------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Rutgers Physicists Tackle Plutonium Complexities
Bully (for) Bush
Admirals back civilian sub visits
Rio Tinto urged to rule out Jabiluka development
India readies for launch of high-powered rocket
Russia to press ahead with Iran nuclear plant
And Now, About Russia
COMMENTARY ON CHERNOBYL VICTIMS
Lethal Side-Effects of Earth-Penetrating Warhead
Pentagon Studies Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons for Underground Targets
U.S. MULLING DEVELOPMENT OF BABY NUKE TO HIT SADDAM
MILLSTONE 1 OWNER TO UPDATE NRC ON SEARCH FOR MISSING SPENT FUEL RODS
Community calendar
Study of K-25 water ills must deal with flood of info
Energy Task Force Works in Secret
Star Wars Lives . . . Once the ABM deal is killed.

MILITARY
Navy debuts radio show on bombings
Congo Rebels Bar Arrival of U.N. Troops in North

OTHER
The Real Story Behind California's Electricity Problems
Geographical Correlation vs CFS
Australia may not ratify Kyoto accord
Oil vessel sinks in Persian Gulf
Despite Report After Report, Unrest Endures in Cincinnati
Problems with police not new
South African police face slaughter
Swift justice raises questions
Police do well
Battered Cincinnati looks for lessons
Navy Crew's Ordeal of Terror and Tedium
U.S.-China talks to zero in on flights
Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs
Saudi Arabia, Iran to sign security pact
Israel publicly recruits spies

ACTIVISTS
Educated protesters plan next 'Seattle'
STOP THE APRIL 27 BOMBING OF VIEQUES, PUERTO RICO!
FTAA summary and Quebec City background
Activists Hang Banner at CITIGROUP Headquarters Today
Cincinnati's Eye of the Storm: Over-The-Rhine
Zapatistas speak out on Pacifica crisis


-------- NUCLEAR

Rutgers Physicists Tackle Plutonium Complexities

Science Daily
Date: Posted 4/16/2001
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010412081719.htm

NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. - Three physicists, members of Rutgers' Center for Materials Theory in the department of physics and astronomy, have devised the first reliable method to predict the physical properties of plutonium. This development is important for the long-term storage of plutonium, an issue of worldwide concern. As stockpiles of plutonium-based nuclear weapons age, their reliability and safety come into question.

In a paper appearing in the April 11 issue of the journal Nature, Rutgers' Sergej Y. Savrasov, a postdoctoral associate; Gabriel Kotliar, professor of physics; and Elihu Abrahams, director of the Center for Materials Theory, present a novel electronic structure method for predicting stability changes in plutonium, potentially a landmark achievement in solid-state physics.

Plutonium is regarded even by scientists as a complex and mysterious element, rarely occurring in nature, and made artificially for the first time in 1940. "Just as water has phases - liquid, solid and gaseous - so does plutonium," explained Kotliar. "In plutonium, there are many more solid phases, ranging from a dense and unstable alpha phase to a much more extended and stable delta phase. The potential decomposition into the unstable phase over time is a matter of concern in old, stored nuclear warheads, where this could ultimately result in changes in the mass that could lead to a chain reaction.

"While the search for answers about plutonium phases generally has been through experimental methods, we employed analytical and computer calculations to predict changes in the structure of the solid states of plutonium," said Kotliar. "We felt a strong need for theoretical methods that are accurate. This element is far too toxic for extensive experimental procedures in the laboratory, and the use of theoretical methods is mandatory if we are to deal with problems over long time scales. Experimental methods do not work for predicting changes 100 years into the future."

In developing its new method, the team employed Rutgers' High-Performance Computing Cluster, a computational grid comprising more than 80 computer processors configured as a distributed resource, and a Department of Energy supercomputer. The researchers can now predict volume and stability changes in plutonium while gaining insights into where and when the transition between the alpha and delta phases occurs and under what conditions.

"We are dealing with an extremely delicate balance between the two phases, and which one wins and when this happens is information that is necessary to assure the safe storage of this important material," added Kotliar.

-------

Bully (for) Bush
The president's foreign policy: better to be feared than loved

US News & World Report
4/16/01,
By Michael Barone
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010416/16pol.htm

George W. Bush's handling of China's refusal to return the EP-3E Aries II surveillance plane and its crew is consistent with his approach to foreign policy generally. Bush has spoken tersely, has delegated duties, and has been unwilling to utter the emollient words or enter into the lengthy negotiations that were Bill Clinton's signature.

Critics here and abroad grumble about Bush's "arrogant" and "contemptuous" approach to foreign policy and his abandonment of Clinton's "peace processes." Bush has refused to try to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders together. Instead, he warmly greeted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, called on the Palestinians to stop the violence, and left PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat conspicuously off his invitation list. Bush told a glum South Korean President Kim Dae Jung point-blank that he would not pursue Clinton's policy of negotiating with North Korea. And Bush said that he would stay out of any Northern Ireland negotiations unless called upon by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Posturing. Similar patterns can be seen on missile defense and Kyoto. Last summer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that a Bush policy of moving ahead on missile defense and abrogating the ABM treaty "could trigger a Seattle-like, Internet-driven, mass-based, anti-nuclear protest against the U.S." in Europe and Russia. But neither Blair nor German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder demurred when Bush made it clear that he would press for missile defense, and the European protesters remain fixated on genetically modified foods. European leaders expressed outrage when Bush said he opposed the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which would require massive drops in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2012. But, as few stories in the media mentioned, Kyoto has been a dead letter from the start. No major single country-including those in Europe that have bemoaned Bush's stand-has ratified the agreement. The U.S. Senate voted 95-0 in 1997 to oppose Kyoto as long as it exempted China, India, and other developing countries from its sanctions-the pact's central architecture. European politicians praise Kyoto to score points with their greens and prefer to gloss over the fact that Kyoto will do nothing to produce cleaner air. Bush's principled stand exposes their cynical posturing.

The contrast between the Bush and Clinton approaches echoes of controversies that raged on college campuses when the two presidents were students. Like the liberal university presidents of the 1960s and 1970s, who believed campus protesters had legitimate grievances and would compromise if concessions were made, Clinton tried to negotiate with terrorists in the Middle East, North Korea, and Northern Ireland in the hope that appeasing their grievances would transform them into nonviolent liberals. Like the conservative critics of college presidents in the 1960s and 1970s, Bush thinks that compromise with terrorists is wrong and negotiations can weaken the forces of order. Events have been kinder to Bush's view than Clinton's. Huge concessions in the Middle East proved only that the Palestinians are determined to destroy Israel; concessions to North Korea have produced no clear abandonment of its nuclear and missile programs; the Irish pact is foundering because Irish Republican Army terrorists refuse to give up their arms.

"Bully Bush," the Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined. Europeans who have a gauzy faith in unenforceable environmental treaties and in endless negotiations to convert terrorists are naturally dismayed when Bush pops their bubbles. So are Clinton administration admirers who believe that their policies are the only form of engagement and anything else is "isolationism." But, as Niccolò Machiavelli noted, it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. Foreign leaders accustomed to deference from the United States are now having to get used to American leadership. Terrorists treated to endless rounds of palaver are having to get used to diplomatic isolation and the absence of cable news network camera crews. As Reagan-era policymaker Richard Perle says, "When you are trying to correct an accumulation of policy errors, you have to change policy, and some people may not like it. But that's not bullying."

It is not clear how the Aries incident will be resolved or how long that will take. What is clear is the direction of movement of U.S. policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's defense policy review seems likely to shift the focus of military preparedness from Europe to the Pacific. China's announced record defense-spending increase and its missiles bristling toward Taiwan will be met with a response intended to deter the Communist regime rather than propitiate it-and one that keeps in mind scholar Arthur Waldron's warning that today's Communist regime may turn out to be no more permanent than the Soviet regime in Russia. The United States will produce a missile defense to protect against nuclear blackmail from rogue states. It will promote freer trade in Latin America and elsewhere. And the president will not devote much of his psychic energy to propitiating terrorists. The world's real bullies, after all, are not found in Washington.

---

Admirals back civilian sub visits

USA Today
04/16/2001
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-16-subvisits.htm

WASHINGTON - Three Navy admirals who investigated the collision of a U.S. submarine and a Japanese fishing trawler want to continue inviting civilians aboard Navy vessels, even though the sub skipper says the 16 civilians on his boat distracted the crew.

The three admirals who were on the court of inquiry recommended that some aspects of the program be reviewed, including how visits are approved and scheduled.

The sub, the USS Greeneville, had canceled a scheduled training mission, but it went to sea on Feb. 9 anyway to show off to a group whose trip was arranged by a retired admiral. Three civilians were at controls when the sub hit the trawler, the Ehime Maru, during a rapid surfacing maneuver. Nine Japanese were killed.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered a review of all military visitor programs. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, earlier this month said that the visitors program would remain "alive and well." But he said that allowing guests at controls is "gone forever."

Cmdr. Scott Waddle told Time magazine that he has changed his mind about the civilians' role in the accident, which he had discounted. "Having them in the control room at least interfered with our concentration," he said.

Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, is expected to decide as early as this week whether to accept the court's recommendation that Waddle not be court-martialed. Fargo could convene an admiral's mast that could punish Waddle with 30 days confinement, 60 days of restricted duty, loss of one month's pay and a letter of reprimand, effectively ending his career. If no action is taken before May 27, he can receive a pension of half his approximately $67,000 in basic pay.

Although some in Japan have expressed anger that Waddle could avoid criminal charges, the report was signed by Japanese Rear Adm. Isamu Ozawa, who sat on the court but did not vote on its findings.

-------- australia

Rio Tinto urged to rule out Jabiluka development

April 16, 2001,
Australian Broadcasting Corp.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-16apr2001-32.htm

The Australian Conservation Foundation is calling on mining company Rio Tinto to completely rule out developing the controversial Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory.

After nine months of assessing the Jabiluka project, Rio Tinto has announced uranium mining will not start at the site, which is surrounded by Kakadu National Park, for at least 10 years.

The foundation's Dave Sweeney says the company's decision is an acknowledgment of the major obstacles facing the project.

"Rio Tinto know it's unpopular, they know the traditional owners are opposed, they acknowledge that there's a whole range of political and technical and scientific and ethical problems in front of any development of Jabiluka," he said.

"But what they haven't done is make the call which traditional owners and national environment groups and the wider community is asking Rio to do and that is to commit to neither sell nor develop Jabiluka."

-------- india / pakistan

India readies for launch of high-powered rocket

April 16, 2001
Reuters
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/04/16/india.launch.update.reut/index.html?s=8

MADRAS, India -- India's state-run space agency will try to launch a high-powered rocket on Wednesday for a second time after the first attempt was aborted due to a technical hitch, officials said.

"The 57-hour countdown has commenced for the launch scheduled at 15:43 IST (1013 GMT) on Wednesday," K. Narayana, director at the Indian Space Research Organization's Sriharikota spaceport, told Reuters by telephone on Monday. He said preparation and checks were proceeding smoothly for the test flight.

A spokesman for the Indian space agency told Reuters in the southern city of Bangalore there would be no live telecast of the launch by state-run television this time. He gave no reason.

Millions of viewers in India watched live as the previous attempt was aborted at the last moment, with smoke and flames appearing to envelop a part of the rocket's booster engines.

A successful launch of the geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle or GSLV-D1 would vault India alongside the United States, Russia, Japan, China and the European Space Agency which can park heavy heavy communications satellites deep in space.

The computerized launching system aborted the March 28 flight after it detected one of four strap-on booster engines did not have enough thrust.

The space agency said a standby engine would replace the faulty engine and the 49-meter (161 feet) rocket would have more flame protection after foam insulation pads caught fire following the aborted launch.

Space agency officials said the launch from Sriharikota, 100 km (62 miles) north of Madras on India's southeastern coast, was scheduled to take place on Wednesday. But it could also take place any time up to April 25, depending on weather conditions.

Last-minute changes

Space agencies worldwide usually set a period of up to a week as a launch window, based on meteorological data, for last-minute schedule changes in case of sudden weather disturbances.

The GSLV-D1 rocket, which cost 14 billion rupees ($300 million) and took 10 years to build, has a liftoff weight of 401 tons. It carries an experimental satellite as a 1,540 kg payload.

The commercialized rocket which would be declared operational after two successful test flights would eventually be able to hoist loads of up to 2,000 kg (4,400 pounds) in geostationary or sun-synchronous orbits as high as 36,000 km in space.

India already has an active space program and satellite launch capability with its commercially operational polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) capable of putting lighter remote sensing satellites in a north-south orbit along the poles.

It also builds its own communications and weather satellites which have been launched by Russian rockets or more recently by the European Space Agency's Ariane vehicles.

India aims to save costs by launching its own communications satellites instead of hiring foreign companies to do so and is also hoping for a lucrative business exporting its skills.

India began studying and experimenting with imported rockets in 1963. But a key aspect of the GSLV was its use of a Russian engine that uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel.

New Delhi's attempt to import the technology to operate the engine from Russia was blocked by U.S. sanctions linked to India's missile and nuclear weapon programs, and it eventually bought only the engine from Russia.

India's nuclear-weapons capable rival Pakistan has no known space programme.

-------- russia

Russia to press ahead with Iran nuclear plant

April 16, 2001
Reuters
By Karl Emerick Hanuska
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010416/09/energy-russia-minister

MOSCOW, April 16 - New Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev committed Russia on Monday to completing work on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station, but was non-committal on plans to build a second reactor there.

The United States, which opposes the sale of nuclear technology to what it considers a "rogue state," had expressed alarm at suggestions that Moscow could build more reactors for the Islamic republic.

"If we are lagging behind schedule on the construction of the first Bushehr nuclear power plant, then we will catch up," Rumyantsev, who replaced Yevgeny Adamov late last month, told a press conference.

"We must fulfil our contractual obligations," he said. The minister repeated Russia's view that the 1995 Bushehr contract did not violate Moscow's international treaty undertakings as the nuclear cooperation was of a strictly civilian nature.

Russian specialists were in talks on constructing a second reactor at Bushehr, he said. But Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying that "no documents have yet been signed."

Moscow analysts said Adamov had been sacked for his "excessive enthusiasm" in reaching deals with Iran, which only aggravated Russia's already fraught ties with the United States.

Washington has slammed Russian sales of nuclear technology to Iran and has cited potential nuclear proliferation to justify its desire build a $60 billion national missile defence shield that has been strongly denounced by Russia.

Russia insists it is only providing technology with civil uses, but the United States fears it will help Iran develop nuclear weapons. Rumyantsev said he expected both sides to find a compromise on the issue.

Washington has also sharply criticised Moscow's decision to ship nuclear fuel to India's Tarapur reactor, but Rumyantsev said Russia intended to build a nuclear power station on the sub-continent, despite international concerns.

"India is our strategic partner. We want to ensure that there are no reproaches (from the international community) in this regard," he said.

Rumyantsev, previously the head of one of Russia's top nuclear laboratories, also backed a plan to earn billions of dollars by importing nuclear waste for treatment.

He dismissed the fears of environmentalists by saying Russia had the technology to handle the waste safely and would earn substantial income from the work.

----

And Now, About Russia

Monday, April 16, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/16/ED138013.DTL

THE WAR of words between the United States and China resumed almost as soon as the plane carrying our detainees arrived in Honolulu; each government has its own interpretation of the letter that ended the impasse. It all almost sounds like the arguments we used to have with the Russians during the bad old days. Former Cold Warriors must love it.

Enemies or "strategic rivals" can be a blessing as well as a curse. Having an opponent to focus on can keep our minds off irritating problems such as global warming and the cost of warming our homes. But please, let's have one "strategic rival" at a time. If we must be cold with China, let's try to be warmer with Russia.

In that vein, Secretary of State Colin Powell's cordial meeting in Paris with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Secretary Igor Ivanov, was an excellent sign.

Relations between the United States and the Kremlin were uneasy throughout the Clinton years. Relations were further strained when the Bush administration learned that FBI agent Robert Hanssen had betrayed our operatives in Russia and had divulged various secrets, including perhaps the existence of a spy tunnel beneath the Russian Embassy in Washington. We're throwing out 50 of their diplomats over a period of months; the Russians will respond in kind.

Yet, Powell and Ivanov bantered as if all were well. Powell even suggested that Ivanov visit Washington and go through a confirmation hearing "so he can get the full sense of what the American Congress is all about." (Or see what American diplomats have to endure before they ever meet with the Russians.)

There are serious disagreements between the two countries. We don't want Russia selling arms to Iran, especially advanced weapons. The Russians are not enthusiastic about our plans for national missile defense.

But we each have a stake in nuclear arms control. And we want a Russia that is strong enough to exert control over its own weapons. We don't want leakage, in either sense. We don't want Russian weapons of mass destruction to be sold, or stolen by hostile elements, and we don't want nuclear accidents. Anything that leads to a more stable, democratic, trusting and trustworthy Russia is in our interest. The Russians are not, at present, a threat to dominate the world,

but they can create great difficulties for us and our domination.

In this and other areas of foreign policy, Powell exhibits restraint and a thoughtfulness that is not as apparent in the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis. Unfortunately, there are more of them than there are of him.

-------- ukraine

COMMENTARY ON CHERNOBYL VICTIMS

geocities.com
Russell Hoffman and Pamela O'Brien
http://www.geocities.com/mothersalert/chernobyl.html

The theory that the Ukrainian Ministry of Heath inflates the number of dead from Chernobyl in order to increase funding to them is false. First, we now have plenty of data to show that there are significantly increased rates of radiation-induced diabetes, thyroid cancer (especially in children), leukemia, chromosome aberrations and a long list of other illnesses (thyroid cancer in children has increased ten-fold around Chernobyl, for example).

