------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Uranium Waste Cleanup Gets No U.S. Funds
Reprimand finishes Greeneville commander's career
Applied Orally, Missile Defense Technology May Work
Taiwan Arms Sale Brings Mixed Reaction
Taiwan to Get Variety of Arms
France finds no Gulf War syndrome but orders probe
German nuclear waste on the move after protest
German nuclear waste shipment prompts protest
Hard Times, Scary Choices in Russia
Glasgow's secret strategy for Russian nuclear attack
Leroy Ingles, 84, first nuclear sub chief
In praise of nuclear energy
Utah uranium cleanup left out of Bush budget
Bush budget skips uranium cleanup
Radiation Distortions
MILITARY
U.S. Offers Arms to Taiwan
U.S. brushes off Chinese objections to arms sale
Wrong way on Taiwan
Reaganīs commitment to Taiwan
U.S. will sell destroyers to Taiwan
Colombia captures drug lord
Peru downs planes with help of U.S. in drug program
Saudi rule looser than Pentagon's
Armed Forces review rules on civilian visitors
Military braces for Rumsfeld recommendation
Rumsfeld's 'Defense Inc.' reasserts civilian control
Robot plane flies Pacific unmanned
OTHER
PECO to offer wind power in Pennsylvania
German wind energy production to rise in 2001 - BWE
Administration steadfast for drilling in Arctic refuge
Britain reassures Europe on foot-and-mouth
Alaska oil remains in energy plan
Foot-and-mouth disease suspected in human
Cuffs ruled OK in minor cases
Trade Secrets
ACTIVISTS
La Carnival Contre le Capitalisme
-------- NUCLEAR
Uranium Waste Cleanup Gets No U.S. Funds
Utah, California protest. Contamination of the Colorado River is feared.
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
By TONY PERRY, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010424/t000034603.html
The Bush administration has omitted any money from the federal budget to continue the cleanup of a huge uranium slag heap in southern Utah that has been leaking radioactive waste into the Colorado River.
Perched about 750 feet from the river's edge near the small town of Moab, the waste heap is the size of a football field and contains 13 tons of material left over from a uranium mill that shut down in 1984.
Chris Ullman, spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, said the request for money for the Moab site will be reviewed by the administration. He said that cleaning up contamination left from the cold war is "a priority to the president."
The budgetary omission has brought protests from Utah and Southern California. Officials in California are worried that the mill waste could severely contaminate the Colorado River, a major source of drinking water for Southern California and the Southwest.
"We worked too long and too hard to let this happen," said Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Montebello). "It's too critical to California."
"Our entire water supply is threatened," said Rep. Bob Filner (D-Chula Vista). "They've got to act quickly."
After years of trying to get federal attention, Napolitano, Filner and other members of Congress managed to get an amendment to a military appropriations bill last year pledging assistance for the cleanup at Moab.
The measure provided no money but contained a pledge that the federal government, pending a study by the National Academy of Sciences, would pay to have the waste pile moved away from the river.
The bill was signed by President Bill Clinton just before the November election, with a promise that the government would continue the project in future years. It was part of a common two-step legislative process in which a project is authorized the first year, and funded in the second and subsequent years.
So far, water intake plants downstream from Moab have not detected any unsafe levels of toxic substances traceable to the waste pile.
Officials worry, however, that the waste heap is a "radioactive time bomb" that should be cleaned up before a flood, an earthquake or the cumulative effects of the leaching contaminate drinking water supplies downstream. Last week, seven members of Congress petitioned the chairman of the House energy and water development subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add $10 million to the budget for the project. Their letter noted that 25 million people in the West depend on the Colorado River for drinking water.
But the Bush administration, to date, has not budgeted money for the cleanup or for the study.
Meanwhile, Moab residents complain that the cleanup work done so far at the site has actually made things worse by increasing the amount of dirt that blows into town during the area's frequent windstorms.
"People here are up in arms about the tail dust blowing through the town," said Bill Hedden, a former Grand County commissioner from Moab and now Utah conservation director of the Grand Canyon Trust.
The slag heap was left behind by a plant run by Atlas Corp., which filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998. The plant, which began operating in 1956, provided uranium for nuclear weapons.
Moab, with 4,500 people, is a popular tourist destination 240 miles southeast of Salt Lake City in a starkly beautiful, ecologically fragile corner of the Southwest. The region is home to several national parks and monuments. In the 1950s, Moab was the capital of a uranium mining boom.
The Colorado River and an 875-acre wetland preserve close to the waste pile are home to dozens of species of fish and birds, including five that are protected by the Endangered Species Act: the Colorado pike minnow, razorback sucker, humpback chub and boneytail fish and the southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird.
California officials hope that it is only a matter of convincing the new administration of the importance of the project.
"The president's budget has been culled back to the president's priorities--Moab was not one of his campaign themes," said Adan Ortega, senior executive assistant to the general manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. "We hope the Congress can convince the president of its importance."
A spokesman for Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), whose district includes Moab, said the Bush budget does not include any specific Department of Energy cleanup projects, and therefore his boss is confident that Moab has not been singled out for exclusion.
The spokesman said Cannon believes that the administration, once it has time to review the budget, will include the cleanup in future budgets.
But others, including the trustee for Atlas, suggest that the Bush administration may decide that it is too expensive and not necessary to move the pile. There are scientific disputes about whether virtually all of the toxic material will have leached into the river before the pile can be moved.
Efforts at removing water from the pile--as a way to decrease the amount of toxic substances leaching into the Colorado River--were halted in February amid a dispute between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and PricewaterhouseCoopers, trustee for the owner of the defunct uranium plant.
PricewaterhouseCoopers unsuccessfully sought a grant of immunity from the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the company if the cleanup was seen as damaging to fish and birds. The company could be fined $25,000 a day if its work injures wildlife.
Denied immunity, the firm decided to halt work, to the chagrin of officials in Utah, California and Washington, D.C.
"The agency is very upset by the slow action, or inaction, by the trustee out there," said Rick Weller, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"We've tried every way we can to clear the path so they can move ahead," said Bill Sinclair, director of the division of radiation control with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
The work done by contractors hired by PricewaterhouseCoopers has been funded not by the bill signed by Clinton but by a fund controlled by the federal government for the cleanup of former uranium plant sites. The fund is made up of federal funds and money contributed by the former plant owners, in this case, Atlas Corp.
Jim Langley, a Houston-based PricewaterhouseCoopers official, said that the fund will pay part--but not all--of the costs of covering the slag heap.
But the fund, he said, will not pay for moving the pile or for the National Academy of Science study of whether moving the pile is necessary. Those actions will require additional federal financing, Langley said.
The estimated cost of covering up the pile is $16 million to $20 million. Estimates for moving it away from the river range from $300 million to $1 billion.
Langley said PricewaterhouseCoopers attorneys have been told by Bush administration officials that the cost of moving the pile is daunting. "We've been told that California energy is the sole interest of the Bush administration's Department of Energy in its first year, not Florida, not Alaska, and certainly not Moab," Langley said.
Langley added that his firm has been getting a "bum rap" for stopping work in February. He said PricewaterhouseCoopers was caught between differing views of the regional office of Fish and Wildlife and the headquarters in Washington about whether it could be fined for any environmental damage.
------
Reprimand finishes Greeneville commander's career
USA Today
04/24/2001
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-24-sub-usat.htm
WASHINGTON - A Navy admiral closed the book on the submarine accident that killed nine Japanese off Hawaii. He took disciplinary action Monday against Cmdr. Scott Waddle that effectively will end his Navy career. Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, spared Waddle a court-martial and instead issued him a letter of reprimand as punishment for the February sinking. He also took action against six other crewmembers of the USS Greeneville.
The submarine collided with the Japanese fisheries training vessel Ehime Maru on Feb. 9 during a rapid-surfacing maneuver being done for the benefit of some visiting civilians.
In an administrative hearing known as an admiral's mast, Fargo handed Waddle, 41, a letter of reprimand for "dereliction of duty and negligent hazarding of a vessel" after the skipper rushed sonar and periscope checks to get his 16 civilian guests back to Pearl Harbor in time for dinner.
Fargo suspended Waddle's punishment for six months so that he will receive his full pay until he retires Oct. 1. That's past Waddle's 20th anniversary in the Navy, the time when he becomes eligible for a pension worth half his pay. Fargo has indicated he will grant Waddle"s request to retire.
In a statement released by his lawyer, Charles Gittins, Waddle thanked Fargo for treating him "fairly and with dignity and respect." He said that the court of inquiry and his punishment "reaffirm that bedrock principle of command accountability."
Waddle, who says he intends to visit Japan to apologize to the families of the lost Japanese, said, "While I regret that my Navy career has ended in this way, I know that I am one of the lucky ones because I survived the accident."
A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll of 1,015 American adults found no consensus for how Waddle should be treated: 22% said he should be court-martialed; 32% said he should not. Nearly half, 45%, said they didn"t know enough about the case to answer, and 1% had no opinion. The poll has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.
Fargo also held an admiral's mast for Lt. (j.g.) Michael Coen, 26, a junior officer who was the Greeneville"s officer of the deck at the time of the collision. Coen received a verbal admonishment only.
Both Waddle and Coen were the subjects of a court of inquiry last month. The three-admiral panel submitted a 2,000-page report to Fargo, who accepted most of its recommendations.
A third subject of the inquiry, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer, 38, the sub's executive officer, will receive a non-punitive warning that will not go into his personnel file.
Fargo also gave a warning to Capt. Robert Brandhuber, chief of staff to the commander of the Pacific Fleet submarine force and the senior officer on board at the time of the incident.
Petty Officer First Class Patrick Seacrest was ordered to appear at a captain's mast, the enlisted equivalent of an admiral"s mast. Seacrest admitted he failed to report a sonar contact with the trawler.
Fargo left virtually unscathed the distinguished visitors program that came under scrutiny after it was revealed that 16 guests were aboard the Greeneville, including three who were at the controls when the accident happened.
The admiral advised that the image-building program be reviewed to ensure that commanders have consistent guidelines for civilian visits and that they follow existing rules - breached by the Greeneville - that no vessels go to sea solely to show off for guests.
But Fargo refused to take the thrill out of civilian sub rides. While he said that guests should not be allowed to handle controls during maneuvers, he approved letting them to do so when the vessel is steaming straight in open waters. He also refused to ban rapid-surfacing maneuvers when civilians are on board.
The court of inquiry's report is available on the Internet at www.cpf.navy.mil.
-------- business
Applied Orally, Missile Defense Technology May Work
A New High-Tech Test Can Help Target Early Mouth Cancers
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55644-2001Apr23?language=printer
It's not every day a dentist gets to play Star Wars.
But that's not why more than 30,000 dentists in the United States are deploying OralCDx, a new diagnostic tool that incorporates technology developed as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. OralCDx, launched nationwide last year, offers dentists a better shot at catching oral cancer lesions while there's time to treat them.
About 8,000 Americans die of oral cancer each year. Nearly 30,000 new cases are diagnosed annually, and only 53 percent of all oral cancer victims are still alive five years after diagnosis. But among those in whom the disease -- which is most common among tobacco users and heavy drinkers and is more common among men, people over 40 and African Americans -- is caught early, five-year survival rates soar to 88 percent.
The problem has been that early stage oral cancer lesions look like benign mouth lesions, even to vigilant dentists. By the time a lesion becomes obviously, visibly cancerous, successful treatment is difficult.
In the past, dentists have had to make tough choices: Should they perform traditional scalpel biopsies (or refer patients to oral surgeons for the procedure) on all of the estimated 5 percent to 15 percent of their patients who have oral lesions? At up to $300 per procedure, plus lab analysis fees of up to several hundred dollars, scalpel biopsy is costly. Plus, the procedure requires the uncomfortable surgical removal of chunks of tissue, and only a small number of the lesions caught in this net turn out to be cancerous.
OralCDx, produced by New York-based OralScan Laboratories Inc., helps dentists determine which lesions warrant a biopsy. When faced with a lesion that is even remotely suspicious, the dentist gathers three layers of tissue with a device that looks a bit like a tiny toilet brush. Having completed this painless procedure, he swabs a slide and mails it off to OralCDx.
The software at the heart of the OralCDx system is adapted from a program designed for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the ambitious missile defense system championed by President Reagan in the 1980s. With it, OralCDx can spot a cancerous cell even if it is partially obscured by other cells, much in the way that the SDI system is supposed to sort decoys from real missiles. Having identified, with the computer's help, any suspicious cells, the OralCDx pathologist faxes a report to the dentist, who can either proceed with a scalpel biopsy or tell the patient to rest easy.
At $65 for the lab work plus the typical procedure fee of $100 to $150 charged by the dentist (who gets the test kits for free from OralScan), the new system might be pricey for the 108 million Americans without dental insurance. OralScan points out, though, that many medical insurance plans cover the cost.
While the SDI's ability to distinguish real targets from decoys remains unproven, OralCDx, which received an American Dental Association Seal of Acceptance in October, is backed by a study published in the Journal of the American Dental Association in 1999. In that study, the system accurately detected 100 percent of the cancerous and precancerous lesions included in the trial and even picked up signs of cancer lesions that clinicians hadn't considered suspicious.
No word so far, though, as to whether OralCDx can be fooled by Mylar balloons.
-- Jennifer Huget
-------- china
Taiwan Arms Sale Brings Mixed Reaction
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 24, 2001; 3:24 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59252-2001Apr24?language=printer
BEIJING, April 24 - The U.S. decision to sell $5 billion in arms to Taiwan brought measured condemnation from China today along with support from security analysts in Taiwan who said the weapons mark an important first step in righting the balance of power between Taiwan and China.
"China has viewed with serious concern the related reports," said the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue. "If the U.S. disregards China's solemn representation, it would be a grave violation of China's sovereignty, rude interference in China's internal affairs and would increase tension across the Taiwan Strait."
The arms sales decision comes during a low-point in Washington's relations with Beijing. Ties have been strained by the April 1 collision between a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese jet fighter, Washington's support of a motion at the U.N. human rights commission to censure China's human rights record and the Bush administration's backing for a national missile defense system.
A Chinese official predicted the new arms sales to Taiwan will bring about a further deterioration of the already shaky relationship. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the American decision to sell Taiwan what are classiied as offensive weapons, meaning submarines and anti-submarine warfare aircraft, "is causing extreme anger in the Chinese government."
"This is a serious violation of solemn agreements made by the United States," said the official, referring to a 1982 communique in which the United States said it would limit sales to Taiwan. "There will be serious repercussions."
Although he declined to be specific, he pointed to an announcement in Moscow today that Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan will discuss an acceleration of bilateral "military technological cooperation" when he visits Russia on April 29.
According to analysts here and in Taiwan, the package constituted a breakthrough in U.S. weapons sales to the island of 23 million people. For the first time, a U.S. government has backed the sale of offensive weapons, the submarines, to Taiwan.
"This sale is unusual in that it entails offensive weapons," said Shen Dingli, an expert on U.S.-China relations based at Fudan University in Shanghai. "This is quite significant. Both the submarines and the anti-submarine warfare armaments will anger Beijing."
President Bush put off a possible sale of the Aegis naval air defense system to Taiwan, but offered four Kidd-class destroyers, a dozen P-3 "Orion" submarine hunter aircraft and eight diesel submarines. There was confusion in Taiwan, however, about exactly what the possibilities are that Taipei will obtain the submarines. The United States does not manufacture diesel submarines and would have to build the vessels with the support of Holland or Germany.
Andrew Yang, secretary general of the Taipei-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, said the Bush arms deal amounted to a "blank check" in regards to the submarines.
"We really don't know what it means," he said. "China could put a lot of pressure on the Netherlands or Germany not to cooperate. There will be a big struggle over the subs. It's only a promise to assist Taiwan to get submarines," he said. "It's a long shot."
Nonetheless, Yang and others agreed that Washington's willingness to consider the submarine sale and its agreement to furnish Taiwan with the P-3 warplanes moved Taiwan's navy toward parity with China's naval forces. "It's an important step towards tactical parity," said Gen. Tyson Fu, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Taiwan's National Defense University.
