Contested Nuclear Plant
Bush Plans Modest Increase for the Pentagon
Security team declares education 'crisis'
Water found below Yucca heightens concerns
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste repository

MILITARY
Turkey cancels deal with France in row
Penguins don't topple over watching planes
EUROPEANS HAIL TALKS
Colombian Offers to Meet Rebels and Extend Zone
Colombia, Drugs and Us
OFFENDER PROGRAM CRITICIZED
Losing a Drug Habit to Keep Children
URANIUM CONTAMINATES SPACE AROUND EARTH
Space Weapons: Refuting the Critics
The Cole Investigation Proves Frustrating
Critics see 'zero' chance of U.N. tax
MERCURY STORAGE
FBI attends trial of Yemeni on hijack

OTHER
Europeans Again Eat Some Beef, but Farmers and Butchers Suffer
COWS TO DIE
Nassau Officer Is Accused in Second Sodomy Attack
No Civil Rights Charges for Police in Diallo Case
Courts Are a Limited Anti-Terror Weapon
Martians and truth
Boucher lashes critic of U.S.-Greek links
U.S. says Gadhafi must compensate victims

Activists
PROTESTERS OCCUPY IMF OFFICES IN QUITO, ECUADOR
Peace Action Organizing Fellowship
TALKS WITH PROTESTERS


-------- NUCLEAR

Bush Calls Putin, Who Brings Up Kremlin Figure Held in U.S.

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01PREX.html

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 - In what appears to be the longest and most substantive of his conversations with foreign leaders, President Bush initiated a 15-minute telephone call to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia today. Mr. Putin raised the case of a former Kremlin aide now under arrest in New York on charges of money laundering, Russian officials said.

White House officials said little about the telephone call - less, in fact, than the Russians did - and would not say whether the two men had talked about Mr. Bush's hopes of building a national missile defense. Mr. Putin has been leading an international campaign to persuade other nations to oppose the program.

But Mr. Putin did raise the case of Pavel P. Borodin, who is being held in New York under a Swiss arrest warrant on charges that he took tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from Swiss contractors renovating the Kremlin. Russian officials have demanded his release.

Under President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Borodin was the head of Kremlin administration, the equivalent of a chief of staff for property and building management. This week he was replaced as state secretary for the union between Russia and Belarus.

According to a Russian statement, Mr. Putin "expressed the hope that a solution will be found for this problem which will correspond both to legal and humanitarian principles." The Russians said the appeal was "met by G. Bush with understanding." A White House official said the United States considered the case a "legal issue," meaning that Mr. Bush did not plan to interfere.

The White House also said Mr. Bush had responded on Tuesday, in writing, to a recent letter from Mr. Putin. American officials described the Putin letter as a call for engagement, but without any new proposals.

In the discussion today, the two leaders agreed to a rough schedule of contacts between their top officials, and agreed to meet soon thereafter. Under the current schedule, however, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin would not come face to face until a meeting of major industrial nations in Italy early in the summer.

That may suit the White House, which has quietly indicated that it wants to move slowly in dealings with Mr. Putin while it sorts out both the political and the technological challenges of missile defense. The Kremlin, in its statement today, said only that the two leaders had agreed to "find mutually acceptable solutions to problematic questions."

Building a missile defense would require amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile agreement. Mr. Bush's defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, said last week that if necessary the United States could abandon the treaty. But that might open a breach in relations with Russia that Mr. Bush is unlikely to want to risk so early in his presidency.

China has also expressed objections to a missile system, and President Jacques Chirac of France criticized the plan several days ago.

While the two leaders duel over missiles, Mr. Bush may soon face the problem that plagued the Clinton administration: Russia's reluctance to enact economic reforms.

Officials from the International Monetary Fund are in Moscow this week to review Russia's compliance with reforms that it agreed to during its 1998 financial crisis. With the exception of some tax reforms, Mr. Putin has moved on few of those issues. In an interview earlier this month, President Bush expressed doubt that the monetary fund had given Russia the right advice. He suggested that he might want to review the economic relationship.

---

UK's Blair Calls Russia's Putin

February 1, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain.html?printpage=yes

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair telephoned Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Thursday and Blair's spokesman said they were likely to have discussed America's new president, George W. Bush.

``I'm sure they would have discussed issues relating to the incoming Bush administration,'' the spokesman said.

He said he did not know whether Blair and Putin specifically had discussed Bush's hopes to build a national nuclear missile defense system -- a plan that would involve Britain, since it would require upgrading of a strategic radar base there.

Putin vehemently opposes the American plan, saying it violates arms control agreements already in place.

Blair and Putin spoke for 25 minutes, Blair's spokesman said. A day earlier, Bush and Putin spoke by telephone.

Blair and Putin met five times last year and Blair has said he considers the Russian leader a friend. He says cultivating ties with Putin are a risk worth taking if it helps keep Russia stable.

But Blair also says he considers it his duty to get along with the new U.S. Republican president and is flying to Washington later this month for his first meeting with Bush.

-------- depleted uranium

U.N.: No link proven depleted uranium, illnesses

02/01/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-01-nato.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Depleted-Uranium.html?printpage=yes

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - Scientific studies have not proven a link between exposure to depleted uranium used in NATO weapons and the onset of cancer or other illnesses, a team of U.N. experts said Thursday.

The four-member team of experts from the World Health Organization traveled to the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo after reports that soldiers serving with NATO-led peacekeepers in the Balkans had become ill. The former top U.N. administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, requested the study.

NATO's use of ammunition containing armor-piercing depleted uranium in bombing campaigns in Bosnia in 1995 and in Yugoslavia in 1999 has sparked fear across Europe that it may have caused serious illnesses in peacekeeping troops. NATO has repeatedly denied that the ammunition could cause cancer or other ailments.

The WHO team told reporters in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, that they found no firm evidence "to link individual medical cases in Kosovo to exposure to depleted uranium." They acknowledged, however, that much more analysis was needed.

The team looked at data from hospitals and spoke with local groups and non-governmental organizations working on the issue in Kosovo. They also traveled to a handful of sites throughout the province where such ammunition was used, but did not say how many sites were checked or exactly where they were.

The team also concluded that currently the greater danger to health in Kosovo comes from exposure to other pollutants such as lead in the air and from an alarmingly high rate of traffic-related deaths.

The team's final report will be released at WHO headquarters next week.

So far neither German nor Portuguese experts have found enhanced levels of radiation or any link of the ammunition to diseases.

Also Thursday, some 40 Italian experts started checking Italian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia and their quarters for possible health hazards related to depleted uranium.

The experts from the Institute for Radiobiology in Rome, hired by the Italian military, started working in two groups, said Lt. Colonel Claudio Linda, a spokesman for the 1,600-strong Italian contingent. One group was to perform medical checks on troops while the other was measuring the level of radiation in the facilities they use.

No danger of radioactivity was found in five locations inspected earlier in the day, Linda said. He did not say how long the probe would take.

--------

WHO APPEALS FOR $2 MILLION IN "FLASH" FUNDS TO TAKE FORWARD WORK ON DEPLETED URANIUM IN BALKANS

1 February 2001
WHO/05 _

IRAQ _ The World Health Organization (WHO) today issued a "flash appeal" for close to $2 million to support activities concerning the possible effects on human health of depleted uranium (DU) used in munitions in the Gulf War and Balkans conflicts.

Over the next six months, WHO is asking for close to $2 million to:

+ strengthen its epidemiological expertise to develop/conduct field surveys with standard protocols, and support data collection as relevant from local health facilities; + provide technical support and equipment as needed to strengthen national surveillance and registry of non-communicable diseases including cancers; and + deploy toxicologists, radiation and chemical experts, together with equipment, supplies and easier access to international reference centres in support of national capacities for diagnosis and treatment of non-communicable diseases. This initial $2 million appeal will eventually form part of an estimated $20 million appeal which would cover WHO's work in this area for the next four years. That money would allow WHO to undertake in-depth epidemiological and toxicological studies into the possible health effects of depleted uranium and other possible environmental effects on human beings in the Balkans and the Gulf.

While experts' current thinking is that the risk from exposure to DU is low, information is not sufficient for firm conclusions.

"Evidence on the incidence of cancers needs to be strengthened in communities within Iraq and the Balkans in order to draw any epidemiological conclusions," says Dr Xavier Leus, Director for the Emergency and Humanitarian Action Department of WHO. "There is also very little information on other possible risk factors for civilians and the military that may be equally important. We need to examine possible connections between risk factors and health outcomes."

"We also need evidence on the numbers of people exposed, amounts of DU involved in the various exposure situations and the concentration, distribution and presentation of environmental pollutants," Dr Leus says.

It is unacceptable, Dr Leus continued, that the current state of uncertainty about the possible health consequences of exposure to DU continues.

"Such uncertainty and the consequent levels of widespread speculation that exposure to DU may be responsible for serious health consequences such as leukaemia, as well as other implications for human health and humanitarian operations, illustrate the need to fill the knowledge gap," Dr Leus said.

While other bodies play their role in looking at the DU in terms of physical properties, radioactivity, environmental safety, legal aspects, WHO intends to ensure that sound information on levels of risk from DU is available and that the international community has the evidence needed for immediate and long-term policies and strategies vis-à-vis this problem. National and local health systems need the capacity to identify DU-related health priorities and address them in an integrated approach.

Notes on the Appeal:

1. _Appealing Agency_: World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, CH-12 Geneva, Switzerland

2. _Title:_ Facing Global Concerns for the Health Effects of Depleted Uranium

3. _Beneficiary Population: _Population in the Balkans and the Gulf Region as well as Humanitarian Workers

4. _Extra budgetary funds requested: _US$ 1,980,000.00 __ 5. _Duration:_ January - June 2001

6. _Contribution sought from_: Humanitarian Donors

7. _Grant Payment Details_ Swift Code UBSW CH 12A US dollar account number CO-169-920.3

8. _Contact desk in WHO/HQ_ Dr Khalid Shibib (for the Gulf Region) Emergency and Humanitarian Action Dir: Tel: +41 22 791 2988 Fax+4122-791 4844 E-mail: shibibk@who.int

Dr Edouard Kossenko (for the Balkans) Emergency and Humanitarian Action Dir: Tel: +41 22 791 2755 Fax+4122-791 4844 E-mail: kossenkoe@who.int

For further information please contact Mr Gregory Hartl, WHO Spokesperson, WHO, Geneva, Switzerland. Tel. (+41 22) 791 4458; Fax (+41 22) 791 4858; e-mail: hartlg@who.int [hartlg@who.int] All WHO Press Releases, Fact Sheets and Features as well as other information on this subject can be obtained on Internet on the WHO home page http://www.who.int/

----

Deception Over Health Risks of Depleted Uranium

February 1, 2001
Irish Times
by Lara Marlowe,
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0201-01.htm

Is depleted uranium, the waste product of the nuclear industry used to make tank-piercing weapons, responsible for Gulf War syndrome and Balkans syndrome? The US Department of Defence and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation both still deny it. But in July 1990 - the month before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait - a report submitted to the US army by Science Applications International Corporation compared the merits of tungsten and depleted uranium (or DU) as armour penetrators. DU is a "lowlevel alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, and chemical toxicity causing kidney damage", the report said.

Following combat, it added, "the condition of the battlefield, and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic penetrators . . ." The report warned that "aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant, with potential radiological and toxicological effects". A navy memo dated September 1990 alludes to "the hazard created from residual radiation of a spent round" and notes that "prolonged exposure could cause illness".

How can one explain that children of Gulf War veterans suffer the same birth defects as Iraqi children born in zones contaminated by DU? That the same symptoms - fatigue, depression, respiratory and kidney problems and in many cases leukaemia - affect civilians and soldiers exposed to DU in both the Gulf and the Balkans? And if DU is harmless, why is Kuwait paying private companies millions of dollars to decontaminate its battlefields? Who will pay to decontaminate Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo?

Three journalists, Martin Meissonnier, who is French, the Belgian Frederic Loore and Roger Trilling from the US, have spent two years investigating DU production, use and effects. Their conclusions - published in Paris on Monday by Robert Laffont in a book, Depleted Uranium, the In- visible War - are causing tremors in the defence establishments of the US and Britain, the only states to have used DU weapons.

The book and a television documentary by the same journalists show the US government was at best grossly negligent and deceitful towards US nuclear workers, soldiers and the civilians of Iraq and former Yugoslavia. At worst - as stated by Paul Sullivan, the head of the National Gulf War Resource Centre - the US is guilty of knowingly contaminating parts of the Gulf and former Yugoslavia for the next 4.5 billion years.

Uranium is found in nature. Those who oppose the use of DU in weapons do so on emotional, not scientific, grounds, NATO and Pentagon spokesmen tell us. If there is no proof, most people conclude, then why worry?

But when he says that DU is a safe material, US Col Eric Daxon ignores even the study produced by his own Armed Forces Radiology Research Institute, which concluded that DU forms tumours and mutates genes in laboratory mice. "Strong evidence exists to support detailed study of potential DU carcinogenicity," the institute's study concluded.

So why did NATO only recently warn Albanian Kosovars not to let their children play on destroyed tanks? Why was a video on the dangers of DU, made in 1995 by Capt Doug Rokke of the US army, never shown? Why were US servicemen and women now suffering from Gulf War syndrome allowed to scramble over destroyed Iraqi armour taking photos? Why did their commanding officer, Gen Barry McCaffrey, wear nuclear-biological-chemical protective clothing when he visited units in the desert?

Mr Trilling admits that "there's a doubt in everybody's mind" about the exact relationship between DU and cancer, and he does not exclude the likelihood that vaccines given to soldiers, the bombing of chemical plants in Serbia and Iraq and the oil well fires in Kuwait also contributed to ailments. "DU is a terror weapon in the sense that no one really knows what it does," he says. "The Gulf veteran groups are desperate to find out. The people we talk to are half mad with terror."

The authors were among the first to report that uranium at the only three US plants which process DU was contaminated with transuranics - highly radioactive elements including plutonium. The plants were meant to process natural uranium, but in the 1950s, without notifying the workers or surrounding communities, the US Department of Energy decided to reprocess spent fuel from military nuclear reactors.

In other words, the hundreds of tonnes of DU fired in the Gulf and in the Balkans were not so "depleted" after all. It was in response to a question from Mr Trilling on January 17th that the outgoing Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, acknowledged the plutonium contamination that independent scientists began to suspect in the early 1990s.

