------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
The Greeneville Inquiry
Putin Ousts Rocket Chief
Russia Will Aid Arsenal In N. Korea
SHAKING UP THE BRASS
Nuclear Reactor Shut Down in Ukraine
Sabotage at Three Mile Island?
Nuclear dump fight heats up again in Austin
Mine-Waste Cleanup to Resume

MILITARY
Foes Remain of Two Minds on One China
U.S. and Britain deny Iraqi report of airstrikes
Week Ends Month of China Relations
ARMS DEAL WITH NORTH KOREA
A War Against Ourselves
Club Owners Are Focus of Effort to Combat Drug Use
Inquiry on Peru Looks at a C.I.A. Contract
Iquitos Journal: Simple, Devoted Lives on the Amazon
Funeral held for slain missionary, child
Japan Signals Peaceful Intentions but Reaffirms Armament Plans
Untimely Exercises on Vieques
Navy resumes second day of shelling on Vieques
VIETNAM HUMAN RIGHTS PLEA
Kerrey's Role at New School Re-examined
War and Memory
Kerrey's War, and Ours

OTHER
Bush Calls In Experts to Help Set Course on Climate
Man Arrested And Handcuffed For Having Messy Yard
Diallo Mural Defaced, Then Repaired
Senator Says He'll Press Impeachment of Verniero
4 Officers in Diallo Case to Keep Desk Duty
Prewar File Told of Hitler's Mental State

ACTIVISTS
Quebec City made Seattle look like a schoolyard fight
NIF-DC NGO Roundtable - Invitation
Anti-Nuclear Activist Defaces Sub
Protests Intensify in Puerto Rico as Navy Resumes Bombing Drills
A FAMILY IN NEED!!!
Late-night raid on 'useless' nuclear sub
Spray-paint protester swims to nuclear sub


-------- NUCLEAR

The Greeneville Inquiry

New York Times
April 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/L28GREE.html

To the Editor:

Regarding the Greeneville submarine tragedy, you recommended a court-martial of Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle "to ensure a fuller hearing"; for example, you say the court of inquiry "did not take live testimony from any of the 16 civilians" on board, and "that failure, combined with the Navy's decision not to proceed to a court-martial, has also fueled speculation that its larger objective was to spare the visitors program a thorough examination" (editorial, April 25).

Yet if the accident was related to the presence of the civilians, this issue should be explored by the Senate. The judicial system should be used to prosecute crimes, not as a forum to review military policies.

The military may have narrowly read the law to protect a program that it deems necessary. Fortunately, we have a system of checks and balances that can better address a policy that may endanger military personnel and civilians at sea.

ALEX C. STEVENS JR. Milton, Mass., April 25, 2001

-------- russia

Putin Ousts Rocket Chief

WORLD In Brief
Peter Baker
Saturday, April 28, 2001

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the head of the country's rocket forces yesterday, signaling an apparent resolution of a bitter internal dispute over the future of the armed forces in the former superpower.

Vladimir Yakovlev, head of the strategic rocket forces, had argued vigorously over the last year for maintaining the preeminent role of Russia's nuclear arsenal, butting heads with Anatoly Kvashnin, the head of the general staff who advocated steep reductions in nuclear missiles to free up money to modernize conventional forces.

Putin replaced Yakovlev with Nikolai Solovtsov, head of the Peter the Great military academy, and the position was downgraded from commander in chief to commander, another indication that Putin has sided with those who believe nuclear forces should not be an independent branch of the military.

The move completes the purge of Kvashnin's main internal rivals. A month ago, Putin dismissed Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, another former head of the strategic rocket forces who had clashed with Kvashnin.

----

Russia Will Aid Arsenal In N. Korea

Reuters
Saturday, April 28, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14293-2001Apr27?language=printer

MOSCOW, April 27 -- Russia signed an agreement with North Korea today to upgrade weapons supplied to the communist state during the Soviet era, Russian news agencies said.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who held talks with visiting North Korean counterpart Kim Il Chol, did not specify what weapons were involved, but stressed Pyongyang's controversial missile program was not part of the talks. He said they had also discussed training by Moscow for the North Korean military.

"Historically we are tied by close bonds of friendship" with North Korea, Interfax news agency quoted Ivanov as saying.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who signed the deal for Russia, told RIA news agency he did not expect the agreement to harm Moscow's relations with South Korea, which is still technically at war with North Korea.

----

SHAKING UP THE BRASS

New York Times
April 28, 2001
World Briefing
Patrick E. Tyler
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28BRIE.html

RUSSIA: The longstanding independence of Russia's strategic nuclear forces came to an end yesterday as Russia's new defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, announced that the service was being folded into a new chain of command that removes its special status. Mr. Ivanovc said that the rocket forces' commander in chief, Gen. Vladimir Yakolev, was being replaced by Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, whose title will be "commander of the strategic missile force." The changes signal new momentum in plans to reform the military. (NYT)

-------- ukraine

Nuclear Reactor Shut Down in Ukraine

Washington Post
Saturday, April 28, 2001
The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010428/aponline140703_000.htm

KIEV, Ukraine -- A nuclear reactor at a Ukrainian power plant was shut down following a hydrogen leak Saturday, officials said.

Reactor No. 3 at the Soviet-designed Yuzhnaya plant was stopped early in the day, the state Energoatom nuclear company said. It gave no further details but reported no increased radiation levels.

The incident came two days after ceremonies in Ukraine marking the 15th anniversary of the reactor explosion and fire at Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident. The last working reactor at the ill-fated plant was closed in December 2000.

That left Ukraine with four nuclear power plants and 13 operating reactors, which are frequently shut down over malfunctions or for repairs but still provide about 40 percent of the former Soviet republic's electricity.

Ukraine had hoped for an influx of Western money to finish building two new reactors, which it sees as compensation for Chernobyl's lost power. But with the aid largely delayed, officials including President Leonid Kuchma say the country may have no choice but to complete construction by itself.

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

-------- pennsylvania

Sabotage at Three Mile Island?
Investigators suspected sabotage at Three Mile Island
There is evidence to suggest that sabotage played a role in the "accident" at Three Mile Island.

tmia.com
http://www.tmia.com/tmisab.html

(This publication details only the evidence that has been documented by official government or NRC investigations.) Several days before the emergency, an unannounced NRC inspection of the plant's physical protection discovered access control infractions. Previous announced inspections found TMI to be in compliance with regulations. At the time of the accident, Three Mile Island was not required to enforce the then new "two-man rule." The two-man rule was designed to prevent a worker from being alone in vital areas. Additionally, TMI had not met the deadline for other newly required security upgrades.

In the first moments of the accident, emergency feedwater was prevented from entering the system because the "emergency feedwater valves" were closed. Indicator lights on a control room panel should have alerted the operators that these valves were closed. The two lights were hidden from view by a maintenance tag that was covering them. The valves are supposed to stay open so that emergency pumps can deliver water to the steam generators if the normal circulation is interrupted. The steam generators remove enormous amounts of heat from the reactor. Without feedwater, the steam generators boiled dry within two minutes. The temperature and pressure soared inside the reactor vessel.

The licensee's internal investigation did not consider intentional closure. The NRC Office of Inspection and Enforcement reasoned that it would take a monumental effort to interview each of the more than 750 people who had access to the emergency feedwater valves. The NRC claimed its investigators from the Office of Inspection and Enforcement were sensitive to any evidence of sabotage. But there is some disturbing and eye-opening evidence that wasn't criminally investigated. In fact, the NRC never even discovered the initiating event.

THE INITIAL PROBLEM

The accident started at exactly 4:00:37am on March 28, 1979. This was precisely to the minute of the one year anniversary of start-up or what is known as criticality. This aroused suspicions of worker celebrations involving drinking. The workers testified that they had their normal coffee and doughnuts only.

The trouble started somewhere in the condensate polisher system. Some unknown event caused the polisher outlet valves to close. There are several ways that a saboteur could have made this happen without being detected by plant telemetry or subsequent investigations.

The NRC Office of Investigation and Enforcement hypothesized that the initial failure was a result of a stuck-open check valve allowing water to pass into an instrument control air line and thereby cause the condensate polisher outlet valves to close. The investigators tried to duplicate this condition to test their theory. Despite pouring 15 gallons of water into this line, they could not cause the valves to shut. But, this remained the best guess as to what the first failure might have been. Because the NRC believed that the accident could have been averted at several points if human errors weren't committed, they were satisfied with not knowing the initiating event. Still, the investigators did conclude, "The problems encountered with the condensate system and condenser vacuum significantly detracted the operator's attention from the accident."

Then in the first seconds of the accident, a condensate polisher pump failure was followed by the immediate shutdown of its paired pump. The NRC investigators reported that a "wiring error" caused this second pump to quit when the first one had. A criminal investigator never assumes that an error is "only an error."

A broken air line in the condensate polisher system was ignored by NRC investigators who believed that air was prevented from leaking out by the actuation of another automatic valve. But, at least one worker testified that he had heard the broken line blowing air during the emergency. The licensee claimed that the air line was broken by a water hammer which caused equipment to shift two or three feet. (A water hammer is a sudden pressure change or a slug of water like the one that can rattle your household pipes when turning off a water faucet.) The NRC investigators reported that based on their visual inspection, the air line movement was not as great as the licensee claimed. The cause was never determined or considered necessary.

An hour into the accident, workers needed to re-establish water circulation by opening a bypass valve. The handwheel was missing from this important valve. A search for the handwheel delayed bypassing the condensate polisher system where the failed pumps were located.

The radiological releases began when a safety valve on top of the reactor failed to close. This valve opened to relieve the rapidly increasing pressure. Control room operators did not know that the Pilot Operated Relief Valve (PORV) was still open because the telemetry system was improperly engineered. The operators were fooled by a panel light which only indicated that an electrical signal had been sent to close the valve and not its actual status. Thousands of gallons of water in the form of steam spilled out of the reactor in what is known as a loss of coolant accident. For a short while the contamination was contained inside the reactor building. Although these valves had failed before at other plants, the PORV at Three Mile Island has yet to be inspected. A TMI engineer who believes that the valve simply failed said that sabotage could not be dismissed. (Eighteen months before the TMI accident, the reactor at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio started going out of control in what was actually a precursor to the Three Mile Island emergency. The PORV stuck open and operators struggled to understand the situation. Another design problem caused confusion about the water level inside the reactor. This problem reoccurred at TMI since both reactors were designed by Babcock & Wilcox. Davis-Besse was operating at only 9 percent compared to 97 percent at TMI when the troubles began. The Davis-Besse operators were able to return the plant to a safe condition. Afterwards, an investigation of the reactor revealed that an electrical relay had been removed from the PORV. Someone suggested sabotage. The reactor manufacturer finally decided that the relay was probably "borrowed" for usage in another part of the plant since it was compatible with several systems.)

The highly radioactive water steaming out of the TMI reactor would normally be pumped into an immense holding tank inside the reactor building. For some unknown reason the valve for this sump pump had been switched so that the contaminated water was transferred into the auxiliary building. From here the radioactivity was released to the environs through open vents.

INADEQUATE INVESTIGATION

In June 1979, an NRC special review group conceded that the NRC investigators of the TMI accident had "no training in investigative techniques or knowledge of the laws of evidence or criminal procedures." The NRC investigators did not have the authority to administer oaths and felt that the quality of the information they had obtained would have been enhanced if oaths were given. The NRC actually did have the authority to administer oaths and didn't appear to know this until after the interviews were conducted.

The report also said:

".... a trained investigator should have been dispatched with the initial response team to organize and retain portions of the supportive evidence (notes, logs, etc.) which were lost during the initial days of the accident."

Additionally, the review group found that the NRC investigation was hindered by the delay of receiving transcripts of worker interviews

(Also noteworthy is that the control room alarm printer fell behind by almost two hours. The printer was designed to store alarms in its memory until they can be printed. So many alarms were going off in the early stages of the emergency that the control room operators had to dump the stored alarms to get to the current ones. The information was forever lost.)

A technical investigator for the President's Commission on the accident questioned the adequacy and efforts of the Office of Inspection and Enforcement. Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigators had not even arrived at the plant until two weeks had passed. He also questioned the licensee's internal investigation.

The President's Commission obtained an internal TMI memo which had been written ten months before the accident. It said, "It's time to really do something on this problem before a very serious accident occurs. If the polishers take themselves off line at any high power level the resulting damage could be very significant."

The Chief Counsel for the President's Commission requested the licensee to examine its personnel files for "any person who might have long-standing grievances against the company." This was requested specifically as an attempt to discover workers who might have had incentive to close the emergency feedwater valves. Interrogation of the five workers who were identified by the company was considered.

On August 7, 1979 the President's Commission requested the FBI to determine the feasibility of an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the closed valves. The President's Commission had the authority to ask for assistance from any Executive agency and by vote had decided that the FBI was needed. But, the FBI went right back to the NRC which informed them that human errors and equipment failures were to blame for the accident; therefore, an investigation was not necessary.

An encrypted telegram sent by the FBI to the White House Situation Room around April 6, 1979 informed the President that sabotage was not responsible for the accident according to the NRC's Harold Denton. There was no reasonable way for Denton to have drawn this conclusion. The telegram which is now in the National Archives is labeled "encrypted for transmission purposes only." Portions of it are blacked-out even though it has been unclassified.