Second, the idea that the Ukrainian Ministry of Health was exaggerating the deaths is an idea being pushed within the official halls of the nuclear mafia because the truth was and is so devastating to their industry. Indeed, Alla Yaroshinskaya in her book "Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth" (Jon Carpenter Publishing Co., PO Box 129, Oxford, OX1 4PH England, distributed in the U.S.A. by InBook, PO Box 120261, 140 Commerce St., East Haven, CT 06512) provides what I think is ample documentation to indicate that deaths and other health effects have been purposefully and seriously UNDERestimated around Chernobyl (the book has a forward by eminent physician Dr. John W. Gofman).

Epidemiological data is available from the Belarus Institute for Hereditary Diseases in Minsk (zip code 220053), and published in the Japanese publication Gijutsu-To-Ningn #283, January - February 1998.(Hiroshima Bunker Woman's Junior College helped with the document, at Asaminami - Ku in Hiroshima.)

It is entirely possible that the true number of dead far exceeds the numbers estimated by even the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, who after all are only counting the deaths within a very localized area. They are not counting the random cancers, leukemias and birth defects that occur an extremely difficult-to-measure (low) rates around the world, but among billions and billions of people.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Health estimates are stunning: From Page 8, Permanent Peoples' Tribunal Session on Chernobyl: Environmental, Health and Human Rights Implications, Vienna, Austria, 12-15 April, 1996:

"The minister of health for the Ukraine has estimate that about 125,000 deaths attributable to the disaster have occurred over the last 10 years".

The panel was full of distinguished persons and the testimony was likewise from highly qualified individuals -- the list goes on for pages and pages. The Tribunal also explored in detail the worldwide cover-up about the effects of all forms of radiation. And the deaths go on and on too --150,000 by now? Probably that many, if not more.

WHO alone is insufficient to produce yet another report. We need outside experts in the medical, biological, environmental and financial consequences of radiological dispersals. WHO are part of the global structure that, as Pamela put it, "hasn't exactly come out condemning the entire global nuclear situation in a loud voice".

ALARA stands for "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". It's definition is in part 20 of the U.S. code of Federal Regulation of the U. S. NRC for exposure to radiation. All ALARA means is that, depending on the amount of money that any nuclear industry wishes to spend on protection of the environment and people, and depending on available technology, that is what they can use! So if you say, as a nuclear producer, "I only intend to spend $10 on keeping emissions as low as reasonably achievable, and that's all the technology that is available" its OKAY!

Dr. John W. Gofman has stated in front of federal judges in U.S. Federal courts that this constitutes "planned deaths":

Question by the court: "What does ALARA..."

Answer: "It permits deaths."

Question: "Permits human deaths?"

Answer: "Yes, because ALARA does not say -- see, the only way you could avoid deaths from the nuclear fuel cycle is to have zero releases. ALARA says keep the releases as low as you can reasonably achieve with the economics that you want to spend on it, and the equipment that you have available and so forth. So it is a planned emission of radioactivity, and that in effect means planned deaths." -- Dr. John Gofman, in conversation with the court, October 2nd, 1978, Jeannine Honicker versus the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Federal Court, Nashville, Tennessee, seeking an injunction to shut down the nuclear fuel cycle.

The judge found out that he had no jurisdiction and that it had to go instead in front of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission/NRC judges. The petition was denied. (It can be found in "Shut Down: Nuclear Power on Trial: Experts Testify in Federal Court" ISBN 0-913990-21-3, published in 1979 in the U. S. by The Book Publishing Company, 156 Drakes Lane, Summertown, Tennessee, 38483.)

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

Lethal Side-Effects of Earth-Penetrating Warhead 102

U.S. Newswire
16 Apr 8:25
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0416-102.html

Scientists: 'Clean' Nuclear Weapon Isn't; Small Earth- Penetrating Nuclear Warhead Would Have Lethal Side-Effects
To: National Desk, Science Reporter
Contact: Bob Sherman of the Federation of American Scientists, 301-219-5395 or 202-546-3300; rsherman@fas.org; http://www.fas.org.

WASHINGTON, April 16 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Low-yield earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, intended to threaten deep bunkers without killing the surrounding population, would release dangerous fallout, according to an analysis by the Federation of American Scientists.

Some nuclear weapons developers have advocated developing and testing new small nuclear weapons as a way to destroy deeply buried bunkers containing enemy leaders or biological weapons. Delivered by a bomb or missile that would strike the ground a high speed and penetrate deeply before exploding, the weapon is intended to destroy the bunker but leave nearby civilians unharmed because the earth over the explosion would contain it.

But the study, performed by Princeton University physicist Robert Nelson, finds this to be technologically impossible. "No earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the Hiroshima weapon. The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with especially intense and deadly fallout," according to the study.

A 1-kiloton explosion, less than one tenth that of the Hiroshima bomb, would need to be under 450 feet of earth to be fully contained. But the U.S. B61-11 deep-penetrating bomb only penetrates about 20 feet. A tactical missile might possibly penetrate to 100 feet, although it would be difficult for a nuclear warhead to function after such an impact.

If an underground explosion is not contained, it becomes very "dirty", in that the earth above it is made radioactive and thrown over a large area. Thus, use of even a small earth-penetrating warhead in a populated area would cause significant civilian casualties, according to the study.

Scientists who built the first atomic bomb founded the Federation of American Scientists in 1945. More than half of the current American Nobel Laureates today serve on the FAS Board of Sponsors. FAS conducts research, analysis, and advocacy on public policy issues created by advances in science and technology (see www.fas.org).

----

Pentagon Studies Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons for Underground Targets

Walter Pincus Washington Post Service
Monday, April 16, 2001
http://www.iht.com/articles/16935.htm

WASHINGTON The Defense Department is studying whether to develop a new, low-yield nuclear weapon with an earth-penetrating nose cone that could knock out hardened or deeply buried targets such as leadership bunkers and command centers, according to administration and congressional sources.

Such a weapon has long been sought by nuclear weapons scientists and some military strategists, including key members of the Bush administration, as a way of reaching targets that are hidden deep underground without incurring huge collateral damage.

Advocates also say that by developing such smaller nuclear weapons, the United States could safely reduce its current stockpile of 6,000 much more powerful warheads. Interest in low-yield weapons has been rising with concern that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, could hide his biological and chemical arsenals in underground bunkers.

Another hardened target that has drawn attention is Russia's long-term construction of a nuclear war command center under a mountain.

A senior adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the Iraqi leader would not be deterred by current U.S. nuclear weapons "because he knows a U.S. president would not drop a 100-kiloton bomb on Baghdad" to reach Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The prospect that the Pentagon would recommend that the administration develop a low-yield nuclear weapon has become the focus of attention for groups committed to traditional arms control. The Federation of American Scientists plans to release a report this week that argues that "adding low-yield warheads to the world's nuclear inventory simply makes their eventual use more likely."

A report on the Pentagon study is to be sent to Congress in July. Seven years ago, Congress barred research and development of a low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapon. But an amendment last year to the defense authorization bill required the Pentagon to study how to defeat hardened and deeply buried targets.

Air Force Testing New Drones

Greg Schneider of The Washington Post reported from Washington:

In the next few weeks, an unmanned airplane the size of a small Cessna will shoot a missile at a tank on a Nevada test range, blasting the air force toward a future in which some of its most dangerous missions could be carried out by robots.

While the Pentagon has been experimenting with pilotless planes for half a century, advances in technology have only recently made it feasible to use them to attack foes. And with the Bush administration moving to redirect military spending into more futuristic weapons, unmanned combat aircraft are expected to be one of the big winners.

"I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a new military technology that has a broader following than unmanned combat vehicles," said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant with the Lexington Institute, a private organization in Arlington, Virginia. "The idea is easy to grasp, and the benefits are easy to see."

Known as uninhabited combat air vehicles, or UCAVs, such drones could knock out enemy air defenses without endangering pilots. They would cost significantly less than traditional fighter jets, yet would be similar in size and capability. And they could be shipped quickly and in great numbers wherever needed.

President George W. Bush cited them in a recent speech on military priorities, and the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, John Warner, Republican of Virginia, added $146 million to the Pentagon budget this year to speed up development.

Defense contractors are lining up to get a piece of what many believe will be the future of military aviation. Both Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. recently unveiled designs for sophisticated robot attack planes and are investing millions of their own dollars in the projects.

Lockheed Martin Corp., meanwhile, is concentrating less on the drones themselves and more on the electronics that allow them to operate, with research programs that include secret government contracts.

But like National Missile Defense, another futuristic program that promises more than technology can yet deliver, the push for attack drones strikes some experts as overblown.

"The problem with UCAVs now is they're in a very early stage of the technology," said Steven Zaloga, a weapons expert with a consulting firm, Teal Group Corp., in Fairfax, Virginia. "It's really premature to be talking about what percentage of the future force is going to be taken up by UCAVs."

What is more, there will be resistance among some in the Pentagon against moving humans another step back from the trigger.

But even critics concede that certain combat roles will inevitably shift over to unmanned vehicles as the technology matures. The reason is simple: They could save American lives.

"Rather than having piloted aircraft go in on day one to break the back of the bad guys," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Alexandria, Virginia, "you send in these robots who are infinitely brave. They are unafraid."

----

U.S. MULLING DEVELOPMENT OF BABY NUKE TO HIT SADDAM

By WILLIAM J. GORTA
April 16, 2001
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/28641.htm

The United States is considering building a new, low-yield nuclear weapon that can penetrate underground bunkers or heavily fortified command centers, The Washington Post reported yesterday.

The "mini-nuke" would feature a penetrating nose cone that would allow it to burrow deep into the earth before detonating, avoiding widespread destruction to the surrounding area, the report said.

Controlled by precision guidance systems, the device could prove to be a deterrent for Saddam Hussein, who, a defense official told The Washington Post, "knows a U.S. president would not drop a 100-kiloton bomb on Baghdad."

Saddam is suspected by U.S. officials of storing chemical and biological weapons in underground depots.

The Federation of American Scientists doubted the mini-nukes would contain nuclear fallout, and scoffed at the idea the U.S. might deploy them.

"This mission does not appear possible without causing massive radioactive contamination," said the group's Web site. "No American president would elect to use nuclear weapons in this situation - unless another country had already used nuclear weapons against us."

The group's analysis said a five-kiloton bomb would need to sink 650 feet into the Earth to contain the fallout while a 100-kiloton device would need to bury itself a quarter of a mile down.

The Defense Department had no comment yesterday on either the study or the article.

Congress outlawed research into precision-guided low-yield systems seven years ago, but last year, a requirement that the Pentagon study how to destroy underground bunkers and hardened facilities was inserted into the defense spending bill.

The Federation of American Scientists said on its Web site conventional bombs could be just as effective without the mini-nukes.

The Pentagon is expected to complete its report by July, the article said.

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

-------- connecticut

MILLSTONE 1 OWNER TO UPDATE NRC ON SEARCH FOR MISSING SPENT FUEL RODS

NRC NEWS
April 16, 2001
http://www.nrc.gov/OPA/gmo/nrarcv/01-019i.html

UNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, REGION I
475 Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pa. 19406 No. I-01-019

CONTACT: Diane Screnci (610)337-5330/ e-mail: dps@nrc.gov
Neil A. Sheehan (610)337-5331/e-mail: nas@nrc.gov

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with Dominion Nuclear Connecticut representatives on Monday, April 23, to discuss the status of an investigation into, and search for, two spent nuclear fuel rods apparently missing from the spent fuel pool at the Millstone 1nuclear power plant in Waterford, Conn.

The meeting is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. in the Public Meeting Room at the NRC Region I office, 475 Allendale Road, King of Prussia, Pa. It will be open to the public.

Dominion recently took over ownership of the Millstone facility from Northeast Utilities. Late last year, Northeast Utilities reported that a review of records revealed two spent fuel rods previously believed to have been stored in the spent fuel pool at the permanently shutdown Millstone 1 plant could not be located. In response, Northeast Utilities launched a search for the fuel rods, including visual inspections of storage racks in the circulating-water spent fuel pool using remote-controlled cameras, personnel interviews and a further review of records. The company also formed an Independent Review Team to augment its investigation.

The various efforts are ongoing but so far have not been able to determine the whereabouts of the rods.

Nuclear power plants use slender metal rods filled with enriched uranium pellets in the reactor to generate heat, which creates steam used to produce power. There are thousands of these rods in use in the reactor when it is in operation. Upon its use in the reactor, the fuel is considered highly radioactive. Once removed from the reactor, it is placed in the spent fuel pool for storage. In the case of Millstone 1, the apparently missing rods are about a half-inch in diameter and 158 inches long.

-------- south carolina

Community calendar

Monday, April 16, 2001
Savannah Morning News
http://www.savannahmorningnews.com/smn/stories/041601/LOCcalendar.shtml

Wednesday
Plutonium fuel scoping meeting

Will be held from 7-10 p.m. at the Coastal Georgia Center, 305 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Meeting is required by law to gather input on the scope of what should be considered in an environmental impact statement on transporting and using plutonium as fuel in commercial nuclear reactors and making this fuel at a facility on the Savannah River. Call: (912) 201-0354.

Thursday
Savannah Council on World Affairs

Presents speaker Dr. Richard L. Wagner Jr., project leader of the Global Long-Range Nuclear Vision Project of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, at 8 p.m. at Coastal Georgia Center, 305 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., located behind Savannah Visitors Center. Topic: 'Missile Defense Shield System - Is It Necessary?'

-------- tennessee

Study of K-25 water ills must deal with flood of info as closes credibility gaps

Knoxville News-Sentinel
April 16, 2001
By Frank Munger News-Sentinel senior writer
http://www.knoxnews.com/talktous/printpage/index.cfm

The end results may not satisfy anyone, but there's a major research effort under way to identify historic water problems at the government's K-25 plant in Oak Ridge and to assess the potential health impacts on workers there.

The complexity of the project could become almost maddening, especially if the team attempts to reconstruct more than 50 years of operations at the nuclear complex. The focus is expected to be mostly on the past two decades.

There are piles of documents to evaluate (some classified, some not), conflicting reports about cross-connections of pipelines that may have allowed radioactive materials and hazardous chemicals to invade drinking-water supplies, and numerous production changes over the years that required the shutdown or alteration of buildings at the sprawling site.

And drinking water isn't the only issue. There are concerns that contamination in steam operations and blow down from cooling towers may also have presented exposure hazards to workers at the Oak Ridge plant.

One of the real challenges for project organizers has been to rein in the study parameters to the extent possible and not become so broad-based as to become meaningless.

Another challenge: maintaining credibility in hopes of gaining the trust of K-25 workers, including a sizable group of sick former workers, many of whom are skeptical of any project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

This latter issue is critical because the workers themselves may be the most important source of information, a point that project overseers made repeatedly during a public meeting last week in Oak Ridge.

"Our skepticism goes back many years," said Harry Williams, a former K-25 worker and president of the Coalition for Health Environment, which represents many of the sick workers and area residents.

Several workers who attended the meeting expressed outrage that project leaders are still trying to confirm the existence of cross-connections that allowed non-sanitary water sources used for fire protection and cooling operations to mix with drinking-water supplies at K-25.

J.D. Hunter, a former fire department commander at the site, and others said they thought plenty of evidence in that regard had already been presented.

Williams added: "There's no question in our minds that the water was very contaminated."

There also were repeated questions about the independence of the project team, with several workers suggesting any study financially supported by DOE may be tainted with bias.

DOE and contractors last year completed an evaluation of the current water system at K-25 and declared that drinking water supplies at the Oak Ridge site were safe. At the time, the federal agency promised it would conduct a second phase of the study to evaluate the potential for water contamination in previous years, and that's what taking place now.

Parallax Inc., a small, Maryland-based company with expertise in nuclear safety and experience in DOE contracting, is managing the Phase II project.

The team includes the JSI Center for Environmental Health Studies (headed by Dr. Richard Bird, a Boston physician involved in earlier evaluations of sick workers); Malcolm Pirnie Inc., an engineering firm with expertise in water evaluations and health-risk assessments; and TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering Inc., which has conducted similar investigations of contaminated water systems.

Any K-25 workers, former workers or community members with information about operations involving the plant's water system and possible contamination are asked to contact the project team. Team members have said they will be willing to work with former workers to protect their confidentiality, if that is a concern.

The project team has established a "hot line," which can accept messages at any time. That number is 1-865-481-8290.

Also, Suzanne Conway of TerraGraphics is listed as a contact person at 1-865-300-9855.

THE TITANS: In the March 26 edition of Argonne (National Laboratory) News, somewhere between a story about four lab inventions being cited among the century's best and a brief item regarding the Easter Bunny's planned appearance at a local egg hunt, there's a news report on David E. Moncton.

Moncton, of course, is erstwhile executive director of the Spallation Neutron Source who left Oak Ridge earlier this year to return to Chicago after being given an ultimatum to commit himself to one or the other -- SNS or Argonne.

After splitting his time at the two institutions for the past two years, Moncton resumed his full-time role as Argonne's associate laboratory director for the Advanced Photon Source (the research facility he birthed in the 1990s).

Now, it turns out, Moncton is on the move again, although not so far this time.

According to the lab's newsletter, Moncton has "agreed to accept" an appointment as senior scientist and adviser to the laboratory director, Hermann Grunder.

"Moncton will lead the research effort for Argonne's Fourth-Generation Initiative, which may lead to a light source many times more powerful than even the APS," the report said.

