------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
U.S.-Russia Relationship Warms Up a Bit
Bush to world: America is back
Court martial is unlikely for Waddle
Traditional owners reject Jabiluka moratorium
Israel developing tank shell
Ample room for engagement on missile defence
Russia Sees Tough U.S. Talks, Against 'NATOcentrism'
Labor to handle ill workers
LABOR PUTS CONDITIONS ON RUNNING PROGRAM
Nuclear workers to get help
Sick worker law may be getting on track, again
Kirk calls moving nuclear fuel out of Zion a top priority
Remove Zion waste: Kirk

MILITARY
Controls on Small Arms
Arms wrestling
NAVY TO RESUME VIEQUES BOMBING
New Mission for Lockheed Space Plane?
U.N. Aide in Kosovo Seized in Rwanda Killings
JORDAN TO HEED IRAQ FLIGHT BAN
Reid presses Navy for jet fuel spill information
Gay Pentagon aide's naming irks right

OTHER
GRANTS TO CLEAN UP LAND
PETROBRAS OIL RIG EVACUATED
BRITAIN: SLAUGHTER BETTER THAN VACCINE
Houston's Priorities
Florida Asks E.P.A. to Waive Safety Rule
Studies Tie Rise in Ocean Heat to Greenhouse Gases
Forest Service Choice Is Praised by Conservation and Timber
Administration Keeps 2 Rules on Efficiency of Appliances
Fight Over Arsenic in Lumber
The Latest Federal Report on Carcinogens
EPA now builds partnerships
'New environmental agenda' looks empty
Kyoto´s 'silver lining'
Developing world woos U.S. to climate talks
Ex-Policeman Defends Actions During Fatal Shooting
Most Changes to End Profiling Are in Place
Suit Is Settled in Case of Man Wrongly Held
Race and the Uses of Law
Metro Briefing
Cincinnati Mayor Imposes Curfew to Quell Violence
How Bush Had to Calm Hawks In Devising a Response to China
American Hostage Freed in Philippines
Beijing Declares Victory but Chat Rooms Are Skeptical
Bush on China: `Different Values, Common Interests'
A Quick Heroes' Welcome, Then On to Long Hours With Debriefing Teams
One Nation, 3 Lessons
Yellow Ribbons Galore and Embracing All the Crew
Rumsfeld Hits China's 'Aggressive' Pattern
With Crew in U.S., Bush Blames China for Collision
The Art and Artifice of Apologizing to China
Is U.S.-China Crisis Really Over?
Crew Destroyed Secret Materials Before Surrendering
The China test
U.S. denies timing anti-China resolution
White House won't stop flights
Choicepoint serves up your personal info to the FBI
Judge in Terror Case Tells Court: Simplify
In Peru Trial, Ex-Associate Contradicts New Yorker

ACTIVISTS
REPORT ON GOOD FRIDAY ACTION AT LIVERMORE
Mass nonviolent action since Seattle
May Day protests face 'zero tolerance'
The People's Repo!-
Chile arrests school protesters
Walk for peace


-------- NUCLEAR

U.S.-Russia Relationship Warms Up a Bit

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13DIPL.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia, April 12 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the Russian foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, decided today to turn the page from last month's tit-for-tat spy expulsions and agreed during a session in Paris that their leaders would have their first meeting by the end of July.

At a news conference in Paris before General Powell flew to Macedonia for Balkan talks, he and Mr. Ivanov outlined several fronts on which they hoped to work together.

They said that their economic and trade ministers had already begun meetings and that the two countries would also revive a joint commission to examine ways to isolate the Taliban of Afghanistan. General Powell said his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, would be in charge on the American side.

But it was also clear from their comments that a major disagreement remained: Russia's sale of weapons to Iran and other unfriendly countries. A senior State Department official also said today's discussions on the administration's plan for a missile defense system - probably the most contentious issue - were only preliminary.

The American-Russian relationship is still being shaped in both capitals.

Washington is undertaking a full policy review on Russia that is being led by the State Department and the National Security Council, senior administration officials said.

In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin still appears to be rearranging his most senior officials, leaving in doubt who is in charge of working with the United States. Reports persist, including some in the Russian press today, that Mr. Ivanov is on his way out because Mr. Putin may want someone in the job who is closer to his own mold.

Formal talks on strategic offensive and defensive weapons systems, and the role of arms control, would be at the center of a stronger relationship between their countries, both General Powell and Mr. Ivanov suggested.

A senior State Department official said weapons talks could not begin until the new undersecretary of state for nonproliferation and disarmament, John R. Bolton, completed his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.

In fact, General Powell invited Mr. Ivanov to Washington next month and suggested - with a joke typical of today's upbeat remarks - that he go through a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill "so he can get the full sense of what the American Congress is all about."

As a senior policy expert at the American Enterprise Insitute, Mr. Bolton has spoken of the need to scrap the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty that Russia seeks to keep intact. Russia says it views the treaty, which forbids the construction of the kind of missile system envisioned by the administration, as the linchpin of arms control.

A senior State Department official who took part in today's session said that in discussing a missile defense, General Powell invoked his grandson and explained to Mr. Ivanov how he would frame the issue as a safe future for that child and for future generations. Mr. Ivanov, in turn, explained the issue in such a way that the grandson would understand Moscow's position.

This basic exchange illustrated, the official argued, that both sides had clear points of view but wanted to pursue a more complex set of negotiations.

On the plans for a meeting between President Bush and Mr. Putin, an encounter the Russians have been keen to arrange, General Powell was upbeat, saying it would occur at the latest on the sidelines of a meeting of the seven major industrialized countries and Russia in Genoa, Italy, on July 20.

"Both presidents are anxious to see this meeting take place as soon as possible, but no later" than the meeting in Genoa, General Powell said.

Chances for a productive meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin are better now that the expulsions related to the case of the F.B.I. agent, Robert Hanssen, who spied for Russia, are over.

"I think we have clearly demonstrated that we are both interested in turning this page," Mr. Ivanov said.

After meeting with Mr. Ivanov, General Powell flew to Macedonia, where he met with President Boris Trajkovski and urged him to pursue a political dialogue that would incorporate the Albanian community into the fabric of Macedonian life.

General Powell's visit was prompted by recent fighting between government troops and an Albanian insurgency in the western part of the country.

While the guerrillas appear to have retreated in the last week or so, Washington is concerned that they could easily resurface with more strength if President Trajkovski did not address the grievances of the Albanians, who make up about 30 percent of the population.

General Powell delivered a similar message of moderation to foreign ministers from other Balkan countries, including Albania and Yugoslavia, who assembled here for his visit.

In an attempt to show that a visit by the secretary of state was more than just symbolic, the administration also announced today that it was granting $5.5 million in new aid for civilian projects in Macedonia. Some would go to training the police and to encourage more Albanians to join the overwhelming Slavic force. General Powell also pledged to speed up $13 million in military assistance for Macedonia.

------

Bush to world: America is back

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/13/01
Michael Warder
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010413-29647050.htm

Presidential candidate George W. Bush last year referred to China as a "strategic competitor" rather than a "strategic partner." The conduct of the Chinese after the mid-air collision between the Chinese jet fighter and the Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane, along with the detention of the 24 crew members and the capture of the aircraft, illustrate the correctness of that terminology. While it is good the troops are home from China, it is important our president did not apologize for the collision.

In the first few months of office, President Bush has consistently let friend and foe alike know that there is a new sheriff in town in the realm of U.S. foreign policy. It is in the vital interest of the United States that the new administration gets the word out consistently to our friends and foes so they may adjust their policies lest they make errors of judgment. The world, especially China, needs to understand the new posture and policies of this recently elected president.

When the United States took out the rebuilt Iraqi radar shortly after President Bush was sworn into office, he demonstrated that he would act when necessary. It was important to act because Saddam Hussein in the last few years had violated the peace agreement with the United States and her allies that he signed to end the Persian Gulf War. Furthermore, the Iraqis had installed radar that threatened U.S. aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone. If Iraq continues to flaunt the inspections for weapons of mass destruction, it will show the world that rogue states need not take the United States seriously.

Not only did the Clinton administration fail to enforce the inspection agreements, it replaced the name "rogues states" to "states of concern" in the hope of improving relations with the likes of North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. To think that this change in terminology would result in different behavior showed an incredible naiveté at best, and a destructive, destabilizing weakness at worst.

Perhaps more importantly, Mr. Bush tossed out 50 Russian spies, a rather dramatic move that sent a strong message to Russia. He has also made it quite plain that he will pursue a National Missile Defense, despite the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) signed in 1972 with the old Soviet Union. Since then, missile technologies are proliferating to some rather unsavory regimes.

Another message recently was sent to the leaders of North and South Korea. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung visited Washington, and shortly thereafter he accepted the resignation of his foreign minister. Why? The foreign minister failed to advise his president properly on the importance that the new administration places on National Missile Defense. Thus, Kim Dae-jung issued an earlier joint communiqué with Russian President Vladimir Putin that called on the United States and Russia to continue to abide by the 1972 ABM Treaty. The former foreign minister also apparently misunderstood that the Bush administration is less inclined than the previous one to trust the statements of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il concerning North Korea´s missiles and nuclear weapons.

How can the United States seem to be so direct in taking these positions? It is because we are unique in the world. Whatever regional conflicts blow-up in the Middle East, the Balkans or anywhere, the United States alone provides a guarantee of world stability. There is simply no other country in the world with our moral, political, economic or military strength. It is not even close. But if the United States vacillates or is weak, the world loses confidence, and all bets are off. Anything is possible.

The Chinese leadership must bear all of this in mind as it contemplates its next move on the world stage. It may seem they held the best cards in their recent contest with the United States. They did not. In a sense, they dug themselves in a hole and had to find a way out. Their leaders lack legitimacy since their citizens do not enjoy free elections. While China is an emerging military power, its repressive government could collapse as did the old Soviet Union´s. Despite its huge population, its economy is only one-fourth the size of Japan´s and about one-tenth of ours. China wishes to join the World Trade Organization, host the Olympics of 2008, and generally be regarded internationally with respect. They put all of these interests in jeopardy when they show their ugly side as they did in recent weeks. Their next test will come when the United States sells arms to Taiwan. We cannot do otherwise given the nature of the Chinese regime.

E-mail: mwarder@claremont.org

Michael Warder is vice president for the Claremont Institute based in Claremont, Calif.

--------

Court martial is unlikely for Waddle

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/13/01
Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001413221429.htm

The Navy has begun procedures to permanently detach Cmdr. Scott Waddle from the USS Greeneville he commanded before the submarine rammed a Japanese fishing boat, The Washington Times has learned.

A Navy source close to the case said the fact that the Navy has begun such a basic procedure is a sign it will opt not to court-martial him, but instead punish him administratively.

"This step indicates a court-martial is unlikely, but still possible," the source said. "The fact they are pursuing this indicates the Navy is trying to get everything closed out."

The source said if a potentially lengthy court-martial were planned, the Navy would not be preoccupied by a procedure to remove Cmdr. Waddle, 41, from the ship's company. The procedure is called a "detachment for cause."

The removal process comes while a Navy court of inquiry moved ahead by one day its recommendation on whether the Navy should court-martial Cmdr. Waddle.

Vice Adm. John Nathman and Rear Adms. Paul Sullivan and David Stone will present their nearly 2,000-page report to Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Thomas Fargo in a meeting at Pearl Harbor today, the Navy official told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Adm. Fargo had initially planned to receive the report tomorrow in San Diego, where he was to attend a celebration honoring a submarine squadron.

But the Navy official told AP that Adm. Fargo chose to remain in Hawaii for the arrival of the 24 detainees from the U.S. surveillance plane at the center of a two-week dispute with China.

The crew members are scheduled to leave Hawaii for Whidbey Island, Wash., at about 7:30 a.m. tomorrow after two days of debriefings.

The court of three American admirals and a Japanese observer heard testimony last month at Pearl Harbor on how the Greeneville executed an emergency surfacing drill and sliced into the fishing boat Ehime Maru.

Nine of 35 crew and passengers were killed. The Navy relieved Cmdr. Waddle of command shortly after the Feb. 9 collision but kept him on the ship's roster.

The decision on whether to start a court-martial, which rests with Adm. Fargo, turns on whether Cmdr. Waddle exhibited criminal negligence in mistakes the Navy said were made by the commander and his crew.

Adm. Fargo has 30 days -roughly until mid-May - to make his decision. But the Navy source said he wants to decide before Rear Adm. Albert Konetzni Jr., Pacific submarine commander, transfers to a higher command later this month.

Adm. Konetzni testified at the court's hearing, "I hold [Cmdr. Waddle] accountable." But he also said, under questioning by defense attorney Charles Gittins, that he did not believe the skipper acted criminally negligent.

Cmdr. Waddle is willing to submit himself to an administrative procedure known as an admiral's mast and then retire.

At a mast, Cmdr. Waddle would face a maximum penalty of 30 days confined to quarters, 60 days restriction, and forfeiture of one month's pay over a two-month period.

The stakes increase dramatically for Cmdr. Waddle at a court-martial.

He would likely face charges read at the court of inquiry: negligent homicide, negligent hazarding of a vessel and negligent dereliction of duty.

If convicted, he would face a maximum penalty of three years in prison for each homicide charge; two years for negligent hazarding of a vessel and three months for dereliction of duty. He could also be dismissed from the Navy.

At court-martial, the Navy faces a much higher burden of proof than it would at an admiral's mast.

A Navy report on the accident blamed a series of errors by the crew and Cmdr. Waddle for failing to detect the fishing boat before the submarine executed a rapid surfacing drill, or "blow."

The report singled out Cmdr. Waddle for failing to conduct a proper periscope check, saying his scan was too brief and not high enough out of the water. At the time, the Ehime Maru was about a mile from the Greeneville, traveling head-on, and was perhaps hidden in the choppy Pacific Ocean.

The Navy report also said a technician had tracked the boat to as close as one mile but failed to tell Cmdr. Waddle because of the large number of civilian visitors clustered on the periscope stand.

"These mistakes were honest and well-intentioned," Cmdr. Waddle told the court of inquiry.

-------- australia

Traditional owners reject Jabiluka moratorium

Fri, 13 Apr 2001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-13apr2001-29.htm

The mining company Rio Tinto has confirmed it has no short term plans to mine uranium at the Northern Territory's Jabiluka mine, and has placed a 10-year moratorium on the project.

The chair of Rio Tinto, Sir Robert Wilson, has made the announcement at the company's annual general meeting in London.

But traditional Aboriginal owners of Kakadu National Park say the moratorium does not go far enough.

Spokesperson for the Mirrar people Jacqui Katona says uranium mining at Jabiluka should never go ahead.

"There has been a lot of ambiguity surrounding Rio's position as to whether they would sell the property and frankly we haven't had any of that ambiguity cleared up by this statement of a 10-year moratorium," she said.

"It is still possible for Rio Tinto to sell it. They haven't committed themselves to follow through on handing the project back."

"All they are prepared to do is undertake mining company rhetoric."

Ms Katona adds that traditional owners will continue to withhold their consent.

"Rio admits that the project cannot go ahead without Aboriginal consent.

"Aboriginal people are going to campaign wherever Rio is, ensuring that controversy follows Rio in regards to Jabiluka wherever they operate."

-------- israel

Israel developing tank shell

Times of India
April 13, 2001
Agence France Presse/Times of India
http://www.timesofindia.com/130401/13mide16.htm

JERUSALEM: Israel is building a revolutionary new form of tank shell with a trajectory resembling that of a ballistic missile, the daily newspaper Haaretz said on Thursday.

The shell, which will have a range of about four kms, will let the Israeli army destroy enemy tanks on the first hit by targeting their vulnerable upperworks, the newspaper said.

Traditionally armed tanks are militarily risky because they must expose themselves to fire during combat and often need to shoot several times before hitting their targets.

Haaretz said the new shell is being developed by arms companies and the defence ministry's department for weapons development. (AFP)

-------- missile defense

Ample room for engagement on missile defence: Celeste

By P. S. Suryanarayana
APRIL 13
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/04/14/stories/02140005.htm

NEW DELHI,. ``There will be ample room for engagement'' between the United States and the leaders of India over ``what should a missile defence mean (and) what should it look like'', but any such exchange of views ``is going to be a five or ten or twenty-year enterprise''. This long-term perspective was outlined by the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to India, Mr. Richard Celeste. He said in an interview to The Hindu here today that it ``remains to be seen'' whether a specific dialogue is possible between the two countries on the immediate plans of the present Bush administration for a national missile defence (NMD) system.

Mr. Celeste said: ``If that (dialogue) is something that the Government of India wants, if they indicate that they would like to be involved in a discussion of the evolution of NMD (on) what would its implications be for Asia and for India, I believe that the Bush administration will welcome that''. India is certainly being seen as a ``friend'' of America, Mr. Celeste said about his impressions as one who ``listened'' to the latest conversations between the External Affairs and Defence Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, and the U.S. President, Mr. George Bush, and others in Washington. However, Mr. Celeste, a nominee of the previous Clinton administration, emphasised that he would not wish to speculate on the nuances of the Bush administration's possible equation with New Delhi or their strategic expectations of each other with reference to a wide array of issues - nuclear proliferation, Kashmir and Indo-U.S. economic cooperation, among others.

The departing envoy quoted a senior Bush administration official as saying in a larger current context that India had ``earned a place at the table'' of global players. ``For the time being, what is clear is that they (the Bush administration officials) are building on a platform that was created'' for the U.S.-India interactions in the final phase of the Clinton presidency.

Mr. Celeste's answer was ``no'' to a question whether the latest move to initiate a dialogue between the Pentagon and the Indian Defence Ministry would effectively substitute the earlier Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks on the nuclear issue and strategic themes. The new initiative could ``complement'' a sustained dialogue on strategic issues. Mr. Celeste traced the genesis of the new understanding to the perception that the Talbott-Singh parleys were marked by a ``missing ingredient'' of active exchange of views on military-related issues. The unpublicised aspects of the new understanding between India and the Pentagon pertained to a previously negotiated note on bilateral defence cooperation that, however, remained on ``the back-burner''.

Mr. Celeste parried a question about what the U.S. made of India's assertions that it would ``not stand in the way of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) coming into force''. The more important commitments, according to him, are India's statements pledging a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing and affirming the principle of not being the first to use atomic weapons. He said: ``Both of these statements of restraint were important to the Clinton administration but are very important to the (new) Bush administration''. This would account for the U.S. being ``comfortable'' with the idea of India as a force for stability. Of India's unilateral moratorium, he said there was an ``implicit'' belief that ``if India were to change its mind, we (the US) would know about that before India would test''. There ``won't be surprises'', he summed up. He expected the U.S. to lift the residual India-related ``sanctions'' in three to six months. The pre-1998 ``constraints'', traceable to the original non-proliferation goals of the U.S., constituted a separate issue still.

On a different plane, India's latest strategic wooing of Iran was ``no'' surprise to the U.S. which, according to Mr. Celeste, was taken into confidence by New Delhi in this respect. India's entente with Teheran ``should not be an irritant'' in Washington's engagement of New Delhi which ``is not going to provide strategic capabilities to Iran'', the U.S. Ambassador said.

Mr. Celeste described his tenure as simply ``great''. As a witness to an era of a strategic awakening in the U.S.-India relations and as a facilitator of that process, Mr. Celeste, who enjoyed the immense confidence of Mr. Bill Clinton, will be succeeded by a man regarded by Mr. Geroge Bush as the right person for a right place.

-------- russia

Russia Sees Tough U.S. Talks, Against 'NATOcentrism'

April 13, 2001
Reuters
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010413/10/international-russia-usa-dc

MOSCOW - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Friday he expected tough talks on issues including U.S. plans for a missile defense shield when he visits Washington in May.

He also reiterated that Russia was ready to work with NATO, but rejected the idea that the alliance should dominate world affairs.

"We understand very well that this discussion will be difficult. We have serious differences in our positions and negotiations will be tough," he told a parliamentary committee, Russian news agencies reported.

Moscow's position in relations would be "principled but non-confrontational," he said during a meeting of the foreign relations committee of the State Duma, Russia's lower house.

Ivanov agreed to a May Washington visit during talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell in Paris on Thursday. They also agreed that Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush would meet as soon as possible for the first time, and no later than a Genoa summit of the Group of Eight on July 22-24.

Russian-U.S. ties have been tense since Bush came to office. His decision to downgrade ties with Russia left Moscow smarting. A major spy scandal, which led both sides to order out 50 diplomats, has also strained relations.

The U.S. plan for a missile shield to halt attacks from potential enemies such as Libya and North Korea has also angered Russia. Moscow says the defense would upset the world strategic balance by allowing Washington to fend off its nuclear weapons.

Ivanov said problems in ties were being caused because U.S. foreign policy was still in a transitional phase. "There are general approaches, but no meat on the bones," he said.

Russia's ties with Iran, viewed as a sponsor of terrorism by Washington, will also be a tough talking point, Ivanov said. Washington is angry over Russia's drawing closer to Iran and its help to build nuclear plants in the Islamic state.

But Ivanov said Russia was not helping Iran obtain nuclear-capable military status. "Russia does not want the appearance of weapons of mass destruction in any place, including Iran," he said.

On NATO, he said Russia viewed the alliance as an inescapable factor it had to deal with. But he added: "Attempts to build a future on a scheme of NATOcentrism do not provide answers to the existing problems of European security."

Russia has had tense moments with NATO, fiercely objecting to its bombing of Yugoslavia and its eastwards expansion. However, Russia troops are part of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

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

Labor to handle ill workers

Oak Ridger
Friday, April 13, 2001
by Katherine Rizzo Associated Press
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/041301/stt_0413010036.html

WASHINGTON -- Labor Secretary Elaine Chao changed her mind and is willing to take charge of distributing compensation to nuclear weapons workers disabled or killed by Cold War-era exposure, a spokesman for Sen. George Voinovich said Thursday.

Chao, however, is seeking an extension on a July 31 deadline for getting the program started, said Scott Milburn, the senator's press secretary.

She also wants some changes in how rejected claims would be appealed, he said.

Labor Department officials spent much of Thursday on the phone with senators and Senate aides trying to build support for the proposed changes.

Officially, the department was not discussing those efforts. "No decision has yet been made," said department spokesman Stuart Roy. "The options include keeping it at Labor and moving the program to another agency."

Congress gave the Labor Department $60.4 million to initiate the new entitlement program, reasoning it was well-prepared because Labor already runs three worker compensation programs.

Chao had insisted her department lacked the resources needed to set up the program and said the Justice Department was better equipped.

Lawmakers who worked hardest to get the program enacted quickly told the White House they opposed moving it. Ten House members introduced a bill to force the Labor Department to run the program for workers who became ill from being exposed to uranium dust, beryllium particles or lung-clogging silica.

Nuclear workers in Paducah, Ky., also turned their union hall into an impromptu phone bank. They repeatedly contacted the offices of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urging him to persuade Chao to run the program. McConnell is married to Chao.

The new program offers lifetime medical care and $150,000 to ailing workers who were employed in the nuclear weapons complex, at factories that worked for the Energy Department, or at nuclear test sites in Alaska and Nevada.

By law, the government should be prepared to accept benefit applications on July 31.

The new program is limited to those with radiation-related cancer, silicosis or chronic beryllium disease. Eligibility rules for some workers have been set by law, and the Labor Department must work out qualification guidelines for the rest.

About 600,000 people worked in the weapons complex during the Cold War.

The Energy Department initially estimated that 3,000 to 4,000 people might be eligible for compensation, but there's a lot of uncertainty about that number because of decades of poor recordkeeping.

For instance, after former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant employee Joe Harding died, his bones were found to contain 1,700 to 34,000 times the expected concentration of uranium

Yet while he lived, Harding was denied compensation because official records showed he was exposed to small levels of radiation.

Harding also suffered from sores that wouldn't heal and sproutings of fingernail- and toenail-like growths on his palms, the bottoms of his feet, and his kneecaps, knuckles, wrists and elbows.

The testimony of his widow, Clara Harding, helped build support for compensation.

The Energy Department preliminarily identified 317 sites in 37 states where exposed workers might qualify for benefits.

A toll-free number set up by that department to field requests has logged more than 19,000 calls.

The toll-free information line is 1-877-447-9756.

On the Net:
Text of compensation law and preliminary list of sites prepared by Department of Energy: http://tis.eh.doe.gov/advocacy/index.html

---

LABOR PUTS CONDITIONS ON RUNNING PROGRAM
Issues unresolved in providing aid to nuclear workers

From: magnu96196@aol.com
April 13, 2001
By Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/documentv1?DBLIST=cd01&DOCNUM=16788&TERM

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Labor now willing to run a federal compensation program for nuclear-plant workers -- with some conditions.

"We're glad that Labor has demonstrated a willingness to consider receiving'' the program, said Scott Milburn, spokesman for Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Still, Voinovich and other compensation proponents must examine the details, Milburn said. The Labor Department wants to expedite the benefits-appeals process and delay putting the program into effect beyond a July 31 deadline, he said.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has been trying to shift the program to the Justice Department, but compensation proponents contend that the Labor Department is best suited to helping Cold War-era nuclear-plant workers gain the benefits they deserve.

But Labor Department officials told Voinovich's office yesterday that Chao apparently will change her mind if some conditions are met.

The compensation program approved in the fall grants $150,000 in lump-sum payments and lifetime health care to potentially thousands of workers made ill by exposure to radiation.Several hundred workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon could be covered by the program.

Proponents were angered recently when Chao asked the White House Office of Management and Budget to give the program to Justice.

Voinovich; Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville; and other lawmakers from states that housed components of the atomic-defense program said the intent of the legislation was to have the Labor Department operate the program.

Milburn said proponents need to know more about the Labor Department's desire to speed up the process by which a worker could appeal a decision on benefits and the department's wish to delay putting the program into effect. Department officials indicated that benefits would be retroactive to July 31 if there were a delay, he said.

"We're going to wait and take a look at that and talk to some other folks about what that could mean,'' Milburn said.

However, a Capitol Hill source called an expedited appeals process a "code word'' for getting rid of a worker's ability to go to court over a rejected benefits claim.

jriskind@dispatch.com

--------

Nuclear workers to get help
But Labor secretary wants to exclude silicosis victims

April 13, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By STEVE TETREAULT DONREY WASHINGTON BUREAU
http://www.lvrj.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_home/2001/Apr-13-Fri-2001/news/15864664.html

WASHINGTON -- Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has changed her mind and will agree to operate a health compensation program for nuclear weapons workers, but was seeking approval this week to drop Nevada Test Site workers suffering rom lung disease, congressional officials said Thursday.

In calls to key lawmakers, Chao proposed removing silicosis from the list of ailments that would qualify victims for $150,000 and ongoing medical care.

The reasoning was not clear Thursday. When the program was being negotiated in Congress last year, some argued that including silicosis might open the door for broader claims against the government by victims of other lung diseases.

As it was, X-ray criteria was made more difficult for victims of the degenerative lung-scarring to claim payments.

Chao was seeking several other changes as well, including a six-month delay, until January, to get the program started. Beneficiaries would receive back payments to cover the delay, officials said.

The Labor secretary also proposed changes in how rejected claims could be appealed, preferring an administrative review rather than allowing workers to go to court.

"Labor is calling around and if they can work out details, they will take this program," said an aide to a Midwest lawmaker working on the issue. Initially the Labor secretary argued her department was ill-equipped to handle the program, which is likely to field thousands of claims.

The compensation program would mostly benefit diseased government contract workers who were exposed to radiation and toxic beryllium while working in nuclear weapons factories during the Cold War. The Energy Department has identified 317 sites in 37 states where workers might have been exposed.

Chao was traveling to California on Thursday. Department spokesmen said it was unclear when an announcement might be made. Earlier in the day, White House officials called Republicans in Congress to let them know an announcement was due soon.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., called officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget, trying to ensure that silicosis remains a covered ailment, spokesman Mark Schuermann said.

Schuermann and aides to Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said the issue remained unresolved Thursday.

Others more directly involved said it appears silicosis victims will remain in the program.

"They're not talking about silicosis anymore," said Scott Milburn, spokesman for Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

An aide to a second senator close to the issue said Chao was warned that removing silicosis victims "is not going to work with Harry Reid, so don't even bother."

"I believe that's off the table altogether," said the aide, who asked not to be identified.

Mike Dayton, chief of staff to Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said the congressman has been assured all along that test site victims will gain benefits.

Gibbons said his office was notified earlier in the day that Labor was going to run the program. There was no mention of silicosis, he said.

"That would go absolutely against what I would recommend," he said.

As for possible delays, "it's frustrating because we have injured families that certainly are looking forward to help," he said. "Each day that passes is another frustration. We passed this bill last year and we want to see it go through."