On August 15, 1979 the President's Commission asked NASA to perform an inspection of the condensate polisher system. Three Mile Island did not even have the "as built" technical drawings needed for a proper inspection. How could the NRC inspectors have done a thorough job without these? The fact was that they didn't. Investigators from NASA's Office of Flight Assurance found wires that were disconnected at five of the eight polisher panels. Operating and engineering personnel didn't know when or why they were disconnected. They also noted that an instrument air valve on the back of the polishing system control panel permits the air to be shut off and thus cause the outlet valves to close. Paul Leventhal, co-director of the US Senate investigation of the Three Mile Island accident (now director of The Nuclear Control Institute), wanted to perform a special sabotage investigation. "The initiating event was always so mysterious in that so little was known about it," Leventhal divulged in an interview. "I wanted to hire someone like a former FBI agent to do an investigation but the Minority co-director objected."

Just four days into the accident, the FBI had already announced that sabotage was ruled out and the investigation was closed. Maybe they were trying to quiet the fears of the public which had just seen the new film "The China Syndrome." (Some people actually wrote to the NRC accusing Hollywood of a sick publicity stunt.) In actuality, the FBI was planning to meet with confidential sources who believed that sabotage was to blame. An openly public source was Pennsylvania State Representative Joseph Zeller.

Both the Senate and President's Commission investigations were called off the hunt and instructed that a criminal investigation was not their responsibility. It is not entirely unusual for a valve or switch to be in the wrong position, but this many "errors" should have been investigated for criminal activity.

Soon after the emergency, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory concluded:

"There was very little protection against insider sabotage. ...There was very little or no control of the whereabouts of people inside the vital area; so it cannot be said that sabotage to the auxiliary feedwater system was impossible."

and

"...some vital area doors that should have been locked or guarded were found to be open and unguarded. Actually, there was very poor protection against the sabotage actions of the insider."

and

"The conclusion can be drawn that the protection against the activities of an insider is still inadequate at TMI..."

And an embarrassing incident did happen several months after the TMI accident when a newspaper reporter was hired as a security guard. He told of entering the control room unchallenged (only armed guards were permitted access). There was no lock on the door and a piece of clothesline hung where the doorknob should have been. A college textbook used this incident as an example of poor security. The book cited the reporter's headline -- "Three Mile Island: It's a Paradise Island for the Saboteur." General Public Utilities sought an injunction to block publication of the article on the grounds that it could compromise national security.

-------- us nuc waste

Nuclear dump fight heats up again in Austin

Houston Chronicle
April 28, 2001, 8:16PM
By KATHRYN A. WOLFE
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/891966

AUSTIN -- Welcome to the latest episode of what some have called the West Texas waste wars.

A bill that would create a nuclear waste dump in West Texas, a legislative hot potato since the mid-'90s, is once again wrestling its way through the Legislature as the session draws to a close.

And as before, it has pit Capitol watchdogs and environmentalists against lawmakers and waste lobbyists in a power struggle over licensing a private company to run a low-level nuclear waste dump.

Lawmakers say it's needed to honor the terms of a federal compact designating Texas as a host site for nuclear waste from Maine and Vermont. It also would provide an economic bootstrap to ailing Andrews, the oil bust town where the dump likely would be located, they say.

"We have an obligation in our compact that we need to meet," said Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock. "It is the responsible thing to do. We can't stick our heads in the sand in Texas; we have low-level radioactive waste stored all over the state. It's just common sense that it's easier to safely regulate that in one location."

Passed by Congress, the compact sets up regional sites to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and other sources such as hospitals, laboratories or factories.

The compact calls for a commission of one representative from Maine and Vermont and six governor-appointed representatives from Texas.

It is estimated that the compact states together will generate 2.7 million cubic feet of nuclear waste over the next 35 years, according to state records.

In exchange for storing their nuclear waste, the two states would provide Texas with $50 million -- $25 million to build the site and $25 million to clean up any future spills.

Critics say the bill, which mandates state ownership of both the waste and the site's land, would stick taxpayers with the liability for accidents while a private company profits from fees paid by waste producers.

Those profits are what have driven Pasadena-based Waste Control Specialists, which operates a hazardous waste facility in Andrews and is in line for the license, to lobby legislators aggressively, said Andrew Wheat of Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan legislative watchdog group.

Wheat called Senate Bill 1541 a quid pro quo "sham" designed to funnel profits to Dallas power broker Harold Simmons, who owns Waste Control and is a generous campaign donor.

"The last thing you want sort of to be your political legacy is a nuclear dump," Wheat said. "The only way you can have any hope of getting something like this through is to make it worth the politicians' while, and we're talking money."

The key lawmakers involved with the measure -- Duncan, author of the bill; Sen. J.E. "Buster" Brown, R-Lake Jackson, chairman of the Senate committee; Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo; and Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, chairman of the House committee -- have accepted a combined $56,000 in campaign contributions from Simmons and Waste Control since 1995, according to Texas Ethics Commission documents.

Simmons is also the third largest donor to Gov. Rick Perry's campaign, with contributions of more than $200,000, according to Houston Chronicle research.

"This is basically saying we're going to let Harold Simmons make billions of dollars in profit and we're going to stick the public with the liability, which is absurd," Wheat said.

All four legislators have denied any relationship between campaign donations from Waste Control and the waste bill, which is pending in the House Environmental Regulations Committee and awaiting debate on the Senate floor.

Bivins characterized the contributions to his campaign coffers -- which at $25,800 represent the lion's share of the group, including two $10,000 donations from Simmons and the Waste Control PAC given on the same day -- as business as usual for American government.

"Major corporations that do business with the state wind up giving a lot of money," Bivins said. "Our system clearly has flaws, and it's easy for [journalists] to paint those as though they're glaring flaws, but the reality is that this is our system.

"I probably wouldn't have been involved in this bill at all were it not for the fact that I represent Andrews County," Bivins said.

The waste that would be stored in the dump could range from medical waste to the walls of dismantled nuclear reactors -- essentially anything but spent fuel rods -- and varies widely in radioactivity and how hazardous it is.

The Sierra Club is concerned that the waste may leak and contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, which the dump sits atop.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches under four states, is the largest in North America.

Fred Richardson of the Texas Sierra Club said the real question isn't whether there will be a spill, but when.

"That's the ultimate problem with radioactive waste: You don't just stick it in a hole in the ground and it goes away. It remains radioactive," Richardson said. "Somebody's going to have to deal with it in the future."

Diane D'Arrigo of Nuclear Information Resource Service, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, said funds historically aren't set up to combat nuclear spills at commercial sites, or the money is inadequate.

"You can't bind a corporation to long-term liability," D'Arrigo said. "We can try to, but it doesn't even look like Texas is trying to. What incentive is there for Waste Control to manage it properly?"

Even within the Legislature, lawmakers are divided on how and whether to proceed with the bill, with some pushing for allowing the site to accept federal waste and others wanting to restrict waste to the compact states.

Bivins, who tacked an unfriendly amendment onto Duncan's bill that would open the site to federal waste, said revenue from the Department of Energy is necessary to make the Andrews site financially viable.

The bill passed the committee as amended, with Duncan beating a hasty exit after the vote.

Duncan said the point of his bill was to limit waste to compact states, and that Bivins' amendment is unacceptable.

"The state won't own the federal waste site, and that gives me some concern as well, because it could open some opportunities for Texas to lose control over the volume of waste," Duncan said.

DOE waste is projected to outpace the compact states by leaps and bounds, with estimates placing the amount of waste generated by the DOE through 2010 at 2.6 million cubic meters. An Olympic-size swimming pool will hold about 2,500 cubic meters of water.

Torpedoed last year over the issue of private ownership of the dump, this session the bill's fate is just as uncertain.

Duncan says it has a better chance of passing without Bivins' amendment, and Bivins says the opposite.

The bill also has been put on and taken off the Senate's discussion calendar, generally an indication that the author needs to drum up more support.

Other lawmakers are warier still. While tentatively approving of the bill, Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, said he probably wouldn't vote for it if it was in his back yard.

But the people at the site's ground zero, the citizens of Andrews, seem to support the dump and the infusion of cash and jobs it means for their community.

Joe Weatherby, a longtime Andrews resident, was present at the first town meetings in 1994 when Waste Control was opening its hazardous waste dump.

The people of Andrews, where jobs are a needed commodity, have approved of the dump from the start, he said.

"We're a small town and I go for coffee every day. I hear all the gossip," Weatherby said. "We've had danger around here since they've had oil discovered. This isn't even brought up anymore."

------

Mine-Waste Cleanup to Resume
Next concern is funding for long-term disposal of Atlas uranium tailings

Salt Lake Tribune
Saturday, April 28, 2001
BY JUDY FAHYS THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
http://www.sltrib.com/04282001/utah/92695.htm

Workers can begin tamping down the uranium tailings outside of Moab once a contractor finalizes the paperwork and gets a crew on the job, perhaps as early as next week.

"The sooner, the better," Radiation Control Division Director Bill Sinclair said Thursday.

News that work can resume on the old Atlas mining waste came after an afternoon conference call among the state, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Atlas Corp. bankruptcy trustee responsible for stabilizing the 130-acre site.

Work stopped in February, leaving radiation-tainted dirt to get lifted into the air and dumped in downtown Moab, about three miles away.

Part of the reason for the hiatus was a possible shortage of money. Another was the trustee's fear that it might be punished legally by one federal agency for carrying out the site plans approved by two other federal agencies.

Thursday's agreement to resume the cleanup only settled questions about the Atlas site for the short-term.

There still are questions about long-term plans for the tailings, including whether there will be enough money to plan for their disposal so they no longer threaten the nearby Colorado River.

Last week, Utah Reps. Chris Cannon and Jim Matheson began raising concerns about future funding at Atlas, which is set to become Energy Department property Sept. 1.

They wrote a letter to House Appropriation Committee leaders to request $10 million to protect the nearby Colorado River from contamination. The tailings pose "a constant threat to the public safety and health" of the 25 million people in Arizona, Nevada and California who rely on the river for drinking water.

That letter comes on the heels of a similar request Gov. Mike Leavitt made last month to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

"Funding interim stabilization, as well as design of the [tailings] removal plan, is a critical next step to protect the citizens and clean up ongoing contamination of the Colorado River," Leavitt wrote.

While the minimum needed for the initial round of planning and stabilization is estimated at $8 million, the Bush administration budget includes only about $2.8 million for the Energy Department's Grand Junction, Colo., office, which oversees the Atlas job.

Some of the funding is for a study on the best way to deal with the tailings. Past estimates have suggested it could cost as much as $300 million to remove the tailings.

fahys@sltrib.com

-------- MILITARY

Foes Remain of Two Minds on One China

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28TAIW.html

BEIJING, April 27 - Eight years after they began a historic but ultimately aborted dialogue on future relations, mainland China and Taiwan both called today for new talks. But the pleas appeared hollow, as neither side showed any sign of compromising on Beijing's core precondition: Taiwan's agreement that it remains part of "one China."

Leaders in Taiwan, as they extended an invitation they knew China would reject, quietly reveled in the new weapons package Washington has offered to sell them and in President Bush's public promise to aid the island if it comes under attack.

Beijing continued today with a drumbeat of harsh warnings - to Taiwan for its refusal to embrace reunification, and to Washington for its arms offer and Mr. Bush's statement of more overt support for Taiwan in the event of an attack. Beijing called Mr. Bush's comments another step on a "dangerous road," even as American officials said there had been no real change in policy.

Today it appeared that Chinese- American relations could be rattled still more, as officials in Washington were reported as saying that President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan might be allowed to meet with members of Congress in the United States during brief transit stops on American soil.

China has sought to isolate Taiwan's government, which it regards as illegitimate, and especially Mr. Chen, who was elected last year and whose party has worked for Taiwan's independence. Ever since Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Nationalists fled to the island in 1949, the two sides have been in more and less hostile states of limbo, with Beijing claiming sovereignty over Taiwan and threatening to use force if it refuses to rejoin the motherland.

Mr. Bush has caused consternation here with his promises of stronger support for Taiwan. And, while he avoided selling the Aegis radar the Taiwanese seek, his proffered $4 billion arms package includes diesel submarines, which previous American presidents had rejected as too provocative. The Chinese have responded with belligerent statements, though not any specific reprisals.

At a news conference today, Zhang Mingqing, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office in China, charged that the weapons offered to Taipei were intended for offense rather than defense, and violated previous American promises to reduce arms sales to what Beijing considers an internal Chinese region. This morning, one official newspaper, The Guangming Daily, urged the United States to "rein in its horse at the edge of the cliff," while several newspapers asserted that Taiwan's leaders, abetted by Americans whose real goal is to keep China down, faced disaster.

Mr. Zhang released a statement from Wang Daohan, an elder statesman, calling for Taiwan to return to what Beijing says was an unwritten agreement in 1992 that made talks possible, in which both sides accepted "one China" in principle but did not try to hammer out the practical meaning. Taiwan officials disagree among themselves over what was tacitly agreed in 1992, but Mr. Chen's government has been loath to adopt Beijing's proposed approach.