Grunder issued this statement:

"The diligence, intelligence and focus of Dr. Moncton and his staff at the APS combined to create a facility that has greatly exceeded expectations. Dr. Moncton has the ability, experience and scientific preeminence to lead the laboratory's research effort in this exciting new area, while also resuming his own X-ray research program."

Senior writer Frank Munger can be reached at 482-9213 or by e-mail at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. This weekly column on science and technology also is available on our Web site at http://www.knoxnews.com/science/munger/

-------- us nuc politics

Energy Task Force Works in Secret
Like Clinton Health Effort, Cheney Group Aims to Limit Leaks, Flak

By Dana Milbank and Eric Pianin
Washington Post
Monday, April 16, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21748-2001Apr15?language=printer

The Bush administration's energy task force is something of a secret society.

At the start of each meeting with outside groups, task-force members request that the session be off the record. They say they will share no documents, to prevent information from leaking. The members are expected not to talk to the media, and the few who do are not able to talk about policy.

"There really isn't anything to talk about," said an official from the Transportation Department. "I'm sorry, but we're not going to discuss process," said an Environmental Protection Agency spokesman who intercepted a call to a task force staffer -- and then asked that his name not be used with his no comment.

Why such secrecy? The broad outline of the policy recommendations, after all, is not in doubt. The final proposal, anticipated within the next three or four weeks, will be heavily focused on increased production of oil, gas and coal and investment in new refineries, pipelines and power grids, according to those familiar with the discussions.

The silence, rather, is an effort to keep a low-key atmosphere around the task force's deliberations. By limiting exposure, the administration is calculating that it can limit criticism.

To close followers of government, the shroud of secrecy may seem familiar: It is precisely the approach taken by Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force at the same point in the Clinton administration.

Members of the Bush energy task force, headed by Vice President Cheney, say they are determined to avoid the disastrous fate that befell that previous task force. They say that despite some obvious similarities in approach, their goal -- solving the nation's energy supply-demand imbalance -- is more circumscribed and achievable than overhauling America's health care system.

"We're not out to reengineer the nation's electric system," said Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser and a member of the task force.

Still, addressing the nation's energy problems is one of the top priorities for the new administration, and some of the issues the task force plans to tackle could spark the same kind of outcry created by the Clinton health task force. Administration officials familiar with the deliberations say the task force is looking at everything from increased drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge and the Rocky Mountains to more emphasis on nuclear power and energy conservation.

For Bush's energy team, as for the Clinton health care task force, the problem is less in coming up with a set of recommendations than in selling its ideas to the public. While Clinton's advisers labored in secrecy, out-of-context news reports made wrong impressions, and the feeding frenzy by opponents once the plan was released contributed to its downfall.

A similar danger faces the Bush task force as reports come out about controversial elements in its plan, including more drilling and more nuclear power plants. "There will be quite a political reaction to that, and not just from the anti nuclear-proliferation types," said Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute. "It's from anyone who doesn't want a plant in their back yard."

Already, there are signs of the divisions. Environmental groups complain that Cheney won't meet with their leaders while the vice president sits down with a parade of industry officials. The nation's powerful environmental lobby is ready to pounce on any report that will shift policy from conservation toward increased energy production -- a central argument of the Bush report.

Some outsiders say the administration is courting trouble with its closed approach. Ira Magaziner, who ran the Clinton health care task force, said it was a "huge mistake" to restrict the news about the health care task force. It didn't work, and it created hostility, he said. "My experience taught me from a political and public policy point of view, it's better keeping things open."

Magaziner would know. In 1993, The Washington Post wrote about the Clinton task force's information "blackout," designed "to stop reporters and lobbyists from bothering the staff." The Clinton administration was even sued by critics for keeping its meetings closed to the public. As for its proposals, "the public can't read them, and the staff can't even photocopy them for fear the copies might be leaked," The Post wrote.

Bush officials are well aware that the two task forces have similarities, in timing and importance. Both focused on complex, divisive issues that pitted consumers against industry. And both administrations sought to keep their subject confidential to keep the public's attention on other matters (Clinton's economic plan and Bush's tax cut) and to prevent opposition from organizing.

The Bush energy advisers say the silent approach is necessary. "We didn't want to make it into a circus," a task force official said. "I don't think this process would be able to get done what needs to get done in a relatively short time frame unless we opened the doors to input, hunkered down, did our due diligence and did our deliberations."

Instead, Bush advisers believe the tight structure of their energy task force will prevent some of the public relations problems that plagued the Clinton group. Clinton's was an unwieldy operation of about 15 committees and 34 working groups, relying on about 500 staff members, several of whom weren't even government workers; the Bush task force has a dozen members and a similar number of staffers. Clinton's report exceeded 1,300 pages; Bush advisers are aiming for a less-detailed report of about 100 pages.

Keeping with the general tone of the Bush administration, the energy group is small and highly disciplined. The task force has met four or five times since January and now plans to consult on a weekly basis in the vice president's ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It includes the vice president; the secretaries of energy, interior, transportation, agriculture, commerce and treasury; the heads of EPA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; Bush's deputy staff chief Joshua Bolten; intergovernmental affairs adviser Ruben Barrales; budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr.; and Lindsey.

Running the effort is Andrew Lundquist, 40, an Alaska native who has worked for both of the state's senators, most recently as staff director of the Senate Energy Committee. His deputy is fellow Alaskan Karen Knutson, and the two, with three other staffers, meet weekly with the people in each Cabinet agency assigned to the task force. The staffers have received thousands of recommendations from hundreds of groups and met personally with many of them.

For Bush's task force, the challenge is to present the controversial calls for more drilling, power plants and possibly nuclear power with plans for conservation and renewable energy. "If our demand is outstripping our supply even at the current pace, we will need 1,900 power generating plants to keep up with demand by 2020," said Mary Matalin, a top Cheney adviser. She said that because nuclear power is 20 percent of the nation's supply, the United States must "at a minimum relicense" existing plants. But, she added, "we're looking at a lot of renewables, alternative resources and technology to make existing resources clean and safe."

The emerging report is expected to be divided into 10 broad chapters, beginning with several that address supply and demand trends and the competing concerns about health, the environment and the economy. There are also chapters on energy efficiency and renewable fuels, but the bulk of the report is devoted to domestic oil and gas production, investment in technology to find cleaner ways of burning coal, and the need for expanded infrastructure.

According to sources familiar with the report, the task force will try hard to put a human face on the issue by including examples of how energy shortages and soaring prices work the greatest hardships on low-income families and minorities.

Task force aides have also stressed their interest in "market-based" initiatives and tax incentives to encourage increased domestic production. Suggestions include a "smart" power-grid system with flexible pricing that charges consumers more for power during peak hours -- much as telephone companies do. Another possibility is an "energy ombudsman" to deal with community objections to new power plants.

Lindsey said he believes in easing the regulations that have prevented new power plants from being built. "There do seem to be legitimate regulatory hurdles and uncertainty," he said. "We don't want to ease clean air standards or anything like that, but there's a need to ease the uncertainty." Overall, the task force will take energy policy more in the direction of increasing supply than reducing demand, which has been the dominant approach in recent years. Although demand "is a matter of concern, certainly, it's mostly a supply problem," Lindsey said.

Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham have repeatedly called for measures to expand the capacity of existing nuclear power plants and to bring new ones on line to meet long-term energy needs. Also, as part of his budget submission to Congress, Bush has proposed a 14 percent increase in federal spending for a project studying whether to use Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a permanent burial ground for 77,000 tons of high-level waste now stored at nuclear power plants and defense sites nationwide. That proposal has encountered strong resistance in Nevada.

Another recommendation sure to cause consternation is domestic drilling. The task force report will include Bush's proposal for oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite strong opposition from influential Republicans and Democrats as well as the leading environmental groups. Moreover, the Interior Department has submitted recommendations for opening millions of acres of public land to new oil and gas development, much of it in the Rocky Mountains.

Balancing those hot-button items, task force officials say they will also have "hidden gems" that will please environmentalists. "We're going to have conservation, we're going to have renewables, and thoughtful pieces on the environment," one said. "There's pieces the renewables crowd and energy efficiency groups will be very supportive of."

Task force officials have also said the report would not specify precisely where on public lands to drill for oil and gas, leaving those decisions to future negotiations between the administration, Congress and special interest groups.

----

Star Wars Lives . . . Once the ABM deal is killed.

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, April 16, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21958-2001Apr15?language=printer

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Under cover of the Pentagon's defense review, their voices muffled to avoid dissonance with the Bush administration's mantra of spending restraint, the brain trust of missile defense is back at its big drawing board. But the hubris of old is mostly gone, replaced after eight years of life-on-the-margins with cold calculation about how to get to deployment.

Generals, admirals, scientists and Reaganite ideologues who for decades have dreamed of Star Wars exuded confidence at a recent Heritage Foundation conference here that the debate about whether the United States should build a missile defense is at last over. But 18 years after Ronald Reagan's sketch of a space-based shield that would end the threat of nuclear war, technical problems still abound, as do rivalries among proponents of ground-, sea- and space-based systems. Even from the perspective of the true believers, there are maddening paradoxes: For example, low-tech missiles from North Korea and Iraq may prove harder to knock down than those of Russia and China. Similarly, simple ground-based defense systems that could be deployed relatively soon may face daunting technological problems.

All of which means that the strategy that emerges in a few months from the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is more likely to have political than strictly military underpinnings. The missile defenders are bitterly divided over what kind of system the United States should aim to build during the next 10 to 15 years. But they agree on this: Any strategy should begin by nullifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, vaporizing the political obstacle most raised both at home and abroad. Moreover, any plan should aim at deploying something, however shaky, before the next presidential election in 2004.

"I think the administration will turn itself inside out to do this in 3.75 years," said Gregory H. Canavan, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National laboratory who has worked on missile defense for more than 30 years. "They need to make this a fact before the end of the first term."

Deploying a jury-rigged system early makes sense to some Republican policymakers because it wouldn't have to pass even the limited effectiveness criteria of the ground-based system halfheartedly pursued by the Clinton administration. That system failed in two out of three flight tests; even more serious, a panel of experts given access to classified data reported to the Pentagon last year that the weapon was not close to overcoming the problems of discriminating between missile warheads and decoys. Oddly, those problems are more serious in some ways with less-advanced missiles; warheads from North Korea and Iraq lack some of the high-tech traits that defense systems are programmed to recognize.

A Bush hurry-up system would not pretend to be foolproof; it could be cast as a stopgap, a defense that would have a shot at knocking down a single warhead or two, or at least of making a rogue leader worry about whether his warhead would get through. Pursuing it would entrench the idea that missile defense is a matter of urgency, while at the same time allowing more time and capital to design and build a system that would actually be reliable. And while a stopgap might be squeezed under the ABM treaty, it more likely would shred it -- again paving the way for more ambitious projects.

It's probably that anti-treaty capability, in fact, that makes the Navy's stopgap option so popular in some quarters of the Pentagon and Congress. Currently the Navy's cruiser-based antimissile system isn't supposed to be ready until the middle of the decade, even as a limited shield for fixed points like ports. But boosters contend that a cruiser equipped with the first-generation system and matched with a sophisticated radar could be stationed off the U.S. coast and provide some kind of defense by 2004. Or the Navy could match an antimissile warhead with one of its existing long-range missiles and deploy it off the Korean coast before the next presidential election, with the aim of thwarting an attack in the "boost phase." Whether or not it worked, either plan would kill the ABM treaty, which bans any sea-based defense against long-range missiles.

Rumsfeld recently let a window close for beginning work this year on an advanced radar system on Shemya Island, Alaska, a key part of the Clinton administration's ground-based system. But there's also a short-cut option there: Experts say the Army could mount the "kill vehicle" it has been testing atop a half-dozen existing Minuteman II boosters -- since the booster planned for the system doesn't yet work -- and station the weapons in Alaska by 2004, while upgrading an existing radar at Shemya.

What would really work? Though there are big differences over the details, the brain trust seems to agree that a reliable defense even against a rogue-nation threat would require multiple layers of sea, space and ground-based systems, an apparatus that would take at least a decade and tens of billions of dollars to develop and deploy. But just as a simple system could be thwarted by decoy technology, the big system could be strategically hamstrung by its own prowess, since it might work as well against Russia or China as against North Korea.

Better to stick to political targets. "The number one priority," says Baker Spring, Heritage's missile defense maven, "is to abandon the ABM treaty -- the sooner the better."

-------- MILITARY

-------- puerto rico

Navy debuts radio show on bombings

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/16/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406742916

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - The Navy went on the air Saturday with the first in a series of radio shows aimed at convincing Puerto Ricans that it needs to resume training on the island of Vieques.

Vieques residents are to vote Nov. 6 on whether they want to expel the Navy following a fatal bombing accident in April 1999 that touched off massive protests in the U.S. Caribbean territory.

Four officers speaking in Spanish spent much of the paid, hour-long show explaining why the practice range was the ``perfect location'' for the Atlantic Fleet to safely practice its shelling, bombing and amphibious invasions.

The Navy said more shows were planned this week and next.

``The range is the perfect location for these types of operations,'' said Navy pilot Capt. John Rodriguez, speaking on-air. ``Since it is separated from population centers and it is in an area with no air traffic congestion it makes the exercises secure.''

Public opposition to the Navy's use of Vieques erupted in Puerto Rico after a jet dropped bomb off target, killing a civilian guard and injuring four other people on the range. The Navy stopped using live bombs after the accident.

Under a deal worked out with former President Clinton, the Navy must leave the island in 2003 if it loses the November referendum.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paused exercises on Vieques in March to allow time for new negotiations with Puerto Rico Gov. Sila Calderon, who wants the Navy to cease bombing immediately, but the maneuvers could resume as soon as April 27.

The Navy owns two-thirds of Vieques, an island of 9,400 people, and the bombing range covers 900 acres on the island's eastern tip - less than 3 percent of its territory.

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

Congo Rebels Bar Arrival of U.N. Troops in North

New York Times
April 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/world/16CONG.html

GOMA, Congo, April 15 - The United Nations abruptly canceled a plan today to station peacekeepers in Kisangani, just minutes before the troops were to land, after rebels denied them clearance.

The rebels, who are backed by Rwanda, had warned they would consider a move to station troops in Kisangani a "declaration of war."

The confrontation was the worst in what until now had been a largely uneventful new effort to station peacekeepers in Congo.

The United Nations is building a 3,000-member force to monitor a month-old pullback by the six armies and two major rebel movements at war here. A two-and-a-half-year war has killed at least 1.7 million people and uprooted at least 2 million.

The rebel response today threatened to undermine cooperation by Congo's many other combatants.

The Rally for Congolese Democracy, the rebels who control Congo's east and who caused the problem today, have been taking an increasingly hard line since consultations with their Rwanda backers.

Rwanda, Uganda and their rebel allies started fighting in 1998 to oust President Laurent Kabila. Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola's armies entered the war on Mr. Kabila's side.

Peace efforts have surged forward since Mr. Kabila's assassination in January and the succession of his son Joseph. But convincing the foreign armies to leave could be extremely difficult.

Rwanda, Uganda and Angola want to be able to pursue their own armed opponents, who have been taking shelter in Congo. And many of the countries now hold interests in Congo's mines and envy any increase in influence there by rivals.

The rebels who hold the control tower at Kisangani airport refused this morning to clear two United Nations planes carrying 120 armed Moroccan troops and cargo.

After circling briefly, the planes were diverted to another airport.

The Moroccan troops were to have been the third group sent to protect installations as the United Nations monitors a nine-mile buffer zone between rival forces. Slightly more than 1,000 have moved into position since mid-March.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

The Real Story Behind California's Electricity Problems

Monday, April 16, 2001,
BY MOLLY IVINS,
FORT WORTH, STAR-TELEGRAM
http://www.sltrib.com/04162001/commenta/89218.htm

BOULDER, Colo. -- Here at the annual World Affairs Conference at the University of Colorado, the assorted experts from around the globe may sometimes be wrong, but they are rarely in doubt.

This lends a happy, "But the emperor isn't wearing any clothes," simplicity to much of the discussion. Shibboleths are ignored, obligatory bows to those who are only partially informed are skipped entirely, and folks get right down to the lick-log.

Thus, Harvey Wasserman, a longtime leader of the anti-nuclear movement, cutting to the chase: "Anyone who advocates nuclear power as a solution to our energy problems should be shut up in a padded cell."

Wasserman can, of course, discuss the details of nuclear plant design, risk, insurance, regulation, waste disposal, etc., ad nauseum. It's just that he would rather not waste his time on the obvious.

One session I attended here not expecting to learn much new (but it's always nice to have your prejudices confirmed) was titled "Our Fake Energy Crisis: What Really Happened in California."

The aforementioned Wasserman waded in with a will, describing the dastardly tale of ruthless utility companies determined to unload the "stranded costs" of their monumental folly in building nuclear plants -- $20 billion worth in California's case -- on the ratepayers. Given that utility lobbyists literally wrote the California deregulation bill, it's quite a reach to blame it on anyone else.

This is a familiar tale to those who have read beyond the basic coverage of the California situation. Wasserman tells the story well, with a fine contempt for the greed and stupidity behind it all and for the politicians now seeking cover. But he presents a media mystery that has me stumped -- one of those cases of the media overlooking the obvious so completely that one is bereft of a handy explanation.

Some parts of California are not suffering from power problems of any kind. In Los Angeles and Sacramento, the lights are still on and the rates have not doubled or tripled. As it happens, the people of Los Angeles and Sacramento own their own power plants. This glaringly obvious fact has for some reason escaped media attention, except in California.