This story is located at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Apr-13-Fri-2001/news/15864664.html

------

Our View: Sick worker law may be getting on track, again

Oak Ridger
Friday, April 13, 2001
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/041301/opE_0413010051.html

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has apparently agreed after all to have her department take charge of a congressionally approved sick-worker program.

Obviously Secretary Chao has done so reluctantly, and after heavy pressure upon the White House by key Republican congressional leaders in states like Tennessee and Ohio. In fact, announcement that Labor had reconsidered and would take charge of distributing compensation to nuclear weapons workers disabled or killed by Cold War-era exposure came not from the Labor Department, but rather a spokesman for Sen. George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio.

We noted here previously that it was rather brazen of Labor to reject congressional intent, and notably politically foolish for the Bush White House to do so.

But if the matter is being resolved as sick workers can only hope that it is, they will be able to chalk up this latest episode to the delays they have become accustomed to in receiving their due. By law, the government is supposed to begin receiving benefit applications on July 31, and that is not especially far off.

The new sick-worker program is limited to those with radiation-related cancer, silicosis or chronic beryllium disease. About 600,000 people worked in the weapons complex during the Cold War.

Eligibility rules for some workers have been set by law, and the Labor Department must work out qualification guidelines for the rest. Labor reportedly is asking for changes in how the program is administered, claims appealed, and other provisions. All those matters can and should be considered, and decided in a manner that weighs the best interests of sick workers and taxpayers alike.

There is legitimate concern raised by many in Washington and beyond that this not become a massive, and massively costly, entitlement program for virtually anybody who worked at or lived near Cold War nuclear weapons plants. We share that concern.

But the overriding concern right now is that there are deserving sick workers out there now, including a number of them who worked in Oak Ridge. It is an aging population which deserves the assistance deemed appropriate by Congress, if the evidence so merits.

It is time to get on with this assistance, and Secretary Chao has apparently lowered one more hurdle to that reality.

------- us nuc waste

Kirk calls moving nuclear fuel out of Zion a top priority

Chicago Tribune
April 13, 2001
By Susan Kuczka Tribune staff reporter
http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/article/0,2669,ART-51159,FF.htm

Images of truck convoys transporting steel- and concrete-encased rods of spent nuclear fuel across Illinois were evoked Thursday as a Republican congressman called for the removal of radioactive waste stored in an inactive nuclear power plant on Lake Michigan in Zion.

With George W. Bush in the White House, Rep. Mark Kirk of Wilmette said, the plan is closer to reality than a year ago, when it was blocked by Democrats concerned about the safety of storing the radioactive material at a permanent site in Nevada.

"I bent (Bush's) ear on this issue," said Kirk, who, as a freshman congressman, recently attended a White House luncheon with the president. "He knows where Zion is now."

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who also supports depositing radioactive waste stored at former Commonwealth Edison Co. nuclear power plants throughout Illinois at a single permanent site in Nevada, said Kirk might be right.

But Durbin said he is concerned that Bush may sign a bill compromising the radiation safety standards that sank last year's attempts to create a single storage site for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

"One cannot observe the first 10 weeks of this presidential administration's sorry environmental record and not have some concerns about this radiation standard," Durbin said.

Environmental groups expressed alarm Thursday about the prospect of spent nuclear fuel rods being transported across the country to Nevada by trucks or railroad cars.

"Rep. Kirk is right to be concerned about nuclear waste, but his proposal poses greater risks to the people of Illinois than does ensuring safe storage at the reactor site," said Ann Mesnikoff, a representative of the Sierra Club.

Dave Kraft, director of the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, said, "Premature shipments to Yucca Mountain would do nothing to solve the nuclear waste problem but would merely transfer liability to people living in Nevada and along transportation routes targeted for large-scale shipments of nuclear waste."

The criticism of the Yucca plan came while Kirk was leading a tour of the storage site for more than 2.7 million pounds of spent fuel rods at Zion.

The 14-foot rods, which accumulated at the plant over more than 20 years when its twin nuclear reactors were operating, are contained in a 60-by-33-foot pool that's 23 feet deep and holds 250,000 gallons of water.

The plant, which once employed about 800 workers, now has about 50 people whose primary job is to provide security.

Security was tight Thursday as visitors were processed through a series of screening devices designed to detect weapons. Leaving the containment area was just as intense as each visitor was asked to stand in a radiation-measuring device for safety.

Kirk, who said having the nuclear waste removed from Zion is his top priority, said his main concerns are the safety of the thousands of residents living near the plant and the potential for contamination of Lake Michigan, 120 yards away.

Kirk represents the 10th Congressional District, which includes lakefront suburbs from Wilmette to the Wisconsin line and as far west as Arlington Heights and Mundelein.

"There is no better way for me to celebrate my 100th day in office than to highlight the No. 1 environmental concern that we have for this region and begin to move Congress and the president toward a final solution that protects Illinois families over the long term," he said.

Kirk said he was sympathetic to environmentalists' concerns about having a single storage site at Yucca Mountain for all of the nation's nuclear waste.

But he said he doesn't support endless studies. The proposed site, about 100 miles from Las Vegas, is under study by the Department of Energy.

------

Remove Zion waste: Kirk

April 13, 2001
BY GARY WISBY ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/nuke13.html

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) gave the media a rare look at the nuclear waste stored at the shuttered Zion power plant Thursday to underscore his point that it doesn't belong there--120 yards from Lake Michigan.

After passing through innumerable checkpoints and being outfitted with radiation counters, reporters and photographers looked down through 500,000 gallons of water at 2,226 "fuel assemblies."

Each cluster contained 204 rods, 12 feet long, full of plutonium and other byproducts--none of it used in a nuclear reaction since the plant's shutdown in 1997.

"Spent" but still radioactive, which it will be for thousands of years, the waste waits under 23 feet of water in the stainless steel-lined concrete pool that is its temporary home.

How temporary is the question. Kirk said the material could be moved in nine years.

That could happen, he said, if President Bush decides by December that the place to store it, along with waste from more than 100 other sites across the country, is in caverns under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

And if Congress agrees.

"This is not a Nevada issue," the freshman congressman said. "It's an Illinois issue. We are the most nuclear state in the nation, with more waste than any other state."

Kirk called removal of the Zion nuclear material "the most critical environmental issue for the Great Lakes region."

That doesn't mean environmentalists are on his side. Many warn that transporting waste across the state could lead to a "mobile Chernobyl."

Dave Kraft, of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, said it's not reassuring, in light of the state's licenses-for-bribes scandal, that plans call for shipping the waste by truck as well as by train.

But Kirk, a Navy veteran, noted that the service has been safely moving radioactive material cross-country for 30 years. "Many argue against ever transporting nuclear waste," he said. "To do that, you must argue it should be stored by the shores of Lake Michigan."

Kraft also said there are signs of vulcanism at Yucca Mountain indicating it could be active again someday. Chlorine 35 from nuclear testing done below the mountain has been found on the surface, evidence that radiation could seep out.

Also, corrosion of equipment in the supposedly moisture-free caverns suggests the same thing could happen to waste canisters.

"If you're not going to do the science, what's the hurry?" asked Kraft.

Kirk, though, argued the Nevada site has "little likelihood of volcanic or earthquake activity" and is one of the driest spots in the nation. Waste would be 1,000 feet below the surface but still 800 feet above the water table, he said.

Newly minted House members don't often have access to presidents, but Kirk recently sat next to Bush at a special freshman lunch.

"I bent his ear on this issue," Kirk said. "He knows where Zion, Ill., is."


-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Controls on Small Arms

New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/L13WEAP.html

To the Editor:

Re "Curbing Small Arms" (editorial, April 10): Weapons producers should take more responsibility for controlling the international market in small arms. Regrettably, this is not the objective of the United Nations conference this July. Key arms exporters, the United States, China and Russia in front, have limited the conference's scope to the illicit trade in small arms. But most illicitly traded weapons start out as legally manufactured and exported weapons. To go after the arms traffickers without tough export controls is futile and should be seen as an effort by the major producers to shirk their responsibility as exporters.

The United States should provide leadership by pushing for its own best practices in export controls and transparency in arms transfers to be adopted at a global level in July.

JOOST R. HILTERMANN Exec. Dir., Arms Division Washington, April 12, 2001

--------

Arms wrestling

From: "GLAISYER, HEATHER" <0015445@mail1.tay.ac.uk>
13/04/01 13:40
http://www.squall.co.uk

A new European agreement is set to ease the path for more corporate arms sales. And, as Solomon Hughes finds out, commercial confidentiality is being used as the government's get-out clause.

The UK government is set to ratify a treaty that will undermine the Britain's existing arms export controls in the name of 'globalisation'. Defence Minister Geoff Hoon launched the treaty at a conference sponsored by the weapons-making giant Boeing, and attended by an array of top arms makers, bankers and politicians.

The 'Framework Agreement' was drawn up at last year's Farnborough Air Show, to help consolidate the European defence industry in the face of American competition. Although the Agreement includes provisions to reduce arms export licensing, it has received almost no press attention. An explicit objective of the agreement (Article 1, Section D) is to "bring closer, simplify and reduce, where appropriate, national export control procedures for Transfers and Exports of military goods and technologies".

Campaigners fear that arms makers are using this trade agreement to level down arms control laws to the lowest European common denominator. The French government is notoriously lax on weapons exports, with an arms export policy looser even than the UK's. In turn the UK is much more weapons-exporter friendly than Sweden. Unlike every other signatory nation, the UK parliament does not need to ratify the agreement, so there will be no debate or vote in the House of Commons. The agreement passed its last hurdle when the Defence Select Committee approved ratification on Feb 14. An MOD Spokesman told SQUALL that the framework agreement would be ratified "shortly". They were unable to say whether this meant days, weeks or months Geoff Hoon gave a push to the deal at a conference organised at the end of January the Royal United Services Institute, a military think-tank. The minister's speech, which marked a rare public discussion of the Agreement, was publicised by the Ministry of Defence under the heading: "HOON WELCOMES THE OPPORTUNITIES THAT GLOBALISATION OFFERS THE UK DEFENCE INDUSTRY".

Hoon told delegates that globalisation is "absolutely irreversible and unstoppable. The new world you will be talking about today will becoming just like the dawn tomorrow, or next Christmas. There is an inevitability about these changes, We would do well not to waste our energies in wishing they were not happening".

However, far from worrying about globalisation, most of those attending the conference are enthusiastic about a free trade in arms. While the MoD did not publicise the conference backers, SQUALL has established it was sponsored by Boeing, who make Apache and Chinook helicopters, F-15 jets and much more besides. Hoon was followed by top speakers from some of the biggest weapon manufacturers in the world, including Dr Scott Harris of America's Lockheed Martin, John Howe of French arms firm Thomson-CSF, Lord Vincent of UK cluster-bomb maker Hunting Engineering, Dr Enders, Vice President of euro arms giant EADS, John Weston of BAe and Simon Frost of British hi-tech military supplier Claverham Group. The £700 a head conference also heard from the head of research from the Society of British Aerospace Companies, Kim Cohen, managing director of Deutsche Bank and Michael Portillo.

Hoon told the conference that the Framework Agreement "should play a big part in removing unnecessary barriers" to weapons exports in Europe. Under the agreement, the countries will maintain joint "lists of permitted destinations" or "white lists" for potential weapons exporters. These lists may undercut existing UK embargoes on arms exports. However, no one will be able to check on whether the 'white lists' include warmongers and tyrants because they will be secret. Before leaving the Foreign Office, Peter Hain wrote to Campaign Against the Arms Trade to try and justify this secrecy saying: "This is not a question of transparency of the export control process, but one of commercial confidentiality". Revealing where arms makers want to sell weapons, he argued, is "commercially sensitive".

In principle arms makers will have to go back to their own governments for a license when they are actually ready to export arms, but in practice it may be difficult to overrule the 'white lists'. Changing the 'white lists' themselves will be doubly difficult, firstly because they are secret, and secondly, as Hain pointed out: "The Treaty makes clear that circumstances would have changed significantly for the worse for a permitted export destination to be removed". For arms exports of goods manufactured by European consortiums, there will be a new euro arms license referred to as "Global Project Licenses". These could well undermine the relative openness of Labour's arms export report. Referring to how these new Global Project Licensees were to appear in the Arms Exports Annual Report, Hain stated: "we have not decided on each procedure to be used".

There is more information on the Framework Agreement on Campaign Against the Arms Trade website at http://www.caat.org.uk

-------- puerto rico

PUERTO RICO: NAVY TO RESUME VIEQUES BOMBING

New York Times
April 13, 2001
National Briefing
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/national/13BRFS.html

The Navy said it planned to resume war games on the island of Vieques on April 27, and Gov. Sila Calderón said she would fight the move. The Navy has used the island, off the east coast of Puerto Rico, as a bombing range for more than 50 years. Ms. Calderón said she would try to stop the training by introducing legislation to toughen noise regulations on island beaches and surrounding waters. The conflict threatens to undermine an accord between the Navy and Puerto Rico that set a referendum for Nov. 6 in which Vieques residents are to vote on the Navy's future on the island.

-------- space

New Mission for Lockheed Space Plane?
Air Force May Give Life to Canceled X-33 Shuttle Replacement

By Greg Schneider and Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post
Friday, April 13, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12274-2001Apr12?language=printer

The experimental space plane that NASA canceled last month may yet fly -- but as a weapon for the military, not the next-generation space shuttle it was primarily conceived to be.

The Air Force and contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. have approached NASA about funding the X-33 program through the end of the year while the Pentagon considers taking it over, several sources said.

The space agency walked away from the venture after spending almost $1 billion on developing the innovative reusable rocket, citing technical delays and cost concerns.

But Lockheed Martin had invested nearly $400 million of its own in the program, and within days of the cancellation it was meeting with generals about the Air Force becoming the X-33's new patron. In the last few days, Gen. Ralph Eberhart, commander of the military's Space Command, wrote to NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin and asked him to "keep the options open" on the X-33.

NASA considers that to mean spending about $15 million in "bridge funding" to sustain the program through the end of the fiscal year in October, said Samuel L. Venneri, the space agency's top aerospace technology official.

Lockheed Martin has offered to pay half that amount if NASA picks up the other half, Venneri said. Then it would be up to the Pentagon to decide whether such a radically advanced -- and technologically unproven -- weapons platform fits into the military plans being drawn up by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his numerous advisory panels.

Goldin is said to be open to the idea but unconvinced of the Air Force's intentions.

"We're not interested in spending any additional money out of our technology program if it is not associated with a strong commitment from the Air Force. We have communicated that position to the administration. . . . We don't want to do something dumb that hurts the Air Force. On the other hand, we don't want to do something dumb by spending money frivolously," Venneri said.

Eberhart could not be reached for comment, but his spokesman said Space Command "will continue to evaluate options to continue the X-33 demonstrator program." There is no Air Force money to put into the program this year, but the service will "look at funding opportunities" in the budgets for the next two fiscal years, said Col. Mike Perini.

Lockheed Martin officials said they are hopeful about working out an arrangement and added that they see big potential for the X-33 as a military program. "We look at this as a transformation in military affairs, certainly as one skipping a generation, and one that will redefine the concept of operations for our military," Brian Dailey, head of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin, said in an interview.

It could cost some $400 million over the next few years to prepare the nearly completed X-33 prototype for a test flight. A full program of development and production could cost anywhere from $3 billion to $7 billion over the next 13 years, depending on how many space planes were bought, one source familiar with the concept said.

While the technology is costly, Bush administration officials have expressed interest. Rumsfeld endorsed the space plane concept in the congressionally chartered report he issued in January on the military use of space, and sources said those in Congress who have been briefed about the Air Force's interest in X-33 are enthusiastic about it.

Instead of "canceling the program, wrapping it up and having nothing, we feel this would be win-win-win for everybody," said one Senate aide. NASA would see its research continue, Lockheed Martin would get to keep working and the Air Force could leverage the earlier efforts and "start from a position of already being somewhere in the program versus starting from scratch," the aide said.

The wedge-shaped X-33 was intended to slash the costs of space transportation and make space more accessible to scientists, the military and an array of commercial customers in addition to replacing the space shuttle.

The 69-foot, unpiloted test model was to lead to a full-scale space plane that could take off like a rocket, reach orbit without dropping off any tanks or booster rockets and land like an airplane. Its most touted innovation was its engine, a new type called a linear aerospike that could adjust itself to perform more efficiently at various altitudes.

While the engine has yet to prove that it will deliver the required performance in actual flight, it has passed a series of ground tests. It was a totally unexpected hitch that derailed the X-33: The lightweight composite material used in its fuel tanks cracked during testing.

Lockheed has designed and is building replacement tanks made of aluminum, but the added costs and expected delay of several years -- along with a sudden decline in the anticipated market for launches -- sealed the project's doom.

The program's funding ran out at the end of March, soon after it lost its bid for more money under NASA's five-year, $4.5 billion Space Launch Initiative.

The agency is in the midst of negotiations with Lockheed Martin over how to terminate the program, including such tough questions as how to divide up intellectual-property rights. Although NASA killed the program, officials have said it provided valuable technical information and several of its components -- including its software, launchpad and aerospike engines -- may be useful.

Venneri said one of the "errors" in program's structure was partnering with a single-contractor team, which has made it difficult now to share the fruits of the research with the whole aerospace industry.

Venneri said he hopes the termination negotiations will be wrapped up "in a month or two."

In any case, he added, "we won't do anything that will jeopardize the hardware." He said NASA's Dryden facility in the California desert is looking into storage possibilities for critical components.

While the X-33 failed NASA's particular cost-benefit accounting requirements, Venneri said, the Air Force has different requirements for which the X-33 might be better suited.

In theory, a military space plane opens up powerful new ways to deliver weapons, all of which would have to be reconciled with arms control treaties and pressure not to militarize space.

Lockheed Martin's Dailey outlined some of the expected advantages of space-based warfare during a speech this week at a Space Foundation event in Colorado, describing how such a craft could launch from the United States, roar into space, deliver a warhead to any spot on the globe and return to base -- all in less than 90 minutes. Because the warhead would be coming from space, it would achieve enormous speed and kinetic energy on its way down -- so great that it wouldn't even need explosives on board to generate the destructive power of a small nuclear device, according to Dailey's presentation. As proof, he pointed out the huge craters that have been created by relatively small meteors.

The space plane presumably would need no expensive, hard-to-maintain stealth technology, because it would fly too fast and too high for ordinary air defense systems to track. Some designs are unmanned, so there would be no pilot at risk. And the system would get around the problem of how to defend forward air bases from enemy ballistic missile attacks.

In short, a true military space plane would be the ultimate long-range bomber, another source said, adding that it could be an alternative to the idea of building new versions of the B-2 stealth bomber that has been gathering momentum within the Bush administration.

While that is a large amount of money for an Air Force already struggling to buy all the weapons on its shopping list, the total is less than the cost of developing a whole new bomber program. Even purchasing new B-2 bombers would cost at least $500 million apiece.

At this point, though, a military space plane remains a pie that isn't even in the sky yet. The Boeing Co., as well as Lockheed Martin, have been studying the idea for the Air Force, but engineers are a long way from proving their ambitious concepts.

Advocates argue that inheriting the X-33 could allow the military to graduate quickly from computer-based designs to actual hardware for tinkering. Industry officials said that under best-case conditions, the unmanned demonstrator could fly in as little as two to three years -- or, as one official pointed out, within the time frame of the Bush administration.

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

U.N. Aide in Kosovo Seized in Rwanda Killings

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13KOSO.html

PRISTINA, Kosovo, April 12 (Agence France-Presse) - A Rwandan who ran a technical department for the United Nations mission in Kosovo has been arrested in connection with the 1994 genocide in his country, the United Nations mission said today.

"A man from Rwanda was arrested at the request of the government of Rwanda on the basis of full legal documents," said Christophe Albiston, the police chief at the United Nations mission. "The next stage will be to consider the extradition procedure."

He declined to give the man's name, but a prosecutor in Rwanda identified him as Callixte Mbarushimana. The prosecutor said the Rwandan "stands accused of complicity to commit genocide for having denounced colleagues" in the United Nations Development Program to the perpetrators of the slaughter, which claimed 500,000 to 800,000 lives, the vast majority of them Tutsi.

The suspect, a Hutu, "worked in Kigali offices of the United Nations during the genocide and gave Hutu militia details of where his Tutsi colleagues were hiding out," according to a United Nations official who did not want to be named. The Tutsi were hunted down and killed.

Troops of Rwanda's mostly Hutu army and youth militias, known as Interahamwe, systematically killed members of the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu between April and July 1994, before the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power.

The suspect has been working for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, running the data-processing department in Gnjilane, in the southeast.

A United Nations court was set up in late 1994 to try those suspected of being the ringleaders of the killings in Rwanda and currently meets in Arusha, Tanzania. It has seen to the arrest of more than 40 people, of whom seven have been convicted.

---

JORDAN TO HEED IRAQ FLIGHT BAN

New York Times
April 13, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13BRIE.html

UNITED NATIONS - Jordan has promised not to begin regular commercial flights to Iraq by Royal Jordanian airlines without the approval of the Security Council. While some council members disagree on what flights violate United Nations sanctions on Saddam Hussein's government, most countries have forbidden commercial flights to Iraq without the permission of the council's sanctions committee, which Jordan says it is seeking. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

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

Reid presses Navy for jet fuel spill information

From: "Paul Maser" <pmaser@govmail.state.nv.us>
Fri, 13 Apr 2001
Frank X. Mullen Jr.
Reno Gazette-Journal

FALLON - After a series of terse questions Thursday, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked Fallon Naval Air Station officials to release all information that might help determine the cause of the acute lymphocytic cancer cases in children.

He said the Navy has given state investigators information about jet fuel spills at the base over the last five years but has not shared data from previous spills, including a tank overfill accident in 1988 that witnesses said dumped 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of jet fuel into the environment.

"The Navy has not been forthcoming in this investigation," Reid said.

Fuel spills are being looked at because 12 Fallon children have been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, which destroys bone marrow. While its cause is unknown, experts said suspected triggers include radiation, electromagnetic fields or compounds, such as benzene, solvents and fossil fuels. Jet fuel is a mixture of kerosene and benzene.

Rear Adm. R.J. Naughton, testifying before the Senate field hearing Thursday, promised to get the fuel data to investigators. Naughton, commander of the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center based at the air station, said he wasn't sure how big the 1988 spill was.

State investigators in 1990 said fuel was found eight feet deep in the soil and jet fuel contamination was at 129 times the permissible limit. This week, Navy and state environmental officials said they can't tell how much fuel is beneath the base, but are reasonably sure none has migrated off Navy property.

In 1991, prosecutors settled on 1,000 to 5,000 gallons for the 1988 spill when they wrote a 14-count indictment against a civilian sub-contractor at the base. State investigators said at the time the two-year time lapse between the spill and the state investigation made it impossible to measure the fuel.

The company in 1993 pleaded guilty to covering up the fuel spill and was fined $175,000 in addition to an $118,500 civil fine it paid in 1990.

During the cover up, crews sucked up standing fuel with a hose from a tanker truck. A civilian firefighter at the base told state investigators the contaminated fuel was burned in a pit for five or six days in February of 1988.

The Navy claimed that never happened and the firefighter was fired.

Reid, who demanded, and got, an investigation of the allegations at the time, Thursday asked Naughton about the burning incident.

"I can't find anyone who has any data on that," the admiral testified. "I think it's a local legend."

After the hearing, base spokeswoman Anne McMillin said Naughton has been at the station for only nine months and was not familiar with the widespread press coverage of the fuel spill allegations in 1990 and 1991.

In 1990, state investigators said they couldn't prove what happened to the contaminated fuel allegedly vacuumed up during the cover up.

Reid said jet fuel spills or jettisons from Navy planes have been mentioned in discussions of possible causes of the leukemia cases. Naughton said most flights are over unpopulated areas and monitoring wells keep track of underground fuel contamination.

Brenda Gross, the mother of a 5-year-old leukemia patient, told the committee that someone besides the Navy should monitor what happens to its jet fuel.

"I'd like to see an outside company come in and have some oversight," she said.

After the meeting, Reid said having outside regulators monitor the military's toxic substances would be too expensive. He said he isn't accusing the Navy of being dishonest, but understands that some people don't trust the military policing itself.

Edward Friel, a former fuel truck driver at the base who witnessed the 1988 spill and attempted cover up, attended Thursday's hearing. Friel was one of two whistleblowers who went to state officials and the media in 1990 and kicked off the fuel spill scandal.

At the time, the Navy said its Naval Investigative Service had conducted an "extensive investigation" of Friel's allegations and closed the case after finding no evidence of a spill. The Navy later reopened the case and admitted the incident took place.

"The Navy covered this up from the beginning," Friel said Thursday. "I told two captains about it (in 1988 and 1989) and they didn't want to know. I see today  that they still don't want to know."

In addition to military fuels, other possible theories for the cases have included children being more susceptible to viruses due to the movement of large numbers of people in and out of Fallon; environmental pollution, arsenic in groundwater, and pesticides used on area farms.

---

Gay Pentagon aide's naming irks right

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/13/01
Joyce Howard Price THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200141322926.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has tapped a homosexual activist who opposes the Pentagon's ban on homosexuals in the military and has supported liberal Democratic candidates to screen applicants for top Defense Department jobs in the Bush administration.

Pro-family groups, already unhappy with President Bush's appointment of a homosexual as national AIDS policy director, are outraged that another homosexual, Stephen E. Herbits, is screening civilians for important Department of Defense (DOD) posts as a "special assistant to the secretary." Mr. Herbits is working on a consultant basis.

"An administration that has pledged to uphold the moral order has no business . . . advancing the homosexual agenda through appointments. People are policy," said Robert H. Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America.

"It appears they [leaders of the Bush administration] are trying to become the bisexual administration. They are trying to have it both ways," Mr. Knight said.

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, also said: "Herbits' appointment sends a message to Congress that the Defense Department openly supports homosexuals in the military, despite the congressional ban. Herbits is an advocate for overturning this ban - despite the intent of Congress and senior military officials to protect the armed forces from homosexual activism. This appointment is a slap in the face to our servicemen and to Congress."

Retired Army Col. Robert Maginnis, vice president for national security and foreign policy for the Family Research Council, said the administration has delivered "at least a one-two punch against the conservative community" with its selections of Mr. Herbits, 59, and of Scott Evertz, 38, another homosexual activist, to head the White House AIDS policy office.

Mr. Maginnis said he believes it's "inappropriate" to hire someone who opposes the Pentagon's ban on homosexuals in military service to "vet key people who will run the Pentagon."

While DOD does not prohibit homosexuals from holding civilian positions in the department, Mr. Maginnis says he worries Mr. Herbits may be turned off by qualified candidates who support military readiness but who find "homosexuality incompatible with military service."

Neither Mr. Herbits nor Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, returned phone calls from The Washington Times yesterday. This is the second time Mr. Herbits has worked for Mr. Rumsfeld. The first time was 25 years ago, during Mr. Rumsfeld's first tenure as defense secretary.

Mr. Herbits also recruited civilians for DOD under former Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney - now the vice president - during the administration of former President George Bush.

Asked yesterday if Mr. Cheney knew Mr. Herbits was a homosexual when he hired him at DOD in early 1989, Juleanna Glover Weiss, a spokeswoman for the vice president said, "Sexual orientation would not have been a consideration and would not have been discussed."

David Elliot, spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said of Mr. Rumsfeld's rehiring of Mr. Herbits at DOD: "Secretary Rumsfeld recognizes that sexual orientation is irrelevant for employment in the Defense Department. We look forward to the repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell,'" referring to the military's official policy on homosexuals in the armed forces.

Given that Mr. Herbits is now serving in the Bush administration, both Mr. Maginnis and Mr. Knight said they were shocked to read in Human Events, the national conservative weekly, that the new Defense Department consultant contributed $13,000 to the Democratic National Committee and $3,750 to Democratic candidates for House and Senate seats in the 2000 election cycle. But the article said a check of Federal Election Commission records showed he gave no reportable contributions to Republican candidates in 2000.

Mr. Maginnis said he was appalled to learn that Mr. Herbits donated $1,500 in 1998 to the Democratic congressional campaign of Margaret Cammermeyer, who was discharged from the Army after announcing she was a lesbian nine years earlier.

However, Mr. Herbits also has given donations to some Republican candidates, including former President George Bush, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, and former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, according to Human Events.

Mr. Maginnis said he thinks it was "naive" of the Bush administration to think that conservatives "who pushed [George W.] Bush over the top" in the close 2000 election "would overlook" the selections of homosexual activists to high-level positions addressing issues such as AIDS and defense.