Beijing halted all official contacts two years ago when Taiwan's former president, Lee Teng-hui, said Taipei and Beijing had a "state-to-state" relationship.

Mr. Wang today reiterated China's formulation, regarded here as a generous offer of future autonomy to Taiwan, that "under the prerequisite of one China, everything is possible."

But Mr. Zhang, of China's Taiwan office, ruled out one path that some experts have proposed: "A federation or confederation would not be `one China,'" he said.

---

U.S. and Britain deny Iraqi report of airstrikes

USA Today
04/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-04-28-iraq.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. and British defense officials denied an Iraqi report Saturday that allied warplanes had bombed southern Iraq, killing one civilian and wounding two others.

The official Iraqi News Agency quoted an unidentified Iraqi official saying the allied airstrike hit civilian targets in Najaf province, whose capital city of the same name is 113 miles south of Baghdad.

"While people were celebrating President Saddam Hussein's birthday, the evil aggressors committed another crime to be added to the list of their crimes against our people," the spokesman said. The government staged festivals across the country Saturday to celebrate Saddam's 64th birthday.

In London, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense said U.S. and British planes flew over Iraq, but did not attack.

"We had a coalition patrol flying in the southern no-fly zone today that was fired at by Iraqi ground forces. However we didn't respond, so no bombs were dropped," the spokesman said on condition of anonymity.

In Washington, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Susan Hansen, concurred, saying: "There were no ordnance dropped today over southern Iraq by U.S. forces."

The Iraqi spokesman referred specifically to American and British planes, which patrol no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. The zones were set up in the early 1990s to protect Kurdish rebels in the north and Shiite rebels in the south from government forces.

The spokesman did not specify the type of building hit, the attack site or give details about the casualties.

He added that Iraqi air defense units fired on the planes, "forcing them to leave our skies for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait."

The allied warplanes that patrol the southern zone operate from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well as U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf.

Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zones and has been challenging the allied planes since late 1998.

The allies often respond by attacking Iraqi radar and air defense units. Sometimes civilians are killed in these airstrikes.

-------- arms sales

Week Ends Month of China Relations

By George Gedda
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, April 28, 2001; 1:07 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010428/aponline130741_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has delighted Taiwan, infuriated China and puzzled those who follow the region by announcing plans to sell Taiwan new weapons and pledging to come to its defense.

"We do look at this new government with a very positive perspective," Taiwan's top diplomat in Washington, C.J. Chen, told American reporters last week. The veteran diplomat kept his enthusiasm within bounds, mindful that U.S. relations with Taiwan ebb and flow - as they do with China, as well.

The good week for Taiwan topped off a bad month for U.S.-Chinese relations, starting with the collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter plane over the South China Sea on April 1 and ending with the Bush administration's seeming tilt toward Taiwan.

On Tuesday, the administration approved the sale to Taiwan of four Kidd-class destroyers, up to eight diesel submarines, and 12 P-3 Orion submarine-killer aircraft.

On Wednesday, Bush followed that up with what many regarded as an unusually strong commitment to Taiwan's defense. China considers Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out retaking it by force.

In an interview with ABC, Bush was asked whether the United States had an obligation to defend Taiwan if the island were attacked by China. "Yes we do ... and the Chinese must understand that," Bush responded.

Did that mean the "full force of American military?" "Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself," Bush replied.

The comments seemed to be a departure from the historic U.S. position of maintaining open options on the issue of Taiwan's defense. The theory, known as "strategic ambiguity, is that uncertainty about a U.S. response deters both Chinese aggression against Taiwan and Taiwanese provocations against the mainland.

The comments enraged China. "There is only one China in the world. Taiwan is part of China. It is not a protectorate of any foreign country," said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue."

To Dana Dillon of the Heritage Foundation, Bush's statement was a breakthrough for Taiwan because it replaces strategic ambiguity with "strategic clarity."

"Certainly he said what has not been said before," Dillon said. "It's been a good week for peace in the Taiwan Straits."

It is not normal for a president to announce policy changes on sensitive issues during a television interview.

Winston Lord, a U.S. ambassador to China during the Reagan administration, said Bush's remarks were new, but thought the president was winging it.

"Maybe the president should have been better briefed," Lord said.

James Sasser, a former Democratic senator who served as President Clinton's ambassador to China, went further.

"I don't think he (Bush) knew how to answer that question," he said. "So he retreated back into campaign rhetoric."

Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, objected to Bush's statement on grounds that nothing in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 obligates the United States to defend Taiwan.

The law only requires "appropriate action" by the U.S. government in consultation with Congress in the event of danger to Taiwan, said Biden, an advocate of strategic ambiguity.

Patrick Cronin of the Brookings Institution said Bush's response simply reflected Republican opposition to what he called the "craven" policy of the Clinton administration of seeking friendship with China whatever the cost.

Bush, he said, "is trying to take back some of the ground that Clinton gave up."

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a CNN interview Friday night, defended the more assertive tone on China by saying China is not as committed to peace with Taiwan as it used to be. He cited Beijing's buildup of missiles aimed at Taiwan.

Cheney also blamed China for the April 1 aerial collision. He said it was evidence of a "much more aggressive" treatment of U.S. surveillance aircraft off China's coast.

Cronin cautioned that China can retaliate against Washington's embrace of Taiwan by buying strategic arms from Russia or selling missiles to South Asia or the Middle East.

Reinforcing that view, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said the Taiwan arms offer would "seriously impact" China-U.S. cooperation on arms control.

Lord advised that the two countries try to ease tensions by focussing on areas of common interest. Both, he said, essentially agree on trade, Korea, Islamic fundamentalism, the environment, drugs, refugees and terrorism.

The Taiwan issue is too confining, he said. "We have to expand the agenda."

----

ARMS DEAL WITH NORTH KOREA

New York Times
April 28, 2001
World Briefing
Patrick E. Tyler
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28BRIE.html

RUSSIA: In advance of an expected visit by North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, Russian officials met in Moscow with Defense Minister Kim Il Chol and signed an agreement to upgrade some of North Korea's Soviet-era weapons. Russia's deputy prime minister, Ilya I. Klebanov, said the agreement would not harm South Korea's interests as the Kremlin seeks to entice the North Korean leader to Russia for talks to promote reconciliation on the peninsula. (NYT)

-------- drug war

A War Against Ourselves

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By ANTHONY LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28LEWI.html

BOSTON -- "They are killing us," the pilot of the small plane carrying an American missionary family said as a Peruvian Air Force fighter fired. Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, died.

But the "they" in the pilot's words were not just the Peruvian gunners, and the "us" were not only Veronica and Charity Bowers. The ultimate cause of their death was U.S. drug policy, the war on drugs; and that war has damaged the lives of millions of Americans.

The attack on the Bowers family focused attention on an obscure part of the drug war: surveillance flights by C.I.A. contract employees who target suspected drug-smuggling planes for the Peruvian Air Force. President Bush ordered a temporary suspension of the program. And critics pointed to flaws in the way it is carried out.

For example, the C.I.A. employees who spotted the Bowers's plane tried to stop the Peruvian fighter from shooting at it before first checking its markings. But a tape of their communications showed that the Peruvian crew had trouble understanding them because the C.I.A. men spoke little Spanish. A former pilot in the C.I.A. operation told The Washington Post, "That's one of the fallacies of the whole program: the language barrier."

But the real point is not a particular flaw like the C.I.A.'s idiocy in using English-speaking spotters. It is the futility of the whole operation.

The effort to stop cocaine exports from Peru has cut the flow from there substantially. But that reduction has been more than made up by a huge increase in coca cultivation and production in Colombia. As Plan Colombia, the military anti-drug program, gets under way there, production is reportedly beginning to shift to Ecuador.

In the last 15 years, the United States has spent $30 billion, most of it in Latin America, trying to cut the supply of drugs from abroad. The costs to other societies have been severe: the rise of drug gangs, the suffering of peasants from crop eradication, the corruption of governments. Yet the amount of cocaine and heroin entering the United States is as great as ever.

To think that we can deal with our drug problem by limiting supply is irrational. Illegal drugs are an infinitesimal portion of goods entering this country, easy to conceal. And if cocaine were magically stopped, Americans who crave drugs would find some other chemical.

The real need is to reduce the craving. Study after study has shown that treatment of drug abusers is the best and cheapest way to do that. Yet treatment funds are scarce, and the heavy emphasis of our drug policy is on criminal punishment.

The costs to our society have been grievous. Long mandatory minimum sentences have filled our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders and made them, and their families, damaged beings for the rest of their lives. Prison-building is now one of the country's largest construction programs.

The war on drugs is a testament to the human capacity for self-delusion. It is hard to change because even legislators who recognize its futility do not want to be seen as "soft on drugs." Yet around the country some politicians, and many members of the public, have begun to call for change.

But not George W. Bush and his administration. Mr. Bush's reported choice as drug czar is John P. Walters, an all-out warrior who has spoken scornfully of drug treatment and wants to intensify the fight to cut off drug supplies abroad.

The Bush administration has also started to enforce a little-known 1998 law that bars financial aid to students who have been convicted of even a minor drug offense. The result, defying reason, is to discourage one of the best routes to rehabilitation, higher education.

The "war on drugs" is more than just a slogan. In war, collateral damage is often regarded as unavoidable. In any sane civilian policy, the collateral damage of the drug war to ourselves and our neighbors would long since have been found unacceptable.

The result of the U.S. drug war, The Economist of London said last week, "is to undermine democracy, human rights and the environment in much of Latin America. A radical rethink of drug policy is long overdue."

---

Club Owners Are Focus of Effort to Combat Drug Use

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/nyregion/28DRUG.html

Frustrated by the rising popularity of Ecstasy and other illegal drugs among young nightclub revelers, law enforcement agencies and local governments around the country are increasingly going after the clubs themselves, saying that the electronic music they play has a close connection to abuse of these drugs.

Fans of the music, nightclub owners and some civil rights lawyers say singling out clubs based on the music they play raises First Amendment concerns.

In New York, law enforcement officials have long used local nuisance laws to shutter nightclubs with a history of drug problems. But in the last year, other large cities, like Chicago, and even small ones, like Lewiston, Me., have adopted ordinances to regulate raves - giant all-night parties featuring electronic music and light shows. And, for the first time, they are imposing criminal penalties on the owners of nightclubs or other dance spaces where drug use is discovered.

And in what some club owners view as the ultimate test case, the United States attorney in New Orleans is prosecuting two club owners under the 1986 federal Crack House Statute, which is used against those who maintain a property where they know drugs are sold or used.

"I can't say I can remember ever using public health ordinances and statutes to the magnitude that we are trying to do now," said Special Agent Joseph Keefe, chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, referring to the federal and local efforts pointed at club owners. "But clubs tend to be a venue for these drugs."

Law enforcement and music have historically had an uneasy relationship, in large part because of illegal drugs, from the crackdowns on marijuana in jazz clubs of the 1920's to the rock concerts and cocaine-fueled discos of later decades.

But law, government and health care experts contend that there are unique features about club drugs like Ecstasy, a stimulant with hallucinogenic properties, and GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, a depressant. While drugs like cocaine and heroin tend to be used in various settings, they say, the majority of people who end up in the emergency rooms from overdoses of Ecstasy and GHB arrive from a nightclub or rave party.

"Club drugs in our experience are being used solely in partying venues," said David W. Simon, a deputy district attorney in San Bernardino County, Calif., who recently tried a young man on murder charges because he supplied GHB to a 15-year-old boy who died.

Experts in electronic music argue that only a minority of patrons abuse drugs, but they concede that Ecstasy is well known for increasing the visceral effects of techno music and light shows. The dancing, whether in clubs or at rave parties, tends to go until as late as noon the next day, and the largest events attract tens of thousands of revelers.

For that reason, many clubs have begun using private ambulance companies to transport people who overdose to the emergency room, and provide cooling-off rooms for people who overheat, a common and potentially life- threatening side effect of Ecstasy. Club owners argue these are public safety moves, but the police view it as evidence that they know about and tolerate drug use.

Perhaps most urgent, officials say, is the rising number of people who are abusing the drugs in dangerous ways. Most bad reactions to Ecstasy occur when it is combined with other drugs and alcohol. Those who overdose usually experience overheating - sometimes fatal in and of itself - as well as faintness, panic attacks, severe dehydration and loss of consciousness. An overdose of GHB can cause a user to become comatose and unresponsive, which is why it is sometimes called a date rape drug. Abusers sometimes must be revived and put on a respirator.

Starting in 1994, as raves and techno music grew in popularity, the number of people who ended up in the nation's emergency rooms from Ecstasy overdoses rose tenfold to 2,850 in 1999, while admissions for drugs like LSD remained steady, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, a unit of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Last year, federal drug enforcers seized more than three million Ecstasy tablets, compared with one million the year before.

In each case where cities have tried to crack down, officials had been vexed by frequent illegal rave parties, overdoses and an inability to shut down nightclubs where there had been multiple drug arrests with traditional methods.

Dallas, for example, has among the country's highest rates of emergency room visits for GHB overdoses stemming from rave parties.

"Most of the kids that go to these type of things for the most part are very passive and nonviolent," said Lt. William Turnage, who investigates narcotics cases in Dallas. "But we pursue it because it is so dangerous."