Over the last 10 years, China's navy has engaged in a major modernization that has involved purchasing four Kilo-class submarines from Russia and building its own fleet of nuclear and diesel-powered submarines. China is believed to have between 20 and 40 operational vessels. Western military officers say that for the first time ever Chinese subs from all of its three fleets now regularly patrol as far as the east coast of Taiwan.
These vessels, along with a pair of destroyers that China also bought from Moscow, arguably have given China the capability to shut down Taiwan's two biggest ports, at Kaohsiung in the south and Keeling in the north, which would bring Taiwan's bustling economy to its knees.
----
Taiwan to Get Variety of Arms
But U.S. Withholds Aegis Radar That China Strongly Opposed
By Steven Mufson and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54851-2001Apr23?language=printer
President Bush has approved the largest package of arms sales to Taiwan in nearly a decade, including Kidd-class destroyers, submarines and sub-hunting planes, but steered clear of the weapons system China had objected to most vociferously, a senior White House official said last night.
Although Bush has decided against selling Taiwan destroyers equipped with the sophisticated Aegis radar and battle management system, the United States will sell the island four less-advanced Kidd-class destroyers, a dozen anti-submarine planes and as many as eight diesel-powered submarines to help Taiwan defend itself against possible attack or blockade by mainland China, the senior White House official said.
The decision to put together a robust package for Taiwan reveals the strength of hard-liners in an administration that is also tugged by moderates and business-minded interests concerned that a large arms sale could worsen relations between Beijing and Washington.
If Taiwan accepts the package, the cost -- though not calculated by the administration -- could amount to more than $4 billion, the biggest since Bush's father sold Taiwan 150 F-16 fighter jets in 1992. It is almost certain to anger Beijing, which regards Taiwan as part of China and which says that U.S. sales of sophisticated weapons to Taiwan violate a 1982 U.S. agreement to gradually reduce the quality and quantity of arms sold to the island.
"China-U.S. relations are at a crossroads," China's Ambassador Yang Jiechi warned in a luncheon speech yesterday, before the final package was disclosed. "Continued U.S. sales of advanced weapons to Taiwan threatens China's national security, violates its sovereignty, and emboldens the separatist forces on that Chinese island."
The White House official last night stressed that the weapons approved were defensive and a reaction to China's own military buildup in the past five years -- not a response to the recent 11-day standoff over the detained crew of a Navy surveillance plane that had collided with a Chinese fighter jet.
The official called it "a balanced package but a substantial package." The administration anticipates Chinese objections, the official said, but "our message is this is driven by them. If they will reduce the threat to Taiwan and make clear that they will not use force against Taiwan to resolve cross-straits issues, that would certainly have an impact on what we would do in the future."
The White House said that one of those future steps could still include the sale of Aegis-equipped destroyers, and the senior White House official said the administration would take steps to ensure that the earliest delivery date for the Aegis destroyers, now estimated to be 2010, would not recede further because of the deferred decision.
While saying the Aegis "decision is for another day," the White House official said, "we're going to look whether there is a way to make sure that the availability date doesn't slip." The Aegis destroyer, armed with anti-missile and anti-aircraft weapons, is capable of tracking and responding to more than 100 planes and missiles at a time.
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said that the Kidd-class destroyers would help train Taiwanese armed forces to handle more sophisticated weapons. They added that Taiwan's military would not be able to use Aegis-equiped destroyers effectively now even if they had them.
Bush, who is to announce the package today, also approved technical briefings for Taiwan on the newest version of Patriot anti-missile missiles, the PAC-3s, which are still in development and will not be available even for American armed forces until 2005 or 2006.
The administration also approved the sale of several other items -- such as mine-sweeping helicopters, torpedoes and amphibious assault vehicles -- while deferring decisions on Taiwan's requests for Apache helicopters, HARM missiles and battle tanks.
The sale of the submarines, if it goes through, could prove almost as irritating as an Aegis sale, according to a Beijing-based Western military official. China, he noted, retaliated against the Netherlands by downgrading diplomatic relations for three years after it sold the island a pair of conventionally powered Zwaardis-class subs in 1981. The submarine and anti-submarine warfare package would go a long way in thwarting the major tactical advantage that China has over Taiwan. Beijing possesses between 30 and 40 operational submarines, including four Russian-built Kilo-class vessels.
Indeed, the official said, submarines are one of three systems -- including the Aegis and the Pac-3 system, that China specifically mentioned in meetings with U.S. and Western officials.
"Anybody who thinks that China is going to be happy with this package is fooling themselves," he said. "If the submarines go through, and that's a big if, it will cause a lot of problems between Washington and Beijing."
The overall package appears likely to disappoint some American conservatives and other China critics, who had argued that even the Aegis system wouldn't be enough to protect Taiwan from a Chinese buildup in short-range missiles positioned within striking distance of Taiwan. China is increasing the number of those missiles, now estimated at 300, at a rate of about 50 a year.
"With the sizable buildup of military forces on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait, I have serious questions regarding the Bush administration's decision not to provide destroyers equipped with advanced command and control systems to Taiwan," said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).
Gary Schmitt, who heads the conservative Project for the New American Century, said that by delaying a sale of Aegis destroyers to Taiwan, "you open the window of vulnerability" through which China can gain superiority over Taiwan.
GOP leaders in Congress, however, supported the administration. "With this action, the administration has made it crystal clear the United States will not allow communist China to dictate our foreign policy and we are committed to our democratic allies in Taiwan," said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that oversees Asian affairs, said Congress would respond favorably. "On balance, most people don't want to be unnecessarily provocative," he said. "If our goal is to promote peace until there is a generational change in leadership [in China], this is the right thing to do."
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have been a sticking point with Beijing since the United States and China normalized relations in 1979. China believes that the U.S. sales make Taiwan less likely to enter talks on reunification.
But the White House said that by making the Taiwanese feel more secure, the arms sales could "actually enhance their ability to enter into a constructive dialogue with the mainland." He also cited the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which said that the United States should provide military systems and services required for the defense of Taiwan.
The White House official yesterday said China's threat had been enhanced by its missile buildup, its purchase of four Kilo diesel-powered submarines from Russia to augment a fleet expected to reach 60 by 2005, and its acquisition of a Russian-made Sovremenny destroyers equipped with Sunburn anti-ship missiles.
Those developments contributed to the decision to provide the submarines, which were previously regarded as offensive weapons. The White House said the subs will be equipped with defensive weapons. The subs would most likely be built in the shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., home state of Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, whose father worked in the shipyard.
The sub sale is complicated by the need for the United States to get designs from the Netherlands or Germany. The United States no longer builds diesel-powered submarines. The White House official said that the administration had not held talks with either country, and the submarines take three to five years to build from existing designs, eight to 10 years if done from scratch. The Kidd destroyers will be available in 2003. The United States, which built them originally for the Shah of Iran, has extras.
Staff writers Juliet Eilperin and Helen Dewar and correspondent John Pomfret in Beijing contributed to this report.
-------- depleted uranium
France finds no Gulf War syndrome but orders probe
By Tom Heneghan
04-24-01
Reuters
From: DSNurse@aol.com
PARIS - An official French study found no hard evidence of a "Gulf War Syndrome" but Paris announced plans Tuesday to examine all 25,000 French veterans of the 1991 conflict to investigate their health complaints.
An independent panel, basing its findings on studies in the United States and Britain, said there was no proof that Gulf veterans were more likely than other troops to die, fall ill, be hospitalized or pass genetic defects to their children.
But French veterans showed similar signs of unexplained illnesses, ranging from chronic fatigue to depression and memory loss, and should therefore be studied, it added.
"There is no particular Gulf War syndrome," Health Minister Bernard Kouchner declared at a joint news conference presenting the study. Asked if he was surprised, he said: "No, I am not."
Defense Minister Alain Richard accepted the panel's conclusion that France had not yet studied the Gulf War's effects on its troops sufficiently and should go ahead with a full examination of all veterans of the conflict.
"Even if we had only a few complaints, we would have to make a general study and take precautions," he said.
VACCINATIONS TO BLAME?
About 200 French veterans have applied for pensions due to illnesses they say are linked to their Gulf service. As many as 100,000 of the 700,000 U.S. Gulf veterans have complained of ailments often linked to the so-called Gulf War syndrome.
Roger Salamon, the Bordeaux University professor who headed the French panel, said his group consulted 350 scientific articles published in the U.S. and Britain about health complaints among Gulf War veterans there.
"Do these signs amount to a syndrome? The answer is a clear no," he said. He said French veterans showed fewer signs of illness linked to their Gulf service, probably because they were subjected to fewer vaccinations than their U.S. and British counterparts.
All three armies distributed the powerful anti-nerve drug pyridostigmine bromide to protect against chemical warfare, but the French say they used less than the Americans and British.
U.S. and British doctors also administered more vaccinations against other threats such as botulism and anthrax.
"This excess of preventative vaccinations under stressful conditions is one of the most probable reasons" for the higher number of complaints in other armies, Salamon said.
"Conditions were not always the same, and I think they were better for the French," he added.
Although the studies found no link between post-war disorders and the chemicals or weapons the soldiers were exposed to, they did note a higher incidence of health complaints from Gulf veterans and slightly higher rates of hospitalization.
U.S. INTEREST IN FRENCH STUDY
Salamon said the full study of all veterans, which should take up to three years, could provide valuable scientific insight that would contrast with the U.S. and British findings.
"The Americans were so interested in this study that they were ready to finance it themselves," Salamon said, quickly adding that Paris did not take up the offer.
Salamon rejected suggestions Paris was late in responding to veterans' complaints, saying the question did not become a public issue in France until late 1999 whereas U.S. veterans had begun pressing their case as early as 1993.
-------- germany
German nuclear waste on the move after protest Reuters
Environmental News Network
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/04/04242001/reu_nuke_43209.asp
Germany began transporting nuclear waste to Britain for the first time in three years on Tuesday, after police cleared away 100 protesters attempting to block the road from a power plant.
In what has become a recurring scene since Germany resumed nuclear waste transports in recent weeks, anti-nuclear activists tried to block the shipment by sitting in its path.
Police detained about 50 of the protesters, a police spokesman said.
The truck carrying the waste traveled 3 miles from the power plant in Neckarwestheim in southern Germany to the town of Walheim. It will await the arrival of another load of nuclear waste from the Biblis plant before continuing by rail to Sellafield in northwest England on Wednesday.
Anti-nuclear activists clashed with police earlier this month as they tried to stop the first transport in three years of nuclear waste from Germany to France.
Thousands of demonstrators also protested last month when Germany took back the first cargo of reprocessed waste from France since the German government banned the shipments in 1998 over concerns about radioactive leaks.
Environmental activists also chained themselves to rail tracks for several hours on Monday to protest Tuesday's shipment.
Protesters say their goal is to raise the cost of nuclear transports so that they become prohibitively expensive and then halted for good.
The nuclear waste transports are part of a deal struck with industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025, a deadline considered too far away by anti-nuclear activists. Germany has no reprocessing facilities of its own.
---
German nuclear waste shipment prompts protest
Planet Ark
GERMANY: April 24, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10614
FRANKFURT - German environmental activists chained themselves to rail tracks for several hours yesterday hoping to stop wagons they said were due to carry a nuclear waste shipment to Britain this week for reprocessing.
The environmental group Greenpeace said a small group of members had been at the Mannheim cargo railway station since early morning to protest against the planned shipment to Sellafield in northwest England.
By early afternoon, German police said they had ended the protest and unchained the demonstrators, who will be charged with dangerous interference in rail transport, an offence that could mean a fine or a jail sentence of up to five years.
"The managers of the power stations who are sending their nuclear waste to Sellafield are unscrupulous. Politicians who have approved the nuclear transports to Sellafield are acting irresponsibly," Greenpeace spokesman Veit Buerger said.
A Greenpeace spokeswoman said 12 members chained themselves to the tracks under an empty wagon that she said was due to transport nuclear waste to the Sellafield reprocessing plant.
Spent nuclear fuel is due to move from power plants at Neckarwestheim and Biblis in southwest Germany to Sellafield late yesterday or early today in what will be the first shipment to Britain in three years.
Anti-nuclear activists clashed with police this month as they tried to hold up the first transport in three years of nuclear waste from Germany to France.
Thousands of demonstrators also protested last month when Germany took back the first cargo of reprocessed waste from France since the German government banned the shipments in 1998 over concerns about radioactive leaks.
-------- russia
Hard Times, Scary Choices in Russia
By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Tuesday, April 24, 2001; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55637-2001Apr23?language=printer
In the 1940s and '50s, Russia's 10 "nuclear cities" were places of relative privilege in the former Soviet Union. Scientists living in these isolated, nameless towns not found on any map were rewarded for their work on nuclear weapons development with good wages and access to scarce consumer goods.
That was then.
Now, six in 10 nuclear experts earn less than $50 per month, and roughly the same number have to moonlight to get by, according to a groundbreaking survey of 500 specialists working in the nuclear cities. The survey was commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"If you're a top manager at Los Alamos, you make about 100 times more than you make if you're a top manager in Russia," said Jon Wolfsthal, an associate in Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project.
"Their economic hardship dramatically increases the risk that they will be forced to sell their skills or materials at hand to the highest bidder," Wolfsthal and Alexander Pikayev wrote in the report's introduction.
More than one in 10 experts said they would like to work outside Russia, and 6 percent said they would move "any place at all." What would they do once they got there? "What they do best, which is make weapons," Wolfsthal said.
Aside from the risk of secret-saturated scientists settling in dangerous places such as Iraq or North Korea, there is the problem of whether there would be anyone left to mind the nuclear store. Private business is proving to be an irresistible lure for many specialists, and migration to the nuclear cities is on the wane.
The report, authored by Russian sociologist Valentin Tikhonov, is available on Carnegie's Web site (www.ceip.org) and will be officially released in early May.
-------- scotland
Glasgow's secret strategy for Russian nuclear attack
The Scotsman
Peter Day,
April 24, 2001,
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=66503&keyword=the
Secret government papers have revealed for the first time how Josef Stalin cast a dark shadow over the Clyde.
In 1952, as Britain recovered from World War II, Cold War emergency planners carried out exercises to see how Scotland's largest city would cope if Stalin launched a nuclear onslaught.
Their grim expectation was that the Kremlin would send a lone bomber carrying a weapon to be detonated 2,000ft over Princes Dock.
Within seconds the city below would cease to exist, its shops and offices would evaporate in the firestorm, tenements would be reduced to rubble and factories swept away by a 700mph nuclear wind.
In those same few moments, 40,000 souls would be lost and a vast army of tormented survivors would be left, maimed and psychologically shattered, to flee the wreckage.
The emergency plans, details of which have just been released at the Public Records Office at Kew in London, assume a weapon of the same power as that which destroyed Nagasaki in Japan.
Despite this apocalyptic vision, the plans show a chilling naiveté about the levels of destruction and what would happen in its aftermath.
There was so little understanding of the effects of radiation that they thought rescue workers would be able to safely get to work close to the heart of the blast within an hour.
And while the scene which greeted them would be one in which every bridge would have been demolished within 400 yards of the epicentre, and most buildings wiped out for 800 yards, they imagined it would be possible to get the trains running again in short order.
The authorities predicted that the firestorm would stop before it reached the suburbs, allowing for the "ruthless billeting" of survivors, sleeping six to a garage among the houses and bungalows of Giffnock.
Another 5,000 would be taken in by the people of Barrhead and surrounding villages, leaving 63,000 to find open-air shelter around Thornliebank.
The problem for civil defence controller Sir Victor Warren was what to do with nearly 300,000 refugees, most of whom were assumed to be heading north to what was then Renfrewshire. Fortunately, civil servants expected 4,500 buses could be found to ferry people to safety.
However London civil servant D. H. Jackson was less than impressed when he reviewed the city's preparations in October 1952. The Ministry of Food official noted: "I got the impression that planning was very far behind in Scotland."