The history of how utility ownership and regulation came about is crucial to this story. Wasserman quoted a 19th century mayor of Cleveland, Tom Johnson, who said, "If we don't control the electric utilities, they will control us."

As is often the case with business and government regulation, it was the utilities themselves that asked for regulation, knowing full well that they could easily dominate state public utility commissions. "Regulation" evolved so that utilities were permitted to make 15 percent on invested capital -- a tidy sum.

This lasted until the early 1990s, when wholesale prices fell, tempting the utilities into deregulation. They dumped the stranded nuke costs on the ratepayers and made a promise in exchange -- no rate increases -- which they promptly broke when wholesale prices went up. Ask the people of San Diego.

The performance of the suppliers in this case -- Enron, Reliant, etc. -- is already the subject of public inquiry. But the California utility companies were meanwhile shipping the recovered nuke costs to their parent companies. And then, in a truly sublime move, the major California utility gave its executives huge bonuses just before it went into bankruptcy.

Wasserman's suggested solution is that Californians should simply get themselves out of the grid by setting up municipally owned power companies. In rural areas, this can be done by counties or electric co-ops. He believes that what held the old system together for so long was not government regulation, which was always blatantly subject to manipulation by the utilities (as anyone who has ever covered a PUC can tell you), but rather the tension between the for-profits and the municipals.

In the current issue of Business Week, the cover story is on Exxon Mobil's plan to take advantage of the "energy crisis." This would normally be funny, given that Exxon is in the oil business and (as most people outside the Oval Office are aware), the oil business has nothing to do with electricity. However, Exxon's acquisition of Mobil, which is rich in natural gas, unleashes a corporate behemoth of unprecedented size. Exxon also has a corporate culture that would give nightmares to "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap of business fame.

Here are some interesting facts from the Rocky Mountain Institute: The cheapest source of new electricity is efficiency; the next cheapest is burning soft coal, which is a gross polluter; and the next cheapest after that is wind power -- 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

-------- environment

Geographical Correlation vs CFS

From: Magnu96196@aol.com
Mon, 16 Apr 2001

Hello Folks,

Most of the folks with GWI complaints recognize that some of their symptoms fall into the CFS and MCS domain, so it might be good to review the past a little and get to the bottom of the toxic connections.

It was way back in the early 80's that CFS first came on the illness scene in an area called Lake Tahoe, Ca., as discovered by doctors like Dr. Cheney. Nature often tells us things, when were are wise enough to pay attention.

Lake Tahoe and the surrounding region are volcanic in origin, which means lots of fluorides and toxic metals like lead. Volcanoes and old volcanic soils and water supplies from them create some effects like from ODS toxic emissions. See the local water report.

http://tahoe.ceres.ca.gov/stpud/wqreport.html

Fluoride mg/L 2.0 1 ND - 0.3 0.1 Erosion of natural deposits

Correlation of Lake Tahoe drinking water with medium high fluorides and other pollutants suggests that this toxic effect is involved in the original CFS cluster found there in the long term residents.

Fluorides tend to make insoluble calcium fluorides in the lymph system from the actions of macrophage based oxygen cell reduction. Macrophages are pathogen destruction cells that eat cell material and digest it with peroxide chemicals. Similarly, metals in the lymph system processed by oxygen reduction result in insoluble metal oxides. Both these types of insoluble products accumulate in the lymph system macrophage cells and damage their mitochondria in the long term. The accumulation of toxic materials impairs the lymph system and leads to virals and other pathogens getting out of control. Prime examples of the virals out of regulation are HHV-6, CMV, and EBV that so often are the markers for CFS illnesses, many others are possible depending on exposures.

This cumulative toxic effect impairs the pathogen reduction mechanism and also sets off cytokine secretory generation from the macrophage toxic cell damage. Macrophages are type one secretory cells of cytokines and produce TNFa in the lymph system. Just this one effect is well connected to fatugue, flu symptoms, foggy thinking, rashes, etc., which are common to both CFS and GWI.

In a similar light, one can say there is a geographical correlation for GWS to the Gulf War zone and the toxics of the GW, that include many halogen chemicals and metals that can set up these same lymph system toxic conditions that set off the original discoveries of CFS. All the toxics that damage cells and trigger the immune system pull the toxic materials into the lymph system macrophages and if there are insoluble conversion products, then the long term effects of CFS can appear.

--------

Australia may not ratify Kyoto accord

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/16/2001
By PETER O'CONNOR Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406743324

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - The Australian government indicated Sunday it won't ratify the Kyoto agreement on climate change, drawing immediate criticism from a global meeting of environmental activists.

Australian Environment Minister Sen. Robert Hill said the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was defunct because the United States would not ratify it.

``I don't think Kyoto can last without the U.S.,'' Hill told Seven Network television from New York. Hill is in the United States to assess Washington's stance on greenhouse gas issues.

To come into force, the 1997 treaty requires 55 countries to ratify it. The 55 countries must also be responsible for at least 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

The United States produces 25 percent of global emissions. Australia is the world's biggest emitter per head of population, responsible for nearly 2 percent of emissions while accounting for 1 percent of global economic activity.

Hill said Australia would not ratify the treaty ahead of the United States.

``We've always said we wouldn't ratify ahead of the U.S.,'' he said.

President Bush said last month he would back out of the Kyoto Protocol because major developing nations were not covered by it. Under the agreement, developed countries agreed to legally binding targets for curbing heat-trapping ``greenhouse'' gases, which are mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

Hill's comments come as about 800 green politicians and activists from 70 countries attended a three-day Global Greens 2001 conference in Canberra.

Delegates reacted angrily to the Australian position.

``The world's got a pretty simple choice here, it's between President Bush and our grandchildren. Mr. (Australian Prime Minister John) Howard has chosen President Bush,'' said conference host, Australian Greens senator, Bob Brown.

``The U.S. is only 25 percent (of world emissions), it cannot scuttle the Kyoto Protocol,'' Brown told The Associated Press.

He said Australia should take a lead roll along with Europe, New Zealand and Japan to ratify Kyoto without the United States.

Brown claimed the U.S. and Australian governments were attempting to divide Europe and Japan to kill the agreement.

Secretary General of the German Greens, Rheinhard Butikofer, told The Associated Press he was optimistic the treaty would come into force.

``The European countries, and particularly my own, are putting up a big effort to form a coalition that will go ahead with climate policy even though the Americans are trying to thwart that,'' he said.

``The world should send a strong message to the Americans indicating that we are not going to accept their arrogance,'' he said.

The Global Greens conference is preparing a plan to boycott U.S. oil companies to protest Bush's decision on Kyoto.

---

Oil vessel sinks in Persian Gulf

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/16/2001
By ANWAR FARUQI Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406743210

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - A ship smuggling thousands of tons of Iraqi oil sank in the Persian Gulf, a U.S. Navy official said Sunday, and authorities here said some of the fuel spilled into the water.

Emergency crews were trying to contain the spill more than 24 hours after the ship sank, an official at the Dubai Port Control said Sunday. He said helicopters were at the scene, some 20 miles off the coast.

A port official in Sharjah, an emirate about 20 miles north of Jebel Ali, said a stretch of polluted waters had been found off the coast of Sharjah.

The Georgian-flagged vessel went down Saturday near Dubai's Jebel Ali port with 3,850 tons of fuel oil on board, said Cmdr. Jeff Gradeck, spokesman for the Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

The Emirate's Federal Environmental Agency, however, put the fuel figure at only 1,430 tons.

Gradeck said the ship had been intercepted several days earlier for violating U.N. sanctions against Iraq. ``The ship was en route to a holding area in international waters for sanction-busting ships when it sank,'' he said.

After the ship was damaged by rough waves, two U.S. ships in the area helped the 11-member Iraqi crew stabilize the vessel, he said. But by Saturday afternoon, the ship began sinking, Gradeck said, adding that the Emirates' coast guard rescued the crew.

Under sanctions imposed by the United Nations following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq can sell oil only on condition that most of the proceeds are used to meet Iraqis' basic needs.

Oil smuggled out outside the so-called oil-for-food deal _ and the vessels carrying the illegal shipments _ are auctioned off.

Ships loaded with smuggled Iraqi oil routinely pass through the waters off the Emirates. But after an oil barge believed to be carrying Iraqi fuel spilled fuel off the Emirates in 1998 and contaminated some nine miles of coastline, the Emirates launched a crackdown on sanctions-busting tankers.

In January last year, a tanker carrying 1,080 tons of crude oil from Abu Dhabi to Somalia sank in bad weather four miles off the Emirates' coast, spilling about 330 short tons of crude.

-------- police

Despite Report After Report, Unrest Endures in Cincinnati

New York Times
April 16, 2001
By KEVIN SACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/national/16RACE.html

CINCINNATI, April 15 - For some residents of this racially embattled city, the Justice Department's decision to open a preliminary investigation into the police department's treatment of minorities follows a familiar pattern. A black man is killed, an investigation is conducted, hearings are held, a report is written and then promptly forgotten.

Rather than investigate, the residents say, Justice Department lawyers could simply read. They could start with the report of the Kerner Commission, which studied race riots in Cincinnati and seven other cities in 1968. They could move on to the report of a mayoral community relations panel that concluded in 1979 that police and city officials "neither really care nor are willing to do anything about reported incidents of misconduct."

They could leaf through the 1981 report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which accused the Cincinnati police of discriminatory hiring practices and criticized their lack of standards for using force. In 1981 and again in 1987, the city signed consent decrees, under federal pressure, to improve the hiring and promotion of black officers. In 1995, after a brutality case involving a black student, the city manager appointed a police review panel that concluded that racism persisted in the department because of "a reluctance to institute necessary organizational and procedural reforms."

Despite all the study, the problems have endured in Cincinnati, which, like Los Angeles, New York and other American cities, has had recurring racial problems involving its police force.

Since 1995, there have been 15 fatal police shootings of black men , and none of whites. In 1999, the city's black police officers' association issued a report detailing more than 150 complaints from black citizens about racial profiling and the use of excessive force. Earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union incorporated many of those complaints in a federal lawsuit accusing the police department of an array of discriminatory practices.

And so, it was not just the report of a police officer's gunshot, but also its echo, that incited civil unrest in Cincinnati last week.

When a white officer killed an unarmed black man on April 7, it revived the lingering distrust that has riven this city's black community from its predominantly white police force for more than three decades, long enough for frustrations to have been passed from one generation to the next.

"The anger in this city has been building to a boiling point for years," said Scotty Johnson, a 15-year-veteran of the police department and the president of the Sentinel Police Association, a group of about 250 black officers formed in 1968. "Everybody has warned city officials and the police department that you're going to have an explosion in Cincinnati if you keep up the same practices."

Some of the studies conducted over the years virtually predicted that their recommendations would be ignored. The 1995 report by the city manager's review panel, which urged a renewed commitment to diversity in hiring, promotions and training, warned against lip service.

"Pious words without resolute and continuous implementation are widely recognized to be the kind of official hypocrisy which generates public cynicism and anger," the report said. "This alienates large sectors of the population."

That shot over the bow never landed, said former Gov. John J. Gilligan, who headed the panel. "We had a lot of recommendations in there for which we were profoundly thanked," Mr. Gilligan said. "And that was the end of that."

Obviously, the nature and racial disparity of the police shootings have created the most concern, though prominent blacks acknowledge that many have been justifiable. They also recognize that the officers involved in several shootings are black. Of the 15 killings since 1995, six of the suspects had guns, one took an officer's gun, one wielded a knife, one a brick and one a nail- studded board. Two were in vehicles.

But three of the suspects, including 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, who was killed on April 7, were unarmed, and at least four of the shootings are considered questionable. In addition to the Thomas case, which will be examined by a grand jury this week, the incidents include the Nov. 7, 2000, death of Roger Owensby Jr., 29, an unarmed man who died of asphyxiation after being subdued by several officers; the March 19, 1999, death of Michael Carpenter, 30, who was shot at nine times through a car window; and the Feb. 23, 1997, shooting of Lorenzo Collins, an escaped psychiatric patient who, armed with a brick, was shot after being surrounded by 15 officers.

Only one of the cases, that of Mr. Carpenter, prompted a reprimand of any officer involved. No police officer in Cincinnati has ever been convicted of killing a citizen, though two have been indicted in the Owensby case.

The perceived toothlessness of the police department's disciplinary process grates on many black residents. "There's this automatic defensiveness that nothing they do is ever questionable," said Marian A. Spencer, a civil rights leader who was Cincinnati's first black city councilwoman.

The city's civilian review panel does not have subpoena powers. And each of the last 10 officers who have appealed disciplinary measures have persuaded arbitrators to overturn their punishments. The police chief has said he feels he has little power to rid the department of bad apples.

In one recent case, Officer Robert Hill was fired by the city last year after a convenience store's security camera captured him throwing a 68- year-old Alzheimer's patient to the floor. The patient, who is white, was armed with only a paint brush and a cordless drill. He broke several bones.

Mr. Hill appealed his dismissal through an arbitration process that is allowed under the police department's contract with its officers' union, the Fraternal Order of Police. The arbitrator reinstated Mr. Hill, and he is now in line to be promoted to sergeant after scoring well on a civil service examination.

"We've got a chief that can't really mete out discipline, officers committing misconduct with impunity, and a discipline arbitration process that takes years and is incredibly frustrating," said Robert Harrod, the executive director of Cincinnati's chapter of the National Conference for Community and Justice.

Lt. Col. Richard S. Biehl, one of four assistant chiefs, said the shootings must be considered individually and not as part of a pattern. Colonel Biehl also said the killings of three police officers over the last four years, two of them black, seemed to have been lost in the debate over the use of force.

Colonel Biehl also said the department had made strides in recent years by adopting a stricter policy regarding the use of deadly force on suspects in moving vehicles, by encouraging the use of Mace and stun guns instead of bullets and by buying high-tech training equipment. As in other cities, the department is also moving toward a community policing approach, though critics say the movement has been slow.

The minority composition of the police force, though it has grown substantially since the consent decrees were signed, continues to trail that of the population. About 28 percent of officers are black in a city where 43 percent of the 331,000 residents are black. The number of blacks on the force has increased to 290 today, from 115 in 1986, and there is one black assistant chief and one black captain. By comparison, about 14 percent of New York City's police officers are black, while 25 percent of the approximately eight million residents are black.

But in Cincinnati there has never been a black police chief, a job that has almost always gone to a white career officer from the city's west side. Some blacks fault an unusual civil service system that requires the chief to be selected from among other high-ranking officers who pass a test. They also complain that city officials have little power over police policy because the chief reports directly to a public safety director and not to the city manager or the mayor.

Critics of the department also charge that its diversity training is inadequate, and that the city has yet to establish a database that would enable easy tracking of every officer's disciplinary record. The department had committed to doing so as part of a 1998 consent decree.

It was not just the shooting of Mr. Thomas that struck a chord in the black community. The incident also resonated because the police were trying to arrest him for 12 misdemeanor traffic citations and 2 warrants charging him with running from the police. For many blacks who have become accustomed to regular traffic stops, the nature of those warrants raised the specter of racial profiling.

Several prominent blacks also said they could understand Mr. Thomas's decision to run from officers when he was stopped. The Rev. Damon Lynch III said blacks often run from the police because "they're thinking, `If I don't run, I get beat up, get my head pushed into the ground, I get hit with the sticks, I get pushed into the car door.'"

A number of city leaders said Cincinnati's entrenched residential segregation was to blame for much of the fear and distrust. The city is the eighth-most segregated in the country, according to newly released census figures, and young whites and blacks learn to be wary of each other and each other's neighborhoods, civic leaders said.

"You have frightened citizens and frightened police," said Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, one of the A.C.L.U. lawyers suing the city. "And that's a dangerous combination."

---

Problems with police not new

USA Today
04/16/2001 - Updated 10:39 PM ET
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-16-policeproblems.htm

WASHINGTON - They are images that have cast the nation's police as increasingly out of control, vexed by racial tension, corruption, poor community relations and a range of other festering problems: In Cincinnati, police are accused of using excessive force in the shooting deaths of 15 black men in the past six years; in New York, a black man named Amadou Diallo dies in a hail of police bullets as he reaches for his wallet; another black man, Abner Louima, is sodomized by officers in a police station; and in Prince George's County, Md., officers allow police dogs to maul suspects during arrests.

Has abuse by police become a national epidemic? Not quite, criminal justice specialists say. Problems between police and the communities they are assigned to protect have long been simmering in many cities. What is different, analysts say, is that such conflicts are being thrust into the national spotlight.

"There is only an epidemic in uncovering police misconduct," says Geoff Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminology professor.

Call it the legacy of Rodney King.

Alpert and other analysts say increased scrutiny by the public and the media is part of the continuing fallout from the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittals of police officers involved in beating King during a traffic stop nearly a decade ago. For African-Americans and many others, a bystander's grainy videotape of the beating became a symbol of overly aggressive police nationwide.

The King case helped push Congress in 1994 to expand the authority of the Justice Department's civil rights division to deal with allegations of police abuses. Since then, Justice attorneys have been able to investigate and file civil lawsuits where they find a "pattern or practice" of police misconduct, such as use of excessive force, false arrests, unreasonable searches and racial profiling in traffic stops.

Last week, Cincinnati's police department became the 14th law enforcement agency to be under investigation by the Justice Department. The agencies being examined are both large and small, ranging from big cities to suburban departments. Among them:

Riverside, Calif., where a young woman was fatally shot by an officer while sitting in a car. New York, where one of two pending investigations is focusing on the stop-and-frisk practices of an elite street-crimes police unit. New Orleans, where the department has been mired in corruption allegations for years.