Texas officials are working to adopt some of the ordinances of other cities to curb the electronic music scene, he said.

In Chicago, the City Council last summer passed an ordinance subjecting anyone holding or producing an event in an unlicensed venue to a $10,000 fine. This slowed down the raves, but to get at club owners, the Chicago council is awaiting a final vote on another ordinance that calls for up to six months in jail for any property manager who knowingly permits drug sales on his property.

"We felt what they were doing was getting to the level of criminal activity, because they knew what was going on in the club and were refusing to do anything about it," said Jennifer Hoyle, the spokeswoman for city's law department, referring to clubs where multiple arrests have been made.

A similar law was passed in Lewiston, Me., where party promoters must now pay for the presence of a police officer for every 250 revelers at raves, which were once totally underground events.

This month, officials in Denver told clubs that they cannot sell alcohol at any events where anyone under 21 is present. "We have lost tens of thousands of dollars since that started," said Jesse Morreale, a partner in Nobody in Particular, which operates two theaters in the city that hold all types of concerts.

But the most controversial and closely watched development in the war on club drugs is taking place in New Orleans, where officials have linked hundreds of overdoses in recent years to raves and to a nightclub known for electronic music events, the State Palace. A young woman died after patronizing the club a few years ago. Last winter, a grand jury indicted three men who operated the club under the Crack House Statute. That case has attracted the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The government has always targeted people who went to concerts," said Graham Boyd, director of the A.C.L.U.'s drug policy litigation project, and a consultant to the New Orleans defendants. "But that is very different than targeting the people who provide the music, and the First Amendment protects music. That legal principle is clear."

The work of government and law enforcement has clearly had an effect. "It is really bad in here," said Erica Miller, a techno music promoter in Detroit. "If you rent a warehouse - Detroit is known for its warehouse parties - you have a big problem."

And many club owners like Mr. Morreale said they were avoiding booking techno D.J.'s, the most popular of whom can draw thousands from around the country. "I think that until we come to whatever agreement we can come to with the city we are going to shy away from techno events," he said. "We can't run the risk of our license being in jeopardy."

Some government officials and clubs have made peace and worked together. In San Francisco, for instance, where club raids used to be frequent, club owners and dancers worked out a compromise. Club patrons agreed to be more considerate of neighbors, even doing volunteer work in the community, and the city passed measures that prohibited the use of 911 call logs as cause for removing a club's permit.

Other cities have hired off-duty police officers to patrol parties and clubs. Club owners in New York have requested the same help from the police, and the police have declined, according to letters between the department and a group representing nightclubs.

New York has taken a hard line against the techno dance clubs since the late 1990's, because of the swelling numbers of overdoses - some fatal - stemming from the clubs. In 1998, prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to convict the owner of the Limelight and Tunnel clubs, Peter Gatien, of running drug supermarkets there. They have since tried to close down the club Twilo, which they contend is an outpost for Ecstasy, and regularly pepper clubs all over the city with summonses for various infractions. The Tunnel has adopted antidrug policies, including hiring an undercover security staff, leading to a decrease in business, said Robert H. Silbering, a former narcotics investigator who now does private investigative work in nightclubs and other businesses.

A company was formed recently to secure permits, work with the local police and governments and teach promoters how to keep their parties drug-free. "You have to be careful at the door about who you let in, you have to have fliers that tell people they can't use drugs, and you have to have the proper security," said Jesse Saunders, a partner in Rave Secure, which charges upward of $2,000 a party anywhere in the United States for its services.

Nigel Richards, one of the most famous D.J.'s in electronic music, said: "I just played a party in a club in Cleveland, and the cops and promoters were outside chumming it up. You might not have seen that a few years ago. Professionalism is increasing in the scene."

---

Inquiry on Peru Looks at a C.I.A. Contract

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28PLAN.html

WASHINGTON, April 27 - With inquiries beginning into Peru's downing last week of a flight carrying American missionaries, Congressional officials say they are examining the role played by C.I.A. contract employees who worked for the Aviation Development Corporation of Montgomery, Ala.

There is no indication of wrongdoing by Aviation Development, and government officials said the three C.I.A. contract employees on board a surveillance plane tried to prevent the Peruvian military from shooting down the missionaries' plane, which was suspected of carrying drugs.

But some Congressional officials privately voiced discomfort that civilians could be detailed to such a delicate mission.

"They have a higher impression of their tactical and technical proficiency than they should," said one official, who asked not to be identified. "Not one person on that aircraft had a commission from the U.S. government to do what they were doing. No one took an oath to the Constitution. They were just businessmen."

American anti-narcotics officials have privately expressed similar doubts about the contractors. Some note that the Aviation Development crew had identified the missionary plane as suspect even though it was en route to Iquitos, Peru, rather than leaving that country's airspace.

The State Department announced today that it was sending a senior anti-narcotics official, Rand Beers, to Peru to lead a joint investigation with the authorities there. In Congress, intelligence committees are gathering information about the incident; a House Government Reform subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday.

It is not clear whether Aviation Development, whose employees on the surveillance plane first identified the missionaries' plane as a potential drug flight, worked exclusively for the C.I.A. Phone calls to the company's office at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery went unanswered this week, and calls to the home of its president, Lex Thistlethwaite, were not returned.

The authorities at Maxwell have allowed the company to operate out of a remote hangar at the base since 1997. But even the officials responsible for handling private contractors said they knew almost nothing about Aviation Development or its activities.

"If they're who I think they are, they've been here for two or three years," said Susan Smith, who is in charge of business operations. "My office has no relationship with them. The contract was written out of some organization in Washington, D.C."

The C.I.A. has long been known to set up front companies to mask its activities, especially in aviation. At their peak in the mid-1960's, companies that were wholly-owned subsidiaries of the agency and had such names as the Civil Air Transport Company, Air America and Intermountain Aviation employed as many as 20,000 people and operated about 200 planes, rivaling the size of Trans World Airlines.

Yet in recent years, American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly contracted workers from private companies. The practice allows federal officials to reduce the visibility of sensitive operations by substituting paid civilians for American troops or career intelligence officers.

In Colombia, for instance, where Congress has strictly limited the number of American troops and their activities, federal officials have hired DynCorp, an information technology and aviation giant, to conduct drug crop fumigation runs and ferry Colombian troops into conflict zones.

Unlike American military advisers, the contract workers in Colombia are not bound by lawmakers' orders to avoid combat.

The extent of the C.I.A.'s involvement with aviation companies became public in the mid-1980's, when longtime employees of agency- owned airlines applied for government pensions. The employees, who decades earlier had undertaken perilous missions to air-drop agents into China or supply the French at Dien Bien Phu, were dismayed when the government blocked their request on the grounds that they never officially worked for the C.I.A.

Then, in 1987, Eugene Hasenfus, a pilot who was shot down over Nicaragua while flying supplies to the American-backed contra rebels, filed suit against two airlines with C.I.A. connections: Corporate Air Services and Southern Air Transport. Mr. Hasenfus, who had flown for Air America, a C.I.A. airline, in Southeast Asia, sued the companies for negligence and fraud, all the while casting light on their ties to American intelligence.

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the C.I.A., today declined to discuss the agency's relationship with Aviation Development. "We have no comment on the company involved and the contractors in this case," he said.

When Aviation Development first settled at Maxwell in 1997, it was greeted with considerable fanfare.

Mr. Thistlethwaite announced at the time that he had received a $10 million Pentagon contract to test and evaluate several different airborne sensors, according to a news release. The company would use five Cessna Citation V twin-engine jet aircraft, he said.

Mr. Thistlethwaite, who said Aviation Development was his first company, delighted local officials by joining the Chamber of Commerce and pledging to employ about 45 people, with about a third hired locally.

Emory Folmar, the mayor of Montgomery at the time, said the completion of a 1,000-foot extension to Maxwell's runway had helped lure the company to the base.

That runway extension, which cost $5.7 million, had been advocated by Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who has since become the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and Representative Terry Everett, a Republican who represents the Montgomery area.

Andrea Andrews, a spokeswoman for Mr. Shelby, confirmed his role in winning the runway improvement at Maxwell. But she said the senator had no ties to Aviation Development or to Mr. Thistlethwaite.

---

Iquitos Journal: Simple, Devoted Lives on the Amazon

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28PERU.html

IQUITOS, Peru, April 27 - Missionaries say there are many souls to be saved along the Amazon, where the people often drink away their money and live by superstitious beliefs that include a myth that unwanted pregnancies are the work of the feared river dolphins.

But as the Adams and Mortimer families glided up the brown waters on their way to this jungle city for a memorial service for one of their best friends, there was little time for these American missionaries from Michigan and Oklahoma to evangelize.

It was a day filled with personal reflection and prayer to understand the meaning of the deaths of Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity, who were killed a week ago by a single bullet fired by a Peruvian Air Force fighter jet that was hunting what it thought was a drug-trafficking plane.

The tragedy has been a major embarrassment for the Peruvian military and has led to the suspension of United States-Peruvian antidrug operations. But it does not appear to have weakened the ardor of the five remaining American missionary families who troll the Amazon around Iquitos on their houseboats for weeks at a time, playing gospel music from loudspeakers like pied pipers playing for souls.

"Ronie is doing great," Connie Adams, 45, said about Veronica Bowers, whom she knew well since the Bowers and Adams families docked their houseboats next to each other here over the last several months. "She's partying in heaven. We're happy for her but sad for the rest of us. It's just not fair that people on the river are now not going to hear about Jesus from the Bowers and go to heaven."

The conversation continued on the pilot bridge of the Adams houseboat without tears or overt signs of grief, as members of both families displayed a calm resignation to events that they say only God or the Devil can cause and understand.

"I'm praying for the man who shot that bullet until he repents," Helena Mortimer, 61, said. "Jesus died for every one of us so we can't afford to be angry."

Mrs. Adams agreed, and added: "If I get scared and run off, the people on the river don't get saved. The goal is to get my ticket to heaven and take as many people with me as possible."

Nevertheless, she said she understood why Jim Bowers, Veronica's husband, has said it would be too painful for him and his son to return to their missionary work here. Mr. Bowers and his son, who have returned to the United States, were also on the plane.

These families that cruise the Amazon, belonging to various Baptist and other denominations, are a hardy bunch who brave snakes, mosquitoes, sunburn and the dangers that go along with sharing narrow curlicue tributaries with heavily armed drug traffickers and navy patrol boats. They spend their days building churches, digging wells, teaching converts how to minister to their people and preaching that drinking and gambling on soccer hurt family life and health.

It is a simple life, but one that has the feel of a transplanted culture in one of the more exotic corners of Peru. The Adams and Mortimer houseboats are outfitted with washer-dryers, VCR's and microwave ovens. The older children waterski off a motorboat that the Adams family ties to the houseboat, and "Winnie the Pooh" and "Toy Story" videos are popular among the younger children.

Lunch on this trip included hamburger meat and pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, canned peas, biscuits and chocolate cake. The children are taught by their mothers from Christian home-schooling curriculums, and everyone helps with the daily chores and joins hands in prayer.

The families work hard at their Spanish but typically ban Spanish from home life, so the children will have an easier time adapting to American life when they go home for Bible college. They make their own clothes, including red, white and blue outfits for the Fourth of July, when missionary families gather together for a party in Iquitos.

Many of the missionaries are children of missionaries themselves.

"It's something in your heart," said Mrs. Mortimer, the daughter of a preacher. "As you pray, God leads you."

She and her husband, John Frederick Mortimer, 58, share a houseboat with their son, John Edwin Mortimer, 36; his wife Cindy, 35, and their three grandchildren. Preparing to refit the boat, they live in tight quarters, using bunk beds and futons on missionary trips that sometimes last three weeks or more.

As a child, John Edwin used to ride motorcycles and horses with his father as he ministered to villages around Veracruz, Mexico, and he said that at 13 he received God's word to follow in his parents' footsteps.

Cindy, who met John Edwin when the Mortimers used to go home to Sanilac, Mich., for annual visits, said that her parents were sad not to see their grandchildren regularly, but that "they are proud of us and happy we chose Jesus over the Devil."

They have been working intermittently for 19 years in and around Iquitos, and full time for the last 13 from the houseboat.

They receive financial support from the Shell Lake Full Gospel Church, an interdenominational Wisconsin church affiliated with World Harvest Outreach, which has sent 35 missionary families around the world. The aid has gone to building 35 churches and drilling 10 water wells in villages where children once had distended stomachs from parasites.

They have tried to spread modern techniques to create better banana and pineapple yields, and they teach hunters to hunt just what they need to eat.

"In the Bible, Paul says we are not saved by our works, we're saved by faith," John Edwin Mortimer said. "But faith without works is dead. The faith that you have brings forth works."

To drive home the point, the Mortimers try to build their wells next to their churches.

On the trip back here, they made a quick stop to Nuevo Horizonte, a jungle village where the Mortimers recently built a well. They heard bad news from the local minister. The water had a metallic taste.

The Mortimers decided that the well was contaminated and needed to be bleached. If that did not work, they would have to work an additional three weeks to build another well.

"The first couple of years I would have gotten real upset," John Edwin Mortimer said after hearing about the well problem. "But now I understand there's no sense in getting bent out of shape about it. I know God has it in his control."

