------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Government admits NWs indiscriminate
Israeli Nuclear Workers Strike
Rare Praise From India on U.S. Defense
Missile Shield and China
Russian army runs short of conscripts
Behind the Shield, a 3-Sided Rivalry
Critics Question LANL's Cerro Grande Funds
Real Men Don't Conserve

MILITARY
Poor Region's Governors in Colombia Unite to Oppose Drug Plan
Australia's First Legal Heroin Injection Room Opens
Hey, Let's Build a Shield Against Another Incoming Threat
More Than 800 Bid for Iran Presidential Election
In Israel, Panel Urges Settlement Freeze and an End to Terror
U.N. Orders Aid for Afghan Refugees

OTHER
U.S. Scientists See Big Power Savings From Conservation
Pox Populi
Patchwork Genes: A Survey of Global Genetic Diversity
The Global Medicine Cabinet
Despite Swift Spread of TB, Russians May Reject Big Loan
CIA helps Hollywood with TV, film projects
U.S. Experts Deem Spy Plane Repairable
Cameras Being Turned on Once-Shy C.I.A.
Zimbabwe Opposition Chief to Face Terrorism Charge


-------- NUCLEAR


-------- depleted uranium

Government admits NWs indiscriminate

From: George Farebrother <geowcpuk@gn.apc.org>
Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001

Mr Dennis Flaherty of Pontypridd, Wales, wrote to his MP, Dr Kim Howells about Depleted Uranium. A long reply came the Ministry of Defence signed by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary - a junior minister - Dr Lewis Moonie. Buried in it is this sentence:

"Furthermore, the Ministry of Defence evaluates the legality of the use of weapons in specific circumstances before they are used. The use of DU ammunition is neither illegal nor prohibited under any international agreements, including the Geneva Conventions. Nor is DU ammunition classified as a weapon of mass destruction or indiscriminate effect. NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS ARE INDISCRIMINATE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO INCAPACITATE OR KILL LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE; DU ammunition is not.

-------- israel

Israeli Nuclear Workers Strike

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=MIDEAST&STORYID=APIS7BQTOB00

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Most operations at Israel's main nuclear reactor in the southern Negev Desert were shut down Sunday due to a workers' strike, a union leader said.

Ninety-five percent of employees failed to show up Sunday, the beginning of the work week in Israel, said union leader Shalom Shamla. The remaining workers turned up at the plant in Dimona, and were monitoring safety systems, he said.

The workers were striking over new contracts negotiated with the government-owned Nuclear Research Institute. Israel's Finance Ministry has so far failed to approve the contracts, which include a 2.5 percent pay rise.

The Finance Ministry said in a statement that the strike was not arranged with the approval of the workers' union, and was therefore illegal.

Israel has nuclear reactors for civilian use. The country is widely assumed to also have nuclear weapons, but refuses to reveal the exact status of its nuclear program.

-------- missile defense

Rare Praise From India on U.S. Defense

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/world/06INDI.html

NEW DELHI, May 5 - For decades, India was a leader in the nonaligned movement of third world nations, often and loudly proclaiming its opposition to America's foreign policy. So it was striking this week when India effusively praised elements of President Bush's missile- defense plan and said nary a critical word.

This brought howls of protest from the political opposition, which depicted the government's position as proof of craven sellout to the United States, and amazement from one longtime India watcher. "I flipped," said Dennis Kux, author of a history of Indian-American relations called "Estranged Democracies," who has been traveling to India for more than 40 years.

Whatever else it was, India's fulsome approval of a Republican president's effort to overturn decades of established nuclear policy was a marker of how much India's relations with the United States have changed since the most recent nadir, in May 1998, when India tested nuclear weapons and an outraged Congress slapped sanctions on the world's largest democracy.

Another moment that crystallized the change came last month when India's external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, called on the White House and the president escorted him into the Oval Office for an unexpected chat. No one in the American press took notice, but in India the photo of Mr. Singh grinning next to Mr. Bush was front-page news. A Hindu newspaper noted that the president had invited Mr. Singh, "and not just for pleasantries."

India, which in the past had called for steps toward eliminating nuclear arsenals, quickly lauded Mr. Bush's proposal this week to reduce America's stockpile of nuclear weapons unilaterally.

On the missile shield - which some analysts fear could prompt China to build up its arsenal and set off an arms race in Asia - India tactfully said that Mr. Bush's policy responded to "a strategic and technological inevitability."

The government also noted with satisfaction that Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had phoned Mr. Singh, the minister, to inform him about Mr. Bush's speech and to tell him that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would soon be visiting Delhi on a trip to brief "friends and allies."

Kanti Bajpai, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said India clearly realized this week that Mr. Bush was going ahead with his missile shield plan whatever India thought - so why make the world's sole superpower mad?

"They feel the United States is the ticket to the new world order," Mr. Bajpai said, "and so for once we might as well get ahead of the pack and cut a deal since everyone else is going to bend at the knee eventually."

So what does India want? It wants the sanctions from 1998 lifted - and there are signs that that is likely to happen. A State Department official said the new administration has already told India that it believes the sanctions have hurt American economic interests more than India's. And in his last interviews, the departing American ambassador, Richard Celeste, predicted the sanctions would be removed within six months.

Eventually, India would also like to be able to buy nuclear reactors for civilian use from the United States, experts say. And it wants the United States to lean on Pakistan to rein in militants who have been battling India in Kashmir.

The Bush administration so far appears to be carrying on efforts made in the waning Clinton years - and solidified when Bill Clinton visited India in March 2000 - to overcome the mutual suspicion that dated from the cold war, when India was close to the Soviet Union and India's foe, Pakistan, was an American ally.

But this week, a pleasant one for India, was not so enjoyable for Pakistan. The State Department did not add Pakistan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism, but it did criticize Pakistan for backing anti-India militant groups operating in Kashmir. It also said it was disappointed that Pakistan's military regime, which took power in a 1999 coup, had cracked down on a pro-democracy rally organized by political parties.

In Pakistan, it is looking more and more as if Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler, does not intend to relinquish power by October 2002, the date he has given for restoring democracy. He has suggested in recent interviews that there should be a permanent role for the military in governing the country. And he has not ruled out making himself president.

Despite Pakistan's many political and economic problems - and because of them, as well - the new administration is likely to try to help Pakistan by supporting soft loans through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, among other things. Like its predecessor, the Bush administration does not want to push nuclear-armed Pakistan - a society with strains of Islamic fundamentalism - over the edge.

Still, Mr. Kux, the historian, who has just completed a history of Pakistani-American relations to go with his one on Indian-American relations, said it is India that the United States now sees as the important player in the region.

"It's a reversal," he said. "We are moving closer to India, the big country in this part of the world. The United States now has a partner in the Indian Ocean."

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Missile Shield and China

New York Times
May 6, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/opinion/L06MISS.html?searchpv=site01

To the Editor:

The missile shield debate (front page, May 2) has largely focused on the possible negative effect of United States relations with Europe and Russia, often overlooking the consequences for the increasingly important relationship with China.

Though President Bush is likely to persuade Europe and Russia to accept an American missile shield, he must not move ahead without showing concern for Chinese reservations.

China quite understandably feels threatened by Mr. Bush's proposal; therefore, it is essential that Mr. Bush establish a dialogue with China about the missile shield to ensure that future relations are not hampered by the friction created today.

Whether Mr. Bush likes it or not, he cannot stop China's rising power; however, he is in a position of monumental importance in setting a precedent for the future of Chinese- American relations. We can only hope that imprudence today does not yield a powerful, angry enemy for years to come.

DANIEL TIMMONS
Sullivans Island, S.C., May 3, 2001

-------- russia

Russian army runs short of conscripts

By Craig Nelson in Moscow,
May 6, 2001
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=004933379611025&rtmo=weijffKb&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/et/01/5/6/wruss06.html

THE once mighty Russian army that for years made Nato spend billions of pounds on defence has admitted that it is running out of conscripts.

The news comes as Moscow prepares to celebrate on Wednesday the 56th anniversary of the Allied victory in the Second World War. Military officials are complaining publicly for the first time. Vladislav Putilin, the army's deputy chief of staff, said: "Today we cannot call up as many people as the armed forces need. Soon there will be no one we can call up."

All Russian men between 18 and 27 are eligible for the draft and are required to serve at least two years. But generous exemptions for students in response to widespread loathing of military service, along with claims of medical disabilities, have sharply reduced the pool of eligible conscripts. Those unable to avoid the draft find that equipment is pitiable and hunger routine.

In what appears to many as an attempt to make a virtue out of necessity, President Vladimir Putin has said that he aims to create a professional army within a few years, cutting 470,000 men and women from its 2.1 million uniformed personnel and eliminating the conscripts, currently 70 per cent on the force.

Yet the demands on the army are high, with the Kremlin fighting an anti-separatist war in the southern republic of Chechnya and protecting friendly governments in Central Asia from possible threats by radical Islamic rebels. In Tajikistan, Moscow is establishing a military base and stationing 12,000 Russian troops to patrol the border with Afghanistan, which it claims funds the insurgents.

-------- treaties

Behind the Shield, a 3-Sided Rivalry

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/weekinreview/06TYLE.html

MOSCOW - IT is a distant memory, but the common enemy that loomed over the Antiballistic Missile Treaty negotiations three decades ago was China.

In March 1969, when Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev began the negotiations that led to the signing of the 1972 treaty, they were convinced that the best defense against global nuclear war was mutual exposure to each other's offense. But because both - especially Mr. Brezhnev - feared the rising power of China, they agreed that each side could deploy a single antimissile site to protect its capital or another strategic target. That would eliminate the China threat.

"I would imagine that the Soviet Union would be just as reluctant as we would be to leave their country naked against a potential Chinese Communist threat," Mr. Nixon said.

This was the dawn of triangular diplomacy, the three-cornered plane of relations between Washington, Moscow and Beijing where the cold war forged treaties of necessity, transitory alliances and opportunities for leverage so that no adversary could totally dominate.

Today, triangular diplomacy is coming back.