The Justice Department has filed five lawsuits against law enforcement agencies. Four have led to consent decrees, in which departments agreed to institute reforms. Such agreements were reached with Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Ohio, Los Angeles and the New Jersey State Police. The fifth lawsuit is pending against the department in Columbus, Ohio, where officers allegedly engaged in a questionable pattern of arrests and searches.

"Unfortunately, (police misconduct) is not new," says Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau.

In the aftermath of the King riots, the NAACP held hearings in seven cities and discovered a simmering discontent among blacks, particularly related to traffic stops. "African-Americans, no matter what part of the country they were from, felt they were being treated more harshly, that they were being treated with less respect than other groups," Shelton says.

They're complaining more than ever about it, says Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha: "Public expectations have risen. People are saying, 'We're not going to put up with this anymore.' "

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, says "expectations should be higher for police." But it's unfair for all police to be tarnished by the actions of a few, he says.

Although a Justice Department inquiry can calm tempers and reassure minorities, it doesn't mean all problems will be solved. The cases are difficult to prove and take time.

Often, Justice doesn't head off problems by uncovering wrongdoing. Instead, it usually enters the fray only after tensions explode. "They are not out looking for cases," says law professor Michael Selmi of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

A senior Justice official says the 30-lawyer unit that conducts such probes receives hundreds of complaints a year, mostly allegations involving individual police officers.

The numbers sound alarming, professor Walker says, but police misconduct isn't spreading from big cities to small towns. Rather, he says, "It's always been there."

---

South African police face slaughter

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/16/2001
By RAVI NESSMAN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406743784

SOWETO, South Africa (AP) - The fervent melodies of the pre-Easter prayer service fill the hall behind a police station in Soweto with a desperate appeal to God: Stop the slaughter of our police.

South Africa's police are being killed at a startling rate. Since 1994, 1,597 officers have been killed out of a national force of about 130,000, and although the rate went down last year, it still averaged a death every two days. New York City, by contrast, lost only three officers out of a force of 41,000 last year, all in car accidents.

``We need prayers,'' the Soweto area commissioner, Martin Maphanga, told the more than 100 officers and churchgoers gathered for a service that went on for hours with marches, speeches, songs and prayer in a mixture of South Africa's languages.

Criminals' increasing boldness, police corruption and the lingering hatred South Africans have for the security forces that enforced apartheid have contributed to the attacks, experts say.

Visiting the families of two slain police officers last month, Safety and Security Minister Steve Tshwete said it appeared police were ``just being shot for no apparent reason.'' The mere sight of police officers seemed to incite criminals to kill them, he said.

The killings are so pervasive that every morning Inspector Maurice Pikwa straps on his bulletproof vest, picks up his gun and then pauses to offer a silent prayer.

``You never know when you are going to be killed,'' he said.

Pikwa, 38, has already been shot once _ during the dying days of apartheid, in 1993, he was caught in the cross fire in riots in Soweto. At that time, many officers of the mainly black force were targeted as lackeys of the oppressive white-led government. Though blacks now occupy many of the senior management positions previously held by whites, police are still viewed by many blacks as the enemy.

Many of the officers killed on duty would have survived had they been wearing their bulletproof vests, said Riaan van Staden, head of the police service's directorate of police safety, which was established in 1999 to reduce the killings.

``Police officers are not that adamant about their own safety,'' he said.

But two-thirds of the victims were killed off-duty.

In some instances, off-duty officers still in uniform and carrying guns have been killed when they stumbled upon crimes, van Staden said. In other cases, corrupt officers are killed committing crimes themselves, he said.

Many have been killed near bars, leading police to conclude they were drunk and brawling, van Staden said. The police department is working to curb alcohol abuse in the ranks.

Police union officials say a more serious problem is low pay. Rookies earn less than 37,000 rand _ about $4,500 _ a year. They must commute in crowded taxi vans, where they are under constant threat of being ambushed for their guns or simply for being police officers.

And few citizens come to their defense, said Moses Mokomane of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union.

``The police are still viewed as if they were still defending the ideology of the past,'' he said.

Under that ideology, police could shoot at suspects with little fear of repercussions, police spokesman Superintendent Leon Engelbrecht said.

``There was a respect for the police. There was a fear of police that does not exist today,'' Engelbrecht said. ``Criminals today are more brutal, they have no more fear and they would do anything to get away.''

As startling as the numbers are, they have improved dramatically. In 1994, 265 police were killed. Last year, only 185 were slain. In Gauteng, the province that includes the cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Soweto, 62 officers were killed out of a force of 22,000, down from 96 in 1998.

Nonetheless, the killings have badly damaged the confidence of a public still wary of their security force, said Sibusiso Masuku, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.

``If they are unable to defend themselves, how can they defend us?'' he said.

---

Swift justice raises questions
Quick court deal on case of passing police information

Montreal Gazette
Monday 16 April 2001
LYNN MOORE The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010416/5015898.html

On Thursday, top Montreal Urban Community police officers made front-page news when they accused a police officer, his retired partner and a private detective of passing confidential police information to organized criminal groups.

On Saturday, the three men and their lawyers reached an agreement about jail sentences with two prosecutors and presented - with little detail - the plea bargains to a judge who sentenced the men.

Yesterday, leading Quebec civil rights lawyer Julius Grey said that Justice Minister Paul Begin and Public Security Minister Serge Menard should consider shedding some light on the case in an attempt to ensure public confidence in both the justice system and the police department.

"I'd like the public to know more about it. I would like all the suspicions to be assuaged if possible," Grey said in an interview.

'We All See Movies'

Given the speed in which the case was resolved - in the middle of a holiday weekend - and the unanswered questions, many people may wonder needlessly about what went on behind the scenes, he said.

"We all see movies, Serpico and so on, and we all know that there could be very powerful people behind this," Grey said.

Of key interest is the role - if any - that organized crime played in the case that MUC police chief Michel Sarrazin described as "revolting" during a press conference on Thursday.

Commander Andre Durocher told reporters then that information obtained from police computers was given to biker gangs and other organized-crime groups, like the Russian Mafia.

Charged with illegally transmitting information contained in police databanks were Det.-Sgt. Alain Desrosiers, retired Det.-Sgt. Claude Aubin, now the operator of a private investigation business, and his associate, Michel Charbonneau.

According to all accounts available yesterday, the possible involvement of organized crime was not aired before the court on Saturday.

Crown prosecutors "could have divulged whatever they wanted to the court in the courtroom. The crown made the representations as it deemed appropriate," defence lawyer Philip Schneider said yesterday.

He represented Desrosiers, a 23-year veteran of the force whose arrest last week concluded an investigation that began last fall.

The prosecutors, Lyne Morais and Jean-Pierre Boyer, could not be reached for comment yesterday.

A spokesman for Begin said that Begin would not have any comment on the court's ruling nor would he comment on the prosecutor's handling of the case. A spokesman for Menard said he would not comment on case.

An MUC police spokesman said that perhaps Sarrazin or other senior officers might have a comment to make on the case next week.

While everyone has the right to plead guilty to a crime at the earliest opportunity, the resolution of this high-profile case raises questions about whether prosecutors should be concerned about what goes on the public record, Grey said.

"We know that prosecutors have duty to the public in terms of convicting criminals ... do they also have a duty to the public in terms of providing the transparency that some people would like?"he said.

Publication bans are sought or information is not presented in open court for various reasons, including the need to protect the identity of victims or police sources, he noted.

"There are reasons at times for not disclosing information but in this case, they haven't been invoked," he said.

On Saturday morning, Desrosiers, Aubin and Charbonneau made their first court appearance in Laval. Everything was over by 1:30 p.m.

Schneider said that even he was surprised at how quickly the matter was settled.

"I went there for a (simple) appearance and then discussions (with the prosecutors) started and information started being exchanged and it quickly turned into something else and we settled the matter to the satisfaction and in the interest of everybody," he said.

The lawyers appeared before Quebec Court Judge Michel Duceppe. A number of journalists were also present but the turnout was lower than normal given the holiday weekend. The Gazette, which did not publish yesterday, didn't have anyone there.

Arms Charges

"The crown stood up and gave a resume of the facts to the court for the court to accept a guilty plea," Schneider said. "The court accepted a guilty plea and (brief) joint submissions on sentence were made ... and the judge imposed the sentences in question."

In addition to the other charges, Aubin pleaded guilty to more than 25 charges of illegal possession and storage of firearms and ammunition.

According to accounts published yesterday in La Presse and Le Journal de Montreal, the court was told that Desrosiers used his access code to retrieve information from the provincial police data bank and the MUC's Forcefield data bank. He supplied Aubin with information and more than a 100 photographs of criminals. Aubin then sold the material to his clients. Desrosiers never received any form of payment for the material.

Asked if the identities of Aubin's clients were disclosed in court, Schneider said no. He would not comment or speculate on whether the ultimate users of the information were linked to criminal groups.

"From what I can remember, I don't think the crown made any allegations or reference to organized crime," Schneider said.

Six-Month Curfew

Aubin's lawyer, John Pepper, could not be reached for comment.

"I wasn't particularly interested in what Aubin did or didn't do (with the information) because it didn't particularly affect my client's position," Schneider said. "As soon as my client gave out information to a third party, he committed the criminal offence in question."

Desrosiers was given a conditional sentence of two years less a day to be served outside jail. The terms include a six-month curfew, requiring that he be at home between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Desrosiers, the father of one, also "lost his career," Schneider said.

Aubin was sentenced to two years in prison and forbidden to possess firearms for 10 years. Charbonneau was given an 18-month conditional sentence to be served outside jail.

The guilty pleas were entered because there were strong and solid cases against the men, Schneider said. They also meant that the cases would be quickly settled - something that judges view favorably during sentencing - and the men would not have to consider being remanded in custody until tomorrow, he said.

- Lynn Moore can be reached at moorel@thegazette.southam.ca

---

Police do well

Montreal Gazette
Monday 16 April 2001
http://www.montrealgazette.com/editorial/pages/010416/5015611.html

Letter to the Editor

I am impressed with the continued string of victories by our police against organized crime. It seems that almost daily there is a new story about a cracked auto-theft ring, seizure of a drug importer's cash or the arrest of a major gang leader.

These successes come after what appeared to be years of police inaction while gang leaders gained celebrity status. I was losing confidence in our justice system, following stories of assassinated justice workers, unreasonably light sentences and even dismissed charges because of planted evidence.

Events over the last few weeks have restored my confidence. The police have every right to be proud of themselves.

Roger McCallum Pointe-au-Chene

---

Battered Cincinnati looks for lessons

Christian Science Monitor
MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2001
By Abraham McLaughlin (mclaughlina@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/04/16/fpcon-intl.shtml

CINCINNATI - For Kimberly Thompson, the recent riots, the police shootings, and the decades of racial tension in her usually quiet Midwestern city all come down to one thing: "That could have been my son."

As this mother of four talks about African-American teenager Timothy Thomas, who was killed April 7 by a white policeman, it's clear that she and many of her neighbors see the riots that erupted after the shooting as a desperate but understandable reaction to a system that they consider utterly unfair. But many say the violence has also served a purpose, highlighting enduring grievances.

Now, as Cincinnati settles into an uneasy calm, enforced by nightly curfews, the question is whether this city that both literally and figuratively straddles the American divide between North and South can pull together and bridge its racial differences.

To a certain extent, Cincinnati is like so many other cities in the recent past - Los Angeles, Oakland, Baltimore, and others - that have seen a controversial police shooting, usually of a minority, break out in urban violence.

But Cincinnati is also unusual, and consequently its handling of the latest incident may hold lessons for other cities trying to deal with enduring tensions between blacks and whites.

The specifics of this case remain the subject of starkly different interpretations by the city's different factions.

What is known is that the 19-year-old Thomas didn't have a gun on that fateful night he was shot - though he did have a record of 14 misdemeanors. When Officer Steven Roach tried to arrest him, Thomas ran away. The chase continued down an alley, where Thomas was killed. Officer Roach says he thought Thomas was reaching for a gun.

Thomas was the 15th black man killed here by police in the past six years. Police are quick point out that 13 of the 15 victims were armed - and some shot police first. Both local authorities and the FBI are investigating the latest incident. After the shooting, two days of riots caused about $1 million in damage.

Behind all the specific complaints about police misconduct lie fundamental changes that have contributed at times to tensions in the city.

City problems

In some respects, Cincinnati has been in a state of slow decline since 1950. Once filled with 503,000 residents, the city now has only 331,000. For the most part, those who left have been middle class and white - and they have gone to the suburbs.

In 1970, Cincinnati was 28 percent African-American. Today, it's 43 percent black. With few other ethnic groups, the city is basically bipolar.

"Here, diversity comes in two colors and one language," says Daniel Hurley, a Cincinnati historian. "All issues become racial...."

On the surface, Cincinnati appears to be the model of a civil and civic-minded American city. It is bursting with Fortune 500 companies and cultural anchors: Procter & Gamble, Kroger Foods, and the city's symphony, ballet, and opera companies.

Yet it's also home to considerable poverty. Of the nation's 75 biggest cities, it is the 12th highest for people living below poverty, according to Census figures. It's also one of the top 10 most-segregated cities in the US.

Here, rich and poor often coexist side by side. A bevy of upscale stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co., stands less than half a mile from the poor neighborhoods where last week's violence broke out.

With the rioting over for now, neighborhood activists and others are watching to see what happens with the investigation into the shooting and what changes might come about as result.

"All the kids want is some real resolution," says Patricia Muhammad, a mother of nine dressed in a black pinstriped pantsuit.

On Saturday, she led a march of 20-somethings through Over the Rhine, the tattered neighborhood where most of the riots took place. Of her motivation for marching, she says with finality: "Most of my kids are girls, and they're going to need husbands."

At one point, the crowd walks toward a line of police clad in riot gear and armed with bean-bag shooting guns. As one group of teens edges toward the police, Ms. Muhammad yells, "This is a peaceful march. Y'all go and be gangsters if you want to, but this is a peaceful march."

The boys back down, and the crowd changes directions. It was a marked difference from the atmosphere of recent days. "The adults have arrived," says Robert Pace, head of the local Black Youth Movement.

Indeed, there's been no shortage of national leaders arriving in Cincinnati the past week. The Rev. Al Sharpton arrived yesterday. Kweisi Mfume, head of the NAACP, led marches this weekend. Members of The New Black Panther Party, wearing black berets, carried the coffin at Thomas's funeral on Saturday.

A time for change?

Locals are skeptical that these recent arrivals will be able to get much done - or that they'll stay very long.

Already, some hints of changes exist. Justice Department civil rights attorneys are now investigating the practices of the police department. And momentum is building behind a plan to change the hiring procedure of the city's police chief. Currently, the chief can be chosen only from the rank and file, which makes reform less likely. A reforming chief hired from the outside, residents argue, would better be able to push through changes.

Says Randy Brown, a sinewy man in a Polo cap standing on a downtown street corner, "Sometimes it takes a revolution for peace to happen - for people to see what's really going on."

-------- spying

Navy Crew's Ordeal of Terror and Tedium

New York Times
April 16, 2001
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/world/16CREW.html

OAK HARBOR, Wash., April 15 - In the harrowing minutes after their midair collision, they were filled with terror, and many were certain they would die. The plane was vibrating. The altimeter was out. Warning lights were flashing.

But once they survived, the mood was just the opposite, with long days spent playing Solitaire, acting out hallway skits, and even teaching a Chinese guard the lyrics to "Hotel California" - spells that were broken by hours at a time of interrogation.

Today, on their first full day back home at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station here, several of the 24 crew members who were detained in China gave the news media their fullest account yet of their experiences from the time their EP-3E surveillance plane was bumped by a Chinese fighter on April 1 to their release 11 days later.

The episode began late into a 10- hour mission, while they were traveling at the lumbering speed of 207 miles an hour and about to return to base in Okinawa, Japan. After buzzing their plane several times, a Chinese F-8 fighter clipped the turbo- prop's No. 1 propeller, rendering it inoperable, and knocked off the nose cone.

Lt. Patrick C. Honeck of La Mesa, Calif., was watching out the window. "After his first two runs at us, it got kind of surreal, like slow motion," he said, recalling that the pilot, Wang Wei, saluted the American crew on his first pass, and "mouthed something to us" on the second.

On the third approach, the Chinese fighter collided with the American plane, causing it to begin falling - nose down - from an altitude of 22,500 feet. The Chinese jet, meanwhile, broke in half, crashing into the sea and presumably killing the pilot.

Inside the American plane, crew members were terrified.

"The first thing I thought of was, `Oh, my God,' " said Aviation Machinist's Mate Second Class Wendy S. Westbrook of Rock Creek, Ohio, the navigator. "All I could see was blue water."

"All the crew members were scared at that point," said Lt. j.g. Jeffrey R. Vignery of Goodland, Kan.

The mission commander and pilot, Shane J. Osborn, a hulking lieutenant from Norfolk, Neb., changed to the seat on the left, where landing procedures are generally conducted, and began working the controls to try to stabilize the plane.

"I was hoping and praying he was going to get us out of this," Lieutenant Vignery said. "I didn't think we were going to make it."

"I had already accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, but I said another prayer at that time in case I didn't get it right the first time," he said.

As the seconds passed, Lieutenant Obsorn gave the order to prepare to bail out, by parachute. But he was able gradually to pull the plane out of its dive, and he rescinded the command, telling the crew instead to prepare to ditch, which meant he intended to land on the water.

For people in the rear, that meant strapping in, facing the back of the plane to minimize any injury upon impact. Even as the plane was about to land on Hainan island, Lieutenant Honeck said, "people in the back thought we were going into the water." Meanwhile, inside the cabin, conditions made it difficult for crew members to concentrate.