---

Funeral held for slain missionary, child

USA Today
04/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-28-peru.htm

FRUITPORT, Mich. (AP) - At the funeral for his wife and infant daughter, an American missionary said he has forgiven the Peruvian pilot who shot down their small plane and said his wife would have done the same.

"I'm not bragging about my attitude. I have no idea why I feel this way," Jim Bowers said Friday night at the funeral for Veronica "Roni" Bowers, 35, and their daughter, 7-month-old Charity. "God's given me peace."

Veronica and Charity Bowers died after a Peruvian military jet, believing the pontoon plane was smuggling drugs, shot it down over northeastern Peru on April 20.

Jim Bowers, 38, and son Cory, 6, were also on board but were unhurt. Pilot Kevin Donaldson, 41, who managed to land the plane on the Amazon River, suffered serious leg wounds.

About 1,300 people attended Friday's service at a Baptist church in Fruitport, 40 miles northwest of Grand Rapids. The victims will be buried Sunday afternoon in Pensacola, Fla., near the home of the wife's parents.

Bowers, in a 30-minute eulogy, spoke calmly as he recalled fond memories of his wife and daughter, and thanked people around the world for their prayers and words of comfort.

"One sign that God was responsible for what happened is the profound effect on people around the world," he said. "I'm hoping it will result in an increase in missionaries .... I'm sure it will; people are challenged now to go do what Roni did."

He said he and his wife considered Charity, whom they adopted when she was 1 month old, "their precious gift from God."

Manuel Boza, Peru's consul general in Chicago, offered his nation's condolences during the service, and called the deaths a tragedy for his country as well.

"There are moments when really it's very difficult to find the words that could appropriately and adequately express our sentiments or emotions," Boza said. "Certainly, this is one of those moments."

Among the flower arrangements near the closed white casket holding the bodies of both mother and child were four dozen red roses with a note that said "From the government and people of Peru."

President Bush telephoned his condolences to Jim Bowers. The White House said Bush did not attend the funeral because he did not want to intrude on a private event.

In Inquitos, Peru, more than 500 people packed a university auditorium Friday night for a memorial service for Veronica and Charity Bowers.

"It's sad that we have been left without them, but we are also happy because we know there is eternal life," Baptist missionary Larry Hultquist said in opening the memorial service in Iquitos, a city 625 miles northeast of the capital, Lima.

-------- japan

Japan Signals Peaceful Intentions but Reaffirms Armament Plans

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28JAPA.html

TOKYO, April 27 - In his first full day in office, Japan's new prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, moved today to reassure neighbors about nationalist currents in his country, while reaffirming a campaign pledge to create a full-fledged army.

At his first news conference since his confirmation by Parliament on Thursday, Mr. Koizumi said, "Saying the self-defense forces aren't an army is just a lie." He then added: "In the very worst case, if Japan is invaded, not being fully equipped and prepared is politically irresponsible."

Mr. Koizumi stressed, however, that the alliance with the United States remains the pillar of Japan's security policy, and said he hoped to meet President Bush as soon as possible. The new prime minister also said he favored a more active role for Japan in international peacekeeping, which is something the United States has long urged.

The comments were Mr. Koizumi's first confirmation since taking office of a campaign vow to seek changes to Japan's Constitution, written by Americans during occupation after World War II, to allow the country to organize a national army in the place of the current national self-defense force.

Japan's self-defense force boasts one of the world's largest military budgets, but is limited to defense by the Constitution's Article 9, which says, "The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation," and "land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained."

Many of Japan's neighbors, victims of this country's aggressive expansionism during the first half of the 20th century, have vigorously condemned perceived movements toward the fielding of a national army, and watch closely for any signs of renewed nationalism.

Mr. Koizumi himself fueled concerns about the rise of nationalism during his recent campaign, in which he joined with other conservative candidates of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to pledge that he would visit a shrine to war veterans in Tokyo on Aug. 15, a national memorial day. The new prime minister renewed that pledge in his news conference today.

The shrine, Yasukuni, contains the remains of some of Japan's biggest war criminals, and most politicians have shied away from visiting in recent years out of concern of offending Japan's neighbors.

In a rare reference to Japan's wartime past by a sitting prime minister, Mr. Koizumi struck a resolutely pacifist tone. "Why did we get involved in that war?" he asked. "Because Japan became isolated from international society. What is most important is that we do not fight a war again, and do not again become internationally isolated."

Mr. Koizumi also balanced his potentially provocative comments about the Constitution and about the war memorial with a telephone call to South Korea's president, Kim Dae Jung, pledging to work with him to settle a controversy over government's recent approval of junior high school history textbooks that avoid mention of Japan's wartime atrocities. Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Kim also agreed to coordinate their policies toward North Korea, together with the United States.

Asked about Japan's perennially difficult relations with China, worsened this week by a visit by a former leader of Taiwan, Mr. Koizumi said, "There are various problems, but what is important is to understand each other's position."

In a busy first day for the new government, Mr. Koizumi's newly appointed foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka, met with the governor of Okinawa, Keiichi Inamine, over the issue of American troops stationed on that island.

Mr. Inamine has recently demanded a reduction in the number of marines stationed on the island, and asked for Ms. Tanaka's "understanding" over the strains caused by the presence of the American troops.

Shortly after her appointment on Thursday, Ms. Tanaka hinted that she would support a new, stricter status-of-forces agreement governing the behavior of American military personnel in Japan. The Marine presence in Okinawa has been a longtime irritant in relations between the two countries, because of a string of rapes, arsons and other crimes.

Mr. Koizumi gave little indication about his economic policy intentions, other than to say that "economic recovery and rebuilding the economy are a top priority."

"The most crucial point for the implementation of policy is for citizens to trust politicians, and the prime minister in particular," said Mr. Koizumi, who during his campaign called for sweeping reform.

-------- puerto rico

Untimely Exercises on Vieques

New York Times
April 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28SAT2.html

The Navy's decision to begin a multiday bombing exercise on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques yesterday was legally authorized but politically insensitive. Puerto Rican opposition to such exercises is strong, and yesterday's maneuvers were greeted with demonstrations and civil disobedience. A referendum among Vieques's 9,400 residents in November will determine whether the Navy will have to phase out use of the island as a bombing range. Studies on whether noise from the bombings is causing heart problems among Vieques residents are currently being evaluated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Navy should have postponed further exercises until that evaluation was complete.

The government of Puerto Rico sought such a postponement, but on Thursday a federal judge declined to issue an injunction barring these exercises. Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that at this point insufficient evidence exists that the residents of Vieques would be "irreparably harmed" by letting the Navy go forward, the very tough standard for obtaining an injunction. But such evidence might emerge from the medical studies, and Judge Kessler noted that the Navy had made "an implied promise" to Gov. Sila Calderón of Puerto Rico to hold off on further bombing practice until those studies had been assessed. She also noted that the bombing apparently violates a new Puerto Rican law against noise pollution. Judge Kessler's decision left room for Puerto Rico to pursue its case both legally and politically. That is what it now needs to do.

Live-fire exercises on the island ended after a civilian security guard was accidentally killed in a bombing accident two years ago. But over the next few days, Vieques will once again be pounded with nonexplosive shells in exercises involving about 15,000 sailors and marines. The Navy argues that Vieques is its most valuable training site in the western Atlantic and cannot easily be replaced. United States military forces have been conducting exercises there for 60 years, starting in the days when Puerto Rico was a colony.

The future of these exercises should be determined by the will of the Vieques voters. Under an agreement negotiated by Puerto Rico's previous governor, even after a no vote in November, Vieques could remain a bombing range until May 2003. That is an unreasonably long interval. Governor Calderón won election last November calling for an immediate cessation of the exercises. After the current round ends next week, the Navy should wait until the health studies have been reviewed before scheduling any more bombing on Vieques. Better yet, it should wait for the November referendum.

---

Navy resumes second day of shelling on Vieques

USA Today
04/28/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-28-vieques.htm

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) - Protesters sneaked onto the U.S. Navy's prized firing range on Vieques island and put themselves in the line of fire, forcing a three-hour delay before shelling began Saturday in a second day of military exercises.

Five protesters were detained inside the target zone overnight and three more were found after daybreak, spokesman Lt. Corey Barker told The Associated Press.

Shelling from ship to shore, with non-explosive ammunition, began just after 11 a.m., the Navy said, three hours behind schedule.

Navy spokesman Jeff Gordon said officials were confident the target area was cleared of protesters before the shelling began, but protest leaders insisted they still had people on the range.

In one close call Friday, fighter jets began the exercises by dropping nine dummy bombs before eight protesters were spotted on an island within 100 yards of the target zone, Gordon said.

The latest detentions brought to 55 the number of protesters arrested since Thursday night, when people began breaching the restricted military zone on the outlying island to prevent the first Navy exercises since December.

Among the arrests announced Saturday was local Sen. Norma Burgos, a longtime proponent of U.S. statehood for Puerto Rico.

At least three people were injured in violent confrontations. Those arrested will be prosecuted for trespassing on federal property, the Navy said.

Gordon said the exercises "have been hindered very little" by the intruders.

But it appeared a partial victory for demonstrators who believe the military activity harms islanders' health and the environment.

The Navy insists it does not hurt the island's 9,400 residents and says local studies that show higher rates of cancer and infant mortality are unscientific and biased.

The military exercises have stirred up anti-U.S. sentiment on Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where residents cannot vote for president and pay no federal taxes.

On the edge of the restricted military zone, sailors laid down new razor wire and repaired some of the gaps that protesters cut in chain-link fences in more than a dozen places Friday.

Some demonstrators hurled rocks and cow manure at federal authorities over a trampled section of fence on Friday. The authorities fired rubber bullets and pepper spray at demonstrators, and a Roman Catholic priest was lightly injured when he was hit in the abdomen by a rubber bullet.

One sailor was hit in the head by a rock, the Navy said.

Navy security guard Luis Sanchez said that although demonstrators speak of "Peace for Vieques," their actions don't match.

"That isn't peaceful. That's a war," Sanchez said.

The exercises began after a federal judge rejected a last-minute legal complaint by the Puerto Rican government, which argued the exercises would harm islanders and violate a new local law on noise pollution. The government said it would appeal.

In a decision that could lessen tension, the Navy announced it would suspend exercises for one day Sunday to honor the beatification of Carlos Manuel Rodriguez Santiago in Rome. Rodriguez, a layman who died in 1963, will be the first Puerto Rican beatified, a step before sainthood.

The Navy exercises involve about 15,000 sailors and Marines and a dozen cruisers and destroyers in the battle group led by the Norfolk, Va.-based aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

Among protesters who may remain in the restricted area is Myrta Sanes, sister of civilian security guard David Sanes, whose April 1999 death by bombs dropped off-target on the range provoked public anger.

After the guard's death, protesters occupied the range and prevented exercises until they were removed by U.S. marshals in May 2000. Since then, training has been limited to inert ammunition.

Actor Edward James Olmos arrived on Vieques Friday night and added his voice to the protest: "(The Navy) should take everything they are doing here to the United States," Olmos told 300 cheering protesters.

Olmos was accompanied by environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said he had asked Olmos to come so the two could "get arrested."

In New York City, which has a large Puerto Rican population, Gov. George Pataki denounced the exercises during a news conference Friday. He pledged to lobby the federal government to pull the Navy out of Vieques.

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

VIETNAM HUMAN RIGHTS PLEA

New York Times
April 28, 2001
World Briefing
Barbara Crossette
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28BRIE.html

UNITED NATIONS - Vietnamese-American human rights advocates met a high-ranking United Nations official to ask that a special envoy be sent to Vietnam to monitor what they call a worsening situation there. The group, organized by Hong Lien Nguyen of the Council for Human Rights in Vietnam, says that attacks on minorities and religious groups are rising and that public criticism sessions are being used to intimidate democracy advocates. (NYT)

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

Kerrey's Role at New School Re-examined

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By KAREN W. ARENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/nyregion/28KERR.html

The central patio of New School University was quiet yesterday, as if nothing momentous had occurred to shake the university. A handful of students sat in the warm sunshine, sipping coffee and catching up on homework and year-end projects.

But on the eighth floor, Bob Kerrey, the university's president, looking haggard and tired, was grappling with the enormous fallout from his disclosure in recent days that a mission he led in Vietnam for which he had been awarded a Bronze Star had killed more than a dozen unarmed women and children.

It was only a few months ago that many at New School celebrated their success at landing him as president: a Vietnam war hero, a successful businessman, a former senator and a possible presidential candidate.

To many associated with the university, Mr. Kerrey, a liberal and a maverick, seemed just the person to tell the story of New School and its historic commitment to progressive ideals and the downtrodden.

They hoped that his celebrity status would bring attention and money to the 82-year-old university, which built its renowned graduate school - formerly known as the New School for Social Research - around the scores of intellectuals it helped escape from Hitler's Europe.

Now, however, students and faculty members are wrestling with what Mr. Kerrey's disclosures will mean for him and for them, and whether his role as front man will somehow be tainted.