When President Bush outlined his vision last week for a robust new configuration of ballistic missile defenses, he offered an implicit deal to Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin: cooperate with America's plan to scrap the ABM Treaty and erect a new missile defense architecture over the United States and its allies. Russia's reward: a role in a "joint defense," meaning that its military industries might also ride the rising technological tide promised by "Star Wars."

Conspicuously, Mr. Bush did not make the same offer to China. In fact, he barely mentioned China in his speech, though its national nuclear deterrent - 20 or so ICBM's - now stands at most risk of being negated.

Intended or not, the global politics of missile defense in a new era of threats - ostensibly from North Korea, Iran and Iraq - is also shaping a new strategic bulwark against China. And after Mr. Bush's showdown on Hainan Island over the American spy plane, and the big sale of new American weapons to Taiwan, grand strategy and American domestic politics are driving Mr. Bush toward lumping China among the rogue nations whose missiles need to be quarantined.

China isn't helping. Its weak collective of civilian leaders has loosed the military and security services to repress all critics while militarizing the coastline facing Taiwan. Under Jiang Zemin and Li Peng, the Politburo's leading twosome, progressive thinking has withered.

Still, today's triangle is a geometry of transformed players and angles different from those of the Nixon era. In the cold war, the United States sought irrevocably to break the Soviet-Chinese alliance that threatened America with a two-front war. In the early 1970's, Mr. Nixon staged the opening to China in order to play's on Mr. Brezhnev's fears that if he attacked Europe, a hostile China might strike his rear flank.

Now there is no Soviet enemy, just a weakened Russia whose largest goals are to find a home in Europe and rebuild a devastated economy, even though its maneuverings sometimes raise American hackles.

China, however, stands as a gathering economic colossus led by an insecure circle of Leninists and quasi- capitalists under Mr. Jiang, who fears what democracy and freedom might unleash in China's people.

Of the two, Russia, for all of its post-Soviet flaws, has made its choice. As Mr. Bush pointed out, Russia now elects its president. China, as Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, likes to say, is now America's "strategic competitor" and poses a war risk in Asia by its constant pressure on Taiwan to accept reunification.

PROFOUND choices now lie ahead for each strategic player on the triangle.

For Russia, up to the moment that Mr. Putin recognized the existence of new ballistic missile threats last year, China stood shoulder to shoulder as an ally in opposition to America's missile shield idea. But Mr. Putin has been hedging his bets lately.

True, he mounted a diplomatic offensive with North Korea, Iran and Iraq to demonstrate that the missile threat from "rogue nations" might be moderated through diplomacy, rather than a shield. European countries applauded. But Mr. Putin and his military chiefs also developed plans on how to help build mobile missile defense systems that could be used against any "rogue" that threatened the West and its allies. A multinational approach would preserve the ABM Treaty since no one country could manipulate missile defenses for strategic advantage.

Suddenly China was isolated. Russia had broken ranks. And though Beijing has remained silent about Russia's shift in policy, China continues to denounce any missile defense proposals - as the New China Agency did last week. The reason is simple. China's nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, where a strong independence movement emboldened by American military support is driving China and the United States toward a new confrontation.

China's nuclear missiles are meant to deter American forces from interfering if Beijing decides to act against Taiwan, by blockade or otherwise. Thus Beijing sees missile defenses as a ploy to contain China.

Beijing is fighting to escape its isolation. With its entry into the World Trade Organization and its bid for the Olympic Games, it is trying to show Mr. Bush its compass is pointed in the right direction for stability and prosperity. Indeed, billions of dollars of Taiwanese investment still flows onto the mainland.

Strangely, the war issue looms over a topography of development and new wealth, which ought to suggest to all sides that military restraint will allow the Chinese eventually to sort out Taiwan's status to their liking.

For the United States, it is too early to say whether Mr. Bush is sincere in his offer to have Moscow participate in a joint defense. But it is no secret here that Mr. Putin views Western proposals for missile defense as a technology train that is leaving the station. Moscow fears that if it does so without Russia aboard, not only could expanding missile defenses be aimed at its own shrinking arsenal, but Russian defense industries might miss the bonanza.

In such thinking, it doesn't matter that missile defense may become a modern-day Maginot Line, easily outflanked by nuclear bombs carried ashore in suitcases or shipping containers. What matters is whether Russia can integrate its security with the West. Even NATO expansion would be easier for Russia to swallow under a shared umbrella.

But what about Russia's geometry with China? It is also too early to say that Russia is indifferent to China's growing isolation. The pragmatic Mr. Putin is unlikely to allow his advance westward to destabilize Russia's relations with the 1.3 billion Chinese with whom he shares a continent - just as he has not let military cooperation with Beijing slow the process of binding Russia to Europe.

The next move in the triangle belongs to Mr. Bush, as he sends his emissaries out in the coming weeks.

If he and his European allies extend a hand to Russia as a partner in missile defense, China will stand alone, its national nuclear deterrent stripped of credibility. It is hard to imagine that China, so weakened, would stand still for that. Perhaps Mr. Bush and his advisers are counting on China's loss of leverage to thwart any plan by Beijing's military to force the Taiwan issue before Mr. Jiang and Mr. Li leave the political stage, probably next year.

But even after they leave, as long as China keeps putting off an evolution toward democracy, the Taiwanese will want to keep their distance - and the war issue will loom.

UP to now, much of the debate over missile defenses has centered on when - or whether - the devices can be made to work. In fact, advances in technology are making missile defenses at least conceivable in the new century. But the most critical question may be how that technology is grafted onto the politics of a world where China, Russia and the United States calculate how to protect their own interests. That may be what decides whether it really works - in other words, whether Mr. Bush will be enhancing global stability or undermining it by pushing forward now.

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

-------- new mexico

Critics Question LANL's Cerro Grande Funds

Sunday, May 6, 2001
By Jennifer McKee
Albuquerque Journal Northern Bureau
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/325477news05-06-01.htm

LOS ALAMOS - The Cerro Grande wildfire of a year ago blackened parts of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Now the fire is bringing in something green - a large windfall of federal money.

Ashes still were smoking around the laboratory last summer when lab managers began adding up their losses:

29 destroyed trailers that had been temporary office space.

20 computers burned entirely, many more damaged by smoke.

Miles of destroyed power lines.

More than 100 storage sheds burned to the ground, including one which held millions of dollars in scientific equipment that melted into a puddle of aluminum.

Congress gave the lab and the Department of Energy, which oversees it, almost $342 million to clean up and repair from last May's Cerro Grande wildfire.

A critic says the sum, almost $90 million more than the cost of the Big I construction in Albuquerque, is another example of the lab and DOE spending huge amounts of tax money just because they can.

Others, like Everett Trollinger, of the DOE's Los Alamos office, which oversees lab spending, said Congress and the government are scrutinizing how every penny of the LANL's fire money is being used.

"They've got a lot of people breathing down their throat," Trollinger said.

So far, the lab and DOE have spent $84 million, or about 25 percent, of the fire money.

About $8 million went to the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam in Pajarito Canyon, designed to prevent a flood from washing over sensitive lab buildings there. The fire left hillsides around Los Alamos denuded of vegetation, raising the possibility of flooding or mudslides from heavy rains.

Millions more went into cleaning up, clearing out and otherwise preparing the lab to reopen after it was evacuated along with the rest of Los Alamos on May 7, 2000.

Almost $92 million more is allocated for big-ticket items, some controversial, such as two new office buildings at $5 million a piece, a new emergency operations center at a cost of $20 million, and $25 million to partially rebuild the lab's electronic fire alarm system.

Fire as an excuse?

Not everyone is pleased with explanations for the big-ticket items. Although public critics are few, other government agencies - behind the scenes - have questioned the amount doled out to the lab.

"It doesn't take a very sensitive nose to smell a rat here," said Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, a Santa Fe-based lab watchdog group.

Mello questions much of Cerro Grande spending, arguing that it's a way for the lab to pay for things it should have bought a long time ago - but didn't in favor of spending for its nuclear weapon programs.

He points to the two office buildings the lab will build, at $5 million each, with fire money.

The lab is using the fire as an excuse, he said, to pay for what it should be buying routinely - suitable office space for workers.

The lab gets more than a billion dollars every year. This year the lab's budget was $1.46 billion, excluding millions spent on construction. That's just shy of the budget for the state of North Dakota.

Mello wants to know why the lab can't build office buildings with money in its annual budget. "What has happened to the lab's ability to manage money?" he asked.

One vexing problem for LANL is how to fireproof the 46,000 drums of stored nuclear waste and a liquid radioactive waste treatment plant. The lab has $29.1 million budgeted to deal with those problems, and lab budget experts said last week they still don't know exactly how they'll spend it.

Cleaning up

Before the lab could reopen after the fire, said Jim Holt, LANL's program director for buildings and construction, crews had to survey all 8 million square feet of lab office and work space.

"Everything was dirty inside," said Ming Moy, deputy director of the lab's Cerro Grande Rehabilitation Project, which is planning the rebuilding efforts.

Crews shampooed rugs, cleaned windows and in some cases scrubbed the walls, said James Rickman, a lab spokesman. Computers had to be cleaned. Hundreds of air filters were clogged with ash, and some, like those that sift tiny particles of plutonium from the air, don't come cheap, Holt said.

In all, the lab has allocated about $100 million over two years to build the dam, repair buildings and prevent erosion. Of that, $48 million has been spent.

According to Stephen Mee, one of the project managers for the lab's rehab, that money bought a lot of work. Last year alone, crews tore down 63 old buildings no longer used and at risk to burn in other fires and stacked 20,000 sandbags and 38,000 straw bales and wattles to stop erosion and control potential flooding.

The lab also had acres of forest - some of it burned - to deal with. It spent several million dollars last year sawing down 20,000 burned trees, raking 200 acres of soil baked by the fire into a glaze that would repel water unless manually broken apart, and spreading 10 tons of seed.

The cost of some of the other plans for the Cerro Grande millions has raised questions - especially when compared to the spending of other agencies with similar projects.

Take the lab's forest-thinning project. The lab wants to thin out trees on 10,000 acres, much of it near areas where scientists conduct high explosives experiments. Mee expects the project to cost between $6 million and $9 million, to be paid by Cerro Grande Fire money.

