------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Did Bush bungle relations with North Korea?
Captain of Trawler Testifies on Collision With Submarine
U.S. warns Russia on dealings with Iran
Iran chief visits Russia nuke plant
WHO to Study Health Effects of Depleted Uranium in Iraq
Deadly Winds From Gulf War Battlefields Still Blowing
Lie of the millennium?
Bush's Unnecessary Lesson
North Korea Turns Up the Heat
North Korea slams Bush stance
Shadow on 'Sunshine Policy'
Bush's Missile Shield at Heart of Asian Diplomacy
U.S. mulls selling weapons to Taiwan
China warns U.S. not to arm Taiwan
Beijing Eases Stand On Missile Defense
China Willing to Talk About Missile Defenses
Bush to Visit China in October
China may determine U.S. missile sales to Taiwan
Bush to visit China in October
Beijing anxious for talks on shield
NATO CHANGED CLIMATE IN SERBIA
SRS faces budget cut under president's plan
WIPP Cuts Back on Tours

MILITARY
Probe starts in Kuwait bomb tragedy
Investigation focuses on air controller
Bodies from bombing accident arrive in Germany
U.S. probers awaited in Kuwait bombing
U.S. Mutes Criticism of Russia's Plans for Arms ales to Iran
Multiple chemical sensitivity in british gulf war veterans
God's Army twins reunited with mom
China places second missile base near Taiwan
Paramilitary group thwarting peace
Republicans Seek More Treatment for the Nonviolent
STAMFORD: STATE IN PAINKILLER INQUIRY
10 police sentenced to death
American airmen welcomed in Ecuador
Indian Defense Minister Resigns
INDIA: BRIBERY SCANDAL
Destruction of Mir Poses No Risk of Radioactivity
Shuttle and Station Dodge Tool in Space
RUSSIA: MIR PLUNGE
Astronauts get extra day in space to finish packing
SIERRA LEONE: U.N. ENTERS REBEL AREA
Peres addresses U.N. Security Council
Captain Outrageous
Antigay Behavior in Military Has Dipped a Bit
Troop Cut in Bosnia

OTHER
New York Admits Plants Headed to Poor Areas
As the Disease Marches On, Britain Dooms More Animals
Imperiled Shores and Coral Reefs to Get Millions in Aid
Kennedy Airport Steps Up Checks
Bush's takes heat for emissions decision
Bush Defends Emissions Stance
The Burden of Containment
Mr. Bush Reverses Course
ANOTHER BEEF IMPORT BAN
Europe adopts fortress mentality to fight virus
Even Dolly's life on the line in epidemic
Dogs greet travelers as U.S. fights livestock disease
Bush takes stand on CO2
Hobgoblins in the Cabinet
Troopers' Appeal Is Denied
Few Answers After Settling a Bad Arrest
OFFICER ACCUSED OF TAKING BRIBES
Minding Their Manners
New Jersey Officials Had Data on Profiling
Freeh picks FBI veteran as counterespionage 'czar'
Goons on trial
Ressam linked to bomb-making parts
Prosecutors Sketch Bombing Suspect's Role

ACTIVISTS
MEXICO: NEGOTIATION IMPASSE
Indonesian rivals continue protests


-------- NUCLEAR

Did Bush bungle relations with North Korea?
"He said a really stupid thing. He shouldn't say stupid things in the future."

Salon
March 15, 2001
By Jake Tapper
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/03/15/north_korea/print.html

WASHINGTON -- Following a week of disjointed messages from the Bush administration, the North Korean government has taken deliberate steps this week to show its anger at the United States. On Tuesday, the North Koreans canceled diplomatic meetings with the South Korean government, meetings very much encouraged by Western powers worried about global security threats should tension continue between the two countries. On Wednesday, the official state-sanctioned media followed up by roundly criticizing Bush.

Did Bush mean to escalate the rhetoric against the North Korean government? Yes, of course.

But to this degree? That is unclear. And Wednesday, foreign policy experts of both political stripes tried to parse the administration's language -- including a classic botched sentence from Bush -- to try and determine how well this bodes for the vaunted foreign policy strength of the new administration.

"They really don't have their act together," observes Joel Wit, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and formerly a State Department official responsible for implementing a 1994 agreement with North Korea that was to have ended the country's processing of plutonium at a factory suspected to be manufacturing nuclear weapons.

North Korea has been a persistent threat for decades, building an arsenal of chemical, biological and other weapons -- apparently even nuclear weapons. As other Communist anachronisms have fallen (like the USSR) or slightly evolved (like China), North Korea continues as a beacon of oppression, militaristic lust and state-sanctioned weirdness (its state-ordered worship of its Lenin-like dead "Eternal President" is but one example of this). U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea are concerned that North Korea could launch an attack against them -- or even against the United States -- in a matter of seconds, which has provided a key argument for the United States' development of a missile defense shield.

The case study begins March 6, the day before South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung, honored with last year's Nobel Peace Prize, met with President Bush, hoping to influence the new administration's views on the region before any policy had been set in stone.

That day, Secretary of State Colin Powell, during an appearance with European Union President and Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh and others, seemed moderate in tone and tenor when he mentioned that he and Lindh had discussed, among other matters, "how to encourage North Korea to comply with its nonproliferation obligations."

"As I said previously, and especially in my confirmation hearings, we do plan to engage with North Korea to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off," Powell said. "Some promising elements were left on the table, and we'll be examining those elements."

This enraged GOP hawks, who view Clinton's policy toward North Korea as dishonest and disingenuous, and as coddling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as he builds up an arsenal. Clinton administration foreign policy experts praised Kim for his steps toward peace. And though Powell called Kim a "dictator" during his January confirmation hearings before the Senate, his remarks about "picking up" where Clinton left off surely raised continued fears that Powell is too moderate.

The next day, the Bush administration's position seemed completely turned around.

The less conciliatory views of the GOP base had clearly been expressed both behind closed doors and in the meeting with South Korean President Kim, views shared by Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. "There are real concerns about the absence of real change by North Korea," Gaffney says. "And with an absence of any real changes, suggestions of concessions, political legitimization and perhaps even assistance is pretty much a debatable proposition."

Right after the meeting with President Kim -- but just minutes before Presidents Bush and Kim appeared at a press conference -- Powell was trotted out to make brief comments to the press. And he presented a very different message than he had the day before. "The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea," Powell said. "There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin -- that is not the case."

"The president has made it clear that he understands the nature of regime in Pyongyang and will not be fooled by the nature of that regime and will view it in a very, very realistic, realistic way," Powell said.

At the joint briefing minutes later, this newer, more hard-line stance against North Korea -- the one advanced in the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- reared its head in comments made by President Kim. Bush had been "very frank and honest in sharing with me his perceptions about the nature of North Korea and the North Korean leader," Kim said, "and this is very important for me to take back home and to consider."

Bush then elaborated on his concerns. "Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea," he said, "there's not very much transparency. We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

This was not his most carefully enunciated statement of the day. As it turns out, the U.S. has only one agreement with North Korea -- the 1994 plutonium agreement that Wit supervised. So which "agreements" were the president referring to? White House spokesmen told reporters that Bush was speaking about possible future agreements.

"That's how the president speaks," one told the New York Times.

But even as this spokesman was trying to explain rather lamely "how" Bush "speaks," other members of the Bush White House were offering an altogether different citation from the Bush-to-English, English-to-Bush dictionaries.

That afternoon, in a background briefing for the press by two "senior administration officials," the following exchange took place:

"President Bush said at the end of the meeting that he was concerned that North Korea was not complying with some of its existing agreements," one reporter asked. "I assume that he meant by that the 1994 agreed framework. Could you tell us what exactly he --"

"No, I don't think that would be an assumption to make, because there's no evidence that Korea is not complying with that," said one of the senior administration officials. The official said that Bush may have been referring to "some logistics situation difficulties ... But there has been no indication of them violating the agreed framework."

No violation? But Bush had said they were violating "agreements." The official tried to come up with an answer again. "I'm not trying to put words in the president's mouth, and I'll leave his statement stand. But what there is concern about is the verification of existing arrangements ... There are transparency questions that North Korea is not a transparent state, and therefore we do not have a 100 percent ability to monitor these agreements. So his concern about them is not of a specific instance of violation, but our confidence in whether or not these agreements are being violated or not."

Aaargh! "I don't want to be too picky on this, but we only have one agreement with North Korea that I know of," the reporter said.

"Right," agreed the senior administration official. "When he said, agreement arrangements, what he's talking about is the proposal that was on the table at the end of the administration wasn't verifiable, in his mind ... He was referring to the totality of it in the sense that I was saying that he's concerned about there not being verifiable --"

"But that wasn't an agreement," the reporter said. "I mean, obviously, there was a negotiation underway. We only have one agreement."

"Correct," said the official.

The reporter tried one last time. "Was the president correct when he said that we --"

Interrupted the official: "The president is always correct."

Wit says that Bush's comments "reflect a certain viewpoint prevalent around many Republicans and some others, too," but that clearly they were also "the result of poor staff work and poor preparation for the meeting."

While this may cause some alarm considering Bush's proud indifference to intellectual inquisitiveness and his refusal to delve beyond briefing papers longer than a page or two, Bill Clinton made a similar mistake in November 1993, in a special Oval Office interview for NBC's "Meet the Press."

According to a Clinton administration source, then-President Clinton apparently misread his briefing papers that day, and he caused a dust-up when he said that "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb," which was interpreted as an ultimatum. Clinton was supposed to have said that North Korea cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power. That is, of course, quite a different thing.

But whether or not Bush's predecessor ever made a similar mistake, one foreign policy expert who preferred to remain anonymous found Bush's misstatement troubling if only for the reason that he feared it was indicative of Bush's general lack of interest in nuance.

In the world of international diplomacy such a weakness "can cause problems with a close ally like South Korea," the expert said. "And it might cause serious problems with the country you're trying to deal with."

Asked if he had a suggestion for Bush, the expert said, "Not really. He said a really stupid thing. It seems obvious that he shouldn't say stupid things in the future."

Regardless, both Gaffney and Wit agree that the larger problem in the week of rotating messages began with Powell. "The important point here is first of all Powell should not have said [they] were going to pick up where the Clinton administration left off," Wit says.

Gaffney agrees. "My personal preference would not be to have Colin Powell going off to tell people what the policy is by his own authority," he says. But Gaffney sees a silver lining. "If Powell is going to do that, I think it's a very good thing that the president feels secure enough to say, 'This is the policy; it's not the same as General Powell said,' even if he didn't say that directly.

"The messages were mixed until the president spoke, and I hope that's the end of the mixed messages," Gaffney says. Gaffney, however, was quick to point to the positive signs he sees in Bush foreign policy. He likes the fact, for instance, that these policy debates are being carried out at a high level; it reminds him of the way his former boss, Reagan, ran things.

"I think that the idea of putting strong people in place upon whom you confer authority is great," Gaffney said. Last week reminded him of when former Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger "were going at it tooth and tong, and then President Reagan stepped in and sorted it out. It's infinitely better that this is being sorted out at this level, and not at the deputy level or at the staff director level."

As for the questions about Bush's command of the facts, Gaffney says, "His command of the minutiae may or may not be perfect," he says, "but he's got the right instincts."

---

Captain of Trawler Testifies on Collision With Submarine

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/national/15HAWA.html

HONOLULU, March 14 - The thunderous force of a rapidly surfacing American submarine lifted the stern of the Ehime Maru, a 174-foot Japanese fishing trawler, out of the sea, jarring its hull with a "terrible metal hitting sound" and flooding it almost instantly, the trawler's captain testified today.

Speaking haltingly in Japanese, the Ehime Maru's captain, Hisao Onishi, appeared before the Navy's court of inquiry here and stoically recounted the confused, horrifying moments after the submarine Greeneville collided with his vessel off Hawaii on Feb. 9.

"There was a terrible sound of `Bang! Bang!' that occurred," Captain Onishi, 58, said through a translator, "and the ship came to a halt."

Captain Onishi's testimony lasted less than an hour and provided few new details about the causes of the accident, which left 9 of the 35 people aboard the trawler lost at sea, including four teenagers learning the commercial fishing trade.

But after seven days of testimony that focused on a series of errors by the Greeneville's captain and crew, Captain Onishi provided the first eyewitness account before the court of what happened aboard the Ehime Maru, less than two hours after the trawler steamed out of Honolulu Harbor that morning.

The collision came without warning, he said, responding negatively when asked by a lawyer for the Greeneville's captain, Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, if anyone aboard the Ehime Maru had spotted a periscope or otherwise detected the submarine using its radar and sonar systems.

"The first impact was of the stern of the ship lifting up," Captain Onishi recalled.

He said he could not be sure whether the point of impact was on the port or starboard side - "probably it was the bottom of the ship" - but recalled that a crew member reported seeing a submarine, the Greeneville, toward the back on the port side.

Almost instantly, it seemed, the trawler was doomed.

Captain Onishi, who was on the Ehime Maru's bridge at the time of the collision, said the ship's instruments lost power and the helm went dead. He tried to announce the order to abandon ship over the microphone, but it, too, was dead. Instead, he told his navigator to gather the crew, the teachers and the students on the upper deck.

"The waves were already reaching my heels," he said, describing the moment he made it to the deck - a scene of commotion, if not panic, as his crew scrambled to tug on life jackets while clutching to the ship's railings for support.

A wave washed him from the ship, throwing him "a great distance," he said. Bobbing in the swelling sea, which was littered with floats and other debris, he watched the remaining crew struggling on the deck as the trawler automatically discharged its life rafts. As water lapped over the side, the Ehime Maru's bow rose, then slipped under.

Investigators have testified that after the initial collision, the rudder of the Greeneville -- made of steel hardened enough to break through Arctic ice floes - sliced cleanly through the Ehime Maru's hull, leaving no hope of the ship's staying afloat and little time for those below decks to escape.

Captain Onishi's testimony appeared to confirm that version of events - from the sound of metals clashing to the speed at which it sank.

"I felt the time was very short," he said. "I felt the ship went in about 5 minutes - not even 10 minutes."

The collision provoked anger and grief in Japan. And Captain Onishi publicly complained about the Greeneville's failure to dispatch divers or put out life rafts to assist with the rescue effort in the immediate aftermath of the crash.

More than a month later, much of that anger seems to have subsided, in part because of the Navy's efforts to hold a public inquiry and to accommodate the relatives of the missing, whom the Navy has flown here at its expense so they can attend.

During a recess after Captain Onishi completed his testimony, the Greeneville's captain, Commander Waddle, also met privately with him and apologized for the collision.

A White House official said that President Bush was expected to express his regrets when he meets with Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori of Japan in Washington next week.

The Navy has already begun negotiations to compensate the victims of the collision and said it was prepared to spend $40 million to try to salvage the Ehime Maru, which lies 2,000 feet beneath the surface, roughly nine miles south of Diamond Head.

In his testimony today, Captain Onishi described watching helplessly as the Greeneville first left the area, then returned, floating nearby but doing little outwardly to help in the rescue.

"We were hoping they would lower their inflatable boats," Captain Onishi said, describing how he and other crew members clambered aboard rubber lifeboats and waited for nearly an hour for the Coast Guard to arrive.

When asked, he said that American and Japanese naval officers had explained to him the inherent dangers of trying to bring people floundering in the water aboard a submarine, especially in rough seas, which could pound them against the hull.

Captain Onishi remained composed throughout his testimony, though when he recalled the moment, aboard a Coast Guard cutter, when he realized that not all of his passengers and crew had been saved, he appeared to fight back tears, staring at the table in the witness box.

Commander Waddle's civilian lawyer, Charles W. Gittins, cross- examined the captain only cursorily. And he prefaced his questioning by saying that Commander Waddle had accepted responsibility for the accident and that his questions were "in no way intended to implicate or impose any responsibility" on the Ehime Maru.

---

U.S. warns Russia on dealings with Iran

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
By David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001315214952.htm

Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday warned Russia that its planned arms and nuclear power deals with Iran could jeopardize its support in the West.

Saying the Bush administration intends a "realistic approach" to Moscow, Mr. Powell said at a Senate hearing that he will raise U.S. complaints forcefully with Russian officials over the Iran deals.

"If Russia wants a better relationship with the United States and the West . . . we have to be concerned when we see suggestions that they may be investing in weapons sales with regimes such as Iran," Mr. Powell told the Senate Budget Committee.

Mr. Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met separately yesterday with Sergei Ivanov, top security adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Ivanov is the highest-ranking Russian official to visit Washington since President Bush took office Jan. 20.

Mr. Ivanov talked with Miss Rice for more than two hours at the White House, then met with Mr. Powell. An administration official, speaking on background, called the discussions "very constructive and businesslike."

Emerging from his meeting with the secretary of state, Mr. Ivanov said U.S. fears that Russia is selling Iran nuclear weapon technology or weapons of mass destruction are misplaced.

"In fact, there are no arms deals with Iran so far, but we discussed the possible future contracts of conventional weapons being sold by Russia to Iran and they are all legitimate," Mr. Ivanov told reporters outside the State Department.

The Bush administration repeatedly has expressed unhappiness with Russia's expanding military ties with Tehran, underscored by this week's warm summit in Moscow between Mr. Putin and Iranian President Mohammed Khatami. The sales of advanced conventional weapons and sensitive technology to Iran could have "serious ramifications," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.

Russia has brushed aside U.S. criticisms. Mehdi Safari, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, said last month that Iran plans to purchase approximately $7 billion in arms from Russia over the next several years.

The administration official, speaking on background, said he knew of no overall review of U.S. aid programs to Russia, but Mr. Powell said yesterday the lavish bilateral and multilateral support Russia received in the early days of the Clinton administration are over.

"Our goal should not be to make Russia our best friend, or to make it our enemy again," Mr. Powell told the Budget Committee. "We should help it through our example, through support where support is merited, but not by throwing money down on programs that don't make sense."

Mr. Powell said Russia's diplomatic and financial investment in Iran, which the United States considers a "rogue state" and a sponsor of terrorists, resembled the failed support the old Soviet Union gave to undemocratic regimes during the Cold War.

"The old Soviet Union wasted decades of treasure investing in regimes that had no future," Mr. Powell said. "It's a lesson they should have learned - that it would not be wise to invest in regimes that are not following accepted standards of international behavior."

But Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, said Russia's domestic economic woes would make it hard for the United States to constrain Moscow's foreign arms sales.

"I don't know whether you can say to a country that is having an awful time meeting its obligations that we, America, want you to behave a certain way even if it means you get no resources for your regime," Mr. Domenici said.

One proposed budget cut outlined by Mr. Powell could have a direct impact on a key Russian sector, a leading Russian oil executive said this week.

Mr. Bush's budget calls for a 21 percent cut in the Export-Import Bank, which provides loan guarantees for U.S. businesses investing in risky overseas markets.

Simon Kukes, president of Tyumen Oil Co., Russia's fourth-largest oil company and a recipient of Ex-Im guarantees in the past, said the cuts would cripple U.S. oil companies seeking Russian partners and clear the way for European and Chinese rivals.

"This is not charity money," Mr. Kukes said during a Washington visit. "It's a signal of stability. Reversing these cuts is the best thing the Bush administration could do."

--------

Iran chief visits Russia nuke plant

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/15/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406400722

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) - The president of Iran on Thursday toured a Russian factory that makes nuclear reactors, amid U.S. protests that the plant is helping Iran develop nuclear technology.

Dressed in flowing robes, President Mohammad Khatami visited the Izhora factory in St. Petersburg, trailed by aides and Russian officials. He stopped to admire workers polishing a huge, cylindrical reactor core for Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant.

The core will be shipped to Iran in the third quarter of this year, state-controlled ORT television news said. Khatami told plant directors Iran will sign a contract for a second reactor core once the first is delivered, ORT reported.

Russia signed a contract in 1995 to build the first reactor at Iran's Bushehr power plant. It is to be completed by 2003 for an estimated $800 million. The United States has strongly objected to the project, fearing the technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons. Moscow and Tehran maintain the plant will be used only to provide energy and will remain under international control.

In the past, Washington has imposed sanctions against Russian companies accused of providing missile technology to Iran.

Earlier this week, Khatami and the Iranian delegation toured Russian space mission control in Korolyov outside Moscow, and expressed interest in buying both military and civilian aerospace technology.

Khatami flew to the central Russian city of Kazan on Thursday to visit a mosque under construction there, ORT reported. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, a mostly Muslim region east of Moscow.


-------- depleted uranium

WHO to Study Health Effects of Depleted Uranium in Iraq

Washington Post
Thursday, March 15, 2001; Page A20
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4585-2001Mar14.html

BASRA, Iraq -- The Iraqi government has for years insisted that the use of depleted uranium shells by U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf War inflicted serious environmental damage here in the southern part of the country. Parts of the desert around Basra remain littered with spent ammunition and the hulls of tanks and other vehicles destroyed by the ultra-hard rounds. Iraqi doctors say the health effects have become increasingly obvious, including abnormal incidence of genetic problems and cancer among children.

In a climate of hostility toward the Iraqi government and in particular President Saddam Hussein, these reports have largely been disregarded in the West. But now, with concern rising in Europe about exposure to depleted uranium munitions used in the bombing of Yugoslav targets during the Kosovo war, the Iraqi claims will get a new review.

A team of World Health Organization officials will arrive here this month to analyze whether there is a link between the use of depleted uranium shells in the Gulf War and cancer or birth defect rates in this part of Iraq. The WHO study fits with other efforts to see whether the ammunition has damaged the health of those who used it or those against whom it was directed -- in the 1991 Gulf War as well as the Balkans conflict eight years later.

Initial WHO analyses in Kosovo, as well as Defense Department and other military studies, have concluded there is no connection between the ammunition and cancer or other health effects, including Gulf War syndrome. A U.N. Environmental Program study released Tuesday showed "no cause for alarm" over radiation from the controversial munitions, but urged monitoring for unknown long-term effects.

But mounting concern, particularly among NATO countries whose troops were deployed in Yugoslavia, has intensified the demand for further testing. This has made Iraqis feel the issue is finally getting the attention it deserves. But they are also angry that the United Nations and others did not seem to care when they were the only ones concerned about it.

"We have been talking about this a lot, and nobody really listened," said Abdel Karim Hassan Sabr, deputy director of the Hospital for Maternity and Children in Basra.

Depleted uranium shells were developed for use against tanks and other vehicles because of their armor-piercing strength. The shells are coated in the residual after uranium ore is processed for use in nuclear reactors or weapons. It is less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium, but in some instances may also contain traces of plutonium or other highly radioactive substances.

Independent of its radioactive properties, depleted uranium also has the potentially toxic properties of other heavy metals.

Top Iraqi officials have tried, as did their counterparts in Yugoslavia, to maximize the potential propaganda value of the issue. But Sabr and other doctors say that the evidence they see requires further analysis -- a thorough epidemiological treatment, rather than the back-of-the-envelope calculations done to date in southern Iraq.

Sabr said, for example, that between 1993 and last year, the rate of congenital defects among live births at the Basra hospital rose from 1.8 percent to more than 4 percent. "Couples here are afraid of getting pregnant," he said. "They are afraid of the birth defects."

So far, however, he said, the hospital has not studied the intervening years or prior years to establish a more detailed record. Nor has it had the time or money to try to determine whether postwar population shifts, intermarriage patterns or other environmental factors might have contributed to the increase.

The area around Basra is heavily industrialized, the flat desert horizon frequently broken with the smokestacks of oil refineries and chemical plants, more often than not emitting a thick black or gray plume of pollution. Near the Shatt al-Arab waterway, in low-lying, marshy areas, oily slicks of water are visible from the roadway.

For 20 years the region has been a focal point of conflict, beginning with the war against Iran during the 1980s and continuing through the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions.

The remnants of those battles are prominent, both in the form of plentiful war memorials -- statues pointing toward the Iranian enemy, an Iraqi soldier slaying a sea serpent -- as well as destroyed vehicles, bridges and buildings.

The region remains heavily militarized, with machine guns propped atop Toyota pickups and frequent roadside sentries deployed throughout an area whose Shiite Muslim population broke into open revolt against the largely Sunni Muslim government in Baghdad after the Gulf War ended.

The uprising was suppressed with force, a fact that contributed to the U.S. and British decision to impose a "no-fly" zone over this part of the country, as well as over the northern provinces that are home to Iraq's rebellious Kurdish minority.

The southern region is also poor, a fact Iraqis blame on international sanctions and the U.S. and British air patrols that nix any hope of private investment. Western officials consider its economic conditions a sign of Baghdad's neglect.

But Iraqi health and political officials insist the depleted uranium shells lie somewhere at the root of what they contend is an epidemic.

"We have found the relationship between these things and cancer, and we have announced it," said Gen. Abdel Wahab Jabouri, who serves on an Iraqi committee on depleted uranium that has tried to trace health problems among Iraqi troops to service in areas where the ammunition was most intensively used.

"The uranium causes these diseases," he said. "The subject doesn't need further evidence. Even Americans are complaining."

--------

Deadly Winds From Gulf War Battlefields Still Blowing

From: magnu96196@aol.com
Thu, 15 Mar 2001
By Sherman H. Skolnick 3-14-1

The Gulf War has been over 10 years, but its cancerous fallout is on the rise in southern Iraq.

The doctors speak with resignation about the wave of disease that has afflicted the people of southern Iraq since Operation Desert Storm 10 years ago.