THE US anti-DU activist Dan Fahey sums up the Pentagon's attitude as, "Don't look, don't find". Congress ordered the Pentagon to investigate the effects of DU in 1993, but nearly eight years later it has undertaken no serious research on the inhalation of DU or the birth defects afflicting veterans' children. When Gerry Wheat, a Gulf War veteran wounded with DU shrapnel, complained of pain in his left kidney, the Veterans' Administration hospital insisted on checking his right kidney instead.

It was known from 1952 that the defoliant Agent Orange caused cancer, degenerative diseases and birth defects. Yet when Vietnam veterans suffered these afflictions, the Pentagon insisted there was no evidence they were caused by Agent Orange. Workers at Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which produced DU in Kentucky, breathed and touched carcinogenic plutonium dust for decades before the Department of Energy admitted in 1999 that the entire place was contaminated. Ten thousand Paducah workers, many of them cancer-stricken, are now suing the US government.

In Italy, Belgium and France, criticism of NATO's use of DU is growing. Yet the number of countries with DU weapons has doubled to more than 40 since Meissonier, Loore and Trilling began their research. "It's a burgeoning industry," Meissonier says. "There aren't any wars on at the moment, so why can't there be a moratorium until the scientists figure out what these weapons do?"

-------- europe

Rumsfeld To Consult With Europeans

February 1, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rumsfeld-Europe.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will attend a European security conference in Munich, Germany, on Saturday in his debut abroad as President Bush's Pentagon chief, officials said Thursday.

Among the topics likely to arise is the Bush administration's plan for deploying a national missile defense, a project strongly opposed by Russia and China and questioned by many of the European allies.

Rumsfeld will meet formally and informally with many of his counterparts from European NATO countries, including the defense ministers of Britain, Germany, Italy and France. He also will deliver a speech to the session, known as the Munich Conference on Security Policy.

After the Munich meetings, Rumsfeld plans to fly to Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, home of the 52nd Fighter Wing, to attend a reception and dinner with service members and their families.

----

The Greening of Mikhail Gorbachev
Pollution Is as Big a Threat as Cold War Arsenals Were, He Says

Thursday, February 1, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Barry James
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=9326

PARIS For the man who once ran a superpower, only one subject is big enough for his global vision: the environment.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, says the world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War.

Since the death of his wife, Raisa, more than 16 months ago, Mr. Gorbachev has thrown himself into his work with the Green Cross International, the environmental organization he founded at the United Nations Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1999.

"No, I haven't gotten over the loss," he said in an interview here. "We lived together for almost 50 years and at my age it is a very difficult situation, of course. But I try to get over it, and for this reason I take on a heavy burden of work and more and more activities.

"I have my daughter and my grandchildren, of course. I don't think Raisa would have approved if I had been completely crushed by sorrow."

Mr. Gorbachev was in France for the opening this week of a Green Cross office in Lyon, which will be the coordinating center for a campaign for an "Earth Charter" that he hopes the UN will adopt on the 10th anniversary of the Rio conference. The charter, a parallel to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would be a code of environmental good conduct for civil society.

Mr. Gorbachev has been interested in the environment since he was a boy growing up in the south Caucasus, where he saw dust storms destroying farm land. Later he witnessed the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the tragedy of Chernobyl, which convinced him of the need for greater government transparency, or glasnost, and the involvement of ordinary citizens in decision-making about the environment.

Governments have not responded adequately to the problems, he contends, citing the meager results of the Kyoto conference on climate change and the failure of the follow-up climate conference at The Hague last year. It is therefore up to nongovernment organizations such as his own to keep up the pressure.

Asked how he viewed other environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, he said, "I sometimes judge their methods severely, but the content of their work is serious, and I support it."

The task of the Green Cross, as he sees it, is to focus attention on specific problems, particularly on the environmental consequences of conflict - including the lingering effects of the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, the stockpiles of chemical weapons or, more recently, the use of depleted uranium in warfare.

The Green Cross also is seeking to avert conflict over access to supplies of clean water, and Mr. Gorbachev has met personally with leaders in the Middle East on the peaceful sharing of the Jordan River. Now he is seeking to involve corporations, such as the French utility owners Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Vivendi, in improving water supplies in the Middle East and Africa.

Mr. Gorbachev said the Chernobyl disaster had convinced him of the need to reinforce democracy and the freedom of the press and of expression to create "a climate in which people can pose questions and find solutions."

"When we introduced freedom of the press in Soviet Union, people started to ask questions," he said, leading the government to close hundreds of polluting factories. Today, he added, "Russia has become very ecologically minded."

But he warned that the protests of citizens and the actions of nongovernment organizations would be limited "if journalists do nothing, and if parliaments do nothing to adopt suitable laws."

Asked if he thought the world was a better or worse place since he left office, Mr. Gorbachev said, "I think things are better, much better, because the situation today has some hopes. It is not completely desperate." Major international conflicts, such as the one in Cambodia, have been brought to an end, and a start made toward peace in the Middle East. Confrontation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact has given way to cooperation.

But in an apparent reference to the proposal by the current U.S. administration to create a national missile defense system, he said: "The fact that a great power like the Soviet Union has left the world scene seems to be creating a temptation toward new geopolitical stratagems. In my view, the strong position that America occupies at the moment must not be transformed into a hegemony but into a partnership. I do hope that the Bush team will reflect before adopting positions and will engage in discussions with Russia and Europe."

-------- iraq

Powell: U.S. intends to hold Iraq to its commitments

02/01/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-01-mideast.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Mideast.html?printpage=yes

WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced Iraq on Thursday as a threat to "the children of the region," and said the Bush administration intends to hold Baghdad to its promise to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction.

"They are threatening their neighbors," Powell told reporters at the State Department as he provided some clues to the new administration's approach to foreign policy issues.

"Iraq is a problem for its own people," Powell said. "I think we have to keep reminding everybody that this is an arms control problem."

At the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, which reversed President Saddam Hussein's annexation of Kuwait, Iraq promised to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear.

Subsequently, however, it managed to limit U.N. weapons inspections, although the United States is using other means to try to monitor Iraq's activities.

Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war, said Iraq is now unable to threaten its neighbors with conventional weapons so it is trying to gain strength with weapons of mass destruction.

"They made a commitment to do away with these weapons, and I think that the international community and the United Nations have to hold them to that commitment," he told reporters in a visit to the press area of the State Department.

It was his first session with reporters since President Bush named his secretary of state.

While declining to be drawn into comparisons to the Clinton administration's approach, Powell indicated a more cautious policy on peacemaking between Israel and the Arabs.

"I think we have to watch carefully what's happening with the Middle East peace process and how it unfolds over the next several days, and watch the Israel election" Tuesday in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak is pitted against Likud leader Ariel Sharon.

"I think, of course, we have to look at the Gulf and especially Iraq," Powell said. "Those things come to mind."

"But I am of a view you can't just concentrate on one thing. There are just many things going on at the same time," he said.

For example, Powell said he is "mindful" of the problems in Africa, in Congo, for instance.

Touching on how the new administration was organizing itself to deal with foreign policy issues, Powell said "we've established a system where we will have working groups, chaired by the State Department."

"Surely we will look at any region that requires looking at in particular," he said. Africa is the topic of one such group, Powell said.

Powell greeted each of the dozen reporters who were at their work stations, and took a close look at some of their cluttered quarters.

His visit had been billed as a "meet and greet" off-the-record session. But Powell agreed to be quoted when a reporter made the request and said he intends to speak for quotation in future sessions with them.

The last secretary of state to take that open approach was George P. Shultz in the Nixon administration nearly three decades ago. The others often spoke on the record, but often disguised their identity by insisting on being described as "a senior U.S. official."

-------- taiwan

Taiwan Leader To Mediate Nuke Debate

February 1, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-Nuclear.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- President Chen Shui-bian is ready to negotiate an end to months of squabbling between the opposition and the government over the scrapping of a partially built nuclear plant, officials said Thursday.

Opposition lawmakers have questioned whether Chen could be an impartial mediator since he was believed to have authorized canceling the $5.4 billion project in October.

But months of bitter debate have not resolved the dispute, and on Wednesday, angry lawmakers adopted a resolution demanding the government immediately restore the project.

The government has said it is not legally bound by the resolution, but the show of legislative force has pressured the government to show it is trying to work with lawmakers.

``Let's hope President Chen can use his constitutional power to mediate this dispute,'' Vice President Annette Lu told reporters.

On Thursday night, Chen had dinner with the legislature's president, Wang Jin-pyng, and the lawmaker agreed to meet with Premier Chang Chun-hsiung on Friday. Chang, Taiwan's No. 3 ranking leader, was appointed by the president and is responsible for dealing with the legislature.

Earlier Thursday, Wang said that the government must respect the legislature's resolution before any type of negotiations can take place.

A survey conducted by the China Times, a leading Taiwanese newspaper, reported Thursday that 43 percent of those polled support restoring the project. Only 28 percent said the government should ignore the resolution and abandon the project. The survey of 859 people had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

Many lawmakers said scuttling the project, approved by a previous government, is a huge waste of taxpayers' money.

But the main issue in the debate was whether the government could scrap the nuclear plant without seeking the legislature's support. Lawmakers argued that since they approved the plant's budget during the previous Nationalist Party government, they should have been consulted about the project's fate.

While attending a gathering of the opposition Nationalist Party, Premier Chang said Thursday he believed a compromise could be reached.

---

Taiwan Legislature Reverses Leader on Contested Nuclear Plant

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01TAIW.html

HONG KONG, Jan. 31 - Taiwan's political stalemate hardened today as the legislature voted to reverse a decision by President Chen Shui-bian to scrap a partly built nuclear plant.

The $5.5 billion plant is no mere public works project. It is the proxy for a much broader battle between Mr. Chen and the Nationalist Party, which he swept out of power last March after 55 years of rule.

The legislature, which is dominated by the Nationalists, voted 134 to 70 to resume construction. It said halting the project had caused "political turmoil, an economic slowdown and social instability."

More tumult seems likely, as Prime Minister Chang Chun-hsiung said the government was not obliged to follow the vote. But he offered to negotiate with the legislature.

"It is about time the dispute, which has been troubling the people and the government for about 20 years, comes to an end," said Mr. Chang's secretary general, Chiu I-jen. "We hope the issue will be resolved without emotional conflicts."

Political analysts said Mr. Chen was under increasing pressure to find a compromise. The dispute has paralyzed the government, inviting unwelcome comparisons with the Philippines and Indonesia, two chronically unstable Asian countries.

The standoff has also scared away foreign investors, hobbled the stock market and undermined the currency. The legislature's vote to restart the project caused the Taipei stock market to surge 2.5 percent.

"Everybody is expecting that a negotiation will bring some results," said Andrew Yang, secretary general of the Chinese Center for Advanced Policy Studies, a research organization in Taipei.

Still, Mr. Yang said it would be difficult for Mr. Chen to retreat, having promised to scrap the plant during his campaign. In addition, his Democratic Progressive Party is fervently opposed to the project.

Nuclear power is a sensitive issue in Taiwan. As the lawmakers voted today, about 200 antinuclear protesters shouted slogans on the steps of Parliament. On Monday a protester set himself on fire.

The plant is one-third completed. The Nationalists were outraged when Mr. Chen's government announced a halt in October, after $2.7 billion had been spent.

Earlier this month Taiwan's highest judges ruled that the government had acted improperly in scrapping the plant without first consulting the legislature. But they did not declare the decision unconstitutional, which could have ended the dispute.

Instead, they said the two sides should compromise - a process now grudgingly being contemplated.

A spokesman for the Nationalists, Jason Hu, accused the government of flouting the will of the legislature. But he said his party had not ruled out negotiations.

Political analysts noted that the legislature's resolution did not demand the resignation of Mr. Chang - an omission perhaps intended to smooth the way for talks.

"The political reality is that the government and the opposition parties all want this thing solved," Mr. Hu said. "The country is already in havoc; people feel so uncertain."

Another reality for the Nationalists is that they risk a lot in ratcheting up the dispute.

If the party cannot resolve its differences with the government, it can mount a no-confidence vote against the prime minister. But if it does, Mr. Chen can dissolve the legislature and call early elections.

In addition to bringing more turmoil, such a move could erode the lopsided majority that the Nationalists now enjoy.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Bush Plans Modest Increase for the Pentagon

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/politics/01DEFE.html?printpage=yes

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 - President Bush will propose modest increases at best in the Pentagon's next budget, two senior aides said today, despite running a campaign that warned of a dangerous erosion of American military power under the Clinton administration.

In a meeting at the White House with senior lawmakers, Mr. Bush said that before proposing significant changes in military spending, he would order Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, to oversee a broad review of the nation's military strategy and its armed forces, the aides said.

"The president thinks the wise approach to take is for the Pentagon to figure out long-term what its strategic needs are before we simply start to throw money in the direction of defense," the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "I think some people may be surprised to hear a conservative Republican talk like that, but that's his view."

Mr. Bush's decision appeared to dash the hopes many senior military leaders had for a large - and immediate - infusion of money into the Pentagon's budget.

In recent months, the top generals and admirals have publicly called for significant increases in spending. In recent weeks they have told members of Congress they will need $90 billion a year - or nearly 30 percent more than the current budget - to pay for the new weapons systems they have in development, like faster fighter planes, stealthy destroyers and more powerful artillery.

Mr. Fleischer and other administration officials declined to specify how much more, if any, they would propose spending at the Pentagon or any of the other agencies.

But a Democrat who attended this morning's meeting said Mr. Bush told them that there would be "no new money this year for defense."

"He was quite emphatic," the Democrat said of Mr. Bush. "I think people in the room were quite surprised."

The Pentagon's budget this year totals $309 billion, including $13 billion the Department of Energy spends to maintain the nation's nuclear weapons. Under President Bill Clinton's last spending plan, the Pentagon's budget is projected to rise to $323 billion in the fiscal year that begins in October.

Mr. Bush's plan to submit what Mr. Fleischer called "a lean budget" for the Pentagon stunned at least some military officers.

"It sounds like campaign promise No. 1 being broken," one senior officer said this evening.

Mr. Bush's aides said, however, that in his first budget proposal he will increase spending to cover a military pay raise and improvements in armed forces housing - both core campaign promises - though he will hold off decisions on major new programs.