Compare that to the Santa Fe National Forest's thinning projects. A typical 8,000-acre thinning project runs about $2.5 million, said Susan Bruin, of the Santa Fe National Forest. The delicate and expensive Santa Fe Watershed Thinning Project will cost around $5 million, she said, far and away the most costly and painfully orchestrated thinning project on the forest.

But even that is cheaper than the lab's thinning estimates. The difference, Mee said, is the complicated web of security regulations DOE and the lab must follow to do anything - from working with plutonium to cutting trees - on lab property.

Because the thinning crews don't have special security clearances, they'll need to be escorted by someone who does. The rule is one escort for every six noncleared workers. Additionally, the escorts must run through cumbersome security regulations every time the work crews enter and leave the lab.

Security delays

All that takes time. Mee estimates DOE work crews lose about 31/2 hours of every 8-hour work day going through security.

To make up for the delays, Mee plans on working the crews overtime, and that's expensive, he said. He also has to pay the escorts.

Further complicating things is a DOE-wide ban on open burning.

That means crews can't pile and burn trees culled from DOE lands like they can on the Forest Service. Mee said he plans to get rid of some of the trees as firewood to the public and saw logs for local lumber mills. But that also costs time and money.

Because every single person who wanted a cord of lab piñon would have to go through hours of security procedures to fetch it, Mee said he plans on hiring other crews to bundle up and move the firewood to an accessible place, further driving up costs.

The lab's proposed $25 million fire alarm system also raised eyebrows. Trollinger explained the cost by saying the lab is buying more than standard office building fire alarms. LANL will use specialized computer panels installed in each building designed to transmit news of a fire and any other emergency to a central command.

Critic Mello also questions an effort to catalog archaeological sites that is to be financed with Cerro Grande funds.

"Taken as a whole, they couldn't justify this much money any other way," he said.

Mello said the lab is spending as much cleaning up from the fire - one that burned hardly any permanent structures - as it did in a whole year during the Manhattan Project days. And that's in dollars adjusted for today's inflation.

"What this says is spending money at Los Alamos is considered to be an absolute good by Sen. Pete Domenici and lab leadership," he said. "What this money actually buys is secondary."

Lab officials have said they weren't compensated at all for one costly loss from the fire - damage to research that occurred because the lab had to shut down during the fire or when computer records burned.

Domenici's office is satisfied with the spending. Every month, DOE officers in Los Alamos send detailed reports to the appropriations committees of both the U.S. House and Senate. Domenici is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

The lab first requested $408 million for cleanup, said Clay Sell, a Domenici aide. Congress whittled it down from there and has regular oversight over where all the money is going.

"It's appropriate for us to make sure the money is being spent in the way Congress intended," he said. "It all looks square."

-------- us nuc politics

Real Men Don't Conserve

By Mary McGrory
Sunday, May 6, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47309-2001May5?language=printer

Vice President Dick Cheney's energy speech last week fell on green ears with the harshness of a brusque directive from the supreme command of the Sopranos. Here's how it sounded to them:

Cheney to environmentalists: Drop dead.

Cheney to conservationists: Fuggedaboutit.

The message: Conservation is for sissies and self-righteous fatheads who think they're better than real people.

Real men drill.

Real men dig coal.

Real men go nuclear.

Everything about Cheney's speech was macho, beginning with the site where he chose to deliver it -- Toronto. America's coal-burning power plants are Canada's acid rain.

The administration is a bit jumpy about the environment -- at least when the polls show a reason for concern. Oil men like President Bush and Cheney simply do not understand why so many people are uptight about the outdoors, with no consideration for the boardroom or the bottom line.

The White House was taken aback by the howls that greeted early devil-may-care sallies on global warming and arsenic levels in drinking water. Bush threw a few bones to the environmentalists, and serious planet-preservers like New York Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a leading Republican moderate, began to breathe easier.

The Cheney energy speech put an end to all that happy talk, although the president sent a few paragraphs to his Second Thoughts Shop. It was a busy week for those charged with management of the We-Were-Only-Kidding, Have-You-Seen-Those-Polls? section of the White House. Once the president's men got that great rush of gushy 100-Days reviews about decisiveness and crisp management style, it was perhaps inevitable that they would do a little stumbling around.

For two hours on Wednesday, for instance, we were no longer speaking to the Chinese military. Brass-to-brass contacts were suspended, the Pentagon said. While the world was pondering the consequences, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his brass were putting the machinery into reverse. All contacts, a second announcement said, would be decided on a case-by-case basis.

The backup on energy conservation took longer. On Monday, Cheney dumped on the sun-wind-and-water set, and it took until Thursday for the president to show up with the dustpan and brush. How could anyone think, he said, that Bushies were against conservation? Had not the president that very day sent the energy secretary himself to La-La Land to turn out the lights?

Cheney's right hand, Mary Matalin, says it means that the press got it wrong, that Cheney favors conservation -- but as part of a mix.

Greg Wetstone of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls Cheney's blueprint the "more pollution solution" and one that will do nothing to relieve the present energy crisis, whereas simple measures such as efficiency standards in home appliances would help dramatically -- and immediately.

The Energy Department Web site still features a department study, dated last November, which claims that 60 percent of the country's energy needs could be met by modest modifications in our cooling and heating habits.

Last week, the White House emitted another major policy speech on a subject that cries out for second thoughts. The president spoke on Tuesday at the National Defense University about Star Wars, a project close to his heart.

His discussion of the nuclear missile defense was strikingly different from Cheney's blast on energy. Bush's tone was measured, moderate -- so much so that the expected explosions in Moscow, Europe and Washington did not occur. The president wants to abandon the 1972 ABM Treaty that forbids deployment of a nuclear missile defense system, but he stated his opposition, for once, in rational terms, and he reached out to Russia for cooperation. He recognized the technological difficulties that have prevented the fulfillment of even a limited version of Ronald Reagan's fantasy.

Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, found the speech "very clever" -- "Bush made an excellent case against the ABM Treaty as a Cold War relic." But the president was still peddling a dangerous doctrine that enrages China and Russia and disturbs our allies. The ABM Treaty may be old hat, but it is all we have in the way of a framework for arms control. Bush offers no substitutes. Berger said, "The arms race will be unregulated, it will lead to the same chaos that came to California when they deregulated energy."

Star Wars, which needs more second thoughts than any item on the national agenda, seems likely to get none. Alas.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Poor Region's Governors in Colombia Unite to Oppose Drug Plan

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/world/06COLO.html

IBAGUÉ, Colombia - Normally, Guillermo Jaramillo, governor of a poor and debt-ridden province, could expect to be ignored by Colombia's highly centralized government in far off Bogotá.

It has been this way since colonial times, with the capital, high in the Andes, dictating policies as it sees fit, often regardless of the wishes of local officials.

But these days, Mr. Jaramillo and five like-minded governors - all from southern provinces mired in civil conflict and where most of the country's illicit drug crops are grown - have not only attracted the attention of Bogotá but also angered entrenched politicians who frown on insolent regional leaders.

The reason is that the governors, all of whom won office last October, have organized into a formidable political bloc that has harshly criticized the central government for everything from the handling of finances to the drug war.

That has embarrassed officials in Bogotá and highlighted the lack of support in rural Colombia for an American-financed program that largely relies on aerial defoliation to stamp out drug production.

Indeed, the governors have gone as far as Europe and Washington to criticize the program, which has destroyed coca fields across southern Colombia but displaced and alienated farmers.

The governors instead propose their own voluntary eradication program of coca and heroin poppy fields, and have sought out foreign governments for financing and technical expertise.

Most troubling to Bogotá, some of the governors have expressed the desire to hold their own talks with insurgencies that have been at war for years, leftist rebels and right- wing paramilitaries. Some in Bogotá, however, see such a proposal as nothing short of treason, since peace negotiations are held under the sole mandate of President Andrés Pastrana.

"This is a threat against the Constitution and against the peace process," said Robert Camacho, a Bogotá congressman.

"This is something that can jeopardize the country's well-being," added Mr. Camacho, who in a recent speech said the governors' bloc is akin to a secessionist movement. "It is about war and peace and too delicate for them to do what they want."

Some Colombia experts say that the governors' efforts, while understandable in a country whose rural regions have long been forgotten, could prove damaging to the country as a whole.

The governors' movement, called the southern bloc, has stirred enough concern that new life has been injected into proposed congressional legislation that would sanction local officials who are seen as meddling in the peace process. The bill was first proposed last fall, before the governors took office.

"These governors are popularly elected, and they are realizing a program contrary to their duties: dividing the state," said Fernando Giraldo, dean of the political science department at the Javeriana University in Bogotá.

Because of the southern bloc, said Mr. Giraldo, Colombia is "before the international community displaying a fragmented voice, the president on one side and the governors on the other."

In interviews, the governors said their goal is not to destabilize. Rather, they said, the aim is simply to draw attention to their region's problems and to obtain resources for regional public projects and agricultural development programs seen as alternatives to defoliation.

If the aid comes from Bogotá, so be it, the governors say; but they say they will continue to appeal to foreign governments, too. The southern bloc's proposals are still in the planning stages, and little financial support has gone their way.

"What we want for the regions, for the provinces as well as the towns, is the possibility to express ourselves," said Mr. Jaramillo, speaking in his office overlooking a public square here in Ibagué, the capital of the province of Tolima. "That is why we've gone out to explain our ideas, and present what we think is a bit different from the national government's concepts."

The governors said that they supported Mr. Pastrana's peace efforts and respected his authority when it came to negotiating, but they said they wanted the particular concerns of their provinces to be aired by local officials in those talks with the insurgencies.

The governors and other provincial officials also hinted, as many local officials in Colombia do, that the government should open dialogue with paramilitary groups, something Mr. Pastrana's government has refused. Recently, in fact, Mr. Jaramillo met with the paramilitary leader, Carlos Castaño, and also paid a visit to the rebels.

"What we've said is we cannot sign a peace pact, but we can do a peace process," said Floro Tunubalá, the governor of Cauca. "And to do a peace process means talking."