Recognising that the refugees streaming out of the city would have no cooking facilities, one of his main concerns was how they would be fed. He was mollified six months later when he visited again and Glasgow demonstrated that it could muster cottage pie and soup for 6,000 civil defence volunteers at Kelvin Hall.
Even then nothing had been left to chance, as a frantic exchange of telegrams shortly beforehand reveals.
A Mr Rich in Glasgow sent a message to a Mr Lewis in London saying: "Emergency feeding pamphlet mentions spread as part of first emergency meal. "The commodity table on page 108 of your pamphlet refers only to jam, marmalade or syrup. Grateful for your reply by return whether spread should include meat paste."
Mr Lewis replied immediately: "Spread means anything available, including margarine, corn beef, fish or meat paste etc anything in fact which can be spread and can be got."
The scene was set for Armageddon.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Leroy Ingles, 84, first nuclear sub chief
St Paul Pioneer Press
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
DEATHS ELSEWHERE
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/tue/news/docs/002917.htm
Pioneer nuclear sailor Leroy Ingles, hand-picked by Adm. Hyman Rickover to serve as the first chief of the Navy's first nuclear submarine, died April 12 in Olympia, Wash. He was 84.
In 1954, Rickover picked Ingles to serve as the first chief aboard USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine.
Ingles later served aboard one of the Navy's first nuclear missile submarines, the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
In praise of nuclear energy
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/24/01
House Editorial
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010424-724194.htm
The not so-well-known subtext to the current energy problems in California is the abandonment of nuclear power as a source of electrical generating capacity. Since the 1970s, the needlessly difficult process and endless legal challenges from anti-energy environmental groups have made it uneconomical to build new plants. Few have been built, particularly in the Western states. In fact, no new plant has been built since 1979.
However, up till now, the consequences of failing to make provisions, in terms of greater power generating capacity, have not been made manifest to the people who irrationally object to nuclear power. Now, the chickens have finally come home to roost, and the time has come to confront the bogeyman ginned-up by environmental zealots.
Abundant, affordable and clean energy is just what nuclear power could provide. No fossil fuels are consumed, no "greenhouse gasses" are emitted. And modern safeguards make nuclear power at least as safe, if not safer, than other forms of generating power. Indeed, the fact is that despite the hype surrounding the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania more than 20 years ago, not a single person has been harmed, let alone killed, by nuclear power in this country. This contrasts mightily with the tens of thousands who have been killed, and the hundreds of thousands afflicted with diseases such as black lung and emphysema as a result of coal mining and other "dirty" means of developing energy.
Fact is beginning to win out over fiction. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the license process, says that existing plants will seek to renew their operating licenses instead. "We have even seen the first stirring of interest in the possibility of new nuclear plant construction in the United States, a thought that would have been inconceivable even a year ago," NRC Chairman Richard Meserve told The Washington Post.
The Bush administration can speed things along by supporting a proposal to create a safe underground storage facility for spent nuclear fuel rods in a remote area of Nevada called Yucca Mountain. Activists have fought for years to prevent the opening of such a facility, but their objections are based on either irrational fears, an inability to understand the safeguards that have been designed, or an outright hostility to any solution that would reduce energy costs for average Americans.
Liberal intellectuals such as Amory Lovins have stated publicly that giving Americans access to cheap, abundant and renewable energy would be the equivalent of "giving an idiot child a machine gun." It was this hostility to an improved quality of life for average Americans that throttled nuclear power in the 1970s. Letīs hope that in the dawning century, clearer thinking prevails.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- utah
Utah uranium cleanup left out of Bush budget
CALIFORNIA FEARS DRINKING WATER CONTAMINATION
San Jose Mercury News
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
BY TONY PERRY
Los Angeles Times
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/nation/docs/uranium24.htm
The Bush administration has omitted money from the federal budget to continue a cleanup of a huge uranium slag heap in southern Utah that has been leaking radioactive waste into the Colorado River.
Perched about 750 feet from the river's edge near the small town of Moab, the waste heap is the size of a football field and contains 13 tons of material left over from a uranium mill that shut down in 1984. The mill provided uranium for nuclear weapons.
Officials of the Department of Energy, which is about to assume responsibility for the cleanup, did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Officials in California are worried that the mill waste could severely contaminate the Colorado River, a major source of drinking water for Southern California.
A past pledge
After years of trying to get federal attention, some members of Congress managed to get an amendment to a military appropriations bill last year pledging assistance for the cleanup at Moab.
The bill provided no money but contained a pledge that the federal government, pending a study by the National Academy of Sciences, would pay to have the waste pile moved away from the river.
The bill was signed by President Clinton with a promise that the government would continue the project in future years. The bill was part of a common two-step legislative process in which a project is authorized the first year and funded in the second and subsequent years.
Potential risk
So far, water intake plants downstream from Moab have not detected any unsafe levels of toxins traceable to the waste. Officials worry, however, that the waste heap is a ``radioactive time bomb'' that could contaminate drinking water in the event of a flood, an earthquake or the cumulative effects of the leaching.
Moab is a popular tourist destination 240 miles southeast of Salt Lake City in a starkly beautiful, ecologically fragile region that is home to national parks and monuments.
A spokesman for Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, whose district includes Moab, said the Bush budget does not include any specific Department of Energy cleanup projects and therefore his boss is confident that Moab has not been singled out for exclusion.
But others, including the trustee of the land, suggest that the Bush administration may decide that it is too expensive and not necessary to move the pile. There are disputes about whether virtually all of the toxic material will have leached into the river before the pile can be moved.
-------- us nuc waste
Bush budget skips uranium cleanup
Seattle Times
By Tony Perry
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
Los Angeles Times
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=uranium24&date=20010424
The Bush administration has omitted any money from the federal budget to continue cleanup of a huge uranium-slag heap in southern Utah that leaks radioactive waste into the Colorado River.
At about 750 feet from the river edge near the town of Moab, the waste heap is the size of a football field with 13 tons of material from a uranium mill that closed in 1984.
Officials of the Department of Energy, which is about to assume responsibility for the cleanup, did not respond to calls seeking comment. A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget said he could not explain why the project had not been funded.
The budgetary omission has brought protests both from Utah and Southern California. Officials in California are worried that the mill waste could severely contaminate the Colorado, a major source of drinking water for Southern California and the Southwest.
"We worked too long and too hard to let this happen," said Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Calif. "It's too critical to California."
"Our entire water supply is threatened," said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. "They've got to act quickly."
After years trying to get federal attention, Napolitano, Filner and others in Congress managed to get an amendment to a military-appropriations bill last year pledging assistance for the cleanup.
The bill provided no money but contained a pledge that the federal government, pending a study by the National Academy of Sciences, would pay to have the waste pile moved away from the river.
The bill was signed by President Clinton just before the November election with a promise the government would continue the project in future years.
The bill was part of a common two-step legislative process in which a project is authorized the first year and funded in subsequent years.
So far, water-intake plants downstream have not detected any unsafe levels of toxins from the waste.
Officials worry, however, that the waste heap is a "radioactive time bomb" that should be cleaned up before a flood, an earthquake or the cumulative effects of the leaching contaminate drinking water downstream.
Last week, seven members of Congress petitioned the chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add $10 million to the budget for the project. Their letter noted that 25 million people in the West depend on the Colorado for drinking water.
But the Bush administration, to date, has neither budgeted money for the cleanup nor for the study.
Meanwhile, Moab residents complain that the cleanup work done so far at the site has actually made things worse by increasing the amount of dirt that blows into town during the area's frequent windstorms.
"People here are up in arms about the tail-dust blowing through the town," said Bill Hedden, a former Grand County commissioner from Moab and now Utah conservation director of the Grand Canyon Trust.
The slag heap was left behind by a plant run by Atlas Corp., which filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998. The plant, which began operating in 1956, provided uranium for nuclear weapons.
Moab, a town of 4,500 people, is a popular tourist destination 240 miles southeast of Salt Lake City in a starkly beautiful, ecologically fragile corner of the Southwest. The region is home to several national parks and monuments.
In the 1950s, Moab was the capital of a uranium-mining boom.
---
Radiation Distortions
Salt Lake Tribune
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/04242001/public_f/91489.htm
The opinion piece by Pamela Jo Brubaker ("Plutonium Wastes . . . ," Tribune, March 30) contains accurate information about the plutonium content of spent fuel rods, but astounding distortions of the concomitant health risks. Accurate information on such radiation issues is readily available from the Health Physics Society, a non-profit scientific professional organization whose mission is to promote the practice of radiation safety. This is an international organization with approximately 6,000 members. The following information is from their position paper on "Deadly Plutonium" found on their Web site, www.hps.org, along with a wealth of other information pertaining to radiation risks and protection.
"The radiological hazards of plutonium are of the same types and magnitudes as those of such naturally occurring radioactive elements as radium and thorium, which are now and always have been present in the food we eat, in the water we drink, and in trace amounts in our bodies. However, the potential for public exposure to plutonium is negligible compared with thorium, which is found everywhere in soil and rock; it is three times as abundant as uranium and about as abundant as lead in the Earth's crust."
Several of the 39 members of the Health Physics Society living and working in Utah, including myself, have professional experience with plutonium and are available to help anyone interested to find peer-reviewed scientific information about radiation issues.
Unfortunately, we are not as adept as Ms. Brubaker, a graduate student in mass communications, in reaching the public!
KEITH SCHIAGER Salt Lake City
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
U.S. Offers Arms to Taiwan
ABC News
April 24, 2001
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/taiwan010424.html
WASHINGTON, April 24 - In a low-key private meeting, the Bush administration today quietly informed the Taiwanese government that it can buy new military hardware to fend off threats from China.
President Bush approved the arms sale on Monday, stopping short of letting Taiwan buy the U.S. Navy's most advanced radar technology. Amid increasing tensions with China, which views Taiwan as a rebel territory, the White House has taken a decidedly low-key approach to today's meeting between Pentagon brass and Taiwanese officials.
A U.S. delegation, led by Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Fred Smith, delivered the decision in a secret three-hour meeting with Taiwanese officials at Fort McNair, a U.S. Army base in Washington.
Bush Says U.S. Would Defend Taiwan
Also today, Bush, in an interview with ABCNEWS, struck a strong tone regarding U.S. support for Taiwan.
Asked whether he believed the United States has an obligation to defend Taiwan, Bush said: "yes, we do. And the Chinese must understand that."
Bush went on to say the United States would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself."
The president's statements were a surprise to Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
"The Taiwan Defense Act obligates the United States to help Taiwan defend itself, but we don't have a mutual defense pact with Taiwan," he said. "I don't think any American president has ever committed carte blanche like that before."
Cirincione notes that since the Nixon administration, the United States has recognized the communist government in Beijing as the one legitimate government for all of China, including Taiwan.
"Whether intentionally or unintentionally, [Bush] seems to be going a lot farther than anyone has previously," says Cirincione.
Good News, Bad News for Taiwan
At the meeting, the Taiwanese were told Bush had decided he would not - at least for now - let Taiwan buy super-sophisticated naval destroyers this year. Both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell had recommended that Bush forgo sales of missile destroyers with advanced Aegis systems.
Fearing an invasion from mainland China, the Taiwanese government has been asking for the most high-powered new destroyers and radar gear. While the $1 billion Aegis-equipped ships will not be in Taiwan's shopping cart this year, the White House is signalling that if China further increases it's saber rattlingtoward Taiwan, the situation could change.
"The president believes very strongly that the best way to promote peace and stability is to make certain that Taiwan has the means necessary to secure its defense needs," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said today, explaining the decision. "And this decision was made on the president's determination on how best to secure the peace and to provide Taiwan with the means necessary to defend itself."
While Taiwan will not be allowed to buy Aegis systems, it has been offered less sophisticated items. Topping the list of less-controversial equipment Bush approved for sale are four Kidd-class destroyers and advanced missiles for Taiwanese air defense fighter jets.
Bush also agreed to help Taiwan get eight diesel-powered submarines, which the United States has not produced in three decades, and a dozen P3 Orion submarine-hunting aircraft. Also deferred for now, however, are requested Apache helicopter gunships and M-1A2 tanks.
Landmark Weapons Sale
The sale will not be everything Taiwan wants, but it will amount to the largest arms sale to the nation in nearly a decade - a fact that has angered mainland China.
Chinese ambassador Yang Jiechi this morning delivered a formal protest of the decision to U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, according to State Department spokesman Phillip Reeker.
"Undersecretary Grossman received the Chinese ambassador today, who had read obviously the press accounts of our arms sales to Taiwan," Reeker said, "and was passing along his country's views in accordance with those press accounts."
London-based China analyst Jonathan Mirsky says deferring the decision on, rather than rejecting it outright, keeps China on notice that the United States is watching closely.
"The message to China is we are going to build these destroyers and they will be available to Taiwan if we think that Taiwan needs defending," Mirsky said.
Relations with China have suffered a major setback in recent weeks, with Beijing's 11-day detention of the crew of a U.S. surveillance plane that made an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet. The pilot of the Chinese aircraft was lost.
Many lawmakers, especially Republicans, had been pressuring Bush to provide Taiwan with more and better weapons. The lawmakers say the surveillance plane incident demonstrated a need to counter Chinese aggressiveness and expansionism.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., a member of the House International Relations Committee, told ABCNEWS the incident is likely to boost congressional support for Taiwan's request to buy advanced weapons.
"We have to send more and better arms, more sophisticated weaponry to Taiwan," King said. "I think that you will see a greater degree of weaponry going to Taiwan now than you would have if there had not been this terrible incident."
Still, Senate Intelligence Committee member Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said the Aegis systems were too tall an order.
"If we were to sell them Aegis cruisers or destroyers, for example, it would be a decade before we could deliver those," Kyl said. "That's obviously not acceptable, given the kind of buildup of the Chinese."
Taiwan's Shopping List
The United States will sell the following to Taiwan, according to the White House:
Four Kidd-class destroyers ready by 2003. 12 P-3C Orion aircraft. Eight diesel submarines designed to counter blockades and invasions. Paladin self-propelled artillery system. MH-53E minesweeping helicopters. AAV7A1 Amphibious Assault Vehicles. Mk 48 torpedoes without advanced capabilities. Avenger surface-to-air missile system. Submarine-launched and surface-launched torpedoes. Aircraft survivability equipment. The United States also will give Taiwan a technical briefing on the Patriot anti-missile system the island has been developing.
ABCNEWS' Ann Compton, Vic Ratner and Tamara Lipper and ABCNEWS.com's David Ruppe contributed to this report. Shopping list compiled by The Associated Press.
Weapons Systems Facts
Diesel Submarine
These have not yet been constructed but are expected to be built on a German or Dutch design and manufactured in one of those countries.
The subs would be intended primarily for anti-blockade operations and to counter China?s growing fleet of modern subs and ships.
They are expected to be able to carry MK-48 torpedoes, but probably will not have a land-attack missile capability.
Kidd-class Destroyer
Initially built for the shah of Iran but acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1979, and then decommissioned in 1998.
Geared for general warfare and capable of operating offensively to deal with simultaneous air, surface and subsurface attacks.
P-3C Orion Aircraft
Land-based, long-range surveillance aircraft, primary used in antisubmarine or antisurface warfare.
Can also carry a mixed payload of weapons internally and on wing pylons.
Paladin M109A6 Self-Propelled Artillery System
Used by military forces in the United States, Israel and Kuwait, this cannon artillery system can fire up to eight rounds per minute or three rounds per 15 seconds.
Has a range of 214 miles with a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour.
MH-53E Minesweeping Helicopter
Minesweeping version of the extremely versatile CH-53E, one of the world?s largest and heaviest helicopters.
Six of these aircraft were used during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. It has proved to be an excellent mine-countermeasures platform.
AAV7A1 Amphibious Assault Vehicle
Designed to provide armor protection, command, control, and repair capabilities while transporting troops and cargo from ship to shore.