In an interview today, Karen P. Hughes, a counselor to the president, said Mr. Bush was not ruling out increases in the future, but that he believed that any increases in spending had to be made wisely.

"We may in fact need resources," Ms. Hughes said, "but he wants a strategic plan in place before he starts advocating large new spending without knowing what the strategic purpose is."

Mr. Bush's decision underscores the new administration's focus on its main priority: cutting taxes, not increasing spending. With new budget projections showing the nation's surplus swelling to $5.6 trillion over the next decade, there will be even more pressure from both parties in Congress to devote the surpluses to new spending. But Mr. Fleischer said the surpluses bolstered the case for tax cuts, not for new spending.

"There's a new sheriff in town," Mr. Fleischer said.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush assailed the Clinton administration's management of the Pentagon, saying that morale and readiness had declined sharply and that reductions in military spending had been one of the causes.

"Not since the years before Pearl Harbor has our investment in national defense been so low as a percentage" of the gross national product, Mr. Bush said in a major speech on military issues in late 1999. "Something has to give, and it's giving."

In his campaign, Mr. Bush called for increasing military spending by $45 billion over 10 years. That was less than half the amount proposed by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore, and far less than what military leaders and some Republicans in Congress have said the Pentagon needs.

Mr. Bush offered few details while campaigning about how he would spend that money, but he did say he would raise military pay by $1 billion and increase spending on research and development of new technologies by $20 billion. As he settles into office, even some of his advisers have been confused about his plans for the Pentagon budget.

"There has not been much illumination of that as to what it meant and what it applied to," a senior adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld said of the $45 billion campaign proposal. "It didn't have much rigor to it."

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld suggested that he would seek large and immediate increases in military spending, though he also emphasized that he wanted first to review the department from top to bottom and clarify its strategy.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have discussed the need for a strategic review, Mr. Fleischer said today, and they are scheduled to meet again at the White House on Thursday.

Mr. Bush's proposals, expected to be unveiled in February, will only be an opening bid in the budget battle. As was the case under Mr. Clinton, Congress may spend more on the Pentagon than Mr. Bush proposes, and pressure is building on that front. In recent weeks, the armed services have appealed for increases of $8 billion to $10 billion in this year's budget to cover rising costs for things like fuel, health care and maintenance.

As for future budgets, many Republicans and even some Democrats contend the Pentagon needs to spend more than $4.5 billion a year to make the improvements Mr. Bush pledged during the campaign.

"With all those challenges out there, $4.5 billion ain't going to do it," Representative Jerry Lewis, a Republican from California who is the chairman of the House subcommittee on military appropriations, said in a recent interview.

Today, however, one Democrat complimented Mr. Bush's approach. After this morning's meeting, Senator Bob Graham of Florida said he "was impressed with many things, but one of those was that the president has a concept of what is the right priority."

---

Security team declares education 'crisis'

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
By Andrea Billups
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200121231225.htm

The deterioration of math and science education has contributed to a "crisis" in national security that must be addressed immediately to protect the nation in a post-Cold War era fraught with "distinctly new dangers," a report by the U.S. Commission on National Security concludes.

"I think if we don't invest in improvements in the levels of achievement in math and science education, then it is a greater threat to the national security . . . than any conventional war," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who serves on the 14-member Hart-Rudman Commission.

The commission, convened in 1997, released the third phase of its three-year study yesterday, warning that the nation must overhaul its national security strategy with renewed emphasis on reforms in education, intelligence, space and military personnel as well as changes in the role of Congress in security affairs.

"America faces extraordinary new dangers for which we are not prepared," the report said. "If the structures and processes of the U.S. government stand still amid a world of change, the United States will lose its capacity to shape history and will instead by shaped by it."

Led by former Sens. Gary Hart of Colorado and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, the commission urged President Bush to consider adopting their suggestions, but they acknowledged the reforms were broad and comprehensive, requiring sweeping changes.

"We have tried to set out the solutions we thought were best, not necessarily politically feasible," Mr. Rudman said.

The report, funded by Congress, painted a chilling picture of the nation's readiness to respond to a direct attack with weapons of mass destruction. It warned of the threat of international terrorism, noting that a strike on U.S. soil is likely in the next 25 years.

"We decided that the most serious problem this nation faces isn't China or North Korea. It's right here at home," said retired Gen. Charles Boyd, the study's executive director.

The report called for the creation of a National Homeland Security Agency and for major alterations in the Defense and State departments.

The State Department is "a crippled institution, starved for resources by Congress because of its inadequacies," the report said.

The panel also sought a broader role for the National Guard, which would be responsible for a "homeland security mission."

The commission, the first to comprehensively review national security since 1947, included Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and retired Adm. Harry D. Train II. It concluded that the executive branch of government had made no major institutional changes since the Cold War.

In education, the commissioners recommended a National Security Science and Technology Education Act to help produce a vital crop of scientists and engineers as well as qualified science and math teachers. They called for a redoubling of the federal research and development budget by 2010 and creating "a more competitive environment" for distributing research funds.

The panel named education reform as its No. 2 priority behind investment innovations. The nation, the report said, lacks enough qualified workers to fill technology-related jobs crucial for national security. There is also a dearth of qualified classroom teachers to give students the critical foundations they need in math and science to move on to higher education.

"The capacity of America's education system to create a 21st-century work force second to none is a national security issue of the first order," the study found. "As things stand, the country is forfeiting that capacity."

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- nevada

Water found below Yucca heightens concerns

February 1, 2001
LAS VEGAS SUN
By Mary Manning
manning@lasvegassun.com

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- The 5-mile-long tunnel that provides access to underground study sites at Yucca Mountain is damper than experts overseeing the project realized. Drip cloths hanging in the tunnel's alcove were wet, Energy Department scientist Mark Peters told independent Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board on Wednesday. If the dampness is an indication of ground water seeping through the mountain, a nuclear waste repository planned for the site could be in jeopardy. However, if the moisture is condensation, the problem is less severe, scientists say. "Soaked?" board member Debra Knopman, a hydrologist and environmental scientist, said. Peters nodded.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied to hold 77,000 tons of commercial and defense nuclear waste. If it passes scientific muster, the mountain could receive the first shipments by 2010.

The presence of water in the tunnel is worrisome because ground water can corrode canisters that would hold the waste. If it reaches spent nuclear fuel, the radioactivity could escape. What scientists are trying to determine is whether the dripping is coming from ground water, which highly corrosive because of its mineral content, or condensation, which is harmless. The U.S. Geological Survey plans to analyze samples for mineral content, John Stuckless, a scientist with the agency, said.

DOE scientists have been surprised at finding more water than expected in the mountain, Russ Dyer, DOE's Yucca Mountain project director in Nevada, said. "It is presumptuous to think we know all there is to know," Dyer said.

One key study area is the travel of the ground water through the desert rock from ancient volcanic eruptions. If water travels to the repository level 1,000 feet deep within 10,000 years, it could indicate serious problems for the project. The DOE has been looking for fast paths that might be carrying water through the mountain since Los Alamos scientists discovered radioactive chlorine-36, a chemical remnant of atomic bomb blasts in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s, in the rock, Peters said. The chemical was traced to the Pacific blasts, and was carried eastward by winds. The radiation was discovered almost 1,000 feet deep along earthquake faults.

When the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California tried to duplicate the experiment last year, no chlorine-36 was detected. Both laboratories are pursuing the chlorine-36 Peters said. "That's the $10,000 question," he said when board members asked him when the mystery might be solved. The DOE is hoping to have some conclusion by the end of the year, Peters said.

The DOE also expects to recommend to the president and Congress by year's end whether to proceed with the repository. The decision, originally scheduled for June, was delayed while the DOE inspector general investigates whether the DOE has a conflict of interest with the contractors.

The investigation was launched after the Sun reported Dec. 1 on a memo attached to a draft overview of the project that indicated that the overview could be used to sell the project to Congress. The DOE is required by law to remain unbiased through the selection process.

Board members, all appointed by former President Bill Clinton, and area residents challenged the DOE during the two-day meeting at Amargosa Valley, a small farming community 12 miles from Yucca Mountain, to explain how complicated engineering formulas will lead to safe storage of the wastes for thousands of years. Review board Chairman Jared Cohon said that the DOE's ultimate goal was to prove a repository at themountain would not harm public health. "Public health should stand on its own," Cohon said, referring to the maze of technical reports presented over two days.

Merlynn Rose of Pahrump said she wasn't waiting for scientific reassurances about the fate of high-level nuclear waste. "I don't need science to tell me something could blow up," Rose said.

Instead of relying on layered metals and packages to contain the waste inside the mountain, Kalynda Tilges, nuclear issues coordinator for the watchdog group Citizen Alert, suggested keeping the spent fuel in dry containers at nuclear reactor sites. "Don't put them in my back yard," she said. "You weren't given permission," Tilges referred to the 1987 congressional decision to single out Yucca Mountain as the only site to study for the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. Before that, sites in New England and the Midwest were considered. "The majority of Nevadans don't want the waste here," Tilges said. "We want you out of here. We don't want your project."

---

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste repository
Yucca backer: Probe a waste

February 1, 2001
LAS VEGAS SUN
By Jeff German
german@lasvegassun.com

A federal investigation into the Energy Department's possible bias toward the selection of YuccaMountain as a nuclear waste repository is a disservice to the public, a proponent of the dump said Wednesday. "We think it's a waste of the taxpayers' money, but they'll do a thorough job," said Henry Osterhoudt, manager of government and community relations for TRW Environmental Safety Systems Inc., the outgoing chief contractor at Yucca Mountain.

Osterhoudt said he understood the Department of Energy's inspector general has sent a dozen or more agents to Las Vegas to examine Yucca Mountain documents compiled by TRW and the DOE. He said he expected the agents to remain in Las Vegas for another month and that his company is not worried about the investigation.

Gov. Kenny Guinn, who has set aside $5 million in his budget to fight Yucca Mountain, said this morning that he doesn't share Osterhoudt's opinion. "It's absolutely not a waste of taxpayer money," Guinn said, before leaving for a conference in Portland with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and other Western governors. "He's trying to spin it in his direction." Guinn said he was anxious to see a report on the inspector general's investigation.

The probe, which got under way earlier this month, was prompted by a Dec. 1 Sun story suggesting the DOE was collaborating with the nuclear industry to win approval for Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Sun reported that it had obtained a 60-page draft of a DOE overview declaring Yucca Mountain suitable for high-level nuclear waste storage, even though scientific studies haven't been completed.

Attached to the draft was a two-page memo that argued the overview could be used to help the nuclear industry sell Yucca Mountain to Congress. Federal laws prohibit the DOE from taking sides in the selection process. Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has disavowed the memo and encouraged the inspector general's investigation.

Osterhoudt talked about the inquiry outside a meeting of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which passed by an overwhelming voice vote a resolution opposing Yucca Mountain for the first time ever. The resolution was recommended by the chamber's chairman, William Wells, and its president, Pat Shalmy. "It's the right thing to do," Wells told his fellow board members.

Osterhoudt, whose company no longer will be Yucca Mountain's chief contractor after Feb. 12, spokeout against the resolution at the meeting. "We're opposed to the business community taking a political stance on our business," he said afterwards.

The one-page resolution refers to the state's key arguments against Yucca Mountain. It describes Southern Nevada as "one of the world's leading tourist destinations" and says millions of visitors might choose to stay away if the valley is seen as unsafe because of the storage of the deadly waste. Just one accident involving the transportation of the waste could "create fears and hysteria" among the public and further harm the multibillion-dollar tourism industry here, the resolution says. The "mere threat of a nuclear waste accident," the resolution adds, also could decrease property values in the country's fastest-growing community. "Whereas, there is no clear scientific consensus that storage of nuclear waste less than 100 miles from Las Vegas will not result in any adverse health impacts to the region in the long term," the measure concludes.

"Now therefore be it resolved, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce expresses its strong opposition to the storage of nuclear waste in Nevada." The chamber, which stayed out of the Yucca Mountain fight for nearly 20 years, decided to take its stand as part of Strip executive Stephen Cloobeck's grassroots campaign against the dump. Cloobeck was to hold another organization meeting today.

The DOE had been preparing to make a recommendation on Yucca Mountain's suitability in June, but the decision was delayed because of the inspector general's investigation.

-------- MILITARY

Turkey cancels deal with France in row

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-20012121346.htm

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey has canceled $1.1 billion in defense contracts with two French firms, retaliating against a French law recognizing the Ottoman Empire killings of Armenians as genocide, a newspaper said yesterday.

The military will scrap a $600 million project to jointly produce Eryx anti-tank missiles, and cancel a $500 million deal to procure six Aviso submarines, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

The military would not comment on the report.

Foreign Minister Ismail Cem, however, has made clear that French firms would be excluded from defense orders.

-------- britain

Penguins don't topple over watching planes

02/01/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm

PHOTO: These king penguins at the Munich Zoo are not affected by overhead aircraft. In fact, flights over 1,000 feet caused ''only minor and transitory ecological effects'' on king penguins, according to studies. Study

LONDON (AP) - Penguins are more sensible than we thought. When an aircraft flies overhead, they do not topple over like dominoes, as some Royal Air Force pilots have reported. A scientist who recently watched king penguins react to aircraft said Thursday that the birds do the practical thing: shut up and try to get away from the noise.

"Not one king penguin fell over when the helicopters came over Antarctic Bay," said Richard Stone of the British Antarctic Survey.

The claim that penguins fell over backward while gawking at aircraft got worldwide exposure last year, following a report in a London newspaper.

Stone went to the remote sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia in December to study how the penguins reacted to British Lynx helicopters.

He compared the actions of a breeding colony at Antarctic Bay, where Royal Navy aircraft flew over, with another at nearby Possession Bay where planes did not fly over.

"As the aircraft approached, the birds went quiet and stopped calling to each other, and adolescent birds that were not associated with nests began walking away from the noise," he said in an interview.

"Pure animal instinct, really."

Stone said the birds resumed their normal behavior within minutes, "usually by the time the helicopter was out of audible range." Breeding adults stayed by their nests and he observed no egg or chick losses.

Stone also noted that during the experimental period, the number of incubating birds in the colony increased at the same rate as that of an undisturbed control colony at Possession Bay.

He concluded that flights over 1,000 feet caused "only minor and transitory ecological effects" on king penguins.