"It was hard to breathe," Ms. Westbrook said.

And hard to communicate. "You had to yell to talk to the person next to you," Lieutenant Honeck said.

Lieutenant Osborn regained enough control of the plane that Lieutenant Honeck moved to the back to study maps to see where the plane might land. They quickly ruled out a run for Okinawa, which was four and a half hours away, or the Philippines, which was farther, because of strain on the wounded engine and fears that the propeller might fly off and pierce the fuselage.

"I knew where we were," Lieutenant Honeck said. "I knew we were near Hainan Island," and they chose that as their safest destination, even though they did not have Chinese permission to land.

"There were a lot of Mayday calls on the radio," Lieutenant Honeck said, adding that the noise inside the plane was so loud that it might have prevented the Chinese authorities from hearing them. But in any case, aircraft routinely can emit electronic signals of distress that show up prominently on the radar screens of traffic controllers.

More worrisome, he added, "once we headed for land, I was concerned that they were going to send more interceptors at us."

As the plane headed for Hainan, the crew began destroying sensitive equipment on board. The crew members declined today to discuss any aspect of those activities, including what they did or whether they completed the task.

Once the plane landed safely, Lieutenant Osborn said that as commander, he wanted to be the first to walk off. A small group of armed Chinese military, including an interpreter, approached.

"He told us not to move and don't do anything," the lieutenant said. "I asked if I could use a phone to call the U.S. ambassador to let him know we were safe on deck, but he said they had already taken care of that. Then they told us to get off the plane, and they were pretty adamant about it. We dropped a ladder, and I got off first."

On the ground, he said, the Chinese offered the crew water and cigarettes and "told us not to worry." The Americans were then herded into vans and taken to what they perceived as officers quarters on the Lingshui military base. "Their best barracks," Lieutenant Osborn said. "But by American standards, they were poor. Lots and lots of bugs and mosquitoes. But it was livable."

The crew was provided with basics like toothpaste and electric shavers - no razors, they said. Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, an American military attaché from Beijing who met the crew on the first day, got them clean socks and underwear. Lieutenant Osborn said the general had assured the crew that efforts by the Bush administration to secure their release were being conducted at the "highest level" and that their families had been notified.

The crew remained at Lingshui, together, for two nights before the Chinese moved them to a nearby base lodge in Haikou, a modest building where the Americans were placed into rooms on two floors, which the crew members said they assumed to be bugged. Lieutenant Osborn was the only one to have a room to himself, which was not necessarily a luxury. Aside from meals, crew members were segregated from those occupying other rooms.

The rooms had television sets without cable and phones that did not work. Meals varied, they said. "It was Chinese food, but definitely not Americanized," said Lieutenant Vignery, adding that the Chinese served them fish heads "until they realized we weren't into fish heads."

Interrogations, which the Chinese videotaped, were conducted at various times, often in the middle of the night and sometimes lasting as long as five hours. And for the first few days, they provided the crew with their only real activity. The members would not discuss any of the dialogue with the Chinese, other than to say some of the guards were friendly enough that they satisfied requests for decks of cards. Later, the guards brought them copies of a newspaper in English, from which Ms. Westbrook said they learned nothing of their situation.

But light reading was not enough to break the tedium, so Lieutenant Honeck said he and Lieutenant Vignery began writing humorous skits to perform in the hallways when the group was taken to their meals.

"They got quite a few laughs," he said. "We did a `People's Court' spoof, news like on `Saturday Night Live' and one of `The Crocodile Hunter.'" That is a cable show."

The crew developed an amiable relationship with the guards. One, Lieutenant Honeck said, "wanted to know the lyrics to an American song he heard, `Hotel California,' by the Eagles."

Lieutenant Osborn said that in the early days of detention, it crossed his mind that two decades ago, Americans were held hostage by Iranian captors for 444 days before their release. He did not expect a similar fate, but the thought nagged at him.

"We knew it might take a while; this was definitely going to be a touchy situation," he said. "But there was no wavering. I was confident we were going to get home."

---

U.S.-China talks to zero in on flights

USA Today
04/16/2001 - Updated 11:33 PM ET
By Dave Moniz and Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-16-chinameeting.htm

WASHINGTON - The United States and China will be looking Wednesday for ways to resolve their dispute over U.S. reconnaissance flights off the Chinese coast, Pentagon and State Department officials say. Both sides are expected to take a hard line initially when they meet in Beijing in the aftermath of the midair collision April 1 that led to the detention of 24 American military personnel. But U.S. officials say they are hopeful that the session will help ease tensions between the two nations.

"We look to the Chinese to address these issues in a straight manner, not an accusatory manner, not in a shrill manner," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday. "If they want to work some of these things out, we ought to be able to work them out."

The U.S. delegation is expected to demand the return of the Navy EP-3 spy plane that was forced to make an emergency landing on the Chinese island of Hainan after a collision with a Chinese F-8 fighter jet. The American side also plans to press China to back off its recent practice of buzzing Navy surveillance planes flying off the China coast.

The Chinese say the accident was caused by the pilot of the U.S. plane, but U.S. officials blame the Chinese pilot.

The 24 crewmembers aboard the Navy plane were released Thursday (China time) after 11 days of detention. But their damaged plane, which made an emergency landing on a Chinese military base, remains in China's possession. It is unclear how much intelligence information and technology they've gleaned from the Navy plane. Crewmembers have said they destroyed some sensitive eavesdropping equipment aboard but have not elaborated.

Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force general familiar with the Pacific, says both agendas are clear: The United States wants its coveted surveillance technology returned immediately, and China wants to push the United States as far from its shores as possible.

"This will set the table for the long-term relationship," he says.

The United States has said it will continue flying electronic surveillance missions in international airspace, which is defined as at least 12 miles offshore. The Navy plane was 70 miles off the China coast at the time of the collision.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the Pentagon is considering using fighter jets based on aircraft carriers to escort future American reconnaissance flights in the Pacific. But Pentagon officials downplay such an option. They say it is both logistically difficult and politically provocative.

Larry Wortzel, former military attache to China, said Monday that it is unclear how much success the United States will have in regaining the Navy plane. "I don't think that part is going to go real well," says Wortzel, who is now with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Wortzel says the U.S. side will stand firm on its legal right to fly surveillance missions in international airspace but is unlikely to object to Chinese monitoring of the flights - so long as it is done at a safe distance.

"This is not a new issue," he says. He adds that U.S. defense attaches have been talking to the Chinese about free navigation and intercepts since 1988.

Wortzel says he expects the U.S. delegation to bring to the meeting several videotapes that show the downed Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, flying dangerously close to other reconnaissance planes.

The U.S. delegation left for Beijing on Monday.

Contributing: USA TODAY reporter Bill Nichols

-------- terrorism

Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs

New York Times
April 16, 2001
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/world/16LANG.html

As a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World Trade Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the nose of law enforcement officials.

The F.B.I. held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb making that had been seized from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. There were phone calls the prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj guardedly told another terrorist how to build the bomb.

There was one problem: they were in Arabic. Nobody who understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six people and injured more than a thousand.

The tale is but one illustration of what intelligence and law enforcement officials describe as an increasingly dire lack of foreign language expertise that is undermining national security.

In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse and scattered over the map, military, diplomatic and intelligence officials are warning of critical shortages in their ability to understand the languages of other nations, and so unravel their secrets.

The reasons are many. With English increasingly becoming the world's lingua franca, the study of foreign languages has suffered. Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut budgets and focus on the basics of reading and math has shortchanged language courses, and districts that are interested in teaching foreign languages report a shortage of qualified teachers.

At the same time, the need for language proficiency has grown as security threats have fragmented and the ability to eavesdrop has expanded.

But government layoffs and employee buyouts have trimmed foreign language expertise drastically, said Theodore Crump, who is updating a book cataloging the federal government's foreign language needs. These days, most agencies can only hope to catch up with, rather than anticipate, their needs.

"Back in 1985 the terrorist thing didn't really come up," he said of the year he first prepared the book. "Now, when you have the possibility of someone coming in with a weapon of mass destruction in a suitcase, it changes the whole picture."

While the cold war's end has brought waves of immigrants with knowledge of obscure languages to the United States, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been reluctant to hire great numbers of them, citing a weakness in English and, frequently, difficulties in gaining security clearances for them.

According to testimony last September before a Senate subcommittee, roughly half of the State Department's diplomatic postings are filled by people lacking necessary foreign language skills.

The F.B.I. must translate a million pages and untold hours of intercepted conversations a year and faces a mounting backlog that undermines its ability to prevent some crimes and investigate others.

Intelligence agencies say they are frequently caught short in times of crisis, lacking a sufficient pool of agents and analysts with needed languages, from Arabic to Korean and - most recently - Macedonian.

Thousands of scientific and technical papers also go untranslated, depriving analysts and policy makers of vital information about the state of foreign research in a range of areas, the Senate heard.

Robert O. Slater is director of the National Security Education Program run by the Defense Department, which offers grants to promote the study of foreign languages and cultures. Mr. Slater said that in the last decade, the linguistic shortfalls had gone from an episodic to a chronic problem. "It's now affecting the ability of federal agencies to address their missions," he said.

A sobering illustration came in 1998, with the nuclear tests in Pakistan and India, said Richard D. Brecht, who runs the University of Maryland's National Foreign Language Center. Official documents on the failure of United States intelligence to translate information that could have warned policy makers of the explosions "remain classified, but you can rest assured that those surprised people," Mr. Brecht said. The explosions, he added, "should not have been surprises."

According to government figures, American colleges and universities graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic last year. Only about 140 students graduated with degrees in Chinese, and only a handful in Korean.

These days, only 8.2 percent of American college and university students enroll in foreign language courses - nearly all in Spanish, French and German, said Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language Association.

That figure, she said, has remained essentially unchanged since 1976. But the demand for language speakers has ballooned.

Many of the lapses in essential translation skills remain invisible to the average citizen, who seldom learns of the linguistic flubs and risks that could have been avoided. But sometimes they spill into the public realm.

In November the publicly accessible version of the C.I.A.'s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, its roundup of foreign news reports, translated an article in a Palestinian newspaper accusing Israel of using weapons containing "phlebotomized uranium" - which does not exist - instead of depleted uranium.

"If such a wild mistranslation by F.B.I.S. is not a private joke, then it is an embarrassing sign of incompetence," said a report on the slip-up in the Secrecy News, an electronic newsletter put out by the American Federation of Scientists.

Mr. Brecht, co-author with William P. Rivers of "Language and National Security in the 21st Century," likened the current period, with its recognition of foreign language deficiencies, to the late 1950's, when the Soviet launching of Sputnik triggered a nationwide mission to raise the level of science and mathematics training.

This time it is the end of the cold war that is spurring the sense of crisis. The Soviet Union required knowledge of one language, Russian, for analysts and diplomats. Its map has broken up into a linguistic jigsaw puzzle of 15 official languages, from Armenian to Ukrainian to Kazakh to Belarussian, and more than 100 ethnic enclaves.

The State Department has had to provide staff for 22 new posts in republics of the former Soviet Union, a region once covered with Russian speakers in Moscow. The linguistic fragmentation is reflected on the political and military fronts as well.

"It's not that the Department of Defense or anyone else has been neglectful," Mr. Brecht said. "It's just that requirements have exploded and budgeting for language is not the easiest thing to do."

There is no single solution.

A number of government agencies, including the Defense Department, are using computers to take a first pass at reducing the load of material for translation.

The Justice Department is exploring the use of a pool of translators with security clearance who could work for a number of agencies. The State Department increased language training for junior officers ninefold between 1997 and 1999.

The Defense and State Departments run the largest factories for training foreign language speakers in the country. Ray Clifford, provost of the Defense Language Training Institute, notes that the languages the military considers critical are not those generally taught in universities, so the military for the most part does its own training.

"The largest number of enrollments in the school system is Spanish," Dr. Clifford said. "Our No. 1 enrollment is in Arabic." The military has more students learning Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Russian than it does Spanish, he said.

Compared with the nine students majoring in Arabic last year in colleges, his institute graduated 409. It graduated 120 students in Farsi. Dr. Clifford said he could not even find figures on Farsi among colleges and universities.

For the first time, the military is planning to set quotas for the recruitment of so-called heritage speakers - the children of immigrants.

Advances in technology have multiplied the ability to eavesdrop and, consequently, the material requiring translation, Mr. Crump said.

Margaret R. Gulotta, the F.B.I.'s section chief for language services, said court-sanctioned wiretaps have to be translated as conversations take place. The expertise needed is high, with suspects frequently using coded language.

And in investigating the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bureau came across a tape recording in an esoteric language. Eventually, the bureau was able to identify the language, but found nobody with the required security clearance who could translate it.

---

Saudi Arabia, Iran to sign security pact

USA Today
04/16/2001 - Updated 09:00 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-04-16-iran.htm

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Saudi Arabia's interior minister arrived in Tehran Sunday to sign an important security agreement on combating terrorism and drug trafficking and bring closer the two regional giants.

The focus of the visit, the first by a Saudi interior minister since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, will be the signing of the security pact on Tuesday that indicates a desire by Gulf countries to improve ties with a country they had kept at arms length.

"God willing, these relations will get stronger, and be based based on the common interests of both countries," Prince Nayef said minutes after arriving at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The agreement calls for cooperation in combating organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, illegal immigration and a joint surveillance of borders. The agreement doesn't include military cooperation.

"This trip and the signing of the security pact on Tuesday is the most important development in the history of relations between the two countries," Iran's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Ali Asghar Khaaji told The Associated Press.

Iran's relations with its Gulf neighbors have improved significantly since President Mohamed Khatami, a moderate cleric, was elected in 1997.

Relations between the two countries plummeted in 1987, when Iranian pilgrims performing an annual Muslim pilgrimage to holy cities in Saudi Arabia tried to hold a rally denouncing Saudi Arabia and the United States. The rally led to clashes with Saudi security forces in which 402 pilgrims, mostly Iranians, were killed.

Relations were also tense after the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel. Initially, Iran was believed to have been involved.

Saudi Arabia has yet to reveal its findings in an investigation that was carried out jointly with the FBI.
-----

Israel publicly recruits spies

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/16/2001
By PAMELA SAMPSON Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406743239

JERUSALEM (AP) - Wanted: a few good engineers _ who can keep a secret.

The Mossad, Israel's spy agency, took the unusual step Sunday of advertising in the help-wanted sections of newspapers in search of 13 engineers for its technology unit.

The ad _ which depicts heavy blue doors emblazoned with the state insignia of the Menorah, a seven-branch candelabra _ is similar to one that ran last July, when the Mossad openly recruited for the first time in its three-decade history.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office issued a statement Sunday acknowledging the agency was having difficulty recruiting high-tech specialists.

``The goal is to raise public awareness, especially among potential employees, of the existence of the unit and the special employment opportunities being offered to quality engineers in software and hardware development,'' the statement said.

The ad says the Mossad is seeking male and female candidates with degrees in electronic or computer engineering and computer science. Candidates are invited to fax or e-mail in their resume.

Other top intelligence agencies, including the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's MI5, also hold open recruitment.

To draw candidates who might otherwise go to higher-paying private companies, salaries offered by the Mossad technology unit are being ``updated,'' the statement said. It gave no figures.


-------- activists

Educated protesters plan next 'Seattle'

Washington Times
April 16, 2001
By Carter Dougherty THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001416224834.htm

Young people like Michael Goegheghan scare the living daylights out of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Mr. Goegheghan, who will hit the streets this week during a meeting of North and South American leaders in Quebec, is not stockpiling bricks to throw at police, nor is he mixing Molotov cocktails.

Instead, the 25-year-old with long brown hair and an impish grin recently stood at a blackboard in a basement science classroom at American University in the District, leading a small group of people in a seminar called "The Free Trade Area of the Americas for Beginners."

The FTAA, as it is known, will top the agenda in Quebec on April 20 and 21, he pointed out. The dozen students and local activists attending the talk admitted they know little about the proposed free-trade zone between Alaska and Argentina.

Methodically, Mr. Goegheghan and another activist, Nisha Anand, 24, walked them through a smartly crafted two-hour presentation that was part lecture, part group activity. Far from dwelling on generalities, the activists covered such obscure points as "performance requirements," the rules governments sometimes impose on foreign investors.

Then Ms. Anand turned a page on a large flip chart. It made an explosive charge: The FTAA "favors corporate and investor rights over people's rights" and "fuels scapegoating and attacks on working people."

"The FTAA steps on a lot of toes," Mr. Goegheghan said confidently. "It gives me hope that we can stop it in Quebec."

Activists like Mr. Goegheghan and Ms. Anand are the muscle of the anti-globalization movement that has turned meetings on international economic policy into a continuing test of wills between police and demonstrators.

The protesters, who warmed up last week for Quebec with demonstrations outside the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on 17th Street NW, are a crazy quilt of causes: environmentalists, advocates for the Third World, labor activists. Some, like the League of Radical Toy Airplane Pilots, stand for mischief and not much else.

In the past two years, they disrupted meetings of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the Organization of American States. Protesters, some of them violent, helped bring a December 1999 meeting of the WTO in Seattle to a screeching halt, and the movement shows no sign of ending.

The ragtag movement has its own vocabulary and internal factions, and funding from small donations and liberal foundations.

But the movement suffers from a major fissure over a central issue since Seattle: the use of violence to achieve its aims. As it moves to Canada this week, the group hopes to make "Quebec" French for "Seattle."

The city of 500,000 people on the St. Lawrence River began its campaign to host the meeting before the debacle in Seattle and soon will be home to 6,000 delegates from 34 countries - and perhaps three times as many demonstrators. Canadian security forces, including the famed "Mounties," came to Washington to learn how the Metropolitan police handled protests last year and are nervously bracing for violence.