The southern bloc is a mixture of traditionalists and upstarts. They include Parmenio Cuéllar of Nariño, a former senator and minister of justice, and Mr. Jaramillo, a pediatric heart surgeon who has operated on 1,200 children.

The group also has the most unlikely governor in Colombia, Mr. Tunubalá, a Guambiano Indian who won office in a province well known for discrimination and social inequality. Mr. Tunubalá's political movement - composed of Indians, union leaders, poor farmers, intellectuals and others outside the province's circle of power - has already angered some people in Cauca and prompted death threats.

The other governors, longtime local politicians, are from Huila and the two provinces where most of Colombia's coca grows, Putumayo and Caquetá.

The governors acknowledge that local officials have more control since the country's 1991 Constitution gave regional leaders more decision- making powers and resources.

But revenue is still raised by the central government. The six provinces, the size of Kansas and with a combined population of six million, also remain desperately poor and rural in a largely urban country.

The region also contains three- quarters of the country's coca crops and nearly all the poppy fields, employing 335,000 people in all.

The very fact that an alliance exists is "essentially a cry for help, a collective petition for the government to do something," said Larry Birns, a Colombia expert and director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. "These are governors that, because they come from peripheral states, have been neglected."

The issue that most unites the governors is their opposition to defoliation, which they warn alienates their constituents without resolving the problems that lead farmers to cultivate illegal crops.

Juan de Jesús Cárdenas, governor of Huila, said regional leaders across the south believed that defoliation would simply drive farmers to cultivate coca and poppies in other regions.

"That is what has happened with defoliation of Putumayo, with the movement of displaced people into Nariño," said the governor, whose province serves as a corridor for drugs and rebels.

The governors want to replace illicit crops by prodding farmers to eradicate in exchange for subsidies and markets for their products. The Colombian government, with American money and expertise, is running such a program, but the governors said they were working to tailor their own programs to meet the needs of farmers in their provinces.

"We need gradual eradication," said Mr. Tunubalá. "We need to put in new crops, and we need to look for markets nationally and internationally."

That was the reason for Mr. Jaramillo's recent trip to a mountainous rebel-controlled region in southern Tolima. There, Mr. Jaramillo met with farmers to urge them to participate in the eradication program financed by the Americans. It was not easy. Most had felt ignored by a central government they view as inept and unresponsive.

Several farmers, after meeting with Mr. Jaramillo, said they would not have agreed to meet with or participate had it not been for the governor, whom they view as independent from Bogotá. Leftist rebels who showed up uninvited - and had the power to quash any government plan in the region - allowed farmers to move forward in part because of Mr. Jaramillo's involvement.

"He's from these lands," said one farmer, Ramiro Pérez, 38, standing on a steep mountain where he grows poppies. "We've seen him here. He has worked hard to get here. Maybe that means good news."

-------- drug war

Australia's First Legal Heroin Injection Room Opens

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/07WIRE-AUST.html

SYDNEY, May 7 (Reuters) - Australia's first legal heroin injecting room began operating in Sydney's red-light Kings Cross district on Sunday night after a court ruled last month its police licence was legal.

``The heroin injecting room opened last night,'' spokesman Pat Kennedy said on Monday.

The controversial injecting room, sandwiched between strip clubs and opposed by the federal government as well as the Vatican, opened from 6.00 p.m. to 10.00 p.m. (0800 and 1200 GMT).

Kennedy did not detail how many heroin addicts used the room, which aims to cater for 150 to 200 addicts a day, but said one addict had agreed to professional counselling.

``This is not just about a place where people come to inject in a supervised area, it also allows them to seek counselling,'' said Kennedy, a spokesman for the Uniting Church which runs the centre.

The centre, which will operate for an 18-month trial, is expected to open again around midday on Monday.

Opposition to a heroin injecting centre in Australia has been long and bitter. Opponents have ranged from Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Pope John Paul II to the United Nations.

In 1999, the Pope sent a letter to the Sisters of Charity ordering them not to get involved in an injecting centre at the Cross. An illegal injecting room in a Uniting Church in the Cross in 1999 lasted only a few days before police closed it down.

The Uniting Church won a lengthy legal battle in April to open a legal heroin injecting room.

Twenty percent of heroin overdoses in Australia's most populous state New South Wales occur on the streets of Kings Cross. In fact, 90 percent of ambulance call-outs for overdoses in ``the Cross'' are within 300 metres (985 feet) of the centre, with about 100 deaths a year in Kings Cross.

Illegal ``shooting galleries'' litter the main street of Kings Cross charging A$10 (US$5) to hit up in filthy conditions. But most addicts simply shoot up in lanes, alleys and parks.

--------

Hey, Let's Build a Shield Against Another Incoming Threat

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By BRUCE McCALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/weekinreview/06MCCA.html?searchpv=site01

CONTROVERSY is already raging around the Bush administration's bold new initiative to halt the flow of illegal substances into the United States for good. Details are secret and security tight, but the "Drug Wars" concept closely resembles its sibling, the newest incarnation of the "Star Wars" dream of an anti-missile defense system to protect the entire continental United States.

Unlike the new land-based missile defense shield, the Drug Wars shield will consist of thousands of specially trained "astrodogs" circling in space aboard high-tech kennels. Their mission: to sniff out incoming drug shipments from as far as 2,000 miles away in the ultra-clear, ultra-clean atmosphere of space, where smells can travel undiminished for thousands of light- years, and start barking.

Allegedly, every such bark will be picked up by sensitive listening devices at Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in Washington;the precise location of the law-breaking invader - by air, sea or land - will be electronically pinpointed, and a response instantly triggered. Within seconds, a shower of water bombs released from hovering "space barrels" will hit their target with the estimated force of six tsunamis.

Administration backers acclaim the Drug Wars concept as a foolproof and impregnable barrier against drug trafficking from abroad. Skeptics pooh-pooh the very idea of astrodogs as the linchpin of a deterrent system. "It's badly flawed," scoffs one. "Some defense system, when dogs spend more than half their lives asleep!"

Other critics point to the system's "exorbitant" $300 billion estimated cost. "And that doesn't even include all the freeze-dried kibble those mutts will require," snorts one Capitol Hill doubting Thomas. "A bonanza for Big Dogfood, a burden for the hard- working American taxpayer."

A research-and-development budget is the administration's initial priority in getting the Drug Wars project underway. "A hundred million or so should get things off the ground," forecasts one budgetary planner. "We buy up all the German shepherd breeders in America, do some preliminary testing of kennels - incidentally, saving tons of money by snapping up used Russian space stations at bargain prices - and subcontract with conventioneering Shriners to practice dropping water bombs out hotel windows. That's another big plus about the Drug Wars idea. It may seem straight out of Buck Rogers, but, hey, it's not exactly rocket science. A lot of it's real low-tech, in fact."

Opponents' other concerns - that Drug Wars could lead to the contamination of outer space with fleas, for example, and the threat of a nationwide "pet drain" as all the smart dogs are drafted into the program - are dismissed by its advocates. "Every daring new idea is bad-mouthed by the timid types, the nervous Nellies," remarks one. "I'll bet my Rottweiler that these guys all have Yorkies and Chihuahuas."

President Bush is reportedly set to volunteer his own dog, Spot, to be the first astrodog, as a symbol of his personal commitment to the Drug Wars program, and in a coming speech at the Texas Kennel Club's annual Bow-Wow is expected to stir widespread public involvement by calling for a schoolchildren's drive to collect rubber bones and other playthings for the nation's thousands of space-based canine sentinels. Anti-Drug Wars forces, meanwhile, are about to recommend that dog owners hang "Hell No, I Won't Go!" placards around their pets' necks, and will soon introduce legislation tightening America's dog-napping laws.

But the Drug Wars debate is only in its early stages. More strident arguments, pro and con, are sure to mark public discourse as both sides dig in. Is the antagonism of the Drug Wars foes more bark than bite? Are its proponents barking up the wrong tree? "There hasn't been a subject this emotional in dog's years," one observer comments. "The fur is really going to fly."

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

-------- iran

More Than 800 Bid for Iran Presidential Election

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iran-po.html

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A record 817 people have signed up to run in Iran's presidential elections next month, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday.

But only a handful are expected to be cleared to stand in the June 8 polls by the conservative Guardian Council, which screens aspirants according to strict Islamic criteria.

The council approved only four of some 240 people who bid for the presidency in the last election in 1997.

Reformist President Mohammad Khatami is seeking re-election and is widely expected to win in the absence of any serious challenger from the rival conservative camp.

Some members of Khatami's cabinet, including Defense Minister Admiral Ali Shamkhani, are among the hopefuls, as are an array of low-key conservative personalities.

The popular Khatami, deeply frustrated by the conservative opposition to his liberal reform program, has said he is running reluctantly.

A conservative clampdown has seen some key allies of Khatami removed from office, sympathetic newspapers banned and fellow reformers jailed.

-------- israel

In Israel, Panel Urges Settlement Freeze and an End to Terror

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By WILLIAM A. ORME Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/world/06MIDE.html

JERUSALEM, May 5 - An international committee investigating the continuing violence in the region has issued an unexpectedly strong call for an Israeli freeze on settlements and a Palestinian crackdown on terrorism as a prelude to the resumption of peace talks.

And in a carefully calibrated reconstruction of the first weeks of the nearly eight-month-old conflict, the committee said the outbreak of the deadly clashes could not be attributed solely to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's well-guarded stroll past Jerusalem's ancient mosques last September, as some Palestinians have said, nor to a preconceived effort by the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to unleash a bloody popular uprising, as Israeli officials have asserted.

The five-man fact-finding committee, led by the former United States Senator George J. Mitchell, was originally appointed by then-President Clinton as part of a failed cease-fire pact negotiated in October in Sharm el Sheik, and was asked to examine the causes of the first weeks of clashes between Palestinian rioters and Israeli security forces.

But as the violence continued, the committee concentrated instead on measures that might permit a renewal of negotiations and security cooperation, and issued a series of recommendations.