Stone said he will now conduct a computer analysis of videos he made of more than 100 penguins using four video cameras. "It may be that there have been changes to the birds' behavior that we didn't notice before," he said.

Environmentalists and scientists have been concerned that increasing aircraft activity in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic could be disturbing wildlife, including driving penguins off their eggs.

Aircraft, including helicopters, are used routinely in Antarctica to transport personnel and light cargo as well as carry out surveys.

And the last decade has seen a dramatic growth in the number of commercial air operations by travel companies; more than 10,000 tourists now visit the area each year.

Royal Air Force pilots first reported seeing penguins falling over during the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina. The story caught the imagination of British newspapers, and one tabloid even published a drawing showing a penguin in various stages of falling.

Stone has always dismissed these reports as "an urban myth."

South Georgia is an important habitat for wildlife and is home to large colonies of seals, penguins and seabirds, including about 400,000 pairs of breeding King penguins. There are about 700 pairs at Antarctic Bay and 400 pairs at Possession Bay.

The Royal Navy ice patrol vessel HMS Endurance and its two Lynx helicopters took part in Stone's five-week study.

During the eight days he filmed at Antarctic Bay, the Lynxes made 17 overflights between 5,800 feet and 750 feet, from various directions and at different speeds. Birds were filmed before, during and after the flights.

The Ministry of Defense wasn't surprised.

"The story of penguins falling over backwards when watching aircraft has been around for at least 18 years and is a complete myth," the ministry said.

------- burma/myanmar

EUROPEANS HAIL TALKS

February 1, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

MYANMAR: A European Union delegation hailed talks between the military government and the pro-democracy opposition as the most interesting development for more than a decade, and promised to try to support the dialogue. Speaking in Bangkok after a three-day visit to Myanmar, a Swedish Foreign Ministry official, Borje Ljunggren, said talks between the ruling generals and the National League for Democracy, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, above, were "at a sensitive stage." (Reuters)

-------- colombia

Colombian Offers to Meet Rebels and Extend Zone

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01COLO.html?printpage=yes

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Jan. 31 - Hoping to restart frozen peace talks, President Andrés Pastrana today proposed meeting the leader of the largest rebel army and offered a four-day extension on the vast territory that he ceded to the group.

In a nationally televised speech, Mr. Pastrana said the jungle swath that the government designated for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as a peace gesture in 1998 would temporarily remain in rebel hands for "the sole purpose of realizing a meeting" with Manuel Marulanda, 69, the guerrilla leader.

The FARC, as the group is known, did not offer an immediate response, and the president did not specify what actions he would take if Mr. Marulanda rejected the proposal.

In recent days, the military has dispatched thousands of troops to the outskirts of the Switzerland-size demilitarized zone in Caquetá Province, raising speculation that an attack might be imminent.

"Manuel Marulanda has said he's prepared to work 24 hours a day for peace," the president said. "Today, I am proposing that we meet before the end of the week to decide once and for all if we are going to continue the peace process that you and I initiated."

Using dramatic language aimed directly at rebel leaders, the president said, "You, the members of the FARC, also have a historical responsibility to not close the doors to peace, as you did so recently."

Since taking control of the jungle zone, rebel leaders have participated in numerous talks with government negotiators. But even Mr. Pastrana's government has accused the rebels of using the zone to consolidate their activities.

Talking to reporters today, Álvaro Uribe, a presidential candidate whose popularity has risen because of his hard-line position toward the rebels, criticized the government decisions. "I don't agree with the new extension," Mr. Uribe said, "because it will simply fortify the criminal power of the FARC in their effort to take power."

The Revolutionary Army broke off official discussions on Nov. 14. The leaders said the government had done little to control the paramilitary gunmen of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. Human rights groups say that force has ties to the military, an accusation that the government denies.

In his speech, Mr. Pastrana said his government was dedicated to combating the death squads.

In a recent report, the Defense Ministry said the government had killed 150 paramilitary gunmen and captured 934 in the last four years. The report said the paramilitary forces were responsible for 70 percent of the massacres here last year, accounting for more than 500 deaths. The ministry also estimated that the number of paramilitary members rose, to 8,150 last year from 850 in 1992.

"This has been the government that has fought hardest against the self-defense groups," Mr. Pastrana said. "And we won't hold back in our efforts to continue doing it."

---

Colombia, Drugs and Us
"No Crops Spared in Colombia's Coca War"

February 1, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/opinion/L01COL.html

To the Editor:

How many innocent people in Colombia will be made to suffer because some Americans crave illegal drugs?

Unless we learn that treatment must be the main strategy, we'll continue to destroy families and neighborhoods in our own country by jailing hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, and destroy other countries, like Colombia, by enticing them to supply our demand for drugs and then forcing them to declare war on drugs.

EMMETT BARCALOW Amherst, Mass., Jan. 31, 2001

-------- drug war

OFFENDER PROGRAM CRITICIZED

February 1, 2001
New York Times
Metro Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/nyregion/01MBRF.html?pagewanted=all

ALBANY:More than a third of juvenile offenders held in state facilities have not received drug treatment and counseling services mandated by the courts, an audit by the state comptroller, H. Carl McCall, has found. The audit also found that 27 percent of youths with special needs had not been evaluated, as required, when they entered the state juvenile justice system. The audit was based on a survey of 100 youths. A spokesman for the state's Office of Children and Family Services, Bill Van Slyke, said the study's methodology was flawed and called the report politically motivated. Somini Sengupta (NYT)

---

NEEDIEST CASES:
Losing a Drug Habit to Keep Children

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By AARON DONOVAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/nyregion/01NEED.html

When her husband, David Webb, died of pancreatic failure in 1993, Redia Esau turned to her sister, Marion Sharpe, for help. Six months later, when her sister died of an asthma attack while asleep, Ms. Esau had no one left to turn to, so she turned to crack.

She had gone on periodic drinking binges since she was in her early 20's, she said, but after her sister died, she needed something more for the pain. "Alcohol wasn't strong enough to numb it," she said.

Ms. Esau, now 48, used crack from 1994 until 1997. It caused her to begin to neglect her children, sometimes leaving them alone in the house for days.

In 1995, social workers from the Administration for Children's Services, the city agency that places children in foster care, noticed that she needed help. They referred her to the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, a nonprofit agency that has a contract with Children's Services to provide preventive services, like counseling and home visits, intended to keep children deemed at risk of going into foster care with their parents.

The Brooklyn Bureau, which provided individual counseling and group therapy to the Esau family at a center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is one of the seven local charities supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Ms. Esau began seeing a counselor, who helped her realize that her addiction was affecting her children. She tried a number of drug treatment programs, she said, but none worked because the temptation to return to crack always won out.

"If you're in an outpatient program and you're living in the same neighborhood where you're getting your drugs, it's only a matter of time before you relapse," she said.

Another counselor suggested that Ms. Esau look for a detoxification program in the Bronx, where she would be far removed from the center of her addiction. But because it also meant that she would have to live away from her children, Ms. Esau at first refused even to consider it.

For several months she tried to raise her two children, Kami (pronounced Kee-AM-ee), now 16, and Christopher, now 12, as best she could while maintaining her drug habit. But eventually, she said, "I could see I was hurting my children. I was with them, but I wasn't really with them."

Ms. Esau said she thought her children did not know about her addiction, but her children said recently that they knew of it all along.

"Kids are aware of a lot more than you give them credit for," said Tina Layton, Ms. Esau's counselor at the bureau. "Once you get it out there it can be a big relief."

In 1997 Ms. Esau decided to attend a drug rehabilitation program in the Bronx, Project Return. She asked her mother-in-law to take care of her children and moved to the center, where she stayed for 14 months.

The children spoke on the phone with their mother every day, but they still missed her. "It was kind of hard because I couldn't see my mother," Christopher said. "I wanted to live with her."

But the children knew that the treatment program was for the best. They noticed that when their mother returned, she was more attentive to their needs. "It was a different beginning after all," Kami said.

Ms. Esau completed the program in January 1999 and found an apartment in Crown Heights that she paid for with the help of the Section 8 federal housing subsidy. Most important, she got her children back.

And she got a job in customer service at The New York Post. She was quickly promoted to the circulation department, where she became a data entry clerk. She vowed to learn everything she could in the department.

Last week, she learned she had been promoted to supervisor. She will earn $26,000 to $30,000 a year, she said.

As her income increases, Ms. Esau's housing subsidy will decrease, but she said it was worth it to become self-sufficient.

"I have something now that I didn't have then," she said. "I have confidence in myself and what I can do."

-------- space

URANIUM CONTAMINATES SPACE AROUND EARTH

February 1, 2001 (ENS)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/feb2001/2001L-02-01-09.html

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Minute particles of uranium are orbiting the Earth, say scientists from California Polytechnic State University.

The researchers, led by Roger Grismore, came across the uranium almost by accident. In June 1991, a small space blanket made in California was placed over a glass instrument on the outside of the Russian space station Mir.

The blanket, which consists of ten thin layers of aluminium and polyester, protected the instrument from solar radiation and showers of tiny meteorites. The blanket was removed in August 1995, returned to Earth and kept in a clean room for 16 months before Grismore and his team looked at it.

They analyzed gamma radiation given off by the blanket, revealing energies characteristic of two radioactive isotopes, lead 214 and bismuth 214 - both decay products of uranium 238. To check that the blanket had not been contaminated in storage, the researchers also analyzed a similar blanket that had stayed back on Earth. It emitted less than a tenth as much radiation.

"That is the thrill of science - seeing something that no one has seen before," said Grismore.

The scientists have three possible scenarios for the source of the uranium. It could have come from nuclear weapons tested in space in the 1960s, or from uranium powered satellites that have burnt up on reentry into the atmosphere.

Or, an exploding supernova could have blasted the uranium into our solar system many thousands of years ago. More data is needed to establish the true origin, the scientists say.

The study is published in the "Journal of Environmental Radioactivity," volume 53, and in the February issue of the British magazine "New Scientist."

--------

Space Weapons: Refuting the Critics

Policy Review
01/02/01
By Steven Lambakis
http://www.policyreview.com/feb01/lambakis_print.html

Clashes over the military use of space, usually a result of proposals to fund politically controversial weapons programs, have agitated and unsettled the country at various times throughout the space age. But though the world has changed, the intellectual and doctrinal foundations underlying the debate have not.

Since 1967, the Outer Space Treaty has banned the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. But what about other weapons? Although the United States has no plans to do so, it could deploy antisatellite (ASAT) or space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) interceptors using conventional explosives or high velocity impact. Currently, the Pentagon has technology development programs for the Kinetic Energy ASAT and the Space-Based Laser. In the long term, satellites or space planes could be designed to exploit high-energy laser, electromagnetic pulse, or high-power microwave technologies to degrade targets in space or on earth. President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative explored the feasibility of many such weapons systems. To some, these new-era tools of war hold out special military promise; to others, they represent a security and foreign relations nightmare.

Political excitement over the use of space also ripples through the foreign policy arena. Prompted by U.S. discussions and war games featuring space control and BMD weapons, in February 2000 the Chinese delegation to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament circulated a paper identifying "a present and pressing necessity" to prevent an arms race in outer space. A treaty forestalling the "weaponization" of space, argued the delegation, would have "the greatest bearing on global peace and security."

Moscow agrees with Beijing on this subject. Russian officials regard the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which prohibits nationwide defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles, as a bulwark against ideas for basing BMD interceptors and other conventional weapons in orbit. Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to host an international conference in 2001 to explore ways to prevent the "militarization" of outer space and enhance the current regime of international space law.

Historically, America's vision has been that space should be free for transit and exploitation by all governments and private entities, provided such activities pose no harm to U.S. interests or security. Questions surrounding, first, the enforcement of this vision and, second, the possible use of space to strengthen America's military prowess naturally will arise as the country struggles to resolve a more radical uncertainty: For purposes of national defense, should space be treated like the land, sea, and air? Or is there something different and sacrosanct about this forbidding environment?

Despite marked physical differences among the earthly and orbital environments, in my view there really are no meaningful characteristics that allow us to consider them differently from the point of view of policy and strategy. The ability to leverage outer space will continue to grow in importance for modern military forces and may make possible even more effective forms of combat.

Yet there are those who reach the opposite conclusion concerning the potential impact of space weapons on national security and international peace. They have argued their case in learned journals, the popular press, and before congressional committees - in many cases, repeating arguments first made decades ago. It is past time for a thorough review of the case for halting the progress of weapons at the edge of Earth's atmosphere.

Stability then and now

The case for treating space as a sanctuary is grounded in two central concerns. The first is that the introduction of space weapons would radically destabilize security relationships. The second is that arming the heavens would undermine U.S. foreign policy by unnecessarily torturing relationships with allies (and potential warfighting partners) - and would cause anti-American coalitions to form and wage political and economic warfare against U.S. interests abroad.

The case against combat activities in space draws heavily on 1950s-vintage theories of strategic stability that evolved to support U.S. policy on nuclear weapons. As policy makers gave up on early disarmament initiatives on practical grounds, many who pondered defense schemes in a world with nuclear weapons focused on arms control and theories about the stability of deterrence. Responsible leaders sought political solutions and the establishment of international legal mechanisms for methodically reducing nuclear arms and improving transparency and predictability in decision making. This security approach sought to eliminate the possibility that the United States or the Soviet Union would perceive an opportunity for a "first strike" against the other. Such fears of nuclear instability and the escalation of regional conflicts have survived the Cold War and enliven commentary on national security today.

In this view, the military use of space has both stabilizing and destabilizing potential. Satellites perform nonthreatening, largely benign, and stabilizing military functions that contribute to nuclear deterrence and transparency. But weapons in space, especially antisatellite weapons, would risk impairing the very instruments and sensors we deploy in orbit to monitor potential enemies and maintain reliable communications. Reconnaissance satellites observe arms control compliance and provide strategic warning of an impending crisis. Infrared sensors on early warning satellites detect ballistic missile launches and, together with observation spacecraft, remain central pillars of peace and stability in the international system. A sudden attack against such spacecraft, in this view, would lead at once to heightened alert status and would aggravate instability in command structures. In today's Russia, the situation may be even more dangerous, given the deterioration of command and control capabilities since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Misperceptions falling out of cloaked activities in space could lead to war and prime a conflict for escalation to higher levels of destruction, in this reasoning. Indeed, one may draw parallels with the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. When the first shot rang out in Tombstone, Ariz., the reflexive response of all was to shoot wildly at anything that moved. Assuming the proliferation of space weapons and a similar instance of provocation, combatants would be tempted to respond in a similar fashion. Each side would have very little time to assess the threat and select an appropriate response.