They don't fully understand what confronts them. But out on the desert flats there are echoes of Agent Orange and troubling reminders of the radiation sicknesses that come after nuclear disasters.

Dr Jawad El Ali, at Basra General Hospital, talks about the cancers: "We had 88 cases in 1988 but in 1998 we had 405 cases. That's more than a four-fold increase." Only later does he add that seven members of his wife's family are among the dead and that she has developed a lump.

Deadly dust Depleted uranium is a man-made by-product created by processing mined uranium ore.

It is used to toughen the metal tips of bombs and missiles to increase their ability to pierce targets, and can burn on impact.

These weapons were used by allied forces in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo against Iraqi and Serb tanks and armoured vehicles and concrete bunkers.

Dr Janan Ghlib Hassan, at Basra Children's Hospital, talks about the birth defects: "Last year we had 221 cases of congenital deformity." She mentions that most of their fathers had served in the armed forces, and only as an afterthought does she produce the book in which she has begun to keep a photograph and details of each of these terrible births.

The people of the region are gripped by a fear that the illnesses are caused by exposure to depleted uranium (DU), which was contained in about 300 tonnes of the armour-piercing ammunition used to drive Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait and back into Iraq and to destroy any of his war machine abandoned during the retreat.

Women are afraid to get pregnant, and if a child develops a fever they immediately suspect leukemia, which has increased six-fold since 1991.

As war's losers, the Iraqis' cry ordinarily might have gone unheeded. But all the governments that joined then-US President George Bush's Gulf coalition are under pressure to investigate the effects of DU exposure on their servicemen, thousands of whom have been hit by what is known as Gulf Syndrome.

Worries about the health risk to United Nations workers who frequent the region are driving inquiries by various agencies of the UN into the use of DU weapons in the Gulf, where they were used in combat for the first time, and later in the Balkans, where big numbers of NATO peacekeepers and a considerable UN staff served.

The difficulty with an issue as emotive as DU is that it can be exploited for propaganda purposes - on both sides of a conflict.

So it needs to be stated that the experts who spoke to the Herald in Iraq last week were not delivered up by the minders from the regime's Information Ministry - they were identified to the Herald by the staff of UN and other agencies working in Iraq.

Confirming that they had not attended the Hill & Knowlton school of public relations, a victim interview organised by ministry staff backfired because it revealed that despite trade sanctions, money or friendship with the regime still secures effective medical treatment.

General Hussain Jasim Salih was blessed. A measure of the trust vested in him was the five-year posting to Moscow where he topped the class in his studies of sea mines and torpedoes.

So when the Gulf crisis erupted, he was in command of the Iraqi minesweeper fleet at Um Qasir, Iraq's only port, which is at the top of the Persian Gulf. He had a substantial home in Basra and, as he put it, "I had cars and my wife had gold and jewellery."

But the gaunt, thin-haired man sitting in the Basra garden, talking to the Herald during yet another air-raid alarm as US jets prowled high above the city, is not the handsome, well-built officer in the photographs which he produced from the family album.

His 51-year-old body is wrecked by leukemia, and the car and jewellery have been sold and more money borrowed to pay for the life-saving $US100 vials from which he injects himself daily. Ironically, the vials are produced in Ireland but the profit ends up in the US - the manufacturer is a subsidiary of the US drug-maker Schering & Plough.

To demonstrate the cost, he sends one of his sons to fetch a big platter, on which there are more empty drug containers than the Herald had seen in visits to three Iraqi hospitals last week. They are brought to Iraq by members of his family who buy them in neighbouring Jordan.

In his sickness the general has become philosophical: "Look at me now - it is better for humans not to be arrogant about money and the beauty of youth."

What about arrogance with power? "Yes, of course, because our religion and culture motivate us to be humble."

In Basra last week the humble and humiliated were at the children's hospital. Waves of worried mothers, shrouded in black from head to toe, throwing themselves in turn at the day clinic staff or at the door of Dr Janan's room for comfort or succour.

On entering the drab, ill-equipped 10-bed leukemia ward, the sight of two empty beds brought a moment of cheer - but only until it was explained that their occupants had died in the previous 48 hours.

Dr Janan, who has worked at Basra for 19 years, said the child leukemia figures for last year represented a 600 per cent increase since the year before Desert Storm.

Most cases - she has pictures of the children strewn on her desk - come from the border village of Safwan, a windswept, dusty last stop on the road to Kuwait.

And here is a hospital at which the leukemia sufferers have whole heads of hair, because the hospital does not have the drugs which might treat the cancer but which invariably cause the patients' hair to fall out.

Then the doctor takes the deformity book from her bookcase. The pictures are appalling - children with grossly oversized heads and no limbs, with whole sets of organs outside their body, with no facial features except a single over-sized eye.

"Last week we had three leukemia deaths and five of these births," she said. "They all died too. And of the 1,200 births we had here last year 221 were deformed. We have had 20 in the last month, whereas we used to have one or two such cases a year.

"In most cases their fathers served in the military. If we had a specialist laboratory we'd be able to take samples and prove the link to DU; we do not have the formal and professionally proved link, but I'm sure it is the cause of all this, not because of its chemical toxicity but because of the radioactivity."

Dr Jawad, the cancer specialist, is impatient, but his promise of 10 minutes becomes 40 minutes as he outlines the cancer epidemic.

He said: "The figures are even more troubling if you look at the mortality rate - in 1988 we had 11 deaths per 100,000 people in Basra; in 2000 we had 83 deaths per 100,000 people. That is an increase of 7.5.

"We also have to deal with a rare development - family clusters of cancer cases. There is a family with eight cases [only the Herald's efforts to identify the family brought forward the admission that it was his wife's] and another with six cases. There is a number of families also that have two or three cases.

"The graphs are getting steeper and more alarming. I have looked at the geographical distribution of cancer in relation to the areas where the DU was used [only a few kilometres from the city].

"There has been a significant increase in lung cancer near it, and leukemia has increased further to the north, where the Qurna winds come in off the Gulf and blow the desert dust.

"I don't know what we are to do. The area is 2,000 square kilometres, and that's too big to decontaminate. And there are many farmers still living in there.

"It's a great problem for the French and the Italians because one or two of their soldiers have died. But where does that leave me? I've had 400 or more die."

That's the extent of Dr Jawad's foray into propaganda before he agrees to talk about his wife.

"The thing about these family clusters is that they cannot be put down as hereditary because there are different cancers within the clusters. In my wife's family there is leukemia, there is breast cancer, there is colonic cancer and there is Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"My wife is 47 years old. She is complaining of pain but she is refusing to have an ultrasound or to allow me or anyone else to examine her. She says she will die without a diagnosis."

Dr Hooda Amash, Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Baghdad, claims that the evidence is compelling, but she too wants a formal and detailed study into the link between the illnesses and exposure to DU.

In her city pathology practice, above the din of a teeming city market, she said: "I want to deal in academically proven facts. But the evidence appears to be compelling.

"Geographic - the cancer increases are across the country, but mostly in the south; nothing was done to clean up the area - tanks and other vehicles are still there producing radiation and pollution; the types of cancers - the ones that have increased are the ones that are associated with radiation."

She warns that after last week's 10th anniversary of the Gulf War, Iraq could be on the verge of an even more dramatic increase in some of the cancers, in the same way that the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were affected 10 years after they were bombed.

US authorities argued that Gulf Syndrome could have been caused by the vaccines given to coalition servicemen in the Gulf, she said. But this could not be said of the Iraqi victims, because they had not been vaccinated.

Other worrying trends that were becoming apparent were an increase in spontaneous miscarriages and miscarriages late in pregnancy.

UN sources in Baghdad said that when the Iraqis had first raised the alarming statistics from the south, they had been dismissed as propaganda.

Work is being done on the subject by various agencies of the UN in the Middle East and in the Balkans. Two preliminary reports are due to be published in the next few weeks.

Despite this, some medical experts in Iraq and UN staff in Baghdad share a fear that some countries, notably the US and Britain, are reluctant for the research teams to get the funds or resources needed to arrive at an effective conclusion.

Their fears are based on the British and US insistence that there is no link between exposure to DU and Gulf Syndrome and two sets of formal advice issued to workers who might be exposed - by the British Ministry of Defence to its servicemen and a memo to UN staff around the world.

The UN memo says that the World Health Organisation does not have sufficient information on exposure to DU in the Gulf or the Balkans to make firm conclusions, and that areas of high concentrations of DU should be cordoned off.

The British advice to its servicemen in 1999 was: "Do not climb on or enter a damaged hard target or loiter within 50 metres, do not eat, drink or smoke near the damaged vehicle."

Some Iraqis express the hope that the pressure from Italy and Germany in particular will force a complete investigation into the impact of DU on servicemen in the Gulf from which they can interpolate the impact on the people of southern Iraq.

A senior UN staffer in Baghdad said: "A lot of my colleagues are worried by the possible effect on them, and they are only mildly reassured by that memo from headquarters."

--------

Lie of the millennium?

By Felicity Arbuthnot
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 March 2001 (Cairo)

On 9 January this year, the United Kingdom's Armed Forces Minister John Spellar addressed parliament regarding concerns over the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons. For those who have followed the issue since these weapons were used in the 1991 Gulf War, his assertions that the harmful impact on the civilian population attributed to DU were grossly exaggerated were astonishing. Whether he was dramatically misled by his advisers or influenced by the "special relationship" that the UK has with Washington, he was being extremely economical with the truth.

The UN Sub-Committee on Minorities and Human Rights has charged three times that these are weapons of mass destruction, which bolsters the case for eventual compensation claims - expected to run into the billions of dollars - by countries where they have been used or tested and by civilians and soldiers for illnesses linked to DU exposure.

Just 10 months after the Gulf War, Iraqi doctors were already bewildered by the rise in rare cancers and birth deformities. At the time, it was not known that DU weapons had been used in the war, but the doctors were already comparing their new cases to those they had seen in textbooks related to nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1950s.

In Basra, the main city of southern Iraq which was in the eye of "desert storm," paediatrician Dr Jenan Hussein has completed a thesis comparing the cancers and birth deformities seen in Iraq with those following the bombing of Hiroshima. Cancers, leukaemias and malignancies - all of which have been linked to DU - have risen by 70 per cent since 1991. Experts say that DU has entered the food chain via the water table and soil.

Death stalks children of Basra from the moment of birth. The unimaginable can be found: babies with twisted limbs, or without any limbs, eyes, or brain - or even without a head. "If you are not prone to fainting, I will show you a baby born just an hour ago," Dr Jenan said during one of my visits. The tiny infant had no eyes, nose, tongue, oesophagus, or genitalia. The impossibly twisted legs were joined by a thick web of flesh. "We see many similar cases," she said.

Having seen the result of their use, it is not difficult to understand why former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark considers the use of DU weapons a "criminal act."

Gulf War veterans began showing signs of illness just months after the war. Their search for treatment and answers has been met with bureaucratic stonewalling and lies. As the veterans, sick and dying, have attempted to find answers for themselves in the UK, their homes have been raided by police from the Ministry of Defence (MOD).

A 1996 survey of US Gulf War veterans in the small Mississippi town of McGann showed that out of 267 families questioned, 67 per cent of children conceived after their fathers had returned from the Gulf had rare birth deformities.

That both the British and American authorities knew of the dangers of DU and ignored them is beyond doubt.

DU weapons were born of greed. Depleted uranium is essentially a waste product of the nuclear industry. Since no one wants it in their backyard and its disposal is hugely costly, it was given free to the weapons industry to be used as core and coating for bullets, missiles and tanks.

"Depleted uranium is a radioactive waste and as such should be deposited in a licensed repository," according to a June 1995 statement by the US Army Environmental Policy Institute.

At no point does it advise its use on mosques, schools, hospitals, radio stations or a Chinese embassy.

"Basically, DU missiles are just cylinders of nuclear waste with fins," comments Angus Parker, a sick veteran and former expert technician at Britain's Porton Down weapons establishment, who was deployed in the Gulf with the First Field Laboratory Unit.

A spokesperson for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) told Al- Ahram Weekly of its astonishment upon discovering that these weapons had been used in the Gulf. Uninformed by the government at the time of the war, the UKAEA only learned of the use of DU weapons from reports in the media. So alarmed was the UKAEA that it sent a report to the Ministry of Defence in April 1991, warning of a health and environmental catastrophe. They estimated that if 50 tonnes of DU dust were left over from the impact of DU weapons, there could be in excess of half a million deaths from cancer in the region within 10 years.

The Pentagon confirms that 320 tonnes of DU dust remain in Iraq. Some scientists estimate there could be as much as 900 tonnes. The UKAEA paper, entitled "Kuwait - Depleted Uranium Contamination," states: "DU can become a long-term problem if not dealt with and is a risk to both the military and civilian population." The UKAEA calculations indicate a significant problem. Further localised contamination of vehicles and soil may exceed permissible limits and this would be hazardous to both clean-up teams and the local population. Inhalation of DU dust particles can lead to unacceptable body burdens, putting the public at risk. DU is dangerous whether taken into the body by ingestion or by contamination of a cut. Furthermore, DU entering the food chain or water magnifies potential health problems. DU remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years.

That the UK government has long been aware of the unique contamination that DU represents was displayed in a rare moment of glasnost by UK Armed Forces Minister Lord Gilbert on 2 March 1998, when he referred to a letter written on 30 April 1991 - two months after the Gulf War - by P G E Bartholomew, business development manager at UKAEA. "I promised to produce a threat paper on the contamination of Kuwait from depleted uranium used by the US and UK forces in the recent war. [The paper] covers the threat and outlines the action we believe is necessary for health safety," Bartholomew's letter reads. "The whole subject of the contamination of Kuwait is emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner. It is necessary to inform the Kuwait government of the problem in a useful way."

"This poisoned chalice," suggests the letter, "should be handed to the luckless British ambassador in Kuwait. (The good news is that we've saved you from Saddam - the bad news is...)."

Kuwait, it seems, had been saved from Saddam, but along with Iraq and the veterans of the war would live with the consequences - sickness and genetic defects - for generations.

Leonard Dietz, an eminent nuclear expert based in New York, has passed another enlightening letter to Al-Ahram Weekly. Dated 15 August 1991, the letter is a response to Dietz from the Office of the Director of Defence Research and Engineering at the Department of Defence in Washington. "You posed the question of the probability that lung cancer could develop after the inhalation of depleted uranium. As you are no doubt well aware, since the material is a source of ionising radiation, the potential for carcinogicity is real," the letter states. "The same holds true for nephro-toxicity protection, which requires a much lower ambient concentration in drinking water or foodstuffs." The letter, signed by the Military Assistant for Medical and Life Sciences, concludes: "Let me assure you that we feel that your concern, which parallels our own, is real and we thank you for sharing that with us."

After the Gulf War, it is the turn of the Balkans - its population and the soldiers who served there - to live the DU tragedy. Seven Italian peace-keepers have already died of leukaemia. Dr Chris Busby, head of Britain's Low Level Radiation Campaign, has estimated that the relative radiation risk to the Italian peace-keepers in Kosovo (closest to the most contaminated area) is 17 times the "safe" limit. Other countries with military personnel deployed in the Balkans during the conflict with Yugoslavia all report unusual illnesses and have begun to screen soldiers.

On the day ground troops were sent into the Balkans, this correspondent asked the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) if we would soon see an epidemic of "Balkans War syndrome," since DU weapons were again being used despite the overwhelming evidence of the danger they represented. "Absolutely not," responded the MOD spokesperson. "The armed forces minister has given the strictest instructions that no service personnel must approach anything which might have been hit by DU - and if it were unavoidable they must wear full radiological protective clothing."

What about the returning refugees? What about Iraq? Was a different sort of DU being used in the Balkans, since the MOD had consistently denied any link between the health disaster in Iraq and the pattern of illness among Gulf War veterans? For the MOD, refugees were not its problem and it insisted that DU, Gulf War syndrome and Iraq were not linked.

Yet peace-keeping troops in Kosovo now have their food and water flown in.

Refugees have, it seems, returned to a poisoned land and, as in Iraq and Kuwait, generations yet unborn will pay the price. Macedonia, the poorest of the Balkan states, took in a million refugees during the 1998 Balkans War only to find out that 10 tonnes of DU debris had contaminated their land. The Macedonians have collected it and are considering returning it to NATO. Belgrade's Centre for Radiobiology and Radiation Protection has reported that radiation in Macedonia is eight times that of pre-1998 levels.

Albania, where two American A-10 helicopters equipped with DU weapons crashed, can be added to the list of countries made radioactive and chemically toxic by DU. It is now another place where parents and their children have nowhere to hide. Following the Balkans War, the Albanian president awarded NATO spokesman Jamie Shea and US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the country's highest honours. The ceremony referred to Shea, who defended NATO actions to a worldwide audience, as a "face of truth and hope." Albania may soon want to ask for the trophies back. The full extent of the contamination of the Balkans is still unknown - radiation does not stop at borders.

Meanwhile, in Kuwait City, just a few kilometres from Basra, on the day Kuwait hosted a reception for senior US military and government personnel active in the Gulf War, Kuwait's First Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah said the Western allied forces had left no nuclear radiation after the war. "I am sure the Kuwaiti territories are free of these radiations," Al-Sabah told the Kuwait News Agency. Professor Doug Rokke, the Pentagon expert who devised the clean-up for Kuwait, has told Al-Ahram Weekly that this is simply "impossible" and that the clean-up was, in fact, never completed. Half of his team has died of DU- related illnesses and the other half, including himself, is desperately sick - with the exception of the only team member who insisted on wearing full radiological protective clothing, despite the heat.

The reasoning behind the ongoing campaign of deception is made clearer by a Los Alamos National Laboratory (the same lab that developed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) memo entitled "The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators." Dated 1 March 1991, the day after the Gulf cease-fire and the day before the slaughter on the Basra road using DU weapons, the memo is from a Lt Colonel Larson to a Major Ziehman. "There is a relatively small amount of lethality data for uranium penetrators... The recent war has likely multiplied the number of DU rounds fired at targets by orders of magnitude. There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment," Larson's memo reads. "Therefore if no one makes the case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and therefore be deleted from the arsenal," it continues. The memo ends: "I believe we should keep this sensitive issue in mind when, after action, reports are written."

Dr Jenan in Basra is more concerned about her patients than about kill-rates: "I want the world to know what has happened here." The time for lying is over. Those responsible should face up to the enormity of their actions. A clean-up of this truly genocidal material, wherever it contaminates, must be undertaken at once. And we must ensure that it is never used again.

* The writer is a British-based journalist who has written extensively on the impact of DU and was nominated by Amnesty International as humanitarian journalist of the year. She has recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq

-------- korea

Bush's Unnecessary Lesson

Christian Science Monitor
MARCH 15, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/03/15/fp8s1-csm.shtml

After splashing into the fishbowl that is the White House, a new president is forced to acquire an education in public. In his early lessons, George W. Bush has learned from his few mistakes, and mostly corrected them.

But last week Mr. Bush stumbled, and needs a rapid recovery. He rashly reversed the US stance toward North Korea and cut off talks. The North then cut off talks with the South. And a downward spiral began on the Korean peninsula, the hottest remnant of the cold war.

Bush's action now runs the risk that the hermit nation's testy tyrant, Kim Jong Il, will resume making the nuclear material and missiles that could reach American shores. At the least, if Mr. Kim restarts his weapons program, it could destabilize the delicate military balance in Northeast Asia.

A little known fact is that soon after the North's secret nuclear program was uncovered in the early 1990s, the Pentagon made fresh preparations for war. By 1994, however, the US had a deal with North Korea to mothball the graphite reactor in Yongbyon that had produced bomb-grade material. A few years later, after one North Korean missile flew over Japan, the US was also able to have the North shelve its missile program.

Steady diplomatic engagement with Kim and offers of food, oil, and two "safe" nuclear power plants (along with a little help from China) have helped to begin luring the North out of its explosive cave. That must not stop.

Bush risks ending that process because of a deep distrust of the North and its past behavior. There's only one problem: North Korea will not let the United States ignore it. The North fears for its survival and could restart its weapons program in weeks.

Bush also risks creating a perception among US allies that he may actually want a North Korean missile threat to justify his expensive plans for a nuclear missile defense system. That view is a bit too cynical. But in foreign affairs, perceptions count.

To give Bush the benefit of the doubt, it may be that his foreign policy advisers still haven't fully reviewed US policy toward North Korea. Once they have, they will come around to the logic that drove the Clinton administration to use "soft" engagement and cooperation to achieve a temporary halt to the North's dangerous developments, while still maintaining the trong US military deterrence that has existed for decades.

North Korea isn't so much a state as it is a cult of personality built around Kim Jong Il, notes the recent US ambassador to Seoul, Stephen Bosworth, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

In dealing with a personality-driven state, the US must avoid raising Kim's fears while offering incentives to save his country from famine and poverty.

In his weakness, Kim can act irrationally. But after he concentrated his small resources into big-power weapons, the US was able to coax him to go down a different path. Why push him back into his old ways?

---

North Korea Turns Up the Heat;
Calls U.S. a Nation of Cannibals

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15KORE.html

SEOUL, South Korea, March 14 - North Korea today issued one of its toughest warnings against the United States since relations with South Korea began to thaw after the North-South summit meeting last year.

The North has been ratcheting up its criticism since President Bush, in talks with the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, in Washington last week, expressed "skepticism" about the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il.

The Bush administration has cited a threat from North Korea as a large part of the reason for its determination to push ahead with building a missile shield. And Mr. Bush said he was concerned about "verification" of any agreement with North Korea under which it might pledge to give up efforts to develop missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Today, calling the United States "a cannibals' nation" and charging the Bush administration with "escalating its provocative and reckless diatribe" against the North, the Communists pledged a "thousandfold revenge" if "the U.S. imperialists turn to confrontation."

The announcement, using language that was typical of the North's tone until last year, came in an editorial titled "Don't Make a Mistake," broadcast on national radio and in the Workers' Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun.

The editorial was issued a day after the North deeply disappointed South Korean officials by canceling, with an hour's notice and without explanation, cabinet-level meetings that were to have taken place here this week as part of a broadening of contacts.

On Thursday, the two sides plan their first exchange of letters between members of 300 families separated since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Today the border between the two Koreas is among the most heavily militarized on the planet, secured by some 37,000 American troops.

A spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry made a cautious prediction that the letter exchange would go off as scheduled.

A successful letter exchange, officials said, might signal that the North wants to continue the reconciliation that began with the summit meeting last June.

A South Korean official, acknowledging that analysts were still "puzzled" by the North's intentions, said cancellation of this week's talks had "greatly embarrassed" Kim Dae Jung, the guiding force behind efforts at reconciliation.

"Nobody knows what to think," the official said. "It is a blow to everything the government has been doing."

The opposition Grand National Party, which holds the largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly, charged that the North, by stepping up a propaganda offensive against the United States, hoped to bring about direct negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, bypassing Seoul.

---

North Korea slams Bush stance

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001315214813.htm

North Korea yesterday criticized the Bush administration for its tough stand in recent days, setting up a confrontation that analysts said could produce an early test of the new U.S. policy team's resolve.

The two countries now are "eyeball to eyeball," with each side testing the other to see who needs the other more or who will be frightened first, former national security official Douglas Paal said.

North Korea's Radio Pyongyang interrupted regular broadcasts yesterday to warn: "The more that the United States takes uncompromising actions against our country, the more we will be uncompromising toward them.

"If the U.S. imperialist aggressors attack our people, they must be aware that they will have to pay a high price," the announcer added, according to the Radio Press monitoring agency in Tokyo.

North Korea already had canceled scheduled ministerial talks with South Korea without explanation this week.

The Bush administration has cited the threat of a North Korean missile attack on the United States, or on U.S. forces and allies in Asia, as a justification for building a missile defense system.

President Bush himself said last week that he was in no hurry to resume talks with North Korea on its missile development and proliferation. He also said the U.S. government would demand that all agreements with the North be fully verifiable.

The president's critical comments about the communist regime in Pyongyang were a sharp departure from warming relations the North experienced recently with the Clinton administration and with South Korea.

The Bush administration was "provocative and reckless. . . . This is a blatant challenge," the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun said, according to Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency.

The newspaper added that North Korea "will never allow anyone to violate its pride and dignity and challenge it. If the U.S. imperialists dare turn to confrontation with the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea], the army and people of the DPRK will take thousandfold revenge on them."

Mr. Paal, a Republican, said that every new administration is tested by the North Koreans to see how much the communist regime can get out of the U.S. government.

"The North needs the outside more than we need them," he said. "We have deterrence against them. They need food, assistance and international recognition. They will see if they can frighten us like the last administration and see what they can get for it."

But North Korea could respond to the Bush cold shoulder "by starting military adventures over the 38th parallel - there is no way to know how far things will escalate," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

"They have missiles with chemical and probably biological warheads. We've got 37,000 troops with limited combat capability along the border.

"They can escalate their nuclear weapons program. They can escalate their missiles [production and deployment]. They can fire a couple of rounds over Japan," Mr. Cordesman said. "There's a good range of mischief they can do."

North Korea shocked Japanese officials in 1998 by test-firing a Taepo Dong missile that crossed over Japan before heading over the western Pacific.

Mr. Paal, head of the Asia Pacific Policy Center, said the U.S. policy that emerged during last week's visit to Washington by South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung was not as hard-line as the media made it seem.