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GRANTS TO CLEAN UP LAND

New York Times
April 13, 2001
Metro Business Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/13BBRF.html

New Jersey has awarded $764,031 to five cities and towns so that they can investigate, clean up and reuse so-called brownfields - useless, abandoned and polluted sites - officials announced yesterday. The sites include a former hazardous waste storage site in Jersey City where chemicals may have been discharged and an abandoned house in Lower Township in Cape May County that may have leaked oil. The money comes from the Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund, administered jointly by the Department of Environmental Protection and the Economic Development Authority. The grants are awarded to municipalities that have acquired such sites, determined the cleanup costs and tried to develop them. Other recipients are Kearny, Perth Amboy and Rahway. Steve Strunsky (NYT)

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PETROBRAS OIL RIG EVACUATED

New York Times
April 13, 2001
World Business Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/business/13FOBR.html

An oil and gas leak forced the evacuation of an offshore oil rig operated by the Brazilian oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras, in the latest in a string of incidents that has damaged the reputation of the state-owned giant. At least 3,500 gallons of oil leaked from a pipe that was being tested on the P-7 rig, which is in the Campos Basin, 75 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro State. Last month, a fire and explosions killed 11 workers and sank a $500 million oil platform at a nearby site. Petrobras said that the P-7 spill was being contained and that there were no injuries. Jennifer L. Rich (NYT)

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BRITAIN: SLAUGHTER BETTER THAN VACCINE

New York Times
April 13, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13BRIE.html

A computer model of the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain found that slaughtering livestock on infected and neighboring farms, the current strategy of the government, is the best method for controlling the disease. Vaccination is less effective because the shots take several days to take effect and do not prevent already infected livestock from spreading the disease, scientists at the Imperial College of Medicine in London reported. Kenneth Chang (NYT)

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Houston's Priorities

New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/L13HOUS.html

To the Editor:

Re "Public Health in Peril," Bob Herbert's April 5 column about the state of Texas's environment and public health:

Clean air is my administration's No. 1 public policy priority. Our region is required to reduce emissions by 85 to 90 percent to attain the federal one-hour ozone standard by 2007, and we are working aggressively to ensure that it happens. Houston's brownfields land redevelopment program has turned acres of formerly contaminated and abandoned land into prime properties.

Houston, the country's fourth largest city, ranks 12th in cases of tuberculosis. Pediatric TB has declined 31.5 percent in two years. Our immunization rate has improved sixfold in the last decade, and we have seen reductions in teenage pregnancies, infant mortality and new AIDS cases. Access to health care for indigent citizens has improved.

You can bet that Texans will fix what's wrong, especially if it concerns our children.

LEE P. BROWN Mayor Houston, April 11, 2001

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Florida, Low on Drinking Water, Asks E.P.A. to Waive Safety Rule

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/national/13FLOR.html

MIAMI, April 12 - In a bid to head off drinking-water shortages, Florida is nearing approval of a plan that would allow billions of gallons of untreated, partly contaminated water to be injected deep into the ground in what would serve as subterranean water banks.

Aides to Gov. Jeb Bush say that the approach, which would involve capturing rain water before it flows to the sea, would save the state hundreds of millions of dollars in treatment costs, and that extensive precautions would be taken to avoid any danger to human health.

With the aquifers that are Florida's main source of fresh water already at dangerously low levels, the aides say the severity of the problem demands fresh solutions.

State officials say that bacteria in the tainted water could not survive underground or at least that the contamination would not spread through ground water.

Opponents say that studies are not conclusive and that the plan, which goes far beyond anything tried in the United States poses far too great a danger, particularly for private wells.

To proceed with the plan, state officials have asked the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver of the federal rules that, under the Safe Drinking Water Act, require that any water pumped into the ground be treated first to meet drinking-water standards. The governor included such an appeal in a January letter to his brother President Bush.

The agency has not said whether it will approve the request.

In his letter, Governor Bush noted that Florida's plan would require that the stored water be treated before it was made available for humans and he asked that the agency demonstrate "a willingness to abandon conventional processes as long as the environmental results are achieved."

"E.P.A's insistence that naturally occurring surface water should be treated to `drinking water standards' prior to being placed underground," the letter continued, "only to be retreated again to the same standard when pumped out of the ground for use, is nonsensical."

Among the issues in dispute are whether the untreated water might contaminate private wells, where drinking water is typically not treated, and whether the high-pressure injection process might disturb the underground geology and affect the purity of the existing aquifers.

"This is something that really has not been studied yet with respect to the injection of untreated surface water," said John Vecchioli, who recently retired as the district director in Florida of the United States Geological Service. "I think the state could be opening the door to a lot of problems."

To a limited extent, other states, like Arizona and Utah, have begun to use the underground water-banking procedure, which is known as aquifer storage and recovery. But they have followed the federal guidelines and pumped only treated water into the ground.

With hundreds of wells planned for South Florida and, potentially, in other parts of the state, Florida's effort would be a departure in scope and substance, as the State Senate made clear on Thursday in approving a measure that would specifically authorize injection of untreated water.

The House is expected to follow suit, with Governor Bush prepared to sign the measure into law.

The plan, designed to capture as much as 1.7 billion gallons of water a day that would otherwise flow into the ocean in South Florida alone, would be the latest of several unusual approaches by Florida to the problem of adequate fresh water. A plan nearing final approval by state regulators calls for construction in the Tampa Bay area of a seawater- desalination plant that would be the second-largest such plant in the world.

"Clearly, we're at the point where demand is creeping up and supply is not, and that's why we're beginning now to look at plans that will make sure that we look at plentiful supplies 20 years from now," David Struhs, who heads Florida's Department of Environmental Protection, said in a telephone interview today.

The state is in the midst of a drought that is the worst in 50 years. With its population projected to grow to 20 million from 15 million over the next 20 years, forecasts say that without new sources of supply Florida by 2020 would face a water deficit of as much as 30 percent.

In large part, the decision to turn to aquifer storage and recovery is a product of the $7.8 billion state-federal plan to restore the Everglades, the vast natural ecosystem that is greatly in need of new supplies of fresh water. The plan calls for construction of 333 wells that would be used to store rain runoff, with the stored water to be pumped up during the dry season to flow across the Everglades.

Water users in South Florida would also benefit from that plan, because the new flows would help to recharge natural aquifers, adding as much as much as 20 percent to available supplies of drinking water.

Still, in a recent report, the National Academy of Sciences warned that many questions remained about the potential effects of water-banking, whether or not the water injected into the ground was treated first. And across the state, environmentalists and scientists have raised concerns that the injection of untreated water in particular could foul existing underground supplies.

"This is a resource that we shouldn't mess up," said Dr. Harold R. Wanless, chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami, who called the state's plan "idiocy."

Among the substances that would be introduced into ground water under the Florida plan is fecal coliform bacteria, which is commonly found in agricultural water runoff but could pose health hazards if ingested.

Some studies cited by the state have suggested that the bacteria would die underground, and the state's plan calls for monitoring to ensure that.

The plan also calls for tests to detect toxic substances, which would not be permitted in any water to be injected underground.

It also envisions that the injected water would be kept separate from the Floridian and Biscayne aquifers, the state's main sources of water, because fresh water tends not to mingle with the saltier ground water in the aquifers.

If drinking water supplies are fouled, existing treatment would purify it, state officials say.

And private wells would be monitored to guard against contamination.

Critics, including John H. Hankison Jr., who served under President Bill Clinton as the E.P.A.'s administrator for Region 4, which includes Florida, have expressed skepticism about claims that the bacteria would die underground. They have also suggested that the high-pressure injection process might disrupt the subterranean geology in a way that could cause unwanted mixing between fresh-water supplies in some aquifers and the brackish water that has begun to intrude into other aquifers near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts.

A safer, more conventional means of storing untreated water would be above the ground, in reservoirs or other surface impoundments. But Florida has shied from that approach because the state's generally hot weather would cause much of the water to be lost to evaporation.

Under the current Everglades plan, about $1.7 billion of the total $7.8 billion cost is set aside for construction and maintenance of the underground water banks, and of that, about $700 million is set aside for water treatment. State officials say the latter cost, which would be split equally between the state and federal governments, could be reduced by $500 million if the pre-storage treatment is not carried out.

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Studies Tie Rise in Ocean Heat to Greenhouse Gases

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/science/13CLIM.html

Using two different computer simulations of climate and the oceans, separate research teams have concluded that a buildup of heat in the seas over the last five decades was almost certainly caused by the heat- trapping effect of greenhouse gases released into the air by human activities.

The findings provide new evidence that people, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels, have caused at least a substantial portion of a global warming measured since the 1950's, several independent experts on climate models said.

The work is described in two papers in today's issue of the journal Science. The raw data on the oceans' rising heat were published last year, but the two new studies were the first to offer an explanation for what influence, natural or otherwise, accounted for them.

The computer models used in the research were among the world's most advanced efforts to recreate the behavior of earth's climate system and so study how changes in the atmosphere might change weather patterns. Even so, they are relatively rough sketches of the real world.

In fact, some climate experts said the papers' conclusions were overstated, a result, they said, of the computer models' lacking sufficient detail to deal with small but potentially important changes in ocean conditions.

But an author of one study, Dr. Tim P. Barnett, said the findings were strong enough to overcome his long skepticism about the models' ability to pinpoint a human influence amid all the naturally chaotic ups and downs of climate.

Dr. Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, said in an interview that he was now convinced that people were contributing to global warming.

"I was maybe 60-40 before, but I'm at least 90-10 now," he said. "The chances that our model could have done this by itself are virtually nil."

He added that the ability of the two computer simulations to reproduce the warming actually measured in the oceans in recent decades indicated that these models were valid tools for projecting how the continuing emission of greenhouse gases might spur further climate changes in coming decades.

This is important because the models, and others like them, are the basis for many of the forecasts being used by experts to recommend how forcefully societies must move to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

At least one aspect of the new studies bears directly on that question. Dr. Barnett and other scientists said the analyses supported the idea that by absorbing most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the air above, the oceans could act as a strong buffer against abrupt climate warming.

"The immediate impact may not be as great, because the oceans may slow things down a little," he said. But eventually that heat will be released from the ocean's surface back into the air, he and others said.

The other modeling study was led by Dr. Sydney Levitus, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ocean climate laboratory, in Silver Spring, Md. It was Dr. Levitus who collated the millions of accumulated temperature measurements, taken around the world's oceans, that detected the heat rise.

Other scientists said the new analyses showed the importance of Dr. Levitus's decade-long effort.

"In putting together this global data set, he's like a national treasure," said one expert on computer climate models, Dr. Andrew Weaver, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia.

Dr. Weaver said previous efforts to identify human interference with the climate system had focused on changes in air temperature, which varies enormously day to day, year to year, in ways that hide clues.

The oceans, in sharp contrast, are a vast long-term repository for heat absorbed from the air, and so exhibit little confounding variability, he said.

"This is a much more convincing approach," he said. "It's not only consistent with the land-based detection schemes, but it doesn't suffer from the problems of being clouded by the noise that critics always focus on." Even so, some scientists said they were concerned that such similar results could emerge from models that deal very differently with forces affecting climate. For example, the model used by Dr. Levitus's group included the sun-blocking effect of volcanic emissions that have punctuated recent decades, while the model used by Dr. Barnett did not.

Others had different criticisms. Chris N. Hill, a designer of ocean computer models at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, "The models being used, although state of the art, still represent the ocean as a viscous oil-like fluid, rather than the turbulent and highly variable real ocean."

But members of both modeling teams said their results were so robust, and the match to the rise in greenhouse gases was so clear, that more detail was unlikely to make a difference.

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Forest Service Choice Is Praised by Conservation and Timber Forces

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/politics/13FORE.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 - Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman today appointed Dale N. Bosworth, a career forestry official, as the new chief of the Forest Service.

The selection drew tentative praise from conservationists and representatives of the timber industry, who noted that the Bush administration was preparing to announce policy decisions that could affect the nation's forests for decades.

Mr. Bosworth, a regional forester who manages 12 national forests in northern Idaho, Montana and North and South Dakota, will oversee an organization of more than 30,000 employees and an annual budget of $4.6 billion.

In announcing her choice, Ms. Veneman said Mr. Bosworth's "background and experience will make him a great addition to our team."

Mr. Bosworth, 57, will succeed Michael P. Dombeck, who was an architect of a number of Clinton administration initiatives to protect forests from development, including a ban on road building in about 60 million acres of federal land.

Mr. Dombeck resigned last month, after Bush administration officials told him they wanted to take policy in "a different direction," aides said.

Mr. Dombeck nevertheless praised the selection of Mr. Bosworth, who he said had played an important role in the road-building ban and in a strategy to place greater emphasis on ecological impact over commercial interests.

Mr. Bosworth is "a great choice," Mr. Dombeck said, adding, "Dale was instrumental in developing key parts of the Forest Service's natural resource agenda and led development of the roads rule."

The Bush administration is studying the road-building ban, and is expected to announce on May 4 or earlier whether it will keep the policy.

The ban has been strongly opposed by the timber industry and oil and gas interests, who accused the Clinton administration of seeking to lock up valuable resources. The Bush administration has not defended the ban, which has been challenged in court by the State of Idaho and the Boise Cascade timber company.

Mr. Bosworth will be called on to make his own recommendation on the policy almost immediately. The Clinton administration's rules would ban most timber cutting in the areas, which make up about one-third of the national forests. They would also bar most new oil, gas and mining operations in the areas.

Environmentalists and industry officials alike say it will be a litmus test on the direction in which Mr. Bosworth will lead the Forest Service. Each side voiced optimism that he would lean its way.

Michael Klein, a spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Association, a national trade group for forest products, predicted that Mr. Bosworth, as a former regional forester, would be sympathetic to the appeals of industry and local governments. Mr. Klein said the new chief was also very likely act to protect forests from catastrophic wildfires and disease and infestation by allowing for greater road access and controlled burns. "He inherits the worst forest health crisis in the history of the national forest service," Mr. Klein said.

But Michael A. Francis, the director of the national forest program at the Wilderness Society, said Mr. Bosworth had always been accessible and sensitive to the concerns of those who sought to keep forests pristine.

"We feel he has a conservationist ethic," Mr. Francis said. "It's a question whether he's going to be allowed to implement the new policy or will he have the forces of darkness in the Bush administration undermine the direction the Forest Service has taken in the last four years."

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Administration Keeps 2 Rules on Efficiency of Appliances

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/politics/13STAN.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 - The Bush administration has decided to keep rules published in the last days of the Clinton administration requiring more efficient clothes washers and water heaters. But it is still reviewing a rule with far more impact, one that would raise the minimum efficiency of central air-conditioners by 30 percent.

In a statement, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the United States faced an energy crisis because of lack of planning, but he added, "We should also use technology where we can to promote energy efficiency and thus lessen demand."

The clothes washer standard requires new machines to be 22 percent more efficient in 2004, and 35 percent more efficient by 2007. The clothes washer industry agreed to the standard in exchange for a two-step approach, which manufacturers said would be easier to meet, and a promise from environmental groups to support tax credits for manufacturers. After the Bush administration ordered a review of the requirements, the industry's trade group pleaded to let the rule stand.

The rule will save almost 7,100 gallons of water a year for the average consumer, along with $48 in electric bills, according to the Energy Department, and the savings will equal the output of a dozen 400-megawatt power plants.

The water heater standard covers gas and electric models, and will save about a dollar a month on each type. The new heaters will need a U- shaped tube at the top, to prevent heated water from flowing into the pipes when no tap is turned on. But that standard is being challenged by manufacturers in court.

The standards are required under legislation passed by Congress and signed into law in 1987. But actually developing the new standards has been delayed for many reasons. Congress blocked them in the mid-90's. And negotiations, usually involving manufacturers, state officials and environmentalists, have sometimes not produced consensus.

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Fight Over Arsenic in Lumber Focuses on Public Awareness
Health: Wood is treated to ward off termites.
Critics say EPA has been slow to warn of exposure risks.

Los Angeles Times
Friday, April 13, 2001
By ALAN C. MILLER, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates2/lat_arsenic010413.htm

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.--Look out the window at the nearest wooden fence, deck, picnic table or playground set.

Chances are, it's made from pressure-treated wood, the distinctive, pale green lumber that's a familiar sight in home improvement stores nationwide. The green tint comes from a mixture of chemicals embedded in the wood to ward off termites, rot and fungus.

You've probably been exposed to this kind of wood many times without encountering any problems. But there's no doubt that handling it, sawing it or burning it can make you or your family sick. That's because one of the chemicals in the wood is arsenic--a poison and known carcinogen.

In all likelihood, you did not know this.

The reason is twofold: The wood-preservative industry, though well aware of potential hazards to those who work with the wood, hasn't lived up to its commitment to inform customers of the risks. And the government hasn't required that it do so, even though it was told more than six years ago that the word wasn't getting out.

Rick Feutz had no idea he was putting himself at risk when he built a floating dock for his three children. For a week, as sawdust coated his body, Feutz became increasingly ill. Finally, he collapsed.

For months, Feutz, then a Seattle-area science teacher, needed assistance to get around; 15 years later, at age 53, he still suffers from weakness, partial facial paralysis, slurred speech and impaired thinking. His doctors' diagnosis: arsenic poisoning.

"There may be a place for this stuff," Feutz said. "But without the appropriate warnings, few homeowners are likely to treat it as a hazardous substance. This increases the likelihood that they may have exposures such as mine."

3 Miami-Area Parks Affected

Industry officials deny that pressure-treated lumber poses a significant health risk.

Nevertheless, the safety of pressure-treated wood has become an issue in Florida, where arsenic levels that the state considers potentially harmful have been detected in the soil beneath children's wooden play-scapes and other public structures.

Last month, officials closed parts of three Miami-Dade County parks after researchers for the University of Miami and the University of Florida found elevated arsenic levels in the soil there. The findings were from a study of soil under public decks and walkways in Miami, Tallahassee and Gainesville that turned up arsenic levels, on average, 35 times higher than the state's stringent standard for residential areas. And, on March 13, Gov. Jeb Bush ordered a state-owned wood-treatment plant to stop using arsenic as a preservative.

"There's a lot more arsenic coming out of this wood than anybody ever realized," said Bill Hinkley, head of solid and hazardous waste for Florida's Department of Environmental Protection. "Our concern is significant and growing." For 25 years or so, most lumber intended for outdoor use has been pressure-treated with chromated copper arsenate, or CCA, which extends its life for decades. The wood-preservative industry has boomed during that period; it now sells 6.5 billion board feet of lumber and brings in $4 billion annually.

Highly concentrated arsenic protects the lumber from termites. The arsenic and copper combat fungi. The chromium bonds the arsenic and copper to the wood.

Arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical element found at low levels in soil everywhere. But it can be fatal when ingested, and chronic exposure can lead to lung and skin cancer, as well as to nerve, organ and reproductive damage. Some scientists say health problems from long-term exposure may not show up for years.

Industry officials say the treated lumber is safe if handled properly. They say the vacuum and pressure process used to apply the pesticide fixes it deeply in the wood, preventing harmful amounts of arsenic from escaping.

Indeed, there are no more than a few dozen reported cases of serious health problems linked to the handling of CCA-treated wood by consumers. And there's no evidence that anyone has become ill from exposure to arsenic that has seeped into the soil at playgrounds or elsewhere.

At the same time, it is impossible to determine the full extent of the problem. There is no agency that actively tracks and investigates injuries and illnesses associated with CCA exposure. And most people who work with the wood don't know it contains arsenic; if they become sick, they may never suspect the cause.

"You can't report what you don't know," said David McCrea, a Bloomington, Ind., attorney who has handled personal injury cases involving pressure-treated wood.

For the average homeowner, CCA does not appear to present a significant health hazard if precautions are taken when handling the wood. In addition, some experts recommend periodically sealing or painting pressure-treated decks or playground sets to reduce leaching. Some also recommend discouraging children from playing in soil or sand under elevated decks and making sure they wash well after playing on wooden equipment.

Some states and foreign nations have restricted use of CCA.

California prohibits using state funds to purchase CCA-treated playground equipment. Treated lumber in public playgrounds must be sealed upon installation and resealed every two years to prevent the arsenic from leaching.

Switzerland has banned CCA, and Japan severely limits its application. Vietnam and Indonesia prohibit the use of arsenic as a wood preservative.

In 1986, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned most arsenic-based pesticides. But it made an exception for CCA-treated wood after concluding that it did "not pose unreasonable risks to children or adults."

Program Calls for Prominent Sign

The EPA initially decided to address handling and disposal concerns through a mandatory safety notice for all purchasers of CCA-treated wood. But, faced with industry opposition, it agreed to let the wood treaters voluntarily distribute, through retailers, an EPA-approved "consumer information sheet" at the time of purchase.

The EPA program called for a sign to be "prominently displayed in the sales area" of stores, alerting customers to the handouts that were to be made available at the sales counter, spelling out precautionary measures people should take. The wood-treatment companies had "primary responsibility for ensuring" that consumers got the literature.

To monitor the program's effectiveness, the industry was required to conduct "a yearly survey of member compliance" and report the results to EPA.

Yet, by most accounts, not many customers carry this information home with their lumber.

Visits by The Times to five Home Depot stores and Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouses in California, Texas and Virginia found that only one displayed a sign about the consumer information sheets and, when asked, only two stores had any printed information at all.

At a Lowe's store in Manassas, Va., a salesman located a handful of brochures, after much effort, beneath a pile of wood. Notices at a Home Depot store in Monrovia told customers to request an information sheet, but none was available; a manager said they were on order.

In recent interviews, key representatives of the EPA and the wood-treatment industry acknowledged that the information is not getting to individuals who are buying the treated wood.

Scott Ramminger, president of the American Wood Preservers Institute, insisted that member companies are trying to educate consumers through his group's Internet site and media campaigns, as well as through retail outlets.

But he said the industry has advised the EPA that the point-of-purchase program is ineffective. "We've told them it's not working."

Ramminger said the required annual survey repeatedly found that chemical companies and wood treaters were providing the consumer advisories to retailers, but the retailers frequently were not getting it to customers. He said the industry informed the EPA of these results at a Dec. 14, 1994, meeting, and of its intent to end the surveys and focus on increasing public awareness.

Connie Welch, who heads the EPA pesticide branch responsible for an ongoing reevaluation of CCA, said officials who attended the 1994 meeting confirmed that the industry "basically said . . . that they didn't see where the program was working."

Welch said oversight of the consumer awareness program has changed hands within the EPA at least twice since then. She could not explain why the agency had not prodded the wood-treatment industry to step up its buyer notification efforts.

Welch said the EPA now is "very concerned" that consumers are not receiving any guidance and that the agency is working with the wood preservers to improve the buyer notification program. EPA's reassessment of CCA is expected to be completed in 2003.

Don Harrison, a Home Depot spokesman, said, "Our policy and practice is to make the information sheets available at the point of picking up the product." He said the company has made them more prominent in Florida as a result of the recent controversy.

Chris Ahearn, a Lowe's spokeswoman, said that its stores are supposed to make the sheets available but that employees don't always do so. She said Lowe's is taking steps to better educate employees about getting out the advisories.

Feutz said a consumer advisory might have made all the difference to him.

"Had I known, I could have made an enlightened decision whether I wanted to use that wood or not," he said. "But, at the very least, I would have used the precautions." He settled a lawsuit in 1992 against the CCA manufacturer, wood treater and lumber store where he bought the boards for a sum his attorney called "substantial."

Mark Dorman said he too had no idea that treated lumber contained arsenic until he wound up injured from it, according to McCrea, his attorney.

A maintenance worker and part-time contractor in Bloomington, Dorman was building a deck in 1996 when multiple splinters lodged in his right shin after he walked into a board. He cleaned up his leg but, six days later, was hospitalized because it was stinging, swollen and discolored. A large splinter was then found still in his shin.

Dorman has since had multiple emergency room visits and hospitalizations, McCrea said. Dorman suffers from decreased mobility, and faces prolonged treatment, the attorney said. He has sued the CCA manufacturer, wood treater and retailer; they deny that the chemical caused his medical problems.

James Sipes, an employee at the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana, vomited large amounts of blood in 1983 and 1984 after sawing CCA-treated wood to make picnic tables. He retired in 1985 on total disability and later won a jury award of $100,000 from the chemical manufacturer and a settlement of $667,000 from other wood-related companies.

State Toxicologist Downplays Risks

Burning the wood creates toxic smoke and ash. A Wisconsin family reported muscle cramps, seizures and hair loss after repeatedly using CCA-treated scraps to fuel the family stove.

Critics contend the industry has not made the information more available because doing so would create demand for wood treated with alternatives to CCA.

Manufacturers of ACQ, a nontoxic wood preservative, say it is as effective as CCA, although slightly more expensive. But larger outlets do not carry it, and it can be difficult to find.

In Florida, the CCA controversy has been fanned by reports in the St. Petersburg Times and other media, university research findings and a lawsuit filed by a Miami-Dade County deck owner seeking class-action certification on behalf of those exposed to CCA-treated wood.

The Florida Health Department has sought to allay concerns.

"Children are not going to be exposed to enough arsenic for a long enough period of time to really increase their risk of cancer," said Joe Sekerke, a state toxicologist. "For acute arsenic poisoning, the children would have to eat incredible amounts of soil."

There is no national standard for acceptable arsenic levels in soil. State standards vary widely. Florida's are among the toughest: maximum allowable levels of 0.8 parts per million in residential areas and 3.7 ppm in industrial areas. California's are much less stringent: 22 ppm for residential areas, 480 ppm for industrial applications.

The industry says Florida's numbers are so extreme that they fall below the average arsenic levels found naturally in soils nationwide.

While defending CCA as "a safe, effective product," the wood institute's Ramminger did not dispute estimates that 10% to 20% of the arsenic in a treated board will leach out over 25 years.

Hinkley and other experts say treated lumber poses a number of potential threats: Arsenic could seep into ground water from discarded wood placed in unlined landfills. It could leach from wood chipped into mulch (which is prohibited but hard to prevent) or toxic ash could be created by burning the lumber.

"We make decisions these days if we know a chemical is not a good thing. We try to minimize its use or its spreading in the environment," said Timothy Townsend, an environmental engineer and an investigator with the University of Miami-University of Florida study. "Science tells us that just increasing the overall burden of arsenic is not a good thing."

Times staff researchers Sunny Kaplan in Washington and Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this story.

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The Latest Federal Report on Carcinogens is Out - So What?

Healing Our World:
Weekly Comment
By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
Environmental News Service
04/13/01
http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2001/2001L-04-13g.html

The mud shall cover our sins and the water shall wash us free and the brush shall cleanse our skin and the wind shall weave our hair and the sun shall bless our face. The sky shall clothe us in blue. -- Nicole Thibodeaux, Grade 10, Taos High School, New Mexico

We are surrounded in our daily lives by thousands of substances and combinations of substances that are affecting the health of nearly every woman, man, and child on Earth.

Our imperiled Earth (Photo courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA))

Even the Inuit native peoples who live in the extreme Arctic, about as far away from technological civilization as you can get, are at risk from birth defects and other health problems from toxic chemicals in their native foods. Pollutants, such as chlorinated pesticides and PCBs, find their way to the Arctic by air or by sea from as far away as India and Egypt.

Even plants and animals are being impacted by this toxic load.

Frustration abounds among people everywhere who wish there was a way to identify toxic materials before they start harming people. Remarkably, the U.S. government has been producing a document since 1978 that tells us what substances in the marketplace are known to cause cancer. Unfortunately, the government is only required to publish the information, not to remove any of these deadly substances from the market.

Congress requires that the Department of Health and Human Services' National Toxicology Program (NTP) publish a report every two years. The report contains a list of substances that are either known to be human carcinogens or that may reasonably be anticipated to be human carcinogens. Substances are included if "a significant number of persons" in the United States are exposed to them.

To date, nine editions of the report have been published. The 9th Edition contained 218 entries and the 10th Edition is in the final stages of review.

Plastic teethers contain chemical softeners that have been found to be harmful to the health of young children. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace USA)

The law also states that the reports should provide available information on the nature of exposures, the estimated number of persons exposed and the extent to which the implementation of Federal regulations decreases the risk to public health from exposure to these chemicals. Industries hate this document, and their representatives and attorneys work hard to keep a substance from making the list.

The National Toxicology Program claims that the reports are purely informational and states that they "do not present risk assessments of cancer potential."

The agency goes on to say that "the listing of a substance in the report, therefore, does not establish that such substances or exposure circumstances presents a risk to persons in their daily lives. Such formal risk assessments are the responsibility of the appropriate federal, state, and local health regulatory and research agencies."

This, of course, is the usual political rhetoric to get the National Toxicology Program off the hook for all the sick people harmed by these substances.