Mayor Jean-Paul L'Allier, worried that Quebeckers will be choking on tear gas before the week is out, last month asked the Canadian government to cancel the meeting.

"This is not the summit we wanted to have," Mr. L'Allier said. "I would probably say no if asked again."

To minimize the risks, authorities have erected a 12-foot metal-and-concrete barrier around Quebec's old city walls. There, inside the 18th-century "Citadelle" that once shielded French troops from English invaders, President Bush and other leaders will determine how quickly free trade will come to the entire western hemisphere.

Professional protesters

The core of activists who keep the movement alive are professionals, though they lack the spit and polish the term implies. These idealistic young people may not know quite what they want, but they can marshal impressive organizational skills that would be welcome in any political campaign, if they had any interest in traditional politics.

The activists who arrived at American University last month on a converted Greyhound bus are part of Call to Action, a loose collection of activist groups that hit the road for six weeks to drum up support for the Quebec protests. They sleep and eat on the bus, which has been outfitted with a kitchen.

The Call to Action caravan, which wound its way from Oregon to the East Coast in February and March, is a model of frugality. It was formed by a potpourri of groups like the Ruckus Society, which trains activists in "direct action" tactics, and Forest Ethics and the Rainforest Action Network, two environmental organizations.

Each group contributed staff and resources for a moving teach-in that would try to generate interest on college campuses in globalization issues, as well as a hodgepodge of other topics, including women's rights, racism and prison reform.

Reform, not revolution

Boston-based United for a Fair Economy is typical of another type of organization involved in protests, one that spends time developing the opposition line on globalization.

The group was founded in 1995 to draw attention to economic inequality but has become active over the past few years on globalization issues, according to Mike Prokosch, an activist with the group. When Call to Action needed written materials for its seminars on trade, it turned to him.

At 52, Mr. Prokosch's causes have changed with the times. He worked as a typesetter and graphic designer before hitting the protest circuit in the 1980s to fight the Reagan administration's anti-communist policies in Central America. With the end of the Cold War, that bogeyman disappeared, and Mr. Prokosch picked up on economic issues.

For him, protests like the ones in Quebec give activists like himself a chance to be heard.

"These demonstrations create teachable moments," he said. "People hear what we're doing and they want to know about it."

Some professional activists still have faith in the system and see lobbying politicians as the crucial fight. Mike Dolan, deputy director of the Washington-based Global Trade Watch, recently moved to San Francisco to spearhead efforts aimed at members of Congress from the West Coast.

The trade group, which is part of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, was founded after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. The gravelly voiced Mr. Dolan, 34, is a former field director for the California Democratic Party whose wife trains activists in "direction action" tactics.

Equal parts drill sergeant and progressive intellectual, Mr. Dolan spent much of 1999 in Seattle helping to orchestrate what remains the high-water mark of the movement. He has no problem with nonviolent resistance but looks for reform, not revolution, in Washington.

"For me, the political horizon remains the U.S. Congress," he said.

Financially, Call to Action, United for a Fair Economy and Global Trade Watch all operate on shoestring budgets and live by the grace of sympathetic left-leaning foundations. According to the groups' financial statements, there is no shadowy sugar daddy keeping them afloat, as their opponents have claimed.

One of Call to Action's component groups, the Ruckus Society, received $50,000 in 1997 for its environmental causes from media mogul Ted Turner's foundation.

United for a Fair Economy gets roughly 75 percent of its yearly $1.75 million budget from a variety of organizations, like the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, a group that backs many liberal causes. Global Trade Watch shares a budget of $10.9 million with five other organizations. Its donors include liberal institutions, but also well-known names like the Rockefeller and Ford foundations.

These organizations will share the stage in Quebec. Local groups have radical, sometimes anarchist, leanings and do not condemn members who engage in violence.

Radical politics

The Quebec-based Summit of the Americas Welcoming Committee - known by its French acronym, CASA - is openly hostile to all forms of what it calls "the growing tentacles of capitalist globalization," and some members consider themselves anarchists.

The group has roughly 150 adherents, according to Helen Ballieres, 22, a student at the University of Quebec. Journalists looking for members of CASA must dial a pager number and request a call; it has no offices. It assigns members a role on an ad hoc basis.

"We don't organize ourselves in a bureaucratic fashion," she said.

Nor does CASA shy away from violence. It refuses to disavow members who destroy property and emphasizes the need for a "diversity of tactics" in fighting free trade in Quebec, a code phrase that rubs reformers like Mr. Dolan the wrong way.

" 'Diversity of tactics' is now code in the movement for 'you can break stuff,' " he said. "But no one has to lay a hand on a cop or pick up a brick to be effective."

Nonviolent protest still has a good name in anti-globalization circles. But whether protesters can lay a finger on police or property remains "the great unresolved schism" since the mayhem in Seattle, Mr. Dolan said. The topic dominates debates on e-mail lists and Internet bulletin boards.

Ominously for Quebec, a group whose rhetoric all but encourages violent protests has assumed a leadership role in the protest planning. The Montreal-based Anti-Capitalist Convergence - best known by its French acronym, CLAC - has hosted planning meetings in Quebec. It successfully wrestled that role away from a less radical organization in the last several months.

Repeated efforts to reach the group by e-mail and telephone were unsuccessful. But other activists said that one of the group's members, Jaggi Singh, helped broker a compromise among competing activist groups that calls for organizing protests in Quebec according to how likely participants are to face arrest by the police. Some protesters, apparently, are preparing for a showdown, while others, leery of activists like Mr. Singh, are staying clear of violence.

One report from a March organizational meeting in Quebec said that the proposed demonstration that would embrace "a diverse range of tactics" has been "a focus of intense discussion and controversy in the broader movement."

Mr. Singh, a well-known figure among protesters and who once took part in an action that sacked a Montreal church and scattered condoms and bras on its altar, has forcefully argued that violence is sometimes necessary to achieve the movement's unspecified goals. He also locked horns with Mr. Dolan before the Seattle protests.

"There are power relations in society and you must neutralize them," Mr. Singh said last year.

Activists like Mr. Singh were undoubtedly what Canada's spy agency had in mind when it warned in a public report last month that "anarchist elements are actively organizing to disrupt the summit."

Though groups like CLAC are a small minority, they punch above their weight when the time to protest arrives, activists said. The movement's ethos of consensus-based decision-making makes it difficult for individuals who eschew violence to impose their will on rowdier comrades, even if they disagree with them, activists said.

"I'm not going to stop people from taking another path," said John Bowling, 31, a member of Call to Action who teaches seminars on nonviolent blockading tactics. "The cops are going to get what they asked for."

Seattle's pull

One event, however, still welds the anti-globalization movement together: the memory of success. Most analysts in Washington believe the world's trade ministers failed to begin a new round of global trade talks in Seattle because they could not hash out their differences.

But the perception that protests matter has done much for the appeal of trekking to Quebec and sleeping on a stranger's floor for the chance to protest, activists said. Seattle - as in "I was in Seattle" -has become urban legend.

And Seattle helped make the use of disruptive tactics particularly sexy.

Mr. Bowling, son of a 33-year U.S. Navy veteran, spent a recent Sunday afternoon tutoring a group of 10 persons, some American University students, some older, in tactics to stop events the movement opposes, such as trade meetings, from happening. His seminar was titled "Blockading Without Limits."

Mr. Bowling, with blond hair down his back and green khaki cargo pants, describes himself as "a full-time activist" from Eugene, Ore. He helped make Seattle happen, and has since participated in a range of actions designed to stop logging in the Pacific Northwest by chaining activists together in front of trees.

To the evident delight of participants, Mr. Bowling explained how his work has certain cloak-anddagger aspects. He talked about why the best-timed protests take place between Monday and Thursday ("I know I'll get sprung [from jail] by the weekend.") and how to maintain "operational security."

Toward the end, participants practiced creating "closed systems" that are hard for police to untangle. Mr. Bowling showed them how to link their arms in lengths of iron or hard plastic pipe so that police cannot use bolt cutters to free them up for jail cells.

When one person picked up a battered piece of pipe covered with duct tape, Mr. Bowling cautioned that the lowly object was a holy relic of the anti-globalization movement.

"Careful," Mr. Bowling said. "That was in Seattle."

--------

STOP THE APRIL 27 BOMBING OF VIEQUES, PUERTO RICO!

From: "V S C" <viequessc@hotmail.com>
Mon, 16 Apr 2001
Vieques Support Campaign
http://palfrente.tripod.com
E-mail viequessc@hotmail.com
U.S. Navy out of Vieques & all Puerto Rico!

STOP THE APRIL 27 BOMBING OF VIEQUES, PUERTO RICO!!!
PROTEST SATURDAY, APRIL 28

Against the wishes of the people of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy has announced renewed bombing practice on the island of Vieques for April 27th. Despite many attempts to make us believe that the Navy, the Pentagon and the U.S. government now have "receptive ears," a large armada of warships will continue their destruction of Vieques.

These bombing practices will further contaminate the water, pollute the air, destroy the environment and put the health and safety of the people at risk. The people of Vieques have resisted these abuses, which have caused a severe cancer epidemic, for most of the 60-year U.S. Navy occupation.

At a time when U.S. militarism and warmongering is at an all time high around the world, it is no wonder why the Pentagon wants to use Vieques for renewing its target practice activities there. The arrogance and disrespect of the U.S. government towards the Puerto Rican peoples' right to self-determination with these bombing practices on Vieques, will bring about further resistance and struggle.

Time: 12 noon Place: 26 Federal Plaza in Downtown Mahattan, New York City

Take the I.N.D. R or N train to City Hall or the I.R.T. #6,4,5 trains to Brooklyn Bridge.

Sponsored by Vieques Support Campaign

Endorsed by: ProLibertad-Faltan 6 Amnesty Campaign, Women For Peace & Justice For Vieques, Todo El Barrio Con Vieques, Todo Nueva York Con Vieques, San Romero Del Las America Church, Palestine Right To Return Coalition (AL-AWDA)

For more information call (212)677-0619 or (718)601-4751

--------

FTAA summary and Quebec City background

Mon, 16 Apr 2001
From: Walter Miale <wmiale@acbm.qc.ca>

The FTAA and the Threat to Democracy
http://www.canadians.org/campaigns/campaigns-tradepub-ftaa_intro.html

On April 20, the leaders from 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere will meet in Quebec City to negotiate the most far-reaching trade agreement in history - the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Although based on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA would, according to reports from its nine Negotiating Groups, far surpass NAFTA in its scope and power. It would encompass a population of 800 million and a combined GDP of $11 trillion (U.S.). It would incorporate the powers of the proposed services agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO) -the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) - as well as those of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). In short, it would combine the most ambitious elements of every global trade and investment agreement - existing and proposed - into one hemispheric pact, with sweeping authority over every aspect of life in Canada and the Americas.

The proposed FTAA would give transnational corporations unequalled new "rights" to challenge and compete for every publicly funded service now provided by governments - from health care and education to social security, culture and environmental protection. If adopted, it could remove the ability of every government to create or maintain laws and regulations protecting the health, safety and well-being of their citizens and the environment they share.

Worse, the FTAA would become the model for future world trade agreements, eventually rendering health, environmental and other laws around the world subservient to those of international trade.

In fact, far from being about trade, the FTAA is about placing democracy under corporate control - it is about weakening health and environmental protections, privatizing public services, commercializing education, and, in general, hindering governments from ever again directly serving the public interest.

The stakes for the people of the Americas have never been higher; a confrontation appears inevitable.

Buying Power: The FTAA Agenda

The mandate of the FTAA is massive. Not only do negotiators plan to adopt and expand existing NAFTA and WTO provisions on "agriculture," "investment," "market access," "intellectual property rights," "subsidies," "competition policy," "government procurement" and "dispute settlement," but they also seek to introduce new provisions related to "services" such as health care, education, energy, water, broadcasting, publishing, postal services and the environment.

Although the Canadian government continues to deny that health care and education are on the table, the FTAA Negotiating Group responsible has declared the deal should include "universal coverage of all service sectors." Certainly, if Canada takes a position at the FTAA similar to its position at the GATS, it will be promoting negotiations in which, as thegovernment's own WTO position paper states, "nothing is off the table, a priori, including the politically sensitive areas of health and education."

And even if Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew enters negotiations promising, as he now frequently does, that Canadians' health care and education are off limits, U.S. negotiators, who dominate the talks, have already declared their resolve to grant transnational corporations important new powers and access to health care, education, and every other government service - federal, provincial and municipal.

No wonder corporations are urging an agreement be reached quickly. Although the FTAA is not scheduled to be completed until 2005, the United States and others are pushing to have the deal ratified as early as 2003. And at the Quebec City summit in April, negotiators expect to sign-off on several "early harvest" agreements in the environmentally sensitive areas of forestry, fisheries and energy.

Under NAFTA, Canada has already surrendered control of its energy resources to the United States - a fact that has led directly to massive exports, lost conservation, higher oil and gas prices for Canadian consumers and increased pollution of the environment.

Other areas are at equal risk under the FTAA:

Water

As with energy, NAFTA has left Canada's freshwater lakes, rivers and aquifers vulnerable to future U.S. commercial exports that, under the FTAA, would extend to the entire hemisphere - with no control over the amount exported regardless of the impact on Canadians or the environment. What's more, with the inclusion of the proposed services chapter of the FTAA, public water services could be challenged under the agreement's "national treatment" provisions, forcing municipal water services to be privatized and contracted out to transnational corporations such as Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Vivendi. The public would shoulder the costs; corporations would reap the profits.

Social Security

Under the proposed services chapter, foreign for-profit health, education and other social service corporations would have the right to establish a "commercial presence" anywhere in Canada - as well as the "right" to compete for public dollars with existing hospitals, schools and day care centres. It's a formula designed to ensure foreign for-profit corporations grow richer at the expense of shrinking public budgets, declining public institutions and, ultimately, the right of Canadians to universally available quality health care.

Culture

Canada does refer to "the ability to preserve, develop and implement Šcultural policies," but the language, which is contained only in the preamble to its position paper, is largely decorative. NAFTA exempted culture in one article only to leave it vulnerable to threats of retaliatory attack in other, unrelated sectors. The FTAA would add tothese the threat of more direct attacks, under the proposed services chapter, challenging government subsidies, including those to the CBC and Canadian book publishers, as well as Canadian content regulations and legislation limiting foreign investment in broadcasting, telecommunications and cable companies. The result? Canada's domination by the U.S. entertainment industry would be written into international law.

Environment

Despite an early - and unsuccessful - attempt to "guarantee sustainable development while protecting the environment," the FTAA, as it now stands, contains no safeguards for the environment. Nor is it likely to, given the agreement's overarching aim of securing "rights" for corporate investors rather responsible environmental stewardship. Of the NAFTA disputes involving corporations and the environment, none have so far been decided in favour of the environment. This situation will only worsen under the even larger FTAA.

Agriculture and Food Security

Canada has already slashed farm subsidies and farm income support far more and far faster than any of its major trading partners - with the result that 1999 and 2000 were the worst years for Canadian farmers since 1926. FTAA negotiators are committed to making things even worse by adopting the WTO agreements on agriculture and food standards, which favour large corporations over small family farms and introduce new powers aimed at downgrading Canada's food safety laws. Under WTO rules, countries can no longer maintain emergency food stocks in anticipation of drought or crop failure, and "food self-sufficiency" means having enough money to buy food, not the domestic ability to produce it.

Investment Clout: The Impact of Chapter 11

No section of NAFTA better demonstrates the dangers of the proposed FTAA than Chapter 11 - the investment chapter. Under Chapter 11, foreign corporations are given the power to sue governments directly whenever they feel their "rights" have been violated by a particular government measure.

Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew has declared that he will not sign a new agreement that includes such provisions, but his credibility is undermined by American negotiators who demand that "investor-state" rules be included in the FTAA. In any case, if Ottawa truly opposed Chapter 11, it would fight ferociously to remove the provisions from NAFTA, rather than continue to pay millions to corporations for lost profits arising from the introduction of laws that protect Canadians' health and the environment.

This is what happened in 1998, when Virginia-based Ethyl Corporation threatened to sue Canada for banning MMT, a gasoline additive long suspected of being a neuro-toxin and which Canadian auto makers complained damaged catalytic converters designed to reduce polluting emissions from car exhausts. (MMT is banned in Europe, California and several other U.S. states.) When tribunal hearings indicated Canada was about to lose the case, the federal government settled out of court by paying Ethyl $20 million, removing the ban and issuing a public apology to Ethyl for implying its product was hazardous.

Since then, Canada has been subjected to a slew of similar lawsuits. Although no one outside the federal government knows how many Chapter 11 challenges have actually been launched, the ones that have been made public, usually by the company making the claim, number fifteen - a trend destined to grow in number (and cost) under the much larger FTAA.

Adding the proposed services chapter to the FTAA poses even greater threats. Since services account for two-thirds of Canada's GDP, a Chapter 11-style clause in the FTAA could make the future creation of public services - national child care, pharmacare and home care programs - virtually impossible since they would almost certainly violate the terms of the agreement.

For the first time in any international trade agreement, transnational service corporations will gain competitive rights to the full range of government services and will have the right to sue for financial compensation any government that resists. Canada's elected officials will be reduced to onlookers as decisions about our environment, health, education and food safety are made by unelected trade panels - and the price for exercising democracy becomes permanent restitution to foreign corporations.