"The Bush administration did not take a hard line," Mr. Paal said in an interview. "They supported President Kim [Dae-jung]'s sunshine policy" of trying to engage North Korea.

"They supported inter-Korean dialogue and they supported the KEDO Framework Agreement," he said.

KEDO - the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization - is using South Korean and Japanese funds to build twin nuclear power plants for the North.

"All they did," Mr. Paal said of Bush administration officials, "is not run breathlessly after North Korea to get them to do what we want them to do."

A former Reagan administration national security official said the shift by the Bush team was badly needed because the North Koreans were blackmailing the United States to obtain food and other aid.

Under the 1994 Framework Agreement, the United States, Japan and South Korea agreed to provide the impoverished North with twin nuclear power plants and fuel oil. In return, the North shut down nuclear facilities believed to have produced enough bomb fuel for one or two nuclear weapons.

-------

Shadow on 'Sunshine Policy'

Washington Post
Thursday, March 15, 2001; Page A03
By Mary Mcgrory
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6768-2001Mar14.html

President Bush's shabby treatment of Kim Dae Jung of South Korea remains a mystery, but the first political returns are in: North Korea, obviously bent on rubbing in Kim's humiliation in the Oval Office, has canceled scheduled peace negotiations with Seoul.

Outside the White House, Kim Dae Jung is much admired. He is seen as a great man, in a class with Nelson Mandela, another valiant visionary who endured a lifetime of sacrifice and suffering to realize a patriotic dream. Kim's breakthrough visit to North Korea won him the Nobel Peace Prize -- but not, for some reason, the regard of George W. Bush.

Not only did the president withhold his endorsement of Kim's risky but promising "sunshine policy" to bring the two Koreas together, he went out of his way, in body English to convey how cross and bored he was with his visitor.

It was a day for a double whammy: The president also felled his own secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had announced the day before the meeting that he expected to pick up where the Clinton administration left off in its talks to persuade Kim Jong Il, the paranoid chief of North Korea, to renounce production of nuclear weapons. There would be no negotiations, Bush said icily, until his administration has reviewed the North Korean situation.

Baffled observers on Capitol Hill speculated that Bush was really mad at Powell for nudging him into a position he was not ready to take. But others think he was really sore at Kim Dae Jung over a joint declaration he issued in Seoul with visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin in defense of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- which of course Bush longs to shred because it forbids the deployment of the foreign policy project closest to his heart, the nuclear missile defense system.

Arms control advocates accuse Bush of turning his back on a rare opportunity to stabilize the wildly rocking North Korea, which put manufacture of nuclear weapons ahead of feeding its people. Spurgeon Keeney of the Arms Control Association says Bush is "trying to build up the case for building an extremely expensive and provocative system that doesn't work -- it's madness."

Democrats who were startled and puzzled by the diplomatic debacle of March 7 had nothing to say. They are cowed these days, and only Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, protested. He said he was disappointed at Bush's failure to signal that he is "willing to talk and negotiate if certain things happen as opposed to emphasizing that these guys are bad guys, period." North Korea's cancellation of further talks with the south, Biden thinks, is dangerous and could ratchet up the situation "to the point where it could get out of hand."

President Clinton's first national security adviser, Tony Lake, thinks there has a been a good deal of "over-thinking" in theories about Bush's motives and strategy in the put-down of Kim Dae Jung. He thinks that what it all means is that the Bush team, despite its vaunted reputation for management expertise, just hasn't got its act together on Asian policy. He thinks in the end that Powell's sensible suggestions about exploring "the many promising aspects that turned up" in the Clinton talks should be pursued.

Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser during the hectic final weeks in office, thinks that what the commotion signifies is what he delicately calls "the instinct against continuity that new administrations suffer from." In this case, that involves a tacit admission that Clinton might have been on the right track. Berger says that Bush's suspicions about bristling, bellicose North Korea are well-founded.

Kim Jong Il is universally regarded as a piece of work -- he is psychopathically secretive and his country is a shambles. But he trusts that Powell will prevail, and that in time the Bush administration will settle down with his formula. Kim Jong Il will take a great deal of hand-holding and schmoozing -- something Clintonites were superlatively good at, but not very viable options in an administration that prides itself on being tough with commie tyrants. In the last hours of Clinton's term, Clinton was torn between a dash to Israel and a dash to Korea, and in the end went to neither place. "We were not close to an agreement," Berger says.

Bush has gotten bad reviews for his first major foreign policy encounter. If he is to redeem himself from charges of making policy in a petulant and petty manner, he will have to say something nice about Kim Dae Jung and his "sunshine policy." It won't be enough not to be Bill Clinton if he's seen as prizing a gadget in outer space over world peace.

-------- missile defense

Bush's Missile Shield at Heart of Asian Diplomacy

Inside China Today
Mar 15, 2001
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=310878

SEOUL -- (Reuters) U.S. President George W. Bush's ambitious plan for a missile defense shield is emerging as a central issue in Washington's diplomacy towards Asia.

An attack from a "rogue state" such as North Korea, which has missiles that could possibly deliver doomsday weapons, is a key argument for building the yet-to-be-designed shield that would protect the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

China regards such a shield as a threat and some fear it could trigger a build-up of the small Chinese nuclear arsenal.

That could provoke India, which fought a border war with China in 1962, and in turn, stimulate a response from Pakistan. The subcontinent has already seen three wars between the neighbors.

The missile defense issue will also help define America's relationship with Japan, which has been busy upgrading its Self Defense Forces since neighboring North Korea stunned the region by test-firing a missile that flew over Japan in August, 1998.

The Bush administration has indicated its missile shield plans are designed to protect not only U.S. territory but American troops abroad -- including those in Korea and Japan.

Tokyo said it was studying a regional missile shield with Washington. Seoul has expressed ambivalence about the idea.

BILATERAL APPROACH TO ASIA

Japan's economic and political malaise has forced it to the sidelines in Asian affairs for the time being.

But the Bush administration has identified America's bilateral alliances, and particularly the relationship with Japan, as the foundation of its approach to Asia.

That would adjust the axis of Asian diplomacy away from a perceived tilt toward Beijing during the Clinton administration and back towards Tokyo, analysts said.

Japan and the United States have boosted their military alliance in recent years, a move that has unnerved China, and Japanese officials say Bush will press Japan to play a greater military role in the region.

Bush may give less emphasis to Asia's alphabet soup of multilateral bodies, such as the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum for defense issues, analysts said.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said Washington prefers to coordinate policies in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, with its Australian ally.

SEOUL TO LEAD ON NORTH KOREA

The United States, which maintains some 75,000 troops in Korea and Japan, made it clear last week it will let Seoul take the lead in bringing North Korea out of its Cold War isolation.

The Bush administration has called for concrete progress on reducing North Korea's formidable conventional forces as part of the quid pro quo for improving ties.

Most of North Korea's one million strong army is in forward deployment along the North-South border, the world's most militarized frontier and the Cold War's last flashpoint.

Kim Sung-han of Seoul's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security is among those suggesting Washington may be stressing this point "to divert international attention from the North Korean missile program".

"This may be because the apparent resolution of the North Korean missile problem could become an obstacle" to pushing ahead with the U.S. missile shield, Kim said.

Pyongyang demonstrated its unhappiness with President Kim Dae-jung's inability to enlist Washington in the campaign to engage North Korea by abruptly canceling cabinet-level talks with the South, scheduled for this week in Seoul.

Deploying rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, Pyongyang on Tuesday denounced the U.S. missile defense plan.

"If the U.S. imperialists dare turn to confrontation with the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), the army and the people of the the DPRK will take thousand-fold revenge on them," said Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers' party newspaper.

During their talks in Washington last week, Bush told Kim Dae-jung -- the first Asian leader to meet the new U.S. president -- he supported Kim's "sunshine policy" of broad engagement with the North.

But the Republican president, who has to answer to an anti-communist right wing in his party, said he did not trust North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and had no plans to resume talks on ending North Korea's missile program.

The subtext of Bush's message to Pyongyang seems to be the road to Washington runs through Seoul, not the other way around, and communist states, especially the North's, can't be trusted.

North Korean diplomacy has always aimed at settling issues regarding the divided peninsula directly with Washington in order to marginalize South Korea and lay claim to being the legitimate successor to an ancient Korean nation.

The Bush brush-off may infuriate Pyongyang into resorting to its peculiar brand of blackmail diplomacy: Brandish a nuclear threat to get electricity, fire a missile to get food.

"If the past is any guide, do not be surprised if Pyongyang tries to provoke a crisis," Robert Manning, director of Asian Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, wrote recently.

That would sorely test Kim Dae-jung's sunshine policy, which saw vindication in his breakthrough summit with Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang last June. That event marked the first time Seoul assumed center stage in the peninsula's great power theater.

But the political risks are high for the South's Kim, who won last year's Nobel peace prize largely for his reconciliation efforts. Public support for his sunshine policy is waning as the perception grows the benefits have been too one-sided in favor of the North.

The issue will be a key one in next year's presidential election. And Kim, barred by the constitution from running for a second five-year term, has to convince a conservative electorate that staying the sunshine course will pay dividends in the end.

He also has to persuade Kim Jong-il to stick to the plan of holding a return summit later this year in South Korea and get Pyongyang to the bargaining table for talks that would end the half-century state of war on the peninsula.

That would go a long way towards convincing Washington the North Korean tiger is indeed changing its stripes.

-------

U.S. mulls selling weapons to Taiwan

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/15/2001
By JOHN LEICESTER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406399030

BEIJING (AP) - China has about 300 missiles that can strike Taiwan and appears to be adding about 50 more each year _ a buildup that if continued might prompt Washington to boost Taiwan's defenses with high-tech weapons, the commander of U.S. Pacific forces said Thursday.

Just weeks before Washington decides on what weapons to sell Taiwan this year, Admiral Dennis C. Blair said Chinese missile deployments could largely determine whether Washington one day sells Taiwan anti-missile systems that Beijing opposes.

``There will be a point at which that missile buildup will threaten the sufficient defense of Taiwan and which it is the United States' policy to maintain,'' Blair said at a briefing Thursday, two days into a six-day visit to China.

``It's important that the Chinese make the connection between what they deploy on their side of the Strait and the types of technologies that the United States might make available to Taiwan to provide for its sufficient defense,'' he said.

U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, a frequent source of friction in China-U.S. ties, are the issue perhaps most likely to disrupt Beijing's efforts to build relations with President Bush.

For China, the Taiwan issue is sacred. The sides split amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing still regards Taiwan as part of its territory to be brought back into the mainland's fold, peacefully if possible.

But U.S. law obliges Washington, a Cold War ally of Taiwan's, to ensure that the island democracy has sufficient weapons to defend itself. Beijing fears that a Taiwan equipped with high-tech armaments could resist pressure for reunification and fight off any attempt to take it by force.

Blair, making his third visit in two years as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, is the most senior American officer to visit since Bush's January inauguration.

Meeting with Blair on Wednesday, the Chinese army's chief of general staff, Fu Quanyou, urged the Bush administration ``to stop arms sales to Taiwan immediately so as to avoid damaging Sino-U.S. relations,'' the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Washington is expected to decide by next month whether to approve Taiwan's weapons requests for this year, including four destroyers equipped with the state-of-the-art Aegis battle system that defends ships against aircraft and missile attacks.

China fears Aegis could form part of a more comprehensive shield to defend Taiwan against missile attack and has specifically warned Washington not to sell it.

Blair said Aegis, as it exists now, does not defend against ballistic missiles. But he acknowledged that Aegis will be a platform for anti-missile systems under development.

China has expressed vehement opposition to providing technology for a theater missile defense to Taiwan. It also says that a proposed National Missile Defense system to protect the United States from attack by rogue states will start a new arms race and undermine China's nuclear deterrent.

Missile defense is expected to be discussed when China's senior leader for foreign policy, Vice Premier Qian Qichen, visits the United States next week.

The Foreign Ministry's arms control director said Wednesday that China wants talks to ``narrow our differences'' with Washington over the system.

Blair suggested that China's objections were based on an oversimplified understanding of the technologies involved.

He said that on previous visits he provided Chinese officials with detailed explanations of the various U.S. anti-missile systems under development, but ``did not get much of sense that they were drawing distinctions.''

``Anything that had (missile defense) in it was considered bad and anything that didn't was considered good. It was a fairly simplistic notion,'' he said. ``So I welcome any more sophisticated discussions of these kinds of systems.''

---

China warns U.S. not to arm Taiwan

San Jose Mercury News
Thursday, March 15, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News
BY MICHAEL DORGAN Mercury News Beijing Bureau
mailto:mdorgan@sjmercury.com

http://www0.mercurycenter.com/cgi-bin/edtools/printpage/printpage_ba.cgi

BEIJING -- China's top arms-control official Wednesday strongly warned the Bush administration that it would seriously damage relations with Beijing if it sold advance warships to Taiwan.

The Bush administration is scheduled to make the annual decision on arms sales to Taiwan next month.

Sha Zukang, director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of Arms Control, also accused the United States of exaggerating the missile threat it faces. He said the proposed national missile-defense system strongly backed by the Bush administration would have ``far-reaching negative consequences for the international security environment.''

Vice Premier Qian Qichen, Beijing's most senior foreign-policy official, will argue China's views on missile defense and arms sales to Taiwan next week on a visit to Washington to meet with the Bush administration's senior foreign-policy team.

China for decades has opposed all U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway part of its territory. But it is particularly worried about Taiwan's request to buy four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers outfitted with Tomahawk cruise missiles and Aegis radar systems that can track more than 100 airborne targets simultaneously.

The sale would be regarded in China as a first step by the United States to develop a theater missile-defense system in Asia that could provide Taiwan protective cover against a missile attack by China.

Any Arleigh Burke-class destroyers destined for Taiwan would not be available for six to 10 years. Taiwan also is asking for Kidd-class destroyers to fill the gap until then, diesel submarines, P-3 submarine hunting aircraft and a variety of advanced air-defense and communications equipment.

Taiwan has functioned as an independent nation ever since the Chinese Nationalists fled there in 1949 after their defeat by the communists in a civil war. China wants peaceful reunification, but has threatened to take Taiwan by force if it formally declares independence or indefinitely delays negotiations on reunification, or if any third country interferes.

``Any sale is bad enough, but if I'm allowed to make a comparison, Aegis is the worst,'' Sha said at a briefing. ``It's really a very, very serious issue.''

Although Bush has not made a decision, he is widely expected to sell Taiwan weapons, perhaps including the Aegis system, which the Clinton administration turned down.

``I have no doubt that the new administration will approve a number of long-delayed requests for Taiwan,'' Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who is chair of the House International Relations Committee, said recently.

Many of Bush's top foreign-policy advisers are known for their pro-Taiwan sentiments, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Deputy Secretary of State-designate Richard Armitage; and John Bolton, nominee for undersecretary of state for arms control.

Bates Gill, an Asia security specialist at the Brookings Institution, predicted that the Bush team would show ``a stronger willingness'' to provide weapons systems to Taiwan that come much closer to the limits of the Chinese government's tolerance.

But Gill said that despite the rhetoric, China's reaction will depend on whether U.S. weapons sales embolden Taiwanese leaders to press for independence.

``China can swallow a lot as long as the window is open, and maybe even widening'' for talks on reunification, he said.

Sha hinted that China might be willing to accept some form of theater missile-defense system designed to protect U.S. military forces. But China strenuously opposes any system that protects Taiwan.

President Bush and key Cabinet officials strongly support developing a national missile-defense system to protect the United States from attack by such countries as North Korea, Iraq and Iran. The technology has not been worked out, and no cost estimates have been given.

Many countries, including Russia and France, have criticized the proposal, arguing that it would undermine the global strategic balance and stability. But China is shaping up to be the most formidable opponent.

The world's other four major nuclear powers -- Britain, France, Russia and the United States -- have large stockpiles of missiles. China has only 20 or so nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. China fears a national missile-defense system capable of intercepting all of its missiles would neutralize their deterrent value.

``We are against NMD not because we intend to threaten the security of the U.S. with our nuclear weapons,'' Sha said. ``We just hope that the existing mutual deterrence between the two countries can be preserved.''

Sha said the proposed missile-defense system would not be merely defensive and predicted that its deployment would trigger a new arms race. He also warned that China would not leave itself vulnerable.

Warren P. Strobel of the Mercury News Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

---

Beijing Eases Stand On Missile Defense
Change Comes Ahead of U.S. Visit

Washington Post
Thursday, March 15, 2001; Page A21
By John Pomfret Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/asia/A6812-2001Mar14.html

BEIJING, March 15 (Thursday) -- China signaled a softening in its opposition to U.S.plans for national and theater missile defenses, saying it looked forward to discussing the issues during a visit to Washington next week by its top diplomat.

Sha Zukang, the chief Chinese arms negotiator, reiterated opposition to a national antimissile shield Wednesday, saying its deployment would constitute "unilateral nuclear expansion." However, Sha added that China wants to narrow its differences with the Bush administration over its plans to create a system to protect the United States from a limited missile attack.

Adm. Dennis C. Blair, Commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, who was visiting Beijing today, welcomed Sha's more moderate tone.

Sha, known to U.S. diplomats for his blunt style, also announced that China would not contest U.S. plans to deploy an Asian theater missile defense system to protect U.S. troops there. China has previously stridently opposed the plan.

Blair welcomed China's distinction between a theater missile defense system and the U.S. national missile plans. "When I discussed these systems with Chinese officials, I did not get much of a sense that they were drawing distinctions," he said. "Anything that had 'MD' in it was bad, and anything that did not was good. So I welcome the distinction they seem to be making."

Sha reiterated, however, that China would view with alarm any U.S. attempts to transfer missile defense technology to Taiwan, the island of 23 million people 100 miles off China's coast that it claims as its territory.

Sha, a seasoned arms control negotiator, was referring to the Aegis radar system mounted on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which the Bush administration is considering selling to Taiwan. A decision on the sale is due next month. "The Aegis is the worst!" Sha said.

Blair said any decision by the U.S. military to sell such a system to Taiwan would depend in large part on China's missile deployments in areas near the island. There are 300 missiles in the region and the Chinese are adding 50 a year, he said.

Blair said he discussed the issue with Gen. Fu Quanyou, China's chief of staff, in a meeting Wednesday. Asked if the general had accepted his arguments, Blair replied, "No, I just got a few Chinese proverbs."

Sha's comments, made at a news conference, were apparently intended to pave the way for Deputy Premier Qian Qichen, the Chinese government's foreign policy dean who is scheduled to visit the United States next week. By depicting its position as flexible, Beijing apparently sought to improve chances for good ties with the Bush administration.

"The U.S. is too big. We cannot kick them to the moon," Sha said. "China has been living on the Earth for at least 5,000 years. We will be here forever."

"We have a love-hate relationship" with the United States, Sha continued. "But we do have a lot of common interests. We want to be their friends. It seems to me that they have the same good intentions."

China also might be responding to signs that Russia and Europe have become more willing to engage the Bush administration on national missile defense. Chinese analysts acknowledge that Beijing is worried about being left out on this issue and is therefore moving quickly to open talks with the United States.

China opposes the Bush administration's missile defense plan because an effective system would undercut China's nuclear deterrent, which is composed of a small number of missiles. However, Sha said even if the system were deployed, China would not necessarily take such radical steps as defying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Sha indirectly threatened to do late last year.

Sha also did not bite when asked if China would move to resume substantial sales of weapons of mass destruction to countries the United States views with concern if the missile shield were deployed, something else he hinted was possible last year.

Most unusual, Sha said China understands U.S. plans to deploy a theater defense to protect its troops in Asia. "There is a gray area here," he said. "China is not opposed to [theater missile defense] . . . to protect troops and military bases."

---

China Willing to Talk About Missile Defenses

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15CHIN.html

BEIJING, March 14 - China's top arms-control negotiator, reiterating the country's opposition to American development of a national missile-defense system or a smaller "theater" system in Asia, said today that China was willing to discuss the proposed antimissile shields with the United States in order to "narrow our differences."

Sha Zukang, director of China's Arms Control and Disarmament Department, called the national missile-defense plan an American attempt "to seek its own absolute security" at the expense of other countries. He also said the presence in Asia of a smaller shield would hurt stability in the region.

But he said China was heartened by the Bush administration's recent assurances that a national missile shield is not meant to neutralize China's ability to defend itself against attack. "China welcomes the statement," he said, "and we are ready to have dialogue and discussions with the Americans."

Mr. Sha's remarks come just days before China's deputy prime minister, Qian Qichen, goes to the United States to meet President Bush, where he is expected to deliver a similar message. China experts said the softer tone may be an attempt to lay the groundwork for that meeting and appears to be part of a broader effort to build trust with the new administration.

"This statement appears to mark a shift from full-on opposition to a willingness to engage in a more open dialogue about the U.S.-China strategic nuclear relationship," said Bates Gill, a Chinese military specialist at the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington. Mr. Gill was part of a nonofficial delegation that recently met with Mr. Sha and heard similar conciliatory remarks.

James Lilley, formerly an ambassador to China who is now with the American Enterprise Institute, said Mr. Sha's remark "is consistent with other feelers we've seen coming out and we should examine them very carefully."

The United States and Japan have already agreed to joint research of a theater missile defense, which would be used to intercept missiles over a more limited area. Such a system, China fears, could be used to shield Taiwan, over which Beijing wishes to regain sovereignty.

China has urged the United States to stop selling arms to Taiwan and it is particularly distressed by the island's request for Arleigh Burke- class destroyers equipped with Aegis radar systems, which Beijing regards as potentially a piece of a theater missile-defense system.

Mr. Sha repeated the country's warnings against the Aegis sale and those warnings were also delivered today to Adm. Dennis Blair, the commander of United States forces in the Pacific, who is visiting Beijing. Mr. Qian is expected to repeat those warnings to Mr. Bush when he visits Washington next week.

"Among the arms they have sold or proposed to sell to Taiwan, Aegis is the worst," said Mr. Sha.

Mr. Sha also said that if Japan put in place a theater system, China would consider it the forward deployment of a potentially larger missile defense for the United States. But China would not object to a theater system that is limited to protecting American troops or ships, he said.

American proposals for a system that would protect all the United States have drawn strong opposition from many countries, most notably Russia and China. The Russians, though, have softened their opposition and last month proposed an alternative missile-defense system to Washington. Now China may be following Russia's lead.

Mr. Sha said China feels particularly disadvantaged because of its limited nuclear arsenal and inability to develop more advanced nuclear warheads because of its adherence to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits countries from testing nuclear bombs.

He said a national missile defense, if pursued, would be tantamount to a unilateral expansion of the United States' nuclear weapons capability because it would neutralize other countries' ability to make defensive strikes in response to an American attack. He also warned that it could trigger a new global arms race.

---

Bush to Visit China in October,
Chinese Prime Minster Says

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15CND-SUMMIT.html

Prime Minister Zhu Rongji announced today that President Bush would pay a state visit to China in October at the invitation of its president Zhang Zemin. Mr. Zhu made the surprise announcement in the course of a rambling response to a Singapore journalist's question at a news conference marking the conclusion of the annual session of the National Peoples Congress, China's parliament.

Mr. Bush had been expected to attend the annual summit meeting of Asian and Pacific leaders, which is being held this year in Shanghai.

"We are very happy that Mr. Bush has accepted Chairman Jiang Zemin's invitation to attend the APEC summit in Shanghai on October 20 this year and at the same time visit Beijing," Mr. Zhu said. "I believe this is a very good opportunity to communicate with each other."

The White House seemed caught off-guard by Mr. Zhu's unexpected announcement. The president's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters at the daily briefing that an invitation from the Chinese leadership was being considered, but he declined to say whether Mr. Bush had accepted it.

"Well, the president is very pleased to have received the invitation to visit China," Mr. Fleischer said. "And we are considering how we can respond at this time. And as soon as we have a formal response, of course, it will be conveyed to the Chinese government, and then we will let you know shortly thereafter."

When a reporter asked whether Mr. Bush might not go to China after all, Mr. Fleischer simply reiterated, "He's very pleased to have received the invitation."

In Beijing, Mr. Zhu gave a somewhat different account, saying that "we have received direct information" that President Bush attached great importance to Sino-American relations and wanted to work together with President Jiang to promote stable and healthy relations between the two countries.

The prime minister said that China had been "clearly informed" that the Bush administration would hew to Washington's standing "one-China" policy, which does which does not recognize Taiwan as a separate country. Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that belongs back with the motherland.

The Chinese prime minister, standing with a mound of flowers behind him and a row of potted pine trees at his back, spoke to a few hundred reporters gathered in a cavernous hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The annual press conference is one of the few occasions at which Chinese leaders speak extemporaneously on live television.

Mr. Zhu began his assessment of Chinese-American relations by saying the Chinese government did not yet know many members of the new Bush administration and that much of what the Chinese leadership had heard was contradictory and needed clarification.

"There are some problems we feel were caused by misunderstandings," Mr. Zhu said, adding that Foreign Minister Qian Qichen's next visit to the United States should improve communications.

"Certainly we have differences," said Mr. Zhu, who cited the Bush administration's characterization of China as a strategic competitor.

The prime minister predicted that China and the United States would work together to shape the 21st century.

Mr. Zhu said he had received a letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell and could "solemnly report to everybody that the communication channel between President Jiang Zemin and President Bush is open and unimpeded."

"They stay in close contact," Mr. Zhu added.