Able to negotiate 10-foot plunging surf, and all kinds of terrain, with a top speed of 45 mph.
MK-48 Torpedo
A heavyweight torpedo designed to combat fast, deep-diving nuclear submarines and high performance surface ships, carried by all Navy submarines.
They can use active and/or passive homing, and can conduct multiple reattacks if they miss the target.
Avenger Missile System
Lightweight, highly mobile and air transportable surface-to-air missile systems, typically mounted on the back of a Humvee.
Includes eight Stinger missiles in two turret-mounted launch pods and can fire from a moving or stationary position.
---
U.S. brushes off Chinese objections to arms sale
USA Today
04/24/2001
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-24-aegis-usat.htm
WASHINGTON - China strenuously objected Tuesday to President Bush's decision to sell Taiwan a substantial package of military hardware, including four destroyers and up to eight submarines. The White House, however, defended the sale and maintained that its size is not linked to the recent U.S.-China standoff over a midair collision April 1 between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter. "The best way to address this issue is for China to take fewer actions rather than more in terms of its military presence so there is less of a threat to Taiwan," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Bush deferred the sale of four destroyers equipped with the high-tech Aegis radar system, the item on Taiwan's military wish list that China most opposed. White House officials said Bush may allow the Aegis sale in the future if China does not curb its buildup of missiles aimed at Taiwan.
Chinese Ambassador Yang Jiechi delivered a formal protest of the sale at the State Department here. In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said the sale will "seriously undermine China"s sovereignty, interfere in China"s internal affairs and will give rise to tensions across the Taiwan Strait." Reaction from China"s People"s Liberation Army to news of the arms sale, the largest U.S.-Taiwan military deal in more than a decade, was stronger. An article in The People"s Liberation Army Daily said the sale will "bring more serious dangers to regional peace and stability and lead to suicidal results."
A delegation from Taiwan was officially notified of the sale Tuesday morning during a meeting with U.S. officials at the Army's Fort McNair in Washington.
Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the United States can supply Taiwan with defensive arms. China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. Washington recognizes Beijing's claim that Taiwan is part of China but insists that Taiwan not be forced into reunifying.
Many congressional supporters of Taiwan had pushed for Bush to sell the Aegis-equipped destroyers, particularly after the midair incident. China held 24 U.S. crewmembers for 11 days after the collision over the South China Sea. Beijing still holds the U.S. plane. Nevertheless, the reaction on Capitol Hill was largely positive toward the sale. Although the four Kidd class-destroyers Taiwan will receive will not have the Aegis system, many lawmakers hailed Bush's inclusion of submarines as well as a dozen P-3 submarine-hunting airplanes. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., said he wished Bush had done more for Taiwan, but he praised the submarine sale in particular. "Their presence in the waters off of Taiwan will deter a communist Chinese invasion," he said.
China analysts said that while Beijing predictably objected to news of the sale, the rhetoric from the regime was not as strong as it could have been. The Chinese response, thus far, "has been fairly measured," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. "But given the creaky decision-making processes of the Chinese regime, we may not know the real response for some time."
Other analysts agree that it's going to take time to see what the future course of the U.S.-China relationship may be, including Washington's crucial economic interest in China"s market of 1. 2 billion people. "It"s still too early for all this to be digested," said John Foarde of the U.S.-China Business Council, a group of companies engaged in trade and investment in China.
---
Wrong way on Taiwan
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/24/01
House Editorial
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010424-92381315.htm
In the wake of the Chinese militaryīs belligerent interference with an American reconnaissance plane operating over international waters and the subsequent diplomatic crisis with China, President George W. Bush had to make a decision as to what defensive weapons he wanted to sell to Taiwan. That decision came down yesterday afternoon and it was the wrong one.
Citing a source close to a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Tony Blankley, a columnist for The Washington Times, reported March 28 that President Bush had decided to deny Taiwanīs request to purchase several Aegis-class guided-missile destroyers. Four days later, Chinaīs military escalated its aggression against U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, requiring an American plane, badly disabled in a collision caused by a reckless Chinese pilot, to land at a Chinese military airport on an offshore island. Here the 24 crew members became de facto hostages for nearly two weeks.
Administration officials have been insisting that the diplomatic crisis would not affect the decision regarding what defensive arms could be sold to Taiwan. One might look at this two ways. If Mr. Bush had decided to sell Taiwan the advanced defensive systems, including the Aegis, which it clearly needs to counter Communist Chinaīs aggressive military buildup, that would have been appropriate, because the policy would have been correct in the first place. But if the administration had decided to deny the Aegis to Taiwan then Mr. Bush should have taken advantage of Chinaīs indefensible behavior and used those incidents to meet Americaīs obligations, in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, to help Taiwan defend itself.
Indeed there was another important reason to sell Taiwan the Aegis system, which, itīs worth noting, could not be delivered for at least another eight years. Ultimately, Aegis could be upgraded to fulfill Mr. Bushīs grand vision of national and regional missile defense systems to protect America, its overseas troops and its allies. To complement the Aegis system, Taiwan had asked to receive the U.S. Armyīs PAC-3 Patriot anti-missile system, which is currently under development and which Bush advisers have reportedly recommended against selling to Taiwan. Meanwhile, the administration approved as a stopgap measure the sale of four less-sophisticated Kidd-class destroyers, which could be delivered within two years. That was the recommendation in a study of Taiwanīs needs by U.S. naval officers, who also argued on behalf of supplying Taiwan with diesel submarines, which the president did approve.
Taiwan is an island of 23 million people who have, over the past several decades, collectively produced both a thriving democracy and a world-class industrial economy. Taiwan, of course, poses no military threat to any of its neighbors, especially the 1.3 billion inhabitants of the Peopleīs Republic of China, who, unfortunately, continue to be ruled by the ruthless dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. Only the United States can prevent the Taiwanese from falling victim to the same fate. The least we could do is sell Taiwan the weapons necessary for it to defend its hard-won democratic and economic victories. Instead, the administration opted for half-measures.
---
Reaganīs commitment to Taiwan
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Harvey Feldman
Published 4/24/01
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010424-25518213.htm
Even before the mid-air collision over the South China Sea caused more turbulence in Beijing-Washington relations, the arms issue was making its own waves. The Peopleīs Republic of China (PRC) dispatched senior officials to lobby strenuously against approval of any major items, objecting most strongly to the one heading Taiwanīs list: Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis battle management system. Yesterday, the Bush administration decided on an arms package for Taiwan. It did not include the controversial destroyers.
One of Beijingīs principal arguments is that any transfer of military equipment violates the joint communiqué of Aug. 17, 1982. In that document, the United States said that "it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan." Further, the Reagan administration agreed that arms sales to Taiwan "will not exceed, either in qualitative or quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution."
Thus, 19 years after this communiqué was signed, China insists that the United States has no business selling any arms to Taiwan, let alone sophisticated equipment. But Beijingīs argument omits some crucial historical facts. Both the text of the communiqué and a public statement issued by President Reagan on the day it was released link arms reduction quite directly to PRC policy and its degree of threat to Taiwan.
Even more directly and dramatically, in a message to Taiwanīs then-President Chiang Ching-kuo on July 14, 1982 a message only recently made public President Reagan went further: "I want to point out," Mr. Reagan said, "this decision [on the communiqué with Beijing] is based on a PRC decision only to use peaceful means to resolve the Taiwan issue. On this point, the U.S. will not only pay attention to what the PRC says, but will also use all methods to achieve surveillance of PRC military production and military deployment. If there is any change with regard to their commitment to a peaceful solution of the Taiwan issue, the U.S. commitments would become invalidated."
The reference to "all methods to achieve surveillance" has particular resonance now, given Beijingīs campaign to end our intelligence-gathering flights. But the more important question is whether the PRC is committed to a peaceful solution to the Taiwan issue.
So letīs look at the facts. The PRC is steadily increasing the number of land attack missiles opposite Taiwan. It has been buying advanced combat aircraft, destroyers and submarines from Russia. It issued two White Papers in 2000, justifying use of military force if Taiwan delays entering into negotiations for unification. But at the same time , Beijing has turned down Taiwanīs attempts to get a dialogue started, refusing to enter into talks on any basis other than Taiwanīs acceptance of the proposition that it is a part of China and that the Beijing regime is the sole legal government of China. As Taiwan has evolved into a thriving democracy, pressure from the giant dictatorship next door has escalated.
The weapons that Taiwan wants to buy are defensive in character. Taiwan seeks to protect itself from missile attack, naval blockade and general harassment from the air and by sea. The idea that Taiwan, with its 23 million people, would want to start a war with the PRC and its 1.23 billion people, is ridiculous on its face.
The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, commits the United States to "make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability." It also says that the determination of what and how much to sell should be based solely on Taiwanīs needs. that is exactly what should have been done.
Amb. Harvey Feldman was a foreign service officer for 32 years, specializing in Asian affairs. In 1979 he co-chaired the State Department working group that prepared the initial draft of the Taiwan Relations Act.
---
U.S. will sell destroyers to Taiwan
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/24/01
Joseph Curl and Bill Gertz, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010424-44664.htm
The United States will sell Taiwan eight advanced submarines and four Kidd-class destroyers, significantly increasing the island nationīs defensive capabilities, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
The administration also will sell Taiwan as many as 12 P-3 Orion aircraft, a plane specially designed for maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare, and other weapons, but Taipei will not receive destroyers equipped with state-of-the-art Aegis missile defense system.
"The balance which we think had started toward (Chinaīs) favor in a dangerous way, is righted," a senior White House official said last night. The administration will make the formal announcement today.
The arms package was not intended as a response to Chinaīs detention of 24 Americans on Hainan island after a Chinese jet fighter collided with a U.S. surveillance plane.
"We made these decisions in the context of what is a clear administration policy to support Taiwanīs legitimate defense needs," said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The submarine sale to Taiwan -- which has only four submarines now, two of which are World War II-era "Guppy-class" vessels -- is a significant development, analysts said.
"The sale signals a change from the last five or six administrations," said Bates Gill, director of the Brookings Institution Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. "Blockades and submarine warfare is apparently the direction China is taking as it contemplates its strategy with Taiwan. This will change things dramatically."
The Clinton administration blocked most of Taiwanīs arms sales requests for the past eight years in what critics have described as a de facto moratorium on arms sales. The State Department blocked U.S. submarine sales, claiming they are barred "offensive" weapons.
The last major U.S. weapons sale to the island was the sale of 150 F-16 jets in 1993.
But senior Bush officials said yesterday said President Bush, on the recommendation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has decided not to award Taiwan its most coveted prize: destroyers equipped with the high-tech Aegis radar system, capable of anti-air, anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare.
The White House official told The Washington Times that the sale of Aegis battle management systems, known as "evolved advanced combat system" was deferred because of the more-immediate need to get the Kidd-class ships delivered.
Those mothballed American ships could be serving Taiwan as early as 2003.
"What we did was by the book and is an assessment of their real defense needs," the senior administration official said. "We did not play politics and we did not try to send the Chinese a signal."
The arms sale also should not be misconstrued by China as a resuming of the defunct U.S.-Taiwan defense alliance. "This is not that at all," the official said.
There was no official Chinese reaction early today, but one Chinese academic said the sale of submarines crossed a "red line" demanding a harsh response by Beijing.
"This package represents a major breakthrough in U.S. arms sales policy to Taiwan and this will be certainly viewed by Beijing as a major problem for U.S.-China relations and for cross-Strait relations," said Wu Xinbo, a professor at the Fudan University Center for American Studies in Shanghai.
"I think there will be some substantive actions and this will come very soon," said Mr. Wu. "At this stage, protest is too mild an action, given this break of the red line."
Mr. Rumsfeld is scheduled to relay Mr. Bushīs decision to a visiting Taiwanese delegation today after notifying senior members of Congress.
The sale is an annual ritual on Capitol Hill, required by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which calls for the United States to provide Taiwan with "such defense articles and defense services as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability."
Defense officials said the German-designed diesel-powered submarines -- to be built by General Motors and Litton -- will not be fitted with missiles that can reach China and will be equipped primarily to conduct anti-submarine warfare.
Construction is expected to take about five years and the total value of the sale is estimated to be around $5 billion.
According to a senior Pentagon official, the eight submarines will help the Taiwanese conduct "counter-invasion" and "counter-blockade" operations, the official said.
The submarines are intended to encourage Taiwan to "invest in developing a layered, integrated approach to anti-submarine warfare," the official said.
While Taiwan sought the Aegis-equipped destroyers, a staff report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released last week said that "Taiwan commanders repeatedly stated that by far the most important item for Taiwanīs navy, indeed for Taiwanīs entire military, is the acquisition of submarines."
The report, written after a fact-finding mission to Taiwan by committee aide James P. Doran, stated that Beijing has more than 20 times the number of submarines as Taipei does and that the Taiwanese navyīs submarine forces is aging.
"Because of their survivability, submarines will be a crucial last line of sea-based defense against a Chinese blockade," the report stated.
Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, has said Chinaīs buildup of some 300 short-range missiles opposite Taiwan is destabilizing and justifies U.S. sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan to balance the forces.
The Defense Intelligence Agency has said that the missile buildup opposite Taiwan, which includes both CSS-7 and CSS-6 missiles, is dangerous because it provides little or no warning time to Taiwan of an attack.
New submarines would be able to survive a Chinese short-range missile attack and any blockade that would follow -- two likely attack scenarios outlined in a Pentagon report to Congress.
"While missiles aimed at Taiwan are always a concern, in terms of real military coercive capacity, we see greater immediate concerns in the submarine and surface warfare areas that Chinaīs bringing to bear in the theater," Mr. Gill said.
The Kidd destroyers -- commissioned by the U.S. Navy in 1982 and taken out of service in 1998 after completing only half of their life expectancy are geared for general warfare instead of just anti-submarine operations. They can fire anti-ship missiles and have advanced air-defense radar and surface-to-air missiles that allow them to command a wide ocean area.
"The point is they clearly need fleet air defense," said one senior defense official. "The Kidd-class ships will cover some of that."
Adm. Blair told Congress last month that the destroyers still have "plenty of useful life yet."
The 12 P-3 Orion anti-submarine aircraft will use advanced sensors to detect submarines from far distances. The $36 million, four-engine aircraft can fly for up to 14 hours with a crew of about 10 and will "net all the components together" in the anti-submarine defense, the senior Pentagon official said.
Defense officials said Taiwan requested 30 different weapons systems this year.
The sale of M-1A1 Abrams tanks and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters is being put off until the Army can conduct a study of Taiwanīs ground forces needs. Sales of anti-radar HARM missiles and Joint Direct Attack Munitions -- precision radar-guided bombs -- also were deferred.
Taiwanese defense officials had no immediate comment, but Parris Chang, a senior lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, said the arms package is a "very, very good one."
"I think this decision shows the Bush administration took Taiwanīs defense needs seriously," Mr. Chang said. "It also shows Bush understands that the balance of power is tilting toward China."
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer yesterday played down the significance of the deal.
"Every president since 1982 has made their decision in the context of the events in that year dealing with Taiwan. Itīs stating the obvious."
-------- colombia
Colombia captures drug lord
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
4/24/01
Steve Salisbury THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010424-702291.htm
MARANDUA, Colombia -- After a 2-1/2 month manhunt employing some 3,300 soldiers and at least 13 combat helicopters, the Colombian army says it has captured Brazilian cocaine kingpin Luis Fernando da Costa in the jungles of eastern Colombia.
U.S. lawmakers and Bush administration officials called for stepped up efforts to apprehend Mr. da Costa after The Washington Times reported in March the discovery of documents, testimony, and receipts showing a drug-running relationship between him and Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Colombian authorities said yesterday that Mr. da Costa will be extradited to Brazil, where he faces multiple charges of murder, drug trafficking, arms trafficking and money laundering.
Brazilian authorities have linked Mr. da Costa to at least 10 murders, and say he controls more than 60 percent of the Brazilian drug trade.