The deployment of space weapons, in the view of their critics, would accordingly increase sensitivity to vulnerability and needlessly heighten fears and tensions, thereby undermining deterrence. Out of fear of losing everything in a surprise war, a "first strike" against space assets (possibly a prelude to a first nuclear strike) could well make this fear self-fulfilling. In conflict, communications would be hindered, and our decision cycles would slow to the point at which we would not understand the events unfolding in space. The "fog of war" would assume a new density.

In the view of space weapon critics, this is not the only danger. The deployment of spacecraft to gather and channel information of importance to the armed forces has militarized space already; but, they ask, can we not now draw the line to prevent the weaponization of space in a dangerous new arms race? After all, U.S. leaders ought not to assume that they can acquire space weapons unchallenged. Other states would respond. Moreover, those going second (or third or fourth) might have an easier time of it. They would strive to capitalize on years of American research and development, avoiding along the way early mistakes and exorbitant development costs. For prestige, foreign governments will not want to be left behind in this "Revolution in Military Affairs." Indeed, out of self-interest, other states eventually would acquire capabilities to affect the course of war in space and even to strike the United States.

To build weapons for use in space, in this view, would be to recklessly disregard American history - in particularly, U.S. experience with multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. Our attempt to gain a technological edge over the Soviets in the 1970s backfired, critics argue. What resulted was a Soviet campaign to match and eventually surpass the U.S. MIRV capability. When the dust settled, each side had acquired the technology to increase substantially the number of warheads and destroy with alarming efficiency the other's nuclear forces. We might, in this account, expect a similar result after Washington deploys its first space weapon.

Upending foreign policy

Finally, critics assert, failure to exercise restraint in space arms would risk upsetting U.S. foreign policy and destabilizing international relationships. The United Nations has provided platforms for denouncing the militarization of space since the late 1950s, when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge expressed the hope before the General Assembly that "future developments in outer space would be devoted exclusively to peaceful and scientific purposes." Over the years, various U.N. state representatives have pleaded with the major powers to take the lead in preserving the purity of this environment.

In this view, deploying arms in environments unexploited by other states would earn for Washington the enmity of capitals around the world. They would see the strongest country in the world trying to become even stronger - and doing so in untraditional, unparalleled ways. This very condition would make it harder to retain friends and allies. The shadow of such weapons would alarm foreign capitals, much as the launch of Sputnik unnerved Washington.

The negative effect of space weapons on foreign opinion could have far-reaching consequences. The multinational coalition assembled by Washington to throw Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991 might not have been possible if the United States had deployed space weapons in disregard of political sensitivities exhibited by the partnership countries. Washington's military plans, moreover, would provoke a costly hostility among potential adversaries and neutral parties in the absence of major threats.

Washington's October 1997 test of the Mid-Infrared Chemical Laser (MIRACL), developed under President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, against a dying U.S. Air Force satellite touched off some spirited international opposition. On balance, this experiment - a test of the ability of a laser based at White Sands, N.M., to degrade the effectiveness of a satellite's optical and infrared sensors - received scant attention in the foreign media. Yet a few editors, pundits, and analysts in Western Europe and Asia condemned and belittled Washington's development of systems to paralyze enemies by depriving them of their eyes and ears in space. To them, this event clearly signaled a new round in the arms race, and to many it foretold the revival of Reagan's "Star Wars" plan.

The idea of space warfare must create in the minds of government leaders around the world vivid images of merciless domination by a state with the power to rain fire upon unyielding enemies. Does Washington really want to conjure this image, critics ask. Do the American people want to provoke an arms race that, in the end, could leave their homes less secure once other states follow the U.S. lead?

Prudence counsels Washington to accommodate the concerns of other governments, in this assessment. The sensibility underlying this course is time-honored. In the words of Federalist No. 63:

An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons: the one is that independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desirable, on various accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy; the second is that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national counsels may be warped by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world may be the best guide that can be followed.

The principles of sound government, therefore, demand we pay heed to foreign opinion.

Academic assumptions

The case against deploying weapons in space rests on a number of assumptions, often unstated. A careful look at the validity of these assumptions reveals serious problems - in many cases undermining the conclusions the critics draw.

One such assumption is that military developments over the past 50 years have created a security environment in which certain tactical events or localized crises run an unacceptably high risk of triggering a general, possibly even nuclear, war. We are therefore more secure when we do nothing to upset the global military balance, especially in space - where we station key stabilizing assets.

Yet we have little experience in reality to ground this freely wielded and rather academic assumption. By definition, anything that causes instability in armed relationships is to be avoided. But would "shots" in space, any more than shots on the ground, be that cause?

When we look at what incites war, history instructs us that what matter most are the character and motivation of the states involved, along with the general balance of power (i.e., are we in the world of 1914, 1945, or 2001?). Fluctuations in national arsenals, be they based on earth or in space, do not determine, but rather more accurately are a reflection of, the course of politics among nations. In other words, it matters not so much that there are nuclear weapons, but rather whether Saddam Hussein or Tony Blair controls them and in what security context. The same may be said for space weapons.

The sway of major powers historically has regulated world stability. It follows that influential countries that support the rule of law and the right of all states to use orbits for nonaggressive purposes would help ensure stability in the age of satellites. The world is not more stable, in other words, if countries like the United States, a standard-bearer for such ideas, "do nothing." Washington's deterrence and engagement strategies would assume new dimensions with the added influence of space weapons, the presence of which could help bolster peacemaking diplomacy and prevent aggression on earth or in space.

Insofar as we have no experience in space warfare, no cases exist to justify what is in essence a theoretically derived conclusion - that space combat must be destabilizing. We do know, however, that the causes of war are rarely so uncomplicated. Small events, by themselves, seldom ever explain large-scale events. When ardent Israeli nationalist Ariel Sharon visited this past fall the holy site around the Al Aksa Mosque at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, his arrival fired up a series of riots among impassioned Palestinians and so widened the scale of violence that it kicked up the embers of regional war yet again. Yet the visit itself would have been inconsequential were it not for the inveterate hostility underlying Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Likewise, World War I may have symbolically begun with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Yet a serious student of history would note that the alliances, the national goals and military plans, and the political, diplomatic, and military decisions of the major European powers during the preceding years and months were the true causes of the erosion in global strategic stability. By extension, if decisions to go to war are set on a hair-trigger, the reasons for the precarious circumstances extend far beyond whether a communications or imaging platform is destroyed in space rather than on earth.

Those who believe we run extraordinary risks stemming from clouded perceptions and misunderstandings in an age of computerized space warfare might want to take a look at some real-world situations of high volatility in which potentially provocative actions took place. Take, for example, the tragedies involving the USS Stark and USS Vincennes. In May 1987, an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet fighter attacked the Stark on patrol to protect neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf, killing 37 sailors. Iraq, a "near-ally" of the United States at the time, had never before attacked a U.S. ship. Analysts concluded that misperception and faulty assumptions led to Iraq's errant attack.

The memory of the USS Stark no doubt preoccupied the crew of the USS Vincennes, which little over a year later, in July 1988, was also on patrol in hostile Persian Gulf waters. The Vincennes crew was involved in a "half war" against Iran, and at the time was fending off surface attacks from small Iranian gunboats. Operating sophisticated technical systems under high stress and rules of engagement that allowed for anticipatory self-defense, the advanced Aegis cruiser fired anti-aircraft missiles at what it believed to be an Iranian military aircraft set on an attack course. The aircraft turned out to be a commercial Iran Air flight, and 290 people perished owing to mistakes in identification and communications.

To these examples we may add a long list of tactical blunders growing out of ambiguous circumstances and faulty intelligence, including the U.S. bombing in 1999 of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during Kosovo operations. Yet though these tragic actions occurred in near-war or tinderbox situations, they did not escalate or exacerbate local instability. The world also survived U.S.-Soviet "near encounters" during the 1948 Berlin crisis, the 1961 Cuban missile crisis, and the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. Guarded diplomacy won the day in all cases. Why would disputes affecting space be any different?

In other words, it is not at all self-evident that a sudden loss of a communications satellite, for example, would precipitate a wider-scale war or make warfare termination impossible. In the context of U.S.-Russian relations, communications systems to command authorities and forces are redundant. Urgent communications may be routed through land lines or the airwaves. Other means are also available to perform special reconnaissance missions for monitoring a crisis or compliance with an armistice. While improvements are needed, our ability to know what transpires in space is growing - so we are not always in the dark.

The burden is on the critics, therefore, to present convincing analogical evidence to support the notion that, in wartime or peacetime, attempts by the United States to control space or exploit orbits for defensive or offensive purposes would increase significantly the chances for crisis instability or nuclear war. In Washington and other capitals, the historical pattern is to use every available means to clarify perceptions and to consider decisions that might lead to war or escalation with care, not dispatch.

Drawing a line in space

The U.S.. and Soviet experience with MIRVs is often brought up to show how Washington's "naïve" foray into missile madness provoked Moscow to respond in kind. But to arrive at this conclusion, one must suspend all awareness of the strategic context surrounding the MIRV decision and assume that America had (and still has) a monopoly on knowledge. While the United States appeared to lead the Soviet Union in mirv technology, throughout the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the early 1970s, which featured the MIRV negotiations, Soviet missile engineers were already busily integrating the technology into their systems. At the time, it was generally expected that Soviet planners, who demonstrated true MIRV technology as early as 1973, would fully exploit this new innovation. U.S. actions, in other words, do not deserve blame for having provoked a Soviet countereffort.

Could we stop the historical progression of weaponry at the edge of earth? From the perspective of the strategist, a "line" between outer space and the atmosphere is strictly conceptual. Nothing in the world of tactics, operations, or strategy, and nothing in the logic of deterrence or the grammar of warfare, says there must be such a line. This leaves only the possibility of political decision to make it so. But the absence of universal political will means there is no practical way to enforce supporting treaties, laws, and proclamations.

One may ask, just because the United States unilaterally refrains from developing antisatellite weapons or space-based lasers, why do we assume that other countries will pause right alongside Washington? After all, not all innovations in war stem from provocation. While weapons developed and deployed by rival states surely influence decision making, it is unlikely that states procure weapons systems primarily to achieve a balance in arsenals. Some states certainly may strive to have what we have, but they also will strive to acquire and master those weapons that meet their unique security requirements.

Washington's very reliance on satellites for security, moreover, would appear to be a more plausible motivation behind any hostile state's desire to acquire satellite countermeasures. While China might wish to integrate ASATs into its arsenal to offset Washington's deployment of ASATs as part of a deterrence strategy ("you hit one of mine, I'll hit one of yours"), Beijing is likely to be more inclined to acquire satellite countermeasures independently of what Washington does in order to degrade U.S. space advantages, which may be used to support Taiwan.

To argue that states must follow Washington and deploy space weapons out of self-interest is to ignore the fact that self-interest has many faces. In the end, foreign officials must weigh personal, national, and party priorities and strategic requirements, understand political tradeoffs, and assess whether the national treasury and domestic resources could support plans to "match" U.S. weapons. Haiti's security needs will not match those of Serbia, Iran's will not match Canada's, and India's will not match those of the United States. Space control weapons, one must conclude, would not fit very well in the defense strategies of many nations. Foreign leaders, in other words, are not automatons. Between action and reaction always lies choice.

No more coalitions?

It is further assumed that deploying arms not possessed by other states in regions unexploited by other states would put the United States in a position to coerce, even terrify, other nations. One must note, however, that Washington already has the power to tyrannize and bully with its current arsenal - but it does not. The United States deploys unparalleled - even "uncustomary" - nuclear and conventional military forces and engages in peace and combat missions on a global basis. Yet the face of overwhelming American military might neither alarms allies nor incites aggression. The U.S. retreat from several forward bases and its positive global leadership, moreover, belie suspicions that, in this unipolar world, Washington harbors imperialist ambitions.

Recent criticisms surrounding the MIRACL test and the U.S. National Missile Defense program were well orchestrated and vociferous, but numerically shallow when put up against the larger body of international opinion. In fact, voices will inevitably rise, from all corners of the globe, to condemn U.S. military decisions and actions. Political assault is the price the United States pays for having global interests and power. There will always be attempts by foreign leaders and vocal minorities to influence U.S. procurement decisions through arms control and public condemnation. It costs little, and the potential gains are great.

Would a vigorous military space program alienate foreign governments to the point at which Washington could never again assemble a coalition similar to the one that defeated Saddam Hussein in 1991? This is doubtful. Leading up to the onset of war, the Iraqi leader's actions, not President Bush's initiatives, dominated foreign policy discussions abroad. Indeed, many Arab countries joined the coalition, despite America's stout support for the much-hated Israel. Any significant anti-American rhetoric was quickly overshadowed by the singular goal of turning back naked aggression.

Similar international support may be expected in the future, even if the United States were to deploy space-based interceptors to slap down ballistic missiles aimed at New York or Los Angeles or antisatellite weapons to blind prying eyes in times of crisis or conflict. When the stakes are high and the United States must act militarily in self-defense or to protect its interests, allies and friends are likely to judge U.S. activities in space to affect politico-strategic conditions on Earth appropriately and in context.

What about the Federalist's advice to seek the counsel of foreign parties to help resolve domestic policy squabbles? But the Federalist refers to impartial advice. To be impartial is to view both sides of a debate equally and without prejudice or bias, as would a judge. An infant nation far distant from the powerful capitals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century might have little difficulty finding such counsel. Yet can we now say that in the foreign criticism thrown at the United States concerning its ASAT, ballistic missile defense, or directed energy programs, we can discern the voice of impartiality? Do we hear a voice of neutrality coming out of Beijing or Moscow? Can we declare with candor that Paris or Ottawa are sufficiently poised and disinterested to counsel Washington objectively? On this issue, politics divides hearts the world over.

Stability revisited

Whether the vast, empty ocean enveloping Earth will be traversable for military purposes and a battlefield where major political stakes are decided may be, ultimately, not a question for policy or deliberation but an inevitability. Yet having been brought up on a steady diet of bumper-sticker slogans concerning space and strategic stability, the country remains intellectually unprepared to discuss and deal with grave defense and foreign policy decisions involving space. "ASATs are destabilizing" and "space must remain a sanctuary" are punchy trumpet blasts, but they are not expressions of sober strategic thought.