If a substance makes it to the document, passing all the conservative tests and standards of the National Toxicology Program, you can bet it causes harm.

Since the Report on Carcinogens carries no regulatory power, people must act for themselves in removing these substances from their lives.

Here are a few of the items on the list. The complete report can be found at: http://ntp-server.niehs.nih.gov/NewHomeRoc/AboutRoC.html

Proposed to be added to the 10th edition of the Report are some substances that may surprise you. Take steps now to reduce your exposure today.

Woodworking shop (Photo courtesy American Woodworking Academy)

Wood Dust Wood dust is a candidate for the 10th Edition, suggested by the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the agency that regulates workplace safety. The agency estimates that at least two million people are routinely exposed occupationally to wood dust worldwide while sanding furniture or constructing cabinets. Because wood is treated with so many chemicals, including arsenic, the dust is harmful and is carcinogenic. People who make wood furniture or cabinets for their own homes are also exposed to the dust. With the huge amount of interest in home improvement projects, this finding affects a large number of Americans.

Ultraviolet Radiation Broad spectrum ultraviolet (UV) radiation from natural sources like the Sun or unnatural sources like tanning salons or even fluorescent lights is under consideration for listing. UV is known to cause skin cancer and the incidence of skin cancers is rising in the United States. Turn off those fluorescent lights, stay away from tanning parlors, and use sunscreen.

Talc The presence of talc on the list ends years of controversy. Many people have believed for decades that talc powder - both with and without asbestos - results in increased cancer risk, and studies have confirmed this connection. Studies have shown increased incidences of alveolar/bronchiolar cancers of the lung in female rats. Recently published studies of the distribution and determinants of cancer among pottery workers suggest that talc exposure is associated with lung and ovarian cancer in women workers in this industry. Don't wait for further proof. Switch to using non-talc powders.

Methyleugenol Methyleugenol is a substance that most people have never heard of, yet can sometimes be found in the list of ingredients in jellies, baked goods, nonalcoholic beverages, chewing gum, candy, and ice cream. It is also used as a fragrance for many perfumes, lotions, detergents and soaps. Studies have shown clear evidence of carcinogenic activity of methyleugenol in rats and mice.

Steroidal Estrogens These hormores are used widely in oral contraceptives and in post-menopausal therapy for women. The International Agency for Research on Cancer believes that there is a "consistent, strongly positive association between exposure to a number of estrogenic substances and risk of endometrial and breast cancer in women."

Vinyl Fluoride Used in the production of polyvinylfluoride which is used for plastics, this material is present in plastic and vinyl toys for babies. Remove them at once from your children. Babies and young children, who put everything into their mouths, should only be given untreated wood toys.

Substances already on the list that were included in the 9th Edition of the Report are:

Ethylene oxide This chemical is used to make other chemicals, and is also widely used in the health care industry to sterilize medical devices. Hospital workers should beware.

Trichloroethylene Millions of people are exposed to this deadly chemical, predominantly used for vapor degreasing of metal parts in the automotive and metal industries. It is also used as a component of adhesives and as a solvent in paint strippers, lubricants, paints, varnishes, pesticides, and cold metal cleaners. It is used as a low temperature heat transfer medium and as a chemical intermediate in the production of pharmaceuticals, flame retardant chemicals and insecticides. It is used in metal phosphatizing systems, textile processing, the production of polyvinyl chloride and aerospace operations.

Now banned for use in foods and beverages, it was used to decaffeinate coffee. It has been banned for pet foods, medicine, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics because of its toxicity.

We cannot underestimate or ignore the immense toxic assault on our bodies and minds from these and other substances. Act now to protect yourself and your family. If you wait for action from federal, state, or local governments, you will probably be waiting a very long time.

RESOURCES

1. Examine the Report on Carcinogens at: http://ntp-server.niehs.nih.gov/NewHomeRoc/AboutRoC.html

2. View the 9th Report free of charge at: http://ehis.niehs.nih.gov/roc/toc9.html

3. The United Auto Workers tracks these issues at: http://www.uaw.org/hs/00/04/hs04.html

4. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety has an excellent website to search for chemicals at: http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/chemicals/

5. Get help understanding the magnitude of the toxic problem from the Worldwatch Institute at: http://www.worldwatch.org/. A good summary of the current state of our world is at: http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/010113.html

6. See how industries fight these listings at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness at: http://www.thecre.com/ntp/

7. Stay informed on health issues with the Health Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader in 1971, at: http://www.citizen.org/hrg/index.html

8. Keep your kids safe with the help of the Greenpeace Toxic Toys program at: http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/toxics/toxictoystext.htm

9. Read about the hazards of wood dust at: http://www.osha-slc.gov/SLTC/wooddust/

10. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them that all items in the Report on Carcinogens should be eliminated at once. What good is a strong economy if we are all sick and dying. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

11. Contact President George W. Bush at president@whitehouse.gov. Tell him that this assault on the environment and on our health must stop.

12. Use your voice at the Act For Change website at: http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/category.cfm?CategoryId=5, operated by Working Assets. There, you can easily send email messages on a variety of issues to the right people.

[Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found preparing for the birth of his son, wondering how to keep him healthy in this troubled world. Send your thoughts and ideas to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at http://www.healingourworld.com]

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EPA now builds partnerships

USA Today
04/13/2001
By Christine Todd Whitman
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-04-13-ncoppf.htm

Since becoming administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, I have tried to express, both in word and deed, the Bush administration's commitment to inaugurating a new era of environmental partnership-building. Since actions speak louder than words, let me share some of what we have already done at EPA to follow the president's direction to make Washington more citizen-centered, results-oriented and market-based.

We are making environmental policy more citizen-centered by building new partnerships with state and local governments to address state and local challenges. That's why the president's budget proposes sending a record $1 billion back to the states to improve their environmental-protection work.

We are making environmental policy more results-oriented by emphasizing progress over process. We are working with Congress to remove federal hurdles that make it tough for communities to clean up brownfields, and we have approved a rule to help clean the air by requiring cleaner diesel fuel for trucks and buses.

We are making environmental policy more market-based by promoting incentives to companies that improve their environmental performance. That's why this administration supports legislation to require power plants to reduce the emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, while encouraging the use of market-based solutions that will save consumers money.

Even my much-criticized decision to take a bit more time before setting a safer standard for arsenic in drinking water reflects our commitment to listen to the people our decisions affect. We will make drinking water safer by lowering levels of arsenic. But when I learned that many of the small water companies serving America's small towns were concerned that the new standard could result in huge cost increases that could drive customers to less-safe alternatives, I thought they deserved a fair hearing.

By enlisting the energy and ingenuity of the American people and American business, we will unleash a new era of environmental protection that will enable us to meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century.

When it comes to the environment, I want the phrase, "I'm from Washington and I'm here to help" to become an invitation to partnership that every American will want to embrace.

Christine Todd Whitman is administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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'New environmental agenda' looks empty

USA Today
04/13/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-04-13-nceditf.htm

Eight months ago, presidential candidate George W. Bush sounded like an environmental visionary. Campaigning for cleaner air and cleaner water, he promised to replace what he called a "30-year-old federal model of 'mandate, regulate and litigate' " with a "new era of environmental protection."

Three months after taking office, President Bush looks less visionary than revisionary. Rather than introduce a second generation of consensus-based environmental policy-making, he has ordered a suite of unilateral policy reversals, none of which has an environmental benefit, whatever else the merits may be.

Most notably, his administration has:

• Retracted tight new standards proposed for arsenic in drinking water, to be replaced with a less-healthful one.

• Reneged on his campaign pledge to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions linked to global warming, thus undercutting a range of private initiatives to control those gasses and further derailing the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty designed to reduce worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions, which the president has renounced.

• Championed oil and gas drilling in pristine wilderness areas and chosen not to defend a proposal to place one-third of the nation's forests off-limits to road builders, decisions that contravene public sentiment and delay a forest plan based on more than 600 hearings and more than 1 million comments.

• And urged repeal of a mining law that would hold gold, silver and other hard-rock miners responsible for the environmental damage they cause.

Economic arguments can be made for each. But collectively, and in the absence of any proactive environmental agenda, they look more like giveaways to various industries.

As a candidate, Bush promised to "set high environmental standards and then provide flexibility and market-based incentives to help localities and industries meet those standards." He spoke of bipartisanship and collaborative efforts to achieve collective environmental goals. But beyond a lot of "no, no, no's," his administration has offered nothing that even looks like an agenda to advance environmental goals in innovative ways, leaving him open to criticism that he has none.

When asked, the White House specifically listed six "bold" presidential steps. But on examination, they are hardly bold and sometimes not even this administration's. A promise to make full use of the Land and Water Conservation Fund is welcome. But four others refer to action taken by the last administration. These are decisions to endorse a consent decree that will force the Environmental Protection Agency to speed up its assessment of the amount of pesticide in foods; embrace new diesel-fuel regulations; honor the designation of new federal-monument lands; and embrace new energy-efficiency standards.

A plan to seek new controls on mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, pollutants emitted by power plants, is part of a more comprehensive initiative that has been kicking around in Congress for years. So much for a "new era of environmental protection."

The lack of initiative is particularly frustrating because articulating an environmental approach with Republican appeal isn't very difficult. Many of principles of such an approach - the emphasis on collaboration; the use of market incentives to entice industry participation - have been around for years. They have broad bipartisan support and were actively embraced by Bush during the campaign.

And they work. Programs that employ such tactics have reduced pollution by hundreds of thousands of tons a year. One notable success is the Toxic Release Inventory, which requires industries simply to publish the amount of pollutants they release. Another is a program that allows industries to trade pollution credits. This allows older plants to purchase unused pollution credits from newer, cleaner operations while still reducing industry emissions overall.

It can work elsewhere, too. The Kyoto Protocol repudiated by the White House would harness market forces and incentives for innovation to begin reducing the worldwide release of the gasses linked to climate change. Even such establishment icons as IBM and Boeing have endorsed the framework. Another proposal is to provide incentives to private-property owners to protect habitats for endangered species. Still others may include solid-waste collection and fisheries management.

To date, administration officials in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department have only fiddled at the edges of these ideas. The president says he has a forward-looking environmental vision. If so, it's time he shared it. Despite promises, many retreats and not a single new idea.

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Kyoto´s 'silver lining´

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/13/01
James Morrison
Embassy Row
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010413-78725180.htm

The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, in true diplomatic style, is finding a "silver lining" in Europe´s outrage over the Bush administration´s decision to discard the Kyoto global-warming treaty.

Ambassador Richard Morningstar this week said President Bush´s action has opened a debate on the merits of the treaty, which has not been ratified by any EU member, despite their protests.

"I would argue that the big flap over the Kyoto Protocol may have a silver lining," Mr. Morningstar said in remarks before the European Policy Center, a think tank in Brussels. "We can argue over tactics, but today we are dealing with each other on this issue more openly."

Mr. Morningstar said Europe should not have been surprised by the decision, especially given Mr. Bush´s criticism of the treaty as a candidate. Before the Clinton administration signed the treaty, 95 members of the Senate endorsed a resolution opposing any accord that exempted populous polluting Third World nations like China and India.

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Developing world woos U.S. to climate talks

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/13/01
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-20014130157.htm

NEW YORK - Developing nations urged the United States yesterday to return to international talks aimed at curbing greenhouse gases and not to unilaterally turn its back on global warming.

"It is a bad and disappointing message from the new Republican administration in Washington to the international community," Iran Ambassador Bagher Asadi, chairman of the U.N. Group of 77 representing developing nations, told reporters.

President Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol last month, saying it stood to harm the U.S. economy and did not require emissions cuts by developing nations like China, whose emissions are growing the fastest.

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Ex-Policeman Defends Actions During Off-Duty Fatal Shooting

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By MONTE WILLIAMS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/13DOBB.html

A former New York City police officer defending himself against a lawsuit testified yesterday in federal court that he believed he was justified as a police officer in using deadly force in killing a Westchester County man outside the officer's family's deli, even though he was off duty.

The family of the victim, Charles Campbell, is suing the city as well as the former officer, several of his relatives, and their businesses for unspecified damages.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Randolph M. McLaughlin, maintains that the city is liable because the officer, Richard D. DiGuglielmo, was acting within "the scope of his employment" when he shot Mr. Campbell during a scuffle over a parking space outside the deli in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., on Oct. 3, 1996.

Mr. DiGuglielmo, who is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in prison and received average or above average performance reviews throughout his 12-year career, said that he was using his training as an officer and was not a private citizen when he killed Mr. Campbell. "I was then an officer," he said.

In the third day of the trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the city's lawyer, Andrea Moss, suggested that Mr. DiGuglielmo was a private citizen at the time. When Ms. Moss asked Mr. DiGuglielmo if he identified himself as a police officer or tried to arrest Mr. Campbell at any point during the fight, which involved his father, his brother-in- law and himself, he said he did not.

"I was going to take down his license plate number," said Mr. DiGuglielmo, who added that he first went into the deli to wash his face, which was bloodied during the brawl. But he said he looked through a window and saw that Mr. Campbell was menacing his father with an aluminum bat. So he confronted Mr. Campbell, shooting him three times in the upper body with a .32-caliber Colt automatic that belonged to his father, Richard B. DiGuglielmo.

"Did you file a line-of-duty injury report?" asked Ms. Moss, as she tried to drive home the city's contention that Mr. DiGuglielmo was a private citizen in a personal dispute. Again, he said he did not.

The incident began when Mr. Campbell, a sanitation worker from White Plains, refused the father's demand to move his Corvette from a parking space in front of the Venice Deli, which is run by the elder Mr. DiGuglielmo and his wife, Rosemarie. Mr. Campbell, crossed the street to a pizzeria and, according to law enforcement officials, became angry when he saw the father placing a "No Parking" sticker on his car window. Mr. Campbell ran back across the street and was accosted by the father and son and a third man, Robert W. Errico, the brother- in-law of the younger Mr. DiGuglielmo.

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Most Changes to End Profiling Are in Place, U.S. Monitor Says

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/13TROO.html

TRENTON, April 12 - The New Jersey State Police have put in place nearly all of the policy changes required by an agreement to end racial profiling, but some key management and supervision requirements still need to be fully carried out, a federal monitor said today.

State officials "worked diligently to correct deficiencies in the scope and nature of the system," the monitor said in the third quarterly report card on the state's compliance with its agreement with the United States Justice Department. New Jersey agreed to the consent decree in December 1999 to avoid a federal civil rights lawsuit. The report examined state police activity from Dec. 16, 2000, to Feb. 15.

According to the report, more than half of the operational changes, mostly requiring the authorities to document behavior by troopers during motor vehicle stops, have been made.

The report said that a requirement for state police supervisors to monitor individual troopers had not been carried out. The federal monitor also said that the state took too long to complete internal affairs investigations.

The assessment comes about a week after Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. admitted that last year some troopers were still singling out minority drivers for traffic stops and drug searches.

Today, Mr. Farmer said the report card showed that the state was committed to ending racial profiling.

"It reflects the continued progress by the state in reaching the terms of the consent decree," Mr. Farmer said. "We're willing to go beyond the four corners of the consent decree to address this problem."

The report also found that the state had not completed an extensive computerized system to track all records related to motor vehicle stops.

Testing on the system will begin in May and could be installed later this year, said Martin Cronin, director of the Office of State Police Affairs.

The report also said that the computerized system that tracks the race of drivers in motor vehicle stops and trooper logs was faulty.

Mr. Cronin said the state would release actual numbers of motor vehicle stops, including the race of drivers, in June. Progress on the reforms required by the consent decree will allow the state to provide details of consent searches, drug seizures, arrests and other activity during those stops, he said.

Figures released in January did not have those details.

According to statistics Mr. Farmer released last week, minorities accounted for 81 percent of the people who consented to be searched in 2000 by troopers on the southern half of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Last year, minorities accounted for 73 percent of people searched by troopers on the entire turnpike, according to the statistics.

A report covering 1994 to 1996 said that minority motorists were involved in 84 percent of turnpike searches.

In January, the state released its first batch of statistics related to turnpike traffic stops. They showed that more than 40 percent of the motorists stopped by state troopers on the turnpike during a six-month period were minorities. Among those arrested by troopers on the turnpike, 60 percent were minorities.

Mr. Farmer said he would not speculate on what figures for this year would show, but management changes ordered by the consent decree are intended to help identify problem troopers and bad behavior in general.

Recent hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee on racial profiling have focused on state police operations from before the consent decree, the state attorney general said.

People must look at how the agency has performed since then, he said.

"My sense is that this going to take some time," Mr. Farmer said. "We are making progress in creating a culture of accountability in the state police that has never occurred before."

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Suit Is Settled in Case of Man Wrongly Held

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/13KERR.html

The State of New York will pay $3.25 million to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of a mentally ill homeless man whose arrest in Los Angeles and bungled identification by the authorities led to his mistaken two-year imprisonment in New York, lawyers said myesterday. The case highlighted the flaws in the handling of inmates as they enter the state prison system, particularly mentally ill prisoners who are not always able to speak for themselves.

As part of the settlement, which must be approved by a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan, New York officials have also written a letter of apology to the victim, Kerry Sanders, 34, and his mother, who conducted a futile two-year search for her son after his disappearance from the streets of Los Angeles in 1993.

Mr. Sanders, who had no criminal record, was misidentified by the authorities as a fugitive drug dealer from New York, Robert Sanders, with the same birth date. The authorities did not compare fingerprints and photographs, and ignored Mr. Sanders's repeated assertions that his name was not Robert, contending that his claims were signs of mental illness. Mr. Sanders was finally released in 1995, after the arrest of the real fugitive in Cleveland.

"I would like to apologize for Mr. Sanders's wrongful incarceration based upon the mistaken belief that he was someone else," wrote Glenn S. Goord, the state commissioner of correctional services, in a letter dated yesterday.

Mr. Goord also apologized to Mr. Sanders's mother, Mary Sanders Lee, for the "loss of her son's companionship during that time."

After her son's disappearance, Ms. Lee undertook an arduous and ultimately fruitless search for her son through the gang- infested streets of South Central Los Angeles, interviewing shopkeepers, homeless people and gang members.

Mr. Sanders, who has schizophrenia and is now living in a group home in Los Angeles, said in a brief telephone interview that he was gratified by the settlement.

"I heard about it," he said. "I feel all right about it."

His mother, who is also his legal guardian, added: "New York did my son injustice, and we got our justice. I don't think it should go any farther than that."

Mr. Goord also wrote in the letter, "Although it cannot alleviate the harm you have suffered, I hope it is at least of some comfort to you to know that at my direction, a series of improvements have been made in our identification procedures."

He cited a new policy of immediately fingerprinting all escapees who have been recaptured, and matching those prints against the originals; ordering correctional officers who pick up prisoners in other states to carry the original fingerprint identification cards; and installing computer- based scanners in prisons so fingerprint checks can be made quickly.

State officials said no disciplinary action had been taken against any prison employees who were involved in Mr. Sanders's case at Green Haven, the maximum-security prison in Stormville, N.Y.

A correctional services spokesman, James B. Flateau, said: "The commissioner's feeling was that as unfortunate as the outcome was, there was no venality on the part of any employees. It was just an incredible confluence of events that we had never before seen happen."

One of Mr. Sanders's lawyers, Benjamin Schonbrun of Los Angeles, said he was astonished by the lack of disciplinary action or reprimands.

"It tells me that the policy makers at the New York State Department of Correctional Services are doing what bureaucrats always do, which is try to resolve an embarrassing situation for them without any accountability," Mr. Schonbrun said.

An article in The New York Times Magazine last year detailed Mr. Sanders's traumatic experience, how the state battled a lawsuit filed on his behalf, and the consistent lack of sympathy to his protests.

One prison therapist has said Mr. Sanders told him as many as 75 times, "I don't know why I'm here." The therapist told him to write to the prison superintendent.

A prison psychiatrist who treated Mr. Sanders said that given his mental problems and homelessness, he was better off in prison. "He should say, `Thank you, for two years you guys treated me very nicely,' " the psychiatrist, Dr. Edward Y. Chung, said in a deposition.

(Dr. Chung still practices in the system, though not at Green Haven, a spokesman said.)

Told of the settlement, Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison monitoring group, said, "It's definitely a worst-case kind of scenario, and at the same time it reflects the lack of attention and lack of resources that the state devotes to prison mental health services."

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, said that falsely imprisoning Mr. Sanders, already a victim of schizophrenia, probably exacerbated his fragile mental state. "That's the horrible thing about doing this kind of thing to someone so vulnerable," Dr. Grassian said.

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Race and the Uses of Law

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By RONALD DWORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/13DWOR.html

LONDON -- Why is affirmative action in universities so unpopular when it seems to be working so well? Statistical studies show that the policy has improved racial diversity not only in the classrooms but later in life, in business and the professions, as well, and contributed to improved understanding among races.

Yet the policy has always been controversial, and now it is at risk in the courts. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause forbids government from making racial distinctions unless it has a "compelling" need to do so. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote in the Supreme Court's famous Bakke decision, said that a university's need for a diverse student body is indeed compelling.

Since then, however, the court has grown more conservative, and a majority of the court has shown increasing suspicion of affirmative action in the business context. In 1989, for example, the court prohibited Richmond, Va., from favoring black applicants for municipal construction contracts, ruling that the city's interest in improving racial diversity in the construction industry was not sufficiently compelling to justify a race-conscious policy.

Unless the court changes direction, affirmative action is finished as a direct means of securing racial diversity in industry or business. But education is different: diversity is much more important there. Universities have traditionally insisted that diversity of all kinds has educational value. For many decades they have sought to admit students from different geographical areas, cultures and social backgrounds because academic discussion is most profitable and has the most lasting social benefits when it draws on different experiences and perspectives. Racial diversity is at least as important as diversity in those other dimensions.

The Supreme Court may still decide that racial diversity is a sufficiently compelling need to justify affirmative action in education. But until it does decide, one way or the other, the issue will remain unsettled, and sophisticated jurists will continue to disagree. Last December, a federal judge, Patrick Duggan, ruled that the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions system, which gives minorities added points, is constitutional because diversity is a compelling need in education. Two weeks ago, another judge in the same court, Bernard Friedman, in a flatly contradictory ruling, declared the more flexible plan of the same university's law school unconstitutional because diversity is not a compelling need. Both decisions have been appealed, and it seems inevitable that the Supreme Court will finally have to resolve the issue.

The high court's ruling will be among the most monumental decisions, for American education and society, that it has ever made. Though the justices' opinions will probably be framed as answers to the legalistic question of whether racial diversity is a compelling need, the underlying question of principle is whether the Constitution's vision of equal citizenship condemns all uses of racial distinction, except by institutions correcting their own past injustices, or whether it permits such distinctions when there is no risk that they reflect prejudice or favoritism or stereotype, and when they plausibly aim to make equal citizenship more genuine.

It is predictable, on the basis of past rulings, that the three most conservative justices - William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - will take the former view, and also that the more liberal justices - Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - will take the latter one. The decision will probably turn on the votes of the remaining justices, who are often described as more centrist: Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor. I believe the second view is the sounder one, both on precedent and in principle, and that there is reason to hope that the centrist justices will accept it.

Why do so many people, including some liberals, resist that view and think that affirmative action, whatever its motives, is unfair and ought to be held unconstitutional? Many of them recognize and endorse the value of racial diversity in education, and hope to find other means to bring it about. Judge Friedman's opinion is a striking and revealing example. He declares that racial diversity in law school classes may provide "important and laudable" benefits, and that "it would be unfortunate if the number of students from any racial group would decline at the University of Michigan's Law School."

He knew that his ruling would sharply reduce the number of black and other minority students, and he therefore proposed that the law school experiment with a variety of colorblind measures that might still achieve racial diversity. The law school might, he said, put less reliance on standardized test scores for everyone, or choose among "qualified" applicants by lot, or take the students with the best grades from less academically demanding colleges. None of these subterfuges would work, and each would likely cause many of the most qualified and promising applicants, white and minority, to be rejected in favor of less qualified and promising applicants. How could anyone think such a process preferable to candidly race-conscious programs that aim to admit the most qualified class consistent with an acceptable level of racial diversity?

All of us who are not racists - liberals and conservatives alike - have an instinctive tic against explicit racial classifications, which is understandable given our nation's history of racial injustice. But if we really want a more just society, we must be prepared to re-examine this instinct with an important distinction in mind: we must distinguish between policies whose premises deny equal citizenship and those whose premises affirm it.

Of course, no one should be penalized for his or her race, and no race should be thought to have special rights or privileges. Black applicants have no right to preference now because other blacks suffered from injustice in the past. But affirmative action assumes no such right: it has a forward-looking, not backward-looking, justification. The policy promises a better educational environment and a less racially stratified society for everyone. It recognizes that prejudice has poisoned society for all of us, and that fostering opportunities for different races to study and work together is part of an effective, even if slow- working, antidote.

Is affirmative action unfair? Universities are not honor societies rewarding applicants for past achievements. They have a public responsibility to choose students with an eye to the future - students who will contribute to the institution's educational, academic and social goals. If a university judges that it can offer a better education to everyone if its student body is racially diverse, then its judgment is no more unfair to anyone than its judgment that it can do better with a geographically diverse class or with athletes as well as scholars. It would, of course, be unfair if a university's judgment were corrupted by bias or favoritism, and universities should be required, if challenged, to offer persuasive evidence rebutting any such claim. But no one's rights are infringed when a university makes an honest and uncorrupted decision about how best to meet its academic responsibilities.

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Metro Briefing
New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/nyregion/13MBRF.html

MANHATTAN: TUITION AID FOR POLICE The City Council's proposed budget would allocate $2 million to expand tuition aid for police officers pursuing the college credits necessary for promotion, Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone said yesterday. The program, to be administered through the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, would be open to all uniformed officers but is intended to help diversify the upper ranks, Mr. Vallone said. Diane Cardwell (NYT)

SCHENECTADY: FORCED STRIP SEARCHES A federal judge has ruled that the Schenectady Police Department's former policy of strip-searching all detainees was unconstitutional. The ruling, made last week, came in a lawsuit brought by Michael Fyvie, 20, who in May 1999, after being charged with disorderly conduct, was ordered to undress, hold his genitals and bend over in front of a female officer. Judge Thomas McAvoy of United States District Court ruled that the searches violated the Constitution's ban against unreasonable search and seizure. The policy was phased out in July 1999. Hope Reeves (NYT)

CONNECTICUT NEW HAVEN: HEARING ON POLICE ACTIONS A three-judge investigatory grand jury is reviewing witness testimony in a murder case that led to a New Haven Police Department scandal. The panel will determine whether testimony given in another grand jury investigation can be used to investigate the killing of Philip Cusick, found dead outside his parents' North Haven home in 1996. No one has been charged in Mr. Cusick's death, but a former detective, Brian Sullivan, has been charged with hindering the investigation. (AP)

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Cincinnati Mayor Imposes Curfew to Quell Violence

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/national/13OHIO.html

CINCINNATI, April 12 - This racially tense city was placed under a strict nightlong curfew today as the authorities struggled to stop sporadic vandalism and the confrontations with police officers that followed the fatal shooting of a black teenager by the police.

"Despite the best efforts of the good citizens of our city, the violence on our streets is uncontrolled and it runs rampant," Mayor Charlie Luken declared as he announced a state of emergency and ordered that the streets be kept clear of most people from 8 p.m. until 6 a.m. until further notice.

Acting after four days of confrontation between the police and roving crowds of protesters and vandals, Mayor Luken conceded that there might be "very legitimate" validity to complaints by blacks about racial profiling by the police. But he said the more immediate problem was to restore civil order.

"Knock it off now," the mayor, a Democrat, told violent protesters who have emerged among groups of young black men protesting the shooting on Saturday of an unarmed teenager in an alley by a pursuing officer. He was the 15th black suspect killed by police officers here in the last six years and the fourth since November.

In the first hours of the curfew, the city was a ghost town under lockdown. Police reported a few violent incidents and more than a score of arrests of curfew violators, while the mayor, claiming initial success, cautioned that a long weekend lay ahead.

The White House announced that President Bush had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to "help calm and resolve the situation" by dispatching two Justice Department mediators to investigate the trouble.

With the city's 1,030-member police force working 12-hour shifts, the mayor said there was "active consultation" with Gov. Bob Taft about the use of National Guard troops, if necessary, to provide relief.

"I don't expect that situation will arise," Governor Taft said tonight in a broadcast interview. Seventy-five State Police officers have been ordered to assist the local police.

Through the day, political and church leaders met, emphasizing the need for order.

"We are trying to keep our youth in tonight," said Juleana Frierson, an assistant to the Rev. Damon Lynch III, the influential pastor of New Prospect Baptist church, who traveled from meeting to meeting.