Mr. da Costaīs seizure was part of the Colombian militaryīs Operation Gato Negro (Black Cat).
"This is a very important operation," Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said Sunday, the day after Mr. da Costaīs arrest. Mr. Ramirez was joined by the military high command at a news conference at the sun-baked Marandua air force base in eastern Vichada province, about 60 miles from the Venezuelan border.
"This operation is going to deliver a very serious blow to the finances of the FARC. It takes away fuel from the war in Colombia. If we weaken the revenues of drug trafficking, indirectly, but effectively, we are draining away the gasoline that fuels the Colombian conflict," he said.
Gen. Fernando Tapias Stahelin, chief of the Colombian military, said, "It has been shown that the FARC has been receiving $10 million a month from narcotics activity with these groups."
"According to the capacity of the (seven) cocaine 'crystalizerī laboratories found (and destroyed during the operation), 20 to 22 tons of cocaine were produced each month."
Mr. Ramirez said the drug operation headed by Mr. da Costa, also known by his aliases "Fernandinho" and "Alvaro," is one of the most important cocaine cartels discovered by authorities since the fall of the Medellin and Cali cartels.
Mr. da Costa is reported to have escaped in the mid-1990s from a Brazilian prison, where he was serving sentences for narcotics and other crimes. Law enforcement officials say he found refuge with the FARC's 16th Front in eastern Colombia, where he based himself in the village of Barrancomina.
Residents and people associated with the drug trade in the Barrancomina area told The Washington Times that Mr. da Costa, known there as "Alvaro," had worked in partnership with the commander of the FARCīs 16th Front, "El Negro Acacio," whose legal name is believed by authorities to be Tomas Medina Caracas.
Paraded before the press at the Marandua base Sunday along with two other suspects accused of aiding his flight from justice, Mr. da Costa, speaking Portuguese, insisted he was just a farmer and rancher.
The Colombian armyīs Rapid Deployment Force entered Barrancomina Feb. 12 and nearly captured Mr. da Costa at a nearby farm later that month, wounding him in the right arm.
After making his way overland for dozens of miles, Mr. da Costa boarded a small plane with several associates on April 19, Army officers said. One of his colleagues was identified as the 16th Frontīs chief finance manager and an important FARC cocaine- and gun-running link.
The plane was intercepted by the Colombian air force that day and forced to land, said Col. Jose Domingo Tafur, the executive officer of the Rapid Deployment Force. All the occupants, except the pilot, fled into the jungle.
Two days later, troops captured Mr. da Costa when he came out of the jungle to drink water from a stream.
Major Juan Pablo Franco, who was with the capturing force, said Mr. da Costa tried to bribe him by saying he could transfer money into his bank account via a satellite phone call.
-------- drug war
Peru downs planes with help of U.S. in drug program
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/24/01
Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010424-97534009.htm
The Peruvian government, with U.S. surveillance assistance, has shot down or strafed more than 100 airplanes since 1992 as part of a program aimed at reducing the flood of cocaine into the United States, U.S. intelligence officials said yesterday.
The air-interdiction program, fiercely advocated by both Peruvian and U.S. officials, is designed to deny drug traffickers the use of the "Andean air bridge" between Peru and Colombia, a corridor linking the two countries through which Peruvian coca paste is transported to Colombia for processing into cocaine.
Peru is one of the worldīs major producers of coca leaf, coca paste and cocaine base, much of the crop coming from 30,000 acres under cultivation in the rugged valleys along the Colombian and Ecuadoran borders.
On Friday, the air-surveillance program came under intense scrutiny when a Peruvian air force jet shot at a civilian aircraft, forcing it to land and killing an American missionary and her infant daughter.
A U.S. surveillance plane owned by the Defense Department and operated by the CIA had provided "location data" to the Peruvian jet, meaning it relayed the civilian aircraftīs coordinates allowing the jet to intercept it.
The information was sent to the Peruvian jet under strictly defined rules of engagement, the U.S. officials said. The shooting occurred near the town of Iquitos, located in northeast Peru between Colombia and Brazil.
Peruvian government officials said yesterday the civilian aircraft had not filed a flight plan, a claim disputed by the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, which sponsored the flight. CIA-operated aircraft typically provide surveillance information to the Peruvian air force on civilian aircraft that have not filed a flight plan.
The U.S. air-surveillance program has been suspended pending an investigation. Some U.S. sources say Peru acted rashly in firing on the plane, while the Peruvians maintain they followed the programīs procedures, which some American sources have denied.
Questions remain on whether U.S. authorities warned the Peruvian jet against the attack because the specific nature of the civilian plane had not been determined.
The Peruvian defense ministry expressed "deep regret" over the incident, saying the pilot had mistaken the civilian aircraft for a planeload of narcotics traffickers. Peruvian officials also said the plane did not respond to attempts to contact it by radio.
The United States began limited air surveillance and interdiction in Peru and other South American countries in 1992 under the Bush administration. It continued and escalated through 1998, when the Clinton administration shut the program down because of "other pressing needs."
The number of U.S. surveillance flights to detect and monitor illicit drug shipments in the Andean nations declined by 68 percent between 1992 and 1998.
The flights resumed again in late 1999 after intense lobbying by government officials in Peru and other South American countries, along with U.S. authorities.
It was the Peruvian government that expressed most of the frustration over the United Statesī decision to halt the air-surveillance program. The withdrawal of Airborne Warning and Control System and other surveillance aircraft, they argued, left air lanes into Colombia virtually open to drug traffickers, hamstringing Peruīs ability to halt the drug trade.
Gen. Dennis del Castillo, director of Peruīs national drug police, argued at the time the Peruvian air force had the pilots and planes to do the job of air interdiction, but without U.S. air surveillance and intelligence, "We canīt always find the traffickers."
Until mid-1995, larger planes based in Colombia had flown directly to the coca-producing areas of Peru with near impunity, where the pilots delivered bundles of cash in exchange for tons of partially processed cocaine. U.S. officials said traffickers were making 40 flights a month until the air program began to have some effect.
CIA-operated aircraft have been involved in air-surveillance duties in Peru for the past six years, operating under a law passed by Congress in 1994. The law lets U.S. government employees assist foreign nations in the interdiction of aircraft when there is reasonable suspicion it may be carrying drugs or is involved directly in the drug trade.
The law also limits U.S. assistance to those countries with "appropriate procedures . . . to protect against innocent loss of life" and that "at a minimum include effective means to identify and warn an aircraft" before an attack is started.
The CIA-manned aircraft are used as hunters to spot potential targets, although all final decisions on actual interdictions are made by Peruvian authorities.
The U.S. Customs Service, which began an air-surveillance program in Peru in 1995, resumed air-surveillance operations in that country early last year, hoping to reverse gains cocaine smugglers made in the 17 months the air-surveillance program was shut down.
The Customs Service program accounted for a 56 percent drop in coca production. The tightly coordinated program accounted for 24 planes being shot down and another 12 being grounded.
But those flights were discontinued in December, although other air-surveillance efforts continue, particularly in the Bahamas and Colombia.
-------- u.s.
Saudi rule looser than Pentagon's
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 11:43 PM ET
By Edward T. Pound, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-24-mcsally.htm
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military directive requiring women deployed to Saudi Arabia to wear a head-to-toe robe conflicts with the official guidance that the Saudi government gives to foreigners and also with the State Department's policy for its employees.
The military policy provoked controversy last week when an outspoken U.S. Air Force female pilot complained that the dress code discriminates against women. Military officials defended the policy. They said it was implemented years ago out of respect for Islamic law and Saudi customs and to protect its women from harassment by the mutawa, or religious police, and from potential terrorists.
However, the Saudi government does not require non-Muslim women to wear a dark robe known as an abaya, according to the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The official guidance, issued by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, says that foreigners should dress conservatively but they are not required to wear the robe, U.S. officials said.
The State Department bases its dress policy on the Saudi guidance. Its employees are not expected to wear an abaya when on official duty. When off-duty, women use their own judgment about wearing the garment.
Military commanders in Saudi Arabia require women to wear an abaya and a headscarf when they leave their installations. Maj. Martha McSally, the senior female fighter pilot in the Air Force, challenged that policy in an interview with USA TODAY last week.
McSally, who has been serving in Saudi Arabia since November, called the dress code "ridiculous and unnecessary." She urged the U.S. command responsible for troops in Saudi Arabia to modify the policy. She argued that women should be able to wear their uniforms on official business and dress in long pants and long-sleeve shirts when off-duty.
Asked to explain their policy in the context of the Saudi guidance, military officials offered no explanation Tuesday.
Home to the holiest of Islamic sites, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia is a religious state where freedom of worship is not allowed and where freedom of speech, press and assembly are restricted. Women"s rights also are restricted: They can't drive, and they must cover up head-to-foot.
The dress code for foreign women varies in Muslim countries. In general, foreign women are encouraged to dress modestly, but only Iran and Afghanistan require all foreign women to cover their bodies and their hair with a shapeless garment when in public.
In Saudi Arabia, State Department employees do not wear an abaya when on official calls, according to Rick Roberts, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh. He says that when off-duty, "moving around the country, people exercise their own judgment."
Roberts said there have been some incidents with the mutawa telling U.S. women to cover their heads, but he said he was not aware of any employee being detained or injured.
The State Department policy, updated in an embassy memo last August, says men and women should dress conservatively. Women, it says, should wear long dresses and avoid trousers.
It adds, "Embassy women are not expected to wear abayas when out on official business. ... The guidance issued by the Saudi Embassy in Washington states that non-Muslim women are not required to wear an abaya but should dress conservatively" when in public, including loose-fitting dresses draped well below the knees with long sleeves and a high neckline.
The memo notes that some Western women, especially those living in the more conservative areas such as Riyadh, wear an abaya "in order to avoid harassment" by the mutawa. Even so, "harassment still occurs," the memo says.
"The embassy," it adds, "will support a woman in whatever personal choice she makes on the issue."
McSally is the first woman in the Air Force to fly a combat aircraft into enemy territory. In 1995 and 1996, she flew her A-10 Warthog jet 100 hours over southern Iraq enforcing the no-fly zone. McSally now runs search and rescue for that operation, based in the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh.
Contributing: Barbara Slavin
---
Armed Forces review rules on civilian visitors
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 09:12 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-24-civilian-visitors.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Civilians can still ride in an Army tank, fly in an Air Force fighter or fire a Marine's M-16 rifle. The Pentagon barred civilians from being at the controls of military equipment in certain situations after the fatal collision between the Navy submarine USS Greeneville and a Japanese fishing vessel. But aside from that, the Pentagon isn't expected to substantially change the popular guest programs considered vital to good community relations.
"It keeps Americans aware of the people who sign up to go in harm's way and serve their country," Celia Hoke, director of the Pentagon's community relations program, said Tuesday.
"People have said it's all about funding," said Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Cate Mueller of the criticism that the Greeneville trip was aimed at rewarding financial donors. "It's also about hearts and minds - about people connecting with and knowing about their military."
Sixteen civilians were aboard the Greeneville when the submarine rammed the Ehime Maru, a fishery training vessel for high school students, during a surfacing drill Feb. 9 in waters off Hawaii. The crash killed nine people - four teen-agers, two teachers and three crewmen.
Navy officials have acknowledged that the surfacing demonstration was done only for the benefit of civilians aboard, three of whom were seated at the sub's controls at the time.
In reprimanding but deciding against a court-martial for the Greeneville's skipper Monday, the Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. Thomas Fargo, said changes are needed in the community-relations program that led to the civilians being on board the Greeneville.
While he asserted that none of the civilians contributed to the collision, Fargo urged a review of the Navy's instructions for the program, and recommended that civilians not be at key control stations during critical maneuvers, including rapid-ascent drills.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said Tuesday that all the other services were also looking at refining rules for civilian programs. In late February Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered civilians indefinitely barred from operating military equipment, including ships, aircraft and ground vehicles, "when such operation could cause, or reasonably be perceived as causing, an increased safety risk."
The Army, Air Force and Marines have essentially adopted that Rumsfeld moratorium as policy.
The Air Force says civilians can still ride in the second seat of an F-16 fighter, but they are not allowed to touch the panel in front of them as they were before. Civilians can also still fire weapons as long as they are not crew-operated weapons - those requiring more than one person to shoot.
"This moratorium is not designed to restrict civilian visitors from observing their military; it is designed to ensure their visits are conducted as safely as possible," Rumsfeld wrote in his memo, not mentioning the sub accident specifically.
The Pacific Fleet had 21 at-sea tours for a total of 307 guests on fast-attack submarines like the Greeneville last year, an average of 15 guests per trip, according to Navy estimates. Three times as many went to sea on bigger ballistic-missile submarines. Including carriers and other surface ships, the Pacific Fleet had a total of 7,836 guests on 158 trips last year, down from 11,440 guests on 233 trips in 1999.
Though no overall number of civilian guests is available, the services said they have hundreds of programs that allow Americans to tour ships, visit bases, participate in training or observe other military activities. The programs are regarded as a way to keep civilians aware of what it takes to keep the armed forces trained and at the ready.
The premier program, Hoke said, is the annual joint program by all the services for what the Pentagon calls "opinion leaders." It started last weekend with a Saturday dinner and Sunday briefing, includes meetings with senior Pentagon officials and will take 56 guests to programs provided by each of the services around the country.
A hospital president, a Wall Street broker, a Girl Scout leader and two city mayors are among the group that learned about paratrooping Tuesday at Fort Bragg. They are scheduled Wednesday to don gas masks and chemical weapons suits at Camp Lejuene as part of the six-stop tour of U.S. bases.
"It gives them insight, ... a broader understanding, a clearer focus," Hoke said, adding that it's hoped the guests will go home and spread the word about what they learned.
---
Military braces for Rumsfeld recommendation
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 10:03 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-24-weapons.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army, Navy and Air Force are bracing for possible cuts in weapons and equipment programs as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nears a decision on how to reshape America's military.
Among programs under threat are the Navy's DD-21 destroyer, the Air Force's modified B-1 bomber and Army's Crusader mobile artillery system.
"Everybody's holding their breath," one Pentagon official said Monday on condition of anonymity.
In a top-to-bottom study of how to move the armed forces forward in the new century, Rumsfeld has ordered at least a dozen separate reviews on strategy, nuclear weapons, missile defense, quality of life for military personnel and conventional forces.
The reviews are being held in secret; a list of the panels and what they are reviewing has not been publicly released. The panels include members from within and outside the Pentagon.
The panel reviewing conventional forces briefed Rumsfeld over the weekend and recommended that he cancel production of the Crusader, officials said Monday. The New York Times said the group also suggested he not move ahead with the DD-21 destroyer and modifications to the B-1 bomber, the Abrades tank, and the Bradley armored vehicle.
"They're all good," said a second military official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. "The question is what do you need, and can you afford it?"
President Bush has pledged to abandon programs that make marginal improvements in existing weapons.
The Army plans to spend $11.1 billion to build 480 Crusaders, which are automatic, self-propelled 155-millimeter howitzers, or cannons that fire farther and faster than the Army's existing artillery system, known as the Paladin.
The Crusaders are cumbersome at a time when the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, has proposed lighter, more agile fighting forces. But until the new generation of combat equipment is ready - possibly in 10 to 20 years - Army officials say they need something to replace the slow Paladin, parts of which were designed 40 years ago.
As for the next generation warship, the Navy wants about 30 of the DD-21 destroyers, partly because their electric power systems allow them to carry more armaments. Crew could be reduced dramatically to 130 members from 300 on the new land attack destroyer.
As word of the weekend briefing spread through the Pentagon, officials at the individual services were loathe to talk about possible cuts to their programs, noting the panel represents only one part of the picture and only a recommendation that Rumsfeld isn't bound to accept.
"Why should we jump into the fray?" said a third official. "Somebody this week says we should ax the DD-21 and the Crusader, but what about the other 10 groups - maybe not everyone agrees."
Rumsfeld has set no deadline for completing his strategy, but military officials say he wants to finish the review soon.