A confident military power should strive to influence and be capable of controlling activities in all geographic environments affecting its prosperity and security. The United States does so on the land with its armies and border guards, at sea with a world-class navy, coast guards, and fortified bases, and in the air with fighters, bombers, and air defense assets.

Responsible leaders, it seems to follow, should strive to ensure a similar ability to influence and control activities in space. Given the increasingly commercial and international character of satellite operations, we must expect that America's public and private interests one day will be challenged or even attacked. To leave the initiative to others is to expose U.S. interests to the whims of the ambitious, the cunning, and the truculent.

A second reason for exploring new military uses of space is that they could provide our leadership and commanders life-saving options. Consider this. In fourth century bc Athens, the modern thinkers of the day proposed designing cities without traditional defenses - which included a street layout designed to confuse an invading enemy and a fortified wall around the city. Those who objected to such "old-fashioned" concepts proposed laying the streets out in tidy rows to improve the city's appearance. Removal of the costly and aesthetically offensive walls would avoid a hostile appearance that might unnecessarily provoke Athens' neighbors.

Critics of this "new thinking" believed that, while a visually pleasing and open city would be attractive, one should not adopt this approach at the expense of safety. The suggestion to remove the walls irked the more defense-minded, especially in light of the fact that the armies of the time were introducing new missiles and machines for improving sieges. The advocates for the city's strategic defenses - the walls - argued that the city's leaders would retain the option of treating the city as an open city, whereas the option of defense would not be available to leaders who chose to ignore the city's military requirements. Particular weapons, in other words, do not commit a country to a particular policy course; rather, they offer offensive and defensive options in a world that often punishes inflexible policies and is unforgiving of those who blunder through decisions that can make the difference between war and peace.

Finally, strength at home and assertiveness abroad have ensured stability for the United States and much of the world during the past century. Capricious misfortune and aggression, after all, are the bane of the republic - and of international security. Military strength can help the United States and its allies direct chance more favorably and, in the worst of times, deter and turn aside aggression.

Vast practical consequences will fall out of policy choices concerning the nature of American space power, especially as they affect the composition of U.S. forces, military organization, and security strategy. The new administration and Congress must help the American people overcome a habit of viewing space weapons in isolation from America's purpose. Should military requirements warrant and cost permit, space weapons could be invited to join the rest of the arsenal to secure American interests and contribute to global strategic stability.

The United States and its allies should resist enchantment with slogans that divert attention from new security possibilities, especially ballistic missile defense, which ought to be viewed in the broader context of space power. Far from jeopardizing stability and peaceful uses of space, American military power exercised on the edge of earth would contribute to world peace and freedom.

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The Cole Investigation Proves Frustrating

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01YEME.html?pagewanted=all

SANA, Yemen, Jan. 31 - Nearly four months after the bombing of the United States destroyer Cole in Aden harbor, early breakthroughs in the inquiry into the attack appear to have petered out, leaving American investigators with only circumstantial evidence, but no proof, of who was ultimately responsible for ordering the attack that killed 17 American sailors, and exactly how it was planned and carried out.

Although about a dozen suspects are in custody in security-police jails in Aden and in Sana, the Yemeni capital, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with a task force of about 20 agents at an Aden hotel, remains convinced that the conspiracy went beyond Yemen, in all likelihood to Afghanistan.

It is there that Osama bin Laden, named from the outset as a prime suspect in the Cole attack, lives in sanctuary under the protection of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic movement that rules 90 percent of Afghanistan.

But the investigation has failed so far to establish more than "inferential evidence," and though high-ranking Yemeni officials say the evidence points strongly to Mr. bin Laden, they, too, admit that it falls well short of the kind of proof that would hold up in an American court.

One of the top aides to Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said, "As we have told the Americans, nobody can say there is solid proof that Osama bin Laden is the shadowy man behind the bombing, but we are convinced, on the basis of everything we have learned so far, that he was."

"Still, so far," the aide said, "we have only links, not proof. How long it will take to get that proof, if it can ever be proven, nobody can say."

Determined to pursue the case beyond the suspects arrested by Yemen, the F.B.I applied strong pressure on Yemen to postpone indefinitely a trial it had tentatively scheduled for mid-January of six suspects held in Yemeni jails. The six include a Yemeni, Jamal al-Badawi, who was allegedly involved in importing the fiberglass boat used in the attack, as well as others, mostly Yemenis, who are said to have confessed to providing the two suicide bombers with false identity documents, a four-wheel- drive vehicle and other logistical assistance.

After sharp frictions between American and Yemeni investigators, who left F.B.I. agents cooling their heels in an Aden hotel for weeks after the bombing, an agreement signed by the two governments in December has improved cooperation, according to American officials. In recent weeks, F.B.I. agents have been allowed to attend interrogations, to request fresh interviews with suspects previously questioned by Yemeni security officials alone, and, in some instances, to question suspects directly, instead of passing questions to Yemeni interrogators.

But American frustrations remain high, partly because of a belief that the extent to which the bombing may have been planned inside Yemen has not been fully established.

One measure of American vexation came two weeks ago, when Yemeni newspapers published in Arabic and English began carrying a full- page appeal by the State Department, with a photograph of the Cole churning a foaming wake at sea before the attack, posting a $5 million reward "for information leading to the arrest or conviction of those persons who committed or aided in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole."

Publication of the reward, on Jan. 15, came as Yemeni officials were actively preparing for the Aden trial, and seems to have been intended, in part, to underline the F.B.I.'s view that nothing established so far by the Yemeni investigation comes close to the heart of the bombing. Within days of the reward's announcement, Yemen's Interior Ministry, which had said that the Yemeni inquiry was almost completed, reversed its position and said further investigation was needed.

This tallied with remarks made by the American ambassador, Barbara K. Bodine, in an interview with Yemen's army newspaper, on Sept. 26. "It will take a long time to find the local people behind the attack," Ms. Bodine said. "Investigations to find the parties behind these individuals will also take a long time."

From the outset, the F.B.I. has said that it believed the bombing to be part of a succession of "holy war" attacks on American targets, including the August 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people, for which American prosecutors have indicted Mr. bin Laden. But American investigators have also said they believe that the attack relied on an Islamic extremist network within Yemen that has been linked to Mr. bin Laden, and they would like to see more focus on these links.

Publicly, Yemeni investigators have said they believe that the operational mastermind of the bombing is a Saudi citizen of Yemeni origin, Muhammad Omar al-Harazi, who is said to have given directions to Mr. Badawi, one of the suspects held by Yemen, in telephone calls from the United Arab Emirates. Yemeni officials say they believe that Mr. Harazi, and at least two other top figures in the bombing plot, have fled to Afghanistan. They also say Mr. Badawi has confessed to being trained for the attack, with others, at a camp in Afghanistan that was run by a former bodyguard of Mr. bin Laden's.

Still, one top Yemeni official acknowledged that the bombing may have had deeper roots within Yemen. The official dismissed suggestions that high-ranking Yemeni military officers with past links to Mr. bin Laden might have helped in the bombing. "Military leaders, nonsense," he said. "But in my personal opinion, the idea that the top leaders of the Islamic extremist movement inside Yemen knew nothing about the bombing, and were in no way involved, that's just as likely to be nonsense, too."

Yemeni officials say the United States chose the week after Yemen postponed the trial to reaffirm that it has no current intention to abrogate the refueling agreement, even if plans for stops by United States Navy vessels remain in abeyance.

Abdul-Karim al-Iryani, Yemen's prime minister, said in an interview that Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the United States Southern Command, which includes American forces in the Persian Gulf, had told him during a visit last week that the refueling pact would not be annulled.

"He said, `We will not be driven away,' " Mr. Iryani said.

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Critics see 'zero' chance of U.N. tax

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
By Tom Carter
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-20012121564.htm

Critics of the United Nations yesterday dismissed a U.N. proposal to tax international currency exchanges as a trial balloon with "zero" chance of being taken seriously.

"This has the same prospects as the [earlier] U.N. proposals to tax the Internet. Zero. The U.N. has no taxing authority," said Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland Republican.

Other critics of the international body were equally dismissive.

"Any U.N. official who advocates [a global tax] should be fired," said Cliff Kincaid, president of America's Survival, a Maryland-based public policy organization that often criticizes the United Nations. "The U.N. is to be funded by contributions. There is nothing in the U.N. Charter that permits this."

The United Nations issued a report Tuesday suggesting a global tax on currency trades to help fight world poverty.

"It's nothing new," Mr. Kincaid said yesterday. "They have been proposing global taxes for years."

He added, "Our taxes are paying the salaries of the bureaucrats who write these reports and make these proposals."

The U.N. report, something of a wish list of ways to reduce global poverty, called for debt relief and sustained aid and investment in the world's poorest countries.

Paragraph 113 called for "conducting a rigorous analysis of advantages, disadvantages and other implications of proposals for developing new and innovative sources of funding, both public and private, for dedication to social development and poverty eradication programs."

The section suggesting that some of the programs might be paid for by taxing international monetary exchanges.

"Some delegations . . . indicated their view that the proposals to be analyzed should include those of national 'currency transaction taxes,'" it said.

If the United Nations collected a 0.1 percent tax on $1.5 trillion in "speculative" currency transactions, it would produce $150 billion a year to fund anti-poverty programs, according to the report, which was compiled in collaboration with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and others.

The congressional compromise that provided for the payment of nearly $1 billion in U.S. arrears was conditioned in part on a provision prohibiting any U.N. attempts to institute any sort of global tax.

The authors of the compromise, Sens. Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat - the chairman and ranking minority leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - declined to comment yesterday on the U.N. report.

Several observers sympathetic to the United Nations said the global tax proposal was unlikely to go anywhere.

"The U.N. tries to be an inclusive organization. Someone proposed this, but it looks like they just put this in to be inclusive," said one.

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MERCURY STORAGE

February 1, 2001
New York Times
Metro Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/nyregion/01MBRF.html?pagewanted=all

HILLSBOROUGH: The decision by the Department of Defense to begin an environmental study on the nation's mercury supply means that more than 2,600 metric tons of the mercury stored here could stay until at least 2004. The mercury stored at the Defense National Stockpile Center Somerville Supply Depot is more than half the nation's mercury supply. Kevin Reilly, the depot's director of environmental affairs, said federal law prohibited moving mercury stored in any of the depots around the country during the study. (AP)

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FBI attends trial of Yemeni on hijack

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-20012121346.htm

SAN'A, Yemen - FBI agents yesterday attended the final court session of a Yemeni man who hijacked a plane carrying 91 persons, including the U.S. ambassador.

Jaber Yehia Ali Sattar, who faces the death penalty if convicted, asked for a reduced sentence, saying he hijacked the plane because of "difficult circumstances," including unemployment.

"The most important thing is that no injustice is brought against me," he told the court.

A verdict will be announced Saturday.

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Europeans Again Eat Some Beef, but Farmers and Butchers Suffer

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/business/01BEEF.html?pagewanted=all

TOULOUSE, France - Christine Schmitz, a 33-year-old mother of three, will not feed her children beef, and their school's cafeteria stopped doing so in December. That was when European regulators moved to contain the spread of mad cow disease - a fatal, brain- wasting affliction with no known cure - by ordering that every cow or steer more than 30 months old be tested and the diseased ones be destroyed.

Yet on a recent evening, Ms. Schmitz sat with a friend picking at a sirloin steak and fries at L'Entrecôte, a favored steakhouse in this southern French city. And she was not alone. "There are people who don't come any more," said Henri Gineste de Saurs, who owns L'Entrecôte and eight other restaurants like it throughout France. "But 90 percent of our clients have come back."

That seems small comfort for people like Leonhard Immerz. On his farm outside Buchloe, Germany, 550 miles northeast of Toulouse, he used to raise some of the cattle that eventually wound up as beef on L'Entrecôte's tables. Now, however, Mr. Immerz says he cannot sell any of his 150 head to his usual meat processor - not at any price - because there is no local market for them.

A few months after the mad cow scare caused Europeans to shun beef in all forms, growing numbers of consumers are coming back - slowly and selectively. They are enjoying an occasional sirloin or other costlier cut, which they believe is less likely to contain the infectious agents that have transmitted the disease to some humans. But they are steering clear of cheaper cuts that they still consider suspect.

Declines are most significant for brains, sweetbread and liver - once staples of French cuisine - because such organ meats are believed to be most risky. There is also evidence that Europeans are curbing their taste for hamburgers. McDonald's said in mid- January that its fourth-quarter earnings fell 7 percent, its first quarterly decline in at least a decade, in part because of European concern about the safety of beef.

Since the first human cases linked to contaminated beef were diagnosed in Britain in 1996, 92 people in Europe have died or are dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the form of mad cow disease in human beings. Of those, 88 were in Britain, 3 in France and one in Ireland. The prions, or infectious agents, that cause the condition can survive outside the body for years. No one knows the incubation period in humans.

Each part of the animal left uneaten takes a bite out of its value in the market, and the financial damage worsens, the farther it travels from feedlot to fork. Overall beef consumption has declined 27 percent, pushing down prices to the point where farmers cannot recoup their costs without government subsidies. Such aid is on the way, and may be big.

The European Union has decided to test cattle, buy and destroy infected animals, and buy and slaughter at least two million healthy cattle to prop up the sagging price of beef. Depending on how many infected animals are found, and how many healthy ones slaughtered, the cost to the union's 15 member nations this year alone could total six billion euros, or about $5.6 billion, according to estimates by Thomas Mayer, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs International in Frankfurt.

But while Mr. Mayer thinks that the long-term economic effects on government spending and overall economic output may be marginal by comparison, uppermost in the minds of the people involved in raising, butchering and selling beef are immediate measures to protect their companies and jobs.

Even if sales to restaurants are holding up, said Jacques Denis, 59, the meat wholesaler near Toulouse who supplies Mr. Gineste's sirloin, flagging demand from supermarket chains, butchers and public institutions like schools has caused his business to fall by 40 percent. "It will be a difficult year," Mr. Denis said. "My goal is to hold on to my employees, but it will mean a lot of sacrifice."

In ordinary times, his 15 butchers process roughly 60 tons of meat a week, about 90 percent of it beef; since the recent scare began, beef sales have dropped about 22 tons a week. He has made up some of that loss through increased sales of lamb, pork and veal.