Both sides "should immediately implement an unconditional cessation of violence," the committee said in a 32-page draft report presented to Israeli and Palestinian officials on Friday. A copy of the report, which has yet to be officially released, was obtained by The New York Times.

The Israelis and Palestinians should then undertake a series of confidence-building measures, it added, including Palestinian efforts to jail terrorists and stop sniper fire on Israeli soldiers and civilians, and a shift in Israeli military strategy to "nonlethal responses to unarmed demonstrators."

The Israeli government should release impounded Palestinian tax funds, the committee said, while Palestinian security officials should ensure that Palestinian workers with permits to work in Israel are "free of connections to organizations and individuals engaged in terrorism."

The committee rejected claims that there was a calculated effort by the Palestinian Authority or by the government of Israel to derail peace talks and force concessions through violence. "We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the P.A. to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity, or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the G.O.I. to respond with lethal force," the report states.

The report was first given to President Bush a few days ago. And both sides are watching to see if the underlying analysis and recommendations of the report will be adopted as a basis for new American diplomatic initiatives in the region.

Palestinian officials were quick to praise the committee's tough stance on Jewish settlements, while Israeli officials welcomed the committee's call for an unequivocal Palestinian condemnation of terror attacks.

The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have until next week to respond officially to the document, which will then be made public, together with comments from each side. "There are a few aspects of the report that are important, and a few where we beg to differ," said Danny Naveh, a rightist member of Israel's government. "We welcome the emphasis on the need to put an end to violence and terrorism. But we do not believe that the issue of settlements is relevant to the present cycle of violence."

Yasir Arafat, returning to Gaza today after a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, said the Mitchell committee's findings should be discussed at a new high-level meeting of Israeli, Palestinian and foreign officials. The Palestinian leader said he discussed the Mitchell report today with both President Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan, the sponsors of a new regional peace effort.

As an essential step toward renewed negotiations, Israel should immediately "freeze all settlement activity, including the `natural growth' of settlements," the committee stated. But Israeli officials were heartened by the committee's rejection of Palestinian demands for a new international observer group in the region, a recommendation some had feared the Mitchell committee would adopt.

Nor did the report hold Mr. Sharon responsible for the violence, as many Palestinians and some leftist Israelis had insisted it should. "The Palestinians expected the committee to put the blame for the violence on the shoulders of Israel, and that didn't take place," Mr. Naveh said.

As the leader of the Israeli opposition, Mr. Sharon was accused by Palestinians - and by many foreign governments - for setting off the violence with his Sept. 28th visit under heavy police escort to the Al Aqsa mosque complex at the stone plaza revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount. Ehud Barak, then Israel's prime minister, told the committee that he permitted the Sharon visit, despite warnings, because he believed he could not ban a move perceived within Israel as a legitimate opposition maneuver.

"The Sharon visit did not cause the `Al Aqsa intifada,' " the committee said. "But it was poorly timed," the report added, "and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed, it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: the decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators, and the subsequent failure of either party to exercise restraint."

Mr. Sharon and other Israeli leaders later said the Palestinians seized on the visit as a pretext for a long- planned insurgency, a thesis also rejected by the Mitchell committee.

Instead, the committee found, the Israeli security response to the riots triggered by the Sharon visit the next day - including the killing of four Palestinian protestors outside the mosques after Friday prayers - inadvertently catalyzed a larger and wider conflict with violent Palestinian demonstrators throughout the territories.

Despite this partial absolution, the report's diplomatic evenhandedness appears unlikely to satisfy Mr. Sharon, who in his one meeting with committee members in March warned them against what he termed a "balanced" report. A failure to blame the violence on Mr. Arafat would be a "reward" for the Palestinian uprising, he said.

As the committee recognized, Mr. Sharon is also almost certain to reject the committee's call for a total freeze on settlements construction, though some leftist members of his unity government also favor such a halt.

"The issue is, of course, controversial," the committee said. "Many Israelis will regard our recommendation as a statement of the obvious, and will support it. Many will oppose it. But settlements activities must not be allowed to undermine the restoration of calm and the restoration of negotiations."

The committee also noted, however, that its opposition to settlements is in accord with longstanding United States policy.

Though Palestinian officials welcomed the call for a settlement freeze, they were disappointed by the Michell committee's flat rejection of their petition for an international observer force. The report also rebukes Palestinian officials for failing to pursue terrorists and publicly denounce terrorism during the recent violence.

The committee, whose work was paid for by the United States, also included former Senator Warren Rudman and Suleyman Demirel, the former president of Turkey, Thorbjoern Jagland, the foreign minister of Norway, and Javier Solana, the European Union's chief foreign policy coordinator.

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

U.N. Orders Aid for Afghan Refugees

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/afghan-refugees.html

ISLAMABAD, May 6 (Reuters) - United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Ruud Lubbers has ordered the delivery of 10,000 tents for refugees fleeing war and drought inside Afghanistan, his agency said on Sunday.

These tents would be sufficient to accommodate some 60,000 people, a UNHCR statement said.

Lubbers, now in neighbouring Pakistan, decided to offer tents to U.N. operations in Afghanistan after a four-day visit last week ``during which he saw first-hand the effects the drought and conflict were having on (many) Afghans.''

According to the office of U.N. Coordinator for Afghanistan, some 600,000 people were displaced in Afghanistan during recent months -- 140,000 in Herat province, 150,000 in the northern provinces of Balkh, Baghlan and Takhar, 80,000 in northeastern Badakshan, 150,000 in southern provinces and 80,000 in the central Hazarajat region and elsewhere.

``The joint U.N. strategy involves helping as many people as possible in their home villages, so that they don't have to move at all,'' the UNHCR statement said.

``U.N. agencies and numerous NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are also assisting groups of displaced people in camps or other locations where groups have gathered of their own accord,'' it said.

The UNHCR statement quoted Lubbers as saying: ``It is foolish to simply wait until they cross into Pakistan and Iran to help them.''

On Saturday, Lubbers expressed shock at the squalor in which he found tens of thousands of Afghan refugees living in a makeshift camp in Pakistan, which wants to send them home.

``Refugees fleeing persecution or forcibly displaced by scorched-earth tactics or fighting need to be protected outside Afghanistan,'' said Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister.

``Drought victims and people suffering from lack of food should be helped as near as possible to their homes. It is in that spirit that I have decided to contribute as many tents as we could spare at this point.''

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

U.S. Scientists See Big Power Savings From Conservation

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/national/06CONS.html

WASHINGTON, May 5 - Scientists at the country's national laboratories have projected enormous energy savings if the government takes aggressive steps to encourage energy conservation in homes, factories, offices, appliances, cars and power plants.

Their studies, completed just before the Bush administration took office, are at odds with the administration's repeated assertions in recent weeks that the nation needs to build a big new power plant every week for the next 20 years to keep up with the demand for electricity, and that big increases in production of coal and natural gas are needed to fuel those plants.

A lengthy and detailed report based on three years of work by five national laboratories said that a government-led efficiency program emphasizing research and incentives to adopt new technologies could reduce the growth in electricity demand by 20 percent to 47 percent.

That would be the equivalent of between 265 and 610 big 300-megawatt power plants, a steep reduction from the 1,300 new plants that the administration predicts will be needed. The range depends on how aggressively the government encourages efficiency in buildings, factories and appliances, as well as on the price of energy, which affects whether new technologies are economically attractive.

Another laboratory study found that government office buildings could cut their own use of power by one-fifth at no net cost to the taxpayers by adopting widespread energy conservation measures, paying for the estimated $5 billion investment with the energy savings.

But the Bush administration, which is in the final stages of preparing a strategy to deal with what it calls an energy crisis, has not publicized these findings, relying instead primarily on advice from economists at the Energy Department's Energy Information Agency, who often take a skeptical view of projected efficiency gains and predict a much greater need for fossil fuel supplies.

Administration officials said that some of the national laboratories' studies were based on theoretical assumptions that do not translate well into policy.

"We are looking for practical solutions here," said Jeanne Lopatto, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department. "Whatever works, we're interested in. But some of these ideas have been funded over many years and they have a very small impact on energy needs."

The once obscure debate between scientists at the national laboratories and economists at the information agency, both sides working for the Department of Energy, reflects a raging dispute between President Bush and many Democrats and environmentalists. While both sides agree that the United States faces energy problems, Mr. Bush's team has emphasized the quest for new supplies, while his critics emphasize untapped potential to reduce demand.

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking publicly last week on the energy plan he is in charge of drafting, used the information agency's projections when he said that the nation would need at least 1,300 new power plants by 2020. Mr. Cheney used the figure to dramatize the need to mobilize public and private resources to close a supply gap.

Mr. Cheney has not publicly noted that other Energy Department studies show ways to trim that number. The conservation measures that the scientists consider feasible would save future energy costs and prevent air pollution from hundreds of power plants.

The laboratories' estimates assume widespread application of some time-tested efficiency standards and the success of some newer inventions that scientists love but many bottom-line economists tend to distrust as expensive or unrealistic.

Their work was reviewed by outside experts from industry, government and universities.

Some of the proposed conservation steps are neither costly nor complex. Just this week, researchers at the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced that they had developed a fluorescent table lamp that reduces the need for overhead lighting. The laboratory says the lamp matches the combined output of a 300-watt halogen lamp and a 150-watt bulb, but uses a quarter of the energy.

"Widespread use of this lighting system in offices and homes could greatly reduce the current power problems we have in California," said Michael Siminovitch, a scientist at the laboratory.

Other technologies have been proved in field tests. At Fort Polk, an Army base in Louisiana, electricity use during peak hours fell by 43 percent after base managers installed fluorescent lights, low-flow shower heads, new attic insulation and new home heating and cooling systems.

Most of the savings came from installing geothermal heat pumps, an efficient home heating and cooling system that circulates fluids through underground coils but otherwise uses conventional technologies. Hundreds of homes on the base were equipped with the systems, generating immediate cost savings for electricity and totally eliminating the homes' use of natural gas for water heating. The entire installation cost was covered by a private contractor that makes a profit by sharing in the government's cost savings for the first 20 years.