Mr. Zhu reminisced briefly about having spoken with President Bush's father, former President George Bush, whose other previous jobs included representing the United States in Beijing.

The Chinese prime minister then went on to answer the actual question from the reporter from Singapore, about the nuclear missile defense shield that the Bush administration wants to build as a defense against attacks by rogue nations.

Mr. Zhu reiterated that China opposed the construction of an anti-missile system.

---

China may determine U.S. missile sales to Taiwan

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 11:15 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-15-chinamissiles.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/world/031501/china_us.sml

BEIJING (AP) - China has about 300 missiles that can strike Taiwan and appears to be adding about 50 more each year - a buildup that if continued might prompt Washington to boost Taiwan's defenses with high-tech weapons, the commander of U.S. Pacific forces said Thursday.

Just weeks before Washington decides on what weapons to sell Taiwan this year, Admiral Dennis C. Blair said Chinese missile deployments could largely determine whether Washington one day sells Taiwan anti-missile systems that Beijing opposes.

"There will be a point at which that missile buildup will threaten the sufficient defense of Taiwan and which it is the United States' policy to maintain," Blair said at a briefing Thursday, two days into a six-day visit to China.

"It's important that the Chinese make the connection between what they deploy on their side of the Strait and the types of technologies that the United States might make available to Taiwan to provide for its sufficient defense," he said.

U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, a frequent source of friction in China-U.S. ties, are the issue perhaps most likely to disrupt Beijing's efforts to build relations with President Bush.

For China, the Taiwan issue is sacred. The sides split amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing still regards Taiwan as part of its territory to be brought back into the mainland's fold, peacefully if possible.

But U.S. law obliges Washington, a Cold War ally of Taiwan's, to ensure that the island democracy has sufficient weapons to defend itself. Beijing fears that a Taiwan equipped with high-tech armaments could resist pressure for reunification and fight off any attempt to take it by force.

Blair, making his third visit in two years as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, is the most senior American officer to visit since Bush's January inauguration.

Meeting with Blair on Wednesday, the Chinese army's chief of general staff, Fu Quanyou, urged the Bush administration "to stop arms sales to Taiwan immediately so as to avoid damaging Sino-U.S. relations," the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Washington is expected to decide by next month whether to approve Taiwan's weapons requests for this year, including four destroyers equipped with the state-of-the-art Aegis battle system that defends ships against aircraft and missile attacks.

China fears Aegis could form part of a more comprehensive shield to defend Taiwan against missile attack and has specifically warned Washington not to sell it.

Blair said Aegis, as it exists now, does not defend against ballistic missiles. But he acknowledged that Aegis will be a platform for anti-missile systems under development.

China has expressed vehement opposition to providing technology for a theater missile defense to Taiwan. It also says that a proposed National Missile Defense system to protect the United States from attack by rogue states will start a new arms race and undermine China's nuclear deterrent.

Missile defense is expected to be discussed when China's senior leader for foreign policy, Vice Premier Qian Qichen, visits the United States next week.

The Foreign Ministry's arms control director said Wednesday that China wants talks to "narrow our differences" with Washington over the system.

Blair suggested that China's objections were based on an oversimplified understanding of the technologies involved.

He said that on previous visits he provided Chinese officials with detailed explanations of the various U.S. anti-missile systems under development, but "did not get much of sense that they were drawing distinctions."

"Anything that had (missile defense) in it was considered bad and anything that didn't was considered good. It was a fairly simplistic notion," he said. "So I welcome any more sophisticated discussions of these kinds of systems."

---

Bush to visit China in October

USA Tdoay
03/15/2001 - Updated 12:19 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-15-bushchina.htm

BEIJING (AP) - Using his annual news conference to reach out to the United States, Premier Zhu Rongji made a surprise announcement Thursday that President Bush will visit Beijing in October.

Bush had been expected to travel to Shanghai in October to attend a meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders, and Zhu said Bush would also visit China's capital.

But in Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer indicated that a final decision has yet to be made on whether to go to Beijing for a state visit.

"The president is very pleased to have received the invitation," Fleischer said Thursday.

Mary Ellen Countryman, a White House spokeswoman on national security issues, added: "We've been invited to have a state visit. We haven't made a decision yet on whether to accept the invitation."

Speaking to reporters on the closing day of the annual session of China's legislature, Zhu said Beijing wants long-term stable relations with Washington. He noted that the Bush administration had promised not to challenge Beijing's view that Taiwan is a part of China - a crucial issue for Chinese leaders.

At the same time, Zhu also reiterated in relatively mild terms China's opposition to U.S. plans for a national missile defense system.

On another subject, Zhu said that pupils at a school where an explosion killed at least 42 people did at one time make fireworks, although he stuck by the official explanation that a lone madman caused the blast.

Zhu said he ordered China's police chief to send a six-member team to southeastern Fang Lin village to investigate after foreign media quoted parents as saying that fireworks production at the school caused the March 6 blast. Parents said their children had been forced to make fireworks since 1998.

"The investigation will continue until we really get the full picture. But up to now, there is no evidence that can been found to override the conclusion we have already drawn," Zhu said.

The parents' denials that a lone madman caused the blast had threatened to tarnish Zhu's reputation as a straight-talker who eschews the guile and double-talk of communist politics.

---

Beijing anxious for talks on shield

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
By Julie Chao COX NEWS SERVICE
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001315215346.htm

BEIJING - In his first remarks to reporters since the Bush administration took office two months ago pledging to pursue plans for a national missile-defense (NMD) system, China's top arms-control negotiator refrained yesterday from making threats and instead said he hopes to resolve the issue through dialogue.

"China does not want to see a confrontation between China and the U.S. over the NMD issue nor an arms race between the two countries," said Sha Zukang, director-general of the Foreign Ministry's department of arms control and disarmament, speaking at a press conference.

Four days before a Washington visit by Vice Prime Minister Qian Qichen, who will be the highest-ranking Chinese official to meet President Bush, Mr. Sha did not repeat China's previous threats to increase its nuclear arsenal or reconsider its nonproliferation efforts in response to the U.S. plan.

"We hope the U.S. will give up the idea, just as they've done with . . . 'Star Wars,' " he said. "We have a series of existing proposals on the table we're ready to discuss with the U.S."

China and Russia have been the most vocal opponents of the U.S. plan, though several of America's European allies are also against it.

Washington says NMD, which would be designed to detect and track incoming missiles then shoot them down, is necessary to protect itself from so-called "rogue states" such as Iraq and North Korea and is not targeted at China. But Beijing believes the U.S. justification for NMD is "very much an exaggeration."

Mr. Sha said the NMD plan was essentially "a unilateral nuclear expansion" by the United States that could trigger an arms race and "will undoubtedly arouse suspicion and mistrust among major powers, hampering their coordination and cooperation in international security affairs."

He declined to say whether China would change its nuclear-disarmament efforts or increase its military cooperation with Russia if Washington pursues NMD. Mr. Sha would say only that it is still too early to tell, especially since U.S. officials have not spelled out what the missile-defense system would look like.

Asked whether China would withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty if Washington pursues NMD, Mr. Sha said he was opposed to linking the two issues, but added, "the pursuit of national missile defense is not good for the effective implementation of CTBT."

China and the United States have both signed the CTBT, but neither has ratified it.

While at times charming, Mr. Sha turned angry when the issue of possible U.S. arms sales to Taiwan came up. The island has requested the advanced Aegis radar system, which would improve its ability to defend itself against a Chinese missile attack, and Mr. Bush is scheduled to decide next month what items to sell.

"We hate this idea," Mr. Sha said, almost shouting. "Taiwan is a part of China. It's none of your [America's] business."

He said sale of the Aegis system would be tantamount to a military alliance between Washington and Taiwan, which is prohibited under joint communiques signed by China and the United States.

"Any sale is bad enough," he said. "Aegis is the worst."

He said the advanced communications system would allow Taiwan to join up with the U.S. communications system "which is like a military alliance."

-------- nato

NATO CHANGED CLIMATE IN SERBIA

emporers-clothes.com
Reprinted from the Yugoslav newspaper, 'Politika'
15 March 2001
by Vladimir Krsljanin, vlada@sps.org.yu
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/changed2.htm

Two eminent experts from the University of Nis, Prof. Dr. Dimitrije Stefanovic from the Faculty of Electronics and Prof. Dr. Milovan Purenovic from the Department of Physics of the Faculty of nature & mathematics are contending that in the course of the air strikes against Yugoslavia a meteorological war took place.

In order to disperse the clouds and make possible clear air space for its bombers, NATO aircraft, by dropping special chemicals into atmosphere caused unprecedented droughts that may last several decades, even a hundred years, depending on global meteorological conditions.

"Thanks to the documents we have acquired and to our analyses, we are contending that use of chemical means in this areas started over Tuzla in 1994", two experts have said. Same happened again in April 1999 over FR of Yugoslavia, first above towns of Vrnjacka Banja, Trstenik and Kraljevo, and shortly later over Nis, and then above Negotin, Zajecar and Smederevo. On April 5th in the evening, skies over Nis were overcast, rain being expected any time. Then, after the air sortie, sky suddenly become red, clouds started swirling and disappeared and latter that night Nis was bombed. Same night town of Aleksinac suffered damage while same happened to Negotin and Prahovo next evening. Ever since in these areas there is a great, unprecedented drought, said Prof. Dr. Dimitrije Stefanovic, professor of the Faculty of Electronics of the University of Nis to the Belgrade daily "Politika".

In the region of southern Serbia, from Leskovac to Aleksinac, thus also over the Nis, on ten occasions use of termo - lighting bombs was registered. This bombs exploded in the atmosphere were rising the temperature to over 3.000 degrees centigrade. Shining light made possible to aircraft to "see" targets on the ground while consequences only have to be seen. Due to such programmed explosions taking place at the altitude between 2500 and 3000 meters, large quantities of energy were discharged causing shifting of layers of the atmosphere and strong winds. Thus, rain-bearing clouds rise to higher strata where get concentrated and, at the temperature of 10 degrees centigrade bellow zero, hailing is formed. If any precipitation occurs, it would be large hailing that destroys crops, said the Nis professors. That, unfortunately happened in May 1999 in the South Morava valley, near Leskovac.

[Note from Emperor's Clothes: Prof. Michel Chossudovsky has written a related article, entitled 'Washington's New World Order Weapons Have The Ability To Trigger Climate Change'. It can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/haarp.htm ]

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

-------- south carolina

SRS faces budget cut under president's plan

Savannah Morning News
Web posted Thursday, March 15, 2001
By Brandon Haddock Morris News Service
http://www.savannahmorningnews.com/smn/stories/031501/LOCsrscuts.shtml

Savannah River Site funding could shrink by as much as $100 million under President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year 2002, a staffer for U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday.

"If we can't get that fixed, it's going to impact the site," Richard Perry, the chief of staff to Graham, R-S.C., said after a meeting of the SRS Retirees Association in Aiken. "In how the site manages that cut, they are going to have to make some tough decisions."

In recent years, the federal nuclear-weapons site's annual outlay has been about $1.5 billion.

If the proposed cuts pass, the site might have to slow cleanup of pollution left by previous SRS activities, Perry said. The budget also could curtail plans to build new plants at SRS to rid the nation of excess plutonium, he added.

Layoffs also are a possibility, Perry said.

U.S. Department of Energy spokesman at SRS referred inquiries about the budget to the agency's Washington headquarters. An Energy Department spokesman in Washington did not return a telephone call placed late Tuesday afternoon.

The budget projections are early, Perry said, and members of the South Carolina and Georgia congressional delegations plan to meet with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to try to reverse some of the proposed cuts.

Early reports indicate that SRS reductions would be part of an overall effort to trim $1 billion from the Energy Department's annual budget. The agency received more than $19 billion last year.

More than $400 million of the planned $1 billion reduction would come from the Energy Department's 'environmental management" division, Perry said. The division funds efforts to clean up pollution and manage nuclear waste at nuclear-weapons sites.

Between 85 percent and 90 percent of the SRS budget comes from the environmental management division.

The proposed cuts have been a topic of rumors and concern in Aiken for weeks. Last month, the four U.S. senators from Georgia and South Carolina wrote Abraham to oppose the budget plan.

"While we fully understand the need to cut unnecessary spending, the idea that the Energy Department could be underfunded in environmental management is unconscionable," the senators wrote. "Many of the nuclear-waste cleanup programs would undoubtedly be affected by this proposal."

Some local SRS watchers also said the plan would hurt the site's cleanup efforts.

"If it comes to pass, that's very bad news," Ernest S. Chaput, special-projects coordinator for the Aiken-Edgefield Economic Development Partnership, said Tuesday. 'They didn't have enough money to do everything that needed to be done before.

"It's just that much worse."

-------- us nuc waste

WIPP Cuts Back on Tours

Albuquerque Journal
Thursday, March 15, 2001
The Associated Press
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/277305news03-15-01.htm

CARLSBAD - The U.S. Department of Energy has cut back on tours to its underground nuclear waste dump near here because it's handling more waste as the repository reaches full operation.

Public tours of the surface and underground areas of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant now are offered only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Previously, tours took place throughout the week.

Interest in the tours remains high, so people should plan to book two months in advance, the DOE said.

"Safety continues to be the primary consideration for all activities at WIPP," said Ines Triay, manager of the DOE's Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP. "Now that the number of WIPP shipments has increased, we need to decrease the number of tours to continue smooth disposal operations."

WIPP buries plutonium-contaminated waste 2,150 feet below the surface of the southern New Mexico desert in ancient salt beds. It opened as a repository March 26, 1999, to take waste from defense sites around the country - such things as contaminated rags, gloves, tools and residues.

WIPP also announced that the 100th shipment of nuclear waste from the closed Rocky Flats plant near Denver arrived at the waste dump 26 miles east of Carlsbad before dawn Wednesday.

The shipment contained 28 drums of waste in two specially designed shipping containers called Trupacts.

Rocky Flats sent its first shipment to WIPP in June 1999. Last week, for the first time, it shipped two truckloads in one day and sent five loads in one week. Shipments are expected to increase from the current average of three a week to nine or 10 a week.

The Colorado site will send nearly 2,000 shipments of waste to WIPP by the time it is cleaned up in 2006.

The DOE will send 37,000 shipments of waste to WIPP from 23 installations around the nation over WIPP's expected 35-year lifespan.


-------- MILITARY

Probe starts in Kuwait bomb tragedy
A coffin with the remains of a U.S. soldier who died in the Kuwait accident arrives Thursday at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
As the bodies of American victims began their journey home, investigators started their work.

MSNBC
01/03/15
Jim Miklaszewski
http://www.msnbc.com/news/543108.asp?0nm=-11Q

THE MILITARY investigative team will listen to tapes of voice communications between a forward air controller on the ground and the pilot, Pentagon officials said, to determine what was said in the minutes before the bombs were released.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, arrived in Kuwait to begin the investigation about 5:30 a.m. ET.

Central Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf, said DeLong will complete his probe by April 16.

"I believe they're going to set right to work tomorrow," Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said Thursday. "His travels will take him wherever he needs to go in the coming days to complete his work."

As DeLong's investigation progresses into the cause of the accident, the Pentagon also plans to launch a separate investigation to look at possible steps to improve safety measures, Quigley said. The two probes will be independent of each other.

FINDINGS TO BE REPORTED

DeLong will be expected to file a report on the findings of his team, which will include one representative each from the Air Force and the Navy, two from the Army, and advisers from the Kuwait and New Zealand armed forces. Quigley said he expected at least some of the report to be made public; legal action may follow, depending on the findings.

DeLong met with the Kuwaiti chief of staff, Gen. Ali al-Momen, and the two agreed the investigation should be conducted jointly by the two countries, according to a Kuwaiti military official.

Defense Department officials have said the controller tried to abort the bombing run, but acted too late. There is still disagreement in the Pentagon over whether the controller had given the F/A-18 Hornet pilot "Cleared Hot" permission to drop the bombs. Investigators also will seek answers as to why the jet was off course during its bombing run.

The soldier who directed the run, according to military sources, was injured but survived the incident and was hospitalized at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. Staff Sgt. Timothy B. Crusing, a tactical air controller with the 19th Air Support Operations Squadron based at Fort Campbell, Ky., was upgraded from stable to good condition, as were the other two survivors. Pentagon officials did not know, however, when the three might be able to return home.

"We'll work very closely with the families, of course, and their desires in the days ahead," Quigley said.

DeLong's investigative team is expected to interview Crusing and the two other survivors, who are also hospitalized at Landstuhl. The investigators will also visit the scene of the bombing in northern Kuwait and the USS Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier in the gulf from which the F/A-18 was launched before its bombing run at at Kuwait's Udairi range.

VETERAN PILOT

Military officials said they would not comment on Crusing's specific role in the accident and had not yet made decisions about any likely cause.

"General DeLong is going into this with a completely open mind and a very broad charter, as to try to learn all the details that he can," Pentagon spokesman Quigley said.

DeLong can make "recommendations on the way ahead or corrective actions that might need to be taken. ... whatever he thinks is the appropriate way to go," Quigley said.

The Pentagon identified the F/A-18 Hornet pilot as Cmdr. David O. Zimmerman, who commands the VFA-37 Hornet squadron aboard the Truman. The squadron's home is Oceana Naval Air Station, Va. Zimmerman had flown a daylight and nighttime mission at Udairi three days earlier. He has more than 3,000 Navy flying hours.

As the probe began, bodies of the six dead were taken to Landstuhl for autopsy and formal identification, said David Roath, director of the U.S. Army Memorial Affairs Activity Europe. It was not immediately clear when the bodies would be returned to the United States.

RUN OK'D, THEN ABORTED

Officials have said it is unclear whether the bombing accident resulted from mistakes by the Navy pilot or Crusing, or both.

However, U.S. officials told NBC News that Crusing, acting as forward air controller, gave Zimmerman the all-clear to drop his bombs and then tried to abort the mission when he realized the plane was off course.

According to the officials, Zimmerman was flying in a two-plane formation in the nighttime live-fire exercise on Monday as he approached the target zone at the Udairi range.

Crusing radioed the two pilots, acknowledging all radio frequencies and whereabouts of the two planes.

Zimmerman radioed back, acknowledging the locations of both the intended target, and the observation post where the air controller and a couple dozen others were gathered. The two sites were approximately 1.3 miles apart.

Crusing, believing Zimmerman was on the proper course, radioed "Cleared Hot" - the signal to drop weapons - but then, realizing the Navy plane was off course radioed, "Abort, abort." But it was too late and three bombs hit the area.

A Navy F-14 circling overhead as an observer to the exercise immediately radioed for medical help.

Crusing is an experienced air controller familiar with the Udairi range. This was his fourth 90-day rotation into Kuwait, and he was training several air controllers.

NBC's Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon, Andy Eckardt in Germany; MSNBC.com's Jon Bonné; The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

---

Investigation focuses on air controller

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 03:11 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-15-kuwait-accident.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - A central focus of the Pentagon's investigation of the fatal bombing accident in Kuwait will be the actions of an Air Force enlisted man who was responsible for directing a Navy pilot to his target and who survived the still-unexplained attack. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, arrived in Kuwait on Thursday to begin the investigation, the U.S. Embassy announced. Central Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf, said DeLong will complete his probe by April 16.

The remains of the five American servicemen and one New Zealand military officer killed in the accident were to arrive at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Thursday, Central Command said.

DeLong's investigative team will visit the scene of the bombing in northern Kuwait and also go aboard the USS Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier in the gulf from which the Navy F/A-18 Hornet was launched to conduct the practice bombing at Kuwait's Udairi range.

The investigators also are expected to interview the three U.S. servicemen who were injured in Monday's accident and who are recovering at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Details of their injuries are not known, but the Pentagon has said they are not life threatening.

Among the three hospitalized is Air Force Staff Sgt. Timothy Crusing, who was the "ground forward air controller" at Udairi responsible for directing the Navy pilot to his target. On Wednesday, officials said the target was a little more than one mile from the observation post.

The Air Force said Crusing is a tactical air controller with the 19th Air Support Operations Squadron based at Fort Campbell, Ky.

Officials have said it is unclear whether the bombing accident resulted from mistakes by the Navy pilot or the air controller, or both.

Central Command officials, based at Tampa, Fla., said Wednesday they would not comment on Crusing's specific role in the accident. "The specific details of those actions have not been established and will be a focus of the investigation," a command statement said.

The Pentagon identified the F/A-18 Hornet pilot as Cmdr. David O. Zimmerman, who commands the VFA-37 Hornet squadron aboard the Truman. The squadron's home is Oceana Naval Air Station, Va.

Zimmerman had flown a daylight and nighttime mission at Udairi three days earlier. He has more than 3,000 Navy flying hours.

The father of one of the men killed in the accident said Wednesday he is not interested in placing blame, but wants officials to concentrate on fixing problems that lead to training accidents.

"What I'm looking for is a solution to the problem," Mike Freligh of Gosnell, Ark., said on CBS. His son was Army Sgt. Phillip M. Freligh.

The others killed were Air Force Staff Sgt. Jason M. Faley, who was based at Fort Campbell with Crusing; Army Staff Sgt. Troy J. Westberg, a medical sergeant assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C; Army Staff Sgt. Richard N. Boudreau; and Army Spc. Jason D. Wildfong.

Freligh, Boudreau and Wildfong were explosive ordnance disposal specialists assigned to the 707th Ordnance Company at Fort Lewis, Wash.

Army Acting Maj. John McNutt, 27, was identified as the New Zealander killed.

---

Bodies from bombing accident arrive in Germany

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 03:12 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-15-kuwait.htm

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany - The bodies of the five American servicemen and a New Zealand military officer killed in a bombing range accident in Kuwait arrived at Germany's Ramstein Air Base early Thursday. Military honors were given as the coffins arrived in the rain at the base. The bodies were taken to the nearby Landstuhl Medical Center for autopsy and formal identification, said David Roath, director of the U.S. Army Memorial Affairs Activity Europe.

It was not immediately clear when the bodies would be returned to the United States.

Three people injured in Monday's accident, in which personnel at an observation post were hit by a bomb dropped from a strike-fighter during a training exercise, have arrived for treatment at Landstuhl.

One was in intensive care here Wednesday, and two more were flown in from Kuwait overnight.

Capt. Andrew Reynolds said the new arrivals had fared well doing the flight. "Right now they've both been stabilized," he said.

"They underwent surgery in Kuwait by American physicians. They were stabilized prior to transport and throughout the transport they did very well," he said.

Officials have said it is unclear whether the bombing accident resulted from mistakes by the Navy pilot or the air controller, or both.

The U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf area, said Wednesday a military investigation team headed by a three-star general will arrive in Kuwait on Thursday to begin interviews.

The team has been instructed to complete its investigation by April 16.

---

U.S. probers awaited in Kuwait bombing

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200131521222.htm

KUWAIT CITY - A U.S. investigation team headed by a three-star general was due in Kuwait today to start examining how a U.S. jet killed five American soldiers and a New Zealander in a desert bombing exercise.

"The Americans will be here early Thursday and investigation work will immediately start," Kuwaiti Defense Minister Sheik Jaber Hamad Sabah said yesterday.

He said that his country had formed a three-man investigation team of its own, expressing satisfaction with U.S. steps taken since the accident Monday night.

-------- arms sales

U.S. Mutes Criticism of Russia's Plans for Arms ales to Iran

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15DIPL.html

WASHINGTON, March 14 - The Bush administration took a muted public approach today to Russia's decision to resume sales of conventional arms to Iran, using the arrival of Moscow's senior national security official to express concerns that fell short of sharp criticism.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that the United States had to be "candid with the Russians" in telling them that they should not be "investing in weapons sales in countries such as Iran which have no future."

During the visit to Moscow on Monday of the Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, the Russian government announced that it would resume sales of conventional arms to Iran and repeated its intention to help Iran complete a long-stalled nuclear power plant. Air-defense missile systems and up-to-date aircraft are reported to be among the items in the Russian package to Iran.

Russia's arms sales to Iran have long been a sore point between Washington and Moscow. Republicans in Congress were particularly critical of the Clinton administration, accusing it of not being tough enough on Russia for its sales of military hardware to Iran.

General Powell spoke just before he met with Sergei B. Ivanov, who heads President Vladimir V. Putin's security council and is described as the second most powerful official in Russia.

Mr. Ivanov also met for the first time with President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who was his host during the visit here. Some unflattering remarks Ms. Rice made about Russia before taking office have been posted on a Kremlin-backed Internet site. For her part, Ms. Rice has said she will not concentrate on the relationship with Russia as much as the Clinton administration had. Before today's encounter, the National Security Council went out of its way to note that Ms. Rice had met with her counterparts from Britain, France and Germany before inviting Mr. Ivanov here.

Ms. Rice said nothing publicly about her two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Mr. Ivanov, and her aides gave only a scanty account of the topics discussed.

Today, unlike during the Clinton era, Mr. Ivanov did not ask for economic assistance, officials said. The Bush administration has said publicly that the international financial institutions were too generous to the Russian economy in the past.

In the brief account of the Rice- Ivanov meeting, a National Security Council press assistant, Mary Ellen Countryman, declined to say whether they discussed the case of Robert Hanssen, the F.B.I. agent who was arrested last month on charges of spying for Russia. The Hanssen matter was discussed by General Powell and Mr. Ivanov, a senior State Department official said.

On Iraq, the secretary said that the United States would be looking for Moscow's support at the United Nations in its efforts to streamline the sanctions, the official said.