Some families left Over-the-Rhine, a black neighborhood where much of the vandalism has occurred, to seek refuge in calmer neighborhoods, complaining of violent young people compounding the problem.

"We don't want any of this," one resident, Fantasy Keahana, said as she left.

"Cincinnati's a microcosm, the belly of the whale," said Kweisi Mfume, national president of the N.A.A.C.P., who addressed community leaders on the need to solve the problem of racial profiling by the police. "It's important for the nation to focus here on ground zero. If we can fix it here, we can fix it elsewhere. But if it doesn't get fixed here, it turns into anarchy and all of us are left wondering, Is justice blind?"

No deaths have occurred in the four days of street violence in which groups of vandals have staged hit- and-run raids on dozens of stores, looting some of them. More than 40 people have sought treatment at hospitals, including some struck by the rubber bullets, beanbags and tear gas the police have fired in efforts at crowd control. The police made more than 100 arrests, most of them on Monday and Tuesday.

Shopkeepers in some of the quieter parts of the city could be seen boarding their windows as the curfew was announced. The police were instructed to allow only people going to and from work to pass on the streets.

With property damage mounting, violence reported in additional neighborhoods and a police officer reported grazed by a sniper's bullet overnight, the mayor used emphatic language in announcing the curfew and citing a new development, civilian gunfire, in some incidents.

"Gunfire went off like you might hear in Beirut or some other place," Mr. Luken told the city of 331,000, which is 43 percent black.

As he spoke, protesters heckled him with accusations of police brutality. "We have been telling you for two years about the brutality!" one person shouted.

The mayor emphasized that the immediate need was to restore order "without regard to what anger and frustration any citizen might be feeling."

Only a week ago, the mayor said, a curfew was "unthinkable." Some of the city administration's leading critics did not disagree.

"The fringe has taken over the protest," said Scott Greenwood, a Cincinnati resident and general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. The A.C.L.U. and prominent blacks filed a federal lawsuit against the city last month accusing the police of systematically violating the rights of black residents for 30 years with frivolous arrests and the excessive use of deadly force.

"We can't negotiate about police behavior while the entire city is under siege," Mr. Greenwood said, citing the fatal shooting on Saturday of Timothy Thomas, 19, as an example of "the very conditions that led us to file a lawsuit."

The police said Mr. Thomas was shot when Officer Steven Roach, who is white, thought he was about to draw a weapon. No weapon was found, and on Tuesday, Mayor Luken said of Officer Roach's account that "the initial finding don't back him up."

The police said Mr. Thomas had 14 outstanding warrants when he was shot. But Mr. Greenwood said all were for misdemeanors or for traffic infractions.

"Five of them for not wearing a seat belt while driving," Mr. Greenwood said.

"That's a charge of last resort when they can't get you for something else," he said, contending that countless blacks had been similarly stopped by police officers.

The last racial protests that attracted outside attention in this city were in 1968, in the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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How Bush Had to Calm Hawks In Devising a Response to China

New Yotk Times
April 13, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13POLI.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 - Early this week, in the midst of stalemated talks with China over the release of 24 Americans detained on Hainan island, the commander of United States forces in the Pacific recommended dispatching the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk up the coast of China, to send Beijing's leaders a message of American resolve.

On Tuesday, the proposal was rejected as too provocative, apparently before it even got to the White House. Instead, the carrier took another route on its way to Guam, well clear of China, to avoid giving a militaristic edge to what the White House repeatedly said it wanted to keep a purely diplomatic confrontation.

It was a telling moment. George W. Bush came to office talking about Beijing as a "strategic competitor," and vowing to take a tougher line with Chinese leaders than had his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

Within his party, and even his administration, many chafed at China's obstinacy, and even at the administration's decision to use the words "very sorry" to describe Washington's reaction to an incident that the Pentagon painted as entirely China's fault.

Yet in his first serious foreign policy challenge, Mr. Bush quickly toned down his first instincts - which had led him to step out of his office and demand the immediate release of the crew and the plane.

He ultimately took a more conciliatory approach that required tamping down the more hawkish instincts of some advisers and of many uniformed commanders. He even kept Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose troops were being detained, from having any public role.

This picture of Mr. Bush's policy decisions emerges from days of background briefings, anecdotes related on the fly by officials in the midst of negotiations and a White House timeline of the diplomatic exchanges. The president appeared to be balancing political instinct and professional advice, and ultimately took a cautious path.

Though Mr. Bush's advisers reject the comparison, the new president sounded at moments like Mr. Clinton, talking about the risks to the broad, if ambiguous, relationship between the world's most powerful nation and its most populous one.

Ultimately, the administration pursued the cooler approach, and today the crew members arrived in Hawaii, which Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney watched on television as they ate lunch and dissected the events of the standoff.

While much remains to be resolved - including the return of the plane and the resumption of the reconnaissance flights at the center of this confrontation - there was a lot to glean about Mr. Bush's management style.

The White House likes to portray him as a quiet manager who delegates, decides and moves on. But until the night of the midair collision, when the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, interrupted the president as he watched a movie at Camp David, Mr. Bush had never faced an international confrontation.

Without question, Mr. Bush did delegate: He left the diplomacy largely to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage and the American ambassador to China, Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, a former commander of American forces in the Pacific.

From the first moment, Mr. Bush was constantly peppering his closest aides, particularly Ms. Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, with questions about the state of the crew, the strategy, their interpretation of what was going on within the Chinese leadership.

Still, the president and his team appeared to have been somewhat slow to grasp the magnitude of what had occurred. Partly that was because of the failure of the Chinese to provide any information until 48 hours after the incident, but partly it may be attributable to the absence of any long-time China experts in the Bush inner circle.

"We thought that the crew would be quickly returned and we'd haggle over the plane," one official said. "It didn't work out that way."

When Mr. Bush realized on April 2 that there was a bigger problem afoot - American officials had not even been granted access to the crew - he headed outside the Oval Office with the first of two strongly worded statements. "They were designed to get the attention of China's leaders, and they worked," one of Mr. Bush's top advisers said shortly thereafter.

But others in the State Department wonder whether the wording was too strong, and might have driven China's leaders into a corner. And by April 4, Mr. Bush had told Ms. Rice, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, and others that it was time to start "looking for a way out of this."

That began the search for the words that would bridge the gap between China's demand for an apology and the American desire to get the crew back without taking blame. Mr. Bush agreed that any letters should be sent in the names of others - Secretary Powell in one case, Admiral Prueher in the case of the final letter to the Chinese.

"It seemed important to let the president stay one step back here," said one official involved in the discussion.

Using that approach, Mr. Bush could not pick up the hotline with China, installed several years ago, and talk to President Jiang Zemin directly. That would probably have been Mr. Clinton's inclination, and it would probably have been the inclination of Mr. Bush's father, who was known for speed-dialing world leaders.

But Mr. Bush did pick up the phone earlier this week, a senior administration official said today, to call the leaders of Britain, France, Brazil and Canada to encourage them to quietly press Chinese leaders.

As the confrontation dragged on, Mr. Bush approved each draft of the letter of regret to China. But mostly the wording was developed by deputies, in a rolling series of phone calls involving Mr. Armitage, Mr. Hadley, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others.

Mr. Bush's aides said they were repeatedly frustrated by the opaque nature of Chinese decision-making, and several China experts outside the administration said they received a few requests - from people they believe were asking on the president's behalf - for their analysis.

It is unclear whether Mr. Bush himself heard that Adm. Dennis C. Blair, commander of American forces in the Pacific, had suggested that the Kitty Hawk, which was about to leave port in Thailand, steam on a northerly route that would have taken it close enough to Hainan to get China's attention.

The proposal by Admiral Blair, who was in daily contact with his predecessor, Admiral Prueher, was reminiscent of the precedent Mr. Clinton set in 1996, when he ordered two aircraft carriers, the Independence and the Nimitz, near the Taiwan straits. At the time China was conducting military maneuvers there that were clearly intended to intimidate Taiwan just before elections on the island, which China regards as a renegade province.

Clinton administration officials said then that the dispatch of the Independence was intended to underscore the warnings the White House was sending to Beijing. Admiral Blair had the same thing in mind, officials said.

"We saw it here from the diplomatic track," said one military officer familiar with the recommendation. "That doesn't mean you can't send signals."

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American Hostage Freed in Philippines

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13FILI.html

MANILA, April 12 - Philippine troops and police stormed a jungle hide-out today to free an American captured by Muslim rebels who had threatened to behead him.

The American, 25-year-old Jeffrey Schilling of Oakland, Calif., was in good health after the raid on Jolo island, 580 miles south of Manila. Marine commandos and the police killed some Abu Sayyaf rebels and wounded others, said Brig. Gen. Diomedio Villanueva.

After the rebels threatened to behead Mr. Schilling last week, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo responded by declaring "all- out war" against the group, pouring 3,000 troops into region, then sending in another 1,800 reinforcements this morning.

Mr. Schilling, a Muslim convert, was taken by the rebels after he visited their camp in Jolo last Aug. 31. He was accompanied by his wife, Ivy Osani, the cousin of a rebel leader, Abu Sabaya. Ms. Osani was freed after the rebels seized Mr. Schilling.

The odd circumstances of his kidnapping led some military officials to speculate that Mr. Schilling might have been cooperating with the rebels. But the rebels, who are believed to number about 1,200, accused him of being a C.I.A. agent.

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Beijing Declares Victory but Chat Rooms Are Skeptical

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13CHIN.html

BEIJING, April 12 - The Chinese government went all out today to convince its people that it had won a moral victory in releasing the crew of an American spy plane after receiving what it billed as a contrite letter from the United States.

But there were plenty of skeptical rumblings, especially on university campuses and in Internet chat rooms, where determined Net surfers played a cat-and-mouse game with bulletin board censors to get their disgruntled postings aired.

Web site censors were unusually strict today, as the government sought to stanch popular misgivings about a resolution that a number of Chinese regard as caving in to the United States.

Comments like, "Our government is too weak - we have lost face," which appeared this morning on Sina.com, were removed just minutes later. This afternoon, visitors to the site repeatedly complained that their comments had disappeared.

Indeed, the range of acceptable opinion narrowed considerably today, as the government declared victory and tried to modulate a range of popular emotions into a single tune.

"The struggle by the Chinese government and people against American hegemony has forced the United States government to change from its initial rude and unreasonable attitude," a commentary in People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, triumphantly announced.

The evening news on the main state television station carried a long piece on President Jiang Zemin's visit to Uruguay and, also, a shorter segment showing a series of "ordinary people" from around China supporting the decision to return the 24 crew members, with thoughts like, "We embrace the party's decision."

And to the Chinese people, well versed in extracting the message from party propaganda, the missive was loud and clear: The spy plane incident had been resolved, and the nationalistic indignation that the party had helped awaken a week before should now be put back to bed.

But it would not go easily, particularly among well-educated Chinese youths, who have formed a wellspring of nationalist sentiment in recent years and generally know enough English to have read the original English-language version of American statement of regret. Although the full text of the letter was not released by the Chinese media, which provided only excerpts in their own reports, it is available to the computer literate on the Internet.

The Chinese government had initially demanded that the United States formally apologize y and take responsibility for the collision of the American plane and the Chinese jet fighter. The letter it accepted, however, provided somewhat less: an expression of "sincere regret" for the incident and "very sorry" for the loss of the Chinese pilot and intrusion into Chinese airspace during the emergency landing.

Some of the big Internet sites got more than 10 million visits on Wednesday - in a country with an estimated 20 million Internet users - and many of them were angry, said an executive at a major Internet company. He said the site's "editors" had scrambled to delete a huge number of comments deemed too critical of the government, as well as a smaller number deemed too supportive of the United States.

In China, each chat room and bulletin board is responsible for policing incoming postings and deleting those with content the government might deem offensive. While the government is not directly involved in this process, government monitors log on to major chat rooms throughout the day, to make sure that the job is being done. Internet sites risk losing their license if discipline is lax.

The Internet executive acknowledged that chat rooms had allowed a wider range of opinion about what to do with the crew members and the plane earlier on in the dispute, when the government had not firmed up its position. But, he added, now that the government's position is clear, those discussions cannot continue.

The Internet executive said that his company had received no special instructions, but that none were necessary. An editor at a state newspaper explained that "it is a long-established rule on major events that everyone can republish or quote only" the two main official media outlets, New China News Agency and People's Daily.

Still, the Chinese Internet is growing so fast that it is hard for the government to control it. In high- profile chat rooms today, discussion may have been sanitized, and dull. But on smaller sites, it was roiling.

"The United States just uttered a few shameful words of apology, and our government released 24 pigs," said one posting this morning. "This shows the Chinese government's incompetence."

On university campuses too, there was a deep feeling of discontent.

"Students are not very satisfied with this, because we know the difference between `very sorry about that,' and a real apology," said a student at Beijing University who would give only his surname, Wang.

In 1999, after NATO warplanes bombed China's Embassy in Belgrade, student protesters quickly gathered at the United States Embassy, and university bulletin boards were splashed with angry anti- American cartoons.

But today there were no posters at Beijing's leading universities, and students said no protests were planned - in part because it was certain that the government would not allow it.

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Bush on China: `Different Values, Common Interests'

New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13PTEX.html

Following is the text of a statement yesterday by President Bush in the Rose Garden on the return of service personnel from China, as recorded by The New York Times.

A short time ago, I had the opportunity to speak to the 24 members of our United States flight crew and welcome them home to America.

I've told them they represent the best of American patriotism and service to their country.

They did their duty with honor and with great professionalism. They are a reminder of the debt of gratitude all Americans owe to the men and women who wear our country's uniform and who voluntarily risk their lives in the service of freedom.

We're proud of our crew and I am glad that they will be with their families this Easter weekend.

I know I speak for all Americans in saluting their courage and the extraordinary skill of the pilot, Navy Lieutenant Osborn, who guided the severely damaged aircraft to an emergency landing that saved 24 lives.

We're looking forward to talking with the flight crew about exactly how the accident happened. From all the evidence we have seen, the United States aircraft was operating in international airspace in full accordance with all laws, procedures and regulations and did nothing to cause the accident.

The United States and China have agreed that representatives of our governments will meet on April 18 to discuss the accident. I will ask our United States representative to ask the tough questions about China's recent practice of challenging United States aircraft operating legally in international airspace.

Reconnaissance flights are a part of a comprehensive national security strategy that helps maintain peace and stability in our world.

During the last 11 days the United States and China have confronted strong emotions, deeply held and often conflicting convictions and profoundly different points of view.

China's decision to prevent the return of our crew for 11 days is inconsistent with the kind of relationship we have both said we wish to have.

As we move forward, the United States and China will no doubt again face difficult issues and fundamental disagreements. We disagree on important basic issues such as human rights and religious freedom. At times we have different views about the path to a more stable and secure Asian Pacific region.

We have different values, yet common interests in the world. We agree on the importance of trade and we want to increase prosperity for our citizens.

We want the citizens of both our countries to enjoy the benefits of peace in the world. So we need to work together on global security problems such as preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

I will always stand squarely for American interests and American values. And those will no doubt sometimes cause disagreements with China. Yet I will approach our differences in a spirit of respect.

The kind of incident we have just been through does not advance a constructive relationship between our two countries.

Both the United States and China must make a determined choice to have productive relations - to have a productive relationship that will contribute to a more secure, more prosperous and more peaceful world.

I know I speak for all Americans when I say welcome home to our flight crew.

I want to thank the families for your patience and for your sacrifice.

And I wish all my fellow Americans a rich and meaningful Easter and Passover.

God bless.

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A Quick Heroes' Welcome, Then On to Long Hours With Debriefing Teams

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By JOHN KIFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13CREW.html

HONOLULU, April 12 - The 24 crew members of the American surveillance plane held in China landed today at Hickam Air Force Base, part of the Pearl Harbor military complex, and were given a deliberately low-key heroes' welcome.

Before they go home to the more tumultuous salute being planned for Saturday at their base, Whidbey Island, near Seattle, they face two long days of debriefing interviews. Navy officials want to determine how the lumbering EP-3E and a Chinese jet fighter collided on April 1, as well as how much of the sensitive electronic gear the crew was able to destroy, and what intelligence windfalls the Chinese might have gained from the downed craft.

"We are definitely glad to be back," Lt. Shane Osborn, the commander of the surveillance plane, said in brief remarks at the ceremony at Hickam today. "But we obviously have some business we have to take care of. On that note, I'd like to start so we can go home."

A major focus in the early stages of the debriefing has been a reconstruction of the accident, in which the American plane was badly damaged and the Chinese jet, an F-8, broke apart and its pilot fell into the sea. American officials have portrayed the Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, as something of a showoff who repeatedly flew dangerously close to American reconnaissance planes.

With the crew safely out of Chinese custody, Pentagon officials let out more details from the early debriefings, putting the blame for the accident on the Chinese pilot.

They said the American plane was flying straight and flat on auto-pilot when the Chinese plane made three close approaches, coming as near as 3 to 5 feet.

The tail of the Chinese plane clipped the left outside propeller of the four-engine Aries, disabling it. The Chinese plane broke apart, officials said, its debris ripping off the nose cone of the American plane. Pieces of the nose cone disabled the larger plane's inside right propeller while other pieces pierced the pressurized cabin with a deafening roar.

The American plane heeled to the left, nearly turning over, and it fell 5,000 to 8,000 feet before the pilot was able to right it, officials said. They would not say how high the plane was flying at the time of the incident.

Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the Pacific Fleet commander, along with Rear Adm. Michael L. Holmes and other officials, has credited Lieutenant Osborn, the plane's commander and senior pilot, with saving the lives of the crew by landing the crippled plane at the Chinese military airfield at Hainan. Some officials here, however, noted that the plane actually has three pilots, and that two other officers alternate with Lieutenant Osborn during normal flights.

Pilots experienced in flying the EP-3 described the feat of landing the big plane in damaged condition as nothing short of astounding.

A veteran of many EP-3 flights, who like his comrades here has been closely examining the pictures of the crippled plane, animatedly described the effects of the damage today.

The left propeller was not only dead, he said, but set flat, rather than feathered - meaning that it created drag. With the nose cone gone, the pilot did not have the instruments that report speed and altitude. The flaps on the wings used to slow a plane down for landing did not work.

"Everything is degrading," the man said in amazement. "The plane's not controlled by anything. He must have just muscled it in."

The crew arrived in a huge gray C- 17 transport plane in the early light of 6:20 this morning.

After an 11-day standoff, which they spent in a military hostel on Hainan island in southern China, the 21 men and 3 women were flown first to Guam aboard a commercial Continental airliner, in keeping with Chinese demands that no military plane be used. After a brief stop there to eat, clean up and call their friends and families, they boarded the transport plane for the trip here.

About 15 minutes after landing, the C-17 taxied toward a mass of television cameras. One by one, the crew members in their flight suits appeared in the doorway, saluted and made their way down a receiving line of admirals, generals and politicians.

A crowd of several hundred - people in uniform as well as crew members' families - had gathered. There was a brass band, and a color guard of sailors, an airman and a marine. There were handmade cardboard signs reading "Pride" and "Honor"; there were cheers, and little American flags.

"Aloha and good morning," said Admiral Fargo. "All are very proud of you and the way you conducted yourselves. Welcome back and well done for this great crew."

But the formalities were brief. After the traditional Hawaiian welcome, complete with leis, crew members marched off to two buses marked "Valiant Return," bound for the base's Bachelor Officer Quarters, where medical examinations and debriefings would begin.

The debriefings, by a dozen teams of specialists, began about 10 o'clock in the morning and were expected to last 12 hours, Navy officials said. They are to resume at 8 a.m. Friday and stretch into the night. The Navy hopes to fly the crew to Washington State early Saturday morning, in time to get them home for Easter.

"I think it's important to understand that in the minds of the crew members, their mission is not complete yet," said their boss, Admiral Holmes, commander of Patrol and Reconnaissance Force, Pacific, which includes their unit.

A naval officer familiar with the debriefing plan said the teams represented "a wide range of organizations from different parts of the country," many cloaked in the acronyms beloved by the military.

One group, for instance, is from SERE, which stands for Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion. This is a kind of training given to troops who might fall into enemy territory, to help them avoid capture - and, if they are captured, teach them to resist interrogation.

The SERE team will want to know how effective its training was and how the Chinese behaved toward the Americans. And, when it comes to the electronic eavesdropping and other intelligence devices on the plane and what the Chinese might have learned from or about them, the discussions will take place in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility, a special soundproof room immune to bugging.

The plane itself is still on the tarmac in Hainan, and the Chinese are presumed to be taking it apart.

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One Nation, 3 Lessons

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/13FRIE.html

So what are the lessons from this latest China-U.S. crisis? They are: (1) When dealing with China, carry a big stick and a big dictionary. (2) This is an inherently unstable relationship. (3) Get used to it - it's going to be this way for a long time.

Let's start with Lesson 2, because it's the crux of the matter. We learn from this incident that the U.S.-China relationship has within it two highly stabilizing and two highly destabilizing elements, and the future will be shaped by the balance between them.

The two stabilizing elements are China's economic dependence on U.S. trade, technology transfers and the American market, and China's more general, but steady, integration into the world. When China's foreign minister declared that China was releasing the U.S. surveillance plane's crew for "humanitarian reasons," I burst out laughing. One thing the Chinese are expert at is calculating their interests. And they had clearly calculated that dragging this affair on another day could imperil China's entry into the World Trade Organization, its $100 billion in trade with the U.S., its application to be host to the 2008 Summer Olympics, its 54,000 students studying in America, etc. etc.

These things matter. They matter to a regime whose Communist ideology is largely defunct and whose only basis of legitimacy is its ability to keep incomes rising. And they matter deeply to the people of China, who see themselves as a rising power and want to be accepted as such. The more China is integrated with the global economy and international rules-based systems like the W.T.O., the more these will be a source of restraint on the regime.

But they are not foolproof, because these stabilizing elements in the relationship are counterbalanced by two highly destabilizing ones: the authoritarian character of the Chinese regime, and China's rising popular nationalism and unquenchable aspiration to absorb Taiwan into one China.

Authoritarian regimes, having little legitimacy, can almost never admit a mistake. That's why you need a big stick and big dictionary when dealing with them. The idea that a slow-moving, propeller-driven surveillance plane, flying on autopilot, rammed into a Chinese fighter jet is ludicrous. But since China's leaders lacked the self-confidence to admit this, the Bush team wisely found a way to apologize without really apologizing.

The same tools need to be applied to Taiwan. Taiwan's character - the fact that it is a country that has built itself in America's image, economically and politically - mandates that we defend it. We cannot shirk that responsibility. But Taiwan's history and geography mandate that Taiwan find a way to accommodate with mainland China - without sacrificing its de facto independence or character. China has actually shown a lot of flexibility in proposing different formulas lately, and Taiwan needs to respond. Pass the dictionary.

We need to keep our eyes on the prize here, folks. Those voices in the U.S. now calling for America to "stick it to China" and to "teach them a lesson" sound as silly as the China People's Daily hectoring America. China is a unique problem. It represents one-fifth of humanity. It threatens us as much by its weaknesses as by its strengths. We may be doomed to a cold war with China, but it is not something we should court.

A cold war with Russia, a country that made tractors that were more valuable as scrap steel and TV's that blew up when you turned them on, was one thing. A cold war with one- fifth of humanity, with an economy growing at 10 percent a year, is another. At the same time, trying to collapse the Chinese regime overnight would produce a degree of chaos among one-fifth of the world's inhabitants that would affect everything from the air we breathe to the cost of the clothes we wear to the value of our currency.

Our strategy toward China needs to remain exactly as it was: Build bridges to China everywhere possible, because they have clearly become a source of restraint on the regime; and draw red lines everywhere necessary, because China's rising nationalism and insecure leadership can produce irrational behavior that overrides all other interests. Do this, and hope that over time China continues, as it slowly has been, becoming a more open, legalized, pluralistic society, with a government more responsive, and less threatening, to its people and neighbors. Lurching to any other extremes with China would be utterly, utterly foolhardy.

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Yellow Ribbons Galore and Embracing All the Crew

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By EVELYN NIEVES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13BASE.html

OAK HARBOR, Wash., April 12 - For 11 days, this Navy town took in the news of the 24-member spy plane crew detained by China like worried parents. Yellow ribbons were tied to nearly every lamppost and tree on Route 20, the main thoroughfare. Businesses, from real estate offices and banks to espresso stands and hotels, posted signs of support and prayer. The local news station kept a crew posted day and night by the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station here, home base of the crew.

Today, Oak Harbor had no cares. Signs around town read: "Welcome Home: God Bless America" and "Welcome Whidbey 24: What an Easter." The Antique Rose flower shop, just outside the base, still sold out its latest shipment of yellow ribbons, but this time for use in the celebration planned for Saturday.

That's when the crew, released by the Chinese on Wednesday, finally arrives here after a debriefing in Hawaii following their trip across the Pacific Ocean to Guam. The families of the 21 men and 3 women who endured a collision with a Chinese fighter jet, landed on a Chinese island, and then became the center of an international incident when the United States and China squabbled over who was to blame, will arrive here from all over the country before 4 p.m. on Saturday, when the celebration is scheduled.

Gates to the base will open three hours before the ceremony, when an expected 10,000 well-wishers, including much of the town of Oak Harbor (population 20,000) and the naval station (population 7,000 military) will greet the crew, along with the governor, Gary Locke, the commander in chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, Adm. Thomas Fargo, and other dignitaries.

President Bush, who expressed gratitude and respect for the crew today, was not expected. He had plans to spend a long Easter weekend in Texas, said Kimberly A. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. "As far as we know," she said, "that's where he'll be."

For Oak Harbor, whose bond with the naval station go back 50 years, there will be plenty to celebrate. Seven of the 24 crew members have families here, but Oak Harbor claims the entire crew as its own.

"These are our sons and daughters," said Patty Cohen, the mayor, "so you can imagine the outpouring and the gratitude and the relief that this community is expressing."

If the town was relieved, relatives of the crew were absolutely elated to see their loved ones alight from their transport plane in Honolulu this morning.

"I just saw him on television , and the camera stayed on him a good long time," said Sandy Blocher of Charlotte, N.C., whose son Steven, 23, is an aviation electrician's mate third class on the crew. "I was able to see Steven quite closely," she said, clearly pleased, "and he looked good. They all looked good."

On Wednesday, Mrs. Blocher met the president, who was in North Carolina to discuss education. "He gave me a big hug, and I started to tear up and he got teary, too, and he had to wipe his eyes," Mrs. Blocher said. "He was very personal, very warm. He made us feel so comfortable. He said he was proud of the troops and proud of the way they conducted themselves."

In Show Low, Ariz., the parents of Brandon Funk said they were awaiting word on details of the trip to reunite with their 21-year-old son Saturday at the naval station. The crew is stationed there. "We don't know when we're flying out but we're already getting ready," said Carly Funk, who will be joined by her husband, Kevin, and their two other children.

Ms. Funk said she knew what she would do when she saw her son again: "I'm going to kiss him and hug him like I'll never let go."

The couple spoke to Brandon, a cryptologic technician, late Wednesday night for about 30 minutes in a call placed from Guam.

"He was very, very relieved and said he was tired," said Ms. Funk, who admitted to shedding a few tears during the conversation. "It was so good to hear from him. He said he couldn't wait to have a pizza."

Oak Harbor had planned to have a big parade on Saturday, but it was postponed until the end of the month so that the crew could spend time with their families.

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Rumsfeld Hits China's 'Aggressive' Pattern

New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 13, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday an American spy plane was flying straight and level until a Chinese fighter pilot, "maneuvering aggressively" in the skies above the South China Sea, struck the U.S. aircraft from below. Chinese pilots had been buzzing U.S. planes for months, he said.

Contradicting Chinese reports of the incident that sparked an 11-day standoff, Rumsfeld said the crew issued several mayday signals and landed in distress. He said the 24-member crew was greeted by armed Chinese troops.

"The Chinese pilots have been maneuvering aggressively against our pilots for months," Rumsfeld said, citing 44 recent cases. "The F-8 pilot clearly put at risk the lives of 24 Americans."

In his first public remarks on the incident, Rumsfeld played dramatic audio and video tapes of previous close encounters between U.S. and Chinese planes.

"We got bumped. We got thumped," an American pilot was heard saying. A U.S. pilot also reported that a Chinese plane was "squirrely. Not real steady."

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With Crew in U.S., Bush Blames China for Collision

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By MARC LACEY and STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13PLAN.html

WASHINGTON, April 12 - With the crew of an American surveillance plane safely in Hawaii, President Bush and his national security aides pointedly blamed the Chinese today for the midair collision off China's coast, shedding some of the diplomatic niceties employed to resolve the matter.