The heat pumps, though still something of a novelty, are completely proven and save so much money that President Bush installed a system at his new ranch home in Crawford, Tex., Mr. Cheney's official home, the Naval Observatory in Washington, also uses geothermal heat pumps to cut down on its energy bill.

A study prepared by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory last year contended that striving to make such savings often made sound economic sense.

The study found that the federal government, the largest energy user in the United States with some 500,000 buildings, could reduce its own energy consumption by one- fifth. The investment necessary to realize those gains would be $5.2 billion, the study said, but the energy savings would knock nearly $1 billion annually off the government's energy bill, an attractive rate of return.

Some private companies have already made significant advances in what are known as combined heat and generation plants, which could become industry standards, energy department experts say. Chevron has estimated that it saved $100 million a year after it withdrew a refinery from the Texas electricity grid and relied on an on-site generator, which allowed it to recycle waste heat from the generation process for refining.

New efficiency standards for clothes washers, water heaters and air-conditioners adopted by the Clinton administration were projected by the Clinton Energy Department to reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 170 300-megawatt power plants over 20 years if fully enforced.

President Bush's fiscal 2002 budget slashed the department's spending on researching and developing energy-efficient buildings and factories, more fuel-efficient automobiles, new appliance standards and more efficient lighting. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said some of that work was better left to the private sector.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, both former oil industry executives, seem to have assigned a tertiary role to efficiency improvements, behind new drilling for oil and gas and new construction of energy infrastructure, like pipelines and power plants. Neither the president nor the vice president has promoted his own energy-saving home as a model.

In fact, Mr. Cheney said last week, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

-------- environment

Pox Populi

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/06WWLN.html

Since Feb. 19, Britain has been under the pall of foot-and-mouth disease, or aftosa fever, as it's called in other parts of the world. The clinical slides of afflicted animals are unpleasant enough. They show blistered tongues and gums, lesions on the coronary band, where hair meets hoof, a look of slackness and profuse salivation. But the news photographs are genuinely gruesome -- stiff, swollen cattle stacked on their backs in long rows for mass interment, sheep penned in great herds for killing, farmers looking away from the sight of it all in grief and disgust. If you believe Daniel Defoe, whose "A Journal of the Plague Year" is closely attested fiction, one of the worst horrors of the 1665 London plague was the shutting up of houses where infection was discovered. By official order, healthy occupants were imprisoned with the dying, a red cross marked on the door, a watchman posted outside. That's how the containment of foot-and-mouth disease works too.

Foot-and-mouth disease is a viral infection that causes fever, blisters and lesions, and results in weight loss and a reduction in milk production. It doesn't kill adult animals. It doesn't have to. The human fear of contagion kills them. Every disease is economic, to some extent, but foot-and-mouth is nearly a purely economic disease. Its worst effects are caused by fear of the economic consequences of its spread. Beasts that are healthy or would otherwise get well are destroyed not to save them from suffering but to keep them from endangering the market value of other, unaffected livestock. Above all, they're destroyed to protect international trade, since countries like the United States ban imports from countries where animals have been infected as well as those where they have been vaccinated (since it can be hard to tell vaccinated animals from infected ones). People who have no contact with agriculture -- most of us, in other words -- are sharply reminded from time to time that in the common agricultural view of things, cattle and sheep are primarily economic beings, their well-being, their care, their ultimate fate determined almost entirely by the investment they represent. This is one of those times.

It's not just images of mass killing, however, that make foot-and-mouth so disturbing. It's the fear of mass contagion, a fear that returns us, somehow, to a time of epidemics like smallpox or bubonic plague or Spanish influenza, a time when effective barriers against the spread of disease were almost nonexistent. Foot-and-mouth disease is an old-fashioned, pestilential scourge -- a word derived from the Latin excoriare, meaning, aptly, to strip off the hide. Foot-and-mouth moves swiftly, vehemently. It sifts across borders, carried on the wind, on the breath of animals, its symptoms condemning entire herds, whole regions. This is a mode of disease -- highly and pervasively contagious, like smallpox -- that's no longer familiar to most of us, not even in our nightmares.

The diseases we tend to dread these days are what might be called deep diseases: slow to catch, the catching and the ultimate causes often hidden as a result. Many cancers are deep diseases, and so is AIDS. Even when they are epidemic, we tend to think of these as inherently personal diseases. They don't rush through a whole society, sweeping away entire neighborhoods in a week or a month, driving the population into exile or seclusion. Deep diseases turn the body against itself, slowly twisting biological coherence into incoherence, inciting rebellion from within.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as B.S.E. or mad cow disease, is a deep disease, too, caused by prions, abnormally folded proteins that form clusters and slowly perforate the brain. Like AIDS, it's a relatively new deep disease. The European outbreak that was first recorded in 1986 was almost certainly caused when animal protein (some of it tainted with prions) was fed to cattle, part of the quest for a cheaper protein supplement and a greater profit margin in intensive agriculture. When humans eat meat containing prions, they don't contract B.S.E., but they can contract a related disease called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which results in dementia, abrupt muscular jerking, seizures and death.

Terrible as foot-and-mouth disease is, its superficiality and epidemiological haste are almost merciful. More than 1,400 cases have been identified in Britain since Feb. 19, and 2,240,000 animals, most of them sheep, have been either slaughtered or marked for slaughter. It's a staggering rate of destruction, but when the destruction is done, there's an ascertainable chance that the disease will have been contained. B.S.E. is a different story. Britain has destroyed nearly five million ruminant farm animals, and the number of British B.S.E. cases has fallen from nearly 37,000 in 1992 to fewer than 1,500 last year. But because it can take years to show itself, and because the official response to it was so sullen and so politically corrupt at first, there's really no gauging its spread. In recent months, it has appeared in several European countries where it was unknown before. The question waiting to be answered is, Where is B.S.E. still lurking? A pungent question, since it may be lurking in some of us.

That deep fear is the lingering ghost behind the present foot-and-mouth outbreak. Though the two diseases are profoundly different, the imagery that surrounds them is so close -- the verdant countryside, the piles of dead animals, the grief-stricken farmers -- that it's impossible to consider one in the absence of the other. On a practical level, the decision to kill all the livestock even remotely at risk for foot-and-mouth conforms to the standard agricultural and mathematical models for how to handle this scourge when vaccination is not an option. But on another level it is a form of political self-preservation. When people see the news images of this slaughter and its consuming fires -- smoke billowing out of the green hollows of Cumbria and Devon, smoke tainted by the smell of burning flesh -- they don't think back to the foot-and-mouth outbreak that hit Britain in 1967. They think back only a few years to the discovery of B.S.E. They remember how vociferously John Major's government insisted that nothing was wrong, and how ready it was to put public relations before public safety. The present government remembers it, too, which is one reason that in March and early April parts of Britain looked like the landscape of forgotten contagion.

One disease is never a perfect metaphor for another. There are always fundamental differences, as there are between B.S.E. and foot-and-mouth disease. From a human perspective, these two epidemics are almost ideally distinct: the fatal disease is not contagious; the contagious disease does not affect humans. But it's the resemblance between them that haunts us, not the dissimilarity, a resemblance that evokes other epochs, other epidemics when humans, not animals, were the victims.

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the New York Times editorial board.

-------- genetics

Patchwork Genes: A Survey of Global Genetic Diversity

May 6, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/06CHART.html

Some people look at the wonder of human diversity and see a gorgeous mosaic. Others see proof of God's handiwork. But more and more biotechnology companies see a business opportunity. In particular, they are interested in populations around the world that have a higher-than-average concentration of rare genetic diseases. The hope is that by studying these people's unusual chromosomal arrangements, scientists will be able to gain insight into the nature of the disease and develop a cure. But lest there be any dispute about the profits that might result, some companies have gone so far as to purchase the rights to these populations' genes. Herewith, a sampling of ethnic genetic variation, adapted from the coming book "Your Genetic Destiny: Know Your Genes, Secure Your Health, Save Your Life," by Aubrey Milunsky, M.D., D.Sc. (Perseus Publishing, 2001).

Africans (blacks)/African-type adult lactase deficiency/Milk intolerance Afrikaners (white South Africans)/Porphyria variegata/Neurological problems Amish or Mennonites/Ellis-Van Creveld syndrome/Dwarfism and extra digits Armenians/Familial Mediterranean Fever/Inflammation and fever Ashkenazi Jews / Tay-Sachs disease/Brain degeneration Chinese/Thalassemia (alpha)/Anemia Finns/Dystrophic retinae dysacusis syndrome/Blindness French-Canadian/Familial hypercholesterolemia /Heart disease

Irish/Neural-tube defects/Spina bifida Italians/Fucosidosis/Mental retardation Japanese and Korean/Oguchi disease/Night blindness Maori (Polynesians)/Clubfoot/Foot deformity Mediterraneans/Glycogen-storage disease (type III)/Liver disease Norwegians/Cholestasis-lymphedema/Liver problems

-------- health

The Global Medicine Cabinet

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By DAWN MACKEEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/06CABINET.html

From Scandinavian fungus to Thai snake venom, a survey of the exotic ingredients in those little white pills.

KAVAKAVA: With its relaxing effects on the skeletomuscular system, this root is used to relieve anxiety. It is grown in New Guinea, Fiji and throughout the Polynesian Islands.

DAFFODILS: The flowers that go into Reminyl, Janssen Pharmaceutica's new drug to fight early Alzheimer's disease, are grown in the United Kingdom.

ASPERGILLUS TERREUS (FUNGUS): The active chemical in Mevacor, Merck's cholesterol-lowering drug, is derived from a camel-colored fungus found in the soil in Pakistan.

YEW TWIGS: Taxol, a chemotherapy drug from Bristol-Myers Squibb, is made from this common shrub found throughout Europe as well as in parts of North America and Africa.

MISTLETOE: Iscar, an F.D.A.-recognized homeopathic drug from Weleda, made headlines recently when the actress Suzanne Somers disclosed that she was treating her breast cancer with injections of the medication, made from merry mistletoe grown in France's Rhone Valley.

BILBERRY: A close cousin of the blueberry; found in England, this fruit acts as an antioxidant and is believed to increase vascular flow and visual acuity. Some also believe it helps diarrhea, varicose veins and hemorrhoids.