"This whole event confirms my misgivings about the bad fit between Bob Kerrey and an institution that grew out of the antiwar movement," said Miguel Kanai, a student at New School's graduate school of management and urban policy, referring to the antiwar sentiments of some of its founders.

"I don't know what would be more harmful to the university, his resigning or not resigning."

But his classmate, Christopher Portelli, disagreed, saying that the explosion over Mr. Kerrey's disclosures reflected America's problems with an unpopular war. "Vietnam is still such a difficult thing for Americans to deal with," he said. "I don't see why it comes as any surprise that as a decorated soldier, he was associated with terrible events."

In the short time since February, when he was installed at Carnegie Hall as president of New School, Mr. Kerrey had begun to meet with faculty members and students; there are 7,000 students in degree programs and 25,000 in nondegree programs at the school.

Mr. Kerry also reached out to alumni and other potential donors. But that process was shattered this week as he turned his attention to the revelations about his role in Vietnam.

The university's board has strongly backed Mr. Kerrey. John L. Tishman, the board chairman, said yesterday that Mr. Kerrey's "character is impeccable and speaks for itself."

But Mr. Kerrey, during a brief interview yesterday in his office on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, said it was too early to predict how events would unfold.

"I leave it to the board to decide whether or not my role here will be impaired," he said. "And I have said from the beginning that whatever the consequences, I'm prepared to tolerate them. I'm not uncomfortable."

The one thing he was certain of, he said, was that the events of the last few days would "unquestionably affect my role here." He plans to talk to students and faculty members next week, and said he hoped eventually to use the issues raised by his disclosures to encourage discussion of the war - "to try to turn this into something good."

The disclosures have already prompted some discussion. On the patio steps Thursday evening, some students from the Actors Studio Drama School, a New School division, said they were saddened by the revelations but still admired Mr. Kerrey.

"In no way do I condone what happened," said Christopher, a third- year acting student, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used. "But Vietnam is still a huge wound that we've never been able to fix."

He said he understood how Mr. Kerrey might not have been able to discuss what had happened during the raid since his father had also fought in Vietnam "and is still not able to talk about it and he still has nightmares."

---

War and Memory

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By TOBIAS WOLFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28WOLF.html

STANFORD, Calif. -- Thirty-two years ago a team of American soldiers killed at least 13 innocent people in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. How did they come to do such a thing? The leader of that team, Bob Kerrey, says that it was a terrible accident, that they shot the civilians while returning enemy fire. Another soldier, Gerhard Klann, says that the unarmed women and children were rounded up and executed on Mr. Kerrey's orders. That is how each man claims to remember it.

This contest of memory takes me back to when I was writing a memoir of my own service in Vietnam. I thought I knew how the book would go when I began it; I didn't. Again and again I found my old version of things overtaken by memories that made me wince in shame. Now and then I recalled good things I'd forgotten, notably the kindnesses of a sergeant who nursed me, a blundering young officer, through that dispiriting time. But the most forceful memories made me ashamed, and something more - they rendered me unrecognizable to myself. Maybe that's why I had forgotten them; they didn't fit my idea of myself.

We tend to think of memory as a camera, or a tape recorder, where the past can be filed intact and called up at will. But memory is none of these things. Memory is a storyteller, and like all storytellers it imposes form on the raw mass of experience. It creates shape and meaning by emphasizing some things and leaving others out. It finds connections between events, suggests cause and effect, makes each of us the central figure in an epic journey toward darkness or light.

You would think, reading the accounts of that night in Thanh Phong, that either Mr. Kerrey or Mr. Klann must be lying. But my instinct is that each of them believes the story his memory has been telling him all these years. One of these stories may have been shaped by a man's sense of his innate decency, the other by a tendency toward self-condemnation. Witnesses to crimes and accidents are notoriously unreliable; imagine being young and terrified on a foggy night in enemy territory, everything going wrong, everything happening too fast. How could you see it clearly even at the time, let alone as the years and your own confusion of pride and remorse thicken the cloud over what you hate to think of anyway? Yet something happened that must be acknowledged. How shall we acknowledge the innocent people who died?

Nations have memories, too. And those memories are almost unfailingly self-serving. If there is to be a correction in memory here, let it be our own. First, let's remember what it means to send people to war. War isn't a contest between champions. It isn't even a contest between armies. War is mostly violence - economic, emotional, physical - against civilians.

We used to praise West Germany for confronting the past honestly and teaching its children the truth. East Germany and Japan did not, and for that we judged them harshly. Today, we urge Serbia to make a full accounting of its recent history. But what of our own? Where, in our national memory, do we account for our government's complicity in El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile?

It puzzles us that a good part of the rest of the world have come to see us as selfish bullies. It contradicts the idea we have of ourselves, and it makes us cross. Not as an exercise in self-loathing, but as a matter of the honesty we demand from others, we need to see our own past with some bravery. It won't be a complete disappointment - a lot of it is as good as we believe it is. But it will certainly chasten us, and perhaps make us less liable to adventures like the one that left those innocents dead in Thanh Phong, and turned what should have been the beautiful memories of fine young men into a tangle of competing nightmares.

Tobias Wolff is the author of "In Pharaoh's Army," a memoir.

---

Kerrey's War, and Ours

New York Times
April 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/L28KERR.html

To the Editor:

Re "Ex-Senator Kerrey Says Raid He Led in '69 Killed Civilians" (front page, April 26):

Bob Kerrey's successful political career was based on his willingness to exploit his record as a wounded and highly decorated war hero. That this record also included the killing of helpless civilians is yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy, evasion and self-delusion that continue to color our thinking about the war in Vietnam.

The simple and ugly truth is that our meddling in a civil war on the other side of the world resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Until we fully confront the moral implications of this appalling fact, the war will continue to fester in this country's psyche.

Wilton, Conn., April 26, 2001

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Bush Calls In Experts to Help Set Course on Climate

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/politics/28CLIM.html

In the wake of its rejection of an international treaty to curtail global warming, the Bush administration is seeking advice from a wide array of scientists, economists, business representatives and policy experts as it tries to forge a new approach to the contentious issue.

Most of those consulted, senior government officials said, are asserting that the science pointing to a serious problem is sound, and that there is need for concrete action to stem rising levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes.

Although the new effort is mainly taking the form of cabinet briefings behind closed doors, it is widely seen as a substantial broadening of a process that until recently was so tightly controlled by a small circle of advisers that cabinet members themselves often gave conflicting accounts of President Bush's plans.

The broadening has elicited expressions of cautious relief from environmental campaigners and frustration by conservatives and skeptics about warming's dangers. But both sides said they could not predict how the review would influence the Bush administration, which is under pressure to devise an alternative to the rejected climate treaty.

"This group is reaching out for a diversity of views on climate issues," said Ken Lisaius, a White House spokesman. "This is a very serious matter that the president takes very seriously."

At the briefings, held about once a week over the last month, half a dozen members of Mr. Bush's cabinet and, most of the time, Vice President Dick Cheney have spent a couple of hours in what amounts to Climate 101.

The list of speakers has been dominated by scientists and policy experts who believe that a recent global warming trend is at least partly caused by humans, poses serious risks and requires a significant response to stem the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The presenters have included Dr. James E. Hansen, a government climate expert who in 1988 testified about the problem before the Senate at the invitation of Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, and Dr. Daniel L. Albritton, the head of a federal climate laboratory and a lead author of an international report pointing to serious risks from global warming for coming decades.

The report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group, was widely criticized by conservative groups as biased but has been held up by many others as strong new evidence justifying action.

The participants all declined to discuss the substance of the meetings at the request of the White House. But some said they saw the meetings as a sign of new openness on the issue.

"It is encouraging that they are spending serious time gathering information and facts in the development of their policy," said Kevin Fay, a business official who was a presenter at the most recent briefing, on Tuesday.

Mr. Fay is the executive director of the International Climate Change Partnership, an organization representing what he calls "the progressive cowering middle of industry," businesses that seek to be environmental stewards, but with the bottom line in mind.

Another sign of the administration's new tack in recent days is its recruitment of seasoned experts in climate issues from the ranks of various agencies as it assembles a team to come up with policy options, which officials plan to present to Mr. Bush by the end of May.

Particularly urgent is an effort to come up with an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that was negotiated and signed by the Clinton administration and summarily rejected by Mr. Bush last month. Mr. Bush said that its binding limits on greenhouse gases could harm the economy and that it unfairly excluded fast-growing economic powers like China and India.

That decision came shortly after Mr. Bush renounced a campaign pledge he had made to include mandatory carbon dioxide cuts in a cleanup of power plants.

Both announcements came after a flurry of lobbying by conservatives who have long opposed restrictions on carbon dioxide, which is, at least for now, a byproduct of almost every activity in modern industrial society.

But the announcements produced a flood of bad press and the first bruises for Mr. Bush in some public opinion polls.

With the dust settling, there is a growing realization at the White House that the blunt rejection of the treaty may have caused more problems than it solved.

"The decisions six weeks ago were made in an appalling vacuum of information," said a senior government official involved in the climate policy review, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

"A substantial portion of the people involved wish they had it to do over again," the official said. "They might still have rejected Kyoto, but probably in a different way. Now you're seeing a genuine effort to get a balanced perspective."

The briefings have been intimate affairs, officials said, including only a handful of White House staff members and a varying roster of cabinet members and government executives - generally from the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, State and Treasury, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.

The first two sessions, held at Commerce Department headquarters and then the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency, were strictly science.

Dr. Albritton defended the international report he helped create. Dr. Ronald J. Stouffer, a designer of computer climate models at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a government research center in Princeton, N.J., talked about the difficulties posed by clouds, which as yet cannot be modeled accurately and so hamper predictions of the local consequences of a general climate warming.

There were props. Dr. Hansen used a one-watt Christmas-tree bulb to represent the extra energy beating down on each half-square-yard of the earth's surface as a result of the growing blanket of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Hansen has been of particular interest to the White House because last year he proposed that the best short-term attack on warming might come by focusing not on carbon dioxide but on methane, a less common but more potent greenhouse gas, and soot, which is not mentioned in the Kyoto Protocol but is increasingly thought to contribute both to warming and to serious health problems.

Dr. Hansen was invited back to the second session, where he was joined by a prominent skeptic, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, a meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long held that any climate influence from human activities is inconsequential.

In the third session, focusing on economics, the administration stayed close to home, listening to Dr. Richard L. Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the administration of Mr. Bush's father. Dr. Schmalensee and other M.I.T. economists have repeatedly asserted that the Kyoto pact is an overly costly insurance policy.

On Tuesday, the pendulum swung to experts who support the general goals of the Kyoto treaty but who concede that the existing language is rife with problems.

They included Mr. Fay, from the business group, and another former official from the first Bush administration, William K. Reilly, who is the president of the World Wildlife Fund and was administrator of the E.P.A.

Now the ball is in Mr. Bush's court, many observers say. The key question is whether he will choose some new way to get governments to agree to binding cuts in greenhouse gases or revert to the approach sought by his father, who at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that preceded the Kyoto document but that called only for voluntary reductions in the gases.

Some business groups that opposed the Kyoto treaty have greeted the chance for a fresh approach to the problem. But they also say there is danger in starting from scratch.

"We're not talking about totally erasing the blackboard," said Norine Kennedy, the vice president for environmental affairs of the United States Council for International Business, which represents several hundred companies. "There's a lot in the protocol that should be retained."

-------- police

Man Arrested And Handcuffed For Having Messy Yard

By Carlos Miller
The Arizona Republic
4-28-1
From: magnu96196@aol.com

A day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police do not need a warrant to handcuff and arrest people for minor infractions, Chandler police said they arrested and cuffed a man for refusing to sign a citation for a messy yard.

Dennis Walker, 40, was arrested about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. He was accused of violating several city codes concerning his front lawn and charged with unlawful interference with a police officer and resisting arrest.

Police said Walker was handcuffed and taken to Madison Street Jail because he refused to sign a citation, a routine request by police when issuing tickets and citations. He was cited for violating the city code because his front yard includes an inoperable vehicle, litter and debris, landscape materials and outside storage.

"These are misdemeanor citations and by law we have to arrest him if he doesn't sign the citation," said Sgt. Ken Phillips of the Chandler Police Department.

Police say Walker put up a struggle when they tried to put on the handcuffs.

But Walker's wife, who said he had never been arrested before, painted a different picture.

"I never once heard them tell my husband to sign a citation," said Lorraine Walker, who witnessed the incident. "They did not attempt to serve him with anything."

Lorraine Walker said the city's code enforcement team came to the couple's home in the 600 block of West Monterey Street accompanied by a plainclothes police officer. Her husband told them to get off his property. Instead, the code officers began looking in the back of his truck.

Dennis Walker then walked into the house, came out with a camera and began taking photos.

"That is when they went into a frenzy," Lorraine Walker said. "It was disgusting."

Chandler police have arrested three residents in the last year for refusing to sign misdemeanor citations, Phillips said.

Reach the reporter at carlos.miller@arizonarepublic.com 602 444-7737

----

Diallo Mural Defaced, Then Repaired

New York Times
April 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/nyregion/28MURA.html

A mural painted in the memory of Amadou Diallo provoked an exchange of dueling paint brushes yesterday when its depiction of four police officers in Ku Klux Klan hoods was blotted out in black paint and then restored within hours by the artist.