The review has generated considerable anxiety in Congress and among senior military leaders who wonder what it will mean for the next defense budget. When the administration released its 2002 budget proposal, it included few details on defense programs because Bush is waiting for Rumsfeld to think through a defense strategy first.
Rumsfeld has briefed Bush on progress of at least two of the studies he assigned. One was a preliminary briefing on strategy that will form the foundation for specific changes. The other, a "quality of life" review, is examining ways to sustain and improve troop morale.
---
Rumsfeld's 'Defense Inc.' reasserts civilian control
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/24/01
Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010424-13721652.htm
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is taking steps to run the Pentagon more like a corporation than a giant bureaucracy, planning a super committee of senior civilian leaders to put in place President Bushīs vision of a transformed military.
At the same time, Mr. Rumsfeld is sending signals that he wants to loosen Congressī and the generalsī grip on Pentagon operations, say Capitol Hill and Pentagon sources.
"Rumsfeld has a mantra: 'We have to reassert civilian control of the Department of Defense,ī" said a congressional defense staffer who has spoken with Rumsfeld aides. "He believes that under the administration of the last eight years that the civilian leadership was weak and ineffective. And when there is weak and ineffective leadership, the uniform officers will fill the vacuum."
The executive committee will include the secretaries of the Air Force, Army and Navy, as well as the Defense Departmentīs undersecretary for acquisition, the comptroller and possibly the undersecretary for policy. The high-powered panel would be run by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, according to sources familiar with the Pentagon reorganization.
The sources said the committee represents, better than any other Rumsfeld change, how the defense secretary plans to import proven corporate management techniques to a building that often gets bogged down in bureaucratic decision-making. The committee would make major recommendations and decisions on weapons-buying, finance and police.
"Itīs the 'Department of Defense Inc.,ī" said one source. "You have Rumsfeld, the chief executive officer, and then you have committee members. They are like your business sections chiefs. You have the guys who run the Navy, Air Force and Army, and then you have the comptroller as the financial officer."
Mr. Rumsfeld, who returned to head the Pentagon a second time after spending a quarter-century as a corporate leader, views the executive committee as the best chance of streamlining Pentagon decision-making, especially the time-consuming weapons-buying process. The sources also said he views an executive committee as an effective means to carry out Mr. Bushīs mandate to transform the armed forces from a Cold War force to one better able to tackle future threats.
The Pentagon is in the process of carrying out Mr. Bushīs order for a top-to-bottom review to establish a new national military strategy, and the weapons and force structure to match it. The executive committee then would carry out the studyīs mandates.
"This board is going to set the policy for the Department of Defense," said one source.
Added a general officer: "These guys are very much businessmen. They understand the divisions of this corporation they are taking over.īī
Mr. Rumsfeldīs corporate management approach was underscored by his picks for service secretaries. James G. Roche (Air Force), Thomas E. White (Army) and Gordon R. England (Navy) all have extensive corporate experience running programs and divisions. The White House has not yet announced its nominations to the Senate. The president has tapped Edward C. "Peteīī Aldridge, an aerospace executive, as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, a post commonly called "acquisition czar."
One source said that if Mr. Rumsfeld wants the service secretaries to be more directly involved in major acquisition decisions, he will have to ask Congress to change the landmark Goldwater-Nichols Act.
The law redistributed decision-making power throughout the armed forces. The planned committee gives the service bosses more acquisition power than prescribed in the law, said the source, who is knowledgeable about Pentagon regulations.
While Mr. Rumsfeld is planning a corporate-style executive committee, he also is attempting to shift the balance of power from Congress and the top brass to the Pentagonīs civilian leadership, say congressional defense aides and department sources.
"The last eight years, a fair amount of deference was given to the military," said the general officer. "Things are changing. There are varying amounts of alarm and dismay at whatīs going on. But I think everything will be OK."
The Rumsfeld inner circle generally has locked out the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress from the strategic review. On the subject of who will get top policy jobs, especially in weapons acquisition, congressional sources say they are getting the message from Rumsfeld people that he does not want policy staffers who are beholden to members of Congress.
"Everybody is aware of the strategic study," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank. "The problem is that none of the people who thought they were players have been invited to participate, which at least worries them and creates a great deal of resentment."
Potentially more troublesome for the Bush administration is the resentment building up on Capitol Hill, especially among Senate officials. Once Mr. Rumsfeld trots out his new vision for national defense, Senate aides said in interviews, his plan has no chance of becoming reality without the support of key Senate players.
Said a senior Republican defense aide: "I donīt think anybody is happy with Rumsfeld. I donīt know of anybody, be it in the industry, the generals or Congress, that is happy with Rumsfeld."
This aide, and others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity.
"Following the course of keeping many of the key players in the dark probably isnīt going to help them in the long run," Mr. Thompson said. "Theyīre going to need all of the help they can get on the Hill and with the services if they really want to get it through. But right now a lot of those key players are irritated with them."
Said the senior congressional aide: "He can do anything he wants to do in the strategy review. But in the end, heīs got to deal with us. So he ought to cut us in now. But what heīs doing is ostracizing all of us."
While several former and current members of Congress were mentioned as service secretary candidates, Mr. Rumsfeld in the end picked three businessmen. Congressional staffers seeking jobs are asked first about corporate experience. If the answer is "none," their chances of winning an important policy job diminishes.
One senator who has openly challenged the Rumsfeld regime on key issues is Senate Armed Services Chairman John W. Warner, Virginia Republican.
Mr. Warner publicly disagreed with the presidentīs refusal to ask Congress for $6 billion in emergency defense spending. The senator openly warned the administration it would have a fight on its hands if Navy carriers were deleted from the five-year defense plan. "As history shows, a president proposes and Congress disposes," he said in a written statement.
Mr. Warner, however, said in an interview he is happy with Mr. Rumsfeldīs stewardship.
"Iīm not unhappy with him, no," Mr. Warner said. "I am very satisfied in the manner in which he is dealing with me and other members of my committee."
At a March meeting of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Warner and eight other committee members, the defense secretary spent part of the time complaining about extensive congressional oversight.
When Mr. Rumsfeld was defense secretary in the mid-1970s, the Armed Services Committee produced a bill with 17 pages of legislation. The current defense authorization bill has 534 such pages.
--------
Robot plane flies Pacific unmanned
ITN Entertainment
April 24, 2001
http://www.itn.co.uk/news/20010424/world/05robotplane.shtm
"The aircraft essentially flies itself, right from take-off, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway." - Australian Global Hawk manager Rod Smith.
A robot plane has made aviation history by becoming the first unmanned aircraft to fly across the Pacific Ocean.
The American high-altitude Global Hawk spy plane made flew (sic) across the ocean to Australia, defence officials confirmed.
The Global Hawk, a jet-powered aircraft with a wingspan equivalent to a Boeing 737, flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed late on Monday at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh, in South Australia state.
The 8600 mile (13840 km) flight, at an altitude of almost 12.5 miles (20 km), took 22 hours and set a world record for the furthest a robotic aircraft has flown between two points.
The Global Hawk flies along a pre-programmed flight path, but a pilot monitors the aircraft during its flight via a sensor suite which provides infra-red and visual images.
"The aircraft essentially flies itself, right from takeoff, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway," said Rod Smith, the Australian Global Hawk manager.
"While in Australia, the Global Hawk will fly about 12 maritime surveillance and reconnaissance missions around Australia's remote coastline.
"It can fly non-stop for 36 hours and search 52,895 square miles (37,000 square km) in 24 hours. Australia is assessing the aircraft and might buy it in the future.
"Emerging systems such as the Global Hawk offer Australia great potential for surveillance, reconnaissance and ultimately the delivery of combat power," said Brendan Nelson, parliamentary secretary to the Australian defence minister.
"Nelson said the Global Hawk could be used in combat to 'detect, classify and monitor' targets as they approached the Australian coast."
-------- OTHER
-------- alternative energy
PECO to offer wind power in Pennsylvania
Planet Ark
April 24, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10604
NEW YORK - Following an environmentally friendly trend spreading across the country, PECO Energy Co. said yesterday it plans to offer newly-developed wind power to customers in southeastern Pennsylvania.
PECO Energy and its sister utility, Commonwealth Edison, which serves Illinois, are subsidiaries of Exelon Energy Delivery, one of the three main businesses under diversified energy company Exelon Corp. of Chicago. PECO will offer the wind power through a voluntary program under a new premium rate to be submitted to the state Public Utility Commission, the company said in a statement.
The wind energy delivered to PECO customers will be supplied from new Pennsylvania wind farms - the Mill Run project in Fayette County, announced on March 14; the Somerset Wind Farm, to be built along the Pennsylvania Turnpike west of Harrisburg; and other projects across Pennsylvania.
Wind energy is produced at stable prices that are only slightly above current market prices for generation, PECO said. Wind is not subject to fuel price volatility like oil or natural gas.
Exelon Power Team, the wholesale power marketing division of the Exelon Generation affiliate of Exelon Corp., has formed a joint marketing agreement with Community Energy Inc., a renewable energy marketing company, to supply the wind energy.
Power Team will purchase the energy output from the wind farms for 20 years and manage the wholesale energy delivery to the regional power grid. Community Energy and PECO, which serves 1.5 million electric customers, will market the "New Wind Energy" option for power supply to commercial and residential customers.
"It is exciting for us that we can support the development of these clean energy projects and offer our customers a green energy product in a way that is both affordable and flexible," Ken Lawrence, PECO Energy president, said in the statement.
PECO and Community Energy will soon accept subscriptions from interested customers in advance of the wind farms' anticipated start-up of energy production later this year.
Somerset Windpower LLC, a joint venture between Atlantic Renewable Energy Corp. and Zilkha Renewable Energy, will build a wind farm consisting of six turbines sitting atop a ridge on 400 acres. The nine-megawatt (MW) project will produce about 25,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity in a year and serve about 3,000 customers. The previously announced Mill Run project will be 15 MW.
The turbines will sit on 210-foot tall towers and have a rotor diameter of 231 feet. The wind farms will become interconnected to the region's power grid, managed by the PJM Interconnection.
Financing for the Somerset Wind Farm will be provided in part by Pennsylvania's regional sustainable energy funds, which were created by electric restructuring in Pennsylvania and aim to support renewable, clean energy projects and energy efficiency education.
----
German wind energy production to rise in 2001 - BWE
Planet Ark
REUTERS
GERMANY: April 24, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10605
FRANKFURT - Newly installed wind energy capacity in Germany will help boost production in the country which is already the world leader in the sector, the Federal Wind Energy Association (BWE) said yesterday.
In the first three months of 2001, some 297,5 megawatts (MW) or 4.9 percent of new capacity were added, bringing the total to 6,400 MW, it said.
Last year, just under 1,700 MW were added.
BWE president Peter Ahmels said planned expansions in the remaining three quarters of 2001 could boost capacity to more than 8,000 MW at the end of the year.
By comparison, out of the 18,000 MW installed worldwide, the U.S. currently accounts for 2,500 MW, Spain for 2,500 MW and Denmark for 2,300.
Germany now has 9,596 wind power units, producing around 12 billion kilowatt hours of electricity which covers 2.5 percent of domestic demand.
Ahmels attributed the boost to the sector to the 12-months old law on subsidising power derived from renewable energies (EEG), which was recently backed by a landmark Europen ruling.
The European court of Justice ruled in March that the generous prices payable by utilities and their customers to operators of renewable power did not constitute state aid and that environmental protection goals justified the subsidy.
Aurich-based Enercon accounted for a 47.1 percent share of newly installed generation.
Next was Nordex AG of Rostock (10.2 percent of the newly installed generation), followed by AN Windenergie GmbH of Bremen (9.8 percent), Vestas Deutschland GmbH of Husum (9.1 percent) and Enron Wind of Salzbergen (8.6 percenrt).
-------- environment
Administration steadfast for drilling in Arctic refuge
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 11:18 AM ET
REUTERS
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-24-arctic.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush still plans to ask lawmakers to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, his spokesman said Monday.
"The president's position on opening up a small portion of ANWR for oil development is unchanged," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.
Fleischer made the comment after acknowledging "there was some confusion" Sunday when administration officials were asked on TV network shows about a Time magazine report quoting Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
The magazine quoted an unnamed source saying Rove told a media consultant for oil companies in a private meeting last Tuesday that Bush wasn't going to push Congress for new drilling in Alaska.
Asked about the magazine article on CBS' "Face the Nation", Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Whitman said a task force report being prepared by Vice President Dick Cheney "didn't specifically say you must drill in ANWR" but instead would present a range of options.
Tina Kreisher, an EPA spokeswoman, said Monday that Whitman was emphasizing that "the form of the final report has not been decided and there have been discussions about keeping it more general, not necessarily site-specific, but ANWR may be an exception."
The report, still being drafted, is expected to be submitted to Bush next month.
Fleischer said Monday that the energy proposal from Cheney's task force "will include a provision calling for opening of a small portion of ANWR for energy development."
Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said Rove did not say in the meeting last week that Bush was putting less priority on opening the Alaska refuge to drilling.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton said on two other shows Sunday, CNN's "Late Edition" and ABC's "This Week," that drilling the Arctic refuge remains an administration priority.
Bush has acknowledged that opening the Arctic wildlife refuge to drilling may be a hard sell in Congress. Seven Republican senators were staunchly opposed to drilling at the start of the session in January. The Senate is divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans.
---
Britain reassures Europe on foot-and-mouth
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 11:35 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/footandmouth/2001-04-24-britain.htm
LUXEMBOURG (AP) - Britain's agriculture minister assured his European Union colleagues Tuesday that the foot-and-mouth epidemic is slowing and downplayed health fears over burning livestock and a suspected case of human infection from the outbreak. "The number of new cases is coming down," Nick Brown said. "We will succeed in eradicating the disease."
Optimism that the British foot-and-mouth epidemic is past its peak has been dampened by new concerns of a human health threat from the burning pyres of carcasses across Britain. Environmentalists claim the pyres have released dangerous levels of cancer-causing dioxins.
"There is no risk-free option" for getting rid of the hundreds of thousands of animals slaughtered to slow the spread of the disease, Brown told reporters. "It's up to the government to minimize the risks, which is what we've set out to do."
EU ministers also quizzed Brown over suspicions that a slaughterer who accidentally swallowed fluid from a decomposing carcass may have become the first human to contract foot-and-mouth disease in the current outbreak.
The slaughterer was tested Monday for the disease, and the results are not yet known. His name has not been released.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said he understood that the man, who was working in the hard-hit county of Cumbria in northwest England, was moving a rotting cattle carcass when it burst, sending fluid into his mouth.
"I only say this just to illustrate that should this be confirmed, how unusual are the circumstances regarding this individual possibly contracting foot-and-mouth," said the spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The virus only very rarely affects humans and is not considered dangerous, producing flu-like symptoms and short-lived blisters.
"Events like this can happen ... but it is very rare and it's not contagious or life-threatening," Brown said.
EU ministers were cheered that the number of new cases in Britain has slowed to around 15 per day - down from over 30 a few weeks ago - and that the spread of the disease elsewhere seems to have been curtailed.
Although the Netherlands is still registering new cases, with 26 farms infected, no other cases have been found beyond two in France and one in Ireland discovered almost five weeks ago.
Britain has registered over 1,400 cases since the outbreak began in February, and officials warn it could be many months before the country is fully free of the virus.
EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler welcomed news that Russia - one of the biggest export markets for EU meat - was relaxing a ban imposed because of foot-and-mouth. He said meat from nations with foot-and-mouth cases would remain banned.
Turning to mad cow disease, ministers were expected to back plans to extend a ban on the use of animal remains in livestock feed, which is due to run out in June.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is believed to have spread through feeding cattle with the ground remains of sheep suffering from a similar brain-wasting ailment. The prohibition on meat and bone meal in animal feed is likely to remain until next year, when new EU-wide safety legislation comes into force. Some nations want the ban relaxed earlier.