MILK THISTLE: The fruits of this artichokelike plant, grown in Argentina and around the Mediterranean, are believed to protect the liver. Milk thistle has long been used in Europe to treat cirrhosis. Recently, it has been embraced by many hepatitis C patients.

GINKGO BILOBA: Herbalists believe that the dried leaf extract of the ginkgo tree, dispensed in capsules and tablets, lessens age-related short-term memory loss. Originally from China and Japan, the ginkgo now grows throughout Europe and in the United States.

CHILI PEPPERS: Zostrix, from Bioglan Pharma, helps to reduce arthritic pain by depleting substance P, the brain's pain messenger. The active ingredient, capsaicin, is extracted from chili peppers grown in China.

IPECAC: Humco's syrup, an over-the-counter drug that treats poisoning by inducing vomiting, is extracted from the dried rhizome and root of the ipecac shrub, which grows in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.

SNAKE VENOM: The venom from the Thailand cobra, a six-foot-long, fang-toothed killer, is being used by Biotherapeutics in Immunokine, a new antiviral drug used to treat neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease and adrenomyeloneuropathy.

PIG AND COW TESTES: Male Power, from Futurebiotics, contains material from the testicles of New Zealand livestock and promises to rev up the male sex drive.

SENNA PODS: Purdue Frederick's laxative Senokot contains ground pods of the senna plant, a relative of the pea that grows in Egypt.

MARE URINE: Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories' hormone-replacement drug Premarin, derived from the estrogen-rich urine of pregnant Canadian mares, treats symptoms of menopause and prevents osteoporosis.

BEAUVERIA NIVEA (FUNGUS): Sandimmune, from Novartis, is a drug used following transplant surgery to combat rejection of a new organ. It is derived from this fungus found high in the Hardangervidda, a treeless plateau in southern Norway, and also in Wisconsin.

CINCHONA BARK: The active ingredient in Quinaglute Dura-Tabs, from Berlex Laboratories, treats cardiac arrhythmia and is extracted from the cinchona tree, which grows in Congo, Zaire and Uganda.

BLUEBELL: This tubular flower, found throughout England and Wales, was documented as a treatment for leprosy in the 13th century. Now researchers at Molecular Nature are trying to resurrect its use to fight leprosy and tuberculosis.

GYPSY MUSHROOM: Studies in mice have shown that RC-183, extracted from this wild mushroom found in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, blocks the growth of herpes simplex 1.

--------

Despite Swift Spread of TB, Russians May Reject Big Loan

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/world/06RUSS.html

MOSCOW, May 5 - Hit with objections from drug makers, legislators and its own Health Ministry, the Russian government is debating whether to turn down a $150 million loan that some experts call crucial to containing a serious tuberculosis epidemic.

The World Bank loan would go to a strategy to stop TB in its breeding grounds, especially the country's overcrowded prisons.

The need is great - one in every thousand Russians has TB, triple the rate of a decade ago and about 15 times the rate in the United States. And there is little debate over the strategy itself, which has largely proven itself in trials in several provinces.

What is suddenly at issue is whether Russia needs the help the World Bank is offering - or whether, as some opponents charge, it is part of a ploy by Western drug companies to seize the Russian market from home-based drug companies.

The Health Ministry official in charge of tuberculosis programs, Dr. Mikhail Perelman, said in an interview today that Russia's war on TB is adequately financed by the Kremlin and is, in his view, already showing results.

And Boris Spiegel, the chairman of a parliamentary committee on national security in health, said he believed that the loan would flood Russia with foreign-made drugs just as domestic manufacturers are starting to prosper.

"If this loan is accepted, the Russian pharmaceutical industry will be brought to its knees," he said in an interview. "We have information showing that this is yet another internal fraud being carried out by the World Bank."

Those complaints appear to have swayed the Ministry of Health, which, officials involved in the negotiations said today, withdrew its support for the loan last month. A formal offer from the World Bank to begin final negotiations on the loan, delivered to the Kremlin in mid-April, has gone unanswered.

Last week, the proposed loan received a scorching reception in Mr. Spiegel's parliamentary committee, where, according to a Moscow newspaper account, it was judged another attempt to impose Western rules on a weakened Russia - and reap a profit along the way.

A spokesman for the Finance Ministry said today only that talks were continuing. A Health Ministry official involved in the negotiations declined through a spokesman to talk by telephone.

"We're trying to clarify the situation with the government, and then we'll see," Jean-Jacques de St. Antoine, the senior World Bank official in charge of Russian health programs, said in a telephone interview today from Washington. "I think there's a lot of misunderstanding on the part of the pharmaceuticals industry as to what this loan would do."

In some Western experts' eyes, the stakes go well beyond Russia.

Tuberculosis here is notable not only for its swift rise, but also for its growing resistance to the array of drugs used to attack it.

Few new drugs have been developed to fight tuberculosis in recent years. And while accurate statistics do not exist, experts agree that strains of multi-drug-resistant TB are far more common here than in most countries.

The threat is heightened by the size of Russia's prison population - at 963,000, one of the world's largest, and a major incubator of the disease. In some prisons, as many as one fifth of all TB cases are multi-drug-resistant.

Some experts fear that the number of TB cases will explode in the near future as the AIDS epidemic sweeps across Russia, claiming hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. Roughly half of all people with AIDS who are exposed to TB contract the disease, these experts say. One recent study predicted that, absent new health programs, the combination of AIDS, TB and intravenous drug use will claim more than 850,000 working-age adults in Russia by 2005.

"The problem is that if you leave people untreated, it's not just that they're untreated. They infect others," said Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the director of the program on infectious disease and social change at Harvard Medical School. He helps run an international tuberculosis project in Tomsk Province, in southern Siberia, where TB infection rates in prisons are high.

"Prisoners are released every year," he said. "It's not going to be long before people with multi-drug- resistant TB wind up in Eastern Europe and Western Europe. This is a concern for the whole world. It's not just a Russian problem."

Dr. Perelman, a surgeon and TB expert in Russia, agrees that the situation is serious. But he also says it is overstated. Tuberculosis cases seem to have skyrocketed, he says, because reporting was scattershot until 1999. And what he regards as two major indicators of the epidemic's pace - overall mortality and the incidence of TB among children - have been flat for the last two years.

He complained that until recently, international experts insisted that Russians follow the same regimen - ensuring that drugs are taken daily under the direct observation of medical workers - prescribed throughout the third world. But third world nations have no options beyond a daily regimen of drugs; Russian medicine, he said, has far more sophisticated ways of attacking TB which can and should supplement drugs.

"Russia, with its advanced space program, a nuclear power, a highly intellectually developed society, cannot be in that category," Dr. Perelman said.

Today Mr. de St. Antoine, of the World Bank, sought to allay any fears that the bank was trying to usurp Russia's lead role in combating tuberculosis. To the contrary, he said, Russia's medical industry should benefit from the $150 million program, which specifically favors domestic contractors and even gives Russian pharmaceutical manufacturers an automatic 15 percent edge in bids to supply drugs to treatment programs.

Dr. Perelman, who stressed that he had no direct role in negotiating the loan, was nonetheless unmoved.

"The great desire of the bank to give this loan is much greater than the desire of Russia to receive it," he said.

-------- spying

CIA helps Hollywood with TV, film projects

By Elaine Sciolino
New York Times News Service
May 6, 2001
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,SAV-0105060395,FF.html

WASHINGTON -- CIA headquarters is a sleepy place most weekends, but one recent Saturday it was forced to call in dozens of reinforcements to stave off a 20-hour siege.

The invasion was not mounted by Iraqis, North Koreans or terrorists with phony passports, but by producers, cameramen, soundmen, writers and others from CBS, which is filming a pilot for a series that would tell stories of everyday life inside "The Agency."

So it is understandable that CBS producers wanted to film opening scenes at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the CIA is cooperating.

"We've sort of been discovered," said Chase Brandon, a public affairs officer and longtime agency operative who has exchanged the work of collaborating with foreign assets for collaborating with Hollywood. "This is such a different place than what it used to be."

As part of its new mission, the CIA has begun to work regularly with filmmakers, television producers and writers it considers sympathetic.

By doing so, it hopes to get out what it calls the truth about the CIA and to explain to a skeptical public why, in the absence of an overarching national enemy, it needs a budget of about $30 billion a year for its operations and those of its sister intelligence agencies.

The CIA is picky about its projects. In a written statement, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said the agency cooperates "where feasible" to help "members of the entertainment industry willing to accurately portray the work of the intelligence community."

Bill Harlow, the agency's chief spokesman, is more specific, saying: "If they appear to be interested in accuracy, if they do not misportray the role of the agency, and we can do so without interfering with our mission, we will consider providing assistance. We decide on a case-by-case basis."

As a result, the CIA, which receives about a dozen scripts a month, has rejected more collaborations than it has accepted. It declined to cooperate on the movie "Clear and Present Danger," for example, because it linked the agency with drug trafficking.

Critics of the agency's unwillingness to be more open scoff at the collaboration with Hollywood. "There's a big difference between openness and PR; what we've got here is PR," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

Four years ago the CIA created a special position in its public affairs office to work with Hollywood and put Brandon (no longer undercover) in the job. The real breakthrough in collaboration came two years later when the agency cooperated with the makers of the Showtime cable television channel on "In the Company of Spies."

A dream film for the CIA, it tells the story of a former CIA covert operator who is coaxed out of retirement to rescue a colleague imprisoned by North Korean intelligence. At the end of the film, the president exclaims: "By God, when the agency is good, it's spectacular. And no one even knows!"

"The Agency" showcases the often-mundane world of analysis and everyday decision making.

"It's less `Mission Impossible' and more about the families and lifestyles and personal day-to-day lives of the men and women of the CIA," said Michael Beckner, the CBS screenwriter.

Paige Turco, for example, who played a recovering alcoholic single mother on Fox's "Party of Five" and a pregnant lesbian police officer on "NYPD Blue," plays a graphics analyst in the office of technical services who is reinventing herself after a divorce.