Democracy Before Trade: A Citizen's Agenda

In spite of government claims that they have consulted widely with citizens on trade negotiations, the proposed FTAA reflects none of the concerns voiced by civil society. In fact, it contains all of the provisions considered most egregious by environmentalists, human rights and social justice groups, farmers, indigenous peoples, artists, workers and many others. Every single social program, environmental regulation and natural resource is at risk under the proposed FTAA. As it appears to stand now, there is no possible collaboration to make this trade pact acceptable.

That is not to say that the citizens of the Americas are opposed to rules governing the trade and economic links between our countries. However, it cannot start with the assumptions and goals of this FTAA. Rather, it must begin by revisiting international trade agreements like the WTO and NAFTA. It is time for a new international trading system based on the foundations of democracy, sustainability, diversity and development. As a beginning, Chapter 11 must be removed from NAFTA; water must be exempted; the energy provisions rewritten with an emphasis on conservation; and culture must be truly exempted. If not, the deal should be torn up.

Most important, the world of international trade can no longer be the exclusive domain of sheltered elites, trade bureaucrats and corporate power brokers. When they understand what is at stake in this hemispheric negotiation, the peoples of the Americas will mobilize to defeat it.

That is the fate it deserves.

The Council of Canadians 502-151 Slater Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 5H3, Canada Telephone: 613-233-2773, 1-800-387-7177 - Fax: 613-233-6776 www.canadians.org - inquiries@canadians.org

---

Activists Hang Banner at CITIGROUP Headquarters Today

Mon, 16 Apr 2001
From: "Beka Economopoulos" <beka@ran.org>

Press release from
RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK
For Immediate Release, April 16, 2001

Contact: Ilyse Hogue, 415/595-7246 (on site);
Shannon Wright: 415/596-7246; 415/398-4404

Activists Hang Banner at CITIGROUP Headquarters: "HEY CITI, NOT WITH MY MONEY!"

Event Follows on This Week's Launch of Credit Card Boycott, Protests in 80 Cities and 12 Countries

Demonstrations Planned for Tomorrow at CITI Shareholder Meeting

New York, NY-- During morning rush hour in midtown Manhattan, commuters were greeted with the sight of two activists unfurling a 20-foot banner from flag poles outside of Citigroup's (Citi) headquarters reading, "Hey CITI, Not With My Money!" The climbers were drawing public attention to the growing controversy around Citi's leading role in financing environmentally and socially destructive projects around the globe.

Today's event follows on the heels of the launch of a student led boycott against Citi credit cards and protests in more than 80 cities in 12 countries last Wednesday, April 11th. Growing ranks of students and shareholders are joining the campaign to demand that Citi adopt comprehensive environmental and social criteria throughout their lending and trading business.

"With only 22 percent of primary forests intact on the planet, there are certain activities we can longer afford to fund," said Ilyse Hogue of the Rainforest Action Network. "More and more Citi customers are outraged by the bank's leading role in profiting off rainforest destruction, global warming and the displacement of indigenous peoples."

The climbers were David Murphy, 28 of Brooklyn and Scott Anderson, 27 of Kentucky. Mr. Murphy commented, "Citi has a consistent record of prioritizing short term profits at the expense of long term health of communities and the environment. I am here to send a clear message that Citi can no longer fund immoral and destructive activities with MY money."

Representatives from Rainforest Action Network on site today pointed to several examples of the company's involvement in egregious projects, including mining in the fragile Amazon basin, constructing oil pipelines through indigenous land in Venezuela and expanding palm plantations in critical habitat of endangered orangutans in Indonesia. Protesters also highlighted Citi's policies of redlining in communities and 'predatory lending' in urban areas that disproportionately affect economically disadvantaged people and target communities of color.

The international campaign targeting Citigroup is working to transform the funding practices of the corporate financial system. The campaign is calling for Citigroup as America's largest financial institution, to become an industry leader in integrating social and environmental criteria into its investment decision-making. Rainforest Action Network calls for an immediate ban on funding development projects that result in the destruction of primary forests worldwide and a prioritization of lending for renewable energies and tree-free lumber and paper alternatives.

A broad coalition of groups, including Rainforest Action Network, NY National Organization of Women, Inner City On The Move, and United For A Fair Economy, will continue their vigilant protest at Citi's shareholder meeting tomorrow morning, April 17 at Carnegie Hall.

High resolution digital photos will be available for use by the press at http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/citigroup/index.html

Beka Economopoulos Rainforest Action Network East Coast Grassroots Organizer http://www.ran.org 888-840-6416 office 917-560-3609 cell

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then you will find that money cannot be eaten." -- Cree Indian Proverb

---

Cincinnati's Eye of the Storm: Over-The-Rhine

Mon, 16 Apr 2001
From: kmurphysmith@aol.com

Field Report No.1
by Karen Murphy-Smith,
Human Rights Activist

I have traveled to the "eye of the storm" to give and receive enlightenment on the front lines and in the trenches known as Cincinnati. I will be here until Thursday afternoon to participate in forums, strategy planning sessions, city council meetings, panel discussions, demonstrations, empowerment workshops, rallies and marches, and to conduct interviews. This is the first of many field reports."

Angela Davis Cop Watch Campaign Against Racial Profiling Milwaukee,WI, 53209 (414) 228-9962 kmurphysmith@aol.com ADCopwatch.againstthewalls.org http://www.againstthewalls.org

April 16, 2001
CINCINNATI'S EYE OF THE STORM: OVER THE RHINE

I drove all night to attend the funeral of 19 yr. old Timothy Dewyane Thomas held at the New Prospect Baptist Church on Elm Street.

Thousands of people from all walks of life filled the streets around the church waiting their turn to file pass the open casket of young Brother Thomas.

Standing outside on the steps of the church was a group of about one dozen young Brothers clad with red bandannas that they informed me represented the Over-The-Rhine hood.

The Media who earlier supressed the happenings in Cincinnati and in my opinion charcterized the events as a riot rather than a spontaneous storm of indignation against systemic racism and disregard for the lives of Black Men.

Here is an illustration of how prevalent and systemic racism, race based policing, racial singling-out or racial profiling is on the Cincinnati Police Department or CPD.

A Cincinnatian who described himself as a "miltary man" described a policy practiced by several of his friends on the force that sounds a lot like racial profiling. Where members of the C.P.D. receive warrant paperwork on Monday, but apprehend of bring a Brothers in over the weekend. Thus resulting in a two to three day lockdown and court on Monday the first business day of the weel. "Basically C.P.D. members are pissed off because they've got to pull a weekend shift. Since they're miserable, they decide to make every Brother they can catch miserable too. No wonder the Brothers are running - I'd run too. This is bound to happen again unless they change their policy."

Inside the churches vestibule sat three women behind a table on which stood a large box and black and grey ribbons to commemorate the loss of the young Brother. Donations where collected for Brother Thomas' young 3 month old son Tywon Thomas.

Summary of events leading up to the funeral:

Timothy Dewayne Thomas was born Black in America on July 25, 1981.

Brother Thomas moved to Cincinnati with his mother, two brothers and three sisters on March 27, 1997.

19 yr. old Brother Thomas was fatally shot by CPD police officer Steve Roach on Friday, April 7, 2001 while attempting to apprehend him on fourteen outstanding misdeamnor warrants. (Note:Brother Thomas was the fourth "Stolen Life" since November 2000 - and the sixteenth within a two year period of time.)

Thousand plus citizens gathered outside of the CPD shortly after taking over city hall following a heated City Council Meeting on Monday, April 10th amid shouts of "Put The Police In Order".

Members of the crowd re-hung "Ole Glory" upside down in the universal sign of distress.

Later that day one hundred and twenty state troopers rolled into Cincinnati that same night during which one hundred and something arrests were made by troopers who at times taunted protesters to cross the line and fired less-lethal bean bag amunition at a crowd of over eight hundred.

After three days of unrest an estimated five hundred arrests and required mandatory 24 hr lockdowns were made.

Buildings along downtown just east of the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood sustained thousands of dollars in damage. (Note: Over-The-Rhine refers to this neighborhood that overlooks the downtown area once a German enclave occupied by settlers familar with the Rhine River in Germany.)

Pursuant to Article XVIII of the Administrative Code of Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken called a 8pm - 6am curfew in specified neighborhoods in Cincinnati. (Cincinnati is unique and has two or three incorporated municipalities within its city limits.)

People came as they were doning do-wrags, Sunday-go-to-meeting attire, shorts and halter tops, and other forms of causal wear befitting the 70 plus degree weather outside and the 80 plus temperature inside the sanctuary.

I sat behind a group of women who identified themselves as the Mothers Of Murdered Sons (MOMS), many of whom revisited the grief of their slain Sons. According to Ms. Owensby Mother of 29 yr old Roger Diandre'Owensby Jr. who died last November of asphxiation at the hands of five CPD officers; Mothers aren't notified by CPD when their Sons lives are Stolen by police, instead they have to find out by word of mouth, from newscasts, or witnesses. (There ought to be a notification policy in Cincinnati.)

Strangely enough I sat next to a reporter from the LA Times. (It looked like a media-circus outside and inside of the church. I wondered where these reporters and journalist were from April 7th thru April 13th.)

One by one, people filed pass the open casket that contained the remains of young Brother Thomas. Brothers took off their hats in respect, young Nubian Sisters holding kleenex against their mouths walked pass the slain Brother. Youngsters led by counsuling parents filed pass in order to etch lasting memories of Brother Thomas and the events that followed. A group of a half dozen young adults wore t-shirts made up with Brother Thomas's colored photo on the front. The back of one of the t-shirts read as follows, " RIP, No Justice No Peace, These Are Our Streets, Fuck The Police."

In attendance was: Ohio Governor Taft, The Ohio Secretary of State,Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken, Rev. Martin Luther King, III, Kweisi Mfuma President of the NAACP, Brother Malik Shabazz and the distinguished members of the New Black Panther Party, as well as other so-called elected officials and dignitaries were in attendance. (The real dignitaries were the citizens from and around Cincinnati.)

Like all funeral services, a eulogy was made, words of consolation were spoken, solemn songs were spoken, and tears were shed. But the most poignant words were spoken by the Representative For The Honorable Lewis Farrakkan of the Nation of Islam who said, "they thought they killed Brother Thomas, but instead they've raised an army of thousands."

Shortly thereafter State Troopers and CPD fired on citizens who were lawfully and peacefully protesting in the area around the church.

African drums were played when Angela Leisure Brother Thomas' Mother and family entered the church.

K.M.S.
PLEASE VISIT OUR URL AT http://www.againstthewalls.org
FOR MORE STORIES VISIT: http://www.ovimc.org

--------

Zapatistas speak out on Pacifica crisis

From: radman <resist@best.com>
[radtimes] #191
Fri, 16 Mar 2001

JAVIER ELORRIAGA, SPOKESPERSON FOR MEXICO'S ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT (FSLN), the political wing of the EZLN, speaks about the US-based Pacifica Radio Network. Interview conducted by David Adelson.

DA: What is your understanding of Pacifica Radio's crisis and its implications?

JE: What are today's problems and in what directions are the world's struggles going, right? Basically, its to build new ways to do politics, and not only has to do with doing politics in the ordinary way, as its usually done, it has something to do with a cultural question. The way of thinking and doing things must change.

The struggle for power has to be removed from the left's thinking. Then, that should be reflected not only in practical aspects of politics, but above all, in the political relations between human beings. You must eradicate the idea that from above, from a certain position, one can construct and decide and do, because that idea leads people to think that the goal of the struggle is to reach that position.

You must understand that politics must change, from relations of power, to solidarity relations. Capitalism is all about relations of power, that's how it expresses itself at the cultural, political, ideological, economic and social levels. We must go around that.

That's what's happening with Pacifica Radio and other media outlets that at one time, they had some degree of independence from the state institutions and large corporations, and today they're seen as a prize, as an economic or political body.

Why? because what they need is to destroy all collective spaces, every place that has a collective-making process, they must go in and break it. They must place the individual all alone against the state, against trade, against the bank, against the church.

Why? because an individual alone has no means to defend him(her)self.

What ten years ago was of no interest for them, like independent radio stations. Pacifica is quite large, but there are some smaller ones, and you may ask yourself, what does a large network care about these little radio station? They care because they must get to the very core of society, and break everything that is collective. To individualize 'til they can go no more.

What can we do to avoid that? to strengthen the collective spaces, the collective decision-making processes, all forms of collective participation. And to understand that we must create a new culture that is not based on isolating the individual from the world, nor on the premise that we stay equal. We must understand that we are equal because we are different, that is based in another way to conceive democracy, social and economic relations.

DA: What can anyone do when power is centralized, like Pacifica's radio transmitters, how can they be placed to the service of the community?

JE: You must try to give the control of the radio station, the programming and decision-making to the community. There can be a Board of Directors for the conduction of administrative matters, but that Board cannot make decisions about the community. The community is the one who must decide and have the power to appoint and remove the members of the Board at anytime They don't have to wait for elections as it is done every four years with the politicians.

Why change the Directors every four years if their performance on the job is poor after the first month? Why wait four years? Yes, you need somebody to manage the finances, to pay the electric bill, to buy CD's, right? There are people who can do that kind of work but they must be accountable to the collective.

What zapatismo says about "giving orders by receiving orders" its not just a formula for politics, its a formula that works in a school in a neighborhood, in a factory, in a radio station.

Who does call the shots in a radio station? The radio listeners, they are the ones that must have an option.

Why? Capitalism says you can change the channel, if you don't like this one, dial another one, that's democratic. That's stupid! Democracy can be something like the people asking: why are you broadcasting that crap? why don't you air something in which we, the audience, are included? There are a few places like that around the world but their number is growing. The fight to break the monopoly in the world of communications, grows and grows and grows, and that makes them very angry.

DA: What is the relation of the spaces were power is distributed within capitalism?

JE: Well, it is a struggle, there are two models, not only political models, but two models of culture and humanity charging against one another. Capitalism does not tolerate collectives and it does not tolerate the community. These spaces that are being opened, these spaces fighting against capitalist enterprises and the governments at their service, are growing in number.

Why? Because they are a necessity for people. If people see that they (alternative networks) can play a role within the media, they will be interested.

Why? Because they don't believe in the system anymore, they don't believe in the government, the press, and television. What will they believe in? In whatever they think is theirs, where they can have participation, where someone is speaking about what they consider, its important.

And that must be built from below, we must forget about the giant struggles and try to build that new relation from below, at the local level.

DA: Is there something that you would like to say for Pacifica's listeners?

JE: Back in early 1994, we used to have a joke that said that, the land is for whoever works in it, and later we used to say, the news belong to those who work on the news. But not in the sense that, because we are here, we're going to sell it, but because it is us, as people, the ones who are making history. Therefore, it is up to us to teach, to broadcast, to tell, what we're doing to others.

Today is not the time to be taking the winter's palace and the great moments of history. Today is for understanding that we're so different from one another that we must listen to each other, to understand that the strength of our struggle is infinite. It is represented in a thousand forms, each individual can do something to fight against capital and against the system, but we don't know it. why? Because we have no control, we have no medium to broadcast it. So, anything that we can use, to tell others about our experience in the struggle its very important. We may not be able to realize it today or in five years, but its becoming evident that it is very important.

why? Because we're re-capturing the past, and we're building a collective future.. Is not a future for someone to give us, its not just like dialing another radio station, because no matter which one you listen to is the same shit....(he laughs)....

We must build from below, we must tell the local stories over and over, those things that seem meaningless. You might say that your struggle is not important at the global level because it failed to drop two points in the stock exchange, but without your little struggles at the local level, there'll never be a global struggle.

So, we must put a lot of effort into it, this is one of the areas where we're gaining more ground, in the alternative media, I think.

And you know, its very interesting, when the zapatismo came out, the internet came out and all of this. And less than a year later, some specialists from the pentagon came out with a study called the war of zapatistas network, or something like that.

They developed a whole idea, a theory on how zapatismo used the internet and social networks, and came out with plans on how to counter this offensive, and ZAP! it jumped in Seattle, right at the heart of the empire who had made a study about how zapatismo caught them by surprise. They got caught right in the middle of their streets, with a horizontal communication through the internet.

Then, all of those who had theorized all that stupidity, had no idea where all the demonstrators in Seattle came from, and later in Prague, did not know where the protestors came from. And it will continue the same way, we don't theorize much, we just do it.

So, we must disseminate all those experiences as much as we can, so other people can do it, so they don't wait for someone else to do it, so they don't wait and say: today its an easy day. But only if you have the community on your side, otherwise, you're like the corporations, even if you're small and marginal, 'cause then you'll be a small and marginal corporation without the people on you side.

If people don't understand that there's something they want to communicate, if they don't understand that through that communication its going to learn something from others, its worthless.

That's what's changing. In the 60's and 70's we used to do radio, and radio speaks to people. But today is not about speaking to people, but speaking together with the people. To make a collective space for dialogue, of reflection, of experience.

That's what we intend to do in the days to come. A place where people will come from all over the country and from other parts of the world, where there's struggle. For what? So they can have the opportunity to tell each other's experiences in struggle.

DA: Why do you think it takes so long and so much effort for people to understand that a radio station should be part of their community. Why are they willing to see it as something separate, outside of them?

JE: Because that's all they ever had. What is what we know? What it has been fed into our heads since we were children. The other stuff is much more difficult. Why? Because there's the idea that you cannot participate in that. It takes a lot of money to have a radio or television station, many millions of dollars, connections with people in power, and it becomes something far away from your reality. When you begin to produce radio programs, to make them, to broadcast them, to watch them, you discover that is not an unreachable goal.

But people don't know, they think it is very difficult, that it is for someone else, that it is part of the big corporations. We must destroy that myth.


------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)

------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!