The European Commission released figures at the meeting showing a slight recovery in the beef market, which has been hit hard by mad cow fears. Beef sales were 18% below normal levels, compared to 23% last month.
"The decline of consumption is not as serious as we assumed ... there is light at the end of the tunnel," Fischler said.
---
Alaska oil remains in energy plan
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
Published 4/24/01
Audrey Hudson
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010424-5603505.htm
The White House yesterday said oil drilling in Alaskaīs arctic will be included in their energy plan, and dismissed contrary statements by the administrationīs environmental chief as "confusion."
"The presidentīs position is as it always has been," said Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, reiterating a campaign promise by President Bush to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and natural gas exploration.
"The president believes that our nation needs to develop more energy resources domestically in order to avoid worsening the current energy crisis, and toward that end, the energy proposal that will be shortly submitted from the vice presidentīs task force will include a provision calling for the opening of a small portion of ANWR for energy development," Mr. Fleischer said.
Christie Todd Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, responded Sunday to a Time magazine article that said the White House would not seek the congressional consent needed to open the refuge to drilling.
Mrs. Whitman said the task force report due next month "didnīt specifically say you must drill in ANWR."
"We didnīt recommend that to the president," Mrs. Whitman said.
Shortly after making those comments on "Face the Nation," Mrs. Whitman clarified her statement saying drilling was still an option, but the task force would not include specifics on where to drill.
Asked by reporters if Mrs. Whitman "is out of the loop" on the administrationīs policy, Mr. Fleischer said, "there was some confusion in the early morning" as the result of Time magazine story but "that confusion was resolved."
A spokeswoman for Mrs. Whitman said yesterday she "made it very clear we need diverse supplies from all of our resources to get us through this energy crisis."
This is the second time in only a few weeks Mrs. Whitman has appeared at odds with administration policy.
Last month, Mrs. Whitman said the administration was committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, only to be corrected a few days later.
Mr. Bush reversed a campaign promise and said he would not seek mandatory regulations on carbon dioxide, which some scientists say is a factor in global warming.
"Itīs the exact same pattern," said Bonner Cohen, a Lexington Institute senior fellow. "The administration needs to work on its communication."
Meanwhile, 40 Capitol Hill lawmakers opposed to drilling will send a letter to Mr. Bush today asking him to support legislation that would designate ANWR a wilderness area and ban all development and most recreation.
"Of all the measures you could possibly choose to make the centerpiece of national energy policy, drilling in the refuge is most certain to evoke a strong, vigorous negative reaction in Congress," said the letter circulated by Reps. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, and Nancy L. Johnson, Connecticut Republican.
House debate on opening ANWR is expected to begin this summer, said Marnie Funk, spokeswoman for Rep. James V. Hansen, Utah Republican and chairman of the Resources Committee.
"This is the course that has been laid out from the beginning, and the White House has been very supportive because this is part of the presidentīs game plan," Miss Funk said.
If drilling is approved by the House, it faces an uphill battle in the closely divided Senate, where several Northeastern Republicans say they oppose oil and gas exploration.
---
Foot-and-mouth disease suspected in human
The Washington Times www.washtimes.com
April 24, 2001 Combined dispatches and staff reports
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010424-50877156.htm
LONDON -- A slaughterer in a British county hit hard by foot-and-mouth disease underwent tests yesterday to determine whether he has contracted an extremely rare human form of the livestock disease.
The Department of Health did not identify the man being tested. County health officials in Cumbria, in northwest England, said he was involved in the slaughter and disposal of animals that are being killed in an attempt to contain the highly contagious livestock disease.
Only one previous human case has been reported in Britain a man who was infected during the last foot-and-mouth epidemic in 1966.
-------- police
Cuffs ruled OK in minor cases
USA Today
04/24/2001 - Updated 05:46 PM ET
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/court/2001-04-24-arrest.htm
A divided Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that people stopped for minor traffic offenses, such as not using seatbelts or driving with expired plates, can be subject to a full-scale police arrest including handcuffs, booking and jail.
The ruling, in the case of a Texas mother who was stopped while driving home with her children after soccer practice, could have consequences nationwide.
Dissenting justices raised the specter of police using minor infractions as an excuse to harass blacks and other minorities. "As the recent debate over racial profiling demonstrates all too clearly, a relatively minor traffic infraction may often serve as an excuse for stopping and harassing an individual," said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
By an unusual 5-4 split, with Justice David Souter writing the majority opinion, the court said that Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizures does not cover Gail Atwater, who was ordered out of her pickup in 1997 for not using seatbelts for herself or her young children.
Atwater, who was driving about 15 mph on local streets in Lago Vista, said she had let her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son out of their belts so that they could better look for a toy that had dropped outside of the truck.
The police officer cuffed Atwater, put her in a squad car and took her to jail, where she was forced to remove her shoes and empty her pockets and a "mug shot" was taken. The children were taken away by a family friend who happened upon the scene.
Souter acknowledged that the arresting officer engaged in "gratuitous humiliations" and used poor judgment.
But he emphasized that the law has long allowed police to arrest people if they believe a crime is being committed, no matter how small.
Reviewing centuries of common law practice, Souter rejected Atwater's plea for a rule that would forbid full-scale arrests when the penalty for an offense carries no jail time. The fine for not wearing a seatbelt law was $50.
"Neither ... history ... nor subsequent legal development indicates that the Fourth Amendment was originally understood, or has traditionally been read, to embrace Atwater"s position," said Souter, who noted that statutes in all 50 states permit arrests for such misdemeanors.
He also said it was important for police to have a clear rule, and said that officers might not know the penalties for various crimes.
A liberal on this court, Souter was joined in rejecting Atwater's claim against Lago Vista by the traditional conservatives: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
In a blistering dissent, O'Connor wrote that the "rule that the court creates has potentially serious consequences for the everyday lives of Americans."
She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
-------- spying
Trade Secrets
America's Cutting-Edge Espionage Techniques at Risk
ABC News
March 24, 2001
By Pierre Thomas ABCNews.com
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/spy_thomas.html
March 24 - Is America's top-secret spy tradecraft still secure?
Miniature cameras placed in the headlights of vehicles of known Russian spies, to record their movements.
Homing devices, and an extensive system of transmitters, to track them as they traveled throughout New York City.
Slivers of metal and fiber optics, embedded in window seals and furniture, to serve as supersensitive listening equipment.
Now, these surveillance techniques, among the best practiced by U.S. counterintelligence, may be lost.
ABCNEWS has learned that suspected Russian spy Robert Hanssen was in a position to reveal the techniques, called tradecraft, to his Russian and Soviet handlers, when he worked for the FBI in New York from 1985 to 1987.
At that time, Hanssen was a counterintelligence agent, supervising a squad targeting Soviet spies in the home town of the United Nations and international finance, the prime domestic location for American espionage efforts against the Russians.
"Hanssen would have had access and knowledge of all of the techniques that would be used against the Soviets," said Harry Brandon, who once oversaw the FBI's counterintelligence program.
"I would assume everything is gone. Assume the worst," he said.
Secrets from the Playbook
Among the secrets that Hanssen may have revealed is the location of a supersecret counterintelligence center in New York known as MEGAHUT.
That knowledge would allow the Russians to closely monitor undercover FBI operations.
He might have also revealed a large scale real estate program maintained by the United States, that bought properties in expensive areas throughout New York City so they could be used for surveillance.
Other secrets from the tradecraft playbook include an FBI system for photographing passengers coming in from Russia - to monitor for incoming spies.
FBI officials are now reviewing failed covert operations from the period Hanssen was in New York, trying to see if the failures were because their tradecraft playbook had been given to the Russians.
But the electronic snooping war continues to evolve, with more sophisticated devices that are increasingly difficult to detect.
One new development is the airborne microphone. "Having no metallic content whatsoever makes it immune from X-rays," said surveillance consultant Martin Kaiser.
"It makes it immune from known wire detection processes so it's really the ideal microphone."
'Exceptionally Strong' Evidence
Meanwhile, a federal judge recently ordered Hanssen to stay in jail on the grounds that the government's evidence against him was "exceptionally strong."
Hanssen was arrested Feb. 18, charged with selling secrets to Russia and the Soviet Union since 1985, including the names of double agents and U.S. surveillance methods.
The counts against him say he "compromised numerous FBI counterintelligence investigative techniques, sources, methods and operations, and operational practices and activities targeted against" Soviet and Russian agents in the U.S.
He faces life in prison or death if convicted. His lawyers have said he is planning to plead not guilty.
-------- activists
La Carnival Contre le Capitalisme
Organization: Community Network
From: "Edward Pickersgill" <Lab@assets.net>
Tue, 24 Apr 2001
Brendan Myers on Quebec City
1. I'm Brendan. I went to Quebec City, to join "La Carnival Contre le Capitalisme", and this is what I saw. Let me preface this report by saying a bit more about who I am, to pre-empt any "ad hominem" objection to the accuracy and factuality of this story. It is too easy to dismiss reports such as the one I am about to make on the grounds that I am a protester, or a unionist, or a long-haired hippie, or just an angry Generation-X, who couldn't possibly have any objectivity. By labeling people this way we can more easily think of them as the label instead of as a person, and since they are no longer people their voices need not be given any attention. Politicians and the media do this all the time by characterizing certain people as "special interest groups", which selects such people out from the wiser and more enlightened majority and makes it easier to conclude that they deserve whatever injuries they get.
As it happens, I am an unionist (I'm the president of my local, actually), and I had every intention of being a protester on Saturday, and although I do not think of myself as a hippie I do have long hair, which one doesn't see on men much anymore. But I will deny and dismiss any attempt to characterize me as an inarticulate and randomly rebellious youth. I hold a Masters degree in philosophy, and am capable of thinking and articulating myself with clarity and precision. I am well aware of "both sides of the issue", fully capable of weighing them against one another, and no matter how often I approach the principles of international capitalism with an "open mind", its logic still leads me to conclude that it is horribly unjust and does indeed represent a clear and present danger to the rights and liberties of people all over the world.
But lest this self-description single me out as one of the "few" protesters capable of intelligence, let me point out that every person who came with me and who I met at the protest was equally if not more aware of the issues than I, just as well educated, most of them more creative, and each and every one of them possessed of a voice that deserves to be heard.
2. At six o'clock on Friday evening, I am surfing the internet in search of photographs and news stories about the protest against the Summit of the Americas. The reports that come through do not help much to steady my nerves, but at least I have a vague idea of what it is that I am about to walk into. The corporate press emphasizes the violence and unruliness of small groups of provocateurs, and I am lead to wonder why six thousand heavily armoured police officers and a concrete and chain-link fence line is necessary to defend against 'small groups'. Counts of attendance at the "People's Summit" range from a few thousand to ten thousand, but with a promise of a doubling or a tripling of this figure come Saturday, when everyone who couldn't get the week off work descends upon the city.
Special attention is given to two or three police officers who got hurt. There is also much attention given to what the politicians within the no-protest zone have to say about the protesters: every one of them is dismissive and patronizing, and some more than others. The left-wing press and other independent media isn't much of a help either because although they are more ready to report the protester's experiences and points of view, there is a lot of slogan-repetition.
At eight o'clock I head down to my office, where the organizing team that I am a part of is assembling, to handle any last-minute preparations and to pep each other up. One friend and I fling elastic bands at each other. Other people are taking inventory counts of 'field supplies': bandanas, food, water, clean cloths, clothing, communications devices, swimming goggles, vinegar, legal aid phone numbers. Someone else is photocopying a map of downtown Quebec City and trying to guess where things are going to be happening. At about nine o'clock most of us move to the front door of the building and await the highway coach. Other people are waiting for city buses to take them home, and we joke about what would happen if they accidentally got on our bus and ended up in Quebec.
Our bus is a bit late but when it arrives, a cheer goes up and we quickly get on board. Then it's off to Scarborough to pick up about a dozen more people, and then we motor on to Quebec City for nine more hours. I don't get any real sleep, as bus seats aren't the most comfortable things, and because of the palpable excitement and anticipation. We arrive at the "green zone" at about eight in the morning. The bus drops us off at a park next to a federal government building and the VIA Rail station, both stately and dignified buildings of brick and stone, with sloping green copper rooftops and gables.
There are already hundreds of people there, and most of them labour, and most of the labour people are steelworkers, as we can tell by the distinctive yellow flags. We soon notice the blue of CAW and the white of CEP, but the CUPE flag in my own hand is the only burgundy that anyone can see. We establish a time and a place to meet at the end of the day to get back on the bus, and then most people separate into their own affinity groups. An affinity group, for those who have never been a part of an event like this, is a small group of about a half dozen people who spend the day together and take care of one another the whole time. Everyone in the group has a job to do: one is the medic, one takes care of the food, one is the marshal who makes sure that no one is missing, one makes sure that we are psychologically steady and focused on the task and hand. There is no template for the size and job descriptions in an affinity group: it matters only that no one is alone and that everyone has something to do.
There is a tent set up in which several famous lefty leaders are going to give speeches; Maude Barlowe of the Council of Canadians is among them and several people from our bus head off in that direction to hear them. I decide that I want to see the barricade right away, as it was peaceful at that time. So we walk up the narrow, sloping streets of the Old City, between rows of some of the oldest permanent structures on the north american continent. I pass a park where I once saw a stage magician performing, when I was a tourist here eleven years ago. A moment of deja-vu passes over me: somehow I remember that eleven years ago I knew I would return to this place.
We encounter the barricade at St. John's Gate. It is a three-foot high concrete highway divider with an eight-foot high chain link fence on top of it. We are able to walk right up to it and lean on it. People have stuck posters on the fence and tied ribbons and flowers to it. About two dozen people are milling about, talking and laughing with one another. Someone has a ukulele and is singing "Don't fence me in". Students from Laval are making an independent video and they interview me, asking about who I am and where I am from and why I came. I tell them that I am here because public protests of this kind are the most visible expression of the people's outrage, and that even if the protest turns out to be futile, since we know the Powers That Be are not listening to us, still it is the right thing to do. It is the exercise of our right to say "No". The students thank me, as others shout across the barricade to the police there: "Did you hear that?". Another Laval student with a press pass talks to us through the fence until an officer orders her to stop talking to us. The people hurl insults at the officer for this. A short while later, she emerges on our side and talks to us, and the people start daring the officer to shut her up again. The reporter said that whenever she goes inside the perimeter, the police constantly harass her and accuse her of having forged her press pass.
The police at this place are about a dozen strong standing in two staggered rows, about fifteen feet from the fence, facing us, unsmiling and unmoving. They are dressed in dark green uniforms with padded armour, black helmets, visors, and are carrying batons. One of my friends shakes the fence a little bit and says "Look, I am shaking the fence!" This is in reference to news reports that people had been tear-gassed the previous day for shaking the fence. At this time, the police do not move, and a moment later an officer orders them off to another location. They march in unison, like soldiers. I shout after them, "Give my regards to Darth Vader", and pretend to shoot at them with a banana.
The posturing continues on both sides. It is a useless gesture because the police are not reacting, but it does boost morale. About two hundred feet away is another gate along the Old City wall, where more identical police are staring down the protestors, and the view through the fence here is particularly heartwarming because the police stand amid sixteenth-century fortifications and eighteenth-century cannons. But these were police, and not actors in costume. This is life, this is reality.
We returned to the People's Summit area after about an hour, to gather our people and join the march that the Federation du Travaille du Quebec had organized. CUPE has lined up behind the CAW, who appear to be at the front, and CEP is behind us. But there are no strict divisions, and the order is not at all a matter of rank. People with whatever affiliation are everywhere. You cannot see more than about twenty feet away from you in any direction because of the density of the crowd, so from the ground level it is impossible to estimate how large it is. One can only see the people, and above them the colourful flags, balloons, banners, puppets, and signs. And above them, appearing to float on a sea of activity brood the majestic train station and federal building. These buildings belong to us, because the spirit of Canada is embodied in them, as it is in our parade-- and this is part of the point of the protest. These buildings belong to us, and we are keeping them.