Witnesses told the Associated Press that the 20 foot by 35 foot mural, which was unveiled on Tuesday on the side of a Bronx curio shop a half block from where Mr. Diallo was killed, was defaced sometime before 7 a.m. yesterday. The artist, Hulbert Waldroup, 33, of Harlem returned to restore the images yesterday.

Police who saw the mural Tuesday had said that they hoped the artist would paint over it. A police spokesman said last night that the department had no information on who defaced the mural.

---

Senator Says He'll Press Impeachment of Verniero

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By IVER PETERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/nyregion/28TROO.html

TRENTON, April 27 - The chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee said today that he would not accept Speaker Jack Collins's refusal to allow impeachment proceedings against Justice Peter G. Verniero.

The chairman, William L. Gormley, said he would seek to change the speaker's mind by persuading the full Senate to pass a resolution calling for procedings to remove Justice Verniero from the State Supreme Court.

But the speaker, whose decision Thursday made impeachment all but impossible, said through a spokesman that he would not reconsider.

Senator Gormley's committee, which made Justice Verniero a principle target of its investigation into racial profiling by the state police, asked Mr. Collins two and a half weeks ago to start impeachment proceedings against Justice Verniero, saying he lied under oath in his 1999 confirmation hearings about his response to profiling when he was state attorney general. Mr. Gormley said today that he would ask the full Senate to repeat the request.

"We are going to craft a resolution that reflects what the committee has voted on unanimously," Mr. Gormley said. "We are going to ask, `Do you think Justice Verniero should resign?' and `Do you think the Assembly should go forward with the impeachment process?' "

In the Assembly, however, the speaker's word is law, and Mr. Collins, a Republican like Mr. Gormley, was described as unmovable on the matter.

"If the Senate feels that they need to pass that resolution, we'll take a look at it," said Chuck Leitgeb, Mr. Collins's spokesman. "But I don't think it will have much influence on the speaker. I think he's comfortable with his decision, and I don't know what more we need to see on this issue."

In a carefully worded statement on Thursday, Mr. Collins avoided saying whether he agreed with the Judiciary Committee's charge that Justice Verniero had lied in his testimony, although in answering questions later, the speaker spoke more harshly of the justice.

Mr. Collins said he agreed with both Mr. Gormley and Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco, the Senate president, that Justice Verniero should resign. But Justice Verniero has repeatedly rejected resignation as a option. Today his lawyer, Robert A. Mintz, said: "The record in this matter clearly demonstrates that the commencement of impeachment proceedings was both unwarranted and unwise. I believe the speaker's decision reflects that judgment."

Mr. Gormley said he was not sure the Senate would approve his impeachment resolution unanimously, but he was sure it would pass.

Senate Democrats seemed prepared to let the drama of Republicans fighting each other play out and to support Mr. Gormley's renewed appeal to Mr. Collins.

"I think it's inappropriate of the speaker to prevent the other 119 members of the Legislature to consider the issue of impeachment," said Senator John H. Adler, Democrat of Camden County. "This is not about Republicans and Democrats. At some point we have to look at the damage this issue does to the executive and the legislative branches."

The chorus of voices calling for Justice Verniero's resignation has prompted a debate in the legal community over whether he is too damaged to serve effectively.

"I think the problem is one of the integrity of the court," said Jay M. Feinman, a law professor at Rutgers Law School in Camden. "The accusations have been made and the details are public, and people in the profession and out are beginning to consider the conclusion that he does not meet the standards to sit on the court."

Mr. Feinman said the issue was not a matter of fairness to Justice Verniero, who has maintained throughout the matter that he testified honestly and fully before the judiciary committee. "It's a problem of the public perception of the court as a whole," Mr. Feinman said.

Mr. DiFrancesco said Thursday that he would introduce a Senate motion to censure Justice Verniero, perhaps as early as next week. But Mr. Gormley said he was not interested in half measures.

"I'm not going to vote for censure, I'm going to vote for a resolution that calls for resignation," he said. "What you have to do is move forward with a process that's meaningful to a majority of the Legislature."

---

4 Officers in Diallo Case to Keep Desk Duty

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/nyregion/28DIAL.html

The four police officers involved in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo will not be allowed to carry guns and will remain assigned to desk duties that will prevent them from interacting with the public, the police commissioner, Bernard H. Kerik, announced yesterday.

Mr. Kerik said he would decide when the officers were fit for regular duty and could once again carry their weapons. He gave no indication as to how long that might be, suggesting that the four would remain on the force but unarmed well into the foreseeable future, although at least one of the four is expected to quit and join the Fire Department.

While the officers will not receive any departmental punishment for the shooting of Mr. Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was struck by 19 of 41 police bullets fired on a Bronx street in February 1999, the decision to strip them of their weapons was seen as highly unusual. Officers in the New York City Police Department are sometimes required to hand in their weapons, when they are under investigation, for example, but are given their guns back if they are cleared, as the officers in the Diallo case have been.

Mr. Kerik's decision clearing the officers of wrongdoing was known on Thursday. It was then defended by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani but denounced by some who have been critical of the department, including Mr. Diallo's mother, Kadiatou Diallo, and three of the four Democratic candidates for mayor. The announcement yesterday that the officers would be barred from carrying guns drew criticism from several community leaders and prompted the fourth mayoral candidate, Mark Green, to call on City Hall to release the entire police findings. Mr. Diallo's mother was withholding comment until she and her lawyer could closely review Mr. Kerik's latest decision, her lawyer said.

Mr. Kerik made the decision after the Firearms Discharge Review Board and another police panel determined that the four should not be disciplined. The officers will also not be allowed to carry their off-duty weapons.

Reading a prepared statement in a subdued and even voice, Mr. Kerik discussed 26 months of investigation since the shooting. In announcing that he would follow the panels' recommendations, he cited the officers' acquittals on criminal charges in a state trial last February and a a decision not to prosecute them for violating Mr. Diallo's civil rights after a federal investigation earlier this year. He also described the department's internal administrative inquiry and the process that led up to the firearms board's recommendation.

The panel concluded that the shooting was within department guidelines because the officers feared for their lives, believing that Mr. Diallo, 22, was reaching for a gun when, in fact, he had his wallet in his hand. "Accordingly, it is my determination that disciplinary action against these four officers, who together have been decorated by the N.Y.P.D. 71 times over a combined 20 years of service, is not warranted," Mr. Kerik said at a 20-minute news conference at 1 Police Plaza.

Mr. Kerik emphasized that the officers would not return to street patrol or "enforcement duties," parlance for police work that puts armed officers in contact with the public. He said that a recommendation to retrain the officers, included in the discharge review board's report, "was moot" because the officers would not carry their guns or work on patrol.

The police commissioner made a personal gesture toward Mr. Diallo's family, saying his decision "does not minimize in any way my sympathy for the Diallo family. As a parent, I cannot imagine the loss they have suffered. The death of their son, Amadou Diallo, was in all respects, a terrible, terrible tragedy."

After hearing of Mr. Kerik's decision, the Fire Department released a statement saying that it would hire one of the officers, Edward McMellon, for the firefighting job he had applied for several years ago. A second officer, Richard Murphy, is also pursuing a job as a firefighter but scored much lower than Officer McMellon on the test and will not become eligible for several years.

The officers were assigned to desk duty shortly after the Diallo shooting. Officer McMellon, 29, and Officer Murphy, 28, are assigned to the Harbor Unit. A third officer, Kenneth Boss, 28, is assigned to the Emergency Service Unit, and Sean Carroll, 38, is assigned to the Aviation Unit.

All four were assigned to the Street Crime Unit at the time of the shooting, which strained relations between the police and minority communities around the city and prompted weeks of protests outside 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan. When Mr. Giuliani appointed Mr. Kerik as the city's 40th police commissioner last August, one of the goals he set before him was the task of repairing police-community relations.

Dennis M. Walcott, the president of the New York Urban League, said the lack of any discipline for the officers could undermine community relations efforts. "No matter whether you thought they were guilty or innocent, some discipline was required," he said.

Mr. Kerik's decision to clear the officers without imposing discipline and yet remove their guns and badges was exceptional. Some officers experiencing psychological difficulties have had their guns taken away, but only during the period in which they were incapacitated, a status known as restricted duty, which also can apply to officers with medical problems. Officers are also put on desk duty without their guns, known as "modified assignment," when they are under investigation or having domestic problems.

One former police official questioned the legality of Mr. Kerik's decision. "There is no basis for them keeping the guns away," said the former high-ranking chief, who requested anonymity. "There is no finding of misconduct and no finding of psychological unfitness, so what grounds are there to take them? If anyone wanted their guns back they could probably go to court and get them back."

Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said the union, which represents police officers, was gratified by the decision. "Commissioner Kerik has recognized that what happened that sad night in February 1999 was a tragedy, not a crime - and not a violation of department guidelines."

-------- spying

Prewar File Told of Hitler's Mental State

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/world/28INTE-GOOD.html

WASHINGTON, April 27 - A C.I.A. file on Hitler made public today included a prewar description of the Nazi leader as a "border case between genius and insanity" and the prediction that he could become the "craziest criminal the world ever knew."

The declassified files were released with those of 19 others, including Josef Mengele, the doctor at Auschwitz; Adolf Eichmann, architect of the effort to exterminate Jews, and Heinrich Müller, Gestapo chief.

Over all, according to historians who have studied the records, the 10,000 pages of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency files are highly unlikely to alter in a fundamental way what is known about the Nazis. Still, the documents do shed light on United States dealings with Nazi officials and on when and how much American intelligence knew about the Nazi era.

Several million pages of United States intelligence documents on Germany have previously been released through the National Archives. Many of those documents were in C.I.A. custody, but related to the Office of Special Services, the wartime predecessor of the intelligence agency, which was established in 1947.

The files released today were the first of the agency's own files disclosed under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. The law, written by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan, requires agencies like the C.I.A. to initiate searches for records that contain information about the Holocaust. The declassification was supervised by the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which has retained well-known historians who have had full access to the records, some of which were edited before release.

At a news conference today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, historians said the files might be most significant, because they illuminate the early days of the cold war by showing that in the aftermath of World War II the United States government, primarily military intelligence, knowingly recruited Nazis accused of war crimes for espionage against the Soviet Union.

Several lesser-known Nazi officials became associated with what is known as the Gehlen Organization, a postwar intelligence operation run by Reinhard Gehlen, one of Hitler's generals. The unit was partly financed by the United States and used to conduct espionage against the Soviet Union.

At the time, the historians said, Americans defended the practice on utilitarian grounds, because of the perceived seriousness of the Soviet threat to the West. European governments also used Nazis in the cold war, and some German intelligence officials sought to use their wartime knowledge of the Soviet Union to ingratiate themselves with the Western powers.

The comments about Hitler's mental state were attributed to his personal physician and surgeon at the University of Berlin, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, in a memorandum written on Dec. 7, 1944, by Ronald Carroll, an O.S.S. officer.

The report is based on an interview with an informer, Hans Bie, who said he discussed Hitler's growing megalomania with Dr. Sauerbruch at a party in 1937. According to the memorandum, Dr. Sauerbruch was reported to have said that "from close observation of Hitler for many years, he had formed the opinion that the Nazi leader was a border case between genius and insanity and that in his opinion the decision would take place in the near future whether Hitler's mind would swing toward the latter."

Historians at the news conference said the files helped to clarify the record of figures like Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian leader and former United Nations secretary general who was found to have concealed his wartime activities as a German officer in Yugoslavia.

For years, researchers have raised questions about whether the United States concealed its knowledge of Mr. Waldheim's role by refusing to disclose its files when he served at the United Nations from 1972 to 1982. But the historians found little evidence in the files to support a cover-up by the United States.

In a report today, Richard Breitman, a history professor at American University who headed the working group's research on the central intelligence files, said, "The thrust of these documents suggests that the C.I.A. itself did not have a great deal of information or knowledge about Waldheim's Nazi past."

The files, Professor Breitman added, did not suggest that Mr. Waldheim was a C.I.A. agent or informer, nor did they show that the Soviet Union was aware of his past and used the information to blackmail him while he was secretary general.

The historians said the files showed that the agency investigated the fate of Müller in 1970 and 1971. Some researchers have said they believe he was killed late in the war or might have survived to collaborate with the Soviet Union. Others thought that he might have been recruited by American intelligence.

The files indicate that the C.I.A. reached no conclusion about him. The historians said it was quite unlikely that the agency would have conducted an investigation if Müller had been working for American intelligence.

-------- activists

Quebec City made Seattle look like a schoolyard fight

From: Carol Moore in DC <carolmoore2@secession.net>
Sat, 28 Apr 2001

From: Mark Laskey <kronstadt@juno.com>

Having been at both Seattle and Quebec City, I can honestly say that Quebec City made Seattle look like a children's schoolyard fight. This was the heaviest street fighting I have ever seen. Some of the numbers I have seen reported include 30-35,000 demonstrators overall, two nights of rioting and heavy street fights throughout much of the weekend (which often took place simultaneously in a number of different areas of the city), thousand of rounds of tear gas used, 56 police injured (with probably twice that many injured protesters), dozens of molotov cocktails used, 60 fires throughout the city on Saturday (mostly burning barricades and barrel fires on street corners), a few kilometers worth of security fence torn down, over 400 arrests (with at least a half dozen, probably more, pre-emptive arrests, which have received conspiracy charges), a few banks destroyed (with at least two set on fire), many damaged multinationals, a damaged water cannon, a damaged tractor (which was trying to drive at anarchists who tore down a section of fence), a number of police cars and riot vans destroyed, and some of the most organized and innovative acts of resistance I have personally ever ever witnessed.