The president telephoned the 24 crew members who had been detained by the Chinese to welcome them home, and later appeared in the Rose Garden to warn that the two nations would have to make "a determined choice" to improve frayed relations after the 11-day standoff.

"The kind of incident we have just been through does not advance a constructive relationship between our countries," Mr. Bush said, as his advisers released new details of the American plane's collision with a Chinese jet fighter on the morning of April 1. "Both the United States and China must make a determined choice to have productive relations." Bush administration officials continued to rebuff Chinese demands that reconnaissance flights off the coast of China cease. Mr. Bush's national security aides were considering when and how to resume the flights, repeating the United States' resolve to protect its right to fly in recognized international airspace.

Officials said the commander of American forces in the Pacific, Adm. Dennis C. Blair, had recommended resuming the missions as soon as this week.

"The reconnaissance missions that we use are part of a broad national security strategy aimed at peace through security in the region and aimed also, by the way, at protecting not just us but our allies," the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on the NBC News program "Today." "And we're not going to do anything that compromises our ability to perform those functions."

Mr. Bush, in his brief afternoon appearance in the Rose Garden, did not repeat his earlier expressions of sorrow for the Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, whose F-8 fighter jet was in the collision with the Navy EP-3E Aries II surveillance plane. To resolve the dispute, the American ambassador presented a letter to China's foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, that said the United States was "very sorry" that the Chinese pilot died and that the American aircraft landed on Chinese soil without permission.

The president defended the actions of American crew members and said he would make sure that at a meeting to be held next week between the two governments the United States asked "tough questions" to China about its practice of challenging American aircraft flying over the South China Sea.

"From all the evidence we have seen, the United States aircraft was operating in international airspace, in full accordance with all laws, procedures and regulations and did nothing to cause the accident," Mr. Bush said.

The president's remarks had multiple audiences. Clearly, he was speaking to the Chinese, who administration officials believe were in part testing the new administration by drawing out the return of the Americans. But Mr. Bush also had his sights on the right flank of his own party, where there is grumbling that the administration did not act tough enough during the episode in its dealings with the Chinese.

Today, Mr. Bush made a point of repeating the litany of disagreements that the United States has with China, from human rights concerns to the proliferation of Chinese arms.

"We disagree on important basic issues such as human rights and religious freedom," he said. "At times, we have different views about the path to a more stable and secure Asian Pacific region."

He also said flatly that he would "always stand squarely for American interests and American values."

Echoing Mr. Bush's tone in the wake of the crew's return, officials at the Pentagon were more explicit in assigning blame for the collision on the Chinese pilot. Several officials - citing interviews with the aircraft's commander as the crew flew to Guam - said the Chinese F-8 had hurtled toward the American plane too quickly and clipped its leftmost propeller.

It was the third time the F-8 had swept close by the EP-3E that day - in one instance within three to five feet - as it lumbered straight and flat on autopilot along the Chinese coast, the officials said.

"The pilot was intent on harassing our air crews, because the Chinese don't want us there," an officer said, referring to the repeated midair confrontations between American patrols and Chinese interceptors during the last few months. "It was an accident. I don't think the pilot meant to collide, but it was aggressive and unsafe airmanship that caused this to happen."

Although a glancing blow, the impact of the collision broke the Chinese plane apart, the American pilot told officials, spraying debris that severed the American aircraft's nose dome and damaged another propeller engine on the right wing.

It also sent the American aircraft into a sharp leftward roll - "virtually inverted," one official said. Punctures in the American aircraft's pressurized fuselage filled the aircraft with a deafening roar as it plunged several thousand feet before the pilot was able to regain control, begin broadcasting "mayday" signals and head toward the Chinese military airfield on Hainan Island.

Pentagon officials said today that discussions had begun on options for resuming the surveillance effort off the coast of China. In addition to flights by aircraft like the one involved in the collision, the American military also conducts patrols with P-3's, which specialize in hunting submarines, and RC-135's, another aircraft built to absorb electronic communications and radar signals.

No reconnaissance flights have been made since the collision, but officials said commanders in the Pentagon and in the Pacific were eager to resume them, if only to show the Chinese that the United States has no intention of backing off. "We should have that going on right away," a senior officer said.

Still unresolved is the return of the spy plane, which officials intend to discuss at next week's meeting. White House aides said the two governments were still discussing the details of the session, including where it would be held.

The American crew members arrived with much fanfare today at Hickam Air Force Base, part of the sprawling military compound at Pearl Harbor, after a stop in Guam. After two days of debriefings and medical checkups, they will return on Saturday to their home base on Whidbey Island, about 35 miles north of Seattle.

Mr. Bush said he had spoken briefly by telephone with the crew members, telling them that they "did their duty with honor and great professionalism." He singled out for praise the pilot and mission commander of the Navy plane, Lt. Shane Osborn, who landed the damaged aircraft.

"They are a reminder of the debt of gratitude all Americans owe to the men and women who wear our country's uniform and who voluntarily risk their lives in the service of freedom," Mr. Bush said. "We're proud of our crew, and I'm glad they will be with their families this Easter weekend."

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The Art and Artifice of Apologizing to China

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/13FRI3.html

It took two days after the midair collision and emergency landing of an American spy plane on Hainan Island for the Chinese government to seek a formal apology from the United States. Then, after rejecting the demand, the Bush administration took nearly another week to come up with a diplomatic note nuanced enough to be satisfactory to both sides.

What happened in that interval was the rediscovery by President Bush's team of the uses of linguistic ambiguity that have solved diplomatic problems in the past, especially in the Far East, but also led to new problems. For now it appears that the Chinese and the Americans have agreed to see the American apology - conveyed by Ambassador Joseph Prueher to the Chinese foreign minister - in their own distinctive ways. It is too early to predict whether their different interpretations will lead to future problems.

The Chinese asked for American apologies over the entire incident, including the practice of flying reconnaissance missions in international airspace. Such a broad apology was rejected by the Bush team. According to Perry Link, a scholar of Chinese language and literature at Princeton, the strongest expressions of regret in the American Embassy's translation of Ambassador Prueher's letter related to the unauthorized entry into Chinese airspace during the emergency landing. Mr. Link said the use of the syllable "qian" in that part of the embassy's translation "does imply that the speaker acknowledges wrongdoing." That syllable, however, appears more frequently in the Chinese translation than in the embassy's, he said, enabling a Chinese reader of the Chinese translation to infer that the admission of wrongdoing extends to larger issues.

If there is a familiarity to this exercise, it relates to the Japanese "apologies" over World War II that China and others in East Asia have routinely rejected as too weak in accepting responsibility for the war.

When I was based in Tokyo as a correspondent during the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan issued what it said in English was an expression of "deep remorse" for the attack. Some news reports described this as a flat apology. Most Japanese, however, understood that in Japanese it was an expression of "deep reflection," a far milder form of regret used frequently to convey apologies to other Asian countries. The United States did not react formally to the Pearl Harbor statement, but China, South Korea and countries in Southeast Asia continue to express dissatisfaction over such language. In 1995 the Japanese prime minister issued a less ambiguous personal apology for the war, but his attempt to get an equally strong one approved by the Japanese Parliament failed.

It is, of course, easier for the leaders of any country to apologize for past actions than for their current behavior. In the art of apologizing, few have exceeded former President Clinton, who apologized for many actions in history like slavery and the support of right-wing governments in Latin America. He also apologized for some of his own actions and statements on the world stage, including the failure to respond to genocide in Rwanda. (Mr. Clinton's most famous and controversial apologies no doubt related to his personal conduct.)

In Japan, apologies large and small are so embedded in regular discourse that several are repeated during a normal conversation. Mr. Link and other scholars say that the Confucian traditions in China are more connected to confession and self-criticism than apologizing. He said that the habit of magistrates in imperial times of extracting confessions in return for more lenient punishments was picked up and exaggerated by the Communists, especially during the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

Probably too much can be made of Confucian traditions in analyzing the Chinese need for an apology in the plane incident, however. The Chinese demand for an apology for the episode is as understandable in political and human terms as the American refusal to apologize.

"I'm less inclined to see this apology in a cultural sense than as part of something that is in the air all around the world right now," said John W. Dower, a historian of Japan and World War II. "It's the concept of victimization. For the Chinese, this little plane became a metaphor for 150 years of imperialist victimizing of China."

It may turn out that we will not know the significance of this apology until both sides act in accordance with it. As Mr. Link pointed out, the Chinese may still expect the United States to go from its apology to greater efforts not to repeat the mistake, perhaps by discontinuing reconnaissance missions off the Chinese coast that the Bush administration considers both legal and vital. In that sense, the latest American apology, with all its ambiguities, may close one chapter but open up others for new potential misunderstandings.

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Is U.S.-China Crisis Really Over?

New York Times
April 13, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/opinion/L13CHIN.html

To the Editor:

Re "China Releases U.S. Plane Crew 11 Days After Midair Collision" (front page, April 12):

Now that the American crew has been released by China, the Bush administration must shift attention to the return of the EP-3 reconnaissance plane. Undoubtedly the Chinese have had time to analyze some of the plane's technologies and gain valuable information that can be used against the United States in the future.

Allowing the plane to remain in China without any consequences or reprimands would signify a Chinese victory in the eyes of the Chinese government and rogue states around the world, and it would set a dangerous precedent for future accidents involving our military. We have won the battle, but by no means is the standoff over.

RAFEY OMAR Woodside, Queens, April 12, 2001

•To the Editor:

The Bush administration displayed political savvy in bringing a peaceful resolution to the standoff with China (front page, April 12). It is gratifying to know that we have a leader in Washington who understands the art of diplomacy.

MICHAEL S. KERR Seattle, April 12, 2001

•To the Editor:

Yes, China accepted America's letter of apology and released the crew of the surveillance plane (front page, April 12). But given that a similar statement from President Bush or Secretary of State Colin L. Powell could have resolved the incident soon after our plane landed, I'd say that for all the white hair in the Bush cabinet, not much experience was in evidence.

SCHUYLER BISHOP New York, April 12, 2001

•To the Editor:

According to "Ending the Spy Plane Deadlock" (editorial, April 12), the Bush administration resolved the crisis with China without accepting blame. But from the perspective of China and the world, the United States did. Moreover, the crisis is not resolved, as the Chinese government still holds our top-secret, high-tech and very expensive plane.

In essence, the Chinese forced down an American military plane operating in international airspace, held the crew hostage, extracted an apology and then kept the plane. The appeasement inherent in President Bush's strategy will affect future relations with diverse nations.

TIM GERSHON New York, April 12, 2001

•To the Editor:

In coverage of the Chinese crisis (news articles, April 12), scant attention has been paid to the fact that American surveillance planes have flown off China's coast for decades.

The likelihood of a glitch or an accident with these flights is always high. Surveillance by spy satellites, however, is highly successful. Why weren't the Chinese flights abandoned in favor of satellites? Of course, it is always easier to start a program than to stop it.

ATILLA BEKTORE Daytona Beach, Fla., April 12, 2001

•To the Editor:

With the end of the crisis comes a question: is it possible that the Chinese pilot who had harassed a number of EP-3 aircraft, and ultimately crashed into one, was on a mission to force a technology-laden plane to the ground (front page, April 12)?

This theory is probably impossible to prove. It has pertinence, however, if we resume the surveillance flights. The Chinese will not likely resume the harassment, but we will have to be alert to subtler forms of retaliation.

BOB TULP Amagansett, N.Y., April 12, 2001

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Crew Destroyed Secret Materials Before Surrendering to Chinese Troops

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13CND-CHINA.html

EIJING, April 13 - As Chinese troops surrounding the aircraft waved their guns and shouted at them to stop, the crew of the crippled American spy plane that landed on Hainan Island spent 15 furious minutes destroying secret materials before surrendering, senior American diplomats said today.

"The crew completed all of its checklist," one of the diplomats said when asked what share of the plane's sensitive items had been destroyed. This was an indication that the losses of American intelligence data and technology may not have been as great as initially feared.

The two senior diplomats, who played central roles in negotiations here to win the release of the 24-member crew, spoke on condition their names not be used.

They said that as the EP-3 surveillance plane approached a Chinese air base for an emergency landing after an in-flight collision with a tracking Chinese F-8 fighter on April 1, the American plane sent between 15 and 25 messages on standard international frequencies. They said the plane warned of its imminent approach, but received no reply.

The Chinese government insists it heard no distress calls or requests for permission to enter Chinese airspace and so the landing was illegal, warranting the holding of the crew and plane for investigation.

Today the diplomats indicated some doubt that the landing was a total surprise to the base. They said a second Chinese tracking jet, after witnessing the collision, had landed at the same field 10 minutes earlier. They also said that the runway appeared to have been cleared for the ailing craft's arrival and that the Americans signaled their intent to land with a 280-degree "clearing turn" above the airbase.

The diplomats also re-asserted the firm United States belief, contradicting Beijing's claims, that reckless flying by the Chinese jet pilot caused the collision, leading to the first crisis in relations between the Bush Administration and China.

The claim of reckless flying was supported in Washington today by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who said at a news conference: "The Chinese pilots have been maneuvering aggressively against out pilots for months. The F-8 pilot clearly put at risk the lives of 24 Americans."

He also played audio and video tapes of what were said to be previous encounters with Chinese jets in which an American pilot was heard saying: "We got bumped. We got thumped."

Since the crew's release on Thursday after being held for 11 days, formerly mum American officials have been anxious to get out their side of the story.

Senior officials in Washington and Beijing - expressing resentment at Chinese accounts that blame the United States for the collision and make other disputed assertions - have provided reporters with the United States interpretation of events.

While the freeing of the crew removes the most explosive element, the incident is far from closed and what could become an acrimonious bilateral meeting is scheduled for April 18 to discuss the causes of the collision, how to avoid future incidents and the return of the damaged aircraft.

The Chinese also insist on discussions about the right of the United States to make surveillance flights near China's coasts, a practice they regard as humiliating as well as a threat to national defense.

Chinese officials have called for an end to the flights, which stay outside the 12-mile territorial zone but are near enough to monitor military secrets. The April 1 collision occurred some 70 miles off Hainan, in southern China.

The United States insists such flights are legal, are made by other countries around the world and will not stop. American officials are already debating how soon to resume flights off China's shores.

In today's briefing, the diplomats elaborated on the circumstances of the collision and its frantic aftermath, as well as the secret, day-and-night negotiations in Beijing and Washington that resulted in a contrite letter from the United States in return for release of the crew.

According to their information, based largely on preliminary talks with the crew while still in Chinese custody, the large, propeller-driven EP-3 was on a steady course when the F-8 fighter jet made two "fairly aggressive" passes, coming within 10 feet. In a third pass, just after 9 a.m., it zoomed in fatally fast and close.

The jet's tail nicked a left engine of the larger plane, and later the fighter jet broke into at least two parts, the officials said. The American crew did not see whether the pilot, Wang Wei, who is lost at sea and has been declared a national hero in China, was able to eject.

The American plane suffered damage and the flight commander, Lt. Shane Osborn, had a tense choice: to try a dangerous landing at sea, to have the crew bail out or to try to land at the nearest airfield, inside China.

Today the senior officials praised the crew as heroic for stabilizing the craft after a wild, steeply angled fall of 8,000 feet, landing it safely and carrying out pre-scripted procedures for reducing the loss of secrets.

After the collision, the plane activated a standard "mayday" distress signal, the diplomats said, and it also made between 15 and 25 radio calls to the airport, using the two standard "guard frequencies" that are supposed to be monitored by all air towers. But it heard no response and so proceeded to land without authorization.

"'They did everything right, in accordance with international procedures," one of the diplomats said. "The Chinese say they never heard any of these calls. It could be they weren't monitoring the guard frequencies."

If this report of multiple messages is true, it undercuts China's argument that the plane entered its territory illegally without even trying to ask permission. Trying to assuage that concern of the Chinese, who for historical reasons are exceptionally prickly about perceived infringements, the letter that Ambassador Joseph W. Prueher delivered here Thursday specifically said the United States was "very sorry" for the unauthorized entry.

After landing, what the diplomats said were heavily armed soldiers peering through the plane's windows yelled. They also used bullhorns and pointed their weapons to "make it very clear" that the crew, which was running through a checklist of security procedures, must stop.

The crew sent a final message home that they were finished and would leave the plane. They opened the door and were taken into custody. They do not believe that shots were fired at any point, the officials said.

The diplomats said there were disputed reports from Chinese sources that a soldier had barged into the plane and wrestled with an American. "I don't want to be flip about this," one official said. "But you take a look at Shane Osborn. There's no way he was wrestled down."

The crew had no alternative to giving up, the officials said. "They were in a disabled aircraft on the ground, after a very emotional disabling event. There was nowhere to go."

Once in custody the crew members were questioned intensively, the diplomats said, on the ground that the collision required investigation.

Ambassador Prueher, a former commander of Pacific forces and Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, the military attaché in Beijing, learned of the collision and emergency landing at about 10:30 a.m. on the same day, the two diplomats said. They immediately contacted the Chinese foreign and defense ministries. But to his frustration the ambassador was not granted a meeting until 9 that night, with deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong, who would be his chief interlocutor through the ordeal.

From that first meeting, the diplomat said, the Chinese asserted that the American pilot caused the collision and that the United States must bear full responsibility.

"We'd had a bad thing happen, an accident," the diplomat said. "I think the Chinese missed an opportunity to handle it well and strengthen our relationship."

He said it appeared "very possible" that the Chinese military had misinformed Beijing leaders about the nature of the collision, causing a hardening of their initial position. Early in the standoff, for example, President Jiang Zemin said that China had proof that an unsafe maneuver by the American pilot caused the mishap.

"The Chinese leadership appears to me to have chosen a path of confrontation when there were other paths available to them," the senior American diplomat said. The reasons for this "are known only to them," the diplomat added.

In the ups and downs of negotiations last week, many experts theorized that the Chinese leaders were divided, or that the military was resisting concessions.

The senior American diplomat would say only that "We spent a lot of time trying to understand the Chinese decision process." It was clear, he said, that in this type of situation, "the decisions are made at a very high level, they are consensus decisions and they take a long time to make."

From the first moment of the first meeting in the foreign ministry, the diplomat said, all discussions were held in English, and it was tacitly understood that the American letter saying "sorry" would only be offered in English. `

`That allows a little more elbow room," he said, referring to the convenient variations in translation and interpretation of the letter given by Chinese and American political leaders as they sought their way out of a politically charged confrontation.

In the end, as it became clear that China's continued holding of the crew would cause severe reactions in Washington on trade policy and other areas of cooperation, Chinese and American diplomats settled on the letter and release of the crew, with some hard issues saved for later meetings.

"I believe the Chinese when they say their foremost goal is economic modernization," the American diplomat said.

The contentious way in which this accident was handled, he said, may have brought short-term political gains, and China did reap possible intelligence information.

"But I don't think it advances their bigger goals," the diplomat said.

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The China test

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/13/01
R. Sean Randolph
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010413-919287.htm

The standoff with China over the release of a U.S. reconnaissance plane suggests the complexity of current U.S.-China relations, and is a foretaste of challenges that lie ahead. Since Richard Nixon´s historic trip to Beijing, China has occupied a unique place in U.S. policy. In the last three decades it has evolved from being a strategic partner against the Soviet Union, to a commercial market and now a human rights pariah. With the Cold War over, the United States the sole world power and China growing in influence, U.S.-China relations need but lack a new equilibrium.

Challenges will come from several directions. One is Taiwan. A vibrant democracy, Taiwan is ruled by the DPP, a party long identified with Taiwan independence. Despite conciliatory gestures by Taiwan´s new president, Beijing will continue to pressure its government, and will test the Bush administration´s resolve to preserve Taiwan´s integrity and the right of Taiwan´s people to choose their government. Stability in Asia and our principles require us to stand firm.

An early test will come with Taiwan´s request for advanced defensive weapons. China´s expected entry into the World Trade Organization may also test U.S. resolve. Despite Chinese objections, Taiwan´s economic importance, its market system and its economic ties with the United States all require that Taiwan also join, as World Trade Organization (WTO) rules provide, as its own customs union.

Trade is another. The deficit with China is our largest in the world, and potentially the most acrimonious. Last year´s extension to China of Permanent Normal Trade Relations and Chinese membership in the WTO will create new opportunities for U.S. business, but won´t reverse the deficit quickly. These agreements are likely, in fact, to produce new disputes. Expect China to try to reinterpret their terms and extend the timetable for their implementation. We should acknowledge the real challenges that trade liberalization poses for China´s leadership, but hold them to their commitments.

Human rights will remain a bone of contention. Beijing shows no sign of loosening its control of China´s political system. If anything, during the last year China´s human rights climate has deteriorated. Despite dramatic progress in economic and social liberalization, China´s leaders will continue to defy U.S. attempts to influence their political system. Recent U.S. efforts to expand political rights using trade and political pressure have failed. We must be unambiguous about our values, but rethink the best ways to advance them.

Security issues may also complicate relations. China strongly opposes U.S. missile defense, seeing itself as a presumed adversary. A new push by the United States to deploy that system is certain to raise tensions. Improved stability on the Korean Peninsula may also lead Beijing to press for U.S. military disengagement from Asia -something that is in neither United States nor Asia´s interests.

George W. Bush won´t be the first U.S. president to be tested by China. For decades, Chinese leaders have skillfully leveraged China´s economic and military potential to exact concessions from the United States. Experience shows that overestimating China´s importance decreases U.S. leverage and influence, and distorts U.S. policy in the region.

As an Asian power and an emerging world leader, China´s interests will both coincide with and diverge from our own. Courting China is unwarranted, but treating it as an adversary will be self-fulfilling. The best course is to foster political cooperation wherever possible, aggressively promote U.S. business and work to draw China deeper into the world market system. Participation in global organizations like the WTO won´t change China overnight or remove our differences. Deeper engagement with the West will, however, encourage the rule of law and create a growing zone of common interest. Over time, it will inexorably expand the personal and economic freedom of ordinary Chinese, and with it the environment for political reform.

U.S.-China relations have become increasingly politicized, making solutions to these issues difficult. China has an important role to play in Asia and the world, and despite the authoritarian rule of its Communist Party is an increasingly modern nation that is undergoing deep and rapid change. Beijing is already preparing China for the onslaught of economic competition that will follow WTO membership. Its ability to enforce its will in China´s far-flung cities and provinces is constrained, however, and its fears of unemployment and instability-caused economic reform and globalization are real. These internal tensions will also complicate our management of the relationship.

Today´s China is neither an ally nor an adversary. The course taken by China´s political and economic development, however, engages vital U.S. interests. The Bush administration deserves credit for its firm but restrained management of negotiations for release of the U.S. aircraft and its crew. More difficult issues lie ahead: weapons sales to Taiwan, a continued congressional spotlight on human rights and the possibility of another bruising debate on Normal Trade Relations. Political tensions raised by the aircraft controversy will aggravate these issues. Charting a course through these turbulent waters will require both principle and pragmatism from the Bush team.

R. Sean Randolph is president of the Bay Area Economic Forum in San Francisco. He served in the State Department and in the Reagan White House, and as California´s director of international trade from 1994-98.

---

U.S. denies timing anti-China resolution

Washington Times
4/13/01
Betsy Pisik THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001413213031.htm

NEW YORK - The United States introduced its resolution condemning China before the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights only moments after the conclusion of the standoff on Hainan Island, setting the stage for a new confrontation between the two powers.

A State Department official said the timing was coincidental, noting that the deadline for the introduction of such resolutions passed on Wednesday at 7 a.m. Washington time. But to have filed the motion earlier could clearly have complicated the delicate negotiations for the release of the U.S. air crew in China.

Such resolutions have been introduced with U.S. support almost every year since the Tiananmen Square massacre. China has managed to rebuff censure every time through a combination of trade deals with and hardball lobbying of swing voters on the 53-member commission.

Human rights experts said yesterday that President Jiang Zemin's tour of Central and South America - which took him away from the surveillance-plane crisis - was connected to defeating the U.S.-sponsored resolution.

"All the countries he's going to, except for Chile, are on the [human rights] commission," said Mike Jendrzejczyk, an expert on Asian issues at Human Rights Watch. "He's signing trade and investment agreements everywhere he's going. This is the same approach China uses every year, and it always works."

Mr. Jiang left China in the middle of the Hainan crisis for a whirlwind tour of Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Cuba - all of which are serving three-year terms on the Human Rights commission, an independent U.N. body.

This year's resolution, like those before it, criticizes Beijing's "severe measures" restricting its citizens' freedom of religion, assembly and speech. It also urges the authorities to "to preserve and protect the distinct cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious identity of Tibetans and others."

The document also protests the treatment of Falun Gong adherents.

The Commission's resolutions bring international attention and some condemnation, but are not binding.

In past years, Beijing has blocked any vote on its human rights record by introducing a "no-action" resolution. If the majority of commission members vote in favor of the no-action, there is no vote on the human rights text.

Observers are concerned that once again China will prevent a vote on its human rights record. This year, unlike previous years, the United States has no co-sponsors.

"If it's just the United States, China can just shrug it off, saying it's Washington out to get them," said one U.N. official.

European nations sponsored the resolution from 1990 to 1997, when the no-action motions carried by narrow margins. There was no resolution in 1998, when China released a number of political prisoners and promised to sign on to several human rights protocols.

Poland joined the United States in introducing resolutions in the past two years as the number of nations abstaining from a vote increased.

"China is saying dialogue, not confrontation," said Mr. Jendrzejczyk. "By offering to have bilateral dialogues, they've peeled off Canada, Australia, Japan, some of the European countries, and some of the Latin Americans.

"Developing countries get trade and investment, industrialized nations get these fairly sterile dialogues that . . . sound good domestically but don't get tangible results."

In the past, human rights advocates have criticized the United States and other Western nations for failing to work hard enough to pass a resolution.

A State Department official said yesterday that U.S. ambassadors and State Department officials have been pressing the matter, and that the European Union has been actively working against the no-action motion.

But U.S. officials said the current composition of the commission is an obstacle. Among those nations elected to serve a three-year term are several with questionable human rights records, including Liberia, Syria, Algeria, Vietnam, Burundi, Pakistan and Indonesia.

China and the United States are also on the commission. The United States has never lost a re-election bid.

---

White House won't stop flights

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/13/01
Dave Boyer THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://asp.washtimes.com/printarticle.asp?action=print&ArticleID=default-2001413222327

The U.S. military crew freed from captivity in China returned to a heroes' welcome in Hawaii yesterday while the Bush administration vowed to continue surveillance flights and stepped up efforts to retrieve the damaged plane.

A military C-17 carrying the 24 service members landed at 12:20 p.m. EDT at Hickam Air Force Base, where a marching band greeted them with "God Bless America" and about 200 cheering friends waved flags.

"We're definitely glad to be back," Lt. Shane Osborn, mission commander, told the crowd. "I'd like to thank everybody's support all over."

President Bush told the crew members by telephone from Washington that they "represent the best of American patriotism" and singled out Lt. Osborn for piloting the crippled plane "to an emergency landing that saved 24 lives."

"They did their duty with honor and with great professionalism," Mr. Bush said later in the Rose Garden. "We're proud of our crew, and I am glad that they will be with their families this Easter weekend."

The crew members will complete 26 hours of debriefing today before returning to their base tomorrow at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state.

With the military personnel safely home, Mr. Bush's tone toward the Chinese turned more stern.

He promised that the United States will ask "the tough questions about China's recent practice of challenging United States aircraft operating legally in international airspace" when both sides meet next week.

The president, in his most detailed comments on the incident, said the U.S. aircraft did nothing to trigger the collision.

"China's decision to prevent the return of our crew for 11 days is inconsistent with the kind of relationship we have both said we wish to have," Mr. Bush said. "The kind of incident we have just been through does not advance a constructive relationship between our two countries."

The administration negotiated the crew's release 12 days after a midair collision between the EP-3E surveillance plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet by telling China it was "very sorry" for the presumed death of the Chinese pilot and for the U.S. plane landing on China's Hainan island without permission.

Chinese state-run media claimed victory, portraying the U.S. sentiment as an apology. China wants an end to surveillance flights off its coast, but Mr. Bush said yesterday the flights will be resumed.

"Reconnaissance flights are a part of a comprehensive national security strategy that helps maintain peace and stability in our world," said the president.

The United States and China are scheduled Wednesday to discuss return of the EP-3E aircraft, which lost its nose cone in the collision, and related issues. Chinese officials indicated yesterday they won't return the plane unless the United States agrees to stop the spy flights.

China's Deputy U.N. Ambassador Shen Guofang said in New York, "We have to make further investigations on the plane and also to have consultation on their further activities along our coastal areas. I'm not sure whether this kind of collision will happen again if they still will carry out spy activities like this."