Overall, General Powell said that the new administration would adopt an approach to Russia not unlike that toward the Soviet Union by the Reagan administration. He called it "realism."

"In some way, the approach to Russia shouldn't be terribly different than the very realistic approach we had to the old Soviet Union in the late 80's," he said. "We told them what bothered us. We told them where we could engage on things. We tried to convince them of the power of our values and our system. They argued back. We should be realistic and keep encouraging them to move in the direction of solid democracy."

-------- britain

Multiple chemical sensitivity and chronic fatigue syndrome in british gulf war veterans.

From: magnu96196@aol.com
Am J Epidemiol 2001
Mar 15;153(6):604-9

Reid S, Hotopf M, Hull L, Ismail K, Unwin C, Wessely S.

Guy's King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine and Institute of Psychiatry, London, United Kingdom. Gulf War Illness Research Unit, Guy's King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine, London, United Kingdom.

The objective of this study was to measure the prevalence of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in British Gulf War veterans and to investigate their association with reported exposures and psychologic morbidity. In 1997-1998, the authors undertook a cross-sectional survey of three cohorts of British military personnel comprising Gulf veterans (n = 3,531), those who had served in Bosnia (n = 2,050), and those serving during the Gulf War but not deployed there (Era cohort, n = 2,614). MCS and CFS were defined according to operational criteria. The prevalence of MCS in the Gulf,Bosnia, and Era cohorts was 1.3%, 0.3%, and 0.2%, respectively. For CFS, the prevalence was 2.1% (Gulf cohort), 0.7% (Bosnia cohort), and 1.8% (Era cohort). In Gulf veterans, MCS was strongly associated with exposure to pesticides (adjusted odds ratio = 12.3, 95% confidence interval: 5.1, 30.0). Both syndromes were associated with high levels of psychologic morbidity. These findings suggest that CFS and MCS account for some of the medically unexplained illnesses reported by veterans after deployment to the Gulf. MCS was particularly associated with Gulf deployment and self-reported exposure to pesticides, findings that merit further exploration given the controversial status of this diagnosis and the potential for recall bias in a questionnaire survey.

PMID: 11257069 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

-------- burma/mynamar

God's Army twins reunited with mom

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/15/2001
By JIRAPORN WONGPAITHOON Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406398817

SUAN PHUNG, Thailand (AP) - The young twins who led the God's Army rebel group in Thailand have been reunited with their mother, more than a year after the family was split up during fighting with Myanmar troops, officials said Thursday.

The mother arrived Tuesday at the border patrol force base where Johnny and Luther Htoo have been held since their surrender to Thai authorities on Jan. 16. The twins are believed to be 15 years old, though they look much younger.

Their father is expected to join them soon and the family will stay at the camp until the government makes a decision on whether to give them refugee status, said police Lt. Col. Somchai Visutsuwan.

``We will continue to confine them here until further notice from higher authorities,'' Somchai, the chief of the border patrol base, told The Associated Press.

The twins' parents already have refugee status and have been living in the Ban Ton Yang refugee shelter nearby. The area is about 100 miles west of the Thai capital, Bangkok.

God's Army, which at its peak had about 150 fighters, had provided minor resistance in a wider guerrilla war by ethnic Karen rebels fighting for autonomy in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

They acquired near-legendary status around 1997, when Myanmar troops came to their village during a sweep of Karen areas. The mainstream guerrillas group, the Karen National Union, reportedly fled while the twins rallied some local men and directed a successful counterattack.

After that, the twins' followers said the boys _ who are Christians _ had powers from God. Their followers believed bullets couldn't hit them and mines wouldn't explode under their feet.

God's Army stopped fighting after they lost their base at Ka Mar Pa Law, just inside Myanmar, in early 2000. During the fighting, they became separated from their parents, who trekked to Thailand.

Johnny, Luther and their small band held out for another year before arriving in Thailand, driven by hunger and exhaustion. Fifteen followers who surrendered with the twins are also staying at the police base.

The twins became icons for youthful rebels around the world after the widespread circulation of an Associated Press photograph showed the angelic-looking, long-haired Johnny next to his tougher-looking, cigarette-puffing brother, Luther.

Thai authorities allowed photographers and television crews into the base Thursday to take pictures of the twins, who did not speak much, except to say they are happy to be with their mother.

Asked how they felt about being the focus of journalists' attention, the long-haired Johnny said: ``I am afraid.''

-------- china

China places second missile base near Taiwan

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001315232019.htm

A U.S. spy satellite detected a newly completed Chinese missile base opposite Taiwan in the past two weeks, The Washington Times has learned.

The base is located where China has placed its newest short-range missiles, which target the island, U.S. intelligence officials say.

The missile base, detected in spy-satellite photographs, is located several miles northeast of Xianyou and some 135 miles from Taiwan. Nearly 100 CSS-7 short-range ballistic missiles and mobile launchers are deployed there.

The base is the second short-range missile base for CSS-7s, said officials familiar with intelligence reports of the discovery.

"It gives them two facilities with sevens [CSS-7s] that are within range of Taiwan," a senior administration official said.

Disclosure of the finished missile base comes as the Bush administration is debating whether to provide Taiwan with advanced weaponry that would include advanced Patriot missile defenses, four Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyers and four Kidd-class destroyers. A decision on the arms sales is expected next month.

Discovery of the new base coincides with the visit this week to China by Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command. During his four-day visit, Adm. Blair will discuss Taiwan issues with Chinese military leaders and visit Nanjing province, home of the newly finished base.

Chinese Vice Prime Minister Qian Qichen, set to visit Washington next week, is expected to lobby against U.S. arms sales to Taiwan among other issues.

White House spokeswoman Mary Ellen Countryman would not say whether President Bush will discuss the Chinese missile buildup with Mr. Qian.

"Our discussions will cover a range of bilateral, regional and global issues," she said.

U.S. intelligence agencies tracked a train loaded with missiles and launchers from a factory in central China to the base, said the officials, who spoke to The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity.

A second trainload of the missiles, along with the transporter erector-launchers, was set to leave the factory last week, they said.

The missiles are believed to be stored inside underground bunkers designed to protect the weaponry from U.S. precision-guided missile strikes. Construction of the bases was first reported by The Times in November 1999.

The CSS-7 base near Xianyou is the second for new short-range missiles. The first, near Yongan, was completed last year. There is still another missile base farther north. It is at Leping, a regional headquarters for all missile forces that harbors up to 100 CSS-6 missiles.

In a recent interview, a senior military officer said the massing of short-range missiles is increasing instability across the Taiwan Strait and justifying future sales of U.S. missile defenses to Taiwan.

The senior official said the Chinese "keep on building" the missile forces, and now there are between 200 and 300 CSS-7 and CSS-6 missiles opposite Taiwan.

If the buildup continues, the official said, "we're going to make theater missile systems available to the Taiwanese."

A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, declined to comment on the new missile base, citing a policy of not discussing intelligence matters.

However, he said the Pentagon closely monitors Chinese military developments.

"It is no secret that China is modernizing and improving its military capability and a lot of that includes capabilities for reaching out to Taiwan," Adm. Quigley said.

"This is something we watch very carefully and it is an element that goes into the decision-making process of meeting the legitimate defense needs of Taiwan," he added.

The missile buildup is part of China's effort to intimidate Taiwan "or attack Taiwan, if necessary," said Richard Fisher, a military analyst with the Jamestown Foundation.

"We can also expect to see additional CSS-7 missiles in the Nanjing region and in the very near future, new classes of land-attack cruise missiles will be deployed," said Mr. Fisher, who is writing a book on China's military.

Mr. Fisher said it is "imperative" that Mr. Bush raise the issue of missile deployments when he meets with Mr. Qian next week.

"He should be told that this type of action will guarantee the deployment of missile defenses in East Asia and guarantee their sale to our friends and allies," Mr. Fisher said.

Larry Wortzel, a former U.S. military attache in Beijing, said the short-range Chinese missiles are part of an "in-depth offensive capability against Taiwan that is meant to degrade Taiwan's air and ground defense capabilities."

The missile buildup provides the basis to sell Taiwan the Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense system, Kidd-class warships and eventually Aegis-equipped guided missile ships, Mr. Wortzel said.

-------- colombia

Paramilitary group thwarting peace

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/16/2001
By MICHAEL EASTERBROOK Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406410351

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - From a small group of gunmen, they grew into a feared army loosely allied with the government in its war against leftist guerrillas.

But the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia _ which prospered for years under the tolerant eye of the state _ has now become a major stumbling block for the government in its quest for peace.

Paramilitary chief Carlos Castano is using his 8,000-strong force _ known by its Spanish acronym AUC _ to thwart Colombian President Andres Pastrana's efforts to grant territory to rebels to end a bloody 37-year civil war.

Last week, Castano _ the son of a rancher who was slain by rebels _ announced his men were ``willing to die'' to stop the government from ceding territory to Colombia's second-biggest rebel group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, in order to launch peace talks. Pastrana ceded territory to the biggest rebel band, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, more than two years ago.

``Do not keep on humiliating the nation with your government's attitude of surrender,'' Castano wrote Pastrana this month in an open letter.

The AUC organized a blockade of highways in north-central Colombia last month to protest Pastrana's proposal, which would cede a territory roughly the size of Rhode Island to the ELN.

The paramilitaries themselves have spent months fighting over the territory in Bolivar state. The AUC wrested control of much of the area through a terror campaign aimed at rooting out and killing suspected guerrilla sympathizers. Thousands of people have fled.

``It isn't that the paramilitaries oppose negotiations with the ELN,'' said Jaime Bernal Cuellar, a former attorney general facilitating talks between the government and the ELN. ``It's that they don't want to lose the position they've won there in recent years.''

The paramilitaries have also crippled Pastrana's initiative toward the FARC.

Attacks by paramilitary forces _ and government failure to stop them _ provoked the FARC last year to suspend talks with the government. Negotiations resumed last month.

Allegations that the Colombian military is assisting AUC fighters have also created a public relations problem for the government and jeopardized funding from Washington, which is training Colombian counternarcotics battalions as part of a $1.3 billion aid package.

The U.S. government says it wants all links between the AUC and government security forces severed. Colombian government figures show massacres and selective assassinations linked to the AUC rose from 400 deaths in 1998 to 1,560 last year.

``There is no doubt that the paramilitaries have become the most difficult issue for the government's peace initiative,'' said Daniel Garcia-Pena, a former peace envoy. ``They're a headache that has just begun.''

-------- drug war

Republicans, in Their Own Drug Bill, Seek More Treatment for the Nonviolent

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15DRUG.html

ALBANY, March 14 - Senate Republican leaders weighed in today on the debate over drug offenders with a $20 million proposal to expand treatment programs for nonviolent drug felons.

The measure, announced by the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, at a news conference this afternoon, would allow prosecutors to send drug offenders with substance abuse problems to treatment instead of to prison. The money would cover an 18- to 24-month treatment program for about 800 felons a year and would finance the creation of additional treatment slots in the state prison system, job training for incarcerated drug offenders and treatment options after prison.

The Senate proposal does not directly address the efforts by the governor and the Democratic leadership of the Assembly to ease the state's stringent mandatory drug-sentencing laws. Mr. Bruno said today that he was reviewing the proposals, but would not talk about them.

The Senate proposal says nothing about the range of mandatory sentences, nor about whether judicial discretion ought to be expanded - the two most contentious issues in drug law reform, both of them vigorously opposed by prosecutors. Instead it focuses strictly on expanding treatment for criminals who are, as Mr. Bruno put it, "alcoholics and people who are drug-afflicted."

Under the state's Rockefeller-era drug laws, judges must abide by a range of minimum and maximum prison terms, based on the weight of the drugs seized on the defendants and their prior felony records. After years of public pressure to soften those laws, Democrats and Republicans seem poised to make some changes this year, though differences among them remain.

The governor's bill would reduce some of the mandatory minimum sentences and offer judges slightly more discretion over sentencing. The Assembly's proposal would provide more judicial discretion and would lower mandatory minimum sentences even further. The Assembly also seeks to expand treatment places by using savings from the decline in the prison population; it proposes to use 75 percent of an estimated $160 million in annual savings to develop 2,000 treatment slots.

---

New York Times
March 15, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15MBRF.html

STAMFORD: STATE IN PAINKILLER INQUIRY The state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, said yesterday that he was investigating abuses of the prescription painkiller OxyContin and had met on Monday with representatives of the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. Mr. Blumenthal said OxyContin factored into an investigation of Medicaid fraud, but he had no evidence that Purdue Pharma had broken any law. Purdue Pharma said it was collecting data about overdose-related deaths and was cooperating with officials. David M. Herszenhorn (NYT)

-------

10 police sentenced to death

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/15/2001
By OLIVER TEVES Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406400740

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Ten police officers were sentenced to death Thursday for accepting a total of $13,265 in bribes from alleged drug dealers.

Supt. Francisco Ovilla, a suburban district police chief, and his nine subordinates were accused of taking the money from two Chinese men who allegedly sold 3.3 pounds of the stimulant methamphetamine hydrochloride to an undercover officer in August 1999.

Two other men who worked beneath Ovilla _ Reynato Resurreccion and Wilfredo Gonzales _ testified against Ovilla during the trial at regional court in Quezon City. Gonzales said his boss tried to give him $306 as his ``share'' of the bribe but he refused the money.

The two alleged drug dealers were freed and have not been arrested since.

Ovilla did not testify at his trial but denied any wrongdoing in earlier press interviews.

Law enforcement agents who accept bribes in the Philippines are given the same sentences _ death by lethal injection _ as those who offer the bribes.

National police chief Leandro Alejandro hailed the court's verdict Thursday, saying the decision ``strengthens the resolve of the Philippine National Police to cleanse the ranks of undesirable policemen.''

He also recommended the promotion of Gonzales and Resurreccion ``for blowing the whistle that uncovered the drug bribery scandal.''

Judge Diosdado Peralta also sentenced the 10 officers to six to 12 years in prison for violating the anti-graft law. One officer was acquitted of that charge.

Under Philippine law, death penalties are automatically reviewed by the Supreme Court. Justice Secretary Hernando Perez last week said he opposes the death penalty and said he will try to prevent executions in his term.

---

American airmen welcomed in Ecuador

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/15/2001
By MONTE HAYES Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406399103

MANTA, Ecuador (AP) - Many Ecuadoreans are uneasy about their country's decision to allow the United States to use an air force base here for anti-drug flights, but you won't hear much opposition in Manta.

This Pacific port of 200,000 inhabitants has put out the welcome mat for American servicemen, untroubled by muttering in Quito, the capital, that Ecuador is becoming America's ``new Panama.''

Townspeople are delighted with the prospect of millions of dollars in investment pouring in at a time when Ecuador is trying to dig its way out of its deepest economic crisis in decades.

``I can say as mayor of the city that most people have accepted the American presence favorably,'' Mayor Jorge Zambrano said. ``We see that there are greater benefits, more pros than cons, in this agreement between Ecuador and the United States.''

Manta's inhabitants give little heed to worries by Ecuadoreans elsewhere that this small Andean nation is being set up as a staging ground for U.S. intervention in Colombia, where powerful leftist rebel groups protect the narcotics trade.

That worry is very real for many Ecuadoreans.

``We support the base being used to fight drug trafficking,'' Antonio Posso, an influential congressman, said in an interview in Quito. ``But the base apparently is also being used to put together an operation to fight Colombia's guerrillas, which involves us in a conflict that is not Ecuador's.''

The United States is spending $62 million to expand and improve the Manta runway and build hangars, dormitories and a dining hall. The number of U.S. servicemen assigned to Manta has risen to 125 and that figure will reach 400 after construction work is completed in October.

At that point, giant U.S. AWACS surveillance planes and tankers to refuel them will replace smaller Navy aircraft now operating, allowing the United States to monitor air and marine activity far into the Caribbean. That will permit full resumption of U.S. anti-drug surveillance flights, which were cut by two-thirds when U.S. forces evacuated Howard Air Force Base in Panama in 1999.

The United States maintains the Manta base will remain under Ecuadorean control and is being used only as an observation post to track drug-smuggling aircraft and boats. U.S. officials insist it has nothing to do with the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package for Plan Colombia, that country's counternarcotics offensive.

Such reassurances are good enough for most people in Manta, who agree with Zambrano that there are more pros than cons to the U.S. presence.

Col. Jose Bohorquez, the Ecuadorean commander of the base, noted that the airport expansion has created 390 new jobs in construction alone.

``I really think this is an opportunity for the economy to open up,'' he said in an interview at the base. ``The investment made so far is already being felt here in Manta.''

Construction companies, computer stores and auto rental agencies are all doing business with the Americans. New restaurants and bars have popped up along the port's seaside avenue _ including one called ``Cheers'' _ aimed at pulling in the Yankee dollar.

``Everyone wants to learn English. English institutes are opening all the time,'' Zambrano said. ``I know because I have one, and before I didn't have many students. Now there are many institutes and they're filled.''

The runway undergoing expansion also is shared by Manta's adjoining commercial airport. When construction is completed, the airport will be able to handle international flights, giving a boost to a fledgling tourism industry built around the area's attractive beaches. City officials have begun talks with Continental Airlines about starting direct flights to the United States.

Manta already has one new five-star hotel and the Sheraton and Marriott chains are said to be nosing around for good beachfront property.

``We have hopes that the economy will recover. Tourism is going to expand with the new airport and generate more jobs,'' said Irene Trujillo, who manages a restaurant on Manta's main beach.

The enlarged airport is expected to propel local exports of tuna, shrimp, coffee and other products since businesses no longer will need to ship via airports in Quito or Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city and commercial center.

The U.S. Southern Command, now headquartered in Miami, has donated garbage trucks, water tankers, bulldozers and vehicles and equipment for spraying mosquitos.

In their free time American servicemen teach English at local schools, conduct basketball clinics and play in a soccer league. In February a 17-member medical team from Keesler Air Force base in Mississippi arrived to provide free medical and dental care to impoverished villages in the area.

It has all produced a warm welcome for U.S. military personnel in Manta.

``They've treated us very well,'' said Lt. Col. Richard Hair, the tall, lanky chief of the U.S. Air Force mission here. ``Obviously, they're interested in the economic benefits, but they've been very, very friendly and we've felt a great deal of support from everyone in town.''

-------- india/pakistan

Indian Defense Minister Resigns

Associated Press
March 15, 2001 Filed at 5:18 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-India-Bribery-Scandal.html

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India's defense minister resigned Thursday as a corruption scandal involving a fake arms deal secretly filmed by journalists shook the government.

George Fernandes, one of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's closest allies, said the allegations against him were ``completely false,'' and suggested they were meant to undermine national security and morale.

``To uphold the morale of our armed forces and prevent further damage to our national defense, I've decided to resign from government,'' Fernandes said on state-run television.

Soon after Fernandes sent in his resignation, three of his Samata party colleagues, including the federal agriculture minister, also offered to quit, but their resignations had not been accepted by the prime minister.

The scandal erupted on Tuesday when the Tehelka.com Internet media company publicized hidden camera videos of party, military and defense ministry officials accepting money and discussing kickbacks in a sting operation.

Tehelka.com said its reporters spent months pretending to be defense dealers and pushing a fake $870,000 deal for hand-held thermal cameras and other equipment.

The president of Fernandes' Samata Party resigned earlier Thursday after videotapes had shown journalists, posing as arms dealers, handing over cash as they chatted with her in the defense minister's home.

Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee had announced that her Trinamool Congress party would withdraw from Vajpayee's 24-party coalition, but would reconsider if Fernandes resigned and an impartial investigation was opened.

The party's defection would not have been enough to bring down Vajpayee's government as he would only lose nine seats in the 545-member Parliament.

``There is no threat to government. We continue to enjoy majority support,'' said Law Minister Arun Jaitely.

However, increasingly critical newspapers and former government officials had joined opposition calls for Fernandes' resignation.

Vajpayee needs to hold his National Democratic Alliance together through May to survive the budget vote in Parliament, which amounts to a confidence motion.

The president of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party, Bangaru Laxman, resigned Tuesday night after Tehelka.com released videotapes of him accepting $2,175. Laxman said he gave the money to his party treasurer.

Accepting money to arrange defense contracts carries a sentence of up to seven years in India.

Since he came to power in March 1998, Vajpayee's government had not been accused of corruption.

---

New York Times
March 15, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BRIE.html

INDIA: BRIBERY SCANDAL Opposition lawmakers called Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee a thief and shut down Parliament, demanding that the government resign after videotapes showed officials purportedly receiving bribes to promote a fake arms deal. The head of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, who appeared on the tapes, has resigned, and the government has suspended four Defense Ministry officials. (Reuters)

-------- space

Destruction of Mir Poses No Risk of Radioactivity, Say Russians

Russia Today
Mar 15, 2001
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=310923

SANTIAGO -- (Agence France Presse) No radioactive contamination will enter the atmosphere when the Russian space station Mir breaks up over the Pacific Ocean later this month, Russian Embassy officials here said Wednesday, seeking to reassure worried Chileans.

"It has no nuclear equipment, nor sources of nuclear energy," said Dmitri Verchenko, second secretary of the Russian Embassy.

Some 20 to 25 tons of the 137-ton Mir will burn up upon re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, and its remains, which are said to include the radioactive plutonium 238, are expected to fall into the Pacific between New Zealand and Chile sometime between March 20 and 23.

The southern Pacific was chosen as the 15-year-old Mir's graveyard because it is one of the most deserted regions in the world, Verchenko said, though the Chilean navy insisted Wednesday the landing zone was just 6,000 kilometers (3728 miles) off the coast of Chile.

Russia's decision has irritated some residents of Pacific Rim nations.

The 16-nation Pacific Forum last week demanded assurances from Russia that their nations would not be threatened by Mir's descent.

Chile's air force is taking steps to protect commercial flights over the Pacific Ocean from Mir's debris, while members of the governing Party for Democracy demonstrated Tuesday outside the Russian Embassy here to express their displeasure.

Guido Girardi, the party's leader, told Russian Ambassador Vladimir Chkhikvadze to tell his country to "stop using the Pacific Ocean as a garbage dump for the remains of its ships and space stations." (Agence France Presse)

---

Shuttle and Station Dodge Tool in Space

New York Times
March 15, 2001
National News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/national/15NATI.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 14 (AP) - The International Space Station and the shuttle Discovery dodged a piece of space junk today, a large tool that an astronaut dropped earlier in the week.

The mission commander, Capt. James D. Wetherbee of the Navy, fired the shuttle's thrusters to move the joined spacecraft to a higher orbit. Without the maneuver, the 12- by-6-inch viselike tool, which Col. James S. Voss of the Army dropped in a spacewalk on Sunday, would have passed within 200 feet of the complex.

A direct hit from such an object could punch a hole in a spacecraft, causing immediate depressurization and killing everyone on board.

The evasive action was carried out just hours after Col. Susan B. Helms of the Air Force moved from the shuttle into the Alpha space station, joining Colonel Voss and a Russian astronaut, Yuri V. Usachev, for a four-month stay aboard the outpost. Her switch in ships marked the completion of the first crew exchange.

"The torch is passing," said the flight director, John Shannon.

---

New York Times
March 15, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BRIE.html

RUSSIA: MIR PLUNGE The head of Russia's mission control said the splashdown zone for the obsolete Mir space station had been shifted slightly to avoid uninhabited French South Pacific islands. The 15-year-old orbiter, once the pride of the Soviet space program, is being scrapped by being allowed to drop into the Earth's atmosphere. Pieces that do not burn up are expected to plunge into the Pacific on March 22. (Reuters)

---

Astronauts get extra day in space to finish packing

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 08:49 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-15-shuttle-extra.htm

CAPE CANAVERAL (AP) - Like vacationers trying to stuff everything back into their suitcases for the trip home, astronauts and cosmonauts had trouble Thursday reloading a cargo carrier parked at the International Space Station.

So NASA gave them an extra day in space to finish the job.

"We've got every confidence that you could get the stowage done, but we've actually got quite a lot of analysis to do down here on the ground," Mission Control said. "We need a little more time."

Discovery will now undock from space station Alpha on Sunday and return to Earth on Wednesday, bringing back not only space station trash but the three men who lived aboard the orbiting complex for four months. Their mission stretched to 141 days with the one-day extension.

The shuttle delivered a new crew to the space station as well as 5 tons of gear stuffed in an Italian-built cargo carrier called Leonardo.

The 10 spacefarers - three on the space station and seven on the shuttle - unloaded the supplies from Leonardo faster than expected.

But refilling it with more than a ton of trash and unnecessary equipment was another matter. They could not just throw things in; everything had to be stored in a rack or bag, or tied down, to prevent items from banging around during the bumpy plunge through the atmosphere.

"It's going slowly," reported Andrew Thomas, the astronaut in charge of packing.

Because of the limited storage aboard space station Alpha, its three new residents wanted to get rid of as much junk as possible. Included in the garbage: dirty clothes, packing foam and six large aluminum plates that had been used to hold down cables in the laboratory.

The packing kept the two crews up long past their bedtime, prompting a gentle scolding from Mission Control: "It's time to go to bed." Then, several minutes later: "You DO need to get to bed."

NASA flight director John Shannon was struck by the vastness of Leonardo - and the entire space station. "It really brings home the fact that this is the largest space station ever put in Earth orbit," he said.

It is also the biggest target ever for space junk, and NASA is being extra cautious in guarding it against speeding debris.