I find profound inspiration in knowing that the largest security operation in Candian history could not stop a few thousand anarchists and a determined resistance...

Solidarity,

MaRK,

Sabate Anarchist Collective (NEFAC-Boston)

---

NIF-DC NGO Roundtable - Invitation

From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
Sat, 28 Apr 2001

Dear peace and environmental colleagues: If you are going to be in Washington, DC on May 10 -- this invotation is for you. Don't miss it. Peace, Marylia

YOU ARE INVITED TO A NGO BRIEFING AND ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION ON THE NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY AND THE U.S. STOCKPILE STEWARDSHIP PROGRAM

WHEN: Thursday, May 10 FROM: 9:30 am to 11:00 am WHERE: Natural Resources Defense Council Conference Room 1200 New York Avenue, NW, 4th Floor RSVP TO: (202) 833-4668

Coffee, bagels and pastries will be provided.

SPEAKERS:

DR. ROBERT CIVIAK, former Program Examiner for the Department of Energy's national security programs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, has just completed a new study, "Soaring Costs, Shrinking Performance: Status of the National Ignition Facility," commissioned by Tri-Valley CAREs, a DOE watchdog organization based in Livermore, CA.

Dr. Civiak's study provides the first independent examination of the cost to build and operate the NIF mega-laser, now under construction at Livermore Lab, and finds that NIF's full price will be 600% higher than what DOE said. The report details the key laser components for which DOE low-balled the costs -- and the ones left out of DOE's estimates altogether.

"Soaring Costs, Shrinking Performance" looks also at the laser's standards, and finds that the output from the NIF per dollar spent is now projected to be only one-ninth what it was when NIF was approved in 1997. Civiak's last report for Tri-Valley CAREs was "Managing the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile: A Comparison of 5 Strategies," in July 2000.

DR. MATTHEW MCKINZIE, NRDC staff scientist, will put the NIF in the context of Stockpile Stewardship and discuss both the shortcomings and the more positive alternatives to the current program. McKinzie has written numerous articles and reports on the U.S. Stockpile Stewardship program and on several of its elements, including the National Ignition Facility and the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.

This "guided tour" through the smoke and mirrors surrounding NIF -- DOE's flagship for so-called Stockpile Stewardship -- is a must for all activists and policy analysts who work on or care about nuclear weapons issues.

Following the briefing, Marylia Kelley of Tri-Valley CAREs and Daryl Kimball of Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers will facilitate a discussion on next steps.

Copies of the study will be available at the Roundtable, and can soon be obtained on-line by visiting <http://www.igc.org/tvc>, the website of Tri-Valley CAREs, which has for 18 years conducted research, critical analysis, and outreach to increase public participation in decisions regarding the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, with a special focus on the Lawrence Livermore Lab. The new study was produced as part of Tri-Valley CAREs' "Redefining Stockpile Stewardship" program.

The briefing is sponsored by Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Natural Resources Defense Council and Tri-Valley CAREs. For further information contact Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs (925) 443-7148 or Jim Bridgman, ANA (202) 833-4668.

end

Marylia Kelley Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) 2582 Old First Street Livermore, CA USA 94550

<http://www.igc.org/tvc/> - is our web site, please visit us there!

(925) 443-7148 - is our phone (925) 443-0177 - is our fax

---

Anti-Nuclear Activist Defaces Sub

Washington Post
The Associated Press
Saturday, April 28, 2001; 6:56 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010428/aponline185657_001.htm

LONDON -- Britain's navy was reviewing security at a Scottish base Saturday after a Danish anti-nuclear activist swam past guards and spray-painted "useless" on the hull of a Trident submarine.

Guards at Faslane Naval Base spotted the woman early Friday minutes after she emerged from the water inside the sub's berth, a military police spokesman said.

The Scotsman newspaper identified the activist as Ulla Roder, 45, of Denmark. Police did not release a name but confirmed that a Danish protester was arrested.

She is believed to have swum for several hours to get inside the secure zone around the base, home to Britain's fleet of nuclear submarines. An investigation was launched to determine how she avoided security.

The Scotsman, which quoted Roder calling the stunt "easy," reported that she was trying to pull anti-radar tiles off the submarine when she was spotted. She then pulled out a can of spray paint and scrawled her message on the hull, the newspaper said.

----

Protests Intensify in Puerto Rico as Navy Resumes Bombing Drills

New York Times
April 28, 2001
By ANDREW JACOBS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/national/28PUER.html

VIEQUES, P.R., April 27 - The Navy resumed military maneuvers on this lush, hilly island today, sparking angry demonstrations and civil disobedience here as hundreds of Puerto Ricans demanded an end to bombing exercises that they say are harming the island's ecology and its residents' health.

Officials said 65 people were arrested this afternoon after they slipped through a fence and onto the Naval camp, which covers about two-thirds of the 52-square-mile island. Warships stationed off the coast lobbed inert shells on a sandy bombing range before the presence of protesters forced them briefly to call off the maneuvers.

The shelling resumed after a federal judge in Washington declined on Thursday to issue a temporary restraining order that had been requested by the commonwealth's government. Military officials said they expected the maneuvers, which were last held in December, to continue for three to five days.

As of this evening, organizers said that as many as a dozen people, including the mayor of Vieques and a state senator, were still hiding in the dense, scrubby jungle in an effort to dissuade the Navy from resuming the exercises. Naval officials, however, insisted that they had removed all those who had entered the restricted area, which is surrounded by 14,000 feet of cyclone fencing topped by coils of razor wire.

The bombing on Vieques, which began in 1941, has enraged many Puerto Ricans for years. But the fury intensified after a civilian guard was killed in April 1999 by an errant shell that wounded four others. Since then, more than 600 people have been arrested for breaching the fence, including 200 people who spent months camped out in the restricted area.

Although a Nov. 6 referendum among local residents will determine the future of the site, the Navy decided to move ahead with its war games today, saying that Vieques was critical for the combat readiness of sailors and marines. The range, officials say, is the only one on the Atlantic coast that allows for joint training involving amphibious, aerial and ship bombardment.

Lt. Col. George Rhyndance, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said the exercises were essential now because the troops involved are scheduled to go to the Middle East. "It is very important that they receive the training that they need to survive," Colonel Rhyndance said.

Many Puerto Ricans say they are angry that the Pentagon is more concerned with military readiness than the health of the island's 9,400 residents, whom they say have unusually high rates of cancer and a rare heart ailment that some studies have linked to high noise levels.

The governor of Puerto Rico, Sila M. Calderón, won election last November after taking a strong stance against the exercises and the issue has brought about a rare unity among the island's three political parties. On Thursday, thousands of people demonstrated in front of the Capitol in San Juan and numerous Puerto Rican celebrities, among them entertainers Ricky Martin, José Feliciano and Benicio del Toro, have joined the chorus of those demanding that the Navy leave the island immediately.

Earlier today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, and the actor Edward James Olmos said they were heading to Vieques and vowed to sneak onto Navy land as an act of civil disobedience.

"After 60 years of abuse, people feel that enough is enough," said Father Nelson Lopez, a Roman Catholic priest in Vieques who took part in today's demonstration.

Hundreds of people joined today's protest at the entrance to Camp García, the military area, which began peacefully but erupted in violence after a group of at least 30 people cut through a section of fence and swarmed into the restricted area several yards from where a phalanx of military personnel was facing off against the crowd.

Although the intruders did not resist arrest, the authorities used pepper gas on several people, which further enraged the protesters.

Furious by what they had seen, as many as 100 people began tearing down a portion of fence as a row of heavily armed United States marshals and Naval security guards stood at the ready.

The crowd was eventually stopped by the protest organizers, who have been promising to wage a nonviolent struggle in their effort to evict the Navy from Vieques.

Military officials, however, reported several incidents of vandalism today, saying that protesters had set fire to brush on Navy land and that others had thrown stones at military vehicles.

Pierre Vivoni, Puerto Rico's superintendent of police, said he would investigate whether the police had used excessive force in detaining protesters.

Today's rally drew a wide range of Puerto Ricans, including pro-independence stalwarts, Senate members, lifelong Vieques residents and college students from the capital who see the Navy presence as an insult to Puerto Rico's sense of pride.

"This kind of thing would not be happening if it were in New York," said Nicol Figueroa, 20, a psychology student at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. "We feel like we're being exploited."

But most of those who rallied outside the gates of the camp were careful not to wrap their anger in anti-American oratory. Their only concerns, many said, were the island's residents and the environment, both of which have suffered during the past six decades, they said. "We love America, and many of us feel American," said Marisol Rivera, 67, who has lived here all her life. "We just want our voices to be heard."

Puerto Rican officials say that Vieques has the commonwealth's highest rate of cancer and one government study has found a large number of people with symptoms of vibroacoustic disease, an unusual disorder that has been associated with exposure to loud noises. That study helped convince Governor Calderón to repudiate an agreement reached last year between the Navy and her predecessor that allowed for the resumption of bombing. The agreement permitted the use of dummy ammunition in exchange for $40 million in aid to the island and another $50 million should residents vote to keep the Navy here after November's referendum.

The firing range is nine miles from the nearest populated area.

As the protesters were taken away in handcuffs, Carmen Pérez, 47, and her aunt, Isidra Martínez, 71, sat on lawn chairs, their backs to the chain- link fence that separated them from a small army of armed military personnel. Born and raised on the island, both women said they were convinced that the contamination from spent shells had somehow caused the cancer that has killed a half-dozen of their family members. "I'm not against the military and I'm not against the American government," said Mrs. Martínez, who is battling throat cancer. "I just want them to stop the bombing. I want my house to stop shaking. And I want them to stop poisoning us."

--------

A FAMILY IN NEED!!!

Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001
Molly Johnson -
SLO CO Grandmothers for Peace - mollypj@yahoo.com

I received the following message via the Grandmothers for Peace web-site. This family is in dire need of help! Please, please, please send me any information you may have that will help them. Or give us some ideas of where we might find help for them.

I will forward your messages to them so they may, in turn, contact you.

Let us all send many powerful prayers up to this family and the countless numbers of others who share their fate.

"Hello. My husband, and I and our three sons have all been diagnosed with toxic exposure from chemical injury. In search of help for my children I have contacted many people. I got the name of your organization for Jay M. Gould. He suggested that I work with you. He said there was a group in Santa Barbara? We have been exposed to heavy metals and solvents from an oil and gas processing plant in Carpinteria. We now live in Thousand Oaks. One of the metals we believe is responsible is Strontium 90. Strontium 90 is in the waste products from oil and gas production. Have you done any studies on Carpinteria?"

----

Late-night raid on 'useless' nuclear sub

Saturday, 28th April 2001
by John Staples,
The Scotsman Online
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/text_only.cfm?id=67720

AN URGENT investigation has been launched after a well-known anti-nuclear activist managed to swim into the Faslane naval base and paint a slogan on the hull of a Trident nuclear submarine.

Yesterday's security breach comes as a severe embarrassment to the Navy, as Military Police have previously said it would be "impossible" for anyone to penetrate as far as the submarine pens. Ulla Roder, a long-term anti-nuclear campaigner from Denmark, said she had found it "easy" to get inside.

Ms Roder had been dropped into the water outside the base at around midnight on Thursday, kitted in a diver's drysuit, and had swum for six hours.

She was only caught at 6am when an armed guard spotted her attempting to pull anti-radar tiles off the side of HMS Vanguard, Britain's first Trident submarine. When she was confronted she pulled out a can of spray paint and wrote "Useless" on the hull.

It is the latest in a series of serious breaches at the high-security base at Faslane.

The 45-year-old Dane was detained for four hours before being released. A military spokesman yesterday said damage to the submarine was negligible, but added they would forward details to the Procurator Fiscal, who would decide whether to prosecute.

Miss Roder has been arrested 16 times for protests against Trident.

-------

Spray-paint protester swims to nuclear sub

Saturday 28th April 2001
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_275326.html

The Ministry of Defence has admitted that an anti-nuclear protester managed to swim up to a Trident submarine and spray paint on the side of the hull. The security breach happened at the Faslane Naval Base on the River Clyde, Scotland.

An investigation is under way to find out how the security lapse could have happened at the home of Britain's fleet of nuclear submarines. The woman campaigner swam up to one of the nuclear submarines in its high-security berth, avoiding detection. It is believed she swam for several hours to get inside the secure zone around the base.

She was arrested within seconds of emerging from the water, in which time she had managed to produced a can of paint and began spraying the side of the submarine.

A woman has been charged in connection with the incident.

An MoD spokesman said a report had been submitted to the procurator fiscal.

He said: "This was an irresponsible act because she could have put the safety of MoD police at risk if she had got into trouble in the water. "We do have good security at the base, but no security is impenetrable. There will be a thorough investigation."


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