Others have tried to cushion their businesses by selling organically raised beef. Their sales have risen 15 to 20 percent in France since November, according to the government.

Exports outside the European Union have dropped, as countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere banned West European beef after mad cow concerns were reignited.

In France, the government is offering subsidized loans at 1.5 percent interest to tide over suffering businesses, but Mr. Denis hopes to ride out the storm without borrowing. He bases his hope for a quick recovery on what he saw in Britain, where mad cow disease first erupted in the late 1980's.

The demand for beef, after initially plummeting, rebounded there when consumers realized how much prices had fallen and how far the government had gone in culling animals at risk of developing the disease.

Over the years, Mr. Denis has ordered the beef he supplies to restaurants like L'Entrecôte from slaughterhouses in Bavaria, in southern Germany. Cattle from that region are prized for the low fat and savory texture of their meat, particularly in cuts like rib steak, sirloin and filet mignon that the French favor.

The middleman between Mr. Denis and his Bavarian slaughterhouses is a French importer in Strasbourg, Serge Maier. His company, Sobev, does about $17 million of business a year importing meat products, about 80 percent of that beef. Since the scare began, demand has fallen by half, Mr. Maier said, though like Mr. Denis he is trying to make up for that by selling more veal and pork.

So, too, is his German supplier, A. Moksel A.G., a meat-processing company in Buchloe, a farm town of 11,000 about 40 miles west of Munich. In recent years, Moksel did a thriving business with French meat distributors and wholesalers, including Mr. Maier and Mr. Denis. With loyal clients accustomed to Bavarian beef, Moksel's annual revenue reached a peak at $1.6 billion - until the first reports of mad cow disease began to spread in Germany, France and elsewhere. "In France, within two to three weeks, everything collapsed," said Wilhelm Habress, the company's export manager for France.

The collapse of French sales has further complicated an already challenging situation at Moksel. After struggling back to profitability in the late 1990's from losses earlier in the decade, Moksel was squeezed last year by slack demand for meat products and overcapacity in the German meat-processing industry, and it posted a first-half loss of $1.4 million. Then came the fear of mad cow disease, which reduced sales 20 to 30 percent further.

French slaughterhouses also find the situation difficult. Last week, Socopa, the market leader in France, said it would lay off 300 of 5,000 workers. Almost half the layoffs will be at its largest factory, at Cherré, in northern France, where beef orders had fallen 40 percent, to 670 tons a week.

With new cases of mad cow disease being discovered daily, after European Union authorities ordered all cattle older than 30 months to be tested, the uncertainty among retail customers is not expected to subside any time soon. And farmers worry that shopkeepers, meat processors and the feed industry, which are large and well organized, will try to shift the burden of the problem onto them.

"Slaughterhouses want to pass on their costs, but food retailers are too powerful, so the easy solution is to cut the price you pay farmers for their beef," said Costa Golfidis, of the Committee of Agricultural Organizations in the European Union, a farmers' lobby.

While farmers may be weak in dealing with wholesalers, they are experienced and skilled at influencing politicians. They and their unions are already demanding that European governments somehow fix the problem or face an explosion. Farmers' lobbying - and less-subtle means of persuasion like road blockades and fires - are powerful and highly visible.

In France last month, farmers threw stones at Prime Minister Lionel Jospin when he visited communities economically affected by mad cow disease. In Rome, several hundred angry cattle farmers pelted the lower house of Parliament with eggs, oranges and firecrackers to protest the government's decision to destroy entire herds if one cow was infected.

Such events obviously increase distrust. Prosecutors in several French cities are looking into accusations that dealers illegally imported British feed, banned from the Continent, by funneling them through Ireland or Belgium. Feed and protein supplements made from animals infected with the disease are considered one of the primary ways mad cow disease is spread. Earlier in January, the French police raided government offices, seeking evidence to help determine whether manslaughter charges should be filed in the spread of the disease.

The bitterness of French butchers is shared by Mr. Immerz, who keeps about 150 head of dairy cattle on his 150-acre farm outside Buchloe. In recent years, Mr. Immerz, 48, has sold 20 to 25 cows a year to Moksel, fetching as much as $955 a head. He now has five cows that should have been slaughtered a month or two ago, he said. But on a recent Saturday when he inquired at Moksel, company officials told him they had already bought all the cattle they wanted for $430 each.

None of his cattle have tested positive for mad cow disease, but Mr. Immerz is worried. He fed his cows and steers vegetable feed, but added protein supplements of the kind suspected of containing bone meal and thus harboring infection.

The loss of income from the sale of cattle has been offset until now by booming prices for milk and cheese, where there is strong demand. But some experts have suggested that the infectious agents that cause mad cow disease may be transmitted in milk. If that proves true, frightened consumers could shun cheese, too.

Mr. Immerz said farmers whose herds are destroyed are reimbursed for their "estimated value," a value that bureaucrats have yet to fix. Even if they pay close to the $955 a head that farmers received before the crisis, Mr. Immerz said he and his colleagues would not be fully compensated. "You have to assemble a new herd," he said, "and years of work in breeding your own herd is destroyed. And your risk is probably greater, since you'll now be buying cows from various sources."

His 19-year-old son is preparing to take over the family business when he retires, but Mr. Immerz is starting to wonder whether it is worth the aggravation. "The farmers around here are very angry," he said.

Not everyone caught up in the supply chain is suffering. Some of the protein supplement that Mr. Immerz feeds to his cattle is produced by Deuka, a German company whose 500 workers and $290 million in annual revenue make it one of Europe's market leaders.

"There's no market for beef," said Dietrich Schwier, Deuka's marketing director. "Prices are down, demand is down; the animals are backed up in the supply chain."

While that may be a disaster for farmers, it is not yet one for Deuka. "The animals are in their stalls," he said. "They need feed."

---

COWS TO DIE

February 1, 2001
New York Times
Victor Homola (NYT)
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

GERMANY: The government authorized the slaughter of about 400,000 head of cattle to help curb mad cow disease as part of European Union efforts to kill two million cows over 30 months old in order to cope with the collapse of the beef trade. The European Commission proposed spending an extra $903 million this year to help pay for the crisis.

-------- police

Nassau Officer Is Accused in Second Sodomy Attack

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/nyregion/01COP.html

MINEOLA, N.Y., Jan. 31 - A Nassau County police officer, already charged in one sex attack while on duty, surrendered today to face charges that he forced a second woman to undress and have oral sex with him, the police said.

The officer, Matthew Murphy, is the third Long Island police officer in recent months to be charged in a sex- related case. His arrest comes as the police in Suffolk County continue to investigate nine complaints from women who reported that they had been forced to disrobe or had been treated improperly by a highway patrolman as a quid pro quo against arrest.

As Officer Murphy, 36, was charged with first-degree sodomy, a department official held a news conference to announce the transfers of four top-level commanders at the Eighth Precinct, where he is assigned, who in one way or another were involved with handling the woman's complaint.

The complaint, which the woman lodged hours after the attack is alleged to have occurred on Aug. 8, was mishandled, and languished for five months before the unit responsible for investigating police misconduct took it over two weeks ago, the police said. Until then, the police treated the case as if the attacker were a police impersonator, not an officer.

"Each of those individuals, in varying degrees of culpability, will be called to task for their part in the delay in the full thrust of this investigation happening," said Jack Costello, the first deputy commissioner of the Nassau police.

Police officials said the four supervisors transferred from the Eighth Precinct, in Levittown, were the commander, Deputy Inspector Patrick O'Connor; Deputy Inspector John Carlson; the head of detectives, and a detective sergeant.

The police say they are widening their investigation into mistakes made by the department. The victim, a topless dancer at Crystal Café, a Farmingdale nightclub, first went to the Second Precinct, in Woodbury, to file her complaint. But the Second Precinct apparently failed to file a report and sent the woman to the Eighth Precinct, the police said.

Police rules require a report to be generated from wherever a complaint about an officer is made, no matter where it supposedly happened. Now, the Internal Affairs Unit is investigating what the woman told Second Precinct officers and how they reacted.

At the news conference, Mr. Costello said there was "absolutely not" a cover-up of the woman's claims by the police. And he warned any officers with any knowledge of the circumstances to come forward or risk being fired. He said the department was reviewing all of the drunken- driving arrests made by Officer Murphy in his six-year career in the Nassau department. Also, police will examine drunken-driving arrests made over several years by all officers assigned to D.W.I. patrol.

Officer Murphy was in plainclothes when he stopped the woman on suspicion of drunken driving on Hempstead Turnpike, near the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway, as she left work at 3:45 a.m., the police said. They said he flashed a badge and gave her a Breathalyzer test, then told her to lie down in the back of his unmarked car as he drove to a wooded area and told her to undress and perform oral sex.

"It was force," Mr. Costello said. "She was frightened. He's a big man. He's armed with a weapon. And she was frightened and afraid for her life and she complied out of fear."

The woman returned Sunday from a trip to Switzerland and was met by the police at the airport. "She made the report five months ago, and I guess she was just shocked," said the manger of the nightclub where the woman works. "She is just a nice girl trying to get along in life."

The wooded area was in the same location where Officer Murphy is alleged to have forced another woman, an immigrant from El Salvador, to have oral sex with him on Dec. 18, 1999, the police said, He was charged last Thursday with first-degree sodomy in that incident.

Officer Murphy was released on his own recognizance after arraignment in First District Court in Hempstead, said his lawyer, Paul Gianelli. "My defense strategy is to try to discredit these allegations and to try to prove them false, baseless, manipulated by the police feeding frenzy to try to find a scapegoat for their mistakes and errors in judgments," Mr. Gianelli said.

---

No Civil Rights Charges for Police in Diallo Case

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By SUSAN SACHS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/nyregion/01DIAL.html?pagewanted=all

Justice Department officials said yesterday that they would not prosecute the four New York City police officers who shot Amadou Diallo to death two years ago, closing the criminal phase of a racially charged case that provoked a citywide debate on aggressive police tactics.

Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement that the officers did not fire at Mr. Diallo "with the specific intent to use unreasonable force." Without evidence of intent, she added, federal civil rights charges were unwarranted.

Acting Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued a statement in Washington supporting Ms. White's conclusion, adding that Mr. Diallo's death was nevertheless "tragic" and unnecessary.

The officers were acquitted of criminal charges in Mr. Diallo's death last year in a state trial that was moved to Albany to escape the public anger and political passions still simmering in New York City.

The decision came 11 months after that verdict and barely two weeks into a new administration in Washington. A senior government official said that former Attorney General Janet Reno had signed off on the decision before she left office nearly two weeks ago, but delayed the announcement for fear it would ignite protests at the Bush inauguration.

While the decision ended one aspect of the still divisive Diallo case, it also released the brakes on several related matters. The Diallo family's civil lawsuit seeking financial damages from the officers and the city is now expected to go forward. And the Police Department, which has restricted the four officers to desk jobs, can begin the process of deciding their professional futures.

Mr. Diallo, 22, a street vendor from Guinea in West Africa, was killed as he stood in the lobby of his Bronx apartment building in the early hours of Feb. 4, 1999. The four plainclothes officers who confronted him fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times. They said they thought he had pulled a gun. It turned out to be a wallet.

John Patten, a lawyer for one of the officers, Sean Carroll, praised the Justice Department's decision. "We felt confident that the decision would be ruled in a matter favorable to the clients because we didn't see any civil rights violation here," he said. "They just reacted to an event. They didn't have time to form an intent."

The Diallo family and its supporters expressed outrage.

"Specific intent to use force, we believe there was ample evidence on that," said Robert L. Conason, a lawyer representing Mr. Diallo's parents in their civil lawsuit.

Ms. White met with Mr. Diallo's mother and father in her office yesterday, shortly before her decision was announced. She was gracious, Mr. Conason said, and assured the family that the decision was not politically motivated.

Still, much about the Diallo case and its aftermath was political. The killing scraped a raw nerve in the city, from the start provoking accusations of police brutality and racial bias. The anger grew into a citywide protest movement embraced by a diverse collection of celebrities from the worlds of entertainment, politics and civil rights. Hundreds were arrested in demonstrations.

The shooting also set off a bruising public discussion over whether the city, particularly its black residents, was paying too high a price for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's crackdown on crime. It spawned several lawsuits, investigations into police tactics and some changes in the way officers patrolled the streets.

Those achievements did not dull the emotions of Mr. Diallo's parents, who are divorced and now live in New York.

"I have been betrayed by the criminal justice system because I believe for me, as a mother, a child is a child," said Kadiatou Diallo, his mother. "If someone has been executed like Amadou was, there should be accountability."

Mrs. Diallo became a minor but much-photographed notable after the shooting and set up a foundation, with a board of prominent New York business and political figures, to promote racial tolerance and better police-community relations.

Mr. Diallo's father, Saikou Amadou Diallo, reacted to the news by saying that a federal prosecution had been "our last hope for justice."

In their lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, the parents and the estate of Mr. Diallo have asked for $20 million in compensatory damages from the city and $41 million in punitive damages from the four officers: Officer Carroll, Edward McMellon, Richard Murphy and Kenneth Boss. With the threat of federal prosecution removed, the family can now take depositions from the officers, Mr. Conason said.

The professional status of the four officers is somewhat more complicated. As is normal in such cases, they face the same charges administratively in the Police Department that they faced in state court. But a full inquiry by the Internal Affairs Division and the Firearms Discharge Review Board on whether their conduct violated police policy will now begin, a department statement said.

"We would hope that the Police Department would do the same as the jury and the feds have done," said Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. "There is absolutely no reason for them to be tried otherwise administratively."

The four officers are working in jobs that do not involve carrying weapons. Officer Carroll is in the aviation unit and Officer Boss is in the emergency service unit. Officers Murphy and McMellon are in the harbor unit, and both have applied to become New York City firefighters.

"Each one of them will now have to evaluate his life and decide where to go from here," said Stephen Worth, Officer McMellon's lawyer.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the main organizer of the Diallo demonstrations, said the federal decision would have local ramifications. "This is really going to intensify the drive for some permanent reform," he said. "But it also increases the tensions, because it's almost saying to police, `You don't have to worry about the federal government coming in.' "

The federal government has been willing to involve itself in other matters involving the city's police. An inquiry by prosecutors in Manhattan concluded that members of the Street Crime Unit - the same unit involved in the Diallo shooting - engaged in racial profiling. The prosecutors did not make findings specifically in the Diallo case, however. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are pushing for changes in how the department investigates and disciplines officers accused of brutality.