On Wednesday, Mission Control ordered the astronauts to steer into a higher orbit to avoid a tool accidentally lost by a spacewalking astronaut over the weekend.

At the time, the U.S. Space Command reported that the viselike tool would pass within 200 feet of the linked station and shuttle unless evasive action was taken. In reality, the tool was a safe eight miles away, Shannon reported on Thursday.

"As you can imagine, 200 miles up in space traveling 17,000 mph, it's difficult to track an object that small," he said.

-------- u.n.

New York Times
March 15, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BRIE.html

SIERRA LEONE: U.N. ENTERS REBEL AREA United Nations troops moved into Lunsar, a town north of the capital, in their first deployment in rebel-held territory since fighters took hundreds of United Nations personnel hostage last May. Sierra Leoneans have long urged international forces to do more to help them reclaim the third of the country now under rebel control. Fighters from the rebel Revolutionary United Front have been accused of killing, raping and maiming thousands of people in a 10-year campaign to capture control of the country's diamond mines. (AP)

---

Peres addresses U.N. Security Council

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 11:15 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/mideast/2001-03-15-peres.htm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - A week after he was sworn in as Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres came to the world body that gave life to the Jewish state and argued Israel's case against another U.N. force in the country's backyard. Peres said Wednesday that the new Israeli government, led by Ariel Sharon, was trying to reach out to the Palestinian Authority and renew a badly battered peace process.

"We are deeply interested in the renewal of the peace process. Nobody would like to see our country or the Palestinians sinking in a sea of blood and violence and misunderstanding," Peres said. "Today there is great anger on both sides ... and the psychological gap today is even larger that the territorial one."

An unsuccessful peace summit in July at Camp David was followed by months of Palestinian rioting and deadly violence, tipped off when Sharon made a visit to a Jerusalem holy site. More than 425 people have been killed.

The Palestinians are making another attempt at getting the United Nations to authorize an observer force to protect them in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. An initial request for the force failed in December.

"They don't need a protection force," Peres told reporters after addressing the Security Council at his request. "The minute (the Palestinians) will stop shooting, there won't be any need for protection. Israel has never initiated any act of violence, only reacting to it."

The United Nations has been a constant presence in Israel's 53 years as a state. The U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of the creation of two separate countries on what was once British-mandated Palestine: one Jewish, the other Arab. The Palestinians' share was lost, however, in the 1948 Mideast war with parts divvied up among Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

And the United Nations has authorized several missions in the Middle East, each born out of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This time, Peres said, Israel and the Palestinians must negotiate directly and find their own solutions.

"We are trying all the time to create a situation where the peace negotiations can be revived."

He said that an Israeli decision Wednesday to ease restrictions that have blocked Palestinian travel and stifled their economy, was "an act of goodwill."

"We have to turn to more balanced emotions," the 77-year-old Nobel laureate said.

He rejected a Palestinian demand to send observers to the region armed with cameras, a proposal backed by several council members.

"There's no shortage of cameras in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and they're contributing to the act" of violence, Peres said. Israel had recently intercepted a radio message by a Palestinian militant ordering supporters to "not to start a protest because CNN is stuck in traffic," he said.

Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize for orchestrating Israel's first accord with the Palestinians in 1993. He has had good relations with Palestinian leaders and twice served as Israel's prime minister, most recently in 1996.

But his dovish position in a broad coalition government headed by one of Israel's most hawkish figures led the Palestinian's U.N. representative to question whether Peres speaks for his country.

"On one hand you have Mr. Peres, a relatively moderate man coming to the Security Council and presenting the position of the Israeli government, but on the other hand this government is not reflective of Mr. Peres' views." said the Palestinian U.N. envoy, Nasser Al-Kidwa, who met privately with Security Council members as well Wednesday.

"The dilemma is whether the government will be influenced by the moderate position of Mr. Peres or that Mr. Peres will provide a cover for the present government," he said.

On Thursday, at the request of the Palestinians, the council will hold an open debate on the idea of an observer force.

Security Council president Volodymyr Yel'chenko of Ukraine, said that there was "no unanimity" in the council on an observer force - an idea the United States will not support without Israel's approval. But almost all members sent a very strong message to Peres "that they are in favor of the observer mission."

---

Captain Outrageous

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
Inside Politics Greg Pierce News and political dispatches from around the nation.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

America can only "pick on little guys" Ted Turner said at a Capitol Hill ceremony last night where he received the "Norman Cousins Global Governance Award" for his support of the United Nations.

The media mogul said he was "sick of the United States bombing developing countries," naming Iraq and Grenada. "Why haven't we bombed the Palestinians? Because all they have is rocks to throw at us."

Mr. Turner said the U.S. military would not bomb "big countries like Russia and China" because they "could bomb back."

Mr. Turner also told the World Federalist Association that President Bush's election was illegitimate, saying "probably the wrong man is president, anyway."

Mr. Turner accused the Bush administration of justifying "its increased military budget buildup" by falsely viewing Russia, China and North Korea as potential enemies. He said: "We did not win the Cold War. It ended pretty much in a stalemate."

Praising the United Nations for its efforts to promote population control, world peace and a cleaner environment, Mr. Turner said that "without the U.N. we wouldn't have made it through the Cold War."

"We owe our very existence to the U.N.," he added.

Learning that a reporter for The Washington Times was covering the event to prepare a profile of him, Mr. Turner told the audience: "On Friday The Washington Times is gonna rip me up."

But the cable TV billionaire - known as "the Mouth of the South" for his outspoken opinions - added, "somebody's going to kick your butt."

-------- u.s.

Antigay Behavior in Military Has Dipped a Bit, Report Says

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/national/15HARA.html

WASHINGTON, March 14 - Reports of antigay harassment in the military declined slightly last year, largely because of improved training programs within the Army, a report by a legal aid group for gay and lesbian service members has found.

But antigay behavior remains common in all the services, including among officers, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says in its seventh annual report on the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

The report, to be released on Thursday, asserts that many commanders continue to violate the policy by overzealously investigating the sexual orientation of service members. The policy allows gay men and lesbians to serve as long as they keep their sexual orientation private and do not engage in homosexual acts.

The report urges Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to develop rules for disciplining service members who engage in, condone or ignore antigay behavior, and to issue a directive strongly stating the Pentagon's opposition to antigay behavior.

"We now stand at a political crossroads and the question is whether the Bush administration will do what the Clinton administration failed to do and enforce don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't harass with fairness and compassion," the report says.

President Bush has said he supports the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but has said little about how he would enforce it.

Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said Mr. Rumsfeld intended to issue an antiharassment directive. "In the meantime," the admiral said, "there should be no doubt in any service member's mind that their service does not tolerate harassment."

Concerns about verbal and physical harassment of gays and lesbians in the military have been taken more seriously by the Pentagon since Pfc. Barry Winchell was bludgeoned to death in 1999 at Fort Campbell, Ky. Investigators found that commanders ignored reports that soldiers had taunted Private Winchell about his sexual orientation for months before the killing.

A Pentagon survey ordered after Private Winchell's death found that 80 percent of service members reported hearing antigay remarks in the previous year. In 1999, reports of harassment to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network skyrocketed to 986, more than double the previous year's 400, and the highest level by far since the policy was introduced in 1994.

In 2000, reports of antigay harassment declined to 871, a 10 percent decrease, the organization says in its latest survey. The Army accounted for most of that decrease, with complaints falling to 209, from 276.

"The Army appears to be leading the way among the services in implementing training programs and holding those found responsible for antigay misconduct accountable," the report says.

C. Dixon Osburn, executive director for the defense network, said training in the other services lagged far behind. The Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force have distributed antiharassment materials through e-mail messages and on Web sites, but have not done enough training on bases or ships, he said. In 2000, the Navy led the other services in reported cases of harassment with 332, up from 330 the year before.

The report also says the Air Force, more than the other services, conducts "fishing expeditions" into the sexual histories of admitted or suspected homosexuals. The Air Force has been particularly aggressive about trying to force gays and lesbians to repay scholarships or bonuses after they have been involuntarily discharged, the report contends.

The report says incidents of physical violence have been rare. But it cites the case of an Army private at Fort Jackson, S.C., who was beaten in his bed soon after a drill sergeant singled him out using an epithet. The private later admitted he is gay and was discharged.

"My whole body hurts," the private, Ronald Chapman, says in a letter to his parents that is excerpted in the report. "I can't tell anyone because they left no marks. Who'll believe me?"

---

Troop Cut in Bosnia

New York Times
March 15, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BOSN.html

WASHINGTON, March 14 - The Bush administration plans to withdraw about 750 American peacekeeping troops from Bosnia and may consider further cuts in the Balkans, White House officials said today.

The officials said the cuts are linked to a NATO review that ended in December. "This is not the beginning of a larger draw-down of troops," said George Johndroe, a White House spokesman.

NATO concluded that some tanks and other heavy equipment - and the soldiers who operate them - were no longer needed. Troops will leave as tours of duty end. More than 9,000 American troops are patrolling Bosnia and Kosovo.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

New York Admits Plants Headed to Poor Areas

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15POWE.html

ALBANY, March 14 - The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators it wants to install around New York City would go into poor, heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents.

The study, conducted in January by the State Power Authority, has not been publicly released, despite requests for information by several organizations, including the opponents.

The debate over the planned locations of the generators has reached such a heated pitch that the State Assembly has taken the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to high-ranking officials in the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki to testify about the generators. They had been asked to appear at a hearing to be held Thursday in Manhattan, but refused. The hearing has been postponed a week to March 22.

Environmental and community groups, local businesses and a state legislator have sued the state over the generators, saying that the state illegally bypassed environmental laws, failed to consider other locations and put an undue burden on certain neighborhoods. Oral arguments were held Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, and Justice Lawrence S. Knipel said he would rule by the end of the month.

The Power Authority plans to install 10 natural-gas-fired turbines at six sites in the city and one on Long Island. The administration hopes that by increasing the region's power supply by 3 to 4 percent, it can avoid the kind of steep price rises that hit consumers last summer and lessen the risk of shortages. Private builders have proposed much larger plants, but they are at least three years from completion.

The authority's analysis says that the sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are in areas with heavy concentrations of industrial polluters. The sites have an average of 100 other plants with air pollution permits within one mile of them.

The state is not required to ensure that sources of pollution do not put a disproportionate burden on minority and poor areas. But it is usually required to consider whether a proposed plant would go into a neighborhood that is already disproportionately affected by pollution. It also has to show that it considered other sites. The state bypassed both requirements by not conducting environmental impact reviews.

The state took advantage of a provision in the law that subjects power plants of less than 80 megawatts to minimal environmental review. The two-turbine sites would be able to produce 88 megawatts, but the state has promised to limit their output to 79.9 megawatts. Critics of the plan say this amounts to an illegal evasion.

Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Brooklyn Democrat whose district includes one of the sites, said, "It's clear they went where the communities were the poorest and the whole thing could be done quickest and with the least resistance."

But a Power Authority spokesman, Michael A. Petralia, said the sites were chosen because they had available gas and electric hook-ups, and could be put to use by summer. He said the generators would have little impact on air quality in those areas, and that the authority would offset any pollution by reducing emissions at other plants.

He also argued that poor communities would benefit most from the effort. "Avoiding high energy costs has a greater impact on low-income communities," he said.

The Assembly delivered subpoenas Tuesday to Eugene W. Zeltmann, the president of the Power Authority; Maureen Helmer, the chairwoman of the Public Service Commission, which asked the authority to install the generators; and Gavin J. Donohue, acting commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, which agreed to the generators.

The officials had declined to testify at the Assembly's hearing. Legislators complained that the administration had not tried to explain its plans to the residents of the affected neighborhoods, or given the residents a chance to comment.

"Our people are always ready and willing to accommodate the Assembly," said Michael McKeon, spokesman for the governor. "It's just a matter of working out scheduling."

Assemblyman Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat, is a plaintiff in a suit challenging one of the turbine projects, and Mr. Lentol and Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, Democrat of Brooklyn, say they plan to join in a suit against another.

The turbines are among the cleanest of power plant technologies, but they would emit pollutants that would most heavily affect the surrounding areas. The authority estimates that a single turbine could produce as much as 61 tons a year of toxic compounds, soot and chemicals that contribute to smog.

The Power Authority conducted what is known as an environmental justice analysis, an effort to determine whether the project would disproportionately affect the poor and minorities.

People and organizations that have requested copies of the analysis say the authority has refused to release it. Mr. Petralia said the requests would be granted in due time. A reporter received a copy from an official at another state agency.

Using 1990 census data, the authority found that at each of the six New York City sites, the surrounding community had a higher poverty rate than the entire borough or the city, and a higher proportion of minority residents. (Detailed data from the 2000 census are not yet available.)

The authority plans to put 4 of the 11 turbines at two sites in the Bronx. Those neighborhoods are heavily poor and populated by members of racial minorities, even for the Bronx, which is the most heavily black and Hispanic county in the state and one of the poorest.

In 1990, 29 percent of the Bronx population lived below the poverty line, 37 percent was black and 42 percent was Hispanic.

Around one proposed turbine site, at the Harlem River Yards, 51 percent of the people living within half a mile of the site lived in poverty, 37 percent were black and 65 percent were Hispanic. At the other Bronx location, in the Port Morris section, 44 percent of the people within half a mile were poor, 48 percent were black and 52 percent were Hispanic, the study said.

The authority also proposes to put one turbine in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; two in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; two near Queens Plaza; one in Rosebank, Staten Island; and one at Pilgrim State Hospital in Islip on Long Island.

"There's clearly an environmental justice issue here, and the state is attempting to pretend that there's not," said Jason K. Babbie, an environmental lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a plaintiff in the suit against all 11 turbines.

The state made a finding that the power plants did not require an environmental impact review under state law, a conclusion that the lawsuit plaintiffs and Democrats in the Legislature say was illegal.

"In the rush to get these plants in, they're simply saying the law doesn't apply, and they're wrong," said Assemblyman Paul Tonko, chairman of the Energy Committee.

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As the Disease Marches On, Britain Dooms More Animals

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BRIT.html

LONDON, March 14 - The confirmation of 27 new cases of foot-and-mouth disease today brought the total in Britain to 232 and prompted Prime Minister Tony Blair to order an intensified slaughter of animals in areas directly affected. He also said the government should consider easing restrictions caused by the disease in economically hard-hit regions that are free of the virus.

About 180,000 pigs, sheep and cows have been destroyed since the disease was first discovered in Britain three weeks ago. Government officials estimated that today's directive to step up and broaden the cull would doom an additional 100,000 animals that show no symptoms but that might have come into contact with those that were infected.

Mr. Blair did not dispute a claim by the Conservative leader William Hague in Parliament that the situation had now become a "national crisis" affecting many sectors dependent upon farming and the countryside. He said, though, that the difficulty was weighing any relaxation of the rules with the need to make sure that the government was taking the right precautions.

"At the present time I believe we have got the balance right," Mr. Blair told the Commons. "But at both ends of the spectrum, we keep it under constant review. We don't want to place unnecessary restrictions on people. On the other hand we must do everything we can to eradicate the disease."

Evidence that the highly contagious disease was not coming under control as quickly as hoped was calling into question plans to go ahead with scheduled local elections on May 3 and Mr. Blair's widely suspected wish to hold a national election on that same day.

"I cannot conceive of how you can possibly have a general election while we have restrictions on movements and disease in significant parts of the country," said Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union. Mr. Blair, whose Labor Party is currently ahead of the Tories by 20 points in polls, deflected parliamentary questions on the subject, saying today was not the day to take up that decision.

The spread of the disease ceased being a purely British problem on Tuesday when the first cases of the disease on the Continent were found on a farm in France and the United States subsequently moved to ban imports of animals and animal products from the 15-nation European Union.

And today Australia, which earlier in the week had banned importing horses from Britain, expanded its ban immediately to include all livestock and their products from Europe because of the outbreak of the disease in France.

The highly communicable virus is considered a scourge that must be eradicated immediately even though it poses no danger to humans who consume the meat of infected animals. The only apparent way to contain the disease is to kill and burn entire herds and to restrict the movement of people and animals in the countryside.

The devastating effect the steps have had on agriculture are affecting other businesses in Britain. The culture secretary, Chris Smith, said today that tourism officials had warned that the travel restrictions were already costing the industry $150 million a week.

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World's Imperiled Shores and Coral Reefs to Get Millions in Aid

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/science/15NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 14 - The United Nations Foundation, created in 1997 by Ted Turner, is proposing to make its largest grant to date - $10 million - to an international campaign to save and restore the world's dwindling coral reefs.

The money would go to an alliance of private, academic and intergovernmental groups, the International Coral Reef Action Network, led by the United Nations Environment Program. Members of the network are expected to raise an additional $4 million.

The environment program says that by adding money already spent on drawing up plans as well as the income generated by the $10 million grant, the four-year project could be worth about $29 million by 2005. By then, the organizers hope, communities around the world will have taken charge of conservation and management of the reefs and endangered shorelines.

The grant is subject to approval by the United Nations Foundation's international board, due to meet on Friday. In 1997, Mr. Turner pledged to donate $1 billion in stock over 10 years for projects involving United Nations agencies. Until now, grants have been much smaller and many have gone to programs for women and girls. The foundation has been looking for substantial environmental projects to support, officers of the organization say.

Lauretta Burke, an expert on coastal ecosystems at the World Resources Institute in Washington, which is part of the project, called the prognosis for the world's reefs "pretty dire." The institute, an independent organization, did a study in 1998 that still serves as a benchmark for environmentalists.

"We found that about 60 percent of the world's coral reefs are threatened by human activities," Ms. Burke said. "In particular, we looked at coastal development, over-fishing, destructive fishing, marine pollution and sediment from inland sources. Sediment is an important threat. Many reefs are just being buried, and the sunlight is being radically reduced."

Global warming is also considered a threat to reefs. Ms. Burke said that during the warming currents of El Niño in 1997 and 1998 there was severe bleaching of many reefs, leading to the death of the coral, which is an accumulation of living organisms. Bleaching occurs when sea temperatures at least one degree centigrade above normal summer temperatures are sustained for a month or more.

"But over-fishing seems to be far and wide the most pervasive of threats," she said, adding that the institute is now preparing a detailed study of Southeast Asia, an area with the richest but most endangered reefs.

Fishing with explosives has been widespread in Southeast Asia, where a huge beach tourism industry has also brought damage to fragile coral reefs. Political turmoil and corruption have hampered conservation in the Philippines and Indonesia, which have more than 10,000 islands.

The most immediate action is planned for the Caribbean and the eastern coast of Africa. Around the Caribbean, the program hopes to set up demonstration sites in St. Lucia, Belize, Bonaire and Mexico. In East Africa, there are plans to establish model projects in the Seychelles, Madagascar and Kenya. Other sites will be focuses for early remedial work.

Projects are to follow in the South Pacific, where the environment program says that considerable work has already been done, and in Southeast Asia.

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Kennedy Airport Steps Up Checks

New York Times
March 15, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15SAFE.html

Federal officials said yesterday that they have stepped up precautions at Kennedy International Airport to ensure that foot-and-mouth disease, which has spread from Britain to France, does not cross to the United States.

Dr. Kay Ahmad, veterinarian at Kennedy for the Department of Agriculture, said that inspectors began two weeks ago to ask most passengers arriving from Europe whether they had spent time on a farm or near farm animals during their trip.

If passengers say they have, officials ask them to allow a bleach or sodium-carbonate solution to be sprayed on the bottom of their shoes or other items that might have had long contact with the ground.

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Bush's takes heat for emissions decision

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 09:03 PM ET
By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-15-emissions.htm

WASHINGTON - It was a throwaway line in a fall campaign speech - and after he delivered it, candidate George W. Bush asked one of his domestic policy aides why the line was in there in the first place.

"We have to talk about that," he said to the aide.

But in the fast-paced atmosphere of the race for the White House, Bush's promise to seek reductions in carbon dioxide emissions at power plants was simply forgotten. The campaign and the candidate moved on.

Then Bush became president. Environmentalists concerned about global warning reminded him of his pledge. Coal and oil industry advocates pressured him, warning that emissions reductions would mean higher electricity prices.

Last week, Bush decided to reverse his position. Aides didn't want the issue to fester, so they made a decision: Get the news of Bush's reversal out, take some hits from environmentalists and get the controversy behind them. Tuesday, Bush sent a letter to Republican senators informing them he would not seek reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2.

Now, Bush is facing the political fallout from a decision critics are portraying as evidence he is exactly the kind of man he says he's not: a typical politician who says what voters want to hear on the campaign trail and then fails to make good on his promises.

The questions being debated in Washington are these: Is Bush a political opportunist who is captive to big business? Or is he simply being honest when he says an energy crisis - which has worsened since the campaign - forced him to change his mind?

The White House bets voters will believe the latter.

Bush's promise came in a speech Sept. 29 titled "A Comprehensive National Energy Policy." Near the end, he said: "With the help of Congress, environmental groups and industry, we will require all power plants to meet clear air standards in order to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time."

"What was that CO2 line?" Bush, who had stumbled over the words in the speech, asked an adviser.

On Wednesday, spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that "including CO2 as a pollutant" in Bush's speech had been "a mistake."

Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, says Bush hasn't lost the right to say he'll fulfill his campaign promises, because curbing CO2 emissions was never one of the six big promises he made over and over: a tax cut, education reform, Social Security reform, restructuring the military, a prescription drug program for poor seniors and a "faith-based" initiative to allow religious groups to use government money for social programs.

"The president ran on six big things, and people know what those six big things are, and he's pursuing them," Rove says.

But Republicans hold only a slim majority in Congress, and to fulfill his promises, Bush needs help from Democratic lawmakers. His decision on CO2 could make negotiations more difficult.

"The Democrats want to get something done and work in a bipartisan way," says Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She says Democrats already were angered by Bush's decisions to roll back workplace-safety regulations, cut off funding for overseas groups that counsel on abortion and allow a House vote on his tax-cut plan without hearings. The CO2 decision, she says, is creating more tension: "It certainly doesn't contribute to the civility the president has talked about."

And previewing a likely Democratic theme in the elections of 2002 and 2004, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., recalled a broken promise that helped cost Bush's father re-election. In the future, he says, "Maybe we'll need to read the president's lips more carefully."

Contributing: Judy Keen

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Bush Defends Emissions Stance

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/politics/15ENVI.html

WASHINGTON, March 14 - Defending his reversal of a campaign pledge, President Bush said today that "an energy crisis" that threatened the nation's economic health caused him to decide not to try to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide.

"I was responding to realities, and the reality is our nation has a real problem when it comes to energy," Mr. Bush told reporters in New Jersey today.

White House officials said any plan to limit emissions of the gas, widely seen as a contributor to global warming, would have pushed electricity prices up, and could have compounded energy shortages like those being felt in California. They said Mr. Bush decided on Monday, hours before the White House announced the move, after concluding a week ago that the promise he had made in the campaign was "an error."

But many of Mr. Bush's supporters outside the White House said they had little doubt that the president's move also reflected the power of a last-minute pressure campaign from Congressional Republicans and industry leaders. Among the top corporate officials said by Washington lobbyists to have been in direct contact with either the president or Vice President Dick Cheney to win the turnabout was Tom Kuhn, a close friend of Mr. Bush's who is president of the Edison Electric Institute, the power plants' main lobbying organization.

"We had been convinced that we were done for," a top industry lobbyist said today of what he said was widespread resignation that Mr. Bush would honor his campaign promise, which called for mandatory reductions in power plants' emissions of the gas. Characterizing the lobbying of the last several weeks, this industry official said, "The very top people on our side were talking to the very highest levels of the administration."

Among people critical of Mr. Bush's move, several suggested in particular today that his diagnosis of "energy crisis" was overstated and was being offered at least in part as a cover for a decision driven by a desire to satisfy the oil and coal industries, the biggest beneficiaries of his decision, as well as to preserve good ties with their supporters on Capitol Hill.

"In every energy decision, politics plays a big role," said Bill Richardson, who was the Clinton administration's last energy secretary. "But the emissions decision is a particularly unfortunate one because it basically says we're for coal and not for any alternative, including natural gas, which should be our future source of energy in this country."

A decision to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide would have been felt most heavily by coal- and oil-burning plants, which are the largest emitters of the gas among the electric utilities. The adoption of the standards would have almost certainly resulted in a shift toward more widespread use of natural gas, a cleaner fuel, in power generation.

White House officials said today that such a shift would have taken place too quickly for the natural gas industry to come up with the supplies necessary to meet the new demand, and that higher prices would have resulted. But Skip Horvath, president of the Natural Gas Supply Association, said his industry regarded Mr. Bush's decision as a mistake.

"The policy seems to view a shift toward natural gas use as some kind of problem, and it seems to us that natural gas is the solution," Mr. Horvath said.

The energy problems now facing California have little to do with oil and coal because most of the state's electricity is generated from hydropower, nuclear power and natural-gas fired plants. But White House officials said Mr. Bush's comments about "an energy crisis" reflected a broader concern about the need to expand the domestic energy supply, by increasing production and use of all possible sources.

Mr. Bush's decision was warmly welcomed today by spokesmen for the oil and gas industries, as well as by a top official of the United States Chamber of Commerce, which had warned that any regulation of carbon dioxide emissions could have hurt the economy.