In the Chinese Foreign Ministry's first remarks since the U.S. crew left China, ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue repeated China's assertion that the incident is "not over."

"China has demanded that the United States stop sending surveillance planes to areas near China's coastal waters," she said.

But Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Beijing must answer for the collision.

"The responsibility for avoiding future accidents rests not just with the United States, it rests heavily with the Chinese and the way that they respond to these flights," Miss Rice said on NBC's "Today."

Military sources have said Chinese fighter pilots engage in a practice called "thumping," in which the fighter jets fly directly underneath a slower turboprop-powered surveillance plane and suddenly dart upward in front of the plane to jostle it with turbulence from their jet engine.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington would renew efforts to recover the EP-3E surveillance plane. It stayed on Hainan island in the South China Sea after its crew was allowed to leave for home yesterday.

As both nations prepared to discuss those issues next week, Mr. Bush also was getting more pressure from members of Congress not to renew permanent normal trade status for China because of the incident.

"This incident calls into question our current policy of sending American trade dollars to a nation that has displayed signs of hostility toward the United States," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, who proposed the measure to overturn the trade law.

"The Chinese didn't act in a normal way, so it brings the trade deal under greater scrutiny," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, Alabama Republican. "The jury is still out on whether we would approve an extension."

Miss Rice said the administration still wants a productive trade relationship with China.

"I think we all believe that trade with China, the effort to try and build an entrepreneurial class in China, to try to bring some freedom to that society through freer economics, is an important goal," she said on CBS' "The Early Show."

Mr. Bush said the nations face "difficult issues and fundamental disagreements."

"We disagree on important basic issues such as human rights and religious freedom," said Mr. Bush. "We have different values, yet common interests in the world. We agree on the importance of trade and we want to increase prosperity for our citizens.

"Both the United States and China must make a determined choice to have productive relations, to have a productive relationship that will contribute to a more secure, more prosperous and more peaceful world."

Mr. Bush spoke to leaders of several other countries to put pressure on China, including the leaders of France, Brazil, Britain and Canada, a U.S. official said.

Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who met this week with Chinese President Jiang Zemin during his Latin American tour, received a handwritten thank-you note yesterday from Mr. Bush, which the Brazilian government made public.

Mr. Bush asked aides if he should call Mr. Jiang, but the consensus was no. Miss Rice told the president he could "only play that card once," the U.S. official said.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.

-------

Choicepoint serves up your personal info to the FBI

Fri, 13 Apr 2001
From: Ben Masel <bmasel@tds.net>

Declan McCullagh wrote:
Some background about Choicepoint and its close ties with law enforcement:

http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story/content/chronicle/ae/books/01/04/01/tapperch1.html http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/27470.htm

http://www.sptimes.com/News/031401/Columns/Privacy_group_gives_T.shtml http://www.choicepoint.net/news/wallstreet.htm http://www.choicepoint.net/news/mostadmired.htm

The Wall Street Journal article (no registration required): http://www.msnbc.com/news/558876.asp

www.cpfbi.com -> choicepoint for the fbi
They provide a pages of links for free resources for anyone to use.

FYI. I think that everyone should ask for their ChoicePoint/FBI record.

Today's Wall Street Journal article

FBI's Reliance on the Private Sector Has Raised Some Privacy Concerns
GLENN R. SIMPSON
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB987107477135398077.htm

I also have a question about ChoicePoint. According to Network Solutions, ChoicePoint owns the following domain names:

cpdea.com, cpins.com, cphud.com, cpgov.com, and cpirs.com

Can you tell me what is the purpose of these Web sites?
Thanks, Richard M. Smith CTO, Privacy Foundation http://www.privacyfoundation.org

-------- terrorism

Judge in Terror Case Tells Court: Simplify

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13TERR.html

Alluding to Thoreau's admonition to simplify, a federal judge in Manhattan said yesterday that the government should consider paring down the mammoth indictment in the embassy bombings trial.

"I really wonder," said Judge Leonard B. Sand, "whether this is not the time for the government to simplify the burden on the jury by abandoning some of these counts."

The judge's comments came in an afternoon session in Federal District Court in Manhattan to prepare for the final phases in the trial of four men accused of conspiring to bomb American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. The defense is scheduled to begin its presentation Monday.

In court yesterday, Judge Sand agreed to dismiss certain charges linking two defendants accused of conspiring in the Nairobi attack to the nearly simultaneous bombing of the embassy in Dar es Salaam, but the judge refused to dismiss other charges, and the result at the end of the day was no change in the potential penalties: two defendants still face life in prison and two others the death penalty if they are convicted.

In calling for the government to reduce the size of the case - there are more than 300 counts against the defendants - Judge Sand said he had been inspired by the 19th-century writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau while driving last weekend. "I was behind a car that had a bumper sticker on it," Judge Sand said, "which had a quote from Thoreau on it, and it said, `Simplify.'"

---

In Peru Trial, Ex-Associate Contradicts New Yorker

New York Times
April 13, 2001
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/world/13PERU.html

LIMA, Peru, April 12 - If they were once lovers, they are not saying. But the destinies of Lori Berenson and Pacifico Castrellón were very much entwined this week in the terrorism trial that will decide Ms. Berenson's fate.

Seven years ago, as a former M.I.T. student with a passion for radical politics, Ms. Berenson met Mr. Castrellón, a middle-aged Panamanian painter and architect, in Panama City. They traveled together to Ecuador and then to Peru, sharing hotel rooms along the way.

Finally, in Lima, they rented a large house eventually used as a terrorist base for a plot by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to take the entire Congress hostage. When Peru's police discovered the conspiracy, the two were arrested. After a gun battle at the house that left two guerrillas and a policeman dead, they were sent to jail for long prison terms.

This week Ms. Berenson, a 31- year-old New Yorker, and Mr. Castrellón, now 54, met again in a jailhouse courtroom, with him the principal prosecution witness against her in a retrial that could sentence her to 20 years as a terrorist collaborator. Given a life sentence in 1996 by a secret military court that did not allow her lawyer to cross-examine witnesses, she was granted a new trial late last year, after years of pressure from the United States.

During most of Mr. Castrellón's first two days of testimony, Ms. Berenson sat calmly, almost expressionless, as he spoke into a microphone some 10 feet away.

While she has testified that they shared the rent for the house, he said their rent, food and a shared car were paid for by the terrorists.

As Ms. Berenson tells it, she and Mr. Castrellón met and decided to travel together while she was a tourist in Panama.

Mr. Castrellón says he was down on his luck and unemployed when a Panamanian leftist activist told him about some people who wanted to meet him and offer him work for a "socioeconomic study."

He says he then met Ms. Berenson, who traveled with him to Quito, Ecuador, and introduced him to a man who called himself Carlos but was actually Néstor Cerpa Cartolini, the top Túpac Amaru military commander.

Mr. Castrellón, who hopes that his own future retrial will reduce his sentence, painted a picture of Ms. Berenson as a go-between for Mr. Cerpa. He also says he was suspicious about the presence of 18 men who occupied the fourth floor of the rented Lima house with Ms. Berenson's consent. She says she did not know that the people living one floor above her bedroom were terrorists.

The only consequential interchange between Ms. Berenson and Mr. Castrellón was an exchange of smiles when he told the prosecutor and three judges that he found nothing unusual in having shared hotel rooms with her even though they were not lovers. He described their relationship as one of "friendship and work," although he later said it cooled around the time he moved from his fourth-floor bedroom to a tiny room beside the garage.

José Sandoval, Ms. Berenson's lawyer, disputed Mr. Castrellón's account, saying, "He is seeking to free himself of all responsibility."

In her testimony, Ms. Berenson said she had never known the real names of the terrorists, or that the woman she hired as a photographer was really married to Mr. Cerpa. Ms. Berenson says she repeatedly went to Congress to do interviews for two magazines, but the prosecution says she was using her press credentials as a cover to case the building.

Investigators say they have a drawing of the congressional seating arrangement scrawled by Ms. Berenson, but she disputes its authenticity.

Mr. Castrellón, who spends much of his time in prison painting and is to continue testifying next week, is expected to repeat an allegation he made to the police five years ago that Ms. Berenson served food to the rebels on the fourth floor, where she says she did not venture.

Many parts of Mr. Castrellón's story appear vulnerable to cross-examination.

He describes himself as an innocent man duped by the terrorists, never active in politics and unaware of the plot to attack Congress.

Yet the rebels rented him a separate apartment, where he drew detailed street maps of the area around the Congress and began building a cardboard model of the Congress building.

Mr. Castrellón says he eventually discovered he was among guerrillas but feared retribution against his family if he fled.

"I don't believe he was fooled," said Mr. Sandoval. "Castrellón is lying in many ways."

-------- activists

BRIEF REPORT ON GOOD FRIDAY ACTION AT LIVERMORE LAB - 62 ARRESTS

Fri, 13 Apr 2001
From: Jackie Cabasso <wslf@earthlink.net>

Early this morning approximately 150 nonviolent demonstrators assembled near the main gate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the 20th annual Good Friday worship service and nonviolent direct action.

Following the ecumenical service, featuring a sermon by Sr. Stella Goodpaster, the participants processed to one of the Lab's auxiliary entrances, stopping along the way to observe the "Stations of the Cross," appropriately themed to reflect the current dangers of nuclear weapons.

The demonstrators were met at the Lab gate by rows of uniformed Alameda County Sheriff's Department officers and University of California police (the University of California manages the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs for the Department of Energy).

While the demonstrators quietly sang songs of peace, several of them conducted a "die-in" at the gate.

After police warnings to leave the road, a total of 62 people (unofficial count) were peacefully arrested, many of them kneeling in prayer. They were briefly taken into custody a the Lab, issued citations and released.

The Good Friday demonstration was sponsored by the Ecumenical Peace Institute/CALC and the Livermore Conversion Project.

--------

Mass nonviolent action since Seattle

From: "Lyn Adamson" <ladamson@idirect.com
Fri, 13 Apr 2001

First arrested in a civil rights campaign, George Lakey co-authored a basic handbook for the civil rights movement, A Manual for Direct Action, and then five other books on social change including Strategy for a Living Revolution. In over forty years of activism he has led workshops for London anarchists, New York Act Up, West Virginia coal miners, Mohawks in Canada, African National Congress in Johannesburg, lesbians and gays in Russia, revolutionary student soldiers in a guerrilla encampment inside Burma, and many other movements and groups

MASS ACTION SINCE SEATTLE:
7 Ways to Make our Protests More Powerful

By George Lakey
Training for Change, Philadelphia
www.TrainingforChange.org

Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles: each of them experiments in mass direct action for justice and environmental sanity. Each has drawn thousands of committed people who care deeply about a better world, for their own back yard and for the planet. Each has involved risk, pain, and suffering, as well as moments of profound connection, creativity, and community. Historians will mark 1999-2000 as a time when the river of change ran more quickly.

Each city's action has also invited controversy and debate about tactics and strategy. In the "morning after" period in which people lick their wounds and organize legal defense against continued state repression, it's easy for resentments to flare and defensiveness to flourish. The challenge is: how to be honest about differences of views, how to allow the authentic debates to happen, and still not lose ourselves in divisiveness?

However much we may need to disagree as we dialogue about our future, two points of unity stand out for most activists:

<> the System needs major change, and compared with those who consciously fight us to preserve the unjust status quo, we activists objectively are allies of each other;

<> we will all benefit from a rapid learning curve in which we learn the most possible from each round of struggle and stay flexible and ready to give up what doesn't seem to be working.

In that spirit, I write about some ways to sharpen future mass direct action scenarios. We can fully appreciate the hard work and sacrifice that has gone into each of these recent experiments (and others, such as Windsor, Eugene, Minneapolis) and still act on our freedom to make different choices for next time as we learn more about how to make social change in the twenty-first century. And even though this paper is about the future and uses some of this year's examples, I'll also weave in direct action examples from the past in order to honor our ancestors and to reduce the near-sightedness that comes from only knowing about the activist culture immediately around us.

1. Create more "dilemma demonstrations."

This form of direct action puts the power holders in a dilemma: if they allow us to go ahead and do what we intend to do, we accomplish something worthwhile related to our issue. If they repress us, they put themselves in a bad light, and the public is educated about our message.

Many examples can inspire our creativity. Most readers will know that some campaigns to save old-growth trees have set up these dilemmas. If, for example, the protesters are allowed to sit in the trees, the trees are saved. If the protesters are stopped violently, the public is educated and new allies can be won.

During the 1992 power holder celebration of the anniversary of the Columbus horror, an informal group of us decided to take advantage of a visit of replica ships Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. We paddled canoes into the middle of the harbor crowded with sailboats and media and raised our banners against racism and slavery. Police boats pursued us immediately, which turned the attention of the crowd to the drama of watery arrests of us and our signs. The corporate media coverage turned out to be centrally about our message rather than reverence for Columbus. For the power holders, whether to arrest was a dilemma: if they let us protest, we spoiled the party, but arresting us got the message out to even more people!

African American students in the South were very creative with such tactics, for example sitting at the lunch counter asking for coffee. If they were served, racism took a hit. If they were either attacked by civilians or arrested, racism also took a hit. The sit-inners didn't even need the signs they brought in order to make their point. The power holders were repeatedly put in a dilemma: whatever they did resulted in lost ground for the status quo.

I wouldn't say that it is always easy to create such tactics, and there are times when stopping traffic may be the best we can think of. The difference, however, is very clear if we take the point of view of the bystander or the television camera. When the police drag away protesters who are blocking a city intersection, what is the message of the protesters? The World Bank has policies that hurt people? Maybe, if the bystander or television viewer is willing to make several logical steps or leaps of imagination. There's no reason to expect that bystanders and TV viewers will work hard to make those connections, especially when the excitement is in the physical conflict itself between arresting officers and activists.

One way to spur our creativity, so more of our tactics actually put the power holders in a dilemma, is to picture to ourselves what the actual point of confrontation will look like to curious bystanders who are not already on our side. The scenarios we then develop will have more power and clarity of message.

One place to look for dilemma demonstration ideas is the community work that activists are already doing. Community gardens, for example, might be planted in places which need reclaiming. In the midst of the Seattle action some activists did guerrilla gardening in the median strips of downtown streets and avenues along the wharf.

2. Decide specifically whom we're trying to influence

Using a term like "the public" is too simple a way to think about strategy (even though I just referred to the public in the previous section). "The public" includes many subgroups, some of whom are very important to the success of a campaign, some less important, and some not important at all. If we create a map of the political territory and decide who we most need to influence in what ways, we will create tactics that more frequently have the force that's needed.

For example, a small group in the Movement for a New Society once threw a monkey wrench into a U.S. foreign policy objective by correctly figuring out who to influence through direct action. The U.S. was supporting, as it often does, a military dictatorship that was killing thousands of people. In fact, in Pakistani dictator Yayah Khan was killing hundreds of thousands of people in East Bengal who wanted independence. The U.S. government lied about its support, but the activists learned that Pakistani ships were on their way to U.S. ports to pick up military supplies for the continuing massacre. The group also realized that if longshoremen refused to load the ships, the U.S. government would be foiled.

The problem was, the East Coast longshoremen were, if anything, politically inclined to support the government, and wanted to feed their families. The activists repeatedly tried to persuade the longshoremen to act in solidarity with the East Bengalis, without success. It was time for direct action. The group announced a blockade of the port which was expecting the next Pakistani freighter, and began practicing "naval maneuvers" with sailboats, rowboats and the rest of its motley fleet. The media gave ongoing coverage, and longshoremen witnessed on television as well as in person the strange antics of protesters who seemed to believe they could stop a big freighter with tiny boats. The tactic raised the longshoremen's motivation to listen and discuss, and they agreed that, if the activists created a picket line, the longshoremen would refuse to cross it!

When the campaign succeeded in that city, the activists took it to other port cities and finally the International Longshoremen's union agreed workers would not load Pakistan-bound weapons anywhere in the U.S.! The blockade, initiated by a small group, succeeded because the group crafted direct action tactics specifically geared toward the part of the public that most needed to be influenced. (1)

As we design campaigns focused on the World Trade Organization or capital punishment or the sex trade we need to create a political/cultural/economic map of "the public" and decide who we want to influence in what ways. Part of our power is in fact through making such choices.

3. Use campaigns more often, to become proactive rather than reactive.

Sometimes a strong reaction to a move of the power holders can be very powerful, as it was in Seattle. By mobilizing around the WTO meeting and disrupting it, tremendous gains were made. The negative side of globalization was put on the public agenda for the first time, something which all the organizing against the North American Free Trade Agreement failed to do. New ongoing alliances became tantalizing possibilities. The very unleashing of rebel energy itself was positive.

Occasionally reacting is one thing; staying in a posture of reaction is something else. A good word for continuous reaction is "disempowerment." Mohandas K. Gandhi's first principle of strategy was to stay on the offensive. Having our action agenda dictated by where and when the power holders want to have their meetings is not staying on the offensive.

Campaigns put us on the offensive. A campaign is a focused mobilization of energy with a clear objective, over a time period that can realistically be sustained by our constituency. Often the objective is in the form of a demand which a targeted entity can make a decision about.

The United Students Against Sweatshops movement mostly works through campaigns, which is one reason why it is meeting with success. When these students choose their objective and identify the power holder whose position needs to change, a lot else starts to become clear. Who is going to oppose them most strongly? And who are their greatest potential allies? In the early part of the campaign they can open communication with the allies and have them already half on board by the time the campaigners start direct action.

This is not a new idea. The victories of the civil rights movement that are now part of our activist lore were won through campaigns -- the Montgomery bus boycott, for example, or the Birmingham struggle of 1963 in which a major industrial city was dislocated in order to force the federal government to pass an equal accommodations bill. (2)

Running a campaign is like taking a magnifying glass and holding it between the sun and a piece of paper. By focusing the energy of the sun, the glass ignites the paper. Successful campaigns focus on their target over time -- nine months, two years, even more if they have the people resources -- with a specific demand that seems achievable.

One of the biggest victories of 1980s U.S. grassroots campaign organizing has been kept a secret from most younger activists. In fact, the collusion of the media and the schooling system has been so successful that I've rarely met a young activist in the current movement who knows about the successful fight against nuclear power in this country.

The anti-nuclear struggle of grassroots groups was against an amazing array of power: the federal government (both civilian and military), the banks which were making major profits from loans to utilities, the utilities themselves, the huge companies like General Electric and Westinghouse which

made the nuclear plants, the construction companies, and the building trades unions. The struggle was also against "conventional wisdom in the U.S.," which believed, in the beginning of the '70s, that nuclear energy was safe and cheap.

Grassroots activists beat the combined power holders! There's not room here to describe the struggle, which often used mass direct action in brilliant ways to stop U.S. utilities from ordering any new nuclear power plants by the late '70s. The grassroots groups used a variety of tactics, from testifying at official hearings to civil disobedience. A favorite tactic was mass occupation of the site where the plant was to be built. The movement remained decentralized, yet each local area expanded through designing and implementing campaigns. (3)

4. Shift our understanding of the role of mass media

The mass media have certain patterns of behavior which are fairly predictable, and our movement needs to learn to use those patterns to our advantage.

We need to understand that the mass media have always reflected the biases of their owners. This is not a new phenomenon. The white-owned media have historically been biased against people of color, straight-owned media against sexual minorities, and so on. I find it difficult for many middle class activists to empathize with working class people and their unions -- why? Middle class activists have been conditioned by the systematic bias of media owned by the wealthy.

We free up our creative energy when we simply acknowledge that these biases exist, rather than go into righteous indignation every time we read or see a new piece that puts us in an unfavorable light. Once we acknowledge the reality, we can decide: for the next campaign we design, do we need favorable media coverage, or not?

If we don't need it because, for example, the group we want to influence through direct action can get our message in other ways, then we can save ourselves some aggravation. We may be able to rely on the independent media, on the Internet -- even on street speaking and mass leafleting. It depends on who we need to reach. The Chinese students during their pro-democracy uprising in 1989 were facing a totally controlled mass media, so they used word-of-mouth and middle-of-the-night posterings and supplemented with faxes!

If we do need some positive media coverage, we can learn how to get it. There's a whole art to this and some allied media professionals willing to lead workshops on it, but I'll state a few principles here.

<> Media usually show what is most dramatic. If a thousand people sit in lockdown and three people smash a window, the campaign will be presented as smashing windows. Organizers need to handle that reality; avoidance of that reality just leads to confusion and demoralization in the movement. (More on this later.)

<> Liberal media pundits, who might be expected to be "on our side," usually start out confused. Early liberal commentators on the civil rights movement were often full of advice on how nonviolent action was a bad idea and sweet reason would be better. The first women to picket the White House for the right to vote were criticized harshly by liberals in the media. Let's face it. To many people of goodwill, an uproar is upsetting. A ruckus is confusing. Most middle and upper class people dislike conflict, however liberal or even radical their political views. If they are media commentators, they will find fault with our direct action.

<> Mass media generally prefer to ignore direct action if they can. The struggle against the School of the Americas, for example, has often found its increasingly large direct actions to be all but ignored. Media will sometimes make exceptions if the action is particularly novel, creative, or includes humor. For example, the campaign against military aid to Pakistan got television coverage in Philadelphia 27 days out of 30, because the organizers found creative and photogenic ways of dramatizing the blockade, and there was such a strong local tie-in. There was also a narrative in the anti-weapons campaign, a story with build-up of suspense. Media have a harder time resisting a campaign with a story-line and an unpredictable "ending." This is another limitation of organizing events rather than campaigns.

Many of us who saw "Millionaires for Bush (or Gore)" at the conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles may not know about their stunt during candidate Forbes' presidential primary race in New England. The group (affiliated with United for a Fair Economy) went to the 1999 kick-off Forbes news conference in "Republican drag," which included dark suits and conservative ties for the men. At the point in the news conference when the reporters were most bored, the group suddenly unleashed their signs "Millionaires for Forbes" and cheered Forbes in the name of greed. The media coverage was a victory for the movement and embarrassing for the electoral charade.

<> Just because a creative tactic got media attention once doesn't mean it will get it again. Media editors often find it easy to ignore whatever has been done before. In September, 2000, at Carleton College in Minnesota demonstrators realized this truth and switched tactics. Charleton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, came to speak on behalf of a Senator, and the protesters decided not to block the entrance to the hall or rally outside and chant. Instead, about half the students in the audience wore black and, when the half of the audience gave Heston a standing ovation, the protesters sat impassively in their chairs. The public radio report of the event was unusually detailed and vivid.

This tactic may work again and again, but to increase our likelihood of coverage in a tough media environment, it pays to go to our creativity and invent new tactics. Creativity is one of the biggest strengths of our movement -- let's use it!

<> Because the reporting side of mass media often ignores or downplays, and the liberal pundits usually start out confused and critical, a movement that needs the media needs to use sustained campaigns rather than episodic uproars. The organizers in Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference practically had this down to a science: they could predict how many days of a campaign before coverage would appear in local papers, how many weeks until regional papers started covering, how many weeks until national media paid attention, and how long until the liberal columnists changed their minds and saw merit in the protests. These campaigns were often successful in achieving concrete victories, with media coverage as one ingredient of their success. People of color, working against white-owned media bias, successfully used the media as a resource in their struggle. Readers who have seriously explored the power of racism have an idea what an amazing feat that was!

Today's activists can learn how to do that when we need corporate mass media for achieving our campaign objectives.

5. Heighten the contrast between protesters and police behavior

One of the great things about our movement is that it understands the importance of drama in the social change process. The confrontations of Seattle and since assume what every playwright knows: the heart of drama is conflict.

I'm not wanting to downplay the value of other kinds of social change work: day-in, day-out educational outreach, culture work, developing alternatives that show better, more community-centered ways of functioning, and so on. In my study of societies where social movements pulled off progressive change, though, nearly all of them required at some point major confrontations. Drama does what nothing else can do: it arouses the attention of otherwise occupied parts of the citizenry, it educates them on a gut level, it motivates them to find ways of acting that make sense in their terms, and it even attracts many of them into the movement itself. (4)

Drama in the streets is, however, different from an off-Broadway play. A sophisticated theater audience might prefer characters to be multifaceted, without a clearly-defined "good guy" and "bad guy." The social change drama of the streets cannot be so subtle: it really does come down to "the goodies" vs. "the baddies" -- in our case, those who stand with oppressed people vs. those who stand with greed, privilege, and domination.

Of course political radicals already know who are on the right side in this play, but when we plan we can forget that most people don't make our assumptions! The moderate audience in the mainstream watching the drama in the streets is surprisingly open-minded about who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Maybe the goodies will turn out to be the protesters, and then again, maybe the police will be. Since drama motivates, some in the audience are curious to see who will turn out to be who.

The protests at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia provide a clear example of this. Some widely-publicized police violence prior to the convention damaged the police image. Those of us organizing the Convergence training in the week just before the Convention did effective media outreach, receiving highly favorable publicity. The result was, going into the Convention, that the burden of proof was on the police to re-establish their credentials as responsible and controlled, and the protesters occupied the moral high ground. A succession of three clearly peaceable marches in three days sustained this, even though the marchers on the third day had been promised arrest. The group organizing that third march, the Kensington Welfare Rights Organization, also took care not to be politically isolated, so that their civil disobedience would bring allies out in support. The police felt they had to back off the arrest threat on the third day, lest they confirm their image as "the baddies."

The second phase of the Convention actions, beginning August 1, reversed roles. The police did not have to be lambs; in the context of public fears and expectations, they only needed to show restraint, flexibility, and control. This they did, avoiding tear gas, major pepper spray, rubber bullets, charges with or without horses. Protesters were caught without a style that would put them in stark contrast with the public behavior of the police. The protesters looked . . . well . . . disruptive. (Which we'd said over and over was our goal!) And the police were helping the public by getting traffic moving again. The police chief, who had on national television been on the defensive, became a folk hero. The Philly mainstream could breathe a sigh of relief that "our hometown police are much better than those brutal, out-of-control Seattle police, and where did these protesters come from, anyway?"

The great lesson to be learned here is that the drama of the streets cannot carry a complex analysis that requires long dissection and persuasion. The drama in street confrontations needs the simplicity of contrast between the protesters' behavior and that of the police.

The symbols used to heighten contrast depend on the situation. Black student sit-inners wore dresses and coats and ties, and remained calmly seated at the counters while hysterical white racists hit them. Gandhi designed a raid on a salt works in which demonstrators calmly walked across the boundary where they were beaten down by soldiers. (5) Vietnamese monks sat in meditative positions in the streets of Hue, in front of tanks, to help bring down the dictatorship in 1963. Philippine participants in "people power" mass action overthrew a government partly with flower necklaces for the dictator's soldiers.

Again, our power lies in our choices. We can choose to design our confrontations using appropriate symbology so that the part of the public we most want to influence will see us as the people standing up for justice. It's our choice.

The Republican National Convention in Philadelphia again shows how much we need to learn about this dimension of direct action. The reaction of the membership of a largely-African American activist group of poor and working class people to the direct action was significant. These Philadelphians use civil disobedience themselves, and are experienced in tactics of blockade and occupation, they also have their own experience with media distortion and police brutality. Nevertheless, the members felt no empathy or solidarity with the Convention disruption. The Convention direct actionists didn't set up the contrast between ourselves and the police to be clear and dramatic. Chanting "police state" is utterly unconvincing to bystanders who see with their own eyes an unusual degree of police restraint, especially if the bystanders know personally how bad brutality can get.

Police are sometimes sophisticated enough to be quite intentional in reducing the contrast. The Albany, Georgia, police chief defeated the African American 1962 civil rights campaign led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Martin Luther King by carefully restraining his police and reducing the contrast. He astutely used his police to prevent Ku Klux Klan and other forces from beating up demonstrators, again to hinder black people from gaining the moral high ground. Dr. King applied the learning from this lesson in the following year's Birmingham, Alabama, campaign, and SNCC's most dramatic use of this lesson was in 1964 in Mississippi.

The police strategy of lessening the contrast between their behavior and ours is one more challenge to our creativity. The British Empire tried a similar strategy during the mass direct action campaign in India called the Salt Satyagraha. Tired of beating and jailing demonstrators, they massed their police in the road in front of the marchers and did a nonviolent sit-down blockade! The marchers stopped and a stalemate ensued. After hours of uncertainty, night fell and allies of the marchers went off in search of food and blankets. When they returned, the marchers took the food and blankets and passed them over to the police. This proved too much for the police, who abandoned the street, and the marchers proceeded to a midnight victory celebration. It was another example of Gandhi's emphasis on staying on the offensive; when confronted with nonviolent resistance, the marchers escalated their nonviolence! (6)

6. Take a powerful attitude toward the prospect of state repression.

Obviously, the purpose of repression is to induce fear, so people will give up fighting injustice. The power holders have a range of tactics up their sleeves: one example is setting a million dollar bail on Philadelphia protesters charged only with misdemeanors. Power holders are counting on the feeling inside us -- our fear -- to change our behavior so as to make us less effective.