No fast-action scenes were filmed at the CIA, just two discreet scenes, one of real CIA personnel, their security passes visible, entering the building, and another of real actors strolling across the main lobby with the giant CIA seal on the floor.

----

U.S. Experts Deem Spy Plane Repairable

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/world/06CHIN.html

BEIJING, May 5 - American technicians left Hainan island in China today after examining the United States Navy spy plane that was damaged in a collision with a Chinese fighter jet last month.

United States officials say the technicians concluded that the plane could be repaired and safely flown off the island. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants the plane flown out, but Chinese authorities have reportedly ruled out that idea.

The team of inspectors are flying to Hawaii, said a spokesman for the American Embassy in Beijing. They will submit their findings in Hawaii to Adm. Dennis Blair, chief of the United States Pacific Command.

--------

Cameras Being Turned on Once-Shy C.I.A.

New York Times
May 6, 2001
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/politics/06CIA.html

WASHINGTON, May 5 - Central Intelligence Agency headquarters is a sleepy place most weekends, but one recent Saturday it was forced to call in dozens of reinforcements to stave off a 20-hour siege.

The invasion was not mounted by Iraqis, North Koreans or terrorists with phony passports but by CBS.

Swarms of producers, cameramen, soundmen, writers, technicians, makeup artists and caterers were descending in dozens of trucks, trailers and vans. Cries of "We're locked up!" and "It's a cut!" echoed across the secured area in front of the main entrance.

CBS is deep into filming a pilot for a series this fall that would tell stories of everyday life inside "The Agency." So it is understandable that CBS producers wanted to film opening scenes at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va.

What is surprising, perhaps, is that the C.I.A. is cooperating.

"We've sort of been discovered," said Chase Brandon, a public affairs officer and longtime agency operative who has exchanged the work of collaborating with foreign informants for collaborating with Hollywood.

"This is such a different place than what it used to be. We've got a store and a fine arts commission and a museum. We've really become more, well, normal in our daily course of events as we continue to remain what we are, a secret intelligence organization helping policy makers and military planners carry out their mission."

As part of its new mission, the C.I.A. is working regularly with filmmakers, television producers and writers it considers sympathetic.

By doing so, it hopes both to get out what it calls the truth about the agency and to explain to a skeptical public why, in the absence of an overarching national enemy, it needs a budget of about $30 billion a year for its operations and those of its sister intelligence agencies.

The C.I.A. is picky about its projects. In a written statement, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said that the agency cooperated "where feasible" to help "members of the entertainment industry willing to accurately portray the work of the intelligence community." Bill Harlow, the agency's chief spokesman, is more specific, saying: "If they appear to be interested in accuracy, if they do not misportray the role of the agency, and we can do so without interfering with our mission, we will consider providing assistance. We decide on a case-by- case basis."

As a result, the C.I.A., which receives about a dozen scripts a month, has rejected more collaborations than it has accepted. It declined to cooperate on the film "Clear and Present Danger," for example, because it linked the agency with drug trafficking.

Critics of the agency's unwillingness to be more open scoff at the collaboration with Hollywood. "There's a big difference between openness and P.R.; what we've got here is P.R.," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "All of this perception management is probably harmless, but at best irrelevant. Advertising and accountability are completely different things."

Collaboration with television and movies is not new to government agencies with classified missions. As head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover was extensively involved with the early television series "The F.B.I." The Pentagon has used its planes, aircraft carriers, helicopters and troops to help filmmakers make war films more realistic, from "Top Gun" to "The Hunt for Red October."

But the C.I.A., governed by a culture of secrecy, was slow to get on the bandwagon. Four years ago it created a special position in its public affairs office to work with Hollywood and put Mr. Brandon (no longer undercover) in the job. The real breakthrough came two years later when the agency cooperated with the makers of the Showtime cable television channel on "In the Company of Spies."

A dream film for the C.I.A., it tells the story of a former C.I.A. covert operator who is coaxed out of retirement to rescue a colleague imprisoned by North Korean intelligence. At the end of the film, the president exclaims: "By God, when the agency is good, it's spectacular. And no one even knows!"

The C.I.A. liked the film so much that it allowed it to be screened for the first time in its main auditorium, sponsoring the first Hollywood premiere in its history. Mr. Tenet, who greeted the actors Tom Berenger and Ron Silver, still calls the film "our movie."

The production staff of last year's hit "Meet the Parents" consulted the agency about how to ensure the plausibility of a polygraph test that Robert De Niro's character, a former C.I.A. officer, administers to his potential son-in-law, played by Ben Stiller.

The agency is acting as a consultant to Paramount on "The Sum of All Fears," based on the novel by Tom Clancy. Ben Affleck, who plays the role of Jack Ryan, the agency's top Russia analyst, spent a day at the agency interviewing real Russia analysts. And both Mr. Brandon and Mr. Harlow, a former Navy captain, have visited the main set in Montreal.

"We were escorted though parts of Langley so we could properly construct our sets," Stratton Leopold, the film's producer, said. "I don't know what fantasy people have about the C.I.A., but it looks like an ad agency with desks with dividers and computers with screen savers."

In "The Agency," the often-mundane world of analysis and everyday decision making is showcased. "It's less `Mission Impossible' and more about the families and lifestyles and personal day-to-day lives of the men and women of the C.I.A.," said Michael Beckner, the CBS screenwriter.

Paige Turko, for example, who played a recovering alcoholic single mother on Fox's "Party of Five" and a pregnant lesbian police officer on "N.Y.P.D. Blue," has been cast in the role of a graphics analyst in the office of technical services who is reinventing herself after a divorce.

Will Patton plays a senior analyst who longs to go overseas as a covert operator; Gil Bellows plays a counterterrorism official on the operations side. The plot of the pilot deals with the agency's efforts to thwart a terrorist plot to blow up Harrods in London.

Along the way, Ms. Turko's character prepares phony documents for the Syrian family of an informant the agency has recruited.

No fast-action scenes were filmed at the C.I.A., just two discreet scenes, one of real C.I.A. personnel, their security passes visible, entering the building, and another of real actors, Mr. Patton and Mr. Bellows, strolling across the main lobby with the giant C.I.A. seal on the floor.

Much to the delight of the agency, CBS clearly has become an agency booster. The network bought 250 baseball caps emblazoned with the agency seal and custom-embroidered "The Agency" on the back for the crew. And on filming day, the security police escorted the crew to the gift shop, which was open especially for the occasion.

The agency would not let CBS use regular extras because it would have had to have so many security people (and lots of overtime) to watch them. So it let real officials (none of them covert operators) with real security clearances volunteer to play those roles.

A fresh-faced 29-year-old woman with long black hair, dressed in a well-cut black suit, was not, it turned out, a Hollywood import. She identified herself as "a chemical weapons analyst for the Middle East in Winpac," the agency's Weapons Intelligence and Non-Proliferation Arms Control Center. Officials from the law, science, security, Congressional relations and recruitment departments were also on hand.

One current big-draw film dealing with spying, "Spy Kids," was produced with no input from the C.I.A. It made mistakes. The film refers, for example, to agency officers as agents, when only foreigners hired by the C.I.A. are called agents.

And the two parents (she American, he from an unnamed Latin country) are former covert operators whose missions were to rub each other out. They fell in love and got married instead, a highly implausible scenario in real C.I.A. life. "To marry an enemy officer is not what we would call a career-enhancing move," said Mr. Harlow, who wrote a novel titled "Circle William," which is described on his Web site as a naval thriller with a sense of humor.

-------- terrorism

Zimbabwe Opposition Chief to Face Terrorism Charge

May 6, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-zimbabw.html

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai appears before the country's High Court on Monday to face terrorism and sabotage charges filed by the government of President Robert Mugabe.

Tsvangirai's trial will be critical to whether the former trade unionist, who has emerged as the biggest political threat to Mugabe in his 21 years in power, will be able to run against the Zimbabwean leader in presidential polls early next year.

The state will argue in court that Tsvangirai contravened the terrorist provisions of the country's Law and Order Maintenance Act -- devised by former Rhodesia's white minority rulers to suppress black opposition.

The government has charged Tsvangirai with attempting to overthrow a legitimately-elected government when he used a gathering of supporters of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to call on Mugabe to resign or face being ousted by force.

Tsvangirai told Reuters in an interview Saturday that the charges were politically inspired to prevent him from challenging Mugabe at the polls and that the government would do anything to win the election.

``By fraud they would like to prevent me from contesting and for being the main competitor and main challenger to Mugabe. They realize I have built a credible base in the country and he stands no chance in a free and fair poll,'' Tsvangirai said.

``I don't believe that I was engaged in any sabotage or unpatriotic actions,'' he said.

Tsvangirai technically faces a life sentence but any prison term of more than six months will make him ineligible to run as a presidential candidate under Zimbabwean law.

TSVANGIRAI WOULD APPEAL

The MDC president said he would appeal to the country's Supreme Court if he loses the High Court hearing on the grounds that the constitution guaranteed him freedom of expression.

Other MDC leaders are scheduled to appear in court over the coming weeks to answer charges of breaking the law in their activities against the ruling ZANU-PF ruling party.

Tsvangirai led the MDC in tightly contested parliamentary elections last year which were marred by the death of at 31 people, mainly MDC supporters, and the violent seizure of white-owned farm land by self-styled war veterans.

The High Court hearing will be against a background of escalating urban violence following attacks by gangs led by veterans of the 1970s independence war against Rhodesia on private businesses and international aid groups.

Rival ZANU-PF and MDC supporters are expected to gather outside the court.

One veterans leader has reportedly threatened embassies of countries which are seen to be supporting the MDC.

Violence and intimidation spurred former colonial power Britain and regional powerhouse South Africa to summon Zimbabwe's ambassadors to London and Pretoria to urge Mugabe's government to uphold the rule of law.

Tsvangirai warned Saturday that if Mugabe won another term in office, the country's democracy would be threatened.

``Then we will be written off as a country. It will put the final nail in any chance to have democratic advance in the country,'' Tsvangirai said.

Mugabe is expected to make the controversial redistribution of white-owned land to poor Zimbabwean blacks the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.


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