"It's very positive in that they've balanced environmental needs against our needs for energy security, and the decision is going to mean that we can both protect and begin increasing our domestic energy supplies," said the official, William L. Kovacs, the industry group's vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

The pressure on the White House to reverse Mr. Bush's decision began early this month, after Christie Whitman, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, began publicly to describe the president's campaign pledge as if it were already policy.

Four Republican senators strongly opposed to regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, led by Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, then sent Mr. Bush a letter asking that he clarify his position. That set in motion an internal White House review and the furious lobbying effort that culminated in the policy shift on Tuesday, White House and industry officials said.

"It was very good that they made a swift decision here, rather than let this issue fester and fester," said John Grasser, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, the coal industry's main representative.

Environmentalists have been sharply critical of Mr. Bush's move, and some elaborated on their criticisms today, saying that the president had passed up an important chance to address the most dire problem facing the environment.

"The energy crisis we have is a short-term phenomenon, but the global warming phenomenon is a long-term issue, and what's important is to begin to put in place a solution that will reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and cut our emissions of carbon dioxide," said Michael Oppenheimer, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group.

A former Clinton administration official who was one of the chief State Department negotiators in recent talks aimed at completing a global warming treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, said today that Mr. Bush's decision would undercut efforts to find a solution to the problem.

"The only silver lining I can see here is that it makes things so stark and clear," said the official, David B. Sandalow. "There's not ambiguity, no attempt to greenwash this. He's just going back on his promise."

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The Burden of Containment

New York Times
March 15, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/opinion/15THU2.html

The effort to contain foot-and-mouth disease has created a nightmarish reality: pyres of farm animals in Britain and France, the abrupt closing of trade borders around the world, a sense of grief and panic among farmers and confusion among consumers. Although foot-and-mouth disease is not widespread in Europe, the mere presence of this highly contagious pathogen forced the swift slaughter, incineration and burial of some 200,000 farm animals in Britain and France in the past month and led the United States this week to ban imports of animals and animal products from the European Union. It was a sad but necessary step.

While foot-and-mouth disease itself does not usually kill farm animals, the fear of it does. Nearly all of the animals that have been killed and burned in the past weeks had been headed for slaughter sooner or later, but for slaughter of a kind that would have been invisible and economically productive. The disease changes all that. At the level of individual farms and farmers, profit margins are so narrow that any loss of productivity from infected herds - a drop in weight gain or milk output, for instance - is unsustainable. Even the suspicion of foot-and-mouth disease means that markets instantly evaporate. No one will buy animals that have had the disease and recovered from it, and no one will knowingly eat products derived from those animals, though no harm has been proved from doing so.

American livestock producers will benefit from the exclusion of European products from this and other markets. But no one can rejoice in the proliferating trade bans, which come at a time when globalization is the economic mantra and when an agriculture without borders is the ideal embraced by many governments, if not necessarily by farmers.

The trouble is that for foot-and-mouth disease, there really are no borders. It moves with a fluidity that is rivaled only by the movement of money. Wherever the disease appears, paradoxically, it has the effect of stopping the movement of animals and people and turning borders into rigid barriers. But it is only strict animal quarantines and constant vigilance at the borders that have kept this country free of foot-and-mouth disease for the past 72 years.

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Mr. Bush Reverses Course

New York Times
March 15, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/opinion/15THU1.html

President Bush's decision not to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, does more than betray a campaign promise. It embarrasses the administrator of his Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman, angers the Europeans and creates needless headaches for his secretary of state, Colin Powell. It also undercuts some of his natural allies in the energy industry who have been willing to go out on a limb in favor of a more aggressive strategy.

During a broad policy speech on energy last Sept. 29, Mr. Bush promised to "establish mandatory reduction targets" for emissions of four major pollutants, including carbon dioxide, a gas that has never been regulated under the federal Clean Air Act. In later remarks, Mr. Bush made quite a point of the fact that he was calling for mandatory targets, whereas Al Gore was asking for only voluntary reductions.

Because the burden of regulating carbon emissions would fall most heavily on coal-burning power plants, the coal producers and some utilities urged Mr. Bush to change his mind. But his campaign stance delighted most atmospheric scientists, who believe that warming over the next century will increase far more than was originally thought, with potentially devastating consequences to the natural systems in some regions.

European leaders, persuaded by the gathering evidence on the causes and dangers of global warming, have been urging the United States to help put some teeth into the Kyoto Protocol, the draft agreement to curb greenhouse gases negotiated in 1997. Meanwhile, the country's more progressive utilities, like Consolidated Edison and New Jersey's Public Service Electric and Gas, are on record as favoring clear targets and timetables for carbon dioxide as part of a multipollutant approach that would create a more predictable regulatory climate and a surer guide to making costly pollution-control investments.

Indeed, as recently as 10 days ago, Ms. Whitman was describing Mr. Bush's campaign promise as if it were already policy. Then came the president's reversal. In a letter to four Republican senators who had criticized the Kyoto agreement, Mr. Bush said he would proceed with plans for further cuts in sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog, as well as with new regulations on mercury emissions. But carbon dioxide was off the table, for two main reasons.

One was that the science about global warming was "incomplete," by which he meant that it was insufficient as a basis for taking action. That was an astonishing statement in view of the recent documentation assembled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The second was that reducing emissions would require converting older coal-fired plants to natural gas, which, in turn, could "harm consumers" by causing a spike in gas prices - as California's energy crisis has demonstrated.

This was a particularly slippery piece of reasoning. It is true that switching fuels will be necessary and costly. But by cynically invoking the California crisis and the specter of sudden price spikes, Mr. Bush made it sound as if a policy aimed at gradual reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would have an immediate and devastating effect on American consumers and the economy.

Despite Mr. Bush's protestations to the contrary yesterday, one can conclude only that political considerations carried the day. His reversal came as a shock to moderate Republicans like Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York, who were preparing to join Democrats in a bipartisan effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in power plants over the next six years. They should push ahead anyway. At the moment, Mr. Bush's evolving energy strategy seems to consist largely of finding new sources of energy without giving any real thought to their global consequences.

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ANOTHER BEEF IMPORT BAN

New York Times
March 15, 2001
World Business Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/business/15FOBR.html

Citing a high possibility that foot-and-mouth disease could spread throughout Europe, South Korea became the fifth country to forbid the import of fresh meat from hoofed animals from all 15 European Union nations. The United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have imposed similar bans. The statement said the ban would not apply to processed, sterilized foods and would be lifted as soon as there were no signs of the disease anywhere in the European Union. Don Kirk (NYT)

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Europe adopts fortress mentality to fight virus

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 01:50 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-15-foot.htm

LONDON (AP) - Dramatically escalating its bid to stop the wildfire spread of foot-and-mouth disease, Britain announced plans Thursday to slaughter up to 100,000 animals that may have come in contact with the virus - in addition to more than 200,000 sheep, cows and pigs already killed or marked for death.

The drastic move, announced by Agriculture Minister Nick Brown, came as reverberations of the nearly month-old outbreak rippled far beyond British shores.

Continental Europe, shaken by the disease's spread to France this week, worked to strengthen its internal defenses against the virus - even as the rest of the world scrambled to shut out European meat and dairy products, including those from countries that have remained disease-free.

Foot-and-mouth disease poses no threat to humans, but when it strikes countries or trade blocs that had previously been certified as free of the ailment it can have disastrous commercial consequences.

If they want to restore their disease-free status - crucial for agricultural trade - countries can find themselves faced with the necessity of destroying enormous numbers of animals.

If they resort instead to vaccination, which does not always work well, they effectively renounce their claim to a share of the lucrative export market; as long as its herds carry antibodies to the virus, the country cannot be certified as disease-free.

As the outbreak drags on, relations between Britain and the rest of Europe - and Europe and the rest of the world - were showing signs of strain. Europe is unhappy over U.S. and Canadian bans on European Union livestock, fresh meat and dairy products announced Wednesday.

The European Commission said Thursday it would not immediately take trade action against the United States and Canada, but did not rule out retaliatory steps later.

Within the EU, which has made the breaking down of borders and barriers its raison d'etre, customs posts were being reactivated.

Along the Belgium-French border, Belgium set up checkpoints to stop the entry of French livestock. The German states bordering France agreed Thursday to check all arriving commercial traffic.

Portugal on Thursday urged a European Union-wide ban on livestock movement. The tiny Faeroe Islands, a Danish dependency in the North Atlantic, banned French meat, as did Austria.

In Britain, authorities faced a dilemma: to ease restrictions, or make them even more severe. They decided to do both.

With farmers in unaffected parts of the country clamoring for relief from tight curbs on animal movement, Brown, the agriculture minister, held out hope that restrictions could be relaxed within 10 days.

But at the same time, he announced the most far-reaching slaughter yet, involving animals showing no signs of illness but believed to have had potential contact with the virus. The prime minister's office estimated Wednesday that could be around 100,000.

All livestock within two miles of confirmed outbreaks in the northeastern county of Cumbria will be destroyed, Brown told the House of Commons. Sheep which may have been exposed to the disease at three markets will also be destroyed.

"We are intensifying the slaughter of animals at risk in the areas of the country - thankfully still limited - where the disease has spread," Brown said. "This is a policy of safety first."

With at least 240 separate outbreaks now reported, farmers have acknowledged the grim necessity of mass slaughter. Even so, the latest measures are a blow.

Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers Union, said the size of the killing zones would mean many healthy animals would die.

"There will be many tears around the British countryside today," he said. Our farms should be starting to jump to life with newborn lambs and calves. Instead, many will feel that spring has been canceled, and their farms are simply dead."

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Even Dolly's life on the line in epidemic

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 06:36 PM ET
By Anita Manning, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm

The devastating epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease raging throughout the United Kingdom and beyond has put even the world's most famous ewe, Dolly, the cloned sheep, in danger. Dolly, the first animal created through cloning techniques developed at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1997, is quarantined from other animals at the institute, says Harry Griffin, assistant director of science. But if foot-and-mouth disease struck, "we wouldn't be exempt from the overall policy of slaughter throughout Europe," he says. Dolly is no exception. "She would have to go the same as every other animal." The British government announced Thursday that it is stepping up its slaughter of animals in hopes of halting the outbreaks.

Griffin says the highly contagious virus has not approached the institute, but the virus is about 30 miles away from one of the institute's farms, and "there's a lot of hill country in between," that would mitigate airborne transmission, he says.

The institute, which conducts research to improve the welfare and breeding of farm animals, has closed its doors to visitors and severely restricted entry to farms to reduce the chance the virus could be carried in by humans or by vehicles passing through.

Still the epidemic is alarming. "I don't think any farming operation in the UK feels safe at all," Griffin says. "Everybody is holding their breath."

The government announced new measures Thursday in an attempt to thwart the spread of the disease. In addition to more than 200,000 animals killed or marked for slaughter, sheep exposed to the virus at three markets, and all livestock within 2 miles of infected farms in the northeastern county of Cumbria will be destroyed, agriculture minister Nick Brown said. These could amount to another 100,000 animals killed. The British government confirmed another nine outbreaks Thursday, bringing the total to 240 since Feb. 20.

In Europe, border patrols are being intensified to prevent further spread of the disease, which already has reached France. Meat and livestock from the European Union is barred from export to North America, Australia and Asia; Belgium is blocking French livestock and Russia and Austria have banned French meat. The disease has emerged in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Argentina.

Foot-and-mouth disease rarely affects humans, but it strikes cloven-hoofed animals, including cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and deer, causing death or severe disability, with weight loss and a drop in milk production. The disease, which causes blisters in the mouth and on hooves, has not occurred in the USA since 1929.

British agriculture minister Brown said he hopes that stringent restrictions on the movement of livestock within areas that are free of the disease can be relaxed within 10 days. But Griffin is not so sure.

The epidemic, he says, is "persisting longer than veterinary authorities had hoped. We expect restrictions to remain in place for months."

At the Roslin Institute, Dolly is not the only animal at risk; so are sheep, cattle and pigs the institute keeps for its research, Griffin says. "When we clone sheep, we need a flock of ewes to provide eggs and be surrogate mothers. We also have large long-term experiments. One is due to run 10 years, and they're partway through that. If we do get foot-and-mouth disease, that extremely expensive experiment will come to an end. So it's not just the value of the animals lost, it's the research."

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Dogs greet travelers as U.S. fights livestock disease

USA Today
03/15/2001 - Updated 06:36 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-14-foot-dogs.htm

CHANTILLY, Va. (AP) - Dogs trained to sniff luggage for contraband food or even soiled boots - signs a traveler may have been on a farm - greeted travelers from London and other European points as inspectors tightened U.S. defenses against foot-and-mouth disease. "It's fair enough, considering you have 10 times as many cattle as we do," British student Anthony Davidowitz said Wednesday as he waited as inspectors disinfected two pairs of his shoes after he arrived at Dulles International Airport. Foot-and-mouth, harmless to humans, could be devastating to the huge U.S. livestock industry. Unchecked, an epidemic could cause billions of dollars in damage, officials say. And people can easily transport the virus on shoes.

A U.S. ban on meat and livestock imports was expanded from Britain to the European Union after a case was confirmed Tuesday in France, and the Agriculture Department heightened its alerts at international airports and seaports.

"We are extremely concerned because we know how quickly it can spread," said Craig Reed, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "In two to four days it can be all over the place."

Any travelers who acknowledge on their U.S. Customs declarations that they have recently been on a farm - as Davidowitz did Tuesday - are pulled aside for special questioning. If their shoes or boots are dirty, inspectors take the footwear and disinfect it in a mild solution of bleach and water.

The Agriculture Department also recently added 100 inspectors to its force of 1,800 nationwide to focus on flights arriving from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. At Washington's Dulles International, where USDA's inspection service normally has a staff, two additional inspectors were on duty Tuesday.

The fight against foot-and-mouth disease largely depends on the honesty of travelers to admit when completing customs forms that they've been on a farm or are carrying meat or other food that could harbor the disease. USDA's trained dog teams, known as Beagle Brigades, are supposed to root out scofflaws, but they get to only a portion of any flight's baggage.

At Dulles, travelers from Britain have been noticeably more forthright recently, probably due to the publicity about the disease, inspectors said.

Quincy, a USDA beagle who met Virgin Atlantic Flight 21 from London, sniffed out a couple of apples and a package of meat jerky from among the 248 passengers.

"They're very wise to take precautions," said Pauline Frankel, a Virgin Atlantic passenger who was sent to the special USDA inspection area after she declared a bottle of homemade chutney she was taking to her son in Richmond, Va.

"We thought we would be sprayed with disinfectant," said the suburban London resident. She was allowed to keep the chutney.

Foot-and-mouth disease has been eradicated from the United States since 1929 and from Canada since 1952.

But it was at the top of Agriculture Department's most-unwanted list long before the current outbreak occurred in Britain last month. The disease is found on every continent except North America, Australia and Antarctica, and in every South American country except Chile and Uruguay

Argentina suspended all beef exports Tuesday after confirming a new case.

The virus spreads so quickly, through the air or on motor vehicles or people, that entire herds and flocks must be incinerated to contain it. The disease can kill young animals and limits the growth of older ones.

The virus causes blister-like sores in the hooves and mouths of animals, hence the name.

USDA has a team of 280 veterinarians who can reach any farm or ranch in the country within eight to 10 hours of a possible case being reported. If a case is confirmed, the farm would be quarantined immediately and all its livestock destroyed, USDA officials said.

Should foot-and-mouth disease reach the United States, "What you have seen in the UK is the same thing you will see happening here," said Alfonso Torres, deputy administrator of veterinary services for the USDA inspection service.

U.S. import restrictions against the European Union cover fresh and frozen meat as well as unpasteurized milk products. EU officials expressed surprised that the U.S. ban was extended to all 15 member countries even though the disease has been detected only in Britain and France.

Agriculture Department officials said the broader restrictions were necessary because people and trade flow so freely among the EU nations. The officials noted that livestock were recently destroyed in Belgium and the Netherlands after being imported from Britain.

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, praised USDA's action.

"Right now we just don't know how far this disease has spread," said Harkin, whose state is a top hog producer. "It is common sense to take protective measures."

---

Bush takes stand on CO2

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • March 15, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2001315174613.htm

Swayed by science - or at least, by the fact that the science about "global warming" is by no means settled - President Bush has decided not to pursue mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) output, publicly distancing himself from comments to the contrary made by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and some other Bush administration staffers.

Environmental activists have tried for several years to portray carbon dioxide - an inert gas that comprises a great portion of the Earth's atmosphere - as a "pollutant" that must be regulated to combat "global warming." Since C02 is, among other things, a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels and industrial activity, significant reductions of man-made CO2 output would entail dramatic cutbacks in energy usage and industrial activity with potentially massive negative economic impacts. "If you attempt to regulate carbon dioxide, you will regulate us into a permanent energy crisis in this country," said Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, who along with a few other stalwart Republicans went to the mat on this issue, refusing to be cowed by political correctness or fear of being portrayed as "anti-environment." Said Mr. Craig: "I think they understand that at the White House now" - meaning, the practical consequences of appeasing radical environmentalists.

Indeed, it appears that Mr. Bush has come to the altogether reasonable conclusion that the so-called "precautionary principle" is not a sound basis for establishing public policy that could affect the well-being of millions of people for the worse. Simply put, the precautionary principle posits that steps be taken proactively to address a given risk, even if the risk is no more than theoretical. Environmentalists have basically been arguing that drastic precautionary steps be taken to deal with the purely theoretical bogeyman of human-caused catastrophic global warming. Mr. Bush has properly stepped back from this precipice.

Among the problems with global warming theory are the troubling incongruities between satellite data and measurements of temperature taken at ground-based stations. They contradict one another. The satellite data indicate an overall cooling trend while some ground monitoring stations suggest a slight warming is taking place. Further complicating matters is the fact that most of the warming trend observed by scientists occurred in the early part of the last century, or well before mass industrialization worldwide. In any event, the entire theory of global warming that forms the basis of the argument for "wrenching changes" (former Vice President Al Gore's words) in our use of energy is based on vague computer models whose predictive value is dubious. There are simply too many variables. Add to all of this the facts that many scientists believe we are just now emerging from a period of abnormally cool planetary temperatures (the so-called "Little Ice Age") and that natural sources of CO2 production far eclipse humanity's contribution, and you have, at minimum, ample reason to proceed with caution.

Reducing U.S. output of CO2 to below 1990 levels - as advocated by such as Mr. Gore and enshrined in the Clinton administration's "Kyoto Protocol" global warming treaty - would likely precipitate major economic dislocations, perhaps even a worldwide depression. That's a stiff price to pay for a threat that may not even exist - or, if it does, may be caused by factors entirely beyond our control.

---

Hobgoblins in the Cabinet

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
Kenneth D. Smith
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2001315175855.htm

When then-President Clinton visited flood victims in North Dakota a few years ago, he couldn't resist suggesting that perhaps there was more involved there than random misfortune. No one knew for sure whether global warming was to blame for a "substantial increase" in disruptive weather events, he said, but many people believed that it was. The implication of his remarks was that some plant manager, some automobile driver or some otherwise inconsiderate person somewhere had emitted sufficient "greenhouse" gases to trip the global warming starter, thereby setting off associated inclement weather and disaster in North Dakota. Unless someone did something soon, he implied, there might be more such events.

A variety of scientific studies have discounted the relationship between global warming and the likes of hurricanes, tidal waves and other disasters. Today Mr. Clinton's remarks serve primarily as a timely reminder of H.L. Mencken's adage: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with a series of hobgoblins."

One would have hoped that the departure of the Clinton administration would have meant an end to the endless Halloween parades to which this country has been treated for the last eight years, but on Saturday the New York Times reported otherwise. Citing a campaign pledge of President Bush, the paper said his administration and some congressional Republicans had taken up the cause of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a "gas" that humans exhale and that puts the bubbles in beer. It also helps trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the now-famous "greenhouse" effect. Without "greenhouse gases" like carbon dioxide or water vapor to trap some heat, the Earth would be just another galactic snow cone devoid of human life.

The question now is whether there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that it could wind up barbecuing the Earth and bringing on environmental "holocaust." That's how Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill effectively described it, which partly explains how the administration got drawn into the controversy. The Times reported that he might be the strongest advocate in the Cabinet for controlling carbon dioxide emissions. At the first Cabinet meeting, Mr. O'Neill reportedly handed out copies of a speech he had made two years before, warning of the dangers of global warming. There are two issues, he said, that warrant special attention. "One," he said, "is nuclear holocaust and the danger of renegade states having available to them nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The second is environmental: specifically the issue of global climate change and the potential of global warming."

The juxtaposition of the two as morally equivalent is breathtaking. Not only are scientists unable to agree about the extent to which humans have contributed to global warming. They can't even agree on whether it is necessarily a bad thing. Rather than devastation and havoc, it might mean longer, more productive growing seasons, for example. It might mean longer, more productive human lives. (There's a reason many retirees migrate south.) This is a holocaust?

Regardless of the merit of this outlook, it created political problems for Mr. Bush, who had made it clear that he wants to seek oil in the barren wilds of Alaska, sometimes known as the "Arctic Wildlife National Refuge." What is the point of drilling for oil, a fossil fuel guilty of emitting carbon dioxide, if you aren't going to be able to use it because of regulations that cap carbon emissions? If Mr. O'Neill, the secretary of global warming, had his way, Mr. Bush would be better off emulating the mismanaged energy policies of California, where rolling blackouts and high energy prices limit carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr. O'Neill's outlook also raises potential ethical problems for him. One of the ways environmentalists seek to reduce emissions is to insist on the production of smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient cars. Many auto manufacturers have responded to such pressure by using more aluminum in their cars. As critics at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are quick to note, Mr. O'Neill holds substantial shares of Alcoa, the aluminum manufacturer, and he stands to benefit financially if U.S. policy-makers see hobgoblins in the same places he does.

Fortunately, Mr. Bush does not scare so easily. After remaining silent as the debate over the administration's stance on global warming raged on around him, Mr. Bush sent a letter to Congress Tuesday, saying he would not seek caps on carbon dioxide emissions because of the "incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." Just so. If Mr. O'Neill can't convince Mr. Bush of the impending environmental holocaust, he may find the American people an equally hard sell.

E-mail: Ksmith@washingtontimes.com

Kenneth Smith is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times.His column appears on Thursdays.

-------- police

Troopers' Appeal Is Denied

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15COUR.html

TRENTON, March 14 - The New Jersey Supreme Court refused today to hear an appeal by two state troopers fighting criminal charges stemming from a New Jersey Turnpike shooting that inflamed the state's racial profiling controversy.

The troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna, had asked the courts to dismiss the charges, which include attempted murder and aggravated assault. A trial judge did just that in October, but an appeals court later reversed that ruling.

Associate Justice Gary S. Stein, who signed the order denying the appeal, did not offer a reason.

In an appeal filed Feb. 5, defense lawyers said the special prosecutor in the case, James J. Gerrow, failed to explain the law governing the justified use of force by police officers when he presented the case to the grand jury in 1999.

---

Metro Matters: Few Answers After Settling a Bad Arrest

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By JOYCE PURNICK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15MATT.html

I'M relieved, but I just wish they would tell us more, how it came about," Preston Brown said this week.

Not likely. Thanks to the government's innate regard for secrecy and a criminal justice system that can sometimes forget its middle name, we may never know precisely how Preston Brown was wrongly arrested and prosecuted in a case of mistaken identity.

Mr. Brown, 30, was arrested two years ago on charges of illegally selling a gun. Not until his trial was under way did prosecutors realize they had the wrong man.

This week, Mr. Brown settled his lawsuit against the government for $75,000, effectively closing the case. Unless a journalist can pry open the files, the real story of a man's unjust arrest and trial will remain under wraps.

"I had to represent my client, but I feel a pang of discomfort in settling the case," said Mr. Brown's lawyer, Joel Berger. "I wasn't able to find out for my client what really happened."

We do know that the error seems to have started innocently, with a name mix-up: Mr. Berger's client had the unfortunate luck of sharing the same name as a man 11 years older, nearly 4 inches taller and 70 pounds heavier.

Two Secret Service agents - Tyler McQuiston and John Walsh - had observed that other Preston Brown up to a dozen times in 1998, during a six-month, ultimately unsuccessful investigation of counterfeiting. They determined that the counterfeiting suspect was also a gun trafficker; in 1999, the younger Mr. Brown was arrested because, the government said, a clerk pulled the wrong rap sheet.

The two agents subsequently testified that the man on trial did the crime. So did a confidential informant, a felon from Israel, David Thause, who had twice re-entered this country illegally after being deported; he was to be granted immunity from prosecution if he testified truthfully in the Brown trial.

The case unraveled last year, the night before Mr. Brown was set to testify in his own behalf. That's when federal prosecutors, preparing for their cross-examination, realized they were trying the wrong man. That night, they tracked down a second confidential informant, identified as Norton Whitter in the trial transcript. Mr. Whitter, who had seen the gun sale, looked at a photograph of the defendant and said he was the wrong man. He also said that the perpetrator's alias was June Bug. The defendant did not have an alias.

Mr. Whitter could have cleared things up much earlier. But the government maintains that it could not find him.

To their credit, the next morning, Jan. 21, 2000, prosecutors alerted the court to their error and Preston Brown was soon free.

MISTAKES happen, and this one was caught. But the case also raises serious questions that, if answered, may prevent the next case of mistaken identity.

For instance, why were prosecutors unable to find Mr. Whitter sooner? Where is the other Mr. Brown today? How could experienced federal agents - one, Mr. McQuiston, had been assigned to the president's Secret Service detail by the time of the trial - misidentify a defendant?