Ville de Quebec is a very good city in which to have a protest, because the downtown and especially the Old City is an architecture museum. This is the reason it was chosen for the Summit as well. Amidst the buildings and the streets was an impromptu festival of thousands and thousands of people. It is a festival of labour, environmentalists, social justice groups, pagans, socialists, civil rights activists, Raging Grannies, anti-poverty activists, patriotic Canadians, patriotic Quebecois, and all sorts of other "lefties". They came from every country in the hemisphere. There were musicians, jugglers, artists, dancers, costumes, and drummers. There are many, many drummers, and one's body moves to their rhythm almost of its own accord. There were black people, white people, Hispanics, Orientals, old people, young people, people with disabilities, many different religions, many different languages, and the whole diversity that is the human race-- in stark contrast to the old white rich men who are the world's corporate elite. A passing FTQ marshal tells me that there are more people in Quebec today than were in Montreal for the national unity rally.
If you were to momentarily forget about the politics of the event and look upon it with innocent eyes, you quickly realise that this wild celebration was a genuine manifestation of human spirit, because all of the activity therein came from direct creative expression. Nothing was a mere repetition of an advertising slogan or reconfirmation of an indoctrinated truth. If there was any indoctrination going on, it certainly was not that of a top-down hierarchical order of power, because there really was no one in charge.
A man standing on a power transformer held two placards in the shape of clenched fists, the word "Rise" on one and "Up" on the other. A man on stilts wearing a mask of Jean Crietien held aloft a water-cooler jug with the word "Mine" on it. One of our marching chants was "Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah", in imitation of all we ever really hear from the politicians. A sign read "34 countries, 33 suckers", in solidarity with Cuba who was excluded from the Summit; several Cuban flags were spotted about the crowd as well. Because all this creativity truly came from within, and was not manufactured externally by political or corporate powers, this march was a profound expression of who we really are and what really unites us, behind and prior to what we are compelled to be by the structures of economic and political power in which we live. I held my union's flag up to the sky and was very, very proud to be there.
The ocean of activity began to move. We are informed by FTQ marshals that there is a break-off point along the march route, and at that place those who do not want to go to the barricade can continue marching one way, and those who do can go the other way. We walk along a road that leads under an highway overpass and into a district of low-rise apartment buildings and local small businesses. Lining the march route are more people with banners, displays, reporters, and hundreds of supportive locals. A friend gives me a small bag of sage and sweetgrass. People are joking that those who hold English-language protest banners will be arrested. Most of us are singing labour songs or civil rights songs. As I pass a reporter, I point directly into the video camera and shout "Do you hear us now, Chrietien?"
Then we get to the break-off point. An FTQ marshal asks me to get rid of my union flag. I understand this-- the unions don't want to be lumped together with the molotov cocktail throwers by the media. I stuff the flag in a friend's backpack and drop the stick on the ground. We group together somewhere to prepare for the confrontation with police that we know will happen: we can already see the thick clouds of tear gas wafting among the buildings less than a kilometer in front of us. Some of us can already taste it in the air. Everyone ties a bandana around her face and douses it with vinegar. People write phone-numbers on their arms, so that they can still call their friends if they are arrested and strip-searched. A rumour goes around: one hundred people were arrested the day before, and they are all still locked up. I tie warrior-braids into my hair and don an old, worn and ripped trenchcoat. Swimming goggles for the eyes, and water bottles ready for those without goggles so they can wash the tear gas from their eyes. The corporate media reported that the only weapons the police were using were tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons. But there are rumours of pepper spray and concussion grenades as well. Rain ponchos to keep the gas from saturating your clothing. Rubber gloves to protect your hands. Elastic bands seal off your pants so that gas cannot travel up your leg. We walk up the long ramp that leads up the cliffs into the Old City of Quebec. I have to stop half-way to dry-heave. When we get within sight of the barricade, it is about five hundred feet away. First thing to do is be sure you know where your friends are and where the exits are. There are already about a thousand people at this gate. It's a different gate than the one I was at that morning, with a wider street and more corporate buildings. There doesn't seem to be much going on except a lot of shouting and fist shaking, so we advance. My friends and I brought a lot of extra medical equipment to help other people, and we station ourselves about thirty feet from the perimeter. The police are in full riot gear here, lined right up against the fence on the other side, dressed all in black and carrying shields. Their badge numbers are printed on their helmets-- they have no names, they have numbers. One gets the impression that they are not people. But we are people-- we have names.
A group daringly moves up to the fence and begins to shake it. A cheer goes up. Then a loud explosive Bang reverberates between the buildings and a thick white fog of tear gas quickly fills the space. The fence shakers get it right in their gas-masked faces, and a moment later the cloud envelops everyone.
When you are exposed to tear gas, your eyes fill up with tears and starts to burn, your throat burns, and your skin burns. Your breathing becomes more labourious. The pain can last up to twenty minutes if it is not treated right away, and remain an irritant for the rest of the day. It is excruciatingly painful. You can not touch your face because you will rub it into your pores. You can not run away either because you will just breathe heavier and ingest more of it. The most you can do is link arms with your buddies and walk away. This is not communicated when the corporate media describes tear gas as "non-lethal". My friends and I walk to a place about sixty feet away: Water is flushed through my eyes, nose, and mouth, and a clean cloth wipes my face dry afterwards. Even so, it is at least five minutes before I can see properly again, because I did not have goggles for my eyes. A friend has to pry my eyes open because my pain reflex is holding them shut. The gas residue fogged my glasses and I wipe them clean on the lining of my coat.
By the time I am okay again, I climb some steps at the doorway of a building to see what is happening on the front line. An armoured truck has arrived and suddenly it opens fire with its water cannon. A water cannon is not a garden hose. It delivers enough blunt trauma to knock a wrestler off his feet and badly bruise him. About a half-dozen people fall to the ground, their gas masks flung from their faces. The stream from the water cannon is sustained for two minutes. Anger rises in me almost involuntarily, and I scream at them: "You bastards!" A friend tries to calm me down, but a moment later someone running by says the water cannon is pepper spray, and my friend screams the same outrage.
We no longer refer to the police as police. Now we call them "cops", or "pigs". People are speaking openly about "the revolution". As soon as the water cannon stream ceases, one of my group and I check out a side street to see if it is a safe exit, should we need it. I ditch my bandana and produce a clean one, doused with fresh vinegar. When we rejoin our group, people have come back up to the fence line so the cops launch another tear-gas attack, this time from the roof of a building. Our position, about sixty feet from the perimeter, is not safe enough and we must back up some more. I am traumatized by tear gas for the second time in five minutes and my friend must treat me again. Mere moments later someone near me enters an epileptic shock and although I can not see properly I pull her over my shoulders and take her to some nearby medics. The faerie wings she made were broken.
At the front line we are all just people, asserting our rights and protesting our injuries. No other affiliations matter. People trade water, bandanas, food, and other supplies freely. The solidarity is incredible. We have a common enemy, but it is not our enemy that unites us. Our humanity unites us. We take position near the top of a stair that leads down the cliff. I stand on a fire hydrant to observe the front line: more tear gas, more water cannons, and now rubber bullets are added to the fray. Looking down the stair to the street below, the march is still moving on, just as thick with people as when we were in it, and with all the colour and joy. But we knew what these people were walking into and because we knew that, our act of looking at them was different and we saw them differently.
We saw a stream of innocent and playful faeries from right out of Celtic folklore, blissfully walking into a blast furnace. I sat down on the stair and cried. I cried for my people and the land of my country, my Canada, who I love so much, and I cried that the state was so willing to use such terror on its own people to impose its will. I had known about the way the state attacks dissent before, and this was not the first protest I had ever attended: but seeing, hearing and feeling it demands a reaction that written words do not. I am ordinarily a very emotionally controlled person-- I do not often experience even happiness. But the supposition that "men do not cry" is part of our indoctrination and not part of what it is to be a man. My tears are part of the protest. However, I swallowed it soon because there was work to be done.
The people who went to the perimeter were people who had come a long way, some of us thousands of miles, to be there. We were daring and courageous. We were willing to expose ourselves to chemical weapons and possible arrest in the service of what is right. The police were there because it's their job. We were there because we wanted to be there. We were capable of looking in the face of the world's largest form of organized evil, and we were not afraid. Soon it became a kind of dance-- we would come up to the fence in an effort to pull it down that we knew was futile, and then the cops would gas us. Then we would "advance to the rear" (we do not "retreat") until the air was clear, and then advance again. Then the cops would gas us again. Then again, then again. We did this all day. The people inside the perimeter have nothing to lose-- they are already wealthy and powerful. The people outside the perimeter have their entire livelihoods to lose. And because the protest itself was largely an affair of culture and creativity, a matter of laughing at the enemy instead of engaging the enemy, therefore in the end the people will win.
My group decided not to go to the front line again for a while, and instead rejoin the parade which was still going on. We wanted to see what was down the other direction after the break-off point. At one place I passed the off-duty riot cops on a side street, where they were washing themselves of sweat and gas with water and vinegar. The cops and the people just stared at each other silently, not confrontationally, but in acknowledgement that both sides were playing the rules of someone else's game. The physical change of location rendered a completely different psychological environment.
On the rest of the parade route, there were more wonderful displays and street-theatre performances and the like. A man sat on the service platform of a billboard, a big papier-mache piggy bank beside him, dangling a giant gold coin from a fishing rod. Below him in the structural support frame stood three people with newspapers stuffed in their mouths. We applauded them. After dinner we went to the protest zone again, this time hoping to stay a safe distance away and watch. We were able to see the huge clouds of gas wafting among the buildings as if it was a predatory animal, and we could even smell it up to a kilometer away. Positioning ourselves on the highway overpass, we observed the same gate we had been at that afternoon from a different angle, about a hundred feet away. The dynamic was much different now. The cops were gassing the people with absolutely no provocation whatsoever. Anyone who walked within ten feet of the fence was shot at. They were firing the tear-gas canisters directly at the people's heads, as if the canister launcher was a kind of gun.
Bricks and rocks littered the barricade where people had thrown them. The flags close to the front were not the flags of labour that I was familiar with, but the black flags of anarchists and the red flags of communists. A group of black-clad, gas masked men whom the corporate press had called "Le Black Bloc" were using bricks and molotov cocktails to attack the police. We timed the tear-gas launches at an average of three per minute, and if the anarchists had thrown a molotov cocktail then cops would launch four or five tear gas canisters simultaneously, and one of them would come out of the perimeter to shoot the anarchists at point-blank range with rubber bullets. One affinity group of five people sat on the ground in a circle about ten feet from the fence line and simply peacefully endured the tear gas and water cannon attacks. Another man sat on a rock of some kind and just stared at the police unflinching. The row of riot cops on the other side of the fence were banging their shields with their batons in unison to intimidate us. But we were banging the metal guard rails of the highway and our noise completely drowned out theirs. It was as if to say, "You want to make noise? We can make noise. We can make a lot of noise."
Tear gas canisters were regularly tossed right back at the cops by people who had hockey gloves to protect their hands. We joked that the tear gas factory was inside the perimeter. We had to make jokes about what we were seeing once in a while to steady our nerves. We were observing a scene right out of a war zone, live and in one of my country's own cities. The cops were also firing the tear gas canisters on high parabolic arcs to land in the middle of the peaceful crowd -- one of which came close to us and we removed ourselves another fifty feet. Someone picked it up and ran with it all the way to the fence line. There we watched the action for another two hours in relative safety, aside from the occasional low-flying helicopter buzz, until a tear gas can rolled under our bridge and wafted everyone on it. This was our fourth exposure to tear gas that day. Then we left, went to our regroup place to pick up the bus. We walked through the narrow, sloping streets of the Old City amidst boarded windows, although none of the unprotected windows were broken. There was very little garbage either, despite the absence of garbage pails (presumably, the police removed them so that bombs could not be concealed within them). The Sierra Club had been cleaning up after all of us all day.
Anarchists running their supply lines were heard saying to each other, "Don't smash the windows. These people are on our side." When we got back to the green in front of the train station, we collapsed in physical and emotional exhaustion, and traded stories of the day with each other until the bus arrived. An experience like this tends to re-order your life priorities, and separate what matters from what does not. Suddenly, things like pro sports, or the ups and downs of my social life, are of no importance whatever. One thing we all take from it: having stood up to power there, we can stand up to power anywhere.
3. In retrospective contemplation, now that I have returned home, I offer the following seven summary comments.
First, Quebec really is a distinct society. (Get over it, Alberta.) Whether this gets admitted as a constitutional amendment or as a declaration of independence remains to be seen (and I would prefer that they stay in Canada), however all the separatists that I met seemed to realise that international capitalism is more truly responsible for all the things that they usually blame federalism for. One separatist I met who was carrying an FLQ flag was savvy enough to realise that the erasure of Quebec's national identity is happening simultaneously with the erasure of everybody's national identity.
Second, firing a tear-gas canister or a rubber bullet is an act of violence. The Summit leaders and some of the activist leaders sanctimoniously denounced the protesters who had been throwing bricks and molotov cocktails. But did anyone denounce the police for their acts of violence? After getting a face full of tear gas fourty times in an hour, returning fire becomes an extremely attractive prospect. If you have epilepsy or asthma and are exposed to tear gas, you will not be able to breathe at all. A rubber bullet strike in the eye or the temple at point-blank range will kill you. Let me say this clearly, and let there be no mistaking: If the police continue to use these weapons, it is only a matter of time before someone dies.
Third, Canada is not a democracy. What is democracy? It entails far more than rule by the majority: it entails rule by certain beliefs and ideas. The beliefs and ideas that rule a democracy are encoded into our constitution and our laws, and are open to perpetual debate, revision, and scrutiny; moreover the debate is something that everyone may join, and is free from intimidation by wealth or military force and so therefore may be based entirely on what is right, what is just, and what is in the public good. Such debate is the essence of democracy. But the people were forcibly excluded from the debate at the Summit of the Americas: they were gassed and shot at for asserting their right to speak, and to peacefully dissent. If this were a true democracy, dissent would be permissible, not silenced with chemical weapons, and the terms of treaties like the FTAA would not be closed nor secret. Moreover, the Government of Canada is guilty of incredible hypocrisy, for it represented the purpose of the Summit as "to increase democracy and liberty in all the Americas". The police actions at Quebec were the actions of a police state, not a democracy. We no longer have the luxury to stay uninvolved in the resistance against the destruction of our democracy.
Fourth, the Government of Canada is responsible for the violence at the fence line. Had the government opened the FTAA treaty to public scrutiny, ensured protection for the commons, not erected so tangible a symbol of its utter contempt for its own people as a barricade, and provoked violence by defending it with heavily armed police, then the protest might not have been so violent. If the people are already outraged, the solution is not to barricade them out of the process. Moreover, had it done its duty to democracy and engaged with the people on the people's terms instead of on its terms, entered into treaties to guarantee the protection and empowerment of the public civil commons instead of entering profit-driven trade deals, and just simply cared for the people, the protest would never have occurred at all. Who knows what would have happened instead: an impromptu festival perhaps, rather a lot like the parade, in thanksgiving to each other for giving to ourselves the greatest country in the world in which to live.
Fifth, one or several of the following three things will happen at events of this kind unless the politicians change their ways. One of the police will die, or one of the protesters will die, or one of the police will drop his shield and helmet and join the side of the people (as happened at the recent liberation of Serbia). The first possibility will turn the tide of public opinion against the protest, whereas the second and third may well be what it takes for the protest to succeed. It sounds horrid to say that death is a precondition for success, but may I remind you that a protest is not a tea party. The impact on public opinion would be powerful. On the other hand, Dudley George was killed by OPP officers for his nonviolent protest and it still did not shame the provincial government into backing down.
Sixth, the protest is a spiritual activity. In many ways the protest is the assertion of who we are, and also who we are not. We are not mere functionaries in the capitalist profit machine, as consumers or target markets. We are people. We are the land. I hope I have shown this throughout this story.
Finally, and most importantly, you should have been there.
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