That's why one of the most fundamental choices any social movement makes is what kind of attitude to have toward repression. (7) It's natural for us to fear punishment, deprivation of liberty, losing our jobs -- we're only human, after all. It is so natural to be fearful in the face of repression that we may not know movements make choices about how to the threats of the state. In the workshops for the Republican Convention protests, many participants didn't know that there was a choice. They believed that all movements have the same attitude toward repression, which is far from true. Some movements see power holders inviting them to play what I call "the Fear Game:" authorities punish and threaten so that activists will respond fearfully. These movements choose a different strategy.

For example, during the Montgomery bus boycott the power holders decided to play the Fear Game by leaking the word that they had a list of black leaders who were going to be arrested. The leaders decided to take a powerful, proactive attitude; they went to City Hall as a group and demanded to be arrested at once. They carefully expanded their numbers so that, more than likely, some individuals would not be on the list and could indignantly demand to be arrested rather than be insulted by not being considered a leader. More recently labor unions in Decatur, Illinois, made a similar move: hundreds of workers filled City Hall and refused to leave until the intended arrests were actually made.

Consider the difficulty this puts the power holders in. If the people refuse to fear them, the power holders have lost one of their most powerful weapons! Another example comes from Poland, where after many years of Communist dictatorship a radical group of workers and intellectuals decided to depart from their activist tradition and create an open, above-ground organization for human rights. The move was a breakthrough which supported the growth of the mass Solidarity movement, resulting by the end of the '80s in the nonviolent overthrow of the dictatorship. (8)

The choice to adopt a discipline of secrecy in which activists work may at some times and places be useful, but it is a choice that needs careful thought, especially when we consider that it is often not necessary even in full-blown police states. In the US., playing the Fear Game seems to be hurting the movement.

One consequence is the withholding of trust. To win, movements need to expand. To expand, activists need to trust -- themselves, each other, and people they reach out to. Think of the last time someone succeeded in persuading you to act. Did you pick up a vibe that they didn't trust you? You probably picked up the opposite energy, that of optimism and confidence that, once you got the information, you'd want to participate.

A major dynamic I've personally seen in our movement is trustlessness. The Fear Game operates in worries about who might be an agent, who might betray us, who cannot be relied on. People don't tell their names, censor their interaction, hold back. The wariness is toxic because activists feed each other's fear. I've seen a black man who was on his way out of the movement in disgust because of what he perceived as white racism; the hostile vibe he perceived might instead have been because "He might be an agent!" This example shows how secrecy complicates movement life. White racism does of course exist where white activists gather, because we have been socialized by a racist culture. When white activists put up other barriers to entry into the movement, like fear of strangers, the barriers can easily be perceived as racism (which is also connected with fear of strangers!).

Even within the boundary of color, trustlessness reduces the movement's growth. A woman of color cried as she told me about the refusal of a meeting of people of color to proceed until each new person, including her, had been vouched for by two others -- an institutionalization of trustlessness. When trustlessness is institutionalized, a movement is very easy to contain because it can't recruit outside the circles of those who define themselves as victims. Since many talented and effective people don't find it useful to define themselves as victims, they are unlikely to stuff themselves into the confining circles of conspirators however radical their views.

The Fear Game also reduces the ability of direct actionists to develop and sustain alliances. Successful direct action movements develop an ability to attract allies. The role of ally is different from the role of campaigner. The job of campaigners is to take the initiative, to get the ball rolling; the job of allies is to come in and help push once it's rolling. In the U.S. we find a lot of activists who simultaneously are campaigning on one issue and are allies to other campaigns around other issues. This flexibility works well.

Because the Fear Game generates trustlessness, protesters have a hard time trusting allies, even less than they can trust each other. They sometimes enter the confrontation stage politically isolated, having failed to reach out and open up the communication channels with people busy on other projects. Where all this comes crashing down is at the moment of state repression, which is when allies are often most needed and also when there is most confusion in the air. That's when activists, who refuse to trust the allies, say to the allies: "Trust us and do X, Y, and Z!" Then the protesters become disappointed and even furious when the allies don't immediately come to attention and salute!

If playing the Fear Game initiated by the state reduces the internal morale of the movement, reduces its growth potential, and hurts relationships with allies, what's the point of the secrecy and stealth? For one thing, it makes possible certain direct action tactics that rely on surprise. We may be reluctant to give up those tactics. I also enjoy the emotions that go with plotting and scheming, and I may not be alone on that! Another reason why secrecy and stealth may appear in our movement is that they strengthen the boundary between Insider and Outsider. (9)

Unfortunately, the security agencies also know the negative impact of secrecy on the movement, and work it to their own advantage. (10) They start out with abundant resources to put into spies and electronic surveillance, and the more covert we are, the more resources they can demand (thereby increasing the already obscene size of the security state). Not only is it an advantage to them in terms of increasing the power and affluence of their apparatus, but it also justifies their putting more people in our ranks, who help make decisions and sometimes exercise leadership. And the more aware we are of this, the more scared we become and the less we can trust each other, which is wonderful from their point of view. The basic reason they like the Fear Game so much is that they know they are sure to win it.

Fortunately, we can make other choices. We can draw inspiration from the choice of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963-64 to organize openly in Mississippi, perhaps the most violently racist state in the U.S. at the time. The largely-black SNCC workers dealt with men who were police by day and KKK by night; SNCC often lived in Freedom Houses that were unprotected in the countryside; they had no guns and everyone knew it; the federal agents refused to protect them; the Mississippi media were against them as were most clergy. SNCC knew they would be hurt, jailed, tortured, and some would die; they were not naive in choosing their attitude toward repression.

At the very beginning of 1964 Freedom Summer, three SNCC workers were murdered -- James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman -- to scare away others who had volunteered. SNCC refused to go underground; they had a better strategy. SNCC's choice expanded the movement dramatically both in Mississippi and nationally, won powerful allies, and broke the political stranglehold of racism in that state. I would challenge anyone in today's movement to study SNCC's attitude toward repression in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 and then explain why our movement should play the Fear Game. The more powerful choice is openness.

7. Fully commit to strategic nonviolent action explicitly.

The vast majority of protesters in this current wave of mass direct action want to be nonviolent and see no reason to do anything else. The dilemma facing the designers of a campaign is: do we fully commit and be explicit about that, or do we soft-pedal the nonviolence? Choosing for a campaign is more important than for these short actions we've seen in Seattle, etc., because the stakes are greater in the course of a campaign of months or years. Before his Chicago campaign, for example, Dr. King and his organizers spent months negotiating with forces in the community to get agreement on nonviolence. King's organizer who was liaison to the gangs was personally beaten up many times by gang members to test his fidelity to nonviolence before they would seriously discuss and finally make an agreement.

It is tempting not to take a stand on nonviolence. There may be moralistic pacifists around, mired in the past and more interested in preaching than acting; their obnoxiousness encourages organizers to just want to move on to the next agenda item.

Some white activists hesitate to take a stand on nonviolence because they mistakenly believe that "it's a white thing." That would be a big surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people of color in the U.S. who have used nonviolent direct action in campaigns for over a century. (In 1876 in St. Louis African Americans were doing freedom rides against discrimination on trolley cars, to take one of thousands of examples.) Not to mention the role of nonviolence in the anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. When we think of nonviolence, why do the names of Gandhi, King, Cesar Chavez, so easily leap to mind? They are only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, a far, far higher proportion of people of color have engaged in nonviolent action in the U.S. than have white people, and continue to do so year in and year out.

The mass media and social studies courses haven't given us this information? What else is new? Only the study of social movements will return our heritage to us. (I won't even start with the myth that nonviolent action is inherently middle class -- that's even more off base than the myth that it's white.)

It may help to remember that this discussion is not about pacifism, but about strategic nonviolent action. Many pacifists don't do direct action because they want to avoid conflict, and most people who do nonviolent action aren't pacifists. So the question is not on a philosophical level but on a strategic level: what makes sense for making change? (11)

Some activists may fear that taking a stand could alienate some friends of ours who are radical and brave. And what about tolerance -- who are we to lay down the law? Isn't the movement to proceed by consensus, and there isn't consensus on this issue!

Alienating our more militant friends is a tough issue, but dialogue would help. I've heard the Black Bloc, for example, referred to by protesters as if it is a rigid monolith which will always believe the same thing and must be deferred to. Another possibility is that Black Bloc wants as much as anyone to be more effective, can evaluate what's working and what isn't, and has internal diversity of opinion. (12) The approach in the African American community during the civil rights movement was useful. When a mass direct action campaign was being organized in a Southern city and consensus wasn't reached about strategy and tactics, people agreed to disagree, and respected each other's right to conduct their own operation. During the recent Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, an agreement like that was worked out for a planned action.

Everyone "doing their own thing" in a mass action doesn't work because it's self-contradictory. If those who organize the action base it on strategic nonviolent action, they aren't being allowed to "do their thing" if others come in and do violence or even property destruction. The advocates of violence or property destruction are, when it comes down to it, being intolerant by not letting their comrades carry out their intentions. The only way that tolerance can work is by mutual understanding that different strategies will be used at different times or in different places -- sufficiently different so that the police cannot use one kind of action as an excuse to bash the other kind.

Tactical disagreement is another diversity challenge that faces our movement. If some of our more militant friends aren't willing to "agree to disagree" but instead do confrontive tactics that endanger others without their consent, then the issue is no longer about strategy and tactics, it is about respect and needs to be tackled on that level.

Doubt about our legitimacy in setting policy needs to be addressed inside ourselves, first of all. Is it OK for me to take initiative in working for change? Initiative is a kind of leadership. As I take initiative I do set a tone, and my words and actions attract some people and turn off others. I can't actually take initiative without finding that I have some responsibility for consequences. So if I'm willing to empower myself to act for change, then I might as well be mindful of the results of what I do and don't do. If I do (with friends and comrades) create a policy of strategic nonviolence, that has one set of results. If I don't, it has another set of results.

I want to leave aside the question of armed struggle for another time, even though I find it fascinating and sometimes work in situations where it is a very live option. In fact, I've taught social change in the middle of a guerrilla encampment in the jungles of Burma; my students were soldier revolutionaries. The very different situation in the U.S., however, is: "If most of us want to be nonviolent anyway, how can we make the most of it?"

The option to make a fuller and more explicit commitment to nonviolence has several advantages. For one thing, it takes the wind out of the sails of the state, which wants us to be violent and, if we're not willing to do violence ourselves, will pay people to do it in our name. There are too many sad stories of groups that learned this the hard way. In Philadelphia, for example, a group of youthful activists believed itself set up by the police because of its growing effectiveness. The police raided the house where the leaders lived communally; while the activists were being handcuffed in the living room the police "discovered" dynamite in the kitchen. The activists complained later, "We have never advocated violence." But the group had been unwilling to take a credible stand for nonviolence, for reasons similar to those advanced today.

Mississippi police didn't even try to set up SNCC in 1964 because, as SNCC's Mississippi coordinator Robert Moses told me, "We don't have guns in our freedom houses and everyone knows it."

It may be, as some of today's Philadelphia activists believe, that police agents were responsible for the property destruction which handed the moral high ground over to the police during the Republican Convention. Again, the movement was fairly defenseless against this kind of tactic because it could not achieve consensus on a stand against property destruction. As much as we'd like to blame police, in all honesty we have to look at how we helped to set ourselves up.

Leaving the issues of nonviolence and property destruction ambiguous may not matter too much for the kind of event organized in Philadelphia or L.A., where most people fairly quickly return to the rest of their lives. People doing a campaign over time which is working to accomplish an objective, however, may have too much at stake to be wishy-washy about something that could undo all their hard work. (13)

Some activists with a long-term commitment are also attracted to nonviolence as a basic personal/political ethic and way of life. One version of this is called "nonviolent revolution:" a personal politics that loves life enough to struggle and loves liberation too much to dominate or violate others.

The biggest advantage of all to adding depth to our commitment to nonviolence is related to the flexible and decentralized character of the action style which worked so brilliantly in Seattle and replayed again in Washington, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. (14) The flexibility and decentralization can bring added power to mass direct action; it also brings chaos. The new physics teaches us that chaos can accompany system change. Easy for the physicists to say; they are theorists and not personally one of the atomic particles buzzing around! We protesters are the particles; we are the ones in motion and are faced with the challenge of how to stay centered in the midst of chaos.

If we do manage to stay centered, we'll make better choices and stay more loving; when we're disconnected we easily get upset or scared or stuck in attitudes of hostility. An advantage of nonviolent action is that it is easier to stay centered while doing it. (15) Of course we'll still experience a roller coaster: flashes of anger, chills of fear, highs of elation, and other strong emotions. Centeredness is the ability to handle the feelings without becoming attached to them; it's letting them run through us rather than letting them run us.

Doing violence or even the not-violence called property destruction doesn't support being centered. We need ways of participating in chaos with eyes wide open, fully aware, feet on the ground, creativity pulsing, and ready to connect.

There are no guarantees: chaos is still chaos. My experience is that going into chaos with a nonviolent commitment increases the chance of being centered, which ultimately benefits everyone.

Conclusion: Solving problems builds the movement

Social movements grow through solving problems. As the movements grow, the problems grow, hopefully along with our capacity to solve them. If we continue to solve the problems that face us we will get to catalyze transformational change, making freedom and justice a possibility for all.

The "new activism" that is expressing itself in the U.S. through mass direct action has, fortunately, some problems to solve. Here I'm suggesting some options that might work: creating dilemma demonstrations instead of relying on "disruption" (although they may sometimes be just as disruptive), making conscious decisions about who in "the public" we're most eager to influence, designing and implementing campaigns rather than simply showing up where the power holders decide, working more realistically with mass media, increasing the contrast between protesters and police behavior, taking the powerful attitude of openness toward state repression, and committing with more depth and explicitness to strategic nonviolent action.

These options focus on direct action itself, and leave out many other questions of strategy and organization, for example, the importance of creating a vision of just alternatives. I look forward to participating in more dialogue on all these questions; we have much to learn from each other.

[October 2000]

HARD COPIES

Available from Training for Change, 4719 Springfield Ave., Philadelphia PA 19143-3514 USA, tel 215-729-7458, e-mail peacelearn@igc.org, web www.TrainingforChange.org

FOOTNOTES

These are the views of George Lakey and not necessarily those of the organization he works with, Training for Change. For this article he draws on the experience of trainers related to TfC, who led workshops in Seattle and Washington, D.C. TfC played a major role in setting up training for the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia. For almost ten years TfC has been providing training services to grassroots groups in the U.S., Canada, Russia, Thailand, Cambodia, South Africa, Burma, and other countries, and has an active, neighborhood-based training program at its center in Philadelphia to which people come from many countries. More information available from Training for Change.

1. This campaign, which has more to teach us about direct action than there's room to go into here, is described blow-by-blow by Richard K. Taylor, Blockade (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977). This campaign in solidarity with Bangladesh happened in 1971-72.

2. One of my favorite books by Martin Luther King, Jr., is Why We Can't Wait, the behind-the scenes story of the Birmingham campaign. The book also includes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." (Book available in various editions.)

3. There are trainers who can lead workshops on campaign design. For more information on the successful anti-nuclear struggle, see Bill Moyer's paper which is a must-read for direct action strategists, "Movement Action Plan," available from the Social Movement Empowerment Project, 721 Shrader, San Francisco, CA 94117. Bill's model has been picked up by a number of movements, for example the whole issue of World Rainforest Report for Sept. 1994 in Australia is devoted to MAP. You'll find a summary in chapter two of Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times, by Berit Lakey, George Lakey, Rod Napier, and Janice Robinson (Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers, 1995).

4. More on this dynamic is in my book, Strategy for a Living Revolution, which was revised as Powerful Peacemaking and published by New Society Publishers in 1986.

5.The historically accurate version in the film Gandhi is worth watching repeatedly.

6. A good source for learning from the master strategist Gandhi is the television documentary A Force More Powerful, which also includes the cases of Danish resistance to German Nazi occupation, Polish resistance to Communist dictatorship, and the Nashville sit-in movement. Available from Public Broadcasting System, which aired the program in September 2000.

7. To read about one choice, called security culture, go to the website: security.tao.ca OR nocompromise.org The article "Security Culture" states its basic assu mption at the beginning: "To minimize the destructiveness of this government harassment, it is imperative that we create a 'security culture' within our movement." Some movements, operating in much more dangerous situations than the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, have found that security culture maximizes rather than minimizes the destructiveness of government harassment.

8. This is one of a long list of dictatorships that have been overthrown by nonviolent "people power," despite the state's using military repression to defend itself. Just in the past few decades mass nonviolent action has played a decisive role in ousting one-party states and dictatorships in: Bolivia, Haiti, Argentina, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, the Baltic States, Mali, Malawi, Madagascar, and Benin, and prevented military-backed coups in Thailand and Russia. See Stephen Zunes, Lester R. Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher (eds.), Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

9. Fortunately we can create many, many tactics that do not rely on surprise. One resource to jump-start our creativity is Gene Sharp's book The Politics of Nonviolent Action, where he describes 198 tactics that have been used historically (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

10. During the movement against the Vietnam War F.B.I. documents included a discussion of the importance of making activists believe there was "an F.B.I. man behind every mailbox." During a spokescouncil meeting preparing for the protests at the Republican National Convention, an activist took a break to call an anarchist house in West Philadelphia and learned from activists there that, when they randomly took their phone off the hook, they heard the spokescouncil meeting!

11. Actually, I believe that a healthy movement includes a lively discussion of pacifism, too, because it represents such a dramatic break from the dominant cultural theme of violence/militarism/sexism/imperialism that we see from playgrounds to movies.

12. An example of Black Bloc interest in dialoguing with the movement is the statement put out by the Bay Area Black Bloc dated October 7, 2000. Their email address: BlackBloc@ziplip.com

13. I don't mean that violence and property destruction are the same discussion. Principled pacifists and nonviolent actionists Daniel and Philip Berrigan are well known for their use of property destruction, for example. And believers in assassination might not consider property destruction valuable.

14. Betsy Raasch-Gilman emphasizes the freshness and innovation of this approach in her paper, "A Trainer's Report on the WTO Protests in Seattle," available from Training for Change. Her paper is also on the Training for Change website: www.TrainingforChange.org

15. Barbara Deming develops this theme and applies it to macro-level change in her important and practical book, Revolution and Equilibrium (NY: Grossman, 1971).

PEACEWORKERS 721 Shrader St. San Francisco, CA 94117 USA Phone and fax 415-751-0302 email PEACEWORKERS@igc.apc.org see our website: www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org

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May Day protests face 'zero tolerance'

Special report: globalisation
Nick Hopkins, crime correspondent
Friday April 13, 2001
The Guardian

Anti-capitalist demonstrators who break the law during the May Day protests will face a "zero tolerance, in your face" approach from police, who are determined to avoid last year's chaotic scenes in Westminster, Scotland Yard said yesterday.

Senior officers estimate that a core of 1,000 demonstrators from all over the country are intending to cause trouble, and that their strategy will involve injuring police officers and damaging up to 200 businesses and banks, with a focus on Oxford Street.

Rather than standing back to see if trouble starts, officers will be briefed to act immediately, police said.

"It will be a more robust approach this year," said Mike Todd, a Metropolitan police assistant commissioner. "We will be very, very positive."

The change of tactics reflects the frustration of Sir John Stevens, the Met commissioner, and the home secretary, Jack Straw, that demonstrators managed to daub graffiti on the Cenotaph, deface a statue of Winston Churchill and dig up the grass in Parliament Square during last year's protests.

After last year's protests Tony Blair declared that such behaviour must never happen again. Sir John is known to have been involved in reformulating the Met's strategy, and has decided to run the risk that a more aggressive approach could lead to claims of stifling peaceful protest and inciting violence.

The civil rights group Liberty said yesterday that an aggressive stance could encourage overreaction from officers.

"We don't have a problem with the police preventing criminality," said a spokesman. "But we would be concerned if zero tolerance in any way curbed the right to peaceful protest. That is a real danger."

A series of demonstrations are planned on Tuesday May 1, entirely separate from the official TUC May Day march.

Police believe that around 5,000 people will come to the capital to take part in unofficial events scheduled to start at 7.30am with a cycle ride to Kings Cross station, culminating in a gathering in Oxford Street at 4pm.

"Our intelligence suggests that this could be the main flashpoint," said Mr Todd. "We don't want to prevent lawful protest. It's a basic right and we police demonstrations all the time. But we are not going to allow people to commit criminal offences.

"There will be a zero tolerance of criminality. If you allow a certain amount of it, then it will escalate. We are going to do all we can to ensure that people working, living and shopping in London are safe. We don't want London closed."

Mr Todd admitted that the ringleaders of last year's trouble had not been caught - even though more than 100 people were arrested - and said it had been difficult to gather intelligence on those planning this year's protests.

A website http://www.maydaymonopoly.net/ and a glossy pamphlet produced to support anti-capitalist action on May 1 invite protesters to play "May Day Monopoly", using the format of the board game to tell people where to go in London. Under headings such as Park Lane, Bond Street and Mayfair, they describe buildings, companies and banks that are legitimate targets for demonstration. It also offers "Don't Go to Jail" advice.

The pamphlet says: "So you want to change the world? Fight the forces of globalising darkness? Not a bad ambition, but you'll need help. Activism, like playing Monopoly or having sex, can be a bit embarrassing if you do it alone. If you are going to play May Day Monopoly, you best do it with people you like and trust. It should be the start of an ongoing career of activism, agitation and generally making a nuisance of yourself."

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The People's Repo!-
First Planning meeting-May 12. please forward.

From: "jenny kirby" <belltoweroverflo@hotmail.com>
Fri, 13 Apr 2001

You are invited to the first planning meeting for:
THE PEOPLE's REPO-
...Taking back our homes, taking back our communities... Days of Action, Action Training and Issue Workshops

The People's Repo is about people taking back what they need. A primary focus of the weekend will be on urban squatting; illustrating the correlation between gentrification, the stockpiles of abandoned buildings in many US cities, and increasing homelessness. Other focus ideas include: land struggles around the world, the role of the WB/IMF and WTO in global corporate control, the growing prison industrial complex, the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, rent strikes, and tenant rights issues.

The People's Repo will take place September 21-24, 2001.

All who wish to organize and plan for the People's Repo are invited to the first planning meeting on Saturday, May 12 at 2:30 pm at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Room A-5 at 9th and G St. NW in Washington, DC. If you need housing for that weekend, or want more information, please contact squat-conf@homesnotjails.org or 202-737-6444 #24.

Also, please email or call if you are interested in sponsoring The People's Repo, sharing skills, presenting workshops and/or organizing in your area for the event.

Starting tomorow, you can download a flyer for this meeting, by visiting: www.homesnotjails.org/dc/materials/peoples-repo-planning.doc

Sponsored by: DC Homes Not Jails www.homesnotjails.org

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Chile arrests school protesters

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/13/01 World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-20014130157.htm

SANTIAGO, Chile - Nearly 100 high school students were arrested yesterday after violent protests, the third in nine days, demanding free access to mass transit.

Some 3,000 teens gathered at a city park and demanded free student passes to use in the city mass-transit system.

The pass, which students seek to obtain for free, currently costs $4.25 (U.S.) and cuts a third off the regular bus fare.

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Walk for peace

The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/13/01
Embassy Row THE WASHINGTON TIMES
James Morrison
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010413-78725180.htm

Peace advocates are hoping to attract diplomatic attention tomorrow when they hold a "Walk for Peace along Embassy Row."

Marchers with the Life Foundation International, which helps counsel victims of international conflict, will begin their walk at 10 a.m. at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi at 2107 Massachusetts Ave. NW and end at the Kay Spiritual Life Center at American University.

Foundation director Anita Goswami will present a peace award to Abdul Aziz Said, founder of the university´s Center for Global Peace, and Gregory Smith, an 11-year-old sophomore at Virginia´s Randolph-Macon College, for his efforts to speak out for peace on behalf of children.

For more information, call 703/771-7330.

c E-mail Embassy Row at jmorrisonwashingtontimes.com, call 202/636-3297 or fax 202-832-7278.

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Call to mobilize solidarity, Cincinnati write-up

Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001
From: Sabrina Gorbett <sgorbett@frognet.net>

(i know this is not a corporate domiance or environmental issue. i am sending this on to you all because of the lack of press - fair or otherwise - coming out about the situation in cincinnati. please take a moment to read this and show your support for a community that is reacting against the systematic oppression of a very racist city.)

THE FOLLOWING IS A WRITE-UP COLLABORATED BY VARIOUS CITIZENS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO. PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE EMAIL, DISTRIBUTE WIDELY(apologies for cross posting), SPREAD THE WORD, SHOW YOUR SOLIDARITY, MOBILIZE!

Since 1995, fourteen black men have been murdered by the Cincinnati Ohio police, four of which have occured since November 2000. One of those four, Roger Ownesbury, was murdered when officers thought he "looked like someone they were looking for." Witnesses reported that the officers handcuffed Roger, picked him up by his arms and slammed his head and neck into the concrete. Reports say that chemical irritants were used, but that he died of asfictiation of unknown causes. On Saturday, April 7th, 2001, another unarmed young black male was added to that total. Around 2 a.m., nineteen year old Timothy Thomas was murdered by Officer Roach of the Cincinnati police.

From the police car video tape, Officer Roach is shown runnning at full speed when he shot and killed Timothy in a dead end ally. Timothy was being chased because the officer recognized him as having fourteen warrents out for his arrest, all of which were misdimeanor traffic infractions(a point that the mainstream media and police fail to address).

Today, April 12th, five days after Timothy's murder, the streets of Cincinnati are still filled with protestors looking for answers and justice.

Over the last three days, a number of businesses have been looted and some set to fire. Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken, the mainstream media, City Council members, as well as many others, see no connection between those in the streets today, and those who were in City Council chambers Monday, the 9th, demanding answers to Saturday's shooting.

After receiving no solutions or answers from city officials, folks have gone to the streets to hit Cincinnati where they will feel it the most -- "the pocketbook." What we have been seeing on the streets is a direct result of the racism that exists in city policies and government. If Cincinnati officials were committed to resolving any of these issues, they would have called for an immediate community forum to address the recent shooting, the ongoing racist policies, and the relations between the police and community.

Instead, Mayor Luken walked out of the city council meeting on Monday, the 9th, and cancelled a city council meeting for Wednesday the 11th.

Mayor Luken did not declare a state of emergency until later Wednesday night when a police officer was shot (but not killed or even wounded). The Mayor then called for the protection of the city streets and the citizens, with the possibility of activating the national guard. The question needs to be asked, for whom is he establishing protection for? There is no coincidence that a state of emergency was not called when Timothy Thomas was shot and killed. The Mayor and other elected city officials have called the current protestors, "thugs and a threat to the safety of Cincinnati's citizens." Once again, the question is, which citizens? Mayor Luken has not described the police department as thugs or a threat to the citizens of Cincinnati. It should not be easy to overlook the fact that the police force has admitted to racial profiling, and many citizens from Cincinnati communities have and continue to testify to numerous accounts of excessive force, violence, aggression, and intimidation used by the police.

So, what to do?

Stop the silence! Spread the word! We need to stand in solidarity for those fighting for justice!

MOBILIZE TO CINCINNATI, THIS SATURDAY, APRIL 14TH!! Various communities have called for solidarity and to protest police violence. The Black United Front in Cincinnati will be holding a rally at Findlay Market in Over the Rhine, Cincinnati at 2pm this Saturday, April 14th--immediately after Timothy Thomas's funeral.

Call voicemall number 614.823.4100 for details. (Check voicemail frequently, please be patient with access to information)

Send $ to the Memorial Fund for Timothy Thomas. All funds will go towards funeral expenses and the rest will go towards Timothy's 3 month old son. Please send to: 5/3 Bank, 705 Central Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45202 Make checks out to 5/3 Bank with the Memo line: Timothy Thomas Memorial Fund

Money is also being accepted to help with bail for the hundred of folks who have been arrested in the past few days. It can be sent to the Drop-Inn Center, 217 W 12th St., Cincinnati, OH 45210 with the Memo Line: Bail Money.

Call Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken and City Hall -- let them know that racist politics, police brutality, and continous social and economic injustice will not be tolerated!! Mayor Charlie Luken: 513.352.3250 City Hall:513.352.5200

FOR UPDATES AND PHOTOS, SEE: CINCINOW: http://www.cincinow.com OHIO VALLEY INDYMEDIA: http://ohiovalleyimc.org CHANNEL CINCINATI: http://www.channelcincinnati.com


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