But legal experts said the standards for winning a federal criminal conviction in a civil rights case were usually more stringent than those faced by state prosecutors. Reckless conduct on the part of the officers is not enough, lawyers said. It must be proved that the officers willfully deprived Mr. Diallo of his 14th Amendment right that guarantees that a person's life should not be taken without due process.

Justice Department guidelines leave some political and legal discretion, however. They state that the case must involve "a substantial federal interest" and that the original trial must have left that interest "unvindicated." There must finally be strong enough evidence to convince federal prosecutors that they could win a conviction.

"In constitutional terms," said William Van Alstyne, a professor at Duke University Law School, "what one is looking for is a case that is not just a murder or brutality case - there are thousands of those in state courts - but one with something particular in which the nation as a whole has an interest."

The Justice Department must also weigh the serious risks of violating the rights of those already acquitted to avoid double prosecution for the same act, he said.

Federal prosecutors have taken up other racially charged cases in recent years. They prosecuted Los Angeles police officers who had been acquitted in a state court of the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King, winning convictions. And Ms. White's office won a federal civil rights conviction against a New York City police officer, Francis X. Livoti, in 1998 in the choking death of Anthony Baez. Mr. Livoti had been acquitted in state court.

-------- terrorism

Courts Are a Limited Anti-Terror Weapon

February 1, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01ASSE.html

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 - The split verdict today in the trial of two Libyans charged in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 brought to a muddled close a prosecution that represented one of Washington's most ambitious attempts to use criminal law as a weapon against a horrific act of international terror.

Like the trial of four defendants in New York charged in the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, the trial in the Netherlands of the two Libyans demonstrated that the United States, and allies like Britain, seem intent on showing that they have options in responding to terrorism - and are not limited to military force.

The government's reliance on forensic evidence and the standards of criminal law scored one success today: the murder conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

The Scottish judges presiding over the trial sentenced Mr. Megrahi to life imprisonment, although he might someday be eligible for parole. Mr. Megrahi said throughout the trial that he was not guilty.

But to some of the victims' family members, and some American counterterrorism officials, the verdict against Mr. Megrahi and the acquittal of a second Libyan, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was a deeply unsatisfying result.

The outcome seemed to underscore the limits of criminal law in these circumstances by failing to punish those viewed by some intelligence and law enforcement authorities as the real culprits: senior Libyan officials and Col. Muammar el- Qaddafi, Libya's leader.

With such a mixed result, today's verdict brought little sense of closure to the painful case of Pan Am 103. Instead, the trial's end confronted President Bush with his first vexing terrorism issue: what to do about Libya now.

Today, Bush administration officials said American sanctions against Libya would not be relaxed until its government accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and compensated the victims' families. United Nations sanctions were suspended but not lifted in 1999 when the suspects were handed over for trial.

At the Justice Department, Robert S. Mueller 3rd, the acting deputy attorney general, said the government would continue its investigation. "The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103," Mr. Mueller said.

But other officials said the United States was almost powerless to determine whether Mr. Megrahi's superiors were implicated in the bombing without the cooperation of Libya, which they said was unlikely.

Moreover, the verdicts left open broader questions about whether the rules of courtroom combat, with strict standards of evidence, are adequate in the face of brutal acts of terror. Such attacks are devised by the perpetrators to make it difficult, if not impossible, to detect who is responsible, and frustrate the criminal justice process.

The verdicts revived a longstanding debate among officials who deal with terrorism. Some experts have said that terrorism cannot be viewed as a criminal justice matter, like a bank robbery or a homicide. Instead, they have said, it is a national security threat that should be dealt with by military force when state sponsorship is proven.

William P. Barr, who was attorney general when the Justice Department brought charges against the two Libyans in 1991, said justice had been done in the case. But he added, "The main question is whether the criminal justice system is in itself the right response."

Although the record has been erratic, presidents have at times adopted more forceful approaches. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes after the East Africa embassy bombings. Those strikes were aimed at Osama bin Laden - whom Washington accuses of being the mastermind of the attacks - even though the bin Laden-inspired terrorist apparatus is a stateless organization of anti-American Islamic militants.

Senior American security officials have weighed how to respond to other terror attacks, like the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole, which killed 17 sailors in October. So far, while the investigation uncovered possible links to Mr. bin Laden, no military action has been taken.

In 1986, President Reagan ordered air strikes against Libya after holding it responsible for a terrorist bombing at a discothèque in Berlin frequented by American servicemen. But there has never been any military action against Libya in response to Pan Am 103.

---

Martians and truth

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm

Opposition to the "Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001," introduced recently by Rep. Bob Barr, Georgia Republican, is being heard from an unusual -extraterrestrial - political wing.

While the principal focus of X-PPAC, or the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, is ending the government embargo on the "truth" of an ongoing extraterrestrial presence, the committee also has great interest in certain closely related areas:

1) secrecy reform; 2) intelligence-agency reform; 3) military/intelligence abuse of power; 4) reform of NASA; and 5) sequestration of advanced technologies.

In the opinion of X-PPAC, Mr. Barr's bill, now before the House International Relations Committee, has no other purpose than to repeal certain sections of three previous executive orders prohibiting assassinations by any element of the U.S. government.

"This bill will be an embarrassment to the nation if it is even voted out of committee to the House floor," says X-PPAC's Stephen Bassett.

The committee instead wants Congress to foster policies that build trust with Americans, enable the State Department to forge policies that build trust with people around the world, and allow the military and intelligence services to anticipate, thwart and prosecute the evils of terrorism -"not to emulate them."

---

Boucher lashes critic of U.S.-Greek links

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-20012121346.htm

The United States yesterday labeled as "outrageous" criticism by Greek parliamentary Speaker Apostolos Kaklamanisit of terrorism cooperation between the United States and Greece.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher accused the speaker of being "out of touch" with U.S.-Greek relations and confirmed reports from Athens that Washington had formally complained about the remarks.

Last week, Mr. Kaklamanisit accused Washington of unduly pressuring Athens on terrorism after a U.S. congressional delegation said the Greek government faced a "challenge" in guaranteeing security at the 2004 Olympic Games.

---

U.S. says Gadhafi must compensate victims

February 1, 2001
Washington Times
By Ben Barber
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001212247.htm

The conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for bombing a Pan Am flight in 1988 over Scotland proves Libya is guilty of the crime and must pay compensation before sanctions can be lifted, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

"If a Libyan intelligence agent does something, the Libyan government is responsible," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

The remarks made clear that far from being mollified by the verdict, the United States will continue to seek to punish those who ordered, funded and carried out the bombing.

The U.S. government will follow the evidence "wherever it leads," Mr. Boucher said when asked if the United States would seek action against higher Libyan officials, including its leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

He said Libya must comply with demands contained in four U.N. resolutions before the United States would consider any bid to lift sanctions. Libya must:

• Acknowledge responsibility for the bombing.

• Disclose all it knows about the bombing.

• End support for all terrorist activities.

• Pay compensation.

U.S. officials rejected a call by Libyan diplomats for the verdict to bring an end to the Lockerbie affair.

"This does not close the book," a senior U.S. official said to reporters in Washington.

Libya's U.N. ambassador, Abuzed Omar Dorda, said in New York that Libya itself had "suffered from this bombing. All 5 million people [in Libya] were victims [of sanctions] much the same as the families were victims," he told Reuters television.

The United States was talking to all members of the U.N. Security Council yesterday to win their support for keeping in place sanctions imposed on Libya in 1992 and 1993 for its refusal to cooperate with the investigation into the bombing, which killed 270 persons.

China yesterday called for an end to the sanctions, which were suspended in April 1999 after Libya finally sent the two men accused of the bombing to the Netherlands to stand trial before a Scottish tribunal.

"We must take into consideration the cooperation of the Libyan side," said Deputy Chinese Ambassador Shen Guofeng. "The sanctions have been there for quite a few years, and the Libyan people have been suffering for quite some time."

Mr. Boucher said the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who was judged to be a senior member of the Libyan state Jamahariya Security Organization, indicates Libya is responsible for the bombing.

He would not rule out asking the Security Council to reinstate suspended sanctions on air travel and arms shipments. He also did not rule out seeking compensation to the U.S. government separate from efforts by the families of the victims to sue Libya.

U.S. diplomats met Libyan diplomats at the United Nations last week to warn them that convictions in the Netherlands would not be enough to end the sanctions.

When asked exactly what Libya had to do to "take responsibility" for the bombing, the U.S. official was vague.

"We'll know it when we see it," he said.

The official also said that he did not believe that the man who was acquitted yesterday was innocent. "The court only found reasonable doubt" in his case, the U.S. official said.

Even if U.N. sanctions remain suspended or are lifted, U.S. sanctions imposed since 1979 remain in place, including sanctions under the annual terrorist list, the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act passed by Congress in 1996 and executive orders issued in the 1980s.

Britain also demanded compensation from Libya, and a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said at least $700 million would be sought.

"We expect the Libyan authorities to take full responsibility for the actions of their official," the spokesman said.

Diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya, broken off in 1984 after the killing of a British policewoman outside Libya's London embassy, were restored two years ago when Libya paid compensation to her family.

Relatives of victims have asked for a public inquiry into all possible theories of who committed the Lockerbie bombing and why, but Mr. Blair's spokesman said he was not sure such an inquiry would add anything "to what we already know."

-------- activists

PROTESTERS OCCUPY IMF OFFICES IN QUITO, ECUADOR

February 1, 2001
Accion Ecologica
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/wsn/2001/msg00318.html

Contacts: Ivonne Yanez, 011-593-2-568091 (in IMF offices) Quito, Ecuador Esperanza Martinez, 011-593-2-529287

As part of a protest movement that has brought Ecuador to a virtual standstill, a growing number of activists from environmental and human rights organizations have occupied the offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Quito to protest the IMF's role in Ecuador's current social crisis.

"We want to expose the real culprits," says Ivonne Yanez, one of the women occupying the IMF offices. "The IMF-imposed policies, carried out by the Ecuadorian government in exchange for more loans, have resulted in more than 50% of Ecuador's national budget going to pay off the foreign debt, have burdened the country with the highest rate of inflation in Latin America, the highest levels of corruption, the most advanced rates of deforestation and environmental degradation, and the worst example of maldistribution of wealth on the continent."

The IMF sit-in is occuring at the same time that the country's indigenous population, who make up more than 40% of the Ecuadorian people, have blockaded the nation's major highways. The blockades, which are entering their fourth day, are in protest against the government's economic policies, which have impoverished millions of Ecuadorians. The blockades have prevented the delivery of food and supplies to large portions of the country, resulting in shortages and skyrocketing prices.

The government's response to the protests have been harsh. In Quito alone, there have been 24 wounded from confrontations between the police and protesters. There are currently between 5,000 and 8,000 indigenous activists camped out at the catholic Salesian Politecnic University, which is hosting them, and more people are arriving from the countryside daily. The police have prevented the indigenous activists from marching through the City of Quito, bombarding them with tear gas every time they try to march from the University.

On Tuesday, January 30, the government arrested the leader of the indigenous movement, Antonio Vargas, on charges of subversion and attempting to overthrow the government.

The protesters occupying the IMF offices in Quito are in support of the indigenous movement.

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Peace Action Organizing Fellowship

Peace Action Education Fund is pleased to offer the Ruth S. and Harrop A. Freeman Fellowship to young people in college or recent graduates interested in promoting campus activism for peace, disarmament and economic justice. This Fellowship is made possible by Ruth and Harrop Freeman who believed in the importance of developing the next generation of peace and justice organizers.

This thirteen month fellowship in Washington, DC (begins in June or July 2001) offers a monthly stipend of $1500 and provides first-hand experience\in bridging the gap between academic learning and direct organizing for peace and justice. The Freeman Fellowship enables a young activist to develop the hands-on organizing skills, experience in creating resources and campaigns, decision-making ability, and contacts useful to a career in the peace and social change movement.

Fellows produce campaign materials for student activists, help campus groups develop programs for disarmament and economic justice, help students create peace groups, interact with campus contacts across the country on a daily basis to provide support and information, work with staff on specific projects, and participate in strategy and coalition meetings. Fellows learn about organizational dynamics, including the work of the Board of Directors and relations between national staff and local activists. The Fellowship offers exciting opportunities for leadership development under the direction of knowledgeable staff concerned about the views and advancement of student leaders. The Fellowship also provides time for the Fellow to reflect on his/her experience in a supportive setting with ongoing mentoring from staff.

The Fellow will play a lead role in developing a campus network dedicated to:

Nuclear and conventional disarmament Halting weapons trafficking nationally and internationally Cutting the U.S. military budget and promoting investment in human needs, and Promoting the non-violent resolution of conflict

Through teach-ins, speaking tours, campus visibility actions, and special campaigns the Fellow will build our campus network. This involves strengthening existing student groups and developing new ones.

The Fellowship is based in Washington, D.C. yet opportunities exist for travel to campuses and to Peace Action chapters across the country.

Qualifications

Strong interest in pursuing work to demilitarize U.S. domestic and foreign policy Campus or other activist experience College student or recent graduate Motivated to learn Energetic, inquisitive, willing to take initiative Good writing skills Good interpersonal skills Willingness to travel Word processing and Internet skills a plus Ability to relocate to Washington, DC

Apply Today

Peace Action Education Fund strongly and expressly encourages the application of people of color to the Fellowship.

To apply: Please send a resume, cover letter, and brief essay (400-500 words) explaining your interest in peace and justice work, your organizing experience and why you would benefit from this Fellowship. Applications are due February 15, 2001.

Mail applications and inquiries to:

Peace Action Education Fund Ruth S. and Harrop A. Freeman Fellowship 1819 H St NW Suite 425 Washington DC 20006-3603 Ph 202.862.9740 ext. 3051

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TALKS WITH PROTESTERS

February 1, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/01BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

ECUADOR: With protests against the economic policies of President Gustavo Noboa growing larger and more violent, the government has agreed to begin talks with indigenous and labor groups. The announcement came after 24 Indian and student protesters were injured while trying to lead a march in Quito, the capital, and Indian groups tightened their blockade of highways, causing disruptions in food supplies and transportation. Larry Rohter (NYT)

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