Did the race of the two Preston Browns - they are black - play a role in what happened? What happened to Mr. Thause, the Israeli informant who wrongfully identified Mr. Brown?

Mr. Berger said he is convinced that the government settled the case to avoid answering questions. "There is a tendency when something embarrassing happens to circle wagons."

Indeed. Denise Gibson, special agent with the Secret Service, said yesterday, "I'm not allowed to comment on internal matters," in response to several questions.

The office of Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in Manhattan, was more forthcoming. Shirah Neiman, a deputy United States attorney, noted that the trial assistant had discovered the mistaken identification. A review "determined that the assistants acted appropriately and commendably. It was also determined that the agents made a good faith mistake, and we understand from the agency that no disciplinary action is contemplated."

Asked if a reporter could see a written report, if there was one, Ms. Neiman said, "I wouldn't comment on that."

Mr. Brown, now a salesman in an electronics store, said he just wanted to put the case behind him, even for a modest settlement. "I'm glad all this stuff is over," he said. "I didn't do hard time, but to be on the brink of serving five years is still not a walk in the park or a day in Florida."

---

New York Times
March 15, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15MBRF.html

MANHATTAN: OFFICER ACCUSED OF TAKING BRIBES Prosecutors yesterday charged Officer Marco Vargas, 24, with taking hundreds of dollars from someone he believed was a member of a drug gang in exchange for information about police narcotics operations on his Harlem beat. He was arraigned on a single count of third-degree bribe receiving, a felony, and faces up to seven years in prison. His lawyer, Stuart London, had no comment. William K. Rashbaum (NYT)

MANHATTAN: NO ACTION AGAINST OFFICER Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik approved last week the recommendation of an internal police tribunal that no action be taken against Officer Craig Yokemick, who threw a police radio at a fleeing suspect. The suspect, Kenneth Banks, suffered a skull fracture and died. In 1999, a state grand jury voted to bring no criminal charges in the 1998 incident. Mr. Banks's family settled a wrongful-death suit against the city for $1.1 million. A federal grand jury is investigating the case. William K. Rashbaum (NYT)

---

Minding Their Manners

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By BOB HERBERT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/opinion/15HERB.html

One night a couple of weekends ago, New York's new police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, was making the rounds of the city. A little after midnight, he and two aides were driving along 42nd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Times Square was its usual rollicking self, which was fine with the commissioner. But there were double-parked cars all over the place.

Mr. Kerik, who was in the back seat of his car, noticed some cops chatting on the sidewalk. He asked his driver to pull over. He was going to tell the cops to do something about the double-parked cars.

A detective in the front seat lowered his window, beckoned to a sergeant and said, "Excuse me, could I talk to you for a moment?"

The response shocked the commissioner. An officer standing beside the sergeant said, "Hey, you want to talk to us, you get out of the [expletive] car and come over here. We don't [expletive] come to you."

"I thought my head was going to pop off my shoulders," Mr. Kerik said in an interview the other day.

The cops on the sidewalk went into a kind of collective shock when they realized that the police commissioner was in the car. Their careers passed before their eyes in an instant. Almost as quickly, the double- parked cars were moved.

But the incident didn't die there. Commissioner Kerik has been spreading the word to the top brass and ordinary officers alike: the heyday of the abusive, arrogant cop is gone. He wants police officers to treat the public with respect.

"I'm not going to have the cops talking to the public like they talked to my guy," he said.

Mr. Kerik, appointed police commissioner by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani seven months ago, is off to an interesting start. He is as committed to the city's crackdown on criminal behavior as any of his predecessors. But he is surprisingly vocal, even vehement, in his belief that the crackdown can be sustained without sacrificing civil liberties, and without disrespectful behavior by the police.

Mr. Kerik has made it his mission to begin the laborious process of rebuilding bridges between the police and the city's racial and ethnic minorities, and he is monitoring civilian complaints more closely than any previous commissioner.

For some time now a different tone - a more positive tone - has been coming out of the Police Department, and Mr. Kerik's appointment last August seems to be part of that.

Civilian complaints against the police have shown a steady decline over the past three years. Complaints of unnecessary force are down 16 percent since 1998. Abuse-of- authority complaints are down 20 percent. And discourtesy complaints are down 26 percent.

The likelihood of a fatal shooting by a police officer has been much lower over the past three or four years than it was in the early to mid- 90's. From 1992 through 1996, for example, 134 offenders were shot to death by the police, an average of 27 per year. From 1997 through 2000, 64 offenders were shot and killed, an average of 16 per year.

"If you go back and look at the Police Department when we had 30,000 cops, I think there were about 41 or 42 fatal shootings," Mr. Kerik said, referring to the number per year. "Now we have 41,000 cops, and yet last year we only had 14 fatal shootings. But people's perception is that they're shooting, they're brutalizing, they're beating people - it's not true."

Terrible tragedies like the Diallo and Dorismond shootings, combined with the arrogance and misbehavior of some police officers, make it very difficult to showcase real improvements in the department, the commissioner said. But he added that he is determined to continue the improvements, and to get the word out.

There may be any number of motives behind the effort to improve the department and burnish its reputation. After many years of refusing to rein in brutal officers, the department is now trying to ward off the threat of a federal monitor. And Mayor Giuliani, as he approaches the end of his second term, may be concerned about his legacy. And it's possible that the mayor and the police commissioner and others simply feel this is the right thing to do.

Whatever the motivation, cynical or otherwise, if a better-behaved department is the result, fine.

---

New Jersey Officials Had Data on Profiling, an Aide Says

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By IVER PETERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/nyregion/15TROO.html

TRENTON, March 14 - As he prepared to acknowledge for the first time that New Jersey state troopers had been singling out minority drivers for traffic stops for years, former Attorney General Peter G. Verniero was upset to learn that his office had been given evidence almost two years earlier on the existence of the problem, a top aide has testified.

The State Senate committee investigating the state's response to racial profiling released transcripts of testimony tonight in which that aide, Paul Zoubek, first assistant attorney general, said he discovered in March 1999 that the state police had sent his office statistics strongly suggesting that New Jersey troopers were guilty of racial profiling.

Mr. Zoubek testified that those data had been sent to the deputy attorney general, George Rover, who was in charge of assembling documents to be sent to the federal Justice Department, which was investigating allegations of profiling in New Jersey.

Mr. Verniero, who had been nominated for a seat on the State Supreme Court, had long said the problem did not exist. Mr. Zoubek was completing a report for him in which Mr. Verniero would acknowledge that it was "real, not imagined." In an early draft, the report maintained that the police had only recently provided evidence of profiling.

But Mr. Zoubek testified that he examined Mr. Rover's files and found the police statistics, which had been sent to the attorney general's office almost two years earlier but had not been brought to Mr. Verniero's attention.

Mr. Zoubek told the Senate that when he told Mr. Verniero, the attorney general's first concern seemed to be whether the documents showed that he had been given them.

"What was the attorney general's reaction to that, that the stuff was in Rover's files?" Michael Chertoff, the Senate committee's lawyer, asked Mr. Zoubek, according to the transcripts. "Was he upset?"

"He was upset that, he was, about being in Rover's file?" Mr. Zoubek said, rephrasing the question for clarity.

"Yeah," Mr. Chertoff replied.

"He said at the time that `Did I, you know, did those documents that you received reflect that they went to me?' " Mr. Zoubek replied.

Mr. Zoubek was interviewed on Saturday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which released his eight hours of testimony this evening. The committee, which has been investigating whether state officials tried to cover up racial profiling by the state police, plans to begin hearings on Monday and to call Mr. Verniero to testify.

In a session in which the questions and answers were often convoluted, Mr. Zoubek also testified that Mr. Verniero had discussed his hopes of becoming a Supreme Court justice as the racial-profiling allegations were swirling around him, bolstered by the shooting and wounding of three unarmed black and Hispanic men by two state troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna, during a 1998 traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

And, Mr. Zoubek said, Mr. Verniero was so anxious to deflect mounting criticism of his handling of the allegations while attorney general that he ignored his aides' advice against releasing one grand jury's indictment of the two troopers before a second grand jury had completed its work on a separate indictment.

As the first anniversary of the shooting approached in the spring of 1999, the families of the three wounded men were pressuring the attorney general for results, and news media criticism of the state's reluctance to acknowledge racial profiling was building. Mr. Verniero grew impatient to get the prosecution of the troopers under way, according to Mr. Zoubek's testimony.

Mr. Verniero was told that the grand jury was nearing the end of its investigation into accusations that the troopers had falsified their arrest records to minimize the number of minority drivers pulled over, but that the second grand jury investigating the shooting itself was far from finished.

"We were upcoming to the first anniversary of the shooting, and there was a discussion of concerns of the length of the time that the overall investigations we're talking about," Mr. Zoubek said. Later, he added, "And there had been recent calls for the investigation to be taken over because it was taking too long." Mr. Verniero asked his staff then whether the state could proceed with just the indictment on charges of falsification of documents, Mr. Zoubek said.

The aides warned that if the first indictment was released before the second grand jury had finished its work, the news could prejudice its deliberations. Mr. Zoubek said Mr. Verniero was warned that doing so "could result in the need to re- present to another grand jury." But Mr. Verniero ignored the advice and made the falsification-of-data indictment public before the shooting grand jury had acted.

In November, a State Superior Court judge did, in fact, quash the most serious charges against the troopers on those grounds. In throwing out both indictments, the judge, Andrew J. Smithson, said Mr. Verniero's decision was "more a matter of political expediency than concern for the substantive rights of defendants Hogan and Kenna."

The state appealed, however, and the Appellate Division later reinstated the indictments.

[The State Supreme Court denied the troopers' appeal of the reinstated charges without explanation Wednesday, The Associated Press reported.]

Robert A. Mintz, Mr. Verniero's lawyer, has been critical of the Senate committee's proceedings.

"A fair reading of the depositions, testimony and documents show that the attorney general's office has been grappling with the issue of racial profiling for at least a decade," Mr. Mintz said in an interview today. "So it is more than a little ironic that the only attorney general to acknowledge that this was a problem is the one who has been singled out as being a problem himself."

-------- spying

Freeh picks FBI veteran as counterespionage 'czar'

Washington Time
March 15, 2001
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001315225645.htm

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has selected a counterintelligence "czar" who will be named today and charged with strengthening U.S. capabilities to track foreign spies in the wake of the Robert Hanssen spy case.

Bush administration officials said the new director of the program called CI-21 - counterintelligence for the 21st century - will be FBI Special Agent David W. Szady, a 28-year FBI counterspy who currently heads the FBI's Portland, Ore., field office.

One official said Mr. Freeh will announce the appointment as the new head of the National Counterintelligence Board of Directors, the Cabinet-level board set up by presidential order.

"Szady was selected unanimously," said the official. "He is someone who has a long and successful career in counterintelligence."

From 1997 to May 1999, Mr. Szady was chief of an interagency counterintelligence/counterespionage group that reported to CIA Director George J. Tenet and Mr. Freeh.

He also worked in the San Francisco office as a counterspy charged with tracking high-tech espionage in nearby Silicon Valley.

Mr. Szady also was a supervisor in Washington for Soviet counterspy efforts from 1975 to 1985 and was commended for his role in the John A. Walker Jr. friends-and-family espionage ring that supplied Navy code secrets to Moscow.

The appointment of the new counterspy czar was mandated by an executive order signed by President Clinton in January known as PDD-75 on "counterintelligence effectiveness."

Another administration official said Mr. Bush's National Security Council approved the Clinton counterspy program.

The directive "outlines specific steps that will enable the U.S. counterintelligence community to better fulfill its mission of identifying, understanding, prioritizing and counteracting the intelligence threats faced by the United States," the White House said in a statement.

FBI counterspying has come under fire in recent weeks from critics who questioned how FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen, a 27-year counterspy, could operate clandestinely for 15 years without being detected.

Mr. Hanssen was arrested in February and charged with being a "mole" for the Soviet Union and later Russia since 1985. He has not entered a plea yet, but his attorney has said he plans to plead not guilty.

FBI counterintelligence also has come under fire for its handling of the Wen Ho Lee spy case. Mr. Lee, a Los Alamos nuclear-weapons scientist, was suspected of supplying China with U.S. nuclear-warhead technology. His case ended in a plea agreement last year on one count of mishandling classified information related to nuclear codes.

The new counterintelligence program also will replace the interagency Counterintelligence Center located at CIA headquarters. Critics have said the center was ineffective.

The fact that the new "CI executive" is being announced by Mr. Freeh and not by President Bush is viewed by some in Congress as a sign that the counterspy chief will lack White House support.

"There are serious concerns about the commitment of the administration to this," said one congressional aide. "The sentiment here is that the person for that job needed to be a heavy hitter."

Some intelligence analysts also questioned the structure of the new program. The program establishes a "czar" post, but with limited resources. The executive also will be directed by a national-level board of directors headed by the FBI director and including senior officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, Justice Department and other agencies.

"The board . . . will operate by consensus and will select, oversee and evaluate the national counterintelligence executive and will promulgate the mission role and responsibility of the CI executive," the White House said in January.

The first task of the board will be to identify a national counterspy strategy from a threat assessment. The point of the program is to make sure "adequate resources" are devoted to catching spies.

The counterspy agency will produce an annual report on foreign spying threats, including those posed by traditional agents as well as newer dangers from information warfare.

---

Goons on trial

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • March 15, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2001315175322.htm

A little known case, involving 14 alleged Cuban spies charged with trying to infiltrate U.S. military bases and exile groups, has been described by U.S. officials as the largest Cuban espionage operation uncovered in the United States in decades. One of the defendants, Gerardo Hernandez, is charged also with conspiracy to commit murder. The evidence of the trial points to a cold-blooded plot by Cuban officials to infiltrate the Brothers to the Rescue group in order to shoot down and kill members involved in a Brothers' flight mission. The spies were tragically successful.

Radio messages from Havana, submitted as evidence in the trial, show that Cuba decided on Jan. 29, 1996, to use lethal retaliation against the Brothers' rafter missions. In February 1996, the Cuban regime repeatedly warned its agents to avoid flying with the Brothers, particularly from Feb. 24 to Feb. 27. On Feb. 24, the following conversation between a Cuban MiG pilot and his Cuban commander took place:

"Target lock-on, authorize us! . . . It's a Cessna 3-37 . . . That's the one! Authorize us, damn it."

"Fire."

"We got him, damn it! We got him! . . . The other one destroyed! Fatherland or death, damn it! The other one down, too!"

Cuban MiGs pursued and shot down two Cessnas, flown by Brothers to the Rescue members, who were flying in international air space, resulting in the death of Carlos Costa, Mario de la Pena, Armando Alejandre and Pablo Morales. Thanks to their spies, the Cubans knew full well the Cessnas were unarmed and unthreatening.

Despite the Clinton administration's requisite rhetoric claiming outrage and a determination to seek justice, the White House failed to initiate criminal proceedings against the Cubans for this premeditated, murderous act. The on-going trial demonstrates that the Clinton administration had a preponderance of evidence to use against the Cuban regime, but failed to act. And a U.S. District Court found the Cuban government guilty and liable for damages. With a new American administration, perhaps justice for the victims and their families will finally be meted out. Attorney General John Ashcroft should review the case and determine whether a federal grand jury should be convened.

Messrs. Alejandre, de la Pena and Costa were all U.S. citizens. Mr. Morales was a lawful U.S. resident and Vietnam veteran. America should demand justice on their behalf.

-------- terrorism

Ressam linked to bomb-making parts
More witnesses testify against Algerian

MSNBC
01/03/15
MSNBC NEWS SERVICES
http://www.msnbc.com/news/542634.asp?0nm=C18P

Alba Gonzalez, a clerk at Costco Canada, identified Ressam as a man named "Benni Noris," who applied for a store membership card. Her Spanish translator is seen standing behind her in this artist's sketch of Wednesday's testimony.

LOS ANGELES, March 15 - Federal prosecutors Thursday sought to link Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian accused of a millennium terrorism conspiracy, to purchases at Canadian electronics stores that provided boxes full of components for making bombs.

The electronic components purchased with the credit cards included sockets, rolls of wire, integrated circuits, various types of glue, soldering equipment and circuit boards.

RESSAM WAS linked to the materials by credit cards issued in the name of his alias, Benni Noris, and signed in August and September 1999, a few months before he was arrested bringing a car full of bomb-making materials into Port Angeles, Wash.

The electronic components purchased with the credit cards included sockets, rolls of wire, integrated circuits, various types of glue, soldering equipment and circuit boards.

Federal officials say the explosives were part of a plot for attacks on West Coast sites timed to coincide with New Year's 2000 celebrations. A prosecutor, however, said at the start of Ressam's trial this week that he would not try to prove specific target sites.

BOMB-MAKING PARTS

One of the witnesses from the Canadian electronics store spent about 40 minutes on the witness stand going through three large cartons of evidence to identify electronic parts wrapped in plastic bags.

Patricia May, manager of Active Electronics in Montreal, was shown a picture of the completed timing device found in Ressam's rental car and said the only things in the picture that did not come from her store were a wrist watch and a miniature lamp.

May said the purchases from her store were made in two visits in which the credit card user spent a total of about $300.

The manager of another branch of that store said the same credit card was used to buy screws and cables on Sept. 3, 1999. Witness Yves Gurin identified a screw on the timing device which he said came from his store.

Neither of the managers was asked to identify Ressam in court because they did not handle the transactions.

FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS

The trial on Wednesday focused on Ressam's alleged use of fraudulent documents to enter the United States and escape detection.

The testimony included an auditor who said Ahmed Ressam spent some $20,000 in the first nine months of 1999 using aliases and had no trackable source of income.

Prosecutors called more than 10 witnesses Wednesday including airline and travel clerks, bank employees and a Catholic priest, who described in painstaking detail the methods by which the Algerian allegedly create a phony identity as a Canadian "salesman" named "Benni Noris."

Prosecutors argue that the alias allowed Ressam, who they say is linked to shadowy Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, to charge plane tickets and bomb making materials to a Visa credit card. They also say Ressam used a fraudulently obtained passport to travel from Canada into Pakistan and into the United States in the months before his arrest.

The Canadian church secretary, a Roman Catholic priest in Canada, and a convicted forger all confirmed Ressam used a phony passport and baptismal certificate. The priest and secretary said the priest's signatures on a baptismal certificate for "Benni Noris" were forged.

Accused of attempting to smuggle explosives into the United States across the U.S.-Canadian border at Port Angeles, Wash., Ressam was arrested Dec. 14, 1999. Prosecutors have said in court documents that Ressam and Lucia Garafalo, a Canadian woman arrested in Vermont, are both members of the same "cell" of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, an Algerian terrorist group that has mounted violent attacks against the country's military and civilian population since the early 1990s. U.S. prosecutors will try to link Ressam to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, accused of funding terrorist organizations around the world. Algerian Islamic League Court documents claim the Algerian Islamic League is an international group with links to suspected terrorist activities in Europe and Algeria. A U.S. intelligence official said the group was not considered to be a terrorist organization per se, but has been known to lend 'support' -- defined as moral and financial assistance -- to Algerian militants.

Armed Islamic Group

The Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, emerged as the most violent of Algeria's Islamic militant groups once the North African nation's civil war began in 1993. The GIA's violence has primarily been confined to the North African country, but several attacks in France during the 1990s have killed at least 20 people.

Osama bin Laden

A banished Saudi millionaire and Afghan war veteran, bin Laden is wanted by the United States for allegedly bankrolling and training terrorist organizations around the world. U.S. officials have accused him of masterminding the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, among other acts of terror.

Bouabide Chamchi

The Algerian national was in the car with Lucia Garofalo when she was arrested at the U.S.-Canadian border in Vermont. He was accused of trying to enter the country with a falsified French passport.

Abdel Majid Dahoumane

Abdelmajid Dahoumane was identified as the man who shared a Vancouver motel room with Ahmed Ressam for several weeks before the latter's arrest as he allegedly attempted to smuggle explosives into the United States.

Lucia Garofalo

Arrested at the Vermont-Canadian border on Dec. 19, 1999, Garafalo was initially accused of attempting to transport an illegal alien, Bouabide Chamchi, across the U.S. border. Prosecutors charged she and Ahmed Ressam were both members of the same "cell" of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). On Feb. 15, 2000, Garofalo pleaded guilty to two counts of violating U.S. immigration law.

Abdel Ghani Meskini

Abdel Ghani Meskini, a 31-year-old Algerian believed to be an accomplice of Ahmed Ressam, was arrested in a dawn raid in Brooklyn on Dec. 30, 1999. A federal indictment said Meskini's name and telephone number were found on a piece of paper belonging to Ressam. Meskini pleaded guilty on March 9, 2001, and admitted conspiring with others to help a man known as "Reda" enter the United States.

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Prosecutors Sketch Bombing Suspect's Role

New York Times
March 15, 2001
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15TERR.html

The videotape was not long, but it was disturbing. It showed a corpse on a stretcher on a smoke-filled street. It showed a hunk of flesh that was unrecognizable except for having once been part of a human being.

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed watched the tape with quiet intensity yesterday at the embassy bombings trial. He stared at his computer screen as a startling image appeared: a burnt-out section of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which had just been destroyed by a terrorist bomb.

Mr. Mohamed has been charged with playing a direct role in the carnage and chaos that was depicted on the screen just inches from his face. He has been accused of riding in the truck that carried the bomb and of joining three other men in a terrorist plot with Osama bin Laden that resulted in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998.

For two weeks, a jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan has been hearing primarily about Mr. Mohamed's co-defendants - Wadih El- Hage, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali. But yesterday, Mr. Mohamed and his part in the Tanzanian blast became the focus of the trial.

Mr. Mohamed, 28, is a slim, bespectacled man who never graduated from high school. He grew up in a tiny town on the African island of Zanzibar, a rural place of farms and unpaved roads.

In their opening statement more than six weeks ago, Mr. Mohamed's lawyers made the shocking admission that he had ground TNT for the Tanzanian bomb, loaded it onto a truck and knew that he was helping to make an enormous explosive device. They added, however, that he was acting on the orders of "higher- ups" whose goals he did not know, and thus did not know the bomb's target.

Mr. Mohamed could face the death penalty if he is convicted, and his lawyers seemed to be arguing that even if he is guilty, he does not deserve to die. They tried to draw a crucial distinction, saying Mr. Mohamed had committed an evil act but was not an evil man.

Yesterday, the prosecution tried to flesh out some of Mr. Mohamed's admissions, calling an operatic cast of witnesses, some of whom had known Mr. Mohamed for as long as 14 years. The government called a man who had once played soccer with Mr. Mohamed in their student days and another who owned a juice bar in Tanzania that Mr. Mohamed went to from time to time.

The government's case against Mr. Mohamed goes something like this: he rented a house in the Ilala district of Dar es Salaam and met with his reputed partners in another house at 15 Amani Street in town. He ground the TNT to make the bomb and helped load it onto a two-ton Nissan truck. He rode in the truck as a driver steered it toward its target, but got out sometime before it exploded near the embassy's walls.

Amina Rashid, who worked as a maid at 15 Amani Street, testified yesterday that she had seen Mr. Mohamed there in the days before the bomb went off. But when she was asked to pick out Mr. Mohamed in the courtroom, she could not, though she did stare directly at him for several moments.

Next, the juice bar owner, Abdallah Hamisi, identified Mr. Mohamed and told the jury that he had often seen him in the company of Mustafa Mohamed Fadhil. Mr. Fadhil has been indicted in the case but has so far managed to elude arrest.

The next witness was a Tanzanian man named Mohamedi Selemani, who works as a real estate broker in Dar es Salaam when he isn't selling fish. Mr. Selemani said he had helped Mr. Mohamed get a yearlong lease on the house in the Ilala district, a house that appealed to Mr. Mohamed, he added, because of its gate and high perimeter wall.

The testimony made it clear that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had gone to extraordinary lengths in the case, sending agents to find a maid who had once crossed paths with Mr. Mohamed - not to mention the proprietor of one of his haunts.

The extent of the investigation was best captured by one of Mr. Mohamed's former roommates, who was asked what happened to a mattress and a carpet that Mr. Mohamed had left in their house.

"The F.B.I.," he said, "they came and took that stuff."

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New York Times
March 15, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/15/world/15BRIE.html

MEXICO: NEGOTIATION IMPASSE Prospects for renewed peace talks between Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government hit a snag after Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader who rode into Mexico City on Sunday with a caravan of Zapatista commanders, rejected a Congress plan to discuss Indian rights legislation considered crucial to the peace effort. President Vicente Fox said he remained optimistic about ending the seven-year Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas State. (Reuters)

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Indonesian rivals continue protests

Washington Times
March 15, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200131521222.htm

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Supporters and opponents of Indonesia's embattled head of state pelted each other with rocks and bottles yesterday in a third day of protests, as the administration faced new accusations of financial impropriety.

About 1,200 students opposed to President Abdurrahman Wahid marched past a downtown campus loyal to him and demanded he resign. At least three Wahid supporters were badly beaten in the subsequent clashes, witnesses said. Meanwhile, about 1,000 supporters rallied outside the presidential palace.

Legislators, who want to impeach the president over two corruption scandals, said yesterday they would investigate what they claimed was the suspicious transfer of $300,000 in cash to Mr. Wahid's entourage at the start of a pilgrimage this month to Islam's holy city of Mecca.

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)